“They’re on holiday, darling,” a bass voice called from beside me.
I turned quickly, my rent-a-drool smile hoisted in readiness. A large blond-headed woman, backlit by the light of her own hall, was standing in the neighbouring doorway, dressed in what seemed to be a white nightgown and clutching a glass of something strong.
“I know,” I said.
“Feebs is what he calls me. I’m Phoebe really. You were here before, weren’t you?”
“That’s right. I forgot to collect the key and had to go back and get it. I’ll forget my own name next. Still, a holiday was what they needed, wasn’t it?”
“He did,” she said darkly.
My brain must have been working overtime, for I divined her meaning immediately. “Of course! Poor man,” I cried. “I mean how was he looking? Better? On the mend? Or was he still all colours of the rainbow?”
But some sense of need-to-know held her back from further confidence. “What do you want, then?” she asked sullenly.
“It’s what they want, I’m afraid. Sally’s typewriter. More clothes. Practically anything I can carry.”
“You’re not a debt collector, are you?”
“Good Lord, no.” I laughed and took a couple of paces towards her so that she could see what a trustworthy fellow I was. “I’m his brother. Richard. Dick. The respectable one. They phoned me. Would I put together some stuff for them? Take it up to London. He’d had this accident. Fallen downstairs, he said. Poor love, if it’s not one thing, it’s another. Did they manage to leave together? I gather it was all rather rushed.”
“There’s no accidents round here, darling. Everything’s deliberate.” She giggled at her own wit. So did I, elaborately. “He went first, she followed him, I don’t know why.” She took a sip from her glass, but kept her eyes on me. “I don’t think I like you going in, you see. Not while they’re in France. I think I’m worried.”
Stepping back into her house, she slammed the front door. A moment later a wet crack like a training grenade split the air as an upper window of the house was flung open and a broad-headed hairy man in an undershirt leaned out.
“You! Come ’ere! You’re Terry’s brother, are you?”
“Yes.”
“Dick, right?”
“Dick is correct.”
“Know all about him, do you?”
“Pretty much.”
“What’s his favourite football team, then, Dick?”
“Moscow Dynamo,” I replied, before I had given myself time to think, for soccer was one of Larry’s many incongruous obsessions. “And Lev Yashin was the greatest goalkeeper of all time. And the greatest goal ever scored was by Ponedelnik for Russia against Yugoslavia in 1960.”
“Bloody hell.”
He disappeared, and a delay followed, presumably while he conferred with Phoebe. Then he was back and smiling.
“I’m Arsenal myself. Not that he minded. Here. How’d he get his black eye, then? I’ve seen some shiners, but he was classic. ‘What happened?’ I says to him. ‘She close her legs too soon?’ Walked into a door, he says. Then Sally turns round and says it was a car smash. You don’t know who to believe these days, do you? Want a hand at all?”
“Maybe later. I’ll give you a shout, if I may.”
“I’m Wilf. He’s a mad bugger, but I like him.”
The window slammed shut.
I closed the front door behind me and stepped round the heap of mail on the floor. In a spurt of futile optimism I flipped the light switch, but no light came. Fool that I was, I had brought no hand torch with me. I stood in the half dark, not daring to breathe. The silence scared me. Bristol has been evacuated. Hurry or you’ll be killed. The sweat again, this time oily cold. I breathed out, then slowly in again, and smelled an old house going into her dotage. I peered round me, trying to let more light into my eyes. The only source was the street lamp. But its glow fell across the bay window, not into it. To see into the interior, my eyes had to scavenge light from the bay and hurry with it across the room, like carrying water in cupped hands.
Her piano stool, unscathed. I ran my hand over it: the light alloy tubes, like an angled reading lamp that reached out and then returned, pressing the padded support against the small of her back. Her portable electric typewriter. It stood on a table, but I could hardly see the table for the papers on it, and I could hardly see the papers for the dust. Then I saw a second table, except that it wasn’t a table but a tea trolley, and on the tea trolley a digital telephone with an answering machine attached to it, with a typical Pettifer lash-up of wires and aerials and the judicious use of Scotch tape. But no light burned on the answering machine, because there was no electricity in the socket.
The room grew smaller, and the walls came towards me. My eyes were seeing more. I could follow the typewriter wire all the way to the wall. I began to distinguish signs of hasty departure: desk drawers pulled out and half emptied, documents spilled across the floor, the grate stuffed with charred paper, the wastebasket lying on its side. I recognised more bits of Larryana: piles of fringe magazines stacked against the wall, with tags of paper marking the places; an ancient poster of Josef Stalin at his most benign, cutting roses in a garden. Larry had drawn an imperial crown on his head and scribbled the words WE NEVER CLOSED across his chest. Scrawled messages on rectangles of sticky paper, posted on an etching of Notre Dame hanging over the grate. With my gloved hand I pulled off a couple of them and took them to the bay, but I couldn’t read them, except to see that the first was written by Emma and the second by Larry. Peeling off the rest in order, I stuck one on top of the other before dropping them into my pocket in a wad.
I returned to the front door and gathered a handful of letters from the heap on the floor. Miss Sally Anderson, I read crookedly, Free Prometheus Ltd., 9A Cambridge Street. Postmark not Macclesfield but Zurich. Terry Altman, Esq., I read, Free Prometheus Ltd.—Terry Altman, who had been one of Larry’s work names, and Prometheus, who for his trickery had been chained to a mountain in the high Caucasus until Larry and Emma had set him free. Pamphlets, lurid brochures, Russian quality. Printed matter from the BBC Monitoring Service at Caversham, headed “Southern Russia (West).” To the Manager, Free Prometheus Ltd. To Sally, Free Prometheus Ltd. Bank statements. A folder full of letters, incoming to Emma and hand-written by Larry, for whom a letter could be anything from a beer mat to a paper napkin to the title page of a radical paperback published by some fly-by-night anarchist in Islington. Addressed to Darling, Darling Emm and continuing Oh Christ I forgot to tell you. A newsletter headed “Media Manipulated” and subtitled “How the Western Press Plays Moscow’s Game.” Stay calm, I told myself as I dropped everything back on the pile. Method, Cranmer. You’re a field man, veteran of innumerable Office break-ins, some of them with Larry as your inside man. Pace yourself. One job at a time. A red-and-white pamphlet in Russian called “Genocide in the Caucasus” in blazing capitals, school of Soviet agitprop, vintage 1950, except that it was dated February 1993 and referred to “The Holocaust of Last October.” I opened it at random and saw the stabbed and bloated bodies of small children. Caucasian Review II (Munich ’56), see pages 134–156. Caucasian Review V (Munich ’56), see pages 41–46. Side-lined passages. Angry marginal scrawls, illegible in the ailing light.
There was an interior door, and geography dictated that it led to the part of the house that gave onto the side street. I turned the handle. Nothing happened. I pushed hard and the door gave, shrieking on the linoleum. I smelled rancid butter, dust, and Lifebuoy soap. I was in a scullery. Through a window above the sink more street light streamed onto the flagstones. A line of plates stood drying in a rack. They had been drying so long they were filthy again. In the shelves, a selection of Larry’s undemocratic self-indulgences: pepper sardines from a grand grocer in Jermyn Street, Oxford marmalade, and Fortnum’s English Breakfast Tea. In the fridge, rancid yoghurt, sour milk. Beside it a wooden door with bolts top and bottom, and a latch with a chain and pin. I
t was the side door I had inspected from the pavement. As I returned to the living room I looked at my watch. Three minutes was how long eternity had so far lasted.
The stairs were in pitch darkness, rickety and uncarpeted. I counted fourteen from ground level. I reached a landing, groped, felt a door, then a door handle. I pushed and stepped inside. I was in a lavatory. I stepped out again, closed the door, and, with my back against it, groped either side of me until I found another door, opened it, and entered Emma’s bedroom in broad daylight, because the halogen light from the street lamp poured straight in the window, passing through the threadbare curtains as if they didn’t exist. I gave her everything, I thought, surveying the bare floorboards and cracked washbasin, the dead flowers in a paste pot, the wonky reading lamp, the brown-flowered wallpaper peeling in strips; and she wanted none of it. This is what I saved her from. And she preferred it.
On the floor lay a futon, and it was prepared the way she liked to prepare our bed when we were going to make love: sideways to the fire, lots of pillows, a white duvet. Across the duvet, the severe little Marks & Spencer nightdress she had brought with her when she came to live with me, its long sleeves stretched out for the embrace. I saw her naked on her stomach with her chin in her hands, turning to look at me over her shoulder as she hears me enter. And the light of the log fire drawing finger shadows on her flanks. And her unpinned hair falling like black flames over her shoulders.
Two books, one his side, one hers. For Larry, a red-cloth nineteen-twentyish volume by one W. E. D. Allen, with the unlikely title Béled-es-Siba. I opened it at random and came on a memorial tribute to the poet Aubrey Herbert and, underlined, the words: he lacked the caddishness of genius. I had a vague memory that Herbert had fought to save Albania from the self-styled Liberators of the Balkans, and that he was one of Larry’s heroes. For Emma, Fitzroy Maclean’s To Caucasus, subtitled The End of All the Earth.
A sepia poster. Not of Josef Stalin this time, not of anyone I recognised. But a bearded, strong-jawed, dark-eyed modern prophet in what I took to be the traditional garb of a Caucasian hillsman: fur hat, skin waistcoat with loops for ammunition. Looking closer, I made out the name Bashir Haji in sharp Cyrillic script across the lower corner and, with difficulty, the words “to my friend Misha the great warrior.” It seemed a strange sort of trophy to hang in a love nest. Tugging it from its fastenings, I laid it on the bed next to Emma’s nightdress. Clothes, I thought: I need more clothes. Nobody who leaves in a hurry takes all his clothes. A curtain hung across a recess beside the chimney breast, reminding me of Uncle Bob’s blackout curtain across the alcove in my priesthole. I pulled it aside and took a sharp step backward.
I am on Priddy, grappling with him. I have seized him by the lapels of his green Austrian raincoat that he calls his moleskin. It is a flowing, long-skirted, olive-coloured affair, silky to the touch. Its softness is offensive to me. As I haul him towards me, I hear a rent and I laugh. As we fight, I have an image of it turning to shreds. As I drag him feetfirst and mud-caked towards the pool, I see its tatters in the moonlight, trailing after him like a beggar’s shroud.
And I saw it now, dry-cleaned and none the worse for wear, hanging from a wire coat hanger with the cleaner’s tag still stapled to the inside lining. I checked the buttons. All there. Did I pull the buttons off? I had no memory of doing so. The rip, where was the rip? I had distinctly heard cloth ripping. I could find not one tear, not a mend, whether in the lining, the hem, or round the buttonholes. Nor round the lapels where I had seized him.
I examined the belt. He had worn it knotted. It had a perfectly good buckle, if you have to wear a belt with your raincoat, but the buckle wasn’t good enough for Larry. He had to knot his belt like a gigolo, which is why I had taken such pleasure in seeing my gloved fists clutching it as I dragged him along the ground, with his head going bumpety-bump and his grin switching on and off in the moonlight.
It’s a different coat, I thought. Then I thought: When did Larry ever have two of anything except women?
Beneath the kitchen sink I had found a roll of black plastic bin bags. Tearing one free, I stuffed the mail into it, making no distinction between printed and personal letters. As I did so I saw the bayonetted children again, and remembered Diana and his perfect note. What was perfect, I wondered, about the screams of dying children? On my knees before the fireplace, I scraped together the charred paper in the grate and with huge care laid it in a second bag. I filled a third and fourth with files and papers strewn around the desk. I tossed in an Esso diary, and a singed account book that somebody had attempted to burn but failed, and a forties pop-up Bakelite address book I associated with neither Larry nor Emma which seemed to be some foundling in their lives, until I realised it was Russian. I extracted the tape from the typewriter, pulled the plug out of the socket, and set the typewriter on the kitchen table on its way to the side door. And that was for the seeming, because I had told Phoebe I needed to collect Sally’s typewriter. I put the tape in the third bin bag.
I returned to the drawing room and made to unplug the answering machine, but on second thoughts picked it up, base and receiver both, and by the glow of the street lamp identified the redial button on the telephone, lifted the receiver, and pressed redial. A number rang out. I heard a man’s voice, soft, foreign, and well-spoken like Mr. Dass: “Thank you for calling the offices of Hardwear Carpets International. If you wish to leave a message or place an order, kindly speak after the tone. . . .” I listened to the message twice, unplugged the machine, and set it on the kitchen table beside the typewriter. My eye caught sight of a set of car keys hanging from a nail. The Toyota. I put them in my pocket, grateful that I wasn’t going to have to jump the wires in a dark side street late on a Saturday night. I rushed upstairs. There was no hard reason for this excessive haste, but perhaps if I hadn’t run I wouldn’t have found the courage to walk.
I stood at the bedroom window. Cambridge Street was deserted. Waiting for my head to clear, I stared out over the grass platform at the rivers of railway line. The night was darker. Bristol was putting itself to sleep. This is where Emma stood when she was waiting for him to arrive, I thought. Naked, as she used to wait for me when she had decided we would make love. I stood at the futon. The pillows were stacked to one side, for a single head. What was she thinking as she lay here alone? He went first, she followed him, Phoebe had said. And this was where she lay, all on her own, before she went. I bent down, intending to pick up the signed poster of the hillsman. Imagined or real, the scent of her body rose at me from the bed-clothes. I folded the poster until it would fit my pocket. I removed Larry’s green raincoat from its hanger and slung it over my arm. I returned slowly downstairs and walked to the kitchen. Slowly. I slid back the bolts of the side door, cocked the latch, and poked the pin in place to hold it open. Slowly. It was very important to me that I should do nothing hasty.
Leaving the door ajar, I walked down the pavement to the car, pulled off the cover, and saw Larry’s buckskin boots lying on the back seat. I determined to make nothing dramatic of the boots. They were Larry’s boots, and Larry was alive. What was so remarkable about his damned boots, made to measure by Lobb of St. James’s and paid for to screams of pain from the Top Floor, all because Larry had decided that it was time he put our love for him to the test?
I noted the caked mud on them, as one notes mud on anything: take a wire brush to them, do it later. The hatred in me was aflame again. I wished I could call a rematch, go back to Priddy and finish him off.
I walked to the kitchen, collected the typewriter and answering machine, and walked back to the car with them, agonising about whether it was intending to start. I made some fanciful calculations about how long it would take to push the car to the top of the hill so that I could roll it down to the station and, if it still didn’t start, transfer my new possessions to a cab.
My courage almost exhausted, I returned to the house for the remainder of my load: Larry’s moleskin raincoat, which I s
eemed to need as proof positive of his survival, and my four bin bags, which I carried by their necks and packed around the typewriter, all but the bag containing the burned paper, which out of respect for its delicacy I laid on the passenger seat. And now all I wanted in the world was to get into the car and drive myself and my treasures to a safe place. But I was worried about Phoebe and Wilf. During the break-in they had become major characters in my imagination. I had been grateful for their acceptance of me, but I needed to know that I had done everything possible to preserve their good opinion, particularly Phoebe’s, because she doubted me. I didn’t want them phoning the police. I wanted them easy in their minds.
So I went back to the house, bolted the side door top and bottom from the inside, slipped the locking pin into its housing, then walked through the living room again, passing Emma’s piano stool on my way. I let myself out of the front door, double-locking it because that was how I had found it. Then I stood on the crown of the road and called to the upper window.
“Thanks, Wilf. Mission accomplished. All done.”
No answer. I don’t think I remember a longer twenty yards in my life than the distance from the front door of 9A to the blue Toyota, and I was halfway when I realised I was being followed. I thought at first it might be Larry behind me, or Munslow, because my follower was so quiet that my awareness of him was communi-cated less by hearing than by my other professional senses: the prickle on your back; the reflection in the air before you, made by someone just behind you; the sense of presence each time you check a shop window and see nothing.
I stooped to open the car door. I cast about but still saw nothing. I rose and swung round with my forearm in the strike position, and found myself standing face-to-face with the small black boy from the Ocean Fish Bar, who had been too serious to speak to me.