Page 29 of Gwen and Art Are Not in Love

‘All right,’ he said, sighing. ‘Fine. I’m here. I – Icare.’

Gwendoline stared at him for a second, and then all the fight seemed to go out of her. ‘Sit down,’ she said heavily. Unable to muster the outrage required to disobey, Arthur did. He could feel her looking at him, so he kept his eyes fixed on the fire.

‘Why do you hate me?’ she said. This was startling enough to get him to lift his head.

‘Does it matter?’

‘Yes, it matters. I’d rather not spend my time with somebody who actively reviles me.’

‘What if I don’t want to tell you?’

‘Well,’ Gwendoline blustered. ‘Youhaveto.’

‘And there it is,’ said Arthur, rolling his eyes. ‘Look – I don’t particularly enjoy being ordered around, insubordinate as that might make me.’

‘I don’t giveorders,’ Gwendoline said quickly. ‘One of us has to act like an adult, Arthur—’

‘There is it again,’ said Arthur bitterly. ‘Can’t you hear yourself? As convenient an excuse as it would be to break off this engagement, you’re not mymother, Gwendoline.’

Gwendoline exhaled a quick huff of frustration. She drummed her fingers lightly on the arms of her chair, and then got to her feet and crossed the room to fetch a pitcher of something from her dresser and pour herself a small glass. Whatever it was smelt sharply of lemons – lemons and something slightly medicinal, like mint. She took a long drink, and then turned to lean against the dresser, eyeing Arthur thoughtfully.

‘I never met your mother,’ she said.

‘What? No, you – you did. You just wouldn’t remember.’Arthurbarely remembered, and he clung to the scraps that were there so fiercely that he worried he’d made them up in his desperation. Long, dark hair; the smell of incense burning in her rooms; kisses pressed to his head when he was half asleep; his father actually smiling, his mother dragging him out of his study so that the three of them could eat dinner together every night, Arthur’s legs not quitereaching the floor yet under the table. He’d been six when she died. Gwendoline must have been four.

That summer was utterly blank. He’d asked Mrs Ashworth about it once, and she’d said that he screamed so much and so continuously that his father had asked her to take him out of the house all day, every day, for weeks on end, returning only when he’d exhausted himself into silence.

‘Oh,’ said Gwendoline. ‘What was she like?’

‘She was … I don’t know, she was my mother,’ said Arthur. ‘She didn’t live long enough to be disappointed by me, so all I have are pleasant memories.’

Gwendoline sighed. She picked up the jug again and filled her glass to the brim. She hesitated, and then poured a second. When she went to hand it to him, Arthur eyed it with deep suspicion.

‘Oh for Christ’s sake, Arthur, I’m not trying to poison you. Just drink it, it won’t kill you,’ Gwendoline said crossly, sitting back down in her chair. ‘You were a nightmare every time you visited, you know. That’s whyIdidn’t likeyou, in case you’re even remotely interested. You were awful to me. And you took pleasure in it. You still do.’

‘You just make it so easy.’ Arthur sampled his glass. It wasn’t bad; sour, but infused with something gently sweet.

‘I was a child! I was younger than you, I looked up to you, and you just … I let you ride my new pony, and in return you put atoadin my bed.’

Arthur stared at her incredulously. ‘That’s not how it happened.’

‘Yes it is, I remember—’

‘You let me ride your pony as a display of your grandbenevolence, and then you got angry and started stamping your little feet because you wanted it back, and I was having too much fun, and then – you ran and told my father that you didn’t like me, and that you’dneverlike me. That you wanted him to take me away.’ He stopped to take a sip of lemons. ‘My father didn’t take that particularly well.’

‘So you put a toad in my bed because your father scolded you?’

‘No,Gwendoline, I put a toad in your bed because my father told me I was useless to him if your parents ended our betrothal,’ Arthur said heatedly. ‘I put a toad in your bed because my father said that it was my sole purpose on this earth to unite our families and to make myself agreeable to you, and that if I couldn’t even manage that, I was even more of a waste of space than he’d previously imagined.’

‘What?’ said Gwendoline sharply. ‘No he didn’t. You were nine.’

‘Oddly enough, I remember it distinctly – although he probably doesn’t; he was drinking quite heavily by that point. Anyway, I didn’t particularly enjoy that little chat.’

‘Hence the toad,’ Gwendoline said quietly.

‘Hence the fucking toad.’

They sat in silence for a while, broken only by the sound of Arthur putting his glass back on the table. He ran a thumb round the rim of it, pressing a little too hard. He felt raw and exposed – he wanted to gather up everything he’d just said and push it back inside himself, not leaving anything for Gwen to hold on to or against him.