Читать книгу Unnatural Order - Liz Porter - Страница 4

Caroline woke to find herself alone in a large double bed. But the initial sweet tide of relief receded when she spotted the two sticky glasses of port on the bedside table. Groaning softly, she stretched weary limbs. So last night had been more than an especially vivid erotic dream.

‘Idiot,’ she moaned, running her hands over her forehead. It felt hot and dry. What – or who – was going to save her from behaving like this when she was 40? There had been several occasions in her 20s when she had woken up in a strange bed, sated with sex and burning with shame at her lack of discrimination. But that was the 70s: open marriage, platform shoes. Poor taste had been the order of the decade. Now she was older and supposedly mature.

What was wrong with her body – or her mind – that a few lingering kisses, done in just the right way, could trigger a heat that blocked out her brain, sweeping all sensible thoughts aside in a rush of sensuality?

Men did this sort of thing all the time – and then made jokes about biting off their own arm so as to escape without waking the woman they’d been stupid enough to fall into bed with the previous evening. Women did it too, of course. But they were supposed to have better sense. Something to do with being biologically programmed to find the best possible father for their children. This was meant to make them more inclined to be selective.

Caroline’s body didn’t seem to want to follow this rule.

Only six months ago she had been minutes away from fucking a man she had known only half an hour. It had been a hot sweaty London summer night and she’d gone to a rock club with Jane, who lived in the flat upstairs, to see an Australian band. By ten o’clock, Jane was nearly fainting from the heat and smoke. Gratefully accepting Caroline’s assurance that she didn’t mind being left there alone, she fled in a taxi. Caroline, reared on a childhood of Melbourne summers where century temperatures were celebrated with front page newspaper stories, had leaned against a wall while the band set up, enjoying the sensation of sweat trickling down her back. That’s when Dave had approached, or was it Mike? Close-cropped hair. Bright eyes in a bony face and a knowing, cheeky smile. Muscled arms swelling out of a sleeveless T-shirt. A tattoo. A rose was it? Or an anchor? A slight Cockney accent. After 20 minutes of smalltalk he had leant over and licked a bead of sweat from her neck, smiling as she shivered with pleasure. Within seconds she was leaning back against the wall, oblivious to the pulsing crowd in front of her, as he kissed her throat and pushed his hands under her skirt.

‘Can we go to your place?’ he whispered sharply. Then reason dragged her back from the edge of sweet oblivion and she was suddenly clever enough to feign regret.

‘I can’t,’ she smiled. ‘I’m married. This is my night out with the girls but my girlfriend’s gone home.’ He had smiled understanding and shrugged.

‘I’ll just go to the loo,’ she had said, straightening her skirt. ‘I’ll be back in a minute.’

‘Be quick,’ he said, his teeth wolfish in the dark. ‘I’ll have to make the most of you here, won’t I?’ She had headed for the ladies’ and then doubled back, making for the exit. Then, pushing through the theatre crowds, she ran through Covent Garden and along the Strand, not stopping until she saw a vacant taxi’s welcoming yellow light.

Footsteps sounded in the corridor and she heard a key fumble in the lock. Pulling the covers over her head, she assumed the foetal position and started breathing deeply.

Fantasies of escape rushed through her mind while she listened to Karl moving about the room. She heard the creak of an armchair as he sat down, the rustle of a newspaper, the click of his cigarette lighter. An exaggerated breath inwards as he inhaled the first smoke. Almost a sigh.

Perhaps he’d tire of waiting for her to wake up and would go out for the day. Then she could check out and make for the airport. Why hadn’t she fled the minute she’d woken up? By now she could be barricaded in her room. Or, passport in hand, she could be padding down the street in her T-shirt and jeans.

But she hadn’t fled and he wasn’t going to leave. There was no way out.

Reluctantly she made stirring movements. There was an immediate response from the armchair across the room. Soft footsteps tapped across the floor, then the bed gave slightly as he sat down beside her.

Caroline counted to ten and opened her eyes. Karl was holding a huge bowl.

‘My God, you can sleep,’ he said. ‘I went out to a street stall to buy these.’ He held up a large bunch of glistening purple grapes.

‘Well?’ His green eyes looked straight into hers. ‘How are you this morning? Obviously you slept well. I couldn’t… I was too excited.’

‘I still feel sleepy,’ she murmured, making a small performance of rubbing her eyes. ‘I take a while to wake up. I never know how I feel until I’ve had my first coffee.’

‘Have a grape then,’ he said, breaking off a small bunch and dangling them over her mouth. ‘Lord Byron ate exactly this variety of grape for breakfast every morning when he stayed in Lisbon.’

‘Really?’

‘No.’ He smiled down at her. ‘But my very German, very efficient guidebook said that he stayed in Lisbon. And how would he have been able to resist grapes like these?’

Caroline raised herself up on one elbow. Her Byron book hadn’t mentioned Portugal, but she was less than halfway through it. Karl’s interest in Byron was a pleasant surprise. Most of the English men she knew seemed to be uninterested in the poetry of their own culture. And here was someone who wasn’t even a native speaker of English. The usual unkind thought popped into her head. Perhaps he had seen her Byron book and was manufacturing another of the many coincidences in reading taste that they had discovered on their day together in Mykonos. But that wasn’t possible. Her new book was still in her handbag, which was back in her own room. And on the beach he had also claimed some enthusiasm for Jane Austen, a most impressive confession for a man. In her experience male readers tended to view Austen as too domestic, too apolitical and just too feminine to attract the interest of a serious red-blooded male, no matter how literary.

‘Maybe Byron only went there for a day.’ Karl picked up a solid-looking, red book from the floor. ‘German travel book writers are very thorough. Even if Byron just got off the boat for 10 minutes and walked around, they would have felt obliged to mention it.’

‘I haven’t read enough of my book to be sure.’ Caroline picked a plump grape off the plate Karl was holding and bit into it, savouring the sensation as it burst, filling her mouth with sweet cool liquid.

‘Byron would never have eaten these,’ she said, taking a small bunch. ‘He was always fussing about his weight. He’d get a paunch and then go on a diet of dry biscuits and vinegar to slim down.’

Karl smiled and looked down at his own lean brown midriff.

‘Poor Byron. I suppose he thought his girlfriends wouldn’t love him any more if he was fat.’

Caroline tried not to stare at the smooth ridges of muscle beneath the skin of Karl’s stomach.

‘More likely he wouldn’t have loved himself any more.’

‘You are a cynic, Caroline,’ said Karl. ‘Despite his great success as a poet, he must have remained vulnerable. He had a… Klumpfuss… how do you say it in English…’

‘A club foot,’ said Caroline. ‘And I’m not cynical, I’m realistic.’ She looked down at Karl’s long bony feet with their neatly trimmed toenails.

‘Anyway forget Byron’s feet. What about his stomach? Does this very efficient, very German book of yours mention important things like the name of Byron’s favourite Lisbon restaurant?’

Karl took the book back. ‘No. But it says that he went to the town of Sintra. That’s only an hour’s drive from here. And he said it was as beautiful as the Garden of Eden. I think we should go there.’

‘I think we should too,’ said Caroline, stretching her arms and legs beneath the covers. ‘But where do you think Lord Byron would have taken his first cafe com leite of the day?’

Karl smiled.

‘If he was anything like you, Lady Caroline, I suppose he would have gone to the nearest place he could find.’

‘OK.’ Caroline sat up to get out of bed. ‘Then that’s where we’ll go.’

Karl caught her wrist as she swung her legs to the floor. ‘Are you glad you came?’

Caroline paused. ‘Yes, I am.’

‘You don’t sound very convinced.’

She looked down at the Stuttgart Football Club T-shirt that Karl had given her to sleep in and smoothed out some imaginary wrinkles.

‘I’m just not good in the morning,’ she lied. ‘Let me just have a quick shower and we’ll go.’

Caroline leant her forehead against the cool tiles of the shower recess and sighed as the warm water rushed over her head. ‘Oh well, you’re here now,’ she lectured herself in the mirror as she brushed her hair. ‘You’ve made a mistake but he’s nice – and he actually reads books. And you don’t have to marry him. Just enjoy the travelling.’

They walked in silence to a dusty little cafe in a street around the corner from their hotel.

‘Has this place been cleaned since Byron’s time?’ Karl flicked imaginary dust from the chair he had just pulled out for her.

Caroline didn’t answer. Were all Germans obsessed with cleanliness? Part of the work in her German linguistics course at university had involved a comparison of Roget’s Thesaurus with the German equivalent. How many different German words for ‘dirt’ had there been? Scores, she seemed to recall.

‘Well, I just associate it with this exaggerated love of order. You know. Signs everywhere telling people to keep off the grass, and everybody obeying them.’

‘Ordung muss sein.’ Karl lit a cigarette. ‘We must have order.’

That sounds like something that should have been written over the gate of a concentration camp,’ she snapped back, suddenly irritated with him.

‘Arbeit macht frei. Ordung muss sein.’

Karl bit his lip and looked at the floor and Caroline felt herself blushing. What a predictable insult that had been. And mean-spirited.

Even Zosia, in her more rational moments, knew that it wasn’t fair to blame all Germans for what had happened during the war. And Caroline had studied so many periods of German history at university that she didn’t automatically think ‘Nazi’ the moment someone said ‘German’.

For all she knew Karl’s parents might have been resistance fighters, or concentration camp inmates themselves. She doubted that, however. He seemed too conventional.

She glanced across at his clear-skinned, untroubled face. He looked solid. Middle class stock. Father in the army? Maybe even low ranks of the SS. She tried imagining Karl’s broad-shouldered trim-waisted figure in a well-cut SS uniform, a sharp-peaked cap shading his chiselled features. It worked. But his father would have done something clean – requisitions, perhaps. There was no sense of inherited family angst about Karl. No guilt, no troubles.

‘I didn’t notice too much Ordnung in your room in the hotel.’ She picked up his cigarette packet. Low tar, low nicotine. Very careful smoking.

Karl laughed. ‘That’s because I’m a German on holidays.’ He flicked his ash into the ashtray.

‘There’s a difference?’

He nodded.

‘I couldn’t possibly explain it. You’d have to observe me in my home environment to see. Why don’t you come back with me and have a look around?’ He smiled. ‘No strings attached. You’ll be allowed to leave the country.’

Caroline shrugged. ‘I told you. I’ve been there. I studied there for two months when I was a student.’

‘I remember.’ He leaned back in his chair. ‘But I also remember hearing that you spent most of your time inside that silly language school. This time you’d have a guide, someone to show you everything.’

He sat forward. ‘Germany is so close – only two days’ drive away, across Portugal, Spain and France. Why don’t you just say yes and be done with it?’

The waiter rescued her, arriving with two outsized menus.

‘Well?’ said Karl, after they had ordered coffee and rolls.

‘What about coming back to Germany with me? School starts the week after next and I have to be back a few days earlier for staff meetings.’

‘I know.’

‘This week will not be long enough.’

‘For what?’

‘For us to get to know one another.’

‘Who says we have to get to know one another?’

‘Didn’t you read my letter?’ Karl’s eyes glistened with reproach.

Caroline studied her right ankle. Damn him. Why was she letting him make her feel so uncomfortable, so guilty? A sense of irritation started pounding behind her eyes like a headache and she cursed herself anew for last night. If she had only insisted on returning to her own room, they wouldn’t be having this conversation now. They might never have had it. Or, more realistically, they might have had it a few nights hence. And by then she might have had some time to think.

‘Has it occurred to you that there are two people involved in this… this…’ She broke off. Was there a word to describe the potential link between them, this mixture of lust, flirtation and hope? She hoped not. She wanted to enjoy this state of delicious uncertainty without pinning it down, if Karl would only let her.

‘Relationship?’ Karl threw the word out like a challenge.

‘It’s not a relationship yet, for God’s sake.’ Caroline spat the words out. She was being rude. Mean, even. But why couldn’t he enjoy a little ambiguity. Just for a while?

How did other people decide how they felt about someone new? Wasn’t some time, alone, to think a necessity?

It was like the words of that silly pop song: How can I miss you if you won’t go away? How sensible it seemed right now.

Meeting Karl’s stare, Caroline studied the dark flecks in the green shimmer of his pupils. What would an iridologist say about them? Probably that he was sick at heart.

‘Well, if it’s not a relationship, what is it?’ His question hung in the air.

Caroline tapped the filtered end of the cigarette on the table. Her father had always done that with his Turfs. He had died of a massive heart attack when she was 18 and she had continued to recall the cigarette routine with great affection.

He probably would have loved Karl. But could she? She wouldn’t know until he stopped pressing her for a response.

‘Look,’ said Karl, taking her hands, balled in damp fists, between his cool dry palms. ‘I don’t care what we call this. I just don’t want to be uncertain about you. Can’t you understand? I have thought of nothing else except you since we said goodbye on Mykonos. I know exactly how I feel about you and what I want of you.’

‘But you have to let me decide what I think about you!’

A tanned matron at the next table raised two neatly pencilled eyebrows at her companion.

‘It’s ridiculous to be having discussions like this.’ Caroline lowered her voice. ‘We hardly know one another.’

‘After last night, I feel I know you. I love you.’

‘Well, you don’t. You just think you do. You can’t love someone you’ve just met.’

Again she was rescued by the waiter. Her eyes followed his every movement as he set down small silver jugs of coffee and milk and a wicker basket of sweet rolls and poured a small amount of coffee into each of their cups. Anything rather than meet the green-eyed gaze pressing against her downcast eyes.

They ate and drank in silence. But Caroline could almost hear Karl wrestling to regain his composure as she flipped through his guidebook.

When he finally spoke his tone was mild and conversational.

‘How much can you understand of it?’

Did he really want to know? Or was it just a safe topic to pursue?

‘Not nearly as much as I should, for all the German books I read at university.’ She struggled to match his similar neutral politeness.

‘Why don’t we read some together tonight?’ He leaned back in his chair and signalled for the bill.

‘I’m sorry to be pushing you with my questions. If I pretend I don’t love you, will you come with me for a walk around the Alfama? Very picturesque, the guidebook says. Sixteenth century houses, tightly jammed together in little winding streets. It sounds like a good place to take some photographs.’

He looked over at her.

Caroline took a deep breath.

‘It would be a pleasure.’

‘Am I permitted to say that it’s romantic here?’ Karl took her arm as they made their way up a steep cobble-stoned street barely wide enough for a car to pass through. ‘So much here is just as it was 400 years ago. Just the right scale for people, don’t you think?’

‘I think I’d prefer it horizontal.’ Caroline wiped the sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand. ‘Aristocrats used to live here, the book says. I wonder how they got around. Probably carried in sedan chairs.’

An olive-skinned girl strode past them, a battered basket of fish balanced on her head. Hoping she was taking the catch to a restaurant, they followed her.

Ten minutes later they were at a rickety table on the narrow pavement of black and white mosaic tiles outside a small dark restaurant. Three skinny cats appeared from the alley separating the restaurant from a shabby two-storey house next door and settled themselves down at a respectful distance, their ears twitching as a tall tanned youth with pale blue eyes emerged from the alley and said something swift and sibilant in Portuguese.

‘Do you mind if I join you?’ he asked. ‘It’s been days since I’ve spoken English.’

Without waiting for a reply he took Karl’s guidebook off the third chair at the table and sat down. ‘A terrific place for pics around here, isn’t it?’ He brandished his camera – a professional-looking Nikon, its black finish battered and scratched – and put it on the ground next to Karl’s bulging camera bag.

The shadow of a frown passed over Karl’s face before he composed his features into a mask of polite enquiry.

‘Photography is your hobby?’ Karl leaned down and picked up the camera, weighing it in his hands.

‘Not exactly.’ The stranger ran both hands through a thicket of brown curls.

‘I’m an art student. Photography is one of my subjects. But how rude of me. I haven’t introduced myself. I’m Oliver. Oliver Bramwell.’

Caroline had to make a conscious effort to take her eyes off him. On his way to becoming a man but still a youth. There was something unformed, untested about him. Plenty of sexual experience, she’d guess, but little else.

‘Karl Dorfler.’ Karl extended his hand and inclined his head formally.

‘You’re German.’ Oliver raised one arched eyebrow.

Karl nodded. ‘Yes. But I try not to speak it when I’m travelling. My countrymen aren’t very popular in most of the countries I like to visit.’ He eyed Oliver. ‘People remember the war.’

‘I’ve been speaking nothing but German, very badly, for the last three days,’ Oliver replied, ignoring his glance. ‘I’m travelling with two German girls that I met in Oporto. Their English is worse than my German, and I thought the practice would be good for me.’

‘Where are your friends now?’ asked Caroline. Friends? Lovers more likely, she thought. Or one lover and her friend, the gooseberry, tagging along, annoyed at the ease with which her friend had been captivated by such a professional charmer.

‘An Australian!’ he said, raising one eyebrow again. Certainly a practised move, Caroline decided. He probably rehearsed it in the mirror.

‘How nice. I shared a flat with two Australian girls once.’

‘It sounds like you spend your life in threesomes,’ said Karl, a new sharpness in his tone.

Oliver looked up, as if he’d forgotten Karl was still at the table.

‘I prefer women’s company to men’s,’ he shrugged.

‘Anyway, Kristina works for some animal rights group in Berlin, and she wants to report on animal abuse in all the zoos along the way. I’m sure the Portuguese style of keeping animals will keep her busy and outraged. And Anneliese follows Kristina.’

The dour-looking bald man who had taken their order appeared with a carafe of wine and three glasses. Oliver spoke to him in Portuguese so swift that Caroline could only catch the words for please. The man laughed and slapped Oliver on the shoulder as he walked back into the restaurant, beaming.

‘So where did you learn your Portuguese?’ Karl sounded like an examiner facing an unlikeable but talented pupil.

Oliver directed his reply at Caroline. ‘My mother is Portuguese. She hated England. At home she spoke only Portuguese to me and my sisters. It really annoyed my father. Typical arrogant Englishman, he never bothered to learn anything more than please and thank you; words he never used in English. Our house was Lisbon in Kensington. The heavy carved furniture, antique candelabra, blue and white ceramic tiles everywhere – and olive oil and garlic in everything. The only English room in the house was my father’s study. Anyway, Mother is living back here now, in a little house in Sintra. She left my father the year I started at art school.’

Caroline studied Oliver’s elegant profile. She had seen it before, on Minoan vases. The Minoans had obviously travelled far and wide.

‘Do you think your mother would have been happier with a Portuguese man?’ she asked.

Oliver shook his head.

‘My mother behaves as if life is one big fado song. You know: unrequited love, sadness, jealousy and nostalgia. She was very moody. My father’s being English made him more tolerant, if anything. He thought that all southern Europeans were like that: hot-blooded, passionate, always bursting into floods of tears.’ He smiled. ‘A Portuguese man would probably have smacked her in the mouth. And then gone off to his mistress.’

‘Your father didn’t have a mistress?’

‘No.’ Oliver turned his attention to the grilled sardines and a bowl of potatoes that had just been set in front of them.

‘His work was his other passion. And he loved my mother. I just don’t think he ever understood her.’

‘And what have you been photographing this morning?’ said Karl, biting gingerly into a potato. He was hardly eating, probably out of pique with her for paying so much attention to Oliver.

‘Women mostly.’ Oliver leant forward to take another sardine. ‘In alleys where the houses are so close together that two lovers could reach across the street and touch fingers.

‘A Portuguese poet, Frederico de Brito, wrote about it once. In English, it goes…’ he paused, and looked at Caroline.

‘Your house is so close to mine,’ he declaimed, one hand over his heart. ‘In the starry night’s bliss, to exchange a tender kiss, our lips easily meet, high across the narrow street.’

‘Of course.’ Karl speared a sardine and shook it on to his plate. Caroline was aware of him trying to catch her eye. Instead she kept her glance fixed on the upper-storey window of the house opposite, where a bent old woman was holding a magnifying glass up to a luridly-coloured magazine.

Why was she behaving as if she were captivated by Oliver? All he had done was talk too much about himself, and she had hung on to his every word. It was more than his beauty that attracted her; it was that bullshit sense of invulnerability that womanisers like him radiated. And women who ought to know better continued to succumb to it.

Caroline knew what her friend Anna would make of this little scene. Anna wasn’t the sort to be dazzled by the glister of men like Oliver. Or so she claimed.

Anna said she had barely noticed her husband Christopher’s good looks on the night, ten years earlier, when she had first met him at a Cambridge May Ball. Instead, she had been attracted by his aura of reliability and honesty, both qualities that had been lacking in the boyfriend immediately before him. Ashley was a performance poet who had written to Anna daily for months, swearing undying devotion and enclosing appropriate chunks of John Donne’s love poetry.

When Anna had finally given in and slept with him, Ashley had said he was the happiest man alive. For the next seven days. On the eighth day, he had complained that Anna was trying to domesticate him and stormed out, taking his battered copy of The Collected Poems of John Donne with him.

He had then started reading them to the girl who, until then, had been one of Anna’s best friends. Caroline had met Ashley, now writing theatre reviews for a London newspaper, at a party a year ago. She had been unaware, at that stage, of his connection with Anna, but she had heard enough of his reputation to know that she should treat him as if he were a cat rubbing its body against her leg. But he was so attractive. Stupidly, she’d thought she could beat him at his own game.

So she’d postponed sleeping with him for a month and often ‘forgot’ to respond when he sent her flowers and wrote her poems. She needn’t have bothered. A week after they first slept together they had gone to see the play Les Liaisons Dangereuses. After the show their lively supper discussion about the difference between love and conquest had turned into an argument.

‘I thought you were an intelligent woman,’ he had sneered. ‘But under that carapace of wit and detachment, you’re pure Mills and Boon.’

‘And under your carapace of wit and detachment,’ Caroline had replied, ‘there’s another carapace. Then another. Inside that, there’s nothing.’

She had felt proud of herself as she stalked out into St Martin’s Lane in search of a taxi home. But depression had set in by the next Monday, when she told Anna and found out that they had more in common than previously recognised.

‘Why do I always pick the creeps and the bastards?’ she had moaned. ‘A room could be full of men who are the salt of the earth. But there’ll be one bastard – and I’ll go straight to him.’

‘Look on the bright side,’ Anna had said. ‘It only took you a month to work through the usual three phases of a relationship with Ashley Carlton. I wasted more than six months of a university year on him. And it taught me a lesson. Beware of charismatic men. Give me someone solid and dependable every time.’

Caroline watched Oliver as he drained his glass of wine. Anna would value Karl for his warmth and sincerity and dismiss Oliver as the callow youth he was. But that was Anna.

‘Anyway, Caroline, what are you two doing tonight?’ Oliver broke into her thoughts. ‘The girls want to see some fado music, and I know a good place. It’s not touristy and it’s just on the edge of the Alfama, about ten minutes’ walk from here.’

Caroline looked at Karl. ‘I’d love to. What do you think?’

‘Of course,’ he said stiffly. ‘That would be very interesting.’

When Oliver went inside to pay the bill, Karl rounded on Caroline.

‘Why did you say yes? He’s such a… A wanker? Isn’t that the English word?’

‘I thought it would be fun. I’m sorry,’ said Caroline.

But she wasn’t. Karl was right. But Oliver appealed to her, despite his self-centredness. Or because of it. She liked his energy. And so what if his family history was interesting enough to be partially invented?

What she liked most about him was that he wasn’t in love with her. It made her feel free.

She concentrated on feeding the cats the leftover sardines while Karl and Oliver conferred about the place and time to meet that night.

Karl looked at his watch, strode over and picked up his bag. ‘Come on, Caroline.’ His tone was proprietary. ‘I think it’s time for our siesta.’

Too embarrassed to protest, Caroline avoided Oliver’s glance. Out of the corner of her eye she saw him raise one eyebrow, then wink.

‘See you later,’ she said.

‘Ate logo,’ he corrected.

As they set off down the street, Karl put his arm around her shoulder. Caroline was sure Oliver was watching. But she didn’t turn around to see.