Rebuilding Coventry (10 page)

‘No,’
he said. ‘We’ll soon be warm.’

We lay
together in the rain for a few quiet moments, and then he asked politely if I
was ready to start. We started, went on and finished. It was all over in three
minutes. His wet string vest shone in the dark under his breathless back. ‘Well,
that was very nice,’ he said as we separated and became two bodies again.

‘Thank
you,’ I said.

We
could have been talking about a slice of home-made cake. As the sky lightened
we discussed my fee. ‘I’ve only got a few quid,’ he said, and turned his
pockets inside out, as though I had called him a liar. For further proof he
opened his brief-case. I looked inside.

‘Can I
have the cigarettes and the Kit-Kat please?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’
he said, ‘and I can spare two pounds.’

He
handed the coins to me and I pressed them to my cheek. I ate the Kit-Kat and
smoked a cigarette while Leslie told me about his wife and how much he loved
her. The day had crept up unnoticed. It was light. We stood up.

‘I didn’t
know you were so lovely,’ he said. ‘Is your hair natural?’

‘No, it’s
a wig,’ I said and ran towards the railings, scaled them and was off, running,
to find Professor Willoughby D’Eresby’s house.

16 Unconventional
Household

‘Pronounce it Darby,’
coughed Professor Willoughby D’Eresby, as he stood on the top doorstep of his
house in Gower Street looking at me. ‘I say, you’re splendidly dirty, aren’t
you? Like traffic, do you, noise and smell of?’

‘No.’

‘Pity,
I’m very partial to the smell of diesel and, my dear, I’m in
seventh heaven
if
a juggernaut crashes its gears outside my study window. Odd, isn’t it?’

He
looked happily up and down Gower Street at the snarling rush-hour traffic,
inhaled deeply on the fumes, then flung his lighted cigarette stub into an urn
by the door containing hundreds of fellow stubs and nodded me into the interior
of the house. He immediately lit another cigarette, coughed, choked and, with
watering eyes, said, ‘Is that a Benson you’re smoking?’

‘Yes,’
I said.

‘Thought
so. Got a frightfully good nose for a fag.’

The
professor’s super-refined upper-class accent sounded like a foreign language.
When he spoke I had to strain to understand him.

As I
was about to enter the kitchen, he put a restraining hand on my arm. ‘Perhaps I
ought to tell you that my wife is a psychologist and she doesn’t wear clothes
in the house.’

From
the kitchen came the sound of wild laughter and then a shrill voice shouting, ‘Stop
pissing about, Gerard, and bring her in. She’s seen a naked
woman
before.’

‘You’re
swearing again, Letitia, and it’s not yet noon.’

Professor
Willoughby D’Eresby pulled me into the kitchen and towards his wife, who put
the
Guardian
down and revealed her head and torso and breasts. It took
me a few seconds to recover, but I managed to say, ‘Hello.’

‘Sit yourself
down, my dear,’ she said. ‘I expect you want a few quiet moments in which to
recover. Shocking sight, aren’t I?’

I
thought it best to say nothing.

‘I
admire my wife enormously,’ said the professor defensively.

‘She
does as she pleases, you know.’

‘Within
the law, Gerard,’ added Letitia, lighting a large cigar.

‘Oh yes,
within the law,’ drawled her husband.

I
glanced around the kitchen. Flies had colonized the sink. The cardboard remains
of Marks & Spencer’s oriental dinners for two were thrown about the floor.
Ashtrays contained insecure pyramids of cigar butts and cigarette ends. Milk
bottles contained penicillin-like substances.

I sat
at the kitchen table with my feet sticking to the floor. I tried not to
breathe. Somewhere a drain was blocked. Letitia Willoughby D’Eresby started to
read aloud an item from the
Guardian,
something about child abuse. Her
husband listened attentively, saying:

‘Awful!
awful!’ every now and again. An evil-looking cat loped in, worrying a half-dead
mouse. It deposited it at Letitia’s feet.

‘Ah
look, darling! Thatcher has brought you in a little present!’

‘Thank
you, Thatcher, you old bastard,’ said Letitia. Then, ‘OK … we can’t keep
this gorgeous child waiting a moment longer.’

She
threw the
Guardian
onto the floor and turned to me. I glimpsed grey
pubic hair and mottled thighs as she raised herself to turn her chair to face
me. I shut my eyes… . ‘As you can see, we’re lazy sods. We do no housework.
We can’t cook. We smoke compulsively and I walk around displaying my
clapped-out old tits. Can’t keep domestic help, can we, Gerard? …’

‘Can’t
get
domestic help, darling,’ said Gerard, smiling fondly at his moustachioed
wife.

Letitia
smiled back and continued: ‘We’ll give you forty pounds a week and free board,
if you’ll keep us straight and cook us a meal every now and again … How say
you?’

‘I say
yes.’

‘Oh,
that’s supercalafragilistic!’ said Letitia.

‘Wife!’
boomed Gerard. ‘You’re never to use that word again in my hearing. It’s twee,
it’s regressive and
it is not a proper word.’

‘Did
you see
Mary Poppins?’
Letitia asked me eagerly.

‘Four
times,’ I said.

‘I’ve
seen it eleven times at the pictures, and fuck knows how many times on video. I
find its naïve — not to say moronic — simplicity to be utterly enchanting.’ Her
voice changed, her eyes narrowed. She turned on her husband. ‘And it sodding
well really
is
a proper word, it’s in the
Oxford English Dictionary
.
. . I think! And if it’s not, it jolly well ought to be. As well you know, I
use it on a daily basis.’ She stood up. I closed my eyes.

‘Right,
Gerard, get up them bleeding stairs!’ she said. Letitia and Gerard wheezed up
the stairs in front of me. I watched Letitia’s buttocks with great interest as
they swayed and dimpled and generally behaved like two grey blancmanges on the
move. As we turned the stairs towards the attic floor, I thought, ‘I wish Derek
could see me now, with my nose only inches away from Letitia’s bare bum.’

The
thought of Derek being here in this house at all made me laugh out loud, and my
companions turned and laughed with me; but asked for no explanation.

‘We
never come up here,’ said Letitia, unnecessarily, as she looked around at the
two tidy rooms and ash-free carpets. ‘So you can do your own thing, play your
pop records, practise body-popping … or whatever it is you young people do.’

‘I’m
nearly forty,’ I said: the first piece of information I had volunteered.

They
had not asked me for my name or my circumstances.

‘If you’d
wear your glasses, Letitia, you would have seen the tiny wrinkles on this dear
girl’s face. Vanity, Letitia, vanity.’

Professor
Willoughby D’Eresby stroked his wife’s buttocks fondly. They stood in reverie
for a few moments and then Letitia wobbled about, opening windows and skylights
and apologizing for the graffiti on the white walls.

GET OUT WHILE YOU CAN!

CAROLINE

SHE’S A LOONY. HE’S A
NUTTER.

JOANNE

WATCH OUT FOR THE SON.

GLORIA

Gerard
smiled at the writing on the walls. ‘We’re used to being called “nutters”, aren’t
we, darling?’

‘Oh
yes,’ smiled Letitia. ‘I used to work with Ronnie Laing.’

‘So you’ve
a son?’ I enquired.

Their
faces clouded over. They looked old and dirty and smelly.

Their
shoulders drooped, they sighed.

‘Keir,’
said Professor Willoughby D’Eresby, sadly.

‘He’s
very hard to reach. He’s in a state of ontological insecurity, ‘added his wife.

‘Where
does he live?’ I asked, suddenly nervous.

‘Floor
below,’ said Willoughby D’Eresby, lighting another cigarette and flinging the
discarded stub of his previous cigarette into the sparkling wash-basin. ‘We
must go to work. Here, get yourself whatever you need, abrasive powders, black
plastic bags …’ His voice trailed off; he was on uncertain domestic ground.
He searched his suit for money and pulled out a bundle of fifty-pound notes.

‘Ooh,
can I have one of those, darling?’ asked Letitia.

He gave
us one each and they went downstairs to prepare for work. Mad Keir was much on
my mind.

I
bolted the attic door and sat on my bed. I had nothing to put in the chest of
drawers or the matching pine wardrobe. I had no face flannel to display or soap
to arrange. I was simply … there, in that most traditional of fugitives’
hiding places, the attic.

I heard
the front door slam and poked my head out of the skylight window, hoping to see
the Willoughby D’Eresbys. Professor Willoughby D’Eresby came into view,
crossing Gower Street with a smart, middle-aged woman on his arm. She was
wearing a fashionable padded-shouldered suit in a grey checked material. She
teetered on black high-heeled court shoes and she carried a bulging black
brief-case. She said something and, as they both laughed, she turned her head.
It was Letitia Willoughby D’Eresby, in clothes and scarlet lipstick.

They
walked out of sight and I was very sorry to see them go.

I was
now alone in the house with Keir.

I
pressed my ear to the carpet and listened hard. I could hear no wild mutterings
or crazed monologue from the floor below. Perhaps he raved through the night,
and slept during the day. I hoped so.

I was
too frightened of Keir to be able to luxuriate in a bath. Instead I took my
clothes off and washed at the wash-basin in my room. One of the previous
occupants had left behind a little bottle of Marks & Spencer’s liquid soap.
I pressed the plunger joyfully over and over until the bottle signalled it was
empty by making a disgusting noise. I washed away the soot, the tears, the
rain, the sweat and Leslie’s semen from the night before. I washed until I was
gloriously renewed and all my tribulations and all my sins had trickled down
the waste-pipe and disappeared underground. Then, having no others, I put on my
dirty clothes and started to work.

They
hadn’t left me a key but it didn’t matter because the lock to the front door
was broken; so I came and went all day, shopping and taking out the rubbish and
lining clean milk bottles up on the step. I ate non-stop: fruit, sweets,
crisps, two pork pies. But I didn’t buy a newspaper. To read about myself and
my crime in black and white would make it real. I rang Sidney every hour, but
got no reply.

I found
a cooker, a fridge and a dishwasher in the kitchen, all out of action due to encrustations
of dirt or ice. It was deeply satisfying getting them all to work and I quite
forgot Keir for ten minutes at a time. The remainder of the time I spent
looking over my shoulder and waiting for an axe to fall between my shoulder
blades. I was scraping grease off the kitchen wall with a fish slice when the
Willoughby D’Eresbys returned. They made no comment on the spectacular renewal
of their domestic appliances. They were deep in conversation. They flung their
coats onto the newly scrubbed kitchen table and ignored me.

‘But,
Letitia, the Tsarevich’s haemophilia was the cause of Alexandra’s depression
and subsequent religious fervour. You’re being very silly to try to prove that
it was a simple ease of post-natal depression.’

Letitia
unbuttoned her blouse. ‘Rasputin took advantage of that poor woman during a
time of hormonal upheaval. Hello, my dear, have you been busy? It’s very light
in here.’ She looked around, bemused. She took off her skirt.

‘I
cleaned the windows,’ I said, getting to my feet. The rest of the wall would
have to wait. I threw the fish slice into the sink.

‘I’ve
never seen that before,’ said Professor Willoughby D’Eresby, pointing in
astonishment at the newly scrubbed kitchen floor with its mock terracotta
tiles. Letitia examined it as she unhooked her bra.

‘Of
course you have; it’s been down at least seven years. We chose it together… from Habitat. When we were paying for it a man had an epileptic fit on a pile
of dhurries,’ she prompted.

‘Remember
now,’ said Willoughby D’Eresby. ‘You pushed a lollipop stick into his mouth and
splintered his tongue.’

I took
a casserole dish out of the oven and put it on the newly scrubbed table. I had
expected amazed cries and perhaps a jump or two of joy, but the Willoughby D’Eresbys
sat down at the table and slopped the beef casserole onto their plates without
comment. They were not discreet eaters; they smacked their lips, gravy dribbled
down their chins unchecked and unnoticed. Letitia finished first.