Matthew experiences a confusion of feeling: mistrust, distress, incredulity, embarrassment. Stalling, he asks the girl where she comes from, but in fact that is already apparent from her accent. She replies that she comes from Northern Ireland. Why did you come over here? Matthew asks. To get away from the Troubles, the girl promptly answers. She launches into a spiel about the DSS, about lodgings that cost twenty pounds a night, about some letter that has gone astray. How old is the baby? Matthew asks, still playing for time, still trying to sort out his feelings. Two years old, replies the girl. The baby, Matthew notes, appears clean and well-fed. As indeed does the girl.
Matthew’s feelings refuse to be marshalled into any kind of order. He remains simultaneously shocked and sceptical. The girl’s patter is practised and fluent: too practised, too fluent. And yet … And yet … There rises up within him an ancestral suspicion of indigence, of fecklessness – the teaching of his parents. Another voice counters that everything she says may well be true, that London is indeed littered with homeless people, that the social services are notoriously overstretched. He havers, flustered; the girl continues to plead. At last he digs into his pocket and puts all his loose change into her hand. She inspects it, thrusts it into a purse, and does not say thank you. He walks on. He glances back once, but cannot see her.
*
The child squats under a cart. It is summer. Her stomach is full, for once, and she is warm. Sunlight slants across her legs and arms through the spokes of a wheel. She picks up a straw and traces the pattern; absorbed, she makes white scratch marks on her skin, until she is distracted by the events of the street. She freezes while a dog pauses to eye her (she was bitten, once), but the dog cocks a leg, merely, and moves on. She is alert to the passage of carts and baskets, from which scavengings might fall. She watches intently as one of that other kind of people goes by, the kind that smell of money, a man with clean clothes, a stick and a top hat. She considers darting out to beg, in an instinctive response, but he is gone, and it is too late. She returns to her straw and her white scratch marks and sees with interest that the lines of sunlight have moved, they lie differently on her skin. And it comes to her in sudden wisdom that this is because the sun moves around the sky. She knows this because in the morning it shines through the window of the room in which they live, and in the evenings it has gone. The room forms itself within her head, bringing with it a whiff of distress, a signal from the bad time when she was ill, a whisper of pain and misery. She recognises that there was then, and there is now, and the mercy of the gulf between, and she pushes the signal away.
‘Why are you picking things up and putting them down again all the time?’ said Jane.
‘I’m looking for a piece of paper I’ve lost.’
‘Here’s a piece of paper.’
‘Thank you. It’s not that one, I’m afraid.’
She followed him around the flat, observing with kindly detachment. ‘Why do you want it?’
‘It’s got an important telephone number on it.’
He sat down. Think. Think carefully. I rushed out immediately after Tony rang, didn’t get back till nearly midnight, after the evening at the Richardsons. Went straight to bed. No one else has been in the flat. It should be on the desk where I usually dump mail, or in my briefcase, or just lying around. Or in the wastepaper basket. It is in none of those places.
Check once more, just in case.
‘You’ve already looked there,’ said Jane.
‘I know I have.’
This morning I went to collect Jane at nine, the normal Saturday arrangement. A bit late, because I overslept. On the way back we went to Sainsbury’s, and then dropped my washing off at the launderette.
He headed for the door. ‘Jane! Come. We’re going back to the launderette.’
She trotted obediently behind him. ‘Why?’
‘Because I think that bit of paper is in the pocket of the trousers I put in the machine.’
‘The writing will have got washed off it,’ said Jane after a moment.
‘Possibly.’
Was it biro or tempo pen? Biro would probably be more tenacious. Please God may it have been biro. But by now the nice lady at the launderette will have unloaded my stuff and put it in the drier, noting that I have not returned, and being ever helpful.
As, indeed, she had. The drier, right now, was thumping and throbbing, panting forth hot air. ‘It’s got cooked,’ said Jane with interest. ‘I don’t think you’re going to be able to read the writing any more.’
‘Mmn,’ said Matthew.
The machine shuddered to a standstill. He opened the door, hauled out nicely toasted clothing. Fished in the pocket of his trousers and there, yes, was a folded scrap of paper, stained and wrinkled.
‘You should have been more careful,’ said Jane censoriously. ‘If it was important.’
‘Yes,’ he agreed.
The writing is both bleached and blurred. The signature can still be made out, and the message. But the numbers … Is that a seven or a two? An eight or a three?
Well, all is not lost. One will simply have to try every possible permutation, at whatever cost in nuisance to others and humiliation to oneself.
And so they walk back to the flat, Matthew carrying the clean washing and with the battered piece of paper in his shirt pocket. They stop off at the stationer’s for Jane to spend half her pocket money on some pencils she has had her eye on. Uplifted by this acquisition, she is in a buoyant and chatty mood as indeed, now, is Matthew. ‘It’s good you found your bit of paper,’ says Jane, tucking her hand into his. ‘If you lose a person’s telephone number you don’t know where they are any more. Except’ – the thought strikes her – ‘you could have looked them up in the telephone book, couldn’t you?’
‘I did,’ says Matthew. ‘This person isn’t in the book. That was why the bit of paper was rather important.’
‘What did people do to find other people when they hadn’t got telephone numbers?’ she continues, struck by another thought.
‘I suppose they very often lost each other,’ says Matthew.
They are walking past the shops, amid the Saturday crowds.
‘How many people are there in the world?’ demands Jane.
‘I’m not sure. Millions and millions. Thousands of millions.’
‘How many are there in London?’
‘Around eight million, give or take a few.’
‘Let’s count how many of them I know,’ says Jane. And she recites a litany. Relatives, friends, neighbours. And the Indian people in Mum’s corner shop and the lollipop lady and all the teachers in my school and the doctor and the receptionist at the surgery …
And people flow past them, a host of strangers, glimpsed for a moment and lost for ever. Swallowed by the city – gone, vanished as effectively as if they had died. The city unites and divides, with impartiality, with finality. Random circumstance flings people together – at work, at play – and separates them. Nowadays, technology imposes order – of a kind and up to a point. Telephones and telex reach into the darkness; machines talk to machines. But once … And Matthew is filled suddenly with a vision of the city as a place of terrifying haphazard loss and severance, of people circling in search of one another. Parents and children, friends, lovers. We have nothing but one another. He holds Jane’s hand a little tighter as they cross the road; he touches, for an instant, the paper in his pocket.
‘Mr Rutter would like to speak to you.’
Before Matthew could react Rutter was on the line. ‘Good morning to you. Life treating you all right, I hope?’
Until this moment, it was. ‘What do you want?’
‘A little chat, that’s all. Somewhere we can talk comfortably. I’m prepared to come along to your place. Now I can’t be fairer than that, can I?’
‘No, thank you,’ said Matthew. ‘Look, I thought I made it clear enough last time. I don’t wish to talk to you. There is nothing whatsoever for us to talk about.’
There was a short silence. When Rutter spoke again his tone had changed. No longer tolerant indulgence. ‘You’re making a mistake, my friend. You really are. I’ve told you already, Glympton’s aren’t getting that Spitalfields site, I am. I’m doing you a favour, that’s all. Trying to make things a bit easier for you. And there could be something in it for you as well, if you’d be a bit sensible.’
Matthew said nothing. This, apparently, was interpreted as encouragement. Rutter continued: ‘Glympton’s are rubbish. You don’t want to be doing business with them anyway. Only a fool would do business with Glympton’s, take my word for it. All you got to do is say you’re not interested.’
This man is mad, thought Matthew. Amoral and mad. I dare say it’s a common combination. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘Since I seem to be talking to you, like it or not, I may as well get things straight. You are offering me a financial inducement to refuse to accept a Glympton Holdings brief for the Spitalfields site, which I have neither tendered for nor been offered, in the event that Glympton Holdings should succeed in securing the site, which hitherto they have not. Right?’
Rutter laughed. ‘If you want to put it like that, Mr Halland.’
‘But why?’ said Matthew. ‘All Glympton’s have to do is go to another firm of architects.’
‘Ah. I knew you was working for them.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ Matthew exploded. He hung up. Three seconds later the phone rang. ‘We got cut off,’ said Rutter. ‘Sorry about that. Don’t you worry your head about whys and wherefores. I know what I’m at, believe you me. Glympton’s are silly buggers nosing in, that’s all. They’ll get what’s coming to them. I don’t stand for people messing me about. There’s a lot of people in this world very sorry they got in my way, I can tell you, my friend. Anyone working for Glympton’s is going to be sorry, you take it from me. So what I’d advise you, my friend, is …’
Matthew put the receiver down on his desk. It continued to crackle on. As soon as there was an intermission he picked it up: ‘I only have one thing to say. I have no connection whatsoever with either Glympton Holdings or the Spitalfields site. If you call me again I shall simply put the phone down. As many times as may be necessary. Goodbye.’
He replaced the receiver. Silence. Continued silence. Well, that’s that, let us hope. The fellow has to be given credit for crazed persistence, I suppose. So that is how people get rich.
With that bleached and foxed scrap of paper in front of him, he worked through the various possibilities. ‘I wonder if I could speak to Sarah Bridges … I’m so sorry. I wonder if I have the right number for Sarah Bridges … I’m so sorry.’ He encountered machines; he spoke to real people, who were patient or otherwise, according to temperament. Finally he achieved her answering machine. Her voice – noncommittal, of course, but pleasant, oh definitely pleasant. He said, ‘This is Matthew Halland. You very kindly sent me a note. I’ll call again at some point, and hope to find you in.’
‘Not tonight,’ said Alice Cook. ‘Sorry. I’ve got something on. Actually Thursday may be tricky, too. I’ll ring you, shall I?’
‘We’re going to be there for three whole weeks,’ said Jane. ‘And Mum’s friend’s coming for some of the time. You know, the nice one. Simon. And he knows how to sail boats and he’s going to get us a boat and we’re going to go sailing in it every day. Mum’s going to get me a yellow life-jacket. And we’re going to go fishing and he’s going to teach me how.’
‘Sarah Bridges is not available at the moment. If you would like to leave a message please do so after the bleep.’
*
London in high summer is a time of melancholy, not of celebration. The city becomes tawdry and stagnant, a receptacle for Coke tins and crisp packets. The grass in parks and squares is worn threadbare, down to dusty earth. The trees stand still and heavy. The sparkle has gone out of tubs and window boxes; the flowers begin to fade and die. The centre of town is awash with people who have nothing particular to do, drifting with backpacks and cameras. Elsewhere, the streets run with disaffected schoolchildren. The place has lost its sense of purpose. The days have no progression, it seems; time has ground to a halt, and people are without direction.
And Matthew decides that he will not after all go down to Devon to join the Whitworths at their cottage. He has not the stomach, just now, for a merry family holiday and, in that frame of mind, would not add to the gaiety of nations; the Whitworths are better off without him. He will stay in London, catch up with a backlog of work, and maybe take a day off here and there for his own purposes. He will go to the pictures; look about the place; read books. He has never been a person for whom solitude holds horrors. Loneliness and solitude are very different things, as he well knows.
It is not too bad, this fallow period. He takes in a couple of good films, enjoys a concert at the Festival Hall. He visits the galleries into which it is not possible to lure Jane. He misses her; tries not to think of the yellow life-jacket, this fishing tuition. On many evenings he sits reading in the flat, beside the open window, in the wing-back chair with battered red velvet upholstery. This chair bears the attritions of hard service: a long stain down one arm where Susan slopped a glass of wine, a cigarette burn – perpetrator unknown – the ineradicable snail trails of Jane’s sticky infant fingers. He tries to view it, these days, as simply a comfortable, convenient chair, and ignore these emotive scars; sometimes this works and sometimes it does not.
From the chair, on these August evenings, with the curtains undrawn, he can occasionally see the stars, when the miasma of the city permits. City stars are polluted – frailer creatures than the crisp brilliants that pepper country skies. Nevertheless, he can identify, can name names. He is surprised by how much survives of that boyhood craze of his. The map of the heavens is more familiar than he had realized. He fetches his binoculars; constellations and individuals leap into greater clarity. There is Mars, distinctly red, hanging low over St Pancras. And there, of course, is Polaris and good old Betelgeuse. Orion and Ursa Major. Could that be Cassiopeia? Perseus? He seeks out eventually one of his old astronomy books, smelling of damp, with his name in stilted schoolboy script.
Hercules, Taurus, Sagittarius. Mars, Venus, Pluto. The dead and dancing sky is mysteriously charted in languages which are no longer spoken; the graffiti of the stars, the imagined conjunctions of gas clouds billions of miles apart, commemorate the mythology of a departed people. The scientists of the twentieth century classify the stars by the letters of the Greek alphabet. The gods and heroes of ancient Greece are still going about their business above our heads, night after night. The world turns against the backdrop of this archaic reference system. The newspapers, this week, carry photographs of Neptune’s moon, beamed across four billion kilometres by the travelling, ticking robot creature Voyager 2. Neptune’s moon is named for Triton, the conch-blowing offspring of Poseidon and Amphitrite. It is as though these silent worlds of fire, ice and gas, whirling in their immeasurable distances of time and space, have for ever so disturbed the human imagination that they can only be approached by attaching to them the codes of a known system. They are the one stability in lives of flux, the only constant. They are inconceivable, and essential. They cannot be understood, and so must be labelled.
And Matthew, contemplating the city sky from his chair, his old Astronomy for Beginners in his hand (‘From Mum and Dad, Christmas 1960’) finds a curious solace. He tries to isolate and establish, to impose order on that glittering assembly; he watches the red and white lights of a plane track from east to west; he grapples for a while with the concept of distance. And he remembers that he did much the same thing, aged thirteen, in the back garden of his parents’ house. With the same perplexity, the same amazement.
‘Hello?’
‘Is that Sarah Bridges?’
‘It is.’
‘Ah,’ he said. Mildly panic-stricken, now. What am I doing? This is undoubtedly the most appalling mistake. ‘This is Matthew Halland. I’ve tried to
get you a couple of times or so. I expect you’ve been away. I …’
‘Yes. I have. Sorry. Holiday.’
‘Good one, I hope?’
‘Yes, very. The Hebrides. I hadn’t been there before.’
‘Wet?’ enquired Matthew.
‘Yes, quite wet.’
That will do, on the Hebrides, for the time being, at any rate. ‘It was nice of you to drop me a line. I hope you didn’t mind my leaving that message. I just wondered if …’
‘Well,’ she said. ‘It was nice of you to buy me a sandwich.’
‘Oh, good heavens … My pleasure. I mean, anyone would have done the same.’
‘Not absolutely anyone,’ said Sarah Bridges.
‘Well, plenty of people.’ No more of this. Get on with it. Actually the poor girl sounds as dubious as I feel. Also wondering what the hell she is doing. ‘I wondered if we could meet sometime and eat our sandwiches together. I mean, if you often lunch around there. Perhaps we could do a little better than a sandwich. Do you know that wine bar in Great Turnstile?’
She did indeed. And so it was arranged. Oh well, thought Matthew, the worst will be humiliation or embarrassment. Neither of them terminal conditions.
Eleven
In youth, of course, he had approached women with ease and without compunction. He had known all the rituals, then; so, too, did the women. You all knew where you were, from the first exchanged glances through overtures and manoeuvres to acceptance or rejection. It was an invigorating game with established moves, even if it occasionally ended in tears. And then there had been Susan and he had not played the game any more. He found promiscuity slightly mysterious. During all the years that he loved Susan he had not wanted to go to bed with anyone else. There had been the occasional frisson of sexual interest, of course, the recognition of someone attractive and desirable, but never anything compelling, disturbing, nothing that made him waver for an instant from the conviction that it was her he wanted, and no one else.