‘Funnily enough, it’s nowhere near as bad as I thought it would be,’ he said.
He held my gaze but I absolutely could not hold his, and instead faked interest in the ebb and flow of my margarita as I stirred the liquid with my straw.
‘What did you make of my little outburst today, then?’ asked Marcus.
I looked up. ‘I wondered what was going through your mind. Why you snapped like that.’
Marcus shrugged. ‘If I could work that out, I could avoid doing it again, couldn’t I, and my team would be a whole lot happier with me?’
‘Think about it. It was that penultimate game. Something shifted at that end change. Maybe something came into your head, I could see your whole demeanour change. Patrick called it, too.’
Frowning, he took a few seconds to answer.
‘Okay. I’m not sure if this is going to make any sense, but when I think I might be about to lose, I go one of two ways: either I change tactics or I start to believe I can’t do it. That I’m not good enough, that I’ll never amount to anything, that I’m about to let everyone down.’
‘Where does that come from though, because it sounds as if it’s entirely in your head. Did someone tell you that once? That you weren’t good enough?’ I asked.
‘Everybody told me that,’ he said, as our main courses were placed on the table in front of us. ‘Now can we please talk about something less depressing?’
The conversation lightened up considerably after that – I hadn’t wanted to get too heavy too quickly and thought a gentle approach to getting Marcus to talk was probably for the best. So instead we swapped stories about our favourite places in the world (mine had previouslybeen Rome, but the Eternal City was now tarnished by the knowledge that Charlie had spent the entire trip trying to pluck up the courage to break up with me), the books we’d read, the music we listened to. Apparently, Marcus played Stormzy on his Beats headphones before a match; it helped him get hyped up. All of this was helping me build up a picture of who Marcus was outside of tennis, and the titbits of information I was gleaning would be extremely useful if I could remember any of them when I got back to my room. Because the thing was, I kept forgetting I was supposed to be working and found myself relaxing in his company and enjoying myself instead. I could have stayed out there chatting all night, and was now on my second cocktail, so had the sort of airy light-headedness that made me temporarily forget about my problems and enjoy the moment for what it was.
Marcus paid the bill again, although I tried to insist we went halves, and then we stood up and I ran my hand over the fabric of my Zara satin dress, the same one I’d worn on my first night in Monaco and had had to wear again because I was fast running out of evening wear. I’d worn my hair down this time to try to make it look subtly different, and had applied red lipstick instead of the neutral lip gloss I’d worn for our first proper meeting at Marcus’s hotel.
As we walked through the restaurant, I noticed a few chic-looking people swivelling to look in our direction. Marcus was a handsome man, it could just have been that, but I also presumed that some of them would have been at the tournament today, perhaps in one of the hospitality suites, and so would have seen Marcus lose. I wondered if in some ways his temper made him more appealing – we always saw these polished versions of famous people, leading us to assume that their lives were near perfect all the time, but of course this was an illusion, Everybody struggled sometimes, and absolutely nobody got everything they wanted. At least with Marcus he was putting it all out there for everyone to see.
A group of nine or ten people were waiting for the lift down to street level and, as we joined them, a photographer seemed to come out of nowhere and started flashing away in Marcus’s face, presumably capturing us both in the shot. I was torn – and possibly so was Marcus – and I could see that his instinct was to shout at them and push them away.
Instead he held his hand out in front of the lens.
‘Come on, Marcus. Just one photo, what’s the harm?’
The maître d’ came rushing out, full of apologies.
‘I am so very sorry, Mr Taylor, we are calling security right away,’ he said, clearly flustered.
As the lift doors opened, I grabbed Marcus’s hand, trying to indicate to him to stay calm, to not engage. It was just one photo, it didn’t matter, and although it was a bit overwhelming to have a lens in our faces like this, it didn’t really matter in the scheme of things, and maybe another shot of the two of us together would cheer Dean up.
The group in front of us probably weren’t tennis fans, because they seemed utterly confused by the frenzy of camera flashes and the maître d’ trying to jostle the photographer away from us, and Marcus mumbling under his breath about how this was invading people’s privacy and shouldn’t be allowed. There wasn’t enough space for both of us to get in, really, but I couldn’t stand much more of this, and so pulled Marcus into the lift with me, just as the doors were closing.
Silence.
The group started talking again. I was still holding Marcus’s hand, but then his other one was somehow on my waist. We were pressed together so hard that my mouth was level with his clavicle and I could feel his warm breath on my hair. He bent his head a little to whisper in my ear, his free hand simultaneously movingfrom my waist on to the small of my back. It was like he was pulling me even closer to him so that there was no space between us at all.
‘Sorry about that,’ he whispered.
I looked up, because I suddenly wanted to see his face this close up. Even in the dim light I could make out the different colours in his beard – mostly dark brown, but also a smattering of red, and the tiniest flecks of grey.
‘Not your fault,’ I whispered back.
Our eyes were locked together as his hand moved slowly from my lower back to the middle of my shoulder blades, the heat from his palm burning into me, and for a second it was like we were alone in that lift, just him and me, suspended in motion, away from prying eyes and all the stresses of the day, his lips slightly parted and tantalisingly close.
And then the doors pinged open on our side, letting the bright lights of the lobby pour in. Even though I didn’t really want to, I dropped his hand as we walked outside to the taxi rank.
Roland-Garros
Chapter Thirteen
Visiting home – particularly if I had to stay overnight – almost always put me in a terrible mood afterwards. I’d never quite worked out why, but if I was going to dig deep on the subject, I’d say it had to do with being rocketed right back into being a teenager again and constantly having the feeling I was about to do something wrong. Dad had been a taxi driver then – or a ‘chauffeur’ as he used to prefer to call it, because he had an executive car and mostly did airport runs for businessmen who were prepared to pay a bit more (or their company was, more like) for a marginally more luxurious start to their journey. It had suited Dad – he loved cars, and although he wasn’t particularly chatty at home, I reckoned he could be pretty jovial when he had a passenger in the back seat, plus he could choose his own hours. I assumed they needed the money because he seemed to be out driving almost all the time and often did night shifts at the weekends. As a result, it would mostly be me, Mum and Cassie at home, a dynamic I always felt distinctly on the outside of.
