Authors: Jane Lovering
Slightly Foxed (17 page)
quick scout round the room revealed a chest of drawers,
under an enormous pile of old horse magazines.
I opened the first drawer, but it contained nothing more
than some old show programmes and rosettes. The next
drawer seemed to be packed with receipts and invoices, and I
began to wonder whether Leo actually
had
any clothes. Then
the third and last drawer. Revelations. Poems. Poems that
made my heart pinwheel and pushed my breath into my
throat, words dragged from the depths of a burning soul.
Such pain. Such dead resignation to fate.
Suddenly ashamed,
I closed up the drawer and went to the window to gasp in
some air, feeling as though I'd somehow forced reluctant
admissions from the lips of a dreamer.
Wrapped in the duvet, I watched the morning coming to
life outside. Once again the sun was coating the world with its
adhesive rays, beating the brightness out of it and flattening
the shadows. Out on the driveway, Leo stood holding a pony
by its head collar. I looked at him with new eyes, new insights
into the depths of him, watching as he glanced up at the
approach of another pony being dragged reluctantly along by
a woman.
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I peered into the baked morning. Was this the elusive Jay?
In my head she had become almost as much of a paragon as
Sabine, efficient around the horses and a siren elsewhere.
The real Jay looked approachable and more like a best mate
than a manager, with a curvy figure and dark brown hair
scraped back and tied into a tidy, workmanlike bun.
She tugged her animal to a standstill alongside Leo, letting
the rope go slack. The two of them bent, side by side, Leo
pulling at the pony's leg, Jay looking down at the hoof. I
opened the window and called down a greeting but neither of
them seemed to hear, both entranced by equine matters.
There I stood, wearing only the sex-damped duvet, and
there was Leo, on his knees. With another woman. Not a
beautiful woman, but an ordinary, everyday woman. He'd left
his bed with me in it, to go to her and the horses.
I'd rarely felt so bereft. Oh, I'd come close of course, when
Alasdair and I had split up, and Florence and I had moved out
of the four-bedroomed place in Harrogate and into the little
flat in York. But then the only things I'd lost had been
material. Now I felt like I'd lost a chance.
Maybe it was the words I'd just read which made me more
vulnerable than I would otherwise have been, because I stood
glumly contemplating the scene coming to an end as the girl
wheeled her pony around and set off back the way she had
come.
Everything inside me had sunk. Yesterday I had been so
buoyed up with excitement and anticipation culminating in
last night's triumphant sexual regatta, complete with flares
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igniting and waves crashing on the shore. Now I felt like the
last voyage of an old dredger.
The dull central core of pain nagged at me like toothache
as I retrieved my hairbrush from the table, my yesterday-
night shirt-of-passionate-abandon from the chairback and
tried to repack them without letting the memories come too. I
didn't want to pull these clothes out of my bag to remember
the way he'd kissed my shoulder when I undid my buttons,
the feel of his fingers tangling in my hair as I'd arched above
him. No.
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"...and so I told him I had an urgent phone call from home
and had to come back." I sat slumped in Simon's chair behind
the curtain, chain-eating HobNobs.
"Alys." Jace shook her head slowly. "You are sometimes a
very silly girl."
"What?" I felt as though she had punched me. Surely,
unequivocal support was what friends were for? "Why?"
"Because once again you are not talking. You are seeing
him with this girl and you are feeling that you are—what?—
too old, too used up, too
dry
to be loved? But you are running
away instead of standing up and saying 'I am feeling very bad
and I wish for you to comfort me'?"
"But he never—" I sniffed back the tears. "He never told
me I was beautiful or great in bed or anything. He thinks
we've got some sort of recognition-thing going—and
that's
only because I've read his poetry." I flopped back in the chair,
my indignation spent. "I feel crap. Used and crap."
"No." Jacinta's voice was very firm. "I am not listening to
you any more, Alys. Always you are going round and round
with the questions with me, but what can I tell you? Is it that
you are
wanting
me to be saying that yes he is
bastardo
? This
I cannot say, because I do not know him. And neither more
do you. So, no more talking of it, unless you are going to be
ringing up this man and having a good talk about how you are
feeling. All right?"
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She broke through the curtain, sweeping out of the
cubbyhole like the QE2 setting indignant sail. Even though the
HobNobs had lost their flavoursome moreishness in the face
of her annoyance, I ate a couple anyway, flicking the crumbs
sadly onto the carpet.
Okay, so Leo had appeared upset by my precipitate
leaving. Not simply upset, but bewildered, baffled. I'd had to
concoct a story about Florence arriving back from London to
find the flat flooded and the fire brigade on the doorstep
before he'd agreed to drive me to the station. He'd even
offered to come back with me. I remembered the feel of his
farewell hug, how I'd briefly relaxed into the sensation of
being wanted, before the mental picture of him and Jay
talking came floating back and I stiffened away. I wanted to
talk to him—oh, how I wanted to. But I needed the
reassurance of home.
"Alys!" Jace called to me from the shop floor. "You are
broody like an old hen. Come here and be helping me, I am
wanting to finish with these books because Piers he is coming
to take me to lunch."
I dragged myself from my weary tangle of thoughts and
went through, trailing biscuit crumbs. "You're going out with
Piers again?" Even my voice sounded heavy. "Where's he
taking you?"
Jace gave me an odd look from under lashes so heavily
mascaraed that any single one would constitute an offensive
weapon. "I am not knowing. Why, do you wish to come also?"
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"I wouldn't want to cramp your style." Although with the
way Jace was dressed today, even anthrax would have had a
job cramping her style. She looked like a gothic lampshade.
"I am sure Piers will not mind." Jace lifted a pile of books.
Companionably, our slight tiff forgotten, Jace and I carried
the priced-up books through, then I left her to get on with
shelving so that I could man the till. Shelving was a job Jace
was ideally suited for. She could easily reach shelves which
had me teetering on a stool.
Perhaps I should wear stilettos
. I
looked down at my shoes. I'd worn sexy boots at Leo's, why
not at work?
"Do you think I should wear sexier shoes?" I called
through.
"I am not hearing you. What did you say?"
"Do you THINK," I bellowed, "that I should wear SEXIER
SHOES?"
"Oh yeah, talk dirty to me again."
I jumped, hadn't heard him come in. "Piers!"
"Were you thinking, say, heels? Kinda like—
real high
?"
I couldn't tell if he was winding me up or not. "Um. Jace!" I
called. "Piers is here."
"Or suede? I get real hot for suede."
"JACE!"
Piers looked at me sideways. "Hey, what's up with you
today? You seem kinda edgy."
"Alys is not liking men right now." Jacinta loomed into
vision like a war barge. "I say we are taking her away to eat
and she will forget all the bad doings."
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Piers frowned. "Bastard stand you up again? Just say the
word and I'll punch him out."
I laughed. Piers was an unlikely champion. "My knight in
shining cotton." I brushed a casual hand over his arm.
"Thanks, Piers. But it wasn't really Leo this time, it was me. I
just felt, well, Leo can compartmentalise his life so easily.
There's the horses"—
and Jay
, my mind whispered—"and
there's me." I made little "boxes" with my hands. "I can't do
that. I want a man who can overlap. Who can make me feel
like I'm the centre of his world."
Jacinta snorted. "You tell me when you find that man, Alys.
I feel you may have long, long wait."
Piers held his hands up. "Hey, you two want to be alone
with your bitterness and anger, or we going to lunch?"
We decided to go back to my flat and have lunch there. I
tried to step back, to suggest that Jace and Piers go off
somewhere alone together, but they were adamant. We
arrived at my front door in the Porsche. It was not a stylish
arrival.
"I think I'll walk back." I levered myself from the miniscule
shelf which passed for a backseat and where I had spent the
journey sitting bolt upright between them like a cross
between a chaperone and a cocker spaniel. "This is
not
a
three-seater."
Jacinta untied her headscarf and forced her hair forward
with both hands. "Is a little fast driving for no roof, Piers. You
too are looking like you have been very well blown."
"Uh, yeah."
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The flat smelled terrible. It had smelled bad last night
when I'd arrived. This was worse.
"Foargh," Jace exclaimed. "Alys, it is smelling like you are
keeping dead persons. It was not smelling like this when I
was coming to feed Grainger." Then her face creased into a
frown. "Although I think that Snakebite made my nose not
work."
I ran round apologising and opening windows. Then we ate
and Jace updated Piers on the latest chapter in the disaster
that was my love life.
"So, Alys, why are you thinking he is like this?" Jace asked
as I returned to the table after another brief and fruitless
hunt for Grainger.
"Hmm—he's not been very well lately, so it's only to be
expected that he might not be able to control himself as well
as he used to." It was only when I saw their confusion that I
realised she had been asking about Leo. "Oh. I don't know.
I'm just so confused. Men, huh! Sorry, Piers, present
company excepted, of course."
"I'm glad you think so."
"I have been thinking that this is a man who is not having
thoughts of you. Is easy with horses, you give them food, you
clean up shit and there they are, all happy. I think this man is
not good with women. Are you still caring?"
Ah, the inevitable question. Did I care? I collected the soup
bowls and ran water into the sink while I thought. Yes, I
cared. I cared that I felt stupid—that he'd been more
interested in sex than in me. I cared about the way
I
felt. But
him? Did I care about him? Enough to swallow my pride and
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talk to him? I could still feel the burning chill from the power
of his words, lying there useless and impotent in a drawer
when they should have been etched into a million souls. I
thought of his green eyes, his cool, muscular body—
"Hey, Alys." Piers came and stood behind me as I
pensively rinsed dishes. "I've been thinking, Florence isn't due
back until Wednesday, right? So why don't you come out with
me tonight? There's a couple parties on, you know the kinda
thing." Jacinta snorted and said something shortly in Spanish.
To my surprise Piers replied, also in Spanish then switched
languages. "How about it? Cheer you up, guaranteed! Come
shake yer funky thang."
The potential of Jace shaking her funky thing made me
smile. "I haven't heard you speak Spanish for years." It was
all I could think of to say.
"Yeah, well," he said. "Been keeping it up, putting in some
practice talking to Jacinta here." Jacinta gave a small smile.
"Y'see Pop's from the Argentine. Met Ma when she went down
buying polo ponies. He's still there, given up the ponies now,
spends his time building boats, so when I call him I speak
Spanish. I was bilingual til I was about twelve but—hey, use it
or lose it, yeah Alys?"
I wasn't sure about the way he was grinning at me. I was
even less sure about the hand on my shoulder. I could feel his
rings cool against my skin where my much-washed T-shirt
sagged.
"Come out tonight. Show this Leo guy you're not sitting in
pining."
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