by Isabel Wolff
“What?”
“The yellow Teletubby. What’s it called?”
“Oh. Laa-Laa,” I replied knowledgeably.
“Perhaps I’ll call you Laa-Laa,” she crooned to the baby. He emitted what sounded suspiciously like a groan.
“Well done, Sally,” I whispered as I parted the flower-sprigged curtains around her bed. “You were really brave.”
“I wasn’t.”
“You were—you did it without an epidural.”
“Well, if it had gone on for much longer, I don’t think I would have held out,” she acknowledged with a grim little smile. Then I gave her a little wave, and left. The hospital was still busy, despite the lateness of the hour. As the lift doors opened onto the ground floor, I saw a man with a bloody bandage round his face being taken to Casualty. On the other side of the corridor, a weeping woman was being led away, her shoulders enfolded by a protective arm. What was her story, I wondered, and why was she crying? What had happened to her that night? As I passed the front reception, I stopped for a moment to read the granite plaque on the wall: The Chelsea and Westminster Hospital was opened by Her Majesty the Queen, on 13th May, 1993, it stated. The thirteenth of May. That was today. This was the hospital’s birthday. And Sally’s baby’s, and, I suddenly remembered, my own. I stepped onto the Fulham Road, where I flagged down a solitary cab.
“To Islington, please,” I said. The driver said nothing, but looked at me oddly. And then I realized why. My white cotton dress was spattered with Sally’s blood.
“I’ve been to an all-night chainsaw massacre,” I said airily. Actually, I didn’t say that. I just managed to murmur, “Baby . . . born.” Then I got into the cab, sped home through the silent streets, and slept.
I woke at eleven and sat outside in my dressing gown, thinking. The storm had passed, and I felt safe again. In my own little house. Dolce Domum, I thought happily; Home Sweet Home. Then I opened my mail. There were birthday cards from Lizzie, Kit and Kate, and to my great joy, a postcard from São Paulo. Hola! Teeffanee, it read. I happy. I coming to London. I stay with you isn’t it? We go salsa! I see you very soon Teefanee. Adios! José. I smiled and sipped my coffee, surveying my little garden. The ceanothus was just coming into bloom, producing small pom-poms of a startling blue. There were tight green round buds on the peonies, showing just a tantalizing sliver of red. And the white bells on the lilies of the valley were newly opened, like tiny parasols. Everything was about to bloom, I reflected as I inhaled their sweet scent. Everything was coming up roses, and delphiniums and sweet williams and stocks. What should I do? I wondered. I knew I couldn’t work—I needed to go somewhere calm. Perhaps I should go to church, I thought as I dressed, to give thanks for Sally’s safe deliverance. I decided to go to the Royal Academy instead, to see the Art of Holy Russia. I walked onto Essex Road and got the number 38. I sat there, grasping my newspaper, but not even registering, let alone reading its contents. I just stared blankly out of the window, not noticing a thing, seeing only the events of the previous night. Sally’s agonized cries still rang in my ears, and I was aware of a dull ache in my upper arms from the fierce downward pressure of her body. I alighted outside the Ritz in bright sunshine, and crossed the road. The Academy’s elegant courtyard was deserted. This was clearly a quiet time to go. A good time.
I stepped inside, bypassing the wide, wrought-iron staircase, and slipped straight through to the back. I was too weary to walk up the frosted-glass staircase, so I called the lift. The curved glass doors drew back, and I floated silently upward, as if in a bubble, to the Sackler Wing on the second floor. It was almost empty, apart from a small knot of students earnestly studying the walls. I wandered slowly, from picture to picture, my feet shuffling over the blond wooden floor. Serene, flat-looking faces with ovoid eyes and deep-gold haloes gazed down from the walls. I didn’t feel as though I was looking at them, rather that they seemed to be studying me. They were all in tempera and gesso and painted on wood—the Virgin of Vladimir clutching the infant Jesus, a long-haired John the Baptist holding a baptismal chalice, the prophet Elijah, ascending into heaven. Then an array of saints passed before my eyes—St. Matthew, St. Nicholas, St. Peter and St. Paul, and St. George on a wonderful white charger. I stopped to read the explanatory notes on the wall: Russia’s greatest master, Andrei Rublev, was active in and around Moscow between 1390 and 1430. Medieval Russia! What wild images that conjured, but the icons were emblems of serenity, created by monks who offered up their prayers in paint. I stood before an image of the Madonna and Child, her face alabaster white, tinged with carmine, the infant Christ clutching at her magenta gown. As I stood before her, she seemed to hold me in an intimate, personal gaze which filled me with peace. This was the right place to have come, I reflected. It was restorative. I needed it. I made my way outside, then sat on the steps in a wedge of sunlight. I leaned against a pillar, closed my eyes, and breathed in deeply through my nose, oblivious even to the loud, monotonous rumble of the buses and cars. Suddenly my tranquillity was shattered by the shrill warble of my mobile phone. Oh God. Not again. Why hadn’t I turned it off? I pressed the button.
“Hello,” I said. “Yes. Yes it is. Oh hello. Thank you,” I added, with a burst of surprised laughter. “How did you know? Did I? I’d completely forgotten that. How are you? Good. Yes, I’m fine. Mmm—the baby’s fine too. He arrived last night, actually. Yes, Sally’s fine too. It went pretty well really. Ten hours. Not too bad. Yes, I am rather shattered. No. No stitches. No, no epidural either. Yes, very brave wasn’t it? And I didn’t faint. Chelsea and Westminster. Very nice. Five star. Yes, I do prefer hospital births. Well, Top Breeders Recommend It. Erm, about eight pounds. Oh, no firm ideas yet. Something beginning with ‘L,’ I think. Ludovic? Well, that’s certainly a possibility. Leonardo? Mmm, maybe. Where am I now? I’m at the RA. I’ve been to see the icons. I’m sitting outside. Well why not? I need a bit of a break after that. How about you? Packing? You’re packing? What now? Why are you packing? Where are you going? You’re not leaving London, are you? What, come round now? But I don’t know how to get to you. You will?” I stood up, my heart beating wildly, my mobile phone clamped to my left ear.
“OK. OK. I’m listening,” I told him. “Keep talking . . . right, I’m leaving the Academy now, I’m turning left out of the courtyard . . . I’m walking along Piccadilly and now I can see Fortnum and Mason opposite, and I’m passing the Alliance and Leicester building society on my left and I can see Hatchards on the other side of the road. What? Oh hang on a sec, I can’t hear you anymore, I think we’re breaking up . . . OK, now I’m going past . . . what? I go left here?”
I stopped in front of a sign which said, ALBANY COURT YARD WI. Set right back from the road was a Regency mansion house in brown brick, with tall arched windows and a white, porticoed entrance. I must have passed it countless times and scarcely noticed it. I entered the building, crossed the scallop-tiled floor, passed the Porter’s Lodge and entered Albany. It was like another world—here, incredibly, was cloistered calm in the middle of Piccadilly. As my feet tapped across the floor, I passed marble plaques which proclaimed that Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Byron and Gladstone had once been residents. Then I walked along the white canopied ropewalk, taking in the heady, collegiate atmosphere. I half expected to see magisterial dons rush by in flowing gowns. To left and right were narrow staircases, alphabetically numbered.
“Which one are you in?” I whispered into my phone. “P2? Well, I’m just passing D . . .” I carried on walking toward the end, and then turned sharp right. “I’m coming up now,” I said as my footsteps echoed up the long flight of worn, stone stairs. On the first landing was a single blue door, with a brass dolphin door knocker, and a white painted “2.” I didn’t need to knock.
“Hello, Seriously Successful.”
“Hallo, Tiffany Trott—how lovely to see you. Come in. And Tiffany . . .”
“Yes.”
“Happy birthday again.”
“Thank you. How
did you know?”
“You told me. When we first met. Don’t you remember? We talked about birth signs. Among other things.” He ushered me into his sitting room—I gasped. It was huge, with a ceiling at least twenty feet high, and a vast bow window which entirely filled the far wall.
“What a place!” I said faintly, taking in the fine furniture and the Aubusson rug on the floor, and the paintings in elaborate gilded frames.
“It is rather special,” he said. “It’s had some quite famous residents too—Stamford Raffles lived here for a while, and Tennessee Williams had the set across the way.”
There were cardboard boxes and packing cases everywhere. Seriously Successful was clearly in the middle of a major operation. He unhooked paintings from the wall as he talked.
“Now, this is a James Baker Pyne,” he said, removing a large landscape from its place above the gigantic granite mantelpiece. “It’s Coniston Water,” he explained as he leaned it against the sofa, and I surveyed the calm lake and cloudcapped mountains. “And this,” he added excitedly, “is a Huber.” I looked at the brightly painted panel, covered in clouds and pudgy putti. “It’s a modello,” he explained, “a sketch for a ceiling painting in a Rococo Bavarian church. I love it. But they’ve all got to go into storage.”
“Why?” I asked as I sank into an adjacent chair.
“Because I’m moving,” he said as he placed his amber-colored cello in its fiberglass case.
“Why are you moving?” I asked him as he folded up his music stand.
“Because all good things must come to an end, Tiffany. And bad things, too.”
“What are you talking about?”
“This isn’t my flat, Tiffany. It belongs to Olivia. Well, to be accurate, it belongs to a trust controlled by her family.”
“But why are you leaving?”
“Because I have to.”
“Why?”
“Because she wants to live here now.”
“I don’t understand. Surely she can live here if she wants to—after all, she’s your wife.”
“Not for much longer, Tiffany.”
“Good God.”
“Yes, right now, I do think God is good.”
“You’ve left her,” I said.
“No,” he said firmly. “She’s left me.” He smiled.
“Why?”
“I have been betrayed,” he said melodramatically. “She loves . . . another!”
“She does?”
“Yes,” he said as he began to stick bubble-wrap around the frames. “ ‘Frailty, thy name is woman!’ ” he added theatrically. “Hamlet,” he explained as he pulled another piece of Scotch tape off the roll. “Act One, scene two.”
“She’s gone off, then?”
“By George, she’s got it! Yes, Tiffany, Olivia has fallen for someone. She has fallen for a fat fellow—Tiffany, just put your finger here, will you?—who shares her interest in—and now here, that’s it, a bit tighter please—contemporary and conceptual art. Just once more, please, I don’t want the gold leaf to get damaged. That’s it. Good!” He stood up with the picture, and then carefully placed it in a crate. “In fact she’s going to open a gallery with him,” he went on. “It’s what she’s always wanted to do. Or to be more accurate, she’s bailing his gallery out. He’s in big trouble. In fact I suspect that Oscar Reeds’ main interest in Olivia is remunerative rather than romantic,” he added as he brushed down his jeans. “But I don’t want to rain on her parade by telling her that. And maybe he’ll make her happy. I know I couldn’t. Perhaps he’ll even get her off the Prozac.”
“Oscar Reeds?”
He nodded, then shrugged his shoulders happily. “None other,” he replied.
“How did they meet?”
“She used to drop in at his gallery from time to time, and she fell for his obvious charms,” he said with a sardonic little laugh. “I’ve met him myself once and I can’t quite see the appeal, but then I’m not a woman. Olivia says they talk the same language,” he went on as he removed a small late eighteenth-century portrait from the wall. “They like the same things. And so they’re going to open a new gallery in their joint names, and leave me to my Claude Lorrains. And so it makes sense for them to live here, near the new gallery, so she’s asked me to give up the flat.” He shrugged his shoulders, then laughed. “Goodbye, Piccadilly,” he said with a smile.
“You seem rather happy about it all,” I said.
“I am. I’m delighted. God, I’d like to shake that man by the hand. He’s done me one hell of a favor.”
“Where will you live?” I asked as I went to the window and looked down onto Savile Row. A cortège of taxis crawled down the street, like a procession of shiny black beetles.
“Oh I don’t know,” he said. “I’ll go back to the farmhouse for a while and then find somewhere in town. I’ve liked it here, but I can be perfectly happy anywhere else.”
“So it’s all been taken out of your hands,” I said. “She’s left you.”
“Yes,” he replied with a grin. “Aren’t I lucky? Now, would you like to come for a walk?”
We wandered down Piccadilly, past Hatchards, then crossed Duke Street, passed a shop selling expensive bags, walked through the Ritz’s colonnade where gaudy mohair jumpers and gleaming leather jackets seemed to jostle for attention in the windows. Then we came to the gates of Green Park and turned in. There were couples everywhere, sprawled on the shining grass, lolling in stripy deck chairs, or strolling under the trees. A distant plane passed high overhead with a ripping, tearing sound. Glossy crows waddled around awkwardly, picking quarrels with the pigeons or lifting lazily up and down with a single flap of their huge black wings. We ambled down toward an avenue of plane trees, dressed in the glorious lime green of early summer, and found a bench which was half in shade.
“Let’s sit here,” he said.
Seriously Successful drew me to him and we sat there, side by side, smiling into the sunlight, our thighs touching. Then he took my right hand in his right hand, and slipped his left arm around my shoulder. A wave of heat rose up, like mercury in a thermometer, from my toes to the crown of my head.
“Well, Tiffany, here we are,” said Seriously Successful simply.
“Yes,” I said. “Here we are.” And then his face drew nearer and nearer, and I felt his lips on mine, dry and soft, and I could smell the Givenchy on his neck, and I thought, if I were to die, right now, this instant, then I wouldn’t mind at all, because I’d die feeling incredibly happy. And the roar of the traffic was masked by the blood pumping in my ears, and the urgent, rhythmic banging of my heart. Then Seriously Successful kissed me again, and then he just kept hold of my hand, fiddling with my fingers, as though they were a puzzle he was trying to solve.
“Oh Tiffany,” he said quietly. “You’re so lovely and . . .” he cast his eyes to the sky, “. . . odd.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“That’s why I like you so much,” he said. “Because I find you so . . . peculiar.”
“Singular?” I suggested.
“Yes,” he said. “That’s it. Singular. And you’re so well informed, Tiffany. I mean, the things you know.” He looked at me quizzically. “137?” he said.
“Um, Crystal Palace to Oxford Circus.”
“Via?”
“Oh. Um. Clapham Common and Hyde Park Corner.”
“Very good. 271?”
“Liverpool Street to Highgate.”
“Stopping at?”
“Essex Road and Holloway.”
“Yes. OK, the . . . 249?”
“Waterloo to White Hart Lane, via Seven Sisters.”
“Excellent. And what about the number 65?”
“Oh . . . er . . . er . . .”
“Come on.”
“Um . . . oh . . .”
“I’m sorry. I’ll have to hurry you.”
“Er, Ealing Broadway!” I said suddenly.
“Going to?”
“Oh God, um, um, Kingston
. Yes, Kingston, via Kew Bridge and Richmond.”
“Excellent. The number 48?”
“London Bridge to Walthamstow via . . . Shoreditch and Hackney Central.”
“Very impressive. And finally,” he said, “the 68a.”
“Oh I know that one. Um . . . Elephant and Castle to South Croydon via Camberwell and Herne Hill,” I concluded happily.
“Oh Tiffany,” said Seriously Successful. “You’re so clever.” And then he kissed me again. “And Tiffany?”
“Yes?” I looked up into his brown eyes, and then he reached again for my hand, my left hand, and started fiddling with my fingers again.
“You know, Tiffany, a Double Diamond Works Wonders . . .”
“Does it?” I said faintly.
“Yes. And I was just wondering whether . . . later on . . . my circumstances having unexpectedly changed, I might be able to interest you in a . . . in a . . . full-time position?”
“Oh. Oh . . . well . . . I don’t . . . I don’t . . .”
“Because you see, Tiffany”—he looked down at me—“it’s the Real Thing, isn’t it?”
I laughed. “Well, I don’t know . . .”
“We’re Getting There, aren’t we?” he added with an inquiring smile.
“Well, yes . . . yes . . . maybe,” I conceded. “Possibly . . . I . . .”
“Yes,” he said. “I really think we are. And I feel we should be together, Tiffany, you and I, Because Life’s Complicated Enough.”
To our left, a little way off, was a very young woman with a small boy. And she was reading to him from The Wind in the Willows. I glanced at them out of the corner of my eye as they sat cross-legged on the grass. She looked like his nanny, rather than his mother, and the little boy was listening to her, entranced, and occasionally peering at the pictures.
“ ‘Rat was walking a little way ahead . . .,’ ” I heard her say, “ ‘ . . . as his habit was, his shoulders humped, his eyes fixed on the straight gray road in front of him; so he did not notice poor Mole when suddenly the summons reached him, and took him like an electric shock.’ ”
