‘I know, Jakes. A table, a bed, a scrap of cashmere, a drop of cognac …’
‘Oh come on, don’t be so leaden.’ Jacob’s mouth tightened at the corners as if someone had turned two screws. No one else teased him or called him by anything other than his full name.
‘Where do you wash?’
‘In the sink.’
‘I hope Tania hasn’t made the mistake of laying on hot water.’ She lit a cigarette. ‘You must be in heaven.’ Barbara still found her husband so interesting that she leaned back in order to scrutinise him more thoroughly. She knew what he was made of, parts that did not belong together and which ought not to fit: a bulky, almost square forehead, a cleft chin, a mouth unbalanced by the comparative slightness of the lower lip, a long thin nose with flared nostrils, heavy brows, and wide pale eyes that scattered light. Although he looked still, even disengaged, Jacob was continuously in the throes of process and adjustment, at a chemical level barely discernible to the eye. From moment to moment, he was a different creature.
Now, without moving or speaking, Jacob stopped being a man laying claim to a home and became nervous and rigid, a boy. To stop herself feeling sorry for him, wanting to do something for him, Barbara got up and went to run a bath.
‘Come on, Jakes.’
He would not look at her but let her raise him to his feet and steer him into the bathroom. As she reached round him to close the door, he leant back against it, pulling her towards him. They were about the same height and their bodies were the same mixture of angles and curves.
With Jacob pinned to the door, Barbara caught sight of herself in the mirror that ran along one wall, floor to ceiling. She looked clumsy, aggressive and unwelcome. ‘Christ, I feel like a man,’ she said and took a step backwards.
Jacob caught her arms with his fingertips. He turned his head away and slumped a little. Poor Jacob. Barbara pressed a hand against his jeans and felt a flick of attention. She knelt down, unbuttoned his flies and took the whole of his soft cock into her mouth. For the few moments in which nothing happened, Barbara felt the purest and most generous tenderness. She would have taken his body into her mouth entire, if she could.
Jacob made the small sound he made when he came, undressed and slipped into the water. Barbara stood in the middle of the stone floor and hitched her skirt up to her thighs before deciding to announce that she needed to pee, only she chose to say ‘piss’, ‘I really must piss’, and did so noisily, keeping her eyes fixed on his as she talked: ‘I love the light in here, how it’s so sort of steely and marine. Do you remember what you said when we first had it done? How it was like being in a bathysphere.’ She stood up and took off her clothes, at first angrily and then coquettishly. She had been undressing in front of Jacob for twenty years and wanted him to realise what that meant, and to want still to watch.
Naked, she hesitated. ‘They were right about all those scatter spots giving it a salty atmosphere. Absolutely right. It’s my favourite room.’ Then she put one foot on the edge of the bath, her groin towards his face.
He made no space for her. ‘I know.’
‘It’s yours, too, isn’t it? Your favourite room,’ she continued, climbing in to crouch at his feet.
‘Don’t you think,’ Jacob was saying as he stood up so abruptly that the water rocked, collided with itself and washed over the side, ‘that you overdid it? Just a bit?’
He got dressed, still wet, and had his hand on the front door when she jumped out of the water and ran naked through the flat to stand behind him.
He waited, blank and tolerant, as she fought to control her voice: ‘You wanted it … as much as … I did … more … so … don’t … don’t … make me feel … all this is … just …’
Jacob had buttoned his shirt wrongly and left it half untucked, not because he was in a hurry but because this was what he did. About five years earlier, Barbara had stopped finding it charming but she had never done what she did now, which was to reach out and tidy him up.
‘You’re forty-three, not seventeen.’
In his smallest, most exhausted voice: ‘May I go now?’
Juliet wrapped herself up in an eiderdown, turned on the television and drank whisky from a teacup, as if that made it good for her. Nothing worked. The room did not become anything more than its four brown walls, its grey windows and warped door; it did nothing to hold her. Damp sat in the icy air and the air sat in her lungs so that what circulated in her body was a kind of slush, neither forming nor melting, grubby, soggy and chill. She wondered why a stranger’s voice could affect her so much.
The pain began, as it often did, when her thoughts ran out. The first twinge at the base of her spine repeated itself and then unfurled, pushed and gripped. I’m not in agony, she thought, it’s not like earache or toothache or being burned, but the pain travelled and accumulated until it possessed her. More than that, it occupied her so fully that she felt thrown out of herself.
She decided to prepare for bed and clutching the eiderdown around her shoulders, moved into the kitchen where she boiled the kettle and filled two hot-water bottles. These she carried upstairs. Then she fetched a can of paraffin and filled the two heaters that stood in the hallway upstairs, heaving one into her room and the other into the bathroom. After trimming and adjusting their wicks, she persuaded both to stay alight. Downstairs again, she coaxed the boiler into action, filled her cup with more whisky, and then went up and ran a bath.
She undressed in a cloud and lay back in water as hot as she could stand, knowing that it would soon cool and that the steam would condense and drip down the walls to feed the mildew, which she would then be able to see, like her poor pink body, far too clearly. The bitter paraffin fumes stung her eyes and mouth, but the smell was a sign that something beyond this bath was giving off heat.
Wrapped in a towel which would never quite dry, Juliet scuttled to her room and turned on a tiny fan heater. She had the largest bedroom, the one with two windows, at the front. It was painted matt duck-egg blue and she kept the navy slatted blinds down, preferring striated light to a view of towerblocks and corrugated iron. Her clothes were arranged on a rail and folded on shelves and in boxes. Her desk, chair and lamp were army surplus, metal-framed and painted grey. She allowed herself one postcard at a time. Her floor was painted dark green and covered in a rug that had belonged to her grandmother. Since childhood, she had loved its lack of traceable pattern.
She surrounded the rug with dullness in order to see it more clearly. She thought about things like this a lot and had impressed Tania at her interview with her ideas about framing space and the importance of absence in display. The truth had been that she liked the empty gallery so much that she knew she would never like anything brought into it. Her PhD, which she planned to finish the following year, was titled ‘Framed Departure: the Empty Metaphor in Post-Iconoclastic Netherlandish Art’.
She got dressed in vest, socks, pyjamas and jersey, and was in bed reading when Fred knocked on her door. Pleased to see him, she moved over and he climbed under the covers, claimed one of the hot-water bottles and lit a joint. Allie had grown cannabis in his attic room, punching holes in the roof above each plant to let in light. His crop had been so successful that the cupboard under the stairs was crammed with large plants hung upside-down to dry. No one had been sure when they would be ready but over the winter they had turned into something like dried seaweed and had a striking effect.
‘How was it?’ she asked.
Fred was too full of delight at his evening with Caroline to want to talk. He shrugged and shook his head, giggled and sighed and smiled so hard that Juliet laughed for the pleasure of something as absolute as his happiness. She was still laughing as she tried to get up, so at first Fred didn’t notice that she couldn’t straighten and when he did, he waited.
When she could speak again, Juliet said, ‘I keep