Learning by Heart (6 page)

‘He was an engraver by trade,’ she had been saying.

‘Tell me his dates.’

‘1757 to 1827.’

He shaded his eyes. ‘You said that without looking at the book.’

‘I just remember things.’

‘Remember one of his poems,’ he said. ‘And not “Tyger, Tyger”.’

‘I can’t,’ she admitted. ‘Not right off.’

‘Is it doing you any good at all, do you think?’ he asked. ‘All this?’

‘I know more than I did,’ she said.

He laughed. ‘You’re so very composed,’ he said. In the silence that followed, she saw that he did not look well. He seemed exhausted.

‘You’re different,’ he remarked suddenly.

Automatically she put her hand to her hair. The night before, she had sat in front of the kitchen mirror while Jenny wound her thick blond hair round little bone-like spin curlers, winding them close to her head until her scalp ached all over. Cora had held the striped packet, doling them out. The stench of the perming lotion had filled the room, strong enough to strip paint. She had emerged looking exactly like Jenny: her natural wave had been replaced with rigid, tight curls, set in place with a thick lotion.

‘I’ve done my hair,’ she said.

‘Hmm,’ he said. ‘I suppose you want to be like the rest of them, more’s the pity.’ He studied her. She had dressed carefully that day; like every girl in London, she wanted to look like Bridget Bardot, a tiny waist cinched with a broad white belt, and frilly petticoats under a gingham skirt. The starch in the skirt made her flesh itch, but it was worth it.

Bisley made his usual God-help-us sigh. Then, crossing his arms over his chest, he said, ‘Tell me about the place you come from.’

‘Sherborne?’ she asked. ‘It’s just a town. A little town.’

‘In Dorset?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘There’s a boarding-school … an abbey.’

‘Tell me about your parents.’

‘They’re very ordinary.’

‘What does your father do?’

‘He’s a solicitor.’

‘Of course he is,’ Bisley murmured. He did not ask what her mother did. In those days, mothers of a certain class did nothing but worry whether they could afford to keep the cook and gardener. ‘Tell me about your house.’

‘It’s in the country …’

‘A big garden,’ he said. ‘Hybrid tea roses, fruit cages and a lawn.’

‘Yes,’ she said. She resented that he spoke as if in criticism.

‘And you lived there until you came up to London, nowhere else.’

‘Well … yes.’

‘And I bet nobody in Sherborne wears a skirt like that.’

She blushed. Her mother, when Cora had last seen her, had been wearing a smart day dress with a white collar. Somewhere back in the dim recesses of time Cora remembered wriggling into liberty bodices and Chilprufe knickers. At home, she still had a wardrobe of frilly party frocks, white gloves for church and Clark’s sandals, all with a little flower pattern in the leather upper. She glanced down at the winklepicker shoes that pinched her toes, then gave Bisley a little smile.

‘Oh, Cora,’ he said resignedly. ‘Go back and get married. Bring up a batch of similarly self-satisfied children.’

‘I’m not self-satisfied,’ she objected, without rancour. ‘And I don’t want to get married,’ she added.

‘What, never?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Why?’

She shrugged.

‘You’ve never met a man,’ he said.

‘I don’t particularly want to,’ she replied. She didn’t like the City boys that Jenny and the others seemed in awe of: she thought them boring and stuffy. And she was programmed, despite what she felt to be fair and liberal-minded, not to consider a working-class man.

Bisley gazed at her for some time. ‘You don’t want to be sullied with all the mess of it, do you, Cora?’

‘It won’t be a mess,’ she said.

‘Oh, God.’ He half smiled to himself. ‘The fire of life. The wild, abandoned passion of it.’ He took a deep breath, which rattled in his throat, and coughed protractedly. Concerned for him, she waited until the bout was over.

‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘I don’t know why you’re always telling me that I don’t understand life, or people, or all these poets. I mean, it isn’t as if you’ve ever married.’

He remained absolutely still, frowning. ‘You think me a cold fish, do you?’ he asked.

She tilted her chin defensively. ‘You seem to dislike everybody,’ she replied.

‘And you think that, if I were married,’ he said, ‘that would be proof that I’d had some kind of real life?’

‘You told me yourself that you fell in love with books, not men or women.’

Bisley went to the window and stood very still, looking out at the street. ‘I was married when I was twenty-two to a very lovely woman,’ he told her. ‘She died four years later, and so did our daughter.’ A note of venom came into his voice. ‘Childbirth in the enlightened technological age.’

A great rush of shame flooded colour into Cora’s face. ‘Oh, I’m so sorry,’ she whispered. She didn’t know what to do. She stood up. Her natural urge was to put an arm round him to comfort him, yet she remained where she was. ‘Can I get you anything?’ she asked eventually.

‘Yes,’ he said. He seemed to shake off his ill-humour as he turned back to her. ‘Fall in love and get your heart broken,’ he told her. ‘It’s the only way you’re ever going to understand what you’ve been reading.’ He waved her away, telling her to go home. ‘Do me that favour, Cora,’ he said, as she went to the door. ‘Get your heart torn to pieces. Just for me.’

She did as he had asked, although she hadn’t planned it.

She met David Menzies at one of Jenny’s parties. Her housemate organized them at every opportunity, especially at weekends. In fact, there had rarely been a free weekend all summer, and Cora had begun to tire of the endless fraught Saturdays preparing the house, usually in the company of Jenny’s gaggle of girlfriends from the shop where she worked in Regent Street. It was an interior-design place, full of overpriced curtains and cushions in what Cora thought secretly were awful designs of black, white and scarlet, but it was very fashionable.

This, it seemed, required a staff of ten, all girls below twenty-five, who pandered to the fifty-something male owner, Terry Ray, placating and admiring him as if he were a performing poodle. Cora hated him. He tried hard to look younger than he was – much younger – and, in her eyes, succeeded only in making himself ridiculous. But that wasn’t the reason for her dislike: he was cruel in his attitudes, nasty with the girls.

‘Oh, he’s a love,’ Jenny would tell her. ‘Such a giggle. Such a gossip.’

‘I don’t think so,’ Cora had told her.

Jenny had turned wide eyes on her. ‘How would you know?’ she demanded. ‘You’re not exactly a social butterfly, are you?’

Cora looked at her friend speculatively: Jenny had changed lately, become less optimistic, more cynical. Once, she would never have made a sarcastic remark. Now, it was all she could do with any feeling. ‘Just something about him,’ she replied. ‘Something strange.’

‘But he’s like another girlfriend,’ Jenny said. ‘Really, Cora, you are dim.’

Cora hadn’t pursued the subject. But she had seen how Ray looked at Jenny and another of his staff, his narrow, possessive glances, his mean little face peering out from behind the primped façade. She had heard him criticize the girls to customers, then watch their bodies, their mannerisms, his eyes on their breasts and shoulders.

It was Terry Ray’s birthday on the night that Cora met David Menzies. He came with other guests, on the periphery of Ray’s group. They arrived at half past ten, two hours late, eight of them, mostly the worse for wear, straight from a restaurant. The house was already full, but Jenny was humiliated by Ray’s late arrival. After all, the party was in his honour, and he came through the door in a tetchy, picky mood, making fun of the house, the road and the neighbours. Cora saw Jenny blush; afterwards, Ray cornered her, and Cora noticed his hand pinch Jenny’s leg, hard, through the wide skirt and petticoats.

She had turned away, and found Menzies next to her, with an empty tumbler. ‘Shall we save her?’ he asked.

‘Do you know him?’ Cora asked.

‘He’s a customer,’ Menzies replied.

‘What do you sell to him?’

‘Glass.’

‘What kind?’ she asked.

He didn’t answer. He held out the tumbler. ‘Could I have some water?’

‘Not Scotch? We have plenty. Someone gave it to us. There’s gin, too.’

‘I don’t drink much at these things,’ he told her.

‘You must be the only person in London who doesn’t.’

‘Ah,’ he mused. ‘I’m a bit dull, then.’

‘No,’ she said. She took him into the kitchen, and ran the tap. ‘Are you a friend of Terry’s?’ she asked, over her shoulder. Menzies was standing in the doorway.

‘Not really,’ he said.

‘Do you know much about him?’

‘No. Other than that he has another shop in Sussex somewhere. And an ex-wife.’

‘He’s divorced?’

‘He has two children,’ he said.

‘And you,’ she said. ‘Are you married?’

‘No,’ he answered, smiling. ‘Are you?’

Menzies was a sociable person. It sounded dreary,
sociable
, but it was this that she liked in him straight away, his lack of arrogance, his good humour. He had a friendly way with women: he put his arm round them a lot.

‘He’s not quite real, is he?’ one of her housemates asked her one evening, after he had dropped her at home.

‘What do you mean?’

‘He’s always the same. A bit unreal, if you ask me.’

‘Yes,’ said Cora, secretly pleased. She didn’t want to waste her time crying in her bedroom over being treated badly, like this girl did.

‘He’s a bore,’ Jenny opined.

David worked alone in a warehouse in east London. Cora went to it early one Saturday, following the directions he had given her. She passed a pub on the corner, a row of terraced houses, and the street ended abruptly in a high wall, with a few lock-up sheds lined up against it. The old dock warehouses were mostly boarded-up, some derelict, only the ground floor used by a strange variety of trades. Just up from David’s workshop there was an Indian garment store; rack upon rack of saris were being wheeled into vans as she passed. She glanced in and saw the clothes on endless rails, bright bands of scarlet, purple and yellow in the gloom. The Indian men pushing them stopped to let her pass; they stopped talking, too, regarding her politely, watching her every move. Once she had passed them they began to speak again, in a rising and falling pitch, a soft catcall.

Other doors revealed anonymous brown cartons almost from floor to ceiling; a photographer’s studio; a furniture-removals office; a shoe wholesaler. Then came several empty units. David’s workshop was at the far end. As she knocked on his door she saw that the warehouses were six or seven storeys high, red-brick, weathered. Pulleys that had once hauled bales or packets to the upper floors hung from the second or third floors of some. They were rusted now, and the big doors behind them decayed.

‘Come in,’ he called.

She stepped into the ashy darkness.

‘You can leave the door open,’ he said. ‘Let some air through.’

She propped it with an empty iron crate; the breeze came in slow draughts from the river.

As her eyes grew accustomed to the light, she saw open racks down both walls; on one side there were small tumblers, perhaps twenty or thirty dozen. She saw that they seemed ordinary until you noticed the speck of colour, a drop of blue or red, in the base of each. The glass was thick, and speckled with air bubbles. She reached out a fingertip and touched the cool, smooth surface of one.

David walked forward.

‘I’ve seen these somewhere,’ she told him.

‘Liberty’s,’ he said.

‘In the window.’

‘Yes, they have a display this week.’

She nodded at him.

He smiled. ‘Look at the other things,’ he said, ‘while I close up the office.’

She crossed to the racks on the other side. These pieces were quite different: larger pieces, all unique. Red bowls with bright pink circles; glass sculptures, abstract, with frosted threads running the length of them. She recognized one as an outstretched hand with what looked like capillaries in the palm and fingertips. It made her shudder. Others were quite pretty: globes with flowers inside. But too big for her taste.

‘Those are commissions,’ he said. He had come back and was standing behind her.

‘They’re unusual,’ she commented.

‘You don’t like them.’

‘They …’

‘Neither do I,’ he said. ‘The flowers are wanted by a bank. They have six in the foyer of their building in Cheapside. Six continents, a different flower for each one. Hibiscus … rose …’

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I see.’

‘A corporate motif,’ he said, raising his eyes to heaven. ‘It pays my rent.’

She laughed.

‘The hand is my own design,’ he said. ‘I’ll take it to the next exhibition.’

She said nothing. It was the one thing she really hadn’t liked.

Menzies grinned. ‘You can’t hide what you’re feeling, can you?’ he said. He took her arm, easily and companionably. She didn’t like to retract it, even though it was the wrong way round; her arm surely should have linked his.

‘Where would you like to go?’ he asked.

‘For a walk,’ she said.

‘You’re a cheap date,’ he told her. ‘We’ll walk to Soho.’

She had never been there before. Somebody at a party had once referred to it as a ‘den of vice’, laughing, then gone on to talk about clubs elsewhere, more discreet and more daring: Soho had lost the titillating glamour of the thirties. ‘Nobody runs between theatres in body-stockings any more,’ he’d said. He was an older man, who sounded weary. ‘Feathers and opaques and body-stockings,’ he’d said. ‘Those were the days.’

Neither had Cora ever been to an Italian restaurant, which was where David now took her. It was all green and purple paint. David ordered a jug of water, and a Cinzano for her. When the food came, she was mesmerized by it; she had never had spaghetti before, except the kind that came in tins.

‘Do you eat here often?’ she asked him.

‘Someone told me it was just like the pasta in Venice,’ he said. ‘They were right.’

‘You’ve been to Venice?’ she asked.