Love (12 page)

When she was two or three years old, her mother took her shopping. Little Annabel slipped out of the grocer’s while her mother discussed the price of butter and played in the gutter for a while until she decided to wander into the middle of the road. A car braked, skidded and crashed into a shop front. Annabel watched the slivers of glass flash in the sunshine until a crowd of distraught giants broke upon her head, her mother, the grocer in his white coat, a blonde woman with dark glasses, a man with four arms and legs and two heads, one golden, the other black, and many other passers-by, all as agitated as could be imagined. ‘You might have been killed!’ said her mother. ‘But I wasn’t killed, I was playing,’ said Annabel, no bigger than a blade of grass, who had caused this huge commotion all by herself just because she could play games with death.

However, this was not the memory of a real event but of a particularly lifelike dream she had under sedation in the hospital although she now believed it to be perfectly true. In the hospital, she could create confusion by a gesture as simple as gulping down her wedding ring; she learned how uncommon she was and so she acquired an aristocratic sense of privilege and, with it, an aristocratic sense of disdain, for all around her she received hints and intimations that her fantasies might mould the real world. She leafed through the
National Geographic
magazine in the lounge and saw pictures of long-horned steers so she decided to brand Lee like the cattle of the Old West as a first test of her occult powers.

When she abandoned drawing completely, she paradoxically appeared to rouse from her physical lethargy. First, with a kind of abstracted wilfulness, she took to wandering around the streets all day; then, one afternoon, she found what she was seeking, a sign advertising the post of an assistant in the window of a draper’s. She went in and was hired on the spot. At first, Lee thought this action was a hopeful sign. Instead, it was the beginning of a period during which she mimicked Buzz’s pattern of casual labour in her own fashion.

She drifted haphazardly from one undemanding, unskilled job to another, working sometimes as a waitress, sometimes packing biscuits in a factory before moving on to a fish-and-chip shop or a department store. She seemed to want to try her hand at anything. She earned a little money for herself but she had given up buying things so there was nothing to spend it on. She kept the notes in an Oxo tin bound with an elastic band on the bedroom mantelpiece and, with the small change, she bought chocolate bars, cream cakes, sugar buns and other sweet, unnecessary things she consumed immediately, as if it were pocket money and she were twelve years old. It never occurred to Lee to touch any of her money. It could have turned to dead leaves the moment she put it inside her tin.

He lost his first optimism as he saw she grew no closer to the common world by mingling with it; rather, she enhanced her own awareness of her difference from it and grew proud. He learned to treat her desultory employments with a weary indulgence even if he were always apprehensive about her for he no longer had any notion of how, in a new set of circumstances, she might behave. But Annabel felt a nascent sense of clarification. She had never felt exhilarated before but now she felt herself stirring. It seemed to her that the concealed shapes which had so long menaced her were casting off their ambiguous surfaces and revealing,
not the perfect shapes of fear she had so long suspected beneath them, but soft, indeterminate, interior cores. The world unshelled itself or she unshelled the world and she found, beneath the crust of spiked armour, a kernel of Plasticine limply begging to be rendered into forms. As she grew more confident this was so, she drew a final picture of Lee as a unicorn whose horn had been amputated. Her imagery was by no means inscrutable. Then her sketchbooks were put away for good.

She longed to share the discoveries she had made with Buzz but she was not impatient to find him again. Her new theory of magic presentiments assured her he would appear again when the time was ripe. She guessed the institution of a new order of things in which she was an active force rather than an object at the mercy of every wind that blew; no longer bewitched, she became herself a witch.

Lee knew nothing of this access of a confidence as strange to him as her former terrors.

As if she was determined, now, to inhabit only incongruous places, her disinterested career in the world took her to work in a local ballroom, one of a chain which operates throughout the provinces. For her duties, she wore a sheath of pink, yellow and white printed cotton slit up to the thigh on the left side and she had to pin a bunch of pink and yellow artificial flowers in her hair. The manager selected a dress he thought might fit her from a folded heap of similar dresses in a musty cupboard and the fabric smelled of disuse and old, stale sweat reawakened by the warmth of her body; it was in no way her own dress and when she looked at herself in the mirror of the changing room she saw, indeed, a stranger. When she was thirteen, she managed to spend a whole year without looking in a mirror for fear of seeing there a different face from her own but, this time, if she felt a passing terror, it was rather at the memory of this old dread than a suspicion it might reassert itself and she shook with excitement for this stranger in vulgar and whimsical clothes who began to smile a little at her, shyly, quite misrepresented herself. This stranger had an appearance not altogether unlike that of ordinary charm.

Annabel pushed her long hair back from her face and practised the smile Lee used to give her in bed, before he gave up smiling. The effect was enchanting and seemed to express utter guilelessness and a marvellous warmth of heart. So she counterfeited the only spontaneous smile he had and took it away from him, leaving him with no benign expressions left for himself. Equipped with this delicious smile, she entered the ballroom and found a cold, bewitching dazzle of lights. Here, since everything around her was artificial, she and her first, carefully contrived, if tentative, reconstruction of herself as a public object passed for a genuine personality.

Everything in this ballroom was absolutely similar to the interiors of all the other ballrooms in the chain, so it was a synthetic reduplication without an original model and there was nothing in it at all peculiar to itself. The bar where Annabel worked was decorated to represent a grove of palm trees spreading green fronds over small, rustic, wooden tables and low stools. The walls were lavishly garnished with fishing nets and, caught in the hanging folds, were brilliantly coloured, luminous, tropic fish, flowers and fruit. Candles placed inside large purple brandy glasses served not to illuminate but to enhance the primary illusion of luxurious darkness. In the swathes of mauve tulle which concealed the ceiling above the dancing floor hung a rotating, many-faceted witchball upon which a spotlight was permanently directed so roving tracks of light scurried about the floor all the time like shining, fleshless mice and concealed lighting effects all round the room caught the dancers in sudden, cold, blue blizzards or washed them with crimson.

Smiling her borrowed smile, a false Eve in an artificial garden, Annabel served drinks and washed out glasses, to all appearances distinguished from the other girls in pink and yellow dresses only by her height and her distinctive slimness. But she still rarely spoke and customers and staff alike treated her with a certain circumspection for she had no notion of how to behave naturally except in the way which was natural to her. She worked in this place for five nights
out of the week, from seven o’clock to eleven o’clock on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday and from seven o’clock to one the next morning on Friday and Saturday. Under these circumstances, she was only infrequently at home when Lee was there. All the time she was away from him, he was afraid for her although he was not sure why and, on the nights she worked very late, he went to the ballroom to bring her home. Then they would take the short cut, through the park. Sometimes, when there was a moon, she would grasp convulsively at his hand but usually she walked quietly beside him while he watched their shadows preceding them along the ragged path like shadows of a nonexistent harmony. One Saturday night, Lee became involved in a fight in the ballroom.

As on the other Saturday nights, she carried her smile through the customers like a person carrying a basin full to the brim with water who has to move very carefully so that not a drop is spilled. Lee arrived at the club before she expected him and she was disconcerted; she hid for a while behind a plastic tree to see what he was like when he was by himself for lately she sometimes wondered if he existed at all when she was not beside him to project her idea of him upon him. His by now a little battered beauty was always at odds with the environment in which he happened to find himself for he still looked more than ever like a handsome outlaw even if he was a schoolteacher by profession, so she was not surprised to see him grow in self-possession in the ballroom, out of self-defence.

Later, watching him closely as she washed glasses behind the bar, she was so sure he was her creature she felt only a little angry contempt and pity when he approached the blonde girl for she could see the fluorescent outlines of his heart and her own name glowing beneath his clothes and knew he could not act independently. By a piece of mental sleight of hand, she rendered the ensuing fight inevitable; she was enchanted by her powers and, laying out the separate events and scrutinizing them as if they were fortune-telling cards, she divined the time was ready for Buzz’s return. Soon she might be able to tell the wind when it was time to blow.

Since there was no clock in the house and he had forgotten to wind his watch, Lee relied on intuition as regards the time and so he arrived at the club only a little after midnight for the unmarked hours passed slowly in his silent room. The doorman knew him well by now and allowed him inside to seat himself at a vulgar table and have his wife serve him in surroundings so reminiscent of his working-class origins she looked like an anachronism, anyway. She wore a smile he did not know was a plagiarism since he had never seen himself wearing it; he knew only that it was sweet, unusual and disquieting for it did not seem to belong to her and might hang in the air after she had gone, like that of the Cheshire cat.

Immensely amplified music from an extremely powerful record player and innumerable confusions of coloured lights contended with one another in the air so noisily that, when a man at a nearby table struck a match and held it aloft for a moment before lighting his cigarette, the small, pure, steady flame amidst the clutter of neon was as startling as a chord of silence. The little fire briefly lit up three faces, two of men and one of a girl with a great deal of flaxen hair which sprayed out like flying snow. She was the girl Joanne and at present she was the object of an unpleasant scene of petty sexual bullying. As soon as the match was out, her companion on her right thrust his hand down the opening of her blouse and ostentatiously fondled her right breast. The girl writhed a little in her chair from embarrassment, not from pleasure, and her companion on her left gave a little, mewing giggle and began to fumble with the fastening of her blouse at the back. Both, though still boys, were rather older than she and had a certain elegance of dress and manner; she was clearly a casual pick-up and they could treat her as casually as they pleased.

She was out of her depth and her first signs of fright gratified them. They laughed at one another across the top of her head and the frantic lights momentarily struck a glittering spoor of tears on her round, white cheeks. When Lee leaned heavily on him and said: ‘Leave her alone,’ the boy laughed up at him with the serene self-confidence of the middle class
mixed with a man-to-man invitation to tolerance and his hand continued to agitate the girl’s breast until Lee hit him on the mouth, which transformed the laugh into a gape of dismay.

Disengaging himself from Joanne, the other stuttered: ‘Here . . . I say . . .’ as if in self-parody. Joanne leaped to her feet and knocked over the table so that everything upon it, glasses, ashtray, brandy glass and candle, rolled and smashed everywhere; in the confusion, she vanished and both boys set on Lee at once while the lighted candle set fire to a swathe of tulle.

Saturday night is the right time for a fight and Lee, a retired veteran of fights in similar times and places, found himself entering into the old spirit. It was like diving back into the past; it was simple, elementary and unpremeditated experience. It had nothing to do with the person he had become.

The first pause in the action occurred when he was thrust back into a drift of flame and lurched forward into the arms of a man in a dinner jacket with a fire extinguisher who pushed him to one side with a curse and attacked the conflagration with squirts of foam. Many of the dancers continued to move to the music as if nothing were happening for both fight and fire were localized in a small part of the ballroom but those nearby the focus of the table had all become involved in it. Lee saw the boy who had caressed Joanne crawling blindly through a labyrinth of legs and overturned chairs, bleeding from the mouth, and some other person was kicking the other boy, who lay on the floor. A few women screamed and smoke billowed out of the smouldering hangings. Another man in a dinner jacket threw a bucket of sand, cigarette ends and dried vomit over the head of the first boy. Perhaps the man had mistaken the contents of the bucket for water. The lights, meanwhile, continued through their various changes so that the chaos was washed by all manner of romantic colours. Lee decided the time had come to leave and slipped out unnoticed. He felt ridiculously light of heart for the insignificant rough-house in the ballroom had reminded him of how simple he had once found it to act
without thought and pay attention only to his immediate impulses and gratifications.