A Sight for Sore Eyes (16 page)

the fingers. It was a phone number he wrote. 'I can't,' she said. 'I really can't.' 'Please. I want you to.' The bus started. She ran across the road behind it, avoiding a swerving bicycle. He might still be there, but she refused to look back. She pulled her cardigan sleeve right down over the ballpoint writing and half-way across her hand. Julia opened the front door just before she got there, a favourite trick of hers. For a moment Francine thought Julia was going to seize her by the arm and pull her into the house. It was just the impression she got from her stepmother's stance and extended hand. But Julia restrained herself, stepping back and quickly pushing the door shut behind Francine. 'Who were you talking to?' It would be easy to lie and say it was a stranger who had asked her the time or which bus went to Chiswick. 'Someone I met at that Private View I went to.' 'Do you mean he picked you up, Francine? Is that what you're saying?' 'No, Julia, I'm not saying that. I was introduced to him.' 'Do you know he has twice been hanging about out there, spying on this house? He came driving down here in a red sports car. I went over to speak to him and he was extremely rude. Your father will be horrified.' Francine went upstairs to her room. She looked out of the window at the bus shelter but of course he was long gone. Almost any one of her friends would know what to do in this situation, but she didn't. And although she was sure they would be very free with advice she didn't want to ask them. She must ask herself. Did she like him? Did she want to know him better? He was young and good-looking, and she thought he was clever and she liked the way he talked. She shut her eyes and put her head in her hands and thought that if he touched her, put his arm round her, held her hand, put his mouth on her mouth, she wouldn't hate it. When he took hold of her hand to write on her wrist she hadn't minded. She had even felt a kind of strange little thrill as his skin touched hers. But phone him? Use that number and phone him? She turned back her sleeve and contemplated the number. Wash it off, forget it. She was saying this to herself when Julia's voice came up the stairs. 'Francine ~ This always happened when Julia had been harsh or dictatorial. She would hector, then ten minutes later cajole. 'Francine?' 'What is it?' Francine opened her door, put her head over the bannisters. 'I've made tea, dear. I thought we might have an early meal and go to the cinema. Would you like that?' Francine used the phrase she never used to anyone else and which she disliked, but which best expressed her feelings. 'I don't mind.' She went into the bathroom and washed her hands and wrists, but first she wrote down the phone number. She wrote it in three separate places to be on the safe side.

Chapter 18

Teddy's ability to concentrate, usually so good, had been badly shaken this past week. The sight of the girl Francine at close quarters was responsible for that. He had never before felt like this. Why couldn't he get her out of his head? Why did he see her face when he shut his eyes and look for her in every young dark-haired girl he passed? He didn't even know what he wanted from her except to have her with him and look at her all the time. Every time the phone rang he jumped and something knocked at his chest wall. He had got into the habit of snatching up the receiver and speaking into it breathlessly. That was what he had done when the woman phoned. His disappointment was correspondingly stunning, like a heavy blow to the back of his knees. He sat down. The voice was shrill and ringing with an upper-class accent. She said she had read his advertisement and wanted some joinery done. A cupboard and shelves to be built into an alcove. Would he come and see her? She was Harriet Oxenholme and she lived at 7a Orcadia Place, NW8. He ought to have been delighted, but all he felt was, maybe he'd get some money out of it. The name ought to have rung bells, but the only name that meant anything or affected him at all was Francine Hill's. He shut his eyes and pictured himself as he had been, holding her white hand in his, writing his phone number on her white wrist. Her hand had been soft and warm and dry. The skin felt like silk. Why hadn't she phoned him? He remembered how he had half forgotten her number. It hadn't been written down and he had had to hold it in his head. But he had looked up her father in the phone book and found the number. Perhaps she had washed his number off her wrist or that woman who had come and questioned him had taken hold of her by force and washed it off. He never found it hard to imagine violence. Go back to that bus shelter and try again? The idea was humiliating, he wouldn't do that, he would never show himself to that woman again. He could go to that shop she worked at and ask her to go out with him. How did you ask? Just said, will you come out for a drink, presumably, or, we could go for a walk. She might say no. And should he take the Edsel? Should he go down to St John's Wood in the Edsel? Maybe not. It was a reckless act, however you looked at it, taking the Edsel anywhere. All that was needed to put an end to everything was a minor accident, even a flat tyre. Better get the tube, go down on the Jubilee Line. The phone rang as he was leaving. His heart jumped. It was just after one. Somehow he thought that if she phoned it would be from that shop and at her lunch-time. But it wasn't her, it was a woman with water coming through her kitchen ceiling who had been given Keith's number. 'He's retired and gone to live in Liphook,' said Teddy. A girl got into the tube train who looked a lot like Francine, but a cheap, shabby version of her. Like a poor reproduction of a great painting, Teddy thought, or chipboard with a veneer made to resemble oak. This girl had bitten nails and a spot in the middle of her right cheek and bony knees. Really, it was only her hair that was like Francine's and her dark eyes. Francine was perfect. You could take Francine's clothes off and train a powerful arc lamp on her and search her all over and find no flaw, no mark. One day hc would do that. He got out at St John's Wood, walked down Grove End Road and across Alma Gardens. Orcadia Place was hidden away where you would least expect a street of houses to be, off the end of Melina Place. He stood still for a moment, for he hadn't known such places as this existed in London. It was like somewhere in the country, a corner of a country town, or a picture in a book of photographs of a country town. And it was quite quiet. Traffic could be heard only distantly and like the humming of bees. Orcadia Cottage was an invisible house, nothing of it to be seen behind the tall barrier of many varieties of leaves, feathery and pointed, shiny dark-green and tender pale-green, bronzed gold and pastel-yellow. He opened the iron gate and went in. Flowers everywhere, he didn't know the names. He only knew roses and of those there were plenty, pink and red and white, heavily scented. Window-boxes and baskets spilled out pink and purple trumpet flowers and blue daisies and long sprays of silver leaves. They blossomed against a backcloth, a rippling layered canopy, of glossy leaves, green but touched with bronze. Most of the front of the house was covered by this foliage, like a drapery or a dense but faintly trembling screen. Where had he seen it before, that wall of leaves? The picture, of course, the painting that must be a picture of this very house. Orcadia Place. He must have been very preoccupied not to have caught on before. He went closer, peering, touching the layers of leaves and the red-gold tendrils that crept across and clung to the brickwork, stroking with one finger the pale-grey door, examining the glass that was like no other glass he had ever seen, but more like solidified clear green water. She opened the door before he could ring the bell. Another woman who had been watching for him. What got into them? This one looked as she sounded on the phone, showy, shrill, too old to dress like that. Her eves went all over him, like groping hands. 'Come in, Teddy,' she said, as if she had known him for years. 'It's so hot, I expect you'd like a drink.' Harriet Oxenholme, she had said on the phone. The bell that should have rung, but hadn't because of his disturbed concentration, pealed now. The red hair was the same and maybe the nose, but it couldn't be... He wasn't going to stick his neck out, anyway, and look a fool when she didn't know what he was talking about. Besides, by the time he had taken two steps into the hall he was overcome by something much more important to him, his surroundings, this house. It was far and away the most beautiful place he had ever seen. The proportions of this hall, this room into which she took him, the windows, the walls, the carpets, the flowers, the furniture, the paintings, all of it dazzled him. The only place he had ever been in remotely like it was the V and A where the Chances had once taken him, the only place where one could hope, he had thought, to see chairs like these and rugs like this and vases like that. He stared about him, turning this way and that, his eyes going up to the ceiling and down towards the long windows that led into the courtyard at the back. People lived here. This woman lived here. And was real, an ordinary middle-aged, long-nosed woman with dyed red hair. Only perfection should be here, only perfect loveliness was fit for it, to be ensconced in this matching beauty. Only Francine. In her white dress, in that creamy brocade chair, her white hand on its white-and-gold arm. 'What will you drink?' the Harriet woman was saying. 'I've a glorious Chardonnay on ice, deliciously cold, unless of course you'd fancy something stronger?' Teddy shook himself, came back to earth. Why was she offering him drink? For a moment it had gone out of his head why he was there. He felt as if he had been in a dream, the kind where you go to a place to perform some task and there are people there who treat you as if you've come to do something quite different. 'You'd better show me where you want this cupboard,' he said. 'Do let's have a drink first.' He nodded, gave in. 'Water, then.' Her disappointment was obvious. He couldn't understand it. In the unlikely event of his inviting someone in for a drink he would be very pleased if they drank water and saved him expense. Money probably didn't mean much to her, she must have lots of it. He took the glass of water absently, not looking at her, she was the least attractive thing in the place, far and away the least. She had poured herself an enormous glass of wine and was eyeing him in a peculiar way over the top of it. He said abruptly, 'Could I have a look over this house? See the rest of it, I mean?' 'You want to go over the house?' Her tone suggested that this was the most bizarre request he could have made. 'Yes. Is that all right?' She nodded. 'It's a rather unexpected request.' Because she didn't see him as an educated craftsman but a common working-class labourer? He turned cold eyes on her and she said hastily, 'Of course I'll take you over the house, I'll be delighted. This is the dining-room,' she said, 'and that's the alcove I want the cupboard in.' Teddy stared at the picture above the sideboard. It was a still life, or almost a still life, for present as well as the oranges and the piece of cheese on the dark table was a white mouse. You could see from its expression the mouse's longing for the cheese and see, too, its fear and wariness. 'Is that a Simon Alpheton?' He had surprised her. She had set him down as an ignorant working boy, he could tell. Like the mouse, she was confused, but perhaps also like the mouse, if it ever got beyond the confines of the painting or had existence outside it, she moved closer. She laid her hand on his arm, on the bit where his sleeve ended and she could touch skin. 'Do you know Aipheton's work?' 'Some of it.' 'Then you must have recognised me. Marc and Harriet in Orcadia Place.' 'I recognised the house,' he said. 'You were that Harriet?' 'I don't think you know that painting as well as you say.' She withdrew her hand. 'I wish you'd have that drink.' 'I don't drink. What's in there?' He pointed to a door at the end of the passage beside the staircase. 'Stairs down to the cellar. It's never used.' 'I want to see everything.' She opened the door, said impatiently, 'It used to be a coal-hole, they delivered coal from outside. Right? There's nothing to see. He looked down the stairs into half-dark. She didn't switch on the light. He saw a cavern, a stone floor, a bolted door. He turned away. 'I'll measure the alcove,' he said, 'and if you give me some idea of what you want I'll do some drawings. It won't take long, only about a week.' She didn't feel capable of stopping him a second time. He measured and stood back and took another measurement, looked at the doors on the china cabinet, the panelling on the walls, nodded, put his measuring tape away. Her touching him he hadn't liked. He would have liked to take hold of that brown, wrinkled, red-nailed hand and throw it back at its o'~vner. But he wanted this job. He followed her up the stairs to the first floor, pausing on the way to look at pictures and out of a pretty bow window. Only two bedrooms and two bathrooms up here. He had expected more, but the main bedroom was very big and spread out, with a huge, glorious four-poster in it, a bed draped in creamy white silk and hung with veils of white gauze, and with a picture inside its roof of nymphs and gods, and a white bull with a wreath of flowers on its horns. You could sit up in that bed and look at yourself in the curved and curlicued mirror on the white dressing-table. Francine could do that. Everyone else would be overcome and diminished by this house, but not Francine. For her it would be a fit setting and he imagined her naked in the bed, dressed in nothing but her own long black hair and the ring he would put on her finger. He had never seen a naked girl, but he had seen paintings. She would be better than the paintings. Another attempt was made to make him drink once they were downstairs again and the hand returned to his arm. He slid away from it in a serpentine movement, got up and walked purposefully out into the hall, promising the drawings within the week. The postman dropped a card through the letter-box at that moment. Teddy bent down, picked it up and handed it to her, careful to keep his fingers from touching hers as he did so. Once out in the street he was overcome with an unfamiliar feeling: envy. He wanted that house and the things in it. The sensations he had were shared by many of the young, poor and beautiful: how unfair it was that they should be denied benefits which the old and ugly enjoyed. In imagination his own home suffered by the comparison. It would look worse than ever now. On the way back he bought paint, matt and gloss, in ivory and coffee, and set about decorating the place. He couldn't bring Francine here, not the way it was. The irony of it struck him when the phone rang and it was someone else answering his advertisement, not asking him to make fine furniture, but to do just what he was doing at home and paint her house. Paint one room, rather. He was affronted and on the point of saying no, telling her to go to hell, but then he thought of the money, he could ask good money and he had to find employment. All evening and all next day he worked on the walls in his room and the living-room, washing them down prior to starting with the paint roller. It soothed him, cleaning away dirt and stains, making a bare scrubbed surface. Francine didn't phone. He was beginning to give up hope. That night, instead of the sideboard dream, he dreamed he was cleaning up the world, getting rid of the ugliness. He had a machine like a giant vacuum cleaner that mowed down motor bikes and chain-link fencing and plastic sheeting, and sucked them into its insides. It ploughed into petrol stations and the shop fronts of discount stores, breaking them up and swallowing the harsh blues and reds and yellows and chrome. He was going to try it on people, sucking in the old and the ugly and the young and ugly, the deformed mob, but just as he directed his machine on to a skinny old man getting out of a car he woke up. The woman who had called was a Mrs Trent. She was not in the least like Harriet Oxenholme and her house in Brondesbury Park was very different from Orcadia Cottage. Teddy looked around her pokv living-room, stuffed with a fat and shiny pink brocade threepiece suite and varnished mock-walnut veneer, and gave her as estimate the first sum that came into his head. He must have set it too low, for she accepted with alacrity. When could he start? Wednesday, he said. He went down to the Chenil Gallery to enquire if anyone had asked about buying his mirror. No one had. He didn't really want to sell it, but he might if someone offered the asking price of eight hundred pounds. It was quite a distance to St John's Wood from there, but on the other hand it was on his way, so he got out of the rube train and walked over to Orcadia Place. Just to look. That first time he hadn't noticed the medallion of the two cherubs with folded wings or the row of blue and green tiles under the eaves and he couldn't remember the falcon heads on the gateposts. No one else phoned. He looked up New Departures in the phone book and wrote down the number on the paper where he had written her home number. All that weekend, while he painted the walls and cleaned the Edsel and made his drawings, he thought about Francine. Not about what she felt or thought or was doing or might feel about him,