She smiled.
‘Who are you?’
‘Cassandra Carlisle. Aged thirty-four. Former actress. Failed playwright. Now running a community theatre in Norwood. Drama therapy. Hall for rent. Four plays a year, plus workshops, and a local panto. Who are you, Stuart?’
‘You know who I am.’ Then, ‘You know I’ve never met you before, don’t you?’
She nodded. She said, ‘Poor Stuart. You live just above here, don’t you?’
‘Yes. It’s a bit loud sometimes. But it’s handy for the tube. And the rent isn’t painful.’
‘Let’s pay the bill, and go upstairs.’
I reached out to touch the back of her hand. ‘Not yet,’ she said, moving her hand away before I could touch her. ‘We should talk first.’
So we went upstairs.
‘I like your flat,’ she said. ‘It looks exactly like the kind of place I imagine you being.’
‘It’s probably time to start thinking about getting something a bit bigger,’ I told her. ‘But it does me fine. There’s good light out the back for my studio – you can’t get the effect now, at night. But it’s great for painting.’
It’s strange, bringing someone home. It makes you see the place you live as if you’ve not been there before. There are two oil paintings of me in the lounge, from my short-lived career as an artists’ model (I did not have the patience to stand and pose for very long, a failing I know), blown-up advertising photos of me in the little kitchen and the loo, book covers with me on – romance covers, mostly – over the stairs.
I showed her the studio, and then the bedroom. She examined the Edwardian barbers’ chair I had rescued from an ancient place that closed down in Shoreditch. She sat down on the chair, pulled off her shoes.
‘Who was the first grown-up you liked?’ she asked.
‘Odd question. My mother, I suspect. Don’t know. Why?’
‘I was three, perhaps four. He was a postman called Mister Postie. He’d come in his little post van and bring me lovely things. Not every day. Just sometimes. Brown paper packages with my name on, and inside would be toys or sweets or something. He had a funny, friendly face with a knobby nose.’
‘And he was real? He sounds like somebody a kid would make up.’
‘He drove a post van inside the house. It wasn’t very big.’
She began to unbutton her blouse. It was cream-coloured, still flecked with splatters of ink. ‘What’s the first thing you actually remember? Not something you were told you did. That you really remember.’
‘Going to the seaside when I was three, with my mum and my dad.’
‘Do you remember it? Or do you remember being told about it?’
‘I don’t see what the point of this is . . .’
She stood up, wiggled, stepped out of her skirt. She wore a white bra, dark green panties, frayed. Very human: not something you would wear to impress a new lover. I wondered what her breasts would look like, when the bra came off. I wanted to stroke them, to touch them to my lips.
She walked from the chair to the bed, where I was sitting.
‘Lie down, now. On that side of the bed. I’ll be next to you. Don’t touch me.’
I lay down, my hands at my sides. She looked down at me. She said, ‘You’re so beautiful. I’m not honestly sure whether you’re my type. You would have been when I was fifteen, though. Nice and sweet and unthreatening. Artistic. Ponies. A riding stable. And I bet you never make a move on a girl unless you’re sure she’s ready, do you?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t suppose that I do.’
She lay down beside me.
‘You can touch me now,’ said Cassandra.
***
I had started thinking about Stuart again late last year. Stress, I think. Work was going well, up to a point, but I’d broken up with Pavel, who may or may not have been an actual bad hat although he certainly had his finger in many dodgy East European pies, and I was thinking about Internet dating. I had spent a stupid week joining the kind of websites that link you to old friends, and from there it was no distance to Jeremy ‘Scallie’ Porter, and to Stuart Innes.
I don’t think I could do it any more. I lack the single-mindedness, the attention to detail. Something else you lose when you get older.
Mister Postie used to come in his van when my parents had no time for me. He would smile his big gnomey smile, wink an eye at me, hand me a brown-paper parcel with Cassandra written on it in big block letters, and inside would be a chocolate, or a doll, or a book. His final present was a pink plastic microphone, and I would walk around the house singing into it or pretending to be on TV. It was the best present I had ever been given.
My parents did not ask about the gifts. I did not wonder who was actually sending them. They came with Mister Postie, who drove his little van down the hall and up to my bedroom door, and who always knocked three times. I was a demonstrative girl, and the next time I saw him, after the plastic microphone, I ran to him and threw my arms around his legs.
It’s hard to describe what happened then. He fell like snow, or like ash. For a moment I had been holding someone, then there was just powdery white stuff, and nothing.
I used to wish that Mister Postie would come back, after that, but he never did. He was over. After a while, he became embarrassing to remember: I had fallen for that.
So strange, this room.
I wonder why I could ever have thought that somebody who made me happy when I was fifteen would make me happy now. But Stuart was perfect: the riding stables (with ponies), and the painting (which showed me he was sensitive), and the inexperience with girls (so I could be his first) and how very, very tall, dark and handsome he would be. I liked the name, too: it was vaguely Scottish and (to my mind) sounded like the hero of a novel.
I wrote Stuart’s name on my exercise books.
I did not tell my friends the most important thing about Stuart: that I had made him up.
And now I’m getting up off the bed and looking down at the outline of a man, a silhouette in flour or ash or dust on the black satin bedspread, and I am getting into my clothes.
The photographs on the wall are fading, too. I didn’t expect that. I wonder what will be left of his world in a few hours, wonder if I should have left well enough alone, a masturbatory fantasy, something reassuring and comforting. He would have gone through his life without ever really touching anyone, just a picture and a painting and a half-memory for a handful of people who barely ever thought of him any more.
I leave the flat. There are still people at the wine bar downstairs. They are sitting at the table, in the corner, where Stuart and I had been sitting earlier. The candle has burned way down but I imagine that it could almost be us. A man and a woman, in conversation. And soon enough, they will get up from their table and walk away, and the candle will be snuffed and the lights turned off and that will be that for another night.
I hail a taxi. Climb in. For a moment – for, I hope, the last time – I find myself missing Stuart Innes.
Then I sit back in the seat of the taxi, and I let him go. I hope I can afford the taxi fare and find myself wondering whether there will be a cheque in my bag in the morning, or just another blank sheet of paper. Then, more satisfied than not, I close my eyes, and I wait to be home.