Portobello

CHAPTER THREE

Just fifty years old, single still but not unattached, Eugene Wren was a tall handsome man who would have looked young for his age but for his white hair. It was thick hair, a glossy thatch, but there was no doubt that it aged him. This was something he minded but he was very careful not to let it show that he minded, just as, though he chose his clothes with care and wore them with appropriateness, he gave the impression of being indifferent to his appearance. Only his girlfriend knew that his sight wasn't perfect but that he wore contact lenses.

He was secretive. Why? Who can tell why we are the way we are? Psychiatrists can. Innumerable books have been written tracing our faults and foibles, fantasies, criminal tendencies, sexual tastes, inhibitions and other peculiarities back to events in our childhoods. Eugene had read a good many of them without being any the wiser. He could have understood his secretiveness if when owning up to something as a child he had been punished, but his parents had been unvaryingly loving, easygoing and kind. In fact, he was encouraged to be open. It made no difference. He kept hold of his secrets. Like his mind, his house in Chepstow Villas held many secret drawers and locked boxes.

One of his secrets was his addictive personality. He had been a heavy drinker and had never given up drink but, by an almost superhuman effort, cut down to a reasonable couple of glasses of wine a day. That was before he met Ella, so he was able to keep his one-time alcoholism a secret from her. The break-up with his previous girlfriend, a long-term partner of several years, had happened because she found the bottle of vodka he kept in the bottom of a wardrobe he thought he had locked. His smoking was impossible to hide. But as he had with his drinking habit, he eventually conquered it. Several attempts were made at giving up, the last and successful one helped by nicotine patches and hypnotism. It had been horrible for Eugene to reveal his weakness to Ella, not least of it the disclosing that he had a weakness. But when it was over he was quite proud of himself and Ella was very proud.

'You can't really continue to smoke when you are going about with a doctor of medicine,' he said to her with a light laugh.

For a while he was without an addiction, but not for long.

He hoped he wouldn't put on weight, though he didn't say this to Ella, and when he did put it on he did his best to keep it secret. The difficulty was that he tended to eat between meals. Once he would have had a cigarette. Eugene called his habit snacking and Ella called it grazing. To combat it he tried eating Polo mints but he didn't really like the taste of mint and, besides, Polos had sugar in them. Considering how he fulminated against gum-chewing, especially against those who spat out their gum on to the pavement, he couldn't take it up himself. Well, he could but it would have to be done in secret and that would be just one more secret. He was anxious not to succumb to deception with Ella. No doubt he would soon propose to Ella and they would live happily ever after, something he sincerely wished and thought likely. Then he had what he called the fat bridegroom dream. He was standing at the altar in a morning suit, marrying Ella, and when he looked down to take the ring out of his pocket all he saw was his huge paunch. Needless to say, he said nothing of this to Ella but pretended to be indifferent to weight or girth.

It was a Saturday morning and he was on his way to the shops. It would be a long walk, some of it perhaps not a walk but a taxi ride. What he sought wasn't readily obtainable even in the sort of shops whose business (he thought) was to sell it. On occasion it was a weary quest he undertook. Although it had been going on for no more than six weeks, sometimes he found it hard to remember what he had done with his time before that day he went into the pharmacy at the top of the Portobello Road.

But spring had come, the day was fine and his scales had just informed him he had lost two pounds. Think of the positive things, he told himself, think what a harmless indulgence this is, and then, glancing down at the pavement, he saw the sprawl of litter. A tumble of fish and chips remains, part but not all of a bright blue polystyrene container, a can that had once held Red Bull and some fragments of a meat pie. Eugene recoiled from this rubbish but braced himself to remove it. The plastic carrier he always took with him on a shopping expedition (in the interest of saving the planet) he took out of his pocket and, covering his fingers with a tissue, picked up and deposited inside it the remains of some lowlife's supper. Underneath it – or, rather, behind it, up against a garden wall, pillar and hedge – was an unsealed and bulging envelope. When he picked it up he could see that inside were five or six twenty-pound notes, a ten and a five.

Without counting the notes, he put the envelope into his pocket before dropping the plastic bag into the next waste bin he passed. Ahead of him he could see in the distance the swarms of people, mostly young, heading for the Portobello Road market. It was always the same on Saturdays. They poured off the buses and out of Notting Hill tube station and charged along, talking and laughing at the tops of their voices, in their weekly quest for bargains and the companionship of their fellow shoppers.

As soon as he had the chance, Eugene turned left to avoid them. Not that he disliked the Portobello Road, but he preferred it on Sundays when it was half empty and you could see its buildings and feel its charm. On weekdays he only went there now for one purpose and he had been up to the pharmacy in Golborne Road on the previous Tuesday. Today one of the other selected shops he patronised must be visited. So now to the serious business of the morning.

What would they think he was in need of and was off to buy, those shoppers heading for the market whose indifferent gaze rested briefly on him before passing on? If they thought about it at all they would assume that a man seeking an addictive substance would look for alcohol, tobacco, cocaine, heroin, amphetamines, ecstasy, crack or, at the very least, marijuana. Eugene allowed himself to feel vaguely glad that it was none of these he sought.

It had begun when he decided he must find some way to curb his appetite. Some kind of slimming pills, he had thought vaguely. But when first he turned out of the Portobello Road in the direction of the illuminated green cross outside the Golborne Pharmacy, it wasn't with slimming or appetite suppression in mind but in search of a plug-in mosquito repellent for the summer ahead. Though it was early March, on the previous night his sleep had been disturbed by the whine of a mosquito in his bedroom and he had spent a frustrating quarter of an hour flapping about with a towel before squashing the thing. Paying for the device, he noticed a row of packets of sugar-free sweets absurdly named Lemfresh, Strawpink and Chocorange on the counter by the till. Probably they tasted disgusting. But he picked up a Chocorange and read the label on it: Sugar-free, healthy, tooth-friendly, it said, only 4 calories per pastille. Suppose they didn't taste too bad. He could eat one halfway between breakfast and lunch, and one between lunch and dinner or maybe two. At any rate, he could give it a try. They had no sugar in them and very few calories.

He took two packets, one Chocorange and one Strawpink. It was four o'clock and hunger was beginning to bite. Like every container these days, the Chocorange pack was hard to open but he got there. It held perhaps a dozen dark-brown lozenges. Tentatively, Eugene put one in his mouth and was pleasantly surprised by the taste. A rich chocolate flavour with a hint of sharp citrus. Delicious, really. And no bitter aftertaste, which used to be the case with sugar substitutes. He took another to confirm his judgement, trying a Strawpink this time. Nice enough, with an authentic flavour of strawberries but a bit insipid, not a patch on Chocorange.

Why not keep some of these by him so that he could help himself to one or two instead of snacking? Money didn't worry him but if it had, these were cheap enough for anyone to afford: seventy-five pence a packet. And he knew where to find them. Golborne Road was ten minutes' walk away from his house. It looked as if he had found the solution. No voice inside his head said, 'Don't go there.' No small cautionary thought came to him, telling him to remember the cigarettes, climbing from five to forty a day, or the drinking, which started with two glasses of wine and mounted to a bottle of vodka plus wine, and now was only shakily reduced to two glasses once more. Don't go there was unspoken or went unheard.

Should he tell Ella? Sucking a Chocorange, he had asked himself that on the way home from the pharmacy. Of course. He must. She would be pleased that he had found such a simple solution. On the other hand, perhaps he wouldn't tell her. She, after all, was a doctor and one who often said how much she disapproved of additives, E numbers and the various inadequately tested chemicals that found their way into food today. The Chocorange packet carried a daunting list of the chemicals in it. She might try to stop him. She might tell him it was healthier to have an expanding waistline than fill up his body with junk.

'We're not talking about obesity,' she had said the other day apropos of something else. 'Being a little overweight won't do you any harm.' After all, she was a little overweight herself, though he loved her the way she was.

But it should remain his secret. After all, he was a secretive man and there was no use in pretending otherwise. Not to himself. He might pretend to others but was that not the essence of secretiveness?

Six weeks had passed since that day, which had also been fine and sunny, much like this one, only today was hotter than had been expected for April, but that, of course, was global warming. It was hard not to be glad of its side effects, warmth and perpetual sunshine. The trees were in the sort of full leaf usual three weeks later, the cherry blossom was past and the lilac out. The gardens of this part of west London had the exaggerated look of a seedsman's catalogue illustrations, banks of pink and white blossom above cushions of purple and rose, all overhung by frondy branches of lemony green and a rich dark emerald. Six weeks. In those weeks he had consumed a large number of packets of Chocorange and now he was on his way to replenish his stocks. In them too he had lost weight.

Visiting pharmacists was what this now regular Saturday morning quest of his was all about. One of these was in sight, in a parade of shops on the other side of Notting Hill Gate; he couldn't bring himself to call in there. He had visited it last Saturday and the pharmacist would remember such a recent purchase and, worse, make some comment such as, 'You're really fond of these things, aren't you?' or, most horrible and shame-making because almost true, 'You must have your fix, mustn't you?'

He began to walk down Kensington Church Street where there were no pharmacists but only antique dealers, picture galleries and purveyors of eighteenth-century furniture. About to pass Eugene Wren, Fine Art, in accordance with his nature, rather in the way he wished for no comments on his behaviour from pharmacists, he kept his eyes averted as if fascinated by the sight on the opposite side of the street of a young man emerging from the florists under an enormous bouquet of flowers. It wasn't that he doubted all was well inside the shop but, rather, that he wanted to go about his Saturday business unobserved. Dorinda Clements, in charge in his absence, was entirely reliable. He sometimes made jokes with valued customers, for instance, that she was 'management incarnate' and that he trusted her more than he trusted himself. But he didn't want her knowing his private business.

The only regular stockists of what he sought were the pharmacy and cosmetics chain Elixir. They had become his default store and, like Dorinda, unfailingly reliable, but again their assistants were human, had eyes and memories, and were also capable of remarking on his frequent visits. How satisfactory it would be when you could do all your shopping without benefit of other human beings and, as you already could in some supermarkets, put your credit card into a machine, key in various numbers and hey presto! You had paid for your goods. You had kept your own secrets. Better not go to Elixir today, then, though he could see the branch he most often used ahead of him in Kensington High Street. That was the one where, a few weeks back, he had bought his second packet of Chocorange, replacement for the one from Golborne Road. And, as he had intended it should, Chocorange had admirably fulfilled its purpose. As a between-meals snack it worked, deadening his hunger and staving off grazing; the result had been that he had lost those two pounds he had gained and then one more. If it had a drawback, this was, paradoxically, that it tasted too delicious. Eugene had never got over how something synthetic and harmless could taste so good. The result was that instead of one or two eaten in the morning he tended to take three or four and, in the late afternoon, once he had started he found it hard to stop. Sometimes, between three and reaching home at six, he ate half a packet. Still, it worked and that was the main thing. The unfortunate thing was that not all pharmacists stocked them and those that did tended to run out.

He would try a place further along towards Knightsbridge. This was a small shop called Bolus, run by a stout Asian man with a chilly manner. That suited Eugene. He went in and picked up two packets of tissues and a tube of toothpaste before raising his eyes to the section on the counter where Mr Prasad presided. The brown-and-orange design on the small packets always leapt to Eugene's eyes before any other colours – you might have said that in this situation there were no other colours – but their absence was as immediately noticeable. The red and pink of strawberry flavour were present, the green of mint but not a single pack of Chocorange. Mr Prasad had sold out. Eugene might have admitted to himself, but did not, that this was largely due to his own excessive buying. After all, the inhabitants of this part of west London, though no strangers to addiction in various forms, weren't prone to spend their leisure time seeking sugar-free sweets.

Eugene was paying for his tissues and his toothpaste when Mr Prasad said in what sounded like sarcastic tones, 'Your favourites will be in by the end of the week.'

The unexpectedness of this assault as well as its content brought the blood rushing into Eugene's cheeks. He muttered, 'Er, yes, thanks.'

'Would you like me to put in a double order next time?'

'Oh, no, thank you. Really, that won't be necessary.'

He wanted to flee but he made himself saunter out of the shop. He would never go in there again. That went without saying. This subtraction reduced the possible Chocorange outlets to ten. And yet, why couldn't he have looked the man in the eye, laughed lightly and said, yes, he'd like some ordered specially for him? He was more or less hooked on the things, as Mr Prasad doubtless knew, ha-ha. They were so tasty. Why couldn't he say all that? He doubted if he could actually utter the word 'tasty', just as he couldn't say 'toilet' or 'kinky'.

He began to recognise he would have to go further afield, perhaps to the outer suburbs. Of course, as always happened in these circumstances, he began to experience a craving for a Chocorange, the smooth oval shape of it, the rich creamy flavour of milk chocolate and the sharp sweetness of citrus. There was nothing for it now but Elixir. They always had Chocorange in stock; indeed, in stock in reassuringly large quantities. His most recent visit to one of their branches had been to the store in Marylebone High Street and before that to New Oxford Street. It must be at least a fortnight since he had used the branch in Paddington Station. Enough walking had been done for one day and Eugene hailed a taxi.

He didn't ask the taxi driver to take him to Paddington Station; not, that is, through the glazed-in approach area in front of the entrance where Isambard Kingdom Brunel, architect of the Great Western Railway, sits on his plinth. That would have led to the driver asking him what time his train was, whether he wanted him to take this route or that and what was his destination. Better ask the man to set him down in one of the streets that run from Sussex Gardens to Praed Street and leave him to make his own way to the station. He had tried to remember street names but only came up with Spring Street. That would do.

The first thing he noticed – the first thing he always noticed – was the illuminated sign with the green cross on it that hangs above pharmacies. There it was, halfway up little Spring Street, a small shop like Mr Prasad's between a bank and an estate agent. Eugene felt that catch of breath and lifting of the heart most people would associate with the sight of the person one is in love with. He used to feel it at first sight of Ella; now it was for a purveyor of sugar-free sweets. Don't think of it like that, he told himself, don't be silly. The pharmacist this time was a woman, also Asian, wearing a sari, beautiful, calm, with downcast eyes. But he didn't look at her. The moment he entered her shop a plethora of Chocorange, radiant in their orange-and-brown wrappings, seemed to leap up and meet his eyes, to jostle for his attention. This was a treasure to add to his list, a number eleven to oust Prasad's Bolus for ever. Without bothering to stock up on more tissues and toothpaste, he went up to the counter, picked out three packets of Chocorange and laid them in front of the deferential shopkeeper. She smiled at him, but courteously, without a hint of cunning or amusement, and rang up the sum of two pounds twenty-five.

Now free to make his other purchases, Eugene took a bus back to Notting Hill, where he bought the ingredients for the dinner he intended to cook for Ella that evening and dropped into one of the bags the envelope he had picked up earlier. Walking home with his two fairly heavy bags and sucking his second Chocorange of the morning, he wondered if tonight would be a good time to ask Ella to marry him, whether it might not be better to put it off for a further week or two. After all, their present arrangement worked very pleasantly. There were none of the problems of living under the same roof but plenty of lovely sex two or three times a week. He checked these thoughts, while telling himself that all men thought along these lines. He loved Ella. If she wasn't quite the only woman he had ever loved, he loved her best. He could hardly imagine being parted from her.

But he was a secretive person. Should someone who treasured his privacy so much marry at all? Still, he had been more or less living with Ella, at least at the weekends and on holidays, for three years now. She hadn't probed into his secret life. But another problem was this habit of his. Even as things were, there were difficulties. Once or twice she had caught him out and he had had to say he had a sore throat and was 'just giving these things a go'. Worst of all, he had been obliged to offer her one, which she had taken and liked. When he got married he would have to give up. He knew he must give up anyway and to some extent longed to give up but, like St Augustine and sex, he asked to be released from his habit but not yet. After all, as he told himself every day, several times a day, it was harmless. He enjoyed it so much. And it stopped him eating calorific food. Once, when he was cooking as he intended to cook this evening, he would have picked at and tasted the ingredients. Tasted again during the process and before he served the food. Now two Chocoranges would see him through.

At home he unpacked the groceries first. The Chocorange were in his shoulder bag and there also was the envelope containing the ten- and twenty-pound notes and the five-pound note he had found on the corner of the street. Sucking his third Chocorange of the day, he counted the notes. Some drug dealer's haul, he thought vaguely, but perhaps not. Eugene wasn't indifferent to other people's feelings, especially in the matter of money, and it might be, though he couldn't as yet see how, that these were someone's legitimate earnings that he had dropped – while being attacked? Such things happened and more often than ever these days. The obvious thing was to take the money to the police station in Ladbroke Grove. But he had another idea.

He sat down at his desk and wrote, 'Found in Chepstow Villas a sum of money between eighty and a hundred and sixty pounds. Anyone who has lost such a sum should apply to the phone number below.' He transferred this to his computer in various sizes and styles of type and printed it out. He would attach it to one of the lamp posts as his neighbours attached appeals for lost cats. Armed with Sellotape and blu-tak, he went outside into the street with his sheet of paper and looked for a suitable lamp post. For the past week such an appeal had been fastened to the post outside number 62 and it was still there, though the missing animal, a spiteful Persian kitten called Bathsheba, had returned home two days before. Eugene peeled off the notice and put up his own in its stead.

He thought about it while he was cooking Ella's dinner. The applicant had only a telephone number. But he had no intention of handing over the money on a phone call alone. Whoever applied must be invited here and then asked to name the sum he had lost precisely. Not eighty pounds or a hundred and sixty pounds but somewhere in between. There was no way anyone could get it right except by the most enormous coincidence or by being the true loser of the money.

The phone call was really something to look forward to. He would tell Ella all about it later. Absently, he helped himself to another Chocorange.