Apartment 16 (25 page)

Apryl glanced into the living room. With her quick eyes she caught glimpses of elegant disorder. A silver drinks trolley sat idle, loaded with crystal decanters, an ice bucket, tongs, and half-empty bottles of spirits. Ageing heavy furniture retreated sorrowfully into the corners. The air was shadowed by leaden drapes, drawn by heavy gold braid. And all this beneath a magnificent chandelier, hanging like a gigantic ice crystal over a mahogany table.

The thin light caught these once glamorous but now dust-filmed objects. They seemed frozen in a forlorn disappointment at the absence of whoever it was who once peopled the space. It made her melancholy. In the noisy maelstrom that existed outside, of angry traffic and marching strangers, of ugly, tragic council estates, of wind-blown garbage, beggars, and the intense energy that both drained and invigorated you at the same time, how could such stillness exist? Shabby with neglect but undisturbed and ominous in its silence, it was another quiet relic from an era of elegant ladies in long dresses and gentlemen in dinner jackets.

And there was nothing on any of the walls. No pictures, no mirrors – not so much as a single watercolour. Nothing.

An open door beside the bathroom revealed a smaller bedroom with an unmade bed. The nurse’s room, beside the Queen’s chamber. Outside which they came to stand. The nurse paused before the closed door and lowered her solemn eyes, too tired to even attempt an encouraging smile. Behind the antique door the sound of a television boomed. Imee knocked so loudly it made Apryl jump.

When a voice, fierce with age, cried out from the other side of the door, she entered the master bedroom.

Apryl suspected the wizened figure had been deliberately positioned and prepared for her arrival. Small as a child, with mottled arms as thin as sticks resting upon the covers, the big hands incongruous below the lumpy wrists, Mrs Roth sat propped up in bed. She was clad in a nightgown of blue silk edged with white lace, an outfit that did nothing but add to the horror of the aged body inside it. The carefully arranged but grotesquely old-fashioned hairstyle had the unmistakable sheen of hair that had been recently attended to. It was as high and perfectly conical as a bishop’s hat, but transparent. And the lipless beak of a mouth above the heavily grooved chin, protruding like the muzzle of a small dog, had been painted bright pink. Small eyes full of mistrust watched Apryl enter.

‘Sit there,’ the voice commanded while the hard eyes glanced at the two chairs at the end of the bed, arranged on either side of the television.

Smiling weakly, Apryl unlooped her bag from her shoulder and made a move for the nearest chair. ‘Hello, Mrs Roth. It’s so good of you to see me. I—’

‘Not there!’ the figure barked. ‘The other one.’

‘I’m sorry. I was just saying—’

‘Never mind all that. Take your coat off, dear. What kind of woman wears her coat indoors?’

On either side of the enormous bed in which the tiny figure was huddled at the very centre, surrounded by large white pillows, two small dressers were cluttered with photographs. The black-and-white faces all looked towards the foot of the bed, where Apryl now sat, uncomfortable on a hard chair with wings that obscured the room on either side of her head, tunnelling her vision forward to the little creature among the pillows.

An audience had truly been granted. But what kind of audience? Mrs Roth’s manner was hardly conducive to any kind of reasonable conversation – but that was the point. The clever old bird maintained complete control of both the discourse and the visitor by immediately unsettling and belittling them with her unpleasantness. And who was anyone to object, either as a guest or as a disempowered member of staff on her payroll, like the porters downstairs? Even the garrulous and feckless Piotr shuddered at the mention of Mrs Roth. And poor little Imee’s face reflected the same fear and aversion. The nurse didn’t enter the room – some rule probably forbade her doing so. Instead, she waited at the door.

But as Miles had reminded Apryl, Mrs Roth was one of a small and shrinking group of people still alive who could attest to the existence of Hessen’s mythical paintings. She was now here on Miles’s behalf too. More importantly, Mrs Roth had known Lillian. And the last tangible traces of her great-aunt’s life were evaporating.

At least Mrs Roth was more lucid than Alice from the Friends of Felix Hessen, and beneath her inhospitable carapace there was a vulnerability about the old woman.

‘I don’t want to talk about him,’ Mrs Roth said, as if reading her mind.

‘Mmm?’ Apryl asked.

‘You know who I am talking about. Don’t play games with me. I’m not stupid. But you are a bloody fool if you think I am.’

Then why did you agree to see me?
She couldn’t risk an argument. Mrs Roth was not someone to trifle with, but to weather until the woman’s mood changed. And she knew from experience that the rude and unpleasant were not insensitive to flattery; the very insecurity that created a menacing facade could be turned into an Achilles’ heel.

Apryl smiled her sweetest and most guileless smile. ‘Not for a minute would I suggest such a thing, Mrs Roth. Would a fool live in such a grand apartment? I’ve never had the pleasure to see such a place.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous. It’s terrible.’ But no sooner had her attempt to win Mrs Roth been rebuffed than the old woman’s mood changed swiftly to something more agreeable. Her cheeks flushed and her eyes flared with self-importance. ‘You should have seen it when my husband was alive. We had such wonderful parties, dear. You’ve never seen anything like them. Full of lovely people. The kind of people you would never meet. You have no idea how charming the men were. You’ve never met such gentlemen. And the beauty of the ladies. You girls are nothing compared to how we used to be. I mean, look at you, dear. You should do something with your hair. It’s awful.’

Apryl tried to maintain her smile. ‘Yes, I should. Maybe you could recommend somebody. As soon as I came in, I noticed the lovely colour of your hair. It’s so shiny.’ Apryl looked at the carefully domed wisps and smiled as sincerely as she could.

Mrs Roth blushed. ‘Would you like some tea?’

‘That would be nice.’

The old lady picked up a small brass bell from her bedclothes and began to ring it furiously. ‘Oh where is she?’ she cried out at exactly the same moment she began to ring the bell.

In seconds the door opened and Imee shuffled in, her eyes lowered to her white gym shoes. ‘We want tea, Imee. Tea! My visitor has been in the rain and you have forgotten to make tea again.’

‘I am sorry, Mrs Roth,’ the woman said.

‘How many times must you be told. And cake. Bring in the cakes. I want the yellow one and the pink one.’

Mrs Roth glared at Imee until she’d left the room, then said, ‘Look over here. Here, dear. These are my daughter’s grandchildren. They are so beautiful. I took Clara to Claridge’s for lunch yesterday. And when the head waiter asked her what she wanted she said, ‘Fish and chips.’ What a darling she is. You’ve never seen such a beautiful child. Look. Here. I said look here.’ Irritated because Apryl hadn’t moved quickly enough to satisfy her most recent and impulsive demand, she began pointing in the general direction of the cabinet on her right side.

When Imee returned with the tea and cakes on a small silver trolley, Apryl looked at the floor. Squirming in her seat and powerless to act, she listened to Mrs Roth humiliate the nurse, going so far as to call her a ‘bloody fool’ for not positioning the tea things in the manner she had been told to ‘a hundred times’. Imee responded by saying, ‘I am nurse, Mrs Roth, not waitress,’ before scurrying from the room on the brink of tears.

‘Cake, dear. Have a slice of cake, dear. I like the pink one. My daughter bought it for me.’

It was so cheap and dry, Apryl struggled to swallow a mouthful of it.

‘You look like Lilly,’ Mrs Roth said, dabbing crumbs from the side of her mouth with one swollen knuckle.

‘I do?’

She nodded. ‘When she was young. Very pretty woman. Such a shame she went mad.’

And then, quite suddenly, Mrs Roth asked Apryl to turn the television on so she could watch some quiz show, during which she was forbidden to speak. But by the first commercial break, Mrs Roth had fallen asleep while the television boomed within the room.

Watching the sleeping figure, who made infrequent whistling sounds through her nose, Apryl sat still for a few minutes. Then she called out, ‘Umm, Mrs Roth. Mrs Roth,’ three times, but to no effect. The woman could not be woken. Perhaps she was dead. But when Apryl became desperate for the toilet and stood up, Mrs Roth’s eyes opened. Milky orbs drifted around her eye sockets, then locked on to Apryl. ‘Where are you going? Sit down at once.’

‘I was going to use the bathroom.’

‘Oh.’

‘You were asleep.’

‘What?’

‘You fell asleep. Maybe this is the wrong time.’

‘What? Nonsense! I did no such thing. Don’t make things up.’

‘No. Well, I was mistaken then. I’ll just be a moment.’

The bell was hoisted aloft and Mrs Roth began furiously ringing it again. Apryl and Imee passed in the doorway and exchanged tired, nervous but ultimately knowing glances. A look familiar to those beleaguered by the petty and the powerful.

When she returned from the bathroom, she tried to formulate a tactful way of bringing the conversation back to Felix Hessen, but Mrs Roth pre-empted her. It seemed she was now ready to speak of him without a prompt. It was as if until now she had been testing her guest’s fitness for disclosure. Playing a game, unwilling to give her what she wanted until she’d tormented her first. And mercifully, the television was silenced.

‘So you want to know about Felix. That’s why you’re here. I’m not fooled by you, dear. But it’ll do you no good. You won’t understand. No one does.’

‘Try me. Please.’

‘He drove Lilly mad. You know that much, don’t you?’

Apryl nodded. ‘Yes. Yes, I do. But I want to know how.’

Mrs Roth looked at her hands in silence. When Apryl began to wonder if the woman would ever speak again, she said, ‘I don’t like to think of him. I never wanted to remember him.’ Her voice was tired. Every vestige of her brittle, difficult, impossible character was now absent from her words. But she was unable to meet Apryl’s eye as she spoke. ‘When he was finally gone we all hoped that was the end of it. But we were naive to have thought so. Men like that don’t follow the same rules as the rest of us. Lilly knew that. She’d have told you the same. No one would believe us. But we knew.’

Apryl leant forward in her seat.

‘When he first came here . . . I don’t remember when . . . but after the war, when Arthur and I came back from Scotland, he was here.’ She paused to paw at the bedclothes with her knotted fingers. ‘He was the most handsome man I had ever seen. We all thought so. But he never smiled. Not once. And he never spoke to a soul. We thought it odd. It had never been a building for recluses. Quite the opposite. It was nothing like it is now. This was once a wonderful place where your neighbours were your friends. We all entertained each other. Only decent people here, dear. Not like today. It’s full of rubbish now. People with no manners. You should hear the noise they make. We have no idea who is living next to us any more. People move in and out all the time. It’s intolerable.’

Mrs Roth began to sniff. From under the sleeve of her nightdress she removed a white tissue and began to dab at her eyes. A long heavy tear that appeared incongruous on her face rolled down her cheek and splattered against her wrist.

Instinctively, Apryl went to her and sat on the side of the bed. Mrs Roth immediately offered Apryl her free hand. It was crooked with arthritis and very cold. Apryl warmed the fingers between her palms. The simple act made Mrs Roth cry harder, in the same way a child’s grief intensifies within the safety of a parent’s arms.

‘One would often come across him in a stairwell. He never used the lift. He would be standing alone and looking at the pictures. He would take them from the wall and study them. But he would turn on you if you disturbed him. I hated it. No one liked to look into his eyes, dear. He was a lunatic. Quite mad. No one in their right mind had eyes like that. No one was comfortable with him here. Many of us were Jewish and knew he’d been one of those Hitler people. What are they called?’

‘Fascists.’

‘Don’t interrupt me, dear. Nothing upsets me more than a woman with no manners.’

‘Sorry.’

‘But that was how it was for years. I never once had a single conversation with him. Nothing. No one did. The porters didn’t like him either. They were frightened of him. We all were, dear. He lived in the flat underneath us. Down there.’ She pointed at the floor. ‘And he was always making such a noise at night. Moving things. Waking us up. This bumping. And shouting. You could hear him talking in a loud voice. As if he was in another room of our home. And right up against his ceiling we heard the other voices. Under our feet. But we never saw any visitors coming or going. No one knows how he got them up here. We asked the porters and they swore no one had called on the gentleman in number sixteen. But he had company. It wasn’t a radio. Radios never sounded like that, dear.

‘Sometimes it seemed like his flat was full of people. As if he was having a party, but not a very nice one. His other neighbours said the same thing. We all heard it in the west wing. And it got worse. Before his accident. The noises and voices. People were leaving because of them.

‘And then one night – I’ll never forget it – we heard such a dreadful commotion. Screaming. It was awful. This screaming from below us. Like someone was in agony, dear. Like they were being tortured. We were so shaken. We couldn’t move. Arthur and I just sat together in bed and listened. Until the screaming stopped.

‘And then Arthur went down there. He called your uncle Reggie, and Tom Shafer, and they went down with him. They were all in their dressing gowns. Reggie came because he had been trying to get Hessen evicted from here. The head porter was called too, and the police. And when they opened it up, they found him in the living room . . .’