“Ours,” said Paul. He was drinking white wine in the back room with the red-haired woman. “Well, Barry’s mostly. But it needed a good little actress to pull it off, and I found her.” She grinned modestly: managed to look both abashed and pleased with herself.
“If this doesn’t get you the attention you deserve, beautiful boy,” said Barry, smiling at me, “nothing will.
“The Windemere painting’s ruined,” I pointed out.
Barry glanced at Paul, and they giggled. “It’s already sold, ink splatters and all, for seventy-five thousand pounds,” he said. “It’s like I always say, people think they are buying the art, but really, they’re buying the story.”
Paul filled our glasses: “And we owe it all to you,” he said to the woman. “Stuart, Barry, I’d like to propose a toast.
“Cassandra,” we repeated, and we drank. This time I did not nurse my drink. I needed it.
Then, as the name was still sinking in, Paul said, “Cassandra, this ridiculously attractive and talented young man is, as I am sure you know, Stuart Innes.”
“I know,” she said. “Actually, we’re very old friends.”
“Do tell,” said Barry.
“Well,” said Cassandra, “twenty years ago, Stuart wrote my name on his maths exercise notebook.”
She looked like the girl in my drawing, yes. Or like the girl in the photographs, all grown up. Sharp-faced. Intelligent. Assured.
I had never seen her before in my life.
“Hello, Cassandra,” I said. I couldn’t think of anything else to say.
WE WERE IN the wine bar beneath my flat. They serve food there, too. It’s more than just a wine bar.
I found myself talking to her as if she was someone I had known since childhood. And, I reminded myself, she wasn’t. I had only met her that evening. She still had ink stains on her hands.
We had glanced at the menu, ordered the same thing—the vegetarian meze—and when it had arrived, both started with the dolmades, then moved on to the hummus.
“I made you up,” I told her.
It was not the first thing I had said: First we had talked about her community theatre, how she had become friends with Paul, his offer to her—a thousand pounds for this evening’s show—and how she had needed the money, but mostly said yes because it sounded like a fun adventure. Anyway, she said, she couldn’t say no when she heard my name mentioned. She thought it was fate.
That was when I said it. I was scared she would think I was mad, but I said it. “I made you up.”
“No,” she said. “You didn’t. I mean, obviously you didn’t. I’m really here.” Then she said, “Would you like to touch me?”
I looked at her. At her face, and her posture, at her eyes. She was everything I had ever dreamed of in a woman. Everything I had been missing in other women. “Yes,” I said. “Very much.”
“Let’s eat our dinner first,” she said. Then she said, “How long has it been since you were with a woman?”
“I’m not gay,” I protested. “I have girlfriends.”
“I know,” she said. “When was the last one?”
I tried to remember. Was it Brigitte? Or the stylist the ad agency had sent me to Iceland with? I was not certain. “Two years,” I said. “Perhaps three. I just haven’t met the right person yet.”
“You did once,” she said. She opened her handbag then, a big floppy purple thing, pulled out a cardboard folder, opened it, removed a piece of paper, tape browned at the corners. “See?”
I remembered it. How could I not? It had hung above my bed for years. She was looking around, as if talking to someone beyond the curtain. “Cassandra,” it said, “February 19, 1985.” And it was signed, “Stuart Innes.” There is something at the same time both embarrassing and heartwarming about seeing your handwriting from when you were fifteen.
“I came back from Canada in eighty-nine,” she said. “My parents’ marriage fell apart, and Mum wanted to come home. I wondered about you, what you were doing, so I went to your old address. The house was empty. Windows were broken. It was obvious nobody lived there anymore. They’d knocked down the riding stables already—that made me so sad. I’d loved horses as a girl, obviously, but I walked through the house until I found your bedroom. It was obviously your bedroom, although all the furniture was gone. It still smelled like you. And this was still pinned to the wall. I didn’t think anyone would miss it.”
She smiled.
“Who
“Cassandra Carlisle. Aged thirty-four. Former actress. Failed playwright. Now running a community theatre in Norwood. Drama therapy. Hall for rent. Four plays a year, plus workshops, and a local panto. Who are
“You know who I am.” Then, “You know I’ve never met you before, don’t you?”
She nodded. She said, “Poor Stuart. You live just above here, don’t you?”
“Yes. It’s a bit loud sometimes. But it’s handy for the tube. And the rent isn’t painful.”
“Let’s pay, and go upstairs.”
I reached out to touch the back of her hand. “Not yet,” she said, moving her hand away before I could touch her. “We should talk first.”
So we went upstairs.
“I like your flat,” she said. “It looks exactly like the kind of place I imagine you being.”
“It’s probably time to start thinking about getting something a bit bigger,” I told her. “But it does me fine. There’s good light out the back for my studio—you can’t get the effect now, at night. But it’s great for painting.”
It’s strange, bringing someone home. It makes you see the place you live as if you’ve not been there before. There are two oil paintings of me in the lounge, from my short-lived career as an artists’ model (I did not have the patience to stand and wait), blown-up advertising photos of me in the little kitchen and the loo, book covers with me on—romance covers, mostly, over the stairs.
I showed her the studio, and then the bedroom. She examined the Edwardian barber’s chair I had rescued from an ancient barbers’ that closed down in Shoreditch. She sat down on the chair, pulled off her shoes.
“Who was the first grown-up you liked?” she asked.
“Odd question. My mother, I suspect. Don’t know. Why?”
“I was three, perhaps four. He was a postman called Mr. Postie. He’d come in his little post van and bring me lovely things. Not every day. Just sometimes. Brown paper packages with my name on, and inside would be toys or sweets or something. He had a funny, friendly face with a knobby nose.”
“And he was real? He sounds like somebody a kid would make up.”
“He drove a post van inside the house. It wasn’t very big.”
She began to unbutton her blouse. It was cream-coloured, still flecked with splatters of ink. “What’s the first thing you actually remember? Not something you were told you did. That you really remember?”
“Going to the seaside when I was three, with my mum and my dad.”
“Do you remember it? Or do you remember being
“I don’t see what the point of this is… ?”
She stood up, wiggled, stepped out of her skirt. She wore a white bra, dark green panties, frayed. Very human: not something you would wear to impress a new lover. I wondered what her breasts would look like, when the bra came off. I wanted to stroke them, to touch them to my lips.
She walked from the chair to the bed, where I was sitting.
“Lie down, now. On that side of the bed. I’ll be next to you. Don’t touch me.”
I lay down, my hands at my sides. She said, “You’re so beautiful. I’m not honestly sure whether you’re my type. You would have been when I was fifteen, though. Nice and sweet and unthreatening. Artistic. Ponies. A riding stable. And I bet you never make a move on a girl unless you’re sure she’s ready, do you?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t suppose that I do.”
She lay down beside me.
