Looking Down Read online

  ‘Haven’t even been having time to read the paper, Sarah. Mr Beaumont collected his post, didn’t even tell me where he was going like he usually does, so he must have been gone first thing, and since then I’ve been up and down, up and down to that sodding penthouse with a whole load of boxes, just got delivered . . .’

  ‘Any messages for me?’

  ‘Nope, although I did see your brother through the door. Thought he was coming in, but he went away.’

  ‘Oh. So tell me about the penthouse. You were going to get inside . . . has she really gone?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, lowering his voice to a whisper. ‘Yes! She’s gone, really gone. She went last week. I’m really sure of it now. Chinese woman wanted me to put stuff in the kitchen, so I got a good look. She’s in a foul mood. No one’s been cleaning in there, I tell you, and she wouldn’t have let me in if Minty had been there to cart stuff, would she?’

  ‘Well well, I suppose it’s a relief. She got away at last. I only hope it wasn’t going from the devil to the deep blue sea. And I wish she could have let you know where she’d gone.’

  It was the wrong thing to say. It made him defensive.

  ‘She couldn’t, could she? Couldn’t or wouldn’t, same thing. But I think it was the money helped, Sarah. She let me save it up, see? And at least she wasn’t starving. And I have to admit, although she was frightened of them, she still got plenty of gumption.’

  He was still whispering. He always whispered when he talked about Minty. Minty was an abbreviation of a name he could not pronounce. Minty, who was the resident servant of the fluctuating Chinese tribe in the penthouse, although perhaps more aptly described as a slave, who never left the building. She had long been a source of anguish to Fritz and a shared concern with Sarah, who found the idea of anyone who was afraid to go out, because they had nowhere else to go, perfectly abominable.

  ‘Remember when she used to come down here and just sit over there and look at the door?’ He pointed to the sofa and chairs arranged in front of the mirror, and then at the large plate-glass doors that led outside.

  ‘Yes. Always fiddling with her necklace.’

  ‘She was so thin.’

  ‘Until you fed her . . .’

  ‘It was my wife feeding her,’ he continued to whisper, uncomfortably. ‘She likes to cook. Said it was as easy to make stuff for three as two, and, anyway, Minty wouldn’t talk to anyone else. Both Romany, see?’

  ‘So, between you, you got the gist.’

  ‘Only that she was illegal. Like my wife,’ fore we got married. Never found out how Minty landed up with the Chinese either, didn’t come in on their passport, like some of them other slaves do. She was too frightened to say. She was stuck, anyway. They worked her to death, starved her and gave her no money. She’d no papers, anyway. Couldn’t call the police, could I? Should I? She definitely didn’t want that, and if the Chinese found out I’d caused that trouble, I’m out on my ears, like as not. I’d have risked it, mind, but she said no, no, no, and cried, and the wife wouldn’t have had it.’

  It was an often repeated conversation. Fritz always had to go back to the beginning, forgetting how Sarah had agreed with him, agreed still, that the choices about what to do about Minty were limited, so the plan they had formed was for the Fritzes to do the feeding, while Sarah and Richard Beaumont stuck money behind the desk regularly, followed by the gift of a prepaid mobile phone. Minty’s stash, they called it. Minty could not take it upstairs into the penthouse; they would find it, she said, but she knew it was there. Minty stole out of the top floor and left the penthouse door on the latch when they were out. She never went further than the foyer. No one ever spoke to the Chinese. A man, a woman and a selection of males seemed to live in the penthouse. They came in and out, always carrying something. Traders, Fritz said. None of them ever smiled.

  ‘And then the stash was gone,’ Fritz said mournfully. ‘A week since. I don’t like to think that was all she wanted.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter if it was, Fritz. It was choice she needed. You gave it her.’

  ‘Did we? Me and the missus, and you and Mr Beaumont? Anyway, she isn’t dead up there, she’s gone. I’ll miss her.’

  ‘You can’t help people more than they allow, Fritz. Never could, except for kids, and she wasn’t one of those. What if you had reported her existence? She’d either be out on the street or sent home. If she had one.’

  Fritz was often close to tears. He blew his nose and laughed nervously, staring at her through dark brown, permanently sad eyes. She always had the desire to make Fritz laugh and never managed it. He was the sort of man who gave her the desire to pull silly faces if only to raise a smile. He sighed, hesitated before he spoke.

  ‘Home? Ah, I didn’t say to you about that. That’s the bit I never told you. See, the wife could never get her to believe what will be happening if she turn herself in. The worst and the best. She’d get sent home. And believe me, that was what she wanted most of all. To go home.’

  Sarah buttoned her coat.

  ‘I wish I’d known that. On the other hand, perhaps I don’t. We can only say good luck to her. She escaped on her own terms.’

  She turned for the glass doors. They looked thick enough to withstand bullets, with large brass handles and lock. All the residents had keys, unless they were slaves. Then she turned on her heel.

  ‘I suppose we’d better be on the lookout, Fritz.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘For whoever the people in the penthouse get in next. There’s plenty where Minty came from.’

  Her own shoes silent on the pavement, she tried to remember the girl as she walked down the street, wondering when exactly she had gone, trying to picture the face she had seen behind the penthouse door putting her finger to her lips, shaking her head and shutting the door again. Doing the same thing on the second attempt. Three months before, the girl’s elbows had been bigger than her knees, until the Fritzes fed her, and Sarah remembered the bare knees. Amazing what food did. Sarah’s impression was that she was not as frail as Fritz thought; simply an ageless girl who had seen too much and was marked by desperation, but not helpless yet. A girl with a hardened heart, capable, therefore, of anything. Frightened but fierce, sinking but not drowning. Minty hung washing on the balcony; Sarah could just see from her window where the line had broken and hung down into the well, as if she had given up. Why hadn’t she and Richard and Fritz joined forces and marched up to the door and demanded to know who she was? Because Minty chose not, and the Chinese paid the bulk of Fritz’s wage, and that was not the way things were done. And because, to be honest, Sarah had not wanted to get more than minimally involved. Her life was in control and that was how she wanted it to be. She did not want it riddled with pity.

  Sarah turned back and looked at the frontage of the block. It was a confused design, Edwardian deco, originally experimental with lots of linear twiddles and red brick, built for luxury, descending to penury and shabbiness in the nineteen sixties, narrowly missing demolition fifteen years later and then restored to dignity at the beginning of the last decade. Now odd, but posh. A safe place for the conduct of private lives. The man who had left Sarah her flat in an astonishing piece of generosity may have thought it was still worth the pittance he had paid for it twenty years earlier. She was immensely grateful and yet it increased her debt to the world. She had not deserved it; no one did. And it was a flawed place, so solid and secure that it could contain with apparent impunity a slave, kept by people who could have afforded to hire an army to clear their stable.

  None of these reflections were part of any firm moral agenda on the subject of asylum seekers, their criminal gangs, Albanian women with drugged babies wailing and begging in the Underground in a way which deadened pity. It made sense to Sarah that the deprived of the world should descend upon the relatively rich – who wouldn’t? She didn’t know what she thought about it as a global problem, but then she tried to avoid having opinions. She didn’t envy polit
icians who had to have opinions without the luxury of being able to change their minds, and all she could really care about was individuals, one by one. There was no time to trouble the mind about what she could not change. Sarah Fortune was hell-bent on a quiet life, avoiding other people’s pain.

  Outside the block, beyond the glass doors and double-glazed windows, the noise of the traffic hit like a body blow, a reminder of how quiet it was within. Noise could never penetrate to the well of the building, and from where she stood the place looked impregnable, as safe as it felt inside. No one ever remembered that dark, interior well, or the tiny back door to the service area where Fritz kept rubbish. It looked as if it led to nowhere, unless you were Steven, always looking for a route.

  Sarah could not run down this street because it was too crowded. There were shops: the florist’s, the jeweller’s, the wine shop, with tourists and people of all kinds en route to mysterious, urgent destinations. It would have been nice to run, because the thought of Steven made her not only want to run away from him, but also towards him. She was not going to feel guilty about him. She was not going to feel guilty about being a lady who lunched with men and went to bed with them in the afternoons if it suited them both. It wasn’t as if it happened every day. She was not going to feel guilty about anything, except perhaps leisure. Leisure did not come naturally. Steven might be right: she had too much of it, although there never seemed enough. Perhaps she should get a job, but she had had a job for fifteen years, and the thought of ever doing anything responsible ever again filled her with horror. This was safer: a place to live, a coterie of generous male friends, the judge, the dentist, the stockbroker, the art dealer, all conveniently central. A little involvement in the lives of others, but not a lot. No missions to the rescue; she had done enough of that. And now she had the safety of the flat, she could give the money away. Money did not matter as long as you had a roof. Who needed more than a roof and a painting or two? She paused to check her appearance in the window of Penhaligon’s. Delicious scents in there, and yes, they certainly counted as the necessities of life, but she also had plenty of those. What more did she need?

  A small, expressive face grinned back. Notable for the peculiar colouring, sallow skin, auburn hair and brown eyes with crow’s feet blurred in the glass. Nobody liked the onset of lines, but like the state of the wider world there was nothing you could do about it. Lilian Beaumont might imagine Sarah Fortune was beyond the pale when it came to luring the opposite sex at the advanced age of almost forty, but then Lilian Beaumont knew Jack Shit about men. Securing a man to keep on a permanent and official basis grew more difficult with the crow’s feet and weight if a girl was competing for a commitment from a man who wanted babies, but Sarah was way beyond that. Marriage was a mug’s game. And the sort of gentle, often timid and shy men she preferred would have run a mile from a Lilian Beaumont unless they were already married to her.

  No, Sarah’s chosen kind of men tended to be clever, kindly, successful in an understated way, and tending towards the socially inept. A teeny bit and not always fortunately eccentric. Such as George, with his passion for Russian icons and all things miniature, suitable for his own diminutive size and huge feet, alienating his customers with his myopic stare and contempt for their taste. Then there was William, six feet three inches high, with a permanent stoop from bending over his patients in the dental chair, whose practice made him ill-at-ease with most of humanity. At the moment she entered the restaurant he was absorbed in reading, and when she touched him on the shoulder he leapt to his feet in a confusion of angles, sending the water and cutlery crashing to the floor. Something he might do twice during a meal. It was never wise to drink soup near William, and yet in his surgery he was precise and soothing, as long as nobody tried to speak.

  ‘Sarah,’ he said, beaming and irritated at the same time, kissing her cheek and pulling at the tablecloth. ‘You must stop sending me patients. I’ve too many already. And you never send me anyone straightforward.’

  ‘I don’t know anyone straightforward.’

  ‘I forgot, of course you don’t. What are we eating?’

  He could never make up his mind and wanted someone to do it for him, although he loved food. Frightened of his own choices. She frowned over the menu while William unloaded the tragedies of the week. The waiter appeared and she told him what William would like. It was a quiet place, full of concentrated eaters who appreciated plain food served speedily.

  ‘How many this week . . .oh yes, I sent Steven,’ she said, smiling at him, pleased to see him. ‘It isn’t as if he can’t pay. I thought he might like the paintings in the waiting room.’

  ‘You told me a little about your brother,’ William said, mildly enough. ‘And yes, he did like the paintings. Rather too much, I thought. Walked off with the one in the lavatory. That nice little nude. Do you think you could ask him for it back?’

  ‘How very rude of him,’ Sarah said. ‘But I’m afraid it’s a bit compulsive, although he’s usually more subtle than that. I think he’s a bit out of practice. It’ll come back, don’t worry.’

  ‘To tell the truth,’ William said while chewing safely dry whitebait, ‘he scared me to death. There’s something about him . . .’

  ‘I know, I know. I shouldn’t have sent him, but he had toothache.’

  ‘He had a simple cavity, and I don’t want him back.’

  ‘Oh, right.’

  ‘He frightens me,’ William announced in the clearly articulated tone he used with patients, ‘because he looks like you and he doesn’t at the same time. And because I know you’re siblings and I think you might be like him.’

  ‘Or he might be like me.’

  ‘That would be fine. But you aren’t being fair, are you, Sarah?’

  ‘It was an emergency . . .’

  ‘If you want me to get involved again, Sarah, not only with your friends but your family, will you remember what you said?’ His voice was now distinctly loud and cheerful. The second course arrived. ‘You said, my dearest, that I should desist, because I am, after all, only your lover.’

  The words seemed to bounce off the walls. After a tiny pause, the eaters resumed eating.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ Sarah said. ‘I did say that.’

  They continued to eat, like old friends.

  ‘Why didn’t I know about this brother before? I’ve known you . . . how long?’

  ‘He worked abroad for years. He works to finance an unfortunate hobby of climbing. Free climbing they call it, anything that stays still. He’s clever and easily bored. Now he works here. In a bank.’

  William dropped his fork.

  ‘A bank? Good God, I don’t believe you.’

  ‘. . . And you’ll get your picture back. It was probably it being in the lavatory that enraged him. He’s like that, you see. Hates lovely things to be hidden away.’

  They ate in easy silence. He sighed at the end of the efficient consumption of his food while she was halfway through.

  ‘I did like that other chap you referred to me. Much more my type. Richard Beaumont, that’s his name.’

  ‘You might prefer the wife. She’s a stunner.’

  ‘Would I? Funny thing about him, though. He doesn’t seem to feel pain.’

  Sarah did not want involvement, but she did like a bit of gentle networking. Let the men help one another. It made her feel useful.

  Steven Fortune, bunking off from work, found himself, as he often did, staring into windows and never for the purpose of seeing his own reflection. This part of London was full of galleries (picture shops, he called them) and while the displays might fill him with rage, he could never resist. Art was the emperor’s clothes. And then there were moments, faced with paintings or drawings in the vaulted hall of a museum or, as now, in the expensive, darkened interior of a discriminating private gallery, when the pleasure factor was so intense that it was almost painful, filling him with an aching warmth.

  Tiepolo, leading exponent of the Italian Rococo.
Style characterised by airy frivolity, joyous sense of colour and playful effects. It was the fourth time he had seen it. It haunted him.

  A watercolour-and-ink drawing: The Sermon on the Mount. What would you call it? Sketch, watercolour using sepia inks, whatever. Why was it magic? Steven struggled to control the light-headed pleasure it gave him by making a strenuous effort to analyse why the painting should have such an effect, took a deep breath and tried.

  Here goes: The composition swoops up with fantastic triangular force (a pile of triangles within triangles), strengthened and dramatised by the uncanny use of light and shade within a limited range of sepia tones. The white-not-pale women at the very centre are droolingly beautiful (look at the bare shoulder and décolleté neckline). They form a triangle with the left arm of Jesus, approached by an equally white pathway through the bald old geezer in the foreground – youth, beauty and old age all in thrall to the wise one. And those ghostly white passages contrast powerfully with the dark backs of the foreground figures (another triangle) …

  Yes, that went some way to explaining it, about 2 per cent of the way, but it helped bring him down to earth and made him aware he was smiling so widely he must have looked an idiot. He turned away from the Tiepolo on its stand and walked to the other end of the room simply so that he could turn back and approach it again, get that feeling all over again. Enter the force field of the thing and get that unholy joy. No, it was a holy joy, but then he was used to thinking of all joy as suspicious.