morning, but she was brought down to earth by the news that Joel Roseman had made an appointment to see her at twelve noon after her morning surgery. He was
Joel's mother visited him every day. He asked her if his father objected, if she was defying his father, spending so much time with him in this flat but she said no, adding ingenuously that Morris didn't mind how often she saw their son so long as he didn't have to. Sometimes she suggested a walk in the park under the trees that stand in a long row parallel with the Bayswater Road, but Joel wouldn't unless it was after dark, so mostly she sat with him in one of the gloomy rooms and talked to him fretfully about his solitary life, his lack of a girlfriend or, indeed, any friend. One day he told her about his near-death experience, though leaving out the part about bringing Mithras back with him. When he said he had found not heaven, but hell at the end of the tunnel, she began to cry.
He tried to reassure her. 'Hell is beautiful, Ma. It's a bit like the park but without so many people.'
After she had gone, driving the Bentley back to Hampstead Garden Suburb, he sat gazing at the endlessly reflected bronze heads. They made the flat appear enormous, Julius Caesar, Augustus, Tiberius and all the rest. They were all the same man, all the same copy of an ancient ruler, dead two thousand years. As he stared at their hard mouths, aquiline noses and sightless eyes, Mithras returned. Joel couldn't have said how he knew Mithras was present because most of the time he was invisible, yet Joel knew he was there as surely as he had known his mother had been. It was as if he had some extra sense, which no one had ever named.
He felt Mithras's presence rather like a perpetual touch, as if his visitor had laid a hand lightly on him and rested it there. At the same time he felt that if light could be admitted to the place, bright white light flooding the flat, Mithras would become truly visible, as clear as any human being, for he had come from a radiant gleaming place. But Joel was too afraid of the light to take such a radical step. He felt it might blind him, literally destroy his sight. Besides, he was unsure whether he hated Mithras's presence or loved it. He sat somnolent in the living room or reclined on the brown velvet sofa for hours on end, not reading or listening to anything or watching television, sometimes falling into a doze. One afternoon he had decided to resume his infrequent habit of taking himself alone to the cinema. Wearing his blackest sunglasses, he set out to see
The morning he was due to see Dr Peacock, the psychotherapist, Mithras spoke to him. Joel couldn't see him, hadn't seen him for several days, though he had felt the touch of his hand, but he heard his voice. At first he wasn't sure who it was or where it came from. Sometimes, though the walls were thick and this dark shadowy place well- insulated, sounds could be heard from his neighbours. They were loud-voiced people who often moved their furniture about and once or twice had given noisy parties. But this voice was soft, persuasive and almost seductive.
He knew this was human speech he was hearing, but for a while he couldn't make out the words, only that the rhythm of what was said was the rhythm of English. Then, quite clearly, he heard it say, 'She will ask you if you hear voices.'
Joel said nothing. He lay back and closed his eyes, wondering as he did so why human beings have the ability to shut off their vision but no mechanism for doing the same for hearing. On his way to Dr Peacock he went into a pharmacy and bought himself some earplugs made of wax, though he was beginning to feel he would have no need to use them.
Dr Peacock said nothing about hearing voices. She said very little. She was a white-haired woman, the hair copious and long, with the face of a Russian ballet dancer and the barrel-shaped body of a bricklayer. The suit she wore was charcoal-coloured linen, the trousers tapering and the jacket like a mandarin's. Joel expected a couch and there was one but not for him. Dr Peacock reclined on it while he sat in an armchair.
The psychotherapist had a high-pitched voice with the slight lisp of a camp vicar in a comedy show. Joel found it rather hard to believe she was a woman. She asked Joel to tell her why he had come and Joel told her about his heart operation, his near-death experience and Mithras. When he paused or hesitated Dr Peacock said, 'Go on,' and when he had told her everything in detail Dr Peacock said, 'Tell me again.' It reminded Joel of police interrogations he had seen on television when the investigating officer asks the suspect to repeat his story in order to catch him out in a lie.
At the end of the second recounting, the psychotherapist asked him who he thought Mithras was but soon after Joel had begun talking about him, Dr Peacock said time was up and she would see him next week. Joel had, perhaps naively, supposed that after even a single session he would begin to feel better about things but he didn't. He put on his dark glasses and walked slowly to a bus stop, not knowing or much caring which buses stopped there. One came but it was the kind where you have to have a ticket or a pass before you board and the driver turned him off.
'You have to get off,' the driver said. 'It's no use arguing. I don't make the rules.'
This unnerved Joel and he hailed a taxi. The people in the streets all seemed to be staring at him, sitting alone in the back. They stared at him, he thought, with resentful eyes or, worse, with savage glares, and children made faces. One little boy stuck out his tongue and Joel put his face in his hands. He hadn't enough money on him so he got the driver to take him to a cash dispenser. Three men were ahead of him. They all seemed to know each other and began to whisper together, one of them turning round to eye him before going back to their conversation. This was what happened when he exposed himself to the light. He felt uncomfortable, wondering if they meant to attack him. But nothing happened, he got his money and was soon at home.
His living room, which until then had always seemed rather too dark, nearly as dark as the rest of the place, was now too light for him. He settled that by pulling down the dark-green blind to its fullest extent. The grey dimness of a wet afternoon now prevailed and, reclining on the sofa in much the same attitude as Dr Peacock had taken up, he phoned Dr Cotswold. Or tried to phone her. The voice he got was the receptionist's, which said she was with a patient but she would pass on his message and ask her to call him back. The call didn't come for almost an hour, the longest hour Joel thought he had spent for years. And when she did phone, though Joel had supposed Dr Peacock would have given her a careful report by now, she knew nothing about what had happened during his visit.
Would she come and see him? He had a lot to tell her.
'Today won't be possible,' she said.
'Tomorrow, then.' When she didn't answer immediately he said, '
'I think you should come to me, Joel. Shall we say 12.30 when my last patient will have gone?'
'I
He could hear very little in the flat; with the windows shut, not even more than a faint hum from the traffic. He fetched the earplugs he had bought and, working the wax with his fingers, moulding two cone shapes, he inserted them into his ears. The peculiar silence that descended was unlike normal quiet but made him feel rather as if he were being smothered. He had to make a conscious effort to breathe but gradually the feeling went and he appreciated his new deafness. Now he was enclosed, sightless and without hearing, and he fell asleep. When he woke, two hours later, remaining in his dark cocoon, he found himself thinking about what he would say to Dr Cotswold next day. He would tell her about Amy, about his father and what had divided them so terribly and irrevocably.
The netsuke lion and the monkey had turned up. Much to Eugene's gratification and gratitude, a shopkeeper in Westbourne Grove had found them in the gutter and handed them in at the police station. He wanted to reward Mr Siddiqui but the shopkeeper refused his offers and said being able to return these valuable objects to their owner was reward enough. A Crime Protection officer had made an appointment to come round to Chepstow Villas and advise Eugene on sensible measures that should be taken to make his house more secure.
'Keeping a light on in the garden, I expect they'll say,' said Ella, 'and putting bars on the french windows and making sure the side gate is bolted on the inside. Where's the side gate key, by the way? I can't find it.'
'Oh, God, I've no idea. That will be something else they'll bully me about, no doubt.'
'They won't bully you, darling. They're only being helpful.'
'If you say so, Ella. I shall hate having them poking about the place. Shall we talk about something else? Like our wedding?'
