Alicia was not Susie’s type. Alicia was the kind of girl Susie had despised at school for her application to work and her failure to see the devastatingly off-putting effect of scraped-back hair and obediently orthodox school uniform.
‘I was going to do that,’ Susie said sulkily to Alicia.
Alicia said nothing. She hung the damp towel over the shower-curtain rail. She was dressed in neat grey running clothes.
‘I said,’ Susie said, pushing clips into her wet hair, ‘I was going to do that.’
Alicia looked at her briefly.
‘No trouble,’ she said. She slid past Susie in the doorway. ‘I’m going for a run. I’ll be forty-five minutes.’
She went out of the front door and let it click gently behind her. She would be forty-five minutes, forty-five minutes exactly. It had driven Susie insane yesterday, Alicia going out to the supermarket, to the launderette, to the movies, saying, ‘I’ll be an hour,’ ‘I’ll be twenty minutes,’ ‘I’ll be three and a half hours,’ and being out all those times, precisely. It made Susie feel she was being spied on. It made her feel that Alicia wanted to claim a closer relationship with Tilly than she, Susie, had. If she hadn’t been feeling so rubbish – some tummy bug, brought back from Spain – Susie would have gone slamming in and out of the flat all day long without a word about where she was going or how long she’d be. She’d have left carrier bags everywhere, mugs and glasses everywhere, left the TV playing, left the radio on, left the windows open. But she hadn’t had the energy. She’d spent most of the day lying on Tilly’s bed with Tilly’s headphones on, listening to I Monster’s ‘Daydream in Blue’ and feeling utterly miserable, too miserable to cry, too miserable to have the energy to be angry.
Now she sat on the sofa with her knees doubled up inside Tilly’s sweater and was aware that the incipient boredom of feeling better was beginning to creep across her mind. There was a lot of day ahead, day filled with Alicia catching up on the domestic and personal rituals of her orderly life and buffing the sink to a shine every time she used it. Susie thought of going out. She thought of borrowing Tilly’s suede jacket and putting on her purple shades and just going out. Out. But she hadn’t quite the heart for it. And, in any case, she hadn’t the money. Tilly wasn’t asking anything for letting her sleep on the sofa, but all the same, she had alarmingly little money until she found herself another job. She sighed. There was a lot of finding ahead-a job, somewhere to live, a new life that would erase the deep humiliation of the Spanish episode. Susie yawned. Long ago, at school, Susie had been punished verbally and ingeniously in front of her whole class by a history master whom she had made the mistake of utterly discounting as a force for power.
‘Susan,’ he had said, this tired and nerdy-looking man, in his flat Midlands voice, ‘never forget that we fear ridicule more than we fear the gods.’
He’d made her squirm then. The recollection could make her squirm still. Her phoney tough-girl pose in Spain had resulted in her feeling just as she’d felt, at the end of that class on the origins of the trade union movement, when she was fourteen. It had somehow, temporarily, taken the fight out of her, whipped away the assumption that sustained her so much of the time, that she could do exactly what she wanted. The trouble, she realized, sitting on Tilly’s sofa, was that she not only didn’t want to do anything much, but she hardly knew what she wanted. It occurred to her, disagreeably, that that’s what getting in touch with your inner child really meant. It didn’t mean getting back to all that crap about innocence and a sense of wonder: all it meant was reverting to wanting someone else to take care of everything for you. Susie sniffed. Then she rolled sideways on the sofa until she could reach the telephone on the floor, and dialled William’s number.
He took a long time answering.
‘Hello?’
‘It’s me,’ Susie said.
‘Oh—’
‘I was in bed all yesterday. I was rubbish.’
‘Sorry about that,’ William said.
Susie swung herself upright holding the receiver.
She said, in a small voice, a voice she had seldom needed to use on William before, ‘I need to see you.’
‘Do you?’ William said uncertainly.
‘Yes,’ Susie said. She wound the fingers of one hand through the telephone cable. ‘Can you come here?’
‘Where’s Tilly—’
‘She’s gone to her mum.’
‘Oh yes,’ William said, ‘I remember.’ Susie could hear him yawning.
‘Didn’t she tell you?’
‘Yes,’ William said crossly. ‘Of course she did. It’s just that I’ve only just woken up.’
‘Come over here,’ Susie said. ‘I’ll make you coffee.’
‘Susie—’
‘Please,’ Susie said. She swallowed. ‘Please. I won’t ask you – anything again. Please?’
William took his time. He showered and shaved and chose, lengthily, one grey T-shirt from a heap of identical grey T-shirts, checked his messages, kicked the mess on his sitting-room floor into a rough rectangle by way of housework, marshalled the washing-up into the sink and replaced the dead light bulb, after six weeks, in the hallway. Then he went down into the street, bought coffee and a Sunday newspaper, and set off for Parson’s Green.
Susie was waiting for him, looking, compared to her usual self, small and scrubbed. Her feet were bare. She took him into the sitting room.
‘This doesn’t feel right,’ William said. ‘We shouldn’t be here if Tilly isn’t here.’
‘She won’t mind—’
‘I mind,’ William said.
Susie hovered in the doorway to the kitchen.
‘Coffee?’
‘Had some, thanks,’ William said. He put the Sunday papers down on the floor. He said, not looking at Susie, ‘How’s things? With – with you and Tilly?’
Susie climbed over the back of the sofa and sat on it, her feet on the seat.
‘OK. I shouldn’t have blown at you. I mean, I did go off.’
‘No,’ William said. He paced a little and then he sat down on the arm of the sofa farthest from Susie.
‘I’m really sorry,’ Susie said.
There was a small pause and then William said, ‘OK.’
‘We had a good time, didn’t we, when we were together—’
William nodded.
‘I just flipped,’ Susie said. ‘It was the weather and Henry going off and looking after Tilly and being bored and stuff. It just did my head in.’
William slowly turned his head sideways and looked at her. She wasn’t looking back. She was sitting with her hands either side of her, along the sofa back, and she was staring at her feet.
‘Sorry, Will,’ Susie said in a whisper.
He said gently, ‘I know. You said it already. I accept it.’
‘I know there’s been Tilly,’ Susie said. ‘I know how you’ve always felt about Tilly. But – well, we were different, weren’t we? We were fun.’
William went on looking at her.
‘Will,’ Susie said, still staring at her feet, ‘Will, will you have me back? Can we start again?’
There was a pause. William didn’t turn his head away, but his gaze dropped to Susie’s feet.
‘Sorry,’ he said.
She put one hand over her mouth.
‘Please—’
‘Sorry,’ he said again.
She jerked her head up.
‘Because of Tilly. That’s why, isn’t it? It’s because of Tilly—’
‘Not really,’ William said.
‘Then what—’
‘I’m afraid,’ William said slowly, lifting his eyes to look straight at her, ‘it’s because of you.’
Tilly let herself into the flat very quietly. She had intended to be back early in the evening, but there’d been a Jeanne Moreau season showing at a little arts cinema in Oxford and she and Margot had been to see Jules et Jim and then eaten at a Lebanese place and, by the time they’d finished, i
t was almost nine-thirty. Tilly wasn’t sorry. She’d loved the movie, loved seeing her mother so caught up in the movie, all over again, loved teasing her mother about her continued manifest aspiration to be like Jeanne Moreau. They’d drunk some weird purplish red wine with their Lebanese dinner and Tilly had got on the train feeling, if only briefly, that her current preoccupations, even if still there, did not loom either so large or so alarmingly. She sat in a corner seat, dressed in Margot’s denim jacket – an odd present, but welcome if only for its oddness – and resolved, not for the first time, to remember how possible it was to enjoy herself intensely without the conventional, accepted adjunct of a man.
The flat was very quiet. Alicia, who kept regular hours, would be tidily asleep behind her closed bedroom door, her mind and clothes already arranged for the morning. The sitting room was dark. This either meant that Susie was still feeling unwell, and was already asleep on the sofa, or that she was feeling better and was out. Tilly tiptoed into the sitting room and peered. Even in the small amount of street light filtering in through the closed curtains, she could see that the sofa was empty. She moved back to the wall and switched on the light.
The sofa was not only empty, but surprisingly tidy. The spangled Indian scatter cushions that Tilly had bought in a sad, brave attempt at nonchalance after Henry’s departure were plumped and symmetrical. There was no sign, anywhere, of Susie’s clutter. Tilly went through into the kitchen and put the light on there, too. On the table was a box of Maltesers, a spindly bunch of Peruvian lilies still in their fancy cellophane from the local petrol station, and a note which said in Susie’s dramatically unformed writing, ‘Thanks for everything, Susie.’
Tilly looked at the note. Then she went back into the sitting room and looked, unhappily, at the tidiness. Then she went down the corridor to Alicia’s bedroom and knocked firmly on the door.
‘Come!’ Alicia said.
She was sitting up in bed wearing a blue T-shirt and reading a John Irving novel.
‘Sorry,’ Tilly said. ‘Sorry’s it’s so late—’
Alicia looked perfectly composed, looked, in fact, as if she was expecting Tilly. She put her novel down.
‘Where’s Susie?’
‘She’s gone,’ Alicia said.
‘Yes, I can see that. But where? I left her here on Saturday with a tummy thing and now she’s gone—’
Alicia said carefully, ‘She went this afternoon.’
‘What happened?’
‘I went out for a run,’ Alicia said, ‘and when I came back, your friend was just leaving—’
‘What friend?’
‘William,’ Alicia said. She spoke his name almost distastefully.
‘Had they had a row?’
‘There was an atmosphere,’ Alicia said. ‘Susie was crying. But I didn’t sense anger. Then William left and Susie got dressed—’
‘Got dressed?’
‘She was half dressed,’ Alicia said, ‘so she dressed and went out and bought those flowers for you, and then she rang for a taxi and left.’
‘Did she say anything? Did she talk to you?’
Alicia looked down at her knees under the duvet.
‘Oh no.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, she wouldn’t talk to me, would she? She hardly knows me.’
‘Didn’t she’, Tilly said, ‘even leave a message for me?’
Alicia sighed.
‘Only the one on the table. I tidied up after she’d gone, of course. Just a bit.’
‘Thank you,’ Tilly said faintly. She took a step backwards towards the hallway. ‘I’ll see you in the morning.’
‘I couldn’t have stopped her,’ Alicia said. ‘I don’t know her well enough.’
‘No—’
‘I’m sure she’ll be OK. I think – I think your friend gave her some money.’
Tilly looked at her. She remembered William in that bed, humped snoring under the bedclothes, remembered leaving messages for him on that bed, ‘Clear the kitchen or you’re out’, remembered ripping the dirty sheets off that bed with the kind of fierce indulgent impatience women reserve for the domestic shortcomings of attractive, likeable men. She felt, suddenly, all the brief optimism of her evening, her weekend, leak away out of her mind, leaving behind it the grey and empty space that had been too familiar now, for too long.
‘OK,’ Tilly said tiredly. ‘Thanks anyway. Night.’
Alicia picked up her John Irving.
‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about.’
Tilly went back to the kitchen and rang Susie’s mobile. It was switched off. She then rang William’s mobile. His voice-mail message gave his business details and asked her to leave her name and number. She dialled his flat in Bayswater. He had forgotten to leave the answer-phone on and after ten rings she rang off. Perhaps, she thought, running herself a glass of water, Susie has gone home to her parents. Perhaps William has gone out for a beer with Sam. Perhaps Susie has made it up with Vivi, perhaps William is in a bar chatting up an eighteen-year-old who hasn’t had time to be fucked up by a man yet, perhaps William and Susie are together, somewhere, even in his flat, in bed together in his flat, listening to the phone ring and deliberately, happily, not doing anything about it.
Tilly put her glass of water on the table and sat down. She looked at the table top, then she looked at the forlorn little lilies, and the childish box of sweets. She closed her eyes.
‘I do not’, Tilly thought with vehemence, ‘want to live like this any more.’
Tilly looked round her.
‘This is amazing.’
‘Well,’ William said, ‘we never eat out, do we? We just kind of mess around in bars and stuff. I thought for once we could have a table and chairs and someone waiting on us.’
Tilly looked down at the menu.
‘Thank you.’
‘Anyway,’ William said, ‘I thought you’d just had enough with all that Susie business. I thought you could do with a treat.’ He paused and then he said, ‘You look wonderful.’
She gave him a quick glance.
‘I think,’ she said, ‘I might start my life of new resolutions by banning my specs.’
‘I’ve got quite fond of them—’
‘You weren’t, once.’
‘That was then,’ William said, ‘that was long ago.’
He picked up the bottle of wine he’d ordered and filled her glass, even though she’d hardly touched it. Tilly watched him.
She said, ‘I spoke to Susie today.’
‘And?’ William said. His voice was neutral.
‘She’s got her old job back. She’s going to live with someone from work.’
‘Oh well,’ William said.
‘Aren’t you interested?’
‘Only in a very non-specific way. I’m having a bit of a reaction to Susie, a bit of a bad reaction.’
‘I’m relieved about her,’ Tilly said.
‘But you’re nice,’ William said, ‘you’re kind and compassionate and forgiving.’
A waiter appeared at their table. William didn’t glance at him.
‘In a minute—’
‘Two minutes,’ the waiter said indifferently. He picked up the bottle of mineral water that stood on the table.
‘Thank you,’ William said, ‘I’ll do that.’ He put his elbows on the table. He said to Tilly, ‘Tell me about your mother.’
‘She’s un-motherly,’ Tilly said, ‘but I like her. She couldn’t do comforting, I think, but she could do supporting. She’s—’ Tilly paused and then she said, almost shyly, ‘She’s amazing to look at.’
‘Of course,’ William said.
‘My stepfather is in a permanent panic that she’ll leave him.’
‘Will she?’
Tilly took a swallow of wine.
‘She might. If someone else very wonderful came along.’
‘Do you believe in that?’ William said.
‘What?�
�
‘In someone, anyone, really being very wonderful.’
Tilly said sadly, ‘I hope for it.’ She glanced at him. ‘I mean, I thought Henry was different, I thought he was special. There are special men, aren’t there?’
William said nothing. He moved his water glass an inch one way, and then back again.
‘Do you talk to your mother about those kind of things?’
‘We’re beginning to,’ Tilly said. ‘She says that women deal in their hearts and imaginations with the future, while men deal with the reality, the present. That’s why men are so good in an emergency.’
‘I don’t actually see the point,’ William said, ‘in dealing with anything much until it’s happened.’
‘There you are then.’
‘Tilly,’ William said, ‘d’you remember when we used to talk, when you were hoping Henry’d come up to scratch, when we sat on the sofa with the TV and a bottle of wine?’
The waiter appeared again.
‘Go away,’ William said.
‘No,’ Tilly said, ‘no, he can’t. We’ve got to order.’ She looked up at the waiter. ‘Endive salad and tuna, please.’
William looked at the menu.
‘What do I want?’
‘The same.’
‘No, I don’t. I want goat’s cheese and lamb tagine. No, not goat’s cheese. Why did I say goat’s cheese? I don’t even like goat’s cheese. I’ll have the artichoke thing.’
He held his menu up. The waiter whipped it out of his hand.
‘Tilly?’
‘Yes—’
‘You heard what I said?’
‘It’s so odd,’ Tilly said, ‘but when I had to go into Alicia’s room the other night, after Susie had left, I was remembering you in there.’
‘Did you feel nostalgic?’
She nodded, not looking at him.
‘Good,’ William said.
‘We were such a funny set-up,’ Tilly said. ‘I mustn’t romanticize it.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because it’s over.’
Girl From the South (v5) Page 24