by Angela Huth
‘I bought the bird,’ said Mrs Fox, turning down the wireless, ‘but it wouldn’t sing. So I let it out. But Mrs Morris – she’s the landlady you will have seen downstairs – reported me to the R.S.P.C.A. Well, they sent along an inspector to see me, and the funny thing was he turned out to be a very nice man. We got on like anything. He quite saw the point about my letting a useless bird out – he said he would have done the same, off duty. Canaries are for singing, I said to him, and he agreed. – To cut a long story short, we’re now great friends and he comes to see me every now and then. In the spring I’m going to spend a weekend with his family at Epsom.’
She laughed to herself and skipped to the window. ‘Are you cold?’ The warm wind from outside was filtering into the room and hesitantly she pulled the window a little farther shut. ‘The thing is, I like plenty of fresh air in one-room flats because you have no idea how they can smell. Especially old people’s. I had to go and see a friend of Ethel’s last weekend, down in Highgate, and I had to keep my handkerchief to my nose most of the afternoon. I came away feeling quite sick. I don’t know what it is about us, old flesh or something. But then most of my generation have this morbid pride in musty old clothes and rotten treasures, pin cushions made in 1900 and all that sort of thing. Pah! Nostalgia is bad enough in itself, but it’s even worse when they have to go and surround themselves with dreadful in memorium mementoes. No wonder they smell!’ Defiantly she sprayed a tin of air freshener round the room. ‘That will do for the moment. Now, sit down somewhere. I’ll plant the seeds then we’ll have tea.’ She pulled a plastic box from under her bed, filled with neat fresh earth and set it on her knee. She dug a hole in the earth with her finger, very gently, and dropped in the first seed.
I sat on the tapestry stool by the unlit gas fire and watched her. The room flickered with grey shadows, like firelight shadows, from the moving treetops outside. The music on the wireless changed from the wail of a Venetian waltz to an old Benny Goodman record. Mrs Fox was looking down at the hole she was filling in, her web-like eyelids trembling slightly in their downcast position. Her feet tapped in time with the music.
‘That was a very nice man, that Joshua,’ she said. ‘I liked meeting him.’ Briefly she glanced up at me, then swooped to her earth again. ‘We had a good time. He took me for a lovely drive. He revved up the engine in the tunnel at Hyde Park Corner and hooted his horn. You should have heard the echoes. Then he came right up with me, here. I showed him the bathroom and everything, and he seemed to like it all. Oh yes, he had very good manners,’ she went on, ‘and he was very interesting about his achievements.’
‘What achievements?’
‘He didn’t say they were achievements, of course. But I could tell. He’s made several very successful documentary films, you know. He’s been all over the world making them,’ she said, expansively vague, ‘and they’ve been shown on television in many different countries. – I had to drag it all out of him. He wasn’t very forthcoming. But I understand that when he’s made enough money he wants to retire to Finland and write historical biographies in the forest. I said I thought that was a funny thing to want to do, and he said sometimes he thought so, too.’
She went to a small stove in the corner of the room and put on a kettle. We ate small pink biscuits iced with white crowns. Later she said:
‘There was a marvellous riot outside the Russian Embassy last Sunday. Did you miss it? Pity. But next Saturday there’s a good wedding at St. Martins-in-the-Fields, I hear. I shall enjoy that. You can hear the music right out in Trafalgar Square when it gets going. Once the bride has come out, you know, it’s easy enough to slip into a seat and listen to the end of the playing. After a wedding, nobody notices one person going into a church when everyone else is coming out.’
‘Did you find out any more about Joshua?’ I tried to sound disinterested.
‘He lives in Notting Hill Gate. He gave me his address – I have it on a piece of paper somewhere.’ She scrabbled about in a drawer. ‘Here you are. Take it – go on, keep it.’ I put the piece of paper into my bag without looking at it. She filled my cup with tea and unconsciously turned up the wireless again. ‘I hear you are parted from your husband for a while,’ she shouted merrily above the music. ‘Well, if you ask me, you should take a lover while the way is clear. I never had one myself, because if Henry had found out he would have insisted on a duelling match. He was very old-fashioned that way. So I went off to my concerts and parades and things instead. And look what its done to me now.’ Automatically, she turned the volume up even louder. ‘No, it’s better to have a lover when you’re young than a neurosis when you’re old. Because if you do have lovers when you’re young, when you’re old, all people will say is that you had a lot of men. They’d probably be envious, but anyone can put up with envy. But if you make do with a substitute, then when you’re old people will say: “She’s mad, poor thing. She’s mad. Dotty about chicken breeding,” or whatever it is you take to. So it’s better to have lovers when you’re young, than pity when you’re old.’
Her voice trailed away into the music. I could not think what to shout back. But suddenly she turned to me and snapped:
‘They sent round one of those social workers here last week. Pah! She suggested I should join an Old People’s Club. She couldn’t believe that I could entertain myself. She couldn’t believe I wasn’t lonely. Interfering old thing. What did I eat? What did I read? She had one of those saintly voices that make me sick. She had compassion in her piggy little eyes, too. So I sent her packing, and I don’t think she will be back for a long time.’ She was laughing again, and making more tea.
I stayed till six. When I left she came with me to the door and the music burst on to the dusky staircase. She leant over the banisters as I walked down the stone stairs. ‘Notting Hill Gate,’ she called over the banisters, then slammed her door.
Outside the hot muggy wind was gathering force. I began to walk very fast, then to run. Buildings, traffic and people fled past my eyes like ribbons. Familiar shops jigged up and down, almost unrecognisable, as if I was seeing them from the whirl of a roundabout. I wasn’t going fast enough. I shouted ‘Taxi’, so loud that people turned round and looked at me. I gave the taximan the address on the piece of paper and flung myself lengthwise on the leather-smelling seat. In order as not to look at our progress through the slow streets I read an advertisement for a night club in Fulham, nailed to the upturned seat in front of me, over and over again. I wiped the sweat off my forehead with the back of my hand.
We stopped at a tall block of flats. The taxi driver took a long, long time to give me the change. I ran through thick glass doors into a hall silenced with a thick, patterned carpet. There were pink tinted mirrors on the walls and I caught a brief sight of myself: red face, hair askew. The lift swooshed slowly up to floor fourteen. I ran down another carpet-silent passage to an anonymous brown door. I rang a shrill bell, waited. I rang again and the door opened. Joshua stood there, his shirt sleeves rolled up, a cigarette between his finger and thumb.
‘Oh, it’s you.’ He didn’t seem surprised.
‘Mrs Fox gave me your address,’ I said.
‘I would have rung you if you’d waited. I’ve been in Essex all day, filming. You’d better come in.’ I followed him into a square white room sparsely furnished with a couple of low Scandinavian sofas: in contrast, the sofas themselves were cluttered with scarlet, orange and purple cushions. Magazines, typescripts and three penknives littered the floor. ‘Why are you wearing a mackintosh?’
‘I thought it was going to rain.’
‘How funny,’ he said, ‘I looked out of the window this morning and I remember quite distinctly thinking: It’s not going to rain to-day.’
‘You were right, then.’ I took it off. I felt flat, regretful.
‘Come and see my view.’ We went to the large windows. London spread to meet the low grey sky. The buildings, a multitude of grubby bulbs, sprouted from indeterminate earth.
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br /> ‘It would be better if they were trees. I don’t know why they don’t build skyscrapers in the middle of forests. Think what it would be like when the wind blew. Do you want some vodka? It’s all I have.’ He poured me a drink and fetched ice from the kitchen. I was still sweating. I held the cold glass to my cheeks. They still burned. I told him about my afternoon with Mrs Fox.
‘She was extraordinary the night I took her home,’ he said. ‘She made me drive her through the Hyde Park Tunnel three times, hooting. She laughed like a child.’
‘Do you think she can find us here? She gave me the piece of paper with your address.’
Joshua laughed. ‘She wrote both my address and telephone number down on the fly leaf of her Bible by her bed, so I wouldn’t be surprised if she arrived at any moment.’ He sat beside me on one of the low leather sofas. ‘Pretty,’ he said quietly. ‘Rather nice, your untidiness. And you shine.’
‘Sweat,’ I said, dabbing at my forehead again.
‘I was planning to take you out to dinner anyway, so it’s funny you turned up. But now you’re here, could you cook something while I finish some work? There’s a tin of Italian tomatoes, frozen scampi and a Camembert in the kitchen. Could you do something with them? I’ll go and buy some wine.’
He worked at a low table and I cooked. Later he pushed the papers from the table and we ate there, me kneeling on the floor. When it became too dark to see we stuck candles on saucers and put them on the table. Joshua said the lighting in the room was bad. The still-hot wind flickered through the open window and almost flattened the flames.
‘What does your husband look like? I’ve been trying to agine.’
‘Medium.’
‘Height? You mean medium height?’
‘Yes.’
‘A nice, safe height, medium.’
‘Sandy hair.’
‘A good colour, sandy. Goes with everything.’
‘Green eyes, rather bulgy.’
‘Green eyes often bulge.’
‘He smokes Olivier cigarettes and wears Old Spice after shave.’
‘I would have guessed both those things.’ We were rather drunk. ‘What big eyes you have, Grannie.’ He leant his head over the table near mine. ‘And what tempestuous hair when you rattle it about like that.’
‘What beautiful eyes you have, now the bruises have gone.’ I wasn’t talking very clearly. He pulled me to join him on the sofa.
‘Marriages shouldn’t come unfastened as easily as yours,’ he said.
‘I know,’ I said.
‘I don’t think I shall ever marry. I’m too bad at sharing things. Besides, I like keeping whole areas of my life entirely private – just innocent things, meetings and ideas and so on. But I don’t like being questioned and asked to share them.’
‘That should be possible, unless you’re married to someone abnormally possessive. Jonathan always told me everything, every movement of his day. There was nothing I didn’t know about him. It was so tiring, and rather dull. And at the same time he wanted to know just as much about me. He interviewed me when I came back from being out for half an hour.’ Joshua’s hand was running down my thigh, feeling the muscles. I talked faster. ‘He hated me to make any arrangements without asking him. He hated me to spend a party talking to one person in a corner. It was so claustrophobic that sometimes I would go and shut myself up with the suitcases in the attic – the only place he never thought of looking for me – and write terrible things about him on scraps of paper, then burn them, just for relief. Just for the pleasure of knowing he could never know what I had written. Privacy to him was totally meaningless. Inessential.’
‘When I was about nine,’ said Joshua, ‘I built myself a house in a tree in a wood near where we lived.’ He took his hand from my leg to describe the tree. ‘It was the most private place I have ever known. No-one could see it from the ground. In fact no-one knew which tree it was built in. I’d go there most days and just sit, loving the fact that no-one knew where I was. Sometimes I’d take my collection of penknives there and carve weird shapes out of pieces of wood. Once, in the winter, I spent the night there. I wrapped myself up in a lot of rugs and went to sleep almost immediately – it wasn’t a bit frightening. Then in the morning I looked out and it had been snowing. I climbed down the tree and spent a long time running round and round, still wrapped in my rugs, so that my footsteps would be too confusing for anyone who tried to track down my tree.’
‘The odd thing about privacy is that although it’s desirable it isn’t quite so valuable unless other people know that you have something private going on.’ I said.
‘Quite,’ said Joshua. ‘I mean, no-one knew where my tree was, that was my secret. But the fact that people knew that I had moments going off, somewhere, made the secret even more important. It wouldn’t have been the same, had nobody missed me.’
I thought of Jonathan’s compulsive keenness to get at the post before me every morning. He would shuffle through the letters and arrange mine neatly on the breakfast table. He was curious about everything but bills.
‘I suppose it’s very difficult for people who believe, literally, like Jonathan did, that married people are one, to respect the need for privacy.’
‘Exactly. Common sense should help, but on the whole it doesn’t, with most people. But you don’t have any of those sort of worries if you don’t marry.’
The candles guttered low into the saucers. Joshua pulled my head down on to his shoulders. He kissed my forehead and eyes and curved his hand over my breast. ‘How would you like,’ he said, ‘to take my car home, pack a suitcase of things, and come back? Pack quite a big suitcase, then you could stay for some time.’
‘That would be practical,’ I said. Jonathan had first proposed bed to me on a wet night in Berkeley Square while we waited for a taxi. ‘Why don’t you come back and have some Horlicks?’ he had asked. We had drunk it sitting up in bed like married pensioners.
Joshua jumped up, helped me into my mackintosh, and thrust the car keys into my hand, all very quickly.
‘Hurry up,’ he said, ‘it’s already past midnight.’
I drove the car badly, never having driven one like it before. In the house the telephone was ringing. I hurried through the dark to the receiver. Maybe Joshua had changed his mind. It was David Robertson.
‘Why are you ringing so late?’ I asked.
‘Just to tell you, darling, that I’m very happy. Rosie here and I are very happy. We wondered if you would like us to come round and have a drink?’ His words were thick and slurred.
‘I’m just going out.’
‘Just going out at midnight? Oh, I see. I see. We’ll come another time then. Did I tell you I saw Jonathan in Rome the other day?’
‘Yes, you did.’
‘Oh, all right then. Bye.’ I slammed the receiver down angrily. Jonathan was gone but David was spying for him. I ran upstairs to our bedroom and switched on the lights, the ugly concealed lights over the bed that Jonathan had insisted upon. On the fireplace, rising from the pottery mugs, stood a sickly blue vase, tall and thin, that Jonathan had bought for me in Greece. It was a very ugly blue in this light. When he bought it Jonathan said to the shopkeeper: ‘Very phallic, don’t you think?’, and laughed. The shopkeeper, who only spoke Greek, didn’t understand. So Jonathan repeated his joke in very loud English, confusing the shopkeeper even more. I walked away in embarrassment. Later he accused me of being rude.
Now, I picked up the vase, wrapped it in a paper handkerchief, and put it in the waste-paper basket.
I packed quickly, choosing clothes and make-up indiscriminately. The case was so full it was difficult to shut. My hands were trembling.
I went and sat at my dressing-table and looked at myself in the ugly light in the mirror. Once, when we were first married, Jonathan crept up behind me when I was brushing my hair at this dressing-table and said,
‘Darling, you look so pretty. I’ll always be faithful to you.’ He must have seen so
me such moment in a film.
‘So will I to you,’ I remember answering, ignorantly. Richard Storm, on the other hand, warned me from the first week of our honeymoon that he was full of human weakness, and it wouldn’t always be like it was then. I had believed myself and both of them.
I left the room, turned out the lights, and double-locked the front door. This time the car was easier and I drove back fast and noisily to Notting Hill Gate.
I let myself into the front door with Joshua’s keys. The sitting-room had been cleared of papers and dinner, and all the lights were on. The uncurtained windows shone blackly, reflecting the harshness of the lights. The room had changed from a soft, seductive setting to one that was cold and mass-produced. I opened the white wooden door into the bedroom. Joshua was sitting up in bed, in an old wool dressing-gown, reading Newsweek.
‘That was quite quick,’ he said, barely looking up. ‘There’s an empty drawer over there for your things and the bathroom is through that door.’ I went back to the sitting-room to turn off the lights. Rain streaked silently down the black windows. Then I went to the kitchen and poured myself a glass of vodka from the fridge, taking a long time.
When I returned to the bedroom Joshua still didn’t look up. I unpacked, slowly, stuffing everything in a haphazard way into the small drawer. Then I took my cotton nightdress and tooth things into the bathroom, and shut the door.
It was a small, green-tiled bathroom with a cloudy paned window. Two black towels hung on the rail and a chipped cork bathmat was propped up against the bath. I undressed, folding my things into small bundles and balancing them on a three-legged stool. On the shelf above the basin lay an electric razor, a tortoiseshell comb and a yellow rubber sponge. I opened the mirrored door of the cupboard on the wall: aspirin, pills in a white box, Optrex and a box of Smarties. I shut it again and stared at my own reflection. A moment later I ran the hot tap so that steam floated up to cloud my vision.