She and Lucian had begun seeing each other almost immediately. She hadn’t been able to resist, and had returned to Camden Lock the following Sunday to buy her black scarf, inviting Lucian, along the way, to a Manorexia concert being held at Union Chapel on Upper Street that Wednesday, to which he said yes without any hesitation, she said, and during ‘Armadillo Stance’, the third song performed, she’d reached for his hand and from then on there was no going back. Her tone was confessional, she halted at moments as if waiting to see my reaction, and more than once I had to reassure her that I didn’t mind, Lucian had been someone I’d yearned for long ago, and I was only too happy, it was no exaggeration, to have been of help, however unintentionally. All the same, at first she only brought him over occasionally and spent most weeknights at his. I almost got used to having the flat to myself but refused to do her washing up.
The next Sunday at one of our locals, the Warlock and Essex, Jane entered a raffle and won a weekend away to a scenic town in the north of England. It had its own medieval wall, the pamphlet read, most of it still standing, and an impressive cathedral. Lucian wasn’t fond of travel and had to remain in London for work. None of her close friends or colleagues were free. Jane turned to me.
As the train ribboned through the unframed landscape, Jane with her magazines and I bookless at the window, I wondered whether decades from now this scene would be replayed, two spinsters on our way to a small town somewhere to visit a provincial church and lay flowers on a grave.
According to the instructions, our B&B lay on the town’s periphery, not far from the train station. Large disused warehouses huddled round us, their broken windows and blackened frames sullen reminders of their former lives. Despite the hour, a quarter past four in the afternoon, the streets were unusually empty and I couldn’t help wondering whether the raffle committee was having a laugh, sending us two hours on a train to nowhere but an abandoned industrial town on the outer limits of existence.
But when we turned a corner and saw the imposing property with tall iron gates we thought we were charmed — not only to have won but in such grandeur — yet as we drew closer we realised our place was next door. Before moving on we set down our bags and peered through the bars, into a large landscaped garden with various pathways leading to a stately-looking home with an expansive façade. Above the entrance rose a clock tower with Roman numerals telling the wrong time. Trimmed hedges, bushes dotted with berries, tall evergreen trees. In the distance, a large man was advancing down one of the paths clutching a stick or a cane. Two women in oversized coats sat on a bench, knitting. In a rectangular airing court beyond them, two people were playing poorly coordinated badminton, not a single shot returned. Upon spotting us the man with the cane quickened his pace and headed in our direction. Worried we were about to be scolded for peering into private property, Jane and I picked up our bags and continued.
Modest in comparison to its neighbour, our B&B was an Edwardian semi, red brick with wooden shutters. We walked up the small path from the street and seconds after we rang the bell the door was opened by a woman with very short hair, a pigeon-neck silver. She introduced herself as Sam and led us into the foyer where another shorthaired woman, this one with elfin eyes, introduced herself as Pam.
They congratulated us on our prize — each year their B&B was entered in the raffle — and asked us to sign the guest book. The last entry, a Mr and Mrs Honeywell, dated from two weeks ago. Sam insisted on carrying our bags and led us up a flight of stairs to a door with a carved number 3. Beyond this 3 lay a profusion of floral print. We paused in the doorway, still in our coats, and looked around. Curtains, bedspread, wallpaper: the blossoming decor seemed to advance in small leaps and spurts from one piece of furniture to another, the only pause the spaces between objects.
Sam deposited our bags on a fold-out table and informed us that breakfast would be served between eight and nine. We removed our coats and settled in. The room was a perfect little square, furnished with a queen-sized bed, two night tables, a fake leather armchair, and a balcony that overlooked a garden whose autumn trees, their crowns tossed in the wind, seemed to mock the inert vegetation inside. Above our bed hung a large pendulum clock with a pearly face and skeleton-like black hands. It was nearing five; I felt impatient for a walk.
After we’d made ourselves a quick cup of tea from a little tray, we set out. By then dusk had turned into an empty-handed magician who kept a few paces ahead of us, snuffing out the streets seconds before we reached them, robbing us of the sights we’d come to see. One by one, the lights in shop windows were switched off, café tables and chairs brought in, postcard racks folded up.
There was always tomorrow of course, our main time for sightseeing, but I’d been hoping for at least one memorable image to make the day feel complete. From nearly every street corner, grand and autonomous and immune to the setting of the sun, the spires of the cathedral, without question the town’s centre of gravity, could be glimpsed. I looked forward to visiting, to wandering amidst the stone tombs of bishops, running our hands an inch above their carved faces, centuries of serenity transmitted to our fingertips, above us a heaven of stained glass windows, columns of rainbowed light.
It had been years since I’d visited a holy place — I once saw a man get down on his knees and pray at the Sienese crucifix in Room 51—but the only time I ever felt in the presence of something holy, maybe even mystical, was when near Caspar David Friedrich’s Winter Landscape.
That evening we dined at a pub, beer from a local brewery and overflowing jacket potatoes, and mapped out our Saturday. Cathedral — tea rooms — museum — tea rooms — city wall — pub. Jane had bought a map of the town though it seemed small enough to navigate on instinct. By the time we made our way back to the B&B the air had grown chillier, impatient nips of winter at the heels of November, and I remember walking close to her as we left the centre and returned to the outskirts, the warehouses with their gaping windows even more somber at that hour.
On our way out Sam had given us a key, just to be safe, she said, since they tended to go to bed early, at least by city-folk standards, and it had happened before that a guest was left standing outside for hours, frantically ringing the bell before either of them heard it since they both had remarkably deep sleep, she said, though Pam’s had grown lighter lately due to a nervous disorder.
We softly let ourselves in and held on to the banister as we climbed the stairs to our room, moving through the strangely female silence of the house, a depth of silence that’s only possible without men, the stairs lit by a small nightlight plugged into the wall between the ground floor and first.
Jane and I had never shared a bedroom but after four years of sharing a roof there was little awkwardness, and almost in tandem we slipped out of our clothes and into our nightwear, Jane to a short cotton gown and I into pyjamas. The radiators emitted a low hiss.
In the bathroom she lent me some make-up remover, a sparkly bluish solution, and afterwards I washed my face with the complimentary bar of soap. As I dried off, Jane, who’d been standing behind me waiting for her turn at the sink, asked whether Lucian used to bring women home when I was living with him.
I answered in the affirmative.
‘Often?’
I paused, wondering whether to measure my response.
She reached for her toothbrush and applied a thick coat of paste, enough for three brushes, then turned to me.
‘Well?’
‘He went through phases.’
‘How many women?’
‘I don’t remember.’
‘Try to.’
I stared at our reflections in the mirror, each of us darkhaired and dark-eyed yet so different, my jagged fringe in need of trimming, her undulating mane that fell past her shoulders, my complexion whiter, hers on the yellow side, and thought about how many times we had gazed into the same bathroom mirror at home yet minutes or hours apart. Until then no mirror, I realised, had held both our reflections at once.
‘Like how many, Marie?’ she asked again and turned to look at me sharply, holding her toothbrush.
I’d give her the truth. ‘I don’t know… a hundred?’
‘A hundred?! In two years? That’s one a week!’
‘Jane, he’s a good-looking man. And he was young at the time, and single.’
She turned on the tap and ran her toothbrush under it, brushed for a second, then removed it from her mouth.
‘Handsome, single, whatever, he’s a bloody liar. He said he’d only been with Carole, his ex, and then with Sue, another ex, and then with some girl from the Lock and then me. Maybe he’s been lying the whole time, maybe he’s up north with some girl this weekend, maybe he’s just as jaded as all the others, who knows… ’
No, I reassured her despite having no idea, No, I’m sure he hasn’t been lying, I said, at most he’s knocking off a few digits to appear more gallant, you really needn’t worry, but Jane wasn’t listening and again called Lucian a liar, this time a liar and a bastard, and as she spoke the water gushed out of the tap.
Each second, I began to feel, was killing a wave.
‘It obviously wasn’t only Carole, his ex, and Sue, his other ex, and who knows who else from the Lock, but a long string of them, I’m sure, and now he’s probably somewhere up north with—’
‘No, no, this was all years ago,’ I said, and motioned to her to turn off the tap but she was too caught up in phrasing and rephrasing, repeating the same thing over and over by simply varying the sentence structure, to notice. I leaned over and shut off the gushing water.
‘I haven’t finished,’ she snapped, and turned it back on.