On Loving Josiah (15 page)

First, Greg would remove the foil lid in one piece: though never in a thousand breakfasts was Thomas ever to witness it tear, each morning it seemed to present a new challenge to Greg. Then,
carefully
laying the lid face up on the table, he would take his teaspoon and scrape off the thick layer of yoghurt in exactly five successive strokes, each time his tongue hovering beneath the upturned spoon in piquant ecstasy. Next, he would make a well in the centre of the pot and fill it with two dessert spoons of granulated sugar, and Thomas would watch the sugar mountain subside bit by bit, mixing firstly with the yoghurt in the pot, and then with the yogurt already moving around inside his mouth. Finally, Greg would fold the foil lid into four, put it into the empty pot, and get up from the table.

Even on the sixtieth occasion Thomas was mesmerized by the accuracy of Greg’s breakfast performance, even on the hundred and sixtieth occasion, but after Greg had been living with him for nine months there was another distraction. Her name was Cilla.

And, quite fittingly, it was breakfast when he first met her.

‘Hello, my name’s Cilla. I hope you don’t mind me staying
sometimes
,’ she enthused, grinning wildly at Greg. ‘Would it be all right if I called you “Tom”?’

Now, no one had ever called Thomas Marius ‘Tom’, at least, not since he was ten years old. But that wasn’t why his jaw dropped now, nor did it drop because she was evidently a pretty, sweet thing somehow lured into Greg’s lumbering embrace. No, what
astonished
him was her name. For in his time he had met two Camillas (both rather aptly named, he thought, fighting Aeneas with
Amazonian
courage and one breast bared); an Athene (and why not call your daughter after the goddess of wisdom?); a Clio (muse of history, quite inspiring); a Thalia (muse of laughter and good cheer,
a blessing, surely); and even a Calypso (whose sexual charms arrested Odysseus for seven years.) But what could Cilla’s parents have been thinking of? Perhaps they were thinking of Scylla before Circe cast a spell on her and gave her six heads with three rows of teeth in each. Scylla, beloved of Glaucus, one of the deities of the sea…

‘Or I could always call you “Dr Marius”?’ Cilla giggled nervously. The expression on her host’s face was unfathomable, and he didn’t answer her.

‘I was thinking,’ she said, ‘this place could really do with a lick of paint to cheer it up a little. I’ve had a bit of training in colour, you know, I’m a beautician. I’ve quite an eye, so they tell me. I’ll be bold. I want to paint Greg’s bedroom coral blush.’

Dr Marius was still one conversation in arrears. ‘No, don’t call me “Tom”. I wouldn’t know who I was.’ And then, he added tactfully, ‘What would you like me to call you? Have you got a nickname or something?’

Cilla giggled again. ‘Greg calls me “Cill”,’ she said.

‘Right then,’ said Thomas, ‘I’ll call you “Sill” too.’ He was
oblivious
to Greg’s stony stare, and thought only how much better to be reminded of windows.

‘And the spot of decorating?’

‘What?’

‘What I mentioned, getting this house in a bit of order.’

‘Oh yes, yes,’ said Thomas, vacantly. ‘Go ahead, by all means.’

And before his very eyes Thomas Marius watched his house become coral blush, orange pekoe and lime green: only his bedroom and his study were impervious to Cilla’s promiscuous paintbrush, remaining stalwart behind their avocado woodchip wallpaper.

‘What a good job you’ve done, Sill,’ Thomas would tell her when he was shown yet another transformed room, and Cilla would grin, chest out, hands behind her back, and say, ‘It was nothing, Tom, honestly. You know, I could always do your bedroom, too…’

‘No, no, thank you. I’m quite happy.’

And by day, at least, Thomas was quite happy. Cilla was always smiling, always ready to oblige; and sometimes when Greg was at an evening seminar and Cilla was back from her beauty parlour, she would make Thomas a cup of tea and bring it to his study.

‘Come in, Sill, haven’t you brought a cup of tea for yourself?’

‘Well, I thought you’d be working.’

‘You get yourself a cup. Come and talk to me.’

And that was, for Thomas, a rather pleasurable twenty minutes of the day, when Cilla would tell him about her father and his father before him who’d both been train drivers, and she promised that one day she’d bring in the family photograph album because the early photos, what with the steam and that, were something else. Occasionally Cilla even tried to regale him with stories from her parlour, about eyebrows and waxing and hairy moles, but she could see from Thomas’ grimaces that these didn’t go down well, and being a sensitive sort she kept them for Greg. Meanwhile, Thomas was always trying to switch the subject to Greek mythology, telling Cilla all about the voyages of Odysseus, which was as close as he ever got to a direct question about Cilla’s peculiar name. She never rose to the bait, of course, but enjoyed the myths and would tell Greg when they were snuggled up in bed together, ‘Your landlord is so eccentric, but I do like him.’

Then Cilla began to cook for her man, and the invasion of Thomas’ fridge continued apace: hamburgers, sausages and bacon appeared on another shelf, and tins of tuna and sardines were piled high in his kitchen cupboard. Thomas soon got into the habit of going back to college for his supper, and when he returned home at ten o’clock he was greeted with wafts of Greg’s fishy breath. But for some reason this only became truly offensive at the thought of that lovely girl suffering it as well.

One night he came in and found them kissing on the sofa in his
now iris-blue sitting-room; he’d rushed past them and up the stairs, and Cilla had followed him up to apologise.

‘I’m so sorry,’ she said, ‘we’re pushing you out of your own house. We’ll stay in the bedroom, Tom. Don’t mind us.’

But that was when he really did begin to mind. The walls weren’t even particularly thin, but perhaps, Thomas thought, as he lay there listening, I’m too conscious of it. Is there an aural equivalent to a peeping Tom? Should I tell them to be quieter? Is that the more moral thing to do, or is it simply the less liberal?

At first Greg was the one he was angry with. Not being exactly a man of fashion, he’d taken Cilla’s rather tight-fitting tunics to be a mark of innocence: he’d even considered that the reason why they were so short was that she’d worn them while she was still at school, and had never had sufficient money to replace them with something a little more modern. The first time he heard Greg say to her, ‘You’ve been a naughty girl, my little one,’; the first time he heard a slap, and then two, why, Thomas was on the point of entering and rescuing the poor girl; but the giggles which ensued confounded him. He lay there in the dark, his heart beat resounding in his chest, alert to every Gregorian grunt and squeak of the old mattress, and so uncomfortably present was he in that little menage that he fancied he could smell salted herring on Greg’s breath.

Occasionally it was all he could do to resist running into the room and shouting ‘Stop!’ Would Cill want him to? he wondered. Was she being raped night after night while he was lying idly by? For the girl would often shout ‘No! No!’, and vigorously, too. And human beings were sufficiently complicated to shout ‘No!’, mean ‘Yes!’, and then, when considering everything in the cold light of day, deeply mean ‘no’ after all. And if even the participants in a rape didn’t know whether ‘yes’ meant ‘no’ and ‘no’ meant ‘yes’, however was a jury supposed to know it?

And then a most unfortunate thing happened. For while Greg
was guilty and his girlfriend innocent, things were at least bearable. But overnight there was a sea-change: her noes turned to yeses. The timbre of her voice changed: initial alarm at Greg’s violent advances turned to greed for them. And Cilla suddenly became Scylla in all her terrible glory. Thomas could bear it no more. He got out of bed, tightened his pyjama cord and put on his dressing-gown. Upstairs he went to his study at four in the morning, scanning the shelves until he found what he was looking for. Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book XIII: here you are, Scylla, bathing in the fountain up to your waist, but look down, Scylla! You think you’re so pretty, don’t you? You look happily for your reflection. But all you find in the water are three monstrous, barking dogs, and you thrash about trying to escape them, but you can’t, dear Scylla, because don’t you
understand
they’re part of you?

Cilla didn’t come down to breakfast the following morning, and Thomas was relieved. He felt he could never look her in the eye again. Greg ate his yoghurt with his customary precision, and for some reason Thomas said to him,

‘I always think how tasty those yoghurts look. Do you mind if I try one?’

‘Go ahead,’ said Greg, surprised, and looking up only briefly from his own, in case he should miss an interesting subsidence of sugar.

In fact, Cilla was only to remain in his house for a further three months. There were no signs of her imminent departure, though Thomas had by now become distinctly less observant and
solicitous
, and their now occasional
tête à têtes
in the early evening had become stiff and consisted only of the briefest formalities. But when she was gone, Thomas felt in some way responsible for it; or rather that he had misjudged her. He wanted to write her a letter to tell her how sorry he was that she had left so suddenly and without saying goodbye; he wanted to ask Greg for her address, or at least to
be given some small clue as to what had happened between them. But Greg was as unforthcoming as ever, and wouldn’t have told him about Cilla’s pregnancy for the world.

‘Well,’ said Samantha, who that afternoon had dressed herself up in silk and leather and spent an hour applying her make-up, ‘I’ve come to the conclusion that you’re gay. And in this day and age, they’re not exactly going to imprison you for it! I’m being no more prying than if I were to ask you your middle name.’

‘If I tell you my middle name, will you leave? This is my tutorial hour and I, thank God, am not your tutor.’ Thomas sighed and was as bored as he sounded.

‘Just tell me this, have you ever lusted for a woman? Tell me that, and I’ll go.’

‘For God’s sake,’ said Thomas, looking at his watch.

‘For example, have you ever noticed that I was a woman? Has it ever crossed your mind?’

‘Unfortunately, yes.’

‘There you see, you don’t like women.’

‘Has it ever occurred to you that it might be you I don’t like?’

‘But what about desire? Desire is surely a more profound
condition
than mere liking or disliking.’

Thomas sighed and said nothing.

Samantha laughed easily and sat on the arm of an armchair with her legs astride. ‘Do you know, Dr Marius, I don’t think I’ve been to a single supervision without an overwhelming desire to take my shirt off, and I never wear a bra when I know I’ll be seeing you, just in case desire finally does overwhelm me.’

‘Aristotle,
Nichomachean Ethics Book
V
: read it, Samantha, and see how you share your free-flowing qualities with the animals. There
is nothing profound about desire, nothing at all. Desire is the least human part of us.’

‘So, I’m in touch with my inner animal. Is that possibly the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me?’

‘Is love within your range, Samantha? Or are you pure desire?’

‘My God, I’ve traced an incurable romantic. And?’

‘And what?’

‘Have you ever loved a woman, then?’

It would have been so easy to have told the truth to Samantha, ‘I was married, once.’ But that would have been sinking to her level, playing her game. The admission would have been a defeat in itself, and he was saved from making it by a knock on the door.

Samantha pleaded, one last time, and Thomas reiterated that he didn’t have to tell her anything.

‘Come in,’ he said.

A fresh-faced undergraduate hesitated when he caught sight of Samantha, as the buttons on her shirt were half undone.

‘Adrian, sit down,’ said Thomas, more effusively than usual. ‘Don’t worry, she’s just going.’

And this was the way he triumphed over Samantha, for the time being, at least.