branches outside my window are spindly and bare, and Tilda stands across the room looking like a waif-woman, saying, ‘How can you stand it? All those broken fingers tapping at the glass.’ She’s opening the door, is halfway out. ‘Anyhow, I want you to come to Curzon Street this evening. I’m ordering Thai food and a DVD. Strangers on a Train. It’s an Alfred Hitchcock.’
‘I know that.’
‘Come about eight. There’ll be someone else too. Someone I want you to meet.’
The invitation sounds innocuous, but it isn’t. For a start, Tilda always comes to my flat for movie nights. Also, it’s unknown for her to introduce me to her friends. In fact, she rarely even talks about her friends. I can name only two, and those are girls she’s known since childhood. Paige Mooney and Kimberley Dwyer. I’d be surprised if she saw them more than once a year, so I’m curious and am about to say, ‘Who?’ but she’s leaving as she’s speaking, disappearing down the communal stairs.
At Curzon Street, I’m clutching my bottle of cider, knowing full well that Tilda won’t have cider. And I’ve brought brownies.
She’s waiting on the second floor, at the open door of her flat. Then she’s greeting me with uncharacteristic enthusiasm, kissing my cheeks, saying brightly, ‘Callie!’ Behind her a tall, fair-haired man is in the kitchen area, sleeves rolled up, busying himself with things in cupboards. He comes to say hello, holding out a thin hand, and from the way he stands, so firmly inhabiting his space, I realise that he’s accustomed to being there. Tilda gazes at him proprietorially, glancing at his hair, his shoulders, his bare forearms. She says, ‘Callie, meet Felix. Felix Nordberg.’
‘I’m opening a bottle of white,’ he says. ‘Will you have some?’
‘No, I’m fine with cider.’ I hold up the Strongbow bottle for inspection and take it to the kitchen counter, thinking that Felix seems to be in command of things. The kitchen, the wine. Then he starts asking me polite questions in a soft, moneyed voice that makes me think of super-yachts and private islands. Where do I live? Do I enjoy my work at the bookshop? I ask him about his work, which is for a Mayfair hedge fund.
‘I don’t even know what that means. Except that it’s a sort of gambling.’
He laughs. ‘You’re right, Callie. But our clients prefer to call it investing, so we humour them.’
I sense that he’s humouring me too, and I watch him pouring our drinks with precision, examining the label of a French Chablis, checking that the wine reaches the perfect level in the glass. And he’s careful with my cider, treating it like precious nectar, even though it’s in a plastic bottle with a gigantic red sticker saying £3.30. He hands Tilda her wine, and she flashes him a half-smile as their hands touch. Then Felix gets back to the kitchen cupboards, taking out plates and bowls, wiping them with a cloth and sorting them into piles, at the same time telling me how to short a market.
‘Think of it like this, I’ll sell you this plate for the current price of ten dollars, agreeing to deliver it to you in three months’ time. Then, just before the three months is up, I’ll buy-in a plate for nine dollars. You see? I’m betting that the plate market will go down and I’ll make a profit of a dollar.’
‘That’s an expensive plate.’
‘Felix likes expensive things,’ Tilda offers from her position at the end of the sofa. She’s decoratively arranged, her feet tucked up, hugging a velvet cushion with one hand, holding her glass with the other, and she’s observing us, wondering how we’re getting along.
I look at Felix, to see if he’ll say That’s why I like your sister, but he doesn’t. He just grins as if to say Got me there! and opens the cutlery drawer, taking out the knives and forks and polishing them. I don’t comment. Instead I ask Felix where he comes from, and how long he’s been in London. His family is from Sweden, he says, but he grew up in Boston, USA and considers himself to be a citizen of the world. I snigger at the phrase, and he tells us that he’s trying to get to grips with England and London.
‘What, queuing and minding-the-gap and apologising all the time, that sort of thing?’
‘Yes, all that. And the self-deprecation, and the way you guys make a joke of all situations, and find it difficult to accept compliments… Did you know, Callie, that those dark eyes of yours are enigmatic, soulful even?’
Feigning a serious expression, he looks right into my face and I feel embarrassed because he’s so handsome and so close to me. But I feel he’s including me in the joke, not laughing at me.
‘Whatever.’
I move away, hot-cheeked, and as I pour myself more cider, I think that he’s intelligent and funny and I like him.
Tilda says, ‘Come and watch the DVD,’ so I pick up my glass and head for the other end of the sofa, intending to recreate the movie nights at my flat, when we sit like that, at each end, passing brownies back and forth and making little comments like ‘Keanu Reeves looks sad in this,’ or ‘Look at the rain outside, it’s going sideways.’ Nothing that amounts to conversation, but enough to make things seem companionable, like we’re children again. But I’m too slow. Before I can establish myself, Felix has taken the space next to Tilda, making it obvious that I should be banished to the old armchair. So I flop down and put my feet up on the coffee table, while Tilda presses the start button on the remote.
Felix and I haven’t seen Strangers on a Train before, but we both like it, the chilling effect of the black-and-white, the clipped 1950s voices and mannerisms, and we all have comments to make as the drama unfolds. Tilda, being an actress, and some sort of expert on Hitchcock, chips in more than Felix and me. Hitchcock put his evil characters on the left-hand side of the screen, she tells us, and good characters on the right. I laugh. ‘So I’m evil, because I’m sitting over here, and you’re good.’
‘Except, silly, onscreen that would be reversed. So I’m bad and you’re good.’
‘I’m the most interesting,’ Felix says. ‘I’m in the middle, and can go either way. Who knows what I’ll do?’
‘Oh, look at Ruth Roman!’ Tilda’s suddenly distracted. ‘The way her lips are slightly parted, it’s so suggestive.’
I say, ‘Hmm,’ in a sceptical way, pouting, and Felix raises an eyebrow. But Tilda isn’t put off.
‘And Robert Walker is incredible as a psychopath. He does that clever thing with his eyes – looking so calculating. Did you know he died just after this movie, because he was drunk and his doctor injected him with barbiturates?’
‘The other guy is using his wrists,’ I offer. ‘He’s doing wrist acting’. Tilda laughs.
‘I like the plot,’ I say.
‘Patricia Highsmith… She wrote the novel that the film is based on.’
The idea is that two strangers on a train could swap murders. The psychopath with the calculating eyes offers to murder the estranged wife of the wrist-guy, if, in return, the wrist-guy will murder the psychopath’s hated father. The police will never solve the crime because neither murderer would have any connection to his victim. There would be no discernible motive.
‘It’s
