The Couple's Secret Page 7

  I realised I’d pulled a face at the word ‘masturbating’ but Ally seemed spurred on by it. I got the feeling she’d come to like shocking me. ‘Oh yes, apparently they all stand around in a circle with a biscuit on a table in the middle. Then they pump away at themselves and the first person to spill his seed, so to speak, is the winner. The last person is, well …’

  ‘Well, what?’

  ‘The loser.’

  I grimaced. ‘And what happens to the biscuit?’ I said, thinking I could probably guess the answer.

  ‘The loser has to eat it.’

  ‘That doesn’t sound very appetising.’

  Ally chuckled. ‘I don’t think it’s meant to be. Just a bit of fun, I’m sure.’

  ‘Can’t you get AIDS that way?’

  She tilted her head to one side and took a sip of her milkshake, apparently considering this. ‘I don’t think so. I’m not sure, to be honest. I doubt it. Otherwise I think most MPs would be on their deathbeds!’

  She laughed loudly at her own joke.

  ‘So, do you know which books they’ll be picking this time?’ I said, keen to get the conversation away from boys consuming their own, and others’, semen.

  ‘Well, they have a bit of trouble now, since they’ve read so much already, so there’s naturally a bit of double-dipping. They haven’t really found a way to control that side of things, so they just try to make sure their lists are made up of a healthy majority of titles they haven’t read before, and the ones they have they aren’t supposed to have read for a good few years.’

  The book lover in me liked the sound of this, although I knew I wouldn’t be able to compete with Ernest and James in a million years. They both seemed to swallow literature, or inhale it like a long drag on a cigarette, relishing it as they went. I read for pleasure, first and foremost, whereas they seemed to see it primarily as a form of self-nourishment.

  ‘Do you ever join in?’ I asked.

  ‘Christ, no. I wouldn’t be able to keep up. It would be a humiliation.’

  Come to think of it, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen Ally with a book, or even properly studying. Perhaps she was one of those people who just sailed through coursework and exams without ever really having to try. There had been a couple of girls in my school like that. I’d envied them greatly.

  We tried to enter Blackwells, but didn’t get very far. A young bookseller, in the midst of neatly arranging copies of a Stephen King novel on a small table, looked up and told us we’d need to finish our milkshakes before we came any further. Ally rolled her eyes at him and for a minute I wondered if she’d ignore him and just march in, but to my relief she stepped back outside. A few minutes later, having discarded our empty milkshake cups in a wastepaper basket the bookseller had helpfully offered us, we walked purposefully, with me following Ally’s lead, through the store towards the back. It was a vast shop, and went further back than I remembered. We found the section marked ‘Classics’ pretty quickly. I noticed it was divided up into ‘English Literature’, ‘World Classics’ and ‘Modern Classics’. Each one was full of a vast array of volumes, most of them sporting the black or light-turquoise spines that characterised a sizeable chunk of Penguin’s publishing output. There were hefty, more academic volumes of famous novels mixed in too, no doubt containing annotations, guides to the text, essays, lists of further reading and various other extras. I was about to start perusing the shelves properly when Ally tugged at my arm.

  ‘Come on, round here.’

  She steered me around the corner of one of the shelves towards a small alcove with a table and set of armchairs. Ernest and James sat side by side on one of them, the former lounging back, his head buried in an extremely large book which I recognised as The Count of Monte Cristo. James, on the other hand, was leaning forward, running an index finger down what appeared to be a long list, written in a leather-bound exercise book.

  ‘Ding dong merrily, my little Christmas readers!’ Ally said loudly. I glanced around, slightly embarrassed, but there wasn’t another person in sight and the alcove was well-hidden from view of the main part of the shop.

  ‘It isn’t Christmas. It’s October, sis.’

  Ernest didn’t even bother to lower the book as he spoke. James’s reaction was friendlier. ‘But she is indeed right that we are here with Christmas in mind.’ He nodded towards the empty sofa in front of him and then looked back at us. ‘Sit down, you two. You can join in the fun.’ Not for the first time, his eyes lingered on me slightly longer than Ally. I could feel myself reddening, so sat down quickly on the sofa, with Ally following suit slightly less gracefully.

  ‘My mother likes to put up our Christmas tree in November,’ I said. I didn’t know why; I just needed to start speaking. ‘A fake one, I mean. It’s plastic. Then she swaps it for a real one in December.’

  I baffled myself with my own words and the boys seemed a little surprised, with Ernest arching one of his neat eyebrows slightly. Ally, however, wasn’t fazed, or at least came to my rescue.

  ‘Oh, that does sound sensible. And plastic trees can look rather good these days, can’t they? I see them in shops sometimes.’

  I got the feeling the boys were trying to hide their mirth and being careful not to look at each other. I couldn’t really blame them.

  ‘So, what have you got so far?’ Ally asked, pulling a stack of books in front of her. ‘God, these are all a bit … well, trendy. Last Exit to Brooklyn? Really? Ginsberg, Burroughs, Henry Miller. Going to be a cheerful Christmas.’

  ‘That’s James’s pile.’ Ernest rolled his eyes, glancing at the slim volumes in Ally’s hands. ‘Plus, they’re relatively short. He’ll need to read a lot of them.’

  James kept his eyes on his exercise book, now making notes, allowing a small smile to creep across his face.

  ‘What about you? How are you going to raise the game?’ I asked, meeting Ernest’s gaze, then worried it sounded like I was defending James (which, if I was honest with myself, I sort of was). It didn’t escape him. The glint in his eye made that clear. He leaned forward and pushed a stack of books in my direction. ‘Only seven so far. Slightly ashamed to say I’ve never read any of these, so am going to put that right this year.’

  I pulled the stack of books towards me and went through them one by one. The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy, The Monk by Matthew Lewis, The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler, Evelina by Frances Burney, The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton, The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy.

  ‘Tess? You must have read Tess?’ I say, holding up the book.

  He smirked, ‘Okay, guilty. I have, but a long time ago. I was about nine or ten.’

  I raised my eyebrows. ‘Really?’

  ‘Precocious child,’ Ally said, shaking her head. ‘We couldn’t take the books from him. He clutched them too hard. Would cry and scream and wail so that nothing could be done.’

  ‘Oh, nonsense,’ Ernest said to her sharply, while continuing to smile at me. ‘Go on then, Holly. Which books should be in my pile?’

  I considered for a moment. ‘I’d add some Joseph Conrad, Truman Capote, Émile Zola. Also, if you haven’t already, try some Hermann Hesse, too. And maybe, if you could bear it, some Agatha Christie. Plus a few ghost stories. You always need ghost stories at Christmas.’

  Ernest tilted his head on one side, apparently impressed. ‘Nice. Curious range. Perhaps you could go and pick me out some.’

  I felt a glimmer of irritation at this. Who did he think he was, ordering me to go and find books for him? Ally apparently had the same thought.

  ‘You lazy sod. Pay no attention to him, Holly.’

  I was about to do as Ally suggested when James piped up.

  ‘I’ll come with you. You can suggest some of your favourites to me, too.’

  Before I knew what I was doing, I had agreed and risen from the sofa.

  ‘Sure!’ I cringed as I said it and quickly looked at Ally and
Ernest to see if they’d noticed my overenthusiasm. They had of course. They were doing their best not to show it, but the slight curl to Ernest’s smile was all I needed to see.

  James stood up, too, and navigated his way around the table and stacks of books, walking straight past me. He clearly expected me to follow, so I did, turning the corner into the dense and completely deserted classics section. He knelt down to a lower shelf, apparently looking for a particular volume. I waited, watching his chinos tighten around his waist, the line of his underwear starting to show. He eventually pulled out an extremely thick paperback book and held it up to me.

  ‘You should read this,’ he said simply, offering it to me. I stared at it for a good few seconds. ‘Can you take it?’ he said. ‘It’s hurting my arm.’ His small smile was back, dancing somewhere around the corners of his mouth. It was like the whole of him glinted occasionally when that smile hovered near the surface. I took the book, trying not to drop it when it became clear to me how heavy it actually was.

  ‘God,’ I exclaimed as I held on to it. ‘I’m not sure I’m brave enough for something this size.’

  He smiled more fully now and got back up, smoothing down his crumpled cream Oxford shirt. ‘That’s what I thought when Ernest first gave it to me, back when I was at school. But it’s worth it. Trust me, it really is.’

  I glanced down at the cover. It depicted a sad or even slightly frightened-looking girl sitting at a desk writing what appeared to be a very lengthy letter. Samuel Richardson. Clarissa. I’d heard of Richardson, of course, but hadn’t ever read him, though I thought I might have bought an old copy of his (much shorter) novel Pamela at a car boot sale a couple of years ago. I lifted the book up and down in my hand, feeling its weight fighting against my fingers. You could have killed a small child with it.

  ‘I’m worried I might die before I get to the end.’

  He laughed. ‘Well, better start soon then.’

  I glanced down at the price. It was £7.99. Very expensive for a paperback, though I reasoned there was at least the same amount of content crammed within it as one would get with three novels costing £3.99. Put like that, it was rather good value. During my outings with the Ally gang, the money difference hadn’t really been an issue. I’d been worried at first that we’d be zooming off in expensive cars to grand hotels and dining like the infamous Bullingdon Club did. Thankfully their tastes seemed a little more modest. I also suspected that Peter, who had grown more and more absent from our outings as term went on, didn’t have as much cash as his friends. I had tried not to read too much into Peter’s increasing absences from our social occasions, though I couldn’t help but feel there was a correlation between the group’s adoption of me and his no-shows. He’d even missed a couple of tuition seminars, much to Dr Lawrence’s irritation.

  ‘Do you like the sound of it?’

  James’s voice jolted me out of my thoughts about Peter. He was staring at me, looking almost hopeful, as if some of his confidence had been stripped away. I felt as if, by recommending the book to me, he had exposed part of himself; shown me a glimmer of what was inside him.

  ‘Yes,’ I said hurriedly, ‘I do. I’m going to get it. It will take me a while, though. I’m not that quick a reader.’

  ‘It’s worth taking your time with,’ he said, then winked at me. It felt as if I’d just been doused in freezing-cold water and I looked down quickly in case he noticed it in my face.

  He cast an eye down the corridor of shelves, out into the main part of the bookshop.

  ‘Our Christmas celebrations are never really much of a big deal, so I’ll have plenty of time to read over the holidays,’ I said, flicking through the pages of the novel, trying to sound more casual than I felt. I glanced back up at him and was about to carry on talking when I sensed he wasn’t really paying attention. He was still looking over my shoulder, as if something had caught his attention and he was having trouble drawing his gaze away.

  ‘I’m sorry, Holly, would you excuse me for a second?’ he said suddenly, then skirted round me and walked purposefully away. I felt a little abandoned, even though I was only metres away from where the others were sitting. On my way round the corner, back towards the alcove, I glanced towards the book-laden tables in the main part of the shop to try and see what he’d been looking at, but I couldn’t spot him.

  ‘What did he show you?’ asked Ally, when I arrived back and sat down on the sofa. ‘God, it wasn’t poetry, was it? I spotted him reading some Keats in the library once. Very unfashionable. I think he fancies himself a tormented, romantic soul.’

  I wanted to ask what romance in particular he was tormented about, but didn’t dare.

  ‘Oh gosh, he didn’t press that on you, did he?’ Ernest nodded at the book in my hands.

  I gave a small nod. ‘He did. I’m going to read it over Christmas.’

  Ernest gave a low laugh. ‘He is for ever begging me to share his love of Richardson. Don’t get me wrong; he’s fine if you like that kind of thing. But he does … well … go on a bit.’

  Though I was currently unqualified to give an opinion on Richardson’s prose, I couldn’t help but feel Ernest was probably right, judging by the way the heavy book was digging into my thighs.

  ‘I said I’d try it.’

  ‘Good luck,’ said Ally, rolling her eyes. ‘Honestly, trust him to recommend a book the size of a small boulder. What have you done with him, anyway?’

  ‘I don’t know. He just said he needed a quick sec.’

  Ernest smirked. ‘Probably wanking off in the toilets to some Marquis de Sade.’

  ‘I think maybe he went to buy something,’ I muttered, though of course I knew no such thing.

  The three of us talked for a bit, with Ernest sharing some additions to his book list while Ally made gentle fun of him. Fifteen minutes after James’s mysterious disappearance, curiosity got the better of me and I stood up. ‘I’m just going to see if they have any Dorothy L. Sayers novels.’ I walked out before I could see their reactions. I didn’t know whether the two of them had any opinions on Sayers and wasn’t waiting to find out if they did. Looking around me as I came out into the main part of the store, I felt oddly panicked that I couldn’t instantly see him anywhere, as if he were a small child who had run off and been out of sight for a little bit too long. I fantasised briefly about the shocked reactions I’d probably get if I suddenly started shrieking ‘JAMES!’ at the top of my voice, but decided it wasn’t worth it, humorous though it might well have been.

  ‘Excuse me, do you need any help?’ The young bookseller we’d met as we came in was looking at me suspiciously. Did he think I was a shoplifter?

  I was about to tell him I was fine when I saw him. James, outside the shop in the street. He was talking to someone. I couldn’t make out a face, but I could tell by the long, flowing, brown hair and shape of the figure that it was a female. James, talking to a girl. And not just talking. She was leaning up against a lamppost and he had his hand on her shoulder.

  I walked away from the bookseller without saying a thing, moving towards the door, trying to keep my pace as close to normal as possible. I felt like running. I wanted to interrupt them somehow, to tell him he had to come back inside. To conjure up some emergency that could only be solved by his returning to the little alcove with the sofas and piles of books. I could see her more clearly now and, with depressing inevitability, saw that she wasn’t just pretty. She was breathtakingly beautiful. I was standing there, right by the doorway, partly hoping he would see me. But he didn’t. He didn’t even glance in the direction of the shop. They were laughing together and I caught a few words.

  ‘Oh, come on. You’ve got to be free at least one night.’

  That voice. American. My mother had always claimed she found the American accent ‘brash’ and said it sounded so ‘uncouth’. But hers didn’t sound anything of the kind. It was silky smooth, like liquid caramel. He laughed and said something I couldn’t catch, then a group of laughing t
eenagers walked in front of them and started entering the shop. Apparently spotting their open bottles of Coca-Cola within milliseconds, the bookseller arrived out of nowhere and began rebuking them pompously. I thought about waiting, to see if I could hear anything more of their conversation, but the bookseller was now rounding on me, clearly disturbed by my odd behaviour.

  ‘Are you sure I can’t help you find what you’re looking for?’

  I wish you could, I thought, but instead said to him, ‘No, I’m fine,’ and walked back towards the others, upsetting a stack of teetering paperbacks on a trolley as I went. I wasn’t fine.

  I cried myself to sleep and felt ashamed when I woke up in the middle of the night, my pillow still damp from my tears hours earlier. I drifted in and out of a sleep filled with vague dreams of James and that girl outside. The American girl. And they were both laughing at me, swinging from lampposts around the streets of Oxford, pointing and jeering and saying things to each other I couldn’t quite catch. The dream was just transforming into something darker and more nightmarish involving vampires when a knock came at my door and woke me with a jolt. Seconds later, Ally walked in without waiting for a reply. She often did this and I thanked God every time that she hadn’t yet caught me naked.

  ‘Morning, morning, morning!’ she said unnecessarily loudly. ‘There’s a phone call for you.’

  I was still slightly dazed with sleep and for a moment didn’t have time to process what she’d said. Eventually, it sank in. ‘Phone call?’