Looking Down Page 9

  ‘Sorry,’ she said.

  The word startled him. It was, in the circumstances, so entirely inappropriate it almost overbalanced him. What was she, this divine creature, who apologised to someone who must have given her the fright of her life? Was she so schooled to please she said sorry for being sick to a thief? He felt desperately foolish and ashamed, and, perversely, still smarting from being told he looked silly. She still looked magnificent.

  ‘Don’t say that,’ he mumbled. ‘It’s me who should say that. Shouldn’t have done this. Sorry. I thought you’d have some big, hairy-chested man in here with you.’

  She giggled.

  ‘If only. Now what was it you wanted?’

  He cleared his throat.

  ‘I really only came to explore. There’s something I’m looking for, you see, and I thought you might have it . . .’

  ‘You climbed in?’ she asked.

  ‘I said so.’

  ‘Can you climb out?’

  ‘I suppose so, but I was rather relying on immobilising the alarm which doesn’t cover this bit, picking a lock if need be, I’m good at that, and going out the door. If that’s all right with you.’

  ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘But you’ve got to take that bloody awful picture. Is there anything else you’d like?’

  He thought, sitting on the window ledge, one leg crossed over the other, with one foot wagging.

  ‘I hadn’t actually had a chance to look. I was rather distracted by you.’

  He could no longer disguise his voice. The neutral accent would never give him away. The richness of her voice surprised him and added to her charm.

  ‘Another time, then,’ she said, getting to her feet, tapping his shoulder and leading the way out of the room. Her touch was electric through Lycra. His bum was stiff; the cap was still over his eyes. She would never know him again. He followed her into the vestibule bit where he had waited for zing, and watched as she went into the room through which he had entered and came back smartly with a small painting wrapped in a towel. She deposited it in his arms, and he stood awkwardly with his arms wrapped round the thing. She led him down the long corridor to the door, opened it and stood back from it.

  ‘There’s one of those buzzer release thingies for the front door, so I’ll give you two minutes to get out, buzz it and then it closes all by itself. So you’d better be quick, Mr Burglar. Just get rid of it. Goodnight.’

  He went. There was no choice but to go, fumbling down endless stairs where he would otherwise have run, clutching the thing to his chest. And he did not want to climb. He was shaking like a leaf in rain and his muscles seemed an impediment, so he had to get out and breathe air and . . . On the bend of the wide stairs, level with Sarah’s door, at which he looked longingly and said no, he heard voices. Oh Jesus, that gorgeous bitch had called for the cavalry, buzzed them in instead, and here they were, coming to collect him. A posse of boys in blue, quicker to respond to the calls of the rich than the poor, thundering upstairs to find a damsel in distress and a man in a silly cap halfway down with a stolen thing in his arms and no nerves in his whole body. Oh, shit.

  Only it did not sound like the cavalry. It sounded furtive, a posse of people coming upstairs without putting on the lights. Sarah’s door to her smaller, almost forgotten flat was recessed, with a small security light next to the bell. He flattened himself against it, obscuring it, looking towards the dim light from the window which, at this point, also led into the well of the building and gave blurred, indistinct light. He imagined himself as a doorstop and crouched alongside Sarah’s door like a dead dog. She had a huge letterbox low in her door which he could feel through his shoulder blades. The movement towards him seemed to have paused on the stairs. Steven uncrouched, shoved the painting through the slit, pushed the surrounding towel after it, put the black gloves back on his hands and crouched again, with his gloved hands over his face, first and second finger V-signed, showing only his eyes.

  Like the eyes of a cat on a country road, ready to reflect, if only there was light to reflect. The shuffling continued towards him and he had an inexplicable conviction, based on nothing at all, that it had nothing to do with him. The shaking stopped; he simply shrank. Inside the cap, his head was damp with sweat. Steven only ever sweated from his head. A posse rose up the stairwell into sight. The posse consisted of a couple, dragging the reluctant form of a girl by the armpits, while she grunted without making any more protest than non-cooperation, so that her feet dragged on the ground and the stairs barked her shins but she still stepped, one in three. Steven had done that stuff at school when he had been bullied, pretending to be hurt when he wasn’t, but he knew he could not judge if this was voluntary. There was a slight clink from a bright chain round her neck. He wondered if she was thumped or drugged, opened the slit of his fingers. Level with his own, he caught the other set of eyes of the woman, dragging, pretending to be dragged or being dragged upstairs. Minty. The eyes met: hers blinked and closed; his remained open, so fixed he imagined them as spotlights. The posse of the couple, and the man in the rear with nothing to do but pick up Minty’s feet, wearily continued their dreary process out of sight.

  It was Minty, even though he had not immediately remembered the name. The only thing he remembered about Minty was that she had a paintable face and a story and she was the same girl he had seen once, sitting forlornly with Fritz downstairs, and he had been briefly bored by Sarah talking about her. He had not shared her concern, could not see why the girl couldn’t just go. But the sight of a woman being dragged was shocking, sinister with overtones of rape and savagery, except for the fact they all looked so tired, more like a sullen family bringing home an errant daughter. They did not act as if they were embarking on any kind of party. It was more the fatigued footsteps of work being done en route to a funeral. Still, he stood and waited, outraged enough to race after them yelling Oi, what do you think you’re doing? until he realised what he was. The burglar in the building, looking one, dressed like one, with a skullcap on his head and a burglar’s implements strapped to his waist and stolen property shoved through a letterbox.

  Steven raced downstairs to the empty foyer. The front door was unbudgeable smeared glass: he had missed the time slot the Vision had given him. She would not be standing by her own front door waiting to let him out, she would presume him long gone with relief . . . she would be putting that knife back under her feather-strewn pillow. His alternative clothes were round the back by the dustbins. There was a way from here to there, but he could not think of it.

  The shaking started again. Post-climb nausea. He was hideously visible in front of the glass door, as exposed as if he was naked. The traffic outside passed slower than by day, but it still passed, the noise of it insulated. It would be easy to bypass the lock, if only he were not so ridiculously visible through the glass door, and if only he could concentrate. Instead he slunk back upstairs again. Shivering and shaking, he leant against Sarah’s bell. He had lost track of time.

  He was leaning against the door and the bell, normally used only by Fritz since all other callers announced themselves at the front door. Hurt stung his eyes when Sarah did not reply. Surely she knew that the times he stayed with her he also desired to protect her? She should be there when he needed her. The refrain, what about me, what about me, was beginning to echo as he slumped against the door, until it opened so suddenly he fell across the threshold on to the painting he had posted through, landing against it so that the sharp edge of the rudimentary frame of the canvas dug into his ribs. He groaned and rolled over, exposing belly and groin, legs outside the door, torso inside, and looked up to see his sister looking like an avenging angel in that dressing gown, with a knife in her hand. Not a discreet knife, either: a big, fuckoff kitchen knife, suitable for sawing raw meat, and all he could think of to say was, Oh God, sis, not another one. I’m in love. Forget everything else, I’ve just had zing.

  Love. A subject men rarely discussed, John thought long after the tail en
d of a meal best consigned to memory for its culinary insignificance, late service, poor quality and startling price, which his companion Richard Beaumont did not question, just waved away in the manner of a Londoner. They had begun late, in this wretched hotel where ‘late’ meant resentment, because John had been called out, did not get there until ten, an unheard-of hour to eat in these parts, where the curtains came down and the closed sign was up long before that. True, they were a little slurred, the pair of them, at whatever the hell hour it was in the morning, alone in a restaurant with a view of the sea and bright moon, magnificent through clouds which disfigured the power of the thing and made it all wonky. The staff had long since given up on them and gone home. It was that nice degree of inebriation, all loose tongues and freedom of speech, and nothing to care about except the comfort of communicating with someone of the same sex and like mind. John told himself it was brilliant, and then amended his own description to stimulating. Brilliant conversations were those one had with women. It was the utter and complete frankness of the man that was so appealing, and the raving honesty it inspired in himself.

  They had begun to order and eat when the others were ending. The hotel aspired to the old-fashioned, not to say outdated, standards of service which insisted that the waitresses wore black dresses and white pinafores while not insisting they knew anything about food or how to put it on the table. There was one smart French lad who knew better and was clearly loathed and feared by the rest. Their own table attendant, when finally allocated, redeemed her clumsiness by a pretty smile and plenty of leg. John had noticed how Richard looked at her and the other two girls, who were quite different in shape and size. He watched their movements as they advanced and retreated with unabashed curiosity and attention. It took a long time to get their attention, so there was plenty of opportunity. John watched Richard watching and was amused by it, wondering if any of them would notice or complain, or offer to slap the customer’s face. But then, they were in a bit of a cleft stick, he supposed. You could not say you had noticed a customer looking at your legs when you were also pretending not to have seen him yet. Richard Beaumont also watched a group containing two women as they left the restaurant, intently enough to be making an inventory of what they wore, leaning over to watch them until they had gone. His attention to them was curiously impersonal. Then he looked at the waitress’s feet as she went away with their orders.

  ‘I do wish they still wore high heels,’ he said wistfully. ‘But I suppose it’s bad for their feet.’

  ‘Would you like stockings and suspenders, too?’

  ‘Of course. Wouldn’t you?’

  ‘I have to confess, I would like to imagine it. But what I would do if actually presented with the sight, I really don’t know. Do you always look at women so closely?’

  Richard sighed, and bit into a bread roll with good strong teeth.

  ‘Yes. They fascinate me. The form in all its varieties fascinates me. I’m afraid it embarrasses my wife. Not my previous wife, who understood it for what it was, but my present wife who is ridiculously young and finds it insulting. Which is terribly odd, don’t you think, for someone who is always the most beautiful creature in the room or the street. I forced myself to stop doing it for the first year or so of being married to her, but the habit’s ingrained. Live models are hard to find, you see. You have to watch all the time and imprint them in memory.’

  ‘You could be had up for being a dirty old man.’

  ‘I suppose I could, but most mature women know the difference between looking and leching, and I find it extraordinary that anyone, male or female, should think themselves defiled by the simple fact of being looked at, especially when, in my case, it’s invariably with admiration. Whatever age or shape, I love looking at them.’

  John nibbled, and smiled.

  ‘Being stared at could be threatening. I don’t dare do it. But that might be because I don’t want to be reminded of how frustrated I am. How much I’d like to bed one of them, and be good at it.’

  ‘It could be construed as threatening, I suppose. But it is the nature of the male beast to observe the other, and the nature of an artist, even a not very good male artist, to look wherever he’s allowed. I mean, just look at the shape of that leg.’

  A plump leg skirted by their table en route to the kitchen. A slab of leg, John found himself thinking, leading beneath the black skirt to a wobbly bottom, not something he found appealing.

  ‘It’s the variety that is so extraordinary,’ Richard went on. ‘And you simply can’t afford to miss another variation. You need it for the memory bank. And you should do something about this frustration. Lack of sex addles a man’s mind, just as much as too much of it.’

  He leaned forward to take another bread roll from the basket, his third. John doubted if it would affect his appetite. He felt he was issuing questions like a parrot, but he supposed that was habit, and he was invigorated by the responses.

  ‘I thought you painted landscapes.’

  ‘I do, but I’m enamoured by the idea of a female form in a landscape. Have you ever noticed how a landscape curves? Dips into hollows, seems to move? Often seems to mirror the form of a body. I see women rising out of landscapes. That’s why that body on the cliff seemed entirely natural. It was as if she had grown there. I felt I was seeing what I’d seen before. Maybe it’s a boy’s dream, coming across a pliant body in long grass. This must sound perfectly weird.’

  He laughed, a loud but musical sound, refreshingly unself-conscious. The same waitress arrived with the fish, smoked trout in his case, salmon for his host. Neither looked particularly appealing, but Richard ate with the enthusiasm of someone who did not care what he ate as long as it was food, pausing only to look at her as she retreated.

  ‘Are you married?’ Richard asked. John nodded with his mouth full. The food was better than it looked.

  ‘Was. She died.’

  ‘Tell me about it.’

  Oh no, men did not talk about their marriages. They did not, in John’s experience, talk about the intimate side of their lives. In all the years of talking to Edwin, did he know if the man lived alone, or with another man or a woman? They would talk about their children, rarely their spouses. He chewed thoughtfully, then answered. The wine Richard had ordered was far better than the fish. Let me do it, he’d said; we’ll just have the best.

  ‘I’m married to a ghost. She died of cervical cancer, three years ago, never bothered me with it until it was too late. My daughter blames me. Says I should have cured her. And I should have been able to. Very stoic and efficient, my wife. The guilt comes from the fact that we’d scarcely communicated for years. I bored her, and kept her. I shouldn’t have taken so much of her life without honestly loving her. Or thinking ahead, instead of just wallowing in work and a comfortable enough status quo. And despising her for not being able to leave and try it on her own, just like I couldn’t. So she lives with me still, in my guilty conscience. And from beyond the grave she encourages other women to torment me. About which I do nothing, and can hardly blame her.’

  ‘Oh, what rubbish. Guilt’s useless. Say sorry and get on with it. But see here, loneliness gets to be a habit. And it’s no basis for making a choice, although that’s the way we normally do it.’ He paused, with a sudden gleam in his eye. ‘You need a transitional woman. I should introduce you to this friend of mine. You need a kind, sexy lady to clear your mind. Worked for me.’

  ‘At my age? Chance would be a fine thing,’ John laughed. ‘She’d have to be a listener and bloody patient. She’d have to be . . . never mind. She doesn’t exist, not here. They think I’m a depressive misanthrope in this town, and they’re halfway right. I feel as if I live on the other side of the glass. Not like you. You seem to be sorted.’

  ‘Different for me. I’m the marrying kind. I loved being married, didn’t want anything else. If I’m brutally honest, I need to be married, need a woman in my life, just the one, perfectly bloody incomplete without, blundering aro
und like a drunken bull after my wife died. Hopeless without sex and a female ear. Then Sarah, she’s the friend I mentioned, looked after that side of things and knocked some sense into me, so that I was freed up to make a proper choice. I’m going to introduce you to Sarah.’

  He grinned and waved his fork. He was a man who could eat and speak at the same time without one interfering with the other. He spoke like a person short of time, but not impatient.

  ‘She’s the sort of tart who sorts out your body and your mind, and puts things into perspective. Not wife material, thank God. Anyway, I fell in love with beauty and had to marry it. And no, I may not have been fair to her, and she’ll probably leave me, but she will at least be well off. Do you think women can be bought?’

  John chewed carefully, feeling slightly giddy.

  ‘None I’ve ever been able to afford. No, I don’t think they can be bought. And I think they need us less than we need them, if only they realised. They have the power, if only they knew.’

  Richard nodded, and sighed.

  ‘That’s what I’m hoping mine will realise. That I don’t own her, or she me. And yet she wants to be owned. I’ve only got a lease on her. That’s all you ever have.’

  Beef arrived, slightly cold and past its best. John wondered what his wife would have thought of Richard, could see her disapproval, and almost smiled at the thought. His mind was floating free. How strange to be talking about these passionate, mysterious creatures so dispassionately, and how cold-bloodedly accurate to equate depression and a sterile existence with a simple lack of sex.

  ‘I began by wanting to paint birds,’ Richard said. ‘Of the feathered variety. But then I looked up and saw women floating among the clouds. And now it’s shapes I want to paint. I think. I might go back to birds. I have, in a manner of speaking. Only I know so little about them. What do you know about ravens?’