Jessie Burton - The Muse

‘It’s Odelle.’ I was grateful for the bottle of Fairy Liquid and the scrubbing pad I began to put to good use.

‘Odelle.’ He stared back through the doorless arch to where the party had turned without a rudder, sinking into a sea of cigarette butts and shrieks, ring-pulls, discarded hair accessories, and someone’s suit jacket crumpled on the floor. Sam and Cynth would be leaving soon — for nowhere but our flat, which I’d promised to vacate for the evening. Tonight, I was to be staying in this pit. This Lawrie seemed lost in thought, perhaps a little stoned, and I noticed small purple smudges of tiredness under his eyes.

‘How do you know the happy couple?’ I asked.

‘I don’t. I’m friends with Barbara and she said there was a party. I didn’t know it was a wedding. I feel rather rude, but you know how it goes.’ I didn’t, so I said nothing. ‘You?’ he persisted.

‘I went to school with Cynthia. She is — was — my flatmate.’

‘Long time, then?’

‘Long time.’

‘Your poem was really good,’ he said.

‘Thank you.’

‘I can’t imagine what it’d be like to be married.’

‘I don’t suppose it’s much different,’ I replied, putting on a pair of yellow rubber gloves.

He turned to me. ‘Do you really think that? Is that why the poem was about love, not marriage?’

The mound of bubbles was rising in the sink because I hadn’t turned off the tap. He seemed genuinely interested, and this pleased me. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But don’t tell Cynth.’

He laughed, and I liked the sound. ‘My mother used to say that marriage got better with practice,’ he said. ‘But she was already on her second try.’

‘Goodness me,’ I said, laughing. I probably sounded so disapproving. Divorce, in those days, still contained the suggestion of debauch.

‘She died two weeks ago,’ he said.

I paused, scrubbing pad hovering over the sink, and looked at him to check I’d heard him right. ‘My stepfather told me I should come out,’ Lawrie went on, staring at the floor. ‘That I was getting under his feet. And of all places I end up at a wedding.’

He laughed again, but then was quiet, hugging himself in his fashionable leather jacket. I had not had such a personal conversation with a stranger before in England. I could not counsel him, and he did not seem to wish for it. He didn’t look like he was going to cry. I thought he might be hot in that coat, but he didn’t seem disposed to take it off. Perhaps he wasn’t planning to hang around. I registered my regret that this might be the case.

‘I haven’t seen my mother for five years,’ I said, plunging a tray sticky with cake smears into the hot water.

‘But she’s not dead, though.’

‘No. No, she’s not dead.’

‘I keep thinking I’m going to see her again. That she’ll be there when I go home. But the only person there is bloody Gerry.’

‘Gerry being your stepfather?’

His face darkened. ‘Yes, sorry. And my mother left everything to him.’

I tried to gauge Lawrie’s age. He could be thirty, I supposed, but the rapidity with which he was spilling himself open suggested someone younger. ‘That’s hard,’ I said. ‘Why would she do that?’

‘Long story. She did leave me one thing, actually. Gerry always hated it, which goes to show what a moron he is.’

‘That’s good you got something. What is it?’

Lawrie sighed again and uncrossed his arms, letting them hang by his side. ‘A painting. All it does is remind me of her.’ He gave me a rueful smile; his mouth crooked up one cheek. ‘Love is blind, love’s a bind. I could be a poet too.’ He cocked his head at the refrigerator. ‘Any milk?’

‘There should be. You know, I think it’s best you remember your mother rather than try and forget. My father died. And I don’t have anything of his at all. Just my name.’

Lawrie stopped, his hand on the refrigerator door. ‘Whoa. I’m sorry. Here am I, going on—’

‘It’s all right. No, really.’ I felt self-conscious now, and wished he’d just get the milk out and busy himself. I never usually talked about my parents, and yet I felt compelled to carry on. ‘He died in the war. He got shot down.’

Lawrie looked agog. ‘Mine died in the war too. But not in a plane.’ He paused and I got the sense he was going to say something, then thought better of it. ‘I never knew him,’ he added.

I felt awkward with this synchronicity of our circumstances, as if I’d deliberately sought it out. ‘I was two,’ I hurried on. ‘I don’t really remember him. He was called Odell, but without the “ e ”. When he died, my mother changed my name.’

‘She what ? What were you known as before that?’

‘I don’t even know.’

This fact about myself sounded absurd and funny — at least, in that moment it did — maybe it was the clouds of pot billowing around — and we both started laughing. In fact, we laughed straight for about a minute, that pain in your stomach when you laugh and laugh — how one mother can rename you, how mad it is another’s suddenly dead, and you in a kitchen round the corner from the British Museum wearing yellow rubber gloves.

Lawrie turned fully towards me, the milk bottle lolling in his hand. Sobering up, I eyed it, worried that the liquid would start dripping through the lid at such a terrible angle.

‘Listen,’ he said, ‘Delly.’

‘Odelle.’

‘Do you want to get out?’

‘From where?’

‘From here , you crazy girl.’

‘Who’s crazy?’

‘We could go to Soho. I’ve got a friend who can get us in to the Flamingo. But you’ll have to take off those rubber gloves. It’s not that sort of club.’

I didn’t know what to make of Lawrie at this point. I could describe him as grief-stricken, but arguably the grief hadn’t truly set in. Perhaps he was in shock — it had only been a fortnight. That he was angry with someone, and a bit lost, both certain of himself and yet avoiding himself — these things could be said about Lawrie. He spoke well, and he talked of Gerry and the house and his divorced, dead mother with a practised world-weariness that I wasn’t sure he was trying to escape or keep alive.

‘I–I’m tired,’ I said. ‘I can’t leave the party.’ I pulled the plug from the sink. As the water drained noisily, I wondered how his mother had died.

‘The Flamingo , Odelle.’

I’d never heard of it, but I wasn’t going to tell him that. ‘I can’t leave Cynth.’

He raised an eyebrow. ‘I don’t think she needs you tonight.’ I blushed, looking into the disappearing bubbles. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘my car’s outside. How about we drop the painting off at my friend’s flat and then let’s go dancing. It doesn’t have to be the Flamingo. Do you like to dance?’

‘You have the painting with you?’ I said.

‘I see.’ He ran a hand through his hair. ‘More of an art girl than a nightclub girl?’

‘I don’t think I’m either of those girls. But I do work at an art gallery,’ I added. I wanted him to be impressed, to show him I wasn’t just some innocent prig who chose to wash up crockery rather than fall around on the carpet.

A light came into Lawrie’s eyes. ‘Do you want to see it?’ he said. ‘It’s in the boot of my car.’

Lawrie didn’t try and touch me in that kitchen. He didn’t let his hand drift anywhere near. The relief that he didn’t, and the desire that he might — I think they are the reasons I agreed to see his painting. I followed him, leaving the dishes stranded in the sink.

*

I think he wanted me to be impressed by the fact he was driving an MG, but that meant nothing to me, once I’d laid eyes on the painting in the boot. It was not large, and it had no frame. As an image, it was simple and at the same time not easily decipherable — a girl, holding another girl’s severed head in her hands on one side of the painting, and on the other, a lion, sitting on his haunches, not yet springing for the kill. It had the air of a fable.