Pat had not expected this. He had issued the invitation, after all; she was not self-invited. “I’m sorry,” she said lamely. “I’m sorry. We’d arranged . . .”
Peter shook his head. “Of course, of course. We’d arranged it. I’m so damn stupid. Come in.”
“If it’s inconvenient . . .”
He reached out and gripped her forearm, pulling her in.
“Don’t be silly. I was doing nothing anyway. Just come in.”
She entered a hall, a large square room of similar propor-tions to the hall of the flat in Scotland Street. This was in markedly worse order, though, with scuffed paintwork on the doors and skirting boards. The floor, which was sanded, was made of broad Canadian pine boards, covered in part by frayed oriental rugs; the planks were uneven, and caused the rugs to rise in small ridges, like tiny mountain ranges.
“This flat belongs to somebody who works in Hong Kong,”
said Peter, waving a hand behind him. “An accountant, or something like that. He’s mean. He never fixes anything, but the rent isn’t too bad and it suits us. I’ve been here over a year.”
“How many do you share with?” asked Pat.
“There are three of us,” said Peter, pointing to a half-open door off the hall. “That’s the biggest room. Joe and Fergus live in that. And that’s my room over here. We’ve got a sort of sitting room, but it’s a tip and we hardly ever use it.”
Pat looked at the half-open door. Joe and Fergus. Then she remembered. When she had seen Peter at the Film Theatre he had been with another young man, a boy who had stared at her while Peter had whispered something to him. I’m naive, she said to herself. I’ve missed the obvious.
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Peter gestured towards the door of his room. “Are you easily shocked?” he asked, smiling as he spoke.
Pat thought quickly. She was not sure what to expect, but who could admit to being shocked these days? “Of course not,”
she said.
“Good,” said Peter. “Because it’s a bit of a mess. If I’d remembered, I would have tidied it up before you came.”
Pat laughed. “I’m a bit untidy myself.”
“Well,” said Peter. “That may be, but . . .”
They went into the room, which was dimly lit by a single reading lamp on the desk near the window. The curtains, made of a heavy red brocaded material, were drawn closed, but did not quite meet in the middle. A thin line of orange light from the streetlights outside shone through the crack.
Pat glanced about her. There was a bed in the corner, covered with a white counterpane, made, at least, unlike Bruce’s bed, which was usually in a state of dishevelment. Then there were two easy chairs with brown corduroy slipcovers; the seat of one of these was covered with a pile of abandoned clothing – a shirt, a couple of pairs of socks, some unidentified underclothes and a pair of jeans. Peter reached down, bundled the clothing up and stuffed it in a drawer.
“This isn’t a mess,” said Pat. “Bruce – my flatmate – has a far messier room.”
Peter shrugged. “Every so often I have a blitz on it. But the vacuum cleaner’s bust and it’s difficult.”
“You could borrow ours,” said Pat. She spoke quickly, and immediately wondered whether this was the right thing to say.
It was as if she was offering to clean up for him, which was not what she intended.
“We’re all right,” said Peter, pointing to one of the chairs and inviting her to sit down. “We get by.”
Pat sat down and looked at the walls. There could be clues there, just to confirm. A picture of . . . who were the appropriate icons? She realised that she was not sure. There was a poster above the bed, a film poster of some sort; but it was for a Japanese film and she had no idea what that signified.
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And above her head, behind the chair, was a framed print of American Gothic, the Midwest farmer, pitchfork in hand, and his wife, standing grimly in front of a barn. Again, that conveyed nothing, except some sense of irony perhaps.
Peter rubbed his hands together. “I’ll go and make coffee,”
he said. “How do you like it?”
Pat told him, and he went off to the kitchen, leaving her alone in his room. Once he had gone, she looked at his desk. There was a pile of books – a Jane Austen novel, a book of critical essays, the Notebooks of Robert Lowell, a dictionary. Behind the books was an open file into which what looked like lecture notes had been inserted. She rose to her feet and went over to the desk. Yes, they were his lecture notes. He had written the title of a lecture at the top: Social expectations and artistic freedom in Austen’s England: Tuesday. There was a pile of papers on the edge of the desk – a couple of opened letters and what looked like an electricity bill.
She moved the letters slightly; of course she would not read them, she was just looking; a foreign stamp: Germany. And underneath the letters, two or three photographs, turned face downwards. She hesitated. She should mind her own business; one did not go into another person’s room and look at his photographs. But at least she could examine the writing on the back of one of them, the photograph on top of the pile. It was not very distinct, as the ink had smudged, but she could just make it out. Skinny-dipping, Greece, with T.
Pat looked over her shoulder. She should not look at his private papers – they were nothing to do with her. But then, he had invited her into his room and the photographs were lying around and how could anybody resist the temptation to look at a photograph with that inscription written on the back?
If you left photographs lying about then you were more or less giving permission for people to look at them. It was the same as sending postcards: the postman was entitled to read them.
And Pat was human. So she turned the photograph over and looked.
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49. Australian Memories
Holding two cups of steaming coffee, Peter came back into his room. “I don’t have anything else to offer you,” he said. “Not even a biscuit. We often run out of food altogether. And I find that when I buy some, Joe and Fergus eat it. I’m not sure if they know what they’re doing. They just eat it.”
Pat was not hungry, and did not mind. Peter had made real coffee, she noticed, and it smelled good, like strong . . . strong what? Coffee was complicated now, with all those americanos and mochas and double skinny lattes with vanilla. This was a bitter coffee, which Pat liked, and made for herself in the flat, although Bruce always turned his nose up at it. Shortly after she had moved in, Bruce, uninvited, had taken a cup of coffee from her cafetière and had spat it out after the first mouthful.
But Bruce was Peter’s polar opposite – unsubtle, uninterested in literature (he had once asked if Jane Austen was an actress), and quite without that willowy charm that Peter had in such abundance. She reflected briefly on this, and ruefully too, because she was now sure that Peter had nothing more in mind than casual friendship. How naive she had been to imagine otherwise: he was far too handsome to be interested in girls. There was that quality of sensitivity, that look in his eyes that told her, and everybody else who cared to look for it, that he understood, but, at the same time, that he was elsewhere.
Peter sat on the bed; she sat on the chair from which the pile of clothes had been moved. He sat there, with his bare feet on the counterpane, his cup of coffee cradled in his hands; she sat with both feet on the ground, her cup of coffee sitting on the table beside her. For a few moments they looked at one another. Then Peter smiled, and she noticed his teeth, which were perfectly straight, either by nature, or through the efforts of orthodontists. There was something familiar about these teeth and she struggled to recall what it was; then she remembered – Pedro, the doll whom she had loved so much, had had teeth painted on the fabric of his face, and these teeth were 162 Australian Memories