He supposed he could cook dinner himself. He had done that before. The room had grown darker around the circle of lamplight in which he sat. He got up and switched on the overhead light. He would need to cheer things up if they were to spend the whole evening here. He could buy some flowers, and he’d have to clean the bathroom and get some nice soap. He remembered a conversation years ago with Stephen — what was it he’d said? — about what to do when a girl was coming round. Stephen had recited this list, as if he’d read it in a book, for God’s sake; things like leaving letters around with exotic stamps, and what else? Oh yes, some kind of intriguing book lying open on the coffee table — actually, Stephen had said by the bed, but that was out of the question. He had gone too far, of course, talking about half-finished poems on the kitchen table and God knew what else. Ralph laughed aloud.
*
Ralph’s flat was to the north of Camden, in a small labyrinth of identical streets where most of the houses were only two storeys high, like a cloned village. The area was bounded and bypassed on either side by two large roads along which streams of traffic ran, prevented from forging time-saving tributaries through the tiny residential island between them by a number of no-entry signs, dead ends, and tortuous one-way systems. This lack of circulation gave the area a curiously bloodless air, Ralph thought, an atmosphere of blockage which, though he valued the parochial quiet it guaranteed, sometimes made him forget the city which lay around it.
He had chosen Camden without hesitation when he had decided to buy somewhere to live, using the small but still inexplicable amount of money his father had left him. He knew things were probably cheaper elsewhere, but when he was younger he and Stephen had always used to come to Camden, during the half-terms and holidays it had mysteriously been decided he should spend with Stephen and his mother. Stephen’s mother lived in west London, in a white mansion house surrounded by embassies. Ralph could remember seeing the large black cars installed with dark, motionless silhouettes roll silently past the kitchen windows, their bright flags writhing in the breeze. Stephen’s mother was forgetful about money and Stephen would sometimes elicit his ‘allowance’, as it was called, from her twice in one day. Stephen’s allowance, Ralph knew, in fact arrived regularly at his bank from his father, who lived abroad, but if she was party to it Lady Sparks never referred to their arrangement. In her vague way she always seemed rather frightened of Stephen and would rifle nervously in her purse at his request, producing a fistful of notes and offering them to him as if he were holding her at gun-point.
To his initial embarrassment and later concern, she gave Ralph money too, and although his stomach would knot with anxiety at the thought that she might pay him in front of Stephen, she never did. She would leave the money in his room or catch him on his own, her manner cool and confusing with discretion, and afterwards she would sometimes stroke his hair. He was grateful for it, of course, for he had little money of his own — just what his father had left him in a policy for his weekly upkeep, the rest to be collected when he came of age — and Stephen always liked to do expensive things when they were in London. Lady Sparks seemed to know just when his supplies were dwindling, and having learnt the secret of her acuity Ralph cultivated a slightly fearful respect for her. She was a small and elegant woman, so unlike the memory he had of his own mother, with a distracted, aristocratic voice and the redundant manners, the despairing aloofness, of a displaced, abandoned queen. She could unnerve Ralph if he was left alone with her for too long without the emboldening presence of Stephen’s bravado, by looking at him so blankly that he thought she was mad. He knew Stephen had had a brother when he was very young who had fallen out of their car on a motorway and died, and although he sometimes thought that Lady Sparks perhaps liked him because of the brother, and might even want to adopt him as a replacement, the sight of her pale, empty eyes told him that she didn’t feel that way at all. Stephen would do imitations of her when they were on their own, rolling his eyes back into his head and speaking in a feeble, effeminate voice until Ralph cried with guilty laughter. He said that his father had divorced her so that he could marry his French girlfriend Isobelle, with whom he now lived in a big house in the French countryside. Stephen went to stay with them sometimes during the summer and Ralph would have to go to London alone, where he crept nervously through the great, cool rooms to avoid the drifting ghost of Lady Sparks and more often than not kept to his bedroom and read during the hot days. Usually it was only for a week or two, though, and while Stephen would often say that he was going for Easter or Christmas, or for the two whole months of the summer, when the time came more often than not something ‘came up’ and he didn’t go. Ralph had never met Stephen’s father, or Isobelle, whom Stephen used to describe to the boys at school, claiming that he had once hidden in a wardrobe in their bedroom and watched them having sex through a crack in the door. They had two small children with French names which Ralph couldn’t remember.
They would usually go to Camden in a black cab hailed in the street by Stephen. Ralph would sit in it, filled with the inebriation of awe and with a sense of how randomly this grace had fallen upon him, how little it had to do with anything that had happened to him before. He wondered now if his own occasional but nevertheless illogical habit of taking cabs existed in deference to those cloistered journeys, which he looked back on amazed that his younger self had felt no embarrassment when emerging from them into the cheerful anarchy of Camden High Street. The area had a significance for him, though, which he did not wish to escape: they had sat in pubs, had looked at people unlike themselves, had bought records and even ‘scored’, as they had called it, from skinny fetid men in the street — not like now, Ralph thought, when Stephen seemed to have a minion for every drug he used, a book full of telephone numbers to be dialled at all times, the late-night ringing of the bell. Stephen had used to ‘skin up’, another phrase which now seemed foreign to him but which once he had had tamed on his tongue, in broad daylight, and Ralph would take panicked nips at it, not really feeling anything. It couldn’t have been very good, he thought now. He had taken things since which had made him feel so far inside himself that his voice was like a megaphone in the pit of his stomach trying to project things out of his mouth.
He smiled as he trudged over Camden Lock with the two bags of shopping he had bought at great but unheeded expense at a delicatessen opposite the Tube station. Even then, he remembered, Stephen had used to change his voice, adopting a colourful proletarian twang, like something out of an Ealing comedy, through which his precise vowels would protrude like limbs from an ill-fitting set of clothes. These days the contrast was less amusing, for the two had almost merged into a single all-purpose voice. When he telephoned Ralph, Stephen would often say things like ‘all right?’ instead of ‘hello’, or ‘see you later’ when Ralph wasn’t going to see him later at all.
He reached his street, changing the bags to opposite hands. He had told Neil he was going to the doctor and had managed to get away early, something he had used to do frequently in the first, desperate months of his job. Eventually, though, things had changed, not at work but in his own acceptance of it: he had come to believe that there was nothing else, that this was the life that had been laid out for him, like a meal at a stranger’s house, and that if he didn’t like it he must change until he did, for there was nothing else.