Crissie did not even look so much the younger, nor Susan much the elder. Susan looked young for her age, and had often been taken for someone in her late twenties. Crissie of course looked older, a woman in her early twenties.
Though they dressed for differing tastes, they did not, as Anne might have put it, clash in their appearances.
Their light brown hair and pale skin were similar. And their eyes. Their height if not figure.
Nothing demanding was said by either about a filial resemblance. Sisters – no, this was not it at all. They were not alike in that way. Two gloves of nearly matching colours, but of uncorresponding materials, and patterned quite differently. But still, two gloves.
When they went out, usually in the middle of the week, or the odd weekend when Crissie was not working, Susan felt unavoidably proud of Crissie – “This is my friend.” Sometimes men would be interested in them, and gravitate their way, sitting at the next table in the restaurant, perhaps, or picking them up in the bar or on the train after a film. They were nice to them, these men, liked their fleeting company, but never wished to develop the liaisons. Susan actively did not want another man after R.J. It had become almost cosy, this state, since Crissie. Whereas Crissie had said privately, during one of the long night talks, those talks when the afterlife and AIDS and so on had been mooted, “It wouldn’t be fair on a man. Maybe one day. I can’t see it, somehow.”
Crissie, (at nineteen) did not look into the future, although sometimes into the past.
“Dad was a builder. My mother – well, she was into being a Gold-Medal Mother. We were quite well-off. I went to a fee-paying school, you know the sort of thing. But – there was some trouble. I told you, I don’t ever see them now. I haven’t since I was fifteen.”
Susan imagined Crissie meant she had discovered, under-age, the lure of sex, perhaps become pregnant, and so incurred the wrath of her parents, whose characters Crissie had not really filled in.
Crissie said, as if Susan had asked, “It was something that happened when I was a child. As Dad said, after I was nine I was fine. He said it a lot. And it rhymed, so we couldn’t forget it. Mother’s contribution was that bloody name she gave me.” Crissie didn’t sound angry, only momentarily exasperated. “Crystal. Oh what a thing to saddle a kid with. As soon as I ran off – which you won’t be surprised to learn was with my boyfriend of twenty-two – I changed it to Crissie. I suppose I could have changed it totally. I think, then, I meant to keep in touch. But I had to realise in the end I never wanted to.”
“Did they try to find you?”
“I expect so.”
“You don’t know?”
“I don’t know what they did. Or do. They could even be dead. Dad worked too hard and he was a big drinker, and Mother was scared of every disease under the sun.”
Susan wondered what Crissie had done that was so awful, when she was a child. She wondered if Crissie would say, but that time Crissie didn’t, and soon they were speaking of something else.
One night Susan told Crissie at length about her own past. Her own mother, and Wizz, and then about R.J. Crissie sat listening, sympathetic and involved, tender, gentle and cool as rain. She let Susan recount it all, all she wanted. Sometimes Crissie said things, unjarring and so apt that afterwards Susan forgot what they were – they were the same things Susan might have said to console and reassure herself, perhaps. There was nothing judgmental or self-expanding about Crissie. She never told Susan she had been foolish, or badly-used, or that Wizz was a monster or R.J. a bastard, or what she, Crissie, would have done, or what Susan should have done. She seemed to have said, Susan thought afterwards, only that life could hurt you, yet here they were. But there was also the kindness of Crissie, her eyes and how they looked at Susan, and the way she brought her the glass of wine, and then touched the tip of Susan’s nose for half a second with her warm, smooth finger.
Like a mother? No. Not like that. Not like any of that. Like Crissie.
There came a gloaming afternoon in late November, when Susan, walking along the Strand, saw Crissie near the Savoy with one of her clients.
Crissie, working, was not very altered from the everyday Crissie, in appearance. Glamorously and expensively dressed, faultlessly made-up, and this time with blood-red lipstick, that on her young mouth looked only edibly correct. She was standing with an oldish, overweight man in a Savile Row suit. He was holding her hand, and she was looking into his eyes, smiling, sweet and affectionate, playful and calm. Then he said something and she laughed and he laughed.
Susan turned away and walked on. The crowd was thick and surging, it was nearly four – she had left Paragon early to pick up a book at Zwemmers.
Then Crissie was there.
“Hello, Susie. I saw you go by. That was my lovely Heinrich. We were just bidding adieu. Thanks for not saying anything. He’d be shy.”
Susan knew that the deal with the clients was often to lunch or dine first, the mask of the agency being that it provided social escorts. There was one young man, Crissie
