Meeting the English (4 page)

*   *   *

Struan had been on the overnight coach, bent up like Meccano. The bus had disgorged him at Victoria and he had drunk his bottle of water and eaten the egg roll Gran had mournfully packed for him right there in the coach station. Then he got out his map and the compass he used for orienteering, and found his way to the Tube station. It was a fine, blue, airy morning, and as he walked, swinging his sports bag, his spirits rose. After all, nothing bad had happened to him on his journey, and no one was now questioning his right to be on this pavement smack in the middle of London. He had a job, and directions to it in his pocket.

Soon, he thought, he'd see London. Something shockingly stylish, something chrome, a name off the Monopoly board. But there was nothing so far but a big road, and at the end of it a station, not as big as Edinburgh Waverley or as fine, but more crowded, filled with more people than he'd ever seen in his life and moving together like a river as he struggled down the stairs to the ticket hall and the Tube.

At the bottom of the stair, Struan held on to the rail, back against the tiled wall, and gazed. He wanted to be dazzled, outclassed. He wanted the London folk to dress in some completely alien way, he wanted the Adidas sports bag and jacket he'd saved up for to be lost in translation, but he couldn't see anything: just hundreds of suits, and women in cotton jackets and printed dresses, and a couple of Goths maybe, but nothing you wouldn't catch any Saturday down Rose Street.

*   *   *

Myfanwy was in the attic, clearing out. To Myfanwy the hoover, to Myfanwy the mop, the duster, the black bag! Well, what else? Myfanwy's practicality had kept brick mortared to brick since the day she made Phillip buy this house, a genteel wreck, in 1967. Myfanwy's ingenuity had curtained it in damask from condemned country houses, furnished it with bargains from the Portobello Road. Despite the divorce, and Linda's execrable taste in cream paint, and Shirin's neglect, it was still lovely and bony as a top-flight Hepplewhite, and Myfanwy was engaged in saving it for her children.

She had picked Jake's room for the Scottish boy – it was larger. Besides, Jake hadn't really stayed here since he was fifteen: just brought back the occasional girl when his father was away. There were never-worn clothes in the wardrobe, ends of spliffs under the floorboards, candlesticks and ashtrays across the windowsill.

Myfanwy fiddled open a black plastic bag. Plop, plop, plop: in went the candles, the mouldy toothbrush, the tuna-can ashtray, the Aertex shirt for a twelve-year-old. The shorts could stay, though, hanging in the closet: the poor Scottish boy might appreciate them. The books on the shelves, too:
Franny and Zooey,
Huis Clos,
The Outsider,
a full set of
Tintin,
Asterix
in Latin. They would be an education for the oddly named Struan. He would not mind having the guitar case in the corner, either, or Phillip's National Service rucksack and cot occupying the eaves cupboard.

Air. Myfanwy opened the Velux above the bed and remembered that the window only had two settings these days: fully open with the pane suspended on its broken hinge, or locked. It was an early Velux, that was the problem. What an exotic item it had seemed to be when Myfanwy had ordered it, back in '78! But then, so did the Jack and Jill bathroom, with its shiny red taps, now rather limescaled. The whole extension was one of Myfanwy's early triumphs of interior design; one that had set her, you could even say, on the path to her current successful career as a property developer.

For who would have thought you could carve two rooms out of that top storey, with its rickety floor, and maids' grates, and crumbling ceiling? When they first moved in, you could see straight through to the slates. A poet had stayed on the bare boards for nearly a year, and the shagging he had done! A wonder the floor had survived. But even then, you see, Myfanwy had thought
practically.
He had got a cheque, suddenly, at the end of the year, from Faber and Faber, and Myfanwy had totted up what he owed them, walked him along to the bank, and sent him on his way with five pounds change.

It would be preferable, decided Myfanwy, to leave the window open: it hadn't rained for weeks. She hopped on the bed, carefully rewound the cunning little hook of garden wire around the hinge, braced the window in her hand, then let go. The sheet of Perspex hung vertically a clear three feet above the bed and only shifted slightly in the wind. The chances of the wire snapping were small; and the blind had never worked in the first place. And you could still look out the window, in the manner of
A Little Princess.
Myfanwy tried it out: stocking her bosom under the slope of the roof, spreading her arms on the hot, historic, chipped slates. She sighed with satisfaction. She loved to make small economies: they gave her a virtuous, cosy feeling inside, like a smile from Grandma Davies, her long-dead mother.

Myfanwy shut her eyes, opened her hands, and welcomed her mother into her mind: breathing deeply the while as Zbigniew had taught her. Ma Davies, with her wide arse and wide eyes, her rage against her wayward daughter softening rapidly into pride. Ma, with her brooms and brushes. Ma, who Phil, come to think of it, had banned from this house for exactly this: cleaning. Or whitewashing, to be more precise. The larder. He had called a taxi and made her get in it, squeaking and still spotted with caustic lime. Myfanwy closed her hands and opened her eyes. Well, she said to the broiling sky, there would be no more of that for Phillip Prys, no more drunken phone calls, sudden confiscations, double-crossings of bank managers, no more shouting, no more
language.
Phillip Prys was stuck inside himself, breathing.
No more than he deserves,
hissed Grandma Davies, in Myfanwy's head.

He won't last, Ma,
Myfanwy smiled back, confidently. And when he finally went, she would get this house back – this house which she still thought of as hers, the one where the authentic slim Myfanwy was still running down the stairs in her knickers, where Cecil and John were demanding coffee after a long night's frotting and fighting on the hearthrug, where the
Daily Mirror
was on the doorstep, hoping for a snap of the star of the latest West End smash – and she would whitewash the larder herself in her mother's memory. They were coming back, such retro touches. Myfanwy wished she had kept the original, enormous, cast-iron range.

*   *   *

In the study, Phillip heard the bangs that meant Myfanwy, Myfanwy doing something with brooms. He betted she was wearing one of her Finnish outfits: Narda Artwear, and a Laura Ashley apron over it. Phillip was glad he could not see her: muscly fat hips in all that sofa fabric. Perhaps it was spring-cleaning: something very like sunlight was cracking the brown curtains of the study. Had it been there yesterday? He had no idea. Time was still liquid at present, but he had hopes that it would solidify. He needed to remember events, put some posts in all this marsh.

He had an idea, for instance, that at some point in the past he'd divorced Myfanwy: he could see the decree nisi at the bottom of a long dark telescope. In which case, what was she doing in the house? The beautiful girl had come to see him this morning, and had fed him, and he was fairly sure that he was married to her now, and not the girl in between her and Myfanwy, who had been called Linda, and had a horse. Had he married Linda? Had he ridden the horse? Myfanwy was his second wife, not his third. His first was in Wales, enormous, still angry about the botched abortion. He couldn't remember her name. It was not possible that she too was called Myfanwy.

The Girl would know. Shirin, Sharoon, Rose of Sharon, her. He wished she would come in, prise his head from the pillow, put her cool fingers on the itch. She understood it all, perfectly. He could tell just from the way she grouped herself exactly in the circle of his vision: her tiny polished limbs, her long layers of black, thick hair, her wonderful sulky mouth. This morning, when she gave him his breakfast, she'd been wearing her tunic and roman sandals too: a martyr, painted by some fabulous Victorian pervert. She had tipped back his head and spooned peach juice into his mouth. His taste buds were working perfectly. He wished he could tell her that.

*   *   *

‘Jake will be mad if you clear out his room,' observed Juliet to Myfanwy, wandering into the attic, sucking her hair. Reluctantly, Myfanwy got down from the window and considered her stout and unbrushed daughter.

‘He'll shout,' said Juliet, mournfully, ‘Jake will.'

‘But,' said Myfanwy, still thinking of Grandma Davies and the brooms, and putting on her best
How Green Was My Valley
chapel lilt, ‘we have the young man arriving today to take care of Daddy, and I think he needs somewhere to sleep, don't you?' And she ostentatiously busied herself with removing a poster stuck on the sloping ceiling. When Myfanwy had been sixteen, she'd been living on the King's Road, high on diet pills and well into her first
affaire
with an older man. She'd been skinny as Brigitte Bardot, had black Capris like Audrey Hepburn, and would never have left the house without her eyelashes on.

‘He doesn't need to go in Jake's
room,
though,' said Juliet. ‘You could put in him down in the collection rooms. It's mad, those rooms being there with no one in them.'

‘Those rooms are full of Daddy's things,' said Myfanwy, reprovingly. In fact, the rooms on the second floor had been hers, for the last years of the marriage. The wallpaper was still her grey sprigged dimity, the curtains early era printed-cotton Laura. Phillip had started filling the rooms with junk the day she moved out, hauling stacks of books and paper up from the cellar, the study, the shed, springing past her on the stairs with crates as she tugged her suitcases down. Myfanwy didn't even know exactly what was in there: Linda had kept her out. And now, they were not only full, but locked, with new, neat, aluminium locks. Shirin's work. Myfanwy would pick a quiet moment, and search her bedroom for keys.

‘Besides,' she added, still tugging at the hardened Blu-tack on the poster, ‘Jake is twenty and he will see that we have to put Daddy first. And he can always spend a night or two in your room.'

‘No,' said Juliet. ‘No he can't. And he really won't see that.'

‘He's not coming home, anyway,' said Myfanwy, ‘not this summer. He's doing his play, isn't he?'

‘
Two fucking Gentlemen meet a Tank.
Edinburgh really needs him. That poster's going to bring the ceiling down,' observed Juliet. ‘I should leave it up there,' she added, ‘the poster. The boy will like it. Everyone likes Aztec Camera. Everyone
young.
'

But Myfanwy kept pulling, and a good bit of the ceiling came down, coating them both in choking fine dust.

‘That's totally your fault,' said Juliet, ‘I'm not going to help.' And off she toddled, hardly able to move her fat arse in her too-tight jeans.

*   *   *

There were hundreds of foreigners on Struan's Underground train, every colour of black, brown, and yellow. Were they all tourists? They didn't have maps, the most of them, or cameras, the way the Japanese did in Princes Street in Edinburgh, taking a million shots of the castle. Lots of them weren't dressed up, either: they looked like working people. On the way to Hampstead he was rammed up against a young woman in an African-print headscarf and dress, like someone out of a geography book, and Struan flushed scarlet with the strangeness of it, because there were no black people in Cuik. There was no one, in fact, who was not pale as a potato, though when he was young Struan had once been treated by a Nigerian student in the Dental Hospital. He had been fascinated by the pink undersides of her fingers. He tried, now, to see if the woman in the African headscarf also had pale palms, but the Tube stopped at Swiss Cottage and she got out.

*   *   *

Juliet's room smelled nearly as bad as Jake's. She opened the Velux, put a record on the old mono record-player, looked inside the wardrobe, and pulled out the summer dress she'd left there last year: pink, and short, with buttons. Top Shop. Celia had persuaded her to buy it. She looked thin in it, Celia said, from the side.

Celia. Juliet had been round to see her, in Highgate, last night, and Celia had said: ‘You can't stay. I'm expecting someone. I'm expecting my lover. I'm in love.'

And of course Juliet said, ‘Don't be daft,' but Celia wouldn't take it back, not for anything. She said he came up the garden, and got in the window, every night. She said Juliet couldn't meet him, not yet, it was too new, and then Juliet said, ‘What about Italy?' But Celia didn't care, and Italy was off, and she made Juliet walk back home alone through the hot stinking streets of London, barefoot, because her flip-flops were broken.

Round and round went the little fat record, making its thin song. Lloyd Cole and the Commotions, singing about a girl who looked like
Eve Marie Saint, in ‘On the Waterfront'.
That was Celia. Celia wearing a white vest and thin little pants and a bracelet, perched on her window seat, her hair was all brushed and shiny. Thin looked better than fat, thought Juliet. It just did, and being jaundiced or dead or infertile or any of the other things they said about Celia really didn't matter a button by comparison. Seal looked like a photo, with her thin flat sides of hair and thin flat thighs and the way her pants fell in on her belly, and that made her look real, that was what. Like a girl should look.

Myfanwy banged the party wall, meaningfully. ‘I'm busy,' shouted Juliet, ‘do your own housework.' And she squidged herself out of her jeans and into the pink dress. It had shrunk. The armholes were too small, and her arms bulged out like balloons, and the waist wouldn't button, and her shins looked like hams and her knees like pillows stuffed badly into their cases. In the mirror over the dressing table she did not look thin from the side.