The doorbell rang a second and third time. Tom retraced his steps to the top of the stairs and waited anxiously for the intruder to decide that no one was home. The door opened — he could hear the turn of a key — and a woman came in. He couldn’t quite see her face from his vantage at the top of the winding stairs but he had no doubts it was a woman. “Hallo,” she called. “Is anyone there?”
“My father’s not here,” he said, coming down.
A long-legged woman of about thirty or so appeared at the bottom of the wide stairwell. “Tom, is it?” she asked.
It was not something he was ready to deny. She introduced herself as Isabelle. “I’m Isabelle,” she whispered. He thought of her — the words came to mind unbidden — as his father’s whore, the latest and greatest. She looked like a movie star, he thought, somewhat like Julie Christie. “Do you live here with my father?” he asked.
She walked away, turned her back on him, before answering. “I have my own flat if it’s any of your affair,” she said.
“You came in with a key,” he said.
He followed her into the kitchen and stood behind her at the stove while she waited for some water to boil, said he hadn’t meant to be offensive.
“Of course you meant to be offensive,” she said.
“The hell with you,” he said and sulked off.
She made herself a cup of tea which she drank in gulps while standing alongside the stove with her back to him.
“How do you know what my intention was?” he asked, his voice rising. Isn’t it possible that you’re the one who’s being offensive?”
Isabelle was looking for something in a cabinet above the sink, her full concentration on whatever she sought.
After she left the kitchen, excusing herself to go by him, she went upstairs to the master bedroom. She was taking a hair dryer and some other gadgets from one of the dressers when Tom glanced in. “Does my father know you’re doing that?” he asked.
She stopped what she was doing and stared cooly at him. “You’re not to be believed, are you? You’re just about the rudest person I’ve ever met in my life.”
Tom walked out and came back, walked up the stairs and halfway down again. “Bitch,” he whispered, a secret he was unwilling to share. She was the one not to be believed, he thought, a mean-spirited, presumptuous shrew. He was aware of having made a terrible impression.
He went upstairs to the unlikely room his father had given him and closed himself in with a self-dramatizing gesture. The door, that had appeared to bang shut, swung open. He crouched on the bed with his hand on the gun in his pocket, staring through tears into the shadows of the hall. His sense of grievance seemed a bottomless wound.
When he heard Isabelle leave he picked up one of the London guides, pocketed the set of keys (though he had no intention of returning) and, after taking a granny smith from the kitchen, let himself out. The house, particularly the third floor, spooked him.
He walked with his head down so was surprised to see Isabelle standing on the corner when he passed. She called to him or so he thought, hearing or imagining his name between them. “Tom?”
He didn’t turn around, though considered the possibility.
“I didn’t mean for us to get off so badly,” she said. “Sorry to be so shrill.”
He turned and shrugged, felt himself immune to her seduction.
“Where are you off to?” she asked.
He withheld an answer, though it may only have been that he had none to give, shrugged his shoulders as if to say it’s of no importance.
“You don’t know or you’re not telling?”
“Come on,” he said. The kind of remark he would have made to his mother when he was fifteen. “I’m the rudest person you ever met in your life.” He walked along with her, some small distance between them, into Holland Park.
It had never been his intention to accompany her; it was just that they happened to be going in the same direction, happened to be walking through an astonishing park across the street from his father’s house.
They walked through a wooded path that screened out the sun, that seemed, for the few moments they were lost in its maze, like a dense forest. “Would you like to see the peacocks?” she asked him.
If he were capable of being charmed, the question would have charmed him.
He let her talk without offering anything in return, took pains to listen, was conscious of himself listening to her talk. At the same time — he rarely did fewer than two things at once — he found himself increasingly disturbed by the gun he had discovered in the bottom drawer of his father’s desk. It was not something Terman would keep unless he had a use for it. What worried him most was his father’s reaction when he discovered his revolver was missing.
She showed him the peacocks and he said yes, they were amazing. One of them had its feathers unfurled and was running up and back, making an odd threatening noise. She put a hand on his arm to gain his attention. She said she believed the noise was a mating call, that it stood to reason, didn’t it? It seemed to him, he said, like some form of indigestion.
When they got to the other side of the park she said she had a flat nearby and did he want to stop in for a bite of something. The offer tempted him which was reason enough to turn it down. He said he planned to spend the day, what was left of it, checking out London.
“I know exactly what you mean,” she said. “When I come to a new place I want to get some kind of hold on it. Is that how it is with you?”
“No,” he said, then laughed madly.
He rejected her offer of food at least twice, stood in front of her building saying goodbye, before giving in to the afternoon’s destiny. Isabelle put out a plate of jam tarts on the kitchen table and made a pot of tea. As an afterthought she brought out some stale bread and blue-veined cheese and the remains of a spinach salad decorated with slices of hard-boiled egg. Tom looked at the off-white walls of the small unlived-in apartment, said her taste reminded him somewhat of his mother’s. There was one beer left in the otherwise bare refrigerator, a Watney’s Light Ale, which Tom agreed to drink only if she would share it with him.
“Oh, Tom,” she said, “go all the way.”
He had a heel of bread, a tiny wedge of cheese and slightly more than a half a glass of ale and felt inescapably in her debt. Assuming that his father was what he wanted to talk about, she told him that Terman, as everyone called him, was a difficult man to get to know, which he could have told her himself if she hadn’t been the one telling it first.
“Does my father treat you badly?” he asked at one point.
She said no, at least not in the obvious way, that she was the difficult one or at least equally difficult.
He kept postponing his decision to leave until it seemed that if he didn’t make his move momentarily, he might never get out the door.
“How did you meet him?” he asked.
“I don’t know that I want to tell you that,” she said.
He stood up abruptly, announced for the third or fourth time that he thought that he ought to go.
She said she understood, that she had to go somewhere in a few minutes herself.
Before he went out the door he thanked her for the food and they shook hands. She was as tall as he was (was it the heels she wore?) and their eyes met briefly in a way that frightened him.