Espresso Tales (18 page)

48. Private Papers

Pat hesitated at the door of Peter's flat in Cumberland Street. It would be easy to turn back now, to return to Scotland Street and to call him from there. Something could have arisen to prevent her from seeing him as planned–there were so many excuses to stand somebody up: a friend in need, a headache, a deadline to meet. If she did that, of course, then she would not see him again, and she was not sure whether that was what she wanted. She was undecided. Men complicated one's life; that was obvious. They made demands. They changed everything. In short, the question was whether they were worth it. And what was it anyway? The pleasure of their company?–women were far more companionable than men. The excitement of male presence?–how long did that last, and did she want that anyway? She thought not, and was about to turn away when she remembered his face, and the way he had stooped to talk to her at that first meeting, and how physically perfect he had seemed to her then and was still, in the imagining of him.

She tugged at the old-fashioned brass bell-pull. There was a lot of give in the wire, but eventually there was a tinkling sound inside. Then there was silence. She tugged at the bell again and as she did so the door opened and Peter stood there. For a moment he looked puzzled, and then he raised a hand to his brow in a gesture of self-mockery over some stupidity.

“I forgot,” he said. “I totally forgot.”

Pat had not expected this. He had issued the invitation, after all; she was not self-invited. “I'm sorry,” she said lamely. “I'm sorry. We'd arranged…”

Peter shook his head. “Of course, of course. We'd arranged it. I'm so damn stupid. Come in.”

“If it's inconvenient…”

He reached out and gripped her forearm, pulling her in. “Don't be silly. I was doing nothing anyway. Just come in.”

She entered a hall, a large square room of similar proportions to the hall of the flat in Scotland Street. This was in markedly worse order, though, with scuffed paintwork on the doors and skirting boards. The floor, which was sanded, was made of broad Canadian pine boards, covered in part by frayed oriental rugs; the planks were uneven, and caused the rugs to rise in small ridges, like tiny mountain ranges.

“This flat belongs to somebody who works in Hong Kong,” said Peter, waving a hand behind him. “An accountant, or something like that. He's mean. He never fixes anything, but the rent isn't too bad and it suits us. I've been here over a year.”

“How many do you share with?” asked Pat.

“There are three of us,” said Peter, pointing to a half-open door off the hall. “That's the biggest room. Joe and Fergus live in that. And that's my room over here. We've got a sort of sitting room, but it's a tip and we hardly ever use it.”

Pat looked at the half-open door. Joe and Fergus. Then she remembered. When she had seen Peter at the Film Theatre he had been with another young man, a boy who had stared at her while Peter had whispered something to him. I'm naive, she said to herself. I've missed the obvious.

Peter gestured towards the door of his room. “Are you easily shocked?” he asked, smiling as he spoke.

Pat thought quickly. She was not sure what to expect, but who could admit to being shocked these days? “Of course not,” she said.

“Good,” said Peter. “Because it's a bit of a mess. If I'd remembered, I would have tidied it up before you came.”

Pat laughed. “I'm a bit untidy myself.”

“Well,” said Peter. “That may be, but…”

They went into the room, which was dimly lit by a single reading lamp on the desk near the window. The curtains, made of a heavy red brocaded material, were drawn closed, but did not quite meet in the middle. A thin line of orange light from the streetlights outside shone through the crack.

Pat glanced about her. There was a bed in the corner, covered with a white counterpane, made, at least, unlike Bruce's bed, which was usually in a state of dishevelment. Then there were two easy chairs with brown corduroy slipcovers; the seat of one of these was covered with a pile of abandoned clothing–a shirt, a couple of pairs of socks, some unidentified underclothes and a pair of jeans. Peter reached down, bundled the clothing up and stuffed it in a drawer.

“This isn't a mess,” said Pat. “Bruce–my flatmate–has a far messier room.”

Peter shrugged. “Every so often I have a blitz on it. But the vacuum cleaner's bust and it's difficult.”

“You could borrow ours,” said Pat. She spoke quickly, and immediately wondered whether this was the right thing to say. It was as if she was offering to clean up for him, which was not what she intended.

“We're all right,” said Peter, pointing to one of the chairs and inviting her to sit down. “We get by.”

Pat sat down and looked at the walls. There could be clues there, just to confirm. A picture of…who were the appropriate icons? She realised that she was not sure. There was a poster above the bed, a film poster of some sort; but it was for a Japanese film and she had no idea what that signified. And above her head, behind the chair, was a framed print of
American Gothic
, the Midwest farmer, pitchfork in hand, and his wife, standing grimly in front of a barn. Again, that conveyed nothing, except some sense of irony perhaps.

Peter rubbed his hands together. “I'll go and make coffee,” he said. “How do you like it?”

Pat told him, and he went off to the kitchen, leaving her alone in his room. Once he had gone, she looked at his desk. There was a pile of books–a Jane Austen novel, a book of critical essays, the
Notebooks
of Robert Lowell, a dictionary. Behind the books was an open file into which what looked like lecture notes had been inserted. She rose to her feet and went over to the desk. Yes, they were his lecture notes. He had written the title of a lecture at the top:
Social expectations and artistic freedom in Austen's England: Tuesday.
There was a pile of papers on the edge of the desk–a couple of opened letters and what looked like an electricity bill.

She moved the letters slightly; of course she would not read them, she was just looking; a foreign stamp: Germany. And underneath the letters, two or three photographs, turned face downwards. She hesitated. She should mind her own business; one did not go into another person's room and look at his photographs. But at least she could examine the writing on the back of one of them, the photograph on top of the pile. It was not very distinct, as the ink had smudged, but she could just make it out.
Skinny-dipping, Greece, with T.

Pat looked over her shoulder. She should not look at his private papers–they were nothing to do with her. But then, he had invited her into his room and the photographs were lying around and how could anybody resist the temptation to look at a photograph with that inscription written on the back? If you left photographs lying about then you were more or less giving permission for people to look at them. It was the same as sending postcards: the postman was entitled to read them. And Pat was human. So she turned the photograph over and looked.

49. Australian Memories

Holding two cups of steaming coffee, Peter came back into his room. “I don't have anything else to offer you,” he said. “Not even a biscuit. We often run out of food altogether. And I find that when I buy some, Joe and Fergus eat it. I'm not sure if they know what they're doing. They just eat it.”

Pat was not hungry, and did not mind. Peter had made real coffee, she noticed, and it smelled good, like strong…strong what? Coffee was complicated now, with all those americanos and mochas and double skinny lattes with vanilla. This was a bitter coffee, which Pat liked, and made for herself in the flat, although Bruce always turned his nose up at it. Shortly after she had moved in, Bruce, uninvited, had taken a cup of coffee from her cafetière and had spat it out after the first mouthful. But Bruce was Peter's polar opposite–unsubtle, uninterested in literature (he had once asked if Jane Austen was an actress), and quite without that willowy charm that Peter had in such abundance. She reflected briefly on this, and ruefully too, because she was now sure that Peter had nothing more in mind than casual friendship. How naive she had been to imagine otherwise: he was far too handsome to be interested in girls. There was that quality of sensitivity, that look in his eyes that told her, and everybody else who cared to look for it, that he
understood
, but, at the same time, that he was elsewhere.

Peter sat on the bed; she sat on the chair from which the pile of clothes had been moved. He sat there, with his bare feet on the counterpane, his cup of coffee cradled in his hands; she sat with both feet on the ground, her cup of coffee sitting on the table beside her. For a few moments they looked at one another. Then Peter smiled, and she noticed his teeth, which were perfectly straight, either by nature, or through the efforts of orthodontists. There was something familiar about these teeth and she struggled to recall what it was; then she remembered–Pedro, the doll whom she had loved so much, had had teeth painted on the fabric of his face, and these teeth were just like Peter's. Had Pedro, the doll, been interested in girl dolls, or did he prefer the company of other boy dolls? As a girl, she had thought that Pedro had loved only her, but that might have been a mistake. Pedro might have wished for something else altogether but had been obliged all his woolly life to be with her, like the captive he was. Such a ridiculous thought, and she smiled involuntarily at the thinking of it. Peter smiled back.

They both began to speak at that same time.

“I…” said Pat.

And he said, “I…” and then, laughing, “You go ahead.”

“No, you go,” she said. “Go on.”

“What do you do? I suppose that's what I was going to ask you.”

Pat explained that she was a student, or almost a student. “I've had a couple of years off,” she said. “I went to…” She paused, and he watched her expectantly. “To Australia, actually.”

He nodded. “So did I. Where were you?”

She could not bring herself to speak about Western Australia, although she knew that she would have to do so sooner or later. So she mentioned Queensland and New South Wales, and Peter replied that he had been in both of those places. “I picked fruit,” he said. “And I worked in a bar in Sydney, down in that old part near the harbour bridge. I did all sorts of things. Then I went travelling with somebody I met there. We had a great time. Two months of travelling.”

“Where was he from?” asked Pat.

“She,” said Peter. “She was Canadian. She came from somewhere near Winnipeg.”

Of course she was probably just a friend, thought Pat. She had travelled in Thailand with a boy who was no more than a friend; it protected one from all sorts of dangers. And of course if she had been with somebody in Western Australia, then she would not have ended up in that plight in the first place.

“I had some pretty strange jobs in Australia,” Peter went on. “I spent a month on a sheep station, looking after the owner, who was ancient. He couldn't walk very far and so they had made him a sort of trolley which he put a chair on. It had bike wheels, front and back, and I had to push him around the garden and down to the edge of the river. He was doing a correspondence course in history and I had to help him with that.”

Pat laughed. She had taken peculiar jobs too, and none more peculiar than that job in Western Australia; but she did not feel like talking about that.

Peter looked thoughtful. “I miss Australia, you know. I miss the place. Those wide plains. The eucalyptus forests and the noise of the screeching birds. Remember that? The galahs? And the people, too. That friendliness. I miss all that a lot.”

She felt his gaze upon her, a quizzical, slightly bemused look, and she wondered what it meant. It was as if he was sounding her out, determining whether she could respond to those images of Australia, that evocation of atmosphere. And she could, of course, and was about to say something herself about the Australian countryside and the effect it had wrought upon her when there was a knock at the door. He looked away, the spell broken, and answered.

The door half-opened and a head appeared. It was a young woman, of about Pat's age, or a year or two older. The young woman looked briefly at Peter and then at Pat. “Sorry to interrupt,” she said. “The thermostat on the hot water has stuck again. Can you fiddle with it like you did last time?”

Peter put down his coffee cup and rose from the bed. “Of course,” he said. Then, half-turning to Pat, he said: “By the way, this is Joe.”

Pat nodded a greeting, which Joe returned with a cheerful wave. Then, while Peter and Joe were out of the room, Pat looked up at the ceiling and smiled. Josephine and Fergus: rather a different picture from the one she had imagined. And this meant that Peter was quite possible now, although there was still the question of T. Who was T and did she (or he) take the photograph of the skinny-dipping in Greece? She could always ask Peter directly, but then that would reveal that she had sneaked a look at the photograph, which was none of her business. Unless, of course, she were to place her coffee cup on the table and inadvertently cause the books and photographs to fall onto the floor…just like this.