by Barbara Vine
One day we were in a train, he and I, not a tube, of course, but the above-ground Hammersmith line that runs from Paddington. A beggar was working the passengers, carrying his tin for contributions in one hand and a card with Homeless and Hungry on it in the other. There were some who gave him their loose change but most people ignored him, taking a sudden passionate interest in their newspapers or staring with concentration at the advertisements. Silver beckoned him over and patted the seat next to him. The beggar thought he was going to get a fiver, I suppose, but Silver took the card from him and asked if he’d like something a bit more dynamic written on it, something that would appeal to people’s sympathy. The beggar said he would, mate, you bet. Homeless and Hungry wasn’t getting him very far. Silver turned the card over and wrote on it in big print with the thick felt-tip he always carried, Would I be doing this if I could do anything else?
It worked. We followed him into the next carriage and watched him collect, notes as well as coins. Morna told me Silver had done this sort of thing before. They were walking down Queensway together, it was a fine day in early April, and a blind man sitting on the pavement asked them for money. He hadn’t a card at all, only his dog and his white stick. Silver bought a card in a newsagent’s, wrote on it It’s spring and I’m blind and propped it up against his begging tin. It drew a crowd, Morna said. He told Silver he ought to be an advertising copywriter and Silver said maybe he would one day, he was too busy with other things at present. I don’t know if those two examples illustrate Silver’s faculty of happiness, perhaps they don’t, perhaps they’re irrelevant, but they’re typical of the way he was.
That Thursday afternoon in April, when he rescued me from the underpass, we walked back to Russia Road arm in arm. Anyone seeing us might have supposed us old friends who had been together for years. He talked to me about things no young person usually knows anything about. The gardens of Maida Vale, for instance. Had I looked at the gardens? The flowers? A house in Warrington Crescent had a mimosa in a pot in the basement, its leaves and yellow flowers reaching up to the first-floor window. It was in flower in December. Another had a tree fern. Look at that wisteria, he said, look at the garrya and its green catkins. Did I know why the gardens of Maida Vale were full of rare and beautiful plants? It was because of the nursery in Clifton Villas, he said, the best and oldest in London, 100 years old, and it only stocked special plants. Everyone went to it to stock their gardens. Suppose, in its stead, a typical garden centre had been there, selling pampas grass and kanzans and privet. The whole place would look quite different.
He let us into 15 Russia Road. The hall I’d caught a glimpse of before was just like Max and Selina’s, same beige carpet, same console table, same, or very nearly the same, but a chandelier instead of a lantern, and instead of the country-house prints a strange dark painting of Dutch people playing cards. On the wall facing the picture hung two glass cases of butterflies, their beautiful corpses with spread wings pinned to a black background, Painted Ladies, Red Admirals, a Purple Emperor.
‘You’re not bothered by heights, are you?’ he asked.
‘Not a bit. I like heights.’
‘Yes. Silly question. I ought to know that someone who doesn’t like tunnels is going to love being high up.’
Four flights of stairs. At the top the arrangement of rooms was quite different from Max’s. Facing me, beyond a small square landing, was the door with the glass panel in it that afforded Beryl those tantalizing views of what went on inside. But there was no view that day. Someone had pinned a sheet of paper over the glass on the inside. Silver unlocked the door and we went in. Again I expected something like Max’s top floor but it was quite different. It was as if someone had made all the little rooms into an open-plan arrangement and then attempted to turn them back again with makeshift plaster-board walls and a couple of Victorian tapestry screens. I later got to know that there were three bedrooms up there and a living room.
The main room overlooked the back. It was quite big still, the acceptable bit of the open plan. It was very untidy, very ‘lived in’, and I expect it was dirty but you don’t notice dust and fingermarks when you’re twenty. There were three of those dormers in the room, just as there were at the front, casements with arched tops, and all of them were wide open, grey net curtains blowing and tangling themselves on the window catches. On a once handsome leather sofa, now scratched and stained with ink or paint, lay a girl of about my own age fast asleep.
‘That’s Liv,’ Silver said. ‘She’s Swedish. She ran away from some children.’
‘Her children, d’you mean?’
‘They were monsters, she says. She was their nanny.’
Was she his girlfriend? I felt my euphoria waver. ‘Why here?’ I said.
‘People of our sort of age run away a lot, don’t you find? They’re always running away from something or other and they mostly seem to come here. Word gets round, I suppose. There’s a guy called Jonny, he’s sort of her boyfriend, I mean he is now, he ran away from prison.’
‘Prison?’
‘An open prison. One of those places where you can walk round the grounds if you want, so naturally he walked round them and walked out. They got him back, it was a while ago. You look puzzled. You mustn’t worry, you’ll get it sorted after a time. I know it’s confusing to start with.’
So there was going to be ‘a time’. And this Liv was someone else’s girlfriend, not Silver’s. Her face was childlike in sleep, a child who had been up a chimney, black mascara smudged on her high cheekbones. The kind of fair hair that comes in stripes, yellow, pale blonde, straw and mouse brown, lay spread out on a cushion in a torn red cover. I went to one of the windows and looked out. The sky was blue and clear, my eyes were on a level with the topmost branches of a tree from which a pigeon with pink breast feathers looked back at me. I could see over the rears of the houses in the next street to a white stucco turret beyond and, distantly, the knife-shaped spire of St Saviour’s church. The air was fresh yet warm and I inhaled it gratefully.
‘Let’s have a cup of tea,’ said Silver. ‘She’ll wake up when she hears the clink of spoons, she always does. And the others will come soon.’
‘The others?’
‘Wim and Jonny. We’re quite slack at the moment.’ He spoke as if he ran a boarding house, which in a way, I suppose, he did. I followed him into the kitchen. No one seemed to have washed any dishes for days. Crumbs on the floor were mixed with what I thought might be mouse droppings. Silver filled the kettle and switched it on. It was one of those jug kettles and had once been white but was now encrusted with a thick uneven brownish-grey film. ‘You’re right about the mice,’ he said, though I hadn’t expressed my thoughts aloud. ‘Liv likes them, she’s mouse-crazy. It’s a sure way to get them to come out at night, put a heap of crumbs in the middle of the floor.’
We took our tea back into the living room. In spite of what Silver had said, Liv didn’t wake. I didn’t hear a sound, not a creak or footfall, and when Silver said in his tranquil easy tone, ‘Ah, here comes Wim, I think,’ I looked towards the hall and the front door. Silver was laughing.
A pair of long legs had appeared at the window on the extreme right. They slid through the open casement, feet in black trainers dropping to the floor. The man I had seen on the canal bank had come in through the window, come from nowhere, out of the sky, for all I knew. He stood there, his eyebrows up, looking at me and smoothing away from his face with long brown hands his non-existent hair.
8
The most difficult kinds of roof to walk on are those on buildings put up in the past 100 years. These roofs are usually tiled, either with peg tiles or pantiles, and they slope steeply. It is as if architects like Lutyens and Mackintosh and Voysey only realized in the twentieth century that it rains a lot here and steep slopes on roofs provide better drainage. The best kinds are shallow and made of slates, preferably with a stone coping or a low wall at the edge, designed to hide from view the fact that the roof slo
pes at all. The more ornamentation on a roof the better, the more gables, belvederes, single chimney stacks and mansarding, the easier it is to climb. Single detached houses are useless to the serious climber. Standing alone as they do, no matter how shallow their roofs, no matter how many footholds the tops of their dormer windows, their pediments and parapet rails provide, they remain islands. The open air, the gap between them and the house next door, which may be several or many feet, is the sea which divides them from the continent. Climbers need terraces, each house joined to the one next door and preferably not divided from it at roof level by a stack that is a barrier to their progress, a high wall spanning the breadth of the roof and carrying a dozen closely set chimney pots or cowls.
The experienced climber despises television aerials and dishes as aids to balance keeping. He treads fast and light-footed on tile and coping and window ledge. He understands that the first big mistake the climber makes is to dislodge a slate and set it clattering down to ricochet off the coping and crash on the ground. He holds on only to that which is firm and steady, avoiding 1oo-year-old chimney pots, drainpipes and flimsy plaster mouldings. The best climbers are light in weight and supple.
Most roof sounds pass unheard by the householder who knows it’s impossible anyone is walking in the sky up above her head. What she hears must be the wind, the rustling and rasping of tree branches. Or a cat may be up there. She has seen a cat on these roofs. At the veterinary practice in St John’s Wood they tell her that most of the cats they treat are brought in with broken legs. The cat on the roof or balcony sees a butterfly and leaps in pursuit of it into the shining void.
We were like cats but we saw no butterflies. Mostly we went on the roofs after dark. In daylight you had the view, north London laid out below you, Hampstead Heath and Highgate Wood, the heights of Mill Hill, the canal coming out of its tunnels and entering Regent’s Park, but by day you might be seen. Not everyone is in her car or stares at the ground when she walks. Once or twice we were seen but nothing came of it. What would you think if you saw three people in blue jeans and dark sweaters up on the roof of mansion flats? That they were workmen putting up an aerial, of course, or doing repairs to the guttering.
By night the lights were strung out and spread and scattered below us. No unpolluted sky was ever so starry. But up where we were, above the lights, the darkness was like thin smoke, the clouds and clear spaces above us stained plum-coloured. When I first began I carried a torch and Liv had the inevitable candle until Wim stopped her. We must learn to see in the dark, he said, as he did. He was our teacher, as it might be a ski instructor with a class of novices on the slopes.
At my school, on the last day of term, the fourth form traditionally played a game called ‘round and round the room’. You had to circle the gym from the main entrance and back without once touching the floor, and you did it by means of wall bars, a horse, a climbing frame and, of course, ropes. People who inadvertently tapped the floor with a toe were disqualified. The winner was the girl or boy to do it in the shortest time. I won it easily in my fourth-form year and got the prize, a tiny silver (silver plate) cat, but unfortunately, you can’t take A-levels in negotiating gyms. The roofs of Maida Vale became my gym and a lot of other things besides. For a little while.
People would think you mad, or at least very eccentric, if you told them you climbed on roofs. Of course, you seldom do tell anyone because you know what the reaction will be. They don’t understand. They want to know why. But you might as well ask why some shoot up heroin or drink brandy or go dancing or climb mountains or do white-water rafting. They like it or they thought they would like it when they began.
It takes a certain kind of person. No one who was afraid of heights would attempt it. No one unfit or unsure on their feet should attempt it. It takes a kind of lawlessness, an unconventional spirit. Claustrophobics are good at it. Some, a very few, are geniuses at it. Wim was, we weren’t. Liv wasn’t, and Jonny, though good, wasn’t in Wim’s class. For us, it was the freedom we could find nowhere else, but once we had pushed ourselves to the limits of what we could do and experienced it to the full, we wanted it no longer.
This morning I interviewed Lysander Taylor and took him on. He’ll start tomorrow. He can do some of the jobs Darren says are not for me, they’re ‘beneath me’. Apparently I should be into administration, sitting in our little Camden Town office, managing and directing. When we started on the Paddington Basin contract I should avoid these tin-pot jobs, putting batteries in clocks and replacing fuses.
‘I’ve never once been called out to put a battery in a clock,’ I protested.
‘You know what I mean. You’re an inverted snob, you are, poking about in these crummy council flats and hobnobbing with riff-raff. For instance, this call that’s come in from that Mrs Clarkson, my sort of brother-in-law can do that. Let her wait. He can do it tomorrow.’
‘Mrs Clarkson?’ I said. ‘Did she ask for me?’
‘Of course she did, Clo. You’re the only one of us she knows by name. But that’s no reason for you to come running.’
‘Ah, but I used to know her,’ I said, ignoring his cast-up eyes. ‘She’s a figure from my past. Tell me something, Darren. If Lysander’s your sort of brother-in-law, do you have two sort of wives and does that make you a sort of polygamist?’
He gave me a sidelong glance. ‘She never said what she wanted, just would you drop in when you’ve a moment. Maybe she only wants a chat about old times. Never mind your time’s precious, you’ve got to work for your living.’ The look became suspicious, the kind of probing stare you get from the doctor when he thinks you may have jaundice or measles. ‘What d’you mean, a figure from your past? And don’t, for God’s sake, say “just someone I used to know”.’
‘OK, I’ll say it’s none of your business, if you like that better.’
So Liv wanted to see me. I was intrigued. I asked Clare who’s our part-time receptionist and phone-answerer to give her a ring and say I’d be along at midday. Whatever she wanted to see me about, it wasn’t two-gang dimmer switches this time.
Liv came from Kiruna in the north of Sweden. It’s not far from the Arctic Circle, in the wintertime there’s no daylight and in summer no darkness. The hotels have black blinds at their windows so that in June and July guests can sleep. Kiruna’s mountain of iron is what once made Sweden rich. A curious feature of the place is the Iceland poppies that grow wild there, pushing up their papery orange and pink and red blossoms through cracks in the paving stones and out of the thin green grass. I went there three years ago to see the midnight sun.
Liv was eighteen and just out of school when she came to London. She was the only child of respectable hard-working total abstainers, her father a mining engineer, her mother a dental nurse. They wanted her to go to the University of Uppsala, which is the Oxford of Sweden – they had ideas much like my parents’ – but, like mine, her school exam results didn’t reach the required level. Her job as an au pair was properly arranged through a reputable agency with headquarters in Stockholm and a branch in London. She was to be paid the statutory rate, do light housework and occasionally fetch a child, aged seven, from school. There would be babysitting too but she would have three evenings off a week and time in the day to attend her English classes. All Swedes learn English at school and most speak it well but Liv didn’t. Part of her reason for coming here was to acquire good idiomatic English, at least as good as her father’s.
I’ve mentioned the post-war houses, of which there are enclaves in Maida Vale, as if bits of suburbia had intruded to remind visitors that the suburbs proper would start a mile or so up the Edgware Road. It was in one of these houses, two-storeyed, detached, half-timbered, with a steep red-tiled roof, that Liv’s employers or ‘hosts’, as they called themselves, lived.
‘As if I was a guest and didn’t work for them,’ she said.
Their name was Hinde, Claudia and James, and they had three children, not one. The youngest was a baby of nine mo
nths. Both parents worked full-time. Claudia – Liv was told to call them by their first names, not that she often got the chance as they were seldom at home – was, like Guy, something important in a merchant bank, maybe the same merchant bank, and James was on the Stock Exchange. Liv described them as ‘rich’ with a dizzy lifestyle. The only time of the day when she had help with the children was at breakfast before the parents left for work. With the phone receiver in one hand and a feeding bottle in the other, Claudia fed the baby while James cut toast ‘soldiers’ for the four-year-old Marcus, his eyes on his electronic organizer. Liv said it was as if, knowing they would have nothing more to do with their children that day but conscious of having some duty towards them, they ‘got it over with’ first thing in the morning when they were fresh. They were always out of the house by eight-thirty when she was due to take Cyrus, the eldest, to school, and necessarily take Marcus and the baby with her.
Supplies arrived at the house twice a week from a food delivery company but she still had to shop. She was expected to drive the Range Rover, a much larger vehicle than any of which she had previous experience. It was on one of these shopping expeditions that she met Jonny, the attendant at the car park she used, sitting in his glass booth taking payment and raising the exit barrier. But that was quite a long time ahead. She hadn’t been in the house more than a couple of days before she realized she was expected to be a nanny, not an au pair. She told Silver she didn’t even like children. With no brothers and sisters of her own, she had no experience of children, yet there she was with a baby to feed and with nappies to change, a four-year-old to look after and amuse and a bad-tempered, truculent, very big boy of seven to control.
