“Maybe I'm just used to men seeing me more as a potential sparring partner,” I hedged. Or as a target.
The chef reappeared at that moment with two succulent Spanish omelettes that melted on your tongue. We both dived in like we were starving. There was a long pause before Marc took up the thread of the conversation again.
“I think it's only fair to tell you that a sparring partner is not how I think of you at all,” he murmured. His voice was rich with hidden meanings, most of which I didn't want to think about right now.
“Yeah, right,” I said, trying not to squirm.
“So cynical for one so young.”
I regarded him straight-faced. “I'm forty-five really, but I've got this painting in the attic,” I said.
To my surprise, he frowned, shaking his head. “I don't get you.”
“Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray,” I explained and dredged the abridged story line from a long-forgotten pigeonhole in my memory. “He was an exceptionally beautiful young man who lived a life of total depravity, but he had a portrait of himself which he kept hidden away, and while he utterly escaped the ravages of time and the effects of his own immorality, his likeness in the picture grew more hideous and more ugly.” I shrugged diffidently. “We studied him at school.”
Marc raised an eyebrow, and took another sip of his wine. “They didn't go a bundle on Oscar Wilde where I went to school,” he said wryly. “Didn't go much on education either, for that matter.”
“It doesn't seem to have done you much harm,” I commented.
He inclined his head slightly with a modest smile. I must remember that method of accepting praise. It was gracious without being smug.
“Ambition can overcome plenty of obstacles if you're determined enough,” he said quietly. He pulled out a packet of cigars and lit one, dunking the end directly into the flame until it caught. “I grew up with plenty of ambition and not much else.”
He pushed his empty plate to one side and twirled the stem of his glass between his forefinger and thumb. He watched the pale golden liquid shimmer in the bowl for a few moments, lost in his thoughts. That single diamond on his little finger dazzled as it caught the light.
Finally he looked up, and met my eyes levelly. “I was born in one of the grimmest tower blocks in the roughest areas of Manchester,” he said. “My mother overdosed when I was seven.”
The bald statement hung in the air between us like it had suddenly grown a body. Stricken, I searched for the right thing to say, but had to admit defeat. There wasn't any right thing.
Marc suddenly seemed to realise what he'd said. He waved an elegant hand mockingly towards his expensive attire, as if only too aware of the contrast with his present-day situation. “If you saw anybody round my old haunts wearing a suit it was usually because some time that day a judge was going to be referring to them as ‘the accused’.”
I felt my shoulders relax a fraction. “Sounds like one of those places where the ambulance crews have to go in wearing flak jackets.”
Marc half-smiled, little more than a derisive twist of his lips. “Oh no,” he said, “they never bothered sending ambulances.”
***
When I finally left the New Adelphi Club it was almost three-thirty. There are not normally two three o'clocks in my day and I was shattered. My eyes felt as though someone had emptied the contents of a seaside sandal into them. My hair and even my fingernails stank of cigarettes.
There was almost no traffic on the ride home, and I was able to give part of my brain over to thinking about the snippets of his past that Marc had handed to me during supper.
The contrast with my own upbringing was stark. While he'd been avoiding rats in pissy stairwells, and dodging the drunken fists of yet another temporary uncle, I'd been taking ballet classes and going to the Pony Club. There'd been a lot of distance travelled between then and now. For both of us.
The rain hadn't eased off on the way back to Lancaster, so I wasn't surprised when I hit the light switch at the bottom of the main staircase in the hallway below my flat and nothing happened.
I think the wiring in the whole of the building was rejected by Noah for the ark because it was past its best even then. Every time there's heavy rain with the wind in the north-east the water seeps in somewhere like a thief and the circuit breakers in the basement click out.
It took me ten minutes or so, swearing, to stumble down there with a torch and flip them back in line. I tripped over a pile of junk on the way and I just knew I was going to have a bruise on my shin the size of a beer mat.
Great! Still, the way things had gone at the club, it was probably the perfect end to a pretty shitty sort of a day.
I fell into bed and into sleep almost simultaneously, but it wasn't untroubled slumber. I woke abruptly in the early hours, before it was light, from a jumbled dream where my father was trying to inject my mother with rat poison through a huge syringe.
She kept screaming and struggling and my father was ordering me to hold her down. I tried to do as I was told, crying because I knew it was wrong. When I looked up at him and he'd changed into a giant rat with yellow eyes.
I looked back down at my mother, but she'd changed, too. It was Susie Hollins I was holding now, on the dance floor at the New Adelphi, while a shadowy madman with a razor-sharp knife reared over us both. He laughed as the blade came slashing down to cut her throat.
Ten
After the rain, Sunday morning showed up dry, lit by pale watery sunshine. The sort of crisp weather, close to warmth, that fools spring plants into making an early break for the surface, only to be decapitated by the next frost.
Not that I saw much of the morning. By the time I'd dragged myself out of bed it was past ten o'clock. I worked out to try and lift my energy reserves up from semi-dormant, but I'm not sure I managed to hoist them much over hibernating tortoise level.
I showered straight after, glad to finally wash the last of the smoky smell out of my hair. I dumped all the clothes I'd been wearing into the washing basket, wrinkling my nose.
I had grapefruit juice for breakfast, drinking a glassful with the shutters open, looking out across the Lune. The water level was high that morning. Sometimes the river seems no more than a stream, sandwiched between two rock-strewn, greyish mud banks. But during high springs, with an onshore wind giving it a step up, it can completely flood the stone quay.
At times like those the residents try, Canute-like to fend the water away from their front doors and cellar windows with sandbags. The unlucky ones discover just how good the anti-corrosion warranty is on their cars, parked outside.
I took the precaution of buying a set of tide tables just after I moved in. If the weather looks bad I shift the bike up the ramp they used to use for loading trucks at the back of the building. It leads to a solid brick platform, about four feet above pavement level, just outside the old boarded-up rear doorway. Then I watch the mopping up exercise from the safety of my first floor balcony.
OK, so maybe balcony makes it sound grander than it really is. In reality all I have is an old iron railing about three feet off the floor, embedded in the sandstone and misshapen with rust. I usually treat its protective qualities with caution. I've no desire to find out the hard way that the railing is only held in by the skin of its teeth and a bit of flaky mortar. There's a good twenty-foot drop to the flagged pavement below.
Now I stood leaning on the stonework enjoying the view. I checked my watch, looking forward to nothing more strenuous than a ride out to Jacob and Clare's for lunch.
Afterwards, I looked on the half an hour or so I spent then as a little oasis of calm before I was hit by a full-blown hurricane. Complete with monstrous winds and tidal waves.