The thing is about flirting, Tess thought to herself as she applied a coat of mould-resistant paint in the utility room, I'm not sure I've ever really been on the receiving end, nor have I been much good at it. She considered that she'd probably just been conditioned to an abbreviated form employed as a preliminary to sex.
She thought back to student days, when it had been both the trend and peer-group pressure to drink cheap wine and pair off with someone on a Friday night. The act of being bought the wine had been the apotheosis of seduction (not least because conversation was restricted anyway, on account of the decibel level at the various college dives). But all of this was less flirting, more it was bartering. I buy you wine all evening on my student grant; you take me back to your digs to do the deed. In retrospect, the cheap wine had such a swift inebriating effect on both parties that the deed was rarely accomplished but the hangover and bravado kept that quiet.
For the first time in years, she cast her mind back to the boyfriend she had all through the third year, but even at the time she knew he was less a soulmate and more a human radiator; someone who warmed her up in the freezing shared house. They also used each other to catch up on lecture notes so they could alternate on sleeping until noon. It certainly wasn't love, it wasn't really lust. There had been sex, quite a lot of it, but it was as if they kept at it to see if it could get any better. With or without wine or spliff. Then came their finals and it was only midway through the summer following graduation that they thought perhaps the relationship had ended. In retrospect, they had merely furnished each other's lives that last year in no greater way than the Jim Morrison posters and cheap scatter cushions had furnished their spartan rooms. A distraction from the unrelenting woodchip of student digs, relief from the boredom of course-work, succour from the sudden panic of final exams, a cheap form of student exercise. Nice enough, but about as symbolic as the lower second degree they both came away with.
Then came Tess's move to London and it seemed that for a long while, the furthest flirting went was the odd person smiling at her on the tube – odd being the operative word. Then came Dick. Tess thought about Dick as she dipped her roller and worked the paint to suitable tackiness. Dick hadn't really flirted with her at all – he'd spouted some cod-Shakespearean poetry at her instead. She couldn't remember it precisely – only that he'd actually used the word ‘maiden’ in all seriousness. He broke off, mid-riff, from some long instrumental number on his beat-up guitar, to gaze at her as if she was a gift from the gods. He'd pointed his plectrum at her and delivered his ‘maiden’ soliloquy. As a rambling preamble, it worked. Some more second-rate prose-poetry, a further few chords on his guitar and bed followed. And so he came. And then he went. And Em arrived. Em, usurping utterly the love anyone else could possibly give Tess or ever elicit from her. Emmeline, her everything.
And though Em has remained her everything, the love of her life and the light in it, Tess quietly wondered about the recent rushes of adrenalin. As much as the love she shared with Em was primal and vast and utterly sustaining, feelings of a different type and intensity were surfacing. As the utility room walls brightened with every run of the roller and the skirting in the lounge became smoother with each rub of sandpaper, Tess thought about these swells of adrenalin; how they crested each time Joe said something like, you've missed a bit, or, would Rembrandt care for a cuppa? And she thought how, when she'd been so engrossed glossing the window frame singing along to a Golden Oldies radio show, she hadn't noticed him leaving a Mars Bar and an apple on a plate by her side – and how she'd been too thrilled to eat them. She recalled how she felt when she was carefully cutting-in along the dado and he'd knocked on the door and said, I think I hear Em – I'll go to her if you like. These little surges of adrenalin, Tess conceded, were actually good old-fashioned butterflies. But her scant experience and battered self-esteem left her unsure whether fetching a baby, or leaving a Mars Bar or calling her Rembrandt or sharing a steak was flirting, or perhaps something more. Or there again, less – just friendship or simply social grace.
She wasn't to know that Joe had told the office he'd be in afternoons only – after lunch. Nor did she know that when he was in his study, rigorously calculating forces and stresses and the risks of compression and tension, torsion and resonance; the truer challenge taxing his mind was whether it was too soon since the last cup of tea to make Tess another. And when he heard her singing, he tried to work out various ways to watch her, unseen. And how he wished he could have witnessed her reaction when she found chocolate and an apple by the white spirit! Joe hadn't really ever had to do much flirting because women had generally fallen, legs akimbo, at his feet. Or fallen to their knees to unbutton his flies. Or simply fallen for him with all the sweet nothings that brought with it which, to Joe, was precisely that: sweet but nothing. There's Nathalie in France, Rachel in London, Eva in Brussels; there had been Giselle in Brazil and there would always be someone in Japan. They all come with the job. It's a perk that he's exploited – the cost of foregoing anything long-term and solid has not been a high price to pay. It's been preferable and it's been his choice. It's kept his life simple. He comes and he goes – to them and away from them and back to the sanity and sanctity and seclusion of his house.
Only now, his space here has been halved and yet somehow broadened too, by the presence of Tess. And Joe can't deny the impact it's having but he's just not sure how to calculate it. It's growing, developing, taking form – yet without him having any control over the design. The details often surprise him. There's a solidity that unnerves him as much as a fragility too. Will it hold his weight?
For the duration of Joe's visit, Mars Bars, lunch and supper, and endless cups of tea, have punctuated the days. But after a week of this, he's off again tomorrow, a fact that has been hovering like a wasp inside a window. They haven't wanted to approach it, because of the sting, so they've tried to ignore it, to pretend they're not acutely aware of it. There's been an inordinate amount of tea-making today and it's only early afternoon. But she's still painting in the snug and he's shut himself away in his study. Em is having her nap. Wolf is convinced the garden is full of rabbits that can climb trees. Joe really can't drink a sip more tea and he has much to organize prior to his departure but it seems like a good enough time to tell Tess the plumber will be calling tomorrow about the downstairs loo.
‘He'll come in the morning – but take that with a pinch.’
And as Joe says it, he's looking down on Tess who is crouching in a corner working the sandpaper into some nook. And her jeans have ridden down just enough to reveal the top of her buttocks. She'll curse it as builder's bum but to Joe, it resembles the upper part of a heart shape. And he thinks, pinch. And he thinks, nook and then he thinks, cranny. And he has to turn around and tell himself to get a grip or fuck off back to his study. When he turns back, she's standing and he thinks, why the hell didn't I look for longer? And she's thinking, shit – these bloody jeans. There's an inordinate amount of eye contact and loitering for the simple information of a tradesman's impending visit.
‘The plumber?’ she repeats, as if the rasp of sandpaper had drowned his words.
‘Yes – tomorrow morning.’ He looks around the den. She's done two walls in a sludge-grey, a period colour that's perfect and, bizarrely, was the only one on offer at the small DIY shop in town. He nods his approval. He decides he'll be calling it the snug from now on, too.
‘I'm just sanding down the Polyfilla,’ she says. She's come over because she needs a new piece of sandpaper and it's on the table right by Joe. She has sludge-grey freckles over her cheek and a scab of Polyfilla on her chin. And Joe just can't help himself. He touches her cheek and he touches her chin and then his fingertips pause before he touches the tip of her nose. He used to have a den, out of bounds to previous house-sitters. Now he has a snug thanks to Tess.
‘You're covered,’ he says, ‘in stuff.’
And Tess can't speak because though she didn't know about the paint and the filler she's pretty sure there was nothing on her nose. It strikes her that he just might be touching her because he wants to. She is immobilized by the possibilities this could provide. But because she can't move, when he moves away she can't reach for his arm to stop him, to turn him back towards