He lazily uncurled himself and steered his gaze straight at me. He was darker than most in the heavily curtained room, with foppishly lank black hair, black eyes, brilliantly white and even teeth, and a wispy burnt bush of chest-hair. We looked into each other’s faces for a moment or two, and I started to wonder if he was wordlessly inviting me to join him when he himself stood up and picked his nimble way through the snake pit between us.
Once at my side, smiling, he said a single word:
‘Gustav.’
At first I wasn’t sure I’d heard right and I asked him to repeat it. He did, this time I understood and answered in kind.
‘Gilbert.’
I at once felt confident enough to raise the stakes.
‘Shall we …?’
He smiled again, but shook his head too and said something that was ridiculous if also, when you think of it, magnificent.
‘Not here.’
‘I’m with somebody,’ he explained, turning to look over his own shoulder. Then, smiling still, he patted the two pocketless sides of his naked body.
‘This is terrible. I want to give you my number, but I’ve got nothing to write it on. Or with.’
‘Then just tell me,’ I said. ‘I promise I’ll remember.’
He did, and I did.
‘How terribly, terribly poignant,’ Evie broke in, ‘but could we please get to the other end of the story?’
‘The other end?’
‘When and why you fell out.’
Ignoring her, I continued.
Our first date took place just two days later in a pub that I had never frequented. He arrived before me, but only by literally a couple of minutes, so he insisted. And there was something wonderfully topsy-turvy to me about meeting, fully clothed – to this day, if I close my eyes, I can see his black Saint-Laurent jacket, pale grey slacks, grey-black roll-neck pullover, black untasselled loafers – about meeting a stranger, which he still was, who had been stark naked when I originally set eyes on him. So vivid in my memory was that earlier encounter that, the first thirty minutes we spent together, the spectral afterimage of his nudity had the effect of rendering his clothing all but transparent.
Evie’s echoing boom again disrupted my reverie.
‘What in God’s name have a Saint-Laurent jacket and a pair of black loafers to do with anything? Get on, won’t you!’
That night we went straight from the pub to his digs, practically without exchanging a word, and became lovers. Three days later, I moved in with him.
Oh, he was adorable! During the sixteen months of our cohabitation Gustav remained such a
As for his body, every single part of it – his shoulder-blades, the hollows behind his knees, the hairy, aromatic spaces between his toes – became for me an erogenous zone. There should perhaps be another word for ‘we’, a separate grammatical form, when it refers to two people in love. A ‘singular’ we?
Yes, we sometimes bickered, and not always tenderly, each of us boasting a kitty of pet tics that set the other’s teeth on edge. He was driven to silent rage – silent because, for the longest time, he said nothing to me of his exasperation and it was only when I asked what was eating him that he let me have it – driven to rage, I say, by my habit, when wondering whether or not to buy a book, of pawing it in the bookshop for minutes on end before, having at last made up my mind, picking up
We shared our lives, I repeat, for sixteen months. Gustav was the first to graduate, in the summer of the following year, with a B.A. in English. But he hung on for several months afterwards in Edinburgh, except for an overnight stay in Sofia for the hundredth birthday of one of his two surviving great-grandfathers. Later that year, in August, we spent a squally fortnight together in blisteringly hot, madly gay Mykonos.
