Offcomer by Jo Baker Read Free Book Online

home? Is there a university in Belfast?”
    “Yes,” he said, briskly. “Two, in fact. UU and Queen’s. I did my BA at Queen’s.” He gestured up to the mantelpiece and Claire rose and padded across the room, stepped up onto the empty hearth to look at the picture. She had taken off her shoes.
    On the mantelpiece the steady candlelight illuminated the unframed, brown-cardboard backed picture of Alan. In the photograph he was solemn, gowned, squinting in bright sunshine, clutching a blue folder. Behind him was a fuzzy, unfocused redbrick gothic building.
    “It looks a bit like Somerville.”
    “It has a very good reputation.”
    She nodded, stood looking at the picture a moment longer, then came back across the bare boards. She sat down, picked up her glass. The sharp, dark wine had taken away the shivers, left her feeling warm and hazy. She remembered shehad not eaten since her early, starchy college breakfast. She sipped again, felt the wine coat her tongue, dust the roof of her mouth. She felt, for the first time in she didn’t know how long, relaxed. The decision to come here had been hers, and she felt that she had done her bit. Whatever followed, followed, and was up to him.
    “You haven’t been back to class.” Alan reached out with the bottle, sloshed some more wine into her glass.
    “No. I’ve been busy. Essays.” She smiled at him. Her lips felt dry from the wine. Her teeth were probably stained too. She licked her lips. They tasted sour. “How have you been getting on?”
    He grinned. “I’m doing grand,” he said. “I think I’m really breaking through, you know.”
    “That’s great,” she said.
    “It’s very frustrating, though.” He put the bottle down on the coffee table, continued looking at it.
    “I know,” she said eagerly, leaning forward. “I can never make anything as good as I want it to be. I’m always trying and trying and doing more and more until I completely bugger it up. Until it’s irreparable. Either that or I just can’t get started.”
    “No,” he said, “I don’t mean that.” He glanced away from the bottle, looked up at her quickly, laughed. “No, no problems there. It’s the models I mean. That’s what I find annoying. I just get fed up drawing Mrs. Peters or yer man Steven week after week.”
    “Oh.”
    “I mean, it’s their bodies. They’re ugly. There’s no satisfaction in drawing well if what you’re drawing is ugly.”
    “Do you think?”
    He nodded gravely, ponderously, swallowed. “So,” he said. “I was wondering if you’d like to sit for me.”
    His eyes, behind their thick lenses, dropped downwards, watching his glass as he raised it uneasily to his lips. And in this momentary awkwardness, in the clumsiness of his request, Claire suddenly realised that he was real; that he was, indisputably, there; and the shock of seeing this was so strong that it almost choked her. She had stopped believing in other people. Somehow, everything had shrunk down to this: one tiny wizened self staring out upon unknowable strangers. And she could not go on like that, she thought. That was no way to be.
    His eyes climbed back to meet hers. He looked anxious. She smiled.
    “Okay,” she said.
    She stood in the unlit bedroom, caught between the closed door and the uncurtained window. A single bed lay beneath the window. The duvet was twisted and tangled like a crisp packet, the bottom sheet creased and loose. Outside, the mist had condensed into fine steady rain, beading the window, refracting stray light from the streetlamps. From up here, she could see into the college. Yellow lights in high up rooms, an edge of the floodlit tower, a corner of the chapel.
    She climbed up onto the bed, knelt, pressing her cheek against the cold glass. Looking out across the parkland behind the college, she could see wet dark grass and thick deep trees. Near the boundary fence, in the shadow of a heavy dripping tree, a paler shadow moved. Claire pulled up the sash,