Sweet Sorrow(76)

After a while she pulled away and looked at me, breathless, her hand still on my neck. ‘Is there somewhere we can go?’ We found a wall to lean against, an unlit, unglazed part of the house near a door where the caterers sometimes stepped out to smoke. I heard someone point us out in the darkness and laugh. ‘Don’t stop,’ she said and I placed my hands higher, on either side of her rib-cage where the silk of Mrs Asante’s nightdress came to an end and Fran’s skin began, and she took my hand and placed it on her breast and here I thought my heart might stop. All this time we kissed, more passionately now until Fran laughed and pulled away and rubbed her lips with the heel of her hand.

‘I think they call this “hungry kissing”.’

‘Is it all right?’

‘What do you think?’ My hand was still on her breast, which seemed strange while we were having a conversation. What was the etiquette? Should I take my hand away and put it back later when we stopped talking? Would she notice? Instead she placed her own hand over mine and held it there.

‘Has my lipstick gone?’

‘A long time ago.’

‘You’re wearing it now,’ she said and we kissed some more, my thumb slipping inside the nightdress and then, with some contortion, into her bra. Again, I waited for her to move my hand away and instead she pressed herself harder against my leg, but I couldn’t quite lose the awareness of the contortion of my arm, my elbow sticking out to one side as if leaning on a mantelpiece, and when one more waiter saw us, laughing and shouting ‘Go on, my son!’ she stepped away.

‘We should …’

‘I know.’

‘I don’t want to though.’

‘One more minute,’ I said and while we kissed, I wondered – should I tell her that I loved her? I’d not said this before, or rather I’d spoken it to Harper, dead drunk, and to inanimate objects, a pizza or a birthday present, but never in a situation where I might actually mean it. I’d come nowhere near. Now, suddenly, as if remembering a forgotten word, one that’s been in your mind but just out of reach, I wanted to say it out loud.

Still I hesitated. Partly this was shyness; even in all this passion, I couldn’t quite shake off the cheap familiarity of the phrase. Embarrassment aside, I had an old-fashioned, almost chivalric sense that those words should not be scattered around. Like a wish or a runic spell that summons up demons, the phrase had to be used with absolute care, and though I might then say it a thousand times, I could say it for the first time only once. Not yet though. Instead I leant back to look at her. Her face had changed somehow, her features differently proportioned, sharper even in the soft light, like in an eye test when the optician drops a lens into the frame. Nothing I’d ever seen came close to this and I said the other thing that I felt strongly.

‘You’re so beautiful.’

She didn’t laugh or jeer. She looked quite serious. ‘You’re drunk,’ she said.

‘I’m really not,’ I said. ‘Or if I am, then I still mean it. I’ve never known anyone remotely like you, not anyone. You are … the greatest thing.’

She kissed me again, lightly this time as if to calm me down. ‘Let’s go and find the others,’ she said, then she took my hand, and we walked back into the light.

The drugs had no effect, but it is true that the rest of the night had the feel of a montage even while it was taking place. We could see the question in our friends’ eyes as we approached the dance floor and so we answered it, Fran pulling me towards her, holding my face and kissing me. ‘There – happy now?!’ she shouted, and they laughed with Helen rolling her eyes, and we fell into a four-square huddle before breaking apart and dancing until our clothes stuck to our skin with sweat. ‘Pool!’ shouted Alex, somehow pulling the shoes from his feet even as he ran, and tripping straight into a splashy dive. Helen went in fully clothed, lowering herself in down the steps, and for the second time that day I pulled my shirt over my head, less self-conscious this time, and laid it reverently out on the damp grass. ‘You can’t swim in those,’ said Fran, and so I turned my back and took off my jeans and found myself grateful that I’d put on my best and plainest underpants, the pair I thought of as somehow classic. We held hands, took a run-up, whooped and landed in water that felt crisp and delicious, with a silver-blue, viscous quality like gin. For a moment we stood together soberly in the centre of the pool, unsure what to do next. I was a pretty strong swimmer at that time and, wanting to advertise even the smallest of my talents, displayed a few strokes. But it didn’t seem right, pounding lengths in front crawl and backstroke.

‘Of course, it’s basically all these people’s bath water,’ said Helen. ‘All these sweaty old people.’

‘Helen, don’t be gross,’ said Alex.

‘So we just stand here, shivering?’ said Helen. ‘Is that it?’ She slapped the water and, as if this was a signal, Fran rolled and twisted away towards the deepest part of the pool, where I followed, diving and forcing open my stinging eyes to see her somersaulting in slow motion once, twice, three times, the black of the nightdress spooling around her like squid ink. I took another breath, pushed off and swam closer, affecting a kind of merman grace but scraping myself on the pool’s bottom. We surfaced, took another breath, submerged again and kissed underwater, closed-lipped then opening our mouths and laughing at the fizz of bubbles. We surfaced and I went to kiss her again but there are limits to all passion— ‘You need to wipe your nose,’ I said.