The Englishman (63 page)

The scene has clouded over, and on the morning of my fourth day I decide that I must go home today, if only to get a change of clothes.

“You’ve had fresh undies each morning,” Giles points out with the face of an Angel in the House, and it’s true. Because we are going through so many bed sheets, he has been doing a load of laundry every day.

“Squidgy, slimy, oozy, gooey, sticky—oww!” he protests as I fling myself on him in the bed and wrestle him down. “I meant me! Did you think I was talking about you? Never!”

What with one thing and another, it is past four o’clock and getting dark again by the time we set off. I am grateful that Giles has offered to drive me and my bike back to the farm, because it’s no longer white and clear but wet and windy-cold. But I am also grateful that he doesn’t ask to come in or when he will see me again. I don’t even know whether he
wants
to see me again.

“Thank you, Giles.” More I cannot manage. I feel myself welling up, and I don’t want to cry in front of him.

“It was my pleasure, Miss Lieberman.” He bends down to give me a quick kiss on the lips, and then he’s off.

I’m glad there’s no Walsh about as I slowly push my bike up to the garage. I lock it in and trudge across to my porch.

I miss him already.

I’m also pretty certain that I didn’t close my shutters before I set out in the small hours of Saturday morning. Maybe Pop Walsh went round the house to do that, thinking his Yankee greenhorn tenant had left for four weeks without battening down the hatches.

The moment I open the front door, I know that something is wrong. It’s too warm, for one thing. I left the heat on low, assuming that I would be back in the morning; now even the little hall is warmer than I usually keep it. What I didn’t leave on is the radio, and I certainly didn’t leave it on in the bedroom, quietly playing country music.

Perhaps it is this detail that reassures me I won’t be clobbered to death by housebreakers. It may still not be wise to venture any further, but fear is only one of my instinctive reactions. The bedroom door is open a crack, and when I cautiously push it open, I wonder what I expected to see. What I did not expect to see is three naked young people having sex on my bed. I recognize the blond girl, Logan’s fuck buddy, and I can only assume that the two boys, one tall and lean, one darker and stockier, are Pop Walsh’s farm helpers. They have the girl between them on all fours, one leisurely humping her from behind, one holding her bobbing head around his cock. It is a very peaceful, relaxed scene, and shocked as I am, I don’t think I will start shouting quite yet.

I take a few steps further and peep into the living-room. They have candles burning in here, and there is a fragrance of orange in the air. On several blankets, draped over the sofa cushions that have been pushed together on the floor, Jules Walsh lies naked on her stomach, being massaged by Logan Williams. He is wearing boxers and a t-shirt, and as I watch, struggling to take in this invasion of my private space, I try to decide whether he is also masturbating her. Not yet, or not now, seems to be the answer to this one.

“Okay, people, end of party.” I switch on the ceiling light, and Jules screams before bursting into tears.

“Get dressed, Jules, and stop blubbering!”

I walk back to the bedroom and throw out the Polish trio; the girl giggles, but the two boys seem to be stoned out of their heads. Without resistance or great hurry they pull on their clothes and disappear into the darkness.

“The first thing you’ll do is strip my bed and put the sheets into the washing machine.”

“Hey, man, don’t—”

“Don’t what, Logan?” I snap at him, showing him how very little amused I am. “Don’t ‘Hey, man’ me, for a start! You call me ‘Dr. Lieberman, ma’am,’ or I’ll call the police. Get on it!”

He shrugs and does as he is told. Meanwhile I lean in the doorframe and watch Jules, still sobbing, blow out the candles and rearrange the sofa cushions.

“Do you want me to put the red dress in with the sheets?” Logan calls from the bathroom. He sticks his head out through the door. “Only because there’s also a lot of cunt juice on that. Dr. Lieberman, ma’am.”

And this is where the absurdity of the situation reaches the critical degree and I can’t keep my face straight any more.

“You really are a little shit, Logan Williams!”

At first he is not sure how he is to take this apparent change of atmosphere, then he steps out of the bathroom into the hall.

“Actually, no, ma’am, I’m not. If I was, I’d have allowed Pavel, Karol, and Elka to clean out the place long before now. I’d also have deflowered that young lady there—” He nods his head to indicate Jules in the living-room.

“You mean to tell me you haven’t?” I ask with awful irony.

“Jules?” he calls. “Have I fucked you?”

“No!” She appears from the kitchen, too upset now for tears. “He hasn’t!”

“Yeah, because you’re saving yourself for Mr. Right. Anyway, I thought you told me you wanted out of this place. Juvenile delinquents don’t go anywhere except jail.”

“She’s fifteen!” Logan says, disparagingly. “She’s a black girl on a white man’s farm! She has no idea who or what she is or wants to be!”

“I’m sixteen!”

“Well, I’ll tell you what she is: no match for persuasive, personable scum like you!”

He gives a sardonic laugh and shakes his head about my ignorance.

“True. Had I
wanted
to fuck her. But guess what: I didn’t! And you know why not? Two reasons! One, I have no mind to be sent down for statutory rape! She’s fifteen! Sorry, sixteen—whatever. I can do sums! And two, my kid sister went down that road. She’s eighteen now, and she’s already chalked up one abortion, one gang rape, and one bout of STD. You may think I’m scum, but I’m scum with principles!”

I look around me. “Yeah, you make Mahatma Gandhi look like a pimp!”

He scratches his cheek, grins, and shrugs.

“Jules, is he telling the truth?” I demand of her.

“About what?” she asks cautiously.

“What do you
think?
Did you have sex with him?”

“No! Not…really.”

I groan, more impatient with her cageyness than with his
chuzpah
.

Logan comes clean. “Somewhere between second and third base. Dr. Lieberman, ma’am.”

“I’m still waiting to hear that from you, Jules.”

She stares at me, in equal parts frightened and appalled.

“The thing is this, Jules, if I have any reason to suspect that Logan’s—or any other boy’s—penis or finger beyond the first knuckle has been inside you, I’m going to drag your sly, secretive little butt to the gynecologist before you can say contraception! Have I made myself clear?”

“Jesus, you
are
a ballbuster,” Logan says, half grinning, half annoyed. “Leave the kid alone!”

Jules has started crying again, and I give up.

“So whose idea was it to break into my house? You did that before, a few times, didn’t you?”

He shrugs again.

“Logan, how can I take you seriously if you behave like a fifteen-year-old, too?”

“I have a key! It was my idea!” Jules speaks up. “And I was sixteen last Sunday!”

“Well, at last you’re standing by your man! Simple rule, Jules: you don’t make out, let alone have sex, with a boy you don’t really, really like! And if you really, really like someone, you help them when they’re in trouble!”

This shames her, and I’m not sorry.

“Did you or the others take anything? Apart from my eggs and my wine?”

“We replaced the eggs! We were cold and hungry!”

I remember Giles in his kitchen, in t-shirt and jogging pants, making vegetable frittata for me.

“No, we didn’t,” Logan says earnestly. “Unless the others took something when I wasn’t looking, but I don’t think so. I told them I’d beat the shit out if them if they did. Are you missing any valuables?”

“I’ll let you know. Now go away. Oh, and, Jules…” I hold out my hand, and she stares at it.

“Give her the key,” Logan orders her, and she digs her hand into her coat pocket and extracts a single key on a length of brown string.

“What will you tell my mom?” She wells up again, and I can’t decide whether I prefer her tearful or petulant.

“I don’t know yet, Jules. You’ll just have to wait and see. That goes for you, too, Logan. I guess I should be all pedagogical about this and make a deal with you, like, I won’t tell anyone if you write me nothing but A essays for the rest of your time at Ardrossan. But I really don’t know whether I want to be so magnanimous.”

“And I don’t know whether I’d take the deal.”

“Then we both have something to think about, don’t we?”

“It’s me.”

There is a short pause in the line. “So it is.”

“Giles, do you think I could come back tonight, with my essays, a change of clothes, and my PJs?”

He gives one of his spurts of laughter. “You won’t need PJs.”

While I’m waiting for the washing to be done, I wander around the cottage, checking it for theft or damage. It is a relief, in a way, to know that I wasn’t imagining the subtle changes I noticed around the house recently, and I lived in shared housing for too long to be very deeply upset about the idea of people using my stuff in the kitchen, or even sleeping in my bed. Still, all that is very different from a group of young people effectively breaking into my home to have sex parties there.

I am worried that I am foisting myself on Giles and he is too polite to say so, and when I knock on his door, a rucksack on my back and a sack of groceries in my hand, I fully expect a lukewarm welcome. His eyes are very bright and very alert, and he is very polite indeed, taking the groceries off me and assuring me that I shouldn’t have.

“Are you all right?” he asks when I’ve peeled myself out of my coat and boots.

“Yes, I am, but you won’t bel—”

The rest is stifled by a big, thorough kiss, after which he literally flings me over his shoulder and carries me off into the bedroom. I didn’t think I would be in the mood for sex, after that little intermezzo at my cottage, but the moment I see his face and feel his body against mine, I decide I am not going to allow a anyone to spoil him for me.

“I missed you,” he whispers into my hair.

“Oh, my sweet.” I hug him more tightly and raise my hips against his. “Then you’d better take better aim, hadn’t you?”

This makes him laugh so hard that he can’t take aim at all for a few minutes. It is almost ten o’clock by the time the quiche is in the oven and Giles has drawn the cork of a bottle of Chardonnay.

“You seem very sporting about it,” he remarks, eyebrows raised, when I have described my domestic situation. “Are you taking this too lightly?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. But they’re young, and after all…it’s just sex.”

“I have to say I have little sympathy left for Logan Williams,” he says.

I sip my wine. “Hmm.”

“You’re going to let him off, aren’t you?”

I gaze at him across his little kitchen table. “It’s so lovely to touch someone you like. I guess I’ll have to talk to Karen. She was odd when I tried to broach the subject before. Evasive. I imagine she’s tired of hearing complaints about her daughter.”

“If you shield the girl, she’ll only get into more trouble.”

“What would you do? Lock her up?”

“She’ll be knocked up by next Christmas.”

“Yeah, maybe. Talking of which, what are we going to do about Selena?”

He pulls a face at me over the rim of his wineglass.

“You mean, what are
you
going to do about Selena?”

“Oh, Giles! She needs help!”

“‘If she’s caught the Nicholas, it’ll cost her a thousand pound ere she be cured,’” he quips.

“You don’t like her because she has fallen for Hornberger! I don’t much like her either, but I’m not just frightened for her but also of her. I think she’s a liability, Giles. And she won’t confide in anyone unless she is confronted.”