Collected Stories (36 page)

They got on at Victoria Station and sat together, kissing lightly. As the train pulled away, she took out her Nietzsche tome and began to read. Turning to the man at her side she became amused by his face, which she studied continually. Removing her gloves she picked shaving cream from his ears, sleep from his eyes and crumbs from his mouth, while laughing to herself. The combination of his vanity, mixed with unconscious naivety, usually charmed her.

Nicole hadn’t wanted to visit her mother after all this time but Majid, her older lover – it sounded trite calling him her ‘boyfriend’ – had persuaded her to. He was curious about everything to do with her; it was part of love. He said it would be good for her to ‘reconnect’; she was stronger now. However, during the past year, when Nicole had refused to speak to her, and had ensured her mother didn’t have her address, she had suppressed many tormenting thoughts from the past; ghosts she dreaded returning as a result of this trip.

Couldn’t Majid sense how uneasy she was? Probably he could. She had never had anyone listen to her so attentively or take her so seriously, as if he wanted to occupy every part of her. He had the strongest will of anyone she’d known, apart from her father. He was used to having things his own way, and often disregarded what she wanted. He was afraid she would run away.

He had never met her mother. She might be incoherent, or in one of her furies, or worse. As it was, her mother had cancelled the proposed visit three times, once in a drunken voice that was on the point of becoming spiteful. Nicole didn’t want Majid to think that she – half her mother’s age – would resemble her at fifty. He had recently told Nicole that he considered her to be, in some sense, ‘dark’. Nicole was worried that her mother would find Majid also dark, but in the other sense.

Almost as soon as it left the station, their commuter train crossed the sparkling winter river. It would pass through the suburbs and then the countryside, arriving after two hours at a seaside town. Fortunately, theirs wasn’t a long journey, and next week, they were going to Rome; in January he was taking her to India. He wanted her to see Calcutta. He wouldn’t travel alone any more. His pleasure was only in her.

Holding hands they looked out at Victorian schools and small garages located under railway arches. There were frozen football pitches, allotments, and the backs of industrial estates where cork tiles and bathroom fittings were manufactured, as well as carpet warehouses and metalwork shops. When the landscape grew more open, railway tracks stretched in every direction, a fan of possibilities. Majid said that passing through the outskirts of London reminded him what an old country Britain was, and how manifestly dilapidated.

She dropped her hand in his lap and stroked him as he took everything in, commenting on what he saw. He looked handsome in his silk shirt, scarf and raincoat. She dressed for him, too, and couldn’t go into a shop without wondering what would please him. A few days before, she’d had her dark hair cut into a bob that skimmed the fur collar of the overcoat she was wearing with knee-length motorcycle boots. At her side was the shoulder bag in which she carried her vitamin pills, journal and lip salve, and the mirror which had convinced her that her eyelids were developing new folds and lines as they shrivelled up. That morning she’d plucked her first grey hair from her head, and placed it inside a book. Yet she still had spots, one on her cheek and one on her upper lip. Before they left, Majid had made her conceal them with make-up, which she never wore.

‘In case we run into anyone I know,’ he said.

He was well connected, but she was sure he wouldn’t know anyone where they were going. Yet she had obeyed.

She forced herself back to the book. Not long after they met, eighteen months ago, he remarked, ‘You’ve been to university but things must have changed since my day.’ It was true she didn’t know certain words: ‘confound’, ‘pejorative’, ‘empirical’. In the house they now shared, he had thousands of books and was familiar with all the writers, composers and painters. As he pointed out, she hadn’t heard of Gauguin. Sometimes when he was talking to his friends she had no idea what they were discussing, and became convinced that if her ignorance didn’t trouble him it was because he valued only her youth.

Certainly he considered conversation a pleasure. There had recently occurred an instructive incident when they dropped in for tea on the mother of her best friend. This woman, a sociology lecturer, had known Nicole from the age of thirteen, and probably continued to think of her as poignantly deprived. Nicole thought of her as cool, experienced and, above all, knowledgeable. Five years ago, when one of her mother’s boyfriends had beaten up Nicole’s brother, this woman had taken Nicole in for a few weeks. Nicole had sat numbly in her flat, surrounded by walls of books and pictures. All of it, apart from the occasional piece of soothing music, seemed vain and irrelevant.

Visiting with Majid she had, by midnight, only succeeded in detaching his hand from the woman’s. Nicole had then to get him to leave, or at least relinquish the bottle of whisky. Meanwhile the woman was confessing her most grievous passions and telling Majid that she’d seen him address a demonstration in the seventies. A man like him, she cried, required a substantial woman! It was only when she went to fetch her poetry, which she intended to read to him, that Nicole could get the grip on his hair she needed to extract him.

By providing her with the conversations she’d longed for, he had walked in and seduced her best friend’s mother! Nicole had felt extraneous. Not that he had noticed. Pushing him out of there, she was reminded of the time, around the age of fourteen, she’d had to get her mother out of a neighbour’s house, dragging her across the road, her legs gone, and the whole street watching.

He laughed whenever she recalled the occasion, but it troubled her. It wasn’t the learning that mattered. Majid had spent much of his youth reading, and lately had wondered what adventures he had been keeping himself from. He claimed that books could get in the way of what was important between people. But she couldn’t sit, or read or write, or do nothing, without seeking company, never having been taught the benefits of solitude. The compromise they reached was this: when she read he would lie beside her, watching her eyes, sighing as her fingers turned a page.

No; his complaint was that she couldn’t convert feelings into words and expected him to understand her by clairvoyance.

Experience had taught her to keep her mouth shut. She’d spent her childhood among rough people that it amused Majid to hear about, as if they were cartoon characters. But they had been menacing. Hearing some distinction in your voice, they would suspect you of ambition and therefore of the desire to leave them behind. For this you would be envied, derided, hated; London was considered ‘fake’ and the people there duplicitous. Considering this, she’d realised that every day for most of her life she had been physically and emotionally afraid. Even now she couldn’t soften unless she was in bed with Majid, fearing that if she wasn’t vigilant, she would be sent back home on the train.

She turned a few pages of the book, took his arm and snuggled into him. They were together, and loved one another. But there were unaccustomed fears. As Majid reminded her when they argued, he had relinquished his home, wife and children for her. That morning, when he had gone to see the children and to talk about their schooling, she’d become distraught waiting for him, convinced he was sleeping with his wife and would return to her. It was deranging, wanting someone so much. How could you ever get enough of them? Maybe it was easier not to want at all. When one of the kids was unwell, he had stayed the night at his former house. He wanted to be a good father, he explained, adding in a brusque tone that she’d had no experience of that.

She had gone out in her white dress and not come home. She had enjoyed going to clubs and parties, staying out all night and sleeping anywhere. She had scores of acquaintances who it was awkward introducing to Majid, as he had little to say to them. ‘Young people aren’t interesting in themselves any more,’ he said, sententiously.

He maintained that it was she who was drawing away from them. It was true that these friends – who she had seen as free spirits, and who now lay in their squats virtually inert with drugs – lacked imagination, resolution and ardour, and that she found it difficult to tell them of her life, fearing they would resent her. But Majid, once the editor of radical newspapers, could be snobbish. On this occasion he accused her of treating him like a parent or flatmate, and of not understanding she was the first woman he couldn’t sleep without. Yet hadn’t she waited two years while he was sleeping with someone else? If she recalled the time he went on holiday with his family, informing her the day before, even as he asked her to marry him, she could beat her head against the wall. His young children were beautiful, but in the park people assumed they were hers. They looked like the mother, and connected him with her for ever. Nicole had said she didn’t want them coming to the house. She had wanted to punish him, and destroy everything.

Should she leave him? Falling in love was simple; one had only to yield. Digesting another person, however, and sustaining a love, was bloody work, and not a soft job. Feeling and fear rushed through her constantly. If only her mother were sensible and accessible. As for the woman she usually discussed such subjects with – the mother of her best friend – Nicole was too embarrassed to return.

She noticed that the train was slowing down.

‘Is this it?’ he said.

‘’Fraid so.’

‘Can’t we go on to the seaside?’

She replaced her book and put her gloves on.

‘Majid, another day.’

‘Yes, yes, there’s time for everything.’

He took her arm.

They left the station and joined a suburban area of underpasses, glass office blocks, hurrying crowds, stationary derelicts and stoned young people in flimsy clothing. ‘Bad America,’ Majid called it.

They queued twenty minutes for a bus. She wouldn’t let him hail a taxi. For some reason she thought it would be condescending. Anyhow, she didn’t want to get there too soon.

They sat in the front, at the top of the wide double-decker, as it took them away from the centre. They swept through winding lanes and passed fields. He was surprised the slow, heavy bus ascended the hills at all. This was not the city and not the country; it was not anything but grassy areas, arcades of necessary shops, churches and suburban houses. She pointed out the school she’d attended, shops she’d worked in for a pittance, parks in which she’d waited for various boyfriends.

It was a fearful place for him too. His father had been an Indian politician and when his parents separated he had been brought up by his mother eight miles away. They liked to talk about the fact that he was at university when she was born; that when she was just walking he was living with his first wife; that he might have patted Nicole’s head as he passed her on the street. They shared the fantasy that for years he had been waiting for her to grow up.

It was cold when they got down. The wind cut across the open spaces. Already it seemed to be getting dark. They walked further than he’d imagined they would have to, and across muddy patches. He complained that she should have told him to wear different shoes.

He suggested they take something for her mother. He could be very polite. He even said ‘excuse me’ in bed if he made an abrupt movement. They went into a brightly lit supermarket and asked for flowers; there were none. He asked for lapsang souchong teabags, but before the assistant could reply, Nicole pulled him out.

The area was sombre but not grim, though a swastika had been painted on a fence. Her mother’s house was set on a grassy bank, in a sixties estate, with a view of a park. As they approached, Nicole’s feet seemed to drag. Finally she halted and opened her coat.

‘Put your arms around me.’ He felt her shivering. She said, ‘I can’t go in unless you say you love me.’

‘I love you,’ he said, holding her. ‘Marry me.’

She was kissing his forehead, eyes, mouth. ‘No one has ever cared for me like you.’

He repeated, ‘Marry me. Say you will, say it.’

‘Oh I don’t know,’ she replied.

She crossed the garden and tapped on the window. Immediately her mother came to the door. The hall was narrow. The mother kissed her daughter, and then Majid, on the cheek.

‘I’m pleased to see you,’ she said, shyly. She didn’t appear to have been drinking. She looked Majid over and said, ‘Do you want a tour?’ She seemed to expect it.

‘That would be lovely,’ he said.

Downstairs the rooms were square, painted white but otherwise bare. The ceilings were low, the carpet thick and green. A brown three-piece suite – each item seemed to resemble a boat – was set in front of the television.

Nicole was eager to take Majid upstairs. She led him through the rooms which had been the setting for the stories she’d told. He tried to imagine the scenes. But the bedrooms that had once been inhabited by lodgers – van drivers, removal men, postmen, labourers – were empty. The wallpaper was gouged and discoloured, the curtains hadn’t been washed for a decade, nor the windows cleaned; rotten mattresses were parked against the walls. In the hall the floorboards were bare, with nails sticking out of them. What to her reverberated with remembered life was squalor to him.