"I was waiting for you." Helen handed him two packages, a pen with his name inscribed on the band from Judy, a box of handkerchiefs from her--an anonymous present, which he suspected was meant to imply how little she could afford. Judy hugged him, Helen offered the side of her face as though turning the other cheek.
"Are you staying for a birthday dinner?" Judy said.
"I'm sorry, darling, I'm already promised." When he hugged her again she felt limp with disappointment. Helen turned her back on him. Could she have led Judy to believe he might be staying so that he would feel guilty? She still blamed Barbara Waugh for the collapse of their ------------------------------------com65
marriage, though she had never been able to prove anything: there hadn't been much to prove.
Out on the street again, when he'd promised to see Judy next weekend, he felt as if he'd left some raw part of himself behind, still trying to resolve the situation. Helen always made it clear that she didn't want him to stay long. She was doling him a series of weekly snapshots of Judy, then snatching them back.
He rather liked that image. It might fit into his novel. All at once he felt cheerful; his mind clarified. On the train he was close to glimpsing an episode which the snapshot image suggested to him, until a baby started crying. He could only listen to the yawning pause while it drew breath, the pause during which it seemed that it might have stopped crying. The pauses were the worst. It recommenced crying at last, louder, more nerve-racking, and the idea he'd almost grasped was gone. Perhaps it might find its way back through the maze of his mind if he didn't nag himself.
By the time he reached his flat it was growing dark. He showered quickly and changed, then he walked across the Barbican estate to Barbara's. On the balconies, pillars fat as giant barrels looked lagged with rough gray stone. Above the balconies and walkways lamps were coming on, inverted wastebins plugged with light. A tinge of sunset lingered on the tiers of concrete across the rectangular lake.
Soon he reached Barbara's terrace, near half a medieval bastion, a huge stone armchair. A few ducks were waddling across the red-brick plateau which displayed the Church of St. Giles on the lake. Among the long-stemmed lanterns which rose from the plateau, a willow dangled its mop of doll's hair. As the last of the sunset crept up the church tower it looked as though the gray stone were cooling, turning to ash.
Barbara kissed him happy birthday at the door, then she ------------------------------------com66
strode ahead of him along the hall. Her dry sweetish perfume drifted back through her long auburn hair, and he glimpsed threats of silver in the auburn. Farewell to our thirties, he said for himself and Barbara.
By the time he reached the main room her long legs had taken her to the couch, under which she stowed a photograph album which presumably she had been studying, then to her desk where she slipped a bookmark into the typescript she was reading, and back down the hall to the kitchen. "I'll have a sherry," she called.
Two minutes later she had set the table: salad, chilled hock, avocados. "How was your birthday so far?"
"Pretty fair." He'd welcomed the chance to leave the presents at his flat--no point in making her think about Helen and Judy when he didn't have to--but all at once he felt a need to talk. "Judy bought me an inscribed pen. She must have been saving for months."
Perhaps his tone said more than he had meant to. "Regrets?" she said.
"Well, I like her better now she's growing up. It's hard to believe I couldn't stand her." He was imagining how much of Judy's development he had missed, and that was why he spoke brutally: he didn't want Barbara to start blaming herself again--something in her poise told him she had problems of her own. "But you know, I suppose I could have put up with losing sleep for a year, except that was only the start of things. Helen insisted on bringing her to bed with us when she ought to have had her own room, did I tell you that?" Of course he had, here in her flat the night she'd said, "Don't go unless you want to," but this was hardly the context in which to remind her of that. "I blame Helen," he said, and hoped that wasn't too obvious a reassurance. "She never stopped Judy from climbing on things. Wherever I hid manuscripts Judy always got to them, and Helen acted as if it didn't matter, I could always ------------------------------------com67
ask the author for another copy. Sometimes I think one shouldn't have children at all in this business."
He was so anxious to reassure her that he made the remark without thinking. What lost faces might she have seen in the photograph album? "Did you have time to read my chapter?" he asked quickly.
"I made the time, since you were coming."
"Don't be afraid to tell me it was wasted." Without warning he felt uncomfortable; you shouldn't ask friends to judge your work, even when their business was judging books. "I mean, I know how busy you are. Your clients ought to come first."
"I'm sure you realize that they do. But this could be a strong book if you finish it, Ted. What's blocking you?"
"I don't understand the private eye sufficiently. I can't predict what she'll do."
"Surely that's a good thing. Try letting the story take over. Write about the situation and see how it reveals the characters. I think you spend too much energy trying to do it the other way round."
She was at her best when she was enthusiastic; when she was at rest her long oval face looked cool as a sculpture, the long nose and the elegant curves of her cheekbones; now her startlingly blue eyes were even livelier, and he was reminded how passionate her wide mouth could be. Still he had a sense that she was preoccupied, harassed. "Just recovering from the Paul Gregory auction?" he suggested.
"It isn't really over yet. The big one is still to come, in New York." she said, and jumped, for the phone was ringing in her bedroom.
Perhaps she had been waiting for a call, perhaps that was why she was on edge. She went quickly up the short staircase and closed the door. Presumably she had left the telephone plugged in there because she didn't want him to overhear, but the flat, which the previous tenant had ------------------------------------com68
soundproofed, magnified her voice. He glanced about, so that he wouldn't be tempted to listen, at the four-story hi-fi, the spherical television, the tables nesting as though caught at leap-frog, the leather suite whose chocolate slabs looked to be drooping with the heat, the numerous bookcases. Scattered through the shelves were Melwood-Nuttall books which he had given her. He didn't want to publish his own novel, he wanted someone else to prove to him that it was worth publishing.
Soon she reappeared and carried off the avocados, though she hadn't finished hers. She returned with chicken tikka. "I don't know if you heard any of that. The girl who was going to Italy with me has decided she can't go."
Behind her on the wall he saw an Escher lithograph of southern Italy: the smooth precise planes of the houses and the rocks on which they stood looked carved from a single piebald block of marble; a mysterious entrance was just visible in the distant hills. "I'd like to see Italy," he said.
"Come with me by all means if you can be free at the end of next month. I'll see if they'll transfer her reservations to you." She seemed all at once much happier, and managed to eat most of her chicken before the phone rang.
This time her eyes flickered for a moment before she controlled herself. She looked reluctant, almost trapped. If she was still expecting a call, could she have left the phone in the bedroom because she hoped that would magic the call away?
When the bedroom door closed he crossed to the window. The lanterns on the plateau were lit now; the church was a charcoal sketch, cut out and propped on a red-brick raft buoyed up by swimming lights. Barbara was speaking low, but he thought he heard stray phrases. "You can't be"--was that what she had just said? A spindly movement by the church distracted him. It must have been the shadow of the willow. ------------------------------------com69
He heard the ring as she replaced the receiver, then there was a long pause. The flattened church hung in the silent dark.
All at once she came bustling downstairs. "Oh, your cake," she said, wavering between the table and the kitchen. "You won't mind if I don't have any, will you? I'm afraid I've eaten as much as I can." He would have asked her what was wrong, except that she clearly wanted to pretend that nothing was. No doubt she would tell him in her own time if she wanted to. But as she cut the cake, having forgotten to let him do so, he saw that her hands were shaking. ------------------------------------com70 ------------------------------------com71
71
Eight
Though the underground was stifling, when Barbara reached Notting Hill she found the street was even worse. Beneath the painfully blue sky the air looked pale with dust. Trucks and cars and buses rushed down Holland Park Avenue, staining the grimy trees. The noise was loud as a car factory, and seemed actually to thicken the air. She couldn't think until she found some refuge from the noise.
Eventually she managed to cross to Pembridge Road. It was somewhat quieter, despite the unbroken train of cars. Litter from the sanitation workers' strike crawled along the gutter. As she hurried past a terrace of shops smoked by the traffic, dogs glared at her with china eyes, one of which was chipped. Further on, scaffolding outlined tall houses, a giant pat of cement glistened on the pavement-- but here was the corner of the Portobello Road, and she stopped, to try to think. What was she doing here? Couldn't ------------------------------------com72
she accept that she had simply been the victim of a sadistic hoax?
Until last night she'd managed to believe that it was less than that--that the call she'd received at her office had been a wrong number, after all. Though she'd heard the girl clearly enough, that need not have meant that the girl could hear her. Nevertheless she had been on edge for the rest of the week. Sometimes when the phone rang she felt herself grow hollow and fragile, held together by her nerves.
Last night's call during Ted's birthday dinner had come almost as a relief; at least it was something to deal with--at least, that was what she had told herself when she heard the voice, though she felt shaky with heartbeats. This time she wouldn't dump the receiver back in its cradle. "Mummy, it's me. Please don't go away again."
Barbara had sat down hastily on the bed, her eyes prickling with tears, even though she'd heard electronic cheeping and the fall of a coin before the voice. Ghosts didn't feed coins into phones; this wasn't a chance to hear that Angela forgave her, a secret hope which Barbara seldom admitted to herself. "Don't bother pretending you're my daughter," she said harshly. "You can't be. The police found her body in a field in Kent."
"That wasn't me. They wanted you to think I was dead."
Whoever it was would have had to say that, yet for an uneasy moment Barbara remembered saying, "I suppose they shot some other little girl to make me think it was Angela." For a moment that seemed agonizingly possible, but she mustn't let herself be tricked that way; the voice sounded older than it should, trying to pretend it was younger. "Who wanted me to think so?" she demanded. "Why?"
"Oh, Mummy, don't ask so many questions. I'll tell you when you come for me." ------------------------------------com73
"Come where?" Barbara hadn't meant to sound so urgent. "Where?"
"I'm going to tell you." Suddenly the voice seemed oddly immature. "But you have to promise that you won't tell anyone."
"All right, now tell me."
"No, you have to say you promise. You mustn't tell anyone about me. You mustn't go to the police."
"All right, I promise," Barbara said, though her whole body was struggling to hold back the words. "Where?"
The cheeping responded at once, high and inane as giggling, long before she would have expected it. "Off the Portobello Road. The house with the bricked-up gate," the voice said in the lull before it was cut off by electronic howling. At least, that was what she'd decided it had gabbled, in the hours when she had lain awake after Ted had left. She had paced the flat when she couldn't sleep, afraid to hope, afraid she would shrink into herself as she had after the kidnapping; she never wanted to feel like that again. By God, she would like to find whoever had made her so nervous and fragile again--and so here she was, at the start of the Portobello Road.
Before she was conscious of deciding, she stepped forward. A corner cut off the uproar of traffic at once. A terrace of two-story houses, painted green or white or pink, led to a crossroads; some of the paint looked cracked as parched mud. Trees no taller than the houses sprouted from the pavements. A few cars dozed beside the curbs.
None of the knee-high walls had a bricked-up gate, but of course she wasn't meant to look on the Portobello Road itself. On the sloping crossroad she could see only blinding chalky houses which challenged her not to look away. She might have followed both directions out of sight, except that she'd realized how many side roads there might be, how much time she might have to waste on a hoax. She ------------------------------------com74
was wandering when she ought to be at work--but she had treated her work as all-important once before, and she couldn't do so now.
She hurried herself down the Portobello Road, past a terrace of galleries, studios, shops brassy with antiques. Here was Westbourne Grove, but wouldn't the voice have called that by name? Perhaps it might have done so if it hadn't been cut off, or perhaps the hoax was meant to make Barbara wander like this, growing hotter and more irritable. Surely nobody could plan something so pointless.
She tramped up and down Westbourne Grove--white houses glared like lightning--then she trudged back to the Portobello Road, into a clutter of market stalls hemmed in by shops pimply with burglar alarms. The side streets grew more numerous, and she had to cross back and forth to examine all of them. Suppose the voice hadn't said "a bricked-up gate" but something else entirely?
Suddenly she halted, between bollards like metal candies that closed off Lonsdale Road. All the side streets had names; why hadn't the voice named the street before describing the house? Could there have been any reason other than to prolong the joke? Suppose the caller had read about Barbara in the Sunday supplement and had resented her success? Suppose the caller were unbalanced enough to want to make her suffer?
All at once Barbara was furious, determined to find the house if it existed, for surely the owner of the voice would be waiting there to see if she'd taken the bait. She struggled onward, though the crowd made the street even hotter, guzzled the air. Stall holders were shouting and arguing, blocks of shoppers obstructed the narrow pavements in front of the stalls. She was conscious of every one of her sticky movements.
Here was another side street, more white houses cracked as senile faces. Cheap sun-bleached curtains of all colors ------------------------------------com75
made the pairs of windows look unmatched and cataracted. Those houses which could afford paths had gates, however staggery, or at least spaces between the gateposts. She turned away, and came face-to-face with a woman who was watching her.
She was dressed in black: black stockings, fat black trousers, black sweater sprinkled with white, perhaps from her dyed hair. Her round teenager's face was made up to disguise how much older she was, and bore a vague meaningless smile--exactly the look one might expect of the person who had made the call. For a moment she seemed about to speak, but was that surprising, given the way Barbara was staring at her? Barbara dodged past her, feeling idiotic, angry, ashamed of herself. When she glanced back from the corner, the woman was still watching her.
At least the end of the market was in sight, beneath an overpass loaded with traffic, above which the air was gray and wavering. Now the crowd seemed to be full of teenage girls--of course it was the school holidays--and all of them stared at her. No doubt that was hardly surprising, if she looked as she felt. Shops sprang open like jacks-in-the-box; the presence and uproar of people and animals, dogs kicked away from the stalls, was oppressive as a traffic jam. She tried to hurry and almost knocked down a wire mesh bin of shoes.
When she reached the overpass it offered no r
elief. The roar of traffic overhead was dull and overwhelming. People clustered beneath the overpass like derelicts under a bridge, fingering clothes that staggered along racks of hangers. Everything looked gray and shabby, the faces as much as the clothes. She thought it was less the shade than the noise which was befogging her vision, choking her thoughts.
Beyond the overpass it was worse, an absolutely constant roar of white noise from the heavy traffic, so intense ------------------------------------com76
that it was physically sickening. She had to halt beside a line of grubby parked cars and shove her hands against her ears, and even then most of the noise seeped through. Her mind seemed to have been wiped like tape. Everything looked flat as the blue plastic sky which was dovetailed into all the spaces between the chimneys of the terrace which paralleled the overpass. She could only stand and stare while she tried to grow used to the noise.
The three- and four-story houses were so nondescript that she seemed hardly to be seeing them at all. Flaking pillars supported their porches, several windows were broken, grayish curtains hung beyond some of the holes. Other windows were bricked up, as was one of the gates. ------------------------------------com77
77
Nine
It looked like very little: an abandoned house, the feeble ending of a cruel joke. None of the windows appeared to be curtained except by dust. Even so, could she be certain that it was empty, even if both adjacent houses clearly were, without going to look? Either a tipsy shadow of the porch was leaning against the edge of the front door, or the door was ajar.
Eventually she crossed the road to the adjacent garden, before she could drown in heat and noise. A fractured armchair, apparently dropped from an upper window, had broken the fence between the gardens. As she clambered over she glanced toward the market, both from guilt and in the hope of glimpsing whoever had enticed her to the house. One or two people were watching, but as far as she could tell at that distance, they looked sympathetic. Perhaps they took her for a squatter. ------------------------------------com78
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