He moved quickly up Oxfort Street gathering presents for his daughter’s birthday. He bought a pair of jeans, a pair of colored canvas running shoes suggestive of the Stars and Stripes. He bought three colored T-shirts with funny slogans… It’s Raining in My Heart, Still a Virgin, and Ohio State University. He bought a pomander and a game of dice from a woman in the street and a necklace of plastic beads. He bought a book about women heroes, a game with mirrors, a record gift certificate for £5, a silk scarf and a glass pony. The silk scarf putting him in mind of underwear, he returned to the shop determined.
The erotic, pastel hush of the lingerie floor aroused in him a sense of taboo, he longed to lie down somewhere. He hesitated at the entrance to the department then turned back. He bought a bottle of cologne on another floor and came home in a mood of gloomy excitement. He arranged his presents on the kitchen table and surveyed them with loathing, their sickly excess and condescension. For several minutes he stood in front of the kitchen table staring at each object in turn, trying to relive the certainty with which he had bought it. The gift certificate he put to one side, the rest he swept into a carrier bag and threw it into the cupboard in the hallway. Then he took off his shoes and socks, lay down on his unmade bed, examined with his finger the colorless stain that had hardened on the sheet, and then slept till it was dark.
Naked from the waist Miranda Cooke lay across her bed, arms spread, face buried deep in the pillow, and the pillow buried deep under her yellow hair. From a chair by the bed a pink transistor radio played methodically through the top twenty. The late-afternoon sun shone through closed curtains and cast the room in the cerulean green of a tropical aquarium. Little Charmian sat astride Miranda’s buttocks, tiny Charmian, Miranda’s friend, plied her fingernails backwards and forwards across Miranda’s pale unblemished back.
Charmian too was naked, and time seemed to stand still. Ranged along the mirror of the dressing table, their feet concealed by cosmetic jars and tubes, their hands raised in perpetual surprise, sat the discarded dolls of Miranda’s childhood.
Charmian’s caresses slowed to nothing, her hands came to rest in the small of her friend’s back. She stared at the wall in front of her, swaying abstractedly. Listening.
“I didn’t know that was in,” she said. Miranda twisted her head and spoke from under her hair.
“It’s come back,” she explained. “The Rolling Stones used to sing it.”
When it was over Miranda spoke peevishly over the D.J.’s hysterical routine. “You’ve stopped. Why have you stopped?”
“I’ve been doing it for ages.”
“You said half an hour for my birthday. You promised.” Charmian began again. Miranda, sighing as one who only receives her due, sank her mouth into the pillow. Outside the room the traffic droned soothingly, the pitch of an ambulance siren rose and fell, a bird began to sing, broke off, started again, a bell rang somewhere downstairs and later a voice called out, over and over again, another siren passed, this time more distant… it was all so remote from the aquatic gloom where time had stopped, where Charmian gently drew her nails across her friend’s back for her birthday. The voice reached them again. Miranda stirred and said, “I think that’s my mum calling me. My dad must’ve come.”
When he rang the front doorbell of this house where he had lived sixteen years, Stephen assumed his daughter would answer. She usually did. But it was his wife. She had the advantage of three concrete steps and she glared down at him, waiting for him to speak. He had nothing ready for her.
“Is… is Miranda there?” he said finally. “I’m a little late,” he added, and taking his chance, advanced up the steps. At the very last moment she stepped aside and opened the door wider.
“She’s upstairs,” she said tonelessly as Stephen tried to squeeze by without touching her. “We’ll go in the big room.” Stephen followed her into the comfortable, unchanging room, lined from floor to ceiling with books he had left behind. In one corner, under its canvas cover, was his grand piano. Stephen ran his hand along its curving edge. Indicating the books he said, “I must take all these off your hands.”
“In your own good time,” she said as she poured sherry for him. “There’s no hurry.” Stephen sat down at the piano and lifted the cover. “Do either of you play it now?”
She crossed the room with his glass and stood behind him. “I never have the time. And Miranda isn’t interested now.”
He spread his hands over a soft, spacious chord, sustained it with the pedal and listened to it die away.
“Still in tune then?”
“Yes.” He played more chords, he began to improvise a melody, almost a melody. He could happily forget what he had come for and be left alone to play for an hour or so, his piano. “I haven’t played for over a year,” he said by way of explanation.
His wife was over by the door now about to call out to Miranda, and she had to snatch back her breath to say, “Really? It sounds fine to me. Miranda,” she called, “Miranda, Miranda,” rising and falling on three notes, the third note higher than the first, and trailing away inquisitively. Stephen played the three-note tune back, and his wife broke off abruptly. She looked sharply in his direction. “Very clever.”
“You know you have a musical voice,” said Stephen without irony.
She advanced farther into the room. “Are you still intending to ask Miranda to stay with you?”
Stephen closed the piano and resigned himself to hostilities. “Have you been working on her then?”
She folded her arms. “She won’t go with you. Not alone anyway.”
“There isn’t room in the flat for you as well.”
“And thank God there isn’t.”
Stephen stood up and raised his hand like an Indian chief. “Let’s not,” he said. “Let’s not.” She nodded and returned to the door and called out to their daughter in a steady tone, immune to imitation. Then she said quietly, “I’m talking about Charmian. Miranda’s friend.”
“What’s she like?”
She hesitated. “She’s upstairs. You’ll see her.”
“Ah…”
They sat in silence. From upstairs Stephen heard giggling, the familiar, distant hiss of the plumbing, a bedroom door opening and closing. From his shelves he picked out a book about dreams and thumbed through it. He was aware of his wife leaving the room, but he did not look up. The setting afternoon sun lit the room. “An emission during a dream indicates the sexual nature of the whole dream, however obscure and unlikely the contents are. Dreams culminating in emission may reveal the object of the dreamer’s desire as well as his inner conflicts. An orgasm cannot lie.”