“Yes, St. Cecilia’s. I was there. I remember it well, particularly the ceiling.”
“What was special about the ceiling?”
“Absolutely nothing, unfortunately. I just spent an awful lot of time on my back staring at it.”
“Oh. I see. Sorry, I’m a bit slow today.”
“How did you find me, anyway?”
“Dogged, journalistic spadework. May I come and talk to you sometime? This is a party line so I can’t monopolize it.”
“All right. Any day except Wednesday or Friday. I teach on those days.”
“Thursday, then?”
“Afternoons are better for me. Three o’clock?”
“Three o’clock.”
The door to 16 Luna Street was opened by a tall, striking woman with scarlet lipstick, a paint-smeared smock and a wide floppy skirt. Her dark hair was tied up in a headscarf, not under her chin the way Jean and all normal people wore it but around her forehead with the knot at the front. She peered at Jean’s jacket with an appraising eye and asked, “Is that collar fur?”
“Yes,” Jean admitted, taken aback by this curious welcome. “Probably fox, but I don’t know—it’s secondhand.”
“Well, I’m afraid you’ll have to leave it out here—I’ve got a hideous allergy. Sorry to be a bore.”
She was wearing a pair of red backless leather slippers that made a slapping sound on the tiled floor as she led Jean down the shared hallway toward a row of coat pegs. The most noticeable thing about her, however, which Jean was doing her best not to notice as she struggled out of the offending jacket and hung it up, was that she walked with a stick. And her hands and wrists were bound with curious leather splints, leaving just her fingers and thumbs free.
“Would you like tea? It’ll have to be black. The milk’s spoiled,” Martha said, opening the door to her apartment, which occupied the ground floor at the back of the building, and showing Jean into a large, high-ceilinged room.
It was done out as an artist’s studio but with a divan against one wall and a couch and coffee table by the window. The space was dominated by an easel, on which was a prepared canvas marked with ghostly lines. A trestle table was covered with buckled tubes of paint, jam jars of brushes, stained rags and crusted palettes. Canvases were stacked in one corner like giant slices of toast. There was a mixture of competing smells, none of them pleasant—turpentine, laundry, a full ashtray and the remains of lunch.
Recognizing poverty, Jean produced the florentines from her Peter Jones bag and handed them to Martha, a trifle self-consciously. “I brought you these.”
A slow, wide smile transformed Martha’s pinched face and while it lasted she looked quite beautiful.
“Did you actually? Thank God for you. I haven’t had a treat like this for ages. Let’s eat them now.” She began to tear at the cardboard packaging before Jean had even had a chance to sit down. “I’ll make some coffee to go with them. I hate tea without milk. Come into the kitchen.”
She waved Jean ahead of her with her walking stick into a long, narrow room in a state of considerable disorder. The sink and draining board were piled with unwashed dishes, while the small table, covered with yellow oilcloth, scorched and melted in places by contact with hot pans, held a pair of leather boots and a can of dubbin. The tiled walls were streaked with greasy condensation and spatters of oil, these markings increasing in concentration in the vicinity of the stove. On the bowed shelves chipped crockery, dusty jars of utensils and various unappetizing packages and cans jostled for space.
Jean proceeded gingerly across the sticky floor, which crunched underfoot from a coating of spilled salt or sugar, past a wooden frame hung with items of female underwear not normally on public display—stout black knickers, ribbed vests and flesh-colored stockings like withered legs. Even Jean, whose housekeeping efforts never went much beyond the surface of things, was dismayed. Martha herself appeared unembarrassed by or perhaps oblivious to the disarray, humming cheerfully as she hunted for two clean mugs among the debris, giving them a quick wipe on the hem of her smock.
When they were installed once more in the studio with their coffee and the ripped box of florentines between them, Jean said, “Do you remember much about your time at St. Cecilia’s?”
“Yes,” said Martha through a mouthful of cookie shards. “I remember it all, apart from those times when I was dosed to the gills with opiates, of course. They couldn’t do a thing for me. I was no better when I went out than when I went in. But perhaps the aim never was to cure me—perhaps it was just to provide respite for my parents. I didn’t think of that at the time; it only occurred to me later.”