‘Eck,’ she said. ‘How are things?’
‘Fine, fine,’ he told her.
‘Shop OK?’
‘You know,’ he said, and he told her the things he had already told Mr Beckwith. ‘How about you?’
‘Exciting, intermittently,’ she said. She told him about her work, but she seemed burdened by whatever had passed earlier between herself and Mr Beckwith. ‘Family all right?’ she asked. Alexander felt his words drag on the silence of the telephone line. While he spoke, he listened for her breathing. ‘You look after yourself, Eck,’ she said.
‘I will. And you,’ he said. He returned to the living room; the TV was still loud.
‘Doing well for herself,’ said Mr Beckwith, looking at the screen.
‘She is,’ Alexander replied.
‘Seems happy.’
‘She does. She tell you about the field trip?’
‘She did.’ Mr Beckwith stared absently at the TV. Tilting his mug towards the screen, he asked: ‘What’s going on here?’
‘Not altogether sure,’ said Alexander. They watched to the end of the programme and Alexander went back to his flat.
When Megan was at home for the weekend, Alexander would usually see her, but never at her house. ‘There are things Dad has to talk about, Eck. He’s different when I’m there. You understand, don’t you?’ he would remember her saying to him, on Oxford Street, after she had bought a skirt that was the same red as the pinafore his mother had once bought her for her birthday. They jumped onto the platform of a moving bus and rode it to Marble Arch, where they saw Billy Liar in a cinema that had a lilac carpet with orange stars in the foyer, and the draught from the street raised a whirl of dust that reminded him of the windblown sand on the beach at Praa. They saw Lawrence of Arabia and This Sporting Life together as well, he would remember, and occasionally they wandered around the West End in the early evening and stopped for a coffee in Frith Street or Greek Street, but most often she would come to the shop as he was closing and they would walk for an hour or two through the streets of Blackheath and Greenwich. She would tell him about the children in her classes, about their parents and her colleagues. One of the teachers was a mathematics teacher who had been taught by Jesuits but had lost his faith at the shrine of Loreto. He was teaching as a way of doing penance for his lack of belief, Megan thought, because he appeared to find children detestable and once said to her: ‘Give me the child and I will give him straight back.’ His name was Draper, which was the name of the boy in Alexander’s regiment who’d cut off a finger in the breech of a gun and could still feel the presence of it a year after his accident. As they talked about the two Drapers, he would remember, she held his arm as if she were cold, though the evening was warm. She would hold his arm whenever they came to talk about Mr Beckwith, as they always did. ‘How does he seem to you?’ she would ask, or ‘Do you think I should come down more often?’ It was the one subject on which she requested his advice, and it seemed that she was reassured by what he told her, or by his presence. ‘You’re right, Eck. I shouldn’t worry so much. He sees you; he speaks to me. He’s not alone.’ They were sitting against the trunk of a pollarded tree, near the place where Liz Gatting had walked away from him. ‘You’re right,’ she said again, as if to confirm that her anxiety was ebbing. Alexander looked up at a sky that was almost white and saw an arc of pale moon, like a last remnant of melting ice on a pool. ‘What’s that going up over there?’ Megan asked, pointing to a crane in the midst of the East End, but he did not know. For many minutes they watched the river and did not speak. A barge came loose from a wharf downstream and slowly turned. A launch with a steep white cabin cut across the barge’s wake. Sensing a change in the quality of the silence, Alexander glanced at Megan and saw her head rise an inch, as though something across the water had caught her attention. Her eyes became fixed on something that he could not see, and her gaze appeared to soften. Gradually the corners of her mouth deepened and furled, but her expression did not become a smile, and as he looked at her face Alexander had the notion that it was not the city but their childhood that she was seeing in the distance. ‘Don’t stare, Eck,’ she said, then kissed his hand.
It was in March, four days after Megan had been in London, that Pen Hollander came into the shop, late in the morning. Alexander looked up from a picture of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, and she smiled and turned to the rack of jazz LPs, where she browsed until there was nobody except herself and Alexander in the shop. ‘Have you heard this?’ she asked, presenting a sleeve that bore the pensive face of John Coltrane. ‘It’s excellent. Truly excellent. Have you heard it?’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Alexander.
‘You don’t think so? Then you haven’t. Believe me: you hear this, you don’t forget it.’
‘I’ll listen to it later.’
‘Do,’ she said. ‘It’s great.’ She replaced the sleeve and flicked through another section. ‘I’m sorry. You were reading your newspaper. I interrupted you. I’m sorry.’
‘Not at all,’ said Alexander. Surreptitiously he watched her as she worked along the racks towards the counter. Her face seemed constantly agitated, and her eyes continually startled. Her hair was dyed black and she wore rainbow-hooped socks that reached over her knees. She was so small that her black corduroy smock might have been intended for a young girl. Over one shoulder she carried a bag that was like a school satchel made of patent leather.
‘Great-looking guy,’ she said, as though in agreement with a proposition someone had just made.
‘Pardon?’
‘John Coltrane,’ she explained, smiling at him. ‘Great-looking guy.’
‘Yes,’ said Alexander. ‘I suppose so.’
‘You should listen to that album. You really should. You like jazz?’
‘Some.’
‘Some? What does that mean?’ she demanded.
‘Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, the usual.’
‘OK,’ she said, relinquishing the subject. She selected an album, looked at it for a second or two, replaced it, and moved on to the next section. Having done the same thing three times, she planted a hand on a hip and made a blowing sound, as if losing patience with herself. She strode to the counter and stood on her toes to offer her hand. ‘My name’s Pen,’ she stated.
‘Pen,’ he doubtfully repeated.
‘Pen Hollander. Penelope Hollander. Penelope Arianna Matilda Hollander. Hence Pen.’
‘Alexander. Alexander Gordon MacIndoe. Alex, Alec, Al, Eck, Sandy or Alexander.’
‘Alexander, would you object if I took a picture of you?’ she asked. ‘I mean, would you object if I took some pictures? Would that be presumptuous of me? You can say. I won’t take offence.’ Her brows buckled as if she were pained by her own persistence.
‘What, now?’ Alexander asked.
‘No, whenever,’ she said, and straight away checked herself. ‘No, not whenever. Soon. Next weekend? I have a week. I don’t live here, you see. I’m visiting. Vacation, kind of.’
‘I’d guessed,’ said Alexander.
‘Ah, no. You haven’t guessed right. I know you haven’t. Born in New York, but I live in Paris, actually. Didn’t guess that, did you? You been to Paris ever?’
‘Never been abroad.’
‘Really?’ she marvelled.
‘Nearly got posted to Germany once. Ended up in Wales instead. Halfway to abroad, but not the whole hog.’
Pen crossed her arms on the counter and looked at him. ‘Alexander, you would love Paris,’ she said, with the conviction of a longstanding friend.
‘I would?’
‘You would,’ Pen affirmed. ‘Anyone with a soul would love Paris. Anyone with any life in them. I couldn’t like anyone who didn’t love Paris,’ she told him, patting her arms. ‘So, would you mind if I took some pictures?’ she asked, and she moved back a step. ‘How about it?’
‘Can’t see why not,’ he conceded.
‘I take a good shot, Alexander.
I’m a professional. Not long at it, but I sell stuff.’
‘I’m sure.’
‘And you’ll take a great shot. No, really. I mean, you don’t have any bad angles. Anything that breathes has got a bad angle. It’s a rule. Normally. But you don’t.’
Two schoolboys came into the shop and stood behind Pen to read the charts on the wall behind the counter. She went back to the jazz albums; the boys went to the opposite side, where they scanned the new EPs and passed a cigarette back and forth. Nervously, rapidly, Pen turned the sleeves she had already checked. When the boys left, she slipped the strap of her bag from her shoulder to her hand, and Alexander knew what she was about to say.
‘Alexander,’ she said, ‘I have a confession.’ She swung the bag onto the counter and held it there, as if to prevent its escape. ‘I already did take a picture of you.’ From the bag she withdrew a paper wallet, from which, wincing in anticipation of his anger, she extracted a stark monochrome photo. He was leaning on a wall, looking up, with one foot flat against the bricks and one hand shading his eyes. ‘A few days back,’ she explained.
‘I know. Sunday,’ he said.
‘That’s right,’ she said, as if he had answered an abstruse question correctly. She watched him as he studied the picture; he had been looking at a birds’ nest that was dangling under the eaves, tethered by some strands of what seemed to be straw; a couple of minutes earlier, Megan had been standing there as well. ‘Are you angry with me?’ Pen asked. ‘I’m sorry. You should be angry. It’s really bad of me. Inexcusable.’
‘No, not at all.’
‘I was walking by and I saw you. Next moment, it was done. I’m sorry.’
‘It’s all right. It’s interesting.’
‘It’s like a reflex. Like looking. That’s how quick it is. I don’t think.’ She pushed the envelope towards him. ‘The negative is in here. If you want it, take it. You can rip it up. Burn it. Here.’ She scrabbled in her bag and produced a lighter.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said.
‘You sure?’ she asked, and before long he had told her about the fairground and the Bovis stove, and later that day, in the living room of his flat, he took the old magazine out of the suitcase and showed her the advertisement in which he stood simpering beside his mother and Geoff Darby. ‘That’s cute,’ she said. ‘That’s so cute.’
‘She’s my mother,’ he explained. ‘But that’s not my father.’
‘No,’ she replied, placing the brittle pages carefully on the seat of the settee. ‘That would be too much.’
That Sunday they met underneath the Waterloo station clock and set off for a walk through the city. He took her past the Theatre Royal and into Lincoln’s Inn Fields, then back to Leicester Square, where she asked him to stand in the path of a crowd of daytrippers and took a picture of him as they flowed around him. At Trafalgar Square she took a longer lens from her bandolier and made him walk away from her, under Admiralty Arch. From a distance she photographed him by the ivy-covered bunker on the Mall, and then they strolled across St James’s Park and he retold the stories that he had heard from Sidney Dixon, about Henry VIII’s hunts in the park and the pelicans that the Russian ambassador gave Charles II. He told her about James I’s aviary as they went up Birdcage Walk, and she talked about Central Park and her parents’ separate apartments and her sister’s family in Toronto. ‘Like Paris in reverse,’ she said, waving him into position by the statue of Achilles. ‘You could never like anyone who loved Toronto.’ In Kensington Gardens, by the statue of Peter Pan, she unloaded the last film. ‘Paris, then,’ she said. ‘You’ll come and see me, yes? I have a nice apartment. There’s a room for you. Stay for a week, two weeks. I’m out for half the day, but it’s OK. You can treat it like home. Do what you like. Whatever.’ She wrote her address on a paper tissue, with handwriting that filled the whole square.
Each week a postcard arrived from Paris, bearing a single message that filled all the space on the back of the card: ‘Come on!’ she wrote on the Tour Saint-Jacques; ‘Bought your ticket?’ on the Orangerie; ‘Dépêche-toi, Alexandre!’ on Place de la Concorde. In an envelope of pink-flecked paper she sent him a photo of his own kitchen, with ‘Still think it doesn’t look bad?’ on the back, and it was when he looked at the tattered Varga girl and the yellow PVC seat and the bubbled paintwork above the cooker, and saw that she had been right, that he decided he would go to Paris.
‘Am painting it white from floor to ceiling,’ he replied. ‘Negotiations with employer have commenced. Date to follow.’ The date was a Friday before a morning on which Megan was due home, bringing someone she hoped he would like, but did not name.
Though it was dark by the time the ferry departed, and it was raining, he remained outside throughout the crossing, sitting on a slatted wooden bench underneath the upper deck, watching the rope of the ferry’s wake unravel into the black water. A slime of salt covered the steel behind the bench, as he would always remember, and the ropes clanged ceaselessly on the davits like a fire bell. He would remember as well the lights of the quayside, glaring on the crocodile’s back of wet cobbles, and an advertisement painted directly onto a wall in dandelion yellow and indigo, and the cocoa-coloured cattle, their hides spangled with raindrops, in the fields he saw through the misted windows as the train carried him to the city. He took the Métro to Denfert-Rochereau, then followed the map she had drawn on the back of a photo of her front door. The door was moss green and heavy, and opened onto the concrete floor of a vaulted hallway, from where a flight of shallow steps with a wrought iron handrail led up to Pen’s apartment. Piano music was playing, but there was no sound of any occupant when he pressed the bell.
The music continued; he pressed the bell again. The door opened abruptly and Pen, in a man’s white shirt and jeans and leather slippers, smiled at him as though his arrival were a daily pleasure. ‘Paris comes to Paris,’ she said, and kissed him for the first time. The room behind her was narrow, with huge cushions on the bare wooden floor and windows that rose from the floor to the ceiling and had broad strips of muslin for curtains. She dropped his bag beside a wide brass tray in the centre of the room and led him, through the corridor that was her kitchen, to the darkroom, where several versions of her face were pegged to a cord above the trays of chemicals. ‘Know thyself,’ she joked, lifting another sheet from its bath with plastic pincers. Her phone rang, with a purring tone. She nipped his lip; under the red bulb of the darkroom, her hair was sea-urchin purple.
He would meet her every afternoon at three-thirty, on the corner of Rue Mabillon and Rue Lobineau, because she could see that corner from the office in which she worked. From there they would wander for a couple of hours, and she would take pictures of him. She photographed him in a café, looking away from the tiny cup he had raised to his lips, as if he were lost in a reverie of Boulevard St-Germain. She photographed his face in profile above the roofline of the Invalides, and she photographed his hands upon a stone lion’s head, somewhere in the Luxembourg gardens. He glowered beside the Gates of Hell and lowered his face poetically to the stopper of a perfume bottle in Rue de Rivoli. Wearing a black shirt with outsized cuffs he sat back against a wall of white-glazed tiles in the Châtelet station. He sat cross-legged on a riverbank wearing an unknotted bow tie and a black velvet jacket that she took from her wardrobe. Feigning despair, he stared down the paths of the Pare Montsouris, where she pushed his hand under her denim jacket to touch her breast.
‘And what did the morning bring?’ she asked him on the first afternoon. He had done nothing but follow the river, walking upstream as far as the Austerlitz station, then downstream on the other side as far as the Palais de Chaillot. ‘What have you been up to?’ she asked on the second day, but still he had done nothing of which he could make an account, though he would not forget the fern of shadows cast by the carvings on an office building, nor the paving stones that bulged like rising bread, nor lying on a bench in the Tuileries, where the noise of the trodden gravel was
as distinctive as any voice and the air beneath the chestnut trees smelled of cement dust and coffee and warmed bark. One morning he walked to the Pont de Neuilly, and then walked all the way back. Next day he walked to Père Lachaise, following no planned route, conducted by the grain of the streets like a bead of water across a board, and then walked all the way back. ‘You didn’t even go in?’ Pen exclaimed. ‘Jesus, Allie. Not making the best use of your time, are you? Took half a day to get somewhere you could have been in ten minutes. OK,’ she asserted. ‘Tomorrow you do some sights. Can’t go back to London without seeing the things you’ve got to see.’
Together they visited Notre-Dame and the Sainte-Chapelle and Sacré-Coeur. They saw the opera house and ascended the Eiffel Tower. On the last day they went to the Louvre, where Pen photographed him at the sleeping hermaphrodite, as he regarded lubriciously its curvaceous rear. She hurried him through the galleries, past walls of battles and disasters and coronations, along avenues of landscapes and saints. She took a picture of him with Ingres’ long-backed bathers, and reciprocating the wistful gaze of Watteau’s Gilles. ‘Come on,’ she urged, as he continued to look at Gilles’ baggy satin suit. ‘There’s a lot more to go.’
‘What’s the rush?’ asked Alexander. ‘We can see it another time.’
‘And you can see him another time,’ she replied.
‘I like him.’
‘Why? It’s a bunch of clowns. Big deal,’ Pen declared, and Alexander took a last glance at Gilles, and knew that if he ever saw him again it would not be in Pen’s company.
That evening, she took him to a party in a house out at Meudon. A man in a tuxedo got out of a Mercedes and preceded them up the path. ‘A few familiar faces,’ said Pen, as they paused in the doorway of the room in which most of the guests had gathered. Candles burned in iron chandeliers, above terracotta pots and multicoloured banded rugs. At one end of the room a laconic double-bassist and a frantic guitarist accompanied a pianist who sang with a cigarette in his mouth. ‘That group’s English,’ Pen explained, ‘and that’s American. Be yourself, Allie.’
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