How Shall I Know You? (3 page)

I was downstairs by six-thirty. The day was fine. I was hollow at my center, and in a vicious temper. The door stood open, and a wash of light ran over the carpet like sun-warmed margarine.

My taxi—prebooked, as always, for a quick getaway—was at the curb. I looked around, cautious, for Mr. Webley. Already a haze was beginning to overlay Eccles House. Smokers' coughs rattled down the passages, and the sound of hawking, and the flushing of lavatories.

Something touched my elbow. Louise had arrived beside me, noiseless. She wrested the bag from my hand. “You came down by yourself,” she whispered. Her face was amazed. “You should have called me. I'd have come. Are you not having your breakfast?”

She sounded shocked, that anyone should refuse food. Did Webley feed her, or did she scavenge? She raised her eyes to my face, then cast them down. “If I hadn't just come now,” she said, “you'd have gone. And never said bye-bye.”

We stood at the curb together. The air was mild. The driver was reading his
Star
. He didn't look up.

“Might you come back?” Louise whispered.

“I don't think so.”

“I mean, one of these days?”

I never doubted this: if I told her to get into the taxi, she would do it. Away we'd go: me rattled, afraid of the future; her trusting and yellow, her mad eyes shining into mine. But what then? I asked myself. What would we do then? And have I the right? She is an adult, however short. She has a family somewhere. I stared down at her. Her face, in full daylight, was patchily jaundiced as if dyed with cold tea; her broad smooth forehead was mottled with deeper blotches, the size and color of old copper coins. I could have wept. Instead, I took my purse out of my bag, peered inside it, took out a twenty-pound note, and squeezed it into her hand. “Louise, will you buy yourself something nice?”

I didn't look into her face. I just got into the taxi. My migraine aura was now so severe that the world on the left had ceased to exist, except as an intermittent yellow flash. I was nauseated, by inanition and my own moral vacuity. But by the time the cab crawled up to the station approach, I was getting a bit satirical,
faute de mieux
, and thinking, well, for sure A. S. Byatt would have managed it better: only I can't quite think how.

When I got to the station, and paid the driver, I found I had only £1.50 left. The cash machine was out of order. Of course, I had a credit card, and if there had been a dining service I could have paid for my breakfast on board. But there was, the announcement said, “a buffet car, situated toward the rear of the train,” and five minutes after we pulled out a boy came to sit beside me on my right: one of the sons of the town, eating from a cardboard box a grayish pad of meat which shined his fingers with fat.

W
HEN
I
ARRIVED
home, I threw my bag into a corner as if I hated it, and standing in the kitchen—last night's washing up not done, and two wineglasses, I noticed—I ate a single cheese cracker dry out of the tin. Back to work, I thought. Sit down and type. Or you might just die of a surfeit.

In the next few weeks, my biography took some unexpected turns. Aunt Virginie and the Mexican got into the text quite a lot. I began to make versions in which Aunt Virginie and the Mexican ran off together, and in which (therefore) my subject had never been born. I could see them speeding across Europe on an adulterous spree, accompanied by the sound of shattering glass: drinking spa towns dry of champagne and breaking the bank at Monte Carlo. I made up that the Mexican went home with the proceeds and led a successful revolution, with Aunt Virginie featuring in it as a sort of La Pasionaria figure: but with dancing, as if Isadora Duncan had got into it somehow. It was all very different from my previous work.

I
N THE EARLY
autumn of that year, three months after my trip east, I was at Waterloo Station, on my way to give a talk at a branch library in Hampshire. I had no opinion, now, of the catering anywhere in England. As I turned from the sandwich counter, balancing a baguette I meant to carry carefully to Alton, a tall young man bumped into me and knocked my purse flying from my hand.

It was a full purse, bulging with change, and the coins went wheeling and flying among the feet of fellow travelers, spinning and scattering over the slippery floor. My luck was in, because the people streaming through from Eurostar began laughing and chasing my small fortune, making it a sport to chase every penny and trap it: perhaps they thought it was converse begging, or some sort of London custom, like Pearly Kings. The young man himself bobbed and weaved among the European feet, and eventually it was he who emptied a handful of change back into my purse, with a wide white smile, and, just for a second, pressed my hand to reassure me. Amazed, I gazed up into his face: he had large blue eyes, a shy yet confident set to him; he was six foot and lightly bronzed, strong but softly polite, his jacket of indigo linen artfully crumpled, his shirt a dazzling white; he was, in all, so clean, so sweet, so golden, that I backed off, afraid he must be American and about to convert me to some cult.

When I arrived at the library, an ambitious number of chairs—fifteen, at first count—were drawn up in a semicircle. Most were filled: a quiet triumph, no? I did my act on autopilot, except that when it came to my influences I went a bit wild and invented a Portuguese writer who I said knocked Pessoa into a cocked hat. The golden young man kept invading my mind, and I thought I'd quite like to go to bed with someone of that ilk, by way of a change. Wasn't everybody due a change? But he was a different order of being from me: a person on another plane. As the evening wore on, I began to feel chilly, and exposed, as if a wind were whistling through my bones.

I
SAT
up for a while, in a good enough bed in a clean enough room, reading
The Right Side of Midnight
, making marginal annotations, and wondering why I'd ever thought the public might like it. My cheek burned on a lumpy pillow, and the usual images of failure invaded me; but then, about three o'clock I must have slept.

I woke refreshed, from no dreams: in a cider-apple dawn, a fizz and sharpness in the air. Out of bed, I rejoiced to see that someone had scrubbed the shower. I could bear to step into it, and did. Cold soft water ran over my scalp. My eyes stretched wide open. What was this? A turning point?

I was on the crowded train for eight, my fingers already twitching for my notebook. We had scarcely pulled out of the station when a grinning young steward bounced a laden trolley down the aisle. Seeing his Ginormous Harvest Cookies, his Golden Toastie Crunches in cellophane wrap, the men around me flapped their copies of the
Financial Times
at him, and began to jab their fingers, chattering excitedly. “Tea?” the steward exclaimed. “My pleasure, sir! Small or large?”

I noticed Large was just Small with more water, but I was swept away, infused by the general bonhomie. I took out my purse, and when I opened it I saw with surprise that the Queen's heads were tidily stacked, pointing upward. And was there one more head than I'd expected? I frowned. My fingers flicked the edges of the notes. I'd left home with eighty pounds. It seemed I was coming back with a round hundred. I was puzzled (as the steward handed me my Large Tea); but only for a moment. I remembered the young man with his broad white smile and his ashen hair streaked with gold; the basted perfection of his firm flesh, and the grace of his hand clasping mine. I slotted the notes back inside, slid my purse away, and wondered: which of my defects did he notice first?