Repeat It Today With Tears (7 page)

‘So, did you get her phone number?’

‘Yes, but I can’t arrange to see her, not in daylight.’

‘She might go back there tonight, to look for you. I would, if I were her.’

Julian’s small boy’s small round eyes widened with delight as he appraised this prospect.

My father asked Sylvester the barman for another drink. He stood up to reach change from his pocket. Once more it made me want to weep as I watched because each move and attitude of his body was beloved and just as I had always imagined it would be.

‘Are you trying to pull that guy at the bar?’

Julian was curious but not in the least dismayed. After all, he had witnessed the transaction of many of his own mother’s liaisons; in age Lalla’s partners had ranged from the septuagenarian to a boy from the sixth form at Julian’s school, the latter episode taking place during the tea interval of the leavers’ cricket match. Such comrades in the pursuit of the desired were we, Julian and I, that immediately he rose saying, ‘Look, I’ll go to the Gents to give you some more room. Don’t worry, I’ll take my time.’

And, as if by some serendipitous stage direction other customers began to drift homewards. Twice the well oiled door with its frosted glass panel swung to the cold Chelsea evening beyond. Twice too Jack smiled at me.

Julian reappeared animated by eager purpose, his hair newly combed and a few coins jingling in his palm. ‘So, how’s it going?’ he nodded with an import of innuendo and the feathery strands at the crown of his head trembled.

‘Good, it’s good.’

‘Okay, well, I don’t expect she will, because she has to get a train from Reading and stuff, but just in case, I think I will
wander up to the Pheasantry and see. I’ve got just enough to pay us both in if you like…’

‘No, I think I’ll stay.’

‘On your own, really?’

‘I’ll be okay.’

‘You look amazing tonight, Suse, be careful, won’t you.’

Julian left and I followed him in my mind’s eye, walking brisk and cheerful and full of hope towards the Kings Road, still jingling the coins in his palm.

Somewhere in another part of the Phene Arms a telephone began to ring. ‘I’ll need to go,’ said Sylvester, apologetically. ‘They’re all away out.’

Then we were the only two left in the bar. Jack stood up and began to walk towards me. Although it was but a distance of fifteen feet or so the leaf-patterned carpet seemed like the void that must be crossed in dreamscapes; I willed him not to falter.

‘Er, has he gone… your… ’ he gestured to the place where Julian had sat.

‘Yes, he has. He’s my friend, a sort of brother, but not.’

‘Okay, I see, sort of, but not… would you mind if I… ’

Of the two of us, we both knew that he was the one who was shy and awkward. ‘Listen,’ he was moving his fingers down the surface of his glass as if he were sculpting it from clay, ‘I couldn’t help noticing… noticing that you were looking over, and so on, just now. To be honest, I’ve been wondering if you thought I was someone else, somebody you knew… ’

I smiled at him properly for the first time because I wanted to reassure him, ‘No, I didn’t think you were anyone else.’

‘Oh, okay. Well, my name is Jack, by the way.’

‘Jack.’ I had repeated it many times over in my head as I tried out his mouth and traced imaginary contacts with his imagined body. Never, until then, had I spoken it out loud.

‘Yes, and may I… may I know your name?’

‘My name is Susie. Susanna, but people call me Susie.’

‘And, do you live around here, Susie?’

‘No, I live across the river.’ I did not dare to say Clapham. In my head I conjured Julian’s flat in the red brick mansions facing the park, ‘In Prince of Wales Drive.’

‘Ah yes, I know it.’

He lifted his arm to drink. I saw that the veins on the back of his hands stood out in relief, that there were a few freckles and golden hairs there and on his wrists. The glass of his watch was scratched and he wore it on a fabric strap of navy blue and red. When he looked at me, only an arm’s length from myself, and I saw how nervous he was, I wanted to tell him there and then how much I loved him and to let my head fall like a dead weight on his chest and to be done with all pretending.

I did not, of course. I sat silent, adjusting myself to the emotion which I felt for my father beside me. It was a physical phenomenon; there was some tide rise in the circulation of my blood. If I could have looked under my clothes I expected that my chest would have been suffused with a flush, like cochineal dripped into white icing.

Sylvester the barman, sensing the musk on the air, folded a towel and retreated through the archway to the public bar.

‘Show me where you live,’ I said, holding my father in my gaze.

Jack was caught off guard, he enunciated one or two of the phonic forms to which Englishmen resort when they are embarrassed or require a moment to collect their thoughts, then, ‘Are you propositioning me?’

He gave a half smile but I did not smile at him at all. Instead I continued to stare at him full face with the look akin to insolence that gamblers use to regard their opponents in games of
chance.

‘Listen,’ Jack stood up and pushed back his hair; the muscle in his left cheek twitched. ‘Listen, I’m not quite sure what’s going on here… ’

Sylvester faltered, hesitating like a prompt in the wings lest we should require another round.

I stood up too. ‘Let us go,’ I said.

Outside in Phene Street I took his arm in such a way that he could be aware of the softness of my cheek and upper arm and breast against him but he gave no sign of response. He was too intent on walking, stalking almost, straight and stiff and upright. Neither did it occur to him that I seemed to know the way. We stopped outside number 33 Oakley Street.

‘I could… I could make you a cup of coffee.’

‘That would be very nice.’

He laughed, ‘God help me, first you pick me up, and now you’re going all demure on me.’ In the hall my father said, ‘Come here, Miss, the timer for the lights goes out and leaves you in the pitch black unless you sprint, I’ll take your hand.’

Ascending the three dark flights, it was an act of supreme self-denial, now that I had his hand in mine at last, not to take up his long fingers and try them inside my mouth, one by one, to see whether they tasted salty against the pink of cheek flesh.

‘Well here it is,’ he pushed open the door, ‘it’s a bit bare, I’m afraid. A bit like a monk’s cell I suppose, but I’m only here during the week, mostly. At weekends I go back to Suffolk.’

I knew that to mean that he had a wife there. ‘Do you have children?’ My question came out sounding rude and clipped because of the fury I might have to suppress against his possible answer.

‘You’re very direct, aren’t you, for one so young. No, I don’t, as a matter of fact. Why do you ask?’

‘Just wondered.’

‘I did have, a long, long time ago. They’re on the other side of the world now… they emigrated with their mother when they were tiny things.’

There was a curtained-off kitchen section to the room. He went in there to boil a red enamel coffee pot. I looked around my father’s room and willed my eyes and memory to work like a spy’s microfilm camera.

The green curtains were drawn over the window which looked down on Phene Street. In front of the window there was a big light oak desk with solid Art Deco-shaped handles to the drawers. On this desk there was a homemade stand of roughish wood, like a lectern, but with the slope at an angle less acute. Beside the stand, in rows, were stoneware marmalade jars holding pens and brushes; there were bottles of inks, a black metal watercolour box and a cloisonné bowl of Chinese ink sticks. Everywhere it was extremely neat and functional; a record player, a stack of LPs, bookshelves with postcard reproductions of Paul Nash and Stanley Spencer paintings propped against the spines.

There was an armchair and an upright chair for the painting desk. I sat on the bed; it was narrow and had a cover of snuff-coloured crepe de chine.

‘Sugar?’ my father asked. I shook my head with nonchalance although my heart had skipped beats when I realised that he had been standing watching me.

He brought the coffee cups. ‘I am an illustrator,’ he explained, nodding towards the desk, ‘I do books and magazine work, that sort of thing.’

He sat in the armchair. I focused on the coffee in my cup yet all the time I felt that he was observing me and it was as though he was covering me with gold or some other precious substance.
‘Why me?’ he asked, after a while, his tone was stern.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean why me, why did you pick on me to…’ He opened out his hands to finish the sentence with a gesture, and then, ‘things like this don’t just happen… not to me, anyway… not nowadays… ’

‘They do, sometimes they do.’

‘But why should it happen, why there and then and why to me?’

‘Why not?’

I knew that it was a contest but that it was a safe one, of the parlour game kind. I knew too that I must only maintain my conviction to keep trumping him every time.

‘Why not… I’ll tell you why not, Susie, shall I? Here am I, I’m over fifty, for God’s sake, and you, how old are you?’

‘Eighteen,’ I said it with neither a blink nor a flinch.

‘Eighteen, Susie, for heaven’s sake, look at you, with your long, long hair and your big brown eyes… you do know, do you, that you have what are commonly known as come-to-bed eyes… you couldn’t not, I suppose. Look, you are… you are an exceptionally lovely young woman. I am an older, old if you like, man.’

I sat and watched my father’s face; it was the only thing in the world that I wanted to see.

‘You’re doing it again, for Christ’s sake, Susie… Listen, I will tell you about me… I am fifty-two, I have a wife and a house in Suffolk where I spend my weekends doing middle-aged things like making an asparagus bed. I am not rich, I am a vaguely successful jobbing artist. I drive a 1962 Citroën which makes odd noises on the motorway… There is nothing about me that could possibly appeal to… someone… someone like you, Susie… ’

His voice, in general deep and the words each considered, had risen slightly in the plaint of his self deprecation. Also, perhaps, because he had told a lie about his age.

‘Tonight, like any other night, I go for a quiet drink in what is possibly the dullest pub in London… and then you, you appear. I really don’t understand.’

‘I wanted to. I like you.’

He made a sound and a gesture indicative of despair as though I had given him an answer that disappointed him. I knew, in fact, that it was quite the opposite. I looked at his battered brown shoes and his trousers of fine cord and the way in which one hand held the coffee cup on his knee.

‘Can I give you a lift somewhere, drive you home or something?’

‘No, it’s okay, I’ll get a taxi.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Certain sure.’ I smiled at him and he smiled back at me.

All the way down the stairs and along the hall he held my hand. I felt that I could draw him into me by the arm, as though on a string of coloured yarn.

We stood on the doorstep. You could tell that the sea was in the air from the river. The pillars on the porticoes of the houses in Oakley Street are fairly grand. Beside them even my tall father seemed on a more human scale. It was incredible to me that nearby, in Kings Road, people continued to do ordinary evening things.

‘Listen,’ he said, ‘listen, if, you know… in the cold light of day… if you really feel that you would like to come again, then I, then I would, of course, be very glad to see you… after all, how could I not be… ’ He touched my cheek with two of his fingers. I had to press my feet hard on to the stone step beneath me so that I should not gasp out loud.

‘Good night, little one,’ Jack said.

For some way I did not even try to find a taxi. At Cheyne Walk I turned left and crossed to the embankment side, I wished to walk slowly and more than once I know that I smiled at the night. I wanted also to be close beside the river. At that date, if you grew up and went to school in South London, you seemed, somehow, to be related to the Thames. It was a constant and familiar presence in your consciousness; you crossed it for excursions and railway termini and the Christmas lights, you knew it from the avuncular narratives of history textbooks.

Over Chelsea Bridge I walked tall when the bikers at the teastall whistled and gestured obscenities. At the bank corner in Queenstown Road stood the Irish boys; Alison had told me fearful tales of their gang and what they did and yet they caused me no alarm. I felt that I was protected by some radiance from any insult. Eventually I found a taxi and it drove me swiftly home across the avenue on Clapham Common. Then I could lie down and make believe that the pillow against my cheek was the fingers of my father’s hand.

The next day was the beginning of that time when I saw the world in a different way. It was not a very long time, in terms of life spans, but while it lasted it was very good and very vivid. I remember that I noticed, especially, the colour of things. In old post-war guidebooks for Paris there are photographs of the flower markets, the blooms are exquisitely bright against the grey and wearied city. That is how I saw London in 1972. Details and people mattered; all of their stories counted because each of them was a component part in the days when I would see my father or of the days when I was waiting to see him and counting and crossing off hours on the end page of a book or the edge
of a paper bag. Every feature of a scene was clear and true, as though my eyes depicted the world for me in
plein air
.

In the morning the tall Austrian manageress was unlocking the metal shutter blind of the American Dream, trying to keep her head straight and level as she bent towards the pavement. ‘Thank God. Thank God you’re here, my hangover is the end.’

She sat in the window at the table where the varnish always looked sticky and asked me to put the coffee machine on without bothering to clean it. She smoked a number of cigarettes which she stood up on their filter end when she had finished, letting them burn out rather than looking for an ashtray.