She was still staring at the carpet.
‘Come back to England with me.’ He swung his arms around the suffocating room. He looked at her face, uncertain.
‘We can arrange it, now the war is over. There are things that can be done.’ Everything in him was alight as he spoke, as if each bruise he had ever received through his life, each blow and burn and peeling of skin returned to remind him he was made of flawed flesh.
There was a framed picture of Pentrohobyn Hall on the sideboard. Because she hadn’t answered he walked to it to compose himself. He loved that house; perhaps more than she did. To her it was simply a prison.
Willie tried to put Khaled Rasul’s face out of his mind, but he could not stop himself imagining the man’s fingertips touching Eleanora’s collarbone, squeezing the white skin of her inner thigh. She still said nothing. She was not going to answer him. His thoughts filled then with an unwanted vision: Eleanora and Rasul in a vast, four-poster bed, arms and legs wrapped around one another. Rasul’s hand on her small white breasts, with him, Willie, sitting transformed into some foul bird, a parrot or vulture, perching above them, peering into their marriage, like a man peeking up a woman’s skirt, stealing intimacy as if intimacy itself were morphine.
‘I must go.’ He stood up.
His instinct was to make his way down towards the kitchen where surely there would be a back door? It was difficult to tell in this house of burrows and tunnels. He moved through a door but instead of a stairwell he found himself on a square rooftop where a washing line stretched from the wall to a wooden pole. A plate covered with the ends of old cigarettes was balanced on the wall and beyond he could see roofs of other crushed and close houses, lives lived on top of one another.
She came behind him. ‘Don’t leave, it is just rather a surprise.’
Surprise?
He heard her swallowing, fighting with words, but still: nothing.
‘I need to go.’
She led him towards the door that took him back to the souk and as he opened it she gently touched his back.
‘Soon we’ll fly together, take the photographs for Ashton?’ She spoke in a thin voice, he barely heard her.
Then she said, fake and bright, ‘I’ll be at the party tonight. You can’t escape me, now you are here in Jerusalem.’
He looked at her. She gave up attempting to lighten things. She was close to him, at the door. He thought for a moment that she was going to embrace him. Instead, she leant her head back, tipping her chin up.
‘If I gave myself to you now, you would throw me away,’ she said.
‘No,’ he said. ‘That is not true.’ He stumbled into the Christian Quarter and turned into the first passage available, a steep, narrow road with a series of steps so shiny they looked as if they had been polished with the purpose of making a person slide. Carved rosaries of varying sizes and colours were for sale on both sides of the steps. he tried to imagine what it must be like to imbue faith in wooden beads on string. The walls around him concealed numerous monasteries and churches and it must have been the turn of an hour because bells struck, loudly ringing, out of synch. It was as if he were in a cog in the centre of the invention of time. He turned into an even narrower passage where birdcages were for sale, rows and rows of tiny prisons, and the sound of the canaries and chaffinches singing for freedom combined with the whistles in his head and the bells of time and noise became all that there was.
Shoreham, 1937
There is a mermaid outside Jimmie’s Tea Rooms on the New Shoreham side of the harbour. Disturbing, almost obscene the way she beckons the children, with her chipped nose and voluptuous form, and when a tuppence is rolled into the slot where a mouth should be she releases a mechanical tune. Skip is in love with her yellow falling hair. He stares at her flawed, peeling face, begs for pennies to bring her to life, and he must be thinking of her now as he curls in the heart of my bed, because he is quietly singing her song. Swimming in the brine her figure was divine . . . she had a yen for all the sailors . . . she had a most immoral eye. . . they called her Lorelei. I will let him fall asleep where he is and move him to his cot-bed later. I shuttle around Cecilia, pretending to tidy things up, humming lightly, so that he knows I am near as he goes down. They called her Lorelei.
I promised Billy that I would not go to the Warnes Hotel, and so I did not go, but I did not tell him about the telegram that was delivered by the churlish, black-haired son of the postmaster who threw it at my doormat. It might easily have fluttered away to become seagull food if I hadn’t seen him do it.
I WILL BE AT THE WARNES TOMORROW EXPECT YOU AT THREE AND DAY AFTER UNTIL YOU COME URGENT AND IMPORTANT REGARDING IHSAN TAMERI.
I slipped this unsettling message into an old copy of Vanity Fair that has somehow travelled with me from London and it is there now. Lying flat. Making no sense.
I dress carefully for Billy, glancing out at the last folds of the day’s light into the sea, but what I’m really doing is looking out for William Harrington and wondering why he is here in Sussex. It is as if he has slipped through a cut-out hole in time, like the paper dolls I used to clip from the back of the draper catalogue, leaving the silhouette of a little girl, fallen backwards. Since his visit I have intended to write to Ihsan and yet I haven’t begun the letter. It has been three days now. Might he still be there, at the Warnes? Surely not. Outside, the clouds are growing thicker until they blend into one flat, fading sky.
Skip watches me dress, sleepily, stomach nicely full after drinking his milk with the last of the dripping on toast. I am getting better at this, the feeding. Since leaving Piers I am marooned, financially, on gifts doled out by Piers’s father, the earl. He deposits monthly cheques – not vast amounts, enough to feed the boy, essentially – and because I couldn’t possibly afford to run to a woman I have learned how to cook a potato. Slicing brown carbuncles, washing off pig manure, cutting into the waxy white tuber.
I did cook once before coming to Shoreham, of course. I was wearing, I remember, a vivid blue taffeta silk dress at my friend Marguerite’s house in Mayfair and we were drunkenly concocting a surrealist soup we intended to serve to the down-and-outs at the workhouse. Onions, carrots, sequins from an old hat and diamonds plucked from Marguerite’s dress. Piers’s friend, Harry, cut his finger and let drips of blood fall into the mixture, shouting, as he did so, Ripen! Ripen! Ripen!
Skip’s head is lolling. I turn off the lantern next to the bed but leave one glowing on the table near the mirror. We do not have curtains, just badly hung drapes, old dust cloths once used for covering my sculptures. There are many areas of domestic housekeeping at which I am failing, curtains being the merest tip. Fighting sleep, Skip demands that I tell him a rabbit story.
‘Not tonight, lovely.’
I look at the clock. Billy is coming at seven. I pull the curlers from my hair slowly, liking the release and spring. Shortly after my arrival at Shoreham Beach, Billy, my self-appointed protector, gave me one of his hand-tinted promotional photographs: long shorts, fists wrapped in white bandages, his lips a shocking red. It had been hard not to smile, but I could see he was serious about boxing so I thanked him politely. On the back of the picture it said ‘Bombardier Billy’. He stands out, here, but is accepted as one of the town’s own. Unlike me. When I walk past the wide-hipped housewives of Shoreham cleaning their steps and windows they don’t bother to tut-tut quietly.
I rummage in my wardrobe-trunk where not a single item is appropriate for Shoreham weather: ensembles, capes, collars, evening dresses, fox stoles, cashmere. I pull out a grey crêpe-de-chine dress, a sleek affair, almost like mermaid-skin itself, and a slip in a matching colour. Both are much too thin for this time of year, but there we are. All of my stockings are damp and so I lay them out in front of the wood burner to dry while I rub cream into my face without looking in a mirror. Finally, I dress, leaving stockings until last.
When the wind drops dead outside it becomes too still inside Cecilia and I whistle
to cover it up. At odd moments I have the sensation that the weather is watching me here, waiting, as if planning a surprise I won’t particularly like. On our first night, Skip and I slept together in the unfamiliar bed – I had not yet got the cot-bed for him – and all night the clamours and repetitions of the sea wove through my dreams. There would never be silence here, I realised. Not with the wind and the sea and yet, despite that, the room could be still. No Piers: that was it. No thick hanging golden curtains tied with a tasselled rope. No sounds of the light tingling from the room-service trolley, none of Piers’s friends banging on the door at three in the morning, drunk from a night at the Midnight Follies cabaret at the Metropole, stinking of champagne and vomiting into the azure-blue flowerpots. I sit on the bed next to Skip for a moment and play with his hair.
‘Can we take the train to London, Mummy?’
‘You’d like to?’
‘I would.’
‘To see Daddy? I’m afraid he’s not there at the minute, darling.’
‘No,’ he says, brave, turning into the blankets, eyes drooping now, ‘I mean, not particularly. I would just like the train ride.’
‘Well I am sure we can do that.’ He puts his head on my knee and I sing to him, my own version of ‘Scarborough Fair’, with the herbs mixed up, rather tailing off at the end until at last he is asleep. I put another blanket on him so that he has two, make weak Indian tea, drink it. There is a scratching noise at the bottom of the door, claws, snuffling. I open the door, let the sea air flap in and I kick at whatever it is, feel the live edge of it against my toe. There is a scuffle, a noise that is carried off to the sea. I shut out the weather again. When I glance back into Cecilia all I can see is mess. Every drawer in the chest in the corner is open and emptied. An unpleasant stain on the floor next to the bed and Skip has left a bucket half-full of murky water in front of the kitchenette. I lean over and push a red-headed curl away from Skip’s eyelid and begin to pick items up – his shorts, his socks, and the pile of newspapers he was using to make paper boats – but the disharmony of the room is too set-in and profound so I give it up, an impossible job. I have left Skip alone before in the evenings and, truth is, I am keen for a drink, but tonight there is a tension in me. It is string-like, a balancing. This boy of mine: made up of fingernails, freckles. When worrying he counts on his fingers for reassurance, or arranges and counts the pebbles or balls of chalk in front of him, over again, his fingers tapping a rhythm of his own. Moving up and down a secret scale. Over the top of my dress I wear a white cape. I put on siren lipstick, but leave off evening gloves. Whatever I wear here I am overdressed.
When I told Marguerite that I was leaving Piers and leaving London and leaving her and the art world and everything to do with our life as it was and taking Skip and going to a place called Shoreham-by-Sea she had laughed and laughed into her apple martini. You have never lived in small-town England, my dear, wafting, as you were, across the shores of Empire. You do not know closed-mindedness. You don’t know what you’re letting yourself in for and I blew a line of smoke towards her crushingly beautiful green eyes and said: ‘But, darling, it cannot be worse than this.’
‘You look a picture,’ Billy says as I open the door and pull him out of the bad-tempered weather.
‘We’ll go to Flo’s Club, shall we?’ He looks over at sleeping Skip and nods.
‘Why not?’
I walk over and kiss Skip, leaving a red stain on his white forehead, take Billy’s arm and we step out together. I am a better person – will this convince me? – if I take certain moments for myself rather than give them to my son. What I mean is: I am a better person for Skip if I have a drink on this blustery night with Billy rather than stay in here and watch him sleep and listen to the rain.
The wind batters against us as if it wants to punish us but I’m grateful because it takes all of my concentration to walk and it is not possible to think or feel guilt in the whirlpool of gust. The signs of the neighbouring chalets – Kangaroo, Puss-in-Boots and Angel – clatter and hammer in their brackets. It is not all bad, the feeling of walking along shingle with a man made up of strands of muscle coiled like fishing rope, a man with a strong thirst for ale which he can handle well. The sea near us is a dead-black, and Billy is quick to pull me closer to his side.
‘Come on,’ he says, ‘into the warm.’
The door to Flo’s Club is secured with extra chains to make sure the wind doesn’t carry it away and Billy, ever gallant, holds it open for me. It is Saturday night. The room is heaving with red-faced fishermen, ex-servicemen, harbour rats, spivs from Brighton. The air is cider, salt, sweat and the musicians on the stage are being applauded, fists banging tables, wolf whistles hitting the roof; the band dismantles itself for an interval just as we squeeze into a table in the corner. Billy’s hand is on the small of my back and every man in the room stares at me.
‘Everyone’s looking at me, Billy.’
‘Of course they are, don’t get a woman like you in Shoreham that often.’ There are hurricane lamps dangling from ropes lashed to the ceiling beams and they swing madly. The wind can be heard whipping at all the flags and sails across the harbour so that it feels as if we are on a boat. There is an air, somehow, of anticipation and, once we are settled into our seats and Billy has greeted everyone he has to, I tap his arm.
‘What is everyone on this spit waiting for?’
‘A war,’ he says, ‘or a storm.’
‘Oh, that.’
‘Not just that. It’s more than that.’
‘You think?’
‘Front line of the country, lovely. We are the unprotected.’ He waves, in the general direction of France. ‘They aren’t on our side, are they?’
He is an expansive person to sit next to. His breath smells of tobacco. A boxer. What would Piers say? I have a feeling he would approve, might even envy him, or me. Billy is half-gypsy, half-fisherman, as far as I can tell, and appears as lawless and ungovernable as the dog breeders or the cockerel fighters, the pawnbrokers and crooks of Brighton. The usual rules of society do not apply to him and this is how we cross over, as it were, because in England I have always felt out of step with how to do things or what does or does not do. This is what Piers and his friends thought so fantastically idiosyncratic about me, thinking me hilarious fun. Original. Out-of-step. They thought I was playing, or acting, at being clueless in that way.
Before long, the woman who I presume to be the club’s namesake, Florrie Forde, walks on to the stage and leads a song. ‘Down at the Old Bull and Bush’. Her voice oppressively shrill. There’s a little nook down near old Hampstead Town . . . The fishermen clang their tin pint jugs on the battered tables . . . Come, come, drink some port wine with me, down at the old Bull and Bush . . . Hear the little German band and at the word ‘German’ the room roars up and there are chants of ‘No!’ The men around us have red eyes and flayed skin. I sip my cider and am in love with them all so much that I don’t remove Billy’s hand from my knee.
‘If war happens, we’ll be the first to be gone. Either bombed or evacuated, but anyway,’ he says, my philosophical boxer, ‘Churchill knows what he’s doing. There won’t be a war. Half the men in Brighton and Worthing are fond of old Hitler anyhow.’
I touch the yellow kiss of the bruise below his eye. I like the lines on his face, the non-London look of him; the way he said, ‘So you’re an artist?’ And it neither impressed nor scandalised him. A man brought up to use his fist to punch and knock out a person for money does not tend to judge others. I cross my legs, let his hand rise further above my knee until his fingers trace the edge of the lace trim of my chemise. I speak to Billy Ludd as if he is my doctor. As if he is the psychoanalyst that Piers took me to: Mr Ridgeway? Mr Raymond? The one who tapped his long fingers and breathed heavily as secrets bobbed up like apples in a barrel. Only, with Billy, I put my ailments freely on to the table, allowing him to give his halfpence even though he is not qualified to talk about trampled minds.
‘No more visitors today?’ he says in a break in the music, sipping his cider. I shake my head.
The man sitting next to us slams his pint jug down on the table with a bad-tempered clatter. The stage-lights are dimming. A spotlight shines on to an invisible ghost centre stage, and the drinkers hush as they will do before the hypnotic power of a shot of light on a wooden floor. I shrug at him. I like this place, but the wind is like bad memories coming in before the dawn and I think of Skip, tucked under his blankets. How much of this wind would it take to fly Cecilia away, like a child’s toy house in a gust?
A woman, clearly steeped and soused in Sussex cider, is coming towards us. She has trouble weaving her fruitful hips through the men and tables and she looks like a goddess coming out of the sea, only, as her face comes closer, I realise that she doesn’t so much. Her skin is haggard and her features unbalanced, as if she has been knocked about here and there and healed incorrectly. Her long brown hair hangs in her eyes which are red and blurred-looking.
‘Billy Ludd,’ she says. ‘Are you planning on getting Walter a present?’ It is the first time I have seen Billy looking ruffled; his neck has thickened, veins show. He stands up, pulls himself away from me, whispers, ‘Just give me a minute.’
The woman looks as though she might throw a glass at me; I can see she wants to. She is bigger, stronger and fiercer than me in every way. I can’t stop staring at the red knuckles on her hand as it presses on the table, but before she does anything Billy steers her towards the bar where they stand together and shout out what they need to. I look away and their words are hidden in the music. This is the balance of things with Bombardier Billy and me. Truly, I don’t want to know, but I can see how he is holding the top of her arm and I understand well enough that grip and what it means.
—–
At Cecilia, Skip is snoring, his arms flung above his head, his forehead covered in a layer of sweat even though it’s draughty. I ask Billy no questions, but it is clear from the way he lingers that I won’t be able to shake him tonight, even though I am quite in the mood for my sketchbook, for drawing out night-thoughts. This is the first time, then, I’ve had the old sensation I remember from Piers, of not being able to move the man out of the room when I want to work. A thwarting, I suppose. Piers, naked in the large room at the Russell Hotel, slamming the door to the private bathroom and saying it’s mine for the night to work, you can piss in the vases, there are enough of them and in the morning him emerging with nothing to show for it.
The Photographer's Wife Page 6