Chapter 33
He heard footsteps thudding doggedly along the pavement and looked up happily, as only Laura walked like that, as though she were furious with the pavement about something.
She opened doors as if the knob had personally insulted her.
She was on the verge of being fired from MacNair’s several times a week for dropping books or slamming drawers or telling people not to buy a certain novel.
(‘Sure,’ she’d told a young man the previous week.
‘Buy Norman Mailer. If you’re interested in being yet another guy who thinks he’s dazzlingly original but who doesn’t have a single original thought in his brain .
But, if you’re not, what about giving Frankenstein a whirl? ’)
‘Good day, Raven,’ Laura said happily. ‘What a beautiful Midsummer’s Day it is.’ She inhaled, as if they were standing in a field in Wiltshire. ‘Ah.’
‘How was work?’ said Tom, who’d had the day off.
She sat down next to him on the stoop and took a drag of his joint. ‘Fairly exciting. You won’t believe who came in.’
‘Who?’
‘Guess.’
‘The queen.’ A kid ran by bouncing a basketball, shouting for some other kids to follow him.
‘No. Close, though.’
‘Princess Margaret! That guy she’s married to!’
‘Lord Snowdon!’ Alice had come outside and joined them on the stoop. She kissed Laura hello. ‘The duke of Kent!’
‘No, Alice, it wouldn’t be exciting if the duke of Kent came into the shop.’
‘I should say it would,’ said Alice. The two Brits rolled their eyes at this.
Alice, a hopeless Anglophile, was fascinated by the Royal Family and had, until now, had no British friends.
She had read The Little Princesses by their old nanny, until it had fallen to pieces, and had once confessed to owning – as a child, she was at pains to make clear – a set of cut-out dress-up dolls of the queen and Princess Margaret.
In turn, Alice found equally worthy of mockery Laura and Tom’s lip service to republicanism intercut with a knowledge neither of them knew they had about obscure traditions and ancient members of the Royal Family.
‘That’s Princess Marina, widow of the previous duke of Kent,’ Tom had remarked once, when Alice pointed at a picture of someone in a group photograph in Life that she’d found at work.
‘How the hell do you know that?’
‘I have no idea,’ he’d said, as Alice started jabbing her forefinger at other people in the photograph. ‘Lord Snowdon. Princess Alexandra. Dear God, this is embarrassing.’
It was one of the unexpected delights of knowing Alice, though, along with her head for alcohol; her talent at design – she had drawn a poster of the inhabitants of No.
5 St Mark’s Place that hung in the dingy kitchen; her love of those little trinkets she called treasures and kept on the windowsill of her bedroom; and, as he had already seen, her hair-trigger temper, the anger that lurked just below everything, especially at perceived injustice.
Curtis, the delivery boy for the Riccardi’s grocery store by Union Square, had been fired for eating a left-over cannoli.
He lived further along St Mark’s Place and Alice had found him sobbing his little heart out on the steps the previous week, having been beaten again by his father, who was a drunk.
His eye was swollen shut and his lip was bleeding, blood clotting on his dark skin, thin frame trembling.
Alice had marched into the apartment building, dragging Curtis with her, and given his father, Mr Hutson, a piece of her mind, whereupon he had smacked her round the face, and she had punched him.
She had broken a finger, and the nail had gone black and was likely going to fall off. But she was unrepentant.
‘You don’t treat your kid like that,’ she’d yelled, as Tom, Merlin and Ginger, alerted to the drama taking place up the street by a neighbour, had burst in on this scene and pulled them apart. ‘You have a kid, you look after the kid! I’m calling the cops on you!’
‘I’m calling the cops on you , you dumb bitch,’ Mr Hutson had hissed at her as Tom and Ginger held him back. ‘You stupid fucking hippies, you think you understand. You don’t understand.’
‘Screw you,’ Alice had said, and she had taken Curtis to Riccardi’s to demand they give him his job back, which they instantly did.
Then Curtis was installed in the box room Merlin had been using as a storage space for the magazine he’d written and had printed but couldn’t sell.
So now Curtis was staying with them, which meant someone else in the stinking hot apartment, a sixteen-year-old boy who ate twice what everyone else ate and jumped whenever there was a noise.
There was also a barefoot girl called Callie who sold love beads on the corner of St Mark’s and Second Avenue.
She had lank, grey-green hair and followed Alice from her job at the poster store back to St Mark’s Place, sitting outside till Alice let her in.
Alice gave her food too. Then, finally, there was the cat, Mrs Snow, that Alice had rescued from the half-demolished church around the corner, where she had been trapped in the empty nave window, frozen and refusing to move.
Alice had climbed up with a sheet tied across her body and slung in the cat, wrapping it tightly so it couldn’t escape.
The cat, in as much as it liked anyone, being a cat, liked Alice.
Tom was pretty sure Mrs Snow was a boy, but Alice took no notice of this.
She saved scraps of food for it and it found her lap wherever she was – another dependant of St Mark’s Place.
Callie and Curtis were making lunch for themselves when Tom, Alice and Laura went inside; like Tom, they were good at keeping things tidy, which was good, because Ginger and Merlin thought tidiness was unbelievably bourgeois.
Alice sat down next to Tom, and Tom said, ‘Tell us who you saw, Laura.’
Laura lit a cigarette and ruffled her short hair with one hand.
‘Now we’re into Alice’s list of everyone in the Royal Family and we’ll be here till Midsummer is over.’
Midsummer. A year ago, he had proposed to Celia.
A year ago, he had found Jenny. He thought of the rivers of ox-eyed daisies along the bank outside Sevenstones.
The cool, cool dip of the stream, the strange lumpen upright stones erupting throughout the garden.
Jenny’s cold, plump hand, her blank eyes, her broken heart.
Celia’s body, arcing against the view of the hills, the white horse in the distance.
His throat tightened. And he missed the place suddenly, with a raw longing that made him ache. A whole year. He shivered.
‘You all right, Raven?’ Alice said, her hand on his shoulder.
‘Tom, don’t glaze over,’ said Laura. ‘So one more guess. Who was in the shop today?’
‘The Aga Khan!’ Alice said.
‘Nope,’ said Laura, folding her arms and looking pleased. ‘Jackie Kennedy!’
‘No!’ Tom and Alice said, in unison.
‘I thought she was on some yacht in Greece!’ Alice said. ‘What was she like?’
‘She was very thin,’ said Laura. ‘Wrists like matchsticks. But she spent ever so long over every book. And we had an author there, this rather WASPy writer who was in the shop waiting for Amy and he was trying to talk to her. He signed a copy of his new book for her and handed it to her and said, “Mrs Kennedy, I’m so sorry for your loss; your husband’s service to this country was …
”, etc., etc.’ Laura waved her hands. ‘“And now the loss of Senator Kennedy etc., etc.,” and get this: she simply said, “I don’t care to discuss it, Kynaston.” Just like that.
And then she clicked her fingers and the Secret Service chap leaped out from somewhere – he’d been reading Valley of the Dolls ; I found it on the floor afterwards – and she walked out and left this Kynaston fellow, the writer, standing there holding his signed copy.
’ Laura’s eyes were gleaming. ‘Isn’t that cold?
I mean, don’t you admire her for it? Alice – what’s wrong? ’
Alice had stood up, hands in her back pockets. ‘Who did you say he was? Did you say his name was Kynaston?’
‘Wilder Kynaston,’ said Laura. ‘I’d never heard of him, Alice, have you?
He’s from some posh upstate New York family.
He knows Amy MacNair, anyway. He hasn’t published for years, but now he’s written some novel about American youth.
How we’re to blame for everything, yada, yada.
’ Laura was fond of an Americanism. She shook her head, not noticing Alice’s expression.
But Tom had. He saw the colour actually draining from Alice’s face, as if she were just skin and bone, as if she were melting. She put her hand to her chest.
‘Why was he there?’ Alice said. She began methodically piling up things like her sketch book and her volume of poetry that were scattered around the room.
She took out a headscarf and tied it round her neck, then took her change purse, and her wallet.
She hung the house key on the hook by the door. Tom watched her.
‘The New York Times were interviewing him for his new novel in the shop. Actually,’ Laura said, stubbing out her cigarette, ‘I didn’t like him much but I read an early copy of some of it and it is rather beautifully done.
Amy says it’s going to be a sensation. It’s called The Treasures , or something like that –’ Laura gave a sniff.
‘It’s about a young girl coming into adulthood, part prose, part poetry.
There’s an apple on the front cover, with a bite out of it …
could be rather hackneyed but he does it in such a way –’
‘He’s at the bookstore? Right now?’ Alice said, interrupting Laura. She was standing by the door.