Portobello (2 page)

Joel Roseman never walked with a purpose, a destination. He
wasn't going anywhere but mostly round in a sort of circle from
his flat in a mansion block at the eastern end of Notting Hill
Gate and back again. Once, when he first tried it, he had attempted
going out in the late afternoon but it was March and still broad
daylight. Next time he went out after dark and that was better.
Sometimes he walked clockwise into Bayswater, down to the
Bayswater Road and home again, sometimes widdershins, in a loop
up to Campden Hill and back to the High Street. Mostly he
wandered aimlessly.

For a long time now he had found life better in darkness. That
was why he dreaded the summer when it wouldn't start getting
dark till ten. But now it was April and exceptionally warm, light
too in the evenings but dusk coming at seven. He wore sunglasses,
a special pair in which the lenses were darker than usual. At home
he had several pairs of sunglasses but none with lenses as black
and smoky as these.

The allowance Pa had paid into his account regularly on the
tenth of the month had just come in on the previous day. Joel
brooded on Pa as he walked along, wondering in despair what made
him tick, why he was so cruel and how it was possible that a man
whose child had drowned could have
that
picture hanging up in
his house. He stopped thinking about it when he found a cash
dispenser in a bank wall at the bottom of Pembridge Road. The
sunglasses had to come off briefly while he drew out a hundred
and forty pounds. It came in twenty- and ten- and five-pound notes.
Carefully looking over his shoulder (as the bank said you should)
he put twenty-five pounds into the pocket of his jeans and the rest
into an envelope. This went into an inside breast pocket of his
rainproof jacket. There was no sign of rain but Joel possessed few
clothes and this jacket had happened to be hanging up, in the
dark, just inside his front door.

He was taking these precautions with his money because he
intended walking up the Portobello Road. It would be his first visit.
He put his sunglasses on again and the world went dark and rather
foggy. When she was young his mother had lived in Notting Hill
and she had told him – she went on speaking to him when Pa did
not – that if your house was burgled and your silver stolen the
police would advise you to go and look for it on the stalls in the
Portobello Road where you were likely to find it up for sale. This
had made Joel think that the market was a dangerous place, somewhere
to be careful, but by 7.30, he had decided, the stallholders
would be packing up. He was surprised to see that this was not
so. The place was blazing with light and colour, packed with jostling
people, voices and music, a flourishing trade still going on. When
the natural light was dying they had to make up for it artificially.
They never thought what it was like for people of his sort. He
blinked behind his glasses. According to his mother, Pa called him
a mole and sometimes an earthworm.

No one took any notice of him. He walked up the western
side, past knitwear shops and blanket shops and print and china
shops. It was a surprise to him to see any shops at all because
he had expected only stalls. These were there in abundance,
shops on the left, stalls on the right, and people, hundreds of
people, walking, dawdling, strolling between them and up the
roadway itself. All the people looked busy and they looked happy.
Joel could always spot happiness, he was an expert at noticing
it, perhaps because in everyone he personally knew it was absent.
On the other side of the road crowds were going home, heading
southwards for the tube and the buses. They looked happy too
and, the ones carrying bags and packages, satisfied or excited.
He went on, not stopping, not considering buying anything. There
was nothing he ever needed except food and not much of that.
He shopped for nothing else. The special sunglasses were his
last buy and he had had them for two years.

By the time he had been walking fairly steadily for twenty minutes
he came to the pub Ma had mentioned called the Earl of Lonsdale.
He crossed the road and turned down Westbourne Grove. No one
had looked menacingly at him while he was in the market and he
was beginning to think reports of the place had been exaggerated.
But it was still a relief to find himself among the genteel boutiques
and soon the gracious houses of this corner of Notting Hill. He
had begun to feel a little tired. Well, they told him he had a heart
problem. Young as he was, he had a bad heart.

It was very quiet. The poor live among strident voices, clatter,
crashes, deafening music, barking dogs, shrieking children, but
places inhabited by the rich are always silent. Tall trees, burgeoning
into spring leaf, line their streets and their gardens bloom with
appropriate flowers all the year round. Joel was reminded by the
silence, if by nothing else, of Hampstead Garden Suburb where
Pa and Ma had a big low-roofed house squatting in landscaped
grounds. Around here wasn't much like that but the peace and
quiet were the same, yet somehow uneasy, almost uncanny.

No one was about but for two men, not much more than boys,
loitering on an opposite corner. They wore jackets or coats with
hoods pulled down over their eyes and Joel had learnt from newspapers
he occasionally saw that hoods meant their wearers were
up to no good. They looked at him and he looked at them, and he
told himself that they would do nothing to him because they could
see he was young and tall and they didn't know that his pockets
were full of money. He looked poor in his old clothes, his ragged
jeans and that jacket with one sleeve torn and the other stained.
Once he had read somewhere about the assassination of the
Empress Elisabeth of Austria, how she had been walking on to a
boat, which was to take her across Lake Geneva, when she had
felt someone jostle her and she received a mild enough blow in
the chest. It was only when she was in her stateroom, some minutes
later, that it was realised she had been stabbed and was about to
die. This was how Joel thought afterwards of what happened to
him on the corner of Pembridge Crescent and Chepstow Road.
He had been struck, not in the chest but on the left shoulder and
from the back. He felt the pain grip him with iron claws down his
left upper arm.

Perhaps he cried out. He never knew. He fell or sank or plunged
to the ground. But he must have leant backwards at some point
for his head struck against the bellpush in a plastered brick pillar,
which was one of the gateposts of the house on the corner. Had
someone assaulted him, as someone had assaulted the Empress
Elisabeth? He forgot that he had a bad heart, he forgot everything
as he lost consciousness.

The two boys in the hoods crossed the street and stared fearfully
at this shabby long-haired man who lay spreadeagled on the
pavement. They thought he was dead. The front door of the house
behind those pillars opened. They ran.

If Joel had fallen forwards, his mother told him, no one and
nothing would have pressed that bell. He would have died. What
she didn't tell him, until a lot later and she was in a temper, was
that his father had said it was a pity he hadn't. As it was, the occupants
of the house had come out to see why their chimes were
ringing and ringing. They found him slumped against the pillar and
called an ambulance.

Just fifty years old, single still but not unattached, Eugene Wren
was a tall handsome man who would have looked young for
his age but for his white hair. It was thick hair, a glossy thatch,
but there was no doubt that it aged him. This was something he
minded but he was very careful not to let it show that he minded,
just as, though he chose his clothes with care and wore them with
appropriateness, he gave the impression of being indifferent to
his appearance. Only his girlfriend knew that his sight wasn't
perfect but that he wore contact lenses.

He was secretive. Why? Who can tell why we are the way we
are? Psychiatrists can. Innumerable books have been written tracing
our faults and foibles, fantasies, criminal tendencies, sexual tastes,
inhibitions and other peculiarities back to events in our childhoods.
Eugene had read a good many of them without being any the wiser.
He could have understood his secretiveness if when owning up to
something as a child he had been punished, but his parents had
been unvaryingly loving, easygoing and kind. In fact, he was encouraged
to be open. It made no difference. He kept hold of his secrets.
Like his mind, his house in Chepstow Villas held many secret
drawers and locked boxes.

One of his secrets was his addictive personality. He had been
a heavy drinker and had never given up drink but, by an almost
superhuman effort, cut down to a reasonable couple of glasses of
wine a day. That was before he met Ella, so he was able to keep
his one-time alcoholism a secret from her. The break-up with his
previous girlfriend, a long-term partner of several years, had
happened because she found the bottle of vodka he kept in the
bottom of a wardrobe he thought he had locked. His smoking was
impossible to hide. But as he had with his drinking habit, he eventually
conquered it. Several attempts were made at giving up, the
last and successful one helped by nicotine patches and hypnotism.
It had been horrible for Eugene to reveal his weakness to Ella, not
least of it the disclosing that he had a weakness. But when it was
over he was quite proud of himself and Ella was very proud.

'You can't really continue to smoke when you are going about
with a doctor of medicine,' he said to her with a light laugh.

For a while he was without an addiction, but not for long.

He hoped he wouldn't put on weight, though he didn't say this
to Ella, and when he did put it on he did his best to keep it secret.
The difficulty was that he tended to eat between meals. Once he
would have had a cigarette. Eugene called his habit snacking and
Ella called it grazing. To combat it he tried eating Polo mints but
he didn't really like the taste of mint and, besides, Polos had sugar
in them. Considering how he fulminated against gum-chewing,
especially against those who spat out their gum on to the pavement,
he couldn't take it up himself. Well, he
could
but it would
have to be done in secret and that would be just one more secret.
He was anxious not to succumb to deception with Ella. No doubt
he would soon propose to Ella and they would live happily ever
after, something he sincerely wished and thought likely. Then he
had what he called the fat bridegroom dream. He was standing at
the altar in a morning suit, marrying Ella, and when he looked
down to take the ring out of his pocket all he saw was his huge
paunch. Needless to say, he said nothing of this to Ella but
pretended to be indifferent to weight or girth.

It was a Saturday morning and he was on his way to the shops.
It would be a long walk, some of it perhaps not a walk but a
taxi ride. What he sought wasn't readily obtainable even in the sort
of shops whose business (he thought) was to sell it. On occasion
it was a weary quest he undertook. Although it had been going on
for no more than six weeks, sometimes he found it hard to remember
what he had done with his time before that day he went into the
pharmacy at the top of the Portobello Road.

But spring had come, the day was fine and his scales had just
informed him he had lost two pounds. Think of the positive things,
he told himself, think what a harmless indulgence this is, and then,
glancing down at the pavement, he saw the sprawl of litter. A
tumble of fish and chips remains, part but not all of a bright blue
polystyrene container, a can that had once held Red Bull and some
fragments of a meat pie. Eugene recoiled from this rubbish but
braced himself to remove it. The plastic carrier he always took
with him on a shopping expedition (in the interest of saving the
planet) he took out of his pocket and, covering his fingers with a
tissue, picked up and deposited inside it the remains of some
lowlife's supper. Underneath it – or, rather, behind it, up against
a garden wall, pillar and hedge – was an unsealed and bulging
envelope. When he picked it up he could see that inside were five
or six twenty-pound notes, a ten and a five.

Without counting the notes, he put the envelope into his pocket
before dropping the plastic bag into the next waste bin he passed.
Ahead of him he could see in the distance the swarms of people,
mostly young, heading for the Portobello Road market. It was always
the same on Saturdays. They poured off the buses and out of
Notting Hill tube station and charged along, talking and laughing
at the tops of their voices, in their weekly quest for bargains and
the companionship of their fellow shoppers.

As soon as he had the chance, Eugene turned left to avoid them.
Not that he disliked the Portobello Road, but he preferred it on
Sundays when it was half empty and you could see its buildings
and feel its charm. On weekdays he only went there now for one
purpose and he had been up to the pharmacy in Golborne Road
on the previous Tuesday. Today one of the other selected shops he
patronised must be visited. So now to the serious business of the
morning.

What would they think he was in need of and was off to buy,
those shoppers heading for the market whose indifferent gaze rested
briefly on him before passing on? If they thought about it at all
they would assume that a man seeking an addictive substance
would look for alcohol, tobacco, cocaine, heroin, amphetamines,
ecstasy, crack or, at the very least, marijuana. Eugene allowed
himself to feel vaguely glad that it was none of these he sought.

It had begun when he decided he must find some way to curb
his appetite. Some kind of slimming pills, he had thought vaguely.
But when first he turned out of the Portobello Road in the direction
of the illuminated green cross outside the Golborne Pharmacy,
it wasn't with slimming or appetite suppression in mind but in
search of a plug-in mosquito repellent for the summer ahead.
Though it was early March, on the previous night his sleep had
been disturbed by the whine of a mosquito in his bedroom and
he had spent a frustrating quarter of an hour flapping about with
a towel before squashing the thing. Paying for the device, he noticed
a row of packets of sugar-free sweets absurdly named Lemfresh,
Strawpink and Chocorange on the counter by the till. Probably
they tasted disgusting. But he picked up a Chocorange and read
the label on it:
Sugar-free, healthy, tooth-friendly
, it said,
only
4
calories per pastille
. Suppose they didn't taste too bad. He could
eat one halfway between breakfast and lunch, and one between
lunch and dinner or maybe two. At any rate, he could give it a try.
They had no sugar in them and very few calories.

He took two packets, one Chocorange and one Strawpink. It
was four o'clock and hunger was beginning to bite. Like every
container these days, the Chocorange pack was hard to open but
he got there. It held perhaps a dozen dark-brown lozenges.
Tentatively, Eugene put one in his mouth and was pleasantly
surprised by the taste. A rich chocolate flavour with a hint of sharp
citrus. Delicious, really. And no bitter aftertaste, which used to be
the case with sugar substitutes. He took another to confirm his
judgement, trying a Strawpink this time. Nice enough, with an
authentic flavour of strawberries but a bit insipid, not a patch on
Chocorange.

Why not keep some of these by him so that he could help
himself to one or two instead of snacking? Money didn't worry
him but if it had, these were cheap enough for anyone to afford:
seventy-five pence a packet. And he knew where to find them.
Golborne Road was ten minutes' walk away from his house. It
looked as if he had found the solution. No voice inside his head
said, 'Don't go there.' No small cautionary thought came to him,
telling him to remember the cigarettes, climbing from five to forty
a day, or the drinking, which started with two glasses of wine
and mounted to a bottle of vodka plus wine, and now was only
shakily reduced to two glasses once more. Don't go there was
unspoken or went unheard.

Should he tell Ella? Sucking a Chocorange, he had asked himself
that on the way home from the pharmacy. Of course. He must.
She would be pleased that he had found such a simple solution.
On the other hand, perhaps he wouldn't tell her. She, after all,
was a doctor and one who often said how much she disapproved
of additives, E numbers and the various inadequately tested chemicals
that found their way into food today. The Chocorange packet
carried a daunting list of the chemicals in it. She might try to stop
him. She might tell him it was healthier to have an expanding
waistline than fill up his body with junk.

'We're not talking about obesity,' she had said the other day
apropos of something else. 'Being a little overweight won't do you
any harm.' After all, she was a little overweight herself, though he
loved her the way she was.

But it should remain his secret. After all, he was a secretive
man and there was no use in pretending otherwise. Not to
himself. He might pretend to others but was that not the essence
of secretiveness?

* * *

Six weeks had passed since that day, which had also been fine
and sunny, much like this one, only today was hotter than had
been expected for April, but that, of course, was global warming.
It was hard not to be glad of its side effects, warmth and perpetual
sunshine. The trees were in the sort of full leaf usual three weeks
later, the cherry blossom was past and the lilac out. The gardens
of this part of west London had the exaggerated look of a seedsman's
catalogue illustrations, banks of pink and white blossom above
cushions of purple and rose, all overhung by frondy branches of
lemony green and a rich dark emerald. Six weeks. In those weeks
he had consumed a large number of packets of Chocorange and
now he was on his way to replenish his stocks. In them too he
had lost weight.

Visiting pharmacists was what this now regular Saturday morning
quest of his was all about. One of these was in sight, in a parade
of shops on the other side of Notting Hill Gate; he couldn't bring
himself to call in there. He had visited it last Saturday and the
pharmacist would remember such a recent purchase and, worse,
make some comment such as, 'You're really fond of these things,
aren't you?' or, most horrible and shame-making because almost
true, 'You must have your fix, mustn't you?'

He began to walk down Kensington Church Street where there
were no pharmacists but only antique dealers, picture galleries and
purveyors of eighteenth-century furniture. About to pass Eugene
Wren, Fine Art, in accordance with his nature, rather in the way
he wished for no comments on his behaviour from pharmacists,
he kept his eyes averted as if fascinated by the sight on the opposite
side of the street of a young man emerging from the florists
under an enormous bouquet of flowers. It wasn't that he doubted
all was well inside the shop but, rather, that he wanted to go about
his Saturday business unobserved. Dorinda Clements, in charge
in his absence, was entirely reliable. He sometimes made jokes
with valued customers, for instance, that she was 'management
incarnate' and that he trusted her more than he trusted himself.
But he didn't want her knowing his private business.

The only regular stockists of what he sought were the pharmacy
and cosmetics chain Elixir. They had become his default
store and, like Dorinda, unfailingly reliable, but again their assistants
were human, had eyes and memories, and were also capable
of remarking on his frequent visits. How satisfactory it would be
when you could do all your shopping without benefit of other
human beings and, as you already could in some supermarkets,
put your credit card into a machine, key in various numbers and
hey presto! You had paid for your goods. You had kept your own
secrets. Better not go to Elixir today, then, though he could see
the branch he most often used ahead of him in Kensington High
Street. That was the one where, a few weeks back, he had bought
his second packet of Chocorange, replacement for the one from
Golborne Road. And, as he had intended it should, Chocorange
had admirably fulfilled its purpose. As a between-meals snack it
worked, deadening his hunger and staving off grazing; the result
had been that he had lost those two pounds he had gained and
then one more. If it had a drawback, this was, paradoxically, that
it tasted too delicious. Eugene had never got over how something
synthetic and harmless could taste so good. The result was that
instead of one or two eaten in the morning he tended to take
three or four and, in the late afternoon, once he had started he
found it hard to stop. Sometimes, between three and reaching
home at six, he ate half a packet. Still, it worked and that was
the main thing. The unfortunate thing was that not all pharmacists
stocked them and those that did tended to run out.

He would try a place further along towards Knightsbridge. This
was a small shop called Bolus, run by a stout Asian man with a
chilly manner. That suited Eugene. He went in and picked up two
packets of tissues and a tube of toothpaste before raising his eyes
to the section on the counter where Mr Prasad presided. The
brown-and-orange design on the small packets always leapt to
Eugene's eyes before any other colours – you might have said that
in this situation there
were
no other colours – but their absence
was as immediately noticeable. The red and pink of strawberry
flavour were present, the green of mint but not a single pack of
Chocorange. Mr Prasad had sold out. Eugene might have admitted
to himself, but did not, that this was largely due to his own excessive
buying. After all, the inhabitants of this part of west London,
though no strangers to addiction in various forms, weren't prone
to spend their leisure time seeking sugar-free sweets.