The furnace and the  fruge
It might have made a difference

I have always believed that friendship is more important than money.  But I have to say he did test that belief, most severely.  If he had paid his debt to me, I could have used a substantial amount for her.  It might have made a difference.

            I had asked her “Which is more important, money or friendship?” I remember exactly the moment I asked her.  We were sitting on a small balcony on the top floor of a hotel in Rome.  The morning sun was clear in a spring sky.  The sounds of a small fruit market in the street below seemed a long way away.  The church bell in the campanile across the road had just finished striking ten-thirty, ten deep-throated gongs and one high-pitched bell.  She was just cutting into a fresh pear and carrying a slice towards her lips, her finger pressing it against the knife.  The elegant movement was unhindered by my question and the slice was deposited safely in her soft pink mouth without mishap.  I knew she had been a ...  Well, I don’t know what I would have called her.  She would certainly not have let me even think of calling her a “tart”.  And indeed, it would certainly not have been apt.  She was, I tell you, in a class of her own, an aristocrat, a shark among minnows, a Botticelli amongst Disney cartoons.  But I had not let myself think of all that whilst we were in Rome.  And yet I must have been thinking of it.  It was the one reason she was with me there.

            I was cheating on my new wife of course; if you could call it cheating.  My wife would have called it that, if she had known.  But it was something else I was thinking of, and at the same time not thinking of whilst I was in Rome.

            Another slice of pear moved elegantly to her lips before she spoke.  The juice filled her mouth with a sweetness that showed in her eyes; and her tongue swept across her red/pearl lips leaving them moist.  “You’ve heard of diamonds,” she said.  It was hardly a question, her eyes looked at me from under lids, her moist lips moving in a coquettish smile, unexpected but forbidding.  It was not the glance of a street girl, it was the darting invasion of a woman of style, underplayed, decisive, a confident beauty. I loved her with passion at such moments.  “Diamonds, my friend,” she added, almost as a protest at my naivety, like a threatened demand.  It had a coldness which mingled with her smile like a piquant sauce on red beef.

            She had come to Rome for two days to meet me.  It was at my request, but I knew why she had come. It was not in fact to enjoy money spent on her.  It was to make him jealous – not that she ever could have made him jealous.  He would never have noticed.  Nevertheless, I knew she would not keep her trip secret, and I knew it could hurt my wife without measure.  But to hurt my wife was not my reason; for my part, it was not to make her jealous.  Instead, it was fascination with this perfect creature.

            And yet she was no creature.  I watched another slice of pear slide sensuously into her mouth. The sun was burning our skin as we sat, tired by the heat, relaxing in the innuendoes of our circumstances.  She was not a creature, she was sublime, to my eyes – and more.  Her urgent physicality met with exquisite and careful elegance to raise her into an untouchable realm.  It was a mixture to explode with; that allowed no ordinary expression.

            She had loved him dearly, though I had never got her to admit it.  And he with his overbearing weightiness had never responded to her.  She would have had to shout it, and on her knees, before he could look down and hear her.  And she would never bear herself so low.  I knew what a heart there was beneath the calm precision of beauty; within the pout she presented to him, and to me; and to her customers.

            She had been looking at the expensive cases of jewellery in the hotel foyer.  She had spotted a diamond creation for her neck.  It would have looked wonderful, she was right.  I had not said a word at the time.  Now, she asked, “What did you think of the necklace I showed you?” The next slice of pear was on its way.

            ‘My dear,” I began.  Some impatience had crept into my voice I suspect.  I was about to protest as mildly as possible that jewellery costing thousands of pounds was beyond me at present.  But I cautiously changed my line.  “It is as beautiful as you are.” I suspect, however, that she had caught my anxious tone.  That slice of pear got, I thought, a harder bite than the others.  She looked aside and I thought I glimpsed an arching of the eyebrows, but she would not let me see it.  She put down her plate with the knife on it at our feet and dabbed her lips with the napkin.  One more slice of pear waited on the plate.  A slight hardness had come into her features, without perceptible movement. Her hardness was legendary.  She knew I was about to refuse her request, about to become insubordinate.  She would not press to that point where she was refused, but she felt it all the same.

            I thought of the money he owed me.

            I could have bought her several necklaces with it. She loved him, I suppose, helplessly. He was the only person that I saw her give her own money to.  But we all did.  He was like that.  His expansiveness towards everyone was so obvious.  He always knew someone who would do just what you needed doing.  He could always get something fixed.  And then of course there was that forlornness; he needed things and not one of us could arrange it for him.  He contrived thus, an imbalance; and it always cut his skin. His sadness of heart made him curiously magisterial.  And even Florence, whose skin could blunt razor blades gave him her own money out of her wallet.  When I was with her, as now, she never even carried money.  I watched her sitting on this penthouse terrace, in the Roman sun, eating Italian pear and utterly matching the serenity I was buying us. But the motionless tension beneath her skin showed me she was not happy.  It is partly why I had asked the question.

            He had sold my car for me.  It had been a rare Bugatti.  I had longed for Italy then, even before I had found it.  I methodically restored it.  I have always been rather predictable and ponderous. Even at Oxford, where I had first met him, Oliver had criticised my essays for their lack of personality – in the very tenderest way; and as always with that slight hint that I had let him down personally, just a bit; that now I owed him something.  Let him down rather than myself.  Anyway, my one gesture to a creative life occurred when I was sailing amongst the sand-reefs of the Suffolk coast and at the opening of a quiet estuary, and amongst various rotting wooden hulks.  I came upon the rusting corpse of my Bugatti barely beneath the surface.  It scraped under my centre-board and I immediately decided to bring up whatever it was.  I assumed at first it was a piece of war machinery, a tank, a felled bomber.  I had just fallen in love then, perhaps it was for the first time and everything in the world seemed possible.  The local farm mechanic was enthused by my energy. He was familiar with any, and all, requests.  It became a challenge for him and his local villagers to raise it for me.  I spent all the summer scraping rust in my father’s garage, picking out the intricate mechanism, still robust from its 1920s manufacture, and much was still rescuable after the years in the cold Suffolk tides.  I worked doggedly into the winter at weekends when I could leave Oxford, and it was the fascination with restoring this dead machine that led me to change (from my degree in history) to engineering – like my father.  That was how I came to spend five rarely uninspired years at Oxford and cemented the relationship with the paternal Oliver.  He had always pressed me to part with my Bugatti, to lend it to him, to sell it to him, to let him sell it for a very good price through one of his contacts at the University who knew an aristocrat family that wished to surround themselves with fashionable and expensive trivia.  When he met Florence, I was not surprised.  I had always thought of his weighty hungriness as a kind of sleaze, a perfect match for her lewd business of practiced intimacy. They had met, as it happens, silently wafting over the north Oxfordshire countryside in a balloon – she taken along as a decorative accompaniment for the wealthy balloonist, Oliver with his soaring intellectual sparkle having ingratiated himself with the same wealthy man. That was in my last year.  I met them soon after the balloon owner had dropped them both for new hangers-on, and new hobbies.

            She was at tea in Oliver’s rooms, and I fell in love with her instantly.  I do not think she minded particularly as, unimaginative as always, I was no problem to her.  I was in control of myself, my ardour always hovering at the right distance.  She had then given me the address where she worked in London.  She asked no questions and let it be known that none would be asked. They, she and him, were such a contrast: he boisterously loud, impulsive and brilliantly shallow; she instead quiet, deep and inviting.  They had in common their respective hungriness.

            I looked at her relaxed form, the very centre of our warm balcony, cut out of the centre of Rome, just for us.  She had come to me for a couple of days.  Just us together.  After twelve years.  Was it so long?  I looked and knew the shape of her breasts which her blouse now enfolded shapelessly. I was familiar with the long sweep of her thigh to which the canvas trousers now clung.  I have encountered all things about her but have not captured them.  Perhaps, I wistfully wondered, if I had the money, she really would be mine.  But, after all these years of friendship, I still knew myself to be just one among the many who attended and contented her.  And I never challenged that.  I would not do that to her.

            Later, when my father died, I had some money to spend on my Bugatti, for proper repair - the bodywork, the upholstery, the canvas top and the now rare materials for restoring the mechanics.  But I had money too for setting up my own practice as an engineer, and I began to travel.

            As I aged a little, in my 30s, my work grew moderately prosperous.  All my young sisters married and I, amazingly, became a fond uncle several times. Babies unaccountably grew on me. I realised I had outgrown my Bugatti and I let Oliver agree to sell it for me.  He had it around for a year and a half in the yard behind his house in the country outskirts where he lives now.  He did not look after it and he let me know, by slight hints, that this favour put a burden on him.  When he had finally disposed of it for me it was without much ceremony to a car museum somewhere in the north of England.  He was somewhat vague about where it went, and at what price.  I knew it should have been somewhere amongst six figures, but he let me know in small ways that pressing him for details, and for money, was an embarrassment to him.  There were only instalments, he conveyed, paid to him, at this stage.  The money would finally be accumulated and handed over all in one sum in the end.  And when at last he gave me a firm figure, it was probably less than half I might have expected.  But for such a favour, he implied, I could not grumble.  Machines have always come easier than people, I know where I am and can handle them.  Not so the complexity of his generosity which was beyond me.  I have therefore been helplessly waiting more than two years for payment.  I am good-natured at heart, and I do not press him.  But my timidity comes also from a taint of intimidation in our friendship. I could not lose him, whatever it cost me.  And it did cost me - not only the money, and also not only the jealous knowing of her devotion to him, but most painfully having the combination, that is, to cede her loyalty to me which the money might buy.

            And then there was the other thing.

 

­_oooo/­\oooo_

 

Why did I give two minutes of my life to this heavy bully?  Why did I always let his grandly, selfish importance feed on my adulation. It is because of the moments of something else; his sudden charming concern for some detail in my life – an inquiry about some worrying contract that I had told him about weeks ago and now long-forgotten by me. He recalled his frequent admiration for some charitable donations I made from my father’s estate after I was bereaved; and then often, at times that were most difficult, I was enriched by his lavish gratitude over my forbearance of his longstanding debt – that money.  I always allowed him the enjoyment of giving me these testimonials to my qualities.  And to be quite fair, I enjoyed them too.  The naivety in his gushes of warmth gave him that concealed charm.  It was the visible boy in him that he thought he camouflaged with bulk – that was what engaged some sentimental part of me.  I had never striven to reach beyond being his student in those first terms at University when he had tutored me in history.

            She shifted her body, uncrossed and recrossed her lithe legs.  She retrieved with a gracious movement the plate with the slice of pear.  I heaved inwardly at the flow of the perfect body that had once contained something of mine.  What, I wondered now, was in her mind?  Was she thinking of the flight that would swiftly take her away from me back to London after her short two days here?

            I decided at that moment to tell her.

            In spite of marriage, my visits to her address in London continued with a frequency I was sometimes ashamed of.  Marriage had been a deeply insignificant event, and I was determined to keep it that way.  The wedding had been entirely a family affair, and so, as far as I was concerned, the marriage had remained.  The reasons for that will have to wait for another occasion.  Florence – perhaps quite simply, she is the straightforward reason – she was always so curiously complimentary about my loyalty to her.  I believed myself her very best consort, of course I did; I suppose they all did.  But it was, I always felt, a considerable consolation prize, one that I wished to keep, and sometimes this specialness was confirmed by a boating trip in Regent’s Park, tea at Harrods, a drink and a theatre somewhere near her birthday.  On one occasion, it was about nine months ago, I suppose, it had been quite a special occasion, she had wanted me to take her to collect a painting from an exhibition a friend of mine had just shown.  She had bought one and we took it back to her flat.  We went as usual into the familiar bedroom.  Afterwards I noticed there had been a leak in the condom.  I was in the lavatory peeling the thing off me and I noticed a few drops of fluid squeezing from a small puncture near the tip.  I wondered, at the time, if there was a risk of sperm getting through to her.  For some reason I decided it would be a delicious pleasure not to tell her. It was the only cruelty I have ever done her.  It became a precious secret, a warmth for me, a permanent companion to cuddle up to on my own. Even if there was no fertility, I had left something of me in her, a spot of my essence that inevitably she had had to accept.

            A few weeks later Oliver was speaking on the phone to me. I think I had made a friendly courtesy call, perhaps I was arranging when I would next go to tea at his place in Oxford.  We had avoided mention of the Bugatti for a long time, but he suddenly said, “You’re my biggest creditor.” It intimated that something was up.  “This place,” he indicated the old farmhouse he was living in, “it’s up to the limit.  I’ve got a mortgage broker looking into Swiss mortgages - two or three percent down on building societies here.” I was not sure if he was bursting with his financial anxiety, or if the intricacies of his arrangements were a kind of boast. Then equally surprisingly he changed tack in his off-putting but characteristic way, “If it were not for you, I’d have the banks onto me.” Suddenly the generosity of his comment warmed me as it always did.  “As soon as the banks have quietened off, I’m going to tackle what I owe you.  I’ve got an idea...” Fortunately, his other phone was ringing, and I was put on hold till I had to ring off.  I was spared the discomfort of hearing the somersaults he was apparently going to turn for me.

            I think it was only coincidence, though, that the next day he was ringing around everyone who knew her with hints that something was up.

            A week later I went to have tea at the weekend with him – my wife indulged my old links with male friends.  But Florence was there on that occasion.  They openly discussed her pregnancy test.  Oliver, as always, was insistent he could sort it out, “I’m pleased you came to me,” he said, his relaxed form lying grotesquely extended in an armchair.  His massive arms placed either side came together at the finger-tips and he viewed her through the lattice they made.  “You know Pearson?” He glanced sideways as if to include me in his pondering.  I had just come in and sat down on a small chair with horsehair showing at the front edge.  Before I could say anything, in fact before I could get my breath from climbing the stairs to his studio in the attic, “You know Pearson, he ran the psychical research club when he was here”. He turned again to Florence, “You know Pearson is a very good friend of mine.  We had dinner a couple of months ago.” In fact, it is probable that that occasion was the only time they had met.  I wondered what Pearson had made of this bombast. He indicated Oxford and its environs with a gentle sweep of his broad hand.

            Florence was less interested in Pearson’s activities as a student in Oxford, but she remained looking pretty in her severe unsmiling sort of way.  “I hope he can do it as soon as possible.”

            “That’s no trouble,” Oliver retorted wildly.  “He’ll do what he’s paid for.” There was an edge of scorn as, true to pattern, Oliver’s respect for others, beginning sky high to prop his high regard for his own impressive connections, then steadily plummeted back with every sentence he spoke about them.  “It’s only a question of paying him.” Then he suddenly reached out with his arms, pushed his sleeves half up to the elbows, flapped his hands up and down as if to subdue anything Florence might say.  “You’re not to worry, dear.  Don’t think about it.  I’ll be glad – no I insist – I’ll take care of everything, Flo.” He glanced a second time at me to collect my approval.  “Brian,” he announced, as if calling me from a distance, “used to have an old Italian car. Not in your day.” It was a gratuitous flatter that silenced any comment I might have added if I had managed to sort out the complexity of it.  He seemed to be implying that he would contribute the money from that sale to Florence’s termination; whilst concealing that money he received from the sale he should have already given to me; whilst also, it seemed, he was challenging me to expose his bluster.

            Florence got up and said she would make a cup of tea. It was a tense moment, as if she did know something of the issue that Oliver and I had over the car.  She said nothing but rather ostentatiously concentrated on moving around the room on her elegant legs as if in some ritual performance to impress our attention.  Oliver, of course appeared oblivious, and directed her to where she would find the milk as he had placed it in a cooler on the window-ledge, the fridge being full because a group of students was coming to supper and one of the female ones had offered to come that morning to prepare food, and she had been so nervous that to reassure her, he had turned the fridge out to accommodate everything she had brought that could possibly go bad.  Florence responded machine-like to his instructions, a beautiful figure on a screen, the projectionist’s puppet.  She lingered a little, motionless and expressionless.  Secretly, I knew she was relieved to have Oliver’s total command of the solution and joyful it had been him who had wanted to help her.

            But she showed nothing of these feelings as she swayed elegantly about the room making tea.

            Oliver turned his attention to me.

            He was insistent.  He was going to arrange the best in Harley Street, through his contact, no expense spared, and he lavishly declaimed with a wide gesture of his grasping hand, it would be all at his expense.  Perhaps he wanted it thought he was responsible for her pregnancy. Within a week it would all be over and back to normal, he concluded confidently.  Naturally Florence, as she produced the tea, seemed gratefully soothed. She said little while she poured our cups and drank hers.  She was listening intently to Oliver’s plans for her.

            Despite his masterly command of her problem, I recalled only those few days before on the telephone, his gratuitous comments that I was so good about the debt to me that was unpaid.

            Then, a few days later he rang to ascertain – he’d known I would agree, he said – that I could not want to press him for money, when Florence was so upset and needed him to fix it for her.

            So I had decided to tell her.  On our paradise, looking down on the sounds and smells of Rome. She listened, still and grave. The slice of pear waited on the plate. I finished telling her: the baby that Oliver had paid to abort was the one I had made in her.  There was a long silence.  Was she thinking carefully about it?  Did I see a slight shrug of the shoulders?  Or not?  I could barely tell.  Any movement was too invisible to be certain.  The final slice of pear slid unperturbed into her perfect mouth.  Had she realised, I could have paid for her to have my child?  If I had had my money.  Would it have made a difference?  It was time for the taxi to be called to take her to the airport.  Her lips tasted slightly of pear as I kissed her goodbye. We never again mentioned the secret I had kept for nine months.

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