The Englishman (61 page)

“I can’t believe that none of the older boys at school had a crush on you.” I lean on my elbow and smile at him. Giles looks up from the grate, clearly taken aback. “You have such a fine ass…‘arse,’ as you’d say.”

“Well, as for that, madam, your own little tush is very fine, too.”

“Thanks…but I wasn’t fishing.”

“As indeed, why should you? You’re used to men lusting after you.”

There he stands, slimmer and more angular than Michelangelo’s
David
, more boyish, but just as perfect in his nakedness, and suddenly there is an acid tone in his voice. I register the electric flash that runs along my nerves. Wait while it peaks and fades. A remark like that would have really hurt me, a few years ago. I am more resilient now. I have grown, I am a little harder, and generally much better at protecting myself.

“And I thought I was paying you a compliment,” I muse aloud. “I’m sorry if I’ve trespassed into a no-go area, Giles.”

And it works. His rigid posture relaxes. I hadn’t even seen him tense up, but he relaxes and casts down his eyes.

“What, school-boy crushes?” He had already forgotten about that question. “Oh, I’m not bothered about that. The geography master fondled my bottom once or twice, but then he fondled pretty much every boy’s bottom. Why do you ask?”

“I don’t know. I guess I was thinking how young you look, and what you must have looked like when you—”

“Were.” His voice is dry as winter leaves. “Young.”

“No!”

He grins at me with that ironic incredulity that makes me want to hit him.

“Are you hungry?” he asks. “Have you eaten?”

“I’m not hungry!”

“Drink?”

“You’re horrible! I’d like a glass of water, please.”

He gives a curt nod and walks off into the kitchen, to reappear a few seconds later with two glasses, a jug of water and an open but full bottle of red wine.

“When did you open the wine? I didn’t hear you.”

With a grim expression around his mouth he pours water into my glass.

“Earlier. Before I took the dogs out. I was going to get well and truly plastered tonight.”

“Oh, you had plans? I’m so sorry! You should have said! I wouldn’t have stayed!”

I’m not going to let him get away with whatever mood he has dropped into, like into a vat of sadness. Maybe that’s all it is: post-climactic
tristesse?
Don’t think so. My taunts make him pause; he seems to be looking at the mouth of the bottle hovering over my glass.

“I’m glad you’ve come.” He doesn’t say it as if he were glad. “I’m glad you’re here.”

“But?”

He sighs and pours me my drink. Then, finally, he looks at me.

“But I wish you hadn’t made me come…like that.”

A ball of lead plummets into the pit of my stomach.

“You think that was sluttish of me.”

“What? No! That’s not at all—no!”

“You think a girl who gives head on the first…date—”

The rest of my protest is stifled against his naked shoulder when he pulls me roughly into his arms.

“You’re crushing me!”

“I’m sorry…”

He releases me from his bear hug, and we laugh together, dazed by the intensity of feeling that is between us, and cowed by the misunderstandings that fly thick and fast.

“Let’s not talk,” he says dumbly. He lays a hand on my knee and runs it up my thigh, then both hands, on both legs, and he is so lovely and so sad, and I don’t want to talk either. I don’t want to fight. I don’t want to spoil this. But.

“But what
did
you mean?”

“Nothing.”

“Giles!”

“Look!” He isn’t looking at me; he’s looking at his hands on my knees. “It’s just that Amanda, my ex-wife—”

“
Is
she your ex-wife?” I ask, a little pissy.

“What? Oh, yes.” He grins. “All over now.”

“Because she wouldn’t give head.”

“No! Well, I don’t know. She said it was demeaning. Eighties’ feminism and all that, but I think she simply didn’t like it. She hated it, frankly, and I hated her turning it into a political issue. Because I don’t think it is that! If she doesn’t want to be so…intimate with me, she doesn’t, but there’s nothing inherently denigrating in a blowjob. Why should there be? Patting someone on the shoulder can be far more denigrating, in a certain context, than—oh, I’m raving again! I’m sorry. I can’t explain.”

“Yes, you can. Do. Please.”

He rouses himself to greater effort, but he still doesn’t look at me, not even when I clasp his hands in mine.

“Well, what I mean to say is that for me…it still feels…special, as if it
meant
something. I know it doesn’t, so you needn’t tell me how absurd that sounds, but—well, it makes me feel like one of John Donne’s poet-lovers. You suck my life’s spirit from me, from my body, and I’ll be a hollow man who’ll sicken and die unless you give me your spirit in return. I’m sorry, I can’t really talk about it in less high-falutin’ terms!”

“What you’re saying is you’re sorry that you let me have you.” At this, he looks up, surprised at how poignantly I have summarized him. “But
you
already had
me
, remember?”

“At Notre Dame?”

“At Notre Dame, and in the observatory, and in your office! My life sounds like an X-rated movie.”

“But that wasn’t the same.”

“How wasn’t it? Of course it was!”

“I’ve never pleased you as you did me, just now!”

He looks like a boy who insists that he has been wronged. He knows it, too, and is ashamed of his insecurity. A few years ago I would have started arguing with him; now I am wiser. I wrap my arms around his neck and snuggle against him. He is warm and smells of arousal. I breathe softly into his ear, making him and myself giggle.

“Do you know, it’s quite ridiculous how sexy you are…even when you’re being silly.”

“Anna—”

I cut him short with a slow, deep kiss.

“Let’s go to bed, Giles, hmm? And bring a pen and paper. Maybe we can start a chart.”

Chapter 36

I W
AKE
O
N
A D
EEP
, I
NDRAWN
B
REATH
. Ten inches away from my face is a naked male arm, crooked against a naked male chest. The shock of recognition seeps through my body like hot treacle, sluggishly.

I cannot move. If this is post-coital languor, it has merged fatally with my general state of exhaustion. My limbs, absurdly, feel like leaden sponges, my eyelids are swollen with passion, and I think also tears; my brain is a ball of soggy cotton wool.

“Hey,” whispers the man who has done this. “Fancy seeing you here.”

With a supreme effort I arch my back to peer up into his face, although I can hardly keep my eyes open enough to see. What I do see is a quiet, intent smile, and I know that my swollen eyes are smiling back.

“Hey.” My voice breaks on a croak. Even my vocal cords are mush.

His cheek rests against the back of his hand, pushed between his face and the pillow. “Good morning.”

I groan and burrow underneath the warm, fragrant cover. The night is over. My body doesn’t want the night to be over.

“Can’t get up…fucked me into a pulp.”

His chuckle erupts against me; he seems to be much more awake than I am. Wondering where he gets his energy, I surrender myself to the heaviness that drags at my limbs.
Briar Rose
. That’s what the Brothers Grimm called the princess in the folk tale who pricked her finger on a spindle and slept for a hundred years until a prince came to kiss her back to life. I could sleep for a hundred years and then some, and a prince and a prick certainly have something to do with it.

“Stay where you are,” he whispers against my ear. “I’ll take the dogs out.”

We spend the day getting to know each other, in bed and out of bed. And in between, we talk. I tell him everything I know about Selena, and he agrees that Hornberger most definitely knew about Selena’s anorexia.

“I told you he enjoys their emotional torment. Go on, off you run!” We are out walking the dogs, and once away from the lakeside path, he takes them off their leashes and they charge into the snowy mush like children. “I found out that Amanda was having an affair one evening when I picked her up at her office. He’d been there, with her, and he knew I’d be there in a few minutes. She was…sucking him off, and he came all over her face, her hair, her blouse. When I turned up, she was in such a state of hysteria that I thought at first she’d been assaulted.”

“But—you said she didn’t give head!”

He shrugs. “Maybe he has a nicer cock than I.”

I look up at him, and I can see that he is flippant rather than hurt.

“She did, eventually, try to explain. I think it’s a combination of factors.” That sounds too coolly analytical even to Giles, and he pulls a face at himself. “She felt bad because she knew that I was disappointed that she didn’t like oral sex, or any kind of sex, really, for most of our marriage. I sound like an obsessive, don’t I? It’s not that. Really, it was more about the way this reflected our whole relationship.
Polite
. We were always so polite to each other. Friends, at first, but emotionally so cautious, and physically…so wrong for each other. Nick clocked from the start what her weaknesses were, and he liked her to give him quick blowjobs in her office. Just to humiliate her and intensify the disgust she felt for herself. So, to put it another way: a girl with issues about her body, about conforming to expectations, a girl brought up to be hard on herself, will find in Nick the perfect self-harming tool.”

“Are you thinking of Selena or of Amanda?”

“Both.”

I am watching his profile, wondering about the wisdom of getting involved with a man who is still so emotionally involved with his wife. Ex-wife. Perhaps it is a good thing, then, that I am not actually getting involved with Giles.

He glances down at me and smiles.

“You look worried. Don’t be. I’m only trying to explain. I do need it to make some sort of sense, and I’ve never had to explain it to someone I care about.”

That is the closest either of us comes to a declaration. We do not talk about our dead-end situation again. There is nothing more to say. We need to be together, we can’t be together, and that is all.

“But what are we going to do about Selena?” I return to the topic later that day when I am chopping vegetables in Giles’s kitchen. Neither of us was hungry enough for breakfast; I even declined the coffee he offered me because my heart was still racing with the excitement of it all. The excitement of being here.

“Some hot chocolate, then?”

“Oh, yes! Would you laugh at me?”

He came over to kiss me. “Only in a good way.”

By teatime, after two hours outside in the woods, I am ready for some food. I am on chopping duty while Giles beats eggs and heats up the pan. Everything he does is delightful to me, and I want to savor every moment of this experience, but I must be careful not to slip into the melancholy of remembering it while it is still happening.

“Right—a few minutes under the grill, and grub’s up!”

“Giles…”

“Hm?” He turns round, and I step between his woolly feet, push up his sweater, and duck my head under it.

“I’m sad!” My voice is muffled by cotton and skin, and I’m not sure he heard me, because he doesn’t respond, only hugs me. Then he leads me over to a chair, sits down in it, and pulls me onto his lap. I wrap my arms around his neck and press my face into the fragrant nook below his ear.

“You’ll feel better for some food,” he says after a while. “Let’s eat, and then I’ll see what I can do to console you.”

It takes us about fifteen minutes to have a slice of frittata each and a glass of water. Then I look up from my plate and see him looking at me.

“Done,” I say softly. Underneath the table my foot is feeling for his; a quarter of an hour without touching is already too long.

“Not yet, you aren’t.” He grins and marches me over to the sofa in the living room.

His elbows on either side of my arms, he rests his chest against my crotch—the contact makes me gasp with a sudden flare of electricity—and covers my breasts with his hands.

“One of the reasons I thought you wouldn’t like me is that I’ve got small tits,” I say, a little meekly.

Giles, who was in the process of leaning in to suck one nipple peeping through the grid of his fingers, groans and drops his head so that his forehead rests in my mini-cleavage.

“Well, because Amanda’s got these huge knockers!” I try to justify my neurosis.

“I don’t even know any Amanda.”