The Muse Read online

  ‘I won’t,’ I said, gratified by her insistence.

  She sat back in her chair. ‘You do remind me of someone I used to know.’

  ‘I do?’ I found this immensely flattering and waited for Quick to go on, but her face clouded, and she broke the spine of the cigarette she’d left on the side of the ashtray.

  ‘What do you make of London?’ she asked. ‘You came in ’62. Do you like living here?’

  I felt paralysed. She leaned forward. ‘Miss Bastien. This isn’t a test. I’m genuinely interested. Whatever you say, I won’t tell a soul. Cross my heart. Between us, I promise.’

  I’d never told anybody this out loud. It may have been the gin, it may have been her open face, and the fact she didn’t laugh at my dream of writing. It may have been the confidence of youth, or that porter Harris, but it all came tumbling out. ‘I’ve never seen so much soot,’ I said.

  She laughed. ‘The place is filthy.’

  ‘In Trinidad, we were brought up being told that London was a magic land.’

  ‘So was I.’

  ‘You’re not from here?’

  She shrugged. ‘I’ve been here so long I can hardly remember anything else.’

  ‘They make you think London is full of order, and plenty, and honesty and green fields. The distance shrinks.’

  ‘What distance do you mean, Miss Bastien?’

  ‘Well, the Queen rules London and she rules your island, so London is part of you.’

  ‘I see.’

  I didn’t think Quick did see, really, so I carried on. ‘You think they’ll know you here, because they also read Dickens and Brontë and Shakespeare. But I haven’t met anyone who can name three of his plays. At school, they showed us films of English life – bowler hats and buses flickering on the whitewash – while outside all we could hear were tree frogs. Why did anyone show us such things?’ My voice was rising. ‘I thought everyone was an Honourable—­’

  I stopped, fearing I’d said too much.

  ‘Go on,’ she said.

  ‘I thought London would mean prosperity and welcome. A Renaissance place. Glory and success. Opportunity. I thought leaving for England was the same as stepping out of my house and onto the street, just a slightly colder street where a beti with a brain could live next door to Elizabeth the Queen.’

  Quick smiled. ‘You’ve been thinking about this.’

  ‘Sometimes you can’t think about anything else. There’s the cold, the wet, the rent, the lack. But – I do try to live.’

  I felt I shouldn’t say any more; I couldn’t believe I’d said so much. The bread roll was in shreds upon my lap. Quick, in contrast, appeared totally relaxed. She sat back in her chair, her eyes alight. ‘Odelle,’ she said. ‘Don’t panic. It’s likely you’ll be fine.’

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  IV

  Cynthia married Samuel at Wandsworth Register Office, in a small room that smelled of bureaucracy and cheap perfume, with dark-­green walls and steel chairs. Shirley and Helen, two girls from the shoe shop, came along in their finery. Sam’s friend from the buses, Patrick Minamore, was best man, and he brought with him his girlfriend Barbara, a fledgling actress and a talkative presence.

  The registrar eyed us. The men were in suits, Patrick’s tie particularly loud – and everyone looked smart compared to the drab surround. Cynth was beautiful – I mean, she was beautiful anyway, even without love beaming through every inch of her, but in her white minidress, a simple white pill-­box hat, and a pair of white shoes, given her by the manager, Connie, as a wedding present, she was radiant. She had a necklace of blue flowers made from ceramic, and two small pearls in her ears, so perfect and round, as if the oysters had made them especially for her.

  Patrick, an aspiring photographer and a bus driver on the 22, was in charge of capturing us all. I still have some of those snaps. A fountain of rice caught mid-­air, white rain upon Sam and Cynth’s laughing faces as they stand on the registry steps, their two hands lifted together as the grains cascade.

  In marriage, at least, Cynth had triumphed. It was never going to be simple for us to find our way, and Cynth should have had a shoe empire by then, she was that good. It was not easy to sell shoes in Clapham High Street in 1967 as a Trinidadian girl. It was probably easier to write a poem about Trinidad’s flowers, send it to the British Consul and be rewarded with a prize. But at least she had Sam, and they had rubbed off well on each other – he serious and shy, she resourceful and determined – how her presence illuminated him as he signed his name in the register!

  We went back to Sam and Patrick’s flat in black cabs, and told the taxi men that our friends had just got married. The drivers rolled down their windows and played the blues on the same radio station in concert, so loud we were terrified we’d get arrested for breaking the peace. Back in the flat, we lifted tea towels euphorically from sandwiches, found bottle openers, corkscrews, put a record on, and watched as they cut the white domed cake that Cynth had laced with rum.

  After a ­couple of hours, other ­people turned up – friends of friends. Barbara had summoned up a gaggle of hip-­looking folk, girls with long hair and short dresses, fellers in open-­necked shirts, who looked like they needed a shave. I only glanced at them; I had long told myself those ­people were not for me and neither me for them. My back was damp with sweat and the ceiling seemed lower than it had been an hour ago. A ­couple of Barbara’s gang fell into a table, and a little red lamp with tassels tumbled to the floor. Though I’d never smoked it myself, I could smell the marijuana.

  When the room was full, the mood was high and Cynth had drunk three Dubonnets and lemonade too many, she lifted the needle off the record player and announced, ‘My friend Delly is a poet and she wrote a poem about love.’ There was a cheer. ‘And she goin’ to read it now.’

  ‘Cynthia Morley, no,’ I hissed. ‘Just ’cos you now a married woman, you can’t boss me around.’

  ‘Wham now, Delly?’ called Sam. ‘Why you keeping yourself so secret?’

  ‘Come on, Delly. For me,’ said Cynth, to my horror drawing out the poem from her handbag as another, yet more unstable cheer rippled around the fuggy room. When I had finally showed it to her a week ago, like a schoolgirl walking the long route to the teacher’s desk, she had read it in silence and then put her arms around me tight, whispering, Good Lord, Delly, you are truly blessed.

  ‘It a very good poem, Delly,’ she said now, as she thrust it in my hands. ‘Come on, show these ­people what you got.’

  So I did it. A little wobbly from my own Dubonnet, I glanced up only once at all the faces, small moons stopped for nothing else but me. I read my poem about love from the paper, although I knew it off by heart. My words made the room fall silent. And when I finished, there was more silence, and I waited for Cynth, but even she didn’t seem able to speak.

  I DID NOT SEE HIS face in the crowd when I read that poem. I did not feel his eyes on me, although he told me later he couldn’t drag them off mine. I felt nothing change in the room, except the shock of my voice alone and the peculiar euphoria one feels in the wake of applause, feeling at once cheapened and triumphant.

  He came up to me about half an hour later, where I was in the minuscule and cluttered kitchen, stacking the empty foil plates in neat towers, trying to make some order out of Sam and Patrick’s bachelor chaos. ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘So you’re the poet. I’m Lawrie Scott.’

  My first thought was to check whether there were bits of egg sandwich on my fingers. ‘I’m not a poet, I just write poems,’ I said, looking at my hands.

  ‘There’s a difference?’

  ‘I think there is.’

  He leant against the counter, his long legs straight, crossing his arms like a detective. ‘Is your real name Delly then?’ he said
.

  ‘It’s Odelle.’ I was grateful for the bottle of Fairy Liquid and the scrubbing pad I began to put to good use.

  ‘Odelle.’ He stared back through the doorless arch to where the party had turned without a rudder, sinking into a sea of cigarette butts and shrieks, ring-­pulls, discarded hair accessories, and someone’s suit jacket crumpled on the floor. Sam and Cynth would be leaving soon – for nowhere but our flat, which I’d promised to vacate for the evening. Tonight, I was to be staying in this pit. This Lawrie seemed lost in thought, perhaps a little stoned, and I noticed small purple smudges of tiredness under his eyes.

  ‘How do you know the happy ­couple?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t. I’m friends with Barbara and she said there was a party. I didn’t know it was a wedding. I feel rather rude, but you know how it goes.’ I didn’t, so I said nothing. ‘You?’ he persisted.

  ‘I went to school with Cynthia. She is – was – my flatmate.’

  ‘Long time, then?’

  ‘Long time.’

  ‘Your poem was really good,’ he said.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘I can’t imagine what it’d be like to be married.’

  ‘I don’t suppose it’s much different,’ I replied, putting on a pair of yellow rubber gloves.

  He turned to me. ‘Do you really think that? Is that why the poem was about love, not marriage?’

  The mound of bubbles was rising in the sink because I hadn’t turned off the tap. He seemed genuinely interested, and this pleased me. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But don’t tell Cynth.’

  He laughed, and I liked the sound. ‘My mother used to say that marriage got better with practice,’ he said. ‘But she was already on her second try.’

  ‘Goodness me,’ I said, laughing. I probably sounded so disapproving. Divorce, in those days, still contained the suggestion of debauch.

  ‘She died two weeks ago,’ he said.

  I paused, scrubbing pad hovering over the sink, and looked at him to check I’d heard him right. ‘My stepfather told me I should come out,’ Lawrie went on, staring at the floor. ‘That I was getting under his feet. And of all places I end up at a wedding.’

  He laughed again, but then was quiet, hugging himself in his fashionable leather jacket. I had not had such a personal conversation with a stranger before in England. I could not counsel him, and he did not seem to wish for it. He didn’t look like he was going to cry. I thought he might be hot in that coat, but he didn’t seem disposed to take it off. Perhaps he wasn’t planning to hang around. I registered my regret that this might be the case.

  ‘I haven’t seen my mother for five years,’ I said, plunging a tray sticky with cake smears into the hot water.

  ‘But she’s not dead, though.’

  ‘No. No, she’s not dead.’

  ‘I keep thinking I’m going to see her again. That she’ll be there when I go home. But the only person there is bloody Gerry.’

  ‘Gerry being your stepfather?’

  His face darkened. ‘Yes, sorry. And my mother left everything to him.’

  I tried to gauge Lawrie’s age. He could be thirty, I supposed, but the rapidity with which he was spilling himself open suggested someone younger. ‘That’s hard,’ I said. ‘Why would she do that?’

  ‘Long story. She did leave me one thing, actually. Gerry always hated it, which goes to show what a moron he is.’

  ‘That’s good you got something. What is it?’

  Lawrie sighed again and uncrossed his arms, letting them hang by his side. ‘A painting. All it does is remind me of her.’ He gave me a rueful smile, his mouth crooked up one cheek. ‘Love is blind, love’s a bind. I could be a poet too.’ He cocked his head at the refrigerator. ‘Any milk?’

  ‘There should be. You know, I think it’s best you remember your mother rather than try and forget. My father died. And I don’t have anything of his at all. Just my name.’

  Lawrie stopped, his hand on the refrigerator door. ‘Whoa. I’m sorry. Here am I, going on—­’

  ‘It’s all right. No, really.’ I felt self-­conscious now, and wished he’d just get the milk out and busy himself. I never usually talked about my parents, and yet I felt compelled to carry on. ‘He died in the war. He got shot down.’

  Lawrie looked agog. ‘Mine died in the war too. But not in a plane.’ He paused and I got the sense he was going to say something, then thought better of it. ‘I never knew him,’ he added.

  I felt awkward with this synchronicity of our circumstance, as if I’d deliberately sought it out. ‘I was two,’ I hurried on. ‘I don’t really remember him. He was called Odell, but without the “e”. When he died, my mother changed my name.’

  ‘She what? What were you known as before that?’

  ‘I don’t even know.’

  This fact about myself sounded absurd and funny – at least, in that moment it did – maybe it was the clouds of pot billowing around – and we both started laughing. In fact, we laughed straight for about a minute, that pain in your stomach when you laugh and laugh – how one mother can rename you, how mad it is another suddenly dead, and you in a kitchen round the corner from the British Museum wearing yellow rubber gloves.

  Lawrie turned fully towards me, the milk bottle lolling in his hand. Sobering up, I eyed it, worrying that the liquid would start dripping through the lid at such a terrible angle.

  ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘Delly.’

  ‘Odelle.’

  ‘Do you want to get out?’

  ‘From where?’

  ‘From here, you crazy girl.’

  ‘Who’s crazy?’

  ‘We could go to Soho. I’ve got a friend who can get us in to the Flamingo. But you’ll have to take off those rubber gloves. It’s not that sort of club.’

  I didn’t know what to make of Lawrie at this point. I could describe him as grief-­stricken, but arguably the grief hadn’t truly set in. Perhaps he was in shock – it had only been a fortnight. That he was angry with someone, and a bit lost, both certain of himself and yet avoiding himself – these things could be said about Lawrie. He spoke well, and he talked of Gerry and the house and his divorced, dead mother with a practised world-­weariness that I wasn’t sure he was trying to escape or keep alive.

  ‘I – I’m tired,’ I said. ‘I can’t leave the party.’ I pulled the plug from the sink. As the water drained noisily, I wondered how his mother had died.

  ‘The Flamingo, Odelle.’

  I’d never heard of it, but I wasn’t going to tell him that. ‘I can’t leave Cynth.’

  He raised an eyebrow. ‘I don’t think she needs you tonight.’ I blushed, looking into the disappearing bubbles. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘my car’s outside. How about we drop the painting off at my friend’s flat and then let’s go dancing. It doesn’t have to be the Flamingo. Do you like to dance?’

  ‘You have the painting with you?’ I said.

  ‘I see.’ He ran a hand through his hair. ‘More of an art girl than a nightclub girl?’

  ‘I don’t think I’m either of those girls. But I do work at an art gallery,’ I added. I wanted him to be impressed, to show him I wasn’t just some innocent prig who chose to wash up crockery rather than fall around on the carpet.

  A light came into Lawrie’s eyes. ‘Do you want to see it?’ he said. ‘It’s in the boot of my car.’

  Lawrie didn’t try and touch me in that kitchen. He didn’t let his hand drift anywhere near. The relief that he didn’t, and the desire that he might – I think they are the reasons I agreed to see his painting. I followed him, leaving the dishes stranded in the sink.

  •

  I think he wanted me to be impressed by the fact he was driving an MG, but that meant nothing to me, once I’d laid eyes on the painting in the boot. It was not large, and it had no frame. As an image, it was simple a
nd at the same time not easily decipherable – a girl, holding another girl’s severed head in her hands on one side of the painting, and on the other, a lion, sitting on his haunches, not yet springing for the kill. It had the air of a fable.

  Despite the slight distortion from the orange street lamp above us, the colours of the lower background reminded me of a Renaissance court portrait – that piled-­up patchwork of fields all kinds of yellow and green, and what looked like a small white castle. The sky above was darker and less decorous; there was something nightmarish about its bruised indigoes. The painting gave me an immediate feeling of opposites – the girls against the lion, together in the face of its adversity. But there was a rewarding delicacy beyond its beautiful palette of colours – an elusive element that made it so alluring.

  ‘What do you think?’ asked Lawrie. His face seemed softer out of the glare of the kitchen light.

  ‘Me? I’m just the typist,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, come on. I heard that poem. Make a poem of this.’

  ‘It doesn’t work like that—­’ I began, before I realized he was teasing me. I felt embarrassed, so I turned back to the painting. ‘It’s very unusual, I suppose. The colours, the subject matter. I wonder when it was painted? Could be last week, or last century.’

  ‘Or even earlier,’ he said eagerly.

  I looked again at the old-­fashioned fields in the background and then at the figures. ‘I don’t think so. The girl’s dress and cardigan – it’s more recent.’

  ‘Do you think that’s gold leaf?’ Lawrie bent down and pointed to the lion’s mane, the flowing strands which seemed to glint. His head was very close to mine and I could smell his skin, a trace of aftershave that gave me goosebumps.

  ‘Odelle?’ he said.

  ‘It’s not your usual painting,’ I replied hastily, as if I knew what a usual painting was. I straightened up. ‘Mr Scott, what are you going to do with it?’

  He turned to me and smiled. The orange light caught the planes of his face and covered him in ghoulish shadow. ‘I like it when you call me Mr Scott.’