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‘There’s some less contemporary stuff upstairs,’ he’s saying. ‘Downstairs, I prefer more modern work.’ He nods at the ink drawing of the trumpet player. ‘I dabble a bit. The odd sketch.’
‘You did that?’
Bloodyhell. He’s so talented, as well as beautiful. Wait till she tells Marcia.
‘It’s really good,’ she says. That’s right, Samantha, hit him with that impressive vocabulary of yours.
But he’s pointing at his drawing, his eyes half closed as if he’s trying to remember something. It’s possible he didn’t hear her pithy appraisal of his work.
‘I sketched that dude at Ronnie Scott’s,’ he says. ‘It’s a famous jazz bar in Soho. We went past it earlier. Do you know it?’
As if. She shakes her head, though she’s secretly cringing at the worddude, grateful for it – no one gets everything right, not even him, and for the first time, she feels a small advantage in being younger.
‘I’ll take you there,’ he adds.
The words hang. She is glad of the low lamplight, knows from the heat in her face that she is blushing.I’ll take you there. Because he can. Because it is nothing to him. Because he is effortless. Even the way he sits on the sofa is easy, one knee tucked into the crook of his arm, the way he seems to command his glass into his hand like a lightsaber, the delicate but firm way he sets it down again. She has met people like him, other lecturers, but she has never been this close to someone of his … learnedness, or calibre, or whatever it is. Until this moment, she’s only spoken one to one with lecturers in their book-lined offices, observed from a distance the specific weight of seriousness they all seem to carry so lightly within themselves. They have been other to her, these people, a separate breed. Peter is a part of that world, one she cannot imagine herself ever belonging to. Yet she doesn’t really belong in the sweat-drizzled walls of student social life either.
And she no longer belongs back home – not now.
They talk about travel – he has travelled extensively in Europe and the Far East. Of course he has.
‘What about you?’ he asks.
‘Erm, well, we went on a family holiday to a campsite in Brittany once. It was a year before my dad left.’ She did not intend to say it, but out it has come.
Wordlessly, Peter gets up to tend to the fire, to change the record, which has reached the end with athm,thm,thm. He turns the disc over in his clean, deft hands before pushing it snugly over the spindle and lowering the needle to a click of static.
‘Your father left?’
‘He … he …’
‘You don’t have to talk about it.’ He is beside her on the sofa, topping up her glass.
She drinks; the wine is so rich, almost too rich for her. He pours some more for himself. He is facing her, intent, earnest, fascinated.
‘So you live with your mother?’
‘Yes. Well, no. I live in London, but when I’m home, I go to my mum’s flat.’ The fire is warm, the music quiet. It is so lovely to be listened to, to be looked at like that.
‘My dad had an affair with an eighteen-year-old girl,’ she says into the soft cradle of his attention. ‘She was five years older than me at the time. She was at my school. There was only one school in the village. We found out that he’d gone bankrupt. It was kind of his reaction to that. My mum thinks, anyway. We had to sell our house. The farm.’ She sounds like an automaton, she thinks, spouting out data.
He leans forward, and before she realises what he’s doing, he has laid the flat of his hand on her cheek with such tenderness she feels her eyes prickle. His first touch. A moment and he takes his hand away.
‘I’m so sorry,’ he says.
‘It is what it is.’ She turns her gaze towards the fire. In the grate, flames lick the wood, curl up the chimney. She doesn’t tell him the rest: that a couple of years later, she lost her virginity one dark night behind the school building to a boy she didn’t even like, both of them off their faces on cheap vodka; that she slept with several more boys after that when she was barely of legal age, thinking herself a feminist, in charge of her body and her desires; that only later did she realise that this was her acting out after the heartbreak and humiliation caused by her father, that ultimately it was a punishment against herself, a form of self-harm. She never went in for the whole arm-cutting thing like some of the other girls.
‘I’m sorry,’ she says, after a moment. ‘Not very cheery.’
He shakes his head, but fondly. He looks proud of her, or something. ‘So where do you want to go on your travels?’
‘I’m going to go around Europe with my flatmate,’ she tells him, ‘once we graduate.’
‘Well, you have to go to Italy. I’ll give you a list of places you must not miss.’
He asks her if she likes London, and she tells him the city is too loud and dense with people for her, even now. But that she couldn’t go back to the farm, even if they still had it, or to the village. It strikes her that Richmond is the perfect place, though she doesn’t say this out loud. There is plenty of green here, yet it is not the country; plenty of shops, yet not the town. She could live here.
‘So, what will you do after uni?’ he asks.
