I don’t want this, she said, grimacing.
Fashion was a young person’s industry, she went on after a while. She herself had entered it at precisely the point – her early thirties – when a lot of the people she knew were starting to settle down and have families. In a way, she supposed, it was the inevitability of that fate that had impelled her to resist it and to move instead into a world that represented a prolongation of the very things her friends were giving up: fun, parties, travel. Even her best and oldest friend Sophia – I might remember her from the old days – even Sophia, her flatmate and long-time partner in crime, was at that time getting married and buying a house with her boyfriend Dan, who was in many ways Amanda’s male ideal: she had been happy living with Sophia and him; the three of them even went on holiday together, she in one hotel room and them in another, as if she was their strange grown child. At night she would feel a mingled sadness and security as they closed their door, behind which she could hear their voices murmuring while she went to sleep. In that period Amanda was offered a job, one that entailed the most hectic social life she had ever known. While her friends signed mortgages and announced pregnancies, Amanda existed in a whirl of fashion shows and parties and staying up all night, travelling to Paris or New York, going from nightclubs to meetings with barely time to shower and change her clothes, flirting with whichever men she met along the way.
She had never found it hard to get men, she went on, or not very nice ones at least, but at a certain point it became clear to her that men like Dan were not to be found just wandering around the place. They were taken, owned, spoken for; in a way she despised it, their life of possession; they were like expensive paintings hung in the safety of a museum. You could look as hard as you liked, but you weren’t going to find one just lying in the street. For a while she did look, and felt as if she was inhabiting some netherworld populated by lost souls, all of them searching, searching for some image that corresponded with what was in their heads. Sleeping with a man she would very often have this feeling, that she was merely the animus for a pre-existing framework, that she was invisible and that everything he did and said to her he was in fact doing and saying to someone else, someone who wasn’t there, someone who may or may not even have existed. This feeling, that she was the invisible witness to another person’s solitude – a kind of ghost – nearly drove her mad for a while. Once, lying in bed with a man whose name she couldn’t even recall, she suddenly had a long, bereft fit of weeping. He was nice to her; he made her tea and toast, and suggested that she see a therapist.
When I think about that time, she said, what is hardest to remember are my clothes. I remember the things I did, the places I went, the men and the parties and even the conversations, and in those memories it’s always as if I was naked. Sometimes, she said, I’ll dream about a piece of clothing, or the memory of something – a jacket or a pair of shoes – will come floating into my head; and I’m never certain whether it was something I actually owned, even if it seems so familiar that I’m sure at one point I wore it all the time. But I can never prove it. All I know, she said, is that I don’t have those things any more and I don’t know where they went.
Her parents, she added, had made all their money from buying and selling property. Her childhood memories were of living in houses that were effectively building sites, houses that were always in a process of transformation. Her parents would painstakingly refurbish them and then, once the work had been done and the house felt like a home, promptly sell them. I learned, Amanda said, that as soon as things began to feel clean and nice and comfortable, that was the sign we were going to leave. She didn’t doubt that part of her attraction to Gavin lay in his association with the vocabulary of her childhood, as if he spoke a language only she could understand. She had been distant from her parents during her twenties and early thirties but these days they had re-entered her life to some degree: they liked being able to talk to her about insulation and subfloors and the pros and cons of converting the loft; the refurbishment of the house had given them some common ground. Perhaps when it’s done, she said, they won’t talk to me any more.
She said she ought to be going: she had a meeting in town she was already late for. She stood up and began brushing dust off her clothes, darting frequent glances at me, as she had done throughout our conversation. It was as if she was trying to intercept my vision of her before I could read anything into what I saw.
‘Will you walk me as far as the Tube?’ she said when we were outside.
She wheezed as we walked, holding her hand to her chest and taking two steps for every one of mine, her high heels clicking rapidly along the pavement. She wasn’t sure if I knew, she said, but she was trying to adopt a child. It was a labyrinthine process, so bureaucratic as to tempt you at every stage to give up, but she had been at it for a few months now and was making progress. The problem was, she couldn’t be put on a waiting list until the house was finished: no agency would even consider putting a child in a home that had live wires hanging out of the walls and no banisters on the staircase. And Gavin’s status was a problem: he either had to be there as a permanent fixture, or gone. The woman who was dealing with her at the agency – her case manager – had become a sort of friend, she went on. She had given Amanda cause for hope; she rang her up all the time to offer encouragement.
‘She says she recognises my capacity for love,’ Amanda said. She gave her unexpectedly merry laugh. ‘A lot of people have recognised that capacity, and made the most of it.’
We arrived at the Tube station and Amanda rested her hand on my arm, panting and beaming. It had been nice to see me, she said. She hoped the building work went well; she was sure it would. If I was free one evening, perhaps we could meet and catch up properly. She searched in her bag for her purse and extracted it with a shaking hand. Then she let herself half-stumbling through the barriers, and with a little valiant wave she disappeared.
It was the day the astrologer’s report had said would be of particular significance in the coming phase of transit.
Tony was demolishing a wall. He stood brandishing his drill at the centre of a storm of dust and noise, a mask covering his nose and mouth. The floor had been lifted: the skeletal joists showed themselves, grey debris in the voids between them. Tony had made a gangway out of planks in order to walk from one place to another. The builder’s van was still in the shop, he said: the insulating boards were being delivered by lorry instead, and the delivery was late. While he waited, Tony was taking the wall down.