Stephen had laughed again and this time, not knowing what else to do, she had joined in. Their laughter had met and intertwined, rising confidently above the murmur of voices, the percussion of glasses, the sensuous thud of the music; and everything had seemed to crystallize for Francine then, as she felt herself truly enter the warm temple of privilege and partake of its sacraments.
A figure was moving along the path at a distance across the park. An eccentricity of motion snagged Francine’s gaze and with the sudden latent shock which signals the imminence of danger she fell from her reminiscences and plunged back into the present moment. She understood from his wild, loping walk that it was a deformed man, his hunched body flailing sideways like that of a crippled bird. As she watched, he struck off into the grass and began running in circles, light footed and graceful, as if he were dancing; then he stopped and gazed beatifically at the empty sky, flinging out first one arm and then the other in a seed-sowing gesture. He looked up, and before she could contrive to glance away he had caught her in his sights and begun lumbering over the grass towards her. Immediately Francine left her seat and started walking quickly towards the park gates. Her heart thudded and strained ahead, alert for the sound of footsteps behind her, but when she reached the road and looked back she saw the man standing beside the empty bench, talking and waving his arms wildly. She crossed quickly, grateful for the firm body of traffic which now lay between them. In the distance she could hear a telephone ringing.
Francine lived at the end of an isolated terraced row on Mill Lane, a long road which dangled like trailing spaghetti from the concrete jaws of Kilburn. The outer side wall of the building gave on to a tangled brace of railway tracks, which lay some way down in a wide incision stretching far away towards the cupped palm of the city like an arm of exposed veins, and which gave the house the precarious appearance of a cartoon character sauntering over a cliff. She had for almost a month been occupying the basement flat, which she had found in response to an advertisement in a newspaper. Janice, who had placed the advertisement, lived there with her. The flat was the fourth Francine had rented in the past year, and although lately she had begun to find certain aspects of Janice’s behaviour far from ideal — in fact, altogether hypocritical — the loftier hopes for the arrangement which she had harboured when first she had moved in had so far prevented her from mentioning them. Janice was undoubtedly the sovereign figure in the history of her flatmates and although, once the first worship of unfamiliarity had faded, Francine had begun to see how she would scale and conquer this more sophisticated range, she required time to accustom herself to its greater challenge.
Before she came to live with Janice, Francine had shared a flat in High Barnet with two other secretaries. Her stay with them had been the briefest of all her tenancies, but she found herself occasionally looking back on it with a vague longing for the home which had included amongst its luxuries the ease of feeling contempt for those with whom she shared it. In return for the condescensions her sense of her own superiority had permitted her to make, Lisa and Michele had admired her unflinchingly, and when she announced her intention to move to a location more central to her expectations, had encouraged her to do so with the selfless wistfulness of plain sisters. Francine rather missed their easy company now, for at least they had all been going out to work, and she had enjoyed watching their eyes widen as she told them of her adventures in the City after their dull days at the local estate agent. Janice only did two mornings a week at a boutique in Hampstead, where she seemed to earn enough not to need anything else and was always getting free clothes, and when Francine came home in the evenings Janice would never ask her anything about her day. In fact, she often seemed to have forgotten that Francine went to work at all, and would say things like, ‘So where have you been today?’ Francine would tell her and she would say ‘Again?’ or ‘Still?’ and look vaguely sympathetic. Of course, on the days when Janice had to go in she would always make such a drama out of it, and would be in the bathroom for hours so that the mirror was steamed up by the time Francine managed to get in to do her make-up.
Nevertheless, she knew that she had been lucky to find Janice, and her first instinct that she would learn things from her which might result in personal advancement had quickly been borne out in the utter unfamiliarity of her habits. Often she had come back from work to find Janice curled on the sofa in a circle of lamp-or candlelight while night filled the rooms around her, irradiating an intimate warmth which, although it came in fact from the portable heater which panted continually at her side, seemed somehow to be the result of personal projection. Janice habitually remained indoors, where she would install herself before the television for the day, its volume subdued, on a bed of cushions, turning the pages of magazines and stirring only to glide to the kitchen in bare feet to make cups of instant coffee. Francine had emerged from her first startling plunges into this quite tangible aura of softness and languor with a hoard of rare and mysterious self-criticisms. Janice was thin and ethereal in appearance and whimsical in deed, and for the first time Francine found her own physique clumsy, her habits too regulated. Janice would wince at the bold voice Francine brought back with her from the office and shrink from the clamour of her return, watching with mildly astonished interest as she prepared her evening meal. It was unpleasant to feel so noisy, but Francine’s dedication to matters of self-improvement could always overwhelm her pride and she accepted the proffered apprenticeship to Janice’s atmosphere with subdued gratitude. Her affection for Janice once she had learned to resemble her more closely was certainly fond, but Francine’s impulses for domination were beginning to rally from their exile. She wondered when their friendship would be established on its proper footing, with its missing element — the open acknowledgement of Francine’s ordination to the exceptional — restored.
Francine had been surprised to discover that Janice didn’t have a boyfriend, and the mood of instruction which still dogged their partnership had so far conferred its chastity also on Francine. Janice was more critical of men than other girls Francine knew. They were always ringing for her, though, and she would whisper into the phone, her lips at the receiver as if she were drinking from it, but she rarely went out. On those occasions when she did, two pale fingers of lipstick on her mouth, she would come back an hour or two later on her own. She never asked Francine to go with her, even though once Francine had invited her out with some people from work. It had annoyed her to see how all the men had behaved around Janice, and so many of them had asked about her the next day at work that she had felt quite insulted, especially when she considered that they had all been trying to get her own attention up until then. One or two had actually asked if Janice had a boyfriend and Francine had lied and told them that she did. Afterwards she had felt a bit guilty about it, but Janice had told her once that she was in love with a man who was getting married to someone else, so it wasn’t absolutely untrue. Janice hadn’t really mentioned the man again, except recently to tell Francine that it was the day of the wedding, whereupon she had drunk vodka straight from a bottle for several hours and then disappeared to her room. She had laughed about the men from Francine’s office when they had got home and then done various quite funny imitations of them involving the type of snorting noises made by pigs. Francine had been forced to laugh, and after that she hadn’t really been interested in them at all.
She crossed the bridge over the railway tracks and for a moment looked along its gorge towards the dark, distant crowd of buildings with its bright mass of nocturnal eyes. There was something in the vista which unsettled her and she hurried past it to her front door. As usual the flat was dark when she let herself in, but along the hall she saw a glow hint seductively from beneath the sitting-room door at Janice’s presence and she went automatically towards it. Janice looked blankly up at her from the sofa when she entered the cave of the room’s warmth, with the mild amnesia which Francine was always required to penetrate even after the smallest separation.