cheerfulness is a great charm in a nurse
November flinches into winter and two red patches stain your cheeks, often now. Your heart catches in your throat every time Gabriel’s voice is on the phone, your stomach churns and after the phone clicks in its cradle you run around the room and leap to the ceiling and bat the hand-made paper globes covering your lights and squeal to the sky. It’s delicious and mortifying to be living like this again; so young, so gone. You never thought this belly-fluttering would ever come back into your life, that it would lie waiting for a waking no matter how old you got.
You have coffee with him. You go to the cinema at two p.m., theatre matinees, National Theatre talks. He’s gleeful that you have a car, wants to do London like a tourist; let’s play in history, he says. You go to Kew Gardens and Alexandra Palace, Chiswick House and Hampton Court. He wants to drive; you let him. He’s like a child with a toy, he’s never owned a car. He takes you to his favourite space, the Rothko room in the Tate Modern, and after it you drag him to the Body section – come on, just a look! – and there’s a Duchamp painting on glass and he watches your intrigue as you stand in front of the work: it’s so odd, you can’t make it out.
What, you ask, to his stare, go away, stop it, you laugh. Well, do you know what it’s about?
Nope. And he walks away, laughing, his hands raised in abandon.
He’s always leaping up for elderly men on the tube and engaging in chat with cafe staff and helping mothers with pushchairs down the steps. All the things you should do, but don’t; all the things Cole would never contemplate. He’s so compassionate, unhurried, relaxed. People aren’t like that. It seems, almost, a naivety. How can he survive in the world? He’s a man without scorn, and Cole, of course, is anything but. It’s as if all the hardness that comes with living in London hasn’t claimed him yet.
Sometimes, guiltily, you have afternoon tea in your flat and Gabriel takes out the rubbish at the end of it, without being asked, a small courtesy and yet enormous, for Cole always has to be nudged to do that. It felt so strange to have him in your space for the first time, you just watched: his lean, exotic darkness, his suit with his shirtsleeves poking out, his scuffed shoes with a piece of cardboard over a hole in the sole because, he said, Charlie Chaplin used to do it and it worked. He roamed the living room with his hands contentedly behind his back, peering at framed wedding photos and CDs and books; gathering evidence of how you lived your life. And how Cole did. He asked questions about him, as if he was endlessly curious about this marriage business.
Do you cook dinner for him?
Not much.
Do you ever wear an apron?
No.
He’s enjoying this, he’s smiling, his eyes are disappearing into slits: you love it when he smiles as completely as that.
Do you iron his shirts?
No.
Do you send him off in the morning with a peck on his cheek?
No. No. No, you shake your head, you laugh.
He opens doors for you, buys your tube ticket, pays the cafe bills, wouldn’t think of anything else. It’s days and days of small kindnesses, each with a tiny erotic charge, and they’re returned all the time now – holding his hand, tugging him along, hugging him with delight – for the young child in you is skipping back. And sometimes there are no underpants under your knee-length skirt and this gives you a charge. It’s just a small thing, for you, but enormous; unimaginable, a year ago. A private trespass, but no less arousing because of that.
You don’t have a hunger for the book project now. You have no desire to ring your old girlfriends from work, despite your promise when you left. Nothing sings but this time with Gabriel. You’re loving the silkiness of distraction, of flirting with possibility and relaxing into play. When you do make it to the Library there are diversions and rambles that stretch into chapters plucked off bowed shelves and sometimes, in one golden afternoon, an entire book of fairy tales or a novella you’ve always meant to read. You’re drawn to the Library’s shadowy recesses, to old cookery manuals and strange, instructional texts for Victorian housewives accompanying their husbands to the colonies. You’re drawn to Gabriel, at his desk, distracting him from his own languorous work.
You don’t have a world you share, apart from the time together. There are huge gaps in his life you know nothing of, he always turns away from your questions and shines the light back upon yourself. He uses your own tricks, you recognise them too well. He’s endlessly curious but will not satisfy your own curiosity.
What is it about bullfighting, you ask after an Almodóvar film, and you take both his palms and search them again for the secrets of his life.
Come to Spain with me, come and watch a corrida.
I’d love to, but how?
A helpless shrug. Both never daring to speak of what binds you, the insistent tug like the pull of a stream, determined, unstoppable, fast. When he leans to you there’s a shivery sense of the nearness of your skins, of his energy, his difference. The different foods he eats, the different sun he was brought up in, the different sky, it’s all stamped into his skin. It’s like the exhilaration you get when you arrive in a country for the very first time and step from the airport and the strangeness of it all assaults your senses, for Gabriel seems so fresh and fascinating and unique, a new territory to be explored; if you dare to slip your fingers on his hips when he stands before you, if you dare begin.
every womanly woman, who truly realises her mission, desires to be a pleasant object of vision for her fellow creatures
Cole knows of him.
He’d insisted upon meeting the new Library friends at one of the drinking sessions after work, he wanted to tag along. As if he just wanted to keep tabs on your new life; the price of the gift, perhaps. You had to say yes.
The actor one is creepy, he said, as you sat side by side on the tube on the way home.
Why?
He’s in love with you, he said.
What makes you say that? Sweat shimmering across your brow like it does after too much chocolate.
I don’t know, just a look, perhaps.
And Cole had returned to his Standard. Secure in his fiefdom, knowing implicitly the type of man you like and do not. He’s always assuming he knows you so well: orders your drink without consultation, insists you try a particular dish he’s sure you’ll like, tapes you television shows he feels you should watch. And he always considers these gestures a kindness.
Gabriel never assumes, he wants to learn.
Two red
