AllFreeNovel
Share Us
And yes, it is darker in November, darker still in December. The air turns chilly. At the end of term, she takes the train to Yorkshire, drinks strong tea in the kitchen of her mother’s aggressively clean two-bedroom flat.
‘So I’ve moved in with Peter,’ she says. ‘You know, that guy I’ve been seeing?’
‘Moved in? Haven’t you just met him?’
She gives a little laugh. ‘Not at all. We’ve been seeing each other on and off for a while. I just didn’t think it was worth mentioning until it was something, you know?’ She cannot look at her mother, cannot look anywhere near her.
‘Well, you’re a grown woman now,’ her mother says. ‘I can’t tell you what to do anymore.’
Later, much later, when she thinks back to this visit, the same feeling she had watching Marcia fade to black the night she moved in with Peter will come to her – that growing sense of going underground, as if she is hiding something from herself as well as them. She will be haunted by the expression on her mother’s face when she said goodbye. She will remember how ninety-nine per cent of her felt so happy, so exhilarated, so in love. She will remember a much smaller feeling, a tiny one per cent in her gut. And she will remember pushing that feeling aside.
But it is not much later. She has not yet lived through all the things that will make her look back on this moment and see it differently. And when her mother asks, ‘So you’re sure about this fella, then?’ she answers, ‘Yes, I am. Completely.’ Adds, ‘Why don’t you come to us for Christmas?’ Without her mother knowing that she’s trying to change the subject. Because, actually, Samantha already knows that her mother is going to her sister’s, since it is where she was supposed to be going too. So she stays another couple of days, to try to even things out, and doesn’t return to Peter until Christmas Eve.
At the station, her mother pushes a twenty-pound note into her hand and gives her a kiss on the cheek.
‘Bye, love,’ she says, and Samantha feels her heart split in two.
‘You’re back,’ Peter says when she gets home and leaves her in the hallway. A moment later, the door of his study shuts and doesn’t open again until evening, when it is time for their glass of wine, by which time he appears to have forgiven her.
‘So many presents!’ The next morning, Christmas Day, Samantha surveys the exquisitely wrapped pile of gifts under the Nordic pine that Peter bought from a garden centre out near Feltham because they sell the best trees and he doesn’t want needles dropping all over the house.
‘Our first Christmas together,’ he says, taking from her the one thing she has bought for him, a Swatch that cost her the rest of her loan.
It is eleven o’clock, later than she’s ever waited to unwrap her gifts. Peter doesn’t like to rush, says it isn’t civilised. And so he brought coffee up to bed, they made love then took a long shower together, followed by a breakfast of smoked salmon and scrambled eggs. After that, he relaid the fire and lit it, and now here they are.
He has wrapped her gifts in thick single-sheet paper, tied them with red ribbon. She opens them one by one: a book, a red cashmere hat, scarf and gloves. A black parka coat, by a brand he tells her makes the finest arctic gear. The weather in the south of England doesn’t strike her as anything like arctic; it is much warmer here than in Yorkshire, but she doesn’t say this to Peter.
‘Oh my God, thank you,’ is what she says and sips her Bellini. It is over an hour later, when they are out walking hand in hand to build up an appetite, that he suggests, kindly and politely, that she refrain from punctuating her speech withoh my Godall the time.
‘It’s not that I object on religious grounds,’ he tells her. ‘But it makes you sound stupid. And you’re not stupid.’
He has already taken off the watch. It is cumbersome for cooking, he says, in a way that his leather-strapped Breitling is not. And he has the bird to prepare. By bird, he means the goose, which he bought from a specialist butcher in Strawberry Hill.
‘Can I help you cook?’ she offers, but he tells her he prefers to do it himself.
She sets the table, for something to do, but later finds him realigning the cutlery, adjusting the glasses, and pretends she hasn’t seen. She returns to the living room, picks up the book he has bought her:What a Carve Up!by Jonathan Coe. It is very funny, he tells her. He can’t believe she hasn’t read it.
She reads forty pages but doesn’t laugh once. She can see what he means, how someone of his age might find it funny. The book lolls in her hand and she thinks about the months she has lived in this house. It is nothing she can tell Marcia, and certainly not her mother, but living with Peter is taking a little more getting used to than she anticipated. There’s still plenty of wine and good food and a surprising amount of sex, given his age. In fact, these things form the basis of a comprehensive evening routine, in that strict order. Not one of the three, it seems, can be missed, unless the circumstances are extenuating. There are other things that must be adhered to as well. There is the matter of the shower screen. She keeps forgetting to go over it with the squeegee, which is kept in the cupboard under the bathroom sink. When she does remember, she leaves the squeegee in the shower tray, which also annoys Peter.
‘Everything in its place,’ he tells her, not unkindly, ‘and a place for everything.’
He has lived alone all his life, she thinks. He is not accustomed to sharing his space with another human being. They both have a lot to get used to. So she does her best. Keeps her laptop and books tidy, always hangs up her clothes, never leaves her knickers on the bedroom floor. Even if it is he who has taken them off during the night and thrown them there, she creeps out of bed in the dark and hides them in the laundry basket before morning.
Mornings, she learns, he likes his first cup of coffee in bed, his second in the kitchen with his hot buttered soda-bread toast. The first few times, he brings coffee upstairs to them on a small tray, a precursor to their morning lovemaking, since that was what happened the first time they woke up together. It will be over a year later that she’ll realise how quickly this coffee–sex routine turned from spontaneity to simple expectation. How one morning, about a week after she moved in, when he kissed her shoulder and whispered, ‘Hey, don’t suppose you fancy making the coffee for a change?’ she was only too happy to oblige.
‘Of course,’ she said, almost leaping out of bed and pulling on his Japanese silk dressing gown.
She had no idea, none whatsoever, while she was waiting for the coffee to bubble through the pot, that Peter had just effected a permanent change. From that day on, it would be her who brought their morning coffee to bed, who would ask if it tasted OK, who would close her eyes when he slid the silk robe from her and pushed her back into the soft white pillows.
She doesn’t complain. About anything. It is his house and she still feels like a guest, keen to be sensitive to her host, to make herself welcome. Once the morning coffee–sex routine is established, he begins to go running immediately afterwards, explaining to her that he has let this habit lapse because of her but that he must now pick up his training. He puts on his kit, talks her through the special breathable fabric of the T-shirt, the trainers that he had professionally fitted at the specialist running shop in Teddington. She can’t understand why he thinks she would find this interesting, but she smiles and tells him it sounds amazing. He seems pleased and leaves her to read in their large white bed.
The moment he has gone, she feels the emptiness of the huge house surround her. Restless, she runs downstairs and grabs her phone, taking the opportunity to cruise through Facebook while he’s not there to pass comment. When she hears the front door slam, she hides her phone beneath the covers and, not wanting him to think she’s lazing around like a sloth, quickly jumps into the shower before he reaches the bedroom. A mistake, as it turns out.
‘Did you wait until I’d got back to have a shower?’ he asks when she returns to the bedroom wrapped in a towel.
‘What?’
His feet are bare. She can smell them, sour in the humid room. He pulls his special breathable T-shirt over his head, releasing a strong, weird whiff of sweat and something like nylon. ‘I was wondering if you’d waited till the exact moment you knewI’dneed a shower just to piss me off, or if it was simply sheer thoughtlessness?’
