Portobello Read online

  In the evenings they sat in front of Auntie Ivy's black-and-white television set. Lance found the telly soothing, it didn't much matter to him what was on, though he drew the line – when he was in a position to draw the line – at documentaries. They reminded him of school. The great drawback to watching was Uncle Gib. He chain-smoked. He talked through every programme, especially the sexy ones, and they were mostly sexy or violent or both. Uncle Gib called everything disgusting or ungodly and, puffing away, said it was liable to bring fire from heaven down on Channel Four and he was particularly incensed by what Lance liked best, girls with not many clothes on. The two of them sat on Auntie Ivy's sagging mock-leather sofa, its seat cushions cracked and wrinkled like Uncle Gib's face, while Lance stared in silence and Uncle Gib fidgeted about, sometimes shaking his fist at the screen and shouting, 'Harlot!' or, 'You wait till the Day of Judgement.'

  Lance's favourite sitcom had just begun when the letter box rattled. Uncle Gib went off to answer it. It was his house, as he often said, and he wasn't having Lance answering his door. Lance was watching the female lead, a beautiful girl mysteriously wearing a bikini in the living room in the depths of winter, trying to persuade her dad to let her boyfriend stay the night, when Uncle Gib came back with two men, one of whom Lance recognised at once as the guy with the moustache he had seen on Gemma's balcony. The other man had a red face and quite a belly on him, though he was young, no more than twenty-something. 'Ian,' he said. 'Ian Pollitt. This here's Feisal Smith but you can call him Fize.'

  Lance got up. 'What d'you want?'

  'My mate and me, we've come here to tell you,' said Ian Pollitt, staring at Lance the way a policeman might.

  This seemed to be the signal for Uncle Gib to switch off the telly. He turned back to Lance, said, 'I don't know what this is about but don't think I'm going. This is my house and I'm staying to hear what he's got to say.'

  'Suit yourself,' said Fize. 'I'm not bothered.' It was the first time he had spoken. He had a funny accent, not like the Indians but not English either.

  'Sit down,' said Uncle Gib with the nearest to graciousness he ever got. 'Make yourselves at home.' His cloudy old eyes were glittering with malice. 'Any friends of my nephew's are friends of mine.' He poked two cigarettes out of the packet. 'Want a ciggie?'

  Ian Pollitt took no notice. Fize shook his head. From his jeans pocket he fetched something in a small plastic bag. 'You know what this is?'

  Lance did. He had seen it before, though in a bloodstained condition. It was Gemma's tooth. Dry-mouthed, he nodded. Uncle Gib looked at the tooth, did a double take and jumped to his feet, throwing up his hands. Fize watched him, apparently with sympathy, and at last he sat down, patting the seat beside him and smiling quite pleasantly.

  'It's like this,' he said when Uncle Gib had joined him, looking up at Lance, 'Gemma's a very good-looking girl, as you know. Now she's got a horrendous great gap in her mouth, thanks to you. You'd agree with that, wouldn't you?'

  'Don't matter whether he does or not,' said Pollitt.

  Again Lance nodded. It was Uncle Gib who spoke. 'He'll agree all right. He knows what he's done.'

  'Now Gemma's been to the dentist and he says she needs an implant, that's what he called it, an implant, and that don't come cheap. Now Gemma's a single parent and she don't have that kind of money.'

  'What kind of money?' Uncle Gib was relishing this. Lance could see he had difficulty in suppressing his laughter.

  It was Pollitt's turn to speak. 'The dentist said he'd do it as economical as what he could but it'll still be a grand. One K, if you get my meaning.'

  Lance found his voice with difficulty. 'A thousand pounds?'

  'Right. You got it.'

  'But I haven't got it,' Lance said. 'Where am I to get a thousand pounds? I'm signing on.'

  'You should have thought of that before you smacked a young lady in the mouth.'

  'Me and Gemma,' said Fize, 'we're not unreasonable, we'll give you till Saturday.'

  Pollitt intervened again. 'Next Saturday, that's May twenty-six. By midnight, mind. That's the deadline.You can bring it round to her place, you know where it is.'

  Lance nodded, dry-mouthed.

  'Don't think her and Fize haven't seen you stalking her, hanging about outside at all hours.'

  'I haven't got no money,' said Lance.

  'Get it off this gentleman then,' said Fize politely. 'He's a property owner, isn't he? He's got to be loaded.'

  'He knows better than that,' said Uncle Gib. 'What, me lend a thousand quid to a fellow who's only my dear late wife's greatnephew? I should coco.'

  But all this talk of money stayed in Uncle Gib's mind. He was a property owner but he wasn't making prudent use of his property. As a religious man dedicated to God's work, he attributed this to his innocence and lack of wordliness. But next day, when Lance was out, he went up to the top of the first flight and untied the rope that cut off access to the second floor. That faculty which, in most people, detects dirt and disorder had been left out of Uncle Gib's make-up. Up in the three rooms on the attic floor he noticed nothing of the cobwebs and the grime, nor did the lack of bathroom facilities or even running water strike him. There was no furniture, of course, and some idea retained from one of the short periods in his middle years when he hadn't been inside told him that the law wouldn't let you evict a tenant from unfurnished accommodation. Still, that was easily solved. Take that good table from Lance's room, a couple of chairs from the dining room and pick up a mattress from somewhere. A bed wasn't needed, a mattress on the floor would do perfectly well.

  No need to think twice. Uncle Gib sat down at the table in the kitchen to compose his advertisement. Lately he'd seen quite a bit on the TV about young people not being able to get on to the property ladder and, seeing the prices of those places he studied in estate agents' brochures, he wasn't surprised. He'd be doing a service to humanity, showing love for his neighbour by offering accommodation to rent. So how much to ask? Rented property advertised by some of those agents was fetching four and five hundred pounds a week. Uncle Gib was a realist and, though he had an inflated idea of the value and desirability of his home, he understood three rooms in it weren't in this league.

  Using the reverse side of the No Entry card (waste not, want not) he wrote: To let: self-contained furnished flat in fashionable movie-featured Notting Hill. £150 per week. He added the address and phone number. When it was done to his satisfaction he took it down to the newsagent in Powis Terrace and paid – through the nose, in his opinion – to have it put in the window.

  Every other shop these days had been turned into an estate agent. He passed five on his way to the Portobello Road except that he didn't pass them but stopped in front of each one, noting to his satisfaction how houses no bigger or better than his own were commanding prices of seven and eight hundred thousand pounds. More than that if, like his own, they were detached. His would soon be in the million league.

  In the window of the Earl of Lonsdale he saw a notice offering a trading site to let outside. Such signs weren't uncommon and, every time Uncle Gib saw one, he thought of the stall his father had had here and from which he sold fruit and vegetables and in the winter roasted chestnuts; thought too how maybe he could take that site and keep a stall of his own. But perhaps not, perhaps it was too late. No, he would become a landlord instead and maybe a millionaire, even if a homeless one.

  He went into his favourite delicatessen and bought black pudding, salami, a piece of Cheddar, half a dozen large eggs for himself and the same number of small ones for Lance, and a bottle of orange squash. It never did to economise on food.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Ella showed her engagement ring to Dr Carter, Dr Endymion, Dr Mukerjee and the practice nurse, Martha Wilcox. Aware from the appearance of the ring that Ella's fiancé must be a rich man, Malina Mukerjee expressed the hope that this didn't mean she'd be giving up work, did it? Ella assured them all that she wouldn't. She was sitting behind the desk in
her room, called a 'doctor's office', American fashion, preparing for the arrival of her first patient, a mother of four, all of whom she had brought with her, when her phone rang.

  It was Joel Roseman. 'I do want to be your private patient,' he said without preamble, 'and I'd like to start today. What do I have to do?'

  'Mr Roseman, I have patients waiting. May I call you back?'

  He sounded disappointed, like a child whose mother is busy. Ella opened the office door and let in Mrs Khan, her two daughters and her twin sons, all of whom vied for the job of interpreter, their mother having not a word of English. It was almost midday before the departure of Ella's last patient, a woman with nothing wrong with her but complaining loudly about a rumour that all prescriptions in future were to cost a pound each.

  Joel Roseman picked up his phone on the first ring. He sounded as if he had been sitting by it for the past three hours. 'I haven't been out yet,' he said. 'Could you come to me? Would you do that?'

  All of them in the practice made house calls occasionally. Besides, if he was to be a private patient, Ella felt she could hardly refuse him. Moscow Road was at the other end of Notting Hill and she was about to say she couldn't manage it today when she realised she could. She easily could. The euphoria brought about by her engagement was enduring, filling her with energy and a desire to move about, be out in the fresh air, enjoy life. Sunshine had come back, if intermittently, and she would walk. Walking would help her reduce to the size 12 she hoped to be for her wedding dress.

  'Two o'clock this afternoon, Mr Roseman?'

  'That will be lovely.' Lovely, the little boy's word. 'Please call me Joel.'

  A mansion block, red brick, with gables and turrets and things she thought were called cupolas. Ten stone steps up to glass doors with art nouveau panes and ironwork. A porter sitting at a desk behind glass directed her to the lift down a narrow green-painted passage but the lift itself was a rather luxurious carpet-lined box with gilt-framed mirrors on two walls. Joel Roseman opened his door before she got there. He looked frail, thinner than she remembered and, though he wore jeans and a sweater, he had a dressing gown over them. But no sunglasses today.

  No doubt this was because the place was dark. Almost her first thought was that the flat, which seemed very large for one person, was the kind of place she would have expected an old lady to live in, not a young man. And that, he told her, as she tried not to show her incredulity at the stuffy darkness, the cumbersome Victorian furniture, the drab shabby covers and curtains, was exactly what it had been. Old Mrs Compton-Webb, ninety-six, had died there, her body discovered by a great-grandson a week later.

  'Pa bought the place lock, stock and barrel. Isn't that what they say? All the furniture and those carpets, the lot. Everything dark red and dark brown and mud. I expect it was done on purpose, to punish me. He was wrong there because it suits me. I like the dark.'

  Doors were open and she could see into darkened caverns where carved cabinets, marble-topped tables and thickly padded chairs all crowded together, loomed in the dimness.The curtains, of mud-coloured or ox blood-coloured plush, were thick enough to exclude all external light. Not even bright cracks of it showed round their borders. The atmosphere was stuffy and musty, and it seemed to Ella that the suffocating silence was unnatural in the heart of busy Notting Hill. It was a relief to be taken into a sitting room where there was a little more light, the fawn, red figured velvet curtains held back by loops of brown braid, and the blinds behind them raised perhaps six inches. For her benefit? The furniture here was brown velvet, the carpet the kind that is called a Turkey, not Turkish, crimson patterned with brown and black squares and triangles. On a console table, a bronze bust of one of the Caesars was reflected in the mirror behind it and again and again infinitely in another mirror hung opposite. Ella found herself staring in horrified fascination at these endlessly repeated gaunt profiles and bald heads.

  'I'm always meaning to make some changes,' Joel said in the kind of hopeless voice people use when it is clear they will do nothing. 'I could afford it. Pa gives me loads of money but I never get around to it. Would you like something to drink?'

  She thought he meant tea or coffee. He came back with two glasses of water. She noticed that he walked slowly and his hand trembled when he set her glass down. 'What do I have to do now?' he said.

  'To be my private patient? Nothing. Or, rather, you've done it and here I am.'

  'So now you ask me what seems to be the trouble?'

  She smiled. 'Something like that.'

  'Well,' he said, 'you will believe me, won't you? You won't say it's all in my head or I'm making it up, you won't say that?'

  'Why don't you tell me what's wrong?'

  He was silent. She looked at him properly for the first time, saw a pale fine-featured face, dull eyes, dark hair falling forward over his forehead. He drank some water, spoke in a low voice she had difficulty in hearing. 'When I was in hospital I had a near-death experience. That's what they call them, don't they? A near-death experience?'

  How many times had she heard this before? It sometimes seemed to her impossible for one of her patients who had had an anaesthetic not to have dreamed while unconscious of that long tunnel and paradisal bower at the end of it. He seemed to expect an answer. 'Perhaps,' she said. 'Go on.'

  'The surgeon told me afterwards. It was during the operation. I can tell you his words. He said, "We nearly lost you. Of course we got you back but it was a ticklish moment."'

  Ella's immediate reaction was to disbelieve this. If it was true, she was sure Joel's surgeon wouldn't have been so indiscreet as to say so. A nervous patient could be seriously frightened by something there was no need to disclose. But she said nothing beyond asking him gently to speak up. She knew what he would tell her, it would be the long tunnel again, the golden river and the white city beyond meadows full of flowers. They always saw something like that. And he did tell her that, but not only that.

  'Like I said, I went through the tunnel – I guess that was the bit where I was dead – and at the end I came out into these sort of fields with a river flowing through them. There was tall grass with tall flowers growing in it and the sun shining, and beyond that was this city, white marble it was but it looked very light, almost like it was made of very thin glass or even cloud. All the buildings had steps up to their doors and rows and rows of tall columns. Are you following all this?'

  'Yes, of course,' Ella said.

  He drank some water. 'There were walls round the city with sort of battlements and angels were sitting on them. It was warm there but not hot. I could see people in white robes – I could see them through the gates in the walls – they were walking on lawns under trees, talking and singing. One of them came out through an archway and he came up to me. He took me by the hand and he said something to me about it not yet being my time. I was just to take a look at the city so that I'd know what to expect when my time came. So I looked at the city and up at the angels on the battlements. They had wings like great white birds. I looked at them but they didn't look at me. Then this man led me back across the fields and along the river bank until we came to the tunnel. Going back through there was when I think the surgeon and the anaesthetist were bringing me back to life.'

  'It was like a rather nice dream, then?' Ella said.

  'It would have been.' Joel was silent for a moment, clutching his glass of water so tightly that she thought he must break it. Then, shaking himself, he relaxed his fingers and set the glass down on the table. 'It would have been,' he said again, 'except that I brought him back with me.'

  In the dimly lit stuffy room, she felt a kind of chill, the small shiver people used to say meant someone was walking over where one's grave would be. 'I'm sorry. I don't understand.'

  'I said to you before I started please to believe me, not to say I'm making it up. Because to do that I'd have to want to do it and I don't. I hate it.'

  'I won't say you're making it up. But I do need you to explain.'
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  'The man who came up to me out of the city and through the archway – well, I suppose it was heaven, or hell maybe if hell can be beautiful and peaceful – that man came back with me, through the tunnel, into this life. Do you understand now, Dr Cotswold? When I was conscious – well, not then, but later – he was sitting by my bed. He wasn't anyone I've ever seen in this world.' Joel seemed to consider. 'Maybe he was, though, maybe he was a sort of friend I had when I was a child but grown up, of course.'

  Guessing, Ella said, 'By "sort of" do you mean an imaginary friend?'

  He nodded. 'That's what I mean. But I don't know if this man is my friend grown up. It's years and years, and he looks different. If he is he's changed his name. My – well, imaginary – friend was called Jasper. This one is Mithras.'

  Tugged into this dream or nightmare, whatever it was, Ella had begun to feel disorientated. Naming the creature of Joel's fantasy and the fairly obvious transit of that name from a child's idea of what a boy might be called to a man's maturer concept of a denison of heaven or hell, brought her back to practicalities.

  'Joel, you don't need me at all. Surely' – she must be tactful here – 'you need someone you can tell all this to who would be sympathetic. I don't mean I'm not but I'm a doctor of medicine, I'm really not qualified to help you over this.'

  'You mean a psychiatrist?'

  'I meant a therapist, yes.'

  'You think I'm mad?'

  'No, of course not. Of course I don't think you're mad because you have – well, a very active imagination.' She took her phone directory out of her bag. 'Look, why not let me phone this woman who's an excellent psychotherapist and make an appointment for you to see her?'

  'She'll think I'm mad.'

  'No, she won't. She's the last person to think like that. Are you well enough to go out now if you go in a taxi?'

  He said lifelessly, 'Oh, yes, I've been out. I'm supposed to go out a bit, only I can't walk far. Mithras doesn't come with me.'

  'So I can phone Dr Peacock?'