by Angela Huth
‘She must be a lonely old cow to do such a thing.’
‘She was being kind. Perhaps she thought she could help me.’
‘What sort of help does she think you need?’
‘I don’t know. Perhaps she just couldn’t resist thrusting upon me some of the help she felt like giving. You know what they are, those people who need to give help. They fling it about regardless.’ A little uncertainly she recalled something she had been reading. ‘You know what Proust said? He said that we pack the physical outline of the creature we see with all the ideas we have already formed about him, and in the complete picture of him which we compose in our minds these ideas have principal place. So if Mrs Thompson, seeing me on television, gets it into her head that I need help, and that very idea does something to benefit her, then nothing in the world is going to change her mind.’
She spoke shyly, uncertain whether or not she should have mentioned Proust. Ulick did not give the appearance of being a literary creature: he might think she was trying to score over him.
Instead, quizzically, he pushed back his chair and looked at Virginia with something that could have developed into interest, had he allowed himself to continue the thought.
‘I haven’t read Proust, as a matter of a fact. Dickens was my only “heavy.” I only have time for Chandler, and not much even for him, these days.’ He spoke with the superiority of those whose lack of time makes the people who find the time to appreciate any form of art sound guilty. Virginia was snubbed. She blushed again, unable to hide from the gaze which Ulick continued to inflict upon her. He lit a cigarette, very fast – he seemed to do everything, but speak, very fast – and stuck it in an amber holder. Then, to ease her, he smiled.
‘Don’t say, Virginia, you’re searching for an identity? God, that’s so tiring. I know so many girls who do. They look quite exhausted.’
‘Who said anything about identity?’ Virginia heard herself sounding quite snappy.
‘Nobody. I was just wondering to myself why you looked so tired.’
‘I’m not tired. You mustn’t concern yourself so.’
‘Oh, I have very little concern, not enough concern. That’s one of my weaknesses.’ He blew a cloud of smoke above his head, in such a way that as it began to disintegrate it moved away from Virginia. ‘Mrs Thompson told me you come from Surrey.’
‘That’s right.’
‘I could almost have guessed.’
‘Is that meant to be insulting?’
‘Not exactly. It’s just that there’s something about Surrey girls. I went out with one, once, years ago. She lived on the outskirts of Guildford. She was exquisitely preserved. For twenty-three years no one had managed to undo the knot in her Hermes’ scarf. Of course, now, she’s been divorced twice and is on heroin, poor thing.’
Virginia straightened her back, supported her chin on clenched hands, and looked very serious.
‘Well, I know a girl from near Guildford who was a virgin till she was thirty-one, and then was raped by an American penfriend in Piccadilly Circus.’
‘Really?’ said Ulick disbelieving. ‘It just shows you what a disadvantage you are up against. How careful you must be.’ He looked at his watch. ‘And talking about being careful, you’ve missed the last train.’
She had. It was well past midnight. But Ulick was the one who appeared, contrary to what he had recently said, most concerned.
‘Hadn’t you better ring your parents?’
‘Oh, them.’ Virginia’s head was a globe of moving liquid. She summoned up two words she had never used in her life before. ‘Stuff them. They must learn that I’m grown-up, now.’
Ulick smiled, perhaps appreciating what the observation must have cost Virginia.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘there’s a spare room in my house. You’re welcome to use it.’
Virginia began to search her seat for her gloves.
‘Thank you,’ she said, trying to divide the words. ‘That’s-really-very-kind-of-you.’
Ulick’s house was one in a terrace of tall, narrow façades of elegant proportions. In the minuscule courtyard that protected it from being jammed against the pavement grew an old wisteria tree, its geriatric branches, jewelled pathetically with fresh leaves, climbing round the two windows on the ground floor. The tree, Virginia felt sure, identified Ulick’s house as being quite the most expensive in the terrace.
Ulick turned the lights on in the hall. It was a tall, narrow area, dense with thick carpets and silky walls. A pile of unopened letters and newspapers lay on a polished table. There was a smell of air that had been dried out by central heating, of air that had no chance to be re-invigorated by the flashes of wind or sun that came through the briefly opened front door.
Ulick flicked through the letters.
‘Nothing that can’t wait. Let’s have just one drink before bed.’
He bounded up the narrow stairs. Virginia, following him, felt each stair to be extraordinarily squashy, padded with its thick pile carpet, beneath her feet. A curious sensation she had never felt before. At home the stairs were hard things, their bones merely covered, not disguised, by thin haircord.
The drawing-room, like the hall, was a narrow dark place, swags of grey silk curtains at each end, mahogany bookshelves reaching to the ceiling, lights so subdued that you had to search for their source. Ulick was at a plate-glass table pouring drinks: someone had put ice in the silver bowl. Virginia stood some yards from him, ankle bones touching, both hands on her bag, hoping that he would not make the whisky too strong.
‘This is awfully grand, for a bachelor,’ she said.
‘It is, for a bachelor.’ Ulick turned to her, holding out a glass that was so thick and nubbled with intricate designs that it scraped her hand. ‘For God’s sake, take that dreadful coat off. It reminds me of my spinster aunt.’
He said it nicely, but in her confusion Virginia had to return the glass to him before she could take off the coat. At last, feeling naked in her Zurich blouse, she stood apart from him again, the fierce glass cradled in both her hands, wondering what to do. In spite of the central heating, she shivered.
‘Tell you what, I’ll play you a tune.’
Ulick went to the shining grand piano, sat on the velvet stool, and ran his hand along the keyboard, looking for dust. Virginia moved to the fireplace. Its marble was scooped into designs as complex as those on the glass: she ran a finger along the stamens of a cold lily, and shivered again.
Ulick was fiddling among the notes.
‘I used to play for hours every day. Hardly any time now.’ Again, he made his busy life sound like something he was proud of rather than something he regretted. ‘Anyway, I like playing to people. I’m an awful show-off.’ He swung choppily into some tunes of the Twenties, humming just off key, occasionally substituting the hum for a few remembered words.
Virginia, at the fireplace, took a drink, put down her glass, and began to swing one leg, from the hip, in time to the music. Ulick watched her.
‘You’ve got nice legs,’ he said. ‘And you look as if you once practised at a bar.’
‘I did. I wanted to be a ballet dancer, once, after seeing The Red Shoes, years ago. I took lessons. In Guildford, of course.’ Her grey flannel skirt, in spite of its inverted pleat, constricted her movements. She hitched it up over her knees. ‘In my mother’s eyes, I was second to Fonteyn after three lessons. But a year later they told me I’d never make it. I was too stiff. “You mustn’t strap-hang on to the music,” my teacher said. “You must flow with it.” I realised I’d never learn to flow, so I gave up.’
Ulick continued playing, watching Virginia’s thin calf and thigh in its stringy tights swing like a metronome in time with his honky-tonk music.
‘What did you want to be then?’
‘A tap dancer, next, after I saw an old Fred Astaire film.’
Ulick changed key into ‘I’ve Got You On My Mind’ and Virginia shuffled a little on the marble hearthplace, her heels making har
dly audible clicks. Then she spun out from her stage, arms out, moth-like, and twirled to the piano. There, panting a little, she folded her arms on its top.
‘Oh, I can be quite gay, sometimes,’ she said. ‘Isn’t it ridiculous, two drinks or more – well, more than two mixed drinks, and I want to dance. I think I must be thoroughly drunk.’
‘I like you drunk, then,’ said Ulick.
‘And when I’m even a little drunk,’ Virginia went on, ‘which isn’t very often, honestly, then I feel more than ever my sense of the chameleon. I feel that wherever I am, whoever I’m with, I become a part of, totally. It’s an effort, at those times, to believe that really I’m Virginia Fly, from Acacia Avenue, Surrey: mediocre school teacher, loyal daughter, monotonous life and so on. I am a part of the present.’ She paused, thinking. ‘So at the moment, it’s impossible to believe that this room isn’t familiar, that I haven’t lived here for years, not with you, but as you …’ Ulick had stopped playing and was listening. ‘I mean, just from showing me a few of your – things, and talking to me for a while, I can imagine so exactly your life that momentarily it seems as if it’s my own.’
‘A very old form of escape,’ said Ulick, ‘you’ll grow out of it.’ He touched her cheek, more kindly than in the restaurant. ‘At least, you’ve got some colour in them now. All that dancing.’ He stood up and banged down the piano lid. ‘Bed,’ he said.
Virginia followed him upstairs, where the carpets were just as thick as downstairs. He led her to a small box of a room whose walls and ceiling were covered with dark brown felt. One wall appeared to be entirely cupboards: the felt was nailed to their seams with hundreds of small brass knobs. The curtains and carpets were burnt orange, the cover of the bed tailored tweed. It all smelt expensive.
‘My dressing-room,’ explained Ulick. ‘I hope you’ll be all right. Bathroom’s first on the left.’ He rubbed the top of her head. ‘I’ll be gone long before you wake up in the morning, so help yourself to breakfast.’
‘Thank you,’ said Virginia, ‘but I won’t bother. And thank you for dinner, too.’
Ulick stood at the door, a yard away from her. She felt cold again.
‘There are Disprin, should you want them in the morning, in the bathroom cupboard.’ He smiled. ‘And thank you for dancing for me.’ He shut the brown felt door.
Alone in the room, Virginia looked for signs of Ulick. But for one ebony-backed hairbrush, there were none. She pulled back the bedcover. Orange sheets matched the curtains: shiny, cold. Initials on the pillow cases. She undressed. Then, naked, enjoying the feel of the soft carpets on her bare feet, she crept over to the cupboards and opened one of the doors. A light snapped on as she opened the door, illuminating a crowded rail of suits: dark, light, tweed, velvet – seventeen. She counted them. In another cupboard were shelves of silk shirts, pale sugared-almond colours at one side, shirts of a more flamboyant nature on the other. Also, seventy-one beautiful ties and eleven pairs of supple leather shoes.
All the cupboard doors open at once now, Virginia sat on the bed and stared at the collection before her. She sighed. In her father’s cupboard there were the three suits she knew well: his summer best, his winter best, and his everyday grey. Four or five ties, three pairs of shoes. Here, it was like a shop.
‘Like a bloody shop,’ she said out loud. She slammed shut the doors but they made no noise. Then got into bed. But she was wide awake. On the bedside table were three books: The Concise British Flora in Colour, The Millionaire Mentality and something by Chandler. She settled for the flowers.
A few moments later she thought she heard Ulick shutting a door along the passage. Her heart quickened; her feet, suddenly very hot, scrambled about to find a new area of cool sheet. She watched the brass handle on her own door, waiting for it to turn, but it didn’t move. Without bothering to get out of bed, as was her normal custom at home, she muttered a variation on her usual prayer: Please God, I would like him to come back, and be gentle with me. Please God: after all, he liked my legs …
But he didn’t come, and Virginia grew tired of waiting. She resigned herself to the study of British flora for most of the night.
The next morning, in Ulick’s small, dazzling kitchen, Virginia found a note saying he hoped she’d had a good night and would make herself a decent breakfast. He added that he would like her to leave her telephone number, and here was a pound for a taxi to the station. It was his fault she had missed the train.
The sun in the kitchen hurt Virginia’s eyes, and her head throbbed. In spite of her last night’s statement about not bothering with breakfast, she boiled the one cold white egg she found in the enormous, almost empty fridge, and made herself some black instant coffee. The kitchen, she saw through flickering eyes, was as impersonal as the other rooms she had seen: no apron on the nail, cookery books, old shopping lists or grocery bills. It was as if someone had come into the house and swept away every trace of anything that might give a clue to the owner’s character. Or perhaps Ulick had simply called in a decorator and given him carte blanche, but the decorator hadn’t felt it was part of his job to supply the paraphernalia of his clients. Virginia wondered about Ulick. Unlike last night, when she remembered so well the sensation of being him, of knowing what it was like to live in this house, she now felt both he and it were all strange to her. She was curious about them, but she wanted to go.
When she had finished the tasteless egg, she wrote thank you on the Formica table with her eyebrow pencil, and left the money by the words. She put on her gloves, and shut the thick front door behind her. In the bright sunlight the wisteria tree now looked even more expensive than it had done at midnight. Something about it made Virginia change her mind, and abandon the idea of the taxi she had intended to take. And so, shocked at first by the hardness of the pavements, after the luxury of Ulick’s carpets, she began the long walk to Waterloo Station.
Chapter 7
Virginia Fly did not share the same enthusiasm as her pupils for the holidays. To her, they were a tedious break. Term-time was hard, monotonous work, but at least it protected her from her mother’s day-long observations. And this holidays, what with the break-up with Charlie, Virginia’s new friend Mrs Thompson, and the mysterious night Virginia had spent in London, Mrs Fly had much to muse upon out loud.
It was Virginia’s custom to set her pupils A Holiday Task, and in the same way she solemnly set herself A Holiday Pleasure. This holidays the pleasure was to be Middlemarch and Van Gogh’s letters. The books gave her some measure of escape, but not much. Almost as soon as she had settled down to read in her room after breakfast, her mother would call up to her:
‘Coffee, Ginny?’
‘No thank you.’
‘Everything all right?’
‘Yes thank you.’
‘Fancy cottage pie for lunch?’
‘Lovely.’
‘I can’t hear.’
Virginia would put down her book and go to the top of the stairs.
‘I said lovely.’
‘I’m just off to the shops, then. Anything you want?’
‘No thank you.’
‘Take care.’
But even Mrs Fly’s shopping meant not more than half an hour’s peace. She preferred to go to the shop at the end of the road three times a day to get a few things every time rather than make one major expedition. Both her husband and daughter had pointed out to her that this was an uneconomic way of reserving her energies, but it was, she said, her way of doing things. She had always shopped like that, nothing would change her now, and anyhow she liked the little walks.
So when, unbearably soon, the small, sharp efficient pecking noises that Mrs Fly made in the kitchen started up again, Virginia slammed shut her book and decided to go for a walk. To relieve her mother of any anxiety she would have been bound to have felt had she found her daughter’s bedroom empty, Virginia made an effort to go through the kitchen.
‘I’m going for a short walk before lunch.’
Mrs Fly was releasing her meagre purchases from their string bag; half a pound of mince, a pound of potatoes, a tin of apricots.
‘Well, I’ve bought mince, potatoes, and apricots for a nice flan. That should see us through till this evening. Take care you don’t catch cold, now. There’s quite a nip in the wind.’
Virginia walked through the garden to the field. The pale April sun was quite warm and the breeze, far from being malicious, was barely strong enough to bow the few anaemic daffodils that had survived Mr Fly’s ruthless methods of gardening.
She took her usual walk: up the beaten path over the mild hillock, which she half despised because of the tameness of its form, and into the spinney. Everywhere the bracken was beginning to uncurl its small fists of bright green; the litter of last summer had rotted with the autumn leaves and there was a stirring of birds in all the branches. Virginia had taken the same walk hundreds of times, in all seasons, and yet still found herself almost as surprised and delighted by the changes as she had been as a child.
A huge oak tree at the highest point of the spinney marked the end of this routine walk. Years ago, its branches had been her secret retreat. She had spent many an afternoon with a book high up in a rustling green world that no one could find, content just to look at the changing patterns of sun on the leaves. Nowadays the lower half of the tree, at any rate, was no longer undiscovered. The Council had put up a sign on a nearby main road urging motorists to the ‘picnic area’ at its feet, and as further encouragement they had provided a wooden bench and table, and a litter bin. But for the moment the area was deserted, the litter bin empty. She went over to the trunk of the tree, put her hand on a space of uninitialled bark, and looked up at the huge tower of branches, hazy with new leaves.
‘Virginia Fly,’ she said out loud, ‘what is going to happen to you?’
For as long as she could remember, Virginia had, on occasions, asked herself questions out loud. They were always questions she was unable to answer, and it never occurred to her to try to answer them. To ask was consolation in itself. Feeling quite cheered, and a little ridiculous – as she always did, having asked herself such a question – she left the picnic area and thought of Ulick Brand’s wisteria tree.