Mind your own business, thought Clémence. But his eyes were pleading. Pleading for what? Understanding probably. Besides which, she had just read his innermost thoughts, his obsession.
‘I had a thing for a boy in the year above me at school,’ she said. ‘For a few weeks I would wake up every day and pray he would talk to me. But that passed. He went out with Gaby Porter. Turned out he was a bit of a...’ She had wanted to use the word ‘prick’, but hesitated in front of the old man. ‘Not-very-nice guy.’
‘Poor Gaby Porter.’
‘No. She deserved him. I never liked Gaby Porter since she stole my favourite pair of leggings and claimed they were hers.’
‘What colour were they?’
‘The leggings? Sort of purple, I think. I got them at Topshop. Why?’
‘Just want to get the full picture. And now? Is there anyone now?’
Clémence smiled shyly. ‘There’s a guy called Callum. From uni. We’ve only been going out three weeks. But I miss him, now. He’s gone home to Glasgow to work in a pub.’ She looked at the old man guiltily. ‘I asked him to come up here and stay with me.’
‘Good,’ said the old man, with a smile. ‘I’d like to meet him.’
For a moment Clémence thought that she would like Callum to meet the old man too. Then she remembered what he had done. ‘But no. That’s nothing like your obsession for my grandmother.’
‘Yes.’ The old man put his head in his hands. ‘Your grandmother.’
Clémence felt sorry for him, she couldn’t help herself. He already knew his obsession was wrong. He had no idea yet how wrong. Or did he? For the first time she wondered if, in fact, he had an inkling.
‘It’s weird about Grandpa and his mother in Antibes,’ she said.
‘What do you mean?’ said the old man.
‘How he felt abandoned by her. And then how he was worried she would jump on Angus. On you.’
‘The upper classes led pretty racy lives in those days.’
‘Yes,’ said Clémence.
The old man looked at her closely. ‘That’s not what you meant though, was it?’
‘No,’ said Clémence.
They sat in silence. A comfortable silence. Then the old man spoke. ‘You can tell me if you like. I won’t tell anyone else. And I’ll probably forget it anyway. It might make you feel better, though your family life has nothing to do with me.’
Clémence was about to shake her head, brush him off, take the book back upstairs, shut herself in her room away from him, but something stopped her. It was those brown eyes, the air of calm attention. She didn’t know who the hell Alastair Cunningham was, she had barely even heard of him until a few days before, and yet she felt she knew him. It was partly because she had just read out loud his most intimate secrets as a young man, but it was more than that. She felt he was on her side. And she desperately needed someone to be on her side.
Callum was, of course, but she was too ashamed to tell Callum, at least not yet. But the old man? After all the bad stuff she had read about him, it didn’t seem wrong to share the shame.
And she felt alone. So alone.
The old man waited.
‘My parents split up three years ago when I was seventeen. My mother started going out with a banker, an Australian guy called Patrick. After a few months we moved into his place — he had a two-bedroom apartment in Mid-Levels, so there was room for me. Of course I didn’t like him at first, he was my mother’s boyfriend, after all, but he was always nice to me, and patient. And I have to admit he was quite good-looking, in a tubby kind of way.’
‘Tubby?’
‘Yeah. He had a bit of a tummy, small and round that peeked over his belt — nothing like Dad, who is as thin as a rake. In fact I gave his stomach a name: Reginald. I used to say: “Hi, Reginald, are you hungry this morning?” every day at breakfast. It was meant to be nasty, and it wound Maman up, but Patrick seemed to like it. Eventually, I began to tolerate him, and then we got on pretty well. He was funny, and he took me seriously in a way neither of my parents had ever really done.’
She paused. Glanced at the old man, who was listening intently, unsure whether to go on.
‘You don’t have to tell me more if you don’t want to,’ he said.
‘No, that’s OK.’ She took a deep breath. ‘Then, when I was home over Christmas, just this last January, Maman was out somewhere, I was watching a dumb film on TV, in fact it was actually called Dumb and Dumber. Have you seen it?’
‘How would I know?’ said the old man, with a smile.
‘Right. I’m guessing you haven’t. Anyway, Patrick joined me on the sofa to watch it. He had opened a bottle of wine and he gave me some. We started swapping comments on how stupid the film was, and what with the wine I was laughing pretty hard. And then...’
She raised her eyes to the old man, but there was no point in stopping now, he could see what was coming.
‘Then he kissed me. I was so surprised, I responded, but only for a second, then I pushed him away, and yelled at him to get off me. He looked angry, for a moment I thought he was going to force himself on me. Then he said: “you shouldn’t have led me on like that”, and I ran off to my room.
‘Well, I didn’t know what to do. I shut myself up in my room. Should I tell Maman? Should I just keep quiet? Would he try it again? How could I even live in his flat with him now?
‘I thought the best thing was to confront him, and demand an apology. Make him promise not to ever touch me again. Maybe if he was sincerely sorry, if I believed he really would leave me alone, I might be able to forget it had ever happened. But what if he didn’t apologize?
‘Anyway, I never got the chance to find out. No one said anything at breakfast the next day, and I could tell Maman was very upset. After Patrick had gone to work, Maman sat me down at the kitchen table. “I know what happened yesterday afternoon, Clémence,” she began. For a second I felt really relieved: Patrick had told Maman all about it, and Maman was going to take charge. Maybe she would leave him and take me with her. But then I saw her face. She wasn’t just upset, there was anger there, and something else. Hatred. Hatred directed at me.
‘She said: “I know what you did, Clémence, and I can’t believe it. It’s not like you’re some thirteen-year-old with a crush, you are twenty, for God’s sake! And you know I love Patrick and he loves me. What were you thinking?”
‘So I said: “What was I thinking? What do you think happened? What has Patrick told you?”
‘And she said: “You tried to kiss him. And when he pushed you away you said that you loved him. Didn’t you think he would tell me?”
‘Of course, I said that that wasn’t what had happened at all, that it was Patrick who had jumped on me, but Patrick had anticipated all that. Maman said that he had told her right away, and that he had been sympathetic towards me, talking about schoolgirl crushes, but that she thought I was an adult woman and knew exactly what I was doing. She was going to buy me an air ticket to Scotland that same day, and she didn’t want me to come back to Hong Kong at Easter.’
‘How dreadful for you!’ said the old man.
‘I tried to reason with her, but there was no way she was going to believe me rather than Patrick. She was so besotted with him, she couldn’t conceive that he might be lying.’
‘Whereas she could conceive that her daughter was lying.’
‘That’s what it looks like. It’s not as if I ever lied very much as a kid.’
‘Did you tell your father?’
‘I tried. But she’d got to him.’ Clémence paused. She swallowed. ‘She’d told him that I had tried to seduce her boyfriend.’