After Purple (49 page)

I could see him now, scowling in the hall as he heard the doorbell ring, thinking it was the postman or the man who reads the meter. Groping to the door, half-asleep and crotchety, Karma growling at his heels. His eyes kindling when he sees me, his whole body suddenly awake. He grabs my hair, pushes me against the wall, loses his mouth and face and tongue in mine. He's screwing me on the lino now, because it's nearer than the bed. Later — on the bed as well, the twenty dragons joining in, the mulberry tree shaking its hair across the window to hide us from the light. The smell of dark and pain and velvet and Leo's sperm. Everything long drawn out. No more quick splashes in bad-tempered bidets, but an hour's hot soak in pine-green water. Then lunch. Not litter bins or leftovers, but six or seven courses of hot steaming complicated things, and wine in
tumblers
. And Leo again, tasting of wine and sin and garlic now, screwing me under the table with the dirty dishes still sitting there on top of us.

I turned my back on the buffet and ran down the steps to the tube. There was a long queue for tickets which I joined. (Victoria is one of those smug, spoilsport stations where you can't slip by without paying.) I sat in the tube train and gazed around me. It was strange being in London after Lourdes. There were hardly any handicapped and no one was singing hymns or crying out to God to heal them. People had bosoms and buttocks and thighs again, whereas in Lourdes they'd done without them. The clothes were brighter (and tighter) and the women's faces lipsticked and mascara-ed instead of pious grey. There were far more men than women, while at Lourdes the females had outnumbered them by almost three to one. Even the smell was different — fug and tweed and cigarette smoke and sudden nudges of women's sharp fruity perfumes, instead of candle-wax and wet plastic wheelchair covers.

I glanced at the advertisements. There was one for brandy with a St Bernard dog sitting on the headline. I tried to avoid its eye — its name made me nervous. I'd assumed I'd run away from Bernadette, but if she could step into a different century, then eight hundred miles and a paltry channel crossing would do nothing to deter her. Apparitions don't need planes or passports. They can turn up anywhere, in the time it takes them just to think about it. Bernadette might even appear to me on this crowded lurching tube train. I tried to calm myself by reading the racing page over my neighbour's shoulder. After all, it was hardly sensible for Bernadette to waste her time in England. Half the English had never
heard
of Lourdes. When I'd told a man in the chemist I was going, he thought I'd said
Lords
and warned me the cricket season hadn't started yet. Far more practical for Bernadette to choose a fellow countryman, someone braver and better qualified than I was, preferably a business speculator who could develop Lourdes as something new and different. If Our Lady was no longer the centrepiece, then perhaps they could discover oil or wildlife or ski-runs, even a Gallic version of the Loch Ness monster — anything to give the tourists a new goal or purpose for their pilgrimages.

I arrived at Leo's station while I was still wondering whether you could turn the Grotto into a funfair and the Gave into a marina. It was good to leave the fug and dark behind and step out into light and air at street level. Notting Hill was as frowsty and frenetic as ever, but Leo's road looked as if it had dressed itself up to welcome me. It's one of the few in London with decent greenery and gardens which are more than just a drooping bay tree or a window-box. Most of the trees are planes and sycamores but there was one flowering cherry, iced with thick pink fondant clusters along its black boughs. Little splinters of white almond blossom lay in the road like the fragments of a shattered windscreen. The sky was a deep trusting blue. Strange to travel so far south and find only rain and storm, and then return north again to the sort of weather you see in holiday brochures.

I took off my sheepskin and shifted the case to the other hand. I was almost at Leo's door. He'd still be in his dressing-gown, his body naked under the rough caressing camelhair. I picked up a handful of blossom and scattered it through my hair. This was my real wedding. I was married to Leo in everything but name. Ray and God had merely been adulteries.

I pushed open the gate, passed the prickly bush whose name I never knew and the tangled plants my mother called weeds and suckers. The front door beetled up, black and heavy-featured with a brass nose which I thumped. Leo had refused to let me take my key away, since the time I'd left it on a beach and forgotten that tides come in.

I knocked again, louder. Perhaps Leo had the radio on or both bath-taps running full blast. He might even be asleep. He'd taken to sleeping later these last few weeks. He claimed it was an effect of the hypnosis, but I knew he was drinking more, to try and forget that the hypnosis wasn't working. It was whisky which was keeping him in bed when he should have been blazing to the door and melting in my arms. I tried the bell instead, kept my finger throbbing on it for a full two minutes. The house seemed to frown and mutter in disgust. It hated vulgar and unnecessary noise, like Leo did himself. I walked down the chipped stone steps to the basement door and hammered on it. Silence. Peered in through the window. Everything looked normal — coffee mugs making dirty pawmarks on a copy of
The Listener
, a score of Scriabin's “Dance of Ecstasy” open on the table. I like the word ecstasy. You can't rush or gabble it. All those hissy consonants mean you have to spell it out. If Leo was still in bed, then I'd join him there and start on the ecstasy as soon as he opened his eyes. His bedroom's in the basement at the back, so I walked round and tried to reconnoitre. The curtains were still drawn which meant nothing, as Leo never lets the light in, even if he's been up and dressed for hours. I squinted through a gap in the velour and saw his bed unslept in, the Indian rug drawn over it, and all twenty dragons quietly dozing in a neat, unruffled line.

I swallowed a tiny shred of panic like a crumb. He'd made his bed, that's all, and gone out for an early morning stroll. Or was breakfasting with Otto in a café or a club, or had rushed to an auction room to inspect a Chinese vase. Perhaps he'd planned moussaka for lunch and was out buying aubergines, or had taken Karma for a run in Holland Park. For the first time ever, I actually longed for Karma — that hoarse throaty bark, those howls of black clotted fury which meant that Leo was there. He and his master always went in and out together.

I tried all the doors and windows at the back, but every one was locked, so I went round to the front again and waited on the step. He wouldn't be long — he never was at this time. He worked at home in the mornings and left his social and business calls for later on. I amused myself by writing his name in pebbles on the path, and then in leaves, and then in almond blossom. The woman next door came out to collect her milk. She had a white jowly chin and a pink hairnet over sparse grey curls.

“Seen Mr Rzevski?” I called.

“No,” she snapped, and slammed the door. She hated Leo. Most of his neighbours did, or they were either mad or foreign or bad-tempered, so even if I called on them, I doubted if they'd help. It would have been nice to wait in comfort in somebody's sitting-room, instead of on a doorstep.

Every few minutes, someone passed the gate. At each set of footsteps I jumped up, peered over the hedge, then sank down disappointed. After the fifth foreign student or dumpy waddling housewife, I refused to even check — just shut my eyes and prayed it would be Leo. It never was.

Forty minutes passed. I went out into the road and stretched my legs a bit. Easier there to see him coming. A child was playing on a tricycle, a cat's green eyes gleamed at me from under an abandoned car, a little knot of Indian women giggled on the corner. I started walking up and down, each time a little slower than the last, to give Leo time to return from his shopping or his brooding or his breakfast. Actually, it was nearer to elevenses, so I nicked a bottle of milk from one of the doorsteps and drank it for my breakfast and lunch combined. When Leo did return, it would line my stomach for the celebration wine.

I'd been up and down thirteen times by now. The fourteenth time, I went a little further, crossed the road and turned the corner to the public phone-box. Otto's number rang out smug and shrill. I was half relieved when no one answered it. At least Leo wasn't loitering in Otto's fringed and fancy drawing-room with his feet up on the sofa and his tea in a Yung Cheng bowl. Leo had been spending more and more time with Otto in the last few weeks. When I complained, Leo said it was business pure and simple. Otto, he claimed, had a better eye for a bargain and a sharper nose for a fake than anyone else in London. He owned certain pieces of Chinese porcelain which Leo told me were rarer than any friendship. His father had left him his collection when he died. He'd been a trader in the Far East, who spent his last years in a bare and shabby flat in Finchley. After the funeral, they found no food in the larder, nor clothes in the wardrobe, but every nook and cranny stuffed with shoe-boxes full of cracked Ming and dusty Ch'ing. Now they were Otto's shoe-boxes.

I tried to keep my mind on something safe and dreary like shoe-boxes rather than on Leo, as I trailed back to the house again and knocked. I suppose it was stupid to worry. People go out for a hundred reasons, and Leo wasn't even
expecting
me till Saturday. He might have planned a visit to a gallery, or a meeting with a dealer out of town. Except he never went out on Wednesdays — it was the day he always reserved for his accountant chap. They sat in the basement all day, going over papers.

There were other tiny things which fretted me — Leo never normally made his bed or locked the fanlights or told the milkman not to leave him milk. There were probably explanations, simple ones. Or perhaps I was only nervous because I'd chucked out my religion and turned my back on Ray and Bernadette, and now I needed Leo to fill the hole. Notting Hill without a Leo was almost as bad as Lourdes without Our Lady. Great chunks kept breaking off from my life and I had nothing to stick them back with. Anyone else would have gone to the public library, or passed an hour or two dawdling round the shops. All I could do was sit on his doorstep and slaver like a spaniel.

After another hour, I made myself get up and trudge back to the tube. I was window-shopping for one thing only — Leo. I checked all his favourite haunts and then searched the shops and bars and restaurants in between. I asked at the delicatessen and the Pakistani grocer's. Neither of them had seen him for at least four days, but they both lent me a pound. (I was down to my last 2p.) I plodded through Holland Park, covering every path and avenue five or six times over, but all the dogs were smaller and paler than Karma.

I was almost crawling when I reached the house again. I hadn't slept a wink the night before. The channel ferry had been crowded and the crossing rough. Even my double gin I'd sicked up over the side. I stood in front of the inhospitable door and prayed for it to open. Leo might well have returned by now. I listened for the sudden crash of the piano booming out the way I never liked it, proving he was there. But there wasn't so much as a
pianissimo
.

When I did knock, the echo seemed to mock me. I peered in through the letter-box, but all I could see were black and white squares of lino distorted into strange crippled shapes. I slumped down on the step again and tried to think of nothing till he came. After an hour or so, nothing got boring, and then frightening. There was a strange irrational panic gnawing at the edges of my mind, and so much space and silence in the centre of it that Bernadette's voice kept sneaking through and scaring me. I knew I'd let her down. I wondered if I'd be punished for it — some grisly penance or racking spell in Purgatory.

The light was already fading, as if to remind me of the glooms of hell. I began to feel so small and miserable, I slunk round the back again and crawled into a sort of coal-cellar-cum-dungeon which was used for storing tools and smelt of fusty things like dead moths and old rope. I cleared a space on the floor and lay down on two sacks and my sheepskin. I'd have a siesta like God did, and when I woke, Leo would be back. It was difficult to sleep and even when I did doze off, I kept starting awake again, thinking I'd heard footsteps round the front. Finally, I took the sacks and spread them on the doorstep. People might stare or assume I was a squatter or a tramp, but at least I'd be there the second he walked in.

It was turning colder now and darker. My earlier elation had subsided into flat and sour champagne. The summer skies, the smiling cherry blossom were only a half-forgotten picture on an empty chocolate box. Now the sky was overcast and cloudy, the street lights coming on, cats and children scuttling safe indoors. My hands and feet were almost numb, but I still had feeling in my middle parts. In fact, I was trying to remember how many days or weeks or months it was since I'd last had proper sex. (Ray didn't count and nor did Leo's limpings.) I'd worked it out as the night before the night before the hospital which made it ninety-nine and a half days — more than a quarter of a year, and the longest time I'd ever gone without it. I'd probably develop nervous tics or eczema or ulcers. The Victorian books said over-indulging wore the brain and body out, but now the medicos had changed their minds and claimed abstinence led to stress-induced diseases. (No wonder Ray looked haggard.) I didn't want to think of Ray. It was Leo who was shouting through my body, squeezing through all its crevices. I longed to hug him close to me, cling to him for comfort. If I concentrated on him hard enough, he might actually turn up. Things often worked like that.

I went through all our mutual history, starting with the first time he'd fucked me, which was the second time we met (our introductory meeting being taken up with tetanus injections). He'd stayed stiff and thrusting for two and three quarter hours. When I purred, he told me it was something they practised in the East. If I hadn't been so sore, I'd have knelt down there and then and worshipped him. Women talk crap about men's looks or jobs or bank accounts, but there's only one thing really — the time between in and come. The longer the interval, the more precious the man. It doesn't matter really how many noughts on his payslip or letters after his name, or whether his hair is thinning or his waist thickening (although Leo has both hair and waist as well as staying-power). When you see gorgeous girls slavering over four-foot-nothing little creeps, you can tell they're three-hour men. Napoleon was one, almost certainly, and Charles II probably, and Jesus might have been, if He hadn't been so busy with other sorts of miracle. Leo was my first. He was not only a stayer, but he had those amazing comes which confuse the so-called sex experts who go around measuring penises and arousal levels and reduce everything to chest flushes and dilated pupils and carpopedal spasms. Their scientific orgasms are charted only in terms of seconds and centimetres, whereas Leo's lasted
centuries
.