touching the polished metal handle, wondering where I would end up if I stepped inside and let it take me along.
‘Are you hungry?’ Lisa was asking, watching my hand hovering. ‘I’m afraid there’s not a lot in there, I’m not much of a kitchen person really, it’s just that we bought it jointly and I didn’t want Baz to end up with it. He only used it to keep those little vodka or champagne bottles in, you know, from when everyone used to stand at parties drinking through straws. But I’ve just got some stuff from the supermarket if you’d like …’
‘No. I’m not hungry.’ I withdrew my hand. ‘But I would like a cup of tea.’
She went on chattering and rummaging in cupboards for cups and tea bags.
‘Raspberry? Lemon and ginger? Peppermint?’
Gooseberry and leek. Tamarillo. Artichoke leaf.
‘Or there’s some ordinary.’
‘Ordinary would be good, thanks.’
When she opened the door of the TARDIS to take out the milk, I saw that it was empty except for a bottle of champagne and one of those pre-mixed packets of artful salad. We settled ourselves on a pair of steel-and-leather chairs at opposite sides of the kitchen table. Lisa lifted her cup, smiling at me again. She had grey eyes, neat features and lovely skin that seemed to have light shining through it like tissue paper stretched over a spotlight tube. I felt tired and colourless, and touched with envy. There was no point in envying youth, I reminded myself. It was a fact, vivid but perishable. You might as well be jealous of oranges.
‘Here’s to new neighbours,’ she said.
We drank to each other and then Lisa hitched her chin at our surroundings.
‘What do you think I should do with it?’
‘You could paint it all white.’
She gave this suggestion careful consideration, as if it was the most imaginative proposal she had ever heard.
‘Could do, yes.’ And then, with an abrupt switch of focus, ‘Are you married?’
I told her that I was and for how long, and that we had no children.
Lisa fixed her gaze on mine.
‘Do you mind not having children?’
‘I have learned to live with it.’
She stood up from the table and went to lean against one of the cupboards, and the TARDIS began a low humming as if preparing to relocate. When she moved, the curved wings of her shoulder blades shifted beneath her T-shirt and poignant knobs of bone showed under the skin at the nape of her neck. Her hair was pinned up today with a butterfly clip. She stood not quite looking at me, hesitating, and I waited for what she wanted to say. It was warm in the kitchen; Derek had this week fired up the big central heating boiler. We were snug in here. The heat and the hum of the refrigerator and the sense of enclosure that Dunollie Mansions always gave bred an impression of intimacy, as though Lisa and I were old friends who had momentarily lapsed into thoughtful silence.
‘I suppose that’s what you do. Learn to live with things, I mean. I wish I was any good at it. Can you learn?’
I shifted on my leather-and-steel perch. At once Lisa moved forward and poured more tea. She didn’t want me to leave yet, because she needed someone to talk to. I was a good choice, after all. I had gradually become someone who listened, rather than a creature who went out and did things.
I thought that Lisa Kirk was probably lonely. And that her loneliness might last as long as a nanosecond, before the next Baz came along.
‘Learn? I don’t know. It was just a lazy figure of speech. You accept what you are dealt, or you kick against it. The end result’s probably no different anyway.’
While she considered this Lisa groped on the floor beside her seat and found her handbag. She took out a packet of Silk Cut and lit one while I looked at the bag. It was made of chartreuse suede and shaped like a pineapple or maybe a hand grenade.
‘Like it? It’s my design. I make handbags, my own company. I’m opening a shop in Walton Street soon. We’re called Bag Shot.’
I had seen the name, possibly in a Vogue spread of witty accessories.
‘I do like it,’ I said truthfully. I was impressed. I would too readily have dismissed Lisa as merely a trust-fund babe or daddy’s girl, and now it turned out that she was a designer and a businesswoman.
She tipped the bag upside down and a heap of keys and lipsticks and ticket stubs fell out.
‘Here,’ she said and gave it to me.
I examined the cunning fastening of the hood and the bottle-green silk lining. The little golden label stitched to the inside said ‘Bag Shot by Lisa Kirk’.
‘It’s beautiful. You can’t just give it to me.’
‘Yes I can, I want to. God. Anyway, we were saying about learning to live with things, only it’s without in my case. Baz was my business partner, you know, he was the one who knew about start-ups and leases and money, and I just drew pictures of bloody handbags and chose stuff to get them made up in. We lived together as well, obviously. Ever since I was twenty-one. Work and play, me and Baz. And then it fell apart, like a piece of machinery suddenly worn out. He met a woman at a party, I was yakking and drinking but all the time I was really just across the room, frozen, watching them fall for each other like they were in a movie. And then, once that had happened, it got really difficult to go on working together, and … so.’ She spread out her hand, taking in the kitchen and the red refrigerator and ourselves, sitting facing each other across the table.
‘I see,’ I said. We sat in silence for a minute.
‘Baz’s new girlfriend is pregnant.’
‘Oh. When did all this happen?’
‘They met four months ago.’
‘That was quick.’
‘It was, wasn’t it?’
I clasped and unclasped the lid of the bag. ‘You know, you’ll find someone else. More quickly than you think, probably. I’m sure everyone tells you that. And you can find a new business partner too although that may be a bit more difficult. The requirements are more stringent.’
She smiled at that.
‘Maybe I won’t find anyone, on the other hand. I feel pretty useless.’
I told her what she probably expected to hear, that you don’t get your stuff featured in Vogue or fix yourself up in mansion flats in Kensington at her age if you are anything less them talented and able. We drank some more tea and talked a little about how Baz and she had worked together, and then about the flat and her plans to transform it once, as she put it, the shop was able to run itself around the block. She showed me round the rest of it and I saw that her bed – as narrow as a child’s – was in the little second bedroom that Peter and I used as an occasional spare room, and in the main bedroom with its good light was her drawing board, with big cork panels pinned with scraps of fabric and sketches and pages
