The earth continues to turn. The sky is no longer mineshaft black but five-fathom blue, and this drains slowly into a milky grey, as if the street, the whole of Soho, is rising upwards, towards the surface of the sea. The girl from upstairs leaves, replacing her red boots with trainers, locking the door behind her, buttoning her coat. She looks both ways, up and down the pavement, then sets off towards Tottenham Court Road.
At six in the morning, an elderly man in a suit comes walking down the middle of the street, with an uneven, limping stride. He has a little dog at the end of a purple leather lead. He pauses outside the Blue Lagoon. The dog looks up at him, puzzled, then strains forward on the lead. But the man continues to peer at the café. Perhaps he comes here during the day. Or perhaps he is one of the few who remembers it as the Elsewhere offices; perhaps he used to drink with Innes in one of the places around here. Or perhaps not. Perhaps it just reminds him of another place. He walks on and in a few moments he and his dog disappear around the corner.
At eight o’clock, the morning baristas arrive: first a woman, who unlocks the door, turns on the lights, plugs in the cappuccino machine, opens the fridge to check the milk, repins a fallen poster to the wall. She is followed by a male barista, who fills a bucket with water and pushes a mop around the floor. He, too, fails to find the focaccia crust.
And, at precisely a quarter to nine, as the first customer of the day, in comes Ted.
Ted orders a latte to go and waits at the counter. He is early today. The waiter is still mopping, dipping the strings of the mop into the grey, greasy water, then slopping their tangled mess out on the floor. Ted watches the mop strings as they swish back and forth, like hair caught in a current. And without warning he is suffused with the feeling he keeps getting – that something he’s never seen before is oddly, closely familiar. Importantly familiar. A mop swishing back and forth on a bare, wooden floor. Why should this sight fill him with such a sense of significance, of meaning? As if he believes it could tell him something. Isn’t that the first sign of madness, seeing signs in everything, believing mundane things and acts are imbued with messages? He finds he wants to put out a hand to the man and say, please. Please stop that.
He blinks and forces himself to look away. At the rows and rows of glasses on the shelves behind the counter. At the waitress who is pulling levers on the cappuccino machine. At the nimbus of steam wisping from the machine’s side.
It is, he decides, like putting on a diving mask and peering beneath the surface of water and seeing another world that has, apparently, existed there all along, beneath a flat, inscrutable surface, without you being aware of it. A world teeming with life and creatures and meaning.
‘Here you go.’
The words startle him and he turns quickly. The waitress is holding a cup towards him.
‘Oh,’ he says, ‘thank you,’ and he hands her some coins.
Outside on the pavement, he stops. He is remembering or seeing or recognising something. What exactly? Almost nothing. The kind of thing everyone must remember. Being held up at a window, the sill of which is painted green. Someone’s arms are around him, beneath him. ‘Look,’ this person is saying, ‘do you see?’ The bodice and cuffs of her dress are embroidered with threads of many different colours and sewn into these threads are hundreds of tiny mirrors. ‘Look,’ she says again, and he looks and sees that the garden has disappeared under blankets of heavy white. Such an ordinary recollection, but why does none of it fit with the childhood he knows as his own? And why does it imbue him with this sense of panic?
Ted looks up at the colourless, empty sky above Bayton Street. He leans against the wall. He allows himself to form these words inside his head: here it comes again. His head seeming to fill with mist, his heart speeding up, as if it knows of some enemy, some danger of which he is as yet unaware. Points of light begin to puncture his vision. They jig and glitter in the flat, depthless sky, in the windows of the shops opposite, in the tarmac of the road. Look, this person had said, do you see. The tiny mirrors in her dress that caught the light, that set constellations in the walls around her. He can recall exactly the sensation of hooking his fingers into the warm dip of her clavicle, the end of her hair against his cheek. And the face. The face was—
‘You all right, mate?’
Ted sees a pair of tan leather brogues, the bottom portion of blue jeans. It is a sartorial combination for which he has a particular dislike. He realises he is bending over, his hands on his knees. He raises his head to look at the person with the tan shoes. A man, older than him, is looking down at him with concern. ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘I’m OK. Thank you.’
The man claps him on the shoulder. ‘You sure?’
‘Uh-huh.’
The man laughs. ‘Rough night, was it?’ And he walks away.
Ted straightens up. The street is the same; the café behind him is the same; Soho is still here, going about its early-morning business. He bends to pick up his coffee. He takes a sip and tries to ignore the fact that his hand is shaking. He needs to – what? He needs to think straight. He needs to sort this out. He needs to get a grip, that’s what he needs.
He is telling himself this, over and over, as he rounds the corner to the street where he works, as he pushes through the glass doors, as he presses the button for the lift. But as he steps into the lift, he thinks of something else: sitting on a rug, pushing chocolate buttons into his mouth, one by one. The feel of the chocolate buttons against his tongue, their domed tops, their latticed bases, which melt into smoothness as he sucks. He is watching his father, who is standing beside a fireplace, his hand on a woman’s sleeve, the woman turning away.
Felix corners her at the mantelpiece as she is handing out slices of cake. She’s been aware of him since he entered the room – someone, not her, must have opened the door to him. She’s skirted round him throughout the opening of presents, through the playing of games, as Theo and the other children waited, tense with longing, to pass the parcel from one to the other, as she served tea and wine and black olives in brine to the grown-ups and crisps and orange squash to the children. As Felix presented Theo with a wooden push-along train. As they sang happy birthday, dear Theo, and she gave Theo the star-shaped cake that the previous night she’d been up with past midnight, studding it with chocolate buttons. Theo had had to gaze at it for a moment, immobile, the points of the star before him, the three lit candles, leaking red wax tears, the chocolate buttons bending and softening in the heat. ‘Blow out your candles, sweetheart,’ she’d had to whisper into his hair before he came to, recalled himself and bent over his cake. ‘Make a wish,’ she’d added, possibly too late.
And now here was Felix, standing between her and the room. ‘Well, and how are you, Alexandra?’ he says jovially.
But she recoils. ‘Don’t call me that.’
‘Sorry.’ And he looks it. For a moment, they stare down into their drinks. They haven’t seen each other for a while. When he comes to visit Theo, she arranges for Mrs Gallo to be in the flat while she works upstairs. ‘You’re looking well,’ he says.
‘Thank you.’ She edges round him, scanning the room, pretending to be engaged with her duties as hostess. She sees Laurence, across the room, pull a face at her, and she smiles wryly back.
‘I like your dress.’ He leans forward, propping himself up with an elbow on the mantelpiece. ‘Wherever do you find these things?’
Lexie glances down at her dress. It is quite her most favourite thing to wear at the moment – long and scarlet, it flows from the deep-cut neckline all the way to her ankles. ‘It’s an Ossie,’ she says.
‘A what?’
‘An Ossie. Ossie Clark.’
‘Never heard of her.’
‘Him. And that doesn’t surprise me.’
‘Really?’ He takes a swig of his wine and, despite herself, she watches his lips fitting around the rim of the glass, the constriction in his throat. ‘Why?’
‘I don’t see him as Margot’s style. Tell
me, how is married life?’
‘A living hell,’ he says cheerfully, draining his glass. ‘My wife occupies this godawful mausoleum of a house her mother gave us. The mother, by the way, lives in the basement. Or, at least, that’s the official line. She spends far too much bloody time above ground for my liking. I, as a consequence, take every trip abroad going and spend as little time as possible in Myddleton Square. And that, since you ask, is my married life.’
Lexie raises an eyebrow. ‘I see. Well, don’t say I didn’t warn you.’
‘Thank you,’ he says, leaning even closer. ‘I’m overwhelmed by your sympathy.’
‘And how many children do you have by now in the Myddleton mausoleum?’
Abruptly, he draws himself upright. ‘Ah,’ he says, in a different, tight voice. ‘None, actually.’
Lexie frowns. ‘But—’
‘Our son,’ he nods towards the rug where Theo is methodically picking all the chocolate buttons off the icing of the cake, ‘is my sole issue.’ Felix sighs, puts down his glass, thrusts a hand through his hair. ‘She keeps . . .’ he makes an indecipherable flicking gesture with his hand ‘. . . having miscarriages.’ He says the word in a low tone. ‘Over and over again. Can’t seem to get the blasted things to stick.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ she begins, ‘I should never have asked. I don’t—’
‘No, no,’ he waves a hand at her, ‘don’t start all that apologising and sympathising.’ He inhales deeply. ‘It’s a dreadful thing to say but perhaps it’s for the best.’
‘Felix—’
But he cuts off her objection. ‘I mean because I’m not planning to stick around. Saw a lawyer the other day, in fact. This is strictly entre nous, of course.’
‘Of course.’
‘There being no children makes it less complicated.’
‘I see.’
‘Although,’ he seems to slide closer again, his hand moving along the rim of the mantelpiece, ‘we’ve managed pretty well, haven’t we?’
‘Managed what?’
‘The children thing.’
Is it her imagination or is his hand in close, hot proximity to her waist? ‘Do you think so?’
He smiles at her. ‘Seeing anyone at the moment, Lex?’ he murmurs in the same, intimate tone.
She clears her throat. ‘That’s really none of your business.’
‘Why don’t we have lunch?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Next week.’
‘I can’t. I’m working. And I have Theo.’
‘Dinner, then. Next week. Or next weekend?’
Next weekend she will be in Lyme Regis with Robert, for the first time in eight months. She got a telegram today. She wonders what Felix would say if she told him she had a clandestine arrangement with Robert Lowe and she has to suppress a smile. ‘No,’ she says.
‘We can talk about our son.’ He lays his hand on her sleeve.
‘What about our son?’
‘Anything. Schools. You know.’
Lexie lets out a short laugh. ‘You want to talk about Theo’s schooling? Since when?’
‘Since now.’
‘You’re unbelievable.’ She shakes his hand off her sleeve.
‘So is it a date? Dinner next week?’
She slips away, across the room, towards Theo. ‘I’ll let you know,’ she says, over her shoulder, before she reaches her son, before he clutches at a fistful of her dress, before she sweeps him up into her arms, settling the familiar, smooth weight of his body on her hip.
The day is not what they had hoped for. When they had set out from London, the sky had been a bolt of blue cloth thrown over the city and the sun had been glowing off every surface. They had zoomed through the streets with the windows down and the sun-roof rolled back. But the further west they got, the more the clouds gathered, like a frown, on the horizon and Elina could feel the wind buffeting the side of the car. Needles of rain were falling now, pulled by the wind into streaks along the window beside her.
They are going to Simmy’s parents’ house for the weekend; the parents are away and, Simmy says, they’ll have the run of the place. Elina has never been to a – what was it Ted called it last night? – a country seat. Will there be servants, she’d asked Ted, and he’d shaken his head. It’s not that posh, he’d said.
Jonah is asleep in his car seat, both fists gripped out in front of him, as if in his dreams he’s tightrope-walking with a pole in his hands. Ted and Simmy sit in the front. They’re listening to an improvised comedy programme on the radio and every now and again will erupt into laughter, but the jokes are too rapid, too idiomatic, for Elina to follow.
She has the beginnings of what might be a headache, a tightness or tenderness at her jaw hinges, at the muscles running from her shoulders to her neck. But nothing serious. She is glad to be getting out of London, glad for the flashes of trees and fields she can see from the car. She thinks of the journey out to Nauvo, to her mother’s house, along the chain of islands, the road that unwinds the length of the archipelago, the bridges over the gullies, then the yellow ferry, the flat expanses of green, the red and white wooden buildings, the sense that you are travelling as far as the land lasts, until soil and rock run out on you, give way to water, lapping, restless water, and only then will you stop, pulling up on the gravel beside the veranda, beside the silver-trunked trees.
She must have fallen asleep because she dreams she is in Nauvo with Jonah and she can’t seem to get him out of his car seat – the straps won’t come off, the buckle won’t undo. And then she’s aware of her head pressed up against a car window and she wakes to find they are no longer on the main road but winding down a narrow street with high hedges, towards the sea, into a town.
‘Are we there?’ she asks.
‘Not yet,’ Simmy says, over his shoulder. ‘We thought we’d stop here for lunch.’
The streets of the town are cramped and steep, the pavements filled with people. They park in a car park behind a public toilet. The sky sags low above them as they walk. Elina has wound Jonah into his sling and the weight of him pulls at the tender muscles in her neck. Simmy and Ted walk fast up the hill of the main street, Elina trying to keep up, her arms wrapped around the shape of Jonah. They survey one café, reject it; they stop in the doorway of another, decide the menu is too ‘measly’, walk on. A third has a good menu but there are no tables; another has a reasonable menu but they decide they want to sit outside. They walk up, then down the street. They walk along the promenade, the whole length of the town. They stop outside a pub near the harbour to debate the merits of line-caught fish. Jonah wakes, finds himself in the sling, decides he hates it and starts to yell and struggle. Elina unwinds him and carries him on her shoulder, where he carries on yelling.
‘A pork pie,’ Simmy is saying. ‘Is that too much to ask?’
Ted is peering at another menu inside a restaurant window adorned with fishing nets. ‘What is it with scampi,’ he mutters, ‘and seaside resorts? It’s not as if they catch scampi here, is it?’
Elina hefts Jonah to her other shoulder, dropping the length of purple material, and has to lower herself to her knees to pick it up. A mother with two children of varying ages in a twin-buggy of pink and sparkling chrome gives her a look of incomprehension, of distaste. Elina looks down at herself. She is wearing striped tights that she has cut the feet off, scuffed plimsolls, a dress made by a friend. It has a looped hem, asymmetric sleeves and a slashed neckline. Elina loves it.
‘I’m going to sit over there to feed Jonah,’ she says to the other two. ‘Come and find me when you’ve decided.’
Elina walks off towards a bench in the lee of the harbour wall, out of the breeze. She settles herself in her looped-hem dress with Jonah held in one arm. Jonah is ravenous, tense with rage, as she fiddles with her clothes, unclips her bra. As he feeds, going at the milk like a Tudor despot at a feast, she looks out to sea. The harbour wall is curved, she sees, enormous, reaching into the water li
ke a huge, protective arm. Elina frowns. She feels sure she recognises it. Has she been to this town before? She doesn’t think so.
Jonah feeds, first one side, then the other. The sea rises and falls, retreating down the sides of the wall, shrinking into itself. Just as she feels she might faint from hunger, Simmy appears. ‘Sorry it took so long,’ he is saying. ‘Everywhere is packed to the gills. We got sandwiches in the end.’ He holds out a brown-paper package towards her. ‘Cheese and pickle all right?’
She nods. ‘Anything.’ She tries to open it with one hand, before Simmy takes it from her, saying, ‘Sorry, should have thought of that.’ He unwraps her sandwiches and balances them on her knee, all scrupulously without looking in the direction of her exposed breast. As she bites into it, she looks round for Ted.