Colouring In (17 page)

I gave him Act II of
Rejection
to read. He made one or two small suggestions, said he was no expert on reading plays but there were various things he liked or that made him smile … or think. I respect his opinion, as I always have, so took encouragement from his comments. But I don’t know what he really thinks. He didn’t show any great enthusiasm – perhaps he doesn’t want to encourage false hope. But it was kind of him to read it, give me his thoughts. So I’ll plod on (‘plod’ being the apt word at the moment. Act II has yet to come alive). One day I’ll say to him, ‘Bert, tell me honestly, do you think my writing’s crap? I haven’t got what it takes? I should give up trying?’ And I know, confronted, he’ll give me an honest answer. But I won’t ask him just yet. Perhaps when
Rejection
is finished. I have sleepless nights trying to think of a proper title.

Carlotta he never mentions, nor do I, although I know he has a meeting with her arranged in his house. I don’t think she occupies much of his thoughts.

I don’t dwell on her much, either. The incident seems far away, reduced in size to a bantam’s egg. Odd, mind pictures: visualising it, I see us both the size of eggs, in the same way that I think of people in the ancient world as very small, toy-sized figures. Historical perspective has always played tricks on my mind.

I still can’t begin to understand what demon got into me – or Carlotta, for that matter. And when I do let myself think of it, it’s with infinite regret. More worrying – and the anxiety is larger than an egg and won’t go away – is the fear that one day Carlotta will hint to Isabel what happened. Years from now she might – even accidentally – refer to it. There have been moments in the past when she’s let Isabel down by revealing something she was sworn not to reveal. But there’s nothing I can do about that. Just hope. If my stern warning to her could trammel up the consequences… But I can’t be sure of that. I can only live trusting that one day the whole regrettable business will fade.

So. The evening of the meeting at last. I sent Bert a card saying please be there at six. I don’t want to ring him again. My plan is to get there at 6.15. That will give him time to take in the progress so far on his own. He can gather his thoughts, put them to me when I arrive. It can all be over very quickly. I shan’t hang around looking for an invitation to dinner. I shall act as if he’s nothing more than a client.

All the same, I’ve been thinking constantly of the move I might make that would stir things up one way or another. Should I, or shouldn’t I? Would it be completely mad? Certainly it would be a risk. Think I shan’t decide till I get there. See what sort of mood he’s in. Act spontaneously if there’s the slightest indication…

I arrived back early from the office, had a bath. When I got out of it I stood for a long time looking at my naked body. Not bad, I have to admit. Amazing breasts, small waist, narrow hips, long legs. Sexier than Isabel, surely? – I know Bert admires Isabel hugely: does he fancy her, I wonder? I put on a black cotton shirt that does up with a spine of tiny pearl buttons. Left a few undone at the top, but not too many. No intention of cheap provocation. Then I took up my Bert file and set off in the car.

With some trepidation, I have to admit.

A week to the day after Bert moved in I ran into him on the stairs. I hate meeting people on stairs. It’s always hard to find something to say as one is going up, the other down: not the place to stop for a proper exchange.

I knew he was off to see what Carlotta had done so far to his house. He’d said he wouldn’t be in for dinner – he thought he’d better take out ‘the decorator’, as he called her, to make up for his previous bad behaviour. If she refused, he added, with a sparkle that indicated this would be unlikely, then he’d look after himself.

Bert was coming down, I was going up. We stopped simultaneously, he just one step above me. Our eyes met. I blushed, then regarded my own hand, a distant thing, nothing to do with me, tighten on the banister. There was a timeless silence, a mutual rush of unspoken words, flaying questions: how to begin? I think both of us wondered.

‘In an ideal world,’ Bert eventually said, ‘I wouldn’t be doing this, going out this evening to waltz my way round Carlotta’s sensitivities. I’d be here sharing the fish pie with you and Dan.’

‘That would have been nice,’ I answered, helplessly.

He stepped down onto my stair, said he wouldn’t be late. He moved as if to kiss me goodbye. Then he flicked back his head before our cheeks had a chance to meet, and looked at his watch without conviction: I knew he didn’t give a damn about the time.

‘Must be going,’ he said, and hurried down. I could see he was disturbed.

When he had gone, I lowered myself onto the stair. Often, as a child, I would sit on the old mole-brown carpet of our stairs at home, trying to puzzle out the worrying preoccupations of childhood.

The habit hasn’t left me. I still do it when no one’s around. I rested my spinning head on my hands. Had Bert said anything about our…whatever it was, our moment of madness, to Carlotta? God forbid: surely not. But how could I know? I’d vowed to myself never to mention it again. Like that, it might go away. But it was terrible not knowing.

Worse was the thought of their evening. Carlotta taking him round his own rooms, explaining things. Giving him those patient little smiles that she knows can captivate, her front teeth just visible on her bottom lip. I know her come-hither stance so well: head on one side while she does her listening act. For all his irritation, Bert might find this too much to resist. It must be some time since he had a woman – I could tell.

The thought of them brought deep unease. I stood up, went to the kitchen, took the fish from the fridge. It would be awful when Bert left, in a couple of weeks or so, but his presence here is an odd strain. I half wished something would happen that would mean he had to leave early: no more slight dread of meeting him alone on the stairs.

I searched for a sharp knife. Dan banged the front door, home later than usual. He put down a bag of lemons I’d rung and asked him to buy. ‘For all Bert’s talents as a guest,’ he said, ‘it’s lovely that we’ve got an evening to ourselves again, isn’t it?’ He took me in his arms, kissed me on both cheeks.

Then he held me a little away from him, and looked at me so intently my guilty heart couldn’t help wondering if it was an enquiry.

I had to drive very slowly to give myself time to calm down. That moment of unplanned proximity with Isabel on the stairs had had its effect. I must be very careful in future: make sure I don’t run into her alone again, be so close.

Carlotta’s car was parked outside the house. I drew up behind her. Heard myself sigh. It was a great effort to get out, let myself through the front door.

The sitting-room was transformed by exactly the kind of mess I’d imagined. Furniture was humped under dustsheets, islands of various size on the carpet white with dust. Pictures were stacked on the floor, wallpaper was stripped from one wall. Didn’t seem to me much progress had been made.

Carlotta was sitting in my old chair – perhaps she didn’t plan to throw it out after all – whose shape I recognised even in its disguise of a gingham dustsheet. ‘Don’t worry about the carpet,’ she said, looking at my footsteps in the dust, ‘it’s going.’

She stood up. She seemed to be wearing less make-up than usual: bare lips, not much stuff on her incredibly long lashes. Bare legs, too: flat shoes. A black shirt done up by dozens of minute buttons. I had the impression she had deliberately not tried with her appearance.

‘Those must have taken you ages to do up,’ I observed, with a nod towards her shirt.

She smiled politely at my pathetic observation. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘but they don’t take a moment to undo.’ I reckoned we were about equal in our feebleness. She suggested a tour of the house.

I followed her: kitchen, study – chaos everywhere. I was thinking of Isabel and Dan at supper. It was hard to take much interest, but I managed to sound appreciative. We went upstairs. She bounced on each stair, bottom swinging from side to side. In my mind’s eye was Isabel – the fluidity of her ascent to the studio that night. The shifting of her long modest skirt. So different.

My bedroom, too, was covered in dustsheets. There were streaks of pink plaster here and there on the walls that covered familiar cracks. On the window ledge a white board had been propped up. It was painted with stripes of various greens.

Carlotta wanted to know which one I liked best. I stood looking at them in uninterested silence. If she had asked me how I would have liked this room to be done, I would have said with white walls and the same curtains as there are in my room at number 18. But she would never have asked, having decided I was as hopeless as all men when it came to decorative matters, and I would never have said. As it was, the greens all looked so similar it was hard to be struck with a preference. I didn’t know, I said at last.

‘Bert,’
Carlotta suddenly snapped, ‘do
try.
Please.’

She swung round to re-study the samples herself. In the hunch of her shoulders and the tightness of her back I read her impatience.

There was a sudden, startling noise of ripping. Her hands were outspread, holding the front panels of her shirt apart. I had a momentary sensation that I was seeing the wings of a rook about to fly.

She pivoted round to face me, more challenging than irritated now. Her shirt, parted wide, revealed her bare breasts. She looked at me looking at them. Smiled.

‘See, I told you the buttons didn’t take long to undo,’ she said, and quickly closed the wings of material and fumbled to do them up again. I don’t know for how long it was she had allowed me to gaze at her nakedness. It might have been a second, it might have been an hour. Whichever, the impact was so astonishing that there was not an inch of those exquisite breasts that was not imprinted on my mind. I defy any man, even Dan, not to have been thrown by such a surprise, such a sight. I was speechless.

‘Joke,’ Carlotta said, head down, still concentrating on the buttons. ‘Joke, joke, joke. Please Bert, take it as a joke. Probably a very silly one. But I had to do something to wake you up, stir a fraction of interest in green paints. Besides, I wanted to lighten things between us, not to seduce you.’

She made a sudden move towards me, gave me what I took for a conciliatory kiss on the cheek. For a second those heavenly breasts were divided only by our shirts from my own chest. I fear I quivered. She backed away. Suggested we should progress to the bathroom, where she talked with incredible speed about brass taps and orchestrated lavatories, wall mirrors and the possibility of a power shower in the corner. It was the weirdest evening I’d ever spent in my own house.

Beyond any coherent thought, I could only keep agreeing with her plans.

‘Can you tell me
exactly
what happened, Mrs.?’ A nice voice was in my ear. ‘Can you remember?’

I couldn’t remember. I was muzzy with the pain, and whatever they’d given me. I couldn’t remember the children’s names, or their numbers or where they lived. So I gave them Mrs. G’s number. Somehow that seemed stuck in my head.

Now, I’m lying in a hospital bed. It must be the middle of the night. A bandage and a wodge of something covers most of my head. It goes right over one eye. With the other eye, which I open just for a second, I can see other beds. I must be in a large ward. Streetlights come through thin curtains across the windows opposite. Someone groans horribly. My left side hurts if I move, even very slightly. My right arm is heavy when I try to lift it. It’s covered in bandages, too.

I shut my eyes again. Try to remember. After a while, things come back to me. I do remember bits.

I left number 18 this morning – was it today or yesterday? I can’t be sure – with head held high. I wasn’t going to be cowed by the thought of Gary any more. I couldn’t let him haunt me. I walked home quite fast, looking neither right nor left, and I didn’t see him.

Late afternoon, after I’d had my tea, I decided I’d treat myself to a cinema. I hadn’t been out of an evening for I don’t know how long, and I’d seen there was an old Carry On film at Shepherd’s Bush. That might give me a laugh, I thought. Take me out of myself.

I set off at six, or thereabouts. I enjoyed the film – laughed out loud with the rest of the audience. I should do this more often, I told myself, as I came out. I was struck with that funny feeling, as I always am after a film, of how small we all are. I suppose it’s after looking at those much larger than life people for a couple of hours. ‘How small I am,’ I thought, ‘and how unimportant.’

I wasn’t twenty yards from the cinema when I saw a man running very fast along the crowded pavement towards me. People were pushed out of his way. I had the impression he was either being chased, or chasing someone. I saw his face only for a moment, twisted with anger or fear or some such. But the light was bad, it being dusk, semi-dark. And it all happened so quickly I couldn’t be sure of anything. Except that the running man was wearing a pale blue anorak with a black stripe down one side. It struck me: Gary has an anorak like that. I can’t be sure if he was wearing it when I saw him outside number 18. But then it’s a mass-made garment. Thousands of men must have them.

As he passed me I felt my bag being wrenched from my arm. I felt the sting of its sharp clasp cutting into my wrist. I was spun round, almost knocked off my feet. I think for a split second I was face to face with my attacker, but by now I was so dizzy I don’t know. Then he held up a hand. He was holding some hard implement, I don’t know what. He hit me on the face. I felt no pain.

I do remember falling. As I went down I felt as if I was disintegrating, my whole body coming to pieces. I felt I was falling in flakes, like snow. I felt the pavement beneath one of my hands. It was oddly gritty as if there was spilt sand. My fingers came across a sticky paper, and a patch of soft stinking rotten banana or something, and I thought I was going to be sick. Commotion, I was aware of. Such commotion.