‘I’m still here,’ said Matthew. Graham’s window must have been open; behind his voice could be heard a stream of song from one of those canaries. And then the rattle of a trolley over the cobblestones.
‘You may have read about it. There was a paragraph in one of the papers.’
‘I think I did. I hadn’t made the connection.’ Some brief news item – the overworked words stifling the reality: fire; child; death. ‘I’ve come across this man Rutter, as it happens.’
‘Have you really? Well, I should steer clear of him, if I were you. It’s a rougher world than one realizes. Maybe they have a point – my more entrenched neighbours, with their gaslights and their panelling.’
‘Theirs seems to me a pretty fey view of the eighteenth century,’ said Matthew. ‘If they’re after authenticity I hope they’re also denying themselves such anachronisms as modern medical facilities and the various public services.’
‘Dear me. I’d forgotten what a no-nonsense fellow you are. But you’re quite right, of course. Long live the Health Service and the Metropolitan Police.’
The conversation was concluded. Matthew put the phone down.
An overcrowded, dilapidated terrace house is indeed a fire trap. Faulty wiring, dangerous cooking facilities, careless inhabitants; it happens every day, up and down the country. Or, someone could lend a hand. Shove a handful of blazing paper through the letter box in the small hours and hope to strike lucky. Make off fast, and who can prove anything?
No, you’d hardly believe it. Except, he thought, that I do.
Twelve
Matthew’s street, in summer, burst into flower. Each façade began in May to bloom with window-boxes and hanging baskets from which cascaded tongues of ivy, drifts of sparkling lobelia, bright torrents of fuchsia. Pots and tubs on doorsteps overflowed with petunias, geraniums, Busy Lizzie. The front of the local pub became a floral cliff – cloaked from top to bottom in an eruption of pink, scarlet, magenta, blue, silver, white and green. By midsummer the whole place was in rampant bloom, with only the occasional withered and fading frontage marking out a household away on holiday. Matthew, no gardener himself, appreciated this display, which seemed some act of defiance against rubbish-strewn pavements and polluted air. Sometimes, faced with a long day in the office, he would get up in good time and go for a brisk walk in the neighbouring streets and squares and then, in the clarity and emptiness of the early morning, this festive quality of the normally sober terraces was at its height. You moved through a garden.
It was on these occasions, with no one else around except postmen, paper boys with orange sacks and a few foraging dogs, that he had several times come across the wild-looking young man. Wearing jeans and a T-shirt with logo of a grinning cartoon face he strode down the centre of the road, shouting. Looking neither to right nor left, forging ahead, shouting at the closed houses, the empty streets. ‘We’re going to fight, you know!’ he shouted. ‘We’re going to fight the fuckers! We’ll get the fucking Giro! Fuckers!’ He would turn a corner, and then five minutes later Matthew would meet up with him again, plunging on, hurling himself purposelessly, it seemed, across the city, empty-handed, shouting. And Matthew would continue on his way, chilled. What wretched, fouled-up life had he glimpsed? Amid the flowers.
And now in September the flowers were losing their glow. The young man was seen no more, lingering only as an image of disquiet, of unease, of the city’s soft underbelly.
When Rutter telephoned Matthew was taken entirely unawares. There were no preliminaries – no intermediary voice. Just that nasal tone, instantly recognized. ‘Mr Halland? I thought it was time we had another word. You ended up talking off the top of your head before, and that was silly. I thought you’d like to know things are progressing quite nicely down in Spitalfields. Far as I’m concerned, that is. I don’t think Glympton’s people are feeling very happy.’
Matthew was silent. I should hang up, he thought. And then: no, that is exactly what I should not do.
‘You still with me?’
‘I’m here,’ said Matthew.
‘Ah, so we’re talking, are we? That’s very sensible, my friend. Very sensible.’
‘What is the point of this phone call?’
‘You want to know what’s the point of this phone call? I make a lot of phone calls, Mr Halland. I’m a busy man. You don’t get where I am by sitting on your arse wondering what to do next, you know. You want to get ahead in this world you move in before other people do. I’m everywhere, my friend, let me tell you. I’ve got eyes in the back of my head. I’m making this phone call because I think you may want to tell your friends at Glympton’s how things stand. They may as well face facts. There’s no way they can develop that site now without I sell them my properties, and I’m not doing that. There’s no negotiation, far as that’s concerned. But if they want to know what’s good for them, then you tell them all they got to do is have a chat with me about a price on their holdings. We can come to an arrangement that’ll be satisfactory all round.’
‘I see,’ said Matthew. ‘Satisfactory to all concerned.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Except people like the unfortunate Bengali family who lost their child in a fire.’
There was the briefest of pauses. ‘Ah, yes. Shame about that. But they’ve only got theirselves to thank for it, I’m afraid. They cook on open fires, you know. What can you expect?’
‘This happened at three in the morning, I understand. Not a normal mealtime.’
A more considerable pause. ‘What are you getting at, my friend?’
‘It seems to me that this fire was arson. And that your henchmen may have had something to do with it. In other words, you.’
‘I don’t think I care for that suggestion,’ said Rutter, slowly and in a new voice.
‘Neither do I. In fact I would find it barely credible were it not for your remarks about your methods of dislodging recalcitrant tenants.’
‘What methods, Mr Halland? I don’t think I know what you’re talking about. I think maybe you’ve got a bit of a vivid imagination.’
Matthew was silent for a moment. ‘In view of the Spitalfields fire, I intend to repeat to the police your comments about how you deal with uncooperative tenants.’
‘What comments? I don’t think the police would be very interested in hearing stories about comments that wasn’t ever made. They’ve got better things to do with their time, haven’t they? You still there, Mr Halland? You’ve gone all quiet on me. Because there’s another point I’m going to make and that is that I don’t like people interfering in things that’s none of their business. You can go and chat up the fucking police if that amuses you, my friend, but I wouldn’t advise you to. You’d be wasting your time. You might even be doing yourself a bad turn. You wouldn’t want my minders to be getting interested in you, would you?’
‘That remark constitutes a threat.’
‘What remark, Mr Halland?’
‘There’s such a thing as the rule of law.’
Rutter laughed. ‘Up to a point, my friend, up to a point. The law’s what you make of it, far as I’m concerned. I’ve never had too much trouble with the law. You don’t get anywhere in this world by poncing around worrying about the law. I wouldn’t be …’
Matthew slammed the receiver down. He was juddering, he realized, as though gripped by intense cold. This was what was meant by shaking with anger, then. A new experience, at this pitch. He sat staring at the phone for a few moments, then reached for the directory to search out the number of his local police station.
He was possessed, in the ensuing days, by the thought of Rutter. He told himself that most people are not like this, that such a man is an aberration, a sport, a freak. Most people are constrained by natural inclination or by social conditioning to moderate their greed and treat one another with a degree of charity. Everyone is preoccupied with self, but most learn, if only out of expediency, to temper the preoccupation and acknowledge the exi
stence of others. He told himself all this, and continued to see Rutter in the innocent faces of passers-by, of the assistant in his newsagent, of a potential client. Rutter’s language overlaid the anodyne exchanges of colleagues or of strangers. He saw that the man was simultaneously risible and appalling, contemptible and fearsome. The classic combination. And the world, apparently, accommodates such people. It furnishes them with means and opportunity. It prescribes their behaviour, and facilitates their progress. They know just how they stand and act accordingly.
When he was about nine years old, the playground of his school had been dominated by a pair of bullies and their satellites. These two, distinguished only by a quality of strident aggression and some sort of compulsive energy, operated a protection racket which determined whether or not others might occupy play space and be exempt from the kicks and thumps of the satellite force. Some children were able to buy peace and Lebensraum with sweets or comics; others – randomly selected, it seemed – were denied even that mercy and condemned to a fugitive life on the perimeter of the tarmac, loitering against the wire or skulking in the toilets in a pathetic attempt to survive the play periods unscathed. The teachers, Olympian figures exempt from this daily hell, were distantly aware of the situation and made occasional efforts to police the playground. When they did, the bullies played football decorously and the teachers were reassured in their belief that things weren’t really that bad. As soon as they had gone, the bullies got back to business again. Matthew, one of those condemned to live on his wits and spend much of every day with thumping heart and sinking stomach, felt that he moved between two mutually exclusive worlds. Walking out of the school, heading for home, he entered a haven of order and justice. Here, if disagreeable things happened to you it was probably your own fault; you had been disobedient or cheeky or untruthful and deserved the ensuing disapproval. The hand of fate was another matter, but at least you had moral support – if you were ill or injured everyone was nice to you. But each morning he was faced with the prospect of moving back into the anarchic lawlessness of school. He saw the distinction, and longed to grow up.
*
‘Is that Sarah Bridges?’
‘Yes?’
‘This is Matthew Halland. I … Well, I just wondered … I enjoyed our lunch the other day and then somehow we seemed to lose each other.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘We did.’
‘I lost sight of you for a moment and then you’d disappeared. I looked all over for you.’
‘Oh. I looked for you too, actually.’
A pause, in which Matthew savoured the uprush of satisfaction. A simple misunderstanding. A mistake.
‘Ichthyosauruses swim,’ said Sarah Bridges. ‘Swam, rather.’
‘What? Oh … Oh, I see. Thanks. I had a feeling they did. How clever of you to find out.’
‘No problem. I got quite absorbed.’
‘You’ve set my mind at rest. Thanks again.’ He took a breath. Continued boldly. ‘Could we meet again fairly soon?’
And she has no objection, it seems.
‘So …’ said Alice, beaming at him over a glass of mineral water spiked with lemon. ‘How are things with you?’
‘Not bad,’ said Matthew guardedly. ‘Not bad on the whole.’ They were sitting at a table in the Covent Garden precinct in the early evening, a meeting arranged by Alice in a breezy and somewhat unexpected phone call: ‘Long time no see … Have you got an hour after work today? I’ll be killing time before a theatre.’
Alice was vibrant. There was no other word for it. She gleamed with good health – skin aglow, dark curls bubbling. Matthew studied her, with guilt and a touch of unease. ‘You’re looking very well, Alice. Good holiday?’
‘Holiday? Oh Christ, that was ages ago. I’d forgotten we hadn’t seen each other for so long. It’s October, Matthew.’
‘So it is … Honestly, I don’t know what happens to the time. It always seems to be next week before you know where you are. I’ve been up to my eyes. Blackwall, Cobham Square, one thing and another. I rang you – more than once. And then there was …’
‘Matthew,’ said Alice. ‘This is not recrimination time.’ She beamed again.
Matthew subsided. ‘Ah. So anyway …’
‘The thing is,’ she continued. ‘I’m pregnant.’
He stared. ‘Alice!’
‘Don’t worry, it’s not yours.’
He reached out, grabbed her hand. ‘Alice … I’m so glad for you. That’s the best news in ages. Terrific!’
‘Isn’t it!’ There she sat, exuding well-being. People flowed past. A string quartet was in action. The precinct pigeons picked up a living around the café tables.
‘Who …’ Matthew began delicately.
‘A guy I’ve met. Well, obviously.’ She giggled.
‘I hope …’
‘We shall see. Maybe and maybe not. I’m crossing bridges as I get to them. Right now everything’s good. He’s all for it, too. The baby.’
‘I’m really glad, Alice. You’ve made my day.’
‘And what’s new with you?’
‘I can’t compete. Nothing much. Work. I got further embroiled with that dreadful fellow I told you about.’
‘Him with the Rottweilers? Gosh – tell me.’
She listened intently. ‘How absolutely ghastly. It’s incredible. I mean, how can there be people like that? So what did the police say?’
‘The police expressed cautious interest. The police don’t go in for being either shocked or surprised. They – or rather he – shook his head thoughtfully from time to time and wrote things down. It’s like being an adolescent in conversation with some worldly uncle who’s seen it all and doesn’t want to spoil your youthful illusions. They know all about people like Rutter. About Rutter specifically, I suspect.’
‘But what are they doing, then?’
‘You may well ask. So did I. They were pursuing enquiries. They thanked me for my information.’
‘Of course they have to be able to prove it …’
‘They do indeed. There’s the rub.’
‘D’you think they were going to have him in and talk to him? The Rottweiler character.’
‘Hard to say.’
‘Well, I think it’s horrific. If people can do that sort of thing and get away with it. It’s scary. I mean, this isn’t the middle ages.’
But Alice was away in a private bubble of content. The vehemence of her speech, the vigour of her outrage – quite genuine, quite unforced – were at odds with her aura of roseate tranquillity. She looked as though at any moment she might gently levitate. And Matthew, infected by this, felt a rush of warmth. He leaned across the table and kissed her. ‘Whoops!’ said Alice, giggling again. ‘Let’s not get carried away … Help – look at the time! I’m meeting my bloke at seven.’
It was darkening. They walked out into the evening streets. It had been raining; the cobbled expanse around the precinct shone black and gold. There was a smell of coffee – and flowers. They were passing the florist’s stall, a rainbow in the city night. Matthew stopped and delved in his pocket. ‘Hey – what’s this!’ said Alice. He thrust red carnations into her arms: ‘It’s for nothing – and everything.’
A few minutes later, alone, Matthew stood at the side of Charing Cross Road, thinking of Alice’s child, whom in all probability he would never know, but with whom he would have a tenuous link. He waited for a gap in the traffic, and saw lives as a web of connections, random and mysterious.
*
The child loiters on the edge of the known universe. She looks through the river of vehicles, past wheels and the legs of horses to the alien shore beyond – the streets and buildings that reach away into infinity. Behind her is the hub of things, the maze of alleys through which she can slip with ease and knowledge. She peers, curious and wary, into that nowhere outside.
A passing omnibus sprays water from the gutter and she darts backwards to the shelter of a wall. She squats alongside rubbish and
a pile of old rags, watching the world go by, waiting for some opportunity to seize. The pile of rags twitches, and the child sees that it is inhabited. At its centre is a face, a face that is ridged and grooved and stubbled, from which a pair of bleary eyes gazes impassively. The child stares into these faded eyes, across a puddle of water in which she can see her own reflection – her face as grimy as the face that inhabits the rags, but different, she perceives, profoundly different. She glimpses, suddenly, the span of a lifetime, and its weight.
And then the bleary eyes close. The rags heave once, and start to snore. The child observes, and observes too that from one filthy fold there protrudes a hunk of bread. She considers taking this. She edges forward to do so, but all at once she hesitates, in the clutch of a sensation which she cannot identify. It is as though she were invaded by a stranger who has feelings that are not her feelings, responses that are not hers. And yet she has no choice but to defer to this stranger. The bread is there for the taking – she could snatch it up and be off, without fear of retribution. But she does not, and cannot. She sits there in the dirt, surprised and enlightened.