Sofka Zinovieff - Putney

‘Does Nina know? Would she mind?’ Her questions were unwelcome and somehow familiar.

‘She doesn’t ask. I’m careful. And she’s careful. We’ve learned how to preserve what we have. That’s important.’

‘This is so strange – about the boys.’ She appeared perplexed. ‘And what’s it got to do with me, with our story? Apart from all this messing around, did you actually love other girls? Other boys?’ She was turning cold and interrogative. Already, he didn’t trust her to understand him.

‘No! No, it was only you.’ He realised he had taken the wrong path and should have focused all his attention on her. ‘You were something delicate and rare.’

‘So could I have been a boy?’

He paused, trying to be honest. ‘You were something else. A sprite. Like Puck – mischievous and fleeting. Your youth, your energy – even the way you were so dismissive of adults. I felt privileged to enter your world. There was a connection between the child part of me and you as a child. It allowed an unguarded love – non-judgemental, uncomplicated by knowledge of the world. I suppose it was partly that I didn’t want to grow up. You gave me freedom. Even more so after I got married and had babies.’

‘So it’s youth, purity and freedom. An appealing little bundle for the older man.’ He hated sarcasm. Her face had a harsh quality he didn’t like, and up close she looked old; crows’ feet creased her temples when she talked.

‘It was like fate,’ he persevered. ‘You came running down the stairs and something happened. It was extraordinarily powerful. You were nine when I met you. And I was twenty-seven.’ He smiled at her with warmth. ‘Eighteen years apart. I suppose we still are.’ He hoped the implied closing of the age gap was apparent to her. ‘Oh shit…’ He tipped the glass to his mouth with too much energy and wine streamed down his chin on to his clothes. Scrubbing the wet patch on my crotch with a napkin doesn’t look good, he thought. Shirt dabbing, sweat beading. Shit.

‘You weren’t a sex object,’ he said. ‘That’s very important. I didn’t crave sex.’ The waiter reappeared by their side and clearly heard the last words as his eyes darted to Daphne. Ralph wondered if he imagined they were married – they certainly weren’t acting like lovers. The young man cleared the plates, and asked Daphne if everything was OK, as she had eaten so little. They both ordered espressos and Ralph suggested sharing an almond tart. She shrugged but he went ahead with the order.

Doggedly, he continued, though he feared it would not help. ‘I think what I was seeking was ecstasy. I mean, I know there are other ways… but there was an enormous excitement being with you. It was almost like being drunk. Something about you made me feel ecstatic.’

‘I never doubted that you loved me, Ralph. And you know I loved you. But I was a child. You could do what you liked, come or go. I was always just there. You had power over me.’

‘I would never have pressurised you. I always left it to you to choose. When I brought you things, presents or books or flowers, it was like placing offerings on the altar to see if the goddess would respond.’

She was messing with her hair, twisting it and fixing it up with a chopstick-like device that wouldn’t stay in place. Neurotic, he thought. Her familiar eyes were still dark as olives, but a delicate mauve colour tinted the lids. He wasn’t sure she understood him. Perhaps her lack of education counted against her and she didn’t have the imagination. After all, she had never studied anything, never acquired discipline or intellectual rigour. Her working life was a shambles, as far as he knew. Even her recent foray into the art world sounded dubious. He’d seen a magazine article featuring an exhibition she was in, and the photographs made her work look creepy and brazenly female. Sewing, embroidery and appliqué always seemed too floppy and feminine, too steeped in oestrogen to count as real art.

‘You can’t expect a child to behave like a goddess. It’s too much pressure. If I imagine this happening to Libby… I think it’d be horrific.’

‘Oh Christ, Daphne. She wouldn’t do it if she didn’t want to. And it’s all culturally relative, don’t you think? There are no absolutes. Read a bit of anthropology and you see there are a thousand ways and ages to discover sex. Girls get married at twelve in some countries. Even in Europe, the age of consent is so varied it’s almost arbitrary.’

She shrugged and he tried another tack. ‘Or look at it like a fairy tale. Like going into the forest. There’s a gingerbread house. The child doesn’t say, “I don’t want to go into this sweet shop.”’ He stopped to see if she would respond, then continued. ‘It’s how the child finds out about the world. In our case… I mean, your life’s gone on. You’re fine – you look fantastic. Things have to happen to you, don’t they?’

‘But what if those things are too much for a child to take on? It was so painful for me. First you made me love you, then you abandoned me, then you picked me up again. You offered the sweet shop and took it away. What was that about? When you went off to live in America I was so fucking miserable I thought about killing myself.’

‘Christ, Daff. You never said.’

‘I didn’t want to upset you. There was nothing you could do.’

‘I always hoped going away was the right thing – it was meant to protect you.’

‘But as soon as you got back we continued.’ Her voice was whiny as a teenager’s. ‘You ran off as if I didn’t matter and then just took up with me again.’

He shook his head slowly. ‘Oh God. You know how much I missed you. I was desperate too.’

He devoured his half of the almond tart, barely noticing the taste but enjoying the sensation of sweetness in the mouth. Daphne didn’t even try it. She was pushing breadcrumbs around the smooth surface of the tablecloth, creating small piles and then breaking them up. He couldn’t catch her eye. All he wanted was to lie down and be quiet.

‘Do you remember telling me about your sexual conquests?’ She flashed a mean, dark eye at him and then continued messing about with the breadcrumbs. ‘You thought I could handle it, understand everything – like a confidante. You even told me you slept with Ellie.’

Fuck! he thought. She’s coming at me from every angle. ‘Oh, Daff. It was like that then. Everyone did that sort of thing. It didn’t mean anything. Not to either of us. It had nothing to do with what we had – you and I.’

‘I don’t know. Screwing my mother?’

‘You have to put it in context, Daphne. You know what it was like. Never after we… after us . The thing with Ellie was soon after we met. And only once. You were still a child. It was how we all went on. There was a dinner for lots of people at Barnabas Road, and she was extremely flirtatious – she could be, you know. We just went upstairs. God knows how we managed.’ He remembered lifting Ellie up against the bathroom wall and how she came incredibly quickly, and then several more times – like a magic trick. Taking a gulp of wine he said, ‘It wasn’t anything more than… you know, a flying fuck.’

Daphne observed him with a baleful expression. ‘The thing about Ellie is I never got enough of her. Even when she was alive. She was always away, or busy fighting the colonels. She gave so much to everyone else and not enough to me. And then she died.’ She didn’t have to say it, but he knew what was on her mind, what this conversation was circling around.

In the disturbing way the Fates arrange things, they’d been together on the day of Ellie’s accident. Daff must have been eighteen. Still at school, though she didn’t act like it. She should have been at school that day. He still adored her – he assumed he always would – but if he was strictly honest, their occasional meetings were no longer something that kept him awake at night with anticipation or with a savage ache of remembered bliss. Panta rhei , as usual. Desire, pain, the body… everything moves on. The river is never the same water again. She had other boyfriends (none particularly impressive, he reflected), and he was madly busy with his music, the father of three growing children and happy with chancy encounters where they cropped up.