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You look across to the man next to you. He, too, is wet. You blurt a laugh; here at last is the joke. So does he.

You need some help, you say.

So do you.

You look down. Your white cotton dress is triumphantly wet in a huge patch at the front, it clings like a piece of recalcitrant silk slicked about a tree. You throw back your head and grimace: oh God. And then a man’s jacket is wrapped round your shoulders, a man’s leading you back to the table, he’s holding you in a way that only a husband should hold you: with ownership.

It is, of course, your man with the beautiful nape.

Lesson 35

hooks and eyes

Everything is changed.

Gabriel Bonilla, that is his name. You repeat it; the sound is all mealy in your mouth. You smile in apology at that. You must wait until your dress has dried to decency; it may take some time and this Gabriel Bonilla asks if you need to get home straight away – no, it’s all right, there’s nothing to go home to – and you laugh, too loud, and as it comes out it’s as if something within you has cracked.

Well, hello.

So there you are, an hour or two in that greasy spoon of a café and you’re both talking about everything and nothing, voices tumbling over the top of each other, learning lives.

Shaking free.

You’d never talk with this freedom, this lightness, if you were unattached. Being married gives you a bloom of certainty, a confidence. But it doesn’t stop the blushing. Gabriel Bonilla blushes too, just like you, fully, completely, ridiculously and you dare to think it means something. You’re hesitant to ask about a partner and a family, you want to know, must know, but fear the effort of asking will reveal too much, that you’ll redden once again. Like after the water splash when you realised he’d seen your body so vulnerably, too many things, the thighs too fat and the nipples through your bra, God, all of it, and your hand flies to your mouth at the recollection but he drops his eyes as if he doesn’t want to intrude, as if he’s opened a door by mistake to your thoughts.

There’s something fascinating about this man sitting before you in his summer-weight suit. You can’t quite put your finger on it but it’s something decent, old-fashioned, polite. Wrong for this world, for this cram of sex shops and neon lights where a girl languid by a doorway has a junky’s spots. This Gabriel Bonilla shouldn’t be here. He’s from another time, another place; the type of person who wouldn’t expect a woman to be driving a car if there was a man in it. There’s his Spanish name and yet fluent English – my mother is English, my father Spanish – and again there’s your laugh, bursting out; ah ha, so that explains it.

What do you do, you ask.

Guess.

You lean forward, cup your chin in your palm: a teacher, doctor, spy?

I’m an actor, he says.

You sit back. Retract, just a touch. You don’t know any actors, you’re not sure you want to.

I don’t recognise you. Should I?

No, no, he chuckles. No one does, any more. I was famous once, for about a week, in my late teens. I did a dreadful soap – and he holds up his hand at your question, he’s not going to divulge – and then two Hollywood films that bombed, and I haven’t done much ever since. I now live in terror of appearing on one of those ‘Where Are They Now?’ shows.

You laugh. You’ve always been distrustful of actors, have suspected that they’ve never really muddied their paws in the mess of life, they’ve lived it second-hand. This is unfair but you’re suddenly brisk. How on earth do you live, you ask.

Voice-overs. Ads. Foreign video rights. The occasional guest role. And I was sensible when I was young. I bought a flat.

What happens in between? How do you fill up your days?

Let me see, I sleep until one p.m. Have a Scotch for breakfast. Do a line of coke. You both laugh. No, no, I go to the gym and do classes as the Actors Centre, go to casting, that type of thing. Read a lot, travel a lot, row, go to the movies, drink too much tea.

You can’t grasp a life like this, none of your peers lives as loosely any more. This Gabriel Bonilla answers your questions as if he’s answered them a thousand times before and he couldn’t care less. The lack of concern over welfare and career path and what he’s doing with his life is intriguing, silly, odd. He strikes you as a man who’s not hungry for anything, he has a flat and enough money to get by; there’s no need to grasp or to rush. It’s not unattractive, this lightness. Then he says he’s working on a script about something else he’s addicted to and you lean forward: what, come on, tell me?

Bullfighting.

The gulp of a laugh. You stuff the little girl down, sit on the lid of her box.

Bullfighting?

He’s laughing too, his father was a matador but he was never much of a success because he wasn’t suicidal enough, he liked his life too much. His father only ever fought in provincial rings but he’s got an idea for a film, he’s told his family he’s finally embarking on a proper life and he’s burying himself in London’s wonderful libraries, the world’s best, and he’s up to his ears in research. He’s writing in them, too, because he’d go mad if he didn’t get out. You examine his hands, long and lean, like a priest’s, you take them in yours and he tells you the strength in a matador’s wrist is what they rely on to make their mark and your hands slip under his and try to encircle them like two rowlocks for oars and you feel their weight, clamp them, soft.

Are your father’s anything like these, you ask.

Absolutely. The spitting image. I also have his cough. And his laugh.

But they’re so thin, you tease, they couldn’t kill a bull!

It’s not about aggression or force. Oh dios mio, you have so much to learn, and his head is bowing down to his palms still in yours.

How did it get to this, so suddenly, so quickly? You sit back. Look at him. The lower lip puffy, pillowed, ripe for splitting. The long, black lashes like a child’s. The tallness in the seat, the slight self-consciousness to it, as if he was mocked, perhaps, at school. The body kept in shape. There’s a beauty to him, to his shyness, his decency, you’ve never been with a man who has a beauty to his body, it’s never mattered, you’ve never cared about that enough. You imagine this Gabriel Bonilla naked, your palm on his chest, reading the span of it and the beating heart, and you cross your legs and squeeze your thighs and smile like a ten-year-old who’s just been caught with the last of her grandmother’s chocolates.

I’ll take you to a bullfight some day, he says. You’ll love it, I promise.

You feel the heat in your cheeks, you try to still it down, you see the heat in his too. You recognise his shyness for you’ve always been shy yourself. You rarely see shyness in a man, it’s always disguised as arrogance, abruptness, aloofness. You’re too alike, this Gabriel and you. You recognise it in the way he doesn’t sit quite comfortably in the world, can’t quite keep up. A jobbing actor, still, and he’s OK with that. He smiles, right into your eyes, you’re distracted and all your questions are suddenly wiped out. He turns the conversation back upon yourself, interviews you as if he’s trying to extract the marrow of your life: your marriage, flat, family, job, colleagues, boss. You answer openly, easily, talk slips out smooth, it’s all ripe with a dangerous kind of readiness, a lightness is singing within you.

But you tell yourself you will never spoil it all by sleeping with him, will never have the connection stained by that. You don’t want sudden awkwardness, don’t want sour sleeper’s breath in the morning or unflushed toilets and smoker’s breath or farts. It took you a year to fart when Cole was in an adjoining room, two to fart in the same room. You sometimes bite the inside of your mouth so furiously that blood’s drawn and the rabbity working of your lips is a private, peculiar thing that no one but Cole ever sees. You cut your toenails in front of him, wear underwear that’s falling apart, defecate, piss. You open yourself to your husband in a way you don’t for anyone else but perhaps he knows too much: all the magic’s been lost.

Cole.

You used to talk like this with him once, when you were lovers just starting out. You don’t want Gabriel Bonilla ever to be disappointed in you, to drift before anything’s begun. So the situation will be preserved just exactly as it is, like a secret document that’s tucked deep into a pocket of your wallet, always hidden, always close, that you can take out and dream about at will, a safe’s combination, a treasure map, a prisoner’s plan of escape.

Gabriel takes out a fountain pen that opens with a click as agreeable as a lipstick. He scribbles down a number on the back of the bill. A man hasn’t given you his number for so long. What does it mean, what comes next, is he playing with you, is it a game? And when your fingers brush you draw back, too quick.

He knows you’re married. He says he’d like to meet Cole. Which throws you.

Lesson 36

happiness and virtue alike lie in action

On the tube hurtling home your fingers worry at the slip of paper like an archaeologist with a snippet at a dig. Connections like this happen so rarely, once or twice in a lifetime perhaps. You would have seized it once, when you were young; you would have dreamt it was the kernel for a big, consuming love, perhaps. But now? A tall, shy, out-of-work actor who’s about your age and yet seems somehow unformed, as if he hasn’t quite stepped into life. A drifter and a dreamer, hanging by the phone, hostage to his agent, always living by the will of someone else.

Everything Cole is not.

With his days to himself.

You smile. You hold the paper to your lips as if you’re anointing it. You’ll call tomorrow, just hello, as a friend, just that. You feel like you’ve dived into the shallow end of a cold pool in one foolhardy zoom but it’s all right, you haven’t cracked your spine; you can smile as you power through the resistance, your body peels away from the danger, you’ve survived the risk.

Everything is changed and you feel shawled by that, anticipation wraps itself around you, a thrill at the secret, secret thought of him.

Lesson 37

upon girls and women depend almost entirely the domestic happiness of men

Where were you all night?

The movies.

What did you see?

Some Iranian thing, you’d hate it.

Hmm.

Cole’s eating a bowl of Heinz tomato soup at the kitchen bench, a weekend jumper over his business shirt. The fridge is now a tomb for items with strange smells and growths: mouldering cheese, blue-speckled bread, jars of tomato paste hosting a soft pale fur. Neither of you has cared enough lately, the oven’s used to store pots and pans, it’s been a long time since a Sunday roast. There was such a tenderness to your little home, once: Theo used to drop in often, unexpected, as if she was cleaving herself to its warmth.

Now, Cole and you have stopped trying. You dreaded that once, that as a couple you’d stop the offers of a bath run or a cup of tea or the dishes done. Actually, it’s survivable. The opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s indifference. Indifference emotionally, indifference physically. You haven’t made love since the hotel room of fresh roses every two days, but tonight you kiss him on the crown of his head and let your lips linger and it wakens something in your groin.

I’m going to bed, you say.

Hmm, again; deep in The Simpsons and the soup.

He doesn’t seem to notice your gesture, or doesn’t want to buy into it right now: The Simpsons has ten minutes to

You smile. You don’t care. For you’ve walked back into the sun, it’s warm on your back. You have a new friend in your life, to play with, to be young again with, to wake you up.