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Picture this, says Lizzie. My father left me in the bath.
It’s slippery on my mother’s knees. The lights are low, perhaps just candles, and the bath is at the end of a long, low room, all panelled in glowing honey-coloured wood. Yes - there are candles, two of them, at the end of the bath; and there’s a jug of bluebells too, somewhere close enough to the candles to cast dancing flower shadows onto the ceiling. I know it’s at the time of the bluebells, so I guess it’s April, or do the bluebells come earlier in Cornwall? We’ve all three of us been outside in the woods all day. I was crawling in those woods, through the bluebells, which can only have been at that time. I can see them above me, not blue, but pink and mauve, and I can feel the wetness of their stems against my face and the taste of peat and bark in my mouth.
My mother is lying back in the water with her long hair knotted on top of her head and I am above her, looking into her calm eyes, at her glistening face. She is singing, I don’t remember what. But she sang old Cole Porter songs to me in those days, in Cornwall, when I was a baby, before she was too unhappy to sing. ‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin’ or ‘Paper Moon’, she’s singing something like that.
The door is open and my father, that’s my real father, Jack, is standing there at the end of the bathroom, silent as a ghost, watching us through the steam. My mum keeps singing and he drops his arms by his side, as though gravity has got the better of him. This is more than I deserve, he says, and leaves. Forever.
‘Right’ he says, ‘I’ll take you straight home then,’ and he continues doodling on her thigh while he weaves a swerving, lurching tarantella through the enraged London traffic. They are beyond Marble Arch now, where the gallows used to be, he says. They could hang twenty-four men at a time there, but Lizzie hardly hears him.
‘Beautiful evening,’ he’s oblivious to her mood, turning up the J.J. Cale and deafening himself to her telling him how much she’s been looking forward to seeing where he lives.
‘Just drop me at my flat,’ she says, and she tries not to sound too sulky, too desperate, too like a spaniel, though ‘flat’ is putting it a bit grandly, she has to admit. Lizzie rents a room at the top of a red brick Victorian house not far from Paddington Station. It’s without embellishments, this room: not a fireplace, not a single plaster curlicue on the ceiling. It’s a no-trust-fund, no favours, hard-luck sort of a place, with its kitchen galleyed off along one wall by a chipped Formica-topped counter and the bathless bathroom, not much bigger than a cupboard, that houses a temperamental lavatory and a plastic shower, hooked up in the corner, without a cubicle. Lizzie has found crouching over the lavatory the only practical way of having a shower.
‘Your place it is then,’ Tony says, his fingers sliding against the thin silk of her dress while his foot stomps between the pedals. Lizzie leans her head against the door and shuts her eyes.
She’s thinking about his house, or rather how she imagines it to be. It’s the usual scene, with her in his bath, up to her neck in pine-scented bubbles, alone on this occasion, though quite often she pictures him in the bath with her, or sometimes, even better, he’s just in the room, talking to her and soaping her back.
He’s thinking what a novelty it is to be with a young brunette when blondes have always been his thing. Each time his hand moves towards the inside of her thigh, he can feel her muscles twitch, minutely, as when a fly lands on a horse. Her flimsy skirt does little to cover her nerves. Lizzie always wears soft clothes in soft colours. Perhaps it’s her way of telling the world that she needs to be loved.