‘Have you tried calling her?’
He stares at the woman.
‘Well? You do have her number, don’t you?’
In the evening it starts to rain hard, lashing, stormy rain. He sits at his laptop and types ‘Danuta’, then ‘Polish’, then ‘London’, then ‘language school’, then ‘cleaning agency,’ and hits the return button, but he is offered a choice of an expensive maid service near Marble Arch or two escort agencies. There are some websites in Polish, but these are of no use to him, so he tries again, but this time for an image search. There appear to be many Danutas of all sizes and ages, but nobody that he recognises. Then it occurs to him that perhaps Danuta is not even her real name. He cut the conversation with the unfriendly woman short, for she clearly regarded herself as the commissar of the language school and there was nothing to be gained by arguing with such a woman. Once he abandoned the office hatch, and left the language school, he caught the bus to the library where he sat for nearly two hours staring at the door in the hope that she would walk in. He thought about simply asking the librarian if she had seen the strange Polish girl who usually arrived with a dictionary and a copy of the Evening Standard, but he worried that the woman might regard him as some kind of stalker. He was sure that the librarian would know who he was talking about, and if Danuta had signed up for a reader’s ticket then her real name and address would be on file, but by the end of his second hour of gazing at the door he had convinced himself that her ‘disappearance’ was not his problem, nor his fault, and he should just get on with his own life.
He tries another web search, this time typing in ‘Danuta’ and ‘Warsaw’ but again there is nothing. He logs into the wine warehouse site and types in his username and password. Clicking on past orders he deposits a dozen screwtop bottles of Sauvignon Blanc into his basket and then quickly checks out. She seemed to like this wine, and he wants to be ready. As he waits for the order to process, he stares out of the window into the black night where he can see that the few leaves that remain on the trees are now falling like confetti. The rumble of distant thunder is now complemented by lightning, which sporadically illuminates his living room, and he can hardly believe that a second storm is brewing.
The following morning the sun is out, although a stiff wind blows litter so that the empty crisp packets and plastic Coke bottles swirl crazily about the Acton street. He leans casually against the wall at the foot of the steps that lead up into the language school, and then he sees her. Danuta is walking slowly and is bent forward into the head wind. When she reaches the school he moves away from the wall and blocks her path.
‘I was worried about you.’
She looks up at him and scrutinises his face.
‘You didn’t show up yesterday. Neither here nor at the library. I was working on my own stuff but I was finding it hard to concentrate.’
She continues to stare at him.
‘Look, I’m not weird or anything, I’m just concerned. I care.’
‘Why should you care? Who are you to care?’
He puts his hand gently on to her shoulder, but she pulls her body away from him so that his hand now hovers foolishly in midair.
‘I know you’ve got your classes so why don’t I just see you back here at four o’clock. We can talk then, when we’ve both finished what we’ve got to do.’ He smiles in a manner that he hopes will put her at ease. ‘Okay?’
At four o’clock he hands her the travel-size umbrella, which is immediately blown inside out by the powerful gale. She lowers it and begins to struggle with the contraption, so he takes it from her and pushes it back into shape.
‘You can hang on to it like this and stop it from popping up on you.’
He places her hand in the right position, then folds his own hand around hers to make sure that she has the correct grip before quickly releasing both her hand and the umbrella.
‘Bloody hell, I can’t believe that it’s raining again.’
Rain is now trickling down her angular face, and her damp, unclipped, hair hangs limp.
‘You’re going to catch your death of cold in those clothes.’
‘I should go home. Tonight I must work.’
‘But I’m just down the road. At least come by and get dry before you go to work. You can wear some of my clothes while we put yours in the tumble dryer. Then you can get a minicab to work. I’ve got to go out tonight anyhow so I’ll just take the cab on.’
He stands in the darkness, his back against the trunk of a tall oak tree. He doesn’t know anything about flowers and plants, but many years ago an overly keen young supply teacher once tormented his class for a whole afternoon with silhouette shapes of various trees until they became imprinted on the pupils’ minds. The windows of the office building are illuminated like square portholes on the side of a ship. Occasionally a figure drifts into view, then retreats into the room and out of sight, but as yet he has not seen her. The security guard sits only twenty feet away in his small hut staring intently at a tabloid newspaper. The man is perusing the sports section, and so far he has turned only one page. Clearly the rest of the newspaper holds no interest for him. He guesses that this heavy-set man with a peaked cap set at a jubilant angle, and a blue blazer that appears to be bursting at the seams, is probably only a few years younger than him. He seems to have settled contentedly into his life as a watchman who does not watch, and the man probably has no ambitions beyond his weekly wage packet and his food being on the table when he gets home early in the morning. But who is he to feel superior? He envies the man who has organised his life so that he has no desire to elevate himself. The overweight guard is a Buddha of tranquillity in his heated shack, with a newspaper for company and silence all about him.
And then he sees her. She has a cloth duster in her hand and she is running it along the windowsill, first to the right, and then to the left, and then she disappears as quickly as she appeared. Once again the lighted box is empty. He cranes his neck, sure that she is going to appear in another window, but all sixteen are empty and for a moment he imagines that the building has in some way swallowed her whole. Perhaps she is in danger, but he cannot leave the safety of the tree’s shadow and show himself. Suddenly, in a window on the floor above, he sees a tall blond boy, and she joins the boy in the window and says something to him, and then as quickly as she appeared she is gone again leaving the blond boy by himself. And then he too is gone.
He is sure that this is the same boy that he saw her with the day before yesterday on the steps of the language school. In fact, the same boy he had asked her about only a few hours earlier when she came back to his flat to dry her clothes.
‘Your roommate is called Rolf?’
‘Is there something the matter with his name? Perhaps it is a popular name in Latvia?’
He didn’t know how to explain that to most people in England, Rolf is a strange Australian man with a beard and glasses who draws cartoons and sings kids’ songs very badly. He is a figure of fun from down under, a man who bears absolutely no physical resemblance to a tall young Latvian.
‘Rolf is harmless, but he has an interest.’ She paused as though expecting a response. Realising that none was forthcoming she continued. ‘In me.’
‘And do you have an interest in him?’
She looked momentarily startled and then she began to laugh, and although he understood that she was to some extent laughing at him he felt relieved that he had finally connected with her. He wondered if there were other buttons he might push that would encourage her to relax and perhaps believe that as a couple they were actually quite good together. But maybe he was the one who needed to unwind and take things easy. Obviously, to some extent, she trusted him. She had come back to his flat and accepted a large towel and gone into the bathroom and removed her clothes. She emerged with the towel wrapped tightly around her, and in her arms she cradled a damp pile of garments like a newborn child. He took them from her and tossed each article separately into the dryer.