Highly Strung (17 page)

“Maybe we should go now.” Milan sighed, rising to his feet, but the drunk turned and pointed to him, ranting unintelligibly.

Lydia watched as he swayed over, aggression written all over his red, thread-veined face. Then he stopped dead and widened his bug eyes even further.

“Kaspar,” he said.

Milan frowned at the man, clearly perplexed for a moment, then the clouds lifted from his face and he said, “Cervenka!”

They fell into a mutual back slap, the drunken man falling against Milan’s chest, then down on the chair beside him, launching into a great ramble in the middle of which Milan made occasional interjections. Lydia cursed her lack of understanding, desperate to hear the tales of old times that she might be missing out on.

Milan turned to explain. “Cervenka and I were at school together.”

“Really?” He looked older and much less healthy than Milan, but then again, a man as drunk as Cervenka seemed to be at four o’clock in the afternoon probably wasn’t an athlete.

“He says my mother still lives in this street. He is offering to take me to see her.”

“Oh, my God, are you going to go?”

“I’m not sure she’ll want Cervenka knocking down her door,” demurred Milan.

“But Milan—your mother.”

“You think I should go?”

“How can you not?”

Milan put his head in his hands. Cervenka rubbed a consoling hand on his friend’s back and leered at Lydia before saying something in Czech.

“Lydia,” Milan answered, with some more incomprehensible words.

How was he introducing her? As a friend? A lover? A colleague?

Cervenka held out a hand to Lydia, who took it and let him shake hers much too vigorously. He pointed to Milan and said something presumably intended to be jovial. She smiled in reply.

“Okay,” said Milan, rising fully to his feet this time. “Lydia.”

“You want me to come? I can wait here…”

“Oh no, no, you can’t,” said Milan, shaking his head firmly. “This isn’t a place for a young woman to be on her own. Come on.”

Taking Milan’s hand, she left the bar with him, following the voluble Cervenka into the street.

Outside, a car stood on bricks at a crazy angle diagonal to the pavement, which was sticky with gum and cigarette butts. They walked on through a canyon of huge, gloomy tenement blocks, the lower parts of the walls thick with tangled black graffiti, until Cervenka stopped at a metal entry door scratched all over with names and burns and paint splodges.

“Is this where you lived?” whispered Lydia, intimidated by the neighbourhood’s surroundings. There was nowhere like this in Surrey.

“Yes,” said Milan tersely. He was nervous, she realised. The hand in hers was slick with sweat.

There was no security for this building—Cervenka simply pushed the door open with his shoulder and led them into a dank, unlit lobby area that smelt of piss and bleach.

Up the crumbling stairs they climbed, past walls that glistened with damp, until they reached the fourth floor. Cervenka hammered at one of the many battered doors with ham fists, shouting, “Pani Kasparova! Pani Kasparova!” to no apparent avail.

Lydia felt an obscure terror, as if a spectre might appear in the doorway rather than an elderly woman, and she clung to Milan, hoping he would think she meant only to offer him support.

Nobody came, even though Cervenka kept up the battery for a good few minutes. Eventually, an irate man in a vest with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth opened the door of the neighbouring flat. He uttered a few choice phrases.

“He says she is out,” muttered Milan to Lydia. “She is shopping.”

They turned, shoulders drooping in unison, to be confronted by a wraithlike figure in a headscarf at the top of the stairs. Her net bag fell open, and oranges and apples rolled out over the stairwell floor.

“Milan,” she said.

“
Matka
,” he replied.

Neither seemed to want to move first.

After a few split seconds of petrified stand-off, Milan swooped forward, gathering up the spilled fruit to give to his mother. She took it.

Lydia thought there was something metaphorical about the gestures.

She stuffed the fruit back into her bag and looked from her son to the other two. Eventually she said something that must have been the Czech equivalent of ‘okay’, and let them all into her flat.

The room was dark and shabby, but it was scrupulously clean, with a screened-off bed in one corner, a stove in another and a little table and chairs by the window.

Milan’s mother put down her shopping on the table and sat herself heavily in a rocking chair, saying something that sounded like an apology or excuse. Maybe it was something about tired feet and needing to sit down, Lydia thought.

Cervenka nodded and left, speaking to Milan as he walked through the door, but Milan didn’t reply. He simply stood in silence while his mother spoke, faintly, with a laboured rasp. The words sounded reproachful.

When Milan’s turn to speak came, he was impassioned and full of wild gestures. Lydia took a step back, wanting to hide in the shadows. It didn’t seem right that she was here, but Milan seized her forearm unexpectedly and yanked her back into the foreground.

“English,” said Milan’s mother.

Not sure if it was meant to be a question, Lydia nodded.

“I no speak,” she said, apologetically. “My son—you love?”

She nodded.

The old woman smiled for the first time, rose from her rocking chair and busied herself at the range, pulling out a dusty bottle of something and pouring them each a small glass.

Milan didn’t speak, apparently waiting for his mother to set the mood.

She turned to Lydia. “He…” she said, then she pointed to her heart and made a violent movement, signifying its splitting in two.

“I’m sorry,” said Lydia automatically.

“You? No. Him.”

“She’s still angry with me,” translated Milan. “But I think I can work on her. I think she’s pleased to see me, in her heart.”

“I can go back to the hotel, if you want to be left alone together…”

“No, it’s fine. Really.”

They sat at the small table and drank something that tasted of apricots with a fiery kick, while Milan and his mother continued to pour out streams of rapid Czech. Lydia tried her best not to feel like a spare part but was nonetheless relieved when, after an hour of this, Milan’s mother got up and opened the front door.

She nodded at Lydia, then drew her son into a tight embrace. Lydia was so moved by this she almost burst into tears.

“Is everything okay, then?” she whispered, not sure if she should break Milan’s meditative state as they descended the stairs. “Are you forgiven?”

“Maybe,” said Milan. “I told her to come to the concert tomorrow—to come backstage. We can talk about her moving to London. She didn’t say no.”

“That’s wonderful. Really wonderful. I’m so happy for you.”

He stopped at the foot of the stairs and looked at her.

“Are you? You really care?”

“Of course I do.”

He slung an arm around her shoulder, walking back into the street with her.

“I’m glad I met you,” he said.

She wanted to burst with happiness, here in the middle of this grimy urban street.

“Now, I owe Cervenka a drink, then we can continue with our tour, yes?”

“Yes.”

As she watched the sunset over the River Vltava from the Charles Bridge, Lydia felt that she had found her ideal of perfect happiness, right here in Prague with Milan. He stood behind her, his chin resting on her shoulder, his hands clasped beneath her ribs, whispering magical tales of Czech folklore directly into her ear. On her right towered the castle and cathedral, and on her left the bridge disappeared into the seething cobbled streets of the Old Town. Ahead, pleasure boats cruised lazily up and down the river, lit up with strings of bulbs while the faint strains of jazz bands drifted up from under the bridge.

Since the meeting with his mother, Milan had seemed different—lighter, younger. It was as if he didn’t have to put on the mask of the charismatic virtuoso, and could just
be
. She thought perhaps he would be like this all the time if they stayed in Prague and let the orchestra go home. She daydreamed of a future for them, living in a beautiful town house with his mother, playing together in the Czech Symphony Orchestra. She would have to learn Czech, which wouldn’t be easy…but Milan would teach her.

“What if I stayed here?” he said, breaking into her thoughts with such prescience, Lydia wondered if he had read her mind.

“I think it would be good for you,” she said. “You seem so happy now. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you happy before.”

“I’m happy when I’m with you,” he said, with a jarring touch of false gallantry.

“Don’t. I’m serious.”

“So am I. What would you think, if I stayed?”

“If it was what you wanted, I would accept that. You have to do what’s best for you.”

“You are very special, Lydia. I don’t think anyone’s ever cared about me in that way before. It’s always been about what people can get from me. Fun, excitement, patronage, sex.”

“That’s not true. Everyone’s in love with you, and you know it.”

“Not the right kind of love. Not like you.”

A golden shaft of late sunlight rippled on the river’s surface. Lydia watched it break up and reform, mesmerised, feeling that she would always remember the sights and the sounds of this moment.

“You don’t fawn all over me like the others,” he continued. “If you think I’m doing something wrong, you tell me. You don’t join in like everyone else does. You challenge me. Nobody else does that.”

“Somebody has to, or your rampant ego would run away with you.”

He laughed.

“You know me.”

“I love you.”

“I know. If I stayed, what would you do?”

She looked up at him. What did he want her to say? Did he want her to offer to stay with him? Or did he just want a declaration of mad love, to satisfy his aforementioned ego? He seemed to want honesty tonight. Should she take that risk?

“If you stayed here…I’d find it hard to go back to London.”

“What if you didn’t have to?”

Is this real?

“If I didn’t have to? If I could stay with you?”

He nodded. His irises skidded from right to left, as if he was terrified she would give the wrong answer.

“It would be a huge decision,” she said. He wanted honesty. He would get it. “But I think…I could live here.”

“Really?” He smiled boyishly and hugged her close.

“Really.”

He kissed her neck, then drew her away from the parapet, linking her arm in his while they passed the sketch artists and ukulele players, the bangle sellers and jugglers. It was a wrench to leave that low-lit river, but if anything could lure her away it was the thought of going back to the hotel with Milan.

The church bells were chiming eight o’clock as they entered the lobby and crossed to the lift. No tactical breaking of their embrace tonight—from now on, it seemed they were ‘officially’ a couple. A couple of flautists came out of the elevator, passing them as they went in, and scampered off, whispering. As soon as the doors shut, Lydia and Milan fell into a passionate kiss that lasted all the way to the top floor.

“Stay with me tonight,” he whispered, opening his door and whirling her round and round the room until she fell backwards, laughing, onto the bed.

She wanted to remember everything about this night, from the tiny cracks around the ceiling cornicing to the way Milan’s muscles moved in his face, his skin stretching and slackening over his jaw and cheekbones while he mock-pounced on her. She wanted to remember the placement of each strand of unruly hair, the exact blue shade of his eyes, the length of his neck and the V of his skin that was exposed when she undid the top button of his shirt. The bed creaked and some of the orange-brown, swirly wallpaper had peeled, but no room had ever held such promise and such joy—and such desire.

Milan dropped off the edge of the bed and removed each of Lydia’s shoes with a dramatic flourish, hurling them to the far corner of the room, then repeating the action with her socks. After diving back on the bed with a springing movement, ending in a low crouch over Lydia’s body, he unbuttoned her jeans and began to shimmy them slowly over her hips. Helping him out, Lydia arched her spine with an inviting smile. All of this was his—all of it could be his forever, if he wanted.

He uncovered her legs reverently, letting the denim slide slowly over inch after inch of thigh, then down past her knees, speeding up to rip them off her ankles and toss them aside. She opened her legs like scissors and clamped his hips, yanking him down with her heels on his buttocks for a long, lascivious kiss. They lay like that, feeding on each other’s mouth, for a long time. Lydia felt him grow and harden at the apex of her thighs, his erection pushing down and begging to be let inside her pussy lips, although they were protected by her knickers. She rubbed her heels up and down his arse in delight, loving the feel of his clothes against her skin. His kiss, always voracious, was also tender, and Lydia sensed that he wanted her to understand and receive his passion as a promise, a solemn vow of togetherness. Once she had allowed herself to hope, it was easy to slip into the consciousness of love and of being loved. Yes, there was a future here, at last, and yes, she meant to seize it.

He curled his fingers under the hem of her hoodie, one he professed to hate with the orchestra logo across the front, and before she knew it he’d slid his hands up her ribcage and lifted the garment over her arms and head, leaving her in no more than her underwear. She writhed beneath him, plucking at his shirt buttons, wanting to equalise their footing, but he took her wrist and held it down above her head, lording it over her for one heady moment before unbuttoning the shirt himself with his other hand.

The cotton flapped over her stomach and ribs, caressing the slopes of her breasts, until he released her so he could shrug it off completely, exposing broad shoulders, muscular arms and the precise definition of his chest. Lydia worshipped him with her eyes, mouth watering at the way his belt sat on his hips below a tight stomach, drawing her eye lower. He smirked down at her, revealing his awareness of the power he held over her, and held her breasts, using his thumbs to peel away the bra cups. Her nipples popped up, red and ready for him, and he circled them with languorous fingers, licking them now and again, building the sensation within her up and up while she shut her eyes and let it take her over.