by Anne Peile
There was an armchair and an upright chair for the painting desk. I sat on the bed; it was narrow and had a cover of snuff-coloured crepe de chine.
‘Sugar?’ my father asked. I shook my head with nonchalance although my heart had skipped beats when I realised that he had been standing watching me.
He brought the coffee cups. ‘I am an illustrator,’ he explained, nodding towards the desk, ‘I do books and magazine work, that sort of thing.’
He sat in the armchair. I focused on the coffee in my cup yet all the time I felt that he was observing me and it was as though he was covering me with gold or some other precious substance. ‘Why me?’ he asked, after a while, his tone was stern.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean why me, why did you pick on me to…’ He opened out his hands to finish the sentence with a gesture, and then, ‘things like this don’t just happen… not to me, anyway… not nowadays… ’
‘They do, sometimes they do.’
‘But why should it happen, why there and then and why to me?’
‘Why not?’
I knew that it was a contest but that it was a safe one, of the parlour game kind. I knew too that I must only maintain my conviction to keep trumping him every time.
‘Why not… I’ll tell you why not, Susie, shall I? Here am I, I’m over fifty, for God’s sake, and you, how old are you?’
‘Eighteen,’ I said it with neither a blink nor a flinch.
‘Eighteen, Susie, for heaven’s sake, look at you, with your long, long hair and your big brown eyes… you do know, do you, that you have what are commonly known as come-to-bed eyes… you couldn’t not, I suppose. Look, you are… you are an exceptionally lovely young woman. I am an older, old if you like, man.’
I sat and watched my father’s face; it was the only thing in the world that I wanted to see.
‘You’re doing it again, for Christ’s sake, Susie… Listen, I will tell you about me… I am fifty-two, I have a wife and a house in Suffolk where I spend my weekends doing middle-aged things like making an asparagus bed. I am not rich, I am a vaguely successful jobbing artist. I drive a 1962 Citroën which makes odd noises on the motorway… There is nothing about me that could possibly appeal to… someone… someone like you, Susie… ’
His voice, in general deep and the words each considered, had risen slightly in the plaint of his self deprecation. Also, perhaps, because he had told a lie about his age.
‘Tonight, like any other night, I go for a quiet drink in what is possibly the dullest pub in London… and then you, you appear. I really don’t understand.’
‘I wanted to. I like you.’
He made a sound and a gesture indicative of despair as though I had given him an answer that disappointed him. I knew, in fact, that it was quite the opposite. I looked at his battered brown shoes and his trousers of fine cord and the way in which one hand held the coffee cup on his knee.
‘Can I give you a lift somewhere, drive you home or something?’
‘No, it’s okay, I’ll get a taxi.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Certain sure.’ I smiled at him and he smiled back at me.
All the way down the stairs and along the hall he held my hand. I felt that I could draw him into me by the arm, as though on a string of coloured yarn.
We stood on the doorstep. You could tell that the sea was in the air from the river. The pillars on the porticoes of the houses in Oakley Street are fairly grand. Beside them even my tall father seemed on a more human scale. It was incredible to me that nearby, in Kings Road, people continued to do ordinary evening things.
‘Listen,’ he said, ‘listen, if, you know… in the cold light of day… if you really feel that you would like to come again, then I, then I would, of course, be very glad to see you… after all, how could I not be… ’ He touched my cheek with two of his fingers. I had to press my feet hard on to the stone step beneath me so that I should not gasp out loud.
‘Good night, little one,’ Jack said.
For some way I did not even try to find a taxi. At Cheyne Walk I turned left and crossed to the embankment side, I wished to walk slowly and more than once I know that I smiled at the night. I wanted also to be close beside the river. At that date, if you grew up and went to school in South London, you seemed, somehow, to be related to the Thames. It was a constant and familiar presence in your consciousness; you crossed it for excursions and railway termini and the Christmas lights, you knew it from the avuncular narratives of history textbooks.
Over Chelsea Bridge I walked tall when the bikers at the teastall whistled and gestured obscenities. At the bank corner in Queenstown Road stood the Irish boys; Alison had told me fearful tales of their gang and what they did and yet they caused me no alarm. I felt that I was protected by some radiance from any insult. Eventually I found a taxi and it drove me swiftly home across the avenue on Clapham Common. Then I could lie down and make believe that the pillow against my cheek was the fingers of my father’s hand.
The next day was the beginning of that time when I saw the world in a different way. It was not a very long time, in terms of life spans, but while it lasted it was very good and very vivid. I remember that I noticed, especially, the colour of things. In old post-war guidebooks for Paris there are photographs of the flower markets, the blooms are exquisitely bright against the grey and wearied city. That is how I saw London in 1972. Details and people mattered; all of their stories counted because each of them was a component part in the days when I would see my father or of the days when I was waiting to see him and counting and crossing off hours on the end page of a book or the edge of a paper bag. Every feature of a scene was clear and true, as though my eyes depicted the world for me in plein air.
In the morning the tall Austrian manageress was unlocking the metal shutter blind of the American Dream, trying to keep her head straight and level as she bent towards the pavement. ‘Thank God. Thank God you’re here, my hangover is the end.’
She sat in the window at the table where the varnish always looked sticky and asked me to put the coffee machine on without bothering to clean it. She smoked a number of cigarettes which she stood up on their filter end when she had finished, letting them burn out rather than looking for an ashtray.
‘It’s my boyfriend,’ she explained when I brought her black coffee, ‘We are finished but we can’t leave each other alone.’
Renata winced when Ali the chef banged through the door, his immense height accentuated by his inevitable companion, the little old man in a beret who was the washer-up. The little man worked in rubber gloves which extended past his elbows; he seemed to speak no English. Ali spoke only a little; Renata said that he knew all the wrong words. His moods transformed with rapidity, from anger to lechery, from melancholy to a loud, singing cheerfulness. At this moment he was already furious, prowling around the stainless steel kitchen in clog shoes and shaking his black curls. ‘Hey, you twos,’ he called us through the hatch, ‘you, bloody shits delivery don’t come, bloody shits.’
His voice was very deep and rolling; he pronounced bloody as if there were one o and two ds. I looked over at the clock which told the time with Coca Cola bottle hands, calculating the hours until I could revisit my father’s room. Ali muttered and swiped at the prep table with a cleaver. The little man, who seemed sometimes to assume the role of a placatory, long suffering spouse, tuned in their radio. A Neil Young song was playing. Ali began to hum along with it,
‘When you were young and on your own,
how did it feel to be alone…
Only love can break your heart…
yes only love can break your heart… ’
and then he slopped back to the hatch and rested his elbows there, tweaking at hairs in his beard and rolling his eyes at me in a grotesque pantomime parody of seduction.
‘You want to come in the alley with me, sugar pie?’
‘No.’ I was pairing knives and forks in red paper napkins.
‘I’m hot sex,’ he insisted, ‘real hot Ali.’
‘I don’t want to, thank you.’ I shook my head over the cutlery. Mireille, the French waitress arrived. She wore a scarlet cheesecloth smock without a bra beneath it. Her prim brown bobbed hair framed her face all of a piece.
‘Hey, Mireille, you don’t want to come in Ali’s alley, do you?’ He turned back to me, ‘Mireille don’t want to, she is lez. You is lez, ain’t you, honey?’
‘Fuck off,’ said Mireille, swinging her Millie Molly Mandy bob.
‘Fuck off you self,’ returned Ali, ‘bloody fucks to you.’
The restaurant was very busy and our apron pockets were weighed down with tips which we were not allowed to change in the till. At my break Ali, unexpectedly, brought me a plate loaded with all the specials from the menu. ‘You eat,’ he said, banging the plate down.
I looked at him questioningly.
‘You have a man now, you have to eat. Men like, you know, big all over. You know it’s the truth.’ He nodded to affirm his message.
At the end of the shift I washed away the restaurant smells in the staff shower. My hair was still damp when I walked down Kings Road and my scalp felt the chill edge to the air. The scent I used in those days was Diorissimo, it was like lily of the valley.
Jack’s writing on the card for the bell push was black italic. He was wearing the same navy blue jersey and he looked at me with a kind of reproof. ‘So, you came back then.’
Up in his room his manner was at first pedagogic, as though he must instruct me in the complicated parts of some theorem. ‘Listen, Susie, I’ve been thinking about this a lot since last night, well, all the time, actually… ’
He moved his thoughts along with his hands; the leaves and plantlets of the spider plant on the windowsill trembled slightly at the disturbance.
‘I think I have to tell you, first, about me, and then you decide… whether you really want to keep coming to see me. You know that I really don’t have anything to offer you… I am married, permanently, I suppose you could say. I’ve not been unfaithful, at all, before, to Olive – that’s my wife. Years ago, it was a different story, I was a different man… I behaved in ways that I am not proud of; I let people down, all sorts of people. Then, and it served me right, I got myself into a mess, I was drinking too much, I couldn’t work, it all sort of caught up with me. Then I met Olive and she… she’s solid, she helped me sort myself out. We got married and we have made a life together. It might not be a very exciting life, or what I once expected, but it’s what I can cope with. I can make a decent job of it. I owe Olive a great deal. I wouldn’t, ever, want to hurt her.’
‘Where did you meet?’
‘At Kingston, at Kingston School of Art, I taught a course there and she… she teaches there too, enamelling.’
My eyes were so big and so dark, then. It was easy to make them look as if I was about to cry.
‘Look, Susie, look… what I suppose I am trying to say to you is that you, you are such a lovely young woman, I am immensely flattered… God, there must be young men queuing half way to Sloane Square for you, I should think…. But me, what could I possibly have to give you… ’
I stood up and went to look through the window onto Phene Street. I think Jack feared that he had managed after all to persuade me and that I was about to turn away and leave him. For a little while I watched the pub dog, grubbing and questing at the garden hedge. And then I stepped forward and kissed my father on his lovely mouth.
I knew that Jack was going back to Suffolk for the Easter weekend. I wondered what Olive looked like, but only in a disconnected, idle way, as I might have done on hearing that a new teacher was coming to the school. There was never any question that I should feel jealous of her. Neither did it occur to me that she should have any bearing on my relationship to my father. In loving Jack I was a zealot; there was no other point of view, no other belief system but mine.
In the Great Gear Trading Company somebody dropped a wallet. Julian picked it up and brought it behind the stall that I was watching. We ate a bag of marshmallows and wondered what we ought to do. Eventually Julian suggested that we should look inside first, before deciding.
‘Fuck me,’ he said, as it opened onto a substantial quantity of notes. We thought that we had better hand it in but then Julian remembered that he had an invitation to a party at the home of a girl in Weybridge. ‘I never thought I’d be able to go, but look… I can buy drink and things… you can come too. Her parents are away and everything. Her dad’s an accountant and he looks after all sorts of people, there might be pop stars.’
‘No, I don’t think I will.’
Julian knew that in other days the prospect would have held great appeal for me. ‘But look, we can both get something really good to wear out of this… ’
‘No, really.’
He was surprised and also annoyed at my refusal. Not, I knew, for the sake of my company especially, but because he was nervy at the prospect of performing should sex arise and he wanted my conspiratorial reassurance that he would be good at it.
‘If you’re going to be like that I won’t bother.’ He picked at the bottom of his shoe which was blue with a narrow platform in a lighter shade. ‘Why are you being such a downer anyway, it’s really anti-social.’
After some minutes of ignoring each other Julian suddenly grinned, ‘I know, you crafty… you’ve got someone, haven’t you? Who is it, is it someone from the Potter? If it’s Scottie you do know that my mother will kill you, don’t you?’
I smiled but said nothing.
‘I’ll find out. I will, I can promise you that.’ Then he bent down under the chipboard counter and divided the cash into two equal sums for us. I went out and spent all mine on a silk shirt. I bought it from a black and silver shop owned by a former model and her photographer. He still took pictures of her, manipulating the images of her body into surreal zippered shapes suspended on coat hangers; there were postersize reproductions for sale. I was entranced by my shirt, by its costliness despite its exceptional plainness. It was the colour of vanilla ice cream and made from raw silk so that when you touched it you felt that the pads of your fingers might adhere.
When the market closed Julian’s harassed father, Peter, arrived to drive him down to Surrey. In Oakley Street some women were unloading armfuls of flowers from the back of a car to decorate the church of Our Most Holy Redeemer and St Thomas More for Easter Day. One had a basket filled with yellow narcissus and blue hyacinth. The fragrance was so strong that it stayed suspended on the air for some time after she had gone.
On Easter Sunday morning Ron went out early to deliver chocolate eggs to his children.
‘There’s one for you there, if you want it,’ my mother said. In her mauve quilted dressing gown she had appeared to collect a tea tray and the Sunday Express to take back to bed. ‘We’re driving out somewhere later, Box Hill, probably. Ron might pick up his dogs, to give them a proper run, seeing as she never takes them out for a walk. You don’t want to come, do you?’
‘No, thank you.’
‘I don’t know when we’ll be back, we shan’t rush.’
‘I might stay at Alison’s.’ I had never mentioned the family’s remove to the estate on the old Croydon airfield.
‘Please yourself. I doubt that Lin will be home, she’ll probably help out down at the pub, now that she’s up and about again.’
My sister had spent some days in bed, following the termination of her pregnancy. She and my mother seemed to discount the matter. Because I found it upsetting I put away contemplation of it in a section of my mind that I could shut off. When they discussed the operation I used only part of my conscious awareness, in the same way as you can prevent yourself from breathing in a bad smell.
I supposed that my sister’s requirement for an abortion had made it easier for me to obtain the contraceptive pill from the elderly GP. Without question he had scrawled me an introduction to the family planning clinic on a slip
of yellow paper. Lin’s introduction to the women’s surgical he had scrawled on a slip of green paper. It was all the same hospital, opposite the tube station at Clapham South.
When the flat was empty I spent a long time making myself ready for my father. I knew that I looked very beautiful, apart from my fingernails. I was never adept at painting the nails of my right hand. I smudged them and went over the edges. I searched for remover among Lin’s things but found none. I looked at my hands critically as I walked towards the bus stop. There were families coming home from the Common. Little girls with white cardigans buttoned over their dresses. The afternoon was grey and it looked as if it would rain.
In Oakley Street Jack’s car was already back, like a huge shell beside the kerb. The rain had begun, soft and fine. When he opened the door and I first met his eyes on the threshold I was filled with awe at what I had done and at what I was about to do. We sat down opposite each other, me on the bed, and him on the armchair.
‘I don’t know, Susie, what are we going to do with you?’ He watched my face while I did not answer. ‘The thing is… I’m trying to be fair, to both of us. I’m not sure that you know what you want.’
‘I do.’
‘Do you, I wonder. By the way, I don’t know whether the blouse… and… and everything is especially for my benefit, but if it is, I have noticed, and it’s… it’s very lovely.’
‘I have the thing,’ I said. Beside me was my handbag, a flat satchel of turquoise suede with mushroom shapes appliquéd to it. I took out the box of contraceptive pills and held it up to show him, ‘It means…’
