Sofka Zinovieff - Putney

It was just as he remembered it: white linen tablecloths, wafts of cooking garlic and earthy prosciutto, a trolley of desserts – that dated it. And there in the back, Luigi, still in a dark suit and shiny shoes, but surely in his late eighties now, collapsed in a comfortable chair like a speckled toad. Ralph greeted him but wasn’t sure the old man remembered him, even though he made a good show of clasping his hand and making pleasantries in Italian. Choosing a corner table that was some distance from the few other customers, Ralph asked for a bottle of sparkling water and decided against an aperitif. He could have done with one but was thinking about the picture of solicitous sobriety he wanted to present. He needed a clear head to get out of this.

Through the window he saw her arrive on a yellow bike that was wrapped with plastic flowers, ribbons and rosettes – transport for a brash May Queen. As she chained it up on the far side of the road, he noted she had retained the quick movements of her youth and was dressed in jeans that showed her ankles, a gypsyish blouse and a long rope of green beads. There was no denying, however, that she was middle-aged. Long gone was the creature he’d worshipped. He stood up to greet her and pulled her into a tight hug. A conspiratorial one, he hoped, wanting to convince her through his body that something still belonged to them and that some vestigial vibrations remained. She didn’t push him away, and though he felt no erotic spark, there was a private familiarity, the animal smell he recognised beneath the perfume. Intimacy such as theirs remained a memory in the body as much as in the mind.

They sat down and he took charge, asking what she’d like to drink and encouraging the handsome Italian waiter to make a fuss over the Signora. The young man looked ready for anything, Ralph speculated, as he noted the almost blue-black hair and sharp features. Daphne said she’d like a glass of Soave, which he remembered her parents drinking when she was a child. He ordered a bottle and, when it arrived and he took a first sip, the pale, almost green wine brought a sensory rush of time past combined with the buzz of alcohol hitting an empty stomach.

‘How are you, Daphne?’ he asked. ‘How is your daughter?’ She answered and enquired politely about his children. It was clear he shouldn’t prevaricate for long.

‘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.