By teatime, after two hours outside in the woods, I am ready for some food. I am on chopping duty while Giles beats eggs and heats up the pan. Everything he does is delightful to me, and I want to savor every moment of this experience, but I must be careful not to slip into the melancholy of remembering it while it is still happening.
“Right—a few minutes under the grill, and grub’s up!”
“Giles…”
“Hm?” He turns round, and I step between his woolly feet, push up his sweater, and duck my head under it.
“I’m sad!” My voice is muffled by cotton and skin, and I’m not sure he heard me, because he doesn’t respond, only hugs me. Then he leads me over to a chair, sits down in it, and pulls me onto his lap. I wrap my arms around his neck and press my face into the fragrant nook below his ear.
“You’ll feel better for some food,” he says after a while. “Let’s eat, and then I’ll see what I can do to console you.”
It takes us about fifteen minutes to have a slice of frittata each and a glass of water. Then I look up from my plate and see him looking at me.
“Done,” I say softly. Underneath the table my foot is feeling for his; a quarter of an hour without touching is already too long.
“Not yet, you aren’t.” He grins and marches me over to the sofa in the living room.
His elbows on either side of my arms, he rests his chest against my crotch—the contact makes me gasp with a sudden flare of electricity—and covers my breasts with his hands.
“One of the reasons I thought you wouldn’t like me is that I’ve got small tits,” I say, a little meekly.
Giles, who was in the process of leaning in to suck one nipple peeping through the grid of his fingers, groans and drops his head so that his forehead rests in my mini-cleavage.
“Well, because Amanda’s got these huge knockers!” I try to justify my neurosis.
“I don’t even know any Amanda.”
“Hers are—”
“When I married her, they weren’t.”
“What? But—so—they’re fake?”
He lifts his head and looks down at me with a mixture of resignation and sarcastic humor. “No, they’re real. Real silicone.”
“So you don’t like—”
“What I don’t like—sorry to be brusque here, Anna, but it’s a sensitive subject! What I don’t like is women who obsess about their boobs! And what makes me incandescently angry is women who insist on having their perfectly fine and healthy boobs cut open to have a blob of insulating material stuffed in there!”
“No kidding. It does make you angry.”
He laughs, unwillingly. “Yeah, it does.”
“You’re really very sweet, Giles.” I arch myself against him, my legs spread wide. I lift them and wrap them around his back to pull him closer.
“No, I’m not,” he contradicts me. “I had some of the worst fights of my life about this topic.”
I wait to see whether he will say more. I have lost all interest in Amanda Saunders’ knockers, but I am very curious about Giles’s buttons.
“I suppose it was a clash of two neuroses,” he says at last. “It was frustrating for me not to get through to her at all. She kept telling me that it was her body and she could do with it what she wanted, but what she didn’t understand, or didn’t want to understand, was that by hating her tits, she made me feel that she also hated what I did to them. That sounds terrible.”
“No, I think I know what you mean. The wife’s anxiety was about her appearance and the husband’s was about his performance. Nothing surprising there, really.”
Hell is being married to the wrong person. Or maybe Giles is simply too screwed up to be in a close intimate relationship with a woman without overpowering her with unrealistic expectations. On the other hand, after a couple of encounters with Amanda, I see that a man might have a tough time of it with her in his bed. And Giles took the plunge and is evidently making an effort to understand why he drowned, while I never had the guts to do more than dip my toe in.
“Well, I love what you do to my boobs,” I announce sheepishly.
“Oh, you do, do you?” He wriggles out of his clothes and pulls my legs on either side of his ribcage. My arms are full of a strange, tall, naked man, and my legs, and my heart, and—