‘As... things...’
‘Where’s all your loose change?’
‘I don’t know. Around.’ He habitually leaves loose change and crumpled notes on convenient surfaces.
‘Look around. How much change do you see. I’ve put all the notes I could find in a sock in your sock drawer. I’m sorry to have to do it but there’s no point in tempting her.’
He’s even sorrier. Betty fails to return one evening. This only becomes apparent the following morning when they awake to an absence of cigarette smoke. He lets Gina go into the guest room. He’s on the point of calling the local police station when they call him. She’s been found lying in a garden in the early hours and detained in custody until sufficiently sober to recall his address. He prevails on Gina to let him go. It’s all gone horribly wrong and it’s his fault.
When he gets there he realises Betty doesn’t subscribe to the same view of the police that he used to hold, before encountering the constable on Gina’s bridge. He’s expecting a subdued woman behind bars. She’s leaning on the counter regaling the desk sergeant with some vulgar anecdote that’s proved so contagious everyone is listening. She sees Christopher and finishes her story quickly. The sergeant convulses in a wheezing laugh that’s taken up by unseen staff behind the partitions.
‘Here’s my lift. Must go. People to meet, things to do, gardens to sleep in.’
Another appreciative burst of hilarity. It’s he who is subdued in the taxi. She chats incessantly, an inane backdrop to his musings.
‘Can I use your mobile?’
‘My?’ He’s forgotten its existence. She takes the phone from his pocket.
‘Chokey always gives me an appetite. Never any other time. Don’t ask me why.’ Assuming permission she dials Gina to order breakfast. For the remainder of the journey she regales one of her cronies, presumably in Newcastle, with her previous night’s activities.
‘...And then I woke up in a rockery. Gnomes an’ stuff. Ornamental pond. Garden centre advert.’
Artistic licence. Wheezing smoker’s laugh for the next suburban mile. Meter ticking up more ignored indebtedness. A week and he’s now more tired of her than he’s ever been of any human being ever. This hasn’t worked. He blames himself. He had hoped her visit would produce some kind of catharsis. It hasn’t up until now and he now knows it won’t.
By the time they get back to the house Gina has made French toast and a reservation for Betty on the afternoon train. She takes news of her imminent departure without rancour.
‘He’s really nice,’ she says approvingly, referring to Christopher in the third person despite the fact that he’s sitting beside them. She leaves with his blessing while a taxi throbs at the same gate she walked through a lifetime previously.
‘I want you to take this bottle of wine for... the journey.’
‘She’s already got two bottles in her luggage...’
‘What I always say is, why not?’ She pinches Christopher’s cheek as if he’s an endearing schoolboy and then gives him a searching kiss that causes him to stumble back against the Welsh dresser.
‘Why not?’ he finds himself repeating, as another taxi ferries another person out of his life.
Gina sees her to the taxi and returns with a look of strained relief on her face. She goes to her room and only comes down to cook. They don’t talk properly till after dinner.
‘I suppose now, having met her, you can see some things more clearly.’
‘You mean about loose change disappearing and that sort of thing.’
‘I mean how I came to be on a bridge trying to sleep in a box, or didn’t you ever wonder how that state of affairs came about?’
‘I still think it strange to find someone as resourceful as you on the street.’
‘So you did wonder?’
‘Yes, I suppose I did.’
‘Didn’t it occur to you to ask?’
‘If you thought it was necessary for me to know I think you would have told me.’
‘Is that an answer?’
‘It’s not my place to ask.’
‘Yes it is.’
He makes a baffled gesture, palms upraised, as if lifting an invisible plank. ‘One doesn’t like to intrude.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Meaning... one doesn’t like to intrude.’
‘You’ve more right than anyone else in the world. If it’s anyone’s place to ask it’s yours to ask me now.’
A pause while he sits considering. He is about to lift the invisible plank again when she interrupts.
‘So are you?’
‘Am I what?’
She leans across and knocks on his forehead. ‘Hello? Anyone home? What have we been talking about? Are you going to ask how I came to be destitute?’
‘If you want me to.’
‘What do you want?’
‘I want people to be nicer and for you to be happy.’
‘For fuck’s sake, Christopher! Haven’t you ever eaten the grapes in the supermarket before you get to the checkout?’
‘No. I don’t see what that’s got to do with anything. And I’m not going to apologise for not having shoplifted.’
‘The first night I stayed here I put the back of a chair underneath the door handle. I thought you might try something on. Call it rent. You don’t have to put that expression on. Much as it might surprise you that kind of behaviour isn’t unknown. I wouldn’t put it past George Coleman to expect to get the leg over. Mum came back briefly, a couple of years after Kevin had gone. It was just for a while. I even stayed with her, to see if we could maybe make a go of it. Whatever I had to offer it wasn’t enough. She disappeared again. I wasn’t sad to see the back of her boyfriends. Most didn’t have George’s subtlety.’
Next to Betty George is the person Christopher would least qualify as subtle.
‘And did any of them... try?’
‘Yes.’
‘You weren’t... hurt?’
His euphemism touches her. ‘I was agile. That helped. Most of Mum’s men were as much of a lush as she is. I’d hear them fuck through the wall when their periods of consciousness overlapped. But a couple of them, if they were up for it and she was out the game, came tapping on my door.’
He has an image: a bloated man with fat hands and venous nose leaning over a sleeping teenage Gina.
‘Don’t worry. I wasn’t Fay Wray. I didn’t lie back with big shag me eyes looking helpless. Most didn’t get near. One broke my nose to slow me down...’
He takes off his glasses and massages the junction of his eyebrows.
‘Mum woke. Guessed right first time and slapped him. It would have been poetic justice if she’d broken his nose, but he cracked two of her ribs on the way out. We were three up. If we’d had a handy chip pan on the go I’d have poured it out the window and scalded the fucker on the doorstep. Like one of those mediaeval sieges. But we didn’t. She never cooked. She never eats. She’s the only person I know who thinks you can get vitamins from smoke.
‘So we never saw him again. Can’t even remember his name. Punches my face, kicks Mum’s ribs and I don’t even know who he was. Says something somehow. Doesn’t it?’
‘If it hurts you don’t have to say this.’
There’s nothing self-pitying. Her disclosure has found a momentum of its own.
‘I saw Mum on her feet. A couple of weeks till she could get to the shops on her own. But I knew that even if he didn’t come back there would always be another. There would always be someone knocking on my door. I was sixteen. I left. Sixteen. I can’t even think of that now. Sixteen. I still think of Millie. I never stop thinking about her. I wonder what she’d have been like when she was five, and ten, and fifty. If I ever thought of her at sixteen, standing on a pavement, carrying everything she owns, I’d probably burst into tears.’
Which is exactly what she does the moment the last syllable is out. He doesn’t imagine she cries easily. He wonders how she held out for so long. What chance did she
have with that raddled phantom of a man he saw in her hall, and the woman who has just left in the taxi. He’s seen women cry before; he’s seen tears of wounded vanity, he’s seen Marjory’s tears of social frustration, but he’s never seen anyone cry like this. The violence of these tears is vehement and purgative. He puts his arm around her. She spasms at each inhalation. He feels something entirely unexpected: privilege. Since the death of his mother he has skated, living on surface tension. If it had been someone other than Marjory, someone who gave back, it might have been different. There was never any immersion till she arrived. He feels the privilege of this vicarious pain. She has lent him depth.
He fishes in his pocket for the ubiquitous hanky. She rests her face against his neck and sobs till his collar is saturated and mascara-stained beyond repair. He waits till the heaving shoulders subside. When she finally pulls away from him to accept the hanky, a long loop of catarrh attenuates from the tip of her nose to his ear lobe. Her head looks full of water. She blows her nose, a foghorn at this proximity. He winces at the noise. The dog barks.
‘There must have been some happier times?’
Phrases come out in a hot rush, thickly.
‘There were in-between times, times that seemed good till I look back, only good because of what came before and after.’
‘You weren’t always on the street?’
‘No. But what you said,’ her speech is becoming more uniform, coherent, ‘about being surprised about me being resourceful and on the street. Sometimes it’s having nothing that’s the test of your resourcefulness. You see, I wasn’t frightened of it. It became a place to go. There was never a home to go back to.’
She has clarified his intention.
Her breathing slows while his arm grows slowly numb. He guesses the effort of this revelation has exhausted her. His bladder competes with his shoulder for relief. He disentangles himself with a muttered apology and returns fifteen minutes later with a tray. He’s made a pot of tea and a pile of hot buttered toast. She rouses herself and puts on the television. There’s an old black and white film, I Know Where I’m Going. They sit side by side watching it in silence.
* * *
It’s a week before he can countenance another interruption to his routine. He’s more tactical this time and waits till she’s going up to bed.
‘You can always invite your friends down here, you know.’
‘I don’t know if you could stand it. I don’t know if I could stand it.’
‘Well, the invitation’s there.’
She doesn’t mention anything for the next few days. It’s Vanessa who puts the thing in perspective for him.
‘She probably feels she wants to see her friends because she’s indebted to them.’
‘So she should. They kept faith. They kept that flat going and that can’t be easy on their combined income.’
‘I don’t blame her that she doesn’t want to go back. From what you tell me it sounds like a museum to the past that she’s just recently gotten away from.’
‘She’s been in the house for a while.’
‘I mean that she’s just gotten away from it in her mind. Don’t be so literal, Christopher.’ He understands how far they’ve moved that she can chide him. ‘So it would be good for her to see them but not go there. So they need to come here. But Gina’s hesitant to invite them because she thinks it might be too much for you. The answer’s obvious.’
‘Not to me.’
‘You need to go away.’
‘Away where?’
‘Will you leave it to me?’
He ponders the implications of this while the Gaggia stutters out another espresso. Gina’s not on shift so they won’t be caught conspiring.
‘You don’t mean on my own?’
‘You mean do I propose to send you away somewhere on your own? That’s seriously what you’re asking me?’
‘Yes.’
‘No, Christopher. I don’t propose to send you somewhere on your own.’
‘With you?’
‘No. George Coleman. You can find your inner gay together. Of course I mean me!’
He ponders some more.
‘Some women would find this hesitation very,’ she lowers her voice in mock gravity, ‘very,’ she lowers it further, ‘insulting.’
‘Sorry. I’m not trying to offend.’
‘I know. Don’t take this the wrong way but you’re not the first man I’ll have ever been away with.’
‘Gina said you’d seen it all.’
‘Did she now?’
‘Yes. Not unkindly.’
‘Gina’s almost as incapable of being unkind as you are.’
‘You know it was her idea to invite you to the barbecue that time.’
‘Yes.’
‘And for me to invite you out for coffee.’
‘Yes. There’s this mysterious form of communication that women practice. It’s called talking. You should try it some time. And not just about the Middle East or architecture or whatever it is you do. You know, you may not be the first man I’ve been away with but you’re the first who didn’t jump at the chance. Most of the others did the inviting too.’
‘All right,’ he says decisively. ‘I’ll do it!’
‘Good for you. Have you got a passport?’
The decisive look vanishes and then reasserts itself.
‘If not I’ll get one. Let’s make it a long weekend.’
‘A week. Give them a chance to spend some time together.’
‘Five nights. I don’t want to leave the dog too long. And not too far mind.’
‘You’re so masterful. I’ll even book us single rooms.’
This aspect of the trip hadn’t occurred to him. Something suddenly does.
‘Do you think I should invite her friends as a surprise?’
‘No. Look what happened with her mother. I think we should give her dates and let her know it’s an opportune time for her to have the girls there. I’m only sorry I can’t meet them myself. They sound good fun. And I’m stuck with you.’
* * *
On a Tuesday night in mid February, two taxis arrive. One rolls up to Christopher’s front door and spills out two girls who abandon the luggage and driver to run towards the figure standing framed in the lighted doorway with the dog sitting at her feet.
The other makes slow progress up the ascent of the Malá Strana in Prague. The night is crystalline. The stars look brittle. Frost coats the cobbles.
Lolly’s stumbling because she’s been crying on and off since Euston. The preliminaries are nothing compared to what happens to her when she recognises the lighted silhouette. She can barely see as she runs towards the light with Ruth at her elbow, and kicks over a potted conifer in her haste. The driver purses his lips and blows air through them. He can just tell that this is going to be one of those reunions. Women are the worst. If only he’d kept the meter running.
The concierge from the small hotel carries Christopher and Vanessa’s luggage from the taxi into the vestibule. Christopher pays the driver off while Vanessa registers for them. She borrows his passport to pass across the details. The same porter follows them with the luggage to the tiny lift. He presses the floor button for them and retreats back. He will have to follow because there’s not enough room for them and the cases. The little cage is a gem of Art Nouveau intimacy, hoisting them up. They wait outside the room till the porter arrives. He opens the door and gestures them inside. Subdued lights have been put on and the large window purposefully left with the curtains open, giving a view down the hill. Steeply gabled roofs descend towards the river in tiers of glinting frost. The crescent of lighted globes arching across the Charles Bridge forms an irregular oval with its reflection in the dark water. Behind the blazing river frontage twin spires of the old town square are illuminated against the night sky. Beyond that Prague hums. He thinks if someone contrived to manufacture this panorama it couldn’t be bettered. It’s improbably beautiful. He hands the porter a note with
out turning around and misses the snort at the derisory tip. Vanessa hands him another on the way out. She always gets the best out of people.
He turns and is arrested by the prospect of the enormous double bed, commanding half the floor, that he somehow missed in his preoccupation with the view. He looks at Vanessa.
‘I lied,’ she says, imitating Gina.
Lolly has cradled Gina’s face in her hands. They’re all crying – with the exception of the taxi driver. No one has said anything. In a moment of profound awareness Lolly becomes conscious of the fact that this drama isn’t restricted to her and Gina. With her left hand she reaches across and cups Ruth’s right cheek. Then she gathers her in and leans towards Gina so that their three faces form a triangle, each with a cheek touching the other two. Thinking that this will be a long fucking night the driver gets the luggage from the boot. He crunches across the driveway towards them, cases dangling from either wrist. Within twenty feet he can tell there’s a different quality to this. It isn’t the excessive hen-party explosion of shrieks, recriminations and tears he’s seen more times than he can care to remember. None of them is making a sound. It’s not his fault he misjudged. That orange one with the big tits has been crying on and off since the station. No, there’s something different to this. Something he feels he’s interrupting and shouldn’t. He drops the bag on the stones and clears his throat almost apologetically. The one who had been standing in the door hands him a crumple of notes. They’re hot. She’s been holding them for some time. The tip is excessive. He’s about to ask her if she’s sure when she smiles at him through a face he won’t forget for a while. He’s sure she’s sure. It’s some kind of delivery bonus he knows he’ll never understand. He’s trespassed long enough.
Christopher looks at the bed, and at Vanessa, and feels both flattered and apprehensive. What does ‘seen it all’ really mean? What is his capacity to disappoint? But then she did choose him.
‘Dinner?’ she suggests.
It’s a basement place of vaulted ceilings that looks as if it’s been here for centuries. The menu is carnivorous. They eat duck and wash it down with a local tannic wine. It’s only a five-minute walk back up the hill, past frontages that have seen out the Hapsburgs, the Nazis, the Communists and now bear witness to an old man ambling up the hill to a nervous tryst.
Four New Words for Love Page 21
