Читать книгу Unnatural Order - Liz Porter - Страница 3

‘Byron is alleged always to have carried a contraceptive in his top pocket,’ read Caroline as her aircraft droned away above the Mediterranean, ‘although it must be said that it was rarely a very effective one: his sword outwore its scabbard with inconvenient regularity.’ Frowning at the smug masculinity of the author’s tone, she took too large a swig of wine out of her little plastic glass, then winced at its rawness in her throat.

She had spotted the biography of Byron in the Heathrow bookshop and bought it out of nostalgia. Perhaps reading it would take her back to her 16-year-old self, the girl who had burned with unformed adolescent passion at the mere idea of Byron: mad, bad and dangerous to know. The idea of being 16 again was looking quite appealing at this moment. At least it would get her out of her present predicament.

But Byron’s contraceptive – probably some carefully crafted but well-worn piece of goatskin – made her think of her own little rubber diaphragm sitting squatly in its plastic case in her overnight bag.

Oh God. Sex was the last thing she wanted to think about right now. Tonight, however, it would be an issue. In an hour’s time she would be landing in Lisbon, where Karl would be waiting. Yes, he had booked himself a single room in the Cintra Hotel, where she had reserved herself a room some months earlier. But he was sure to see this arrangement as a technicality.

And why not, from his point of view? Hadn’t sexual attraction been the entire basis of their embarrassingly short acquaintance? And while he might not be expecting her to sleep with him tonight, the tone of his letter suggested that he anticipated moving on, sexually, from where they had left off in Mykonos. Anyway, hadn’t sex been on her mind a mere 24 hours earlier, when she had carefully washed her diaphragm, held it up to the light to check for holes and then put it in her bag?

She picked up the Byron book again, opening it at a random page. ‘His “under-look”,’ she read, ‘made every virgin feel like a potential adulteress and every adulteress a vulnerable virgin.’ Caroline almost sighed aloud. She hadn’t appreciated her virginity when she had it, but how delightfully uncomplicated it seemed in retrospect.

At a virginal 16 her only concept of a man’s penis had been based on dim memories of early childhood showers with her father, combined with the diagrams of male genitalia in the pamphlets from her school sex education class. At 17, when her first university boyfriend had pushed her hand down the front of his loose corduroy trousers, she was shocked to find the smooth pillar of flesh pointing upwards, instead of hanging down. It wasn’t until the next boyfriend that she realised the male organ could rise all the way up until its head could peep over the top of enclosing trousers.

Yet, even in her ignorance, sex had been the source of her well-being. The textbooks said that adolescence was a troubled time after the carefree innocence of childhood, but the process had been the reverse for her. The discovery of boys, the simultaneous revelation that at least some of them liked her and the uncomplicated mindless pleasure of their kisses and adolescent fumblings had given her a release and a source of power that had transformed the anxious child she had been until the age of 13. Her interest in sex and boys made her the same as every other girl in the class: ordinary, average, accepted.

She could remember arriving at a girlfriend’s house for a Saturday afternoon visit. She and Helen had been friends in primary school and had maintained contact, although they had been sent to different secondary schools. Helen’s father had opened the door with a flourish. Mr Benson was a bluff, red-faced, sandy-haired man who liked to tell jokes and go to the football, the opposite of her quiet, ironic, intellectual father.

He probably hadn’t seen her since she was about 11, and now she was 14. She was still skinny; photos of her at both ages showed a face that had barely changed, although her hair was longer. But she must have had about her an air of self-possession and optimism that had been absent in her 11-year-old self.

‘Caroline, look at you,’ he had cried, so loudly that she was sure the whole street had heard. ‘Our ugly duckling has turned into a swan.’

It seemed absurd to even think of describing a nine-year-old as a tortured soul, but Caroline could think of no better word for the nameless miseries of her life at that point.

Her only close friend was their next-door neighbour, Zosia. Caroline had been confiding in her since she could talk. But Zosia was an adult, and Caroline knew that children were supposed to prefer the company of their peers. Accordingly, she had chosen Helen. Faithful, friendly, cheerful Helen. Precious afternoons with her were the closest Caroline ever came to acting out the carefree joys of childhood. Helen had a tricycle, a cubby house, two younger brothers and a joie de vivre as unselfconscious as the gurgles and smiles of Caroline’s newborn sister Jennifer. Caroline envied both of them without rancour. What would it be like to wake up without feeling a great lump of dread in your stomach?

Later she had attempted to reinvent this childhood angst, recasting it as something bleak but romantic; a big black cloak. At the time it had felt more like the grey plastic mackintoshs her mother made her wear on rainy days: drab, all-covering, depressing.

She had always been a fearful child. What, exactly, she had been frightened of was difficult to define. Mr Benson, who coached Caroline and his daughter at rounders, always accused her of shrinking from the ball when it was bowled. Perhaps he had been right – she was certainly physically timorous. The combination of an innate lack of physical aptitude and parents who, with the exception of their own golf games, showed little interest in sporting excellence had produced a child who was so unconfident of her physical self that she felt stomach-churning anxiety whenever she was faced with any kind of athletic challenge.

How could other children display such glee as they swarmed over monkey bars or flew down huge slides? She looked at them in awe. They were proper children, uninhibited, fearless, careless of their own safety. She, on the other hand, was a small, worried adult trapped in a skinny child’s body. Other children intuitively recognised this in her, choosing her last for teams in games which required skill or daring.

She was simply no good at being a child. She knew this with a sad certainty. She was a failure. She knew too much, understood too much, feared too much.

The ultimate proof of her failure to be a proper child was her fear, almost bordering on dislike, of groups of her own kind. She could manage single encounters with skill, but the prospect of being forced to join an unknown group of children in the street filled her with horror.

Helen’s family went to Queensland during the summer holidays in which Jennifer was born. Nine-year-old Caroline spent the entire period playing alone or with the new baby, refusing her mother’s urgings that she join a group of children who had started playing in the park at the bottom of their street.

Hunched in her room over a library copy of Lord of the Flies, her worst fears were confirmed: children were not to be trusted. Adults could be relied on to like her; they thought she was clever. Children had her number. They could tell she was a fake.

Central to her failure to be a child was the way her body continued to let her down, her stomach clenching with panic at activities which gave real children paroxysms of joy. On swings she didn’t like going high because she was scared of falling. She didn’t have a bike, and was too hesitant to catch on when Helen gave her a quick go on hers. She didn’t even have the knack of throwing a ball far enough to be useful at rounders. When others were watching, her clenched stomach seemed to extend as far as her arms, cramping them with fear.

Only recently she had asked herself why she hadn’t ever confided any of these miseries to her parents. Had she known that her failings would have seemed like a reproach to them? Or was she just sure they wouldn’t have understood? ‘Never mind,’ her mother had shrugged once, when Caroline had bemoaned her failure to get into the school rounders team. ‘I don’t think we even had sport at school when I was your age.’

In her first year at the expensive girls’ school her parents had been saving for since she was born, she felt isolated and lonely. Plagued by stomach aches, she was a regular visitor to the dispensary and its matron, a sallow-faced German woman with a strong accent, who lived in at the school and provided medical attention to the boarders.

On one occasion the woman’s hard look had made it clear that she didn’t believe her for a minute. Yet she had told Caroline to lie down and had given her two aspirins. Lying there in a half-dream, she heard one of the boarders come in for sanitary pads. While she didn’t catch what was said next, she could tell from the intonation that the boarder had asked Matron a question. The first half of the nurse’s reply was also muffled. Then the answer separated out into hard little syllables.

‘The weak ones… sent them to the gas chamber,’ the woman was saying. The emphasis was wrong, gas chamber, not gas chamber, Caroline remembered. Then the nurse had laughed harshly and the boarder had tittered.

‘The weak ones,’ Caroline had repeated to herself over and over. ‘Am I one of those?’ How could she answer the question except in the affirmative as she lay there listening to the happy clatter of the boarders descending the stairs to the hot cabbage smells of their dining room.

All the boarders seemed so unworried: happily sporting, apparently not homesick and impervious to the appalling food, the mere smell of which poisoned the air for hundreds of metres around the boarding house.

After school that day she had made her usual visit next door to Zosia, but hadn’t repeated the nurse’s words. Zosia was an Auschwitz survivor, and Caroline was always careful to censor anything that might fuel her neighbour’s deep-seated fear that 95 per cent of the world was anti-Semitic. Zosia was inclined to suspect any German, regardless of age, of being a Nazi. She had already raised her eyebrows when Caroline had mentioned the presence of a German nurse at her WASPy girls’ grammar school.

Anyway, Zosia would have laughed if Caroline had confessed to having closed her eyes, as she lay on the hard dispensary bed, and prayed that the deity responsible for such things might reincarnate her as sporty, insensitive and, above all, unthinking. ‘To be clever —that’s the important thing,’ she would say, banging her iron down on the table by way of emphasis. ‘Nobody can take your education away.’

Caroline’s prayers remained unanswered, but they were soon irrelevant. By the next year, her angst had shrivelled to nothing in the heat of her awakening sexuality. There were boys on the tram to school, boys on the corner, boys at the beach.

Not that they all fell at her feet. But there was enough response to give her an interest. And above all, to make her happy.

Happy. The word sounded childish. Just like her. The excitement of the sexual chase had brought her contentment at 14. Ought it still be consuming her at 32?

Had she sighed aloud? It didn’t matter. The pinstriped business type who had been occupying the seat next to her was still stranded, clutching his electric shaver, in the queue for the lavatory. She was safe.

But how was she to find a way out of her present dilemma? Here she was, strapped into a seat 6000 metres up in the air and on her way to keep an arrangement that she was starting to wish she’d never made.

What sort of woman, she asked herself, tells a man with whom she has spent precisely seven hours that she is spending her next holiday in Portugal, then gives in to his suggestion that he meet her there?

‘An idiot.’ That was the answer.

She had met Karl in the hotel nightclub on the last night of her holiday on Mykonos. Sensing eyes on her as she danced, she had turned around and found herself staring up into the smile of a tall, green-eyed man with thick blond hair.

After the first few minutes of their conversation, shouting in one another’s ears as they stood together in the crush near the bar, it seemed like a foregone conclusion that they would eventually sleep together. Two hours later she refused his suggestion that he accompany her back to her hotel, but she rather liked his cheek for asking. She told him she was flying back to London the next afternoon, and was gratified by his insistence that she meet him in the village the next morning.

Having made arrangements for this, she now looked forward to saying a formal goodnight. She knew he would kiss her and she was curious to know what it would be like. The teasing sensation of his lips on hers was as arousing as she had hoped, awakening a warm rush that started in her stomach and moved quickly downwards. As the tip of his tongue brushed the inside of her lips, she found herself wondering how it would feel if he were pressing it into the wet warmth between her legs.

The next day on the beach was a pleasant mix of bookish conversation and sexual tension.

When they swam together, he pulled her to him, brushing his hands over her breasts before folding his arms around her waist. As they floated, kissing, in the water, she locked her legs around his waist and felt the delicious pressure of his erection against her. Moving gently against him as they kissed, she became aware of a building urgency. Suddenly uncomfortable, she broke the embrace and swam for shore.

That afternoon she had wanted Karl intensely. Later, she wasn’t so sure. Over the last few weeks she had even thought of cancelling her plans for a Lisbon holiday, or telling Karl that she had done so. Then she need never see him again. But how many times, in the two years since she had asked Gary to leave, had she met a man who professed to feel real emotion for her?

Caroline glared at her own reflection in the small, darkened window. Why couldn’t she have predicted that she might be feeling ambivalent once the immediate excitement of the first meeting had faded? For God’s sake, she was old enough to know better than to commit herself to an arrangement that she might later regret. More to the point, she was old enough to have grown out of this sort of dilemma altogether.

At 32, when she should have been settling down, getting married and thinking about motherhood, she had a rented flat, a couple of (very) part-time lovers and a job on the sort of magazine she wouldn’t have looked at if she wasn’t working for it. At 27, she’d had a flat of her own, a long-term boyfriend who wanted to marry her and a permanent job on a quality Sydney paper. Had she been growing up or down in the intervening five years? Even her little sister Jennifer, a child of 23, was married and had announced her pregnancy on the eve of Caroline’s departure for London.

There had been plenty of excitement in the 18 months since she had arrived in London, and her exploits on Greek Island ferries, Egyptian trains and Italian beaches had provided rich material for letters home.

But the contrast between her own nomadic existence and the domestic stability of her friends back home in Australia had started to bother her. The enthusiastic reaction she elicited from men 10 years her junior had once been a delight to her. Now she found it irritating.

After Mykonos she had spent a night in Athens. She had just sat down at an outdoor cafe in Syntagma Square, when a youth of about 20 strolled over to her table and smiled down at her, as if expecting an invitation to sit down. Caroline felt a surge of annoyance.

‘Go away,’ she had hissed in Greek, adding, in English, ‘I am old enough to be your mother.’ The boy laughed, but remained standing in front of her.

‘Go away,’ she repeated. Shocked, he took a step backwards, then turned and strode off.

While Jennifer had been giving birth in Melbourne, Caroline had been wandering around the Casbah in Tangiers, hand-in-hand with Ali, a beautiful 21-year-old with soft brown eyes and an English vocabulary only slightly better than Caroline’s Arabic.

‘I will come back with you to London,’ he would say, as he kissed her hand. ‘There I cook for you the real couscous.’ Ever since Jennifer had married, two years earlier, she had been demanding regular bulletins on what she insisted on calling Caroline’s ‘love life’. And Caroline’s dutiful report on her Moroccan holiday had prompted the usual immediate response.

How I envy you,’ her sister had replied. ‘There are no dewy-eyed young men in my life at the moment, unless you count the baby, who is sleeping, thank God. And I feel so floppy and stretch-marked that no youths would be interested in me anyway. But there are men in my life. As I write, I am awaiting the arrival of not one but two repairmen – one for the fridge, one for the dishwasher. What excitement!’

Caroline smiled to herself as she thought of the wry grin with which Jennifer faced the world. When she was 12, Caroline had once overheard her mother refer to her younger sibling as “our precious little surprise” and had wondered whether the surprise factor made her more valuable. Certainly Jennifer was much closer to their mother than Caroline was. She had always found Zosia more welcoming, even before her mother had disappeared into hospital and returned with a small yowling bundle in a pink bunny rug. The closeness between Jennifer and their mother had been cemented when the younger daughter paid her mother the compliment of following her into a nursing career. But Caroline liked Jennifer too much to begrudge her their mother’s preference. Besides, she had always considered herself well compensated by her father’s beaming pride in her achievements.

A sudden juddering and shaking jerked her back to the present. As the plane hit a pocket of turbulence, the Fasten Seat Belt signs lit up. She noticed that her neighbour had returned from the lavatory, his grey jowls now shiny and smooth-looking. Feeling her glance, he shot her a questioning look before picking up his copy of the Financial Times and turning, with ostentatious flapping and folding, to the foreign exchange listings.

Caroline closed Byron, reached into her handbag and pulled out the fat envelope containing Karl’s letter, addressed to Mrs Caroline James, 25 Joseph’s Lane, Holloway, London, Great Britain. The handwriting was neat, if a bit small. It had been written in fountain pen. She smiled at the Mrs. No teacher of mathematics in a German secondary school, not even one who had spent two years in England as an exchange student, could be expected to know that the English did not follow the German habit of addressing an unmarried woman of a certain maturity with the honorific Frau.

At least the error told her that Karl wasn’t in the habit of writing letters like these – or not in English anyway. She skimmed the six closely written sheets, stopping at the last page and reading it slowly:

I can think about nothing else but the prospect of seeing you again. I find myself returning obsessively to the Kosmos, and watching the door just in case you might walk in. I know that you’re back in London writing your magazine articles. But to me that nightclub is so full of the atmosphere of you that I can’t help expecting to see you. Am I being foolish in hoping that my feelings might be returned? You seemed so off-handed when we talked about the possibility of seeing one another when you took your holiday in Portugal. Yet you agreed that we should meet again. I know we have only spent a few hours together – and on a Greek Island, of all things. As you read this, you’ll say that I’m suffering a touch of the sun and I’m just talking myself into a holiday romance because I’m responding to all the clichéd associations of Greek Islands. But I just can’t help thinking about your smile, your shiny eyes and the salty taste of your kisses. After a year of living on my own I am ready to fall in love again and I feel it should be with you. I hope you don’t think I am being foolish in revealing my emotions like this. I wish only that you be honest with me in return. I think that, at our age, lies will always hurt much more than truth.

Caroline put the letter away, her cheeks red. Its sentiments had charmed and flattered her at first. But after reading it, re-reading it and taking it to the office to show Anna, she found her initial delight gradually giving way to anxiety. Only two types of people were likely to make emotional revelations like this at such an early stage of an acquaintance: romantics and desperate neurotics. How would she be able to tell which group Karl belonged to? Or did being German put him into a third group altogether? The protagonist of Goethe’s The Sufferings of the Young Werther had killed himself for love, sparking off a frenzy of suicides among fashionably poetic young Prussians of the late eighteenth century. This attitude to matters of the heart might have seared itself into the German character.

Caroline didn’t remember the novel very well, but she thought she detected something dangerously Werther-like in Karl’s letter. Didn’t he know that courtship was most fun when it was treated like a game with certain fixed rules, the most important of which was that both partners should feign a slight degree of detachment at the beginning? It might be obvious that both were making light of feelings that they hoped would deepen, but that knowledge only intensified the delicious tension.

Why did he have to show his hand like this? And why so quickly, in a letter that arrived only 10 days after she returned from Mykonos? She had agreed to meet him in Portugal because of their mutual sexual attraction, not because of any talk of love.

In principle, Caroline was very taken with the idea of someone falling in love with her. Both of her previous serious relationships had started with the man in question wooing her while she remained indifferent, at least initially. She needed time to get used to the idea of a particular man as the object of more than mere sexual desire: time alone, time to miss attention and company that she might otherwise take for granted.

She liked the days that often elapsed between meeting a man and receiving his first phone call. It gave her a chance to realise that she wanted to hear from him again.

Karl had deprived her of that opportunity. There had barely been time to reflect on their brief meeting before his letter had dropped into her mailbox. If she had only received a couple of amusing postcards from him and then a chatty phone call to confirm the tentative arrangement that they had made on the beach at Mykonos, she might have been looking forward to seeing him again.

Still, who was she to criticise him? She had been hasty in consenting to meet him in Portugal. He was just being rash in another way. Still, his letter made her feel uncomfortable. She wasn’t ready to be romantic yet. She wanted to take up their acquaintance exactly where they had left it, at a stage where the keynotes were sexual attraction and laughter.

Predictably, her colleagues at London Woman had thought she was being unfair. How rare, Paula and Anna had chorused, to find a man who could talk about his feelings, and in a language that he had only learnt at school.

‘He sounds like a real old-fashioned romantic,’ said Paula, stroking the thick parchment-like writing paper of Karl’s letter with her long, elegant fingers. ‘I bet he’d never give you an electric ladies’ shaver for a birthday present.’ Six months earlier Paula’s husband James had thought he was doing the right thing, having seen her cut her legs with his razor.

‘You’re so hard to please,’ Anna chimed in.

‘The poor chap says all the right things and you’re not happy because you think he’s saying them too early.’

‘Well, I don’t think there’s such a thing as love at first sight,’ replied Caroline. ‘If someone thinks they’re in love with you after a few hours, then it’s not you they’re in love with.’

This level of interest in Karl was typical of the attention usually given to Caroline’s affairs. As the only single member of the three-woman writers’ room, Caroline had a kind of totemic status to her married friends. They followed her adventures with an intensity of interest which they claimed was pure envy, but which Caroline knew was also composed of equal parts of pity for the lack of security in her life.

Anna, who had just discovered she was pregnant with her first child, made much of the dullness of her suburban life in comparison with what she called Caroline’s “adventures”. On more than one occasion she had offered to take Caroline’s place on the Greek island holiday on which she had met Karl.

This holiday, an invitation to spend an all-expenses paid week on Mykonos as the guest of a man she had met only days before, had been the cause of much debate in the office. Rob Davidson was a close friend and a colleague of an old boyfriend of Caroline’s, David Fenton, a former journalist who was now making a huge salary as a public relations man. The two men had dropped into London on their way to Mykonos for two quiet weeks windsurfing. But their plans had been upset by the arrival of David’s fiancée, Julie, a spoiled 25-year-old with no apparent interests beyond her own career prospects as an actress.

‘Save me, Caroline,’ Rob had pleaded at their second dinner since his arrival. ‘I couldn’t bear to spend a week listening to Julie ordering waiters around. I’ll die for lack of adult female conversation. Come with me. You’ll have your own room and I promise I won’t lay a hand on you. Just come, it’ll be fun.’

Caroline had been uncertain. She liked Rob and he was interesting company. Yet she didn’t find him sexually attractive, and the prospect of a week with another couple who spent all their time either bickering or screwing made her squirm. Still, the idea of being flown to Greece for a holiday was irresistible.

Anna agreed. ‘Go,’ she said. ‘You have to. Most men would want to go to a cheap hotel, get you to pay half, and still try to fuck you. You’ve seen all the travel stuff. The Palace is the most expensive hotel on the island. And you’re flying first class. Do it for me. The only expensive accommodation I have to look forward to is the delivery room at St Barnaby’s.’

Right now, thought Caroline as she poured more wine into her glass, she would happily swap lives with Anna, as long as she didn’t have to take on her job as medical writer for the magazine. She would take Anna’s rambling house in Hampstead with its volatile boiler and rising damp, Anna’s sociopath cat Arthur and, best of all, Anna’s handsome architect husband, Christopher. She would even happily take on Anna’s pregnancy once the morning sickness was over.

Anna, in exchange, could have Caroline’s furnished bedsitter with its nasty orange fleck sofa, its dingy wallpaper and the creepy landlord, George, who came round every Saturday to collect the rent and make suggestive remarks. She could also have Caroline’s passionate but irregular encounters with her lover Damian, managed on those rare occasions when he could manage to convince his wife that a valuable client simply had to be seen after hours. Caroline would happily swap these for regular but predictable sex with Christopher. And, best of all, Anna could have all the “adventures”.

If only the swap could be instantaneous, thought Caroline, as the pilot announced that they were about to land in Lisbon. Then, at the snap of her fingers, she would find herself in Anna’s cool green living room, the one glass of wine a day permitted by the obstetrician in a crystal goblet at her elbow, Christopher at her side, and some BBC drama about the days of the Raj on the box.

In exchange, Anna would be hunched in Caroline’s economy class airline seat drinking lousy Portuguese wine out of a plastic glass and dreading the onset of her next ‘adventure’.

As the plane began its descent, Caroline stared out the window. She saw only the reflection of her own almost triangular face with its wide cheekbones and small neat mouth, now pursed into a sulky pout. Her thatch of short red hair, reflected in the glass, looked dark. How would her face look with brown hair, Caroline wondered. She had been dying her hair for so long that she had almost forgotten what she looked like with her own mouse-brown colour.

The deep auburn looked natural; but no natural redhead had her rich olive skin, bequeathed by her father’s Italian grandfather. She had long given up hope of acquiring a pale and interesting Celtic complexion to match her red hair. In summer her face defied all efforts with hats and sunblock, glowing a smooth and unfashionable golden brown.

An hour later Caroline was in the airport, leaning back against a wall and watching as an unclaimed red leather rucksack passed her for the umpteenth time. The handful of other passengers who were still waiting for their bags were becoming restless as they watched the near-empty luggage carousel go round and round, but Caroline felt calm and unhurried.

She glanced at her watch. It was one o’clock local time. Her planned arrival time had been midnight. Perhaps Karl would think she wasn’t coming. Perhaps he had already given up and gone back to the hotel. Then she could check into a hotel on the other side of Lisbon and catch a bus north in the morning.

A succession of thuds broke into her reverie as another cartload of luggage was dumped on to the carousel and her giant army-style kitbag came into view.

As she bent to pick it up, a uniformed youth appeared at her elbow.

‘Bagagem?’ he asked, as he took the handles of her bag. Caroline shook her head.

‘No thank you,’ she said. She could have said it in Portuguese. But she didn’t want to trigger a conversation about her terrific Portuguese.

I speak English,’ the boy said. ‘Tomorrow, I show you Lisbon.’

Caroline groaned softly. Not again. She shook her head. ‘My husband is meeting me,’ she said. The boy looked puzzled.

‘Marido! Meu marido,’ whispered Caroline, trying to look like a wife with a muscular and jealous husband due back at any second.

Understanding dawned in the youth’s eyes and he dropped his grip on her bag.

‘Adeus,’ said Caroline, as she slung the bag over her shoulder and headed for customs.

‘Adeus,’ the boy replied, already focussed on a blond in a crumpled linen suit who was trying to strap a large suitcase on to a tiny collapsible luggage trolley.

Caroline looked around as she walked past the customs desk and out into the main terminal. There were no familiar faces. Perhaps he really had given up on her. Maybe he’d changed his mind altogether. Or fallen in love with someone else in the meantime.

As she put her bag down and looked around, scanning the area for blond heads, a movement caught her eye. Turning, she saw a long straw mat unroll. On it, in huge red letters, was written, ‘Welcome to Portugal, Caroline.’

Then Karl stepped out from behind a pillar, a bottle of champagne in his hand.

‘I thought you’d changed your mind. I was starting to worry.’ He pulled her to him. As he stared into her eyes, Caroline fiddled with her bag, torn between admiration for his sense of theatre and a desire to run headlong out of the airport building.

She could jump into a taxi and demand to be driven as far away as possible. She knew how to say: take me to… That had been lesson one in the Portuguese for Travellers course. Leve-me a Espanha she’d say. Take me to Spain, or anywhere – as far away as possible from here.

‘Take these,’ he said, handing her two glasses and popping the cork. Caroline’s cheeks burned as she noticed people turning to stare.

‘You’re not happy?’ Karl poured a portion of warm fizzing liquid into each glass.

Caroline thought of Paula and Anna back at work. They’d think this was the most romantic gesture in the world.

‘I’m here, aren’t I,’ she said, blushing as she heard the lack of grace in her own voice. ‘The champagne is lovely. Let’s drink it outside where everyone isn’t watching.’

‘We’ll drink it in the car.’ Karl raised his glass to her. ‘And then we’ll go to the hotel. You must be very tired after the flight.

Karl played the perfect tour guide as they drove into Lisbon, making a small detour to show her the city’s main square and the spot where the Portuguese king and his son were assassinated in 1908.

‘This is Lisbon’s version of the Via Veneto,’ he said as they drove along a wide tree-lined boulevard. ‘Isn’t it great how the pavement cafes are still full of people at two in the morning? People seem to stay up so much later here than they do in Germany.’

‘They don’t stay up very late in London either,’ yawned Caroline as Karl did a wheeling turn into a narrow side street.

Here we are,’ he said, as they pulled up outside a three-storey colonial building with huge shuttered windows and small iron balconies.

Not exactly an architectural highlight, is it?’ he murmured, as she filled out her registration forms at the front desk. ‘But it’s comfortable and the beds are enormous.’

Caroline said nothing. She didn’t want to think about beds.

‘Goodnight, Madame, sleep well.’ The old night clerk bowed his head as he handed over her key. ‘Goodnight Sir.’

‘I think he’s surprised that we’re bothering with separate rooms,’ said Karl as he drew back the lift’s ornate metal doors.

She shrugged.

‘You don’t think so?’ Karl ran one finger slowly down her cheek.

‘I’m trying not to think.’ Caroline could feel a dull ache beginning behind her eyes. ‘I’m too tired to come up with anything sensible.’

‘Shall we have a drink before bed?’ Karl tugged the metal door open as the lift groaned to a stop at their floor. I don’t want you to think either. Because I think you believe you’ve made a terrible mistake.’

She said nothing.

‘I’ve bought some beautiful port,’ he continued, relentless. ‘It was made in Oporto, which is a few hours from here. The name, port, like the name of Portugal, comes from the name of the city. So it’s just the thing for your first drink here.’

If only she could make him disappear, thought Caroline. Along with his fucking travel commentary. And herself too, but to a different place of course – you had to specify all the details with magic spells. Anna’s house would do her fine. Oh, to be with someone that she knew almost as well as she knew herself – in the way that Anna knew Christopher. Someone with whom the mating dance had been done long before. Someone who felt like home.

‘I think I’d like to have a shower,’ she said. ‘I feel so sweaty and tired. I’ll have a drink after that. OK?’

‘But of course,’ said Karl. ‘I’ll leave my door open. See you soon.’

As soon as Caroline had locked her door she tore off her crumpled black dress and flung it to the floor. She gasped with cold as she stepped under the shower, directing the icy jet of water on to her face and, when she could bear it, down her body. Pressing her forehead against the cool white tiles of the shower recess, she sighed as the water rushed down her back.

Ten minutes later she was towelling herself dry. What should she wear? Not a nightdress. Not that she’d brought one anyway. She always slept in the nude. Except in winter, of course. In her freezing little bedsitter in London, she’d often gone to bed in jumpers and two pairs of tights and wished fervently for a man with a body like Karl’s to keep her warm. Now it was summer in Lisbon and she didn’t need another body for warmth. Did she require one for any other reason?

Caroline pulled a pair of jeans and a long-sleeved shirt out of her bag and put them on. She looked in the mirror as she brushed her hair. A fraught-looking face looked back. She did up the top button of her shirt and unlocked her door.

Karl was lying on the queen-sized bed smoking, wearing only a pair of jeans.

‘Help yourself,’ he said, gesturing at the two small glasses of port and the packet of cigarettes which sat on the bedside table.

Caroline took a port, sat in the armchair next to the window and tried to sip it as if she were at a wine-tasting. The local port was, as he had said, supposed to be excellent.

And perhaps it was. She glanced at the swell of Karl’s biceps and the tufts of blond hair under his arm and then looked away, gulping her port down as she did so.

He was smiling. ‘You’re not supposed to gulp it like that,’ he said. ‘It’s a delicate taste.’

‘You can give me the port-drinking lesson tomorrow.’ Caroline stood up. ‘I’m too tired now. Goodnight.’

Karl swung his legs off the bed. ‘Allow me to walk you to your front door,’ he said lightly. ‘Or at the very least to my front door.’ Caroline remembered the last time – the only other time – they had said goodnight. She felt a twinge in her stomach at the thought of it.

‘Goodnight.’ She raised her face to his.

Karl brushed his lips past hers, paused, and then ran the tip of his tongue gently along her bottom lip. When she opened her mouth, he wrapped his arms around her waist and pressed his body against her.

Caroline leaned back against the door and surrendered to the familiar delicious tension. Karl fumbled her fly buttons open and sank to his knees on the floor.

As his hands caressed her stomach and wandered down her thighs, she let her knees buckle until she was on the floor beside him.