Conversations With Mr. Prain by Joan Taylor

chess board, and looked at me, jocose. He knew I had seen my black box. I felt myself blushing. Should I mention it? There was no point. He was the one who would say precisely when the box would be opened. I had agreed to let him come to it in his own time. I knew now that the gallery was the last room he would show me. Here he meant us again to sit down. In due course, he would discuss my work.
    “You liked the sculpture,” he determined.
    I looked at him, trying to fathom what on earth he was thinking. “Yes, I do. I think it’s very clever,” I affirmed. Perhaps now we could get on to my typescripts.
    “Do you want a drink?” he asked cheerily. “I don’t think it’s too early.” It was about five o’clock.
    He can tell he has unsettled me, I thought. So much for my ability to seem calm. He’s thinking I need a drink to relax. “OK.” Be compliant.
    “What would you like?”
    “I’d like a … martini,” I said. I never drink martinis. I see them advertised at the pictures as belonging to exotic or unusual locations. Perhaps this room—and thesculpture—was surreal to me. It was certainly outside my usual reality. My natural habitation was found amid the noisy, populous streets of Camden Town. My countryside was Regent’s Park. My environment was a large, shared flat above a shoe shop on Camden High Street: an untidy flat with balconies facing the afternoon sun, where I sat on warm evenings, ignoring car fumes. Flatmates and friends came and went: the irregular tides of the day’s occupants. Sometimes I would go out to a film, the theatre, an exhibition, with a friend, a lover. Such was my ecosystem: a scruffy flat, the sort in which one finds old earrings and coins lodged under an off-cut of carpet or beneath the armchair when the vacuuming eventually gets done; where musical instruments and amplifiers clog the hallway. In a vegetarian kitchen piled with used crockery, pots and pans and decorated with faded Greenpeace posters, I would pour myself an organic beer, and take it to my bedroom full of books I could not resist at the price. I would go to my balcony overlooking the road, the people, the traffic, and I would treat the balcony as if it faced the ocean. There, I would write, beside a gnarled piece of driftwood found at the seaside. There I would drink a beer. In the house of Mr. Prain, I wanted martini.
    Mr. Prain moved towards the eastern wall, where the Kandinsky hung, and pressed a button, which was the same colour as the wall, so that I had not noticed it before. He pressed the button and the hidden door of a hidden cupboard sprung open.
    “How many secret compartments are there?” I asked.
    “Oh just this one,” he said. “I dislike obvious bars.”
    Mr. Prain disliked things that were not good taste.
    Then why me? I was not one of his ilk. I was something completely different.
    I sneezed.
    “Bless you,” he said.
    I sneezed again. (At-issue, at-issue, we all fall down.)
    “A speck of dust,” I explained, sniffing, rummaging for my handkerchief in the pocket of my floral dress and not finding it.
    “Bless you again,” he said, making tinkling sounds as he mixed drinks, pronged ice cubes, replaced bottles.
    Bless me. Bless my soul. Blessings in disguise. Lord help me, I thought. I sniffed as inconspicuously as possible. Something is wrong.
    Mr. Prain handed me a glass of martini. The glass was shaped like a bell, like those they have in advertisements.
    An advertisement in a cinema. Take me and Mr. Prain, dressed in evening attire, and place us in an exclusive club in the Caribbean. Note: palm trees, azure sea, white beach, black waiters. We are an advertisement couple, totally beyond reality, totally perfect. My hair is not in springy curls, but the gleaming result of a salon’s straightening treatment, swirled in a sleek roll, like that of an Alfred Hitchcock blonde. The colour of the sea is magical. Music: a breathy flute, soft and sensual. Storyboard it. His eyes. My