The Potter’s House

I shifted on my leather-and-steel perch. At once Lisa moved forward and poured more tea. She didn’t want me to leave yet, because she needed someone to talk to. I was a good choice, after all. I had gradually become someone who listened, rather than a creature who went out and did things.

I thought that Lisa Kirk was probably lonely. And that her loneliness might last as long as a nanosecond, before the next Baz came along.

‘Learn? I don’t know. It was just a lazy figure of speech. You accept what you are dealt, or you kick against it. The end result’s probably no different anyway.’

While she considered this Lisa groped on the floor beside her seat and found her handbag. She took out a packet of Silk Cut and lit one while I looked at the bag. It was made of chartreuse suede and shaped like a pineapple or maybe a hand grenade.

‘Like it? It’s my design. I make handbags, my own company. I’m opening a shop in Walton Street soon. We’re called Bag Shot.’

I had seen the name, possibly in a Vogue spread of witty accessories.

‘I do like it,’ I said truthfully. I was impressed. I would too readily have dismissed Lisa as merely a trust-fund babe or daddy’s girl, and now it turned out that she was a designer and a businesswoman.

She tipped the bag upside down and a heap of keys and lipsticks and ticket stubs fell out.

‘Here,’ she said and gave it to me.

I examined the cunning fastening of the hood and the bottle-green silk lining. The little golden label stitched to the inside said ‘Bag Shot by Lisa Kirk’.

‘It’s beautiful. You can’t just give it to me.’

‘Yes I can, I want to. God. Anyway, we were saying about learning to live with things, only it’s without in my case. Baz was my business partner, you know, he was the one who knew about start-ups and leases and money, and I just drew pictures of bloody handbags and chose stuff to get them made up in. We lived together as well, obviously. Ever since I was twenty-one. Work and play, me and Baz. And then it fell apart, like a piece of machinery suddenly worn out. He met a woman at a party, I was yakking and drinking but all the time I was really just across the room, frozen, watching them fall for each other like they were in a movie. And then, once that had happened, it got really difficult to go on working together, and … so.’ She spread out her hand, taking in the kitchen and the red refrigerator and ourselves, sitting facing each other across the table.

‘I see,’ I said. We sat in silence for a minute.

‘Baz’s new girlfriend is pregnant.’

‘Oh. When did all this happen?’

‘They met four months ago.’

‘That was quick.’

‘It was, wasn’t it?’

I clasped and unclasped the lid of the bag. ‘You know, you’ll find someone else. More quickly than you think, probably. I’m sure everyone tells you that. And you can find a new business partner too although that may be a bit more difficult. The requirements are more stringent.’

She smiled at that.

‘Maybe I won’t find anyone, on the other hand. I feel pretty useless.’

I told her what she probably expected to hear, that you don’t get your stuff featured in Vogue or fix yourself up in mansion flats in Kensington at her age if you are anything less them talented and able. We drank some more tea and talked a little about how Baz and she had worked together, and then about the flat and her plans to transform it once, as she put it, the shop was able to run itself around the block. She showed me round the rest of it and I saw that her bed – as narrow as a child’s – was in the little second bedroom that Peter and I used as an occasional spare room, and in the main bedroom with its good light was her drawing board, with big cork panels pinned with scraps of fabric and sketches and pages torn from magazines resting against the walls alongside it.

I thought of our tidy rooms below, static and silent at this time of day, and the way this web of Lisa’s uncertainty and tentativeness and peering into the future was exactly superimposed on them, not just on Mrs Bobinski’s. It made me feel as stiff as our decor.

We returned to the kitchen. Lisa picked up the bag and put it into my hands.

‘Thank you,’ I said.

She came with me to the front door and I looked through the diamond glass panels at the swimmy, distorted view of the hallway.

‘Would you like to have had children?’ she asked, with her hand on the latch.

I knew that she was only asking for whatever my answer might reflect on her own situation, on the baby her ex-lover was expecting that she believed should have been hers.

‘You’ll have a baby,’ I said as gently as I could. ‘You’ve got all the time in the world.’

‘But would you?’ she persisted, with the tactlessness of self-absorption.

I am used to deflecting these thoughts, but still I saw the pictures now, the queasy procession framed and frozen by the camera shutter, click, all the way back into history, click and click.

‘No.’

Her hand had dropped back to her side so I opened the door myself and stepped out into the hallway. We exchanged unspecific invitations to have a drink, or drop round for a kitchen supper. And then I went downstairs to the close air of our own flat where the supermarket carrier bags were waiting for me to attend to them.

Peter sat in his usual chair, with a whisky at his elbow. He had had a reasonable day, he said. Busy, and the Petersens people were a bunch of amateurs who couldn’t run a tap, let alone a software licensing programme, but nothing really to complain about.

‘And you?’

He looked across at me, arching his eyebrows behind the fine metal ovals of his spectacle rims. I told him about having tea with Lisa Kirk, and showed him the chartreuse hand grenade.

He examined it, inside and out.

‘Bit extreme, isn’t it? Do women really buy this sort of stuff?’

‘Yes, I think so. They probably pay about two hundred quid for it. She runs her own business and is about to open a shop.’

He puckered his lips in a soundless whistle, interested now. Peter was a management consultant, with expertise I couldn’t even guess at. He read and wrote reports in a language as impenetrable to me as Mandarin, and he too had a company, on the comfortable earnings from which we lived our sedate life in Dunollie Mansions. ‘Chalk and cheese,’ my mother said before we married, which was also not long before her early death from ovarian cancer. (My father and she separated when I was about twelve, and he married again and acquired a second family to which he and his new wife swiftly added. The Steps and Halves, my mother and I called them.)

Chalk and cheese Peter and I may have been, but we were determined to have each other. We were introduced by a photographer I knew who gave a drunken Christmas party in his studio, to which Peter was brought along more or less on a whim by the photographer’s agent. I remember looking across the room, through a sea of outlandish people who didn’t at the time look outlandish to me, and seeing his well-cut suit and the lights flickering off the shields of his glasses. He was the one who looked out of place in that company of Mapplethorpe boys and six-foot women. After a little while the photographer’s agent brought him across and introduced us.

‘Cary Flint, Peter Stafford.’

I remember that we talked about our fellow guests and a new book of our host’s pictures, and a Matisse exhibition we had both recently seen in the South of France. I had to work hard to sustain this cocktail party standard of chat. I was very thin at the time and taking a lot of pills, and felt speedy and mad. I was disconcerted by the way this man tilted his head towards me so as not to miss a word of my insane gabble, and I also saw the way that his hair fell forward over his temples and the mildness of his eyes behind his glasses, and my knees almost buckled with lust for him. The party was reaching its crescendo. Two boys were exchanging tongues under the ribs of the spiral staircase that also sheltered Peter and me. A procession of other models’ legs filed up and down past our ears and I noticed that he never even glanced at all this thigh and buttock because his eyes were fixed on me. I began to speak more slowly, although I had to shout over the noise, and all the time he watched my mouth with minute attention. Blood hummed in my ears, drowning the crashing music.

At last Peter took my glass out of my hand and put it down, reaching past the intertwined boys to do so.

‘Shall we leave now?’ he asked.

Outside, the cold air hit me in the face. My tiny party dress also exposed a length of bare leg and my coat didn’t cover much more.

Peter wrapped a protective arm round my shoulders.

‘It isn’t far to my car.’

I couldn’t even remember whether I had come in my car, let alone where I might have parked it. That was how I was in those days.

Peter’s turned out to be low, two-seater, quite old and with an interior of creased leather and glowing wood. I learned later that it was a Jaguar XK140. He always loved old cars and kept a series of them on which he bestowed almost as much affection as he did on me. He took me that night to a French restaurant in Notting Hill, old-fashioned but good, and made me eat whitebait and steak. I drew the line at pudding, although he wanted to order one for me. I hadn’t eaten a pudding or a slice of cake since I was fifteen.