which looked like a sideboard till you opened the lid. He kept changing them, playing just one song from each and then moving on to something else. He kept that up until there was a pile of records on the floor, all out of their sleeves. ‘You’ll like this one,’ he’d say, each time. There were a few I’d heard – Connie Francis, the Springfields, Dean Martin – but now and then he’d lob a little jazzy number on. I didn’t really appreciate those. It wasn’t jazz like Acker Bilk who you saw on telly; they were names I’d never heard of and I couldn’t pick out the melody in half of them. I didn’t say I didn’t like them, but I think he could tell. By now I was sure I was flushed from the refills he poured every time my glass was empty. I hadn’t eaten, and the alcohol was rushing through my veins and invading my head, making me feel as though I was moving and talking faster than usual. Eventually I plucked up the courage to say,
‘Who’s going to cook us some tea then, if your mum’s out?’
‘Me,’ he said. ‘What would madam like?’
I giggled. ‘What have you got?’
We went into the kitchen and searched through the cupboards, ending up with a tin of meatballs and a pack of spaghetti. This, spaghetti, was something I had just persuaded my mother to buy, to vary our diet of meat and two veg, so I was pleased to be able to impress Rick in knowing how to cook it. The only problem was it was very messy to eat, so while Rick twirled it in a spoon with some success I chose to cut it up into small strands, and eat it that way. Rick laughed at me, but I didn’t mind. I was feeling far more sure of myself than usual, after all the Martinis and the bottle of red wine that he’d fished out of the pantry. The awe I’d felt earlier was shrinking by the glassful.
After we’d eaten Rick gave me a tour of the house, which was all as lovely as downstairs. When we got to his bedroom he pushed the door open, and I saw a very plain room, with regency-striped walls and a narrow, single bed, covered with a candlewick spread. There was a record player on the floor, and more LPs.
‘You like your music,’ I said.
‘Yeah. I’d like to have been a singer.’
‘Never too late,’ I said, and he started crooning loudly – ‘Who’s Sorry Now?’, or something like that. I pulled a face and put my hands over my ears.
‘Okay, okay, now I see why you aren’t,’ I laughed, and he suddenly stopped, put his arms round my waist and drew me to him. His face went all serious, and as I stared into his gold-brown eyes my whole body tensed. I waited.
‘You are gorgeous, do you know that?’
He kissed me, and it was different to before. Or maybe it just felt that way because I knew what was coming next. He didn’t waste time, undoing the zip on the back of my dress and unhooking my bra, then caressing my breasts and guiding my hands to his fly. Excitement caught in my throat.
‘Come on,’ he said. He pulled my dress right down, so that I stood there in my slip, then I stepped out of the dress and we tottered towards the bed. We more or less fell onto it, but as he began to run his hand up my leg I suddenly felt a little bit of panic. I wanted this to happen more than anything, I wanted him more than anything, and in my drunken state it seemed as though it would be a proof of his feelings for me. But all of that was pitted against my upbringing and the sort of talk I heard at work when the men had forgotten you were there – about girls who were ‘slags’, who ‘gave it out’.
‘Rick… wait.’ I put my hand on his.
He groaned. ‘What?’
‘You will still… I mean you don’t think I’m…’
He kissed my neck and his hand continued upwards.
‘I don’t think anything. I can’t think. You’re driving me mad, girl.’
‘But what about –’
‘I’ll be careful,’ he said, as his hand found its target. ‘Don’t worry.’
And I was lost.
It seems crazy now, from a distance of thirty years, to think that I would trust him. His parents were never there – he only asked me round when they were guaranteed to be out, with mine fondly believing I was having a nice family tea. Each time, we drank too much and played his records and then went up to his bedroom. We did use contraception. Mostly. Apart from that first time. And the day he didn’t have any. And then again when he said, please let me, it’s better without, I’ll pull out in time.
Nothing changed otherwise. I was still left wondering when we’d see each other again, and more and more it was just to go to his house for sex. At work he never openly acknowledged that I was his girlfriend.
Call me stupid. I have.
Eva
1987
‘Eva, wake up! Look at this!’
I wake with a start, blinking and disorientated, but within seconds it all comes flooding back; first the unbelievable chaos of last night, then Ed and me here, stranded together in this soft and springy bed, like a ship on the high seas. I stretch out luxuriously, my limbs heavy with sleep, then lift my head off the pillow to listen for the wind, and hear a silence so thick I think it could be the end of the world.
‘What’s happening?’
‘Come and look.’
Sliding from under the covers I suddenly feel self-conscious in a way that was notably absent last night. I pull off the top sheet and wind it round myself, then wiggle in it over to the window.
‘This is what they do in films,’ I say, ‘wrap themselves in a sheet and wander round in it. It’s harder than it looks.’ Ed has on his boxer shorts, and has tweaked the curtain aside.
The scene below is one of devastation.
‘Oh … my … God.’
It seems that everything is either broken, fallen, or leaning at a crazy, sometimes dangerous angle. Like the tree opposite that has crushed a car and is lodged on top of it, its branches spread all over the road. Or the canopy from a shoe shop that is attached only at one end, its other end lying smashed on the cracked pavement. Or the scaffolding from a building down the road, that has tumbled down around it like matchsticks. I have a faint recollection of hearing that metallic roll at some unearthly hour of the morning.
‘Jesus.’
For a moment we just stare, transfixed. Ed puts one arm around me and pulls me close.
‘We were lucky to get in here. It’s a solid Georgian building.’
‘If it had been full,’ I say, ‘I would have refused to budge and slept on the floor. There’s no way I would have gone out in that again.’ Then I add, ‘Wouldn’t have been as good though. Sleeping on the floor.’
He squeezes my waist, and we exchange a long, slow kiss that eventually takes us back to bed for a long, slow shag, and that’s where we still are when a knock on the door announces breakfast.
‘Leave it there,’ Ed calls. ‘We’ll get it.’
Later, we sit on the end of the bed to eat our cold full English, and watch Breakfast Time on the small TV that hangs on a bracket on the wall. It’s being broadcast from an emergency location because all the power is out at the BBC, and the presenters’ voices are shrill with a mix of disbelief and excitement. It seems that the winds ripped across the country in a swathe that travelled from south-west to south-east, gathering strength and causing more damage as they went. Some of the scenes pictured look like war zones; collapsed buildings, blocked roads, crushed cars and overturned lorries, and a forest in East Anglia that has been entirely felled. People interviewed talk of being ruined, their businesses destroyed, their houses without power or uninhabitable. There will be questions asked,