Then Alice
Then
Alice
Here at the French House (actual name the York Minster, though no one calls it that), Jacob is famous. Everyone knows him: young, old, the red-faced, bad-tempered barman, who redeems himself when he shouts, ‘What’s your girl drinking, Jake? Gin or beer?’
It’s halves of beer and pressing ourselves into a tightly packed corner, no tables or chairs or anywhere even to put down my sketchbook. I keep it wedged beneath one arm until Jacob notices, takes it from me and stashes it behind the bar.
The white noise of a hundred or so people talking and laughing, the air putrid with smoke and spilt alcohol, our bodies unnervingly close. We try to talk a few times but it’s like puppet theatre. I’m mouthing words, like I’m underwater; he’s shaking his head.
‘Nope,’ he shouts. ‘Still can’t get it.’
And then he looks at me in a way that makes me aware of my heart thudding, pulsing, and my breath, which I let go in one long rush. He doesn’t drop his eyes and I don’t drop mine and the look, the half-smile, lets me know that he feels as I do. There is a conclusion to this, an obvious one, and I understand it here in this densely packed bar where the noise is like a cocoon, just me and Jacob at its very centre, no room for anyone else.
I’ve made a decision and the decision is this. If there’s a chance to sleep with Jacob tonight, I’m taking it. The desire to touch him, with my hands, my mouth, to press my cheek against his, it’s exactly the same pull I felt when I watched him on stage at the Marquee.
‘What are you thinking about, Alice?’ he shouts. He pulls his face into a comical frown.
I’m thinking that I would really, really like to kiss him, though I can’t say that.
‘Shall we find somewhere quieter after this?’ I shout back, and he smiles again.
‘Come on.’ He takes hold of my hand, and just that first contact is an electrical charge that judders through my bones.
Outside, it’s a crowded Friday night in Soho. There are people everywhere, the streets now vivid with neon signs for strip joints and peep shows and girlie bars. When I first arrived in London, a few weeks ago, I was shocked by the blatant, frenzied sexualness of Soho. Not like my father, who decries it as a snake pit of immorality (he’s always been unoriginal in thought); more the fact that these bodily desires I’d always considered secret, and possibly shaming, were to be honoured and celebrated instead. I took the trouble to lose my virginity in my last year at school; nothing special, a few pleasant-enough skirmishes with a boy from school I liked but didn’t love. One thing I knew was that I wasn’t going to arrive in London with the tag of virginity tied around my neck.
Drinkers pool on the pavement outside every pub we pass, and quite often we walk in the middle of the street just to get around them, still hand in hand, Jacob now with the sketchbook beneath his arm.
‘Are you hungry?’ he asks, and I tell him yes, wanting to stretch the evening out for as long as I can.
‘Chinatown then.’
Our ‘business deal’, such as it is, is struck in a red and gold restaurant over bowls of chicken in black bean sauce and egg-fried rice.
‘What we have in mind is a charcoal drawing of the three of us on stage, something very posed and stylised, almost like a classical painting, but it’s a sketch.’
He flips through the final pages of my sketchbook and comes to the last drawing of Josef.
‘This is incredible, Alice. You have so much talent.’
I can’t hide the glow of pleasure at his words.
‘There are some classic poses that life models always adopt. Maybe we could incorporate some of those?’
‘Are you suggesting we do this in the buff?’
I start to laugh, but it dies halfway through because now all I can see is him naked.
‘We’ll get you some money from the record label, of course. How much do you want? Fifty pounds? A hundred? Let’s call it a hundred.’
‘A hundred pounds is far too much.’
‘Most people would actually be quite pleased. Most people would ask for more. Stick it in the bank or something, you might need it someday.’
In my head I’m storing up these extraordinary moments to recount to Rick, but they are coming at me too fast. Me earning a hundred pounds in the course of one brief conversation? Rick sold his painting to San Lorenzo for thirty, and at the time that seemed unthinkable to us.
‘What shall we do now? We could go to a club, but there’s nothing open for an hour or so. But maybe you want to go home?’
‘I don’t want to go home.’
‘So …’ A slight hesitation. ‘I live in Soho. You could come to my flat for a bit, if you wanted? But is that what you want?’
I nod, because it’s impossible to speak.
The way we grin at each other then, a mutual smile that tips into almost-laughter, is an agreement signed.
In darkness now, we pass doorways with red lights above them, others where girls stand outside, bare legs with fur coats, the standard uniform. Sometimes Jacob says hello.
‘Hi, darling,’ he calls, and the girls always know his name.
‘Hi, Jake.’
‘Should I call you Jake?’ I ask, and he laughs.
‘I should think so. My grandparents were the only people who called me Jacob, and you wouldn’t want me to associate you with them.’
His flat is at the far end of Dean Street, three floors up, he tells me, though the moment he has opened up the front door of the thin, tall house and pulled me inside, he kisses me, both hands clasping my face, the sketchbook thudding to the floor.
‘Next time,’ he says, stooping to pick it up, ‘let’s leave the etchings behind.’
The front door of his flat opens into a large sitting room, painted wine red with purple and gold strips of fabric hanging from the ceiling like rows of hammocks. There are candles everywhere, dark red ones, stuffed into empty wine bottles with swollen bases. Beneath the window there’s a low-slung sofa made of brown corduroy, almost hidden beneath a covering of cushions, twenty or thirty of them, in orange, red and purple, each one embroidered in gold and glinting with tiny mirrors.
Jake picks up a box of matches and begins to light the candles.
There are records everywhere – in boxes on the floor, in piles stacked up against the wall – and I watch him flipping through the first pile, taking his time to select one. Exile on Main St . I’ve played it so often on the turntable in my teenage bedroom, the soundtrack will always be imbued with memories of home.
‘They wrote this album in the south of France. And we’re going to do the same thing in Italy. We’ve rented a house in Fiesole, just outside Florence, for the summer.’
Jake lights the last candle and comes to sit next to me on the sofa.
‘There’s a lot of pressure with this second album,’ he says. ‘The first one made it to number six; they’re expecting the next one to be even bigger. And it’s complicated because – well, you saw the show – our music is very varied, not one thing to define us, and that can be hard to sell.’
He leans forward to kiss me.
‘Shall we have some wine? There’s a bottle in the fridge.’
‘Wine would be good,’ I say, feeling that I need it. I’m not much of a drinker – Rick can testify to my weak head – but it’s hard to ignore the undercut of nerves, my whole body clenched with … desire? Fear at what comes next?
Jake returns with an opened bottle of Frascati and two glasses, which he places on a wooden coffee table covered in music magazines, including Sounds , with its arresting picture of him. This, more than anything, underlines the surreality of the situation. I’m about to sleep with a rock star; there on the table is the evidence.
He sits next to me and kisses me again, more insistently this time, and I close my eyes, expecting more, but he draws away.
‘I think we both want the same thing. But any time you want to stop you just have to say. OK? I’m a lot older than you and you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do.’
‘I want to do everything,’ I say, and Jake laughs.
‘Oh me too. All of it. Shall I tell you what I thought when I saw you at the Marquee for the first time? I thought you were the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen and that whatever happened that night I must make sure I talked to you. And then you disappeared. Not to say that the album cover project is a ruse, but I had to find you.’
He sketches an outline of my features with his finger, stroking my eyelids, nose, mouth, chin.
‘You’re so lovely,’ he says, manoeuvring himself so that somehow we are both lying down on the sofa, Jake on top of me, his hips pressing against mine, bony and a little painful. But his touch is so light, hardly there, as he strokes a pathway from my neck to my chest, veering outwards, exactly, expertly sliding back and forth across my T-shirted breasts, as though he is touching my nipples. The T-shirt needs to go, that’s all. I sit up and begin to peel it off, but he stops me, taking hold of my hand.
‘Let’s take it slowly.’
He presses his mouth lightly on top of my breasts, first one, then the other, then moves his hand inside my T-shirt, seeking each nipple in turn.
‘I’m not sure I want to take it slowly,’ I say, and though his face is buried against my chest, I know he is smiling.
‘You will want to, Alice Garland.’
I love the way he says my name, all the time, almost every sentence. On his lips it seems to transcend into something else, something poetic, majestic. He lifts his head again and stays there, not touching, not kissing, but the way he looks at me, the gravity of his dark-eyed stare, is more intensely sexual than anything that has come before.
‘The waiting is the thing. The wanting is the thing. You’ll see.’