Angel Cake (15 page)

Alicia sat alone in the dark room when Alison had gone and she told a few home truths to the furniture. ‘You’ll live to rue the day, my dear,’ she said. ‘He’ll never turn up trumps. Believe me, my dear, I’ve seen his sort before. If you take my advice, you’ll pack your bags and strike out on your own. There’s plenty of other fish in the sea. Leave him now, dear, now while you’re young.’

This is Rob’s idea of a romantic gesture: on New Year’s Eve, we were invited to a party given by some friends of his called Chris and Consuela, but at the last minute Rob said mischievously that he didn’t want to go because he wanted to begin the New Year inside me. I was completely amazed, needless to say, because that was so out of character; putting intimate enjoyment before a good time with his friends. I was a bit worried, although of course the idea delighted me, because it might create even more of a gulf between me and his friends if he failed to turn up at a New Year’s Eve party and they thought that I was keeping him away. Chris and Consuela are not his closest friends, but I knew the whole gang would be there, whooping and hugging one another at midnight, and drinking toasts to getting rid of the Thatcher government, to sending the Cruise missiles back home, to one more year without a nuclear war. ‘Rob’s copped out,’ they would say sadly. ‘Smothered in domesticity by little Miss Muffet.’ But Rob had his way, because after all I was hardly going to refuse him, and we didn’t go to the party and he did begin the New Year inside me.

I do wish I wasn’t someone who feels obliged to think solemn thoughts on solemn occasions, because I can’t help wondering whether the rest of the coming year will be anything like as much fun. All right, it was a promising beginning, but I don’t have promising feelings about the rest of it. I can’t help being struck by the difference between last January the first, when my happiness seemed to splash a benevolent shine on everything as I carted it around, and the
day before yesterday when, waking beside Rob’s still-snoring shape, I felt so curiously heavy-hearted.

Last January the first, I had spent the night at Rob’s flat and as he was driving me home to mine in the early evening, he had unexpectedly said, ‘God, this is a boring drive. Have you ever thought about moving in with me some time? It would save us both this stupid trek.’

When I could reply, I said, ‘Are you sure? I mean, I think I’d love to, but are you sure you’re really willing to have me?’

Rob is one of the few people I know who can give an angry laugh. He gave an angry laugh then and he said, ‘Shit, Alison, I’m not inviting you to an afternoon tea-party. There’s no need to go in for all this, “Oh how kind, thank you for having me” routine. I’ve thought it over and I’ve made up my mind. It makes sense, that’s all. It’s up to you.’

‘May I think about it?’ I asked. ‘It is a bit of a big decision.’

But that was a lie. I had made up my mind already and when Rob dropped me at my flat, where I had a room in a household of ill-assorted girls, I started to take my pictures down off the walls.

The first problem of the New Year arose straight away on January the first. It is a tricky problem and I do not know how I shall tackle it. Rob has decided to give up his sitar lessons. He told me this with a clear sense of achievement, over our New Year breakfast, and it was obvious that, like me, he had been thinking things over solemnly at the turn of the year.

‘It’s not getting me anywhere,’ he said. ‘It’s retrospective and nostalgic and pointless. I’ve decided it’s time I hung up my old sitar and called it a day.’

‘But I thought you enjoyed it,’ I said weakly.

Rob said, ‘I used to. I felt it provided a useful counterbalance to everything else in my life. But it’s seemed incredibly irrelevant of late and, well, my heart just isn’t in it.’ He grinned. ‘Are you glad?’

I said, with an effort which Rob of course misinterpreted, ‘I never put pressure on you to stop.’

‘That’s true,’ he said gallantly. ‘You didn’t. But you never
liked it much either, did you – that whole mystical Eastern kick?’

‘Don’t try and pretend you’re stopping because of me,’ I protested, with a mixture of teasing and genuine irritation.

Rob looked hurt. ‘For heaven’s sake,’ he said, ‘I just thought you’d be pleased, that’s all.’

I felt doubly guilty and I caught his hand over the table. ‘I’m pleased if you’re pleased,’ I said valiantly.

Rob was not convinced. He forked up the last of his scrambled egg in a huff. ‘It’s not an issue,’ he said sullenly. ‘It just struck me that you might like it if we could do things together occasionally on a Sunday afternoon.’

January 1st was a Saturday. On the Sunday, Rob went for his last-but-one sitar lesson. Even though it was supposed to be a new leaf, he felt it was only fair to give Anand more than seven days’ notice. And I slipped away to Mrs Queripel’s, wondering if it would turn out to be one of my last visits too. Except that I realized when I got there that I was not going to be prepared to give them up. I might have imagined it briefly as the coward’s solution, because then I would never need to tell Rob what I had been up to all this time, but I knew as soon as we sat down together that I couldn’t bring myself to do it.

Mrs Queripel was wearing my brooch and I was wearing her fox. (The question of how to explain the fox to Rob had not arisen, because he hadn’t noticed that it was any different from my old one, which I had surreptitiously taken to Oxfam.)

The first thing Mrs Q asked me was, ‘Did he admire it?’

‘Oh yes,’ I exclaimed, before I had had a chance to think through the consequences of this lie. ‘He thought it was fantastic.’

She glittered. ‘And did you let on? Did you tell him who gave it to you?’

I hesitated for only a fraction of a second but, in that fraction, she pounced. ‘You didn’t? You kept him on tenterhooks? Well, maybe you’ve got more sense than I gave you credit for, after all.’

I laughed. ‘Oh, he’s mad with jealousy,’ I joked. ‘He’s beside himself trying to work out who it could be.’

We giggled together like a pair of schoolgirls. Then Mrs Q said seriously, ‘I don’t mind if you don’t let on, dear. You needn’t tell him it’s from me.’

‘Oh, I will in my own good time,’ I assured her. ‘But I’ll make him suffer first.’

She clasped her wrinkled hands in glee. ‘Good girl,’ she crowed. ‘That’s my girl!’

She didn’t look that well actually, in spite of her high spirits. I tried to see if there had been any noticeable change in her since the Sunday when I had first seen her. She did seem to have shrunk a little and maybe her skin hung looser. But her dreadful make-up was as defiant as ever.

That Sunday, we touched on the subject of racism. At least, the conversation began about her West Indian home-help, who had apparently failed to turn up for two weeks in a row, and whom Mrs Queripel was accusing of racially typical fecklessness and unreliability. Indignantly, I took it upon myself to point out to her that she was being unfair. It was, to use a favourite expression of hers, water off a duck’s back. Her beastly ideas are so deeply ingrained that nothing I could say made the least bit of difference to her. So, somewhat disgustedly, I changed the subject slightly and I asked her if she had ever been abroad.

‘Yes, I have,’ she snapped. ‘And I didn’t think much of it!’

I couldn’t help being amused by this blanket condemnation and I asked her where she had been.

‘Paris,’ she snapped again. ‘And, let me tell you, it’s nothing like what it’s cracked up to be.’

To make conversation, I said, oh, but I remembered going there on a school trip as a teenager and I had loved it. In fact, Rob and I were thinking of going there together over Easter.

She shook her head vehemently.
‘That’s
what I mean,’ she said. ‘In
that
respect, it’s not what it’s cracked up to be: a Mecca for lovers, the “Capital of Romance”. A load of nonsense!’

That seemed a bit surprising coming from someone as keen on romance as Mrs Queripel, but when I tried to ask her more she clammed up and sat staring disapprovingly ahead
in frosty silence. I got only one clue when she said that they had stayed in a horrid little hotel in not a nice part of town at all, and that when she thought of what had gone on in that hotel it still gave her the creeps, even now.

She seemed in rather a bad mood all round after that, and it was the first Sunday for ages that she didn’t tell me another instalment in the ‘Romance of Leonard and Alicia Queripel’.

When I got up to go, she asked a bit pathetically, ‘I’ve not been very good company, have I?’

‘Oh yes, you have,’ I lied brightly. ‘You’re just a bit under the weather, that’s all.’

She said something so dismal then that, it really filled me with gloom.

‘You’ll never get your youth and beauty back, my dear,’ she said. ‘Don’t squander it on stony ground.’

I said sharply, ‘What
are
you talking about?’ and she gave a gusty sigh.

‘Mrs Queripel,’ I said, ‘I know you think I shouldn’t talk back to my elders and betters. But, really, I do think it’s a bit much your telling me what I ought to do about Rob when you’ve never even met him.’

Mrs Queripel started. She peered at me for a moment as if trying to work out whatever had put such an idea into my head. Then she grinned wickedly. ‘My, you do take things very personally, don’t you?’ she said maliciously. ‘Who knows, maybe I wasn’t thinking about you and him at all?’

Alicia realized that she was falling behind with her furniture removal. She laid the blame for it fairly and squarely on Alison. How could she arrange herself a haven in the front room when she had to entertain her visitor in there week after week? She had kept on carrying things down all through the past three months, but they tended to be little frippery things. She was putting off her final commitment to the front room because of Alison. She had almost reached the last irreversible stage of bringing down her bedding, which she intended to spread at night on the settee and to hide during the day behind it. All that needed to be carried down beforehand was her bedside table and her lamp, her two pillows
and her necessaries. But she suspected that bringing down the bedding would be beyond her. She had dreadful visions of slipping and falling, dragged headlong by the eiderdown and crashing into the hall to be smothered as she lay stunned beneath its pink weight. So here she was dithering, as she had been for days, between the relative evils of risking a fall and of being caught short downstairs without her comforts, between the shame of Alison seeing her domestic shortcomings and the pain of having to toil up the stairs again every night. Her breathing had never quite gone back to normal after her cold. At the slightest exertion, something like a sea mist rose from the marshy bottom of her lungs and fogged her chest and her vision. To accompany this, there was a squealing, squawking effect of seagulls as her breath fought its way in and out of her constricted whistling tubes.

She found that the dilemma would come upon her in odd moments and she would discover that she had been sitting or standing, frozen, dwelling on some unhappy aspect of it. She would come to with a tea-towel in her hand, or a powder-puff, and realize that more than minutes – maybe hours – had gone by.

The first time Alison came round after the New Year, Alicia had been dwelling on what an obstacle to her arrangement Alison was and, try as she might, which she did not, she could not help being snappish and resentful to her. It occurred to her, as she watched Alison bad-manneredly crunch a biscui, that considering how young and strong she was, with all her cycling and God knows what, the least she could do was offer to help Alicia carry down some furniture in return for all her hospitality. She glared at her quite angrily for not having offered of her own accord, and then she nearly started out of her skin because she realized that of course Alison could not possibly have offered, since she had no idea what Alicia was up to. Besides, Alicia suddenly thought, could she trust her enough to have her help?

The week after the New Year holiday, Pearl came back. There was no word of warning and, initially, no explanation. Her big shadow just reappeared at the front door early on Wednesday morning and when Alicia at last brought herself to open the door to her, her heart in her mouth, Pearl sang
out, ‘Mornin’, Mrs Queripel,’ as though nothing at all had happened.

Outraged, Alicia barred her way. ‘Wherever have you been?’ she exclaimed. ‘I thought you weren’t coming any more.’

Pearl grinned shamefacedly. ‘I was off sick, wasn’t I? Didn’t they send someone else instead? Didn’t they let you know?’

‘No, they certainly didn’t,’ Alicia answered. She repeated, ‘I thought you weren’t coming any more.’

Pearl said something unpardonable, but since she had already taken off her turban and begun to unbutton her mac on the doorstep, Alicia had no option but to let her in. ‘No such luck, Mrs Queripel.’

Alicia gave a sour snort. ‘No such luck,’ she agreed in an undertone.

She followed Pearl into the kitchen and grimly surveyed the brilliant pink blouse and bulging maroon slacks which emerged from under her raincoat. No consideration for other people’s sensibilities, she concluded bitterly to herself.

She sat in a corner of the front room and sulked as demonstratively as she knew how for most of the morning. It was only when Pearl was nearly due to leave that she had an inexplicable change of heart and wondered if she wasn’t being unfair. She went graciously into the kitchen and asked Pearl condescendingly what had been the matter with her.

Pearl said, ‘The flu, I was in bed all over Christmas. It passed me by, Christmas.’

‘Oh dear, oh dear,’ said Alicia. ‘I had a shocking cold myself; I didn’t take to my bed though.’

‘No?’ said Pearl vaguely. She was wringing out cloths fiercely at the sink.

‘No, I soldiered through. I was more or less right in time for my visitor on Boxing Day.’

‘My daughters had to do everything,’ Pearl said. ‘Cook the meal, lay the table, do the washing and the clearing. I couldn’t even swallow a mouthful. I was weak as a baby.’ She chuckled indulgently. ‘Yeah, weak as a baby.’