I described to Alex what had happened.
‘Why didn’t you go on?’
‘I was afraid.’
‘Big girls don’t need to be afraid.’
Nineteen
‘Yes.’
‘May I speak to Jane Martello, please.’
‘Yes, what is it?’
I wasn’t in a good mood. This would be the fourth time in one morning that someone from the council had rung me about changes to the hostel. The next day, the committee was going to meet to give the go-ahead — or not — to the revised budget for a building that had already been so cut back, compromised and revised that I hardly wanted my name attached to it any more.
‘Jane, this is Caspar, Caspar Holt.’
‘What?’
‘It wasn’t necessary, but thank you for your postcard.’
It was the philosopher. I sat down, and breathed deeply.
‘Oh, yes, well, I wanted to apologise for my behaviour that evening.’
‘In the circumstances, I think that you behaved with aplomb. I wondered if you’d like to meet?’
Oh God, a date.
‘Um, fine, I mean, when did you have in mind?’
‘How about now?’
‘Now?’
‘Well, in half an hour, then.’
I needed to sort out the final details for the next day’s committee meeting, I needed to go to the office, I desperately needed to wash my hair. It wasn’t a good day; it was my day for a rush and a sour bad mood.
‘Give me an hour. Where shall we meet?’
‘Number thirteen, Lincoln’s Inn Fields. I’ll meet you outside.’
I didn’t manage to sort out the committee details or phone the office. But I did wash my hair.
He was standing outside wearing the same bulky tweed coat he had worn at the ICA. He was engrossed in a paperback book so I was able to observe him before he saw me. His hair was ash-blond, long, curly and swept back off his forehead. He had round wire-framed glasses.
‘Sir John Soane’s Museum,’ I said to him. ‘Is this where you usually take girls on their first date?’
He looked up in surprise.
‘Yes, it probably explains my luck with women. But it’s free and it’s like walking around inside a man’s brain.’
‘Is that good?’
He put his hand lightly on my shoulder as we went through the front door, and into the strange interior, the space extending into the upper floors and down into the basement. He steered me into a room that was painted a dark rusty red. There were strange objects, architectural fragments, archaic instruments, eccentric works of art on every surface.
‘Look at that,’ said Caspar, pointing out something shapeless. ‘That’s a fungus from Sumatra.’
‘A what?’
‘Actually, it’s a sponge.’
We walked on through improbably tiny corridors giving on to sudden even more improbable vistas, up and down, everything lined with a baffling array of objects.
‘Each room is like a separate part of the mind that planned it,’ he said. I noticed his hands were splashed with red paint at the knuckles, and his shirt collar was frayed.
‘Like a man’s brain, perhaps,’ I said.
He smiled. ‘You mean compartmentalised. Full of objects. Maybe. Maybe you’re right. It’s not a woman’s house, is it? I come here sometimes at lunchtime. I marvel at how a lifetime can be packed into a house. It’s such an introverted place, don’t you think? And extroverted as well, of course.’
‘Is this your standard lecture?’ I asked.
‘Sorry, am I irritating you?’
‘I was only joking.’
We went upstairs, into the high picture room painted green and deep saffron yellow. The winter sun flooding in through the arched windows illuminated the dull, rich colours; the room felt cool and grave as a church. We walked together along Hogarth’s The Rake’s Progress, all that savagery and anger. Caspar paused in front of ‘The rake in Bedlam’.
‘Look,’ he said. ‘By cell fifty-five, that man with a sceptre and a pot on his head, he’s urinating. Can you see the look on the faces of those two fashionable ladies?’
I peered at the grotesque scene, making out dim and writhing figures, and shivered.
‘It’s Bethlehem Hospital, Bedlam. It was in Moorfields, just outside the city wall. Hogarth’s father was in prison for debt, it made a great impression on him. Look at the face of that old woman on her knees, Jane, she seems only half-human.’
I watched his face, his steady grey eyes. I noticed how he used my name. It suddenly occurred to me that it had been a very long time since I had last felt happy. Standing with Caspar, in a house like a man’s brain, it was as if I was looking out from the gloom I had inhabited for so long, through a window, into a different kind of future: brighter. I could see views, sky. For a minute, I stood quite still, while hope clutched me. I caught his eye for a moment.
‘Hang on,’ he said. ‘I want to show you something.’
We descended the stairs again and crossed two rooms.
‘Look through there.’
I saw what looked like a totem pole made up of fragments from different columns. On it was carved the name ‘Fanny’. I turned to Caspar with raised eyebrows.
‘Yes?’ I asked.
‘That’s the tomb of the dog that belonged to John Soane’s wife. But it’s also the name of my little daughter.’
‘I thought Fanny was one of those names we can’t use any more.’
‘I’ve tried to revive it.’
‘Are you married?’
‘No. I live on my own.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be.’
Outside, blinking in the chilly light, we grinned stupidly at each other. Then Caspar glanced at his watch.
‘Lunch?’
‘I shouldn’t.’
‘Please.’
‘All right.’
We walked to Soho, past the delicatessens and the porn shops, and stopped at an Italian café-cum-restaurant. We had goat’s cheese half-melted on crisp toast, and green salad, and a glass of white wine each. He looked at my ringless hands and asked if I was married, and I told him I was separated. And I asked him how old his daughter was. She was five. Lots of people, he said, thought he was some kind of superman just because he did what hundreds of thousands of women did without anyone noticing them at all.
‘I didn’t know about love before Fanny, silly thing that she is,’ he said.
I told him about Robert and Jerome, how grown-up and tall they were, how they protected me, were always on my side, and he said he’d love to meet them one day. And then the possibility of there being a future to this, a ‘one day’, opened up before me and I felt dizzy and scared, and I lit a cigarette. I said I had to go. He didn’t try to stop me, just saw me to my bike and watched as I got tangled up with the lock and the helmet and wobbled off.