“You might pass a girl a towel.”
A dingy rag hung over the door. He tried to reach around her to drape it chastely over her shoulders, but she sunk into his body, soaking him.
“Brrrr. That’s cozy.”
“Fuckssake!”
She whispered into his ear: “The good news is if they claim I’m out and about I might as well go out and about. We might as well.”
Felix stepped back, got on his hands and knees and stretched an arm under the bath.
“According to them I’ve already been out. I’m in Heaven every night dancing it up with the Twinks, without my knowledge. Sleep-living. Maybe this is the start of a whole new life for me! For God’s sake, what are you doing down there? Oh, don’t be such a bore, Felix. Leave that alone…”
Felix re-emerged holding a silver-handled mirror from a fairy tale with four thick lines of powder cut along it, crossed by a straw, like a coat of arms. Annie stretched her arms out toward him with the wrists turned up. The veins seemed bigger, bluer.
“Not even lunch time.”
“On the contrary, that is lunch. Do you mind terribly putting it back where you found it?”
They stood either side of the toilet: the obvious gesture suggested itself. It would be one way of saying what he had to say.
“Put. It. Back. Please.” Annie smiled with all her showgirl teeth. Someone was knocking at the door. Felix spotted a wayward shiver in her eyelid, a struggle between the pretense of lightness and the reality of weight. He knew all about that struggle. He put it back. “Coming!”
She grabbed a silk Japanese thing off a hook on the door and slipped into it, folding one side into the other so as to hide a gigantic rip. It had a flock of swallows on the back, swooping from her neck down her spine to the floor. She ran out, shutting Felix in. Out of habit he opened the glass-fronted cabinet above the sink. He pushed the first row aside — Pond’s Cream, Elizabeth Arden, an empty, historic bottle of Chanel No.5—to reach the medications behind. Picked up a bottle of poxywhadyacallitrendridine, the one with the red cap which, if mixed with alcohol, had a manic-mellow buzz, like ketamine-laced Ecstacy. Worked very well with vodka. He held it in his hand. He put it back in its place. From the other room he heard her, suddenly strident: “Well, no… I really don’t see that at all…”
Bored, Felix wandered in and parked himself on an uncomfortable high-backed wooden chair that once graced the antechamber of Wentworth Castle.
“I barely use the stairs. It may be a ‘shared area’ but I don’t use it. My only traffic is the occasional deliveryman or friend coming up. Very occasional. I don’t go down, I can’t. Surely the people you should be talking to are the ladies downstairs, who, as we both know — I’m assuming you’re a man of the world — have people stomping up and down constantly. Up, down, up, down. Like Piccadilly bloody Circus.”
She stepped forward to demonstrate, with a finger, this popular right of way, and Felix got a glimpse of the man in the doorway: a big blonde, buff from the gym, in a navy suit, holding a ring binder that said Google on it.
“Miss Bedford, please, I am only doing my job.”
“Sorry — what’s your name? Can I see some sort of official…”
The blonde passed Annie a card.
“Do you have instructions to come and harass me? Do you? I don’t think you do, Mr. — I can’t possibly pronounce that name — I don’t think you do, Erik. Because I’m afraid I don’t answer to Mr. Barrett. I answer to the actual landlord — I’m a relative of the actual landlord, as in the lord of the land. He’s a close relative, and I’m quite sure he wouldn’t want me harassed.”
Erik opened his ring binder and closed it again.
“We’re the sub-agents, and we’re instructed to advise the tenants that the shared areas are to be improved and the cost split between the flats. We’ve sent several letters to this address and received no reply.”
“What a funny accent you have. Is it Swedish?”
Erik stood almost to attention: “I am from Norway.”
“Oh, Norwegian! Norway. Lovely. I’ve never been, obviously — I never go anywhere. Felix,” she said turning round, with a louche lean into the doorframe, “Erik is Norwegian.”
“Is it,” said Felix. He moved his jaw rigidly in impersonation of hers. She stuck her tongue out at him.
“Now Erik, is it Sweden that had all the recent trouble?”
“Excuse me?”
“I mean, Norway. Oh, you know, with the money. Hard to believe a whole nation can go bankrupt. It happened to my aunt Helen, but of course she was really asking for it. A whole country seems rather… careless.”
“You are speaking of Iceland, I think.”
“Am I? Oh, perhaps I am. I always get the Nordic ones sort of…” Annie tangled her fingers together.
“Miss Bedford—”
“Look, the point is, nobody wants to see this place tarted up more than me — I mean, we haven’t had a film crew here since — whenever that was — and that roof is crying out to be filmed from, it really is, it’s just absurd to leave it lying fallow. It’s one of the best views in London. I really think it would be in your interests to make the place more attractive to outside investment. You’ve been very slack indeed as far as outside investment is concerned.”
Erik shrank a little in his cheap suit. It didn’t matter what nonsense came out of her mouth, her accent worked a spell. Felix had seen it magic her out of some unpromising corners, even when the benefits people turned up, even when the police raided the brothel downstairs while a sizable bag of heroin sat just out of sight on her night table. She could talk anybody away from her door. She could fall and fall and fall and still never quite hit the ground. Her great uncle, the earl, owned the ground, beneath this building, beneath every building on the street, the theater, the coffee houses, the McDonald’s.
“The idea that a vulnerable woman who lives alone and barely leaves her apartment is required to pay the same amount as a group of ‘business’ ladies who entertain their male visitors approximately every eight minutes — I think it’s incredible. Stomp stomp stomp,” she shouted, and marched out a rhythm on the doorstep. “That’s what’s wearing the bloody carpet away. Stomp stomp stomp. Gentleman callers on the stair.” Erik looked over — a little desperately — at Felix. “That,” said Annie, pointing, “is not a gentleman caller. That is my boyfriend. His name is Felix Cooper. He is a filmmaker. And he does not live here. He lives in North West London, a dinky part of it you’ve probably never heard of called Willesden, and I can tell you now you’d be wrong to dismiss it actually because actually it’s very interesting, very ‘diverse.’ Lord, what a word. And the fact is, we’re both very independent people from quite different walks of life and we simply prefer to keep our independence. It’s really not so unusual, is it, to have—”
Here Felix jumped up, passed his hands around Annie’s waist, and drew her back into the room. With a sigh she wilted into the chaise and gave all her attention to Karenin, who looked like he considered it no less than his due. Erik opened his binder, detached a sheaf of papers and pushed them toward Felix.
“I need Miss Bedford to sign this. It obligates her to pay her share of the works that—”
“You need it right now?”
“I need it this week, for sure.”