Authors: Jane Lovering
Slightly Foxed (14 page)
and I'll find us some supper?"
"That would be lovely!" I yelled. Courtship by megaphone.
"Where
is
the kitchen?"
"Hold on, I'll come and get you."
It must be nice to be able to walk around your house
without having to sidle past the furniture. And to have rooms
large enough for two people to be in without having to stand
buttock to buttock. Although I could probably spend all night
happily buttock to buttock with Leo, I thought, as he rounded
a corner and came towards me, swinging my bag casually
from a slender wrist and whistling under his breath. Even the
shorts had a new charm from a perspective where I didn't
have to be seen out with them.
"Hi there. Stables go all right?"
"Oh yes, fine thanks. We did think Felicity had a touch of
colic, so we've brought her up onto the yard, but apart from
that—" He advanced towards me and put my bag on the floor
at my feet. "And how about you?"
I smiled. "Can I go grab a quick shower and get changed?
I'm feeling terribly overdressed here."
He backed away a few steps, his eyes glimmering with
something like panic. "Oh, um. Well, yes...um...of
course...but..." He obviously thought that I was going to slip
into a wisp of lace and two nipple clamps. "Wouldn't you
rather we have a bite to eat first?"
God, what was it with me? I didn't exactly want to meet a
man who'd rip all my clothes off with his teeth and a bullwhip,
but I seemed to find myself attracted without exception to
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men who'd bought their sexual personas from Reticence R Us.
But then, Leo's shyness was part of his charm, wasn't it?
"I'd like to change first, if that's okay." I undid the zip on
my bag. "I'll wear these"—I grabbed jeans and a long-sleeved
T—"if you show me where."
"Oh I see. Changed, yes." Leo reached out an arm and
flipped open a door, pulling a cord to flood a tiled room with
halogen lights. "In here. Just come on through to the kitchen
when you've...well, yes."
I went inside and he pulled the door shut behind me as
though relieved that I had, indeed, chosen to take my clothes
off behind a door. I glanced around at a room which was
completely tiled, with a central drain and several nozzles
jutting out of one wall. It looked either like a cubicle in a
slaughterhouse or a luxurious urinal.
After about a minute's showering, and while I still had
some skin left, I turned the water off and stood dripping,
realising with a nasty sinking in my stomach, that there were
no towels in here with me. Woollen jumpers, I found, are not
as absorbent as they look or feel. When rubbed over a wet
body they slide over water droplets with the ease of a cabinet
minister avoiding an awkward question. So, still slightly
moister than I usually liked, I went in search of Leo.
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"You must be starved."
When I found the kitchen again, after a couple of false
starts, it was filled with an appetising smell. "I am rather,
yes."
Leo looked a bit embarrassed. "It's nothing very special,
I'm afraid." He bent to the door in a gigantic iron range which
would invoke sleepless nights for any wicked witches with a
gingerbread inclination. He straightened up bearing a baking
sheet and flourished it onto the table in front of me. "Pizza."
"It looks delicious." In reality it had a kind of second-hand
quality to it.
"I did think about taking you out to eat." Leo began slicing
the pizza in an inept way, causing the base to split and drag
the topping from one slice to another. "But I thought it would
be better if we could stay here and talk. There wasn't
anything much in the freezer apart from pizza so I hope you
like pepperoni."
Leo sat opposite me and we chewed at each other for a
few moments. Eventually he sighed and rested back in his
chair. "You really can't buy this feeling."
I didn't know how to answer. I knew offhand of three
places where you could purchase the makings of chronic
indigestion, but didn't think that was what he meant.
"Mmmm," I said, noncommittally.
He put his elbows on the table and leaned forward,
cupping his chin in his hands and looking at me intently.
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"You've brought out feelings in me, Alys, feelings I thought
I'd buried with Sabine. Do you realise what that means to
me?"
I shook my head. There was blood pounding in my head,
echoing my heartbeat.
"When I saw you in Izzie's dining room, looking at the
photographs with such—such
fierceness
, such concentration—
for the first time in these two years, I felt that I could relate
to another person, that I wasn't totally alone." He reached out
a hand and loosely clasped fingers around my wrist. "I'm
sorry if this is all a little fast for you. Believe me I can't really
get my head around it either. But—I'm hoping—well, actually
I'm praying, Alys, that you feel the same way."
I turned my hand over and let my fingers tangle with his.
"I think so," I said through dry lips. His fingers felt hot and
my pulse was booming against the veins in my wrist like an
insistent incoming tide. We were lit only by a small table lamp
with a lopsided lampshade. I could see his glasses gleaming,
the soft fall of hair across his forehead, but the rest of his
face was vestigial, features drifting in and out of focus in a
surreal way as he moved slightly and the light twisted against
his skin.
"I—" he began, when a strident beeping broke out of
nowhere, crashing into our little idyll, making me jump and
jerk out of his grasp. "Oh
bugger
. This is just—" He was
thrusting his hands into pockets in a desperate search for the
source of the beep. "Bloody
typical
." Finally he withdrew his
mobile, still squealing its message-received tone to the world,
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and glanced at it. "Sod. It's Jay. Says Felicity is down in
agony, do I want to phone the vet?"
He stared at the text as though it might spring into life and
wrench him out of the kitchen. He was so clearly torn that it
seemed the only kind thing to do was to help out.
"Why don't you go on down to the yard and do what needs
doing. I'll clear up in here, pour a couple of glasses of wine
and we can carry on talking when you get back?" Given that
two minutes ago, I'd been half a dozen heartbeats from
flinging myself across the table at him, I thought this was
particularly decent of me.
"Well, I—look, are you sure you'll be all right?" He was
running his hands through his hair, and hayseeds were falling
like bucolic dandruff onto the table. "This is particularly
unfair, but I should really—"
"Go. I'll be fine." Then to make sure, "I'm a big girl, I can
cope."
"I could take you down with me." He was already halfway
to the door. "But if we get the vet out, it could be a long wait
and you'd, well, you might..."
"I'd only be in the way." I gave him a cheery little wave
and didn't add that I really didn't like horses that much. "I'll
just mooch about, read, have a drink. You go deal with your
emergency. Go on. Go."
When he'd gone, I managed not to give in to the urge to
fling his mobile repeatedly against the wall until it broke.
Instead, I picked up the pizza plates, put them in the sink and
switched on the main lights. Romantic illumination was all
very well when things were going romantically, but when they
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weren't going at all, fluorescent glare was the thing. This
room really was grotty and in need of a female touch—hell, in
need of any touch at all. It was tinsel-chained with cobwebs,
the flagstones were patterned with random muddy paw prints
and an examination of the greaseproof-wrapped butter on the
middle of the table showed the unmistakeable marks of
tongue raspings. But, if tonight was anything to go by, Leo
clearly didn't have a second to call his own. It wouldn't be
reasonable to expect him to spend his spare time cleaning
every inch of the house.
Another ten minutes passed. I made myself tea in a mug
which necessitated dispossessing several woodlice of an
apparently ancestral home. I'd even begun to leaf through a
copy of
Horse and Hound
when the mobile on the table
buzzed into life, urgent and unignorable as an alarm clock. I
leaped for it and picked it up.
"Alys. Very sorry, looks like I'll be late. The Green Room is
yours again, see you in the morning. Leo."
Right. Well I might as well go to bed. I switched off the
lights and groped my way along the hall towards the main
staircase. At the base of the stairs a telephone squatting on a
wisp of a table cast a mighty shadow on the wall behind.
I dropped my bag and lifted the receiver. The thought of
calling a taxi crossed my mind, but stomping off in a huff was
a bit juvenile.
I took a deep breath, overwhelmed with a longing to be
home. Back in the flat, with Florrie's music thrumming from
her room and a pile of Book Club selections beside the bed. A
bar of chocolate, a cup of tea, and possibly Mrs. Treadgold on
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the phone gossiping about Mrs. Searle and her family. All this
buildup, all this longing. Now, here I was. Lonely.
"Jace?" It was twenty past eleven, and her answerphone
was picking up? Where the hell was she? Jacinta never went
out after dark. She had what I considered to be a totally
irrational fear of being attacked. I repeatedly pointed out that
she was by far the most scary thing on the streets of York,
but she resolutely stayed in and watched videos. I wasn't
sure
which
videos, her shelves were always bare of the
evidence, but I suspected that she was to Benicio del Toro
what I was to Johnny Depp. "Jace, if you're there, pick up.
It's me. Alys."
Nothing but her pre-recorded message. Anyway, what
could I say? "He's left me on my own"? I could almost hear
Jacinta's scathing voice as she listened to the tape.
Alys you
are a big wimp. Go to bed or you will be baggy in the
morning.
"Sorry Jace, I was—er—ringing up to check everything was
okay after I left today. Don't forget that I left Mrs.
Winterbourne's order parcelled up on the desk. Okay, thanks,
goodbye." Then I dialled my only other friend.
"Hello?" The voice sounded tentative. "Who is it, please?"
"Mrs. Treadgold. It's Alys."
"Alys, is something the matter? It's not that young man of
yours, is it? I was saying to Mrs. Munroe only yesterday,
Alys'll have to be careful. He's a bit of a looker. She's going to
have to keep an eye out for the other girls. But, saying that,
he really does seem smitten, doesn't he?"
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"Um, no. It's—no. Nothing like that. I was just—I'd
forgotten whose turn it was to choose a book this fortnight
and I wondered if you knew," I finished, feebly. Here I was,
fully paid-up member of the Gloria Gaynor
I Will Survive
club,
ringing a seventy-year-old just to hear a reassuring voice.
Too much of a chicken to admit I was wondering what the hell
I was doing here. I hadn't told the book group about Leo.
They were all so convinced I was being naughty, as they
would have put it, with a lovestruck Piers. Admitting I was
really involved with someone else would be tantamount to
pitchforking puppies.
At the far end of the phone, Mrs. Treadgold coughed
gently. "Are you sure? If you're in any trouble, I can get Mr.
Mansell to ask his niece for the loan of her car. We can come
and get you, you know."
"No. No, I'm fine. Sorry to have bothered you."
Having heard a voice apart from my own brought me back
to earth. If I'd been Florence, I would have got a good
talking-to for being petty and selfish. He wouldn't just shrug
his shoulders and leave an animal rolling around a stable in
pain, would he? I was tired and grouchy and not in the best
frame of mind for seduction anyway. I should go to bed and
arise all fresh and dewy eyed, the better to ravage him on the
morrow.
I hefted my bag again and set off up the stairs, moonlight
shadowing my heels like a ghostly dog. At the top I turned for
the Green Room, but halfway down the corridor I stopped. All
right, so he might be back late. What was there to stop me
from simply being there, in his bed when he came in? Warm
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