The Real Thing (12 page)

Some of the buildings are Mansions, built from the start as flats, but most were houses, since converted into three flats. Hard to work out how these houses functioned. The cellars are all wet. In mine labels come off bottles in three months. Yet there was a lavatory down here. Used by whom? Surely nobody could have lived in this earthy cave? Perhaps it wasn’t wet then. Now a circular hole or mini shaft has been dug into the soil, for the damp has long ago heaved off the cement floor, and in it one may watch the water level rise and fall. Not according to the rainfall: all of us in this area know the tides have something to do with the leaking pipes of the reservoir, which from my top window looks like an enormous green field, or village green, for there are great trees all around it: the Victorians put their reservoirs underground. (They say that if you know the man who has the task of guarding the precious waters, one may be taken through a small door and find oneself on the edge of a reach of still black water, under a low ceiling where lights gleam down. One may add to this attractively theatrical picture the faint plop of a rat swimming away from sudden light, and a
single slow-spreading ripple.) The top of my house is a converted attic. But the attics were not converted then. There are three bedrooms on the second floor, one too small to share. Two rooms on the first floor, now one room, but then probably dining room and sitting room. A kitchen is pleasantly but inconveniently off a veranda or ‘patio’-a recent addition. It was not a kitchen then. On the ground floor is one room, once two, and ‘conveniences’ also added recently. A garden room, most likely a nursery. In those days they had so many children, they often had relatives living with them, and every middle-class household had at least one servant, usually more. How were they all fitted in? Where did they cook, where was the larder, how did they get the washing done? And how did they keep warm? There are minuscule fire baskets in small fireplaces in every room.

A hundred years ago this suburb, these houses, were built, and they are solid and thick-walled and all the builders who come to mend roofs or fix plumbing tell you how well they were put up, how good the materials were. ‘We don’t build like that now.’ Nor are these experts dismayed by the wet cellar. ‘You keep that clay good and wet around your foundations, and it won’t shrink in these summers we are having now, and you won’t be sorry.’

As I turn the corner into the street I live in the light is arranging the clouds into tinted masses. The sunsets up here are, to say the least, satisfactory.

Ivy loads the corner house, and starlings are crowding themselves in there, swooping out, swirling back, to become invisible and silent until the morning.

There is a new café in our main street, Stephanie’s, a year old now, and always full. It is French, like the ‘Boucherie’ next to it-a very British butcher-like the ‘Brasserie’ opposite, and it is run by two Greeks. At once it acquired its regulars, of whom I am one. Here, as in all good cafes, may be observed real-life soap operas, to be defined as series of emotional events that are certainly not unfamiliar, since you are bound to have seen something like them before, but to which you lack the key that will make them not trite, but shockingly individual.

The miraculous summer of 1989, when one hot blue day followed another, made pavement life as intense as in Paris or Rome, and our cafe had tables outside crammed against the aromatic offerings of a greengrocer. There everyone prefers to sit, but you are lucky to find a seat. Early in the summer two German girls appeared, large, attractive, uninhibitedly in search of boyfriends for their holidays. They were always together, usually outside, and for a few days sat alone eating the delicious cakes-genuinely French-that none can resist. They were delighted when someone-anyone-said, ‘Is this chair free?’ Once this was me. They had three weeks in London.
They were in a small hotel ten minutes away. They thought London was a fine place. The weather was wonderful and-look!-how brown we are getting. While we chatted their eyes at once flew to anyone coming in.

And then they were with a young man. I had seen him here before. He sometimes dropped in for a coffee and was off at once. The German girls liked him. They leaned forward on their large and confident behinds and laughed and flung back blonde manes and all their rows of dewy teeth shone out at everybody. For they continued to keep an eye on possibilities. He leaned back in his chair, and entertained them. ‘I like that one,’ you could imagine one girl saying to another. ‘He is a joker, I think?’

He was a likeable man, perhaps twenty-seven or eight, blue-eyed, fair haired-all that kind of thing, but he had about him something that said, Keep Off. He was a little like a young hawk that hasn’t yet got the hang of it, with a fluffy apprentice fierceness. And he was restless, always hooking and unhooking his legs, or flinging them hastily to one side to get them out of the way of someone coming past, or who seemed to sit too close.

For a few days the three of them were together, usually in the early afternoon. When they left, a girl was on either side of him. But there ought to be a fourth, and soon there he was. When the four met, inside the cafe or on the pavement, it did not seem as if they had paired off. The girls still kept their eyes on the entertainer, their bright mouths smiling in anticipation for the moment they could laugh, for that is what they liked best to do. And he sat watching them laugh, pleased he was giving them what they wanted, and the other young man, who did not seem to hope for much, laughed too.

Once or twice they ate a proper meal. Sometimes they talked about a film they had seen. One afternoon he came in with a dark composed girl who had a sisterly and satiric
air. He bought her coffee and cakes and seemed apologetic about something. When the German girls came in he waved at them, tucked away his legs like an awkward parcel to make room, and the three girls and the man stayed for a time, and then went off together. Thereafter I saw him with the dark girl and with other girls and he treated them as he did the German girls, for he seemed to like them all.

Once two tables outside were empty and I sat at one and soon he was at the other, dropping into a chair at the last moment as he went past, as if he might as well do that as anything else. By now we were cafe acquaintances. He remarked that the summer wasn’t bad at all and he was glad he hadn’t gone to Spain, for it was better here. There was a week left of his holiday. He worked at the builders’ supply shop down the road. It wasn’t bad, he quite liked it. Sitting close to him in the strong light it could be seen that he was older than he seemed. There were lines under his eyes, and he was often abstracted, as if he were continually being removed from present surroundings by an inner buzzer: attend to this.

The German girls arrived and they were laughing in anticipation before they sat down.

Then they were not coming to the cafe, and he was back at work. He dropped in once or twice with a colleague from work, two young men wearing very white boiler suits, which were to make them look knowledgeable about building materials. The German girls’ young man seemed frail inside the thick suit.

One day I was standing outside the Underground station, waiting to meet someone. He strolled past, taking his time, preoccupied. Then his face spread in a smile so unlike anything I had seen there, I quickly turned. Just ahead of him on the pavement was a young girl with a pram. No, when you looked she was a small pale young
woman, probably twenty, and she was the baby’s mother, from the tender way she bent to tuck it into already overwhelming covers. She smiled at the concealed baby, and then turned, startled, as the man came up and said in his whimsical, don’t-take-me-seriously way, ‘Hilda, it’s me.’ The two stood, dissolved in smiles. In a moment they would be in an embrace, but she recovered herself and quickly stood back. Then he, too, put on responsibility, as if fitting a winter’s coat over his white boiler suit. Because he could not, apparently, embrace the mother, he leaned over the pram with a gallant air, and she leaned past him, lifted a bundle from its depths, and held the baby so that he could see its face. He bent politely over it and made appropriate noises, laughing at himself so that she had to laugh too. But all the time his eyes were on the young mother. She laughed again and pretended to thrust the baby at him for him to hold. At which he staggered back in a pantomime of an embarrassed male, and she fussed the bundle back under its covers and stood soberly, confronting him. He too was serious. They stood there a long time, long at least for an observer, perhaps a minute or more, looking at each other, entranced. These two were a match, a fit, the same kind: you had to say about them as you do, rarely, say about a couple: they are two halves of a whole, they belong together.

Again it was she who recovered herself and pushed the pram away down the pavement. Slowly pushed. After a few steps she turned to look at him. On she went-but turned again. He still stood there, gazing after her. She gave him a brave little wave, and went on. Slower, slower … but she had to go on, she had to, and she reached the comer much too soon, where she stopped and looked back to where he stood, his face as miserable as hers. Again the seconds sped past … But at last she firmly pushed the pram on and away and disappeared. Never has there
been a corner of a street as empty as that one. He stared. She had gone. He took two steps to go after her, then came back, sending over his shoulder a quick glance: yes, she really had gone.

Slowly he walked on, slower, and stopped. He was level with me. He wasn’t seeing anybody or anything, he was inside himself. He stood with his knees slightly bent, his arms loose, palms showing, his head back, as if he planned at some point to raise his eyes to the sky.

On the face of the charmed man chased emotions. There was regret, but a self-consciously dandyish regret, for even in his extremity he was not going to let go of this lifeline. There was bewilderment. There was loss. Above all, tenderness, banishing the others. Meanwhile his forehead was tense and his eyes sombre. What was he thinking? ‘What was all that? What? But what happened … what
did
happen, I don’t understand what happened … I don’t understand …’

Something like that.

Two young women sat on opposite sides of a table in the cafeteria in Terminal Three, Heathrow airport. They were in the raised part, which is like a little stage. Sybil had gone straight to this area though there were places empty in the lower, less emphasized, part of the room.

They were sisters, both large-boned, stocky, with broad sensible faces. But Sybil refused to be ordinary, wore dramatic makeup, short yellow hair, clothes you had to look at. She was a dazzler, like a pop star. No one would particularly notice Joan, and she sat admiring Sybil and giving London full credit, at least for this: they were from northern England, and they valued this sound inheritance, so much better than anything the frivolous and spoiled south could produce. They were in the old tradition of two sisters, the pretty one and the clever one, and so they had been cast in their childhoods-Joan, clever, and Sybil, pretty. But they were both clever attractive hard-working girls who pursued their chances with skill.

Joan was saying, ‘But you’re only twenty-two. I thought you were going to take your time?’ She was the older sister, twenty-four.

Sybil said in her loud careless voice that everyone had
to listen to, always, ‘But my dear, I’ll never find anyone like Oliver, I know that.’

Joan smiled. Deliberately. She raised her brows.

Sybil grinned at her, acknowledging the older sister act.

They did not need to hurry this conversation. Joan was on her way to Bahrain where she had got herself a job as secretary in a part-American, part-English firm. She had just flown in from Yorkshire, and there were three hours before her flight out. Sybil had said that of course she would come out to Heathrow to be with her sister, no, it didn’t matter, she just wouldn’t go to work that day. She had arrived in London two years before and had at once taken possession of it, getting herself-God only knew how-a secondhand car, and she thought nothing of driving out to the airport at six in the morning or eleven at night to have a chat with friends who were always on their way through, or of dropping in on several parties in one night, in places as far apart as Greenwich and Chiswick. She had come to London as a secretary, but had decided that ‘temping’ was a better bet. Thus one sampled all kinds of different work, met a lot of different men, and when she was offered a job that suited her she would stay put. At least, that was what she had said until recently.

‘You said all that about Geoff, remember,’ said Joan, not unpleasantly, but putting the case.

‘Oh
God,’
said Sybil, ‘but I was only an infant then.’

‘Eighteen,’ said Joan.

‘All right! Granted! And I know it doesn’t sound likely, but we are made for each other, Oliver and I.’

‘Has he said so?’

‘I think we’re in for it-marriage, kids, a mortgage, the lot.’ The loud confident voice was attracting attention, and Joan was embarrassed. As she had been, all her life, by her sister.

She said in a pointedly low voice, ‘Sybil, you told me it was all off with Oliver.’

‘Yes, I know I did,’ said Sybil loudly. ‘He said he didn’t want to marry again. He liked being free. And off he went. I didn’t see him for months. He broke my heart. When he came after me again I said to him. You’ve broken my heart once, so this time you’re going to have to make the running, I’m not coming after you. Not the way I did when I first met him,’ she explained. And she cast a glance around to make sure her audience was still rapt.

Joan considered all this. Then she asked, ‘When you’re married, are you going to travel abroad with him when he’s on his trips?’

Oliver travelled a great deal for his firm, was more often away than in London.

‘No. Oh well, I’ll go with him sometimes, if it’s somewhere interesting, but I’ll make a home for him in London. No, I’m going to be a real wife,’ she insisted, to her sister’s quizzical smile.