“Don’t you want to come into the water?” She smiled seductively.
“No, he wouldn’t,” I felt like saying, but clouds can’t talk. Henry undid the belt of his bathrobe, let it drop from his shoulders to the ground with a casual gesture, so purposefully that B sighed happily in the whirlpool, and I found I was having problems staying in the air. Without doing anything about it myself, I had dissolved into something between a cloud and condensation, and I knew I couldn’t stay in that peculiar state for long. But that was the only thing I knew—what the hell was going on here? Secrecy’s snide remarks shot into my head. What was it she’d written? That Henry wasn’t exactly known for being backward where women were concerned?
Without really noticing what I was doing, I turned into a dragonfly and settled on the leaf of a spider plant beside the pool. That was better. As a dragonfly, I could at least breathe and cling to whatever was under me with all six legs.
Meanwhile B narrowed her eyes and looked Henry appreciatively up and down. “You have a fantastic body,” she purred. She was right too. Even David Beckham paled beside Henry, literally, because he had already disappeared without a trace.
At least Henry was wearing bathing trunks, I saw, not that that really reassured me right now.
“What are you waiting for?” Laughing, B flung her head back. She had beautiful teeth too. “Not afraid of me, are you?”
No, Henry definitely didn’t look afraid of her. Far from it. I felt my wings begin to quiver. Was this maybe why Henry was so happy to wait before our relationship got any closer? Because he was seeing other …
Don’t go into the water, I begged him in my thoughts, all the same. I wished I could have put my front legs over my eyes (why did I always have to turn into creatures with excellent vision?), but I did no such thing. Instead I stared at Henry as he slid into the water, submerging as slowly as a male model in an aftershave ad. When he came up again, tiny drops of water shimmered around him in slow motion with the light breaking on them, and larger beads of moisture stood out on his smooth skin. With a satisfied smile, Henry settled down comfortably in the pool opposite B. They had it all to themselves now. And Celine Dion started up again. Every night in my dreams, I see you, I feel you, that is how I know you go on.…
Could dragonflies throw up? Because that was what I felt like doing right there and then.
Now an elderly man in a crumpled suit had taken over for David Beckham beside the pool. He was sitting on a shabby plastic chair that didn’t suit the grand surroundings in the least, and he was saying something in a foreign language, maybe Russian, but anyway, he sounded gruff and unfriendly.
B was reluctantly listening. She frowned. “Am I leading children astray?” For the first time, I heard the slight accent in her voice. “Well, look at him, Papa. He’s more of a man than you ever were. And I have a right to a bit of fun.”
The old man answered in his own language, sounding even less friendly than before, and to reinforce whatever he was saying, he spat on the ground.
“That’s not true,” cried B indignantly. “I don’t look a day older than twenty-nine, and this young man has come of age and knows exactly what he’s doing.”
“Absolutely,” said Henry, although that was a lie. He hadn’t quite come of age; he wouldn’t be eighteen until February, a week later than Florence and Grayson. “And now I’ll ask you to go away and leave your daughter in peace, or I’m afraid I’ll have to lend you a hand.”
B’s father didn’t look as if he felt like doing as Henry asked. He opened his mouth to reply, but Henry raised a hand, and it was as if he had muted the sound track: B’s father was talking volubly, with much gesticulation, but you couldn’t hear a word he was saying, even when he shouted harder and harder with his mouth wide open, and the veins on his forehead stood out. At another wave of Henry’s hand, two white-clad pool attendants appeared, picked up the old man, chair and all—he was still shouting silently—and carried him away.
“That’s that, then,” said Henry, turning back to B, who was looking at him admiringly.
“How did you do that?” she asked. “No one else has ever managed to silence him.”
“Then it was about time,” said Henry, shrugging his shoulders in a way so typical of him that I began trembling again on my spider plant leaf, and this time the leaf trembled too. What was I really doing here? Why had I followed him? I didn’t want to watch any of this. All I really wanted was to wake up.
By now the whole plant was shaking, but Henry didn’t notice.