In Bed With Lord Byron

that I wanted to kiss him.
    ‘Lucy, this is great. Well done.’
    ‘Well, thanks,’ I said lightly.
    ‘What do you think, Brian?’ Kerry asked. I whipped round to look at her, but there didn’t
seem
to be any malice in her face.
    ‘Delicious.’ Byron smacked his lips, looking at her breasts.
    ‘It’s great.’ Anthony rubbed my arm and I knew he was saying sorry. I bit my lip, telling myself to calm down, not be uptight.
    ‘So, Kerry,’ I said. ‘What do you do?’
    ‘Oh, I work for a magazine you might have heard of. It’s called
Time
. It’s pretty big in the States . . .’
    ‘Oh. Oh wow.’ So, high-powered stuff then.
    We spent most of the first course playing Q and A. Kerry was an only child. Kerry had studied English at Harvard. Kerry had only come to England to write an article on dating agencies over here.
And –
yes!
– she was going back to the US in two weeks’ time.
    Then I felt a flicker of guilt.
Put yourself in her shoes,
I told myself sternly,
and remember she’s only human too
.
    ‘So what do you do for a living, Brian?’ Anthony asked.
    ‘He’s a—’ I began to say, but Anthony interrupted, smiling gently.
    ‘I think Brian can answer by himself, Luce.’
    ‘Uh-huh,’ Kerry echoed under her breath, and I had to force myself not to give her an utterly monstrous look.
    ‘I’m a poet,’ said Byron importantly. At which point, normally about a hundred women would have collapsed at his feet. But this was the twenty-first century, and if you
announced at a dinner party that you were a poet, people would react with polite distress.
    ‘Well,’ said Anthony, ‘good for you. But it must be tough trying to get recognition, right? I mean, I had a friend at uni who decided to become a poet and he spent years
scraping by, sending things out to magazines and radio stations and never getting anywhere. By the time he finally managed to get something accepted by Bloodaxe, the bailiffs had taken away half
his flat.’
    By now Byron was nearly purple.
    ‘He has had stuff published,’ I said quickly. ‘And it’s been well received.’
    ‘Oh wow, what about?’ said Anthony, pointedly addressing the question to Lord B.
    ‘He likes writing about nature,’ I cut in. ‘About birds and trees and that sort of thing.’
    ‘Sounds very Wordsworthian,’ said Kerry, and I saw Byron’s fingers tighten around his knife as though he wanted to plunge it into her chest.
    ‘I can assure you that Wordsworth has never been an influence on my work,’ said Byron acidly. ‘Blake – a fellow Romantic – once blamed a lifelong bowel complaint on
reading Wordsworth’s poetry,’ and we all laughed.
    ‘So what about you, Lucy?’ Kerry asked. ‘What do
you
do?’
    ‘Well, I was working for a scientist, but that job finished. So I’m kind of between jobs. I’ve been temping,’ I added lamely.
    I saw Kerry look at Anthony and raise an eyebrow, and just a flicker of something less than kind passed across her face for the first time that evening. But then she smiled warmly and said,
‘Hey, I could help you out. I know a friend who runs a secretarial temping agency. Anthony said you used to be a PA.’
    ‘Yes, but Lucy’s much too intelligent for that,’ Anthony said.
    My heart soared. Beside me, Byron snorted. I poked my fork into his thigh. That shut him up.
    ‘I mean,’ Anthony went on, ‘I remember last Christmas, we went over to Dad’s and we all sat down to play Trivial Pursuit. Now nobody,
nobody
, can beat Dad at
Trivial Pursuit.’
    ‘Oh, Anthony, don’t tell them this!’ I blushed.
    ‘No, go on,’ said Kerry. ‘Tell us.’
    ‘Lucy thrashed him,’ Anthony said. ‘She even nailed him on Geography, which is his forte. She scored the winning point by somehow managing to know the capital of Belarus.
Remember that, Luce?’
    ‘I do,’ I said. ‘It’s Minsk.’
    For a moment it was as though we were sharing our own private dinner and nobody else was about.
    ‘That’s fascinating,’ Kerry cut in. ‘I have a friend, James. Nobody could beat him at Trivial Pursuit either – I mean, not even Lucy could. In fact, I’m going
to introduce Anthony to him when we go to the US at the end of the month.’
    Hang on!
    What!
    Anthony was going to the US with Kerry?
    Suddenly I felt as though the sheet of ice had cracked beneath me and I was drowning in icy water.
    ‘Really?’ I said, getting up to fetch dessert and hide my face. I passed round the tiramisu,