‘I have a good nose,’ he said, smiling as he tapped the proboscis in question. ‘Arturetto Landi once gave me a tour of his studio and said that I could have had a career in it.’
‘Being a nose?’
‘Being a nose.’
‘It’s good to have options. Hello,’ she said, turning to Angela.
‘Hello,’ replied Angela, standing up and shaking her hand.
‘This is a friend of mine,’ said George, looking a little rattled. He would have preferred if Angela had pretended to be a deaf-mute and kept to her seat. ‘Angela Gosebourne. Angela is a milliner.’
‘A milliner?’
‘Yes, a milliner.’
The Shadow Home Secretary considered this for a moment, as if she was not entirely sure that she understood the word. ‘Do you mean hats?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ replied George. ‘Hats. And, you know, fascinators. And what have you …’ he added, trailing off.
‘How interesting. I don’t wear hats very often. I don’t think I have a head for them.’
‘Everyone does,’ said Angela. ‘You just have to find the right hat for you, that’s all.’
‘No, you’re quite wrong,’ replied the Shadow Home Secretary, who had been concerned about the size of her head since childhood, when the children in her school suggested that she had been immortalized on Easter Island. ‘But I wish you well in your endeavours all the same.’
‘Thank you,’ replied Angela, sitting down again.
Some more conversation was exchanged between the principals before George resumed his seat too.
‘That was very odd,’ said Angela. ‘Why did you tell her that?’
‘Tell her what?’
‘That I’m a milliner.’
‘I momentarily forgot that you’re a therapist, that’s all.’
‘What nonsense.’
‘All right, I didn’t want to say anything incriminating. She knows Beverley. It wouldn’t do if news of this lunch got back to her.’
‘And why is being a milliner any less incriminating than being a psychotherapist?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said, throwing his hands in the air. ‘I panicked, that’s all. Sometimes, I find myself at a loss to explain my actions.’
‘The milliner and the nose,’ said Angela, considering the careers they might have had in the alternate universe he had created. ‘It sounds rather like a children’s fairy tale, don’t you think?’
‘Children’s fairy tales are notoriously dark,’ he replied, ordering another drink and wondering whether it would betray his emotions too much if he ordered a double. ‘Full of gruesome murders and anthropomorphism.’
‘And cannibalism,’ she added. ‘Think of Hansel and Gretel locked away in a cage above the witch’s fire. Being fattened up for the slaughter.’
‘I’ll avoid that one when I’m reading our son to sleep.’
‘So that’s something that you can see happening?’ she asked, looking up hopefully.
‘Well, possibly. We’ll see.’
‘But you’ll give me an answer at some point, though? About whether you want to be involved?’
‘Of course,’ he replied. ‘I’m not saying yes, but I’m not saying no either. I’m sorry I can’t be clearer, but I need some time to think. Is that all right?’
Angela sighed and stood up, putting on her coat. ‘I suppose it will have to be,’ she said. ‘Sometimes I wonder what it is that I ever saw in you, George, I really do.’
She leaned over to kiss him on the top of his head. His thick white hair was one of his most attractive traits, reminding her of a bichon frise puppy. ‘Enjoy your book,’ she said. ‘All eight hundred pages of it. I’ll wait with bated breath for your call.’
DEVIL WOMAN
While George was coming to terms with the concept of being a father again at sixty, his wife of almost twenty-five years was sitting in a Heathrow Airport coffee shop, saying goodbye to Pylyp, her lover of five months, who was leaving London for Odessa, his home city in Ukraine, to attend the funeral of his father. And he’d just upset her greatly by admitting that he would be staying till the end of the week.
‘Oh no!’ she cried, raising her voice in dismay. ‘Wouldn’t two nights be more appropriate? Or even just one? It’s not as if he’s going to come back to life the longer you stay.’
‘But is my mother,’ replied Pylyp, looking at her through the dark brown eyes that had mesmerized her on their first encounter and had continued to make her feel like a teenage girl ever since. It wasn’t just his eyes, of course. It was his face, his hair, his body, his muscular chest and arms, his tight ass, his accent, his entire sexy self. ‘Is in need of big son now that she alone with eldest son rotting to dust in grave and husband corpse now too.’
‘Of course,’ replied Beverley, who had heard the story of Pylyp’s brother’s untimely passing on several occasions during their time together and was, quite frankly, tired of it. Pylyp liked to maintain that he had been killed fighting the Russians, martyring him as he grew into legend, but the fact was that Borysko Tataryn had actually died en route to a military training camp when he’d been stung by a bee, suffering an allergic attack that left both him and his anthophilous assailant dead within minutes. ‘But sometimes,’ she continued, ‘a person needs to be left alone to grieve. That way, they can come to terms with their loss more quickly. After all, it’s not as if you’re going to return to Ukraine permanently, is it?’
‘I do not plan on this, is true. My life is here. In London. My tortoise is here. In London. And you are here. In London.’
Beverley tried not to betray how maddening it was to find herself relegated to the bronze medal on his list of affections. She knew how much he loved Ustym Karmaliuk – named in honour of the great Ukrainian folk hero – but it bothered her to think that, faced with a choice between the two of them, she would probably lose out to a vertebrate reptile currently enjoying his one hundred and fifteenth summer.
‘I wish I could come with you,’ she said.
‘This would only confuse my mother,’ he replied, shaking his head. ‘You have six more years than her and, in my country, you would be seen as devil woman.’
‘Right,’ said Beverley. ‘Good to know.’
‘Of course, I know that you are not devil woman.’
‘Thank you.’
‘But she would think so. She would call you slut, say you are person with deranged mind. Even whore.’
‘Yes, all right.’
‘Tramp and jezebel. Harlot, lady of the night—’
‘Yes, I’ve got it, Pylyp,’ said Beverley, raising her voice in irritation. ‘You don’t need to go on.’
‘She would ask friends to stone you in street. Behaviour of women in England very different to behaviour of women in Ukraine. At home, women have … what is word?’
‘Less progressive attitudes towards relationships between older women and younger men?’
‘No, I think word is self-respect. Maybe is not. I need learn of these words.’