There was an interior door, and geography dictated that it led to the part of the house that gave onto the side street. I turned the handle. Nothing happened. I pushed hard and the door gave, shrieking on the linoleum. I smelled rancid butter, dust, and Lifebuoy soap. I was in a scullery. Through a window above the sink more street light streamed onto the flagstones. A line of plates stood drying in a rack. They had been drying so long they were filthy again. In the shelves, a selection of Larry's undemocratic self-indulgences: pepper sardines from a grand grocer in Jermyn Street, Oxford marmalade, and Fortnum's English Breakfast Tea. In the fridge, rancid yoghurt, sour milk. Beside it a wooden door with bolts top and bottom, and a latch with a chain and pin. It was the side door I had inspected from the pavement. As I returned to the living room I looked at my watch. Three minutes was how long eternity had so far lasted.
The stairs were in pitch darkness, rickety and uncarpeted. I counted fourteen from ground level. I reached a landing, groped, felt a door, then a door handle. I pushed and stepped inside. I was in a lavatory. I stepped out again, closed the door, and, with my back against it, groped either side of me until I found another door, opened it, and entered Emma's bedroom in broad daylight, because the halogen light from the street lamp poured straight in the window, passing through the threadbare curtains as if they didn't exist. I gave her everything, I thought, surveying the bare floorboards and cracked washbasin, the dead flowers in a paste pot, the wonky reading lamp, the brown-flowered wallpaper peeling in strips; and she wanted none of it. This is what I saved her from. And she preferred it.
On the floor lay a futon, and it was prepared the way she liked to prepare our bed when we were going to make love: sideways to the fire, lots of pillows, a white duvet. Across the duvet, the severe little Marks & Spencer nightdress she had brought with her when she came to live with me, its long sleeves stretched out for the embrace. I saw her naked on her stomach with her chin in her hands, turning to look at me over her shoulder as she hears me enter. And the light of the log fire drawing finger shadows on her flanks. And her unpinned hair falling like black flames over her shoulders.
Two books, one his side, one hers. For Larry, a red-cloth nineteen-twentyish volume by one W. E. D. Allen, with the unlikely title
A sepia poster. Not of Josef Stalin this time, not of anyone I recognised. But a bearded, strong-jawed, dark-eyed modem prophet in what I took to be the traditional garb of a Caucasian hillsman: fur hat, skin waistcoat with loops for ammunition. Looking closer, I made out the name Bashir Haji in sharp Cyrillic script across the lower corner and, with difficulty, the words "to my friend Misha the great warrior." It seemed a strange sort of trophy to hang in a love nest. Tugging it from its fastenings, I laid it on the bed next to Emma's nightdress. Clothes, I thought: I need more clothes. Nobody who leaves in a hurry takes all his clothes. A curtain hung across a recess beside the chimney breast, reminding me of Uncle Bob's blackout curtain across the alcove in my priesthole. I pulled it aside and took a sharp step backward.
I am on Priddy, grappling with him. I have seized him by the lapels of his green Austrian raincoat that he calls his moleskin. It is a flowing, long-skirted, olive-coloured affair, silky to the touch. Its softness is offensive to me. As I haul him towards me, I hear a rent and I laugh. As we fight, I have an image of it turning to shreds. As I drag him feetfirst and mud-caked towards the pool, I see its tatters in the moonlight, trailing after him like a beggar's shroud.
And I saw it now, dry-cleaned and none the worse for wear, hanging from a wire coat hanger with the cleaner's tag still stapled to the inside lining. I checked the buttons. All there. Did I pull the buttons off? I had no memory of doing so. The rip, where was the rip? I had distinctly heard cloth ripping. I could find not one tear, not a mend, whether in the lining, the hem, or round the buttonholes. Nor round the lapels where I had seized him.
