When I phoned her from the National that afternoon all those years ago, she gave me Isabel’s address. Yes, if I remember rightly, it was Isabel’s encouragement that brought Alice down to London in the first place.
Once in the capital, she quickly found a job as a Girl Friday for a professional photographer named William. Now Alice was working long and unusual hours on his shoots. The trains south of the river to where she rented a room in Sydenham were practically nonexistent after midnight, and on more than one occasion she found herself stranded in the West End, the last service from London Bridge long gone, with no alternative but to telephone Belle. A spare key for Alice was the obvious solution. The flat, so I gathered, was somewhere high on the Northern Line, but not far from the Tube station, easy enough to find … and if I had a problem?
‘Well, you’ve a tongue in your head,’ came her voice down the line.
‘I’ll be round straight after work,’ I said. ‘I’ll bring the wine.’
‘That’d be nice,’ her voice returned. ‘Oh, and make it white.’
The hour or so until clocking-off time would often be more or less empty of jobs: the clinics finished, inpatients accompanied back up to their wards, outpatients taken over to their nearby hospitals, or gone home with relatives more or less under their own steam. That day, idling away the last bit of time with some desultory chat, the morning’s newspapers or weekly magazines, was more than my libido could stand. Now, expectantly ticking off the stops on its map, the Underground carriage deserted, I watched my face elongate and shorten by turns in the crazy house mirror of its glass.
Just the previous weekend, we had hitchhiked back up North for a birthday party at Jim and Veronica’s rented terrace house. Our mutual, already-married friends had stayed on to begin research degrees. Both of us had been sent invites to the party and separately told we were welcome to stay the night. We found themselves alone together in the small hours of that Sunday morning with a mound of bedding in the half-cleared room where the gathering had been held.
We had naturally made up two beds on the floor. But lying there under the sheet, still chuckling over that incident from the party when Alice had gone into the bathroom only to discover Alison and Mick, sworn enemies from the year below, hard at it in the tub, the thought came over me: ‘Well, why not?’ After all, it wasn’t as if the thought had never crossed my mind during our late-night talks at university. So, crawling over in the dark, I attempted to plant a kiss where it seemed her lips ought to be. I wasn’t far wide of the mark, and, no, she didn’t take offence, thank goodness, but put both arms around me and let things continue in their own precarious way.
I could hardly believe my luck, and our journey back South on that Sunday afternoon was charged with unspoken implications, possibilities and consequences. The chatty driver of an artic dropped us off where the North Circular meets the motorway and we took the Tube from Hendon.
Now, just five days later, as the West Hampstead station sign flashed past the window, I was still picturing her as she had looked round for her exit at the end of our weekend together. Through the sliding door, she had given me a glance that was as much as to say: ‘Now look what you’ve done!’ Suddenly another future beckoned like a crack in the surface of that curving concrete wall. Back in a seat with my train disappearing into a tunnel, I felt as if nothing could ever be quite the same again.
The house with Belle’s flat in it was part of a renovated terrace. The entire street was lined with plane trees in full leaf. The land behind fell away to well-tended gardens and, beyond them, Hampstead Heath—where now the walkers with their dogs, the couples strolling, and ambling solitaries would be going their separate ways. It was getting towards the end of yet one more sweltering day, and still the heat clung to the city, appearing to soften its brick and asphalt like a bloom on the contour of the street. Way above the thick leaf-cover, the curves of shade, each intersected by paler arcs of pavement, some faint wisps of cloud deepening further the sky’s full blue were just touched by a pinkish light.
Her flat was in the last house of its terrace. It was not a gable end. The absent neighbour must have been bombed or demolished, or perhaps it had never been built. The house itself seemed recently renovated: lintels, window frames and doors all painted a deep chocolate brown. Up the grey stone steps I went, and rang the bell.
And here was Alice now; smiling too, and showing me inside. A feeling almost like intense relaxation and tenderness suffused the whole of my body, as if from the hairs on my neck to the tips of my toes. It had started up uncalled for and gave such an intimate excitement to everything that would catch my eye. By the time I’d crossed the threshold and pulled the heavy door shut, she was heading off into the shadows of a long narrow corridor with gilt-framed ornithological prints the length of its walls.
‘This way,’ Alice called—her broad back and slightly turned out feet in brown crisscross woven sandals heading off before me, her lightly perfumed russet hair leaving its wake down the corridor.
Bijoux, I thought, meaning the contrast with my own accommodation, as she led me through to a living room on the far side of the house.
‘Why don’t I put that somewhere safe?’ she said, taking my green bottle of mid-price wine wrapped in blue tissue paper.
‘Quite a peculiar place, isn’t it?’
‘Peculiar?’ she said, with a quizzical lilt, and moving about the flat where her friend had a bedroom and the use of facilities, from a certain James—unmarried, in his thirties, getting on. ‘Belle says he’s rather quiet, in a nice sort of way. Wealthy too, you can see by the décor. He’s in the City.’
‘Reprehensibly perfect,’ I found myself quoting, and must have conveyed a trace of unease.
‘Oh, no need to worry,’ she said, responding to the glances with another of her smiles. ‘Jimmy’s away in Frankfurt, visiting the parent company’s offices … or something.’
‘I’m fine … I’m fine.’
‘And Belle won’t be back this evening,’ said Alice. ‘She’s staying overnight at her parents’ house in Wimbledon.’
Coming up the escalator at Holborn that morning, there seemed to be some hold-up connected with the usual works in progress. The hemispherical roof had all its panels removed; twisted intestines of wiring spilled out and hung down perilously near the heads of commuters being brought up slowly to the surface. Most mornings the southbound Piccadilly Line was packed with people on the platform at Finsbury Park. Hospital porters aren’t paid a fortune, and to make a decent tour of the European galleries on savings from £27 a week involved putting away as much as reasonably possible. At the other end, whether Holborn or Russell Square, it was simplicity itself to pay the ticket collector the minimum fare for the shortest journey, five new pence, or nothing at all if nobody inquired. But that morning the crowd was filing out much more slowly than usual as I approached the barrier where a man in the booth was checking the tickets.
‘And where’ve you come from?’ asked the inspector in response to the small coin in my fingers.
‘Caledonian Road.’
‘Do they have automatic ticket machines there?’
Suddenly, prickling hot and cold, I found no answer forming in my mouth before the inspector started again.
‘You didn’t get on there, did you? Now, before you go inventing something I’m not going to believe, why don’t you tell the truth? It’s going to be easier.’
‘But the machines were out of order.’ The pitch of my voice was rising uncontrollably.
‘Look, sonny, there’s absolutely no point lying to me. You’re in enough trouble as it is. What station did you start your journey from?’
‘Finsbury Park.’
Then there was a silence while the inspector considered his options. As he did, I couldn’t help noticing the man’s shaving sores above his tight white collar and dark blue tie.
‘So where were you going to?’ he asked.
Again no answer came into my mouth, my tongue as if stuck to its roof.
‘Do you work nearby?’
‘The National Hospital for Nervous Diseases … I’m an outpatient porter.’
Then there was another moment’s silence, the inspector still studying his hooked and wriggling prey—but now that bit more intently.
‘You’ll have to go and see my superior, young man,’ he said, with a world-weary sigh, pointing towards the huddle of caught commuters, ‘and when he asks the same question, you just tell him you’re a male nurse.’
The inspector put his hand firmly on my shoulder and steered me over towards that morning’s catch. There the senior inspector and his queue of offenders were flanked by two police officers. Members of the public were being ordered to pay the fine before a certain date, or expect a summons. I was sweating more profusely. Hands gripped clammily in front of my stomach, my muscles were involuntarily tensing and relaxing. Now this other London Transport official and, beside him, the tall police officers were examining the criminal: his shadowy two-day beard, scuffed white baseball boots, washed-out Levis, and a green tennis shirt to complete the uniform.
‘Do you work locally?’ the senior inspector asked.
‘I’m a nurse at the National Hospital for Nervous Diseases,’ I lied.
‘And how much do you earn a week?’
‘£27 after tax.’
The second inspector considered me a moment more.
‘So how much was the fare you should have paid?’
‘Twenty pence.’
‘And have you got it?’
Automatically my hand reached into my pocket for the coins. The inspector was writing a receipt for the fare.
‘Don’t ever do this again, sonny Jim, do you hear? Right. Now, off you go. Or you’ll be late for work.’
Out of the Holborn Tube station, into the sunny morning air, the flow and counter-flow of commuters moving in Southampton Row, the supposed male nurse tried to cool his pounding brain. The turrets and tourelles of Sicilian Avenue with its pretty collonaded screens went by, then Theobald’s Road opposite the Liverpool Victoria Friendly Society Building. That morning the shock of being caught in a trap, only to be let off with a reprimand, baffled and befuddled me. Perhaps the inspector had done it out of pity for my apparent poverty and obvious youth, or out of solidarity at one remove for those in an overworked and underpaid vocation, or some other reason impossible to imagine. Unnoticed and unnoticing, I continued between hurrying business people, their faces set in masks of purpose, habit, disturbance, abstraction—at the start of one more stifling summer’s day.
Standing beside me in an alcove of the kitchenette, Alice was dressing the salad, and turning to talk. Things seemed to be going as well as I could hope—though my story of the encounter with the Underground inspectors, told as if to recruit her into a version of life for underpaid care-workers in the capital, had not produced the wished-for result.
‘It’s your own silly fault,’ she said. ‘You can’t expect me to have any sympathy for you when you try and cheat them out of twenty pence, for goodness sake. And it’s not the money either: it’s the feeling that you somehow have a right.’
‘So why do you think they let me off?’
‘Well,’ she added, with a minimal smile, ‘what if “male nurse” were a sort of code word for one of their kind?’
‘What? You don’t think …’
But now she was positively laughing.
‘No, you obviously don’t.’
Crestfallen and doubly upset, despite her seeming immediately to forget all about it, I was taking in her latest look. All through university she had worn her hair in a bob. It was naturally straight and an auburn colour. Now she’d let it grow almost to shoulder length, had it permed into tight springy curls, and hennaed a rich chestnut brown. She kept running her fingers through the soft washed locks with a smile of satisfaction. Alice was blossoming: such a lovely young woman, fresh-faced, calmly confident of her attractiveness and worth. Her solidly-built figure was moving between the stove and sink, silhouetted in a sash-window’s fading light. There were traces of Edinburgh in her accent still, a warm contralto that rose from the chest, usually with something decisive to say. A semi-circular scar marked the back of her left hand—as if someone had put a scalding pan down on it by mistake—and there was a white crescent moon below her right eyebrow.
The mass of that red-tinged hair enlarged and softened the outline of her head, turning now to speak in the large painted frame of the window.
‘Take the salad to the table, will you?’
She was so lovely and bonny, her well-defined features, blunt nose and narrow mouth expressing the congruence and firmness of a person who had thought quite a bit about exactly who she would be. It was someone whose self could be directed against other people’s by the mouth quickly lifting at one side—an accompaniment to some piercing witticism. Those lips might, though, with luck, break into some cheerful laughter. Her eyes, which could hold you with their even gaze, would also glint wickedly as a confidence was offered, or when, with an epigram, she summed up a person’s character and weaknesses. That glint had sparkled against all of us in her circle at one time or another. It too constituted part of the excitement: how to keep on the tender side of her tongue.
Turning my too attentive eyes from her a moment, I glanced again round the room. It was all done in a dark, neo-Victorian manner, cluttered and eclectic. Hand-tinted prints of rare flowers behind glass in veneered frames were hung against the bottle green Morris-style wallpaper. The original fireplace had been retiled. Arranged on the marble mantel stood a collection of vases with leaf-shapes set into them. They grew out from the shoulders, tinted with earth or vegetable glazes. These, Isabel had warned, were James’s prize possessions and extremely valuable. The entire array was doubled by reflections in an enormous mahogany-framed mirror with speckled foxing at its edges that had been fastened to the wall immediately above the mantelpiece.
‘Do be careful with them,’ she was saying. ‘He’s obsessed with the jugs.’
‘Smashing place for a party!’ I heard myself exclaiming, and immediately regretted it.
Alice frowned a dismissive frown. An enormous livid peacock feather curved from the full mouth and slim neck of one of those pots, brushing the mantel with its plume. Isabel’s dining table was set against a window that gave onto a pampered garden. Deepening shadows extended from the trunks of great elm trees. Over the Heath the sun glowed like a dying ember. Its colours came flooding through the window’s now almost dark rectangle where our two heads were surrounded by the broad leaves of the garden’s sycamores. Threads of pale grey cloud were strung above the thick foliage.
That piercing fondness when she opened the front door returned more sharply, more persistently. She was so appealingly self-possessed, so absorbingly different and separate. Which is why there would always be that healthy resistance: as if the idea of us together might spoil a conversation, or make me lose track of my thoughts.
She offered me the bottle of Frascati to uncork, brushing lightly against a shoulder as she passed back into the kitchenette for two chicken breasts. They were sizzling underneath the spotless eye-level grill.
‘You know,’ she was saying, ‘I’ve never really thought of myself as your type.’
From the age of about thirteen, at the growing consciousness of my involuntary eye movements while walking back from school, it was true I had become aware of being attracted to a certain type of girl. She was petite, though preferably with generous breasts, dark hair and small features, a sun-tanned or Latin complexion, ever so slightly eastern-looking—a composite personal temptress, as it were, like the nurses at the Ospedale Italiano. This comment of hers, though, was my first encounter with the idea that other people might have opinions, and determined ones at that, about my attraction to the opposite sex. But then again, perhaps what she meant was that she hadn’t ever really thought of me as her type?
Now she was carrying our plates over to a table pushed against the large back window—laid already with condiments and cutlery on a dark blue cloth.
‘So what is my type?’ I said. ‘I ask merely for information.’
‘Oh Algy,’ said Alice, replenishing our glasses. ‘And don’t you dare take me for your butler, either.’ She had casually sloshed the pale green liquid out of its bottle, filling each glass to the brim.
‘Would I do a thing like that? No, not even for ready money.’
‘All right, then, I’ll tell you. You’re the sort of person who marries late, when you’ve got yourself established. It’ll be to a girl of about our age, one of your students quite likely, a slim blonde, fairly short, so she can look up to you, the older man, the sugar daddy; someone who’ll take you on your own terms—a pretty art student, somebody like that.’
‘No, definitely not,’ I said, uncertain where the sentence would go. ‘I’ve fancied you for ages, and when we talked at university, when we were “just good friends”’—making the rabbits with my fingers—‘I couldn’t help thinking how much more we might have been.’
The clumsy phrases out, I looked up from a slice of chicken breast and let my eyes wander over towards the window, by way of her face, in the hope of glimpsing the impact my words were having there.
‘Well, then, you were the first to think of it,’ she said. ‘I thought of us as only just good friends—if you see what I mean. After all, it seems like you’ve always been with your quite contrary one. It wasn’t until you said those things, before I left the North, remember, that I even had an inkling you might have other ideas … which is when I began to think about you differently and to feel, to feel, to feel the way I do now.’
On her last day up North, we had met at a Kardomah. It was a miserable, late autumn afternoon. Raindrops were coursing sluggishly across the panes. Heads over the coffee cups, we were warming our faces with the steam rising from them. She was rummaging in one of her large paper shopping bags with its coloured rope handles.
‘Can’t imagine leaving the North … I’d lose what shred of identity I have.’
‘One thing you’ll never lose,’ she said, as if foreseeing the other things, ‘is your Northern-ness—and especially if you go away.’
‘But what makes me so provincial then?’
‘Asking the question! What doesn’t?’ she laughed.
‘Well, you know I’ll miss you.’
‘And why is that?’ she asked.
‘Oh because, because …
Above the steam, across the Kadomah’s window, rain droplets merged and parted as we talked. Staring out at shop displays blurred and confused through the globules of water, I heard myself fibbing about the reasons for expressing that suddenly urgent thought.
‘… because you don’t mind telling me the things I need to hear.’
Better not press her about how she feels now, I thought, arranging the knife and fork in a vertical direction on the plate and still worrying about her reaction to the let-off at Holborn. So instead I let my eyes drift back to the all but finished bottle; once more glancing at her face, the cheeks rising and falling slightly as she chewed and swallowed a mouthful of salad. Her blue gaze seemed a little fuller, her face composed into a smile as she put down her glass.
‘I’ll make some coffee,’ she said.
After a few minutes absence, she came back over to the sofa with a tray. Sitting by the fireplace, examining the ornamented screen placed in front of it, her eyes widened and glanced away. Then she crossed her legs. The newly red-painted toes were glistening above the leather of her brown summer sandals. The pattern of their weave was imprinted onto her feet in the negative by all that sunshine we were having. As I turned my head slightly to look at her, my eyes were drawn to and held by the right lobe of her ear. There was an amber earring attached to it. As if to reveal the thing, she had brushed her hair back with a casual combing action. She was looking at her toes as well, wiggling them to see how the light of the table lamp glinted on each one, and how the tiny glimmer shifted as she moved.
The window opposite, its curtains not drawn, still showed the dark curve of the Heath against the blue dark of the night. A lamp glowed warmly through its treated paper shade that seemed like luminous skin. Then the two of us became aware of the other’s gaze directed at the wiggling red toenails. And as if there were nothing else for it, I leaned my head towards her and she didn’t pull hers away. We would prove to each other that we were equal to each other’s desires, equal to being desired. We would try to satisfy, try to be satisfactory. For now it had became obvious that the sofa was far too uncomfortable. Twisting around as we were, holding each other with a passionate firmness, kissing and being held and barely talking, sometimes just gazing off through the window at the dream-like dark outside, we were, we were doing our best. Then she simply stopped and whispered what seemed like words of love to me—
‘You know you have no right, but you can if you want to.’
James’s bathroom was a sultry cube. Three wall mirrors multiplied the cramped space, offering innumerably varied aspects of the features reflected and receding in every direction. Each one of them leaned forward slightly and peered at the selves to identify a blemish that might be there inside what was then my hairline. At that, a multitude of hands reached out to touch with an infinite number of distinguishable disbeliefs the olive-green, flock wallpaper.
That first temporary job in Park Royal, the one the Manpower Agency found me, was at a metal rolling warehouse. It was exactly the time of the Moorgate Tube disaster. Why had a train failed to stop on a terminal line? The dead man’s handle should have halted it. The Underground’s worst ever accident, the papers said, with their grainy grey photos of corpse-filled, mangled wreckage. It made compelling reading for the blokes with head bowed over sausage and chips in the tiny works canteen. There were columns of speculation about mechanical failure or human error. Had the driver been suffering from a nervous disease? For the dead man’s handle not to operate, he would have had to drive his train into the wall.
At the warehouse, my first job was to help making up orders of copper piping. The stuff needed collecting into bundles, tying together, then loading onto the back of a lorry that would take the orders somewhere in the Midlands. My work mate’s conversation was all about exploits on days off, holidays, at weekends, and always with different girls. He described a trip to Brighton that involved a swimming party, intimate details of acts performed underwater, and the views of massive breasts in drenched dresses and wet T-shirts. But despite all the details it sounded like his sex-life was a work of fiction—as if he spent his spare time in a Pirelli calendar.
Then, just when staying there would have obliged him to yet greater flights of fancy, I was transferred to the presser. This was a vast machine that took blocks of metal and squeezed them into great flat sheets. It was an enormous mechanized rolling pin. The trick was to walk the metal, keeping it in place on the rollers. The work pieces needed to be kept moving on the conveyor belt until they slid off the machine and down into a trolley. This vehicle then transported the flattened sheets to the next in their series of processes. Also working on the machine was a short, red-haired guy who controlled the switches from a gantry.
‘Let me have a little feel of it,’ he said, ‘just a little feel.’
He’d strolled into the lavatory after me and was staring directly south towards what I had in my hands.
‘I’d prefer it if you didn’t,’ were the strange, ungenerous-sounding words that came out of my mouth.
‘Oh go on, why not?’ the redhead persisted. ‘You’ll like it if I do.’
Onto the inside of my hastily buttoning up flies, a last trickle of pee expressed itself. Another employee, one of the foremen, had come into the toilet, putting a sudden stop to my new workmate’s advances.
‘Get your maulers off his dick, you filthy pervert,’ said the other, with a joshing sort of familiarity.
From that day on I only went to the toilet when I was sure that others were on their way to have a slash, which didn’t look unsuspicious itself. By the end of the week, what with the man on the presser, and the others’ fantasies and jokes, I asked for my cards. Then there followed a desperate month, a month of phone calls from booths and interviews terminated after barely sitting down with ‘You don’t really want this job, do you: and, in any case, you’re way over-qualified’—a month which inexplicably produced that more suitable niche in the Outpatients Department at the National Hospital for Nervous Diseases.
No, perhaps James wasn’t … because there was an Ingres odalisque, a turbaned nude framed in varnished wood, hanging above the bath. All of their heads turned back on long, sinuous necks, plump but coolly seductive, seeming to follow those selves of mine around the bathroom, and proving frankly nothing.
Cleaning my teeth with the usual staccato movements, toothpaste foam spilling out of one side of my mouth, I was still worrying about my being attractive to the opposite sex, about finding myself pressed into service as an object of desire for a member of my own.
A prize fish balanced on the cistern in the bathroom. It looked about a foot long, a silvery brown colour, and had its mouth slightly open so that the two tiny rows of teeth could be seen. The fish’s tail was turned towards the front, as if it were still propelling itself through the water. The taxidermist had mounted it in a case with a wooden base and backboard, the other four sides being made of glass. He’d painted the distance to resemble a riverbed, placing a few small stones and bits of gravel on the base.
Leaning forward to study more closely the detail of the artist’s brushstrokes and the stuffed fish’s insensate eye, I pulled automatically on the handle to flush the toilet. At once a fierce pain started at the second joint of my right middle finger. Blood was flooding from its side, threatening to stain James’s bathmat. Stepping back in horror, I turned on the cold tap. Running the cut under it a moment to get the sensation of pain in perspective, I found that the bloody thing wouldn’t stop bleeding.
‘Oh God, oh God!’ all the mouths exclaimed at once.
I sucked at the side of my finger to try and control the flow; then, raising my hand, its wounded finger pointed at the sky, I came running from the bathroom calling Alice’s name.
She stepped out of Isabel’s bedroom wrapping a lemon-yellow bathrobe around her otherwise naked form.
‘What’s happened? What’s the matter?’
‘I’ve gone and cut my finger!’
‘How?’ She seemed to wince and smile at once. ‘How did you manage to do that?’
‘It must have been a sharp edge on the handle … or something.’
‘Come into the kitchen,’ she said, taking my hand in hers like a mother with a son in the wars. ‘Here, take this tissue to wrap it in while I look for a plaster. Oh, mind the floor. Let’s see if I can find some antiseptic to put on it.’
Now she was rummaging rapidly through the kitchenette’s cupboards and produced some lint, some cream in a tube, and a plaster. She held my hand beneath the tap and inspected the shallow, half-inch gash.
‘Nothing to worry about here,’ she said, and, squeezing a little ointment onto the lint, set it against my stinging finger.
‘Hold this while I put the plaster on.’
‘Oh God, oh hell,’ I sighed, embarrassed and anxious about the effect my mishap might be having on her mood.
But there was no need to worry, not yet awhile at least, for we were already sloping off towards Belle’s bedroom.
Porters on day shifts at the National were expected to clock on by eight thirty sharp. We were both awake and up by seven. Swathed once more in the yellow cotton robe, she was filtering some coffee and heating up a couple of croissants in the oven. She’d been given the day off from that Girl Friday job of hers in Fulham. William the photographer was young and keen to make it in the Capital—which meant that because he didn’t get the work he aspired to, he had to put up with establishing a reputation by taking the pictures to go in crystal chandelier catalogues and the like. For that particular one it was her task to fiddle with the placement of the spots so as to get the glints in the right place on each and every glittering piece of glass. By no means the life you might imagine, she had said, endlessly having to run errands for a perfectionist. The previous day she’d spent the afternoon painting glazes over prawns for his shoot devoted to a plate of spaghetti with a fancy sauce. William couldn’t make his mind up about whether he wanted a droplet of light gleaming on each of the prawns, or whether the horrible pink things wilting under the spots should merge more into the whole ensemble. Relieved not to be at his beck and call for a whole twenty-four hours, she would make her way, in leisurely fashion, back to the flat she shared near Crystal Palace after some window-shopping in the West End.
The night had been no less sweltering than usual. Barely room for both of us in Isabel’s single bed against the wall, she must have got too hot lying cramped up there. At some point in the night she had taken a pillow from her side of the bed and stretched herself out naked on the floor. Waking in the small hours, finding her not there, I rolled across, about to get up and look for her. But there she was lying fast asleep on her stomach, the wide expanse of her sun-tanned back peeling around the bikini-shaped white areas, semi-transparent flakes of skin lifting along the ragged curve between her shoulder blades.
‘I don’t much like relying on Belle like this,’ she was saying between bites at her croissant. Alice wasn’t alone in the bedroom at the little flat she shared, and I would only once visit that place above a sweet shop not far from the Crystal Palace. Such practicalities threatened to render our thing impossible too, and before it had barely started.
‘No, I know; but what can we do? The Seven Sisters Road’s no good. I’m not supposed to have anyone in the cupboard. It’s against Mr. Power’s rules and regulations.’
‘As if anyone else would fit,’ she smiled.
‘Well, look, why don’t we take off somewhere together when I quit the National.’
‘Why not?’ she said, but in a tone that implied she had a list of reasons as long as her smooth freckled arm—which was just then reaching towards a drained coffee mug.
She placed the crockery in the sink on top of last night’s plates and glasses.
‘Don’t stare at me like that!’ she exclaimed. But she was talking to the sink. ‘I’ll deal with you lot later.’
‘Sorry I haven’t the time to help.’
‘Don’t even think of it,’ she said. ‘But I thought you were going to be gadding about with Miss Quite Contrary in Italy when you stop pushing the nervous around?’
‘Well, yes, I am—or we are.’
‘And everywhere that Mary went,’ sang Alice, ‘the lamb was sure to go!’
‘It’s been arranged for months; but that doesn’t stop the two of us taking ourselves off somewhere else first, does it?’
‘Well no, I don’t suppose it does,’ she said. ‘What did you have in mind? A dirty weekend in Rottingdean?’
‘No, obviously not: I just thought it was a good idea. Rotterdam, more like. Maybe we could talk about the where and when next time.’
‘Richmond Park, Saturday?’
‘No, sorry, can’t Saturday. There’s that party of Mary’s cousin’s we’re supposed to go to in Denmark Hill. How about Friday night?’
‘Sure,’ she said, holding everything in reserve.
‘Let me just go and clean my teeth …’
‘You want to do that now?’ she asked, surprised and sucking her own. ‘I like to keep the taste of my breakfast lingering a while.’
So, postponing the teeth cleaning, stooping instead to thread up the laces through the top eyes in my pair of mucky white baseball boots, I caught myself remembering the peeled flakes of skin across her back.
‘Let’s meet for a drink before then. How about tomorrow, after work, at the Lamb, if you can get away from William?’
‘I’ll see what I can do,’ she said, and looked away through the window towards the now not-so-dreamlike Heath. ‘Maybe I can come up with a where.’
Then she caught me glancing at the empire clock nestling amongst those precious vases on James’s mantelpiece.
‘You’re late, you’re late,’ she said. ‘Oh your paws and whiskers!’
Beyond the back window, sunlight already filled the sloping garden. It was gleaming brightly across the glass, almost effacing the lawn and trees. Today would be another of those seemingly endless summer days. Already mid-August, for weeks the radio news had been warning us to save water. In Cornwall, standpipes were reported to be operating, and no rain forecast for at least another month. Muted, remote, somewhere in the blue above an opened window, one inbound jet for Heathrow reached my ears—the various birds of the garden sycamores lifting and swooping as if in response to its roar.
‘So you’re thinking of leaving her then?’
‘Can’t exactly leave someone you’re not living with, can you?’
‘You know what I mean. Don’t prevaricate,’ she said.
‘Things haven’t been going that well between us lately. Not since we came down to London, in fact.’
‘Never struck me as the passionate type,’ she said with a grin, ‘a dead hake between the sheets, if you ask me.’
‘Certainly, he that hath a satirical vein’, I remembered, ‘as he maketh others afraid of his wit …’
‘… so he had need be afraid of others’ memory,’ she added, completing the phrase. ‘But, darling, I even give you your best ammunition.’
As a kind of memento mori, she had neatly inscribed that sentence of Francis Bacon’s onto a piece of white card and sellotaped it to the wall beside her first-year college-room bed.
‘She’s using you, you know,’ she said, changing her tone.
‘Using me? How do you mean?’
We were dawdling along the shadowy passageway, reluctant to bring that brief chance of being in the same place at the same time to its inevitable end.
‘Don’t you see how possessive she is, you’re her vicarious culture.’
‘There goes your satirical vein again,’ I said, thinking how much better it would be if we stuck to discussing the light spots in Vermeer.
Nonetheless, adopting the look of a person allowing an important point to sink in, I lifted and spread my shoulders in an inquiring shrug. Alice reached out a hand. The chocolate brown door was open once again, then we were standing on the top step looking out across another North London summer morning, all the world before us, or so it seemed. I leaned and kissed her on both cheeks, like a foreigner. She kissed me on the mouth, like a lover.
Down into the street, relishing the fresh warm air, her hospital porter turned to wave. She was still standing there, a lemon yellow shape in the brown rectangle of the porch. But instead I just rubbed my chin, unshaven again that morning: a three-day beard, there was so little growth it didn’t really matter back then. Alice gave me a wave, and stepped back inside behind the closing door.