Portobello (16 page)

'You can only ask him,' Gemma said when she and Lance were
lying in his bed, having a post-coital glass of Soave. Uncle Gib was
attending the baptism (total immersion in a disused storage tank)
of two new members. 'When d'you reckon on doing it?'

'The old woman goes away on August eight and she's not back
till the twenty-first but I don't want to leave it too long. How about
the fourteenth? It's a Tuesday.'

'What's with Tuesdays, then?'

'It's a weekday,' said Lance incomprehensibly.

'I'll ask him, shall I? He may be doing his community service.
It's cleaning graffiti off tube trains. But I'll ask him, see what he
says.'

'You know what you are? You're an angel, you are.' This show of
emotion soon led to renewed lovemaking and it was another hour
before Gemma left, making her way down the Portobello Road just
as Uncle Gib turned out of it into Raddington Road.

Believing that her visit to Joel Roseman would cancel the
appointment she had made to see him at twelve noon, after
her morning surgery, Ella was preparing to leave. She had
a fitting for her wedding dress at 1.30 and she hoped to have lunch
with Eugene first.

Clare, the receptionist, put her head round the door: 'Mr
Roseman is here, Ella.'

Ella sighed. Her instinct was to say she couldn't see him but of
course she must. She sat down again behind her desk.

He was once more wearing sunglasses. 'I walked,' he said. 'I
walked all the way. And in broad daylight. Aren't you proud of me?'

Those were the words a mother might be gratified to hear from
her small son. She smiled. 'It's a long way, Joel. You mustn't overdo
it, you know.'

'It's very bright today. The light hurts my eyes.'

She stopped herself saying the obvious. If he sat and lay all day
in the dark, what did he expect? 'Still, it seems you're feeling better.
I've been in touch with the care agency. They can find someone
for you. She'll come in the early evening and stay overnight. Get
your breakfast for you if that's what you'd like.'

'I don't like,' he said.

She lifted her head and looked at him for the first time for a
long while, looked properly. She saw how long his hair had grown
since he returned home. It hung down on his jacket collar,
unwashed, unkempt. He looked as if he had stopped washing altogether
and stopped changing his clothes. 'Joel, you shouldn't be
alone. You need someone to look after you. Not a carer, more than
that. Will you let me speak to your mother? Explain to her how
much you need looking after?'

'She hates coming. She's afraid of Mithras.'

'What do you mean?'

'People are afraid of mad people and she thinks I'm mad.
Maybe I am. I'd be better if Mithras would go away. I can't
sleep any more. Not at night I can't. Will you give me sleeping
pills?'

I'll give you the sort you can't overdose on, she thought but
didn't say aloud, and took out her prescription pad. 'I'd still like to
speak to your mother.'

'Pa might answer.'

'That doesn't matter. I'll talk to him.'

Joel shook his head, not to deny what she said, but apparently
in doubt that she knew what she was talking about. 'You want the
phone number?'

'Please.'

She wrote it down, she passed him the prescription. 'That's
enough for one week. I shall speak to your parents. Meanwhile,
you must tell Miss Crane everything you've told me. Tell her on
Friday and you should tell her I've recommended a carer.'

He stared at her, pushed one hand through his greasy hair. 'I
don't want a carer. I said. I want you.'

'Well, you've got me. I'm your doctor.'

'I want you to come and live in my flat.'

She flinched, recoiling back into her chair. It was disconcerting,
not being able to see his eyes.

Perhaps he read her thoughts for he took off his glasses and sat
there blinking at her. 'I'm not talking about sex. I don't do sex.' He
twisted the glasses in his fingers and looked down. 'If you don't
like my place, Pa would buy us a house. There's lots of money. We
could live anywhere you like.'

She was silent, feeling despair combined with a terrible desire
to laugh, a desire she suppressed. She said in a cool quiet voice,
'That's not possible, Joel.' She held out her left hand, showing him
the diamond on the third finger. 'I'm engaged, you know that. I'm
getting married in October.'

'Engagements can be broken.'

'Not mine.' Amusement was turning to anger. She controlled it,
spoke in a brisk voice. 'Now, you'd better go home in a taxi. You
shouldn't walk any more. I'll speak to your mother or your father,
and I'll talk to Miss Crane too.'

It wasn't her job but she called the taxi company Eugene sometimes
used. It would be there in ten minutes. She was longing to
escape. As it was, she had no time to do more than meet Eugene
and tell him – well, that she couldn't meet him for lunch. Joel
could very well wait for his taxi in reception but bringing herself
to tell him so was too much for her. They sat in silence while she
went through a stack of papers on her desk, papers she had been
through before. Just when she thought she ought to say something
to him, he said, 'I saw a newspaper this morning. I don't often see
a newspaper. There was a bit in it about how they've found how
to breed schizophrenic mice.'

'Really?'

'If they have delusions, these mice, what do you think they hear?
Strange squeaks telling them to do bad things? Telling them to kill
other mice? What about hallucinations? Do you think they see
sabre-toothed cats, big as tigers?'

He began to laugh. She thought she had never heard him laugh
before. The receptionist put her head round the door and said Mr
Roseman's cab had come.

Eugene had lost the argument and lost it with good grace. It's
too early to go to Sri Lanka in August, Dorinda told him. You
go to India and neighbouring countries in January. Surely he remembered
when the tsunami was. Why did he think all those
holidaymakers were in south-east Asia in midwinter? So Eugene
gave in and they fixed on Lake Como.

It was two months away. He had more or less resigned himself
to the impossibility of giving up his habit in those seven or eight
weeks. Like a smoker, like an alcoholic, he had cut down. This
was achieved, as cutting down usually is, by making sure that he
carried none of his fix about with him, kept none at the gallery –
it too had once contained caches in secret drawers – avoiding
streets where purveyors of Chocorange had their premises and
responded to his craving by having a glass of water. But he had
never passed a whole day without a suger-free sweet and he still
kept eight packs in their plastic bag behind the Forster novels in
his bookshelves, and three more in a drawer in the spare bathroom
cabinet. These were not to be touched, certainly not ever to
be looked at or checked on. They were his emergency supplies for
use if, for instance, he broke his leg and was housebound or got
the flu. It was a measure of how Chocorange was driving him
mad that he thought seriously of such eventualities as a smoker
might lay in four or five packs of cigarettes and a drinker his
bottles of vodka. But how much more dignified than his were
their addictions!

They were recognised and in their way accepted. Alcoholism
might be something to be a bit ashamed of but people with a
forty-a-day habit regularly talked to journalists about their indulgence
and, with a laugh, conceded they 'must give up one day'.
He imagined being interviewed as a gallery owner about to hold
an exhibition of a promising young artist's work (as indeed he
was to do next month) and saying in answer to the (no doubt
impertinent) questions about his private life that he was fiftyone
years old, lived in Notting Hill, was about to marry a beautiful
and charming general practitioner . . . and was hopelessly
addicted to a particular flavour sugar-free sweet. He couldn't
pass a day without sucking the sweets. The whole thing was
impossible. It was beyond measure ridiculous. To coin a doubly
appropriate phrase he would never use, it sucked.

Of course he would never say such a thing to a journalist or
anyone else. As with the secret alcoholic and his covert drink
pushed to the back of the fridge shelf when his wife walked in,
his gin which looked like water when no ice or lemon was added,
he could never allow anyone else to know. If he encountered
Elizabeth Cherry in the street or saw George Sharpe over the
garden wall, the Chocorange he was sucking was surreptitiously
slipped into the tissue he kept in his pocket solely for that purpose.
And even that prudent move distressed him. It was such a waste.
He still had to decide how to handle his addiction while on his
honeymoon. Total denial was impossible. You were supposed to
enjoy your honeymoon. But he and Ella would be away for two
weeks and the idea of being deprived of his fix for a whole fortnight
didn't bear thinking of. He hated the idea of those Customs
people, or whoever it was X-rayed and searched one's checked
baggage, finding eight chocolate-brown-and-orange packs, say,
inside one of his suitcases. He couldn't imagine denying himself
his sugar-free sweets but he could well picture the faces of those
officials staring at their screen, shaking their heads, laughing at
the chav who wanted his sweeties in a luxury Italian hotel.

But he would have to take them if he was not to suffer deprivation.
Only vaguely aware of what withdrawal symptoms might be,
he nevertheless thought he had them. He had his own kind.
Finishing the modest lunch he was eating in a bistro in the
Haymarket – Ella had phoned to say she couldn't make it – he
had begun to feel the craving that came to him most acutely when
he had been eating something savoury. His mouth went dry.
Drinking water only served to bring him another manifestation of
his longing – a need for some sweet but sharp flavour on his tongue.
The waitress had brought him two very small biscotti with his
coffee. He ate them disconsolately.

Beginning one's packing at least a week before one went on
holiday was a habit Elizabeth Cherry's mother had instilled in
her some seventy years before. You spread a sheet on the bed in
one of the spare rooms, laid your suitcase on the sheet and began.
Her mother hadn't used suitcases but a cabin trunk made of thick,
polished, brown hide, lined in silk and with cedar wood hangers.
It was immensely heavy even before there was anything in it but
that didn't matter as you never carried it yourself. Porters did that,
it was their job. Elizabeth used one modest case and a carry-on
bag but she still spread out the sheet and laid her luggage on it.
Whenever she bought something wrapped in tissue paper she saved
the paper for her packing. A sweater or blouse was laid flat on one
sheet, another laid on it before it was folded and a third on top.
Then all was placed inside the case. Shoes were put inside plastic
bags. She prided herself on not taking too much. If what she took
with her turned out to be inadequate, she reasoned, she could
always buy something. She never did.

The packing done, she opened the drawer where, in envelopes,
she kept foreign currency. Since the widespread use of the euro,
the number of envelopes had much decreased. She would need
euros and, as she would be passing through Switzerland, Swiss
francs. This drawer was visited no more than twice a year and it
always surprised her. How had she collected so many US dollars?
Nearly five hundred? She couldn't remember how it had come
about that such a lot had been accumulated. And there were far
more euros than she wanted to carry on her. Better take one of
the credit cards from the desk downstairs for use in a cash machine.
It was years since she had been to Canada yet here were more
than three hundred Canadian dollars. They could stay where they
were, as could the American money.

Remember to close all the windows, she told herself. Not that
she had opened any with all this rain falling daily. The child who
had got in and eaten the cake might come back. Window locks
might be a good idea but arranging for these to be fitted would
have to wait until after she came back. How about her jewellery?
She only thought about her jewellery when she was about to go
away on holiday. The rest of the time the two bracelets and the
eternity ring her dead husband had given her, her mother's rings
and heavy gold chain, remained in the jewel box and were never
looked at. But the evening before going away for two weeks
she worried about them. They were insured, after all. Every time she
went away she considered taking them all with her. But
considering was all she did. Imagine the nuisance going through
security, that arch thing you walked through beeping so that some
grim-faced woman in uniform searched you. Imagine putting them
all in one of those plastic trays so that everyone could see exactly
what you'd got. No, best leave them where they were. They had
always been all right and they would be this time.

No mention was made of the jewellery when Elizabeth went
next door at six o'clock to remind her neighbour to water her house
plants and take in any parcels that might arrive at number 25 in
her absence. As she always did when Elizabeth called, at any rate
after four, Susan said she was just about to have a small sherry
and would Elizabeth join her. Elizabeth was fond of sherry, a
civilised drink that seemed to be fast disappearing from all but the
drinks cabinets of those over seventy, and she sat down.

When told that Elizabeth was going to Salzburg and Budapest,
Susan asked if she would be meeting her 'friend' en route. Elizabeth
said she would, but at Waterloo for the Eurostar, not at an airport.
Like everyone else, Susan assumed that Elizabeth's friend was a
woman and she never enlightened them nor did she say that holidaying
with a woman would hardly be her idea of fun. She merely
nodded and smiled when Susan referred to the friend as 'she'.

'It's very kind of you to do this. I doubt if there will be any
parcels. The most important thing is to water the maidenhair fern
every day. But I know you won't forget,' which was a nicer way of
putting it than, 'Please don't forget.'

'Have a lovely time,' said Susan after a second small sherry had
been drunk by each of them.

Elizabeth was due to leave the house very early for a flight
which went from Gatwick at eight and she slept badly, as she
always did the night before starting her holiday. The alarm was
set (unnecessarily) for five and at ten to she dreamed that the
child came into the house as he did last time. No, not quite as he
did last time. She was standing at the window in the half-dark and
she saw his thin little body squeeze itself out of the mouth of the
drainpipe and pull itself up on to all fours. A child of seven or
eight. He scuttled across the area of flat roof and skylight, and
slipped in through the casement she had left open in her bedroom.
Except that she had no casements and no flat roof. This realisation
woke her. She switched off the alarm and went into the
bathroom to have her shower.