‘You two seem to have hit it off,’ she says, not with any apparent resentment, but rather as if expressing lukewarm surprise at an incident that doesn’t interest her greatly.
‘I wouldn’t say we hit it off. Circled around each other, more like. She said we got on?’
‘Not explicitly, no.’
‘But that’s the impression you get?’
‘It’s a pretty obvious conclusion, isn’t it?’
‘I’m not with you. Conclusion from what?’
She gives a small growl of irritation. ‘For God’s sake, Malcolm. You know perfectly well. She wants to go back.’
‘She told you she wants to come back?’
‘I don’t know why you act all innocent. She told me she talked to you about it.’
‘Not really. She mentioned it, just before the train left. It came completely out of the blue.’
‘Sure, sure.’
‘Believe me or not, Kate, but it’s true. She never said a word until she was on the train. I honestly wasn’t sure she meant it,’ he says, trying not to sound as pleased as he is.
‘Evidently she did.’
‘I think the hotel’s the attraction. She really seemed to like the garden, and the pool.’
‘So I gather.’
‘And I think she began to get a feel for the place. For why we’re doing something special on the last night. We’re going to have a big meal –’
‘Yes, Malcolm, I remember.’
‘It should be nice.’
‘Yes, it’ll be spectacular. I entirely understand her excitement at the prospect. It’s a struggle to get her to eat anything I put in front of her, but I can see that a bellyful of stodgy English hotel food is a vastly more enticing proposition, particularly in the company of a gang of old-age pensioners. Not forgetting the pool, of course. Because we don’t have pools in London.’
‘Well –’
‘It’s all right, Malcolm. I’m not going to slit my wrists because she wants to see you again. Just don’t make out that this is nothing to do with you.’
‘I’m not making out anything, Kate. I didn’t suggest it: she mentioned it, but we didn’t talk about it. We didn’t talk much at all. Not as much as I’d have liked.’
‘I’m sure,’ she says, adding a wordless comment that’s made indistinct by a break in the signal.
‘So,’ he goes on, ‘what do you want to do?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, are you inclined to let her come back?’
‘I don’t think I have a choice. It’s more than my life’s worth to say no.’
‘Shall we talk about it?’
‘Not now, Malcolm. Not now. Tomorrow. The day after.’
‘There’s less than a week left.’
‘Yes, I know. We’ll talk tomorrow.’
‘Fine,’ he says, and then he asks: ‘So is Stephanie there?’
‘No.’
‘Oh.’
‘She went out, a quarter of an hour ago.’
‘She didn’t tell me she was going out.’
‘Didn’t tell me either.’
‘We were going to arrange to meet up tomorrow, somewhere in town. We haven’t agreed where yet.’
‘Can’t get enough of you,’ she wearily baits him.
‘So I can buy her some books. Backdated birthday presents.’
‘Yes. She said.’
‘I’m in London. The interview was this afternoon,’ he tells her, then it occurs to him that he hasn’t yet said what he intended to say at the outset. ‘It went well,’ he adds. ‘Virtually offered me the job on the spot.’
‘Congratulations.’
‘Looks like I’ll be starting in October. I’ll have to begin looking for somewhere to live right away.’
‘Have fun,’ she says flatly, through a drizzle of electrical hiss.
He pauses, then says: ‘I was sorry to hear about your father. Stephanie told me. I wish you’d have let me know. I’d have written to your mother.’
‘I didn’t think. Sorry,’ she says, but not in apology.
‘How is she?’
‘She’s coping.’
‘Give her my regards when you speak to her, will you?’
‘I will.’
‘What time will Stephanie be home?’
‘Ten. Eleven. Twelve. Your guess is as good as mine.’
‘Could you ask her to give me a call when she gets in? I gave her my mobile number.’
‘Sure.’
‘We’ll speak soon.’
‘Yes,’ she exhales.
Before going up to his room he goes into the first-floor bar for a whisky. He sits in one of the windows that overlooks the road. The traffic is heavy in both lanes, but the triple glazing muffles the noise so effectively that all he can hear is the conversation, such as it is, of the businessmen who are playing cards around the table on the far side of the room. In the window of the newsagent’s across the street a handwritten sign comprising fourteen sheets of A4 paper, one letter to each sheet, proclaims ‘Fresh Sanwiches’. Five storeys above the shop, a woman stands at a window looking at the street, stroking a cat with one hand while waving a hairdryer around her head with the other. He takes his phone from his jacket, to make sure it’s on, then puts it back. A white stretch limousine, its radiator grille adorned with flashing rainbow lights, is creeping towards the junction, preceding a tourist coach from Poland. ‘Let’s be having you,’ says one of the businessmen, spreading his cards in a fan for them all to see. ‘Arse,’ says another, and he lifts the empty wine bottle from the table, flicking a fingernail on it to attract the barman’s attention. At each end of the bar stands a plastic Tiffany-style lamp, and the bottles of spirits are multiplied by brown-tinted mirrors. Looking at the hideous lampshades and the beery mirrors behind the bar, he is reminded of a hotel bar in Amsterdam, where the walls were clad with mirrors that made everyone look like a jaundice case, from which springs a memory of the place that had life-size pin-up girls in stained glass, which in turn leads to another hotel in Amsterdam, the one with the Manhattan Niterie. There was the Capri Bistro on one floor, all terracotta and red-chequered tablecloths and swags of plastic garlic, and in the basement was the Niterie, with its black leather banquettes and neon skyscraper silhouettes. And also in the basement there was a Raffles bar, fitted out in wicker and bamboo. It was in the Raffles bar that the manager bought them a drink and handed over the keys to a couple of rooms, inviting them to look around at their leisure. On the stage of the Manhattan Niterie a woman in cerise sequins was miming to Nancy Sinatra. ‘Not in a million years,’ Kate whispered on the stairs. One of the keys was for a suite, the Rembrandt Suite, at the end of a corridor that was hung with reproductions of Rembrandt paintings. He was looking at one of the pictures when Kate took the key and went ahead, and when he opened the door of the suite it was dark inside. Then a light came on beside the bed, and Kate was sitting on the floor, wearing one of the yellow towelling robes from the bathroom, and nothing else. He sips his whisky, looking out at the traffic, remembering Kate in the yellow bathrobe, and it is like remembering a scene from a film.
fourteen
He knows these streets by heart, as securely as he knows any poem. They are a corridor that comes into existence as he moves along it, a corridor through the invisible, the limitless, the unformed mass that is London. Eight paces from the stippled paving he finds the crossing, where he turns right and then left at the corner, where the tumult of Kingsway’s traffic will suddenly fade. He moves to the left side of the pavement, to avoid the wide holes from which the trees grow, his hand grazing on the railings and the stone blocks to which they are fixed. Left again, by the broad pillar box, and at the third driveway he stops: opposite, across the road, is the gate of the park of Lincoln’s Inn Fields. At the gate he turns right, along the perimeter path, with the scuffle and thwack of the tennis courts to his left, and when the swerve of the path straightens out there’s the bench. He sits down. Here was w
here he preferred to sit with his reader, when the weather was fine. His vision by then was rarely more than a dark monochrome, an almost impenetrable smog in which people and postboxes looked the same, doors and windows and walls looked the same, and car headlights at night put a film of dull grey all over his eyes. Some days he could barely distinguish anything smaller than a building, but there were moments, on the sunniest afternoons, when he would perceive a shapeless incidence of colour, a shapeless pigmentation, and some of those moments happened here, when the sun burning on the grass and through the leaves above him would force a murky green into his eyes, like moss glimpsed in the depths of a cave. Thinking of those rare last flickerings, as he experienced them here, he does not recall that they caused him torment, and neither does recalling them torment him now. Rather, he seems to remember acceptance, akin to the later stages of mourning, a sombre equanimity due in part, perhaps, to the companionship and friendship of his readers, and in part to this particular place, a locality at once calm and diverting, in which he feels separate yet not removed from the life of the city, hearing people talking and strolling all around him, and the tennis players, and the cars passing behind him, endlessly falling away.
Soon, as always used to happen, he finds himself eavesdropping, but the nearest conversation, between two women who sound as if they are in their thirties and work together, is turning into an argument, and it becomes clear that the reason for the argument is that one of the women is married and is having an affair with a colleague, a younger colleague, whose youth would appear to be the basis of the other woman’s objection. Discreetly, at what seems to be an indignant pause, he gets up from the bench, almost forgetting the bag of new tapes and batteries, and walks past the gate through which he entered, leaving instead by the one in the corner of the square, by the waterless fountain, where the pavement is extremely wide. He goes through the paved arcade and emerges into the din of Kingsway, by the junction where you can never be sure if the lights are in your favour. A very tall woman assists him across, says goodbye and sets out in the direction that he will be going. He passes under the canopy of the hotel, then feels for the low stone wall that runs along the side of the Freemasons’ Hall. He skirts the curving steps at the front of the hall, goes over a small road and past the pub, then it’s the street he knows is Drury Lane. Beyond the junction there’s tarmac underfoot and the shops begin at the approach to Bow Street, where taxis are always turning to the right. Now, around the busier shops, it becomes harder to make progress, but after forty paces there’s a break in the buildings, the alleyway that takes him through to the high dead wall of the Opera House. He follows the wall to the end, to the line of high bollards and the stream of people on the broad cobbled path to the old market hall. He steps into the flow and stays in it, past a busker playing a kazoo and another blowing a didgeridoo, to the bottom of the slope, where the crowd disperses into a dozen streams, with the slithering sound of a busker’s violin above the eddies of voices and footfalls.
He goes up the small stone ramp to the colonnade, which he follows as far as the passageway, almost at the end, and here he cuts through, on greasy paving stones, into the space before St Paul’s church. A gathering of people is on his right, talking excitedly: in front of the church someone is performing. ‘Do with a bit of support here,’ a young man yells, his voice coming from somewhere higher than the heads of his audience. Clapping begins, beating time regularly, then accelerating in a crescendo. He walks behind the audience, and as the clapping disintegrates he makes contact with the rope that is strung around the tables of the café. Now a right-angled turn is needed, down the single low step that runs between the market hall and the church, then across the cobbles to the kerb, which redirects him leftwards, towards the opening in the sturdy timber barrier that constricts the road here. He pauses, facing the corner from which the traffic comes. A van is there, moving towards him very fast, with a taxi close behind. Someone stands behind, then pushes past with an agitated mutter. Waiting, trying to recall the name of the street, he hears Claudia’s ‘Hello’, as it was spoken here, almost on this very spot.
He waits, making an effort not to remember any more of that day, to resist the attraction of nostalgia. At a gap in the traffic he rushes across the road and hurries onward to Trafalgar Square. He climbs the steps of St-Martin-in-the-Fields, to stand in the gateway in the middle of the portico’s railings. A breeze wafts into him from the square’s open air. As if to obliterate all thoughts in the turbulent pool of sounds, he attends wholly to what is present: the vortex of traffic noise, voices on the steps below him, phrases in a language he does not recognise, a whirr of wings, a distant chime, car horns and the grind of buses, a whistle like a referee’s whistle, voices from the West Midlands, a crunch of bicycle gears, a burst of a police siren, the faint gush of fountains. Two men are talking by the door of the church; he interrupts their conversation to ask if there is a concert this lunchtime. ‘Think so,’ says one of them, his breath is a stink of cheese and nicotine. ‘Yes,’ calls another man from the vestibule. He goes inside and takes a seat at the back. Heavy feet boom on the hollow floor of a pew nearby and someone is talking on the other side of the church, too quietly to be overheard. A light metal stepladder is being scraped across the floor at the front, but there is nothing with which he can occupy himself, nothing that will enable him to disregard the memories of the day Claudia spoke to him, memories that are like a gathering crowd, surrounding him silently. Weakening, he tells himself that he will listen for a while, allow himself this one indulgence, then he remembers that he had gone into town to deliver some work, an instruction manual, to an office in a lane off Long Acre.
It had almost stopped raining, but water was still dribbling from gutters and awnings, and there were spits of water in the frigid wind. The stones of the piazza were slippery, and it was when he was picking his way across the cobbles that he realised a shoe was leaking. He seems to remember that there was scaffolding near the corner, because he had put his hand on a steel pole as he hesitated on the kerb. He put a foot down on the road, into water, and a young woman’s voice said ‘Hello’ in a way that made him think she knew him, though he had no idea who she might be. She touched the inside of his elbow with her fingertips, steering him lightly, and stayed with him when they reached the other side of the road. A stretch of pavement had been dug up, she warned him. It was there, as she guided him past the rubble, that he asked where she was from, and he remembers using the word ‘cieco’, and the smile in her voice when she said, ‘Yes, that is right.’ He lied about where he was going, so he could walk with her. He can’t imagine how so much happened in so short a space of time, but it must have been before they crossed to go down the road that leads to the Strand that the motorbike passed them, very close. ‘Idiot! Idiot man!’ Claudia shouted, batting at the skirt of her raincoat. ‘Can you believe what he did? He saw us. Stupid. Imbecile.’ That was how they came to be talking about her father living in London when ‘everything was very wow’. Somehow, in this interval he learned that her father and mother lived in Recanati and she was going back home the week after next. The imminence of her departure and the fact that she was leaving the country affected him with a sharpness that surprised him and was absurd, because it made no difference whether she was going next week or next year, or was travelling one mile or a thousand – once their conversation was over and she had walked away, she would be lost forever. ‘Recanati?’ he asked, and so on and so on, trying to think what he could do, and then they were standing by the pedestrian crossing. ‘Well,’ he said, with some trepidation at what he might be about to say, to which she replied, in a tone of elation, as if she had seen a flamingo flying over Charing Cross station: ‘There’s a shoes shop.’ She laughed and apologised, putting one hand on top of his forearm and one gently on the underside, a gesture that seemed to acknowledge the shock her laughter had caused. Every winter, she explained, her father asked her to bring back a pair of English shoes, ‘brogs’, in
a particular style he had favoured for as long as she could remember. This morning she had been to the January sales. She had been to Harrods, which was horrible, really horrible. Dabbing his soles on the wet pavement, he told her that he too needed new shoes. ‘Could I come with you? Or vice versa,’ he asked. There was a pause, in which perhaps she decided that a blind man was unlikely to have designs on her. ‘If you can’t trust the judgement of an Italian woman in a question of style, who can you trust?’ He actually said that, he recalls, wincing at the memory of his ingratiation. ‘No, no, no,’ she pronounced, rejecting a pair proposed by the assistant, as though she were pained that things of such ugliness could exist in the world and felt sorry for the poor girl whose job required her to foist them on her customers. ‘’Orrible,’ she whispered to him, as he felt the glossy leather. ‘They look like slugs. Huge brown slugs.’ In a café on Charing Cross Road they sat at a small Formica table, with the bags of shoes between their feet. At some point he became aware of a scent like cinnamon and remarked on it, not knowing where it came from. In German, Zimt, he told her. They talked about her research and the trip to the Philippines, but it wasn’t then, it was a week or two later, at the Italian restaurant near Oxford Street, that he heard the story of Claudia, aged nine, on holiday with her parents in Greece, where they all went out on a boat to go fishing, and she saw a live octopus for the first time. Back at the harbour the fisherman put the octopus into a deep stone trough of sea water, and she stayed there, watching the sea creature floating in its prison, while her parents and brother sat at a table outside the taverna on the harbourside. Spellbound, she watched the octopus for an hour. It was uncanny and beautiful, like an angel of the seas. ‘So I became a lover of the cephalopod,’ she said, and there was such affection in ‘octopus’ as Claudia spoke it, as if it were a pet name she had devised. That was when he gave her a present for her father: a jar of Patum Peperium, the gentleman’s relish. ‘It’s disgusting,’ he warned her, placing the little plastic puck in her hand, and now someone at the back of the church starts to applaud, and someone to his left is clapping, joined by half a dozen others scattered around the church, followed by a single violin note, then the other strings, tuning. ‘Huge brown slugs,’ he hears. ‘Yooge brown slugs.’
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