by Tobias Hill
please pay to the order of of of of of of of of of of of of this or that –
‘What do you think?’ the publisher asks, and Florence is jolted up to find him watching her, much as Terence does. For once she doesn’t like it.
‘It’s horrible.’
The publisher nods. ‘I agree. But interesting.’
‘It’s not right,’ she says, ‘reading it. You shouldn’t have it. You should burn it.’
‘Perhaps,’ the publisher says. ‘Or perhaps I should publish it. There’s a sense of the zeitgeist about it.’
‘It’s sick,’ Florence says, her voice too sharp, too real for this company: even to her, it isn’t clear whether she means their reading of the thing or the thing itself. Her hands are shaking.
‘Take it, I don’t want it,’ she says, and the oarsman cocks a brow as he takes the folder from her. The older woman clears her throat and lights another Dunhill. Terence is suddenly there among them.
‘You alright?’ he asks; but before Florence can fake an answer the staff are coming out to usher them in for dinner.
She is placed some way from Terence, between an Egyptian novelist and his much younger French wife, who is a poet. The conversation shrinks again to small talk of the world of letters. Florence lets it pass over her.
The food comes all at once and keeps coming, gobbets and dollops of foreign stuff on pretty plates and stupid rustic platters. Florence is eating too much, she knows, more than she wants or needs, in an effort to think of something other than the publisher’s folder. The malice in it has jarred her. It’s not part of her world, that violent incantation, not part of this world she adores and has made her own. It makes her angry, that the publisher would bring the folder into it. The folder is an imposter.
Florence looks at her hands and out at the dusk. She can see trees on the hill lines – the strange tall ones that are like the columns of mossy ruins – and the lights of Perama coming on below, and other lights beyond them, fishing boats rocking out to sea, twinkling like evening stars.
Look, she thinks. Look at how beautiful it is! Don’t you know how lucky we are? Don’t you remember how much work it took to get here? Why bring ugliness into it? Isn’t there enough wrong with the world? Aren’t you satisfied with that? Leave bloodiness where it belongs; it’s easy. Just have some faith in beauty. Just be grateful for what you’ve earned. Be happy to be lucky.
Laughter erupts around her, and she pulls herself together. She has missed some splendid joke. Beside her the Egyptian smokes as he eats, small raisin-dark cigars. As she studies him he meets her eye and smiles.
‘You must find this dull,’ he says, ‘all this talk of books.’
‘Oh,’ Florence says, ‘I bore easily.’
‘You are with the photographer?’ he asks, and she bristles.
‘I don’t see why you should put it like that. I don’t see why I need to be here with anyone.’
‘I did not mean –’ the Egyptian begins, but Florence won’t have it.
‘You mean I’m not famous. You haven’t heard of me, so I must be some kind of hanger-on.’
‘No, I apologise, I meant no such thing. In fact I have heard of you.’
‘Oh, don’t.’
‘It’s true, we have met before. We were not properly introduced, Miss Lockhart, but indeed I do remember you. You were being photographed in one of the hotels in London. We met in an elevator . . . this was some years ago. I forget the hotel.’
But not me, Florence thinks, and for the first time all night her heart lifts with unadulterated pleasure.
She looks up at the novelist. He has a gentle, craggy face. The gentleness might make him handsome, though it’s hard to tell in the lamplight, which romanticises everyone.
‘Lifts,’ she says. ‘We call them lifts. We don’t have elevators in London.’
‘Lifts,’ the Egyptian happily concedes. ‘You must excuse me, but now that we meet again, I would very much like you not to dislike my company, yes? May I tell you something? It is an anecdote about elevators. Lifts! I hope to be amusing.’
Florence relents. She wants to be spoiled. ‘Well go on, then,’ she says.
‘So I will tell you now about the lifts of Cairo, the lifts of the Hotel Shepherd. The Shepherd is magnificent, truly, second in Egypt only to the Winter Palace in Luxor. In this hotel are ten lifts, with ten lift men, in robes and turbans. You might say the work of these lift men is not rewarding, but in fact it matters. Of course it is prohibited for a guest to use a lift without its man. So, it matters for the guests. Then there are ten families, living on the baksheesh, the tips that come from those ten moving boxes. And, if you spoke Arabic, and if you gave baksheesh, very soon you would have the many stories of those men, their children and ancestors.
‘The lifts, they are also grand, also very old. Wooden, made in Leeds, in your England. Often, every few journeys, one of them breaks down. Sometimes they stop between the floors. Then the lift man opens a kind of a hatch in the side of the box, and shouts down Five or Six. That is the name of his lift. And then up comes a second lift, with its man, beside the first, and you crawl through the hatches, from Six to Seven. So you continue on your way. This activity is happening all the time.’
The publisher’s daughter-in-law laughs. She is listening to the Egyptian, as are some others, Terence among them. The woman next to Terence has a hand under the table, slanted towards his knee or lap. They all wait idly on the Egyptian’s amusing anecdote. A pang goes through Florence, sharp and sweet, of jealousy and want.
‘I don’t believe you,’ she says. ‘You’re making it up. Anyway, what does it matter? Don’t you have stairs in Egypt?’
‘Yes, we have stairs too, of course, but in the Hotel Shepherd there are nine floors. A long climb, and Cairo is hot, and the stories of the lift men, sometimes they are sensational. And also, yes, I must tell you . . . As it happens, there are strict controls on the women there. You see, the lift men of the Shepherd, they will admit only wives. From the ground up to the eighth floor, when they open their doors, they ask the women for their passports, for their identifications. But when they open their doors on the ninth floor . . .’
Mild laughter on the evening breeze. The Egyptian waves his hand, blowing – hoof! hoof! – on his fingertips, as if they have caught alight from the little cigar he holds.
Florence nods a brittle thanks. She takes her chance and turns away. The Egyptian’s wife is there, ready for her with a smile.
‘My husband loves telling stories,’ she says, apologetically. ‘He is always trying to make people happy.’
‘I was happy to begin with,’ Florence says.
‘Your name is Florence? A pretty name. It doesn’t sound English.’
‘Should I take that as a compliment?’
‘Oh,’ the wife says, ‘perhaps. What do you do, Florence?’
‘I used to model.’
The wife of the Egyptian nods, as if that much is obvious. ‘And now?’
And now Florence says nothing, having nothing to answer.
Terence drives her to the airport. It’s a sunstruck morning. Neither of them are morning people, even on those days when they don’t nurse hangovers. Light flickers through the cypresses. They’re both wearing sunglasses.
‘Penny for your thoughts,’ Terence says, and Florence grins into the wind, holding onto her headscarf: Terence has the roof down.
‘What kind of cheap mind do you think I have? For my thoughts I’ll take a ticket to London, and I’ll still be doing you a favour.’
‘Done.’
‘I was thinking of last night. Your friend the publisher.’
‘Did you like him?’
‘Not much. He had this folder . . .’
‘I saw. He’s always pulling numbers like that. Still gets a kick out of it, showing off his latest finds. What was it?’
‘The diary of some nutcase. It wasn’t nice, I didn’t think. You didn’t read it?’
‘I didn’t have the privi
lege. He must have liked you. What wasn’t nice about it?’
They turn a hairpin, barely slowing. The sea lies below them in a gulf of shadow.
‘Oh,’ Florence sighs, ‘I don’t know! Nothing really, it was just words, words. It might have been just me, no one else seemed to mind it. I don’t either, today. It’s hard to go on minding, isn’t it, when it’s so lovely here?’
There is building going on at the airport. They stand in the lee of the old passenger station, out of the light and dust. A Comet waits on a runway that juts out into the sea. Three old warplanes are lined up beyond the jet, dwarfed by it but still powerful, crouched in the sun like hounds.
Terence holds her. ‘Well, here we are. Take care of yourself, Flo, won’t you?’
‘How do I look?’
‘Knockout. You don’t need me to tell you that.’
‘It doesn’t cost you anything.’
‘Blimey, you’re not crying on me, are you?’
‘Don’t be silly,’ Florence says, but she winces, takes off her sunglasses, chuckles. ‘There’s actually something in my eye.’
‘Shoreditch coal dust, probably.’
‘Get lost.’
‘Muck. There’s no getting away from it.’
‘Bastard. Honestly you are. When are you coming home?’
He hesitates. ‘I don’t know. I was thinking I might try it on with the Yanks for a while, see if I can make a splash. You only live once, don’t you?’
Florence laughs. She kisses him, releasing herself. ‘There’s no getting away from it. Good luck,’ she says, and starts towards the new station.
*
London is wet and grey, a mockery of itself. As she nears home the rain hardens, knuckling down into the byways and the Tottenham Court Road, crizzling down the windows, drumming off the dustbins.
Her flat is in Percy Street, two floors above Sieghart the Jewellers: three rooms, one of them good, in a handsome Georgian house, and the street itself not all bad, either, with a shabby Fitzrovian glamour, and only once or twice each block a building derelict since the war.
Wolf-whistles from the men sheltering by the City Tote. ‘Haven’t I seen you on the telly?’ one calls out, and his mate, ‘Can I do your washing for a month?’
‘I’d rather stink,’ Florence calls back, and the men chortle to one another, chuffed just to have an answer.
She climbs the dog-leg stairs, humping her case after her. She unlocks the door, goes to the window, lights a cigarette, and peers out – breath on wet glass – across the scaffolds and chimneypots and mansard roofs of the West End, her West End, as if she is anchoring herself.
She loves this view, for all its greyness. It’s as much as she can afford; more, if she’s honest, which often she is not, and most often with herself. No work and all play makes Florence a poor girl. Her last two jobs – small-change gigs, for hands and eyes – came over a year ago. She lives here by the grace of others, by virtue of their favours. She takes what she’s given, and there is always someone wanting to give Florence something. Look at Terence. Look at her father, who sends her money twice a year, birthday and Christmas, his postal order always accompanied by a letter. Florence used to send them back, letter and order, when she could still afford that anger.
And even so, her savings dwindle. One day they’ll run out . . . and the Terences? Will they run too? The thought fills her with such fear that Florence never lets it occur.
Small things, each in its place: she scavenges shillings, feeds the meter, runs the bath, scrubs herself clean of the sheen and smell of transit, her hair a slick bright rope of blonde. She boils the kettle (no milk, but sugar) and picks fresh clothes (a gypsy print, Ossie Clark, given to her years ago when the makers still gave her things, warm and worn enough to be a house dress now: she hasn’t changed her size). She carries her tea downstairs to borrow milk and fetch her post.
‘You get so much!’ says Mr Sieghart, ‘and not just bills, there’s invitations too. RSVPs on the envelopes. All kinds of places! Hotels! Not that I mean to look, but I can’t help seeing. Well, it just looks such fun, all of it.’
‘Thanks,’ Florence says. ‘. . . Milk?’
‘Oh yes. Hang on,’ the jeweller says, and fetches a bottle from the back. ‘Shall I just . . . shall I be mother?’
Skinflint, Florence thinks, but she likes her landlord, lonely dirty old man that he is, and she does what she can (within reason) to stay on the right side of him. The world would be a harder place for a girl like her without men like him.
‘Mother away,’ she says, and he does, topping up her cup, frowning in concentration, as if he’s setting diamonds.
‘There,’ he says, ‘that’s the ticket. I can’t drink it black myself, can’t drink milk straight either. It’s just one of those things, isn’t it? One’s no good without the other.’
There are other invitations. There are others for tonight, it being a summer Saturday – one for a mime performance, one for a film launch supper party – and the dinner isn’t promising, even if they’ll still seat her. Florence vaguely remembers a Hilary Chance, a beer-flushed business boy with no talk except of himself and nothing of that worth recalling. She knows this hotel, too: it isn’t the Savoy. And Kensington is alright, but it’s a trog from here in any weather.
She’ll go anyway, if they’ll have her. The mime is too hippy (Pierrot in Turquoise Will Welcome Your Presence at Gandalf’s Garden Benefit: why is she sent this stuff? What does it even mean?), and a film launch supper is bits on sticks; it isn’t dinner. Dinner is worth shifting for, with nothing in the house but cold tea and a dash of milk. Florence checks the time, weighs the card, dials the number.
She takes the Underground. She wears raw silk, bone-white, boat necked, sleeveless, thigh length, belted with a black vinyl leash. White vinyl Courrèges slit boots. A slender velvet choker. She wears her hair up.
The clothes don’t make her beautiful: Florence is that regardless. Even so, they change her. She believes in them, and so the clothes are more than physically worn. They are in her mind. Dressed, she is twenty-four again, pure gold; twenty-one and going places; eighteen and on the up, the past dwindling behind her. She lifts her chin as she crosses St Giles’s. Her look is poised at the midpoint between arrogance and desire. She is her father’s daughter. Oh, she is Michael’s daughter, to the bone.
And someone is watching her.
She has no inkling. She buys her ticket and descends the stairs and dirty escalators of Tottenham Court Road Underground. If someone follows her – jostling, to keep her in sight – he is only one of many, leading and trailing and surrounding Florence as she makes her way towards the westbound Central line. She is too composed to notice much of anyone else, and any sense of being watched is lost in a general consciousness of eyes – the many eyes of London, taking her in, lingering and then drawn away and on.
Now she has nearly reached the platforms. She is in the last crosstunnel, checking the maps on the wall, when there is a brief disturbance on the stairs behind her.
‘I said stop that shoving, won’t you?’ a man says, his voice raised to another, and as the other answers Florence looks back and meets his eyes.
It’s only for a moment. Before a second is out she is looking back at the maps, but she is aware of him now. She is being followed. The certainty is like a pressure, like the change in the air which foreshadows the arrival of an Underground train.
Florence steels herself. She risks a second glance. The man has stepped back upwards, and as he sees her turn he ducks into the stair-raked crowd. He’s too lanky for those around him to be much of a hiding place. Florence has an impression of dark skin, wide eyes, a look of hunger that is all about her – but she doesn’t want to meet that gaze again, and she turns away.
She thinks, Let him look. Let him look, it does no harm. Let him try more than that and he’ll find out what she’s made of. She strides out onto the platform.
She doesn’t have long to wait for the
train. Already the air is moving, pushing in out of the dark. Florence edges down the platform through tangles and knots of crowd. Only when the train is there, as it is thundering alongside, does she risk another look back towards the crosstunnel.
There. He is a black man, very tall, and alone. He wears some kind of uniform that means he belongs down here: Underground clothes. He is standing in the thick of the crowd, but there is a space around him – people allow him room – and his face is turned towards Florence. He looks desperate for her. The whites of his eyes catch hers.
(is that)
The train doors trundle open. Florence gets on with those around her. A pipe-and-crossword man offers up his seat for her and she takes it without a word. She is only dimly aware of the gesture. Her eyes have lost their proudness now, and
(was that was it?)
her composure is forgotten. She stares at nothing. She looks the wrong side of ordinary herself; she has gone pale as her raw silk dress in the electric light.
They come into Oxford Street. The train disgorges and engorges. At the next stop west – almost too late – Florence jumps up and pushes. She gets out – grime on her knuckles – and trots to the crosstunnel, then straight on to the eastbound platform. The tunnel mouth is dead silent.
‘Come on,’ Florence whispers, ‘oh, come on, will you?’
Slowly the air does come. Displaced, it seethes and quickens, and Florence rocks on her go-go soles as the eastbound train pulls in beside her.
She gets off where she started. The Tottenham Court Road platforms are quieter now, as if there has been some general exodus to the dance halls and restaurants four score feet above.
Florence looks left and right. Her heart falls: she’s too late; he’s gone. Then she remembers – stupid! – that he was never here; he was on the other side, watching her heading west; and she runs to the crosstunnel and through, and looks, and
(is it?)
there he is, and it’s him.
He is sitting on the furthest bench, hard against the tunnel mouth, head lowered. He is hunched uncomfortably forward, his elbows on his knees, a roll-up gone out in his hand. His face is still turned westwards, towards the tunnel which took Florence away from him.
