Most days, when Bruno went off to his job at the British Council, she drifted down the Portobello, passing the time of day with various itinerant stallholders, usually ending up at Mr DellaCosta’s stall, which sold varieties of exotic fruit and vegetables quite beyond the scope of Mr Jarvis.
Mr DellaCosta had a pale fudge-coloured whippet called Cleopatra who, during working hours, was tied by a dressing gown cord to the corner post of the stall. However, when Mr DellaCosta’s brother Petey played the steel cans, which, when the mood took him, he did outside the Salvation Army on the Portobello, Cleopatra sat by his cap looking wistful and encouraging the punters to part with their loose change.
One day, when Petey was playing, Vi, who liked buskers, had stooped down to place money in the cap and Cleopatra licked her wrist.
‘She don’t do that often,’ Petey said. ‘She’s nervy. Bet you’re Pisces, aren’t you?’
Vi said that she thought not, her birthday was in November.
‘Your moon’ll be in Pisces. I’m never wrong. I’ll do your chart for you, if you like.’
The dog, Petey explained, was on loan from his brother, and Vi, whose moon turned out not to be in Pisces but quite elsewhere, got into the habit of dropping by Mr DellaCosta’s stall each day to buy veg for supper. Although she did not recognise this she was lonely and, unlike Mr Jarvis, Mr DellaCosta was chattily companionable.
A section of the library served as the ship’s bookshop and Vi, her hair a little wild from drying in the salt breeze, found it packed out with people.
The critic was at a table, set with a jug of water and a plate of biscuits, behind a placard of his name, written in Gothic script, and the legend ‘Signing Today’. Beside him, on display, was an edition of his latest collection of theatre reviews, Slings and Arrows.
When he saw Vi he waved. ‘I expect you have come to buy my book?’
Vi shook her head. ‘I’m here to look for something in the library.’
‘A shortbread or a custard cream?’
‘No thanks.’
‘Spurned,’ said the critic, affably.
Disapproving murmurs rose from the bevy of waiting admirers. The bookseller looked uneasy. There had been a small unpleasantness at Kimberley Crane’s signing, when a so-called fan had confused her with Philippa Gregory.
Vi, in an out-of-the-way spot in the Bistro, had ordered lunch and opened the frayed-at-the-edges volume, which she had tracked down in the section of the library marked ‘Hobbies and Reference’. To her irritation, she saw a figure approaching.
‘Is it all right if I join you?’ The hovering presence resolved into Valerie Garson, in a trouser suit which, in the white piping, suggested a naval allusion.
Vi summoned politeness. ‘Of course.’
‘Only, Les is having a Thai massage.’
Vi closed the Works of William Shakespeare. ‘Honestly,’ she untruthfully assured, ‘it’s fine.’
‘Oh, were you reading?’
Vi said she could always read later.
‘Anything good?’
‘Not bad.’
Valerie Garson settled down to study the menu which offered continental snacks, light meals and today’s specials. ‘I’ve not tried here before. What have you ordered?’
Vi tried to think. ‘A salade niçoise.’
Valerie Garson said she fancied a salad too, though she was also tempted by the crostini. She plumped finally for one of the specials, fillet of sole on a bed of warm pear and rocket.
When Vi’s plate arrived Valerie Garson said, ‘Those anchovies look nice. Makes me wish I’d had a salad after all.’
‘You can always order one.’
‘They’ll have started on the sole and it’s a waste, isn’t it?’
‘Well,’ said Vi, ‘a drop in the ocean, perhaps, when you think about it.’
‘Are you enjoying it?’
‘The salad?’
‘No, all this—the cruise.’
‘I seem to be. How about you?’
Valerie Garson lowered her head confidentially. ‘To tell you the truth, I’m not enjoying it that much.’
‘Oh dear.’
‘Don’t tell Les I said so.’
‘Of course not.’
‘Would you like some wine? I’m going to have some.’
‘OK,’ said Vi. ‘I’ll have a glass if you like.’
Valerie Garson beckoned the wine waiter and ordered a bottle of Pouilly Fumé. Her French accent, Vi noticed, was impeccable.
‘Les has prostate cancer and it makes him tetchy. You wouldn’t notice it maybe but he turns quite nasty with me.’
Valerie Garson’s unremarkable blue eyes dampened and then filled. ‘I sometimes wish I’d divorced him. I nearly did once. But he persuaded me to come back. He said he’d treat me like a princess if I stayed.’
‘Ah yes.’
‘I shouldn’t have listened,’ Valerie Garson said, pouring them each a large glass of wine. Her small plumpish, well-manicured hand shook a little.
Vi said, ‘It’s a nuisance but these things often become clearer with hindsight.’
‘You can say that again. This isn’t bad.’
Vi sampled the wine. ‘It’s excellent. You know about wine?’
‘My pen pal’s family ran a vineyard in the Loire. I went on an exchange there when I was a schoolgirl. I fell in love with her brother.’
‘A happy experience?’
‘It was bliss,’ said Valerie Garson. ‘To tell you the truth, it was meeting him again that made me nearly leave Les.’
‘I see.’
‘My pen pal and I had a reunion in Paris, and Jules came along too. He’d got a photo of me in his wallet, in my bikini, as a matter of fact. You wouldn’t believe it but I was the runner-up in Bournemouth’s beauty queen contest in 1965.’
Vi said that she could well believe it.
‘He took the picture, the one he had in his wallet, when we hitchhiked down to St Tropez together. He got me to thumb the lifts while he hid, and then when a lorry, or whatever, stopped he jumped out of the bushes and got in the cab too.’
‘Did the drivers mind?’
‘What could they say? Own up they had designs? Jules introduced me to St. Raphaël—that’s an aperitif, quite classy. We took a bottle with us on the beach and slept there in sleeping bags. Well, one sleeping bag, to be honest. My pen pal came out in a funny rash and couldn’t come with us. Just as well, really.’ Valerie Garson giggled. ‘The sky down there’s ever so clear because of the atmosphere. He showed me Orion’s Belt. I always think of St Tropez when I see it.’
‘I should think you do.’
‘I kicked myself that I didn’t, you know, but I was still a girl and it wasn’t like it is now. But to tell you the truth, Jules and I had a bit of a reunion in Paris.’ Valerie Garson coloured; for a fleet second, behind the furrowed, heavily-powdered face Vi saw the fair young girl who had slept on the beach at St Tropez and had not known that this was the best life would offer her. ‘His wife had gone off with a wine taster from Rouen. He wanted me to go back with him and help to run the vineyard.’
‘But you didn’t?’
‘I was going to, but Les came home from a golfing weekend—it was raining and they left early—and found me packing. Lucky I hadn’t written the note I was going to leave him. More wine?’
‘Thanks, I’m fine. What would the note have said?’
Valerie Garson poured herself another glass. ‘I’m leaving you, you big bully. Or fat bully, I hadn’t quite decided.’
‘Ah.’
‘That sole’s taking its time. They must be out with a net catching it. Anyway, I couldn’t leave him now, with the cancer.’
Vi considered whether or not to say, You could, of course, and said it.
‘I don’t think I could live with my conscience.’
‘Well,’ said Vi, ‘forgive me, because it is not my business, but I think consciences are more elastic than we imagine. And cancer is no excuse f
or bullying.’
‘I know that,’ Valerie Garson said. ‘But you know, I haven’t got the gumption to leave now. Pathetic, isn’t it?’
‘No,’ said Vi. ‘It’s quite understandable.’
‘I shouldn’t be saying all this.’
‘It’s OK to say it.’
‘It’s nice of you to listen. Les says I ramble.’
Vi said, ‘Yes, well he would, wouldn’t he? I’m really very sorry, Valerie. And thank you for the wine. It was delicious.’
In the lobby by the lifts, she met Les Garson, rather more glistening than usual. ‘Have you seen my other half ?’
‘I think,’ Vi said, ‘I spotted her on the way up to the Alexandria.’
‘She’ll be at the trough, the little piggy-wiggy. Fancy a quickie?’
‘Thanks, I’ve had a drink.’
‘Go on. Spoil yourself. I’ve been. I had a young woman with legs up to her armpits walk all over me this morning. Mind you, it cost an arm and a leg! Black girl, but very attractive.’
‘Really?’
‘Got a book there, have you?’ Vi pressed the button for the twelfth floor. ‘See you tonight, then?’ As the lift arrived, Les Garson stood, smelling of an aftershave heavy with pheromones, not absolutely blocking her path. ‘Did anyone ever tell you you’re a very attractive woman, Vi?’
‘No one I wanted to hear it from, Les.’
20
Vi, in her room, opened the doors and went out on to the balcony. She breathed in the clean air to expunge the lingering scent of Les Garson’s villainous aftershave. The mercurial sea had turned a brooding green. Above it, as far as sight could reach to, stretched a taut white sky. With any luck, she thought, we shall have a storm.
Back inside, she opened the library copy of Shakespeare at Antony and Cleopatra and found the line she was looking for: Sometimes we see a cloud that’s dragonish.
The clock on the church tower of All Saints, along the road towards the Portobello, struck the half hour.
‘Oh Christ,’ Bruno said. ‘I’m meant to be meeting La Carfield for lunch.’
Tessa Carfield, who had been a year or so above Bruno at the LSE, was a partner in a headhunting firm and had found him his job with the British Council. ‘I’d better fly or I’ll be late and then she’ll moan like buggery.’
Seeing him off at the door, Vi met the postman with Edwin’s card. In the afternoon she took Cleopatra to Kensington Gardens.
A warmth had sprung up between Vi and Mr DellaCosta’s fudge-coloured whippet. Vi had got in the way of liberating the dog from her post at the stall and taking her for an afternoon run in the park. Cleopatra chased grey squirrels, not too successfully, and sniffed the bottoms of other dogs while Vi stood about, mindlessly gazing, or sat on benches beside chatting women, discontented au pairs, lovers necking and dozing old men. Usually the two of them walked down to the lake where Cleopatra pursued and then retreated from the vicious, over-fed swans.
She was chopping vegetables, still in a reverie, when Bruno returned. ‘That looks good.’ He kissed the back of her neck—where babies are kissed, as he’d said once.
‘Ratatouille, or will be, courtesy of Mr DellaCosta. He’s given us some chrysanthemums. I wish I liked chrysanths better. There’s not much else by way of flowers at this time of year.’
Bruno said, ‘It’s the smell you don’t like. It’s funereal.’
‘But also the colours. I ought to like them. But I don’t. How was lunch?’
‘Fine.’
‘Someone rang from Tessa’s office. Were you very late?’
‘She was. She’d got the time wrong.’
Vi, chopping garlic, felt a small cold spot in her stomach. ‘How do you mean?’
‘She’d written the time wrong in her diary.’
Over supper Bruno said, ‘You not hungry, my pet?’
Vi said she wasn’t really and thought she might go and lie down.
At night the flat made strange clicking noises as the poorly fitted joinery of the house conversion eased itself back on to old accustomed planes. That night, Vi, who had always slept well, lay awake listening to the noises of the shifting house and the traffic outside. Bruno, by her side, was breathing heavily. She slid from the bed, stole into the sitting room where she found her notebook and shut herself in the bathroom, wrapped against the draught in an old dressing gown rescued from Edwin.
Towards Christmas, Edwin visited them. He wanted to discuss the future of Ariel of which Bruno was now the official editor. Edwin, who had a new poetry collection coming out, seemed to have lost his old enthusiasm for the magazine and even spoke of selling it.
Bruno occasionally asked Vi’s opinion about a poem but since Edwin’s abandoning of the role of editor no poem of hers ever appeared.
On the last day of his visit, when Bruno was at work, Vi introduced Edwin to Mr DellaCosta and they took Cleopatra for a walk in Kensington Park. London was experiencing a cold snap and Vi wore a hat knitted in the colours of the rainbow, bought in the Portobello Road. Edwin borrowed the matching scarf and wound it round his head and ears like a turban. Neither had gloves and they walked in the freezing air, making dragon’s breath and blowing ineffectively on their fingers.
Their cheeks and noses grew visibly pinker as they stood watching Cleopatra snuffle about in the roots of a horse chestnut. It put Vi in mind of the morning she had woken in Edwin’s bed to see the pale fawnish backs of the unfurling horse chestnut leaves outside.
Perhaps it was this which made her say, ‘Ed, are you really OK in Oxford?’
‘As much as I ever am. How about you here?’
‘I think so. Mostly.’
‘Are you writing—don’t say if you’d rather not.’
‘I am, I think.’ Vi placed a superstitious hand on the horse chestnut’s venerable grey bark. ‘Actually, it was Cleopatra that got me going. And then the coincidence of your card.’ She told him about the poem she had written in the night.
‘Well, the night’s a good time for working. Safe. Are there others?’
‘There seem to be.’
‘What does Bruno think?’
‘I’ve not mentioned them.’
‘Ah well.’
Following Cleopatra’s lead they strolled towards the lake, where the ducks and geese were shoving each other, greedily angling for bread or whatever else that was edible they could get their beaks on. Cleopatra made a few sallies and then stood stock-still, staring at the milling fowl, apparently hypnotised.
‘You know, I’m afraid she is rather a stupid dog,’ Edwin said. ‘Not a bit like her namesake.’
‘We don’t know that the original wasn’t stupid,’ Vi said. ‘We only have Shakespeare’s version.’
‘No, there’s Plutarch too. I’ve got my sixth formers reading him at school. The North translation anyway.’
‘Ed, what was Bruno like at school? I never hear much about his past, nothing at all, in fact.’
‘As you’d expect, stroppy, definitely not stupid. Remember, he only arrived when we were in the sixth form.’
‘How would I remember that? Neither of you talks about it. I don’t even know much about his family, except that he seems to dislike them. What were they like?’
But Edwin said that he had never met Bruno’s family, nor, so far as he could recall, had Bruno ever discussed them. They had been too taken up with French existentialism and alcohol.
‘So he drank then?’
‘Oh God yes. We always met in the pub.’
‘A bit different now!’
‘He’s a convert. Converts always tip into their opposite.’
Vi stood, looking out over the wintry lake at the herring gulls, sailing in their ease on the far reaches of the silvery water. It might be no bad thing to be a gull. She said, ‘I don’t know if I should say this’ and told him about Bruno’s lunch with Tessa Carfield.
‘People do lie about being late.’
‘Yes. But the other thing is I looked in his
diary.’
‘Aha.’
‘I shouldn’t have done, of course, but I had such a strong instinct.’ The best thing about Edwin was that, even implicitly, he never reproved. ‘He’d written 12.30 in his diary. I know this sounds bonkers, but I’m pretty sure they were supposed to meet at one and to save face he changed the time. He did the same to me once—changed the time we had agreed to meet and then wrote it in his diary.’
‘To prove that he was right?’
‘Or me wrong.’
Edwin frowned. ‘Have you raised this with him?’
‘I don’t like to. It’ll put him in a mood.’
‘Don’t you think you should?’
‘But I may be wrong,’ Vi said. ‘I probably am. I can be vague.’
‘You know you aren’t really,’ Edwin said.
They returned Cleopatra to Mr DellaCosta who presented Vi with some figs, a bag of over-ripe tomatoes, a bunch of parsley and the tail end of a rope of garlic. ‘The trouble is,’ said Vi, ‘I can’t ask to buy anything now because he always gives it to me for nothing. Even the good stuff. Not like Mr Jarvis.’
That evening, she cooked tomato sauce for spaghetti, their old favourite, while Edwin went out to Victoria Wines in search of Valpolicella. They had already drunk most of a bottle when Bruno came home.
‘You’ve got tomato on your cheek.’ Vi wiped her face with her sleeve. ‘Now you’ve got sauce on your jumper.’
Over the spaghetti, Edwin and Bruno discussed what to do with Ariel. Vi’s own contribution to the magazine had practically dwindled to that of copy editor. This mostly meant checking the poets’ punctuation, a delicate task since some were quite unclear about their punctuation, and indeed might never have learned its rules, while others held eccentric, if not quite untenable, and fiercely defended views. Bruno said nothing during the conversation about her poems, or his own, but divulged to Edwin that he planned to borrow a cottage from Tessa Carfield in order to finish his book on sorcery. Tessa had a cousin in publishing to whom, when it was written, she had said she would direct the book.
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