Unfinished Business by Conrad Williams

Author:Conrad Williams
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2016-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 15

I poked around in the cottage doing this and that, making tea, lighting the fire, plumping cushions, emptying groceries onto shelves, drawing curtains, attacking the smell of mildew with various air-fresheners, and readying the laptop on the side-table in the living room. Vince’s manuscript sat on the coffee table. I had pulled out a pack of streaky bacon and a baking potato for dinner, and there was at least the prospect of a fireside read to get me through the evening. I fought the mild sense of claustrophobia and switched on as many lamps as possible to warm the place up, and after the bachelor ritual of dinner – potato skins scraped into the bin, dish washed, pan in soak – I took my coffee mug next door and headed to the armchair where I slumped in the seat with a pencil and Vince’s book.

I had absolutely no interest in reading. I was ‘Vinced’ to the gills and far too preoccupied to grant his demanding intelligence yet more attention. I put the manuscript back on the table and glanced around with a mounting feeling of distraction and impatience, crossing and uncrossing my legs, rapping my fingers on the chair arm and then looking forlornly at the wall opposite.

Later, it seemed as if I had been in this frozen introspective mode for upwards of half an hour, just staring at the wall, as if cruelly skewered by a mood that I can only describe as an impaled sense of injustice. I was riven by an emotion I could hardly define or source until the thought came to me that I was desperate for the love of a woman, and completely disturbed by the sight of Xenia in Madelin’s studio, and even more deranged by the idea, triggered by Vince, and not exactly disproved (but hardly confirmed) that Madelin and Xenia were somehow intimate. As I sat, staring at the wall, digesting the impossibility of this but sounding its logic, then dismissing it as a preposterous twist in Madelin’s well-attested heterosexual career; as I countenanced the thought much as Vince might have done, and recalled the way in which Madelin ran her fingers through Xenia’s hair and moved her into a position that was so beckoning, so careless, so available, it was impossible not to imagine searing fantasies that clingily conjoined Madelin’s sylph-like form with the edible globes of Xenia’s booming figure, a feasting and repast that drained my face of colour and put steel in my trouser fronts; leaving me with an ache I could hardly bear: a raging sense of arousal and frustration, of exclusion and need that brought back thoughts of Nadia, of hair spilt on the pillow, of rising ribs in the cage of my hands, a whole cataclysm of harrowing memories that tortured me with desire but could never happen again; and then the tristesse welled up, as did an aching certainty that I was missing out on life and love and happiness, and truly doomed, and then I heard footsteps and a knocking on the front door.

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