About a week after I'd moved in, I came home to find Marsha chatting on the front doorstep to a tall fellow with a blond buzz-cut and dark glasses. He was clean-shaven and tanned, but with limbs that were way too long for his torso, and an unexpectedly sharp angle to his jaw that prevented him from being merely good-looking.
Lucky old Marsha, I thought.
'Here she is now,' she said as she spotted me. 'Clare, let me introduce you to our downstairs neighbour, Mr Walter O. Cheeseman. Take a good look at him while you can; it's not often he's around.'
Walter Cheeseman and I shook hands. He had the firm, dry, confident grip of someone who regularly pressed flesh for a living. 'Pleased to meet you,' he said. The accent was American. I liked the look of him, and feeling playful and confident after one of my liquid lunches with Dirk and Lemmy, asked what the O stood for.
Walter Cheeseman grinned, displaying a set of preternaturally perfect teeth. 'An old cultural reference,' he said. 'Won't you guess my name?'
'Oscar?'
He shook his head. 'A film reference.'
'Oliver…? Osbert…?'
He shook his head.
I'd run out of Os for the time being. 'So what is it?'
'Nothing,' he said.
'Go on,' I urged coquettishly. 'Tell me.'
'The O stands for nothing,' he repeated. 'Like Roger O. Thornhill in North by Northwest.'
In my lightly plastered state, I wasn't listening as closely as I should have been, but I knew I'd seen North by Northwest. It was a thriller by Alfred Hitchcock, who'd been one of my favourite film directors until Sophie had convinced me that thrillers were stupid and adolescent and couldn't hold a candle to arty costume dramas adapted from classic works of literature. I vaguely remembered a scene in which James Stewart dangled from the Statue of Liberty's torch, but I couldn't remember any names beginning with the letter O.
I asked Walter if his name was Ogden or Ozymandias. 'It's something too embarrassing to reveal in public, isn't it?'
Walter was very patient, though his grin had slipped a couple of notches. 'It's nothing!' he shouted, no doubt hoping that by raising his voice his words would penetrate my thick skull.
I jumped, and he lowered the volume apologetically. 'My mother thought middle names frivolous. She favoured a return to wholesome, apple-pie, middle-American nomenclature. But I was determined to be rich and famous. I was going to have monogrammed shirts, like the Great Gatsby, and I was damned if I was going to have them monogrammed with the letters WC.'
'Whereas with the O,' I pointed out, 'you're WOC.'
You could still see traces of that grin, but now it was more than a little frayed. 'Nice meeting you Clare,' he said in a resigned tone. He nodded farewell to Marsha and started down the steps to the basement.
I had no intention of letting it go at that, so I called after him, 'I understand you're a film director.'
Walter Cheeseman looked back, surprised and (I thought) a little pleased. He glanced at Marsha. 'You understand correctly.'
'I'd love to see some of your films,' I gushed. 'Can I get them on video?'
'I told you she'd be interested,' said Marsha.
'As a matter of fact, yes,' said Walter. 'They are all on VHS, though I'm afraid it's the American format, otherwise I'd certainly lend them to you.'
He frowned slightly, as though working out a complicated equation in his head. 'However, if you have an afternoon to spare, you're more than welcome to come down and watch them on my equipment.'
'I'd like that,' I said. I thought Walter O. Cheeseman was a little bit weird, but quite dishy. Maybe he was just the ticket to help me get over Miles.
'Good,' he said. 'Better make it soon, though. I can't stick around too long.' He gave me one last grin, this time making no effort whatsoever to inject it with warmth, and clattered down the steps.
Marsha playfully whacked me between the shoulder blades as we went into the house. 'Go for it.'
'He's strange.'
'He's American,' said Marsha.
I wondered if Sophie had run into Walter before she'd been dispatched to the continent. Probably not; Sophie hadn't been out and about much after her breakdown, and now she wouldn't be back for another week. With a bit of luck, and some canny manoeuvring, I would have established a substantial head-start with Walter Cheeseman by the time she returned.
In the meantime, there were a few things that needed to be sorted out. One of them was the bathroom. I was having problems with it.
It didn't help that there wasn't a window. Now that Lemmy had fixed the wiring, it wasn't just the light that came on when you tugged the cord; it also started the death-rattle of an old extractor fan. It was so loud I'd almost had a heart attack the first time it had throbbed into action. It was so loud it drowned out the radio when I was in the bath.
But, in truth, the bathroom was so depressing with its chipped tiles and yellow walls and flourishing arachnid population that I spent as little time in there as possible. Lemmy had managed to get the ancient immersion heater working, but it was on its last legs, and though tubfuls of water were a possibility, they usually turned out more tepid than hot, and I had a horrid suspicion that the ventilation had been worked out by someone who thought carbon monoxide poisoning was something you got from chewing typewriter ribbons. Most of the time, I found it more convenient, not to mention safer, to use the showers after my sessions at the swimming pool.
It wasn't just the tiles in the bathroom that were cracked. There was also that crack in the mirror, an emphatic fissure that ran diagonally across the middle, so that it was impossible to look into it without seeing your face split into two halves which didn't quite match up at the edges. It could have been the cover design for a book about schizophrenia.
That mirror gave me the heebie-jeebies, and not just because it was impossible to forget what had once happened in front of it. One night, while I was brushing my teeth, I had the distinct impression that each half of my face was following its own separate game-plan. I'd already removed my glasses in readiness for bed, so I had to squint at the reflection to bring it vaguely into focus. One half of my face was drooling liquidised toothpaste over my chin like a rabid dog; the other was wreathed in yellowish shadow and scrutinizing me through brown eyes so dark and narrow they appeared almost black.
Normally, I wouldn't have worried. Except that my own eyes were blue.
It was a trick of the light, of course. The eyes in the mirror were not brown at all. How could I have thought that? I shifted on to my other foot and squinted even more, and — sure enough — the mirror reflected back eyes that were very definitely that insipid baby blue I despised so much.
After that, I tried to replace the cracked mirror with something more wholesome and flattering, but it had been fixed to the wall with some sort of superglue. I tried to pry it off with the corner of a metal ruler, but only succeeded in chipping one of the bevelled edges.
There was nothing for it but to let it stay there, though from then on I looked into it as little as possible. For putting on make-up, I switched to a magnified shaving mirror in the bedroom. And the market yielded a full-length looking-glass for the living-room; it was a scruffy old thing in need of resilvering, but it served its purpose.
They were useful, these new mirrors, and not at all frightening, but even so I didn't gaze into them any more than I had to, especially after dark.
One lunchtime I met up with Dirk and Lemmy and, even though I hadn't been intending to have the bathroom painted just yet, offered them another twenty-five quid to go over the yellow walls with a roller and some white paint. It wasn't a lot of work. They'd be able to knock it off in a day. I was confident they would say yes, so it was something of a shock when they both stared mournfully at me and, in unison, shook their heads.