Portobello Page 11

  'He's seeing a psychiatrist, Gene, but he doesn't like her. I think he'll give up. And you know I can't tell you things he tells me in confidence. Well, I don't think I can, though if they're not about an illness… I honestly don't know. It's just better not.'

  With that Eugene had to be content. It wasn't that he was in the least jealous of Joel Roseman. Of Ella's love for himself he had no doubt. But at present he needed to be with her every moment of the time neither he nor she was working. She had seemed, he'd noticed, rather surprised, if gratified, by his new attentiveness and, apart from this insistence on dancing attendance on Joel Roseman, accepted it delightedly. Of course he loved her, there was no doubt of that, but the truth was that while they were together his consumption of Chocorange sweets was severely curtailed. He was obliged to pass hours without one. And this withdrawal from his fix, whole evenings of abstinence, a Saturday and Sunday in Rye and another in Gloucestershire, whole weekends, he hoped would help him in his phasing out. Unfortunately, what always happened was that as soon as he and Ella parted he was unable to resist gorging on the bloody things, one after another until half a pack was gone. It was in this way that he thought of them now, the classic addict's reaction, needing but hating, longing but loathing. The bloody things.

  The sale of the quasi-Ernst, acknowledged decorously in the gallery with the purchaser and Dorinda in several glasses of champagne, he had personally and privately celebrated by dashing down to Elixir and tearing open a pack of Chocorange before he was even out of the store. Half the pack was eaten while he sat on a seat in Kensington Gardens and when he closed it and put it in his pocket he felt, for the first time, despair. In every respect his habit had become odious to him. He was a dignified man and no dependency could be more undignified than a craving for the sort of sweets guzzled by children and old ladies. It might also be seriously bad for him. Could you ingest vast daily quantities of a chemical sugar substitute without doing yourself enduring harm? The secrecy too appalled him. He knew he was naturally secretive but only to the extent of not wanting casual acquaintances and employees to know his private business. With regard to these wretched, horrible, bloody, lumps of caramel gunge, he had constructed a whole covert, hidden, humiliating world of pretence and lies, sneaking around pharmacies and stores to find his fix, inventing a serious disease for himself to cover an addiction as compelling and overpowering as if it had been heroin that enslaved him. And the phasing out wasn't a success. Or, rather, it was only when his life was calm and stress-free. Give him an hour or so with a client who couldn't make up his mind to buy or not to buy, give him a disagreement with the Customs and Excise or his accountants, and once it was past he was down the road to the nearest pharmacy…

  Sitting there on a seat under a spreading copper beech, Eugene bent over and put his head in his hands, for once not caring who saw him or what they thought.

  She rang the bell and banged on the brass knocker but it was a while before she could make Joel hear.

  At last he came, trudging, bleary-eyed. 'I was asleep.' He peered at her as if he had never seen her before. 'I sleep a lot. I don't have much to do, so I sleep.'

  It was brighter outside than the last time Ella had been to the flat but darker in here. 'The dim halls of sleep and death' was the phrase that came into her mind but she didn't know if this was a quotation or she had made it up. The darkness seemed to carry its own silence with it. She followed him into the living room where the blinds were down and this time no lamp was on. On the brown velvet sofa the cushions were crushed where his head had rested.

  'I went to the hospital to have my check-up,' he said. 'The doctor said I should start taking gentle exercise. I said what was gentle exercise and he said walking. But I get very tired when I walk. Mithras tells me not to walk, to rest.'

  'Have you told Dr Peacock about Mithras?' Speaking the name nearly made her shudder but she persisted. 'If you've started hearing his voice you ought to tell Dr Peacock.'

  'I'm not going to Dr Peacock any more.' He sat down, waved her to a chair. 'I don't want someone like her. She doesn't tell me what to do. She doesn't tell me anything. I don't like the way she looks at her watch and tells me that's enough for today. It upsets me.'

  'Joel,' she said, 'you must see someone. Your condition needs to be assessed and a suitable – well, a regime of drugs prescribed for you. I should think,' she added uncertainly. 'I can't do that. I'm not that sort of doctor.'

  'But you're the doctor I want. You listen and you answer. You're not like Dr Peacock.'

  'I shall refer you to someone else, Joel. I'll find someone you feel more comfortable with. Now you were going to tell me about your father. Could we have the blinds up, do you think?'

  He shook his head. 'I like it better when it's dark.' He made a little sound, which might have been a sigh or only a rather strong expulsion of breath. 'I don't think I could talk about it in the light.' He looked at her and turned sharply away but it was a few seconds before he began to speak. 'Pa never spoke to me again, I told you that,' he said. 'My mother tried to get him to speak to me but he wouldn't. He sent me messages by her. I mean messages about money and school and going to university, that sort of thing. You know who he is, don't you? He's Morris Stemmer, you'll have heard of him.'

  She had heard the name, she couldn't remember where. 'But you're called Roseman.'

  'It was my mother's name. He made me take it. He told Ma he didn't want me called Stemmer any more. You know who he is, don't you? They call him the king of the tycoons.'

  Some head of an insurance company or the chief executive of a huge syndicate? She never knew about things like that but she would ask Eugene. He would know.

  'He was punishing me because he said I'd killed Amy. He never seemed to see that it was as bad for me as for him, I loved Amy too and I had guilt as well. I told Ma that over and over and she told him but it never made any difference. I left school but my A levels weren't very good. I got into one of those universities with a name no one had ever heard of and I stuck it for nearly two years. Then I dropped out. I don't know what he thought, Ma never said and I didn't ask.'

  'Were you living at home?'

  'I wasn't allowed to. He took a flat for me near my college and he gave me an allowance, a big allowance, bigger than I wanted. I told Ma but he just went on paying it into my bank account. I had some jobs, unskilled stuff, the sort of thing illegal immigrants take these days, cleaners and working in cafés, that sort of thing. I worked in a sandwich factory for a while. All the other people were Italians and we never spoke. I couldn't stand it so I left.'

  'If your father was giving you money why did you need to take that sort of work? Couldn't you have trained for something? Done a course?'

  He said simply, 'I hadn't the heart.' And then, 'I never felt very well, I was always tired. Ma said it was my imagination but it wasn't, it was my heart. I literally hadn't the heart, you see, Ella.'

  'Pa had bought this flat for me. Like I said, he bought it with all this furniture and curtains and everything. I didn't have any choice about it. By then I couldn't have worked if I'd wanted to. I got so tired, especially in the evenings. I'd do nothing all day except sometimes go to the shops but still I'd be wiped out by seven. I'd fall asleep on that sofa. Ma wanted me to go to the doctor but I didn't. Then I had that heart attack, which was how I came to meet you.'

  And have a near-death experience, she thought, or what he thought was a near-death experience. The question she wanted to ask was a therapist's question, not a doctor of medicine's but she asked it. 'That place you went to that was beautiful but you thought was hell, was that somewhere you knew? Was it familiar to you?'

  He said nothing for a moment or two, then, 'I don't know. It was a bit like Mossbourne, it had the white columns and a turret, but it wasn't really very like. I tried to make it like that in my mind, but I couldn't, it wouldn't work. The place I went to was a river with grassy banks and at the end of it a city. The view was of a city with domes an
d palaces and towers. It wasn't the house at Mossbourne. That would be too convenient, wouldn't it? Hell as the lake at Mossbourne where you could say everything began – or maybe where everything ended.'

  She gave him the name of another therapist, and said she would phone this woman and tell her about Joel. The dimness was beginning to oppress her, the unnatural dark, which almost anyone else would have altered by pulling up the blind or switching on a light. It was almost as if this contrived dusk was making it hard for her to breathe. She found herself drawing in deep gulps of night-indaytime air. Writing a letter for him to give Miss Crane, she had to peer closely at the paper. The therapist's phone number, which she could usually remember, she had to look up in her address book.

  Joel seemed to be listening. 'Can you hear the people next door?' he asked her. 'I can hear they're talking but not what they say.'

  She could hear nothing but she thought it might be best to say she could. 'Maybe just a murmur.'

  'I bought earplugs so that I couldn't hear it,' he said, 'but they didn't make any difference.' He stared at her through the gloom, leaning forward across the space between them. 'You see, Ella, I'm not mad, I know it's not the neighbours I hear. It's Mithras. He makes a noise like two people talking when he's trying to get through. But he always does get through. He will in a minute.'

  For the first time since she was a child and her father had accidentally driven into the back of the car in front (with no injury to anyone) she wanted to scream aloud. She'd screamed then and sobbed while her mother tried to comfort her. Now, thirty-five years later and a responsible person, a doctor, she controlled herself and no sound came till she said in a hoarse voice, 'You must see Miss Crane and as soon as possible. You will, won't you, Joel?'

  He nodded. 'I want to get better,' he said like the child he still seemed to be.

  * * *

  While Mithras was talking to him, Joel found it impossible to sleep. The voice, other-worldly, very low, to some extent like an automaton's, droned quite softly, and sometimes another voice, which he fancied was his own when he was a boy, answered him or asked him questions. Because there were occasionally two speakers he had been able to tell himself it was the neighbours he heard. An argument or discussion went on in his head but afterwards he couldn't say what it was they had been talking about. He had absorbed enough pop psychology to expect Mithras and his companion, his own other self, to tell him that certain people he knew were his enemies and perhaps that they would kill him if he didn't kill them first. This didn't happen or hadn't happened yet.

  The strangest aspect of all this was that he could hear Mithras and the other Joel talking and know they were speaking English. He knew too that they hadn't, either of them, that kind of foreign accent that would make sorting out what they said difficult. This unknowing was the worst of it. Having hated Mithras's voice, tried to explain it away and taken steps to block up his ears, he now wanted very much to understand what was said. He felt excluded, isolated and lonely. How could he teach himself to decipher their conversation or simply interpret Mithras when he spoke on his own? And how did he know his visitant was called Mithras?

  The discussion came to an end and there was absolute silence. Those who live in the country, come to London only seldom and view all its doings with suspicion, believe everywhere is noisy, night and day. There is no peace, no quiet and stress reigns. They have no idea of the utter silence that prevails inside some of London's mansion flats in the afternoon. Joel knew very well that his neighbours made no noise. If they had, it would scarcely have penetrated those walls. But for Mithras and the other one (himself?) not a sound would reach the interior of this flat, and when a neighbour came home from work he would hear no more, and then only if his front door was open, than the whisper of the lift rising and the turning of a key in a lock. The earplugs were useless and he threw them away.

  He lay down on the brown sofa to sleep again. The slats on the dark-green blind were not entirely closed and thin strips of sunlight gleamed in the gaps. He got up and remedied this by pulling the cords as tightly as they would go. His action deepened the darkness and he lay down again, savouring the silence and the gloom. It occurred to him that this was very likely what death would be with the added bonus of unconsciousness.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The paella stall was almost too much for Lance. He couldn't afford to buy anything from it, any more than he could afford to buy one of the sugar-dusted pancakes he had seen on offer outside Magic City, the amusement arcade. But the circular pans of steaming and bubbling prawns in golden sauce, green peas and onions and chicken pieces, and another of gleaming saffroncoloured rice as beautiful as one of Gemma's quilted and beaded cushions, made him sick with longing. He forced himself to turn away and concentrate on the true purpose of his visit.

  The woman in the red jacket and the floral skirt spent a long time looking at Lilla's window. Her companion, a man as thin and weedy as she was fat, seemed to be urging her to go into the shop where he would buy her jewellery. Their voices were loud and Lance, in the middle of the roadway, could hear every word they said. He moved closer. Few cars or vans come up or down the Portobello Road, though plenty cross it, but here pedestrians wander unthreatened, chatting, pointing, laughing in amazement. The couple he had his eye on passed him, crossing the road, and homed in on the stall where rings and brooches and long strings of beads were on offer, at half Lilla's prices. The woman was carrying a red shoulder bag, its flap, which fastened with a stud, left open. Lance, who knew something about such things, reflected that this kind of handbag was rubbish, as was the type with a zip. The only reasonably safe kind was the old-fashioned sort like his nan had the sense to carry, which closed with a clip over which a kind of belt came down and and locked into a buckle. There was no way a bag snatcher could get into that.

  Before his encounter with Fize and his friends, he had experimented with cutting into a bag with a kitchen knife. The knife had been Auntie Ivy's and was one of several lying among forks and sharpeners, and what Uncle Gib called a fish slice, in a kitchen drawer. You had to work it in a crowded place. Lance had picked the tube – not the tube here really, the underground, for the trains from Edgware Road via Paddington to Hammersmith run along the oldest line in London, passing Uncle Gib's house almost too closely for comfort. Ladbroke Grove was the nearest station to the Portobello Road but Lance got on at Westbourne Park and in the rush hour. The train was loaded with commuters at 5.30 in the afternoon, hundreds of them standing and crushed together. He picked on girls with large bags slung over their shoulders on short straps. These were the most accessible. Aiming for the side of the bag and from the back as the train moved out of Ladbroke Grove, he managed to cut a slit in it about six inches long. The girl didn't feel a thing and no one noticed. The passengers were all too tired and jaded after a day's work.

  Lance wasn't tired. He'd done nothing all day except buy junk food and eat it, and watch the telly. He slipped his hand inside the bag and brought out a leather something that felt like a wallet and another leather something, the kind of case people keep credit cards in. It took nerve to remain inside the train after that but he only had to stay until it pulled into Latimer Road. The girl got out when he did but she hadn't noticed anything wrong with her bag. It was an anticlimax and an unpleasant one when, trudging back to the Portobello, he looked at his haul and found the thing he'd thought a wallet was a pouch containing sunglasses and the case he'd thought was for credit cards a kind of make-up with a sponge inside its lid. He threw them away in disgust. Since then he hadn't tried the trick with the knife again. Truth to tell, he was a bit afraid of carrying a knife. Getting caught with a knife when you'd done nothing with it but split a handbag, when you didn't mean to do anything else with it, was a bit of a waste. His injured arm felt heavy and sore, although the plaster had come off, and his ribs ached.

  The fat woman in red and her husband – Lance thought the thin guy must be her husband as no man would be seen dead w
ith her unless he was chained too tightly to get away – were now seriously studying the wares on show at the jewellery stall. Lance knew the girl who ran it, although not her name, but he wasn't too pleased at her 'Hi, Lance', uttered loudly and drawing attention to him.

  Still no one seemed to take any notice. He muttered 'Cheers', the term that served equally as a 'hello' and a 'thank you' with him, and edged closer to the woman in red. She was holding up a long string of black and white beads, which she suddenly put down and began rummaging in her bag. Lance thought she was reaching for a purse or wallet but no, she evidently left paying for things to her husband. Out came a pack of Benson and Hedges and a lighter. The strain of shopping was too much for her without the stimulus or sedative effect of a cigarette. Another one smoking those stinking things! Just wait till July first when they ban it for ever, he found himself muttering under his breath, you'll know what it's like to have the filth slap a hand on your shoulder then. But would she? Wasn't this an open space where they could kill themselves with the things as much as they liked?

  She was putting the cigarettes and the lighter back in the bag now and, no-brain that she was, leaving the flap hanging open. She held up the black and white beads to the girl who'd spoken to him, said she'd have them. Lance slipped his hand inside the bag, drew out a large heavy wallet and shoved it into the pocket of his jeans. Just as he'd thought, the man was paying for the necklace, asking her if she'd like a pair of earrings to match. Lance stepped back, turned and stared into the window of the cheese shop, as if entranced by the Jarlsberg and Roquefort on offer. The heavy wallet made a grotesque bulge in his jeans like he'd got a hernia. One of Uncle Gib's religious pals had a hernia, which gave him a small belly on top of his large natural belly. Slowly, pausing to glance at stalls he'd seen a hundred times before, Lance walked up the Portobello until he could safely turn into Golborne Road away from spying eyes.