It was not quite dark yet, the sky watery and blue with the aftermath of the afternoon’s cold sun, but the air had grown thin and icy and Ralph was surprised to see children in T-shirts wheeling and chattering round the street on their bikes. They were a familiar motif of summer to him, but he hadn’t seen them over the past few months and they had changed, had strange, brutal haircuts and new versions of their faces.
‘Hello,’ he said none the less as he passed them.
They looked round at him but didn’t reply, their compressed mouths bursting with suspicious humour. As he reached his flat and took out his keys he heard a volley of cries behind him.
‘’Allo! ’Allo!’ they shouted in voices effete with vaudeville mimicry.
He shut the door, hoping they wouldn’t be there by the time Francine arrived. He tried to imagine her in his road, a strange and beautiful fruit suddenly appearing on the bare branches of the sentinel winter trees which lined it. For a moment he felt faint at the prospect of the evening ahead, his responsibility for it, and almost decided there and then just to take her to a restaurant and be done with it. He put the bags of food on the kitchen table and sat down with his head in his hands. A thread of self-consciousness stole through him as he did so. He was the picture of despair, like somebody in a film. He laughed aloud at his own comedy. He would do exactly what he had set out to do: he had bought food and wine, had rendered the flat unrecognizable with order the night before, had even had his hair cut on the Holloway Road at lunch-time.
‘Get the doctor to do something about your hair, mate,’ Neil had said, folding over with his own hilarity, when Ralph had left for his fictitious appointment at four o’clock.
He stood and went to look at himself in the hall mirror. The cut made his face appear rather beefy, giving it the exposed, foolish look of a passport photograph. He ruffled it a bit and saw a spray of dark filaments fall gently to his shoulders. He turned away from the mirror, his face itchy and hot. He had planned to do the cooking first and then get himself ready at the last minute. He had ruled out the temptation to make something elaborate: it wasn’t much of a temptation in any case, as his preliminary skim through his only cookery book — a strange fifteenth-birthday present from Lady Sparks, with garish photographs of prone crustaceans spewing lumpy substances from their backs — had informed him that he possessed neither the utensils nor the skills even the simplest dish demanded for its creation. He would make a risotto, something he had learned to do as a student; never properly, of course, merely approaching it by intuition and experiment, until finally he’d made it for a group of friends who’d called it risotto and said how much they’d liked it. This time, he had bought expensive things to put in it, which probably could have formed something more impressive if he assembled them in a different way, but the expansive, forgiving framework of the risotto offered an indispensable form of insurance against disaster.
He went to the sitting-room and looked at the answering machine. There was a message on it, and he regarded it for a moment with foreboding as he realized it might be Francine, saying that she couldn’t make it after all. He pressed the button and heard Stephen’s voice saying something clipped, which sounded like ‘let’s see’ — probably ‘it’s me’, Ralph thought — then a kind of long sigh and the clamour of the phone being put down. Everything was fine, then.
*
Some time later, Ralph lay in the bath. Next door, the risotto lay in the oven, warming. He had been too frightened to taste it, but he knew there was something wrong. At first it had been too liquid, and he had added more rice, in his enthusiasm rendering the whole thing rather glutinous, its parts indistinguishable. More worrying, however, was the peculiar smell it emanated, which Ralph had attempted to track down to some infestation of the fridge or kitchen cupboards but which finally he had had to admit was the perfume of his offering to Francine. He had attempted to identify it — it was a bitter, floury smell — from the parade of ingredients from which he had assembled the dish, but it had resembled none of them. In the end he had tried to disguise it with the addition of stronger presences which he had hoped would somehow crowd it out. The spices he had added had succeeded only in transforming its colour, against which he had had no complaint in the first place, and he had been forced to resign himself and place the muddy, odorous mass in a large dish in the oven.
The incident had burdened him with a sense of indifference which was prolonging his lazy, lukewarm immersion dangerously close to the half-hour zone he had cordoned off for last-minute preparations. His bath had thus far been a nihilistic event, an exercise in detachment involving the objective scrutiny and contemptuous dismissal of each immobile, ghoulish part of his body. In the day-dreams with which he had readied himself for Francine’s arrival, the bath had been a hearty, foamy affair, a steamy and fragrant series of whale-like dives and merry purgings, from which he would emerge tousled and shining to spray and slap himself with pungent substances. Only enforced contemplation of the inescapable and fast-approaching evening succeeded finally in urging him into a cursory scrubbing, and he rose from it dripping and slightly more cheerful, thinking of how he and Francine could laugh together at his risotto and how all he had to do was relax. His hair didn’t look so bad in the bathroom mirror either, and after one or two different attempts his clothes seemed all right too. He went back to confront the hall mirror, and found that he had improved himself.
In a moment of largesse, filled with the growing sense of his own urbanity, he decided to open a bottle of wine and drink some of it, just to show Francine that he knew how to be sociable with himself. She wasn’t due to arrive for half an hour yet, taking into account the fifteen minutes by which he assumed she would be late, whether by accident or design. He opened the oven door and peered in through the crack. His oven had a light in it which gave the risotto the appearance of a museum exhibit, a dish of planetary matter brought back by astronauts, or a porridgy alien captured and held hostage. He slammed the door shut and opened one of the bottles of red wine he had bought at the delicatessen. Sitting at the kitchen table with it, he realized that he hadn’t spent an evening — well, this kind of evening, anyway — with a woman for a long time. He had thought that he had, of course, but the quite suffocating excitement and fear with which he currently trembled explained to him why he had felt so awkward on those occasions, almost as if he didn’t care what happened during them. He had cared in the hours before a liaison, going through the imaginary evening like a diligent tourist would a guidebook, marking every highlight; and then registering his disappointment on arrival at each reality with equal thoroughness. This time, he had tried not to think about anything beyond the moment of Francine’s arrival. His unfamiliarity with her rendered his conjectures flimsy and unenjoyable, and it was a testament to her superiority, he thought, that the idea of imagining her in unplayed scenes appeared all at once rather lewd and inappropriate. He had always thought that love, or even infatuation, took him a long time to make, an old-fashioned business which would eventually produce a high-quality emotion. If he was honest about it, though, Belinda was the only person he had really loved, and when he first met her he had instantly felt much the same as he was feeling now. The disbelief at the beginning that she had agreed to go out with him, gradually eroded by the fact of her continuing presence; really, it had been the most amazing thing. He had felt disbelief at the end, too, but events had made it true, a sickening succession of votes cast against him until he had had to concede that he had lost.