could examine the writing on the back of one of them, the photograph on top of the pile. It was not very distinct, as the ink had smudged, but she could just make it out.
Pat looked over her shoulder. She should not look at his private papers – they were nothing to do with her. But then, he had invited her into his room and the photographs were lying around and how could anybody resist the temptation to look at a photograph with that inscription written on the back?
If you left photographs lying about then you were more or less giving permission for people to look at them. It was the same as sending postcards: the postman was entitled to read them.
And Pat was human. So she turned the photograph over and looked.
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Holding two cups of steaming coffee, Peter came back into his room. “I don’t have anything else to offer you,” he said. “Not even a biscuit. We often run out of food altogether. And I find that when I buy some, Joe and Fergus eat it. I’m not sure if they know what they’re doing. They just eat it.”
Pat was not hungry, and did not mind. Peter had made real coffee, she noticed, and it smelled good, like strong . . . strong what? Coffee was complicated now, with all those americanos and mochas and double skinny lattes with vanilla. This was a bitter coffee, which Pat liked, and made for herself in the flat, although Bruce always turned his nose up at it. Shortly after she had moved in, Bruce, uninvited, had taken a cup of coffee from her cafetiere and had spat it out after the first mouthful.
But Bruce was Peter’s polar opposite – unsubtle, uninterested in literature (he had once asked if Jane Austen was an actress), and quite without that willowy charm that Peter had in such abundance. She reflected briefly on this, and ruefully too, because she was now sure that Peter had nothing more in mind than casual friendship. How naive she had been to imagine otherwise: he was far too handsome to be interested in girls. There was that quality of sensitivity, that look in his eyes that told her, and everybody else who cared to look for it, that he
Peter sat on the bed; she sat on the chair from which the pile of clothes had been moved. He sat there, with his bare feet on the counterpane, his cup of coffee cradled in his hands; she sat with both feet on the ground, her cup of coffee sitting on the table beside her. For a few moments they looked at one another. Then Peter smiled, and she noticed his teeth, which were perfectly straight, either by nature, or through the efforts of orthodontists. There was something familiar about these teeth and she struggled to recall what it was; then she remembered – Pedro, the doll whom she had loved so much, had had teeth painted on the fabric of his face, and these teeth were 162
just like Peter’s. Had Pedro, the doll, been interested in girl dolls, or did he prefer the company of other boy dolls? As a girl, she had thought that Pedro had loved only her, but that might have been a mistake. Pedro might have wished for something else altogether but had been obliged all his woolly life to be with her, like the captive he was. Such a ridiculous thought, and she smiled involuntarily at the thinking of it.
Peter smiled back.
They both began to speak at that same time.
“I . . .” said Pat.
And he said, “I . . .” and then, laughing, “You go ahead.”
“No, you go,” she said. “Go on.”
“What do you do? I suppose that’s what I was going to ask you.”
Pat explained that she was a student, or almost a student.
“I’ve had a couple of years off,” she said. “I went to . . .” She paused, and he watched her expectantly. “To Australia, actually.”
He nodded. “So did I. Where were you?”
She could not bring herself to speak about Western Australia, although she knew that she would have to do so sooner or later.
So she mentioned Queensland and New South Wales, and Peter replied that he had been in both of those places. “I picked fruit,”
he said. “And I worked in a bar in Sydney, down in that old part near the harbour bridge. I did all sorts of things. Then I went travelling with somebody I met there. We had a great time. Two months of travelling.”
“Where was he from?” asked Pat.
“She,” said Peter. “She was Canadian. She came from somewhere near Winnipeg.”
Of course she was probably just a friend, thought Pat. She had travelled in Thailand with a boy who was no more than a friend; it protected one from all sorts of dangers. And of course if she had been with somebody in Western Australia, then she would not have ended up in that plight in the first place.
“I had some pretty strange jobs in Australia,” Peter went on. “I spent a month on a sheep station, looking after the
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owner, who was ancient. He couldn’t walk very far and so they had made him a sort of trolley which he put a chair on. It had bike wheels, front and back, and I had to push him around the garden and down to the edge of the river. He was doing a correspondence course in history and I had to help him with that.”
Pat laughed. She had taken peculiar jobs too, and none more peculiar than that job in Western Australia; but she did not feel like talking about that.
Peter looked thoughtful. “I miss Australia, you know. I miss the place. Those wide plains. The eucalyptus forests and the noise of the screeching birds. Remember that? The galahs? And the people, too. That friendliness. I miss all that a lot.”
