The Lake of Darkness (16 page)

By now they had come out into Coppetts Road and Francesca was looking about her for bus stops when a taxi, which had perhaps dropped an inmate or a visitor, came out of the gates of Coppetts Wood Hospital with its light on. The driver didn’t seem to know the whereabouts of Samphire Road, N4, even when Francesca said it wasn’t far from Crouch Hill Station, but he agreed to let her direct him. Lindsay started screaming that she’d, been promised a bus, she wanted a bus, and she made so much noise that Francesca could tell, by the back of his neck, that the driver was wincing. She stuffed Lindsay with more chocolates to shut her up and then they played the growl and snap game most of the way home. The fare was two pounds which Francesca could ill afford.

The pavements here were even stickier and more slippery than in Finchley. It was a depressed, semi-derelict region to
which the taxi had brought them, a place where whole ranks of streets had been demolished to make way for new council building. Acres of muddy ground stood bare between half-dismantled ruins, and some of the streets had become mere narrow lanes running between temporary fences ten feet high. Even in the driest weather the roadways were muddy, smeared with clay from the tyres of tractors and lorries. There was an air of impermanence, of dull, unhopeful expectancy, as of the squalid old giving place to a not much more inviting new.

But Samphire Road was sufficiently on the borders of this resurgent neighbourhood for it and the streets which joined it and ran parallel to it, to be left alone. Samphire Road, with its rampart-like houses of cardboard-coloured brick, its grave-sized front gardens, its ostentatious treelessness, was to be allowed to live out its century undisturbed and survive until at least 1995. Sulphur-coloured lamplight turned the fog into just such a pea-souper as Samphire Road had known in its youth.

Francesca unlocked the front door of number 22, painted some years before the shade of raw calves’ liver, and let herself and Lindsay through an inner door into the hall of the ground floor flat. Inside it was as cold as only an old house can be that has no central heating and has been empty for ten hours, and when the month is January. It was damp as well as cold, with a damp to make you cringe. Francesca put lights on and humped Lindsay into the kitchen where she lit the gas oven and switched on an electric wall heater. Breakfast dishes were still stacked in the sink. She unwrapped Lindsay’s layers of clothes and then her own layers, spreading her fur coat over the back of a chair to dry. The two of them squatted down in front of the open oven and held out their hands to the pale bluish-mauve flames.

After a while Lindsay said her feet were cold, so Francesca went to look for her furry slippers. In the hall it was as
cold as out in the street. There were only two other rooms in the flat, the front room where there were two armchairs and a dining table and a piano and a sofa that converted into a double bed, and the bedroom at the back where Lindsay slept. Francesca drew the curtains across the huge, draughty, stained-glass french windows and lit the gas fire. The gas fire had to be on for at least an hour before she could put Lindsay to bed in that ice box. The slippers were nowhere to be seen, so Francesca went into the other room (known as the sitting room but where no one could have borne to sit between November and April) and found the slippers under the piano. The bed wasn’t made. It hadn’t been made for several days and it hadn’t been used as a sofa more than half a dozen times since Lindsay was born. Lindsay said, “Where’s my daddy?” “Gone to some meeting about historic Hornsey.” “I’m not going to bed till my daddy comes.” “Okay, you don’t have to.” Francesca made her scrambled eggs and buttered fingers of brown bread. She sat at the table drinking tea while Lindsay plastered chocolate spread on bread and biscuits and even on to a piece of Swiss roll. Lindsay adored chocolate spread, they had had to take sandwiches of it for their lunch. Francesca wiped it off Lindsay’s chin and the tablecloth and the wall where a blob of it had landed. She was thinking about Martin. It was like heaven being in the flat in Cromwell Court and in that warm car and eating in the Villa Bianca. She loved comfort and luxury and longed wistfully after them, perhaps, she thought, because she had never known them, had been too busy living to look for them before. That weekend with Martin had shaken her, the warmth and ease, so that, in spite of the boredom, she had actually thought of becoming the girl he thought she was. Not just sweet and obedient and passive and clinging and Victorian, but the girl who was going to get a divorce and marry Martin and live with him forever …

“There’s my daddy,” said Lindsay.

The front door banged and there was a sound of feet being wiped on the doormat. Francesca didn’t get up, and though Lindsay did, bouncing off her chair, she wasn’t going to venture into that freezing passage, not even to greet her long-awaited father. He opened the kitchen door and came in, throwing back a lock of wet black hair out of his eyes.

“Hi,” said Francesca.

“Hi.” He picked up the little girl, held her in the air, then hugged her to him. “And how’s my sweetheart? How did you get on in Mummy’s shop? I bet they made you manageress.” He sang to the tune of the Red Flag, “The working class can kiss my arse, I’ve got the boss’s job at last!”

“Oh, Tim,” said Francesca, “we’ve had an awful evening out in the sticks. Wait till you hear!”

“So I just don’t see the point of carrying on with it,” said Francesca. She and Tim confronted each other across the kitchen table and across the greasy pieces of paper and copy of the
Post
which had wrapped the fish and chips brought in by Tim for their supper. The kitchen was now very warm and smoky, the windows running with condensation. Lindsay had been put to bed ten minutes before. “Can I have another cigarette, please? I can’t smoke when I’m with him-it doesn’t go with the image and it nearly kills me, I can tell you.”

Tim gave her a cigarette. He frowned a little, pushing out his red lips, but he spoke quite lightly in his usual faintly ironic drawl. “Yes, but, honey, why suddenly throw your hand in now? Why
now
when everything is going so extremely well? I mean, even in our wildest fantasies we didn’t foresee he’d, fall for you quite so heavily. Or has he?” Tim’s eyes narrowed. “Maybe mah honey chile wasn’t being strictly truthful when she said Livingstone wanted to marry her.”

“Well, I’m not always absolutely truthful, Tim, you know that. Who is? But I don’t tell pointless lies. Oh, dear, I nearly came a cropper over Annabel, though, didn’t I?” Francesca giggled and her eyes met Tim’s blue eyes and she giggled even more. “Oh, dear. Now we must be serious. What I mean is, I don’t see the point of carrying on with it because it’s not getting us anywhere. All it’ll do is lose me my job. If he takes to coming into the shop after me, I’ll
have to leave to get away from him. What did we think we’d, get out of it, Tim? I can’t even remember.”

“Of course you can remember. Money, Prospects, Opportunities.” Tim lit a Gauloise. “And, incidentally, my little revenge.”

“Isn’t it a funny thing? He says he loves me and all that, but he doesn’t exactly confide in me. He’s never said a word about winning the pools, and I don’t believe he has.”

“You don’t believe in your Uncle Tim’s total recall? I tell you, if I died and they opened me up they’d, find the perm on that pools’ coupon written on my heart. Of course, there’s just the weeniest chance Miss Urban didn’t send it in. But if Miss Urban did send it in, then sure as fate is fate, she’s won herself the first dividend, all or part of, the lucky, lucky girl.”

Tim always referred to Martin as Livingstone or, when his camp mood was on him, as Miss Urban. Francesca, for reasons she didn’t understand but thought might be sick reasons, found the camp mood almost unbearably sexy. Tim, when he was that way, made her go weak at the knees and she didn’t want that happening now, she wanted to be serious.

“Well,” she said, “when you sent those awful yellow chrysanths you said to get in his good graces and get him to take me out a bit because he’d, got wads of money and hadn’t got a girl friend. You said he might let me have the money to start my own florist’s, or at least give me some big presents. But nothing like that’s happened. He just fell right in love with me. He’s not even that interested in sex-well, not
very
I mean, you’d, have raped me if I’d, gone on with you the way I have with him. But he’s in love. It’s not just wanting to screw me, it’s real love. And the only place it’s going to get me is living with him in his flat or some house he wants to buy. And what’s the use of that? What’s the use of going on with it, Tim, if I only get to where I have to run away and hide to avoid living with him?”

“One would think, wouldn’t one,” said Tim thoughtfully, “that Livingstone would have given you something more by now than those very strange decanters or whatever they are. Five grand is nothing, but nothing, to spend on a ring, say, or a bracelet in these inflationary times. What about furs? An’ mah honey chile shiverin’ in her ole coonskin.”

“He did say something about a mink,” said Francesca, giggling, “when we’re married.” She groped about under the fish and chip papers. “He did give me some chocolates tonight only Lindsay’s gobbled most of them. Here you are.”

“She’s a chip off the old block all right, she’s only left the nougats and the coconuts.”

“The latest is he wants to sell his flat and buy a house for him and me and Lindsay, so I suppose he must have money.”

“Now she tells me. Francesca, what d’you think Krishna Bhavnani told me today? That it was Livingstone put up the money for his kid’s operation.”

“Are you going to put something about it in the
Post?”

“If you’re quitting, yes. If you’re keeping on, no. Just as untruths have been known to appear in the
Post
, so have truths sometimes been suppressed.”

Francesca laughed. She came behind Tim and put her arms round his shoulders and stroked the Nureyev face. “Tim, I could keep it up a little bit longer. I could see him on Wednesday, if you really think it’s worth while. Now I know about the Indian boy, I could have a go at getting a fur coat. Or a ring. We could sell a ring.”

Tim rubbed his face against her hands, making purring noises. “Did you switch our blanket on?”

He had bought them an electric blanket for Christmas. “When I took Lindsay to bed,” she said.

“Then why don’t you take me to bed and tell me all about the times you’ve misbehaved yourself with Dr. Livingstone?”

“Miss Urban,” said Francesca somewhat breathlessly.

“Mah honey chile should tak’ shame talking like dat befo her Uncle Tim, Lawd God!”

Francesca and Tim had been living together for three years. Tim had moved into the flat in Samphire Road instead of just spending nights there, when Francesca found she was pregnant with Lindsay. They had never really considered getting married and couldn’t have done anyway since Francesca was still married to Russell Brown. After Tim had met Martin Urban in he wood he had several times invited him to Samphire Road but Martin always refused, Tim hadn’t known why. He had been wounded by it, Francesca thought, though Tim never showed that he could feel pain. Then had come the Saturday in November when Tim checked his pools and found, as usual, that he had won nothing while the formula he had given Martin must have scooped the first dividend.

It had disturbed Francesca to see Tim waiting for Martin to phone. Her placid happy-go-lucky nature was ruffled by Tim’s intense neurotic anxiety. The days had passed and there had been nothing. As taut as a bowstring, Tim had gone to that interview at Urban, Wedmore, Mackenzie and Company, but still Martin hadn’t spoken. The worst thing for Tim had been Martin’s refusing to come to the party. Getting a party organised at Samphire Road was no mean feat. They had cancelled it at the last minute because there was nothing to celebrate and no point in opening the champagne.

“I fear,” Tim had said, camping it up, pretending, “she’s keeping it all the darkest because she doesn’t want to have to give any to poor me. Though what I’ve done I never will know, save be friendly and helpful. Maybe I wasn’t quite friendly enough, which some girls, you know, can resent.”

Francesca couldn’t hazard an opinion on that, but she knew Tim had hoped for something from Martin, even a
loan to help them buy a place that would be a cut above Samphire Road. He walked up and down shouting that he would be revenged. He would get hold of some of that money by hook or by crook. After that it was a short step for Francesca to go round with the flowers and-hang on hard.

She was a good-tempered easy-going girl and nothing put her out for long. Tim had once told her that one of the things he liked about her was that she had no morals and no guilt. This made playing the part of Martin’s Francesca, the moral and guilty Francesca, rather difficult at first, but Tim had instructed her and even set her a course of reading, Victorian and early twentieth-century fiction mainly, with suitable heroines. She had worked hard at moulding herself according to these models and sometimes after meetings with Martin she felt quite tired. She spent a lot of the time in his company silent and apparently raptly listening, while in fact she was concentrating on how to escape in a taxi and get out of being driven up to Finchley. Now she was faced with the additional problem of how to make Martin believe she loved him and wanted to live with him while refusing to submit to any plan for their living together he might make.

Accordingly, the next time he phoned she said that she would hate to think of him selling his flat in order to buy a house. She knew how much he loved his flat.

“But I’ll have to sell it one day, darling. When you’re free and we can get married we’ll need a house.”

“I’d, much rather you waited till then, Martin.”

“Yes, but that doesn’t solve the problem of how we’re going to live
till
then, does it?”

That lunchtime Francesca went across the Archway Road and sold the two cut-glass scent bottles for seventeen pounds fifty. All those taxis were making inroads into her resources and if Martin was taking her to dinner at the Mirabelle, as he had promised, on Wednesday, she ought to
have a new dress. She ought to try and rake up enough to buy the burgundy crepe Kate Ross, who owned the flower shop, had for weeks been trying to sell for twenty-five pounds.