‘Everything is strange now,’ she said, ‘there’s nothing familiar any more.’
Eventually a Wimbledon train arrived and we took ourselves and the distance between to Fulham Broadway. We came out into a lot of noise and people outside the pub next to the station, then crossed and went down Harwood and turned right into Moore Park Road. Walking down that road to a house where Serafina now lived apart from me I felt that my life had flown away in all directions and left me behind.
Zoë’s flat was in a house at the Eel Brook Common end of the road. On the far side of the common an eastbound District Line train rumbled past with golden windows. In the dim pinky-yellow of the street lamps I looked at Serafina and saw tears running down her face. We went up the steps, she unlocked the front door, we climbed the stairs past the smells and sounds of unseen — strangers and arrived at the top and Zoë’s place.
Serafina didn’t switch on the lights immediately. I smelled cat and in the darkness of the sitting-room I saw on the mantelpiece the glow of a lava lamp in which ghastly red shapes like frozen damned souls huddled in their violet night. ‘The cat switches it on,’ said Serafina. ‘It must have done it just a little while ago — those are its warming-up shapes.’
She turned on the other lamps to reveal a large black tomcat who was sitting on the floor contemplating the lava lamp; the flex trailed across the carpet and there was a cat-operable switch on it. There were a couple of wicker chairs and a low table, a brownish depressed-looking couch with some colourful cushions, a wall of well-stocked plank bookshelves supported by bricks, a poster of Leon Trotsky, and another, for In Your Face, featuring the rear end of a baboon. A beaded curtain separated the room from the kitchen.
‘What’s the cat’s name?’ I said.
‘Jim.’.
‘I was expecting something with a little more political resonance.’
‘Jim has no politics, he’s more into meditation.’
‘Neutered?’
‘Yes.’
‘That’ll make anybody meditative.’
‘Mmm.’
‘Will Zoë be coming directly home from the Vegemania?’
‘I think she’ll be staying at Mtsoku’s place tonight.’ She wasn’t looking at me as she said it. We took off our coats as if we had nothing on under them. She lit the gas fire and it purred softly as it glowed into life. ‘Would you like something to drink?’ she said. ‘There’s a bottle of red or I can make some tea.’
‘Tea, please.’
‘What kind?’
‘Rose-hip, please.’
She looked at me sadly and went through the beaded curtain into the kitchen.
For a moment I stayed where I was, watching the lava lamp as the damned souls unfroze and sank into the primordial red. Zoë, though absent, was a presence in the room. She’s twenty-seven, a statuesque six feet tall, does her blonde hair in many little plaits interwoven with coloured yarn and (when she’s not waiting tables) headphones, wears kohl, patchouli, a silver nostril stud, and black garments with a lot of leg. The last time I asked her about the music in the headphones it was Mind the Rap, the latest album from In Your Face. Her current carrying book was a biography of Frida Kahlo. She has a degree in Politics and Modern History from Manchester University, is a member of the Socialist Workers’ Party, and frequently gets time off from the Vegemania to take part in protests and demonstrations. Her boyfriend, Mtsoku, is a black saxophonist from Kenya who performs with In Your Face. Zoë’s absent presence seemed to be watching me with a certain amount of cynicism.
I went into the kitchen and leant against the cabinets watching Serafina while she filled the kettle. ‘Why don’t you put on some music?’ she said.
Looking through the CD collection I was surprised to find the same Purcell disc we had at home. I put it on at Track 4, ‘Musick for a while’:
Musick, musick for a while,
Shall all your cares beguile;
Shall all, all, all,
Shall all, all, all,
Shall all your cares beguile; …
‘Is this Zoë’s,’ I said, ‘or did you buy it?’
‘I bought it,’ she said from the kitchen.
With Serafina there I could listen to that song that I hadn’t been able to bear alone: the haunted and haunting melancholy of Purcell’s music and Chance’s counter-tenor, a male voice not coming from the usual male place but from a soul-place beyond that, where in a flickering shadow-world of flame and darkness the guilty were whipped by a fury whose head was wreathed in snakes:
Till Alecto free the dead
From their eternal bands,
Till the snakes drop … from her head
And the whip from out her hands.
The beaded curtain rattled as Serafina came into my arms and I kissed her and hugged her and we cried a little. The kettle whistled; she went back to prepare the tea, then she brought in the jug and two mugs on a tray and put it on the low table by the couch where I was sitting. She sat down not on the couch but in a wicker chair opposite and there we were then. Jim rubbed against Serafina’s legs, then jumped into her lap and purred loudly.
There sat my Serafina in her old faded jeans and baggy grey jumper, my destiny-woman who wasn’t mine any more. I looked at her and looked and looked, wondering if I had ever really seen her and trying very hard to see her now — her face that was at the same time sharp and softly rounded, her ripe mouth a little open as if for another kiss, her blue-green eyes as she leant forward, her long fingers caressing the self-satisfied cat. You can’t step into the same river twice, I was thinking. Sometimes you can’t even find the river.
‘Fina,’ I said, ‘why are you sitting so far away?’
‘Jonathan, a hug and a kiss can’t take us back to where we were before.’
‘I’m not trying to get back to where we were, I’m trying to move forward to a new place.’ As I said the words I heard them coming out in soap-operaspeak.
‘That’s easy to say, but if you put in salt instead of sugar when you’re making a cake and then you put in sugar to cancel out the salt, it doesn’t — all you have is a ruined cake.’
Purcell and Chance were now into ‘O Solitude’ and the lava lamp was doing swaying red cobras and phallic shapes whose heads came off and rose to the top of the cylinder. ‘I’m not trying to cancel out the salt,’ I said, ‘but is there no such thing as forgiveness?’
‘Forgiveness …’ She lapsed into silence, then began to laugh.
‘What?’
‘I just had a vision of Humpty-Dumpty lying on the ground all in pieces, and he says to whatever made him fall, “I forgive you.” But he’s still lying there all in pieces.’
‘But you’re not a broken egg.’
‘You don’t know what I am, Jonathan. And I don’t know what the act of forgiveness is. If I say, “I forgive you,” what does that do? What happened doesn’t go away. Maybe some of me goes away.’
‘Maybe what goes away can come back.’
‘Do you really think so? Zoë used to live with a man who cheated on her and she forgave him, whatever that is; but she said her anger didn’t go away, it got worse as time went on and she changed in little ways, like she found that she couldn’t stand the sight of the pubic hairs he left in the bath, and in bed if he touched her when she was asleep she’d give him the elbow without waking. She decided to end it before she started spitting in his tagliatelle.’
‘What can I say? For Zoë it’s the politics of sex that matter.’