‘Marie – Annabelle’s friend whom I was seeing before her – was utterly neurotic. The stupid cow used to cry after sex and then insist on cooking me bacon and eggs, even in the middle of the night.’
After hearing these tales, when the teapot was cold or empty and Annabelle was making quiet fumbling noises in the hall – indicating she wanted some attention now – I would stumble onto the street and stare bewilderedly at the pavement I had plodded so many times before. I imagined the seven-year-old me, clad in a gingham dress and kicking stones with sensible shoes, and I wondered how she and I were still in the same place, how I could know so much now, yet still have to pretend to be the same little girl living the same little life in the same little town.
One day Matthew played me a Leonard Cohen album and began speaking in a much more serious tone.
‘Of course, what I was looking for yet was afraid to find all those years was what I had right at the beginning. When I went to university, my family made a big deal about it because I was the first one of us not to work on the farm. I wanted to go to Oxford, of course, but I failed my Latin, so Exeter it was. I was reading English Literature and rushed to join the department paper, to set up a John Donne society and to establish the best way to sneak books past the librarians. I was so innocent then, hardly thinking about girls.
‘Suzanne was in one of my lectures. She was from Paris and wore only black. All the boys were in love with her, but for some reason she came over to speak to me. I bought her a hot chocolate at a café and she took me back to meet her flatmate Marie-Anne.’
I noticed with something approaching panic that a tear had dribbled from Matthew’s eyeball.
‘We had from November to June together and it was perfect. The three of us lived in harmony: Marie-Anne and I both totally in love with Suzanne and loving each other for our mutual predicament. I would watch Suzanne spread out on the bed on spring afternoons, reading poetry aloud as Marie-Anne ran a razor ever so gently over her pubic bone, then softly kissed the raw skin.
‘But that upstart Mickey Robinson decided to publish something in the campus paper about our ménage à trois as he called it. It was the biggest scandal of the term and I was hauled into the Dean’s office. He was so embarrassed he couldn’t even look me in the face when he told me I was being sent down. Suzanne’s parents were informed and she was summoned back to France before any of us could say goodbye. But it was Marie-Anne who took it the worst.’
He was crying fully now and, borrowing a gesture learnt from films rather than life, I walked over to his chair and wrapped my skinny arms over his shoulders.
‘What happened to Marie-Anne?’ I asked softly.
‘She hanged herself in our flat. The landlady found her. I wasn’t even allowed to go to the funeral.’
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Before I learnt about Suzanne and the others, before I’d committed too fully to my second life, Matthew and I had to organise my Bunbury.
‘It’s regrettable, but I think it would be safest if we offered your mother a reason for you to come here so often.’
‘What sort of reason?’
‘Well, perhaps you could work for me. I’ll employ you to sort my books and maybe put my horseracing accounts on the computer. How about that?’
I’d never thought about what Matthew ‘did’. I knew he’d once been a journalist and was vaguely aware he now made money offering betting tips to a mysterious collection of ‘clients’, but generally I imagined he spent his days reading poetry and waiting for my visits. In contrast to my workaholic parents, Matthew’s life was so theoretical and luxurious that the concept of him sat in front of a computer concentrating on paid employment was almost laughable.
‘I really could do with sorting through my books – both the horsing ones, and these,’ he said, brushing his hand over an old edition of To the Lighthouse. ‘I’d like them in order throughout the house. We could do it together and drink cups of tea and discuss the dead poets as we go. As far as your mother’s concerned, you’d just be earning a bit of pocket money helping out a scatterbrained old gambler.’
Thus I began ‘working’ for Matthew. The legitimacy of this work was never clear; sometimes he would thrust a small amount of money into my hand as a kind of payment ‘to show Mummy’, but most of the time I just spent my Saturday and Sunday afternoons reclining on his chaise longue reading scraps of verse from the anthologies we were meant to be alphabetising.
Sometimes I felt a pang of guilt when I returned home and my mum asked me how the afternoon had gone, if we’d got much done. But mostly I rationalised that it wasn’t a lie as such and, anyway, such measures were only necessary because she and everyone else who thought it odd for a teenager to spend so much time with a sexagenarian were so steeped in the dismal unreality of the world they couldn’t see the true beauty of friendship. Besides, Matthew was adept at sensing my angst and, whenever I began to slip too far into the vicinity of guilt and shame, I would find an email waiting in my inbox, pulling me back to the beautiful world of literature and poetry:
From: Matthew Wright <[email protected]>
To: Natalie Lucas <[email protected]>
Sent: 12 July 2000, 08:27:31
Subject: Your worries
I know you struggle with the lies, but never forget what is real. You feel guilty about your Ma, who herself feels guilty about you and her Ma and all of the world, simply because she’s trying too hard. She can’t see the beauty.
But you, my angel (my Uncle), can. And that is a gift (for me as well as you).
Edmond Rostand said: ‘The dream alone is of interest.’
So, my darling, let us dream.
MW
*
About halfway through the summer, just after my sixteenth birthday, we began discussing love. We read the Romantics, then moved on to Whitman and finally picked up some collections by Leonard Cohen. I liked the singsong neatness of Blake and the hallmark sentiments of Burns, but Matthew would always reach for Leaves of Grass or mumble the lyrics to ‘Death of a Ladies’ Man’.
We discussed unrequited, inexpressible and forbidden love; we talked about communities running people out of town, countries stoning women for infidelity and religions turning their backs on faithful worshippers. We watched The Wicker Man and flicked through the writings of the Marquis de Sade. We reread extracts from Brave New World and talked about the concept of everyone ‘belonging’ to one another. He told me monogamy was just as abstract an idea as polygamy and we discussed his relationship with Annabelle once more. We talked about the line between friendship and love, about why the world has to be so blind to the possibilities of their overlap. Sometime in late August, Matthew told me he loved me and I wrote in my diary that he was not being improper.
A lingering hug became our ritual goodbye. Back in my bedroom I would miss his arms and want the safe feeling of being enveloped by a true friend. We swapped ‘I love you’s in emails and notes through the letterbox. We knew the others wouldn’t understand, but we also knew that it was true and innocent.
My Bunbury evolved so that once I returned to school to begin the sixth form I had permanent employment archiving Matthew’s racing tips at the weekends. I never went near his computer, but sometimes he’d tell me about reading the form and calculating probabilities so I could blag my way through knowing about gambling. Through a slow accumulation of half-truths and almost-lies, Matthew and I constructed a wall around our friendship that allowed us to spend intense afternoons discussing Uncles, love and poetry. The neighbours, my parents and his in-laws