Portobello (15 page)

He sat on a wall and counted the money, just as he had done
when he plundered the American woman's handbag. Not so much
from today, only forty-five pounds. He'd take the credit cards next
time.

The Sharpes from next door and Elizabeth Cherry were being
entertained to drinks at Eugene's house. They had all talked
about the weather, how it was unbelievable, rain pouring down day
after day, and so cold that Marilyn Sharpe had had her central
heating on for two days. In July!

Ella thought talking about rain as boring as anything one could
think of and she was relieved when Elizabeth began telling everyone
about her extraordinary experience of the previous day. Eugene
went round filling glasses from the second Veuve Clicquot bottle.
Everyone in this smart area of Notting Hill served champagne on
such occasions, wine being considered rather mean and spirits
unhealthy.

'I waited till the rain stopped,' Elizabeth was saying, 'and then
I went out shopping. I'd absolutely nothing in the house except
this enormous cake I'd made for my granddaughter's birthday. Or
let me say I
think
I'd made. Really, I'm telling this story against
myself because it'll make you all think I'm senile. And, oh dear,
perhaps I am.'

She paused until the cries of 'But you're wonderful' and 'Absurd,
you're like someone twenty years younger' had died down. 'Well,
anyway, I came back after about three-quarters of an hour – it was
raining again, needless to say – and everything was just as I left it
except that the house had an odd feel about it. That's the only
way I can describe it. I think a
child
had been in there.'

Ella asked why a child.

'I'd left the laundry-room window open to let out the steam.
But only a little way. I mean, no adult could have squeezed
through. A child could have. The next thing was I found crumbs
going into my living room, quite a trail of them,
brown
crumbs like
my chocolate cake. Of course I went straight to the fridge and
the cake was gone. Honestly, you'll think I'm senile, but if it
hadn't been for those crumbs I'd have wondered if I'd actually
made the cake or if I'd dreamed of making it.'

'Was there anything missing?' Eugene asked.

'Only the cake, as far as I know. I haven't searched the house.
It's just what a child would do, isn't it? Eat cake and then steal
the rest of it.'

Eugene was trying to think up something witty to say about
having one's cake and eating it when the phone rang. 'Leave it,'
he said to Ella. 'Let them leave a message.'

'It may be for me. I'd better take it.'

It was Joel Roseman. 'I'm not well,' he said. 'Can you come?'

Inexperienced in the handling of private patients, Ella nevertheless
thought she must have some rights. She could take a stand.
It was seven o'clock, a cool wet evening. 'What's wrong, Joel?' She
kept her voice gentle and quiet, very conscious too of listeners,
fascinated as people always are, by 'doctor' conversations. She heard
Eugene murmur to the others 'A private patient'. 'Are you in pain?
Breathless?' After all, the man had a heart condition.

'Not in
pain
, not breathless,' he said. 'I'm just under the weather.'

It seemed appropriate, she thought, watching the rain lash the
french windows. 'Would you like to come to me in the morning?
I could fit you in after surgery. Shall we say twelve noon? Come
in a taxi.'

'I thought you'd come here.'

'I'll tell you what.' She glanced at her watch. 'I'll give you a call
at nine to see how you are or you can call me.' She gave him
Eugene's number.

He said nothing and the receiver was replaced.

Ella worried for the next two hours. The Sharpes departed.
Elizabeth Cherry went home and spent the rest of the evening
puzzling over the mystery of the chocolate cake. The rain stopped
while Ella and Eugene were eating the black olive pasta Eugene
had prepared earlier in the day.

'I won't be able to sleep if I just leave it,' Ella said.

Eugene knew she meant visiting Joel Roseman. 'It's a pity you
took him on but it's too late to say that now.'

She tried to phone Joel but there was no reply and the phone
wasn't on message. 'I'll have to go over there.'

'You must do as you think best, darling,' said Eugene.

The first thing he did after she had gone, even before he had
cleared the table, was go to his Chocorange cache and break open
a new pack. Oh, the relief after three hours of denial! The most
wonderful taste in the world . . .

The flat was in total darkness. Not even a feeble gleam showed
through the small stained-glass panes in the top of the door.
At first Ella thought he must be out. No, worse, he might be
unable
to reach the door when she had rung the bell. He was really ill
after all. Her own heart began beating rather fast. She rang the
bell again, lifted up the metal flap and called to him through the
letter box, 'Joel, Joel, are you there? It's Ella.'

A moment or two passed. She heard footsteps, like an old man
shuffling in slippers. He opened the door and stood there, blinking
at the light, his dressing gown loosely tied and a blanket over his
head like a cowl.

'I didn't expect you,' he said, his tone accusing.

She walked into the hallway. 'I was worried. I didn't want to
leave you alone overnight.'

He closed the front door. The light from the corridor outside
made two faintly glowing patches, greenish, reddish, brown, on the
panelled wood. Apart from that the place was absolutely dark. She
was aware of something she had felt once or twice before in his
presence, a frisson of fear. 'Please let us have some light, Joel.'

She wouldn't have believed bulbs of such low wattage were
available. But, yes, perhaps the one he reluctantly switched on
was the kind for putting in the bedrooms of children afraid of the
dark. They left the partial light behind to stumble once more into
blackness as he led her into the living room. Rain roared against
the window behind the muffling blinds. Without waiting for his
permission she pressed the switch on one table lamp, then another.

He glowered at her as if she had committed some serious social
solecism and took a pair of sunglasses out of the table drawer. She
put down her bag on the brown sofa and seated herself beside it.
The long procession of identical emperors seemed to come alive
with the light. She made herself not look at them. 'Now, what do
you think is wrong with you? How do you feel?'

His head bowed, he stood in front of her. 'I don't know.'

'All right. Why did you want me to come?'

He lifted his shoulders and the enwrapping blanket with them.

She persevered. 'Have you been breathless? Have you any pain?'

'No. Not either.'

Asked to take off the blanket and remove his pyjama jacket, he
obeyed with maddening slowness. Her stethoscope held against
his chest and then his back, she listened to his heart, his lungs.
'I don't think there's much wrong with you, Joel.'

'It's not my body, it's my mind.'

'That's for Miss Crane, not me,' she said. 'You are seeing Miss
Crane?'

'I've been once. I told her about Mithras. I told her I wanted him
to go away. It's strange, really, I liked him at first but I hate him now.'
He seemed to read the doubt in her eyes, the fear. 'I tell myself he's
not real, he's in my mind. I told him that. But when I'm alone with
him I don't know. How can he only be in my mind when he talks to
me in a language I can't understand? I can't have made that up.'
She said faintly, 'Is he here now?'

'He's here but he's not speaking. He won't speak till you've gone.'

'And when he does will he speak – well, English or his own
language?'

'It's hard to say.'

She must stop asking him about this imaginary creature. It wasn't
her province, that was for the therapist. 'When is your next checkup
at the hospital?'

'Friday,' he said.

It was a relief. She wanted him to be in other hands than her
own. 'I don't think you should be alone here, Joel. Would your
mother come and stay with you?'

'Pa wouldn't let her.'

'Is there no one else? No friend or relative you could ask to stay
for a few days?' A few days wasn't enough but it was better than
nothing. 'There must be someone.'

'No one who'd come unless I paid them. I mean, Pa paid them.'

She came to a quick decision. 'I will find someone for you.'

'I don't want a nurse!'

'Not a nurse, a carer. Someone just to be in the flat overnight.'

He put his head in his hands but he made no objection. 'You
can go now,' he said, looking up. 'It gets better when I talk to you.
I feel a bit better.'

When she was out in the street heavy rain was falling from a
leaden sky and it was as dark as winter midnight, the street lamps
dimmed by the yellowish fog the rain made. She drove back to
Eugene's, thinking of the man she had left behind in that sepulchral
place and wondering if, with her departure, the mind-created
thing he called Mithras was muttering to him once more. She had
meant to ask him how he passed his long lonely days in that dark
place. She would do so next time they met, perhaps after his checkup
on Friday. The reason she hadn't asked might have been because
she knew the answer. Nothing. Nothing at all. No exercise, no
reading, no watching television, listening to music, no talking to
friends, nothing but sitting dozing in the dark.

Half the country was under flood water. Uncle Gib saw the
pictures of Tewkesbury and Gloucester on his computer and
in a newspaper he found on a wall in Raddington Road. 'We shall
be all right up here,' he said. 'It's not called Notting Hill for nothing,
is it? Haitch, I, double L, geddit?'

Dorian Lupescu didn't get it. He hadn't understood a word but
he nodded in agreement. Uncle Gib had exited from the Internet
and was replying to a few selected letters. One of them had come
from a man in Marlow, a member of the Children of Zebulun's
Cookham church, who was watching the Thames rise and who
hadn't insured his house. The Agony Uncle had no intention of
answering it, privately or in print. Questions of morality, usually
sexual, were all he bothered with. He turned his attention to the
letter from a woman in Kenton whose partner couldn't maintain
an erection. Disgusting, thought Uncle Gib. He wouldn't sully the
pages of
The Zebulun
with that word. A reply only would suffice.

Distraught, Kenton
, he wrote.
Your letter is unsuitable for family
reading. The man you call your partner must ask God's forgiveness
for sinful living. Marriage to you will cure his problem. It is a wellknown
fact that guilt, justified guilt in his case, makes a man uncapable.
Uncle Gib wasn't sure about that final word. It didn't look
right. He checked in the dictionary and corrected it. Then, although
he wasn't going to reply to it, he looked again at the letter from
the Marlow reader. In spite of what he had said to Dorian Lupescu,
it had made him rather uneasy.

He had remembered the Brent Reservoir that they called the Welsh
Harp. It was quite a long way away but water travelled fast. Look
how it had travelled all over Gloucestershire from rivers on the border
of Wales. He switched on the television for the one o'clock news just
to check where that water had got to now. Fifteen flood alerts issued,
the newscaster told him. Tewkesbury cut off, Oxford in danger,
Bedford threatened. That Welsh Harp was a great lake and it was
high up, a lot higher than here, he thought vaguely, geography not
being his strong suit. He imagined it bursting its banks the way they
said the Severn had and the Great Ouse. Water would pour down
through Willesden and Kensal into North Kensington . . .

Uncle Gib looked up insurance companies in the Yellow Pages
but the abundance of them confused him. Turning down the volume
on the television, he picked up the phone and dialled Reuben
Perkins's number. Maybelle answered, which was just as well as
it was she who saw to what she called 'business matters' in their
household. Within minutes she had given him the phone number
of their insurance company.

The way they made him hold on before anyone was available to
answer his call started to put Uncle Gib in a bad temper. Music
played – if you could call that droning and throbbing music – interrupted
every few seconds by a woman thanking him for his patience
and inexplicably telling him his call was important to her. Uncle
Gib had shouted loudly and threatened the speaker with dire
punishments before he realised he was berating a recorded voice.
After ten minutes of this, Lance came into the room, hovering on
the threshold, looking apprehensive. 'Get out!' Uncle Gib yelled
and threw the Yellow Pages at him.

But he got his answer at last and by the time the weather man
had appeared on the screen and was forecasting more torrential
rain, he had arranged for the insuring of his house. Against water
damage, fire, tornados and other Acts of God, which Uncle Gib
naturally thought less likely to be directed at his property than at
that of the rest of the population. Forms would arrive, a cheque
must be sent, but substantially the deed was done.

He could have the whole day in the old woman's house, the
whole night if he wanted it. He could stay in the place. The
thought of it made Lance feel quite dizzy. Before Uncle Gib got
religion he'd told Lance how he and a pal had cleared someone's
flat while they were away on holiday. Just turned up in the pal's
van and walked in with a key Uncle Gib had got from somewhere
and taken everything, two TVs, a new computer, a CD player, a
microwave and most of the furniture. The pal was a good dad,
devoted to his daughter, and he'd wanted the tables and chairs and
whatever for her flat. She'd just got married. Lance decided that
it wasn't likely the old woman had a computer but she'd got a
state-of-the-art TV with flat screen and built-in DVD player. He'd
need a van but now he and Gemma were having their affair he
and her brother were best mates again.