The Josh I think of is much more ramshackle. It’s the Josh who, yes, dressed himself up three times a day in colourful outfits, but fretted and asked me continually if he was going out into the world looking a fool. Whose exquisite jacket pockets were held together by the tiniest of safety pins. He always liked shopping in the most expensive shops and bought two of everything he liked (one for best, one for everyday), but only in the sales, when he could become quite fierce and managed to get forty, fifty, sixty pounds knocked off his total. His bookshelves were replete with shining hardbacks, many of them first editions, but he was no reader. Serena gasped over his wide and eclectic tastes. Later he confessed to me that hardly a spine on that shelf was sufficiently cracked to prove that he’d opened those books even once. Text worried him and made him feel insecure. Younger, he’d been braver, and read widely, dismissing and commending authors as he still did the columnists of newspapers and the people they wrote about. Text that came loose in newspaper sheets, he had no problem with. When it came bound up in covers (and the only hardcovers he bought were perfect bound: he despised those glued-up fakes), then that text stole his nerve away. Nevertheless, the gleaming, colourful shelves in the underwater dining room, floor to ceiling, looked wonderfully expensive. The room was called the underwater dining room because Katy had covered the windows with blue and green cellophane, casting us in aquamarine shade. Mermaids and octopi appeared everywhere, as cut-outs, standing figures, rubber toys. Other rooms were similarly given over to whatever father and daughter could dream up. The white marble fireplace in the living room was, as Serena said, as finely dressed as the shoulders of a Duchess, with antique clocks flashing their expensive innards, porcelain figures and full-bellied cases, but there was also a plastic Godzilla and a string of fluffy parrots.
Joshua made no explanations of his taste. He wasn’t a bore who talked you around his every acquisition. When I asked, though, he did tell me about the four pictures in the hallway. They came from a children’s book he had found in a junk shop. They were grey and framed in grey, the only other colour being orange, for the oranges that a girl was shaking out of a tree and her hair, which was styled in a vivid bob. I loved those pictures, ripped from four moments in the book’s adventure. I asked Josh, but he could never remember what book it had been. It was ages ago, and he hadn’t taken much notice. He just liked the drawings.
He had his reasons for liking everything, according to his own, quiet scheme of things. And so if he liked you, you automatically felt vaguely pleased with yourself.
He drove a petrol blue Skoda, which was the biggest challenge to Serena’s blithe assertion that he always bought himself the best. He’d snapped it up for seven hundred pounds and boasted that it had never given him a moment’s bother. He had a car tape deck that slid out of its place in the dashboard and when he left the car he brought this with him. He carried that tape deck by its plastic handle and it looked like a compact metal handbag and I told him so.
When he drove me around London, when he drove me anywhere, I used to love sitting beside him. I would look at the night road, until he noticed out of the corner of his eye and look back at me. “What?” He would fumble for a cigarette. I would slide my hand under his thigh while he drove. I don’t remember how that started. I just liked the warmth and weight of him. He got used to me doing that. When I forgot, and neglected to absently slide my hand between the seat and his thigh, he would turn and look aggrieved. “Mm! Hand!” When he was pleased he would tilt his head side to side and didn’t know he did this until I pointed it out.
I sometimes think the whole pattern of my falling in love with Joshua was in my pointing out things he did naturally. I noticed them, said them, and he’d feel silly until I told him they were lovely things to do unconsciously and so we’d go on.
Yet I’m getting ahead of myself. I’ve already told you I fell in love with the fella, and Serena and I haven’t even visited Greenwich yet.
They were still only getting to grips with building the Millennium Dome at that time. They were nailing thick metal sheets onto the struts. They looked like plates over a skull. When it was up and finished and empty, I thought, Joshua would have a smashing view.
That night early in March we arrived and Joshua was still busy preparing himself. Serena treated the place like her own, hanging our coats on racks dangerously overladen with Joshua’s and Katy’s array of outdoor things. She went through to poke about in his tiny galley kitchen which, she said, she approved of because everything in it was white and cobalt blue. On the way she pointed things out and I caught my first glimpse of the grey and orange pictures, the clockwork owl, and the Peruvian armoire freighted with Art Deco tableware. Serena was stopped on her way by a woman she obviously knew and hadn’t been expecting. She executed an embarrassingly phoney double-take as the woman, an ample, mumsy figure in flattering black, looked up and smiled.
“Wendy, this is Melissa. Joshua’s sister.”
The woman rose to offer a plump, ringed hand. She had been sitting with Katy and they’d been
