I let Benji’s words sweep over me through the cassata and espresso, losing sight of the precise propositions that composed his enthusiasm. I had become used to such talk and was already learning to give it no thought until something actually happened, not acknowledging the seed of disrespect in this.
“Look,” I interrupted, proving my lack of attention. “Look how my arm’s changed colour.” I pulled my blouse sleeve back from my shoulder to show the difference. “I’ve turned black.” I reached over and pushed his rolled-up shirt sleeve up to his biceps. “You too. You’ve changed colour just like me. Just in an afternoon!”
He laughed, easily changing gear, not too committed to his schemes. “We’re discovering our inner blackness.” At that moment there was an enormous thump, bigger and stranger than any familiar sound, bending our eardrums and insisting on attention. I looked around. Pedestrians had faltered, looking south towards Bayswater Road then towards each other. Finding no answer in any direction, they gathered themselves and carried on.
I still find this strange and do not know whether their reserve was part of being in England, or because in Bayswater there is always the likelihood that the person next to you will not speak your language.
“What was that?” I asked Benji, who had stood to peer in the direction of the sound.
“An explosion. Maybe a bomb.”
We were still waiting for our bill as the police cars, ambulances and Bomb Squad vans screamed their way past us, lurid in their orange and lime fluorescent paint. It might have been a film. Everyone seemed content to leave it to the professionals.
“IRA,” offered the Italian waiter, laconically.
He was wrong. Three Arabs in a car had blown themselves up by mistake on their way to plant a bomb. No one else was killed. The analyses on the TV and in the newspaper foundered before clarifying anything. It might have been the Iran-Iraq war spilling over into Bayswater, or they may have represented the Palestinians, or had something to do with Libya, or the Lebanese civil war. Nobody in England seemed to care very much which of these was true.
My day often included the Strada—a new Iranian place with a Hollywood theme that had replaced the Greek Patisserie next to Porchester Baths—Le Cafe, run by Iraqis, and Etty’s in Hereford Road, a French restaurant owned by a Syrian architect married to an English woman. The newsagents in Westbourne Grove were owned by Asians, but the ones on Queensway were Arab-owned and I realised I did not know the precise nationality of any of them, nor of their restaurants, groceries or Halal butchers. As far as I could tell, everyone in Bayswater got along regardless of where they came from or the wars around the world, and I had loved Bayswater for this, its contrast to Zanzibar.
With time, I remember the lunch at Pizza Express with increasing clarity, memory picking it out from other occasions to say: Remember that lunch with the bomb, something shifted then.
OUR FRIEND KEN LAI BROUGHT THE PAPERS FOR THE
flat and the mortgage to Le Cafe. We spread them out over the sparkly perspex, between the coffee and tea. “ You sign here and here and here,” said Ken, marking the forms with crosses.
“'You mind if I just go through the small print?” asked Benji. He had recently acquired his first pair of reading glasses and now he took them from their case and put them on, though I doubted that he really needed them. “I always thought people with reading glasses had an advantage,” he had told me earlier. “Instant seriousness.” He had practiced in front of the mirror, pushing them on and whipping them off, asking, “What do you think?” I made small talk with Ken and waited. The small print usually was not a concern of Benji’s. “Judge the quality of the person, not the paper,” was one of his dictums. “The best deals are made with a handshake.” Finally, I asked, “Is it OK?” sure that it was.
“It seems fine,” he said, then hesitated. “Ken, would this work if just one of us signed?”
“If you want only one of you to be the owner.” “Legally speaking, we’re increasing our liability if we both sign, aren’t we?”
“In a sense.”
“Increasing the complication.”
“Yes, perhaps.”
I was watching him, puzzled, and he turned to me. “Marcella, why don’t you sign this on your own? I’ll pay my share, but I don’t think I need to sign. You know I don’t like signing things.”
“I thought we were doing this together, Benji. You’ve never said anything before.”
“I know. I know. I hadn’t thought it through before. But it’s better. We’ll still be doing it together. It’s right that it should be your name on the deed. You found it, and you really want to own a home of your own. I’ve already had a home. I’ve done all that. It’s still there, in Italy.”
“Benji, I thought you wanted to sign. I’d feel better if you’d sign. Half the deposit is your money.”
“Don’t worry about that.”
“Ken, I need to talk to Benji. Can we postpone this?”
“If you do, you might lose the flat.”
I closed my eyes and found a surprising thing, that alongside the intensity of my wish to share this home with Benji was a second wish, rising like a monster from the depths, for the flat to be
