There was another page of her longhand with its lean tadpole Fs and refined seahorse Ss, as if the lines were living and shining:
Sweetheart—four weeks of not seeing you and yet it feels so natural to call you sweetheart. Please forgive me for racing off on you the way I did. I had to. I had to cool off. I don’t know what more to say except I want to see you again.
I was going to fly home from Frankfurt, but maybe I could go through London instead. Can I stay with you? I will ring you in a few days. Will it be easy to have you come to the phone? If it’s not I will leave a number and hope you feel like calling.
Do take care. Speak soon.
I wouldn’t put it past the future to have ears. Massive ears so it can listen in on phone calls and assess if two people are matching up. The measurement for success I bet is giggly standardised language: plenty of How have you been? and I wish you were here and I miss you. If the future was listening to Tilda and me it would have thought we were coming along nicely. From the first phone call we used sweetheart instead of our names. There were numerous pauses for sighing. We hadn’t even finished the call and we were looking ahead to another one the next day.
Tilda was in Amsterdam. I was in limbo. I said I was moving on to better employment. I didn’t know what employment that might be but I glossed over this using an optimistic air, big-noting myself that I could do anything I put my mind to.
‘If you can conquer RADA, you certainly can do anything,’ said Tilda.
Chapter 16
There should be a town called Comeuppance. There probably is, where others like me go. My Comeuppance town ended up being Scintilla. We’ll get there soon, but first there’s Amsterdam.
And before Amsterdam there were five more sweetheart and sighing phone calls. Whispery darlings were added, and kiss-sounds when we said goodbye. I’d run out of big-noting—I was too busy thinking about Tilda to scour London for a job more prestigious. Those phone calls with her were the central focus of my days.
‘You need a break, darling. Why not come here and be with me,’ she said. She had a pension room all to herself near the Van Gogh Museum. She had ‘an appetite’, which is love talk for mad lust. I had it too, so strong an urging it could only be permanent.
Chapter 17
I can’t sit calmly at my nook desk if I’m to commit Amsterdam to the page. I have to stand up and walk around between lines. There I am: I have just landed, am about to be queued and stamped through the airport doors.
My blood is sprinting in-out of my heart. I am a few seconds from seeing Tilda. Even now, these eight years later, after all that has come to pass, my blood sprints in anticipation. I push my chair out and bounce on my toes. I wave as if seeing her among the hugging and handshaken greetings of others. I pace the elation out, one circuit around my nook. But I do it softly or else the floorboards creak and Tilda calls out complaints from her studio. My floor is her ceiling. It disturbs her concentration, my creaking. To paint is to need silence to order your thoughts and summon inspiration. Could I please pay her the courtesy of silence, for she has lost so much time? There is so much time to make up.
Floorboards are my enemy. But not the rickety stairs. The old wood there is friends with me should Tilda suddenly appear. The slightest footstep and my friend sets off his creak-alarm, my warning to hide these pages immediately and quickly wind other paper into my typewriter.
My short-notice hiding place is under the desk’s tablecloth. I keep a pile of books handy to stack on top. From there I transfer them, once Tilda is gone, to places in the walls around me. The architraves are loose and skew-whiff enough to tuck pages behind and tap the wood shut like a secret compartment. I don’t trust Tilda not to go through my things. Hiding places have become essential.
So I walk softly. And although my heart may be sprinting I sit down and close my eyes. I puff my cheeks out to get my breath back. I light a cigarette and jerk the window open to blow the smoke out the slit.
Tilda had hired someone to take us to her pension by car. ‘Look at that.’ She pointed to the night’s colours in canals, street lamps dancing pinkly in water. I couldn’t have cared less about Amsterdam’s canals. I wanted my hands all over her, starting just above the knee and working up, but she wriggled and pushed me off. ‘The driver,’ she smiled and frowned. She shrugged my lips from her neck skin. She glanced at the rear-vision mirror to shoo the driver’s eyes from our play.
I slumped along the back seat in mock rejection. Pressed my knees against her thigh to cork it gently in punishment. I sprang up and kissed her ear deep into its wax bitters.
‘Don’t.’ Her protesting was not about the driver anymore. She put her palm on my chest, held it there, a fence of fingers. ‘I’m sorry if I’m standoffish, but I’m shy. It’s natural. I haven’t seen you in weeks, and I think: Is it going to be the same between us?’
‘You’re confusing me. Have you got cold feet?’
‘No. No. Let’s wait till we get to our room. There’s something that might dampen your enthusiasm.’ She moved the fence to my mouth. She re-pointed to the canal colours. ‘Aren’t they gorgeous?’
I replied yes, sarcastically. Yes, the moon is very…moony. Yes, the water is…watery.
After a squabble with the pension manager we climbed the steep spiral to number 12. He wanted my passport for safekeeping. His safekeeping, not mine. ‘You young people don’t pay and one morning—phut! You are gone.’ I gave him my passport to speed up getting onto those stairs.
The room had a low double bed covered by a black eiderdown with windmill embroidery. Window glass was the headrest. Through the glass was a ledge with red and green flowers in a planter box.
‘Look at that,’ Tilda said, kneeling on the bed. ‘Across the street. You wonder how the whole façade keeps standing.’ She was referring to a row of bulging buildings, cracked from the ages and kept from toppling by telegraph poles propped against them.
‘Yes, it’s fascinating,’ I said. I knelt beside her, positioning myself to catch her lips with my lips when she turned. Sweet poison dripped through me. She turned and, lip to lip, we spoke into each other’s mouths.
‘Wait,’ she said.
‘For what?’ I fingered under her jumper, arms wedging open the wool. I fingered a layer of cotton singlet to ungoggle the bra wire from her breasts. She bit my bottom lip with her kiss. Her man arms were quivering. The taut skins of her ribs and drum belly were quivering. I was quivering too. She had hardly touched me with more than her mouth but that was enough to pluck my nervous system like a thumb.
The ungoggling went smoothly; so too unbuckling her belt—one of those seatbelt arrangements that snapped together instead of a spur and hole. But when I slid my flattened hand down her fly-front she jackknifed away just as I reached the saliva parting. My wrist was locked between her legs—I had to shimmy after her as she jumped off the bed or risk a dislocation. She held my wrist in her hands as if I needed controlling. ‘That’s the thing I needed to tell you. My period has arrived. I hoped it might start tapering off by now. It’s tomato soup down there.’
‘So?’
‘So it’s a mess.’
‘So?’
‘So it’s not attractive.’
‘I’m used to blood.’
‘Ay?’