Portobello (26 page)

A lot easier now she knows . . . This was in such conflict with
what was actually the case that he could almost have laughed.
Except that he felt he would never laugh again. Without saying
any more to her, he went out into the hall and put on his coat.
The pockets were weighed down with Chocorange and Oranchoco
packs. For the first time in his life Eugene experienced the emotion
that is a combination of desire and loathing, and is usually called
a love-hate relationship. He pulled all the packs but one out of
his pockets and threw them on to the floor of the cupboard. It no
longer mattered if she saw them. It was too late.

But he waited until he was outside the door before splitting
open the pack. With a Chocorange in his mouth, its flavour not
at all diminished by the scene just past in the drawing room, he
put up his umbrella and began to walk along Chepstow Villas
towards the Pembridge Villas turn-off. The sweet was soon finished
and he immediately craved another.

What was he going to do? Not go home again. He turned round,
walked back the way he had come and towards the Portobello
Road, passing his own house but keeping his head turned away.
The rain had dwindled to a drizzle and stopped. He put down his
umbrella. The Portobello was just the same, only rather more
crowded, ablaze with lights, alive with music and laughter and
shouting. He went into the Earl of Lonsdale and bought himself
a glass of white wine. A Chocorange substitute. Pubs had never
really been his thing and, since knowing Ella, he had only once
been in one. The wine was sour and sharp but he drank it, unable
to find a seat and standing up at the bar. This was how it felt when
a carefully guarded secret was discovered. It had been the same
with the drink when a friend caught him in the men's room, swigging
covertly from a hip flask. The same? No, this was far, far
worse.

Going home was impossible. He considered finding a hotel. But
Londoners know nothing about hotels in their own city and besides,
he had no change of clothes with him. He put another Chocorange
into his mouth and wandered across the street among the crowds
to the Electric Cinema. There he went up to buy a ticket and
astonished the woman who asked which number theatre he wanted
by saying he didn't care, it didn't matter, and he would take whatever
she chose to give him.

It really didn't matter; he fell asleep as soon as he was in one
of the red leather armchairs that had replaced the old seating.
Someone further along the row woke him by pushing past his knees
when the lights came up. It was close on midnight but the streets
were still crowded. Not when he reached Denbigh Road, though.
He thought, I am a homeless person now, obliged to be a street
sleeper, and then he thought how Ella would have reproved him
for his callous insensitivity when he was healthy and rich and
successful with a home in one of the most sought-after districts
of any city in the world. Fool, he told himself, and he went home
at last to a dark and silent house.

Twice in the past weeks she had tried to phone him but got
no reply. Eventually, his mother had phoned her, speaking
in a bright gushing voice, to tell her that her son was 'enormously
better', thanks to taking Miss Crane's pills 'religiously', and
really there was no reason for her to see him again.The implication
was that the therapist had succeeded where Ella had failed.
Ella wondered if she was being paranoid in thinking this way or
if she was simply feeling rather low. No wonder if she was, after
what had happened with Eugene.

She had lain awake for much of the night, waiting for him to
come to bed, unsure whether he had come home. She had gone
downstairs to look for him but when she tried the study door, found
it locked against her. It must have been against
her
– who else?
That door was still locked in the morning and calling to him to let
her in had no effect. She went to work but phoned him before
seeing her first patient. Her relief when he answered was enormous.

'I'm fine,' he said. 'Just off to the gallery.'

'Gene, where were you? What happened last night?'

'I'll tell you later.'

She had never before, not even when they first knew each other,
heard that remote tone addressed to her. It was the way he spoke
to someone delivering a package – no, cooler than that, less polite
than he would be to the postman. Halfway through the morning
she phoned the gallery to be told by Dorinda that Eugene was with
a client but would call her back. No call came. She had no appetite
for lunch. It was her afternoon for calls, three of them to be made
to elderly bed-bound patients, the fourth to Joel. But this one she
made for something to do, for a way of passing the time, such a
new departure for her that she couldn't recall experiencing the
feeling before. His mother had told her she wasn't needed. Wendy
Stemmer wasn't his guardian. However strange he might be,
however ill he had been, he was in charge of his own life.

It was a view she quickly had to modify. As soon as Rita let her
into the flat she could see there had been radical changes. It was
a sunny day and the place was flooded with light. Whoever had
done this must have seen that taking down the blinds and replacing
the heavy velvet drapes with thin curtains revealed the shabbiness
of the furnishings, so much of this had been replaced with Ikea
tables while the sombre upholstery of the chairs was hidden under
stretch covers. The Caesars were gone and the ornate mirrors that
reflected them.

Rejuvenation had been done on the cheap. A lot of house plants
stood about, the kind that come from supermarkets rather than
garden centres. Ella found Joel in a room she had never been in
before, only seen dimly from its doorway. He sat at the old dining
table on one of the old dining chairs, holding a ballpoint pen above
a sheet of paper resting on a table mat.

'Hello,' he said, looking up, and she could tell at once from the
tone of his voice that the drug he was taking had deadened his
personality.

'How are you, Joel?'

'I'm fine.'

'Is Rita with you all the time now?'

'Only in the day,' he said in the same monotonous voice. 'Bridget
comes at night. They don't leave me alone.' There are two ways in
which that last phrase may be interpreted:
they don't let me be
isolated
or
they never stop harassing me.
'Ma comes. She doesn't
like it but she comes.'

'Did your mother get the new furniture?'

A profound boredom dulled his features. 'I suppose. Someone
did. They took away those men's faces, said they were bad for me,
made me brood.' He gave a little staccato laugh. 'I'm not in the
dark any more.' It was impossible to tell if he meant that literally
or metaphorically. She expected him to mention Mithras but he
didn't. 'I'm writing my memoirs.' The sheet of paper was blank.
'It's hard to start. I get an idea for a way to start but then I get
tired and I have to sleep.' An empty smile stretched his mouth. 'It
doesn't matter, does it?'

She thought she should do something, but what? He was well,
he was calm, he seemed content. Wasn't this better than when he
was haunted by an imaginary phantom, the voice of a god? She
watched him lower his head, put the pen to the paper, but on the
right-hand side of the sheet. With real horror she saw his hand
move the pen in linked circles and loops towards the left, a pattern
rather than writing, as his lips moved with a fishlike opening and
closing.

'I'll see you soon, Joel.'

She got up. The woman called Rita was hovering in the hall,
waiting for her to leave. As Joel's doctor, she thought she could
ask about his situation. Out of his earshot, she asked, low-lowvoiced,
if Mr Stemmer came to see his son.

'Only her,' Rita said. 'Only his mum.'

On her way home Ella tried to think of how she had first met
Joel. It had been when he was in hospital having his heart surgery
and she had brought him the money Eugene had found in the
street. He was a sick man then, or at least a recovering man, but
his ills seemed all physical. In those five months his mind had
grown sick and strange, and now it was as if he had been hollowed
out and only a shell of that man in the hospital remained. There
was nothing she could do, there never had been much. Her attention
now must be given to Eugene whom she was due to marry in
ten days' time.

She expected him to be at home by now. The house was empty.
She realised she had eaten nothing since breakfast and breakfast
had been only a slice of toast. The fridge was full of food, the
fruit bowl laden with oranges, bananas and the ripe figs that were
just appearing in the shops. Carli had left a new spelt loaf on
the bread board and beside it, in the cheese dish, a slice of fresh
Cheddar. She turned away from it all, went into the drawing room
where she stood at the window, gazing down the street in the
direction from which he would come. The phone rang and she
ran to answer it but the caller's was an ingratiating voice enquiring
if she wanted a new kitchen fitted. As she put the receiver down
she heard Eugene's key in the lock, the door close and his footsteps
move along the hall in a slow reluctant way quite unlike
his usual brisk pace.

Gemma was the loveliest thing ever to have been seen in that
grim room with its ranked tables, each with a chair on either
side of it, each chair occupied by a woman Lance set down as
deeply unattractive. A bunch of dogs, he described them to Gemma
who reproved him for his cruelty. She, he told her with unusual
flights of imagination, looked like a flower on a landfill site. Had
they dared, the other men would have whistled at her as she came
to take her seat opposite him in her pale-pink miniskirt, high black
boots and white fur jacket.

'It's not real,' she confided in him. 'I wouldn't wear real fur, not
when you know what they do to them poor little animals. How've
you been, lover?'

'I'm good,' said Lance, not because he felt well or happy but
because this was what he always said when asked this question.
'That Fize know you're here?'

'You must be joking. He'd kill me or get that Ian to do it.'

'Like that, is it? Now, listen, Gemma. I never done that fire.'

'I know that, sweetheart.'

Lance lowered his voice to a whisper. 'I was over in Pembridge
Villas in a house.' Now it came to confessing it he found himself
increasingly reluctant to state baldly what he had been doing. 'I
was – well, I mean, you know, I broke a window and I, you know,
got in. I'd been in before, had a look around and ate a chocolate
cake.'

Gemma started laughing. 'You what?'

'I ate a chocolate cake and some soup. The old woman what lives
there was away on her holidays, I mean the second time. I took
some stuff, jewels and stuff, you know, whatever. I come back with
the stuff in my backpack and there'd been that fire, only it was all
over and her next door and him too was outside, and they said
about Uncle Gib was OK and Dorian being dead and they thought
it was me . . .'

'Wait a minute, Lance. You've lost me. You mean, you was
breaking into this old lady's place on Pembridge, so you wasn't
burning Uncle Gib's house down? Is that what you're saying?'

'Yes,' said Lance simply.

'You'd better tell the fuzz, then.'

'They won't believe me.'

'They will. The lady'll have told them there'd been someone in
there and said what was missing and all. Look, lover, you have to
tell them. You want to get sent down for murder?'

'I don't know,' said Lance.

'I do. You could go inside for life and that's fifteen years. Maybe
the judge'd say –' Gemma put on an accent she would have defined
as 'posh' – 'I recommend this evil person serve at least twenty-five
years on account of he burnt a house down as well as murdered
a poor harmless visitor to our shores. He could, Lance, I'm not
kidding.'

'You reckon?'

'Look, if you won't tell them, I will. OK? I'll write them a letter.
Now you tell me the number of this house you broke into and the
lady's name and the time, right? Maybe I'll tell them about the
chocolate cake too. It'll sort of prove it was you.'

* * *

She went up to him, holding out her hands. He took a step
backwards, shaking his head. His face seemed to have accumulated
enough lines to age him ten years.

'What is it, Gene? What's the matter? Are you ill?'

Again he shook his head. He made a movement with his hand,
indicating that she should sit down, the kind of gesture a man
might make to a female stranger, courteous, remote. She hesitated,
then sat down rather heavily. They faced each other but his gaze
faltered and he lowered his head.

'Please say something, Gene.'

'There's only one thing I can say.' There was an undercurrent of
despair in his voice. 'I wish things were different but they're not.'
He seemed to be searching for words. 'We can't be married,' he
said at last. 'I can't marry you, Ella.'

She stared at him, slowly clenching her hands. Her voice came
at last, as hoarse as his had been. 'I'm not hearing this.'

He shrugged, his expression hopeless. 'I can't marry you,' he said
again.

'I said, I can't believe I'm hearing this.'

'I mean it. I can't marry you.'

'But why?' The two words came out like a cry from the heart.

He avoided answering. 'You can stay here. I mean, you can stay
indefinitely, for ever if you like. I'll go to an hotel. I'll do the
cancelling of all the – the arrangements. I'll tell everyone what's
happened. I'll try to make it as easy for you as I can.'

'You'll try to make the breaking of our engagement
easy
for me?'

'What else can I say, Ella? I can't marry you, that's all.'

'Don't you love me? You loved me yesterday, you loved me last
week.' She put her head in her hands but almost immediately
looked up, staring at him. 'Why? Why?' Events of the evening
before came back to her. 'It isn't – it can't be – it's not because of
those – those
things
I found?'

The deep flush had returned to his face. He lowered his eyes.
She saw a tremor start in his hands.

'It
is.
It's because I found those sweets. No, this is mad. It's not
possible. Is it possible?' His attitude of humility, of a meek yielding
to the inevitable, told her that it was. She jumped up, cried out,
'But it doesn't matter, darling. It doesn't matter. I can forget all
about it. I'll never mention them again. You can eat the wretched
things to your heart's content. I don't care.'

'But
I
do.' He spoke with quiet finality.

'You can't destroy both our lives because I found out you'd got
a harmless habit. For God's sake, it's not as if it was looking at
pornography online or stalking women or – oh, I don't know. You
can't split us up for that. We
love
each other.'

'I'm leaving now, Ella. As I said, I'll see to everything.'

He was shaking so much she thought he would fall. She went
up to him, trying to touch him.

'Ella, please don't. I have to go.'

She followed him out into the hall. It was as if she felt that so
long as she stayed with him, shadowed him, kept close, he would
be unable to carry out his threat. Yet she was afraid to touch him.
He kept his back turned to her. She walked round to face him
again but he turned away once more, took his overcoat out of the
cupboard, felt in the pockets, put the coat on. He picked up his
briefcase. She put out both hands and clung to his arm but he
loosened her grip with his free hand, finger by finger.

'You are making things worse for yourself and for me,' he said
in a remote voice.

Opening the front door, he stepped outside without looking back.
She followed him down the path but when he let himself out of
the gate, stopped and turned away. The front door was swinging
in the wind and she had no key with her. She ran back, grabbed
her bag with her key in it, and without attempting to find a coat,
ran down once more to the gate and the pavement outside. Eugene
had disappeared from view.