Page 4 of The Rest is History
Of a breast.
Of a mouth.
Even if that mouth is snarky as fuck.
Granted, my ‘perfectly natural biological reaction’ has forced me to scoot my chair further under the table in the staff room on occasion. Just as it’s caused me to spend far more time in the shower with my fist than I’d wish of an evening.
Perhaps I should swap the t-shirt last year’s GCSE class bought me—slogan:I HAVE A HARD-ON FOR REVISIONIST HISTORY—for one sayingI HAVE A HARD-ON FOR A SUBSTITUTE TEACHER.
None of this is ideal, obviously. Or admirable. Or even advisable. But at least I can comprehend it.
Which is more than I can say for my reaction to her neck that first day, in the conference room.
She was already sitting down when I entered, you see. Her back was to me. Her hair up in a loose knot. And the neckline of her dress scooped elegantly, just enough to showcase a shapely column of pale, flawless skin. The faint outlines of the bumps of her spine. And wisps of baby hair.
The best way I can describe it is thatshe happened to me.In that moment, understanding hit me with visceral weight. That slim neck of hers made immediate sense to me, even though I wasn’t able to define that sense until I was at home alone later.
It exuded the oddest mix of grace and vulnerability. And the way it made me feel, the wayshemade me feel when she turned around to greet me and I saw that the rest of her very much lived up to the promise of that neck, was a reaction that plagued me for the entirety of that dratted interview.
Not that it was a feeling I’d had before.
It wasn’t.
But it was a feeling I recognised as having been spelt out for me before. One I’d read about, and mulled over, and struggled to imagine. Even if it had previously eluded me.
Until that moment, in an airy conference room in the school that was my second home.
And later, a good pinot noir in hand, I stared into the translucent liquid as it swilled around an oversized glass. My subconscious rewarded me by dredging up the emotion I’d struggled to identify and chucking it at me, as if it was an oldshipwreck yielded by a previously inscrutable sea and tossed onto the beach.
The way I felt when I came upon Elodie Peach and her swanlike neck was the way I’d always imagined the great King Henry VIII to feel when he was first granted the blessing—or the curse—of seeing her.
Anne Boleyn.
The woman he would have burnt the world down for.
The woman for whom he broke with Rome. Razed monasteries to the ground. Pillaged their treasures. Executed men who failed to procure a divorce for him.
The woman whose magnetism plagued him day and night until she allowed him to consume her. Own her. And even then, his joy was short-lived before his agony began again.
Because we all know how that ended.
We all know the desperate, hideous lengths his jealousy and torment drove him to.
And somehow, all these unarticulated thoughts swirled around in my brain at the very moment that my eyes alighted on Elodie’s neck.
As if the sight of it was portentous.
As if my subconscious was trying to warn me that this was the beginning of something way above my pay grade.
Historians have pondered and argued the nature of Anne Boleyn’s appeal for centuries. She bewitched Henry, and countless others, and the main conclusion we can draw seems to be that she exuded her own particular brand of charm: a concoction of sex appeal and sophistication and exoticism and striking features whose combined allure was basically fucking kryptonite.
Elodie Peach’s charm is more straightforward. While no one can agree on how classically beautiful Mistress Boleyn was, Elodie’s beauty is undeniable. And yet, in that first moment,it wasn’t her beauty, but some trick of her physique and her posture, that transfixed me. That caused a kind of alchemy in my veins, the like of which I’d never felt.
And that night, as I swilled my excellent Otago pinot and beseeched its depths to bring me clarity, a thought struck me like a fucking sledgehammer.
Elodie had a little neck.
Anne Boleyn had a little neck. She’s reported to have commented on that very feature on the eve of her execution. I’ve never been able to tell if such a comment showed extreme pragmatism, resignation to her fate, or a devilishly dark sense of humour. I’d like to think it was a combination of all three, though we know a chilling amount about the emotional rollercoaster ride Anne’s nervous system treated her to in those tense final days of her life.
