‘Why not? Just tell me why not?’
‘Ralph would kill me.’
‘I told you, he won’t find out.’
‘Of course he will. You’ll tell him. You won’t be able to resist it. I’ve been here before, believe me.’ She looked at him, not understanding, and he laughed. ‘So he didn’t tell you that, either? My, he has been discreet.’
‘Tell me what?’
‘Oh, just a little past naughtiness. It was a long time ago.’
He fiddled shamefacedly with a beer mat, and Francine suddenly saw it.
‘With his girlfriend?’ she said deliriously. ‘With — what was she called — with Belinda?’
‘Clever girl’ He smiled. ‘I fucked the love of Ralph’s life and he still goes to the pub with me. That’s friendship for you.’
‘Does he know?’ said Francine, victorious with information.
‘I told you, of course he does. First sign of a quarrel and out it came, whack over the head. And that was the end of that.’
‘What was she like?’
‘Ah, lovely,’ said Stephen wistfully. ‘But she was a bitch to Ralph. And so are you.’
‘Ralph and I are finished,’ said Francine. ‘I finished it last night.’
‘So you’ve finally freed the poor creature from your clutches?’ Stephen laughed. ‘About time too. Was he pleased?’
‘So there’s nothing to stop us.’
Through a fog of drunkenness she heard the shrill music of her voice. Stephen drew back slightly at the sound. She tried to soften herself, smiling and leaning towards him.
‘Look,’ he sighed, picking up his glass. ‘You’re a beautiful girl, Francine, but at the moment I need you like I need — look, I don’t want to get involved, OK? It’s too late for all that. So just drop it.’ He looked at the wine bottle. ‘This is empty. We might as well go.’
He stood up and began putting on his jacket. When Francine got to her feet the room whirled, listing like a flailing ship. Her thoughts spun with it, indecipherable, but through them she felt something hard and compelling, a wire drawn tight along which she appeared to be strung. Stephen draped her coat around her shoulders and she gripped his hand as he led her through the crowded tables and up the stairs.
‘I’ll find you a cab,’ he said when they were outside. ‘Come on.’
The night had grown black and the air was piercing, agonizing. As they set off towards the busy street Francine felt the drag of failure, and the penetrating cold shrank in seconds the heady dilation of the recent hours. She felt packed again with all the lumpy, ugly furniture of anxiety which had come in the past few weeks to clutter spaces which had once been bright and empty, and trapped amongst it a searing, hopeless consciousness of the fact that things were going wrong visited her. In that moment, as Stephen walked ahead, a violent flame of resistance coursed through her and consumed it all. She would not let this happen to her! Why, when every glance in the mirror told her, when every look and gesture confirmed it, when she knew — had been told time and time again! — that she could have anything she wanted, why then was nothing as she wanted it to be? How had she come to these doomed and darkened passages, so far from the world she knew; what had happened to her magic, the arts she had practised for as long as she could remember, the spells which she had known would one day conjure success? A wave of drunkenness washed over her, and she stood still as the alley blurred in her eyes. Everything seemed all at once rather muddled. A jumble of images churned and then settled thickly on her surface. For a moment all of her was gathered and a forgotten doubt began to revive and struggle in her, beating its wings. She was sick, sick of herself.
‘Come on, Francine,’ said Stephen, waiting for her up ahead. He turned and walked back towards her. ‘You’re a bit tanked up, did you know that? Decidedly squiffy, as my dear old mother would say.’
Francine watched his mouth moving. Who was he, standing there making fun of her, talking about his mother, when he should be begging to touch her? They all wanted her — they all said it, that she was the most beautiful, the most desirable, that they would do anything for her. She hated them all, all of them! And most of all she hated Ralph, who had ruined everything and made it disgusting! Stephen was close to her now. She felt a pressure across her shoulders and realized that his arm was around her.
‘Come on,’ she whispered, turning and pressing herself against him. She felt him recoil slightly and she pressed harder.
‘Jesus,’ he said, laughing and putting his arms around her. ‘What are you doing?’
Her face was almost level with his and she lunged forward, trying to insinuate her tongue into his mouth.
‘Christ, Francine!’
He twisted his head to avoid her as a group of people came loudly out of the bar and along the street. One or two of the women giggled as they passed and a man shouted something.
‘Who cares?’ said Francine. ‘Ignore them.’
‘You’re drunk,’ said Stephen. His tone was milder now, and he ran a hand up and down her back. ‘Come on, stop it.’
‘Take me!’ she shouted. Her voice echoed along the empty alley.
‘What?’
Stephen began to laugh, but she planted herself against his open mouth and suddenly he started to kiss her violently, grabbing her hair with his fist and pulling back her head. He tugged her blouse free of her skirt with his other hand and she had a dull consciousness of pain as his teeth bit into her lips.
‘Is this what you want?’ he said viciously in her ear, turning her and forcing her against a wall. Her head banged on the cold brick. She struggled against him with surprise but his body was a cage, pinning her where she stood.
‘Stop it!’ she said, writhing against his grip as terror penetrated her drunkenness. His breath gusted warmly in her face. ‘Get off!’
As quickly as it had started the tumult stopped. The pressure of his weight fell from her, and seconds later, feeling the cold gather at her clothes, she realized he had gone. The sound of fading footsteps drifted to her ears and she turned her head to watch his dark back grow smaller as he disappeared. As if feeling her eyes, he raised his arm in a salute without turning around.
‘Bye, Francine!’ he called.
The sound of his laughter bounded back down the alley towards her and vanished. She heard the silence of the small street in the darkness, and beyond it the sound of cars passing, going somewhere far away. The wall at her back was cold and continuous. She tucked her blouse back into her skirt, drew her coat around her, and began to walk as elegantly as she was able towards the road.
Sixteen
Ralph left the Tube station and turned up Camden High Street towards home. The days were getting longer now — he could suddenly feel it, the almost imperceptibly slow arm wrestle, the gradual gain of light over dark — and the sky was still bright with the memory of sun as he walked towards the Lock. He passed the launderette and then the funeral parlour, behind whose tinted windows pale ruched curtains were lavishly bunched above a thick pink lawn of carpet, suffocating as a girl’s bedroom. Inside, a middle-aged woman stood proprietorially at the glass, peering anxiously up and down the pavement like a waiter looking for customers at the door of an empty restaurant. He walked on, surprised to feel his lips stretching with a grin.
Tentatively, running nervous fingers over his feelings, prodding his situation again with a scientist’s circumspection, he could admit that things hadn’t been so bad today. Yesterday he had felt cast out, irretrievable, doomed to patrol the border of what he could endure, and it had come as a surprise to him to wake the next morning and realize that something, if only a day, now lay between him and his catastrophe. His sense of his own survival gave way as he walked to more expansive thoughts, a feeling of having been aroused from some long dormancy, the revivification which he recognized was the residue of pain. His life echoed now, empty, filled only with the potential for beginning it again. The idea lent some enchantment to the darkening street lit gold by a putative halo of street lamps, the friendly, sleeping faces of shops, the shy eyes of passers-by violet in the dusk, even the beating of his heels and the puff of his own breath! His body seemed suddenly rather miraculous to him, the ambulant parcel of himself: he was contained, all of him, in this machine bent only on doing his bidding, this vehicle in which he could travel wherever he chose. He wondered why he had never thought of his sufficiency before, for it liberated him to consider it, drew his muscles tight and ready beneath his skin. Remembering times when he had felt as if he were dragging his punctured form about after him, or were lying opened on a table with the world performing his dissection, he resolved to think of it more often.