Portobello

CHAPTER TEN

Ella had confessed to leaving the necklace Eugene had given her for her thirty-ninth birthday on top of the cabinet in the drawing room. She had been wearing it with her trousers and sweater, decided it was too 'dressed-up' for a drive to Sussex and taken it off, meaning to put it in her suitcase. Eugene was never cross. All he said was, 'Never mind, darling. These things happen. I'll buy you a nicer one for your fortieth.'

He was more concerned about his netsuke animals, which the burglar had also taken, and the Nymphenburg porcelain the police had found smashed on the corner of the Portobello Road. All of it had been stolen, it seemed, by a bunch of thugs who had finished off their spree by beating up an innocent young man on his way home after a harmless evening out. The police had been rather severe with Eugene, scolding him for leaving his french window key in the lock and not bolting his side gate. He had been so sweet to Ella that she didn't say she'd told him so.

The pleasures of the weekend were still with her when she walked into the medical centre on Tuesday morning, but she was brought down to earth by the news that Joel Roseman had made an appointment to see her at twelve noon after her morning surgery. He was physically much better. The receptionist said he laid stress on the word.

Joel's mother visited him every day. He asked her if his father objected, if she was defying his father, spending so much time with him in this flat but she said no, adding ingenuously that Morris didn't mind how often she saw their son so long as he didn't have to. Sometimes she suggested a walk in the park under the trees that stand in a long row parallel with the Bayswater Road, but Joel wouldn't unless it was after dark, so mostly she sat with him in one of the gloomy rooms and talked to him fretfully about his solitary life, his lack of a girlfriend or, indeed, any friend. One day he told her about his near-death experience, though leaving out the part about bringing Mithras back with him. When he said he had found not heaven, but hell at the end of the tunnel, she began to cry.

He tried to reassure her. 'Hell is beautiful, Ma. It's a bit like the park but without so many people.'

After she had gone, driving the Bentley back to Hampstead Garden Suburb, he sat gazing at the endlessly reflected bronze heads. They made the flat appear enormous, Julius Caesar, Augustus, Tiberius and all the rest. They were all the same man, all the same copy of an ancient ruler, dead two thousand years. As he stared at their hard mouths, aquiline noses and sightless eyes, Mithras returned. Joel couldn't have said how he knew Mithras was present because most of the time he was invisible, yet Joel knew he was there as surely as he had known his mother had been. It was as if he had some extra sense, which no one had ever named.

He felt Mithras's presence rather like a perpetual touch, as if his visitor had laid a hand lightly on him and rested it there. At the same time he felt that if light could be admitted to the place, bright white light flooding the flat, Mithras would become truly visible, as clear as any human being, for he had come from a radiant gleaming place. But Joel was too afraid of the light to take such a radical step. He felt it might blind him, literally destroy his sight. Besides, he was unsure whether he hated Mithras's presence or loved it. He sat somnolent in the living room or reclined on the brown velvet sofa for hours on end, not reading or listening to anything or watching television, sometimes falling into a doze. One afternoon he had decided to resume his infrequent habit of taking himself alone to the cinema. Wearing his blackest sunglasses, he set out to see The Lives of Others but when he was halfway there he felt a dizzying sensation he thought might be the start of a panic attack and he turned back towards home. The very fact of heading for home, his dark sanctuary, calmed him.

The morning he was due to see Dr Peacock, the psychotherapist, Mithras spoke to him. Joel couldn't see him, hadn't seen him for several days, though he had felt the touch of his hand, but he heard his voice. At first he wasn't sure who it was or where it came from. Sometimes, though the walls were thick and this dark shadowy place well-insulated, sounds could be heard from his neighbours. They were loud-voiced people who often moved their furniture about and once or twice had given noisy parties. But this voice was soft, persuasive and almost seductive.

He knew this was human speech he was hearing, but for a while he couldn't make out the words, only that the rhythm of what was said was the rhythm of English. Then, quite clearly, he heard it say, 'She will ask you if you hear voices.'

Joel said nothing. He lay back and closed his eyes, wondering as he did so why human beings have the ability to shut off their vision but no mechanism for doing the same for hearing. On his way to Dr Peacock he went into a pharmacy and bought himself some earplugs made of wax, though he was beginning to feel he would have no need to use them.

Dr Peacock said nothing about hearing voices. She said very little. She was a white-haired woman, the hair copious and long, with the face of a Russian ballet dancer and the barrel-shaped body of a bricklayer. The suit she wore was charcoal-coloured linen, the trousers tapering and the jacket like a mandarin's. Joel expected a couch and there was one but not for him. Dr Peacock reclined on it while he sat in an armchair.

The psychotherapist had a high-pitched voice with the slight lisp of a camp vicar in a comedy show. Joel found it rather hard to believe she was a woman. She asked Joel to tell her why he had come and Joel told her about his heart operation, his near-death experience and Mithras. When he paused or hesitated Dr Peacock said, 'Go on,' and when he had told her everything in detail Dr Peacock said, 'Tell me again.' It reminded Joel of police interrogations he had seen on television when the investigating officer asks the suspect to repeat his story in order to catch him out in a lie.

At the end of the second recounting, the psychotherapist asked him who he thought Mithras was but soon after Joel had begun talking about him, Dr Peacock said time was up and she would see him next week. Joel had, perhaps naively, supposed that after even a single session he would begin to feel better about things but he didn't. He put on his dark glasses and walked slowly to a bus stop, not knowing or much caring which buses stopped there. One came but it was the kind where you have to have a ticket or a pass before you board and the driver turned him off.

'You have to get off,' the driver said. 'It's no use arguing. I don't make the rules.'

This unnerved Joel and he hailed a taxi. The people in the streets all seemed to be staring at him, sitting alone in the back. They stared at him, he thought, with resentful eyes or, worse, with savage glares, and children made faces. One little boy stuck out his tongue and Joel put his face in his hands. He hadn't enough money on him so he got the driver to take him to a cash dispenser. Three men were ahead of him. They all seemed to know each other and began to whisper together, one of them turning round to eye him before going back to their conversation. This was what happened when he exposed himself to the light. He felt uncomfortable, wondering if they meant to attack him. But nothing happened, he got his money and was soon at home.

His living room, which until then had always seemed rather too dark, nearly as dark as the rest of the place, was now too light for him. He settled that by pulling down the dark-green blind to its fullest extent. The grey dimness of a wet afternoon now prevailed and, reclining on the sofa in much the same attitude as Dr Peacock had taken up, he phoned Dr Cotswold. Or tried to phone her. The voice he got was the receptionist's, which said she was with a patient but she would pass on his message and ask her to call him back. The call didn't come for almost an hour, the longest hour Joel thought he had spent for years. And when she did phone, though Joel had supposed Dr Peacock would have given her a careful report by now, she knew nothing about what had happened during his visit.

Would she come and see him? He had a lot to tell her.

'Today won't be possible,' she said.

'Tomorrow, then.' When she didn't answer immediately he said, 'Please.'

'I think you should come to me, Joel. Shall we say 12.30 when my last patient will have gone?'

'I will be your last patient, won't I?'

He could hear very little in the flat; with the windows shut, not even more than a faint hum from the traffic. He fetched the earplugs he had bought and, working the wax with his fingers, moulding two cone shapes, he inserted them into his ears. The peculiar silence that descended was unlike normal quiet but made him feel rather as if he were being smothered. He had to make a conscious effort to breathe but gradually the feeling went and he appreciated his new deafness. Now he was enclosed, sightless and without hearing, and he fell asleep. When he woke, two hours later, remaining in his dark cocoon, he found himself thinking about what he would say to Dr Cotswold next day. He would tell her about Amy, about his father and what had divided them so terribly and irrevocably.

The netsuke lion and the monkey had turned up. Much to Eugene's gratification and gratitude, a shopkeeper in Westbourne Grove had found them in the gutter and handed them in at the police station. He wanted to reward Mr Siddiqui but the shopkeeper refused his offers and said being able to return these valuable objects to their owner was reward enough. A Crime Protection officer had made an appointment to come round to Chepstow Villas and advise Eugene on sensible measures that should be taken to make his house more secure.

'Keeping a light on in the garden, I expect they'll say,' said Ella, 'and putting bars on the french windows and making sure the side gate is bolted on the inside. Where's the side gate key, by the way? I can't find it.'

'Oh, God, I've no idea. That will be something else they'll bully me about, no doubt.'

'They won't bully you, darling. They're only being helpful.'

'If you say so, Ella. I shall hate having them poking about the place. Shall we talk about something else? Like our wedding?'

This had been provisionally fixed for October and since neither of them had been married before, why not have a church wedding?

'I'd prefer something quiet,' Ella said. 'Church would be a big affair, wouldn't it?'

'But I'd love a big affair. With me in a morning coat and you looking beautiful in a white frothy dress like a meringue and masses of flowers and all our friends and relations there. And a big lunch somewhere grand. Where shall we go for our honeymoon?'

'Italy?'

'Well, I was thinking of Sri Lanka,' said Eugene.

The robbery had been a setback. If his life had proceeded in tranquillity, everything pleasant and anxiety kept to a minimum, he was sure he could have kept up his abstinence. He had kept it up throughout their weekend and if he had drunk rather more than usual, so had Ella, and there had been something sweet and companionable about saying, 'I really mustn't have another one, darling,' yet having one just the same, and she replying, but with a laugh, that they must watch it or they would both be on their way to Alcoholics Anonymous.

Then they had come home to discover the burglary. From the first moment of being aware of the loss of his netsuke he had felt on his indrawn breath an urgent desire for a Chocorange. He needed it for comfort when he saw what was missing and, though he made light of it to Ella, remembered the large sum of money he had paid for the gold and peridot necklace. It was Sunday, nowhere was open – well, nowhere in the vicinity that sold the things. If Ella hadn't been there he would have been off to a Tesco or a Superdrug. The temptation, the longing, would have been too compelling to resist. Instead, he had had to suffer a worse deprivation than he had known at any previous time of Chocorange shortage. He craved, he longed. Secretly – but how secret was it really? – he took sips of whisky throughout the evening until he dared take no more.

The only way to handle it, he decided next morning, a hangover throbbing at his temples, was not to think. No thinking, just doing, and doing meant walking swiftly down to Elixir the moment they opened and stocking up with five packets of Chocorange. The relief was so great that he went on not thinking. No self-reproach, no recrimination, just abandonment to this wonderful solace. Next day he replenished his stocks in the kitchen drawer by a visit to the shop in Spring Street and the day after that up to Golborne Road. Packets inside plastic bags went into the bottom drawer of the cabinet in the guest bathroom and another lot in the drawing-room bookcase behind the novels of E. M. Forster. Far from troubling him, he laughed with delight when he counted twenty-two packets carefully stowed away for the future.

Euphoria lasted four days. On the fifth day, after asking himself (while Ella slept) if he was going mad, he resolved that this couldn't go on.

It was no use saying, as he had yesterday, that he would never be without them again. He must be without them. With the wedding set for October, he had four months and a bit to begin the phasing out. For phasing out was the way. His mistake had been this cold turkey business. If he had been gradually giving up, when he came back from his weekend away, there would have been, say, half a packet in the house and he could have allayed his stress by sucking one that evening and another perhaps in the night. That was the way. If the worst came to the worst he could just go away on his honeymoon with a single packet of Chocorange in his baggage to tide him over. Easy. Why, he might even have conquered his habit before that. Nothing, he told himself, sucking his twelfth of the day, could be more likely.

'How did you get on with Dr Peacock?'

'I don't know,' Joel said. 'She just made me tell her about Mithras coming back from hell with me and when I'd done she made me tell her all over again. I thought she'd ask me about my father. I thought they always asked people about their fathers.'

They were in Ella's surgery. She had been hoping to meet Eugene for lunch but this would have to be cancelled. Joel, who clearly had only a hazy idea of time, had been fifteen minutes late and evidently intended to spend a long time with her.

'Perhaps you should ask Dr Peacock if you can talk about your relations with your father.'

'I'd rather tell you.'

'Let me just make a phone call.'

Although it must have been plain to him that Ella was phoning her fiancé to tell him she couldn't keep their lunch date and plain too from Ella's responses that the fiancé was very disappointed, Joel showed no sign of intending to curtail his story or even postpone its telling. And when she put down the phone he launched straight into it. 'I want to tell you because you're sympathetic. You understand things. It happened like this, oh, years ago. I was sixteen…'

'Just a minute, Joel. I have to tell you again, I'm not a psychiatrist. I'm a doctor of medicine. I'm not qualified to practise as a psychiatrist. You know that, don't you?'

'Yes, but someone told me that anyone can be a psychotherapist in the UK, anyone. You don't need qualifications. And you're a doctor and all those others aren't. Now, like I was saying, this happened when I was sixteen… Are you listening?'

'I'm listening,' Ella said, keeping her sigh silent.

He began, speaking rapidly, giving the impression that if he hadn't uttered it before – though maybe he had – he had rehearsed the telling over and over very thoroughly. It had loomed large in his life, it was his life. Later, as she turned it all over in her mind, she wished more than anything that she could have told Eugene about it. But she couldn't. Joel was confiding in her as his doctor and that was all there was to it.

He had had a sister, he told her, ten years younger than himself. Her name was Amy. They had just moved, his parents, Amy and himself, from Southampton to a house in the Hampshire countryside with twelve acres of land and a lake. From being rich, his father had become a millionaire. When the move was taking place Joel was away at school and, coming home for the summer holidays, he saw Mossbourne House and its grounds for the first time.

'It was beautiful,' he said. 'I loved it. I'd never seen anywhere like it. But I'll tell you something.' Joel looked to right and left and then, rather diffidently, over his left shoulder. 'I'll tell you something. That place at the end of the tunnel, that place I went to when I died, that was hell but that was Mossbourne too. Those white columns and the turrets, they were Mossbourne, and the river – but not the lake. There's no lake where I went when I died.' He shook his head ruefully. 'Hell is beautiful, you know. It's not all ugly and burning up like those old writers said.'

Ella's office was light and bright and practical but suddenly it seemed to have grown dark. She would have shivered if she hadn't controlled herself.

'Go on.'

'You sound like Dr Peacock,' he said. 'My sister wanted to show me all round the place. She had been there for three weeks by then. She thought she knew all about it.'

Amy had taken him all over the grounds, sometimes holding him by the hand. It was fine hot weather, the sun shining every day. She led him into the wood and along the little stream. One evening they saw an otter and there weren't so many otters about then as there were now. She liked best to take a picnic and eat it by the lake.

'I'm not supposed to go into the water unless Mummy or Daddy are with me. Or you. Mummy says it's all right with you because you can swim and she says you're a grown-up now. Are you a grownup?'

'Of course I am,' he had said.

'But you're not to keep me waiting because I'm longing to go in.'

They put on swimming things and jeans and T-shirts on top, and took towels along with the picnic. There were fish in the lake and long green weeds trailing through the water like streaming hair but it was clean and clear. You could see the round cream and golden pebbles on the bottom. Joel was teaching Amy to swim. But it wasn't the best place to learn. A swimming pool would have been better, with steps to go down into the water, a shallow end and a deep end and a bar all round its rim. He said he would take her to the pool in Salisbury next time their mother drove in there. Meanwhile, they bathed in the lake. The hot weather couldn't go on like this, perfect every day, it must change soon, but it did go on. It got even hotter.

One day they both went into the water in the morning and at midday or a bit later they ate the picnic lunch they had brought with them, quite a big lunch, half a cold chicken from the fridge with bread rolls and butter and tomatoes, and a big piece of Brie cheese and a chocolate cake and a box of shortbread biscuits.

'You can really remember all that?' Ella said.

'I remember everything about that day. Except the bit when I was asleep.'

'You went to sleep? A sixteen-year-old?' She said it for something to say because she could tell now what was coming and she wanted to stop it or at least postpone it.

'I've always slept a lot,' he said. 'My mother says I was a very good baby. I slept the whole night through from the time I was born. I can sleep now – I only have to lie down and close my eyes and I'm asleep.'

This time she didn't say, 'Go on.'

He was full of food and it was very warm. He lay down on a blanket, meaning just to lie there and stare up at the blue sky, and he told Amy not to go into the water. It was too soon anyway. It was bad for you to go swimming straight after you'd eaten. She was to wait for him, lie down and have a rest and wait for him. They should give it half an hour. When he woke up she was gone. Her clothes were still there in a heap but she was gone.

'I'd slept too long, you see, Ella.' It was the first time he had called her by her given name. 'She must have got tired of waiting. I was so frightened, Ella. I was in a panic. I ran up and down, calling her. I picked up her clothes and looked underneath them – mad, wasn't it? As if she could have been hiding underneath her clothes. I was afraid to go into the water – I don't mean I was afraid of the water – I was afraid of what I'd find. And I did find it. I went into the water, I looked for her and I did find her. In the end I did. I found her dead body. It was bleached so white like she was made of bone, soft bone. And she was all caught up in the weed and the reeds. I couldn't pull her out, not on my own I couldn't. I went back to the house and told my parents. I had to, though it was terrible. At first my father wouldn't believe she was dead, he said I'd made a mistake, she couldn't be dead. We all went down to the lake and he and my mother managed to pull her out. When Pa knew she was dead I thought he was going to kill me. My mother had to hold him back. She put her arms round his waist and held on to him and told me to run away, to go into the house.'

Ella was shaking her head, murmuring, 'How dreadful, how dreadful.'

'I'll tell you the rest of it next time. He never spoke to me again. I'll tell you about that next time I come here or you come to me. You will come to me, won't you? I want to tell you the rest of it. I can't tell you now. I'm so tired. There's nothing tires me so much as talking about it.'