Black Feathers: Dark Avian Tales: An Anthology(82)

She read the job sheet. “What do they do there?” she asked.

I said irritably: “How would I know? Cosmetic medicine. Fantasy factory stuff. Does it matter?”

She put her arms round me. “China, I was only trying to be interested.”

“Never ask them what they do with the stuff,” I warned her. “Will you do it?”

She said: “If you kiss me properly.”

“How was it?” I asked when she got back.

She laughed. “At first they thought I was a patient!” Running upstairs to change, she called down: “I quite like West London.”

Isobel’s new body delighted her. But she seemed bemused too, as if it had been given to someone else. How much had Alexander promised her? How much had she expected from the Miami treatments? All I knew was that she had flown out obsessed and returned ill. When she talked, she would talk only about the flight home. “I could see a sunrise over the wing of the airliner, red and gold. I was trying hard to read a book, but I couldn’t stop looking out at this cold wintery sunrise above the clouds. It seemed to last for hours.” She stared at me as if she had just thought of something. “How could I see a sunrise, China? It was dark when we landed!”

Her dreams had always drawn her away from ordinary things. All that gentle, warm September she was trying to get back.

“Do you like me again?” she would ask shyly.

It was hard for her to say what she meant. Standing in front of the mirror in the morning in the soft grey slanting light from the bedroom window, dazed and sidetracked by her own narcissism, she could only repeat: “Do you like me this way?”

Or at night in bed: “Is it good this way? Is it good? What does it feel like?”

“Isobel—”

In the end it was always easier to let her evade the issue.

“I never stopped liking you,” I would lie, and she would reply absently, as if I hadn’t spoken: “Because I want us to like each other again.” And then add, presenting her back to the mirror and looking at herself over one shoulder: “I wish I’d had more done. My legs are still too fat.”

If part of her was still trying to fly back from Miami and all Miami entailed, much of the rest was in Brook Green with Alexander. As September died into October, and then the first few cold days of November, I found that increasingly hard to bear. She cried in the night but no longer woke me up for comfort. Her gaze would come unfocussed in the afternoons. Unable to be near her while, thinking of him, she pretended to leaf through Vogue and Harper’s, I walked out into the rainy unredeemed Whitechapel streets. Suddenly it was an hour later and I was watching the lights come on in a hardware shop window on Roman Road.

Other times, when it seemed to be going well, I couldn’t contain my delight. I got up in the night and thrashed the BMW to Sheffield and back; parked outside the house and slept an hour in the rear seat; crossed the river in the morning to queue for croissants at Ayre’s Bakery in Peckham, playing Empire Burlesque so loud that if I touched the windscreen gently I could feel it tremble, much as she used to do, beneath my fingertips.

I was trying to get back too.

“I’ll take you to the theatre,” I said. “Waiting for Godot. Do you want to see the fireworks?” I said: “I brought you a present—”

A Monsoon dress. Two small stone birds for the garden; anemones; and a cheap Boots nailbrush shaped like a pig.

“Don’t try to get so close, China,” she said. “Please.”

I said: “I just want to be something to you.”

She touched my arm. She said: “China, it’s too soon. We’re here together, after all: isn’t that enough for now?”

She said: “And anyway, how could you ever be anything else?” She said: “I love you.”

“But you’re not in love with me.”

“I told you I couldn’t promise you that.”

By Christmas we were shouting at one another again, late into the night, every night. I slept on the futon in the spare room. There I dreamed of Isobel and woke sweating.

You have to imagine this—

The Pavilion, quite a good Thai restaurant on Wardour Street. Isobel has just given me the most beautiful jacket, wrapped in birthday paper. She leans across the table. “French Connection, China. Very smart.” The waitresses, who believe we are lovers, laugh delightedly as I try it on. But later, when I buy a red rose and offer it to Isobel, she says, “What use would I have for that?” in a voice of such contempt I begin to cry. In the dream, I am fifty years old that day. I wake thinking everything is finished.

Or this—

Budapest. Summer. Rakoczi Street. Each night Isobel waits for me to fall asleep before she leaves the hotel. Once outside, she walks restlessly up and down Rakoczi with all the other women. Beneath her beige linen suit she has on grey silk underwear. She cannot explain what is missing from her life but will later write in a letter: “When sex fails for you—when it ceases to be central in your life—you enter middle age, a zone of the most unclear exits from which some of us never escape.” I wake and follow her. All night it feels like dawn. Next morning, in the half-abandoned Jugendstil dining room, a paper doily drifts to the floor like a leaf, while Isobel whispers urgently in someone else’s voice: “It was never what you thought it was.”