by Rennie Airth
And so one way or another they never got to talk about Uncle Matt over dinner, and by the time they got back to the hotel where Rose and Molly were staying, the chance had slipped away. Rose was beat.
‘Too many late nights for your old aunt.’
Too much Molly, more like it.
Addy went up with her to her room and waited while Rose got ready for bed. The room was full of memories, Rose’s things, and the perfume Addy remembered from her childhood: Chanson d’Amour. It was just like Rose never to have switched.
There was the silk robe with the flower pattern, Chinese or something, that Rose had brought back with her from the East, the tortoiseshell hairbrush and comb, and the old copy of Palgrave that had belonged to Grandpa, Rose’s father.
And on the bedside table, two silver-framed photographs. One of Rose and Addy that summer on the Cape: Addy small and scowling, mad about something, while Rose stood behind her, arms crossed protectively over Addy’s shoulders, smiling at whoever was taking the picture, Uncle Matt most likely. He was in the other photo, staring out and away, not really focused on anything. Good-looking sonofabitch. Addy hadn’t known what jealousy was until Uncle Matt showed up. Rose stood beside him, her face turned to his: then, now, always.
Rose’s things: they were all there, everything she cared about, everything she wanted with her.
Everything?
Addy felt a small hole open in the pit of her stomach.
Rose came out of the bathroom in her nightdress. She glanced at Addy, who was sitting there on the bed trying hard to look casual. What did she care? It was just a piece of junk, nothing to make a scene over. Anyway, it must be filthy by now, falling to bits, and probably covered with fleas. All the same, you would have thought—
‘Hey!’ Something hit the back of her head. ‘What—?’
Before Addy knew it, Rose had grabbed her from behind, wrestling her down, and there was something between them on the bed, something round and soft and hairy. Rose was laughing.
‘Go on. Admit it. You thought I’d dumped him.’
‘I did not. I never …’
‘Little bear, little bear … Little bear of little brain.’
And then Addy was laughing with her and they were hugging each other and it was like time had made this great leap backward and nothing had changed.
‘You were just waiting, weren’t you? It was a set-up.’ Addy looked at the shaggy brown body on the bed. ‘Poor old Grumble. He could use a bath.’
‘Are you kidding? He’d fall to pieces. He keeps shedding hair as it is. Pretty soon I’ll have a bald bear.’
‘An ugly bald bear.’
‘Who says he’s ugly?’
Addy laughed, remembering. It was when she was living with Grandma and Grandpa up in Connecticut and Rose used to come out from the city at weekends to see them. Saturday nights Rose would give Addy her supper and then put her to bed and the two of them would read Winnie the Pooh stories together. Rose took to calling her Bear. Addy loved it.
So much so that when Rose had a birthday coming up Addy got Grandpa to take her to the nearest Walmart, and with a bagful of dimes and quarters, carefully hoarded, and with a little help from Gramps, she had purchased Rose’s birthday present. ‘Well, it is certainly a bear, you could say that for it,’ Grandpa had muttered, though that wasn’t saying much. He called it a clunker, a word Addy hadn’t heard before but liked the sound of. The bear had rough brown hair and black button eyes and a permanent scowl that came from having its mouth sewn on wrong. At least, that was Grandpa’s opinion, though Addy thought it gave the bear just the right look – serious, even menacing. Try messing with me …
Grandma said, ‘Oh my lord, what is that?’
‘It’s the most beautiful bear I’ve ever seen,’ Rose said when Addy gave her present to her. ‘What’s his name?’
‘Grumble,’ said Addy.
‘That’s his name?’ Grandma said.
‘Grumble,’ said Rose. She took the bear in her arms. ‘I’m going to keep him for ever,’ she told Addy. ‘Do you hear me? That’s a promise. Where I go, he goes.’ And Addy had never felt so happy in her life.
Nothing had changed. She put her arms around Rose and hugged her again.
‘Rose,’ she began – maybe this was the right moment. Her aunt moved away and stood up. She looked down at Addy.
‘Rose, I don’t know how to say this, but—’
Rose put a finger to Addy’s lips. She shook her head. ‘You mustn’t mind me,’ she said, which was dumb, really dumb, because what else could Addy do but mind? ‘Your aunt’s not herself.’ She took the photo from the bedside table, the one of her and Uncle Matt, and gazed at it for what seemed like the longest time. Addy held her breath. ‘Desolate and sick,’ Rose said.
‘What … what did you say?’
‘Like the fella in the poem, that’s me.’ She went on staring at the photo. ‘Desolate and sick of an old passion.’
Then she looked at Addy and her eyes were filled with tears.
Addy had checked it out later, found the lines in a dictionary of quotations and then run down the poem on Google. ‘Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae’. Didn’t exactly ring a bell. Ernest Dowson, 1867–1900. She had memorized the lines.
‘… and I am desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, hungry for the lips of my desire …’
‘Come again?’
Addy started, turned. Mike was awake now, smiling at her.
‘You were saying?’
‘Nothing.’ She shook her head. ‘Nothing …’
FIVE
It was a little after four when they came to a halt for the last time, though Kimura did not know it was their final destination until he heard noises beneath them and saw a section of the metal floor being loosened. It fell away and a voice from below called out to them.
He waited while the family clambered out. Apart from a plastic bag that bore the remains of their food, they carried no baggage – not now. When they had boarded the truck on the outskirts of Frankfurt the previous day, the parents had each lugged a bulging suitcase bound with straps, but the driver and his companion had made it clear that these would have to be left behind. Why? Kimura had seen no obvious reason for this prohibition, but since it did not concern him he had stood to one side and watched as the men, impatient with the woman’s incessant high-pitched pleadings, had settled the matter by heaving the cases over the fence of the lay-by into a ditch beyond. Kimura himself had only the clothes he stood in, which was perhaps fortunate for all concerned.
He followed the family through the trap door and found himself crouching beneath the truck, ankle-deep in snow. Nearby he could hear voices raised in anger, one man shouting above the others. He crawled out from under the truck.
There were three of them: the driver and his companion, and a third man. They stood in a menacing circle about the father while the woman sat slumped on the ground close by. She looked dazed, exhausted, equally oblivious to the snow and the two children, a boy and a girl, who clung to her arms and stared up at their father with wide, frightened eyes.
Kimura took in the scene at a glance, and then examined his surroundings. The truck was parked in what looked like a scrapyard. The rusting chassis of motorcars stood stacked in lines alongside piles of twisted metal. Brick walls enclosed the area, one of them divided by a pair of iron gates. At the back of the yard was a wooden hut that served as a makeshift office.
The driver was doing the talking. A big man, unshaven, he had all the marks of a bully, thrusting his body up close to the father, jabbing at his shoulder with a finger, bearing down on him, battering him with a stream of words.
Kimura had only a limited knowledge of English, and he found it hard to follow what the driver was saying. His accent was strange, at least to Kimura’s ears, and the words followed each other so quickly that he had difficulty separating them. But presently he understood. The man was demanding money: more money. Kimura himself had paid the
equivalent of one thousand pounds for his passage and he assumed that the price his fellow travellers were charged was of a similar order.
Well, that was their misfortune. Time was short. He started towards the gates, and as he did so, the driver, catching sight of him, called out something.
Kimura turned and saw the hulking figure coming towards him, striding across the snow, red-faced and angry, shouting as before, but this time uttering a single word.
‘Mate!’
Mate? Kimura knew what it meant but was under the impression it was a term applied to animals, generally those in the wild. Still he took no offence. Why should he? He could see that the man hurrying towards him, brandishing his fists and mouthing other, incomprehensible words was a fool: a fool as well as a bully.
Because only a fool would approach another as he did, heedless of danger, blind to whatever he might be facing. Kimura himself would never have taken such a risk. Study your opponent. Watch how he moves. Attend to his bearing. Does he carry himself like one accustomed to combat? Above all, look at his hands. The hands tell all.
If this fool blundering across the snow had taken the time to study Kimura’s hands he might have noticed that running along the edge of each, from wrist to fingertip, was a calloused ridge; though whether that would have changed anything was open to question. A fool was a fool.
As the driver came up to him, Kimura took a step back, feigning fear, and then struck, hitting him with the hardened edge of his hand at a precise spot under the nose, and as the bone broke and the blood spurted, the man stumbled and fell to the ground, shrieking in pain. His companion, struck dumb by the sight, barely had time to raise his fists before Kimura was on him. Spinning on one foot, he drove his heel into the man’s unprotected kneecap, cracking the patella like a walnut, and then there were two of them down in the snow, screaming like animals in the wild, and the third man was running for his life towards the office and Kimura let him go because time was pressing and he had much to do.
Walking quickly to the gates, he went out into the street. Left or right? He had no idea which way to turn, but away to his right, at least three blocks distant, he saw the lights of a line of traffic crossing at an intersection and set off in that direction.
He had walked perhaps half the distance when a black saloon car, parked a little way down the street from the entrance to the yard, pulled away from the kerb and set off behind him. It moved at a steady speed, gradually shrinking the gap between them.
SIX
Hauling her bags through the jostling crowd, fighting every inch of the way – what was the big attraction anyway, the whole carriage emptying, everyone getting off? – Addy came out of the Underground at Knightsbridge and wow!
There it was, right in front of her, strung with lights and glittering like a fairy tale castle – Harrods!
She stood and gaped, remembering what Rose had told her: how they would stroll down there in the morning for their hot croissants and coffee. You could buy anything in Harrods, Rose said, from a bread roll to a diamond necklace, and looking at it now Addy thought it wasn’t just the department store, it was the whole scene: the lights and the dazzling store windows and the snow – snow on the streets and sidewalks, snow falling out of the pitch-dark sky. This was Christmas. How it was meant to be. The only thing missing was Santa and his reindeer, and too bad they didn’t go jingling by just then because she could have hitched a ride. There wasn’t an empty cab to be seen, just traffic crawling along the slushy street. Time to make like a Sherpa; she took a fresh grip on her bags and set off.
Using the instructions Rose had given her when she was over in New York, Addy had come in on the Tube from Heathrow. She and Mike had said goodbye in the terminal. He was travelling light – all he had with him was hand luggage – while Addy had one of her bags in the hold, and it had made no sense for him to wait. All the same she wished he had. But he’d promised to call her in a day or two, which was something.
‘Let’s get together,’ he had told her. ‘And I want to meet this aunt of yours.’
Addy just bet he did, after the way she’d gone on about Rose. Why did she do these things to herself? He had looked every bit as good by daylight as he had the night before – tall and alert, up for anything. For a while when they were talking he had seemed almost to come on to her, holding her gaze with his, looking deep into her eyes – it had given Addy goose bumps – and she wished now she’d asked him more about himself: her and her big mouth. All she knew was that he had two ex-wives (some recommendation, that), one daughter, and did a lot of travelling in his job. Here and there, but mainly to London where he kept a change of clothes at an old roommate’s flat where he’d be staying. He had waved to her as he left the baggage area and Addy had felt her heart skip a beat.
From the Tube exit she crossed the wide street in front of the store – that would be the Brompton Road, she had it all memorized from the map Rose had drawn for her – walked up Montpellier Street (pretty name), turned left, then right, then left again, and each time she made a turn the road got narrower and the snow got deeper, but just as Addy was wondering whether she’d lost her way, she saw it on one of the pair of pillars framing an arched entrance: Rutland Mews North. She had made it! Glory be, as Grandma used to say.
Addy paused at the entrance to the narrow cul-de-sac to take it in. So this was where Rose lived. It gave her a warm feeling to think that horses had once been stabled here. She pictured them being led out of their stalls, stamping and snorting, filling the air with good horsey smells.
Feeling a little like a pack-pony herself – she could swear she was starting to steam – she trudged down the mews looking for Rose’s house, which was number six. Lights were showing in all the houses except one. Even before she reached it Addy was getting a bad vibe. It couldn’t be, could it? She stood in front of the darkened house which had a 6 clearly painted on the white door and thought, What in the name of Sarah Bernhardt and all the saints am I going to do?
Ring the doorbell? She did that, and heard the answering peal from inside. There was no response.
What now? She couldn’t just stand here in the snow. Should she look for a pub or a café to wait in?
‘I say, hullo, good evening …’
Addy turned and saw there was a woman standing in the doorway of the house opposite.
‘Are you Addy, by any chance?’ she asked.
‘Yeah – yes, that’s me. I’m Addy.’ Glory be! A saviour!
‘Rose told us you were coming. I’ve been expecting her all day, but it’s all right, I’ve got a key to her house. Come in, please, you’ll catch your death out there.’
Addy walked across the mews and the woman said, ‘I’m Sarah Hudson. Rose has told me so much about you.’ She shook Addy’s hand and then picked up the bag she had put down and took it into the hallway of her house. Addy followed on her heels.
‘Look, I’m sorry to bother you—’ she began, but the woman cut her off.
‘Don’t say that. It’s so nice to meet you, and we’d do anything for Rose. We all love her so.’ She was fiftyish and plump, with rosy cheeks and bright blue eyes. ‘I’m so concerned about her. This weather – can you believe it? She was sure she’d be back by today, but I heard on the radio they’ve stopped all flights from Paris.’
Damn! Addy swallowed her disappointment. ‘You said you had a key, Mrs Hudson?’
‘Sarah, please. Yes, I’ve got it here.’ She opened a drawer and took out a key. ‘You can hang on to it until Rose gets back. But please, won’t you stay here with us tonight?’
Addy saw that she meant it, but she’d been waiting for more than a year for a chance to visit Rose, to see where she lived. The house was just a few steps across the way and she knew she couldn’t wait a moment longer.
‘That’s very kind of you, Mrs … Sarah, but if you don’t mind, I’d really like to get settled.’
‘Are you sure?’ She handed Addy the key. ‘I wish you’d change your mind.’ S
he sounded wistful. ‘We’re going away ourselves, my husband and I, the day after tomorrow, weather permitting. Our daughter and her husband live in Italy and we’re going to spend Christmas with them. But you’d be welcome to stay with us till we leave.’
Addy smiled, shook her head, no way. ‘When did Rose go to Paris?’ she asked.
‘Let me see … it was more than a week ago.’
‘That long? Did she say what she was doing there?’
Sarah Hudson shook her head. ‘I didn’t actually speak to her. She must have left early. She slipped a note through the door telling me she planned to be back by the time you arrived, but if she was late could I let you in.’
Hmm … intriguing. What was it Rose had said in her letter about the Paris trip? ‘I’ll tell you all about that when we meet.’ Addy couldn’t wait.
‘I think I’ll go over now,’ she said. ‘I want to unpack and take a shower.’
‘Let me come over with you—’ Mrs Hudson began, but Addy cut her off.
‘No, please.’ She hoped she didn’t sound rude. ‘It’s just … well, I’ve been dying to see where Rose lives and I’d love to explore.’
The woman looked crushed for a moment and Addy felt a brute. But then her face brightened. ‘There’s probably nothing to eat in the house. At least come over and have dinner with us. My husband will be home soon. We usually eat around eight, but come over any time.’ She gave Addy’s hand a squeeze.
‘Thank you, I’d really like that.’ And she would too. Sarah Hudson was a doll and Addy had a feeling that her hubby would turn out to be the same. Rose’s friends. She took hold of her bags and walked across the mews. Sarah stood watching as she unlocked the door of number six and went into the darkened house.
SEVEN
Kimura sat in the workmen’s café warming his hands on his third cup of tea. At least that was the name given to the muddy liquid, though if someone had told him it was buffalo’s urine he would not have been astonished. But it was hot and wet and, together with a cheese sandwich of dubious origin, had served to take the edge off his hunger.
