The Lake of Darkness (6 page)

“Much the same, Martin, much the same.” Mr. Cochrane, applying silver polish to the tea and coffee spoons, seemed to brood with suspicion on this question. When Martin came back with his overcoat on he said sharply, “I don’t know what accounts for your interest, Martin. She’s not a nubile young lady, you know. She’s not one of your pin-up girls. Just a poor old woman who went out into service when she was fourteen. You wouldn’t trouble to pass the time of day with the likes of her, Martin.”

If it hadn’t been for the fact that he knew Mr. Cochrane, by the time he left at noon, would have made the flat more immaculate than even the house in Copley Avenue, would have ironed with exquisite finesse seven shirts, cleaned three picture windows, and polished a whole canteen of cutlery, Martin would have booted him out on the spot. He only sighed and said he was off now.

“Good-bye, Martin,” said Mr. Cochrane in the tones of a headmaster taking end-of-term farewell of a pupil whose conduct has been idle, slovenly, violent, and rude.

It was rare for Mr. Cochrane to leave him messages but if he did, his notes were in the same disapproving and admonitory style as his conversation. Martin found one waiting for him when he came home just before six.
Dear Martin, A Mr. Sage phoned 2 mins after you left. I said I was only the cleaner and could not account for you going off so early like that. W. Cochrane.
Martin screwed the note up and threw it into the emptied, and apparently actually polished, wastepaper bin. As it struck with a faint clang the side of this, in fact, metal container, the phone began to ring. Martin answered it cautiously.

“How elusive you are,” said Tim’s voice. “You have quite an army of retainers to protect you from the press.”

“Not really,” said Martin rather nervously. “And what can I—er, do for the press now it’s found me?”

Tim didn’t answer that directly. There was a silence in which Martin guessed he must be lighting a cigarette. He braced himself for the question and was very taken aback when Tim said,

“Just to remind you you’re coming over here tomorrow night, love.”

Martin had forgotten all about the party. It had gone so far out of his head that he had accepted Gordon’s invitation to the theatre. Suddenly he realised how much he hated, and had always hated, Tim calling him “love.” It was much
worse than “my dear.” “I’m sorry,” he said, “I’m afraid I can’t. I’ve arranged to do something else.”

“You might have let me know,” said Tim.

Martin said it again. “I’m sorry,” and then, rather defensively, “I didn’t think it was necessary for that sort of party.”

If it were possible to hear someone’s eyebrows go up, Martin felt he would have heard Tim’s then. “But what sort of party, Martin?” the drawly, now censorious, voice said. “This is going to be a dinner party. Surely you understood that when I said to come at seven? Just eight of us for dinner.” There was a long, and to Martin awful, pause. “It was to be rather a special celebration.”

“I’m sure my not being there won’t spoil the evening.”

“On the contrary,” said Tim, now very cold. “We shall be desolate.”

The receiver went down. No one had ever hung up on Martin before. He felt unfairly persecuted. Of course he had always refused in the past to go to Tim’s, but this time, if it had been made plain to him from the first that this wasn’t going to be a noisy drunken get-together in uncomfortable darkened rooms, he wouldn’t have forgotten about it and he would have gone. If Tim had something to celebrate, why hadn’t he told him so when he had invited him last Friday? Martin felt a sudden, almost fierce, dislike of Tim. When he heard from the tax inspector he would write him a formal letter, not phone this time. He had had quite enough of Tim for the time being. Let a few weeks go by, then maybe at Christmas he’d, give him a ring.

But that night he dreamed of Tim for the first time for many weeks. They were in the house in Stroud Green which Martin, in waking reality, had never visited. Tim had spoken of it as unsavoury, and in the dream it was more than that, Dickensian in its grotesque squalor, a series of junk-crowded rat-holes that smelt of rot. He and Tim were arguing about something, he hardly knew what, and each was provoking the other to anger, he by a kind of contrived
pomposity, Tim by being outrageously camp. At last Martin could stand it no longer and he lunged out at Tim, but Tim parried the blow and together, clutching each other, they fell on to a deep, red, dusty, velvet settee that filled half the room. There, though still locked together, elbows hooked round each other’s necks, it was impossible to continue struggling, for the red velvet which had become damp and somehow soggy, exerted an effect of sucking and seemed to draw them into its depths. Or to draw Martin into its depths. Tim was no longer there, the red velvet was Tim’s mouth, and Martin was being drawn down his throat in a long devouring kiss.

It was the kind of dream from which one awakens abruptly and to a kind of rueful embarrassment. Fortunately, it was half-past eight when Martin awoke as he could hardly have remained comfortably in bed after visions of that sort. Once recovered, he saw the day floating invitingly before him, a rather-better-than-usual Saturday. It was warmish, a damp, misty November day with the sun like a little puddle of molten silver up there over the dome and cupolas of St. Joseph’s, jade green and gleaming in that sun’s pale glow.

By lunchtime the mist had melted and the sun brightened and Martin wondered whether to walk to the Flask for his drink with Norman Tremlett. It took him about a quarter of an hour to walk there, two or three minutes to drive—but walking there meant walking back too. He often thought of that in the weeks to come, that if he had decided to walk he wouldn’t have been there when the doorbell rang and he would never have met Francesca. Why hadn’t he? There had been no reason but laziness. A spurt of energy had prompted the walk that led to his meeting Tim; laziness had cancelled the walk that would have prevented the meeting with Francesca. He felt there must be some significance in this, though he was never able to say what it was.

He thought his caller must be Miss Watson. She had
never called on him before, but he had never offered to buy her a home before, and he was convinced it must be she. He opened the door, a kindly and welcoming smile already on his lips.

Outside stood a boy holding a bunch of enormous bright yellow incurved chrysanthemums. The boy had thick smooth black eyebrows and big dark brown eyes and very pink cheeks. He was wearing jeans and a kind of tunic of dark blue cotton or canvas and a close-fitting woolly cap that covered all his hair.

He said, “Mr. Urban?” in a voice that sounded to Martin very like a woman’.s

“Yes, that’s right,” said Martin, “but those can’t be for me.”

“You are Mr. Martin W. Urban and this is 12 Cromwell Court, Cholmeley Lane, Highgate?”

“Yes, of course, but I still can’t …”

“They certainly are for you, Mr. Urban.” The woolly cap was suddenly snatched off to release a mass of long glossy wavy hair. The hair was dark brown and nearly two feet long and its owner was definitely a woman, a girl of perhaps twenty. She had a rather earnest voice and she spoke slowly. “It’s really warm today, isn’t it? I don’t know why I put this on. Look, you can see on the label they’re for you.”

He forced himself to stop staring at her hair. “Please come in, I didn’t mean to keep you standing there.” She came in rather shyly, it seemed to him, hesitated between the open doorways, not knowing which to enter. “In here,” he said. “People don’t send flowers to men unless they’re ill, do they?”

She laughed. In here, where the big window made it very light, he was a little taken aback to see how pretty she was. She was tallish and very slim and delicately made and with a beautiful high colour in her face, a rose-crimson that deepened with her laughter. How awful if he had betrayed to her that at first he had taken her for a boy! It was her
slimness, those strongly marked eyebrows, her earnest look, the boyishness in fact about her, which only made her more attractive as a woman. He was suddenly aware of the strong, aggressive, bitter scent of the chrysanthemums.

“Is there a card with them?” He took the flowers from her and found the card, wired on to the bunch of coarse damp stems. The message on it was printed, the signature an indecipherable scrawl. “‘Thanks for everything,’” he read aloud, “‘I will never forget what you have done.’”

“The name is just a squiggle. I expect whoever it is came into the shop and wrote that themselves.” She looked distressed. “Could it be Ramsey or Bawsey? No? I could try and check if you like.”

He was standing by the window and he could see the van she had come in parked on the drive-in to the flats. It was a dark blue van lettered on its side in pink: Bloomers, 416 Archway Road, N. 6.

“Is that your shop on the corner of the Muswell Hill Road? I pass it every day on my way to and from work.”

“On weekdays we don’t close till six. You could call in on Monday.”

“Or I could phone,” said Martin. It would be difficult to park the car, one of the worst places he could think of. Was it his imagination that the girl looked slightly hurt? You’re twenty-eight, he told himself, and you’re fussing like some old pensioner about where you’re going to park a car two days hence. He could put it in Hillside Gardens, couldn’t he? He could walk a hundred yards. “I’ll come in about half-past five on Monday,” he said.

From the window he watched her drive away. The mist had gone and the puddle of sun and the sky had become leaden. It was twenty-five to one. Martin put on his jacket and went off to the Flask to meet Norman Tremlett. When he got back the first thing he had to do was put those flowers in water. He didn’t know anyone called Ramsey or
Bawsey or anything like that; he didn’t think he knew anyone who would send him flowers.

There were far too many chrysanthemums for one vase there were too many for two. He had to use a water jug as well as the Swedish crystal vase and the Copenhagen china jar with the spray of brown catkins on a blue ground. Fleetingly, he thought of not putting them into water at all but of taking them with him as a gift for Alice Tytherton. And have Alice think he had chosen them? It seemed awful to say so, but they were very ugly flowers. Martin had always believed that flowers were beautiful, all flowers as by definition, and his feeling about these slightly shocked him. But it was no use pretending. They were very ugly, hideous, more like vegetables than flowers really, like a variety of artichoke. You could imagine them cooked and served up with butter sauce.

He began putting them into water and in doing so looked again at the card. Not Ramsey-but, yes, surely, Bhavnani! What more likely than that Mrs. Bhavnani should send him flowers as a token of her gratitude. As an Indian she wouldn’t know it wasn’t the custom in England to send flowers to men, and she might see flowers with different eyes too. The eye of an Oriental might not see these great spherical blooms as monstrous and coarse. But if she were the sender, it was an oddly colloquial message she had sent: “Thanks for everything. I will never forget what you have done.” And why would she come all the way to the Archway Road when there was a flower shop in her own block in Hornsey? It was just as likely that Miss Watson who lived in Highgate, in Hurst Avenue, was the mysterious donor.

His living room was transformed, and somehow made absurd, by an embarrassment of chrysanthemums, chrome yellow, incurved, smelling like bitter aloes. All the time he was arranging them Martin had been searching his memory for what incident in the past that scent brought back to
him. Suddenly he knew. A dozen years ago and chrysanthemums arriving for his mother from some friend or recent guest. Those chrysanthemums had been fragile-looking, pale pink with frondy petals, but the smell of them had been the same as these. And what Martin remembered was going into the drawing room where a pale frail woman called Mrs. Finn was crying bitterly because she had dropped and smashed a cut-glass vase. The pink flowers lay about in little pools of water and Mrs. Finn wept as if it were her heart and not a vase that had broken.

The extraordinary things one remembers, thought Martin, and evoked by so little. He could still see Mrs. Finn as she had been that afternoon, weeping over the broken glass or perhaps over her own cut finger from which the blood fell in large dark red drops.

His window gave on to the back of a house in Somerset Grove. There were strips of untended garden between and tumbledown sheds and even a green-house in which all the glass was broken. But unless he looked down all he could see was the yellow brick back of the other house, its rusty iron fire escape, and its bay windows. In one of these bays a woman stood ironing.

Finn stared at her, exercising his powers on her, trying to bend her to his will. He bore her no malice, he didn’t know her, but he willed her to burn her finger just slightly on the iron. Pressing his body against the glass, he concentrated on her, piercing her with his eyes and his thought. He wanted her to feel it in her head, to stagger, bemused, and graze her trembling hand with the burning triangle.

The iron continued to move in steady, sweeping strokes. Once she glanced up but she didn’t see him. All magicians long to discover the secret of making themselves invisible, and Finn wondered if he had found it. He stared on, forcing his eyes not to blink, breathing very deeply and very slowly. The woman had set the iron up on end now and was folding a rectangle of something white. He could have sworn she brushed the tip of the iron with her hand, but she didn’t wince. And now, suddenly, she was staring back at him with indignation, looking at him full in the face. If he had been invisible, he was no longer. He saw her move the ironing board away from the window to another part of the room, and he turned back to what he had been doing before, screwing the cover back on the hot plate.

His room was on the second floor. It contained a single mattress, a three-legged stool, and a bookcase. There had once been more furniture but gradually, as he mastered himself and his energies increased, he had disposed of it piece by piece. He hung his clothes from hooks on the wall. No curtains hung at the window and there was no carpet on the floor. Finn had painted the ceiling and the walls a pure, radiant white.