‘June.’ His palm was unpleasantly moist. I could imagine his testicles sticking to his legs.
‘Do you need any light?’
‘I think I’ll be getting through the candles rather quickly.’
‘I’ve got a good alternative. Follow me. It’s alright, I don’t bite until you know me, ha ha.’
I realised I was trusting him because his voice was cultured and confident. That’s the class system in a nutshell. The BBC might have Indian newsreaders now but they make damned sure they sound like Old Etonians. Dr. Elliot held open the door for me. ‘Hurricane lamps,’ he suggested. ‘I went out and purchased a job lot from some peculiar Turkish shop in Kennington Road. They’re only pressed tin but they add a touch of gothic atmosphere.’
‘I wouldn’t have thought this building needed any more.’
‘Extraordinary, isn’t it? A veritable palace of bad dreams. Makes you wonder what the architect was thinking. A Frenchman, apparently. It’s their uncompromising nature that makes them so artistically adroit. And so fucking rude. He must have had a very strange idea of London in his head.’
He led the way into the darkened lounge, stopping to light a pair of the tin lamps on a sideboard. Weak light burnished maroon walls, picking up the glister of expensive gilt frames. He turned and smiled, a stern thin face framed by endearingly slept-on hair, but the eyes were bothersome because I couldn’t tell where he was looking. ‘At least the water’s gas-heated. I hope you were given adequate warning about the electricity. You’ll be undressing in the dark.’
‘I’m not sure I would have come if I’d realised it would be this dark.’ I followed Elliot around the room as he lit the lamps. His apartment was squarer and taller, with windows on two sides, the walls painted in deep crimsons and browns, lined with paperbacks. A gallery led to a sloping ceiling, planked like the inverted deck of a ship. I stopped before the riverside windows to check the view from a different perspective. From here, London seemed veiled in steel grey mesh. Beside the curtains, what I’d thought was a lifesized statue was revealed to be a full-sized cutaway model of the human body, its skull sectioned to expose a quarter of pink plastic brain, one bulbous eye in its socket, a bright crimson rubber heart, blue-grey lungs, maroon liver and coiled intestine the colour of a flamingo.
‘Oh, that’s Maurice. He’s a bit startling, isn’t he? 1930s. He came from a medical training college. I’ve grown rather attached to him.’
‘You’re a doctor?’
‘God, no. I’m not interested in the plumbing side of things. Psychiatric research. Motivational stuff for corporate staff training. Physical and psychological effects of sudden life-change. I organise behavioural experiments on patients, poorly paid volunteers mostly, mess about with their preconditioning, change their diets and stress levels, try to work out what triggers their responses, generally fuck them about until they beg to thank me. What do you do?’
‘Oh, I’m nobody at all,’ I replied without thinking. No-one had ever asked what I did. Elliot confirmed my assumption that only high-powered businessmen would live in a building of such peculiarly masculine design. Women would always be less visible here.
‘Come now. I rarely find that’s true in my line of work. Everyone’s somebody, even if they don’t know it.’
‘All right. I’m a housewife.’
‘Is that all? I don’t think I know anyone who’s just a housewife. It’s such a fifties word, so redolent of aprons and baking. Won’t you be uncomfortable here? It’s very dark. We might as well be cut off in some ghastly remote part of the country.’
There was something arrogant and suggestive in his manner that irritated me. ‘I’ve got a friend coming over later,’ I lied. ‘Anyway, civilisation’s just outside.’
‘Do you really think so? I look out and see chimps in vans shouting at cyclists, no-one you could actually rely on. Collectively, human beings have the morality of germs.’
‘I’ll be fine when my friend gets here.’
‘The outside buzzer’s not working and the main entrance door is open. You’d better tell him to come up the stairs, and sing so as not to frighten you.’
‘I won’t be frightened, don’t worry.’
‘That is... if it’s a man.’ His distracting eyes reflected light like some nocturnal animal. He was studying me too intently, a hazard of his job, perhaps. ‘What made you agree to stay here, I wonder?’
‘The money,’ I answered honestly, sensing he knew when I lied. ‘A friend of the owner offered to pay me if I stayed until Monday morning.’
‘So you’re like one of my paid volunteers. Is this a service you provide regularly?’
‘No. I’m just helping someone out.’
‘If you were that much of a friend you wouldn’t be taking his money, would you? Or perhaps the exchange of cash eases the social transaction for you both.’ He joined me at the window, standing too close. ‘Of course, I knew you weren’t like the rest of them as soon as I saw you.’
‘In what way?’
‘My dear lady, they’re the vanished rich, the overseas professionals. The kind you usually find taking leases in Hampstead and Holland Park. I’ve only met three other people here: a Swiss banker, a Russian electronic surveillance expert and a plastic surgeon of indeterminate and dubious origin. They’re somewhat overcautious about their privacy. Not terribly interested in other people. They like to bring ladies here for a few hours, then let them out to find their way home. You could hammer on their doors screaming blue murder and they wouldn’t open. Not that many apartments are occupied. The owner is asking far too much for them. Rumour has it Jeffrey Archer is buying the last remaining penthouse.’
‘So I heard.’
‘It has a view of the Houses of Parliament. Why would anyone want to be constantly reminded of something they can’t have? Now there’s a case study I’d love to conduct.’
‘How did you end up here?’
‘I see too much of people’s emotions at work. I need a place to relax and think.’
‘You could live in the country.’ As he dropped onto the sofa and folded his legs, I saw that he was wearing see-through socks, pulled up too high. Not a good look.
‘Oh, my practice is in town, and the building fits my needs.’ He stretched out a hairy white wrist and tapped the back of the seat, as though beckoning a cat. I remained standing. ‘Besides, it’s rather interesting as a social experiment. I’m waiting for it all to break down, you see. That’s when the real discoveries are made, when organisation collapses into chaos. Until recent times the streets around us were filled with the grandchildren of earlier residents. They shared a complex social history that informed every stage of their behaviour and allowed even the most inarticulate householder to communicate relatively sophisticated ideas. It’s all gone now, of course. The homes have been tarted up into ersatz hotel suites filled with multicultural moneychurners who share no common social skills whatsoever. It’s a giant leap back into a dark age, psychologically speaking. Yet there are compensations.’
‘It’s more cosmopolitan,’ I suggested, ‘more varied.’
‘Yes, uneducated people always say that. It’s a poor substitute for sophistication. In my opinion –’
‘My friend,’ I interrupted lamely, ‘he might be waiting for me.’
He clapped his hands with unnerving suddenness. ‘Then I mustn’t keep you, must I?’ He jumped up and guided me from the room. I felt relieved to be leaving, but he stopped in the doorway and turned back to me, his face so close that I could taste his breath. ‘Just how well do you know the owner?’
‘Not very well.’
‘By which I take it you mean not at all.’
With so little experience of tangential conversation, I was unsure how to reply.
‘No, I thought not. Well, of course it’s your business, or rather
his
business. God knows there’s enough corruption in the world without worrying about the moral grey areas of our fellow residents. Luckily for me there are no absolutes, or I’d be out of a job. And as you’re just a housewife, I don’t imagine many moral dilemmas present themselves.’
‘I’m sorry, I have no idea what you’re talking about.’
‘Your friend. The owner of the apartment in which you are staying. A bit of a villain, by all accounts.’ Elliot looked pleased at the idea. ‘He’s had a few seedy-looking visitors up here. Of course, I don’t count you in that number. Here, you should take one of these with you.’ He handed me one of the hurricane lamps and rested his hand lightly in the small of my back, the supercilious ushering of a doctor seeing off a disregarded patient. ‘You can bring it back when the electricity returns. Now you’d better go, or I’ll want to keep you here all night.’
I turned in the doorway and studied him. ‘Can I ask you something about Maurice?’
Elliot glanced back at the dummy. ‘Him?’
‘Yes, do you hold conversations with him?’
‘No, of course not. What an extraordinary thing to ask.’
‘I know I would. He and I would become great friends. I used to talk to the television. You know, soap characters.’
‘I fail to see the point of holding such a one-way discourse.’
‘You should try it some time.’
Brush up on your conversation skills,
I thought.
It might stop you from sounding so condescending.
That was it, my first foray into casual conversation with a total stranger. Hardly a great success. Elliot closed the door before I’d managed to find my way back to the apartment, as though he had quickly decided that I was unattractive and not worth flirting with. Unsettled by the encounter, I returned to Malcolm’s flat holding the lantern high so that I could check the stark rooms.
The reflection from the river’s palisade of floodlit buildings had robbed the paintings of their corrosive colour. I looked in the bedroom cupboards and found plain grey suits and white shirts, as neatly arranged as shop displays. Clearly, Julie didn’t risk leaving any of her clothes here. A single pair of women’s shoes, cheap and damaged, lay in the bottom of a cupboard, the only proof of deception. His wife’s home would be more warmly decorated. It was where he lived. This was just for sex, any woman coming here could see that. It was why the wife avoided the place; she wouldn’t want to be confronted with such obvious evidence.
I pulled back the glass doors and stepped out onto the balcony. The scene below drew attention in a way that the view outside our house in Hamingwell never had. In the far corner to the left, I could see into Elliot’s penthouse. Even though the rooms were dark it was possible to discern the psychiatrist standing in his window, as motionless as his medical dummy.
I fancied a drink, but the only tonic I could find was flat, so I tipped fruit juice onto what I hoped was decanted gin, and stood proprietorially behind the bar at the rear of the lounge, sipping slowly. The room was stuffy, and the temperature control panel was not apparent in the gloom. Checking my purse I found a twenty pound note squashed into the corner, together with a few small coins. It would buy me drinks somewhere locally, but not much else. I studied the paintings by lamplight. They didn’t look especially valuable, but I had only ever seen paintings in books. Seating myself beneath the largest canvas, I drank and allowed my mind to drift.
Gordon with Hilary. Lou with Darren. Malcolm with Julie. Everyone else seemed to be involved in a complicated relationship. For me there had only been Gordon. Now he had gone, and I was alone. I had hoped for a sense of elation, but felt tired and unsure of myself. Stretched out on an umber couch in the lounge, I watched the creamy flames poised in glowing wax like a line of torch-bearing monks, and tried to summon a sense of independence, but there was nothing.
The room grew warmer. No street sounds reached my ears. Up here there was only the soughing of the storm-sky. Cocooned in the huge robe, my eyelids grew heavy.
My dreams were uneasy, dislocated. First I was in Hamingwell, tree-surrounded, then looking down on a yellow room stripped bare of furnishings, bright wavering light, someone crouching naked in a corner, plangently suffering. I could sense cruel treatment of a sexual nature, the figure being painfully penetrated for the pleasure of others, and thought of a ruptured Pasiphae wilfully damaged by her beast. Before this hunched child walked a dark creature with blank eyes, rattling something rhythmically in a large steel pot. It held a ladle, clicking against the metal rim, back and forth, back and forth, the sound of a clock, or pipes quickly heating.
When I awoke and looked at my watch it was a quarter past ten, and I could still hear the clicking noise. It wasn’t in my head, it was real.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Choke
T
HE CANDLE CENTRED
a shifting golden sphere, raising walls where there were none. The edges of the light led me to the second bedroom, where a salvaged wooden arch stood above a floor-length mirror. I studied my spectral reflection, rather pleased with it. Robed in white, candle raised, the heroine of a Victorian Gothic novel was distorted in dark machine-rolled glass.
A cool draught stippled my skin. One of the glass doors to the balcony stood ajar. I couldn’t remember if I had left it like that. I wanted to close it, but was compelled to step outside.
The breeze from the river was sharper now, sour with decay. It was lighter outside than in. I looked to my right, across to the east corner balcony, nervously scanning the pastel darkness, and flinched when a torch-beam scanned the windows. Someone was in the third riverside penthouse, the one Jeffrey Archer was supposedly buying. I set the candle out of the wind and looked harder. The last apartment was set at a steeper angle than Elliot’s, affording me a dim view of its interior. Its balcony door was open, a thin beam of light bouncing across the walls. I couldn’t tell if the girl on the balcony was looking in my direction, but she was standing as stiffly as Elliot’s mannequin, her hands raised to her throat, long black hair fluttering like flags at her arched back.
A low wave of air attacked my candle and snuffed it out. When I glanced back, the girl was outlined against the pale night like a statue, a memorial to some kind of household divinity, affixed to the building in spiritual appeasement. I could tell she was young by her slender waist, small raised breasts and flat stomach. She could have been a dancer, a model. She lifted her hands high above her tilted head, her fingers spread wide and reaching, as if waiting to be carried up into the night air. High above her, electricity flared within the clouds, like a faulty connection in heaven. For a moment I actually thought she had caused it.