Looking Down by Frances Fyfield Page A

on the second attempt. Three months before, the girl’s elbows had been bigger than her knees, until the Fritzes fed her, and Sarah remembered the bare knees. Amazing what food did. Sarah’s impression was that she was not as frail as Fritz thought; simply an ageless girlwho had seen too much and was marked by desperation, but not helpless yet. A girl with a hardened heart, capable, therefore, of anything. Frightened but fierce, sinking but not drowning. Minty hung washing on the balcony; Sarah could just see from her window where the line had broken and hung down into the well, as if she had given up. Why hadn’t she and Richard and Fritz joined forces and marched up to the door and demanded to know who she was? Because Minty chose not, and the Chinese paid the bulk of Fritz’s wage, and that was not the way things were done. And because, to be honest, Sarah had not wanted to get more than minimally involved. Her life was in control and that was how she wanted it to be. She did not want it riddled with pity.
    Sarah turned back and looked at the frontage of the block. It was a confused design, Edwardian deco, originally experimental with lots of linear twiddles and red brick, built for luxury, descending to penury and shabbiness in the nineteen sixties, narrowly missing demolition fifteen years later and then restored to dignity at the beginning of the last decade. Now odd, but posh. A safe place for the conduct of private lives. The man who had left Sarah her flat in an astonishing piece of generosity may have thought it was still worth the pittance he had paid for it twenty years earlier. She was immensely grateful and yet it increased her debt to the world. She had not deserved it; no one did. And it was a flawed place, so solid and secure that it could contain with apparent impunity a slave, kept by people who could have afforded to hire an army to clear their stable.
    None of these reflections were part of any firm moral agenda on the subject of asylum seekers, their criminal gangs, Albanian women with drugged babies wailing and begging in the Underground in a way which deadened pity. It made sense to Sarah that the deprived of the world should descend upon the relatively rich – who wouldn’t? She didn’t know what she thoughtabout it as a global problem, but then she tried to avoid having opinions. She didn’t envy politicians who had to have opinions without the luxury of being able to change their minds, and all she could really care about was individuals, one by one. There was no time to trouble the mind about what she could not change. Sarah Fortune was hell-bent on a quiet life, avoiding other people’s pain.
    Outside the block, beyond the glass doors and double-glazed windows, the noise of the traffic hit like a body blow, a reminder of how quiet it was within. Noise could never penetrate to the well of the building, and from where she stood the place looked impregnable, as safe as it felt inside. No one ever remembered that dark, interior well, or the tiny back door to the service area where Fritz kept rubbish. It looked as if it led to nowhere, unless you were Steven, always looking for a route.
    Sarah could not run down this street because it was too crowded. There were shops: the florist’s, the jeweller’s, the wine shop, with tourists and people of all kinds en route to mysterious, urgent destinations. It would have been nice to run, because the thought of Steven made her not only want to run away from him, but also towards him. She was not going to feel guilty about him. She was not going to feel guilty about being a lady who lunched with men and went to bed with them in the afternoons if it suited them both. It wasn’t as if it happened every day. She was not going to feel guilty about anything, except perhaps leisure. Leisure did not come naturally. Steven might be right: she had too much of it, although there never seemed enough. Perhaps she should get a job, but she had had a job for fifteen