by Barbara Vine
2
I was nineteen when I wrote that.
Ever since I’d learnt to write, I’d kept a diary. Maybe it was because I was an only child and had no one to tell things to or else I’m a natural diarist. Some people are. It hasn’t much to do with being a writer or good at it or anything. It’s more a need to record what you think worth recording. All my life I have written down things that happened to me when they were really important or just seemed important to me. The ordinary day-to-day stuff never got a mention until I met Silver and after that nothing was ordinary any more.
I took my diaries with me to Max’s, then to Silver’s, back to Suffolk, then to Beryl’s, to the various colleges I went to, to the flat we had in the East End and finally here, to our home. Most of the entries, naturally, were written in the first person. All but one. And that, which chronicles the most terrible thing that had ever happened to me up to that date, I seem to have written in the form of a short story. Why? All these years later I can’t remember writing it or what reason I had for writing it. I had no literary ambitions then or at any time. What I do now and what I love doing must be as far from being an author as one can get. I wonder if my counsellor suggested that I write it all down as an exercise in therapy, or if, later on, the psychiatrist I was referred to after my conviction told me to do it and write it as if it’d happened to someone else. I don’t know, I don’t remember. I’d even forgotten that I’d kept it and it was only seeing Liv again that made me search for it and the papers that were with it.
The call from a Mrs Clarkson had come in the afternoon before. Darren, who works for me, took the message (or one of his girlfriends did) and sent it over by e-mail along with all the other calls for the day. He was tied up, as he put it, with a rewiring job, which brought me a picture of a very handsome lithe black man struggling to escape – like Leviathan, was it? – from coils of cable come alive like snakes. So Mrs Clarkson and her dimmer switches in Downshire Hill were left to me and I made her my first call.
I live, and have lived since just before I got married six months ago, in the penthouse on top of a block of flats in Highgate. The view over London is stupendous. I can step out of my living room on to my roof garden. The only thing about it I don’t much care for is the underground car park. It could be worse, though. There’s no part of it from which you can’t see between the concrete uprights that support the block to the light and air outside. Besides, I’m a lot better about enclosed spaces now. I’ve even been in the car wash all by myself and sat there with the soapsuds blinding me and the brushes slurping and the red darkness enclosing me like the belly of a whale.
Hampstead is just at the other end of the Spaniards Road and I was at the house in Downshire Hill in less than ten minutes. By the look of things, builders had been doing some sort of interior conversion. Debris in grey plastic sacks and piles of broken timber filled the front garden, which, fortunately, was mostly paved. A face at the downstairs window, no more than a pale blur, told me an anxious Mrs Clarkson was on the look-out for my arrival. Once she had seen the white van with C. Brown and Co. Ltd, Electrical Engineers, printed on it in red above my logo of the curve of a C with the double loop of a B inside it (logos should always be as simple as possible), she dropped the curtain and went to let me in. I recognized her before I reached the door. Whether she recognized me then I couldn’t be sure because, of course, as nearly always happens, she was amazed to see a woman at all.
There still aren’t all that many female electricians and there are very few highly qualified ones with their own businesses like me. Because I’m proud of what I do and I know I’m good at it, I’m quite prepared to boast about landing the contract for the electrics for a hotel of the status of the Four Seasons in Knightsbridge, and later for those new houses they’re building in Paddington Basin. But most people think it very strange indeed when they call C. Brown and Co. and a woman turns up. Once or twice I’ve even been told I wasn’t wanted, thank you very much, they’d sent for a real electrician. Mrs Clarkson gave me just such a doubtful wary look and said (which no one had ever said before), ‘Isn’t your husband coming?’
I didn’t laugh, though I wanted to. Nor did I say my husband was in Africa and knew nothing about electricity anyway. ‘You’ll have to put up with me,’ I said. ‘I’m the electrician.’
‘All right then, if you think you can do it.’
‘Don’t know what it is yet,’ I said, ‘but I’ll give it a go.’
That house was astounding inside, open-plan, minimalist and bleak. The living room, marble-floored and islanded with pieces of furniture shaped like bright-coloured grubs or molluscs, was cut off diagonally by a gallery rail and its ceiling ended at the same point and angle. Above was soaring space that terminated as far as I could see in a turret of glass. It might have been warm up there in the turret but it was very cold down here. I looked for candles, once Liv’s undisputed accessory, but couldn’t see any. Lamps were everywhere, standards that were glass funnels on steel stems apparently growing out of the floor, wall lights like champagne flutes and wall lights like Roman vases, and two great chandeliers, the modern sort that you see in international hotels (I don’t stay in them, I rewire them) that look like glaciers or frozen waterfalls. Mr Clarkson must be doing very well for himself.
I wasn’t sure at that point whether to enlighten his wife or not. Perhaps ‘enlighten’ isn’t the word, for by now I was sure she knew me just as I knew her. It might be better to do the job, whatever it was, and leave. Get down to Paddington Basin where I had a meeting at midday with the Clerk of Works. She didn’t look at me and I realized that she hadn’t looked at me after that first amazed stare.
‘I don’t know if you can do it,’ she said, and for the first time I heard the accent that was once so familiar, the sing-song rhythm of the Swede speaking English. Her English was perfect now, but she was nervous. ‘I mean, maybe I should have got the original electricians back. But they’ve disappeared, they’re not in the phone book. It’s the switches, they don’t work – well, they don’t do what they’re supposed to. I mean, there are supposed to be thirty-two ways of having the lights on in this room, but when you push those buttons you just get a lot of bright light.’
It wasn’t for me to ask who the hell would want thirty-two light-level variations. The rich are different. They have more money. So no doubt they want as much or as little light as they are prepared to pay for. As that went through my head, I also thought that the way I was going, it might not be too long before I was rich myself.
I went back to the van and got my toolbag. On my way back in I glanced at myself in the enormous mirror with a steel frame and steel stars clustered about in the corners of it which covered one wall of the hall. Who can tell if they look different from how they looked eleven years before? Everyone must do, I suppose. I saw a tall thin woman in the same gear as Darren wears, jeans and T-shirt and leather jacket, with very short black hair, nearly-black eyes and eyebrows that draw together all the time in a way that’s already giving her frown lines. The best thing about my face is my cheekbones, which in Silver’s words are sharp enough to cut cheese. The frown lines aged me, I supposed, not much caring, as did the crinkles round my eyes that come from enjoying life.
Liv looked older but she also looked better. She looked beautiful. The make-up she had on was the kind you can have done in the cosmetics department of big stores. It takes half an hour to get it right, longer if you do it yourself. Her fair hair, which was always very long, shaggy and tangled before that look was fashionable, was now absolutely straight, cut just to cover her ears with a straight-across fringe, and bleached or dyed the colour of unsalted butter. I’d seen her looking at my hands (rather than my face). All I can say about mine is that at least they’re clean. Hers were white as milk and the nails very long, square-trimmed and painted a silvery ultramarine blue. They matched the sapphire in the ring on the third finger of her left hand. What fascinated me most about her was the thing she
wore round her neck. I knew what it was, though I could hardly believe my eyes and my memory.
While I was outside she had disappeared. I found a door in the hall that looked as if a cupboard might be inside but in fact opened on to a wall of keypads and plateswitches as well as several fuse boxes, and set to work. The way the ‘original electricians’ had wired it up was a mess and probably quite dangerous. I would have to turn the power off before I began and from then on it would be a simple job that didn’t take much thought. I called out to her that she’d be without electricity for the next half-hour but there was no answer, so I cut the power to the circuit on this floor and maybe to the one below it too, it was hard to tell.
I’d been sorting out the various connections and thinking about Liv and her dizzy ascent to where she now was, twelve years later, wondering of course how she’d done it, when a woman holding the hand of a child on either side of her came down the wide staircase. I’m not good at children’s ages but I would think the boy was about four and the girl three. The woman, the girl, was obviously an au pair-cum-nanny. There’s a look that identifies them, you can always tell. Invariably they have puzzled, anxious expressions, pink noses, chapped lips, long hair, and they are always dressed the same, in jeans and big sweaters and lace-up boots, as if they’re off hill-walking in the Cairngorms rather than taking the kids on a trip to South End Green. I exaggerate, but they often do look like that and this one was more like that than usual. She passed me on her way to the front door and to my ‘Good morning’ returned a shy smile. So, exactly, had Liv looked when she had just such a job with just such children. Just such a house as this, only no doubt more traditional in its design and its furnishing, and in Maida Vale not Hampstead, had she run away from and joined us in our refuge on top of the world.
It was seeing the au pair-nanny and the children that were undoubtedly Liv’s and ‘Mr Clarkson’s’ that decided me. Having found being in her presence a mite awkward, I now wanted her to come back. I switched the power on. I tested the lights, going through the thirty-two permutations I’d achieved. In fact, it was thirty-six, which made me feel quite pleased with myself. Whether she was upstairs or downstairs I’d no idea, but I went to the gallery rail and the widely curving wrought-iron staircase that led into another vast chamber below and called out what I always call out when I don’t know the customer’s name or, as in this case, don’t want to use it.
‘Are you there?’
No answer. I called again. She appeared behind me, materializing from some room whose existence I hadn’t suspected. ‘Liv,’ I said.
Again the fear flashed in her well-painted, black-outlined blue eyes. I saw I must be gentle. What was curious and funny to me was a threat to her. I forced myself to take my eyes off that lump of ivory, that tooth she wore mounted in gold on a chain round her neck.
‘Liv, I knew you at once,’ I said. ‘Please don’t be anxious. You do know me, don’t you?’
She shook her head, then nodded. ‘Chloe,’ she said.
It was just possible she had forgotten my true name. ‘Clodagh,’ I said, ‘Clodagh Brown.’
She whispered, ‘C. Brown and Co. Ltd. I found you in the Yellow Pages. How was I to know?’
‘I’ve done the job. Do you want to try your lights?’
She didn’t move, apart from her hands. She began wringing her hands, the blue nails like frightened beetles wildly scurrying this way and that. Then, incredibly, in a high voice, she said, ‘I’m trying to think where we met. It must have been at college. Or when I was Lavinia’s PA, I met so many people, it’s hard to recall…’
I took pity on her. I’d been on the point of saying that it was in Russia Road, on the top of Silver’s parents’ house, on the roofs, don’t you remember? Don’t you remember what happened? Don’t you remember Jonny and Wim? I didn’t say any of those things. I hadn’t the heart to torture her further. Instead I took her through the light sequences. There wasn’t a chance she’d remember which switches worked what. Her head would be full of me and of the threat I represented. I wanted to be able to say to her that she need never see me again, never fear me, but I didn’t know how to begin. I couldn’t find any words to say what in any case would only result in her telling me she didn’t know what I meant.
‘Right,’ I said, ‘I’ll be on my way.’
‘Would you like me to pay you now or will you send in your account?’
‘I’ll send you the bill,’ I said.
She’d closed the door before I’d reached the front gate. And the garden path was only a few yards long. I’d frightened her very badly. My usual procedure, when I’ve done a job for a new customer, is to call them a couple of days later and check that all is well. It’s a good system. In a very few cases all isn’t well and they’re foaming at the mouth because they’ve forgotten your name and haven’t got the bill yet. On the other hand, when all is well as it mostly is, calling them puts your name back in their minds as well as making them think you’re a thoughtful caring person. I decided I’d waive this calling back in Liv’s case. It would do more harm than good. She would never call me again anyway. There, as it happens, I was wrong but I didn’t know that at the time.
I’d be early for my next appointment but I drove straight down there just the same. I quite often get called out to the Maida Vale area and sometimes to Little Venice, once even to Russia Road, but I’d never been back to Paddington Basin since I was chucked out of the Grand Union Polytechnic and their mixed course in Business Studies and Psychology. Even now I can’t think of that place, since renamed the University of Latimer, without shuddering and then laughing at my shudders. But then, the only way I could find of getting there without one way or another descending below ground level was to walk along the canal bank and thus pass under the Westway exit road but not underground.
You can’t drive to the Basin. You have to park your car as best you can (and pay a pound an hour) in Howley Place or Delamere Terrace and walk down through the little garden that overlooks the point at which the canal branches and the island where they say Browning used to sit and write his poetry. They’re big on Browning round there. There’s even a pub called the Robert Browning. Selina once had an apron with a picture of him and Elizabeth Barrett on it. A path that no one would suspect is there, still less that it leads anywhere of importance, runs down through a kind of shrubbery and brings you out on to the canal bank and the bridge. Above you is the Harrow Road and it’s quite a wide bridge but not dark enough under there or shut in enough to upset the claustrophobic. On the other side of the canal are all the houseboats, moored aft to bows, all with their names on their sides in painted wreaths of flowers, Susannah and Water Queen and Cicero and Garda, plants in pots on their roofs and plants on the canal bank in the gardens the boat people have made. At this time of the year those gardens are full of tulips and wallflowers in bloom. The boats are doomed, of course. Once building starts down here, and building is scheduled for the whole of the Basin, the boats will go and the gardens, the wild buddleias that push their purple spires out of every cranny and the elder trees with their flat white platelets of bloom and the brambles and nettles and tall milk thistles – and the mess and awful slumminess too.
The clearing on this side has already started so I was able to walk quite a long way down, under the Westway exit and past the point where the underpass comes out. On the other side, on the towpath between the boats and the gardens, was where, twelve years ago, I first saw Wim. He was talking to a man on one of the boats, though who he was I never found out, and the two of them were gazing upwards at the sky and the traffic roaring along the great curved concrete flyover. It was cold that day. The boats were covered in tarpaulins like horses in coats, the flowers had been nipped and browned by the first frosts, and an icy mist hung over the motionless dull green water. I didn’t know it was Wim then, I didn’t know who he was or where he lived, only that his face was one of the strangest and most beautiful I’d ever seen, away from the cinema or TV s
creen.
The Clerk of Works is already in residence down there, in a temporary building too grand to be called a hut. He didn’t react to my turning out to be a woman, he expected that, we’d talked on the phone. We studied the architect’s plans together and went on a tour of the cleared area, trying to form some sort of idea in our minds as to how it would look when rows of tall houses faced each other across the wide lake the Basin becomes at this point. It was after two by then. He was pleased as men are when I did as I always do in this situation and produced from my toolbag a rather carefully thought-out lunch for two. Smoked salmon sandwiches this time, pâté and cheese and Bath Olivers and strawberry tarts I’d stopped off on my way and bought from Raoul’s. A man wouldn’t think of doing that but when I do it, even if he tends to be sexist, he’ll think that there may be more to having a woman electrician on the job than first meets the eye. You see, I can’t afford to neglect any move that might improve my career chances or enhance my reputation.
After that I dropped in to see Beryl, for a chat and a cup of tea. I had one more call to make that day. It was on my way home, a town house in Tufnell Park, and I’d more or less guessed what it was before I got there. You’d be surprised how many householders can’t mend a fuse. And not only can’t mend it but don’t even know it needs mending and that that’s what the trouble is. I charge £40 as a minimum for any call-out and it does puzzle me how anyone would rather pay that amount of money for a job that takes five minutes than get someone like me to show them how to perform this simple operation. That would cost them £40 too but at least it would be a one-off. I’ve tried, I’ve offered, but they either refuse point-blank or ask me why I think they’ve sent for me. One woman even said she wouldn’t keep a dog and bark herself.
