Sweet Tooth (16 page)

Without a pause the band cruised straight into their second song, ‘My Rockin’ Days’. If they really were there, down among the punters and their pints, the Watchers would have been far closer to the speakers than I was. I guessed that this wouldn’t have been their kind of music. Those stolid A4 types would be more the easy-listening sort. They’d hate this throbbing jangling din. There was some comfort in that, but not in much else.

I decided to go home and read another story.

No one knew how Neil Carder came by his money or what he was doing living alone in an eight-bedroom Highgate mansion. Most neighbours who passed him occasionally in the street didn’t even know his name. He was a plain-looking fellow in his late thirties, with a narrow pale face, very shy and with an awkward manner, and no gift for the kind of easy small talk that might have led him towards the beginnings of some local acquaintance. But he caused no trouble, and kept his house and garden in good order. If his name came up in the rounds of gossip, what generally featured was the large white 1959 Bentley he kept parked outside the house. What was a mousy fellow like Carder doing with a showy vehicle like that? Another item of speculation was the young, cheerful, colourfully dressed Nigerian housekeeper who came in six days a week. Abeje shopped, laundered, cooked, she was attractive, and was popular with the watchful housewives. But was she also Mr Carder’s lover? It seemed so unlikely that people were tempted to
think it might even be true. Those pale silent men, you never knew … But then, they were never seen together, she was never in his car, she always left just after teatime and waited at the top of the street for her bus back to Willesden. If Neil Carder had a sex life it was indoors and strictly nine till five.

The circumstances of a brief marriage, a large and surprising inheritance and an inward, unadventurous nature had combined to empty Carder’s life
. It had been a mistake to buy so large a house in an unfamiliar part of London, but he couldn’t motivate himself to move out and buy another. What would be the point? His few friends and Civil Service colleagues had been repelled by his sudden enormous wealth. Perhaps they were jealous. Either way, people were not queuing up to help him spend his money. Beyond the house and car he had no great material ambitions, no passionate interests he could at last fulfil, no philanthropic impulses, and travelling abroad didn’t appeal. Abeje was certainly a bonus, and he fantasised about her a fair bit, but she was married with two small children. Her husband, also a Nigerian, had once kept goal for the national soccer team. One glance at a snapshot of him and Carder knew he was no match, he was not Abeje’s type.

Neil Carder was a dull fellow and his life was making him duller. He slept late, checked on his portfolio and spoke with his stockbroker, read a bit, watched TV, walked on the Heath now and then, occasionally went to bars and clubs, hoping to meet someone. But he was too shy to make approaches and nothing ever happened. He felt he was held in suspension, he was waiting for a new life to begin, but he felt incapable of taking an initiative. And when at last it did begin, it was in a most unexceptional way. He was walking along Oxford Street, at the Marble Arch end, on his way from his dentist in Wigmore Street when he passed a department store with immense plate-glass windows behind which was an array of mannequins in various poses, modelling evening wear. He paused a moment to look in, felt self-conscious, walked on a
few paces, hesitated, and went back. The dummies – he came to hate that term – were disposed in such a way as to suggest a sophisticated gathering at cocktail hour. One woman leaned forwards, as though to divulge a secret, another held up a stiff white arm in amused disbelief, a third, languorously bored, looked across her shoulder towards a doorway, where a rugged fellow in dinner jacket leaned with his unlit cigarette.

But Neil wasn’t interested in any of these. He was looking at a young woman who had turned away from the entire group. She was contemplating an engraving – a view of Venice – on the wall. But not quite. Through an error of alignment by the window dresser, or, as he suddenly found himself imagining,
a degree of stubbornness in the woman herself, her gaze was off the picture by several inches and was angled straight into the corner. She was pursuing a thought, an idea, and she didn’t care how she appeared
. She didn’t want to be there. She wore an orange silk dress of simple folds and, unlike all the rest, she was barefoot. Her shoes – they must have been her shoes – were lying on their sides by the door, discarded as she came in. She loved freedom. In one hand she held
a small black and orange beaded purse, while the other trailed at her side, wrist turned outwards as she lost herself to her idea. Or perhaps a memory. Her head was slightly lowered to reveal the pure line of her neck. Her lips were parted, but only just, as though she was formulating a thought, a word, a name … Neil
.

He shrugged himself out of his daydream. He knew it was absurd and walked on purposefully, glancing at his watch to convince himself that he did indeed have a purpose. But he didn’t. All that waited for him was the empty house in Highgate. Abeje would have gone by the time he got home. He wouldn’t even have the benefit of the latest bulletin on her toddler children. He forced himself to keep walking, well aware that a form of madness was lying in wait, for an idea was forming, and becoming pressing. It said something for his strength of mind that he made it all the way to Oxford
Circus before he turned around. Not so good, though, that he hurried all the way back to the store. This time he felt no embarrassment standing by her, gazing into this private moment of hers. What he saw now was her face. So thoughtful, so sad, so beautiful. She was so apart, so alone. The conversation around her was shallow, she had heard it all before, these were not her people, this was not her milieu. How was she to break out? It was a sweet fantasy and an enjoyable one, and at this stage Carder had no difficulty acknowledging that it
was
a fantasy. That token of sanity left him all the freer to indulge himself as the shopping crowds stepped around him on the pavement.

Later, he was not able to remember actually weighing up or making a decision. With a sense of a destiny already formed, he went into the shop, spoke to one person, was referred up to another, then a more senior third who refused outright. Quite out of order. A sum was mentioned, eyebrows were raised, a superior summoned, the sum was doubled and the matter agreed. By the end of the week? No, it had to be now, and the dress must come too, and he wished to buy several others of the correct size.
The assistants and the managers stood around him. Here they had on their hands, not for the first time, an eccentric. A man in love. All present knew that a mighty purchase was under way
. For such dresses were not cheap, and nor were several pairs of matching shoes, and the shot silk underwear. And then – how calm and decisive the fellow was – the jewellery. And, an afterthought, the perfume. All done in two and a half hours. A delivery van was made immediately available, the address in Highgate was written down, the payment made.

That evening, no one saw her arrive in the arms of the driver
.

At this point I got myself out of my reading chair and went downstairs to make tea. I was still a little drunk, still troubled by my conversation with Shirley. I felt that I would doubt my own sanity if I started looking for a hidden microphone in my room. I also felt vulnerable to Neil Carder’s loose grip
on reality. It could loosen my own. And was he yet another character to be ground under Haley’s narrative heel for getting everything wrong? With some reluctance, I carried my tea upstairs and sat on the edge of my bed, willing myself to pick up another of Haley’s pages. Clearly, the reader was intended to have no relief from the millionaire’s madness, no chance to stand outside it and see it for what it was. There was no possibility of this clammy tale ending well.

At last I returned to the chair and learned that the mannequin’s name was Hermione, which happened to be the name of Carder’s ex-wife. She had walked out on him one morning after less than a year. That evening, while Hermione lay naked on the bed, he cleared a wardrobe for her in the dressing room and hung her clothes and stowed her shoes. He took a shower, then they dressed for dinner. He went downstairs to arrange on two plates the meal Abeje had prepared for him. It only needed reheating. Then he went back to the bedroom to fetch her down to the splendid dining room. They ate in silence. In fact, she didn’t touch her food and wouldn’t meet his eye. He understood why. The tension between them was almost unbearable – one reason why he drank two bottles of wine.
He was so drunk he had to carry her up the stairs
.

What a night! He was one of those men
for whom passivity in a woman was a goad, a piercing enticement
. Even in rapture he saw the boredom in her eyes that brought him to fresh heights of ecstasy. Finally, not long before dawn, they rolled apart, sated, immobilised by a profound exhaustion. Hours later, aroused by sunlight through the curtains, he managed to turn onto his side. It touched him profoundly that she had slept the night through on her back.
He delighted in her stillness. Her inwardness was so intense that it rolled back upon itself to become its opposite, a force that overwhelmed and consumed him and drove his love onwards to constant sensuous obsession
. What had started as an idle fantasy outside a shop window was now an intact inner world, a vertiginous reality he preserved with the fervour of a religious fanatic. He couldn’t allow
himself to consider her inanimate because his pleasure in love depended on a masochistic understanding that she was
ignoring him, she disdained him and thought he was not worthy of her kisses, of her caresses, or even of her conversation
.

When Abeje came in to tidy and clean the bedroom, she was surprised to find Hermione in a corner staring out of the window, wearing a dress of torn silk. But the housekeeper was pleased to discover in one of the wardrobes a rack of fine dresses. She was an intelligent woman of the world and she had been aware of, and somewhat oppressed by, her employer’s lingering, ineffectual gaze as she went about her work. Now he had a lover. What a relief. If his woman imported a dummy to hang her clothes on, who cared? As the extreme disorder of the bedlinen suggested, and as she relayed it in her native Yoruba that night to embolden her muscular husband,
They are truly singing
.

Even in the most richly communicative and reciprocal love affairs, it is nearly impossible to sustain that initial state of rapture beyond a few weeks. Historically, a resourceful few may have managed months.
But when the sexual terrain is tended by one mind alone, one lonely figure tilling the frontiers of a wilderness, the fall must come in days
. What nourished Carder’s love – Hermione’s silence – was bound to destroy it. She had been living with him less than a week when he observed a shift in her mood, a near imperceptible recalibration of her silence that contained the faint but constant note, almost beyond hearing, of dissatisfaction. Driven by this tinnitus of doubt, he strove harder to please her. That night, when they were upstairs, a suspicion passed through his mind and he experienced a thrill – it really was a thrill – of horror.
She was thinking about someone else
. She had that same look he had observed through the store window as she stood apart from the guests and gazed into the corner. She wanted to be elsewhere. When he made love to her, the agony of this realisation was inseparable from the pleasure, sharp as a surgeon’s scalpel, that seemed to slice his heart in two. But it was only
a suspicion after all, he thought as he retreated to his side of the bed. He slept deeply that night.

What revived his doubts the next morning was a parallel shift in Abeje’s attitude as she served him his breakfast (Hermione always stayed in bed until noon). His housekeeper was both brisk and evasive. She wouldn’t meet his eye. The coffee was lukewarm and weak and when he complained, he thought she was surly. When she brought in another pot, hot and strong, so she said as she put it down, it came to him. It was simple. The truth was always simple. They were lovers, Hermione and Abeje. Furtive and fleeting. Whenever he was out of the house. For who else had Hermione seen since she arrived? Hence that look of distracted longing. Hence Abeje’s abrupt performance this morning. Hence everything. He was a fool, an innocent fool.

The unravelling was swift. That night the surgeon’s knife was sharper, cut deeper, with a twist. And he knew Hermione knew. He saw it in the blankness of her terror.
Her crime was his reckless empowerment. He tore into her with all the savagery of disappointed love, and his fingers were round her throat as she came, as they both came. And when he was done, her arms and legs and head had parted company with her torso, which he dashed against the bedroom wall. She lay in all corners, a ruined woman
. This time there was no consoling sleep. In the morning he concealed her body parts in a plastic sack and carried her and all her belongings to the dustbins. In a daze he wrote a note (he was in no mood for further confrontation) to Abeje to inform her of her dismissal ‘forthwith’ and left on the kitchen table her wages to the end of the month. He went for a long and purging walk across the Heath. That night, Abeje opened up the plastic bags she had retrieved from the bins and modelled the outfits for her husband – the jewels and shoes as well as the silky frocks. She told him haltingly in his native Kanuri (they had married out of their tribes),
She left him and it broke him up
.

Thereafter, Carder lived alone and ‘did’ for himself and
shrank into middle age with minimal dignity. The whole experience bequeathed him nothing. There were no lessons for him, no reckoning,
for though he, an ordinary fellow, had discovered for himself the awesome power of the imagination, he tried not to think of what had happened. He decided to banish the affair utterly, and such is the efficiency of the compartmentalised mind, he succeeded. He forgot all about her. And he never lived so intensely again
.