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  Richard gave the lie to his statement about leaving work at the office by launching into an anecdote about a judge’s daughter who had been charged with soliciting.

  I squeezed Angelina’s arm, I hoped discreetly, and walked to the dining room. A few moments later she followed.

  ‘What was that about?’ I said.

  ‘She didn’t mean any harm. She’s just a bit of a ditz.’

  ‘I didn’t mean her.’

  ‘Too much to drink. Don’t worry about it. Not your problem.’

  I waited, and she added, ‘We broke up. A week ago. It’s still a bit raw for both of us.’

  ‘Can I get you a drink?’ I said.

  ‘I’d love one. Thank you. You’re being very sweet.’

  On my way to the kitchen, I realised that she didn’t know my name, which was probably why she hadn’t introduced me. By the time I found vodka, orange juice and ice, she had wandered off.

  I eventually spotted her at the top of the stairs. There was a handwritten sign at the base: No guests upstairs please.

  I took her drink up. ‘I didn’t feel like any more conversation,’ she said. ‘With anyone else, I mean.’

  ‘Hard to have a conversation without anyone else,’ I said, and she smiled at the lame joke. ‘I’m Adam.’

  ‘That’s a shame. I’d hoped you’d have an uh sound in your name, to go with your accent.’

  ‘Like Gus? Or Duncan? Or Douglas?’

  ‘Dooglas.’ She laughed. It was an attractive laugh, a little tipsy but not drunken, and I liked being the cause of it. ‘Sorry. You’re not offended, are you?’

  ‘You can call me any name you want.’ Even a Scottish one.

  ‘All right, Dooglas,’ she said. ‘What did you do with your girlfriend?’

  I told her the Tina story, at length, throwing in a few Mancunianisms to go with the accent, and she laughed through it. I was enjoying myself, too.

  ‘It was a nice choice of song,’ she said. ‘I don’t get called beautiful too often and it’s what everyone’s looking for in my world.’

  ‘You have to trust the spontaneous song test. It’s like word association. Never lies.’

  ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘That night I sang with you. I saw myself in the mirror afterwards. Mascara everywhere. I looked like Alice Cooper.’

  ‘You realise I’ll never look at Alice Cooper again without thinking of you. I may decide he’s the sexiest man on the planet.’

  The music from downstairs had stopped for a few minutes, but it came back with a roar: Joe Cocker singing ‘You Can Leave Your Hat On’. Angelina smiled and touched my arm, starting a non-verbal conversation which seemed to go:

  ‘I’d like you to kiss me.’

  ‘You’re not really saying that, are you?’

  ‘I’m really saying that. That’s why I haven’t let go of your arm.’

  ‘No, you can’t be. Not to me. Not to Adam Sharp, the database guy from Manchester.’

  ‘I’m standing here with my face turned up toward yours, and it’s going to be awkward for both of us if you don’t kiss me.’

  I had not kissed anyone for a while. I closed my eyes and fell into it: the softness, the openness, the unreality of who she was. I didn’t want to stop but we were out in the open, visible to anyone who chose to look up from the base of the stairs.

  We pulled each other down the hallway, and there was a bedroom—the master bedroom by the look of it, with family photos and an en-suite bathroom. No lock on the inside of the door, so after I closed it, I leaned against it while I kissed her again.

  After a few seconds she broke the kiss, turned us around so she had her back against the door and said, ‘See, I don’t only do sex at work.’ It could have been a sultry come-on, but her tone was more defensive than seductive. For a moment I wondered if she was referring to what we had done already, if she had made her point, but then she pulled me into her again.

  There was not a lot of foreplay, and that was her fault as much as mine. It was straight to hitched-up, unzipped and pushed-aside clothes, with Angelina sandwiched between me and the door. I was no longer feeling overwhelmed. We were two people making love, and the rest didn’t matter.

  Then, out of the blue, she let go a series of gasps that morphed from ecstasy to apparent surprise that it had happened so quickly. But before either Joe Cocker or I could finish, Angelina disentangled herself, picked up her handbag and made a dash for the bathroom. She was still wearing her beret.

  She was gone a good ten minutes, time I used to mentally kick myself for taking it too fast. My fears were confirmed when she emerged: she went straight to the door with an expression that said what have I done? I picked up our glasses and followed her downstairs, took a detour at the bathroom to clean up the lipstick that had found its way onto my face, and then could not find her.

  Richard was still in the living room. He peeled off from a conversation with Jayne Mansfield as I walked past. If he had had too much to drink before, he was now comprehensively leathered.

  ‘Sorry, my friend, gone. Gone home without you. I have some advice for you, choom.’

  I thought he was about to warn me off, threaten me. Jayne Mansfield looked excited at the prospect.

  Richard managed to string another sentence together. ‘In the words of the immortal bard, all that glisters is not gold.’

  There were plenty of comebacks to that, but there was no point getting drawn in.

  The hostess confirmed that Angelina had left, and let me use the phone to call a taxi. But not before she had commented on my Union Jack sweatshirt.

  ‘Nice to see a man who’s proud of his heritage.’

  ‘Just a nod to the theme of the party.’

  ‘What theme?’

  4

  That could have been the end of it. Not exactly something to tell the grandchildren, but a memory to bring a smile whenever I heard ‘You Can Leave Your Hat On’. Or ‘Because the Night’. Or ‘Both Sides Now’. Or ‘You Are So Beautiful’.

  Everything suggested a one-off, and I suppose a reasonable person might have concluded that this was not the first time a woman on the rebound would pick up a random guy for a quick encounter and toss him aside afterwards.

  It didn’t sit. My head told me that she would not have gone to the trouble of inventing and delivering an invitation to satisfy a passing fancy. My gut told me that there was something more between us. And in the bedroom: I had no sense that she was using me. I replayed her hurried exit and saw embarrassment rather than disconnection.

  That said, I was still Adam Sharp and she was Angelina Brown.

  When I was at school, there was the usual drama of dates for the end-of-year dance. Those of us without girlfriends were in the awkward position of having to ask someone out—and the girls were in the more awkward position of saying, ‘No, I’d like to wait for a better option, but if things get desperate…’

  There was a girl named Sarah. I liked her a lot, but she was drop-dead gorgeous—unfortunately for me, because I had convinced myself that, alone among my classmates who fancied her, I appreciated her finer qualities. Her looks put her out of my reach. It was only a couple of days before the dance, when I had organised to go with another girl, that Sarah asked if I would partner her. She had been waiting for me to ask. Everyone had thought she was out of their reach.

  That was a time I would have liked my dad—not the dad of my early teens who was never home but the version of him who taught me to play piano when I was a child—to have been around to give me some words of wisdom. Perhaps, eight years on, fate was offering me a second chance.

  It took three phone calls to locate Angelina’s agent.

  Australian-posh female voice: ‘A personal message? If you have a fan letter, you may send it care of our office. And you might want to make certain that you have the right person. Miss Brown plays the sergeant, not Constable Danni.’

  ‘I’m not a fan. I work in a bar. She left something here the other night.’

/>   ‘I can take care of that. What did she leave?’

  ‘A record. “Because the Night” by Patti Smith.’

  ‘I doubt she’ll be too concerned about a record. I’m sure you can keep it.’

  ‘It’s signed. To Angelina—from Patti. That’s how we worked out who it belonged to.’ Genius.

  ‘Very well. I’ll come and collect it myself.’

  No point backing down now. ‘Lovely. We’ll keep it behind the bar.’ I gave her the details, and briefed Shanksy to tell her that the record had disappeared if she turned up.

  The agent didn’t turn up. Nor was there any contact from Angelina.

  In the absence of a life beyond work and the bar, I spent a bit of time contemplating what to do next. In the middle of the night, some of my ideas seemed inspired, but in the light of day they all risked making me look like a stalker. Angelina had given no indication that she wanted to see me again. She knew where the bar was.

  Looking for a solution only increased my desire to see her again. She had been interested enough to invite me to the party and then upstairs. There was chemistry: I had felt it at the piano and again at the party—not to mention in the bedroom. And while Richard might have had the edge on me in looks and profession, he seemed intent on poisoning the well rather than recovering the relationship. I couldn’t shake the feeling that something momentous had happened and that she had felt it too. Maybe, just maybe, if I played it right, I had a chance.

  The bar had a television that was only used occasionally. Shanksy was prepared to turn it on in the early evening when the bar was quiet, and for the next three Mondays we watched the weekly episode of Mornington Police.

  Richard’s jibe about Angelina doing sex at work had some basis in reality. Her character, Sergeant Kerrie, was the smart and stable one at the station, but, as foreshadowed by Tina, she was pursuing a relationship with the district pathologist, a married man. It was family viewing, and there was nothing too explicit. Nevertheless, I hoped the actor who played Dr Andrews did not go on to international success, as I had taken a deep dislike to him.

  The surprise was Danni, the hot one, who was tasked with patrolling the beach in plain clothes, a brief that the costume department had interpreted liberally. She was played by the woman I had dubbed Jayne Mansfield, and was about as interesting on screen as in real life.

  I made a note of the production company and decided to try one more time. My approach had to be confident but not arrogant, admiring but not sycophantic, about her but also about me. Dramatic, perhaps, given her profession. Creative, to match her Bring a Brit invention. And intelligent. It was going to take a fair bit of intelligence to meet all the other requirements.

  The florist sold me a dozen roses—seven white and five red—and I arranged them in the form of a piano octave on a length of cardboard, the red roses doing duty as the black keys. We punched holes and fastened the flowers in place with wire ties.

  Over the florist’s protests, I flattened three of the rose heads with the side of my fist to make an A chord, the triad I had played to introduce ‘Angel of the Morning’, the song her boyfriend had not let her sing. A for Angelina. And Adam. Could I pack any more meaning into crushed roses?

  I could. I squashed the white G rose to make the chord a natural seventh—a lead-in, tension, anticipation.

  The florist agreed that a card would be overkill.

  I had never done anything like this before: a bunch of roses on Valentine’s Day was my previous benchmark. It was probably a good thing I had not confided in anyone but the florist, who had a vested interest, or I would probably have let myself be talked out of it.

  I was in the bar until closing that night. And the night after that, living on nuts and cheese twists while I twisted myself into a knot, turning around after every song to scan the bar, running through scenarios of what I might say.

  On the third night, I finished by playing the Tom Waits song generally known as ‘Closing Time’ (correct title: ‘I Hope that I Don’t Fall in Love with You’) to an almost empty room and when I looked up there she was, in the half-dark, sitting alone with a green cocktail, dressed in jeans and a loose sweater. The song was apposite, if too late. It would be some time before I acknowledged that I was in love with Angelina, but the feelings were all there at that moment.

  I went to the bar, more to compose myself than anything else.

  ‘What’s she drinking?’ I asked Shanksy.

  ‘It’s called a Fallen Angel. Gin, lemon, crème de menthe. Smells like mouthwash.’

  ‘Better make me a nine-inch pianist.’

  He just looked at me.

  ‘It’s a joke. A genie offers a guy one wish…’

  ‘I know the joke.’ He pulled me a beer. ‘Be nice. She’s as nervous as you are.’

  Nervous or not, the piano man is as much a student of human behaviour as his co-workers behind the bar. I reminded myself that the biggest hurdle had been getting Angelina to turn up. Things would be relatively straightforward from here on.

  She spoke before I had time to sit down.

  ‘I’m not staying. I just wanted to say thank you for the roses—it was really sweet, and very clever, and I love your accent, but the thing at the party was a mistake. I’ve never done anything like that before. I’m married. To Richard. We’ve separated, but I’m not ready for anything new. I’m sorry if I gave you the wrong idea.’

  Speech over, she began to stand. Her glass was still half full. And I was suddenly empty, drained.

  Deep breath. Smile. ‘No problem. You didn’t give me the wrong idea. But finish your drink. It’s fine.’

  ‘Thanks. I was feeling terrible. I mean, I love your accent…’

  The bloody accent again. What about the piano, the sparkling wit and the athletic but considerate sexual performance?

  She sat down. She was wearing wedding and engagement rings. She saw me looking.

  ‘I should have told you at the party. I just assume everyone…I went there straight from work and I don’t wear my rings when I’m filming. And I’m not ready to take them off yet. Which I guess must tell you something.’

  ‘You must have got married young,’ I said.

  ‘I was twenty-two. I’m twenty-three now.’

  A short attention span. Or a bad decision.

  She read my mind. ‘I don’t want to jump from one relationship to another. I’m not even sure this one is over. So I am definitely, absolutely not available.’

  ‘But you like my accent.’

  ‘I looove your ahk-cent.’

  ‘But not enough to be me regular bonk, eh?’

  She laughed and drained her glass. ‘I don’t want to be anyone’s regular anything at the moment. I need to get my head straight.’

  She got up again. I was about to move towards her to give her a kiss goodbye, while trying to think of how to buy some time, when I realised that she was considering something.

  ‘Can I ask you a question?’ she said.

  I gave her what I hoped was a reassuring and encouraging nod.

  ‘You promise you’ll answer honestly?’

  ‘Any reason I wouldn’t?’

  ‘Yes. That’s why I need you to promise. And that you won’t tell anyone I asked.’

  ‘Spit it out, lass.’

  She half turned away, then swivelled back. ‘Was I okay? I mean…’

  I knew what she meant. And if I were to answer honestly, I would have had to say: How the hell can I tell in sixty seconds, while I’m trying to concentrate on staying upright, not dropping you, and wondering if the banging on the door was your husband or just us? Plus, wanting to do it well enough that you’d want to do it again with me. Which apparently I didn’t.

  On the other hand, when you’re twenty-six and haven’t had sex for three months, all sex is good, let alone sex with the most beautiful woman you’ve ever met. But if you want to know if you’re good in bed, you’ll have to audition properly.

  I said, ‘I’ll get us bot
h drinks and then I’ll answer.’

  Which I did. I told her the truth, with a subtle emphasis on the part about auditioning properly, and she laughed. With a drink to keep her there, I asked my own question.

  ‘So what’s this all about, then?’

  ‘You really want to know?’

  ‘I really want to know.’

  She folded her arms. ‘I never slept with anyone before Richard.’

  ‘Nothing to be ashamed of,’ I said. ‘Personally, I think you’re quite attractive.’

  ‘Stop it. You ask me what it’s about, I tell you, and then you make fun of me. Anyway, it was the opposite problem. Which is not as much fun as you might think it is. Too many creeps.’

  I was wise to have abandoned my less sophisticated plans for contacting her.

  ‘What about before. At school?’

  ‘I went to a girls’ school. They weren’t big on helping us find boyfriends. My parents…my mother is very straight. No living together, no sex before marriage. I didn’t sign up to that, but I suppose it made me a bit cautious.’

  ‘You were living at home?’

  ‘Even after I got the part in Mornington Police. You know that’s what I do, right?’

  ‘I do now. I didn’t when I met you.’

  ‘It’s pretty demanding. I do classes and singing lessons as well: it gives you more options. I wasn’t avoiding relationships but this is what I really want to do, and I didn’t want to let myself down by not making the most of my chances. And I don’t look like Nicole Kidman, so I have to work harder.’

  ‘Given a choice…’

  ‘Don’t. Anyway, Richard came along. I was twenty-one, so it wasn’t as if I’d spent years waiting to meet someone.’

  No one-night stands before twenty-one? My tally at that age had been two, and I was living away from home and trying hard. I was more surprised that she had not had a steady boyfriend.

  Whether as a result of inexperience or unreasonable expectations, it had not gone well with Richard, but he seemed adept at deflecting the blame onto Angelina. His dig at the party was closer to the bone than I had realised.