He went downstairs again and found his way to the dining room. The table cloths looked clean enough but the light was yellow and dim. Each of the half-dozen tables was decorated by a small, faintly glowing lamp, conducive to festivity.
Peering at the much-fingered menu, Mr Porter deciphered various forms of pasta, veal cooked in various ways, fish and shellfish. He attempted to communicate with the waiter, but while doing so, spoke to himself.
“Of course he’ll say it’s fresh, you fool. What d’you expect? Hot veal, that’s your best bet, spaghetti al pomodoro, scallopine con limone, vino bianco, non troppo secco, aqua minerale.”
He settled something with the waiter, told himself firmly that a little plain spaghetti, escalope with lemon, a Sicilian wine and bottled mineral water could do him no harm.
All the time he was aware of ghosts. The shades of Lilac and Jerome haunted this place. Perhaps they had sat at this very table, laughing and flirting. He could hear their cheerful voices, could even half distinguish them in the dusky light. There were only two or three other people dining in the room, local visitors, he guessed. The waiter came and went silently.
Ah, Lilac! The sorrow of loss burned in his veins with bitter fire. His long hand cracked and crumbled bread sticks as he sipped his peasant wine, every action, every sensation concentrated by memory. Life itself seemed, in this little hotel on the lonely shore, to have a significance beyond immediate reality.
He finished the wine and went up to his room. Moonlight poured through the open balcony door. Mr Porter fell exhausted on his bed and in a few moments, in spite of himself, he slept.
In sleep, he dreamed he was in a vast hotel, or series of enormous halls, filled with people. He was accompanied by someone—a man he thought, or perhaps a woman—and also his little white dog—a bitch in fact with a sweet, docile, face. There were other dogs in those halls—all shapes and colours and sizes—and many, many people, all busy with their own activities. The time had come to leave but, as he and his companion passed through the largest hall of all, a great party of people was brilliantly celebrating the birthday of a very young child. They were Arabs, he thought, glitteringly dressed under the light of an enormous cut-glass chandelier. There was a cake with a single large candle which was lit and the child, amid huge laughter and delight, was being asked to blow it out. Mr Porter stopped to watch and it was only minutes later that he realised his little dog was missing.
He began to search the halls—at first accompanied by the companion, who then seemed to disappear and then he was alone, wandering and searching. Every now and then he would sight an animal that, for a moment, he thought with leaping heart, was his own—but he was always disappointed. A terrible desolation came over him. The dog was lost. He began to call. “Lilac,” he called, “Lilac!” There was no sign of the dog. He grew desperate. “Lilac! Lilac!” and now his voice became hoarse until gradually, although he tried to shout, no sound came through. He was overwhelmed by despair. If only he had not been distracted by the Arabs. Summoning all his strength, he opened his mouth and gave a last great cry, “Lilac …!”
He woke himself with this cry. He lay shaking in the moonlight. Although there was some relief in having emerged from his nightmare, the sense of loss of the real Lilac was savagely alerted. He lay for a while without moving. Then, very deliberately, he began to go over the story again, meticulously, step by step. He began at the beginning, the day he had seen Lilac Jones for the first time.
Two
One windy autumn afternoon Mr Porter took a brisk walk in the direction of Marylebone High Street. He was making for the shops, mentally running over the list of various items he needed, from shoe polish to grapes. A tall and sombre figure, Mr Porter strode determinedly, long nose following his handmade shoes, navy coat belted loosely but tidily, large hat pulled well down, scarf up to his ears.
He looked up as he was about to cross New Cavendish Street and suddenly noticed the woman. She was standing by the pedestrian crossing, looking first to the left, then to the right, an anxious expression on her pale face. Her blonde hair was tousled by the wind. She seemed lost and unhappy.
“Doesn’t know her way,” Mr Porter observed to himself and kept doggedly on course. “Or perhaps she’s meeting someone who hasn’t turned up.” He plodded on.
He was right. Lilac Jones, bored and tired, hands and feet freezing, peered yet again up and down the street and wondered, as there was no sign of her lover, whether she had better go home. She hesitated, glanced once more at her watch and decided to walk around the block one more time. If Jerome hadn’t appeared by the time she returned, she’d give up.
Mr Porter marched home from the shops clutching a large box of groceries to his bosom and realised, as he reached his front door, that he’d forgotten the beer.
“Damnation,” he cried angrily. Was it safe to leave the box in the hall while he went back to the High Street? Those new tenants on the top floor—Arabs were they, or Pakistanis, or even Iranians?—what was the world coming to, although Heaven knows he was a liberal man—were possibly unreliable, not from criminal tendencies, of course, but just unaware of the customs of the country. There was some question of two bottles of milk having disappeared from outside Mrs Kirk’s door.
He’d take a chance, he decided daringly, and hid his box behind a green, large-leaved, plant in a corner of the hall. Off he went, braced against the cold and had hardly gone more than a few yards when he saw her again: the blonde young woman, still waiting, it seemed, looking cold, tired and forlorn. Mr Porter observed her carefully without actually looking at her. She was loitering along, hands stuck deep in the pockets of her jacket, and she gave Mr Porter a stare as he went by. She had, he noted, very pale skin and widely spaced grey eyes. She was not really beautiful, although she gave the impression of beauty. Gazing ahead, he was aware of and shrank from her inquisitive and provocative stare. No makeup, he noticed, pale mouth a little awry with sadness, perhaps, or fatigue.
He hurried on, face averted. She reminded him, he was bound to confess with a pang in his heart, of that other one, that heartless girl of long ago, same ashy colour of hair (both perhaps out of a bottle), same thick, creamy skin, same slightly arrogant expression, both enticing and challenging.
Moved by the memory, Mr Porter passed on, face sharpened by melancholy.
Lilac Jones, for her part, fed up with waiting for Jerome, saw for the second time in half an hour a tall, very thin, handsome man, muffled up to the eyebrows in what looked like an expensive cashmere? mohair? alpaca? navy overcoat, some soft, engulfing fabric whose turned-up collar met the wide brim of an equally luxurious navy hat. Beneath the hat, above the warm dark scarf, angry suffering eyes both glared at and ignored her out of a narrow face.
The sight of his adamant back aroused in Lilac a moment’s anxiety which, added to her boredom and misery over Jerome’s failure to appear, caused her to decide to drive away. Someone or something must have held Jerome up at the office. She got into her car parked opposite Mr Porter’s front door.
Meanwhile, Mr Porter, having almost reached the street corner, suddenly regretted his decision to leave his groceries in the hall and hurried back to retrieve them. He’d get the beer later. He hauled the box upstairs and, having hastily placed cheese and olives in the frigde, grapes by the sink waiting to be washed, and various other tins, jars, breads and bottles on the appropriate shelves, went to the window to see if the drizzle had stopped.
Lilac Jones, about to drive away, got out of her car to wipe the water from the rear windscreen, heard the noise of Mr Porter pulling up the casement, and looked up. A thin, long-nosed face with a pair of dark eyes stared down at her from the first-floor window. With a flash of recognition she gave a smile and a shy little wave. The face stared impassively.
“I should have waved back,” thought Mr Porter when she had driven away. “She looked upset.” He ruminated gloomily for a moment. Then he turned back from the window, and grasping an old plastic
bag, prepared himself to set off once again to fetch the beer.
Rather crossly, he recalled details of the girl. Her eyes, despite the provocative stare, were innocent, like a child’s eyes, a victim’s eyes. The provocation was a game, not meant to be taken seriously. On the contrary, there was a plea, he thought, for restraint and self-control. Here was a person who silently enticed and at the same time silently begged to be left alone. As if to support that plea, her trim body was modest and unobtrusive, dressed in pale colours, unadorned.
Yet every man in the street had looked at her lustfully. Mr Porter was intrigued, fascinated almost, by this flamboyant display of ambivalence, of emotions which conflicted and contradicted. What, he wondered, had she thought of him? An angry, forbidding, yet comical-looking, middle-aged man carrying cardboard boxes up and down the street. Once again, he remembered that other, never-forgotten, lover-mistress of his fantasy. The messages, signaled with gestures and eyes, in the crush of the train between Bank and Liverpool Streets. Once, he had brushed against her hand, which she had slowly closed around his arm, he half-fainting with torment and delight. The smell of the Underground, winter, unwashed crowds, grime and dust, tickled his nostrils. He sneezed. The remembered odors, combined with wet, cold, London air, were too much for him.
Irritably, he sneezed again, somehow blaming the girl who had no right to have been standing there, grey eyes in an ivory face, reminding him of Bank and Liverpool Streets, enchanted stretch of the Central Line, so many dark winter evenings, so many thick bodies swaying with the speed of the train, and her pale, pale, face under the glow of the light, her grey eyes steadily summoning him—until … He sighed.
As he neared the corner of New Cavendish Street again, he noticed a sad-looking young man standing under the street light, loitering and disconsolate just as the girl had been. He was clearly waiting for someone, staring up and down The High Street, looking at his watch, running his hand through his thick head of hair, looking at his watch again.
Mr Porter approached.
“Don’t bother,” he said in an even voice. “She’s gone.”
“Gone? How d’you know? Did she give you a message?”
“No message, no, but I saw her drive off. She waited for a while. Then she went to her car and drove away.”
“Oh Lord!” cried Jerome. “I couldn’t help it, I’m afraid, I simply couldn’t manage to leave my office in time. But I thought she’d wait.”
He looked so distressed that Mr Porter, who was about to move on, stayed for a moment. He hesitated, and thought, “Perhaps I made a mistake, it may not have been her.” And, aloud, enquired “A blonde woman? Rather pale? Young? Light blue wind-cheater, white sweater and jeans? A fairly new black Metro?”
“Yes, that’s her. She should have waited. She knows I can’t always be on time,” said Jerome despondently, gloomily aware that she was becoming increasingly impatient with him.
“Thank you,” he said to Mr Porter, inspecting more closely the neat, tall, striking man who had given him the news. “Very kind of you,” said Jerome, “to have taken the trouble to let me know. Do you know her by any chance?”
“No,” said Mr Porter. “I’d seen her a few times here, waiting, as I passed by. She reminds me of someone. I looked at her closely. Later, when I got home she got into her car parked outside my front door. I saw her drive away.”
Mr Porter irritably began to feel that he sounded as if he were justifying himself, if not actually apologising. He prepared to go on. “Well,” he said, “Goodbye.”
Jerome, suddenly overwhelmed by a wave of misery, said, “If you’re walking this way, may I come with you?”
Mr Porter looked gloomy. “I’m not going far,” he said, “just to the grocery for beer.” He waved his plastic bag. He thought: “What a nuisance! Why can’t he make his own arrangements?” He felt a spasm of anger for the sad young man and at the same time a searing pity for all abandoned creatures in the world.
“Come along, then,” he said rather sourly.
Jerome, feeling awkward said, “Will you have a drink with me, please?”
By now the dark autumn evening had firmly closed around them. The pubs were open and a buzz of warmth and conversation came from the nearby Herald and Duck. Jerome set his pace to match Mr Porter’s striding steps and they approached the grocer’s together.
“Damnation!” muttered Mr Porter under his breath, loading the cans into his bag. But a swift change of mood came over him. “Why not?,” he thought, “as long as he lets me pay for the drinks. He’ll tell me about the girl.”
Jerome was uncertain as to why he’d implored Mr Porter to let him go along with him. There wasn’t much comfort to be had from his narrow face, his withdrawn, almost hostile, expression; but Mr Porter was, at the moment, his contact with Lilac.
He offered to carry the bag with the beer cans but Mr Porter waved him aside. They trudged together into the Herald and Duck. Mr Porter commandeered a table, signalled Jerome to sit down and asked, “Your beverage?” “But I asked you,” stammered Jerome. Mr Porter shook his head. “Unthinkable! Please be my guest.” His tone was so formidable that Jerome collapsed. He sank into the chair to which Mr Porter had waved him. “A dry sherry, please, if you insist.”
Mr Porter went to the bar and returned with two sherries and a pint of beer. He pushed the sherries towards Jerome, then settled down in the chair beside him. With an expression of extreme concentration, he gently dipped his lips into the glass and took a small sip of beer. Then he said, “That girl reminded me of a woman I used to see when I was still a kid, on the Underground every morning on my way to work. She was older than I was, blonde and, I think, very flirtatious. I was very attracted to her. Once she came and stood beside me when the train was very crowded. I swear she pushed herself right up against me, deliberately. In my foolishness, I thought she was also attracted to me. I dreamed about her. I imagined talking to her—taking her out—and, yes, making love to her. Then one day, one Sunday afternoon, I was walking on Hampstead Heath, alone, of course, as usual, and I saw her. She was with a man—someone her own age, I suppose. I was staring at her with a sense of absolute betrayal—a woman I’d never spoken to—and yet—if we’d been lovers for years I couldn’t have felt more hopelessly jealous and more let down. She noticed me. I was lurking behind a few other people—pathetic creature I must have looked—gazing at her. She said something to the man and he glanced across at me. Then they both laughed and strolled on, arm in arm.”
Mr Porter was silent after his monologue, remembering the pain of that encounter. Then he said, “I never, ever, looked at her again, although we travelled together for months afterwards—and I could feel her looking at me … a pretty blonde woman, same pale hair and skin as your …”
Jerome had listened intently. He was moved by the story. He pictured Mr Porter as a tall skinny boy, unconfident, vulnerable. He identified with the loneliness and rejection. Lilac was undoubtedly more elusive and even hostile of late. Soon she would abandon him. His sadness merged with Mr Porter’s. He said, “I know how you must have felt. I’m sorry. It’s the same for me now. I’m afraid she doesn’t love me any more.”
Mr Porter nodded and suddenly Jerome, in a rush of confidence—why not, a stranger, a man he’d never meet again—unburdened himself in a way he’d never been able to do before. “She’s my sister-in-law,” he said and the guilt and fear and sorrow which had been imprisoned in him spilled convulsively into the convivial, noisy atmosphere of the Herald and Duck.
“Ah!” said Mr Porter. He nodded slowly with an air of great sympathy. Sisters, sisters-in-law, it was the same thing, brothers and brothers-in-law. He thought of his sister, Vera, and her off-putting vagueness, her indifference to him. A surge of passionate and unrequited love welled up in him. His brimming eyes, unguarded, met Jerome’s. For a moment the two incongruous men sat locked in shared misery over their half-drained drinks.
Jerome sighed. Mr Porter shifted his stiff limbs a
nd stared down at his beer. Then he turned and looked carefully at Jerome. He saw a fair young man with blue, troubled eyes, a kind, intelligent face—good-looking, although the features were a little squashed—a nice young man, Mr Porter thought; weak, perhaps, but not an evil man at all, nor even a wild one.
Jerome’s eyes met Mr Porter’s directly, but the confusion in him was easily seen. There seemed to be a question hanging in the air. Mr Porter did not ask it. Instead he said, “What a …” he hesitated … “muddle,” he ended rather lamely.
“Yes, I suppose you could call it that,” said Jerome. “There is also my wife … The outcome is lies—endless lies. Lies first to one, then the other—then the excitement—then the guilt—terrible guilt.”
“You don’t feel all that guilty!” snapped Mr Porter.
Jerome looked as if he had had his face slapped, quite unexpectedly. He was hurt, surprised and angry.
“You wouldn’t do it, otherwise,” said Mr Porter more mildly.
“No, I suppose not. You must be right.”
Jerome became agitated. “I do feel guilty—and I know I am guilty—but I can’t stop it.”
“What’s your wife like?” asked Mr Porter, suddenly curious.
Jerome, embarrassed, was silent a moment, then said: “She’s Australian—brought up to be an outdoor girl. I think I fell in love with her because she was different than the subdued English girls I knew. She’s earthy, a bit rough and tough. That’s attractive to me. But she hasn’t got Lilac’s magic. When I married her, I thought she was a strong, capable girl who wouldn’t be helpless and dependant—the opposite of my mother, I suppose. Beatrice is strong and capable physically, but emotionally she’s very … fragile … She gets hysterical. She was absolutely convinced I was going to do what her father did—have one affair after another—from the day we married. She was always accusing me—there were scenes galore. But in fact I was faithful to her until this thing with Lilac. So Beatrice was right after all, I suppose. But I love her still—and I also love Lilac,” he added sadly.
Mr. Porter and the Brothers Jones Page 2