thought of our tidy rooms below, static and silent at this time of day, and the way this web of Lisa’s uncertainty and tentativeness and peering into the future was exactly superimposed on them, not just on Mrs Bobinski’s. It made me feel as stiff as our decor.
We returned to the kitchen. Lisa picked up the bag and put it into my hands.
‘Thank you,’ I said.
She came with me to the front door and I looked through the diamond glass panels at the swimmy, distorted view of the hallway.
‘Would you like to have had children?’ she asked, with her hand on the latch.
I knew that she was only asking for whatever my answer might reflect on her own situation, on the baby her ex-lover was expecting that she believed should have been hers.
‘You’ll have a baby,’ I said as gently as I could. ‘You’ve got all the time in the world.’
‘But would you?’ she persisted, with the tactlessness of self-absorption.
I am used to deflecting these thoughts, but still I saw the pictures now, the queasy procession framed and frozen by the camera shutter, click, all the way back into history, click and click.
‘No.’
Her hand had dropped back to her side so I opened the door myself and stepped out into the hallway. We exchanged unspecific invitations to have a drink, or drop round for a kitchen supper. And then I went downstairs to the close air of our own flat where the supermarket carrier bags were waiting for me to attend to them.
Peter sat in his usual chair, with a whisky at his elbow. He had had a reasonable day, he said. Busy, and the Petersens people were a bunch of amateurs who couldn’t run a tap, let alone a software licensing programme, but nothing really to complain about.
‘And you?’
He looked across at me, arching his eyebrows behind the fine metal ovals of his spectacle rims. I told him about having tea with Lisa Kirk, and showed him the chartreuse hand grenade.
He examined it, inside and out.
‘Bit extreme, isn’t it? Do women really buy this sort of stuff?’
‘Yes, I think so. They probably pay about two hundred quid for it. She runs her own business and is about to open a shop.’
He puckered his lips in a soundless whistle, interested now. Peter was a management consultant, with expertise I couldn’t even guess at. He read and wrote reports in a language as impenetrable to me as Mandarin, and he too had a company, on the comfortable earnings from which we lived our sedate life in Dunollie Mansions. ‘Chalk and cheese,’ my mother said before we married, which was also not long before her early death from ovarian cancer. (My father and she separated when I was about twelve, and he married again and acquired a second family to which he and his new wife swiftly added. The Steps and Halves, my mother and I called them.)
Chalk and cheese Peter and I may have been, but we were determined to have each other. We were introduced by a photographer I knew who gave a drunken Christmas party in his studio, to which Peter was brought along more or less on a whim by the photographer’s agent. I remember looking across the room, through a sea of outlandish people who didn’t at the time look outlandish to me, and seeing his well-cut suit and the lights flickering off the shields of his glasses. He was the one who looked out of place in that company of Mapplethorpe boys and six-foot women. After a little while the photographer’s agent brought him across and introduced us.
‘Cary Flint, Peter Stafford.’
I remember that we talked about our fellow guests and a new book of our host’s pictures, and a Matisse exhibition we had both recently seen in the South of France. I had to work hard to sustain this cocktail party standard of chat. I was very thin at the time and taking a lot of pills, and felt speedy and mad. I was disconcerted by the way this man tilted his head towards me so as not to miss a word of my insane gabble, and I also saw the way that his hair fell forward over his temples and the mildness of his eyes behind his glasses, and my knees almost buckled with lust for him. The party was reaching its crescendo. Two boys were exchanging tongues under the ribs of the spiral staircase that also sheltered Peter and me. A procession of other models’ legs filed up and down past our ears and I noticed that he never even glanced at all this thigh and buttock because his eyes were fixed on me. I began to speak more slowly, although I had to shout over the noise, and all the time he watched my mouth with minute attention. Blood hummed in my ears, drowning the crashing music.
At last Peter took my glass out of my hand and put it down, reaching past the intertwined boys to do so.
‘Shall we leave now?’ he asked.
Outside, the cold air hit me in the face. My tiny party dress also exposed a length of bare leg and my coat didn’t cover much more.
Peter wrapped a protective arm round my shoulders.
‘It isn’t far to my car.’
I couldn’t even remember whether I had come in my car, let alone where I might have parked it. That was how I was in those days.
Peter’s turned out to be low, two-seater, quite old and with an interior of creased leather and glowing wood. I learned later that it was a Jaguar XK140. He always loved old cars and kept a series of them on which he bestowed almost as much affection as he did on me. He took me that night to a French restaurant in Notting Hill, old-fashioned but good, and made me eat whitebait and steak. I drew the line at pudding, although he wanted to order one for me. I hadn’t eaten a pudding or a slice of cake since I was fifteen.
Over the first course I confessed what I believed it was only fair for him to know from the beginning. If, in fact, there was actually going to be anything further, if this start didn’t turn out also to be the ending. There had been a few evenings of that sort, lately.
‘I am afraid that I am mad. Known fact. Crazy. Completely barking.’
He chewed his food, reflecting briefly on this idiotic announcement.
‘I think I will be the judge of that,’ Peter Stafford answered.
I ate as much as I could of my steak and vegetables, without making much of a dent in the portion, and all the time I could think of nothing but how soon we might be able to go to bed together. When he was finally convinced that I wasn’t going to eat tarte Tatin or chocolate soufflé, Peter shepherded me back to the Jaguar and drove me to his flat in Bayswater.
We kissed for the first time under the overhead light in the hallway. In his sitting room, standing beside the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, I reached around to the zip on the back of my dress and undid it. Slowly, I let the folds drop to the carpet. I was naked underneath except for my pants. He covered my breasts with his hands.
I kicked off one high-heeled shoe and then the other. Barefoot, I was closer to his height. He took my hand and led me into his bedroom, and closed the door behind us.
When he took off the last garment he knelt over me and looked.
‘Oh God, oh God,’ he breathed. After a beat of fear I realised that it was in pleasure and admiration, not dismay. I put my arms round his neck and pulled him down on top of me.
When we made love, Peter
