The door opened and Prince strolled into the room. He dropped his briefcase on the armchair and quickly unbuttoned his overcoat.
‘Hi,’ he said. ‘How was your day?’
‘Hi. Very nice. How was yours?’
‘Oh, usual stuff. City Hall. But there was some good human interest in the afternoon.’
‘Do you want a drink? What happened?’
‘You bet. The way people …’ He stretched, yawning vigorously. ‘The ways people can think up of behaving badly. They’re like bloody artists, some of them. How was your day?’
‘Nice. Very nice. The weather…’
‘Tell me about it in incredible detail.’
So she told him about it, in detail. She did this every evening. She used to wonder how the routine rhythms and quotidian readjustments of her new life could hold any interest for Prince—Prince, who came home hot and tousled from the hard human action. But she enjoyed telling him about it all and he seemed to enjoy hearing it too. He never let her leave anything out.
‘How are you feeling these days?’ he then asked her.
She blushed, but her voice was steady. ‘I’m very grateful. I can’t stay for ever though, can I. You’ll tell me when it’s time for me to go.’
‘No, stay!’ he said. He stood up and turned his back on her. ‘Stick around,’ he said more quietly, running his eyes along the banked shelf of records. ‘It’s nice to have a woman in the house, as they say. Now who would we like to hear from?’
Amy said, ‘I thought I’d make an omelette or something later on.’
‘Good thinking,’ said Prince.
At eleven o’clock Amy said good night and went upstairs. She stood before the mirror in the sane bathroom. With cleansing lotion and cotton wool she removed the light arrangements of rouge and mascara from her face. She looked good: she looked both older and younger than before, more substantial. Now she gazed into her own eyes without fear; she knew who she was, and didn’t mind much more than other people minded. Her right temple and the soft chin still bore the tenacious discolorations of bruising. Amy didn’t blame Jo for them. Amy didn’t blame Jo for the skilful and virile beating she had given her—in the flat, on New Year’s Day. It was an intelligible thing to have done. Jamie was going to be all right. He was in an expensive clinic called The Hermitage. She wanted to see him but no one thought this was a good idea. No one thought this was good thinking. Amy knew she would see him one day, and would tell him she was sorry without giving fear. She brushed her teeth, then went across the landing to her room.
Amy’s room contained a bed, a table, a chair, and not much else. Prince of course had a bigger and more complicated room, next door to hers. In many ways Amy’s room resembled her attic at the squat, and she liked it very much. But she liked it in an appropriate way. She knew that it was in no sense hers. The window neatly framed the black sky and its hunter’s moon. Looking out, she could hear the faint creaking of the young trees and the discreet surge of an occasional car in the neighbouring streets. That was all. But she saw and heard all that she longed to see and hear. She took off her clothes and put on her white nightdress. She wrote in her diary for a few minutes, then said her prayers—yes she did, down on her knees at the side of the bed.
22
• • •
Old Flame
She lived in a remote arcadia, a pleasant, fallen world. Dogs and cats moved among the people on terms of perfect equality; the slow cars veered for them in the right-angled streets. The place was called a dormitory town. It had baubelled hedges, and grass was shared out scrupulously, often in patches no bigger than paving-stones. This was where the earners of London came back exhaustedly to sleep in lines, while on the far side of the planet other people rose like a crew to man the workings of the world. Prince had shown her round the thought-out precincts, the considered mezzanines. There was one of everything. You wouldn’t ever need to go further than this—though of course they sometimes did, like other people everywhere.
He gave her a certain amount of money each week, for housekeeping, and Amy had always liked testing money against the buyable world. Money, of course, was still in everyone’s bad books; in shops and coffee-bars people talked bitterly about money and its misdeeds. But Amy had a lot of time for money and thought that people seriously undervalued it. Money was more versatile than people let on. Money could spend and money could buy. Also you could save money while you spent it. Finally, it was nice spending money and it was nice not spending it—and of how many things could you say that? Money seemed to work out much better here than it did before, when she had had so little and when she had had so much.
Prince got up at seven every morning without fail. Amy got up then too, partly for his company and partly for her share of the delicious breakfasts he made. Prince was always pleasantly irascible in the mornings; his vague anger was a rhetorical style directed outwards at the world. With calm relish he read out extracts from the newspaper that the boy brought—accounts of greed, spite and folly—and commented on them in that complicitous way he had of making the good seem bad and the bad seem good. Then he drove offjust as it was getting light, to join the queue for London. Amy did the washing-up and readied herself to deal with the day.
In the evenings they sat and read and listened to music. Amy did most of the reading and Prince did most of the listening. Prince listened to music with his green eyes closed, the formidable, gourdlike face thickened out towards the jaws. Sometimes they watched television together. ‘Let’s watch television for a while,’ he would say. He never wanted to watch anything in particular. ‘When I want to watch television,’ he said, ‘I just want to watch television.’ Occasionally they watched Michael Shane, who was still out there, still out on the burning zones, in jeeps, helicopters, canoes, in sweltering prison-yards, adobe huts, bullet-sizzled bunkers—in all the places where the world was on fire.
One night Amy hesitated and said, ‘He’s an old flame of mine, you know.’
‘Mm, I know,’ said Prince coolly. ‘Hard to believe, isn’t it. That little wimp?’ He turned to her and nodded several times in amused appraisal. ‘Boy, I bet old Amy made short work of him. I bet she didn’t waste much time feeding his … feeding him through the wringer.’
Amy laughed shamefacedly and said, ‘He told me that after Amy he thought he was going queer— that’s what he said.’
‘Actually he was right. He did go queer and never went—Whoops,’ said Prince as his glass nearly skidded from his hand. ‘I nearly spilt it,’ he said.
‘What were you going to say?’
He shook his head. ‘Nothing. Talking of old flames, your Mr Wrong seems to be keeping a low profile these days,’ he said, returning his gaze to the screen.
‘Really?’ said Amy.
‘Perhaps he’s gone straight.’
‘Not before time.’
He turned to her with his knowing smile, the smile that knew things.
‘I’m not afraid,’ she said. ‘I think I’d know what to do this time round.’
‘Good for you, Amy,’ he said.
That night she went to bed a little too early. As she got undressed and looked out of the window she heard from downstairs the deceptively brash opening of a piano concerto which she had grown particularly attached to over the past weeks. Hurriedly she put on her nightdress. She felt sure that Prince wouldn’t mind if she came and listened with him for a while. The music settled as she walked barefoot down the padded staircase and opened the door. She saw Prince before he saw her. He stood in front of the window, his head erect, his arms tensed and raised, conducting the night air.
He turned suddenly, almost losing his balance. For a moment he seemed without bearings, unformidable, his hands still stretched out in supplication, or helplessness.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Amy.
‘No that’s all right,’ he said, steadying himself. He smiled foolishly and held her eye. He’s in awe of me too, she realized suddenly. She walked into the room and sat on the sofa with her legs tucked up. He stood before the fire. She closed her eyes and he closed his, head solemnly bowed, and they listened to the music together.
Later Amy got up from her knees and climbed into bed. Through the window she could see the moon, perched alone on the very tip of the night. The silvered tinge against the navy-blue sky contained tiny particles of rose among its inaudible storms of light. If tenderness had a colour, then that was the colour of tenderness. With her cheek on the pillow, Amy’s thoughts began to loosen. She felt a gentle impatience for each successive moment, not the tearing eagerness but the half-anxious certainty of a mother at the school gates, waiting for her child to emerge from the crowd. She felt that Prince was watching her. She felt what it was like to be young. She felt that the moon and her own prayers and thoughts were living things that shared her room and carefully presided over the contours of her sleep. She wasn’t sure whether this was love. She thought that everyone’s heart must hurt slightly when they began to feel all right about themselves.