Sweet Sorrow(93)

She looked terrible, far, far worse than I had ever seen her before. Her mouth hung open gormlessly and I could feel her breath, hot and stale and boozy like the back room of a pub, and I loved this, loved the black smudges round her eyes and the grease on her forehead, the wine stains in her cracked lips and the spot on her chin that had formed in the night like a mushroom, and because I loved the stinking realness of her head on my shoulder and the damp warmth of her thigh across mine and the smell of bodies that seeped from beneath the sweat-damp tangled sheet, I wondered – if I stay very, very still, how long might this last?

But the bladder will have its say and eventually I extricated myself. Standing in the bathroom, brushing my teeth and peeing at the same time, queasy and full of mysterious aches, I heard the sound of tyres on the gravel. Thoughtlessly, I flushed the toilet and now it seemed to roar like a dinosaur as, through the frosted glass, I watched the abstract shape of Bernard stepping out of the car. Crouching, I scuttled back to the living room where Fran sat with the sheet held across her. I pressed my finger to my lips and found a line of sight through the gap in the curtains. Bernard was a few feet away, fiddling with the latch on the gate to the estate while Polly strained to see her reflection in the wing mirror, wiping at the lipstick in the corner of her mouth.

‘Hurry, Bernard,’ she said, ‘we’ll miss the train,’ and I was close enough to hear Bernard mutter under his breath then climb back into the car.

And then they were gone.

‘Is it safe?’

‘It’s safe.’

‘We don’t need to whisper any more.’

‘We weren’t whispering.’

‘We don’t need to forget to whisper any more,’ she shouted and I leapt onto the bed and kissed her.

‘You’ve brushed your teeth.’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Cheat. I stink.’

‘You don’t,’ I said, though she did, and we kissed until we both tasted the same.

We stood in T-shirts frying eggs in butter and drinking instant coffee. We squeezed together under the pathetic shower then went back to bed. Finally, late in the morning …

‘Shall we take a walk around the garden?’

Like burglars, we had checked the grounds for alarms. The main house would be out of bounds, but the rest of the orchards, woods and meadows would be ours as long as we stayed out of sight of the road. Oh, I have bought the mansion of a love, says Juliet, but not possessed it. Here we were, the morning after, in full possession.

But the day was overcast, the light softer, the first leaves on the sycamores and oaks starting to curl and turn brown. It might have been the first day of autumn and we pulled each other close as we walked through the woods that led to the main grounds, eerily quiet today, an empty stage.

‘Imagine living somewhere like this.’

‘Must be weird, mustn’t it?’ said Fran. ‘It’s not something I think about. Big houses, money. Maybe it’s something that comes on when you’re older. Love of stuff. I hope not.’

‘Harper thinks about it. He’s got all these car magazines and he sort of paws and turns the corners of the ones he’s going to buy. And hi-fis and all that stuff – cameras, big watches that tell you how far underwater you are. He’s not showing off, he just likes it, like a hobby.’

‘But you don’t want a big watch, do you?’

‘No. Same time, I don’t want to be poor.’ Spoken aloud, the word sounded so strange and old-fashioned that I wondered if I’d mispronounced it. Certainly I wished I hadn’t said it.

‘Do you worry about money now?’

‘Not with the wages I’m pulling in at the petrol station.’

‘Big bucks.’

‘Loaded. But my dad worries and I worry because he worries … so it’s sort of infectious.’

‘I just want enough money not to worry about money.’

‘Me too.’

‘And a job I like doing.’

‘Famous?’

‘God, no. I mean, famous as a by-product of the work, not for its own sake. Fame’s the big watch. Who wants that? I’d much rather just be doing good work. With lots of friends, and in love and having lots of sex. There. Put it like that, it sounds really easy.’

‘I know.’

‘I mean, really, what’s the problem? We’re halfway there.’

Abruptly, we lapsed into silence. We could talk with ease about anything except the future. September hung ahead of us like a heavy curtain. The subject made me sulky, but to not discuss what might lie on the other side was absurd and cowardly too. We were too young to have subjects that we couldn’t talk about.

In a while, after taking a breath, she said, ‘I think you should go to college.’

‘Nah, I’m going to get a job.’

‘Sure, but even if you don’t get the grades—’

‘Which I won’t.’

‘—you could work then retake.’

‘It’s not for me.’

‘Just Maths and English, so you could do other things.’

‘No, that’s over now.’

‘But you’re really smart, Charlie, I wouldn’t be with you if you weren’t.’

‘Let’s talk about something else, yeah?’