Seven Scarlet Tales (20 page)

‘That’s a good point,’ said Rob. ‘Lucy’s here to learn. I suggest you go up before we’re tempted to take Allyson up on her idea. Oh, but which room?’

‘I’ve put you three in the big bed upstairs,’ said Allyson. ‘I’ll take the sofa bed down here. Blake’s on the air mattress over by the fire. You’d better not snore, Blake.’

‘I’d better not drink much more then,’ said Blake, putting down his glass.

‘Run along then, madam,’ said Richard, helping Lucy up and on her way with a smart smack to her bottom.

‘Ow,’ she protested, but she didn’t try to argue, knowing better than that by now.

She climbed the stairs, looking down at them reproachfully before disappearing from view.

‘So, then, Rob,’ said Allyson, returning to her interrogation. ‘If you aren’t on the scene, how did you get into this? Have you been doing it long?’

‘Oh, you want my story?’ said Rob.

‘Please.’

‘Well, all right then. It all started in my PhD year when I was sharing a house with some other students …’

Everybody asked him how he’d done it. How he’d managed to get himself lodged in a house with three female flatmates.

The guys at the pub toasted him, lost in admiration, but they didn’t know how difficult it was for him. OK, not difficult so much as awkward.

Their boyfriends – for they all had one, gallingly enough – regarded him with suspicion. All the women he came into contact with assumed he was either seeing one or other of
his flatmates, or that he was gay. It was shagging suicide. He didn’t get laid for six months, even though he was good-looking, and personable, and popular.

Then came the day that he returned home from the library to find Ruth, his favourite flatmate, sobbing as she peeled vegetables over the kitchen sink.

‘What’s up?’ he asked, though as a rule he tried to avoid this kind of thing, heading to his room if there was a whiff of it in the air. But today he happened to be hungry and he knew that there was cold pizza in the fridge, so the peril must be faced.

‘Do you think I’m a lazy slob?’ she asked, sniffing madly.

‘Do I? No. God, no.’

Actually, she was, a bit. Nothing terrible, though. Frankly, she was about as untidy as he was, in terms of leaving mugs under the bed for weeks on end and empty DVD cases all over the floor. But it wasn’t that bad, was it? It wasn’t up to
How Clean Is Your House
levels. Yet.

And she’d never peeled a vegetable before. This was new. She had PickupaPizza on speed dial, just as he did.

But he worked harder than she did. Ruth rarely got out of bed before two in the afternoon, and was constantly making horrified remarks about how behind she was with her PhD studies. She spent half the week at her boyfriend’s place, and the other half mooching around the house watching
Cash In The Attic
. Rob privately thought she should get a job if she wasn’t interested in the academic side of things, but of course if he said that it would be furiously debated and held against him for all time. He wasn’t her supervisor. It wasn’t his problem.

She wasn’t his vision of a slob, though – she had nice nails and she dressed well, if a little outrageously sometimes – so
he wasn’t being entirely untruthful when he repudiated the suggestion. And she was sweet. And a bit sexy. Who in their right mind would call a sweet, sexy girl a slob?

‘Did someone say you were?’

He took the cold pizza from the fridge and munched on it, enjoying its chewy, stale texture.

A fresh burst of tears greeted his question. He waited patiently for them to subside.

‘Dave,’ she said.

‘He didn’t! Have you split up then?’ A flicker of optimism. If Ruth was single, then …

‘No, we haven’t. I don’t think so. I’m not sure.’

‘Why did he say it?’

‘Had a meeting with my supervisor this morning.’

‘You mean you got up in the
morning
?’

‘Fuck off! You’re as bad as him.’ She half-turned, brandishing the peeler.

He backed away.

‘Sorry. Go on.’

‘Supervisor said I was in danger of being kicked out. I went to see Dave for a bit of moral support and comfort, and he said my supervisor was right and I should pull my socks up and stop being a lazy slob.’

‘The bastard.’ But Rob’s heart wasn’t in it. Dave had a point, really.

‘Do you think so?’ More woe poured from Ruth’s eyes, and nose, and dripped into the vegetable water. Rob thought he might give dinner a miss tonight.

‘Well, don’t you?’

‘No. I think he’s right. I want to be better. I want to get back on track with my PhD. I want to have a lovely room and cook healthy meals and all that jazz. I just don’t know how.’

‘Oh.’

Rob hadn’t expected to find Ruth on the road to Damascus. He had expected denial and indignation, followed by a resumption of the status quo. He supposed he ought to offer her his support.

‘Do you? Do you know how?’

‘Um, what does Dave think?’

‘He thinks I should just somehow
know
all this organisation and domestic type stuff – like it’s innate to women.’

‘Sexist bastard.’

‘Do you think so?’

‘Yeah. I do. But he’s right to say you can’t carry on like this.’

‘That’s what I thought. So what can I
do
? Ouch!’

Her peeling had reached such a pitch of savagery that she had sliced the implement into her finger, and bright red blood gushed at an alarming rate out on to her skin.

‘Shit, are you OK?’ Rob darted forward and grabbed her wrist, holding her finger under the running tap.

‘You see?’ wailed Ruth, and the tears made an unwelcome reappearance. ‘I’m useless. I can’t even peel a vegetable. According to Dave that makes me a shit woman and a waste of planetary space. I hate myself!’

‘Don’t be silly,’ scolded Rob, waiting for the blood to thin, and fade, and stop flowing. ‘Have we got a first aid box?’

‘In the bathroom cabinet.’

‘Hold your finger there. I’ll go and get you a plaster.’

He turned around in the kitchen doorway.

‘Don’t move,’ he reiterated, pointing at her to reinforce the order.

When he came back and applied the plaster, she was looking at him in a doe-eyed kind of way, if doe eyes were red and teary.

‘Never seen you like that before,’ she said.

‘Like what?’ He fixed the plaster in place and gave her a brief smile.

‘All forceful and efficient. Like Julian in the Famous Five.’

He laughed out loud.

‘I always had a bit of a thing for Julian, even though he was a patronising twat,’ she said. ‘But I didn’t like Anne. What a fucking drip. I saw myself more as George.’

‘I see myself more as Dick. Sorry.’

But she had burst into laughter and he joined in with her and then, on impulse, pulled her into him for a hug.

‘Oh.’ That was a sigh. She was sighing. And she felt gorgeous in his arms, all soft and yielding.

‘Sorry,’ he said again, although he wasn’t sure why.

‘Don’t be sorry. I needed this.’

She pulled her face away from his shoulder and looked up at him, in a kind of shy, expectant way that made his heart twitch.

‘Maybe you could help me,’ she said.

‘Could I?’

Maybe I could kiss you. Is that what you want? Or would that be sexual assault, or abuse of male privilege, or … Oh, fuck it, it’s too difficult. And Dave!

‘Yeah.’ She chewed her lip for a moment, and Rob thought he could see an inner demon trying to fight its way out. ‘No,’ she said eventually. ‘It’s a stupid idea. I’m sorry.’

‘No, tell me,’ he said.

She shut her eyes. ‘Make me,’ she whispered.

‘What?’

‘That tone you took before. I couldn’t argue with that. You could ask me to do anything.’

Rob’s eyes widened. He could use his voice to wield
power? Well, there was a thought. It had always been the case that people tended to do as he asked; he was just that kind of person. It wasn’t bossiness, more a clear idea of what needed doing and the firm intention of getting it done. The idea that a girl might find it … Did she? Did she find it arousing? Did he turn her on when he ordered her around?

‘OK,’ he said firmly. ‘You’re going to tell me whatever this thing is.’

‘Maybe not in the kitchen,’ she demurred.

‘Your room or mine?’

‘Mine, I guess. No, it’s a mess. Yours.’

Rob’s room wasn’t a great deal tidier, the bed unmade and a tottering pile of books adorning the centre of the floor, but it had a desk chair to sit in, and he pulled up a squashy footstool so that Ruth could crouch at his feet. This seemed to suit the dynamic admirably, and she made no protest, so he crossed his feet at the ankles, steepled his fingers and raised an eyebrow.

‘Well?’

‘I can’t,’ she said, crimson of cheek.

‘You can, and you will. I won’t let it drop now. Tell me what’s on your mind.’

‘Oh, you’re going to make me,’ she said, with a little tremble in her voice that owed more to pleasure than fear. ‘Aren’t you?’ She glanced hopefully up at him.

He nodded, face perfectly straight.

‘Oh God,’ she fluttered, and then, sotto voce, ‘Why can’t Dave be like this?’

Because Dave’s not the right man for you.

Her chest was heaving like nobody’s business. He had an urge to grab her by the elbow and just … He had to shake it out of his head.

‘OK,’ she said. ‘This is going to sound weird.’

‘Weird’s fine with me. Go on.’

‘I want to be better at, you know, life in general. Tidier, more organised, on top of things. I’ve got so many bad habits I don’t know where to start. I thought it might be easier if I had a, like, kind of, like, a mentor.’

‘A mentor? Like a supervisor?’

‘Yeah,’ she said eagerly, ‘except for general stuff, not my PhD. Someone to check that my room’s tidy, and bills are paid, and there’s decent food in the fridge and, you know, just keep me on track.’

‘Keep you on track?’ Rob smiled. He couldn’t help it. He could see where this was going, and he liked it a lot.

‘Take charge,’ said Ruth, and her voice was barely there, though the eye contact certainly was.

‘Take charge of you?’

‘Yeah.’ She swallowed and looked at the door. ‘Sorry, it’s a stupid idea. I know you’re busy and I don’t want to impose.’

She half-clambered to her feet, but he put out a hand.

‘No, no, no,’ he said. ‘Don’t move.’

She subsided back on to the beanbag.

‘Give me a minute to think about this,’ he said.

She sat looking at the floor while he turned the proposition over in his mind.

‘What about Dave?’ he said.

‘What about him?’

‘What about him? You’re doing this for him, aren’t you?’

‘No. He’s just the catalyst. What he said has made me think seriously about how I want to change, that’s all.’

‘But you want to change because you
lurve
him and you want to make him proud of you?’ Rob couldn’t keep a note of bitterness from his voice.

‘I don’t love him. I’ve never been in love with him. He’s just … I dunno.’

‘There?’

‘Yeah. He’s just there. Shit, that sounds bad.’

No, it doesn’t. Give it a little more thought, just enough to persuade you to dump him.

‘Not really. Since you’re reorganising your life, and he’s part of it, you should think about whether you want him in it. He called you a lazy slob, Ruthie. Whether you agree with him or not, that’s not a very nice thing to say. Is it?’

‘No, I suppose.’

‘You wouldn’t say a thing like that to somebody you were meant to care about, would you?’

‘No.’

‘Well then.’

‘Oh God, this is so difficult. Do you really think I should dump him?’

‘Sounds like he wants you to. If he’s talking to you like that.’

‘You’re right. Yes. You’re right. Oh, God.’

‘Anyway,’ said Rob, not wanting thoughts of Dave to take up any more time than was strictly necessary, ‘whatever you decide, you want me to, uh, take you in hand. So to speak. Is that right?’

‘Mmm.’ She seemed to enjoy his turn of phrase, shutting her eyes and sighing gustily. ‘In hand.’

She looked at his hands and he couldn’t help following suit. He liked his hands. They were good, strong, capable but attractive. He flexed his fingers, admiring them, then felt a twinge of embarrassment at his vanity and coughed.

‘I don’t have any objection to that,’ he said. ‘But you need to make me a list of the things you want me to take charge of. You’ve said tidiness, finances, diet. Anything else?’

‘Don’t let me slack off when I say I’m going in to the university. Make me get up at nine at the latest. Um, you know, that kind of thing.’

‘OK. So far, so easy. But what if you don’t want to?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Ruth, I know you. If you don’t want to do something, you’ll come up with a million excuses and reasons why it’s best not to do it. I don’t want to spend ages arguing with you.’

‘I promise I won’t argue.’

‘Even if the power goes to my head and I start making totally unreasonable demands?’

She smirked. ‘What kind of unreasonable demands?’

‘I don’t know, yet. I don’t know how benign dictatorship is going to affect me. Maybe I’ll turn into a monster.’

‘That’s a chance I’m willing to take. Let’s start now. Tell me to do something. I’ll do it.’

She tidied her room, changed the bedding, washed all the old cups and plates.

For two days, Ruth was a busy bee and all Rob had to do was issue gentle reminders if she left a cup on the arm of her chair or switched on the TV five minutes before she was due to leave for the library.

The other housemates seemed to notice a subtle alteration in the atmosphere, but they couldn’t put their finger on it.

‘Aren’t you seeing Dave tonight?’ asked Kalaya, applying lipstick before dashing out to a meeting.

‘We’re on a break,’ said Ruth.

Kalaya and Lulu both whirled around.

‘Since when?’

‘Couple of days. Anyway, have a great night – I’ve got work to finish.’

She went upstairs.

‘Rob, do you know what’s come over her?’ asked Lulu in a confidential whisper. ‘She made dinner tonight and everything.’