What Was Promised (23 page)

‘It’s not a
world
war, to be fair.’

‘I don’t know,’ the actor says. ‘The whole world seems to be going crazy, these days. I don’t know where we’re sailing, but I don’t like the cut of our jib. And don’t tell me London doesn’t have its share of crazies, I’ve seen them.’

‘Oh, we do, but ours are harmless. They’re not
doers
, like yours. Our crazies don’t knock people off. They’re even worse at shooting than they are at shouting. We’re not much cop at assassination.’

‘Character assassination,’ the actor mutters. ‘I’ve read your critics, you’re plenty good at that.’

The publisher stirs. ‘Speaking of the devil, there’s something I might show you. Entertain yourselves,’ he says, and goes inside, reappearing soon enough with a thin cyan folder. He holds it low down against his thigh, like something best kept inconspicuous.

‘That looks devilish, alright,’ the oarsman says. ‘What is it, the next
Lady Chatterley
?’

‘It’s a Verifax,’ the publisher says, ‘of the diary of Sirhan Sirhan.’

‘You’re
kidding
,’ the actor says. ‘May I – ?’

‘Who’s this Sirhan fellow?’

‘The psycho who shot Bobby K. How did you get this already? Is it for real?’

‘So I’m reliably informed.’

The actor exclaims as he reads. Florence is closest to him when he offers up the folder. She takes it out of politeness, angles its pages to a lantern, and reads:

   my determination to
eliminatee
eliminate R.F.K. is becoming more the more of an unshakable obsession.

 please pay to the order

plea

 port wine

     port wine

port wine

   port wine

R.F.K. must die. R.F.K. must be killed. Robert F. Kennedy must be assassinated. R.F.K. must be assassinated assassinated
as
. Robert F. Kennedy Robert F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy must be assassinated assassinated. I have never heard

please pay to the order of of of of of of of of of of of of this or that –

‘What do you think?’ the publisher asks, and Florence is jolted up to find him watching her, much as Terence does. For once she doesn’t like it.

‘It’s horrible.’

The publisher nods. ‘I agree. But interesting.’

‘It’s not right,’ she says, ‘reading it. You shouldn’t have it. You should burn it.’

‘Perhaps,’ the publisher says. ‘Or perhaps I should publish it. There’s a sense of the zeitgeist about it.’

‘It’s sick,’ Florence says, her voice too sharp, too real for this company: even to her, it isn’t clear whether she means their reading of the thing or the thing itself. Her hands are shaking.

‘Take it, I don’t want it,’ she says, and the oarsman cocks a brow as he takes the folder from her. The older woman clears her throat and lights another Dunhill. Terence is suddenly there among them.

‘You alright?’ he asks; but before Florence can fake an answer the staff are coming out to usher them in for dinner.

She is placed some way from Terence, between an Egyptian novelist and his much younger French wife, who is a poet. The conversation shrinks again to small talk of the world of letters. Florence lets it pass over her.

The food comes all at once and keeps coming, gobbets and dollops of foreign stuff on pretty plates and stupid rustic platters. Florence is eating too much, she knows, more than she wants or needs, in an effort to think of something other than the publisher’s folder. The malice in it has jarred her. It’s not part of her world, that violent incantation, not part of this world she adores and has made her own. It makes her angry, that the publisher would bring the folder into it. The folder is an imposter.

Florence looks at her hands and out at the dusk. She can see trees on the hill lines – the strange tall ones that are like the columns of mossy ruins – and the lights of Perama coming on below, and other lights beyond them, fishing boats rocking out to sea, twinkling like evening stars.

Look, she thinks. Look at how beautiful it is! Don’t you know how lucky we are? Don’t you remember how much work it took to get here? Why bring ugliness into it? Isn’t there enough wrong with the world? Aren’t you satisfied with that? Leave bloodiness where it belongs; it’s
easy
. Just have some faith in beauty. Just be grateful for what you’ve earned. Be happy to be lucky.

Laughter erupts around her, and she pulls herself together. She has missed some splendid joke. Beside her the Egyptian smokes as he eats, small raisin-dark cigars. As she studies him he meets her eye and smiles.

‘You must find this dull,’ he says, ‘all this talk of books.’

‘Oh,’ Florence says, ‘I bore easily.’

‘You are with the photographer?’ he asks, and she bristles.

‘I don’t see why you should put it like that. I don’t see why I need to be here with anyone.’

‘I did not mean –’ the Egyptian begins, but Florence won’t have it.

‘You mean I’m not famous. You haven’t heard of me, so I must be some kind of hanger-on.’

‘No, I apologise, I meant no such thing. In fact I have heard of you.’

‘Oh, don’t.’

‘It’s true, we have met before. We were not properly introduced, Miss Lockhart, but indeed I do remember you. You were being photographed in one of the hotels in London. We met in an elevator . . . this was some years ago. I forget the hotel.’

But not me
, Florence thinks, and for the first time all night her heart lifts with unadulterated pleasure.

She looks up at the novelist. He has a gentle, craggy face. The gentleness might make him handsome, though it’s hard to tell in the lamplight, which romanticises everyone.

‘Lifts,’ she says. ‘We call them lifts. We don’t have elevators in London.’

‘Lifts,’ the Egyptian happily concedes. ‘You must excuse me, but now that we meet again, I would very much like you
not
to dislike my company, yes? May I tell you something? It is an anecdote about elevators. Lifts! I hope to be amusing.’

Florence relents. She wants to be spoiled. ‘Well go on, then,’ she says.

‘So I will tell you now about the lifts of Cairo, the lifts of the Hotel Shepherd. The Shepherd is magnificent, truly, second in Egypt only to the Winter Palace in Luxor. In this hotel are ten lifts, with ten lift men, in robes and turbans. You might say the work of these lift men is not rewarding, but in fact it matters. Of course it is prohibited for a guest to use a lift without its man. So, it matters for the guests. Then there are ten families, living on the
baksheesh
, the tips that come from those ten moving boxes. And, if you spoke Arabic, and if you gave
baksheesh
, very soon you would have the many stories of those men, their children and ancestors.

‘The lifts, they are also grand, also very old. Wooden, made in Leeds, in your England. Often, every few journeys, one of them breaks down. Sometimes they stop between the floors. Then the lift man opens a kind of a hatch in the side of the box, and shouts down
Five
or
Six
. That is the name of his lift. And then up comes a second lift, with its man, beside the first, and you crawl through the hatches, from
Six
to
Seven
. So you continue on your way. This activity is happening
all the time
.’

The publisher’s daughter-in-law laughs. She is listening to the Egyptian, as are some others, Terence among them. The woman next to Terence has a hand under the table, slanted towards his knee or lap. They all wait idly on the Egyptian’s amusing anecdote. A pang goes through Florence, sharp and sweet, of jealousy and want.

‘I don’t believe you,’ she says. ‘You’re making it up. Anyway, what does it matter? Don’t you have stairs in Egypt?’

‘Yes, we have stairs too, of course, but in the Hotel Shepherd there are nine floors. A long climb, and Cairo is hot, and the stories of the lift men, sometimes they are sensational. And also, yes, I must tell you . . . As it happens, there are strict controls on the women there. You see, the lift men of the Shepherd, they will admit only wives. From the ground up to the eighth floor, when they open their doors, they ask the women for their passports, for their identifications. But when they open their doors on the ninth floor . . .’

Mild laughter on the evening breeze. The Egyptian waves his hand, blowing –
hoof! hoof!
– on his fingertips, as if they have caught alight from the little cigar he holds.

Florence nods a brittle thanks. She takes her chance and turns away. The Egyptian’s wife is there, ready for her with a smile.

‘My husband loves telling stories,’ she says, apologetically. ‘He is always trying to make people happy.’

‘I was happy to begin with,’ Florence says.

‘Your name is Florence? A pretty name. It doesn’t sound English.’

‘Should I take that as a compliment?’

‘Oh,’ the wife says, ‘perhaps. What do you do, Florence?’

‘I used to model.’

The wife of the Egyptian nods, as if that much is obvious. ‘And now?’

And now Florence says nothing, having nothing to answer.

Terence drives her to the airport. It’s a sunstruck morning. Neither of them are morning people, even on those days when they don’t nurse hangovers. Light flickers through the cypresses. They’re both wearing sunglasses.

‘Penny for your thoughts,’ Terence says, and Florence grins into the wind, holding onto her headscarf: Terence has the roof down.

‘What kind of cheap mind do you think I have? For my thoughts I’ll take a ticket to London, and I’ll still be doing you a favour.’

‘Done.’

‘I was thinking of last night. Your friend the publisher.’

‘Did you like him?’

‘Not much. He had this folder . . .’

‘I saw. He’s always pulling numbers like that. Still gets a kick out of it, showing off his latest finds. What was it?’

‘The diary of some nutcase. It wasn’t nice, I didn’t think. You didn’t read it?’

‘I didn’t have the privilege. He must have liked you. What wasn’t nice about it?’

They turn a hairpin, barely slowing. The sea lies below them in a gulf of shadow.

‘Oh,’ Florence sighs, ‘I don’t know! Nothing really, it was just words, words. It might have been just me, no one else seemed to mind it. I don’t either, today. It’s hard to go on minding, isn’t it, when it’s so lovely here?’

There is building going on at the airport. They stand in the lee of the old passenger station, out of the light and dust. A Comet waits on a runway that juts out into the sea. Three old warplanes are lined up beyond the jet, dwarfed by it but still powerful, crouched in the sun like hounds.

Terence holds her. ‘Well, here we are. Take care of yourself, Flo, won’t you?’

‘How do I look?’

‘Knockout. You don’t need me to tell you that.’

‘It doesn’t cost you anything.’

‘Blimey, you’re not crying on me, are you?’

‘Don’t be silly,’ Florence says, but she winces, takes off her sunglasses, chuckles. ‘There’s actually something in my eye.’

‘Shoreditch coal dust, probably.’

‘Get lost.’

‘Muck. There’s no getting away from it.’

‘Bastard. Honestly you are. When are you coming home?’

He hesitates. ‘I don’t know. I was thinking I might try it on with the Yanks for a while, see if I can make a splash. You only live once, don’t you?’

Florence laughs. She kisses him, releasing herself. ‘There’s no getting away from it. Good luck,’ she says, and starts towards the new station.

*

London is wet and grey, a mockery of itself. As she nears home the rain hardens, knuckling down into the byways and the Tottenham Court Road, crizzling down the windows, drumming off the dustbins.

Her flat is in Percy Street, two floors above Sieghart the Jewellers: three rooms, one of them good, in a handsome Georgian house, and the street itself not all bad, either, with a shabby Fitzrovian glamour, and only once or twice each block a building derelict since the war.

Wolf-whistles from the men sheltering by the City Tote. ‘Haven’t I seen you on the telly?’ one calls out, and his mate, ‘Can I do your washing for a month?’

‘I’d rather stink,’ Florence calls back, and the men chortle to one another, chuffed just to have an answer.

She climbs the dog-leg stairs, humping her case after her. She unlocks the door, goes to the window, lights a cigarette, and peers out – breath on wet glass – across the scaffolds and chimneypots and mansard roofs of the West End, her West End, as if she is anchoring herself.

She loves this view, for all its greyness. It’s as much as she can afford; more, if she’s honest, which often she is not, and most often with herself. No work and all play makes Florence a poor girl. Her last two jobs – small-change gigs, for hands and eyes – came over a year ago. She lives here by the grace of others, by virtue of their favours. She takes what she’s given, and there is always someone wanting to give Florence something. Look at Terence. Look at her father, who sends her money twice a year, birthday and Christmas, his postal order always accompanied by a letter. Florence used to send them back, letter and order, when she could still afford that anger.