In Bed With Lord Byron

taking the bag. Inside was a four-pack of Tennants Extra and a packet of Wrigley’s chewing gum.
    ‘It was just some stuff I grabbed from the shop.’
    ‘Oh, sure, it’s great,’ I enthused, putting the Tennants pack down on the table alongside my bottles of spirits and the chewing gum next to the plate of little Belgian
chocolate Florentines.
    ‘Well . . .’ he said, stuffing his hands in his pockets. ‘So – how are you?’
    ‘Oh, great. Yep. Er – I’ve got vegetable risotto on the go – is that OK?’ I didn’t add that it was all out of an M&S packet; there was no way I was going
to risk cooking it myself.
    ‘Uh, yeah, sure. I had a big roast for lunch, so something light will be fine.’
    Something light?
    ‘I’m a vegetarian,’ I said, and his face assumed an ‘oh dear’ expression. ‘Well, anyway, it’ll be ready in about ten minutes.’
    ‘Oh, good.’
    His past manner had always seemed so cocky and cheeky that his nerves took me quite by surprise. Just watching him walking about, picking things up and putting them down in the manner of an
alien making notes for a thesis on human living habits was getting me jittery. I tried to look relaxed by sitting on the sofa. Eventually he joined me, though as far away as possible, a gulf of
cream cloth between us. I couldn’t help feeling disappointed. I’d been half fantasising about him walking into the house, tearing off my clothes in the hallway with helpless passion and
making love to me on the stairs. At this rate it would take six months for us to have a one-night stand, which sort of defeated the object a bit.
    He broke the silence. ‘D’you mind if I smoke?’
    Oh God. I loathed smoking.
    ‘No, sure,’ I said.
    He grabbed the African pot on my table, mistaking it for an ashtray, and lit up a Silk Cut. I tried to hold my breath. He leaned forward, sifting through the pile of magazines and books on my
table. I felt a bit more cheered up when I noticed his fingers were still looking deliciously grubby.
    ‘So who’s this weird-looking bloke then?’ he asked.
    ‘What?’ I frowned. He was holding up a copy of
Don Juan
. Byron was looking at his most dewy on the cover.
    ‘Lord Byron, of course,’ I said.
    ‘Oh, right, who’s he then?’ He took a puff and looked up, and he must have seen the look on my face because his smile faded and he hunched his shoulders defensively.
‘Well, look, I never bothered with school – I had crap teachers, and so reading isn’t exactly my cup of tea.’
    ‘Sorry – I’m not some big snotty snob, if that’s what you’re thinking. I’m just a bit obsessed with Byron, and so I kind of go around thinking everyone else
must be.’
    He looked guilty for making me feel guilty.
    ‘So tell me about him,’ he asked.
    ‘Well,’ I said, smiling, ‘I think he was the greatest poet of all time.’
    ‘Wow,’ he said, and for a moment I thought he was being sarcastic, but he grinned and I carried on, relieved to have something to talk about.
    ‘Well, he interested a lot of people because he was so handsome . . .’
    He looked at the cover doubtfully.
    ‘. . . but he was born with a club foot, so he had a limp. It didn’t stop him being irresistible to women, though.’ I used to hate those TV adaptations about historic figures
which were full of rose-tinted bedroom scenes with perhaps one stale breadcrumb of poetry tossed in, as if to say yeah-we-know-history-isn’t-
all-
about-shagging. But I found myself
doing just the same, committing the sin of sensationalism. ‘His father, Mad Jack, was an alcoholic and a gambler, and when he was only eleven, his Scottish nurse, May Grey, initiated him into
the pleasures of sex . . .’
    ‘
Eleven!
’
    ‘Yep. When he was eighteen, he went to Cambridge. He was a bit of a rebel – the college rules forbade him to keep a dog, so he kept a bear instead! He lived a life of such
dissipation that by the end of the first term he was a thousand pounds in debt. After he left, he wrote some outrageous pieces of poetry, like
English Bards and Scotch Reviewers
, where he
slagged off just about every contemporary. It’d be a bit like a Booker Prize winner today writing a prologue to his next novel with rhyming couplets declaring all his contemporaries are a
bunch of tossers – unlikely, I guess – but an entertaining thought.
Childe Harold
was the poem that got him noticed. He found himself famous overnight and wanted at every party.
That was how