Chapter 5

“What’s the matter? Helen?”

“Nothing.” She hadn’t thought she’d ever use his number. “I’m fine.” Even when he gave it to her, the hurt behind his eyes had told her very clearly that he didn’t believe she would call. “I just wanted to call.”

“Well, that’s . . . thank you. I’m very glad.”

Her breath was coming in hot gouts. There was a plan she’d made for what to say, but it was slipping.

“That’s all right. I wondered . . . I wondered . . .” The sentence failed her.

“Where are you? And are you okay, you don’t sound it. Where are you, Helen?”

“Here.”

And then she cried. It surprised Helen how very seldom she cried, but when the feeling was on her she did it a lot.

Edward wanted to come and get her, but she made herself able to say she would go to the underground station at Gloucester Road and he could meet her. He said that wasn’t too far from his house.

Although she had no doubts that he would be there, she worried he’d be late, or that she wouldn’t see him, or would take the wrong way out. If he wasn’t right on hand and ready to be recognised Helen knew she would start crying again and people who cried publicly in London were always mad; changing guards and ravens and the homelessly mad—that was the capital. Helen didn’t want to be homeless or mad.

At the barrier she concentrated on lifting her bag ahead of her and feeding her ticket through correctly and on looking up only at the very last point she could.

Edward.

Edward making this home.

Edward making this safe.

She was taken by a liquid feeling that pained her while it pleased.

Edward, already sidling through the crowd, cautiously tall, rummaged at the top of his hair with one hand, indisputably there. He lifted her bag away from her, took her arm and was ready when she swung in and held him and was able to hold her back.

“Hello.”

“Hello.”

He was so much more of himself than she had remembered, even though she had tried to remember him well.

“Welcome to Bailey Park.”

Helen felt him rest his mouth against her hair and knew that people were walking round them, thoroughly inconvenienced. She didn’t feel guilty a bit.

Outside there was a dry, grey, bite in the air and unfamiliar leaves, big like crumpled sheets of brown paper, were softening the pavement. They walked to Edward’s home, side against side, cradling each other’s waists because for two people walking together, this is the most comfortable way to proceed.

“I won’t consider it.”

“I have money. I mean, I’ll be able to get some. Tell me a good place to stay, that’s all I need.”

“Helen, you don’t have any money, be sensible. You can be here.”

“That’s not why I called you.”

“I know that. There’s a room you can sleep in, will sleep in, and I will trust you, if you will trust me to do nothing but sleep. I’m hardly going to creep up on you in the dark—not one of my vices. If that’s what was worrying you. I can’t think of anything else, unless you just . . .” He burrowed his hands in each other uneasily. “You’ve come here because I’m your friend. I hope. I help my friends. Aaaw, come on, Helen. Let me help you out and do like Jimmy would—I’ve never hayd the chaynce before.”

“No, leave Jimmy out of it, I’m talking to you.”

“Then let me be here for you, because I want to. Be here for me.”

They weren’t really arguing. The words were like an argument, but they didn’t mean one.

“I can’t.”

“Do it anyway. There are so many other things you can’t. You want a whole life full of can’ts? Maybe this is one you can. Come on, it’s harmless. Me too.” Edward seemed to consider smiling, but then didn’t want to risk it. He left the room instead, fumbling as he closed the door, and she knew he had gone to make up the bed where she would sleep.

She sat in Edward’s living-room and listened to him scuffling softly in and out of other doors, opening drawers and bustling, moving inside a flat that was totally his. Everything here was built up and covered with years and years of Edward, uninterrupted by anyone else. He smelt of his flat, she realised, and his flat smelt of him and she was breathing easily, liking the taste of him in her lungs. She was coming up for Edward’s air and finding it familiar and still. This was a good, soft place. Her hands, clasping tight to each other, were lit by the slightly disturbing high and wide window that still held the sky she’d seen behind him in one of his photographs.

At rest and with an emptying mind, she remembered how much she ached: because of the bruising and confusion and most of all with holding on, with clinging as hard as she could from the inside, so nothing of her personality could fall out of place. The concentration she had needed to force a way through the journey south had left her almost hypnotised with exhaustion. Sentences and images looped and repeated inside her skull, cut loose from any sense.

Slowly, she stopped trying to look all right. Mr. Brindle had been careful as ever to leave her face unmarked, but if she really wept, the hurt would show and now she wanted it to. Mr. Brindle had made the pain, but it was hers and she could do what she wanted with it at any time.

“Oh, don’t. You don’t need to. It’s fine now. Unless you want. It’s okay if you want.” She hadn’t heard Edward come in and couldn’t think clearly how long he’d been gone.

Helen bleared up at him while he stumbled forward and patted at her. One of his hands was holding something. “I made toast.”

For some reason this let waves of sobbing break up through her. She listened to herself. She wouldn’t stop.

“Well, it’s all . . .” He clattered the plate down on the table and tried to lever his arms in about her. “Toast is all I make. Helen. Helen?” She knew he was beginning to lift her, but couldn’t help. For a moment he rocked her forward. “It’s all right. You know it’s all right.”

They scrambled against each other, Edward making for the sofa until they hit it and fell. For a long time, Helen was aware of being against him, his pullover and solid ribs. She touched him from inside a fog of her own noise.

Edward held her until she was quiet, until the sky in the window had bruised into an overcast night.

“Helen. Helen? You’re not asleep?”

“No.” She swallowed. Her throat was raw. “No, I’m here.”

“Good. And I’m here, too. No.” She turned and met the quiet tension in his arms. “Don’t move. Just lie. I want to talk to you—it’s nothing bad.”

He began to kiss across her forehead, sometimes brushing away her hair because that was a good thing to do. “I wanted to say,” he punctuated himself, “that you,” with regular, “are exceptionally beautiful,” tiny pressures of mouth, “and that you have,” and breath, “a beautiful brain. I was incapable of saying this properly before. Because I can be almost terminally inarticulate when it comes to people. You know how I am—I do get it right, but only eventually. I count myself lucky that you’re so patient.

“And now I have a duty to say that, inside here, in your mind, there’s no limit to you. You are your own universe. Your own happiness. They could dye you with silver nitrate; you’d be your own photographic plate. A picture of the roots into your soul.” Edward paused, nuzzling her hair.

“Networks. And webs. And branches. Layered. Woven. Spun out of need and hope and, um, love. Love.” The word caught at something in her blood. “You’re free, Helen. You’ve always been free. If God made your mind, then that is the way that He made you. Now you’re to stay here as long as you like. Nothing bad will happen, do you understand?”

“Okay.”

She knew that when she spoke, her words touched his throat, the open button at the collar of his shirt and his neck.

“Whatever has, will . . . whatever happens, our mutual conditions are not at fault. That is to say, I can’t second-guess God, but if I’d made you, I would wish you to be completely yourself and not necessarily perfect.”

Her eyes stung out of focus and she shook her head against him. “It’s all gone wrong.”

“Oh, don’t say that. Please. Not when you’re here with me. This is the point where it starts to go right. Don’t try to stop it. We can be safe here and . . . we’ll have fun or something. Talk. You can have this. You don’t have to pay for it—no more than you already have. You’re not a bad person, Helen, not sinful. I don’t think we even understand sin—what we commit and don’t—we can’t judge. We just should collate our total information, be complete and act for the best. We’re for the best. We, meaning me and you. What do you say?”

She said yes, because she felt yes.

“Thank you, Helen.”

“Why thank me?”

“Because you came to me.” She tried again to sit up and this time he let her. “I mean thank you for knowing you’d be welcome. He grinned up at his ceiling and then down at her. “All the way to London with no guarantees . . . That Mrs. Brindle, she’s a determined woman and she does get what she wants.”

Helen thought of what she wanted and Edward’s eyes stammered shut while his hands wrestled quietly with each other. “Aaaw, yagodda see, I wish a was a little bit bedder at making folks feel okay. No practice. James Stewart would do this better.”

“But he wouldn’t be the same as you.”

Edward flushed mildly and began a contented frown. “Better luck next time.”

“No thanks.”

The cold toast was still on the coffee table, untouched. Edward stirred, “Well, I’m going to . . . If you would like to see your room. I don’t know . . . are you tired?”

“Absolutely.”

“Good. That is, you’ll sleep, which is good. Will you?”

Helen nodded. Stood up and apart from him.

The room he offered her was lined with shelves and heavily curtained and carpeted. The small sounds she made unpacking her night things; coming back from his orderly bathroom that smelt so remarkably of his skin; undressing for bed—every tiny impact and footfall was damped down, softened to silence. He had given her somewhere insulated where she couldn’t help but be at peace.

Their first breakfast developed the easy shape it would always have while she was there.

“Toast.” Edward pointed at the toast plate in case she found it unfamiliar and seemed to wonder if he read his newspaper next or talked.

“It’s all you can make.”

He let go the paper and smiled. “Well remembered.”

“You only told me last night.”

“Nice to be remembered, though. Toast is, in fact, not absolutely everything I can make. It’s nearly absolutely everything.”

“Good. I can cook. But I don’t like to.”

“Fine. That’s fine.” There was a tremor in his hand. He noticed and rested it under his chin. “Sleep?”

“No thanks, I’ve just had one.”

“Fine. Good.” He leaned his chair back recklessly. “Well, I’m going to do some work now, since I have time to do that again. If you—” Feeling himself unsteadied, he swung into the table again. “You should treat this as where you live, as home. Do what you want. Bearing in mind that I’ll take you out to eat. If you want to be taken . . . I won’t make you eat . . . that is, obviously you will eat . . . but not necessarily with me. It’s not a problem, um, evidently. In fact the only one confused here is me.” He sighed lightly and began again. “If you do want to go with me, to eat, then we can co-ordinate times and things; it would be more efficient that way.” He felt forward for the butter knife, something to distract him.

“Why did you put me in that room?”

Setting the knife back and numbly making sure that it was straight, “I know, I know. It is the spare room, it simply isn’t all that spare. It’s always been where I keep the stuff—everything’s in there. I do apologise.”

“It’s like . . . a library . . .”

“I know. It’s not good. You could stay in my study instead.” He examined the palm of his hand with sudden concern. “I should have mentioned . . . And now I have to say that I am making use of you—of your presence—because it keeps me out of there. Not that I go in there any more, in amongst the muck. I’m behaving.” He checked her eyes. “I am. But if you’re there, even if you’ve been there, it will make me feel safe. I slept safe last night.” He borrowed a glance at her, then blinked away. “But I should have asked your permission, I know.”

“I slept safe, too.”

“Oh. Well, good.”

“How much is there?”

“How much . . .?”

“How much muck.”

“Oh, as much as you could see. Four walls, from ceiling to floor: videos, magazines, books.” Edward seemed anxious to be comprehensive, keen to be humiliated with absolute accuracy. “There are some originals of The Oyster and The Pearl from when I was kidding myself this was all about art—bloody expensive stuff and no good, because Victorian tastes are not quite mine. Porn gets dated, like anything else. Which all helps me to side-step saying that I don’t exactly know how much. I counted the videos once; there are seven hundred of them, seven twenty, something like that, but that’s as far as I got. The act of cataloguing tends to become secondary. I start off alphabetical and then I go astray. I get too absorbed in my work.” He was trying to keep it light, but his eyes weren’t managing. “No self-control.”

“You have control now.”

“I try. Seeing it all offends you, doesn’t it? I mean, the titles are bad enough. I’m sorry.”

“I was surprised, that’s all. It helps you if I’m in there?”

“Honestly?”

“Of course.”

“I don’t want to put you under pressure, but yes, it does.”

“Well I might as well stay there, then. You’re the one who’d have the problem being in there. I don’t mind.”

Edward twisted out a smile and rubbed his cheek.

“But why haven’t you thrown it all away?”

He spoke with the air of a man describing an incorrigible friend. “Will-power.” He rubbed his cheek again. “I decided I would test my will-power by keeping my temptations within reach. Otherwise they’re hardly a temptation, after all . . .” His eyes searched the air above her. “Obviously, if my will then fails me, I can get really disgraceful pretty much instantaneously.” Edward examined her expression almost surgically. “I know, I’m fooling no one, not even me. I know exactly what I’m like. I only ever assume the moral high ground to get a running start for my descent.”

He huffed out a breath with something approaching relief, still bewildered by himself, but more content. “Positive action must be taken, I realise, I just can’t take it yet. I do live in hope, though—I’m back to nearly a month without a slip and some days I don’t even think of wanting it. Eventually, I’ll be able to chuck it away. And I’ll do the chucking, no one else.” His mouth tensed. “By then I might have worked out how on earth to dispose of it. I can hardly stack it all down at the bottom of the stairs and wait for the bin men to come. If that isn’t a slightly over-appropriate verb.”

Edward began a stretch then faltered, stopped. She wanted to touch him a little and thought about how.

“Oh, God.”

“Edward? What?”

“Oh, God. Helen. I didn’t—”

Helen had pushed up her sleeves, as she often did. She had forgotten the scratches on her forearms, the random bruises, the finger-grip imprints. The marks were dark, ripe, full of blood.

“What did he do?”

“It’s all right.”

“No, it’s not fucking all right. What did he do?”

She really didn’t need him to be angry on her behalf, Helen was perfectly able to manage that herself, if she chose to; she was a determined woman, after all.

“What did he do?”

Edward was starting to frighten her and she couldn’t allow him to. He was starting to shout.

“He found one of your postcards.” She didn’t say that to blame Edward, only to make him be quiet and just let her forget it again. “That’s what he did. He found your card.”

“Oh, Hele—”

“You’d have watched it, wouldn’t you? If I’d been a video, you’d have watched.”

Edward almost reached for her, but then let his arm withdraw. He closed both hands over his head and said nothing.

A person who is scared and angry often strikes out inappropriately. Helen wished that she didn’t conform so perfectly to type.

They were civil to each other after that, but they didn’t exactly speak. Edward shut himself into his study for most of the day and she dozed, watched children’s television and found it stupidly moving, then dozed again.

“Hello.” Edward knocked at his own living-room door.

“You don’t have to do that.”

“Well. I don’t feel comfortable. I don’t know what I should do.”

“Yeah.” Maybe she should go. A sinking greyness in her limbs made her think she should go. But there was nowhere that would have her, or nowhere she could have.

“Do you . . . should you see a doctor?”

“No.”

“You’re sure?”

“It’s happened before, I never went to the doctor then.”

She heard Edward snap in a breath and force it out again.

“You’re right about me. I will watch anything. You’re quite right. But I do have to know it’s not real. Jesus—real people frighten me. And if it was real pain . . . Helen, I grew up with that. My mother, I saw what Dad did to her. Or if I didn’t, I heard it, I saw the marks. It was my fault then and it’s mine again now. I was stupid to write to you.”

“I didn’t tell you not to. I didn’t want to tell you not to. You didn’t do this; you weren’t there.” There was an uneasy pause that she wished she could leave unbroken. She couldn’t. “You were stupid to write to me?”

“The way that I did.” He moved to stand beside her chair, very still. “I had to write, but I shouldn’t have done it that way.”

“Don’t let him make me angry with you. I don’t want to be. You haven’t done anything wrong.” She leaned until her head could touch his arm. He let her be close, but didn’t move closer. “Do you think we’ll work, Edward. Do you think I can be here?”

“You need somewhere to stay and I need you with me.”

He rubbed at her ear with his thumb and forefinger and she heard the shingly, seaside rush of sound close beside her eardrum. When she was a girl, she’d loved that noise. It was private, something no one else could ever listen to. For a moment he squeezed slightly and she caught the thrum of his blood, or her own.

“Helen, my work keeps me busy, but it’s lonely when I stop. Especially now, when there’s nothing else here. I would need you, even if I didn’t . . . You know. If I didn’t feel for you.”

“Will we work, though?”

“I don’t know.” He tried that again, to make it seem hopeful. “I don’t know. That’s not something I’m professor of. But I think we’d be good.” This time, he’d sounded mainly sad, so she kissed his hand.

At first, Helen worried, imagining how they might be and what they might have to do to each other if they didn’t take care, but the slow days they made together left her nothing but settled and calm.

She listened to Edward at night, his orderly pattern of preparations for his bed and sleep, and she rested in her room with his videos and books and was secure and undisturbed. She felt her conduct and presence here were justified, were all right, and her memory started her life with the day she stepped up from the underground at Gloucester Road. Glasgow wasn’t hard to keep out of mind.

Helen came to believe she was good and could have good things. She didn’t deserve them any less than other people she could think of. Edward was right, if she accepted all the facts about herself— the ugly and the clean—she understood who she was precisely, all the time. She hadn’t done anything bad since she’d known her own nature and its controls. She had come to no harm and had been offered the chance to change away from what might be called sin.

There was always the possibility of sin with Edward. Undoubtedly what she felt for him was love, she admitted that, but her love need not be expressed in ways that were wrong and had to be paid for. She was learning how much salvation there was in the passage of time; it could re-form passion into friendship and let her live here, growing well and strong. Her sleep was obedient and prompt, her dreams unmemorable but happy, and if her God was watching she couldn’t feel it and couldn’t feel His loss.

Edward pursued his work, sometimes shouting in his study, emerging and pacing, then diving back again, but with an underlying air of fixed content. He began to make sentences involving the word we and talked about taking pains with his appearance because this made him feel clean and as if he were leading an upright life.

“Come and see my study.”

Helen was newly back from buying milk, her face and hands anxious for the warmth of the flat. The warmth of home.

“It’s nothing very interesting, but I thought you might like to see.” He held the door for her, which was something he liked to do.

Only one wall was occupied with shelves. The other three were covered in photographs, drawings and picture postcards, fixed over each other like scales.

“They’re lots of little slices through my head—the things I like to remember. I can focus on one picture and it will fire off through the whole day. It’s a sort of music; so I can sit in here with an old friendship playing, or a nice day, or a good argument. I occasionally like to argue.”

Helen was more interested in his dark, monstrous desk and its huge computer. “I thought you didn’t approve of them.”

“Computers? They’re things, instruments, nothing to approve or disapprove. I have a problem with the people who use them. The person who uses this one is me, so I like it fine. And it gets me into the Net. I love the Net. It carries proper information, facts with added emotional interference, irrelevancies, passions, general human subversiveness. People keep overrunning the machine and so it’s full of Completed Facts and nobody in there has to forget what they are— human. They may forget who they are, but anyone can be lost in thought—thought is a very big place. Every day, I make a point of feeding the Net with new things conventional programming would not like: ethics, nonsense, morality.”

“And I thought you were working in here.”

“I do that, too. Honestly.”

He looked so suddenly earnest, she had to rub his shoulder to make him smile.

“I know. You work hard, I’m sure.”

“I’m sure also. Sadly, the Nobel people don’t agree. Not this year.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.”

“I’m not. Not this year. I couldn’t spare the time.” He brushed her with a soft glance. “They’ll have to give me one in the end. But back to morality . . .”

“Yes?” She noticed a beat between them, a flicker of something that quieted again.

“There is, of course, very human and understandable im morality on the Net. My printer could stay active, day and night, discharging uncontrolled configurations of anatomy. I could spend all day in here, having virtual sex. The screen’s radiation makes you sterile but the text still makes you come. Neat, isn’t it?” He didn’t smile.

“And is that what you do?”

“No. I’ve never tried sex on the Internet. Not because I disapprove—”

“Obviously.”

He pinned her with a tiny look. “Yes, quite obviously. I have never gone in there because I know I haven’t got the strength of character to ever climb out again. I do harmless things in cyberspace: talk to colleagues, work. I spend my days at work. That’s what I wanted to report. That all is safe and well in here.”

“Um, good. Well done, then.”

“Yes.”

She felt very much as if she should shake his hand now, but didn’t.

Edward appeared happy in a tentative way, grabbed a pencil from his desk and put it back down again. “Mm hm.”

Helen’s time gently expended itself in reading or walking, playing the tourist. At first she was unsettled by the air of satisfaction she noticed in so many of the people she passed in the street. Faces and bodies moved under a thin but unmistakable sheen of health. The shops that were closest to her calmly charged ridiculous prices and sold ridiculous foods while their staff seemed to appraise her and find her an introduction they did not wish to make. Locked gardens and high windows and craftsman-applied paintwork were all wadded in with a cool lead-and-smoke-flavoured air, only occasionally coloured by the stench of crumbled drains. But her new district’s little brushes with squalor and the repetitive fuss of its prettiness gradually eased into normality. A person can grow used to anything. Helen learned that when she ceased to care about it, the city—like God—receded and let her be.

Sometimes she wished she had money to spend on Edward’s house—to buy an ornament or picture that he wasn’t expecting—but then, as he said, he didn’t actually need any more than he had. Helen did no housework at all, not even the toasting of toast. Edward’s cleaning lady looked after the house twice a week, taking care of everything but Edward’s study and Helen’s room—the two places she was asked not to disturb. Because she never saw where Helen slept, she made assumptions, but Edward and Helen did not. They made a point of dressing fully for breakfast and rarely kissed.

“Forty-eight days.”

Sometimes, he would pop through at supper-time and clear his head of work before he went to bed.

“That’s a long time.”

“Yeah. The fillings in my back teeth are fusing.”

“What?”

He flopped into an armchair. She liked that none of the chairs belonged to anyone in the flat. They could both feel at ease sitting anywhere, although she did prefer the sofa, because it allowed her to stretch out and lie. She was getting lazy. Or comfortable. Sleeping and reading paperbacks and going out to eat—it made a comfortable life.

“No, only joking. Forty-eight days. Wouldn’t have believed it.”

“How do you feel.”

“Great.”

“And more generally? All this?”

“Great.”

“Anything happening you don’t like?”

“No.”

“Anything not happening you would like?”

They both laughed instead of saying anything.

Their dinners with each other were different. She looked forward to them more.