looked confused.
After Jacob had washed up, he found the family slumped in front of a television in a small room at the back of the house. Clara, Juliet, Carlo and Fred were squashed together on a sofa, their arms and legs trailed round and over one another. Mary sat on the floor at their feet and Stefan was asleep in an armchair. When Jacob said goodnight, only Mary replied.
How odd the Cloughs looked, drained by the television’s light. Their outlines were so harsh. Fred was too delicate, epicene even, and Carlo venal. Clara in profile was a hook-nosed witch and Juliet was, well, plain. Then they all threw back their heads and laughed at something Jacob couldn’t see, and he watched their shadows bobbing on the far wall – infantile, hilarious, monstrous.
One Sunday morning in April, Jacob arrived at Khyber Road.
‘Why does he just turn up like this?’ Fred hissed to Juliet in the kitchen. ‘You must have given him the number by now.’
‘What for?’ retorted Juliet, who admired Jacob’s lack of manners. ‘Would you tidy up? Bake a cake?’
‘No, I’ve got more important things to do and anyway, if I knew he was coming, I’d leave.’ He took an ostentatious breath, ‘He’s not right.’
‘How would you know? You’ve hardly spoken to him.’
‘He doesn’t look right.’
Jacob did look wrong: too tall for the low-ceilinged room, too clean for its murky walls, too well-made for the failing sofa. He was wearing an indigo shirt, half unbuttoned and untucked. One sleeve was rolled up over a fine-boned golden forearm.
Apollo, thought Juliet as she came back in with a bottle of wine and two glasses. Fucking Apollo. He did take up a lot of space.
‘How’s Federico?’ Jacob asked, taking Juliet’s hand and leading her up the stairs to her room. He stood by the open window, a concentration of blue and gold against the fading blue and gold sky.
‘Still in love with that girl Caroline, who works on the same floor. She rents a room from this dreadful couple and I think she’s sleeping with the man.’
‘That sounds,’ Jacob began, pulling Juliet down on top of him as he lay back, ‘like a tedious story.’
Juliet did not like to talk about Jacob. She wouldn’t have known what to say. He disappeared from the gallery and appeared at Khyber Road, and they would lie like this and he would kiss and stroke her, not where she might expect him to but on her calves, ribs, cheekbones and wrists. It was as if they were starting obliquely, with Jacob approaching her from the steepest possible angle so that she couldn’t see him until he was absolutely there.
His attention turned her in on herself. She hadn’t noticed how inert she had become when she was with him or that their conversation consisted of Jacob’s questions and her answers. She made the assumptions about his quietness that people usually made, and thought of his interest in her as a pleasing but not particularly useful thing. She did not know what she felt, and anyway she was tired. Two months had passed since Tobias’s death and Juliet was not sleeping well. Her pain had not got worse but she could bear it less, her physical pain that is, for Juliet acknowledged no other. There would be a moment when the small of her back burst into flame, and then the glass and stone in her would rise, and her voice and breath were sucked down into the fire. She took the painkillers as the doctor had instructed, and more when she needed them.
As Fred plucked each petal from the rose, he stopped himself saying ‘She loves me, she loves me not.’ Whether or not someone loved you was not the point of loving them. He laid the petals out and selected a dozen of the largest and roundest. Parchment, the recipe said. Parchment.
As Jacob unbuttoned Juliet’s shirt, there was a knock at the door and Fred’s tremulous voice called: ‘Jules?’
She pulled the shirt together and stood up. ‘Juliet. What is it?’
Fred asked as casually as he could: ‘Have we got any parchment?’
‘What?’
‘Parchment.’
‘Parchment?’
Jacob reached for his cigarettes.
‘Why?’
‘Cooking.’
‘You mean greaseproof paper?’
‘No, parchment.’
‘Oh, for god’s sake go and talk to him properly!’ One of Jacob’s other voices – vicious and shrill. The fire in Juliet’s belly leapt through her skin and she had a sense of herself drawing back, as if violently recovering her edges. She buttoned her shirt and went downstairs with Fred, where she spent a long time looking through drawers until she found an old manila envelope which she opened and flattened, assuring Fred that it would do perfectly well as parchment.
When Juliet came back up, Jacob was standing naked by her shelves. He was confident, imperfect, and made nothing of his beauty. He flicked through one book after another. ‘Who is G. Clough?’ he asked, holding up an annotated edition of Hamlet.
‘I am.’
‘G.?’
‘I was christened Giulietta. No one could spell or pronounce it.’
Jacob had remembered something and was reaching for another book: ‘Oh yes, I found this.’ He brandished the title page of a broken-backed copy of The Catcher in the Rye. ‘Another incarnation?’
‘Don’t …’
In curlicued script, ‘Juliette C.’ The dot over the ‘i’ was a circle.
‘Your French period? Left Bank?’
Juliet grabbed the book. ‘Just think yourself lucky that I didn’t draw smiley faces.’ She pushed him towards the bed. ‘Or hearts.’
He snatched the book back as she unbuttoned her shirt once more. ‘And somewhere you will have written “irony” in the margin. Oh yes, page sixty-five …’
In the kitchen, Fred balanced a small saucepan containing a broken-up bar of dark chocolate inside a nest of chopsticks and skewers suspended over a larger pan of boiling water. Every time the teaspoon he was stirring it with got too hot to hold, he chucked it onto the floor and reached for another. Six teaspoons later, the chocolate had melted. He moved the pan onto the table and rushed off to the bathroom to fetch Juliet’s tweezers.
He held up a petal with the tweezers and dipped it into the chocolate. It disappeared. He tried again and the second petal stayed in his grip but wilted to a stringy blob. It wouldn’t work. He went and got his back-up rose out of the sink and shoved it in, head first, stirring it round in the chocolate as if loading
