“Er … yes … OK.” It could have been worse, I suppose. At least it wasn’t Otto. Perhaps Leo had an auction or a deadline, or had fallen foul of Sister Aidan yesterday.
I opened the case. Inside was a piece of paper with a kiss on it — just one large kiss in Leo’s bold black writing with a florid ‘L’ underneath. The fountain pen had leaked and one leg of the kiss looked as if it were bleeding or deformed. Leo couldn’t come himself, but he had sent me a spiv, a taxi, and a crippled kiss.
I stuffed the paper in my pocket and my possessions in the suitcase. I had nicked the books on Bernadette. I couldn’t bear to leave her in that fusty hospital library — she was my sister now, so she had to go where I went. I also packed the tiny cereal packets. There were three of them — my babies. One of the girls I’d worked with once had given birth to triplets last October. I’d read it in the Daily Mail.
“Kept you hungry, did they?” The driver had seen the chocolates and the custard creams follow the Sugar Puffs. He was standing in front of the window, blocking the view, so I couldn’t say goodbye to my tree. Even the nuns had disappeared. It was Angelus time, so they’d all be in the chapel. A cleaner and an orderly were holding the floor with the first lay nurse I’d seen there. It seemed odd that she should come complete with legs and hair and breasts, when the nuns had managed perfectly well without them. Sister Aidan had hinted they were short of nuns. Not enough vocations.
“I’m … er … leaving now,” I mumbled.
The greyish curls and tinted spectacles barely wavered from their paperwork. “Mrs Morton isn’t it? Got your drugs?”
“Yes,” I said to both. Perhaps that’s why Leo hadn’t come. If I was Mrs Morton, then he was an adulterer. Wildman had disappeared again. And I’d never be Mrs Rzevski. It was a name which no one could ever spell or share.
I was still lingering by the desk. It seemed wrong to leave with so little send-off, especially after yesterday. I felt there should have been a heavenly guard of honour handing me not my penicillin, but chunks of light and love. Instead, I picked my way round mops and buckets, followed by a whistling taxi driver scattering a trail of ash. He was a fairly professional whistler, but every time he hit a high note, the noise caught on my mouth and ripped it. I hoped the cleaners wouldn’t assume he was my husband. He had long black hairs protruding from his nostrils and gold bits on his shoes. Sister Aidan would have really been confused. Another Jewish uncle, she’d assume, but from a less favoured tribe of Israel. We trailed through the drizzle to the car park. I wondered what the car would be — not, I prayed, a sneering scarlet snob like Otto’s. It was a green Granada Ghia with fake fur on the seats and a pink plastic girlie doll dangling naked over the driving mirror. The driver helped me in, banged the doors, flung his fag-end out of the window and lit another.
“Smoke?” he offered, as we cruised round the corner and on to the main road.
“No thanks.”
“Your bloke been bashing you up, then?”
I tried to laugh, but it came out like a gasp. Was he just joking or had he seen my case notes? Perhaps the crowd he mixed with all beat their women up, like those articles you read on battered wives or women’s refuges. I’d never thought about them much. Violence was like sex — it went on all the time, but no one talked about it. Now I was a statistic, I suppose, an entry in Erin Pizzey’s guest book.
“No,” I stuttered. “I … had an accident.”
“Nasty,” he said and switched the radio on. So that was that. He’d dismissed the whole thing in a couple of syllables. I felt a little better. I tried to listen to the programme which was a record request thing where people called Cheryl, Val and Les were sending love to Brenda and the twins, or the Best Mum In The World. There were four Best Mums before we’d even got to Richmond. Everyone belonged. Stacey had six aunts and eleven cousins and wanted each one mentioned individually, and Gavin from Grimsby said goodbye to all his old workmates and hallo to all his new ones, and not forgetting Gran up in Glasgow and Mum (Best?) down in Kent.
I had only ex’s. One ex-husband, one ex-baby and one almost ex-mother. She’d moved to Jersey for the climate, so she said, but I suspected it was more to avoid the burden of having me as a daughter, instead of Patricia Jane. I wondered if I should request a record for her. Thea (who?) Morton sends greetings to the Best Ex-Mum In The World and to her workmates at the Mayfair office where she was recently receptionist, and love to all the ex-Franciscans posing as tramps and taxi-drivers, and please tell Leo she hopes he isn’t ex, and she can’t wait for him to come and fetch her home from hospital.
The driver turned Gavin down and removed his cigarette. “Can’t get on with nuns,” he said, racing an amber light. “I mean, it’s not natural, is it, shutting themselves away like that, with no blokes?”
I’d yearned to be a nun all the years I’d been at the convent school. We all had. Who wanted blokes, when God was on offer?
“Men aren’t everything,” I said. I wondered if Leo would be in. If he wasn’t, I couldn’t even pay the cab. Perhaps he’d take a Chinese vase in lieu of, or a hand-painted jardinière.
“They go to bed in all them robes, you know. Never take ’em off. Not allowed to see their own bodies. Unhealthy, in ’t?”
He flicked a long grey chrysalis of ash against the dashboard. We were crawling through the fag-end of London now, dingy, noisy, choked. The world beyond the hospital looked stained and tarnished. God had disappeared, become another ex. I wasn’t sure in which world I belonged. Ray would be busy with his boys now, Sister Aidan tidying somebody else’s bed. I pulled the piece of paper out of my pocket. The ink had blurred beneath my fingers and the kiss and the ‘L’ looked more like small black insects. I tried not to sniff in case the driver caught my cold. I wondered if he had a girl, one with ankle-chains and peroxided pubic hair.
“Who’s this geezer, then?” he asked. “The one who booked the cab?”
“Oh … an uncle. Uncle Les from Grimsby. He’s Jewish. I’ve got eleven Jewish uncles.”
“Blimey!” He was silent for a while. Shock, I suppose.
I wiped my nose on a piece of the toilet-roll I’d pinched from the hospital and watched the traffic thicken and the shoppers crowd and tangle on the pavements. No one was alone. It was like the record request programme — mums everywhere; older ones with carbon-copy daughters; younger ones with pregnancies and prams. Boys kissed girls in doorways, friends linked arms with friends. I felt like a piece of shopping abandoned in a trolley. No one seemed to own me.
We were turning into Shepherd’s Bush Road now. It could only be minutes before we reached the house. We dawdled through a hold-up, swung right, then left, then right. I glimpsed the name-plate on Leo’s street. Two of the letters had been blanked out, which made it look dyslexic.
The driver was crawling now, checking the numbers on the houses. “Nine, eleven, fifteen — right, there you are, seventeen.”
I shut my eyes. I felt dizzy and light-headed. Part of me wanted to rush inside and throw myself on Leo, the other part to double back to the hospital and never leave my bed again. I remembered those films where the Mistress returns and all the servants line up in the front hall, and step out and curtsey when they hear the crunch of gravel under wheels. No one stepped out except the driver, but I could hear Karma barking before I’d even opened the car door. The driver left me to walk up the path by myself. He leant against the bonnet with the engine still running, waiting for his fee, and whistling. I knocked. Karma’s barking was a black pain in my head. As Leo opened the door, the dog darted towards me, growling, and with his ears laid back as if I were an enemy or a stranger. He had never growled at me before. All right, he didn’t like me much, but he’d always accepted me as Leo’s mate. Things were different now, so Karma said. Leo’s face looked grey and brave and strained, almost holy, like one of those paintings of martyrs embracing God and the stake. His eyes had burnt holes through his charred and flaking skin and there were ashes on his lips.
He took my hand and held it very tightly. We were both aware of the driver just outside, and of Karma’s low, threatening snarl.
“Quiet, Karma. Down!”
“Savage brute you got there.” The driver had sidled up the path. I think he was keen to see a Grimsby Jew. Leo pulled a sheaf of bank-notes from his wallet and handed them over. I felt almost guilty costing him so much. When he’d shut the door, Karma went on growling, the hackles on his neck standing up and his whole body crouched and menacing, as if he were about to spring. Leo took me in his arms and held me against his soft healing sweater. I could smell his smell again. Juniper berries crushed up with Old Russia and back numbers of The Listener. He held me so long, everything went purple. Karma’s growl had changed now to a note of mocking, savage jealousy. I’d almost hoped Karma might have gone — in reparation for my mouth. I’d imagined Leo sacrificing him like Abraham did Isaac, but without the providential ram.
Leo took the suitcase and my sheepskin and led me to the drawing-room. The house looked strange, almost wounded. I realised he had cleaned and tidied it. Even his music was sorted into piles on the bureau, instead of strewn on the floor. The piano had been dusted, and was draped with a long, fringed sort of cover thing with roses woven into it. There were more roses — stiff, forced, unnatural ones — standing to attention in a Ch’ienlung vase. Their scent was trapped in the room like a prisoner and the thorns were almost bigger than the blooms. Leo laid me on the sofa like some new acquisition he had bought from the auction rooms, a chipped and broken object which needed restoration. I felt shamed, almost frightened. He was trying to say sorry. It was such a simple word, yet he couldn’t get it out. He offered me everything else instead. He had swept and shopped and tidied, shrouded his piano, bought out-of-season nectarines. He was wearing the sweater I’d bought him which he hated. He’d even banished Karma to the far end of the room, where he was crouching underneath the window seat, watching us with angry scornful eyes.
Leo excused himself a moment and went down into the kitchen. He returned with lunch on a tray which he must have had all prepared, because he was only gone two minutes. I had never known him wait on me before — lunch exactly timed, everything laid out, silver salt and pepper set, damask napkin folded on my plate. He looked wrong with a tray in his hands, undignified, like those animals in zoos which are forced to play at tea-parties.
He had made me blinis stuffed with cream cheese. The batter had hardened slightly round the edges, but I forced it down more roughly than I needed to. I felt I ought to suffer in return for all his efforts. He had even put a rose on my tray, an elegant, decapitated bloom drowning in a brandy glass. There were too many blinis and they tasted now of pain and labour rather than cream cheese. But I dared not leave them. They were part of Leo’s sacrifice, the careful rose-trimmed, thorn-crowned ritual he was laying at my feet. He didn’t eat himself, just sat on a stiff-necked chair, twisting my unused napkin through his fingers. It was too much like the hospital again.
“Have a mouthful,” I offered. I wanted us to break bread together, share a Eucharist.
“I’m not hungry.”
“They’re good, really good.” I forced the last one down.
“Leave some room, Thea — there’s lemon sorbet after.” He brought it to me in a small silver goblet, like a chalice. The sorbet was white and cold and very insubstantial like frozen air or grated bits of cloud. He squatted on the floor beside me and fed me like a child. It wasn’t sisterly like Ray, but sacred. Almost worth having lost a face, a tooth or two, to have this new, tender, chastened Leo abasing himself in front of me. I had suffered for it, paid the blood-price, and this was my reward and compensation. The sorbet was finished, the dish scraped, but Leo still crouched there, dark and solemn like an icon. I hardly knew what to say to him. We never just sat together. Either he was out, or working, or we slept or fought or screwed. All I needed now was for him to reach out a hand and say, “I’m sorry”, to make the ink-and-paper kiss a real one. The whole room was screwed up and waiting for it, even the walls had moved a fraction inwards as if to catch his words.
We had both forgotten how to speak. It was as if we were total strangers, or members of a different race. Leo just sat there, frowning into the silence, the heavy silver salt cellar cradled in his hands. I suddenly felt frightened. I’d never noticed it before, but the room was full of dangerous things. Bronze statuettes with jutting plinths, metal photo-frames with cruel, sharp-edged angles, foursquare ashtrays in glass and alabaster, a lump of crystal, a hunk of malachite. These objects were quiet now, heads-on-their-paws and watching us like Karma, but the slightest stir, the tiniest disturbance, could send them crashing through the air, ripping apart the dentist’s slow, careful, patient handiwork. Everywhere I looked was danger. Karma’s white-trap teeth unsheathed like swords, Leo’s hands weighing up the salt cellar, a vicious fruit-knife gloating on the tray. I shut my eyes. I could hear the room drawing in its breath as if to strike or pounce …
I started counting. I’d read some article about it being a good idea to count in dangerous situations since it soothed the nerves. I fixed my gaze on the wallpaper which was covered with dark, swirly, dragony things swallowing their own tails. I counted every second tail. “Two, four, six …” I began.
A clock began to mutter through the silence. I suppose it must have been ticking all along, but I hadn’t noticed it. Now it grew slowly louder and more insistent, taking over everything. Our breathing was geared to it, the pulsing of our blood. It even upset my counting. At twenty-four, the tails turned into ticks, so I changed to counting ticks.
“Fifty-eight, fifty-nine, sixty-one …” I think I’d missed a few — it was impossible to concentrate. I wanted to choke that clock, stifle it, stuff it under a cushion. How could Leo ever say, “I’m sorry”, with that pitiless thing drumming him down? I needed him to say it. It wasn’t just a salve to my pride, or a sop to Adrian, or a bow to convention. Those five short letters could stick me back together. I had never heard Leo apologise to anyone before, so it would make me special, safe, beloved.
“Much traffic?” Leo asked.
The words were so soft, the clock had already swallowed them. All the same, I jumped.
“Er … no …” I said. Small talk was even worse than silence. Leo was hardly there. He seemed to be growing darker with every tick, merging into the background as if he were a splodge on the carpet or the shadow of a piece of furniture. His face was just a blur now. How could he apologise if he hadn’t any lips? Perhaps neither of us would ever speak again, just sit there for ever, dark and stiff and separate, running down like clocks. I could hear my own breathing rasping through my head, too loud and raw and snuffly beause I had a cold. Leo hated colds.
“Two hundred and twenty-three,” I muttered under my breath. “Two hundred and twenty-four …”
I longed for the phone to ring, or for Karma to go skidding down the hall and bark at an intruder, anything to break that heavy-breathing silence, that endless counting.
All the time I’d been in hospital, I’d tried not to think about how I’d landed up there. Safer to anaesthetise it. But now I could see clenched fists in every corner of the room, closing in on me, snarling at my face. One false move and a thousand paperweights would explode between my lips.
Suddenly, Leo shifted. He was rising to his feet, standing square in front of me. His shadow was scarlet now like bruised and bleeding peonies, decapitated flowers. He took a step towards me, hands still clenched around the salt cellar. I could see the glint of silver in his eyes.
“No!” I shouted, covering up my mouth. “No, Leo, NO!”
He flinched, as if he had been struck himself. His face shut up like a jeweller pulling a metal blind down over a window. He was stumbling away from me, tail down like Karma’s, kicked into a corner, banished and betrayed.
I realised now he had only been trying to say something, offer me that sorry, stick me back together. His fists were clenched simply because it w
as the most frightening word he’d ever had to struggle with. And all I had done was pick up his fear and fling it back at him, smash the moment, abort the words.
“Leo, look, I didn’t realise … I mean, I wasn’t really thinking. I’m just a bit on edge, you see. I only …”
He didn’t seem to hear. He was standing by the window staring out at the dead grey afternoon, the snivelling rain. I had spurned him, humiliated him, turned his “sorry” into fury. I would have to make amends.
I lay back on the sofa and unzipped my jeans. “Leo …” I whispered. “Come back over here.”
He didn’t move. I peeled off my tee-shirt. I had nothing on underneath. It seemed strange to be naked in his drawing-room, a normal room where everything else was over-dressed — tables carved and inlaid, ceiling stuccoed, curtains tasselled and swathed. Even the people in his portraits wore wigs and ruffs and bows. They were staring down at me, blushing at my nerve. We had never done it in that room before.
I went up behind him and pressed my bare breasts against his cashmere back.
“I want you, Leo,” I murmured. It wasn’t quite the truth. My face was still so battered, it flinched at the thought of his pressed steel body slamming into mine. Sex with Leo was always sort of desperate. His thing was a pillar, a piston, a battering ram. I had worshipped it like that, yet now I was frightened of it. I was like a broken vase, only held together by a couple of rivets and a dab of glue. If he rammed too hard, I might crack up again. I had to be handled gently, screwed only by God or E. H. Leatherstone.
Leo turned towards me, pushed me almost roughly on to the sofa. He pulled off his own clothes, then knelt down and kissed my naked belly since he couldn’t kiss my mouth. His chin felt rough and barbed.
“Leo,” I whispered.
“Mmm?”
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