He went back into the corridor and closed the kitchen door behind him. Barry and Ray were still bickering about the bed, which was half in and half out of the front door. “How long have you two got? Are you very busy? Do you have a bit more time?” he asked them. He managed to keep the shake out of his voice.
“We said we’d be back by dinnertime.”
“Will you do me a favor?”
They looked at each other doubtfully. “Well, what sort of thing? Only I said we’d have the van back, didn’t I?” Ray said. Barry nodded.
Then Arthur said something that sounded to him as if he was speaking in a foreign language: “I’ll see you right.”
The atmosphere changed imperceptibly.
“This is what I need,” Arthur said. “This is what I want. Everything has to go.” He waved his arms around. “We can’t live like this.”
“Terrible,” Barry said. Ray nodded.
“I need it all out,” Arthur said, holding their gaze.
The lads exhaled in unison. Barry shook his head. “Don’t know, Mr. Hayman.”
“How much did we agree on for you to bring our stuff over? Twenty-five, wasn’t it?” Arthur put his hand into his pocket and brought out his wallet.
“It’s not the money, it’s the time, Mr. Hayman. Really.”
Arthur opened his wallet.
“Anyway,” Ray said aggressively, “what would we do with it, all the stuff?”
“You could sell the bits that are worth anything, keep the money.”
Ray guffawed contemptuously.
Barry touched his arm. “Hang on a mo, Ray. There might be—”
“Firewood,” Ray interrupted. “That’s all it’s good for. Look at it.”
Arthur took twenty-five pounds out of his wallet. “Anyway, here’s what I owe you for the move,” he said, and handed the money to Barry. He took out a couple more notes and held them in front of him.
“There’s that dump out near Borehamwood, isn’t there, Ray?” Barry said.
“We’ll never be back by dinnertime.”
“No, you’re right,” Arthur said. “You’d never be back by dinnertime.” He put the notes back into his wallet, and the wallet back into his pocket. “Well, you’d better just move the stuff in.”
Barry looked at Ray. Arthur looked at his watch. “Come on,” he said. “I don’t want you to be late.”
“Forty,” Ray blurted out.
“Forty what?”
“Pounds,” he said uncertainly.
“You mean the twenty-five I’ve already given you and another fifteen?” Arthur said.
Ray’s eyes flicked towards Barry. He cleared his throat. “On top,” he said. “Forty on top.”
“Oh,” Arthur said. “I haven’t got that much, Ray.” He walked up the corridor. “Bed goes in there. Dining-room chairs up here. Try not to scuff the walls if you can help it.”
“Okay. Twenty,” Barry said. “We’ll do it for twenty.”
“I don’t want you to be late,” Arthur said. “It’s getting on. You’d better make a start.”
Two hours later, the swap had been done: Arthur and Martha’s furniture had been moved in, and all of Terry’s junk was piled in the back of the van. Several jokes had been made about how much fuller the van was going to be leaving the new flat than coming to it. Although Barry and Ray kept talking about having to get back, they did not seem in any particular hurry to go. The dining-room chairs had been arranged in a rough circle in the sitting room and they were all drinking from a selection of chipped glasses and mugs that Arthur had discovered in one of the kitchen cupboards with a bottle of wine, which he and Martha were halfway through. The lads were drinking beer—Martha had gone down to the off-licence to get it while Arthur was cleaning the stove with bleach. He had also cleared out the fridge and scrubbed it, and now, with the windows open, a pleasant breeze was blowing through the flat and there was only the faintest vestige of the smell that had greeted him when he had first opened the door.
Martha was laughing. Her cheeks were slightly flushed. She was telling Barry and Ray about their previous landlord, Mr. Bubek, and her various rows with him. The lads had got through three bottles of beer each and were on to their fourth. When Martha got to the punchline of her story, in which she imitated Mr. Bubek saying, in his thick Polish accent, “And what is so common, please, about my parts, Mrs. Hayman?” Ray, who was taking a swig from his can, laughed so violently that he inhaled the beer instead of swallowing it and it foamed out of his nose while he spluttered and coughed. Barry had to stand up and wallop him on the back.
They were laughing so much that they did not notice Arthur leave the room. He stood outside in the corridor, then leaned against the wall. Although he had only had a little wine, much less than Martha, it had taken the edge off the memory of the feeling that had risen in him as soon as he had entered the flat and had stayed, like a low hum, until Barry and Ray were moving Terry’s junk out. It was like panic—on the same wavelength as panic anyway—but it didn’t feel like panic about a single event or moment: it felt like something without boundaries that extended as far back as he could remember and as far forward as he could see.
Now Martha was cross-examining Barry about his accent. “Birmingham?” she said. “You’ve got those sharp vowel sounds. Newcastle? Bolton?”
Barry was giggling.
Ray was egging her on: “Further north, to the east, little bit up, that’s it—you’re getting close.”
“Scotland?” she said tentatively.
“Too bloody far!” Ray said.
There was a great roar of laughter. Arthur smiled at Martha’s unexpected animation. She was normally rather awkward with people on the lower rungs of the film industry. Arthur and Terry, who had worked in and out of the studios all their lives, were more attuned to the caste system that divided them from the sparks, standbys, and props boys, and the awkward mixture of hostility and supplication they tended to give off.
After a while Arthur tuned out of their conversation to concentrate on the air blowing through the flat and the sound of traffic. He closed his eyes. He didn’t know how long he was gone for, but it was as if he had left the flat and was somewhere else. Their voices brought him back: Ray seemed to be talking about a baby. “No,” he was saying, “she sleeps right through.”
“How old?” Martha asked.
“Nine months. And she’s a big eater. Oh, she’s a real sweetheart Dawn is, a little darling.”
“Dawn!” Martha said, with a laugh in her voice. “Now, that’s a lovely name for a baby girl. Whose idea was it?”
But Arthur was walking down the corridor, away from them, and Ray’s answer was lost to him. He was imagining a small child with blue eyes sitting on Ray’s knee. He saw Ray lift her up and hold her in the air above him. He imagined a street where Ray might live and the wife he might have, and a Sunday lunch with children and grandparents.
Arthur looked into the rooms as he passed. Now, with their furniture in place, the flat tidy and Martha laughing up the corridor, merry with too much wine, everything seemed calm. He stood in the doorway of the apartment, looking out at the stairs and the elevator shaft, and suddenly remembered where he had drifted off to earlier: he had been in a place where he could allow himself to think, for one brief, dangerous instant, that everything might be all right.
When the doorbell rang at seven o’clock on a bitterly cold morning in the winter of 1960, it was more than two years since they had moved into the flat on Shaftesbury Avenue. Then it had been the end of summer and for several weeks after they were first there they could leave the windows open and let the noise and heat of the city flow through the rooms. Now the inefficient central heating that had just started clanking through the pipes towards the radiators hardly took the chill off the air, and Arthur had to light the fires in the sitting room and their bedroom to bring the flat to any perceptible level of warmth.
He was up earlier than usual. He was spending his days at the
studio where a film set during the French Revolution was having a problematic shoot. Arthur had been brought in to write additional dialogue for some of the crowd scenes and to beef up the tepid romance at the center of the story. As the film continued to reel from crisis to crisis and fall further behind, the shooting of the love scenes Arthur had written kept being delayed. The bedroom that had been built in readiness for them sat forlornly in the corner of the stage where the main Bastille set stood. Only yesterday Arthur had heard a rumor that the bedroom was going to be struck, which meant that his scenes were definitely to be dropped and he wanted to get to the studio early to talk to the producer.
He was shaving in the unheated bathroom opposite their bedroom when the bell went. The tap was running so it was a moment before he heard it. It was too early for the post, and although it was around the time the milkman usually came, he left theirs downstairs and only rang the bell once a week when the bill had to be paid, which Arthur had already done.
He had left Martha asleep when he had got up, but now he could hear her moving around their bedroom. “I’ll get it,” she called.
He peered round the bathroom door and saw her padding down the corridor in bare feet. She wore a slip and was pulling a cardigan round her shoulders. When she got to the entryphone by their front door, she picked up the receiver and said, “Yes?” in a croaky voice. Arthur could hear a distant squawk of what sounded like static and Martha said, “I’m sorry, I don’t—” but then she stopped and the static started again. Then she said, “Oh,” and took the receiver away from her ear. She let her hand drop so she was holding it against her leg. She stayed like that for a few seconds, her back very straight, and Arthur could see a little tear in the hem of her slip. Then she brought the receiver slowly back up to her ear. Her other hand was over her mouth and she had to take it away so she could speak. “No,” she said. “Wait there. I’ll come down.” She tried to put the receiver back into its cradle, but it slipped out of her grasp and fell, banging against the wall and swinging by its curly wire, like a pendulum. Martha picked it up and forced it into the cradle with a cry of frustration, then unbolted the door and vanished.
There was almost no sound now, only the soft receding thud of Martha’s bare feet on the carpet. The steam, which had hung in the bathroom like fog, was drawn out by the draught of the open front door and swirled into the corridor.
Back in their bedroom, Arthur looked at his watch. It was five past seven. Martha would be back any moment. He wondered whether he should make some coffee and heat the milk. He put his robe over his pajamas and went up the corridor. Before he got to the kitchen he stopped and waited. The apartment was silent. Then, without knowing why, he retraced his steps past the bedroom and went out through the front door that Martha had left open.
He could hear talking drifting up the stairwell from downstairs. Although he could not catch the precise words, he registered Martha’s voice rising and falling, his ears catching the high notes better than the low ones. Then the low notes fell away and there was the insistent high staccato of the same short word being said over and over again. He moved down the stairs to the half-landing. The word Martha was repeating was “no.”
“No,” she said. “No. No. No. No.” Her inflection was slightly different each time.
Through the metal grilles of the elevator shaft in the center of the stairwell, Arthur could see two pairs of legs standing against the front entrance, the bodies obscured by the lobby ceiling.
Then Martha said, “It’s simply not true.”
There was a silence. Then the other person, a woman, said, “But I know.”
“You’re wrong,” Martha said. “You must be mistaken. You are mistaken.”
“There’s no mistake. No mistake at all.”
“Look,” Martha said, “I don’t know how—”
“The bills. I’ve seen them.”
“Bills?”
“Hotel bills. For the room,” the woman hissed. “In Bloomsbury. Great Russell Street. I know the hotel.”
“It’s not true,” Martha said indignantly.
There was a pause. Arthur was thinking, Poor woman, what an embarrassing mistake to have made, what a terrible mix-up.
“Mrs. Hayman,” she said wearily, “I know about the French place, about Le Touquet.”
The woman pronounced it wrongly—she called it “Le Tooket”—but Arthur realized what she was talking about. He knew about Le Touquet as well. A few months before Martha had gone to France for the night. She had said a friend, someone she used to work with, had won a competition in the Daily Express. The prize was a ferry ticket and the friend said she couldn’t use it and had offered it to Martha. “It seems a shame to waste it,” Martha had said. “I could stock up on wine and food.” When she came back she brought with her a little tin of foie gras and a jar of green olives stuffed with pimentos wrapped in waxy white paper tied with a ribbon.
“And I’ve read the endearments,” the woman said. “I’ve seen them. In your little notes. So please—please don’t talk to me about mistakes.”
It was seven fifteen now. Arthur wondered what was going to happen, but he knew that, whatever it was, it would be better if he was dressed properly, not standing in the stairwell of a block of mansion flats in his pajamas and robe. As he crept back up the stairs he heard the woman say, “You’re ruining us, Mrs. Hayman. You have to get out of our lives. Please.” There was a catch in her voice.
The flat was still silent when he came back in, and he decided to do what he had been going to do before he had gone to see who had rung the bell: he went to the kitchen, filled the percolator, and turned the gas on, then began organizing the milk. Back in the bedroom, he took a white shirt out of the chest of drawers and pulled on the gray flannel trousers that were hanging over the back of a chair. His black shoes were under Martha’s dressing table. He had polished them yesterday, but he buffed them up with a duster before slipping them on and tying the laces. He pulled his tweed jacket out of the wardrobe and, before putting it on, wrapped a dark blue patterned tie round his neck and knotted it.
The front door banged and he heard Martha come along the corridor. She stopped outside their bedroom. “It’s cold,” she said, shivering.
“I’ll do the fires in a minute,” Arthur said. “Who was at the door?”
“Your collar’s crooked,” she said. She came over to Arthur and straightened it. Her cheek brushed his and he felt how cold her face was. “Bloody woman doing a survey.”
“Survey?”
“From the council. Whether we’re happy with the street cleaning. Writing everything down on a clipboard.”
“I’ve never even seen a street cleaner.”
“That’s what I said.” She pulled the top drawer of the chest out, searching for something. Then she rummaged violently on the top of her dressing table. She kept running her fingers through her hair, which looked dirty. Arthur wondered if there would be enough hot water for her to wash it.
“What are you looking for?” he asked.
“My bracelet,” she said angrily. “The silver one, the African one.”
“It’s on the bedside table.”
She sat on the bed, reached over and slipped it on her wrist. He thought she would stand up immediately, but she just sat there, staring ahead.
“Are you all right?” Arthur said.
“I’m just cold,” she said. “What’s the time?”
“Nearly half seven.”
“No sound?”
“Not a squeak,” Arthur said.
“He’s normally like clockwork.”
“The milk’s on.”
As if by magic there was an angry cry from up the corridor and Martha smiled, as if she was relieved. She got up and was out of the room in a second. “Get the milk, will you?” she called.
When Arthur got to the baby’s room, Martha was kneeling beside his cot. He was standing up, holding on to the side and stamping up and down on his blanket. He was giggling and
trying to tug at Martha’s hair as she moved her head back and forth towards his fat little hands.
When he saw Arthur holding the milk, the baby’s mouth widened into a lopsided grin. He reached out his hand.
“Hello, Jordan,” Arthur said. “Hello, little pig.”
Sometimes they saw each other every week and sometimes several weeks passed with no contact. Once they had even seen each other three days in a row, but after Ray’s wife had turned up on the doorstep, Martha knew it was over.
Since the doorbell had rung that cold morning, she had entered a state of what seemed to her like suspended animation. It had a curious familiarity to it and it took her some time to realize that it was how she had felt when her father was dying. But the baby needed feeding and the diapers needed washing and Arthur’s sandwiches had to be made before he left in the morning for the studio, where he went every day, still waiting for his scenes in the French Revolution film to be shot.
The worst time was the afternoon, when the idiotic Spanish girl, Chita, who worked for them part-time and whom Martha was always about to sack, came in to look after Jordan so Martha could get on with her PhD, which she had been working on for more than ten years, interrupted fatally when she had gone to work for Wally Carter, researching his crusader film. She went into the bedroom, where there was a table she used as a desk, and sat moving her notes around and flipping through the books she had marked with thin pencil lines in the margins. She lit cigarettes, then put them out after a few puffs. She made cups of tea. She looked into the sitting room at Jordan and Chita playing. Sometimes she went for aimless walks through Soho, huddled in a coat and woolen scarf against the bitter cold.
She was living in dread of something happening or something not happening. She dreaded seeing Ray and she dreaded not seeing Ray. Most of all she dreaded Ray’s wife coming back and telling Arthur, but she also dreaded continuing in the state of limbo in which she and Arthur flapped slowly round the flat like dying moths.
So when the phone rang early one afternoon and it was Ray—he was conversant enough with her schedule to know that Chita turned up to look after Jordan just after lunch and therefore she would be able to talk—Martha did not know whether she was relieved or not.
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