Across the hallway, the bedroom door was half open and an elegant brown limb was visible, stretched out from under the sheet. The toenails perfectly manicured and painted in rich, deep shining red.
‘Still here, Billie?’ he said. ‘Nice to be a student, eh?’
‘Don’t worry, I got screen printin’ in an hour, baby,’ the cheerful, heavily accented voice replied from the bedroom. ‘No classes dis mornin’ though so I been doin’ some readin’ here in me bed but I’ll be right out of your hair in a jiffy, man.’
Such a wild accent to Stone’s ears. Even when she was talking about studying it sounded like she’d been having a party of sorts. Stone wondered if any variant of his native German could ever sound so carefree and organically cool.
‘Take your time,’ he called out filling a kettle. ‘Really, there’s no rush. Stay in bed if you feel like it.’
He spooned coffee beans into a little electric grinder and whizzed them up. He had to go all the way to a shop in Soho to get those beans. The coffeeless culture was one aspect of his adopted homeland that he never got used to.
‘Hey, baby. I’ve got t’ings to do meself, you know,’ Billie replied from behind the open door where Stone could hear her getting up to get dressed. ‘I wasn’t just sittin’ here waiting t’get laid.’
Stone reddened. ‘I didn’t mean… I mean, I wasn’t saying, stay for… well… what I
He could hear her laughing at his confusion.
‘No time, baby. No time for breakfast.
It was a good relationship. By far the best Stone had ever had. Friendship plus sex. Billie wasn’t looking for anything more serious than Stone was, although for the exactly opposite reason. Her whole life was ahead of her, while Stone’s was behind him.
She was young, free-spirited and ambitious. She could not afford to be wasting her time falling in love. Particularly with a man like Stone who had made the decision that he did not deserve to be happy.
‘You got about a million demons locked up inside you, man,’ she had observed on one of the first nights they had spent together. ‘Do me a favour, don’t let ’em out when I’m around, heh? I got plenty shit of my own.’
‘I never let them out,’ Stone had replied. And he never did.
After a few minutes Billie emerged from the bedroom, hopping into her shoes as she went. He never understood how she could make herself look so immaculate so quickly.
‘Coffee’s coming,’ he said. ‘Two minutes.’
‘Plenty time. I can be at college in fifteen. You know I only like you because of your address anyway,’ she teased, sitting at his little breakfast bench and taking out a tube of lipstick.
Billie was in her third year doing textiles at the polytechnic in Kentish Town. When she spent the night with Stone she was already halfway there.
‘Of course I do. Happy to be useful,’ Stone said. ‘I wouldn’t want you to like me for any other reason. How about you put that stuff on after you have your coffee? It’s hell to get off the rim of the cup.’
‘Too late,’ she replied, pressing a tissue to her scarlet lips and then pushing the tissue into the breast pocket of Stone’s jacket, which was hanging over the back of the high-backed stool on which she was perched. ‘Something to remember me by in the week, eh? Haha!’
Stone would not have blamed her if truly she did only like him for the convenience of his apartment. He certainly did not consider himself much of a catch, fourteen years older than her and in love with a memory. He was aware that women sometimes found him attractive although never understood why, but Billie could do so much better. She was clever and wonderfully stylish, positively lighting up his drab little kitchen in her smart pink woollen two-piece suit with its pencil-line skirt and matching beret perched atop a stiff, jet-black Marilyn Monroe perm. And such a wonderful smile. A huge smile, it seemed almost to sparkle simply with a love of life.
He poured the coffee. Watching her as she busied herself packing her student bag. Pencils, paper, books of photography borrowed from the library and a swatch of fabrics which, even as she put it in her bag, she couldn’t resist caressing, her slim fingers slipping sensually across the fabric, appreciating its qualities.
‘Opposites attract,’ she said suddenly, as if reading his thoughts. ‘I like quiet boys. Means I got no competition bein’ centre of attention.’
Then she drained her coffee, slung her bag over her shoulder and made for the door, the piece of toast with Cooper’s Oxford marmalade Stone had just made for himself clamped firmly between her teeth.
‘So see you next weekend,’ she said through the toast. ‘Maybe come to mine. Mum’s doin’ pork, stir-fried up wi’ ginger an’ spice. You’re welcome if you want.’
‘I don’t really eat pork. Don’t know why. We did when I was a kid.’
‘You’ll eat it when me Ma cooks it.’
‘Yeah. I’ll bet I would. But I’ll be gone at the weekend, I’m afraid. Remember? I told you, I’m going to Berlin.’
‘Oh yeah, dat’s right. The long-lost girlfrien’ eh? Haha! Good luck!’
‘She was my brother’s girlfriend.’
‘Yeah, an’, man, didn’
Stone had never told Billie anything about his feelings for Dagmar but he supposed it was pretty obvious. Women tended to know these things.
‘I’ll bring you back some sweet pretzels,’ he said.
‘No t’anks. On a diet. But if you pass a bookshop see if you can find somet’ing on Bauhaus for me. Don’t matter if it’s in German, it’s the photos I love. Give me a call when you get back. That’s unless you’re all tied up wit’ your
‘I’m free tonight,’ Stone said without thinking. ‘We could have dinner.’
‘Can’t. I’m modellin’ for the art students. They love me, let me tell you. They t’ink I’m exotic. I say to ’em, jus’ wait till there’s a few million more of me brothers an’ sisters gettin’ off de boat. We won’ be so damned exotic then. Haha. Dat made ’em t’ink.’
And with a click-clack of stiletto heels, Billie was gone.
Funny how she did life modelling.
Just a coincidence. But it was a nice one. A connection to his mother, like the club in which he had met her was a connection to his father.
Stone took his coffee into the little sitting room of his apartment. The statuette stood on the mantelpiece above the gas fire. He took it up and held it in his hand.
Running his fingers along its smooth, satisfying lines. Was there something slightly wrong about him fondling a likeness of his naked mother? he wondered. Perhaps Freud would have had something to say about it.
A part of Stone hated that figure. He hated it because of who had created it. But he loved it more. Because it was his mother. Frieda, sculpted in the first year of Stone’s life, just before he had become fully conscious of her. Twenty-two years old, naked in the full bloom of youth. His grandfather had bought the piece and it had stood in their apartment all through his childhood and youth. It had still been standing there in 1946 when his German agent had collected up what family possessions were left prior to the sale of the apartment and sent them on to Stone in London.
He wondered how many good Nazis had fondled that statue in the years when some unknown family had squatted like murderous cuckoos in his parents’ home. How shocked those thieves would have been to understand that they were caressing the likeness of a Jew. There had no doubt been a Nuremberg Law against that sort of thing —
His father had hated that statuette.
Stone smiled as he recalled Wolfgang Stengel’s intense, semi-comical exasperation when anyone admired it.
It defied every artistic principle Wolfgang Stengel had possessed. Boring realism, nothing but boring realism, he’d protest. Which was why of course Stone and his brother had loved it then and why Stone loved it still. Precisely because it
For a moment Stone held the statue by the head.
