After Purple Read online

  Bello:

  hidden talent rediscovered!

  Bello is a digital only imprint of Pan Macmillan, established to breathe life into previously published classic books.

  At Bello we believe in the timeless power of the imagination, of good story, narrative and entertainment and we want to use digital technology to ensure that many more readers can enjoy these books into the future.

  We publish in ebook and Print on Demand formats to bring these wonderful books to new audiences.

  About Bello:

  www.panmacmillan.com/imprints/bello

  About the author:

  www.panmacmillan.com/author/wendyperriam

  Contents

  Wendy Perriam

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Wendy Perriam

  After Purple

  Wendy Perriam

  Wendy Perriam has been writing since the age of five, completing her first ‘novel’ at eleven. Expelled from boarding school for heresy and told she was in Satan’s power, she escaped to Oxford, where she read History and also trod the boards. After a variety of offbeat jobs, ranging from artist’s model to carnation-disbudder, she now divides her time between teaching and writing. Having begun by writing poetry, she went on to publish 16 novels and 7 short-story collections, acclaimed for their power to disturb, divert and shock. She has also written extensively for newspapers and magazines, and was a regular contributor to radio programmes such as Stop the Week and Fourth Column.

  Perriam feels that her many conflicting life experiences – strict convent-school discipline and swinging-sixties wildness, marriage and divorce, infertility and motherhood, 9-to-5 conformity and periodic Bedlam – have helped shape her as a writer. ‘Writing allows for shadow-selves. I’m both the staid conformist matron and the slag; the well-organised author toiling at her desk and the madwoman shrieking in a straitjacket.’

  Chapter One

  “A what?” said Leo.

  The telephone didn’t answer, or if it did, it made sure I couldn’t hear. Leo had it cradled in his lap, the phone-lead coiled across his stomach like an umbilical cord, both hands fondling the receiver. His dressing-gown gaped open, so that if I shifted slightly, I could see the whole line of his naked body underneath it. I crossed my legs and rubbed myself against the chair. It had a rough cane seat which prickled.

  “Oh, I see. No, that’s no problem. Late K’ang Hsi, you say. What shape? Mmm … sounds interesting. Is it just one phoenix or a pair?”

  I tried not to listen. It was a phoenix I had smashed last night. The shattered pieces of the Chinese pot were still scalding and accusing on the floor behind me. It had broken right across the wings.

  The base of the phone had slipped a little further down towards his groin. Leo’s two thin hands were cupped around the mouthpiece as if it were a breast. He was joined, entwined, in full congress with a telephone. I was the intruder. I traced a picture with my teaspoon in the little puddle of sugar which had spilt on the breakfast table. It was meant to be a tree, but it came out like a prick. Leo’s prick. I swirled the outlines round a bit, so it turned into a Chinese vase. That was more appropriate. He’d been talking for twelve minutes now, and this was Reconciliation Hour.

  “Where did you say you spotted it?” Leo stretched an arm along the table, towards my cereal bowl. I thought he was going to touch me, squeeze my hand perhaps, acknowledge I was there, but the arm was stern, impatient — fingers tapping sharply on the table.

  “Pencil, please.”

  I got up and dug out a clutch of biros from the empty chutney jar. The first two didn’t write. I handed him the third and kissed the space between the lapels of his dressing-gown. He brushed my lips away like flies. He also refused the biro. He had found his fountain pen and was already scribbling me away with it, jotting down dates and shapes and details on the back of the current issue of The Listener, a deep frown gashed between his eyebrows.

  “Bermondsey Market? What, that chap we see in the salerooms? But the market’s only open on a Friday. Oh, I see — his shop. I don’t quite trust him, actually. Do you?”

  The telephone cooed and simpered back at him. I couldn’t hear the voice, but I knew it must be Otto. Only Otto was indulged so long. Usually some fancy vase or jar or snuff bottle or other he’d tracked down in a junk shop or a market stall and wanted Leo to buy.

  “It’s cracked, I suppose. What, just along the foot-ring? Oh, that as well … pity. Even so, it doesn’t sound impossible. Look, I’d better get round and see it. Is the guy there now?”

  I heard a purr or two and then a click as Otto put the phone down. Leo still hung on. He had pressed the receiver against his bare chest now. This must be the afterplay.

  “So you’re going out?” I said.

  He didn’t answer. He was staring at the back cover of The Listener where his bold black pen had lunged over rows of neat advertisements for Polish Programme Assistants or Secretaries for Audience Research. I passed him his toast, his cup, and the jar of peanut butter. The sooner we had breakfast, the sooner we might get to bed. Leo made his own peanut butter in a sort of antique churn he’d found in an auction room. He bought nuts cheap, in bulk, from a bird-food supplier, and ground them in a small machine marked ‘Flagstaff, Arizona’. He never let me do it. I didn’t cook at all. We didn’t have that sort of relationship. Leo dislikes the word relationship.

  I glanced across at him. If other men sprawled at the table with bare feet and bare chest, scooping peanut butter out of the jar with the wrong end of a paper-knife, they might well have looked slovenly, or even plain ridiculous. Leo looked magnificent. He turned breakfast into some dark, solemn ritual. He was dark himself, like an oil painting that needed cleaning, an old master with a crust of smudgy varnish daubed across it. His eyes went on forever. It was frightening, really, how little I knew about him. Both his parents were dead — that he had admitted. His mother was half Russian and a café singer. His father, twenty odd years older, had been thoughtless enough to die when Leo was still unweaned. That we had in common — no fathers. I doubt if his had even been married to his mother. I’d tried to probe, but Leo rarely answered questions.

  “More tea?” I asked. He had opened The Listener now and was continuing his article on Bertrand Russell, a Reassessment by a Transcendentalist. I was eating branflakes. Leo despises commercial breakfast cereals, but I need them for the roughage. Since my divorce, I’ve suffered with constipation. I tried to eat them quietly so that my crunching wouldn’t disturb his Reassessment. I never read The Listener. The print is too small and all the articles have a brown, musty, scratchy taste like branflakes.

  Behind me, on the floor, I could hear the phoenix struggling to arise. It wasn’t just the value of the thing, it was Leo’s you
th I had smashed. He’d bought that vase when he was more or less a stripling, the first in his collection. I could never imagine Leo as a boy, with only one bright bird between his hands. I suspect that after the phoenix, life had let him down a little, so in breaking the vase I’d destroyed the best bit of his life.

  The kitchen was so quiet now, so innocent, it seemed strange that only seven hours ago, it had been spinning in black, bellowing circles, as I screamed at Leo and tore at his face and eyes, the rain sheeting down outside, the radio turned up to hurting, and karma’s fierce, hacking barks cracking through the room like gunfire. Karma always sided with Leo. He was Leo’s dog and hated any rival, so if I cried, he simply drowned me out by howling louder. He hadn’t appeared at breakfast yet. Karma was a sulker. If we upset his evenings, he skulked in his basket the whole of the next morning and refused all overtures. Not that I’d made an overture, not yet.

  I pushed back my chair. “I didn’t mean …”

  Leo turned another page. “No post-mortems. Please.” A crumb was trembling on his lip. It didn’t fall, even when he spoke. If it was still there by the time I’d finished my branflakes, then I’d take it as a Sign that Leo loved me. I was always doing things like that. Little tests, silly games. Since he never told me, I had to find out other ways. We hadn’t spoken since the phoenix.

  Just fought and wrestled and hurled abuse and books, then slammed our bedroom doors and sweated and sobbed through the wreckage of the night.

  Well, I had. Leo may simply have gone to sleep. I couldn’t check, because once our doors were shut, we never made any contact till the morning. There were rules even to the rows. Curfew until dawn. Then fumblings, rustlings, trips to the toilet, freezing bathroom, stifling kitchen, strong tea, stale toast, Bertrand Russell or Bernard Levin, according to what day and periodical it was, and — finally — the reconciliation. Which meant sex in Leo’s bed, very long, wild, violent, still silent, but cleansing. Only then would one or other of us pick up the pieces — literally, I mean.

  Breakfast is always a bit of an ordeal — stumbling and yawning from nightmares and unconsciousness to Sugar Puffs and Mother’s Pride, trying to pretend the world is white and wholesome and sugar-coated, when you’ve just been dipped in dark and death. I’d found it unsettling even when married to Adrian (and he was wholesome — good-natured and sturdy like that sort of bran-enriched cereal which comes with a free plastic toy and a list of added vitamins). With Leo, the tension was unbearable.

  To start with, it was always dark. Leo lived in the basement of his two-floor share of a five-storey Victorian house. I had the ground floor. They were both his, but he had assigned us separate territories. The kitchen was in his area. I had my own gas-ring upstairs and an electric kettle and even a sort of grill-cum-waffle-maker, but we mostly ate together (never waffles), sitting at the long, pitted pine table which was piled high with back numbers of all Leo’s periodicals, and faded piano music without its covers, and expensive prints waiting for their frames. The high, narrow windows looked as if they were sitting up and begging for light. They didn’t get much. A mulberry tree hogged most of it. Leo had bought the house for the tree. Mulberry trees are rare in Notting Hill. (My mother called it Kensington when she talked about me to the few brave bridge partners she still honoured with her conversation. “Living with friends near Kensington Palace” was how she put it. She didn’t know London and she hadn’t met Leo. If she had, she would have put it differently. Very differently.) Even if the sun was pouring its heart out in the street upstairs, we still breakfasted in gloom. It suited Leo, really. He looked wrong in sunlight, sort of cracked and faded. I’d met him in the dark. He’d been sitting with Otto and Karma in a gloomy basement wine bar, listening to an Indian sitar. I’d lost my job and my handbag on the same day and was drinking some rather scratchy red wine I had no means of paying for. Karma bit my leg, which solved the problem, because with all the fuss of blood and tetanus injections the barman forgot about my bill, and even if he hadn’t, Leo would have been more or less forced to pay it, in simple compensation. When I met him for the second time, it was daylight and he looked a lot older, but he’d had me, then, and after that, things like age didn’t matter.

  There was a small grey puddle left in the bottom of my bowl and one waterlogged sultana floating in it. The crumb was still trembling on Leo’s lip. He loved me. I pushed my nightdress up above my navel. Leo likes navels. We often did it on the kitchen floor with a pile of spread-out Listeners underneath us, I was used to being screwed on Bertrand Russell or Alistair Cooke or Letters to the Editor. Sometimes he rammed my head against the skirting. He always hurt. That was one of the reasons I lived with him, the recklessness, the scarlet-edged excitement. With Adrian, it was all pale pink candlewick and vaginal deodorants and tenderness.

  The crumb fell off his lip at the exact moment I swallowed the sultana. That worried me. He was brewing a second pot of tea. He should have grabbed hold of my wrists by now and pinioned me against the wall. He’s very thin, the sort of build you’d call gangling if he were anyone else, but so strong he’s cut out of sheet metal, with steel rods where ordinary men have bones.

  His dressing-gown had fallen open again. (He never wore pyjamas.) His skin was smooth, almost polished, with a dull, sallow tinge to it, as if he’d been painted in a bad light on a foggy evening. He didn’t have vulgar things like body hair. He was like one of those ancient, precious icons of Christ the Saviour, where fuzz would have been sacrilege.

  I held out my hand to him. He left it stranded, pawing the air like a limp, foolish thing without an owner. Leo gave me headaches — the endless tension, the unpredictability. I pulled my nightie down again. He had picked up his cup and was walking towards the door. He wasn’t angry, just preoccupied. Bertrand Russell made him nervous. I heard his footsteps fade and vanish up the stairs, followed by the higher, brighter footsteps of the piano, racing and tumbling down again.

  The piano was the most expensive thing he owned. It was a Bechstein grand in inlaid ebony, and twice as old as he was. The removal men couldn’t get it down the narrow curving stairs into the basement, so it stood in my territory. In fact, I didn’t have much territory left. Once the piano was established, that room became his living-room, (which he and Otto called a drawing-room and my mother would have called a disgrace, since no one bothered cleaning it). That encouraged him to use my bedroom, too — not for sleeping in, but for storing the largest and most gloomy of his canvases. I often went to sleep surrounded by ruined temples or anorexic nudes, tipped on their sides and glaring. I could hardly complain, when it was all his house to start with. Even with Adrian, I’d never got my half. Other wives have joint mortgages and shared bank accounts. Adrian thought more in terms of pocket money, or presents of huge boring (improving) books he wanted to read himself.

  Leo was playing very loud. and fiercely. He had plunged straight into the middle of a piece, a general sort of pandemonium where his hands keep crossing over on the keys and he hurls himself about a lot. He’d been practising it for at least two months. It sounded fine to me, but then I’m not musical. (Another thing between us.) I hated Leo’s music and yet I worshipped it. I can’t even type, let alone play an instrument. I’ve never had the knack of doing different things with each hand, except in bed. When Leo first showed me his musical scores, I was dumbfounded. A hundred pages of squiggles was a whole crashing symphony, or the sobbing tangle of an opera. A murder or a deathbed or Man’s Highest Aspirations crammed into five straight lines and a clutch of crotchets. It was like God in a grain of sand or the Bible on a silicon chip, and gave me that same sinky, trembly feeling as when I watched television programmes on “Man and The Cosmos” and realised we were just a small, second-rate planet spinning towards extinction.

  I shut the kitchen door. The music was crashing and pounding through the house, booming down the stairs, churning up my breakfast. I felt extinguished by it, excluded. I had no idea who the composer was. I never dared ask Leo t
hings like that, in case the piece was so ludicrously well-known that even an ignoramus would have known it. I was an ignoramus. My lack of musical knowledge so appalled me that I always kept it quiet, which saved me from contempt, but never taught me anything.

  It had been much the same with Adrian. He wasn’t musical, but he wrote textbooks on medieval history and I don’t know history, either. At smart dinner parties I used to say that Adrian divorced me because I thought Stephen and Matilda were a folk group. Adrian didn’t divorce me, anyway — I walked out on him — but even if he had, he would have done it on the grounds of just that sort of flip remark, not because of my ignorance. On the other hand, if you don’t know anything (I mean really know, like Leo and Adrian know things, or Bertrand Russell, or the man at the auction rooms) you have to get by on flip remarks, or by regurgitating chewed-up bits of other people’s conversations. I stole whole sentences and served them up, not as stale and tepid left-overs, but as my main Dish of the Day. Their owners never noticed, because I changed things round or tacked bits on from someone or somewhere else. My vocabulary was already quite impressive, but it couldn’t compare with theirs. They had whole freezers and larders full of freshly-brewed opinions and ideas, jumbo-sized tins and packets, while I had only a few rinds and husks pinched from their plates and secreted in a paper serviette, the sort of thing you’d tip into the dog’s dish.

  It amazed me, really, how ordinary people could remember things. Adrian talked about thirteenth-century battles as if he’d been standing there in person, handing the king his breast-plate or picking up the arrows. He probably knew what Matilda ate for breakfast. Leo could play whole piano sonatas off by heart, without the music. If he turned on Radio Three in the middle of a concert, he knew immediately the name and dates of the piece and the composer. I could listen to an hour of it and still not guess whether it was Mozart or The Merry Widow.