‘You’re riding high, Ellie,’ Mr Belhatchet said and his voice seemed a long way away, although when she looked at him he seemed nearer and more beautiful than before. He was insane, she thought: there was beauty in his insanity. She never wanted to leave the vivid room above which and through which she floated, depending on the moment. She closed her eyes and there were coloured orchids.
Eleanor slept, or seemed to sleep, and all through her dreams Mr Belhatchet’s voice came to her, speaking about his mother. At the same time she herself was back at school, at Springfield Comprehensive, where Miss Whitehead was teaching Class 2 French. The clothes of Miss Whitehead were beautiful and the hairs on her face were as beautiful as the hair on her head, and the odour of her breath was sweet.
‘Mother died,’ said Mr Belhatchet. ‘She left me, Ellie.’
He talked about a house. His voice described a house situated among hills, a large house, remote and rich, with an exotic garden where his mother walked in a white dress, wearing dark glasses because of the sunshine.
‘She left me the little business,’ he said. ‘The pretty little business. Flair: she had flair, Ellie.’
He said he could remember being in his mother’s womb. She’d taught him to remember, he said. They read novels together. His mother’s hand took his and stroked the flesh of her arm with it.
He took off his shirt and sat in the embroidered chair with the upper half of his body naked. His feet, she saw, were naked also.
‘I loved her too,’ he said. ‘She’s back with me now. I can taste, her milk, Ellie.’
He was like a god in the embroidered chair, his bushy hair wild on his head, his pale flesh gleaming. His eyes seemed far back in his skull, gazing at her from the depths of caverns. Time did not seem to be passing.
In the house among the hills there were parties, he said, and afterwards quiet servants gathered glasses from the lawns. Cars moved on gravel early in the morning, driving away. Couples were found asleep beneath trees.
She wanted to take some of her own clothes off as Mr Belhatchet had, but her arms were heavy and in time, she guessed, he would take them off for her and that would be beautiful too. His eyes were a rare blue, his flesh was like the flesh of flowers. The room was saturated with colours that were different now, subtly changing: the colours of the trouser-suits and the purple of the sofa and the coloured threads of the embroidered chair and the green blinds and telephone. The colours were liquid in the room, gently flowing, one into another. People stood on banks of foliage, people at Mrs Belhatchet’s parties. Mrs Belhatchet stood with her son.
She would like to have children, Eleanor said; she would like to be married. She’d noticed a house once, in Gwendolyn Avenue in Putney, not far from where her bed-sitting-room was: she described it, saying she’d once dreamed she lived there, married to a man with delicate hands.
‘I love you,’ she said, knowing that she was speaking to that man, a man she had always imagined, who would marry her in a church and take her afterwards to Biarritz for a honeymoon.
‘I love you,’ she said again, with her eyes closed. ‘I’ve waited all my life.’
She wanted him to come to her, to lie beside her on the sofa and gently to take her clothes off. In the room they would anticipate marriage because marriage was certain between them, because there was perfection in their relationship, because in every detail and in every way they understood each other. They were part of one another; only death could part them now.
‘Come to me,’ she said with her eyes still closed. ‘Oh, come to me now.’
‘Mother,’ he said.
‘No, no –’
‘Up here you can be anyone, Ellie. Up here where everything is as we wish it.’
He went on speaking, but she couldn’t hear what he said, and it didn’t matter. She murmured, but she didn’t hear her own words either. And then, a long time later it seemed, she heard a voice more clearly.
‘The truth is in this room,’ Mr Belhatchet was saying. ‘I couldn’t ravish anyone, Mother.’
She opened her eyes and saw Mr Belhatchet with his bushy hair, still looking like a god.
‘My friend,’ she said, closing her eyes again.
She spoke of her bed-sitting-room in East Putney and the posters she’d bought to decorate its walls, and the two lamps with pretty jade-coloured shades that she’d bought in the British Home Stores. She’d said to her landlady that she was determined to make a home of her bed-sitting-room and the landlady said that that sounded a first-class idea. Her landlady gave her a brass gong she didn’t want.
In the room their two voices spoke together.
‘I put my arms around her,’ he said. ‘With my arms around her and hers round me, it is beautiful.’
‘It is beautiful here,’ she said. ‘The foliage, the leaves. It is beautiful in the garden of your mother’s house.’
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘I am waiting here for a tender man who wouldn’t ever hurt me.’
‘That’s beautiful too,’ he said. ‘Your clothes are beautiful. Your blue clothes and the pearls at your neck, and your shoes. We are happy in this present moment.’
‘Yes.’
‘We have floated away.’
They ceased to speak. Time, of which as they dreamed and imagined neither of them was aware, passed normally in the room. At half past six Eleanor, still feeling happy but by now more in control of her limbs, slowly pushed herself from the sofa and stood up. The floor swayed less beneath her feet; the colours in the room, though vivid still, were less so than they had been. Mr Belhatchet was asleep.
Eleanor went to the lavatory and when she returned to the sitting-room she did not lie down on the sofa again. She stood instead in the centre of the room, gazing around it, at Mr Belhatchet with bare feet and a bare chest, asleep in his embroidered chair, at the designs of trouser-suits and the pictures of limbs and bones. ‘Mother,’ murmured Mr Belhatchet in his sleep, in a voice that was a whisper.
She left the flat, moving slowly and gently closing the door behind her. She descended the stairs and stepped out into Trilby Mews, into fresh early-morning air.
Police Constable Edwin Lloyd found Eleanor an hour later. She was lying on the pavement outside a betting-shop in Garrad Street, W.1. He saw the still body from a distance and hurried towards it, believing he had a death on his hands. ‘I fell down,’ Eleanor explained as he helped her to rise again. ‘I’m tired.’
‘Drugs,’ said Police Constable Lloyd in Garrad Street police station, and another officer, a desk sergeant, sighed. ‘Cup of tea, miss?’ Constable Lloyd offered. ‘Nice hot tea?’
A middle-aged policewoman searched Eleanor’s clothing in case there were further drugs on her person.
‘Pretty thing like you,’ the woman said. ‘Shame, dear.’
They brought her tea and Eleanor drank it, spilling some over her pale blue suit because her hands were shaking. Constable Lloyd, returning to his beat, paused by the door.
‘Will she be OK?’ he asked, and his two colleagues said that they considered she would be.
In the police station the colours were harsh and ugly, not at all like the colours there’d been in Mr Belhatchet’s flat. And the faces of the desk sergeant and the policewoman were unpleasant also: the pores of their skin were large, like the cells of a honeycomb. There was something the matter with their mouths and their hands, and the uniforms they wore, and the place they occupied. The wooden seat was uncomfortable, the pages of a book in front of the desk sergeant were torn and grubby, the air stank of stale cigarette smoke. The man and the woman were regarding her as skeletons might, their teeth bared at her, their fingers predatory, like animals’ claws. She hated their eyes. She couldn’t drink the tea they’d given her because it caused nausea in her stomach.