A Dry Spell Read online

  She was offered a shared room in a hall of residence in Camden Town. Her room-mate, a girl called Barbara who was studying politics, was in the habit of bringing her boyfriend back for the night when she imagined Nina to be asleep. After enduring the sound of this furtive coupling for a fortnight or so, Nina complained to the accommodation office and was moved to a much smaller single cell in a block off Oxford Street. From her window she could see open-topped buses packed with tourists; she gave her address as ‘Off Park Lane’; Selfridges was her corner shop.

  Nina was a natural extrovert, but her reserves of sociability had been somewhat depleted by the false start in Camden Town. She had made an effort to be friendly there and met some promising people. Even Barbara, when not screwing, had been pleasant enough company. Now, several miles away, she debated the wisdom of demanding a single room. At times it had the aura of solitary confinement. The corridor into which she had moved was lively enough: there often seemed to be a party in progress in one or other of the cells, Pink Floyd and Yes reverberating through the walls in the early hours, making the leaves of her Yukka plant quiver. But cliques form quickly and Nina had so far not been invited to join in.

  She even resorted to the unusual measure of making an overseas call to her parents to whinge.

  ‘Cheer up, darling,’ said her mother, breezily, in response to Nina’s lamentations. ‘It’s always hard at first. You know what we’re like when we first move. It’s just a question of gritting your teeth and breaking the ice.’

  Breaking the ice. Nina had an image of herself wielding her smile like a pick-axe. The next day she had summoned up the courage to knock on her neighbour’s door and introduce herself. She had not actually seen the occupant coming or going, but had noticed a light under the door at night. In response to her gentle tap there came a faint scuffling noise and then the prickly silence of someone pretending to be out, and Nina had slunk back to her room, humiliated, vowing to make no more gestures of friendship.

  For the next few days she tried, in spite of herself, to catch a glimpse of the reclusive inhabitant by bursting out of her room whenever she heard footsteps in the hall, often surprising someone emerging innocently from the bathroom, but she never caught anyone entering or leaving. She began to wonder whether she had imagined the scuffling noise, and to suspect the room was vacant, but then one morning there appeared a mysterious note tacked to the door. YOU’RE DEAD, BREAD! it announced in angry capitals. From this Nina deduced, intuitively, that her neighbour was male. Later that day she noticed that someone had appended, in minute letters, the reply Bread is risen!, but of the subject of this bizarre correspondence there remained no sign.

  Fortunately Nina’s isolation proved to be only temporary. Her hall-mates were an amiable bunch, well able to assimilate a newcomer, especially one who was attractive and charming and ready to have fun. After only a week in solitary Nina was initiated into party life by a knock at the door as she was getting into bed. She pulled her dress back on hastily, embarrassed to have been caught going to sleep at such an early hour – it was well before midnight – and threw the door open. Two girls, one of whom she’d nodded at on the stairs as she was dragging her suitcase up all four flights, and a boy she recognized from the Geog. Soc. disco she’d attended last week, with her Camden friends, stood outside holding bottles of Newcastle Brown. The unfamiliar one of the girls who had long red hair parted in the middle, and large white front teeth, also parted in the middle, said in a cheerful voice, ‘We’re having a party.’

  ‘Oh?’ said Nina, with one of her ice-pick smiles. ‘Where?’

  ‘Here,’ said the boy, pretending to take a step into the room, and they had all laughed. He was good-looking in an open, unthreatening sort of way, with blond hair and very blue eyes.

  ‘No,’ said the other girl, who had one hand hooked into the boy’s waistband. ‘I thought if we all open our doors, we can drift in and out. I’m over there.’ She pointed across the hall to a dimly lit cubbyhole in which several bodies lay slumped on cushions, hardly moving. It all looked rather more horizontal than the parties Nina was used to, but she realized that to be stand-offish now would condemn her to terms of her own company. And besides, there were those blue eyes.

  ‘Okay,’ said Nina. ‘I haven’t got any drink, or anything, though.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ said the red-haired girl. ‘We’ve stocked up. I’m Fee, by the way. This is Martin and Jean.’

  Jean had stepped past her and was inspecting Nina’s record collection which was still lying on the floor like a spread deck of cards. ‘Hey, can we take this one?’ she said, picking out a Velvet Underground LP. ‘I love it. It’s so mellow.’ She was wearing a long cheesecloth dress with tiny bells around the hem, and had bare feet and a silver ring on her middle toe. She moved on from the records, browsing unhurriedly through Nina’s few possessions. ‘Oh, you’ve got a twelve-string guitar,’ she said, pausing beside the instrument which was resting on a stand with a college scarf around its neck. She ran her thumb across the strings. ‘Can you play?’

  ‘Not much,’ Nina admitted. She wasn’t about to be tricked into giving a recital. ‘Blackbird’ and ‘The House of the Rising Sun’ were the beginning and end of her repertoire. ‘It’s more of a clothes horse really.’

  ‘Martin can, can’t you, Martin?’ said Jean, smirking up at him.

  ‘Three chords,’ said Martin, ‘and I’m working on B7.’

  ‘Are you coming then?’ said Fee from the doorway. She was trying to conduct a conversation across the hall with one of the prone bodies at the same time.

  ‘Er, yes, I just need to sort myself out,’ said Nina, conscious that she wasn’t wearing any knickers and that this was no way to set off to a party.

  ‘So where have you been hiding for the last few weeks?’ Jean asked, when they had finally joined the smokers in the darkened cell across the corridor. Nina explained about Barbara’s creaking bedsprings and her successful petition to the accommodation office. ‘It didn’t occur to me that I might have to share,’ she said. ‘I’d sort of taken it for granted that I’d have my own place.’

  ‘Martin’s sharing with two other people,’ said Fee.

  ‘One of them doesn’t speak any English,’ said Martin, ‘and he’s always in.’

  ‘If you’d got your act together earlier you could have been living in this corridor,’ said Jean.

  You mean instead of me, Nina thought.

  ‘Well, I’m always in the wrong place at the wrong time,’ said Martin, smiling at Nina.

  ‘We didn’t realize your room was empty all that time,’ said Fee. ‘We thought there must be another weirdo living opposite.’ They all laughed.

  ‘Have you met your neighbour?’ Jean asked, accepting a joint from the person beside her, and passing it on to Nina, who took a cautious drag. She had never smoked dope before and wasn’t sure what to expect. She didn’t want to start seeing snakes or thinking she could fly in front of a roomful of strangers. All the same, none of the others present looked as though they were tripping wildly; on the contrary a couple of them – a very hairy-faced bloke and his girlfriend – seemed to have nodded off. In the event her first joint did nothing more than give her a sore throat: subsequent experiences were more successful, but she never bothered to cultivate or seek her own supply.

  ‘I knocked on the door but there was no reply,’ she said. ‘In what way is he a weirdo?’

  Jean shrugged. ‘I don’t know. His reputation preceded him. He’s in his second year here, but he’d already done two years at Oxford.’

  ‘Cambridge,’ someone corrected her.

  She wafted her hand dismissively. ‘He got sent down for selling acid, I think,’ she went on.

  ‘No. I heard he got pissed one night and crapped on the bonnet of some professor’s car,’ said the hairy individual who was roused momentarily from his slumber. This was greeted with gales of laughter from the company.

  ‘There aren’t any cars in Ca
mbridge,’ said Martin. ‘It must have been a bike.’

  ‘You’re just guessing,’ said a blonde girl in the corner, who had been silent, apparently comatose, until this point. ‘Ziggy told me that she knew someone who was at Oxford at the same time as him and she said he was accused of raping this fresher. Apparently the college authorities wanted to hush it up and the girl agreed not to go to the police as long as he was thrown out.’

  ‘So, to summarize,’ said Nina, who was forming a less and less favourable picture of the character beyond her bedroom wall, ‘my neighbour is an ex-Oxbridge drug-peddling rapist with loose bowels.’ This was received with more laughter. ‘Why do people call him Bread?’ she went on.

  ‘I think his friends must call him that, if he’s got any,’ Jean said. ‘He makes his own.’

  ‘Friends?’ asked Nina.

  ‘Bread. He fancies himself as a bit of a chef.’

  ‘God,’ said Nina. ‘Worse and worse.’

  ‘I tell you, he’s completely mad,’ said hairy face. ‘But a genius.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Nina, drily, catching Martin’s eye. She was beginning to twig that they were winding her up.

  ‘I should just point out that nobody here has actually met him,’ Martin said, taking the joint from Jean.

  ‘I have,’ said Jean indignantly. She struggled to her feet to change the music, her bare feet getting caught up in the tassels of her dress. There was the rasp of needle on vinyl as she yanked the record-player’s arm up. Nina glanced fearfully at her Velvet Underground LP, which Jean was dragging from its sleeve, fingers and thumbs all over it. ‘I went into the TV room the other night to ask them to turn the sound down a bit and he was in there on his own watching The Sky at Night,’ Jean went on.

  ‘What did he say?’ Fee wanted to know.

  ‘He didn’t say anything. He just sort of grunted, and turned the sound down; and when I went back a while later he was still there, sitting right up close to the screen.’

  ‘He didn’t try and rape you, then, or sell you acid?’ said Martin.

  ‘No,’ she admitted. ‘But then he wasn’t exactly, like, friendly either.’

  The music started and she stood swaying dreamily beside the loudspeaker, letting her long dark hair swing down across her face. ‘Listen to this bit, everyone,’ she suddenly commanded, putting one hand up, and they all kept still and paid attention dutifully to an unremarkable couple of bars of guitar music while Jean closed her eyes with an expression of rapture. ‘That’s exquisite, that is,’ she said, coming back down to earth. ‘I’m going to play it again.’

  Rape and pillage, thought Nina, when the party had finally dispersed and she had changed back into her nightdress and climbed drowsily into bed. I don’t believe a word of it. But she reached over and locked her door for the first time, just in case.

  7

  Jane removed her shoes on the threshold to reveal a broad ladder on the instep of her tights. The blob of nail varnish with which she had attempted to halt its progress had now fused the fabric to her heel. Guy and the girls were already inside, shoeless. Jane had gone back out to the car for the bag of toys and the present. Her in-laws always subjected them to this humiliation, as if they were naughty children who had just come in from making mud-pies in the garden, or as if the place were a mosque, or something. A shrine to the god of Wilton double twist at £39.99 a yard, thought Jane, trying to peel the sticky tights from the sole of her foot and sending the ladder racing further up her ankle. Guy’s parents themselves were not obliged to parade around in their socks, but wore what Mrs Bromelow called House Shoes: hers were a pair of elasticated, red sateen slippers which snapped shut like clams when not occupied.

  Family visits to Guy’s parents were rare, and dreaded by both Guy and Jane as occasions when all the deficiencies in their approach to child-rearing and discipline were cruelly exposed. The combination of pale carpets, spindly antique tables and precious ornaments ranged at about knee level, seemed to make the children more than usually clumsy and boisterous. Jane would spend the whole day scolding and apologizing and scrubbing at spills. There was nothing for the girls to do, of course, and nothing that might conceivably entertain them was ever provided. The loft was full of Guy’s and his brother’s old toys – all in mint condition, naturally – and these items were often alluded to but never produced in case they got damaged in the course of play. Quite what circumstance they were being preserved for was never made clear. There would be a long, tedious, sit-down lunch to negotiate, perhaps with some elderly, childless guest in attendance. Guy’s parents were the world’s slowest eaters: Jane would have almost finished before the last person was served, and be obliged to make one sprout last fifteen minutes. All her concentration would in any case be required to keep Harriet and, to a lesser extent, Sophie, chair-bound.

  It was by mutual agreement that this ordeal was confined to Boxing Day or other significant anniversaries. Otherwise the senior Bromelows tended to visit their son at his own house, where tensions were more easily disguised. Today’s break with tradition was caused by Guy’s mother having sprained her ankle in the garden a few days before her birthday. Around the door Jane could just see the injured limb, minus its red slipperette, bound in crepe bandage, resting on a tapestry footstool.

  ‘Absolutely excruciating,’ the invalid was saying. ‘Worse than childbirth.’

  Jane, who had had rather difficult labours, was inclined to take umbrage at this. ‘Hello, Daphne. Happy birthday,’ she said, walking into the sitting room and handing Guy’s mother some roses and a wrapped present – the copy of The Downing Street Years that Harriet had pinched from the arcade.

  ‘Oh. Thank you so much.’ Having ascertained from its shape and weight that it was a book Mrs Bromelow laid it aside unopened. Guy was standing with his back to the unlit fire, rocking on his heels and trying to urge his daughters to kiss Granny hello. Although she showed no other sign of affection towards them, she demanded this act of homage at each meeting.

  ‘Go on,’ Guy said, pushing them gently in the middle of their backs. They shuffled reluctantly in the direction of their grandmother’s corrugated cheek.

  ‘Hello, Sophie. Hello, Harriet,’ said Mrs Bromelow, acknowledging their grudging kisses. ‘Mind Granny’s foot.’

  ‘Now don’t let me forget. I’ve something for you,’ she said, a moment later, addressing Guy. ‘You know we inherited most of Aunt Muriel’s things?’

  ‘Oh yes?’ said Guy, hope fluttering.

  ‘Well, some of it just doesn’t look right here. So I thought you could take the dogs. Do you remember – they used to sit either side of her front door?’

  Guy’s face fell: he did remember. ‘Oh, right. Thanks.’

  ‘Anyway, do take them; I’ve put them in the downstairs cloakroom for the present, but they need a good home. Go and have a look at them, Jane.’

  As she passed, Guy gave her a grimace, which said, ‘Be prepared’, and she felt a surge of happiness, as she always did when he fell back on one of their private codes to exclude his parents or some other hostile element. He understood her so well. Inside the cloakroom, in which a small bowl of shrivelled pot-pourri was competing with the full might of a plug-in air freshener, a pair of three-foot china alsatians sat guarding the lavatory. Jane almost laughed. It was quite the most unnecessary and undesirable gift she had ever received. And there was so much of them: their absence (for Jane had no intention of keeping them) next time Guy’s parents came to visit, would be hard to overlook.

  ‘Big, aren’t they?’ said Guy on her return.

  ‘Yes.’ She feigned confusion. ‘I couldn’t work out where you were supposed to put the loo roll.’

  Mrs Bromelow gave Jane a wintry smile to let her know that her sarcasm had been noted, but not appreciated.

  In the corner her husband was pouring sherry from a crystal decanter. The smell reminded Jane of college tutorials with the Dean, of après-funeral drinks, of other Sunday lunches with her in-la
ws, of everything dreary.

  ‘Here you are, girls.’ Jane dropped the bag of toys and they pounced on it eagerly. ‘Don’t just tip it all on to the floor,’ she said, as Harriet pulled out a long packet of felt-tipped pens, upside down, and they cascaded over the blond carpet. In her armchair, Mrs Bromelow stiffened as if she could already see graffiti on the walls.

  ‘Well, cheers,’ said Mr Bromelow, when they were all holding their sherries. ‘Good to see you all.’

  ‘Happy birthday,’ said Guy, tilting his glass towards his mother.

  ‘I want a drink,’ said Harriet.

  ‘So do I,’ said Sophie.

  ‘What’s the little word you’ve forgotten?’ said their grandmother, frowning.

  ‘NOW,’ said Harriet.

  ‘Please,’ said Sophie.

  Mr Bromelow squatted beside the drinks cabinet and produced from among the port and single malts an ancient and half-empty bottle of bitter lemon. When he twisted the cap there was only the feeblest hiss.

  ‘I don’t want that,’ said Harriet.

  ‘You’ll like it,’ Jane promised. ‘It’s fizzy.’ Or was, she thought.

  ‘When does Harriet start nursery or playgroup or whatever they call it?’ Mrs Bromelow wanted to know. Jane could map her train of thought precisely. It went Harriet – rudeness – discipline – school.

  ‘She’s already started. Two mornings a week,’ said Guy.

  ‘Soon be off your hands, Jane,’ said his mother, encouragingly. Jane resented the implication that she couldn’t wait to be rid of her own daughter – the more so since it was true. ‘Then what will you do with yourself?’

  ‘I haven’t really thought,’ Jane lied. In truth she thought of little else; she imagined herself being pampered in one of those health clubs for the idle rich, or turning out pen and ink drawings of local parish churches, doing a second degree in some subject far removed from her own specialism: nursing studies. Linguistics, perhaps, or philosophy: something that would sweep her away from the material world of Coco Pops and Barbie dolls and nits and up into the rarefied realm of pure theory. ‘The school day is so short. There aren’t many jobs that would fit in.’ There was no point in elaborating as Mrs Bromelow was already on her foot and, with the aid of a pair of Great War-style crutches, hopping towards the hallway. Jane had momentarily forgotten that conversational elephant trap that her mother-in-law liked to lay: ask a question and then leave the room. Jane walked into it every time.