Five Days

The rain had been at it since the start of the week.

Not dramatic rain, nothing that would give you a story to tell. Just the flat, relentless Cambridgeshire kind that sits on everything like a damp cloth left on a worktop. Jacqueline said it was unusual for April. She said that every morning, looking out at the garden with her coffee, and I nodded each time like it was new information.

Mattia had gone to Greece on the Thursday before Easter. Rock climbing in the Peloponnese with three blokes from his club, all of them the same age, all of them the same type, weathered, competent, slightly competitive in that quiet way older men get. Jacqueline had shown me a photo on her phone. Mattia grinning on a ledge somewhere, harness on, looking like a man who had organised his retirement very well. I told her he looked fit for his age. She said he'd be insufferable about it when he got back.

She was fifty, my aunt. My mother's younger sister, though she'd left Cork at twenty-two and barely come back. She'd married an Englishman, divorced him, lived in three different counties, and ended up here in a village outside Saffron Walden with Mattia and a garden that needed more attention than either of them gave it. The house was old and comfortable, full of books and decent wine and the kind of furniture that had been chosen carefully years ago and then just stayed. She'd kept her accent. Softer than Mam's, worn down at the edges, but still there.

I was eighteen and I'd been in Ireland two years, long enough to pick up some of the rhythm but not the vowels. I still sounded like someone from Queens who'd been mildly confused. Jacqueline found this funny. She found most things about me mildly funny, in the way that adults find teenagers funny without meaning to be unkind about it. I didn't mind. She wasn't condescending. She just noticed things.

Duxford was her idea. She'd suggested it on Friday morning when the forecast showed Saturday being marginally less terrible, and I'd said yes because there was nothing else to do and because she'd said it with actual enthusiasm, not the manufactured kind adults produce when they're trying to give a young person a good time.

We drove out in her Volvo. She wore dark trousers and a waxed jacket over a cream jumper, hair pulled back, minimal make-up. She'd looked like that every day. Put-together without effort, or at least without visible effort, which I was starting to understand was a skill in itself. I had jeans and a hoodie and the expression of someone who wasn't quite awake yet, which was accurate.

The Imperial War Museum at Duxford sits on what used to be an airfield, and even in April drizzle it's a serious place. We paid and went in and Jacqueline moved through it like someone who'd been before but was still interested, reading the panels properly, not rushing. I followed. I'd been to air museums with my dad when I was a kid, the kind with plexiglass barriers and laminated signs, but this was different. You could walk under the aircraft, around them, close enough to see the rivets, the patched repairs, the hand-painted nose art worn down to almost nothing.

She stopped in front of a Spitfire. Just stood there for a moment.

"My father would have wept," she said. Not to me specifically. Just out loud.

"Was he into planes?"

"He was into anything that represented the war ending well." She glanced at me. "He lost two uncles. Merchant Navy."

I looked at the Spitfire. Thought about that. We stood there a bit longer than you'd normally stand anywhere.

We ate lunch in the café, soup and bread, nothing special, the kind of food that's exactly right in cold weather. She had a glass of red wine. I had tea. We talked about my course, about whether I actually wanted to do engineering or had just said yes to something that sounded sensible. She didn't lecture. She asked questions and listened to the answers, which not many people do.

"Mattia's son is an engineer," she said. "He's dreadful company."

"Maybe it does something to you."

"Maybe." She smiled into her wine. "You won't let it."

I didn't know what to say to that so I didn't say anything, and she didn't seem to need me to.

On the way back we stopped for petrol and she went in to pay and came out with a bag of Maltesers and handed them to me without explanation, the way you do with someone you're comfortable with. I ate most of them. She had a few. The rain came back properly on the A11 and she drove with both hands on the wheel, not talking, easy in the silence.

The house was cold when we got in. She turned the heating on and put a lamp on in the sitting room and I went upstairs to drop my jacket and when I came back down she'd opened a bottle of red and was standing at the kitchen island looking at her phone.

"Mattia says it's twenty-three degrees in Nauplion," she said.

"Rude."

"Deeply." She set the phone down. "Are you happy with wine or would you rather something else?"

"Wine's good."

She poured two glasses and we took them through to the sitting room. She put music on, something low and acoustic I didn't recognise. We sat on opposite ends of the sofa. I'd been here five days and this was how most evenings had gone, wine, music, talking until one of us said something that ran out of road and then comfortable quiet. I'd liked it. More than I'd expected to.

She'd taken her hair down at some point. I noticed it without deciding to notice it. It sat on her shoulders, dark with a few threads of silver in it. She'd taken her shoes off and tucked one leg underneath her.

We were talking about Cork, about what it had been like growing up there, about her mother, who was my grandmother and who I'd known only as a small, precise woman who smelled of lavender and had opinions about curtains.

"She was harder on your mother," Jacqueline said. "Firstborns always get it. I was the afterthought. More freedom."

"You don't seem like an afterthought."

She looked at me. Just a look, level and brief. "No?"

"No. You seem like someone who decided things for herself."

Something shifted in her face. Not much. She looked away and drank some wine. "That's a kind thing to say."

"I mean it."

She knew I meant it. That was the thing, I think. She was too sharp to mistake sincerity for performance, and she didn't deflect it or make a joke of it. She just sat with it. I watched the side of her face, the line of her neck, the way she was holding her glass with both hands.

"Kieran."

"Yeah."

"Don't look at me like that."

I didn't say anything. She turned her head and we looked at each other and the music kept playing and the lamp made a warm circle on the ceiling.

"I'm your aunt," she said.

"I know."

"And I'm fifty."

"I know that too."

She set her glass down on the side table. Looked at her own hands for a moment. When she looked back up there was something careful gone from her expression, some composure she'd been maintaining for longer than just this evening, and I felt it go like a knot loosening.

"This is very stupid," she said.

"Er yeah, probably is."

She didn't move for another moment. Then she leaned across and kissed me.

It was a real kiss, not a testing one. Her hand came up to the side of my face and she kissed me with the kind of intention that makes it clear there is no version of this that was accidental. I kissed her back. She tasted of red wine and something warmer underneath it.

When she pulled back her she looked at me for a long second as though checking I was still real.

"Mattia's away until next week, so we have time."

She stood up and took my hand.

---

*I'd known since I picked him up at the airport.*

*Not that anything would happen, not with that kind of certainty. But I'd known that the possibility had entered the room and was going to stay there, making itself comfortable, until I either addressed it or didn't. He'd come down to breakfast and I'd watched him pour his cereal and thought: this is going to be a problem. Then I'd thought: it really doesn't have to be. And then I'd carried on making coffee and said something about the rain.*

*Five days of that. Five days of being a reasonable adult woman in her own home.*

*I'm not sure what broke it, in the end. He said I seemed like someone who decided things for herself, and he meant it, and I knew he meant it, and I sat there with that for a moment too long. When I looked back at him he was still looking at me, and I told him not to. He didn't stop. So I kissed him.*

*Real and deliberate and no version of it accidental.*

My bedroom is at the back of the house. I turned on the lamp by the bed, the small one with the orange shade that I keep meaning to replace and never do, and I pulled my jumper off because if I thought about it any more I was going to think myself out of it. I reached back and unhooked my bra. Let him look. I'd been fifty for six months and I'd made my peace with what that means, mostly, but there was a moment standing in that low light when I thought: *he's eighteen and he has no idea what he's looking at yet, and that's all right.* What I mean is: I was not performing. I was just there.

He kissed me and I heard myself make a sound I hadn't expected, low and not theatrical at all, just a real response coming out of me before I'd decided to allow it. His hands moved across my back and I pressed into him and felt his youth in it, the warmth and solidity of him, and I thought *oh, this was always going to happen,* not with any particular satisfaction, just with recognition.

We moved to the bed. I was unhurried because I've learned that hurrying is waste. He was paying attention, I could feel it, that quality in a person of actually being present rather than performing presence, and it settled something in me I hadn't known was unsettled.

When he put his mouth to my breast I made him work for it. I wanted to find out whether he was the kind of man who rushes past it, treating it as a staging post on the way to somewhere else. He wasn't. He stayed. He understood, without my having to explain it, that there are two of them and they both have feelings about fairness, and that if he lingers too long on the left without moving to the right he'll hear about it. He did move. He knew to pinch and draw upward, never down. He knew to take the flesh and squeeze until I was breathing fast and biting my lip and having a quiet argument with myself about what I was about to ask him for.

I asked him for it.

He lifted his head and looked at me, and I recognised the expression: *tell me you mean it.* So I told him with my hands, drawing him down, and he smiled, and it was the right kind of smile, not triumphant, just eager, and it was the eagerness that mattered.

One palm flat against my sternum, pressing me back. Both hands on my thighs, shifting me to the edge of the bed so I was exactly where he needed me. He knelt on the floor and looked up and said something in that Queens-by-way-of-nowhere voice of his, something direct and explicit about what he wanted to do, and it worked precisely because he said *wanted.* Not *can I,* not a performance of asking permission, just a man telling me plainly what he was hungry for.

I don't let men do this, as a general rule. I've written it off, internally, as something I don't ask for, because of the trouble it involves and the worry that they won't really want to and the whole exhausting business of monitoring someone else's face for signs of endurance rather than desire. I know this about myself. I know the arithmetic of it.

He looked up and said *look at me* and I did, and there wasn't a scrap of endurance in him. He was into it. Entirely, genuinely, vocally into it in a way that dispensed with every doubt I'd been carrying about asking for this. You can tell. You always can tell if you're willing to look.

So I looked, and I held his gaze, and I gripped the sheet on either side of me and let him do it for as long as I could stand it, which was not very long and then very long and then not very long again. He kept that broad firm contact with his mouth and he watched me making faces I don't make for strangers, and I didn't care, not for a moment, not even when I heard myself saying *please keep going, please, don't stop,* which is not a sentence I say easily. I said it. I meant it. I was close and I let myself be close without pulling away from it or managing it or doing any of the things I do to stay in control of a situation.

*Give in,* I thought. *Just give in.*

I came on his tongue with my face turned sideways on the mattress and my hand pressed to my mouth, and he stayed with me through all of it, exactly there, until I put a hand in his hair and pulled him up.

He moved inside me and the sound I made had nothing composed about it, and I noticed that, and I didn't care about it either. His face above me was open and present and he was watching mine the way he'd watched everything all week: properly, with real attention.

I know what I look like when I let go. I used to be self-conscious about it. I'm not, any more. It's a face that means the thing is working and I refuse to apologise for it.

He lifted onto his hands and I shifted to let him further in and gasped at it and my leg went tight around him and neither of us said anything because there was nothing useful to say.

He came with his face pressed to my neck, one broken sound, his hands gripping hard, and I held him through it and felt his weight and his heat and his heart going fast, and I thought *well, then.* The way you think it after something that was always going to happen has happened.

Outside the rain moved through the garden.

"Well," I said.

He said *yeah.*

I laughed. Couldn't help it. My hand found his back and moved in slow circles and I lay there in the orange lamplight thinking: *stupid.* But not the way a verdict lands. More the way you say it about something you'd do again.

"Don't make this strange in the morning," I told him.

"I won't."

"Good lad."

He turned onto his side and I fitted myself against him and let him put his arm around me, and I didn't make anything of it, and neither did he.

The rain came harder against the glass. I was warm and awake and entirely, if briefly, at peace.