Angel

Around sunset, someone knocked on my door. Pappy! I thought, then realised that it wasn’t her knock. This one was authoritatively brisk. When I opened the door and saw David, my heart sank into my boots. I just hadn’t expected him, the bastard. He came in before I issued an invitation and stared around with this look of fastidious distaste, how a cat might look if it found itself standing in a puddle of beery pee. My four dining chairs were good, stout wooden ones I hadn’t started to sand down yet, so I poked one forward with my foot for David and perched myself on the edge of the table so I could look down on him. But he didn’t fall for that—he stood so he could look me in the eye.

“Someone,” he said, “is smoking hashish. I could smell it in the hall.”

“That’s Pappy’s joss sticks—incense, David, incense! A good Catholic boy like you should recognise the whiff, surely,” I said.

“I certainly recognise licentiousness and dissipation.”

I could feel my mouth go straight. “A den of iniquity, you mean.”

“If you like that phrase, yes,” he said stiffly.

I made my tone conversational, tossed the words off like mere nothings. “As a matter of fact, I am living in a den of iniquity. Yesterday a Vice Squad constable checked up on me to make sure I’m not on the game, and this morning I said hello to one of the top-flight professionals next door when she leaned stark naked out of a window. This morning I also met Jim and Bob, the Lesbians who live two floors up, and watched them kiss each other with a great deal more passion than you’ve ever shown me! Put that in your pipe and smoke it!”

He changed tack, decided to back down and beseech me to come to my senses. At the end of his dissertation about how nice girls belong at home until marriage, he said, “Harriet, I love you!”

I blew a raspberry of thunderclap fart proportions, and I swear that as I did, a lightbulb flashed on above my head. Suddenly I saw everything! “You, David,” I said, “are the sort of man who deliberately picks a very young girl so that you can mould her to suit your own needs. But it hasn’t worked, mate. Instead of moulding me, you’ve broken your precious bloody mould!”

Oh, I felt as if I’d been let out of a cage! David had always cowed me with his lectures and sermons, but now I didn’t give a hoot about his pontifications. He’d lost his power over me. And how cu

So I let him prose on for a while about how I was going through a phase, and he’d be patient and wait until I came to my senses, yattata, yattata, yattata.

I’d found a packet of Du Mauriers in the laundry and slipped it into my pocket. When he got to the bit about feeling my oats, I fished the cigs out of my pocket, stuck one in my mouth and lit it with a match from the gas stove.

His eyes popped out on stalks. “Put that thing out! It’s a disgusting habit!”

I blew a cloud of smoke in his face.

“The next thing it will be hashish, and after that you’ll start sniffing glue—”

“You’re a narrow-minded bigot,” I said.

“I am a scientist in medical research, and I have an excellent brain. You’ve fallen into bad company, Harriet, it doesn’t take a Nobel Prize wi

I stubbed the cigarette in a saucer—it tasted vile, but I wasn’t going to let him know that—and escorted him outside. Then I marched him to the front door. “Goodbye forever, David,” I said.

Tears came into his eyes, he put his hand on my arm. “This is utterly wrong!” he said in a wobbly voice. “So many years! Let’s kiss and make up, please.”

That did it. I doubled my right hand into a fist and whacked him a beauty on the left eye. As he staggered—I do pack a punch, the Bros made sure of that—I saw a newcomer over his shoulder, and gave David a shove off the step down onto the path. I looked, I hoped for the benefit of the newcomer, like a particularly dangerous Amazon. Caught in a ridiculous situation by a stranger, David scuttled out the front gate and bolted down Victoria Street as if the Hound of the Baskervilles was after him.

Which left the newcomer and I to look each other over. Even given the fact that I was on the step and he on the path below it, I picked him as barely five foot six. Nuggety, though, standing lightly balanced on his toes like a boxer, his reddish-brown eyes gleaming at me wickedly. Nice straight nose, good cheekbones, a mop of auburn curls trimmed into discipline, straight black brows and thick black lashes. Very attractive!

“Are you coming in, or are you just going to stand there and decorate the path?” I asked coldly.

“I’m coming in,” he said, but made no move to do so. He was too busy looking at me. A peculiar look, now that the wickedness was dying out of his eyes—detached, fascinated in an unemotional way. For all the world like a physician assessing a patient, though if he was a physician, I’d eat David’s Akubra town hat. “Are you double-jointed?” he asked.

I said no.

“That’s a pity. I could have put you in some grouse poses. There’s not much meat on you and what there is looks sporty, but you’ve got very seductive breasts. They belong to your body rather than a bra manufacturer.” He hopped up the step as he said this, then waited for me to precede him inside.

“You have to be the artist in the garret,” I said.

“Dead on the knocker. Toby Evans. And you must be the new girl in the back ground floor flat.”

“Dead on the knocker. Harriet Purcell.”

“Come upstairs and have a coffee, you must need one after the wallop you gave that poor silly coot outside. He’s going to have a shiner for a month,” he said.

I followed him up two flights of stairs to a landing which had a huge female symbol on one of its doors (Jim and Bob, undoubtedly) and an alpine view on the other (Klaus Muller, undoubtedly). Access to the garret was up a sturdy ladder. Toby went first, and as soon as I’d climbed onto firm ground he pulled a rope which plucked the ladder off the floor below, folded it against the ceiling.

“Oh, that’s terrific,” I said, staring about in amazement. “You can pull up the drawbridge and withstand a siege.”

I was in an enormous dormered room with two alcoved windows at its back and two more at its front, where the ceiling sloped. The whole place was painted stark white and looked as sterile as an operating theatre. Not a pin out of place, not a smear or a stain, not a speck of dust or even the outline of a dried-up raindrop on the window panes. Because it was an attic, the windows had seats with white corduroy cushions on them. The paintings were turned with their faces to the wall in a white-painted rack and there was a big professional easel (painted white), a dais with a white chair on it and a little white chest of drawers beside the easel. That was the business area. For leisure he had two easy chairs covered in white corduroy, white bookshelves with every book rigidly straight, a white hospital screen around his kitchen nook, a square white table and two white wooden chairs. Even the floor had been painted white! Not a mark on it either. His lights were white fluorescent. The only touch of colour was a grey army blanket on his double bed.

Since he’d got personal first with that bit about my breasts—the cheek!—I said exactly what I was thinking. “My God, you must be obsessional! I’ll bet when you squeeze the paint out of a tube, you do it from the bottom, then carefully bend the empty bit over and make sure it’s perfectly squared.”