somewhat grouchy supervisor whose attention I worked hard to avoid attracting.
Now… he was the most wonderful man I’d ever met, amazing in bed, kind and affectionate out of bed. I was turning into every bad love song in existence.
I sat up and picked up Kelley again. Back to cardiomyopathy.
I clambered into the back seat of Andrew’s Morris and made myself tear my eyes away from him and smile at the kid sitting in the front seat. “Hi, I’m Matthew.”
“Henry,” he replied. “Good to meet you.”
He was podgy, and looked nothing like Andrew, then he smiled back at me and there was a sudden resemblance. He looked like he was about ten or eleven years old, which was never an attractive age. Old enough to be hormonal, and too young to have worked out that you needed to be nice to people to get anywhere in life. I’d been a disgusting eleven-year-old, something that I still occasionally apologised to my mother for.
Andrew smiled at me, and we did that whole can’t-take-our-eyes-off-each-other thing for a moment, then Andrew said, “You both hungry?”
“Yes!” Henry said emphatically, and I joined in the chorus.
“Starving! Where are we going?”
We went to a cafe just off Euston road, and I wondered why Andrew had chosen somewhere that was so down-market and dingy, until I saw the plates of food being served to the people at the next table. This was real food, solid, substantial, and filling. Genuine home cooking. I was going to have a real meal again.
Henry interrupted his recounting of playground politics to enter negotiations with Andrew as to what and how much he could order.
All of a sudden, mid-discussion of the relative merits of spaghetti Bolognese, I realised why Andrew was so patient with the med students. Henry sounded just like Nevins.
I was just eating my first mouthful of carbonara when Henry addressed me directly for the first time.
“So, Matthew, aren’t you like far too young for my dad?” he said.
“Henry!” Andrew said, and I smiled disarmingly at the brat.
“Well over the age of consent, I promise you,” I said to Henry. “Aren’t you far too young to be harassing an adult?”
“Nope,” Henry said cheerfully. “I live to aggravate. It’s a lifestyle choice.”
“Back in your box, Henry,” Andrew said. “You expose Matthew to the worst aspects of your personality, and make him run away, and I’ll persuade your mother that you need to go on a thousand calories a day diet. Understand?”
Henry looked horrified, then Andrew said, “And there’s always the issue of you being at home unsupervised every afternoon. Perhaps you should come straight from school to whichever hospital I’m working at and wait for me in my office.”
“Sorry, Matthew,” Henry said contritely. “I’m not really a monster; it’s all an act I put on to make people like me.”
“’I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being really good all the time.
That would be hypocrisy,’” I quoted at Henry, and Andrew leaned back in his chair and laughed loudly while Henry looked at me, his poor little brain obviously confused.
“Random Oscar Wilde,” Andrew explained to Henry. “You, too, can come out of the British educational system with a ready supply of witticisms.”
Henry nodded. “They’re making me learn Shakespeare.
Can you believe that? And algebra and geography and all sorts of stuff.”
“What will they think of next?” Andrew said. “A solid education? You wait, the joys of trigonometry are before you, followed closely by calculus.”
“Tell me about the Reformation,” I said around a mouthful of pasta.
“The what?” Henry said.
“Henry the Eighth,” Andrew said. “Yet another Henry with an attitude problem. I believe Matthew is winding you up.”
“We’re learning about the American War of Independence.
Apparently it was all about tax bases and stuff like that.
Nobody ever told me that before,” Henry said. “People kept expecting me to know stuff about this, even the teacher.
What do I know about the basis for constitutional authority to raise Federal taxes in America?”
“What else were you expected to know?” Andrew asked, and I found myself losing track of the conversation briefly as Andrew’s foot slid along my calf.
“Did you know that America could never have fought the War of Independence without the French? And that England and France have been at war for, like, forever?”
All right, this was something I knew about. “We stopped fighting the French a few years ago,” I pointed out. “The last time France thought long and hard about invading Britain was in 1900.”
Henry stared at me. “You know this stuff?” he said.
I nodded.
Andrew said, “Go on, tell us some more.”
Andrew’s foot was pressed against my ankle now, an invisible reminder of why we were doing this. I was getting to know his son.
“However,” I added, “The relative diplomatic detente between Britain and France is not indicative of either countries’ relationship with the rest of the world. Twenty years ago, French secret service agents committed an act of terrorism in New Zealand and bombed a Greenpeace ship.
France seems to have learnt to stop invading other countries, and hasn’t staged any significant military intrusions since it pulled out of the whole mess in Vietnam in 1954, unless you include nuking some islands it owns in the Pacific.”
Andrew’s eyes were on me. He smiled approvingly, and Henry groaned. “Now I know why Dad likes you,” he said.
“You’re just like him.”
Chapter Thirty Nine
Henry had bounced back from being squashed by Matthew before I’d dropped him off at Kendra’s, and I’d left him concocting plans to network Matthew’s laptop with my PC so they could play Counter Strike together at the weekend.
Matthew was going to call me when he’d studied his brain to a pulp, so I had some time to do domestic stuff like laundry, and unpack the boxes from my office. F had called, and I needed to take my CV into London the next day, so I had to update the damn thing and add Jackie’s reference to it.
But first, before any of that stuff got done…
I sat on my bed and undid the brown-paper wrapped packages. The smell of pastels triggered waves of nostalgia.
I’d bought a pack of handmade Fabriano Roma cotton paper, which had the most gorgeous tooth to it. The pastels were traditional style, thick in my hands, made in Northumbria. I’d bought fixative, too, and charcoals.
All of my real art supplies were in storage in the US, carefully wrapped and padded, left over from my marriage.
I’d thought, when I followed Kendra and Henry over here, that the time of my life when I painted was over, left behind in the past, along with diapers and breastfeeding and the slammed doors and unmet expectations of married life. But here I was, spreading violet and mauve and heliotrope across paper again, smudging the colours, sliding my fingers through the pigment, layering and blending and building.
This was making love to the paper, there was no other way to describe it, and I wanted to fill the house with
