‘But I never had any intention of getting tangled up with you,’ I said primly.
Donovan laughed. ‘You’re a bit young for me, anyway. I go for older women.’
It’s impossible to put up any defence against a slur like that. My ego was still reeling when the porch light came on and Mum appeared in her dressing gown and slippers, holding a rinsed milkbottle for the doorstep.
‘Is that you, Donovan?’ She peered at us, blind without her glasses. ‘Have you seen Esther? Oh, there you are. I wondered where you were.’
‘I’m here,’ I confirmed.
‘Righto. Lock up when you come in. Night night.’ She withdrew, leaving the porch light on, the bulb, in its death throes, flickering madly.
‘You see. Mum doesn’t think you’re the least bit dodgy, Donovan. She thinks you’re completely normal.’ This was intended, and received, as an insult. Having delivered it I was about to suggest going in, then realised Donovan still had an inch or so of cigarette left, so instead I sat down on the edge of a stone planter in which nasturtiums and chickweed fought for space. ‘Besides,’ I added, ‘if anyone’s doing the avoiding, it’s you. You never come out of your room.’
‘The reason I don’t come out of my room is that I know the moment I do, someone is going to ask me how the job’s going.’
‘How’s the job going?’ I asked.
Donovan pulled a face at me. ‘It’s awful. It’s the total pits. I don’t even want to talk about it,’ he said, and then proceeded to do just that for the next ten minutes. He was working for a big estate agent and surveyor near Cannon Street, he said, but instead of being up in the office doing the exciting stuff like valuations, he was stuck down in a windowless vault all day long by himself, filing maps. Every so often the phone would ring and someone upstairs would request a particular map. He would have to locate it amongst the thousands of files, put it in a tube, and send it up this chute. At other times a whole batch of used maps would be returned for re-filing. That was it, all day. There wasn’t even a chair, just a desk. ‘I thought there would be people to talk to,’ he said. ‘But the only time I’ve actually seen a human being is when I lit up a fag and set off the smoke alarm and someone came down to switch it off and have a go at me. There isn’t even a window to look out of. It’s like a tomb.’
‘Can’t you listen to your Walkman?’
‘I tried that, but then I can’t hear the phone. I tell you, Esther, it’s so tedious, I go off into this trance of boredom for hours on end, and then I look at my watch and only five minutes have gone past.’ He glanced automatically at his watch. ‘Only nine hours till it all starts again.’
‘Why don’t you just leave if you hate it so much?’
‘I can’t. It’s a friend of Dad’s who got me the job, and Dad made such a big deal of it – what a favour this guy was doing me and how lucky I was to be earning money, etc. etc. I can’t just leave. Anyway, what else could I do? I can’t go home. The house is let all summer.’
‘Maybe one of your older women could look after you?’ I suggested evenly. Later I thought this was rather a mean remark, in view of his recently broken heart, but I was still smarting from that dig about my tender age.
Donovan smiled. ‘The fact is, I’m between older women at the moment.’ He sighed. ‘No, I’ll just have to grin and bear it.’ He bared his teeth in an experimental grin, then an idea seemed to strike him. ‘What do you do around here all day?’
I shrugged. ‘I sort of mooch about. Sometimes I go and hang around the precinct with my mate, Dawn. Or I might go over to Penny’s to walk the dogs. Mostly I just mooch about,’ I conceded.
‘You could come up and meet me for lunch tomorrow,’ he suggested. ‘If you’re not too busy mooching.’
I said I could probably spare a few hours from my packed schedule. ‘If you’re sure you can put up with my extreme youth,’ I couldn’t resist adding.
Donovan flung his cigarette butt into the bushes, laughing remorselessly.
We had arranged to meet on the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral at five past one. This precision timing was important as Donovan had exactly one hour for lunch and couldn’t afford to waste a minute of it. I wasn’t used to making my own way around London, but reckoned that even I ought to be able to find something the size of St Paul’s without too much trouble.
I was rather hot and flustered when I arrived, after my experience in the underground. The automatic barrier had swallowed my ticket, and one of the men on duty had practically stripped the machine down to retrieve it, eating into those valuable extra minutes I had allowed myself for getting lost. As it happened I was still early, so I went into the cathedral to cool off. As I stepped inside, the roar and hum of the London traffic was replaced by a purer sound: the reverential hush of large numbers of people trying to keep silence. Then over the top of that came the angel voices of the choristers, rising in perfect unison, clear and true. I stood, spellbound for a while, and then looked at my watch and discovered it was six minutes past one. I emerged, blinking, into the noise and sunlight, and saw Donovan sitting on the steps. He was in black jeans and a T-shirt and the soft leather cap he always wore, which made him look like a Russian peasant. Dad had christened it his Raskolnikov hat.
‘You’re late,’ he accused, but he looked pleased to see me, nevertheless. One side of his face was red and crumpled as though he’d been lying on something patterned. I refrained from mentioning it, but he must have caught me staring as he rubbed his cheek and said, ‘I fell asleep. I was only woken by the phone. If it hadn’t rung I’d have slept through the whole lunch hour.’ He seemed horrified by this thought. ‘Where shall we eat?’
‘There’s a coffee shop in the crypt here, I think,’ I said, remembering a sign I’d passed, but he shook his head.
‘I’ve been in a crypt all morning. I need fresh air.’ We walked down Ludgate Hill towards Fleet Street until we found a café that had a couple of wobbly aluminium tables outside on the street. Exhaust fumes competed with the smell of garbage and drains rising from the vents in the pavement. It was a relief when Donovan lit up. Over two ‘all-day breakfasts’ he told me his working conditions had dramatically improved since he had borrowed a chair from the lobby, and located the Klix coffee machine on the third floor. Now he could lounge around in comfort, reading John Updike between interruptions. I said I’d never come across any of his stuff. (He wasn’t on Penny’s reading list.)
‘It’s probably just as well,’ Donovan replied, keeping a very straight face. ‘It’s not really suitable for girls as young as you.’ I refused to rise: this joke was going to run and run, I could tell.
When it was time to pay, Donovan brushed aside my offers, producing a roll of notes from his jeans pocket. ‘This is the money Mum left me,’ he explained. ‘Might as well use it.’
‘I thought it was supposed to be for household expenses,’ I reminded him.
‘That’s right. Consider yourself a necessary household expense.’
As we walked back up Ludgate Hill Donovan suggested that I come back to the office to check out his tomb.
‘Will I be allowed to walk in off the street?’ I asked, doubtfully.
‘No one will even notice,’ he promised.
His building was a squat, ugly, concrete and glass block in a side road off Cannon Street. Various other workers were scurrying up the steps to the glass doors as we arrived, trying to make the two o’clock deadline.
Inside the meanly lit lobby, with its zig-zag carpet of competing colours that jumped and receded dizzily before my eyes, Donovan handed his time card to a girl behind a high kidney-shaped desk, and we passed on to the lift, unremarked. In the corner, starved of natural light, stood a flourishing fig tree in a terracotta urn.
‘Plastic,’ said Donovan. ‘All plastic. Even the gravel is fake.’
We took the lift to Basement Two, and stepped out into a narrow corridor, partially blocked by cardboard boxes and broken filing cabinet drawers, where the air w
as subterranean and cool. ‘You need a canary down here,’ I said. ‘There might be firedamp.’
Donovan gave me a quick grin. ‘Look at that. Health and Safety,’ he said, pointing to the boxes. ‘I could get this whole place closed down.’ Instead, he showed me his quarters: a twenty-foot square bunker lit by a whining neon strip, and furnished with rows of grey filing cabinets. In one corner was a vinyl bucket seat, recently filched from the lobby, and a desk on which sat a phone. To the untrained eye the filing system seemed not to be arranged according to sound alphabetical or numerical principles: drawers would be labelled X0005932-ZA8 or similar, but Donovan had evidently mastered these strange and complex encryptions.
It was a thoroughly depressing place, and I couldn’t wait to get away, though I felt almost guilty abandoning him there.
‘What do you think?’ he asked, throwing out both arms in fake pride.
I walked to one of the blank, porridge-coloured walls, where a window might have been expected to sit, and tried to peer out. ‘It’s got no prospects, Donovan,’ I said, making a move to go.
‘You’re not going to leave me mouldering down here?’ he said, indignantly. ‘I was just going to get us a coffee from the machine. Sit down.’ He put his hands on my shoulders and pushed me firmly into the chair. ‘Don’t answer the phone,’ he instructed as he left. A minute later I heard the lift door ping and then there was silence. Not the awe-inspiring hush of St Paul’s, but an oppressive, crushing nothingness, maddeningly overlaid by the whine of that overhead light. A few minutes passed. I began to wonder whether Donovan had deliberately abandoned me, just so I’d know how it felt. The phone rang. I ignored it. After a few rings it stopped, then started again, more insistently, it seemed to me. I picked it up.
‘It’s me,’ said Donovan. ‘I forgot to ask if you take milk and sugar.’
I said I did.
‘Anyway,’ he added sternly, ‘I thought I told you not to pick up the phone.’
I think it was at this point that I decided falling in love with Donovan might be as pleasant a way as any to pass the summer.
29
AFTER THAT DAY I often met Donovan for lunch, at least twice a week, and always at his invitation. These invitations were casually delivered, as if it was a matter of complete indifference to him whether or not I came, and were accepted in the same vein. In fact I made sure to keep my afternoons free, just in case he should ask, and on one occasion cancelled an outing with Dawn at short notice, using Grandpa as an excuse – a shabby trick, but infatuation can make traitors of us all.
We were supposed to be going to help Pam and Andy decorate their spare room in preparation for the imminent arrival of twins. They had recovered from their falling out and were married now, and living in a two-bedroomed place on the same estate as the Clubbs.
‘Why do you have to stay in with your Grandpa?’ Dawn wanted to know when I rang up to cry off. ‘He’ll be okay for an hour or two, won’t he?’
‘He’s a bit doo-lally,’ I replied. ‘He wanders off, or lets burglars in. It would be just my luck if I popped out and he chose today to burn the house down.’
‘Can’t Christian do it?’
‘He’s working.’ As Penny had predicted, Christian was too broke to consider travelling, and had taken a job as a plasterer’s labourer – just one source of friction between the two of them.
‘I could come to you instead,’ Dawn suggested.
‘No, no,’ I said, hastily. ‘You go to Pam’s. I’ll come another day.’ I was glad that exchange took place over the telephone because my face was burning by the time I’d finished. I suppose I should have felt ashamed of myself, but Penny had always insisted that fibs were a necessary emollient to relationships and not to be despised.
Generally, after having lunch at our favourite café, I would accompany Donovan back to the tomb, and we would while away the afternoon playing cards: knockout whist, demon patience and box rummy – all the games Christian had taught him during those childhood visits to the Old Schoolhouse. His general mode of address could only be described as affectionate scorn, and I seemed to provide him with endless material. Chief amongst my deficiencies was my dress sense. In spite of Penny’s coaching I still suffered occasional lapses when she wasn’t on hand to intervene. A pair of smart grey trousers with a belted jacket had seemed fine to me until Donovan said they made me look like a bus conductor, and at the other extreme, a white ruffled skirt, which I had thought pretty and romantic, had elicited a raised eyebrow and the enquiry, ‘Are you off to a barn dance?’
In spite of this mockery he was otherwise very generous, always paying for my lunch (from Aunty Barbara’s funds, of course), and from his first pay packet he bought me an enamel hair slide from a stall in Covent Garden. He had left the price on the box, in case I wanted to take it back, he said, but I think it was to let me know that it was more expensive than it looked. Anyway, it was an unusual and thoughtful gift, and it occurred to me that Donovan had had past experience of buying presents for women.
Penny took great interest in this development. ‘He must be quite keen on you, Esther,’ she said.
‘He’s never said anything keen,’ I replied, pleased all the same. She had come over one Thursday morning so that I could do her hair in dozens of tiny braids. She had a page from Cosmo which showed you exactly how to do it with beads and cotton. It was going to take hours, but we had nothing else to do.
‘Ah, but the giving of gifts is a sure sign,’ she said. ‘Christian bought me a pair of gold earrings when we started going out. I had to go and get my ears pierced so I could wear them.’
She wasn’t wearing them now, I noticed.
‘He was always bringing me little presents. He doesn’t any more,’ she added. ‘He’d have to borrow the money off me first.’
‘He told me this plastering job pays quite well, so maybe he’ll get back into the habit,’ I said, making a mental note to take him aside and suggest it. At the same time I couldn’t help thinking it typical of Penny to expect the tide of generosity to flow only one way – in her direction.
She rolled her eyes at the mention of the plastering job. ‘Didn’t I tell you how it would be back in February? I turned down the America trip so we could go somewhere together, and now he’s got to work all summer just to pay off his debts. I’ve a good mind to go to France with Wart instead. His parents have got a place in the Loire. A whole group of people are going down there.’
‘I didn’t realise you liked Wart,’ I said.
‘Oh, he’s all right,’ she said, blushing slightly. ‘He pays me a lot of attention, and it’s hard not to like someone who does that.’
The phone rang, so I left Penny pinching a half-finished braid between finger and thumb while I went to answer it. It was the garage, saying Donovan’s car was fixed and ready for collection. As I hung up the ringing began again. I snatched up the receiver.
‘Is Donovan there?’ said a female voice. Not Aunty Barbara.
‘No, he’s at work.’
‘Oh. Have you got his number?’
I hadn’t. I couldn’t even remember the name of the office, despite my frequent visits to its vaults. ‘It’s got two names – two surnames, you know, like Clayton Fortescue, or Taylor Chadwell, but that’s not it.’
‘Oh.’ The voice was sounding bothered. ‘Could you tell him to ring me tomorrow evening at home. It’s got to be tomorrow. That’s very important. He mustn’t ring at any other time. He’ll understand.’ I was taking such care to remember this curious detail that I put down the phone without asking her name. He’ll know, I thought, with a slight stirring of jealousy.
Penny was standing at my bedroom window when I went to resume my hairdressing duties. ‘Speak of the devil,’ she said putting a finger to the glass. It was Wart. He had driven right up to the house and was now examining the dark green paintwork of his MG for scratches. The bench seat was occupied by a wooden rocking-horse and a bouquet of flowers.
‘God al
mighty, it’s a bit overgrown here,’ he protested, when we had joined him in the driveway. ‘What are you? Sleeping Beauty or something?’
‘It dies back in winter,’ I said. I would have to get those shears out again.
‘What brings you here?’ Penny asked. ‘You’re a long way from home.’
‘I’m going to visit my sister in Sevenoaks. She’s just had her first sprog. I thought I’d take a little detour to see Christian. Where is he?’
‘Helping to plaster the Holiday Inn,’ said Penny.
‘Oh good, he’s got a job, has he? Because he still owes me a few pennies. And I was hoping to get my hands on some of them before I go to France.’ He spat a gobbet of chewing gum into the bushes and grinned at me, his mirrored sunglasses obscuring the direction of his gaze, making him look more than usually sinister. I felt the same odd mixture of repulsion and mesmerism that I’d experienced at our first meeting. He was wearing very tight jeans and a sweatshirt with the sleeves torn off to reveal his muscly shoulders and plenty of underarm hair. There was something belligerent about his masculinity that made me uncomfortable.
Penny seemed unintimidated. ‘What have you been doing with yourself since the end of term?’ she asked.
‘Just rattling around at home. I knocked down a couple of outhouses that were about to collapse. I went to see Martina in Clapham one day. She was in a pretty bad way.’
‘What was wrong with her?’
‘Same old stuff. Really low, not eating again. She said you hadn’t been returning her calls.’
A guilty blush spread over Penny’s cheeks. ‘I did try once, but she was out,’ she said defensively. ‘Anyway, it’s not me she wants to see. It’s Christian. I’m not stupid.’
‘She just needs someone to take her out of herself. Stop her getting all introspective. I’ll try and go again before I go to France.’
‘When are you off?’ asked Penny, a touch wistfully to my mind.
‘Next week. Why don’t you come? I’ve got room.’ He nodded towards the MG.
‘Oh, I don’t know. Next week’s a bit soon.’
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