Katie In Love: full length erotic romance novel (11 page)

'Absolutely not,' he replied, and turned. 'Well, a little.'

'Good, I'm glad to hear it.'

I followed him into the shadows asking myself why I had said that; why, when you clearly like someone, there is an absurd inclination to show otherwise. We reveal false versions of ourselves, a protective veil we weave with words, then wonder why there are misunderstandings. He opened the door to an old Land Rover streaked in mud. I kissed his cheek and he kissed me on the mouth until I pulled away, breathless.

'I just love kissing in car parks,' I gasped.

'You do it often?'

'All the time. Car parks, the street, bus stations...'

'I don't believe you've ever been in a bus station.'

'In Paris once.'

'I knew it.'

We kissed again and he slapped my backside as I hauled myself up into the cab.

'You are so predictable, Tom Bridge,' I said and he laughed.

With the doors closed, I caught the familiar smell of stables and moist earth. My seat had split seams and bounced up and down as the engine fired. The gear box grated. He reversed, swept up the curving incline and lurched into the traffic as if casting off into an empty sea. He spotted an opening, accelerated and switched lanes. The car behind blasted its horn.

'You have driven before,' I remarked.

'It's a jungle out there,' he replied, foot hard on the gas. 'In Sri Lanka the roads turn to mud in the monsoon. It's like driving in blancmange.'

'Did you bring the car back with you?' I asked, and he laughed.

'No, no. Course not. It belongs on the farm. Tamsin and Joe drove up in two cars and left it so we had wheels.'

'That's kind.'

'They always think of those things. They're quite amazing.'

'Isn't everyone amazing, in their own way?'

'Not at all. But they are. They've just got it together, you know. Joe's American, an economist turned financial consultant...'

'One of those.'

'Can't live with them, can't put them all behind bars. He's got an office in the City and manages to spend most of his time working from home,' he said. 'Tamsin's a busy bee, baking and sewing, growing things. She started making ceramics, vases, coffee sets, all that sort of stuff, and it just took off.'

'I hate her already.'

He laughed again. 'They've got horses and dogs – and the children, of course.'

'Three children?'

'You are a spy. How did you know?'

'It's the fashion.'

'I don't think that's the reason...'

'It's quite an achievement.'

He glanced sideways for a moment. 'What, having children? It's not difficult.'

'Not having them. All the other things that go with having them.'

'Do you want children?'

I cleared mist from the side window and glanced out. 'Some time,' I said, but he can't have heard me.

'Sorry?'

The vehicle shuddered, the cogs grinding like an olive press. 'Yes, some time,' I repeated in a louder voice.

He shot by a line of buses. The road was clear for a moment. We followed the river; it was slate grey, the colour of an old pipe, the surface serrated by the wind. Flickers of light slid across my knees as we crossed Blackfriars Bridge. The Tate Modern came into view, the Oxo Tower and, in the distance, Shakespeare's Globe with its mock Tudor façade and the sudden recollection of Julian Rhodes in a red duffel coat and white fur hat like a pantomime woodcutter.

Julian had been anxious to meet the director of
Much Ado About Nothing
, a rising star straight out of Cambridge, not that we got to see him that autumn night when Julian had tickets. What I did remember was sitting on my hands with freezing feet uncertain whether I should identify with the witty, alluring Beatrice or the intense, yielding Hero, the two female leads. It was Shakespeare's genius that I found in myself a fusion of both these women. I could be shrewish and sharp-tongued as well as compliant. I took offence easily and was quick to lie back and submit. The play ends with two marriages, Beatrice with Benedick, Hero with her beloved Claudio, an uncommonly positive resolution for Shakespeare and for me, too, as it turned out.

'Have you been to the Globe? I asked.

'No, we must go,' he replied. 'That's what I miss most about London, the theatre, the galleries. I'm becoming a philistine.'

'Yes, that's what I thought,' I said and he laughed, a deep, rich laugh from the diaphragm. He crunched into second, accelerated, and eased back through the gear box.

The A3 took us through Kennington Park and Clapham Common. The sky was pale and watery, devoid of birds, the sun like a mourner at a funeral. I watched a jogger move through the cold trees, vanishing and emerging again. I thought about the Danaides. Mr Patel. Jo and Tamsin – baker, potter, mother. Tom was doing something he believed in. Something that mattered. Father the same. I was more like Mother, filling my days with the intangible, an occasional job waitressing, an odd sort of masochism.

'What's it like in Sri Lanka?'

'Incredible,' he said. 'I love it. The people are unspoiled. They're not like us. They're not grasping to have more than they've got.'

'You mean they're happier because they have less?'

'No. Not that...'

'People looking for work, single mums, teenagers on sink estates, they're not celebrating their poverty.'

'Now you sound like
The Guardian.'

'No,' I said. 'I sound like me.'

'You're right, that was below the belt.' He paused. 'The thing is, we have higher expectations. Maybe too high. The banks, the corporations, the internet; we're one world when the developing world is still developing. We had a Parliament in England for three hundred years before women got the vote. They have these insane wars and expect the Afghans to create the same kind of democracy in five minutes. People I meet, every day, every single day, have integrity. An honesty. The Tamils aren't trying to be something, succeed, all the stuff that's important to us.'

'Are they really more honest? I doubt it. People are people. Good and bad...'

'It's different. It's hard to explain,' he broke off, glanced at me, then back at the road. 'If you book a sleeper on the train, you are expected to give the ticket clerk an extra couple of rupees. It's his job to sell the sleeper and the baksheesh is a sort of thank you. In the developing world where wages are low, you bribe people to do what they are actually paid to do. In our world, we bribe people to do what they are not supposed to do, what's illegal. It's a different mindset.'

'Just sounds like different types of corruption to me.'

He laughed. 'I'm, sorry, I'm being too serious.'

'I don't mind that.'

'I know, I just bang on too much sometimes. The world's turning to shit and it doesn't have to. It's such a pity, it would take so little to make it work.'

'Your voice changes when you're talking about Sri Lanka.'

'Really?'

'You love your work.'

'I suppose.'

'That's when it stops being work.'

'Writing must be the same.'

'On good days. And there aren't many of those.'

He ran his hand over my thigh then squeezed the tendons at the side of my knee, just softly, but enough to make my leg shoot out.

'Ouch.'

'That didn't hurt.'

'Yes it did. And it was a surprise.'

'Don't you like surprises?'

'I love surprises.' I squeezed his knee, really hard, but he didn't react. 'And I love my present.'

I took the yellow ball from my pocket and threw it from hand to hand.

'You should exercise that finger at least ten times a day. It will heal more quickly.'

'Yes, doctor.'

He gathered speed to beat the traffic lights and turned right. The Land Rover was like a fairground ride throwing me about in the seat.

'Sorry, I get impatient. Driving is such a waste of time.'

'I thought it was the journey that mattered more than the destination?'

'That would depend where you're going and how you're travelling. A walk around Troy would be about the journey. A drive down the A3 is a necessary inconvenience.'

I squeezed the yellow ball. The necessary inconvenience for me was being inspected by his baker mother potter sister. The road was clear. We gathered speed. Trees and hedgerows flashed by. The seat rocked on ancient springs. I had lost my sense of balance, of equilibrium. I understood how strangers met and fell into bed, not how they met and fell in love. I wasn't sure what falling in love meant. The very notion seemed so corny, so arbitrary, so fragile. And after falling in love, it rarely lasts. Love is a noun as well as a verb, a treacherous construct. If you fall in love you exchange one life for another life. Was I getting ahead of myself? Was that look in his eyes and the touch of his hands something he had cultivated, a professional quality, that what seemed imperative to me was merely a passing romance for him?

'Is there someone else, Tom?'

He eased his foot off the accelerator pedal.

'No, Katie, there isn't.'

'I just wondered.'

'There was. It's over.' He paused. Our eyes met for a fraction of a second. 'I could ask you the same question.'

'Yes, over. Dead as old tombstones. An actor whose neck had a permanent crick because he couldn't stop turning to look at himself in every shop window.'

'That's why you were alone on New Year's Eve.'

It was a statement, not a question. He had obviously thought about it. Same as me.

'Bad timing.'

'Or good timing?'

'Yes, good timing.'

He squeezed the tender spots below my knee again.

'Ouch, you really are a sadist.'

'I can't help it. I just love to hear you squeal.'

'That's what dominants say to submissives.'

'Oh my God, I forgot I was with an expert.' He paused. 'You must have done loads of research?'

'Is that a question?'

'I'm not sure really.'

'I have a vivid imagination.'

'That I do know.'

He changed gear. The Land Rover rattled more at low speed. The going was slow through Guildford. We stopped. Tom bought two dozen winter roses. They were pale yellow, like dying suns unaware they were already dead. He pulled back into the line of cars. There was a sign and he pointed.

'Albury. Nearly there.'

We curved through bends that rose and fell through the Surrey Hills. He listed the places we drove through, Foxholes Wood, Newlands Corner, Silent Pool, Farley Green, names from storybooks, and I thought, love finds you when you aren't looking for it. It is a surprise like unexpected happiness. A dead flower that suddenly comes to life, so fragile you are instantly terrified.

10

The Way To Live

He turned through an open five-bar gate and we bounced over a track that turned in such a way that the entire house came into view like a painting of a lost England.

'Bramley,' he said.

The house sat in the fold of two hills. It was long and low, two-storeys below two peaked roofs, the dormer window between them bringing light into what must have been a huge attic made for storing memories. Some blue had seeped into the sky and the light of midday lent a powdery flush to the white façade.

The door was open and two Airedales charged out barking as we came to a halt. Tamsin followed, waving the dogs away. She had good legs in flat shoes, solid but shapely, a fast walk, back straight; she looked like a round-the-world yachtswoman with dark blonde hair piled on her head, a broad, heart-shaped face, sea blue eyes that missed nothing.

'You managed to get here in one piece, then?' She kissed her brother, then gave me a hug, squashing the roses. 'So, you're the fabulous Katie Boyd. Lovely name. Good name for a writer,' she glanced at Tom. 'He's going to lend me your book when he's finished. Not very good for royalties, I suppose.'

She took the flowers.

'They're gorgeous. I bet this was your idea. He's totally useless.'

The dogs ran in circles. Tamsin held on to my hand and I bathed in the perfume of her life, the laundry, pottery, freshly-baked cakes. Tom stood to one side jangling the car keys.

'Thank you, I'll take those,' Tamsin said, releasing me to take the keys, which she slipped into a pocket. She paused a moment to study her brother. 'You look like the cat that swallowed the canary,' she added, and I was conscious of the bond between them, the love, and suddenly missed Matt.

Tom looked at me. 'You should wear more yellow,' he said.

As I was about to respond, we were interrupted by three children who swam into view, all talking at the same time.

'Have you seen Dr Watson?'

'Are you Katie?'

'Who do you think she is, silly?'

The children were Gretchen, Hugh and Clemency; eleven, eight and six; candidates for a Christmas card.

Gretchen, in jodhpurs and a red riding hat, had the same quick movements as her mother, a games captain in waiting, a girl who would dry the tears of other girls and take on the bullies. She was holding Clemency's hand and the child stood in muddy green boots, studying me as if I were a piece of bric-a-brac at a fair she wasn't sure whether or not she had a place for in her life. She was darker than the other two, like her father, I assumed, with grey eyes and chestnut hair in a ponytail. Hugh was an angel from a painting with full pink lips, dreamy blue eyes and white-blonde hair. He wore a silver calliper from the knee to the ankle on his left leg and moved with astonishing speed on aluminium crutches gripped about his forearms. His voice was slurred, but so slightly he sounded like an old tape recording that had slowed down.

'One at a time, one at a time,' Tamsin said over the sound of the barking dogs, and the girls deferred to Hugh, the male.

'You have to come and see Topsy, she's just done an enormous poo,' he said.

'Perhaps Katie's not interested in Topsy's poo, Hugh.'

'It's enormous,' he insisted. 'Are you Tom's new girlfriend?'

'Hugh's got a girlfriend,' Clemency said; it saved me the trouble of answering, and made me wonder how many old girlfriends Tom had brought to Bramley.

Hugh shook one of his crutches at his sister. 'No I haven't.'

'Oh yes you have,' said Gretchen. 'Daisy Oakthorpe. I saw you kissing.'

He shuddered. 'It was awful. I hate her...'

'Don't say hate, darling,' Tamsin told him. 'Now leave Katie alone.'

Hugh looked back at me. 'Do you want to come and meet Topsy?'

'Yes, I'd love to.'

'Hold your nose, Katie, he's not kidding,' Tamsin warned me.

She shooed the dogs inside. They gave her a surprised look, then waddled off like a pair of Teddy bears behind her. Gretchen took my hand and we followed Hugh as he wind-milled around the house towards the stable, a long, brick building with open doors and the tang of Topsy's poo.

'Come and see mummy's pottery first,' Gretchen suggested and Hugh just missed as he leaned out to give her a swipe with one of his crutches.

'You always do that,' he said.

'No I don't. Anyway, just for a minute.'

We made our way to the barn opposite the stable and I was struck as I entered by the sense of calm creativity. The smoothness of it all. It was like a surgery with two potter's wheels, an electric kiln, deep steel sinks, the vague smell of ammonia. There wasn't a trace of clay or slip on the floor, and the walls were lined to the ceiling with shelves mounted with finished work. When Tom told me his sister was a potter, what ran through my mind was the cute china tea sets with flower designs that Americans take home from Canterbury and Windsor. I had misjudged. I often do. Tamsin's work was original, contemporary, her plates and vases embellished with pixelated lines of wine red, bottle green and gold, the contours drawing the light, and I remembered the way Tom that morning had worked me through his hands as if I were a soft wet substance he was shaping into someone else.

I reached for one of the plates and ran my fingers over the surface. 'They're so good,' I said, and turned to find Gretchen cuddling a black cat with big jet eyes as shiny as the porcelain.

'Mr Holmes,' she told me. 'He's terribly sad. He needs cheering up.'

'What a wonderful name.'

'We call him that because if we hide something he always finds it,' she answered, and her blue eyes darkened. 'Dr Watson's missing. He's been gone for two days. We've searched everywhere.'

'I'm sure Mr Holmes has looked.'

'That's what mummy said.' Her gaze shifted to the display on the shelves. 'Mummy makes it all, well, not everything. Pammie and Janice help, and I help sometimes.'

'Come on, we're wasting time,' Hugh shouted from the doorway.

We turned to leave, and at that moment, Tom came in.

'We were just going,' Hugh said.

'One minute,' Tom replied, holding up his finger like a minute hand. 'Did you know, when I was your age I wanted to run away with the circus?'

'Honestly?'

'Cross my heart,' said Tom.

He took three coffee cups from the shelf and started juggling, the cups passing from hand to hand, as fast and as nimble as a surgeon. Each cup he tossed into the air went higher and higher and I half-expected and half-wanted him to drop one. I had been holding my breath, and we all clapped when the performance came to an end.

'Another skill,' I remarked.

'You mean I have others?'

'Oh, yes, and you know what they are.'

'They? Plural,' he noted.

I was saved again by Hugh. 'Come on,' he said, and we followed him out. 'Will you teach me how to do that, Uncle Tom?'

'Absolutely. But not with the coffee cups.'

Hugh's eyes lit up. He really did have the face of an angel.

The barn, the stable and the house edged three sides of the courtyard like a stage set, a private world looking over the undulating landscape. In the paddock, off to my left, the horse jumping bars stood forlornly under a coating of frost. The apple trees lined up in the orchard had the appearance of a surrendering army with extended arms, and the pines on the hillside were motionless like frozen plumes of smoke. The clouds had cleared. There was that moment of brightness that comes sometimes into the sky on cold January days, and I could see for miles in every direction. There were no other buildings, and I felt instantly that sense of reprieve you get when you leave the city and arrive in the heart of the English countryside.

We entered the stable. The poo was impressive and overwhelmed all other smells. Topsy clattered her heels in a skittering dance. She was a friendly, black fell pony with the tragic face of the endangered species to which she belonged, as Gretchen informed us. Razor, the grey, Anglo-Arab, as proud as a Saudi sheik, stood 16 hands; daddy took her out at daybreak every day before locking himself away in his office. Tamsin's Cleveland Bay was named Henry V; mummy had won 'millions' of prizes at jumping events and an assortment of rainbow-coloured rosettes were pinned on a board.

'Do you ride, Katie?'

I was stroking Topsy and turned to Tom. 'Yes. I used to.'

'It's so peaceful here,' he added, as if making a point, which I didn't grasp.

Tamsin interrupted my thoughts, her voice, deep as Tom's, singing out across the courtyard.

'Lunch, everyone. Boots off. Hands washed. It's on the table.'

We left the horses and shuffled out. The Airedales chased around the courtyard and ran in behind Tamsin. The children went ahead. Tom pulled off my grey woolly hat. He threw it into the air and caught it again.

'I love your hat,' he said.

'You can have it if you want,' I replied.

I shook out my flattened hair like one of the horses. He put the hat on and pulled it over his ears.

'Do you like it here?'

'Yes, it's…it's like a dream. The children are amazing. They're so...unaffected.'

Tom marched off towards the side of the house, paused mid-stride and threw the hat back to me. 'Here,' he said. 'I left something in the car,' and disappeared.

There was a tap low on the wall outside the back door. The girls had gone in and I watched Hugh wash his shoes and the bottoms of his crutches.

'Do you need any help?'

'I'm okay, thank you. I do everything for myself,' he answered. 'At school they call me the Iron Man.'

'Better that than the Tin Man,' I said and his hair danced about his face as he laughed.

We entered the mud room with its assortment of tack and riding hats. I hung my coat. Hugh dried his shoes on an old towel and I followed him down a corridor lined with bird prints. The calliper and crutches stalked along like the legs of a tripod. He leaned to the left before turning into a dining room with logs spitting in the fireplace and Christmas cards looped above the stone chimney on strings of red ribbon.

That same moment, Joe appeared with a dish of potatoes flecked with parsley.

'Katie, hi, I'm Joe. Good to meet you. Love the roses,' he said, glancing at the alcove behind me. 'Hope you brought an appetite?'

'I certainly did. I'm starving.'

'That's what we like to hear.' He turned away, then turned back to speak to Hugh. 'Guess what mom's made?'

'Don't tell me, it's asparagus, right, dad?' he said, the slowness adding a touch of irony to his reply. He glanced at me. 'I hate asparagus. It tastes like string?'

'I'll tell you what, I'll eat yours when no one's looking,' I said and his eyes lit up. I had made a friend for life.

The flowers were arranged in a vase with Tamsin's stylized rings of colour and stood on a side table below a wall lamp with a vellum shade. The dogs had taken up positions either side of the fire like a pair of sphinxes with extended legs and paws. The kitchen was half-concealed by an arch, the walls either side shelved with books; hardbacks, paperbacks, the non-book books you see on shop counters filling the narrow, wedge-shaped spaces where the arch joined. The ceiling was supported by beams and the lattice windows looked out over the hills.

Tom entered holding a case of wine as Joe reappeared with a dish of vegetables.

'For the cellar,' Tom said. 'Louis Bernard, Côtes du Rhône, 2007.'

'Sounds interesting. Should be ready next year.' Joe called out. 'Table, please,' and the children came hurrying in from different directions.

With his head almost touching the ceiling, Joe Hirsch had the stooped posture of the excessively tall, cropped hair, thin lips like a pink scar and round glasses. He had the distant, aesthetic look of a don, or a poet, and the silvery grey eyes bequeathed to Clemency. He was wearing a black tee-shirt, faded jeans, trainers with orange laces like it was dress-down Friday. He projected an air of being laid back, but I sensed an aloofness, a shrewdness, that behind the wire-rimmed spectacles, that could have been on loan from Gandhi, his brain was conducting millions of calculations per second.

Tamsin appeared bearing a golden pie with a domed crust, the swirl of steam like an escaping ghost. She had changed, how she had found the time I couldn't imagine, and was artlessly chic in a velvet dress the same shade of red baked in her porcelain, the bodice cut to reveal high firm breasts over a flat tummy. She had brushed her hair, it was thick, dark, a shade like old bronze, and I found myself doing that thing I do, judging others, comparing myself.

'Steak and kidney. I did check you're not a vegetarian.'

I glanced at Tom.

'The...what do you call them? The meatballs.'

'Ah, yes, albóndigas,' I replied.

'What's that?' Clemency asked, and I could see the likeness to her father, her little brow rippling as she took in information.

'Meat balls, silly,' Gretchen told her.

'I'm not silly...'