The Potter’s House

I stood to one side to let the woman and her puffing retinue pass by. She was walking upstairs backwards and would have collided with me if I hadn’t put out my hand to steer her away. She wheeled round at once.

‘God, sorry. Can’t even look where I’m going. Hang on a sec.’ The last words were called down to the two young men. The one on the lower end hitched his shoulder under the padded arm and stared up in sweaty disbelief.

‘Don’t worry about us. We’ve got all day, Col, haven’t we?’

Ignoring him, she introduced herself to me. ‘I’m Lisa Kirk. Just moving in, number seven.’

‘Let your end down, Col.’

‘Right you are.’

I told the woman my name and pointed to our door. She was younger by far than anyone else currently living in the flats. I would have put her age at twenty-three, although I learned later that she was actually twenty-seven. Fifteen years or so younger them me. She had fair hair with blonde streaks and a soft leather rucksack slung over one shoulder. Even her combat pants had obviously come from somewhere expensive and fashionable, well away from the firing line. She looked as if she ought to be moving into a loft in Clerkenwell or a pastel-fronted little place in Notting Hill, not a flat in a stuffy red-brick block in a Kensington backwater.

‘If you need a cup of sugar. Or maybe gin …’ I said.

‘Thanks,’ she answered and smiled. An attractive smile. ‘You come and have a drink with me when I’ve got the glasses unpacked. Tell me what I should do with the place.’

I flattened myself against the wall as Col and his counterpart hoisted the sofa again. They laboured past me, with Lisa Kirk leading the way. I went out to post my letters and to the greengrocer’s down the side street to buy vegetables for dinner, then walked slowly back into the building.

The shallow stairs and the bare landings in Dunollie Mansions were kept clean and swept, and blown light bulbs always promptly replaced by Derek the caretaker who lived in the basement. There was a mahogany table to the left of the front door above which communal notices were posted, about things like holiday refuse collection, temporary interruptions to the water supply or work on the old-fashioned but effective central heating system. There was a faint scent of Derek’s floor polish and an even fainter whiff of disinfectant, and occasionally the rattle of the lift door grille followed by the hum of the machinery. It was a quiet, unflashy place.

I always liked the two solid doors on each landing, facing each other at a slight angle on either side of the stairwell, and the ornate brass door furniture worn with polishing, and the diamond panes of leaded glass on either side of the central panel. The hallways within were dark and would have been claustrophobic if the ceilings were not so high, but the rooms opening off them were bright and well-proportioned, especially the corner drawing rooms with their bay windows looking in two directions. From the top flats there was a view of the dome of the Albert Hall and a landscape of rooftops and chimneys, but in summertime our windows, lower down, framed nothing but the leafy plane trees out in the street. When there was a breeze the leaf patterns moved on the floor and furniture. Even in winter the bare branches made a screen against the walls and windows across the wide street.

I liked the sense of enclosure. And the well-ordered, dull and unimaginative sheer safety of everything.

It was not a background against which you could, for example, imagine anyone running amok. No one could chop through the three-inch thickness of the front doors. The walls and floors were solid too, and no murmur of the outside world ever penetrated. We all lived there in our separate castles, friendly enough and with Derek to sweep up: the Frasers on the top floor, and Mark and Gerard the gay couple who lived opposite Mrs Bobinski’s, and Peter and me, and the rest. But separate. There were no children in the block. The flats weren’t quite big enough for families. It was a place for small dogs, like Mark’s and Gerard’s schnauzer, and childless regret, like mine.

It was a few days before I saw Lisa Kirk again. I told Peter about her that evening, when he came home from work. I remember him sitting in the armchair against the Chinese yellow wall of the drawing room, with a drink on the stool beside him. It was September, and the leaves of the plane trees were just beginning to brown and crisp around the margins.

‘How old?’ he asked and I told him – underestimating by about four years as it later turned out.

‘Oh, God. It will be techno music at all hours and impossible parties, and people running up and down the stairs. We should operate on a co-op system, like the Americans. Nobody admitted unless approved by the committee.’

Peter affected fogeyishness, sometimes. It was one of the ways he tried to look after me, by pretending to be staider and more reliable and conservative than he really was. It was one of those unspoken contracts that long-standing couples make, knowing their partner’s needs and histories. In fact, he was a tolerant man, with a remarkable capacity to overlook other people’s foibles and most of the irritations generated by them.

‘We’ll see,’ I said, because there was nothing else to say, and moved on to the other snippets of the day’s news. I wasn’t working, then, and it was sometimes difficult to think of anything at all to relate. Lisa Kirk’s arrival was a welcome new topic.

When I met her for the second time we were both coming in with Safeway carrier bags, at the end of a damp afternoon with the smell of autumn thick under the plane trees.

She rested her bags on the stairs beyond our front door and looked down at me.

‘Come up and have a cup of tea. Have you got time?’

A commodity in abundant supply, as it happened. I pushed my own shopping into our hallway and followed her up, curious to see and know more.

Old Mrs Bobinski’s decor was mostly still in place: Regency striped wallpaper with darker rectangles outlined in grime where murky pictures had once hung, fluted wooden pelmets, central light fittings hideous in gilt and smoked glass. Against this backdrop Lisa had partially arranged her modishly beaten-up brown leather sofa, CD tower and two tall glass urns filled with coiled snakes of twinkling little lights.

‘It’s all a bit of a tip.’ She sighed. ‘I haven’t had time to think, let alone get anything done to it. I needed to move quickly after I split with Baz. And I really liked this place. Lofts are a bit done-that and Dunollie Mansions is so …’

She eyed me, transparently wondering which word to use in order not to offend me. ‘… Neutral,’ she concluded. ‘You know. I reckoned you could do anything here, make it into anything you wanted, without it being a statement.’

‘Really?’

I felt a twitch of dismay. This refuge, my safe haven, was about to teeter out on to some cutting edge of style. I didn’t want it to be invaded or to have its sagging face lifted.

‘If I ever get time. Come in the kitchen, I’ll make us some tea.’

There was the same schizophrenia in there. A maplewood butcher’s block on wheels, an espresso machine and Philippe Starck knick-knacks disposed against Mrs Bobinski’s yellow Formica, and one of those American refrigerators with an ice dispenser in the front, finished in pillar-box red. This monster fitted into none of the available spaces and hummed in the corner of the room next to the door like a TARDIS waiting to dematerialise. I found myself touching the polished metal handle, wondering where I would end up if I stepped inside and let it take me along.

‘Are you hungry?’ Lisa was asking, watching my hand hovering. ‘I’m afraid there’s not a lot in there, I’m not much of a kitchen person really, it’s just that we bought it jointly and I didn’t want Baz to end up with it. He only used it to keep those little vodka or champagne bottles in, you know, from when everyone used to stand at parties drinking through straws. But I’ve just got some stuff from the supermarket if you’d like …’

‘No. I’m not hungry.’ I withdrew my hand. ‘But I would like a cup of tea.’

She went on chattering and rummaging in cupboards for cups and tea bags.

‘Raspberry? Lemon and ginger? Peppermint?’

Gooseberry and leek. Tamarillo. Artichoke leaf.

‘Or there’s some ordinary.’

‘Ordinary would be good, thanks.’

When she opened the door of the TARDIS to take out the milk, I saw that it was empty except for a bottle of champagne and one of those pre-mixed packets of artful salad. We settled ourselves on a pair of steel-and-leather chairs at opposite sides of the kitchen table. Lisa lifted her cup, smiling at me again. She had grey eyes, neat features and lovely skin that seemed to have light shining through it like tissue paper stretched over a spotlight tube. I felt tired and colourless, and touched with envy. There was no point in envying youth, I reminded myself. It was a fact, vivid but perishable. You might as well be jealous of oranges.

‘Here’s to new neighbours,’ she said.

We drank to each other and then Lisa hitched her chin at our surroundings.

‘What do you think I should do with it?’

‘You could paint it all white.’

She gave this suggestion careful consideration, as if it was the most imaginative proposal she had ever heard.

‘Could do, yes.’ And then, with an abrupt switch of focus, ‘Are you married?’

I told her that I was and for how long, and that we had no children.

Lisa fixed her gaze on mine.

‘Do you mind not having children?’

‘I have learned to live with it.’

She stood up from the table and went to lean against one of the cupboards, and the TARDIS began a low humming as if preparing to relocate. When she moved, the curved wings of her shoulder blades shifted beneath her T-shirt and poignant knobs of bone showed under the skin at the nape of her neck. Her hair was pinned up today with a butterfly clip. She stood not quite looking at me, hesitating, and I waited for what she wanted to say. It was warm in the kitchen; Derek had this week fired up the big central heating boiler. We were snug in here. The heat and the hum of the refrigerator and the sense of enclosure that Dunollie Mansions always gave bred an impression of intimacy, as though Lisa and I were old friends who had momentarily lapsed into thoughtful silence.

‘I suppose that’s what you do. Learn to live with things, I mean. I wish I was any good at it. Can you learn?’