Nowhere Girl Read online

  I drew the shutters, so that slits of sun and shadow patterned the tiled floor, and lay on the bed. I shut my eyes. I could hear Jonathan sit down at the dressing-table, light a cigarette, search about for an ashtray, shuffle a few papers. Silence for a moment, followed by seven slow thumps on the keyboard. Then the squeal of his chair being pushed back over the tiles.

  ‘Darling? Could you help me a moment? I need your advice. I want to try out something on you.’ I opened my eyes. He sat towards me now, legs apart, shorts riding high up his thighs, the curly black hair thickening towards his crutch. His tinted spectacles had slipped down over his nose which even in this light was a sore pink. He rearranged the few papers in his hands, as if the new arrangement was enormously complicated.

  ‘The thing is, about this kind of outline, it brings the whole thing to life if you throw in a few lines of dialogue to show them the sort of thing they can expect in the final script. Well, how about this for the start of Scene Two?’ He cleared his throat.

  ‘ “Scene: the kitchen of a large, comfortable farm house.”‘ He looked up and smiled. ‘I hope you note, darling, that I’m not writing a drawing-room comedy. Far from it. Anyway, as I say, the large, comfortable kitchen of a farm house – or the other way round, as I think I said before. What does it matter? ‘ “A middle-aged couple and a young couple are sitting at a table eating soup. There is silence, except for the supping” – good word, that for soup, isn’t it? – “except for the supping of the soup, then suddenly the oldest man, Thomas, stands up.

  Thomas: My God, Marcia! My God! Say something, can’t you? How can you carry on eating your soup like that?” ’

  ‘Jonathan scraped his chair a few inches nearer to the bed and raised his eyebrows in preparation for Marcia’s high voice.

  ‘ “Marcia: Sit down and get on with your soup, Horace. It’s lovely soup. It’ll get cold if you don’t get on with it.

  Thomas: How can you all think about soup at a moment like this?

  Marcia: Come on, Horace, it’s your favourite, isn’t it? Carrot and onion. I did it specially for you – “ ’

  Jonathan turned, slammed the papers back on the dressingtable, then swivelled back to me again.

  ‘You see the kind of thing I’m trying to do? Here’s this fat, insensitive man, Horace, in a rage, and the only reaction he can get from his wife Marcia is comments on the soup. The strumming of emotion against lack of understanding, if you like. Non-communication of the highest form. Of course, it should have been read with a lot of Pinteresque silences, really to get it across, but I don’t pretend to be an actor.’ He began to undo the buttons of his shirt. ‘What do you think? Do you think it’ll give them an idea of the sort of thing I have in mind?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ I said. ‘It’ll do that very well.’ A mean pause in which he looked uncomfortable. So I went on: ‘But it’s difficult to be much of a judge not knowing anything about the characters. What happened in Scene One?’

  He stood up, startled.

  ‘Scene One? I haven’t thought about that yet. This was just – a fragment, a particle of the play I thought worth getting down on to paper while the words leaped through my head.’ He threw his shirt on the floor and undid the belt, and flies of his shorts. ‘Hell, it’s far too hot to go on working. We’ll take a cottage on Lake Como in the autumn, perhaps. I could work very well, there, in the cool.’ His shorts dropped to the floor and he stretched his arms high about his head. ‘Let’s sleep for a couple of hours, then go for a swim, then go out to dinner at that place you like along the coast, and dance. Would you like that?’

  ‘Lovely.’

  He padded towards the bed.

  ‘You’ve still got your hat on,’ I said. He threw that, too, onto the floor and lay beside me.

  He lay beside me, naked, on top of the bedclothes, holding my hand.

  ‘You’re beautiful, Suki Soo,’ he said, with his eyes shut. ‘There’s never been a luckier man.’

  ‘Nonsense.’

  ‘It’s true. Beautiful, brown, warm, gay, loving. What more could a man want?’ He hoisted himself up on one elbow and looked down at me. Arms, legs and face an incongruous red against the flat whiteness of the rest of him. ‘I feel so loving towards you I don’t know what to do with myself. How can I ever tell you how much I love you?’ He flung himself on top of me, his hands parting my bathing robe, his tongue swooping into my mouth. His body was hot and heavy. He was hard against my thigh, breathing fast, shuddering.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ He rolled off me again. ‘Do I smell of garlic, or something?’

  ‘Not much,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t you want me?’ I didn’t answer. ‘Don’t you like it in the afternoon? Is it too soon after lunch? We’ll wait a while.’ He lay back on his pillow but still held my hand.

  ‘I think I’m nearly asleep,’ I said. We lay in silence for a while, looking at the ceiling. Then:

  ‘Don’t you ever feel anything violent?’ he asked. ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Well, I think it could be said I express my love for you. I want you all the time, and show it, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But you have a funny way of expressing your love for me. You don’t do anything. In fact, you crudely resist me sometimes.’ He watched one of his feet as he bent each toe slowly in turn, as if he played a five-toe exercise. ‘I mean, sometimes, when we’re walking down a street or going to a theatre together, say, and I want to take your arm or hold your hand, you don’t do anything or say anything, but you just make it very clear you don’t want me to touch you. Don’t you?’

  ‘I admit I’m not by nature demonstrative. But then you’re very calculated.’

  ‘Nonsense, darling. What utter nonsense you talk. If there was ever a spontaneous lover, it’s me. Think of the mornings – working mornings at that – we’ve had breakfast and I’ve said: “Let’s go back to bed.” ’

  ‘They’ve hardly been spontaneous,’ I said.

  ‘You silly old Suki Soo,’ he said, rolling over towards me, ‘you’ve got on that funny hard voice that means you’re a thousand miles away from me. Come on, cheer up. Smile. We’re on holiday, remember? We’re having a lovely time.’

  I smiled. Encouraged, he let two fingers walk up to my breast like a child pretending to be a spider.

  ‘I love you,’ he said. ‘Do you know how much I love you? I love you, I love you, I love you.’ The fingers walked over to the other breast. ‘Do you love me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘I don’t know. How can I measure?’

  ‘Do you need me?’

  ‘I expect so.’

  ‘Do you want me?’

  ‘I expect so.’

  Sudden heat, a blackness in the shade of his heavy face. His tongue, enormous in my mouth, loiters at the roots of one tooth, then shambles on to another. Three more days till the aeroplane home. Sing things, sing things. Te voglio bene tanto tanto, bene tanto tanto.… how did it go then? Count things. How many people at the table next to us at lunch? Three. Remember things. The fat woman wore a red dress. Very good. And the others? Now my nose squashed flat under his, spreading across my face, setting like fungi. His hand, confoundedly gentle and nosy, prying over my stomach, and up and down and up and down –

  ‘Jonathan! Stop it! Stop it!’ He rolls off me, a freak tide ebbing in fright.

  ‘What on earth’s the matter? What have I done now?’

  I stand, pulling at the belt of the bathing robe. The floor tiles warm from the sun under my feet. I look at him, quickly crumpling, hurt.

  ‘You must have overdone the sun,’ he says at once, covering his anger. ‘I told you you would.’

  I sit on the bed again, thankful.

  ‘That must be it, I’m sorry.’ Silence. To calm, or to attack? I wonder which he will choose.

  ‘Go to sleep, darling. You’ll feel better when you wake up. As I said, the sun, and all that lunch ….’ His voice fu
ll of care. I sleep.

  When I woke up, some hours later, he had opened the shutters. A dusky mauve sky, a strip of mercury sea through the balcony railings. On the table a bottle of champagne stood in a primitive bucket of ice. I could hear Jonathan moving about in the bathroom. He came in, tying a blue-flowered tie that matched his blue flowered shirt and blue Terylene trousers. He indicated the champagne.

  ‘Non-vintage, I’m afraid, but it’s the best they could do. I thought it’d be nice to wake up to.’

  ‘Lovely. Thank you.’

  ‘At least it’s cold.’ He fingered the bottle, opened it easily and filled the glasses. ‘After this you must have a slow bath, and put on those beautiful lilac trousers, and then we’ll take one of those awful tourist carriage that you’re always on about and go to the Prima Trattoria. I’ve booked a table.’

  I tried the champagne. It was warm and sweet. Jonathan knew I had never liked it, but this was no reason to stop him ordering it for special occasions.

  ‘Do you really need to book a table at the one restaurant in a small village two miles from anywhere?’

  ‘I suppose not. But I like booking tables, don’t I? You must let me book my tables in peace.’ He smiled. ‘Anyway. It’s booked. Feeling better?’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘It was only the sun – ’

  ‘ – and all that lunch.’

  ‘And all that lunch, yes, as I said.’

  ‘Yes, yes.’

  Jonathan refilled his glass and took my hand. ‘You’re not cross with me, darling?’

  ‘No, why should I be?’

  ‘I just thought you might be.’ He cleared his throat. ‘I was thinking, while you were asleep. I was thinking, we mustn’t let this sort of thing get us down.’

  ‘What sort of thing?’

  ‘The sort of thing that happened this afternoon. It’s not important.’

  ‘What isn’t important?’

  ‘Well, we mustn’t make a fuss about it, worry ourselves about it. The thing is, my love, in the long run sex doesn’t matter. You know that, I know that.’ I sat up and he gave me his arm to help me off the low bed. He smelt of lemoney after-shave. ‘Well, when I say that, you know what I mean. I simply mean it shouldn’t become too important, should it? There are lots of other things besides, aren’t there, that are so much more important? And anyway, everyone has their off moments, don’t they? –’

  ‘I’m going for my bath,’ I said. ‘I absolutely agree.’ He followed me into the bathroom and turned on the taps.

  ‘So we won’t make a fuss, we’ll forget all about it,’ he said, ‘and I’m sorry if I was – a bore.’

  ‘Of course you weren’t,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what came over me. I’m sorry too.’

  He sat on the edge of the bath while I washed, playing with a sponge. Filling it with water and squeezing it, filling it with water and squeezing it.

  ‘So what we’ll do is, we’ll have a lovely dinner and lots of drink, and dance a bit, and talk to that nice man at the bar. Then we’ll come back here, and it’ll be nice and cool. And then, if you can bear it, if you’re feeling like it, that is, we’ll try again.’

  As David Roberts said, Jonathan was indeed a loving man.

  *

  ‘Funny,’ said Mrs Fox, ‘this is the very bench we met on.’

  It was eleven o’clock in the morning of a mild January day. Mrs Fox and I had been walking through the park feeding the birds. We were going to have lunch in a cottagy restaurant she knew in Kensington where they sold home-made pies and cakes. But it was too early yet, and warm enough to sit.

  ‘Oh yes,’ she went on, ‘I shan’t be likely to forget that day. Edith’s last outing, that was. And you all in black, looking very down. But then you’d been to that funeral, hadn’t you? One of your husbands. – It doesn’t seem like five months ago all that happened, Edith dying, does it? – Lovely yellow, that.’ She pointed towards some early yellow crocuses nearby. ‘Yellow was Henry’s favourite colour. We always had yellow crocuses, just like those, in a bowl in the front room, every spring. But of course what Henry really liked was daffodils. You’ve never seen a man like him for daffodils. They were the first flowers he ever gave me. Bunches and bunches of them. He must have bought up a whole flower stall, I think, honestly, and he was only a student at the time – what it must of cost him. As a matter of a fact I wanted daffodils, for that very reason, for his coffin. But it was the wrong time of year. I went to all the flower shops I knew for miles, and I said I must have daffodils. Forced, I said, if need be, as long as they were daffodils. Oh madam, there are limits to forcing, they told me. They said I couldn’t have any, no matter what I paid. I don’t think they cared, really. Not by the way they spoke to me. Forced daffodils! I might have been asking for an extinct plant, the reception they gave me.’

  She took a handful of crumbs from a small paper bag and threw them to some starlings.

  ‘I forgot to tell you,’ she said, ‘I’ve got two tickets for a pop concert at the Albert Hall to-morrow night. I was wondering if you would like to come? I’m not sure of the name of the group, but it’s their farewell concert, I heard people saying in the queue. They’re bound to have lots of those amplifier things – they almost burst the Hall with noise. I’ve heard that sort of thing there before. It should be good.’

  ‘That would be lovely,’ I said. To-morrow night Joshua was working very late, he said. Two starlings came right up to Mrs Fox’s feet.

  ‘February,’ she said. ‘My, it’s almost February. Your decision’s coming up then, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘What’s it going to be?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Well, it’s better to admit you don’t know than to pretend you do, as Henry always used to say. He was the quickest doctor to admit he didn’t know I ever met. More like him would save patients a lot of time.’ Her bag of crumbs empty, she touched the Poppy Day poppy in her hat.

  ‘That reminds me,’ she said, ‘I never told you what they did that day.’ She rubbed the rings on her bare hand and gave a small kick towards the starlings, as if their greedy pecking, now that the crumbs were finished, suddenly annoyed her. ‘As soon as she died, that is. As soon as she died, before they’d even closed her eyes, they pulled the bedclothes back. Her nightgown had all wormed its way up round her, if you know what I mean, and her body, it was like a skeleton. Imagine it! There was never a more modest woman all her life, and yet the minute she dies they expose her. I pulled the sheets up again because her nightgown was all under her. I couldn’t have moved that without moving her. But that bossy matron – trust her to nose her way in at the dramatic moment – was on to me in no time. “What do you think you’re doing?” she says. “She’ll be cold,” I says. – Stupid, I know, but I felt she would be cold. The matron laughed at me. “Cold?” she says. “She’ll be cold in a jiffy on this earth, no matter how many blankets, and if she’s been a good woman she’ll be warm in Heaven.” I’ll always remember how she said that. Then she told me to go away, unless I wanted to watch the preparations.

  ‘The funny thing is, ever since then, and this is what’s troubling me, I’ve never been able to think of Edith with her clothes on again. I lie awake for hours in the night, sometimes, trying to imagine her in her brown wool dress, or her navy floral summer one, or her best dress, the greeny crêpe. I knew them all well, all those dresses, but for the life of me I can’t imagine them on her any more. What I do is, I lay a dress out on a chair in one corner of my mind, then she walks in from the other side, like in a film. She puts on the dress, slowly, like she used to dress, and stands with her back to me zipping it up. When she turns round again I can see her face, clear as anything, but the dress isn’t there. She’s naked. All I can see is her poor thin body, like it was the day she died. And I hadn’t seen it bare for fifty years, remember. “Edith,” I says to her in my mind, “get dressed Edith. You mustn’t stand about like that or you’ll get
cold…” But she just looks at me, silent like she often was, silent and bare and getting cold….’

  Without warning it began to rain, gentle rain from the mild sky. Mrs Fox stood up. As she rose she gave a small gasp. I gave her my arm but she ignored it.

  ‘For heaven’s sake, child, I’m not having a heart attack, you know. It’s just indigestion. I tried frozen hamburgers last night, all laid out with the rest of the meal in a tinfoil tray. All I had to do was warm them up. They must have done it. That’s the trouble with instant food.’ We began to walk towards Kensington.

  ‘Lots of funny things, this morning, if you think about it,’ she said. ‘That other time, you remember? That other time it began to rain upon us too.’

  *

  Somewhere in a place full of light further lights explode. Way out beyond the petty rim of the globe there is a soaring and a swooping and an ultimate meeting as flesh dissolves flesh, bones are liquid, blood flames. On the way back there is a lesser light, a more ordinary light, shaped like a window. And the blare of inaudible music is scraped to nothing but the tick of an ordinary clock.

  Joshua is kissing me, my eyes, my hair. He is slung all over me, his arms and legs heavy as fallen boughs.

  ‘Funny Face?’

  ‘Joshua?’

  ‘I was only just awake, too.’

  ‘I know.’ I hold him. He is soft. He is warm.

  ‘Funny Face?’

  ‘Yes? What?’

  ‘Nothing, really.’ He falls to my side now, his head on my breast. ‘You’re very small’ My smile moves his hair.

  ‘You’re huge.’

  ‘Like that?’

  ‘Um.’ I wriggle. ‘You know what?’ I say. ‘It’s Sunday.’

  ‘Sunday?’

  ‘Sunday.’

  ‘Imagine. Sunday. I didn’t know that.’ He moves higher on the pillow now, so that he can look down at me.

  ‘We can spend all day in bed.’ I rub his scratchy chin. ‘I’ve got kippers for very late breakfast.’ He twists a strand of my hair in his fingers, pulling it quite hard.

  ‘You funny old planner. You must have worked it all out yesterday.’