Since making her visits to Richard in Devon her life had been afflicted by two mundane problems: lack of time and lack of money. He actually knew very little of this, because in the early days he had been so suspicious of her excuses. Since then she had tried to minimize her problems to him, in the greater cause. He paid for everything he knew about: her travel expenses, the lodgings in Devon, car rental, meals whenever they were together, but these had very little to do with the central problem. She still had to find the rent, she had to eat, pay for heating, had to move around London, clothe herself.
Her working life had been thrown into chaos by her frequent absences from London. The studio seemed less and less inclined to commission work from her, because she had become unreliable, and she had no time to go out and look for alternatives.
The fact that she had supported herself for some years was a matter of considerable importance to her. It had always been precarious, but she had survived somehow. Independence and honestly earned income were identified in her mind with her growth away from Niall’s influence, three or four years ago, when she had started to reject his way of life.
But the temptations were constant because the solution was within reach. Niall had taught her the techniques of shoplifting, and she knew she could still use them. Her glamour was much weaker, but it was there to be used if she needed it. So far she had resisted it, and Richard knew nothing of the struggle she had waged.
When she told herself that her past was behind her, this was exactly what she meant. Petty crime was a negative function of the glamour, and it was the negatives that had ruined everything before.
They left the cafeteria and returned to the car. Richard carried his stick rather than used it, but he was walking with a limp. She watched over him protectively as he lowered himself backward into the passenger seat, then swung his legs one at a time into place. These efforts at normal movements touched her, and after she had closed the door on him she stood for a moment, staring vacantly across the car’s metal roof and remembering, briefly, a moment from their first affair when she had seen him running.
Soon they were back on the motorway, heading for London.
II
She found his apartment with some difficulty, in spite of his directions. She had always been scared of driving in London. After a wrong turn into a one-way system and several near misses with oncoming cars in the narrow back streets, she found the road and parked the car not too far from the front of the house.
Richard leaned forward and peered up through the windshield at the houses.
“It doesn’t seem to have changed much,” he said.
“Were you expecting it to?”
“It’s been so long since I was here. I somehow imagined it would look different.”
They left the car and went to the house. The main door led to a tiny hall with two more doors, one for the ground-floor flat and one for his own upstairs. As he fumbled with the key ring Sue watched his face, trying to judge his feelings. He revealed no expression, perhaps deliberately, and slipped the Yale key into the lock and pushed the door open. There was a rustling, scuffing sound and the door jammed briefly. He pushed again, and this time the door opened fully. On the floor at the bottom of the stairs was a huge pile of letters and newspapers, mostly newspapers.
He said, “You go first. I can’t step over those.”
He moved back to make room for her and she went in first, pushing the papers to one side against the wall. She scooped up as many of them as she could, and cradled them in her arms.
Richard led the way up the stairs, taking the steps slowly and carefully. She followed, thinking how strange it was to be here again, when for a time she had thought she would never even see Richard again. The place had memories for her.
At the top of the stairs he halted unexpectedly, and because she was right behind him she was forced to take a step down.
“What’s the matter?” she said.
“Something wrong. I can’t tell what it is.”
There was a frosted-glass window built into the wall beside the stairs, but because all the room doors were closed the landing at the top was in semidarkness. The flat felt chilly.
“Would you like me to go first?” she said.
“No, it’s all right.”
He moved on, and she followed him onto the landing. He opened one door after another, peering inside, then moving to the next. Apart from the kitchen and bathroom, immediately to the right of the top of the stairs, there were three main rooms. The doors were old-fashioned and paneled, stained dark brown, giving the apartment a dinginess that reminded her of childhood. She remembered his saying once that one day he would get around to stripping the doors and repainting them.
She went into the living room and dumped her armload of newspapers and letters on one of the chairs. The air in the room had that indefinable smell of someone else’s home, but there was also a sense of neglect, that the air had not changed in a long time. The curtains were half drawn, so she pulled them back and opened one of the windows. Street noises came in. On the sill in front of the main window was a sad row of house plants, all now dead. One of them was one she had given him as a present, Fatsia japonica, the castor-oil plant, but most of the leaves had fallen off and the single remaining one was brown and brittle. She stared at it, wondering whether to touch it and make it fall.
Richard walked in from the landing, looked around at the furniture, the bookshelves, the dusty television set.
“Something’s different,” he said. “It’s been moved around.” He swept his hand through his hair, lifting it away from his eyes. “I know it sounds crazy, but that’s what’s happened.”
“Everything’s the same.”
“No. I knew it was different as soon as we walked in.”
He swiveled around quickly, balancing his weight on his good hip, and went out again. Sue heard his irregular pace as he went down the thinly carpeted landing.
She was thinking about the first time she had been here, soon after they met. Because it was summer the room had been full of light, and the newly painted walls had seemed bright and refreshing; the same walls now looked drab and cold, needing some pictures or wall hangings to cheer them up. The whole flat wanted cleaning and reviving. It brought out domestic instincts in her, but the thought of doing housework for someone else was daunting. She was tired from the long drive, and felt like going out for a drink.
She heard Richard moving around in the next room, where he kept his pieces of antique film equipment, and she went in to talk to him.
“There’s a room missing, Sue!” he said at once. “Down at the end, next to the bathroom. There used to be a spare room!”
“I don’t remember that,” Sue said.
“I always had four rooms! This one, the living room, the bedroom and a spare. Am I going mad?” He went down the corridor and gestured at the blank wall at the end.
“That’s an outside wall,” she said.
“You’ve been here before … don’t you remember it?”
“Yes. But ,it was just like this.”
She went to him and squeezed his arm gently. “Your memory’s playing you tricks. Don’t you remember this morning, on the motorway, you said you were remembering the flat in two ways?”
“Yes, but now I’m here.”
He stumped away from her and limped down the landing. Sue wondered what she could say. Unknown to Richard she had had a private meeting with Dr. Hurdis the day before. The psychiatrist had gone to some pains to warn her that Richard’s restoration of memory might be only partial, in spite of what he claimed. Hurdis believed that there were still gaps, and that some misremembered details might be thought of as actual memories.