Meeting the English (25 page)

But all the time,
o,
all that time,
e,
she was so cold. All the time,
u,
no omelettes or tomato salad,
a,
no smiles over Juliet's head,
e,
no walks on the Heath. And in the night, every night,
oo, ee, ae,
crying: Struan, in the bath; Shirin, in her bedroom, you could hear her if you crouched on the landing outside, bum on the carpet, feet on the polished wood. Who was she crying for?

And she went to visit her mother a lot, and she wasn't painting so much, and she didn't take much of a turn with Phillip, any more.

Then, one middle of the dark sad night, there were crashes from the room underneath Struan, the locked museum room, and Struan went in to investigate and found Shirin there, her hands full of files. And she said: ‘Come to investigate a grand larceny, Struan?' and he said, ‘No,' and then, ‘No,' again and she softened and said, ‘I need to find something to pay the rates with,' and sat on the floor like a wee bird, her small soft head, and he said: ‘Can't I help?'

And after that, since then, at odd times, evenings, mornings, he'd been going up there with her and helping with those rooms, which needed clearing, she was right. And if she could sell a thing or two for Phillip's care that was the right thing to do, he had no doubts about that, any more, there was no money coming in otherwise, Giles said as much. They were going to put
Top Girls
on the A-Level syllabus, that was the rumour. Not that Struan ever mentioned the second-floor rooms to Giles, or to Juliet, even. They only went there when Juliet was out.

What they did was: Shirin picked out the sketches and pictures she said were ‘good' or ‘had possibilities' and Struan wrapped them and labelled them the way she said and carried them down to the dealer's van which had come once, twice, three times now. Struan had done a lot of arranging books: pulling out the ones which were first editions, or signed, putting them in boxes for Christie's. Shirin had, he was startled to realize, only a limited grasp of English on the page, for all her oral fluency. She'd never read any of the books Phillip had in such numbers, no Dickens, Dylan Thomas, Bleasdale, Hughes, and certainly no David Storey; but she listened with great attention when Struan told her what he knew, read her wee bits, even. ‘There are no women here,' she said, once, and Struan said, ‘There's Sylvia Plath, look,
Winter Trees,
' holding out the dry hardback. Shirin picked it up cautiously, blew dust from the compressed pages: ‘Unread,' she said, ‘he thinks no women could write, you know, Struan. Or paint.'

‘What about you, then?' he asked.

‘It was never my work he was interested in,' she said, and smiled.

Shirin knew her way round the catalogues and big Art books, though. After the best pictures were sorted, she started on the photos, hundreds of them: black and white; signed; framed; a whole world of young men in polo necks in blackened streets; girls with stiff helmet hair and hard dark lips. She started a collage of especially unlikely images of Myfanwy on the side of the filing cabinet: in Capris; in a dance studio; in her pants, flashing a neat bum. Struan contributed a studio shot: Myfanwy dimpling over folded, cashmere arms; fluffy-eyed, insouciant, quite like the new Juliet.

‘She was really something, wasn't she?' he said. Shirin took the picture and stared at it with predatory attention.

‘She was tremendous,' she said seriously. ‘And that is sad, because look at these pictures, Struan, this is her work, being beautiful like this, and then it is over and she is not thirty.' And Struan said:

‘I was thinking, I might apply for medicine, next year.' And Shirin looked at him and nodded, good idea, then squirrelled the picture away as she did sometimes, ‘to work on.'

They didn't look at each other when they were working, they looked at the photos, and that meant they could talk. For instance, Shirin said: ‘I have photos of my mum in this dress exactly.'

And Struan said, ‘In Iran?' and so Shirin gave him a good lecture on the history of Iran since 1901, and Struan, abashed, went and read about it, and then he understood a bit more, a bit more what it meant to come from a Zoroastrian family in Tehran, to trace your family back to Darius the Persian, to cook rice and almonds and wear Chanel, to summer in the mountains, and visit Europe in the autumn, clever and sophisticated as all get out. But the day Shirin said, ‘Look! Polo neck! There is a fashion! Do you have this, your father in a polo neck?' he was able to explain about Cuik, the town too poor to support a branch of C&A, and she listened to that, too.

It all stayed in the high locked room. It was nothing to do with the rest of their lives and was nothing to do with anyone fancying anyone or anything that had gone before. Shirin seemed to like Struan, in there, respect him, the way she had before Gnome Morning, and that warmed him. It meant he thought less about Jake, too, remembered the kiss in the kitchen only a hundred times a day; or fifty even. He'd thought up that explanation about Jake being over-familiar, being the grabby sort, and rehearsed it to himself, and believed it,
yes,
and not,
no.

Until.
No. No. a. e.
Struan was blushing, whirling the board like a motor. Until the other day. Shirin and Struan had been up there at noon – Phillip asleep, Juliet out at work – and were halfway through a heap of celluloid reels and film stills which had been stored near the window, trying to pick out the damp pieces from the ones which Shirin could get checked out by the National Film Theatre, when Struan asked her: ‘Did you know about all this before you met him? About Phillip? I mean, about
The Pit and Its Men,
and all that.'

And Shirin, carefully peeling apart a batch of prints, said she had never heard of it.

‘So it wasnae like,' said Struan, peering at a strip of film, a series of orange and black faces with mould on them, like measles, ‘it wasnae like, he was the big star and you wanted to meet him.'

‘Oh,' said Shirin, putting the photos down and looking at Struan. ‘You mean, why did I marry him?' Struan nodded, dumbly.

‘Well,' said Shirin, staring straight ahead of her, ‘as Myfanwy says, there is a passport issue.'

‘But,' said Struan. ‘You could have married anyone. Anyone would have married you.'

‘I could have married my cousin, in fact,' she said.

‘But you didn't like him?' asked Struan.

‘I liked him,' said Shirin, ‘but' – her voice harsh and posh, full of water – ‘as Myfanwy says, Phillip is rich, and he had a house. My cousin had no house. I needed a house.'

‘Where were you living?' asked Struan.

‘Uncle's house in Harrow. Auntie's house in Edgware. Cousin's house in Bushey. Sharing a bed with my sister, a bed with my mother. All the way through St Martins. Eight years, in fact, ever since we left Tehran.'

‘Oh,' said Struan, ‘I had you in a flat, a wee studio of your own.'

‘Everyone thinks that,' said Shirin, ‘that flat. That studio. Everyone has me in there. I think it is in Chelsea.'

Struan laughed. Shirin looked straight at him with her burning gold eyes. ‘Eight years, I go to college, I go to parties, I go to openings, I have the right clothes, I have a drink in my hand. Everyone thinks, I am a city girl, I am a Western girl, I am rich. But I am not such a girl. We have lost our money. I borrow the clothes, I bargain them from shops. I never sip the drink. My father is dead.' Struan nodded, not seeing, quite. Shirin said: ‘My mother lost her country, she lost my sister, she lost her husband. She cannot lose me, too. She needed me to be married, not – in that studio in Chelsea. But me, I needed that studio.'

‘Aye,' said Struan, ‘I can understand that.'

‘Phillip didn't want children,' said Shirin, holding the piece of film very tight between her clean slim fingers, ‘he just wanted me to sleep with him and stay in his house. He didn't mind if I went on with my work. This is a very, very good deal for me.'

‘You didn't love him?' said Struan. ‘You didn't mind?' His fingernails were working painfully into his palms, thinking about the
sleeping with him
bit.

‘I didn't not love him,' said Shirin. ‘When I met him he was … I liked how he was always cheerful. He was – like Juliet.'

‘Like Juliet?' said Struan.

‘Yes,' said Shirin, ‘that way Juliet is? So hard and bright always? Like a strong little animal? So knowing what she likes? I like this in her.'

‘I like that too,' said Struan.

‘I liked this in Phillip,' said Shirin. ‘There was no need, you see, ever to be sorry for him. It is being sorry for people that stops me from doing my work. I needed to get on with my work.'

And Struan – thinking about Shirin's studio, the tiny picture of the wheelchair, her tiny hands as he had first seen them, holding a pencil, scratching a picture of Phillip in a few thin lines, at this point actually raised his head and gazed at her, so beautiful, the foreign lady, and she dropped her lashes and flushed and got up and said:

‘Who are you? Who the hell are you to look down on me?' and left him there.

So that was shit. That was
no,
no,
no,
ae,
oo,
a.
That was useless, that was stupid,
a,
e,
i,
o,
you cunt. That was a boil on the bum, that was a boil as big as your head. He'd pushed a note under her door the next day, ‘I meant no offence. SR' but she was gone already, gone to flaming Harrow, leaving him with a series of locum nurses to help with Phillip. And that was really why Struan Robertson wasn't looking forward to his upcoming eighteenth birthday, why he was filled with sulks and tears worse, to his unspeakable shame, than he'd ever turned on when his dad died, why he didn't want a party, why he didn't enjoy being a hero, why he was as glum right now, to be honest, as he'd ever been in his whole life.

24

Juliet was in the shop, on her own. Miriam, the owner, had popped out half an hour ago, leaving her to tidy the rails, listen to Miriam's Billie Holiday tapes on the shop stereo, and contemplate Miriam's crochet, elegant and silvery on the counter. It was grey outside, it was darker than it ought to be at three in the afternoon. Juliet hated the autumn, it made her want to scream. She hadn't done much to the rails; and she was just deciding between calling Ron, even though he was having a writing day and she wasn't allowed, re-plaiting her little plaits, trying on the new underwear stock, and unravelling the crochet, when Ding Dong! in slid Celia, looking slightly monstrous in a rah-rah skirt.

‘Seal!' said Juliet, who hadn't seen her for a week. ‘You look like a pencil stabbed in a pie. You really can't wear tights, you know, when you're as thin as that. You've been starving again, haven't you?' Celia didn't answer, just sat down in a small portion of the shop's tub armchair.

‘I can't help it,' she said, ‘it's my self-esteem.'

Celia hadn't gone back to school in September, owing to having two broken ribs and an inadequate body mass. She was taking a gap. (Turning into a gap, more like, ha ha, said Juliet to Struan, but she felt a bit badly, right now.) Celia was seeing her therapist in West Hampstead twice a week, going to a support group at the Royal Free, and reading Virginia Woolf between times. And Lewis Grassic Gibbon, since the Struan obsession, though Struan kept trying to say, about the Central Belt …

‘How is your mother?' said Celia suddenly. In the chair bought to accommodate the large arses of wallet-holding, waiting men, she looked like a dress, laid down on its arm.

‘Mad as a brush,' said Juliet. ‘She lost that sale, you know? She was going to sell Yewtree to a rich American, it turns out, only Shirin wouldn't let her, and now, like yesterday, all his money's gone pop. The American's money. Junk bonds. I said to Mum, “Well, think if he had paid, he'd have paid in junk bonds and then you'd be bust, and anyway, you can't just sell the house. Dad's alive and I'm living in it,” but she's desperate to get out of Cricklewood, you see, who wouldn't be? I'm almost sorry for her.' Celia nodded solemnly, clasped her leafy little hands together.

‘How's Ron?' she asked.

‘Last weekend,' said Juliet carefully, because she had very much implied to Celia that she and Ron were having great sex, instead of just frotting and yelling a lot, ‘we went to the Camden Palais. He bought these Es, but they turned out to be rubbish.' Celia nodded again.

‘How's Jake?' she said, looking carefully at her tiny wet boots, and Juliet spotted an agenda.

‘Out of the clinic,' she said. ‘He's joined a thing called Ersatz, now. What you have to do is, after you join, you go on a camp…'

‘I don't think it's called Ersatz,' said Celia, not raising her eyes.

‘Erstaz! Erstaz! Is that it?' said Juliet. ‘Anyway, what you have to do, is contact everyone you damaged when you were drunk or a druggie or whatever…'

‘It's called Est,' said Celia, ‘he called my mum.'

‘Est Est is a kind of wine,' said Juliet, ‘the Pope makes it. Can't be right. Anyway. What you have to do is, apologize to the person. Make amends, it's called.'

‘He was really nice,' said Celia, ‘on the phone. My mum said.'

‘But what he said to me was,' said Juliet, ‘that he didn't really think he had injured me, it was the other way around. He's making an exception for me when it comes to apologies. And Struan. Can you believe it? Dickhead!'

Juliet looked at Celia. Her eyes were twitching like goldfish in the tiny white bowl of her head.

‘Did he call you, Seal?' asked Juliet, and Ding-Dong! a lady in a long raincoat arrived in the shop. Juliet picked up a random black garment and pushed it at her friend. ‘Do try it on,' she said, shoving Celia into the tiny curtained changing room. The raincoat lady picked up one of the Miyake dresses, and started pulling it against herself. So Juliet popped into the changing room, where Celia was still in her coat contemplating the trouser thing in her hands.