The Darkening Hour (12 page)

Deptford.

She says I’m out of touch, that these are the very areas being snapped up by young professionals. But when you’ve grown up on one of London’s hills, in a large house in
Blackheath, moving down is belittling. I’m the only one of us who’s ended up in a trough. Terence lives in a detached house on Dartmouth Hill. Anita and her banker husband Richard, in
Muswell Hill. Simon is itinerant, but will no doubt wriggle his way into some wealthy woman’s home in Hampstead or Highgate eventually.

I’ve ended up in a house in one of London’s dank river basins, where 1970s council blocks dominate and the High Street’s a magnet for deviance and vagrancy. Roger and I bought
the house, believing our street, with its beautiful terrace of Georgian ship-merchants’ houses, would go upmarket.

Which it has, in a way. It’s the location that hasn’t.

‘Anyway, does she know you are “the Voice of the South-East”?’ Anita asks. ‘She must respect that.’

My sister’s right. People don’t come across the world to do domestic work for fun. And this house, that Roger and I bought as a bolt-hole when we first went abroad, may not be as big
as our Moroccan residencies, or as luxurious, but it’s beautiful, and elegant enough in its own way. Mona is desperate, appreciates the work I’m giving her.

I’m about to ask Anita what she thinks of Mona buying the roses, when Mona herself comes back in, closely followed by Simon.

‘That was a waste of time,’ says Simon. ‘He refused to look at me. Only had eyes for Mona. He’s certainly taken to you,’ he tells her, and Mona inclines her head
shyly.

‘OK – well, I’m going to see him now,’ Anita decides. ‘He’s finished his lunch now, has he, Mona?’

Mona looks at Anita, her eyes travelling up and down, taking in her fashionable wool skirt, her cashmere cardi and her expensive boots.

‘Your daddy needs to sleep now. He’ll be ready to see you in one hour.’

Anita glances at me as if to say, ‘Blimey, she’s feisty!’

And I feel a kind of loyalty towards Mona. My brother and sister can’t even get here at the right time to take their father out, while Mona has cooked for him, cleaned up, taken him to the
loo and given him his medication.

‘I tell you what,’ I say. ‘You and Simon can spend the afternoon with Daddy when he’s had his sleep. Mona hasn’t had any time off yet. We’ll go for a little
walk, Mona, and I’ll show you the river.’

‘Fine,’ says Anita, exchanging a glance with Simon as if it isn’t really fine at all, but knowing now that they have no choice.

‘Do you know, Mona,’ I say, as we go past the houses with their figureheads above the doorways, ‘this street is very historic. The houses were once owned by
shipbuilders.’

She nods but doesn’t speak.

‘One of them, at the other end, I think, was a girls’ club, set up by a local woman to help the “Gut Girls”. They were called Gut Girls because they worked with meat.
There used to be a cattle market on the High Street, and those poor girls had to slaughter the animals. They slaved away from dawn ’til dusk, hacking beasts to pieces with meat cleavers.
Wrenching bones apart. Can you imagine it? It was hellish. Cold, dirty, smelly and gruesome. Imagine how it must have sounded – cows moaning as they died. The crunch of breaking bones. Not a
girl’s work.’

‘No.’

‘But of course girls were cheap labour, could be exploited. Anyway, one day, a kind woman, seeing how terrible their lives were, set up a special school in this street to teach these Gut
Girls laundry, cooking, and housework. She raised them out of the depths of squalor. Gave them a future.’

I’m aware as I talk of the parallel in what I’m doing now, for Mona, employing her to do my laundry, the cooking and housework, to raise her out of whatever depths of squalor she had
to tolerate in Morocco.

The city’s a closed fan, I want to tell her, its layers of history hidden one behind the other. I often like to imagine the scenes witnessed by the little statues above the doorways
– acts of folly and deviance, murders and rapes, dealings and exploitations. I glance at Mona, wondering if she understands the little history lesson I’m giving her, but her face
remains impassive.

‘We’ll take a bus to Rotherhithe and go for a walk along Paradise Street,’ I suggest. ‘There’s a nice view of the river along there.’

The afternoon’s already darkening by the time we arrive in Rotherhithe. The tide’s up now and the water moves against the wall just a couple of feet beneath us. We
find a bench and sit down. I point out Tower Bridge, looming through the dusk as its lights come on, and explain to Mona how it parts in the middle and lifts to allow tall ships to pass.

I unwrap and hand her one of the cupcakes I bought from the market. As we sit and nibble our cakes, two mothers, side by side, I think that everything is getting better again because Mona has
come!

Mona and I can help each other out. We’re like two towers of the bridge, one essential to the other. Like my mother and I when we used to fold the sheets, when I was a child, something I
loved to do with her, holding the corners between us before moving together to fold them. Apart again, and together until we had a compact bundle to put into the airing cupboard.

‘You are happy today,’ Mona says suddenly.

‘Oh?’

‘Yes. Today you look a young woman.’

I’m dying to tell someone about my text from Max. I can’t mention my lover to my best friend Gina! It’s torture to me.

That’s when I find myself telling my new maid all about him. One of the sides of my nature, that Daddy used to point out in the old days, is that I’m too trusting.

In retrospect you can see the point at which you should have stopped. But in the fading light of this autumn’s afternoon, I feel I’ve not just employed a carer for my father, and a
cleaner and housekeeper for myself, but a confidante too.

And I begin to speak.

‘I’m happy because I’m meeting my man next week. I haven’t seen him for ages.’

‘I didn’t know you had a boyfriend.’

I look at her to see if she’s acting dumb. Leo said he’d seen her looking at the photo of Max in my room. She must realise there’s a man in my life. But she’s gazing out
over the river, no guile in her face.

‘Yes, I do.’

‘But I’ve been here three weeks. I haven’t seen this man.’

‘No. Well, he lives in the States.’

‘Then – when do you see him?’

‘When he has time to come here.’

She looks at me, turning her lips down.‘You wait till he has time?’

‘I have to, Mona. No choice.’

‘You met him in the USA? Or in London?’

‘Oh, it was extraordinary how we met. At the Albert Memorial.’

‘Albert Memorial?’

‘You’ll see it, one day. I’ll show you. It’s in Hyde Park, opposite the Albert Hall. I was waiting for my husband – you know – Roger. We were due to be at a
Prom in a few minutes’ time.’

‘Prom?’

‘Promenade concert, classical music, at the Albert Hall. You can stand and listen, or walk around – “promenade” – unless you have seats. You’ll see, one day .
. .’

‘I’d like to.’

‘I was looking at the memorial, thinking about the love Queen Victoria felt for Albert. She had it built when he died. She was devastated. Mourned for years . . .’

I stop. Glance at Mona, remember she, too, is a widow and realise with remorse that I have trodden upon sensitive ground again. I move on.

‘All along the steps, there were people in love, cuddling, kissing. I wondered whether I’d missed out on something. I had never felt this passion for Roger. It was a shock to me to
realise. But you know,’ I turn to Mona, to emphasise the feeling behind the words I’m about to say, ‘it’s almost as painful to realise you don’t love someone as it is
to learn they don’t love you.’

‘You were married to him.’

‘Yes. But it hit me then. Or maybe not even then. Perhaps . . . my memory is muddled. Perhaps it was after Max appeared that I knew our marriage had been an illusion.’

‘Illusion?’

‘A lie. Oh, Roger was from the right background. My parents loved him and I wanted to please them. But that evening, on the steps, for the first time I faced the truth. I had married
Roger, for Daddy.’

I pause for a moment, letting words I’ve never said sink in.

‘I wanted Daddy – Charles – to approve of the man to whom he gave me away. I was Daddy’s gift, you see, Mona – he always called me that, “God’s
gift” – Theodora.’ I pat the chain round my neck. ‘It’s why I wear this. He bought it for me when I was born. I was always the closest to him.’

‘It’s very beautiful. Is it real gold?’

‘Oh yes. Daddy would never have bought fake. It’s eighteen carat.’

‘Precious.’

‘Yes. Anyway. I owed it to him to marry someone he liked and approved of. That’s what I thought.’

‘It’s important your family are happy with your husband. I think this is good,’ Mona says.

‘Yes, maybe. But it’s not the only reason to marry! Roger was wrong for me. He didn’t want a woman with a mind of her own and a career! He wanted the sort of wife who enjoys
entertaining and making the house beautiful. I was bored living out there with him, bored and frustrated.’

Mona frowns.

‘Sorry. I’m talking too fast. It was as though . . . I became invisible when I was with him. After I had Leo, I was content for a while. I felt such intense love for my son it
enabled me to tolerate everything else. But once Leo started school I knew it wasn’t the life for me.’

There’s a silence after this and I wonder what Mona’s thinking. I’m hardly concerned. She is an earpiece, nothing more, someone impartial who can’t possibly have any real
influence or impact on my life. I don’t even know how much she understands, I’m simply relieved to talk.

So I go on.

‘Admitting I’d never loved him was terrible. It meant either putting up with it, or acting on it. And I didn’t want to break up my marriage or tear Leo from the heart of his
home. But then we returned to London for a few months. The BBC begged me to come back to work with them. I wanted to desperately, but knew Roger wouldn’t have it. It was while we were living
back here, the day at the Proms, that I met Max. He had a week off to sightsee. He was looking for the Serpentine Gallery, he said. Was he anywhere near, did I know? Of course I knew! I knew the
artist exhibiting there too, someone I loved – Chris Offili. I waved my arm in the right direction across the park, proud to be at home here, that I was a Londoner. “I guess
you’re local?” he said. He was a doctor – a professor, in fact, over from the States for some conference. He had been to London before, but never alone, never with this time on
his hands.’

I’ve lost Mona now, I can see. She has a glazed look in her eyes, is thinking of something else. She probably doesn’t understand half what I’m saying.

‘He was handsome, tall with a beard . . .’

‘Ali had a beard,’ says Mona.

I barely hear her, I’m so engrossed in my tale, in reminiscing. Max’s voice was deep and breathy – as if he had just finished making love and was preparing for a cigarette. I
found it sexy immediately, wanted to sit and listen to him all afternoon. I almost wished Roger would never come back from wherever he’d gone. The power of the voice! How we underestimate
it.

I never thought I’d go for a man with a beard either, but on Max it was another thing that attracted me to him. A neat goatee that sprinkled his chin, greying, flecked, ginger hairs mixed
in with black. Like Endymion, my cat, whose three colours are mingled. It was neatly trimmed and, before I could help it, I found myself imagining the texture of it against my skin.

I explained that London had many hearts from which its inhabitants sort of fan out, and from which the energy pulses; that the Albert Memorial was one of those hearts. He looked as if he found
me amusing. I recall our conversation.

‘You have to be careful,’ I said. ‘There are impostors. Places you might imagine were crucial to the city that aren’t.’

‘Fake hearts?’

‘Yes. Pacemakers!’

He laughed. ‘London’s quite a riddle then? I certainly find it hard to navigate. No blocks. It’s a maze.’

‘Would you like me to show you?’ I asked him before I knew what I was doing.

I was overcome by pride in the city I loved. The attraction I felt for Max was instant and so powerful I was practically knocked sideways. My unconscious knew it before I did. I was ensuring we
would meet again, before I’d told myself what was happening. I, too, had a week off. Now I knew I was going to spend it with him.

Later, in my fanciful state I imagined that Queen Victoria’s feelings for Albert had somehow transmitted themselves to Max and me. That we were caught in its metaphysical force. Before
Roger returned, I had arranged to take Max to an exhibition at the Hayward Gallery the next day. And we’d exchanged mobile numbers. I had already, even before Roger and I crossed Kensington
Gore to the Prom we were about to attend, fallen in love with him.

Later, when Max had gone back to the States, and I to Morocco, he started to send me photos of the statues he thought we should meet beside whenever we were both in London.
We’d met first by Albert’s statue, so he wanted it to become our thing.

Max tried to find erotic ones – the naked bronze of Psyche on Chelsea Bridge. Achilles at Hyde Park Corner, wearing nothing but his little fig leaf. Then the stone mermaids on one of the
pediments over the eastern entrance to Victoria Station, and the lady wearing nothing but a headscarf draped seductively around her, atop the Palace Theatre in Cambridge Circus – a sexy
vision that I would never have noticed were it not for Max, opening my eyes to the secrets of my own city.

When we ran out of erotic statues we moved on. We met at Nelson’s Column one night, of course, and on another occasion squished ourselves between Roosevelt and Churchill in Bond Street. We
kissed passionately beneath the bronze
Angel of Peace
at Wellington Arch and had a romantic late-summer rendezvous beside the
Goatherd’s Daughter
in Regent’s Park
where Max read out to me the inscription
To all the Protectors of the Defenceless
.