‘They did, that’s quite true.’

  Lit by square and trembling fluorescent wall lamps, we started to ascend up inside Almayer House; the stairs had been painted oxide red at their edging, as if to mark the outline for an intended but errant carpet. I could immediately smell our carry-out food in the semi-enclosed concrete stairwell. At each floor level, the stairs accessed a long landing lobby and the front doors of apartments. We briefly crossed this communal area to reach the next stair ascent. These landing lobbies bored right through the building from the south to north; square ends, the size of barn doors, sealed from the sky by a criss-cross frame of thick lattice concrete moulding through which no child could pass, though doubtless they could jettison an array of ordnance down towards the earth below. It was like ascending within some riddled lighthouse.

  Llewellyn breathlessly said, ‘Cause of these stairs and no lifts, it’s mainly single weirdos and younger people with kids here. Oldies on the ground floor. Wonder what the architects actually supposed would heat these landings in winter, eh? The farts of Le Corbusier wafting from the Côte d’Azur, perhaps?’ He shook his head wearily.

  As we climbed on up and through them, I began to distinguish many, many items placed on the wide landings: unfolded picnic tables and deckchairs, prone for usage on what had been a warm day; bicycles, chained motorbikes which must have been manhandled up the stairs for storage, a live fridge wired to a power cable which trailed into a drilled hole at the side of a front door. I saw an abandoned electric cooker, the enamelled top around the four rings browned with tributaries of spillage which festered on lavishly down the sides. A piled collection of hubcaps. Llewellyn pointed to them. ‘They fly off on the tight corner by Victory House; kids collect them to sell for scrap.’

  On the third floor were two wooden hutches, one placed atop the other. Some creatures scuffled in their darkness.

  ‘Mr Linton’s ferrets. Stink in summer. Get loose sometimes.’

  Up on the fourth and topmost floor we came to a windowless front door painted the same ochre red as the stairs: 506. Llewellyn produced a Yale key and turned it in the lock.

  I suddenly felt very defensive, threatened by the illustrious presence of the matriarch. I could conceive of no aspect of my arrival the Lady of the House might cherish other than the curry.

  The front door opened inward and we advanced: yellowish lamplight, magnolia woodchip wallpaper, warmth and a smell of close-quartered domesticity; the slight and cloying sweetness of nappies, the chalkiness of talc. Coats that hung in the narrow corridor were buffing out. I was surprised to spot another identical macintosh there. I’d assumed Llewellyn had pulled his least valued coat over his bloodied chest, but these garments seemed a characteristic mode of dress for him.

  Off the long passage – which had no carpet – were doorways, the first revealing a darkened kitchen with the dull glint of a sink and then night views of street and depot lights way below. Llewellyn quickly turned and stated to my face, ‘Reader, if you seek his monument look around you.’

  I laughed.

  ‘And that Cyril Connolly bastard. The enemy of promise is the pram in the hallway. Is it now? Our hallway is too narrow to fit the bloody pram in.’ He quickly called in softer register, ‘Hey, Aoife. The soldiers are back from the war.’ He’d moved in through the second doorway. I could see hinge marks where the door had been removed, possibly with some force.

  It was very dark within that living room; his plastic bags and the sides of his raincoat brushed against the door frame. A bottle of light – a small enclosed candle – gave out some illumination, deeper into the lumps and shapes of the room.

  Then a light – forged only for a precious instant before it shrunk, having defined the perfect edges of two long, rectangular windows. A vista of the railway lay down there and I realised there had been an electrical flash from a train far below, easily reaching up this high. An airy, feminine voice – from where I could not see – spoke out, ‘How are you, Lou?’, frank and nervous.

  I saw two long and bare arms lift over the broad shoulders of his coat to embrace Llewellyn gently.

  ‘Don’t squeeze.’

  ‘I won’t. I won’t,’ the voice reed-like and the accent nasal; Nottingham or Derby, I guessed. ‘Just like last time, eh?’ She was hidden behind the wings of the opened overcoat. The embrace had been brief and now a tinge of outrage was new to her voice. ‘Oh, look at you.’

  ‘I’m fine now. Just the stitches opened a little. The rib cage didn’t shift. It’s fused. They just told me to rest and go back next week. Aoife, this is first-rate lunatic Mr Douglas Cunningham, lately of University College. A scholar. Welcome him to Brideshead Rewallpapered. And look at what he’s bought us.’

  I could see her now, coming forward from the edges of the light’s reach, and she gave Llewellyn a sideways and tolerant smile.

  ‘Sorry to intrude into your home this way.’ I actually bowed my head a little and held out my hand, which she took very limply – her fingers felt as thin as a plastic skeleton’s – and she let go. To my surprise she laughed, almost just a little escape of air.

  She lifted a hand to her lips then asked of me, gentle and sincere, ‘Are you okay?’

  Before I could answer, a tumble of breathy words continued, perhaps even nervously shy, while she looked at all the booze and all the food. ‘Oh. This is a surprise. It’s so very generous. We haven’t had any treats in a long while now. Lou probably told you how. I’m sorry about this place.’ She presented the dark room with a hand held out as if she expected a drip of water to fall into her palm. I almost looked upwards for a leak. ‘It’s all the council would give us before Lily came. He has told you we have our little girl?’ Her tone was now oddly vulnerable and anxious.

  ‘Yes. Congratulations.’

  In a voice with no hint of humour so I did not know whether to smile or not, she said, ‘The only good thing about here is that his gran – The Apple; Granny Smith, who’s like a mother-in-law – can’t climb up the stairs.’

  Llewellyn hoisted the swag bags of our triumph. ‘I’ll serve,’ and he rustled off and up the corridor to the kitchen.

  Aoife and I were left there together. I turned my head from side to side looking for the crib, or manger or whatever infants slumber in. ‘Is Lily here?’

  ‘She’s sleeping in our room.’

  ‘Oh.’ And all the while, Aoife’s pale face – as if she was being propelled backwards and forwards in a wheelchair. The face came out of the dark towards me and then withdrew into it again.

  I thought she wore trousers soaked in black blood. In fact she was wearing leather trousers which were reflecting odd points of light, like starlight upon an oil slick – the hall lamp was smeared on the creases of her narrow thighs as she moved back into darkness. From through the double windows, distant street light had found lodgement in Aoife’s legs – then there was another train flash down in the cauldron below and the light pulled and elongated around her lower body – Isis, and her arched torso of stars.

  Almost inaudibly she said, ‘Sorry it’s so dark. I’d a little headache earlier, I was so worried about him. They pass.’

  ‘It’s fine. Leave it dark. He’s fixed up fine now, so there’s no need to worry.’ I chuckled, trying not to be flippant but to hit the right tone. I said admiringly, ‘I’ve never seen anything like Llewellyn at the hospital. He was very funny. He was very cool.’

  She watched my face, her eyes receptive, her whole body slightly tensed for every bit of information about Llewellyn. She quickly said, ‘Oh, Lou’s so brave, Douglas. So brave. His illness and the big operation he had on his heart. He must have told you about it?’

  ‘Yes, he did.’

  ‘We’ve had so much stress in this last year. Stress. The baby and Lou’s illness. Please. Sit down.’ She leaned over and reached under a lamp to switch it on, which suddenly brought the mainly derelict room into existence around us. She sat down.

  All the wallpaper was half-torn from the walls but then the job had seemingly been abandoned. An old-fashioned yellow sofa sat against another stripped wall, so rather than walk the length of the room towards a table and chairs, I had to lower myself, a little awkwardly, seconds after she had. So I sat beside her. Her long leather thigh was very close to my own. My weight drove me deeper into the sofa than she, so our faces were at the same elevation. She stared out across the room – at nothing, or so it seemed – a slight smile on the edge of her lips as if in thought. She told me, ‘This is the second time his stitches have gone,’ with a tone of awesome amazement. I nodded very slowly – my head aside, staring at her profile. Then I looked down because there was a rumpled-up towel on the sofa which both our bottoms were sitting upon.

  ‘Oh gosh,’ she said. ‘Sorry. Watch your trousers on that, I’m afraid.’

  I frowned, then I realised the towel concealed Llewellyn’s blood from when his stitches had torn open, snoozing on this sofa.

  But I just looked back up. I felt I had been waiting to deliver this woman a message which had been carried in my throat all of my life. The great moment had come but a dry croak was my voice. Her face, her neck, her eyes and her body actually stopped me, stopped my thoughts, so I found myself just nodding and pretending to be indifferent. I was not listening as I looked at her arms, bared from the pushed-back sleeves of a thin white V-neck pullover.

  In the first seconds of entering that dark room, with a bizarre distress, I had seen that Aoife McCrissican was menacingly beautiful.

  4

  That first night the three of us sat at the table against the far wall of the living room, around that plastic, slidey yellow tablecloth which tended to make objects easily whizz off it; exterior lights beyond the window – the most distant, perhaps towards Brentford – were semaphoring in the clear night atmosphere.

  Where I sat, facing her, I was constantly aware of a cautious, trickling necklet of steady lights which crawled along Aoife’s slight shoulder, behind her high neck, then re-emerged across the top of her other shoulder. My eyes were drawn to these slightest of stirrings. This slow revolving garland was the lacing of continual airliners, moving toward Heathrow airport as if they were duteously rounding assigned but invisible pylons.

  When Llewellyn joined us he had covered his bandages with an old sweatshirt and was transporting plates horizontally with still enwrapped food packages balanced upon them. He sat down very carefully and a twist came in at the corner of his mouth.

  She ate without you noticing and not a great amount. In her small cleavage lay a tiny chain and silver crucifix which rested on flatness. She sipped some wine from a glass and whispered, ‘Now my headache will most likely come back.’

  Llewellyn nodded and ate with a predatory stoop, huddled over his plate, the fork moving quickly, and he talked a lot. She managed to talk too, but consumed her food in a ghostly way. The particular and alarmed energy of her constant grey-green eyes contrasted with her slightly hesitant and soporific movements.

  At one point during the meal, Llewellyn called, ‘What do you make of the old penthouse suite? Haven’t done the papering since I can’t afford bloody wallpaper so I was thinking of using the Christmas wrapping paper this year. What do you think? Think you could be happy up here for a bit, working as my valet in the sky?’ He looked at me.

  ‘Sure. It’s great.’

  ‘Come on, Cunningham. You can do much better than that. Give us a few bon mots?’

  I said, ‘It’s Look Back in Anger with digital watches.’

  He put down the fork and clapped.

  After we had eaten, I helped stack and cautiously manoeuvre curry-lashed, naan-bread-smeared plates through to the kitchen. There were no curtains there either. Curtains seemed a mod-con hardly adopted up in the skies of Acton. The window glass was a vertical wall of sepia with the clear sense of the drop outwith. By the cooker I saw a special holder for inverted, sterilised baby bottles with their teats balanced atop.

  In an unspoken manner, Aoife had silently vanished and Llewellyn and I took up the masculine prerogative, sipping Guinness cans back at the table, talking books. He smoked, explaining he was permitted to do so but never in the same room as Lily.

  Suddenly Aoife put her head around the door and signalled directly at me with one coaxing, commanding finger.

  Llewellyn said, ‘I’ll finish this fag. Go give our miracle child your blessing. You worthless Protestant.’

  I rose and respectfully left my can of Guinness on the table, moving out and down the corridor. Their bedroom door was ajar. The shadowy room was lit by a special low-power child lamp, giving it the solemnity of a Nativity grotto. The double bed was to the right and I could not help a brief glance at its pulled-over blankets, the candlewick bedspread and jumbled links of a crocheted bedcover.

  Baby Lily lay in an old-fashioned wooden cot, profoundly asleep, surrounded by a barrage of totems: cuddly toys, hanging kinetic mobiles pinned to the low Artex ceiling; devices were clamped to the coulisse of the lift-out side frame. Aoife stood by her daughter, looking down on her with that ever-renewed yet modest astonishment at what she’d brought into the world.

  It would be wrong to say I was unmoved by the sight of a beautiful mother and her babe, who was asleep, its bunched fist of minute fingers with perfectly miniaturised nails clenched near its lips. The foundation of my feeling, I now realise, was not for their child – it was, of course, for myself; the deep sentimentality I felt was celebrating my own fortune. Llewellyn and Aoife’s was a generosity my tight heart would never understand. I have dispensed indulgence in my life since then but I’ve never been truly generous.

  ‘She’s very beautiful. Is she a sleeper?’

  ‘A log. We can even be quite noisy around her. Lou plays his awful classical music and she doesn’t even wake up.’

  ‘Has your eyes,’ I said cleanly.

  ‘They’re closed.’

  I swallowed. ‘I mean the shape of you, eh, round your eyes.’

  ‘Mmm.’

  Of course Aoife and I kept our voices very low and I enjoyed the implied intimacy of us whispering together. I kept smiling and tried to think of what else to say.

  ‘I love their hands.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘They’re so precise. Like the porcelain dolls’ hands in Hamleys.’

  ‘They are.’

  ‘Need to do something.’ I stood on my tiptoes, pushed my hand into the pocket of my jeans and quickly withdrew a five-pence piece. ‘Scottish custom in the Highlands. When you first see a newborn you touch their palm with silver.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘For money. Not in a vulgar way; just so they will never go without. Never be hungry. But. Maybe I should go wash the coin?’

  ‘What?’ She had been looking down at baby Lily and now she met my eyes in the dim light, that mocking smile on the edge of the mouth.

  ‘Don’t want to touch her palm with a dirty coin.’

  ‘I shouldn’t fret over that. She crawls up and down that filthy passage, if I don’t watch her. We need to get it covered in lino or something.’

  ‘We’ll do it,’ I rashly promised. ‘It would be funny if Llewellyn caught me, wouldn’t it?’

  She looked puzzled.

  ‘With the coin. A Scotsman a few hours in your home and Llewellyn catches me scrubbing a five-pence piece under the hot-water tap. I know he’d make a brilliant joke about it.’

  Her finger shot to her perfect front teeth again. ‘If there is any hot water. Both of you are daft together. The way you talk.’

  My eyes had helplessly swayed round this private zone once again. Halfway up it, the exterior wall of the bedroom was completely obscured by barricaded clothes racks, heavy hung, leaning and straining under a long and colourful accumulation of garments. More women’s clothes were squeezed into plump carrier bags, piled in the space between the top of the wardrobe and the ceiling – one particular arm of a blouse loosely dangled down; tall boots leaned their flanks out and dresses bulged from the wardrobe doors, like some kind of garish wall insulation. I didn’t see how a woman of her young age could have accumulated so much to wear. Couldn’t they sell the lot and be rich?

  Near the end of the bed the exterior wall formed a right angle against the enormous external culvert which ran all the way down the north side of Almayer House. Two windows were placed here forming a corner, each facing the other at a ninety-degree angle. Finally, some thin polyester curtains were drawn across these; then a further windowless wall turned again and followed along the bedside to its head, leaving some access space.

  Hung up on that wall to the side of the bed were two very large photographs, unframed but covered by glass. I looked across the bed to them and took a few steps forward. ‘Oh, wow.’

  In all that chiaroscuro of make-up, I would not have recognised her but for the mouth and the eyes. A cover shoot, theatrically lit. Aoife wore a great deal of sequins on a very, very little amount of dress; one leg in a platform boot seemed insanely long and was placed upon the running board of a cream coloured vintage sports car outside brick stables.

  She whispered, ‘Oh, I’m a sort of failed model.’

  ‘A model. Wow. Llewellyn never said.’

  ‘That was used. Actual. On a poster. In Scandinavia and Spain.’ She frowned her flawless forehead at the image of herself as if she was looking at something obscure and modish in an art gallery.

  Then there was that other photo in black and white: a horizontal strip of pale tropical beach, studded with glossy, small black crabs – the type which scuttle up the surf line then back, on fast telescopic legs. In the precarious midst of them Aoife sat, legs crossed in the lotus position; both her big toenails on the sand had been painted with the crab symbol of Cancer. Her face was hidden but I could already identify that small mole on her lower neck which always showed above pullovers and low collars, the neck so delicate it seemed under constant strain, showing pale veins and striations of ligaments as she turned her slow smile away from you. Her parted crown was exposed so that long blonde hair fell, obscuring her torso, to just above her flat belly. The pubic area was submerged by the camera angle down in the crossed feet, only the tops of her small breasts showed, semi-concealed by her length of hair. She was stark naked, imitating the crouched posture of those crabs. It was gothic, spectacular and erotic.