“I suppose it was just foolish of me to want to see if the basement has been changed.”
“Why did you want to see the house at all?”
“I don’t know. I just wanted you to see it. Often I used to wish it was just us two who were in the house. But I was very grateful for that basement when I came to London first. What do you think of it?”
“I think it’s a fine house,” I said.
I had a beer in the small local at the corner of the road, where she and Jonathan used to have a drink on Sunday mornings after walking in the gardens. Then we took the underground to Finsbury Park. Her flat was just seven bus stops from the station.
Cars were parked bumper to bumper on both sides of the road we turned into, the long rows of glass glittering each time the sun shone out of hurrying white clouds.
“There must be a home game,” she said. “We’re just a few minutes away from the Spurs ground. Both my landlords are fanatic Spurs followers,” and as if to support what she’d said a huge roar went up close by, followed by a deafening rhythmic pounding of feet on hollow boards, broken by a huge groan that led off into sharp definitive clapping. The whole little terrace was grey, the brick dark from smoke or soot, tradesmen’s houses of the nineteenth century, each house with a name plaque between the two upper windows in the shape of a cough lozenge. “Ivanhoe” was the barely legible name I made out as she searched for her key. A black and a grey cat met us in the narrow hallway.
“We have the house to ourselves. My landlords are on the Costa Brava. I’m looking after the cats for them. You should have heard all the feeding instructions I got before they left. The cats are their children,” she stroked the cats in the hallway but they did not follow us up the stairs. I listened to the baying of the crowd: indignation, polite appreciation, anxiety, relief, abuse, anger, smug satisfaction.
“I’m hardly ever here on a Saturday. I do my shopping and laundry round this time every Saturday.”
The flat looked as if it had been furnished from several junk rooms. There was a gas cooker, a gas fire, a circular table, armchairs of different shapes and colours, a corduroy sofa, a narrow bed against the wall. There was lino on the floors but what nearly broke my heart was the bowl of tulips, the fresh cheese biscuits, the unopened bottle of whiskey and the bottles of red and white wine, and even packs of stout.
“You have gone to far too much trouble,” I said into her shining eyes. “How did you come on this place?”
“I saw it in the paper. And the two men liked me. They thought I had a bit of class. Though they’re men they’re really married. George is all shoulders, masculine, deep voice. And Terry is the dreamy, flitty one, very so-so. They must have taken a whole case of suntan lotion to the Costa Brava. They’d make you die. I’m going to come back with a really sexy tan,’ Terry said. ‘And I’ll hold George’s hand when we go out to shop’!”
“Do they know you’re pregnant?”
“No.”
“Do you think you will have any trouble when they find out?”
“No. I don’t think so. They’re very nice. The house couldn’t be more quiet. And it’s cheap. I even save money now. Except they might want to adopt the baby, when they find out I’m pregnant, that’s the only trouble I can foresee. It’s the one thing in their line that poor Terry can’t do.”
She’d poured me a large glass of whiskey and sipped at a little white wine herself, sitting cross-legged on the floor.
“Does your family know anything yet?”
“No. And I don’t intend to tell them. If they did find out, they’d hold their big middle-class conference. A course of action would be decided on. And they’d arrive en masse to take over the show. I’d be whisked home or into a convent or something. Boy, would they be thrown. Nothing like this ever happened in the family before.”
“You won’t tell them, then?”
“Not until it’s over, if even then. As far as they’re concerned I’m on an artistic jag, seeking fame and fortune in the environs of Fleet Street.”
Her eyes shining, brimming with tears but smiling through them, she moved towards me over lino, a child rolling an orange across the floor. She leaned her face against my knees and when I put my arms round her I felt the sobbing.
“It means so much to me you’re here,” she said. I stroked her hair and rocked her quietly, glad of the burning whiskey numbing a confusion of feeling. Smiling apprehensively up at me through tears as if afraid of my reaction, she started to undo buttons, and then she took my penis in her mouth. Excited, I let my hands run beneath her blouse, teasing and globing the full breasts.
“We might as well go to bed,” I said as an enormous roar that sounded as if a home goal had just been scored rolled through the shabby room.
“You see, you can only notice for certain without clothes,” she said, but in the narrow bed she pushed me away, crying out angrily that I was using her to induce a miscarriage, “That is what you want anyhow.”
“If you think that, come on top,” I pulled her on top of me. “You can control everything. The bed is too narrow.”
“I’m sorry. I’m just nervous.”
A sudden swelling roar from the crowd reached a pitch when it seemed it must sweep to triumph, but with a groan it fell back, scattered in neat handclapping. My hands went over her shoulders, her back, her buttocks, her sweating: and I willed all sense down to living in her wetness like in a wound.
When it was over, feet stamping impatiently from the ground on the hollow boards, she said, “Sometimes I lie in this bed and just cry and think how did I ever get myself into this. And other times I’m just so happy that I don’t want to go to sleep. I think of the young life growing within me. I think how amazing it is. I’m giving another person the gift of life, of the sky and the sea and summer and the crowded streets of cities, everything that Man or God has made. And I can’t get over what a miracle of a gift it is to be able to give to anybody, what a gift it is to give, not only a whole garden in the evening but everything, can you imagine it, everything, just everything?” She raised herself above me on one arm so that her breasts and fine shoulders shone. What sounded like a final roar went up from the crowd, and then a general round of applause for what could have been teams leaving the field, broken by the odd coltish boo. “How can you deny that it’s wonderful?”
“Nobody can. No more than they can quarrel with the sea or the morning.”
“What’s wrong with you, then?”
“Nothing. I happen to think the opposite is true as well. It’s horrible as well as wonderful.”
“But that doesn’t matter. There’s nothing to be done about it.”
“It’s still the truth. I’d find it depressing if a place couldn’t be found for it on the committee.”
“Who knows the truth?”
“Nobody. The cowardly fall short of it, bravura tries to go beyond it, but they are recognizable limits and balances. We mightn’t be able to live with it but we can’t block it out either.”
“O boy, here we go again.”
“And it certainly doesn’t seem to be getting anywhere.”
“And I love you. I often cried out for you. Now I’m being selfish. I want to eat and drink you.”
I thought nobody could tell anybody that, and I listened to the loud street. Footsteps were hurrying past. Feverish discussions or arguments, tired and contented voices went past. Gar doors banged. Motors started. And then the clip-clop of a police horse came slowly down the street.
“What are you listening to, love?”
“A horse. It must be a police horse.”
“They’re always around on match Saturdays. That’s the crowd going home. They always make that much of a racket. You’d hardly get moving in the streets around here now and the buses are all packed. Especially when they’ve lost, they’d trample you down.”