I summon my visiting optician, who arrives reluctantly, bemoaning the absence of his most treasured and necessary instruments, which are too large and too delicate to make home visits. We begin, like Vladimir and Estragon, with him moaning and me telling him to shut up. Then I moan, and he tells me to relax.
I call him Dr Karlovic, though I suspect he has no such qualification. But he has never corrected me, and the glint of pleasure when I proffer the D-word is presumably a sign not so much that he has hoodwinked me (his business card has no mention of a medical qualification or PhD), but because he takes it as a form of respect.
He changes my prescription, and next visit brings me my new glasses. They work. I should email him to say thanks. It’s a blessing to see clearly again.
Hand in hand, we walked round the corner to Khan’s, the local newsagent’s, which was one of Lucy’s favourite places. Better than the park, the swimming baths, or even the beach. From her earliest months she’d had a craving for sour things, and Mr Khan stocked a particularly mouth-puckering lemon super-sour ball, for which Lucy was, I suspect, his only customer. Not that she was allowed to buy one. Nor was I. As we entered the shop most days, in search of the newspaper and perhaps a magazine, he would open the large plastic jar of lemon sours that sat on the shelf behind him, and pick one out.
‘Goodness me,’ he would say, looking at the ceiling, where the fan was circling lazily, ‘I wonder if anyone likes these nasty sour things?’
‘I do! I want one!’
‘Now who could that be?’ he would enquire, for her head didn’t reach above the counter, and he would pretend to look around the shop to see who was talking. ‘There is nobody here, is there? Except you, Dr Darke. Good morning, sir!’
‘No, no! It’s me! I’m down here! I want one!’
Mr Khan loved this game, but Lucy had only a limited toleration for it, before her desire for the sweet became overwhelming and she would start to cry.
‘I’m down here!’
‘Where is that voice coming from?’
‘Me! Here! I want it!’
With practised timing, he looked down to spot her head, inclined backwards as she tried to look over the edge of the counter to catch his eye.
‘Oh,’ Mr Khan would say, ‘it is you, is it not?’
‘It’s me! It’s me!’
He would have gone on for another few minutes – he loved it – but the ritual ended here, with the transfer of the sweet. Lucy grabbed it and stuffed it into her mouth, her fingers already sticky with the white sugar covering.
‘Ooooh,’ she said, puckering and slurping, ‘it’s sourlicious!’
‘Shall I have it back?’
‘No! No! It’s mine!’
‘What do you say?’ I enquired from my news rack, unable to choose between the stodgy London Review of Books and the high-falutin’ New York Review of Books, neither of them likely to occasion a smile, much less any laughter. Perhaps I should buy Private Eye, and have a good sneer, but I cannot abide that sanctimonious midget, its editor.
I occasionally buy one of the literary magazines, prey to the stale fantasy that they represent a view of the world, of reading and writing, that can still move me. But they don’t. If I find even one article or review that amuses me, I feel blessed. Why is literature become so dull?
The magazines are curatorial. Run by curates, marching off to war: improve the unimproved, wash the unwashed, enlighten the heathens. Literature improves you. I believed that for God knows how long, ever since being brainwashed by Dr Leavis and his gang of Cambridge acolytes. The improved! Poor fucking Frank and his ghastly and appropriately named wife Queenie. I wonder if they thought of him as Kingie?
‘Thank you, Mr Khan!’ said my slurping girl, her face a rictus of received sourness, her attention now on a young African who had selected an ice lolly from the freezer, and was approaching the counter.
Lucy stared at him intently. ‘Daddy,’ she said, ‘why is that man so dirty?’
I think it is American cowboys – or perhaps Bugs Bunny? – who skedaddle, a word I’ve always fancied using, though actually doing it is not all that different from the (weaker) English locution ‘beat a hasty retreat’. You turn as fast as you can, passing the enemy (who glared not at tiny Lucy, but at her reprehensible father) and head for them thar hills.
As we made our way home, she sucking away industriously, I tried to explain. It’s not easy. To her innocent eye the poor African had looked distinctly odd, and other. ‘Darling,’ I said. ‘I’m afraid you hurt that poor man’s feelings.’
She looked up at me, bemused, sour-mouthed, puckered. We lived in a largely white, middle-class neighbourhood, and I’m not sure she’d ever noticed the few West Indians or Africans who occasionally drifted by.
‘You see, darling, the man is not dirty. He just has brown skin. You have white skin, he has brown. But both of you are people.’
She looked up at me quizzically.
‘You both have faces, and noses and eyes and arms and legs, don’t you?’
I expected some response, some acknowledgement that there was, if not a problem, at least a mystery to be explored. But she wasn’t interested.
‘You know Amarjit and Sanjay at the crèche? They have brown skin too. And you know they’re not dirty.’
She laughed. ‘That’s silly. They’re the same as me.’
‘Everybody is the same, but sometimes we just look different.’
Poor. And untrue – or true in a way that it would take her many years to assimilate. How to explain things to a three-year-old, who was now staring at me with the wide-eyed fixity of a barn owl?
‘I have a good idea,’ I said, in what was intended to be a breezy and assured tone, ‘let’s go back to Mr Khan’s. Shall we say we’re sorry?’
‘No.’
Relieved, I took her hand once again, and we walked home, quickly.
The new cleaner will come on Thursdays. I couriered the agency a key so that she could let herself in, and the first week I left detailed instructions on the kitchen table – not detailed enough, as it turned out, for she was curiously selective about which she chose to follow – telling her where the cleaning materials and Hoover were. On the first day she arrived, as promised, at nine in the morning and I heard the front door close as I sat upstairs in my study, with the door locked and a yellow Post-it sticker on its door (and the one across the hall), saying ‘Do not clean this room’.
For the first couple of hours she busied herself emptying the dishwasher, putting the clothes in the washing machine, and doing the ironing. I heard her hoovering the drawing-room and dining-room carpets. But what I also heard, sometime just before noon – she must have brought a wireless with her – was the sound of music, blaring, inane, peace-destroying. Pop music, accompanied by the grating voice
