Portobello

craved another.

What was he going to do? Not go home again. He turned round, walked back the way he had come and towards the Portobello Road, passing his own house but keeping his head turned away. The rain had dwindled to a drizzle and stopped. He put down his umbrella. The Portobello was just the same, only rather more crowded, ablaze with lights, alive with music and laughter and shouting. He went into the Earl of Lonsdale and bought himself a glass of white wine. A Chocorange substitute. Pubs had never really been his thing and, since knowing Ella, he had only once been in one. The wine was sour and sharp but he drank it, unable to find a seat and standing up at the bar. This was how it felt when a carefully guarded secret was discovered. It had been the same with the drink when a friend caught him in the men's room, swigging covertly from a hip flask. The same? No, this was far, far worse.

Going home was impossible. He considered finding a hotel. But Londoners know nothing about hotels in their own city and besides, he had no change of clothes with him. He put another Chocorange into his mouth and wandered across the street among the crowds to the Electric Cinema. There he went up to buy a ticket and astonished the woman who asked which number theatre he wanted by saying he didn't care, it didn't matter, and he would take whatever she chose to give him.

It really didn't matter; he fell asleep as soon as he was in one of the red leather armchairs that had replaced the old seating. Someone further along the row woke him by pushing past his knees when the lights came up. It was close on midnight but the streets were still crowded. Not when he reached Denbigh Road, though. He thought, I am a homeless person now, obliged to be a street sleeper, and then he thought how Ella would have reproved him for his callous insensitivity when he was healthy and rich and successful with a home in one of the most sought- after districts of any city in the world. Fool, he told himself, and he went home at last to a dark and silent house.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Twice in the past weeks she had tried to phone him but got no reply. Eventually, his mother had phoned her, speaking in a bright gushing voice, to tell her that her son was 'enormously better', thanks to taking Miss Crane's pills 'religiously', and really there was no reason for her to see him again.The implication was that the therapist had succeeded where Ella had failed. Ella wondered if she was being paranoid in thinking this way or if she was simply feeling rather low. No wonder if she was, after what had happened with Eugene.

She had lain awake for much of the night, waiting for him to come to bed, unsure whether he had come home. She had gone downstairs to look for him but when she tried the study door, found it locked against her. It must have been against her – who else? That door was still locked in the morning and calling to him to let her in had no effect. She went to work but phoned him before seeing her first patient. Her relief when he answered was enormous.

'I'm fine,' he said. 'Just off to the gallery.'

'Gene, where were you? What happened last night?'

'I'll tell you later.'

She had never before, not even when they first knew each other, heard that remote tone addressed to her. It was the way he spoke to someone delivering a package – no, cooler than that, less polite than he would be to the postman. Halfway through the morning she phoned the gallery to be told by Dorinda that Eugene was with a client but would call her back. No call came. She had no appetite for lunch. It was her afternoon for calls, three of them to be made to elderly bed-bound patients, the fourth to Joel. But this one she made for something to do, for a way of passing the time, such a new departure for her that she couldn't recall experiencing the feeling before. His mother had told her she wasn't needed. Wendy Stemmer wasn't his guardian. However strange he might be, however ill he had been, he was in charge of his own life.

It was a view she quickly had to modify. As soon as Rita let her into the flat she could see there had been radical changes. It was a sunny day and the place was flooded with light. Whoever had done this must have seen that taking down the blinds and replacing the heavy velvet drapes with thin curtains revealed the shabbiness of the furnishings, so much of this had been replaced with Ikea tables while the sombre upholstery of the chairs was hidden under stretch covers. The Caesars were gone and the ornate mirrors that reflected them.

Rejuvenation had been done on the cheap. A lot of house plants stood about, the kind that come from supermarkets rather than garden centres. Ella found Joel in a room she had never been in before, only seen dimly from its doorway. He sat at the old dining table on one of the old dining chairs, holding a ballpoint pen above a sheet of paper resting on a table mat.

'Hello,' he said, looking up, and she could tell at once from the tone of his voice that the drug he was taking had deadened his personality.

'How are you, Joel?'

'I'm fine.'

'Is Rita with you all the time now?'

'Only in the day,' he said in the same monotonous voice. 'Bridget comes at night. They don't leave me alone.' There are two ways in which that last phrase may be interpreted: they don't let me be isolated or they never stop harassing me. 'Ma comes. She doesn't like it but she comes.'

'Did your mother get the new furniture?'

A profound boredom dulled his features. 'I suppose. Someone did. They took away those men's faces, said they were bad for me, made me brood.' He gave a little staccato laugh. 'I'm not in the dark any more.' It was impossible to tell if he meant that literally or metaphorically. She expected him to mention Mithras but he didn't. 'I'm writing my memoirs.' The sheet of paper was blank. 'It's hard to start. I get an idea for a way to start but then I get tired and I have to sleep.' An empty smile stretched his mouth. 'It doesn't matter, does it?'

She thought she should do something, but what? He was well, he was calm, he seemed content. Wasn't this better than when he was haunted by an imaginary phantom, the voice of a god? She watched him lower his head, put the pen to the paper, but on the right-hand side of the sheet. With real horror she saw his hand move the pen in linked circles and loops towards the left, a pattern rather than writing, as his lips moved with a fishlike opening and closing.

'I'll see you soon, Joel.'

She got up. The woman called Rita was hovering in the hall, waiting for her to leave. As Joel's doctor, she thought she could ask about his situation. Out of his earshot, she asked, low-lowvoiced, if Mr Stemmer came to see his son.

'Only her,' Rita said. 'Only his mum.'

On her way home Ella tried to think of how she had first met Joel. It had been when he was in hospital having his heart surgery and she had brought him the money Eugene had found in the street. He was a sick man then, or at least a recovering man, but his ills seemed all physical. In those five months his mind had grown sick and strange, and now it was as if he had been hollowed out and only a shell of that man in the hospital remained. There was nothing she could do, there never had been much. Her attention now must be given to Eugene whom she was due to marry in ten days' time.

She expected him to be at home by now. The house was empty. She realised she had eaten nothing since breakfast and breakfast had been only a slice of toast. The fridge was full of food, the fruit bowl laden with oranges, bananas and the ripe figs that were just appearing in the shops. Carli had left a new spelt loaf on the bread board and beside it, in the cheese dish, a slice of fresh Cheddar. She turned away from it all, went into the drawing room where she stood at the window, gazing down the street in the direction from which he would come. The phone rang and she ran to answer it but the caller's was an ingratiating voice enquiring if she wanted a new kitchen fitted. As she put the receiver down she heard Eugene's key in the lock, the door close and his footsteps move along the hall in a slow reluctant way quite unlike his usual brisk pace.

Gemma was the loveliest thing ever to have been seen in that grim room with its ranked tables, each with a chair on either side of it, each chair occupied by a woman Lance set down as deeply unattractive. A bunch of dogs, he described them to Gemma who reproved him for his cruelty. She, he told her with unusual flights of imagination,