A Sight for Sore Eyes (18 page)

Chapter 20

A fumbling among the things on her dressing-table woke Harriet rather than any untoward sound from elsewhere in the house. In the half-dark she made out the figure of Franklin. He was holding the pole with a hook on one end that opened the fanlight. 'What's the matter?' 'Quiet,' he said. 'There's someone downstairs.' The first time he said that to her in the middle of the night she had shrieked in fear. That was twenty years before. There hadn't been anyone downstairs on that occasion nor on the next or the next and, no doubt, there wasn't now. Franklin heard sounds that no one else did, he had the sort of tinnitus that was less a ringing in the ears than a buzzing and bumping. He also failed to hear sounds that others heard. Silly old man. She repeated the words scornfully to herself. Silly old man, silly old fool. He had put on his camel-hair dressing-gown and tied the cord round his middle. He opened the bedroom door stealthily, pole in hand. Once, on a similar occasion, she had put on a light, which had made him grimace and punch the air and stamp in dumb show until he got darkness again. She heard the stairs creak as he went down them. No other sound until he gave his usual challenge, uttered in commanding officer tones. 'Don't move. Stay where you are. I am armed.' After that, when he got no response - and he never had got a response - he put on the lights. She switched on the bedroom lamps. 'I suppose you realise', she said when he came back again, 'that any burglar worth his salt could overpower you in two seconds. You're an old man.' 'I've no doubt you'd prefer me to cower under the bed while the intruder raped you,' said Franklin with a knowing grin. She lay awake for a while. On the bedside cabinet beside her was the envelope containing Teddy Brex's drawings and his covering letter. She would phone him in the morning and ask him to come back and talk about the project. Of course there wasn't really a project, Franklin would have a fit if he thought some youth from Neasden intended building a cabinet in one of his Georgian alcoves and the whole thing wasn't feasible. None of that mattered because Harriet wasn't serious about it, the only one who was being Teddy Brex. Harriet would give him one more chance to understand her true intention and, if he didn't, give him and his drawings their marching orders. But, perhaps because it was the middle of the night and things always look different at night, more hopeless and depressing, she told herself that she had made a mistake about Teddy Brex. It wouldn't be the first time. Her overtures had a failure rate of about one in four, for although she had entertained over the years young construction workers in such numbers that, banded together, they could by their combined efforts (as she sometimes thought with a giggle) have built and fitted up a hundred-acre housing estate, there had always been some who turned her down. There had always been one or two, or three or four, who rejected her because they were shy or newly married or gay or even faithful to a wife or girlfriend. It was possible, too, that some simply didn't find her attractive. Into one of these categories it was likely that Teddy Brex came. If it was so it couldn't be helped. She slept after a while and woke to find Franklin standing by the bed with a piece of broken glass in his hand. The disturbance in the night had apparently been caused by someone in the mews throwing a stone over the wall and breaking one of the rear windows. Since the window was barred there had been no danger, only nuisance. 'Why show me?' said Harriet. 'I'm not going to mend it.' 'Perhaps I'm going to cut your throat.' Franklin laughed merrily to show he wasn't serious. 'You will have to find a glazier.~ 'A what?' 'A man who fits glass into window frames.' That was an idea. Failing Teddy Brex, a glazier. She contemplated herself in the mirror and felt quite pleased with what she saw. Phone Teddy, go to the hairdresser, maybe buy something new to wear in St John's Wood High Street. There wouldn't be time to go down to the West End or Knightsbridge. If Teddy agreed to come at, say, two, she could phone for a glazier at one-thirty. That way their visits wouldn't clash. Franklin brought her tea and the newspapers. She had a sudden urge to ask him if he had been faithful to her, but what was the use of such a question? You either got a lie in response or the same enquiry cast back at you. She looked at herself in the mirror. Maybe there would be a glazier advertising in the Ham and High, she thought, watching herself opening the paper. Franklin got in her way, returning to his pockets handkerchief, keys, small change and folded cheque-book. She dodged round his head and back to see how white her skin was and how red her hair. 'Why are you always looking at yourself?' he said as if he had never asked before. 'I don't look at myself any more than anyone else.' Franklin laughed. 'I'm off on my hols next week, may I remind you. So I'll want my stuff back from the dry-cleaners. You ought to have fetched it yesterday, I don't know why you didn't.' 'Are you going alone, Frankie?' 'Why do you ask? I never ask you.' She pouted at her reflection. 'One of these days,' she said, 'you might come back and find me gone.' 'True.' He didn't really think it was true. 'And you might come back and find me gone.' 'What would you do if I just walked out?' Franklin grinned. As is the case with many thin men when they grow old, his smile made a death's head of his bony face. 'Don't forget to phone a glazier,' he said. Instead, when he had gone, Harriet phoned Teddy Brex. Two o'clock would suit him. What had she thought of the drawings? Harriet had scarcely looked at the drawings, but she said she would rather not give her opinion over the phone. That was what they would talk about when he came. The hairdresser put a fresh application of Tropical Mahogany on to her hair, chatting the while about her grey roots which in places had become white roots. Harriet was relieved to see them all covered up in purple paste. In the shop next door she bought a pair of white palazzo pants and a white, pink and jade-green top, which she kept on, carrying the clothes she had been wearing home in the shop's bag. Today there were no glaziers advertising in the Ham and High, but she found a great number in the Yellow Pages, finally choosing one whose first name was Kevin. Kevins were usually a good bet, being mostly under thirty. This Kevin wasn't at home, so Harriet left a message on his answering machine which suited her very well. It would have been awkward if he had said he would come along immediately. Her earlier feelings were aroused when she saw Teddy Brex once more in the flesh. A little thrill of excitement, the kind she used to feel when she was young, ran through her. He looked her up and down, but his expression was impossible to read. She liked to think he was attracted and admiring. But again he refused a drink. The main thing was to look at the drawings together, he said, and decide on what she wanted. Harriet had left them upstairs on purpose. There had been some idea underlying this of getting him to follow her into the bedroom, but he let her go alone, his manner, she thought, growing colder and more distant by the minute. When she came down again he was standing by the broken window, looking out at the paved area, the back of the garage and the gate into the mews. 'How did that happen?' He indicated the broken pane. 'Someone must have thrown a stone in the night.' He nodded. 'You want to get that boarded up.' He didn't say why or offer to do it. She stood close beside him, pretending to examine the window. He bent down to pick up something from the floor. It was a pebble that long ago and on some distant beach the sea had worn smooth. Their heads brushed as she bent down and he straightened up. If anything could have told Harriet she was wasting her time his movement of recoil did. He sprang away, the stone clutched in his fist as if he meant to hurl it at her. Flushing, for she was not totally thick-skinned, she sat down at the dining-table and spread out the drawings listlessly. Even someone less observant than Harriet, or less inclined to take an interest in people other than as sex objects, would have noticed Teddy's eyes light up at the sight of his own work and something that was almost adoration alter the whole expression of his face. But the adoration was plainly not for her and, besides, she was already humiliated and sore. She said suddenly, 'I don't really think so. These aren't what I want.' The look he turned on her was not a nice one. Contempt was in it and a savage dislike. 'What?' 'I said this stuff isn't what I want.' 'It's what you asked for.' 'I can't help that. It still isn't what I had in mind. It's all wrong.' She was half enjoying herself now. 'These designs just aren't very good,' she said. 'I do know about these things. You've only to look around this house to see that. Your designs - well, they aren't up to the standard of the house.' It was his turn to flush, but he didn't. He turned very pale and his long fingers, perfect but for one that was mutilated and deformed, closed into fists. He got up. Somehow she knew he wasn't going to speak another word to her and she was surprised when he did. His tone was brittle and icy. 'Can I go out the back way? I've left my car in the mews.' 'Go any way you like,' she said. 'It's all the same to me.' She watched his departure as if she suspected him of stealing something on his way out. Not that there was anything to steal out of that little paved yard but a stone pot with a juniper in it and the white wrought-iron garden furniture, most of it too heavy to lift. He opened the gate, gave her a sullen look over his shoulder and went out into the mews, closing the gate behind him. Harriet waited until she heard his car engine start up. Then she went down to the gate and bolted it. The back of the house was even more thickly covered with that creeper than the front, its leaves reddening now. How many leaves would there be on this one plant? Millions - well, hundreds of thousands. Eleven Manvantaras and one Krita make one Kalpa, she repeated to herself. Thinking in this way wasn't like her. What did it matter how many leaves there were? She went into the house and to the nearest mirror to study her image. Franklin had once told her, in their early days, catching her staring at herself, how no one ever sees themselves in a mirror as they really are. They always pout a little or raise the corners of their mouths or lift their chins, pull in their bellies, straighten their shoulders, open wide their eyes or soften their expressions to wistful idiocy. That was why it was absurd to look at oneself in the glass except to check quickly for nearness and make sure one's flies or skirt zip were not unfastened. But she had gone on looking in spite of these remarks of his and as she looked now, she did all the things he had cited and more besides, half closing her eyes so that the lines about her mouth were blurred and putting up one hand to hide the parallel ridges that ran horizontally across her neck. In those conditions it was a pleasing picture that she saw, a woman absurdly young for fiftyodd, and while she was admiring herself the phone rang. It was Kevin the glazier. Could he come tomorrow midmorning? Gladly, Harriet said he could. He sounded about nineteen.

Chapter 21

They went to a pub. It was the nearest one to where Francine lived, a red-brick thirties roadhouse on a crossroads that looked huge from the outside but was quite small within, packed with fruit machines, smoky and noisy. He drank water and she drank orange juice. He talked to her about the pub, how ugly it was, what an offence that such places could have been built, could still endure. They should be pulled down, all such places should be demolished, everything that was as hideous as this and things half-way as hideous should be flattened, bulldozed, razed to the ground. Only beautiful things should be allowed to exist so that everywhere one looked one's eye was pleased and one's senses satisfied. She listened and nodded because he talked well and seemed to know about these things. And somehow she understood, if he didn't, that this was his way of courting her and that his praise of beautiful things was a displacement of his admiration for her. 'I wish I lived somewhere beautiful,' she said, 'but I don't. Do you?' He didn't want her to see it - ever. He shook his head. A surge of anger rose in him as he thought how he had nowhere to take her that was fit for her, nowhere he wouldn't be deeply ashamed of. 'I did once,' she said and she thought of the cottage whose prettiness was spoilt for her by what had happened there. 'Do you live at home?' Where else could one live? Where one lived was home, wasn't it? 'With your parents, I mean?' 'My parents are dead.' 'I'm sorry,' she said. 'I know what that's like. My mother's dead.' She would never tell him how her mother had died, she would never tell him about hiding in the cupboard and hearing the man come and the shot. Her friendship with him, if friendship it turned out to be, she would keep clear of that. She began talking instead of the year she was taking out before going to university, of the job she had had and of possible future jobs. He listened, he didn't ask. She had no means of knowing that it was her voice he listened to, the tone and timbre of it, her beautiful Champlaine School accent like an actress in a play on television, not her words or her meaning. 'I told her I was going out with a girlfriend,' she said. 'I said I was with my friend Holly. You remember my friend Holly?' 'Do I?' 'At the exhibition.' 'Yes,' he said, 'yes,' and added, 'She's a dog.' Francine was shocked. 'She's not, she's very good-looking. Everyone says so. She's very attractive to men.' 'Seeing you with her', he said, and his voice was serious and intense, 'was like a - a princess and a toad!' She laughed at that and after a moment he laughed too, a grim laugh as if he didn't express his feelings this way very often. They soon walked back, but on the way went into a little park and sat on a seat. It was a mild evening, not yet autumnal. Because he was silent and seemed to be waiting for her to speak she remembered why she had made that phone call to him in the first place. Because she needed someone to confide in and someone who was not one of those impatient school friends, someone new, someone who - and the word came strangely into her head - would treasure her. So, sitting beside him on this park bench in the dusk, she talked to him about the way Julia imprisoned her and acted the vigilante, watched her every movement and tried to worm her way into her heart and soul. And how she was afraid Julia and her father would finally close in upon her, find some way of confining her to indoors and prevent her going up to Oxford. He didn't interrupt. He listened and sometimes he nodded. She expected solutions of the kind Holly and Miranda offered and she dreaded them, but he produced no answers. He was like what psychotherapists should be, listeners, receivers, absorbing everything the better to understand. Real ones, not the Julias of this world. When they walked on he took her hand and held it. No one, she felt, had ever performed for her such a much-needed gesture at precisely the right time. If he had kissed her before they parted she would have been afraid and perhaps shocked. He didn't, but only said as if there could be no doubt about it, as if it were arranged and scheduled by some higher authority or by fate, 'I'll see you tomorrow then.' 'Where?' she asked him. 'Here. Right where we are now. Under these trees. At seven. Julia was waiting just inside the door. It swung open seconds before she reached it. There is always something ominous and almost sinister about a door opening before one has rung a bell or inserted a key in the lock. It suggests reproaches to come. And reproaches there were. Julia said in a high voice, 'How did you get home? I didn't hear a taxi.' 'I walked.' 'Do you mean you walked from the tube station, Francine? You mustn't do that. Not after dark. You know that. I thought you were learning to be more responsible. If you haven't enough money on you for a taxi you only have to ask the driver to wait while you fetch me and I will pay him.' Francine went up to her room. Mrs Trent chose a sickly pale-green and a muddy ochre-yellow for her rooms. Teddy didn't like applying it to the walls, but he had to. It was his first lesson in understanding that if you work for other people for money you must do as they ask. Who pays the piper calls the tune. He thought as he worked. Harriet Oxenholme had almost vanished from his mind except, occasionally, as a source of wonderment. That she could be the Harriet of Aipheton's painting still astounded him. A cause of greater concern was that he had left his drawings behind in her house. If he had been able to afford it he would have made photo-copies of those designs, but he couldn't and he hadn't. He wanted them back and he wanted to go to the house again. Presumably, she lived there alone. No mention had been made of any other occupant. A kind of day-dream began to unfold in which he took Francine to Orcadia Cottage and the place was empty but for them. Harriet had gone away and left it to them. Francine was in the bedroom in that bed and he came up to her... Teddy could hardly bear to pursue this fantasy, for all his strong young man's need and desire, so long unacknowledged, overcame him. His body became too much for him, the physical was all, and his mind nothing but a red heat and light. He cooled himself, breathing deeply. This possession of Orcadia Cottage was something he mustn't think about, it was useless to dwell on the impossible. He must think about using the place, he must ask himself if the solution which occurred to him was a practicable one. Home again, instead of relaxing he cleaned the house. In his eyes it still looked horrible. But where could he bring her if not here? If he had a car it would be easier, but with that thought he put away the vacuum cleaner and stationed himself at the french windows. The high, finned rump of the Edsel gleamed a deeper gold in the sunset light. Even if it were not burdened with its cargo of Keith he couldn't imagine her in it, her exquisite refinement in its vulgarity. The only future for the Edsel was to sell it and perhaps buy something less offensive with the money. First the contents of the boot must go. His eyes fixed on the car, he thought how afraid he would be to open that boot. He admitted it to himself, he would be afraid. Six months had passed, seven, since that night. What had happened in that time? Decay, certainly, but what was decay? He remembered his grandmother approving cremation when his mother died, saying something about that way you wouldn't be eaten by worms. Were there worms in that plastic bag, or some kind of liquefaction or what? He felt the hairs rise on the back of his neck. He couldn't open that boot; yet he would have to open it. An idea came to him of years passing, of the Edsel standing there for years on end, the boot never opened, of himself everlastingly watching over it until a decade or two had gone, and then one day lifting the lid to find a bagful of dry grey bones. It was another version of his dream. He knew it could never be, he could never tie himself to this place for a lifetime. And what of her? What of bringing her here with that a few feet away from his bed? He went out to meet her under the trees and took her to another pub. She wanted to know all about him, his childhood, his parents, his friends, the people he knew. Telling the truth about Jimmy and Eileen was impossible, but invention was beyond him. Instead, he told her about Keith and his cars, and the great car-makers who were his idols. She wanted to know where his uncle was now and he said, retired to Liphook, he had bought a bungalow in Liphook. 'And left his car behind? Won't he come back and fetch it?' That nearly made Teddy shudder. Grey, bony Keith, in a stage of decay, lumbering in through the gates to drive away his car... 'I know Liphook quite well,' she said. 'My mother came from there. I've got relations there.' A shadow seemed to pass across her face and he was glad of it, not interested in knowing the cause, only pleased that she wasn't pursuing the Liphook connection. He gazed in silence at her, the folded lips like a red flower, the big dark eyes, the black hair which, parted in the centre, fell in two smooth curtains on either side of her face. He might have taken her hand, but he was afraid to do it in case the touch of her was too much for him and he pulled her to him, seized her, there in front of these indifferent drinkers. 'About the mirror,' he said. 'The exhibition's over. Will you come with me to fetch it?' 'I won't be able to tomorrow or the next day, I'm sure I won't.' 'I'm talking about Saturday.' 'All right.' She thought for a moment, then said, like a much younger girl than she was, 'And then can I come and see your house and the crazy car?' There was no help for it. He had to be alone with her and where else was there? He had to be alone with her and somehow make her want him as much as he wanted her. How to do that he seemed to have no idea. But standing with her under the trees, where they had parted last night and met this evening, he understood something that made things simple. When you are young and the other person is young and you are both good to look at, words are of no account, nor does cleverness or experience matter. Nothing more is necessary than to look. All you need do is look, then long, then touch. And what follows is an electric charge that brings you together into a desire each to be engulfed by the other, perhaps, even, to be the other. Their kiss was a natural part of this. Kissing her, he didn't want to stop, he wanted to go on to a complete possession and without words he knew she felt the same. A tide seemed to break over them, a wave that threatened to drown them. It was he who broke apart, pushed her away and heJd her at arms' length, gasping while she gasped. He stared into her eyes and she into his. They were both breathing like people who have run a race. He put his hands to her face, cupped it and murmured his goodbyes. Then he ran. He ran down the street towards the tube station as if fleeing something, as if instead of embracing a girl who wanted his kiss as much as he wanted to give it he had committed some violent assault and was escaping the consequences. They had made no arrangements for Saturday. While he was wondering what to do she phoned him. Her father would be home at the weekend and had told her on the phone he wanted to take her and her stepmother on a visit to some friends in the country, but she had said she couldn't, she had this engagement with Isabel. Her stepmother had tried to persuade her to cancel, but she wouldn't, she had told her father she was too old to tag along on outings with him and Julia. It was a world of which Teddy knew nothing. These people were beyond his comprehension. He asked Francine to meet him at the Tate Gallery and then he went off to Mrs Trent's to paint her living-room pale-green. His own house - he thought of it as his own, though without pride - was as clean as could be, everything neat, washed and scrubbed, the windows sparkling. But could he bring her there? He must. She should come for one visit while the Edsel and its boot contents stood outside those windows, but only one. After that, as soon as possible, he would do what had to be done. Then, and only then, the place would be truly clean and he free.