Russell Hoban: My Tango With Barbara Strozzi

Bertha lived in Fulham, in the North End Road. My flat was also in Fulham, in Basuto Road, so we both took the Circle Line westbound. We sat down and looked at each other for a few moments as the train left Farringdon. I was expecting the usual exchange of personal histories and provenances, but no: ‘How tall are you?’ said Bertha.

‘How tall am I?’ I said, sitting up straighter.

‘That’s what I said,’ said Bertha.

‘Five seven,’ I said, stretching my neck.

‘I’m five nine,’ said Bertha.

‘So do you want to throw me back or what?’

‘I don’t know — I’m kind of old-fashioned,’ she said after a pause.

‘Meaning?’

She blushed, half-shrugged, half-smiled, looked apologetic. ‘I want a man who can protect me.’

It was my turn to blush. ‘Should I forget tango and take up karate?’

She didn’t laugh. ‘I’ll have to think about this,’ she said.

‘I’m really confused, Bertha.’

‘Me too.’

‘I thought there was something happening between us.’

Again the apologetic look, the half-shrug and a little shake of the head. ‘Yes and no,’ she said.

‘Is there some particular thing or person you want protection from?’

‘Let’s talk about something else,’ she said. ‘Where are you from?’

‘Pennsylvania,’ I said lamely. As we travelled west the metaphor of the Circle Line was closing its loop and I felt myself on the outside looking in. She was from Exeter and we pushed these and other counters towards each other while long silences sprang up like brambles. At Paddington we sat saying nothing and looking at the people waiting on the opposite platform until a Wimbledon train arrived. We sat among Saturday-night faces and voices until Fulham Broadway appeared and we got out. I walked her to the North End Road which was full of Saturday-night noise, people, and rubbish. She opened her street door and I followed her up a flight of stairs to her flat. At her door I didn’t feel free to kiss her or even take her hand; by then the colours had gone out of the night and everything was like a not-very-good print of a black-and-white film. I just stood there and waited for her to say something. Only a little while ago I had held her, felt the weight and warmth of her body under my hands!

‘Give me your phone number,’ she said.

I wrote it down on the back of a handbill from the tango class and gave it to her. ‘Are you going to give me yours?’ I said.

She wrote it on the same handbill, tore off that piece and gave it to me. ‘Not too soon,’ she said, ‘OK?’ And I thought that was the end of it for now but as she turned to go inside she paused and turned back to me again. ‘Would you like to come in for a coffee?’ she said.

‘What is this?’ I said. ‘What the hell are you playing at?’

She didn’t blush but she shook her head the way one does when baffled. ‘Nothing is simple for me,’ she said.

‘That makes two of us. When I sit down for the coffee, will you pull the chair away or what?’

‘I promise not to pull the chair away.’ She opened the door. ‘Are you going to come in?’

I went in cautiously. There was a smell of rug shampoo. She switched on a light and the flat sprang into view not looking like her. ‘This flat belongs to a friend,’ she said as she hung our coats on a clothestree by the door.

‘Man or woman?’

‘Woman,’ she said as I followed her into the kitchen. The light was hard, the walls were blue, there was a framed photograph of Sir Cliff Richard. There was a framed print of Jesus with his Sacred Heart exposed. There was a cutesy spice rack, there were smiley magnets on the fridge door.

‘Why Cliff Richard?’ I said.

‘Hilary’s doing an Alpha course because he recommended it on the website,’ said Bertha. ‘This is her kitchen. We’ve been flatmates for more than a year but I don’t put anything of mine on the walls except in my room.’

‘You moved here when you broke up with somebody?’

‘Yes.’

‘Are you with anyone now?’

‘No. Are you?’

‘No. I was divorced six months ago.’

‘Your idea or hers?’

‘Hers. She said I was a failure. What about your somebody?’

There was a pause while she spooned instant coffee into two mugs, filled the kettle and turned on the gas. I wasn’t sure if she’d answer me.

‘I left him,’ she said. ‘We’re still married.’ Her face now seemed very vulnerable. She took off the velvet jacket and I saw purple bruises symmetrically on both arms as if she had been held and shaken.

‘I guess he’s more than five nine,’ I said.

She nodded.

‘Those bruises,’ I said, ‘are less than a month old.’

She nodded again and crossed her arms to cover them.

‘Have you seen The Rainmaker ?’ I said.

‘No. Why?’

‘In this film a husband’s beatings put his wife into hospital. Her name is Kelly. She falls in love with a lawyer called Rudy. When the husband discovers them together he goes for Rudy with a baseball bat. Rudy gets the better of him and beats him half to death. Then Kelly takes the bat and says to Rudy, “Stop! Give me the bat. You were not here tonight. Go!” When he’s gone she finishes the job but she beats a murder rap because it was self-defence and no jury would convict her.’

‘What happened then?’ said Bertha.

‘Rudy and the widow go off together and start a new life.’

Bertha poured the coffee and we sat down at the kitchen table while Jesus watched with a shit-happens look on his face. ‘Do you think they could?’ she said.

‘Start a new life?’ I could feel Pluto going over my Sagittarian ascendant. Where to?

‘Yes,’ said Bertha. Her face was soft and she was looking at me as if I might be five foot eight. What a sweet face.

‘Certainly,’ I said. ‘That husband got what was coming to him. Their consciences would be perfectly clear. You ever think of a baseball-bat sort of solution for your problem?’

‘Not with a bat.’

‘So you have thought of it. How would you do it?’

‘I wouldn’t do it. People have fantasies about all kinds of things. How did we get into this anyhow?’

‘Your bruises.’

She put on the velvet jacket again. ‘Now it’s colder in here. Let’s take our coffee to my room.’

We went through the sitting room quickly. There was a painting on black velvet of a Spanish dancer. The last time I saw a painting on black velvet was in my grandmother’s house in Philadelphia. There was a little shelf of paperbacks; I saw the names of Georgette Heyer and Barbara Cartland. There was a book on the coffee table, The God That Changes Lives . There was a little shelf of little glass animals. ‘Are you good friends with Hilary?’ I said.

‘We get on well enough but we don’t have much to do with each other. Here’s my room.’

The first thing I noticed was a poster of the painting called Hope , a young woman in clinging garments sitting on half a globe with her left ankle tucked under her right leg. Her eyes are half-closed as she leans her head against the lyre that she strokes with her right hand. There’s a dreamy smile on her face — she looks as if she’s stoned out of her mind. I don’t know who painted that picture. Where do I remember it from? Was it hanging on a schoolroom wall? Not at the front with George Washington but perhaps in a lesser position at the back. ‘Our father who art in heaven,’ we said in the morning, ‘Hallowed be thy name.’ And so on while the planets seen or unseen moved above us. We pledged allegiance to the flag and we sang ‘Long, Long Ago’ and ‘The Little Brown Church in the Vale’ and other primary-school standards and then we started our lessons.