Looking Down (10 page)

And so was Lilian. She liked them and they liked her. She did not think beyond that to imagine the mentality of the mother who had imbued these kids with such confidence, or the sleepless nights, devotion, expense and that element of luck that made them turn out the way they were. Sweet, pleasant, and united in their welcome of her. Nor did Lilian wonder why, when Sally told her in the ladies’ loo that they were all so genuinely thrilled that Dad was getting married again. Losing Mum had been so hard, and he had been so lost and miserable, and they had all been so
worried, you know? Lilian could have read between the lines that her future husband was presenting himself as a great big, lonely, overconcerned nuisance and a potentially awful future obligation to children who no longer needed him. She could have read between other lines and seen, not only their palpable relief, but also their fascination about the fact that good ole Dad had hit upon a bird of paradise, the old goat. Lilian might have seen that they were close enough to form a united front in the acceptance of the inevitable, and mightily relieved because she herself was a helluva lot better than they might have got. Or also seen, when she went out with Ben and Charlie, the nudges and winks behind her back when they told their mates she was their
stepmother.
None of that would have mattered, even if she had seen it.

Lilian met them regularly. She made them beautiful Christmas stockings. They joined in for holidays and behaved well. They came round in a posse on high days and occasional weekends, or she met them in various combinations of at least two. It had never occurred to her that they might, in some understated way, have been monitoring her. They were simply nice. They were mates from the very beginning.

‘Do you know he hates cornflakes, or anything which makes a noise in the morning?’

A nudge and a slap, from Charlie to Sally.

‘Did you know he snores? Only joking.’ From Charlie.

‘Do you how
critical
he is? Always criticising. Always gets the needle in. If you don’t work, you go nowhere.’

And from Ben, who was always protective towards her, saying to her today, ‘Is the old man behaving right, Lil?’

‘Yeah, he’s fine. Just a bit distracted, you know? Painting, you know. Goes at it madly.’

‘Oh, Lil, he was always like that.’

It had a strange back-echo to what Sarah had said.
Maybe he was always like that – obsessional.
However protective Ben might
seem, she knew she could not tell him that his father had become distinctly odd and had taken to painting obscenities. Nor that he appeared to have been arrested for something on a clifftop. That would have been an admission of failure, which she was not going to make to her own family, and even less to his. She had being going to tell Ben and Sally all about it, but in the end she had not because of the realisation that it might not be wise. Something about Ben’s relentless cheerfulness forbade it and some latent instinct was telling her that yes, they might be mates, but they did not want her confiding in them on the subject of their father.
They
could criticise and tease;
she
could not, and if ever the chips were down and there was a division of loyalties, or she ceased to take care of their father, this friendship might be pretty short-lived. It was a lonely feeling, not assuaged by the lingerie department of Fortnum’s. Ben and Sally had had to dash; they always had to dash towards the end of lunch, while Lilian did not have to dash anywhere. And she could not tell them
anything.

Hanging from a padded silk hanger there was a frothy concoction of a silk dressing gown of oyster white, edged at the neck and sleeves with similarly dyed ostrich feathers, matched with a nightdress of thin-strapped simplicity, adorned only with a single diamante button at the V of the cleavage. Definitely honeymoon stuff. In another mood, she would have laughed at its silliness, because those damn feathers would shed everywhere in a clinch, or get all over the bathroom when you washed your face, and the whole ensemble would spend most of its life in the dry cleaners. And besides all that, Richard detested feathers as much as frills and pastel colours, preferred her in red or black, slinky but unadorned, with a distinct preference for nothing at all. She stood by the side of it, not exactly wondering if she had a mind of her own, but peculiarly enraged by something she could not define, and because she knew he would loathe it, she bought the
negligee anyway. It was wrapped with a great deal of tissue paper and fuss, which had her stamping her heels with an impatience she did not show. It might never be unwrapped, which made the wrapping a particular waste of time, for something bought as a gesture that already felt futile.

And then what? Home to a message from him, that he loved her and hoped she was having fun, would be back tomorrow. What had they ever done together? What did she know about him? He painted obscenities. He ignored her. She surrounded him with too many things, and made him too
safe.

Later, she put on the ensemble. It had a certain old-fashioned, ridiculous glamour, making her imagine her name was Gina, or Gloria, or Bardot, or at least Juliet or Nicole. She wafted round the flat in it with a glass of champagne, swigging it carefully so as not to spill. In the bathroom, entirely according to her predictions, a couple of the feathers flew off while she set her blonde hair on heated rollers and played with the look of the unutterably seductive vamp with coiled locks, somewhere between Art Nouveau slenderness and a nineteen-fifties film star with a bosom and a breathy voice. She got well into the role, waltzing round to the right kind of music in the reception room, admiring her own work in all respects. Beautiful room, just as the bathroom was, in its own way, beautiful. An impressive row of invitations on the mantelpiece, including galleries, which she liked, and one to a Buckingham Palace garden party, which was very satisfying, even though she didn’t much care for the Queen. Everything state of the art and everything on the walls
hers.
Except the glass in the kitchen, which he no longer wanted.

So, all right, then, why did he not want her any more? Oh, but he did. Surely he did. If only she didn’t want him. There was a sudden panic.
What would she do on her own?

You make him too comfortable.

Then she was angry. She went into the daylight room to make
herself even angrier. Why did he hide in here when he had so much else from which to choose? A draught blew from the window. The painting on the easel was only a small thing, but it caught the eye and made her want to be sick. Lilian slammed the door behind her, went back to the kitchen and refuelled on champagne. This was no way for a girl to spend an evening, dressed like this. She could go out; she didn’t want to go out. She could find a girlfriend and sit in a bar, but she had never really liked doing that. Never gone for clubs and dancing, except in her teens, when it had quickly palled. She enjoyed turning heads but preferred the quieter environment where she could be noticed; she had always wanted exclusive attention. Perhaps this made her ideal for the older man. She had felt so safe as the younger woman. Her feelings for him might alter, but his, never: he was the lucky one.

Too comfortable.
He enjoyed comfort and beautiful things, didn’t he? Well, she could certainly do something about that.

Another phrase echoed through her mind. That old cliché
Get a life.
She dismissed that. She had the life she wanted, what else was there to get?

Missing him was like having toothache.

Perhaps if she changed everything here, that would change the balance of things. She walked down the long corridor, circled the reception room, once, twice, three times. And finally, dizzy with her own circular thoughts, lay on her sumptuous bed, still wearing the now creased negligee. The designer had been right. Ostrich feathers felt soft against the face, and the sheer sensation of silk could lull a person to sleep.

Two hours after midnight, in total silence, Steven began climbing. The well of the building had been beautifully designed for his purpose: the drainpipes were ancient and fat, with solid brackets anchoring them to the wall, the window ledges
thoughtfully placed, and there were even small balconies jutting out from the kitchens and the remnants of an old, disused pulley system which had once been used to remove rubbish. He supposed, as he climbed, slowly and silently, keeping control of his breath, that in the heyday of this building there might have been a restaurant below, delivering meals to the apartments by a similar system. Those were the days when people really did live in style in apartments created to provide every service, and he was grateful for that kind of history as he clung to the metal stanchion of the old lift and paused for strength. Grateful for the fact that no one had ever cared about the well of the building, so that when new drainpipes had been included down one wall or another, none of the old had been taken away. It was a mess of foot- and handholds, because no one cared what it looked like and all the money would, of course, go on the front.

He worked upwards, to that open window. There were other open windows, but that was the one he wanted. Past the floor where Sarah lived, with windows closed, and on to the next. Convenient windows, too, big and old, with efficient sash cords, so that he could slip one open easily and swing himself inside. No burglar alarms at the back. They felt so
safe
in here.

Nothing much in this room. The torch showed a cluttered studio, as he remembered. He moved to the door and set off down a long corridor. How kind they were to him: even the floorboards did not creak. He toured the big room at the end, picking out the details. The curtains hid him from the silent street; every light was on. Someone had gone negligently to bed. He knew someone was there, he could smell it, but he did so prefer burglary with the occupants in residence. It seemed fairer somehow, and was more of a challenge. He liked to think how long it would take them to notice that something might have gone while they were asleep.

He went back down the corridor and tried three closed doors in turn. Boring bathrooms, etc. The last door, next to the studio door, was half open, a dim light beyond it. He pushed it open further.

Oh my God.
Zing.

Steven stepped back out of the room, holding on to the door handle without relinquishing or closing it. There was a small vestibule which led to the three doors at the turn of the long corridor and with his back to the bedroom door he was facing a mirror, cunningly placed to maximise minimal light. He had retreated out of the room in order to go back in, but the sight in the mirror prevented him. He saw a smallish, skinny-hipped man with prominent thigh muscles, clad in black from neck to toe, with pale, chalk-stained hands, broad torso, and the heavy belt at his waist. He noticed the contours of too much muscle, normally invisible inside his usual loose clothes, and the ridiculous additional feature of a black rubber skullcap over his sandy hair. Left alone, that lighter hair would grow with the same unruly thickness as his sister’s, but it was cropped, and his skull beneath appeared as a series of bumps and lumps belonging to some mutant beast. An erection strained the Lycra. There was no noise from the sleeping beauty in the room. He counted to fifteen, a random number slowly intoned under his breath, breathed deeply and quietly. Then went back inside.

Zing.
He took another breath and tried a familiar trick. Compared the composition of her to
The Nude Maja
in the National Gallery, a painting he particularly remembered because it had been vandalised and repaired, and he had studied it closely. Here goes: a perfect composition, with her lying on one side, nicely centralised in the bed, with her visible eye central to the portrait. He took a deep breath and intoned to himself.
The eye of the onlooker is led first to the breast, half covered by the arm, and then to the profile, and then to the brilliant, dizzy curls of the hair, and then travels back, via the shoulder
 . . . and then took another, similar excursion, this time noticing the peripheral details. A few, floating feathers on the pillow, the hand supporting the head, and then back down to the feet, via the knees, demurely together under the gown so tightly secured round the waist. Oyster white against purple, he noticed. A fantastic harmony of brilliant colours, deliberately enhancing the pale skin tones. He approached and touched the nightgown. Always did love fabrics. He wondered what the title would be, nothing pretentious or allegorical he hoped. Something simple, like
Woman Sleeping.

She stirred and moved, while he did not. Turned a full half circle to lie on the other side, revealing more of her face. Now it was the right eye that was central, and more of the calf revealed, and the slipper shoe stayed on the same foot, but as for composition, still excellent. Beautiful light in here, softening already soft contours, accentuating shape. The only thing bothering him were the feathers on the pillow. That was slightly contrived, giving an unnecessary hint of conflict and decay, although otherwise the tableau was fucking stunning. He was disturbed by those feathers, hated it when the artist overdid it, but he was moved by the visible trace of a tear on her cheek.

One more time, then, just to get it again. Out of the room; breathe, count, and then back in, the way he did it with paintings.
They had an aura, and if that did not work more than once, the critical faculty went into overdrive and the
zing
died. You did not want to look at them again. Somewhere in this apartment there was something to steal and rescue, but it was only this scene he wanted: shamed himself for wanting to rape and punish her for having this violent effect on him, wanting to possess and admire and then kill her, so that she would never move. It was his own reflection in the mirror that made him pause, but it did not stop that terrible beating of the heart, which pounded in his head, louder than a deafening electric drill. He wanted her to remain perfect. After a longer pause, he pushed open the door, waiting and aching for
zing.