101 Pieces of Me (16 page)

“Where to, miss?”

The young couple had gone off in their taxi, and the next one had drawn up. “Oh … Raleigh Court, Bayswater, please. Number 23.”

The driver hopped out, put my bag in the luggage compartment and hopped back in again, whistling. I thought how uncomplicated being a taxi driver must be, and for a moment I actually envied him. But when the cab swung into the traffic, my envy disappeared. I realized I had never been in a London taxi alone at night before. David had always been there to chain my attention, so I had never been aware of the swarm of motor cars and horse-drawn vehicles, bicycles, motor bicycles, double-decker omnibuses and hackney cabs swirling along the streets. It all looked so higgledy-piggledy, and there were so many lights and conflicting noises, I wondered how the driver could work out what to do and where to go without injuring himself or me. Rounding Hyde Park Corner, I was thrown sideways even though I was holding tightly to the strap above the taxi door.

I am alone
, I said to myself.
I am grown up. For the first time in my life there is no one to do anything for me; there is only me
.

As the taxi slowed down, the driver looked from side to side of a narrow street, searching for number 23. I began to panic slightly. Supposing Aidan was away, or not in, or refused to answer the door?

I leaned forward and spoke to the driver. “Excuse me … could you please wait? The person I am visiting may not be there.”

“Very good, miss.”

In order to deposit my case at Aidan’s door, the driver had to come into the light that shone above it, and I saw for the first time that he was young. I started to envy him again. Much later tonight he would count his takings and go home to his mother or his wife. Tomorrow he would go out, perhaps to a football match. And tomorrow night, if anyone cared to look, they would find him as usual outside Victoria Station, ready for drunks, complainers, arguers… How lucky he was in his ordinariness! As I thanked him I noticed he was quite good-looking. I wondered bleakly if he would ever appear on a newsreel and be “spotted” for the films.

When I rang the doorbell, footsteps sounded inside the building. The taxi driver tipped his cap. “That’ll be one-and-ninepence, miss.”

I gave him two shillings. “Keep the change,” I told him, as I had heard David do. He touched his cap again before he returned to the waiting cab. And at the same moment the door of number 23 opened.

“Good grief!” Aidan stood there with one hand on the door latch and the other in his pocket, his eyebrows in his hair.
“Clara?”

“G
ood evening, Aidan. May I come in?”

In the train I had rehearsed the speech I would make to him. But now it sounded prim and spinsterish, as if I were an aunt addressing him in an I’m-determined-to-educate-you tone.

He gave one of his exaggerated stage bows. “By all means, madam.” He caught sight of my suitcase. “And you’ve come to stay! How positively
de-licious
!”

The spinster aunt vanished. “Shut up, Aidan, and help me with this, will you? I’ve had a long day and I’m exhausted.”

Grinning, he picked up the case. “Well, at the risk of offending madam, I must say you look it.” With his other hand, he pulled me into a small vestibule, from which rose a flight of polished wooden stairs. “This way.”

I went up first. As the front door crashed closed behind me, something like the fear I had felt in the hotel room overwhelmed me. We were only halfway up, but my legs failed. I stopped and turned helplessly to Aidan, whose bemused expression immediately changed. “Clara, whatever has happened? You look …” – his eyes roamed my face – “has someone hurt you?”

He was a blur. I do not know if it was tears or faintness that dissolved my image of him, but I could no longer support myself. I had escaped from the hotel, found Brighton Station, caught the right train, taken a taxi and arrived at 23 Raleigh Court, fired by determination not to allow David’s betrayal to defeat me and by my habit of imagining I was someone else, in this case a taxi driver. But now that I had caught hold of a lifebelt – Aidan was at least familiar, and he was
here
– I suddenly found myself nearer than ever to drowning.

Aidan caught me around my shoulders and lowered me to a stair, where he sat beside me while I wept. The weeping became howling, and still he sat there calmly, comforting me with soft murmurs as one would a child, tolerating my shoulder-shaking sobs and dripping nose. When the flood lessened, he took a clean handkerchief from his pocket and wiped my face while I hiccupped and sniffed. “Oh, dear …” I blurted apologetically, “what must I look like?”

“You look like a girl who’s been badly hurt by some heartless bounder,” he said. “And I’m pretty damned sure I know who. Now come in and make yourself comfortable.”

H
e helped me to my feet and up the rest of the stairs. From the doorway of the main room I could see that the flat was the home of a man who cared little for wealth but a great deal for comfort and beauty. There were no thick carpets or silk-upholstered chairs; rather, the comfort of a soft sofa and the beauty of book-lined walls. I had never seen such a room. Since I had left Haverth, I had lived in hotels. I had only seen decoration designed to impress rich people who had the same sort of furnishings at home. But Aidan’s sitting-room, simply furnished and softly lit, had no pretensions to impress anyone.

The floor was polished wood, over which had been laid a rug. Not the Persian kind with intricate patterns I had seen in so many hotels, but a plain rug, the colour of grass. In fact, the exact colour of the hills around Haverth in the first days of spring. At the windows, which were the old-fashioned sash kind, were cotton curtains, unswagged, untrimmed, unfringed, and the colour of the sky on the hottest summer day. Apart from the sofa, there were cushions on the floor and a wicker chair. The only wall not covered with bookcases was crowded with pictures: photographs of Aidan and other people, sketches, postcards, greeting cards, some framed, some not, some not even mounted but stuck to the corners of others with drawing pins. I gazed and gazed.

My legs were trembling. I was glad Aidan was still holding on to my arm. “Is this really where you live?” I asked.

“What an odd question!” He gave me a puzzled, but amused, look. “Do you think I merely
pretend
to live at 23 Raleigh Court, when my true home is far away in … I don’t know, Ruritania, perhaps?”

He was right. It was a foolish question. But I was foolish enough to be taken aback at the sight of a modest, pleasant room after months of lying in starched sheets gazing up at ornate ceilings. “I’m sorry,” I said, hoping he could hear that I was sincere. “It’s just very different from everywhere else I’ve been since … well, since I left home.”

I could not go on. My throat contracted, and I bowed my head, unwilling to allow Aidan to witness yet more tears. I swallowed repeatedly, trying to compose myself.

Aidan had the decency not to look at me. He settled me in the corner of the small sofa, bustling a little, asking if I were warm enough and could he get me some tea or something to eat?

“Please don’t take any trouble.” My voice was a whisper. “I am quite all right.”

“I’ve got some soup I can heat up,” he said, halfway to the door that led to the rest of the flat. “And I’ll do some bread and butter, shall I? And tea. I could do with a cup myself.”

He brought me a bowl of soup and put a plate of bread and butter and my teacup beside it on a low table, then sat in the wicker chair, balancing his own teacup on his knee, and regarded me carefully. “Now, are you going to tell me what’s brought you to my door?” After a pause, he added, “My
real
door, that is, not the one in Ruritania?”

I did not smile. “Thank you very much for this.” I took a mouthful of bread and butter. “I had no supper.” I took another mouthful. “What brought me to your door, as you say, was the piece of paper you wrote your address on, ages ago. It was in my make-up bag, all screwed up and dirty. But I could still read it.” I took a spoonful of the soup. It was too hot but unexpectedly delicious. “This is very good.”

“It’s only some vegetables and a bit of stock.”

I looked at him sharply, wondering if it was another joke. I had never heard of a bachelor, or indeed any man, making soup. He looked back at me with an expression of innocence. “Do you think I can afford a cook? I can make eggs and bacon, too. And lamb chops. I assume my cooking skill is the sole reason you turned up here, since I am accustomed to being roundly despised by Miss Clara Hope.”

I stirred the soup and blew on it, giving myself a little time, collecting the courage I needed to admit the truth. “I came here because I have nowhere else to go,” I told him. “Perhaps you remember that you once offered me help if I ever needed it? Well, I do.”

F
or the first time since my arrival, I looked at him, properly. His hair had been recently washed but not oiled, and stuck up in tufts at the back, as if he had been resting it on a cushion. It was now almost midnight, so he might have been in his bedroom when I rang the doorbell, though he was dressed in old trousers and a shirt without its collar on. On the front of his pullover I detected a cigarette burn, possibly two, and a smear of something like gravy. His face looked just as it always did – self-aware, mocking, alert, smooth. The injuries David had inflicted upon it had healed. I had never noticed before how slim his shoulders and chest were. Or had he got thinner since I had last seen him?

“So what has David done?” he asked.

“I don’t
know
,” I confessed. “I don’t understand. All I know is that he has broken my heart.”

He sighed softly. “Oh, Clara. You’re a nice, loving girl with no experience. A blank canvas for David Penn to put whatever he likes on.”

I could not dispute this. “He said I’m an idiot.”

Aidan made a sound like
Grrrumph!
and said, “Only an idiot would consider you an idiot, Clara.”

“So
David’s
the idiot, then?” I took another spoonful of soup. “Aidan, please let’s be serious. I am more of an idiot than you suppose. You see, when David asked me to go away with him to Brighton for the weekend, I didn’t realize he meant I was supposed to, you know …” – I could feel myself blushing helplessly – “share his bed.”

“Ah,” said Aidan with resignation. To my relief, he did not try to make a joke.

“And he’d booked two rooms, because I’d insisted. But there was a bathroom between them, with a door from each room.” I paused. “I suppose it was easy for someone to hide in there.”

He frowned. “Someone was hiding in the bathroom?”

“I know it sounds like something from a penny dreadful,” I said, still red-faced, “but there was a man in there, and when I was changing he suddenly came into my bedroom, and he had a camera and he was taking pictures of me without some of my clothes on.”

The room was utterly silent. By this hour the residents of Bayswater had retired. The window must have been open; a breeze twitched the blue curtains. Aidan whistled softly. “Christ, Clara.”

“And do you know what happened next? David came in through the bathroom too, and he wasn’t wearing his shirt, and he pushed me onto the bed, and…” Unable to go on, I put down my spoon. I got up and looked at the bookshelves through watery eyes, trying not to sniff, hoping Aidan would have the grace to let me gather myself.