Quick reached for another cigarette, but then seemed to change her mind. If you were alone, I thought, you’d have already smoked three more. Her eyes rested briefly on my face as she lifted the steel dome to reveal a lemon meringue. ‘Do eat something, Miss Bastien,’ she said. ‘All this food.’
Whilst I ate my slice of meringue, Quick didn’t touch a thing. She seemed born to all this, to the smoking and the telephone orders, the tangential observations. I imagined her in her twenties, raffing round London with a glamorous, careless set, a cat amongst the Blitz. I was piecing her together from Mitford and Waugh, dousing her with a coat of my newly discovered Muriel Spark. It was perhaps a vanity, instilled in me from the education I’d received, which was little different from the model used in English public schools, with its Latin and Greek and boys playing cricket – but I had yearned for eccentric, confident -people to enhance my life; I thought I deserved them, the sort of -people you found only in novels. Quick hardly had to do anything, I was so sprung for it, so willing. Starved of my past life, I began to concoct a present fantasy.
‘Your application interested me greatly,’ she said. ‘You write very well. Very well. At your university, you seem to have been one of the brightest students. I take it you think you’re too good to be a secretary.’
The fear ran through me. Did this mean she was letting me go, that I hadn’t passed the trial? ‘I’m very grateful to be here,’ I said. ‘It’s a wonderful place to work.’
She made a face at these blandishments and I wondered what it was she wanted. I reached for a bread roll and rested it in my palm. It was the weight and size of a small marsupial and I had an instinct to stroke it. Feeling her eyes upon me, I plunged my thumb into the crust instead.
‘And what sort of things do you like to write?’
I thought of the piece of paper on the typewriter in the other room. ‘Poems, mainly. I’d like to write a novel one day. I’m still waiting for a good story.’
She smiled. ‘Don’t wait too long.’ I was quite relieved she gave me this instruction, because usually whenever I told -people I wanted to write, they would tell me how their own lives would make the perfect subject. ‘I mean it,’ said Quick. ‘You mustn’t hang around. You never know what’s going to pounce on you.’
‘I won’t,’ I said, gratified by her insistence.
She sat back in her chair. ‘You do remind me of someone I used to know.’
‘I do?’ I found this immensely flattering and waited for Quick to go on, but her face clouded, and she broke the spine of the cigarette she’d left on the side of the ashtray.
‘What do you make of London?’ she asked. ‘You came in ’62. Do you like living here?’
I felt paralysed. She leaned forward. ‘Miss Bastien. This isn’t a test. I’m genuinely interested. Whatever you say, I won’t tell a soul. Cross my heart. Between us, I promise.’
I’d never told anybody this out loud. It may have been the gin, it may have been her open face, and the fact she didn’t laugh at my dream of writing. It may have been the confidence of youth, or that porter Harris, but it all came tumbling out. ‘I’ve never seen so much soot,’ I said.
She laughed. ‘The place is filthy.’
‘In Trinidad, we were brought up being told that London was a magic land.’
‘So was I.’
‘You’re not from here?’
She shrugged. ‘I’ve been here so long I can hardly remember anything else.’
‘They make you think London is full of order, and plenty, and honesty and green fields. The distance shrinks.’
‘What distance do you mean, Miss Bastien?’
‘Well, the Queen rules London and she rules your island, so London is part of you.’
‘I see.’
I didn’t think Quick did see, really, so I carried on. ‘You think they’ll know you here, because they also read Dickens and Bront? and Shakespeare. But I haven’t met anyone who can name three of his plays. At school, they showed us films of English life – bowler hats and buses flickering on the whitewash – while outside all we could hear were tree frogs. Why did anyone show us such things?’ My voice was rising. ‘I thought everyone was an Honourable—-’
I stopped, fearing I’d said too much.
‘Go on,’ she said.
‘I thought London would mean prosperity and welcome. A Renaissance place. Glory and success. Opportunity. I thought leaving for England was the same as stepping out of my house and onto the street, just a slightly colder street where a beti with a brain could live next door to Elizabeth the Queen.’
Quick smiled. ‘You’ve been thinking about this.’
‘Sometimes you can’t think about anything else. There’s the cold, the wet, the rent, the lack. But – I do try to live.’
I felt I shouldn’t say any more; I couldn’t believe I’d said so much. The bread roll was in shreds upon my lap. Quick, in contrast, appeared totally relaxed. She sat back in her chair, her eyes alight. ‘Odelle,’ she said. ‘Don’t panic. It’s likely you’ll be fine.’
IV
Cynthia married Samuel at Wandsworth Register Office, in a small room that smelled of bureaucracy and cheap perfume, with dark--green walls and steel chairs. Shirley and Helen, two girls from the shoe shop, came along in their finery. Sam’s friend from the buses, Patrick Minamore, was best man, and he brought with him his girlfriend Barbara, a fledgling actress and a talkative presence.