Aphrodite's Hat (11 page)

She sensed he was deliberately keeping from anything which might seem like an enquiry. ‘Look, I'm so grateful …'

‘Please.' He looked at her and she saw something.

‘Your eyes,' she cried. His eyes were of quite different colours, one blue, one brown.

‘Yes. My mother, who was foremost among yarn-spinners, claimed it was because I was conceived under a hazel-bush. She liked to pretend it bestowed occult powers. A good ploy, I found, for getting girls into bed. Here, would you like brandy in it?'

‘Please.' He poured a large measure into the green cup. Sipping it and feeling the hot coffee and alcohol begin to warm her, she said, ‘My daughter's being held by the police. That's why I have to get to London.'

‘Naturally. Don't worry, I'm a fast driver.'

Somehow she hadn't taken in that he proposed driving her himself. ‘Oh, but isn't that an awful nuisance?'

‘What is more important – the nuisance you cause me or your debt to your daughter?'

Debt
. It was a funny word to choose. ‘Do you have children?' she asked.

‘None I've been introduced to.'

‘I have two,' she said. ‘A daughter and a son.'

‘So?' he said. ‘Two. I envy you. Listen, that noise like a Jabberwock you hear is Michaelis returning my car!'

It was ten past two when they reached Athens Airport.

Laura, before she left the car, said, ‘I'll never be able to thank you.'

‘Then don't try – I've enjoyed it. I've already turned it, in my head, into a yarn. Beautiful damsel in distress at my door at dawn.'

‘Hardly a damsel!'

‘Still beautiful though.' One blue-grey eye, one conker-brown looked at her. ‘Married?' In six hours he hadn't asked a single personal question.

Relentless Time was speeding past. ‘I was here on my honeymoon. Look, would you write your address for me?'

‘Here,' he said, and she noticed, taking the scrap of paper from his hand, he was still wearing his slippers. ‘If you hurry you will be with your daughter by this evening. One night in the cells will be no more than a yarn for her to dine out on later. She might be able to spin it into gold, you never know.'

‘A yarn?' There was no time to explain about Simon.

‘You can't start too early with yarns.'

After she had bought the ticket she went back out to the forecourt to see if he were still there, but he had gone. So she was unable to tell him he shared a first name – indeed the initials – of her favourite poet.

They had been packing for hours. Cardboard boxes, bandaged with brown sticky tape and marked with cryptic messages as to their content, stood as a bulwark against chaos among the litter of tin openers, screwdrivers, weather-blackened clothes pegs, dish cloths, unravelled hanks of garden twine, a nest of withered daffodil bulbs and the singular cherubic head of a doll which looked hard at no one with dead blue eyes.

Beneath the head with its dainty rosebud lips, Jacob, as if avoiding the remorseless blue stare, lay on a floor bare of its Turkish rugs upon a stack of folded blankets destined for any charity shop that would unbend enough to accept them. The local Oxfam shop, they had discovered, had been transformed into a chic designer emporium. What, Selina wondered, would happen now to all the bits and bobs and sharp bits, as her godmother would have called them, that until lately had so usefully been passed on for further use. The need to do good, she thought, also required some cherishing. Nowadays, charity required of its aspirants standards which they were increasingly likely to fail.

Selina looked at her friend. His body stretched out upon the stack of blankets was a medieval knight or princeling's, made marmoreal for eternity on his own tomb. ‘You look like something Damien Hirst might pickle in formaldehyde,' she said, guessing that this comparison would please him more.

‘I wish he would.' Jacob couldn't see Selina, who was sitting with her back straight against the wall, but he could smell that she was smoking. He wished she wouldn't. But she would know quite well what he was feeling and was presumably overriding politeness. And the house by tomorrow lunchtime would no longer be his, so what did it matter if it stank of smoke?

Aware of what was passing through her friend's mind, Selina pushed herself up, groaning a little at the stiffness, and went out into the small enclosed garden. A passionflower of deepest purple, its dark stamens forming the cross which gave it its name, was swinging one of its fronds over the lime-washed garden wall. Flowers didn't have to bother about feeling intrusive, she thought. She had helped Jacob paint that wall. This little house of peace and charm was perhaps the only place in the world where she did not feel like an intruder on God's earth, and tomorrow it would be gone. Or gone, at least, for her.

She would no longer have the use of the white upper room, full of weather because years ago the blinds had stuck and Jacob had never fixed them. When he had once tried, she had said, ‘No, you can leave it. I like to see the light break.' His discretion was such that he had not made the obvious connection aloud: that she was so often awake long before dawn that to see the sun rise at last was a comfort and a release, a sign that she would not have to remain alone much longer in the dark.

‘Of course,' Selina said over her shoulder from her post in the garden, ‘when they come for all this tomorrow I might simply stay.'

‘What do you mean?' There was a slight hint of anxiety beneath the casualness.

‘I might just stay here and when the “purchaser” arrives I'll say, “You can't come in because you see I live here, so buzz off!”'

She knew that he knew that this bit of foolery on her part was not wholly impossible and he showed that he was aware of this by taking it humorously.

‘Good plan. Then you could smuggle me back in and we could have our cake and eat it. Though I never quite get what that means. Who wants to keep cake? It would grow mouldy.' No need to add that he needed the money. Neither of them wanted him to have sold.

Thinking this, she said to reassure him, ‘I could stay and help you to see all this into the van tomorrow, if you wanted me to?' It would delay her return to the dim flat in Clapham, made available to her by a not so close friend while she found a more permanent place to stay.

‘It's all right, I can manage.'

Selina said, ‘I just wanted you to know it's on offer.' Tomorrow she would have to think of something else to do.

‘If you want to, of course …' Jacob said. From his position on the blanket, he had caught a glimpse of her neck. Her neck, once a column of smoothness had, he saw, folds in it. The small gold and silver pendant that she always wore looked more than ever like a charm against a dangerous world. She's getting old, he thought. ‘It goes without saying I'd rather you stayed.'

Selina, recognising that this was affection for her rather than any need for himself, said, ‘I shall miss all this terribly.'

‘Me, too.'

‘Terribly,' she repeated. And then, ‘Shall I open the champagne?'

‘Why not?'

She had bought champagne, spending more than she could afford. The truth was she didn't much like it. But Jacob did. And she wanted them to leave the house in the spirit in which they had lived there. Was it true that there had never been a cross word between them or was that sheer sentimentality? There must have been cross thoughts but she honestly couldn't recall any. A scrap of jealousy at times, but never for his male friends. She supposed she wanted to be best for him, at least as far as women went. But that was a pipe dream. Only for babies were you ever truly number one. But she mustn't think of babies. ‘Too late' her breastbone screamed.

She had taken the foil from around the cork and was untwisting the little wire cage. ‘Do you want to open it?'

‘No, you do it.'

She came and stood over him and the cork exploded like a fairground gun and the pale froth anointed his forehead and newly greying hair. ‘I name this ship Jacob. God bless her, and all who sail in her.'

‘Here,' he said, unfolding himself and holding out the couple of glasses they had spared from the packing. Not any old glasses. Long crystal glasses she had given him for no special reason. It was a rule between them that they never did Christmas or birthdays; both agreeing that the sense of requirement ruined the pleasure in buying the gift.

They polished off the bottle before they set about the last of the packing. It was past midnight before they stopped and looked at each other, disarranged and dirty but for all the sadness of the enterprise pleased at their efficiency.

‘I bet I look a fright,' Selina said.

‘You always look good.'

‘I wish that were true.' It had been true. Once she had almost always looked good enough.

Jacob said, ‘I wish there were more champagne.'

‘We could go out looking.' She hoped that they might climb into his environmentally incorrect Mercedes and trawl off into the night on a forage.

‘I think I'm too weary.'

Selina said, ‘
I am aweary aweary, I would that I were dead
…'

‘I hope that's not true, S.'

‘Not altogether,' she said, as convincingly as she could, and kissed his cheek. He always smelled so nice. What a shame that the people you were easiest with were the people you didn't have sex with. But sex, so wonderful, so terrible, so utterly precarious, brought children.

She slept fitfully and woke the following morning long before dawn. By the time Jacob appeared downstairs she had drunk four cups of coffee and smoked three cigarettes. ‘Ready, then?' She smiled dishonestly, trying to convey cheer.

‘As ready as I'll ever be.'

And when the van with three men arrived, one short, stocky and young, one emaciated and old, and one nonentity, whose role seemed to be to boss the other two shockingly about, it went far easier than either of them had dreamed. In two hours, the house was empty of everything but the doll's head.

‘What shall we do with this?' Jacob tossed the rubber sphere in the air and caught it with his other hand. The van had driven off and the two of them were alone again.

‘When do you need to get to the storage place?' Most of his things were to go to his lover Douglas's house. But the remainder was to go into store.

‘Douglas is seeing to all that.'

Selina said, ‘It's Hetty's doll. She must have left the head here when you and she were playing executioners.' In the days before she lived there. In the days when she lived. When she and Hetty had their little council flat.

‘Oh God.' His eyes were dark dismay. ‘I'm sorry. I didn't think.'

‘Why should you?'

‘Let's take it to her,' Jacob said suddenly, ‘or, I mean, if you wanted to …'

But she seemed pleased at the thought after all. ‘If you wanted to …?'

Hester Emily Palliser's grave lay at one of the outer edges of Putney Cemetery under the shadow of a lime tree whose beneficent branches had strayed over to shade the heedless dead. The small grey slab of uncut stone merely gave her name, and the dates of her coming into the world and her swift departure. Side by side they stood contemplating this account of Selina's daughter's life – b. 10 x 2004 d. 3 iv 2007. Selina bent and laid by the stone the doll's head, which stared up at them with its blank speedwell eyes. She had planted a rose on her daughter's grave. A crop of loose, pale pink blooms exhaled a faint scent of apples in the warm air.

‘What rose is it?' Jacob asked.

‘A sport of the wild rose.' She had planted a root of rosemary too, but it had perished. Rosemary for remembrance. But there was no need for reminders to remember Hetty.

She had put her daughter to bed, one cool April night, kissed her and left her with her musical bell playing an old lullaby. And in the morning Hetty was dead – dead as a door nail. The investigations had been lengthy, gruelling and finally inconclusive. She knew that for ever now she would be marked down as the possible murderer of her beloved child. She didn't care. She had wished they had sent her to prison where at least her surroundings would have matched her state of heart. That she lived on at all while Hetty had gone was a cruel joke. Only some kind of sense that she ought to continue to live for the sake of her dead child – and she could not have explained or defended that decision had she been asked to – had kept her alive. That and the sanctuary of Jacob's white room in his kind house, which had housed her and her misery. Now that was gone too where on God's earth was her grief to be housed?

A single magpie flew past and settled on a nearby tomb. A tomb replete with waxen flowers in dirty glass domes. One for sorrow.

Selina picked up the doll's head. ‘It looks wrong here. Would you keep it for me?'

‘But don't you …?'

‘No. I'd rather you did. She loved playing with you.'

Taking the empty head from her hand, Jacob touched her arm and said, ‘We, I, I mean, should have brought her flowers. I'm sorry.'

‘It doesn't matter.'

Nothing mattered any more. One day she would move for good. Until then, she must find other accommodation.