by Helen Harris
‘Would it be a convenient time to show me round the rest of the stuff?’
Actually, it wasn’t. There are a hundred and one things which have to be done first thing in the morning, before the public starts arriving at the Desk, but I didn’t want it to appear to Rob that I was bogged down in bureaucracy. So I said, ‘Hang on a second. I’ll be right with you.’
Rob later admitted that, of course, he would far rather have gone round the galleries on his own. That was much more in character. But he was worried about coming across me somewhere in the museum and my being offended that he had not asked for my help. As he put it, now he had got into this silly situation with me, he thought he had better go through with it.
He wandered around the hall while he waited for me. That day his checked shirt was brown and green, I think, instead of blue and red, and he had on a beaten corduroy jacket. Most noticeably, he was wearing glasses – they were fashionably large, with fine tortoiseshell frames. I admired his face for being one on which glasses looked chosen rather than inflicted.
As soon as I had sorted out the post and prepared the piles of enquiry forms and reproduction request slips, I said to Mary-Anne, ‘I’ll be gone for about half an hour, all right? Cover for me, will you?’
She ‘humphed’ exaggeratedly. ‘No accounting for tastes, I suppose.’
‘Oh, go on!’ I said.
She grinned and gave her flamboyant wave. ‘Run along, run along.’
I hoped that as I stood up and came out from behind the Desk, Rob would notice me and come back from his prolonged examination of the lack of view through the mullioned windows. But he seemed quite engrossed and I had to go right across the hall, stand next to him and say, ‘I’m ready now, if you are.’
He is much taller than I am, of course, and that might explain in part why I felt so much like a little girl on my best behaviour as I showed him round. I even had to hurry a little to keep up with him in the corridors. But the main reason was that I guessed a television writer, who was not in the habit of visiting museums, might make one visit to research a play – or two at the most, if he was very conscientious or there was something he had forgotten to check on – but no more. If my optimism at the sight of him was not to end the way of all my other five-minute fantasies about men seen at lectures and private views, this was my only chance to shine.
I had read all about the rooms we were visiting at the weekend, which shows that at that period of my life I had nothing better to do at weekends. I was well prepared. But I was determined not to rattle away nervously like last time so that Rob politely asked me to leave. I would just volunteer the barest details, but have impressively full and accurate answers to any questions which he might ask. I even wandered off once or twice and left him to concentrate on his researches. I pretended to be re-examining exhibits which I knew by heart. I had a chat with Milton.
‘Who’s the lucky fella, Alison?’
‘Ssh, Milton. He’s a writer I’m supposed to be showing round. He’s researching a play, for television.’
‘Oh, not a friend of yours, then? Too bad. But wasn’t he here the other day too?’
He eyed Rob with a searching bulbous eye. ‘A play for television, huh? What is it – a costume drama?’
I giggled. ‘I don’t think so. He says it’s about computers.’
Milton’s eyes bulged positively dangerously and he burst into a hooting derisive laugh. ‘Com-puters? Com-puters? Whatever is he doin’ here, then? Alison, you’ve been had!’
I tried to argue with Milton, but it was no good. He struck his solid thigh and laughed and laughed. To him, it was obvious that the whole thing was only a ploy and that Rob had come back to the museum just to visit me.
Rob spent less than an hour looking at the furniture, but he made a couple of rough sketches and he took some notes. He did call me over when he had finished looking at everything and asked me a few questions. I could answer all of them; I deserved a gold star. As we walked back to the Enquiries Desk, Rob said, ‘Well, thank you very much for your help. This has been quite an eye-opener. I don’t often come to museums.’
‘Really?’ I lied. ‘Well, I’m glad to have been of help. Do let us know when the play’s going to be broadcast.’
Rob grinned. ‘Thank you. That is a wonderfully optimistic remark. First, it has to be written. Then, it has to be sold.’
‘Oh, well,’ I said awkwardly. ‘Look forward to hearing from you in a year or so’s time.’
‘Even that,’ said Rob, ‘would be phenomenal.’ And then he added, so casually that for a moment I did not take in the full significance of what he was saying, ‘It seems rather a long time to wait to renew contact though, don’t you think? What about a drink maybe, one night next week?’
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Um.’
And then this morning’s flat denial. As if I could forget; how I blushed abominably and felt obliged to pretend that such an idea had never crossed my mind, how, after I had gracelessly accepted and we had agreed on Wednesday, even Rob had become awkward and said, ‘Now I overheard your name’s Alison, but you don’t even know mine – I’m Rob, Rob Wright.’ How I answered stiffly, ‘The rest of mine’s Woodgate. Pleased to meet you.’
We did not swap phone numbers or anything. Rob said he would meet me at the main entrance of the museum at six o’clock on Wednesday. We parted at the Desk. He could not have turned up. I could have had cold feet and slipped out on Wednesday by the back entrance.
Our ‘anniversary’ has been an absolutely ordinary day. After breakfast, I kissed Rob goodbye where his bald patch is beginning, and he absent-mindedly reached one arm round the back of his chair to pat me in response. I went off to the museum on my bicycle. Then I sat all day at the Enquiries Desk and waited for it to be time to come home.
I could tell that Rob had had a good day’s writing because he wasn’t there. After I have left in the morning, he takes his second mug of coffee into his study and settles down to work. He stays there, whatever happens, until some time in the afternoon – only coming out to fetch coffee or bread and cheese from the kitchen, or matches. To keep up his concentration, he doesn’t answer the telephone when he’s writing and, in fact, if I’m at home, he doesn’t talk to me either. It’s an agreement. He puts the message on his answering-machine; it says: ‘Hi, there! This is Rob Wright’s answering-machine. I’m sorry I can’t be with you right now but, if you can bring yourself to, please leave a message after the tone and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. OK, here comes the tone. Fire away.’ If things are going well, he feels free to stop around the time his friends in offices are finishing work, and he goes out for a run or to meet one of them for a drink. If they aren’t, I find him still battling away – in a filthy mood – when I come home at half-past six. I look up as I turn the street corner from Holland Park Avenue and, ironically, I have been trained to feel disappointed if I see the light is on in his study window and pleased if it is not.
There was a note for me on the kitchen table: ‘Alison! Did you know you were living with a genius? Got to end of first draft of Print-Out and gone to meet Andy at The George. Join us there and then all go for a curry? Rob.’
As I walked over to join them through the purple-orange London evening, my thoughts idled back over the year that has gone. In such a short time, so much has changed. I relished the way my whole life now revolves around Rob. He turned out to be unswerving, the kind of man about whom people say jealously, ‘He knows what he wants,’ and I had to be incorporated into his life rather than he into mine. But I was sure I liked it that way. Only recently it occurred to me that this might be a cheery rationalization of a situation I can do nothing about. I still don’t quite understand why I abruptly decided – in this, the week of our anniversary – that it was time I had a patch of my own again. It doesn’t make sense, if I’m as happy as I keep telling myself I am. And I know I am, because even while I was thinking these thoughts, I kept looking forward to seeing Rob’s welcoming gr
in across the smoky pub and to being squeezed ‘hello’ in his particular hug. I didn’t tell Rob about what I have done because I was embarrassed to admit that I had such feelings. I was embarrassed about what it was I had chosen to do; he would think it so geriatric. After an interview with the local branch of Age Concern, I have been allocated a housebound old lady whom I am going to visit once a week. I went to her house for the first time last Sunday but, oddly, she was out.
*
Alicia awoke on Monday morning with no memory of her unexpected caller of the evening before. This was the effect of her sleeping pills, which she took not so much to find sleep as to suppress her dreams. In the early days of their marriage, she and Leonard had always told each other their dreams first thing on waking, so that they could share even those black hours when they were of necessity apart. In those days, her dreams had always been perfectly presentable, she fancied; nothing that she need be ashamed of recounting, domestic in their detail maybe, but nothing like the gruesome visions which tormented her today. She thought they were every bit as bad as those video nasties the papers were always full of and she wondered guiltily why, if the videos could be banned, there wasn’t something which could be done to stop those frightful night-time showings in your head. At first, after Leonard’s death, she had welcomed her dreams, for they were a way of being reunited with him. She replayed her favourite dream reels night after night: Leonard in a straw boater, when they were courting, on the seafront at Eastbourne; Leonard going down on bended knee in her dressing-room to propose to her; Leonard waiting for her at the altar in a grey top-hat. Only, as the years went by, the difference between the real Leonard she remembered and the Leonard in her dreams grew distressingly until, in her dreams, he was no longer even recognizable and his actions were completely out of character. Imaginary burglars, muggers, breathe it not, rapists came along too until, in the end, her nights became quite unbearable, haunted by savage, unlikely scenarios in which Leonard, preposterously in league with the burglars, subjected her to all sorts of horrors and humiliations. That was when she hit on the sleeping pills and she had stuck to them ever since, taking them steadfastly as a kind of chemical censorship to confound the forces of darkness.
In the mornings, her head was heavy. It took her several minutes to remember where she was and, when she did, it was invariably a disappointment. She would rather have woken in almost any of the other houses she had lived in: Gascoigne Gardens, Albion Crescent, Mrs Pritchard’s, even in the boarding-house in Eastbourne. When she felt sufficiently restored to move, she went slowly to the bathroom and then, in her dressing-gown, down to the cold kitchen. She knew that, one of these days, she would no longer be able to manage the climb up and down the stairs and that then she would have to rig up a bed in the front room and wash as best she could in the scullery out at the back. The upstairs of the house would disappear as though it had been sliced off. She prayed that day was still far off, but every time she went down the stairs she made a point of carrying something dear down with her, in preparation. She had been doing this for about two years, she thought, but she was still a long way from completing her task. It was fraught with insuperable difficulties; although the downstairs of the house was now noticeably cluttered and the upstairs in places already bare, she had not yet carried down the half of what she wanted. Some of her belongings were too big for her to carry: the bed itself, of course, the chest of drawers, her favourite travelling trunk. She had emptied the drawers of the chest and painfully brought them down one at a time, but the chest itself would have to stay upstairs. Some of the things she had already brought down, she would suddenly miss upstairs: the gilt-framed mirror, the glass-domed clock. But she saw no other way of ensuring herself a comfortable decline. This morning, she picked up a white porcelain figurine of a little lady flinging up her hands in ecstasy, chosen and put ready at the head of the stairs the night before, and set out carefully. It was not until she reached the bottom of the stairs and stood facing the front door that she remembered the short shadow on the other side of the stained glass.
Involuntarily, she drew her dressing-gown closer across her collapsed breasts, as though someone were still out there, looking in at her. She patted her hair with her free hand and stared searchingly at the door, struggling with her dulled memory. Who on earth could it have been? And what a nerve! She stood deliberately a little straighter, as if to put the intruder in his place. How many times had he rung? And on a Sunday, at that hour too. She turned her back on the door with exaggerated purposefulness as if to show him that, whatever his business, he was not wanted here.
The memory of the shadow followed her into the kitchen, she filled the kettle at the stiff tap and, on her third attempt, she lit the gas. What month was it, she suddenly thought? Surely too early for ‘Penny for the Guy’? She went into the scullery where, she remembered, there was a calendar, but it turned out to be from two years previously, and displaying a midsummer page of a glorious flowery meadow which she had kept up because the picture cheered her. Drat it, she knew it was October and it didn’t help her identify her caller at all.
All the time she was preparing her breakfast, all the time she sat at the kitchen table eating it – for even tea and a slice of bread and margarine can be a business with dentures – the mystery worried her. It returned every time the sight of the front door or something else reminded her of it. And, as the morning progressed and no other event occurred to upstage it, it began to plague her.
As if an ominous presence had been positioned at the front door to snoop on her, Alicia began to act that Monday morning as if she had an audience. She was careful not to dab at her dripping nose with the back of her hand, nor to pick up breadcrumbs from her plate with the moistened tip of her finger. She felt that she no longer had her house to herself, although she scolded herself several times for being ridiculous. She wished that there were someone she could tell about the mystery, and she calculated when she would next have someone in the house whom she could talk to. Monday; that meant there were still two whole days before her home-help came on Wednesday, and her home-help was not a person in whom she would wish to confide anyway. The more she resolutely avoided paying attention to the footsteps on the pavement outside, the louder they resounded. The more she kept her face averted from the front door as she went through the hall, the brighter the stained-glass flowers blossomed.
Once, towards lunchtime, when she had her ears strained for the lady from the Meals on Wheels, a new thought nearly formed in her head, to the effect that it was nonsensical that here she was, so petrified because someone had come and rung her bell, and at the same time she was desperate because she had no one to tell about it. The thought nearly formed but, requiring greater mental agility than drugged Alicia could manage, it did not.
*
I was the first one at the main entrance of the museum, of course. Because Rob wasn’t there yet – anyway, who knew if he would turn up at all? – I walked round the museum in the windy dusk. It takes ten minutes to walk right round the buildings. Gusts of wind untidied my carefully combed hair and, coming at sharp angles, brought tears to my eyes. I felt sorry for myself in advance because I thought Rob was not going to be there.
By the time I got back to the front entrance again, it was nearly a quarter-past six and it must have been quite clear to Rob – who was by then standing on the steps and looking out for me – what I had done, since I was coming from such an odd direction and so windblown.
He bounded down the steps and said jokingly, ‘Hi, I thought maybe you’d stood me up.’ The sort of joke which can easily be made by someone who has thought nothing of the sort.
I smiled rather forcedly and said unconvincingly, ‘Sorry, I had to deliver a letter.’
Rob never lies.
He did not seem to read any special significance into this beginning. One of the first things I noticed about him was that he goes on living fluently in the present after incidents and comments on which I would get snagg
ed. At night I would replay that first exchange, and others, dubbing my character with brighter better lines. But Rob had already dismissed my botched beginning and with his hands in his pockets, his shoulders slightly hunched against October, he was looking around keenly and he said, ‘Well, you know this part of town. Where’s somewhere decent we can go for a drink?’
I had expected him to take that initiative. Over the preceding days, all my preparations had centred on conversation and clothes and I was thrown into a panic by the responsibility of the choice. The only place I could think of was the little mews pub where all the museum people go. I suggested it hastily and Rob, who had never been there, said, ‘Fine. Why not?’ It is crowded and stiflingly chintzy; that was why not. It would be full of people from the museum too, who would take note and ask me questions in the morning. But by the time I realized all this, we were already on our way there and of course it would have made an even worse impression to change my mind.
Rob was forbearing. He did not burst out, ‘My God, don’t you know anywhere better than this dump?’ He pushed his way to part of a bench seat for us and he capably fetched our drinks. He sat down next to me, managing by the way he spread himself, to cut out the doleful elderly drinker who shared our seat. He placed his cigarettes beside his beer mug and then he concentrated on me. But I sat in a state of miserable embarrassment, sure that my poor choice had spoilt my chances. Rob could not fail to equate the pink pub trimmings with my taste, the staid surroundings with me. I was too absorbed in my own disappointment to pay attention to him.
I had envisaged dinner. I had thought that, after the drink, Rob would suavely suggest that we went on somewhere smart to eat and, when he did not, of course I decided that I had fallen at the first hurdle. I never noticed that he liked me, that he, so capable, found my muddle and embarrassment endearing and that, in the laborious course of our conversation, I had managed to talk ‘fascinatingly’ about an exhibition of the first mechanical toys and capture his interest.
