‘That’s horrible, isn’t it?’ she said, exactly as she would have said it about something they were eating that didn’t taste very nice.
‘No one even spoke to him!’ exclaimed Leo, stricken. ‘For all they knew he was about to die!’
This idea, that the world could triumph in its coldness, could triumph even over one man in its despicable bleakness, was abhorrent to him.
‘I expect they were frightened,’ Susie said; so that their being frightened became normal, became understandable even. There were people who were mad and there were people who were unlucky enough to be stabbed by them, and then there were people who were frightened. The only abnormal thing, in Susie’s view, seemed to be Leo himself. ‘Why does it get to you so much?’ she said. ‘At least they called the ambulance. You couldn’t expect them to do more than that.’
If he could only leave it all to her; if he could simply be incorporated into her beliefs, the way people are absorbed into religion: Susie never worries that she and Leo always seem to be reaching and reaching for something they can’t quite touch, striving for a satisfaction that eludes them. She doesn’t think about it like that. She lives in the moment as though moments are all there are. She swabs away the past and the future from the shining instant. She deals efficiently, hygienically, with its rich waste-product of guilt and shame and apprehension. She laughs at the children, and the way Madeleine says, ‘Not again,’ in the mornings, with a puckered little face like a raisin. She makes it seem as though all these things are one thing, one entity neither good nor bad.
Leo wonders if he has been too easily defeated in the men’s department. There was a coat he didn’t try on. He left it there, out of the rack, hanging over the others. He had it all arranged. That woman and her husband have driven him off before he was finished, like hyenas from the kill. The escalator carries him fatefully downwards. His eyes fill with electric light. Above his head are strange geometric distances and perspectives, a labyrinth of grilles and air vents and sections of false ceiling that seem to travel upwards and upwards towards some unseen core, strung with cables like giant nerves. A dazzling yellow haze stands just over him. It makes his eyes water: it is almost alive. It seems to have no source other than the building itself, as though a monstrous god or spirit has struggled into being somewhere up in that grey labyrinth. The escalator carries him past a blown-up photograph of a woman standing in a doorway in her underwear. Her hand rests on the doorknob and she looks at the camera with a beckoning expression. Her lips are parted to show a glimpse of her teeth and tongue. The underwear is intricate and white, but somehow little-girlish on that obstinately self-regarding body. What does she think she is doing, standing there? It is the door to a hotel room, he realises. A sign reading ‘Do Not Disturb’ hangs from the doorknob. Leo lets out a strange bark of laughter. At the bottom of the escalator he turns around and goes up again on the other side. She reminds him unexpectedly of his sister-in-law, Tonie. She has curly brown hair and a tight little midriff. She has a body so buffed and groomed that it vitiates her nakedness. It seems a form of clothing in itself. But it is her eyes that he can't stomach. That fake, play-acting expression, as she goes about her fake hotel tryst above the endlessly revolving escalator on West Hill Road — she makes it seem as if there is nothing lovely or true in the whole world.
Someone has returned the coat to its place on the rack. He takes it off the hanger again and puts it on. The woman and her silent husband have moved away to the shoe section. He can see them in the distance, together, like little figurines. In the mirror he strikes himself as extraordinarily flawed. His skin looks rough and red and his hair goes everywhere in painful-looking spikes, and he seems riven through with wearying variation and texture, with pores and veins and cracks, with moles and bumps and broken fingernails. By contrast the coat is amazingly bland and smooth. It is like something that has been cut out and pasted on to him, like a felt coat from Madeleine’s Fuzzy Felt kit. It is brown and big. It envelops his strange particular contours like a large brown generalisation. His soft belly, the little breast-like mounds of flesh on his chest, his white, womanly haunches: those are all now as private as thoughts, unseen behind the brown shield of the coat. It is not exactly the coat he has imagined — that coat actually transformed his defects rather than simply obliterated them — but all the same it has the feeling of a good idea. Already he is getting used to it. What a relief it is, what a blessing, to be completely covered up. It is the same sensation he sometimes feels getting into bed at night and drawing the covers over himself, a feeling of being returned to an original innocence; as though his years of life drift away once his body is hidden from view. When he and Susie have sex, it is spoilt for Leo by the sight of their abundant mottled bodies all grizzled with pubic hair. He never looks the way he feels, any more than Susie looks like that girl in the poster. But in the dark all of that moves away from him, that dirty, densely wrought revulsion.
At the till he has to take the coat off to pay for it, but as soon as the woman has his credit card he lifts it from the counter and tears the price tag off with his teeth.
‘Do you want a bag for it?’ she says.
‘No. I’m wearing it.’
‘Do you want a bag for what you were wearing before?’ she says, as though every second person who comes into her department does precisely what Leo has just done.
‘Oh. I suppose so.’
‘Hanger?’ She waves it in the air, a plastic shape.
‘No, thank you.’
Leo feels deflated. Somehow, in the course of that exchange with the woman at the till, the desirability of the brown coat has peaked, has reached the summit of what it is or ever could be. The woman hands him the plastic bag containing his rumpled grey jacket. She has folded it carefully: she has smoothed the exhausted fabric with her long, brilliantly varnished nails. She seems to take pity on it, this discarded piece of his life. She seems to feel for it, for all unwanted things, for everything that is old and abandoned: he feels that by her folding and smoothing she has criticised the world for its inhumanity.
‘Very nice,’ she says, when Leo puts the new coat on.
She gives him a little approving smile. He looks at his watch. It is a quarter past ten. He takes his card and his receipt and stuffs them in his coat pocket. The pocket’s silky lining, cold and unfamiliar, closes around his hand.
XXVI
Her mother has different faces. Sometimes she has a face like a witch. It is on the back of her head, not the front. Alexa sees it when she walks up the stairs behind her.
In the mornings, when Tonie comes into her bedroom, Alexa pretends to be asleep. Often she is asleep. It is the presence in the room that wakes her up: she feels it through her closed eyes, something warm and soft and attentive, though at first she doesn’t remember what it is. She keeps her eyes shut. She lies still. She thinks her mother will love her better that way. She feels beautiful, lying completely still in her nightdress. She is like a doll. She imagines her mother looking at her and loving her. But at the same time she knows she is pretending.