“Out,” he says to me briskly, gesturing to the door. “Now.”
I pout and slink off to my room. I want to listen! I try to stick my ear against the door, but it does not yield any secrets.
Quarter of an hour later I hazard a return to the living room. For some reason, it really irritated me to hear Blakey call him Eliot. Ain’t she got no respect? I feel like a lioness with her cub – no other woman must touch him.
He is drinking deep from his wine glass, gloom etched into his sharply sculpted features.
“I need you to leave the house for a while,” he says. “Go and see your friends.”
“They’ll be at the pub,” I tell him.
“Meet them there then,” he says, eyeballing me intimidatingly.
“I…er, I haven’t got any money.”
He sighs and delves into his trouser pocket, bringing out a tenner.
“Stay out of mischief,” he says, placing it in my hand. “And I want you back by eleven. Sharp.”
I bump into Blakey on the way downstairs, looking as if she has a swarm of bees in her knickers. When she sees me she stares wildly, looking up the stairs to Sinclair’s apartment door then back at me again.
“Evening, Dr Blakey,” I say insouciantly. Ha! How’s he going to explain that little arrangement to her? They will split up for sure.
Rather than meet Dearbhla and Emily on a slow Monday night at the Union, I…what has come over me?...simply spend an hour or so mooching around the locale in the dark. It is a chilly, almost moonless night, but I feel brimful of this strange romantic longing, and solitude is what I need. In the expansive stone mansions I pass, I sometimes see a tiny tableau of life through a lit window – a piano practice, a table laid for dinner, the flickering blue of a television screen – and I want to feel included in something like that. With Sinclair. I want him. Oh God. I really want him.
He said be home by eleven, didn’t he? So twenty past ten is a perfectly acceptable time to come back, no?
I slide my key into the lock as noiselessly as I can, turning the handle with excruciating slowness and inching open the door. Rather rewardingly, the sounds of discord emanate in a jumbled mess from the living room. I stand in the doorway, frozen for a few minutes, trying to fine-tune my ears. Sinclair is not raising his voice, but Blakey certainly is.
“…twenty first century woman….Victorian era….power….and control….not standing for it….mature adult relationship….I was mistaken….”
Ah, sounds good. What did he do? Did he try and wrestle her over his knee? I am delighted at the mental image that springs to mind. Dr Blakey isn’t a kinky sort then. He’s better off out of it…and into me.
I jerk to attention as the living room door is crashed open and a furious Blakey pauses mid-storm to stare at me again. “Here she is,” she spits. “Your little project. I’d get out of here if I were you, dear. The man is an unapologetic sadist.” Hey, my favourite kind. An apologetic sadist would be lame. She presses her face to mine. “Good luck.”
/>
And she’s off.
Sinclair appears in the door frame, not exactly chasing her and begging her to come back. He frowns at me.
“Why are you here?”
“You said to be back by eleven,” I remind him.
“So I did. Glass of wine? Or have you already had too much?”
“I..we didn’t go to the pub.”
He raises an eyebrow. “Really, Beth, is my influence so compelling already?”
I smile sheepishly and move after him into the living room, seating myself on the sofa at the opposite end from him. He hands me a glass of pinot grigio and pours one for himself.
“I need to make it clear that anything that happens in this house is private and should be classed as restricted information. If it becomes public knowledge that I have had…dealings…with Dr Blakey, I will know the source, and believe me, Beth, the consequences will be unpleasant. Have I made my point?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good.” He strokes the stem of his wineglass for a while, staring out at the pitch black night.