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 flak
es 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.
CHAPTER 4
Porters at the National only had to be one minute late by the punch-card clock and fifteen minutes pay was docked, but this couldn’t prevent them arriving after half past eight. It was true that four minutes on four different days was an hour’s less pay for the holiday savings, but, what with the traffic in London, there was often nothing to be done but make the best of it. Sometimes, sick of the Tube, I took the 19 through Highbury and Islington to the stop opposite Boswell Street, then got off and walked through to Queen Square. But if the rush-hour was a bad one, as it frequently was, then the bus would get stuck, and with only ten minutes still to go as we passed Sadlers Wells, there wouldn’t be a hope in hell of making the punch-clock by eight thirty sharp. So, seeing as there was now the time until eight forty-four, why not get off to have some coffee and a bacon sandwich in one of the espresso places along the Holborn side of Theobald’s Road?
That Tuesday morning in mid-August, the unfamiliar bus had trundled down from Highgate, crossed the Euston Road and was heading along Southampton Row. There were construction workers up on scaffolding. Leaning over in silver hard hats, they were calling down to one of their mates on the pavement. He was unloading a bucket on a winch. A group of secretaries came out of a sandwich bar. As they emerged from under the cage of steel poles and wire, sunshine showered their pale-coloured blouses with a dazzling light. Wolf-whistles pursued them down the street. The bus shuddered forward. Perhaps Alice would already be heading towards Knightsbridge, and you would be arriving at Great Ormond Street. We were to have lunch that day.
The traffic had fouled up again: jarring shrieks and hoots of horns and the hiss of airbrakes …
Already late, I swung down the bus’s stairs, trying to keep the bandaged middle finger straight and away from its rail. The lights had just turned red. I stepped off onto the pavement. Young women in nurse’s uniforms came swarming around and went by. Tourists, foreign students, businessmen in their shirtsleeves, the puzzled and determined pushed along the street. The voice of Frank Sinatra emerged from a hi-fi shop doorway already open against the coming heat: To every word of love I heard you whisper, the raindr
ops seemed to play a sweet refrain.
I didn’t know the song back then. But I needed to feel alive and loved, too, like everybody else: the patients in their wheelchairs, shop assistants gazing off into distance without customers to help, a petrol pump attendant down on his knees, and you, you as well, of course.
And there was Steve, my fellow porter, an even worse timekeeper, emerging out of Boswell Street on his Honda 250. Beyond the plaque recording the occasion when Princess Alice had opened the New Wing on the 30th April 1937, a Spanish girl was disappearing into the entrance marked RESEARCH. She worked in the kitchens. This morning she was wearing a sleeveless white cotton blouse that revealed the side of her pale pink bra and armpit where a black tuft sprouted. She’d been fastening her hair back with a green rubber band.
The morning stretched out before us: first, we would have to unload the cleaned laundry through the entrance marked HEALING—a trial for my middle finger wounded in love. We were to bring down the lab samples, then go up to x-ray and the wards or physio, then the Homeopathic or Italian for that day’s patients.
Going in through the front entrance would mean saying a bright ‘Good morning’ to the head-porter at Reception. He was likely to produce another of his black looks and a meaningful glance at the wall clock. It was easier and safer to walk round past the Homeopathic, down Great Ormond Street and in the Powis Place entrance. Just cut through the underground passages to the porters’ locker-room, throw on a white jacket and clock in exactly fourteen minutes after eight-thirty. That wouldn’t hurt the holiday savings too much. Night nurses were just going off duty, stepping down from the main door. A taxi halted by the entrance. A crumpled figure in a fur coat was lifted out from its rear seats: a venerable old lady with a badly curved spine and a head her neck seemed no longer to fully support. The taxi driver strode into the front hall and now a porter was coming down to help with the lady. Up the steps she climbed in evident pain, towards the double doors that another porter was holding open for her, as I disappeared round the corner and descended into the bowels of the National Hospital for Nervous Diseases.
September in the Rain Page 6