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There was a sharp ring from inside the office. The woman turned and went inside, picking up the telephone. ‘Energy Committee, Andrea speaking – oh, hello!’ Her voice went from stern to girlish; she giggled. ‘No, Patrick, don’t you be – I’ll tell you something, there’s a lovely surprise for you when you get in, a lovely surprise waiting, your favourite thing … Oh. Who told you? … Well, no one tells me anything … Oh, about the usual, I would say. I expect you’re phoning to say you’re late in, as ever. Well, let me tell you …’
George walked away, feeling he should not listen to this flirtatious conversation. The walls were hung with mezzotints; eighteenth-century politicians and bishops on the shiny magnolia walls. Another door stood open to an empty office: its windows were hung with dirty grey net curtains, too long for the space and falling to a pile on the windowsill.
‘That was Patrick,’ the woman said, coming out of the office with a dark blue document clutched to her bosom. ‘What are you doing down there? Come back and sit down with your aunty Andrea. She’ll tell you what’s what. You’ll never guess. Patrick’s calling from the phone box at the top of Whitehall. He says— Well, did you hear that bang?’
‘No,’ George said. ‘What bang was that?’
‘That bang!’ Andrea said. ‘Half an hour ago, that bang. I wondered what it was so I went down and asked the front desk, they didn’t know any more than I did. What bang, he says. It made me jump, I can tell you.’
There was a pause. Andrea was inspecting him in close detail, standing with her legs apart.
‘Well, we can’t have you standing in the corridor all day,’ she said. ‘I expect I’d better show you where your office is, and you can make yourself at home. It’ll be funny not having Mike in there. Ah, well.’ She sighed theatrically. ‘Now, these are my keys. I’ve got a set for everyone’s office. Don’t waste your time asking me if you can borrow them when you forget yours – ooh, Andrea, pretty please, it’ll only be this once, I’ve never forgotten them before. I’ve got a good reply to that sort of thing. No. Way. Sunshine. Because there’s no way I let them, my keys, I mean, out of my possession. So you’ve just got to hang on to yours. Welsh, are you?’
George’s office was quite bare: there was a desk facing the door, an empty bookcase, and nothing more but a desk tidy, and a pair of plastic trays, one labelled IN and the other labelled OUT. There was a pile of papers in the in-tray. There was a large, grubby white telephone on the desk, and a spiral-bound notebook with a chewed biro alongside. Everything was generic, except one thing: a miniature object, a range of five furled flags the size of a stretched hand. There had been a previous inhabitant of this office, who now had moved out and left this. At some point George was going to meet that previous inhabitant; at some point he, too, was going to leave some individual sign of his life for a new boy, a new girl, to wonder about. In two years’ time, perhaps.
Andrea had gone back to her office, closing the door, without waiting for a response to her question. A red light on the telephone showed that she had started a call. George hung his coat on the back of the door, and put his empty briefcase down by the side of the desk. His father’s professional life must have started exactly like this, thirty-five years ago. He had arrived in the office where he would spend the rest of his working life, moving from job to job, but always remaining loyal to the organization. George’s life had led up to this moment, and he would never be unemployed or unattached again. The years at university, trying to get an essay exactly right, trying to fish a piece of overlooked information from the seas of the Bodleian had led up to this moment, with an empty desk and a tray full of stern, detailed information.
He had taken two days off from the language school in October to undertake the application process. He had filled in forms, and drafted polite letters to imaginary supplicants who were attempting to defraud the public purse; he had entered into discussion with other applicants and with the examiners; and he had been interviewed. The rooms in which the process had taken place were bright-lit and yellowish. Each of them had windows, which, like this one, were veiled by net curtains too long for the space. A middle-aged woman with a mop of ginger hair and an amber brooch on a green sweater had introduced herself as the psychologist on the team. She had asked him penetrating and quite personal questions until one question – George could not recall what the question had been – had made him reply that he didn’t believe the answer was any of her business. The interview had come to an end promptly after that. At the time, George had wondered whether he had scuppered his chances by being rude. Afterwards, when the offer of a job came, it seemed to him that he had been firm and impressive in drawing a line. So he was in his office, not yet with his name on the door, preparing to start work.
Elsewhere in the city, Londoners were setting to work, exchanging insults and flirtatious suggestions with their colleagues, having a cup of coffee, getting down to their most ordinary business. To kick your shoes off under your desk, to hang your jacket up and straighten the photograph of your family in front of you. They would be taking it all for granted. They did not know how magical it was to have a job; only George, on his first day, knew that. In a moment, it occurred to him that he was being paid for what he was doing, even now. The thought made him dizzy.
He had been in only two or three rooms in the public service, and before, he had thought that the net curtains hanging over the windows were a matter of personal idiosyncrasy by the inhabitants or users of the rooms. Now he understood that it must have been a decision made by some central authority. He got up and examined the net curtains. They did not hang loose, but fell to a gathering pile on the windowsill. The hems of the net curtains held small lead weights, to hold the curtain down in any breeze. He picked them up; felt them in his hand. The window did not have any kind of view. It gave onto a well between buildings, and faced a high wall with yellow and brown glazed brick, broken by a single brightly lit window. It appeared to be a window on a stair or a communal space. Snow was falling thickly through the artificial light.
‘You’ll be wanting to get on with that,’ Andrea said, leaning against the doorpost. She held a blue printed report, the size of A4. ‘The dreaded in-tray. There’s always more to be getting on with. One word of warning – Patrick’s quite nice but he’s a devil for punctuality. He doesn’t like it if there’s something sitting in your in-tray that he’s waiting for and he’s still waiting for it tomorrow or, God forbid, the day after. Another word of warning – if Patrick starts gently suggesting that perhaps we could make a start on work before ten, start coming in by nine thirty or nine, just agree and come in at ten anyway. He’s hopeless about all of that, coming in early – he’s not another Chris Leonard, if you know who that was, which you don’t, I don’t suppose. Don’t be taken in by that demeanour, he’s very strict about most things. I had an aunt who was Welsh, not blood, of course, she was my uncle Edward’s second wife. Ooh, she was a bully. She sent him out to fetch her little things, all her errands, in all weathers right to the end of his life and her twenty years younger than him. He was an old fool, we always used to say, my mum whose brother she was. I don’t know why, but I’ve never managed to fancy the Welsh since then, all because of my uncle’s second wife, Phyl. Strange, isn’t it? And speak of the devil!’
In the corridor, behind Andrea, was a thin man with grey hair flopping over a drained white face, both middle-aged and boyish; he grinned forcefully, brushing the snow from his shoulders. ‘What a day,’ he said. ‘What a day. So you must be George! Welcome, welcome, welcome. I should have been here to welcome you. But Andrea was here, I’m sure. How are you, my sweet?’
‘Don’t think you can get around me as easily as all that,’ Andrea said.
‘There’s the most extraordinary thing,’ Patrick said – he must be Patrick. ‘Out there, the whole of Whitehall’s been closed off. Did you see? There’s been some kind of mortar attack on 10 Downing Street. I’m amazed you got through. A very, very good start, George! You succeeded in getting through the mass of police cordons and security walls. Most people would have given up and gone home and started work tomorrow. But not George! A big gold star on your first day, George. I really doubted I was going to make it. Did you not hear anything going off?’
‘You see?’ Andrea said. She tapped a red-painted fingernail sharply on the back of the report she was clutching. ‘I said there was a bomb going off, didn’t I? Didn’t you hear it? I’m the only one who heard anything, but, oh, no, Andrea, you must have been hearing things. But there you are.’
‘I was at the far end of Whitehall,’ Patrick said. ‘And there was a police cordon going up, and I phoned you then from the phone box. Then I asked the policeman in charge what was happening. He wouldn’t let me through at first. I knew he wouldn’t. But then all of a sudden there was the Clerk of the House. I can’t think what he was doing at the far end of Whitehall at a quarter to ten, but he just sort of glowered at them and told them who he was, and they let him through and me as well.’
‘Well, there you are, then,’ Andrea said. ‘A mortar attack on 10 Downing Street. I do hope that nice Mr Major is quite all right.’ She stood for a moment inspecting George, her mouth slightly open, an expression of amusement in her eyes. As if with a snap of command, she turned and left, shutting what must be the door of her office with a bright slam.
‘She’s a good soul,’ Patrick said. He thrust an index finger in his ear and waggled it furiously, extracting it with a pop. ‘You’ll find that she has her own ways of dealing with things, and they all work out in the end. Just don’t try to suggest any changes, and everything will be absolutely fine. Well. Welcome! I’m not at all sure what we should be doing today. I need to make two or three phone calls, and then we can sit down and talk and I can explain things, about where the committee has got to and what you ought to be doing and so on. I won’t be too long. One thing …’
Patrick came into the office, and noiselessly pushed the door to. ‘If I could recommend something – if I were you, I would always find that I had something important to do at the close of business on a Friday. Andrea’s a very good soul, but it’s as well not to be drawn into her Friday afternoons and evenings. Just a word to the wise.’
‘What are you saying?’ Andrea’s voice shouted from her office.
‘Nothing! Nothing at all, my sweet!’ Patrick called. ‘I was just welcoming George to the office. It occurs to me –’ his voice dropped to normal volume ‘– that the one thing that is supposed to happen this morning is John Slaughter, the bod from UCL, he was supposed to come in and brief us. About wave energy. I don’t know anything about wave energy and I don’t suppose you do either. He was meant to come in at eleven thirty but I don’t know if that’s going to happen. If you wanted, you could try to find out whether they’re letting anyone through. He hasn’t phoned, as far as I know. Andrea,’ he called again. ‘Has John Slaughter called? Well, no, then.’
Patrick left. George knew that the time had come to demonstrate initiative and efficiency. He picked up the biro, and wrote ‘John Slaughter?’ in the spiral-bound notebook. He thought the best way to discover the state of affairs was to go downstairs and ask the security staff. He left the office, leaving the door open, and walked to the stairs. At the bottom, the woman security officer was at the desk on her own. He noticed she had a large hairy mole on her left cheek. He wondered if the time would come when he knew her name, and could recognize her. There was no need to ask her anything. Her voice called out behind him: ‘There’s been a mortar attack on 10 Downing Street. Everything’s sealed off.’ He nodded at her, and left the building, checking that he still had his pass in his pocket. The side-street outside was deserted; the snow was falling heavily, and had now settled. The junction with Whitehall was sealed off with police incident tape. George walked up to it. It must have been sealed off since Patrick had made it through. The whole of Whitehall, to left and right, was deserted behind incident tape. The snow fell on untouched ground, and was now a pristine three inches deep.
Once, George had been out in the country after a heavy snowfall, and had seen a woman playing a trick on her dog. A wound-up, bounding, overwhelmed dog, a Jack Russell. The woman bent down, and took a fistful of snow, rolling it into a snowball, and threw it. The dog hurtled forward to find the thrown thing to fetch, but where the snowball fell into the snow, there was only snow, and nothing to bring back. The dog ran around, astonished, baffled, and returned. The woman bent, rolled, threw again. The dog fell for it again. She had been doing it for some time. The field of snow contained something to fetch, and the dog had run into it, again and again. Now, beyond the Cenotaph, two policemen stood in their dark uniforms, like picturesque figures in a snow scene. There was no possibility that anyone would reach them until the road block was lifted. George stood there. The boulevard was transformed. Nobody else was there, looking at it. There was a perfume in the air that was the absence of perfume: London stripped of its odours and made to smell of snow falling through oxygen. Nobody else would ever see the sight of Whitehall as blank and clean and silent as a remote moor in deep winter, unpressed by the tread of foot. The sight was as unique as his first day at the work he was going to make a success of.
He was able to tell Patrick that he thought there was no possibility of receiving any visitors until the cordon was lifted, and he did not know when that might be. Patrick cursed amiably, and went away, promising that he would sit down and explain everything about the committee and its work later that morning. George sat down and reached for his in-tray. He opened the first document. It was the annual report of an organization that seemed to be something to do with nuclear energy. George began to read it. He understood almost nothing of what he read, and soon a feeling of mild satisfaction came over him at the image of dedication he must be presenting, if anyone walked past his office and happened to glance in. In time, he shut the document and placed it in the out-tray. It occurred to him to make a note of what he had read, and he did so, in the spiral-bound notebook. He picked up the second document in the pile, and soon he looked like someone who was making efficient work out of his inconveniently interrupted day. He passed papers from one pile to another, with the appearance of someone who was working hard, and beginning a new life. Anyone could see he had the capacity to be useful, and the thought gave George, head down, something rather like joy.
My Dog Ian (#u19c4ad0e-46de-54d5-b07a-a9f76b91dded)
‘No, I don’t speak the lingo at all,’ she would say. ‘Just bono giorno, honey, bono sera, that’s all it takes. What’s the point? They rob you anyway, rob you blind. Take Paolo …’
Those Florentine afternoons. And afterwards I was always the same. Some people are always on stage. Most are destined always to be in the audience. Realizing it, you can never change the fact afterwards. After Florence, I would always be in row F of the stalls, hands clasped, looking up as the lights pointed in a different direction, allowing myself to be persuaded.
I went to Italy because of love – no, guilt. I was twenty-seven. I had been working ‘in the arts’ for five years. It was the sort of job that had sounded immensely desirable once. ‘Arts administration,’ I had confidently said to careers advisers, friends of my parents at drinks at Christmas. It had sounded good, labour rooted in passion and exchanged, at the end of the month, for money you couldn’t be ashamed of earning. My contemporaries failed, and had to settle for jobs as solicitors. Five years later, they earned three times what I did and were beginning to drop me. They could not be blamed. ‘Arts administration’ meant a narrow office in a Victorian museum in the north, kept going with public money and the promise of lottery largesse. I found, after all, that you could be ashamed of the money at the end of the month. It was so little. My grey walls teetered with box files; outside, you walked between the museum’s doubtful Raffaelino and the still more doubtful school parties. I grew to detest the single Matthew Smith, lurid as the municipal flowerbeds, to hate, too, the multiple aldermen in committees, drab and important in appearance as the museum’s solitary Stanley Spencer. Last Supper in Maidenhead. You may know it from reproductions.
It was a city of three hundred thousand people but, still, it hardly seems surprising that I noticed Silvia. In that city, she was like a panther at a Tupperware party. The society was less extensive than you might imagine. A small Italian woman, with expensive accoutrements and an expensive, contemptuous way of standing with her hips jutting forward, made herself conspicuous. I had formed the habit of going to concerts in the university hall every other Friday. The tickets were cheap, and the platform just about big enough for an orchestra. The timpanist had to sit beneath the conductor’s podium, however, and guess at the beat. More usually, as tonight, it was a string quartet. In the interval, the audience sat in their seats or clustered in the chilly atrium drinking coffee. It was not a well-dressed audience. You noticed Silvia.
‘Have you seen,’ my colleague Margaret said. ‘A footballer’s wife?’
(It was a recognized social category, in that impoverished northern town with two famous football clubs. It was used for any woman under thirty with a tan and a handbag.)
‘I hope she enjoyed the Webern,’ Margaret said bitchily. I went to concerts with Margaret. It was no more than that.
‘I hope so too,’ I said.
After the interval, I took more notice of Silvia. She was sitting three or four rows in front of us, on the other side of the aisle. She listened intently to the first two movements of the next piece. Then, with a sigh, just as the string quartet was raising its bows, she got up and left, clacking down the central aisle. The string quartet lowered its bows, waited for her to leave. They began to play again.
‘A bit much for the Footballer’s Wife,’ Margaret said archly, when it was all over. ‘The bitonal passage can be a little demanding for many music lovers.’ I wasn’t sure, and not just because I didn’t know what Margaret meant. To me those decisive stilettos clacking towards the exit looked much more like someone who only wanted to hear the scherzo of the Ravel string quartet; had come for that, had left when it was done.
In fact, Silvia seemed to attend the university concerts fairly regularly. I started to notice her now, and wondered why I hadn’t noticed her before. She rarely stayed for a whole concert. She would turn up at the interval, leave after a particular piece, or even walk out, as with the Ravel, in the middle of one. It was terribly rude. It was the behaviour of someone, I decided, who had come to like music through a collection of CDs. She had the habit of skipping about, selecting favourite movements, and rejecting music with all its tyranny and gleeful infliction of boredom in favour of ‘highlights’. Margaret had a great deal to say on the subject. I weakly agreed, though tried not to refer to Silvia as ‘the FW’. I did not agree with Margaret as often as she seemed to assume, and sometimes rebelliously thought, as I clapped exhaustedly at the end of some juvenile assault on a great masterpiece, that it might indeed be quite nice to press a fast-forward button as the Diabelli Variations grew a little too pleased with themselves. There was no such fast-forward button at the museum, either. It took up as much time as you were prepared to grant it.
‘I’ve found out about the FW,’ Margaret said one day, popping her head round the door of my office. ‘She’s not an FW, a footballer’s wife, I mean. She’s a lettrice.’
‘A what?’ I said.
‘A lettrice in the Italian department of the university,’ Margaret said immaculately. ‘The equivalent of a lectrice in French, Lektorin, I believe, in German. She’s come to teach them Italian.’
‘It’s not a big department,’ I said. In the museum, we liked to think we had a relationship with the university that extended to sending Christmas cards to given departments, as long as no Bunsen burners were involved, at which point snobbery came into consideration. We did not know them, but we went to their concerts and we very well might have known them personally. Margaret, for instance, constantly referred to the professor of English literature, a man she had never spoken to and who was not called Percy as ‘Percy’.
‘No, it’s not,’ Margaret said. ‘She’s the first time they’ve been able to afford a lettrice – they’re cock-a-hoop about it.’
‘Where does the budget come from, though?’ I said knowingly.
‘They’ll have got sponsorship from an Italian company,’ Margaret said. ‘Fiat, no, I tell a lie, it’s Buitoni.’
‘They make ravioli,’ I said.
‘They’re sponsoring all sorts, these days,’ Margaret said. ‘The Hallé had a bel canto evening in Manchester and there was a reception at the town hall here after – the whole orchestra went. Oysters, I heard, the cor anglais player was laid prostrate for a week.’
‘Only to be expected,’ I said.
‘But they’ve funded a lettrice for the Italian department here as well,’ Margaret said. ‘I found out she’s called Silvia. Do you think they’d be interested in giving us money, Buitoni, I mean?’
‘What for?’
‘Oh, I don’t know, that’s your pigeon, isn’t it? Something Italian. Futurismo. Let’s have a meeting. She’s living with the professor of theology. She comes from Cremona. Ah, la bella Italia,’ she finished, clacking her hands in the shape of imaginary castanets, for some geographically inaccurate but festive reason.
‘You’ve been busy,’ I said, giggling.
‘You know who I mean, the Australian professor of theology, not that there’s more than one,’ Margaret said. ‘Renting a room off him. Must dash.’
She dashed.
As often happens in life, once you have acquired a certain body of information about a thing, a place, a person, it is impossible not to enter into a more active relationship with them. Once Margaret had told me all of this about Silvia, it was inevitable that I would meet her very soon. It is something to do with the quality of the gaze. Once you know that a woman lives in the spare room of the Australian professor of theology, that she comes from Cremona, a town that, though famous for violin makers, only called up in my more slapdash mind the idea of a vast pudding, creamy and lemony at once, a city, more realistically, of pale yellow churches surrounded by a perfectly circular crimped wall, the warm colour of baked pastry … To be in possession of all this knowledge, both factual and fanciful, and yet to know that she knows nothing about you, not even your name, such a situation must engender a curious, knowing, unequal gaze.
I finally met her in the museum. Having seen her only at concerts, I stared somewhat, trying for a second to establish her context. She was looking with apparent enchantment at a glass case of ammonites. She felt my gaze; she looked up.
‘Hello,’ she said. ‘You go to concerts, don’t you? I recognize you.’
So we started to become friends. Three days later, we were sitting in the museum café.
‘But you work here?’ Silvia said. ‘That’s marvellous. I love this museum, so wonderful. In Italy we don’t have these things, so beautiful, you know?’
A day or two later we were standing, as we had arranged, in front of a stuffed model of a sabre-toothed tiger. It had been patched together forty years ago out of old bits of dog and plaster fangs. Its skin was split and leaking kapok. Its fur was bald and patchy. Underneath, a handwritten notice in fading ink told us that possibly ten thousand years ago this animal had possibly roamed the countryside hereabouts, possibly.
‘Look, a woolly mammoth,’ Silvia said, moving on. ‘Or the tooth thereof. You would not know that I was not English, yes?’
‘Excellent,’ I said. ‘But you really like all this stuff?’
‘Oh, yes, lovely,’ Silvia said. ‘Where do you live? You live alone?’
‘Quite near here,’ I said. I went on to tell her – there was not much to tell, but I told her about the rented flat at the top of a big Victorian house, converted for four single people by the Irish doctor who owned it; the dingy communal spaces, with the floral wallpaper no one had chosen, the half-dead spider plants, the solitary undusted china ornaments, Irish cast-offs, a chipped and smiling Edwardian lady in her china skirts at each turning of the stair, the mail for departed tenants piling up in the hall.
‘Oh, that sounds nice,’ Silvia said dismissively. She abruptly looked at her watch – ‘Heavens,’ she said. The watch was so tiny and so heavily jewelled you could not imagine using it to tell the time from, but Silvia said, ‘I nearly forgot. I call my mother.’
‘Not in the museum,’ I said, gesturing at the woolly mammoth’s tooth. But no one was around, and Silvia whipped her mobile phone out pooh-poohingly.
‘Mamma,’ she said. ‘Come stai? … Bene, bene. Fa freddo – sta piovendo … Si, si, sempre. E Papa? … E Luca sta bene? … E Luigi? … E Roberto? … Mauro anche? … Massimo? … Va bene, va bene, ci parliamo domani, va bene? … Ciao ciao, Mamma.’
She switched off. I later learnt that Silvia made this exact phone call, at exactly the same time, every single day of her life. She said that it was raining in England, she found out what the weather was like in Italy, and she asked after the health of her father and, in order, her five unstoppable brothers, Luca, Luigi, Roberto, Mauro and Massimo, twenty-two years old down to five, before promising to telephone at the same time the next day for the same purpose. It seemed strange to me, who in the English way called his mother once a fortnight or so. I rarely had much more to say than Silvia, but the embarrassment happened much less frequently. Silvia, I guessed at the time, might be homesick. That was not, however, the case.
And a week or so later, sitting in a pub in the early evening, she continued this conversation about her room and told me about the Australian professor of theology. For some reason, I had thought that he was a single man, but I learnt that he had a wife and three children, two sons and a daughter. By the end of that evening, Silvia had invited me to dinner, the day after next, at their house.
‘I would say tomorrow night but, you know, it’s not my house. I can’t tell them until tomorrow morning, I need to give them a day or two, you understand? Listen, you like Italian food? I cook you an Italian dinner.’
All afternoon the next day I felt feverishly burgeoning, down in my windowless office at the museum. I felt like a nineteenth-century girl in a Swedish film, throwing off my corsets and discovering my sexuality.
‘We missed you,’ Margaret said, sidling through the door with a clipboard.
‘Oh, Christ,’ I said. ‘It was the— Christ, what was it?’
‘The education and outreach committee’s budget meeting,’ she said. ‘It’s been in all our diaries for weeks.’
‘I knew there was something,’ I said.
‘There was indeed,’ she said. ‘There was something, you’re right there.’
‘That’s a catastrophe,’ I said. ‘I don’t know how I could have forgotten it.’
‘You’ll get the minutes,’ she said. ‘Don’t be hard on yourself.’
Of course she was right: people missed meetings all the time. It wasn’t that she was concerned about me. She could just tell that something new had come into my life; it would have taken a bright guess to alight upon Silvia, but Margaret, hovering in the door of my office, could tell it was something of that sort. She just wanted to know. I just wanted not to tell her.
The professor of theology was called Professor Quincy. He lived, I discovered, in an absurd villa in the opulent inner suburbs of the city. The street was lined with vast, ancient beeches, never intended by the Victorian planners to grow to such a size. Their foliage met and struggled overhead, and the pavement writhed and buckled over the roots like a late chapter of Moby-Dick. In other cities, to live in a Victorian house of this sort would require some wealth. These houses had been built for ruinous, grasping magnates, but a hundred years on, few people in the city had much money at all, and they were lived in by mere professors of theology. Quincy’s house had crenellations, battlements in the local orange stone, stained glass in the oddest places. In the street, two small girls were playing an unnecessarily picturesque game of pat-a-cake, slapping each other’s palms fiercely. As I passed them, they stopped and silently watched me. Silvia had given me the address, but had not offered to pick me up and take me there. I rang the doorbell, holding a box of chocolates and a bunch of carnations, which, I realized too late, were artificially dyed into lurid colours, the sort that would probably last in the recipient’s second-worst vase for several weeks.
A dog hurled itself at the other side of the door, yelling furiously. I stepped back into the neglected border, tangling myself in some dead vines. As I was pulling my foot out, a shape appeared through the stained glass, a feminine shape, though too short and dumpy to be Silvia’s. The girl – the Quincy daughter, it must be – rattled the door free from its chains. It swung open. I quailed back. The dog, still bellowing with rage, threw itself past me and ran directly to the front gate. It continued barking at the street, which was empty of anyone except the two small girls, who ignored it.
‘He does that,’ the girl said. ‘He wants you to think he was barking at something behind you all the time. It’s really that he doesn’t want to offend you, but the temptation to bark, it’s just too much for him. He’s called Joseph. He’s got very good manners, really. He’ll come back when he thinks he’s made his point.’
‘Hello,’ I said, going in. The hall of the house was red as raw liver, the heavy, elaborate wallpaper torn away into yellowing scars and hung randomly with pictures, knocked off the level by the passing human traffic: cheap old prints, a painting by a child, solidly framed, a watercolour of Derwentwater, a disconcerting and conical nude that might be of either sex – the acquisitions of rainy days, the findings in junk shops, the exhibitions of local painting groups, of arguments concluded with a dashing purchase. Something was clinging about my feet. I looked down. It was a man’s walking sock. I kicked it off discreetly, trying to appear as if I were shaking myself from rain.
‘Are you a friend of the Lettuce?’ the girl said. ‘Silvia, I mean. We call her the Lettuce because she’s a lettrice, sorry, not very funny, I know. I’m Natasha.’
‘I’m Mark,’ a medium-sized boy said, hanging over the banister. ‘Who’s that?’
I introduced myself.
‘Why have you got flowers? You’ve not come for dinner, have you? No one said anyone was coming for dinner.’ The boy came downstairs, slouching from side to side.
‘Yes, they did,’ Natasha said. ‘Silvia said, this morning.’
‘Oh,’ the boy said. He approached me, looked at me with amusement and, with a considered gesture, wiped his wet and dribbling nose noisily along the sleeve of his home-knitted red sweater. I looked at his clothes, and at Natasha’s, with compassion. They were the clothes of the children of theology professors the whole world over. ‘I’m precocious. Do you know what that means?’
‘I would say that being able to describe yourself as precocious at your age is a fair definition of it.’
‘No,’ Mark said. ‘That’s not really correct. That would be an instance of precocity, and not a definition of it.’
I agreed.
‘Come through,’ a voice called. I followed the children into what proved to be the kitchen. I wondered whether I was expected. From the ceiling, what seemed to be a week’s washing was hanging on a wooden frame, the frills and collapses of much-washed intimates like some natural phenomenon of drip and accretion. On the kitchen worktop, a pile of unsorted socks threatened to fall into a bowl of salad. The only orderly thing in the kitchen seemed to be five neatly labelled recycling boxes, and they were near overflowing.
‘Hi,’ I said. Silvia was at the stove. You noticed the things of the kitchen before the people in it.
‘Oh, hello,’ she said, half turning from the pot she was peering into. ‘You found the house.’
‘Yes,’ I said. For some reason, I could not walk forward and offer her the awful flowers. With the terrible clarity of a crashing driver I envisaged the small but ugly scene as Silvia accepted the dyed carnations from my hand and I struggled to remember what on earth you say when handing over such a thing, and I stood there mute. But then Natasha took it from my hand, gently but persuasively, and removed it, and I never saw it again.
In time other people came in, and sat at the table. ‘This is my mother,’ Natasha said; she seemed to have taken over the job of hostess. Conversation of a sort came and went. ‘This is my father,’ she said.
‘We’ve never met,’ I said firmly to the professor, bedraggled from some labour in the study, or so it seemed. ‘But I know you by reputation.’
‘Admired him from afar,’ Mark said. ‘Stalked him for months, drawn by an inexplicable fascination.’
‘You can behave yourself,’ the professor said. ‘Company.’
