by John Harvey
“Wait.”
“No.”
“Where d’you think you’re going now?”
“Anywhere. Out. I’ll be back around nine.”
“You’re staying here …”
“Alex, let me alone. Let go of me.”
“No! Don’t you run out on me. Don’t you dare.”
“Alex, you’re hurting. Let go.”
“I warned you.”
“Let me go!”
“I’ll let go, you stupid bitch!”
“Alex, no!”
“Stupid, selfish bitch!”
“Alex, no. No. Oh, God, please no. Don’t hurt me. No …”
Ten
For once, there were no small children running full pelt between the tables, mean mouths and shrill little voices. The garden attached to the Brew House restaurant was mercifully devoid of mothers in long, flowing dresses from Monsoon, au pairs from Barcelona or Budapest who shopped at the Gap. Grabianski carried his tray, bearing filter coffee and an encouragingly large chunk of carrot cake, up the short flight of steps and across the flagstones to a table in the shadow of the far wall. With a flap of the hand, he scooted away a trio of blue-gray pigeons feasting on the remains of somebody’s buttered toast. Sparrows jostled hopefully around his feet.
Quarter past the hour: he had no way of knowing whether Eddie Snow would be early or late.
On the low bench seats to Grabianski’s right, two elderly men from Poland or the Ukraine were playing chess; a woman with startling white hair and spectacles that hung from a filigree chain was talking loudly to her companion about a recent visit to Berlin and the depressing legacy of the GDR; farthest from where Grabianski was sitting, a couple in their late thirties, wanly married but not to each other, held hands across the wooden table with the special hopelessness of those for whom happiness was the memory of damp afternoons in Weymouth or Swanage, hotel rooms that smelt of disinfectant and had a meter for the gas.
He was contemplating going for a second cup of coffee when a skinny man with thinning, short-cropped hair pushed through the door into the garden. Shiny leather trousers sheathed thin legs, a hip-length gray leather jacket hung loose over a black T-shirt bonded closely to his ribs. Despite the almost total absence of sun, he was wearing shades.
“Jerry?”
Half-rising, Grabianski reached out a hand.
“Eddie. Eddie Snow. Here, let me put this down.”
His plate was loaded with sausages and bacon, grilled tomatoes, fried bread and scrambled egg that had been sitting too long. “Best meal of the day, right?” Snow used his teeth to tear open two sachets of brown sauce and dribbled the contents across the curling, crispy bread. “Between me and my arteries, eh?” Behind dark glasses, Snow winked. “You want to get something more for yourself, go ahead. I’m going to get stuck into this lot before it gets cold.”
Grabianski nodded, pushed back his chair, and opted to wait.
The first time he had met Eddie Snow, himself and Maria Roy had been snapping at each other in the departure lounge at Orly Airport, a lunge toward romance that had been too calculated and too late. Eddie Snow had been drinking champagne and wolfing down packets of honey-roasted peanuts he had carried off from his last flight. “Couple of days in Cologne,” he told them. “Just two days and I earned so much fucking money, it’d make your head spin to count it. Here, have some more of this bubbly, eh?”
“What is it you do?” Maria asked, careful to touch his wrist as she offered her glass. Money had always been a great aphrodisiac where Maria was concerned.
“Everything,” Eddie Snow laughed. “Little of this and that. Just about everything. You know how it is.”
He had shaken hands on a deal with a private collector, whose principal acquisitions up to that point had been twentieth-century American; a quarter of a million for a painting, oil on board, of a former hospital for the chronically insane in Dalston. One of the many the artist had sketched on his travels east and west along the North London line. Snow had picked it up cheap from an ailing British rock star, who had once had hits on the label Snow had set up in those heady days of love and commerce when Virgin Records was a warehouse off Portobello and a hole-in-the-wall shop on Sloane Square.
Eddie Snow was not quite as youthful as he looked; sunglasses aside, it showed around the eyes.
Midway through his meal, Snow took a packet of Marlboro from his jacket pocket and lit up. “So, Jerry, what happened to that TV guy’s wife you were screwing? Arse on her like the Pope’s pajamas.”
By way of reply, Grabianski slid an envelope up onto the table and from it eased out two Polaroid photographs. Using middle finger and thumb, he swiveled them round for Snow to see.
“Straight to the business, eh, Jerry. I like that.” The photo on the left showed a landscape painting, a typically rural English scene; sheep grazing under the careless eye of a straw-chewing youth, an avenue of trees angled behind.
The second was as singular as that was conventional. The sun, full and faint, lowered through clouds over an expanse of ground, purple and brown, that could either be moorland or field. Trees stood sparse on the indistinct horizon.
It was this picture that Eddie Snow picked up and angled to the light. After a long moment, his face broke into a smile.
“Had me there for a minute.” He replaced the Polaroid. “Departing Day: study, isn’t it? Not the real thing.”
Grabianski waited.
“Eyesight’d started going by then, poor tosser. Either that or he’d got the DTs.”
A sparrow, perversely brave, dipped its slate-colored head toward a piece of bacon rind and narrowly missed a backhander for its pains.
“So what you saying here, Jerry?”
“I’m not saying anything.”
“Yeah, so I noticed.” Snow picked up the photographs, first one and then the other, and studied them again. “You’ll want to get shot as a pair?”
From Grabianski a nod.
“Two a penny these,” Snow said, indicating the sheep.
“Not by him.”
“Crap all the same. This first one. Pastoral bollocks. Whereas this … Going for it, that’s what he’s doing there. Color. Light. All them gradations of blue in the sky. Whistler in a way, but Turner closer still.”
“You like it?”
“Yeah, course I do, but that’s not the point.”
Grabianski smiled. “Your friend in Cologne …”
Eddie Snow shook his head. “Strictly kosher. Never touch anything without it’s got perfect pedigree, properly authenticated bill of sale, the whole bit.” He lit a second cigarette. “I don’t suppose you’ve got a bill of sale?”
“And you,” Grabianski said, “have you got buyers who are less scrupulous?”
Using his tongue, Snow fidgeted a piece of sausage from between his teeth. “Let me know how to get in touch.”
“Better I get in touch with you.”
Snow scraped back his chair and stood up. “Legit business. I’m in the book.”
“I know.”
As Grabianski watched Eddie Snow walk, slim-hipped, away, he noticed that though the couple were still holding hands, the woman was crying. He restored the Polaroids to his pocket and moved the remains of Eddie Snow’s breakfast to another table, where the birds could scavenge in peace. He would have another cup of coffee and then that second piece of carrot cake would go down a treat.
Eleven
She could feel it happening. The listlessness that crept over her, those evenings when he had neither arrived nor phoned; evenings which previously she would have used productively, reading, preparing work, enjoying the space and time before settling back downstairs at ten to watch whatever was on TV. Northern Exposure. Frasier. ER. Or she would be on the telephone to friends, arranging to meet for a drink, a chat, a movie perhaps. And there were those evenings when she would crawl home from school like someone who had been beaten, those days when for one reason or another the kids had left her exhau
sted and drained. But all of this was okay, this was what she could handle, it was her life: pleasant, controlled, contained. And she could feel what was happening with Resnick beginning to threaten that in so many ways and, much as she enjoyed being with him, it was hard not to resent him for it.
She recognized the feelings from before; first with Andrew and then with Jim. An Irishman who taught poetry and a musician who taught clarinet, oboe, and bassoon. Andrew aggressively and Jim by default, both men had made her dependent upon them. Not for money, stability; not, exactly, for love. Presence, that’s what it was: need, the need of one person.
Outside a relationship she was fine, living on her own something she had learned, something she had earned the right to do. She had her job, her immediate family, her network of friends, some of whom she had known since university, a few since school. But once a commitment was made, however unclear or uncertain, then no matter how hard she tried to resist it, things began to change.
Hannah smiled to herself wryly, remembering the key she had slipped into Resnick’s pocket-what? — six weeks ago, two months? So casual a gesture, almost insignificant. Now it felt as though she had handed over part of herself, the part that allowed her to stand up straight, on her own two feet and clear-eyed.
She thought about her mother, abandoned in the dust-free suburban home in which she had lived for more than thirty years, Hannah’s room still first left at the top of the stairs. Posters of famine and forgotten pop stars, teddy bears. Her father was living in France with a twenty-nine-year-old writer called Robyn who had just sold her first novel. Robyn with a Y.
“It won’t last, Dad,” she’d told him, cutting into her capricciosa in Pizza Express. “It can’t. She’ll leave you, you know that, don’t you?”
Stupidly happy, her father had sipped his Peroni and smiled. “Of course she will. In time.”
It was three and a half years now, shading up to four. And Hannah? Eighteen months with Andrew, a little over two years with Jim. The way her mother bit her lip heroically when the question of grandchildren came to mind. Birthdays on the calendar, challenging time. Did she really want to make herself vulnerable to all of that again, the disappointment, the pain?
When the doorbell rang, it wasn’t Resnick, forgetting his key, but Jane, lines of sorrow plump around her eyes.
They sat in the kitchen while Hannah made tea, impatient for the kettle to boil; drank it at the table, Jane holding her cup with both hands, steadying it slowly to her mouth. Upstairs in Hannah’s study, they sat in the bay window, Jane with her feet tucked up beneath her in the easy chair, Hannah on a cushion on the floor. Dark spread like a slow bruise across the park.
Three times Jane started to speak and each time she betrayed herself with tears.
Getting lightly to her feet, Hannah touched Jane’s hand, and leaning over from behind the chair, kissed her gently on the head, gave her shoulders a squeeze. “I’ve got some things I should be doing downstairs. I’ll be back up in a while.”
Hannah organized the books and folders she wanted for the next day, wrote a quick card to her mother, rinsed the supper things. She was sorting some clothes, ready for the wash, when the phone rang.
“Charlie …”
Resnick’s voice was muffled, remote; strange to think he was no more than a mile or so away.
“No, I don’t think so, Charlie, not really. Not tonight. It’s just …”
Resnick was quick to assure her she didn’t need to explain.
“Tomorrow, then,” Hannah said. “How about tomorrow? We could get something to eat; a movie, maybe. If you’re feeling up to it.”
Resnick told her he had to be in London, didn’t know what time he would be back.
“Okay, no problem. And look, I’m sorry about tonight.” She made hot chocolate, whisking the milk; upstairs, Jane’s head lolled sideways in the chair and her eyes were closed. Hannah was about to turn around again and go back down when Jane stirred.
“I thought you were asleep,” Hannah said.
“Just for a minute, that’s all.”
“Here.”
Taking the thick white china mug, Jane sipped at it and laughed.
“What?”
“I haven’t had this for years.”
Hannah settled herself back down, cross-legged on the floor. One lamp was burning at the far side of the room, illuminating shelves of books, a segment of table, sanded boards, an orange arc of wall.
“Do you want to phone Alex?” Hannah said. “Tell him where you are.”
“No, I don’t think so. Thanks.”
“We had this row, earlier. Before I went out. Alex had come home and I’d not been there. I mean, he was back sooner than I’d thought, an appointment had been canceled or something, I don’t know, and I’d stopped off in town after school. Just looking round the shops, nothing …” Jane looked across at Hannah and paused. “He’d only been in twenty minutes, half an hour at most.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I wasn’t there. He got angry, upset.”
“But why? I mean, what does he expect, for heaven’s sake?”
Shrilly, Jane laughed.
“You to be there at his beck and call? Rush home after school and get his dinner ready for him, warm his slippers by the fire?”
“No. No, it’s not like that. That’s not what it’s about.”
“What then?”
Jane took her time. “It’s to do with …”
“Control, that’s what it’s to do with.”
“He wants to know exactly where I am, what I’m doing, all of the time.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“Yes.”
“Unreasonable.”
“It’s the way it is.”
Hannah sighed. “He’s got to understand, surely, you’ve got a life of your own.”
“No.”
“What do you mean?”
“According to Alex, we’re married and that’s that. We don’t have lives of our own.”
“Oh, fine …”
“He says that’s the whole point.”
“It’s his point. That’s the trouble. His rules, his timetable.”
“He says it’s the same for him.”
“Except you don’t start climbing up the wall if he’s twenty minutes late getting home.”
“No.”
“So he can come and go as he pleases.”
“But he doesn’t. I always know where he is, what he’s doing, every minute of the day. If he says he’ll be in at five twenty-five, at five twenty-five there he is. So why shouldn’t it be the same with me?”
“Come on, Jane. How many answers do you want? You’re a grown woman doing a difficult job. You’ve got your own friends. Damn it, you married him; it wasn’t an operation joining you both at the hip.”
“Look, Hannah, I know it’s difficult for you to understand …”
“Because I’m not married, you mean?”
“Maybe.”
“Jane, I’m your friend. Married or not, I can see what’s happening to you, how unhappy you are. I’ve got a right to be concerned.”
“I know. I’m sorry. I am grateful. And I don’t know what I’m doing, sitting here defending him.”
“Habit? Duty?”
Jane shook her head. “I really don’t know.”
“Do you still love him?”
“I don’t know that either.”
Hannah leaned close toward her. “Have you thought about leaving him?”
Jane laughed. “Only all the time.”
“And he knows?”
“Not because of anything I’ve said.”
“But you think he does know?”
“He suspects, he must do.”
“And you think that’s why he’s behaving like this?”
Jane stepped to the window, leaned forward until her forehead was pressing against the glass. Small bats cavorted outside, splintering the space between the house and the trees. When she
turned back into the room, the ghost of her mouth remained, a blur of breath upon the pane.
“It isn’t only … He’s jealous, that’s part of what this is all about. Just jealous.”
“What of?”
“Oh,” Jane gestured widely. “Anyone. Men. You. Our neighbor across the street. Anyone. It doesn’t really matter.” Slowly, she shook her head. “He thinks I must be having an affair.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“Of course it is.”
“Then why?”
“Because … Oh, because … He says it’s why I don’t want him any more. Sexually, I mean.”
“And that’s true? Not wanting him, that’s how you feel?”
“Yes, but that doesn’t mean …”
“I know. I know.”
Jane came to where Hannah was sitting and reached out her hand. “It’s just a bloody mess.”
“I’m sorry.”
“And I don’t know what to do.”
Hannah squeezed her friend’s hand and rested it against her cheek.
“I’m frightened. I really am.”
“You’ll be all right,” Hannah said, encouragingly, and then she realized Jane was starting to shake. “Come on,” she said, levering herself to her feet. “Come on over here and sit down.”
“The light,” Jane said.
“What about it? Is it too bright? I can turn it off.”
“No, I want you to come with me, over to the light.”
She pulled free her cotton top, pushed down the waistband of the skirt, and half-turned away: the bruise shone purple-black in the glow of the lamp, slick and fierce as a man’s fist.
Twelve
Grabianski was thinking of his father; the half-sister, Kristyna, he had never seen. The family had fled Poland in the first year of the war-and a slow, cold fleeing they’d had of it, walking, occasionally hitching a lift, hiding beneath the heavy tarpaulin of a river barge: Czechoslovakia, Austria, Switzerland. Kristyna had drowned in the waters of Lake Neuchâtel; she had been eleven years old.
His father, a textile worker from Lodi, had flown as a navigator for both the French and British forces; parachuted out over the Channel, plummeting toward the black, unseeing water with images of Kristyna, her stiff, breastless body, trapped tight behind his eyes.
