The Critic

III

‘I can’t believe you did that, Enzo!’

‘You sound just like her.’ He was huffy and defensive.

‘I’m not surprised.’

‘Anyway, it was you that told me about them. What did you think I was going to do?’

Charlotte shook her head, eyes wide with disbelief. ‘I didn’t think for one minute you’d go charging in there to lay down the law. These are two grown people, Enzo. You don’t have the right.’

‘Why did you tell me, then?’

‘Because I thought you had the right to know.’

Enzo breathed his anger and frustration through clenched teeth. He looked down into the street from Charlotte’s kitchen window and saw a man walking his a dog. Otherwise the Rue des Tanneries was deserted beneath the street lamps of this slightly seedy quartier in the thirteenth arrondissement where mills and tanneries once poured their industrial bile into the river Bievre.

Charlotte had made her home in the offices of a former coal merchant, creating an indoor garden and atrium in the one-time courtyard, where she now consulted with her patients. Galleries on each floor looked down into the garden and opened onto bedrooms like fishbowls behind walls of glass. Its eccentricity reflected the character of its owner.

He turned away from the window to face her. ‘I think maybe I also have the right to know what it is about Roger that so concerns you.’ He took her by the shoulders and made her look at him. ‘Something dark, you said, Charlotte.’

She pulled away from him and crossed to the work counter to refill her wine glass. ‘I can’t.’

‘You mean you won’t.’

‘No, I mean I can’t. It’s not something I can point a finger at and say, “it’s this,” or “it’s that.” It’s just a feeling.’ There was pain in her face. The pain of searching and failing to find a way of expressing something felt deep inside. ‘I lived with him for eighteen months, Enzo. It was a feeling that grew on me. That sense of something dark in him, something hidden. In the end it overshadowed everything that had ever drawn me to him, his charm, his humour, his intelligence. I grew to dislike him so much I could barely stand to be in his company. It’s why I left him. It’s why I told you about him and Kirsty.’

Enzo threw his hands out to either side of him. ‘So what am I supposed to do?’

‘Nothing. There’s nothing you can do. Except be aware, and be there when she comes to you, as one day she will, and says, Papa, you were right.’

He straightened the waistband of his kilt, fastened the buckles, and carefully clipped it to its hanger. Then he crossed the bedroom to hang it from the rail. His suitcase lay open on the bed, clothes and toiletries strewn about it. He felt a tiny worm of apprehension, maybe even fear, turn over inside him. If he was caught… But he didn’t want to think about it. If he did, he would probably be unable to see it through. From the far side of the bed, he looked through glass to the darkness beyond and had the uncomfortable sensation of being watched, as he always did here. Of someone being out there on one of the galleries, made invisible by darkness, while he was exposed to full view by the light. He invariably felt vulnerable until he turned off the lamps, and then, with moonlight spilling through the glass above the garden, would lie and watching strange things take shape in the dark. He had never understood how Charlotte could live on her own in this place, with its ghosts and shadows and obfuscations.

A movement in his peripheral vision made him turn, startled. Charlotte leaned in the doorway watching him. She was wearing her black silk dressing gown with the Chinese dragons. It was very loosely belted at the waist, and he could see that she wore nothing beneath it. She had an odd, predatory look in her eyes. ‘You don’t have to spend the night in the guest room.’

He turned back to his packing and sighed wearily. ‘You feel like sex, and I’m supposed to just sit up on my hind legs, stick out my tongue and pant for it. Is that how it works?’

‘If you like.’ She was quite unruffled.

‘I’m not going to do it, Charlotte. I’m not going to be your occasional sleeping partner. I’m not going to be your occasional anything.’

‘You don’t want to sleep with me?’

He whirled around. ‘Of course I want to sleep with you! You’re a beautiful woman. You do terrible things to my libido. But you also do terrible things to my head. And I can’t deal with that. I need more than just sex.’

‘Is that your feminine side speaking?’

‘No, it’s my lonely side speaking. I spent twenty years on my own, Charlotte. Sex lasts minutes, an hour, a night if you’re lucky. Lonely lasts a lot longer.’

He returned to his packing, and there was a long silence, broken finally by the swish of silk as she moved into the room. ‘I didn’t know you had a kilt.’

He glanced round to see her examining his kilt hanging on the rail. She touched the pleats, felt the wool between her fingers, and then ran them down the tartan.

‘It’s heavy.’ She looked at him. ‘Are you taking it to America?’

‘I wore it for the funeral.’

‘It’ll get crushed in your case.’

‘I’m not putting it in my case. It cost nearly a thousand euros, Charlotte. I’m not entrusting it to the vagaries of airline baggage handlers. I’ll wear it for the flight.’

She raised an eyebrow. ‘That’ll make you a bit conspicuous at customs. And give the cabin crew something to look at.’ She smiled. ‘Both sexes.’

He shrugged. ‘Americans like the kilt. A lot of them have Scottish roots. If they’re looking at me, they’re less likely to look at what I’m carrying.’

She frowned. ‘What are you carrying?’

‘You don’t want to know.’

She regarded him thoughtfully for several moments before a tiny smile turned up the corners of her mouth. ‘One thing I would be interested to know, though…’

‘What.’

‘Something I’ve always wondered. Probably most women do.’ She paused. ‘You know…what it is a Scotsman wears under his kilt.’

‘There’s a standard reply to that.’

‘Which is?’

‘There’s nothing worn under my kilt. It’s all in perfectly good working order.’

She grinned. ‘Which doesn’t answer the question.’

He straightened up and looked at her very directly. ‘You really want to know?’

She nodded. ‘I do.’

He looked down at the floor with a sense of resignation, then up again to meet her eye. Somehow they had got very close, and he could smell her perfume rising on the heat of her body. He let his hands slide over smooth silk until they cupped her buttocks, and he pulled her towards him. She moved her hands behind his head and undid the ribbon to release his hair, and her robe fell open. Full breasts swung free. He dipped his head to kiss the hollow at the base of her neck, and as his hair tumbled across his shoulders to brush her skin, she shivered. ‘You’ll have to promise never to tell a soul.’

‘I promise.’ Her voice was a whisper.

‘Because, you know, it’s a national secret. I could be hanged from the gibbet at Edinburgh Castle.’ He moved his mouth across all the curves and angles of her face, peppering it with kisses until he found her lips and then her tongue, and he pushed himself hard against her belly.

She moaned, and drew her head back, breathing in short bursts. ‘I thought you weren’t going to be my occasional sleeping partner.’ His own words came back to him with the full force of her irony and his regret.

But libido had triumphed over lonely. The tumescence between his legs told him he had gone beyond the point of no return. ‘I won’t tell anyone if you don’t.’