and cornice of a room, a jigsaw piece that didn’t fit anywhere. A voice buzzed in his ear like a trapped midge. It was bothering him.
‘Who?’
‘Harry. It’s Andrew. Andrew Lawson.’
‘Andrew?’
He shook his head, whether to clear it or to deny the name, he didn’t know. He saw some single-masted boats floating on dappled water. That was Argenteuil. But where was he?
‘It’s your wake-up call. It’s eight o’clock.’
‘Hm.’
‘Okay?’
‘Yes. Yes.’
‘See you at nine?’
‘Fine. Thanks. Cheers. Andrew.’
His hand put the receiver down clumsily.
What plans? He had plans? The only plan he had at the moment was to work out where he was. Who had a Monet painting in their bedroom? What he had in his bedroom was a Russell Flint watercolour of nude women bathing in a sheltered waterway in what he had always assumed was Venice. He missed the women’s unselfconscious company. Yet that painting of boats moored at Argenteuil was familiar. He had it in his sitting-room. It was then he remembered that he had switched the prints a couple of days ago. He was in his own bedroom. He was relieved.
The relief was short-lived. He didn’t need painted nudes in his bedroom this morning. He had a real one in his bed. He sat up very carefully and leaned on his elbow to contemplate her as if she were some piece of extra-terrestrial matter that had fallen from the sky. Except that she was very much of this earth, thank God. Any planet she was on couldn’t be such a bad place.
He closed his eyes tightly for several seconds, then opened them wide. She was real. It was the reality of himself he wasn’t sure about. She lay there, effulgent as a lighthouse leading someone lost at sea back to land. He took his bearings from her. Her blonde hair was marvellously dishevelled on the pillow, evoking a raunchy night. Had he been part of it? Her breasts were carelessly displayed above the duvet. A thrown arm leaned against the headboard.
The image of her lying there slowly filtered other images into his mind in fragments, like disjointed scenes from a grainy film that hadn’t been edited yet. He remembered her coming up to him at the party to say she knew his writing. This wasn’t a bad result of literary appreciation: the word made flesh. There was a man who was drunk being persuaded to leave. There were streetlights observed from the darkness of a taxi. He was seeing them through a screen of fair hair. There were coilings in the dark, luminous bodies turning there.
He had been able to make love to her satisfactorily, drunk as he had been. At least, it had seemed satisfactory to him. But, then, he probably hadn’t been the most stringent of judges at the time. He was trying to remember her name. The need to remember developed urgency as her breathing told him that she wasn’t sleeping. Her eyes, opening lazily on him, bright blue, became an accusation.
‘I have to go,’ he said.
‘I didn’t know that,’ she said softly. ‘I didn’t know that writers were on call as well. Like doctors.’
The accent was American. Had she had it last night? She smiled. He caught her mood.
‘People don’t know the half of it,’ he said. ‘My life’s not my own. Us linguistic paramedics have it hard. The language would grind to a halt if it wasn’t for us.’
She shifted slightly. The heavy movement of her breasts made radar contact with his loins.
‘So what is it?’ she said. ‘Emergency parsing?’
He stroked her arm.
‘What it is,’ he said, wishing he could think of something to sustain the levity. ‘I’ve got to deliver a mixed metaphor. Seems to be a tricky one. Sounds like a breech birth. The writer’s in agony. Coffee?’
‘That would be nice.’
She lay watching him as he got out of bed and put on his boxers. He was self-conscious before her eyes, hoping that what had been posing as a battering ram during the night hadn’t turned into a toothpick. He paused on his way out of the bedroom.
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘How do you take it? The coffee, I mean.’
‘Black, no sugar.’
‘Interesting social inversion, isn’t it? I know how you take sex but not how you take coffee.’
‘Well,’ she said, smiling at him. ‘Some of the ways.’
‘There’s more?’
‘Hm.’
‘May I study long at the encyclopedia of your body.’
‘You certainly passed first grade,’ she said.
He saw his kitchen with a stranger’s eyes. It was a shambles. He found it hard to believe that such a small place could contain so much untidiness. Had she been in here last night? He wondered what could possibly have been the point of stacking these empty milk cartons neatly on the draining-board. He understood when he raised the lid of the bin and found it full to overflowing. He crumpled up the cartons and stuffed them ineffectually into the bin. The lid wouldn’t shut properly.
He turned around vaguely in the kitchen, wondering where to start, and saw that there was no way he could finish until he had a spare day to work with. To hell with it. Presumably she had found him out already. Caliban in his cave, living among the debris of his loneliness.
Boiling the water for the coffee, he remembered her name. She was called Mary Sue. She came from New York. He was troubled about something. Staring out of the window, he located it among the leaves of a sycamore tree outside, as surely as if it had been sitting there like a bird, watching him. That was it. He felt too much at ease with her too quickly. Hers was an effortlessly comfortable presence to be in. It was like having known each other already and they had just been waiting for circumstances to get round to introducing them, exchanging names.
The feeling was so strong that he was tempted not to go to Cannamore. That was ridiculous, surely. Decisiveness gelled with the coffee-grounds in the water. He was going, all right. Last night was fine. It was a sweet short story. Why try to turn it into a novel?
When he brought the coffee through, she was sitting in her bra and pants, freshening her makeup. He regretted that. He liked the way she had wakened, with her eye-shadow lewdly wrecked. Courtesan was turning into housewife.
‘Is this all you want?’ he said.
She eyed him questioningly over her compact.
‘More is possible?’
‘Well,’ he said, ‘I could scrape the mould off some bread and toast it. Or there’s a chocolate biscuit through there we could break with an axe.’
‘I’ll forego the breakfast menu,’ she said, taking the coffee. ‘Thanks.’
‘You’ve obviously seen my kitchen.’
‘Only
