Poppyland Read online

  The scar on his hand twists round to the underside of his wrist and disappears beneath his watchstrap. When I notice it again, desire leaps within me and slithers into my core.

  ‘Do you think so?’ I can’t believe I am responding so physically, or whatever this is, to a guy I have only just met. It’s freaking me out and at the same time thrilling me. It’s like driving a fast car or riding a horse at full gallop; the adrenaline pulses through me like a fix and I feel high. I might do something I regret. The thought makes me laugh and I twirl around and away from him, shy to look at him in case he sees more than I want to show him in my eyes. His gaze is on my face, touching me everywhere, along my throat and down the front of my dress. It makes me smile.

  ‘It’s an art gallery, not a bar.’ I am just staying with the thread of our conversation but I am hardly aware of what we are saying, because all I can think about is how I’m longing to touch his skin. I have the urge to take his hand again and to trace his scar with my fingertip from its beginning in the curve of his thumb, slowly down the glinting metal of his watchstrap, and there to pause and press my finger under the articulations of the watchstrap and down the inside of his wrist.

  What if he is thinking the same? What if he wants to touch me as much as I want to touch him? He is so close I am breathing in the scent of his body, his skin. It’s making me feel dizzy. And his scar. I didn’t know I was turned on by scars. Oh God. I am not thinking straight. I’ve got to come up with more to say; if there’s a silence I am sure he will read my thoughts. Luckily he is talking, unaware of the state I am getting myself into. Now he is running his hand through his hair, looking up at the wall behind us.

  ‘A gallery? Oh that makes sense. How great! Can anyone go in, do you think?’

  ‘Oh yes.’ Speaking breaks the tension.

  ‘Your hair smells good,’ he says, and it is like an electric shock when he touches it and it falls from behind my ear across my cheek.

  Completely thrown, I gasp, ‘Yes, of course anyone can go in.’

  He looks at me and across at the gallery. ‘Why do you think that?’

  We are standing in one another’s body heat. Or rather I am in his, as my body heat is around zero. No coat. I shiver. ‘Because this is the private view.’

  ‘Is it? How do you know?’

  ‘How do I know? Umm. I was at it.’

  I just can’t say they are my pictures. It is too much of an exposure for this delicately balanced game; it will change everything. Really I am just scared. He touches my elbow and my nerves thrill as if he has run a feather along the inside of my arm and down the length of my body. I look back at him and both of us can’t help smiling.

  He takes my hand. ‘Did you come with someone? They will be wondering where you are,’ he says, then frowns. ‘And why are you out here by yourself with no coat? Why did you leave the private view?’ He laughs and squeezes my hand. ‘And while we’re at it, what did you say your name is?’

  I laugh. ‘Shall we start again? My name is Grace, I can’t believe you forgot that already, and I’m doing the same as you are out here, I’m standing around looking at the lights. You’re right, it was a mistake to come out with no coat, and now I wish I had one.’ My red dress glows like an ember but gives off no heat.

  His voice is low and gentle. ‘I’m sorry, I was looking at you and I forgot to listen to your name, I mean your surname, because I know you’re called Grace.’ A car hisses past on the damp road, and the quiet between us is as intense as any words. ‘And I was just thinking what a coincidence it is that we met here, tonight. It’s auspicious.’

  ‘Is it? Why?’

  He takes his coat off and holds it out on his finger. ‘Well, for a start, you might be cold?’ he asks hopefully. ‘And if you are, I can give you this.’

  I bite my lip, suddenly shy. ‘Why do you think it’s a coincidence? Isn’t it just a random meeting?’

  He shakes his head. ‘No, I don’t think so.’ He shakes the coat, making me laugh.

  ‘You look like a bullfighter. I’m fine, really,’ I say.

  ‘Oh really?’ He swirls the coat around my shoulders and his warmth settles all over me. The coat smells of wax and oil and inside it I feel soft and safe.

  ‘That’s nice,’ I whisper. My protective shell has dropped off. A random selection of soft, shell-less items float into my head, including an open oyster, a jellyfish, and an un-formed egg, its shell collapsed like the overused ping pong ball I found in the hen house at my Aunt Sophie’s house when I was six. But these images only veil my true intent; I’m looking at Ryder’s mouth and wanting more than anything on earth for him to kiss me.

  I put my hand over my mouth to wipe away desire and hide the huge smile breaking from within me, as I stand cocooned in the coat as though in an embrace. Ryder wanders away along the sea front. His hair is dark in the night light, and he is incongruous in the winter street with no coat on. He doesn’t seem to mind; he looks completely at home on the harbour. He is turning away, but he stops and is back next to me in a moment. ‘Being chivalrous is the best excuse not to go back to the boat yet. I’m with a big ship, you see. We’re leaving tonight.’

  ‘How can you be with a ship? Are you a sailor?’ Confused, I rattle through my thoughts aloud. ‘Oh, and this is an encounter out of one of those old musicals. Singing in the Rain, maybe?’

  He frowns. ‘Yes. No. I’d prefer On the Waterfront.’

  ‘Oh yes. That fits.’

  Ryder lights a cigarette and inhales hard. Maybe he isn’t feeling as relaxed as he looks.

  ‘I’ve been in Copenhagen for a day or two, but mainly I’m working, and work is out there on a ship.’

  ‘Are you a fisherman?’

  His eyes are narrow through the smoke. I have a sense that he is looking past my face into my head and my heart.

  ‘The real answer is pretty mundane,’ he says lightly. ‘I’m a marine engineer and I’m writing a report on the proposals to build an offshore wind farm here in Copenhagen.’

  ‘That’s not mundane, that’s a real job in the real world,’ I object, and maybe it’s because he said he has to go, but I am sad that the grains of something precious are slipping away as if there was an egg timer tucked into the corner of my mind.

  ‘Well, it’s real up to a point. But making guesses about what might happen often feels like a nightmare, or an acid trip. But then reality is all relative, isn’t it?’

  I try to find words, but it is like a dream, nothing comes out of my mouth, even though desire to hear him and be heard by him tugs at my heart.

  ‘I’m sorry, I’ve run out of brain power.’ His presence is magnetic, distracting, comforting, singular. Even while my mind whirls with all these feelings I am aware that I will not forget him when he is gone.

  And suddenly it is all too much. A rubber mallet has rained blows on my head ever since my plane landed, and now I feel flattened by exhaustion and I know I should be back in the gallery. ‘I’ve got to go.’

  ‘I’ll take you.’ He flicks the cigarette away and it rolls, glowing, into the gutter.

  I shake my head. ‘Thank you, but I can’t go anywhere. I have to go back in there.’

  Ryder is by my side, his face bathed in prism rainbow colours by the projected lights of the gallery. He touches my cheek. ‘I’ll come with you.’

  ‘Thank you.’ The hem of my dress swings against his knee. If he is coming in with me, I’d better tell him, that it’s my show now. I tuck my hair behind my ear, embarrassed suddenly, and looking anywhere but at Ryder’s face.

  ‘It’s my exhibition, you know. I mean, they are my pictures.’ I wave at the façade of the gallery, feeling a bit futile. Would I feel any more exposed if I had unbuttoned my dress and stepped naked into the street in front of him? Probably not.

  Ryder looks at me, whistles under his breath, and takes my hand, a wide grin on his face. His hand holding mine is a good, safe feeling. ‘Wow. I’d love to come and see what you do,’ he says
. I feel numb now, but he keeps talking as we cross the road, easy chatter I can half respond to.

  ‘I’ve never been to an exhibition with the artist before. I’ve never really wanted to,’ he says. ‘What would it be like to go round the National Gallery with Caravaggio, for example?’

  ‘Scary,’ I laugh, ‘but it could be fun.’

  ‘This is fun,’ he says, opening the door for me, and his warm presence by my side is the thing I am most aware of as we walk into the gallery.

  Chapter 3

  Ryder

  Copenhagen

  Five years later

  The plane veers along the runway in a hiss of protesting brakes mixed with the applause of passengers. After a turbulent end to the flight, even the polite and usually implacable Danes are carried away with relief, and can’t resist an impromptu party. Ryder squints out of the window, enjoying the comforting roar of wheels on the ground, gazing at the amber-lit evening and the bulk of the airport building ahead. A pea-green articulated bus passes, and as the plane taxis to a halt, Ryder watches people scurrying about. The outside temperature must be below freezing as dusk falls, and men in fluorescent yellow tabards move stiffy about the tarmac, circling awkwardly around themselves until the concentric nature of order takes over and they become still. The stillness lasts for a few moments then, slowly, they begin to spiral out again into more tasks and patterns and this part of the airport becomes busy again with spreading action while further over towards the runway, different people are turning different circles.

  Is this all we really do in life? Ryder wonders as he folds his newspaper and stuffs it into his bag. One last clue on the crossword remains undone, so it is impossible for him to leave the paper on the plane. A sweet bird descending, tree espaliered.

  He looks out of the window again and up at the yellow-white sky. Snow is coming, and suddenly he is pierced with a memory of the childhood Christmas tree and his family decorating it. His sister Bonnie standing on the back of the sofa, laughing as she tried to reach with the knitted fairy to the topmost branch. She must have been nine, her legs in blue tights, stretching impossibly long, teetering, her arms stretched out and the orange dress she was wearing like the heart of a flame against the forest-green of the tree. Her face was a pale oval lit with excitement, as she bit her lip in concentration and placed a glass ball on the tree, pulling down the branch to slide the loop on, then standing back to judge while the bauble bobbed and the tree settled again.

  The window by his seat frames a scene outside; a long tier of steps rising into the side of a huge jumbo jet, a stretched white concertina filling up with first one or two, then a creeping flood of people. Transatlantic passengers, some of them very wealthy looking. Ryder grins, clocking a couple of sumptuous fur hats floating up the aeroplane steps on the heads of two black-coated men. On their way somewhere luxurious for the weekend, no doubt, or back home to houses with silk-clad wives and fragrant pots of lilies. Quivers full of finely grown children – Ryder can see it all, in the fabulous caricature that his brain conjured up for much-imagined ideas outside his own experience. The fantasy is made more sumptuous by the gap between it and his own reality. Though thinking himself into his girlfriend Cara’s apartment isn’t at all bad. Far from it, he likes the books piled high, the hiss of the gas radiators and the vague pleasure with which Cara greets him. Admittedly, he sometimes feels that she has forgotten he is coming, but better that than that she stopped her life to wait for him.

  Cara, in fact, doesn’t stop her life for anything, not even Christmas. ‘They needed someone to cover at the office on the paper so I said I would do it and you know it’s going to be easy to write because no one will call,’ she’d told him on the phone a few weeks earlier. ‘And I don’t like Christmas, it’s for people with children.’

  Cara was single and liked it that way when she met Ryder two years ago. She came to interview him about the wind farm, and their affair began, based on a mutual restlessness and lack of commitment. Only now Ryder was beginning to realise that maybe the lackadaisical approach was more a symptom than a quality of their relationship, and he, for one, wanted more in his life. Christmas and children. Nothing wrong with that combination he feels, as he prepares to get off the plane on a brief pre-Christmas visit to see Cara and have a final meeting to sign off from the wind farm project. The green signs to unfasten seat belts flash along the plane and Ryder stretches and yawns, rolling his head on the seat back, hit by sudden exhaustion.

  Through the window a woman catches his eye, or rather he notices the flash of a red dress. The hem flies up in a gust of wind from a jet engine, and his heart leaps. He looks again at the woman; she is walking up the steps now, carrying a coat over her arm and looking in her handbag, dark hair falling over her face. She raises her head and her face lifts towards him, and he whistles, or tries to, though it doesn’t come out because his heart is in his mouth. And it starts racing like an engine. He can’t stop staring, it’s so unbelievable. It’s her. The painter. The one. The one he met here. When was it? Five years ago. But it could be yesterday. The most amazing girl with whom he had the most amazing, intense evening. So amazing he remembers it still. She looks different, maybe thinner. Yes, perhaps it’s thinner. Girls always seem to look thinner than before, but she also looks the same. Older, but who wouldn’t? Actually, she doesn’t look old. She is so familiar and yet exotic. She looks like a girl he might have seen in a movie or in a magazine, desirable and distant. Not his. He is leaning against the window now, his hand raised, ready to knock. She has paused at the top of her plane steps, and she looks back towards the terminal. At someone? Who knows. Anyway, she doesn’t wave or smile. She tucks her hair behind her ear and though it is irrational, and untrue, he feels the gesture is something he knows so well it settles in a warm space inside him and he grins out of the window at her. Not that she can see him. She turns and walks on to the plane and the red dress flips and swishes through the doorway, vanishing from his sight but burned on to his retina like a hot kiss.

  An air hostess coughs next to his seat. ‘Sir, would you like to get ready to leave the plane? The doors will be opening in a moment and your hand luggage is obstructing . . .’ she trails off, her smile peach soft and flashing now at the exasperated older man Ryder has not noticed who is trying to attract his attention.

  Taking in the man’s irritation, Ryder nods an apology and swings out of his seat to reach his luggage down. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he says to the air hostess. ‘Yes, of course. I’ll get out of the way. I just— oh never mind. Actually, can you tell me something? Do you know where that jumbo is going?’

  She glances through his window. ‘Oh, that’s Dan Air’s Copenhagen to New York flight. It’s a bit late taking off this evening, they are usually away from the building before we land.’

  ‘Are they? So it’s just chance – a coincidence, I mean, that the plane is still here?’ The air hostess raises her eyebrows, a silent judgement on the urgency of Ryder’s enquiry, but she nods.

  ‘Yes, it’s just chance,’ she agrees.

  With difficulty Ryder stops himself gasping and smiting his brow like a ham actor in some ridiculous pantomime. He can’t believe the air hostess is acting so normally. It’s the flight to New York! This kind blonde woman is trying to see him off the aeroplane courteously without succumbing to this astonishing information. She is bafflingly preoccupied with her walkie talkie and uninteresting news about the door-opening schedule. But of course she is unaware of the enormity of the situation. That it must be her. It must be. The plane is going to New York. She lives in New York. It can only be the girl he met on the waterfront and whom he has never forgotten. She has a lovely name – Grace – and she is English, though she lives in New York. She is here again. The painter. The beautiful painter is back. Well, in fact, she’s leaving, but she was here a minute ago. Here where he is now.

  Suddenly Ryder is right back in time with her. There on the harbour wall in Copenhagen five years ago. It was so u
nexpected. Though what else could it have been? How can you expect to bump into someone you didn’t know you were looking for? In his mind, Ryder is again standing with her on the harbour. This girl whose presence was so magnetic, that he wanted to put his arms around her and hold her close, even though he scarcely knew her name and it was so dark he couldn’t even see the colour of her eyes. But he could see her smile and the shape of her face and her skin bathed in moonlight. And then, in the gallery, he lost her. Her world swallowed her up in a dazzle of flashing cameras and the white walls of the gallery which seemed to Ryder to do the exact opposite of creating a sense of space. One moment they were holding hands and then she was gone. He left without saying goodbye, though he left a note with the gallery owner: ‘Dear Grace, I . . . you . . .’ Crossed out. Rewritten. Crossed out. Finally, he just put his name and number on the match book in his pocket. She never called.

  In the tedious delay while Ryder’s plane doors do not open and everyone stands expectantly in the aisle, their briefcases and hand luggage gripped for the fray, night creeps across the sky above the orange glow of the airport lighting, and Grace’s jet taxis off, twinkling like a decorated Christmas tree. Ryder feels wildly, absurdly elated. The connection he made with her is palpable. It may have been dormant for five years, but it has sprung up again and he is run through with it – the energy and the optimism of sexual chemistry surges in his veins and he is amazed. He has not felt this love struck for years. It’s like a drug, but the drug has just got on another plane without him actually touching it. Finally the plane doors open and the passengers trudge off and out along miles of carpeted corridor. Ryder sleepwalks through the terminal. Why has she been in Denmark again? Who will know? How can he find out? In the queue for passport control he notices that the woman in front has an international edition of a Danish newspaper under her arm.