Coral Glynn (18 page)

“No,” said Coral. “It isn’t proper. You can’t enter someone’s private room in the middle of the night…”

“I’ll sit over there,” he said, pointing to the chair in the corner of the room. “Just for a moment or two. Please. Just sit in the dark and talk for a moment. Wouldn’t that be nice?”

“No,” said Coral. “Go back to your room or I shall scream.”

He sat down in the chair and began to weep. He covered his face with his hands.

Coral watched him, saying nothing. Was he really weeping, or only pretending?

“Please shut out the light,” he said. “I’m ashamed to be seen weeping.” He removed his hands and looked at her. “I mean no trouble. Please.”

Coral turned out the light but continued to sit upright in bed. After a moment he seemed to stop weeping. It was quiet. If she didn’t know he was sitting on the chair in the corner of her room, she would not know he was there.

Then he spoke again. “Would you mind if I smoke a cigarette?” he asked.

“No,” said Coral.

“Would you like one as well?”

“No,” said Coral.

She heard him rummage in his trouser pockets and then he flicked on a lighter and dipped his head, with a cigarette already in his mouth, into the flame. He snapped the lighter shut and the cigarette brightened as he inhaled.

“You’re not still scared, are you?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Coral. “Of course I am. And tired. I wish you would leave.”

“If you’re tired, you aren’t scared,” he said. “You can’t be both.”

“I can,” she said.

“Then you are very special,” he said. “But I knew that—that you were special—from the moment you appeared downstairs. So beautiful, so special.”

“You’re talking rubbish,” said Coral. “You’re drunk. You should go to bed.”

“Truth is what the drunken speak, not rubbish,” he said. “Everyone knows that. Truth.”

Coral said nothing.

“Have you got a man?” he asked.

“No,” said Coral.

“It isn’t right, a beautiful girl like you, all alone. My mother says you’re lonesome as a nun.”

More, thought Coral: Nuns have Jesus to love, to go on and on about. I have no one.

“I think you need a man,” Lazlo said. “It is a feeling I have. It kept me from sleeping.”

Coral said nothing. She could feel her drunken drowsiness returning, crawling out from where it had hidden at the shock of him.

“It would be a shame,” he said, “for you to be alone, now that I am here. I don’t think it’s natural.”

She did not speak because she wanted him to continue talking. Through the darkness she could now make out the pale glow of his naked arms and his face, which appeared each time he raised the cigarette to his lips.

“Christ, but it’s cold in here,” he said. “There’s no heat at all. And me sitting here half-naked, freezing to death. Christ.”

“So go to bed,” she said. “Go to bed if you are cold. You’ll soon be warm.”

“No,” he said. “My bed’s like ice. You couldn’t know how cold it is.” He stood up, and she watched him stub his cigarette on the window ledge. He moved aside the curtain and looked out the window. The gentle light from outside fell upon his face. “It’s snowing outside,” he said. “Did you know that it’s snowing?”

“No,” said Coral.

He was suddenly standing beside the bed, looking down at her. Perhaps she had fallen asleep for a moment, for she did not remember him moving from the window to the bedside. She looked up at him.

“How beautiful you are,” he said. “And it’s snowing. You don’t want me to freeze to my death, do you? A man could freeze in weather like this.”

She shook her head, and heard it rasp against the pillowcase. She reached up a hand and held it so that it obscured his face, and then moved it aside, revealing him again. He reached up with both hands and pulled his braces off of his shoulders and let them fall to his sides. One fell faster than the other so they made two separate little smacks against his trouser legs. And then he peeled his undershirt off over his head. “Look at me now,” he said, “shivering to death, and you as warm as you can be. It isn’t fair.” He unbuttoned his flies and stepped carefully out of his trousers, and then scooped his underpants down his long legs, revealing his cock, which appeared to be slowly reinventing itself. “Ah, look at him,” he said. “How brave he is. Despite the cold, he is the only part of me that is warm.”

Coral said nothing.

Lazlo’s cock got bigger, and lifted up away from him, like a baby reaching out its tiny arm.

“Touch him,” he said.

Coral touched him, just barely clasping the tube of flesh, and it was warm. It twitched in her hand and she let it go. “You aren’t cold,” she said.

“I am,” said Lazlo. “Feel here.” He reached out and took her hand and placed it against his thigh, held it against the curve of his leg.

“It’s warm,” she said. “You’re warm.”

“No,” said Lazlo. “Feel this.” He reached down and laid his hand against her cheek. It was freezing. She took her hand from his leg and held it against his hand against her check until it felt warm. He slowly withdrew his hand and moved it down her neck, his fingers touching her throat, and she turned her face aside as he slid it beneath her nightgown and touched her breast. He stood like that, his hand on her skin, and she felt her breast swell within his loose grasp, as if rising up to meet him, and she heard him mumble something—it sounded like “Yes, yes”—and she closed her eyes and shifted over in the bed, towards the wall, making a space beside her.

*   *   *

He came to her room every night of the week he stayed in London, came at some point after everyone had gone to bed and left each morning before dawn. During the day or evening, if he happened to encounter her, he treated her with the same cordiality as his mother, as if the night was another country that had severed all diplomatic relations with the day.

When she returned to Grantley Terrace on the evening of the last day of the year, and climbed the stairs to her room, she noticed that the door to Lazlo’s little bedroom was open, and the mattress lay bare upon the bed, and all of his clothes, which had been strewn about the room all week, were gone. The window was open wide, to air out the funk of his smoke. Lazlo was gone, gone back to Lowestoft, gone without a word.

*   *   *

One day, after she had been in London for over a year, Madame Paszkowska stopped Coral in the front hallway as she returned from work and told her that her room would be painted the following day, and it would be a help if she would remove everything from the walls and window ledge.

There was only one painting in the room, which had been there when Coral arrived, left behind by some former tenant, as most of the objects in her room seemed to have been, for it was obvious there was no singular, unifying aesthetic connecting any one piece to another: they were all castoffs. People had hurriedly left this room countless times, for as many reasons, gathering up the things they could carry with them and leaving the rest behind, and it was the detritus of all these lives that furnished Coral’s room. And she did not mind it: there was something rich and welcoming about the motley collection of things; they augmented the meagreness of her own existence, for she did not have enough possessions to fill even a room.

When she lowered the painting—two robins standing on the rim of a nest in the crotch of a tree, observing the five blue eggs that lay potently within it—she was surprised to see Mrs DeVries’s sapphire ring hanging from the picture wire. She had hidden it there when she first arrived at Grantley Terrace, keeping it safe until the time she would need to pawn it, which she was sure would be soon. But things had worked out far better and more quickly than she had expected, and the money that Major Hart had given to her had lasted until she had found her new job.

*   *   *

The woman in the pawnshop on Bethnal Green Road suffered a toothache and had a bandage tied around her head and jaw. She placed a rather grubby velvet pad on the wooden counter and motioned for Coral to deposit the ring upon it. Then she turned on a lamp and stuck a jeweller’s loupe in her eye and examined the ring.

“It’s gold,” said Coral. “I know it is. And the stone is real. It’s a sapphire.”

“It’s flawed,” said the woman.

“Flawed?” asked Coral.

“Occlusions,” said the woman. “And the gold is very worn. The shaft is weak.”

Coral said nothing.

The woman placed the ring back upon the velvet pad and then removed the loupe from her eye. She turned off the lamp and named a price that seemed very low to Coral.

“I think it’s worth more than that,” said Coral. “Surely it is.”

“Perhaps it is and perhaps it isn’t,” said the woman. “In any case, that is what I can give you for it. It’s a fair price.”

“It isn’t enough,” said Coral. “I want more.”

“We all want more,” said the woman, “but few of us get it.”

Coral picked up the ring. “I shall keep it, then,” she said. “It was my grandmother’s.”

“Yes, keep it,” said the woman. “But come back when you need to sell it.”

Her repossession of the ring awoke in Coral a strange compulsion, and on the following Saturday she took a train from Waterloo to Guildford, where she arrived late in the morning. It was an unusually warm spring day. She removed the jacket she was wearing over a sleeveless dress and felt the sun on her arms and face. It was a new dress, her best dress, navy blue with white polka dots, and she had bought navy blue shoes to go with it. Her bag was black, but perhaps with the dress and shoes it looked navy blue.

She walked up the street into town and had lunch at a café. She found that she was very hungry: she had eaten nothing that morning before leaving London. She had a cup of tea and egg on toast, and sat in the café, watching out the window at the people passing by along the High Street in the warm sunlight, everyone happy, for it was Saturday, and sunny, and they were shopping.

When she was finished with her lunch she stepped into the street. She looked back through the café window at her table, which had not yet been cleared, and the remnants of her meal remained there as blatant as evidence: she was a person in the world. She existed, and she was free.

She went into a draper’s shop and bought an Irish linen tea towel and a porcelain eggcup. She bought these things not because she needed them, or even wanted them, but because she could. She asked if they would hold her items in the store so that she could return for them later. Of course, they would be happy to.

When she left the shop she walked purposefully along the street to the edge of the commercial district and turned onto Winchester Road. She remembered the way perfectly, even though it had been winter when she had been here before and now everything had a different feeling to it: the trees were leafy green and the gardens were full of flowers and the windows of the houses were open and the sun was hot on the street. At the end of Winchester Road she turned left onto Winslow Road. It was good that she remembered the number—41—because all the houses on the street looked the same to her. She stood for a moment across the street from number 41. The façade was covered in ivy, which she did not remember, nor did she remember that the door was painted blue. The windows were all shut and it seemed unnaturally still and quiet, even for a house. It did not appear as if anyone was home. She stood and waited, although she did not know for what. A man and young boy came out of the house she was standing in front of and stopped beside her. The man was holding the boy’s hand; the boy wore spectacles and had a patch over one eye.

“Good afternoon,” the man said.

“Good afternoon,” said Coral. And then she said it again, to the boy, but he did not answer her. Perhaps he was deaf; there was an odd vacancy about him.

“Do you need help with something?” asked the man.

She realised she has been standing there for quite some time and looked suspicious. “Oh, no,” she said. “Thank you, but no. I just—could you tell me, is that house—is that where the DeVrieses live?” She pointed at the house across the street.

“Oh, no,” he said. “Not anymore. They’ve moved around the corner. Onto Lambkin Crescent. Number three, I believe.”

“Oh,” she said. “Thank you. Thank you very much.”

“It’s just up the hill on your left,” the man said. “It’s the brick house painted white.”

“Thank you,” Coral said again.

“Come along, Dickie,” the man said, and he and the boy continued along the street.

Coral went the opposite way and turned onto Lambkin Crescent. Number 3 was indeed a brick house painted white. Before she could think and perhaps stop herself, she walked up the cement pathway and rang the bell.

Nothing happened.

She rang it again, and once again failed to elicit any response. It was quiet, and in the quiet she heard music, orchestral music, floating around the house from the back garden. She listened for a moment to make sure she had heard correctly, and as she listened a dog came around the corner of the house and sat down abruptly to scratch itself. Then it looked up at her.

“Hello,” she said.

The dog cocked its head and continued to regard her with an uncanine neutrality. She remembered the yellow-toothed, desperate rabbits in the hutch at the bottom of the garden and supposed the DeVrieses had moved onto dogs. There had been a cat, too, and kittens, she remembered.

After a moment the dog got up and disappeared back around the corner of the house. Her presence at the front door obviously did not interest him one way or another. Coral followed him. There was a paved yard on the side of the house with a gate leading into both the front and back garden; both gates were open. She stood in the yard and watched the dog cross the lawn and approach a man sitting low to the ground on a canvas sling-back chair that was facing away from her, reading a book that he held upon his lap. The music came from an old windup gramophone that sat upon a wooden chair that stood beside him. She remembered that he was keen about music. He was a music publisher, whatever that was. The dog whined and the man in the chair said, without looking up from his book, “What is it, Toby?”