The Lake of Darkness (9 page)

At Highgate High Street, waiting in the traffic queue to turn up past the school, he turned to speak to her. She had been talking artlessly, charmingly, about transport difficulties between Highgate and Hampstead, how there ought to be a new tube line under the Heath, a station called the Vale of Health. He didn’t speak. He was suddenly conscious that she was not pretty but beautiful, perhaps the only truly beautiful person who had ever been in his car or sat beside him. Except, of course, for Tim Sage.

She told him her name as they were driving along the Spaniard’s Road.

“It’s Francesca,” she said, pronouncing it in the Italian way. “Francesca Brown.”

It turned out that the friend, who had a flat in Frognal, wouldn’t yet be home from work. Martin suggested a drink
in the Hollybush. The rain was lashing against the windows of the car, but Martin had an umbrella on the back seat. He put up the umbrella and held it out over her but, to his surprise and slightly to his confusion, she put her arm through his and drew him towards her so that they were both protected from the rain. There weren’t yet many people in the bar. As he came back to her, carrying their drinks, he saw her big dark glowing eyes fixed on him and slowly she broke into a somehow joyful smile. His heart seemed to beat faster. It was eight before either of them realised how much time had passed and even then she lingered for another half-hour.

“Would you have dinner with me tomorrow night, Francesca?”

He had parked the car at the top of Frognal in front of the big houses in one of which Annabel had her flat. Francesca hesitated. The look she turned on him was intense, unsmiling, no longer joyful.

“What’s the matter?” he said. “Is something wrong?”

She said carefully, “No,” and then in a shy voice but as if she couldn’t hold the words back, “we must meet again, I know that.”

“Then tomorrow?”

Her answer was a vehement nod. She got out of the car. “Call for me at the shop.”

The grey rain, blown by sharp gusts of wind, swallowed her up. It went on raining most of the night. On the radio at breakfast there was an announcement of a murder that had taken place in Hampstead the evening before. Martin shivered a little to think that while he had been sitting and talking with Francesca a woman had been murdered less than a mile away, her body left lying out in the teeming rain.

He called for Francesca at the shop at a quarter to six. They had drinks at Jack Straw’s Castle and then dinner at the Villa Bianca. Francesca didn’t smoke or drink more
than a glass of wine, and for an aperitif she had orange juice. When the time came for her to go home she wouldn’t let him drive her. They were standing by his car, arguing about it, Martin insisting that he must drive her and she declaring in her earnest fashion that she wouldn’t dream of allowing it, when a taxi came along and she had hailed it before he could stop her. The taxi bore her away down Hampstead High Street and turned into Gayton Road which was what it would have done whether her home had been to the north of Hampstead or to the east or even possibly to the west. Tomorrow night, he thought, he would ask her point blank where she lived. Why hadn’t he done that already? He felt almost ashamed when he reflected that he had spent most of their time together talking about himself while she had listened with the attention of someone already committed to a passionate interest in the speaker. Of course, he wasn’t used to that kind of companionship. It was laughable to think of his parents or Gordon or Norman Tremlett hanging breathlessly on his words. But it hadn’t been laughable in Francesca. It had been enormously flattering and gratifying and sweet, and it had made him feel very protective towards her-and it had distracted him from asking her any questions about her own life. However, he would ask her tomorrow.

Not the shop this time but the foyer of the Prince of Wales theatre. This was the way he had conducted his previous and rather brief unsatisfactory relationships with girls, dinner one night, theatre the next, cinema the next, then dinner again. What else was there? Francesca looked so beautiful that he blurted out his feelings once they were in their seats.

“You look absolutely beautiful. I can’t stop looking at you.”

She was wearing a softly draped dress of rose-coloured
panne
velvet, and round her neck on a ribbon a tiny pink rosebud. Her hair was piled like a Japanese lady’s in
mounds and coils, fixed with long tortoiseshell pins. The unaccustomed make-up she wore made her seem a little strange, remote, and violently sexually attractive. She winced a fraction at the compliment.

“Don’t, Martin.”

He waited until the play was over and they were walking towards his car, parked in Lower Regent Street. Then he said gently and with a smile,

“You shouldn’t make yourself look like that if you don’t like compliments.”

His tone was light but hers serious and almost distressed. “I know that, Martin! I know I’m a fool. But I couldn’t help it, don’t you see? I did want you to think I looked nice.”

“Of course. Why shouldn’t you?”

“Oh, let’s not talk about it,” she said.

When they were driving up Highgate West Hill he said he was going to drive her home and where did she live? If he would drop her here, she said, she would get a taxi. He pulled into Gordonhouse Road by the Greek Orthodox Church, switched off the engine, turned to look at her.

“Have you got a boy friend that you’re living with, Francesca?”

“No, of course not. Of course I haven’t.” And she added, “Not a
boy friend.
Not that I’m
living
with.” He was quite unprepared for what she did next. She opened the car door and jumped out. He followed her, but not fast enough, and by the time he reached the corner a taxi carrying her was starting off up the hill.

That night he asked himself if he could possibly, after only three days, be in love, and decided that he couldn’t. But he slept badly and could think of nothing and no one but Francesca until he had phoned Bloomers at nine-thirty and spoken to her and been told she would see him again in the evening.

They went to a little restaurant she knew at the top of the
Finchley Road. He didn’t ask her why she had run away and she volunteered no explanation. After the meal he asked her if she would come back to Cromwell Court with him and he would make coffee. And in saying this he felt shy and awkward with her, for invitations of that kind to girls he supposed always carried the implication of a sexual denouement. He had had a secret half-ashamed conviction since last night that she might be a virgin.

She agreed to come. The yellow chrysanthemums were still alive, fresh and aggressive as ever, only their leaves having withered.

“They are
immortelles,”
said Francesca.

After half an hour she insisted on leaving. He helped her into her coat, she turned to him, and they were so close that he brought his face to hers and kissed her. Her lips were soft and responsive and her hands just touched his upper arms. He put his arms round her and kissed her passionately, prolonging the kiss until suddenly she broke away, flushed and frightened.

“Darling Francesca, I couldn’t help it. Let me take you home.”

“No!”

“Then say you’ll see me again tomorrow.”

“Will you come down with me and find a taxi?” said Francesca.

It was a damp rather misty night, the last of November. From every bare twig hung a chain of water drops. They walked out into Highgate Hill. There were plane and chestnut leaves underfoot, slippery and wet and blackened.

“Shall I call for you at the shop tomorrow?” He had hailed the taxi and it was already pulling in towards them. So many of their dramas, he was later to feel, had been associated with taxis. She took his hand.

“Not tomorrow.”

“When, then? Saturday?”

She gasped, put up her hands to her face. “Oh, Martin, never!” And then she was gone.

If his car had been at hand he would have followed that taxi. But it was two hundred yards away in the Cromwell Court car park. He walked back, dizzy with panic, with near-terror, that he had lost her. Because of that kiss? Because he had pressured her about her private life? He was sitting desolate in his living room when the phone rang. The reprieve of her voice made him sink back with a kind of exhaustion.

“I shouldn’t have said that, Martin, I didn’t mean it. Only you do understand, don’t you, that I can’t see you this week-end?”

“No, I don’t understand, but I’ll accept it if you say so.”

“And we’ll meet next week, we’ll meet on-Tuesday. I’ll explain everything on Tuesday and it’ll be all right. I promise you it’ll be all right. Trust me?”

“Of course I trust you, Francesca. If you say it’ll be all right, I believe you.” He hadn’t meant to say it, he hadn’t been quite sure until this moment that he felt it, and it should be said for the first time face to face, but, “I love you,” he said.

“Martin, Martin,” she said and the phone clicked and the dialling tone began.

It was a strange empty feeling knowing he wasn’t going to see her for four whole days. Instead, his parents’ house tonight to make up for his absence on Thursday, drinks tomorrow with Norman in the Flask, dinner with Adrian and Julie Vowchurch, Sunday a long gloomy void…. The postman came early, at ten past eight, bringing the phone bill and an envelope addressed in an unfamiliar elderly hand.

The letter inside was signed Millicent Watson. She addressed him as Mr. Urban, “Dear Mr. Urban,” though he remembered having been introduced to her as Martin and hearing her call him by his christian name. She hadn’t quite
understood his letter, she wrote. Was he sure he wasn’t mistaking her for someone else? If he was under the impression that she was a client of his firm and had investments, this was not so. She couldn’t take on the responsibility of owning property. Moreover, she would never be in a position to repay any money which Urban, Wedmore, Mackenzie and Company might advance her. She had never in her life owed anyone a penny and didn’t want to begin now. His letter had worried her a lot; she hadn’t been able to sleep for worrying.

Martin was reading this in some dismay when Mr. Cochrane arrived. He was carrying a six-foot long cane with a green-nylon brush attached to the head of it. This implement, designed for sweeping the ceilings, had once before been brought into the flat, transported very ill-temperedly by Mr. Cochrane on the bus from his home in the Seven Sisters Road. Martin had said he would gladly buy a ceiling brush to save his cleaner so much trouble and inconvenience, but Mr. Cochrane, getting angrier and angrier, had replied that it made him sick to hear people who had never known the meaning of want talk of throwing money about like water, spending pounds like pence; Martin would want to buy a dustette next, he supposed, or an electric polisher-and so on.

This morning he omitted any greeting. Positively hurling himself into his ironmonger’s coat, he plunged into a rather incoherent account of his sister-in-law’s latest dramas-and thereby imparted to Martin information that otherwise would have been hard to get. The green-nylon brush rasped and whisked across the ceiling.

“On the verge of total nervous collapse, Martin, according to the doc. He’s put her on eight Valiums a day-no, I tell a lie-twelve. I was round there at number twenty, up with her half the night, Martin, and I don’t mind telling you …”

“Number twenty?” hazarded Martin.

“Number twenty, Barnard House. Top of Ladbroke Grove, isn’t it? How many times do I have to tell you? Might as well talk to a brick wall. Now mind out or you’ll get cobwebs down on that expensive suit. Beautiful, them chrysanths, aren’t they? Must have cost a packet. And here today, as you might say, Martin, and tomorrow to be cast into the oven.”

If only that were true, Martin thought, but the yellow chrysanthemums still looked aggressively fresh on Monday morning. On his way to work he posted the now completed letter to Mrs. Cochrane. He drove by way of High-gate High Street and Southwood Lane so that he passed the flower shop, but at twenty past nine it wasn’t yet open. He waited till ten and then he phoned her at Bloomers. The other girl answered, the one who owned the shop. Martin asked to speak to Miss Brown and wondered why he sensed a sort of hesitant pause before the girl said she would fetch Francesca. Again he felt that quickened heartbeat when her voice came soft and serious, faintly apologetic, on the line. Yes, she was going to see him tomorrow, she was looking forward to it, she could hardly wait, only she had to wait, and would he call for her at the shop?

He had lunch with Gordon Tytherton in Muswell Hill. Gordon had invented a new system of taxation. There was, of course, no question of its ever being implemented, it was purely academic, but Gordon was immensely proud of it, being certain that if put to use, it would solve all the nation’s economic problems. He talked about it all the time. His little short-sighted eyes lit up and occasionally his voice trembled with emotion as might another man’s when he spoke of a woman or a work of art. Martin parted from him at the foot of the hill and went into the travel agency where he collected the air tickets for Mrs. Bhavnani and Suma. Should he take them to the Bhavnanis’ shop or send them? After a protracted inner debate he decided to send them to Dr. Ghopal.

Francesca phoned him at twenty-five to ten on Tuesday morning to say she couldn’t see him and not to come to the shop.

“It’s not possible, Martin, and something awful’s happened! Martin, do you see the
Post?”

He heard it as the post, the mail. “What post?”

“The local paper, the
North London Post.
I know you do, I saw it when I was in your flat. Martin, promise me you won’t look at it when it comes on Friday. Please, Martin. I’ll see you on Friday and I’ll explain everything.”

After she had rung off he thought how, if she left her job, he would have no means of knowing where to find her, she would be lost to him. He was in love with someone whose life was a total mystery to him, who might live, for all he knew, in Golders Green or Edmonton or Wembley, with her parents, in a hostel, in her own flat. She was like one of those heroines of a fairy story or an Arabian Nights tale who comes from nowhere, who vanishes into a void, and who threatens to disappear forever if her lover attempts to lift the veil that conceals her secrets.