She was so hungry that the meal seemed to come and go without her sensibly appreciating it, until they arrived at a point where Joe, pushing a coffee in front of her, said, ‘Shall we shift through?’
The enormity of saying, ‘Oh the kitchen’s all right, let’s stay here’—she couldn’t make herself do it.
Drink this in sips, Kit thought. She stood up, picked up the coffee and followed him, glancing, as she had done on her previous visit, into his impressive, antique mirror. Drink it in sips, she told her reflection, string it out. In the speckled, silvery glass, she looked distinctly flushed.
‘Oh—this picture,’ she said, and stopped to take in properly a large pencil study that hung to the side of the mirror, next to the archway through which they were about to pass.
‘Ah, you’ve noticed,’ said Joe. ‘What do you think?’
‘Well, I mean, at the risk of sounding completely silly, am I—doesn’t she look like me?’
‘I know.’
‘You think so?’
‘Very much I do. I was startled when I first saw you for that exact reason.’
‘Yes?’
‘Yes. I thought, here’s my picture, she’s jumped off the wall and gone out for a dance.’
‘Was that why you followed me to the bus stop?’
‘No,’ he said. A look flitted across his face. ‘No, I followed you because—you know it was such a crush and everyone had to divide into boys and girls? The way you managed the steps on your own; it was unlike anyone else there. For an hour I watched you, and wanted to be the person you were imagining dancing with.’
This answer made Kit feel so shy that she simply blanked it out. ‘Who is she?’ she said, pointing at the girl.
‘Just a model, I think. It was done by a friend of Rodin’s. My father picked it up for a song in a junk shop, and he can’t sing.’
‘You mean, extremely cheap?’
‘Yes, considering. The artist’s called Rothenstein. I think he was an early director of the Tate. I should find out. I’m not quite sure.’
‘You know there’s this whole schtick about the image of the female reader in Victorian art?’
‘No, I don’t know.’
‘I mean, boring, boring,’ Kit paused, ‘—well, actually, it isn’t completely boring—in art and in literature, I mean. I wonder if he drew her because she was reading, or, because he was drawing her, he let her read to get through the time.’ She leant in closer. ‘She’s very peaceful, isn’t she, despite looking like she’s effectively unwrapped for display. It really is disconcerting how much she looks like me. I just have to say that. It makes me feel odd.’
‘It’s even odder for me, now I’m seeing you both at once.’
‘Your father gave her to you?’
‘No.’ Joe laughed a little, and not happily. ‘No, this whole place is his and most of what’s in it. She isn’t mine. I shouldn’t have said that. That’s mine.’ He gestured through the archway to the sitting room, and an impressive black piece of furniture with shell inlay on the doors. ‘It’s a replica of a desk by Charles Rennie Mackintosh; original was one of the most—I think—one of the most expensive pieces of twentieth-century furniture ever at sale.’
‘Blimey. I quite like it.’
‘Yes. This is supposed to be the ideal double bachelor pad. Chrome and antiques; probably passé, who knows.’
‘With mildly suggestive sketches of late nineteenth-century women readers?’
‘One.’
‘One.’
He took her out onto his balcony. Kit, on her previous visit, hadn’t noticed the picture, had barely considered the sitting room and hadn’t realised the balcony even existed. Here it was, though. Joe shifted a Japanese screen to one side. To get out, you had to climb through a window.
‘It’s Buddy’s bathroom underneath,’ he explained, ‘and the ground-floor kitchen under that. The extension isn’t original to the house. They put this balcony on top without ever making proper access, hence the need to clamber.’
‘Buddy’s flat has to be enormous,’ said Kit, climbing out after him. Inside the flat it had grown quite dark, but outside, the sky to the west was holding its light—an empty, fading brilliance.
‘It is. Must be worth a lot these days, but he lives like a mouse.’
‘With his wodges of Stilton.’
Kit peered briefly down into the garden below, which was dotted with plastic toys, a lidded ladybird sandpit, a trike on its side.
‘Ground floor is married graduates with two little kids,’ said Joe, ‘French. They’ve only been here a couple of months. It’s a rent—change and change about.’
But Kit wasn’t looking down any more, or even really listening. The balcony formed a striking contrast with the flat. On either side it was walled, and these walls were covered with wooden lattice, while at the front there was an iron parapet. In and out, in a jumble, wove a passion vine and a clematis, a jasmine, a rose; a white rambler rose in bloom. The brickwork, too, was strewn with plants that had been slipped into holes in the mortar.
Kit put down her half-empty coffee cup on a flaking and rusty, painted metal table. ‘Amazing,’ she said, as she peered at the blooms and the clinging clumps of foliage.
Joe waved from one to another, ‘Snapdragons, thrift, valerian, daisies, pimpernel, wall lettuce, moss.’
‘Amazing,’ said Kit again. There were baby snails on the walls, no more than a couple of millimetres across, perfectly formed miniature knock-offs.
‘You see this red honeysuckle tucked away here?’ he said.
‘It’s pretty.’
‘I don’t know, I’ve been thinking about whether to keep it. I keep thinking it looks like the trailing parts on some pimped-up tropical fish. Early October, most of these plants shouldn’t still be in flower, but they are.’
‘I like the way it’s almost entirely on the vertical plane, this garden, apart from these three pots,’ said Kit.
‘Yes. They’re actually a bigger challenge than the walls,’ he replied. ‘I wouldn’t mind having bare terracotta; but there are tricks to container planting, if you want them to look good all year round, that is, without endlessly adding new plants. This is a Japanese maple,’ he added. ‘It should turn soon and go practically magenta. Exotics tend to turn before the native trees, although, these days—’
‘Isn’t there something about prime numbers and fir cones?’ said Kit, dredging up the question without thinking about it very hard.
‘You’re perhaps looking for the word “fractals” as it relates to ferns?’ he said. His lesser eyebrow twitched. ‘Or was it the connection between Fibonacci numbers and, for example, the ordering of seeds in the head of a sunflower?’
Kit grinned. ‘Just so you know, it was a miracle I scraped a “B” for maths in my GCSEs.’ She nodded at one of the containers. ‘I guess people must occasionally give you new plants, though?’
‘It’s not my custom to let anyone see this,’ he replied.
Not for the first time that evening, Kit felt outmanoeuvred. What a funny situation, she thought, when escaping it required you to climb through a window.
She reached for her coffee cup, searching, once again, for something inconsequential to say, and settled on, ‘I don’t usually like wallpaper, but this is a bit like wallpaper that’s alive.’ She glanced at him hopefully. ‘I like this, I mean; and it must change all the time.’
‘I know. I think of this, the balcony, as being my real room,’ he said. ‘Even though it’s open, I don’t feel overlooked. I could be, if one of the neighbours bent right out of their skylights, or if a person in one of that block of flats beyond the trees had a pair of binoculars on me; but why? And when I lie down on my back and stare upwards, I really am invisible. I can get to feeling sometimes as though I own the bit of sky above me here—not own it—as if, as if that’s the right bit of the sky for me to be staring at. I like it. Humpty says he’ll put it on my gravestone: “He liked looking up at the sky
.”’
‘When you said “invisible”, I thought for a second you meant “see-through”, “transparent”; that when you lay down and couldn’t be seen, it was because you became transparent.’ Kit put a hand to the window frame. She wanted to go back inside—to leave, in fact. Life was confusing. She’d had enough of it for one day.
‘About Humpty,’ said Joe, ‘you know you asked if he was all right? I just want to mention; you know how if you’re crammed into a seat at the cinema and your legs don’t fit, you feel too big, but if you are on the side of an enormous mountain you feel quite small, right?’
Kit let her hand drop again. ‘Believe me, I know all about my legs not fitting into seats at the cinema, or on buses, or aeroplanes, sleeves not reaching my wrists, trousers floating above my ankles. I could go on,’ she said.
‘Yes. The thing about Humpty is that I think he feels exactly the same size whatever he’s doing, wherever he is. He always feels as though he’s exactly the same size,’ said Joe, ‘except at the weekends.’
‘You mean he’s a bit mad?’ she said.
Joe replied to this question merely by dipping his head. ‘What’s your full name?’ he asked.
‘My full name? Farr, Christine Iris.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes.’
‘Christine Iris Farr?’
‘Yes. Christine was my mother’s choice, and my father’s mother was called Iris. I chose to be Kit when I was about nine, because I didn’t like being called “Chris”, or “Chrissy”. And by the way, I also have a brother—a half-brother—called,’ she sighed, then said quickly, ‘Graham. He’s miles older than me. We have the same father. My father’s seventy-four. Graham’s mother ran away with a man from Dundee, but left him behind, Graham, I mean. So we grew up in the same house and everything, but not at the same time, essentially. I mean I’m fond of him, but he’s more like he’s my uncle, kind of thing. There’s twenty years between my mother and father, working out that Graham is considerably closer in age to my mother than my father is.’
‘Right,’ said Joe, not apparently that interested.
Kit downed the remains of her coffee, realised what she had done and felt a pang of concern. ‘So?’ she said.
‘So?’
‘What’s your name?’
‘Leppard, Joseph.’
‘Leopard?’
‘Leppard.’
‘Leppard, sorry. Beg your pardon.’
‘That’s all right.’
‘No middle name?’
‘No.’
Her coffee was all gone. Kit decided to announce that she was leaving. She began to gear herself up for it. ‘You know what I think’s strange?’ she said.
‘What?’
‘There’s the sky up above, and we’re down here surrounded by plants, but this is not the earth. It seems funny, you know? Do you know that Paul Muldoon poem about, one blue eye and one brown?’
‘Why do I get the feeling it would be better to admit to syphilis or something, than to not having read Paul Muldoon?’
‘No, no.’
‘What about it?’
‘The poem?’ she said fretfully.
‘Look,’ said Joe, ‘you might want to factor it in that the answer to any question you ask me that begins, “You know that poem where”—the answer will almost certainly be, no.’
‘That’s okay. I apologise. I mean, I’d quote it to you,’ said Kit, ‘but I can’t remember it. And it only has four lines. To me, that’s me having—that’s, I’ve got syphilis as well, that I can’t even quote it, four lines. I often find myself wishing I’d been brought up to memorise, as a matter of course, the things that I really like; not that I—’ What was she on about? Never mind. I’m leaving now, she thought: the window. ‘But in the poem, you know,’ she said, trying to wrap up her remarks, ‘it’s that, there’s this girl with eyes different colours, and it’s the brown eye for the earth, and the blue eye—’ she threw a hand skywards.
About as lightly as it’s possible to ask such a thing, Joe said, ‘Would you like to sleep with me again?’
‘Oh I just couldn’t,’ she exclaimed.
A woman’s voice burst out from a window down below. ‘J’en peux plus de ce bordel!’
Joe looked away, over across the gardens, taking in Kit’s reply. With a touch of amusement, he said, ‘I didn’t mean out here.’
After this, they stood, for what felt like a long time, just as they were, mute and still, in the city-whacked dusk, undecided.
CHAPTER 4
Kit lay in bed looking at her clock radio, 8:37—8:38—8:39—8:40—whereupon she put out a hand to turn it off; except, as she confusedly then understood, she hadn’t been listening to the radio, she’d been watching the time. And the time you don’t turn off.
Another Friday, not enough sleep.
Michaela came thumping into the kitchen with the post. ‘Yours,’ she mumbled, and tossed Kit an envelope.
‘Thanks.’
‘For nowt.’
Spoon, bowl and cup, knife, a box of parched health stuffs, fruit, soya milk: noisily, Michaela made herself a collection on the table.
The envelope was stamped with the information that it came from Shropshire, was an appeal for funds for the rehabilitation of careworn donkeys, and was ‘important’. Kit slung it unopened into the paper recycling box under the counter by the oven.
‘For fuck’s sake,’ said Michaela, leaning back out of her chair, ‘office paper here, window envelopes and cardboard in with cans and plastic bottles.’ She retrieved the letter and threw it into the correct crate. Out flew a wasp.
‘Sorry,’ said Kit, who found herself wondering whether it was because Michaela’s father owned a bottle factory that she was so militant about recycling.
‘I’ve labelled the bloody crates. I’ve done all the work.’
‘Believe me.’
‘You haven’t put vanilla in your coffee? Why do you do that? Vile. You’re so free and easy.’ Michaela fished around in her bowl, trying to get just the pineapple bits on her spoon. ‘Well, in some ways,’ she added, ‘nudge, nudge.’
‘Betsy Trotwood, yes,’ Kit wasn’t paying attention, ‘yes, Betsy Trotwood, David Copperfield, hates donkeys. I suppose they still have them, do they, on beaches? They haven’t been banned yet?’
Michaela looked up. ‘Planning another little adventure this evening?’ she asked. ‘And don’t say, “With who?”’
‘With whom?’
‘Piss off, okay? What’s he called? Jack, Bob? It’s a Friday night thing, right? Friday nights? Right? What does he do other nights?’ Michaela sat back and pushed her bowl away from her. ‘More’s to the point, did you sleep with him again last week? I’ve been very good. I haven’t asked.’
Kit endeavoured, as a performance, to look wry—although, how was she supposed to tell what face she was pulling? No one practised, did they? Or was a wry face the exception? She felt she had seen it in the movies, young men, timid, faintly smiling at themselves in the mirror. She had seen it, more than once; though was this in English-language movies only? She took in her fair share of Korean, French, Japanese films, naturally, the odd Iranian one, German ones, heaven knows; but she couldn’t instantly place the scene she had in mind in a setting with subtitles, which perhaps meant—
‘Not very talkative, are we?’ said Michaela. ‘Too early for you, ten past nine in the morning?’
—which perhaps meant that the business of using a mirror to be certain you were pulling off wry was a defining experience common only to the writers of English-language film scripts.
This was the sort of line Kit could imagine being delivered by someone funny, who would say it funnily, so it sounded funny. But was it true? Did—‘What?’ she said. Oh. Yes. Yes, she was meeting him again, Bob?—Joe, up the hill, dancing, yes. He owed her, apparently, wished to discharge his debt. The rest of the week, goodness knows what he did. Yes, she thought, it’s a Friday night thing, and today is Fr
iday and—why was it that she and Michaela always seemed to want breakfast at the same time?
‘Kit,’ boomed Michaela unpleasantly, ‘you’re off in la-la land, you twit. You slept with him again, I’m asking? I take it you did, right? Was it better than before?’ She stared narrowly across the table. ‘I see. Yes. Good. Sweet. I knew it. I knew it. Maths lecturer sounds a bit crap, frankly, but, I don’t know, he’s got presence, hasn’t he? Don’t look at me like that, the wind might change. I mean, seriously, for you, Kit, twice is practically married.’
Kit flicked a scattering of toast crumbs onto the floor. She doubted it was humanly possible for a person to feel less married than she did.
*
She knocked off a reading list for Orson—she was getting increasingly efficient about them, and he was as ready as he was ever going to be to tackle Bleak House—then spent most of the day between two libraries, with a break in the middle to watch Get Carter, a film that buoyed her with the illusion that she was more alive coming out of the cinema than she had been going in.
She had started out that morning trying to make progress with her regular work, but had swiftly abandoned it. Friday had become the day she allowed herself to pursue other courses, and besides, while hunting for traces of Eliza in the catalogue of all Oxford’s libraries, she had come upon an irresistible title, the very thing she had been hoping might exist. Eliza Grimwood, a Domestic Legend of the Waterloo Road was a supposedly true, contemporary account of the murder, initially printed in instalments, and designed to capitalise on the public’s fascination with the crime. The author had been catalogued as, ‘Grimwood, Eliza, fict.’—wrong all ways round. Eliza was by no means a fiction, but at the same time, could hardly have written up her own death. Kit had ordered the book in a whir of excitement. The film had then put her in the perfect mood, so that she felt a terrible, happy jump within herself as she danced back up the Bodleian staircase. She was even happier as she collected the book from the issue desk. It smelled great. Her hands felt suddenly heavy as she tucked herself in at a table, seat 109, and began to read.
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