The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [158]
“I was so very sorry to hear about … Corinna, and …”
She almost stopped, put a hand on his sleeve, perhaps in silent thanks, though there was something corrective in it too. She looked up at him. “You couldn’t find me a taxi, I suppose, could you?”
“Yes, of course,” said Paul, chastened as if by several reminders at once, but relieved he could be of service. Above them towered the grey bulk of the new YMCA, and beyond it there was the glitter and hiss of traffic in the Tottenham Court Road. “Where do you want to go?”
“I have to get to Paddington.”
“Oh, you’re not living in London any more?”
“I think there’s a train at about ten to nine.”
Now the rain started pattering on the umbrella. They were by the bright doorway of the Y, young men coming out, with a glow of self-worth about them, putting up hoods, making a dash for it. “Would you like to wait here—I’ll find you a cab.” Under the light he saw more plainly how shabby she was. She wore a lot of powder, over a face that now appeared both gaunt and pouchy. The rain had splashed her brownish stockings and her scuffed court shoes. The workings of time were sordid, slightly frightening to him, and he steadied himself with the thought of what she had been long ago. These glowing and darting boys coming out of the gym and the sauna had no idea of her interest. He spoke to her loudly and charmingly to show them she was worth it. She was a Victorian, she had seen two wars, and she was the sister-in-law, in a strange posthumous way, of the poet he was writing about. To Paul her natural habitat was an English garden, not a gusty defile off the Tottenham Court Road. Poems had been written for her, and set to music. She remembered intimacies that by now were nearly legendary. Whether she remembered Paul, however, he couldn’t tell.
It took five minutes to get a cab on the main road, and signal it round to where she was standing. Running back to her, seeing her expression, anxious but somehow inattentive, he knew he would go with her to Paddington, and on the way he would make an arrangement to see her again. He spoke to the driver, and then strode across with the brolly to bring her to the car. “The silly thing is,” she said, “I’m not sure I’ve the fare for the cab.”
“Ah!” Paul said, almost sternly, “don’t worry,” wondering if he could in fact afford this. “Anyway, I’m coming with you.” And adopting a bland, unhearing expression he more or less pushed her into the taxi, and went round the other side to get in himself. He supposed they had fifteen minutes.
They settled, rather tensely; the cabby kept up talk through the partition about the diabolical weather, till Paul sat forward and shut the screen. He glanced at Mrs. Jacobs for approval, though she seemed for a moment, in the underwater gloom of the cab, to be ignoring him. Her soft face was oddly haggard in the running shadows and gleams.
Paul said, “I can’t get over just bumping into you like that.”
“I know …” It was a struggle for her between being grateful, embarrassed and, he sensed, somewhat offended.
The cab had a food-like smell of earlier occupants, and the seat was still slippery from their wet clothes. He unbuttoned his coat, sat at an angle, with one leg drawn up, eager but casual. She had the transparent aura of old age, was notable and ignorable at the same time. She had her bag on her knee, both gloved hands on top of it. It wasn’t the same bag of twelve years earlier, but another, closely related, with the family trait of being shapelessly bulky—too bulky, really, to count as a handbag. It admitted as much in its helpless slump. He said, “So how have you been?”—giving the question a solicitous, tentative note. He thought it was three years since Corinna’s death, and Leslie Keeping’s suicide.
“Mm, very well, really. Considering, you know …!”—a dry chuckle, quite like the old days, though her face retained its look of anxiety and preoccupation. She wiped the window beside her ineffectively and peered out, as if to check