‘I don’t,’ said Robert.
Chapter 5
Above the Sex Emporium
Promptly at five-thirty the long six-storey chalky grey concrete slab began to regurgitate its half-digested human pellets. Wives and husbands, boy friends and girl friends waited outside, watching people putting on their coats in six symmetrical rows of windows. These were all offices. The actual making of instruments was done in two long low blocks, tacked on behind the main building.
The crowds began to pour out through the glass doors, between the huge Ionic columns which were just façades. The bonds of Cadman and Bentwhistle Ltd were loosened, its employees disappeared into their own private darknesses. Some of them would find the evening harder to endure than the day.
Robert looked back at the massive building almost lovingly. He sometimes claimed that he worked in the ugliest building in London. In four weeks’ time he would work there no longer, and he would miss it.
He walked slowly through the drizzle, conscious of the Georgian houses at the far side of the square, their proportions mocked by Messrs Cadman and Bentwhistle, conscious too of the 1930 pub on the north side of the square, looking like a Moorish public convenience. Beside the pub was a 1960 garage, a cheap garish toy blown up to life size. He really hated that garage tonight, and gave its wall a savage kick as he passed.
He took his annoyance out on the newspaper seller. The poster read: ‘Mystery Murder Sensation’. Everyone else’s front page lead announced: ‘Knifed diplomat – Commons told of “Mystery Parcel”’. But his paper had ‘Premier orders big union probe’. It was an early edition. He demanded his money back. The man argued. He told the man he only wanted the paper because of the knifed diplomat. He got his money back and immediately felt ashamed.
He went on to the platform and waited for the little Broad Street line train. It was too pathetic, taking it out on the paper seller, too pathetic even to tell Dr Schmuck. And that was another thing. He must break with Dr Schmuck. It was doing him no good at all.
The train arrived. He stared at the lights of London, wishing he had a paper. They rattled across the Caledonian Road, past decaying residential areas and railway sidings. He could do with a drink. He didn’t fancy a quiet evening at home. He didn’t fancy cooking or eating alone at the Blessington Café.
He got out at Kentish Town West, an intimate crumbling little wooden station. He would ring Sonia. Tall, long-faced, fractionally-equine, comfortable sexy Sonia. It was sad that she hadn’t married, she was eager enough. She never would now. She’d have her moments, but they’d be sad and snatched. Sonia, uninhibited, perhaps too uninhibited, knitting sexual balaclavas for the neurotic troops of London. Why haven’t we got married? Thus mused Robert Bellamy, noted Kentish Town raconteur and gourmet, as he made his way through the damp streets.
Number 38, Blessington Road, was the end house in a row of three-storey late Georgian houses set far back behind the shop fronts that disfigured their ground floors. Number 38, like Number 12, at the other end, had an extra storey, an attic. They were small eccentric shops, the shops in Blessington Road. They sold tropical fish, gentles, hamsters, dustbins and scarlet watering cans. Numbers 38, 32 and 26 were owned by Mr Mendel, a big untidy Austrian Jew who walked like a woman. He leased out the shops.
The shop at Number 38 was the North London Surgical and Medical Supply Centre. It was run by a wizened hypochondriac cockney who lived in a council flat in Bethnal Green and was never seen in Kentish Town outside shop hours. Robert called his shop the sex emporium.
The row of houses opposite Number 38 was unoccupied, waiting for demolition.
He let himself in without so much as a glance at the trusses and dirty books. They bored him, but it amused him to live above them.
He entered his room with a little shock of pleasure and dismay. He had gradually replaced all Mr Mendel’s furniture with his own, and now the room was exactly as he wanted it. Wood was its major material. The stained floorboards were bare save for two small rugs. By the window, looking out over the great expanse of the sex emporium roof, was his dining suite – a simple wooden table and four wooden chairs. Robert dumped his rain coat on one of these chairs, went into the little kitchenette and put the kettle on a low gas. Then he went to the communal phone in the corridor and rang Sonia’s number. She was thirty-five, a bit old to start having children, but it still wasn’t too late. The phone still had its sexy French tone. He breathed harder.
No reply. He dialled again, just in case there had been a mistake. But there had been no mistake.
He went back into his room, switched on the television with his remote-control switch, drew the wine-red curtains, and made his pot of tea. As he did so he was conscious that something in the room irritated him intensely.
He let the tea stand for a couple of minutes and examined the room. It wasn’t the dining suite. Nor was it the wine-red Finnish sofa, matching the curtains, or the high-backed wooden chairs that stood at each side of the electric fire. Perhaps it was his divan, behind the door at the end of the room farthest from the window. An uninteresting piece of furniture, the divan.
He poured himself a cup of tea, sat on the sofa, watched 30 seconds of Quiz Ball, Kilmarnock v Arsenal, pressed his hand switch, watched 20 seconds of the BBC 2 Test Card, pressed his hand switch, watched 15 seconds of ‘Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea’ and switched the television off.
It wasn’t the divan. The wicker waste paper basket? The cheap ash-trays? The Dutch cigar box? The heavy wardrobe? The solid chest of drawers? The streamlined radio? The home-made wooden bookshelves? The three modern paintings, carefully yet in the last resort arbitrarily chosen? The electric fire and its surrounds, painted blue to contrast with the shining whiteness of the walls?
He sighed – and wondered whether the time had come to leave Number 38. Dr Schmuck had said it would be a great help. You paid £4 a session for analysis and that was the kind of deep advice you got – move from Number 38.
He poured himself a second cup. His mouth thirsted for something stronger. He picked up a book, one of Sonia’s, like almost all his books, she dispensed books as she dispensed her affections, with no real expectation of their return. But tonight he couldn’t concentrate on a book.
The wardrobe. Suddenly he knew it was the wardrobe. He must get rid of it. It was manic-depressive.
He drank his tea slowly. Number 38, he thought, isn’t what it used to be. The sociability has gone. For too long I have refused to admit it. He hardly knew the present incumbents at all. O’Connor and Tooley, the young Irish lads, he met occasionally in the Blessington Arms. He liked Mrs Palmer, who never had any letters or visitors but insisted that she had once been Europe’s foremost female unicyclist. It was, however, rather a one-way relationship. Miss Flodden and Mr Marshall left insulting notes about tidiness and unlocked doors, and, rumour had it, bathed together. He never saw them and didn’t like them. Dr Strickman was inaccessible, with his shifty eyes, his strange-shaped parcels from Munich and his cryptic telephone calls. And he didn’t really know Mr Pardoe, who ran three launderettes, one of which, near Westminster Bridge, was named ‘The Diplomat’.
He went to the phone and rang Sonia again. Still no reply.
He met Mrs Palmer, going upstairs.
‘Hullo. How are you?’ he said.
‘Lübeck,’ said Mrs Palmer.
‘I’m
