Stray Love (5 page)

My interest in her had grown dramatically ever since I had read the hidden hospital letters. So I began to take advantage of lulls in conversation while Oliver drove around. I began asking some simple questions. In this way I discovered that she liked bread pudding with sultanas and that she took two lumps of sugar in her tea. Her favourite shop was Kleins Haberdashery in Soho. She had long fingers, which were my fingers. She had a long flared nose, which was my nose.

Slowly, the facts Oliver shared became more personal.

“We were very much in love.”

Or, “Did I mention how pleased she was when she found out about you?”

Perhaps I made the fatal mistake of looking too eager during these conversations. Maybe Oliver began to worry that he had disclosed too much or was startled by something he recalled or feared losing me to a ghost—but one day there were no more mother facts. He turned away from my questions, changing the topic to himself. For a while, I had a strange feeling that he was trying to win me back to him.

“I’ll make you proud, Marcel. Just you wait. One morning you’ll open up the newspaper and see my byline right there: front page, above the fold.”

I wanted him to feel that he was still my hero, but his ambitions were strange to me. As far as I could tell, the lessons “above the fold” were horrible and predictable: war was continuous, politicians made loads of mistakes, trains and planes weren’t safe, it was better to live inland than by open water, and—if you read the tabloids like
News of the World
—the streets were full of roving maniacs, perverts, arsonists and murderers. Stories above the middle crease were a kind of horrid stain that made people put their hands over their mouths. They were bleak events children weren’t meant to see.

It was either a coincidence or a final act of shedding, but a month after this conversation, Oliver gave up the flat in Orme Square (where we had all lived before my mother disappeared). We moved to a skinny house in the middle of a row of skinny houses on New King’s Road in Hammersmith and Fulham, right across from a small park called Eel Brook Common. It
was a former workman’s house, and it took me a while to get used to seeing our familiar belongings in cramped, unfamiliar surroundings. I kept staring at our old moss green settee thinking that it looked lost.

Happily, between New Year’s and my ninth birthday in February, a space opened up at Kensington International School. Oliver promised it would be better than Draycott and this time he was right. Founded ten years earlier, Kensington was the choice of diplomats and visiting dignitaries from former and current British colonies. Some of the children came from plush homes in Belgravia and Knightsbridge. There was a large framed portrait of the Queen at the front of each classroom and children with skin of every colour seated at the desks. My class was an energetic crowd of Ugandan Asian, Irish, West Indian, Greek Cypriot, and Indian kids who often slipped into other languages while playing in the yard. The headmistress, Mrs. Heaney, ancient and thin-lipped, had a strange habit of speaking to our hairlines, and seldom to our eyes.

A few of the children weren’t black or white but beige, like me. There were two girls, Hayley and Adele, daughters of a Trinidadian-born economist and white British mother, who proudly referred to themselves as “half-caste.” I had never heard the term before and was curious. Was that what I was?

In the evenings, Oliver began spending more time on the telephone. At first I assumed he was fielding work-related calls, but then I noticed that his voice had a softer tone than usual. It made me suspicious. There was more space between his sentences, and his words had a vagueness that I somehow associated with romance. Whenever I approached, he would dissolve into silence or cover the mouthpiece until I moved away.

I left him to his murmuring conversations.

When I felt lonely, I would take out my sketchbook. I had taped the blurry photo of my mother to the inside back cover and would sneak peeks at it. I began to look forward to school each day. Kensington had several kind teachers, mostly young women, who warmed to Oliver and me. My favourite, Miss Humphreys, wore tortoiseshell glasses and a silk scarf tied around her neck like a French woman. She tucked in my collar and once even offered to mend a hole in Oliver’s jacket. We must have appeared wrinkled and chaotic to her. It must have been clear we were missing a woman’s touch.

Then we met Pippa. She had moved into a house several doors down—a flat with a thickly painted blue door—when I was nine years old. She came from Poland by way of Canada but had been living in London for almost thirteen years and considered herself English. She had dark brown hair that ended halfway down her back. Her face was pretty but there was a hatching of lines around her eyes even when she wasn’t smiling.

We met her at the park across the street in early spring. She was photographing a tree, though she held the camera at a strange and distracted angle, glancing around every so often. When she noticed me watching her, she lowered her camera and waved.

“Hi!” she shouted out, and walked over to us.

“I’m Pippa,” she said, breathless, holding out her hand.

Oliver stared at her face and at her outstretched hand. Then, at last, he said, “I’m Oliver.”

“I’m Marcel,” I said.

She nodded as if she already knew this, and gave my hand a gentle shake with her long fingers. When she let go of my hand, we stood for a moment without speaking. I eyed her coat,
which was delicately pleated at the shoulders like seashells, then looked down at her rubber boots, so immense that they might have belonged to a fisherman.

Finally, Oliver said: “Well, I guess we’ll be on our way, then.” He explained that we were just heading over to the swings. For some reason, he seemed nervous.

“All set, Marcel?” said Oliver, jerking his head towards the playground.

Pippa turned to me. “Do you mind if I join you?”

I glanced over at Oliver, who was now blushing.

“Would that be okay?” she said.

Oliver stared intensely at the ground, having evidently discovered something there of great interest. I looked back at Pippa. I didn’t know why Oliver was behaving so rudely.

“It would be our pleasure,” I said.

Together we set off for the playground. Unable to decide on a proper strolling arrangement, we proceeded in single file. Oliver. Pippa. Myself. As we walked, Oliver moving briskly ahead, Pippa advancing with a slight bounce in her step, I noticed how the wind lifted her hair and whipped it about like silk ribbons.

At the playground, Pippa offered to push me on the swings. I said, “Yes,” without hesitation, though I was too old for it.

She pushed gently at first, then she pushed me higher, and higher. Before long I felt myself riding on waves of air. I looked down and saw Oliver sitting on the bench with Pippa’s camera bag, a glazed look on his face.

When I stopped swinging, Pippa bent over and picked up two index cards that had fallen from my jacket pocket onto the ground.

“What does this say? ‘Acquiesce’? ‘Resign’? Well, these aren’t very happy words, are they.”

I shrugged and reached my hand out for the cards, then slipped them back into my pocket.

“I can see you’re a funny, serious boy. A nice mish-mash of the two. Hmm … Mish. I like the way that sounds. Do you mind if I call you ‘Mish’? Now tell me, why did you bring your spelling homework to the park?”

“Because Oliver said I could.”

I watched a bird a few feet away. It pecked at a twig. It hopped onto a rock. It hopped down.

“He did, did he?” she said. “And I suppose you took
could
to mean
should.”

“I don’t mind it,” I said with a shrug. “I’m working on my word power.”

I was still sitting on the swing. To my pleasure and embarrassment, Pippa bent over and retied my laces. When she was done, she tucked a few strands of hair behind her ear. I looked around and saw that the other mums in the playground had sculpted hair, hair that didn’t move. No one else had hair that flew about their faces in silky strips. There was something girlish about Pippa. And the warm way she called me “Mish” made me feel strangely proud.

I wanted to ask her questions. I wanted to know if she was married, if she had children. But the sky was beginning to darken and it was time to say goodbye.

“That was lovely,” said Pippa, giving us each a kiss on the cheek.

Oliver, usually so articulate, barely managed a whisper. “Thank you … Pippa, was it?”

We watched her walk away, her camera swinging against her hip. When she reached the road, she stopped and turned around, as though sensing us. She gave a wave. I waved back.

Oliver and I looked at each other.

“That was nice,” I said, just as he said, “That was strange.”

“Nice and strange,” he murmured as a compromise.

On the way home, Oliver pointed out Pippa’s door. Other than its blueness, it was an unremarkable door. But how remarkable it seems now that I failed to question:
How did he know she lived there?

That night I sat in the bathroom with Oliver while he shaved, applying a few deft strokes of the razor to his pale jawline. With his cheeks still lathered with cream, he placed his face very close to the mirror. He held the edge of the razor to the bottom of his right sideburn, then stopped and stood back. He studied his face in the speckled mirror, turned his head to one side and then the other. He pushed his hair off his forehead.

“Look, Marcel. I’m still young,” he said. “Much younger than I feel.”

He wiped the shaving cream off with a damp towel, rinsed his face in the sink, put his shirt back on. He left it half unbuttoned, exposing the pale ladder of bones below his throat, and walked back to the kitchen to prepare dinner. He made poached eggs and slipped them onto the plates without disturbing the yolks. We sat at the table and I watched as he mopped up the last bit of egg with his toast and chewed it slowly.

I thought of the wind lifting Pippa’s hair like ribbons.

W
E MET PIPPA AGAIN IN LATE SPRING
. It was drizzling and we noticed her across the Common, getting out of a taxi. She was struggling to remove something from the cab and when we crossed the street towards her, she seemed relieved to see us.

“Mish, Oliver,” she said, her eyes brightening. “Just in the nick of time. I could use a hand.”

We helped her remove a sewing machine and a wooden ironing board from the boot of the cab.

When the car pulled away from the curb, she looked me over quickly and said, “I like your new hat.”

I was wearing a yellow rubberized hat and matching coat with metal clasp closures. Oliver had secured the hat tightly under my chin so it wouldn’t fly off in the wind as the last one had.

“Thank you,” I said. “I like your new hair.”

Since we last saw her, Pippa had cut her hair into a chin-length bob.

She smiled and gave a shiver and said, “Shall we proceed?”

She picked up the sewing machine in its carrying case, and we followed behind with the ironing board. The rain pattered onto the pavement.

“A quick cup of tea?” said Pippa, when we reached her flat.

“We’d love to,” I said.

“We can’t,” said Oliver.

“Please, Oliver,” said Pippa, sliding her hand along his arm, one easy movement, as if she had known him forever.

His eyes met hers for a moment, then he said, “All right, then, a quick cup.”

I don’t know if it was the living room’s warm glow—an effect created by several cloth-covered lamps, which cast everything in a hazy pinkish light—or if it was Pippa’s natural, cheery hospitality. But the moment I stepped inside, I felt at home.

This was odd because, in reality, Pippa’s unruly flat could not have been more
unlike
home—at least the tidy, organized one I shared with Oliver. At Pippa’s, there were mannequin parts, bolts of fabric in reds and burgundies, piles of fibre-board boxes. There were shelves crowded with china animals, books and fringed pillows. In one corner, there was a stuffed partridge, a set of deer antlers and the number 3 pinned to a tailor’s dummy.

Oliver took the room in quietly, calmly, almost knowingly, as if he had already pegged Pippa as a woman who would live this way, with mysterious layers of things piled upon things. I felt a shift in his mood. On the doorstep, he had acted as if he wanted to turn around and leave. Now he removed his coat, his overshoes, with the manner of someone settling in to stay a while.

Pippa looked down at Oliver’s socked feet with a smile and said, “I don’t remember the last time I had a man over to visit.”

“Really?” he said, doubtfully.

She halted, took a deep breath and exhaled. “I have no time for anything lately. I’ve just started as a window designer for
Marks & Spencer. They hired me to work at the flagship store over at Marble Arch. My job is basically to sell raincoats in the summer and beach frocks in the winter. But I like to try out new ideas at home. Thankfully, Stasha—my sister—doesn’t mind. Did I mention that we share this flat? She lived with me in France too. That’s where I trained. I apprenticed at the Galeries Lafayette under a very snooty but talented window designer. When I moved back to London and started working at the Arch, they had really dreadful windows. I mean,
completely
forgettable. Boring cotton vests dangling on visible strings and dusty trousers tacked to ugly boards with putty and tape to keep everything in place.” She stopped and smiled. “Am I talking too much? How about a tour?”

She showed us around the rest of the flat, switching the lights on and off as she went. At first it seemed to be a tour of all the things she had removed. In the dim hallway: “There used to be a ghastly light fixture here. And beef brown wallpaper over there.” In the bathroom: “That’s where they had their rotting curtain and, right where you’re standing, a mouldy runner.”

She showed us her room, the bed where she slept. The open wardrobe, with its dresses organized in colour blocks, seemed to be the only spot of order in the entire flat. Then she led us to the guest room at the back of the flat where she presented us with “The Wall.”

The Wall was a floor-to-ceiling corkboard where she tried out new ideas for future window arrangements. There were rows of tinsel for the Christmas display tiered to look like a massive dress, a collage of mismatched toes and heels and arches carefully scissored out of magazines as a possible backdrop for the spring footwear line. I ran my finger over squares of fabric. Each square had a strange name written under it:
nylon, Terylene, Crimplene, Orlon, leatherette.
Off to the side, in an otherwise blank area, was a row of three photos taken at the park. The corners were slightly curled.

Oliver leaned in closer for a better look. “Wait a minute. These are all of Marcel,” he said.

I walked over and saw that it was true. I was somewhere in each of the photographs.

For the first time since we had met her, Pippa’s face went blank. She tilted her head to the right, drew a shoulder up to her ear. Then she stood up straight and smiled. “Look at me just standing here. Where are my manners? I’ve completely forgotten about that tea I promised.” She pointed to the other room. “Why don’t you two have a seat? I’ll put some music on while I change.”

When Pippa called us into the dining room a few minutes later, she had changed into an orange shift dress and her damp hair was slicked back off her forehead. Her legs were bare but she had slipped her feet into a pair of pointy leather boots. There was a pot of tea and a bowl of ginger biscuits on the table.

Not wanting to appear rude, I took one biscuit at a time, leaving long breaks in between. I noticed Oliver’s collar protruding at an odd angle from his sweater and touched the collar of my own shirt to let him know.

The tea was underboiled. There was a scudding of cloud on the surface. As we sipped the tasteless liquid, Oliver eyed a vase of peonies in the middle of the table, and finally reached over to tap the ceramic side with two fingers. A petal fell. He withdrew his hand and frowned.

For a moment we rested in the quietness of that fallen petal.

“A gift from an admirer?” Oliver finally asked, a sudden strain in his voice.

Pippa shook her head. “But if they were?” She smiled playfully.

When Oliver didn’t say anything, she stood up, picked up the flowers, walked over to the garbage bin and dropped them in. As soon as she had done this, she returned to her seat. She looked at the empty vase for a moment before turning to me.

“Mish, don’t be shy, eat up,” she said, pointing at the one remaining biscuit.

“Thank you,” I said.

I could tell it was not an entirely comfortable visit for Oliver. But at the end of it, when we were walking home, he surprised me.

“Well, that went well,” he said.

“Do you like her?”

“Hmm. She’s quite nice.”

I asked him what he thought of her decor and the words he used were
complete mayhem
and
obviously communist,
but he seemed amused. Though he was usually appalled by disorder, there was something about Pippa’s messiness, about Pippa, that he appeared to find appealing.

I stored away any nagging questions I had about the photos in her workroom. And the flowers in the garbage bin.

I
STILL HAVE PENCIL SKETCHES
of Pippa from that time. Pippa in a hot air balloon. Pippa playing the piano. Pippa holding an umbrella. Pippa on a swing, kicking the air, her shoe flying off like the girl in that famous Fragonard painting. Even today, I tend to draw more when I’m freshly captivated.

Lately, I’ve been sketching Iris. Tonight, I sketched her along the margin of the magazine article I was reading, her untidy dark
hair recently liberated from an elastic band. She was sitting sideways in a chair, lost in a book, with her legs dangling over the armrest. I have discovered that she enjoys the occasional introverted moment. I’ve never been a big reader (much to Oliver’s disappointment), but Iris can sit for hours with a good mystery. Right now it’s
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.
(“Is that appropriate?” “Yes. Book report material.”) Later, she joined my neighbour Sarah downstairs for a restorative yoga class. A waft of sandalwood incense crept up the stairs on her return.

Over the past few days, I’ve noticed myself awaiting her homecoming whenever she leaves the flat with Kiyomi’s irritating acquaintance, Elizabeth. In the morning, I watch them from my study window and keep watching until they pass the Portuguese bakery and disappear around the corner, and I don’t feel quite right or settled until the front door flies open and Iris reappears.

O
LIVER TOO WAS HUNG UP ON
P
IPPA
. After that visit to her flat, he began using words like
fantastic
(Mrs. Bowne’s lemon cake) and
gorgeous
(the neighbour’s garden) and
hilarious
(the cover of
Punch
magazine). He was unrecognizably cheerful and started wearing mod polo shirts and stovepipe trousers, taking extra effort to look suave.

But what followed was a disappointing week of no further Pippa sightings.

By the second week Oliver was less cheerful. He broke the toaster knob, which meant the door wouldn’t close, and he tried to fix it with tape but the tape melted from the heat. He swore at the toaster. Then he put his hands on the counter and breathed slowly, deeply.

I tried to remain calm and positive.

By the third week, Oliver wasn’t whistling while he shaved any more. He grumbled at the babysitters and snapped at me. The days and nights passed without lectures or lessons. In an effort to lift his spirits, I made him pots of tea and heated tins of soup.

Then I remembered Pippa saying that she worked at Marks & Spencer as a window dresser. That afternoon, I found a pair of scissors and carefully cut a hole in the seat of my trousers.

“Oh, no. Look,” I announced when Oliver returned from work, holding up the damaged trousers.

“You don’t have others?”

“They were my best pair.”

“I see,” Oliver said, examining the hole and nodding serenely. “Well, we had better see about getting you new ones. How does Saturday sound?”

On Saturday I made sure he brushed his hair and wiped the thumbprints off his glasses. I turned his wardrobe inside out in search of a suitable shirt for him to wear.

It was still summer but at Marks & Spencer the mannequins were wearing sweaters and scarves and heavy wool coats. A sign announced in large friendly letters, in print that was supposed to look like it was written by a careful human hand and not by a machine: Winter’s most fashionable women!!

I spotted Pippa through the pane of glass. She was wearing a short red dress and standing in the corner like a theatre director issuing cues to her immobile actors. In profile, I could see her short hair was pushed up at the back in the latest fashion. She seemed not to notice the passersby, even the ladies who paused to examine their reflections in the window. I watched as she
adjusted a scarf on a mannequin, ducking to avoid a cluster of silver balls that were hanging from the ceiling, swinging and sparkling in the sun.

Oliver and I entered the store and made our way to the display.

“I’d like to buy the yellow coat on that mannequin,” I said.

Pippa turned around and removed the tape measure from her mouth. She rubbed her eyes as if she couldn’t believe what she was seeing, but really she didn’t seem at all surprised.

“Hello, Oliver, Mish. Once again, perfect timing. Take this,” she said, passing one end of the tape measure to Oliver. “I have a wooden sleigh that’s being delivered this afternoon and I need to decide where to put it. Now stay still while I measure.”

Oliver held the end while she stepped away, stopping after a few yards. She closed her eyes, silently counting, then walked back.

“You shaved,” she said to Oliver, rolling up the tape measure and dropping it into the pocket of her dress. “And bought a new shirt.”

I hid under a clothing rack while they chatted. After a few minutes, I noticed an awkward lull and whispered loudly, “Come and have dinner with us tonight.”

“I don’t know,” Pippa said. “I’ve never been to dinner with a shop rack before. What do you say, Oliver?”

I poked my head out and gave Oliver a look.

“If you don’t mind a simple meal,” he said.

“Fine,” she said. “I’ll be done work by six.”

Back at the flat, Oliver attempted to prepare something involving chicken, onions, stewed tomatoes and crisped bacon. He cleaned the countertops and set the table. He neatened, then
unneatened, the furniture. Then he bathed and shaved while I banged on the door, yelling, “Remember tonight, whatever you do, don’t panic!”

Oliver was stiffly cheerful at first and his hands shook when he poured the wine, but I was proud of him that evening. Pippa wore a perfect black velvet dress with a lacy cape over her shoulders. She was flawless. Oliver kept his eyes on her the entire time. He was a perfect gentleman. When it came time for Pippa to leave, he escorted her to the door, lightly resting his hand against the small of her back.

I’m fairly certain that Pippa came back that night after I went to sleep. I heard a knock and the creak of a door being opened. In the morning, I saw candle stubs and puddles of hard wax dotting the table. I remember feeling surprised but not shocked by this evidence. (There had been other candles on other mornings.) All the same, I sensed that Pippa was different from the other women who had slept in Oliver’s bed over the years. Mostly women he met through work, they never stuck around for very long. They would leave quietly. On occasion, on my way to the bathroom in the middle of the night, I would come across a woman silently searching for her shoes, or folding pound notes into her purse, or jotting down a message for Oliver. But Pippa was different.

Oliver made her an extra key, stocked the kitchen with her favourite tea blends and biscuits. He even bought her a toothbrush.

It is commonplace to say that memory is an art of reconstruction. But in my experience it isn’t always so. When I think back to those early days with Pippa, it all comes back to me effortlessly. It’s like that film trick when a scene is played backwards and the pane of glass that has been shattered earlier
suddenly coalesces, all the shards flying back together, drawn by magnetic force.