John Millet’s house in Greenwich can be approached by rail from London Bridge. The trains rumble high over Southwark, haunt of Geoffrey Chaucer’s pilgrims, and lure one with the emotive promise of Rochester, Chatham and Gillingham at the end of the line. It was the romance of the platform announcement which gave me the idea of going away. John was lunching with a friend upon German wine and onion quiche made, of course, by himself.
‘We didn’t wait for you,’ he said. ‘You were rather vague about your plans.’
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I look terrible, John. Don’t look at me.’ Because I knew appearances mattered to him, I felt that I was an affront to his aesthetic senses. John smiled quite kindly.
‘Boyfriend trouble is only temporarily disfiguring,’ he said. ‘Sit down. Alex,’ he said, ‘Katherine.’ He handed me an engraved hock glass containing chilled wine. A great pleasure to have in the hand.
‘Katherine is embroiled in a poor little tottering affair with Jake Goldman’s son,’ he said. ‘Remember Jake? My neighbour in Belsize Park? Stunning wife. Beautiful eyes. Yes?’ He made a fluent cosmopolitan gesture, drawing a circle in the air and lightly kissing his fingers. An ironic, romantic, harlequin gesture. His friend had taken off his suit jacket and was sitting in his waistcoat and pinstriped shirt sleeves.
‘I never met him,’ he said, ‘but I remember the woman. A handsome, tired young woman, with a mewling toddler.’ John gestured again, spreading his hands to denote, with resignation, the condition of mortality which besets us all.
‘The “mewling toddler” is now the cause of Katherine’s scorbutic pallor,’ he said. ‘We are none of us getting any younger, Alex.’
That afternoon we walked alone along the waterfront, he and I, to the naval college where he expanded upon the decorative use of symmetry in wrought iron.
‘I thought I might go to Rome,’ I said.
John lent me a book called Italian without Toil. It came with a set of records. Then he wrote letters on my behalf to two of his friends, employing, in my interest, his stunning left-handed writing which Jacob had previously slandered. He gave them to me to post.
‘Cheer up, Katherine,’ he said. ‘That pretty little Goldman is not the only man in the world.’ I replied with simple commitment that he was for me. John, having given me a glass of brandy, sat opposite me for an hour or so and sketched me as I sat on his sofa, chronicling, in brown chalk, a phase of my unhappiness. Then he got up and ran a bath. He came back and handed me a large porridge-coloured bath towel. To resist would have seemed gauche. It was when he entered the bathroom to get me out, had wrapped me in the towel, with my arms pinned to my sides, and propelled me towards his bed, that I remembered the spanner.
‘Jacob says–’ I said. I was not going to tell him about the spanner. Merely to gabble nervously, to break the dignity of his hypnotic magic, that Jacob had said – as he had in a light moment – that John slept in black sheets. John put his index finger over my lips.
‘Shshsh,’ he said. And very quietly, very strangely, I thought, he said into my ear, ‘You will say after me, “Jacob is the butcher’s grandson.”’ I found this so perverted, so bizarre, so ridiculous, that I pulled away from him in ungainly, childish confusion and scrambled clumsily for my clothes.
‘I think I hate you,’ I said.
In the train I opened the book. ‘Non e difficile I’italiano per un francese,’ it said, encouragingly. ‘Italian is not difficult for a French person.’