So it was settled.
“Fine. Give me a call first.”
The tingle of conspiracy, undercover work—meeting in car parks. The excitement that, in spite of everything, begins to infect them. The thrill of the chase.
She unlocked her car. Then she said, as if she’d forgotten her manners—as if we’d met by accident at some gathering, some convention of language teachers, say (though what would I be doing there?): “I’ve just talked about me. I don’t know about you.”
Her face even looked a little guilty in the dark.
The car park was heaving. Trolleys careering, boots yawning, a scene of plunder.
“That’s okay,” I said. “You don’t need to know.”
9
I drive off quickly, forgetting the speed bumps. The car bucks. The flowers almost fall off the back seat.
All her fault? Yes, in the sense that if she’d never let that girl under their roof … If she’d never tried to be more than her teacher … She should have seen it coming: the wife’s fault for putting temptation under the husband’s nose.
But was that supposed to be her first consideration? And was he supposed to have put up his hand and forbidden the whole thing, on the grounds that—you never know—he might just be tempted?
And anyway it wasn’t like that. He wasn’t a “womanizer.” Only professionally. There wasn’t a history. Just the history of them being a happy couple with good careers, a grown-up son who’d flown the nest, and (her own sad words): “pretty well everything we could want …”
She poked her spoon in her cappuccino. The traffic slid by outside.
“And, anyway, when she first arrived, she looked—well, she looked like not much at all. You know what I mean? She looked like she didn’t care how she looked …”
If you have everything, why go and risk it all? The good life. That house up there, through the trees, in burglar-alarm country. Why go asking for trouble? All her own bloody fault.
But for pity’s sake. Or charity’s. Since wasn’t that the point? If you have everything, then shouldn’t you be able to afford that? And to look out from your window at the world now and then? Why do people spend money on flowers?
“Do you follow the news …?”
It wasn’t really a question, and I didn’t say anything. I sipped my coffee. I follow people, I follow scents, it’s how I make my living. And where would I be if the well-off didn’t go chasing trouble now and then, with their cheque books to wave in its face?
The black cashmere—to shop in. How much did a gynaecologist make?
And she’d thought the vermouth was wrong.
A teacher, she said. French and Spanish. A little freelance translation. A little English as well.
I sipped my coffee. I didn’t say: Teachers—smart-arses, they always used to piss me off. But there must be something about them … I married one once.
She looked straight ahead at the window but I could see her reflection in the glass.
A teacher. A “lecturer.” Twice a week, Tuesdays and Fridays (so it was where she’d just been), she took an English class, open to all-comers but aimed especially at foreign students. Brush up your English. And into that class had walked, one Tuesday afternoon, Kristina Lazic from Dubrovnik in Croatia.
I looked it up, I wasn’t sure. You could say my field was domestic affairs.
Croatia then—Yugoslavia before (and in my out-of-date atlas). The “former Yugoslavia”: a familiar phrase.
“They won, you see. The Croats beat the Serbs.”
What did this have to do with a flat in Fulham?
And Dubrovnik, Dubrovnik in Yugoslavia, had once been, I knew this, in the holiday brochures. Hot old walls, blue sea. A tourist destination. The “Dalmatian Coast.” And that’s how it had been before she left—before Kristina had left—five years ago.
She’d won a studentship and come to London only months before the serious trouble began. It must have involved calculations, hard thinking. Conscience searching. Eighteen years old: her big break. And then the world she’d left behind her had been smashed apart.
But not just that—worse than that.
“It’s hard to imagine … You might as well know …”
First her brother, then both her parents had been killed. She’d got the news in two terrible, barely separated stages. The brother had become a soldier—but not for long. The parents had been unluckier still. They’d left for where they thought they’d be safer. A mistake. The wrong place, the wrong time. They weren’t the only ones to be rounded up.
“Can you imagine …?”
I cleared my throat, the way you do during a lecture. The samba music swayed on.
It put paid to her studies, of course. What was the point now? Though she was granted an extension to her studentship—and counselling—and, slowly, she’d begun to pick up the pieces, to make up for lost time. But even when she’d walked that Tuesday into Sarah’s class she’d looked “only half there—like some convalescent.”
So Sarah had taken her under her wing.
This would have been late in ’93. Then the summer had drawn near when her studentship—and visa—would expire, when her only option would be to register as an asylum seeker.
“You know what that means?”
I nodded. My work takes me around. It means the bottom of the heap.
So there was Kristina Lazic, about to become an official refugee, and there were Sarah and Bob Nash, just the two of them in a smart house in Wimbledon, and even a room in it recently knocked together with another to make a “guest suite,” after the son had left to go and work in the States.
“He’s in Seattle. Computers. He makes a mint. He doesn’t know about any of this. I mean, about Bob and her. I hope he never will.”
She turned for a moment and looked me straight in the eye.
My eyes might have flicked away.
Charity: okay if you’ve got the money, if you’ve got the room. Okay for some. A luxury item. And was it such a fine piece of charity anyway, if what you got out of it was unpaid help around the home and the bonus of feeling good? Look, we have everything—including our very own orphaned Croatian maid. Look at the good life we lead.
But for pity’s sake. Have a heart. Can’t a good deed be a good deed? And who can say when the urge to commit one won’t suddenly steal over you? You never know. Someone walks into your life and you want to care for them specially, you want to protect them. You know you’ll put yourself out for them, never mind all the other cases, the thousands of other cases. This is your case.
And that poor girl. Have a heart.
Kristina. A name like fragile glass.
Girl? She was almost twenty-two—a woman, even if she’d lost a chunk of her life. Poor? She’d landed on her feet. A damaged soul, a convalescent, a stunted flower. But, put down in new soil—I hadn’t seen the photos yet—she’d bloomed.
10
I come out onto Parkside. Opposite: the Common, a sea of glittering yellow leaves.
And what about him, the husband, Robert—Bob? Why does it still seem (to my crude, ignorant, private-investigator mind) like some bad kind of joke? Do gynaecologists marry? Can they have affairs? Can a woman love a gynaecologist? But she did, she did. And he wasn’t a gynaecologist when they met—of course not. Just a student, like her, who said he’d drive her, one summer, in a purple Mini-Cooper, to the South of France.
“I had the French, he had the car …”
And either a trip like that turns out to be a disaster—a disaster trapped in a purple bubble on wheels—or a lasting success. It was a success.
Wouldn’t gynaecologists be, like diplomats, immune—protected? And how does it work for women: “I’m a gynaecologist”—chill or thrill?
I’m a private investigator.
Clearly, he wasn’t immune. A girl under his own roof. Though it was the first and only time, Sarah swore, she knew. So, when it happened, however it happened, it must have hit him like a train. Under
his own roof, with a refugee for pity’s sake. Surely, for that very reason …
And him a gynaecologist too.
It must have knocked him clean off his feet.
She would have moved in one Saturday, in September, three years ago. Become part of the household at number fourteen. Of course, she’d come before—to look, to be introduced. She’d have met Mr. Nash. “Bob—please.”
How do they deal with it—the professional tag that comes with them—as they hold out a hand? Do they learn a special kind of smile—a bit apologetic, a bit boyish? Or do they go for the breezy and frank?
I’m a private eye. Call me Dick …
“He works at Charing Cross Hospital, in Fulham—and privately of course. He does a day at the Parkside. Just up the hill. It’s handy.”
It looks out on Wimbledon Common.
All of it, anyway, on a trial basis. And maybe it wouldn’t be for long—till things “sorted themselves out.” She wasn’t allowed to work, to take paid employment, but receiving charity wasn’t against the law. And, yes, if it bothered her, then she could think of herself as their unpaid au pair. A sort of joke, of course, but, as it turned out, it was just how it was, in the beginning. She wanted to do things—she didn’t have to, but she did. To clean and tidy, to fetch the shopping. To show she was grateful, to be their servant, to earn her keep. An initial cool, polite, obedient stage.
And cooking, I thought, did she cook? Surely not, if that was Sarah’s speciality. But then she would have helped, perhaps—been Sarah’s under-chef. And yes (I guessed right), that’s how they really got to know each other, preparing meals. There are worse ways. That’s how the cool and awkward phase turned into something else. This girl about the place. A kitchen warmth. Good food, winter evenings. The smells that can creep from an oven and into the nostrils like kindness itself.
Did Sarah even learn a thing or two from her? What do they eat in Croatia?
In those days, not much, I suppose. What do refugees normally get fed?
But, as it happens, there was a connection. There was a ghost there in that kitchen, at the side of this girl who was ready to act like a maid. There were three ghosts. But the brother, the soldier of just a few weeks—his name was Milos—had once worked in a restaurant, first in the kitchen, then as a waiter. Too handsome—Kristina had said—to be kept in the kitchen for long. One summer, before it all happened, in the tourist days. A waterfront restaurant in Dubrovnik. Having a high old time—cutting a swathe through all the foreign girls.
You never know what’s in store.
• • •
But that first Saturday in September (Sarah would tell me later) was almost a disaster. It was almost the point where she’d had to say it had all been a terrible mistake. All her own fault.
They’d picked her up—in the Saab—along with her few boxes and bags of things. It had all been arranged, discussed, agreed. But, to their surprise, she’d sat in the car not speaking, not even looking at them, as if she didn’t know them, as if she was under arrest. At any moment, it seemed—when they stopped at lights, a junction—she might have made a sudden bolt.
And when they’d arrived she’d just sat rigidly at their kitchen table, while Bob carried her boxes silently up to her room. This was her home now, her place, but it was as though she was trying not to be there. She said things, mumbled things to herself, but they weren’t in English, or any other language that Sarah could understand.
She just sat there, like a prisoner, in Beecham Close.
And then—“Thank God”—the tears had come, in a gush, in a flood that went on for minutes, and Sarah had simply put her arms round her while she sobbed and moaned, and had known then that it would be all right, once the tears had stopped, they could make a start.
She’d never seen Kristina cry before. She’d seen the student with the frown and the dark eyes that were dark in some extra way, but she’d never seen her cry.
• • •
I can see it. You have to put yourself in the scene. The two of them in that kitchen. The girl sobbing and Sarah holding her, as if there was no question who needed protecting.
But him? What about him? What did he do with the two of them glued there together at the kitchen table? He’d carried up her boxes, like some servant. His feet had crunched on the gravel as he’d to-and-froed from the car.
He felt it too. A relief. It would be all right now, after the sobs. A lump in his own throat maybe—though, God knows, he’d heard enough women sobbing, in his job. Not such a mad idea, not such a bad idea, after all. A good idea. But right now—standing there empty-handed in the kitchen doorway—what should he do?
A gynaecologist. But this was a woman’s thing.
He’d have made himself scarce, he’d have beat a wise retreat. September: a nip in the air. But he’d have gone outside, warm from lugging boxes, paced around, like a man whose wife is in labour. He’d have thought of other things. His son in Seattle, maybe, who didn’t even know yet (would he have to?) that a Croatian refugee girl would be sleeping in his bed.
He’d have looked at the garden, at the trees, beyond, in other gardens, screening other houses all around. The first berries. Spiders’ webs glinting. But even out there he might have heard the sobs, somehow tugging at his own chest, and as he paced he might even have peered through the kitchen window and met his wife’s eyes (Kristina’s head buried under her chin) staring steadily back at him.
I know what he’d have thought: a thought that had never occurred to him before then. The nape of Kristina’s turned, shuddering neck. That he couldn’t do it, could he? It wouldn’t be permitted, would it? That simple, obvious and healing thing Sarah was doing. Put his arms around her.
11
She brought in the photos the following Tuesday. It’s true, it’s better that way. The file in my head. The less such things have to pass in the mail between me and my clients the better. Suppose everything turned out just as she wished—but then he discovered that all along he’d been watched.
They cross a line, it’s not a simple line. They’re the injured party, but they’re spying on their husband. Up to something too.
They enter a little web of deceit.
It’s true, I didn’t really need the photos. I had to follow a man and a woman in a car. It made me seem scrupulous. It meant she might call by my office again.
She knows all this by now: the days when I got her to visit me.
She came late in the afternoon, direct from her classes again. A Tuesday—Tuesday and Friday afternoons: English classes. And was this another afternoon when, right then, at the Fulham flat…?
Almost five-thirty. Dark outside. The way people change on a second, a third meeting, as if the air around them changes as well. She must have been carrying those photos with her all day—her husband and her husband’s lover tucked up inside that shoulder-bag.
If I’d been a fool I might have said to Rita: “It’s okay, off you go …”
She had something more than the photos: the date and the flight. (So I had the job.) There was a light in her eyes when she told me, a small brief flush. I saw how she might look—must have looked once often enough—when real happiness washed over her face. Her glance by the Fine Foods section: What’s it tonight?
Maybe I had the thought: she looks like she’s about to be released.
It was to be a Monday evening, in three weeks’ time, Monday 20th of November. The girl was to fly to Geneva to be officially cleared as a returning refugee. Then on to Zagreb.
How did this work? “Officially cleared”? It had all been openly arranged? Her husband had shown her the ticket—as proof, as pledge? Or just said? It wasn’t his ticket, of course. But then there might have been two—or none.
Geneva. That might mean anywhere.
But all these things she must have thought through herself. Why was she sitting there, why had she come again, if anything was sure?
I said, “You’ve seen the ticket?”
“She’s got it.”
I looked at her. There are ways of checking if someone’s on a passenger list.
“The flight exists. Seven-thirty—in the evening. And I’ve checked—she’s on it. Just her.”
So, a detective too—a detective glow in her face. But he might always book a ticket for himself meanwhile. And if you wanted—what’s the word?—to abscond, elope, disappear, you might go to some pains to cover your tracks. Even buy an air ticket you never intended to use.
She’d thought of it all, all the possibilities. All the same, there was this brightness about her. This was really happening. A release? A verdict at any rate. The look of a bright, hard-working student waiting for a result. I felt for a moment as if I was her teacher now.
I thought of Helen, when she was young. How she hated me.
“And you’ve brought the photos?”
“Yes.” She unzipped the shoulder-bag. Her homework, ready for handing in.
She took out a stiff-backed envelope, pulled out the photos and put them on my desk, leaning forward in the same huddling way you might to show snaps of your kids.
How had she chosen? For “recognition purposes.” The one of him—of Bob—showed a man in a holiday pose: a loose shirt, the sleeves rolled up, a pair of sunglasses tucked in a breast pocket, a pullover round his shoulders. A smile just breaking. A good-looking man in his mid-forties. What do gynaecologists look like? What are the tell-tale signs? He looked like some lean and handsome cricketer, a good eye, a straight bat. A flop of dark hair across his forehead, which you could picture him smoothing back.
What do you say? Some guff? Commend them on their choice of husband? I didn’t have to ask: it was taken two summers ago—before Kristina had arrived.
The photo of Bob that appeared in the papers must have been from a professional file. For use in some medical brochure. Head and shoulders only. A picture of clean-cut reliability. A studio shot.
The photo of Kristina was the poorer picture—even a little blurred. (Was that why she chose it? Were there so many to choose from?) A slim girl in jeans and sweater and an old outdoor jacket that didn’t look like her own. Sarah’s? Bob’s? It was in the garden at number fourteen. She seems to have been involved in some physical task—sweeping up leaves maybe. She’s holding the handle of some broom or rake. But she looks as though the camera’s surprised her, trapped her into an expression she can’t quite manage—she would have looked better if she’d been caught unawares.