Portobello Read online

  'If you like,' she said, still a little stunned.

  'We'll go and have a drink first.' They went into the study. 'Why don't we have a bottle of champagne?'

  She smiled, took his arm. 'You can't be going to propose to me again?'

  'I will if you like,' he said.

  'What are we celebrating, then?'

  A lucky escape, he thought. An amazing stroke of good fortune. If I had been five minutes – no, half a minute – later… 'The new exhibition, Priscilla Hart's show,' he said. 'It's going well. I sold three of her miniatures this afternoon.'

  'Good,' she said. 'Let's celebrate for ourselves too. Not long to our wedding now.'

  He kissed her. Because he had been saved from humiliation at her hands, had vindicated himself perfectly by pretending he had seen a burglar, he felt a surge of love for her. It was going to be all right. They were going to be very happy.

  The shortening days of September seemed each one more beautiful than the last, the sky a clear blue, the air as warm as on a July day. Only it hadn't been like this in July but grey and cold and constantly raining. Now, although the sun was strong, in the shade you felt the chill of autumn. It was too late for true heat. The time for hot days and mild evenings had gone by, and the nights were cold. Ella noticed how tired the trees were beginning to look, their leaves worn out by onslaughts of wind and rain and now by belated sunshine.

  The gardens in front of Joel's block were scattered with fallen leaves, not those of the final shedding, which would come in November, but the September drop, which relieves trees of their weight. They crunched under her feet as she walked up the steps. The lift seemed to rise especially slowly and, when she rang Joel's bell, a woman she had never seen before opened the door to her. She introduced herself as the day carer and, although she didn't say so, Ella thought she might be responsible for letting more light into the flat.

  In the grim and gloomy living room the blind had been raised and the curtains half drawn apart. In the increased light it was possible to see how shabby the furnishings were, the only bright and fresh object an amber glass vase on the table full of orange coloured chrysanthemums. Had the day carer brought them or even Wendy Stemmer?

  Joel lay on the sofa. He wore dark glasses but had also spread a black scarf over his face. He gave no sign of having seen or heard her. She sat down in one of the chairs drawn up to the table and asked him how he was feeling. To her surprise, after a long while, he took the scarf off his face and sat up. Because he hadn't replied she said it again, 'How are you?'

  'Well enough.' His voice was low and lifeless.

  'When you were in the hospital did they give you any tests? Did they check your heart?'

  'You think maybe I damaged it taking all those pills? They did a lot of tests.' He spoke indifferently. 'They wouldn't have let me out if there was anything wrong, would they?'

  'I will check with them,' Ella said. 'Did your parents find the carer for you?'

  'Ma did. He's paying, I suppose. I don't want her. She opens the curtains. She brings me food and drink and whatever.' He gave a small unamused laugh. 'I think she's frightened of me – well, I know she is. It's the shades and the scarf. Do I look frightening, Ella?'

  'Not to me.' She wondered as she said it if that was quite true.

  Still wearing the glasses, he turned his gaze towards the corner where hung the long mirror in a carved mahogany frame in which the bronze face was reflected. And would have been reflected again in the mirror behind it and again and again infinitely. Today the room was too dim for anything to be seen in the glass but patches of shine and dull shadows. Joel's face contorted as he seemed to peer. He stretched his neck and concentrated, subsided with a sigh.

  'I think he's gone. I really think so. Sometimes I hear a whisper but I think that may be me imagining things. I haven't seen him, not since I came round – after what I did, I mean. Do you want to know why I did what I did?'

  Ella could see nothing but she knew the reflections were there, the faces half turned, the never-ending faces… Was Mithras also there, though neither of them could see him? 'I don't think you meant to kill yourself,' she said.

  'No. No, I didn't. I'll tell you about it. I haven't told anyone, not Ma or any of the people at the hospital.' He took off the glasses and blinked as if, instead of a greyish dimness, the room were flooded with brilliant light. 'Would you like something to eat or drink? I've never asked you that before, have I? I don't think I've ever asked anyone that before.' He had, once, and Ella remembered the glass of water, but she didn't correct him. 'Rita's here and she'll do it,' he said. 'She likes doing it.'

  'I don't want anything, thanks, Joel.'

  'I collected up those pills. It doesn't matter how. I don't go out much but I went out and bought myself a half-bottle of vodka. I liked the taste. They say it hasn't a taste but it has and I like it. I could take to drink – shall I?'

  She ignored this. As she had thought before, in any sustained conversation he might begin by sounding adult but he gradually became more and more like a child. 'Tell me, are you taking your medication? The pills you get from Miss Crane, I mean.'

  He nodded, turning his eyes once more to the mirror.

  'Sure?'

  'I promise, Ella. Shall I tell you why I did what I did?' It was the second time of asking.

  'If you want to.'

  'Do you remember what I told you about having a near-death experience? When something went wrong under the anaesthetic?'

  She nodded, feeling suddenly cold in the warm close room. It was fear she felt as shivers touched her skin, moving across her shoulders and down her arms. Don't be silly, she told herself, get yourself together. You're a doctor, you've been a doctor for fifteen years.

  He seemed not to notice her slight shrinking. His eyes were turned away from her, his gaze far away on some other plane. 'Mithras,' he said, 'I wanted him to go. I brought him back with me from that white city at the end of the river. I think maybe he was one of the angels on the battlements. But no, that's not right. They had wings and he didn't. I wanted him to go. He was getting bigger, you see. No, I don't quite mean that. He was getting clearer and his voice was too. He never said anything terrible like I was to harm someone but I kept thinking he'd start. I thought that if he – well, went on getting bigger and louder and stronger he'd take me over, he'd take this place over.

  'I once saw a picture. It was an illustration for Alice in Wonderland. I was only about eight or nine. Alice had drunk something and it made her grow big. She grew huge till she filled the house, she had to lie down, her arms and legs couldn't get through the doors. I don't know why but that picture frightened me terribly. I screamed when I first saw it and I couldn't get it out of my head. That was how I was starting to feel about Mithras, that he'd get so big he'd never be able to get out. He'd take me over, kind of absorb me. I knew I'd have to do something.'

  'What did you do?' she asked, although she guessed.

  'I thought that if I had another near-death experience I'd go back to that place, the river and the meadows and the city at the end of it, I mean. I'd see all those white walls like castle walls and see the angels walking there. And Mithras would come with me, he would, he'd want to because it was the only way for him to get back there. And he'd stay. He'd be happy and I'd be free.'

  'So you took the pills and the vodka to get yourself near death?'

  'That's what I did. I told Mithras to come with me and he came, I think he did, and when I started to leave again I think I left him behind but I don't know. I didn't see the city or the river or the sunshine, Ella. It was all dark with kind of moving shapes, vague dark shapes moving in the dark. I talked to you out of the dark and then I – then I sort of passed out. Now I keep looking for Mithras but I can't see him and it's only in the night time that I hear his voice. It's coming from a long long way off so I know he's talking to me from the city.'

  She sat quite still, feeling a kind of despair. There was nothing to say.

/>   'I went to all that trouble to take him back,' Joel said, 'but now he's gone, I half want him back. I miss him.' He lifted to her an abject little boy's face and met her eyes for the first time since she arrived there. 'I'm so lonely, Ella.'

  She reached for his hand but thinking this inadequate for his great need, got up, sat beside him and took him in her arms. Holding him, she felt his heart beating against her as if he were more afraid than she was.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Once more they were out on the balcony, watching the roadway. A crowd of gesticulating men ran about shouting at the driver of an articulated truck, which had wedged itself between a bendy bus and a concrete mixer. Lance's nan had let him in before rushing back to her ringside seat, anxious not to miss more than a minute of the sitcom currently being enacted in the Harrow Road. Lance followed her out there. His hospitable grandmother had already poured him a large glass of Pino Grigio. Enthralled by the sight of the lorry driver landing a mighty punch on the bus driver's jaw, Dave passed Lance the crisps without turning round.

  His nan leant over the railing and began yelling at the lorry driver. 'Give him another, mate! Them bendy buses are a menace! They think they own the bloody road.' Spectators in the street turned their faces upwards as one. 'Who d'you think you're looking at?'

  'Cool it now, Kath,' said Dave, as police sirens sounded coming closer. 'You calm down. We don't want no trouble.'

  Lance looked at him admiringly. Dave seemed to be the only one he had ever come across, within the family or outside it, able to exert any sort of control over his nan. Two officers had got out of their car and strolled over to the men who had moved into a stand-off. Things quickly quietened down as the concrete mixer was expertly reversed through a narrow gap and the crowd began to dissolve.

  Lance's nan, deprived of entertainment, sighed resignedly and turned to him. 'So how's the world treating you, lovely?'

  'I'm good,' said Lance with a hopeful glance at Dave.

  Dave refilled their glasses. He shook the last of the crisp crumbs into the palm of his hand, dropped the bag over the railing and watched it float gently down into the street below. Then he turned to Lance and smiled in an avuncular sort of way. 'You'll be wanting to know what them bits and bobs fetched.'

  'Rings and things and buttons and bows,' said his nan unexpectedly.

  'The market's very dodgy.' Dave might have been talking about the current state of the euro. 'There's like a world recession. Still, I've done my best for you.' He pulled out of his pocket two dirty and crumpled notes, a twenty and a ten. The twenty had a rent in it mended with Sellotape.

  Deeply disappointed, Lance stared. 'That all you got?'

  'Didn't I say the market's dodgy? After I took my ten per cent that's the best I could do. It's not like they was diamonds.'

  Diamonds were exactly what Lance believed they were. In those few moments, sitting on his nan's balcony, the light fast fading and the air taking on an autumnal cooling, a metamorphosis came over him. Uncle Gib, in one of his biblical phrases, would have said that the scales fell from his eyes. His father might have said that he began to grow up. He saw that the trust he habitually had in people, in almost anyone, was misplaced. No one was going to do anything much for him. They never had and they never would. He was out on his own.

  When his nan said the nights were drawing in and it was time for them all to go down the Good King Billy, he got up and walked through the doorway into the living room. But instead of waiting to accompany them meekly to the pub – where he would have been expected to spend a good half of his thirty pounds – he said, not 'Cheers', but like someone three times his age, 'Goodnight,' failing to add, as he normally would have done, the obligatory 'See you later'. They were silent, apparently aware that all was not well. He let himself out, went quickly down the stairs and out into the street, turning in the opposite direction to the one that led to the pub.

  Of the hundred people who had been invited, eighty-three had accepted their invitations. The hotel on the river, licensed for wedding ceremonies, was booked, the lunch menu scrutinised (and frequently subjected to alterations) by Eugene, the flowers lavishly ordered, the cars organised and, of course, every detail of departure for the honeymoon and the honeymoon itself arranged in advance. Ella had collected her wedding dress and her 'going-away' suit. Her own two suitcases were packed, as was Eugene's.

  'You want me to come over in case anyone comes back here?' said Carli. 'I mean, serve tea or drinks or whatever?' She was plainly anxious to feast her eyes on the guests and get a sight of Ella in her wedding dress.

  'No one will come back here, Carli. Not even ourselves. We shall go straight from the hotel on our honeymoon.' Ella could see no particular reason to tell Carli where that honeymoon destination was or when they would be leaving from Heathrow. 'While we're away perhaps you'd like to check-up on your – er, sweets you've left in the drawers. There seem to be rather a lot of them, even some in one of the bathrooms.'

  The woman stared. 'My what?'

  Her tone was belligerent. Ella felt she had herself perhaps been too abrupt. 'I'm sorry, Carli. There's absolutely no reason why you shouldn't keep your sweets in this house. Forget it.'

  'I never eat sweets. Never. You're mixing me up with someone else.'

  Ella started to say there was no one else but she stopped herself. Carli had been vacuum-cleaning their bedroom and she left her to it, going back into the guest bathroom. The brown-and-orange pack of Chocorange – for that, she saw, was its name – was still there. Down in the drawing room, Eugene had put all her books away as he had promised, neatly, precisely, according to author and each one alphabetically. She had been kneeling there, in front of the row of Forsters, when he had come in and shouted at, as he thought, an intruder. But had he really believed the person on her knees there in the fading light was a burglar? A bookish burglar with a fondness for literature? It was extremely unlikely. And why had he undertaken to finish the task she had begun?

  She squatted down on the floor again and removed from the shelf A Passage to India, Howard's End, two copies of The Longest Journey, Maurice and A Room with a View. She put her hand inside, feeling behind the remaining books, first to the right and encountering more space, then to the left, her fingers coming in contact with a plastic bag full of something. She pulled it out. The something was a number of packets of Chocorange. She counted ten of them. The bag in her hand, she began walking about the drawing room, opening a tallboy, lifting the lid of a Chinese chest, pulling out a drawer in a console table. A carved flange, which Eugene perhaps believed concealed a secret drawer, yielded four packs of Chocorange. Under some folded linen in the chest she found six more. The house was full of the things. At the handsome lateeighteenth- century wardrobe, which stood in the hall where they hung their coats, she hesitated. The idea of going through a man's pockets was repugnant to her – but surely that distaste would only apply when the search was for letters or photographs? She opened the wardrobe door and felt in the pocket of Eugene's raincoat, which he hadn't worn much since the relentlessly wet summer seemed to come to an end in the last days of August. No Chocorange but a mass of the cellophane wrap covers with their distinctive red taping, which had to be stripped off in order to reach the contents. The pockets of a light linen jacket contained much the same discarded wrappings.

  After that Ella went all over the house causing Carli, who encountered her in one of the spare bedrooms, to ask her what she was looking for. Ella simply smiled and shook her head. By that time she had found twenty-three packets of the things but she had left them where they were, concealed inside drawers and cupboards, some hidden in a spongebag. Those, she thought, he probably intended to take to Como with him. This find made her look inside his big suitcase, where she found another six in an inside zip pocket.

  That must mean he couldn't exist without them, not even on his honeymoon.

  Seldom did Lance have occasion to go into a pharmacy or what Uncle Gib would have calle
d a chemist's shop. He was doing so this time at the request of his mother. She herself was too busy watching repeats of Cagney and Lacey on ITV3 to go out and buy the aspirins of which she regularly ate fourteen or fifteen a day but had run out of, for she too was an addict in her own way. Lance chose this particular pharmacy because he passed its window on his way to visit Uncle Gib and it was the first one he had come to since walking down from his parents' flat. His walk necessarily took him down the Portobello Road and the sight of the stalls and small shops full of delectable goods made him feel even more acutely the lack of the means to buy them. Copies of designers' handbags, but so much like the real thing as to be indistinguishable from them, were everywhere this morning. A new shop had opened selling home-made soaps whose strong, nostril-burning scents dominated all the usual smells of bacon and cheese and doner kebab. They made Lance sneeze but Gemma liked that sort of soap and the 'natural' bath essences the shop also sold. He'd like to buy them for her even if they did give him an allergy. And he'd like to buy that green lace tunic with the sequins and those black velvet harem pants and that… It was no use. He was once more approaching skint status, Elizabeth Cherry's three hundred pounds and the thirty pounds Dave had produced nearly gone.

  He hadn't seen Gemma since the night of the fire. But he had heard from her. The postcard she sent him was the first missive that might be called a letter he had ever had. It came to his parents' address, which she must have remembered from when he first met her. The postcard was a picture of the late Princess Diana with the infant Prince William. It said, How are you? I hope OK. I miss you. Abelard says to say hi. Lots of love, G.

  He turned into Golborne Road and there was the pharmacy on his left. The man standing at the counter he recognised at once as White Hair, the rich git who was the owner of all that stuff he'd nicked and lost when Fize and his mates attacked him. Lance would have expected White Hair, if he had been in that shop at all, to have been buying expensive perfume for his girlfriend or maybe a new electric shaver. Instead, he was in the act of paying for three packs of sweets the assistant was just putting in a paper bag. Lance didn't expect to be recognised and he got a shock when White Hair turned round, gave him a curt nod and said good afternoon. For a moment Lance thought he must know him in his burglar's identity. Then he remembered trying and failing to claim the money found in the street. He muttered a 'cheers' in return but by that time White Hair had gone, taking his sweets with him.