Yes, he had been secretly looking at her, but it was actually Yvette who had asked him if he wanted to go out to the cinema, and a week or so later, when she had finally forgiven him for falling asleep, it was she who suggested that he visit her north London home. He could have said ‘no’ and not gone to the cinema with her, and he could have made up some plausible excuse and not visited her home. But he liked her and he wanted to sleep with her, and he was curious to know if she wanted to sleep with him, which it soon transpired she did. It was a bit much suggesting that he was the only one responsible. Rather than give voice to these thoughts, he deemed it best to leave while there was still some vestige of civility about their discussion. He pushed his glass away from himself, then slid from the barstool and started to edge his way towards the hallway.
‘Listen, it’s getting late so I’d better go.’
Yvette shook her head in disbelief.
‘So that’s it then, you want to just end it like this?’
He quickly licked his dry lips and then shrugged his shoulders. This degree of indignation was not something that he had anticipated.
‘Listen, let’s just leave it. We can talk about it later, okay? I probably need to do some thinking.’
Yvette held on to the counter top with both hands, and then she stepped down from the barstool and caterpillared her bare feet into her fluffy carpet slippers.
‘So what do you think’s going to happen now, Keith?’
‘Listen, Yvette, I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.’
‘Well you had better go then, hadn’t you.’
‘Look, I’m really sorry about everything.’
Yvette moved swiftly past him and into the hallway, where she yanked open the door.
‘Just fuck off, Keith. I don’t like being used. Colin tried and it didn’t work.’
He could hear birds twittering in the small front garden, and then a sputtering car attempted to change gears as it passed by. He looked into Yvette’s fiery green eyes, but it clearly didn’t make any sense to linger.
‘I’m sorry, Yvette. Really.’
He felt the rush of air behind him, and then he heard the crash of the door as it slammed shut. He stood still, shocked at the fury that he had unleashed. Carefully buttoning up his jacket against the early evening chill, he began to walk quickly back in the direction of the tube station.
The music has stopped, so he feels in his pocket for more change and then stands and crosses towards the jukebox. He selects the same artists, but different tracks, beginning with Bob Marley’s ‘Exodus’. He sits back in his corner and nurses the third of a pint that he still has in his glass, having decided not to bother topping it up with another half. The music is good, but there’s no escaping the fact that the pub is dismal. His mind revisits the problems of work, and the policy report on trans-racial adoption that his department is supposed to produce by the end of the week, and he shakes his head. After many years working in the Race Equality unit, during which time he has contributed to drawers and cabinets crammed with spurious material associated with countless quickly forgotten initiatives, he has no appetite left for reading, let alone producing, these meaningless policy reports. Twenty-five years ago, when he was leaving Bristol University, he thought differently. The urban insurrections, or riots as the media liked to call them, which punctuated his days as a student, convinced him that staying on and doing graduate work would almost certainly prove to be a frustrating waste of time. He already understood that while he would be bashing the books in the university library, out there on the streets there were youths who looked just like him who were being brutalised and beaten by Maggie Thatcher’s police. His generation of kids, who were born in Britain and who had no memory of any kind of tropical life before England, were clearly trying hard to make a space for themselves in a not always welcoming country. Back then that’s how it seemed to him, and that’s how he tried to explain it to Annabelle’s father when he and his wife took the young couple to dinner at the Madras Bicycle Club shortly before they graduated.
He had been warned, for when he and Annabelle went for coffee after the Tennessee Williams play, she had confessed to him that her father could be a ‘difficult’ man. She told her new friend that her father was an ex-army officer who had resigned his commission because he was distressed at having to associate with fellow officers who he regarded as being a cut below by birth, but who behaved as though they were a cut above by divine right. Her father had used his old school tie contacts and forged a successful career for himself in banking, but he had recently retired to the tranquillity of the countryside. ‘I’m it,’ she said, ‘the only child they were able to have so they dote on me, but they also kind of resent me a little for not being two, or even three, and that way they wouldn’t have had to put all their eggs in the potentially disappointing Annabelle basket. Of course, he wanted a boy, so the daddy’s little girl thing never really worked for me.’ He listened to Annabelle, but he found it difficult to hear anything that she was saying for he couldn’t take his eyes from her stunning, almost perfectly oval face. Her wispy brown hair was tied back with an elastic band, although unruly strands sprouted out from all sides so that the overall effect was a weird bohemian self-possession. When he entered into the second year of the sixth form he had a girlfriend of sorts, but that solitary relationship was more about sexual confidence-building than any kind of affection, or even attraction, and once he was accepted at university their friendship gradually petered out. For most of his first year at university his energies had been thoroughly invested in football and drinking, and the notion of pulling a bird seemed so vaguely remote that he spent a great deal of time affecting a lack of interest. However, from the moment during the interval of Sweet Bird of Youth when the girl looked up from her theatre programme and leaned across the empty seat between them and asked him if he was enjoying the play, he was intrigued. At the end of the performance, as they were both putting on their coats, he found the courage to ask her if she was a student, and she not only told him ‘yes’, she also scribbled down her name and the number of the phone in her hall of residence and handed the piece of paper to him saying, ‘I thought I was the only one who went to see Tennessee Williams’s plays on my own.’ As she smiled and turned to leave, he heard the words emerge of their own volition. ‘Would you like to have a coffee?’
Two days before the end of his first year at university, he waited for Annabelle outside Lecture Theatre One in the English department, and showed her the letter which effectively undid his summer plans. Despite Brenda’s urgings, he had consistently made it clear to her that he had no interest in spending the summer building any kind of a relationship with his father, for he felt that the effort should be coming in the other direction. In fact, he had already made plans to spend the late summer travelling around Europe on the trains. The university authorities had agreed that he could stay in the halls throughout the early summer, and so he had set himself up with a part-time job pumping petrol in a garage on the edge of the campus. He reckoned that by mid-August he would have saved enough money to fund a month of Inter-Railing, and perhaps have enough left over to be able to spend maybe another two weeks in Spain, or Portugal, or anywhere that was warm and cheap. After he and Annabelle had shared their first hot and stuffy night squeezed up tight in his single bed, he asked her if she wanted to join him ‘on the road’. She laughed and wondered if he was deliberately trying to sound like a hippie, but before he could answer she said ‘yes,’ she would love to join him but she would have to meet him in late August as her father had fixed up a job for her as a lowly dogsbody at the Wiltshire Times so she could acquire some journalism experience. However, just as he was beginning to feel happy and safe with their arrangements, everything came apart when he got the letter from Brenda. He walked over to the English department, and once Annabelle had read the letter he explained to her that this woman had pretty much raised him by herself and that if she needed his help then he had to be there for her as she didn’t really have anybody else in her life. Annabelle nodded and smiled. He assumed that she might be annoyed because he was changing their summer plans, but she slipped her arm through his and laughed. ‘Listen,’ she said, ‘we can do it next year. Europe will still be there. If she’s become ill then you must go and be with her. Maybe you could take me too, or maybe I can come and visit when it’s convenient?’