At once I felt my guardian angel flash, at the corner of my eye. The weakness he brought with him, the migrainous qualm, ran through my whole body. I put out the palm of my hand and rested it against the papered wall.
There seemed to be no reception desk, nowhere to sign in. Probably no point: who’d stay here, who traveled under their right name? Come to that, I didn’t travel under mine. Sometimes I got confused, what with the divorce disentanglements, and the business bank accounts, and the name under which I’d written my early novels, which happened to be the name of one of my grandmothers. You should be sure, when you start in this business, that there’s one name you can keep: one that you feel entitled to, come what may.
From somewhere—beyond a door, and another door—there was a burst of male laughter. The door swung shut; the laughter ended in a wheeze, which trailed like another odor on the air. Then a hand reached for my bag. I looked down, and saw a small girl—a girl, I mean, in her late teens: a person, diminutive and crooked, banging my bag against her thigh.
She looked up and smiled. She had a face of feral sweetness, its color yellow; her eyes were long and dark, her mouth a taut bow, her nostrils upturned as if she were scenting the wind. Her neck seemed subject to a torsion; the muscles on the right side were contracted, as if some vast punitive hand had picked her up and taken her in a grip. Her body was tiny and twisted, one hip thrust out, one leg lame, one foot trailing. I saw this as she broke away from me, lugging my bag toward the stairs.
“Let me do that.” I carry, you see, not just the notes of whatever chapter I am working on, but also my diary, and those past diaries, kept in A4 spiral notebooks, that I don’t want my current partner to read while I’m away: I think carefully about what would happen if I were to die on a journey, leaving behind me a desk stacked with ragged prose and unpunctuated research notes. My bag is therefore small but leaden, and I rushed to catch up with her, wanting to drag it from her poor hand, only to realize that the scarlet stinking stairs shot steeply upward, their risers deep enough to trip the unwary, and took a sharp twist that brought us to the first landing. “Up to the top,” she said. She turned to smile over her shoulder. Her face swiveled to a hideous angle, almost to where the back of her head had been. With a fast, crabwise scuttle, leaning on the side of her built-up shoe, she shot away toward the second floor.
She had lost me, left me behind. By that second landing, I was not in the race. As I began to climb to the third floor—the stairs now were like a ladder, and the smell was more enclosed, and had clotted in my lungs—I felt again the flash of the angel. I was short of breath, and this made me stop. “Only a few more,” she called down. I stumbled up after her.
On a dark landing, she opened one door. The room was a sliver: not even a garret, but a bit of corridor blocked off. There was a sash window that rattled, and a spiritless divan with a brown cover, and a small brown chair with a plush buttoned back, which—I saw at once—had a gray rime of dust, like navel fluff, accumulated behind each of its buttons. I felt sick, from this thought, and the climb. She turned to me, her head wobbling, her expression dubious. In the corner was a plastic tray, with a small electric kettle of yellowed plastic; yellowed wheat ears decorated it. There was a cup.
“All this is free,” she said. “It is complimentary. It is included.”
I smiled. At the same time, inclined my head, modestly, as if someone were threading an honor around my neck.
“It is in the price. You can make tea. Look.” She held up a sachet of powder. “Or coffee.”
My bag was still in her hand; and looking down, I saw that her hands were large and knuckly, and covered, like a man’s, with small unregarded cuts.
“She doesn’t like it,” she whispered. Her head fell forward onto her chest.
It was not resignation; it was a signal of intent. She was out of the room, she was hurtling toward the stair head, she was swarming down before I could draw breath.
My voice trailed after her. “Oh, please … really, don’t…”
She plunged ahead, and around the bend in the stairs. I followed, I reached out, but she lurched away from me. I took a big ragged breath. I didn’t want to go down, you see, if I might have to come up again. In those days I didn’t know there was something wrong with my heart. I only found it out this year.
* * *
WE WERE BACK on the ground floor. The child produced from a pocket a big bunch of keys. Again, that bilious laughter washed out, from some unseen source. The door she opened was too near this laughter, far too near for my equanimity. The room itself was identical, except that a kitchen smell was in it, deceptively sweet, as if there were a corpse in the wardrobe. She put down my bag on the threshold.
I felt I had come a long way that day, since I had crept out of my double bed, the other side occupied by a light sleeper who still seemed, sometimes, a stranger to me. I had crossed London, I had traveled east, I had been up the stairs and down. I felt myself too proximate, now, to the gusty, beery laughter of unknown men. “I’d rather…” I said. I wanted to ask her to try for an intermediate floor. Perhaps not all the rooms were empty, though? It was the other occupants I didn’t like, the thought of them, and I realized that here on the ground floor I was close to the bar, to the slamming outer door letting in the rain and the twilight, to the snarled-up traffic … She picked up my bag. “No…” I said. “Please. Please don’t. Let me…”
But she was off again, swaying at speed toward the stairs, dragging her leg after her, like an old rebuff. I heard her draw breath above me. She said, as if just to herself, “She thought it was worse.”
I caught up with her inside the first choice of room. She leaned against the door. She showed no sign of discomfort, except that one eyelid jerked in spasm; the corner of her lip lifted in time with it, pulling away from her teeth. “I’ll be all right here,” I said. My ribs were heaving with effort. “Let’s not do any more rooms.”
I felt a sudden wash of nausea. The migraine angel leaned hard on my shoulder and belched into my face. I wanted to sit down on the bed. But courtesy demanded something. The child had put down my bag, and without it she looked even more unbalanced, her vast hands hanging, her foot scuffling the floor. What should I do? Ask her to stay for a cup of tea? I wanted to offer her money but I couldn’t think what would be enough for such a feat of porterage, and besides I thought that I might be further in debt to her before I left the place, and perhaps it was best to run up a tab.
* * *
I FELT SAD, as I stood in the doorway, waiting for Mr. Simister. My nose ran a little. When Mr. Simister arrived I said, “I have hay fever.”
“We are actually close,” he said; then, after a long pause: “To the venue.” We could walk, he was saying. I shrank back into the doorway. “Perhaps in view of your ailments,” he said. I shrank inside: how did he know my ailments? “Though, a night like this,” he said. “Damps the pollen down. I’d have thought. Somewhat.”
The lecture was to be given at what I can only describe as a disused school. There were school corridors, and those polished shields on the wall that say things like “JK Rowling, Cantab 1963.” There was a smell of school, residual—polish and feet. But there were no signs of actual, present-day pupils. Perhaps they had all fled into the hills, and left it to the Book Group.
Despite the rain, the members had come out in heroic numbers: twenty, at least. They were widely dispersed through the long rows, with tactful gaps between: in case the dead ones rolled in late. Some few had squints and others sticks, many had beards including the women, and the younger members—even those who appeared sound at first glance—had a glazed unfocused eye, and bulging parcels under their seats, which I knew at once would be the manuscripts of sci-fantasy novels, which they would like me to take away and read and comment on and post back to them—“In your own time, of course.”
There is a way of looking, and then there is a professional, impersonal, way of looking. I settled myself behind a table,
took a sip of water, flicked through my notes, checked the location of my handkerchief, raised my head, scanned the room, attempted a theoretical sort of eye contact, and swept a smile from side to side of the audience: looking, I am sure, like one of those nodding dogs you used to see in the back of Austin Maestros. Mr. Simister got to his feet; to say “he stood up” would give you no notion of the impressive performance it really was. “Our guest has not been well in the last week, you will be as sorry as I am to learn, hay fever, so will deliver her lecture sitting down.”
I felt a fool already, a greater fool than I needed to feel. Nobody would sit down because they had hay fever. But I thought, never explain. I rattled smartly through my performance, throwing in the odd joke and working in one or two entirely spurious local allusions. Afterward there were the usual questions. Where did the title of your first book come from? What happened to Joy at the end of Teatime in Bedlam? What, would I say, looking back, were my own formative influences? (I replied with my usual list of obscure, indeed nonexistent Russians.) A man in the front row spoke up: “May I ask what prompted your foray into biography, Miss Er? Or should I say Ms.?” I smiled weakly, as I always do, and proffered “Why don’t you call me Rose?” Which created a little stir, as it is not my name.
On the way back Mr. Simister said that he considered it a great success, more than somewhat, and was sure they were all most grateful. My hands were clammy from the touch of the science fantasists, there was a felt-tip mark on my cuff, and I was hungry.
‘By the way, I expect you have eaten,’ Mr. Simister said. I sank down in my seat. I didn’t know why he should expect anything of the sort, but I made an instant decision in favor of starvation, rather than go to some establishment with him where the members of the Book Group might be lurking under a tablecloth or hanging from a hat stand, upside down like bats.
I stood in the hall of Eccles House, and shook drops of water from myself. There was an immanent odor of aged cooking oil. Supper over, then: all chips fried? An indoor smog hovered, about head height. From the shadows at the foot of the stairs, the small girl materialized. She gazed up at me. “We don’t normally get ladies,” she said. Her tongue, I realized, was too big for her mouth. She had a rustle in her speech, as if the god that made her was rubbing his dry palms together.
“What are you doing?” I said. “Why are you, why are you still on duty?”
There was a clatter behind a half-open door, the bump and rattle of bottles knocked together, and then the scraping of a crate across the floor. A second later, “Mr. Webley!” someone called.
Another voice called, “What the fuck now?” A small dirty man in a waistcoat tumbled out of an office, leaving the door gaping on a capsizing tower of box files. “Ah, the writer!” he said.
It wasn’t I who had called him out. But I was enough to make him linger. Perhaps he thought he was going to filch the regular writer business from Rosemount. He stared at me; he walked around me for a while; he did everything but finger my sleeve. He rose on his toes and thrust his face into mine.
“Comfortable?” he asked.
I took a step backward. I trampled the small girl. I felt the impress of my heel in flesh. She wormed her flinching foot from under mine. She uttered not a sound.
“Louise—” the man said. He sucked his teeth, considering her. “Fuck off out of it,” he said.
* * *
I BOLTED UPSTAIRS then, stopping only on the second landing. The whole evening was taking on a heightened, crawling quality. These men called sinister and webley; I thought they might know each other. I have to face a night in that room, I thought, with no company, and see what sort of sheets they keep beneath that turd-colored candlewick cover. For a moment I was uncertain whether to go up or down. I’d not sleep if I didn’t eat, but out there was the rain, a moonless night in a strange town, miles from the center and I have no map; I could send for a taxi and tell the driver to take me somewhere to eat, because that’s what they do in books, but people never do in life, do they?
I stood debating this with myself, and saying come now, come now, what would Anita Brookner do? Then I saw something move, above me; just a faint stir of the air, against the prevailing fug. My left eye was by now malfunctioning quite badly, and there were jagged holes in the world to that side of my head, so I had to turn my whole body to be sure of what I saw. There in the darkness was the small girl, standing above me. How? My poor heart—not yet diagnosed—gave one sunken knock against my ribs; but my head said coolly, emergency stairs? Goods lift?
She came down, silent, intent, the worn tread muffling the scrape of her shoe. “Louise,” I said. She put her hand on my arm. Her face, turned up toward me, seemed luminous. “He always says that,” she murmured. “Eff off out.”
“Are you related to him?” I asked.
“Oh no.” She wiped some drool from her chin. “Nothing like that.”
“Don’t you get time off?”
“No, I have to clear the ashtrays last thing, I have to wash up in the bar. They laugh at me, them men. Saying, han’t you got a boyfriend, Louise? Calling me, ‘Hippy.’”
* * *
IN THE ROOM, I hung my coat on the outside of the wardrobe, ready to go; it is a way of cheering myself up, that I learned in the hotel in Berlin. My cheeks burned. I could feel the sting of the insults, the sniggering day by day; but “Hippy” seemed a mild name, when you consider … The appalling thought came to me that she was some sort of test. I was like a reporter who finds an orphan in a war zone, some ringwormed toddler squawking in the ruins. Are you supposed to just report on it; or pick up the creature and smuggle it home, to learn English and grow up in the Home Counties?
* * *
THE NIGHT, PREDICTABLY, was shot through with car alarms, snatches of radio playing from other rooms, and the distant roaring of chained animals. I dreamed of Rosemount, its walls fading around me, its bay windows melting into air. Once, half-awake, tossing under the fungoid counterpane, I thought I smelled gas. I tumbled into sleep again and smelled gas in my dream: and here were the members of the Book Group rolling from beneath my bed, sniggering as they plugged the chinks round the windows and door with the torn pages of their manuscripts. Gasping, I woke. A question hovered in the fetid air. Just what did prompt your foray into biography, Miss Er? Come to that, what prompted your foray into foraying? What prompted anything at all?
I was downstairs by six-thirty. The day was fine. I was hollow at my center, and in a vicious temper. The door stood open, and a wash of light ran over the carpet like sun-warmed margarine.
My taxi—prebooked, as always, for a quick getaway—was at the curb. I looked around, cautious, for Mr. Webley. Already a haze was beginning to overlay Eccles House. Smokers’ coughs rattled down the passages, and the sound of hawking, and the flushing of lavatories.
Something touched my elbow. Louise had arrived beside me, noiseless. She wrested the bag from my hand. “You came down by yourself,” she whispered. Her face was amazed. “You should have called me. I’d have come. Are you not having your breakfast?”
She sounded shocked, that anyone should refuse food. Did Webley feed her, or did she scavenge? She raised her eyes to my face, then cast them down. “If I hadn’t just come now,” she said, “you’d have gone. And never said bye-bye.”
We stood at the curb together. The air was mild. The driver was reading his Star. He didn’t look up.
“Might you come back?” Louise whispered.
“I don’t think so.”
“I mean, one of these days?”
I never doubted this: if I told her to get into the taxi, she would do it. Away we’d go: me rattled, afraid of the future; her trusting and yellow, her mad eyes shining into mine. But what then? I asked myself. What would we do then? And have I the right? She is an adult, however short. She has a family somewhere. I stared down at her. Her face, in full daylight, was patchily jaundiced as if dyed with cold tea; her broad smooth forehead was mottled with deeper blotche
s, the size and color of old copper coins. I could have wept. Instead, I took my purse out of my bag, peered inside it, took out a twenty-pound note, and squeezed it into her hand. “Louise, will you buy yourself something nice?”
I didn’t look into her face. I just got into the taxi. My migraine aura was now so severe that the world on the left had ceased to exist, except as an intermittent yellow flash. I was nauseated, by inanition and my own moral vacuity. But by the time the cab crawled up to the station approach, I was getting a bit satirical, faute de mieux, and thinking, well, for sure A. S. Byatt would have managed it better: only I can’t quite think how.
When I got to the station, and paid the driver, I found I had only £1.50 left. The cash machine was out of order. Of course, I had a credit card, and if there had been a dining service I could have paid for my breakfast on board. But there was, the announcement said, “a buffet car, situated toward the rear of the train,” and five minutes after we pulled out a boy came to sit beside me on my right: one of the sons of the town, eating from a cardboard box a grayish pad of meat which shined his fingers with fat.
* * *
WHEN I ARRIVED home, I threw my bag into a corner as if I hated it, and standing in the kitchen—last night’s washing up not done, and two wineglasses, I noticed—I ate a single cheese cracker dry out of the tin. Back to work, I thought. Sit down and type. Or you might just die of a surfeit.
In the next few weeks, my biography took some unexpected turns. Aunt Virginie and the Mexican got into the text quite a lot. I began to make versions in which Aunt Virginie and the Mexican ran off together, and in which (therefore) my subject had never been born. I could see them speeding across Europe on an adulterous spree, accompanied by the sound of shattering glass: drinking spa towns dry of champagne and breaking the bank at Monte Carlo. I made up that the Mexican went home with the proceeds and led a successful revolution, with Aunt Virginie featuring in it as a sort of La Pasionaria figure: but with dancing, as if Isadora Duncan had got into it somehow. It was all very different from my previous work.