‘An Australian!’ he said, raising one eyebrow again. Certainly a practised move, Caroline decided. He probably rehearsed it in the mirror.
‘How nice. I shared a flat with two Australian girls once.’
‘It sounds like you spend your life in threesomes,’ said Karl, a new sharpness in his tone.
Oliver looked up, as if he’d forgotten Karl was still at the table.
‘I prefer women’s company to men’s,’ he shrugged.
‘Anyway, Kristina works for some animal rights group in Berlin, and she wants to report on animal abuse in all the zoos along the way. I’m sure the Portuguese style of keeping animals will keep her busy and outraged. And Anneliese follows Kristina.’
The dour-looking bald man who had taken their order appeared with a carafe of wine and three glasses. Oliver spoke to him in Portuguese so swift that Caroline could only catch the words for please. The man laughed and slapped Oliver on the shoulder as he walked back into the restaurant, beaming.
‘So where did you learn your Portuguese?’ Karl sounded like an examiner facing an unlikeable but talented pupil.
Oliver directed his reply at Caroline. ‘My mother is Portuguese. She hated England. At home she spoke only Portuguese to me and my sisters. It really annoyed my father. Typical arrogant Englishman, he never bothered to learn anything more than please and thank you; words he never used in English. Our house was Lisbon in Kensington. The heavy carved furniture, antique candelabra, blue and white ceramic tiles everywhere – and olive oil and garlic in everything. The only English room in the house was my father’s study. Anyway, Mother is living back here now, in a little house in Sintra. She left my father the year I started at art school.’
Caroline studied Oliver’s elegant profile. She had seen it before, on Minoan vases. The Minoans had obviously travelled far and wide.
‘Do you think your mother would have been happier with a Portuguese man?’ she asked.
Oliver shook his head.
‘My mother behaves as if life is one big fado song. You know: unrequited love, sadness, jealousy and nostalgia. She was very moody. My father’s being English made him more tolerant, if anything. He thought that all southern Europeans were like that: hot-blooded, passionate, always bursting into floods of tears.’ He smiled. ‘A Portuguese man would probably have smacked her in the mouth. And then gone off to his mistress.’
‘Your father didn’t have a mistress?’
‘No.’ Oliver turned his attention to the grilled sardines and a bowl of potatoes that had just been set in front of them.
‘His work was his other passion. And he loved my mother. I just don’t think he ever understood her.’
‘And what have you been photographing this morning?’ said Karl, biting gingerly into a potato. He was hardly eating, probably out of pique with her for paying so much attention to Oliver.
‘Women mostly.’ Oliver leant forward to take another sardine. ‘In alleys where the houses are so close together that two lovers could reach across the street and touch fingers.
‘A Portuguese poet, Frederico de Brito, wrote about it once. In English, it goes…’ he paused, and looked at Caroline.
‘Your house is so close to mine,’ he declaimed, one hand over his heart. ‘In the starry night’s bliss, to exchange a tender kiss, our lips easily meet, high across the narrow street.’
‘Of course.’ Karl speared a sardine and shook it on to his plate. Caroline was aware of him trying to catch her eye. Instead she kept her glance fixed on the upper-storey window of the house opposite, where a bent old woman was holding a magnifying glass up to a luridly-coloured magazine.
Why was she behaving as if she were captivated by Oliver? All he had done was talk too much about himself, and she had hung on to his every word. It was more than his beauty that attracted her; it was that bullshit sense of invulnerability that womanisers like him radiated. And women who ought to know better continued to succumb to it.
Caroline knew what her friend Anna would make of this little scene. Anna wasn’t the sort to be dazzled by the glister of men like Oliver. Or so she claimed.
Anna said she had barely noticed her husband Christopher’s good looks on the night, ten years earlier, when she had first met him at a Cambridge May Ball. Instead, she had been attracted by his aura of reliability and honesty, both qualities that had been lacking in the boyfriend immediately before him. Ashley was a performance poet who had written to Anna daily for months, swearing undying devotion and enclosing appropriate chunks of John Donne’s love poetry.
When Anna had finally given in and slept with him, Ashley had said he was the happiest man alive. For the next seven days. On the eighth day, he had complained that Anna was trying to domesticate him and stormed out, taking his battered copy of The Collected Poems of John Donne with him.
He had then started reading them to the girl who, until then, had been one of Anna’s best friends. Caroline had met Ashley, now writing theatre reviews for a London newspaper, at a party a year ago. She had been unaware, at that stage, of his connection with Anna, but she had heard enough of his reputation to know that she should treat him as if he were a cat rubbing its body against her leg. But he was so attractive. Stupidly, she’d thought she could beat him at his own game.
So she’d postponed sleeping with him for a month and often ‘forgot’ to respond when he sent her flowers and wrote her poems. She needn’t have bothered. A week after they first slept together they had gone to see the play Les Liaisons Dangereuses. After the show their lively supper discussion about the difference between love and conquest had turned into an argument.
‘I thought you were an intelligent woman,’ he had sneered. ‘But under that carapace of wit and detachment, you’re pure Mills and Boon.’
‘And under your carapace of wit and detachment,’ Caroline had replied, ‘there’s another carapace. Then another. Inside that, there’s nothing.’
She had felt proud of herself as she stalked out into St Martin’s Lane in search of a taxi home. But depression had set in by the next Monday, when she told Anna and found out that they had more in common than previously recognised.
‘Why do I always pick the creeps and the bastards?’ she had moaned. ‘A room could be full of men who are the salt of the earth. But there’ll be one bastard – and I’ll go straight to him.’
‘Look on the bright side,’ Anna had said. ‘It only took you a month to work through the usual three phases of a relationship with Ashley Carlton. I wasted more than six months of a university year on him. And it taught me a lesson. Beware of charismatic men. Give me someone solid and dependable every time.’
Caroline watched Oliver as he drained his glass of wine. Anna would value Karl for his warmth and sincerity and dismiss Oliver as the callow youth he was. But that was Anna.
‘Anyway, Caroline, what are you two doing tonight?’ Oliver broke into her thoughts. ‘The girls want to see some fado music, and I know a good place. It’s not touristy and it’s just on the edge of the Alfama, about ten minutes’ walk from here.’
Caroline looked at Karl. ‘I’d love to. What do you think?’
‘Of course,’ he said stiffly. ‘That would be very interesting.’
When Oliver went inside to pay the bill, Karl rounded on Caroline.
‘Why did you say yes? He’s such a… A wanker? Isn’t that the English word?’
‘I thought it would be fun. I’m sorry,’ said Caroline.
But she wasn’t. Karl was right. But Oliver appealed to her, despite his self-centredness. Or because of it. She liked his energy. And so what if his family history was interesting enough to be