What Was Promised (24 page)

And even so, her savings dwindle. One day they’ll run out . . . and the Terences? Will they run too? The thought fills her with such fear that Florence never lets it occur.

Small things, each in its place: she scavenges shillings, feeds the meter, runs the bath, scrubs herself clean of the sheen and smell of transit, her hair a slick bright rope of blonde. She boils the kettle (no milk, but sugar) and picks fresh clothes (a gypsy print, Ossie Clark, given to her years ago when the makers still gave her things, warm and worn enough to be a house dress now: she hasn’t changed her size). She carries her tea downstairs to borrow milk and fetch her post.

‘You get so much!’ says Mr Sieghart, ‘and not just bills, there’s invitations too. RSVPs on the envelopes. All kinds of places! Hotels! Not that I mean to look, but I can’t help seeing. Well, it just looks such fun, all of it.’

‘Thanks,’ Florence says. ‘. . . Milk?’

‘Oh yes. Hang on,’ the jeweller says, and fetches a bottle from the back. ‘Shall I just . . . shall I be mother?’

Skinflint, Florence thinks, but she likes her landlord, lonely dirty old man that he is, and she does what she can (within reason) to stay on the right side of him. The world would be a harder place for a girl like her without men like him.

‘Mother away,’ she says, and he does, topping up her cup, frowning in concentration, as if he’s setting diamonds.

‘There,’ he says, ‘that’s the ticket. I can’t drink it black myself, can’t drink milk straight either. It’s just one of those things, isn’t it? One’s no good without the other.’

There are other invitations. There are others for tonight, it being a summer Saturday – one for a mime performance, one for a film launch supper party – and the dinner isn’t promising, even if they’ll still seat her. Florence vaguely remembers a Hilary Chance, a beer-flushed business boy with no talk except of himself and nothing of that worth recalling. She knows this hotel, too: it isn’t the Savoy. And Kensington is alright, but it’s a trog from here in any weather.

She’ll go anyway, if they’ll have her. The mime is too hippy (
Pierrot in Turquoise Will Welcome Your Presence at Gandalf’s Garden Benefit
: why is she sent this stuff? What does it even
mean
?), and a film launch supper is bits on sticks; it isn’t dinner. Dinner is worth shifting for, with nothing in the house but cold tea and a dash of milk. Florence checks the time, weighs the card, dials the number.

She takes the Underground. She wears raw silk, bone-white, boat necked, sleeveless, thigh length, belted with a black vinyl leash. White vinyl Courrèges slit boots. A slender velvet choker. She wears her hair up.

The clothes don’t make her beautiful: Florence is that regardless. Even so, they change her. She believes in them, and so the clothes are more than physically worn. They are in her mind. Dressed, she is twenty-four again, pure gold; twenty-one and going places; eighteen and on the up, the past dwindling behind her. She lifts her chin as she crosses St Giles’s. Her look is poised at the midpoint between arrogance and desire. She is her father’s daughter. Oh, she is Michael’s daughter, to the bone.

And someone is watching her.

She has no inkling. She buys her ticket and descends the stairs and dirty escalators of Tottenham Court Road Underground. If someone follows her – jostling, to keep her in sight – he is only one of many, leading and trailing and surrounding Florence as she makes her way towards the westbound Central line. She is too composed to notice much of anyone else, and any sense of being watched is lost in a general consciousness of eyes – the many eyes of London, taking her in, lingering and then drawn away and on.

Now she has nearly reached the platforms. She is in the last crosstunnel, checking the maps on the wall, when there is a brief disturbance on the stairs behind her.

‘I said stop that shoving, won’t you?’ a man says, his voice raised to another, and as the other answers Florence looks back and meets his eyes.

It’s only for a moment. Before a second is out she is looking back at the maps, but she is aware of him now. She is being followed. The certainty is like a pressure, like the change in the air which foreshadows the arrival of an Underground train.

Florence steels herself. She risks a second glance. The man has stepped back upwards, and as he sees her turn he ducks into the stair-raked crowd. He’s too lanky for those around him to be much of a hiding place. Florence has an impression of dark skin, wide eyes, a look of hunger that is all about her – but she doesn’t want to meet that gaze again, and she turns away.

She thinks, Let him look. Let him look, it does no harm. Let him try more than that and he’ll find out what she’s made of. She strides out onto the platform.

She doesn’t have long to wait for the train. Already the air is moving, pushing in out of the dark. Florence edges down the platform through tangles and knots of crowd. Only when the train is there, as it is thundering alongside, does she risk another look back towards the crosstunnel.

There. He is a black man, very tall, and alone. He wears some kind of uniform that means he belongs down here: Underground clothes. He is standing in the thick of the crowd, but there is a space around him – people allow him room – and his face is turned towards Florence. He looks desperate for her. The whites of his eyes catch hers.

(
is that
)

The train doors trundle open. Florence gets on with those around her. A pipe-and-crossword man offers up his seat for her and she takes it without a word. She is only dimly aware of the gesture. Her eyes have lost their proudness now, and

(
was that was it?
)

her composure is forgotten. She stares at nothing. She looks the wrong side of ordinary herself; she has gone pale as her raw silk dress in the electric light.

They come into Oxford Street. The train disgorges and engorges. At the next stop west – almost too late – Florence jumps up and pushes. She gets out – grime on her knuckles – and trots to the crosstunnel, then straight on to the eastbound platform. The tunnel mouth is dead silent.

‘Come on,’ Florence whispers, ‘oh, come on, will you?’

Slowly the air does come. Displaced, it seethes and quickens, and Florence rocks on her go-go soles as the eastbound train pulls in beside her.

She gets off where she started. The Tottenham Court Road platforms are quieter now, as if there has been some general exodus to the dance halls and restaurants four score feet above.

Florence looks left and right. Her heart falls: she’s too late; he’s gone. Then she remembers – stupid! – that he was never here; he was on the other side, watching her heading west; and she runs to the crosstunnel and through, and looks, and

(
is it?)

there he is, and it’s him.

He is sitting on the furthest bench, hard against the tunnel mouth, head lowered. He is hunched uncomfortably forward, his elbows on his knees, a roll-up gone out in his hand. His face is still turned westwards, towards the tunnel which took Florence away from him.

Her steps echo down the platform. He doesn’t look up once, he doesn’t see her coming. She stands in front of him, and only then does he rouse himself, and the lines on his face all fall away into amazement.

‘Floss?’ he asks, but Florence shakes her head.

‘Say it. Say it’s you. Go on!’

And he wipes at his mouth. He stands up and he does. ‘It’s me,’ he says, as soft and nervous as he ever was. ‘It’s Jem.’

They sit side by side, him in his steel-capped boots, her in her shining clothes. A train comes and goes. Jem is smiling and then is not. Neither of them says anything until, finally, Jem does.

‘I knew it was you. Soon as I saw you. You haven’t changed,’ he says, and Florence looks down at herself.

‘No.’

Jem hesitates. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing,’ Florence says. ‘It’s just a shock, that’s all.’

‘Yeah. You look really good.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Your clothes are nice. You’re all dressed up.’

‘Oh.’

‘You’re going somewhere, isn’t it?’

‘Yes . . . look, do you have the time?’ she asks, but Jem doesn’t. ‘I think I must be late,’ she says.

‘You better go, then,’ he says, and Florence looks at him, hearing the crestfallenness in his voice.

‘I don’t have to. It wasn’t anything, I didn’t even want to go, it was just dinner.’

‘Dinner’s alright. You better.’

‘No, it doesn’t matter. I’m not hungry now.’

Jem shrugs. Another train is coming. They wait for it to leave.

‘I could take you,’ he says. ‘I could buy you dinner.’

Florence laughs. ‘Oh no,’ she says, ‘no.’

‘I was going anyway, I done my shift. You could just come with me. You don’t have to eat, even.’

Florence shakes her head. ‘Do you eat down here, too?’ she asks, and he stares at her and starts to laugh.

It’s almost a giggle, his laugh, a boy’s
heehee
pitched to the depth of a big man. His laughter is infectious. Florence joins in.

‘Of course you don’t,’ she says. ‘I don’t know why I said that. I thought there might be a canteen or something. Well I don’t know how it is down here! I don’t even know what you do. I don’t know anything about you now.’

‘I could tell you things,’ Jem says.

Florence folds her arms. The Underground is greenhouse-warm, as it often is in summer. The air soothes her. She lets out her breath.

‘Alright,’ she says, and Jem beams.

‘Yeah?’

Florence nods. She stands. ‘Take me to dinner.’

He takes her to a narrow street not far from her own. He leads her down the basement steps to a plastic tasselled curtain under an unlit sign for
The Coronation Café
. He holds the tassels open for her, holds the chair back for her, and never stops smiling.

‘I’ll get some food in,’ he says. ‘You sure you don’t want nothing?’

Florence glances around. The basement is strip-lit, bright. On the wall behind the counter three framed pictures hang: the Queen, the Guinness toucan, and a great sunlit street market. The café’s customers are few and mostly old. Hers is the only white face, and she is the only woman.

‘Chicken’s good here,’ Jem says, anxiously – he’s seen her look, knows what she’s seeing – and she nods and smiles for him. ‘So chicken, great,’ he says, and retreats to the counter.

Florence opens her handbag. She doesn’t need to, but it saves her from meeting the eyes of those around her. In with all the rest of it is the invitation:

she reads, and the words are foolish, and their flourishes too, but what she feels is like homesickness.

‘I got you pop,’ Jem says. ‘Or I can ask for water –’

‘Pop’s fine,’ Florence says, and he nods, still anxious. He sets the plates and bottles down, takes off his jacket, sits.

The meat is crusted black. The rice that comes with it is mixed with beans and other things, shreds of pink that Florence doesn’t understand. They could be anything. She pushes them round her plate.

‘When did you start eating stuff like this?’