Portobello (12 page)

Eugene had sold a picture by a painter who worked in the
style of Max Ernst, just a small drawing called
Dagon's
Wife
, which Ella found rather frightening, a woman with
a cat's head in a silver dress and holding a fan made of bones, but
he had got a large sum for it, his share of which, he said, would
pay for their wedding. He was determined this must be lavish, her
wedding dress not a bit like the one in the picture, but to be made
by the designer who had made the Duchess of Cornwall's. Ella
had got her own way only about the venue for the ceremony, not
a church, not a register office, but a beautiful old house in Chiswick,
licensed for marriages. The reception, which Eugene in his oldfashioned
way called the 'wedding breakfast', though it would be
a late lunch, was to be at the Connaught.

They had had a not very acrimonious argument about Ella's
insisting on visiting this private patient of hers, Joel Roseman.

'I don't want to go over there, darling, you must know that. I've put
him off twice and now I must go. He wants to tell me something.'

'Yes, I know. You said. But though you won't tell me what it's
about you say it's not a physical illness he has. Isn't this a matter
for a psychiatrist?'

'He's seeing a psychiatrist, Gene, but he doesn't like her. I think
he'll give up. And you know I can't tell you things he tells me in
confidence. Well, I don't think I can, though if they're not about
an illness . . . I honestly don't know. It's just better not.'

With that Eugene had to be content. It wasn't that he was in
the least jealous of Joel Roseman. Of Ella's love for himself he had
no doubt. But at present he needed to be with her every moment
of the time neither he nor she was working. She had seemed, he'd
noticed, rather surprised, if gratified, by his new attentiveness and,
apart from this insistence on dancing attendance on Joel Roseman,
accepted it delightedly. Of course he loved her, there was no doubt
of that, but the truth was that while they were together his consumption
of Chocorange sweets was severely curtailed. He was obliged
to pass hours without one. And this withdrawal from his fix, whole
evenings of abstinence, a Saturday and Sunday in Rye and another
in Gloucestershire, whole weekends, he hoped would help him in
his phasing out. Unfortunately, what always happened was that as
soon as he and Ella parted he was unable to resist gorging on the
bloody things, one after another until half a pack was gone. It was
in this way that he thought of them now, the classic addict's reaction,
needing but hating, longing but loathing. The bloody things.

The sale of the quasi-Ernst, acknowledged decorously in the
gallery with the purchaser and Dorinda in several glasses of champagne,
he had personally and privately celebrated by dashing down
to Elixir and tearing open a pack of Chocorange before he was
even out of the store. Half the pack was eaten while he sat on a
seat in Kensington Gardens and when he closed it and put it in
his pocket he felt, for the first time, despair. In every respect his
habit had become odious to him. He was a dignified man and no
dependency could be more undignified than a craving for the sort
of sweets guzzled by children and old ladies. It might also be seriously
bad for him. Could you ingest vast daily quantities of a
chemical sugar substitute without doing yourself enduring harm?
The secrecy too appalled him. He knew he was naturally secretive
but only to the extent of not wanting casual acquaintances and
employees to know his private business. With regard to these
wretched, horrible, bloody, lumps of caramel gunge, he had
constructed a whole covert, hidden, humiliating world of pretence
and lies, sneaking around pharmacies and stores to find his fix,
inventing a serious disease for himself to cover an addiction as
compelling and overpowering as if it had been heroin that enslaved
him. And the phasing out wasn't a success. Or, rather, it was only
when his life was calm and stress-free. Give him an hour or so
with a client who couldn't make up his mind to buy or not to buy,
give him a disagreement with the Customs and Excise or his
accountants, and once it was past he was down the road to the
nearest pharmacy . . .

Sitting there on a seat under a spreading copper beech, Eugene
bent over and put his head in his hands, for once not caring who
saw him or what they thought.

She rang the bell and banged on the brass knocker but it was
a while before she could make Joel hear.

At last he came, trudging, bleary-eyed. 'I was asleep.' He peered
at her as if he had never seen her before. 'I sleep a lot. I don't
have much to do, so I sleep.'

It was brighter outside than the last time Ella had been to the
flat but darker in here. 'The dim halls of sleep and death' was the
phrase that came into her mind but she didn't know if this was a
quotation or she had made it up. The darkness seemed to carry
its own silence with it. She followed him into the living room where
the blinds were down and this time no lamp was on. On the brown
velvet sofa the cushions were crushed where his head had rested.

'I went to the hospital to have my check-up,' he said. 'The doctor
said I should start taking gentle exercise. I said what was gentle
exercise and he said walking. But I get very tired when I walk.
Mithras tells me not to walk, to rest.'

'Have you told Dr Peacock about Mithras?' Speaking the name
nearly made her shudder but she persisted. 'If you've started hearing
his voice you ought to tell Dr Peacock.'

'I'm not going to Dr Peacock any more.' He sat down, waved
her to a chair. 'I don't want someone like her. She doesn't tell
me what to do. She doesn't tell me anything. I don't like the way
she looks at her watch and tells me that's enough for today. It
upsets me.'

'Joel,' she said, 'you must see someone. Your condition needs to
be assessed and a suitable – well, a regime of drugs prescribed for
you. I should think,' she added uncertainly. 'I can't do that. I'm not
that sort of doctor.'

'But you're the doctor I want. You listen and you answer. You're
not like Dr Peacock.'

'I shall refer you to someone else, Joel. I'll find someone you
feel more comfortable with. Now you were going to tell me about
your father. Could we have the blinds up, do you think?'

He shook his head. 'I like it better when it's dark.' He made a
little sound, which might have been a sigh or only a rather strong
expulsion of breath. 'I don't think I could talk about it in the light.'
He looked at her and turned sharply away but it was a few seconds
before he began to speak. 'Pa never spoke to me again, I told you
that,' he said. 'My mother tried to get him to speak to me but he
wouldn't. He sent me messages by her. I mean messages about
money and school and going to university, that sort of thing. You
know who he is, don't you? He's Morris Stemmer, you'll have heard
of him.'

She had heard the name, she couldn't remember where. 'But
you're called Roseman.'

'It was my mother's name. He made me take it. He told Ma he
didn't want me called Stemmer any more. You know who he is,
don't you? They call him the king of the tycoons.'

Some head of an insurance company or the chief executive of
a huge syndicate? She never knew about things like that but she
would ask Eugene. He would know.

'He was punishing me because he said I'd killed Amy. He never
seemed to see that it was as bad for me as for him, I loved Amy
too and I had guilt as well. I told Ma that over and over and she
told him but it never made any difference. I left school but my A
levels weren't very good. I got into one of those universities with
a name no one had ever heard of and I stuck it for nearly two
years. Then I dropped out. I don't know what he thought, Ma
never said and I didn't ask.'

'Were you living at home?'

'I wasn't allowed to. He took a flat for me near my college and
he gave me an allowance, a big allowance, bigger than I wanted.
I told Ma but he just went on paying it into my bank account.
I had some jobs, unskilled stuff, the sort of thing illegal immigrants
take these days, cleaners and working in cafés, that sort
of thing. I worked in a sandwich factory for a while. All the other
people were Italians and we never spoke. I couldn't stand it so
I left.'

'If your father was giving you money why did you need to take
that sort of work? Couldn't you have trained for something? Done
a course?'

He said simply, 'I hadn't the heart.' And then, 'I never felt very
well, I was always tired. Ma said it was my imagination but it
wasn't, it was my heart. I literally hadn't the heart, you see, Ella.'

'Pa had bought this flat for me. Like I said, he bought it with
all this furniture and curtains and everything. I didn't have any
choice about it. By then I couldn't have worked if I'd wanted to.
I got so tired, especially in the evenings. I'd do nothing all day
except sometimes go to the shops but still I'd be wiped out by
seven. I'd fall asleep on that sofa. Ma wanted me to go to the
doctor but I didn't. Then I had that heart attack, which was how
I came to meet you.'

And have a near-death experience, she thought, or what he
thought was a near-death experience. The question she wanted to
ask was a therapist's question, not a doctor of medicine's but she
asked it. 'That place you went to that was beautiful but you thought
was hell, was that somewhere you knew? Was it familiar to you?'

He said nothing for a moment or two, then, 'I don't know. It
was a bit like Mossbourne, it had the white columns and a turret,
but it wasn't really very like. I tried to
make
it like that in my mind,
but I couldn't, it wouldn't work. The place I went to was a river
with grassy banks and at the end of it a city. The view was of a
city with domes and palaces and towers. It wasn't the house at
Mossbourne. That would be too convenient, wouldn't it? Hell as
the lake at Mossbourne where you could say everything began –
or maybe where everything ended.'

She gave him the name of another therapist, and said she would
phone this woman and tell her about Joel. The dimness was beginning
to oppress her, the unnatural dark, which almost anyone else
would have altered by pulling up the blind or switching on a light.
It was almost as if this contrived dusk was making it hard for her
to breathe. She found herself drawing in deep gulps of night-indaytime
air. Writing a letter for him to give Miss Crane, she had
to peer closely at the paper. The therapist's phone number, which
she could usually remember, she had to look up in her address
book.

Joel seemed to be listening. 'Can you hear the people next door?'
he asked her. 'I can hear they're talking but not what they say.'

She could hear nothing but she thought it might be best to say
she could. 'Maybe just a murmur.'

'I bought earplugs so that I couldn't hear it,' he said, 'but
they didn't make any difference.' He stared at her through the
gloom, leaning forward across the space between them. 'You
see, Ella, I'm not mad, I know it's not the neighbours I hear.
It's Mithras. He makes a noise like two people talking when
he's trying to get through. But he always does get through. He
will in a minute.'

For the first time since she was a child and her father had accidentally
driven into the back of the car in front (with no injury to
anyone) she wanted to scream aloud. She'd screamed then and
sobbed while her mother tried to comfort her. Now, thirty-five years
later and a responsible person, a doctor, she controlled herself and
no sound came till she said in a hoarse voice, 'You must see Miss
Crane and as soon as possible. You will, won't you, Joel?'

He nodded. 'I want to get better,' he said like the child he still
seemed to be.

* * *

While Mithras was talking to him, Joel found it impossible to
sleep. The voice, other-worldly, very low, to some extent like
an automaton's, droned quite softly, and sometimes another voice,
which he fancied was his own when he was a boy, answered him
or asked him questions. Because there were occasionally two
speakers he had been able to tell himself it was the neighbours
he heard. An argument or discussion went on in his head but afterwards
he couldn't say what it was they had been talking about. He
had absorbed enough pop psychology to expect Mithras and his
companion, his own other self, to tell him that certain people he
knew were his enemies and perhaps that they would kill him if he
didn't kill them first. This didn't happen or hadn't happened yet.

The strangest aspect of all this was that he could hear Mithras
and the other Joel talking and know they were speaking English.
He knew too that they hadn't, either of them, that kind of foreign
accent that would make sorting out what they said difficult. This
unknowing was the worst of it. Having hated Mithras's voice, tried
to explain it away and taken steps to block up his ears, he now
wanted very much to understand what was said. He felt excluded,
isolated and lonely. How could he teach himself to decipher their
conversation or simply interpret Mithras when he spoke on his
own? And how did he know his visitant was
called
Mithras?

The discussion came to an end and there was absolute silence.
Those who live in the country, come to London only seldom and
view all its doings with suspicion, believe everywhere is noisy,
night and day. There is no peace, no quiet and stress reigns. They
have no idea of the utter silence that prevails inside some of
London's mansion flats in the afternoon. Joel knew very well that
his neighbours made no noise. If they had, it would scarcely have
penetrated those walls. But for Mithras and the other one
(himself?) not a sound would reach the interior of this flat, and
when a neighbour came home from work he would hear no more,
and then only if his front door was open, than the whisper of the
lift rising and the turning of a key in a lock. The earplugs were
useless and he threw them away.