‘Women’s group?’ Agnes had replied suspiciously. ‘Well yes, okay. Is that where you all sit around and talk about diets and boyfriends and things?’
At the time Nina had found this jest hilarious, and had had ample opportunity over the subsequent years to ruminate upon the possibility that Agnes might have meant it seriously.
It wasn’t long before the arrival of Merlin, a bouncing eleven-stone mathematician, completed their family group and even strengthened their commitment to one another. Many were the times Agnes and Nina concealed their quarrels for his sake, for he doted on them both. Merlin, although quiet and bespectacled, was possessed of the rare ability to make people like him with very little apparent effort on his part. This was possibly owing to a certain air of impartiality, an asocial, asexual calmness in his nature, which never failed to attract those beset by insecurities concerning their own frenetically social and sexual selves; who, it might be added, in those days of identity crises, constituted the great majority of his peers. While Merlin appeared not to mind his involuntary popularity, Agnes and Nina took it upon themselves to protect him from the wasteful wiles of moaners and whingers. They discouraged the distressed individuals regularly to be found taking up tenancy in his room; whisked him away from under the noses of those attempting to waylay him with their problems on his way to the library; and even, upon occasion, salvaged him from the jaws of women who, wounded by less liberated loves, sought to assuage their hurt in the safety of Merlin’s enlightened sensibilities.
So Merlin went unscarred, if uninitiated, through the three difficult years of weaning from adolescence; he frolicked untrammelled in Elysian groves of quantum mechanics and chaos, while Nina and Agnes dealt with the hard realities of English literature. They listened patiently, their hands dusty with medieval prose, their foreheads smudged with nineteenth-century hardship, while Merlin spoke sweetly of the frothy surface of time and the vexing disappearance of Schrödinger’s cat. It was not, then, without some surprise — and perhaps the smallest quantity of resentment — that as they emerged some years later into the harsh light and noise of a brutal London and anxiously watched Merlin take his first faltering steps, they clearly saw him break into a confident run straight into the arms of a multi-million-pound financial institution, a company car, and a salary for which Elizabeth Bennet would have left Darcy’s dinner burning in the oven.
Agnes and Nina listened nervously as Merlin debated the various advantages of living in Chelsea, Hampstead or Kensington, then took to reading the Hackney Gazette and the Acton Observer in the hope that such publications, if left lying around, might cultivate in him a taste for the distinctive flavour of the more modest boroughs. This practice, however, was short-lived, for as pleasant as the world seemed when reflected in the Merton Mirror, it offered little opportunity for gainful employment; although Agnes, it must be said, often spent illicit hours poring over their yellowed pages, lost in the twilit subterrene of out-of-date local intrigue and small-ads; of macabre deeds, petty thievery and sleazy domestic violence, of truth that was stranger indeed than the fiction of bombs, wars and global decay that she observed nightly. She read about a woman who left her husband’s corpse rotting on the sofa, claiming she didn’t know he was dead; a man who, catching his wife with a man he look to be her lover, shot them both and then shot himself; someone divorcing his wife after discovering she’d been feeding him cat food for the last ten years. ‘I was saving him money,’ the woman protested. ‘I used the extra to buy nylons, a bit of lipstick — you know.’
Agnes imagined them, these borough-dwellers, packed into honeycombed tower-blocks and desolate shopping malls, their territories orbiting round Belgravia and Knightsbridge and Soho like strange satellites round a mysterious sun. She was fascinated by their fearlessness. There were days when she sat until the afternoon died into darkness, her eyes raking the classified pages in search of she knew not what. Models wanted for mail order catalogue. Commis chef required. Earn hundreds from home — own transportation essential.
They ended up living in Highbury; or at least that was what Agnes said. Merlin, taking for his reference the nearest conurbation, said they lived in Finsbury Park. Nina said they lived in the Arsenal. What Nina’s claim lacked in glamour it made up for in accuracy: they did indeed live in the Arsenal, a tiny grid of quiet streets possessing an unusually parochial charm for what they all claimed was central London. The Arsenal, however, although dangerously near the borders, was undeniably in Agnes’s Highbury, and the two friends were happy to discover they lived in such close proximity. Alas, it was Merlin, insisting as he did on the windswept reaches of Finsbury Park, who dwelt in error; for though it was but half a mile away, this barren region of concrete and cast-iron, of clotting traffic and petrol-heavy air, of desolate pavements overrun with skulking dogs and whirling litter cyclones, of filthy strings of shops selling only what nobody wanted to buy, was — and on this Agnes insisted — a world apart.
The house belonged to Merlin’s uncle Dan, but Merlin’s preferment displayed scant consciousness of the time-honoured rituals of heirloom and inheritance. Dan deserted the property like a precipitant rat at the first sign of listing, when rumours of the street’s subsidence were still but rumours. The council had agreed to purchase the house at the end of a two-year period — by which time, they assured him with what appeared to be complacency, it was certain to be uninhabitable — and Dan was partially comforted to find in Merlin a tenant prepared to pay handsomely for the pleasure of witnessing the property’s decline. The proximity of the Arsenal football ground went some way towards recompensing Merlin for his pains, and although the value of this bonus had been calculated without his incumbent flatmates in mind, they at least were relieved that he seemed to have abandoned his dreams of security guards and private swimming pools.
What it lacked in elegant accoutrements the house made up for in symbolic value, for it was, after all, their first. Like its occupants, 14 Elwood Street was detached from its neighbours. Merlin claimed there was an exiled Cameroonian prince living in disgrace next door; but while Agnes and Nina had seen for themselves the broken windows, overflowing bins and constant stream of unsavoury visitors that paid testimony to the latter part of this statement, they had no evidence as to the veracity of the former.
Once Merlin had started his job, Agnes and Nina spent their days scrubbing and sweeping and purging like symbiotic housewives. Within a fortnight, however, Nina found a job on a local newspaper, which shifting of the household’s employment ratio meant that home improvements were relegated to weekends. While the democratic process exempted Agnes from days of lonesome toil, it did not see fit to replace this occupation with any more productive form of employment. She spent days wandering the streets of her unfamiliar home, and was eventually driven to go into different news-agents, buying three papers a day just so that she could talk to someone. On one of these social forays she encountered her next-door neighbour, the erstwhile prince of the Cameroons, rooting in his own rubbish bin as if in the hope of scavenging something that he, as a monarchist spendthrift, might have tossed away half finished.
‘Morning!’ Agnes called out, driven by pity and desperation to an attempt at human kindness.
The man looked up and stared at her. Presently, he grinned and indicated a battered lime-green Cortina parked outside the house.
‘Joy ride?’ he said. ‘Me and you?’
‘No thank you,’ said Agnes smartly as she walked on, chilled by this untimely encounter with derangement.