Out of the Sun

by Robert Goddard

  “I am sorry, Harry.”

  “I know. So am I. And we’ll both be sorrier yet.” He rose and fastened his coat. “If you’d waited, I’d have done everything I could for you. You and David.”

  There’s nothing you could have done.”

  “There’s nothing I can do now. That much is certain.”

  She looked up at him. “Goodbye, Harry.”

  He returned her gaze levelly, squeezing condemnation and forgiveness into a grudging blankness. There was nothing to say. Parting was merely a turning away, a closing of a door. Time, the hidden dimension, was reeling them in. What they had shared was over. What he was about to do was simply a silent statement of the obvious.

  He raised his hand as if to wave, then let the gesture fall to his side. He took his leave of her in a single glance un consoling un accepting unreconciled. Then he turned and walked away. He did not look back. And she did not call after him.

  FIFTY-ONE

  The London train had barely cleared the end of the platform at Manchester Piccadilly station and was rattling and swaying across the points when Harry presented himself at the buffet and ordered a scotch. He stood by the narrow carriage window, watching the grey Mancunian vista of streets and house-backs slide past him as the train gathered speed. Was the city moving or was he? He pondered this relativistic nicety as he swallowed the first of the whisky. It made nothing clearer. Which was, after all, the point of drinking it. He had no need of clarity. Much more of that and he would regret letting Iris off so lightly.

  “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen,” crackled a voice through a microphone somewhere above him. “This is your conductor speaking. Welcome aboard the eleven-thirty West Coast Intercity service to London Euston. This train will call at Stockport, Macclesfield, Stoke-on-Trent, Watford Junction and London Euston.”

  Why, Harry wondered, as he raised the plastic tumbler to his lips again, had he not made Iris suffer for what she had done? Because he had always been too soft too gentlemanly in his own way. Lazy and unambitious maybe, but never cruel or vengeful. Faintly chivalrous, perhaps, though his chivalry had often been ignored or misunderstood. Come to that, it had never been tested to the limit. Would he have stood by her all those years ago, if she had told Claude she was pregnant by another man and he had thrown her out? Would he have done his best by her and David?

  It was easy to say yes and to blame her for not giving him the chance. But at least she had enabled him to give himself the benefit of the doubt. And doubt was always a two-edged sword.

  Yet the anger remained. Indeed, it seemed to grow as the whisky sapped his sorrow. He had tried so hard. He had achieved so much. Yet still he had failed. Perhaps it would have been better not to try at all. Better by far, he reckoned, draining the tumbler and turning to order a refill, if this sterile churning anger was all he had to show for his efforts. As it seemed it was.

  The buffet attendant raised his eyebrows at Harry, but served him obligingly enough. Harry went back to the window and gazed out again at the unyielding view. There was nothing in its colourless portion of the world to comfort him. No sticking-plaster for his wounds; no target for his anger. Just a drab suburban haul through playing fields and shopping centres, trading estates and recreation grounds, cul-de-sacs and fly overs It was all

  HEWITT ENGINEERING. His eyes focused suddenly on the name, starkly lettered on a factory wall. There it stood, amidst a jumble of industrial premises beside the track. Hewitt Engineering where good old Ken was even then checking his profits and losses, making up for the time he would spend at his stepson’s funeral on Monday, a funeral he had worked so assiduously to bring forward. Yes, of course. Ken Hewitt ran an engineering business. Iris had told him so. In Stockport.

  The train began to slow at that moment. They were on a viaduct, crossing a motorway and a stretch of the Mersey. The factory fell away behind. “This train will shortly be arriving at Stockport,” came the conductor’s announcement. “Stockport will be the next station stop?

  Harry emptied the tumbler, turned around and slapped it down onto the counter.

  “Don’t you think you’ve had enough, sir?” the attendant gently enquired.

  “Yes,” Harry replied. “Definitely.”

  FIFTY-TWO

  Hewitt Engineering occupied a triangular site between the M63 and the railway line, a redundant spur of which could be seen rusting away on a patch of weed-choked wasteland to the rear. The car park was nearly full, suggesting a healthy order-book; Ken Hewitt was not the man to pay time and a half without good cause. A fork-lift truck was active over by the loading bay. A sound of welding could be heard from the region of the workshop. The place seemed busy enough. It certainly looked more prosperous than most of its neighbours. Good old Ken doubtless had a shrewd head as well as a hard heart. And he was there all right. Harry recognized the racing-green Jag in its reserved berth by the office entrance.

  Harry pushed the main door open and walked into a pot-planted reception area decorated with framed certificates of technical excellence. Hewitt Engineering had apparently won a Queen’s Award for Technological Achievement. Ken would be in line for an OBE if he played his cards right, maybe something more prestigious still. No wonder he had not wanted his wife dragging him into Globescope’s murky affairs. Not when the New Year Honours List might be beckoning.

  The receptionist was evidently one member of staff who did not work on Saturdays. No reps to fob off, Harry supposed. It left the coast clear for him, though. He started up the stairs, which looked as if they might lead to the boss’s lair.

  There was a long straight corridor at the top, running past a series of doors to the right and windows to the left looking out over the dip-and-scarp roof of the workshop. A door stood open at the far end of the corridor, giving onto an office large enough to be that of the man himself. Who, talk of the Devil, chose that moment to emerge from one of the intervening doorways, tossing some remark to a junior over his shoulder. “Be sure they do. Maybe’s not good enough.” He looked even more arrogant and domineering in pinstripe trousers, straining blue shirt and taut red braces, bestriding his home turf, than he had in tweed and twill at the Mitre Bridge Service Station. Harry struggled for a moment to call to mind all the excellent reasons for hating him. Then their eyes met.

  “Barnett!”

  “Morning, Ken.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  Harry stopped at the top of the stairs. They stared at each other along half the length of the corridor. “Came to pay my respects. Felt I couldn’t leave Manchester without looking in.”

  “You’ve seen Iris?”

  “You bet. We had an appointment. Didn’t she mention it? Must have slipped her mind. Well, I suppose she’s had a lot to think about lately. Arranging the funeral and everything. Arranging a death, come to that. Or was that down to you?”

  “I warned you before to leave my wife alone.” Hewitt started advancing slowly towards him. “Listening to your worthless ramblings is the last thing she needs to do at a time like this.”

  “Ah, but she did listen. Do you know why? Because it’s a time like this. Because our son is dead. Like you wanted him to be. Dead but not yet buried.”

  “Get out of here.”

  “Gladly. Once you’ve answered a couple of questions.”

  “Your questions don’t warrant answers.”

  “You haven’t heard them yet.”

  “I don’t need to.” Hewitt came to a halt three feet away and stared at Harry in a manner his employees doubtless found intimidating. He lowered his voice, perhaps to ensure none of them caught what he was about to say. “You’re a spineless shit, Barnett. You had a connection with my wife. A foolish and regrettable connection, now sundered. That’s all I need to know. I don’t allow myself to be questioned by the likes of you.”

  “Why were you so eager to have David killed?”

  “It’s only out of consideration for Iris I don’t call the police and have you arrested
. You’re drunk, you’re offensive and this is private property. I’m telling you to leave. Now.”

  “Because of the cost of his treatment? Because he was our son rather than yours? Because he was the son you were never capable of having?” This last was an impulsive jibe he had not even thought of uttering until the words were out of his mouth. He was not even certain Hewitt had no children. But the look on the other man’s face suggested he had hit home. “Which one of us is really the spineless shit, Ken, eh? Me or ‘

  Hewitt telegraphed the punch by the sudden gritting of his teeth and the widening of his eyes. Harry saw it coming and felt pleased in that instant to have provoked it. Pathetically late, his reflexes got in on the act and jerked him out of the line of the blow, which struck nothing but thin air. Hewitt was evidently in even worse shape than Harry, because the effort left him red-faced and off-balance, clutching at the top of the banisters for support. As he turned Harry hit him hard with his fist on the bridge of the nose. He heard something crack and found himself wondering if it was a bone or a banister. Hewitt grunted and fell backwards, subsiding onto the top step of the stairs like a punctured zeppelin. Blood began to stream from his nose. He coughed, groaned and raised a hand to his face. His eyes rolled for a moment before focusing on Harry. The arrogance in them had gone now. It had not taken much to dislodge it.

  “What the hell’s going on?” A figure had emerged from a doorway down the corridor and was moving hesitantly towards them. He was a tall shambling man of forty or so, wearing just the expression somebody would wear when called upon to rescue an employer he probably feared more than he respected.

  “Call the police, John,” roared Hewitt through a blood-flecked handkerchief and what sounded like a heavy cold. “I think the bastard’s broken my nose.”

  “As a matter of fact,” said Harry, grinning inanely, “I think this bastard’s broken my thumb.” Certainly it was throbbing painfully. He flexed it experimentally and winced. “But I reckon it was worth it.”

  “Don’t just stand there goggling,” Hewitt shouted, when John still made no decisive move. “Get to a bloody phone.”

  “Which is undoubtedly preferable to a bloody nose, eh?” Harry was tempted to administer a boot to Hewitt’s groin, but the futility of even talking to the man, let alone kicking him, washed over him in that instant. He shook his head dismissively at him and started down the stairs.

  “Don’t think you can get away with this,” Hewitt bellowed after him.

  Harry paused long enough on the half-landing to grin back at Hewitt and raise two contemptuous fingers at him. Then he headed for the door.

  Outside, the world was cold and grey and unaltered. At a chapel of rest in Wilmslow, his son’s body still lay in its coffin. Nothing could change that. Nothing at all. Hitting Hewitt had made Harry feel better. But he knew the sensation would not last. Crossing the car park, he noticed a half-brick lying at the foot of the low boundary wall from which it had been dislodged. He picked it up in his left hand, his right now protesting at any movement, and looked back at the office building. He could see John in an upper window, speaking on a telephone and glancing down anxiously at him. Harry caught his eye and smiled, then took aim and lobbed the brick towards the windscreen of Hewitt’s Jaguar. It hit dead centre. The sound of smashing glass blotted out the breaking of so much else in Harry’s heart and mind. But only for a second. Only for a fraction of a second.

  FIFTY-THREE

  Ten days late rat noon, near the chill grey heart of Kensal Green Cemetery, Harry was sitting on the steps leading up to the east front of the Anglican Chapel, smoking a cigarette with his left hand while his right, encased in plaster save for the top two joints of his fingers and the tip of his thumb, rested on his knee, the thumb fixed ludicrously in a hitch-hiking position. But there were no rides to hitch here. And he had no destination to name even if he had been offered one. The fading of the year and the slow silent crumbling of the catacombs and sarcophagi around him perfectly matched his mood.

  Death, he understood in the aftermath of his own son’s, was not merely extinction, but erasure. The broken pillars still stood, the hollow helmets still echoed. But the thousands of names and the thousands of people they had once been vanished, sooner or later, beneath the lichen of utter forgetfulness. The memorials outlasted the memories. They alone remained, in this petrified forest of cere monied mortality.

  He ground out the cigarette beneath his heel on a lower step and tackled the complicated task lighting another had become on account of a broken thumb. As he did so, he thought fondly of the day he could throw away the lighter he had recently bought and revert to honest-to-goodness matches.

  A figure, he noticed, had appeared far off along the central avenue that led from the chapel towards the east gate. A sightseer, he surmised, for there were always more sightseers than mourners,

  though few of either on days as cold as this. Strangely, however, this one did not seem to be interested in the memorials lining the path. He or she kept up a steady pace in Harry’s direction, looking neither to right nor left and becoming, somewhere near John St. John Long’s Grecian monument, identifiably female. She was a slim slightly built woman dressed in jeans and a dark coat with a hood, carrying a bag of some kind over her shoulder. By the time she had passed George Birkbeck’s mausoleum, Harry knew who she was.

  “Hi, Harry,” said Donna as she reached the foot of the steps. “Good to see you.” She gave him a faltering smile that was somehow the more moving because of its uncertainty. “Mind if I join you?”

  “Be my guest.”

  “Your landlady told me where to find you.” She climbed to where he was and sat down beside him. “She said you’d been spending quite a lot of time here lately.”

  “Well, none of the residents object to Greek tobacco, you see. Can’t say that of many places these days.”

  “Don’t joke about it.” She squeezed his arm through the sleeve of his coat. “I know what you must be feeling.”

  “But that’s the point, Donna. A joke is what I feel. Or the butt of one. I plod around here trying to see the funny side of it. But laughter seems in short supply. Plenty of weeping angels. But not a grinning one to be found.”

  “I came as soon as I could.”

  “But not sooner than was safe, I hope.”

  “Haven’t you read about it in the papers?”

  “Mrs. ‘I said there was something. But I … couldn’t seem to face the chapter and verse. What have they done? Turned the story into a major theatrical production with Lazenby as the villain of the piece and a discreditable bit-part for David?”

  “Something like that. The Washington Post went for it in a big way. Now all the media have joined in. Globescope’s closed its doors and Lazenby’s gone into hiding. Pretty ironic, given that we’ve just come out of hiding.”

  “You’re sure he won’t try anything?”

  “He’d be crazy to. I mean, Newsweek are assassinating him in print, film crews are besieging his house, Globescope’s clients are taking out law suits against him and his senior staff are probably trying to set up book deals to compensate for the redundancy money they won’t be getting, but it’s all so much less excruciating than he deserves. Criminally, he’s fireproof. None of the deaths fall under US jurisdiction and I doubt the British, French, Canadian and Danish authorities have the basis of a case between them, let alone adequate grounds for extradition. If Lazenby sits tight and keeps his hands clean, he can’t be touched. And by the same token…”

  “You can’t be touched either.”

  “Exactly.”

  “I’m glad my efforts achieved that much, Donna. Really.”

  “We wouldn’t have got out of this without you, Harry. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Well, you wouldn’t have got into it either, would you? Ultimately.”

  “You can’t take responsibility for David’s actions. He was his own man.”

  “But what sort of man would he have beco
me if I’d raised him as my son, eh? That’s the real question. And the answer? I can’t help wondering. Dead and disgraced at thirty-three? I don’t think so. I’d like not to think so, anyway.”

  “I reckon you’re probably right. He would have been better for having you as his father.”

  “Kind of you to say so.”

  “I happen to believe it. David had so many gifts so early he was blind to his own fallibility.”

  “Well, I could certainly have taught him about that.” He held up his plastered hand. “I’ve never made much of a fist of anything, have

  I?”

  That’s garbage. You saved me, Harry. Makepeace and Rawnsley too. We owe you our lives. As for David… God, I’m sorry they let him die, even though I don’t suppose Sandoval could have done much for him. Talking of whom, Iris didn’t seem to know anything about him. How come you didn’t mention him to her?”

  There didn’t seem much point.”

  “So you went easy on her, despite her broken promise. See what I mean? Not such a bad example to set. I tried to explain how grateful we all are to you, but I’m not sure she took much of it in. The publicity’s hit her hard. It’s one hell of an obituary. What with that and Ken Hewitt for a husband, her future must look pretty bleak. But I gather she’s put a stop to your prosecution for assault, so she evidently realizes you’re not to blame for what’s happened.”

  “Really? I assumed Ken had withdrawn his complaint for fear of what I might say in court. But you’re probably right. Iris isn’t a malicious woman. In some ways, I wish she were. Then I might feel less sorry for her.”

  “Not to mention yourself?”

  “Ah, self-pity. That’s your diagnosis, is it?”

  “You tell me. David’s dead. That’s a fact. He’s dead, but not for the want of trying on your part. That’s a fact too. There’s plenty to regret, but nothing to be ashamed of. You don’t seem to realize what an altogether remarkable man you are. I didn’t go to bed with you just because you happened to be there at the time, you know.”