Learning by Heart by Elizabeth Cooke Page B

had never seen her father make a cup of tea, let alone cook – or more extreme yet, wear an apron. No man cooked unless he was a chef. Men sat in chairs and waited to be served; they smoked cigars, as her father did; they cut lawns, as her father did; they went to work, as her father did. Nothing else. To do more, or to do different, was not being a man.
    She watched David as he walked back across the room, and felt liberated and happy. David was different, and successful, and charming. Different enough, but not so very different that her father wouldn’t recognize the gentleman in him, his background of public school and European travel. She found herself wondering when she might take David to Sherborne and show him off.
    ‘Make yourself comfortable,’ he said.
    The flat was painted white, bright and modern, instead of being furnished, as the mews house was, with dark period pieces – she always felt a bit stifled there, in the house she rented with her friends; threading her way between vast mahogany tables and cupboards that the owner had evidently brought up from a bigger place in the country. Cora looked round the sitting room: there was nothing that would have been in her parents’ house. No fireplace, no piano, no panelled doors, no sideboard. Instead, one sofa, like a box with a straight back, in a red and blue pattern, a spindly-legged coffee-table, a starburst clock on the wall, two bright orange lampshades on two Chianti-bottle bases.
    ‘I hope you like fish,’ David said, from the kitchen.
    She went in to him. He was cooking trout in almonds: she had only ever seen a photograph of it in a cookery book. ‘I’m impressed,’ she said admiringly.
    ‘You should be,’ he told her, and raised his glass as if to toast her.
    ‘Where on earth did you get trout?’ Such things were like gold dust; she and the rest of the girls in her house subsisted on toast with sardines, and corned-beef sandwiches.
    ‘Someone I know sent it down from Scotland.’
    ‘Sent it down?’
    ‘Packed in ice.’
    ‘They caught it themselves?’
    ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘She caught it herself … Wild,’ he murmured. ‘She should have been a backwoodswoman. Follows hounds, shoots …’
    ‘Who is she?’ Cora asked.
    ‘A friend of a friend. Nobody important.’
    There was another bottle of wine on the Formica table. He began to open it.
    ‘Let me help you,’ she said.
    ‘No, I’m rather good at this,’ he told her. ‘I’m rather good at everything.’
    She didn’t know that the champagne, the wine, the dinner, the remark, meant anything in particular. She had not been brought up to know.
    He was attentive through dinner, insisting that she sit while he served her. The dessert was crème caramel – ‘I cheated – I bought it,’ he had said. There was coffee, and liqueurs. He gave her a crème de menthe, which she didn’t say she disliked, both the colour and the taste. They sat on the hard sofa.
    ‘Anyone would think you were trying to get me drunk,’ she joked.
    ‘I am,’ he replied. And kissed her. She knew what kissing him would be like, and hoped that this time it would be more gentle, measured, romantic. But it wasn’t. He put an arm round her, held her chin with the other hand, and forced his mouth on hers so hard that he pushed her lips against her teeth. It was not a dry kiss. His mouth was wet. He smelt strongly of the brandy he had drunk.
    She drew back, taken unawares.
    ‘Cora,’ he said, and pulled her towards him again, still with the arm round her shoulders. She straightened her back and tried to slide sideways a little. She didn’t like to ask him to stop: she felt obliged to let him kiss her. She had a feeling that women weren’t supposed to be awkward, or object.
    ‘Don’t tease me,’ he said.
    She didn’t know what he meant. ‘I must go home,’ she told him.
    He laughed. ‘Oh, darling.’
    ‘No, I must.’ She tried to push him away from her.
    ‘Didn’t you like the dinner?’ he