The Lemon Grove (17 page)

Over there. The café by the tram station. The unisex toilet down the spiral staircase. A waitress with a nose that is a prolonged extension of her forehead, and heavily made-up eyes passes them on her way up. It must be coming off their faces in waves. The waitress shoots them a look, her big loop earrings jangling as she shakes her head. Jenn makes fleeting eye contact, drops her head and follows him into the cubicle. Nathan shuts the door behind them and slides the latch shut. The basin of the toilet is stuffed with toilet paper; she thinks, no, no, not here – but then Nathan is turning her to face the big gilt wall mirror. He stands behind her, pulls her top, her bra down, licks and kisses her shoulders. She squirms. He stands back. Through the mirror, he forces her gaze down and over herself. Their breath clouds the glass. He leans over her, his cock jutting into her hips, pushed back by his jeans. He licks a patch clear, looks her mirror image in the eye. She can’t bear it any longer and she turns round and claws at his belt. He flips her back round.
Places her hands on the mirror and pushes her face forward into the cool glass. One hand threads her tresses round his fingers. The other digs his cock out; tugs her knickers to one side. He sticks it in her cunt and pushes once, twice; then pulls it out and tries to put it into her arse. ‘Not that way,’ she mumbles and reaches down and feeds him back into her core. It is urgent and profound and it’s over within seconds. She tries to hang on; she clenches her muscles to stop him sliding free; and when he does, some part of her comes away, too.

16

From the doorway she watches him at work. Whatever he’s writing, he means it: it’s spewing from him, in a fury. And yet, observing him now in the hard white glow of the desk lamp, his body has never looked so slack, so tired. The loose skin of his chest hangs down as he hunches over the pad. His skin looks lived in; soon he will be like the crones in the backstreets. His pelt will hang from his body like old pyjamas. Their history is inscribed all over those dimples, creases; his weathered hands. No extraordinary love story, theirs; defined not by drama or tragedy, but by friendship. Faith. Mutual dependency. She watches him write and she is choked.

It whispers in her ear; the piece he read to her on their wedding day. It was an extract from a D. H. Lawrence poem.

And when, throughout all the wild chaos of love

slowly a gem forms, in the ancient, once-more-molten rocks

of two human hearts, two ancient rocks,

a man’s heart and a woman’s,

that is the crystal of peace, the slow hard jewel of trust,

the sapphire of fidelity.

The gem of mutual peace emerging from the wild chaos of love.

She will always remember that, word for word – no matter what. She and Greg had hardly been together long enough for those words to have such resonance, yet the passage meant everything to her. It felt right.

She was a care assistant at Summerfields, when they met. Greg cut a tragic, heroic figure. He’d lost his wife the year before, not long after she’d given birth to their daughter, Emma. Greg and the little one used to come in, every Saturday, without fail, to visit his mother-in-law. Not once did he miss a visit – not that old Irene would have noticed. He’d recite poems to the patients in the day room; Keats or Shelley, she later found out. She thought they were his words, his poems. He’d incant the lines like he meant it; like those thoughts and words could only have emanated from him. The way his eyes would shine when he told her what he loved about
poetry – the way you could own it. It became a part of you.

The old women in the home loved Greg. Her workmates loved him, too. He was handsome, after a fashion – Clark Gable with a beard. He wasn’t really her type; too big, too manly. But he radiated some elemental
goodness
that she found attractive. He was nice. He was constant. And it worked – they were good together. Really good. Emma took to Jenn, and Jenn responded. She’d loved the sense of being needed. She loved snuggling up with Greg once Emma was asleep and resting her head on that broad chest.

He drops the pen on his pad and slumps back in his chair. He seems pleased with what he’s written.

She clenches her fists and steps gently back out of the room and into the corridor, before he sees her. She gets herself out of the villa, out of earshot. The force of her sobbing sits her down among the rotting carcasses of the lemons; green welts pitting their dull, yellow-brown skin.

17

‘I don’t trust him,’ she says as she forks hard left onto the switchback. It is early evening. It is one night and one day since the incident with the van on the cliff bend but, somehow, it feels much longer. It seems like Nathan has been here forever and yet when he’s not with her, when he’s with Emma, time drags like tar. She endures every second of his absence. Farmers are tilling and raking their groves. A line of goats picks its way down the rocky incline with a toll of maudlin bells. The light is soft and the landscape mellow.

‘Who? Nathan?’

‘Nathan.’

Greg’s eyes are on her for a moment, drilling the side of her face, then he turns away, gazing on out to the
slow-rippling sea beyond. ‘Why? What’s happened?’ There’s a snap of suspicion in his tone.

‘Nothing’s
happened
. Just a hunch, that’s all.’ She keeps her eyes trained on the road. A mountain rabbit flits across, pauses and looks directly at them, then leaps to safety. ‘I just think we need to be careful.’

‘Careful? Careful how?’

She rests her free hand on his lap and gives a reassuring squeeze.

‘Look. It’s nothing, right? Nothing at all …’

‘It can’t be
nothing
.’

‘It’s just … I dunno. The way he looks at girls. You know?’

Greg is hunched forward in his seat now, his hands on his knees.

Her free hand is back on the wheel.

‘Why? Has she said something?’

‘Who, Emma?
No!
’

Greg sits back in his seat, drags his hands back up his thighs; taps out a rhythm with his fingers. He’s on the verge of saying something – and then he’s stalling, thinking it through. She shifts down a gear and slows to a crawl as she approaches the first hairpin bend.

‘Because I looked it up, you know, this so-called blog of his,’ Greg says.

‘Yes?’

He doesn’t answer right away. There’s a lurch in her solar plexus. What has he seen? What has Nathan written? Something about
them
?

‘And guess what?’ He pauses for effect and drives irony into his expression. ‘
Site still under construction
.’

Jenn relaxes. They turn into the dirt track up to the villa.

He releases his seatbelt and shifts his whole body round to face her.

‘Well?’ he says.

‘What?’

‘Well, what does that tell you?’ Jenn lowers her chin, indicating for him to expand. ‘How likely is it that Godrich’s people would approve an interview with a kid who doesn’t even have a website?’ Before she can respond, he adds, ‘So I asked Emma.’

Jenn nods.

‘… I asked her if he’d be flying home early, for the
big
interview. She had no idea. Of course, she was quick to cover for him, but her first reaction was one of surprise. And the funny thing is, I knew it. I knew straight away that he was spinning you a yarn.’ He points a finger at her, vindicated.

Tell me, Greg,
how
did you know? she wants to shout. She maintains a cool authority. ‘Possibly. Although it could just be that he didn’t want to say anything until it was confirmed?’

And as though this were a game of chess, he considers it carefully before making his next move. He cranes his neck and rolls his gaze right up to the village where the young lovers are dining right now. ‘Do you not think it a little odd that he told you – and not Emma?’ His eyes drill her again.

She gives an insouciant shrug of the shoulders but her neck is starting to burn. She badly regrets instigating this line of conversation. Her motive was simple: to throw a veil of doubt over Nathan’s integrity, should he ever expose her. She can see now, there was no need. Greg had already cast him as the unreliable narrator – but now his sixth sense has fastened onto something else. She tries to kill it before it takes seed. She shrugs again and gives it her best poker face.

‘Come on, Greg, isn’t that obvious?’

‘What?’ He raises his eyebrows.

‘He told me because he knew I’d tell you. I’m starting to find it just a little bit embarrassing – how desperate he is to earn your respect. That’s one thing we can be certain about – the boy reveres you.’

Greg dismisses this with a hiss. But Jenn knows her husband too well: there’ll be a part of him that wants to believe; a part of him is flattered.

Jenn shuts down the engine. She turns to him, cups his face with a hand.

‘I knew I shouldn’t have said anything. There’s nothing sinister about him, really. Just … let’s be on standby, hey? Just in case …’

She kisses him, hard on the mouth, and draws the conversation to an end.

They get out of the car and start unloading the shopping from the boot. Jenn runs ahead to open up the big wooden doors. Greg lumps the carrier bags inside, four in each hand. He takes the eggs out of their box and begins stacking them in the fridge one by one, but with such force that Jenn fears he’ll break them.

‘Tell me, Jenn,’ he mutters. ‘If there’s something I need to know, then, please, tell me.’

‘Jesus! Are we still talking about that?’

‘Well? Is there?’

‘God. No. Nothing specifically … I mean, you know the way men are. The silly little games they play. The lies they tell.’

Gregory speaks slowly, deliberately, into the fridge.

‘He’s not a man, though, is he, Jennifer? He’s a boy. And he’s your daughter’s boyfriend.’

If he’d have turned round, he would have seen Jenn fighting back a furious flash of guilt. He finishes stacking
the eggs in their cup-holes. It’s all she can do to smooth her face out and arrange her features in a way that roughly signals agreement. She moves out of his eyesight, into the lounge. She hears him sigh deeply and then a bottle is being uncorked. There’s the glug-glug-glug as he fills his glass, full. He doesn’t pour one for her.

‘We having the pasta or the fish tonight?’ he shouts through.

She waits till she’s halfway up the stairs then shouts back.

‘Whichever. You decide. I’ll be down in a mo. Just need my inhaler.’

On the landing she pauses at that place. She shuts her eyes and tips her head back for a moment; it shoots through her again, almost as devastating as the first time. The moment she steps away it tugs at her, first from the inside, and then from the outside, tugging her by the wrists, dragging her to the floor. She sits there with her back up against the wall. He’s out there with her, up at that little tapas bar at the end of the street. They are together on their tiny terrace, under the orange trees, hand in hand like lovers. And they are talking, animatedly. No –
he
is talking, and she is sitting there, all smiley and mute. He doesn’t seek her opinion on anything, she’s noticed that, it’s enough
that she’s there, looking the part with her long legs and sun-blond hair; her honey-brown skin. Even with her leg in plaster, she looked amazing going out this evening. Greg looked almost tearful as he bid them farewell. ‘There goes my little girl,’ he said. And now she’s sitting there, his little girl too, sipping wine, looking into his eyes, agreeing with whatever he throws her way, and perhaps when they stumble back to the taxi hut later on, they’ll slip off into one of the cobbled alleyways, and they’ll kiss and his hand will slide up her thigh. She can’t bear it.

The little gecko is back. It stays dead still, watching her from the other side of the wall. ‘What should I do?’ she asks it. It watches her for a moment, scuttles up to the circular window and slips out of sight. She’s brought around by the sound of Greg calling her from the kitchen.