Portobello (6 page)

He was soon cursing the kind of people who don't need to leave
for work until 9.30 or ten. What did that rich guy do for a living?
Never having worked himself, Lance knew very little about other
people's jobs. In a bank, he thought vaguely, or was he something
called a stockbroker? He had no idea what this might be. Maybe
the man didn't work at all. Maybe he stayed in all day. He was
deciding this must be true, that the guy stopped in to guard all
that stuff he'd got in the house, when the front door opened and
the white-haired man emerged. He was dressed today in a dark
suit, white shirt and a grey tie with some sort of pattern on it in
purple. Lance thought the bag he was carrying was called a briefcase.
And now he was in a dilemma. Should he follow him to find
out where he went or take advantage of his absence to get round
the back of the house? The latter option. White Hair wouldn't be
carrying that case thing if he was just going down to the shops.

First, though, he tried ringing the doorbell. There might be a
woman in there. Just because he hadn't seen a woman the evening
before didn't mean the guy hadn't a wife or a girlfriend on the
premises. He rang again, waited, listened at the letter box for a
movement from inside. There was nothing. At the side of the house,
the detached side, was a small barred window. He hoisted himself
up, peered between the bars. He could see the hallway he had
passed through on his extremely short visit. No one there, no movement.
He tried the side gate. It had no latch but a handle that
turned and it was a solid gate, made from some sort of hardwood.
Of course it was locked or bolted on the other side. There was no
way he could get over it without a pair of steps.

Lance walked down Chepstow Villas into Pembridge Villas where
he soon turned right from where he calculated which garden of these
houses backed on to the guy's place. A woman was staring at him
out of a ground-floor window. He carried on walking until he came
to the next cross-street. A house about halfway down was being renovated.
Scaffolding covered the front of it and a sign in the front garden
said, 'Williams and Dhaliwal, Specialists in Elegant Restoration'.
However, Williams and Dhaliwal weren't working today, though they
had left a good deal of their equipment about, including a pair of
aluminium steps resting against the lowest bar of the scaffold.

People who see a man carrying a pair of steps don't assume he
has stolen them. They suppose he is on his way to a building job.
Without more thought, Lance picked up the steps, which were
very light, rested them on his shoulders and set off back to old
White Hair's. He put the steps up against the side gate, climbed
up them, pulled them up after him and dropped down on the other
side. Silence. No shocked yells. No cries of, 'What do you think
you are doing?'

As he had thought, the windows at the rear weren't barred. No
doubt White Hair thought that no one could get into that garden
from the back and maybe he was right. The high walls surrounding
it were covered in creepers, which looked to Lance like the prickly
kind you couldn't climb up. Only a cat could climb them and one
had, the stripy devil that had raked its claws across his fingers.
From among the thorny leaves it stared malevolently at Lance,
unblinking and perfectly still. Never mind. He wasn't going to
climb any walls. Some awareness of danger kept him from going
boldly up to the french windows. It was as well for him it did, for
as he crept up to a small sash window to take a look inside, a roar,
a crescendo of sound, held him frozen there on the paving. A
vacuum cleaner. It was a Hoover starting up. Without going any
closer, he could see a woman plying this machine up and down a
carpet, like someone mowing a lawn.

This woman must have arrived while he was walking round the
block looking for a way in. She had her back to him now but was
about to turn round. He ducked down and went back on all fours
the way he had come. How long would she be in there? Hours?
There were no ground-floor windows on this side of the house so
no possibility of her seeing him unless she came out into the
garden. He undid the bolts on the side gate and turned the key,
listening all the time to the rise and fall of the Hoover's bray. What
to do with the steps? If he took them with him, where could
he dump them? By this time he had moved them out into the
front garden and locked the gate behind him. He was scared to
take them back to where he had found them. In the end he
slipped the key into his pocket and left the steps behind, leaning
up against the house wall.

He'd go back again next day. After 8.45 when the old guy went
out and before 9.30 when that woman came in. The chances were
no one would notice the gate was unbolted or that the key was
missing.

The private wing was newly built but that part of the hospital
Ella had come from had changed very little from the old
workhouse it had once been. Her patient had been in a
mixed ward, shared by old men and old women, and hated by both.
That at any rate would not have been allowed in Victorian England
when this place was built. She went up to the streamlined green
glass desk to ask for Joel Roseman, fulminating inwardly against
the government (or maybe the Primary Care Trust) and its promises
to put an end to this state of affairs, and was told he was in
Room Five. She found him not in bed but asleep in an armchair.
Ella saw a man in his thirties, dark-haired, rather good-looking,
dressed in jeans and a T-shirt with a blanket over his knees. The
room was very warm and the windows were shut.

Ella sat down in the other chair, the one on the opposite side
of the bed. He woke, as she knew he would, but instead of taking
her for yet another therapist come to manipulate him, he started
and then he stared.

Ella got up and held out her hand. 'How do you do? I'm Ella
Cotswold, Dr Cotswold, but I'm not here professionally. I've brought
you a cheque for the money you lost.'

He blinked and, seeming to shrink away from the brightness of
the window, put out his hand and took the envelope. 'That's very
kind of you. I thought for a moment you were – well, someone
else.'

'How are you?'

'I'm sort of OK,' said Joel Roseman. 'Only it's too bright in here
for me. Just a moment.' He reached for the drawer in a bedside
cabinet and took out a pair of large black sunglasses. They obscured
a good deal of his face. 'I'm supposed to be going home soon.'

'You must be looking forward to that.'

He was silent, opening the envelope, contemplating the cheque.
'This signature, that's the man I spoke to on the phone? Is he a
friend of yours?'

Ella nodded. She wished she could say Eugene was her fiancé
but she couldn't. Not yet. 'You've someone to look after you when
you get home?' she asked in doctor mode.

'My mother will come over sometimes.' He moistened his lips,
leant towards her across the bed. The black glasses turned his
face into a mask. 'My father doesn't have anything to do with me.
We don't speak. Well, he doesn't speak to me.' The voice changed
and became a child's, confiding, innocent, naive. 'He pays, though.
He pays for everything. They'd call me a remittance man, wouldn't
they?'

'Perhaps,' Ella said. 'I don't know.'

'Are you a GP?' When she nodded again he said, 'I haven't got
a doctor. I mean, I'm not on a doctor's list. Of course, I've got
doctors in here, lots of them. Do you take private patients?'

Ella tried not to let her astonishment show. 'I have two or three
friends who come to me privately.'

'When I get out of here could I be your private patient? My pa
will pay, there won't be any difficulty about that.'

Nonplussed, she said, 'You don't know me, Mr Roseman.
Perhaps you should wait until you get home before you make
decisions like that. I'll give you my card and you can phone me
if you want to.'

Joel Roseman took a long time reading the card. He took his
sunglasses off, put them on again, turning the card over, rereading
it. He put it in his jeans pocket, handling it more carefully than
he had the cheque. 'I won't tell you what's wrong with me now
if you don't mind. That can keep till I'm your patient. You'll think
it strange, I know you will, but it's all
absolutely true.
'

She got up, sure she would never see him again. 'Goodbye. I
hope all goes well for you.'

'I'll tell you when next we meet,' he said.

Going into a Tesco Express in Kensington High Street for a
pint of semi-skimmed milk, he had come upon a metal rack
in front of the counter crammed full of packets of Chocorange
and Strawpink. He stood in front of them, contemplating them
sadly. It was too late. Tesco of all places, Tesco, which he had
always affected to despise! How happy this discovery would have
made him a week ago. This meant it wasn't only in this Express
but surely in all, in all the main stores too and the Metros including
the one in the Portobello Road, a stone's throw away. And such
an impersonal place too, five bored-looking mechanical youngsters
lined up behind the checkout, indifferent to what customers
bought or didn't buy. He took a packet off the shelf, put it into
his basket, then put it back again. Quickly he turned away and
took his milk up to the checkout.

Once out of the shop, he began to regret not taking the
Chocorange with him. Surely he could have taken one packet,
made it last two days or three. It was harmless, after all. He
wasn't talking about crack cocaine, for God's sake. But he didn't
go back to the Tesco Express. He comforted himself with selfcongratulation.
It was three days now that he had been without
a Chocorange and it had been bearable. There was a lot to be
said for not having the things in the house, for he knew that,
even if he had put a packet on top of a cupboard he would need
a ladder to reach, he would have fetched that ladder and climbed
it. Best not to put temptation in his way and this thought brought
him a kind of euphoria that lasted for most of the afternoon,
enduring even when the man who came in regularly to walk up
to the Rothko, eye it, finger its frame but postpone any decision
he might make about it, returned for the last time to say he had
definitely decided against it.

Dorinda was wrathful. 'These people have the most colossal
nerve. And there's absolutely nothing one can do.'

'Nothing at all,' said Eugene. 'It's time we changed the window.
We could try some of those minor Pre-Raphaelites. Well, maybe
two. The girl walking with her baby in the woods, I think, and
the woman waiting for the lifeboat to come back. Oh, and that
famille noire
vase. Jackie can do it.'

Look at the upside of your self-denial, he told himself. There
will be no more pretending you've a sore throat or you've been
eating a chocolate. No more removing the thing from your mouth
in a tissue when a potential customer comes in. The days of never
passing a pharmacy without wondering if they stock the things,
those are gone. Secrecy is past. A small voice somewhere inside
him said, 'But you like secrecy, it's what you do.'

Now, for instance, as he chose two paintings among the Pre-Raphaelites,
taking a long time over whether he preferred the girl
and her baby or the wounded soldier and his wife, he told himself
that at least he no longer had to fear Jackie's observant eye when
she spotted the telltale bulge in his cheek. He carried the painting
into the window, moved the Chinese vase a little off-centre and
sent her to find a length of yellow damask to drape an easel.

The craving had suddenly become very bad. He took a deep
breath, which made Jackie turn to look at him. 'Are you OK,
Eugene?'

'I'm fine,' he said.

Leaving her to finish, he went into the little kitchen at the back
of the gallery and filled a glass with water from the tap. Water
sometimes helped, but not this time. There was nothing to be
done but bear it. He walked home, telling himself that he had
been shut into a prison but there was a door to his cell that he
had opened by exerting willpower. He should be proud of himself.
He had said no and walked past those shops. He had put his
hands in his pockets, turned his head away and walked past.
Perhaps he should tell Ella. He could tell her now he had given
up. But wouldn't it be better and wiser to keep his addiction and
his conquest of it a secret?

Once in the house, he thought how only a few days before he
would have put six packets into the secret drawer in the kitchen,
four into the carved drawer in the black oak table and the rest
into various pockets in his coats and jackets, keeping one out for
dipping into during the course of the evening. No longer. The
feeling of deprivation was profound, a sensation of emptiness and
that nothing he might do could be of any value. A vast interminable
evening stretched ahead of him, unrelieved by a secret
helping himself to a Chocorange while Ella was in the kitchen or
having a bath.

The doorbell rang.

He wasn't expecting anyone and for a brief moment his thoughts
went to the young man without a name who had tried to claim
the hundred and fifteen pounds. But why should he come back?
Eugene went to the door.

A man in an orange day-glo anorak over dirty jeans stood on
the step, his face convulsed with anger. In his left hand he was
carrying a lightweight aluminium stepladder. 'I could have the law
on you,' he shouted when Eugene opened the door. 'You're lucky
I haven't got on to the police already.'

'I have no idea what you're talking about,' Eugene said.

'You didn't
borrow
my steps from
my
building site in Pembridge
Crescent? Oh, no. You didn't have the bloody nerve to leave them
stuck up against your house. You don't know a fucking thing about
it, do you?'

'Well, no, I don't. I've never seen that – that ladder before.'

The builder flapped his right hand in a gesture of despair, said,
'Bloody toffee-nosed creep,' and retreated down the steps, carrying
his stepladder. When he was out of sight, Eugene went up to the
side gate where the steps had apparently been. If they had been
there earlier he wasn't much surprised that he hadn't noticed
them. He wasn't particularly observant of domestic detail and
usually attributed this deficiency, if deficiency it was, to his mind
being on higher things. He felt the side gate and noted that it
was locked. Was it possible that Carli his cleaner had helped
herself to the stepladder and left it there? It seemed unlikely and
unwise to ask her. She might take offence and leave, and then
where would he be?

He couldn't have a Chocorange, so he decided to calm his
disturbed nerves with a drink. It surely proved his addiction wasn't
as intense as he had feared. A real addict would need his fix more
than any possible substitute. A large gin with a little drop of tonic
worked wonders. He reclined on the raspberry-coloured chaise
longue, admiring his surroundings. His beautiful furniture, exquisite
porcelain and glass, and his carefully chosen extravagantly
draped curtains always calmed him and put him in a good mood.

He sighed and thought of Ella who would be along when her
evening surgery ended in ten minutes' time. Tonight he would
take her somewhere especially nice for dinner but, before that,
over another gin for himself and a dry sherry for her – but no, it
should be champagne. He went off to the kitchen to put a bottle
of Moët on ice. Before that, as the soft late-spring dusk began to
close in, he would propose. Her perpetual presence in his house
would be the best inhibitor of his dependency he could think of.
He had given up, he told himself. It was over and now was the
time to make this major change in his life. The sight of her lovely
face daily across the breakfast table and nightly at drinks time,
would keep him on the straight and narrow . . . Keep him? There
was no question of his lapsing. Not now. He had got over the first
day, the second and the third. Those were the first steps that
counted.

She arrived a little sooner than he expected, looking almost
prettier than he remembered. She should always wear dresses, he
thought, dresses of floral silk with that crossover neckline effect,
so flattering and sexy on a woman with a large bosom. He hadn't
got a ring but they could buy one together tomorrow and no
expense should be spared.

'My darling, champagne for us this evening. Will that be nice?'

'Lovely,' said Ella. 'But I have to tell you about Mr Roseman
and the cheque first.'

'Oh, no, please, spare me. I'm sure you did it all perfectly. You
always do everything perfectly.'

Ella laughed. 'Just as you like. Why the champagne?'

But Eugene had gone outside to fetch it. She wouldn't have
told him very much, anyway, she thought. Nothing about that
strange stuff Roseman had hinted at. Soon, if he carried out his
promise – threat? – of becoming her private patient, she wouldn't
be able to reveal anything of what he said to anyone else. Eugene
came back with the champagne and two cut-glass flutes on a black
japanned tray. The wine was poured, he raised his glass to hers
and the flutes touched with a delicate ring.

'Going down on one knee is a bit absurd, Ella, wouldn't you
agree?'

Awestricken, she whispered what she had murmured to Joel
Roseman, 'I don't know.'

'Still, I'll try it.' Eugene knelt down, surprising himself by the
ease with which he did this and with no creaking of joints. 'I want
you for my wife more than anything in the world. Will you marry
me, Ella? Say you'll marry me.'

She nodded. 'Yes, oh, yes.'

In the middle of the night Eugene got up to fetch himself a
glass of water. Ella was fast asleep, a half-smile on her lips,
one white arm lying outside the barely whiter quilt. He had drunk
rather a lot the evening before but refused to fill his tooth glass
from the cold tap in the en suite bathroom. All his life he had
been told, first by his mother, then by various women including
Ella, that it was unwise to drink from any but the mains tap in
the kitchen. Upstairs, water had stood too long in a storage tank
where bacteria would abound. So he went downstairs and drank
two glassfuls straight down, filled another glass and, at the top of
the stairs, used the toilet (which he would never have called a
toilet) in the other bathroom so as not to wake Ella with the sound
of the flush.

The craving for a Chocorange sweet had started from the
moment he woke up but it had been mild at first, controllable.
Now, with his thirst quenched, it began to rage. He reminded
himself that he had none in the house. There ought to be a version
of the nicotine patch for those giving up sugar-free sweets. Some
sort of throat pastille? The irony didn't escape him. You began on
sugar-free sweets to avoid sugar with its weight-gaining potential
and had recourse to sugar to avoid an addictive substitute. Suppose
that somewhere in the house there was just one left? He opened
the door of the little wall cupboard and found only a lone tin of
Fisherman's Friend. That was no good, he couldn't stand the taste
of liquorice. Four drawers underneath seemed only to hold the
usual accumulation of bathroom rubbish, scattered cotton buds,
hairclips and a pot of lip gloss left behind by a one-time girlfriend,
used and unused tissues, combs with missing teeth, half-used
tubes of hair gel and several toothbrushes, their bristles worn
down and clogged with toothpaste. Except the lowest drawer. He
opened that one and checked the cry of surprise and joy he would
have uttered if Ella hadn't been in the house.