That day, struggling along the street to where the car was parked away from the house, with his two suitcases and his jazz records in two plastic bags he was praying wouldn’t give at the handles, he had felt a great elation. The house lay behind him like a discarded uniform. He wasn’t who they had all thought he was. He was a mystery, even to himself. He would be defined by her. Her, wherever she was. Since his teens, lying in bed at night, he had seen her dimly from time to time, as behind a veil, an ectoplasm of limbs, a floating, half-glimpsed smile like a butterfly in moonlight. It was time to take off the veil, to touch the solidity of her presence. He felt as dedicated as a medieval knight. Where would his journey take him?
It took him first of all to 53 Gillisland Road. He rented a single room with a gas-fire that worked on a coin-meter, a papered ceiling which looked as if somebody had started to strip it and then grown bored, a single bed and a moquette suite so larded with the past that John wondered if the settee had doubled as a dinner table. There was a shared kitchen, a shared lavatory. There were in another room two boys from the Western Isles who sang in Gaelic when they were drunk, which appeared to be every night. Their names emerged, from midnight meetings in the kitchen to make coffee, as Calum and Fraser. They were full of oblique jokes only understood by each other, like a touring vaudeville team who hadn’t yet adjusted to the local sense of humour. There was Andrew Finlay, a fifty-five-year-old recent divorcee with a cough that preceded him everywhere like a town-crier. He still couldn’t believe what had happened to him. He was given to knocking at doors throughout the evening until he found someone who could confirm for him that he was really there. John became a frequent victim and had learned to dread that cough, like the lead mourner bringing in his wake the funeral for himself that was Andrew Finlay. There were others who remained no more to John than the same song played again and again or a flushing cistern. The house had once been the sort of place Katherine had always wanted and then it had fallen on hard times and been divided into bedsits, so that John felt he had become a lodger in his own past.
It wasn’t a happy thought. But he decided that the seediness of his present, ironic in relation to his shimmering mirage of the future, was only temporary. His present was the frog. Come the kiss . . . But he didn’t seek it promiscuously. The strength of his romanticism lay in not devaluing the dream. Only once in the three years or more they had been apart had he become seriously involved with a woman, wondered if at last this was the one.
Sally Galbraith worked in one of the offices he visited. She was in her thirties, divorced, with a daughter. She had luxuriant brown hair, gentle eyes and quite marvellous breasts. But it was her smile that had brought her into sharp focus out of the crowd scene that was his thoughts about women. The smile was quite unlike most of the smiles that met him on his rounds – ‘do not disturb’ signs hung on the mouth while, behind them, the eyes went on with private business. The smile was disturbingly genuine. It was attached to the eyes and seemed personal to him. He felt they were sharing something, an immediate rapport. It was as if he knew her already, but he managed not to say that.
‘You’re new,’ he said instead, and didn’t feel it was much more dashingly original.
‘Am I? I don’t feel as if I am.’
He liked that.
‘I would’ve remembered you.’
‘I’ve just started.’
‘Who do I call you?’
‘Sally.’
‘John.’
He had carried that conversation around with him all day and taken it back at night to his room in Gillisland Road and opened it up and made a meal of it, like a Chinese carry-out. It might have seemed dull on the outside but the secret ingredients were exactly to the taste of his loneliness, all piquant implication and succulent innuendo. Like a gastronome of small talk, he knew exactly what it was made of.
Incredibly enough, he had proved right. On each subsequent visit, the more he assumed the more his assumptions were welcomed. In a month he had asked her out to dinner. He took things slowly. He didn’t want the route taken to mar the view he imagined of the arrival. Like someone learning as much as he can about the country to which he wants to emigrate, John studied Sally carefully at meals, on visits to the pictures, in pubs, on walks. He came to know the bleakness of her marriage, interchangeable with a lot of other people’s, the fact that she hadn’t been with a man in a long time. He met her daughter, Christine, a nine-year-old with a disconcerting habit of talking to her mother as if he wasn’t there. He became familiar with the house, a flat with a lot of hanging plants (Sally had done a night class in macramé). Meanwhile, Sally had been taking lessons in John’s past.
The night they graduated to bodies seemed to happen by mutual agreement. They had been eating out and were sitting chatting at the end of a good meal when they touched hands and knew at once what both of them wanted for afters. The waiter suggested liqueurs but John settled the bill and they went straight to Sally’s flat. The baby-sitter was watching a serial. They had a drink and began to regret their patience in moving towards this moment. John wondered if it was an omnibus edition of the serial. As the baby-sitter was eventually leaving, Christine got out of bed to discuss what she would have to take to school the next day for P.E. There was some doubt, apparently, about whether they would be in the gymnasium or outside.
When Christine went back to her room and while they waited to make sure she was asleep, they kissed and touched each other in delicious preparation. Sally’s body was such an exciting place for his hands to wander in and her mouth felt so capable of swallowing his tongue that John was glad of the drinks he had had. He thought they would slow down his reactions nicely. It had been some time now since he had made love and he didn’t want to be finished before they had started.
Sally broke away from him and went through to check on Christine. Coming back, she stood in the doorway with her mouth slightly open. She nodded.
‘She sleeps through anything,’ Sally said. John came across to her and they led each other clumsily through to the bedroom.
The room was a fully furnished annexe of John’s dreams. The lighting was from one heavily shaded lamp and it seeped a soft, blueish glow into the room. ‘The Blue Grotto’, John’s mind offered from somewhere, like homage. In the light the yellow walls seemed insubstantial. The bed, with the duvet pulled back, was fawn and inviting.
As they undressed, Sally said, ‘I’m sorry about the Wendy House’.
In his feverish preoccupation, John couldn’t understand what she meant. He thought at first that it might be a code expression. He wondered bizarrely if she was euphemistically telling him that her period was here. Then he lost his balance slightly taking off a sock and, turning as he steadied himself, he saw the cardboard structure against the wall. Sally was talking about a real Wendy House.
‘There’s nowhere else to put it,’ she said. ‘If we put it in Christine’s bedroom, it fills the room.’
He didn’t mind. It was certainly incongruous here, as if a femme fatale were discovered playing with her dolls. But in a way it added to the moment, he convinced himself – like making love in a fairy story. He was naked. Sally was naked. The beauty of her breasts owed nothing to the brassiere manufacturers. He approached and touched them, awestruck, as if he had found the holy grail twice. They embraced and fell in luxurious slow motion on to the bed, Sally on top. A part of his mind, like an accountant at an orgy, carefully recorded that she must have had the electric blanket on for some time. It was like making love in hot sand.
Everything went right. In the arrogance of his formidable erection, John knew that he was the scriptwriter for this scene. They passed through their initial