Lunch passed in eating and in Vanessa telling me at length about her latest feuds with her neighbours—the semi-detached neighbours this time, rather than the people over the road, and with the local hairdresser who, she insists, cuts her hair too short. I told her that her hair still looked very nice. She said I didn’t understand about hair.
During the afternoon, which was mild and fine, she gave me her usual tour of her long and quite elaborate garden. “How awful for you, Roderick, not to have one. My garden gives me scope. I hope you take regular walks?”
“Oh, yes,” I dutifully answered. Of course I did. Ten minutes to the station every morning, ten minutes back at night. And now and then a walk to and back from The Red Stag at lunch-time, or The Black Sheep after dinner. About five minutes, those two.
“And you have no view,” she added, “nothing to look out on.”
I have explained more than once that in fact the back view from my flat isn’t bad. I face the Little Common, beyond which the sun sinks behind the burgeoning central city outskirts.
I shrugged. “Nothing as pretty as your garden.”
She made an annoyed noise, and told me about her feud with the Gardenman, as she calls him.
Despite all that, it was, I admit, rather pleasant on the autumnal patio, watching the trees. We drank our coffee, and I fell asleep at one point. She seemed not to notice. She was still telling me, when I woke, about a campaign she was trying to start against too-early schooling of children. She seemed to believe they were now expected to attend nursery school at two years of age. Is she right? God knows, the way things are.
In the evening we had tea, and ate a very peculiar cake that someone she knew had made. It seemed to be thinly iced in the middle, with a bitter jam on the top, and was wholly organic.
When it got to seven o’clock I was, as ever, able to remind her of the train I had to catch. She told me of course I must go, it was very noble of me to have visited on Saturday, after my stressful week of work in central London. I replied that the rural quality of her house, the garden, and my brief looks at the sea from the train, had been wonderful.
She kept her final, if recently habitual remark until I was putting on my coat.
“Roderick… I do know you’re gay, you know.”
“I’m not gay,” I replied. As always I do.
“You won’t admit it, I see that. But why not? There is absolutely no stigma now. Why won’t you be honest at least with me?”
“I am,” I said, patiently, “being honest. I’m not gay.”
“But you are, Roderick—you are! And oh, Roderick, I’d be so glad to see you with some nice friend—I’d be so happy for you. You could bring him to visit me! Do you think I wouldn’t welcome him—that he’d sense any animosity from me—me, your Auntie Vanessa? Oh, I’d love to meet him, Roderick. Won’t you trust me?”
I kissed her cheek.” If there were anyone, Auntie, I’d trust you. But there is no one. No one at all.”
“Oh, Roderick,” she said as we got her rather complicated door undone. “Oh Roderick.”
7
I’m not gay. At least, as far as I know. And surely by now I would. I’m thirty-two years of age. Men don’t interest me. People don’t, a great deal, if I’m honest. But I like to look at women, if not in an especially lascivious manner. I like their scents and the way they colour their hair and choose their clothes and make their faces up. The way they move.
My mother and sister were killed when I was only five. In a train crash in France. Rotten, yes it was. My mother was only about my age now, and the little girl, my big sister, just nine. A psychologist would say I miss them, so I look at women now and try to see my mother as she was, and my sibling as she might have grown up to be.
The train back was full of jaded seasiders, lurching home to the sea-less tidal city, noisy or exhausted, or both. I had a vodka and tonic off the jolly-trolley. That would be my limit for today. I like a drink but I don’t have too much. Can’t afford it for one thing.
I made some notes on the train going back, as I had on the one going down. It was dark, the windows black before we reached Victoria.
All places smell different. Brighton had been salt and fish and leaves and compost. London that night was newspaper and neon and chemical smoke. I caught the other train out and down, there hadn’t been a stop-off at my station on the way up. I always think that is so strange, going past your own station, unable to stop, having to go all the way in and then out again.
8
There was somebody hanging about in my road as I turned into it. As a rule, if that happens, it’s some gang of youths, boys or girls or both, off the common or making for the common, under a street lamp with their death-advertising cigarette packets vivid with plague warnings, and their little toy bottles of alcopops. They may yell at one, or not. They mostly don’t seem to see me, or any adult. We’re like ghosts to them, remnants already faded from the vast movie-screen of life on which, day and night, they get top billing.
Tonight though, it was just a girl on her own. Dark-haired and in a dark coat. Eye make-up, nothing else. She was walking slowly up and down between the station end, from where I came, and the five detached houses in the middle, the second along of which is where I have my flat.
She glanced at me as I went
