A Stairway to Paradise Page 2

  ‘You must come and see us after Claire gets back,’ said Alex. ‘Come and have dinner. Meet the brats.’

  ‘I’d love to,’ said Andrew.

  ‘Good,’ said Alex. ‘I’ll get Claire to give you a call. I know she’d love to see you again.’

  ‘Any time,’ said Andrew.

  Alex had risen. Andrew got to his feet and saw him out. All the pain, sorrow, failure was over there in the shadows: here under the light was this golden-brown present, this fine, long, delicate filament of future: I’ll ring the bank first thing on Monday, he thought; then all I have to do is actually buy the bloody car. How long will that take? I could be behind the wheel by the middle of the week, couldn’t I? I could be seeing her before the week is out: couldn’t I? Dear God, could I?

  I could just go up there, thought Alex. Just bloody turn up, unannounced, tomorrow morning. Well, midday. She might just be hungry: she might just be hungry enough to come out for lunch with me. And then…can I do this? Should I? No, never mind should: fuck should. I can, I must, I fucking will. There’s a somebody I’m longing to see. I’ll give her longing to see. All the way home to Highbury; longing. I’ll give her longing. He noticed the red light coming up only just in time.

  There was a message on the answerphone when he got home. Claire. I’ve been trying to get you all evening. I’ll try again tomorrow around midday. For God’s sake be there. That was that then. I’ll be here. And then there’ll be what’s left of the afternoon, drifting away into emptiness and waste. No Belsize Park, not tomorrow: not after Claire on the telephone: not, probably, at all. Not ever. Fuck Claire. No: not Claire’s fault: sorry, Claire. Poor Claire. Bien sûr.

  And right now, there’s nothing to do but go to bed. Don’t drink, don’t smoke, and above all don’t think. But as Alex drifted towards sleep in the sketchily made bed he thought, maybe later in the week. Maybe I could manage it later in the week. It was—what? Two years more or less since he’d last seen Barbara; one whole year, one whole year at least since he’d even thought of her. And there, suddenly, she’d been, tonight, as golden as ever. Longing, intolerable longing. Then merciful sleep inundated him.

  3

  ‘Hello…’ Andrew’s tone was hesitant; he was almost turning away again, as if having after all thought better of the whole enterprise, but he carried on, nevertheless; brave, stalwart. ‘Andrew Flynn. I met you the other night at the Carrington party—we came home together with Alex Maclise.’

  She was still staring at him, quite silent, standing in the doorway.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. She had been so sure that she would not see him again. Not that she had particularly wanted to.

  He was almost turning away again; but he went on. ‘Would you like to come out somewhere? We could go and get a Marine Ice, or something. I’ve just bought this car.’

  She was suddenly touched. Ice-cream. New car. Sweet.

  ‘Yes, all right. I’ll just—hold on a sec. I’ll just get my bag.’

  And she left him standing there on the threshold. He looked through the open door along a passageway at the end of which was another door through which he could see a tiny kitchen where yet another door, directly opposite this one, but made of glass, gave a view of a trellis covered with creepers beyond which there was evidently a back garden. The doorway on the left of the passage through which she had vanished and through which she now reappeared led presumably to the flat’s chief or only room, perhaps a rather large studio room. Would he ever discover the truth?

  She came out carrying her large bag and closed the front door behind her. ‘Off we go, then,’ she said.

  After they’d bought the ices he parked the car in a street near Primrose Hill and they walked on the hill while they finished eating. Then they sat down on the grass. Soon it would be autumn: as the light began to fade, one could already see that haze in the air. They sat quite quiet, each transfixed by the shimmering prospect. That was something he’d forgotten, away there in the USA: the melancholy inhering in the English scene: a heart-rending sense that everything you see before you might in the next instant vanish for ever, that everything trembled on the verge of a sudden and total dissolution.

  After some time, unable, unwilling, to keep his own counsel any longer, he spoke. ‘This is the first time,’ he said slowly, ‘since I’ve been back here, that I’ve felt really…’ happy? No: that gave too much away; gave away even more, perhaps, than was the case.

  ‘Yes?’ she said.

  ‘Glad,’ he said. ‘Glad to be back.’

  She gave him a brief, intelligent stare. ‘How long since you came back?’ she said.

  He told her, giving the merest possible account of the circumstances of his solitary return. Then she asked him what he did: I’m a mathematician, he told her. I used to do it; now I mainly teach others to do it. I’m burnt out.

  She thought about this for a while. ‘Would you like to take me home now?’ she said.

  There was something in her tone: he couldn’t, couldn’t possibly, believe his luck. ‘Yes,’ he said.

  They got up.

  She unlocked the front door and he followed her inside, and he saw, now, the mysterious large room. It had french windows at the nether end giving a view of the trellis and glimpses of the garden beyond—chiefly of a large lime tree in the middle distance. ‘Sit down,’ she said. She went into the kitchen and made some coffee.

  Of course it was too good to be true: she couldn’t possibly, not possibly, have meant—no; not possibly. Now that he was here, in this room, with the divan bed hugely in view, he couldn’t possibly think, couldn’t possibly imagine, that she had been inviting him into it. She gave him his coffee and sat down on the edge of the bed. She drank for a while and then leaned back among some cushions. ‘Come over here,’ she said.

  Even before he reached home, he was aching to have her again. His mind felt almost dislocated with happiness; he did not want to think: he was glad to be as incapable as unwilling to do so: he had long ago forgotten what it was to feel this dislocation, this ecstatic dislocation. How soon, how early in the day, could he telephone her? How long would it be before he could be with her again?

  4

  Barbara let herself into the main house and went into the kitchen with the shopping which she began to unpack and put away where necessary. For most of the day she had been sitting under a tree on Hampstead Heath reading, but it was time to get the dinner ready for her employers, who were two lawyers, and their offspring. She started to clatter about.

  Shrieks were now heard from above and footsteps descending the stairs, and two faces appeared around the doorway: two exactly identical androgynous thirteen-year-old faces with floppy fair hair and long eyelashes.

  ‘Hello, Barbara,’ they said very politely. ‘Can we help you?’

  She looked at them. It was easy to do: one could do it indefinitely. There was something almost absurd about their beauty, now on the eve of its perilous transition into the adult form.

  ‘No,’ she said.

  They came into the room.

  ‘We know you don’t actually mean that,’ said James.

  ‘Of course she doesn’t,’ said John. ‘She needs us much more than we need her.’

  ‘No I don’t,’ said Barbara. ‘I don’t need you at all. Now leave me alone.’

  ‘Never,’ they said. ‘We shall never ever leave you.’

  ‘Except when we go away to school,’ said John. ‘But we’re not responsible for that.’

  They were about to go away to boarding school.

  ‘We could take her with us,’ said James.

  ‘No you couldn’t,’ said Barbara. ‘I don’t want to go.’

  ‘You’ll miss us, you know,’ said James.

  ‘You’ll simply cry your eyes out,’ said John.

  They started to imitate her imminent grief, crying and wailing and waving their arms in the air in a pantomime of female anguish. Then they suddenly stopped.

  ‘Will you come and see
us?’ said James.

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ said John. ‘Brilliant. You can come down on the train and see us. Will you?’

  ‘No,’ said Barbara. ‘I’ve got better things to do.’

  ‘I always knew she didn’t really care for us,’ said James to his brother.

  ‘She has a heart of stone,’ said John.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Barbara. She was getting on with the dinner.

  ‘What are we having?’ they asked.

  ‘Smoked salmon,’ she said.

  ‘Yuck!’ they cried. ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Tarte aux asperges,’ she said.

  ‘Ah, ca ç’est formidable,’ said James.

  ‘Oui, c’est tout à fait bien,’ said John. ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Raspberry fool,’ said Barbara.

  ‘Wicked!’ they yelled. ‘Wicked!’

  ‘Now go away,’ she said. ‘And let me get on.’

  ‘Couldn’t we just watch?’ said John.

  They both sat down at the kitchen table and watched her with their long-lashed blue eyes. She could fairly have eaten them. They would never be like this again: the imminent term would be their first as boarders; they would be changed for ever.

  ‘What did you do today?’ she asked. As almost every weekday evening, for the last several months: and then the replies: bizarre accounts of the daily grind at their day school, where the rites designed to prepare them for the approaching initiation were supervised by adults of fabulous eccentricity. That production had now reached its triumphant conclusion; these last weeks of childhood had been allotted to a vacation in France and a flurry of tightly scheduled activities of the improving kind.

  ‘We’ve been playing tennis,’ said John. ‘I won.’

  ‘Actually, it was me,’ said James.

  ‘He’s lying,’ said his brother.

  ‘Now he’s told two lies,’ said James.

  They began to fight.

  ‘Okay,’ said Barbara. ‘Out!’ They stopped.

  ‘No, do let us stay,’ they pleaded. ‘We’ll be so quiet.’

  They sat in a dumbshow of utterly inert silence for half a minute and then a faint ringing was heard below. ‘Hey, Barbara!’ they cried. ‘It’s your telephone! Shall we go and answer it for you?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Leave it.’

  ‘How can you?’ they yelped. ‘Please let us answer it.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Anyway, it’s stopped.’

  They were now at last bored with her; John turned to James. ‘Shall we go and see if Simon’s home?’

  They got up. ‘Goodbye, Barbara darling,’ they said.

  ‘Goodbye,’ she said. ‘Be careful crossing the street.’

  ‘She’s pretending that we’re babies,’ said John.

  ‘It’s her way of showing that she really cares about us,’ said James.

  ‘She can’t help it,’ said John, as the front door slammed shut behind them.

  5

  The meal was almost ready—there were just a few last-minute things left to do. She looked around and began to clear up.

  The front door opened and closed again; a single, heavier tread was heard in the hallway. It stopped and then advanced once more towards the kitchen. The master of the house.

  ‘Ah, Barbara.’ He stood in the doorway, a much larger and coarser version of his sons, but with dark hair, and enveloped (as one might hope they never should be) in weariness.

  ‘Hello, Tom.’

  He looked around at her demesne: he knew perfectly well that he was trespassing. He gestured. ‘I—got away early today. Had to pick up the car.’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘Little blighters about?’

  ‘They’ve gone to see Simon. So they told me.’

  ‘Ah, yes. Simon. Serena not home yet of course—is she?’

  ‘No, not yet.’

  ‘Well—I might just jump the gun and get myself a G & T. How are we off for tonic—are we okay?’

  ‘Yes, there’s plenty; I got some more today. There’s some in the fridge. In the door.’

  ‘Oh, yes. Marvellous. You’ll join me, won’t you?’

  Barbara sat down on a chair diagonally opposite to her employer’s, shaking her glass gently, watching the bubbles, to all appearances unaware of his scrutiny, with all its helpless hunger. She went on playing, letting him look, letting him hunger. She liked him, but that was as far as it went: that was as far as it could go.

  ‘I haven’t actually seen you for ages, have I? How have you been keeping? Managing okay down there, are you?’

  ‘Yes, fine, thanks. Everything’s fine.’ So it was. Now she was looking at him: those eyes. Poor sod. Don’t make it worse. Put a stop to it, in fact: enough is enough. ‘I’d better get on,’ she said. She got up and took the cream from the refrigerator.

  He didn’t ask, like the twins, can I watch you: simply sat, unable to move, watching. She took down a bowl and got the whisk; she poured the cream into the bowl. ‘Fool,’ she said. ‘I’m making a fool.’

  ‘Ah,’ he said, cottoning on at last, smiling with relief. For one extraordinary moment he had thought…but of course it was so. Yes, he dumbly, helplessly thought, I want her, and I’m a fool to do so, because it’s hopeless; entirely out of the question; hopeless. I should go up and change. ‘Won’t you have another?’ he said.

  She stopped whisking; she smiled. ‘No,’ she said, ‘thank you.’ He got another drink and sat down again.

  ‘I can hear your telephone ringing,’ he said.

  ‘It’s nothing important,’ she said, unperturbed. ‘Or if it is they’ll try again later.’

  ‘Perhaps we should get you an answering machine,’ he said very seriously.

  ‘No, really. It’s fine as it is.’

  ‘If you’re sure.’

  ‘Yes, positive. Thanks all the same.’

  She was almost done. She finished making the fool and put it in the refrigerator. She put the tart in the oven and set the timer, and wrote a note for Serena to tell her what needed to be told and left it in the agreed place, and he watched her all the while, dumb, helpless. This sort of thing won’t actually do, she thought. Still, it hardly ever occurs: if he started to come home early more often then it would really be bad news, but as it is—he’ll have forgotten all about me within half an hour.

  He’s rather a dish, though, she thought! no doubt about that.

  6

  Alex wandered into Claire’s study and stood there, looking around. It was one of the things he sometimes did, when he was alone in the house.

  Alex and the house had a whole deep relationship unknown to anyone else. He thought of it, in fact, as in some quasi-spiritual aspect his house, his solitary own. It was for one thing his brainwave, the only truly clever thing, he thought, he’d ever done: going in for this big house, back there in the dark ages, in that innocent era before the property boom. The mortgage repayments had become an absolute doddle and the whole heap was now worth several times what it had cost.

  But the real beauty of it was that a marriage such as his and Claire’s had become was perfectly negotiable: perfectly: as long as one had all this space. All this rare and valuable north London space. And just look at those mouldings, and try those doors: yes, those are the original handles. And the skirting—it made up for a lot, an awful lot, that skirting. It made up for vacancy, and ironical courtesy, and alienation, almost. He sometimes wondered if buying this house hadn’t been merely clever, but actually prescient.

  He always had, of course, a reason for being in Claire’s study, a real reason. There was the dictionary, for example. If Claire hadn’t been indifferent to his coming in here she wouldn’t have insisted on keeping the Shorter in here. Alex was damned if he was going to buy another copy just so as to save Claire’s feelings. Or his. Claire. Claire’s books. He looked, once more, at Claire’s books: shelves, positively in the plural shelves, of fiction, virtually all of it contemporary. I never read novels, he said one
day. At some point (he hadn’t noticed precisely where, along the long slow curve) he had ceased to be a person who read novels; now he too could say, flatly, I never read novels.

  No, Claire said, men are always saying that. Well, it’s true, he’d said. Yes, of course, said Claire. But the point is the tone of voice: as if you were disclaiming the practice of some solitary vice. Which is what you seem to think novel-reading is. The average man I suppose would rather be caught with his prick in his hand than a novel, God help you all.

  And the thing was, he couldn’t be bothered arguing: couldn’t be bothered pointing out to her that any man so caught was up to something one million times more authentic (repeat, authentic) than reading any of the works of…and there followed a sample of the names of the novelists reviewed, admired, interviewed and extolled by Claire and her fellows over the past few years: Claire in the broadsheets, Claire across the airwaves, Claire in the glossies, Claire and all her kind: all that avidity, all those queasy phrases: all that crazed enthusiasm: if he’d had the time, if he could have been bothered, he just might have managed to demonstrate, clearly, cleanly, and apocalyptically, that all this activity wasn’t, wasn’t by any means, wasn’t by even half, as harmless as it looked, and that it was in fact the sign, the very sign by which one knew, beyond any possible doubt, that civilisation was coming, disgracefully, to its end.

  He took down one of Claire’s novels, inscribed by the author, and began to read. Yes. You see, he said to himself, as if addressing Claire, as if she might attend to him, as if he might really care that she should, it isn’t simply a case of the emperor’s having no clothes: the fact is, that it isn’t even the emperor: it’s actually—just take a good look, just open your eyes and for God’s sake look—it’s actually the court bloody eunuch.

  He replaced the book, and looked around again, at Claire’s desk, at the litter on its surface, the chair (one of her jerseys still draped over its back), the rug beneath it. It was one of the good ones which they’d bought in the early, early days. Caucasian. And at its edge, the daybed. He sat down.