Sweet Sorrow(77)
‘What?’
‘You’ve got something –’ and I indicated the green emerald of snot that had found its way onto her upper lip.
‘Okay. Sorry about that. Pretty sexy.’ She swiped at her face with the back of her hand. ‘Did you notice it?’ she said. ‘Underwater?’
‘Notice what?’
‘Okay. Listen to this music!’ Unfamiliar disco played, orchestral and lush. ‘Now go under!’ she said, and as we sank below – nothing changed. Some finely tuned speaker system had made the water disappear, the music as loud and crisp as before. Amazed, we tried to dance, spoofy disco moves, grabbing at each other so that we might remain in the deepest part of the pool for as long as our lungs could bear, her nightdress black and slippery, her skin cool and dimpled with goose-bumps. I placed my hand at the top of her thigh and, just for a moment, felt hers cupped between my legs before she laughed and pushed herself off to the surface. I grabbed at her ankles, but she was gone, and now I was faced with the new problem of getting out of the pool without drawing attention to myself. ‘No petting, no running, no bombing,’ called Alex, and so I stood, cool and pensive, and pressed my erection hard against the pool tiles, hoping to cut off the circulation like a finger trapped in a door.
Somehow the four of us found ourselves back in the house, shoes in hand, clothes still damp, hair clinging, finding drinks and padding from room to room. The other guests continued to regard us with tolerant amusement as we arranged ourselves on low modular seating, as if this was just another Friday night, Fran’s head on my shoulder, her hair scented deliciously with chlorine. The pill had no effect, but I had a fantastic sense of benevolence and open-mindedness, so that I felt no embarrassment at all when Alex recited the Queen Mab speech to a small silent crowd, quietly and plainly, and was surprised to find that I understood every word.
For what might have been an hour or perhaps ten minutes, we lay with our eyes closed, listening to the music, tuning in and out of conversations. The party was entering its final stage and, hoping to find some life, Fran and I went back outside. The famous pines were silhouetted against the brightening sky now. On the abandoned dance floor, she slipped her hand onto my back; I held her hip, her shoulder blade, but the music was now too quiet to drown out the sound of the blackbirds, the best and worst of sounds, and so we just clung to each other.
‘Today is tomorrow,’ said Fran, and I remembered a scene from the play, the lovers complaining about the break of day, making excuses – the lark is just a nightingale, the dawn light a meteor – and I thought it might be clever to slip into that dialogue. But my brain was too fuzzy to recall a single line with any accuracy and paraphrasing something about larks and comets might make me sound mad.
Besides, a thought that I’d been suppressing all night had finally gate-crashed its way in and, close behind, another, darker thought and I suddenly felt as sober as I’d ever been. The anxiety was physical, as if realising that I’d left a bath running for the whole week, and Fran felt the snap of tension.
‘What’s up?’
‘I’ve not seen my dad for five days now.’
‘Where’s he been?’
‘Nowhere. That’s the point.’
‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have made you come.’
‘Are you kidding? Of course I was going to come.’
‘But, go now! I have to get home anyway, before they wake up.’
‘Should we say goodbye to the others?’
She kissed me. ‘No, let’s just leave. They’ll know.’
Shoes in hand, we crossed the cool, damp lawn, scattered with cocktail glasses, champagne flutes and empty bottles. Outside, I unlocked my bike. The village where Fran lived was four miles from here and I had an idea that she might sit on the saddle while I pedalled but, like the underwater kiss, this is one of those things that works better on screen than in real life. Besides, the tyres were soft and our combined weight made the wheel rims grind into the tarmac and so we walked and every now and then Fran would climb on the bike and sit there, queenly, while I pushed.
We crossed the motorway, silent for the first time, as if we were the only people left on earth, and as the streets gave way to countryside, we would break off at intervals to fall upon each other, in fields and verges, prickly and dew-damp, the bicycle wheel spinning as if we’d been thrown into the cow parsley in some terrible accident. At one point we both urgently needed to pee, Fran squatting blithely across an irrigation ditch, me standing just a short way off, the process taking longer than seemed possible. ‘Christ, I’m like a horse,’ said Fran and I laughed and thought, wow, look at us, weeing next to each other, filthy and sophisticated. Certainly Alex’s exquisite shirt was now a rag, grass-stained and rank, and later, when I smuggled it into our machine for a hot wash, I discovered that one rare and pearly button was missing, lost to the verge of a B-road, wrenched off while making love.
‘Making love’ is silly. The most precise term that I can come up with for what we did is dry-humping, which goes some way to illustrating the gulf between language and experience. Groping is gross, fooling around makes it sound frivolous, but whatever it was called, it meant that a journey of an hour or so took nearly three, and the village was stirring and stretching as we approached, stockbrokers walking the dog to fetch the weekend Telegraph. Here was Fran’s house, detached, white-painted, sash-windowed with roses in the garden.