Part 16 (2/2)

The walls, now sealed and burnished, and smooth, are painted cream-white. The pale gold paper lamp that hangs from the clouds and the swifts has a gold metal st.i.tching on it, and when the light burns at night, gold flecks are thrown all over the walls. There are also wonderful scintillas and glows that are wavered from the colored candles standing on the shelves Silver put up. Each candle is a different color, or colors, and stands in a scoop of colored gla.s.s. These scoops are, in fact, a batch of flawed gla.s.s saucers bought for nickels, and painted over with gla.s.s enamel. The mirror, too, has a glorious gla.s.s painting on it, of leaves and hills and savage flowers. Every slope and tendril and petal totally hides some spot or chip in the mirror. We have wall to wall carpet, too. It's made of literally hundreds of tiny carpet remnants given away as free samples. We spent a whole day walking from store to store, asking about carpets and, ”Unable to decide” on one, going off with handfuls of pieces to ”match with our furnis.h.i.+ngs.” It took hours to glue every sc.r.a.p in place. The effect is astonis.h.i.+ng, a mosaic that rivals the rainbow in the ceiling. No chairs, but large dark green fur pillows to sit on, or the couch, draped with rugs and shawls like the divan of a potentate. Curtains for the clean window, are to encourage the sky, being the color of blue sunlight. (The scatter of little tears in them are concealed by one whole packet of heat-and-press-on embroidered badges-tiny gold and silver mythical animals and castles.) The door is cream-white and vanishes into the wall. The horrible functional kitchen hatch (with the crotchety miniature oven and electric ring behind it that hardly ever get used) has become a wall-painting. It's blue with clouds, like the ceiling, and a big-sailed, heavily winged s.h.i.+p is flapping over it, with a gilded cannon poking from its side, which is the handle fitting. We both painted this, and it's remarkably silly.

The wings on the s.h.i.+p are modeled after geese. The bathroom is madder. The walls were raw cement and broken tiles, and when patched up to seal, they looked impossible. Then, in another market, there were sky-blue tentlike waterproof coveralls going at four in the morning for next to nothing because no one wanted them, and the stall-keeper had a virus and was dying to get home. These, cut in lengths with a kind of spontaneous but enticed s.h.i.+ning and ruching, are glued over every inch of the walls. The waterproofing looks like silk, and they make the room into a weird oriental fantasy, particularly when the rose-red paper lamp hanging from the rose-red clouds comes on, and hits every pleat and fold with an electric magenta streak of s.h.i.+ne. We re-enamelled the bath, hand basin, drinking-tap basin, and the lavatory, all blue. The enamel is cheap and will probably crack inside six months. But for now, each area is reminiscent of a lagoon. The second night, Silver stripped the floor and put the new planks down, polished and varnished them. The bathroom floor is now a golden fake pine, and looks as if it cost a thousand. Well, at least five hundred.

”How do you know how to do all that?” I asked him, endlessly.

”I read the instructions,” he endlessly and innocently replied.

Of course, a robotcan just read instructions and then know exactly how to follow them, and get it absolutely right. I kept saying to myself I mustn't persist in thinking of him as an exceptionally talented man, no I mustn't. Yet it was difficult, and besides, that's what I'd asked him to pretend to be.

On the last afternoon of the first week, the caretaker came puffing and grumbling up the stairs to collect the rent, plainly thinking he wouldn't get it.

”It's just the one quarter month,” he announced as I stood there, a plum in one hand and a long artist's paintbrush in the other. ”Just the one week. Then I shan't be up till the first of next month for the three quarters.” As the end of the month was also only a few days off, that meant nothing. He implied, in any case, I'd have run away by then in arrears. ”It's legal, you know,” he said. But already his eyes had gone past me and were bulging on the room. ”Well,” he said. ”I wondered what your boyfriend wanted the steps for.” He tried to edge in by me, so I let him. He stood and gaped, as if in a famous cathedral. ”Not everyone's taste,” he said, ”but it's cheerful.” Which is more, I thought, than can be said for you.

I waited for him to go on and say: ”Now you've spent your rent money on all that, you'll have to get out.” But he only glanced at the huge evergreen plant which Silver and I had dug out of the subsidence the night before and planted in a big cracked beer jeroboam of wondrous amber gla.s.s. ”That'll die,” he said.

”Perhaps you'd like to come to its funeral,” said Silver, who was seated on a pillow, reading, at fifteen seconds per page, a job-lot of books we'd picked up that morning.

The caretaker scowled.

”This flat,” he said, ”is only supposed to accommodate one person.”

I felt a stab of terror, but Silver said, ”I'm not paying her any rent. I'm her guest.”

Grudgingly, the caretaker accepted that this was all right, and Silver smiled at him.

I was already fumbling out the rent and electric money, all in small change by now, when Silver rose and graciously gave the monstrous visitor a tour of the bathroom. I could hear the monster grunting away, things like: ”Don't know I'd want it myself,” or ”What's that white thing in the ceiling? Oh.” And then, surprisingly: ”Quite like that.”

They came back, and Silver poured the caretaker, and me, a mug of very cheap and vinegary wine, which the caretaker gulped down. When we finally got rid of him, and the rent, I lost my temper. The beautiful apartment, on which we'd slaved, smeared by that old man's stupid carping.

”He's just forgotten how to respond,” said Silver. ”And he's sick. He has to take a prescription medication that gives him another sickness as a side effect.”

”How doyou know?”

”The night I borrowed the ladder, we sat around for a while, and he told me.”

”Still trying to make everyone happy,” I said.

”Still trying. Uphill work all the way.”

I looked at him and we laughed. And I went to him and put my arms round him. The carpet floor is nice to make love on, too.

The evergreen plant, by the end of the month, had spread up to the ceiling in a l.u.s.trous fan.

Which brings me to the end of the month.

The night before the first day of the new month, we were sitting out in the subsidence, on one of the girders, watching the stars stare their way past the last of the clinging leaves, and the distant city center blooming into its lights. We often came out there, which had firstly been his suggestion. Sometimes he played the guitar there quietly and sang to me. It was beautiful in the subsidence. Mysterious at dusk, and wild, like the heart of some forest, with the safe edges of civilization around it. Now and then, the white cat appeared, and we'd bring a plate of cat's meat and leave it by. Despite its apparent homelessness, Silver had spotted, with his faultless sight, the little mark on the hindquarters of the cat, which means it's had its anti-rabies shots quite recently. I had a wish to lure the cat into the apartment.

But that night the cat didn't come, just the stars. And as I lay against him, wound with him in the cloak, I said, ”This is the happiest time of my whole life.”

He turned and kissed me, and he said, ”Thank you.”

I was touched suddenly by the innocence inherent in his sophistication. I held him. The coolness though not coldness of his body had never troubled me, and now, from proximity to mine, he seemed warm.

”I don't even mind that you don't love me,” I said. ”I'm so happy.”

”But I do, of course, love you.”

”Because you canmake me happy.”

”Yes.”

”Which means I'm no different from anyone you make happy, you can love us all, so it's not what I mean by love.” At last, it didn't hurt; I was arch and unconcerned, and he smiled.

I shall never grow tired of, or familiar with, his beauty.

”I loveyou ,” I said. ”Let's go. out to dinner. Do you mind? Will you pretend?”

”If you're sure you want to spend money on it.”

”Yes, yes, I do. Tomorrow I'm back to a thousand.”

”I confess,” he said, ”I rather like the taste of food.”

”Youdo ?”

”Should I be ashamed, I wonder?”

”Ohyes ,” I said. ”Most reprehensible.”

Our positions were reversed for an instant, our dialogue, our speech mannerisms. He was playing, but I had still learned.

”You've changed me,” I said. ”Oh thank G.o.d you have.”

We went in, and I washed my hair. I'd hardly seen it since we'd started work. It had been bound up in scarves as I painted and glued things, and it was thick with dry shampoos because it takes so long to dry without a dryer when I wash it. But tonight I was lavish with the wall heater. As my hair began to dry before the painted mirror, I saw emerge among those blue hills and that tigerish foliage, a mane of light, the color of blond ash.

My mother had got something wrong. Or had she? Or the machines, perhaps, the coloressence charting.

Or had my natural hair color simply altered as I grew older? Yes, that must be it, because- ”Oh,” I said, touching my hair, ”it's beautiful. It's beautiful in a way it never was.”

”And that,” he said, ”is your own.”

I put on one of my oldest dresses, which Egyptia once gave me, and which had been hers. Demeta hadn't thought it suited me, and neither had I, but I'd kept it for the material, which was strange, changing from white to blue to turquoise, depending on how light struck. And tonight it did suit me, and I dared to put on the peac.o.c.k jacket and b.u.t.toned it, and it fit. I was slim. I was slim and tall. And my hair was moonlight. And I wept.

”I'm sorry, I don't know why-”

”Yes you do,” he said. He held me until I began to laugh instead. ”Poor Demeta,” he said.

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