Mirror, Mirror
FIG TREE
an imprint of
PENGUIN BOOKS
FIG TREE
www.penguin.com
‘I am not I: pitie the tale of me’
from Sir Philip Sidney,
Astrophel and Stella
It was a woman’s shout, then a man’s, cut short by a slamming door. Flicking the blind aside, I put my eye to the gap.
Silence. No one. Only bare branches twitching. And lamplight bathing everything – terraced houses, parked cars, the slither of sullen night sky – in a gaudy orange film. Perhaps it’s me, perhaps it’s just the sudden waking.
I can hear a loud tock-tock of heels from the opposite corner. She’s tall, young, in jeans and narrow black leather jacket; long hair, a dark, burnished gold. She casts a quick glance behind her, and now up, it seems, towards me.
We lock gazes and I step back, slightly stunned. She halts, turns and retraces her steps. A car door shuts somewhere close by. I remain snagged at the window, shivering to the distant roar of an aeroplane.
Voices again – coming from the same corner. Now she is coatless, bare-armed in a tight sparkling vest. A long denim handbag swings furiously from her shoulder as she speeds up her clunking, high-heeled pace. Close behind follows a man, fair shorn head rising from a black parka, face thrust out like an angry fist.
I can make nothing of their hoarse shouts as she comes to an abrupt stop on the pavement, directly opposite my window. His reaction is to push her hard with a flat palm, mid-chest. It’s a laboured, sideways fall, in which she manages to strike her forehead against the roof of my car on the way down, cigarette clutched in her left hand.
Balance recovered, she leans against the car and stays with her back to me, smoking, watching, as he gropes about in her fallen denim handbag, flinging makeup, hair brush, mobile to the ground. Finally, some object is found and stuffed into an inner pocket of his parka. As he slings the bag into the gutter by her feet, he turns a slow semi-circle around her, as if unable to tear himself away.
At this point, she utters something – something devastating because even from here, I see his tautening mouth, the ominous rise of his hand. But he moves away – giving my car door a stiff kick – before marching back round the corner. A car engine gnashes to a start; only now does she turn, touch her forehead and stare at the blood gathered on her finger.
The tilt of her head provokes a smudged recollection and the sensation of tiny hot shards coursing through the top of my skull. Full of urgency, I lift the blind and open the window to the slap of icy air.
‘Are you all right?’ I ask.
Her head swivels round with ceremonious slowness.
‘You’d better come in,’ I say, noting a fleeting little smile on her lips.
The chill slices through my skin as I tie my silk dressing gown tightly at the open door. She approaches at a sullen gait, fixing me with a calm, beatific look. Close up, her pupils are dilated, hopping with manic life in that mess of smudged eye shadow. Dark daub of blood on her brow, the mouth nearly purple with cold.
‘Come in, it’s freezing,’ I say to her. A sudden movement; her body falters. I steady her by her shoulders, help her over the threshold, but it’s a job; she’s tall in those boots and marble-cold to touch.
I lead her into the sitting room, on to the corner of the sofa nearest the door, lighting the lamp beside it. Collapsed back, the arc of light strikes her with a kitsch dazzle. She is all antique sheen, her dirty-gold mane merging with the sparkling camisole. There’s a secretive ecstasy in the curling ends of the mouth. In a daze, held by the icy-blue gleam of her skin, I literally have to shake myself into waking, action. I decide to do what they do in films: walk quickly yet calmly to the kitchen, assemble a medical kit of sorts to clean and dress the wound, and grab Jake’s Armagnac (he never drinks it). Back at the sitting-room door, I hear her say, ‘The cunt took my fucking fags.’ She is transfigured: crouched, rummaging in her handbag. ‘Can’t believe it. Oh, here they are.’ It’s an affecting voice, a voice thick with wood smoke. She shoots me a manic grin, oblivious to the thin line of blood trickling down to her eye.
‘Drink this. Let’s clear up your forehead.’ Standing behind her now, I guide her head back. She gulps down her drink, woozily submitting to my hands smoothing back her hair.
‘By the way, I’m Christabel Fellner,’ I say.
‘This is all really freaky. I’m Tina.’ She has jolted her head back, but I press it back down, noting slanted eyes, half-moons of pale green glass. ‘Try to keep still.’ She responds with a gravelly giggle.
Time floats drowsily in the silent lull. I clean the wound gently; there’s not much more blood. I notice her eyebrows are russet-coloured, with a sprinkling of faint gold at her temples. The hair smells of bar fug and silt, and of sweetish singed plastic like a burnt doll. I push down a bandage with firm finality, letting go of her head.
‘There, just a graze, though you should get it checked out.’
‘Hate doctors.’ She helps herself to a good swig of Armagnac while reaching for a cigarette and then clicks at a long lighter with a trembling hand. A high flame shoots up, coming to rest a millimetre from her eyebrow; I hear the tiny fizzing of hair. Cigarette lit, she follows with a lengthy, self-absorbed exhalation into mid-air. ‘Yeah, well, fuckit.’ The tips of her long, bony fingers are grey with the grime of a long, hard night.
‘How do you feel?’
By way of response, I am met with a straying, doleful gaze, a swift don’t-careish hunch of the shoulders. And it is here that I begin to be – charmed, tenderized.
‘Do you live close by?’ I hand her an ashtray from the coffee table and turn, sitting towards her, suddenly flushing with self-consciousness at being in my dressing gown with a stranger.
‘Nowhere. It’s his flat. He took my keys, didn’t he?’ The accent is all young urban layering, hard to place: the ubiquitous estuary mockney, a hint of Jafaican. But the aspirated ‘h’, the occasional swooping consonant, sound the caricatured airs of a diva.
‘Is he your boyfriend?’
‘Carl? Caaarl?’ The sound is a spit of derision. ‘Hate him. Hates me.’
There follows a dismissive drag on the fag. ‘He’s lost the plot. Won’t leave it. Tonight, right…’ Moving round to fix me with that pale-glass stare, she stabs at the air with the cigarette for emphasis. ‘Tonight he was like, really on to me with this sleazeball in the car; so he could like, watch…’ A knowing laugh cuts the narrative short. The long eyes narrow and glaze over. ‘Yeah, well, you don’t wanna know. I’ll call old Charlotte, she lives ten minutes away.’
Now she clambers over the coffee table, mouth fretting at ash-heavy fag, and swoops towards the hallway worrying at her mobile, a sleek, silvery, flip-top affair. I can hear much impatient stomping up and down the hall corridor. ‘It’s me, Tina! Carl’s flipped. Totally. I’m locked out. Answer the phone. Okay, ring me asap. Jeezus.’ I can make out a long sigh of annoyance – at the inconsiderately sleeping friend. But it sounds an overblown note. Why did she go out to ring? It occurs to me, instantly, that she may have faked the call. I look across at the time, glinting greenly on the DVD machine: 05.14. I had no idea it was so late.
Back in the room, she has sobered up enough to sense my agitation. ‘I’ll just have to turn up and buzz the fuck out of her buzzer’. I am flashed a shark-like smile with a row of tiny, glinting teeth. She edges closer. ‘You know me. I work in The Castle, round the corner’. She blows smoke shamelessly into my face. ‘You came in for a meal three weeks ago. It was a Friday… Ever so slinky in black, slinky black hair – your plate, you didn’t touch anything… just puffin’ and drinking, all mysterious – and pissed off.’ She holds out her cigarette hand, flips it deliberately into a gesture, my exact ‘troubled-and-smoking’ gesture. I start, as if chancing on a dissonant, angry self in a reflecting window. ‘This one’s different, I thought to myself, different’, she continues, exhaling roughly, ‘not like the rest of the wives. If you cut them, they’d have organic cranberry juice for blood.’ An abrupt automaton’s cackle erupts from the direction of her half-closed mouth.
Absurdly, I seem intent on injecting a tinkling drawing-room tone. ‘So, don’t you enjoy your job?’
‘First regular job for, like, three centuries. Tryin’ to bin all that shit.’ She gestures at the window, by which I take her to mean the earlier drama. Now she turns, pulls herself up straight with a skittish amusement. ‘How about you? Do you enjoy it?’
‘Enjoy what?’
‘Your job, your life.’ I see her arm is sweeping graciously outwards in a parody of my own. There’s a ticking sound from the direction of the dark fireplace. I finally answer, ‘Good question. Not since I gave up smoking.’ She holds out her lit fag to me and I take it and pull on it. Our ensuing laughter cuts itself suddenly short, arrested by the night’s silence.
‘I don’t really have a job at the moment,’ I tell her.
I am now being assessed with drunken boldness, the tips of those creaturely teeth chewing contemplatively at her lower lip.
‘You alone here then?’
‘Yes. No. I mean, my husband works in LA.’
Now she swoops forward, hand extended. Her index finger begins slowly to stroke the chain around my neck, coming to rest on the pendant diamond in the middle. ‘Bet he gave you that.’
‘Yes, yes.’ My neck smarts at the strange touch. I lift my hand automatically to stop hers, flinching in confusion. She removes her own hand calmly, smiling opaquely. I say, ‘I must have forgotten to take it off.’ I feel peeled, exposed.
‘So why did you ask me in then?’ A lilt in her voice tightens the net of edgy intimacy around us; I try to shake it off with glibness.
‘You did hurt yourself. Well, the truth is, it was concern for my car. You fell on it and your boyfriend kicked it.’
‘But I could be anybody.’ She shoots me a sideways leer.
‘You didn’t look too dangerous. Just a vulnerable, cold girl.’
‘Girl? I’m twenty-five.’ The voice is thickening, clotting. ‘I saw you, looking at me out there, it was you, up there… and… I knew, like from the start…’ She halts for breath. The moment stales. Oh yes, she was right. What the fuck is she doing here? I get up, gingerly, my unease somehow deepening at the sight of the vulnerable, skeletal bones on my feet.
‘Listen, I’ll call a cab and lend you some money.’ She stays seated, long pale arms crossed in her lap. Having fetched my purse from the kitchen and called a cab, I hand her twenty pounds; far too much, but she plucks it from my hand with a breezy air of entitlement. I say, ‘Now, the cab’s coming straight away…’ Her glance has fixed on my white-knuckled grip on the purse defensively held to my midriff. Our eyes meet in a charged exchange. Out of guilt, or fear, I add impetuously, ‘I’ll lend you a jumper.’
‘If you like…’
‘It’s fine – for God’s sake, you work round the corner.’
Rushing upstairs, I grab the first suitable thing, a red cardigan, from the bedroom, realizing too late when I’m back downstairs that it is one of my new Christmas presents from Jake. Expensive cashmere. Hermès. Far too small, delicate, inappropriate. I could have given her one of several hoodies hanging by the door. Never mind: I want her out. I open the front door to an inky sky being beaten into fast grey whorls. A gust blows from nowhere. Spindly branches clack and poke about. Her hair flies back and her eyes, her mouth, all follow, slanting, as she puts on the cardigan. She’s shouting through a column of air.
‘Pay you back, pay you back.’
‘Whenever.’ I close the door with difficulty against the heave of wind. Through the spyglass I note the girl’s forlorn backward gaze in the receding taxi. By contrast, the mouth, otherwise petulantly full, is pressed into a thin line of intent.
Back inside, I am struck by the stilled air. I – we – have been here nearly two months, and the house still feels inscrutable, a little contemptuous of us even. I hear again the gravelly catch in her voice, my neck pricking at the memory, the chain intolerably scratchy. I fumble for ages to unclasp it and sling it back in its box in the drawer – as Jake always reminds me to do. Then, the slide into the new bed I have chosen. Plain, simple mahogany.
Sounds invade: random creaks, the odd snapped gust punctured by the whistle of a distant police siren. My heart twitches in its cage – the diazepam, disturbed in its course. I feel for the bottle on the bedside table in the dark. Another won’t kill me.
The television is showing a news flash. Hundred-mile gales in the north, paralysed transport services, cars blown off the road, bridges closed down, damaged power-lines, trees devastated.
The winds have reached the south and parts of the city. The images show loose fragments of buildings, house fronts slashed like the flimsiest of silk, a steeple blown off a church, like the work of some bored hooligan deity. Looking out of the bay window, I see no overturned cars, no roofs savagely swept away. Only one of the pavement cherry trees has suffered a half-lopped branch. In the glass, my reflection merges with a matted tangle of twigs huddled in a corner. Other lines weave in, arabesque fashion. A face forms there with exaggerated, slanting features. Oh dear me, last night. I switch channels. Soldiers scurrying around Baghdad like rubble sculptures, rubble stick-men. London. Another police search in some bedraggled block of flats.
Ah now, that’s better – Home Invaders, the new morning rival to DIY Brigade. Josh and Daz are arriving at a new house on whose doorstep waits a quivering housewife. A mini-squad of iconic masculinity, indistinguishable in their khaki combat gear from the newsreel soldiers, they set to work after a quick flirt and a cup of tea. Here they are, thundering into walls with power drills, masculine thighs straddling the floor as corner fittings are prised out with grunting expertise.
These are the sort of shows that zip me through the mornings. Rural Bliss, Restoring Follies, House Swap–Life Swap, Top Pads, Renovation Renovation – the illusion of rebirth through the cult of interiors. Dark, handsome Josh is now demonstrating to the newly appeared husband how to make shelves that stay up. Josh holds up a long screw and a long plastic rawlplug and inserts screw in plug. ‘These two need each other.’ He grins at the camera. ‘Otherwise, it’s a case of this.’ His large paw on the bookshelf behind him causes it to flop down – the husband’s goatee beard twitches. The TV flashes up a sign: ‘Wall Colour: Deep Boudoir Red’.
It’s barely a week since I called a halt to my own Home Invaders, to their endless screeching drill, my mind fraying with their sodden cigarette butts floating in the loo. So the house is only half habitable. Kitchen, front sitting room, bathroom and my bedroom form one region, stripped and smoothed of history, bare rectangles for hearths, a sanctum of white and glass. But the old house remains in the nicotine-hued hallways, the two spare bedrooms, dining room and disused attic.
It had been empty for months before we bought it; some man living abroad had inherited it from his mother. I feel the old woman’s brown breath in the cloistral hallway, her tread on the balding carpet-stair. And here, in the old dining room, so dismal I’m almost fond of it. The room needs exorcizing of a congealed, overcooked pall. A huge patch of damp dominates one corner, in the shape of a crab with an outsize claw sprawling over the window. The yard outside is in the permanent shadow of the wall to its right, and on its other side by the street corner. I’m still startled in my tracks by the rodent-like shuffles of people passing unseen beyond the wall. And here in the other corner, the only item of furniture, my mother’s high-backed Jacobean chair. Even the stacked boxes are succumbing, their cardboard edges curling and merging with the gristle-coloured marble of the fireplace surround. Nails prod dimly through the floorboards like miniature mines.
I leave for the gleaming contrast of the kitchen in shiny new metal and pale wood, the partitioned French windows framing the chaos of garden outside in multiple screens. The wind has done some stealthy work: a bush has been stripped bare, leaving thin, toothless combs for branches, revealing a convolvulus curled tight about its newly naked core.
Back from this view, the mess in the hall needs even more immediate attention. I cannot leave it in this state for Kim, my new cleaner. She’ll never stay. I hoover and scrub away the clinging dust of the decorators – all to little effect. The smell of dust is pervasive, as if the house were built on some vast, cindery desert. I finally give up, surprised by the suddenly darkening afternoon light, and go upstairs. Stepping out of the shower, I realize I am a violent pink from scrubbing myself and wonder exactly how long I’ve spent in there. These recurring distortions of time, needle-stings of anguish.
In the bedroom mirror, I force my gaze to meet me full on. Portrait of a Pointless Woman. At thirty-eight. It has a numbing clang to it. (Bring on the ringing toll of forty.) On good days I can ‘pass’ for less but still, my relationship with mirrors is becoming anxious, glancing. And to think of how I used to gobble up mirrors. Well, the thrill is gone, baby. It’s not vanity, not as such. All right, well, perhaps. But vanity aside, there’s something else to it, a blind panic at any visual scrutiny. As my face fades, the veil will slip to reveal it: that huge, psychic blister silently building underneath. Only in anonymity can I shed skin, flesh, age, self. But today, I make an effort; I’m paying a long overdue visit to Suzy, old friend and near neighbour, and this is what it reduces to: dressing up to others’ expectations. I should have spared Jake and married a gangster property tycoon with hair implants. Cocaine for breakfast; Kristal for lunch, followed by a monumentally ravaged decline. Anything but this blanching, this drip-drip effacement.
Making my way downstairs, I grow clammy recalling the girl on the threshold, as if I’d literally sleep-walked through the incident.
The sky is low, drizzle slashes thinly on cheek. My breath forms plumes which die quickly in the icy air. Most early afternoons, I’ve taken to prowling around this becalmed neighbourhood of Ladbroke Park, savouring the cosy novelty of its neo-suburbia. The bare stumps of the harshly pruned trees, the placid streets, all so different from last summer by the copse in the country, dank foliage and dank earth encroaching. A disaster, that experiment. No use dwelling on it: I’ve escaped all that. Here, I – we – (Jake is hardly ‘here’) will find balance in the limbo of this satellite world, under the eiderdown of the smoke-grey clouds.
There’s a lightly emotional pull too, a tentative family connection, my father having spent part of his childhood a mile to the north. They must have arrived, my paternal grandparents, Polish Jew and cockney – what, nearly sixty years ago. At some point, when their business prospered, they’d decamped to a larger house, further out, the one I knew. I’d been seven when they’d died soon after each other. Though their faces have long since faded, still, I hear the warmth of their voices, grown alike through the years – or perhaps it’s my memory that joins them in one sound. Still, I hear their fond, plangent awkwardness around my father, their brilliant son Leo, the art historian, married to a lapsed Catholic and visiting them always in his black, Bohemian sweaters. Not in denial, I prefer to think, so much as in aesthetic retreat from his roots. My aunt, his sister, is also dead. Apart from her children in Chicago, there is no other family on that side, so many potential branches having strayed, or perished. But then, I’m hardly close to my own brother, or to the remnants of my mother’s querulous bloodline and their withered genealogy. What a furtive thrill would overcome me, after she died, when I lied and told people I was an orphan.
I have a photograph of my father, little Leo, a wiry boy in tweed gazing with shrewd coyness at the camera in a garden. Even then, in the tilted head and impish curl of lip and forelock, that assumption of seductiveness, the cosseted aura. He has not yet visited me here in the new house or shown me the house where he lived, if it still stands. But then, he affects not to know, scoffing at the idea of revisiting such Pooterish horror.
These terraces, built for clerks and shopkeepers, have already seen several waves of immigrants in the last century – from Ireland, the Caribbean, Pakistan. But recent booming property prices have brought a different species. Priced out of the grander, stuccoed central localities, comforted by the presence of other Ruperts and Mirandas, they – I have yet to think of myself as we – continue to arrive in sleek silver hatchbacks and MPVs. These are tucked in rows of new parking bays marked out by freshly painted white lines. I notice one of the street’s few remaining eyesores, the crushed-nosed rusting red saloon, has vanished overnight. A curious thing this: the more the new arrivals attempt to impose their tasteful individuality on their property, the more the houses, previously scarred by different degrees of dilapidation, end as serial images of one another, their windows like port-holes in a well-oiled ship. There’s a joke, a local myth. They arrive to breed only to find their desire drain efficiently away down the well-maintained copper pipes.
‘It’s everywhere,’ Suzy tells me of the passionless torpor of the unions as she reels off a growing list of examples. ‘It’s in the air.’ But there is no real air except the soft sighing through the cherry trees. Not even today, the night’s gales having glided through fitfully, late for somewhere else. Clouds float motionless. Inclemency seems to bypass Ladbroke Park, baffled by its satellite status, neither city centre nor real suburb.
Suzy’s house is the other side of Main Road, on a corner of the Park, the area’s dinky pastoral heart. The street names – Hopeglade, Mornington – promise painless lives, cheery avenues to painless deaths. I glimpse the Park, which I’ve yet to visit. Encircled by low black railings, one can see through to the other side, to the pert two-storey houses, their low contours scaling down all, sky, trees, humans, to their own dainty proportions.
We are in Suzy’s neo-industrial kitchen where gleaming pots and pans hang obediently in a rectangular formation over the central cooking range. Only jars of expensive oils and spices are allowed an artful disarray on two stainless-steel shelves. The steel worktops reflect back our faces with clinical precision. Suzy’s large-boned frame fizzes metallically around the place, under the stern watch of a forbiddingly rectangular white vase at the windowsill, stuffed with spiky wintry foliage.
‘From your garden?’
‘No, darling, haven’t you noticed the new florist’s by the tube station? Next to the new organic deli.’ Her mock-astounded glare never fails to bring to mind those Lely portraits of Restoration ladies, all urbane pragmatism behind coy, bulbous eyes. In fact, Suzy is growing nicely into her Restoration character, the blithe drollness in her voice bringing every subject, lofty or sad, down to the same rolling foothills of gossip. It works its way into her face, a deadpan irreverence pulling down the lines around her mouth into a bemused moue. In stillness – a rare thing – her mouth settles into a depressed arch.
As she prepares coffee, she starts in on her usual comic plaint, the chaos and strife of juggling her work as a freelance art director, motherhood and play – though her life is as regulated as her precision-layered glossy dark locks. On the table lies a large biblical leather diary – a thick codex of organic traders, bikram yoga teachers, contemporary dance tickets, children’s dental appointments, private openings, dinner in new restaurants with old friends, lunch in old restaurants with new contacts.
It appears her husband, Nick, has forgotten to order something or other from Real Soil, the organic delivery people. She offers up some hilarious examples of his convenient lapses of memory. I recall the multiple doomed love affairs of her youth with cute Jamaican dub DJs, each break-up heralding another avant-garde hairstyle: yellow-and-green mohican would give way to surly-fringed Juliette Greco beatnik. And how, on the stroke of her thirtieth birthday, the mettle of her breed had set in and bagged the obligingly suitable Nick. As she reopens the fridge, she lets out a melodramatic groan, both hands on hips. ‘No milk. And yes, of course, you guessed it, the butter’s gone too. She gets through half a pound of organic butter in two days!’ ‘She’ is Olga, her taciturn au pair.
‘She might have other uses for it,’ I suggest.
‘She’s far too busy throwing up to get buggered.’ The last word bounces jauntily in the air; Suzy sighs with lengthy emphasis. ‘Oh well, it’ll have to be the soya milk.’ As our cackles subside we move into Suzy’s large sitting area, open-plan, though ingeniously sectioned. I am shown the new black leather sofa unit. ‘Black is a much better colour with children around,’ she says as she ushers me down. Recently I’ve had the sensation that all Suzy’s utterances to me are speared with strategic hints; might this be about my childless state? But now we’ve moved on, with Suzy’s customary deftness, by way of sofas to our mutual friend Zara Marshall. ‘She’s completely lost the plot, the new house is all garish post-punk – purple sofa, pink and black everywhere. Poor old Tom – now she’s decided she wants to live in Goa… and – as if heroin weren’t enough, she’s apparently moved on to crack.’
By way of contrast to her environmental minimalism, Suzy collects friends like a collection of cherished, cracked antique dolls, about whom she likes to confer darkly. She and I are the last of the old college gang in town, drawing closer as people do on large tables as departing diners begin to leave salient gaps. Ours is an elastic friendship, stretched on a tacit pact against unwelcome truths – yet fondly loyal. My cracks appeal and appal; if nothing else, they must enhance her own hold on virtue.
‘Last time she invited me for a girlie supper,’ she continues, ‘and she wasn’t there! No one. No lights in the house. No message. Nothing.’ Suzy’s patrician nose snorts with indignation. ‘And when she’s feeling bad she just dumps it all on you, for hours, on the phone. In the end, you have to let them fall. Hope they pick themselves up again.’ By way of punctuation, she gets up to rearrange two twigs in another austere vase. ‘I mean, she does have a three-year-old child.’
I feel the mischief of my father in me: ‘You’ve just given me an idea on research. “On Contemporary Vanitas: the iconography of early-twenty-first-century interiors.”’
‘I wouldn’t mind being a student again,’ she sniffs, ‘if I could afford it. Anyhow, I thought you’d already done a PhD or what have you.’
‘An MPhil, which, you may recall, I left half-way through.’ I add a hint of despair, to veil the flatness. ‘You’re right. Here I am, like some empty, privileged hausfrau from another era, doing up the house.’
Suzy’s cup chinks with efficient irritation against its saucer. ‘Well, babe, the pills might be helping but – you need something. If not a job or a baby – a – a project. A dog – a Jack Russell. You like Jack Russells. How’s the house?’
‘Oh, I got rid of the builders. They were quite literally doing my head in.’
I am thrown a tart frown, dramatically despaired of, and let off, though not without a caution, my attention being drawn to a pair of black art deco ashtrays on the coffee table in the shape of female dancers. ‘Kitsch or what? Nick hates them. Bloody architects. But there has to be some compromise in a marriage.’
I take my leave, tickled, as I always am, by the unintentional comedy of Suzy, her genius for illustrating the grave with the mundane. At least her affinities reveal a tireless pedalling at life – so much more human than my own sniggering evasions.
Back out on Main Road, walking rapidly through the charcoal air, I am caught by a bust of a child in green glass in the window of the junk shop. With its blankness of eye, hairless head, it brings to mind a dream from last night. Fragments surface and collide with the uncanny softness of mercury. I was in the gallery, in The Big Room, with Paddy, my old boss. Then I was alone, with a sculpture which had just arrived; I didn’t want to look into its blank eye.
Thank God we opted for a larger house on this scruffier side. I would have throttled myself in all that pleasantness. But what use the barrier is at the end of my road, I’m not sure. Perhaps to discourage entrance from the pitted, traffic-guzzling, shop-strewn Broadway, a section of a long old Roman road leading westwards out of the city. Grimy men with jumpy dogs cross over in the afternoons to the corner shop, a family-owned ‘dairy’ and newsagents run by Ali and his family with resigned good humour. Here, in the cramped interior divided by a long tall shelf creating two single-file rows, presence is heard rather than seen, in sonic variations. The gentle clack of elderly teeth; the scrape of coins in children’s sticky hands; the fractious jangle of maternal car keys. Today, it is silent as I buy the paper. At the counter, Ali tells me he is planning a month’s holiday to Pakistan, letting his sons do the work.
‘So they don’t get so lazy, hey, Reza.’ He elbows the abashed, fluffy-moustached teenager beside him, whose gaze skids off in alarm along the counter. I tell Ali I’ve just been to the Park.
‘Ah, the Park.’ His deep eyes rise upwards from his round, dimpled face and prophet’s dark beard. ‘For a few weeks, the beautiful blossom comes on the trees, glorious. Like a dream come true. Then, it’s over.’ He chuckles. ‘Each year the blossom comes too early, each year it leaves too early.’ Our laughter falls off. Young Reza’s eyes snag furtively on a mini-skirted, leather-booted blur passing the shop window.
Back outside, I glimpse my car and recall the girl’s boyfriend kicking it. Oh yes, a neat little dent, a thin black line at its centre. So I didn’t dream it up. Frankly, I don’t give a toss, but Jake will. Nothing escapes the rigour of Dr Jake’s medical scrutiny. Yes, what had truly baffled Suzy was my marriage to him, as if I’d committed a cardinal sin of miscasting. We’re still tentative after the rural fiasco. Clearly, quite clearly, it’s no accident he jetted off with supersonic haste to LA. I wonder, does he think he made some terrible mistake? Had he formed a notion of some endearingly dizzy creature, only to have caught a glimpse of the slavering monster behind the jungle foliage? But he would never let on; his tact is heroic. The real luxury Jake affords me is that of shade.
The dried fungal whiff of the walls as I re-enter the hall: the scent of solitude. There we are, in the wedding photograph. My heavy mask of bridal makeup, his long neck anxiously stretching from his collar, baffled eyes aimed up at the middle distance, as if at some unaccountable development in the sky. His hands removing his tie that night, his clean clinician’s fingers, like fine instruments. At home, as in his practice, he washes his hands, those fingers, with sacramental regularity. I seem to conjure him up as a lovable alien. His pride is veiled, his obsessions and rituals intense. When he sits on lawns, it is with trepidation, as if the grass beneath him will seethe and heave and throw up unimaginable reptiles. And yet he can tend to the horror of a burnt or disfigured face, look death in its dull eye.
Jake was such a rarity in our circus of artists, gallerists, hacks, curators, liggers, drug dealers, bar jockeys and tenuous celebrities. The fact of his being a real doctor filled us with immature glee, so that if we’d overdone it on the drugs we’d say, ‘Oh, come on. Let’s call Doctor Jake and ask him for a script to come down.’ It became a clarion call, a panacea for all occasions. As a dermatologist he was hardly in a position to help, but we’d call him out of sheer mischief. Jake would sigh fondly, cataloguing my litany of symptoms; slowly extracting admissions of half-recalled excess. At gallery openings I would turn to find him, just behind, his gaze in hasty retreat. He’d stand there, silent in the loud banter, with his air of hushed sanatoriums and careful vigil, or bemusedly scanning some arcane installation art. He’d put business our way at the gallery; he knew wealthy consultants, fund managers with serious bank accounts. But what exactly drew me? My sick soul clung to his white-coated ministrations. And something else, that acute, droll tact of his, screening a secretive obsessiveness, an antiquated courtly ardour. Love proffered and never retracted. Later, he told me he had waited for me for three years, bided his time.
Like all beginnings, it began with departures. I had just left the frantic, self-enclosed world of Paddy’s gallery. I remember waking up with the now familiar red-hot dread pressing on my chest. And then it came to me, Jake’s clear, unblinking stare, the way he spoke gently to me, through my illness, as if words were fallen rocks to be negotiated on the road. Once I came to from some near-blackout to glimpse an unusual convulsion. His face looked down on me but his thoughts had startled in their tracks. With visible effort, he brought himself back to calmly meet my gaze. I knew he’d heard something, half-spied my inner phantoms; I’d been muttering something as I came to. ‘What was I on about?’ I asked. He examined me slowly, carefully weighing up the possible consequences of his words. At length, his expression arranged into one of theatrical blitheness, he said, ‘You were ordering another Brandy Alexander.’ With the solemnity of a guarded heart in thrall to love, he stayed, unflinching, true.
I called him. We had lunch. Outside the air had the citrus tartness of early April. Slipping into a breezy persona, I thought the answer is to will, just to will, a new beginning. We strolled past old Greek restaurants and dank delis, past the pub where my father once drank with old-style artists who fought over one another’s mistresses, fought over unpaid debts, made up with another round. A young postman had rushed by, his slate-grey uniform mocked by his tall toucan hairstyle – all bright red dyes. And I’d felt a pang, a full stop in my centre.
It’s late at night. I surf the net for a while, trawling ebay. A minor compulsion. I never go so far as to buy any of the old tat. Well, yes, I lie – once, when I bought the whole shebang from one seller. Three garden chairs; a disused saw; a prehistoric-looking claw hammer, good but chipped and faded porcelain, an awful watercolour, a bashed-up thirties wood veneer side table. Some eleven items in all. There were a few other takers for the auctions; perhaps, like me, they scented death. I like to think it was the image of a penniless widow. But that wasn’t it – nor the five glasses of wine. There was an automaton quality to my clicks of the computer. When they arrived, I almost didn’t open them, but they’d been touchingly well wrapped. My eyes ran over the nicks and welts, the chips and scratches and rust, until they came to the final item: the most knackered of the striped canvas garden chairs, its bottom sagging, its backrest warped with the imprint of its absent owner. Out came hot, automatic, silent tears, as if out of two leaking taps. No emotion at all. The next day I phoned to have it all removed. I look now, but I haven’t bought anything since that peculiar spree. I put it all down to idleness and its peculiar distortions.
I’m instantly warmed by the kitsch chiaroscuro of the restaurant’s dark brown wood, fat orange candles and jazz photographs. She doesn’t appear to be working tonight. Relieved, a little deflated, I try to entertain Jake out of his jet lag. He refuses wine; I order a bottle of Gigondas for myself and tell him about the plumber, astoundingly named John Leak.
Jake smiles absently, his usually clear grey eyes red-rimmed from the long flight, his equine face waxy in the candlelight. By way of comfort, he fingers his flat mobile phone. His passion is for the ultra-smooth aesthetic: the thinnest electronic gadgets, the sleekest minimal lines, geometric abstract art, as if by way of compensation for all the weals, cysts and nodules, the hairy epidermis and infected subcutis, the burns and base cells. One might say his life’s mission is a perpetual smoothing-out. In another life he would have made a good ironing lady. He believes, with uncynical certitude, that even the lucrative, purely cosmetic side of his practice offers an ideal, a release from the tyranny of the flaw.
He buys me Chanel, vintage St Laurent, mainly in black or navy; silver or platinum jewellery (never vulgar gold), a few diamonds – the Cartier engagement ring and the Graff pendant. At first, we shopped rigorously and often. And then his gifts began to suffer more and more violent accidents. Some inner hooligan in me revelled in cigarette burns, nail rips, claret stains. It perturbs him that I bother only in occasional manic spurts to spend his ready credit on acupuncturists and glycolic facials. I’m somehow not conforming to expectation, not revealing my desire. Lately, he’s taken to inspecting me as he does now – aslant, discreetly alert to the as yet uncatalogued flaw, the shivery psychic mole once briefly glimpsed, which will, given patience, one day reveal itself entirely to his scientific eye. To be smoothed, cured.
Her voice, all honeyed grit. ‘Hello there.’ A smile of conspiracy plays on her lips as she comes to take our order. I straighten up, realizing with a stinging jolt that she is wearing the red cardigan.
‘Hello, yes, thank you,’ I cut in briskly, afraid she will talk. ‘My husband is starving!’ Jake has given no appearance of noticing. And what might she notice? His fine physician’s brow? More likely his compulsive, precise reordering of the cutlery. We order our food, he asks for a pomegranate juice. One dismissive glance suffices to assess him before she saunters away – the eyes of the men, all except the preoccupied Jake’s, swivel on furtive stalks towards her.
She returns with deliberate slowness, forgetting the juice. A game evolves in which I send her off needlessly to fetch and carry each time she appears, and she responds with frequent intrusions, deliberate mistakes, menacing solicitousness. The game pivots around the unmentionable, the other night. I wonder why I don’t just tell Jake, entertain him with it. But he wouldn’t find it remotely entertaining. I’d be nudged solicitously in the direction of some five-star funny farm. Yet during one of Tina’s appearances at the table I think I can see a muscle pulsing in his cheek.
There, in the large gilt mirror directly opposite me, I catch her looking over. I register that antique glint to her colouring, follow the line of her shoulders, the way her torso (longer, more solid than mine), the pert breasts (fuller than mine), inhabit the lustrous wool. Briefly, we lock eyes. She rolls the sleeves of the cardigan up to her elbows in a slipshod gesture before pinching the front of the garment, letting it go with a sluggish, hot-and-bothered ping. She is wearing a dark mauve bra beneath. An agreeably sluttish colour. My own look in the mirror, I note with surprise, is cold, appraising, calculating. We are sharing a game that Jake can’t possibly enter.
The candle on the table splutters, dies out, leaching Jake’s long face to hollows and bones, as he concentrates on slicing at his poussin, his fingers clamping the cutlery. He blinks, mouth gawping with soft alarm. She brings another candle. But the light is altered, harsher. I listen half-distractedly to myself talking about the house, how I’ve delayed the building work. Jake, who can see little reason why I would prefer this to a more expensive, white-stuccoed postcode which we can well afford, finishes his rigorous chewing, cutting in quietly. ‘Is it going to help you? Why don’t we just call in an interior decorator?’
A cold key turns the foggy-drunk mood in my head. ‘I don’t want to live in some rich interior-decorated ghetto.’ The beetroot has leaked everywhere, soiling the rest of my food. I push my plate away in disgust.