by Barbara Vine
They packed up just before five, which was early for them, but it had been a good day, they had taken over £20. Tom got Mark to promise to join them again – with his wireless microphone system – and then he thought of going along to meet Alice from work.
He knew more or less where she worked and the name of the company, though he had never been there. He knew the street but not the number. It was too far to walk if he was to get there in time. He went along to the Central Line going east. The platform was jammed with people and after a moment or two a voice came over the public address system apologizing for the absence of trains and explaining that there had been an ‘incident’ on the line. This meant another body, a suicide.
More people kept coming on to the platform. Could you get to a point where the pressure would push people over the edge on to the line? He imagined a choked escalator, and a water image came to him, the escalator like a waterfall that poured into a full pool. Water would drip over the edges, heave, swell and flood. Jarvis had told him there were stations where a warning bell rang to stop this, but the occasional claustrophobia from which he suffered began to affect him. A headache was beginning. He struggled back through the mass of people and made for the westbound platform. It was ten past five and Alice would have gone.
Months had gone by since he was home so early. Alice was not in the Headmaster's Study nor in Four. Even if she had been at home he was not allowed to consult her about Axel's plans. He was going to do it anyway, wasn't he? The two of them were to get into one of the disused parts of the tube and Axel would take his photographs. Axel had not told him how they would get in nor who these photographs were for.
Russia? It seemed ridiculous. Since Jarvis went to Russia, there had been a continuous detente, a loosening of all those tight bands that bound the satellites of Eastern Europe to their mother planet. Some Middle Eastern country, then? Why would any country want photographs of the London tube? Tom remembered, while a student, being threatened by an official with having his camera taken away from him when he got it out in a railway station in Italy. And wasn't there a rule in some countries about not taking pictures of their territory from aircraft? So perhaps wanting photographs of London Transport's signals system was not so bizarre as it seemed, perhaps all countries wanted such photographs of their enemies' or possible enemies' secrets.
It was inescapable, though, that all the time he thought about it he had this feeling he was being taken for a ride. Possibly it was only the money that worried him, the chance he might not get the money. Tom resolved that if he said yes and the promised £1,000 was not forthcoming, he would withdraw. But it was not just the money. It was more as if Axel thought he was a fool who would accept any story. As soon as this idea came to Tom he dismissed it. He had no reason to think Axel did not respect and trust and like him. Other people might call him paranoid. He knew he was paranoid, he did not deceive himself, but this was the reverse of that. Axel liked him, Axel had nothing against him.
Tom lay on his bed and slept for a while. He was tired. There was the occasional tube passenger who passed them and made a comment about beggars or about their being too lazy to take proper jobs, but busking was hard work. Tom sometimes felt worn out by evening.
When he woke up it was nearly seven. His left hand was numb, as it often was on waking. There was no sign of Alice. He put his head round the door of the Headmaster's Study but she was not there. Jed's door was open a little way and Tom could see the hawk in there, asleep on its perch. The room smelt like the aviary of a bird of prey, which was what it had become.
He went along to the Art Room and knocked on the door. There was no answer so he knocked again and looked inside. Someone had been there but not for a long time. The empty whisky bottle on the drawing table looked as if it had been emptied days before and a winter-surviving fly had drowned in the dregs of one of the glasses. Tom knocked at Five. He opened the door and Alice got up off the bed and stood looking at him.
It was cold in there, no heater was on, and she was still in her outdoor things, the old navy-blue coat and the thick shawl. He said, puzzled, ‘Were you waiting for Axel? Were you looking for him?’
‘I must have gone to sleep.’
‘I wondered where you were,’ he said.
He thought she looked strange, weary and worn. She was holding one hand up to her mouth, speaking through the fingers. ‘I'm cold,’ she said, and then, ‘I don't know what I'm doing in here.’
That made him laugh. ‘Well, I certainly don't. Come on. You always feel cold when you wake up, you know that. I expect you're hungry too.’
‘I'm not hungry,’ she said, but she allowed him to lead her from the room and downstairs to where he had made Four warm and had spread out an Indian takeaway and had a bottle of red wine breathing. He helped her gently out of her coat and wrapped her once more in the shawl. She was deathly tired, he could tell, and he thought he would talk to her about giving up that job. A train rattled down beyond the wall and he drew the curtains to shut it out. She turned to him, ‘Oh, Tom, oh, Tom!’
‘What is it, darling? What's wrong? You can tell me.’
She went into his arms and held him as he held her. ‘I'm so tired of it all, this life.’
‘We won't stay here much longer,’ he said. ‘We'll have a home of our own.’
Later, after they had eaten, and she was listening with closed eyes to a Haydn symphony, Tom heard Axel come up the stairs. He said he would be quick, he would be straight back, but she gave no sign that she had heard him. He went upstairs to Five where the door was ajar and told Axel he would do the job – so long as he got the money.
Axel smiled, said he was pleased and gave Tom a £1,000 in £50 notes. He had it all ready, which amazed Tom. His worry receded when he had the notes in his hand and this made him certain that all he had been worrying about, all the time, had been money.
21
Every evening, when she got home from work, she went to Axel's room to wait for him. This was the fifth time she had waited in vain, or she believed it would be in vain when the time came to 6.30, to a quarter to seven. Of course she knew very well he would hate her pursuit of him, her waiting for him like a dog, but she could not help herself.
Tom had told her he would be away for a whole night. He was going to Bristol to see a man who had a secondhand dynamic microphone for sale. He had not explained why he could not come back in the evening, it was only a two-hour train journey, but she had not asked or cared. The first thing she thought of was that she and Axel might have that night together. The idea of a whole night with Axel as a marvellous possibility had replaced musical aspiration. It was all she wanted, a night with him – then a life with him.
Wrapped in her shawl, her coat on, she sat waiting for Axel in his unheated room. Once, when she went there the first thing she did was put the heater on, but now she told herself not to prepare, not to turn down the bed, not even to take her coat off. If she did those things Providence would be tempted and he would not come. So she sat shivering in a coat and shawl not warm enough to keep out the chill.
Sometimes she got up and walked about. She was tempted to look inside his suitcases. She told herself mad things, that the time in which she was doing things in his room she should not be doing was the only time she would not want him to come. There would be ten minutes, half an hour, of not wanting him. While looking in his suitcases she would be hoping for him not to come, so therefore he would come. Was she prepared to pay the price of his anger?
She listened. The house was silent. Then footsteps began to mount the stairs. She froze and waited but the footsteps did not continue up the second flight. It was Tom coming in or Jed. She thought she felt much the same about Tom now as she did about Jed, a friendly, impatient indifference. She would have hugged each of them equally, except that Tom was clean and Jed smelt of stale meat. That made her laugh hysterically. She laughed to herself in the empty room.
Tom was a comfort to her. She hugged him and cried
in his arms as she might have hugged her father, if she had had that sort of father. Guilt overwhelmed her and made her dislike him, though it did not keep her from clinging to him, from holding him in the night. She would have said she had no physical feeling for Tom left, yet paradoxically her feeling for him was all physical, for his warmth, his touch, his arms round her, his body near her in bed in the dark. Once she had reassured herself by recalling the things they had in common, the way they could talk and confide in each other. Now she did not want him to speak or to speak to him, only to have him there to hold.
In Axel's suitcases she felt sure was contained his secret life, his past, his history, all of which she knew nothing. While in here, her eyes often went to Mary Zambaco on the wall. She had grown jealous of the picture, believing that if she looked like that he would love her.
The cases lay open. A folded garment lay on top of the contents of each, obscuring the tantalizing things beneath. If she touched those open cases, he would know. He might even have placed objects in certain positions to catch her out. Perhaps a hair had been laid carefully between a cloth surface and a sheet of paper, a piece of fluff nearly invisible on white cotton.
She listened, heard the silence, heard a train go down to Finchley Road. The things in the cases would smell of him, all had been handled by him, bore his hairs or his sweat or the residue of his breath. They drew her to them. She was the girl in the Bluebeard story, longing to search forbidden places, longing to find out, even though finding out would be her destruction.
Silence prevailed. A firm resolution not to touch anything in the room took her back to the bed, to seating herself on it, gripping her left hand in her right. How many such resolutions had she made in the past year and broken them as soon as they were formed? To go back to Mike that first morning. Not to become Tom's lover. To put music first before everything. Not to go to Kensington and meet Axel.
Her head turned away from the suitcases, strained sideways like a lever turned, she looked towards the cupboard. She held her breath, jumped up, opened the cupboard door. A leather jacket hung inside, a pair of jeans over the bar of a cleaner's wire hanger, a dark sweater on another and, shimmering a little in that dim place, bright with the light it gathered to itself, a long white dress.
Clothes did not interest her much. It was as if she knew she could not afford them and might never be able to. But this dress demanded attention as a work of art might, its snow-white perfection, its embroidered panels, its lace, the fine tucks that covered the broad spaces of the lawn of which it was made. Alice was reminded of her own wedding dress, a plainer confection, but also white and tucked, a ridiculous travesty, the waist made high to conceal her pregnancy.
But this one, in Axel's cupboard – could it be intended for herself? She stared at it but did not touch. A belief that if she touched it with her perfectly clean fingers she would leave a mark, made her draw back her hands. Could it be a present for her? She did not want to think of other reasons for its being there, other women who might wear it, who might have worn it. Without touching, she brought her face close to it, her eyes, she stroked it with her eyes and saw the tag hanging on a loop of white cord from one of the long lacy cuffs. No one had ever worn it, it was new.
She closed the cupboard door just in time. The door opened and Axel's hand came round it, the hand with the gold-and-silver ring. He came in.
‘Why are you standing there in the cold?’
‘I'm waiting for you.’
‘Put the heater on.’ He kicked the switch. ‘I'll be glad to get away from this cold.’
Terror struck her. ‘What do you mean, get away? You're not leaving?’
‘Not just yet.’ He smiled. ‘Not till Friday. I think I'll go on Friday.’
She was silenced. She watched the bar of the old-fashioned electric fire turn from grey to a dull pink, to orange. As it heated it made a sporadic crackling sound. He had sat down opposite her, in the chair. His hands, his thin wrists, dangling from the sleeves of his dark overcoat, looked cold, bluish, and the ring loose between the joints. She wanted to take one of his hands but she dared not. She dared not speak now, not after what he had said. A cold panic silenced her, she seemed to have forgotten how to speak.
He turned away and warmed his hands at the heater. She found a voice, remoter than her normal one, no more than a distant whisper. ‘Where will you go?’
Instead of answering, he said in tones that were teasing, that were full of laughter, ‘Shall I take you with me?’
‘You don't mean that.’ She had begun to tremble.
‘Don't you know by now that I never say what I don't mean? I may tell lies but I don't say things unless I mean them.’
It was like a revelation. She seemed at last to see things clearly, to see what suspicion and distrust had made her miss before: that his laughter was sincere, not a teasing malice, that he might really love and want her, that he might, against all the odds, be good and kind. But he had also said he was mad. Was that a thing he meant?
‘Can we really go away from here together, Axel?’
‘Why not?’
‘Where shall we go?’
‘Over the hills and far away. I'll fix something.’
She felt she could touch him now, the time had come for that. She put her hand on his knee. He brought his hands away from the hot bar and leant towards her. Their faces were close.
‘I was going to say to you,’ she said, ‘that Tom will be away on Thursday overnight.’ Her voice dropped. She told herself that she was wrong when she believed he liked to make her embarrassed. It was all in her head. ‘I thought – I mean, that we could have the night together. But it doesn't matter if we're going to go away.’
He said in a businesslike way, ‘I shan't be here on Thursday night anyway. I've arrangements to make. I told you I have to fix things up.’
‘Shall I tell Tom?’
‘Tell him what?’
‘About us.’
‘For Christ's sake, no.’ His vehemence startled her. She pulled back. She had never heard him speak so roughly. Perhaps she had never heard him speak with such real feeling. ‘Don't say anything to Tom. Not till Friday, maybe not even then. He'll know when we're gone. Promise me, please, Alice.’
‘I'll write a letter resigning from my job but I promise not to say a word to Tom till Friday.’
He pulled her to her feet and kissed her gently. She was warm now, a little sweat on her upper lip. He unwrapped the shawl and began to undo her coat. It seemed to her that he was looking at her tenderly, appreciatively, and hen she was naked with a breathless, barely controllable, admiration.
She wanted to say to him that he was everything to her, the very beat of her heart, but she thought he would laugh.
‘I love you,’ she said.
She said it every time they met.
Because the theft of Cecilia's credit card, chargecard and cashpoint card was never reported, Nicholas Mann was able to go on using them with impunity. He knew that he had emptied her current account but this did not stop him drawing a cheque for £500 which, backed by the credit card and the chargecard, he presented to a secondhand car dealer as deposit on a five-year-old Ford Fiesta. The rest of the cost was covered by a hire purchase agreement that Nicholas Mann had entered into quite serenely.
Driving himself back to London, he checked into an hotel in the Edgware Road. He had no more wish to return to his sister than she had to have him back. By now he understood that, for some reason or other, the owner of the handbag had not reported its loss. Sometimes he speculated as to why this should be, but not often. He was in no state to think. He had embarked upon a death wish-fulfilment roller coaster, though he would have said himself that he was happy.
He drank. He bought cocaine from a man in a bar in Noel Street. Most of the time he was on a giddy high. If he had any wish it was that the owner of the things he had stolen had been a man and not a woman so that when the shop assistant made that phone inquiry, checking on the
presenter of the credit card in the case of expensive sales, she would not be obliged to say when she had given the number and the cost of the purchase: ‘It's a lady.’ It meant that he could not dare to buy things that cost more than £100.
Luck remained with him, the gambler's quixotic, inexplicable luck. He even made money on the fruit machines and passed dizzy hours in amusement arcades. He went to the dogs, put £100 on a greyhound that won at odds of seven to one. The cash he took back to his hotel room, guarded it and counted it carefully like a miser. The room was full of things he had bought, not things that he wanted but which he had bought on the credit card for the sake of using it: electric shavers and hair dryers and bottles of cologne, silk scarves and sunglasses, videotapes of TV series, sterling silver cigarette lighters and agate eggs. He even bought a telephone answering machine because he saw one for £79.99. He lounged in an armchair among all this, drinking vodka and watching dirty Italian videos.
The only things he used real money for were taxis and gambling. Two weeks after his spree began he spent much of Wednesday night in the Formosa Casino, where he made a little fortune at blackjack, lost most of it and made himself stop when he was down to £600. Nicholas had a last drink at the bar, a double vodka kir, a concoction of Stolichnaya Imperial, champagne and cassis, his own recent invention.
There were no taxis but he was not far from the hotel. He walked down Castellain Road to the bridge at Warwick Avenue and there, taking the south bank of the Grand Union Canal, began to make his unsteady way along Maida Avenue. When he came to the dark bit this side of the church they were upon him. Three of them had followed him from Formosa Street. They knocked him down and kicked him. They took his wallet, containing something over £600 and all Cecilia's cards.
He groaned, so they knew he was conscious. With no wish to kill him, only to make a safe getaway, they tipped him over the railings. But they had supposed the tow-path wider than it was, a broad walkway, not a mere narrow kerb between embankment and water.
