Kate and John. John and Kate. What can I say? Maybe… maybe I’d say it was inevitable, despite (or, indeed, precisely because of) our history of mutual suspicion, that I’d seek to involve John Toby. He was, after all, by and large, in the memorabilia business. I’d be a fool not to ask him if he could point me in the right direction.
And if anything corrosive came my way as a consequence, I was absolutely primed and ready. It would be as nothing to me. And this prospect was odds-on – because the thing was, John never quite managed to disguise the fact he found it difficult, to put it mildly, to be generous towards any of Kate’s old friends, especially anyone who seemed in any way special to her: anyone who’d had a Kate connection, a real Kate connection, a connection that was, who knew, perhaps still alive.
The mere thought of this ate at John’s insides. You could see that. It was obvious. More than obvious. And so, one way or another, whenever you were in his ambit, whenever you found yourself locked into the most blameless of conversations with him, there’d soon be a toxic undercurrent, intimations of the apocalypse, an aggressive vibration in the ether.
Maybe he had nothing to lose. He must have known there were those who could absolutely not understand what a smart and elegant woman like Kate was doing with a man (rough diamond doesn’t even begin to cover it) like John.
The answer, obviously, lay in the markets. They both ran stalls, both operated franchises, John tout seul, Kate in partnership with this slightly older woman called Sam. So that was it. They were, in fact, well matched: they were part of the same travelling circus, descending one day a week on various locations – Covent Garden, Greenwich, Camden Passage. The sorts of markets specialising in the artsy and the craftsy with a bit of antique bric-a-brac thrown in. Kate had a vintage jewellery stall, John had a stall selling macho stuff, from sports to military. It looked like a load of old tat but in actual fact, according to the man himself, he was really in the business of selling legends.
Memorabilia of a sort. Curios with stories attached. His most successful line was Zippo lighters with battle scars, purporting to have been the result of skirmishes with the enemy in Normandy or Korea or Vietnam. Nothing too ambitious – nothing that could easily be investigated for veracity or that would, without corroborating authentication, seem incredibly far-fetched. He wasn’t selling a piece of General Patton or anything – merely the vague evocation of shadily-outlined unknown soldiers. It worked. It picked a pocket or two.
This stallholder business, it wasn’t their whole story, not quite. I think (tell a lie, I know this to be the case, I remember it like it was yesterday) they actually met way back, in pre-stall days, when she worked in a jewellery shop and he was a sales rep; but stall-holding (if that’s the right way of putting it) was now their alpha and their omega. And yes, some days they’d work it so as they’d be set up at the same market, right next to each other.
I arranged to meet John one day when he was set up in Camden Passage. Turned out that Kate was set up there too because when I arrived at the pub, there they both were, sat in at one of a cluster of tables outside.
Perhaps they’d just had a row because Kate didn’t meet my eye, barely acknowledged me; and John was larger than life, as you might expect, but there was already, right from the off, an edge to his bonhomie. I could soon sense that the last thing we were destined to talk about was my quest. My project, my folie, my sometime notion.
Kate, subdued yet somehow still bright: bright as in always seeing the point of the joke miles before you did. Shy Kate, cautious Kate, Kate squinting needlessly because she had her sunglasses with her, there they were on the table.
John in his shiny brown (a nasty shade of caramel) leather bomber jacket. John the professional Cockney, the spieler, letting his voice drop off now and then for minatory emphasis, a word in your earhole. Mr Snide. Whispering Grass. John the nimble welterweight carrying a few more pounds these days, pot-bellied in his polo shirt, John with his cigarillos, for all the world like a natterjack Clint Eastwood.
I had it right: we said nothing to the point that lunchtime, we merely meandered from one superficial topic to the next, politics, love, death, religion, that sort of thing. I only had a couple of drinks. I felt virtuous. And cool, I suppose. Bodily, physically cool, but also detached; and then, suddenly, we were saying our goodbyes. It must have been about half two. I said I was heading back along to the tube station; they, obviously, were headed back to the market. I watched them go. Derby and Joan, in their own sort of way, I thought. They’d almost been swallowed up by the crowds at the gloomy far end of the alley when I sensed Kate turning back. She came at a brisk walk and there was madness in her eyes, a real wildness. When she reached me, she grabbed my arm and stared intently into my eyes, as if searching there.
“We must talk,” she said.
And then she had spun round and was off up the alley again. I couldn’t see any sign of John. She must have sent him on ahead.
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