Blind Date (20 page)

Donald went outside, putting down the pan gently as he went to water the window boxes. This was not his part of the business. He admired it, but it was not his.

Tomorrow, they would do something about the chandelier. First thing in the morning.

T
hey had begun rather well in the morning. It felt like a beginning. Elisabeth did not quite see it like that, but Joe did. She did not know she was being carefully handled, but Joe was half aware of what he was doing. Or thought he was. Trying to distract her.

He was looking up at the bare bulb, far above
his head, and they were talking in desultory fashion about how the room in which they sat could be improved. The morning was dark and thundery, showing signs of promise. He decided talking about common ground was safe. It was all they shared. A respect for the place they were in: an accidental affection. The more his interest showed, the more she would accept him.

“That light,” he referred to the huge bulb meagrely dressed in a large, tin shade, “makes it all look a bit spartan after dark, even with the lamps. Needs something different.”

“Could be very contemporary,” she said, suddenly animated. “Paint the walls blinding white. Have a dozen or so tiny little halogen lamps recessed into the ceiling. Paint the ropes black. It would look like a film set for something. Is that what you mean?”

“Black geometric chairs,” Joe said. “Italian, of course. A black and white rug, like a chessboard. The chairs could be the pieces.”

She was smiling and shaking her head.

“Nope. Definitely not. It would alienate the ghosts.”

“You could start with a book on
feng shui.”

She, too, looked at the light. Crossed her thin arms and leaned back. Absorbed.

“Something to fill the space. A sort of upside-down Christmas tree, with fairy lights. Could I get something to grow upside down? My nephew would like that.”

“Something magnificient and silly and decorative,” he agreed. “To make it look more like a folly.”

She seemed to lose interest, as if the prospect of change was all too much.

“It is a folly. And probably a folly to live here. Why make it look more like one? Why make an effort at all?”

That was the way she was at the moment, he surmised. Full of the diffidence of the depressed, trying
to rally, but finding everything difficult, not sure she had the will or the energy for it. His father had told him it was ever thus with convalescents, with all of Dad's robust common sense. You should have been a doctor, Joe: you're good with patients.

He had heard her talk in her sleep this morning as he crept to the bathroom. “It's over, get on with it,” she was muttering, which sounded like a contradiction in terms. Joe decided he would call her Elisabeth. Other people might call her Lizzie, even her nephew, but he would not. He struggled to keep the conversation afloat. It was no good finding something to talk about and then letting it go.

“This place is at its best in the morning,” Joe said. “But it lacks a certain something after dark. You'll have to do something about it. One of these days it'll be winter. It's already getting darker sooner, have you noticed?”

She had: she noticed everything. He suspected she might look forward to winter, it would give her an excuse to hide, behave like a tortoise. He was polishing a piece of undistinguished metal from the clock, holding it over yesterday's newspaper, letting gunge from an old piece of rusty steel wool drip on an open page. There was a photograph and an article there he did not want her to see. They could have been an old couple, he thought, rather than an odd couple, oddly at ease after so short an acquaintance. Perhaps that was her mental state. Now that was a really flattering conclusion. He was allowed to stay and watch her because it made no bloody difference, one way or another.

“Something silly,” he repeated. “And gorgeous and old, and grand and superfluous. A centrepiece. How about a chandelier?”

She looked at him with more than a glimmer of interest, lit another cigarette and continued the contemplation
of the ceiling. The clouds were clearing: in one, bright second, she could imagine light, striking on crystal. Matt would approve of that. So would she. She found herself nodding enthusiastically, seeing it, hanging in splendour, a daft contrast to the rest.

“Oh yes. Definitely. Just a large one. Yes.”

“Right,” he said, springing to his feet. “We'll go and find it, shall we?”

“How?”

“Looking in shop windows, ‘course.”

“Why?”

“Because they're there.”

He was putting things into the pockets of his jacket as if the decision was made. His left hand was scrunching the newspaper, absentmindedly, but deliberately. He did not want her to read about murder.

“I've got nothing to do until this evening, no work to go to, that kind of thing. Oh, I am out this evening, by the way, not late—”

“I don't need, or want, your bloody timetable,” she said flatly. “The more often you're out the better.”

“Only I want to be out
now
,” Joe said. “This minute. Right now. Out. Come on, come with me.”

She was touching her hair, a feature of her life and appearance she had forgotten until she had come home. It had once been her pride and joy. Emma and she had once joked about the fact that they had spent three hours in a row, discussing the state of their oh-so similar hair. Should I cut it short? Should I let it grow this time? It does this, it does that, why won't it do this? “A copper and a paid-up mother,” Emma said, “such serious, dedicated people we are: we've spent longer discussing hair than others spend on the law of relativity.” Now Elisabeth's hair hung limp. She had not washed it in months without assistance and it felt a shameful thing to
admit. After a few days in dirtier London, it felt like an unfamiliar, greasy wig simply because it was impossible to use both arms and all fingers in coordination with each other; she was getting better, rapidly, but she still could not wash her own hair unaided. To think, she had despised her mother's help, without realizing how much she needed it. Then she looked at Joe, yawning and stretching, scratching his great big chest, obviously dressed for the great outdoors, in more or less the same uniform in which he slept. Same kind of scrubby shirt, clean but unpressed trousers, and even in this sultry weather, boots. Why worry? They were all ugly out there. Who would notice her?

“Yeah. Let's go.”

And the fact was, the world outside was different with Joe. He insisted on the bus, rather than the efficient Underground. “You haven't been on a London bus in
how
long?” he asked. “You haven't lived. Top deck, front row. Now what do you want to see and where do you want to go?”

Elisabeth failed to say she did not mind where the hell they went. Puzzled as she was by this willingness to be led, it felt ungrateful to resent his energy.

“Look,” he kept saying, pointing all the time to punctuate his running commentary on all they passed, “look. Look at the sun catching that roof, knocks your eyes out. Quick, look at that woman, that one over there, on the zebra crossing, with that amazing dog; she's dyed her hair red to match.”

“She hasn't…”

“OK, then, she dyed the dog. Look!” As the bus lurched and swayed, she looked. She saw the gracious lines of buildings on Euston Road, not the traffic; saw the groups of youths, loud and nonchalant, calling to a group of girls, all of them delighted with and wary
of each other, but lovely in their preening. She saw people who were purposeful, listened to the grumbling jokes of the passengers. Look! There's the Lloyds building: don't you love to hate it, great monster, covered in intestine. Now here's Westminster Palace, looking like an old wedding cake. And the Abbey, full of statues. You could pinch one, to put outside the door. See if anyone would miss it.

They changed on to another bus, amid a crowd of tourist, cackling with questions, glorious in their colours, said Joe. If that one keeps his camera to the end of the day, it'll be a miracle; bet he doesn't know how it works, anyway, he points it like a gun. There'll be tears before bedtime with that child, but isn't she pretty? It was a nudging, whispering commentary which made Elisabeth feel like an ally, and made her laugh. It made her watch the world go by, to the tune of his pointing.

Matthew might love this, she was thinking. When I'm better, I'll bring Matthew. We'll go on the river.

“Pimlico, this is where it's at,” said Joe.

“What is?”

“Chandeliers of course. And other things. I like people best,” he told her, “but there is an enormous compensation in things. If you ever happen to be out of love with the human race, try loving objects instead: it works.”

She found herself looking at a row of shops in a corner of central London she had never known before. “You go round with your eyes shut, you,” he teased her. “I thought you said you were a policewoman.”

“Officer, not woman,” she said without rancour, “and not a very good one at that. It perverted my view of the streets, you know, like this neck alters it now. You were never looking ahead, always sideways. You were never relaxed and you were always looking out for malice and for thieves, not for ordinary, everyday
kindness. When you looked at a shop window, you were looking to see how easy it would be to rob, not what was in it.”

“I see,” he said. There was a shop, as vaguely promised, with chandeliers.

“We've come to look at your stock: we can't afford to buy it, but we are really theatrical impressarios in deep disguise, imagining a stage set and a limitless fortune,” Joe announced.

“Go ahead and welcome,” the woman said.

Crystal dripped into a small room, pear-shaped and diamond cut, a slight tinkling to the touch. Small chandeliers and elaborately large. One with seventy-five lights, once seventy-five candles. Can you imagine lighting that, and then putting out the lights? No wonder so many old houses burned down. The thing had curved, tapering branches, like so many antlers, with linked chains of cut crystal droplets, each the size of a tiny fist, suspended in between, small glass saucers supporting the little lights which stood slightly crooked, like tired soldiers at ease. The woman flicked a switch. The whole shop blazed with light: Elisabeth could imagine a thousand different rooms and with her neck extended, her eyes unblinking, she said, “Oh!”

“These would be hellish difficult to photograph,” Joe was saying. For her, it was enough that they existed. She was entranced. Joe pointed to the mammoth with the seventy-five lights.

“We'll have two of those,” he said. “Can you wrap them?” and she laughed in total delight.

“Just the two?”

They lunched, late, and talked about nothing. They fantasized about the position of the chandelier in the bell-tower, whether Reverend Flynn would approve and how you would hang the ton of a thing from the
ceiling, let alone get it up the stairs. They had wandered, seen elegant ladies buying beautiful things.

“You don't have to own a chandelier,” Joe said. “You just have to know it exists.”

“Yes,” she said. “I know that. I have always known that. My father,” she told him, in a rush of information, “was a jeweller and it was not enough for him to know that things existed: he had to possess them. He thought gemstones were the most fascinating things in the universe; people always came second or third. He could bore for Europe on the properties of stones. I loved stones, too, any form of crystal, but I liked them for their impurities, not their perfection. He couldn't understand that: nor could he understand my mother's less than total fascination.”

Once she started, she could not stop. Talking was a glorious luxury.

“She liked what a gem could buy, saw it as a piece of trading stock, quite pretty really, but not as good as money. My sister loved jewellery with a passion. Rather a nice kind of passion, the same she had for many things, but my father never seemed to notice that her interest was only the same kind she might have had for a doll or a dress.”

“Highly feminine … frills?”

All Joe had to do was prompt, express the interest.

“Oh yes, a perfect little lady, with tremendous airs and graces, loved dressing up, and the dolls, too. She looked after things, though, that was what he liked. I was never forgiven for losing things. Not many children play with diamonds. I lost a couple, Emma, never. She looked after people and pets in the same way, though. He didn't notice that. She was always more likely to cry over a sick dog than she was over a stone with a scratch, sort
of thing would break his heart.”

“I may as well tell you,” he said, casually, stirring the third coffee, “that I know of your sister Emma. Oh, and I once did some work for the police. For someone called Jenkins. He kept in touch. So, I know that Emma's dead and how she died. Besides newspaper reports stick in my mind, especially pictures. You look so like her and anyway, Flynn told me.”

She paused, looked suspicious, decided it was too late to stop. She put these revelations into limbo, and went on. She knew she was talking way too much. But the combined effect of this single day and this large, easy stranger, made her want to explain.

“Flynn thinks that I'm secretly a rich eccentric. I think, when I see that chandelier, that I can understand my father's passion. He wanted to shower Emma with gems, probably gave her many, but I never knew, because I never cared. Emma married about the time he died. He may have given her something then … he had quite a collection, but no-one knows what happened to it because by that time, she didn't care either. She only cared for living things. People and animals. Objects bored her.” There was another pause.

“Why am I telling you this?” she demanded.

“Because of the chandelier. I wouldn't know the difference between paste and diamond. Is there any? Go on.”