When I came back the court had risen for lunch. Nicolette was in the corridor talking earnestly to my father, her face raised to his. The place seemed deserted. My father was somber, eyes fixed on her face. But he must be hungry, I thought. He looked up, he scanned the corridor as if for rescue or a waiter. His eyes passed over me, but he didn’t seem to see me. He looked drained, gray, as if he’d been left standing by the curb and one of the lowlifes from Ancoats had been siphoning off his blood.
Then the corridor began to fill up with the bustle of the various people hurrying back from lunch. A miasma of extinguished cigarettes, of pale ale and cheese and onion and whisky billowed before them, a smell of wet mackintosh and wet newsprint came in with them, as damp pages of the early edition of the Evening News were unfolded and flapped in the air. Nicolette clipped over to me, smiling, her heels spearing the floor. She seemed keen to strike up a friendship. She clicked open her bag. “Your father thought you might need two of these.” She pulled out a bottle of aspirin.
“I usually have three.”
“Be my guest.”
She unscrewed the top with an air of liberality. But there was a cotton wool twist in the neck of the bottle, and when I tried to fish it out it flinched away from my forefinger and impacted itself out of reach. “Give it here,” Nicolette said. She probed the glass with her pearly claw. “The little bugger,” she said.
My father had joined us. Holding up his thick digit, he showed that he was helpless in the matter. Nicolette flushed, her face downturned. Across each eyelid there ran an eely flick, teal-blue, drawn with a fine pen. I positioned myself next to her so that I could try to see down her neckline, and find out where her caramel hue ended, but all I could see was an ugly mottling of frustration, spreading crimson to where the buttons of her silk blouse blocked my view.
The forces of the Crown arrived. “What’s up, Frank?” Bernard Bell said.
My father said, “My daughter’s started her … she’s started her headache.”
“Touch of the sun.” It was February. Nobody smiled. “Oh, suit yourselves,” Bernard said. “Tweezers will do it.”
I almost glanced behind me for Tweezers, a rachitic clerk with fingerless gloves. Then I saw that Bernard was digging in his pockets. He came out with some treasury tags, small predecimal currency and some fluff. He sifted it, plunged his two hands in again, and ferreted down there for quite a while; it was a tribute, I thought, to the charms of Nicolette. My father snorted, “Bernie, you never carry tweezers into court? Nail-clippers, yes…”
“You may scoff,” Bernie said, “but I have known nasty injuries occur from slivers of flying glass, where in the hands of a man trained by the St. John Ambulance, a handy pair of sterilized…”
But then Nicolette gave a squeak of triumph. She held up the plug of cotton wool between her fingertips. Three aspirin rolled into my palm. If they’d rolled into her palm, I could have settled a question.
Early in the afternoon the case was thrown out. The Irishman tumbled into the corridor to greet his well-wishers, punching the air and crying, “Drinks all round.”
It surprised me to see that Nicolette was still there. She was standing alone, her bag looped over her elbow. She’d lost her papers, whatever they were. She looked as if she were queuing up for something. “Very honorably prosecuted, sir, and in a gentlemanlike manner,” the landlord flung in the Crown’s direction. When he passed Nicolette, fists flailing, feet flashing out, I saw her step back against the wall with a briskness almost military, and clamp her forearm across her tiny belly.
That night my father took my mother aside. She kept walking away from him, in little aimless drifts, so he had to follow her down the hall and into the kitchen, saying listen to me Lillian. I went up to the bathroom and looked in the bathroom cabinet, which I normally avoided as the thought made me sick. I sorted through what was in there: a small bottle of olive oil, some oozing ointments, a roll of sticking plaster and some round-ended scissors with a rust spot at the junction of their blades: crepe bandages packed in cellophane. There was more provision for casualties than I had imagined. I pulled some cotton wool out of a packet, rolled it up into balls, and put it in my ears. I went downstairs. I watched my soundless feet go before me, like scouts. I didn’t look through the kitchen door, though it had a glass panel. But after a while I sensed a vibration under my feet, as if the whole house were shaking.
I went into the kitchen. My father wasn’t there and being quick on the uptake I deduced he must have slipped out through the back door. The room was filled with a dull thudding sound. My mother was beating on the edge of the kitchen table the ovenproof dish in which she usually shriveled his dinner. It was made of toughened glass and took a long time to break. When it shattered at last she left the wreckage on the floor and brushed past me on her way upstairs. I pointed to my ears, as if to warn her that any commentary on the situation was wasted on me. But left to myself I picked up all the shards of the dish, and carried on picking them up and placing them on the table. Not having the obliging tweezers by me I took up the fragments from the carpet tiles with my fingernails. This detailed work of recovery occupied a satisfactory amount of time. While the muffled evening continued on its way without me I arranged the jagged fragments so that the pattern of onions and carrots with which the dish had been decorated was complete again. I left it for her to find, but when I came down next morning it was gone as if it had never been.
* * *
I WENT ROUND to see them after the twins were born. Nicolette was very pally. She tried to reminisce about old times—the modesty panel, all that—but I firmly rebuffed her. My father still looked gray, as he had since the day the Irish landlord was in court, and the babies were both yellow, but he seemed pleased with them, grinning away like a callow youth, I thought. I looked at their little fingers, and the palms of their hands, and marveled at them, as you are meant to do, and he seemed all right with that. “How’s your mother?” he said.
Something was stewing, a brown foodstuff, on the hot plate of the Baby Belling.
My mother got the house. She said she would have been loath to leave the garden. He had to pay her maintenance, and she spent some of it on yoga classes. Having been a brittle person, she became flexible. Each day she saluted the sun.
I was not a prejudiced young person. I still notice these things, the colors people turn when they’re lying, the colors they turn. Nicolette, I saw, looked as if she needed dusting. She smelled of baby sick and brown stewing, and her curly hair hung above her ears in woolly clumps. She whispered to me, “Sometimes he’s on call, you know, the rota. He’s out till all hours. Did he do that before?”
My father, always a diffident man, was agitating his knees beneath his babes, by way of bouncing them. He was singing to them, in a subfusc way: “One-a-penny two-a-penny, hot cross buns.” Love is not free. In point of fact, he was reduced to penury, but he must have counted on that. I expect Simon Kaplan admired him, Bernard Bell, those people. As far as I could see, everybody but me had got what they had ordered. “Drinks all round?” I said. Nicolette, finding her hands free, reached into the sideboard and extracted a bottle of British sherry. I watched her blow the dust off it. Only I had failed to name my pleasure.
HOW SHALL I KNOW YOU?
One summer at the fag end of the nineties, I had to go out of London to talk to a literary society, of the sort that must have been old-fashioned when the previous century closed. When the day came, I wondered why I’d agreed to it; but yes is easier than no, and of course when you make a promise you think the time will never arrive: that there will be a nuclear holocaust, or something else diverting. Besides, I had a sentimental yearning for the days of self-improvement; they were founded, these reading clubs, by master drapers and their shopgirl wives; by poetasting engineers, and uxorious physicians with long winter evenings to pass. Who keeps them going these days?
I was leading at the time an itinerant life, struggling with the biography of a subje
ct I’d come to dislike. For two or three years I’d been trapped into a thankless cycle of picking up after myself, gathering in what I’d already gathered, feeding it onto computer disks that periodically erased themselves in the night. And I was forever on the move with my card indexes and my paper clips, and my cheap notebooks with their porous, blotchy pages. It was easy to lose these books, and I left them in black cabs or in the overhead racks of trains, or swept them away with bundles of unread newspapers from the weekends. Sometimes it seemed I’d be forever compelled to retrace my own steps, between Euston Road and the newspaper collections, which in those days were still in Colindale; between the rain-soaked Dublin suburb where my subject had first seen the light and the northern manufacturing town where—ten years after he ceased to be use or ornament—he cut his throat in a bathroom of a railway hotel. “Accident,” the coroner said, but there’s a strong suspicion of a cover-up; for a man with a full beard, he must have been shaving very energetically.
* * *
I WAS LOST and drifting that year, I don’t deny it. And as my bag was always packed, there was no reason to turn down the literary society. They would ask me, they said, to give their members a snappy summary of my researches, to refer briefly to my three short early novels, and then answer questions from the floor: after which, they said, there would be a Vote of Thanks. (I found the capitals unsettling.) They would offer a modest fee—they said it—and lodge me for bed and breakfast at Rosemount, which was quietly situated, and of which, they said enticingly, I would find a photograph enclosed.
This photograph came in the secretary’s first letter, double-spaced on small blue paper, produced by a typewriter with a jumping h. I took Rosemount to the light and looked at it. There was a suspicion of a Tudor gable, a bay window, a Virginia creeper—but the overall impression was of blurring, a running of pigment and a greasiness at the edges, as if Rosemount might be one of those ghost houses that sometimes appear at a bend in the road, only to melt away as the traveler limps up the path.
So I was not surprised when another blue letter came, hiccupping in the same way, to say that Rosemount was closing for refurbishments and they would be obliged to use Eccles House, convenient for the venue and they understood quite reputable. Again, they enclosed a photograph: Eccles House was part of a long white terrace, four stories high, with two surprised attic windows. I was touched that they felt they ought to illustrate the accommodation in this way. I never cared where I stayed as long as it was clean and warm. I had often, of course, stayed in places that were neither. The winter before there had been a guesthouse in a suburb of Leicester, with a smell so repellent that when I woke at dawn I was unable to stay in my room for longer than it took me to dress, and I found myself, long before anyone else was awake, setting my booted feet on the slick wet pavements, tramping mile after mile down rows of semidetached houses of blackening pebbledash, where the dustbins had wheels but the cars were stacked on bricks; where I turned at the end of each street, and crossed, and retrod my tracks, while behind thin curtains East Midlanders turned and muttered in their sleep, a hundred and a hundred then a hundred couples more.
In Madrid, by contrast, my publishers had put me in a hotel suite that consisted of four small dark paneled rooms. They had sent me an opulent, unwieldy, scented bouquet, great wheels of flowers with woody stems. The concierge brought me heavy vases of a grayish glass, slippery in my hands, and I edged them freighted with blooms onto every polished surface; I stumbled from room to room, coffinned against the brown paneling, forlorn, strange, under a pall of pollen, like a person trying to break out from her own funeral. And in Berlin, the desk clerk had handed me a key with the words “I hope your nerves are strong.”
* * *
THE WEEK BEFORE the engagement, my health was not good. There was a continuous airy shimmer in my field of vision, just to the left of my head, as if an angel were trying to appear. My appetite failed, and my dreams took me to strange waterfronts and ships’ bridges, on queasy currents and strange washes of the tide. As a biographer I was more than usually inefficient; in untangling my subject’s accursed genealogy I mixed up Aunt Virginie with the one who married the Mexican, and spent a whole hour with a churning stomach, thinking that all my dates were wrong and believing that my whole Chapter Two would have to be reworked. The day before I was due to travel east I simply gave up on the whole enterprise, and lay on my bed with my eyes shut tight. I felt not so much a melancholy, as a kind of general insufficiency. I seemed to be pining for those three short early novels, and their brittle personnel. I felt a wish to be fictionalized.
My journey was uneventful. Mr. Simister, the secretary, met me at the station. How shall I know you? he had said on the telephone. Do you look like the photograph on your book jackets? Authors, I find, seldom do. He giggled after saying this, as if it were edgy wit of a high order. I had considered: a short pause on the line had made him ask, Still there? I am the same, I said. They are not a bad likeness, only I am older now, of course, thinner in the face, my hair is much shorter and a different color, and I seldom smile in quite that way. I see, he said.
“Mr. Simister,” I asked, “how shall I know you?”
* * *
I KNEW HIM by his harassed frown, and the copy of my first novel, A Spoiler at Noonday, which he held across his heart. He was buttoned into an overcoat; we were in June, and it had turned wintry. I had expected him to hiccup, like his typewriter.
“I think we shall have a wet one of it,” he said, as he led me to his car. It took me a little time to work my way through this syntactical oddity. Meanwhile he creaked and ratcheted car seats, tossed a soiled evening newspaper onto the dog blanket in the back, and vaguely flapped his hand over the passenger seat as if to remove lint and dog hairs by a magic pass. “Don’t your members go out in the rain?” I said, grasping his meaning at last.
“Never know, never know,” he replied, slamming the door and shutting me in. My head turned back, automatically, the way I had come. As, these days, my head tends to do.
We drove for a mile or so, toward the city center. It was five-thirty, rush hour. My impression was of an arterial road, lined by sick saplings, and lorries and tankers rumbling toward the docks. There was a huge, green roundabout, of which Mr. Simister took the fifth exit, and reassured me, “Not far now.”
“Oh, good,” I said. I had to say something.
“Are you not a good traveler?” Mr. Simister said anxiously.
“I’ve been ill,” I said. “This last week.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
He did look sorry; perhaps he thought I would be sick on his dog blanket.
I turned away deliberately and watched the city. On this wide, straight, busy stretch, there were no real shops, just the steel-shuttered windows of small businesses. On their upper floors at smeary windows were pasted Day-Glo banners that said TAXI TAXI TAXI. It struck me as an area of free enterprise: freelance debt collectors, massage parlors, body shops and money launderers, dealers in seedy accommodation let twice and thrice, bucket shops for flights to Miami or Bangkok, and netted yards where inbred terriers snarl and cars are given a swift respray before finding a happy new owner. “Here we are.” Mr. Simister pulled up. “Like me to come in?”
“No need,” I said. I looked around me. I was miles from anywhere, traffic snarling by. It was raining now, just as Mr. Simister had said it would. “Half past six?” I asked.
“Six-thirty,” he said. “Nice time for a wash and brushup. Oh, by the way, we’re renamed now, Book Group. What do you think? Falling rolls, you see, members dead.”
“Dead? Are they?”
“Oh yes. Get in the younger end. You’re sure you wouldn’t like a hand with that bag?”
* * *
ECCLES HOUSE WAS not precisely as the photograph had suggested. Set back from the road, it seemed to grow out of a parking lot, a jumble of vehicles double-parked and crowding to the edge of the pavement. It had once been a residence of so
me dignity, but what I had taken to be stucco was in fact some patent substance newly glued to the front wall: it was grayish-white and crinkled, like a split-open brain, or nougat chewed by a giant.
I stood on the steps and watched Mr. Simister edge into the traffic. The rain fell harder. On the opposite side of the road there was a carpet hangar, with the legend ROOM-SIZED REMNANTS painted on a banner on its façade. A depressed-looking boy zipped into his waterproofs was padlocking it for the night. I looked up and down the road. I wondered what provision they had made for me to eat. Normally, on evenings like this, I would make some excuse—a phone call expected, a nervous stomach—and turn down the offer of “a bit of dinner.” I never want to prolong the time I spend with my hosts. I am not, in fact, a nervous woman, and the business of speaking to a hundred people or so causes me no qualms, but it is the small talk afterward that wears me down, and the twinkling jocularity, the “book-chat” that grates like a creaking hinge.
So I would sneak away; and if I had not been able to persuade the hotel to leave me some sort of supper tray, I would walk out and find a small, dark, half-empty restaurant, at the end of a high street, that would provide a dish of pasta or a fillet of sole, a half-bottle of bad wine, a diesel-oil espresso, a glass of Strega. But tonight? I would have to go along with whatever arrangement they had made for me. Because I could not eat carpets, or “personal services,” or solicit a bone from a drug dealer’s dog.
* * *
MY HAIR FLATTENED by the rain, I stepped inside, to a travelers’ stench. I was reminded at once of my visit to Leicester; but this place, Eccles House, was on a stifling scale of its own. I stood and breathed in—because one must breathe—tar of ten thousand cigarettes, fat of ten thousand breakfasts, the leaking metal seep of a thousand shaving cuts, and the horse-chestnut whiff of nocturnal emissions. Each odor, ineradicable for a decade, had burrowed into the limp chintz of the curtains and into the scarlet carpet that ran up the narrow stairs.