I was in deep trouble.
Chapter Eight
It was a long time since I’d seen the gardens.
I leaned on the stone balustrade, letting my eyes adjust to the dusky light, and looked out over them, finding little changed, though they were more overgrown than I remembered. The fountain, in which we had bathed naked, was switched off. The little maze of formal and informal gardens through which we had chased each other, around the statues and under the rose arches, was unkempt with trailing branches and bristling hedges, but they were essentially those same gardens. And, down by the edge of the lake, the fragrant bower in which we had lain and quoted poetry to each other and kissed and spoken words of love looked as enticing as it had ever been.
I had thought that summer would last for ever, a season of hot bare skin and overripe scents and bursting colour stretching eternally.
I could still be lying on the grass, smelling of factor fifteen and his mother’s Mitsouko, lazy and sticky from sex, a pile of little books with the Faber and Faber logo on the spines beside me, watching the sun sink through the cross-hatch of branches overhead. I could still be in his arms, pressed against his chest while his open shirt tickled my thighs, connected lip to lip, wondering yet again how it was possible that such a sensitive and kindred soul had been found in such a strange place.
And then the ringing of the phone in the distance and Joss breaking the kiss and frowning and muttering something about why his parents couldn’t get mobiles like everyone else.
I had no idea, when he kissed me goodbye and sent me off home for my tea, that it was the last I would see of him.
I could almost hear that ringing now, but this time I knew it for what it was. A death knell.
When he came and stood beside me, I wanted to ask him why, so badly, but something held me back. Fear, I suppose, of what he might say. I just wasn’t that into you. I didn’t want to hear it.
Instead I turned to him with a pathetic little laugh and tried to blame kink-nerves.
‘Sorry. Bit overwhelming,’ I said.
‘Am I taking things too fast? I’m sorry but we need to get moving if we want to be ready in time for this Christmas shindig. Submission takes a lot of practice.’
‘I daresay it does.’ I was trying very hard not to sound bitter, but in my mind’s eye I could see a cold, blue image of my eighteen-year-old self lying in my narrow Hall of Residence bed and crying myself to sleep. ‘Especially when it’s me and you.’
He bowed his head at that.
‘Yeah,’ he said quietly. ‘I get that.’
‘How empathic of you.’
‘Lulu, I will prove myself. I will be a better man, for you.’
He sounded so sincere, but then, he was good at that. Good at the look and the sound of things, even if his heart was fundamentally a shrivelled old prune.
‘We’ll see,’ I said. ‘I think I’m done for tonight. Can I take that cheat sheet with me?’
‘Of course. Prep,’ he said with an upward curve of his lip.
‘We called it homework at my school.’
‘Oh, you real worlders.’
He led me back into the morning room and handed the sheet to me with a flourish. I put it down and set to work dressing myself again.
‘I’ll be testing you next time,’ he said.
‘I’ll be testing you first.’
He stood to attention. ‘What’s my next detail, ma’am?’ he asked.
‘I want you to sort out that garden. And I don’t mean hire somebody in to do it.’
‘I can’t afford that anyway,’ he said.
‘Good. I want you to do it, all by yourself. Strip to the waist and shear those hedges. I expect it to be in tip-top condition for my next visit.’