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 s
alad. 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.
September in the Rain Page 5