‘I can’t remember,’ he said. The thing that kept going round my head was the same phrase Denise Carroll’s mother had used: ‘Please don’t hurt him.’
‘We found a raincoat,’ they said. ‘We’d like you to come and take a look at it.’
Ken’s face brightened. ‘I lost my raincoat.’
After they’d left I gave Ken an early supper in bed – a hamburger with plenty of ketchup and four sleeping pills. I had told the police I’d bring him round the station in the morning. They were decent about that, said they’d send a car for him. Ken was quite excited about getting a ride in a cop car. When he’d eaten I sat by the side of his bed and held his hand. He’s no beauty, but my heart caught on the innocent arch of his eyebrows, the mild curve of his mouth, bits of my features woven into his unfinished face. How had evil got into him? Was it evil, or just a man’s desire coming through some twisted circuit, like carbon monoxide forced through a car window? Anyway, he was mine. I couldn’t let them get him. I settled his pillows, slipping out the one that raised his head too high. I watched him a moment to remember how he looked asleep and then pressed the pillow over his head. I did it carefully, like pressing a cutter over pastry. It was very peaceful. Suddenly Ken’s arms shot out; he reached out, wildly clawing at me. I lifted the pillow and saw the look on his face. Oh God, that face. I pressed down with all my might. Ken’s strong, but the sleeping pills were against him. His arms fell. The doorbell rang. Bloody cops, back again! Of course they didn’t trust me to bring him to the station. When I removed the pillow Ken looked like a squashed doll. I stood there clutching the pillow to my chest while the doorbell shrilled. As I turned to go downstairs there was a shudder from the bed and Ken regained his breathing with a mighty snore. I touched his forehead and he smiled.
At first there seemed to be no one at the door, but when I looked down there was a little girl, eight or nine. ‘Is Ken there?’ she said.
‘Ken’s in bed.’ I kept my hand to my face to hide the scratches. ‘So should you be.’
‘I only found out tonight where he lives,’ she said. ‘I had to come and thank him. He got my kitten, Susie, down a tree.’
‘Oh, my God,’ I said.
‘It was being chased by these big boys with a dog and it ran into someone’s garden. They went in after it; I was terrified. Then Ken came along. He’s very brave,’ she, said admiringly. ‘Those boys gave him a right going over. They set their dog on him.’ She was about to go when she remembered the large carrier bag she was holding. ‘Here’s Ken’s coat. He asked me to mind it when he went up the tree.’
She watched me oddly. ‘Don’t cry,’ she said. ‘Susie’s all right. Oh, and she says she’s very sorry. She gave Ken a terrible scraping, but we all do foolish things when we’re frightened.’
The Artist
Maggie Gee
Maggie Gee (b. 1948) is a British novelist who has written eleven novels and a collection of short stories. She was the first female Chair of the Royal Society of Literature, and is now one of the Vice-Presidents of the organisation. Her 2003 novel, The White Family, was shortlisted for the Orange Prize. She was awarded an OBE in 2012.
When Boris had only been with her a month, he came in from the garden holding a rose, a dark red complicated knot of velvet. Bowing slightly, he placed it in her fingers. ‘Broke in accident,’ he explained (he was repointing the brick at the back). It was her own rose he was offering her with that graceful, cavalier flourish. ‘Put in water, Emma, please.’
‘Beautiful, Boris,’ she said, inhaling deeply, once, then again. The scent of the rose was so intense it shocked her, made her throat catch and her eyes prickle, as if life was suddenly all around her, as if she was breathing for the first time in years. Emma had hay fever, and avoided flowers. ‘So beautiful, I shall write about it.’ (She wrote novels, which had never been published, but she had a study, and told people she wrote.)
‘I am artist,’ said Boris, grinning at her with self-deprecating, dark-eyed charm. His teeth were very white, but one was chipped; he had a handsome, cherubic face. ‘I am artist, you see, Emma. I am artist like you.’ He jabbed his brown finger towards her, laughing. ‘I make beautiful house for you.’
‘Wonderful, Boris. Thank you. But really I just need the tiles laying out in squares. One black, one white, and so on.’
‘Emma, I like you very much. I make you a beautiful floor, it is my present to you.’ He bowed extravagantly, a knight. How old was he? Forty, fifty? ‘I am artist, Emma,’ he continued, showing her a piece of paper on which he had sketched an elaborate black and white design. ‘You don’t want one square – two square – one square – two square, black, white, same thing always. Very boring. No good!’
She took the paper from him, folded it narrowly, and slipped it back into the pocket of his jacket. ‘That’s just what I do want. Black, white, black, white. Like a chessboard. Simple. The tiles are in the garage. Now, I must go and work.’
Boris smiled at her forgivingly. ‘Yes, you do your work, Emma, you write your books, beautiful. I like this very much, to work for an artist, like me.’
The rose was lovely, though slightly battered. She kissed it lightly before throwing it away.
‘He’s impossible,’ she complained lazily to her husband as they lay in bed with their books, looking at Edward over her glasses, his familiar pinched profile in the cool blue room. She wanted to tell him, she wanted to tell someone, that Boris had given her a rose. ‘Impossible. Edward? I’m talking to you.’
‘Who is? For heaven’s sake, I’m reading my book.’
‘Boris,’ she said.
He sat up and stared. ‘Why do you keep talking about this person? Get a proper builder, an English one.’
‘I tried, if you remember. You said the price was outrageous.’
‘When you heard Boris’s quote, you were very happy.’
‘You found him, not me.’
‘You agreed we should ask him.’
Edward couldn’t deny it. He changed tack. ‘You can’t manage tradesmen, you never could. The cleaners never do what you tell them to.’
‘The cleaners always leave. Because you won’t let me pay them enough.’
‘I’ll talk to the fellow. I’ll sort him out.’
‘—No, Edward. It’s fine, really.’ She knew how Edward would talk to Boris, He would send him away, as he had threatened to do. Then the house would be empty every day. She liked Boris’s voice, and his accent, which spoke to her of strange wide spaces somewhere far away in southeast Europe, hot stony fields, bright market-places, somewhere she would never go, she supposed, since now she so rarely went out at all. She could never tell Edward about the rose. Her memory of it wilted, faded. ‘It’s okay, Edward. Boris is – different.’
‘What the hell does that mean?’ How scornfully he spoke. Had he always spoken to her like that?
‘Boris feels he’s an artist. He isn’t, of course. But he wants to be.’ She enjoyed this thought. Poor Boris. What Emma did, he only dreamed of.
‘Fraud and con man, like all the others. I want him out by the end of the week. Now could I please get on with my book?’
But she saw he was reading his Antiques Almanac, which surely could not have much of a plot-line. ‘He lost everything, you know. In that bloody awful war. He didn’t choose to come here. But now we can help him.’ Saying it, Emma was suffused with love.
Edward sighed with irritation. ‘He’s just an illegal. That’s why you’re using him. Because he’s cheap.’ He snapped his book shut, lay down abruptly, and presented her with his navy silk back, taking off his glasses, clicking down the arms. ‘A guy in the office said Afghans are cheaper. Good night, Emma.’ In minutes he was snoring.
In September, when he should have been clearing out the drains, Boris had brought round his wife and daughter in a rusty, dust-covered grey saloon.
‘Van break down. Very sorry.’
‘Never mind, come in and get started.’
&nbs
p; ‘No can do. I am in car, with wife, daughter… I can come in for cup of coffee, Emma, only.’
Boris loved her real coffee, which reminded him of home. ‘Actually, I’m writing,’ she protested, but he had already barrelled past her, sighing.
‘What about your wife, your daughter?’
‘They are well, thank you, Emma. Except only daughter—’
‘I mean, you can’t leave them out in the car, Boris.’ It was a bore, but good manners demanded it.
‘Yes, they love it.’
‘Of course they don’t love it. Go and ask them in.’
They trooped up the path, very straight-faced, in front of Boris, who drove them before him like sheep, looking off contemptuously to one side with a smile that seemed to say to the neighbours, ‘I know, but these were all I could get.’ ‘Wife,’ he jabbed one finger towards a thickset, grey-faced woman with hostile, uncomprehending eyes. ‘Daughter,’ and he put his hand on the girl’s shoulder, but this time his voice was tinged with love and regret. ‘Anna,’ he added. ‘Seventeen.’ She was pretty, with her fathers white teeth and cherub nose, but her skin and lips were pale, too pale, her eyes had a slightly sunken look, and she was leaning on her mother.
‘Hallo, Anna,’ Emma smiled at the daughter. To the wife she tried, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know your name,’ but the woman’s reply meant nothing to her. The words were guttural, unfamiliar.
‘Will they have tea or coffee?’ she asked Boris.
‘No, they don’t like,’ said Boris, pushing them into the drawing-room, while trying to shepherd Emma back into the dining-room where the serious business of coffee would go on. ‘Maybe daughter will have water.’
‘Lemonade? Biscuits?’
‘They don’t want.’
‘Water? I can hardly give them just water.’
Emma had broken away from Boris, doing her duty, reluctantly, and followed the two women into the drawing-room, where she found them standing together in front of the fireplace. ‘Sit down,’ Emma said, and they did, too promptly. ‘Cake? Fruit juice? Milk? Herbal tea?’
The daughter took pity on her and explained. ‘My mother speaks nothing,’ she said. ‘We like water, thank you, only water.’
‘Water, okay then,’ Emma said, reluctantly.
She got two glasses, but forgot to fill them, dreaming while Boris’s coffee brewed. In the dining-room, Boris was inspecting, with what was surely self-conscious over-emphasis, the prints on the walls, frowning upwards, pursing his lips, nodding judiciously. ‘Yes, very beautiful,’ he said aloud, looking, not by accident, she thought, at a Lucian Freud of a naked woman. He must want her to see that he liked bare flesh. Such a terrible flirt! Though of course, she was flattered… He made as if to notice her a few seconds later. ‘Daughter is ill,’ he hissed.
‘Oh dear, Boris.’
‘Yes, I take to the doctor. But she need clean air. Air here very dirty. She cannot breathe, Emma. London very bad. Is dust, where we live, damp also. No good.’
‘Oh, has she got asthma? What a shame—’
‘Asthma, yes. In my country, she hasn’t got it. Now she pray every day to Virgin, but she get it very bad.’
‘I am so sorry, Boris. But don’t worry. I myself have atrocious hay fever. They’re all allergies. Have you considered acupuncture?’ She mimed little needles jabbing into her arm. ‘Maybe aromatherapy?’
He shook his heavy, curly head mourrifully. ‘Injection? No. Too much – never mind. More coffee, please, Emma.’
Invited in, at first, on a strictly limited basis, to repoint the fireplace, then repaint the drawing-room, Boris’s role slowly became a roving one, as different parts of the house demanded his attention. He would announce these impending tasks to Emma, with a mixture of sorrow and glee.
Their relationship progressed in fits and starts. Boris nearly always complimented her. She had striking blue eyes, she had always known that, but he noticed the effect of different colours that she wore, and one day told her he would like to paint her. ‘First paint my house,’ she said, fondly, and he looked at her with a strange regret that made her think he was a little in love. It wasn’t so surprising; she was still quite pretty, and his benefactor, and a writer. But her books became a stumbling block. Boris took everything literally; she had told him she wrote books, when he first came to the house. After a few months he asked if he could see one, just to flatter her, she thought, of course, and she deflected it. But he kept on asking, becoming more pressing, and in the end she had been forced to explain: she hadn’t actually published any books. He seemed unreasonably disappointed. Was there a slight dimming of his admiration?
Boris was doing the exterior paintwork when Edward put his foot down. ‘When will this clown get the job finished?’ he raged at his wife.
‘It’s been very wet.’
‘It isn’t now. Has he been here today?’
‘His daughter’s been ill this week, so he’s hardly been in,’ Emma said, placatingly, but Edward glared at Boris’s paint-pots straggling across the patio, and his brushes in tins of cloudy white spirit, sticking up at the sky at an irritating angle.
‘He’s never going to darken my doors again if he doesn’t get the bloody job done and this mess out of the way before Friday!’ he exploded. ‘I mean it, Emma. Don’t think I don’t. We’ll get in a decent English builder at last.’
Next day Boris arrived around four, looking worried. After giving up for months, he smelled of smoke again, ‘Anna is in the hospital,’ he explained. ‘I just come to tell you how she is, Emma.’
She didn’t make him tea. ‘Edward says you have to finish the job by Friday or never come back, and he means it,’ she said.
‘She is very bad, Emma. Tea with sugar, please.’
‘No, he is serious,’ she said. ‘You have to get it done.’
But Boris suddenly clutched her fingers, with an odd little moan. ‘Last night they make us stay with her in hospital. Daughter’s face goes blue…’
She pulled her hand away. ‘Boris what are you going to do?’ she yelled at him, feeling her power at last, losing her temper with his handsome tanned face, his white broken teeth, his thick stupid curls, his foreign problems, the swamp of his need, sucking down tea and coffee and kindness, the scruples that stopped him making love to her, his pallid, boneless daughter and grey hopeless wife, the way he’d made her husband cross with her.
He looked shocked. ‘Not to shout, Emma. I am sensitive, like you. I am artist. Not to shout.’ He looked as though he was going to cry.
‘All right, Boris. But you must get the job done.’
He rang on the door at seven thirty next morning, half an hour earlier than ever before. Emma was bleary and vague, in a hastily donned jade silk kimono. Boris’s eyes ran automatically over her body, but his mouth was a line, and his eyes were bloodshot. ‘Daughter very sick last night,’ he said. ‘Van is no good again. And I haven’t car, because wife must have it to visit hospital. Emma, you will drive me.’
‘Drive you where?’
‘Drive me to find men.’
‘Why haven’t you found them already?’ she screamed at him.
Boris was frightened of this new savage woman, so different from the mild, flirtatious one he knew. ‘Please, Emma. I know where we find men. But quick, drive me now, please.’
‘I’m not dressed,’ she said. Not that she often did get completely dressed, nowadays, for why go out? Most days Boris came in.
‘Emma, put on clothes now,’ he insisted. She liked him sounding masterful, and went off upstairs without protesting, returning dressed in the first thing she found in her cupboard, a smart Chanel-copy suit with gold buttons and pink braid.
He looked at her strangely as she came downstairs, but he bowed slightly, and she felt exalted. She was excited: it was an outing. She didn’t listen to what he was saying.
‘Slow down,’ he said, in the northern suburbs. ‘Here we find men, Emma.’ His mobile rang and he swore and dived for it. As
the traffic waited at a bottleneck, he listened intently, then shouted at the phone, finally clicking it off after an explosion of furious consonants. Emma was surprised to see tears in his eyes.
‘Are you all right, Boris?’ she asked him, tentative.
‘Yes, Emma. Now I do work.’
‘But you’re crying, Boris.’
‘Is only dust.’
‘Oh. That’s good.’
Her attention was distracted. She was driving down a long desolate road, straight, running between Victorian terraces, but there was something in front of the terraces, something that at first she mistook for trees, grey shapeless trees with aimless branches, one or two hundred metres of trees, something that struck her as strange in a city, but then she realised they were not trees. They were thickets of men, standing in clumps, mostly silent, staring at the traffic, men in rough clothes with worn brown skin, men looking furtive, men looking hungry, men with no colour beneath their tans. Dozens of them. Scores. Hundreds? Not a single woman among those thin faces. Washed out tracksuits, ill-fitting trousers. Some of their hair was white with dust. Most of them were smoking lethargically. The slogans on their chests looked tired, dated.
‘What is it, Boris? What’s going on?’
‘Here we find men. Stop car. I do it.’
‘I don’t want these people!’ she found herself shouting. They looked ill and strange, not exotic like Boris. Scenting interest, some had turned towards the car. They were calling out, but she couldn’tunderstand them. Then she caught some broken English: ‘Only fifty!’ ‘Only forty!’ She felt naked and stupid in her pink Chanel ribbons and terrible glittering golden buttons.
‘Not to shout, Emma.’ He looked very weary. ‘Is okay. You leave to me.’
‘They’re not coming in my house. I want proper workmen.’
‘Is workmen, Emma.’ His phone rang again. He cursed, and threw it down on the back seat, got out of the car and left her alone.
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