Under the Rose (37 page)

‘I thought you were a burglar.'

‘No.'

‘Come in the front door,' invited Pippo. ‘I'll let you in and you can climb up from here. We have a stepladder.'

Nino, not knowing what to say, let himself drop into the yard, then, reluctantly, went round to the front and slowly up the stairs to Pippo's flat. This, he told himself, was a bad mistake. Maybe everyone in the
palazzo
knew already, and
if they didn't, what was the point of his letting them know? Pippo must know. Maybe he, Nino, was peculiarly half-witted and lacking in common sense? Maybe he should turn around and take the train back to his grandmother's? By the time he reached Pippo's door he was crying and had smeared dirt from the drainpipe all over his face, though he didn't know this until Pippo commented on it.

‘Your mother's not in,' said Pippo. ‘The couple is, though. I think she lets them have the flat when she's away.'

‘What …' But he couldn't bring himself to ask. What couple? Who?

‘Don't feel bad about it,' said Pippo unexpectedly. ‘I think it's just from friendship. Not for money or anything. I don't think that. Nobody does. Your Mamma's just lonely. She likes the bit of music and their company.'

By now he had pushed Nino out onto the balcony and up the stepladder, so that he could see in the window to his own sitting room where Mr Williams and the chemist were naked as truth itself and lying in each other's arms.

Lost among the demonstrators was a rain-sodden dog. Up and down it ran, rubbing against anonymous trousers and collecting the odd kick. It was a well-fed animal with a leather collar but was quickly taking on the characteristics of the stray: that festive cringe and the way such dogs hoop their spines in panic while they wag their shabby tails.

‘Here boy! Come – ugh, he’s all muddy. Down, sir, get away! Scram! Tss!’

People threw chocolate wrappers and potato-crisp packets which the dog acknowledged from an old habit of optimism while knowing the things were no good. It was tired and its teeth showed in a dampish pant as though it were laughing at its own dilemma.

Jenny Middleton, a mother of two, recognized the crowd’s mood from children’s parties.

‘Don’t tease him,’ she said sharply to a dark-skinned young man who had taken the animal’s forepaws in his hands and was forcing it to dance. The dog’s dazed gash of teeth was like a reflection of the man’s laugh. ‘Here,’ she said, more gently, ‘let me see his tag. There’s a loudspeaker system. It shouldn’t be hard to find his owner.’

‘I’ll take him,’ said the man at once, as though, like the dog, he had been obedience-trained and only awaited direction. ‘I will ask them to announce that he has been found.’ Off he hared on his errand, like a boy-scout eager for merit. One hand on the dog’s collar, he sliced through the crowd behind a nimbly raised shoulder. ‘I’ll be back,’ he called to Jenny, turning to impress this on her with a sharp glance
from yellowish, slightly bloodshot eyes.

He was the sort of man whom she would have avoided in an empty street – and, to be sure, she might have been wrong. He was friendly. Everyone at the rally was. Strangers cracked jokes and a group carrying an embroidered trade-union banner kept up a confident, comic patter. The one thing she wasn’t sure she liked were the radical tunes which a bald old man was playing on his accordion. They seemed to her divisive, having nothing to do with the rally’s purpose. When the musician’s mate brought round the hat, she refused to contribute. ‘Sorry,’ she told him when he shook it in front of her. ‘I’ve no change.’ Turning, she was caught by the ambush of the dusky young man’s grin. He was back, breathing hard and shaking rain from his hair.

‘The dog will be OK,’ he assured her. ‘The authorities are in control.’

This confidence in hierarchy amused her. The next thing he said showed that it was selective.

‘They’, he nodded furtively at the musicians, ‘come to all rallies. I am thinking maybe they are the police? Musicians, buskers: a good disguise?’ He had a shrill, excited giggle.

‘There are plenty of ordinary police here,’ she remarked, wondering whether he was making fun of her. She felt shy at having come here alone in her Burberry hat and mac. The hat was to protect her hair from torch drippings and was sensible gear for a torch-light procession. But then, might not sense be a middle-class trait and mark her out?

‘Bobbies’, he said, ‘are not the danger. I am speaking of the undercover police. The Special Branch. They have hidden cameras.’

‘Oh.’

She eased her attention off him and began to read the graffiti on the struts of the bridge beneath which their section of the procession was sheltering. It was raining and there was a delay up front. Rumours or joke-rumours had provided
explanations for this. The levity was so sustained as to suggest that many marchers were embarrassed at having taken to the streets. Old jokes scratched in concrete went back to her schooldays:
My mother made me a homosexual
, she read.
Did she?
goes the answer, conventionally written in a different hand.
If I get her some wool will she make me one too?
There was the usual Persian – or was it Arabic – slogan which she had been told meant
Stop killings in Iraq!
The man beside her could be an Arab. No. More likely an Indian.

‘I know them,’ he was saying of the secret police. ‘We know each other. You see I myself come to all rallies. Every one in London.’

‘Are you a journalist?’

‘No. I come because I am lonely. Only at rallies are people speaking to me.’

Snap! She saw the trap-click of his strategy close in on her: his victim for the occasion. It was her hat, she thought and watched his eyes coax and flinch. It had singled her out. Damn! A soft-hearted woman, she had learned, reluctantly, that you disappointed people less if you could avoid raising their hopes. Something about him suggested that a rejection would fill him with triumph. He did not want handouts, conversational or otherwise, but must solicit them if he was to savour a refusal.

A graffito on the wall behind him said:
I thought Wanking was a town in China until I discovered Smirnov
. Don’t
laugh
, she warned herself – yet, if she
could
think of a joke to tell him, mightn’t it get her off his hook? Would Chinese laugh at the Smirnov joke, she wondered. Probably they wouldn’t, nor Indians either. Wankers might. They were solitary and the solitary use jokes to keep people at bay.

‘You see,’ he was saying, ‘I am a factory worker but also an intellectual. In my own country I was working for a newspaper but here in the factory I meet nobody to whom I can talk. Intellectuals in London are not inviting working men to
their homes. I am starved for exchange of stimulating ideas.’ His eye nailed a magazine she was carrying. ‘You, I see, are an intellectual?’

‘Goodness, no.’ But the denial was a matter of style, almost a game which it was cruel to play with someone like him. She had never known an English person who would admit to being an intellectual. In India – Pakistan? – wherever he came from it would be a category which deserved honour and imposed duties. Denying membership must strike him as an effort to shirk such duties towards a fellow member in distress.

Her attempts to keep seeing things his way were making her nervous and she had twisted her sheaf of flyers and pamphlets into a wad. Am I worrying about
him
, she wondered, or myself? Perhaps even asking herself such a question was narcissistic? Objectivity too might be a middle-class luxury. How could a man like this afford it? He was a refugee, he was telling her now, a Marxist whose comrades back home were in prison, tortured or dead. Perhaps his party, would take power again soon. Then he would go home and have a position in the new government.
Then
English intellectuals could meet him as an equal. He said this with what must have been intended as a teasing grin. She hadn’t caught the name of his country and was embarrassed to ask lest it turn out to be unfamiliar. It would have to be a quite small nation, she reasoned, if he was hoping to be in its government. Or had
that
been a joke?

‘We’re moving.’ She was relieved at the diversion.

The trade-union group started roaring the Red Flag with comic gusto and the procession ambled off. He was holding her elbow. Well, that, she supposed, must be solidarity. The rally was connected with an issue she cared about. She did not normally take to the streets and the etiquette of the occasion was foreign to her.

‘
Let cowards mock
’, came the jovial Greater London bellow from up front, ‘
And traitors sneer
…’

‘I’m as foreign here as he is,’ she decided and bore with the downward tug at her elbow. He was small: a shrivelled man with a face like a tan shoe which hasn’t seen polish in years. Dusky, dusty, a bit scuffed, he could be any age between thirty and forty-five. His fingers, clutching at her elbow bone, made the torch she had bought tilt and shed hot grease on their shoulders. She put up her left hand to steady it.

‘You’re married.’ He nodded at her ring. ‘Children?’

‘Yes: two. Melanie and Robin. Melanie’s twelve.’

The embankment was glazed and oozy. Outlines were smudged by a cheesy bloom of mist, and reflections from street-lights smeary in the mud, for it was December and grew dark about four. Across the river, the South Bank complex was visible still. He remarked that you could sit all day in its cafeteria if you wanted and not be expected to buy anything. His room, out in the suburbs, depressed him so much that on Sundays he journeyed in just to be among the gallery- and theatre-goers, although he never visited such places himself.

‘But galleries are cheap on Sundays,’ she remonstrated. ‘Maybe even free?’

He shrugged. Art – bourgeois art – didn’t interest him. It was – he smiled in shame at the confession – the opulence of the cafeteria which he craved. ‘Op
u
lence,’ he said, stressing the wrong syllable so that she guessed that he had never heard the word pronounced. ‘It is warm there,’ he explained. ‘Soft seats. Nice view of the river. Some of the women are wearing scent.’

On impulse and because it was two weeks to Christmas, she invited him to join her family for lunch on the 25th.

When the day came, she almost forgot him and had to tell Melanie to lay an extra place just before he was due to arrive.
His name – he had phoned to test the firmness of her invitation – was Mr Rao. He called her Mrs Middleton and she found the formality odd after the mateyness of the rally when he had surely called her Jenny? Their procession, headed for Downing Street, had been turned back to circle through darkening streets. Mounted police, came the word, had charged people in front. Several had been trampled. Maimed perhaps? No, that was rumour: a load of old rubbish. Just some Trots trying to provoke an incident. Keep calm. Then someone heard an ambulance. An old working man gibbered with four-letter fury but the banner-bearers were unfazed.

‘Can’t believe all you hear, Dad,’ they told him.

Mr Rao tugged at Jenny’s arm as though he had taken her into custody: the custody of the Revolution. ‘You see,’ he hissed, ‘it is the system you must attack, root and branch, not just one anomaly. There are no anomalies. All are symptoms.’ He was galvanized. Coils of rusty hair reared like antennae off his forehead. ‘Social Democrats’, he shouted, ‘sell the pass. They are running dogs of Capitalism. I could tell you things I have seen …’ Fury restored him and she guessed that he came to rallies to revive a flame in himself which risked being doused by the grind of his working existence. He laughed and his eyes flicked whitely in the glow from the torches as he twitted the young men with the trade-union banner in their split allegiance. A Labour Government was loosing its police on the workers. ‘Aha!’ he hooted at their discomfiture. ‘Do you see? Do you?’ His laughter flew high and quavered like an exotic birdcall through the moist London night.

‘You remember that demo I went to?’ she reminded Melanie. ‘Well, I met him there. He’s a refugee and lonely at Christmas. A political refugee.’

‘Sinister?’ inquired her husband who’d come into the kitchen to get ice cubes, ‘with a guerrillero grin and a bandit’s moustache? Did he flirt with you?’

This sort of banter was irritating when one was trying to degrease a hot roasting pan to make sauce. She’d just remembered too that her mother-in-law, who was staying with them, was on a salt-free diet. Special vegetables should have been prepared. ‘Did you lay the place for him?’ she asked Melanie.

The girl nodded and rolled back her sleeve to admire the bracelet she’d got for Christmas. Posing, she considered her parents with amusement.

Jenny’s husband was looking for something in the deep freeze. ‘He did, didn’t he?’ he crowed. ‘He flirted with you?’

She should have primed him, she realized. James was sensitive enough when things were pointed out to him but slow to imagine that other people might feel differently to the way he did. Mr Rao would be hoping for a serious exchange of ideas between men. Stress serious. He had been impressed when she told him that James, a senior civil servant, was chairman of a national committee on education. But now here was James wearing his sky-blue jogging suit with the greyhound on its chest – a Christmas present – all set to be festive and familial. He was a nimble, boyish man who prided himself on his youthfulness.

‘Will Mr Rao disapprove of us?’ he asked puckishly and tossed his lock of grey-blond hair off his forehead.

‘Listen, he’s a poor thing.’ Jenny was peeved at being made to say this. ‘Be careful with him, James. Can anyone see the soy sauce? I’ve burnt my hand. Thanks.’ She spread it on the burn then went back to her roasting pan. Melanie, darling, could you do some quick, unsalted carrots for your grandmother? Please.’

‘Better do plenty,’ James warned. ‘
He
may be a vegetarian. Lots of Indians are.’

‘God, do you think so? At Christmas.’

‘Why not at Christmas? You’d think we celebrated it by drinking the blood of the Lamb.’

‘People do,’ said Melanie. ‘Communion. There’s the doorbell.’

‘I’ll go. Keep an eye on my pan.’

In the hall Jenny just missed putting her foot on a model engine which James had bought for five-year-old Robin and himself. An entire Southern Region of bright rails, switches, turntables and sidings was laid out and there was no sign of Robin. Did James dream of being an engine-driver, an aerial bomber or God? Or was it some sexual thing like everything else? Through the Art Nouveau glass of the door, she deduced that the blob in Mr Rao’s purple hand must be daffodils, and wished that there was time to hide her own floral display which must minimize his gift.

‘You were mean, horrible, appalling.’

‘
He
is appalling.’

‘Shsh! Listen, please, James, be nice. Try. Look, go back now, will you? They’ll know we’re whispering.’

‘I’m not whispering.’

‘Well you should be. He’ll hear.’

‘Jenny, you invited him. Try and control him. He has a chip a mile high on his …’

‘Well, allow for it.’

‘Why should I?’

‘You’re his host.’

‘He’s my guest.’

‘God! Look, get the plum pud alight and take it in. I’ll get the brandy butter.’

‘If he suggests Robin eat this with his fingers, I’ll …’

‘Shush, will you? He doesn’t understand children.’

‘What does he understand? How to cadge money?’