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Her agent appeared to know most of the other diners in the restaurant so Frankie had to smile a lot whilst fretting at the time this was adding to the evening. In the studio, Scott was utterly wrapped in his music; coasting on the vibrant energy from his afternoon with Frankie and all the Maison Bertaux calories. Why stop now? he said to the engineer – let’s get this down. When he worked like this, hours polarized into mere moments. It was two in the morning when he arrived back at the hotel. The bar area was closed and, though he wondered whether Frankie might pop out from behind a giant urn, she didn’t. He checked his phone. They’d spoken earlier – she’d ducked out of the restaurant telling him her agent was ordering a second bottle of wine but she should be back by eleven. At the time, Scott said he didn’t think he’d be much longer either. And, until he looked at his watch on leaving the studio, he genuinely thought he hadn’t been. Jubilance and frustration hand in hand. What a day.
So sorry – I’m only just back and I guess you’re asleep. Scott x
Frankie read the message and wondered what to do. It was the early hours and she’d woken with a start, reaching blearily for her phone. In the vast bed, in a froth of Egyptian cotton, she thought and thought until she infuriated herself. She could text back. She could pad off along corridors in the complimentary slippers, holding up the voluminous towelling robe like a ballgown. And then what? Knock on his door, wake him? Stand there, the both of them, with expectation oozing from one to the other. What would he do? Pull her towards him, shut the door behind them, tug her belt loose so the robe fell open, slip his hands inside to find her body, find her lips and sink his mouth against hers. Then what? Fumble and fondle over to the bed and fall together in a writhe of lovemaking. This is what she wanted and she didn’t doubt he wanted it too. But what would it be at this time of night? Sex for the sake of it because she was leaving tomorrow?
And it’s stupid o’clock.
Frankie switched the light off and settled back into the darkness.
Not now, Scott.
But if not now – then when?
Scott woke early and he thought, she’s going today. He thought, it’s Thursday and that’s that – Frankie’s going home. Suddenly he wanted to be home too, not on his own here, negotiating the pace of London, working peculiar hours, living in a hotel, eating too much red meat and spending too much time indoors. He wanted to be sitting at his favourite spot on the Lillooet River, with Aaron and Buddy and a couple of beers. The rivers and creeks had recently turned a milky eau-de-nil colour, the glacial silt causing the change and heralding summer until the rain run-off turned the waters clear again in November. What’s the sea like, near Frankie’s place in Norfolk? What colour are the rivers there? Where can you fish? Who do you come across, whose landscape do you share? Eagles and otters, beavers, bears?
He left the bed and walked across to the window, looking down to the street five floors below, the besuited hurrying to work, their stress palpable. If this were a scene for a movie, he’d underscore it with a fidget of bickering strings and just the occasional soft melodious piano trying to establish a refrain for the pedestrian walking slowly, mindfully, against the commuting surge. He turned his back on the day and sat down on the sofa, switching the television on and a few moments later, off again. He checked his phone.
Morning!
She’d sent it an hour ago. He phoned Reception. Had she checked out? No Mr Emerson, she has not.
He left his room on the fifth floor and walked along the corridor to hers. Funny how he hadn’t wanted her to know he was on the same floor, that first night. Yes, his heart had pounded in the elevator, the air between them thick and heady with attraction and desire. But something had told him to slow down, to give grace to what was growing so fast. He hadn’t wanted the premature pressure of your room or mine; for the first time in a long time, his head was steady over his heart, his cock. That night had been too good, had had such a novel impact, he hadn’t wanted to sully it with how things used to be. Standing there, outside her door, he thought back to how he’d let her leave then had to ride up before returning down to the fifth.
Quiet Please.
She’d hung the sign on the door. He could do quiet. It was a trait of his personality that most saw as a quality though it frustrated the hell out of all his exes. He knocked gently.
And Frankie thought, Scott?
The door opened and Scott thought Christ alive, the sun really does come out when that girl smiles. And Frankie simply thought it’s him, he came.
‘Good morning sir.’
‘Morning.’
‘Did you want to come in? It’s a bit of a mess.’
No it wasn’t. Her room was tidier than his. Funny how rooms which are identical can be so different. Same curtains, same furniture, same orchid, same grainy black-and-white artsy photographs, same background whir from the minibar. Yet Frankie’s room was distinct; it was the same when Jenna was at home with him – a space personalized and warmed, made smaller yet fuller by a feminine energy. He glanced around. Perhaps it was the Converse trainers placed neatly just under the chair. Or the way her belongings were in a tidy pile on the coffee table. A drift of perfume, maybe. He didn’t know, really, and it didn’t matter anyway because as he sat on the sofa he felt this was as good as being in her living room in Norfolk.
‘Coffee? Does your room have a Nespresso machine?’
He laughed. ‘Think you’re special?’
‘Aren’t I?’
‘No – I mean yes. And yes – to coffee.’
‘Have you had breakfast?’
‘No.’
‘You can have the rest of the jelly beans from the minibar.’
Scott laughed. ‘Makes a change from granola.’
As Frankie made coffee, she thought about how Scott laughed so easily. She didn’t think herself a particularly funny person, it wasn’t any staggering wit on her part that made it happen. A gentle sound, deep and genuine, like an oversized soft chuckle. It struck her that Scott was a man who was alert for the happy in life and it was a quality that had its attractive physical manifestation in the laughter lines around his eyes.
‘Here you are.’
‘Thank you.’
‘When are you leaving for work?’ she asked.
‘Well – soon, really.’ He looked at her, sitting in the armchair just like the one in his room; hugging a scatter cushion, not drinking the coffee she’d made, her legs curled under, her hair loose with a bedhead kink to one side. ‘And you? When do you check out?’
‘In about an hour.’
They thought about that.
‘That’s too bad,’ said Scott.
‘I know,’ she said quietly.
‘I fly home Sunday.’
‘I know.’
And she thought to herself, over the sea and far, far away. Insanity. She stood up and crossed over to the window, gazing down on the irritable heave of rush hour outside, mercifully silent five floors up.
‘So glad I don’t work in a job like that in a place like this.’ He was behind her. Right behind her. His chin just perceptible against the top of her head, his body very nearly against hers.
‘Me too,’ said Frankie and she leant back just slightly until she felt him there. His arms encircled her, his lips pressed against her neck; she had only to turn just a little to kiss him.
‘Is this just crazy?’ she whispered.
‘Crazy not to,’ he whispered back and kissed her again, deeper and for longer.
On the train to King’s Lynn, just pulling out of Liverpool Street station, her head against the window, Frankie’s journey back to her life began. As the train moved, a completely new emotion swept through her; a swirl of euphoria and desolation. She was on her way home and soon, he would be too. To Canada. Would that she had never met him?
The train jolted and stopped. Started, slunk along, juddered, stopped again. Eventually, the tannoy crackled then went quiet, hissed again – then nothing. It was as if the driver had thought better of it. Now at a standstill in nondescript countryside, Frankie recalled how it was a journey like this when she’d first met Ruth. They’d been sitting opposite each other. Tall and elegant with her hair in the sleekest bobbed haircut, like varnished ebony. On looks alone, Frankie had the idea for a character, even more so when the woman called the train line bastards and buggers and for fuck’s sake just bloody get a move on you sods.
‘You speak my language,’ Frankie had said and when it transpired Ruth had a son Annabel’s age and a younger daughter and lived not too far from Frankie, the basis for friendship was formed
‘What do you do? That you travel from London to Lynn?’
‘I write,’ said Frankie. ‘And you?’
‘I teach Alexander Technique.’
‘Is that when you’re meant to walk with a penny between your bum-cheeks and a pile of books on your head?’
How Ruth had laughed. ‘No – but that’s how our grandmas were taught to walk, nice and ladylike,’ she’d said. Somehow, she’d detected that Frankie suffered headaches. ‘Come to me for a few sessions,’ she said. ‘Mate’s rates.’
Scott. What just happened? And what could happen next? Suddenly it struck Frankie that she wanted Ruth to know.
I met a man. Like no other.
Ruth phoned her immediately.
‘There are only clichés to describe it. What he’s like. I’m a bloody writer and I can’t do better than Love at first sight.’
‘But actually, you can’t do better than Love at first sight,’ Ruth laughed down the phone. ‘What could beat that? I have to see you!’
Frankie gazed out of the window again. The landscape was now passing by fast in a blur. When did the train pick up speed? When did the points change? When did they get so far from London, so close to King’s Lynn? Reality felt suddenly distorted. However present and alert, alive and sentient she’d felt in London, actually she was hurtling back to the real Frankie – Norfolk and children, the house that leaked and page after page of bare paper devoid of all trace of Alice.
‘Don’t let him leave before you’ve seen him again,’ Ruth said. ‘You can’t let him go just because of clichés and complications.’
‘Canada is a pretty big complication,’ Frankie said.
‘Rubbish,’ said Ruth so passionately that it struck Frankie she ought to believe her.
‘I have to go – the train is pulling in to Lynn.’
‘I’ll be phoning you later,’ said Ruth.
Her mother had cleaned the fridge though Frankie had cleaned it the day before she left. Her mother had also reorganized its contents. It was a typical gesture that could be interpreted one way or the other and responded to graciously or defensively. Her mother had gone by the time Frankie arrived home yet she didn’t know whether to be relieved or affronted.
Mum. Mother. Mother dear. Having a sparse relationship with your mother was as complex as having an overinvolved one. Would Annabel some day feel as distant from Frankie as Frankie felt from Margaret?
She left the kitchen and went to the children’s rooms. The beds were made and it was a stark sight. The children never made their beds until, bizarrely, they were just about to get into them each evening. She cast an eye over the bathroom. Sam had obviously had a wee and forgotten to flush. Margaret was obviously making a point by leaving it for all to see – though she’d picked up towels, wiped the basin and hung a damp flannel over the tap. Frankie thought of Peta’s boys and she wondered why her mother never passed comment on their bedroom walls festooned with semi-naked women, their floors obliterated with piles of dirty clothes. Neither Peta nor Frankie could work that one out at all.
She checked her phone. Nothing. She made a call.
‘I’m home and it’s very quiet.’
‘I’m in the studio,’ said Scott. ‘Listen.’
‘How was Grandma?’ Frankie asked Annabel who’d run across the playground into her arms chanting Mummy Mummy Mummy – something she’d never do usually, though admittedly Frankie was usually late and her daughter was cross. This afternoon, she was bang on time. ‘Was everything OK when I was gone?’
Annabel settled herself into the front seat, fastened her seat belt and leant forward to open the glove compartment. Mummy Mummy Mummy. Chocolates and crisps to choose from.
‘She was all right,’ Annabel said. ‘She wouldn’t let us watch The Simpsons. She wouldn’t even let Sam watch The Simpsons and he’d done all his homework and everything.’
‘You can watch double Simpsons this evening.’
‘Her cooking is disgusting.’
‘I don’t like the word disgusting. Did she let you have ketchup?’
‘Yes – but she blobbed it on because she said too much was bad for us. Stop checking your phone. You have to be hands-free to drive.’
That evening, during triple TheSimpsons, Frankie’s phone beamed through a text from Scott. He’d attached a photograph of the control room at the studio – his left arm just visible; a bank of switches and knobs and empty paper cups.
THE Abbey Road.
It wasn’t how she’d imagined it.
Been thinking of you, Frankie. Scott x
She looked around the room. Could she really envisage him here? Was there room on the sofa? Yes, if they all squashed up a little. Did he like The Simpsons? Would he like everything she liked and would it matter if there were some things he didn’t? She alighted on her CDs and LPs. Would he approve of her taste? Was Duran Duran a deal breaker? She glanced at Annabel and Sam. What on earth would her children make of a man in their home, a man in their mother’s life?
If you ever get a boyfriend I will spill his dinner down him and make his life hell.
Annabel had come out with this, apropos of nothing, a few months ago. But the three of them had laughed because the sentiment was so random and the concept so far-fetched anyway.
‘Mum – no double-screening, that’s what you say to Sam.’ Annabel tried to take Frankie’s phone. ‘It’s “Grift of the Magi” – we love this episode!’
‘I missed you,’ Frankie said to her children, nudging them, trying to kiss them.
Sam grunted and Annabel said shh!
I miss you she texted to Scott.
Frankie looked up and away from the burning brightness of the empty paper in front of her, gazed out of the window to the sunlight dancing on dewy grass, the light from the unseen sea bathing the garden with clarity. But she wasn’t focused on the garden. She was back in the hotel foyer with Kate Moss on the magazine and Scott saying care to join me? Over and over again she replayed the sensation of turning and seeing him and hearing his voice and thinking me? me? really?
She started to write, displaced words and short justifications, a technique she used to shape character and build a backstory.
Polite/thoughtful (hates olives/didn’t say)
Strong/principled (raised daughter single-handed)
Talented/modest (shining career/doesn’t court limelight)
Secure (happy to say he’d been thinking about me)
Handsome (but not the point)
Foreigner.
‘A man who lives on a bloody mountain in sodding Canada.’
She took another page and quickly sketched Alice, enveloping her with chains. Alice in Chains she scrawled, leaving the table and going over to scan her CDs for the band of the same name. She played ‘Check My Brain’ very loudly, her forehead pressed against the wall.
What did her brain say? What was going on behind the scramble of thoughts? Was it ludicrous to feel that this could be life-changing and wholly good? Or was she just selfish and insane to pursue it? Her romanticizing tendencies had brought all sorts of trouble in the past.
‘Be rational.’
She shook her head.
