Fire After Dark (4 page)

But she came back from it, didn’t she? Other photographs around show Celia at varying stages of her life and as she moves through it, that vulnerability seems a little less evident. The Celia, glowing and laughing in her thirties, is definitely stronger, more confident, more prepared to take on the world. She’s sophisticated and knowing in her forties, glamorous and experienced in her fifties in a world before Botox and fillers when a woman’s age showed whether she liked it or not. And age looks good on Celia.

Maybe she just realised that the blows will always come. It’s how you deal with them, how you get up again and carry on.

Just then, the silence is shattered by a shrill ring and I jump with a gasp, before realising it’s my phone going off. When I answer, my parents are on the line, wanting to hear how I am and what I’ve been up to.

‘I’m fine, Mum, really. The flat is gorgeous. I’ve had a lovely day, it couldn’t be better.’

‘Are you eating properly?’ my mother asks anxiously.

‘Of course.’

‘And have you got enough money?’ my father says. I can guess he’s on the sitting-room extension while my mother is sitting in the kitchen.

‘Honestly, Dad, I’ve got plenty. You don’t need to worry.’

Once I’ve recounted everything to them in minute detail, told them my plans for the next day and assured them that I’m completely safe and able to look after myself, we say goodbye and I’m left in the strange buzzing silence that descends after lots of chatter and noise abruptly stops.

I get up and go over to the window, trying to quell the loneliness I can feel growing inside. I’m glad my parents called and everything, but they’ve unintentionally
brought me down again. It feels all the time as though I’m struggling as hard as I can to get out of the black misery that’s swamped me since the night I surprised Adam; it takes all my strength to get just a few steps away, and then the lightest touch sends me straight back into its depths.

The flat opposite is still in darkness. Where is the man I saw last night? I realise that I’ve unconsciously been looking forward to getting back here and seeing him again; in fact, he’s been floating through my mind all day without my really being aware of it. The image of him half naked, the way he moved so gracefully about his sitting room, the way he stared so directly at me – it’s all burned itself onto my retina. He looked like no man I’ve ever seen before, not in real life at least.

Adam is not a particularly tall man and although he’s strong from the work he does for his father’s building company, it’s made him stocky rather than defined. In fact, the longer I’ve known him, the more solid and squarish he’s become, perhaps because he gets his energy from a greasy-spoon diet of endless fried food and cooked breakfasts. And in his downtime, he likes nothing more than to sink several beers and make a late-night trip to the chip shop. When I saw him that night, raising himself on his elbow and gazing at me in horror, with Hannah’s frightened face on the pillow below him, my first thought was:
He looks so fat
. His white chest seemed podgy and his naked stomach hung down pendulously over Hannah, who matched him in ripeness with her big breasts, an expanse of pale belly and full hips exposed.

‘Beth!’ he’d gasped, his expression flicking between confusion, guilt, embarrassment and, unbelievably, annoyance. ‘What the fuck are you doing here? You’re supposed to be babysitting!’

Hannah said nothing but I could see her initial bewilderment becoming a nasty kind of defiance. Her eyes glittered at me as though she was spoiling for a fight. Caught in the sordid act, she was going to take me on. Rather than play the role of the wicked seductress, she was going to recast me as the lumpen fool intent on standing in the way of Romeo and Juliet’s true love. Her nakedness was becoming a badge of honour rather than shame. ‘Yes,’ she seemed to be saying, ‘we’re fucking, we’re mad about each other, we can’t resist it. So what the hell are
you
doing here?’

Don’t ask me how I knew all that in those few seconds between walking in and realising what I was seeing, but I did. Female intuition may be a cliché but that doesn’t make it untrue. I also knew that everything I’d believed in approximately one minute before was now utterly defunct, and that the horrible pain I felt was my heart being beaten and mauled to within an inch of its life.

I managed to say something at last. I looked at Adam. In my eyes, I implored but I said only, ‘Why?
Why
?’

I sigh heavily. Even a day losing myself in the hugeness of London can’t seem to stop me replaying the whole miserable scene. How can I escape it? When will it all end? Because the truth is, misery is so bloody tiring. No one ever talks about how exhausting it is being sad.

The flat opposite is still in darkness. I guess the man must be out, living his glamorous life, doing endlessly exciting things, hanging out with women like him: beautiful, sophisticated and high maintenance.

‘I need ice cream,’ I decide suddenly. I turn away from the window and say to De Havilland, who is curled up on the sofa, ‘I’m just going outside. I may be some time.’ Then I grab the keys and head out.

Outside the flat, some of the confidence I’ve acquired during the day seeps away, like air escaping slowly from a punctured tyre.

Around me the buildings are high and forbidding. I have no idea where I am or where to go. I’d planned to ask the porter on my way out, but the desk was empty as I passed it, so I head back towards the main streets. There are shops all right, but none that has anything offer me and anyway they’re all closed, their windows grilled and locked. Behind the glass are Persian rugs, vast china vases and chandeliers or exquisite clothes. Where can I buy ice cream? I walk without direction through the warm summer evening, trying to remember where I’ve come from. I pass bars and restaurants, all smarter than anything I’d seen before, with burly men in black jackets and earpieces standing at the door. Behind manicured box hedges, people in sunglasses, with that unmistakeable air of wealth, sit at tables, smoking over ice-coolers of champagne, white plates of delicious-looking morsels abandoned in front of them.

I begin to quail inside. What am I doing here? What makes me think I can survive in a world like this? I must be mad. It’s ridiculous. I don’t belong and never will. I want to cry.

Then I see a bright awning and hurry towards it, full of relief. I emerge from the corner shop a few minutes later with a tub of very expensive ice cream in a bag, feeling a lot happier. Now all I have to do is find my way back.

It occurs to me I’ve not yet seen a television in Celia’s apartment, or a computer, come to that. I’ve got my aged laptop with me but goodness knows if there’s an Internet connection. Probably not. I’m not sure I can imagine eating ice cream without watching something on the telly at the same time, but I guess I’ll survive somehow. It will still taste the same, right?

I round the corner into Randolph Gardens and I don’t know exactly how I manage to do it but the next moment I’ve almost walked smack into a man on the pavement in front of me. He must have been ahead of me and stopped without my noticing so I kept right on going until my nose was practically pressed into his back.

‘Oh!’ I exclaim and step backwards, losing my balance so that I stumble off the pavement and into the gutter, dropping the bag with my ice cream in it. It rolls away and comes to rest on a dusty drain stuffed with litter and dead leaves.

‘I’m sorry,’ he says, turning around, and I realise I’m looking straight into the handsome face of the man from across the way. ‘Are you all right?’

I can feel myself flushing scarlet. ‘Yes,’ I say, sounding breathless, ‘but it was all my fault. Really. I should watch where I’m going.’

He’s quite mind-blowing close up, in fact I can hardly look at him, concentrating instead on his beautifully cut dark suit and the bunch of white peonies he’s carrying.
How weird,
I think,
he’s holding my favourite flower.

‘Let me get your shopping,’ he says. His voice is deep, low and his accent is well educated and cultured. He steps forward as if to get down into the gutter to get my ice cream for me.

‘No, no,’ I say quickly, blushing an even hotter scarlet. ‘I’ll get it.’

We both bend and reach out at the same time and his hand lands right on top of mine, warm and heavy. I gasp and pull away, and promptly stumble forward into the gutter. He instantly clasps my arm in a strong grip, stopping me from falling forward flat on my face.

‘Are you all right?’ he asks as I try to regain my balance. He isn’t letting me go, and my face is flaming with embarrassment.

‘Yes . . . please . . .’ I say faintly, only aware of the iron fingers round my arm holding me up. ‘You can let me go now.’

He releases me and I bend down to retrieve my bag with the all-too-obvious tub of ice cream in it. Bits of old leaf stick to my bag. I rub a hand across my face and feel the grit of dust there. I must look a fright.

‘Just the weather for ice cream,’ he says, smiling. I look up shyly. Is that a teasing note in his voice? I suppose I’m just some random girl in the gutter with streaks of filthy dust on her face, holding ice cream like a little kid with her treat. But he is something else. His eyes are so dark they’re almost black but it’s his eyebrows I really notice: strong black lines with a devilish hint about the arch. He has one of those straight noses that have a kink at the bridge that, oddly, only adds to its perfection, and below that is a full, sensual mouth, although at the moment the lips are curving into a smile and revealing straight white teeth.

All I can think, weakly, is
Wow.
All I can do is nod. I’m completely speechless.

‘Well, good night. Enjoy your ice cream.’ He turns and heads quickly up the steps of the apartment building, vanishing inside the front door.

I watch him go, still in the gutter, now feeling the grit between my toes. I breathe in, a long, desperately needed breath. I’ve been holding it while he looked at me. In fact, I feel really strange, a bit overwhelmed, with a kind of buzz in my head.

Slowly, I walk into the apartment building and make my way back up to Celia’s flat. When I get there, I go straight to the sitting room. The light in the flat opposite is on now, and I can see him quite clearly. I fetch a spoon from the kitchen and go back, pulling a chair up to the window, close enough so that I can see out easily but not so close that I’m visible. I open my tub of ice cream and watch as the man moves about, going in and out of his sitting room. He’s taken off his jacket and tie now and is walking about in a blue shirt and dark trousers. He looks effortlessly sexy, the shirt emphasising his broad shoulders and the trousers his lean masculine form. It’s as though he’s dressed for a fashion shoot in a men’s magazine. I notice that he has a dining table and chairs in his sitting room. That makes sense. If the apartments are identically laid out, then his kitchen will be, like Celia’s, a narrow, galley affair. While eating clearly doesn’t matter enough to Celia for her to bother with more than the tiny two-man table in her kitchen, this man wants something a little more civilised.

Does he cook?
I wonder.
Who is he? What does he do?
I need to give him a name, I decide. ‘The man’ isn’t quite evocative enough. What shall I call him? Well, Mister something, obviously, as we haven’t been introduced and first names are so peculiar to an individual. It would be weird to call him something like Sebastian or Theodore, and then discover his name was Reg or Norm or something. No, I need something that’s mysterious and flexible, something that can contain all possibilities . . .

Mr R
.

Yes, that’s it. I’ll call him Mr R.

As in Randolph Gardens. It kind of suits him.

Mr R walks back into his sitting room carrying an ice bucket and a couple of glasses. A promising-looking gold foil top pokes out of the bucket. Two glasses – so he’s expecting company unless he intends to have a drink in each hand. There’s no sign of the flowers. I sit back on the chair, crossing my legs like a school kid, and take the lid off my ice cream. I curl a long bit up onto the spoon and suck it off slowly, letting it melt on my tongue, savouring the sweet, cold trickle down my throat. It’s plain vanilla, just the way I like it.

Mr R disappears again, and he’s gone a long time. I’ve managed to eat about a quarter of the tub, and De Havilland has nested in the gap between my knees and slipped instantly into purring slumber. When he comes back, he’s obviously showered and changed – he’s now wearing a pair of loose linen trousers and a blue T-shirt, which look, needless to say, amazing – and he’s not alone.

I gasp when I see her and then mentally roll my eyes at myself.
So what, he’s not allowed a girlfriend? He doesn’t even know who you are! You’ve spent two nights having a good old look at him, and now he somehow belongs to you?

I almost laugh at my own craziness and yet, somehow, the weird intimacy of being able to see inside his flat like this has made me feel like there’s a connection. That is clearly in my imagination, but still, I can’t quite shake it. I lean forward to get a better look at the girlfriend.

Okay. Just as I thought. I’m way, way off course if I think I’ll ever be able to compete with a girl like this.

Girl? She’s a woman. A proper adult, grown-up woman, the kind who makes me feel like a gauche and scruffy child in comparison. She’s tall and slender with the kind of elegance that can’t be learned, and she’s wearing a pale linen trouser suit with a white T-shirt underneath the jacket. Her dark hair is cut into a wavy bob, and she’s wearing red lipstick in a way that indicates style, rather than tartiness. I can see that she’s fine-boned and lovely, as though she’s stepped out of the pages of Paris
Vogue.
She’s the kind of woman who would never look tatty or sweat-stained or have a ponytail that hangs limply down her back. She’d never trip into gutters or walk about with a streak of grime on her face.

She is the kind of woman who is given white peonies and champagne in a Mayfair apartment. I bet she never ate ice cream with only a cat for company because her boyfriend preferred to shag someone else.