Looking Down (5 page)

But something had changed. He had been called to the scene to assess the mental and physical health of the artist, and his interest should have stopped there. The artist was a novelty because of his age, sobriety and ability to articulate, while most of the doctor’s customers in the cells were young, speechless and brutal, spat rather than spoke and challenged his humanity as much as his ability to withstand halitosis at close quarters. He had only been called to the artist because of their doubts about his state of mind, and the bruise on his left cheek, which looked suspiciously like the familiar effect of a fist. About which the man made no complaint, although he winced when he was touched. A strong, able-bodied, older, but not old, man, definitely well nourished and obviously capable of shrugging off far worse.

Semi-retirement did not suit John. He had too much time on his hands, and enough money not to be hungry, leaving a vacuum for haunting. A dead wife and a daughter who blamed him for it, a mild case of depression. And if guilty curiosity about a single death out of the hundreds he had seen was a substitute for the intellectual challenges that no longer inspired him, he had better get back to his garden. Or live somewhere else, with less rough trade and fewer memories – if only he could bring himself to leave the cliffs, which would haunt him more than anything else, because he knew the temptation to jump. Go right to the edge and launch himself into delirious nothingness. Fall prey to that belief that a man could fly, like Icarus, away from his own loneliness, into a less sterile sky.

It was men who jumped. In his experience, female suicides preferred prettier, more controlled deaths, not in the presence of strangers. This one was surely pushed, and no one mourned her. He did not know why he took it upon himself to do so, or why it made him so angry.

Poor, well-nourished little stranger.

It was an area of strangers, and this was not, generally speaking, the sort of central London block where the occupiers of the different-sized flats associated with one another. Not much banging on the door opposite to borrow a cup of sugar, on account of the fact that half of the apartments were empty at any given time and only used by those in transit from the second house, or another country; there was the lack of a common language and circumstances. Some apartments were rented; of the other residents, half were rich, half not so rich, with at least one example of the league of distressed gentlefolk struggling to pay the service charges. No one knew who they all were, or on what terms they lived there – company let, money, inheritance, foreign money – except Fritz the porter and Sarah Fortune, who got much of her incomplete information from him and the rest from behaving as if this was not a remote, upmarket City abode where the very stairs looked discreet, but a small-town terraced street where the residents were related by common misfortune and it was perfectly OK to say hello and examine one another’s washing on a line. Even in the absence of any children, which might have united them all a little, the disingenuous approach of friendly curiosity tended to work, but then Sarah had always found that breaches of commonly held codes of manners usually did. If the inhabitant of an apartment was rich and not riddled by suspicion, they welcomed neighbours and wanted to show off; if they were not, they wanted to moan. Midweek the place was virtually empty during the day. Few had been obdurate in the face of her
knocking on the door, except for the Chinese, who rented the biggest flat, the penthouse flat, which straddled the whole of the top floor and was enviable for being light and bright. The Chinese paid the most, had the most power, trailed in and out with mobile phones, remained aloof and impervious to smiles, repelled any advances, and nobody knew what they did. Still, Sarah had reckoned, you couldn’t win them all. Undeterred, and with the pretence of delivering a flyer, she had knocked on the Beaumonts’ door and invited herself in the year before, just at a point when Lilian was dying to show someone what she was doing with the place, and in what colour. Sarah’s charm was entirely natural and based on the fact that she liked everybody and assumed they were likeable themselves until they proved otherwise. Her manners were honed by long use; she was unfazed by rejection and more or less proof against shock or surprise, which was useful on that first occasion when she saw Richard come out of the kitchen with a glass in his hand.

Dear me, an old lover. An older, stouter Richard than the one she had comforted years before in the wake of his first wife’s death; a jollier version of that grief-stricken, sex-starved man she had known for six months five years ago and parted from as amicably as she always did from any of them. She watched him standing in that long corridor, blinking, until she shook his hand firmly and said how pleased she was to meet him. Had they bought the place or was it rented, what a pretty lamp! A dim memory of the only lessons she had learned from her mother, viz: whenever you go into anyone else’s house always say, What a lovely room! And mean it. And also forget that you had met the man of the house in an art gallery, staring at a picture with tears streaming down his face, and simply taken him home. Richard was no fool, returned the handshake, said yes, we’re very pleased, let me get you a glass of wine, and she knew it might not be very exciting wine, but the glass would be marvellous. In that other flat
he’d had there had been that terrific collection of glass, which had, she remembered irrelevantly, left her cold.

And then the wife . . . shimmeringly lovely and adoring of him and delighted to have company. Sarah was sincerely pleased for him. And he knew her well enough to understand that discretion about sexual relations in between marriages, or during marriages for that matter, was entirely assured. She had once told him she admired men who had the sense to find a sympathetic, semiprofessional bed mate when recently bereaved or divorced because it certainly beat the shit out of the sort of baggage-laden, life-wrecking relationship which usually followed grief and foundered, messily, on the rocks of too much need and too many comparisons. I’m your interlude, she said; you’ll move on when you’re ready, and he had.

As for any suggestion that the presence of this overfriendly single woman on the floor below would cause a smidgeon of envy or suspicion in Mrs Beaumont’s heart, nothing could have been further from reality. When Sarah had knocked on their door eighteen months ago, Lilian had been utterly confident in her own outstanding beauty, the patent love of her man and her own unlined immortality. To Lilian, stunning at twenty-eight, Miss Fortune, aged almost forty, with specs round her neck, could have been any old bag with awful red hair and the potential to be an agony aunt. Naturally, when visiting neighbours, Miss Fortune looked untidy and clean in her own favourite colours, but that was all. She had never been a sexy dresser, anyway, except when it came to her passion for belts. Big tan leather belts, cloth belts with tassels, tapestry belts cinching in the plainest black dress. Her aphrodisiacs were perfume and sympathy.

But, of course, her immediate acceptance chez Beaumont created a bit of a problem in the long run. Because of the sympathy, and the availability, lovely Lilian Beaumont had taken to knocking
on
her
door in the last months, and was sitting here, at the moment, on Sarah’s shabby sofa, sniffing and tearful, and entirely unaware that her husband occasionally did the same, only without the tears. It was an awkward position, being confidante to both man and wife, but there it was, and Sarah had in a manner of speaking asked for it, so she would do the best she could and try to honour both, without betraying either. Provided they never coincided, which they never had (Richard either on his way out or on his way in, prefaced with a phone call; Lilian mid-morning and bored), and provided they didn’t want counselling, only an ear, any old ear, and they were each entirely self-absorbed, it was not that much of an imposition, but she had the feeling everything was going to get worse.

Lilian sat where Sarah’s brother had last sat. At the back of Sarah’s mind was relief that Steven had gone so quietly, plus the nagging feeling that a lack of protest spelt trouble. Though why she should worry also nagged her. Steven had a perfectly adequate flat of his own; it was his fault that he dithered about getting anything more permanent. He had gone while she slept, leaving a note that stated, ‘Darling sis, I completely understand.’ That was ominous. Four days’ silence might not have been ominous since he frequently disappeared for weeks, or, as he had once, for years, but it was.

‘I don’t understand,’ Lilian was saying for the seventh time. ‘I just don’t . . .’

‘Understand?’ Sarah added.

‘Exactly.
You
understand, don’t you?’

‘Well, no. Everyone’s different, you see.’

‘Exactly. But some are more different to others. And he’s gone
very
different.’

This was hardly profound chat, and going nowhere, so Sarah kept quiet and waited.

‘He’s gone so different, it’s as if he swanned off to another
planet and came back an alien. I mean completely different. But I’ve stayed the same.’

Sarah thought that might be part of the problem. She was thinking this morning that Lilian was not exactly the sharpest knife in the box, although so easy on the eye one tended to forget that. It was obviously easier to listen to a musical voice speaking inanities through a perfect mouth than to listen to nonsense from someone less blessed. Lilian’s voice had the knack of making everything sound intelligent, a very appealing voice, with a deep, rich chuckle when she was amused, so infectious Sarah found herself longing to hear it.

‘What drew you to him in the first place?’

‘He made me laugh.’

Ah yes, a man would turn somersaults to hear her laugh, invent jokes, make a fool of himself, simply to hear that sound. It had a powerful beauty, even to another woman, and if you added to that the potency of sex, no man would stand a chance with Lilian.

‘And doesn’t he still?’

‘Oh yes,’ Lilian said sadly. ‘When he tries. When he notices me at all.’

She was not stupid, Sarah had long since decided. She had an intuitive intelligence which showed in her taste and her ability to create order out of chaos, but analysis was not her strong point. She could not hold to a subject for long, and did not want to delve deep. Above all, she could not take blame, or have it pointed out to her that anything could ever be her fault, or even the result of something she had done. She wanted emotional massage, not suggestions. Concentration, even on her own preoccupations, was difficult. Sarah put it down to stress. And God, she was a beautiful girl. Not only classically lovely, but a male icon of beauty, with blonde hair, big boobs, tiny waist and endless legs. She had every excuse for imagining that was all she had to
be, for dwelling in the cocoon of it and postponing for ever any consideration of what else she was. Beauty like that was a gift, with a curse attached.

‘You never got those new curtains, did you, Sarah?’

‘No, couldn’t be bothered, and too expensive.’

That was where they had started, Lilian coming to her flat to offer advice, which fell on stony ground although Sarah had solicited it. This flat was half the size of the Beaumonts’, and even if Lilian’s ideas would have worked on a smaller scale, Sarah had never had any intention of doing more than listen to them. It was a neutral subject, was all. There were blinds at the window which worked well enough, minimal, comfortable second-hand furniture and the over-large painting which Lilian studiously ignored. As far as she was concerned, art in the form of paintings should go with the walls. The painting they faced was of a huge chestnut cow, predominating over a field of bluebells, entirely wrong for an urban reception room. Not the subject matter, necessarily, but certainly the scale. The animal practically lumbered into the room, salivating. Lilian imagined she could hear it say Moo, glanced at it and glanced away.

‘I don’t know if it started with his getting interested in birds, or painting. First he went off birdwatching, made him feel a boy again, he said. Bless. Then he started to paint. Oh, he says he’s always done it, you know, drawn things, but it’s not as if he was trained or anything. Now he wants to do it all the time. He brings back sketches, goes into that hell-hole of a room and paints for ever. And he doesn’t like towns any more. Always wants to be out and away. Doesn’t always tell me where he’s going. I have to ask Fritz; he tells Fritz, for God’s sake. Doesn’t notice anything. Especially me.’

Sarah knew all this and did not really want it to go on, not because she was unsympathetic, but because she also knew what the end result would be if Lilian told her too much. If she
got to the point of tears, or specifying the last point Richard had made love to her and how, she would go away and feel ashamed of revealing so much, and the next time she saw Sarah she would smile brightly and scurry off, as if nothing intimate had ever been said. And that would go on for a week or three until she had forgotten her weakness and could convince herself it had not happened. Sarah would have dolloped out a few indiscretions of her own to even out the balance and make Lilian less ashamed of the gut-spilling but she could not think of anything that might fit that particular bill. It was better to let Lilian feel slightly sorry for her and tell herself she called on Sarah because it was Sarah who was lonely. A widow, poor thing, disregarding the fact that Sarah had been widowed for fifteen years and was hardly mourning. Lilian’s yawning gap of insecurity filled Sarah with pity, even if that was accompanied by irritation. Lilian at twenty-eight had no armour against disappointment, whereas Sarah with the benefit of years had long since developed the carapace from behind which she struck back, and she had no sense of shame whatsoever. Shame was alien stuff, worse than jealousy. It was useless to mention neighbourhood problems to Lilian, even by way of distraction. No good talking about Minty, the abused servant of the wretched Chinese in the penthouse, because she would not want to know. Unlike her husband, who was curious, courteous, liked gossip and always wanted to know. He knew about Minty. He had helped, and Sarah would have taken a bet that Lilian did not know about that, either.