FOR A COLD CLIMATE THIS PLACE CAN BE SURPRISINGLY hot. The heat and insects have come to Vermont and I now know why my house has a porch and why the porch has wire-mesh screens. I’ve been reading in the hammock, wondering at the landscape, which has gone from all white to all green, someone heavy-handed with the paint pot here. This is home, even though neither the structure nor the furniture is mine. The evenings are most difficult; they are too long and too empty now the semester is over, and prison has left me unpracticed with space. There’s time to wonder how we teetered from our lovely perfect balance in Bayswater and why we could not read the clues and save ourselves. I go to bed early just to curl up with myself. I go to bed early and get up early, living entirely in the light.
Hot, humid summer days in Bayswater always caught the English by surprise, wearing the wrong clothes, doing the wrong things. The swimming pool at Porchester Baths became a soup of screaming children and the men took to drinking their thick beer in the sun, growing red on two counts. We watched them, Benji and I, while we ate lunch on the patio of the Pizza Express at the corner of Westbourne Grove and Porchester Road. The tables were full of young office workers, commuters to Bayswater working in Building Societies, the girls pinkly sexy in their summer dresses and the boys uncomfortable in their loosened ties.
We were very pleased with ourselves: the last flat had sold for a good price and I had repaid Adnam in full. In the morning I had located a rental flat in Queensway for a family from Kuwait who needed to be away from home for a discreet period, and it seemed I was being carried along by a happy momentum. In my shoulder bag was a deck of new business cards from Pip Printing with “Marcella de Souza, Property Consultant” on them. And Benji was glowing from his previous night’s dinner with Lord and Lady Cramp, those twigs of the Churchill family tree.
On our way to lunch, we had strolled down Westbourne Grove, stopping to see our Iraqi friends at Le Cafe. Benji gave the bent old bag-lady outside the cafe a ten-pound note. She had settled there after discovering that our friends were kind and, unlike the English, offered food and drink to the destitute as a matter of principle. It was a day for resting on laurels.
With the garlic bread and Peroni beer, our talk ran over the satisfactory events just completed and the equally satisfactory ones to be anticipated, much as our hands ran lightly over each other’s bodies after love. Then I asked, “Where are we going to live, Benji?”
He was leaning back in his chair, the sun glinting on his forehead. For once he had left his suit jacket in his car. His head turned to idly track someone walking behind me, the waiter or a pretty woman.
I pressed on: “Don’t you think it strange we are selling homes to people when we don’t have one ourselves? We can afford to buy something.”
Benji’s photosensitive sunglasses had turned dark, and now they turned to face me. “Can we?”
“Yes. Easily. With a loan.”
He nodded and pushed himself up in his seat. I recognised Benji’s special air of gravity adopted for serious deals. I would have preferred the boyish enthusiasm. “Then we should. It doesn’t make sense not to.”
“I think so.”
“Not in a rising market. It makes sense to borrow as much as possible.”
“Yes.”
“Do you have somewhere in mind?”
“I want to know what sort of place you’d like.”
“I don’t know. Not too small. Around here somewhere. I don’t think I like basements.” He was uncomfortable. “What do you think? You’re the property consultant.”
“There is a place near here.”
“I knew it.” Now he was laughing.
“Knew what?”
“That you had a place in mind. I know you. You always have a plan.”
“Not always.”
“Yes, you do. It’s a good thing. You wouldn’t be Marcella without a plan.”
“You wouldn’t be Benji with one.”
“I have plans. Just not one plan.”
“Sometimes I wish you’d have just one.”
“Hey, Zanzibar girl! Never mind about my plans. They’re going fine.”
“Well, you make it sound like I’m trying to run your life.”
“So what about this place?”
“OK, you’re sure you want to know?”
“I’m sure.”
The pizzas came and the waiter made his flourishes with the pepper pot. Most of the office workers had returned to their jobs and the tourists had not replaced them, preferring to sit inside away from the sun. We had outlasted the paler competition.
“OK, it’s in Westbourne Grove above the Abyssinia restaurant. It’s got a huge living room with three big casement windows overlooking the road. A brand-new open-plan kitchen. Two bedrooms in the back where it’s quiet, overlooking a garden. High ceilings with the original mouldings. The bathroom’s nice too.”
“Hey, slow down, you’re not selling it to me.”
“No, it’s nice, Benji. They’re asking seventy thousand, but it’s not really on the market yet. It’ll go quickly. Do you want to see it?”
“Right on Westbourne Grove? It’ll be a bit noisy and dirty.”
“But it’s interesting to look out of the window. You can see down Queensway too.” I wanted to be right there, right in the middle of things.
“OK, I’ll see it. Now eat your pizza.”
“Benji, I do love you.”
“No, no, no. Not that love nonsense. Not here in the middle of Pizza Express.” But he had his smile back.
We ordered more beer. I let Benji talk and, as if eager to distance itself from the anchoring subject of a home, his talk flew fast and high. Lord Cramp had introduced him to gulf state Arabs with tens of millions to invest— but secretly. That was the beauty of being someone like Lord Cramp, you see. He could deposit millions of other people’s
