‘I’ve made some tea,’ she said. ‘Shall we go upstairs?’
She had a large, sunny room on the second floor, as well as a bathroom and a small kitchen all to herself. She served Earl Grey tea in bone china cups and didn’t offer me milk or sugar. There was a television, a telephone, a hi-fi, a large single bed, a writing desk, a dressing-table and two high-backed but comfortable armchairs. The walls were decorated with nineteenth-century landscapes. It was a warm and friendly room but it said nothing about Madeline herself, except that she was obviously happy not to impose her own personality on to it. One slightly unexpected feature was that a small crucifix had been placed on top of the dressing-table.
‘Is she religious, this woman?’ I asked (meaning Mrs Gordon).
‘No, not especially.’ She saw what had prompted my question. ‘That’s mine.’
‘I didn’t know you were a Catholic.’
‘Well how could you? You’ve barely met me.’
I sipped my tea, chastened, and said, ‘I went through a brief religious phase once. I used to go to communion every week. Apart from anything else, it’s still the only place you can get a drink first thing on a Sunday morning.’
She didn’t laugh or even smile, and I felt that I had struck a wrong note.
‘What would you like to do this evening?’ she asked. ‘Shall we go out somewhere?’
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Anywhere you like.’
We walked to a little Hungarian restaurant on the Kings Road. I tried putting my arm around her waist on the way, but could feel no encouragement, so I withdrew it at the first opportunity. Not that she asked me to or anything. It was just a sense I had.
‘What are your plans?’ she asked me, after we had ordered our food.
‘Pardon?’ It seemed an odd question.
‘What are you going to do? With all this music and everything. Where’s it going to lead?’
‘I don’t know, I hadn’t really thought. That’s not why I’m doing it.’
‘Why are you doing it?’
‘Well, you know… I’m only twenty-three, after all. I’ve just got to make myself known, play as often as possible — there’s no saying what might happen. I’ve got this friend, Tony, who used to teach me, and he thinks that I’ve got the potential — ’ I couldn’t think why I was telling her this, so I decided to stop. ‘Anyway, what about you? How much longer are you going to look after Mrs Gordon?’
‘What else can I do?’
‘I don’t know.’
Madeline paused, and then said another odd thing.
‘My parents think I’m an accountant.’
‘What?’
‘After I left university, I started to train as an accountant. That was where I met Piers — you know, the friend I was supposed to be seeing that night? But I got bored, so I gave it up. But I haven’t told my parents about it yet.’
‘When was this?’
She frowned. ‘Nearly a year ago, now.’
‘Where are your parents?’
‘In America. Daddy works for this bank. They asked him to be an overseas manager.’
‘Don’t you miss them?’
‘No.’
‘Do you have any brothers or sisters?’
‘A brother. He’s in Japan somewhere.’
‘Do you miss him?’
‘No.’ She smiled, blandly. ‘We weren’t very close, my family. We travelled about all over the place. My parents went to Italy for a while and left us with relatives. They separated for a while and I lived in Ireland with my mother. It feels as though my father and I never spent more than a few months together.’
‘So when did he use to listen to “My Funny Valentine”?’
The reference didn’t seem to register.
‘I’ve only had two phone calls from them in all the time they’ve been away. But every so often I write to them. That’s when Piers is useful.’
‘In what way?’ I asked. For some reason I already disliked this Piers character. (Well, forget ‘for some reason’. It was for the obvious reason.)
‘He still works for this accountancy firm, you see, and he can get me sheets of their headed notepaper. So I write to my parents on this notepaper and they still think I’m working as an accountant.’
‘That’s awful,’ I said. ‘Why do you have to lie to them?’
‘They’d be furious. They didn’t put me through university just so I could end up as a glorified nanny.’
‘My parents have never tried to stop me doing anything I wanted to do,’ I said. ‘They trust me.’ I hope this didn’t sound as pompous to her, then, as it does to me, now. But I could feel my mood deteriorating and I asked her another petulant question. ‘So you and Piers are pretty close, are you, one way and another?’
‘We’re just old friends, that’s all. I like him.’ She held up her wrist. ‘Look, he gave me this, once.’
‘What, the bruise?’
‘No, silly, the bracelet.’
It was thin and elegant and looked as though it was made of solid gold and had cost him about five thousand pounds. I hated it.
‘Very nice,’ I said. I would have to find out when her birthday was and start putting money into a savings account.
‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘He’s not my boyfriend.’
I thought that if my feelings were that obvious, I might as well press the point.
‘There’ve been… men in your life, have there?’
‘Not really,’ she said, seeming more bored than embarrassed by the question. ‘There was someone a couple of years ago, but it wasn’t very serious. We used to meet on Saturdays and go up to walk his dog on Hampstead Heath.’
‘What was his name?’
‘Rover, I think. This food’s a long time coming, isn’t it?’
I always have this problem with restaurants. I know that the idea is to catch the waiter’s eye, or to make some kind of discreet gesture; there are some people (Chester would be one of them) who only have to make some lazy little movement with their right forefinger for a whole army of waiters to descend on them, dancing attendance. Me, I can get up and stand right in their path, waving my arms about like someone trying to flag down a speeding taxi, and they still manage to look right through me. I wouldn’t mind, but this disability seems to rub off on to whoever I’m dining with: so there we were, the only two customers in this bloody restaurant, with about fifteen waiters standing over by the till acting like the place hadn’t even opened yet.
‘I suppose I only liked him,’ Madeline said suddenly, ‘because he was a Catholic.’
‘It’s that important to you?’
‘It makes a difference.’
‘I’m not a Catholic.’
‘I know. I don’t mind.’
I looked at her full in the face for as long as I thought good manners would allow. She was without doubt the most beautiful woman I had ever dated. Oh, Stacey was pretty, there’s no denying that: but Madeline was in a different class altogether. It occurred to me, from the way she was dressed, from the way her hair was done, from the way she was made up, that she must have spent hours preparing for this evening, and I felt suddenly ashamed of my shabby work clothes and my sloppy assumption that I could just turn up at her house, without making any special effort, and expect the whole occasion to go swimmingly. A swirl of feelings, compounded of desire and incipient affection and a wish to apologize, swept over me and it was all I could do to refrain from leaning across the table and kissing her long and gently on the mouth.