Portobello (27 page)

Until now, his journalistic experience had been confined to
answering readers' letters; and when no letters from people
with emotional and sexual problems came, to inventing
suitably lurid substitutes. But now Uncle Gib was confronting a
new challenge, the composition of Reuben Perkins's obituary. He
sat in Maybelle's former dining room, now allotted him as a study,
at work on the computer the Children of Zebulun had bought him.
Its ivory-white keys were already dyed pale yellow from his cigarette
smoke and stubs mounted in the pottery fruit dish Maybelle
had provided as an ashtray.
A life of selfless service and generosity
to the community
, he had typed,
unparalelled single-minded devotion
to one and all, regardless of age, sex or creed
, when Maybelle
came into the room with a cup of tea for him and a black pudding
and cheese sandwich.

'How d'you spell "unparalleled"?' he asked her.

'I don't know, Gilbert. I'm not intellectual like you.' She scrutinised
the screen. 'Like you've done it. That looks right.'

Uncle Gib thought it looked wrong. The trouble was he didn't
know how. Maybe he'd put 'unrivalled' instead. 'You going out?'

'I can do,' said Maybelle eagerly.

'Get me forty fags, then, will you?'

Maybelle said she would, smiling at him fondly. Uncle Gib
lit a cigarette and set down a few episodes in Reuben Perkins's
life, which bore no likeness to reality. He ended with words he
calculated would get him into even greater favour with Reuben's
wife:
Cut off in his prime, he leaves a widow, the lovely Maybelle,
some twenty years younger than himself.

Now to attend to the final arrangements for the funeral.

The first thing Ella had done after he went was take off his ring.
She took it off and immediately put it on again. This was ridiculous.
He would come back, if not that night, next day, he would
come back and say what a fool he had been and could she forgive
him. Perhaps she believed this and perhaps not, for she couldn't
sleep. In the sad mad hours between two and four, panic struck
her and she sat up in bed sobbing, with tears running down her
face. The ring had come off again in the morning and she had gone
into work, bare-fingered, weak with crying and lack of sleep. If any
of the others in the practice noticed they said nothing.

In between patients she asked herself what she should do. Get
in touch with him? Go to the gallery? Leave him to come to his
senses? Mrs Khan arrived with a different child to interpret for
her. This time it was a girl wearing a hijab, though she was no
more than nine, her small pale face looking as if the black veil
pinched it. Ella thought it very unsuitable that this little child
should have to talk about her mother's heavy periods and agonising
cramps but she said nothing. In normal circumstances she might
have commented but these circumstances weren't normal. But no,
she wouldn't run after Eugene. It would be useless. He would
come back, she was sure of it, or told herself robustly that she was
sure of it. Mrs Perkins was next, inviting her to come along and
view her late husband's body and please not to fail to attend his
funeral.

There were no calls to make in the afternoon. She went home,
that is to Eugene's house. She hardly felt she could continue to
call it home. This reminded her that on the following day she was
due at her solicitor's to sign the contract for the sale of her flat.
But was this the time to sell? Suppose Eugene had meant it and
wouldn't change his mind? Whatever he may have said, she couldn't
live in his house, occupy his home, if they were not to be together,
not to be
married
. For the first time she put it plainly into words:
we are not to be married.
It seemed utterly unreal, yet the only real
thing in her world at the moment. She went upstairs and in their
bedroom – she still thought of it as their bedroom – she saw that
he had been back in her absence. He had taken some of his clothes.
He had also, apparently, taken a good many packets of those ridiculous
things, that sugar-free rubbish. With a spurt of energy she
went round the house, hunting for them. Some remained in drawers
and on shelves and in pockets. Breathing as if she had just run a
race, she gathered them all up into a plastic carrier bag, twenty,
thirty, forty of them, took them outside into the garden and, almost
ritualistically, set fire to them.

Searching for means of doing this, she remembered her sister's
story about being asked for matches by the girl with the cigarette
in the hotel foyer. She and Eugene had been so happy then. A sob
caught at her throat but anger came back. A book of matches was
in that secret drawer in the kitchen and alongside it another packet
of those things, those
bloody
things. She found some paraffin too,
an ancient bottle of the stuff, untouched for years. It worked,
though, and the matches worked. Regardless of the ban on bonfires,
in place for decades, she started the fire and it blazed up, consuming
his stupid sweets, the garden stinking of – well, it couldn't be burnt
sugar. Burnt chemicals, saccharine, aspartame. She stood, looking
at the little blackened patch left behind on the grass until the
phone ringing fetched her indoors.

It must be him, it must be. To say he was sorry, he had lost his
mind, he didn't know what had come over him. She stumbled and
almost fell in her haste to get to the phone.

It was her sister.

'Oh, Hilary,' she cried, 'I don't know what to do. I think Eugene's
gone mad. Would you come or can I come to you? I'm going mad
too.'

* * *

Fize didn't believe in letting women in on men's business.
Besides, confiding in Gemma would mean confessing that he
and Ian were responsible for setting fire to that house. Or Ian was.
But he had been there, he had helped, and Fize knew enough
about the law to be pretty sure that in a case of murder and arson,
when two people were there, even if only one of them struck the
match, both were considered to blame. He wouldn't have cared
about any of this if they hadn't arrested Lance, if they hadn't
charged him and banged him up. He might not have cared too
much if the man on remand had been someone he didn't know.
At the time, or just before the time, when he and Ian had been
on their way over to Blagrove Road, armed with a bottle of petrol
and a bag of fireworks, burning up Lance in his bed had seemed
an entirely just and reasonable thing to do. Any man would feel
the same towards the bloke who's been messing about with his
girlfriend.

But there were objections to that. For one thing, he didn't really
know that Lance and Gemma had been doing any more than she
said they had when he asked her, that is, having a cup of tea with
Uncle Gib and talking about old times. To back up her story was
the fact that he had seen the old man go into the house while
they were in there. Surely that meant they couldn't have been
doing anything they shouldn't. Of course he hadn't felt like that
when he was shoving the bottle of petrol through the letter box.
As for Ian Pollitt, he didn't feel anything at all about Lance or
Gemma or himself, for that matter, Fize was sure of that. Ian just
enjoyed a bit of trouble and was always on the lookout for it.

But he'd started to feel bad about things when first he heard that
they'd killed a man who was living in the house that he'd never even
heard of. Killing someone you didn't hate or want to have revenge
on, someone you didn't know existed, seemed worse than anything.
Fize didn't want to lose his job and Gemma or upset his mother, he
didn't want to go to prison, but he had some sort of vague idea,
picked up from Hollywood films, that you could make something
with the police called a plea bargain. You could in America,
so presumably you could here too. If you confessed and told them
the name of the bloke who had done it with you, he might go down
but you'd get off – or get a suspended sentence or something. Fize
thought it was worth trying.

He tried it on Ian.

They were in the amusement arcade in the Portobello Road at
the time, playing the fruit machines. Ian had just had a big win
but whereas anyone else would have ploughed the lot back, he
pocketed his winnings. He always did. He didn't seem to hear what
Fize was trying to tell him about Lance – not surprising considering
the racket in there – but said he needed a drink. They went
into the Portobello Arms.

Fize could never express himself very well. Gemma could. She
was what they called articulate. He tried to explain to Ian what
he meant but the way it came out, Fize stumbling over words and
saying 'you know' every five seconds, it sounded as if all he was
doing was trying to drop Ian in the shit. And perhaps he was.

'Can you tell me why it is', said Ian in a very aggressive way,
'every time we go into a fucking pub you go ballsing on about
bleeding Lance Platt. Can you tell me that?'

'It's on account of I don't reckon it's right him being banged up
when he didn't do nothing.'

'Oh, no,'said Ian with heavy sarcasm, 'he didn't do nothing. He's
not a thief, he don't break into places and nick old ladies' jewellery.
He never smacked your girlfriend so her tooth come out. He don't
mug folks for their mobiles.'

'Yeah, maybe, but he's not going down for that, is he? He's going
down for something he never done.'

'Oh, give me a break.' Ian finished his drink and asked for another
– for himself. No second one for Fize. 'I'm going to say just two
words to you,' he said, laughing at his own wit, 'and the second
one is "off".'

Fize saw Ian's big calloused hand go to his jeans pocket, go into
it and close over something. He said no more.

At home he and Gemma never said much to each other. His
parents had never said much to each other. This was partly due
to his mother speaking only a very few words of English and his
father no Farsi at all. Gemma liked talking, she was hours on the
phone to girlfriends and round at her mother's the two of them
chattered away non-stop, but the things they talked about, kids
and clothes and make-up and celebrities and music, interested
Fize not at all and he knew nothing about them. He liked Abelard
but he had nothing to say to him. They watched telly together, and
he and Gemma watched telly. Gemma talked about the actors in
soaps and the things they did and said, but all he said was 'yes'
and 'right' and 'don't know'. He didn't know what to say, so he left
all the talking to her.

She talked to everyone about everyone they knew, the people in
the other flats, the other mums with little kids, his mum even
though she could hardly understand a word, and, if he was there,
he listened without saying anything much. But she didn't expect
replies from him. And the one subject she never talked about was
Lance Platt. It seemed like she'd forgotten him. Fize would have
liked more than anything to find out what she thought about his
dilemma but he was scared to mention it, even to touch on it. She
might get up out of her chair, grab Abelard and go straight down
the cop shop. She was capable of that.

It was getting so that he lay awake in the night, thinking about
what he and Ian had done, lay awake beside the soundly sleeping
Gemma, often with Abelard snuggled up between them because
the little boy had got into bad habits Fize's own mother would
never have allowed. Gemma wouldn't leave any windows open in
case Abelard fell out of them. It was stuffy and hot in that bedroom
and Fize sweated as he thought about Lance Platt in a much
smaller room somewhere, a cell with bunks in it and another bloke
maybe. Not a lovely girl like Gemma. And the chances were Lance
would stay in that room or somewhere like it for years. Fize knew
he had to have another go at Ian but not in a pub this time.

Here, maybe. Ask him round when Gemma was out of the way.
Perhaps when he was babysitting Abelard, and she'd gone over to
Michelle's or her mum's. If this fine weather went on he could
leave the door to the balcony open and there'd be people on all
the other balconies. And Abelard would be around, running in and
out. He'd have to persuade Ian to see things his way. If he couldn't,
if there was no moving him – and Fize was afraid there wouldn't
be – would he have the bottle to go to the police on his own?

On his instructions, Jackie printed off a hundred slips of
headed paper inscribed:
The marriage arranged between
Dr Ella Cotswold and Eugene Wren for
20
October
2007
will not now take place.
Eugene thought of adding a few words of
apology to all those guests who wouldn't now have the pleasure of
seeing him and Ella joined in matrimony, eating a splendid lunch
and drinking his Dom Perignon, but somehow he hadn't the heart.
He hadn't the heart for much any more.

He had taken a room in an hotel in George Street, very comfortable,
very expensive, but he doubted if, since he had arrived there
several days before, he had slept for more than two or three hours
a night. If he went to sleep at midnight he was awake again at
two, sitting up in bed eating an Oranchoco for comfort. Then
another and another. They were just as nice as Chocorange. He
wondered now why he had found their taste bitter at first.

Falling into a doze at the gallery wasn't unusual. Dorinda had
sometimes found him at his desk, his arms spread out and his
head resting on them. 'Dead to the world,' as she put it. She told
him he should go home, he couldn't go on like this.

'I have no home,' Eugene said.

There was no answer to this. She and Jackie exchanged glances.
Neither of them knew the reason for the engagement being broken,
only that it was broken. No one knew. It would have been easier
to tell people of the infidelity of either party or some recently
discovered incompatibility than of his addiction to something so
absurd and degrading. He was consuming more of the things now
than ever, at the rate of at least two packets a day. Because those
two women were there, he was afraid to put one of them in his
mouth while in the gallery, so he dragged himself outside to walk
the pretty streets of Kensington, sucking as many as five in the
half-hour outside he allowed himself. Sometimes he simply stood
in a doorway or under a tree like a smoker excluded from the workplace.

The original reason to buy Chocorange, as it was then called,
that of keeping him from snacking between meals or eating too
much at meals, at last seemed to fulfil its purpose. He had lost
interest in real food. Without the heart to weigh himself – there
were scales in his bathroom at the hotel – he could see and feel
he was losing weight. His clothes started to hang on him and his
waistband was loose. The thought had begun to come to him that
if he went on like this he could die. He could kill himself. People
did. He remembered reading somewhere of a man who had put
an end to his life by eating nothing but carrots until he died of an
overdose of vitamin A. Probably there were no vitamins at all in
Oranchoco but there were plenty of chemicals and no fat or protein
and precious little carbohydrate. Thinking of that, he ate another
and another, and skipped going out to the restaurant in Crawford
Place for his dinner.

A letter came for him at the gallery from Ella. Not an email or
a text message but a proper letter, which seemed to have been
delayed for several days by the postal strike.
Eugene
, it said,
I have
moved out of your house and back to my flat. Obviously, I couldn't
stay there. You can go back now. I have taken all my things with me
and left the key on the hall table. Ella.

It upset him terribly. He was nearer to tears than he had been
when he was eight and old Sid Gibson had shouted at him for
knocking a lemon off his stall. But he checked out of the hotel
and went home in the vain hope that he would feel better. He had
believed that by being surrounded by his treasured things he would
be comforted. He wasn't. The one single thing that would have
comforted him wasn't a thing at all. Bitterly, he thought that he
loved and needed Ella more than ever now she was gone. He
opened his suitcase in the bedroom he had shared with her and
tipped its contents out on the floor, clothes, shoes, and twenty or
more packets of Oranchoco. One of these he ripped open, though
he had two already open in the pockets of his jacket, and put two
into his mouth at once.

Lying on the bed, he thought that the best thing that could
happen to him would be for Oranchoco to be withdrawn from sale.
He remembered reading of certain foodstuffs that contained too
much of a substance found to be carcinogenic when eaten by mice
at the rate of a kilo a day for fifty years. Immediately they vanished
from the shops. It was the result of the current mania for health
and safety. If only it would happen to Oranchoco! If only he could
walk into the sari lady's shop and when he asked her where the
things had gone (only he never would) be told they had been taken
off the shelves owing to their new-found toxicity. Come to that, if
only the new taste of Oranchoco had put him off the things, as
he had hoped it might.

When he had put all this stuff away, should he go out for dinner?
Cook himself something at home? He was aware that he had begun
to feel sick. Better not eat, then. He had his consolation here in
his bedroom, twenty packets of it.

On her way back from another patient, Ella found herself driving
past the block where Joel Roseman lived. It was weeks since
she had heard from him, even longer since she had seen him. Her
life had become a mechanical routine: get up, go to work, resist
with a forced smile the sympathetic glances of colleagues, see
patients, visit patients, go home to the flat, eat something she need
not bother to cook, have a whisky and go to bed. Joel had not been
one of those patients she visited. She had come near to forgetting
him. Now, as she parked the car, she glanced up to the windows
of his flat. The blinds were gone, the curtains too, as far as she
could see. Had
he
gone as well? Not much could distract her from
her own troubles but this could. She was remembering how Joel
had tried to take Mithras back to the river and the meadows and
the city with the white towers but had only partially succeeded.
Could he have tried again and this time it had worked? It had
worked because it killed him?

Ella went up the steps and into the hallway. A porter sitting
behind his desk asked if he could help her. Mr Roseman?

'Gone, madam. He moved out a week ago.'

It was a forlorn hope that they might have a forwarding address
for him but, remarkably, they did. The porter wrote it down. Ella
recognised the street in Hampstead Garden Suburb. This was his
parents' house, his father's, of course, as well as his mother's.

If life had been good to her, Ella would never have gone up there.
Life was very bad to her, so she went to take her mind off things,
off Eugene and the madness of it all, and off her humiliation.

The Stemmers' house was a palace, a single-storey bungalow
covering about an acre (Ella thought exaggeratedly) and surrounded
by several more acres with palm trees and monkey puzzles and laid
out geometrically as a tennis court, a bowling green and a mini-golf
course with artificial hills and ponds. Eugene would have called it
vulgar, a word few people still used. She could see all this from behind
closed wrought-iron gates, which apparently only opened electronically.
She pressed the bell and a voice asked her who she was.

'Dr Cotswold,' she said. 'To see Mr Roseman.'

'One moment.'

A growling sound was followed by the gates slowly parting. She
drove in across a huge bare expanse of paving. Parked on that stony
plateau, her car looked very small. It slightly alarmed her that the
right-hand half of the double front doors was opened before she
had set her foot on the first of four steps. Standing inside was a
woman in a dark-blue dress, which would have been a uniform if
there had been an apron over it or a label on the breast pocket.
She might have been a mute for all she spoke to Ella, leading her
across marble and polished wood and perilous scattered rugs.

There appeared to be no doors in this house and no means of
excluding daylight. It was one of those brilliant October days, which
would be all over by five in the afternoon, but now sunlight streamed
in through walls of glass and a domed skylight. Rooms were separated
from other rooms only by a cunning arrangement of walls and
half-walls serving as screens. On one of these hung a painting, a
large oil of a mermaid inside a goldfish bowl but apparently struggling
to get out through its narrow neck. The woman led Ella
behind the wall with the painting on it and there, in a silver leather
chair behind a desk, sat a fat white-haired man holding a silver
phone receiver in his right hand.

He acknowledged Ella with a small dip of his head. The woman
waved one hand at a chair and she sat down. For about a minute
Joel's father, for this was surely who it was, continued to talk on
the phone. Then he said a rapid, 'All right, that's enough. I get the
picture,' and put the receiver into a rest. He came over to Ella
with hand outstretched, said, 'Morris Stemmer. I believe you were
my son's medical attendant?'

Ella had never before been called a medical attendant and she
wondered why he had used the past tense but she shook the hand
that was offered and asked if she could see Joel.

He smiled slightly, a smile that turned his fat cheeks into bulging
cushions. 'You may see Mithras if you like.'

'I don't understand.'

'This whole business is hard to understand, Dr Cotswold. Perhaps
it is best to accept that Joel has become a different person and
one who may be easier for the rest of us to live with.'

She could think of nothing to say.

'If there are any fees owing to you perhaps you will send me an
invoice and I will, of course, gladly reimburse you.'

'You owe me nothing,' Ella said, 'but I would very much like to
see Joel. Even if he is ill. Especially if he is ill.'

'Mithras,' he said. 'He only answers to that name. It's best to
remember that.'

Now he was on his feet she could see how extremely fat Morris
Stemmer was. That overused word 'obese' might have been coined
for him. His girth had reached the stage where an apron of fat
hung down against the taut cloth covering his swollen thighs. His
breathing was laboured and he sighed when he sat down. Ella
wondered how a man whose much-loved little daughter had
drowned could bear to have that picture of the desperate mermaid
in his house.

A bell was pressed and the woman reappeared. She stood in
front of Ella, waiting for her to rise to her feet. Ella followed her.
The woman opened the only interior door in this central hall of
the house. This room was the antithesis of the flat in Ludlow
Mansions with its velvet curtains and drawn blinds, and if not as
light as the rest of the house, more than dimly lit. It was furnished
pleasantly in soft colours, a deep pile carpet covering the floor, a
trough of house plants under the thinly curtained window.

The man who sat on a green velvet chair against leafy wallpaper
was Joel, yet was not. His dark hair was a bright blond and wavy,
his normally doleful face wearing a slight smile. For surely the first
time since she had met him he was without sunglasses. The smile
widened when he saw who had come in, yet she had the impression
he didn't recognise her. He would have smiled like that at any
newcomer.

'Hello,' he said in a tone unlike his usual Joel voice. 'I'm Mithras.'

'Ella,' she said, her voice shaking. 'I'm Ella.'

The voice was higher-pitched, the vowels flatter and he had a
slight lisp. 'I think we've met before. In another life maybe.When
I had a heart. Before they took it out. You can't be a human being
without a heart, you see. You're a spirit or a god.'

A movement behind her made Ella turn round. Wendy Stemmer
had come into the room. She made a little low sound, a soft
whimper, and, walking over to stand beside her son, began stroking
his newly blond head as one might stroke a cat or dog. But she
looked sad, more
real
than Ella had ever seen her, all the meretriciousness,
the desperate girlishness gone.

Joel suffered the stroking, yet he managed to behave as if no
one was there. He picked up a book and began to read it. His
mother withdrew her hand.

'There is no point in staying here,' she said. 'He'll read that book
for hours. It's always the same book, he reads it over and over.'

Ella saw that the title was that of a currently popular work on
schizophrenia, the picture on its cover a brain pierced by a lightning
flash. This was the book that had been beside him along with
the vodka and the pills when he tried to revisit 'death's door'. She
turned, gave him a last look. They left the room and Ella found
herself once more facing, across gleaming emptiness, the struggling
mermaid in the bowl of water.

Wendy Stemmer closed the door behind her. 'I'll come out to
your car with you,' she said.

For the first time since Ella had met her she was wearing a skirt
that covered her knees. She pulled it down when she was in the
passenger seat.

'He bleached his hair himself. He must have used kitchen bleach
because he never went to the shops. The carer said he didn't go
out at all. I don't know why he did it.'

I do, Ella thought. Mithras had fair hair and he wanted to become
like Mithras, to
become
Mithras.

'I found him like that, the way he is now, talking nonsense,
saying he had come back with Joel – he talked about Joel as if he
were someone else. He said Joel had fetched him from a city made
of cloud but when he tried to take him back again he couldn't.
Joel stayed there and he – this Mithras – had to stay here.'

'But your husband,' Ella said, 'what happened to change his attitude
to Joel?'

'I don't really understand.' To her surprise Wendy Stemmer
clutched at her hand and held it. 'It frightens me. It makes me
feel I've two mad people to deal with, not one.'