Tell her, Kath,' said Keith calmly.
'Get out, you old witch. Get out. You vicious thing.'
'Well as I said before, 'said Nicola, gathering herself and looking up into Keith's considering sneer, inches from her eyes, 'it's nothing more nor less than a question of money.'
She swayed out on to the ramp. Violently yanked from inside, the door gave an agonized creak and then closed almost noiselessly.
Nicola found that she was short of breath and taking great bites out of the air. Now to get back and prepare for Keith's coming. As she turned she heard the voices from the toy house.
'Vicious. Purely vicious.'
'They can't touch you, girl. You are who you are. Don't ever forget it. You are who you are, girl. You are who you are.'
So when he rang her bell, when he buzzed and blurted and came jinking up the last flight of stairs, Nicola was ready for this summit meeting, ready to turn all the new energies her way. She had done Keith violence, but she wanted no violence done to her, not yet. She wanted that violence violently stoppered. It was all right: she had the money. And any innocent or idiot could tell that a considerable sex-deflection would also be called for. Thinking this, Nicola had breathed in sharply and embraced herself, bristling - even her breasts had bristled. Love wouldn't do it. (Keith wasn't the type.) Sex wouldn't do it either, all by itself. Not even Nicola's sex, whose power had so often astonished even Nicola Six: the threats, the reckless bribes (money, marriage), the whimperings, the unmannings and unravellings, the bared teeth, the tendons of the neck so savagely stretched . . .
Keith entered. Nicola stood at the table in the darkened room, counting money under an angle lamp. She wore a black nightgown of candid vulgarity. With her hair freed and a third of each breast showing and no smile on her business face, she hoped to resemble a Monaco madame after a hard week in her first tax year of semiretire-ment, or something like that, as seen on TV. She removed her dark glasses and looked into the shadows for him. He looked back into the light. Silently, their force fields touched. And said:
Home was his secret. Nobody had ever been there before. Oh, there had been ingress: rentmen and census people, the police, and cheating electricians and would-be plumbers and so on as well as real social workers and probation officers—but nobody he knew. Not ever. Only the dog, and the woman, and the child: the insiders. They, too, were secrets. Home was his terrible secret. Home was his dirty little secret. And now the secret was out.
'Once upon a time,' saidNicola carefully, 'your wife must have been very lovely.'
'You shouldn't've fucking done it, Nick.'
'And the little girl is divine. What did you say your dog was called?’
'You shouldn't've fucking done it, Nick.'
'Such a noble beast. Keith, I understand. You didn't want me to know, did you, that you lived like a pig.'
'That's so ... That's so out of order.'
She had a bottle of whiskey and two long glasses ready. One of the glasses she filled with perhaps a quarter of a pint of neat spirit. She took two swallows, and came round the table towards him.
'Have some of this.'
And he took two swallows.
Nicola could be taller than Keith when she wanted to be. She was certainly taller than him now, in her four-inch high heels. Keeping her legs straight she leant back on the table and dropped her head, murmuring, 'I took some of your money and spent it on new stockings and things. I hope you don't mind.' She looked up and said, 'You do know why I'm doing this, don't you, Keith? You do know what this whole thing is really all about?' Nicola didn't feel like laughing. But she did think it was wonderfully funny.
'What?'
'It's your darts: listen.'
The speech went on for five or six minutes. She then took him by the hand and guided his leaden body towards the sofa, saying, 'I've made a little tape for you, Keith, which in its curious way will help show you what I mean.'
. . . The black elbow-length gloves, the look of young wonder, the jealous dress, the blown kiss, the wiggling black finger, beckoning.
'Slow it,' moaned Keith, as the fade began. With a soft snarl he snatched at the remote. Then Nicola's quarter-clad brown body dashed backwards, and became a clockwork mannequin, then a living statue, as Keith froze the frame of choice.
'That,' said Keith, and sighed, not with yearning so much as with professional sincerity, 'that is the real thing.'
She gave him the money now, negligently tossing handful after handful into a tradenamed shopping-bag, and then led him into the passage. Every now and again Keith tried to look shrewd and deserving, but his lips kept scrolling into an adolescent leer. Standing above him at the top of the stairs, she folded her arms and appeared to gaze downwards at herself. 'The eternal appeal of the cleavage, Keith. What is it, I wonder. The symmetry. The proximal tension.'
'Prestigious,' said Keith. 'Looks nice,'
'In the books, they say, rather wistfully, that men want to put their faces there. Return to mother, Keith. But I don't agree. I don't think men want to put their faces there.'
Keith nodded his head, and then shook it.
'/ think they want to put their cocks there, Keith. I think they want to fuck the tits. Ooh, I bet they do.'
'Yeah cheers,' said Keith.
This wasn't the real thing. Just a mannequin, on the remote. 'Remember. Next time you see him: mention poetry. I don't care how. And meanwhile, masturbate about me, Keith. Beat off about me. As a form of training. A lot. All those things you wanted to do to girls and were too shy to. Or they wouldn't let you. Do them to me. In your head.'
Keith's eyes seemed to be seeping upwards beneath his lids. 'Give me a taste. Come on, doll. Give me a taste.'
She must touch him. With three long fingers she felt his hair: as dry as fire-hazard gorse. One spark and it would all go up. She took a grip near the snagged parting line and pulled back slowly. Then, leaning into his opened face—and already hearing the swill of mouthwash, the twanging floss (it isn't me doing this: it's Enola, Enola Gay) - she gave him the Jewish Princess.
The telephone was ringing. Nicola drank whiskey. She lifted the receiver, heard the panicking pips, paused, and dialled six. 'I'm afraid I'm not here,' she said. And she even meant it, in a way. 'If you'd like to leave a message, please speak after the tone.'
Of course, there was no tone, and they both waited. Christ, how many seconds?
'Hello? Hello, Nicola? . . . God, I'm completely soaked. It's so awkward, talking to a machine. Listen. I've been -'
She pressed down with a finger.
Carefully Guy ducked his head out of the telephone cubicle and turned to face the street-wide wall of rain. Music was playing — it came and went beneath the thunder-racetrack of the sky. The right music, too. Guy turned: an old black man in the corner with a sax and the fierce melancholy of Coleman Hawkins. What was it? Yes. 'Yesterdays'. Guy would certainly be giving him money.
He stood in the steeped emptiness of the underground station on Ladbroke Grove, barely half a mile from the house, where he had recently discovered a live telephone box - in a long rank of dead ones. Quite a find. Like seeing a pterodactyl, complacently perched on a telegraph wire among the sparrows and worn old crows. Forever intensifying, the rain was now coming down so hard that even the cars seemed to be wading off home. Just buses, like lit fortifications, stalled in the wet night. That song: such complication, such grievous entanglement. First you go through this, it was saying. Then you go through this. Then you go through this. Life, thought Guy. When at last the man was finished Guy went over and pressed a ten-pound note into his styrofoam cup. 'That was beautiful,' he said. No answer. Guy turned and walked. And then the man called out: 'Hey buddy. I love you.'
Five long strides got him under the bus-stop shelter. Already he was farcically drenched. Rather than go straight home, where Marma-duke was in any case well-attended despite the nanny shortage (two night nurses until he was better again), Guy dreamed up reasons for breaking th
e journey with a visit to the Black Cross: two hundred yards along Lancaster Road. He kept on waiting for the rain to slacken. But it didn't. It kept on doing the other thing. It was lashing down, just like they said, whipstroke after whipstroke, in climbing anger. Extremity upon extremity, and then more extremity, and then more.
As Guy dodged and jumped towards the Portobello Road and its low-strung lights he saw a figure splashing about like a stage-drunk in the swollen gutter beneath the lamp. Keith. And he wasn't staggering. He was dancing, and laughing. And coughing.
'Keith?'
'. . . Yo!'
'My God, what are you doing?'
Keith sank backwards against the lamp-post, his head up, his gut softly shaking with laughter or exasperation -with laughter or defeat. He had a green carrier-bag, crushed to him beneath his crossed arms. 'Oh, mate,' he said. 'You tell me. What's it all about, eh? Because I don't fucking get it.'
'Come on in. Look at us.'
'Because I don't fucking get it.'
'What?'
'Life.'
Now a tomato-red Jaguar jerked round the corner and came to an urgent halt beneath the lamp.
'Here comes summer.'
The back door opened and a voice said from the contained darkness, 'Get in the car, Keith.'
'Cheers, lads.’
'Get in the fucking car, Keith.'
Guy straightened, showing all his height. Keith held up a dripping hand. 'It's okay,' he said. 'No, it's okay. Only messing.' Keith stepped forward, and stooped. Then he said casually over his shoulder, 'We'll have a drink. Not in there. Inna Golgotha. I'll -' A hand came out of the shadow and Keith flopped suddenly into the back seat. 'Ten mimff. Oof!'
He shouted something else and sustained another blow but Guy couldn't hear in all the rain's swish and gloss.
Re-entering the Golgotha meant rejoining it, at heavy expense, because Guy hadn't brought his stencilled nametag and could do nothing with the doorman's wordless stare. With some reluctance he ordered a porno (in the context of the Golgotha, Keith frowned on all other drinks) and secured a table by the fruit-machines, some distance from the band. As he did so he marvelled at this new thinghe had: guts. Guy didn't even look around for another white face. For some reason the physical world was feeling more and more nugatory. He thought that perhaps this was a consequence or side-effect of the time he was living through: the sudden eschatology of the streets; the tubed saplings and their caged trash, marking the place where each human being might be terribly interred; her leggy disarray and the bubble at the centre of everything . . . Keith came in; he held up a bent thumb, and then vanished, soon to reappear with a glass and an unopened bottle of porno - a litre bottle, too, or possibly even a magnum.
'Are you all right?'
Keith's grinning face looked hot and swollen, and one of his ears was a startling crimson, with the beginnings of a rip showing beneath the lobe. A patch of blood on his hair had had time to dry and then to deliquesce again in the rain. He kept looking at the middle finger of his right hand as if it had a ring on it, which it didn't.
'Nah, load of nonsense. They're good as gold really. All forgotten now as such.'
His clothes were smoking. But so were Guy's. Everyone was smoking in the Golgotha, and everyone's clothes were smoking too. This was what happened when water met with warmth; and the rain that fell on London now gave off smoke for reasons of its own.
After a few quick glasses Keith said, 'I'm going to treat meself tonight. Debbee Kensit. Debbee - she's special to me. You know what I mean? Not yet fully mature. And pure. Natural love. Not like some. Nothing dirty. No way.’
'Dirty?' said Guy.
'Yeah. You know. Like gobbling and that. Seen uh . . ?'
At once Guy raised a forefinger to his eyebrow. 'Not in a while.'
'I don't understand you, Guy Clinch. I don't. Know what she said to me the other day? She said, "Keith?" I said, "Yeah?" She said, "Keith?" I said, "Don't start." She said, "Keith? You know, there's nothing -I wouldn't do - when I go a bundle on a bloke like that." There. That's what she said.'
Guy was staring at him in addled incredulity. 'Wait a minute. She . . . told you -'
'Or words to that effect,' said Keith quickly. 'Now hang on. Hang on. You're getting off on the wrong foot here, pal. She didn't say it. Obviously. Not in so many words.'
'So she said what?'
'It was like from this poem or something,' said Keith, with what certainly seemed to be sincere disgust. 'Christ! How'm I supposed to know. Eh? I'm just scum. Go on. Say it. I'm just scum.'
'You don't -'
'Jesus. Oh, excuse me, mate. No no. I'm not sitting through this. I come in here. Relax. A few drinks. You try to bring two people together in this world.'
'Keith.'
'I expected better of you, Guy. I'm disappointed, mate. Very disappointed.'
'Keith. It's not like that. Look. I really apologize.'
'Well then. And listen: I didn't mean no disrespect to her either. Neither.'
'Keith, of course you didn't.'
'Well then. Okay. Yeah cheers. I'm glad we ... Because you and me, we . . .'
Guy suddenly felt that Keith might be on the verge of tears. He had certainly been punishing the porno. Something else told Guy that the word love was not too far away.
'Because you and me, we — we ought to look out for each other. Because we're in this together.'
'In what?' said Guy lightly.
Keith said, 'Life. In this life.'
They both sat up straight and cleared their throats at the same time.
'I didn't see you there Saturday.'
'You were there, were you?’
'You didn't -'
'No, I couldn't. What was it like?'
Keith dropped his head and peered up at Guy with an expression of rich indulgence. He said, 'Obviously the visitors were keen to blood their new signing from north of the border, Jon Trexell. How would the twenty-three-year-old make the transition from Ibrox Park to Loftus Road? At just under a million one of Rangers' more costly acquisitions in the modern era, no way was the young Scot about to disappoint. . .'
Twelve hours later Guy came down the stairs of his house in Lansdowne Crescent, carrying the breakfast tray and humming non piú andrai. He paused and fell silent outside the door of the main drawing-room. He put two and two together. Hope was interviewing, or importuning, a new nanny. Guy listened for a while to the conjuring of large sums of money. Nanny auditions were a constant feature of Hope's daily life. There had been a standing ad in The Lady ever since the week of Marmaduke's birth ... He went on down to the kitchen, bidding good morning to a cleaning-lady, a maid, a nurse, two elderly decorators (the cornices?), and an outgoing nanny (Caroline?), who was openly drinking cooking-sherry and taking deep breaths as she stared in wonder at the garden. Blindingly lit by the low sun, the near end of the room was still a slum of toys. Both the closed-circuit TV screens were dead but Guy's attention was drawn by a portable intercom on the table. Its business end must have been in the room above, because you could hear Marmaduke in stereo. He was evidently being quite good, as was often the case when a new nanny was in prospect. To hear him now, a stranger might have thought that the child had suffered nothing worse in the past few minutes than a savage and skilful beating. Abruptly everyone in the kitchen yelped with fright at an atrocious crash from the room above.
'No no, Melba,' Guy sang, heading off the maid as she went for the industrial vacuum-cleaner beneath the stairs. Til do it.' Present myself to the new nanny: present the normal smile. One behaves as if that's all nannies could possibly want: normality.
'Melba!' yelled Hope as Guy came swerving into the room, grappling with nozzle and base. Marmaduke had somehow toppled the full-length eighteenth-century wall mirror, and was now gamely struggling to go and throw himself in its shards. Hope held him. Between the child's legs the cord of a lamp dangerously tautened. Guy stared into the Kristallnacht of fizzing glass.
'Melba'.'
yelled Guy.
After a few minutes Guy helped Melba fold the crackling binliner. He got up from his knees, brushed himself down — ouch! — and turned as Hope was saying,
'. . . quite as hectic as this. Darling, don't. Please don't. This is my husband, Mr Clinch, and I'm sorry, what did you say your name was ?'
'Enola. Enola Gay.'
You look for the loved one everywhere, of course, in passing cars, in high windows — even in that aeroplane overhead, that crucifix of the heavens. You always want the loved one to be there, wherever. She is the object of the self's most urgent quest, and you search for her sleeplessly, every night, in your dreams . . . Guy felt panic, and pleasure: she was here, she was closer, and how gentle she looked in pink. Obeying a lucky instinct, Guy came forward and kissed his wife good morning. Whatever other effects this had it predictably caused Marmaduke to attack him. Left free for a moment to wander down the room, the child saw the caress and ran back over to break it up. Thus Guy was busy pinning Marmaduke to the floor as he heard Hope say,
The money I think you'll agree is extremely generous. I've never heard of anyone paying anything even approaching that. You can wear what you like. You'll have backup most of the day from Melba and Phoenix and whoever. You'll have the use of a car. You get a double rate for any Saturdays you might like to do, and triple for Sundays. You can ha ve all your meals here. You can move in. In fact —'
Melba knocked and re-entered. Three builders or gardeners stood ominously in her wake.
'Do excuse me for a moment,' said Hope.
So then. Leeringly chaperoned by Marmaduke, Guy and Nicola sat ten feet apart, on facing sofas. Guy couldn't talk to her; he found, once again, that he couldn't even look at her.
But Marmaduke felt differently. He slid from his father's grip. He put his hands in his pockets and sidled across the carpet. Checking out a new nanny — checking out her tits and weakspots: this was meat and drink to Marmaduke.
'Hello then,' he heard her say. 'You're a cool customer, aren't you? Guy, I'm so sorry. I hoped you wouldn't be here. I had to do this-I had to see. Ow! I say, that's quite a pinch. I got your message and I felt so—I see. Well, two can play at that, young man. Come to me today. You must. It's called the Pinching Game.'