Portobello Page 10

  'Just a minute, Joel. I have to tell you again, I'm not a psychiatrist. I'm a doctor of medicine. I'm not qualified to practise as a psychiatrist. You know that, don't you?'

  'Yes, but someone told me that anyone can be a psychotherapist in the UK, anyone. You don't need qualifications. And you're a doctor and all those others aren't. Now, like I was saying, this happened when I was sixteen… Are you listening?'

  'I'm listening,' Ella said, keeping her sigh silent.

  He began, speaking rapidly, giving the impression that if he hadn't uttered it before – though maybe he had – he had rehearsed the telling over and over very thoroughly. It had loomed large in his life, it was his life. Later, as she turned it all over in her mind, she wished more than anything that she could have told Eugene about it. But she couldn't. Joel was confiding in her as his doctor and that was all there was to it.

  He had had a sister, he told her, ten years younger than himself. Her name was Amy. They had just moved, his parents, Amy and himself, from Southampton to a house in the Hampshire countryside with twelve acres of land and a lake. From being rich, his father had become a millionaire. When the move was taking place Joel was away at school and, coming home for the summer holidays, he saw Mossbourne House and its grounds for the first time.

  'It was beautiful,' he said. 'I loved it. I'd never seen anywhere like it. But I'll tell you something.' Joel looked to right and left and then, rather diffidently, over his left shoulder. 'I'll tell you something. That place at the end of the tunnel, that place I went to when I died, that was hell but that was Mossbourne too. Those white columns and the turrets, they were Mossbourne, and the river – but not the lake. There's no lake where I went when I died.' He shook his head ruefully. 'Hell is beautiful, you know. It's not all ugly and burning up like those old writers said.'

  Ella's office was light and bright and practical but suddenly it seemed to have grown dark. She would have shivered if she hadn't controlled herself.

  'Go on.'

  'You sound like Dr Peacock,' he said. 'My sister wanted to show me all round the place. She had been there for three weeks by then. She thought she knew all about it.'

  Amy had taken him all over the grounds, sometimes holding him by the hand. It was fine hot weather, the sun shining every day. She led him into the wood and along the little stream. One evening they saw an otter and there weren't so many otters about then as there were now. She liked best to take a picnic and eat it by the lake.

  'I'm not supposed to go into the water unless Mummy or Daddy are with me. Or you. Mummy says it's all right with you because you can swim and she says you're a grown-up now. Are you a grownup?'

  'Of course I am,' he had said.

  'But you're not to keep me waiting because I'm longing to go in.'

  They put on swimming things and jeans and T-shirts on top, and took towels along with the picnic. There were fish in the lake and long green weeds trailing through the water like streaming hair but it was clean and clear. You could see the round cream and golden pebbles on the bottom. Joel was teaching Amy to swim. But it wasn't the best place to learn. A swimming pool would have been better, with steps to go down into the water, a shallow end and a deep end and a bar all round its rim. He said he would take her to the pool in Salisbury next time their mother drove in there. Meanwhile, they bathed in the lake. The hot weather couldn't go on like this, perfect every day, it must change soon, but it did go on. It got even hotter.

  One day they both went into the water in the morning and at midday or a bit later they ate the picnic lunch they had brought with them, quite a big lunch, half a cold chicken from the fridge with bread rolls and butter and tomatoes, and a big piece of Brie cheese and a chocolate cake and a box of shortbread biscuits.

  'You can really remember all that?' Ella said.

  'I remember everything about that day. Except the bit when I was asleep.'

  'You went to sleep? A sixteen-year-old?' She said it for something to say because she could tell now what was coming and she wanted to stop it or at least postpone it.

  'I've always slept a lot,' he said. 'My mother says I was a very good baby. I slept the whole night through from the time I was born. I can sleep now – I only have to lie down and close my eyes and I'm asleep.'

  This time she didn't say, 'Go on.'

  He was full of food and it was very warm. He lay down on a blanket, meaning just to lie there and stare up at the blue sky, and he told Amy not to go into the water. It was too soon anyway. It was bad for you to go swimming straight after you'd eaten. She was to wait for him, lie down and have a rest and wait for him. They should give it half an hour. When he woke up she was gone. Her clothes were still there in a heap but she was gone.

  'I'd slept too long, you see, Ella.' It was the first time he had called her by her given name. 'She must have got tired of waiting. I was so frightened, Ella. I was in a panic. I ran up and down, calling her. I picked up her clothes and looked underneath them – mad, wasn't it? As if she could have been hiding underneath her clothes. I was afraid to go into the water – I don't mean I was afraid of the water – I was afraid of what I'd find. And I did find it. I went into the water, I looked for her and I did find her. In the end I did. I found her dead body. It was bleached so white like she was made of bone, soft bone. And she was all caught up in the weed and the reeds. I couldn't pull her out, not on my own I couldn't. I went back to the house and told my parents. I had to, though it was terrible. At first my father wouldn't believe she was dead, he said I'd made a mistake, she couldn't be dead. We all went down to the lake and he and my mother managed to pull her out. When Pa knew she was dead I thought he was going to kill me. My mother had to hold him back. She put her arms round his waist and held on to him and told me to run away, to go into the house.'

  Ella was shaking her head, murmuring, 'How dreadful, how dreadful.'

  'I'll tell you the rest of it next time. He never spoke to me again. I'll tell you about that next time I come here or you come to me. You will come to me, won't you? I want to tell you the rest of it. I can't tell you now. I'm so tired. There's nothing tires me so much as talking about it.'

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  While he was in the hospital Uncle Gib never came near him. Lance didn't expect it, he'd have been so surprised to see him he'd have thought he was having a nightmare. It was amazing enough when his mum came. He was all over bruises, he had something wrong with one of his elbows and two broken ribs. It was touch and go whether they removed his spleen, or so he thought he'd overheard them saying but this might have been something he remembered from watching ER. He didn't know where his spleen was or what was the use of it but he was relieved they weren't going to take it out.

  The day before they discharged him something wonderful happened. It was the last thing he'd have thought possible but the only thing he really wanted. The ward was full of visitors except round his bed. He had no one, which was normal, and when Gemma came in he thought he was seeing things because all that kicking and punching had done his head in. She was looking more beautiful than ever, like Paris Hilton, in a sleeveless yellow dress and silver sandals with four-inch cork wedges. He couldn't speak, he just stared.

  'I left Abelard with Mum,' she said. Abelard was the baby. 'How're you doing?'

  'I'm good. Going home tomorrow.You're the last person I thought I'd see but it's great to see you.' He said it again. 'It's great.'

  'Yeah, well, they hadn't no call to do what they did. I mean, that Ian don't know his own strength. He gets carried away. I thought, you know, I'll go over there and see Lance, it's the least I can do, I mean, tell him I'm sorry and they'd no call to do that.'

  'He don't know you're here, that Fize?'

  'Do me a favour. You was jealous but Fize is an animal. He reckons I'm round at Michelle's place and Mum won't say a word.'

  'Gemma?'

  'What?'

  'Did they – I mean, that lot, did they get enough dosh from all that stuff they took off me – I
mean, the necklace and stuff – like to pay for your tooth?'

  For answer, she inserted one long white finger, the nail lacquered lemon yellow, into her mouth, pulled back a gleaming peachcoloured lip and showed him her flawless incisors and molars. 'It's a temporary for now but Mr Ahmed'll be putting the permanent one on soon as it's been made.'

  'That's good,' Lance said. 'I'm really glad. That's all I nicked that stuff for. It wasn't for myself.'

  Gemma smiled at him quite fondly. 'Oh, you. You was my tooth fairy, Lance, only you don't want to be so free with your fists. Specially round women. Now I've got to get over to Mum's and pick up Abelard. Shall I come and see you when you're back in that dump with old what's-his-name?'

  It was a strange part of the world, the edge of Kensal, where the Portobello Road squeezed under the train line and the Westway and, wandering on, passed the Spanish convent before coming close to the suburban line and turning sharp right to become Wornington Road; a street of stalls and shops and stalls in front of shops, and especially on Saturdays, that space between was crammed full of people. American visitors, tourists from India and Japan, white-skinned white-haired housewives who lived in the old council flats and had done since they were girls, and had always shopped down the Portobello, hippies from the sixties, old now but still wearing robes and strings of beads, their long grey hair tied back in a pony tail, and the young, hundreds and thousands of the young, wearing a different uniform from their flower power grandparents but still a uniform, jeans and T-shirts and boots, unisex gear, distinguishable only because the girls had breasts and the boys carotid cartilages.

  The shops sold meat and fish and cheese and bread and flowers, and junk of every possible provenance and description. The stalls sold junk too and plenty of things that weren't junk, prints and watercolours, good jewellery and bad, umbrellas, handbags, hats, leather jackets, lampshades, masks, fishnet tights and miniskirts, mirrors and fire screens and cigarette cases and long white gloves. The young ones could buy things unknown to their flower power grandparents: star fruit and custard apples, amaranth flakes, wild rice, aubergines striped like dahlias, samphire, chorizo and Chinese cabbage. The hallucinogenic fungi had been banned a couple of years before but certain herbs in innocuous-looking cellophane packs did the job just as well.

  Some of the stallholders kept up a running commentary on what they had for sale, kept it up for hours, the street cries of the twentyfirst century, and their voices never grew hoarse. One of them was shouting the virtues of a cigarette substitute with a battery inside it which produced a red light and tasted of cloves but could be used – hardly smoked – in any pub or restaurant or enclosed space. As the Portobello climbed and dipped northwards and passed the old Electric Cinema, the decoration of shops and adornment of stalls became more colourful and bizarre, as if an army of graffitists or students of Banksy had been called in to make this the brightest market in London. One or two of them had painted whole sides of buildings with Caribbean festivals or medieval ladies with unicorns and knights on gold-caparisoned white chargers. Bright green and scarlet and acid yellow, orange and turquoise and, more than anything, a rich violet.

  When the houses were built around the top of the Portobello, 'road' was a classier name than 'street'. And the houses are becoming classy again, tall ones divided into flats, smaller ones, the size of Uncle Gib's, smartened in ways that would be unrecognisable to their early owners. New front doors, new windows, discreet cladding, window boxes, bay trees in tubs – anchored down because this place is rich in crime – driveways off the street for cars. Curtains are gone; these windows have blinds and when these are raised you can see right through the house to the rear garden beyond. All the front rooms and dining rooms have been knocked into one through-room and the garden revealed has gum trees and spiraea and fremontodendrons – for this is twenty-first-century Britain where everyone has luxury and no one has any money. They have spent it on their homes and their holidays as it comes in, and keep on spending it. All except Uncle Gib. His house is almost in a state of nature, a unique original Victorian dwelling, circa 1880. If they had any sense, the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, on whose northern border this is, would buy it off him, titivate it a bit and open it as a nineteenth-century museum.

  But all they had done was send a Pest Control officer round to deal with the vermin. Far from all wanting a rat of their own, as Uncle Gib had suggested to Lance, the neighbours had complained. The Pest Control officer sniffed, poked about in the outside toilet and shook his head at the state of the kitchen. 'This place needs a spot of attention,' he said, adding unwisely, 'if you ask me.'

  Uncle Gib said what he always said to visitors who criticised, 'I'm waiting for the builders to start next week,' and then, because he wasn't going to have any ratcatcher finding fault with his arrangements, 'and I don't ask you. You want to mind your own business, which is clobbering vermin.'

  He felt so pleased with this put-down that he went about the house after the man had gone, singing 'Jesus Wants me for a Sunbeam'. He hummed it now, threading his way among the ambling tourists and the slouching young, past the shop that sold venison and guinea fowl, and the stall that sold Persian perfumes: 'A sunbeam, a sunbeam, I'll be a sunbeam for Him.' No one took any notice of him, this tall emaciated old man with his Voltairean face and his fluffy white hair singing hymns as he bounded along. Eccentricity is the norm in the Portobello Road.

  At one of the last stalls he stopped to buy eggs and at almost the last shop, next to the one where, in the previous week, he had bought a second-hand single mattress for the new tenant, slices of mortadella and chorizo and a piece of Double Gloucester. Uncle Gib ate only eggs and sausage-style meats and cheese, and not much of that. With a scornful glance at the stall displaying cigarette substitutes, he put his purchases in the old pink plastic bag he carried everywhere with him and which had seen many such outings since it started life in Superdrug. Saving the environment suited Uncle Gib. He had lived frugally long before global warming became an issue.

  So sharp right and then right again down to the bottom of Blagrove Road. The Pest Control officer hadn't done much beyond poisoning the rats with Warfarin (or so Uncle Gib supposed) but, approaching his house, he seemed to see it as somehow refurbished and smartened up by this vermin-cleansing operation. Hygiene had been effected and, what interested him most, at absolutely no cost to himself, so he let himself into his house, right up against the Westway and the Hammersmith and City Line, in a cheerful frame of mind. This soon changed. Like an animal, which without seeing or hearing or even smelling the intruder, immediately knows when someone else has entered its home and is present there, Uncle Gib sensed that he wasn't alone. He lit a cigarette before he went upstairs.

  Lance's bedroom door was shut. Knocking on doors was a courtesy unknown to Uncle Gib who opened it wide and stood on the threshold.

  'I'm back,' said Lance.

  'I can see that. I'm not blind.'

  Lance had a cast on his left arm, which was in a sling, and a wide strip of gauze held in place by plasters on the side of his head where the hair had been shaved away. Making no comment on his injuries, Uncle Gib stared searchingly at the cast and the plasters, then cast up his eyes as if expecting some heavenly visitation or judgement.

  'Is there anything to eat?' said Lance, coughing at the smoke.

  'You can have an egg and a bit of sausage. If you want any more you'll have to fetch it in yourself. Missed your slave, did you?'

  Uncle Gib went downstairs and Lance shifted his position on the bed – his ribs ached – not too dismayed because he was thinking about Gemma and thinking too that, when all was said and done, he would have been a highly successful burglar but for the intervention of Fize and co. Perhaps, when he was better, he would try again.

  Above his head he could hear Dorian Lupescu moving about. He hadn't yet encountered him and didn't want to. That top flat should have been his, not handed over to some immigrant or whatever he was. The man h
ad moved in while he was in hospital and Lance was sure this had been arranged on purpose so that he wouldn't be there to tell Dorian about the inadequacies of his flat, complain about the missing table and give him an account of the sighting of the rat. Still, when he had accomplished a successful burglary he'd be able to move out and leave Uncle Gib and the Romanian (as that, apparently, was what he was) together on their own. He'd shake the dust of this place off his feet for ever.

  The footsteps upstairs continued, followed by a swishing sound as if a mattress were being dragged about on a dusty wooden floor. Lance rolled over on to his front and went back to sleep.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Eugene had sold a picture by a painter who worked in the style of Max Ernst, just a small drawing called Dagon's Wife, which Ella found rather frightening, a woman with a cat's head in a silver dress and holding a fan made of bones, but he had got a large sum for it, his share of which, he said, would pay for their wedding. He was determined this must be lavish, her wedding dress not a bit like the one in the picture, but to be made by the designer who had made the Duchess of Cornwall's. Ella had got her own way only about the venue for the ceremony, not a church, not a register office, but a beautiful old house in Chiswick, licensed for marriages. The reception, which Eugene in his oldfashioned way called the 'wedding breakfast', though it would be a late lunch, was to be at the Connaught.

  They had had a not very acrimonious argument about Ella's insisting on visiting this private patient of hers, Joel Roseman.

  'I don't want to go over there, darling, you must know that. I've put him off twice and now I must go. He wants to tell me something.'

  'Yes, I know. You said. But though you won't tell me what it's about you say it's not a physical illness he has. Isn't this a matter for a psychiatrist?'