William Boyd - The Destiny of Nathalie X

Behind the glass of the recording studio Albertina swayed her hips to and fro to the sinuous rhythm that was slowly building. Pure chorinho , she thought, sensuous yet melancholy, only Liceu is capable of this, of all the great choros in Brazil, he was the greatest. At that moment he looked around and caught her eye and he smiled at her as he played. She kissed the tip of her forefinger and pressed it against the warm glass of the window that separated them. Once Liceu and his fellow musicians started a session like this it could last for days, weeks even. She would wait patiently for him, though, wait until he was finished and take him home to their wide bed.

Wesley stepped out into the back garden and flipped open his mobile phone.

“Café Caravelle, may I help you, please?”

“Ah. Could I speak to, ah, Margarita?”

“MARGARITA! Telefono.”

In the chilly dusk of a back garden in Hounslow, Wesley Bright listened to the gabble of foreign voices, the erratic percussion of silverware and china and felt he was calling some distant land, far overseas. A warmth located itself in his body, a spreading coin of heat, deep in his bowels.

“Ghello?” That slight guttural catch on the “h”…

“Margarita, it’s Wesley.”

“Ghello?”

“Wesley. It’s me — Wesley.”

“Please?”

“WESLEY!” He stopped himself from shouting louder in time, and repeated his name in a throat-tearing whisper several times, glancing around at the yellow windows of Dermot’s house. He saw someone peering at him, in silhouette.

“Ah, Wesley,” Margarita said. “Yes?”

“I’ll pick you up at ten, outside the café.”

Pauline stood at the kitchen door, frowning out into the thickening dusk of the garden. Wesley advanced into the rectangle of light the open door had thrown on the grass.

“What’re you up to, Wesley?”

Wesley slid his thin phone into his hip pocket.

“Needed a breath of fresh air,” he said. “I’m feeling a bit off, to tell the truth. Those vol-au-vents tasted dodgy to me.”

Pauline was upset, she had been expecting a meal out after the christening, but she was also concerned for him and his health. “I thought you looked a bit sort of pallid,” she said when he dropped her at her flat. She made him wait while she went inside and reemerged with two sachets of mint infusion, “to help settle your stomach,” she said. She took them whenever she felt bilious, she told him, and they worked wonders.

As he drove off he smelled strongly the pungent impress of her perfume, or powder or makeup, on his cheek where she had kissed him, and he felt a squirm of guilt at his duplicity — if something so easily accomplished merited the description — and a small pelt of shame covered him for a minute or two as he headed east toward the Café Caravelle and the waiting Margarita.

Her hair was down. Her hair was down and he was both rapt and astonished at the change it wrought in her. And to see her out of black too, he thought, it was almost too much. He carried their drinks through the jostling noisy pub to the back where she sat, on a high stool, elbow resting on a narrow shelf designed to take glasses. She was drinking a double vodka and water, no ice and no slice, a fact he found exciting and vaguely troubling. He had smelled her drink as the barmaid had served up his rum and coke and it had seemed redolent of heavy industry, some strange fuel or new lubricant, something one would pour into a machine rather than down one’s throat. It seemed, also, definitely not a drink of the warm South either, not at all apt for his taciturn Latin beauty, more suited to the bleak cravings of a sheet-metal worker in Smolensk. Still, it was gratifying to observe how she put it away, shudderless, in three pragmatic drafts. Then she spoke briefly, brutally, of how much she hated her job. It was a familiar theme, one Wesley recognized from his two previous social encounters with Margarita — the first a snatched coffee in a hamburger franchise before her evening shift began, and then a more leisurely autumnal Sunday lunch at a brash pub on the river at Richmond.

On that last occasion she had seemed out of sorts, cowed perhaps by the strapping conviviality of the tall, noisy lads and their feisty, jolly girls. But tonight she had returned to the same tiresome plaint — the mendacious and rebarbative qualities of the Caravelle’s manager, João — so Wesley had to concede it was clearly something of an obsession.

They had kissed briefly and not very satisfactorily after their Sunday pub tryst, and Wesley felt this allowed him now to take her free hand (her other held her cigarette) and squeeze it. She stopped talking and, he thought, half smiled at him.

“Weseley,” she said, and stubbed out her cigarette. Then she grinned. “Tonight, I thin I wan to be drunk …”

There you had it, he thought. There. That was it. That moment held the gigantic difference between a Pauline and a Margarita. A mint infusion and an iceless vodka. He felt his bowels weaken with shocking desire.

He returned to the bar to fetch another drink for her and ordered the same for himself. The tepid alcohol seemed all the more powerful for the absence of chill. His nasal passages burned, he wrinkled his tear-flooded eyes. Made from potatoes, hard to believe. Or is it potato peelings? His teeth felt loose. He stood beside her. Someone had taken his stool.

Margarita sipped her drink with more decorum this time. “I hate that fockin’ job,” she said.

He raised her knuckles to his lips and dabbed at them.

“God, I’ve missed you,” he said, then took a deep breath. “Margarita,” he said softly, “tenho muito atração para tu.” He hoped to God he had it right, with the correct slushing and nasal sounds. He found Portuguese farcically difficult to pronounce, no matter how many hours he spent listening to his tapes.

She frowned. Too fast you fool, you bloody fool.

“What?” Her lips half formed a word. “I, I don’t—”

More slowly, more carefully: “Tenho muito atração — muito, muito — para tu.”

He slipped his hand around her thin back, fingers snagging momentarily on the buckle of her bra and drew her to him. He kissed her, there in the hot pub, boldly, with noticeable teeth clash, but no recoil from Margarita.

He moved his head back, his palm still resting on her body, warm above her hip.

She touched her lips with the palp of her thumb, scrutinizing him, not hostile, he was glad to see, not even surprised. She drank some more of her flat gray drink, still looking at him over the rim of her glass.

“Sempre para tu, Margarita, sempre.” Huskily, this. Sincere.

“Weseley. What are you saying? Sempre , I know. But the rest …”

“I … I am speaking Portuguese.”

“For why?”

“Because, I — Because I want to speak your language to you. I love your language, you must understand. I love it. I hear it in my head in your music.”

“Well …” She shrugged and reached for her cigarettes. “Then you must not speak Portuguese at me, Weseley. I am Italian.”

Marta shucked off her brassiere and had hooked down her panties with her thumbs within seconds, Liceu Lobo thought, of his entering her room in the bordello. He caught a glimpse of her plump fanny from the light cast by the bathroom cubicle. She was hot tonight, on fire, he thought, as he hauled off his T-shirt and allowed his shorts to fall to the floor. As he reached the bedside he felt her hands reaching for his engorged member. He was a pretty boy and even the oldest hooker liked a pretty boy with a precocious and impatient tool. He felt Marta’s hands all over his pepino , as if she were assessing it for some strumpet’s inventory. Maldito seja! Liceu Lobo thought, violently clenching his sphincter muscles as Marta settled him between her generous and welcoming thighs, he should definitely have jerked off before coming here tonight. Marta always had that effect on him. Deus! He hurled himself into the fray.