got to get the kids out. And Bob. That’s the trouble,’ she mumbled, more to herself than to me.
I sat in silence, waiting for her to work it out. Women like her always have some drama or other. Just as I was wondering if it would be rude to signal Hanna to bring the bill, Angela leaned back in her chair, rubbed her face and heaved a great sigh.
‘You’re right, I can’t get involved,’ she said.
I inclined my head, and caught Hanna’s eye.
Angela pinched the bridge of her nose and huffed again. ‘Fuck.’
The expletives that pepper today’s conversations are particularly unsavoury, so ugly and unimaginative, although it was more the repetition that bothered me than the word itself. Angela’s curses were so frequent that they were like punctuation points, each one provoking a twinge of distaste, a sourness in my mouth and hers. Her speech was as sloppy as her scuffed shoes. I picked up my bag and put it onto my knee, ready.
Hanna brought over the bill. As she put the saucer down in front of us, she briefly squeezed Angela’s shoulder, but before I could decide what the gesture meant, Angela tweaked the paper between her fingers. ‘I’ll get this.’
I shook my head, ‘Oh no, please don’t,’ fumbling coins out of my purse. Angela waved them away, ‘No, go on. I barged in on you, it’s the least I can do.’ She slapped a five-pound note on the table and gave a hovering Hanna the thumbs up.
‘Well, there was no need. No need at all. But thank you.’ I stood up, feeling awkward as always, on the cusp of conversations. Beginnings and endings, I’m never sure how they should go. ‘Er, goodbye then. Hope you manage to … sort it out.’ But as I backed away, she grabbed her bag and slid out of her chair. ‘I’ll walk with you, I could do with the fresh air.’ I muttered an oath of my own.
Angela lit up again as soon as we were outside, inhaling her ‘fresh air’, head back and eyes closed, the bruise on her cheek already darkening. She turned to me, smoke curling out of her flared nostrils.
‘Where is Arthur?’
I nearly stumbled, so discomfited – and offended – by the question that for a while I didn’t reply. There was something disturbingly direct and intense about her.
‘He lives with his father, my son. In Australia. They moved out there three years ago.’ The words had to be choked out, everything in me rebelled against them. Angela stared at me for a second, then turned and kicked a fallen leaf.
‘That’s some tough shit,’ she said. ‘What’s he like?’
The marble was back in my throat. ‘He’s four. He likes Lego, and football, and Batman, and all the usual things a boy of his age likes, I suppose.’ I stopped, then found I couldn’t. ‘I don’t see them often, but when I do … He’s busy. Always playing, running, fighting. He hardly ever sits still, he’s just fizzing with energy all the time, so when he does stop, you want to … pin him down, moor him somehow. It’s so hard to keep up with him. But I want to. I want to keep a version of him at every age. He just keeps getting better and better. But I miss all the babies and boys he was, and want them all back.’ I tailed off, embarrassed.
Angela nodded slowly. ‘Yes, it’s like that, isn’t it?’
‘What’s Otis like?’
‘Such a sweet boy,’ she said. ‘Nothing like me. Nothing like his father either, thank Christ. There’s no side to him, no edge at all. I get scared sometimes, by the love. I used to be hard as nails – had to be, doing what I do – but he’s taken it out of me, made me soft. Like when you bash a steak.’
‘Tenderized,’ I said.
‘That’s it. He’s tenderized me, the little sod. I’m no bloody good at my job any more.’
I still didn’t like her much, but she had Otis and I had Arthur. ‘Sylvie said you’re a journalist?’
‘Yeah, but freelance, so you’re always hustling for the next thing.’ She switched into interrogation mode again. ‘You’re retired, right? What did you do?’
‘I was a librarian. Before I had children.’
‘They’re closing all the libraries now,’ she said glumly.
‘Well, this is me,’ I said, my hand on the gate.
Angela looked up. ‘Fuck me, the whole house? I’m just down the road, but in the top-floor flat. Postage stamp. You’ve got the whole house?’
‘We bought in the sixties. The area wasn’t quite so gentrified then.’ I thought of the riots, the strikes, the burglaries. The rubbish piling up in the street. We’d been pioneers.
Resigned to the fact that Angela wanted to come in, I made a last stand all the same. ‘Where’s Otis?’ I asked, hoping she’d remember she had to go and pick him up.
‘He’s at the childminder’s,’ she murmured, still gazing up. ‘The whole house. Jesus.’
Unlocking the front door, I could sense her behind me, hopping from foot to foot in anticipation. Pushing it open, we stepped inside.
The first time I went into that hallway was back in 1964. Heavily pregnant, and daunted by the wide sweep of stairs, I’d waddled left and discovered the most charming drawing room. A huge bay window sent sunlight flooding through, casting rays along the varnished floorboards; dark and light, dust particles rolling in the shafts as I wandered between them. Unfurnished – the previous owner had died and evidently the relatives had swooped in and snaffled the lot – it was a blank slate. While Leo argued with the agent about damp, the house whispered to me that it was mine.
Nowadays, of course, people would move in and immediately gut the place, stripping out and paring back so they can fill it all up again. New owners are so keen to ‘put their stamp on things’ – such an aggressive term, as if a house can be branded with one’s personality. We preferred to let the building’s own character shine through and didn’t change a thing, apart from re-painting one of the bedrooms for the baby. In fact, beyond general maintenance, it was still the same as it was just after Miss Edith Crawshay passed away in it.
‘Shit a brick,’ said Angela, seeing the kitchen. ‘This is a fecking time warp.’ It was rather outmoded, I suppose – the cabinets dated from the fifties. There was an Aga, which seemed incongruous in a city house, but it worked perfectly well, and to demonstrate, I put the kettle on the boiling plate. Angela had already prowled off. I scurried after her, keen to stop her before she reached …
Leo’s study. The door was already ajar. How dare she barge into my house and take stock like this? But as I opened my mouth to berate her she turned and her face was so transfixed with wonder it brought me up short.
‘Oh, Millicent,’ she breathed. ‘This is fabulous.’ She was stroking Leo’s John Milton reverently. ‘It’s a treasure trove. Look!’
‘It’s my husband’s,’ I said, taking it off her and putting it back on the shelf.
‘Some collector,’ she observed, unabashed, wandering over to his still-dusty Dickens collection. ‘Is this him?’ she stopped by his desk to pick up a photo of us, taken shortly after we were married.
