Portobello

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Everyone who read the Evening Standard and those who picked up a freebie in the street, read the paragraph about Lance Kevin Platt, twenty-one, of Kensal, west London, who had been charged that day with the murder of Dorian Lupescu and with setting fire to a house in Blagrove Road, West Ten. Ella read it but, because the name of the man who had applied to Eugene for his cash find had never registered with her, immediately forgot about it. Perhaps because he had seen him the day before in the Golborne Road pharmacy, Eugene remembered him and his name very well. At the same time, when telling Ella that he had only seen Lance Platt twice, he recalled that there had been a third sighting. Looking out of his bedroom window in the small hours of a morning he had seen the youth (as he had thought of him) with his characteristic backpack walking along the street in the direction of Denbigh Road. It was the night after he and Ella had been to the theatre to see St Joan. He had gone round to Elizabeth Cherry's to check that the house was secure, come back and got up later to eat a Chocorange – what else?

Now he had a very vivid memory of thinking that Lance Platt must be up to no good. And then, immediately afterwards, telling himself that it was bad to be suspicious of someone just because he was out in the street at the time when people he thought of as law-abiding were in bed asleep. It looked as if he had been right that first time. Still, whatever Platt had been doing walking along outside his house, it was obviously unconnected with murder and arson half a mile or more away on the Kensal borders.

Uncle Gib also read about it. His source was a giveaway newspaper called Metro and the news item brought him considerable satisfaction. It wasn't that he thought the police must be right or even that Lance had indisputably done the deeds, but rather that someone he had always disliked and disapproved of was getting his come-uppance at last. Gemma read it when she bought the Sun. She was out shopping in the Portobello Road Tesco with Abelard in the buggy and, in her own words to her mother, it gave her quite a shock. It was a crying shame, it must be a mistake. Lance hadn't been with her that night but maybe she should go along to the police station and say he had been.

'Oh, no, you don't,' said her mother. 'You want to keep a low profile. Suppose they've got proof it was him and you've stuck your neck out. You could go inside and then what about your boy? Come and give nanna a cuddle, my lambkin.'

Fize was refitting a transformer at a house in East Acton. As he put it himself, he broke the rule of a lifetime and went down to the pub in his lunch break. It was Ian Pollitt's local and, being without a job or having the prospect of getting one, Fize knew he would be likely to find him passing his empty midday hours in the Duchess of Teck. Fize had a lager and lime, which Ian said was a woman's drink, as bad as 'lady juice', which was what they called white wine.

'Maybe,' said Fize, 'and maybe I don't want to do my head in when we're talking about a couple of thousand volts. What d'you reckon to Lance Platt?'

Ian tilted his head back and poured down getting on for half a pint of stout. 'Best thing that's happened to me for years.'

'Yeah, but you know what I mean.'

'It's not like they're going to top him,' said Ian. 'Not like they used to. What with eighty thousand banged up there's no space for him. He won't go down for no more than five or six years.'

'He never done it,' said Fize. Now he'd bought it he no longer felt like his lager and lime and he pushed it away across the table. 'You know he never done it.'

'I don't know nothing. My mind's a blank. Don't even know when it was.'

'August fourteen.'

'Is that right? Now that's funny. I was away on my holidays in Tenerife August fourteen.' Ian laughed uproariously at his joke and was still laughing when Fize left and went back to work.

There was no bail for Lance this time. He was remanded in custody for however long it took. In his cell at the police station, stranded there until they decided where they could possibly put him until his appearance in a higher court, he took a philosophical view. Things could be worse. He'd get free meals with no effort on his part, he would no longer have to sleep in company with the bike and the car tyres. As for freedom, there wasn't much you could do with it if you'd no money.

They had altered the design on the pack. Instead of the bold chocolate-brown-and-orange lettering and the (hideous, Eugene the connoisseur had to admit) drawing of a kind of beigecoloured lozenge with a stream of something pouring on to it, the new colours were muted, the illustration more abstract and the name changed. Chocorange was now called Oranchoco. Accumulating enough of them to keep him going on his honeymoon, Eugene thought at first, with a sinking heart, that Elixir had run out of his favourite sugar-free sweets. An assistant passing by while he was scouring the shelf both embarrassed and gratified him by telling him this was simply a name change.

'A lot of our customers have remarked on it. But don't you worry, they're just the same. Same taste, different pack, that's all it is.'

Eugene got out of there as fast as he could, having first bought four packs of Oranchoco and the last remaining Chocorange in the shop. Hoping, but not very confidently, that this innovation might be confined to Elixir, he visited two branches of Superdrug and the lady in the sari in Spring Street. She alone still had Chocorange. Superdrug had changed everything in the store around, putting shampoos where skin creams used to be and switching vitamins with baby-care products. Eventually he found a single packet of Oranchoco in the sweets and chocolate section, which was now where perfumes used to be. No more than six months ago he would have considered knowing the layout of a pharmacy so that he could find items in the dark beneath his dignity. How are the mighty fallen! Perhaps to be brought so low was good for his character.

On his way back to Eugene Wren Fine Art he split open one of the new packets, took a sweet and tasted it. Whatever that shop assistant had said, it wasn't the same. There was a subtle difference and not for the better. The essence of Chocorange had been its smooth creaminess but this new one had a rough edge to the flavour, an undertaste of slight – very slight – bitterness.

His disappointment was profound. He would get used to it, he told himself. The difference was too subtle to affect him that much. But the change made him angry for the rest of the afternoon and even angrier that something so stupid, so banal and petty, could disturb his equilibrium to this extent. A woman who had arrived in a chauffeur-driven Bentley would certainly have bought Priscilla Hart's Study in Precious Metals if his brusqueness hadn't driven her out of the gallery. Walking home, he tried to dismiss the whole thing from his mind but, as he struggled to do this, bitter resentment kept coming to the surface. How could they do this to him, causing him to endanger his business? How could they spoil a flavour and a texture that had been close to perfect?

And then, what did I think about six months ago, he asked himself, before this thing took hold of me? When I look back it seems to me that I was free and that freedom I voluntarily gave up just for a taste, for something to put in my mouth. All the time he was thinking this way he was sucking an Oranchoco, unwilling to waste a precious Chocorange on something so mundane as a walk home.

He chewed up the last of it, no better pleased with its flavour than he had been four hours before when he tasted the first one.

Ella called out to him as he let himself into the house, 'Is that you, darling? You're nice and early.'

His pockets were stuffed full of sweets packets. He hung up his coat, leaving the sweets where they were. She poured him a dry sherry and one for herself, taking them into the study. The warmth he so often felt when they met again after a short separation, even if that parting was no more than a matter of hours, filled him with the kind of pleasure that made him smile. She was so nice, so sweet, and she looked just the way he wanted a woman to look, pretty rather than beautiful, not thin but not plump either, a lovable woman and wonderfully intelligent.

'What are you thinking?'

'That I'm lucky to have you.'

She smiled, took a sip of her sherry, passed him a dish of olives. 'There's something I want to ask you but it can wait till we've eaten.'

'That's quite terrible,' he said, laughing. 'It makes me think you've postponed your question, whatever it is, because if you ask it I shall be put off my dinner.'

'Oh, no, it's nothing like that. It's quite trivial, really. Let's say it's a question of our – well, our medical care after we're married. I mean, I shall go on going to Malina in the practice but you might think you could leave Dr Irving and I could look after you. Only I don't really think that's a good idea. Of course I'll still be a doctor and I'll still tell you when I think you ought to go to Dr Irving because you've got something that needs attention. Am I being too fussy, do you think?'

'Not at all, my darling, you're absolutely right as usual.' He felt obscurely relieved, he didn't know why. 'Was that the question you're no longer putting off till after dinner? What is for dinner, by the way?'

'Only a Thai takeaway, I'm afraid. He'll be here with it any minute.'

He was. They ate but when Ella passed him the fruit bowl for dessert, although he took a small bunch of grapes, Eugene was aware that what he really wanted, and wanted now, was a Chocorange or even an Oranchoco. As he helped Ella clear the table – showing himself to be at least halfway to the house-husband all women seemed to want these days – he began to think of reasons for escaping from the house for ten minutes or even getting himself alone upstairs for ten minutes. That is, he tried to think of reasons but failed. Once he could have gone out to post a letter but no one sent letters any more. Replies to their wedding invitations had been the first post and the last (apart from junk mail) he and Ella had had for months. It had begun to rain, a thin drizzle misting the windowpanes.

Dry-mouthed, a sour taste on his tongue, he went into the drawing room and put on a CD. It was a harpsichord suite of Scarlatti and it began to lull his craving, even making him wonder if, were he to play this kind of sweet Baroque music as a constant background, his addiction would gradually depart. He listened and relaxed but when Ella came in he experienced a tautening and a tensing of his whole body. And he was back to thinking, I must give it up. Now is the time, when the taste has changed, when it's no longer exactly what I want, when I'm getting married and if I give in to this craving, face a life of subterfuge and concealment and yes, lying.

He looked up at her and saw what she was carrying. Through the glassy transparency of the plastic bag, one of those ziplock bags that could be resealed after opening, he could see the orange-andbrown lettering and the illustrations on half a dozen packs of Chocorange. The feeling he had was that which most people feel when threatened with violence. His heart began beating hard and rapidly, and his mouth dried.

'Darling,' she said, smiling, 'how many more of these things are there in the house? I've found twenty-two but I'm sure I haven't looked everywhere.'

He couldn't remember when he had last blushed. Perhaps not since he was a small child. He felt the hot blood rush into his face and he touched one burning cheek with the palm of his hand.

'You mustn't be embarrassed about it and above all you mustn't think of it as an addiction. It isn't. Believe me, I do know. It's a habit and it can quite quickly be got over. I once had a patient who was the same, only with her it was mint imperials. She was eating twenty of the things every day but she was over it practically as soon as she'd told me.' She put the bag down on the table in front of him and went to sit beside him on the arm of the sofa. 'I must say you've done a very good job of hiding it. I've thought for weeks it must have been Carli who was hooked on the things. I never dreamed it might be you.'

Still he said nothing. She leant over him and laid her cheek against his hair. 'I haven't upset you, have I? I'm not going to try and stop you eating them. I did taste one and I thought it was rather nice. I said a habit like this can be quite quickly got over but it doesn't have to be. Of course I don't know how many you're eating, but if it's a lot, like ten a day or something like that, it might be sensible to cut down. After all they are "sugar-free" and that means aspartame or one of those sweeteners, so it's not a good idea to overload your system with the stuff.' She moved away from him, stood back. 'Gene? Are you all right?'

'Yes, of course,' he said, his voice thin and shocked. He tried to clear his throat. 'I think I'll go out for a bit.'

'Gene, look at me. What's wrong? Is it what I said?'

'I'm just going out for a walk.'

'It's pouring with rain!'

She moved a little towards him again. Her face was contorted with concern and dismay. 'You can't go out now. We have to talk. We can't just leave it. I'd no idea when I spoke to you that you were going to take it like this.'

'I haven't taken it like anything,' he said. 'I'm tired and I need fresh air.'

'Well, when you come back we'll talk about how you got into this and how you're going to handle it, it'll be a lot easier for you now I know. Remember it's not crack cocaine, it's not even cigarettes. You'll be over it in a week.'

A lot easier now she knows… This was in such conflict with what was actually the case that he could almost have laughed. Except that he felt he would never laugh again. Without saying any more to her, he went out into the hall and put on his coat. The pockets were weighed down with Chocorange and Oranchoco packs. For the first time in his life Eugene experienced the emotion that is a combination of desire and loathing, and is usually called a love-hate relationship. He pulled all the packs but one out of his pockets and threw them on to the floor of the cupboard. It no longer mattered if she saw them. It was too late.

But he waited until he was outside the door before splitting open the pack. With a Chocorange in his mouth, its flavour not at all diminished by the scene just past in the drawing room, he put up his umbrella and began to walk along Chepstow Villas towards the Pembridge Villas turn-off. The sweet was soon finished and he immediately craved another.

What was he going to do? Not go home again. He turned round, walked back the way he had come and towards the Portobello Road, passing his own house but keeping his head turned away. The rain had dwindled to a drizzle and stopped. He put down his umbrella. The Portobello was just the same, only rather more crowded, ablaze with lights, alive with music and laughter and shouting. He went into the Earl of Lonsdale and bought himself a glass of white wine. A Chocorange substitute. Pubs had never really been his thing and, since knowing Ella, he had only once been in one. The wine was sour and sharp but he drank it, unable to find a seat and standing up at the bar. This was how it felt when a carefully guarded secret was discovered. It had been the same with the drink when a friend caught him in the men's room, swigging covertly from a hip flask. The same? No, this was far, far worse.

Going home was impossible. He considered finding a hotel. But Londoners know nothing about hotels in their own city and besides, he had no change of clothes with him. He put another Chocorange into his mouth and wandered across the street among the crowds to the Electric Cinema. There he went up to buy a ticket and astonished the woman who asked which number theatre he wanted by saying he didn't care, it didn't matter, and he would take whatever she chose to give him.

It really didn't matter; he fell asleep as soon as he was in one of the red leather armchairs that had replaced the old seating. Someone further along the row woke him by pushing past his knees when the lights came up. It was close on midnight but the streets were still crowded. Not when he reached Denbigh Road, though. He thought, I am a homeless person now, obliged to be a street sleeper, and then he thought how Ella would have reproved him for his callous insensitivity when he was healthy and rich and successful with a home in one of the most sought-after districts of any city in the world. Fool, he told himself, and he went home at last to a dark and silent house.