My excitement was subverted only by the sense that we were going the wrong way. We had arrived at an airport west of London and to get to Geoffrey’s home in Reading we were going further west, leaving the city behind us. When I first saw Geoffrey in Zanzibar he had been standing with his back to the people and the sea, staring at a blank, grey wall. Now his heavy head was on my shoulder, and he was leading me away from London.
We took a taxi from the centre of Reading to Geoffrey’s house. “Who will be home?” I asked, anxious about first impressions.
“No one. I live alone.” He seemed surprised.
“Oh.”
There had been little time for thought and, though Geoffrey was a single man, the only home I was able to imagine was some sort of family household, Geoffrey probably at its head. If I assumed anything, it was a home a little grander than the average, whatever the average might prove to be. There had been the authority of his questions in Zanzibar, the ‘Dr.’ in front of him, the United Nations behind him. If I had pressed myself for specifics, I might have seen poorer dependents craving his attention and a phone that rang off the hook with international callers. Shrivelled grandparents might be waiting in the doorway, ready to take his coat and disapprove of me. Maybe servants. There would be Christmas cheer, of course, but there would also be the question of my suitability as a wife. It could come to that. His awkwardness with women was promising, a portent of seriousness. And he was the cleverest man I had ever met.
The taxi turned into progressively narrower streets until we were in one with barely enough room for us to pass between parked cars. This street was a long, straight dead-end, seeming to diminish to nothing. On both sides we were flanked by long, low brick buildings studded by hundreds of colourful doors and windows, no two alike, and separated from the street by tiny patches of fussy garden.
“A hundred and four,” said Geoffrey to the driver. “Just past the red Escort.”
The information I was receiving about my new life was arriving faster than I could take it in and my first impression of Geoffrey’s home was just the cold clunking of our suitcases against the door frame and a dark interior, musty as a cave.
“I’ll turn on the central heating.” Geoffrey heaved himself up a narrow staircase and out of sight. There was a single room downstairs and, tacked onto the back of it, a little kitchen. I walked there and greeted as a friend the cooker with a kettle sitting on it.
“I’ll put the kettle on,” I called out thinly into the gloom. “Where do you keep the tea?” There was no reply, but my hand wandering across the shelves found, at first attempt, a tin with tea in it and, taking this as a good omen, I returned back through the narrow living room to open the curtains and let in the weak December light. All was silent. There was no movement in the street, not even wind. This was the full stop at the end of a very long sentence.
I found a grubby sweater lying on the couch, pulled it over my head and unrolled the sleeves so that they hung down beyond my chilled hands. The whistle of the kettle wavered, then established a steady keen for me. I gave a slight cough—the damp—and turned towards the noise. “Welcome to my humble abode,” said Geoffrey, arriving next to me, an awkward smile on his face.
“It’s nice,” I lied, looking around. “Lots of books.” Then, uncertain how to continue: “I’m making tea.”
“Oh, you should let me do that. "You’re my guest, Marcella.” But in contradiction of his words, he slumped onto the couch, his outstretched legs bisecting the room.
“No, you’re my patient, remember.”
“As long as you don’t think it’s because you’re a woman,” he replied, mysteriously.
In the next two or three weeks, I read books, two of them, while Geoffrey worked. I spent my long days lying in bed, wrapped in his duvet, the untidy red-brick backs of the neighbouring row of houses my only view. Geoffrey told me that these little terrace houses had been built for workers at the local biscuit factory a hundred years before, but now they were homes for single young professionals like himself, or family homes for immigrants—like me. He was inexplicably proud. From my window I could see Indian women in their kitchens, wooly cardigans over their saris. They looked miserable. Loud music came from the Jamaican family next door. It was good, Geoffrey explained, to live among ordinary people—though I never saw him talk to them.
Among all his dull books on economics I found a book by Dickens—David Copperfield—the only author I recognised. Memorably, the nuns had made us read A Christmas Carol at school, not understanding the terror that ghosts could produce in Zanzibaris. David Copperfield took me to London. He braved loneliness and destitution on his way to winning love and riches. Like me, he was fatherless, not belonging to anyone or anywhere. He had a stupid first marriage before finding happiness and I soon chose to identify with that too.
