Repeat It Today With Tears (8 page)

‘It’s my boyfriend,’ she explained when I brought her black coffee, ‘We are finished but we can’t leave each other alone.’

Renata winced when Ali the chef banged through the door, his immense height accentuated by his inevitable companion, the little old man in a beret who was the washer-up. The little man worked in rubber gloves which extended past his elbows; he seemed to speak no English. Ali spoke only a little; Renata said that he knew all the wrong words. His moods transformed with rapidity, from anger to lechery, from melancholy to a loud, singing cheerfulness. At this moment he was already furious, prowling around the stainless steel kitchen in clog shoes and shaking his black curls. ‘Hey, you twos,’ he called us through the hatch, ‘you, bloody shits delivery don’t come, bloody shits.’

His voice was very deep and rolling; he pronounced bloody as if there were one o and two ds. I looked over at the clock which told the time with Coca Cola bottle hands, calculating the hours until I could revisit my father’s room. Ali muttered and swiped at the prep table with a cleaver. The little man, who seemed sometimes to assume the role of a placatory, long suffering spouse, tuned in their radio. A Neil Young song was playing. Ali began to hum along with it,

‘When you were young and on your own,
how did it feel to be alone…
Only love can break your heart…
yes only love can break your heart… ’

and then he slopped back to the hatch and rested his elbows there, tweaking at hairs in his beard and rolling his eyes at me in a grotesque pantomime parody of seduction.

‘You want to come in the alley with me, sugar pie?’

‘No.’ I was pairing knives and forks in red paper napkins.

‘I’m hot sex,’ he insisted, ‘real hot Ali.’

‘I don’t want to, thank you.’ I shook my head over the cutlery. Mireille, the French waitress arrived. She wore a scarlet cheesecloth smock without a bra beneath it. Her prim brown bobbed hair framed her face all of a piece.

‘Hey, Mireille, you don’t want to come in Ali’s alley, do you?’ He turned back to me, ‘Mireille don’t want to, she is lez. You is lez, ain’t you, honey?’

‘Fuck off,’ said Mireille, swinging her Millie Molly Mandy bob.

‘Fuck off you self,’ returned Ali, ‘bloody fucks to you.’

The restaurant was very busy and our apron pockets were weighed down with tips which we were not allowed to change in the till. At my break Ali, unexpectedly, brought me a plate loaded with all the specials from the menu. ‘You eat,’ he said, banging the plate down.

I looked at him questioningly.

‘You have a man now, you have to eat. Men like, you know, big all over. You know it’s the truth.’ He nodded to affirm his message.

At the end of the shift I washed away the restaurant smells in the staff shower. My hair was still damp when I walked down Kings Road and my scalp felt the chill edge to the air. The scent I used in those days was Diorissimo, it was like lily of the valley.

Jack’s writing on the card for the bell push was black italic. He was wearing the same navy blue jersey and he looked at me with a kind of reproof. ‘So, you came back then.’

Up in his room his manner was at first pedagogic, as though he must instruct me in the complicated parts of some theorem. ‘Listen, Susie, I’ve been thinking about this a lot since last night, well, all the time, actually… ’

He moved his thoughts along with his hands; the leaves and plantlets of the spider plant on the windowsill trembled slightly at the disturbance.

‘I think I have to tell you, first, about me, and then you decide… whether you really want to keep coming to see me. You know that I really don’t have anything to offer you… I am married, permanently, I suppose you could say. I’ve not been unfaithful, at all, before, to Olive – that’s my wife. Years ago, it was a different story, I was a different man… I behaved in ways that I am not proud of; I let people down, all sorts of people. Then, and it served me right, I got myself into a mess, I was drinking too much, I couldn’t work, it all sort of caught up with me. Then I met Olive and she… she’s solid, she helped me sort myself out. We got married and we have made a life together. It might not be a very exciting life, or what I once expected, but it’s what I can cope with. I can make a decent job of it. I owe Olive a great deal. I wouldn’t, ever, want to hurt her.’

‘Where did you meet?’

‘At Kingston, at Kingston School of Art, I taught a course there and she… she teaches there too, enamelling.’

My eyes were so big and so dark, then. It was easy to make
them look as if I was about to cry.

‘Look, Susie, look… what I suppose I am trying to say to you is that you, you are such a lovely young woman, I am immensely flattered… God, there must be young men queuing half way to Sloane Square for you, I should think…. But me, what could I possibly have to give you… ’

I stood up and went to look through the window onto Phene Street. I think Jack feared that he had managed after all to persuade me and that I was about to turn away and leave him. For a little while I watched the pub dog, grubbing and questing at the garden hedge. And then I stepped forward and kissed my father on his lovely mouth.

I knew that Jack was going back to Suffolk for the Easter weekend. I wondered what Olive looked like, but only in a disconnected, idle way, as I might have done on hearing that a new teacher was coming to the school. There was never any question that I should feel jealous of her. Neither did it occur to me that she should have any bearing on my relationship to my father. In loving Jack I was a zealot; there was no other point of view, no other belief system but mine.

In the Great Gear Trading Company somebody dropped a wallet. Julian picked it up and brought it behind the stall that I was watching. We ate a bag of marshmallows and wondered what we ought to do. Eventually Julian suggested that we should look inside first, before deciding.

‘Fuck me,’ he said, as it opened onto a substantial quantity of notes. We thought that we had better hand it in but then Julian remembered that he had an invitation to a party at the home of a girl in Weybridge. ‘I never thought I’d be able to go, but look… I can buy drink and things… you can come too. Her parents are
away and everything. Her dad’s an accountant and he looks after all sorts of people, there might be pop stars.’

‘No, I don’t think I will.’

Julian knew that in other days the prospect would have held great appeal for me. ‘But look, we can both get something really good to wear out of this… ’

‘No, really.’

He was surprised and also annoyed at my refusal. Not, I knew, for the sake of my company especially, but because he was nervy at the prospect of performing should sex arise and he wanted my conspiratorial reassurance that he would be good at it.

‘If you’re going to be like that I won’t bother.’ He picked at the bottom of his shoe which was blue with a narrow platform in a lighter shade. ‘Why are you being such a downer anyway, it’s really anti-social.’

After some minutes of ignoring each other Julian suddenly grinned, ‘I know, you crafty… you’ve got someone, haven’t you? Who is it, is it someone from the Potter? If it’s Scottie you do know that my mother will kill you, don’t you?’

I smiled but said nothing.

‘I’ll find out. I will, I can promise you that.’ Then he bent down under the chipboard counter and divided the cash into two equal sums for us. I went out and spent all mine on a silk shirt. I bought it from a black and silver shop owned by a former model and her photographer. He still took pictures of her, manipulating the images of her body into surreal zippered shapes suspended on coat hangers; there were postersize reproductions for sale. I was entranced by my shirt, by its costliness despite its exceptional plainness. It was the colour of vanilla ice cream and made from raw silk so that when you touched it you felt that the pads of your fingers might adhere.

When the market closed Julian’s harassed father, Peter,
arrived to drive him down to Surrey. In Oakley Street some women were unloading armfuls of flowers from the back of a car to decorate the church of Our Most Holy Redeemer and St Thomas More for Easter Day. One had a basket filled with yellow narcissus and blue hyacinth. The fragrance was so strong that it stayed suspended on the air for some time after she had gone.

On Easter Sunday morning Ron went out early to deliver chocolate eggs to his children.

‘There’s one for you there, if you want it,’ my mother said. In her mauve quilted dressing gown she had appeared to collect a tea tray and the
Sunday Express
to take back to bed. ‘We’re driving out somewhere later, Box Hill, probably. Ron might pick up his dogs, to give them a proper run, seeing as she never takes them out for a walk. You don’t want to come, do you?’

‘No, thank you.’

‘I don’t know when we’ll be back, we shan’t rush.’

‘I might stay at Alison’s.’ I had never mentioned the family’s remove to the estate on the old Croydon airfield.

‘Please yourself. I doubt that Lin will be home, she’ll probably help out down at the pub, now that she’s up and about again.’

My sister had spent some days in bed, following the termination of her pregnancy. She and my mother seemed to discount the matter. Because I found it upsetting I put away contemplation of it in a section of my mind that I could shut off. When they discussed the operation I used only part of my conscious awareness, in the same way as you can prevent yourself from breathing in a bad smell.

I supposed that my sister’s requirement for an abortion had made it easier for me to obtain the contraceptive pill from the elderly GP. Without question he had scrawled me an introduction to the family planning clinic on a slip of yellow paper. Lin’s introduction to the women’s surgical he had scrawled on a slip
of green paper. It was all the same hospital, opposite the tube station at Clapham South.

When the flat was empty I spent a long time making myself ready for my father. I knew that I looked very beautiful, apart from my fingernails. I was never adept at painting the nails of my right hand. I smudged them and went over the edges. I searched for remover among Lin’s things but found none. I looked at my hands critically as I walked towards the bus stop. There were families coming home from the Common. Little girls with white cardigans buttoned over their dresses. The afternoon was grey and it looked as if it would rain.

In Oakley Street Jack’s car was already back, like a huge shell beside the kerb. The rain had begun, soft and fine. When he opened the door and I first met his eyes on the threshold I was filled with awe at what I had done and at what I was about to do. We sat down opposite each other, me on the bed, and him on the armchair.

‘I don’t know, Susie, what are we going to do with you?’ He watched my face while I did not answer. ‘The thing is… I’m trying to be fair, to both of us. I’m not sure that you know what you want.’

‘I do.’

‘Do you, I wonder. By the way, I don’t know whether the blouse… and… and everything is especially for my benefit, but if it is, I have noticed, and it’s… it’s very lovely.’

‘I have the thing,’ I said. Beside me was my handbag, a flat satchel of turquoise suede with mushroom shapes appliquéd to it. I took out the box of contraceptive pills and held it up to show him, ‘It means…’

‘I know what it means.’ He stayed still, staring at me. I was
glad of the beautiful silk shirt, I knew that it would hold up well under his scrutiny. Suddenly he caught sight of my fingernails and leant forward to take up one of my hands. ‘What have you been doing?’ The excuse for action seemed quite to restore him.

‘Show me – look at it, Susie – it’s a mess.’ He shook his head in indulgent despair.

‘I know it’s a mess.’ One of my hands lay on one of his and I wanted to snap closed on it like an oyster shell and to mark his palms with my nails.

‘Do you want me to sort it out for you?’

‘Yes, please.’

He took a bottle from the painting desk and then manoeuvred his chair close to me; his long thighs were either side of mine. In places of habitual creasing, at the groin and at the knees, the lines of the cord nap on his trousers had worn away, as corduroy does. He tipped solution from the bottle onto small pieces of lint and began to clean each nail meticulously. It stung a little between the skin and the nail bed. His hair fell forward as he worked. More than once I saw the muscle twitch in his cheek. He continued in silent concentration and careful method until each nail was done.

‘There,’ he held out my hand to admire his work. I saw that against his hand mine still seemed as podgy as it had been at primary school when we had made patterns by drawing around our fingers.

‘Do you want me to re-do them for you?’ He looked up at me as he asked. I only nodded for my voice was gone. He himself was quite gruff. ‘All right, give me the stuff then.’

I found the bulbous little Mary Quant bottle from my bag. His eyes remained downcast as he spread my fingers and began to paint. I saw that the brushstrokes were deft and deliberate, using very little varnish. When he had finished the first coat he
lifted my hands and supported them in the air upon his as if it were the preliminary to some courtly dance. Then he blew on each finger end to help them to dry. When he painted the last nail for the second time I thought that my heart might burst out through my ears or throat.

‘There,’ he said, and placed my hands upon his knees. We both looked down at them; he rested his forehead against my bowed head. Slowly and deliberately, as though I were his pupil or his witness he asked me, ‘Do you know what’s going to happen now?’

I replied yes but the end was missing from my word.

‘And do you want it to happen, Susanna? Is it really what you want?’

I said yes again but I spoke the sound inside his mouth.

T

‘I cannot believe how soft your skin is.’ He was looking closely at a small area of my shoulder, inspecting it as experts examine sections of paint and pigment to date canvases. I heard footsteps on the landing outside, walking softly, but with a heavy tread.