by Anne Peile
Just then Scottie the jewel thief arrived, parking his Jaguar arrogantly slewed to the kerb outside. He came in with expansive gestures and said that he would just have Apollinaris water as he was thinking of getting into training again. Rubbing his hands together, he said, ‘Well, what have we here then,’ and taking the seat at my side, he began to pay court to me. Lalla picked up my glass and snapped the bowl off the stem.
Scottie looked confused. ‘Oh, now look here,’ he began; Julian ushered me outside.
‘She gets like that sometimes, don’t worry about it.’
The following Saturday Lalla seemed to have forgotten. ‘Julian is away with Peter this weekend. You and I will have special fun tonight.’
When Great Gear closed she said she would take me to meet a man called Tam Noble at a wine bar in Beauchamp Place. He too had been an actor; he spoke every sentence as if it was Shakespeare on a stage with poor acoustics. He wore a fedora and a belted overcoat of herringbone tweed. His eyelashes were the type that curl markedly upwards, I thought that they might also have been mascara-ed. Lalla ordered me a large glass of sweet Spanish wine.
‘This is my little friend, Susie, that I was telling you about. Susie, say hello to Tam. Tam, isn’t she lovely? I thought we might have a little party.’
‘A party, oh what delights.’
At the next table was a group of work colleagues celebrating a leaving ceremony for one of their number. Their gathering was noisy and good humoured and they looked normal and ordinary.
Tam said, ‘Shall I telephone for reinforcements? There’s some I know that wouldn’t want to miss…’ He stood up to find the payphone, oblivious that the skirt of his voluminous tweed coat brushed the bottles and glasses at the next table. One of the company put out his arms to prevent them falling. As he did so, I caught him exchanging glances and raised eyebrows with a colleague over the weirdness of Tam’s appearance and his diction.
‘Drink up, darling, then Lalla will buy you another.’
But there was not time, Tam returned, ‘All arranged, the gang’s all here.’ He bent towards me, the beak of his nose was pronounced under the tilted brim of his hat,
‘I live in Draycott Avenue, not far.’ Tam’s flat was a room where daylight seemed never to enter. It was not even possible to gauge whether and where there were windows behind the heavy velvet hangings which bowed the brass café rods. Everywhere there were such draperies, on walls and chairs and over a chaise longue. The fabrics were a mixture of heavy velvets and brocades, the sort of exotic, rich materials used to make cloaks for the three kings in Nativity plays.
‘Drinks, I think,’ said Tam.
I noticed that on a side table there was a bottle of Johnson’s Baby Oil, its clean modern plastic lines incongruous amid the heaped and dusty faded materials.
‘I’m going to the bathroom, darlings,’ said Lalla.
Tam had poured me a glass of green Chartreuse.
‘Would you care to see some photographs?’ He produced a sheaf from the drawer of a shrouded side table. ‘Do look.’
The top image was of a group of people standing around as if chatting at some social gathering. Their necks and faces were not included in the shot. All were clothed except for a man who had loosed his trousers to his knees and was pointing his very large erect penis towards the bottom of a woman who had lifted her skirt.
‘Don’t you like that one? Try another, little girl.’ Tam’s voice wheedled.
The next photograph was of two men, one sitting on the lap of the other, both were trouser-less but had retained their shirts and ties. A group of people, who may have been the same ones, stood in a circle around them as though it were a wrestling contest in a small sporting arena. I noticed that the light shone on the round spectacles on the upturned face of the man on the lap. Perhaps Tam noticed it too for he said, ‘Flash bulbs, I must make sure to find them out.’
Lalla returned from the bathroom, smiling, her hair and make-up freshly done. From somewhere beyond the muffled room we heard a taxi stopping in the street below.
‘Might be George, our first party guest, do hope so.’
‘Oh, me too, darling,’ replied Lalla, shrugging her shoulders and smiling in delight. It felt like school to me, the times when you sense the dislike that others have towards you, knowing that they are discussing and plotting though all the while they turn towards you friendly faces.
‘I’m going to the bathroom too,’ I said.
The bathroom was beside the front door. I heard the person who must be George being admitted although his voice was no more than urgent muttering in comparison to Tam’s. On a shelf there were many old boxes of colognes and medical preparations, all covered with thick white fluffy dust. I heard Lalla greet George and then I opened the door and ran from the flat and from the building; out in the street I dodged behind cars, knowing that it must look ludicrous, like a television detective series. I had not felt fear until I allowed myself to start running; Tam’s voice sounded from the doorway of the building, ‘The bitch! The bitch has gone! Come here, bitch, come here!’
Further along the street I saw that there was a police panda car but I envisaged with what contempt a policeman would regard me if I stopped him and told my story.
I no longer heard Tam’s voice at my back but even so I took a circuitous route, in and out of the narrow mewses and around Chelsea Green before I returned to Kings Road. I found a small supermarket still open and went in and bought a bar of Cadbury’s chocolate; the packaging was familiar but the writing was Arabic. I finished the bar as I reached Oakley Street. It was empty and quiet and my footsteps were soft as I passed my father’s house. At the corner turning for Phene Street I looked up at the streetlamps and the stars in the night sky; the gable end of the cream painted terrace resembled a superior doll’s house. I stood watching and I wished that smoke would issue gently from one of the chimney pots.
Julian appeared quite glad of the rift between Lalla and me. Although he did not say so, I guessed that since early childhood he had been frequently embarrassed by his mother’s activities and by the humiliations to his father. In public he was never allowed to acknowledge Lalla as his mother, she insisted that he always called her by her first name.
On the afternoon of the last day of the spring term we were discussing our revision plans in the Picasso and then Julian said, ‘Let’s go to a pub somewhere that she won’t be.’
We walked through the chilly evening air to the Phene Arms. The Phene was a pub with a quiet evening trade, predominantly male and local. Julian and I were conspicuous among its regulars and I wondered if we might not be served, because of our age. I was about to suggest to Julian that we moved on but then I saw the man sitting alone, sideways on to the bar. Over his shirt he wore a baggy jersey of navy blue and he was reading a newspaper. It was my father. For some moments it seemed impossible that the quiet contented company in their low-pitched conversation would remain oblivious to the blood rush and cacophony crashing inside me. I felt sure that their faces would turn in unison to watch me, as though I were making my entrance upon a theatre stage, and no certainty of either sympathy or applause from them.
Julian went to the bar and I looked for a table. I thought that my gait might stagger as I moved but I made sure to find a place where I could sit directly in my father’s line of sight. Julian was waiting for the barman to fetch change. I sat down on the upholstered bench and pressed my back and knees against the cushions to prevent the shaking. After a few moments I had the courage to look about me and be assured that, extraordinary as it might seem, no one had guessed what was going on inside me. By the time Julian came to sit down I was calm, I tasted the floweriness of the cold wine and I recalled, by rote, what Lalla had taught me about the use of the look, that to effect a connection with another person the eyes were all that were necessary.
Julian was much taken up with a conquest he had made the previous evening; in imparting and evaluating the encounter, he did not, for some
time, notice my preoccupation. I was noting how thin was my father’s face, the skin and muscles drawn so tight and spare across the bones that it reminded me of an anatomical poster in the science laboratory at school. It was not, however, thin in a way suggestive of ill health or hunger, but of discipline or self denial. His skin was slightly tanned, not in a holiday colour, more like the complexion of a New Zealander. With age his eyes had become more deep set than in the photograph, the brows and eyebrows a little lower and more forward. At the front his dull blond hair was long; from time to time he pushed it back unconsciously with the flat of his hand as he leant over his newspaper. He was drinking beer. He called the barman by his first name and his shoes were battered brown but polished.
Gleefully, Julian was recounting how, on the evening before, he had met a girl in the darkness of the Pheasantry Club and she had mistaken him for the teen idol singer, David Cassidy.
‘Did you tell her you weren’t him?’
‘Of course not. She was kissing me and everything. She wanted to go outside with me as well.’
I calculated that at any moment my father would finish the column he was reading and that then he would have to lift his head to turn the broadsheet page.
‘Did you then?’
‘No, I thought she might find out, under the streetlights, that I wasn’t him. I said that I couldn’t take advantage of a fan. God, it nearly killed me not to. I wish I’d chanced it now.’
My father, lifting his head from the completed article, raised his eyes to turn the page and saw that I was staring. From that moment I knew that he was mine.
‘Are you listening?’ Julian asked me, while my father, somewhat discountenanced, made a poor job of folding over the thick sheets.
‘Yes, you wish that you had done stuff after all. Didn’t she wonder why you were there on your own?’
‘No, because Jimmy from Great Gear was in there so I got him to pretend to be my manager. He came across with drinks for us. I’ll have to pay him back on Saturday.’
There was a nerve or muscle in my father’s cheek that twitched periodically. I waited for him to look over a second time; he would need to see whether his eyes had deceived him on the first occasion. I was quite ready for him when he did; outwardly most cool though under my ribs there was a sensation like a press stud closing as our eyes met. Everything that I sought was contained there, all the world in that brief connection made across the saloon bar space.
‘So, did you get her phone number?’
‘Yes, but I can’t arrange to see her, not in daylight.’
‘She might go back there tonight, to look for you. I would, if I were her.’
Julian’s small boy’s small round eyes widened with delight as he appraised this prospect.
My father asked Sylvester the barman for another drink. He stood up to reach change from his pocket. Once more it made me want to weep as I watched because each move and attitude of his body was beloved and just as I had always imagined it would be.
‘Are you trying to pull that guy at the bar?’
Julian was curious but not in the least dismayed. After all, he had witnessed the transaction of many of his own mother’s liaisons; in age Lalla’s partners had ranged from the septuagenarian to a boy from the sixth form at Julian’s school, the latter episode taking place during the tea interval of the leavers’ cricket match. Such comrades in the pursuit of the desired were we, Julian and I, that immediately he rose saying, ‘Look, I’ll go to the Gents to give you some more room. Don’t worry, I’ll take my time.’
And, as if by some serendipitous stage direction other customers began to drift homewards. Twice the well oiled door with its frosted glass panel swung to the cold Chelsea evening beyond. Twice too Jack smiled at me.
Julian reappeared animated by eager purpose, his hair newly combed and a few coins jingling in his palm. ‘So, how’s it going?’ he nodded with an import of innuendo and the feathery strands at the crown of his head trembled.
‘Good, it’s good.’
‘Okay, well, I don’t expect she will, because she has to get a train from Reading and stuff, but just in case, I think I will wander up to the Pheasantry and see. I’ve got just enough to pay us both in if you like…’
‘No, I think I’ll stay.’
‘On your own, really?’
‘I’ll be okay.’
‘You look amazing tonight, Suse, be careful, won’t you.’
Julian left and I followed him in my mind’s eye, walking brisk and cheerful and full of hope towards the Kings Road, still jingling the coins in his palm.
Somewhere in another part of the Phene Arms a telephone began to ring. ‘I’ll need to go,’ said Sylvester, apologetically. ‘They’re all away out.’
Then we were the only two left in the bar. Jack stood up and began to walk towards me. Although it was but a distance of fifteen feet or so the leaf-patterned carpet seemed like the void that must be crossed in dreamscapes; I willed him not to falter.
‘Er, has he gone… your… ’ he gestured to the place where Julian had sat.
‘Yes, he has. He’s my friend, a sort of brother, but not.’
‘Okay, I see, sort of, but not… would you mind if I… ’
Of the two of us, we both knew that he was the one who was shy and awkward. ‘Listen,’ he was moving his fingers down the surface of his glass as if he were sculpting it from clay, ‘I couldn’t help noticing… noticing that you were looking over, and so on, just now. To be honest, I’ve been wondering if you thought I was someone else, somebody you knew… ’
I smiled at him properly for the first time because I wanted to reassure him, ‘No, I didn’t think you were anyone else.’
‘Oh, okay. Well, my name is Jack, by the way.’
‘Jack.’ I had repeated it many times over in my head as I tried out his mouth and traced imaginary contacts with his imagined body. Never, until then, had I spoken it out loud.
‘Yes, and may I… may I know your name?’
‘My name is Susie. Susanna, but people call me Susie.’
‘And, do you live around here, Susie?’
‘No, I live across the river.’ I did not dare to say Clapham. In my head I conjured Julian’s flat in the red brick mansions facing the park, ‘In Prince of Wales Drive.’
‘Ah yes, I know it.’
He lifted his arm to drink. I saw that the veins on the back of his hands stood out in relief, that there were a few freckles and golden hairs there and on his wrists. The glass of his watch was scratched and he wore it on a fabric strap of navy blue and red. When he looked at me, only an arm’s length from myself, and I saw how nervous he was, I wanted to tell him there and then how much I loved him and to let my head fall like a dead weight on his chest and to be done with all pretending.
I did not, of course. I sat silent, adjusting myself to the emotion which I felt for my father beside me. It was a physical phenomenon; there was some tide rise in the circulation of my blood. If I could have looked under my clothes I expected that my chest would have been suffused with a flush, like cochineal dripped into white icing.
Sylvester the barman, sensing the musk on the air, folded a towel and retreated through the archway to the public bar.
‘Show me where you live,’ I said, holding my father in my gaze.
Jack was caught off guard, he enunciated one or two of the phonic forms to which Englishmen resort when they are embarrassed or require a moment to collect their thoughts, then, ‘Are you propositioning me?’
He gave a half smile but I did not smile at him at all. Instead I continued to stare at him full face with the look akin to insolence that gamblers use to regard their opponents in games of chance.
‘Listen,’ Jack stood up and pushed back his hair; the muscle in his left cheek twitched. ‘Listen, I’m not quite sure what’s going on here… ’
Sylvester faltered, hesitating like a prompt in the wings lest we should require another round.
I stood up too.
‘Let us go,’ I said.
Outside in Phene Street I took his arm in such a way that he could be aware of the softness of my cheek and upper arm and breast against him but he gave no sign of response. He was too intent on walking, stalking almost, straight and stiff and upright. Neither did it occur to him that I seemed to know the way. We stopped outside number 33 Oakley Street.
‘I could… I could make you a cup of coffee.’
‘That would be very nice.’
He laughed, ‘God help me, first you pick me up, and now you’re going all demure on me.’ In the hall my father said, ‘Come here, Miss, the timer for the lights goes out and leaves you in the pitch black unless you sprint, I’ll take your hand.’
Ascending the three dark flights, it was an act of supreme self-denial, now that I had his hand in mine at last, not to take up his long fingers and try them inside my mouth, one by one, to see whether they tasted salty against the pink of cheek flesh.
‘Well here it is,’ he pushed open the door, ‘it’s a bit bare, I’m afraid. A bit like a monk’s cell I suppose, but I’m only here during the week, mostly. At weekends I go back to Suffolk.’
I knew that to mean that he had a wife there. ‘Do you have children?’ My question came out sounding rude and clipped because of the fury I might have to suppress against his possible answer.
‘You’re very direct, aren’t you, for one so young. No, I don’t, as a matter of fact. Why do you ask?’
‘Just wondered.’
‘I did have, a long, long time ago. They’re on the other side of the world now… they emigrated with their mother when they were tiny things.’
There was a curtained-off kitchen section to the room. He went in there to boil a red enamel coffee pot. I looked around my father’s room and willed my eyes and memory to work like a spy’s microfilm camera.
The green curtains were drawn over the window which looked down on Phene Street. In front of the window there was a big light oak desk with solid Art Deco-shaped handles to the drawers. On this desk there was a homemade stand of roughish wood, like a lectern, but with the slope at an angle less acute. Beside the stand, in rows, were stoneware marmalade jars holding pens and brushes; there were bottles of inks, a black metal watercolour box and a cloisonné bowl of Chinese ink sticks. Everywhere it was extremely neat and functional; a record player, a stack of LPs, bookshelves with postcard reproductions of Paul Nash and Stanley Spencer paintings propped against the spines.
