father locks the door at night and the key’s lyin’ under his head
With my too-ri-ah fol-a-diddle-dah
My too-ri-ah ri-fol-a-diddle-dan-too-ni-doh
she sang to herself, a faint feeling of unease accompanying the words and the tune which had popped into her head. This young man was attractive, humorous, intelligent. But he didn’t hit the spot and she didn’t want him in her bed. In the last year, since Teague had departed from her life, she had tried out various males, had sex with some of them, discarded others. There had been a Ph.D. student, a lecturer in economics, a tradesman, a teacher, a musician. She could not fall in love at all. Teague was the last man she felt had ticked most of the boxes, although she never felt with him as she had with … with … no, she wasn’t going there.
Eliza went inside, patting the imaginary slavering hounds on the head as she closed the door. “Good Fang, excellent Tusk, worthy Jaws,” she praised them, for keeping her free of marauding males. Thinking, what happened to the libidinous little trollop that I know I am? The word trollop started the feeling of unease again, not shame or fear but a sort of sweet sting, like a scorpion bite laced with maple syrup. Quickly! she thought. To the violin, before I remember something I don’t want to think about. She ran upstairs and started to play something very fast, with her bag still hanging over her shoulder.
Richard walked to her door and took in the scene, shrewdly. He knew what this meant. Sawing away at her violin, home at eleven p.m., no whispers on the stairs or messages saying she wouldn’t be back till morning. “Hi,” he said, with his mouth turned down in imitation of her own.
Eliza jumped violently, as you do when somebody you weren’t expecting to be there whispers something quietly in your ear to avoid startling you. “Oh, hell. Sorry, I assumed you’d still be out. Hope I didn’t wake you up.”
“Didn’t go out. Something came up.” He seemed to be sparking with electricity, as though he had stuck his finger in a power socket. Richard was forty-six by this time. His hair had a few streaks of grey, the sort that is thought to be distinguished on a man and aging on a woman. He was able to comb it without undue anxiety, reassured by the knowledge that his maternal grandfather had a good head of hair well into his sixties. Right now his cheeks were flushed charmingly, his eyes were very blue and bright, and he looked about twenty-six in the artificial light. Eliza put the fiddle down and looked at him in mock accusation.
“You!” she said, assuming an expression of moral outrage. “You are in love, you old roué.” She danced around him, singing in a manner calculated to irritate, “Richard’s got a gir-irl, Richard’s got a gir-irl!” Her bag fell unnoticed to the floor. He sat down on the edge of her bed; far from being irritated, he couldn’t get the smile to leave his mouth.
“Hey, can’t your old man be happy without sex being involved?”
“You forget I have known you for eighteen years,” she reminded him. “C’mon, upend the legumes. Who is she?”
He relented. “Remember Linda?” he said, carefully.
She thought. “Yes, red hair. Or would you call it auburn? Feisty. I thought she was nice. I could have got attached to her given another couple of years. You do realise, by the way, that my attachment problems stem from your philandering ways? It’s all there in the literature. Anyway, then we went to Australia and we never saw her again.”
She looked directly at him. “You were pretty cut up about it, weren’t you?”
He nodded slowly, apparently looking into the past. “She tracked down my email address and we just started talking,” he said. “I think I’m going to have to go to London to see her. Do you want to come?”
“No,” she said quickly. Eliza wasn’t going anywhere near London for a reason she couldn’t quite remember because she had put it away. “Do you trust me to feed the cat, turn on the burglar alarm and to clean up after my orgies?”
“I do, and sadly I don’t believe you’re going to fill the house with your lovers in my absence.”
“You are a most unnatural father, and I appreciate that about you,” said Eliza. It was true. He had interfered in her carnal delights only when he felt she was in danger of bestowing her favours on the undeserving. Otherwise he had given her all the necessary warnings and left her to it. “I’ll find someone, and I’m only eighteen. There will be grandchildren.”
“God, no! Really?” He over-registered Shock and Horror. “Anyway, as long as you’re not still pining for—” he stopped as she held her hand up.
“Don’t say it or I’ll have to give you a lobotomy, or have one myself.”
Richard obeyed, and in due course went off to London, leaving Eliza, the hounds and Warwick to guard the house.
And in his absence Eliza met an actor. Oh well, she thought, inevitable, really, because she attracted actors into her life in direct proportion to her wish to avoid them.
She was playing with the band when he deliberately stood directly in her line of vision, and smiled a Mad Smile at her. The stage was about a foot off the floor, and her eyes were level with his. He was tall, very tall, ridiculously tall when you consider she was a mere five two. He was blond, and insanely handsome, and well built. Well bugger me dead, she thought, as her eyes met his and she burst out laughing in spite of herself. My libido isn’t atrophied after all.
* * *
I almost hate to say this, but there is something compelling about a tall, well-built man with good looks and charm. Even the most cynical female will cheerfully start ovulating when such a man makes it obvious she is the sole focus of his attention. She may raise her eyebrows sceptically at him, and she may make him wait while she apparently decides if she wants to go out with him, have sex with him and bear his children. But this is all show, just the courting ritual in which she appears Reluctant, but isn’t, and he goes through the expected movements of the dance, the Pursuit, but really knows the deal is signed and sealed already. Almost the minute their eyes meet.
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