“Of course, the terminology has changed,” Domenica went on, waving a hand airily. “In my day we used to refer to men as being musical. That was a code word. The other words came in, and now, of course, everybody spells it out. Is he, do you think?”
“Is he what?”
“You know. Cheerful?”
“You mean gay?”
Domenica blushed. “Yes.”
“I don’t know,” said Pat. “I really don’t.”
Domenica laughed. “But you must. Any woman can tell. We can just tell.”
“I’m not so sure,” said Pat. “Do you think men can tell when a woman isn’t interested in men?”
Domenica did not hesitate. “Of course they can’t,” she said.
“But that’s because men aren’t as perceptive as women. Men
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don’t pick these things up. They just don’t notice the obvious.”
“And the obvious is?”
Domenica picked her glass up off the table beside her chair.
“Trousers,” she said. “Big, baggy trousers, and boots. Certain tattoos. Subtle clues like that.” She paused. “But tell me – is he available, so to speak?”
“I think so,” said Pat. “I get the impression that he is, but . . .”
Domenica’s eyes widened. “There was something?”
Pat looked down at the floor. She would not emerge very well from this story, but she wanted to tell it to Domenica, and so she continued. “There was a photograph,” she said. “It had something written on the back –
And I had a quick look at it when he was out of the room. I couldn’t help myself.”
“Entirely understandable,” said Domenica. “Anybody would have done the same. Anybody.”
“Well, I did. And it was a picture of him, of Peter, standing in the sea. It looked as if it had been taken on a Greek island somewhere. He was a little bit off the shore and so the water came up almost to his chest. It was a perfectly respectable photograph.”
Domenica sighed. “How disappointing.”
Pat was not sure what to make of that. There was something racy about Domenica, something liberated. And yet at the same time, she was in no sense coarse. There was no scatological language of the sort that is so casually pumped out by the foul-mouthed, for whom the obscene, predictable expletive is an obsessive utterance. And yet there was a complete lack of prudery. It was contradictory – and puzzling.
“T must have taken it,” said Pat. “But I didn’t know who T
is.”
Domenica shrugged. “Does it matter?”
“Well, I think it may,” said Pat. “If T is Tom, for example, then perhaps Peter wants me just to be a friend. But if T is Theresa or Tessa, then, well, it could be different.”
“You should have asked him,” said Domenica.
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“I tried to. I made the photograph fall on to the floor and when he came back in I picked it up and said: “Oh! Who’s T?”
“And?”
“And he said, ‘Oh, that! That was on Mykonos.’ And then he said – and this is the bit that really surprised me – he said:
‘I’m a nudist, you know.’”
For a moment there was complete silence. Pat watched Domenica’s reaction. In all the time she had known her, she had not seen her at a loss for words. Now she was. She looked beyond Domenica, to the bookshelf behind her. Margaret Mead,
And then there were the books on feral children that rubbed spines with Mead and Pitt-Rivers. Feral children wore no clothes. More nakedness. Why should her neighbour be surprised by nakedness in Edinburgh?
Domenica herself supplied the answer to the unspoken question. “A nudist? In Edinburgh? Does he realise what parallel we’re on?”
Pat smiled at that. This was vintage Domenica. Then she told her what Peter had said.
“And then he invited me to something,” she said, dropping her voice as if others might somehow hear.
“To?”
“To a nudist picnic in Moray Place Gardens,” she said. “Next Saturday night.” And then added: “Subject to confirmation.”
