Juliet decided that most of the women at the opening were variations on Tania. Like her, they had vague features defined by bright lipstick and characterful glasses, and wore detailed clothes in strong muted colours such as mustard and plum. Their shoes were ill-fitting and overly eccentric. There were others who wore black and grey, and did not use their hands when they talked. They varied from slender to statuesque but always along straight lines – like Juliet.
She shoved her way into one knot of people after another, elbowing and grumbling and thrusting out a tray of drinks, and was hovering crossly by a group who had not noticed her when she nudged someone’s back with her tray so that he turned and the group parted and she came face to face with the person they had been listening to. This woman was taller, fairer, heavier and maybe ten years older than Juliet, who instantly thought of her as someone to be admired.
The woman kept talking as she took a drink. Her hair was a blend of silver, ash and sand, and her clothes were an equally technical combination of kingfisher and cobalt blue. She wore jade leather boots and a cashmere shawl in the babiest of blues round her shoulders. Her eyes were dolly blue and her face had an expensive liquid finish. Her voice was avid and cool. She did not look at Juliet or say thank you, nor did she pay any attention to her audience but peered beyond them. Just as Juliet turned away, the woman craned forward and seemed to grow and to soften, and then her over-stretched smile collapsed into a small ‘o’.
‘Oh,’ said Barbara as she realised that the person at whom Jacob was directing the full force of a smile she had not seen for years was not as she had thought for a moment herself, but someone standing between them. The plain thing handing round the drinks. Boyish, cropped and scrubbed, with the virtue in Jacob’s eyes of not being one of the grown-ups. ‘Oh.’
Juliet, who had seen none of this, was looking for another group to interrupt when a hand landed on her shoulder and a mouth brushed her ear. ‘You are so rude.’
Juliet put the tray down on the floor and reached up to embrace her brother. ‘Have a drink, Carlo. Thank you so much for coming. Fred’s buggered off to some banker’s do. Have six.’
‘I’ll have two. A green and a blue?’
‘Good choice. The pink’s dreadful.’
‘Come outside for a smoke.’ Juliet grabbed the hem of Carlo’s jacket and leaving the tray on the floor, led him towards the back door.
‘Do you have to stick around all night?’ he asked.
‘I’m not going to.’
‘The Natural Fringe are playing at The Glory Hole. We could walk over and give them a bit of an audience.’
‘Double family duty for you tonight then.’
They were about to go back inside to get more drinks when a man approached and asked for a light.
‘Sure.’ Carlo pulled out a box of matches and began to strike one after the other into the man’s cupped hand. They would not stay alight. ‘Sorry.’
The man shrugged and dropped his cigarette. ‘Never mind.’ He did not walk on but stood there, smiling at Juliet.
‘Hello,’ said Juliet.
‘Hullo,’ he replied. ‘Hullo, you.’
Even after Juliet had explained to Carlo about the wall, and how they had to listen to each other all day but had never before met (not mentioning the notes), and Carlo had laughed and introduced himself (‘The big little brother!’), and everyone had run out of things to say, Jacob made no move to leave them.
‘What do you think of the show?’ he asked.
Juliet had spent days helping to hang works and lay out installations. There had been nothing that she would choose to touch or enter.
‘It’s a shipping office,’ she said. ‘I should be recording cargoes not collating mailing lists.’
‘Same thing,’ Jacob countered softly.
‘No it isn’t, it’s more like –’
‘We really ought to be getting over the river,’ said Carlo, offering an apologetic nod to Jacob.
‘We have to go and support … someone we know, who … sings a bit,’ Juliet explained.
‘Sounds great.’ Jacob was nodding at everything she said. He kept nodding until Juliet found herself nodding back, which he appeared to take as an invitation.
Carlo began to walk towards the main road and Juliet wanted to follow him but was unable to turn away from Jacob, who was still nodding, smiling, staring.
She stepped backwards, ‘It was nice to meet you at last,’ and then tripped and stumbled, which meant that he could catch her elbow, steady and steer her.
Carlo looked resigned when Juliet appeared with Jacob, who had only just let go of her arm. She could not think of anything to say because the situation seemed so momentous, but also hilarious. Jacob raised his arm to hail a taxi and then dropped it again because Carlo spotted a bus, which took them as far as Waterloo.
Crossing the bridge, they passed a girl huddled against the wall in a sleeping bag, who reached out and tugged at Jacob’s coat.
‘Got any change,’ she sneered. The styrofoam cup in front of her contained a few coppers.
Jacob muttered ‘Sorry,’ without looking at her and did not slow down. Carlo appeared not to notice whereas Juliet paused, dug into her pocket and passed the girl some change. Jacob looked back, hesitated, patted his own pockets and walked on. He reached the next beggar first, a man who cradled a can of beer inside his leather jacket and did not look up but belched as Jacob dropped several coins in front of him without being asked. Juliet looked cross, even more so when the young man asked her if she had any change.
‘I only give to women,’ she announced and strode past.
Going down the steps on the north side, they passed another beggar who was buried in his sleeping bag with one hand protruding, keeping a grip on his cup. Carlo threw something in, saying primly, ‘And I only give to sleeping bags!’
Juliet guffawed and took Carlo’s arm, while Jacob hung back as if repelled by the force of her laughter, but he continued to follow the brother and sister through the streets and into Soho, where a weedy neon sign above some basement steps pointed the way down to The Glory Hole.
The more he drank, the more Carlo swelled out of his chair. He leaned comfortably against his sister. ‘If he wants to keep buying the drinks, let him. Just be a good girl and give him a nice time later on.’
‘He’s married.’
‘He doesn’t look married. He doesn’t even look grown up.’
Jacob was making his way towards them, holding three plastic glasses of colourless lager. A withered slice of lime clung to the rim of each.
Carlo whispered, ‘Do you think he keeps that hat on in bed?’
Juliet smacked his arm. ‘It’s only a hat.’
‘Oh no it’s not,’ he said, nodding at Jacob who was trying to squeeze the drinks onto the full table, ‘it’s corduroy.’
‘So,’ said Jacob, ‘what’s this band called?’
‘The Natural Fringe,’ Carlo replied.
‘Interesting, it suggests –’
‘They’re named after a haircut.’
Jacob appeared about to laugh.
Juliet explained: ‘Our friend, the singer – her mother used to cut her hair when she was a child and she had a thing against neatness. You should see the photos. The poor girl looked like a juvenile psychiatric patient.’
‘She was one, wasn’t she, after she walked on water?’ pondered Carlo.
Jacob turned away, not listening.
The DJ began to play some bebop. Carlo stood and hauled Juliet up after him. She shook her head and turned back to Jacob, who was tapping his foot and clicking his fingers in a limp, exaggeratedly offbeat manner. What could she say to him? She followed Carlo.
The Glory Hole had been a jazz club, a discotheque and a punk venue, and in these indecisive times was something of each. Carlo pushed his way onto the kidney-shaped dancefloor. He grabbed his sister, reeled her in and then set off in a tight circle. Used to this, Juliet gave in and kept her balance as best she could, determined not to let Jacob’s presence embarrass her; only it did, terribly.
The lights went down and a saxophonist began to play a few notes, then paused and played a few more. He played rushing trills and deep swoops, as if sticking to the edges of whatever piece of music he might have been playing. Eventually, a pianist joined him and their instruments fell into a dialogue in which nothing accumulated or added up. This kind of music annoyed Jacob as things do when they reflect your own nature.
A woman made her way out from behind a curtain to stand between them. She was small and pale, and wore a long black dress that fell from her white collarbone to her white ankles. On her feet were a pair of apricot satin high-heeled sandals, which looked too big. Her mouth was red and her wide weak eyes were outlined in black. Her dark hair was pinned back in a knot. She started to sing: The cold begins to tell, outside a long long while … and the piano and saxophone fell into place behind her.
Jacob was more interested in the band once the girl had joined them, even though she pushed the words out of shape as much as the musicians did the tune. She looked frail and disturbing, and her voice was so clear that her singing seemed to move meaning out of the way, leaving the air full of unanchored feeling. What song was it anyway? People stopped trying to work it out. They liked her voice; the details didn’t matter.
The band finished, the audience began to clap, and the woman stepped forward and froze. She raised a hand as if about to reach out, only her palm flattened and her gesture became a sign, ‘Stop’. Then she was gone. There were one or two whoops and whistles, and a call for an encore, but the applause quickly faded. At this moment, Carlo and Juliet got to their feet and began to chant ‘Mary George! Mary George!’ and the rest of the crowd, encouraged or amused, joined in: ‘Mary George! Mary George!’
A taxi pulled up in the sidestreet next to the Shipping Office and a woman in a fluffy blue coat and noisy heels got out. She marched round to the back of the gallery and banged on Jacob’s door. She rattled the handle and gave the door a kick, but Jacob was not there. He was at The Glory Hole, standing behind Juliet, his mouth inches from the back of her neck and his finger tracing, without touching, the shape of her large flat ears and the pattern on her nape where her cropped hair revealed its curl.
Barbara Dart had gone to the Shipping Office in the middle of the night to take Jacob his post. Every envelope had been opened and some had been scribbled on. Barbara had no doubt about her right and need, a practical one, to know what was going on.
As she expected, the padlock on his door was not quite in place. When she first met him, he had carried a knapsack full of books, cigarettes, fruit and beer, overloaded and loosely buckled, and whatever escaped had been left where it fell. She laid the post on his bed and began to flick through his papers: half an essay on Bob Dylan and the flâneur, the beginnings of a letter to his mother, an old-fashioned porn magazine, a list of what looked like payments and debts, a gift catalogue and other circulars to which Jacob paid so little attention that he did not even throw them out. Barbara opened every cupboard, box and drawer in Jacob’s room, not looking for anything in particular and finding nothing she wanted.
The night Barbara realised that Jacob was not coming back, at least not for now, she had poured the contents of his study into binbags and left them here on his doorstep. Now they were just inside the room, squashed and split and leaking a mixture of intimacies with which she was rawly familiar. Jacob asserted his independence by leaving his secrets around, and Barbara had spent years coming across things beginning with the notes from other girls while they had been living together at university – heated, high-minded exchanges he insisted were necessary and harmless. Even back then, in his twenties, he had kept copies of everything he wrote to other people and here they were. There were letters to people he wanted to sleep with or wanted to be, so finely tuned that you might think him calculating and manipulative. To Barbara he was none of these things, just frightened, driven and beyond himself. ‘You understand me,’ he liked to say and she liked to believe she did.
Juliet and Carlo, with Jacob close behind, emerged from The Glory Hole into the heightened air of a cold still night. They shivered and toughened, and Juliet wondered that she could feel so distinct. Carlo whispered something to her and said goodnight. Jacob offered to put her on a bus.
Juliet savoured these after-hour streets with their residue of drama and secrets; it was like being on stage just after a play had ended. She walked carefully beside Jacob, who led her left and right and into dead ends which turned out to be alleyways connecting places Juliet recognised but had not known to be within reach of one another.
A heavy, anonymous door swung open and a giant in evening dress hauled in a cordon of purple rope knotted onto silver plastic bollards. Further, a dug-up pavement herded them into a cratered hallway next to a board on which two hands held out a pair of perfectly circular breasts. They negotiated the pungent, leaking binbags outside a restaurant and the heap of empty crates propped against the shuttered windows of a delicatessen. Jacob noted the charm of the boarded-up front of a fishmonger’s, which Juliet thought sad. He complained about the hard-lit, alarmed and bolted entrances of photographic agencies and film companies, and said nothing about the side-doors lined with cards and intercoms. A café, little more than a counter, served coffee to a couple wearing city suits who could not stop kissing. A pair of teenagers in pumped-up jackets and low jeans swaggered past looking flushed and lost, and Juliet watched them go with the feeling that they were carrying on something she had left off. She did not listen to their music or take their drugs, and was about to remark on this to Jacob when she realised that she could probably say the same about him, too.
A tall, finely painted woman brushed against Jacob (deliberately! Juliet could tell) and dropped an elbow-length glove, which he leapt to retrieve. The woman said an elaborate thank-you in a crooning baritone and sailed on as if it were a hundred years ago, a time when ladies wore gloves and their dropping one meant something. Three men, arms linked, walked past with luxurious slowness, their skin wet and their breath feathering the air. A police car idled by.
Juliet and Jacob continued on, past the all-night cinema where Carlo was fighting sleep in the back row, struggling to follow the plot of a subtitled Russian film in which a telephone kept ringing. He was there because he had a crush on the projectionist, who was also a masseur, and whose card was on the noticeboard in the cinema foyer. Jonathan Mehta. Carlo tried to concentrate on the film. No one picked up the telephone.
A woman came in and pushed past him without saying ‘Excuse me’. Her bag knocked against his knees, but she didn’t apologise. She sat down beside him and stuck out her elbows, letting her fluffy coat spill against his arm. When her body started shaking, he turned to join in her laughter only to see that she was crying. Although she swung her head so that her slithery blonde hair covered her eyes, Carlo had seen her face, its feathering surface and the dark runnels under her eyes, and he apologised, ‘Sorry’, and standing up said ‘Excuse me’, as he left.
Jacob, who had had something to say about every other building they passed, stopped talking, giving Juliet the chance to wonder: ‘So what is it you do … in your room?’
‘I write.’
‘What?’
‘I write.’
‘No, I meant what do you write?’
‘You are endearingly emphatic. I write on art and architecture, and about the cultural life of the city.’
‘Should I have heard of you?’
‘Yes.’
Juliet snorted. ‘Well I have, sort of. That is I’ve got Foucault’s Egg, but I haven’t read it. I forgot it was by you.’
‘You didn’t know me.’
‘Actually, I didn’t read it because I thought I did know you, at least your type.’
‘And what is my type?’
‘You use words like “quiddity” and “ineffable” more than you ought. Your prose is awash with parentheses and you usually throw in some casual Latin and slangy French, oh and an anecdote about Goethe’s socks which makes it sound as if you washed them yourself when you haven’t even actually read him …’
She stopped and looked at his face. He was staring at the ground with a tight smile that she took to signal amusement, especially when he said, with such dryness, ‘Do go on.’
‘You use cricketing terms, and refer to your “wireless”. At parties, you look ostentatiously blank if anyone refers to a television personality, but you sometimes throw in a reference to something terrifically in-touch like hip-hop or acid house.’
‘But who am I?’ His smiling face revealed nothing.
‘I only said I know your type,’ Juliet continued unabashed, ‘not you.’
‘And do you have a type?’ he asked, still showing no sign of annoyance.
‘Inevitably. Do you know it?’
‘I think so.’
‘Can you sum it up? Like I did?’
‘Is that what that was? The summary of a type? Well, well.’
Juliet stumbled, feeling that the path beneath her feet was nothing more than ice and that at any moment she would plunge through and drown in her own embarrassment. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean, it’s just that there’s so much of all that.’
‘All what?’
‘So much charm, and it works. I read that kind of stuff and I am charmed but I’m not satisfied. I don’t feel I’ve been given anything to grapple with, to grasp. It’s so mobile and non-committal. It wants to come across as modest when it’s not even shy, just unwilling.’
‘Unwilling?’
‘Unwilling to really truly absolutely say something.’
‘Really truly absolutely?’
‘I know I sound like a five-year-old; anyone who speaks with any emphasis these days does.’
‘I admire your energy,’ said Jacob, taking her arm.
He didn’t deny it.
They walked on in silence, which made her nervous so she tried again. ‘I’m sure your book’s not particularly dull but the title does put me off. Yet another so-and-so’s something-or-other.’
‘It refers to the pendulum.’
‘What have pendulums got to do with eggs?’
‘Foucault’s pendulum stays in the arc of its swing while the world moves round it.’
‘I know that.’
‘I’m sure you do. However, if other forces exert pressure, they disturb the pendulum’s swing and instead of tracing an arc, its path becomes elliptical, ovoid, like an egg.’
‘I understand the concept, but what does it mean?’
‘It doesn’t mean anything. It’s a record of process, a map of accumulating disturbance.’
‘And what’s it got to do with the city?’
‘How we move and think and meet – everything, really.’
He gave something of a laugh and letting go of Juliet, turned into Green Park where the sky was the green-black-blue of medieval pigment, so rich and strange that some of those who looked up at it wished that everything else, including the stars and even themselves, would disappear.
Jacob was enjoying the silence between them, but Juliet was caught up. ‘Do people buy that? God, I bet they do. We love patterns, even anti-patterns, as long as they’re graceful.’
‘What’s an anti-pattern?’
‘Fuck knows, I just made it up. And what is your egg? No, don’t answer that. I bet I could carry on asking you questions all night and you would always have an answer, and every answer would take us further away.’
‘From what?’
‘The point. And if you say “Does there have to be one?”, I just might puke.’
Jacob looked a little shocked. ‘So no more questions?’
‘No.’
‘Tania told me you’ve almost finished your thesis.’
‘She talked to you about me?’
‘No more questions – although I would like to know more if you want to tell me.’
He took her arm again and they walked on to the end of the park while Juliet explained her theory of the empty metaphor and the frame. By the time they had reached Hyde Park Corner, she was exhilarated because no one had ever been so interested or had understood it so well.
He had surprised her and now she surprised herself by saying, ‘You’re quite patient, really.’
‘Yes, I am.’
They were walking unnaturally slowly and for a long moment, nothing was said.
‘I’m going away,’ Juliet announced in the tone of someone remarking that they had lost a glove. ‘In six months time, to America.’ Jacob did not react. She went on: ‘A visiting professor at the Institute, Merle Dix …’ Did he recognise the name? She wasn’t sure. ‘She’s going back to Littlefield and has offered me a research post.’ Still nothing. ‘At the end of August, for a year.’
A bus pulled up as they reached the stop. Juliet stepped forward, then turned back to face Jacob and found herself turning in his arms. To stop herself meeting his kiss, she said the first thing that came to mind: ‘My father was a medical student in London in the Fifties and he used to talk of a walk that took in every bridge.’
He lifted his hands, spread his fingers and pressed them to either side of her face. ‘Have you done it?’
‘No.’
‘How long have you lived here?’
‘Ten years, nearly.’
‘Let’s do it then.’
He tipped her head to one side. She felt his teeth electrically sharp on her earlobe, and then her head was tilted forward and his whole open mouth was on the back of her neck.
She stepped back, meaning to say ‘You’re married’, but what she said was ‘I’m going away’.
A bell rang, an engine revved and the conductor gave a torn-off shout. Then Juliet was leaning her head against a window watching her jittery reflection, and Jacob had gone.
On the steps of a City banqueting hall, Fred held Jane’s hand. Her head lolled on his shoulder as she hiccupped and gurgled. He tried not to look down at her breasts which were shying away from the bodice of her strapless dress. He drew her fun-fur coat more tightly together at her neck. She flinched and Fred trembled.
‘Grem,’ Jane mumbled. Then more urgently, ‘Grem? Grem!’
‘Graham’s gone to find a cab. Caroline’s helping him.’
‘Going home are now? Um, we?’ She was shivering, so Fred took off his rented dinner jacket and put it round her shoulders, giving her dress a restorative tug as he did so.
From the hall above them came a continuous baying, as if everyone in the room had worn out their voice and could now only make noise. Five hundred young financiers were trying to live up to the stories they had heard. Their bosses sat at the top table – men in their thirties and forties, veterans of the economy’s most volatile years. They were bored with the games and pranks but clever enough to encourage the belief that if money was a tool, it was also a toy.
A group were competing over the most amusing thing to do with the chocolate mousse. A man wiped it across the bottom of a passing waiter, raising a cry of ‘Shit-arsed dago!’ but the one who provoked the greatest cheer pulled a fifty-pound note from his wallet and used it as a spoon. This caught on as if no one had done it before, and those who had only tens or twenties used several at once. A window opened and a hand threw a spike-heeled sandal into the night. Fred retrieved it and noticed the price label on the sole, £449. He passed it to Jane, ‘Look at this.’
‘Gord!’ she blurted, ‘Y fnd m shoe!’
He looked down. ‘You’re wearing your shoes.’
‘Wanted these shoe. Thuz a waitin list.’
To Fred, the one in her hand looked identical to the pair on her feet.
‘This is somebody else’s, and anyway there’s only one.’
Jane clutched the shoe to her. ‘Sbetter thn nn.’
‘Someone will be looking for it.’
Jane held the shoe more tightly.
Feet were pounding the floor and a chant had gone up: ‘Off! Off! Off!’ but at that moment someone at the top table gave a sign and the lights flicked on, and all the young men in the room straightened themselves out as best they could and began trying to help the nearest woman out of her seat. They trailed out with elaborate courtesy, shaking hands, helping each other into coats, holding open doors and volunteering (like Graham and Caroline) to find cabs. Some would go home and wonder at themselves but being young and excitable and rich, as well as so very tired, none would let this bewilderment harden into anguish. They would sleep and if they couldn’t, they had no qualms about pursuing sleep through whatever means they chose.
‘Cold a long long while,’ Juliet was singing to herself on the almost empty bus as Mary George got out of the saxophone-player’s mini-van and climbed five flights of stairs in Block A, North Square of the Hugh Carmodie Trust Estate in Walham Green. Mary had moved there five years ago and was used to its treeless concrete squares. She knew by name the twelve-year-olds who rose out of dark corners to sell bags of powder. She knew the wandering encrusted toddlers, the coddled pitbull terriers, the girls who smoked and shrieked beneath her window, and the boys who careered past in stolen cars refining their handbrake turns. She was on first-name terms with the women who kept their flats spotless and swore at their children, who were brought up in the old-fashioned way. They were free to play outside all day, given duties from an early age and retained respect for their parents. Many of them had aunts, uncles and grandparents living nearby.
Mary let herself into the dark hall, stubbed her toe on a piece of motorbike engine and then bumped into a clothes-horse draped with washing and positioned just inside the living-room door. In the bedroom, she took off her clothes and put on a t-shirt that Tobias had left on top of the laundry bin. She lay down and reached out, her hand meeting first his cropped hair, then the coarse stubble on his cheek and then, beside him, the heat and force of their two-year-old daughter, Bella George Clough.
Mary propped herself up and put her lips against Bella’s head to kiss her, catching the odd smell of biscuit and vinegar that collected in the child’s clammy hair. Bella began to wake, her mouth opening and closing with a sticky smack. Her free arm waved and her legs kicked out as if the world had all at once let go of her. Her fists clenched and her first sleepy agitations hardened into a wail, and Mary wondered as she often did if Bella sometimes forgot having been born and was furious to find herself here.
Tobias began to sit up. Mary lifted Bella onto her chest and pushed him back down. He smiled, mumbling Hello, Good night and How did it go, trying to find her to kiss her. Mary kept her hand on his shoulder, saying ‘Goodnight, fine, sleep now,’ as he subsided back under the quilt. He was working as a despatch rider and had to set off at seven-thirty. Mary settled herself back against the pillows, feeling the child’s fist knock against her ribs as she sang to her:
Somewhere over dawn’s early light,
it begins, the holding hands,
haunting me to tell,
a long long while outside.
Soon Bella was sleeping again and Mary continued to sit, one hand caught in Tobias’s sleeve and the other pressed against the solid back of her daughter. She started to drift off but even this sketchy darkness brought the rushing feeling back, and as her eyes closed her hand shot up and she shouted ‘Stop!’
Tobias turned towards her.
‘Sorry, did I wake you?’ Mary asked, putting her hand on his shoulder. Stop.
He opened his eyes. ‘Is something wrong?’
‘I don’t know why I said it, I’m sorry.’
‘Said what?’
‘Stop. I shouted “Stop”.’
‘It was just a dream. You didn’t shout anything. I would’ve heard you.’
Even if the post had not been lying on his camp bed, Jacob would have known that it was Barbara who had broken in. He would say nothing to her. The spilled papers and books were worthless to him now. He would leave them where she had dropped them until the day he gave up the room, and began now by walking over them to collect a notepad, a bottle of whiskey and a packet of Egyptian cigarettes. He wrapped the Mexican blanket from his bed around his shoulders and sat on the step where he smoked and drank, the calm this brought balanced by the stimulus of the cold air. He made notes in writing he would not be able to read, looking up now and then to watch the light enlarging above the river.
Jacob had the air of someone halfway through a door. People thought of him as averted and non-committal and, being Jacob, he enjoyed such misunderstandings. He wondered at the evening, and admired his own insistence. This girl who looked like a boy was still young enough for her gaucheness to be endearing. She had begun to know things about which he knew more. She was more susceptible than she realised and she was in pain, he could see that. She was going away. Jacob knew exactly why Juliet interested him and this did nothing to alter his belief that he was in love.
Juliet sat up in bed. ‘Endearingly emphatic! Endearing! Christ. And emphatic. Emphatic! Fuck, fuck. Endearingly emphatic! Fuck …’