Free The Destiny of Nathalie X by William Boyd

don’t have to suffer. A man of your age. Jesus.”
    Gerald ate some of his mixture. Wesley looked around fora waitress and saw Elizabetta, the plump one. She came over, beaming.
    “Pint of lager, please. Ger?”
    “Large gin and tonic.”
    Wesley lowered his voice. “Is, um, Margarita in today?” he asked Elizabetta.
    “This afternoon she come.”
    He shifted his shoulders around. Gerald was not listening. “Tell her I’ll phone. Say Wesley will phone. Wesley.”
    “Wesley. OK.”
    Gerald pulped his apple crumble with the back of his spoon.
    “Nice little place this, Wes. Worth the drive. What is it, Italian?”
    “Sort of. Bit of everything.”
    “ ‘International cuisine,’ then.”
    Wesley looked around the Caravelle. There was no nautical theme visible in its pragmatic decor, unless you counted the one seascape among its five reproductions on the wall. He and Gerald sat in a row of booths reminiscent more of—what was the word? Seating arrangements in libraries …—carrels, yes. Maybe the name was a malapropism, he thought. An asparagus on the banks of the Nile. Someone had blundered: it should have been called the Carrel Café & Restaurant. Names, again … He stopped thinking about it and thought instead about Margarita.
    Mar-ga-ri-ta. Not Margaret.
    He rolled the “r”s. Marrrrgarrrita.
    She was dark, of course, very Latin, with a severe thin face that possessed, he thought, what you might call a strong beauty. Not pretty, exactly, but there was a look about her that attracted him, although, he realized, she was one of these southern European women who would not age well. But nowshe was young and slim and her hair was long and, most important of all, she was Portuguese.
Uma moça bonita
.
    Gerald offered him one of his small cigars.
    Dr. Liceu Lobo put down his coffee cup and relit his
real excelente
. He drew, with pedantic and practiced care, a steady thin stream of smoke from the neatly docked and already nicely moist end and held it in his mouth, savoring the tobacco’s dry tang before pluming it at the small sunbird that pecked at the crumbs of his pastry on the patio table. The bird flew off with a shrill
shgrreakakak
and Dr. Liceu Lobo chuckled. It was time to return to the clinic, Senhora Fontenova was due for her vitamin D injections.
    He felt Adalgisa’s hand on his shoulder and he leaned his head back against her firm midriff, her finger trickled down over his collarbone and tangled and twirled the dense gray hairs on his chest.
    “Your mother wants to see you.”
    Wesley swung open the gate to his small and scruffy garden and reminded himself yet again to do something about the clematis that overburdened the trellis on either side of his front door. Pauline was bloody meant to be i.c. garden, he told himself, irritated at her, but then he also remembered he had contrived to keep her away from the house the last month or so, prepared to spend weekends and the odd night at her small flat rather than have her in his home. As he hooked his door keys out of his tight pocket with one hand he tugged with the other at a frond of clematis that dangled annoyingly close to his face, and a fine confetti of dust and dead leaves fell quickly onto his hair and shoulders.
    After he had showered he lay naked on his bed, his hand onhis cock, and thought about masturbating but decided against. He felt clean and, for the first time that day, almost relaxed. He thought about Margarita and wondered what she looked like with her clothes off. She was thin, perhaps a little on the thin side for his taste, if he were honest, but she did have a distinct bust and her long straight hair was always clean, though he wished she wouldn’t tuck it behind her ears and drag it taut into a lank swishing ponytail. Restaurant regulations, he supposed. He realized then that he had never seen her with her hair down and felt, for a moment, a sharp intense sorrow for himself and his lot in life. He sat up and swung his legs