‘Are you tired?’ she said, examining his face inquisitively and evidently noticing the ravages of his recent trials. He didn’t want to mention the dreaded business going on in his body or the hospital humiliations.
‘I’m just back from Berlin. Bloody exhausting. We were doing Songs of Innocence. We had to change the child soloist, the one doing your part, after the first one got tonsillitis two days before the concert. Of course, none of them have been nearly as good or as original as you.’ This last statement wasn’t strictly accurate but he wanted to please her. ‘Little Dagna would squeak on the high notes. Not like your clear, pure voice.’ He gulped his wine and grinned. ‘And now, very exciting, they’re organising a special event for my birthday next year, my big seven-O – at the Barbican. We’re gathering ten youth choirs from around England – I’ll be travelling about rehearsing and choosing the soloists. It should be pretty impressive. But, Christ, seventy.’ She smiled politely.
‘Of course you still look as though you’re thirty,’ he said gallantly.
She ignored the compliment. ‘So, I think it’s really important we…’ She stopped abruptly as the waiter stepped between them, bearing pen and pad and smirking as if he knew something. She chose spaghetti alle vongole. ‘And for me, fegato alla Veneziana,’ he said, enjoying rolling some Italian around his mouth. ‘Grazie!’ He hoped the liver would give him strength. Red blood cells, iron, prop himself up.
She started again. ‘I really want to know how you see it. What it was like for you. You’ve never told me how it all began or what it meant in your life. Do you remember meeting me as a child? Shit, Ralph! It’s as if I don’t know this story that had me at the centre.’
‘I’ve been thinking about it a lot since your letter.’ He didn’t often get flustered but she was already giving him a headache. His plan was to prise open several of his carefully sealed secrets as a way of presenting her with something – at least an inkling of his motives and desires. He had to make an offering.
‘You know, I was very unconfident around women when I was young. You didn’t meet any at a boys’ boarding school. I felt unsure of them.’
Daphne’s laugh exploded as a snort of disbelief. ‘That’s not the reputation you had!’
‘No, really, I always felt very shy of women. You didn’t board. You can’t imagine what it’s like. Very extreme. All those years with no females around. And I was only eight when I left home. But right from the first day at prep school, there were deeply intense encounters. It’s what we all did. Of course it all got much more serious when I went to Stowe. We had real love affairs.’
He could see this was not what Daphne was expecting. ‘But what’s that got to do with me? I was a girl. And when you knew me, you’d left all that far behind, hadn’t you? I mean, you were in your late twenties. You never mentioned fancying boys.’
‘No, there were always boys.’ Ralph realised this didn’t sound right. ‘Young men,’ he corrected. Be careful, he thought. ‘It remained like a closed world I could dip into.’ Daphne laughed another snort before he noticed his unfortunate choice of words.
‘Still?’
‘Well, maybe not so much.’ He didn’t want to admit his sorry slide away from sex since the illness took hold. In any case, this was taking the wrong direction. But how to back out? ‘It’s secret, though. Nobody must know, OK, Daff?’
Perhaps this confession wasn’t such a good idea, he thought. Too risky. Probably just more ammunition for her to turn on him. He recalled two boys in Tallinn a few years ago, before his prostate turned traitor. They were both brass players with lips red and swollen from their instruments. And wicked eyes. The naughty ones in a youth orchestra of Europeans aged sixteen to twenty-one. Ras and… he’d forgotten the other one’s name. In their hotel room they had a plastic bag filled with small metal vials. ‘For making whipped cream,’ Ras, the taller one, explained. There was a device for cracking them open and a packet of party balloons. ‘Breathe from this!’ He handed Ralph a green one and they all three lay on the floor, sucking gas from the rubbery necks until they cried from laughter. Then they were kissing. It was blurred – lips, head floating, giggling, opening of more vials. In the end he couldn’t tell whether the giddiness came from laughing gas or their frantic race to finish each other off. He’d felt like a boy again with them: young and free and swept along by torrents and rapids of hilarity. They’d practically jumped on him; it was like being back at school. Christ! He pulled at his shirt collar as though he needed more air.
The food arrived and the young Italian wielded an ostentatiously outsize pepper mill high over Daphne’s food. She appeared mesmerised by his absurd performance and forgot to tell him to stop until her plate was littered with an unnerving layer of black shrapnel. Ralph had to say something and she laughed like a woman you might end up locking away in the attic. The man’s shirt was open and Ralph noticed the dark stipple of shaved chest hair. The young were merciless shavers these days; not just the girls but boys too were often almost as severely depilated. All a legacy from porn films, apparently, where hair mustn’t get in the way of a good camera angle. But pornography had never been his preferred vice. He speared the strips of liver, bolting them down with the thought of loading a gun with ammunition. She picked out a few minuscule clams from their shells and hardly touched the spaghetti. He didn’t like her lowered eyes and mistrusted the lack of interest in her food.
‘Does Nina know? Would she mind?’ Her questions were unwelcome and somehow familiar.
‘She doesn’t ask. I’m careful. And she’s careful. We’ve learned how to preserve what we have. That’s important.’
‘This is so strange – about the boys.’ She appeared perplexed. ‘And what’s it got to do with me, with our story? Apart from all this messing around, did you actually love other girls? Other boys?’ She was turning cold and interrogative. Already, he didn’t trust her to understand him.
‘No! No, it was only you.’ He realised he had taken the wrong path and should have focused all his attention on her. ‘You were something delicate and rare.’
‘So could I have been a boy?’
He paused, trying to be honest. ‘You were something else. A sprite. Like Puck – mischievous and fleeting. Your youth, your energy – even the way you were so dismissive of adults. I felt privileged to enter your world. There was a connection between the child part of me and you as a child. It allowed an unguarded love – non-judgemental, uncomplicated by knowledge of the world. I suppose it was partly that I didn’t want to grow up. You gave me freedom. Even more so after I got married and had babies.’
‘So it’s youth, purity and freedom. An appealing little bundle for the older man.’ He hated sarcasm. Her face had a harsh quality he didn’t like, and up close she looked old; crows’ feet creased her temples when she talked.
‘It was like fate,’ he persevered. ‘You came running down the stairs and something happened. It was extraordinarily powerful. You were nine when I met you. And I was twenty-seven.’ He smiled at her with warmth. ‘Eighteen years apart. I suppose we still are.’ He hoped the implied closing of the age gap was apparent to her. ‘Oh shit…’ He tipped the glass to his mouth with too much energy and wine streamed down his chin on to his clothes. Scrubbing the wet patch on my crotch with a napkin doesn’t look good, he thought. Shirt dabbing, sweat beading. Shit.