‘For now.’
‘No, Eck, not for now. All those years, when we were kids, and after. They’ve gone. I can’t feel them any more,’ she said. She looked at him imploringly and then stared at the pavement in front of her, and she did not seem to notice when his hand touched her back.
‘It’s not like that for me,’ said Alexander.
‘I know it’s not. I regret it and you don’t.’
‘No, I don’t,’ he confirmed. ‘I knew you’d leave, in the end, but I never regretted it and I won’t ever regret it.’
Megan came to a halt and confronted him. Her eyes were smarting. ‘You knew I’d leave?’ she demanded.
‘I thought you would.’
‘When did you think this?’ asked Megan, jamming her hands on her hips.
‘From the beginning,’ Alexander stated.
‘What?’ she exclaimed, and she stamped a foot on the ground. ‘Why, for God’s sake?’
‘I thought it wouldn’t be enough for you. Eventually.’
‘You always thought that?’
‘Not always. Sometimes.’
‘From the beginning?’ she asked, as if she wanted him to admit that he was embellishing his story.
‘Yes,’ he replied.
‘So you came to live with me, knowing it wouldn’t last?’ she said, her brow creasing quickly with sadness and perplexity.
‘Well, for one thing I’d say it did last. For another I hoped I was wrong. And it was what we both wanted.’
‘And all that time you were waiting for it to end.’
‘Of course I wasn’t. You make it sound like a prison sentence.’
‘But if that’s what you were thinking –’
‘It wasn’t what I was thinking. I thought you’d be the one who would end it. That doesn’t mean I was moping around waiting for my eviction order,’ he explained, but Megan continued to look at him doubtfully. ‘It’s not hard to understand, Meg. I love you.’
‘Please, Eck,’ she said, ducking her head.
‘No, I do. I’m not pleading my cause. I’m not asking you to come back. I accept that we’ve parted. I want to see you still, but I’m not going to argue. It’s pointless. I know that. I’m only telling you that I love you.’
‘Eck, please. Don’t be a saint. I feel guilty enough.’
‘There’s no reason to feel guilty.’
‘There’s every reason.’
‘There isn’t, Meg. Everything ends,’ he said, but she appeared not to hear him.
Neither of them spoke for a minute. The street lights were coming on as they came to the corner of Princes Street. Standing on the kerb, Megan surveyed the façade of the Mansion House, her gaze moving up storey by storey to the roofline, as though the building were inexplicable. The road was clear, but she did not move. She regarded her shoes. ‘Eck,’ she said, very quietly, and her body seemed to become rigid, as though she were in a situation of such peril that she could not raise her voice or move a limb. ‘I can’t bear it,’ she whispered. ‘I’m sorry.’ She turned towards him and raised her hands to cradle his face. She looked at him desperately, as if fixing every aspect of his face in her memory. Her lips parted slightly. With a thumb she smeared the tears from her eyes, and then she walked away.
Alexander watched her until the steps of Bank station hid her completely. A car with a rusted roof drove past, he would remember, and the pattern of the clouds was like the imprint of the skin of a palm on glass. When she had gone he turned and walked back west, down Queen Victoria Street and Cannon Street, past St Paul’s, along Fleet Street and the Strand, noticing nothing.
42. The Bellevue
He was drunk with boredom and he would remember as little of these months as a man would remember of months of drunkenness. He could be certain, though, that when he drove out of London, late one Friday afternoon in February, he had no plan but to spend a few days somewhere other than London.
He drove west and stopped at a village near Salisbury, where he took a room above a pub. The next morning he continued westward, intending to stop wherever he happened to be when the daylight expired. Soon he found himself on roads that were familiar from the shape they made across the land, passing farms and petrol stations that were as conspicuous as waymarks, and in the late afternoon he saw the first sign for Penzance. At the fourth or fifth sign he followed that direction, and as dusk fell he was driving through the outskirts of the town.
Without thinking he turned into the street in which he and his parents had stayed the year after the holiday with the Beckwiths. He parked the car close by, took out his suitcase, and walked back to the hotel that had been the Tivoli and was now the Hepworth. He looked at the façade of the closed hotel. The breakfast room had smelled of turpentine, he remembered. Someone’s woollen swimming costume was left hanging in the bathroom every evening and would drip all night, like a clock that was running down.
From a street corner he took a look at the seafront. The pavement he had run along looked meagre and drab in the misty yellow light of the streetlamps. A scrap of black bin-liner, caught by a gust off the sea, flew into the window of a supermarket that had not been there when he was a boy. He circled back, and after wandering for half an hour he came across a street where the loudest sound was the screech of signboards swinging in the wind. Attracted by the tub of snowdrops beside the steps, he stopped outside the Bellevue Hotel. As he stood beside the tub, brushing the waxen flowers with his fingertips, considering whether to return to the car and drive on, a hand appeared in the window of the Bellevue’s front door and straightened the sign on which the word ‘Vacancies’ was written, and then a woman’s face appeared.
A dozen hooks in the shape of anchors were ranged above the table in the hall, and a key hung from every hook. The landlady took the key from hook number twelve and surrendered it to Alexander. ‘Top floor, Mr MacIndoe,’ she said, with the air of someone bestowing a special favour. Room twelve was at the end of a windowless corridor and its door had been wallpapered to match the walls, with such care that it was only when he noticed the keyhole that Alexander saw where he should go. This he would remember, and what he saw when he opened the door. The bed was immense and its quilt was covered with a sunburst in tones of mauve and pink, a motif repeated on the curtains. A blazing sun was embossed on the headboard, which was made of a brass-coloured metal that the pressure of a thumb could dent. A shroud of thick plastic still encased the plinth of the basin; the taps were cubes of perspex tinted the colour of ginger ale, and the mirror was set inside a plastic scallop shell. A chair with a red plastic seat and a back of curved black wooden slats was pushed under a flat-pack table from which the veneer-effect surface was peeling at the edges. On the table stood a portable TV with a broken dial. Next to the wardrobe hung a painted view of Penzance in a tropical sunset, printed onto card that was slubbed like canvas. A fringe of grime extended a third of the way down the lower windowpane, shining like petrol in the light of the room. Rain dribbled on the glass. Through the droplets and the reflection of his face he could see a portion of the beach, and surf rushing up.
In the morning he sat in the bay window of the dining room, where Mrs Deveral served him a breakfast of thickly sliced ham and toast and eggs, and laid a sheaf of Sunday newspapers on the edge of his table. ‘Anything else you need, Mr MacIndoe?’ she asked him, knitting her fingers underneath her bosom. Everything was perfect, he thanked her. ‘I’ll be popping out. Back in a mo,’ she said, and she withdrew, closing the door behind her. A minute later she appeared on the steps outside; knotting her pink chequered headscarf, she surveyed the sky as if to decide what she should do, and then she strode off in the direction of the sea, purposeful as a policewoman who has seen a fight brewing. Left alone in the building, it appeared, Alexander read the newspapers as the day brightened; when Mrs Deveral returned, soon after ten, he went out.
He knew the street on which the Bellevue stood, he realised. On a hot afternoon he had walked down this street with his f
ather, and they had seen a man brewing tea on a stove in the back of a van. His father was holding a pouch of tobacco, which he had bought from a shop that was very near. Within a few minutes Alexander found the shop. It was now an estate agent’s office, but its windows were the same, with decorations like rosehips on the foot of each mullion. He had been there on another day, with his mother, he remembered; she had bought a postcard to send to the Beckwiths, and behind the counter there was a picture of the Queen and Prince Philip, next to a bigger one of Tenzing on the summit of Everest. The floor used to be bare pine, which was worn to the colour and softness of balsa by the sand carried inside by the customers’ shoes. He leaned against the glass and closed his eyes, and saw the sea and his father’s arm outstretched. He had been somewhere by the harbour, sitting on a bench between his parents. He walked down to the water and stopped where the bench had been. His father had spotted a seal between two boats. ‘There, there,’ he cried, standing up to point to the place, and his excitement made Alexander’s throat constrict with affection for him, as he stood beside his father’s quivering arm and stared out at the sea, seeing nothing but the seal-coloured humps of the swells.
All morning Alexander walked through the town. He found the place where the huge black Mercedes with headlights as big as colanders had been parked, the corner of the market where toy gliders had been strung on a line like fish, the street where, he suddenly remembered, a girl with eyes that slanted upwards had stroked his hand quickly, while she stood on the kerb with her mother, waiting for a bus with cherry-red paintwork to pass. On the outskirts of the town he found the field in which people from Birmingham had pitched their small green tents in a single straight line, like an army encampment. On the beach a clump of fleshy yellow seaweed brought back the weeds he and his father had seen in a stream, which had looked like creatures jostling for a view of the world above the water.
Enlivened by the vividness of these memories, in the afternoon he drove to Praa, and climbed the clifftop path to the hummock where he and Mr Beckwith had sniffed the ground for the apple aroma of chamomile. Making a cup of his hand, he saw the pellet of desiccated earth that Mr Beckwith had put in his palm and crumbled with a thumb to expose a backbone curled inside the fragile ball, like a tiny white zip. He went down to the beach and walked over the rocks where he had sat with Megan, but as he picked a path towards the cliff he became aware of the ridiculousness of what he was doing. He stood near the place where Megan had danced in a skirt of seaweed. Mrs Beckwith had stood behind her, with a towel knotted on her hip. He closed his eyes and saw them, but they faded instantly, like shapes breathed onto glass. The sun had almost gone. It was cold. Tedium returned, as forceful as the hissing of the sea.
He went back to his room in the Bellevue, where he watched TV and read the catalogues he had brought, and wrote some orders. The next morning he drove back to London.
43. The Rotunda in Ranelagh Gardens
It was not long after the last conversation with Megan that Charlie Williamson came into the shop. He was with three friends, who stood outside while Charlie went in. For a couple of minutes he browsed through the new CDs, then his friends rapped on the glass and pointed at their watches. One of the boys pointed a stabbing finger at Alexander. Charlie examined the back of a CD, and again his friends knocked the glass. ‘Fuck off,’ he shouted, swatting the air. Rubbing his face as if he were waking up, he brought the CD to the counter. ‘What I was going to say,’ he said, ‘was I don’t suppose there’s any chance of a job, is there, because I know my music and films and I’d like to work here, but I suppose if there was a chance there isn’t now, is there, not after that?’ His friends were shouting something that might have been a nickname, and one of them was bowing and cringing by the doorstep, kneading his hands unctuously. Charlie watched his friend’s performance until it was over. ‘Excuse me,’ he said to Alexander, smoothing a five-pound note onto the counter. He took a deep breath, went to the door, pulled it open and said, in a tone of reasonableness: ‘Will you three bennies do me a big favour and just go and fuck right off out of it? Like fuck right off away over the hill?’ Clutching at his mouth, the cringing boy gave an effeminate shriek of alarm, as the other two hugged each other in terror. Charlie closed the door on them and returned to Alexander. ‘Sorry about that. They are good lads, really they are, but there is no meaning to their sorry little lives,’ he said, and he smiled in a way that reminded Alexander of John Halloran, which was the explanation Alexander would later tend to give himself for his promise to Charlie Williamson, a few minutes later, that he could have a part-time job whenever his current assistant decided to move on.
On the mornings and afternoons that he had free, Alexander would often take a train up into the city, where he would walk for a couple of hours, as he used to do with Sidney Dixon. At first he would do nothing more than roam, pausing at whatever street or building gained his attention, sometimes returning to the shop having seen nothing he had not seen before. Soon, however, it became his habit to choose a small zone of a borough and sedulously explore every street and square in it, every notable building and monument. Sitting in a pew or on a bench, he would feel the air change while he read the guidebook or journal or history book he had brought, as if the words were a rarefied incense, and he would briefly be somewhere that was not perfectly in the present. Intensely he imagined buildings that were no longer there. In Leicester Square he looked up from a picture and saw the minarets of the Royal Panopticon rising in place of the Odeon cinema. In Soho Square he imagined the Soho Bazaar, with its gloves and laces spread on mahogany counters. He envisaged the magnificent rooms of Carlisle House, the home of the Viennese singer Mrs Cornelys, who was once the lover of Casanova. On a foggy morning in February he imagined the rag-clad villains who lurked in the lawless warren of Alsatia, where the Carmelite monastery had stood. He crossed the Strand to Lincoln’s Inn Fields and there, standing on the spot where he had sat with Sidney Dixon and seen Sir Archibald Mclndoe, he closed his eyes to see the Sardinian Chapel, where Fanny Burney, once a guest at Mrs Cornelys’ house, was married to General d’Arblay.
It was during one of these walks that Alexander made up his mind that his shop would no longer sell music. Soon he would forget the nights he spent pondering the future of his business, though he would remember Charlie holding the sleeve of a Madonna record as he clutched his head, moaning that music had died with Sid Vicious, and he would remember his father at the dining room table, rapidly filling sheets of square-ruled paper with figures, and taking a cup of tea from his wife with a ‘Thank you’, as though he were restored to his office at the bank and she was his secretary, and putting his thin old hands over his eyes when he had satisfied himself that Alexander’s plan stood a chance of succeeding. And although he would be able to recall little of the process by which the shop was converted, he would know that it was refitted in the middle of the year, because he would remember a hot morning in July, on which the smell of new plastic boxes filled the shop, and the phone rang as he was standing on a chair to adjust the monitor above the counter.
Hooking the phone from the counter, he answered: ‘The Video-centre.’
‘What?’ said a woman’s voice, not aggressively, but rather as if their conversation had commenced some time ago and she had not properly heard his last remark.
‘The Videocentre,’ Alexander repeated.
‘Since when?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
There was a silence, and a soft laugh, and then she said: ‘My God, that is you, isn’t it? Alexander?’
Now he recognised the voice. ‘It is,’ he said.
‘You’re still there,’ Jane marvelled, and she laughed again.
‘Evidently. How are you? Where are you?’
‘I don’t know why I thought you might have gone,’ she said. ‘Of course you’re still there.’
‘Are you in London?’
‘Yes, I’m in London. Can’t you hear? Listen.’ A door squealed, a
nd an unintelligible announcement echoed under a high roof.
He heard the word ‘Eastbourne’ amid the echo, before the door squealed shut. ‘So how are you?’ he asked.
‘You sound nervous, Alexander,’ she observed, with a tinge of mockery to her tone. ‘You sound a bit tense.’
‘That’s because I’m balancing on a chair with a drill in my hand.’
‘Get down then, Alexander,’ she said, as if addressing a child. ‘There’s a couple of minutes left on the meter.’
Climbing down from the chair, he heard a sharp rhythmic tapping on the glass of the phone booth. ‘How are you?’ he asked again.
The tapping stopped. ‘I’m very well. But I think what you want to know is why I’m calling, isn’t it?’
‘Well, not quite in those words, but –’
‘A whim. Nothing more than a whim,’ she sighed. ‘I got off the train and the first thing I saw was an aftershave advert, and the boy in the picture made me think of you.’
‘Do you want to meet up?’
‘I think so,’ she said casually, after a pause.
At six o’clock he walked into the café. He scanned the crowded room but could not find her. About to leave, he looked around the room one last time, and then he saw that it was Jane sitting at the corner table, by the open window, fanning herself with a magazine. Though she was facing the door she had made no attempt to catch his attention, and now she watched him approach without any alteration in her expression, as if she were disinterestedly analysing his response to her appearance. She was slimmer than she had been, her hair was cut short and razored very closely at the sides, and her clothes – a loose-fitting sleeveless black cotton top, loose black cotton trousers and a pair of thin-soled black pumps – were of a style quite unlike the clothes she used to wear. Laying the magazine down beside her sunglasses, she leaned forward to request a kiss. Lines as fine as cobwebs were visible in the strokes of suntan below her eyes. Through the perfume she had dabbed on her neck he could detect the familiar saline scent of her skin. Settling back, she handed the menu to Alexander.
Ghost MacIndoe Page 40
