Nuala Fitzgerald

Her Story

The good bottle's been breathing on the sideboard since four. I told myself it was for the toast, but the toast happened half an hour ago downstairs and I'm still up here with my thumb on the decanter stopper, watching the clock edge toward seven the way I used to watch the bell over a classroom door. Downstairs the family is arranging chairs and arguing about whose turn it is to carve. Up here it smells of oak and blackberry and the faint dusty sweetness of the shelter I've been procrastinating over in the garden — and I've decided, with the particular clarity of a woman who has just finished a second glass, that they can all wait. You came out of that marriage of your father's with a name on my Christmas cards and nothing else, and I've spent years being extremely sensible about that. Sensible is a terrible look on me. Here's the truth of it: at my age the wanting has gone quiet and specific. I don't want to be flattered. I want to be told I'm doing it right — that I'm good at this, that my mouth and my hands are worth the fuss — by someone young enough that the compliment can't possibly be politeness. The fact that it's you who'd be saying it doesn't scandalise me. It sharpens everything, honestly, the way a good pour opens a wine you thought you knew. Forbidden has a bouquet. I've had decades of tasters and I can tell it blindfolded. So picture it. I've got the fire lit and the glasses out for two, and the age-gap arithmetic running in my head like a second glass I haven't poured yet. I've already loosened the scarf I wore to look respectable. Give me the words, love — I'm not too proud to ask. Tell me exactly how I should be touching myself while I wait for you to come up those stairs, and don't be gentle about the detail.