It was temporary, she said – ‘Just part of the new economy drive.’ The new economy drive was made necessary by Phoebe’s wager of mid-May.*2 Hereford Road was immediately, and illegally, sublet to three immigrant families – with Phoebe retaining a back bedroom wedged solid with her worldly goods.
It was now May 4, a Friday, and on the phone she was saying,
‘Still at Merry’s. Who’s very sweetly going to drive me over. When she’s ready, that is. We’ve got a minute, so go on. And no, it’s not too painful for me to talk about.’
‘Okay. Just curious, but why d’you keep betting against Mrs Thatcher?’
‘I told you. Because I don’t want to be ruled by a woman, okay?’
‘Yeah, but betting against her doesn’t make that less likely.’
‘It’s the principle, Martin. You wouldn’t understand. It’s a matter of being true to your convictions and your…Ah, Merry’s emerging at last. Right. I’ll be on your doorstep in five minutes.’
There was only the one suitcase – unliftably heavy, but only the one. She stood there on the porch, in her oldest black business suit (with the worn patches and missing buttons).
‘Ask me in then,’ she said. And he obliged with a twirl of his hand. ‘It’s like with vampires, Mart,’ she went on with a stare of sudden clarity. ‘And it’s a good vampire rule, this – like them being invisible in mirrors. You see, vampires can’t cross your threshold unless you ask them to.’
∗
Which he definitely had done – asked her to. She did the prompting and the hinting, but he did the asking. This should be noted. Martin certainly noted it: it astonished him. The Next Thing was in its early days, but he was already wondering if in all his life he had ever suffered so…
‘Martin, I’m ruined,’ she’d said in the Fat Maggot on May 2. ‘Penniless, and homeless. I’m on the street! I don’t even know where I’ll lay my –’
‘That’s all right,’ he said. He gave an emphatic nod. ‘Move in. Move in with me.’
Unsummoned, and very much against the run of his conscious mind, the invitation just formed on his lips: the words said themselves. And as he sat there, eating bread and cheese in the burbly pub, he wondered why he felt proud, why he felt he had done the right thing – the bold thing, the manly thing, the interesting thing.
Move in with me, he said. And now she was here.
‘You know, Mart,’ she called as she unpacked in the other room (the only other room), ‘we must have our housewarming. One of our Blue Moons.’
Cautiously he stirred. That was the current name for their interludes of passion, Blue Moons (in triple reference to their impurity, their melancholy, and above all their rarity). She said,
‘But first I’ve got to recover from all this insane rushing about. I’m shattered. And how’ll we fit it in? It’s the party season and my diary’s about to burst.’ The disembodied voice resumed; and she sounded (he thought) like a hearty aunt in a radio play. ‘I was thinking perhaps Sunday. But no! Cohabitation, my friend, isn’t all beer and skittles, not by any manner of means. On Sunday, Martin, you’ll have to squire me to Morley Hollow – there to seek the paternal blessing. Oh yes. Sir Graeme’ll have to forgive us for living in mortal sin. Now – now what have we here?’
…If he leant forward, which he did, he could see her, watch her: her reflection in the long mirror on the face of the wardrobe (so no, she was not invisible). And framed in that way, she moved with the temporary innocence of the unknowingly observed…Phoebe had in front of her the wrenched-open suitcase; its contents lay at her mercy. With quick fingers she was sorting and grading her smalls and separates, flicking some items away towards the pillows yet seeming to cherish others, at one point raising to her cheek a purple scarf and briefly communing with it…Still in the remains of her officewear, Phoebe: the loose blouse, the dark skirt cinched but half unzipped with a white bloom of slip or camisole sprouting out from the haunch. She stopped dead. Staring into nothing, her eyes hardened. Then she steadied, and went on in a private murmur,
‘One pair, two pairs, three pairs, four…Oh, my clothes, my clothes, my loathsome clothes.’
Over the next few days, while the realignment settled (and while her musky, smiley, gauzy, rumpy, nipply presence thickened round about him), he continued to feel he had something to celebrate. And he continued to wonder why.
Perhaps there were grounds, at least, for some primordial Mesozoic satisfaction, in that it was to him, Martin, mandrill number one, that she gravitated (and not to Lars or Raoul, or to any old arbitrageur or ski bum). No great triumph, clearly, but why disdain a silent grunt of simian support?
Perhaps he was still fantasising that as her champion, guardian, and regent (and as her ruthless slum landlord) certain seigneurial privileges would inevitably begin to come his way. And they did, too, in a sort of sense. In Kensington Gardens Square she was almost constantly naked, or more often practically naked, or at the very least (to use a word she liked) thoroughly déshabillé. He very soon found out that this was not meant as any kind of invitation.
The nudism was new. He remembered Phoebe saying that the Next Thing ‘would be a package of measures’; and display was clearly one of them, joining applied flirtation and stingey foreplay (as well as the ever-lengthening purdahs)…Now it got complicated for him. At first he liked the idea of her being broke and homeless and above all vulnerable, but now she was actually present, with her toothbrush and her pillowslip of laundry, he soon saw that her vulnerability made her – that her very vulnerability made her invulnerable to unworthy designs…
Perhaps, in the end, it was because she was a cryptogram
