We went for dinner in the à la carte restaurant – Mexican – and it was fine, and we had a laugh, actually, and he let me put tiny pinpricks in his ego, just for fun, and he seemed to quite enjoy it, as though it were a massive novelty, and I allowed myself the luxury of thinking that he looked at me with lust and interest and curiosity in his eyes. I had Badges again in the morning, after all. And after we had got through the best part of three bottles of wine, I took him back to the room he had followed me to earlier and this time he fucked me, just the once and terribly – so so terribly – and then I kicked him out.
I saw him, in the morning, although I didn’t want to, as I was nursing a bruise as big as my birthmark on my inner thigh and a head that was constantly yelling, ‘Stupid, stupid, stupid!’ at me, and I had been, hadn’t I? I was doing Badges and I had to walk from Meeting Room 2 to the lobby and he was waiting for me, outside the loos.
‘Hey, beautiful,’ he said.
‘You hurt me,’ I said.
‘You let me.’
‘I was drunk.’
‘You didn’t say “no”.’
‘I did say “no”, at that point – and you know which point I am talking about. I said it until you finished – but you wouldn’t get off me.’
‘You let me,’ he repeated.
‘I could report you.’
‘Are you going to?’ I realized he was holding something in his right hand.
He knew the answer and so did I. Spanish police, all the shame, the interrogation and the hassle. I had invited him up to my room, hadn’t I? He had only become rough once he was actually inside me. He hadn’t punched me in the face or pinned down my upper arms or worse. He had just pounded into me like a pile driver, kept going while I tried to rain ineffective punches down on his back and he held a garlicky hand over my mouth. I would not be believed. I couldn’t really understand what had happened myself, let alone articulate it to strangers who were primed for every inconsistency in my story, every ambiguity. I knew the struggle to be believed – to tell my story in a clear, unambiguous way – would almost, almost be worse than what had taken place inside my room. And it would make it realer and realer and realer, and I didn’t want that. I just wanted to forget it had happened.
He held up what was in his hand. It was a leaf. A red one, like it should belong to an English autumn or a New England fall, not a summer in Tenerife. A red leaf, who knows from what tree, heart shaped and folded down the middle so it looked like a veiny butterfly. He smiled and held the leaf out to me, by the stalk. I didn’t take it.
‘It looks like what’s on your face.’
He was mumbling. I couldn’t quite hear what he said.
‘What?’
‘It looks like what you have on your face,’ he said and his eyes were pretending to be kind, but it was a trick. He was not kind. He was unkind and cruel. He was just like all those others. He was worse than all the others. And I knew exactly why he had done what he had done to me – recognized it with an uncomfortable familiarity – because he knew I didn’t get many other offers, or any other offers; because he thought I should be grateful to be raped in my hotel room, during a badge-system-advising trip, to Tenerife.
I would not cry or give him the pleasure of seeing my anger. He was nothing to me. He would be nothing, in a day or two. When I would erase him, banish him from my memory, expel any trace of him – tell myself nothing had happened and I was OK. I took the leaf, scrunched it up in my hand and let it fall, in pieces, to the marble floor. Then I turned from him, went to my room to pack my case, put myself on a flight home and asked to change departments.
CHAPTER 19
Dad and I are outside Liberty. The sun is beating down for about the millionth day running and I have persuaded him into another hat – a baseball cap with ‘New York’ on it (not that either of us have ever been there; he bought it online from Next) – while I am stifling in a misjudged charity-shop khaki jumpsuit I thought could one day hold the power to make me look chic and current, but actually makes me look like a long past-it children’s TV presenter.
‘Architects hated Liberty,’ says Dad, as I look up at the famous black-and-white timbered shop in the blazing hot sunshine. I don’t have a cap on and can feel my face burning, despite my thick layer of suncream. ‘They said it was for philistines. It’s the finest example of Tudor Revival Arts and Crafts architecture in London and beyond,’ he continues. ‘Twenty-four thousand cubic metres of teak and solid oak timbers from two British naval ships – HMS Hindustan and HMS Impregnable – make up its frontage, and the store is the same height and length as the Hindustan.’
He sounds like he’s reading from a website via his Braille display. He is grumpy again. The fun of Covent Garden has gone today and been replaced by surliness. I’m not really sure why. Perhaps it was the tube journey. A terrible twat in a tracksuit quipped, ‘Look out, it’s Andre Botticelli and Freddy Krueger’s sister,’ as we were going through the barriers.
‘Andrea Bocelli,’ I corrected him, ‘mate,’ while shooting him a look that would freeze burning lava. ‘And Freddy Krueger doesn’t have a sister.’ I knew my make-up hadn’t worked today; sometimes it just doesn’t seem to stick. Then there was the pigeon that got on the tube at Mornington Crescent, causing great amusement to the other people on the carriage, but Dad got strangely snappy at even the mention of the word ‘pigeon’, wouldn’t join in with the smiles and laughter and went all quiet on me.
Great Marlborough Street is busy and bustling this morning. ‘The owner, Arthur Lasenby Liberty, literally wanted to dock a ship in the city streets,’ adds Dad, sounding as excited as a fish reading the news.
‘Excellent,’ I say. Perhaps it’s my grumpiness that has rubbed off on Dad. My mind is not on Great Marlborough Street, outside Liberty, this morning. It is still on the darkened street outside the Dickensian as a taxi draws up and a man looks at me with tenderness, then kisses me with passion and says goodbye.
Dad asked me this morning how it went, the date. I lied and said it was fine, but I expect he’s not fooled. I didn’t smile and laugh at the commuting pigeon, either. I stared morosely at my own reflection in the opposite window of the tube as we rattled here, disappointment scraping away at my insides with a metal spoon. No one expects a reflection of a middle-aged face in a tube window to be flattering but I looked blank, a non-person.
I wondered if Philippa Helens had stared at such a reflection of herself, on her final journey. If she literally couldn’t stand the sight of herself. I read something new about her last night, actually, something quite strange: that on the Victoria Line leg of her tube journey from Knightsbridge, where she was due to change at Warren Street for the Northern Line, she was caught on CCTV getting off the train when it stopped at Oxford Circus, walking two carriages down the platform (with her balloon?), and getting on again before the doors re-closed.
‘Arthur Liberty had a vision of an emporium with luxuries and fabrics from distant lands,’ continues Dad rather morosely, ‘and he borrowed two thousand pounds from his future father-in-law to make it happen. The loan was repaid in eighteen months.’
‘Wonderful,’ I say, a robot with a residual headache from two gin cocktails and one large measure of confusion. Maybe some paisley scarves and an assault of perfumes will distract me from what happened last night (dated, kissed, dismissed …), and today’s sunshine will blast me from the darkness I felt in bed last night, when my memories crept over me like shadows.
‘Shall we go in?’
Dad and I approach the main entrance, where overflowing blooms in metal pots spilling out on to the pavement welcome us into the fragrant, wood-panelled lobby with a heady bouquet. I realize I’ve never been inside this building before. It’s beautiful. It’s kind of cosy.
‘Cheer up, Dad,’ I say, and, ‘everything will be all right,’ I randomly add. Sod him, I think. No, not Dad. Sod Salvi. Yes, I shouldn’t have put my head above the parapet only for it to be shot down but sod him. It wa
s only one date. I’ll get over it. I don’t want to be a blank face in a tube-station window, numbed by some man.
‘There are six floors and three atriums,’ says Dad. We are trailing from the lobby behind a group of Japanese tourists and a woman with an enormous bottom, who sways it side to side like a water buffalo. People bustle round us on all sides; some staring, some uninterested, some very obviously not staring. ‘All surrounded by smaller rooms. And I’m OK, Prue. I must have just got out of the wrong side of bed this morning. Check out the engraved pillars and the heraldic shields of Henry the Eighth’s wives, if you can find them. There are also carved animals hidden all about the store.’
‘OK, Dad.’
I look at him quizzically. He just looks sad today. I’ll buck up. I have to. If I buck up then hopefully he will, too.
‘Tell me the story,’ I attempt, as we tap our way through the food hall, me guiding Dad away from the glass jars of all sorts of delights, set on low benches. ‘Of when you came here as a kid.’
‘OK,’ says Dad. ‘First, take me to a pillar with the engraving on so I can feel it, please.’ I lead him over to a dark wood pillar, engraved with smooth, bulbous leaves, and I place his hand on it. ‘Ah, yes, beautiful work,’ he says. He glides his fingers over the leaves and down the pillar. Gives a sigh. I touch it, too, the glossy wood, here for over a hundred years. ‘Well, I came here with Nonna – we’d come to the wholesalers in Ganton Street and we wandered in here, in awe – and she kept saying she shouldn’t be in here, you know, that it was too smart, that she was just a contadina – a peasant.’ He smiles a little at the memory. ‘But she knew about the two ships, and the little windows between some of the wood panelling straight from the captain’s quarters, and how the whole store had been designed to feel like a home and, well, I was just fascinated. I started looking around me and I thought about the flow of people and the flow of rooms and that it was beautiful and practical and really said something.’ Dad is warming to his theme. I can see the small boy in him peering out, curious and excited about the world. I like that image. ‘And then, years later, I was doing carpentry at the Barbican, and it was so, so different, but each building I worked on served the architect’s vision of its purpose – the purpose of the people who would use it, you know?’
I nod. ‘John Harrison Burrows,’ I say.
‘Who?’
‘The blind architect. From Hawaii. He consults on libraries and centres for the blind and suggests things like using panels of differing lights, and textured surfaces, to aid people’s navigation of spaces. Makes sure they serve the vision of their purpose.’ I read that on the internet. I think I’ve paraphrased it quite well. Should I have brought him up, though, at this point? The blind architect?
‘He’s a clever guy, then,’ says Dad. ‘Let’s go up to the second floor.’ He takes his hand from the pillar and we head upstairs, then scoot up further, to the upper atrium. I describe scarves and artefacts and trinkets. Dark wood balustrades and panelling. There’s a whispery kind of restraint in posh shops like this. A rarefied air. We mooch, we linger and we trace our fingers over slippery fabrics and run them through lace and buttons and pins. We don’t smile a whole lot. We hardly talk. But we are here. Finally, I think we’ve been in every room.
‘Hungry?’ asks Dad.
‘Hungry,’ I agree.
We come out on Kingly Street. ‘Is the clock still there?’ asks Dad. ‘Up on the arch?’
I look up. ‘Yes.’
‘“No minute gone comes ever back again, take heed and see ye nothing do in vain,”’ says Dad. The inscription, black on gold, scrolling beneath the clock, is ignored by all the people wasting their lives below it. ‘Take heed,’ he repeats.
‘Yes, Dad.’
We walk down Carnaby Street. It’s so busy there is barely room on the pavement in front of us for Dad’s tapping cane, and we shift like clams within a chattering sea of slow-moving people until a sudden commotion to our left causes a ripple. There’s a bustle of people foraging round a hotel entrance, men with cameras jostling and crunching shoulders with each other, and a young woman steps out, flanked by bodyguards, her head down.
‘What’s going on?’ asks Dad.
‘Margot Robbie,’ I say. I recognize her straight away. ‘Actress. Very beautiful. She’s come out of a hotel and is signing autographs by the looks of it.’ There’s a huddle of people around her, thrusting things under her nose. The flash of a silver pen.
‘Yes, I’ve heard of her,’ says Dad. ‘Can you describe her?’
How can I describe such perfection? And do I want to? Do I want to list features so far from my own? Such beauty, when even a fragment of it has been denied to me? ‘Well,’ I say, ‘she has large, almond-shaped eyes, full lips, an angular face that is contoured in all the right places. Cheekbones to die for. A smile to break a million hearts.’
Imagine being that beautiful, I think. To have people in awe of you because of how you look. To have your face stared at for all the right reasons. I would like to have that. Just for one day I’d like to step out of my front door and walk around London with people looking and looking for all the right reasons. Men, women, children – they say children and babies stare at the most beautiful faces the longest; well, I’d like to enrapture a baby in a pram, for a day. And one day would be enough. Honestly.
Margot is ushered away from the minions to a waiting car, the admirers closing round her like the Red Sea.
‘She could have an awful personality,’ says Dad, when it becomes safe to proceed and we are able to walk on in the dispersing slipstream of Margot followers. ‘A black, black heart to counter-balance all that beauty.’
‘I don’t think so,’ I say, and I briefly wonder if he’s thinking of Mum, who was pretty rather than beautiful, but definitely turned out to have a heart blacker and more drug-addled than most. ‘I’ve heard she’s really nice. She’s married.’ As if that makes someone nice … It doesn’t always – remember that awful girl screaming ‘I’m married!’ at the end of Muriel’s Wedding? Poor Muriel. I can relate to her a lot. And that awful girl was a bit like Angela. Some people are so desperate to get married they’ll marry anyone, and other people, like my mother and her black heart, just can’t wait to escape marriage. Some people, like me, get neither.
Still, I bet Margot is really nice.
‘How do you feel, these days, about your mother?’ Dad asks, a couple of minutes later, once the tide has gone out on the crowd. Has he been reading my mind?
‘I feel OK,’ I say. Well, I do. My heart is stapled down where she is concerned. I know this is a protective mechanism, a defence, but it’s true. My feelings are locked against her and I like them like that. Who wants to unlock them? Wallow in pain when it is nicely filed away. I’m fine.
‘You don’t get the urge to track her down?’
‘Nope. Do you?’
‘Not at all.’
‘Do you miss her, Dad?’
I have never asked him this question. We don’t do this. I look at him, as we walk, and I wait for an answer.
‘No. I miss the old her, sometimes – I miss the old life I had with her – but I think that’s more about me before I went blind, or my teenage years or even my childhood. I miss the me I used to be, I guess, rather than her – it’s just that for quite a few years of being that old me, I was with her.’
‘Yes, I understand. She’s part of your history.’ I’m sad he misses the person he used to be, incredibly sad.
‘She is. And part of you and me and Angela, when things were good. And that’s how I like to remember her. The person she became – the ugly person – doesn’t exist for me. Even when I was first blind, when it was just us three, we didn’t need her, did we?’
‘No.’ We were OK then, Dad and Angela and I, when we had the dogs. As good as it could get.
‘She’s not even out there, for me, if you know what I mean. But, for you, if you want to talk about her, you can, with me. I don’t mind.’
>
‘Thank you, Dad; I’ll bear that in mind.’
I don’t want to talk about her. I never have. But I’m glad Dad and I are talking. Like this. Can we ask each other all the questions we have not dared ask before? Is now the time to do it, as we walk the streets of London? I think of the clock in Liberty and its slogan: No minute gone comes ever back again … These minutes walking together may not come back again. What if they last just for this summer? What if we haven’t said everything we want to say? I want to go further, to ask Dad if he’s sad today, if he’s still scared, but on this sunny, bustling street, something holds me back. Is it because deep down I want to tell him all of my truths – my fears and my memories – but I am afraid to? I don’t know. But I like the feel of his hand on my arm. I like walking with him like this. And after lunch we’re going to the Albert Hall and after that, we still have three places on the list, so you never know what the rest of the summer might hold.
‘Table outside?’
We’ve stopped outside the steakhouse we booked. People are stacked on the pavement, under a huge awning, tucking into the most delicious-looking food.
‘Perfect,’ says Dad.
CHAPTER 20
We arrive at the Albert Hall at four o’clock. The sun is still high in the sky and renders the building a pinky-plum gateau, under skies of the purest blue.
‘Is it still the same?’ asks Dad.
‘Still the same,’ I reply. I wish he could see it; it breaks my heart that he can’t. I haven’t been here for years; I’d forgotten what a delightful surprise it is when it comes into your sights as you walk along Prince Consort Road, a terracotta confection rising to the sky. How it takes your breath away. We came here to perform in a school choir concert, Angela and I, not long before Dad went blind. We sang songs from Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat in the auditorium, to an audience of adoring parents, and then afterwards Dad bought us a choc ice from one of the little bars and we came and stood outside with them, our backs against the brickwork, while Dad told us all about Prince Albert and the design of the Hall.
Summer in the City Page 14
