A Sight for Sore Eyes (27 page)

necklaces he had discovered among Harriet's jewellery, but now, disconcerted by something she didn't know the name of, his obsessive gaze, she had wrapped herself in the white embroidered bedcover. 'I'm sorry, Teddy, I don't want to hurt your feelings, but I don't think it's quite right you dressing me up, or not dressing me up really, and stating at me. It's -, she nearly said 'sick' but stopped herself '- not the way it should be.' Instead of answering he said, 'If we're in the complaints department I'd just like to say that I hate the way you dress. I hate your clothes, jeans and shirts and jackets a guy might wear on a building site. The first time I saw you you had a dress on. 'I can wear a dress if that's what you want.' 'Find something in the cupboard. Go on. There are plenty. She won't want them. I've got a job to do - remember? I'd best get on with it.' Left alone, Francine put on her underclothes and opened the wardrobe door. The interior reminded her of Noele's shop. Here hung the dresses and suits of a middle-aged woman of flashy taste, one partial to pearls, sequins and rhinestones. The colours were mostly red, black and white, but one dress of velvet was a startling emerald. Even if she had liked them she wouldn't have wanted to put on any of these garments. They weren't hers and she couldn't believe their owner wouldn't object to her wearing them. She expected the second wardrobe to contain a more casual line of clothes, but the things inside it were all men's. Suits, sports jackets, trousers, a camel-hair winter coat and the sort of raincoat policemen wear in television serials. A man's clothes, but not a young man's. It was no business of hers, Francine decided, and remembering what Teddy had said about her jeans and her shirt, after some small hesitation she put on a black silk dressing-gown. Whether Teddy wanted her to be with him while he worked she wasn't sure, but there was nothing else to do in this house. She went downstairs and, guided by the strong and heady smell of paint, found him in a corner of the hall at the back near the kitchen door. When he saw her he jumped. 'I didn't hear you.' She laughed. 'Julia would say you had a guilty conscience. Well, she'd more likely say you'd a guilty super-ego.' He didn't smile. 'Where did you find that dressing-gown?' 'It belongs to your friend - employer, client, whatever she is. Teddy, did you know that other wardrobe is full of men's clothes? You said she lived alone.' He put down the paint roller. He thought about what she had said. 'They must be Marc Syre's.' 'But he died before either of us was born.' 'I don't know, then. Does it matter?' She wasn't frightened of him, only puzzled. He followed her up the stairs, switched off the light, went into the kitchen to clean his paint roller and wash his hands. 'What shall we do?' she said, like a child. 'Do?' 'I mean, you've finished working, so what shall we do for the rest of the day?' Instead of answering, he dried his hands, turned to her and snatched her into his arms. It was like that, a seizing of her, rough and sudden. He pushed the dressing-gown down off her shoulders and kissed her neck and her breasts. He held her waist in his two hands as one might hold a bunch of flowers. 'It'll be all right now, he kept whispering. 'Come with me now, it'll be fine now.

Chapter 30

But it was not all right. Just as he had felt that years-old emotion, long-forgotten, that sense of fear, so now another childhood urge returned. He wanted to cry. In the play-pen he had cried, but never since, not even when he cut his finger with Mr Chance's chisel. He buried his face in her shoulder and heaved with dry sobs. She held him and told him yet again that it didn't matter, it wasn't important. One day it would come right, if he would stop worrying. She kissed his hands and kissed the mutilated finger, but he hated that, he hated her drawing attention to his one flaw. It would only come right, he said to her peevishly, when she was with him all the time, when she left that old woman, when she wanted him more than that old woman. But he made no physical attempt to stop her going, even drove her part of the way in the Edsel. And when she was away from him, in a strange way things were better. He could no longer feel she was watching him and wondering, despising him, growing impatient. He could even direct his mind and his actions to the pressing things he had to do in the house. It was no bad thing that she had refused to see him for a few days, for he could spend them finishing the job. It was a strange feeling, contemplating that wall, on which the white paint was drying, and knowing that behind it was something that maybe no human eye would see again. That was no doubt what those makers of the pyramids thought, when the Pharaoh and his attendants and his artefacts had been laid in the tomb, and they came to seal it up. Of course, they had been wrong, the pyramids had been broken into and the dead discovered, and perhaps his burial chamber would also one day be opened. But no, he thought, no, I have sealed it so that no one will believe anything was ever here. A little white chamber, a tiny windowless room, lying deep in the earth under London. It was the kind of idea he liked. In a curious way it even cheered him. It took away some of the pain of his inadequacy. In this area, of making death and achieving concealment, he was a king. No one could enter his secret chamber from the house for there was no entrance to it. From the backyard there would soon be no opening, no hole, no way in, for Paulson and Grieve, Ironsmiths of Stoke, in their laurel wreath, would be hidden in some store-place of his own and where the coal chute had been, a blossoming plant growing in a new flower-bed. Airless it would become inside there and the ill-matched couple slowly decay, return to earth, to dust, to bones. So should all ugliness be concealed and buried... { The phone ringing made him jump. Naturally, he wasn't going to answer it. The answering machine cut in. He went upstairs. Francine hadn't made the bed before she left. This omission irritated him. He didn't expect bed-making from her because she was a woman; he would expect it from anyone. She had been on a pinnacle and now she fell a little in his estimation. His grandmother used to say that we can't all be alike and that this was a good thing, but he wasn't so sure. It would be a good idea if everyone were like him, tidy, clean, methodical, circumspect and punctual. He straightened the bottom sheet and shook out the white silk coverlet. 'When he plumped up the pillows he saw Harriet's address book lying underneath. Sitting on the bed, he went through it again. One of these phone numbers might be her PIN number. What did PIN stand for, anyway? Personal something? Personal Index Number? No, Personal Identification Number. Perhaps she had used her own phone number. Or Simon Aipheton's. He had an idea that if you kept trying the wrong numbers in one of those machines it would eventually, maybe after three goes, swallow up the card and keep it. It could be any number. You wouldn't use a friend's phone number for that, though, would you? If you were like him and had no friends it was hard to know. What would he do? Remember it, he thought. But just as few people were as tidy and clean and particular as he, so few had his retentive memory. The time was coming, he had read, when those cash dispensers would work on a fingerprint or a picture of the iris of your eye. But it hadn't come yet. At the moment it still relied on numbers. Once again he leafed through the address book. Most of the names were of people, but some seemed to be of restaurants and there were a lot for people who performed services, plumbers, electricians, builders of various kinds. To maintain the house in its pristine condition, he supposed. Why would she have all those restaurants? Rich people ate out a lot, of course. Would she eat out alone? Take a guest with her? He knew so little about that kind of life. He had heard of none of those restaurants: Odette's, the Ivy, Orso's, Odin's, Jason's, La Punaise, L'Artiste Assoiff~, L'Escargot. If they were restaurants. Back at home, he finished making the wooden frame for the flagstone. In Orcadia Cottage he had drawn a section through the skirting board to be sure the moulding was right, and now he set about cuffing and planing a suitable piece of deal. It would be possible to buy beading to fit, but he couldn't afford to buy anything. His finances were in a serious state. Francine didn't seem to understand that they couldn't go out driving in the Edsel or eat in even the meanest restaurant because he had no money. Restaurants. He found the Yellow Pages and looked up all those listed in Harriet's address book. The only one that wasn't there was La Punaise. The exchange was the same as Jason's which meant, according to Jason's address, that it must be somewhere in Maida Vale. The four-digit number was four-one-six-two. He dialled the seven digits and got a woman~ s voice saying that the number he had called could not be located, whatever that meant. On the way back to Orcadia Place he found a parking meter off the Finchley Road with fifteen minutes left to run. The space was big enough to accommodate the Edsel, which most were not, so he left the car there and went off to find a cash dispenser. Nervously - he half expected the machine to carry out immediate retribution of some kind - he inserted Harriet's Connect card and when requested to punch out four digits, used her phone number. Please Wait, said the machine. Then it said there was a fault and his order could not be processed. But the card came back. He was afraid to try a second time. Rage or hysterical joy, Francine was accustomed to one or the other from Julia. But silence was new. To be greeted with an injured stare, head lowered, a frown gathering between those suffering eyes, but not a word uttered, was unprecedented. Somehow she knew quite well that asking why, what was wrong now, what had she done, what should she do, all those enquiries were useless. Julia was beyond reason. If she had once genuinely feared harm would come to Francine from some external cause or from within herself, this she had long since forgotten. All that now mattered to her was her obsession with keeping Francine there with her, indoors, under her eye day and night. Going upstairs to her room, Francine thought that Julia didn't even want her to have a job, suitable friends, an occupation. She wanted a prisoner she could control. Her father was at home. She had made up her mind to tell him the truth, that she was meeting Teddy, 'seeing' Teddy, that he was her boyfriend. She was tired of lying, she hated it, the false statements that she was visiting this girl's home or that. But she was unable to be with him without Julia being there and although he would certainly tell Julia, she couldn't bring herself to come out with it all in Julia's presence, face her rage and panic and somehow, too, her triumph. But nor could she say to her father that she would like to speak to him alone. The result was that she said nothing and spent long hours up in her room. Next day she was due to see Teddy again and she wanted to see him, she wanted to reassure him once more. It was her firm belief that if she could only make him understand it didn't matter and she didn't mind, things would come right. But to go over to Orcadia Place on Thursday would mean directly lying to her father. Making false statements to Julia was one thing, to her father quite another. It would be impossible to bring herself to stand in front of him and say she was going clubbing with Miranda or to the cinema with Holly when in fact she was meeting Teddy. Francine was learning that while it is easy enough to lie to someone who means nothing to you, it is a verv different matter with a person for whom you feel love and respect. She phoned Teddy at home and got no reply. The Orcadia Cottage number she didn't know and she reminded herself to find out what it was. That set her speculating about Orcadia Cottage and worrying a little. Who was this woman who lived there and allowed Teddy to make free with her house? Young as she was, Francine was already an observer of people and she thought that few would behave like that, let someone who was, after all, a builder, move into one's house and sleep in one's bed and bring his girlfriend there. Teddy's past life remained a mystery, perhaps a secret. She knew only that his parents were dead. It might be that this woman was some relation, an aunt or godmother. There were holes in this theory - who, for instance, did the men's clothes belong to? - but on the whole it satisfied her. She would ask or he would tell her without being asked. When she tried phoning him again, this time in the early evening, he answered. A sulky response to her excuses for not seeing him was what she expected. She had to listen to indignant protests and a stream of invective directed at Julia. 'I'll see you on Saturday,' she said. 'Don't be cross. Please.' 'I'm not cross with you.' But he sounded it. Then he said, 'Francine?' 'What is it?' 'You know French, don't you? You did it for your A Level.' 'You want me to translate something?' "What does La Punaise mean? P, u, n, a, i, s, e.' People who don't understand a foreign language that you do always expect you to know every word it contains, to be a complete walking vocabulary. You couldn't be that even in your own language, there would always be some words you had to look up in the dictionary. 'I don't know, Teddy. I've never heard it before. Shall I look it up and call you back?' At home again, he was working on the skirting board. He didn't mind carving and glass-papering, these were soothing, tranquil activities, but at the same time it irked him to think that if he had had a few pounds at his disposal he could have bought beading to do a job in ten minutes that was taking hours. There had been no reply from Mr Habgood. No doubt he was impatient, but if that estimate had been accepted, the ten per cent deposit he had asked for should also have come in the envelope. Craftsmen sometimes had to wait weeks, months, to get paid, as he remembered from certain remarks of Mr Chance, complaints that had gone over the head of a small boy but now came back to him. Francine hadn't called back. He didn't ask himself why not, he could imagine. That old woman had got hold of her and was haranguing her, or her dad had come home and needed her for something or other. Still, you'd think she'd keep a French dictionary in her room. A bell started ringing, but it was the doorbell, not the phone. Nobody ever called, he couldn't imagine who it was unless Nige had come round to make a fuss about the noise the plane made. It was his grandmother. She had rung the bell - for 'politeness's sake', she said - but immediately let herself in with her key. 'Hallo, stranger,' she said. He wanted to keep her in the hall, but but she came in, marched into his room and stared at the Edsel, which she evidently hadn't expected to see. But her first remark wasn't about the car. 'This place is like ice. It's colder than outdoors.' 'I can't afford to heat it,' he said. 'Too proud to sign on, are you? Well, it makes a change to find some pride in this family. I'm not stopping, I wouldn't want to take my coat off. The doctor says I'm not to get chilled, I could get that hypothermia they all have nowadays and I don't fancy being wrapped up in cooking foil in an ambulance at my age. I came to say my pal Gladys has done your curtains and what about you painting her outside toilet like you promised.' The idea of curtains for this house seemed to belong in the distant past. He had a new home now and a warm one. Maybe he could sell Gladys's effort, take it to one of those second-hand curtain places. But meanwhile he would have to paint a freezing-cold backyard privy... The phone was ringing. He could see his grandmother brightening up, the way she always did when she had the chance of overhearing someone's private conversation. He picked up the receiver. It was Francine. 'I'm so sorry, Teddy. My dad came home just at that moment. And then Miranda's dad's secretary phoned to say I hadn't got the job.' He cared nothing about all that. 'Did you find out what La Punaise means?' 'Yes, I did. It means a pin.' 'La Punaise means a pin?' 'That's right.' 'You're wonderful,' he said. 'You're brilliant. I'll call you back.' He threw his arms into the air and jumped up and down. He burst into peals of laughter. His troubles were over, everything had come right. 'Whatever's got into you?' said Agiies.