Portobello (25 page)

He felt rather shaken. A nasty idea had come to him that he
might dream about that dead man lying on a table, his slack cold
hands folded, his eyelids unnaturally white. When he closed his
eyes he seemed to see that sight again, it was so different from
the dead people he'd seen on telly almost every day of his life.

He walked across the railway bridge and along Golborne Road
to the canal, its waters ruffled by the cold wind into a thousand
little ripples. Leaves were falling, the wind blowing them into flurries
and settling them in quivering heaps. If he had kept to the
towpath it would have taken him on to the southern edge of Kensal
Green Cemetery, between it and the great gasworks, but he left it
for Kensal Road, heading for his parents' home. He had put the
dead Reuben Perkins out of his mind and was thinking about the
aspirins he had bought for his mother and how, when he handed
them over, she might let him stay indoors for the rest of the day,
when an unmarked police car stopped and two men in plain clothes
got out.

Most members of the public would have failed to recognise
them as police officers but Lance knew. He identified them for
what they were as surely as if their car had been painted in red
and yellow squares and they dressed in dark uniforms and chequered
caps. He muttered something about having to go home and see
his mum and though they didn't exactly laugh, the older one's lips
twitched like he'd got some sort of tic. They got him into the car
exactly the way police did on the telly, one of them holding his
head down with one hand and pushing him into the back seat with
the other.

Uncle Gib was always telling him how ignorant he was but he
wasn't so ignorant he didn't know they couldn't question him any
more once he'd been charged. So he didn't mind being questioned
yet again. It was warm in the interview room and he got cups of
tea. At one point he said could he ask them something and when
they didn't answer but just looked, he asked if Uncle Gib, Mr
Gilbert Gibson, had told them he'd been round at his place and
where to find him.

'We ask the questions,' said the one who twitched.

He went on denying that he'd been anywhere near Uncle Gib's
house at the time of the fire. The young lady lawyer arrived and
kept asking if they were going to charge Mr Platt. Because, if
not, they should let him go. Lance wished she wouldn't. It only
gave them ideas and that was exactly what it must have done.
He knew there would be no escape and this time it was for real
when he heard the words of the caution and all that stuff about
things he might want to rely on in court. 'In court' made his blood
run cold. It was going to be next morning, and murder and arson
were the charges.

Everyone who read the
Evening Standard
and those who
picked up a freebie in the street, read the paragraph about
Lance Kevin Platt, twenty-one, of Kensal, west London,
who had been charged that day with the murder of Dorian Lupescu
and with setting fire to a house in Blagrove Road, West Ten. Ella
read it but, because the name of the man who had applied to
Eugene for his cash find had never registered with her, immediately
forgot about it. Perhaps because he had seen him the day
before in the Golborne Road pharmacy, Eugene remembered him
and his name very well. At the same time, when telling Ella that
he had only seen Lance Platt twice, he recalled that there had
been a third sighting. Looking out of his bedroom window in the
small hours of a morning he had seen the youth (as he had thought
of him) with his characteristic backpack walking along the street
in the direction of Denbigh Road. It was the night after he and
Ella had been to the theatre to see
St Joan
. He had gone round
to Elizabeth Cherry's to check that the house was secure, come
back and got up later to eat a Chocorange – what else?

Now he had a very vivid memory of thinking that Lance Platt
must be up to no good. And then, immediately afterwards, telling
himself that it was bad to be suspicious of someone just because
he was out in the street at the time when people he thought of
as law-abiding were in bed asleep. It looked as if he had been right
that first time. Still, whatever Platt had been doing walking along
outside his house, it was obviously unconnected with murder and
arson half a mile or more away on the Kensal borders.

Uncle Gib also read about it. His source was a giveaway newspaper
called
Metro
and the news item brought him considerable
satisfaction. It wasn't that he thought the police must be right or
even that Lance had indisputably done the deeds, but rather that
someone he had always disliked and disapproved of was getting
his come-uppance at last. Gemma read it when she bought the
Sun
. She was out shopping in the Portobello Road Tesco with
Abelard in the buggy and, in her own words to her mother, it gave
her quite a shock. It was a crying shame, it must be a mistake.
Lance hadn't been with her that night but maybe she should go
along to the police station and say he had been.

'Oh, no, you don't,' said her mother. 'You want to keep a low
profile. Suppose they've got proof it was him and you've stuck your
neck out. You could go inside and then what about your boy? Come
and give nanna a cuddle, my lambkin.'

Fize was refitting a transformer at a house in East Acton. As he
put it himself, he broke the rule of a lifetime and went down to
the pub in his lunch break. It was Ian Pollitt's local and, being
without a job or having the prospect of getting one, Fize knew he
would be likely to find him passing his empty midday hours in the
Duchess of Teck. Fize had a lager and lime, which Ian said was
a woman's drink, as bad as 'lady juice', which was what they called
white wine.

'Maybe,' said Fize, 'and maybe I don't want to do my head in
when we're talking about a couple of thousand volts. What d'you
reckon to Lance Platt?'

Ian tilted his head back and poured down getting on for half a
pint of stout. 'Best thing that's happened to me for years.'

'Yeah, but you know what I mean.'

'It's not like they're going to top him,' said Ian. 'Not like they
used to. What with eighty thousand banged up there's no space
for him. He won't go down for no more than five or six years.'

'He never done it,' said Fize. Now he'd bought it he no longer
felt like his lager and lime and he pushed it away across the table.
'You know he never done it.'

'I don't know nothing. My mind's a blank. Don't even know when
it was.'

'August fourteen.'

'Is that right? Now that's funny. I was away on my holidays in
Tenerife August fourteen.' Ian laughed uproariously at his joke and
was still laughing when Fize left and went back to work.

There was no bail for Lance this time. He was remanded in
custody for however long it took. In his cell at the police station,
stranded there until they decided where they could possibly put
him until his appearance in a higher court, he took a philosophical
view. Things could be worse. He'd get free meals with no effort
on his part, he would no longer have to sleep in company with the
bike and the car tyres. As for freedom, there wasn't much you
could do with it if you'd no money.

They had altered the design on the pack. Instead of the bold
chocolate-brown-and-orange lettering and the (hideous,
Eugene the connoisseur had to admit) drawing of a kind of beigecoloured
lozenge with a stream of something pouring on to it,
the new colours were muted, the illustration more abstract and the
name changed. Chocorange was now called Oranchoco. Accumulating
enough of them to keep him going on his honeymoon, Eugene
thought at first, with a sinking heart, that Elixir had run out of his
favourite sugar-free sweets. An assistant passing by while he was
scouring the shelf both embarrassed and gratified him by telling
him this was simply a name change.

'A lot of our customers have remarked on it. But don't you worry,
they're just the same. Same taste, different pack, that's all it is.'

Eugene got out of there as fast as he could, having first bought
four packs of Oranchoco and the last remaining Chocorange in
the shop. Hoping, but not very confidently, that this innovation
might be confined to Elixir, he visited two branches of Superdrug
and the lady in the sari in Spring Street. She alone still had
Chocorange. Superdrug had changed everything in the store around,
putting shampoos where skin creams used to be and switching
vitamins with baby-care products. Eventually he found a single
packet of Oranchoco in the sweets and chocolate section, which
was now where perfumes used to be. No more than six months
ago he would have considered knowing the layout of a pharmacy
so that he could find items in the dark beneath his dignity. How
are the mighty fallen! Perhaps to be brought so low was good for
his character.

On his way back to Eugene Wren Fine Art he split open one
of the new packets, took a sweet and tasted it. Whatever that shop
assistant had said, it wasn't the same. There was a subtle difference
and not for the better. The essence of Chocorange had been
its smooth
creaminess
but this new one had a rough edge to the
flavour, an undertaste of slight – very slight – bitterness.

His disappointment was profound. He would get used to it, he
told himself. The difference was too subtle to affect him that much.
But the change made him angry for the rest of the afternoon and
even angrier that something so stupid, so banal and petty, could
disturb his equilibrium to this extent. A woman who had arrived
in a chauffeur-driven Bentley would certainly have bought Priscilla
Hart's
Study in Precious Metals
if his brusqueness hadn't driven
her out of the gallery. Walking home, he tried to dismiss the whole
thing from his mind but, as he struggled to do this, bitter resentment
kept coming to the surface. How could they do this to him,
causing him to endanger his business? How could they spoil a
flavour and a texture that had been close to perfect?

And then, what did I think about six months ago, he asked
himself, before this thing took hold of me? When I look back it
seems to me that I was free and that freedom I voluntarily gave
up just for a taste, for something to put in my mouth. All the time
he was thinking this way he was sucking an Oranchoco, unwilling
to waste a precious Chocorange on something so mundane as a
walk home.

He chewed up the last of it, no better pleased with its flavour
than he had been four hours before when he tasted the first one.

Ella called out to him as he let himself into the house, 'Is that
you, darling? You're nice and early.'

His pockets were stuffed full of sweets packets. He hung up
his coat, leaving the sweets where they were. She poured him a
dry sherry and one for herself, taking them into the study. The
warmth he so often felt when they met again after a short separation,
even if that parting was no more than a matter of hours,
filled him with the kind of pleasure that made him smile. She was
so nice, so sweet, and she looked just the way he wanted a woman
to look, pretty rather than beautiful, not thin but not plump either,
a lovable woman and wonderfully intelligent.

'What are you thinking?'

'That I'm lucky to have you.'

She smiled, took a sip of her sherry, passed him a dish of olives.
'There's something I want to ask you but it can wait till we've
eaten.'

'That's quite terrible,' he said, laughing. 'It makes me think you've
postponed your question, whatever it is, because if you ask it I
shall be put off my dinner.'

'Oh, no, it's nothing like that. It's quite trivial, really. Let's say
it's a question of our – well, our medical care after we're married.
I mean, I shall go on going to Malina in the practice but you might
think you could leave Dr Irving and I could look after you. Only
I don't really think that's a good idea. Of course I'll still be a doctor
and I'll still tell you when I think you ought to go to Dr Irving
because you've got something that needs attention. Am I being too
fussy, do you think?'

'Not at all, my darling, you're absolutely right as usual.' He felt
obscurely relieved, he didn't know why. 'Was that the question
you're no longer putting off till after dinner? What is for dinner,
by the way?'

'Only a Thai takeaway, I'm afraid. He'll be here with it any
minute.'

He was. They ate but when Ella passed him the fruit bowl for
dessert, although he took a small bunch of grapes, Eugene was
aware that what he really wanted, and wanted now, was a
Chocorange or even an Oranchoco. As he helped Ella clear the
table – showing himself to be at least halfway to the house-husband
all women seemed to want these days – he began to think of
reasons for escaping from the house for ten minutes or even getting
himself alone upstairs for ten minutes. That is, he
tried
to think
of reasons but failed. Once he could have gone out to post a letter
but no one sent letters any more. Replies to their wedding invitations
had been the first post and the last (apart from junk mail)
he and Ella had had for months. It had begun to rain, a thin drizzle
misting the windowpanes.

Dry-mouthed, a sour taste on his tongue, he went into the drawing
room and put on a CD. It was a harpsichord suite of Scarlatti and
it began to lull his craving, even making him wonder if, were he
to play this kind of sweet Baroque music as a constant background,
his addiction would gradually depart. He listened and relaxed but
when Ella came in he experienced a tautening and a tensing of
his whole body. And he was back to thinking, I must give it up.
Now is the time, when the taste has changed, when it's no longer
exactly what I want, when I'm getting married and if I give in to
this craving, face a life of subterfuge and concealment and yes,
lying.

He looked up at her and saw what she was carrying. Through
the glassy transparency of the plastic bag, one of those ziplock bags
that could be resealed after opening, he could see the orange-andbrown
lettering and the illustrations on half a dozen packs of
Chocorange. The feeling he had was that which most people feel
when threatened with violence. His heart began beating hard and
rapidly, and his mouth dried.

'Darling,' she said, smiling, 'how many more of these things are
there in the house? I've found twenty-two but I'm sure I haven't
looked everywhere.'

He couldn't remember when he had last blushed. Perhaps not
since he was a small child. He felt the hot blood rush into his face
and he touched one burning cheek with the palm of his hand.

'You mustn't be embarrassed about it and above all you mustn't
think of it as an addiction. It isn't. Believe me, I do know. It's a
habit and it can quite quickly be got over. I once had a patient
who was the same, only with her it was mint imperials. She was
eating twenty of the things every day but she was over it practically
as soon as she'd told me.' She put the bag down on the table
in front of him and went to sit beside him on the arm of the sofa.
'I must say you've done a very good job of hiding it. I've thought
for weeks it must have been Carli who was hooked on the things.
I never dreamed it might be you.'

Still he said nothing. She leant over him and laid her cheek
against his hair. 'I haven't upset you, have I? I'm not going to try
and stop you eating them. I did taste one and I thought it was
rather nice. I said a habit like this can be quite quickly got over
but it doesn't have to be. Of course I don't know how many you're
eating, but if it's a lot, like ten a day or something like that, it
might be sensible to cut down. After all they are "sugar-free" and
that means aspartame or one of those sweeteners, so it's not a good
idea to overload your system with the stuff.' She moved away from
him, stood back. 'Gene? Are you all right?'

'Yes, of course,' he said, his voice thin and shocked. He tried to
clear his throat. 'I think I'll go out for a bit.'

'Gene, look at me. What's wrong? Is it what I said?'

'I'm just going out for a walk.'

'It's pouring with rain!'

She moved a little towards him again. Her face was contorted
with concern and dismay. 'You can't go out now. We have to talk.
We can't just leave it. I'd no idea when I spoke to you that you
were going to take it like this.'

'I haven't taken it like anything,' he said. 'I'm tired and I need
fresh air.'

'Well, when you come back we'll talk about how you got into
this and how you're going to handle it, it'll be a lot easier for you
now I know. Remember it's not crack cocaine, it's not even cigarettes.
You'll be over it in a week.'