Angel Cake (8 page)

‘Well, old things generally,’ the girl answered.

Alicia’s first mouthful was quite spoilt. She put the cake down, and gave a harsh laugh. ‘Well, that includes me too, I suppose,’ she said nastily.

She did enjoy watching the girl blush. But she was not prepared for her answer.

‘Oh, please don’t get me wrong, Mrs Queripel. But I
am
interested in your memories.’

Alicia snapped, ‘Well, you shouldn’t be.’ She was going to add, ‘My memories are
my
business,’ but she decided it might be too harsh when she noticed the girl’s desperately upset expression. Goodness, she thought fleetingly, who’s
supposed to be jollying up whom? Instead she asked her, ‘And that’s what led you to go prying among my pictures?’

‘I was looking to see if I could tell which one was you,’ the girl confessed.

Alicia paused. She had picked the sugar rosette off her fancy and she held it between her finger-tips. ‘And,’ she asked coyly, ‘could you?’

‘Oh yes,’ said the girl in a rush of eager reassurance. ‘Oh yes, in every one.’

Alicia popped the rosette into her mouth and crunched it deliciously to bits.

They ate for a while in silence; the girl did not seem to be making much headway with her fancy. It was Alicia who broke the silence by asking after a minute or two, ‘This flat of yours – is it decently decorated?’

‘Well, it’s not to my taste,’ said the girl.

‘Oh, I know what furnished rooms can be like,’ said Alicia. She could just see the set for the television series: drab walls, dull curtains and hand-me-down furniture. Half visible in the background, she even imagined a grasping landlord whom she called Abrahams or Isaacs.

But the girl amazed her. ‘It’s not rented,’ she said. ‘It’s all my friend’s furniture. He owns it.’

‘You mean your friend’s a
man?
’
said Alicia. I’ve been had, she thought.

She sat very straight and she stared at the girl, full of disapproval. What tell-tale signs had she missed? There didn’t seem to be anything about her which suggested that she was that sort of a girl. She was evidently secretive, on top of everything else. How shocking! But as Alicia got over her amazement, she found she had to struggle to stop her disapproval from being swept aside by glee. It was of course wrong – oh, it was very wrong – but so much more interesting.

Only for appearance’s sake, she concentrated on her disapproval. ‘Well, you’re old enough to know your own mind, I suppose,’ she said grimly, ‘But let me tell you, we did things very differently in my day.’

She must have glanced unconsciously at Leonard’s picture for confirmation, because the girl asked eagerly, ‘Was he your husband?’

Alicia drew herself up even straighter. She clasped her hands above her cake plate and in her most dramatic voice, she declared, ‘He was my life!’

The girl was duly impressed, Alicia could see. She took advantage of the lofty impression she had made to lean forward and ask her keenly, ‘Your friend – how long have you been with him?’

She did wonder, when the girl was gone, if she had not maybe asked her too many questions. The girl had glanced at her watch all of a sudden and got up in a fluster. ‘Gosh, it’s dreadfully late! I must be going.’ Was she simply fleeing from Alicia’s questions?

Alicia accompanied her to the front door and then watched her going away; she tied the paws of her mangy fox and unlocked her bicycle. As she climbed on to it, she looked round and she saw Alicia. She gave her a quick little wave before she pedalled off into the dark.

Alicia was left alone in her living room. She stayed for a while at the window. It was a nice time of day, with the street-lights on and not everyone having yet thought to close their curtains. She hoped that someone might have looked in on her and her visitor and seen them sipping their tea together in the lamplight.

She turned back to her room but, extraordinary thing, it had been transformed. In front of her was another room in which two people had just had tea. The furniture stood in new positions. The depth of the silence had changed. Sitting down to take stock in her armchair, Alicia was indignant. Was the room always going to be different now, even when that troublesome girl wasn’t there?

Her alarmed eyes fell on the tea-table. How sad that two of the fancies had been eaten, that two of the plates had been soiled. She took comfort in the neatly aligned uneaten wafers. Everything would have been so much better, she thought bitterly, if that girl had never come.

It was only a long, long time afterwards that Alicia remembered her present. Where on earth had she put it? She caught sight of the golden ribbon glinting on the mantlepiece. For quite a while, she just sat and looked at it and then, for quite a while, she held and felt it. At last, she opened it. It was
small and cushiony, like a cloth toy. She brought it up to her face and examined it; it seemed to be heart-shaped and made of a flowery material. For a moment she was mystified. Then she remembered days which had smelt differently. She put it to her nose and sniffed it. It was a frilly sachet of strong, sweet-smelling lavender.

My first night here in Rob’s bedroom – did I think then that something important was beginning or just that I was holding spinsterhood at bay? As I lay awake afterwards, far too exhilarated to sleep, and heard for the first time the now familiar night-time noises of his house – the sharp shots of the central heating system and the loose skylight trying to flap away – did I think that I was here to stay or that the night was just an episode of uncharacteristic adventure?

We had dinner in a little Greek café which Rob likes. One of their specialities is sticky pastries and, even though Rob has not got a sweet tooth, he had agreed to have pastries to humour me.

‘Which do you think would be nicer?’ I asked him. ‘Boureki or Katafia?’

‘Boureki,’ he said trenchantly. ‘The Katafia looks like Shredded Wheat.’

‘What are you having?’ I asked him.

He studied the cake tray, which stood a little way away on the counter. ‘You know what I’d like?’ he said. Then he turned to me. ‘I’d like it if you felt like coming home with me tonight.’

He said it so lightly; it did not seem a great deal to ask. I said, ‘OK.’

Rob blushed ferociously. ‘Shit, do you really mean that?’ he said.

And I was so drunk on my bravado, I nodded blithely and I said yes.

Inside the front door of his flat, we didn’t draw things out. We didn’t drink drinks or play music. We went straight into his bedroom. And in the morning, I remember, the curtains in the living room greeted us already wide open,
because we had not gone in there to draw them the night before.

Only in the museum, things have hardly changed over the past year. I still sit at the Enquiries Desk and snub tourists. I still spend the intolerably long afternoons proof-reading catalogues and writing little captions to illustrations which are then utterly rewritten by Mr Charles. Mary-Anne and I still flick magazines on our knees and gossip and have depressed lunches together in the canteen. But my museum colleagues soon noticed that life outside had changed for me. Even at the beginning, Rob didn’t often come to the museum to collect me; when I finished work, he was usually still writing. But he did come once or twice and on one of those early occasions, Milton spotted us leaving.

The next day, he said to me in the canteen, ‘Hah, I saw you with that writer.’

‘Did you now?’ I replied gaily.

‘Indeed I did! And I thought to myself, “Why’s that young lady been trying to lead me up the garden path, I wonder? Showin’ him round the museum a short while back and pretendin’ she didn’t even know him?”’

‘But I didn’t then!’

‘And now he comes hanging round here waitin’ to walk you home? Isn’t that the funniest thing?’

‘Milton!’ I protested. ‘I wasn’t pretending. Really, I’ve only just got to know him now.’ I added cockily – why is it that people who’ve recently fallen in love always think they’re so clever? – ‘He seems an extremely interesting person.’

‘Oh yes?’ said Milton. ‘What’s he researching now, then? A romance?’

Mary-Anne’s reaction was more spiteful. I did actually tell her what had happened since we spend all day together and, from a shortage of entertainment, we tend to tell each other most things.

‘Oh,
no!
’ she burst out. ‘Oh, I don’t believe it! Another good woman bites the dust.’

She scrutinized me carefully. ‘What is it? The irresistible lure of the lemming? The heady vertigo of the cliff-edge?’

‘Mary-Anne,’ I said irritably, ‘before you go on, I
like
him.’

‘Of course you bloody like him, more’s the pity. That’s nine-tenths of the problem. Listen, petal, let me tell you something, as someone who also
likes
you. Believe me, that is the very worst kind of man.’

‘You don’t even know him!’

‘I’ve seen enough. Believe the words of the wise old woman. That man is your classic “dark handsome stranger”. Otherwise known as a common or garden bastard. He’ll offer you sweets and then he’ll take you away and he’ll eat you.’

‘Oh, you think all men are monsters!’

‘But, my honey-child, they
are!
Well, go your own sweet way, if you must – but, mark my words, I’ll be around to see you regret it. Christ, why are we all so self-destructive?’

Mary-Anne’s dislike of Rob has not let up all year. Of late, she has hit on a new approach: ‘You always looked so blissful at the beginning,’ she said to me musingly last week. ‘I thought, OK, let’s wait and see what happens when the first flush wears off. Well, if I’m not mistaken, it’s certainly paling now, isn’t it? You’ve started to look positively downtrodden sometimes, you know. Are you still sure he’s – ha – ha – Mister Right?’

I tried to laugh her off. I pretended to be indignant. ‘Mary-Anne!’ I exclaimed. ‘Don’t you think that’s a bit presumptuous?’

‘I haven’t hit a sore spot, have I?’ she responded. ‘Don’t tell me you have found warts on Mister Wonderful?’

I told Rob once, a few months ago, about Mary-Anne’s campaign against him. He thought the whole thing was hilariously funny. ‘That frigid female!’ he scoffed. ‘That loopy lesbian.’ He has met Mary-Anne once or twice and he found her gruesome. He said she belonged in a nut-house or in a nunnery. He didn’t like to think of me sitting next to her all day long in case some of her nutty notions started to rub off on me. I tried suggesting to him that women of my age who are nutty the way Mary-Anne is are casualties of the battle won by his generation; they made access to women’s bodies so free and easy, and for women like Mary-Anne that freedom is frightening.

‘You mean they want to bring back purdah and chastity belts?’

‘Rob –’

‘Am I being unfair?’

When he had finished laughing at the expense of the prudes, ball-breakers and lesbians, he made one of his characteristically ‘free and easy’ remarks which, although it was doubtless intended as a joke too, upset me no end. ‘Of course, if you’re ever tempted to give anything piquant like that a try, Alison, you know that’s OK by me.’

So much for my first pathetic attempt at doing my own thing. I am really beginning to wonder what I have let myself in for. Mrs Alicia Queripel does not seem to be a particularly nice person. She had certainly gone to a lot of trouble for my visit last Sunday, tidying her horrid house and preparing the most ghastly lurid tea-table. But considering all the efforts she had gone to, she didn’t seem especially pleased to have me there. I got the feeling in fact that she didn’t like me. Or perhaps she didn’t know what to make of me, which was, I suppose, rather how I felt about her. She cross-questioned me ferociously and she didn’t seem to think much of my answers. I let her find out about Rob. I had thought this over. I decided that while it ought to be quite possible, for a time, to keep Mrs Queripel a secret from Rob, it would not be nearly as easy to keep Rob a secret from Mrs Queripel. First of all, she would want to know who I lived with. We wouldn’t have such a great deal to talk about otherwise, and in any case I guessed that she would be avidly interested. I guessed too that she would also be intensely disapproving but, apart from a moment’s affected pursed-lipped primness, she more or less wasn’t. In fact, she grew quite keen to find out about him and for a minute or two, it almost felt as if we were going to settle down together like two old gossips and juicily discuss the idiosyncracies of our menfolk. I only remembered in the nick of time that, of course, her husband was dead.

Mrs Queripel said one thing which set me thinking. In an effort to distract her attention from Rob, I asked her if the man with the twisted nose had been her husband. She gave me the most grandly theatrical answer. Sitting up quite
straight, as though our conversation had now moved to higher matters, she said, ‘He was my life.’ I was duly impressed, but I didn’t like to question her any further. Only, cycling home, I thought some more about the words she had used and in the silly way that one might, I found myself wondering if I would ever one day say such a thing about Rob.

I gave Rob a Kashmiri papermâché letter-rack and a carved ivory Indian paper-knife for his birthday. I once read an article in a women’s magazine, I remember, which said that the true art of present giving lay in not trying to give someone something in which they are interested. The theory was that if a man is interested in fishing, he will know that you have bought him slightly the wrong rod. If a man is an India buff, he will know that you have bought him second rate papiermâché and a knife which isn’t really ivory. The article said that the solution was to continue to give the most traditional presents – silk ties and handkerchiefs and leather wallets – for they will always give pleasure.

We made love rather quickly on his birthday morning; I had to go off to work. When Rob was recovering beside me, I made him laugh by saying, ‘Many Happy Returns!’ Then I got out of bed and brought him his presents from the back of the wardrobe.

‘Ooh,’ he said. ‘Presents!’ He wasn’t quite recovered yet. He held them on his chest and looked at them. ‘Last year,’ he said drowsily, ‘you were my birthday present.’