Jessie Burton - The Muse

He laughed. ‘So you were counting.’ I blushed and looked away, busying myself with the post. He held up the brown-paper package, and said, ‘I’ve brought the lion girls.’

I couldn’t conceal the suspicion in my voice. ‘Who are they?’

He grinned. ‘My mother’s painting. I’ve taken your advice. Do you think someone will have a look at them for me?’

‘I’m sure they will.’

‘I looked up those initials you pointed out, I.R. Didn’t find a single name. So it’s probably not worth anything.’

‘Are you planning on selling it?’ I asked, head still fizzing, heart thumping uncomfortably as I moved around the other side of the wooden counter. I’d never been so direct with a boy before in my life.

‘Maybe. See what happens.’

‘But I thought it was your mother’s favourite?’

‘ I was my mother’s favourite,’ he said, laying the parcel on the counter with a grim smile. ‘Only joking. I don’t want to sell it, but if it’s worth something, it will get me started, you see. Any minute, Gerry the Bastard — excuse my French — could kick me out.’

‘Don’t you work?’

‘ Work ?’

‘Don’t you have a job?’

‘I’ve had jobs in the past.’

‘The dim and distant?’

He pulled a face. ‘You don’t approve.’

The truth was, I didn’t approve of people who did no work. Everyone I knew since coming to London — Cynth, the girls in the shoe shop, Sam, Patrick, Pamela — we all had jobs. The point of being here was to have a job. Where I was from, doing your own work was the only wake-up from the long sleep which followed the generations in the fields. It was your way out. It’s hard to change the messages that circulate all your life, especially when they’ve been there since before your life was started.

Lawrie stared into the brown wrapping paper. ‘It’s a long story,’ he said, sensing my disapproval. ‘I dropped out of university. That was a few years ago. My mother wasn’t — oh, never mind. But I’d like to start something new.’

‘I see.’

He looked embarrassed, jamming his hands into his jacket pockets. ‘Look, Odelle. I’m not. . a layabout. I do want to do things. I want you to know that. I—’

‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ I asked.

He stopped, mid-breath. ‘Tea. Yes. God, it’s early, isn’t it,’ he laughed.

‘Were you going to just stand out there until I turned up?’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘You’re a mad boy.’

‘Who’s mad?’ he said, and we grinned at each other. I looked at his pale face. ‘Even without a job, my mother would still think you’re perfect.’

‘Why would she think that?’ he asked.

I sighed. It was too early in the morning to explain.

We had an hour together, sitting in the reception hall, the front door locked as I sorted the post and brewed the tea and coffee that Pamela and I had to keep renewing throughout the day. Lawrie seemed genuinely delighted by his cup of tea. It was as if he had never seen a hot beverage before.

He told me about his mother’s funeral. ‘It was awful. Gerry read a poem about a dying rose.’ I put my hand over my mouth to hide my smile. ‘No, you should laugh,’ he said. ‘My mother would have laughed. She would have hated it. She didn’t even like roses. And Gerry has a terrible poetry voice. The worst voice I’ve ever heard. Like he’s got a plunger up his bum. And the priest was senile. And there were no more than five of us there. It was bloody awful and I hated that she had to go through it.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

He sighed, stretching his legs out. ‘Not your fault, Odelle. Anyway. It’s done. RIP, all that.’ He rubbed his face as if erasing a memory. ‘And you? How’s life without your flatmate?’

I was touched he remembered. ‘All right,’ I said. ‘Bit quiet.’

‘I thought you liked quiet.’

‘How would you know?’

‘You didn’t want to go to the Flamingo.’

‘Different sort of quiet,’ I said.

We were quiet ourselves then, me sitting behind the counter, and him on the other side, the brown-paper package between us, waiting on the wood. It was a nice silence, warm and full, and I liked him sitting there unobtrusive — yet, to my eyes, fizzing with the light I had sensed when we first met.

He was beautiful to me, and as I laid out the Express for Pamela, and did a spurious sorting of the desk, I hoped that she would be delayed somehow. Back home, I’d had one or two of what my mother would have called ‘dalliances’; holding hands in the dark at the Roxy, hot dogs after lectures, awkward kisses at a Princes Building concert, a late-night picnic on the Pitch Walk, watching the bluish light of the candle-flies. But I’d never done. . the whole thing.

I generally avoided male attention, finding the courting business excruciating. ‘Free love’ had passed us schoolgirls by in Port of Spain. Our Catholic education was a Victorian relic, redolent with overtones of fallen women, irretrievable girls mired in pools of their own foolishness. We had been instructed that we were too superior for that exchange of flesh.

My attitude to sex was one of haughty fear, confused by the fact that there were girls who did it, girls like Lystra Wilson or Dominique Mendes, with boyfriends older than themselves and secrets in their eyes, who seemed to be having a very good time indeed. How they procured these boyfriends was always a mystery to me — but it no doubt involved disobedience, climbing out of bedroom windows and into the nightclubs off Frederick Street and Marine Square. In my memory, Lystra and Dominique, those daring ones, seemed like women from the moment they were born, mermaids come ashore to live among us, feminine and powerful. No wonder we scaredy-cats retreated into books. Sex was beneath us, because it was beyond us.

The Skelton front door was still locked. I didn’t want it to end — the kettle whistling for more tea in the back room, him stretching and folding his legs, asking me what films I’d seen and how could I have not seen that and did I like blues or was I into folk and how many months had I worked here, and did I like being in Clapham. Lawrie was always very good at making you feel like you were important.

‘Would you like to go to the cinema?’ he said. ‘We could see You Only Live Twice , or The Jokers .’

‘ The Jokers ? Sounds about right for you.’

‘Oliver Reed’s in it — he’s excellent,’ said Lawrie, ‘but isn’t a crime caper too flip for you?’

‘ Flip ? Why?’

‘Because you’re clever. You’d take it as an insult if I took you to watch stupid blokes scampering around for the Crown Jewels.’

I laughed, happy to discover that Lawrie also had a strain of nervousness about all this, and touched that he wasn’t afraid to tell me about it. ‘Or do you want to see one of those French films,’ he said, ‘where people just walk in and out of rooms, looking at each other?’

‘Let’s go and see the Bond.’

‘All right. Excellent. Excellent! I loved Goldfinger — that bowler hat!’ I laughed again and he came up to the counter, leaning over to take my hand. I froze, looking at it. ‘Odelle,’ he said. ‘I think — I mean, you are—’

‘What?’

‘You’re just. .’ He was still holding on to my hand. For the first time in my life, I didn’t want a man to let go.

Outside, it began to rain. I turned my head, distracted by the rush of water beyond the door, cascading down onto the grey pavement. Lawrie leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. I turned back and he kissed me again, and it felt good, so we stood for some minutes, kissing in the reception of the Skelton.