Here, maybe. Ask him round when Gemma was out of the way. Perhaps when he was babysitting Abelard, and she'd gone over to Michelle's or her mum's. If this fine weather went on he could leave the door to the balcony open and there'd be people on all the other balconies. And Abelard would be around, running in and out. He'd have to persuade Ian to see things his way. If he couldn't, if there was no moving him – and Fize was afraid there wouldn't be – would he have the bottle to go to the police on his own?
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
On his instructions, Jackie printed off a hundred slips of headed paper inscribed: The marriage arranged between Dr Ella Cotswold and Eugene Wren for 20 October 2007 will not now take place. Eugene thought of adding a few words of apology to all those guests who wouldn't now have the pleasure of seeing him and Ella joined in matrimony, eating a splendid lunch and drinking his Dom Perignon, but somehow he hadn't the heart. He hadn't the heart for much any more.
He had taken a room in an hotel in George Street, very comfortable, very expensive, but he doubted if, since he had arrived there several days before, he had slept for more than two or three hours a night. If he went to sleep at midnight he was awake again at two, sitting up in bed eating an Oranchoco for comfort. Then another and another. They were just as nice as Chocorange. He wondered now why he had found their taste bitter at first.
Falling into a doze at the gallery wasn't unusual. Dorinda had sometimes found him at his desk, his arms spread out and his head resting on them. 'Dead to the world,' as she put it. She told him he should go home, he couldn't go on like this.
'I have no home,' Eugene said.
There was no answer to this. She and Jackie exchanged glances. Neither of them knew the reason for the engagement being broken, only that it was broken. No one knew. It would have been easier to tell people of the infidelity of either party or some recently discovered incompatibility than of his addiction to something so absurd and degrading. He was consuming more of the things now than ever, at the rate of at least two packets a day. Because those two women were there, he was afraid to put one of them in his mouth while in the gallery, so he dragged himself outside to walk the pretty streets of Kensington, sucking as many as five in the half-hour outside he allowed himself. Sometimes he simply stood in a doorway or under a tree like a smoker excluded from the workplace.
The original reason to buy Chocorange, as it was then called, that of keeping him from snacking between meals or eating too much at meals, at last seemed to fulfil its purpose. He had lost interest in real food. Without the heart to weigh himself – there were scales in his bathroom at the hotel – he could see and feel he was losing weight. His clothes started to hang on him and his waistband was loose. The thought had begun to come to him that if he went on like this he could die. He could kill himself. People did. He remembered reading somewhere of a man who had put an end to his life by eating nothing but carrots until he died of an overdose of vitamin A. Probably there were no vitamins at all in Oranchoco but there were plenty of chemicals and no fat or protein and precious little carbohydrate. Thinking of that, he ate another and another, and skipped going out to the restaurant in Crawford Place for his dinner.
A letter came for him at the gallery from Ella. Not an email or a text message but a proper letter, which seemed to have been delayed for several days by the postal strike. Eugene, it said, I have moved out of your house and back to my flat. Obviously, I couldn't stay there. You can go back now. I have taken all my things with me and left the key on the hall table. Ella.
It upset him terribly. He was nearer to tears than he had been when he was eight and old Sid Gibson had shouted at him for knocking a lemon off his stall. But he checked out of the hotel and went home in the vain hope that he would feel better. He had believed that by being surrounded by his treasured things he would be comforted. He wasn't. The one single thing that would have comforted him wasn't a thing at all. Bitterly, he thought that he loved and needed Ella more than ever now she was gone. He opened his suitcase in the bedroom he had shared with her and tipped its contents out on the floor, clothes, shoes, and twenty or more packets of Oranchoco. One of these he ripped open, though he had two already open in the pockets of his jacket, and put two into his mouth at once.
Lying on the bed, he thought that the best thing that could happen to him would be for Oranchoco to be withdrawn from sale. He remembered reading of certain foodstuffs that contained too much of a substance found to be carcinogenic when eaten by mice at the rate of a kilo a day for fifty years. Immediately they vanished from the shops. It was the result of the current mania for health and safety. If only it would happen to Oranchoco! If only he could walk into the sari lady's shop and when he asked her where the things had gone (only he never would) be told they had been taken off the shelves owing to their new-found toxicity. Come to that, if only the new taste of Oranchoco had put him off the things, as he had hoped it might.
When he had put all this stuff away, should he go out for dinner? Cook himself something at home? He was aware that he had begun to feel sick. Better not eat, then. He had his consolation here in his bedroom, twenty packets of it.
On her way back from another patient, Ella found herself driving past the block where Joel Roseman lived. It was weeks since she had heard from him, even longer since she had seen him. Her life had become a mechanical routine: get up, go to work, resist with a forced smile the sympathetic glances of colleagues, see patients, visit patients, go home to the flat, eat something she need not bother to cook, have a whisky and go to bed. Joel had not been one of those patients she visited. She had come near to forgetting him. Now, as she parked the car, she glanced up to the windows of his flat. The blinds were gone, the curtains too, as far as she could see. Had he gone as well? Not much could distract her from her own troubles but this could. She was remembering how Joel had tried to take Mithras back to the river and the meadows and the city with the white towers but had only partially succeeded. Could he have tried again and this time it had worked? It had worked because it killed him?
Ella went up the steps and into the hallway. A porter sitting behind his desk asked if he could help her. Mr Roseman?
'Gone, madam. He moved out a week ago.'
It was a forlorn hope that they might have a forwarding address for him but, remarkably, they did. The porter wrote it down. Ella recognised the street in Hampstead Garden Suburb. This was his parents' house, his father's, of course, as well as his mother's.
If life had been good to her, Ella would never have gone up there. Life was very bad to her, so she went to take her mind off things, off Eugene and the madness of it all, and off her humiliation.
The Stemmers' house was a palace, a single-storey bungalow covering about an acre (Ella thought exaggeratedly) and surrounded by several more acres with palm trees and monkey puzzles and laid out geometrically as a tennis court, a bowling green and a mini-golf course with artificial hills and ponds. Eugene would have called it vulgar, a word few people still used. She could see all this from behind closed wrought-iron gates, which apparently only opened electronically. She pressed the bell and a voice asked her who she was.