Seb’s younger sister, whom Leela had an idea Richard had always thought pretty, wasn’t there; she was at university in Bristol. Her name was India.
Richard’s dad came for a visit. Richard, flushed and pleased, said they’d gone to lunch in an Indian restaurant in Mayfair. ‘You’d have liked it, the food was delicious. We’ll have to go some time.’
Leela didn’t argue with him. She went out with Judy after work.
‘Do you want to go somewhere round here, then go back into town?’
‘Are you crazy?’ Judy said. ‘Have you seen the places round here?’
She lived south of the river, Leela north, so they went for a drink at Baker Street, then to a restaurant that served crêpes and galettes.
Judy listened, her head on one hand, as Leela explained the situation with Richard, his father, and the unusual living arrangement. ‘So you don’t really see him when his dad’s here?’
‘I do, but not that much. He calls if he’s free.’
Judy’s eyes narrowed. Then she smiled, and reached for the carafe. ‘Let’s have another drink,’ she said.
Leela went home, which was now a flat share in Marylebone, in the apartment owned by a woman named Dee Dee, who had a seven-year-old daughter, Alisha. Dee Dee wore acrylic nails, and kept her Mars bars and cans of Coca-Cola in the fridge, so that vegetables had to be eased in between them. She was in theory an accommodating but in practice exasperated flatmate. She was pathologically clean, and had given Leela basic instructions when she moved in. The sink had to be washed every time dishes were washed in it; it must then be wiped with a paper towel to prevent water marks.
Dee Dee went to sleep early most days, and Leela was able to steal into the flat, walk to the kitchen and sink, get a glass of water, wipe the sink (Dee Dee would notice if she hadn’t) and go to her room. She kept the door locked; Dee Dee had said she might.
When she was in bed, her phone beeped. It was a text from Richard: Goodnight sweetie xx. She replied: he called, upbeat after a nice evening with his father. He left it slightly too long to ask about her evening, and in the small lag her rage mounted. She gave herself permission to be angry.
‘Why are you gloating about your evening? What’s wrong with you?’
‘What do you mean gloating?’
‘You’re always going on about things you do with your dad, but you won’t let me meet him. It’s deliberately cruel.’
‘No it’s not. I’ve explained –’
‘I don’t give a fuck about your explanation.’
It went on, increasingly vicious in words and forms, but a part of her was nonetheless aware of the moonlight, cold and quiet, moving across the room through not-quite-closed curtains.
Chapter 16
She was up quickly, out of bed, then in the kitchen, putting on the kettle, but Richard was almost unbelievably slow. She put a cup of coffee near him when she came back for a towel. He rolled over and smiled at her, the secretive smile of a child who knows he is loved. She felt a kick of repulsion.
‘Coffee.’
‘Thanks sweetie.’
She went to the bathroom, turned on the shower, brushed her teeth, examined her face in the mirror. Her eyes narrowed. She got into the shower, soaped, washed her hair and emerged in a towel, got her coffee, heard the noises of Dee Dee waking up, a radio, and went back to her room. The light was still on, the curtain unopened. Richard was up, bumbling, looking at his hair in the mirror, then rifling through his bag.
‘I don’t know if you have time to take a shower, unless you hurry,’ she said.
‘I’ll hurry.’
He took the other towel and headed to the bathroom. She dressed and put on some make-up, the eyes still severe. He came back, gave her a kiss, and she recognised and silently condemned the smell of his mouth beneath the toothpaste.
‘Sorry sweetie, I’ll only be a minute.’
‘I’m getting late.’
‘I know, I’m sorry, give me a minute.’ He pulled out clean boxers and put them on, a shirt, then his perennial grey jumper and a pair of corduroys. He looked at her, suddenly appealing. ‘Can I borrow some socks?’
She was exasperated. It was a bone of contention, quasi-humorous, that he took her socks and didn’t return them. She fished in a drawer. ‘Here.’
‘Thanks sweetie.’
He sat on the bed to put them on properly, irritating her further, then checked his satchel. They could leave. She marched towards the station; he followed.
‘Hey, slow down, you’re leaving me behind.’
She turned. Her face was a mask of rage, but that was ordinary. Today, though, he hurried closer, shifted his satchel strap, hunched his shoulders, and took the hand she reluctantly gave him.
‘I’m feeling a bit odd,’ he said.
‘Odd how?’ She tried to pull him along faster.
‘A bit tender. Like you don’t really want me around.’
Near the station, a bus roared by. A shiny cab swung in front as they were about to cross the road. Leela nearly tutted. When the cab had passed they crossed, in the opposite direction to a flow of men and women in stiff, heavy overcoats. How neat their facade was, she thought.
‘I’m worried about being late again. You don’t get what it’s like,’ she bit out.
‘I know. Sorry, sweetie.’ It was annoying, this faux humility.
They arrived at the tube; she would go one way, he another.
‘See you tonight?’ he said. He looked tall; his skin was bad right now.
‘I might just have a night at mine,’ she said. She imagined blissful solitude.
‘I can come over again,’ he said quickly.
‘No.’ She paused. ‘Okay, I’ll come to yours.’
‘See you later, sweetie.’ He swooped in for a kiss and was gone.
Leela hurried through the turnstile.
‘So things are going better?’
Leela shrugged. ‘I think I just don’t care as much any more.’
Judy raised an eyebrow.
‘Is it lunchtime yet?’ Leela asked.
The other woman grinned. ‘That’s the sixth time you’ve asked. Why did you come with me if you were going to get this bored?’
‘I thought you needed one of the edit people in case you had to cut text.’
‘Hypothetically, yes,’ said Judy.
‘To blame, in case there’s a typo or a hanging sentence.’
Judy grinned. ‘Now you’ve got the idea. Okay, we can go. I’ll finish the rest after a break.’
They stood, found their coats again at the outer door, and were leaving the printer’s when they nearly bumped into someone tall, dark, bearded, slightly plump, oddly familiar.
‘Oh, hi!’ He paused, staring at them, particularly Leela. He stuck out a hand. ‘Roger Wilkes. From the wedding.’
‘Oh, of course. Hi, how are you?’
He looked from one to the other of them. ‘This is my friend Judy, my colleague,’ Leela said.
‘Roger, hi.’ Judy’s voice was uninflected. Leela listened neurotically for a shade of mocking.
‘Um, are you going for lunch?’
‘Yeah, we’re going for a sandwich.’
‘Oh, okay.’ He hesitated.
Someone else was pushing the glass door behind Leela, who jumped aside. ‘Ooh, sorry.’
‘Well, maybe see you later?’
‘Okay!’
They took the stairs.
‘Who’s that?’ Judy asked.
‘I met him at the wedding, remember, the one I went to in Devon? I wouldn’t have remembered his name, actually. He seemed nice though. He was on his own.’
‘Hm, he’s sort of cute.’
‘You think? Not a bit fat?’ Leela stopped at the bottom of the stairs.
‘I think he’s attractive.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Yeah,’ Judy said. ‘I like that Mediterranean look. A bit stocky, a bit hairy.’
‘Who would have guessed?’
‘Jesus. Look at this weather.’
Leela was tormented agreeably through lunch and the afternoon by the desire to see Roger again, and find out if he was indeed handsome, or if she was attracted to him. Either or both of these questions might be answered by another chance encounter on the stairwell.
What had he been doing in the building? She didn’t think he worked there, but perhaps he too had some sort of journal to produce, or something he was getting printed.
‘Do you want some coffee?’ she asked Judy in the afternoon.
‘Yeah. Uh – actually, no, that machine coffee makes me feel sick.’
‘Shall I go to the place in the mall?’
Judy looked up, then at the clock on her screen. ‘Forget it, it’s three forty-five now, we won’t even be here that late with any luck.’
‘I might go anyway, just to get some air.’
Judy raised her eyebrows, and said nothing. Leela, unsure whether she felt excited or slightly sick, went into the stairwell, put on her coat, and descended the steps. She walked to the coffee place and ordered an Americano and a cappuccino. She returned, meditating on the way the suburban landscape was completely without beauty. There was a branch of a tree hanging over a wall near the shopping centre; a couple of leaves still clung to the knobbly wood. If her eyes had been better, if she could have looked more closely, would she have found more to see in it?
She carried the coffee upstairs and met no one.
‘So January is closed?’
‘Yeah. Thank fuck.’
‘Right.’ Leela continued to hover. ‘What about Cement Trade?’
‘Huh?’ The other girl looked up, and pushed hair away from her face. ‘Which one?’
‘Um, March?’
‘Are you feeling okay?’
Leela grinned and melted away. ‘Yeah, I mean, yeah. Just – yeah.’
‘Wait! You want to go to the printer, don’t you? And meet Alfred Molina?’
‘Who?’
‘The swarthy man, Ha ha,’ Judy began to cackle, though to Leela’s relief softly. ‘You have a thing for him.’
‘No I don’t.’
‘You do!’
‘I think,’ Leela said, her dignity impaired only by a grin that seemed to stretch over her entire head, ‘that you are forgetting I have a boyfriend.’
‘Someone is.’
‘Oi.’
Judy smiled, picked up her water bottle, and walked towards the passage.
For about three days and four nights Leela dwelt in a romantic-sexual haze. She had experienced this numerous times, with objects that had included boys at school, Robert Redford in Out of Africa, an unattractive occasional tutor at university, men on the tube. Now she dreamt of Roger, who in the daydreams had come increasingly to resemble Alfred Molina – an actor, she discovered – because she couldn’t remember how Roger actually looked. He was tall, a bit paunchy, dark, and pretty hairy, she remembered that much. His hairy wrists and dark eyes now became an erotic focus. Roger – strange name – was no doubt passionately artistic. The sex was amazing. The intensity of their bond was extraordinary. She imagined a misunderstanding that briefly separated them, and led to an even more passionate reunion.
It passed the train journey, when she sat soporifically staring at misty, rain-dampened outer-city fields and miserable horses. It passed the moments when she reviewed the next quarter’s editorial budget in an Excel sheet for each title. It nearly passed the horrid cups of coffee either from the Klix machine on their floor, or from the building’s cafeteria on the third floor, where of a morning she went to get a drink and examine the oleaginous bacon rolls.
She mentioned it to Richard, wondering why he didn’t see into her thoughts and discern the obvious interest. ‘I met Roger, remember, the guy from Christian and Elisa’s wedding? The one who was on his own?’
‘The guy with the beard?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Oh, really,’ Richard said. He didn’t lift his head from the magazine; he continued to read, massaging his earlobe. ‘Where did you meet him?’
‘At the printers. We went to check on the January issues, you know, sign the pages off.’
‘Oh, okay.’
‘Yeah, they sometimes have last-minute changes. Judy went to look at everything again, and I went as well, partly in case they needed someone from edit, you know, to change stuff.’
‘Mm?’
‘Yeah, so we bumped into him there.’
‘What was he doing there?’ He was still reading.
‘No idea,’ Leela said. It bothered her. Why hadn’t she found out?
‘Oh yeah, now I remember. He owns that furniture business, doesn’t he?’
‘Does he?’
‘Yeah, quirky upholstered chairs or something. He has a thing, in west London somewhere. Notting Hill, somewhere like that.’
‘Oh, okay. So why the printers?’
‘Catalogue?’
There was a silence. Richard broke out, with a resurgence of passion, ‘Prospect is so well edited. It’s such a great magazine!’
Eleven o’clock. Leela got up to go to the cafeteria, came back with a cup of horrible coffee and a fruit salad that she would eat too quickly and which might give her indigestion but would fend off hunger. The kiwi would be surprisingly tasty. The pineapple would be unripe. The orange would be insufficiently peeled. The grape would be sour.
She opened the flimsy plastic box and yellow juice spurted onto her newspaper. She wiped it away, sat down, stuck the little fork into the grape and realised she had an email.
The grape turned out to be sweet.
The email’s sender was Roger.
‘Dear Leela,’ it began, and she read other words, ‘the other day’, ‘see you’, and a mobile number. Her immediate feeling was delight, the usual mysterious intimation that the world did in fact agree to her desires, that she was as magically connected to it as she had always sensed, while sometimes fearing this was not the case; this was followed by sorrow that possessing the content of the email meant losing the promise it retained while unread.
She read the words several times.
Dear Leela,
It was very nice if unexpected to see you the other day at Quickprint and I looked for you and your friend in the evening when I was leaving but didn’t see either of you. Do you ever make it to the wilds of Notting Hill or Kensington? Let me know if you do and you feel like a cup of coffee when in the area. I almost never leave the workshop/office/house but it might be worth texting before dropping in. I’m on 07949 885324.
Roger W.
She moved to call Judy to her desk, then remembered Judy was on leave for a couple of days. She thought. How could she get to Notting Hill? And when?
She must reply immediately, but she must also not reply immediately in order not to appear as though she had been waiting for the email.
Forgetting she already had a cup of coffee, she went to the cafeteria for another, and only the bemused, slightly irritated expression of the cashier, a wisp of dyed blonde hair escaping from her polyester cap onto her tired face, brought her back to herself.
The next morning, when leaving and putting a cup of tea into a bleary Richard’s hand, she said, ‘I might go for coffee with Roger some time. From the wedding.’
‘Oh, did you bump into him again?’
‘He has a studio in Notting Hill,’ Leela said. Though this didn’t answer the question, Richard nodded. ‘Today?’
‘Not today.’
‘Okay. See you later then?’
‘Sure.’
She left his house, feeling that things between them were strange, and yet satisfied with the way in which they were strange.
A series of short, flirtatious emails with Roger resulted in an appointment to have a drink after work in Notting Hill. Leela dressed with care. She told Richard where she was
going. He would be out with three school friends. Leela had been staying more in the flat in Marylebone, squeezing her existence between Dee Dee’s strictures of domestic hygiene. She felt harassed and at home, and enjoyed her aloneness. She would read a bit, go out to buy food, and cook something simple: half a packet of little pasta envelopes stuffed with a sticky mixture of cheese and vegetables, and half a tub of sauce. She would wash the dishes, wash and wipe the sink, make a cup of tea and retreat to her room. Its small window and view onto more brick and backyard made her think of the backs of houses, which had always meant an entry into London, through suburbs of terraced housing: brick buildings, bare and set in gardens that held small squares of grass, flower beds, a woman sunbathing, a man listening to the radio, children, a paddling pool, a dog, a tree-like drying rack spinning in the wind.
She thought of herself as more distinct from Richard. With the absence of anger came a lack of attachment.
On the day she was supposed to meet Roger the February issue of Construction Monthly experienced a glitch; one or more of the files turned out to be corrupted, and she had to stay late at work. There was then a delay on the Metropolitan line, and the train sat at Harrow-on-the-Hill. She realised she didn’t have Roger’s number with her. When she got home she sent him a text explaining why she was late. ‘Another time,’ he suggested.
Richard was still out. Leela, in her lamp-lit room with thoughts of escape, freedom, irony at her own desires, and the usual subterranean pleasure at finding herself alone when she had expected to be out, daydreamed, read a magazine, ate her pasta, and felt sleepy.
Walking from the tube on a misty evening ten days later, she put a hand deeper in her coat pocket. It was cold; the night sparkled. Notting Hill Gate was different at this time, its cheerful, rackety shops shuttered, and the stream of people from the tube absent.
She held her A–Z and scanned it. A right, then a left, then a small mews – there it was on the map, its name in letters so cramped they didn’t fit in the street. She began to walk. There was a large house on the first corner. Near it, a thuggish tomcat sat flexing his shoulders. When he saw her, he let out a rising cry, prrrk? He minced over, back arched, asking to be patted. She chuckled, paused, and obliged. The animal, brow furrowed, intent on his own need, purred loudly, and rubbed against her calves.
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