Gifted and Talented (20 page)

Olly glanced up at the shopping-centre clock. The afternoon was slipping away and he still hadn’t bought his shirt.

‘See you around,’ Sam said. ‘Well, you might be around,’ he corrected himself. ‘I tend to stay still, as you can see.’

As Olly walked off, a child was squirting Her Majesty with a water pistol and a tramp was installing himself at the foot of Elvis’s plinth.

He went back out on to the High Street and started looking at shirts again. He had spotted nothing so far that would perform the three functions of improving his appearance, getting him a job and – should the opportunity arise – impressing Isabel. It seemed, suddenly, a fiendishly difficult choice to make. A white shirt might be a bit waiter-ish. While a striped one was a bit City-ish, a bit Bullinger, altogether too Jasper De Borchy. He sounded horrendous, Olly thought. Even worse than his brother, if that were possible.

He turned away from the window and looked down the busy street. The Christmas crowds were thicker than ever, a purse-bearing, bag-barging, shoulder-shoving, toe-treading river. Among the heaving mass he thought he recognised something. Someone. A flash of red hair. A glimpse of white cheek. Isabel! He felt a powerful leap of delight. Something beautiful amid all this tawdry grabbery; something he knew – and loved.

He stepped out to flag her down, calling her name. Her face, as she spotted him, seemed to flex in shock. He had expected a smile. Dismay filled him, but then understanding hit like a thunderbolt.

Something had happened. Something untoward. With powerful determination he shouldered his way through the crowds to her side.

‘Olly!’ Her voice was pitched artificially, nervously high. Her wide green eyes scanned his, her mouth stretched in something midway between a smile and a grimace. Her narrow body strained away as he held her thin shoulders in a greeting; her cheekbone hit his chin as he kissed her. He had the strangest feeling that she wanted to run away.

‘Is everything OK? You haven’t answered my texts,’ he said solicitously, inviting her to confide all.

She seemed to draw in a huge breath at this, as if steeling herself to say something considerable. For a moment he held his breath too.

But all she said was, ‘Sorry. I meant to. Been a bit, um, busy.’

It was as if, he thought, they had hardly met. And that hardly-meeting had been years ago. No one watching them would believe they had spent hours talking in his bedroom just days ago. And then gone to the pub, where she had all but begged him to sleep with her. Looking at her downcast face, he could hardly believe it himself.

He wondered if she was embarrassed. She was biting her lip awkwardly, avoiding his eye quite obviously. But she had done nothing to be embarrassed about – largely thanks to him. Or did she think he had rejected her? Women! Olly thought, with a flicker of exasperation. You were damned if you did and even more so, it seemed, if you didn’t.

He must move to eradicate doubts, eliminate the lingering uncertainty with one brilliant blast of positivity. He fixed on her a radiant smile. ‘I’m so glad to see you. The other night, in the pub – it was brilliant. I was hoping I’d see you again.’

She did not react. Perhaps she had misunderstood.

‘I mean, not just see you, obviously I’m seeing you now,’ he gabbled on. ‘I mean, see you as in –’ he shrugged – ‘
see
you.’ He sounded like an idiot. He turned out his palms in appeal. She must have got the message, however imperfectly expressed.

She said nothing.

‘If you wanted to,’ he added, penitently.

Isabel looked up. Her large white front teeth were still pressed into her pillowy lower lip. ‘Oh, Olly,’ she said. ‘I can’t. I’m sorry.’

The world reeled. He recognised how much he had depended on a ‘yes’ from her. How all else was an abyss, the darkness. ‘Can’t?’ He blinked, rapidly, helplessly.

She did not elaborate. Her glance slid away, back down to the pavement.

Olly picked himself up and prepared for another effort. ‘Did I do something wrong?’ His voice sounded, he knew, plaintive. But he couldn’t help that. He felt plaintive. He was panicking.

Her narrow chest raised itself in a sigh. ‘It’s, um, work,’ she said vaguely. Still she was not looking at him.

He seized on it in violent relief. Work, after all, was not another person – someone else who had caught her eye. Although, was that likely, in such a short time? He sought to calm himself. ‘Work?’ he repeated, in as level a voice as he could manage.

The shining red hair nodded. Small curls at the end were thrown about. ‘Essay crisis.’

He looked at her in anguish, plunged once more into doubt. He had believed work, but not this detail. For Isabel to have essay crises was uncharacteristic. She was much too meticulous, dedicated and well organised. It was something else, he was sure now – surer than before. He must talk to her, find out what.

‘Come for a coffee?’ he pleaded.

She turned to him, half her face hidden behind a fall of hair. ‘Olly, I’m sorry. I can’t miss this next tutorial.’

‘With David?’ He snatched at the possibility. They could walk back to the house together.

‘With Professor Green.’ It was, Isabel felt, frightening how easily lying came to her. She had hardly ever told an untruth before but this was the fifth in as many utterances.

Guilt churned within her as she saw how she was hurting him. Olly was shaking his head, smiling in his good-natured way, but a puzzled frown was puckering his broad brow.

‘But it’s Saturday. I thought we could go out tonight, somewhere.’ There, he had said it.

‘I can’t.’ Isabel swung her head down. ‘I’m, um, busy.’

‘Busy?’ He said it pleasantly, lightly, but there was terror in his eyes, he knew. Thankfully she was not looking at them.

‘Doing an, um, extra paper.’

Oh, this was hard. She could see his disappointment and bewilderment. She could have replied to his texts, at least. Put him out of what was quite obviously his misery. He deserved better from her; he had been nothing but good to her, behaved with impeccable politeness at all times, like a gentleman – although not one like Jasper, obviously. The thought of what she was really doing tonight now filled Isabel with a rush of hot excitement. ‘Come out for dinner,’ Jasper had said. ‘Candlelight and spaghetti; little place I know; nothing fancy, but really sweet. Cosy.’

‘Come on,’ Olly pressed gently. ‘A coffee will do you good.’

He saw now that her attention was no longer on him. She was looking over his shoulder, her eyes wide and her mouth slightly open. She looked rapt, like one seeing a vision.

Olly twisted violently round. She was, indeed, seeing a vision. Some feet above the stunted crowd, a tall god was approaching. He had shelf-like cheekbones and glinting gold hair. The smile on his face was that of the victor, not only in this situation but in life generally.

‘Jasper,’ Isabel gasped, from somewhere deep down in her throat. It was enough.

He experienced a violent understanding. As if he had been hit and, simultaneously, something inside him had exploded. The essay crisis. It approached and smiled at him with detached contempt.

‘Jasper
De Borchy?
’ He could not help repeating it. That there was someone else was bad enough, of course. But that that someone else was . . . him. The extra paper, in other words.

‘And this is . . . ?’ His long-lashed amber gaze, aloof, regarding Olly as if from a vast, unbridgeable distance.

Olly saw that Isabel was positively radiating adoration, Jasper coolly absorbing it. He felt sick with misery. He felt murderous. He felt he wanted to crawl away and hide under a stone – die there.

‘This is Olly,’ he heard Isabel say distantly. ‘He, um, lives in the house of one of my tutors.’

Olly pulled himself together. He could not just walk away and leave Jasper De Borchy to take the field, with his cruel beauty, his cold smile.

He could tell that Isabel didn’t realise. Couldn’t, possibly. He spoke in a low, urgent whisper. ‘Honestly, Isabel, you don’t know what you’re letting yourself in for, the way the De Borchys treat women . . . Honestly, I’ve seen it, I’ve heard them and their sort talking . . .’

She couldn’t hear properly, but enough to get the gist. All the conflicting awkwardness, guilt and febrile excitement within Isabel now exploded into a great anger. What made him think he could tell her what to do?

‘He’s a member of the bloody Bullinger; have you any idea what they do? Dwarves, strippers, you name it . . .’ Olly looked at her exasperatedly. ‘Drugs . . .’

It was the final weapon in his arsenal. He had heard rumours, that was all. But, as the Bullinger was a byword for any number of vices, there seemed no reason not to chuck the kitchen sink at it.

Isabel listened to him stammering out his words, but none of them really went in. Her eyes were fixed on Jasper. He was looking at his watch now, looking around, yawning. Dear God, don’t let him just walk off. Terror twisted within her, sharpening her annoyance with Olly. Just because he had helped her with her bags, just because he had taken her for a drink, Olly thought he owned her.

Even as this crossed her mind, she recognised its unfairness. But there was, nonetheless, a truth within that could be twisted to suit her purposes.

‘. . . the whole De Borchy family, just poisonous . . .’ Low-pitched, fervent words were streaming out of Olly. ‘They own all the papers I’ve been trying –
trying
–’ he rolled his eyes ironically – ‘to get a job with . . .’

Isabel felt desperate. What did she care, now, when Jasper was blazing away in all his magnificence mere feet from her? She wished that Olly would go away. Leave her. He was embarrassing her. It was her life; she was a grown-up. She had navigated herself perfectly well up to now.

She bit out the words. ‘I can look after myself.’

Desperately, he played his last card. ‘But he’s a member of the Bullinger!’ Olly’s eyes searched hers, begging her to understand, for the old Isabel to come back and replace this new, cold, superior one.

‘What if he is?’ she snapped.

He swallowed, trying to compose himself. ‘You can’t. You just . . . can’t,’ he repeated desperately. ‘Please, Isabel. You’ve no idea . . .’

‘Come on,’ Jasper De Borchy was suggesting. He took her arm – her slim, white, beautiful arm – and turned to Olly. ‘Best leave her alone,’ he suggested with a cold smile. ‘Out of your league, don’t you think?’

Olly felt as if he were falling. He stumbled off before either of them could hear or see the great howl-sob rolling up from within.

Richard was in the labs. It was the end of the day and outside the metal-framed, thirties windows the sun was setting. Great glowing salmon streaks of light were painted over a duck-egg blue sky. It had been a beautiful day, glowing, golden and warm, although admittedly he hadn’t seen much of it. He had been crouched over his experiments, making up for the time lost in all the endless development meetings of late.

The most recent had been called by Flora because of what was apparently being referred to in the development office as ‘the Bursar’s breakthrough’.

Working his reluctant way through his section of the alumni list, the college financial controller had desultorily dialled a former student in New York. He had had an unexpectedly electric effect.

An American modern languages graduate from 1968 called Mary-Beth Baumengartner had, it seemed, gone on to forge a successful career in the haulage business and marry multiple times, latterly and most recently to a hugely wealthy businessman called Chuck Snodgrass III. Mary-Beth seemed surprised and amazed to hear from her old college and a cheque was apparently in the post. The Bursar was triumphant.

Richard now got to his feet and began pacing about the labs. He stopped at the noticeboard to read the laminated set of laboratory rules he had put up there himself. Number four: ‘Never assume that your work can be completed in the bare minimum of hours required by the faculty. Successful careers in neuroscience demand at least double this commitment and in many cases even more.’ He had told it like it was, Richard reflected. No point beating about the bush. After all, he wasn’t asking anything of them that he wasn’t willing to do himself – had done himself, for that matter, and for many years too.

The large, strip-lit room was empty, nonetheless. For all the double commitment required of them, most of his research colleagues had by now gone home. It was Saturday night, after all; even science nerds had places to go and things to do. As had Richard, although the place he had to go and the thing he had to do was a prospect that filled him with terror.

Tonight was his date with Diana and the first time he had dated a woman in years. What had possessed him to ask her out? It had been completely unnecessary and over the top, a mere apology for his behaviour would have done. No doubt she thought he was mad; perhaps he was.

Richard returned to his own experiment. The wall at his end of the room was covered entirely with a great many illuminated Perspex boxes, all fitted closely together in a way that had stretched the department’s maintenance staff to their limits, accustomed as they were to unusual requests. From a distance, as Richard approached, it looked like a contemporary art installation, glowing rectangles of red and blue with a number of worms in each one.

He stopped and stared at them, almost fondly. The worms had definitely got with the programme now. They were beginning to firmly associate certain shades with certain smells that he was able to release into the boxes, and they would respond in certain predictable ways to certain combinations. That you could influence the brain through colour seemed not just likely but definite.

Richard, regarding his colour-sensitive worms with deep absorption, didn’t want to leave. It was so pleasant here in the quiet lab with his work going exactly the way he wanted it to. He could easily spend another couple of hours here. Instead, thanks to a moment of madness precipitated by guilt, he had to waste his time in a restaurant with a woman he didn’t know. It was all so illogical and impulsive. Absorbed, he pressed one of the buttons to send in another one of the smells and shuffled on his seat, fascinated, as the invertebrates began to react.

Shanna-Mae was an artist with eyeliner, Diana thought. As Debs’ daughter stepped back, brush in hand, Rosie’s mother leant forward and stared at herself in the mirror. Her eyes looked huge, her lashes long and feathery, her eyebrows, lightly plucked, appeared level and groomed. Her weather-beaten skin, concealed by a layer of foundation, looked dewy and youthful. She looked as if she were going to the Oscars, not spending Saturday night in a local hotel restaurant.

It had been she, in the end, who suggested Lecturer. It had been on her mind since the conversation with Sara – who, mercifully, had not shown up yet and hopefully never would. The hotel did at least have the virtue of being new and people were talking about it; although, from Richard’s guarded reaction, she guessed he was generally not a fan of new places that people were talking about. She wasn’t either, usually, having had a lifetime’s worth during the London years. But old habits died hard, she had been unable to think of anywhere else and he had obviously been unable to think of anywhere at all.

Of course, it was only dinner. Nothing more. All the same, Diana concluded, it was months, if not years, since she had looked this good. She shook out her hair, on which Shanna-Mae had worked more miracles with her straighteners. It rippled over her shoulders in a silky sheet the colour of milk chocolate, with occasional flashes of red and green from Debs’ hysterical light display next door.

‘You look great, Mrs Somers,’ Shanna-Mae grinned.

‘Yeah, Mum,’ Rosie echoed from where she sat on the bed, watching. ‘You look wicked.’

Shanna-Mae had a vast array of kit: rolls of make-up brushes, bottles of different-coloured foundation, tubes of lip gloss, eye-shadow compacts the size and shape of toolboxes and containing a dizzying selection of colours. She had, Diana learnt, saved up for it all over years of birthday and Christmas money and through doing odd jobs in between.

As she had worked on Diana’s face, Shanna-Mae had spoken knowledgably about the make-up artists she admired, the brands and equipment she rated and had outlined her professional plans, the courses she intended to take, how she would finance her business and where it would be. Listening, Diana’s admiration had risen. She had no doubt that, in even less than the ten years Shanna-Mae estimated it would take her after leaving school, her neighbour’s daughter would be right at the top of her very competitive game.

Diana was, all the same, guiltily aware of how, once, she would have judged this girl. Shanna-Mae, for all her skill in beautifying others, was far from glamorous herself. At fourteen, she was almost the same generous size as her mother, a size which she insisted on drawing attention to by wearing the tiniest of denim miniskirts teamed with opaque black tights. She habitually wore an enormous amount of make-up and her hair, dyed a bright yellow-blond, was cut by Shanna-Mae herself in an unflattering – but, Diana gathered, wildly fashionable – asymmetrical wedge which covered half her eyes.

‘This is for you,’ she smiled, slipping a ten-pound note into Shanna-Mae’s hand. ‘Buy yourself those eyelash curlers you were talking about. Don’t tell your mother!’

Debs had been adamant not only that Shanna-Mae did the make-up for Diana’s big night out, but that her daughter’s services were free. Shanna-Mae took the money gratefully, but Diana saw doubt in the small hazel eyes ringed thickly with mascara. ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked.

Shanna-Mae bit her lip. ‘I can’t not tell Mum,’ she confessed. ‘I tell her everything.’

‘You tell her then. I don’t think she’ll mind.’

To go with her smart face, Diana had found a pair of black cigarette pants and a thick, cream silk fitted blouse: both relics from wealthier days, although never had they looked so good. Both were considerably looser than they had been. Walking miles every day round Branston’s gardens lugging buckets of weeds was succeeding where many a smart West London gym had, over the years, failed.

Diana took a deep breath and watched her pale and powdered nostrils narrow. She twitched up the corners of her glossed and painted lips and noticed the hollows deepen under her cheekbones. She wondered what Richard would make of her look. He had only ever seen her with her hair everywhere and smudges of dirt on her face. But what did it matter, anyway, what he thought? He was only taking her out under duress.

The hotel was near the centre of town, so Diana parked in the staff car park of Branston and walked the short distance. It was misty – one of those dense and weighty autumn fogs that occasionally present themselves as an alternative to the blaze and glow. Students muffled in scarves and woolly hats laboured past on bicycles or hurried in and out of college entrances. Across the road, the Georgian windows of the closed gift shops looked blankly back. Across the city, the age-old sound of bells rolled and drifted like ectoplasm.

Couples were walking; groups were lurching. There was the occasional distant shout. College chapels were lit from within, presumably for some concert or practice. The effect was strange; stained glass glowed through the vapour like lights from an alien spaceship and the faint sound of singing could be heard.

Lecturer was at the end of one of the mist-swirled main streets. It was a small and elegant Georgian red-brick manor with windows picked out in white and a fanlight over the portico entranceway. It looked comfortable and tasteful and so it was a shock for Diana to find, once over the broad stone steps of the threshold, that the restrained nineteenth century gave way abruptly to the contemporary at its most moronic. As the framed birch canes lining the walls and the receptionist in a mortar board attested, Lecturer was a hotel with an academic theme. She looked around, horrified. She had had no idea.

Seized with panic – what would the caustic Richard make of all this? – Diana tried not to look, as an elderly waitress dressed as a schoolgirl crossed the wooden-panelled foyer.

‘Can I help you?’ the mortar-boarded receptionist asked, her hauteur undiminished by her headgear.

‘I’m meeting someone,’ Diana muttered. ‘Professor Richard Black. Is he here yet?’

The mortar board clicked a mouse and peered over half-moon spectacles at the screen. ‘No,’ she said, as if she enjoyed it. ‘Would you like to wait in the bar?’

She waved Diana towards a doorway above which was a small, framed blackboard with ‘Bar’ scribbled on it in chalk.

Diana went hesitantly through. Perhaps Richard was late because he was cycling here. But would he? In this weather? He might be knocked off. He might not come at all.

Inside, the floor was wooden and the bar tables were those small, old-fashioned desks with lifting lids and small holes for long-vanished inkwells. All were set at incongruously companionable angles, each with its inhospitably hard chair and a bar menu which looked like a maths exercise book. The walls were white and fixed to them were dark-wood frames displaying the periodic table, a British Empire-era world map and some handwriting exercises. There was a bookshelf with a number of battered old books and age-spotted paperbound collections of O-level papers from the nineteen-seventies and eighties.

The bar, inevitably, was equipped with a chalk board on which the wine list was scribbled and, while there was no barman around, his recent presence was signalled by the mortar board lying on the bar top.

‘You’re late!’ someone suddenly snapped from behind. A male voice. Diana turned, heart in mouth. It didn’t sound like Richard, but who else would speak to her like that?

It was a tall youth in an academic gown. ‘One hundred lines!’ he thundered at Diana. She stared at him, confused and not a little scared. Then his stern face melted into a professional smile. ‘But now you’re here, what can I get you?’ It was, she realised, flustered, the barman.

‘J-just a tap water, thanks,’ Diana stammered.

‘I can’t interest you in a glass of champagne?’ the barman said, baring his teeth and gesturing at the wine cooler on the bar. It contained several magnums of champagne, the unopened bottle tops bristling out like the spikes of a hedgehog.

‘No,’ Diana said firmly. She certainly couldn’t afford it herself and to order it would send out all the wrong messages to Richard.

He rolled his eyes huffily and said, ‘Whatever, Madam,’ with such rudeness that, briefly, Diana had a good mind to retaliate, but decided to retain her dignity.

He sloppily poured out a glass of water from a jug on the counter and shoved it sulkily towards her. ‘Economising tonight, are we, Madam?’

Diana looked him in the eye. This was one step too far. ‘Is my drinking tap water a problem for you?’

‘Not at all, Madam.’ Acidly.

Diana now did her best to ignore him and, such was the hostility in the atmosphere, she felt relieved when he crammed on his mortar board and flounced out.

Registering his departure with relief, she hardly noticed someone else come in.

‘Hello,’ said Richard, rather stiffly.

His physical presence, materialising so unexpectedly, sent a powerful jump of excitement through her. She stared at him, reddening and flustered and feeling somehow exposed, as if revealing a shameful secret.

He was carrying a cycle helmet, which answered one question. But he looked less bedraggled than the conditions outside suggested. The faint sheen on his skin, the flush in his cheek, the sparkle in his eye was becoming. He looked alive. Fit. Vital.

How had she not noticed before?

His hair, close-cropped in the Caesar style, was dark but flecked with grey. His face was as long and lean as the rest of him and there was something of the wolf about the long nose and piercing greenish eyes set slightly aslant beneath dark eyebrows.