‘What are you thinking?’
‘Next week I’m going to Los Angeles to be in a film.’
‘Is that true?’
‘What about you?’
She lives nearby with her parents. Her father is a psychology lecturer in the local college, an alcoholic with a violent temper who has not been to work for a year. One day he took against London, as if it had personally offended him, and insisted the family move from Kentish Town to the country, cutting them off from everything they knew.
‘We always speculate about the people who stay here, me and the kitchen girl.’ She says, suddenly, ‘Is something wrong?’
She turns and looks behind. As Martha has been talking, I have seen Florence come out into the garden, watch us for a bit, and throw up her hands like someone told to mime ‘despair’. A flash of purple and she is gone.
‘What is it?’
‘Tell me what you’ve been imagining about me,’ I say.
‘But we don’t know what you’re doing here. Are you going to tell me?’
‘Can’t you guess?’ I say impatiently. ‘Why do you keep asking me these things?’
She takes offence, but I have some idea of how to get others to talk about themselves. I discover that recently she has had an abortion, her second; that she rides a motorbike; that the young people carry knives, take drugs and copulate as often as they can; and that she wants to get away.
‘Is the bar shut?’ I ask.
‘Yes. I can get you beer if you want.’
‘Would you like to drink a glass of beer with me?’ I ask.
‘More than one glass, I hope.’
I kiss her on the cheek and tell her to come to my room. ‘But what will your parents say if you are late home?’
‘They don’t care. Often I find an empty room and sleep in it. Don’t want to go home.’ She says, ‘Are you sure it’s only beer you want?’
‘Whatever you want,’ I say. ‘You can get a key.’
On the way upstairs I look into the front parlour. In the middle of the floor Florence and Archie are dancing; or rather, he is holding on to her as they heave about. The Scrabble board and all the letters have been knocked on the floor. His head is flopped over her shoulder; in five years he will be bald. Florence notices me and raises a hand, trying not to disturb him.
He calls out, ‘Hey!’
‘Drunk again,’ I say to her.
‘I know what you have been doing. Up to!’ he says with leering emphasis.
‘When?’
‘This afternoon. Siesta. You know.’
I look at Florence.
‘The walls are thin,’ he says. ‘But not quite thin enough. I went upstairs. I had to fetch something from the bathroom. But what an entertainment. Jiggy-jig, jiggy-jig!’
‘I’m glad to be an entertainment, you old fucker,’ I say. ‘I wish you could be the same for me.’
‘What was Rob doing this afternoon?’ Florence says. ‘Don’t leave me out of the game.’
‘Ha, ha, ha! You’re a dopey little thing who never notices anything!’
‘Don’t talk to her like that,’ I say. ‘Talk to me like that, if you want, and see what you get!’
‘Rob,’ says Florence, soothingly.
Archie slaps Florence on the behind. ‘Dance, you old corpse!’
I stare at his back. He is too drunk to care that he’s being provoked into a fight.
I feel like an intruder and am reminded of the sense I had as a child, when visiting friends’ houses, that the furniture, banter and manner of doing things were different from the way we did them at home. The world of Archie and Florence is not mine.
I am waiting for Martha on the bed when I hear Florence and Archie in the corridor opening the door to their room. The door closes; I listen intently, wondering if Archie has passed out and Florence is lying there awake.
The door opens and Martha rattles a bag of beer bottles. We open the windows, lie down on the bed and drink and smoke.
She leans over me. ‘Do you want one of these?’
I kiss her fist and open it. ‘I know what it is,’ I say. ‘But I’ve never had one.’
‘I hadn’t till I came down here,’ she says. ‘These are good Es.’
‘Fetch some water from the bathroom.’
Meanwhile I remove the chair from its position beside the wall and begin shoving the heavy bed.
‘Let’s have this … over there … against the wall,’ I say when she returns.
Martha starts to help me, an enthusiastic girl, with thick arms.
‘Why do you want this?’ she asks.
‘I think it will be better for our purposes.’
‘Right,’ she says. ‘Right.’
A few minutes after we lie down again, undressed this time, there is a knock on the door. We hold one another like scared children, listen and say nothing. There is another knock. Martha doesn’t want to lose her job tonight. Then there is no more knocking. We do not even hear footsteps.
When we are breathing again, under the sheets I whisper, ‘What do you think of the couple next door? Have you talked about them? Are they suited, do you think?’
‘I like him,’ she says.
‘What? Really?’
‘Makes me laugh. She’s beautiful … but dangerous. Would you like to fuck her?’
I laugh. ‘I haven’t thought about it.’
‘Listen,’ she says, putting her finger to her lips.
Neither of us moves.
‘They’re doing it. Next door.’
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘They are.’
‘They’re quiet,’ she says. ‘I can only hear him.’
‘He’s doing it alone.’
‘No. There … there she is. A little gasp. Can you hear her now? Touch me.’
‘Wait.’
‘There … there.’
‘Martha –’
‘Please …’
I go into the bathroom and wash my face. The drug is starting to work. It seems like speed, which I had taken with my friends in the suburbs. This drug, though, opens another window: it makes me feel more lonely. I return to the room and switch the radio on. It must have been loud. We must have been loud. Martha is ungrudging in her love-making. Later, there is a storm. A supernatural breeze, fresh, strangely still and cool, fans us.
Martha goes downstairs early to make breakfast. At dawn I run along the stony beach until I am exhausted; then I stop, walk a little, and run again, all the while aware of the breaking brightness of the world. I shower, pack and go down for breakfast.
Florence and Archie are at the next table. Archie studies a map; Florence keeps her head down. She does not appear to have combed her hair. When Archie gets up to fetch something and she looks up, her face is like a mask, as if she has vacated her body.
After breakfast, collecting my things, I notice the door to their room has been wedged open by a chair. The maid is working in a room further along the hall. I look in at the unmade bed, go into my room, find Florence’s sweater and gloves in my bag, and take them into their room. I stand there. Her shoes are on the floor, her perfume, necklace, and pens on the bedside table. I pull the sweater over my head. It is tight and the sleeves are too short. I put the gloves on, and wiggle my fingers. I lay them on the bed. I take a pair of scissors from her washbag in the bathroom and cut the middle finger from one of the gloves. I replace the severed digit in its original position.
As I bump along the farm track which leads up to the main road, I get out of the car, look down at the hotel on the edge of the sea and consider going back. I hate separations and finality. I am too good at putting up with things, that is my problem.
London seems to be made only of hard materials and the dust that cannot settle on it; everything is angular, particularly the people. I go to my parents’ house and lie in bed; after a few days I leave for Los Angeles. There I am just another young actor, but at least one with a job. When I return to London we all leave the flat and I get my own place for the first time.
*
I have come to like going out for coffee early, with my son in his pushchair, while my wife sleeps. Often I meet other men whose wives need sleep, and at eight o’clock on Sunday morning we have chocolate milkshakes in McDonalds, the only place open in the dismal High Street. We talk about our children, and complain about our women. After, I go to the park, usually alone, in order to be with the boy away from my wife. She and I have quite different ideas about bringing him up; she will not see how important those differences can be to our son. Peaceful moments at home are rare.
It is in the park that I see Florence for the first time since our ‘holiday’. She seems to flash past me, as she flashed past the window in the train, nine years ago. For a moment I consider letting her fall back into my memory, but I am too curious for that. ‘Florence! Florence!’ I call, again, until she turns.
She tells me she has been thinking of me and expecting us to meet, after seeing one of my films on television.
‘I have followed your career, Rob,’ she says, as we look one another over.
She calls her son and he stands with her; she takes his hand. She and Archie have bought a house on the other side of the park.
‘I even came to the plays. I know it’s not possible, but I wondered if you ever glimpsed me, from the stage.’
‘No. But I did wonder if you took an interest.’
‘How could I not?’
I laugh and ask, ‘How am I?’
‘Better, now you do less. You probably know – you don’t mind me telling you this?’
I shake my head. ‘You know me,’ I say.
‘You were an intense actor. You left yourself nowhere to go. I like you still.’ She hesitates. ‘Stiller, I mean.’
She looks the same but as if a layer of healthy fat has been scraped from her face, revealing the stitching beneath. There is even less of her; she seems a little frail, or fragile. She has always been delicate, but now she moves cautiously.
As we talk I recollect having let her down, but am unable to recall the details. She was active in my mind for the months after our ‘holiday’, but I found the memory to be less tenacious after relating the story to a friend as a tale of a young man’s foolishness and misfortune. When he laughed I forgot – there is nothing as forgiving as a joke.
However, I have often wished for Florence’s advice and support, particularly when the press took a fascinated interest in me, and started to write untrue stories. In the past few years I have played good parts and been praised and well paid. However, my sense of myself has not caught up with the alteration. I have been keeping myself down, and pushing happiness away. ‘Success hasn’t changed you,’ people tell me, as if it were a compliment.
When we say goodbye, Florence tells me when she will next be in the park. ‘Please come,’ she says. At home I write down the time and date, pushing the note under a pile of papers.
She and I are wary with one another, and make only tentative and polite conversation; however, I enjoy sitting beside her on a bench in the sun, outside the teahouse, while her eight-year-old plays football. He is a hurt, suspicious boy with hair down to his shoulders, which he refuses to have cut. He likes to fight with bigger children and she does not know what to do with him. Without him, perhaps, she would have got away.
At the moment I have few friends and welcome her company. The phone rings constantly but I rarely go out and never invite anyone round, having become almost phobic where other people are concerned. What I imagine about others I cannot say, but the human mind is rarely clear in its sight. Perhaps I feel depleted, having just played the lead in a film.
During the day I record radio plays and audio books. I like learning to use my voice as an instrument. Probably I spend too much time alone, thinking I can give myself everything. My doctor, with whom I drink, is fatuously keen on pills and cheerfulness. He says if I cannot be happy with what I have, I never will be. He would deny the useful facts of human conflict, and wants me to take antidepressants, as if I would rather be paralysed than know my terrible selves.
Having wondered for months why I was waking up every morning feeling sad, I have started therapy. I am aware, partly from my relationship with Florence, that that which cannot be said is the most dangerous concealment. I am only beginning to understand psychoanalytic theory, yet am inspired by the idea that we do not live on a fine point of consciousness but exist in all areas of our being simultaneously, particularly the dreaming. Until I started lying down in Dr Wallace’s room, I had never had such extended conversations about the deepest personal matters. To myself I call analysis – two people talking – ‘the apogee of civilisation’. Lying in bed I have begun to go over my affair with Florence. These are more like waking dreams – Coleridge’s ‘flights of lawless speculation’ – than considered reflections, as if I am setting myself a subject for the night. Everything returns at this thoughtful age, particularly childhood.
One afternoon in the autumn, after we have met four or five times, it is wet, and Florence and I sit at a table inside the damp teahouse. The only other customers are an elderly couple. Florence’s son sits on the floor drawing.
‘Can’t we get a beer?’ Florence says.
‘They don’t sell it here.’
‘What a damned country.’
‘Do you want to go somewhere else?’
She says, ‘Can you be bothered?’
‘Nope.’
Earlier I notice the smell of alcohol on her. It is a retreat I recognise; I have started to drink with more purpose myself.
While I am at the counter fetching the tea, I see Florence holding the menu at arm’s length; then she brings it closer to her face and moves it away again, seeking the range at which it will be readable. Earlier I noticed a spectacle case in the top of her bag, but had not realised they were reading glasses.
When I sit down, Florence says, ‘Last night Archie and I went to see your new film. It was discomfiting to sit there looking at you with him.’
‘Did Archie remember me?’
‘At the end I asked him. He remembered the weekend. He said you had more substance to you than most actors. You helped him.’
‘I hope not.’
‘I don’t know what you two talked about that night, but a few months after your conversation Archie left his job and went into publishing. He accepted a salary cut, but he was determined to find work that didn’t depress him. Oddly, he turned out to be very good at it. He’s doing well. Like you.’