‘I suppose this is goodbye,’ he said.
I rested my head on the back of the seat. ‘For a while.’
In a lower voice he said, ‘I can’t bear you to go.’
I turned. ‘Can’t you?’
‘I can’t bear it . . . I . . .’
I moved towards him. He took my face in his hands and kissed my mouth, hesitantly. I was released, like a coiled spring; the old blindness rose up. I grabbed him.
It lasted for a long time. Then he drew back, shakily, and kissed my eyes and my cheeks; I put my hand inside his shirt, at last, and felt his lovely hard chest. I stroked the hairs; I ran my hand over his shoulder, feeling its smoothness. He was trembling, he wanted me so much. My mouth was dry; I couldn’t swallow.
I whispered, ‘Don’t leave me tonight.’
We kissed again, and finally we managed to get out of the car. Dazed, we made our way into the hotel and along the lobby. My legs were so weak that I had to lean against him. We stood at the lift . . . his shirt was unbuttoned but he didn’t notice. I always feel superstitious, at lifts. If the lift arrives soon, its arrow pinging, then it will be all right. This time it did. We stood there suspended like waxworks as the lift rose.
I fumbled my door open and slammed it shut. Then we were down on the bed, struggling.
‘I love you,’ he said. ‘Heather, I can’t believe this . . . Let me look at you.’
‘No.’
I gripped him between my thighs. I’d got his shirt off now and his skin . . . oh, its smell . . . I was rubbing my nose against it.
‘I mustn’t do this . . . Heather –’
‘Come on,’ I crooned, unbuckling his belt.
‘I shouldn’t – please, my darling, please stop me –’
‘No,’ I hissed in his ear.
‘We mustn’t – not yet.’
‘Yes – now!’
‘You see, I love you. Do you understand? I’ve been wanting to tell you, all this time . . . I didn’t dare say it – don’t –’
I was licking his chest . . . the salty skin. My tongue stroked him. I grappled with his zip.
‘Ever since that party . . . those stupid people all round you –’
I silenced him. He couldn’t speak now. I silenced him with my mouth, pulling him into me until I was filled. Greedily I explored his mouth; greedily I arched and fell with him, gripping him, damp with sweat, my legs tightening around him. There was a high humming in my ears, like telegraph wires singing in the wind, higher and higher.
He was so passionate. His face was wet with tears, from wanting me so much. Cries came from deep inside him, as if his soul was being dragged up in pain. My face was wet from his kisses; he couldn’t stop kissing me . . . we opened our mouths so wide it seemed our faces must split.
We rolled over and fell on to the floor, bumping my hip. The counterpane was pulled down, tangled in our legs. I giggled but he didn’t; there was nothing light-hearted about him. We were jammed against the table; its lamp rattled, in rhythm . . . the wires in my head hummed higher.
Miraculously, we finished together. Afterwards he lay holding me tightly, for a long time. I had no idea what he was thinking; his intensity had shaken me. We lay there, skin to skin; he didn’t relax. I wondered if I should get us a glass of water.
Minutes passed. Finally he unstuck himself from me, gently, and removed the counterpane as if tenderly unwrapping a parcel. He gazed at me; his dark eyes were like two sorrowful pools.
‘We shouldn’t have done that,’ he said.
‘Why not?’
His voice was high and tight. ‘Just . . . so very soon . . . too soon.’
He started stroking me, still in a sad way. He stroked every inch of me, gazing at my body. I was used to this, as you probably are . . . a lazy itemization . . . a sated inspection of the goods. But the expression on his face wasn’t like that. It was tragic, and reverent. He pulled down a pillow and put it under my head, to make me comfortable.
Finally he got up and put on his underpants. There was a thud and a giggle from the next room. He sat on the bed.
‘Want a Polo?’ I asked.
He put his head in his hands. ‘No thank you.’ I fished for the Polos, on the table behind me, and took one. Sucking it, I watched him. He sat there, slumped. I gazed at his walnut body and white briefs.
Then he said, ‘Did that mean anything?’
I looked at him, startled. ‘What?’
‘I just have a feeling . . . that I wasn’t quite reaching you.’
I paused. ‘Really?’
He lifted his head and gazed at me, stricken. ‘I love you so much, you see . . . I love you so much, Heather, that it frightens me.’
Chapter Fourteen
TWO WEEKS LATER a letter arrived. I read it in the Tesco car park; I preferred reading letters in my Mini. The back seat was heaped with carrier bags. Dad was useless at shopping, and Mum was at work.
It was a sunny Saturday. I wound down the window. Beyond the fence was the recreation ground, and the squeak of the seesaw.
My darling Heather,
Your departure has shattered me. It’s as if half of myself has been torn away. Those two days with you have changed my life for good. Existence before I met you – all twenty-one years of it – has become irrelevant. I told you it’s frightening, didn’t I? And now, life without you is meaningless too. I open my mouth to talk to people – why? I eat, I work, and I can’t see any reason for it. Believe me, I’ve never felt anything like this for any human being. I can’t be careful and cool about it, there’s no point disguising my words. I tell myself that you can’t possibly feel the same, it would be a miracle if you did, but I would be quite happy if, some day, you just felt a fraction of what I feel for you. Do I dare hope?
I can’t concentrate, I can’t work, I just remember the scent of your hair. I close my eyes and try to picture your face. If only I had a photo. I go over those two enchanted days again and again, trying to find some moment that I’ve overlooked. Just now I had a wonderful surprise – I remembered the government shop, and we were looking at handbags and you leant over and said, ‘It’s such a relief, not having your driver staring.’ I remember how happy I felt then. I remember, over and over, what happened that last memorable night. Those words I said: will you forget them? I behaved badly, please forgive me.
I can’t exist without you. I must see you. Even being in the same city would help – even if I only saw you sometimes. Please, will you write and tell me whether you will be angry if I come to London?
And please, one more thing, will you tell me exactly what you’re doing and what you’re wearing, while (IF?) you write to me?
All my love, my darling, in hope
Your Ali
A cracking of branches. It was Teddy and his friends, bashing through the undergrowth. I sat in the car, holding the flimsy blue letter. Teddy stopped, and said to them loudly,
‘I kiss my girlfriend’s tits before I go to sleep.’
They stood, switching at the bushes aimlessly. Teddy was eight now, and turning into a real thug.
‘So do I,’ said one of his friends, feebly.
‘Smelly-bum!’ Teddy rushed at him; they thundered off like elephants through the rhododendrons.
‘Tits! Tits!’ They raced out of the bushes and across the grass. Toddlers rose up and down on the see-saw, watching them.
I’d never had a letter like this. I couldn’t think how to reply, so I put it off until the next week, when I was in New York. He wanted to know what I was doing; I told him that I’d put a mud-pack on my face. I said I was sitting in my hotel room; there were cop sirens on the TV and down in the street, both at the same time. I ended it by saying that I hoped he was well, and that I’d love to see him again, if he came to London, and he must let me know the date. I ended it ‘all my love’ because he did.
It didn’t seem an adequate reply, a bit flat, but I didn’t seem to have any feelings except lust and curiosity. I should have
been terribly flattered, but I kept thinking: how can he say all that when he doesn’t know me? Does he think he knows me? My one fear was that somehow he’d come to my home. I imagined him standing at the main road and realizing that the place with the pigs wallowing in front belonged to me.
Porky, Porky, Poo-ee . . . They’d thought me filthy, too . . . They knew how I felt. This Ali hadn’t found me out yet, but what difference did that make?
When my face moved, the mud-pack cracked. I showered, and beige water trickled into the drain. Later that night I met a Lebanese man; I used my Intermediate French with him as he sat beside me, his hand up my skirt, and told me how très important he was in the government. Later still, I lay beneath him and gazed up into his nostrils, which were stuffed with hairs. He was pompous and overweight; I hated him.
Gwen used to make herself sick by scratching her throat. I remembered that, as I pressed him into me. Ali, want to love me now?
I made my escape through Ali. In April a letter arrived; not flimsy blue this time but a creamy envelope posted from London. He was in Earl’s Court; he’d found a flat and moved straight in, the first day. Could he see me? Now that he was only seventeen miles away, the letter was formal in tone.
I met him in a trattoria. We sucked in spaghetti worms, though neither of us was hungry. We only relaxed when he leaned over to wipe my chin, tenderly, with his serviette.
‘You look so different’, he said, ‘with your hair up.’
‘Don’t you like it?’
‘No.’
‘Shall I take it down?’
‘Not now.’
Our plates were taken away. He said in a low voice, ‘The flat looks out on the Cromwell Road . . . you know, the one with all the airport traffic coming in. I’ve been sitting there imagining that one of those cars had you in it.’
‘But I didn’t know you were here.’
‘London is you . . . Then I couldn’t wait any longer.’ He paused. ‘Do you forgive me?’
‘For asking me out?’
He shook his head. ‘For talking like this.’
‘I like it.’
‘Only like?’ He paused. ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t ask you. I told myself that before I started.’
‘What’s happened at home?’
He raised his eyebrows, hopelessly. It came back in a rush; how I’d kissed his lovely mouth, how his skin smelt. How warm his hands had been inside my clothes. I melted inside. I wanted him right now . . . all afternoon and all tomorrow.
‘Heather, I’ve broken their hearts . . .’
He lit a cigarette. He didn’t see the waiter hovering beside him, holding the menu for dessert.
‘My mother cried for two days. Everywhere in the house there were doors opening and closing . . . My uncle was called down from ‘Pindi . . . My sister Bibs wouldn’t speak to me . . .’ He rubbed his head and raised it, with the same sorrow I’d seen before, weeks back in the hotel room.
‘They said . . . oh that they’d brought me up to be decent and responsible, and what was I doing leaving the family like this, leaving my sisters . . . deserting the business, running off on impulse, acting shamefully.’ He paused. ‘I wish they hadn’t said shamefully.’
‘Are you ashamed?’
He shook his head, as if to clear it. ‘I’m confused. They know I’m not just sowing wild oats. They know I’m not like that.’
‘They must hate me.’
‘Just at the moment.’
‘Luring you away.’
‘But they’re angrier with me. Worse than angry – disappointed. Sad.’
He stubbed out his cigarette. He wore a blue tee-shirt; not one of the smart suits I’d seen him in before. After all, he was unemployed now.
‘You’ve given up an awful lot,’ I said. I was imagining rolling up his tee-shirt slowly, taking my time; rolling it up like a window blind.
‘I love you,’ he said.
Three days later I moved to Earl’s Court. Dad watched me pack up the Mini. Now I knew I was going, I’d become more friendly with him.
‘It’s not Honolulu,’ I said. ‘It’s half an hour away.’
‘Beats me what you see in it. Filthy place, London. You’re a country girl.’
‘Call this the country?’ I said, my arms full of clothes.
‘Fresh air, here.’
‘Kerosene fumes and pig-shit, you mean.’
‘It’s London makes you swear like that.’
‘Dad! It was you.’
I climbed into the car and wound down the window. From here I was level with his belt as he stood beside me.
‘Well, Dad . . .’
‘Earl’s Court, you say? You watch out . . . full of wogs. Wogs and Jew-boys . . .’
A silence. Neither of us knew what to say; we never did, at moments like this. I looked around at the yard: his sightless lorry, its windscreen broken . . . the blond grass, swept flat by yesterday’s rain. I pictured myself being buried there, and the grass was my hair sticking out. I looked at the caravan, its hardboard panels buckled and peeling.
‘Remember when you was little?’ he said. ‘Couldn’t get you out that trailer. Had all them bottles in there.’
Remember when I was little, what you did in the hen-house? Twelve years old, I was.
I spoke something to the dirty denim of his trousers. A plane roared overhead.
‘What’s that?’ he said.
‘Nothing.’
We paused.
‘We’ll be seeing you at the weekend, your Mum and me?’
I nodded and drove off, jolting over the potholes. Cars hooted as I swerved into the main road.
I reached Earl’s Court in twenty minutes flat, speeding through the lights as they changed to red, and flashing cars that got in my way. Drivers swore at me as I passed.
Leaving the car, I ran up the stairs and into Ali’s arms. I pressed my cheek against his scarred skin.
‘Are they upset?’ Ali asked. ‘Will they ever speak to me?’
‘They don’t know about you. You’re two girls called Daphne and Rose, you work for British Caledonian.’
‘Should I feel guilty, plucking you from your family’s bosom?’
I shook my head, wordlessly. We rocked backwards and forwards.
‘I still can’t believe it,’ he said. ‘I can’t believe my luck.’ He hugged me tighter. ‘Tell me about them and little Teddy. I want to know everything about you.’
‘I wouldn’t bother.’
‘You’re a mystery girl, know that? I’ll find out. We have all the time in the world. I want to know you through and through . . .’
‘Stop it, Ali!’
He drew back. ‘What a challenging look. Try me.’
I was loved. No doubt about that. I hope that some time in your life you’ve been the object of such tenderness as Ali lavished on me. He opened out like a flower – honestly, there’s no other word for it. He shed his stilted good manners; he bloomed with confidence.
I’m sure you deserved it more than I did. I was used to lust, of course, and to people fooling themselves with the words they were saying when their blood was up. But Ali meant what he said. When he urged me to tell him everything, he meant exactly that. If I’d replied: my father betrayed me, he scrumpled up my childhood and threw it away like soiled paper out of a car window . . . If I’d said that, oh, and a hundred other things, it would have been all right. Ali would have been outraged but he’d have held me in his arms and loved me even more fiercely. He’d have said: trust me.
If only it were that simple. In women’s magazines, on the problem page, they always advise: talk to him about it. They’re so silly. If you’re able to talk – if you want to share it – then where’s the problem?
Closing my eyes, I can describe every detail of that flat. I can think myself back into it; nobody can take that away from me. It was on the second floor. Down below was a porticoed porch, with flaking columns. The hallway was silted up with bills and cards for 24-hour minicab
s; yellower ones were heaped on the table. It smelt of torn cats and escaping gas. I never saw the people who lived on the ground floor. On the first floor lived a woman who passed me once and muttered in something that sounded like German. On the third floor, above us, lived some Iranian students whose pop music thudded dully through our lovemaking and the rhythm of my bad dreams. There must have been someone called Miss Maguire on the floor above, because letters addressed to that name disappeared from the hall.
Our flat: a big front room, fitted carpet, and embossed wallpaper like an Indian restaurant. Through the nylon curtains you could see down into the Cromwell Road, busy day and night with the traffic coming in and out of London. Amongst the cars came the airport buses, big as queen bees, carried along in the flow. Our first day I realized: it’s the A4. This is the road I’d lived on all my life, and I’m still living on it . . . Still here.
There was a partitioned-off kitchen, with a high, stained ceiling, and a bathroom, and the bedroom at the back. It overlooked a dark well of yards. Beyond the houses you could see a church, one of those monster, sooty, Victorian ones, all boarded up. Its spire rose above the TV aerials. At night all the lights came on in the little windows, all those flats where people lived who I’d never meet, nobody knew anyone in Earl’s Court, I soon realized, because nobody was there long enough . . . hotel-land, bedsitter-land, foreigners and transients and girls, six to a flat, waiting to get married. So many other girls, you couldn’t count the numbers, who’d run away from home. All the lights came on but the church stayed black.
Our flat . . . You probably want to know about me and Ali, but that flat meant a lot to me. We didn’t do much to it; it was furnished, and anyway we didn’t have the inclination. Someone’s child had pasted Flash Gordon stickers to the hardboard where the fireplace had been. Someone else had hung a net frill around the electricity meter; I wondered about that person. The flat never really became ours, though we inhabited it. For days I didn’t even know the address. We didn’t move the furniture around; it was enough to be there.
That’s what Ali said, anyway. He’d say, ‘Let’s stay here all day.’
‘My feet are cold.’
‘Darling, your poor toes.’