The Perfect Lover

‘Are you mad?’ she asked her grimly. ‘Tell Gareth Simmonds about Saul?’ She closed her eyes as she remembered the revolting pity she had seen in his eyes. How dared he pity her? How dared anyone?

‘He’s given me until Christmas to catch up...’

‘Well, that shouldn’t be too difficult.’ Katie tried to comfort her. ‘We’ve got the rest of the summer vac. And I can help you.’

‘I don’t want your help. I just want—’ Louise began angrily, and then stopped.

The force, the futility of her own feelings frightened her. She felt oddly sick and light-headed.

‘Why don’t we spend the evening together?’ she suggested to Katie, trying to make amends for her earlier bad temper. ‘We could have supper and share a bottle of wine. I’ve still got that case in my room that Aunt Ruth gave us at the beginning of term. She said it would come in useful for student parties...’

‘I’d love to but I’m afraid I can’t,’ Katie told her regretfully, shaking her head before explaining blushingly, ‘I...I’ve got a date and...’

‘A date? Who with?’ Louise questioned her sister.

But Katie shook her head and told her awkwardly, ‘Oh, it’s no one you know... Oh, Lou,’ she pleaded as she turned to give her twin a fierce hug, ‘I do understand how you must feel, but please, please try to forget about Saul.’

‘I wish to God I could,’ Louise told her chokily. ‘But I’m not to get the chance, am I? Not if I get sent down and I have to go back to Haslewich. Oh, Katie...’ It was on the tip of her tongue to plead with her twin to cancel her date and spend the evening with her, but then she remembered the look she had seen in Gareth Simmonds’ eyes when he had told her that he knew she had been using Katie to stand in at his lectures for her, and she resisted the impulse.

She was not, she assured herself fiercely, the selfish, thoughtless, self-absorbed person his look had implied. She would have done the same thing for Katie...if Katie had asked...

But Katie would not have asked, a small inner voice told her.

The summer afternoon had given way to evening. Louise stared tiredly around her room. Papers and textbooks covered every surface, and her head was swimming with facts she couldn’t assimilate; they floated in her brain like congealing fat on top of her mother’s home-made stock, coagulating and clogging.

Saul. Where was he now...? What was he doing...? She got up and walked into her small kitchenette. She couldn’t remember the last time she had eaten, but the mere thought of food made her feel sick.

Out of the corner of her eye she caught sight of Aunt Ruth’s wine stacked in a dusty corner. Dizzily she went and removed a bottle.

Aunt Ruth had quaintly old-fashioned ideas about how Oxford’s modern-day undergraduates lived. The wine she had chosen for her great-nieces had been carefully selected for its full-bodied richness. Ruth had imagined it would be drunk at the kind of under-grad gathering that featured in expensive TV dramas—adaptations of books set in a glittering gilded era.

Louise opened one of the bottles and poured herself a glass. She was not normally a drinker. Oh, she enjoyed a decent glass of wine with good food, and she had gone through the normal student ritual of drinking at the bar in the students’ union during the first few weeks at university, but that had simply been a rite of passage, something to be endured rather than enjoyed.

The red wine was rich and fruity, warming her throat and heating her cold, empty stomach.

Louise sank down onto the floor, owlishly studying the mass of paper she had spread all around her. Katie’s handwriting danced dizzily before her eyes. Frowningly she blinked as she tried to focus and concentrate, quickly finishing off her glass of wine.

It was making her feel distinctly better—lighter, number. It was even making it possible for her to think about Saul without that wrenching, tearing pain deep inside her, threatening to destroy her.

Saul...

As she walked erratically back from the kitchenette, having refilled her glass, Louise tried to summon up Saul’s beloved mental image and found, to her consternation, that she couldn’t—that for some reason his beloved, adored features had become amorphous and vague, sliding away before she could crystallise them into a hard image. Even more infuriatingly, the harder she tried to visualise him, the more impossible it became. Instead, the male image that came most easily to her mind’s eye was that of Gareth Simmonds.