‘No, I have no one.’ The mournful phrase horrified him. ‘I live in a small flat, with no room to spare. There’s nothing I want from here.’
‘You realize that the contents will have to be disposed of?’
‘Yes, well, if you have no need of them. I believe everything is as my cousin left it, down to the cups and saucers.’
There was an almost audible sniff. ‘Hardly to my taste, I’m afraid. In fact it would help if you could dispose of them. Or indeed take them away with you, if you came by car.’
‘I did not come by car, and I must leave the matter to you. Or to Arthur, who has been exceedingly helpful.’
‘No problem,’ said Arthur, who had missed nothing of this exchange.
‘In that case, Mr… I’m afraid I’m hopeless with names.’
‘Sturgis,’ he said, his patience suddenly evaporating. ‘If you’d like to take another look I’ll leave you with Arthur. I have one or two things to see to.’ This was untrue. ‘I’ll look in again before I go home.’ This was for Arthur’s benefit, rather than hers. He was anxious to get away from the sound of her voice. Further discussion would, he saw, be useless. Besides, he was indignant on Helena’s behalf, her cups and saucers spurned, and with them her taste. If interests were to be identified he would unhesitatingly spring to Helena’s defence, and to the defence of everything she stood for, pretentious though that had been. Social anxiety may have been her lot too, valiantly disguised though it had been. Her cups and saucers may have been the only relic of her earlier life, before he knew her. He saw nothing amiss with her taste, indeed saw it as entirely respectable, over-stuffed sofas included. He was to be at the mercy, it seemed, of intractable women. It was just that some were less agreeable than others.
He took a pointless walk round the neighbourhood, in order to dissipate his very real antagonism to this woman. The surroundings were no more to his taste than before, but the streets seemed relatively innocent compared with the machinations involved in disposing of his property. He had no desire to see Mrs Fitch again, but supposed he had some sort of duty to Arthur, who had engineered the whole project. He wanted to get back to his own flat, wanted to put this place behind him. He rang the bell to the basement flat and was admitted promptly.
‘Cup of tea?’
‘No, thank you. I came to say, take whatever you want from the flat. I have no use for any of it.’
‘That’s very kind of you. Not that we haven’t got all our own stuff. Still, some of it might come in handy. Knows what she wants all right, doesn’t she? I’ll have my work cut out with that one. Do this, do that. Still, I’ll be off soon.’
‘I envy you. And you’ve done a good job. I’m very grateful.’ A ten-pound note changed hands, and was secreted in a pocket.
‘There’s just one thing. Thank you, sir. I took the liberty of removing the lady’s luggage. Just in case she wonders where it had got to.’
He opened a cupboard and dragged out Mrs Gardner’s bags. ‘Shall I call you a taxi? They’re not heavy, just a bit bulky.’
With despair he possessed himself once again of Mrs Gardner’s effects, with despair installed them once again in his bedroom. This, it seemed, was to be his fate. How had it come to this? Six months ago he had been unencumbered, paying his dues, making provision for his own eventual demise. Now he was beset by complications. He would do well to avoid further entanglements. This, however, would not be easy. The looming evidence of the bags in his bedroom seemed to mock his desire to live a boring but peaceful life. As ever, circumstances had got the better of him, as they did of everyone. There was some small, very small, consolation in the fact that he was not alone in this.
22
Now he had more money than he needed, and no one to whom he could leave it. There was no shortage of good causes, but then he would not know how wisely the money was being spent. He remembered Mrs Gardner’s references to her work at some Aids charity, and the astonishing amounts of money made available to the victims, or perhaps merely to the administration. This was a problem he could not solve, one of many, the most prominent being his feeling of indignation at Mrs Fitch’s prospective despoliation of Helena’s effects. He felt this indignation on behalf of all those who had to make their own way up the social ladder, and thus, inevitably, himself.
He could not hide from himself the knowledge that little bound him to Helena’s memory apart from those ghostly Sunday afternoon visits in which he acted merely as audience. Yet even these had instilled a measure of respect for a woman who had contrived a life for herself, fictitious though this may have been. His parents, those silent but loyal antagonists, had felt the same respect as soon as she had entered their orbit. They had, not incorrectly, perceived her as superior to themselves, conscious as they were of the failure of their own lives, lives lived joylessly in the knowledge that they had succumbed to the poor choices with which they had been faced, had made a pact with each other not to complain, though knowing that they would have done better with different partners. Of the two his father did his duty, but with grim determination, intent on fulfilling his obligations to the social order. His mother, he now recognized, suffered the same unhappiness that he himself had experienced as a child, the same fretful loneliness. Helena had promised an introduction to a wider world. He remembered her wedding breakfast, the relative sophistication of the attentive waitresses, and the promise of similar celebrations to come. These had not materialized, his parents relegated to some dim limbo to which she had paid little attention. His mother had been tormented by hints that these celebrations were being enjoyed by others, much as he had taken seriously Helena’s accounts of activities to which he had no access. He saw now, and perhaps had always suspected, the flimsiness of these impressions, his parents, and perhaps he himself, mistaking this fleeting connection for a semblance of family, having no real family to fill the gap.
Of the two of them his father was the more grimly realistic, making no secret of his disappointment. To his father Sturgis owed his career, although he was conscious of having done rather better in the relative success of his own endeavours, once undergone simply in the hope of winning that same father’s approbation. His mother, he realized, had been inconsolable. In truth they were all unhappy. His own unhappiness had been made bearable by thoughts of escape, and this, to his surprise, he had achieved, through his work. Yet what had been bred in him by their silence was the very opposite of their native disposition: a desperate assiduity, a desire to be of service, to prove his good will in every possible circumstance. Too nice, Sarah had judged him, and he had always secretly acknowledged the truth of this, for his niceness was a learned response to indifference rather than genuine inclination. He was thus a failure by his own standards and only by dint of extreme privacy had he kept this hidden from others. In this he had succeeded, but it was a poor success. And it had left him in the same situation as his mother, all those years ago, longing to be included in a family network which she had failed to contrive for herself.
In this context Helena retained her prestige, despite the reality of her widowhood and the solitude that manifested itself in her undisturbed rooms, the stateliness of her pretensions, which he had never bothered to verify, seeing them as her armour, although the artifice prevented either of them from speaking the truth. The truth, their truth, had never been subjected to examination. They had succeeded in maintaining a fiction of kinship, and he did not doubt that she felt as little as he did. Her death had not much affected him: indeed having seen the conditions to which she had been subjected in the hospital he was as glad for her as he would have been for himself in such circumstances. But oddly it was the sight of the flat that had affected him, so obviously bereft of a human presence, so filled with the amenities with which she had ordered her own existence, and so summarily dismissed by the odious Mrs Fitch, for whom he now felt considerable enmity. He would have preferred to leave the flat empty for a while, perhaps a few months, though he knew this was impractical; i
t would have been a mark of respect, that same respect that his mother must have felt, and that had not been reciprocated.
These memories of the past, unleashed by as little as the sight of those fragile teacups – Proust again – did little to assuage his habitual melancholy. Nor did the realization that with the disappearance of this connection he was now truly free of the past. He would not regret this. In attempting to see himself as others saw him he also saw that he had become the character he thought suitable: appearance had become reality. He was respectable; he had nothing to hide. But having nothing to hide meant an inner emptiness, and a predisposition to any fantasy that might fill that onerous gap. On the face of it there was nothing untoward in his desire, or more accurately his impulse to forge an alliance with a woman, even though the age in which such choices were spontaneous now lay in the distant past. It was this knowledge, the consciousness that time was running out, that made him persist, never quite translating it into reality but seriously entertaining it as a possible strategy. And there was that other fantasy: the escape to the sun, a sun no less physical than metaphysical, the exile in some undemanding place, and the reality of a solitude which had always been his and which he had never managed to overcome.
His cousin Roland was his, and his parents’, icon of masculinity, though Roland was to let the side down by dying relatively young. This at least provided a topic of conversation, and the opportunity of a visit of condolence that was the occasion of his first sight of the flat. The death of his father had provoked a return visit; the same thing had happened after his mother’s death, and after that the Sunday visits had been inaugurated. When asked how she did, her invariable response was, ‘My diary is full.’ At first he had taken this at face value. It was only gradually that it dawned on him that this was not entirely true, a fact confirmed by her lonely death in the hospital. But both were slaves to convention and the fiction was loyally maintained. Now she was gone, and with her any remote familial link. He was now free, and rich, as he had once longed to be. But neither the money nor the freedom had brought a sense of ease, rather the opposite. Only the fantasy of choice remained.
Thinking of the past brought him round to Sarah’s point of view. It was hateful because it encoded one’s mistakes, and was thus less about youth than about what one had done with it, and how close it had brought one to the fact of mortality. For Sarah this was self-evident: she saw herself, or chose to see herself, as impaired, not merely altered but fatally altered. He had brushed aside her fears, but might have done better to take them seriously. If he had not done so it was from fear of contagion. Newly alive to what might constitute a threat, he persisted in routines which had lost their meaning, in an effort to prove to himself that little time had passed between then and now, and that he was in essence unchanged.
He sighed at the prospect of a day alone with his thoughts: the limits of freedom were soon reached. As he left the flat he was not altogether displeased to see Mrs Gardner swinging along the road in his direction, bringing with her evidence of self-sufficiency, of a welcome lack of regret.
‘Vicky,’ he said. ‘Good to see you. I was wondering where you’d got to.’
There was little sign that she was pleased to see him. Indeed she was almost stern, as if she considered him seriously at fault.
‘Shall we go in? It’s rather cold out here.’
It was indeed cold, the weather having retreated into a greyness, a lack of colour, despite the blossom, the tentative hint of green of reviving nature.
‘You’ve had breakfast?’ he queried.
‘I could do with a cup of coffee. As you can imagine I can’t get into that flat. Not that I’m not glad to see the back of it. What’s going on?’
‘I had an offer for the place. I told you I intended to sell it. And the buyer was rather insistent. So it’s no longer available, I’m afraid.’
‘I couldn’t care less about the flat. But what about my stuff?’
‘Your stuff, as you call it, is here. But not for much longer, Vicky. You really must find another place for it.’
‘Easier said than done. I haven’t yet got a place of my own.’
‘Why don’t you go back home?’ This sounded so peremptory that he regretted the question as soon as it was put. ‘Here, drink your coffee.’
‘With another woman there? No, thank you. Anyway, I’m off to New York in a few days. Might as well be there as here. I must say I’m rather surprised at your attitude.’
‘But you knew that this was a purely temporary agreement. Or rather no agreement at all.’
‘In your place I’d have…’
Suddenly he lost patience. ‘My dear girl, you can’t rely on strangers to help you out.’ Though, he realized, that was what he had always done. ‘They can’t always meet your needs. Why should they? The world is fundamentally indifferent to one’s needs.’
‘I’m not talking philosophy here. I just know we’re on this earth to help one another. That’s what I was taught, anyway.’
‘Well, your husband…’
‘Let’s not bring him into this discussion. I did go home, if you really want to know. We had a blazing row.’ She smiled reminiscently. ‘Just like old times. So, no, I can’t go there again.’
‘New York? You’ve friends there who can put you up for a while?’
‘I’ve got friends all over the world.’
He remembered her saying this before. ‘It would help if you’d leave me a telephone number. I suppose you’re going to tell me that you want to leave your bags here. But I don’t think you can, Vicky.’
‘Why not? It’s a small thing to ask.’
‘I may be going abroad,’ he said desperately. ‘So I’d be grateful if you’d find another home for them.’
She brightened. ‘Well, if you’re going abroad, why don’t I…?’
‘Don’t even think of it.’
But he found himself smiling. ‘Did you give your keys back to the caretaker?’
‘No, why should I? You can take them back if you like. I must say, I didn’t expect this. Is there any more coffee? As you can imagine, I’ve had a rather upsetting morning.’
He shook his head in admiration. ‘You can leave your bags here on one condition, that you leave me your mobile number.’ He realized that, as ever, she had asked him no questions about his plans. For this he was grateful: his plans were, as ever, unformed. But imperceptibly he could sense a growing desire to be elsewhere, whatever it cost, away from this greyness. He could no longer stand England, its cold, its coldness. In her fashion she had much to teach him. Rootlessness did not appear to disturb her, rather the opposite. She sat back in her chair, quite relaxed now that she had achieved her objective. And in truth the favours she asked were insignificant. It was just that she saw no reason why her wishes should not be granted. Others, no doubt, had found themselves in the same position, would face the same triumph of the will. Even now she was quite relaxed, bright-eyed, flicking her hair behind her ears, as he remembered her doing. He wondered if he could ever live with such a woman, and decided that it was impossible. Yet she was not easy to dismiss, and he was sure that many men had been attracted. She would be an intriguing partner, but not for long. He saw her days filled with endless soliloquies poured into the ears of defenceless friends. The difference between them was not simply one of temperament, but of age, or rather of generations. Only Sarah, he knew, would have shared his reactions in a similar circumstance. That was one of the ties that united them, that of age. And the coming age for both of them was one of austerity, not of indulgence.
‘What will you do today?’ he asked, anxious now to see her go.
‘Look in on one or two people. My solicitor is taking me out to lunch. Why? Do you want to get rid of me?’
‘I have things to do,’ he said lamely. ‘Papers to go through.’ He wished it were true. ‘It’s been nice to see you.’
‘I get the message,’ she said. ‘Well, I’ll love you and leave you.’<
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‘Your mobile number, Vicky.’
She reeled off the inconveniently long number, which he hastily wrote down. ‘Perhaps you’ll let me know when you’re next in town. Your bags…’
‘Don’t worry. I know they’re quite safe with you.’
They both laughed. There would be no need for further negotiations. No room either.
23
‘Did you enjoy that?’
‘Not much. A bit suburban, wasn’t it?’
‘That was the whole point. That was why I liked it. I am an inveterate suburbanite.’
‘Oh, I know.’
They were lunching at the Tate, having paid their respects to an exhibition of paintings by the Camden Town Group.
‘Even when I moved away from home I never really felt at home, if you know what I mean. It felt more natural to explore London as if I were a foreigner, different districts, you know? Pilgrimages to St Paul’s, Westminster Abbey. I still thought of these as obligations, something Londoners ought to do. I was quite startled when tourists asked me directions, never felt I was in a position to advise them. Even now I never feel quite at home, but that’s an old story. Homesickness. A chronic condition. Or maybe it increases with age. Do you want coffee?’
‘Yes, please. Then I must go. I have to say, you don’t look old. You’ve still got hair. You haven’t put on weight. How do you manage that?’
‘I don’t eat much, I suppose. But then I don’t know how much other people eat. I have no standards of comparison.’
‘I eat all the wrong things, I know. Except when I’m in France.’
‘Yes, how was your trip?’
‘Oh, very brief. Just to check on the house. No need, really. I’ve got a local man who does odd jobs for me. He looks in from time to time.’
‘When are you off again?’
‘In a couple of weeks. I ought to sell the house, I suppose, but I can’t bring myself to do it.’
Strangers Page 15