Life_ An Exploded Diagram - Mal Peet [66]
When she had breath enough, she said, “Put your hands lower down. Please.”
A lifetime later she lifted herself off him, tossed her hair aside, and looked at her watch, a small silver-framed square on a black leather strap.
“I don’t want to stop,” she said, “but I have to go now.”
“I thought you said your mum and dad were out.”
“It’s not just them.”
She was kneeling astride him. With the last light behind her, all he could see of her face was the glimmer in her eyes. He took her breasts in his hands.
“Oh, Lordy,” she said.
“Frankie.”
“No. Clem.”
“Please.”
“No. I have to go.”
She stood, stooping under the roof. He thought she was angry.
He said, “What d’you think of this place, then? Will it do?”
She looked over her bare shoulder into the gloom.
“It needs tidying up a bit. But, yes, it’ll do.”
THEY FURNISHED THE loft modestly. An inventory of its contents would be brief: a horse blanket (clean) from the manor’s tack room; a sleeping bag (only slightly less so), last used three years ago on Clem’s one and only (and miserable) school cadet camp; a few candles and a box of matches (sometimes, when dusty rain flurried at them over the naked fields, they found it necessary to close the shutters); a shallow wooden box, found beneath the loft, kept supplied with carrots and apples (to placate Marron when he grew restless); fear (often); delirium (frequently).
They embarked upon their halcyon days. Their brief golden age.
Over breakfast, Frankie would tell her parents that she thought she might take Marron on a nice long hack, then go to the kitchen and ask Cook, sweetly, if she would prepare a packed lunch.
Nicole found it vaguely worrying.
“Don’t you think it strange, this sudden enthusiasm for riding, Gerard?”
Mortimer replied from behind the Daily Telegraph.
“Is it? She’s always been rather keen, hasn’t she? It’s good for her, anyway — keeps her out of mischief.”
He lowered the newspaper. “Besides, what else would she be doing?”
Nicole pursed her lips and tilted her head: a Gallic gesture Gerard had once found charming, but which now irritated him.
Frankie was careful to vary her route away from the manor, and this might add a mile or more to the ride. No matter; the thought of Clem’s impatience, and the ways he would show it, excited her. She smiled, remembering Maddie: They get into the most extraordinary states.
“Where’re you been all day, Clem? You weren’t here when I come home for dinner.”
He’d been waiting for the question.
“Homework, Mum.”
“Homework? What homework?”
“Art. We’re doing landscape next term. I’m supposed to do loads of sketches over the holidays.”
Ruth filled the teapot from the electric kettle and looked at him.
“And hev you?”
“Yeah.”
“Can I see ’em?”
Clem shrugged. “If you want to.”
He was almost always at Franklins long before Frankie got there. He felt, though he’d never acknowledged the feeling, that he should be. Because he’d found the place and therefore had a kind of ownership of it. Because it was important that she come to him. A kind of power. Besides, the waiting excited him. He was becoming addicted to the anticipation of her arrival, the long bodily thrill of expecting her. Then she would lead the horse into the barn and throw herself upon him, having worked herself up into a state, hoping he’d be there.
It was like dreaming and waking into the dream.
Instinct, rather than the need for an alibi, made him bring his sketchbook and his pencils to the barn. Waiting for her, he drew the coarse, complex bark of the pines. The way the trees looked from twenty daring paces into the field. Or the ferns bursting through the walls of the ruined house. The overhanging shadows on the path. Drawing was like putting the lid on a pan coming to the boil. The pictures had a jittery spontaneity and quickness that he’d never previously found within himself.
Ruth said, “Where’s this, then?”
“Them trees? Out Swafield way.”
“I like this one, that ole building. Where’s that?”
Clem tried to look ashamed of himself.
“Nowhere. I made that up. Jiffy’ll never know.