that. It’s in his face.
always say your prayers
A new cafe. He’s holding your hand across the table, he’s cupping it like a turtle’s shell, he’s not letting go; as if he’s reluctant to abandon contact now it’s been made. A cup of tea is in front of you, it’s cold, a milky, spotty scum has tightened on its surface.
Gabriel, are you a virgin? Straight out.
Yes.
Just like that. You weren’t expecting the confession so quickly. His smile has all the honesty of a desert sky in it; it’s as if he’s never uttered the affirmation to anyone and it’s a relief, such a relief, to have it said. He says yes, again, yes, and his fingers are stroking yours absently, they’re stroking your knuckles, they won’t stop. And then he says I think I need some help, I’ve been thinking about this night and day and you’re nodding, you’re saying nothing of your own nights and days.
How come, you ask, soft.
He sits back, he laughs. Well, he says, slow, he’s struggling to begin, he goes to say something, changes his mind. And then he starts. There was a girl when he was fifteen. Her name was Clare. They were in a musical together. It was a joint production with his boys’ school in north London and the local convent school. He’d just moved there, from Spain.
What was the musical?
You don’t want to know. Salad Days.
You both laugh.
She was American. Her parents were Spanish but she was from California. She was different from all the rest. Gorgeous. Warm. It was like, I don’t know, she stored the sun under her skin or something. I was…gone.
You nod, you smile, it’s a tale you can almost secondguess: that they fell in love, madly, sweetly, consumingly. That a teacher found them in a storeroom, during a rehearsal. That they hadn’t got far but their clothes were off and you see the two of them: their hands, their faces, shy, shivery, wondrous, focused, scared. They were dragged apart. Clare’s parents were very strict; she was withdrawn from the production; she never saw it. Gabriel was told not to phone, he wasn’t allowed to see her, he sent a letter telling her he’d wait for her and he wouldn’t look at anyone else but he never knew if she’d received it. She moved schools. He couldn’t trace her, she was lost.
My family says I fixated on her, he says. I guess I did, I don’t know. Not a single day went by without me thinking about her, and what I’d lost. Is that fixation?
I think so, yes, you smile. You turn your palm beneath his so that they’re facing each other, flat.
Well, my mother says I have an addictive personality. He grins ruefully. Anyway, I was determined to be an actor—maybe, on some level, it was to find a way back to her, I don’t know; I spent so much time pretending and imagining, it was all in my head. Anyway, one day when I was twenty I was walking down Charing Cross Road and she was just there, in front of me. He’s nervous, there’s a little cough through his talk, a clearing of his throat, you remember it from moments when he’s been thrown off balance: when he has to query a waiter’s bill, perhaps, or respond to a madman’s belligerence on the tube. I’d been waiting for so long, he continues. We went back to my flat. Your hand tightens around his. Gabriel is silent, he licks his lip, he looks straight at you. I told her she’d have to be gentle, he says. I didn’t know what to do. I’d never been with a woman. In my mind, I was still in the relationship with her. I’d been waiting so long.
You are holding his cheek, you are holding your breath.
She laughed. She just…laughed.
The anger in him still, after all these years.
She’d changed so much. There was such a hardness to her, she was so…cynical, knowing. All the sweetness was gone. And she’d dyed her hair and had too much lipstick, and this horrible, thick make-up on her face. She didn’t need it, any of it. I don’t know what happened to me. I grabbed her by the shoulders and I just shook her, I shook her as if I was trying to rattle the laugh out of her. I couldn’t stop.
You press his hand between both of yours like a beautiful, smooth stone that you’ve found on the beach.
And then, I don’t know, I lost focus, I couldn’t concentrate, it was like some virus of insecurity was eating me up. Everyone knew me; girls, for God’s sake, had posters of me on their walls; and as he talks he slips his hand from yours and his fingers worry at a paper napkin and begin tearing it into little holes. I couldn’t say that I’d never actually slept with someone. I was paralysed by it. I said to myself that by the time I was twenty-two I’d have been with a woman, and then it was twenty-five and then I was thirty and God, how could I tell anyone then? And weirdly, over the years it just became easy to say no. To pretend. It was like living behind a pane of glass and looking out at everyone, and not being able to touch. And he’s laughing, soft. And then I met this woman, in a café.
Your breath catches in your throat.
I liked her, very much. He speaks so slowly; you can scarcely hear him over the hammering of your heart. And she was married, which meant, in a weird way, that she was free. There’d be no complications, no messy aftermath. I thought about it a lot. She was someone I could trust. And she was a teacher, too. It’s funny, that.
Your mouth is sapped dry.
And yet I can’t ask her to help me, it’s impossible. I could never ask her that. She asked me once but I just blanked, freaked, I wasn’t ready. And then…I couldn’t face it. I’m sorry.
You look at him sitting before you, utterly naked, with such a helplessness on his face and his forehead all crinkled up and you’re moved, so moved, by the courage of his honesty. You think of the contrast with Cole, the set of his jaw when you’d asked him again and again about Theo, the tightness in his hands as he’d pushed your questions away. Gabriel’s making an enormous leap with his words, you’re sure no one else has heard them. There was always a strange kind of absence to him, some piece of the puzzle you didn’t have and now, suddenly, he is present, in such an endearing, transparent way and a tenderness is falling over you like a wave. You won’t judge him or condemn him. In fact, you respect him; for not succumbing to all the pressure and panic about losing one’s virginity, for resisting, holding out. It’s so old-fashioned and disciplined, so austere, noble, quaint. No one does this any more.
Gabriel suddenly cringes and bows his head in his hands as if he can’t believe what he’s just confessed. This is a moment he will never forget in his life: tread softly, you must. Don’t hurt him, don’t scare him off, don’t thicken that pane of glass. He’s closer to you now than he’s ever been, he’s all vulnerable, stripped, and you know that you’ll also remember this moment for the rest of your life, like a too-bright fluorescent light in a communal corridor that’s never switched off, this moment of Gabriel sitting before you, naked, when all the nos that have been stopped up within you for so long become one enormous
yes.
you had better have a millstone tied to your neck and be thrown into the deepest pond than become a taker of opium
Walking to his flat. Not daring to talk; holding hands, tremoring, wet.
His rooms are spare and neat, like a monk’s, with a few beautiful objects from his travels here and there, and small stacks of paperbacks and some black and white postcards on the walls. He does not intrude heavily upon the space.
His bed’s surprisingly big. You turn off the lights. Where to begin, you are the teacher and before you is the blank slate: God, the responsibility of it. You gather your