Grassa and Berthold, a Brief Romance

 As they reached the corner of the narrow, gently sloping street and stepped off it onto the low-walled Victorian market forecourt that served as a sea prospect and alternative route to the High Street, Berthold leaned on Grassa's arm, unconsciously drawing her close as he tried to arrange some vague plans for the rest of the holiday fortnight in his mind while simultaneously sharing them out loud with her, confident of her approval or at least her sympathetic understanding. 

"My mother," he told her, "said this morning that she didn't need to go back to London just yet, so I thought..." He paused for a moment, feeling a twinge of guilt as he reflected on how he'd left his mother aimlessly pottering in the house all day for, what, three days now, while he'd been out joyously gallivanting round town with Grassa. "So I thought, well, we could maybe take her out tomorrow, bring her for a walk around town." Grassa looked up at him, a glance of mildness and acquiescence that made further conversation on that topic unnecessary. Of course, bring her, the glance said, I don't know why you haven't already. I like your mother. Everybody does.

For some reason, this prompted a turn in the conversation in which Berthold found himself bitterly complaining about the sort of misunderstandings that he seemed to get involved with whenever he tried to talk to anyone - that "anyone" naturally excluding Grassa herself - about, well anything really, For rhetorical purposes, he paused in his stride, and leaned towards the ceramic balustrade that followed the seawall around the market building. "You see," he went on, "people are always going well, there's this, and you have to take into consideration this and this, and well, of course there's the obligation to do this and this" - and with each "this", Berthold found himself energetically smacking his hand on successive tiles of the balustrade, punching out a scale of C major in crescendo on the cold stone - "and what I want to say to them is hang on a minute, let's go right back to here," - he swivelled back round like a conjuror in a cape - "you see everything depends on your interpretation of this word (the D next to middle C), and well, I don't interpret it the same way as you, so nothing else after that makes sense to me..." He paused, realising he had raised his voice slightly. More surprisingly still, he'd been expressing himself with complete spontaneity - even with a degree of passion.

Grassa gave him a look somewhere between awe and amused affection. She understood his frustration with other people and their glib assumptions. She paused, and said with a smile, "Keep talking like that, mister, and you'll have all the girls running after you!"

She wasn't to know it, but with that joking, good-natured appeal to his habitually dormant ego, Grassa had touched on his weak spot. (Perhaps anything with the word "girls" in it, or indeed any conjuring of the gender genie, would have done.)

A moment later, he was squeezing her in his arms, his mouth fixed on hers. He was too involved in the moment to reflect on whether he'd been moved to embrace her out of straightforward desire or - as had generally been the case in other past encounters - out of a reflexive, rather sheepish wish to not let his companion down, to avoid deflating her romantic expectations of the moment with his own diffidence and lifelong shortage of passion. 

The kiss went on: she was timidly responsive in his arms. He separated his lips from hers to draw breath, and spoke. "I didn't expect this to happen," he moaned - "this" being not just the kiss, but all that had preceded it, that extraordinary week in which he and Grassa had found each other - and it was only after he'd uttered these trite words that he realised his tone had been almost exaggeratedly, parodically hoarse and passionate, quite unlike his habitual bloodless murmur. For a split second he wondered whether she might interpret it as a cruel piss-take on his part... but then he heard from her a sound like a muffled squeal, denoting either genuine passion (in a female register off limits to his understanding) or a sympathetic response of dutifully complying with the script, of not letting him down just as he strove to not let her down. It didn't seem to matter which motive was predominant. Then he heard, in a timid, almost apologetic squeak, "I wanted it to be human!..." And a second or two later, more quietly still, "... and jealous!"

Oh, he thought confusedly, still holding her close, she wants me to be jealous, possessive of her... well, I guess a woman would want that. It was a pity that the precise thing she'd asked for was the one thing he couldn't give her: he'd only ever experienced possessiveness once in his life, with his first girlfriend an eternity ago, and the eruption of emotion had been so terrifying that it had completely burned out the capacity for jealousy in him forever after: he found it simply inconceivable that he could ever again care, even slightly, about the presumed infidelities of a spouse or romantic partner - as if such things could ever be any of his business! It didn't matter, though, since experience had already taught him that jealousy was easy enough to fake, on demand: women seemed satisfied with even the most perfunctory histrionics in this regard, the merest wisp of smoke from his extinct volcano. Ritual possessiveness was one of those many things women knew they were better at, and easily forgave men for being blundering idiots at. So that wasn't really a problem.

 As for all the other future stages of this blossoming "relationship" - the carefully measured and spaced dosages of successive disappointment that he would have to administer over the coming days, weeks or months in the procession to and beyond the narrow bed - he preferred not to think about them for now, instead basking in the moment, in the glorious, utterly amazing reality that he was, at last, loved (or liked; the difference seemed minor) by a woman who, until recently, he would never have suspected of such bizarre proclivities. Perhaps there was a clue in "I wanted it to be human" - perhaps it was the same story it had always been, he'd been chosen by a recessive female who, whether because of a bad experience or for any other reason, was willing to sacrifice the more traditional masculine qualities for the sake of safety, domesticity and effortless programmability - but perhaps he was also the beneficiary of some latent need evangelical Christians like her had, to commit a sin once in a while in order to convince themselves they still belonged to fallen humanity. Perhaps he'd just been accidentally standing in the right place when her need to sin had suddenly descended on her, unannounced, from a cloudless sky. 

The most surprising thing was - on further reflection, and the sky was dimming - she had never been anywhere in his list of desirable conquests (a purely notional list anyway, at his age) - she'd never been part of that dwindling gallery of women he allowed himself to think of sexually from time to time. Nothing about her particularly induced him to think of her that way. And that wasn't just because she was an evangelical Christian, and therefore presumed immune to sexual temptation: it was also because while his goddesses had always tended towards the sultry and exotic, she was the very picture of prim, staid Englishness: her femaleness was more about what she didn´t have than what she did.

A minute or two passed. Uppermost in Berthold's mind was the odd syzygy of circumstances: (1) someone liked him; (2) this person was, unexpectedly, a colleague from work; (3) his mother was still alive. Intellectually, this represented a challenge or conundrum, in part because his mother hadn't been alive when he took his current job, thus acquiring the current set of colleagues. He held on to the idea of being liked (for his capacity to smack ceramic balustrades) as long as he could, while the contradictions ate away at one another in the background. Even when he finally identified himself as awake, and was able to reason that all of the preceding must therefore be classified as a dream, he couldn't immediately shake off the seductive notion that what he'd just experienced was a revelation: aha, now I know something I didn't before, that Grassa secretly loves me, and that the only thing stopping her from showing it is the fact we are not on holiday in Hastings (or is it Brighton? Sitges?). 

It took a full minute for him to reason himself out of this, in part by reflecting that if the person sleeping in the bed beside him didn't like him, it was highly unlikely that anyone else ever would.