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I shifted on my leather-and-steel perch. At once Lisa moved forward and poured more tea. She didn’t want me to leave yet, because she needed someone to talk to. I was a good choice, after all. I had gradually become someone who listened, rather than a creature who went out and did things.
I thought that Lisa Kirk was probably lonely. And that her loneliness might last as long as a nanosecond, before the next Baz came along.
‘Learn? I don’t know. It was just a lazy figure of speech. You accept what you are dealt, or you kick against it. The end result’s probably no different anyway.’
While she considered this Lisa groped on the floor beside her seat and found her handbag. She took out a packet of Silk Cut and lit one while I looked at the bag. It was made of chartreuse suede and shaped like a pineapple or maybe a hand grenade.
‘Like it? It’s my design. I make handbags, my own company. I’m opening a shop in Walton Street soon. We’re called Bag Shot.’
I had seen the name, possibly in a Vogue spread of witty accessories.
‘I do like it,’ I said truthfully. I was impressed. I would too readily have dismissed Lisa as merely a trust-fund babe or daddy’s girl, and now it turned out that she was a designer and a businesswoman.
She tipped the bag upside down and a heap of keys and lipsticks and ticket stubs fell out.
‘Here,’ she said and gave it to me.
I examined the cunning fastening of the hood and the bottle-green silk lining. The little golden label stitched to the inside said ‘Bag Shot by Lisa Kirk’.
‘It’s beautiful. You can’t just give it to me.’
‘Yes I can, I want to. God. Anyway, we were saying about learning to live with things, only it’s without in my case. Baz was my business partner, you know, he was the one who knew about start-ups and leases and money, and I just drew pictures of bloody handbags and chose stuff to get them made up in. We lived together as well, obviously. Ever since I was twenty-one. Work and play, me and Baz. And then it fell apart, like a piece of machinery suddenly worn out. He met a woman at a party, I was yakking and drinking but all the time I was really just across the room, frozen, watching them fall for each other like they were in a movie. And then, once that had happened, it got really difficult to go on working together, and … so.’ She spread out her hand, taking in the kitchen and the red refrigerator and ourselves, sitting facing each other across the table.
‘I see,’ I said. We sat in silence for a minute.
‘Baz’s new girlfriend is pregnant.’
‘Oh. When did all this happen?’
‘They met four months ago.’
‘That was quick.’
‘It was, wasn’t it?’
I clasped and unclasped the lid of the bag. ‘You know, you’ll find someone else. More quickly than you think, probably. I’m sure everyone tells you that. And you can find a new business partner too although that may be a bit more difficult. The requirements are more stringent.’
She smiled at that.
‘Maybe I won’t find anyone, on the other hand. I feel pretty useless.’
I told her what she probably expected to hear, that you don’t get your stuff featured in Vogue or fix yourself up in mansion flats in Kensington at her age if you are anything less them talented and able. We drank some more tea and talked a little about how Baz and she had worked together, and then about the flat and her plans to transform it once, as she put it, the shop was able to run itself around the block. She showed me round the rest of it and I saw that her bed – as narrow as a child’s – was in the little second bedroom that Peter and I used as an occasional spare room, and in the main bedroom with its good light was her drawing board, with big cork panels pinned with scraps of fabric and sketches and pages torn from magazines resting against the walls alongside it.
I thought of our tidy rooms below, static and silent at this time of day, and the way this web of Lisa’s uncertainty and tentativeness and peering into the future was exactly superimposed on them, not just on Mrs Bobinski’s. It made me feel as stiff as our decor.
We returned to the kitchen. Lisa picked up the bag and put it into my hands.
‘Thank you,’ I said.
She came with me to the front door and I looked through the diamond glass panels at the swimmy, distorted view of the hallway.
‘Would you like to have had children?’ she asked, with her hand on the latch.
I knew that she was only asking for whatever my answer might reflect on her own situation, on the baby her ex-lover was expecting that she believed should have been hers.
‘You’ll have a baby,’ I said as gently as I could. ‘You’ve got all the time in the world.’
‘But would you?’ she persisted, with the tactlessness of self-absorption.
I am used to deflecting these thoughts, but still I saw the pictures now, the queasy procession framed and frozen by the camera shutter, click, all the way back into history, click and click.
‘No.’
Her hand had dropped back to her side so I opened the door myself and stepped out into the hallway. We exchanged unspecific invitations to have a drink, or drop round for a kitchen supper. And then I went downstairs to the close air of our own flat where the supermarket carrier bags were waiting for me to attend to them.
Peter sat in his usual chair, with a whisky at his elbow. He had had a reasonable day, he said. Busy, and the Petersens people were a bunch of amateurs who couldn’t run a tap, let alone a software licensing programme, but nothing really to complain about.
‘And you?’
He looked across at me, arching his eyebrows behind the fine metal ovals of his spectacle rims. I told him about having tea with Lisa Kirk, and showed him the chartreuse hand grenade.
He examined it, inside and out.
‘Bit extreme, isn’t it? Do women really buy this sort of stuff?’
‘Yes, I think so. They probably pay about two hundred quid for it. She runs her own business and is about to open a shop.’
He puckered his lips in a soundless whistle, interested now. Peter was a management consultant, with expertise I couldn’t even guess at. He read and wrote reports in a language as impenetrable to me as Mandarin, and he too had a company, on the comfortable earnings from which we lived our sedate life in Dunollie Mansions. ‘Chalk and cheese,’ my mother said before we married, which was also not long before her early death from ovarian cancer. (My father and she separated when I was about twelve, and he married again and acquired a second family to which he and his new wife swiftly added. The Steps and Halves, my mother and I called them.)
Chalk and cheese Peter and I may have been, but we were determined to have each other. We were introduced by a photographer I knew who gave a drunken Christmas party in his studio, to which Peter was brought along more or less on a whim by the photographer’s agent. I remember looking across the room, through a sea of outlandish people who didn’t at the time look outlandish to me, and seeing his well-cut suit and the lights flickering off the shields of his glasses. He was the one who looked out of place in that company of Mapplethorpe boys and six-foot women. After a little while the photographer’s agent brought him across and introduced us.
‘Cary Flint, Peter Stafford.’
I remember that we talked about our fellow guests and a new book of our host’s pictures, and a Matisse exhibition we had both recently seen in the South of France. I had to work hard to sustain this cocktail party standard of chat. I was very thin at the time and taking a lot of pills, and felt speedy and mad. I was disconcerted by the way this man tilted his head towards me so as not to miss a word of my insane gabble, and I also saw the way that his hair fell forward over his temples and the mildness of his eyes behind his glasses, and my knees almost buckled with lust for him. The party was reaching its crescendo. Two boys were exchanging tongues under the ribs of the spiral staircase that also sheltered Peter and me. A procession of other models’ legs filed up and down past our ears and I noticed that he never even glanced at all this thigh and buttock because his eyes were fixed on me. I began to speak more slowly, although I had to shout over the noise, and all the time he watched my mouth with minute attention. Blood hummed in my ears, drowning the crashing music.
At last Peter took my glass out of my hand and put it down, reaching past the intertwined boys to do so.
‘Shall we leave now?’ he asked.
Outside, the cold air hit me in the face. My tiny party dress also exposed a length of bare leg and my coat didn’t cover much more.
Peter wrapped a protective arm round my shoulders.
‘It isn’t far to my car.’
I couldn’t even remember whether I had come in my car, let alone where I might have parked it. That was how I was in those days.
Peter’s turned out to be low, two-seater, quite old and with an interior of creased leather and glowing wood. I learned later that it was a Jaguar XK140. He always loved old cars and kept a series of them on which he bestowed almost as much affection as he did on me. He took me that night to a French restaurant in Notting Hill, old-fashioned but good, and made me eat whitebait and steak. I drew the line at pudding, although he wanted to order one for me. I hadn’t eaten a pudding or a slice of cake since I was fifteen.
Over the first course I confessed what I believed it was only fair for him to know from the beginning. If, in fact, there was actually going to be anything further, if this start didn’t turn out also to be the ending. There had been a few evenings of that sort, lately.
‘I am afraid that I am mad. Known fact. Crazy. Completely barking.’
He chewed his food, reflecting briefly on this idiotic announcement.
‘I think I will be the judge of that,’ Peter Stafford answered.
I ate as much as I could of my steak and vegetables, without making much of a dent in the portion, and all the time I could think of nothing but how soon we might be able to go to bed together. When he was finally convinced that I wasn’t going to eat tarte Tatin or chocolate soufflé, Peter shepherded me back to the Jaguar and drove me to his flat in Bayswater.
We kissed for the first time under the overhead light in the hallway. In his sitting room, standing beside the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, I reached around to the zip on the back of my dress and undid it. Slowly, I let the folds drop to the carpet. I was naked underneath except for my pants. He covered my breasts with his hands.
I kicked off one high-heeled shoe and then the other. Barefoot, I was closer to his height. He took my hand and led me into his bedroom, and closed the door behind us.
When he took off the last garment he knelt over me and looked.
‘Oh God, oh God,’ he breathed. After a beat of fear I realised that it was in pleasure and admiration, not dismay. I put my arms round his neck and pulled him down on top of me.
When we made love, Peter Stafford made me feel three-dimensional.
I forgot the jut of my hips and my overlong and protuberant spinal column, and the dull grate of bone. In his arms I became languorous and creamy and fat.
Afterwards he held me against him, warming me with his solid flesh.
‘Cary, Cary. Be still,’ he ordered and I knew that he didn’t mean just now, under the crisp covers of his bed, but in my life. No more spinning around and gobbling pills. No more talking nonsense or drinking or dementia.
‘I asked Cecil to bring me over to you,’ he said. Cecil was the photographer’s agent. ‘I didn’t think you would even speak to me, but I made him do it just the same.’
‘I would have come to you, if you hadn’t.’ Maybe I would have done, too.
That was a Thursday evening. I had a job the next day, but I called in sick. It was the first time I had ever done such a thing and my booker was astonished. Peter called his office too. We stayed in bed for the whole of Friday and for the weekend that followed it, except for when we got up to forage for something to eat and drink. I padded around wearing one of his shirts because I had nothing with me but my party dress and we fed each other cold chicken legs or buttered toast.
‘Good,’ he approved.
Another time when we were quietly lying together and watching raindrops on the window glass he asked, ‘Why did you say you were mad? Except for the job you do and the people you do it with you seem exceptionally sane to me.’
I fended him off. ‘No real reason. Drink, nerves, babble. Or I suppose that if someone were to look at you and then at me, they might put you in the sane category and me in the other. Just as a matter of relativity.’
‘Because of the way we look, relatively?’
Without his glasses Peter’s eyes were soft, with creases at the corners. His forehead and the faint lines hooking together his mouth and nose and the curve of his lips were already dear to me. I touched them, stroking the skin with the flat of my thumbs.
‘No. Nothing to do with that. It’s history.’
‘What history?’
‘Tell me yours first.’
He held me so that my chin rested in the hollow of his shoulder. I closed my eyes and listened while he described his childhood. He was the middle one of three boys, children of a City solicitor and a career mother. They lived in a good house in Hampshire and the brothers played cricket in the garden and sailed dinghies, and went to a suitable public school and then on to appropriate universities.
‘Not very interesting, you see,’ Peter said.
‘It is to me. Where are your brothers now?’
He told me that they were both lawyers and both married, and made a joke about it being such a conservative family that his own minute deviations from this norm were regarded as acts of rebellion.
‘No wife, you mean?’
‘No law, no wife. But I have had a couple of girlfriends. I’m quite normal, you know.’
I did know already, but I wanted to know more about his background because he was so safe and rational, the living equivalent of the scent of clean laundry. Everything about Peter Stafford, past and present, was a magnet to me.
Probably after that we started to make love again and so his original question to me was forgotten. I avoided talking about my own history that time, although eventually, of course, I did confess it to him.
In any case, within three months Peter and I were married.
He asked me once or twice if I had seen our new neighbour again, and I told him no. Then I met Lisa parking her car as I was coming back from a walk in Hyde Park. We talked for a minute or two, and on impulse I asked her if she would like to come and have dinner with us the following week. To my surprise she accepted. She was lonelier than I had calculated and Baz had not yet been replaced.
Lisa rang the doorbell late, well after all the other guests had arrived. Peter answered the door and I heard him introducing himself and then Lisa’s laughing response before he shepherd her into the drawing room. She was wearing a short, slippery red dress with a little pink cardigan shrugged over it, and red suede shoes. Our guests collectively sat upright, our old friends Clive and Sally Marr and Mark and Gerard from upstairs, and the visiting American woman associate of Peter’s, and the young portrait painter and his girlfriend whom I had invited in an attempt to span the age gap between Lisa and the rest of us. Her arrival was like a shaft of daylight coming into the nighttime gathering.
I saw her looking around at the room that was identical in shape and size, and yet so different from hers.
‘Your flat is very smart,’ she said, after we had greeted each other.
‘Is it?’
‘Definitely.’
I introduced her to the others and as she moved around I saw that what she brought with her wasn’t exactly light, but warmth. Aside from her youth and her prettiness, she had genuine heat that thawed the formality of the occasion. Clive Marr unwound his long arms and legs from their self-protective embrace and shook her hand, and Jessy the American woman smilingly made room for her on the sofa. I hitched my black woollen sleeves round my wrists. I was glad that Lisa Kirk was entirely natural and at ease, and that she didn’t need her hostess’s protection. My hands were cold, so I went closer to the fire and warmed them.
The evening took off. Clive told a funny story I had never heard before about his days as a houseman under an autocratic consultant who thought his inveterate stutter was an affectation. ‘D-d-d-iverticulitis, Dr Marr?’ he mimicked, embedding his own impediment within the fearsome doctor’s voice with surgical precision.
Everyone laughed including Lisa, and Clive looked boyish with pleasure.
Dan Cruickshank the portrait painter gossiped indiscreetly about the royal princess who was currently sitting for him, and Mark and Gerard leaned forward greedily to catch the details. From across the room Peter smiled at me, his eyes creasing behind his glasses. I smiled back, buckling my mouth into a curve against a sense of alarm that I didn’t yet recognise.
We went into the next room to eat. The candles reflected tapering ovals of light off glass and polished wood. Lisa studied Peter’s pictures, a pair of splashy Hodgkins and a small Bacon. She had taken off her little pink cardigan and her shoulders were bare except for thin straps. Her skin was pale and the candlelight seemed to strike off it, breaking and intensifying into painterly slashes of green and peach and yellow so that I narrowed my eyes to make it recombine, wondering if I had already had too much to drink.
‘Lisa, would you like to sit here?’
Peter drew out the chair next to his. I took the other end of the table, between Gerard and Dan. The talk and laughter swelled and I sliced and spooned food on to plates and watched it disappear. After long years of conditioning myself, I didn’t any longer care much about eating. But I had plenty of time at my disposal to prepare meals like this one and cooking was still one of my pleasures.
At my end of the table Dan and Sally and Jessy were talking about portraiture. Peter had wanted Dan to paint me and we had met originally to talk about the project. I had hedged and demurred, because I didn’t want to sit and be scrutinised so closely, and in the end the idea had come to nothing. But we had remained friends with Dan and therefore also the current one of his series of girlfriends.
‘I would still like her to sit for me, but I don’t think I can persuade her,’ Dan was saying.
‘You should keep trying,’ Gerard advised.
Lisa had been deep in conversation with Peter. Her attentiveness to him made her seem taut as a stretched bow with the arrow in the notch and ready to fly. But now she turned her head. Our eyes met and locked.
