They had met again in London in April, at their mutual friend Callum’s twenty-third birthday party, spending the whole of the next day in Kensington Gardens together, drinking wine from the bottle and talking. Clearly she had been forgiven, but they had also settled into the maddening familiarity of friendship; maddening for her at least, lying on the fresh spring grass, their hands almost touching as he told her about Lola, this incredible Spanish girl he’d met while ski-ing in the Pyrenees.
And then he was off travelling again, broadening his mind yet further. China had turned out to be too alien and ideological for Dexter’s taste, and he had instead embarked on a leisurely year-long tour of what the guide books called ‘Party Towns’. So they were pen pals now, Emma composing long, intense letters crammed with jokes and underlining, forced banter and barely concealed longing; two-thousand-word acts of love on air-mail paper. Letters, like compilation tapes, were really vehicles for unexpressed emotions and she was clearly putting far too much time and energy into them. In return, Dexter sent her postcards with insufficient postage: ‘Amsterdam is MAD’, ‘Barcelona INSANE’, ‘Dublin ROCKS. Sick as DOG this morning.’ As a travel writer, he was no Bruce Chatwin, but still she would slip the postcards in the pocket of a heavy coat on long soulful walks on Ilkley Moor, searching for some hidden meaning in ‘VENICE COMPLETELY FLOODED!!!!’.
‘Who’s this Dexter then?’ her mother asked, peering at the back of the postcards. ‘Your boyfriend, is he?’ Then, with a concerned look: ‘Have you ever thought about working for the Gas Board?’ Emma got a job pulling pints in the local pub, and time passed, and she felt her brain begin to soften like something forgotten at the back of the fridge.
Then Gary Nutkin had phoned, the skinny Trotskyist who had directed her in a stark, uncompromising production of Brecht’s Fears and Miseries of the Third Reich back in ’86, then kissed her for three stark, uncompromising hours at the last-night party. Shortly afterwards he had taken her to a Peter Greenaway double-bill, waiting until four hours in before reaching across and absent-mindedly placing his hand on her left breast as if adjusting a dimmer switch. They made Brechtian love that evening in a stale single bed beneath a poster for The Battle of Algiers, Gary taking care throughout to ensure that he was in no way objectifying her. Then nothing, not a word, until that late-night phone-call in May, and the hesitant words, softly spoken: ‘How would you like to join my theatre co-operative?’
Emma had no ambitions as an actress or any great love of theatre, except as a medium to convey words and ideas. And Sledgehammer was to be a new kind of progressive theatre co-op, with shared intentions, a shared zeal, a written manifesto and a commitment to changing young lives through art. Maybe there’d be some romance too, Emma thought, or at the very least some sex. She packed her rucksack, said goodbye to her sceptical mum and dad, and set out in the mini-bus as if heading out on some great cause, a sort of theatrical Spanish Civil War, funded by the Arts Council.
But three months later, what had happened to the warmth, the camaraderie, the sense of social value, of high ideals coupled with fun? They were meant to be a co-operative. That’s what was written on the side of the van, she had stencilled it there herself. I-hate-this-job-I-hate this-job, said Sid. Emma pressed her hands against her ears, and asked herself some fundamental questions.
Why am I here?
Am I really making a difference?
Why can’t she put some clothes on?
What is that smell?
Where do I want to be right now?
She wanted to be in Rome, with Dexter Mayhew. In bed.
‘Shaftes-bury Avenue.’
‘No, Shafts-bury. Three syllables.’
‘Lychester Square.’
‘Leicester Square, two syllables.’
‘Why not Lychester?’
‘No idea.’
‘But you are meant to be my teacher, you are meant to know.’
‘Sorry,’ Dexter shrugged.
‘Well I think it is stupid language,’ said Tove Angstrom, and punched him in the shoulder.
‘A stupid language. I couldn’t agree with you more. No need to hit me though.’
‘I apologise,’ said Tove, kissing his shoulder, then his neck and mouth, and Dexter was once again struck by how rewarding teaching could be.
They lay in a tangle of cushions on the terracotta floor of his tiny room, having given up on the single bed as inadequate for their needs. In the brochure for the Percy Shelley International School of English, the teachers’ accommodation had been described as ‘some comfortable with many mitigating features’ and this summed it up perfectly. His room in the Centro Storico was dull and institutional, but there was at least a balcony, a foot-wide sill overlooking a picturesque square that, in a very Roman way, also functioned as a car park. Each morning he was woken by the sound of office-workers breezily reversing their cars into each other.
But in the middle of this humid July afternoon, the only sound came from the wheels of tourist suitcases rumbling on the cobbles below, and they lay with the windows wide open, kissing lazily, her hair clinging to his face, thick and dark and smelling of some Danish shampoo: artificial pine and cigarette smoke. She reached across his chest for the packet on the floor, lit two cigarettes and passed him one, and he shuffled up onto the pillows, letting the cigarette dangle from his lip like Belmondo or someone in a Fellini film. He had never seen a Belmondo or Fellini film, but was familiar with the postcards: stylish, black and white. Dexter didn’t like to think of himself as vain, but there were definitely times when he wished there was someone on hand to take his photograph.
They kissed again, and he wondered vaguely if there was some moral or ethical dimension to this situation. Of course the time to worry about the pros and cons of sleeping with a student would have been after the College party, while Tove was perching unsteadily on the edge of his bed and unzipping her knee-length boots. Even then, in the muddle of red wine and desire he had found himself wondering what Emma Morley would say. Even as Tove twirled her tongue in his ear, he had conducted his defence: she’s nineteen, an adult, and anyway I’m not a real teacher. Besides, Emma was a long way away at this moment, changing the world from a mini-bus on the ring road of a provincial town, and what was all this to do with Emma anyway? Tove’s knee-length boots sagged in the corner of the room now, in the hostel where overnight visitors were strictly forbidden.
He shifted his body to a cooler patch of terracotta, peering out of the window to try to gauge the time from the small square of vivid blue sky. The rhythm of Tove’s breathing was changing as she slipped into sleep, but he had an important appointment to keep. He dropped the last two inches of cigarette into a wine glass, and stretched for his wristwatch, which lay on an unread copy of Primo Levi’s If This is a Man.
‘Tove, I’ve got to go.’
She groaned in protest.
‘I’m meeting my parents, I’ve got to leave now.’
‘Can I come too?’
He laughed. ‘Don’t think so, Tove. Besides you’ve got a grammar test on Monday. Go and revise.’
‘You test me. Test me now.’
‘Okay, verbs. Present continuous.’
She coiled one leg around him, using the leverage to pull herself on top of him. ‘I am kissing, you are kissing, he is kissing, she is kissing . . .’
He pulled himself up on his elbows. ‘Seriously, Tove . . .’
‘Ten more minutes,’ she whispered in his ear, and he sank back to the floor. Why not, he thought? After all, I’m in Rome, it’s a beautiful day. I am twenty-four years old, financially secure, healthy. I ache and I am doing something that I shouldn’t be doing, and I am very, very lucky.
The attraction of a life devoted to sensation, pleasure and self would probably wear thin one day, but there was still plenty of time for that yet.