Chapter 19
We saw each other as much as we possibly could in the weeks that followed.
Theo would drive over to me, or I’d take the train to Leeds, sitting with him, either in the library or in his room, where I found it very difficult to keep my hands off him while he studied.
He spent a lot of time, when he should have been revising, down at the squash courts, practising and practising shots over and over again, angry and swearing at himself when he missed, coming off the court gloriously glowing and still full of energy, clearly fuelled for more exercise, but of a totally different kind.
One evening, we were the last ones to leave and as I watched him from the viewing rails above, he glanced up, holding my eye as he wiped slowly and almost seductively at his neck with a white towel.
‘Come with me,’ he mouthed.
‘Where?’
‘Just come down.’
The changing room was quiet and cool – no clothes hanging up on pegs except those I saw to be Theo’s and, as well as the slightly pungent odour of sweat and rubber, there was a tension in the air; an exciting illicit frisson as Theo took my hand, moving his fingers to my face, to my neck.
‘Anna…’ he breathed, bending to lick my collarbone – something he knew I couldn’t resist.
‘Here?’ I said nervously, looking round.
‘Everyone’s gone. It’s OK. Stan – the caretaker’s – left me to lock up.’ He held up a bunch of keys. ‘I’ll drop the keys in on the way out.’
Emboldened by the changing-room door Theo now locked behind us, I reached up to him, kissing him so fiercely and without restraint I surprised myself as well as him.
Taking his cue from me, he pulled off his Adidas top and I watched, marvelling at his sweat-soaked torso, at his hardness in the white shorts.
‘Hell, Theo,’ I whispered as he kicked off his shorts and moved me against the cool white wall. He lifted my cotton skirt, removed my knickers and, lifting me up, wrapped my legs around him, entering me slowly and oh so expertly, his eyes never once moving from mine.
I think it was probably the most erotic evening of my life.
We were into June, the weather still glorious, and Theo finished his exams and consequently his second year at Leeds University.
He was still uncertain about taking a year out – as with my course it was an option that not everyone took – but having had three gap years before he actually started, in effect becoming something of a mature student, he was debating whether he should just crack on with his final year.
Secretly, that’s what I was hoping for too: a whole year in Leeds with Theo!
We’d finish our degrees together and then – well, who knew?
He was playing more and more squash, still with the dream of turning professional, and I began to realise that perhaps academic life wasn’t really for him.
To my amusement, Theo became more than friendly with Mum and Dad when, if I didn’t manage to beat Mum to the phone, she’d answer and ask him how his day had been.
How his exams were going. Had he played much squash recently?
I sometimes had to almost wrestle her off the little phone table we had in the narrow hallway as she settled herself to more questioning of my boyfriend.
Because that’s what he was: my boyfriend.
I had a boyfriend: a gorgeous, intelligent, funny, lovely, bloody sexy boyfriend and every minute that I wasn’t in contact with him was a wasted minute.
We’d chat for hours, me telling him about work in the office, how I was getting a bit fed up with the routine of it all; how I just had to mouth ‘my dad and my two brothers’ in the general direction of John Dyson to know he’d think twice about trying anything on with me ever again.
Dyson now ignored me completely, which suited me, never demanding I make him coffee and giving any photocopying and filing to Linda or Debs, rather than to me who was actually supposed to do it.
Theo was moving out of his student accommodation at the end of the week, packing up his things and taking them back home to North Yorkshire for the summer.
He wasn’t, he said, particularly looking forward to spending the next couple of months back at Mandeville Hall, but needs must, and he was expected to work on the estate, either in the gift shop or on one of the many farms as well as helping Graham with the horses up at the stables.
‘You could come and stay,’ he said, at the end of one evening when neither of us refused to be the one to put down the phone on the other. It often went like this:
‘OK, I’d better go.’
‘OK.’
‘Go on then…’
‘I’m not putting the phone down first…’
‘Well, I did last time…’
‘I don’t think you did…’
‘Tell me what you’re wearing…’
‘Does it matter…?’
‘I just want to picture you…’
And so it would go on, but this time, with the invitation to spend another weekend back at Mandeville Hall floating in the air between us, I knew I had to make some concrete answer.
‘Would your parents be all right with that?’
‘I don’t see why not,’ Theo replied. ‘There’s always someone staying in the guest wing.’
‘But what would I do all day?’
‘Walk? Read? Help me with the hay making on one of the tenant farms?’
I laughed at that. ‘You’ve been reading The Forsyte Saga. Wasn’t it Fleur Forsyte who wheedled her way onto John Forsyte’s sister’s farm and ended up frolicking in the hay with her man?’
‘I’m always up for a quick frolic in the hay.’ Theo gave a dirty laugh. ‘Anyway, before that, we’ve London the weekend after next. How about I drive over to you, we leave the car at Sheffield and get the train down?’
‘Is this the weekend you told your parents you’re meeting up with your old public-school friends? Who was it…? Ah… Minky, Binky, Old Buffy, Barty and Farty…?’ I started laughing.
‘God, you’re so predictable,’ Theo tutted but I could hear the amusement in his voice. ‘And yes, the weekend I’m supposed to be off to some old-school do with Wills and Fraser.’
‘Well, as long as it’s just you and me and not an entourage of champagne-drinking Hooray Henrys.’
‘Actually,’ Theo said slightly irritably, ‘you’re not only predictable, but you’re also bloody rude and prejudiced as well, Anna Piasecki. You’re classist…’
‘Nope,’ I said trying to lighten the slight tension I could now feel between us. ‘Never understood the foundational texts of Greco-Roman antiquity. Homer and Virgil are utterly dead to me.’
‘Seeing as they’re thousands of years old, very likely,’ Theo retorted dryly. ‘Anyway you’re mixing classist with classicist. You’re a snob, Anna, an inverted snob, who presumes to think anyone not having had what you see as your working-class upbringing and status…’
‘That’s unfair,’ I interrupted, knowing Theo’s accusation of me was probably more than equitable.
‘I don’t think it is, Anna. I’m going. Got to start packing my things up to take home.’
And for the first time in our nightly phone conversations, there wasn’t, on Theo’s part, the usual intimate and amorous protracted goodbyes that had me wanting to hang on to him for just a few more seconds before floating up to my room, or off to join Dad at his allotment.
‘Oh, Theo, this is just heaven.’ The bedroom window of Theo’s family’s house in Holland Park looked directly onto the actual park itself. ‘Come on, come on,’ I said in huge excitement, ‘let’s go down, let’s go and look in the park. I can see a peacock. Hell, I’ve never seen one before. Look, look…’
I was like an overexcited kid on Christmas Day, wanting to see everything the big city had to offer. We’d arrived at St Pancras station from Sheffield where Theo had left his Mini.
‘Wow!’ I’d stood in front of the red-bricked facade, stepping back to take it all in. ‘That’s incredible. What an amazing building.’
‘Hmm, but you don’t want to know how it was built.’
‘I do, I do, I want to know everything. Who was the architect? When was it built? How much did it cost…?’
‘It cost the lives of a lot of children. They helped to make the bricks. Not something in Victorian history to be proud of.’
‘Oh, well, that’s spoilt it for me. Child labour!’
Theo had taken my hand. ‘I thought it would. Come on, we need the Piccadilly and then the Central Line to Holland Park.’
I’d been just as fascinated by the London Underground as when I’d first travelled on it as a kid, watching stations go by that I recognised only from the Monopoly board, but even though it was well past rush hour, the trains were hot and airless.
I was glad when we took the lift up to Holland Park station and out into the balmy June evening before walking down a vibrant and buzzing tree-lined avenue.
Each café and bar on Holland Park Avenue had taken advantage of every inch of its allotted frontage; chairs and brightly coloured umbrellas from one melting and merging into its neighbour’s until we gave up trying to walk together and, still clutching on to his fingers, I followed Theo in tandem.
‘Ooh, a big red London bus,’ I said, in delight.
‘Hundreds of them, you daft thing.’
‘So many people, so many cars,’ I went on, catching up with Theo who was striding away through a sea of people. ‘And what ridiculously over-the-top cars.’ I stood, counting three Porsches, numerous BMWs and a bright red Ferrari. ‘Blimey, there isn’t half some wealth in this city.’
The whole of Holland Park Avenue pulsated with that particular London restless energy that, in years to come, I would learn to recognise and love as my own adopted city.
The house that Theo stopped outside – flourishing a key like some magician before smiling down at me – was a typical London terraced villa, tall and imposing but belying the number of rooms and bedrooms within.
While probably needing some updating, there was something about the shabby chic of the house I immediately fell in love with.
Theo drew back heavy curtains and opened windows in the downstairs rooms, allowing the warm evening air and birdsong to drift in.
I followed him into a large ground-floor kitchen which boasted a modern stove instead of the ubiquitous Aga, the usual kitchen cupboards, fridge and freezer and a somewhat boring-looking table and chairs in the middle of the room.
Theo went straight to the fridge, pulling it open.
‘Yay. Good old Mrs Crabtree.’ Inside were a couple of bottles of white wine, cans of lager and enough olives, paté and cheese to set up a deli.
‘Shouldn’t it be Good old Mum?’ I asked, giving Theo a look. ‘Surely she would have had to organise this for you?’
‘Nope, it was me actually,’ Theo said. ‘I reminded Mum I was coming down for the weekend, and she told me to ring Mrs C and order in what I wanted. “I know what you boys are like,” Mum said. “Order what you want. Put it on your father’s account. I don’t want Wills’ and Fraser’s mothers thinking I don’t know how to look after their sons. ”’
This was a different world to the one I knew.
‘Do you want to shower?’ Theo asked, pouring us both a glass of Chablis.
‘Yes, and I’d like to change.’
The previous week, Linda from the office had taken me in hand once again, insisting I take advantage of the sales in the town centre, selecting summer dresses, another couple of cotton jumpsuits which were still all the rage, while encouraging me to treat myself to some fancy bras and knickers.
‘I can’t afford all this,’ I’d insisted, stroking the silky fabric of a pair of French knickers.
‘Anna, you only live once,’ Linda had said.
‘You tell that to the bank manager,’ I replied. ‘Or the poor miners who haven’t a penny to their name.’
‘Oh, sod the bloody miners,’ Linda had sniffed and, not for the first time, I wondered if working for the NUM was really up her street.
Theo led the way upstairs to the room he said was always his when he was here in London, and I was glad we wouldn’t be in the master bedroom. How awful to have been sleeping in his parents’ bed.
It had been nearly a week since I’d last been with Theo.
He’d driven over to me, ended up talking to Dad in the back garden about Dad’s escape from the Nazis, as well as the Russians and, both enjoying each other’s company, it had meant I’d only had an hour or so with him before he drove back to Leeds.
‘He could have stayed the night, love,’ Mum had insisted.
‘Oh? Where?’
‘Well…’ Mum had looked round vaguely. ‘In our David’s bed.’
‘Next to Les? I don’t think so.’
There was so much sexual tension between us in Theo’s schoolboy’s bedroom that evening, the city’s summer light and warmth streaming in through the open windows, but rather than jump on him, I looked round, taking in everything that drew a picture of Theo, the child.
The room probably hadn’t changed much since he was a schoolboy, and I found it touching that his model aeroplanes and Beano annuals were still on display.
Having examined his childhood treasures, I opened my case, moving a couple of things around, taking out clean underwear and a different T-shirt. I found the new knickers Linda had insisted on buying for me as a going-to-London present and was about to head to the bathroom.
‘Jesus.’
‘What?’ Theo looked up from where he was lounging on the bed, reading Time Out.
‘Nothing, nothing.’ Pink-faced, I started to laugh. ‘I reckon whoever made these forgot to sew the seams of the… you know… the… gusset!’ I held them up for Theo’s inspection, suddenly utterly turned on by the very thought of wearing them.
We didn’t get to see the delights of Holland Park or anywhere else in London that evening.