Kitabı oku: «An Almost Perfect Moon», sayfa 2

CHAPTER TWO Harry faces a conundrum

The following morning Harry started up his Citroën and headed back towards Wandsworth. That was the good thing about this particular job: it was fairly close by and there were no parking restrictions on the road outside. To avoid using the Underground, with its cattle trucks of commuters and dilapidated escalators, Harry drove wherever possible.

He was enjoying this current project, a mural for a middle-aged couple’s kitchen. As usual he rang on the bell, got no answer, and then let himself in. Ian and Anna both left for work long before Harry even thought about opening his paints, and usually he finished long (he suspected) before they returned. Little notes would be left for him, words of encouragement, or a sudden change of heart, and would he mind terribly, if it was not too much of a pain, just adding another bit to the scene? On two occasions they had left him photos of buildings or sights they wanted incorporated. Harry didn’t mind. After all, he was there to paint what they wanted. That was the whole point of his murals: to realize his clients’ dreams. He would make suggestions, talk through ideas, and provide sketches, helping the client with crystallize whatever it was they had in mind. In this case, Ian and Anna had been quite certain they wanted a river scene running all the way round the kitchen between work surface and overhead cupboards, with images of their favourite parts of the countryside as background. Since he had been a comparatively young child, Harry had nursed a love and fascination with architecture. From the Suffolk churches and grand houses in and around the area where he grew up, to the medieval castles discovered with glee on family holidays, Harry’s taste had always been broad and varied. But as he grew older, read, learnt and saw more, so he developed a love of classicism. William Kent, Capability Brown, and Vanburgh were his heroes; Fragonard, Watteau and Boucher his artistic inspiration. Much of his work reflected this, his skills honed by a year at art college. After leaving Cambridge he’d shelved any ideas he might have had for becoming an architect, and instead, spurred on by his mother, he’d enrolled at St Martin’s. Although this had crippled him financially at the time, the gamble had paid off: ever since, he’d been able to maintain a career doing what he loved most. This latest work was a river scene, surrounded by luxuriant foliage and with hints of ancient temples and ruined columns in the distance, was no exception. He’d sketched the whole thing first on paper, then lightly onto the wall, so they could begin to see how the finished painting might look. Did they want people, birds and animals added along the way? Quite definitely, Anna had nodded emphatically. And what about a few more ruins? Or a folly on a hill in the distance, perhaps? Yes, they’d agreed, that might be fun.

He walked downstairs into the basement kitchen, with its large, square central space and thick terracotta tiles, put down his kit, and made a brief examination of his work. Over halfway through now. He should be finished in a couple of weeks. Luckily he had another big job to go to in a restaurant, plus a very small cupboard decoration in another private kitchen. He often found juggling the work difficult, so that sometimes he would take on more than he could really cope with, and on other occasions he might be unemployed for several weeks. Still, he’d never been out of work for long, and he certainly saw no point in worrying about it. So far, between bouts of feeling very cash rich and extremely short, he had survived very happily. The restaurant might take as long as a couple of months, though. Perhaps he could paint the cupboard while he was at the preliminary sketches stage of the other. Marcus, the restaurant owner, need never know. He would just have to work into the evening for a few days. But then there was the bathroom in Chelsea to do. He’d forgotten that. Damn. Perhaps he could do the prelims for Marcus, but postpone actually working on the walls for a week or two. He’d already postponed the Chelsea job once. He would just have to work a bit harder and longer over the next few weeks, Harry thought to himself as he boiled the chrome kettle in Anna and Ian’s kitchen.

His mobile rang. Below ground reception wasn’t great, but he could still hear Julia’s voice.

‘What are you doing now?’

‘Working incredibly hard. Making myself coffee.’

‘God, you have it easy.’ She laughed. ‘And do you have plans tonight? Why don’t you come over?’

‘I tell you what, why don’t you come over to me? Come straight from work and I’ll cook you supper.’

‘OK. That would be great. I feel I’ve hardly seen you.’

Harry paused. ‘Come whenever you can. Bye.’

He put the phone back down on the work-surface and blew onto the top of his coffee. How could she say she’d hardly seen him? They were together all Saturday. And he’d spent the previous Wednesday night at her flat too.

Ben was right though, he should be thanking his lucky stars. Perhaps he was being too choosy, too particular. From the outset, he had found Julia easy to talk to, down to earth and lacking pretension. And she was stunning, no question about it. Ben, though, had a vested interest in their relationship. It was he who had introduced them in the first place. Initially, Harry had felt his normal wariness of City workers. They were all (with the exception of Ben, of course) over-worked, materialistic machines, fit only for sneering at. Anyway, he was sure she wouldn’t think much of him. He didn’t even know how to read the FT share prices. But Ben had refused to listen to his attempts to wriggle out of the evening, and so eventually he’d given in and gone along. To his surprise, but as his friend had promised, Julia was broad-minded, self-deprecating and, despite being an extremely proficient investment banker (Ben had told him so), reluctant to discuss her own work for fear it would sound too dull. At the end of the evening, they’d exchanged numbers, met up a couple of evenings later, and gone to bed with each other two dates after that.

Harry slurped his coffee, in between peering intently at the mural and laying out his paints. It had certainly been an unusual first night. They’d met up in Soho, and she’d suggested they go to a Chinese restaurant she knew on Wardour Street.

‘It’s a really fun place. The waiters are always extremely rude, but the food’s great,’ she’d told him. Harry had been further surprised by her restaurant choice, having prepared himself for a ludicrously expensive meal in one of the top restaurants in town. Glazed brown ducks had hung by their necks in the windows, their heads pathetically limp. Harry shuddered and followed Juliain, hoping he wouldn’t be forced to look at them throughout dinner. He needn’t have worried. No sooner had they entered the slightly steamy atmosphere than a waiter bluntly told them to ‘get upstairs’.

‘See?’ said Julia. ‘I told you they were rude.’

‘Other people seem to like it too,’ said Harry as they were frog-marched through the crowded first floor to a table.

Harry found himself liking Julia more and more. As she talked, he attentively held her gaze, absorbing the details of her face. A slender jaw-line, straight nose and pale blue eyes; bobbed blonde hair and distractingly perfect white teeth beneath her narrow lips. Her skin, protected by a light brushing of foundation, looked pale and perfect, almost translucent. He imagined her playing a femme fatale in an old film; she would look even more beautiful in black and white.

After the Chinese, they managed to hail a taxi surprisingly quickly and, getting in, Julia said without conferring, ‘Cottesmore Gardens, please.’ Following her, Harry had no intention of avoiding what was inevitably going to ensue. He felt more attracted to her than to anyone else he’d met in the past few years. As the taxi trundled off, Julia turned to him seductively, her lips shining with a renewed gloss of lipstick, her long legs folded towards him.

‘Great Chinese,’ said Harry. ‘What do you think happens if you’re rude back? Do they poison you? Has anyone ever been poisoned?’

Julia laughed, then said, ‘I’ve had a lovely evening, thank you. It’s been such fun.’

‘Good, I’m glad you’ve enjoyed it,’ he grinned. She was looking at him intently. Clearly, the time had come. Leaning over, he kissed her, catching a deep infusion of her scent as he did so.

Once in her flat, Julia led him to the sofa, then disappeared only to reappear a few moments later with a bottle of champagne and two glasses. The place reeked of refined elegance: thick curtains hung luxuriously over the twin french windows facing out onto the street. Antique furniture – a beautiful dining table at one end of the room and two small console tables – stood beneath original artwork and a huge gilt mirror. Harry had never known anyone his age live in such style. ‘Cheers.’ She carefully chinked his glass and sat down next to him on the big sofa. He was conscious that the scene unfolding was perhaps just a bit contrived, the seductive champagne maybe a bit too planned. Quite flattering though. Carefully putting down his glass, he kissed her once more. Moments later, they lay full stretch, each grappling with the other’s belt and buttons. Harry marvelled at her wonderfully sleek and well-proportioned body. It felt good to be back in the fray at long last. As he kissed her all over, she murmured gently, her legs contentedly stretching out beneath him. Moving his arms behind her, she raised herself slightly, enabling him to neatly unclip her white lacy bra. With his hands and lips caressing her breasts, she began digging her fingers digging into his back. Suddenly, she pushed him up and, smiling mischievously, said, ‘Let’s go next door.’ Only her knickers lay between her and complete nakedness.

‘Now, where were we?’ She smiled once more, calmly pulling down his trousers and boxer shorts. ‘Ah, yes. You were about to fuck me, I think.’

Harry was slightly taken aback by her choice of words, especially as he’d never once heard her swear before, but was none the less happy enough to oblige. He hadn’t made love to anyone for over two years and, feeling incredibly aroused, was worried he might ruin everything by firing off in under thirty seconds. Desperately trying to think of anything non-sexual, he found the task slightly easier when Julia started repeating, ‘Fuck me, Harry, fuck me, Harry,’ quicker and quicker. What did she think he was doing? he thought, pummelling in and out of her.

‘Fuck HARDER,’ she yelled, and Harry, obeying her demands and pounding as hard as he could, tried desperately not to laugh. Still, he thought, if that was her kick, who was he to start objecting?

‘I hope you didn’t mind me shouting like that,’ Julia said afterwards. ‘I can’t help talking like that whenever I have sex.’

Harry shrugged and smiled. He couldn’t really think of an appropriate answer.

But it wasn’t the kinky sex talk that bothered Harry. It was something he couldn’t quite put his finger on. He supposed he’d been worrying slightly about where he and Julia were heading, but this concern had taken a different turn over the past two days, ever since he’d seen Jenny at the theatre. Or at least, he was pretty sure it had been Jenny. During the interval, Julia and he had been chatting about the play, wedged in one corner of the bar with their pre-ordered drinks, when, over her shoulder, Harry had spotted two girls talking animatedly on the far side. Something about the back of the chestnut-haired one looked strangely familiar, and then she turned. She was quite a long way away, but he was certain it was Jenny. The way she smiled and brushed her hair from her face as she laughed was just so Jenny, it had to be her. When Julia asked him what the matter was, he said, Nothing, just someone he thought he recognized, but when he looked up again she’d gone. Vanished into the ether, as though she’d never been there at all.

He began sketching the outline of the Palladian bridge Anna had requested, between a lawn on one side and a row of poplars stretching away on the other. Perhaps Jenny hadn’t been there the other night. Perhaps he’d just seen a ghost of her. Every time he thought of her, a pang of regret came over him. Jenny had been lovely. Still, it had been a long time ago. He’d been eighteen then. They’d met, briefly, in Africa, where both had been spending six months before going on to university. But they would probably never have seen each other again had it not been for the fact that their parents lived quite close to each other in Suffolk. Sitting outside their tents watching the sun set over the Ngorongoro Crater, the world had never seemed bigger; discovering they lived barely fifteen miles apart back home struck them as a particularly strange piece of serendipity. On his return, he bravely called her up. Her father was in the RAF and they’d only been posted there a couple of years before, while Harry had lived in the same house in Polstead all his life. He was able to take her places she’d never been before – the best pubs, the prettiest spots. The relationship moved fast. Most of his other friends were still away, so he and Jenny spent almost all of the final couple of months before university together, totally wrapped up in their own little microcosm into which no one else was allowed or required to enter. They would meet up in the evenings and drive to a pub, or go to see a film. At weekends they took themselves off camping, walking for miles and miles and talking incessantly, so that in a short time Harry felt he knew more about Jenny than just about anyone he’d ever met. They even took a week off to go to Paris together, holding hands as they idled around Montmartre, gazing into each other’s eyes across café tables. Making love by night. Harry remembered feeling quite heady with the romance of it.

He felt he’d come of age during his time with her. What were his previous relationships compared with what he had with Jenny? Nothing. Merely insignificant teenage fumblings. Everything was different with her. They were just so right together, they laughed so much, had so much fun, and the summer days seemed so particularly summery: long, light and warm. Youth tasting the cup of adulthood without the weights of responsibility. When he wasn’t with her, he thought about her: the smell of her dark flowing hair; the long eyelashes that protected her hazel eyes. He would think of the delicate curve of her neck and the outline of her collar bone, so sensuous, feminine and alluring. Harry felt an intensity to his love, his feelings given added confidence by Jenny’s incredible love for him.

So how had he allowed her to melt away from his life? Everything had changed once he got to Cambridge. He was there, and Jenny was in London, beginning four years of teacher training at Roehampton. They were no longer half-an-hour apart and it was no longer summer. For a brief, blissful while, they had been flowing in the same wind, but with the flick of a switch, their lives were suddenly set on totally different courses. All around him at Cambridge, his fellow students were getting drunk, debating the meaning of life and sleeping with one another. Jenny sounded distant on the phone and hurt when he didn’t ring when he said he would. He began to feel resentful that she seemed to depend on him so much; the balance of their relationship had somehow shifted. When she came to visit him, early on in the term, he felt embarrassed: young freshers weren’t supposed to be involved in serious – and hence boring – relationships; they were meant to be young bucks, carefree, unshackled and irresponsible. By the Sunday afternoon, Harry was snapping at her irritably and she was looking at him with disbelieving pain. They went for a walk across the water meadows, but it was no good. The magic of the summer had gone. Then she asked him whether he’d slept with anyone else, and he admitted he had. He’d got drunk, ended up in some girl’s bed, screwing her while someone else was sick in the corridor outside. It hadn’t meant a thing and he hadn’t seen or spoken to her since. Jenny looked desolate. Without saying another word, she drove off in her cluttered Peugeot. It was the last time he saw her.

From rather enjoying thinking about the fun they’d had that summer, Harry now felt rather depressed. To make matters worse, he’d never really gone out with anyone else at Cambridge. All those pathetic plans to sleep around and be a ‘free agent’ – what a sham. He’d kissed quite a lot of people, slept with some of them, and then started seeing a girl called Katrina in his last two terms. Looking back on it now, he realized he had been fairly horrible to her too. He rarely saw her during the day, creeping round to her rooms last thing, spending the night with her, then drifting off the following morning. Once they’d left, the – the relationship, if it could be called that, ground to a halt. They liked each other, but not enough to make an effort any more.

Who came next? A year of being single and jealous of friends who had settled relationships, and then Jo, an old Cambridge friend. She had been single for a while too, so it became a pairing of convenience. They carried on being friends, only now they slept together. Harry wondered whether he might feel more for her once he knew every inch of her body. But he didn’t. Then she found someone to fall in love with properly and that was that. They were still friends though, which was more than he could say for Jenny or Katrina. And Jo got married to the man she’d fallen in love with. Harry and he became friends too, and when they asked him to design the service sheet, he felt only too happy to help out. He liked doing that kind of work. It was something slightly different, didn’t take long, and all the compliments at the wedding gave him a smug sense of satisfaction.

Harry switched on the radio, hoping for some old classics on Radio Two or Heart FM, but didn’t recognize anything they were playing, so switched to Classic FM instead. It was never long before they played something he knew, and the stuff he’d never heard before was always bearable as background noise. Soon after Jo, he’d started seeing a New Zealander called Tanya. She was almost very beautiful, but something about the end of her nose and her slightly crooked teeth spoilt things. And he also had a suspicion that her eyes were just slightly too wide apart. He kept hoping that somehow these minor flaws would iron themselves out as he grew more and more fond of her. It was Ben who put him straight. Tanya’s flaws weren’t her nose or teeth. It was simply that they weren’t really suited. Harry knew his friend was right, but carried on going out with her until, fortunately, she decided to go back to New Zealand. As he waved her off at Heathrow, Harry felt an enormous sense of relief and liberation sweep over him.

There was only one other person he’d slept with before Julia. Christ, he couldn’t even remember her name. That was terrible. He stopped painting and stood back, rubbing his chin. A man’s name, shortened for a girl. Sam, or Marty. Toni? What was it? Clary. That was it. Not a man’s name at all. She’d been voracious though, pulling off his clothes the moment they were in her room, then leading him to the shower and getting straight down to business. He remembered thinking her sexual confidence must stem from experience, and then becoming terrified she might give him some dreadful sexually transmitted disease. Still, she was feisty and attractive, and Harry was slightly drunk and his fears quickly subsided. But after making love for a second time back in her room, she pulled out a cigarette and started to smoke. He hadn’t touched a cigarette himself for a couple of years and the smell, at that time in the early hours of the morning, seemed particularly repugnant. The lights were off, but the room was still suffused by a faint orange glow from the streetlights outside, and Harry watched in horror as the burning red tip glowed brighter every time she inhaled. Then, her fix of nicotine complete, she leant across him, her left nipple brushing against his chest, and stubbed it out on a plate on the bedside cabinet.

‘Hmm,’ she breathed over him, and thrust her tongue in his mouth once more. The taste was vile, like kissing an ash-tray, and completely unerotic. The next morning he left as soon as he could, appalled at his own cheapness.

That had been nearly two years ago. Until Julia, he’d forsaken casual sex and any relationship vowing that unless he met someone he could fall in love with, he would rather stay both single and chaste. Harry smiled to himself. He hadn’t thought about his former girlfriends for ages. But it was sad that with the exception of Jenny, he’d slept with five people and only really liked one of them. That was Jo, and she’d been a friend anyway. If he’d known what he knew now, he wondered, would he have discarded Jenny so casually? But at the time, in his youthful imagination, he’d pictured a future full of wild love affairs and nights of passion with a string of beautiful women, until someone swept him off his feet so completely he’d never want for anything again. He stopped painting again, and went upstairs and out onto the road, clutching his phone.

‘Ben, hi, it’s me,’ he said into the phone.

‘Oh, Harry, hi. Listen, I can’t speak now. I’ll call you later, OK?’

‘Yeah, yeah, all right.’

He tried Flin, but got his voicemail. He nearly left a message, but decided against it. Perhaps Lucie was around. She wasn’t, only her assistant, who said she was terribly sorry, but Lucie was in a meeting. Could she help at all? No, thought Harry, no one can. He didn’t really want to talk to any of his other friends. There was a simpler remedy: stop thinking about what might have been with Jenny. Things had worked out differently. Now he had Julia, and if he wasn’t in love with her just at that moment, then perhaps he would be in time. She was certainly more fun and better looking than anyone in between. And he was very fond of her. Or maybe he was in love with her, but just didn’t realize it. Maybe memory was shrouding his relationship with Jenny in a rosetinted frame, and it had never been half as good as he remembered.

Stomping back downstairs, he heard the hourly news. More misery in Chechnya. Mass killings in Sierra Leone. Harry picked up his brush, humbled. It was easy to distance oneself from horrors in a far-off land, to feel sorry for the people involved, but then to shrug and put them to one side. But really, if all he had to worry about was whether he was in love or not, he couldn’t be doing too badly. And at least he didn’t have to go to meetings. He didn’t have to call back later because someone was hovering over him. He could do what he liked, and, at the end of the day, if he so wished, he could go back to his flat and do whatever he wished there too, without anyone to get in his way.

But when he arrived back home later that evening, he padded upstairs and, in a move that had been secretly premeditated since before lunch, dug out his photo albums. He soon found the picture he was after, his favourite photo of her, the one he’d once kept in a frame by his bed. The colours were fading, but every line and curve of her face still looked, even after eleven years, heart-breakingly familiar.