We had quite vigorous sex and afterwards I really began to ache. It was clear that something was wrong with my hip, which wasn’t bruised at all.
We lazed around and finished the bottle of wine and talked. After a while Jennifer asked me what I most wanted in life.
‘I would like to see my mother again.’
It wasn’t the sexiest answer, but I knew it would interest Jennifer.
‘Then perhaps you should visit her.’
‘You know she’s dead.’
‘Go to your family house in Bethnal Green and tell me what happens.’
She had found a stick of charcoal and was balancing a sheet of paper across her naked thighs.
‘I can see cobblestones and a Gothic university,’ I said.
Her hand did not move across the page.
‘I thought you were going to draw?’
‘Well, there isn’t a Gothic university in Bethnal Green. I’d rather draw your mother than a building. Do you miss her more than your father?’
It was hard work being tangled up with someone like Jennifer Moreau. We heard the front door slam.
‘That will be Claudia.’ Jennifer placed my hand in the middle of the sheet of paper and drew around my fingers with the stick of charcoal. Her bedroom was next to the kitchen and we could hear Claudia filling the kettle.
I was lying on my back and could see a bunch of flowering nettles on Jennifer’s green Mexican desk in the corner of the room (made from wormwood, or something that sounded sinister), also her passport, also a pile of black-and-white photographs. I wanted to tell Jennifer that I loved her, but I thought it might put her off me.
The bedroom door suddenly creaked open. Claudia, who always soaked seaweed overnight, was naked because she was about to step into the sauna, a pink towel wrapped around her head. She was yawning, slowly, massively, languorously, as if the whole world bored her shitless, one arm stretched above her head while her left hand rested on her flat tanned stomach.
I asked Jennifer Moreau if she would consider marrying me. In that moment I felt as if I had just split an atom. She leaned forward and followed my gaze.
‘You know, I think it’s over between us, Saul. We should call it a day, but I’ll send you the Abbey Road photos anyway. Have a good time in East Berlin. I hope it works out with your visa.’
She lay back on the pillow next to me and pulled the pilot cap over her face so she did not have to look at me.
I stepped out of bed, slightly drunk, and closed the dodgy bedroom door, tripping over the empty bottle of wine we had thrown on to the scratched floorboards.
‘Your white suit is on the chair,’ she said. ‘Can you get dressed quickly? I have to get into the dark room at college before they lock it tonight.’
I had bought the suit at Laurence Corner, the army surplus store on the Euston Road. It was where the Beatles had found their Sergeant Pepper jackets in the 1960s. I think my white suit used to be a Navy uniform, which was just as well because my marriage proposal had sunk to the bottom of the sea. I was shipwrecked amongst the empty oyster shells with their jagged sharp edges and I could taste Jennifer Moreau on my fingers and lips. When I perched next to her on the bed and asked her why she was suddenly so angry with me, she did not seem to know, or understand, or care. She was calm and rather cold, I thought, as if she had been thinking about this for a while.
‘Well, apart from anything else, you have never once asked me about my art.’
‘What do you mean?’ I was shouting now. ‘There’s your art, it’s on your walls, there and there.’ I pointed to two collages taped on the wall of her room. One of them was a blown-up black-and-white photograph of my face in profile, hung above the bed like a religious icon. She had traced over the outline of my lips in red felt-tip and written the words DON’T KISS ME.
‘I look at your art all the time.’ I was still shouting. ‘I think about it and I think about you. I am interested.’
‘Well, seeing as you’re so interested, what am I working on now?’
‘I don’t know, you haven’t told me.’
‘You haven’t asked. So, what kind of camera do I use?’
She knew I had no idea. It was not as if Jennifer had much interest in communist Eastern Europe either. I mean, she hadn’t exactly asked me for a reading list and I didn’t hold it against her.
‘Oh yes,’ I said, ‘you took a negative of me and taped it on your shoulder and lay in the sun and then you peeled it off and you had a sort of tattoo of me on your skin.’
She laughed. ‘It’s always about you, isn’t it?’
In a way it was. After all, Jennifer Moreau was always taking photographs of me.
When the bedroom door creaked open again, Claudia was eating baked beans from the tin with a giant spoon.
‘Jennifer’ – I was pleading now – ‘I’m sorry. Since my father died I’ve just been trying to get through the day.’
We could hear the hiss of the kettle boiling on the other side of the door.
‘As it happens,’ she said, jumping out of bed and slamming the door shut again, ‘a curator from America came to my studio and bought two of my photographs. And she has offered me an artist’s residency in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, after I graduate.’
So that’s why her passport was lying on her desk.
‘Congratulations,’ I said miserably.
She looked so excited and young and mean. We had been together for just over a year but I knew I had met my match. For a start, the deal that Jennifer Moreau (French father, English mother, born in Beckenham, South London) had made with me was that she could praise my own sublime beauty (as she put it) in any way she liked, the shape of my body, my ‘intense blue eyes’, but I was never to describe her own body, or express my admiration for it, except with touch. That is how she wanted to know everything I felt and thought about her.
Claudia had now switched off the wailing kettle. When I glanced at the wall again I noticed a photograph of Saanvi taped to the crumbling plaster. The basement flat was damp and some sort of fungus crept like deranged ants over the walls of Jennifer’s bedroom. In the photograph, Saanvi lay sweating on her side in the sauna. She was reading a book, her left nipple pierced with a small golden hoop.
‘Get going, Saul. I don’t know why you’re still hanging around.’
Jennifer slipped on a kimono with a dragon embroidered on the back and then edged her feet into her favourite sandals, which were made from car tyres.
She was practically pushing me out of the door.
I spent some time fiddling with the latch on the front gate. I never could get in or out of that gate; I had watched Jennifer and Claudia leap over it on days they were late for class. Their other flatmate, Saanvi, had no problem with the latch because she was patient, but Jennifer said that was because she had a degree in Advanced Mathematics and knew a lot about limitless time.
The late-afternoon sunshine felt harsh on my eyes. My intense blue eyes. I suddenly turned around because I intuited that Jennifer was watching me. And she was. With a camera in her hand. She was standing by the front door in her dragon kimono and sandals made from car tyres, still flushed from making love with me, her left hand rummaging in her silk pockets, searching for the jelly beans she always kept there. Her camera was pointed at me. As it whirred and clicked, she said, quite dramatically, ‘So long, Saul. You’ll always be my muse.’