‘Keep walking and stick close to me,’ I said. ‘We’ll soon have him confused.’
I took another right and then a left and then doubled back down a footpath which led between a row of three-storey terraces. Then we crossed the road a couple of times and cut through a small alleyway which brought us out nearly at the edge of Battersea Park. We stopped and listened. There was the usual traffic noise, and the distant sounds of a party just beginning to warm up a few streets away. But no more footsteps. We sighed with relief and Fiona let go of my hand, as if only just realizing that she had been clasping it for the last ten minutes.
‘I think we’ve lost him,’ she said.
‘If there was anyone.’
‘There was. I know there was.’
We walked the rest of the way down the main road, a small unfamiliar distance having opened up between us. There was a short pathway leading up to our entrance porch, lined raggedly with laurel bushes, and it was here, just before unlocking the door, that I had been hoping to offer Fiona a first tentative kiss. But the mood was no longer right. She was still looking tense, her handbag held tightly to her chest within folded arms, and I was so flustered that I worked stupidly at the lock for what seemed like an age before noticing that I had taken out the wrong key. Then, when I had finally got the door open and was about to step inside, Fiona let out a sudden cry — somewhere between a gasp and a scream — and leapt in before me, grabbing my arm so as to drag me with her and slamming the door which she then stood against, breathing heavily.
‘What is it? What’s the matter?’
‘He was out there — I could see him. His face in the bushes.’
‘Who?’
‘For God’s sake, I don’t know who. He was crouched there, peering at us.’
I made for the door handle.
‘This is ridiculous. I’m going to take a look.’
‘No — Michael. Please, no.’ She stopped me with a cautioning hand. ‘I saw his face quite clearly, and … and I recognized him.’
‘Recognized him? — Well who is it?’
‘I’m not sure. I didn’t actually recognize him, but … I’ve seen his face before. I’m sure I have. Michael, I don’t think it’s you he’s following. I think it must be me.’
I shook myself free and said, ‘Well, we can soon settle this.’ I opened the door and slipped outside; Fiona followed as far as the step.
It was cold by now and very quiet. Thin lines of mist hung in the air and coiled strangely around the white glow of the street lamps. I walked up and down the pathway, across the lawns, and looked both ways along the street. Nothing. Then I checked the bushes, pushing my face between branches, cracking twigs and making sudden thrusts into every leafy opening. Again, nothing.
Except that …
‘Fiona, come here a minute.’
‘Not on your life.’
‘Look, there’s nobody here. I just want to see if you notice anything.’
She squatted down beside me.
‘Is this the bush where you saw him?’
‘I think so.’
‘Breathe in deeply.’
We inhaled together: two long, exploratory sniffs.
‘That’s odd,’ she said, after a moment’s thought; and I knew what was coming next. ‘There’s no jasmine round here, is there?’
2
Fiona and I watched Orphée together one evening, two or three days after our dinner at the Mandarin. She had recovered from her fright soon enough, and now I was the one who was having trouble sleeping. The last few hours before dawn would find me wide awake, listening tiredly to the fitful lull which, in London anyway, is the closest you ever get to silence.
… La silence va plus vite à reculons. Trots fois …
My thoughts would be dizzy and incoherent, a pointless rehearsal of half-remembered conversations, unpleasant memories and wasteful anxieties. Once your mind is locked into such a pattern, it soon becomes obvious that the only way to break free is by getting out of bed: and yet this is the very last thing you feel capable of doing. It was only when the dry, acid tang in my mouth became too strong to bear that I would find the impetus to go out into the kitchen for a glass of water; after that, I might be assured of some sleep at last, because the circle would have been broken.
… Un seul verre d’eau éclair le monde. Deux fois …
I had an alarm clock which was set for nine o’clock, but invariably I would wake before then. Struggling for consciousness, the first noise I recognized would not be the rumble of traffic or the passing aeroplanes, but the song of a persevering robin as he greeted the feeble daylight from the treetops beneath my bedroom window.
… L’oiseau chante avec ses doigts. Une fois …
Then I would lie in bed, half-asleep, half-awake, listening for the postman’s footsteps on the staircase. For some reason I have never lost faith, not since I was a young child, in the power of letters to transform my existence. The mere sight of an envelope lying on my doormat can still flood me with anticipation, however transitory. Brown envelopes rarely do this, it has to be said; window envelopes, never. But then there is the white, handwritten envelope, that glorious rectangle of pure possibility which has even shown itself, on some occasions, to be nothing less than the threshold of a new world. And this morning, while I gazed with heavy, expectant eyes into the hallway through the half-open door of my bedroom, just such an envelope slid noiselessly into my flat, carrying with it the potential to transport me, not only onward into an unsuspected future but at the same time backward, back to a moment in my childhood more than thirty years ago, when letters first started to play an important part in my life.
Messrs Bulb, Plugg and Sockitt,
Electricians since 1945 (or a ¼ to 8),
24 Cable Crescent,
Meterborough.
26 July 1960
Dear Mr Owen,
We must apologize for the delay in connecting the electricity supply to your new home, viz. the second cowshed on the left on Mr Nuttall’s farm.
The truth is that we have been somewhat amp-ered in our attempts by the failure of our latest recruit, a bright spark if ever I saw one, to turn up for work. As a result, we realize that you have now been without electricity for several weeks, through no volt of your own.
Watt are we going to do about it, you ask? Rest assured, Mr Owen, that your supply will be connected a.s.a.p.,[38] and in the meantime please accept this small gift as a token of our goodwill — a month’s supply of current buns (enclosed).
Yours sincerely,
A. Daptor
(Head of Complaints).
Once upon a time, a short walk from my parents’ house along quiet roads would bring you to the edge of a wood. We lived at the point where Birmingham’s outermost suburbs began to shade into countryside, in a placid, respectable backwater, slightly grander and more gentrified than my father could really afford, and every weekend, usually on a Sunday afternoon, the three of us would set off for this wood on one of those long, mildly resented walks which have since become the nucleus of my earliest and happiest memories. There were various routes available, each given its own functional (but at the time intensely romantic and evocative) designation: ‘the glade’; ‘the ponds’; ‘the dangerous way’. But I had a personal favourite which, though we must have taken it more often than any other, never failed to exert its pull of (even then) nostalgic glamour. This was known simply as ‘the farm’.