by Helen Harris
She realized with a rush of resentment that all her ordinary everyday preoccupations had been swept aside. She had nearly forgotten to ask after Pearl’s boy too. Had he enjoyed his biscuits? Pearl had said that with four of his front teeth gone, biscuits were still a bit much to manage. She had added that he was ‘in traction’, but Alicia did not know what that meant. She thought of a cross between ‘fractious’ and ‘intractable’ and, imagining the boy propped-up sulkily on his pillows, pulling a pouting face at his visiting mother bearing the biscuits, she had said briskly, ‘Ah well, he’ll snap out of that soon enough, I expect.’
But her own week, her own considerations, what had become of them? Sitting down heavily on the settee, she realized that her own week was set out on the blue and purple table mat; her own considerations were in the kitchen, wrapped up in Mr Patel’s brown paper bags.
She had dressed warmly, taken her handbag and her shopping-bag, and she had gone at her snail’s pace down to the corner shop. A bitter wind blew in her face all the way to the corner and single huge raindrops splashed demeaningly only on her. She struggled along, stamping her two sticks down one after the other, while the younger and more able-bodied danced provocatively past her. The Council still had not mended the pavement. All along her path there were unbelievably tall piles of dogs’ dirt which, if you had not known they were dogs’ dirt, you might easily have mistaken for the droppings of some gigantic wild beast. Of course, if you had to walk all the way bent nearly double, it did magnify what was on the pavement.
She was in terrible shape by the time she reached Mr Patel’s. Mr Patel had seen her coming – of course, the pace she went, he had had enough time to – and he held the door open for her, beaming. ‘Good morning, good morning, and what can we do for you?’
Oh yes, it’s all very well for you to be cheerful, Alicia snarled to herself. Raking in other people’s money to feather your nest.
She did not return his greeting as she hauled herself up the step, but made her way proudly past him and began with dignity to survey his shelves. It was a long time since she had taken a look at the cakes shelves and she couldn’t right away remember where they were. So, to regain her breath, she propped herself arbitrarily in front of the pet food and waited there for a while. A number of badly brought-up youngsters pushed their way past her. One of them panted fierce fumes into her ear. She moved along to take a look at the biscuits, which she knew quite well. She had already decided she would buy fancy ones; it was just a question of the price. The cakes turned out to be on a separate stand of their own at the end, right by the till. She stood there for such a long time, examining them, that Mr Patel could not resist butting in from behind her: ‘What are you looking for, dear? Can I help you?’
She couldn’t say she was eating the pictures, which was what, in her mind’s eye, she was doing: the miniature milk chocolate rolls on the purple box, which were filled inside with the fluffiest of bright white cream, or the pretty pastel fancies on lace doilys which, in cross-section, contained the softest yellow sponge. Mr Patel’s importunate question nearly rushed her into the wrong decision.
‘I’m looking for a Battenburg,’ she said smartly, that being the one cake which she was sure was not there.
But, to her fury, he reached one down from the highest shelf and presented it to her proudly in a long cellophane tube. It was such a long cellophane tube, as he thrust it at her, that she knew it would take her for ever to finish it off.
‘Oh, I don’t like the look of that,’ she said quickly. ‘No, I think maybe cup cakes.’
Mr Patel tossed the Battenburg lightly back to its high shelf, depriving Alicia of the pleasure of hesitating over it. ‘Cup cakes,’ he agreed. ‘Here you have every sort of cup cake.’ He beamed at Alicia so broadly that she felt positively dwarfed by his benevolence.
‘What make are they?’ she asked vaguely, not that she cared. Her eye skittered a last time up and down the shelves. Maybe she should get a bit of angel cake, so pretty with all the different coloured layers, first the pink, then the yellow and then the white. Only angel cake was such a let-down when you got it on your cake-fork. All those different coloured layers tasted disappointingly the same. The colours were just a con; they tasted of nothing much at all. But she knew she was only procrastinating. She had set her sights on a box of fancies, which she could already see laid out on her cake plate on the very same lace doily that was on the box.
At least the girl was punctual. Alicia could not have borne it if after all that build-up, she had been late. When her bicycle bowled up to the front door, Alicia was long ready, changed and made-up and waiting at the window, beside herself at what she had begun.
‘Gosh, you shouldn’t have gone to any trouble,’ was the first thing the girl said when she walked into the front room.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Alicia answered sharply. She was put out that her efforts should be so soon exposed.
‘You’ve laid everything out so prettily. Honestly, you shouldn’t have.’
Alicia glared at her. The girl had no manners. First you talked of this and that, with your eyes averted, and only when the tea table was brought to your attention did you acknowledge that you had come to tea. She thought out a reproving answer while the ill-mannered girl fumbled with her things. But the girl was scrabbling in her handbag and, to Alicia’s amazement, she produced a small gift-wrapped package. ‘I’ve brought you a little something,’ she said.
It was over eleven years since anyone had given Alicia a present. Leonard, on the last birthday that he was alive. She stood stock-still and looked at it and the mittened hand which offered it and, for a measurable amount of time, she was quite unable to stretch out her own hand and accept it, in case it turned out to be a misunderstanding and was snatched upsettingly back.
The girl encouraged her. ‘It’s really nothing.’
Alicia stiffly took it and put it, politely unopened, on the mantlepiece. To her disbelief, she heard her voice from ‘East Lynne’ say, ‘Thank you, my dear. How charming!’
They faced each other.
‘Do sit down,’ said Alicia. She examined her visitor from head to foot. Without her coat and her tatty fox, she looked quite schoolgirlish and awkward. She was so nervous that she twice crossed and uncrossed her feet, which were in funny old-fashioned ankle-boots. Alicia finished her examination at the feet.
‘However do you manage with those?’ she asked. ‘On your bicycle?’
The girl had ridden over from Holland Park. Alicia remembered Holland Park, although it was years of course since she had been there. She strained to picture it.
‘Where do you live?’ she asked. ‘In a flat?’
The girl nodded and Alicia was satisfied; she could imagine that. It was like on the television; young girls in London sharing flats, telling one another their secrets, while in the background tens of pairs of tights hung drying over the bath and a week’s washing-up was stacked undone in the sink.
‘What’s it like?’ she asked eagerly.
The girl said hesitatingly that it was very nice. ‘We’re on the top floor of one of those big old white houses. It’s six flights up, but it’s very peaceful.’
‘No lift?’ enquired Alicia.
Greedily, she pressed the girl to describe it a little more. They had two bedrooms, a study, a kitchen and a bathroom. Even though they were up on the top floor, they still had the original high ceilings and, in every room, those beautiful tall but draughty windows.
‘And,’ Alicia asked, ‘do you have heating?’
The girl smiled and pretended to shiver. Those windows and the high ceilings gobbled up an awful amount of heating. But, on the whole, she thought it was well worth it for the space. They gave you the impression that you lived somewhere much bigger and much grander than you did. Yes, she liked it although, she added politely, she hoped that she would one day end up living in a proper house like Alicia.
‘How do you get on with the o
thers?’ asked Alicia.
‘The others?’
‘The others in your flat. Do you get on top of one another?’
‘Oh, oh no. We get on fine … We sometimes have a bit of trouble with our downstairs neighbours –’
‘Foreign?’
‘Well yes, but –’
Alicia nodded sagely. This again, she could imagine. In comedy programmes, people came out in their curlers, with rolling pins, driven mad by the noise. She leant forward expectantly. ‘Black?’
‘No,’ said the girl reproachfully. ‘No, Iranians actually.’
Alicia was momentarily mystified. She had no opinions on Iranians. She hazarded a guess: ‘Are they very noisy?’
‘No,’ said the girl. ‘No, quite the contrary. But they’re always complaining about us.’
‘Whatever do you do?’ asked Alicia.
The girl looked embarrassed. ‘I don’t think they like our music’
‘Oh,’ Alicia said disapprovingly. ‘Oh, do you play loud music?’ It was funny, she thought – she would not have imagined this dowdy little girl leaping around to loud music.
‘It’s not so much that it’s loud,’ the girl said, ‘but my friend likes Indian music. I don’t know if you know Indian music?’
Alicia didn’t really know what the girl meant by Indian music but, because she didn’t want to seem out of her depth, she surprised herself by announcing, ‘I once played the part of a Maharanee in a beautiful love story set in India.’
The girl’s tense face was instantly transformed. ‘Ooh!’ she exclaimed. ‘Ooh, how interesting!’
Alicia was suddenly embarrassed by what she had let slip. She stood up abruptly. ‘If you’ll excuse me for a moment,’ she said formally, ‘I think it’s time to make the tea.’
‘Oh, please let me,’ said the girl behind her, as she made for the door. ‘Is there anything I can do to help?’
Alicia often went into a trance in the kitchen; it was the combination of the poor light and the expectation of whatever she was cooking. Once she was safely in there, she very nearly forgot that she had a visitor sitting in the front room and she had no idea how long had gone by when she jerked back to the realization that the kitchen was full of steam and the kettle was screeching. She hastily bundled the pot of tea together, covered it with the better cosy and carried it back through the hall as quickly as she could. My goodness, she thought in a panic, that girl has had time to pocket every ornament in the place.
Her darkest fears were confirmed as she came into the front-room doorway for, instead of sitting waiting as she had been told, the girl was crouching down over by the bookcase, peering at the rows of photographs on the shelves.
‘What are you looking at?’ snapped Alicia.
The girl scrambled up. ‘Your theatre pictures,’ she exclaimed. ‘They’re wonderful!’
Alicia bridled. How dare she go poking around while she, Alicia, was out of the room? How dare she not be the least bit ashamed that she had been found out?
‘Come and sit down,’ said Alicia angrily. ‘I thought you had come for tea, not investigations.’
She poured them each a cup in the chilly silence which followed. She watched the girl like a hawk to observe her table manners.
Alicia was proud, there was no denying it; she was proud of the spread which she set before them. As well as the fancies, she had bought a packet of cream wafers which came in three colours. The tea-table was a sight to behold.
She offered the girl the plate of fancies. ‘Go on,’ she said gruffly. ‘Treat yourself.’
The girl took a chocolate one. Alicia was so overjoyed that she had not taken the only pink one, which she had set her heart on since Saturday, that she very nearly forgave her for prying.
‘You’re interested in theatrical things then, are you?’ she asked conciliatingly. She picked up her cake politely and bit delicately into the first corner of pink icing in an ecstasy of delight which nearly blotted out the girl’s answer.
‘Well, old things generally,’ the girl answered.
Alicia’s first mouthful was quite spoilt. She put the cake down, and gave a harsh laugh. ‘Well, that includes me too, I suppose,’ she said nastily.
She did enjoy watching the girl blush. But she was not prepared for her answer.
‘Oh, please don’t get me wrong, Mrs Queripel. But I am interested in your memories.’
Alicia snapped, ‘Well, you shouldn’t be.’ She was going to add, ‘My memories are my business,’ but she decided it might be too harsh when she noticed the girl’s desperately upset expression. Goodness, she thought fleetingly, who’s supposed to be jollying up whom? Instead she asked her, ‘And that’s what led you to go prying among my pictures?’
‘I was looking to see if I could tell which one was you,’ the girl confessed.
Alicia paused. She had picked the sugar rosette off her fancy and she held it between her finger-tips. ‘And,’ she asked coyly, ‘could you?’
‘Oh yes,’ said the girl in a rush of eager reassurance. ‘Oh yes, in every one.’
Alicia popped the rosette into her mouth and crunched it deliciously to bits.
They ate for a while in silence; the girl did not seem to be making much headway with her fancy. It was Alicia who broke the silence by asking after a minute or two, ‘This flat of yours – is it decently decorated?’
‘Well, it’s not to my taste,’ said the girl.
‘Oh, I know what furnished rooms can be like,’ said Alicia. She could just see the set for the television series: drab walls, dull curtains and hand-me-down furniture. Half visible in the background, she even imagined a grasping landlord whom she called Abrahams or Isaacs.
But the girl amazed her. ‘It’s not rented,’ she said. ‘It’s all my friend’s furniture. He owns it.’
‘You mean your friend’s a man?’ said Alicia. I’ve been had, she thought.
She sat very straight and she stared at the girl, full of disapproval. What tell-tale signs had she missed? There didn’t seem to be anything about her which suggested that she was that sort of a girl. She was evidently secretive, on top of everything else. How shocking! But as Alicia got over her amazement, she found she had to struggle to stop her disapproval from being swept aside by glee. It was of course wrong – oh, it was very wrong – but so much more interesting.
Only for appearance’s sake, she concentrated on her disapproval. ‘Well, you’re old enough to know your own mind, I suppose,’ she said grimly, ‘But let me tell you, we did things very differently in my day.’
She must have glanced unconsciously at Leonard’s picture for confirmation, because the girl asked eagerly, ‘Was he your husband?’
Alicia drew herself up even straighter. She clasped her hands above her cake plate and in her most dramatic voice, she declared, ‘He was my life!’
The girl was duly impressed, Alicia could see. She took advantage of the lofty impression she had made to lean forward and ask her keenly, ‘Your friend – how long have you been with him?’
She did wonder, when the girl was gone, if she had not maybe asked her too many questions. The girl had glanced at her watch all of a sudden and got up in a fluster. ‘Gosh, it’s dreadfully late! I must be going.’ Was she simply fleeing from Alicia’s questions?
Alicia accompanied her to the front door and then watched her going away; she tied the paws of her mangy fox and unlocked her bicycle. As she climbed on to it, she looked round and she saw Alicia. She gave her a quick little wave before she pedalled off into the dark.
Alicia was left alone in her living room. She stayed for a while at the window. It was a nice time of day, with the street-lights on and not everyone having yet thought to close their curtains. She hoped that someone might have looked in on her and her visitor and seen them sipping their tea together in the lamplight.
She turned back to her room but, extraordinary thing, it had been transformed. In front of her was another room in which two people had just had tea. Th
e furniture stood in new positions. The depth of the silence had changed. Sitting down to take stock in her armchair, Alicia was indignant. Was the room always going to be different now, even when that troublesome girl wasn’t there?
Her alarmed eyes fell on the tea-table. How sad that two of the fancies had been eaten, that two of the plates had been soiled. She took comfort in the neatly aligned uneaten wafers. Everything would have been so much better, she thought bitterly, if that girl had never come.
It was only a long, long time afterwards that Alicia remembered her present. Where on earth had she put it? She caught sight of the golden ribbon glinting on the mantlepiece. For quite a while, she just sat and looked at it and then, for quite a while, she held and felt it. At last, she opened it. It was small and cushiony, like a cloth toy. She brought it up to her face and examined it; it seemed to be heart-shaped and made of a flowery material. For a moment she was mystified. Then she remembered days which had smelt differently. She put it to her nose and sniffed it. It was a frilly sachet of strong, sweet-smelling lavender.
*
My first night here in Rob’s bedroom – did I think then that something important was beginning or just that I was holding spinsterhood at bay? As I lay awake afterwards, far too exhilarated to sleep, and heard for the first time the now familiar night-time noises of his house – the sharp shots of the central heating system and the loose skylight trying to flap away – did I think that I was here to stay or that the night was just an episode of uncharacteristic adventure?
We had dinner in a little Greek café which Rob likes. One of their specialities is sticky pastries and, even though Rob has not got a sweet tooth, he had agreed to have pastries to humour me.
