had stepped back into the corridor so Jane carried on talking, pretending to be having a normal conversation with a normal bloody human being.
‘Oh I expect I can borrow a nightie. All right, Auntie. See you tomorrow. Bye.’ She even blew a kiss. And then hung up the dead phone, ready for the grand tour of the flat.
The sitting room had bare floorboards covered by a peculiar offcut of carpet that had been woven with a fancy monogram of Ps and Hs (when they redecorated the Portland Hotel the landlord had done a deal with one of the carpet fitters he’d met in a local pub after finishing the job). The only furniture was a three-legged chaise-longue propped up on a pile of old Vogues, an armchair and a row of six red plush tip-up cinema seats. The dingy striped wallpaper had half a dozen clean, gaily coloured patches where pictures had once been. A naked light socket hung from the chipped rose in the middle but there was no bulb in it. Instead Suzy zipped round the room switching on three lamps with pink nylon shades on stands made from old dimple whisky bottles. There was only one electricity point in the room and the long flexes had all been crudely spliced together with fluffy black knots of insulating tape. The three plugs all met in one corner in a terrifying tangle of wires and two-way adaptors.
The only ornaments on Suzy’s huge old plaster chimneypiece were a row of blue china elephants linked together by trunks and tails and a Moët and Chandon ice bucket full to the brim with ritzy little matchboxes. Jane selected a Claridge’s bookmatch and crouched down to light the gas, waving the flame along the bottom row of charred white mantles until the whole thing stopped hissing and woomfed scarily to life.
‘Would you like a glass of water?’ called Suzy. Jane wandered out to the kitchen. It was a largish room about twelve feet square with a utility dresser, an old stone sink, a grimy gas stove and a huge, gleaming white roll-topped bath tub.
‘Mad, isn’t it? Not all the flats have got one. Most of them head off to some cosy bath-house place down in Soho. You know, special occasions: Jewish holidays, Queen’s birthday, Grand National, that sort of thing. The lavatories are all down on the half landing. There is one for each flat but it’s still a frightful pain. We usually wee in the bath, quite honestly. Quite hard finding anyone to share. Most of them just curl up and die when they see the kitchen. Glenda just used the place as a wardrobe really and we only got Lorna by dropping her rent to a quid provided she did all the cleaning and washing up. Which worked brilliantly for about a fortnight but as you can see . . .’
The bath was the only clean thing in the room. The kitchen floor was covered in black and blue fake marble lino tiles but the blue ones were almost black with grime, except for a cleanish path polished back to their original colour by passing feet. Doreen kept a pretty hairy kitchen floor but she did at least run the mop over it occasionally.
‘I could clean the floor if you like.’ Jane wasn’t sure she could face stepping barefoot on to that filthy old oilcloth. Beetles, said Doreen, Germs.
‘Don’t be daft, sweetie. Life’s too short. You can put some newspaper down, if you like. There’s even a bathmat somewhere.’ Which there was. It said Grand Hotel and there was dried blood on one corner.
The sink was overflowing with coffee cups and glasses, the gas stove was brown and sticky with long-forgotten fry-ups and the walls, which had once been painted a sort of school-corridor blue, were encrusted with strange little yellow worms, each about two feet long. Jane picked at one of them very, very cautiously.
‘Spaghetti. You can tell it’s cooked when it sticks to the wall – so Lorna says. Bit of a dark horse, Lorna. Works in the British Museum, sensible shoes and all that but she spends most of the week shacked up with one of the Egyptologists in his rat’s nest in Gordon Square. He goes home to the family on Friday nights but the wife and kids have gone to her mother’s in Reigate so Lorna’s off to Brighton for a nice dirty weekend. Let’s hope she brings back a new bathmat.’
Suzy began running herself a