It wasn’t always like that, of course. Most of the time, it was just as it had been when it had been a bachelor flat, messy, cosy, a place to kick back and relax. Veronica did not fill the place with scented candles, cushions and flowers. She did only as much cleaning as he and Carl did – very little. With Veronica’s contribution, the already minimal rent had shrunk to something almost ridiculous. Occasionally Jake would feel guilty, especially when confronted with Mark’s moans about the state of the housing market. But he never felt guilty enough to move. Why would he move anywhere else when all he wanted was right here in this house?
They had a lot of fun, the three of them. They were young, comfortably off, good looking and healthy. They were nearly always out; beers after work in the old Victorian boozer three streets away; cocktails in Mayfair on a Friday night; languid, alcoholic Sunday afternoons in the gastro pub a tube stop away. There were parties, gatherings, summer barbeques; they spent hours slumped in cinema seats, lifting handfuls of popcorn to their mouths. They slouched around the Heath, smoked joints and, lying on a big tartan picnic rug, drank cans of sweet, fizzy cider.
They didn’t often have people round to Fever Street – they seemed to have an unspoken agreement that the house was just for the three of them. Sometimes, when Jake was home, and Carl was too, and they heard the click and thud of the door as Veronica walked in, there was almost a tangible, just-heard sigh of relief breathed by the house. Whenever they came through the front door, each one of them turned back to flip the lock before they moved away. World stay out. Carl, Jake and Veronica, stay in.
Before Veronica had moved in, Jake had allowed himself myriad fantasies. Veronica, surprised in the shower, glittering with water drops. Veronica, stumbling from her room on a Sunday morning, flushed and sleepy in her brushed cotton pyjamas and curling up on his bed to regale him with tales of her Saturday night. Veronica, swinging her narrow hips to Motown, as she prepared their dinner. None of these came to pass. The closest he got was when she was sitting next to him on the sofa, curled into the armrest, her legs tucked neatly beneath her. Carl was working late, immersed in some immeasurably boring finance deal. Jake was watching some piece of inanity of TV, pleasantly conscious of Veronica’s presence in the cosy, intimate warmth of the living room. He almost jumped as she suddenly shifted position, bringing her long narrow feet over to his legs. Disbelievingly, he felt her toes push under his thighs and flex themselves luxuriously against his jeans. He was almost immediately hard. He flicked a glance across to Veronica, not knowing what he was going to say.
She wasn’t even looking at him. Her head was bent, hair falling in a long golden sweep towards the glossy pages of her magazine.
“Sorry,” she murmured. “My feet are cold.”
“That’s okay.” His voice sounded quite normal.
She kept her feet there for the rest of the program, flexing her toes occasionally. After a while, Jake pulled discreetly at his jeans, hoping to ease the fabric that had bunched around his erection. He needed the toilet quite desperately by the time Carl came home but had been unable to get up, owing to the bulge in his jeans pointing outward like an accusing finger.
“Christ!”
Carl threw his briefcase across the floor of the living room and followed it with both of his shoes, eased and kicked off his feet as he moved. They scuttered across the boards like large black beetles, coming to rest against the legs of the coffee table. Veronica looked up, smoothing the hair back from her face.
“Hard day at the office?”
“You have no idea. The fucking muppets I work with…”
The rest of the sentence was lost in a hoof of exhaustion. Carl bent over his girlfriend and kissed her firmly on the mouth. Jake kept his eyes on the screen. His brother slung himself into an armchair, one long leg dangling nonchalantly over one arm. His black hair was raked back, thick with styling wax. It looks stupid, thought Jake treacherously and then berated himself for being an immature and jealous fool.
“What’ve we got to eat?”
Veronica smiled. “You know where the fridge is.”
“This is not good enough. I want my dinner on the table when I get home. Served up, by you, in a tightly strapped corset and black stockings.”
“I refuse to ruin my best underwear by filling it with spaghetti bolognaise.”
Carl stared at her for a moment, nonplussed, and then gave a great bellow of laughter.
“Come here, Stepford Wench. I’ll let you off this time.”
Jake looked away as Carl pulled his girlfriend on to his lap and kissed her.
The three of them spent so much time together but only rarely did Jake feel like a fifth wheel, the odd one out, a gooseberry. Partly it was Carl, protective of his little brother and trying not to make him feel awkward. Jake realised this and loved him the more for it. And partly it was Veronica’s distaste for public displays of affection, for overt sentiment and too-enthusiastic touching. She kept herself at a physical distance, even from her lover. With almost anyone else, such reserve would have been repulsive but she somehow managed to make her standoffishness seem right, natural, the way it should be. It helped that her smile was warm – it softened the ice-maiden image.
Jake had hoped that living with Veronica might lessen his obsession. He’d assumed that by seeing her every day, in every domestic situation, constantly observing her very human characteristics and behaviours, that this might possibly knock her off the pedestal, both erotic and chaste, that he’d placed her on. He’d also hoped that by seeing her with Carl, by seeing the evidence of her love for his brother before his very eyes, might also persuade his heart, groin and head that she was not for him. That she never would be. A month after her little brass lock installation, he wasn’t convinced that it was happening. If anything, he seemed to be getting worse.
Every day, he struggled not to open her door and plunge himself into her possessions, rifle through her underwear drawer, prostrate himself on her bed. So far he was winning, but how long could he hold out? He spent too much time already mooning over the lacy frivolities she left drying on the radiators. Things had got to a bad point when he found himself rubbing the ball of his thumb over the splayed bristles of her toothbrush, thinking that’s been in her mouth, next to her tongue…
Most of all, though, he was afraid of Carl finding out. Not so much because of the retribution that would no doubt be meted out to him in some violent and prolonged fashion – more that he couldn’t bear to see his brother hurt. Nor could he bear to break the closeness that seemed to exist between the three of them, despite the roiling emotional tension bubbling under the surface. Things were so easy in the house; he would hate to be the one to change that. Better, by far, to swallow down his own feelings in the hope that one day he’d be able to rise above them.
He loved to look at her, though. He’d perfected the art of the sideways glance, the use of a mirror to observe while being unobserved himself. He loved to watch her read, flicking his glance over her face as she turned the pages. She always frowned slightly as she read. He loved to watch her eat, to watch her long neck undulate as she swallowed. She liked to swathe herself in Carl’s dressing gown as she ate breakfast, her long toes flexing away from the cold kitchen tiles. The sleeves hung down past the slender tips of her fingers, trailing in the marmalade on her toast. Jake would watch as she’d laugh and lift the material to her mouth, licking the smear of jam away with a crumb-strewn pink tongue.
At the same time, he was too nervous to look for long. His eyes seemed super-charged with the weight of his passion and it seemed impossible that Carl would be blind to the significance of his gaze. So he watched her in snatches, grabbing glimpses here and there.