by Edward Docx
William appeared puzzled. ‘A little blue cool box. It has two bottles of champagne in it.’
Madeleine spoke. ‘Well, I’ve been watching and nobody could have stolen it.’
Nathalie sat up and pushed her sunglasses back on to her head. ‘Maybe you left it in the car. Didn’t you put it on the back seat because the boot was full?’
‘Did I?’ William asked.
‘I can’t remember. You might.’
‘The car was packed with stuff. Do you really think I left it in the back?’
Nathalie shrugged. ‘You might have done. I really don’t know.’
‘I suppose.’ William hesitated. ‘Well, someone could nip back and check. Madeleine, you seem the most awake – would you mind?’
Madeleine smiled. ‘Not at all. I quite fancy some exercise. And I’ll do anything for champagne.’
‘Do you remember which way it is?’ William asked.
Cal sat down.
Phil flipped a page.
‘No, not exactly.’
‘Have you got a phone? It’s in the north-west car park … just up that way and –’
‘I’m useless with the compass, I’m afraid. I’m a travel journalist.’ Madeleine placed her hand to the back of her head and winced apologetically. ‘And I left my phone at home today. Is it right on that path under those trees or –’
‘You’d better go with her, Jasper,’ William looked over, ‘or can’t you face the walk? Nathalie, maybe you –’
‘I’ll go,’ I said, quietly. ‘I don’t mind.’
Phil looked up.
William took out his keys. ‘Two sets for the same car on one bunch. Stupid really. But my father likes to keep them all in one place.’ He teased off one ring and chucked it to me. ‘Don’t drink it on the way back.’
Oh believe me, Hampstead Heath is a maze, a labyrinth, a jungle. In all honesty, for those unfamiliar with the crisscrossing paths, the proliferating ponds, the disorientating number of seemingly separate hills, the identical wooded vales, the constant forks and double-backs and junctions and confluences, the random railings, the bridges, it is impossible not to get lost. Indeed, I doubt if even the grizzled veterans of the Gents’ know where they are half the time. As for the joggers, they are not running to keep fit, oh no, they are running because they are lost, because they are desperate to find a way out, back and forth, back and forth, ever more nervous, more panicky … What I am trying to say is that it could have happened to anyone. Especially two people deep in conversation and not paying particular attention to where they were going.
Oh sure, we found our way back to the car all right – in no more than twenty-five minutes, I would guess. And the cool box was there – no doubt about it – waiting patiently in the well in front of the rear seats. We set off on the return journey just fine too, following (I swear) exactly the same path along which we had just come. So it must have been in the trees, at one of the tricky five-way intersections, that we made our mistake.
‘Down here,’ I said, lifting the cooler slightly to indicate the direction I meant. ‘Christ, it is still so hot. You wouldn’t think England could get so hot.’
‘It’s lovely.’ Madeleine moved ahead to allow a young family with a child buggy to pass. She had twisted her hair up in a clip and there was a faint sheen of perspiration on the back of her neck. ‘It always gets me how everybody is so surprised by the weather in this country. You know, twice a year, every year, everybody is like “Oh my God! It’s snowing! Who would have thought it could get so cold, and in the winter too! Snow!” or “Oh my God it is so hot and sunny today – would you believe it? In June of all months? Phewwee!!”’ She turned to wait for me and we carried on side by side through the trees until we came to another divergence where we stopped. ‘This doesn’t look right,’ she said.
‘No, it doesn’t. I think we should go back up there because we must have been quite high up to have had that view.’
We set off again up a small hill.
By the time we found our old spot, almost an hour and a half later, they were gone. Not a sign of any of them. I was confused. Madeleine didn’t have a watch but she guessed it must be half-sevenish. She sat down with her back to the tree near where Don and Cal had been lying earlier.
‘Looks like they all fucked off and left us.’ She took out a cigarette and lit up. ‘Now what are we going to do?’
‘Shit. I guess we took longer than we thought. Have you got your phone?’ This was a question to which I already knew the answer, of course.
‘No, I didn’t bring it out. It’s charging back at my flat.’
‘Well, I’ll leave this here with you and go and have a look around – in case they just moved over to the next field or something. I’m certain this is where they were.’ I put the cool box down and walked back towards the path.
When I came back, Madeleine had a note. ‘This was on the ground,’ she said.
J and M –
No idea where you two have got to … Sam and I need to get back into town this evening so we’ve set off for the car. W furious with you – thinks you planned to steal his booze. Phil says can M give him a call later on about tomorrow. D and C are coming out with us tonight if you also want to join … We’ll probably see you on the way back to the car – in which case you won’t read this.
Nathalie.
Needless to say, we did not encounter any of them again. And it must have been getting towards nine-thirty by the time we stepped off the forty-nine bus outside Warwick Avenue Tube station – just the two of us.
The sun had not yet left the sky but had dropped behind the buildings, and the clouds were busy changing into their evening colours, pink and peach.
A car hesitated and Madeleine ran across the road ahead of me, then stopped in front of the church to light a cigarette. I waited for it to pass and walked across towards her. Above her knees, and despite her tan, her skin looked slightly burnt where the rays had taken advantage of her habit of sitting cross-legged with her summer dress bunched up in her lap.
I suffered a moment of acute weakness. I was tempted to come right out and be honest, to say what was in my mind, to chance it all on the instant. ‘All this could be yours,’ whispers the Devil when we are at our most starved and thirsty, perched high on a rocky ledge in the wasteland of our minds. But in my other, wiser ear, faintly I heard the generic platitudes of her reply: ‘Oh Jasper, that’s so nice of you to say, really, but I don’t want to ruin us being friends and I don’t think it would be right – and, anyway, I’m already seeing someone but hey, look, I don’t want you to think that I don’t like you very much because I do, as a friend …’
So I held back.
Nonetheless, without being explicit, I was now determined to push my luck as far as it would go.
‘Do you want to go home and see if you can find Phil’s number,’ I asked. ‘Or can I interest you in a bottle of whatever is inside this bloody box?’
Holding her cigarette high, she rubbed her wrist against her forehead. ‘He’s grown up enough to take care of himself. Let’s drink – if you don’t think William would mind.’
‘He hasn’t got a say.’
We swung around the corner on to Formosa Street and from there to Bristol Gardens. My arm ached for her waist.
‘This is a very nice flat,’ she said, standing with her back to the sink and watching me punch a number into my phone.
‘You think? I just wish I had a proper kitchen. I even hate “kitchenette” as a word.’
‘I like the feel of it. Living in the eaves. All the nice wood. But it must be a pain in the ass coming up all those steps every time. Is it OK if I smoke?’
‘Sure … Oh fuck, he’s on voice mail.’ I had dialled William’s work number. The last thing I wanted to do was talk to him. I waited for him to finish inviting me to leave a message. ‘William, it’s me. I don’t know where the fuck you are or where everyone disappeared to, but anyway: I am back at my flat and I’m going
to drink your wine. Sorry. Speak soon.’ I hung up. ‘There’s an ashtray on the table in the other room. Go on through. I’m going to open this cool box and see what we have inside.’
She smiled and stood upright. ‘Do I get to stay for the whole bottle?’
‘If you are nice and well behaved and don’t make any adverse comments about my taste in music or whatever, then yes, I may allow you to.’
‘That’s very kind of you, Jasper.’ She lit her cigarette and went in search of the ashtray.
Jesus Christ! Truly, I thought, caprice is a many-headed monster. Perhaps William was right about Phil not having slept with her after all. Or perhaps Madeleine was just enjoying playing everybody along. All right then, so be it: she could drink the wine and go and take her body with her; or she could drink the wine and stay. But, I said to myself, you’d better be on your guard, Miss Belmont, because now you’re at my house and I’ve done this before, and many more times than you.
I slid two clean champagne flutes from the cupboard and held them to the light to check for any traces of washing residue. They were immaculate. I placed them on the side where she had left her cigarette pack.
Her voice came through from the other room. ‘You have a lovely view of the garden from up here.’
Carefully, I removed the champagne from the cool box. It was a 1982 Cristal. You have to hand it to William, he knows how to help a man out. It was still sufficiently chilled.
‘Hey!’ She shouted. ‘You can almost see into my flat. There’s my patio.’
Carrying the bottle and both flutes, I went into the sitting room. ‘You know I’m quite pleased that we don’t have to share this with the others.’
She turned and smiled – sexily, I thought – not provocatively exactly, not seductively either, and certainly not tantalizingly or suggestively, but right on the true note of the word – sexily. A difficult pitch to hit and rarely done. And different to anything I had seen from her before.
‘Can I put some music on?’
I nodded. ‘Yes. Have a look. Choose anything you like.’
She crossed to my wall of shelves while I set down the glasses and took my customary wait-and-see seat on my single wing chair. (Let her have the sofa, I thought. If she wanted to do anything about it, she could get up and do something about it.) I watched her as she knelt down in front of my discs and ran her finger along the line a little unnecessarily, a little theatrically, a little nervously? She sat back on her heels but the soles of her sandals stayed flat against the floor and I saw that the bottoms of her feet were covered in dust from the heath and scratched from where I guessed she had been walking barefoot in the garden.
She twisted her head round. ‘It’s all Bach,’ she said, looking somewhere between nonplussed and disappointed.
‘No, it isn’t.’ I grasped the bottle and clenching the cork in my fist began to coax it out. ‘Try down at the bottom.’
‘Oh good, Ella Fitzgerald,’ she said, kneeling up again and fiddling with the stereo. ‘Thank Christ for that.’
The music started. She stood and surveyed the other shelves. ‘Have you read any of these books?’ she asked.
‘No. Not a single one. I can’t read. I prefer TV.’
‘Mmm. So I guessed. You’re a bit too dumb to have read anything much. Which is a shame really because you are a very nice man otherwise.’
‘Thank you.’ With feigned concentration, I poured the wine and then topped up the glasses where the champagne bubbles had retreated. ‘Well, if you know any basic sort of easy starter books for beginners then I’m very willing to try again. Have to be something without too many long words, though, and very easy to follow, because I can’t really be doing with anything – you know – clever.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I can see that. I’ll try to find something for you. But in the meantime you must promise not to worry.’ Now she came over. ‘Lots of men are very slow and they get on OK.’
We chinked glasses, she swivelled the bottle in order to read the label and then sat down on the sofa – not straight but with her legs curled under her so that her knees were pointing at me. She held her glass in one hand and with the other she rubbed her bare shin. Outside, the light was beginning to fade.
She sucked in her lips. ‘This is gorgeous. But I do feel guilty drinking it.’
‘Don’t. Seriously, William doesn’t mind. We’ll save him the other bottle.’
‘Where do you think they went?’
Our ease in one another’s company was almost restored to pre-comedy-night levels. And we were talking about other people, always a good sign. ‘I guess they thought we weren’t coming back or that we had got lost. They must have returned to the car with the stuff. We must have missed them when we were buggering about. William will probably have waited for a while to see if we turned up and then driven everyone back into town, I suppose.’
‘How would he have got in, though? You locked it.’
‘He has spare keys. His father buys and sells vintage cars for a hobby and William is always driving them up and down the country to deliveries or auctions or just for the hell of it.’
Ella Fitzgerald was on to ‘We Can’t Go On This Way’. I leant forward and picked up the bottle. She reached her arm out so that I could top her up and then raised the glass quickly to her lips to catch some of the bubbles before they vanished. ‘How long have you known William?’ she asked.
‘He’s a friend from college. So I guess that makes it something like ten years.’
‘Were you friends straightaway?’
‘Pretty much.’
‘How did you meet him?’
‘You really want to know?’
She frowned. ‘Yes. Or I wouldn’t ask.’
‘I met him on the first day. I think it was actually the very first day. I’d just put my pathetic couple of boxes away in my room and was wandering about, feeling a bit dislocated, and looking for something to do when I came across him in the porters’ lodge, trying to stack all these crates of wine on to a trolley by himself.’
‘I love the idea of a porters’ lodge.’
I sat back in my chair. ‘It was quite funny. Everybody else was bustling about with their families, stopping on the pavement outside in estate cars and clogging up the gate as they unloaded kettles and notebooks and toasters and things, but William was on his own with no one to help. He didn’t seem to have any possessions at all apart from all these wooden boxes of wine. And every time he managed to pile them up out of other people’s way, this bastard delivery man would dump another load right in front of the porters’ desk, so that nobody could move in or out. Then all the porters started getting officious, talking about fire regulations, until William was just running around in a real state, apologizing madly to everyone.’
‘I can imagine him doing that.’ Madeleine smiled. ‘Go on.’
‘So I gave him a hand because … well, I suppose I was on my own too.’ I took another sip. ‘My grandmother was still in Heidelberg then and I had come up on my own the day before – I used to go by train because it was the cheapest way – change at Frankfurt, Paris, overnight ferry to Dover, London, Cambridge and what a journey that was every term.’
‘Where did he put it all?’
‘What?’
‘The wine.’
‘Oh – he kept it in his room. We trolleyed it all there – about a dozen trips’ worth – and we built this massive stack. He had already moved all his furniture into the corridor to make way for it. All he had was his bed. When we finished, I said something about it being a shame that porters didn’t port any more and he thought that was very funny and opened up a bottle and we sat down and shared it and he said that I must come round any time and help myself.’
‘Christ. You two must have been paralytic for the entire three years.’
‘In actual fact, most of the stuff wasn’t really for drinking – although obviously that didn’t stop us. The real reason he had to keep it all with him, or so he told
me, was because every time his parents went away – which was a lot – his older brother would have another “coming out” party at their house and William couldn’t trust him to stop his friends gulping their way through William’s share of the cellar, which, obviously, was some kind of long-term investment or something – worth a lot of money anyway. So he did the only thing he could think of and brought it with him.’
‘What a life.’
‘I know.’
‘You’re lucky he puts up with you.’ She grinned. ‘He must be very generous. Today was a banquet. There can’t be many people who serve fresh oysters at picnics.’
‘He is very kind.’
‘What’s his job? Or doesn’t he work?’
‘Oh yes, he works. I suppose … I suppose you’d say he is a tramp orchestra impresario.’
‘What? Like a music thing – what do you mean?’
‘He runs this … he’s basically in charge of a theatre production company.’
‘Explain.’
‘OK. Well, going right back to when we left college he decided to be a communist for a while – quite literally, living in a commune somewhere in Bethnal Green – I know, I know, but there’s actually a long tradition of it among people like him. Anyway, he paid for about a dozen people to do what they liked for two years. But he got fucked off with all the nouveau homeless, as he called them, who kept showing up. He said that he preferred proper tramps. So he set up this hostel for some of his bona fide tramp mates – men and women over thirty-five – drunks, drug addicts, all that. And somehow or other, he managed to start up this joke orchestra with a group of them who were quite good musicians. They got a student conductor from somewhere and it became slightly more serious. William opened up two more hostels and a few more people became involved. Then one day, a couple of years ago, the whole orchestra appeared on local television. Boom! And after that it just grew and grew. Now they’re huge. Big money too.’