First Love Read online

  He smirked, again.

  ‘Well, those things are out of the window now, aren’t they?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘I said I’d take care of you. Some people might argue that taking care of someone was a loving thing to do. You, clearly, don’t feel that way. I’m not asking for much because I know that I haven’t got much to offer. All I can really offer is affection and a certain amount of support and, I hope, a bit of ease from care. I wanted to offer that. I want to offer that. Love for you is being welcome, isn’t it, being wanted? I can offer you that. But I just expect in return somebody who acknowledges my existence and my own reality. Not someone who just thinks I’m a kind of pet that needs to be fed and patted. I know your need for affection is great and I’m willing to supply that. I haven’t had any affection in my life either, I like the affection between us, but don’t kid me that it’s about love. It’s about need for love. If you love someone, you don’t want to frighten them or make them more worried than they have to be.’

  ‘No. Of course not. I’m sorry. Won’t you forgive me? For that one night.’

  ‘No,’ Edwyn said, frowning. ‘I don’t forgive you.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘I don’t forgive people.’

  ‘No.’

  I looked at his hands on the table then, by his plate, by his glass: swollen, crabbed. I looked at his face: worn out, defeated. He was blinking, as he did when he was upset.

  —

  The next morning, Edwyn had taken the day off work to go and see an exhibition, in town. It was a nice day, so I walked with him part of the way. We bought a coffee on Kensington High Street, then set off across the park. It was still misty at half past nine. A green and golden haze hung about the trees and on the damp grass large crows executed their leisurely inspecting strut. And here were squirrels, dashing. The crows lit on the fragments of lemon cake Edwyn was throwing. I held onto the elbow of his coat.

  ‘Here comes Ted.’

  ‘Craw craw,’ said the crow.

  ‘He looks like Douglas Bader.’

  ‘Craw craw.’

  We walked on, towards the pond, where we passed a man whose footwear caught Edwyn’s attention.

  ‘Oh, are they back in style? I used to love them. Dunlop Green Flashes. What a pleasure it was to get a nice pristine pair every summer.’

  ‘When you were a boy?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did you wear them with little jeans and a stripy T-shirt?’

  ‘Of course. Until it was time to change into my tennis gear. And then those Flashes would be covered in red dust from the court. It was dismaying after a few weeks how they’d turn pink from that dust…’

  Edwyn used to live in town. In Marylebone, in a rich friend’s spare room, when he first left university.

  ‘You forget, don’t you, that you had these other lives?’ he said. ‘That was twenty years ago. Twenty-five years. Gosh. And I was on this single bed, with this tiny old school desk to work at, just in a fog of Camel smoke all day long. I was quite keen on trying to cook back then. Trying to make myself useful, I suppose. But Christ, I must have stunk. How did I taste anything? I used to walk up every Saturday to the market and buy bags of vegetables, which would then proceed to collapse and rot within twenty-four hours. But I loved it, I kept going back!’

  ‘Did you talk the lingo?’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘I remember you talking the market trader’s lingo, in the Portobello Road. “Two cukes, pound o’ pots.” ’

  ‘Oh, yes. Well, that’s half the fun! And I’d remember who I could chat to, and go back to them the next week, for some chat and some friendliness. That’s what you do in life, isn’t it?’

  —

  At Marble Arch, we said goodbye. I stood and watched him go, head down, rushing. Oxford Street was so crowded. Edwyn hunched his shoulders, braced, dodged, and soon enough he disappeared.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  GWENDOLINE RILEY’S debut novel Cold Water was published when she was still at university and won a Betty Trask Award for first time novelists. Riley is also the author of Sick Notes, Joshua Spassky (which won the Somerset Maugham Award and was shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize), and Opposed Positions. She lives in London.