Katie In Love: full length erotic romance novel (26 page)

Evelyn was in full flow, a general reminding the other ranks how important it is to be 'on your toes as if you are wearing six-inch heels.' Always say yes, whatever the question. 'Remember we are in a service industry. The people who come to our events expect the best service.' She raised her fist.

'Team Talbot,' she cried.

'Team Talbot,' the girls echoed.

She had noticed me coming in, Evelyn noticed everything, and approached when the team talk was over.

'Late, Katie?' she said, and I shrugged. 'You'll be late for your own funeral if you're not careful.'

Evelyn was skeletal with streaked blonde hair in a French pleat, heels too high, a tad too much make-up, lipstick too far along the curve from pink to scarlet, a case of if a little of something is good, then a lot must be better.

'What would you like me to do?' I said, and she pointed at the table set slightly apart in a semi-circle of floor to ceiling glass.

'That's the power table. The booking came from the architects.'

'What are they building?'

'Does it matter?'

'Everything matters, Evelyn.'

Her hair remained immobile as she shook her head. 'Some buildings in Mayfair, two crescents that will make a circle. Something unique.'

'Until the next unique thing comes along.'

'I really want to get in with these people. Just be, you know,' she did a little shimmy. 'Just be great, Kate. We can really go places.'

'We?' I asked her.

'It's there if you want it. You've always known that.'

She tottered off in small steps. Evelyn didn't particularly like me, but must have thought I added something to Team Talbot.

We unpacked crystal glasses. The three men on the team, moonlighting actors, were in charge of opening the champagne, not something you could leave to girls, not on their own. Evelyn watched from below arched eyebrows, and the first guests began to wander in just as were finishing.

A man of indeterminate age, with gold in the bands of his turban, robes and dark glasses, entered with his court. Everyone grew silent before putting their hands together in a round of applause. Evelyn led the party to the money table and the sheikh sat between two younger Arabs, his sons, probably, polished young men in shiny suits with thick moustaches. The sheikh turned as if bored and gazed out into the mystery of the universe, the skyline hidden by low cloud. Helicopters glided by, the sound through the glass like the buzz of mosquitoes in the bedroom at night.

The names of the guests were embossed in gold on grey place cards and we girls in our tight skirts flapped about giggling as we helped the men find their places. There were almost a hundred guests, just two women, the party divided on twelve tables of eight. A four-girl string quartet in floor-length dresses played Vivaldi and Mozart.

When everyone was seated, we hurried to the kitchen where sombre chefs served soup in bowls with gold rims and gold crowns glazed into the china. We watched Evelyn until she gave us the nod and exited in a file with trays containing eight bowls of soup, breasts pushed forward, spines pulled back against the strain, and I thought for some reason of girls carrying water jugs on their heads in far away places.

The sons of the sheikh had moved to new positions. A tall, dapper man in a blue velvet jacket and bow tie now sat on the sheikh's right. On his left was a muscular, square-jawed ex-rugger player with a mane of flowing gold hair, wide shoulders and a wide knot in his gold tie. I drew the conclusion that the bow tie was the architect, the gold tie the main constructor.

As I placed the soup in front of him, he leaned round and gave my backside two soft slaps.

'Don't spill any, there's a good girl,' he said.

'You can be certain of that. I'm very careful,' I replied, and turned away.

The light had gone. The sky was leaden, vast as the sea. The quartet slipped through their repertoire. After collecting the bowls from the soup course, one of the new girls dropped her tray as she returned to the kitchen. Evelyn took deep breaths and gripped her fists. I helped the girl pick up the broken pieces. Like the sky, the colour had drained from her face and her hands trembled.

'It doesn't matter,' I whispered.

'It does,' she said, and I could see panic in her eyes.

The chefs were filling plates with roast lamb and vegetables, typically English, or typically Arabic. My stomach turned queasy seeing the vast quantities of meat, so much food that we would remove again from the tables and scrape into black bins. While we girls carried laden trays, the actors served a Côte d'Or Grand Cru; £800 a case wholesale, Evelyn whispered. The sheikh indicated that he would take a small measure of wine, and the rugby prop with the gold tie threw up his two hands as I placed a plate in front of him.

'Look, no hands,' he said.

'You'll need them for your knife and fork,' I replied, and he laughed.

'So, what's your name, honey?'

I paused. 'Kate,' I replied.

'Kate. That's nice. That's pretty. Hey, everyone, this is Kate. She's
very
careful.'

The two young Arabs studied me with eagle eyes and I thought perhaps they weren't the sheikh's sons but bodyguards. All over London that winter I had noticed vigilant men in black suits standing beside polished parked cars with black windows outside hotels, boutiques, night clubs, casinos, building sites.

We served treacle pudding. More wine that loosened their tongues. The noise level rose, drowning out the quartet. An MC in a white jacket tapped a microphone and fiddled with the electrics, preparing for the speeches.

The builder beckoned.

'Hey, Kate, Kate. Come here a minute. Come, come.'

The eyes of the men at the table were on me as I approached.

'Yes.'

He placed his hand on my bare arm – anchoring; I knew all about anchoring.

'I wanted to give you my card.'

He removed a card from his top pocket and gave it to me.

'Thank you,' I replied.

He ran his hand up my arm and down again. 'I thought you might like to give me a call.'

'You should speak to Evelyn.'

'Evelyn? Who?'

'If you need a waitress.'

'A waitress? That's the last thing I need.'

He swept his hand through his golden hair and laughed. He was handsome, sure of himself. The others laughed. The sheikh had made a spire with his fingers. His dark glasses were on me. This was a game. I imagined there was a wager at stake.

'No, nothing like that,' the builder added. 'I thought we could have a drink?'

'A drink?'

'Yes, you know, meet up, go somewhere nice. Anywhere you like. Have a drink?'

'A drink?' I said again.

'Yes. The two of us.'

'But why?'

'Why? Why not, Kate? Kate. You know, I love that name. Don't you think that's a great name?' he said, and glanced around the table. Everyone loved Kate. He looked back with a smile. 'See,' he added, as if some point had been proven.

'You want to have a drink with me?' I said.

'You got it.'

'Why?' I said again.

'Well, why not?'

'Because I don't know if you really want to have a drink with me, or whether you just want to go to bed with me?'

Now there was silence. The men at the closest tables had stopped talking and were listening.

'No, no, not exactly.'

'Then what?' I prompted.

'Well, yeah, if you want to put it like that.'

'Then this is a business arrangement?'

'How do you mean, Kate?'

'You don't want to know me. You don't want to go traipsing round the bars drinking. You want to take me to bed.'

He held up his palms in the same surrender gesture.

'Okay, you win. What do you say?'

The silence stretched. We were playing tennis. Maybe I'd broken his serve.

'I just thought, as a businessman, you understand everything is business. Politics is business. Sex is business.'

He smiled and did that thing, stroking my arm.

'You know something? I like a girl who's direct.'

'I've got your card. I'll text you my bank details.'

He sat back, grinning. 'You what?'

'I thought we'd agreed. This is business.'

'You're something else. OK, baby. You do that.'

'When you get my text, set a time and date and wire me £200,000.'

'You what?'

'I'll send my bank details.'

'Are you out of your mind? You want £200,000 for a fuck?'

'You don't think I'm worth it?'

'Nobody's worth that.'

'Yes, you're right.'

I glanced at the sheikh. The lights reflected in his dark glasses. The two young Arabs stroked their moustaches. Those men at the table by the window were used to getting whatever they wanted.

Evelyn, who missed nothing, appeared like Death in a play.

'Is everything alright?' she asked and the builder pushed his chair back before replying.

'This waitress of yours is soliciting,' he said.

'She's…What's that? What…'

'That's right,' he looked around the table. 'She wants me to wire her money, a lot of money.' He smiled at the sheikh. 'And in sterling, not dollars.'

Evelyn was shaking. She looked at me as I placed the business card down on the table. Evidence.

'Get your coat. You will leave this instant,' she said. I noticed her apologetic shrug as she turned to the architect. 'Nothing, nothing like this has happened before, I promise you.' She looked back at me. 'Go. For heaven's sake go. You are more trouble than you're worth.'

The round room of glass had grown quiet except for the quartet. They played on like the band on the Titanic and the other waitresses remained motionless like pillars of salt.

21

Sunrise to Sunrise

I walked home through the grey streets beneath my yellow umbrella with a feeling that I had taken on the world of bankers and builders. Not that I had. Those men at the money table were sitting back at that moment listening to speeches applauding their vision. The crescent buildings would rise over Mayfair and the woman in Norwich denied respite care would still be looking after her handicapped son. In the end, you have to decide who you are, take sides. There's no future sitting on the fence. Eventually, you fall off.

Since I had ironed my skirt that morning, an unformed thought had been playing through my head like a jingle, like a word in a foreign language you know you know but can't bring to mind. I stepped off the kerb into a puddle. My soaked shoe made sucking noises as I crossed the road. I told myself I would have to go out and buy another pair and, the same second, it occurred to me that I didn't have to do anything of the sort. I would dry the shoes, polish them, make do with the shoes I already had, that these small frustrations are like mist drifting in from the sea and concealing everything solid and tangible. On the corner, the scribble of white neon above the windows of a shop reminded me for some reason of meeting the man in the torn tee-shirt in Regent Street.

I took a shower, changed into my pyjamas and made scrambled eggs on toast. I sat at my desk with a mug of spice dragon chai, gave the yellow exercise ball a few squeezes, then watched my fingers type 'English School' into Google without being entirely sure why.

There are hundreds of schools where you can learn English and almost as many where you can study for the TEFL certificate you need to teach English. I sat back with that feeling you get when you're following a map and suddenly see a sign that makes sense. I remembered that night when Tom told Ray to contact him when he came out of the army. 'We need people who can do things,' he said.

I found a school a few stops down the tube line at Kings Cross with an intensive four-week course starting Monday, in two days. I emailed, apologising for being late applying. I explained that I would arrive at the school early Monday with the full fees and prepared to start immediately. I paused before adding that I had a degree in English and French Literature, and the opportunity of a job.

Sunday. Lunch with Mother. I needed a loan. Just a loan. I had withdrawn as much as I could from the ATM machines, I explained, but needed to top up what I had to pay the fees for the TEFL course.

'TEFL,' she said. 'Isn't that the black stuff they put on saucepans and it always comes off?'

'Teaching English as a Foreign Language. I'm going to become a teacher.'

'A teacher? Teaching what?'

'English.'

'I can't see much future in that, dear. Everyone we know speaks English.'

'Yes, Mother. I am going to teach people who do not speak English.'

'But why?'

'I'm going to Sri Lanka. I'm going to teach children at Tom's orphanage.'

'You are going to teach English to orphans?'

'Yes.'

She sat back and shook her head. 'You like this one, don't you.'

I nodded. 'I don't know why,' I said.

'There is no why, dear. It's that thing, you know, chemistry. Now hang on to him for heaven's sake. Don't go and sleep with all his friends, or whatever it is you do.'

'Mother, what are you saying?'

'You know what I'm saying. You're my daughter.' She paused. 'Not too tightly, mind you. They hate it if they feel suffocated.'

I wasn't drinking, I'd told her that, but she added a sip of white wine to my sparkling water for form's sake. She raised her glass and I followed suit.

'Good luck, darling,' she said.

We clinked glasses.

'Thank you,' I replied.

'You know I love you, don't you?'

'Of course I do.'

'Matt's weak. Don't think I don't know that. You're strong, Katie. I admire you for that.'

'I don't know what to say.'

'That's certainly a first.' We both laughed. 'You, teaching English. Who'd have thought it.'

I poured some wine in a wine glass.

'To you,' I said.

'To me,' she replied.

Piers Ashton, head of the Winston School of English, wore a beard, brown leather brogues and a white shirt with a top pocket bulging with pens and a spiral notebook. It would not normally have been acceptable to begin a course before completing the foundation work, but due to the extenuating circumstances, and incidental to the £1,200 on his desk, I was provided with a course book and a timetable printed on plastic. At nine, together with eleven other would-be teachers, I took my place in a classroom with whiteboards, chairs with writing trays that levered over your lap, and posters with grammar rules illustrated by cartoon ants with studious expressions and oversized heads.

I had thought it was going to be easy. It wasn't. Teaching English in a way that people who do not know the language will learn and understand is not the same as writing English for an English-reading audience. I had spent ten years bending and breaking rules, projecting my ideas beyond the obvious. Now I had to climb right back inside the box.

At lunchtime, I read my books while I had a sandwich and carrot juice at Pret. I called Tom immediately I got home each evening. It was a little after six my time, just before his bedtime. I was tempted when he asked me what I had been doing to tell him, but I didn't for reasons that were still not entirely clear to myself. I read up on Sri Lanka and asked him about the orphanage, the children, his work. We skyped good night kisses and I went back to my books.

Saturday, heart drumming, I booked a ticket from Heathrow to Kankesanturai in Jaffna. I adored the taste of the word on my tongue: Kankesanturai, its foreignness, its spicy flavour, its colour, the hard k and soft vowel ending. I reserved a room at the hotel where I had stayed that bleak night before Tom left on the same journey, the two bookings – and the promise of financial loss for cancellation – more a show of positivity than excessive confidence about the upcoming exams.

I worried myself sick, the same as when I was at school. I studied every night and the TEFL certificate presented to me by Piers Ashton at the end of the course took on the status of a passport to a new immigrant. It only occurred to me why I hadn't told Tom that I was taking the course when I had the qualification in my hand. To have failed would have been too much to bear, and now that I was 'one of those people who can do things,' and could prove it, it struck me that perhaps the last thing they needed at that moment was teachers. We skyped. We kissed. I would present myself as a fait accompli, and I finally removed the video camera from the box to pack in my luggage.

Lunch Sunday with Mother and Matt. He was starting a course in film editing and was going to borrow my flat while I was away. I spoke to Father, kissed the smoking man on the cheek and caught the tube to Heathrow.

Airports at night are a sort of Purgatory, neither heaven nor hell but an interval in life, a mini-death. The cold hand of hotel bedsheets. The half sleep. The roar of the alarm call. The long walk down dimly-lit tunnels, the wheels on the suitcase echoing behind me. The exhausting wait for the flight to be called. More tunnels. Sparky girls in pressed uniforms. A window seat with a glimpse of green light rising over the horizon. The assertive voice of the pilot with his weather report and expectations, the wheels folding beneath the undercarriage as London scatters behind us.

Jaffna sits on the edge of a lagoon surrounded by fan-palms and oleander. I could pick out the temples dotting the shoreline, the cluster of modern buildings, the dark presence of Jaffna Fort. The plane banked through low cloud, the engine roared and the runway slid beneath the skidding wheels. We create in our minds high walls and barriers, reasons for not doing things. When we do them, the walls we thought so high aren't there at all, they are just figments of our own self-doubt. Perhaps Tom had changed his mind; perhaps he doesn't like girls with murky pasts and broken fingers after all. If that's the case, it won't matter. Once the walls have come down, we can move on.

From Kankesanturai Airport, the taxi raced down the new roads of the commercial centre before twisting through a patchwork of colonial bungalows that emerged like polished teeth from the mature foliage. The driver wanted to practise his English; he was with the right person, a teacher with a new certificate. I glanced out at the places I had read about as he told me that he was married now and his wife was having a baby; he hoped it was going to be a boy and he was saving to buy their own house.

'Now tell me, madam, how is my English?'

'It is very good.'

'A gold star?'

'Two gold stars,' I said and he blasted the horn exuberantly.

The journey, with stop-overs, delays and the time change, had taken 24 hours. I had left at sunrise and, as we circled Jaffna Fort, I watched the labourers climb the scaffolding ready to start work on restoration. I had seen photographs of the 17
th
century stronghold, read the history, the arrival of the Portuguese, the Dutch, the British, 400 years of battles, exploitation, promises lit by the morning sun.

We curved down a winding unsurfaced road overhung by trees and the sea came into view. The sun was warm when I stepped out of the taxi and entered a low prefabricated building carrying my luggage. A woman in a yellow sari was mopping the floor. She was thin, dark, her smile lighting her tiny features.

'Good morning,' I said.

'Good morning. Good morning.'

'I'm looking for Tom.'

'Tom?' She looked puzzled.

'The doctor.'

She smiled again. 'Am. Am. Yes. Yes. Not here.'

'He's gone,' I said, and she seemed to understand my disappointment.

She went to the door and pointed to a track between the trees.

'Swim. Doctor Tom, he swim.'

She took my luggage without my having to ask, stood the suitcase and bag in the corner, then continued mopping the floor.

I set off down the track listening to the morning birdsong. It was sandy underfoot and I carried my shoes. I saw him chopping overarm through the sea, a tiny figure vanishing and emerging through the waves. There was a towel and a pair of size 10 thongs close to the shoreline where I sat and continued to watch as he swam away from me, turned, and swam back.

He ran up the wet sand and stopped when he saw me. He had a puzzled look, a look of such disbelief I thought at first he was angry. I stood. We approached each other slowly, like two animals meeting by chance and testing for danger. I stopped. He smiled and hurried the last few steps. He held me tight and kissed my hair, my cheeks, my lips.

'You came.'

'You don't mind?'

'I wondered how long it was going to be.' He paused. 'Mind?' he then said. 'I told you, if you didn't come, I was coming back.'

'I don't remember that?'

'On camera.'

'On camera?' I repeated.

'I left a message on the camera, the camera I bought.'

'I never looked at it. I'm sorry. I've been so busy.'

He smiled. 'Of course, you've finished your book.'

I shook my head. 'No. I took an English course, for teachers, I can teach English.'

'What? That's amazing. You never told me. You never looked at the message I left for you.'

'I'm sorry.'

'Sorry? Katie, you never need to say sorry. It was stupid, and cowardly. I should have just told you to your face.'

'Told me?'

'You know very well,' he said and I smiled.

'Yes, Tom Bridge, I do.'

We made love, hidden by a fold in the dunes. We swam and, later, we sat in his room staring at the small screen on the camera as Tom in his fisherman's sweater on a grey morning five weeks before said, in that mumbling English way, those things I had wanted to hear.