Pack of Cards

by Penelope Lively

  The friend coughed. ‘Excuse me. Where does his mother live?’

  ‘In Surrey. Reigate. His sister lives with her. She has red hair and works in the library. What I can't get over is how things push on like they do and take you with them whether you want it or not. Days. They drag you on. One day you're with the yellow trains like daffodils and the next you're sitting here with a knot in your insides. Sometimes I'm not sure if I can go through with life if this is the way it's going to be.’

  ‘Oh, come on now …’ said the friend. After a moment she went on, ‘Hello? Are you still there?’

  ‘I'm here. There's this dog outside that's got its paw muddled up in a bit of plastic. Do you think I should go out and help it?’

  The friend said, ‘I don't know. Of course he wouldn't have known about you making the pizza.’

  ‘It's all right – the dog's got its paw out of the plastic. I couldn't get the big olives so I had to use the other kind. I had them in my bag when I was walking along the platform at Clapham Junction and now there they are in the fridge. Same bloody olives. Funny, when you come to think about it.’

  The friend said sadly, ‘I suppose you're in love with him.’

  ‘Is that my trouble? God, how unoriginal. And here was I going on about clouds and yellow trains. Oh, and there was Battersea Power Station. I didn't tell you about Battersea Power Station. It looked like a temple. Egyptian, I think. Do you imagine he's going to see someone else instead?’

  ‘Look, don't think about that kind of thing.’

  ‘I'm not. It's not a question of thinking. I'm not thinking about anything. I just get attacked from time to time.’

  ‘I know,’ said the friend, after a moment.

  The girl said, ‘Do you remember the way when you were a child you always wanted it to be next week? Today was so boring. Next week was always Christmas and birthdays and going to the cinema.’

  ‘He'll ring up,’ said the friend. ‘You see. Next week. Tomorrow.’

  ‘Ah. Will he? Since when were birthdays always last week? And yellow trains.’

  ‘These trains …’

  ‘Sorry about the trains.’ The girl saw sparrows float down from a tree and hop among crisp packets and paper bags. ‘He said it was a pity and we'd have to fix something another time. He ran out of coins and had to go.’

  Miles away, across roads and buses and taxis, the friend said, ‘Then that's how it is. Another time. There's always other times.’

  ‘I don't want other times,’ said the girl. ‘I want yesterday. I want to be so happy like I was yesterday. I want to go back into yesterday and settle down there and live there for ever. I want to spend the rest of my life riding out of Clapham Junction on yellow trains, looking at the smoke against those clouds. I don't want to be here; I want to be there. I want to be sitting on those bright blue seats, watching the houses go by. I don't like now, I want to be then.’

  The friend sighed. ‘Go and eat that pizza. It won't keep.’

  ‘The Ghost of a Flea’

  HE MET her at the opening party for an exhibition of paintings by a friend of his brother's. He stood penned against a wall talking to no one with an empty glass in his hand and suddenly there was this short girl with a soft inexorable voice at his elbow, saying things.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘I said, you've got such a kind face, I knew you wouldn't mind my coming across. I mean, I can always tell, just looking at people. Most of them here – well, I just wouldn't … You see, the thing is …’

  He couldn't hear the half of it. He bent over her, frowning with concentration. She had thick long fawn hair that sometimes obscured her face and a physical solidity at curious variance with some kind of manic tension. She alarmed him. She was called Angela. As the party thinned out he learned that they were going to have a curry at a place round the corner and then he would walk her back to her flat.

  Over the curry, they exchanged telephone numbers. She said it was so lucky he was working in Holborn because actually her office was only just round the corner. She said she was terribly interested in painting, she'd done an art course once herself but as therapy in fact, it had been good, it had helped. After the meal, as they left, she said she was feeling a bit odd. Hang on a minute, she said, do you mind? She stood on the pavement, her back against some railings, staring, it seemed, at the passing traffic, a small stocky girl with something dogged about her, dogged and enclosed. He wondered nervously if she was drunk, but she had had only a glass of lager with the curry. After a moment she said, ‘I'll be all right now, Paul, it's just I get this sort of breathlessness, it goes if I keep still a minute. Shall we go?’ He left her outside the house in which she had a flat.

  He was at home in the evening, five days later, when the phone rang. She said, ‘It's Angela. Look, can I come round? I'm having a bit of a bad spell, it's an awful help to talk.’

  He made her coffee. She took off her shoes and padded around his room with bare feet. She said, it must be marvellous to have so many books, I've got hardly any books. Is that Battersea? You must be able to see the river from this window, I never know if I love the river or if it upsets me.

  She sat cross-legged on the rug with the coffee mug cradled in her hands, the thick dun swatches of her hair falling across her face, her soft quiet voice going on and on, unstoppable, distressing. ‘After Mummy and Daddy were killed in the car crash I lived with Daddy's aunt in Guildford until she got this liver disease. Then I got rheumatic fever and I was in St Thomas's for nine months, because of the complications. They thought I was going to die and the thing is, it's left me with a sort of funny heart, but it's not too bad, they're terribly sweet, they see me every six months … Then I got the job with Hatchards and then I did the secretarial course and I went to Steers two years ago … I found this flat through my boss, he's been awfully kind … I'm taking Catholic instruction, I started with one of the fathers at Gregory Street but now I'm going to St Damian's … I absolutely adore flying kites, I've got this new kite from Selfridges, I thought, let's go and fly it on Saturday, O.K.?’

  He was disturbed, concerned. He said, ‘Haven't you got any relatives, Angela, honestly?’

  She shook her head. ‘There's these people, the Stanleys, in Basing-stoke, I go to at Christmas. Mrs Stanley was a friend of Mummy's. They've been terribly kind, I can go there any time, absolutely whenever I want.’

  They flew the kite on Hampstead Heath. It wriggled like a tethered serpent against the luminous London sky. Angela ran about, calling him. She wore a furry coat and boots, her face grew pink in the wind, she became quite pretty. Walking to the tube station, he wondered if she expected him to take her hand; he strode worriedly beside her, a tall stringy young man, short-sighted, good-tempered and made despondent by injustice. He did not find her sexually attractive. He told her at length of his work with a firm of architects in order to conceal and distance the guilt engendered by this absence of desire. He took her back to his rooms and made them scrambled eggs and bacon. Angela said, I can't cook, it's silly, I know, I've never learned, all the girls in my office are terribly good cooks. Later, she declared herself tired and lay on the sofa where she fell asleep. He sat in the darkening room, peering at newspapers, glancing at her from time to time in unease. He suspected she might be a rather unstable girl.

  He met her for lunch in the pub near his office. They flew the kite again. Sometimes she telephoned him late in the evening and talked lengthily, fluently, her low regular voice coming to him through the noisy London night, tense and yet stoical. She made him think, uncomfortably and with a wrench of pity, of those resigned resilient children who stand at the edge of school playgrounds, unsought, excluded from games. She made him think also, disturbingly, of cripples. At that party, when first he met her, he had looked down, he now remembered, in instinctive search of something: a surgical boot, a leg caliper. You're being the most enormous help, Paul, she said. It's sweet of you to take so much trouble, you don't mind, do you? The think is,
I had this beastly business with someone at the office, I can't sleep, it's made me feel all strange, if I could just talk for a bit …

  She said, I've never been to the Tate, isn't it silly? I had a thing about the river once, I used to keep going to the Embankment to walk up and down, and look over that bridge, the iron one – you know, which is it? – but I never went into the Tate. So I thought, let's go on Sunday. He said cautiously, Look Angela, there are these people I know with this cottage in Suffolk and I was actually thinking of going down there this weekend … She nodded and smiled her damaged smile and he winced and hurried on, but next week – next week would be fine.

  She often arrived first at the pub or entrance to the Underground. She would have bought the drinks, the tickets, the sandwiches. No, she'd say, it's my turn, Paul, honestly, otherwise it's simply not fair and you've been so terribly sweet to me anyway, I'm not going to be any more of a nuisance.

  He saw her from some way off, on the steps of the Tate, standing with her hands in her pockets and a strand of hair blown horizontally across her face, staring at the Thames. When he arrived she said, ‘Don't you think seagulls are the most terribly threatening things? Their eyes. When I was a child I used to have nightmares about birds.’

  In the Blake Room she pored over the cases. From time to time he lost her in the murky, crowded room and then would catch sight of her small bundled figure in a group, gazing at a picture, always looking somehow apart from other people, isolated. He joined her in front of a case of drawings at which she intently stared.

  ‘Isn't that ridiculous!’ she exclaimed. ‘The Ghost of a Flea! But that's mad – it's absurd. A flea couldn't have a ghost.’ She began to laugh, loudly. People turned their heads, peering across the dark, respectful room in which the paintings gleamed from their glass cases like tropical fish.

  He tried to move her on. ‘Blake is a kind of visionary, isn't he? It's rather a neurotic picture. Isn't he supposed to have been a bit mad?’

  ‘Neurotic!’ She continued, mirthlessly, to laugh. ‘I hate it!’

  ‘Let's go, then.’

  ‘Just a minute. Oh God, look at it – I'll never forget it, now. That awful grotesque head. It gives me the shivers.’

  ‘Come on, Angela,’ he said nervously.

  ‘I'm coming. Can we go home?’ She began to walk quickly towards the door.

  He caught her up. ‘But it's only half past two. I thought we were going to …’

  ‘I'm sorry, Paul, I'm not feeling too good.’ Her voice was even lower than usual. He loped behind her down the steps, out on to the Embankment. He thought she might be crying. The faint gloom always induced in him by her company was unsettlingly compounded now with both pity and irritation. At this time last week he had been having a convivial lunch in a Suffolk pub with an old friend and his jovial, matey wife. He said, ‘What's the matter, Angela?’

  She was leaning now over the parapet, looking down at the viscous flow of the river. Seagulls bobbed among scarves of plastic. He peered at her. ‘You're not crying, are you?’

  ‘I never cry. I can't remember ever crying. It was just that picture, it made me get this feeling I get.’

  ‘What sort of feeling?’

  ‘I'm afraid it's almost impossible to explain to other people.’ She had her eyes closed, he now saw. ‘It's like being very scared, but you feel a bit as though you might faint as well. Your legs go funny. And you know it's only you who's like that, and there's nothing anybody else can do about it. I'll be fine in a minute. It's beginning to go now.’ She continued to hunch over the parapet.

  Paul said, ‘You know, Angela, I wonder if perhaps it might be an idea to see a doctor sometime.’

  She opened her eyes and turned to look at him. She had brown, rather large eyes. ‘I have done.’

  ‘Ah. And …?’

  ‘What do you think?’ she said wearily. ‘Look, Paul, I think I'm just about all right now, but I'd like to go back. Thank you for being so sweet. I'm sorry to be such a bore.’

  In silence they returned to her flat.

  A week later she telephoned to ask him to come with her to a party.

  ‘Tonight? Well, I'm not sure, Angela, truth to tell I've had a bit of a tiring day, would you mind awfully if …’

  ‘Never mind. It's just it helps awfully having someone with me. And I wanted to talk to you anyway.’

  He sighed. ‘O.K. But only for a bit, if you don't mind.’

  At the party, she was in a state of uncharacteristic animation. She towed him around the room, locking in conversation with strangers, talking quickly and loudly, moving on. She drank rather a lot. Pink crests formed on her cheeks. When eventually they left she said, ‘Let's go back and have a cup of coffee at your place.’ He asked her what it was she had wanted to talk to him about and she said she couldn't remember, it didn't matter now.

  In his room she sat as usual on the floor. She did a lot of yoga at one time, she had told him, and this inclination was a legacy of that period. Similarly, a residual distaste for meat stemmed from having once been a vegetarian. She sat sipping coffee and telling him about Father Michael who was such a help and what he had said yesterday. Paul said, ‘When are you actually, er, going to be properly converted or whatever it's called?’ She stared at him and replied, ‘Oh, I'm not, I've decided not to finish it, didn't I tell you? They've been terribly kind but I've decided to stop at the end of the month.’

  Presently she said, ‘I had too much to drink at that stupid party. I think I'd better spend the night here.’

  He shuffled in alarm. ‘But there's only my bed, Angela.’

  ‘I'll sleep on the sofa.’

  ‘I will, then. You have the bed.’

  ‘No. It's my own fault. I shouldn't have let those people keep filling my glass. I'm sorry, Paul. You go to bed. I'll just have a wash.’

  He retreated to the bedroom. Presently there was silence. With relief, he turned and slept.

  He woke with a jump to see her standing in the doorway. ‘I can't sleep, I've got that awful feeling.’

  His heart sank. He sat up. ‘Look, Angela …’

  She came over to the bed. ‘I'll get in with you. I'll just lie beside you and then I'll be fine. Go to sleep.’

  He said wildly, ‘Angela, I simply don't …’

  ‘Go to sleep,’ she said again.

  He rolled to the far side of the bed. She climbed in. He wasn't sure if she had any clothes on or not. He thought not. He thought she was stark naked six inches from him. He could feel warmth come across the sheet from her thigh. He cowered against the wall.

  Presently he heard her breathe more heavily. She sighed, shifted, was asleep. He lay rigid, hour by hour. Once she sighed again and lurched towards him. He shrank into the crevasse between bed and wall where a cold draught strayed along his back.

  In the morning, he wriggled precariously from the bed without touching her, grabbed his clothes and took them to the bathroom. When he was making tea and toast she came in wearing his dressing-gown. She said, ‘I feel such a fool. I feel such an awful stupid fool. I want to die.’

  He avoided her eye. ‘It's O.K., Angela, honestly, we were a bit overtired, that's all. Look, the marmalade's in the cupboard, shall I …’

  ‘I wish I were dead.’

  He forced a laugh; it sounded even worse than he'd feared. ‘Oh come on, Angela, everyone has a bit too much every now and then, it's not …’

  ‘Actually,’ she said, ‘I have tried to kill myself. Twice. I wasn't going to tell you.’

  He slopped the tea and did some concentrated diversionary wiping up.

  ‘In fact,’ she said, ‘I probably would have told you. It's only fair, when you've been so sweet. The first time I took some pills and the second time I tried to jump into the river.’

  He dumped the cloth in the sink. ‘Tried?’

  ‘There was this man who came along.’

  ‘Well,’ he said firmly, ‘I'm very glad it didn't work. And please don't talk li
ke that, you'll feel fine later on, just you see. It's silly to get so upset. I'll have to rush now or I'll be late for the office. You'll be all right, won't you?’

  She sat at the table, a small teddy-bearish figure in his brown schoolboy dressing-gown. She stared down at the table, her hair swathing her face. She did not answer.

  ‘I'll give you a ring,’ he said desperately. ‘At lunch-time.’

  She looked at him. ‘That's very nice of you, Paul. I can't tell you what a help you are.’

  Outside, he took great gulps of the London morning. He paused at the shop further down the road outside which shocks of daffodils and tulips stood in buckets and he thought of buying her a bunch and going back and leaving them by the door, and then did not because flowers are no compensation for other unperformed actions, and in any case what he would be doing would be to assuage his own feelings, not make her any happier.

  Either you take a shine to a girl or you don't. Unless of course you are the sort of bloke who is simply a sexual opportunist.

  He shambled disconsolately to his office. He was twenty-seven. When he was nine he had written an indignant letter to the Prime Minister of the day protesting against stag-hunting, a barbarity which had just come to his attention and which had caused him a night of distress. Nowadays, he was the kind of person who gives up his seat to old ladies and contributes heavily to charities. He shambled to the office and at lunch-time he rang up Angela and the next evening he had a drink with her and at the weekend he went with her to a film.

  Three weeks later, when the spring had just touched London, Paul fell in love. He met her in the house of some friends and at the end of another fifteen days they were in bed together. She was called Frances. She had dark curly hair and an exuberant personality. She was competent, generous, lithe and merry and she loved him back. He said, ‘Look, I'll have to tell you at some point, there's this girl. Not what you might think, not like that at all. The thing is, you see …’ And then he cried, ‘Oh Christ, that's what she says – the thing is – it must be catching. But the thing is …’