Spencer's List

by Lissa Evans

  ‘Thanks, little Fran. Hug first?’ He held out his arms, and it was like standing in front of an open fridge.

  ‘Hug afterwards,’ she said, decisively.

  In the heat of the water, Duncan’s body turned from white with red extremities, to red with purple extremities, and finally to a uniform shrimp pink. He lay with his eyes closed, groaning half-pleasurably at the tingle of returning blood, his hands floating just below the surface, and his bony knees jutting above it. He was thinner than when Fran had last seen him, more gristly, and a few silver hairs glistened in the scrubby beard. She added a little more hot water to the tub, and poured in some of Sylvie’s blue bubble bath.

  Duncan opened his eyes. ‘I feel reborn,’ he said.

  ‘Do you want your cocoa now?’ She offered him a mug to which she had added a large dash of brandy, and he sat up, slopping water onto the floor. The bathroom was already wetter than she had ever seen it, condensation dripping down the tiles and Duncan’s clothes lying in a pool of their own making. It reminded her of the first occasion that she and Duncan had shared a bathroom. He took a sip of the cocoa.

  ‘Fucking fantastic.’

  ‘Are you hungry?’

  ‘Nah.’ He lay back and looked at her, with an expression that she could not read.

  She felt a little uneasy. ‘What?’

  He shook his head and then reached out and took one of her hands. He held it loosely and turned it over, as if checking the provenance. ‘What a small hand. Such small fingers.’

  For one ludicrous moment, she thought he was about to whip an engagement ring from – well, from God knows where – and slip it onto her finger. Instead, reality asserted itself and he squeezed her hand and farted, creating a temporary jacuzzi effect near the taps.

  ‘Jesus, Duncan.’ She jerked her head back.

  ‘Loud and lethal, eh? Sorry about that.’

  He settled himself again and resumed his study of her face, his own assuming a look of gentle melancholy. ‘Why didn’t you come with me, Fran?’

  ‘Why? You know why. Because I had a job and a mortgage and I didn’t want to live in a tent for a year.’

  ‘But were there other reasons?’

  ‘Well… yes.’ She paused. All the other reasons involved wanting to see less of Duncan, but it seemed rather ungrateful to bring that up when he’d just schlepped halfway across Europe to see her. It seemed to be the right answer, in any case. He nodded significantly and took her hand again, this time sandwiching it between his hot, wet palms.

  ‘I missed you so much, Fran. I didn’t realize how lonely I’d be. The only people I was meeting were shopkeepers and gits in fast cars who tried to run me down. I was smoking a lot, and getting very low and I just wanted you there, keeping me plugged to reality. I wanted little stubborn Fran walking beside me and the dark horizon ahead. The long… dark… horizon.’ He had drawn her hand closer, so that she was leaning halfway across the bath, looking into his gooseberry-green eyes. ‘And then after I’d crossed the border from Denmark I started to realize that it wasn’t a journey across land I was making, it was a journey through my mind. And I spent hours in there sometimes – exploring, searching…’

  Her gaze drifted. When Duncan was in poetic mood, she always lost the thread of what he was saying and started focusing on the carnal. Beneath the bubbles his chest rose and fell, the hairs just breaking surface, and out of the corner of her eye she could just see his cock, floating palely in the deep. She wondered whether she should get in the bath too; she’d be more careful this time, more aware of the downstairs ceiling. He’d started talking about the landscape again, and she forced herself to listen.

  ‘… seemed to reflect just what I was thinking. I’d see a lake and it would show me how deep my thoughts were; I’d see pylons and ideas would flash across my mind. Like electricity. I think I was going a bit mad.’ He released her hand temporarily and took a slug of cocoa, before resuming the clasp and the intensity, his voice growing husky with nostalgia. ‘I was looking for a sign – something to show me why I was there, and what I should be doing. And then one evening I got to this little town. It was just an ordinary place. I was going to stay there one night and then walk straight through and back to open country. I camped in an orchard on the outskirts and when I woke up the next morning I looked through the tent flap and – it was amazing.’ His eyes were vivid, meeting hers and then bouncing off to examine their own private landscape. His body tensed with the memory and she watched the muscles springing into line down his belly. ‘The whole orchard was in blossom. The whole orchard –’

  ‘In November?’ said Fran, incredulously, lust suddenly dissipated.

  ‘In November,’ he confirmed, almost with reverence.

  ‘What sort of trees?’

  ‘I don’t know, but the blossom was white. And it smelled of… heaven. And I knew it was the sign I was looking for. I didn’t feel mad any more, I just knew I was in the right place.’

  ‘What shape were the leaves?’

  ‘And the next thing I saw were two people coming through the orchard towards me, bringing me breakfast. It was like coming home.’ He pressed her hand between his own and then released it rather theatrically, as if launching a dove.

  ‘I wonder if –’ With an effort she wrenched herself away from the subject of unseasonal blossom (although she’d have taken a substantial bet that what he’d seen hadn’t been an orchard at all, but a few bushes of Viburnum fragrans, which flowered all winter directly onto bare stems and could only be mistaken for fruit trees by someone who couldn’t tell a cornflower from a speedwell). ‘So who were these people, then?’

  ‘They were part of a community – it’s called Schone Welt. It means –’

  ‘Beautiful World,’ said Fran, who’d done German O Level.

  ‘– and they’re artists and craftsmen and cooks and teachers. They run a restaurant and a gallery and they’ve converted a farmhouse and all the outbuildings to live in. Fran, it’s amazing.’ He was almost breathless with enthusiasm. ‘The ones who brought me coffee were Hella and Auguste. Auguste is a carpenter.’ He left an obvious gap for her to fill with a question.

  ‘And Hella?’

  ‘Hella.’ He repeated the word rather slowly, as if for the pure pleasure of saying it, and then said it again. ‘Hella…’

  Fran looked at him for a moment, and then sat back on the linen basket and put her feet up on the edge of the bath. ‘Oh, right,’ she said, ‘I get it.’

  Duncan heaved himself into a sitting position, slopping water onto the floor. ‘It’s more complicated than that, Fran. That’s why I had to see you.’

  ‘Uhuh. Hang on a minute.’ With studied calm, she mopped up the worst of the flood with a bathmat, and then blotted the rest with a couple of handfuls of loo roll. ‘All right,’ she said, sitting back down again. ‘Carry on. You were telling me about Hella.’ The word came out with the harshness of an expectoration.

  Duncan took a deep breath. ‘You know when something’s just right, when it fits into place like the last piece in a jigsaw?’ He waited, yearningly, for an answer and Fran allowed herself a teeny little nod. ‘Well that’s what Schone Welt felt like. They took me in and I was suddenly a part of it. They’d wanted someone to document what they were doing, and there I was, right where I was needed. Like a limb, an essential limb.’

  As opposed to a non-essential one, thought Fran, pettishly.

  ‘I mean, it was the first time I’ve ever wanted to stay anywhere. You know me, Fran, you know how hard it is for me to settle. But I didn’t have to walk away from there to find new horizons… there were new horizons –’ he spread his hands as if kneading stiff dough ‘– within it.’ He looked at her expectantly.

  ‘Well how come you never mentioned this, then?’ she asked. ‘How come your letters were still wittering on about factory chimneys and ditches and things?’

  ‘Because part of everything, part of what I felt, had to do with Hella – and I couldn’t
mention Hella in a letter because… because she was too huge a subject to mention.’

  Fran had a sudden image of a Teutonic Bessie Bunter, puffing across the orchard with a plate full of cream buns. ‘Well, you’re here now,’ she said, more brusquely than she meant to. ‘Fire away.’

  ‘Don’t be angry, little Fran,’ said Duncan, placing a wet hand on her knee. She restrained an impulse to shake it off and instead took a deep breath. This was ridiculous; she was being ridiculous. Duncan, whom she didn’t love, had never loved, and in fact had tried to dump only eight months ago, had clearly met the woman of his dope-fuelled dreams, and she, Fran, had turned into the archetypal jealous cow, defending her man with hooves unsheathed. She hadn’t known she was capable of it; jealous of Duncan, for fuck’s sake, with his unreadable letters and supine career plan.

  She picked up his hand and plonked it back in the bath. ‘I’m not angry,’ she said.

  ‘You look angry.’

  ‘Well I’m not. You were going to tell me about Hella. What’s she like?’

  His face seemed to melt and then reassemble itself into a new and sloppy shape. ‘She’s tall, and she’s –’

  ‘No,’ said Fran, suddenly changing her mind. ‘I’m still not angry, but I don’t want to hear any more about her. What does she do?’

  ‘She’s an architect.’

  ‘Fine.’ She nodded. ‘That’s it. That’s enough information.’ Bessie Bunter had transmuted into a Valkyrie with a doctorate. ‘I’m going to check on the potatoes.’

  ‘Wait!’ He launched himself out of the water and stood dripping. ‘Don’t go, Fran. I had to say this face to face, I couldn’t tell you over the phone. I do still love you, Fran. I’ll always love you, but…’ He looked down at her, tears in his eyes.

  She folded her arms and stated the required line, ‘You love Hella more.’

  He nodded solemnly.

  ‘All right,’ she said flatly. She knew there was a gracious way to do this, a way that would match the drama and romance of Duncan’s journey, but she was unable to find it.

  ‘You know what I think about you, Fran, you know how much I –’

  ‘Yeah, OK. I’m all right about it, Duncan.’ Each word felt chipped from a block. He reached out his hairy arms and wrapped them around her, and kissed the top of her head, and she stood like a cross little statue until he let go.

  ‘I’m all wet now,’ she said.

  While he dressed, she threw the blackened potatoes into the bin with unnecessary force, and fanned the back door to and fro, dissipating the smoke that still clung to the ceiling. The temperature had dropped and great clouds of steam billowed up by the outside drain as the bathwater swirled away. The snow was beginning to settle.

  Duncan entered the kitchen rather diffidently, his drying hair sticking up in tufts like the top of a thistle.

  ‘The potatoes have had it,’ she said. ‘Do you want bread and cheese? Or we’ve got some beans, I think.’

  He shook his head. ‘I’m going to go, Fran.’

  ‘What do you mean? Where?’

  ‘I’ll kip at my sister’s tonight.’

  ‘You can stay here, I don’t mind. You can sleep on the sofa if you want.’

  ‘Nah.’ He smiled. ‘I think I should leave you alone. Maybe we can talk tomorrow. Go to a bar and have a real old session.’

  She shrugged. ‘OK, if that’s what you want.’

  ‘I’ll still miss you Fran.’

  ‘I’ll miss you too,’ she said, truthfully, if a little stiffly. She was used to Duncan being lyrical, or raucously horny, or melodramatic, or stoned and giggly, or asleep; she wasn’t used to this sweet and dignified regret. He fiddled with the buttons on his coat, still damp after an hour and a half on the radiator. ‘Fran?’

  ‘Yup?’

  ‘Can you lend me something for the tube?’

  She saw him off into the snow with a twenty-pound note and all of her loose change in his pocket, a hot-water bottle stuffed down his jumper, and one of Peter’s hats tied under his chin with one of Peter’s scarves. On the doorstep he gave her a hug which lifted her off her feet, and she stood and watched him trudge up the road until he disappeared round the corner by Aashish Videos. Then she closed the door gently and wandered back into the kitchen. A few wisps of smoke still curled across the ceiling, and she leaned against the open back door with a beer in her hand, and watched the snow settle on the Brussels sprouts.

  14

  Iris, standing outside the library with her petition, didn’t bother to target the two men who were strolling out of the covered market and along the pavement towards her, but instead turned her attention to a studenty girl who had just crossed the road and was heading towards the post office. The three successive Saturdays that she had spent collecting signatures had turned her from a nervous rookie, plastered against the library façade bleating ‘Can I possibly interest you in…?’ at people’s backs, to a focused assessor, skilled in predicting the exact response of a given passer-by, homing in on the keen and the weak with ruthless accuracy. She felt she could publish a leaflet on the subject.

  The girl was in her early twenties and was wearing a jacket that looked vaguely ethnic. This was a good sign, as were her clumpy lace-up shoes. Other items of clothing that seemed inexplicably linked to an interest in the fate of the library were zipped-up anoraks, hats with brims (this included flat caps) and knitted scarves. It had been a chastening moment when Iris realized that she simply had to look out for people who dressed a bit like her. On a broader scale, there was little point in approaching males under twenty-five (unless they were actually entering the library), women under twenty-five in packs of three or more, anyone with a shaven head and anyone who hadn’t put their teeth in that morning.

  ‘Petition against library closure.’

  ‘Huh?’ The girl turned towards her.

  ‘Would you like to sign a petition against library closure?’ She had learned to start with a statement and keep the clipboard half-concealed at her side until the person had stopped moving. Beginning with a question and an outstretched biro sent people veering away as if repelled by an invisible force field.

  ‘It’s closing, is it?’ said the girl, surprised.

  ‘There’s been a steady reduction of opening hours which means that fewer and fewer people can use the library, which then gives the local authority the ammunition to cut the service entirely.’ (Alison Steiner had invented this wording which – as Iris had pointed out at the Save the Library committee meeting – actually translated as ‘No, it’s not closing.’ ‘It’s a pre-emptive strike,’ Alison had said. ‘We’re saying, “It’s not closing yet – but if we don’t act now then the philistine right will shut every library in Britain and sell them off for yuppie flats.” ’)

  ‘OK,’ said the girl, rather uncertainly.

  ‘And it’s the best library in North East London.’ This was Iris’s own addition, one she’d taken on trust from her father who used to claim that he’d cycled round every library in the area, comparing stock, staff and architecture. Admittedly that had been in the late 1940s, but it had become a tenet of family lore, together with her mother’s ‘nothing beats a nice cup of tea’ and her Auntie Olive’s ‘three prunes a day and you’ll live to be a hundred’, though she herself hadn’t made it past seventy-seven.

  The girl took the proffered pen and clipboard and started to fill in her details, while Iris scanned the street for the next potential signatory. The last couple of weeks had awakened a competitive side of her nature that she had never known existed, and she was keen to beat last Saturday’s total. A couple of hundred yards up the street, lingering beside the rack in front of the Pound Store she could see a sure-fire bet – one of Dov’s patients who was, moreover, wearing a natty (brimmed) Homburg.

  ‘That all right?’ asked the girl.

  ‘Thanks very much,’ said Iris, taking back the clipboard and then starting violently as someone tapped her on the shoulder.

&nb
sp; ‘God, you’re jumpy, Mum.’ It was Robin and Tom, and she realized with a mental lurch that they were the two men she’d seen just a moment ago, distance turning them into unrecognizable adults. Close by they looked reassuringly unchanged, but she felt unsettled, as if something important had happened while she wasn’t looking, and she had yet to catch up.

  ‘Do you want us to sign then?’ asked Robin, taking the pen from her hand.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, surprised. ‘Yes please.’ Neither had been keen library users for at least a decade, and when she had first mentioned the campaign Robin’s response had been, ‘Oh, is it still open then?’ They had been hugely amused at the thought of her standing in the street ‘soliciting’, as Tom had put it.

  Now he took the clipboard from his brother and started filling in their address with his usual speedy scrawl.

  ‘I’ve been practising,’ he said, finishing his signature with a huge full stop.

  ‘Practising what?’

  He started writing on the next line. ‘Different signatures. I can do you about fifteen extra people.’

  ‘What? But you –’

  ‘No one will know and it –’

  ‘No, Tom.’ She tried to grab the clipboard but he turned his back protectively and stuck out his elbows.

  ‘Honestly, I’m really good’, he said over his shoulder, ‘and they’re all real people.’

  ‘That’s not the –’

  ‘Mum.’ She recognized the warning note in Robin’s voice, and turned to see a bulgy young woman holding a large camera.

  ‘Hi.’ The woman stuck out her hand. ‘I’m Lara.’

  Iris shook it hesitantly. ‘I’m sorry, I…’

  ‘From the Dalston Advertiser? We spoke earlier?’

  ‘Did we?’ said Iris, doubtfully.

  ‘You’re Alison Steiner?’

  ‘No. Oh, I see – you’re a bit early. Alison takes over at two o’clock.’

  ‘But you’re doing the petition, aren’t you?’