She was dreaming of Aunty Anne. This had been triggered by Serena saying, as they passed through the low, flat fields outside of Darlington and Wendy’s head swam: “Your aunt, of course, has never quite learned the true extent of my wild side. She needs to believe in my civility, my good manners. Anne refuses to recognise any other aspect in me at all. She makes me feel full of contradictions.” Serena sighed as they hurtled through Darlington station and Wendy imagined her aunt only a few miles away, already in Newton Aycliffe and already part of her other life.
Wendy was dreaming of Aunty Anne in the small new town where her lover lived and had wedged his apparently glorious bulk in a council house, where he held rapturous services for the local women who came to hear him praise the Lord. Aunty Anne extolled his charisma as a beacon in a place horribly lacking in beacons. It was an odd town, she had explained, full of little box houses like dolls’ houses and the people she met there she often found surprising. Wendy’s dream brought it to life for her, though she had never been to Newton Aycliffe. Aunty Anne wouldn’t let her: “I don’t want you to see where I’ve been living in recent years. It represents the past. You have to go on.” She was playing the plucky widow, though Uncle Pat had never been to Newton Aycliffe either.
Wendy pictured a place of yellow brick houses and winding miles of estates, satellite dishes and ice cream vans that patrolled night and day, chiming out ‘Lara’s Theme’, the tune from Dr. Zhivago.
“During services in Ralph’s house, it was me who had to run out when we heard the Dr. Zhivago theme and buy his cigarettes and his umpteen bars of chocolate. Ralph would look up from his prayers to take the change and his Bounty bars.”
He was Buddha, stolidly attaining perfection in his council house. Aunty Anne said he lived in a place called Phoenix Court, and she said he had chosen it as the place for his mission just because of the name. Phoenix Court described his purposefully arrested spiritual ascendency with wonderful precision.
Then, even in her dreams, Wendy rushed past the North, and she started to imagine London and everything there.
Serena was still talking when they left King’s Cross and took the tube and the overland to Kilburn. Wendy followed without a word, drugged by the train (“Still vibrating the next day!” she heard Uncle Pat say) and did all the things Serena did, asking for a Travelcard, hurrying through the white, dirty hall, feeding her pink slip into the turnstile. Serena kept up her chat all the way down the busy escalator, hardly noticing her surroundings, as if she was walking down her own staircase. Others were doing the same.
Wendy was looking at those rushing heedlessly down the escalators, at the posters for musicals with wads of chewing gum stuck to them. She was overhearing snatches of hundreds of conversations. A man at the bottom of the escalator was busking Jonathan Richman’s ‘Summer Feeling’. Serena was saying, “I feel drawn to spending my time with those younger than me. Most of my friends are, though you are the youngest now. You must think me ancient. I was born before the Sixties. To you, that must be like being born before the French Revolution.”
On the tube Wendy sat beside Serena and tried not to look at people’s faces. Her face in the window was distorted horribly in the dark and she was embarrassed, realising that everyone else would see the same reflection of her. When someone at the doorway, clambering past, said “Excuse me,” it took her by surprise. She’d heard that Londoners were supposed to be rude.
It was going to be a place where you came home at night and blew black, sooty snot out of your nose. Aunty Anne had told her that. It wasn’t like Edinburgh, where when you walked in town and between buildings, the crags came into view. Edinburgh was a city of trompe l’oeil, with sandy-coloured mountains and castles hugger-mugger with Seventies tower blocks. It was a city you could escape after a few minute’s walk. London wasn’t going to be like that.
“And here,” said Serena, leading Wendy into her home, “is the clutter, the clabber, the pitiful ragbag of accoutrements that constitute me.” She went through the house like someone accustomed to living alone, flicking on all the lights, tossing post aside, making towards the kitchen.
Wendy was taking it all in. The rooms were jam-packed with tasteful objects, hangings and pictures, each placed that bit too close together. Newspapers from before Christmas covered the coffee table. The living room which they passed through, and left untouched, was a homage to William Morris, and the dining room to Robert Mapplethorpe. Serena had her head in the fridge. “Everything has turned sour and stale,” she cursed. She plucked out a bag of coffee beans and spilled them into the grinding machine. “Don’t you hate the flat, bleak smell of a place when it’s been empty?”
Wendy had never live in an empty place. By now, though, she was used to Serena’s extra-sensitive nose. She watched her friend go through the rooms, wrinkling it and opening windows. She played her messages.
“Sweetheart, it’s Joshua. Christmas Eve. I gather you’re away in the frozen north. You’re terribly missed here. We’ll muddle through without you, I’m sure. Phone me when you return.”
“One message,” Serena sighed. “What an empty life. No tortured lovers missing me. Not this Christmas. I’m obviously clapped out.”
“Was that your friend Joshua?”
“We’ll see him soon.” Serena brightened. “Shall we rustle up something to eat?” She yanked open the freezer and started peeling plastic films off pasta and sauces, mussels and dips.
“Well now,” she said, when they sat to eat at the white table. “Aren’t we
