Dead Romantic (7 page)

He mouthed hopelessly.

‘Aren't you going to introduce me to your friend?'

‘We, er, were just going.'

Madeleine looked at him quizzically, demanding a response.

‘Yes. Right. This is Sharon. Sharon Wilkinson. Sharon – Miss Severn, my, er . . . my teacher.'

‘Pleased to meet you,' said Sharon, with a common little nod.

‘Where are you two off to?' Madeleine didn't mean it to sound patronising, but it made Paul feel about eleven. He looked at Sharon and, by comparison with the older woman, she seemed gawky, unformed, vulgar.

‘Flicks,' Sharon replied. ‘Shirley MacLaine movie. Supposed to be dead romantic.'

‘Oh. Well, have a good evening.' With a little smile, Madeleine moved across to the bar.

‘Thank you,' said Paul.

‘Nice to meet you,' Sharon called out politely.

Crimson with shame, Paul scuttled out of the pub. Bewildered and disowned, Sharon followed.

‘I think it was all right,' said Madeleine as she handed Bernard his drink.

‘What do you mean?'

‘That was one of my Garrettway students. I don't think he saw you, though.'

‘Well, why shouldn't he . . . ?'

‘Your wife,' Madeleine murmured conspiratorially. ‘We don't want anything to get back to her. If it gets round Garrettway, Mrs Franklin's such a frightful gossip. . .'

Bernard Hopkins felt obscurely pleased. Madeleine's desire for secrecy meant that she saw the meeting as more than just two colleagues having a drink, implied perhaps that she felt a little for him of what he was feeling for her. There was complicity, contact. He felt happy.

As he walked from the pub to his Turk in the Metropole Hotel, Bernard's thoughts were more complex. The happiness was still there, but it was overshadowed by fears. He shouldn't have talked to Madeleine so much about his wife. He should have kept that part of his life out of it.

There had been other women, other failures which he did not like to dwell on. But for none of them had he felt like this. Surely with Madeleine it would work. The feeling he had for her was so strong, he felt a sense of rightness. Madeleine would make him feel like a normal man again.

But he must go very gently, very slowly, very carefully. Make plans. This one was too good to mess up.

Paul and Sharon's evening, which had begun so promisingly, turned into disaster. He didn't speak to her on the way to the cinema, he didn't touch her during the film, and he didn't speak to her on the bus back.

Finally, when he deposited her on her doorstep, she fixed her blank blue eyes on his. ‘Paul, what's the matter? What have I done?'

‘Nothing,' he said. ‘You haven't done anything.' He let out a rasp of laughter and walked away.

Sharon was more puzzled than hurt. Her self-esteem was very durable. She had a bath, got into her crisp little nightdress and into her crisp little bed and read about how Randall and Virginia finally re-met, sorted out the confusions of Crete, and faced the rest of their lives together.

Paul walked home in fury. How could he ever think of another woman while Madeleine was alive? He felt destroyed, guilty about the lust he had felt for Sharon, desolate for being away from Madeleine, anguished at his hopeless youth and inexperience.

And furious at the man who had been with her. He had not looked into the booth, but he had heard the assignation being made that morning. His rival was the new tutor at Garrettway.

Two things he wanted to do with desperate urgency.

The first was to rid himself of the terrible handicap of his virginity.

The second was to kill the man who was after Madeleine Severn.

As he passed a tree, he swung his arm at it and smashed his right hand in a karate chop against the rough bark.

The shock went through his entire body. He held up the crippled hand in the street light. The skin was broken and, even as he looked at it, he could see the fleshy pad of his palm begin to swell.

And the pain he felt gave him pleasure.

He knew now what had to be done and, having made the decision, he felt calmer. It was ridiculous that he had left it so long. All his contemporaries, he knew from what they had said, had disposed of this insignificant rite years before. And yet for him it had always seemed so difficult, such a big deal. Well, maybe if love were involved, it would be a big deal. That was the main argument for making it a simple, clinical, financial transaction, paying for his passport into the real adult world.

So it had to be a prostitute. On some nameless tart he would finally unload the insupportable encumbrance of his virginity. Just as a dry run, just to prove that he could do it, that technically everything worked. It would be easier with no emotion involved. And then, after the anonymous initiation, he would be ready for the real thing, ready for Madeleine.

To his mind, a prostitute meant London. He had seen the scribbled names on bell pushes when he walked round Soho, the felt-penned phone numbers scrawled on coinboxes at Victoria Station. No doubt similar services were available in Brighton, but he didn't know where to start looking for them. Besides, it had to be secret. There were people in Brighton who might recognise him. And a trip to London, bracketed by the train journeys, would put the episode outside his normal life, an important, a necessary act, but one of which he could forget the details, one that he could quickly push to the back of his mind.

It was a course he had contemplated before, but never with this determination.

The house was empty as he made his preparations. Obviously he needed some disguise. Not only would it prevent recognition, it would also give him a role, distance him from the act, as if what was being done was being done by someone else.

In the loft there were two suitcases full of his father's clothes. After his father died, his mother had emptied the wardrobe into these cases, intending at some later date to sort them through to sell or give to charity. But the second part of the plan had never been achieved. As she slowly recovered from the shock of bereavement, she had felt less and less willing to stir up painful thoughts, and so the clothes had stayed hidden away, unsorted.

Her son had looked through them before, when contemplating other acts of secrecy, so he was able to go straight to what he wanted. He had even tried some of the garments on and found, to his surprise, that now his frame had filled out a little, they fitted remarkably well. Or maybe it was just that his father was larger in his memory than he had been in reality.

In his mind he had preselected the brown herring-bone sports jacket and dark grey flannel trousers which he had worn before. Their cut was a bit dated, but not so much as to be conspicuous. Plenty of people still walked around in clothes like that, people to whom no one in the street would give a second glance, and that was exactly the kind of anonymity he sought. He took the garments out of the suitcase and looked at them. They remained ideal for his purpose. Around them still clung a hint of the nicotine smell of his dead father, something that he found both unnerving and strangely comforting.

But the weather was colder than on the previous occasions when he had dressed up in the costume. He would need an overcoat. That he had not investigated. He couldn't wear his own; the effect of secrecy would be ruined. He opened the second suitcase.

There was a duffel-coat in there, familiar, camel-coloured with rough string loops and wooden toggles. It was perfect, again inconspicuous, anonymous. And the hood could be useful, providing additional cover.

But there were other objects in the case that were more moving. Into it his mother had thrown not just clothes, but also his father's private possessions, the details, the props by which the son had identified the man. There was the shaving-kit, badger-hair brush and the slim-necked silver safety razor, at the top of which, with a twist of the handle, two doors opened to receive the new blade. There was the ivory-backed hairbrush, the round brown plastic tobacco- pouch, shaped like a discus. And there was the worn blue-plastic-covered spectacle case, which unpopped and clicked open to reveal his father's glasses, still pinioned at the corner by a bit of fuse-wire in place of a missing screw, the temporary repair that had become permanent.

He put the glasses to one side and dug deeper into the case. His hand felt a small square envelope whose contents were squashy. He drew it out to reveal the old-fashioned pinkish package of a Durex condom.

It moved him strangely. First, he found it sexually arousing. But at the same time it bewildered him, with its implications about his parents' relationship, raising again the incongruous idea of their having had a sex-life, of their making love, of the mystery of his own existence.

And it made him the more determined to carry through his plan for the day.

He had to be at Garrettway for a tutorial at ten o'clock that morning, so when he left the house, he wore his ordinary clothes and carried his father's in a shapeless bag he had kept since school. His plan was to change identity in the gents' lavatories beneath Brighton Station.

There was no problem. The large tiled space was empty when he arrived. He put in a coin and entered one of the cubicles. But he felt sweaty and tense, and his fingers fumbled as he struggled with shirt buttons.

He heard footsteps on the tiled floor, and froze. But there was only the swish of a man peeing and the footsteps receded.

Forcing calmness on himself, he stripped off and started to put on his father's clothes. As he did so, as he became engulfed in their familiar smell, his confidence grew. He was doing the right thing. He felt very together, his concentration suddenly good. He remembered to transfer the money from his own jacket to his father's. He had drawn a hundred pounds out of his Post Office Savings Account. Surely that would be enough, even for a London prostitute. And if the act freed him of the millstone which had been around his neck for years, then it would be cheap at the price.

Changed, and with his own clothes stowed in the bag, he sat for a moment on the lavatory seat to compose himself. A sudden panic hit him as he thought of his mother. What would she have said if she had known what he was planning?

Breathing deeply, he mastered the fear. It had to be done.

He took his father's spectacle-case out of the overcoat pocket, removed the glasses and put them on. The graffiti-scrawled walls around him blurred, and that restored his confidence. It made him feel that people looking at him would receive the same indefinite impression, as though he had assumed a cloak of invisibility.

Carefully flushing the lavatory to maintain an alibi for anybody who might be listening (there was no one), he opened the door and walked out.

He used his normal voice when he bought his ticket, but the man behind the glass did not look at him. Nor did the girl in the bookshop from whom he bought a copy of the
Daily Mirror.
Nor did anyone else, as he walked through the barrier and caught the next train to Victoria.

He walked around Soho for a long time, summoning up courage. He went into sex-shops, secure in his bespectacled invisibility, and in dank booths put 50ps in slots to see brief, blurred scenes of intercourse flicker against the white screens on the doors. He went into peep-shows, where further 50ps opened letter-box traps to reveal bored girls fingering their genitals to crackly music. It all had the desired effect, arousing him till he ached for relief. He grew more and more desperate. He had to do it. It would be all right. God, he needed it.

In his perambulations, he had earmarked the one he was going to. Down a cross-alley off Wardour Street, beside the steel-meshed window of a Topless Bar, was a doorway whose bell-pushes offered ‘Mandy – First Floor' and ‘Cleo – Second Floor – Walk Up.' He decided that ‘Mandy' was going to be the one.

Just before three o'clock closing-time, he went into a pub and downed two large Scotches. He had eaten no lunch and they made him feel disembodied. But they also had the desired effect of making him care less, of convincing him that what he was about to do did not matter.

One more visit to a peep-show restored the desperation of lust. Looking neither to left nor right, he strode along to ‘Mandy's doorway. Without slowing down, he walked in.

Inside, it was surprisingly quiet. His footsteps sounded heavily on the uncarpeted stairs, but he did not falter. He only stopped when he was on the landing.

Here, incongruously, he was reminded of the Garrettway School of Languages. The natural proportions of the landing, like those of Garrettway's hall, had been destroyed by partition walls. The boarded fire-doors were the same. Only the number of bars and padlock-rings showed this to be a venue of a different sort.

A printed card, reading ‘Mandy', was drawing-pinned to one of the doors. Too far committed now to stop, he banged against the dark-grey fireproofing.

Simultaneous with his knocking, he heard the click of a latch turning. The door, still secured by a chain, opened about six inches, and through the space a wrinkled face under dyed red hair peered.

‘Yes?'

‘Mandy?' he asked, shocked by the thought that this might be what was on offer.

‘The young lady's busy at the moment,' said the maid. ‘Could you come back in ten minutes?'

The door re-closed, and the latch snapped home.

For a moment he stood on the landing, breathless. Then the clash of reality against his fantasy hit him.

He ran down the stairs, hailed the first empty cab he saw, and told the driver to take him to Victoria.

In the train back to Brighton, he sat mesmerised, careless whether anyone penetrated his disguise. He felt soiled, disgusting, as his mind pitilessly kept superimposing the wizened face with its dyed red locks over the pure image of Madeleine.

‘“The wandering outlaw of his own dark mind”,' Madeleine quoted, using her fine reading voice for Paul's benefit. ‘That's how Childe Harold is described, and it was inevitable, given the kind of reputation the poet had, that Childe Harold should have been identified with Byron.'