Written on the Body (17 page)

I telephoned. The receptionist didn’t want to talk to me. There were no patients at the clinic. No, I couldn’t speak to Mr Rosenthal.

I began to wonder if the receptionist was one of Inge’s.

‘May I speak to Mrs Rosenthal?’ (how I hated having to say that).

‘Mrs Rosenthal is not here any longer.’

‘Then may I speak to the doctor?’

‘
Mr
Rosenthal’ (she underlined my faux pas) ‘is not here either.’

‘Do you expect him?’

She couldn’t say. I slammed down the phone and sat on the floor.

All right. Nothing else for it. Louise’s mother.

Louise’s mother and grandmother lived together in Chelsea. They considered themselves to be Australian aristocracy, that is, they were descended from convicts. They had a small mews house from whose upper floors they could see the Buckingham Palace flagpole. Grandmother spent all of her time on the upper floors, noting when and when not, the Queen was in residence. Occasionally she broke off to spill food down her front. She had a steady hand but she liked to spill. It made work for her daughter.
Louise was rather fond of her grandmother. With a little twist to Dickens, she called her The Aged Pea, peas were what grandmother spilled the most. Her only comment on Louise’s separation from Elgin had been ‘Get the money.’

Mother was more complicated and in a very unaristocratic fashion worried about what people would say. When I announced myself at the entryphone she refused to let me in.

‘I don’t know where she is and it’s no business of yours.’

‘Mrs Fox, please open the door, please.’

There was silence. An Englishman’s home is his castle, but an Australian’s mews house is fair game. I banged on the door with both fists and shouted Mrs Fox’s name as loudly as I could. Immediately opposite, two coiffured heads popped into the window like Punch and Judy in their box. The front door flew open. It wasn’t Mrs Fox but The Aged Pea herself.

‘Think you’re on a kangaroo shoot or somethin’?’

‘I’m looking for Louise.’

‘Don’t you come through these doors.’ Mrs Fox appeared.

‘Kitty, if we don’t let this digger in, neighbours’ll think we got either the bugs or the bailiffs.’ The Pea eyed me suspiciously. ‘You have the look of a thing from the Disinfectant Department.’

‘Mother, we don’t have a Disinfectant Department in England.’

‘We don’t? That explains a whole lot of smells.’

‘Please, Mrs Fox, I won’t be long.’

Reluctantly Mrs Fox stood back and I stepped on to the mat.

When there was a centimetre gap between me and the
door, Mrs Fox shut it and barred my further passage. I could feel the plastic letter-box cover on my spine. ‘Get it over with then.’

‘I’m looking for Louise. When did you last see her?’

‘Ho ho,’ said the Pea banging her stick. ‘Don’t play the Waltzing Matilda with me. What do you care? You walked out on her, now get lost.’

Mrs Fox said, ‘I’m glad you’re having nothing more to do with my daughter. You broke up her marriage.’

‘I’ve no quarrel with that,’ said Grandma.

‘Mother, will you be quiet? Elgin is a great man.’

‘Since when? You always said he was a little rat.’

‘I did not say he was a little rat. I said he was rather small and that unfortunately he had the look of a, well, I said a …’

‘Rat!’ screamed the Pea banging her stick on the door just by my head. She should have been a knife thrower in the circus.

‘Mrs Fox. I made a mistake. I should never have left Louise. I thought it was for her own good. I thought Elgin could make her well. I want to find her and take care of her.’

‘It’s too late,’ said Mrs Fox. ‘She told me she never wanted to see you again.’

‘She’s had a worse time than a toad on a runway,’ said the Pea.

‘Mother, go and sit down, you’re getting tired,’ said Mrs Fox supporting herself on the banister rail. ‘I can deal with this.’

‘Prettiest thing this side of Brisbane and look how she’s been treated. You know, Louise is the spitting image of myself when younger. I had quite a figure then.’

It was hard to imagine Pea having any figure. She
was like a child’s drawing of a snowman, just two circles plonked one on top of the other. For the first time I noticed her hair: it was serpentine in its rising twists, a living moving mass that escaped from its tight bands just as Louise’s did. Louise had told me that Pea had been the undisputed Beauty Queen of Western Australia. She had had over one hundred proposals of marriage in the 1920s from bankers, prospectors, city men who unrolled maps of the new Australia they were going to build and said, ‘Sweet darling all this is yours when you are mine.’ Pea had married a sheep farmer and had six children. Her nearest neighbour had been a day’s ride away. I saw her suddenly, dress to the floor, hands on her hips, the dirt track disappearing into the flat of the horizon. Nothing but flat and the bar of the sky measuring the distance. Miss Helen Louise, a burning bush in the dry land.

‘What you starin’ at digger?’

I shook my head. ‘Mrs Fox, have you any idea where Louise has gone?’

‘I know she’s not in London, that’s all. She may be abroad.’

‘Got a packet out of the doctor. She left him as lean as a woodlouse in a plastics factory. Heh heh heh.’

‘Mother, will you stop it?’ Mrs Fox turned to me, ‘I think you’d better leave now. I can’t help you.’

Mrs Fox opened the door as her neighbours closed theirs.

‘What did I tell you all?’ said Pea. ‘We’re in disrepute.’

She turned in disgust and pegged down the hall on her stick.

‘You know, don’t you, that Elgin was to be in the civil list this year? Louise cost him that.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ I said. ‘A happy marriage has
nothing to do with it.’

‘Then why wasn’t he?’ She slammed the door and I heard her crying in the hall. Was it for her lost connection with the great and the good or was it for her daughter?

Evening. Couples out on the sweating streets hand in hand. From an upper window a reggae band with a long way to go. Restaurants were pushing the alfresco style, but a wicker chair on a dirty street with the buses grinding by isn’t Venice. I watched the litter blow among the pizzas and raffia carafes. A vulpine waiter fixed his dicky bow in the cashier’s mirror, slapped her bottom, put a peppermint on his red tongue and swaggered over to a group of under-age girls drinking Campari and soda. ‘Would madams like a something to a eat?’

I caught the first bus regardless of its destination. What did it matter since I was no nearer to Louise? The city was suppurating. The bus driver wouldn’t open the doors while the bus was moving. The air in there smelt of burger and chips. There was a fat woman in a sleeveless nylon frock sitting with her legs apart fanning herself with her shoe. Her make-up had slipped into ledges of grime.

‘OPEN THE DOORS FUCKFACE,’ she shouted.

‘Fuck off,’ said the driver without looking round. ‘Can’t you read the notice? Can’t you read?’

The notice said
DO NOT DISTRACT DRIVER WHILE BUS IS IN MOTION
. We were stock still in a traffic jam at the time.

As the temperature mounted the man in front of me resorted to his mobile phone. Like all mobile phone users he had nothing urgent to say, he simply wanted to say it. He looked at us all to see if we were looking at him. When he finally said, ‘Goo nye then my mate Kev,’ I asked
him very politely if I might borrow it for a moment and offered him a pound coin. He was reluctant to separate himself from such an essential part of his machismo but he agreed to punch in the number for me and hold the phone to my ear. After it had rung pointlessly a few times he said, ‘That’s out then,’ pocketed my pound and hung his treasure back round his neck on a bulldog chain. There had been no answer at Louise’s house. I decided to go and see for myself.

I found a cab to take me through the thick heat of the dying day and we turned into the square at the same moment as Elgin’s BMW pulled up at the kerb. He got out and opened the passenger door for a woman. She was a little business suit number, serious make-up and the sort of hairdo that looks on tempests and is never shaken. She had a small travel bag, Elgin a suitcase, they were laughing together. He kissed her and fumbled for his keys.

‘You gettin’ out or not?’ asked my driver.

I was trying to control myself. On the doorstep breathing deeply I rang the bell. Keep calm Keep calm Keep calm.

The hot date answered the door. I smiled brightly and walked around her into the wide hall. Elgin had his back to me.

‘Darling …’ she began.

‘Hello Elgin.’

He spun round. I didn’t think people did that in real life, only in kooky crime thrillers. Elgin moved like Fred Astaire and placed himself between me and the hot date. I don’t know why.

‘Go and make some tea, darling, will you,’ he said and off she went.

‘Do you have to pay her to be so obedient or is it love?’

‘I told you never to come here again.’

‘You told me a great many things I should have ignored. Where’s Louise?’

For a split second Elgin looked genuinely surprised. He thought I should know. I looked at the hall. There was a new table with curved legs, a hideous thing in maple inlaid with brass strips. No doubt it had come from the kind of shop where there are no prices but it had its price painted all over it. It was the sort of hall table interior designers buy for Arab clients. Next to it was a radiator. Louise hadn’t been here for some time.

‘Let me show you out,’ said Elgin.

I grabbed him by his tie and jammed him against the door. I’ve never had any boxing lessons so I had to fight on instinct and cram his windpipe into his larynx. It seemed to work. Unfortunately he couldn’t speak. ‘Are you going to tell me what’s happened, are you?’ Pull the tie a bit tighter and watch his eyes pop out.

The hot date came tripping back up the stairs with two mugs. Two mugs. How rude. She stopped dead still like a ham actor then screamed, ‘LET GO OF MY FIANCE.’ I was so shocked I did. Elgin punched me in the stomach and winded me against the wall. I slipped on to the floor honking like a seal. Elgin kicked me in the shins but I didn’t feel that until later. All I could see were his shiny shoes and her patent leather peep-toes. I threw up. While I was crouched over the black and white diamond tiles of the marble floor like an extra in a Vermeer, Elgin said as pompously as a half-strangled man can, ‘That’s right, Louise and I are divorced.’ I was still coughing up egg and tomato sandwich but I struggled to my feet with the grace of an old wino, wiped my hand across my mouth and dragged its stippled backside down Elgin’s blazer.

‘God you’re disgusting,’ said the hot date. ‘God.’

‘Would you like me to tell you a bedtime story?’ I asked her. ‘All about Elgin and his wife Louise? Oh and about me too?’

‘Darling, go out to the car and telephone for the police will you?’ Elgin opened the door and the hot date scuttled out. Even in my decrepit state I was taken aback. ‘Why does she have to phone from the car, or are you showing off?’

‘My fiancée is telephoning from the car for her own safety.’

‘Not because there’s something you don’t want her to hear?’

Elgin smiled pityingly, he had never been very good at smiling, mostly his mouth just moved around his face. ‘I think it’s time you left.’

I looked down the road to the car. The hot date had the phone in one hand and the instruction manual on her knee.

‘I think we’ve got a few minutes, Elgin. Where’s Louise?’

‘I don’t know and I don’t care.’

‘That’s not what you said at Christmas.’

‘Last year I thought I could make Louise see sense. I was mistaken.’

‘It didn’t have anything to do with the Civil List did it?’

I didn’t expect him to react but his pale cheeks turned clown-red. He pushed me roughly down the steps. ‘That’s enough, get out.’ My mind cleared and for a brief Samson moment my strength returned. I stood below him on the steps, below the water-line of his envy. I remembered the morning when he had challenged us in the kitchen. He had wanted us to be guilty, to creep away, our pleasure
ruined by adult propriety. Instead Louise had left him. The ultimate act of selfishness; a woman who puts herself first.

I was colt-mad. Mad with pleasure at Louise’s escape. I thought of her packing her things, closing the door, leaving him for ever. She was free. Is that you flying over the fields with the wind under your wing? Why didn’t I trust you? Am I any better than Elgin? Now you’ve made fools of us both and sprung away. The snare didn’t close on you. It closed on us.

Colt-mad. Break Elgin. This is where my feelings will spill, not over Louise in fountains of thankfulness but here down on him in sulphurous streams.

He started motioning to the hot date, his arms in extravagant semaphore, a silly puppet boy with the keys to a fancy car.

‘Elgin, you’re a doctor, aren’t you? Then you’ll recall that a doctor can guess the size of someone’s heart by the size of their fist. Here’s mine.’

I saw Elgin’s look of complete astonishment as my fists, locked together in unholy prayer, came up in a line of offering under his jaw. Impact. Head snapped back, sick crunch like a meat grinder. Elgin at my feet in foetus position bleeding. He’s making noises like a pig at the trough. He’s not dead. Why not? If it’s so easy for Louise to die why is it so hard for Elgin to do the same?

The anger went out of me. I moved his head to a more comfortable position, fetching a cushion from the hall. As I propped his crushed face a tooth fell out. Gold. I put his glasses on the hall table and walked slowly down the steps towards the car. The hot date was half in half out, her mouth fluttering like a moth. ‘God. God, oh
my God, God.’ As though repetition might achieve what faith could not.

The phone dangled uselessly from its strap around her wrist. I could hear the crackly voice of the operator ‘Fire Police Ambulance. Which service do you require? Fire Police Ambulance. Which …’ I took the phone gently. ‘Ambulance. 52 Nightingale Square, NW3.’

When I got back to my flat it was dark. My right wrist was badly swollen and I was limping. I put ice into a couple of carrier bags and Sellotaped them around my gammy limbs. I wanted nothing but sleep and I did sleep on the dusty unchanged sheets. I slept for twenty hours then got a cab to the hospital and spent almost as long in the Outpatients Department. I had cracked a bone in my wrist.