Nick Laird - Glover’s Mistake

She leant against the steel sink, peering out of the window, and David stood beside her and followed her gaze down to the lit squares of distant kitchens, the empty trays of pale grey garden.

‘If I lived here I’d spend all my time looking at this view.’

He helped her off with her yellow wool coat, and she was tiny inside it and dressed, as expected, in black. He felt he’d removed the protective cover of something and was inspecting the intricate machinery. There was something raw and breakable about her. Things had not, David knew, been going at all well. In New York someone called Paolo had broken her heart.

‘It’s great you could come round.’

‘Oh, I have vast amounts of free time. New city, no social life. And didn’t we have fun in Larry’s club?’

‘Do you remember that basement bar afterwards? With all the bikers?’

‘They sang “Happy Birthday” to the barmaid.’

Glover left to change out of his work clothes, and David felt a pang in case his flatmate missed something, some further evidence of how close they were. Yet when he looked back to Ruth he could think of nothing to say. He eased out the cork with a pristine cluck. It would take some time to remember how they fitted together. She was reading a poem on the door of the fridge, standing with her hands on her hips as if she might start stretching. Her hairstyle was shorter, blonder, straighter-edged, the clothes more fitted; it was as if the focus had been sharpened.

‘So what have they actually got you doing, then, as artist-in-residence?’

David had served up the pasta bake, cut the baguette, forked out the spinach and rocket salad, and now stood holding the back of a kitchen chair, rocking gently on the balls of his feet. He felt curiously passive and wanted to exert some dominion over the room.

‘Walter’s organized this great flat in the Barbican, and a studio ten minutes away. As a space it’s wonderful, this washed-out English light coming through the skylights—it’s an old factory of some type, though I’m not sure what it made.’ She frowned at the mystery of industry.

‘But what are you going to make?’ Glover said, pouring more wine. The confidence with which he addressed her struck David as slightly presumptuous. He wasn’t even supposed to be in tonight. He was meant to be at work.

‘Which reminds me,’ David said, ‘we should talk about our project at some point.’

‘I can’t think about that at the moment.’ She gave a little shiver of her shoulders, and David tried hard to keep smiling. ‘I’ve got a million things to do right now. Did I tell you they’re doing a retrospective here in London, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts? And yesterday I spent three hours talking to students, though that was actually kind of fun. I forgot about that.’ She threw David a wide-eyed glance, and he looked away. Each time his eyes met hers he felt a charge of something, a little rolling emotion that would gather, if he let it, to an avalanche.

‘I was very young, of course, when I taught David—not much older than him, really.’

You were twelve years older, a small, uncharitable part of him wanted to say, exactly the same as you are now.

‘David’s teacher. So it’s you we should blame.’ In his laughter, Glover’s eyes became two slits in his face, two scars.

‘Not all the blame, I hope.’

David felt an uncomfortable passivity again. The oven had made the kitchen hot and he hoisted up the steamy sash window behind the sink; immediately September began to cool the room.

‘You only taught me for a few months, and to be honest,’ he laughed—at what he wasn’t sure, ‘I think the damage was already done.’

They were christened that evening. After dinner they adjourned to the living room and Ruth’s phone rang. At the sound Ruth looked sulkily around her, then lifted her canvas bag from the foot of the sofa and began to go through it, extracting an overstuffed black leather wallet, two purple silk-bound notepads, a hardback of Chekhov minus its dust jacket, a small Maglite torch, a silver glasses case, and then a phone the size and shape of a silver glasses case.

‘Her mobile’s not very mobile.’

‘It must be twenty years old.’

Ruth ignored them, wincing at the screen before answering it.

‘Hi, Karen, hi…No, that was from earlier. I straightened it out. I just didn’t know which form they meant…Right…No, I’m with a friend…No, I’m at the boys’ flat…Yes, tomorrow’s fine…Okay, great.’ She plunged the phone back in her bag. David realized she’d hung up without saying goodbye.

‘The boys?’ he asked.

After broaching a bottle of Amaretto that Glover located under the sink, Ruth announced that she was going to the National Gallery the next afternoon.

‘Is there something in particular you have to do?’

‘Oh, I don’t know, not really. I want to drop in and take a look at a few pictures, and then go somewhere else and think about them.’

Glover slapped his hand loudly against his chest in the gesture of allegiance. ‘Well, I’ve got to work, but David’s free, aren’t you?’ There was a hint of laughter behind his voice; he didn’t even understand that David would want to go.

‘I could check online and see what exhibition’s showing.’ ‘Or we could let it surprise us,’ Ruth said. David thrilled a little at that us.

‘You should drop into the Bell afterwards, sit and have a proper think about those pictures.’

David thought Ruth might take offence, but Glover had judged it finely. Through it all he possessed a firm sense of what people wanted from him.

The evening was out of the ordinary. David felt good. Here was difference and it was fine. Ruth on his sofa. An artist. An American. A woman. When Glover rang her a cab before heading, finally, to bed, there were just the two of them at last. David half-hoped and half-feared that a further intimacy would develop—as if now they’d lean in close and start declaring the stark facts of their lives—but it turned out Glover’s absence bred a vague uneasiness. When he disappeared, the strain of carrying on a one-to-one took hold, and Ruth checked her watch, then leant her chin on her hand, spacing four fingers along her jaw. David imagined them on his fleshy back, indenting. They were waiting for the buzzer and when it eventually went, they both started slightly, relieved. A chaste kiss on her hot cheek and she vanished. In bed he noticed, for the very first time, how the galaxies of Artex on his ceiling all swirled clockwise.

Raining when he woke, and so dark he thought it must still be night. Footsteps scuffled on the stairs and the front door banged: Glover was leaving for work. It was already after ten. A sheet of A4 on the kitchen table:

D, Thanks for dinner. Did you like the way I set you up? I’m on till six if you want to pop in later. God Save The Queen, J

The sign-off was a rejoinder to Who Dares Wins, which David had used on a note about milk and toilet roll a few days ago. It had been proverbs until recently. Had he set him up? Did he mean he’d set up a date with Ruth for him? Or did he mean he’d tricked him into going? David didn’t know. He crumpled up the note and dropped it in the pedal bin.

They’d agreed to meet outside the National Gallery at two, and he arrived ten minutes early. The rain had eased but not stopped, and the vista from the portico was still uniquely uninspiring: London done by Whistler, arranged in black and grey. Ragged, pewter clouds turned on Nelson’s head, so that he alone was all that held the heavens up. Lutyens’s limestone fountains were blown to spray and rain danced on the surface of their pools in time to the Cocteau Twins’ ‘Iceblink Luck’. Everything today had kept rhythm with the tunes on his iPod: the shunting of his tube carriage through its rock-wall galleries had accompanied The Clash, his footsteps on the underpass at Charing Cross had syncopated perfectly with the Blind Boys of Alabama. And now not even the Great British weather could puncture his mood. He was thinking about Ruth.