Neverwhere

There were statues of angels on tiny plinths. There were paintings of angels on the walls. There were angel frescoes. There were huge angels and tiny angels, stiff angels and amiable angels, angels with wings and haloes and angels with neither, warlike angels and peaceable angels. There were modern angels and classical angels. Hundreds upon hundreds of angels of every size and shape. Western angels, Middle Eastern angels, Eastern angels. Michelangelo angels. Joel Peter Witkin angels, Picasso angels, War-hoi angels. Mr. Stockton’s angel collection was “indiscriminate to the point of trashiness, but certainly impressive in its eclecticism” (Time Out).

“Would you think,” Richard asked, “that I was being picky if I pointed out that trying to find something with an angel on it in here is going to be like trying to find a needle in an oh my God it’s Jessica.” Richard felt the blood drain from his face. Until now he had thought that that was simply a figure of speech. He hadn’t thought it actually happened in real life.

“Someone you knew?” asked Door. Richard nodded. “She was my. Well. We were going to be married. We’ve been together for a couple of years. She was with me when I found you. She was the one on the. She left that message. On the answering machine.” He pointed across the room: Jessica was making animated conversation with Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber, Bob Geldof, and a bespectacled gentleman who looked suspiciously like a Saatchi. Every few minutes she checked her watch and glanced toward the door.

“Her?” said Door, recognizing the woman. Then, obviously feeling that she should say something nice about someone Richard had cared for, she said, “Well, she’s very . . . ” and she paused, and thought, and then said, ” . . . clean.”

Richard stared across the room. “Will she . . . is she going to be upset that we’re here?”

“I doubt it,” said Door. “Frankly, unless you do something stupid, like talk to her, she probably won’t even notice you.” And then, with more enthusiasm, she said, “Food!” She descended on the canapes like a small, smut-nosed girl in a too-large leather jacket who had not eaten properly for sometime. Enormous quantities of food were immediately crammed into her mouth, masticated and swallowed, while, at the same time, the more substantial sandwiches were wrapped in paper napkins and placed into her pockets. Then, with a paper plate heaped high with chicken legs, melon slices, mushroom vol-au-vents, caviar puffs, and small venison sausages, she began to circle the room, staring intently at each and every angelic artefact.

Richard trailed along behind her, with a Brie and fennel sandwich and a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice.

Jessica was deeply puzzled. She had noticed Richard, and having noticed him, she had noticed Door. There was something familiar about them both: it was like a tickle at the back of her throat, impossible to get rid of, utterly irritating.

It reminded Jessica of something her mother had once told her about, of how Jessica’s mother had, one evening, encountered a woman she had known all her life—had been to school with, had served on the parish council with—and how her mother, encountering the woman at a party, had suddenly realized that she was unable to recall the woman’s name, although she knew the woman had a husband in publishing named Eric and a golden retriever named Major. It had left Jessica’s mother quite disgruntled.

It was driving Jessica to distraction. “Who are those people?” she asked Clarence.

“Them? Well, he’s the new editor of Vogue, she’s the arts correspondent of the New York Times. The one between them is Kate Moss, I think . . . “

“No, not them,” said Jessica. “Them. There.”

Clarence looked in the place that she was pointing. Hm? Oh. Them. He couldn’t understand how he had failed to see them before. Old age, he thought; he would soon be twenty-three. “Journalists?” he said, without much conviction. “They do look rather trendoid. Grunge chic? Please. I know I invited The Face . . . “

“I know him,” said Jessica, frustrated. Then Mr. Stockton’s chauffeur phoned from Holborn to say that he was almost at the British Museum, and Richard slid out of her head, like mercury trickling through her fingers.

“See anything?” asked Richard. Door shook her head and swallowed a mouthful of hastily chewed chicken leg. “It’s like playing ‘Spot the Pigeon’ in Trafalgar Square,” she said. “There’s nothing that feels like the Angelus. The paper said I’d know it if I saw it.” And she wandered off, inspecting angels, pushing her way past a Captain of Industry, the Deputy Leader of the Opposition, and the Highest-Paid Call Girl in the South of England. Richard turned away and found himself face-to-face with Jessica. Her hair was piled on her head, and it framed her face perfectly in corkscrews of chestnut curls. She was very beautiful. She was smiling at him; it was the smile that did it. “Hello Jessica,” he said. “How are you?”

“Hello. You won’t believe this,” she said, “but my assistant failed to make a note of your newspaper, Mister uh.”

“Paper?” said Richard.

“Did I say newspaper?” said Jessica, with a tinkling, sweet, and self-deprecating laugh. “Magazine . . . television station. You are with the media?”

“You’re looking very fine, Jessica,” said Richard.

“You have the advantage of me,” she said, smiling roguishly.

“You’re Jessica Bartram. You’re a marketing executive at Stocktons. You’re twenty-six. Your birthday is April the twenty-third, and in the throes of extreme passion you have a tendency to hum the Monkees song ‘I’m a Believer’ . . . “

Jessica was no longer smiling. “Is this some kind of joke?” she asked, coldly.

“Oh, and we’ve been engaged for the last eighteen months,” said Richard.

Jessica smiled nervously. Perhaps this really was some kind of joke: one of those jokes that everyone else seemed to get and she never did. “I rather think I’d know if I’d been engaged to someone for eighteen months, Mister um,” said Jessica.

“Mayhew,” said Richard helpfully. “Richard Mayhew. You dumped me, and I don’t exist anymore.”

Jessica waved, urgently, at no one in particular all the way across the room. “Be right there,” she called, desperately, and she began to back away.

“I’m a believer,” sang Richard, cheerfully, “I couldn’t leave her if I tried . . . “