‘Lucky you, to go away,’ said Andreas. He took her hand and brought the fork to her mouth. Then he smiled and made to wipe her lips. She shook him off, but gently.
‘Where are you going anyway?’ he said, leaning back in his chair again.
‘Oh, friends of mine. They have a house in the Lake District. It’s very beautiful.’
‘Why are you going away, when you could hang around with me and be fed with a fork?’
She laughed and said, ‘I know, it’s crazy.’ But he seemed serious. ‘Really, don’t go away,’ he said. ‘Or come away with me in a couple of weeks. When I get paid I’ll take you away.’ Now he took her hand. ‘You know you want to.’ He looked directly at her, and this made her embarrassed. She held his gaze for a brief moment, then dropped her eyes. She was trying to think of something light to say. ‘I’d love to,’ she said, looking down at her plate. ‘The thing is, I’ve been promising these friends of mine for months that I would go to see them.’
‘Aren’t you worried about how it looks?’ he said. She looked up at him, and saw he was quite relaxed, his legs slung over the arm of a chair, his hair falling onto his fine face. He lifted a hand and seized his glass. He drank, staring at her over the brim.
‘What do you mean?’
‘It’s looks as if you are running away because you can’t control yourself with me,’ he said.
‘Yes, that’s right,’ she said. She always entered into his badinage, though she sometimes cringed a little as she did it. ‘I’m hot-footing away from my powerful feelings.’
But that was close to the bone, if not the bone of their relationship — dalliance, friendship, however she was naming it — then certainly it was quite close to the raw and ragged existential bone, and Rosa stopped. She even blushed, which confused him, and he leant across the table and kissed her on the cheek. Really, Andreas was like a symbol of simplicity — dark eyes and hair, white shirt, crisp clothes. This is how it might be, he was saying, if you just relax. She dropped her fork on the plate and sat back. ‘Still, I tell you, you are a little too thin,’ said Andreas. ‘You need much more cheese in your food.’
‘It’s delicious, thanks.’
‘So how was your day?’ he asked.
‘Oh, busy,’ she said.
There was much Andreas didn’t know, and at present he thought she was between contracts, looking for something truly fine with a decent offer already in hand. He thought that because she had told him and he seemed to believe her. She wasn’t sure why. It only made things more complicated. Instead of telling him about Brazier and the agony of the shoes, she had to summon an altogether different day, invent and galvanise. ‘How’s your search for the perfect job going?’ he asked. He spooned her out some more food.
‘Nervous energy,’ she said. ‘That’s the thinness.’
‘Yes, but you could plump up and no one would mind,’ he said. ‘I’d enjoy it.’
‘The job hunt is fine,’ she said. ‘Just as usual.’
‘I’m glad you came,’ he said, kissing on the cheek again. ‘I was having a really boring evening.’
‘I wanted to see you,’ she said. ‘Of course, that’s why I came.’
In fact I wanted to ask you. Could I come and stay? Just for a few days? The weekend and then a few days beyond. Just while I look for somewhere else and find a job? She was very hungry, so she thought she would eat a little more and then ask. When she had finished she ran her fingers across the plate and licked them. A neon light spluttered above their heads; behind the smell of soap was a background trace of detergent. Andreas passed her a glass of wine and said, ‘Better?’
‘Much better,’ she said, cracking him a smile. He took her hand and kissed it.
*
Later they were sitting in his small living room, where the furniture was old and matted with dust. There was a jaundiced collection of newspapers on an oak table. ‘My cuttings,’ he had explained, when she asked. A spotlight was angled from the mantelpiece, beaming at the fireplace. He had stacked a series of plants by the window, set off against thick green curtains. The effect was determinedly theatrical. There was a piano, its keys chipped at the ends. On the piano was a portrait of Andreas, in theatrical mode, lit carefully, the shadows making him more chiselled than he was. But he looked more beautiful in the flesh, she thought, turning towards his wide, solid back and the slender lines of his hips. Their talk kept drying up, like a stream in a drought, but they battled on, determined to wring out every last word they could think of. That was part of the problem, these heavy pauses they sustained. She felt them like a kick to her stomach; they made her hunch up. He was more relaxed than she was, and didn’t seem to mind. He could sit cracking his knuckles, smiling at her. As if it didn’t matter at all! Several times, Rosa asked Andreas about the other actors in his play. Several times he replied. It was a conspiracy between them, to pretend each time was the first. And when he talked he moved his hands, and his hands were elegant, good to watch. He had a wide jaw like a dog. This suited him and made his hair curl up at the ends. It was all delightful, this vision of youth was quite the consolation she required, and for a few moments she thought that instead of going north she would settle herself in Andreas’s flat and stay there, until he noticed that she did nothing and asked her to leave.
‘Can I help you with your lines?’ she said.
‘Which lines? Oh those. Yes, well, I have managed to commit them all to memory. It’s been a long day. But you are a sort of highlight.’
‘Thank you.’
Then Andreas said, carelessly, ‘Are you going to stay up in the country and become a lass?’
‘A lass?’ she said.
‘You know, a wench. These are archaic words I was definitely taught when I studied Chaucer.’
‘You studied Chaucer?’
‘Yes, they let me do it, even a person as idiotic as me,’ said Andreas. He smiled, but she thought he was offended.
‘No, no, I meant, I’m surprised, in all your international schools and so on, that they bothered with medieval English.’
He thrust out his lower lip and looked more boyish than before. ‘Well, they had to teach us something. So are you?’
‘Staying in the countryside? Of course not,’ she said. ‘My invitation is for a few days only.’
‘Well, make sure you come back,’ he said. And there was a subtle shift to his expression; she noticed he looked briefly embarrassed.
‘So tell me something else about your play,’ she said, quickly.
‘Rosa, there’s nothing more to tell.’ He took her hand again.
*
‘Job interview,’ she said, to change the subject. He hardly knew the half of it. ‘I had an interview with a company in Hoxton,’ she said, dimly remembering a scenario from some weeks before. Then she really had an interview, had really worn a suit and tried to impress some kids of thirty who were wearing spotted ties and handkerchiefs in their breast pockets. They claimed to be a ‘media consortium’. She claimed to be a ‘top arts correspondent for a leading newspaper, enjoying a career break while I reprioritise’. They were all on the same page for a good twenty minutes and then Rosa was aware that she had fallen silent a while ago and so had they. Perhaps it was round about then that they looked her up and down and wondered why her suit was frayed and what she had done to her hand — earlier that day she had shut her hand in a door in a mistaken moment, and had really ripped it apart. Her hand was black with bruises. She couldn’t do it, and after a decent interval they thanked her and said they would call her. That was a resounding lie, and she never heard from them again. The doors of their office were swing doors, like a cowboy saloon, and once she swung them open she trotted out of their particular town and never went back. She was telling this to Andreas, cutting out some of the details, and he was laughing at the image of the kids and the cowboy door. ‘Kids?’ he said. ‘How old?’ Five years older than you, she didn’t say, and laughed and said, ‘Kids in mind, of course.’