The Last Weekend (21 page)

‘About Milo.’

Though the answer was no surprise, I couldn’t hide my dismay. ‘Oh.’

‘It’s finished. The marriage, our relationship, the lot. I’d no idea. I assumed everything was OK. Don’t look at me like that, Ian.’

I wasn’t conscious of looking like anything.

‘I thought he was your client.’

‘He is. Was. That’s all over with.’

‘He just ended things between you?’

‘Yes. He’s off to New York.’

‘I’m sure you’ll find someone else to take his place,’ I said, as unsarcastically as I could.

‘Of course. There are dozens of good art directors in London. But it’s upsetting. I’ll miss him terribly.’

‘So what does he do for you that Ollie can’t?’

‘Don’t be silly — Ollie isn’t an artist.’

‘Oh, so it’s because Milo’s an artist that you’ve been sleeping with him.’

‘Sleeping
with him? Where did you get that idea?’

‘He just ended your relationship. You said so.’

‘Our
business
relationship. It’s he and Bianca who have broken up.’

‘What?’

‘She was only meant to be going home to the States for a
month. But things have been difficult for some time apparently and now she’s announced she’s staying. She’s found a flat in Brooklyn, and a school for the girls. Milo says he’s going to find a job and move nearby, so they can share childcare.’

‘It makes sense. So why the tears?’

‘I know it’s silly. But he’s a good friend. Bianca too. It always upsets me when friends break up.’

I took her hand to hide my impatience. To cry over someone like Milo would have been indulgent at any time but it was especially so now, with Ollie terminally ill. But she didn’t know about the tumour, of course, and Ollie had sworn me not to tell.

‘Those poor little girls,’ she said.

‘Kids are resilient,’ I said, stroking her arm.

‘It’s sad all the same.’

If Daisy was so worried about kids being fucked up by their parents, she should look closer to home. But rather than say this, I kept stroking her arm.

‘Let me get you a drink,’ I said eventually.

‘I’ve drunk too much already.’

‘I’ll take that as a yes.’

I fetched two clean wine glasses from the kitchen.

‘Turn the lights off, will you?’ she said.

I sat at the opposite end on the sofa, with my back to the armrest, just like her. Our knees were bent and our feet were touching. The only light in the room was moonlight.

‘I can’t believe you thought I was sleeping with Milo,’ she said, more teasing than indignant.

‘He’s obviously attracted to you.’

‘Is he?’

‘Any man would be.’

‘Ah, now you’re being
gallant.’

‘I mean it,’ I said. ‘You know that.’

‘Yes. You’re very loyal. To me as well as Em.’

I wasn’t used to her flirting with me. Nor to her slurring her words. But I would not have said she was drunk.

‘I’m pleased you and Em are happy together,’ she said.

‘We are.’ I wasn’t going to mention the children issue. Or money problems. Or my occasional visits to websites.

‘I used to worry about you,’ she said. ‘But things have turned out all right. Come and give me a hug.’

Or perhaps I was the one who suggested the hug. It doesn’t matter either way. We’d been friends for over twenty years, and the hug was simply to celebrate that. But because Daisy was lying against the armrest, finding a position to hug her from was tricky. She seemed ready to sit up to make it easier, but instead I gently slid her towards me, and shoved her bottom towards the sofa back, and lay down next to her, so that we were together on our sides, just as we used to be on her narrow student bed, with each of us looking over the other’s shoulder: a cheerful, tender, horizontal embrace. She was the one facing out and, firmly though I pressed into her, I felt in danger of falling backwards onto the floor, and for some reason — all that wine probably — I found this funny. My laughter wasn’t out-loud but she registered the tremor through my body.

‘What’s the joke?’ she said.

‘I’m about to fall off.’

‘We’d better sit up, then.’

‘No, if you just shift and …’

The only shifting possible was for her to slide outwards and down, and me clamber inwards and up, and though the manoeuvre wasn’t complex I found it awkward to effect, in part because I knew how we would end up, with me lying on top and her legs parted to accommodate me, a posture which would have shocked the other people in the house if they had
seen us. Still, she didn’t seem especially embarrassed by my shuffling movements, and even managed to tilt her head forward and drink from the glass which, despite lying flat, she’d hung on to and kept from spilling — further evidence, to me, that she couldn’t be drunk.

‘Oh, I do love you,’ I said, speaking a truth but also parodying what people in our position traditionally say as a prelude to sex.

‘Dear Ian,’ she said, ‘you’re a good friend.’

Encouraged, I kissed her, chastely, on the brow, then no less chastely on each cheek, and nibbled her ears, which she refused to reciprocate, but she did grab my nose and waggle it, saying ‘Nice big nose', and at that point I thought she must be drunk, because her eyes were closed, with a dreamy expression across her face, but I did also wonder if in saying ‘Nice big nose’ she meant to acknowledge she could feel what was happening in my groin, and as I kissed her on the chin (the last safe place I could think of) I decided she must have meant it, or couldn’t not now be aware. Her eyes were still closed, happily, trustingly, almost as if she’d dropped off, and this gave me the courage to do the next thing, which was to kiss her lips, actually only one corner of her upper lip, but her eyes stayed shut so I kissed the opposite corner, and then each corner of the lower lip, at which point, feeling her stiffen, I thought about stopping — perhaps the friendly hugs had gone far enough. Except that she then seemed to relax again, so I kissed her some more, not lightly, either, and after that, or after my next kiss full on her lips, or the one after that, with my tongue in her mouth, or without a shadow of doubt after the kiss on her stomach when I’d pulled up her dress, there was no possibility of our stopping, not me anyway, not her either I’m sure, though she did say no, sharply, and push my chest as if to force me upward, but that no, and the subsequent noes,
three or four of them, were reflex rather than genuine (belated attempts to prevent what she wanted to happen from happening) and I found them easy to stifle, and if her final noisy guilt-struck no, accompanied by a bite to my shoulder while her nails raked down my back, was certainly not lacking conviction, I sensed its purpose was to excite us both further, to add to our passion rather than offer resistance. I kept on going to the end, feeling her body quake beneath me in the aftermath, not because she was crying but because — I assumed — she too had come. The thought of Em, sleeping alone in all innocence upstairs, might normally — normally! — have taken the edge off my pleasure. But I felt triumphant, heroic, physically renewed, a shimmery gym-mirror version of myself, and, rather than recoiling, I gripped her tighter and kissed her some more, as if to resuscitate her. She had gone limp now, sad and rag-doll-like, defeated by her own desire. Once or twice she tried to push me off, not I think because she disliked the weight of me on her but from embarrassment. When I couldn’t be budged she lay still again. At some point she reached for a tissue, and threaded it between her thighs, a gesture that made me kiss her on the cheek, the flow between us still strong as we lay there in the knowledge of what we had done, our hearts beating together and our legs intertwined, a position we’d not have altered for some time had we not heard footsteps on the gravel beyond the house, and immediately afterwards a key turning in the door along the corridor.

It’s strange what spurts into your head when you’re having sex. All the stranger in this case, since the memory, though an episode from university, did not involve Daisy.

One weekend during our second year, a friend of Ollie’s from boarding school — Toby I think he was called — came up to stay. They left me out of their various outings but I was
fine with that: we all compartmentalise, and if one of my old school friends had come to visit me I would have done the same. Still, as it happened, I did run into Toby. On the Saturday night, the sound of voices in the kitchen drew me down from the bedroom, and there, next to Ollie, on a high stool, was a stocky, red-haired young man drinking coffee out of my turquoise mug. Though Ollie looked far from pleased to see me, Toby insisted I join them, which I did, helping myself to coffee in another mug, which was old and cracked, but carefully controlling my temper. (It’s typical of Ollie that, despite the earlier episode with Yukio, he’d simply not noticed Toby using my mug.) I’d been expecting some wealthy curled darling but was pleasantly surprised by Toby’s geniality; he seemed almost relieved to see me, as if a weekend spent with Ollie was proving a strain. I must have stayed talking for an hour, and would have stayed longer but for an awkwardness that arose when we discussed their boarding school. I forget what led up to it, but having confirmed that Toby had been a prefect — or ‘monitor’ as they called them — I made some joke about the likes of him and me not being ‘head boy material', with a meaningful nod at Ollie. Toby looked bemused for a second then flushed brick-red. Ollie quickly changed the subject. I made my excuses soon afterwards, aware I’d made some gaffe or spoken out of turn. Ollie didn’t allude to the episode afterwards, except to comment that Toby was a good bloke, but like all gingers (a word he pronounced with two hard ‘g’s) quick-tempered and jealous. I inferred that Toby had been desperate to become head boy himself — and that my remark had annoyed him by rubbing it in. Perhaps he even thought that Ollie had been sneering at him behind his back, and that my comment was a pre-planned joke at his expense. You can never underestimate people’s paranoia. I began to see why Ollie valued his friendship with me.

Later, as I came to know Ollie better, I saw the episode could be interpreted differently. What if Toby had flushed red from embarrassment at seeing his friend caught out? That’s to say, what if Ollie had lied to me about being head boy? Parts of his past didn’t quite hang together. Hearing him boast of his military adventures to Daisy, who rather than mock (just as we had mocked the gap-year vets) hung on his every word, I sometimes wondered if his time at Sandhurst had been quite so colourful, supposing he’d been there at all. His claim to have bought the very MG his father had once owned seemed a story in the same mould — more wishful thinking than reality.

Perhaps that’s why the memory of Toby came back to me in Badingley. And Daisy wasn’t quite as peripheral to the story as I implied. In fact, the reason Ollie was entertaining Toby that weekend was that Daisy had gone home to see her parents in Leeds. And the reason she’d gone home was to placate them, after a terrible scene a couple of weekends before. As Daisy tells it, Mr and Mrs Brabant turned up unannounced at her hall of residence at ten o’clock on a Sunday morning. Normally at that time Mrs Brabant would have been in church, confessing her sins, but Daisy’s were the sins preoccupying her that day, specifically the sin of premarital sex. She and Ollie weren’t caught in the act, but when he emerged from where he was hiding in the bathroom Daisy couldn’t deny that he’d spent the night there. Her mother called her a lewd minx who’d be damned in Hell. Her father called Ollie a rutting goat who’d ruined his daughter. According to Daisy, what shut them up was Ollie saying how deeply he loved her and that he hoped to marry her if she’d only consent. According to Ollie, what did it was his public-school accent: a lordly sentence or two and the Brabants were tugging their forelocks. Within the hour, they scurried back to Leeds, where Daisy went to visit
them two weeks later, to show that, whatever her sins, she was still a dutiful daughter.

She was of course mystified as to what had brought them in the first place. Intuition was my suggestion. But Ollie thought an anonymous letter or phone call more likely, and Daisy wondered whether someone had it in for them both, perhaps the next-door neighbour in her hall of residence who sometimes banged on the wall during their lovemaking. Whatever the reality, the stunt backfired. Rather than being driven apart, Ollie and Daisy drew closer, and have remained together — utterly loyal to each other — ever since.

Utterly loyal as far as I know. (You never do know, do you?)

Loyal until Badingley, when Daisy gave her body to me and these memories came surging back.

Snapped on, the chandelier hit us like a spotlight.

‘Archie! What are you doing?’

‘I could ask you the same question, Mum.’

‘I’m sitting here with Ian, as you can see.’

‘Hi, Ian.’

I would have preferred an ‘Uncle Ian', but perhaps he was getting too old for that.

‘Hi, Archie.’

‘It’s three in the morning, Mum. You never stay up this late.’