Failed … Or chosen to fail. It’s the old story he’s been hearing since he was eight years old. ‘Simon is a boy who could go far, but is hampered by his own sheer mental laziness.’ Simon will never climb past the middle of any ladder, let alone to the top. Simon is a reasonably competent civil servant. He quite likes his work. The sense that not too much is expected of him is a relief rather than a goad. Simon is a good chap. One of us. If a copy of the Railway Magazine strays from Simon’s briefcase at lunchtime, it does him no harm.
He ought to have stayed at Cambridge. He might have written a book.
Idiotic. He didn’t get his First. He’d always known he wasn’t going to. He hadn’t a first-class mind.
He must put the briefcase in the shed in the back garden for now, and leave the side gate unbolted. In the morning, he’ll nip up the path and fetch it, after he’s said goodbye to Lily and the children. Then he’ll go straight down to King’s Cross, to the left-luggage office. After that the bloody thing will be out of the way and he won’t have to think of it again.
He listens. Sometimes, even now, Lily gets up to check that the children are all right. But tonight everything is still. They are all fast asleep and they know nothing. Simon looks around the room. There is Lily’s pile of marking, all done. After that she would have laid the table for breakfast. She doesn’t like a mad rush in the mornings …
There are a few twigs of winter-flowering cherry in a blue jug by the toast-rack. She must have gone out in the dark to pick them.
He thinks that he can still smell the cartridge burning.
6
One Way Out
Simon picks up the receiver and hears heavy breathing. There’s a scrabble, followed by a grunt of annoyance. ‘Dropped the sodding receiver in what passes for breakfast,’ says Giles.
‘How are you feeling?’
‘Bloody awful.’
‘You must be getting on all right, if they let you have breakfast.’
Another grunt, then: ‘I can make a telephone call, if that’s what you mean. How did you get on?’
‘At your flat, you mean?’
‘You found the file all right?’
‘Yes.’ Simon runs the telephone cord between finger and thumb, then squeezes it hard in his left hand. The silence develops. He should say something, but what? He nearly gave his own name at the left-luggage office, but remembered just in time and wrote ‘Stephen Cartwright’ on the form. The briefcase is in the left-luggage office at King’s Cross. The cartridge is in the stove. Simon is at his desk. It all reminds him of Bridgie’s school reading books and he finds he is smiling.
‘I can’t hear you.’
‘I said, “Yes”.’ He is not in Giles’s world, whatever Giles may think. He is in his own. ‘I found it all right.’
And it must all be there in his voice, because Giles is silent, breathing. In the background, Simon can hear hospital sounds.
‘Have you taken it back?’ asks Giles at last, and Simon is back in prep school Latin, learning the form for ‘Questions expecting the answer “No”’.
‘Not yet.’
‘Why the hell not?’ He’s querulous now, but also, Simon thinks, relieved by that weaselly ‘yet’.
‘It’s a bit awkward.’
‘It’ll be more than a bit bloody awkward for me, if you don’t pull your finger out. Or’ – his voice changes, becomes charged with something Simon doesn’t quite want to name – ‘do you mean that it’s awkward at this particular moment?’
He means, is anyone else within earshot? Or is the business of putting the file back turning out to be trickier than Giles thought, for some other reason? Brenda away, for instance? Complicity, that’s what it’s called. I was mistaken, Simon thinks. It hasn’t crossed Giles’s mind that I won’t do as he wants. He thinks he’s got me. Am I going to go on letting him think that?
The plaited telephone cord is printed into Simon’s palm. ‘No,’ he says. ‘It’s always going to be awkward, Giles, as far as I’m concerned. The file’s in a safe place. I shan’t discuss the matter with anyone. But I can’t muck about with a file like that.’
There’s a hissing, whistling silence, as if the line has been cut. This goes on for a few seconds, and then the receiver clatters into its rest.
And now, drugged to the eyeballs and woozy as he is, Giles swings into action. He is black with fury against Simon. Christ! He sounded like a headmaster chiding some boy about a confiscated dirty book. Who the hell does he think he is? Ask him to do the simplest thing, and he not only cocks it up but has the temerity to make it sound as if Giles is the one at fault. Rage and self-righteousness course through Giles. Simon has left him no choice. Now, if he can get that telephone into position, it should be perfectly possible to take off the receiver, dial and then lift the receiver, all with one hand. He won’t be forced to rely on that fool of a girl to dial for him.
It is bloody difficult. By the time he gets the connection, he is sweating and exhausted, which does nothing to improve his temper.
‘Good morning, is that the Sunbeam Laundry?’ asks Giles.
‘I’m afraid you have the wrong number. This is Wilkes’ Tea Importers.’
‘I beg your pardon. Good morning.’ He replaces the receiver. Time to go through the whole childish performance again. ‘Good morning, is that Wilkes’ Tea Importers?’
‘Yes, Wilkes’ Tea Importers, which department, please?’
‘Put me through to Mr Thompson, would you?’
A series of clicks and whistles. The nurse outside Giles’s room glances incuriously, professionally, at her patient on the other side of the glass. Pulse, temperature and fluids chart in twenty minutes.
Without announcement, a different voice speaks in Giles’s ear: ‘You should not call me on this number. Brown has been to the flat. Everything else is organised. Your chum has taken the subject back?’ It’s the man Giles knows as Alex. Chum. Where in God’s name do they learn their English?
‘The thing is, there’s been a slight hitch.’ And then he hears himself go on, stupidly – because of the bloody anaesthetic, that’s what it is; the real Giles would never talk like that: ‘I’m sure I can sort it out. Just give me a chance—’
Alex’s voice sharpens. ‘Go on.’
Giles goes on. The man at the end of the line doesn’t speak until Giles finishes, and then all he says, quite softly, is, ‘How long will it be before the subject is missed?’
‘I’m not absolutely sure. Just possibly tomorrow morning.’ Even as he says it, he knows that Alex knows it’s a lie.
‘This really is a frightful nuisance, old boy.’
Giles hears his own tone coming back at him, mocking him. Now Alex can show his contempt. Unreliable, that’s Giles. Bloody drunkard, falling downstairs, risking everything, and then making another balls-up when he tries to put things right. Alex will sacrifice Giles immediately. He’s always known that.
The bed is rank and sweaty. His leg itches. Silence hisses through the telephone line, but he knows that Alex is still at the other end. Silence is also a weapon. Here Giles lies like a pig on a spit, unable to do a bloody thing. His mind clicks on, measuring the distance it must travel to safety. What the bloody hell did Simon think he was playing at? I can’t muck about with a file like that. Too pure to pretend you don’t know what you’re doing, for the sake of good old Giles. You won’t sully yourself. You don’t want to be down in the dirt.
Now it’s rising in him, a groundwater of anger that’s been gathering for years. You married a woman called Lily, for fuck’s sake. Pure as the lilies in the sodding dell. You didn’t want me, says his mind, lifting layer after layer, finding the raw place. Long-ago rages and humiliations, fresh as the paint on a canvas hidden behind another canvas for decades. And the fear. He’s always had his get-out more than half-fixed, but he won’t be slipping away to Bergen with half a ton of plaster and pulleys attached to his leg. He’s trapped. A sitting duck.
Frith will have him. He
’ll sit at Giles’s bedside, night and day, implacable, until Giles is well enough to be taken into custody. Mr Plod. All Giles’s brains and wit and quickness – all that he is – won’t help him. They’ll pull out the coils of his double life – all those years, his cleverness – and by the time they’ve finished his guts will be all over the floor.
Everything falls away. Oscar Wilde stood on a platform at Clapham Junction for half an hour, in shackles and prison uniform. Presumably, those in charge of his transfer made sure that there would be that half an hour of utter disgrace. It wasn’t enough for them that he’d lost everything and was on his way to pick oakum. His gaolers looked the other way and left him to it as a crowd gathered to shove and shout and jeer. One man spat in his face.
‘I, once a lord of language, have no words in which to express my anguish and my shame.’
A man in prison uniform covered with arrows, jailed for sodomy. That’s what comes of trying to be so funny. Who’s laughing now?
Have you heard the latest about Giles Holloway?
Marigold says she always knew that there was something not quite right about him.
He’d have cleared off like Burgess and Maclean if it hadn’t been for his accident.
Oh, come on, surely you’re not saying Giles Holloway was in the same league as those two. From what I gather, he was just an errand boy. Yes, I know, getting a bit old for an errand boy …
It’s all rather seedy.
‘I must say to myself that I ruined myself, and that nobody great or small can be ruined except by his own hand.’
A fat, queer traitor, a drunkard and a bungler. Who’s laughing now?
‘I hope that you have got a bright idea,’ says Alex.
Giles has only got one. There’s one way out. Simon.
All day it has been streaming wet, but now ragged holes have appeared in the cloud cover. Sometimes they show the moon. It looks as if it’s racing across the sky, but of course that’s an illusion. Simon has been working late for once, and was just about to go home when he had a message that old Firclough wanted him. After what seemed like hours of Firclough’s mouth opening and shutting, it turned out to be something perfectly trivial: a list of submarine movements that wasn’t completed correctly by some underling who was apparently, suddenly, Simon’s responsibility.
Lights are still on, high up in the buildings; policemen change shift. There are always lights burning, and always policemen on guard.
It’s only a step from the Admiralty to Charing Cross, but he’s going in the other direction, down Whitehall. He’ll go as far as Derby Gate, then along the Embankment as far as Northumberland Avenue, and back up again. The smell of the water will clear his head. He doesn’t want to go home until he has decided what to do. He doesn’t want to bring all this home with him.
He never takes the bus from Highgate: always walks. Up the hill, then along Woodland Gardens and The Chine, across and upward through the narrow grid of streets until he reaches the terrace where he would never have imagined himself living. All the way uphill and home. That’s what Lily tells the children, when they tire and pull on her hands. Lily believes in walking. But he’s forgetting: only Bridgie is still young enough to whinge. When he’s away from Lily, the image that comes when he thinks of her and the children dates from years back: Lily pushing the big pram up the road to the shops against the wind, with the baby as fat as an emperor under the canopy, Sally on a seat across the body of the pram, and Paul alongside, clutching the ivory pram handle. Sally was a hopeless walker, until she went to school. Lily leans forward as she pushes the weight of the pram uphill. Her hair whips over her face. She presses her lips together and pushes harder.
A muscle twitches in his cheek. It’s been the hell of a day, he tells himself, and the banality of the words almost calms him. Once or twice a year he’ll come home and burst open the front door, raging against the whole damned lot of them and how the office is eating up his life. ‘It’s been the hell of a day,’ he’ll explode, and she’ll advance, pushing back her hair, not at all disconcerted, saying something like, ‘The collar on that shirt’s worn, I hadn’t realised – and they’ve given me an extra half-day’s teaching. That’s good, isn’t it?’ and she’ll smile. No matter what his day is or was, her smile says it’s over and it can’t follow him here.
That won’t work tonight. He has got to fetch the briefcase from the left-luggage office. He can’t think why he was such a fool as to take it there in the first place. He filled out the form and took the ticket, and then suddenly, hours later, while watching the end of Firclough’s nose as he spoke – a little twitch every sentence or so, he’d never noticed it before – Simon realised what he’d done. If Simon didn’t come back for the case, they would look inside it for a name and address, and then they’d find the file. Why the hell hadn’t he burned it, along with the cartridge? But that wouldn’t have solved anything: Giles would have asked where it was, the file would be missed – and that file is the only evidence that Simon hasn’t dreamed up the whole business.
There’s a bit of a flap on about Giles. Comings and goings down the corridor. Rumours that the piles of fag ash and papers on Giles’s desk are being sorted out at last. That man Frith has been in there all day. Giles has come a cropper, they say. Poor old bugger has fallen downstairs and smashed his leg. He won’t be back for weeks. Simon says nothing. The talk of the office washes around him while his heart beats with uneven strokes.
He can’t remember when he last felt like this. Uneasy, as if something toxic is bubbling away inside him. Not knowing, for the life of him, what to do. Maybe it was that first night at Bradenham, after his parents had driven away, when hundreds of other boys surged around him, shoving him out of their way as if he weren’t Simon Callington of Stopstone House, Stopstone, Norfolk, England, the World, the Universe, Outer Space, but anyone or anything at all. If he’d looked down at his hands and seen them transformed to a pig’s trotters, he wouldn’t have been surprised.
It seems a hundred years since he put on his clean white shirt that morning, upstairs in their bedroom, at half past seven. The light was murky, and the street-lamps were still on. Simon went to the window as he always did, tying his tie with automatic fingers, gazing over the city and its lights.
‘You can see as far as the Surrey Hills,’ the estate agent had boasted when they came to view the house. Simon had never set foot in Muswell Hill in his life. He didn’t know what to make of the narrow hall and long strip of garden that ran down to a disused railway line. Whether or not the house was worth two thousand pounds, he hadn’t the faintest idea. But Lily had gone straight to the bedroom window and leaned out.
‘It’s beautiful,’ she’d said quietly, so that only Simon could hear, and then she’d turned to the estate agent and begun to bargain. He had put out his hand to stop her, before he realised that the estate agent was listening, really listening, as Lily discussed with un-English frankness what they would pay and what they would expect for the price.
Hundreds and hundreds of clean white shirts, a fresh one each morning. How many years of clean shirts? Paul was two, Sally one, Bridgie not yet born when they moved into the house. The children had loved it from the first minute. Lily kept a dustbin full of clay in the kitchen, and they modelled birds and animals and queer little families to which they gave names he couldn’t remember. They would play like that for hours on end, and then they’d be out in the garden in their siren suits in all weathers. He used to have tiger hunts with them in the dark, when he came home, and then he’d bring them in, Paul and Sally standing on his shoes and clinging to his legs, Bridget in his arms.
Every morning the faint smell of Imperial Leather, and a splash of the cologne Lily bought him at Christmas. Lily seeing him off, rubbing her cheek against his smooth face, kissing him on the lips. And then he was out of the front door, swinging down the steep steps and on to the street. He always turned and waved to the children. But now they’re too old for clustering at the
window in their pyjamas. They’re busy, clattering up and down the stairs, getting ready for school. Bridget can’t find her shoes; Paul hasn’t got a shirt—
His body is clammy with sweat and his shirt sticks to him unpleasantly. He can’t go home like this. He’ll have to do something. Once he’s got the briefcase back, he’ll know what to do with it. He thought that the man behind the counter at the left-luggage office looked at him strangely when he deposited the case.
He has reached the public gardens and can smell the dirty brown spoor of the river through the traffic fumes. The Thames looks dangerous as it slides about in the dark, sucking at its bridges. Some days, even as far upstream as this, he tastes salt. Today is not one of those days. He turns left, then hesitates. But what can he do, if he doesn’t go home? What else is there? He is what he appears to be, a reasonably well-regarded civil servant in his thirties, in dark suit and tie, dark overcoat, no hat. He glances sideways into the trees, and then, as if he’s found no answer there, he strides out along the path that goes east, parallel to the river. A gust of rain blows in his face but he doesn’t put up his umbrella. The wind is rising again, thrashing branches, whipping the piles of wet leaves. It blows the shadows about so that even if Simon were to look round he might not see the two men in dark overcoats and trilbies who are walking fifty yards or so behind him, keeping pace with him. The wind covers the sound of their footsteps. They follow him for a short distance, and then they peel away.
At the left-luggage office, Simon hands in his ticket. The chap at the counter disappears into the back. Simon waits, glancing around. Outside, a policeman walks past with slow, steady gait. He’s on his beat, you fool. Nothing to do with you.
‘Here you are, Mr Cartwright.’
Simon stares at him, absolutely blank, the words, ‘My name’s not Cartwright,’ as near as damn it on his lips. On the way home, grasping the case, he reassures himself. That chap won’t remember anything; he must have hundreds of people through his office every day.