It's Beginning to Hurt: Stories (25 page)

“You did indeed.”

“We were in Asprey’s. I said a daughter’s only seventeen once. Splurge.”

Anna gave her a look of blank incomprehension.

Then she leaned over to kiss her father’s cheek. “It’s nice, Daddy. Thank you.”

“Aren’t you going to try it on?” Lesley asked.

“Well, all right.”

“Here, let me fasten it for you.”

The .woman leaned over and fastened the necklace around Anna’s neck. Against her girlish cardigan, patterned in rows like an embroidery sampler, it seemed violently incongruous. Even so, it was rather beautiful.

Mr. Hamilton surveyed her, nodding approvingly.

“ ‘Aphrodite, your garlands are made of golden leaves,’ ” he quoted at her. “Sappho, in case you didn’t know.”

He spread the menu before him like a general’s map, plotting his debauch on our inexperienced palates. The drinks arrived. Mine went straight to my head. I felt alert, pleasantly aware of being in an expensive restaurant. The sound of well-heeled Londoners in full conversational cry, vying with the gulp and throb of a tabla, the moan of a sitar, gave me a sensation of being a part of the rich, swaggering life of the metropolis—not something I often felt in those days. When I drained the last of my cocktail, Mr. Hamilton rewarded me with a connoisseur’s nod and smile as if I had accomplished something requiring great technique and sophistication.

“Bravo! Get you another one?”

I was quite drunk by the time the food began arriving. In his usual extravagant fashion, Mr. Hamilton had ordered far more than we could possibly eat. The salvers shoaled at our table till there was no room for any more, and the waiters had to set up an auxiliary camping stool to hold the remainder. Unlidded, the dishes smoked and sizzled, releasing their aromas into the air. Mr. Hamilton spoke knowledgeably about the ingredients of each one as he served us. Words such as fenugreek, cardamom, and asafetida acquired meanings for the first time as I probed the flavors of each dish with my cautiously adventurous tongue. A dish of curried plovers’ eggs had been sprinkled with edible gold. “Yes, that’s amusing, isn’t it, when they do that?” Mr. Hamilton said.

I was acutely susceptible to new sensations in those days; new tastes, new sounds possessed a mystery and resonance entirely unconnected with their objective reality. A dish of lobster tails in a creamy masala sauce arrived. Neither Anna nor I had eaten lobster before. We prized the tails from their dark pink armor as Mr. Hamilton instructed us. As I bit into the succulent flesh, 1 felt without exaggeration as if I were being led across the threshold into a new universe of delights.

I looked across the table at Anna. She had fallen into a quiet reverie, overwhelmed, it seemed, by the strangeness of the situation: the disturbing presence of her father’s friend, the novelty of the food, the fantastical green-gold ivy leaves glittering around her neck. A feeling of tenderness came into me as I gazed at her.

There was something all at once stunned, brave, and delicate in her expression.

At one point Lesley went off to the ladies’. Watching her disappear out of sight, Anna turned to her father, this time with a more pointedly questioning look.

“Ah yes,” he said, lowering his eyelids. An embarrassed smile played about his lips. “You’re wondering who my friend is. I’m afraid I got rather bludgeoned into bringing her along tonight. I must tell you, though, it was against my better judgment.”

He looked up at his daughter.

“Unfortunately, you see, I made the mistake of promising her I’d inform you of our, ah, well, that I’d
tell
you about ... us. Myself and Lesley, that is. And then last week I’m ashamed to say I told her that I
had
told you, so of course she insisted on my bringing her along to meet you tonight. But of course I
hadn’t
told you ...”

“I see,” Anna managed in a subdued voice.

“Now, darling, you’re not upset with me, are you?”

“No.”

Mr. Hamilton looked at his daughter hesitantly for a moment, before deciding to take her at her word.

“Well, I’m glad that’s out in the air, 1 must say.” He patted her on the shoulder and began to grin. “One should never bottle these things up, you know. Bad for the digestion.” He smoothed his napkin and adjusted the flamelike triangle of his silk handerchief. “Now, if you don’t mind, I’d rather we weren’t discussing this when Lesley returns. She can be extremely touchy, and it mightn’t go down too well if she cottons on that I hadn’t mentioned her to you till now.”

In the silence that followed, a sudden mischievous expression appeared on his face.

“Here,” he said, “I don’t think you’ve tried this yet, have you?”

He scooped us each a spoonful of something from a small dish at the center of the table.

“Eat the whole thing”—he encouraged—“go on, you’ll enjoy it.”

As soon as we put the spoons in our mouths a violent sourness and fieriness burst on our tongues. It was as if he had given us each a red-hot coal to eat, or a spoonful of hydrochloric acid.

“Lime pickle,” he said, and burst into laughter.

At the end of the meal he wanted us to come back to Lesley’s flat and listen to her sing. We made our way through Soho, Mr. Hamilton leading us at a stately pace, surveying everything we passed— the bead-curtained strip clubs with miniskirted hostesses beckoning us in, the porn-shingled shopwindows—with leisurely, unabashed interest. Lesley clopped along next to him, keeping up an incessant flow of soft chatter, which he largely ignored.

Anna was beside me, clinging to my arm. Her school satchel hung from her other shoulder, in it the nautilus we were going to put on the stone table in our island house. The ivy leaves tinkled strangely at her neck as she walked.

We went into a newish brick building and climbed a flight of stairs to a door that Lesley opened. Her flat was done up in flowery pastel materials with a lot of flounces and ruched trimmings. There were lace-edged cushions everywhere and a row of costumed dolls on a shelf. In one corner was an electric piano.

Anna and I sat on a sofa while Mr. Hamilton poured us each a drink. Lesley turned the lights low and, after the obligatory show of bashfulness, struck up a tune on the electric piano and began to sing.

Her voice wasn’t bad—husky and surprisingly low—but to our fastidious, intolerant ears, the songs themselves (Broadway ballads mostly, as far as I can remember) were unbearable. While she sang them, which she did in an American accent, she went through a routine of stiff, exaggerated expressions. She batted her eyelids, tossed her head, puckered her mouth to look “wry,” doggedly illustrating whatever the lyrics suggested, as if she had a foreign or perhaps deaf audience in mind. Mr. Hamilton clapped at the end of each number, defiantly unfazed. At one point she sang a song with a chorus that went “Because he teases me he pleases me,” gazing at him lovingly. Anna looked at her father as if in expectation of—what? A complicit wink? An acknowledgment that all this was at the very least an aberration? But he studiously avoided her eye. Even in my inebriated state I felt the painfulness of the situation. Anna clung to me tightly as if to protect herself. I felt her perplexity, her slight fear and horror as she leaned against me. It was as if she were watching the seventeen years of her family life at the Suffolk millhouse, with all its civilized entertainments and innocent rituals, dissolve in some corrosive solution before her eyes.

“You’re going to be a star, my dear. I feel it absolutely,” Mr. Hamilton said as Lesley finished.

“Oh, Boland, it’s so tiresome when you flatter me. He’s forever trying to flatter me. But I never believe him. I’m afraid I’ve got his number.”

Mr. Hamilton stood up. “I’ll tell you what. Why don’t we leave these two here and us jump into a taxi? Anna looks ready for bed, and Matthew, I’m sure, doesn’t want to slog all the way up to Wood Green at this time of night, do you, dear boy?”

“Well—”

Lesley broke in. “Of course! What a good idea. There’s everything you need right here. I’ll get you some towels, but I put on clean sheets just this morning.”

Mr. Hamilton turned a little uncertainly to his daughter. “How does that suit you, darling one?”

Anna looked at him helplessly. She seemed to have taken in about all she could absorb in one night.

“All right.”

Fluffy pink towels were produced. We were shown the floral bedroom, the warm, windowless bathroom, where the gleaming chrome snake of a handheld shower had coiled itself over the taps of a vast oval bath.

Then they were gone.

That was twenty years ago. Last month I read Mr. Hamilton’s obituary in
The Times.
By then his wife had divorced him, and between his own expensive tastes and those of Lesley and her successors, he had bankrupted himself. For a while he lived at the Bayswater flat, then moved into a series of increasingly seedy hotels.

A few years ago 1 visited Anna at her house in Muswell Hill. She herself was divorced then, with two teenage children, one of them in trouble with drugs. Dirty washing up was piled in the sink, and a great tidal stain of damp had spread across the ceiling. Exhausted, though stout and surprisingly robust-looking, Anna told me how her father had taken to “dropping in” on her for days, and then weeks, at a time. He had become shabby and cantankerous and was often drunk, and although she felt sorry for him, she found his presence in the house increasingly hard to bear. Finally she had had to ask him to leave.

As I read his obituary, I found myself thinking once again of our night out at the Madras Chop House. I remembered the casually debonair way in which he had turned up with his girlfriend, the gilded ivy necklace he’d given Anna and how it tinkled disconcertingly as we walked through Soho. I thought of Lesley’s songs and Mr. Hamilton’s furtive charade of pleasure as he listened to them, and of course I remembered their abrupt departure, leaving Anna and me alone for the night. It was the first time we had been in a position to spend the night together, but the circumstances had left us more depressed than elated. Everything estranged us: the sugared decor of Lesley’s flat; the evening’s vast,' if barely acknowledged, revelations; the unexpected freedom the night had thrust upon us. A heart-shaped satin cushion lay on the bed. The sheets were scented. We undressed and climbed in, holding each other tightly in an attempt to retrieve our companionable intimacy. I remembered the thin, curiously irrelevant feeling of desire that came into me. Anna looked at me with her frail, still rather stunned expression. “No,” she said, “no, not now. In the summer ...” But a short while later we were no longer virgins.

And I remembered too the spoonful of lime pickle Mr. Hamilton tricked us into eating, his laughter as it burned on our astounded tongues—harsh, caustic, not altogether benign—his shoulders shaking, his eyes watering with pleasure almost as much as ours had with pain. At the time the joke had seemed to me merely stupid and cruel, but as I remember it now, I find myself curiously amused by it. An involuntary smile twists itself into my face. A gravelly chuckle begins to rise in my throat. Tears come into my eyes . . .

Before I left Anna’s house in Muswell Hill, she took me up into her bedroom, saying she wanted to show me something. There on the mantelpiece, gleaming palely in the gray London light, was the nautilus I had given her for her seventeenth birthday. She and I had kept in touch over the years, though we had little in common other than an increasingly small proportion of our pasts. Perhaps I misconstrued her gesture in bringing me upstairs, but I felt awkward standing there, and my reaction on seeing the shell—still there in her life, still intact—was in all truth one of suffocating oppression. As delicately as I could, I made my excuses and left.

I haven’t seen her since.

“Good lunch, Mr. Bryar?”

“Excellent lunch.”

“Sorleys?”

“No, some . . . Chinese place.”

“Your wife rang.”

He dialed home; his wife answered:

“Where on earth have you been?”

“Sorry, darling. Complicated lunch . . .”

Strange, to be lying to her once again. And about a funeral! “Tom’s coming down. Stop at Dalgliesh’s—would you?—and pick up a salmon. A wild one? Better go right now, actually, in case they run out.”

It was July, a baking summer. He walked slowly, thinking of the ceremony he had just attended. Among the half dozen mourners, he had known only the solicitor who had introduced him to Marie ten years ago and had told him of her death last week. The news had stunned him; he hadn’t known she was ill, but then he hadn’t seen her for seven years. Throughout the service he had found himself weeping uncontrollably.

The man at Dalgliesh’s hoisted a fish the length of his arm from under a covering of seaweed and ice.

“How’s that?”

“Okay. Would you—”

“Gut her and clean her, sir?”

“Please.”

The man slit the creature’s belly with a short knife, spilling the dewy beige guts into a bucket. He rinsed the flecked mesh of scales and the red flesh inside, then wrapped the fish in paper and put it in a plastic bag.