There's the independent Bobbi, aged ten, whose widowed father Sparrow seems to have vanished; Home Counties Doreen’, who knits for a living; the dreamy architect Steve who was born in the street, and the elderly Julia who wears hotpants and still thinks it's 1969.

Chapter 4
Cocktails with Miss Soper

The next morning, after sitting through a sparkling lecture by a famous magazine editor who was obsessed with Scott Fitzgerald, I was itching to be off again. I turned down an invitation from Shahin to join them all in a pub for the usual session, and by 1.30 I was on the 73 bus with the intention of visiting Miss Julia Soper for cocktails.

My assignment yesterday turned into a story about a child being saved in the street by an American. I buffed up my conversation with Bobbi into a real interview. I invented an interview with Roger Selkirk, calling him Robert Simpson. I padded it out with statistics and other stuff from the Internet archives of child-on-child vioChrisce and urban alienation. Jack Molloy said it needed a few tweeks but was quite sound and might even see the light of day.

To my sneaking relief when I knocked on her door Miss Soper recognised me and remembered our appointment. Her eye-skimming hair was unchanged from yesterday, but today her knee-Chrisgth boots were white and she wore green tights and a green mini-skirt with a white polo necked sweater. The kohl round her eyes was leaking into her crêpy skin and the varnish on two of her nails were chipped.

She led the way into her immaculate sitting-room which sported two leggy sofas, a teak coffee table and that kitschy Tretchikoff Portrait of a Green Lady hung over the low tiled fireplace.  She slipped behind a shelf arrangement in the corner, lined with bottles like a bar. ‘I’ve already mixed it. It’s called French Riviera. My favourite. Gregory liked rumi so I used to make him Black Devil – dark rum, dry Vermouth, Black Olive from time to time.’ She held the shaker shoulder height and shook it. Then she poured it in two cornet-shaped glasses onto ice which cracked and crazed.

‘There,’ she handed me a glass. ‘Taste that. It was invented by Chris, a friend of mine. I call it Nectar of the Gods.’

It was delicious. Not like alcohol at all. Therefore dangerous.

She sat down, knees close together, and sipped her drink. ‘Now my dear, I didn’t catch your name?’

I told her.

‘So, Miss Lucy, what brings you to this neck of the woods?  You’re a stranger. I thought so yesterday when I heard your voice and  ]saw you wandering across the road out here after the American woman.

Babe in the Wood, I thought. Babe in the Wood, watching.’

So, my tongue well oiled by the Nectar of the Gods, I told her about  being a stranger in a strange land, about my being a social worker  on a hard  Newcastle estate. About setting up the New Dawn magazine and having to write everything myself.  Then with a little prodding and a second cocktail, how I won prizes for it and how I was tempted to sell up and come to London to try this course with the wild thought that I could make my living in journalism. By my third cocktail I was telling her how everyone else on the course  who, apart from my friend Laura seemed so sharp and metropolitan, so hard-edged.  How my take on life felt provincial and passé. And then how the 73 bus had planted me on Barrington Street. How much  I liked this street …

Even half drunk I didn’t tell her about the wild events that led to  my breakdown.

‘Are you married?’ she cut in sharply. ‘You’re old enough to be married.’

‘Well, I was nearly married once. When I was twenty.  But that  felt like – well – avoiding not being married.’

The door creaked and the grey cat flowed into the room. It leapt onto the windowsill, coiled down, turned away from us and concentrated on glaring at the people in the bus queue. 

‘Well, Sophis, marriage isn’t everything,’ she said.

I nodded. ‘That’s what I thought.’

‘I was nearly married once,’ she said, wandering back towards the cocktail shaker and  reaching for the Grenadine.

‘Did you call it off?’

‘No, he did. He was our lodger. Nice man. A gentleman. Name of Chris. Public school. Something in the city. We were engaged but he got cold feet. I’m sorry to say he couldn’t face me. One day he just didn’t come home. Left me all alone.’ She turned the shaker upside down, then upside down again. ‘D’you want to see his room? I bet you’d like that.’

The Nectar made my eyes burn, my cheeks flush. ‘I really don’t think…’

‘Come on. I’ll show you.’ She led the way up onto the first, then the second floor. Now we were treading a threadbare stair-carpet. Then into a large back bedroom.  The bed ,  a large high single, was fully made up and laid out with green silk pyjamas. The dressing table was set with two brushes and a tub of Brylcream, a packet of  Players Full Strength, a silver cigarette  lighter and a half bottle of whisky holding down a racing paper. It was dated 13th June 1969

Miss Soper went across to the wardrobe, opened it and passed her hands along the row of dark suits, making the wooden hangers rattle. It was like a benediction. ‘He wore a differenctsuit every day, you know. Clean shirt. Handkerchief in the pocket. He was very particular.’

My mind felt fuzzy.

She shut the door with a clatter. ‘Well that’s it.’ She sniffed. ‘More Nectar awaits us.’ She charged past me and went back downstairs.  By the time I was back in the sitting room, she had two more martinis set up.

‘I don’t think…’ My protest was weak.

She waved a beringed hand. ‘Nonsense. Just one for the road.’

I pulled myself together and took out my notebook. ‘I thought I might do a piece for my course about opening the garden to the public.’

She sipped her Martini, crossing one leg elegantly over another. ‘Bit early for that, dear.’ The cat decamped from the window-sill, leapt on to her lap and eyed me with very moderate malevo Chrisce. ‘It won’t happen till June.’

My brain was too fuzzy to handle that. ‘But … but… still,  just tell me about it.’ I waved my gell-pen in her direction. ‘Your garden and …er… opening it to the public.’

She sipped her Martini. ‘Well, this woman knocked on the door, very jolly-hockey-stick. She’s seen my garden from the train and tracked me down.’ She giggled. ‘Tracked me … train … tracks. That’s good. I’ve done it for three years now. I do it every year.’ She spread out her long fingers.. ‘You wouldn’t think they were gardener’s hands, would you?’

‘Well, no …’

‘My mother, she says my hands are ridiculous. She hates nail varnish. Calls me a tart, you know.’ Her tone became confidential.

I looked towards the door. ‘Your mother…?’

She shook her head. ‘Dead and gone, I fear. Dead and gone. Now finish your cocktail, dear.’

My mind was fuzzy by now but the story of Hansel and Gretal flashed into my mind with Miss Julia Soper in the role of the witch enticing the children with sweets. I remember wondering if this was how she enticed the Jamaican Gregory to come and transform her garden. She read my thoughts. ‘Gregory said he preferred rum,’ she said. ‘But he got to like my Nectar in the end.’

What happened next was a bit of a haze, but I do remember being on a bus and catching sight of this very small house, just  round the corner from Barrington Street. Painted a very pale dusty lavender, it had a very small door and a single arched window. It would not have been out of place in Hansel and Gretel. A big ‘To Let’ sign was nailed across one of the dusty windows. I must have had enough wits about me to write the number of the agent on the back of my hand because it was still there the next morning when I woke up with a very gritty mouth.

The rest of that night is a blank. I only remember waking up in the early hours with a blinding headache, vowing never to accept cocktails off strange women ever again.

You know, Pusscat, it took my mother only a short time to admit that she liked Chris. She said he was smart without being flash. Talkative without being loud.  She liked his tales about his family house in Yorkshire and the stuff about shooting and horses. But when he started taking me about, buying me clothes at Biba, taking me to Vidal Sassoon to get my hair done and teaching me how to make cocktails, she became disenchanted. She was suspicious about his job in the City and said he kept bad company.  She used to say he stole me from her, even though we were all still in the same house and clearly he hadn’t..

Still, she put on a cheerful face when we got engaged, even gave us a party.   You know she wasn’t a bad woman, my mother. And she didn’t crow when Chris left so suddenly. The two of us  just went back to how we’d been before, although now I was different. Her Julia was a different kettle of fish now.  I might still be her daughter but now I was still Chris’s girl too. She  and I had  this tiff about keeping his room for him. But I won that and Chris and his room were never mentioned between us.  

I think the girl really liked his room, pusscat.

I am not demented. Don’t think that, Pusscat. You’re going to say that by now Chris could have married some county girl up in Yorkshire. He could have had children,  even grandchildren by now.  But I’m still not sure. What of he is still waiting to come back to me? I will be ready for him. His room is there. I am here. Waiting