It wasn’t what Simon would have called Maida Vale, but what the hell, here in any event they were, in a battered little street near the canal. ‘Hmmm,’ said Simon, looking up at the peeling façades of a terrace of ungentrified stucco-fronted houses; ‘interesting neighbourhood. I don’t believe I’ve ever been in this part of the world before.’
And if I have anything to do with it, Lydia’s glance seemed to say, you won’t again. ‘Oh, really?’ she said, in the surprised tone of one to whom the remark might have been uttered in, say, Gloucester Road. ‘Well, never mind. You’re here now. Thank you so much for the lift. I do hope you’ll be able to find your way out again without too much trouble.’ She’d had to give him directions towards the end.
‘Oh, no problem, no problem,’ said Simon. ‘But look, you must let me give you a hand with that suitcase. Didn’t you say you lived on the top floor?’ The offer was purely a formality; the idea of entering the house was entirely unsympathetic: even fearsome. That peeling paint; God knew what rot might be found within.
‘Oh, thank you,’ said Lydia. ‘How very kind.’ Simon, flabbergasted, picked up the suitcase and followed Lydia – who was carrying two bulging plastic bags – through the front door and up the uncarpeted stairs.
It seemed clean enough, even sound enough; the landings were free of refuse, needles, rats, and worse; there were no disgusting esoteric odours. It was a case of arrested decline rather than outright decay. They reached the top floor, and Lydia did the business with the mortice lock and at last opened her front door. ‘Here we are,’ she said. ‘Do come in.’ He could hardly refuse; filled with a new dread, he entered Lydia’s flat.
Lydia had darted across the room on to which the front door immediately opened and turned on a desk lamp, and Simon, still carrying the suitcase, beheld a sitting room with three arched windows which overlooked the street. He put the suitcase down and glanced around at the shabby furniture, the haphazard décor. ‘So this is where you live,’ he said pointlessly.
‘Yes,’ Lydia agreed. She folded her arms and looked at him; she seemed to be smiling, half at him (at him, not with him) and half to herself: a smile which seemed challenging, ironical, mysterious, and almost – had it not suddenly vanished – infuriating. Who the hell are you, he might almost have said, to smile at me like that?
‘Let me offer you a drink before you go,’ she said, and she turned before he could refuse and looked inside a Victorian sideboard affair. ‘I’m sure I’ve got something here, somewhere. ’ He stood there, helpless, while she rattled bottles, and then she stood up, holding one aloft. ‘How about this?’ she said.
It was a bottle of green Chartreuse. Well, what else should it have been? ‘Just a very small one,’ he said.
‘Of course.’ She poured out two liqueur glasses full and handed him one. ‘Do sit down,’ she said, nodding towards the sofa. It was very faded and threadbare, and was draped with a large silk-fringed shawl. Simon sat down at one end, but Lydia remained standing by the sideboard. It was hard to tell in this half-light, but she seemed to be staring at him – not rudely, but certainly, frankly, staring.
‘Won’t you join me?’ he said, inclining his head towards the other end of the sofa. She said nothing but crossed the room and sat down.
He hadn’t quite noticed before how well she moved: she had a firm, rhythmical tread, and when she sat, her frame folded, just so, her back very straight. Where could she have learned to do all that? She moved – now he came to think of it – now that he’d actually watched her, properly, for the first time in all these years of intermittent brief meetings – like one of those old-time actresses. Deportment. A nice old-fashioned word for a nice old-fashioned thing. She sipped at the drink. There was something just right about the way she did that, too. Who, now he came to think of it (he must once have been told, but he hadn’t actually been listening), was she? Who are you, Lydia?
‘Have you lived here long?’ he said, looking around the room again. Shabby didn’t begin to say it: the curtains, for instance, were half in tatters, and the large Aubusson-style carpet on the floor was virtually threadbare – here and there you could just discern a rose-petal or two, the end of a blue riband, half a spray of foliage.
Lydia considered. ‘I bought it three and a half years ago,’ she said.
‘Oh, you own it then.’
‘Yes. My mother had one of her fits of conscience, and gave me the money.’
‘Ah.’
‘One of these days she may have another such fit, and I’ll be able to do it up properly.’
‘What about your father?’
‘He has no conscience.’
‘Your mother –’
‘Lives in Australia. She ran off with an abstract expressionist when I was fourteen years old.’
Simon began to laugh, and then stopped. ‘I am sorry,’ he said. She shrugged. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said.
‘Your father, then –’
‘My father’s remarried and has another family; they all live in Bucks. I was my parents’ only child. Now you know everything there is to know about me: I need only add that art is long and life is short – as I dare say you have already realised.’ Her glance fell on him briefly, teasingly, dismissively. Now you can go, she might have said: and he was for the moment paralysed; he did not know how, politely, gracefully, to make a move. It was as if she had heard his unspoken question and had teasingly, then dismissively, answered it – but only to leave him wondering still further. Yes, but who are you?
He looked into his glass and then drained it and put it down on the low table in front of the sofa. ‘I really must be going,’ he said. ‘Thanks for the Chartreuse.’
‘That’s alright,’ she said. ‘Thanks for the lift, and everything.’
He was standing up. It had all taken an almost superhuman effort; she rose in one swift, easy movement, like a bird taking flight, and walked over to the door and opened it. She stood, waiting for him to follow her and depart, her head slightly tilted. That smile again. He stood in the doorway, not twelve inches from her. She was almost as tall as he – much taller than Flora: her eyes almost directly met his. ‘Well, good-bye,’ he said. And, oh God, for one terrible instant he was seized by the impulse to lean forward and kiss her on the mouth; to extinguish that smile, subdue that teasing, alien glance. How could this be? He stopped himself just in time, of course.
But there was worse. For as he turned to go, finally, truly to depart, he saw that she had seen this impulse come and go, and thought as little of him for having resisted it as she would have thought of him for succumbing to it. He hastened down the stairs almost at a run, and escaped the terrible house. He did not see her again for another six months or so, and when he did, had all but forgotten that dreadful moment in the doorway: but looking at her at the other end of a dinner table – at the Carringtons, was it? – he thought, she’s not my type at all, not remotely. Could she be anyone’s?
Apparently not. Apparently no one wanted to hook up with Lydia. ‘But how old exactly is she now? Thirty-five-ish?’ Simon