Fog Heart

by Thomas Tessier

  Tomorrow he had a late-morning flight to Munich, to keep the vastly talented and desperately insecure Marthe Frenssen in line. They had so much to accomplish before someone else discovered the amazing things she could do with raw flax and linen weaves.

  So this was his night on the town. Oliver had a vindaloo at a nearly empty Indian place on Abingdon Road, and then took a cab to Piccadilly. The Esquire was a bit drearier than it had seemed on his last visit. He downed a short and left.

  Things were much livelier at the Miranda, on Kingly Street. The doorman recognized him, or at least pretended he did. Inside, downstairs, the late-night crowd was beginning to gather. Here was the old London Oliver knew and, in a way, almost adored. There was something vaguely seedy about it, and yet it had a kind of low glamour. The décor was out of date by a couple of decades but the place was so dark and smoky you didn’t notice. The food was hardly memorable, but the floor-show made up for it.

  The women were young, pretty and well shaped, and when they weren’t busy dancing they mingled without being pushy. They came from places like Southampton and Reading and Peterborough. They wanted to enjoy the fast life in London, have torrid affairs with exciting young men on the make, make some money, catch a break, and, eventually, when they grew tired of it all, land a reasonably reliable gent who had a job in the City and a deposit on a lovely mock-Tudor in one of the better parts of Surrey. If he owned the house and already had a wife installed, that was acceptable too, as long as he could afford to dislodge the incumbent and not lose everything in the process. Hardly any of these women had the bad luck of falling in love to the tune of a net financial loss.

  The men were mid-range business types, entrepreneurs, hearty marketeers treating their out-of-town customers, has-beens with a modicum of buoyancy left, villains with their docile flunkeys and dangerous apprentices, and a few deep-pocketed old geezers in for some genteel slap and tickle. It was a crowd that could be merry and loud or strangely tense, but was seldom merely dull.

  Oliver fancied himself somewhat apart from the others. They were regulars, and he was an outsider who dropped in from time to time. The club was part of their normal routine, whereas for him it was an occasional rest-stop. He chatted with some of the women, but he didn’t buy them a drink from the gilt-edged suckers’ menu. He usually ended up discussing markets and trade with one or two businessmen, and he often got a useful indication of how the trends were going before it appeared as an official fact in the FT indexes. Most of these men had had their hopes broken more than once, and would again, keeping at it until the day they fell down for good. He knew that what separated him from them was largely a matter of luck.

  Oliver stayed a little over an hour. A waste of time, perhaps, and yet it didn’t bother him. On the contrary, visiting this club always seemed to make him feel better, in some way he couldn’t quite understand. The Miranda was a lingering pocket of myth, the London of the fifties and sixties, the London of Ruth Ellis, the Krays, Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies, of Rachman and his thuggish winklers, a London that stretched from John Christie to the Beatles and the Stones. By the time Oliver had begun to hear of it late in his childhood it had been fading into dubious legend, and he’d always had the feeling that he’d missed something.

  He gave the taxi driver a card with the address in Limehouse and sat back for the ride. He still had good connections in the music industry, and on most trips to London he could expect to be invited to at least one party. The music business was ever hard and merciless. Denmark Street rules still applied. A kid could write a string of hit singles and still have to scrounge for the cost of a pint. You lived on beans on toast, a squirt of sauce, and by the time you got your hands on money real enough to put in a bank account, you were ancient history. Make way for the new. Oliver was happy to be out of it on a day-to-day basis, and the only thing he missed was the fun of watching unvarnished kids make new music before the grind wore them out.

  The party was in a converted warehouse, although what it had been converted to was hard to tell. The crowd was large and many more people were streaming in. The stereo system was cranked up high. There were long tables of food and barrels of quality beer. Say what you want about record companies, but they still knew how to throw a proper piss-up. Oliver wandered around aimlessly for a while, spotting old hands like Marianne Faithfull, Dave Davies, Brian Ferry and a bespangled Gary Glitter.

  Eventually he caught up with Ian. Ian was his contact, the name to give at the door. Years ago, he had been a scruffy kid from Woking who couldn’t quite master rhythm guitar. But he was bright and eager, and Oliver had given him a useful nudge at the right time. Now Ian was a highly regarded studio soundman, about due for his first major production job. He would probably have found his way there anyhow, but he was eternally grateful to Oliver. People with memory were rare in the business.

  They swapped bits of personal news and work talk, and got up to date with each other. It had been three months since Oliver’s last visit. As usual they vowed to have lunch or dinner the next time, definitely, schedules permitting.

  Oliver didn’t mind being left on his own. He picked at the mounds of shrimp and smoked salmon, he sipped Greene King beer and wandered around idly, nodding to some of the same magazine hacks he used to court in an effort to win column inches for his band. They still scoffed free nosh and booze frantically.

  He skimmed the surface of the party. After a while, he sat down in an overstuffed old armchair, one of several that were scattered around the perimeter of the huge room. Within a minute or two a young woman came along and perched on its fat arm. She leaned back and sighed. ‘I hope you don’t mind.’

  ‘Not at all,’ he said.

  ‘Only my feet are killing me.’

  ‘Do you want to take the seat and I’ll take the arm?’

  ‘Oh, you are sweet.’

  They traded places, and she promptly rested her head against his body, just above the hip. She fanned herself with the press booklet that told you more than you would ever want to know about the Limehouse Knights. She was on the tall side, a little skinny and angular. She had short hair and a short skirt, long legs and small breasts. Her name was Becky Something-Something. She was an assistant features editor at a glossy women’s magazine. Music was part of her turf. She loved London, loved the scene, got ten invites a week and went to every one of them. Oliver smiled. He knew what it was like to be in your early twenties in London, to connect, to plug into the action. You really live and your life is electric, even if you’re only one of the minor players on the fringe – as this girl was.

  Why tell her how soon it jades and fades? Perhaps she’ll be one of the lucky few and for her it won’t. She wouldn’t believe him, anyway.

  Oliver got her a fresh drink. Becky seemed mildly impressed when she heard that he was part-owner of a record label, and she promised to see that future Redbird releases were reviewed in her magazine.

  She was even more impressed when he told her he lived in New York and did a little import-export in the rag trade. Exotic shirts and jeans were acceptable. Becky’s father, it turned out, had made a fortune on plastic macs, and they were definitely not.

  Becky didn’t like her father, it seemed, but then she said that he chipped in on her rent – otherwise she’d have to share a flat and she’d tried that and it was bloody awful. So she had her own place, and when she asked Oliver where he was staying in town he knew that he could fuck her if he wanted.

  ‘With some friends,’ he said. ‘It’s handy, I come and go as I please. But…’ And that was enough to imply in some way that he couldn’t take her there.

  No problem. They shared a taxi back into the West End, and along the way Becky asked him if he wanted to come in for coffee or a nightcap. Well, yes, that would be nice. She wasn’t pretty in the obvious ways but there was something attractive about her. How she moved, her height, the angular gawkiness that she fought mightily to overcome – as if she still didn’t know quite what to
do with her body. Oliver did.

  So he found himself in a small but tidy flat at the back end of Maida Vale, sipping plonk. One sip was enough. And they were stretched out together on a rather hard sofa, Becky with her head resting on Oliver’s chest. When he found her breasts, he stroked them lightly. ‘So, what’s the trouble with your dad?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Why do you hate him?’

  ‘What makes you think I do?’

  ‘I don’t know. Do you?’

  ‘I don’t much care for him, put it that way.’

  ‘What did he do to you?’

  ‘What didn’t he? I mean, it wasn’t sexual, but…’

  ‘He beat you, then.’

  ‘Not exactly, no.’

  ‘What else is there?’

  ‘He – oh God, never mind. It’s embarrassing.’

  ‘That’s all right. You can tell me.’

  ‘I don’t want to…’

  But she did, and the drink in her helped.

  ‘It’s not your fault, love.’

  ‘I used to think it was.’

  ‘Never. It’s never a child’s fault.’

  ‘He used to give me enemas,’ she blurted out, with rather too much high drama in her voice. ‘All the time, and not just when I was little. When I got older, he still kept at it.’

  Oliver willed himself to be still, otherwise he’d erupt in laughter. Enemas! ‘You think that wasn’t sexual?’

  ‘It was a health thing with him.’

  ‘Sugar coating, with a little kink inside.’

  ‘Could be. But at least he didn’t make me wear one of those bloody macs. That would’ve been flat-out perv.’

  ‘When did it stop?’

  ‘When I turned thirteen. I stopped it.’

  ‘Thirteen.’

  ‘He was serious about health, a real fanatic. And still is. Like, you should chew everything fifty times.’

  ‘Fletcherism.’

  ‘And posture. That was another thing. It used to drive me crazy, trying to stand and sit and walk what he called the right way. Which was impossible.’

  ‘The Alexander technique.’ Small wonder Becky still had a hard time carrying her body around.

  ‘Did you go through all this rubbish too?’

  ‘No, but I’ve heard of it.’

  ‘Bastard. Don’t know why I still love him.’

  He couldn’t see her face, but he touched her cheek just near the eye and felt a bit of moisture.

  ‘Tell him how you feel about it. Let him have it full bore. It’d do you a world of good. Clear the air.’

  ‘Very American, I suppose.’

  ‘Charterhouse, actually. I learned the hard way too.’

  She shook her head. ‘He’d never speak to me again.’

  ‘You’d feel a lot better.’

  ‘I feel better now,’ she said, squirming happily beneath his touch. ‘You’re very nice. And comfy.’

  They thrashed around on the sofa for a while, staggered into her small bedroom and fell together onto the bed. They lost some of their clothes in the process, made love quickly and furiously, and then they cuddled and kissed gently, resting.

  A little later, Oliver explored her body at a more leisurely pace, administering nip-and-peck kisses to her nipples, belly and thighs. Such long legs, such a long flat tummy. She had rather small breasts, but they were high and firm, still girlish.

  Oliver licked her. She didn’t know what to do with him, and her awkwardness was beginning to tell. Never mind, darling, some women never learn head – even long after they’ve become addicted to getting it. English women especially, or so it seemed. Maybe that was why Oliver had married a Yank. Becky began to cry. She held him there, wouldn’t let him move. Or stop.

  Eventually her hands slipped away and she seemed to sag into herself, dazed. Oliver rolled her over and took her from behind. Slow, gentle, sweet. He wet his fingertip and rimmed her with it tentatively. A long deep moan. A little more, and he could feel the moan in her body now, as strong and resonant as a cello chord from Bach. Yes, Daddy. Becky seemed to fly straight from orgasm into sleep.

  One thing: Oliver could never sleep in situations like that. He would lie there afterwards, eyes open or shut, awake. Thinking it was all kind of stupid, though he didn’t know why or how, just that it felt that way. Wondering if she would fall in love with him – but, then, they all did. They wanted him to stay for ever or they wanted to follow him back to America. Stay, and stay as tender and frank and understanding and loving as you were, as you really really are. And eat me eat me eat me every night.

  Oliver turned his head and stared at her in the grey light. Hair mussed, she did look pretty. Yes, darling, you have a right to some kind of a life, something approximating happiness, all of the usual milestones and millstones. A career, marriage, a house and kids. Click the menu, and make sure you get your full share. Some day, soon perhaps, you’ll even get to bury the old bastard in some dreary Midlands plot. Sell his house and all his things, and never visit his grave.

  He wanted to wake her and tell her. Becky, Rebecca, my dear child, Something-Something. It will be all right. You are good, you are pretty. You see? It is worthwhile. In a way. Somehow. I believe. I do. And so … And so …

  Enemas, for God’s sake. How on earth had he managed to keep a straight face? A triumph, really.

  She had such a lovely long neck. Such an exquisite throat. Slender, elegant. There was some kind of powerful erotic magic in it, irresistible. Don’t forget the people at the party, don’t forget the taxi driver. There are a million important factors to consider in the tiniest of moves.

  Oliver slipped his fingers around her throat and he squeezed with great gentleness, so as not to wake her.

  Such a feeling. Something to think about. Again.

  Because, Christ – it would be so easy.

  2

  The movie did nothing for her, but it was probably her own fault. Carrie had been distracted all day. Taking in the film had been a sudden impulse, and action thrillers could usually be relied on to erase two hours painlessly from your life. But it didn’t work this time.

  Distracted – and vaguely unsettled. That was the problem. A loss of concentration in the middle of her discussion with the Wellers about redesigning their kitchen. That blank spot while she examined an assortment of Italian tile samples. But it had been a busy day, so a brief lapse was perhaps understandable, and it was not as if anyone else had noticed.

  But there had also been that moment yesterday evening when Carrie had been sorting through her underwear to make up a load of laundry, when a tremendous sense of sadness welled up within her. She had no idea how long she’d stood at the hamper, close to tears. Over nothing. Why had it happened to her?

  As soon as she got back to the apartment, Carrie called her mother in Pensacola. Nothing much new there. A ziti dinner for the church, a book and bake sale for the local library.

  ‘Are you all right, dear?’

  ‘Yeah, just kind of – I don’t know.’

  ‘That would be the blahs.’

  Carrie smiled. ‘I guess so. Oliver’s away.’

  A cluck. ‘Where now?’

  ‘London and Munich.’

  ‘He’s going to turn into Willy Loman on you.’

  Carrie laughed. She felt a little better after she hung up, but the mood didn’t last. She took a long hot bath, had a glass of Cointreau with a single cube of ice in it, and skimmed a couple of articles in Vanity Fair without noticing what they were about. Later, she sat for a while on the edge of the empty tub, her naked body still moist, strands of wet hair dangling in front of her face, thinking, The blahs?

  She put on a white terrycloth robe and went into the living room, bare feet slapping on the parquet in the hallway. She put some quiet jazz on the stereo. Carrie loved their apartment, a co-op in the Dalmas Building on West 73rd, just far enough away from the noise where Broadway crossed Amsterdam.

  She and Olive
r had put a lot of time, money and labour into the place. They had stripped and completely redecorated it, but it was worth the effort. Decorating was her talent, her career. The apartment her home. New York her city.

  Was it Oliver, some uncertainty about her husband? True, he had seemed a little out of sorts before leaving on this trip, but he was always moody, she was used to that and knew how to handle it. He spent too much time fretting over his numerous business involvements, none of which he really cared about that much. She often thought he would be better off to settle on a single area of activity, something that totally absorbed him and brought out the best in him. He was a man of talent and keen business sense, an intelligent man.

  Their marriage was sound. Oliver was attentive, he actually listened, and Carrie knew that a man who listened was a gem to be treasured. They made love regularly, and the sex was still good. They talked. They cared for each other. And … And what more can you ask? But enumerating the pluses didn’t help.

  Carrie poured more Cointreau and added another ice cube. She went upstairs to the master suite and sat on the edge of the bed, trying to think what she was there for, what she should do. Put on a nightgown? Pyjamas? Just panties? Instead, she chose grey jeans, white socks, sneakers and a purple Lakers sweatshirt.

  Oliver was gone five or six times a year, a week or two each trip, and that was not great. But when he was around, which was most of the time, he was around all day and at home every night. They would meet for lunch, or in the evening for dinner out. He used the second bedroom as an office. So times like this, times when she was alone, were usually not a problem for her.

  Something in the bedroom behind her, she thought. A sound of movement. Holding the sturdy glass like a rock to throw, she went slowly to the open door. The light was still on. The room was the same, bathrobe draped over a chair. Empty. Windows shut and locked. Nothing. The closet – just clothes. Dressing area and bathroom, both fine. Nothing. See? Carrie turned the light off and closed the door as she left the bedroom.