by Francis King
‘That doctor never struck me as in the least bit competent.’
‘He was dead.’
‘Well, it was certainly a miracle that after a fall like that …’
‘Yes. Yes.’ Again he halted, gripped my arm. ‘A miracle. That was what it was.’
‘As I looked down, I was willing him not to be dead – willing it, willing it!’ I confessed. ‘But I find that, when I will things, they never happen.’
He shook his head. ‘I thought for a time that I was willing it too – as I sat beside him in the ambulance. But I wasn’t. I was begging – entreating – someone that he shouldn’t be dead. But whom was I begging – entreating? That’s what’s so strange. And who heard me? Who heard me? Who heard me and came up with that miracle?’
When – at Joy’s, never Sonny’s, invitation – I subsequently visited the vast, over-furnished house in Brampton Square, Sonny was rarely present. Either he had hidden himself away in his room or he had deliberately gone out to avoid me, I decided. Joy, embarrassed and anxious, would make some excuse – at the last minute he had had to take charge of a relative on a visit from the States, he had been detained by business in Paris, he had missed a train. On one occasion, ignoring whatever such excuse she had just come up with, I asked: ‘Is something the matter with him?’
‘Oh, no! No! He’s – all right.’ She was flustered and hesitant. Her face began to redden.
Eventually we lost touch with each other. Twice, at widely spaced intervals, Joy invited me round and, for perfectly legitimate reasons, I had to refuse. I stopped dropping in, as I once used sometimes to do if I had been shopping in the area. I did not invite them back. Friendships have a natural cycle that often ends in a withering away and then a total dissolution. Perhaps ruthlessly, I have always thought it pointless to keep them on a life-support system beyond their natural expiry date.
Last week at a dinner-party I found myself sitting opposite an elderly man whom, I remembered, I had met many years before at a typically lavish, rowdy cocktail party given by Sonny and Joy. He was Sonny’s stockbroker. Inevitably I asked after the couple. ‘Sonny now seems uninterested in all the things that interested him before,’ he told me in his precise, metallic voice. ‘Doesn’t go to the theatre, doesn’t play golf, doesn’t go to parties, doesn’t give parties. Doesn’t hunt women, doesn’t gamble. Can you imagine that? Sonny no longer chasing a skirt, Sonny no longer gambling. And only two or three years ago he was constantly in pursuit of someone or other, and would make or lose twenty grand at the tables in a night.’
‘What do you think is the reason for the change?’
The man shrugged. ‘I sometimes wonder if he hasn’t had some sort of breakdown.’ I stared at him in incredulity. Sonny had always seemed to me far too mentally and emotionally robust for a breakdown. ‘People do, you know,’ he said. ‘The very rich far more often than the very poor. But – amazingly – he seems to be happy. As though he had received some wonderful news that he can’t tell us about. So perhaps it isn’t a nervous breakdown. Perhaps it’s something else at which we can only guess. Who knows?’
I have just been for a walk in nearby Holland Park. There’s an arbour there, with a long bench, where the winos congregate. Usually I try to avoid passing that way, because it embarrasses me when they shout out at me for money. Today, bunched together at one end of the bench, two disheveled, red-faced men were drinking from cans. On another bench not far distant, an old man with grey, untidy hair, in a rumpled suit and scuffed brogues, was slouched, swollen hands on knees and legs thrust out. He might have been mistaken for a wino himself. Eyes closed, he had uptilted his blotchy, heavily lined face to the sun. He was smiling, not at me or at anyone else, in beatific contentment.
It was Sonny. I paused, stared at him. His eyes remained closed, the smile broadened. Then feeling, I could not have said why, that he had entered a region where I, friends far closer, and perhaps even Joy could no longer follow, I hurried away.
‘That’s right.’ She must be one of those people who wanted to sell one double-glazing, interest one in some dodgy investment, or persuade one to give to a charity of which one had never heard. ‘Yes? What is it you want?’
‘You won’t know who I am. I don’t imagine you’ll remember after all these years.’
‘Well, tell me.’
‘I’m the daughter of Denisa Popescu. You know who I mean?’
‘Of course.’
‘I’m Ana. Ana Williamson. The Williamson is the name of my ex.’ She gave an embarrassed laugh. ‘Long ago I heard that we were neighbours.’
‘You heard? How did you hear?’
‘Oh, someone told me. Maybe my mother. And then today – I don’t know why – I looked in the telephone book and there I found your number. I thought you’d be ex-directory. But you weren’t.’
‘Is your mother with you?’
‘No. No, she died two, three years ago. I thought you might have known.’
‘No. No one told me. We had – lost touch. It’s all so long ago, that stay of mine in Bucharest.’
‘My mother said that you had once told her that it was the happiest time of your life.’
He had told many women that this or that time was the happiest. ‘I was young. Well, comparatively young.’
‘My mother told me never to get in touch with you.’
‘I can’t think why she told you that.’
A silence. Each waited for the other.
Then she said: ‘It would be nice if we could meet?’
He wanted to say ‘ Why?’ He wanted to say ‘No, I don’t really think so.’ Then he relented: ‘ Yes. If you’d like that. Of course. Why not?’
That night he dreamed of Denisa. He had not thought of her for twenty and more years. They were trying to get into a museum, a towering Gothic building dripping with ivy, which was locked. She repeatedly rang the bell, she rattled a vast iron ring of a door handle, she banged with a fist. Then she snatched his hand and dragged him round the building to a side door. That too was locked. ‘But they said someone would be here to open it for us,’ she burst out. ‘What’s the matter with this country?’
What’s the matter with this country? It was something that she had often cried out in frustration and fury.
He woke. The eiderdown had slipped off his bed. He was cold. Almost everything in those far-off days was wrong with the country. One of those things was Denisa herself – or, rather, her role. He had soon realised that, so fluent in English, so critical of the regime and so free in her comings and goings, she must be a plant. Later she even confessed it to him – ‘I just report things of no importance. If I didn’t report something, then I’d have to leave the job. And stop seeing you. You understand that, don’t you?’ Of course he understood it. He might have then sent her packing. But, alone in Romania because his wife did not think it a suitable place for an ailing child constantly requiring expert medical attention, he had needed Denisa.
As he shaved, with the cutthroat razor that, innately conservative, he still preferred, he wondered what Denisa’s daughter would be like. His daughter too? He stared at his reflection in the glass, opened his eyes wide, slowly shook his head. He remembered how, after a day of ski-ing under a pale-blue, cloudless sky, she had told him, turning her head on the pillow and smiling: ‘I have a surprise for you.’
When she had revealed to him the nature of the surprise, he had answered: ‘And I have a surprise for you.’
‘Yes?’ There was a tinny note of apprehension in her voice.
‘It’s not something I like to talk about. But medically it’s impossible I’m the father. Our child has a genetic disorder. Inherited from me. So – a few years ago I had an operation. A vasectomy. You know what that is? One didn’t want to take a risk.’ He often spoke of himself as ‘one.’
After that he could not feel the same towards her, nor she towards him. But their affair continued until, a few weeks later, he moved on to another diplomatic posting. She never spo
ke again about the pregnancy during those weeks, but in the desultory correspondence that for a brief period had followed his departure, she had told him of the birth of a daughter and of her determination not to give her up for adoption, as her family had urged her to do.
‘Let me carry that for you.’
‘No, it’s not really –’
‘Please. Let me!’
‘Oh, all right,’
She had already picked up the tray from the kitchen table.
‘You have a beautiful garden.’
‘Very small.’
‘But beautiful.’ Without being asked she began to pour out the tea.
‘People – friends, busybody neighbours – keep telling me that I ought to have all these trees pruned. One gets so little sunlight.’
‘I think they’re right.’
‘But I don’t want more sunlight.’
‘Maybe one day I’ll do some pruning for you. I’m a good gardener. But now I live in an attic flat and so I have no garden. My ex has the garden now. It was our garden, now it’s his.’ The tone was humorous, without any bitterness. The pale blonde hairs on her strong forearms glistened in the afternoon sunlight. Suddenly he was pierced by a memory. It was of his mother lying out on a deckchair on the top deck of the Lloyd Triestino liner that brought them back home from India when he was a child. Pale blonde hairs glistened on her bare forearms. The child had put out a tentative hand and brushed the back of it against those hairs. At the contact, he had felt a shiver of delight.
He stared up at this woman who was deliberately cutting the chocolate cake, her lower lip drawn between her teeth as though she were concentrating on some difficult task. As soon as he had opened the door to her, he had been tantalised by a resemblance that he could not define. Now it had come to him: She looked like his mother – the same eyebrows, each at first a straight line and then a rising one, the same almost gaunt cheek-bones, the same uptilted nose with the slightly flared nostrils. But he was fancying that resemblance! She was in no way related to his mother. She was the daughter of Denisa and some lover of hers.
‘I know nothing about you. First, tell me what you do.’
She was receptionist at a medical centre, she told him. It was, he realised, not far from his house; he had often passed it and had wondered whether he should not register there, since he was dissatisfied with repeatedly having to wait for an appointment at the one to which he went. The trouble was that she had no real qualifications, she said. Without qualifications it was difficult to get the sort of job she wanted – in publishing, in broadcasting. She had married at seventeen. She talked of the marriage, troubled and brief. A mistake, she said.
‘And you? Do you live alone here?’
‘Yes, since my wife died. That was four, no, five years ago. Time flies when one is old, one loses account of it.’
‘You have a son. I remember my mother told me that.’
‘Had. Died years and years ago.’
‘You don’t mind living alone?’ She jumped up to refill his teacup.
‘One gets used to it. In fact, in the end one rather prefers it. For a time after my wife’s death a cousin of mine volunteered to come here as housekeeper. No good. Nothing wrong with her, decent woman, always kind, but it just didn’t work. In the event, one had to make an excuse to end the agreement. Poor soul – the excuse didn’t convince her, I’m afraid.’
She was looking round the garden. ‘This lawn will never grow properly. Too much shade. Why not have it paved?’
‘I like what grass there is.’
‘York stone. That would be fine.’
He ignored it. He stared at her hands as they now rested one on either knee, as though preparatory to departure. They were beautiful hands, the nails carefully manicured, natural in colour as he liked nails to be.
When she was leaving, she said: ‘I was serious about the garden. I’d love to put in some work on it.’
‘I do have a chappie who comes in from time to time.’
‘Why go to that expense? I’d do it for nothing.’
He watched her from his upstairs bedroom window as, mounted on a ladder, she sawed at a branch. Her hair, brown streaked with gold, was dishevelled about her shoulders, and there were patches of sweat, dark on light, staining the cotton of her blouse under the arms. Her energy and strength overwhelmed him. All around her were the severed branches of privet and cotoneaster. They looked almost black against the yellowish green of the long grass that she had said she would mow the coming day.
He went down and joined her. From the ladder, looking down at him, she said: ‘Oh, I do wish you’d have that lawn paved. You could have two urns with flowers in them. You could even have a fountain. Oh, do!’
He shook his head, smiled. ‘Nope. I like it as it is.’
‘Oh, you are obstinate!’
‘Yes. Yes, I am.’ He laughed.
She spoke of the tenants below her. ‘It’s odd how noise rises. I hear that thump-thump-thump late into the night. When I last complained, he – the man – called me a fucking bitch and then slammed the door on me.’ A few days later she spoke again of them. When they had their parties, they wedged the front door open. It was so dangerous, anyone could slip into the house. ‘I’ll just have to find somewhere else to live.’
Soon after that, he was in bed with a summer virus. He wheezed, coughed and expectorated, now sweating and now shivering. She had called round unexpectedly with two rosebushes and had stared at him, in his pyjamas and slippers, his forehead shiny with sweat, as he had opened the door to her. Then she was all concern. She demanded a thermometer, which he had difficulty in locating in a bedside drawer, and, having peered down at it, at once told him: ‘You must get to bed. It’s over a hundred.’
‘Oh, one doesn’t give in to a temperature. I feel fine.’
‘You look ghastly.’
Eventually he gave in both to the temperature and to her with a feeling of voluptuous relief. She dosed him with aspirin, brought a bowl of chicken soup and a pot of yoghurt up to his room on a tray, and announced that, having gone home to see to one or two things, she would return to spend the night.
‘Oh, but that’s not at all necessary! One can manage perfectly well.’
Again she insisted. Then, so far from continuing to oppose her, he suddenly gave in. with an upsurge of joy that took him by surprise.
‘I’m going to be terribly busy the next few days. I must do some house hunting.’ She was cleaning the silver, some of it tarnished to almost black, that his daily, who was in fact a weekly, never had either the time or the inclination to tackle.
‘So you’re really set on a move?’
Vigorously she rubbed at the side of an entrée dish now rarely used. She nodded, her hair falling forward to screen her face. He wanted to put out a hand to feel the thickness of that hair, his fingers lifting up strands of it and then letting them fall over forearm and palm. ‘What else can I do? Things can’t go on as they are. I hardly slept a wink last night. And when I was coming up the steps behind him yesterday, he just shut the door in my face. Deliberately. No doubt about it.’
‘He sounds an absolute little shit.’
‘Not little. He’s even taller than you are. And huge. He plays rugby in his spare time.’ Again she rubbed vigorously. ‘The trouble is that everything in this area’s so expensive. Even a bed-sitter with its own kitchen and bathroom. I’ll have to look farther afield. Someone said that Bow might be worth a try.’
‘Bow!’ He was appalled. ‘ But that’s miles away.’
‘Yes, I know. If I went there, I’d have to find another job. I couldn’t make that long journey from Bow to Kensington each day.’ The implication was obvious to him. She could not each day make that long journey from Bow to him.
‘I have an idea.’ He said it on an impulse. Once said, he could not withdraw it. ‘How about your taking up residence here?’
‘Here?’ She stopped buffing the dish. Her face was radiant as she tur
ned it up to him. ‘Are you being serious?’
‘Yes. Of course. Why not? You know the room. It’s dark and not all that comfortable. But, being in the basement, it has it own entrance. And its own loo and shower.’
‘What more could one want? Oh, that’s wonderful. Do you really mean it?’
‘I wouldn’t have suggested it if I didn’t.’
‘I won’t be any trouble.’
‘I’m sure you won’t.’
‘But what rent would you want? Rents here are so high. I wonder if I could afford it.’
‘Nothing.’
‘Nothing?’
‘Nothing.’
He put out a hand and patted her shoulder.
Gradually she brought in possessions of her own, to replace pieces that she carried up to the loft. At first these replacements were from her former flat. Then they were from Portobello Road, or from car boot sales. To these last she began by travelling long distances by public transport. Then, after a few weeks, he urged her to take his car whenever she wished. It was a battered but still beautiful old Daimler, which he himself now rarely used. Sometimes he would accompany her, telling her that something that she fancied was rubbish or advising her to buy this or that chair, table or picture.
One day, he had pointed to a bedside table. ‘That’s a good piece. Sturdy. Handsome. Victorian.’
She laughed. ‘Like you.’ She walked round it, examining it. Then she asked the price. ‘ Oh, gosh!’
‘Let me buy it for you.’
‘Oh, no! I couldn’t agree to that.’
‘Of course you could. You’ve done so many things for me.’
From then on he would often buy objects for her. They always had to be things that he, as well as she, liked.
‘You’re so good to me.’
‘Well, you’re so good to me.’
He meant that. She would shop for their meals and cook them, load and empty the dishwasher and the washing machine, iron his shirts, even clean his shoes. Above all, each weekend she worked in the garden. Sometimes that bothered him. It was no longer the garden, overgrown and for the most part shaded, that once he had loved. He found its present order finicky; he hated the sight of once soaring branches now reduced to raw stumps by amputations with an electric saw that she had badgered him into buying. Once it was high summer, it was difficult to find somewhere to sit where the sun did not scorch him.