‘It’s easy to make a mistake about him. He’s given me enough cause to forget. Only there are things . . . The year after we were married – when – when my baby had died. We were not happy – he had become so different. I cried a lot. I would start to cry for no reason and then I wouldn’t be able to stop. One night we went into a cafe and there were these four young fellows who had been drinking. They had the style, you know, of gang boys. A weak mindless look about two of them, and a lad that might have been simple, and another that had a face of pure badness. You wouldn’t know which of them would turn nastiest without cause given. They talked at me, not nice talk, until you couldn’t ignore it. He got up and went over to them and something happened. You don’t need to believe me. I don’t even know if he spoke to them or just looked at them. He came and sat down with his back to them and started talking to me again, almost as if he hoped I wouldn’t notice what he’d done. And the four of them got up and went out like dogs a man had turned timid with his stick.’
When she tried to smile at me, her lips trembled. I was desolated by something I had not looked for or wanted – an aching flood of tenderness towards her.
‘I remembered then,’ she said, ‘that I had started off being afraid of him.’
The dull blurred Kennedy of every day got in the way so that I could not believe in the reality of those vivid and dangerous memories to which she laid claim. Perhaps that had happened to her too over a long time. If it had, she must have been lonely: married and lonely. She had stopped believing in her memories and then Kilpatrick had come to lodge; ‘Peter’ with his hard good looks and sudden temper. That bastard wouldn’t have hesitated about taking her to bed, and if she had gone I couldn’t feel prim any more or disapproving.
What would the husband of her memories have done, though, if he had found out?
TEN
Muffled against my mid-afternoon pillow, the radio leaked music and then for a while, turn about with the advertisements, an account of the arrival of my father’s Great Man at the city’s top hotel. I had worked as a relief porter at Christmas at Riggs Lodge and it amused me to think how impressed my father would be if I was there still to encounter at close quarters the lofty skeletal figure of the old politician, or get from his own hand a gratuity – some appropriately small coin, of course, since they always get that sort of thing right, those hereditary aristocrats. I thought about that and it stopped being funny and then I fell asleep.
Someone was ringing the front door bell. Late sunlight had slipped from antlers to hooves in the picture above my bed I had christened ‘Son of Stag at Bay.’ The bell went on ringing after any reasonable person would have given up. When I had that thought, an instinct got me out of bed to answer the door.
‘I thought you’d help me,’ Margaret Briody said.
She was in jeans with some kind of tatty shirt hanging over them, and she was the most desirable thing I had ever been close enough to touch.
‘What kind of help?’ I asked.
I sometimes had these bad attacks of caution.
‘Please,’ she said.
My father had advised me about the dangers of being helpful in an undiscriminating sort of way to girls in the big city.
‘Wait here,’ I told her.
‘If you won’t,’ she called after me, ‘I don’t know what I’ll do.’
I went upstairs at the fast limp and collected the stick and my jacket. After a hesitation, I took all three notes out of their hiding place in the shoe under the bed. It was only money. If Paris was worth a mass, my father’s advice was a fair swap for Margaret Briody even in a mess.
She made a forlorn figure standing at the door. A gentleman would have asked her in; but then no one had ever mistaken me for one of those.
‘I don’t think my landlady’s too keen on you,’ I said. ‘We can get a seat in the park. It’s not far.’
Before we got there she had told her story. We sat on a bench near the statue of Carlyle; the massive head emerged out of a column of uncut stone like a tethered lion. Behind us, the river made quiet noises whenever there was a break in the traffic.
‘Let me get this straight,’ I said. ‘Kilpatrick’s hurt. And you want me to help him?’
‘To help me.’ She was crying again. ‘I took him to Daddy’s yard. It was the only place I could think of. It’s empty because of the holiday.’
‘Why, in God’s name, didn’t you get an ambulance? If he’s hurt, he should be in hospital.’
‘But he wasn’t really bad – not until I moved him. But now he’s lying there and I can’t waken him. I’m frightened.’
‘That’s what I’m telling you – he should be in hospital. What else can I tell you? There isn’t anything I can do.’
‘Help me.’ She touched my arm. ‘If you come with me – and we could get him into the car – and we could take him to the hospital. You’re right – that’s where he should be. Only if we took him up to the door, we wouldn’t have to go in ourselves. You could help me with him. He might not want to go, you see.’
I saw; suddenly, I saw. ‘We take him to hospital,’ I worked it out, ‘and if he doesn’t want to go, I persuade him. But we don’t go in with him, because then we’d have to give our names. We just leave him and drive away. That makes everything lovely. Nobody needs to know that he got himself hurt while he was in your house – for some reason, in your house. Not even Daddy and Mummy since they’re away on holiday. Are you serious?’
Visibly, she decided to ignore any hint of indelicacy in what might have brought Kilpatrick to her house, Daddy being on holiday. Instead, she clung to the point at issue. ‘I’m sure Peter wouldn’t mention our names,’ she said.
I couldn’t think of anything to say to that.
‘I’ve told you what happened.’ When she sobbed, her breasts took big silhouettes out of the evening park. ‘I don’t know why you should want to be nasty to me. I’d gone out to do some shopping. I was going to make him – make him a lovely dinner. And when I came back, he was sitting on the floor in the hall and there was blood— blood—’ Her voice edged towards a hysteria that was only half intended.
‘He’d been shot,’ I said.
She made a movement of protest.
‘What do you mean?’ she asked.
‘Shot. With a gun. You said he was hurt. Now you’re talking as if he might be dying. He didn’t get into that state falling downstairs. And don’t tell me you live in a bungalow.’ I felt she was capable of anything.
‘He wouldn’t let me phone a doctor. I did want to! But he said it wasn’t serious and he would phone his boss and find out what to do. He made me help him into the living room and then I’d to go outside while he phoned. And then I’d to get him the stuff to make up a parcel and—’
‘You brought it to me,’ I said, ‘just like he asked. What harm had I ever done you?’
The sun was going down the sky and a little wind stirred in our faces.
‘That’s not fair to Peter,’ she said. ‘He didn’t tell me to take the parcel to you. I was to take it to an address he gave me. But I was frightened. He’d used the towel I’d given him for the blood and I’d seen the gun although I said nothing – I didn’t want to make him angry with me.’
‘He was lucky. It didn’t matter how I felt, so I get the gun.’
‘Do you have to talk like that?’ she asked. ‘I didn’t know for sure what he’d put in the parcel. He asked me to take it to this address he gave me and—’
‘What address?’
She could fix those wide violet eyes on you for a long time without blinking. ‘I don’t remember,’ she said. There was no way of telling if she was lying.
‘Anyway,’ she sighed, ‘I couldn’t find it. He’d given me directions, but I got them muddled. I didn’t think it could be the right address, the streets were so awful. And then this man started following me. I couldn’t take the parcel back to Peter. You don’t know what a temper he has. And then I remembered you were in th
e same lodgings as Peter. You always look as if you know what to do – You were the only person I could think of when I was so frightened.’
The brightest woman in the world couldn’t have found a better method of persuading me.
‘Stop crying,’ I said in my rough, competent way. ‘We’ll work it out.’ Something struck me. ‘When you gave me the parcel, you said that Brond was going to come for it. Why did you say that?’
‘It was just a name,’ she said. ‘I had to tell you something.’
I shook my head. ‘No. That’s no good. There has to be a reason. Was it his address Kilpatrick gave you? Were you supposed to take the parcel to Brond? It was him Kilpatrick phoned, wasn’t it?’
For instructions. Because things had gone astray. Because something disastrous had happened. A knock on the door, you open it, smiling probably since it’s this young pretty girl (damn it, beautiful, damn it, damn it) who’s come back with stuff for dinner and herself for afters (no wonder the bastard was smiling), only it wasn’t her but someone else, someone unexpected. The gun must have looked like a cannon. It was the kind of trick they pulled off all the time now in Northern Ireland. Bang! Bang! you’re dead. Only whoever it was must have hesitated since Kennedy had got the gun from him. It hadn’t stopped him getting shot though. Smiling, he had probably gone to the door with an erection. It must have felt strange when he realised it was death that had knocked.
‘He phoned Brond, didn’t he?’ I said.
‘When I went back, he wouldn’t believe that I’d taken it where he told me.’ She gulped and bit her lip in a child-like movement. ‘I had to tell him I’d given the parcel to you. He made me. And then he was angry.’ She made the same child-like and vulnerable movement of her mouth. ‘It was worse than that, he was frightened. He said I’d have to find somewhere else for him to hide.’
‘Because you’d given it to me?’ I didn’t understand.
‘Yes – till the man he’d phoned could help him. And I thought of Daddy’s yard. It’s got a room behind the shop with a bed in it. My father used to sleep there often in the early days – so he could be on top of things.’
She said the last bit like a phrase rehearsed in the house so often it had turned into rote.
‘How long can Kilpatrick stay there?’
‘Till Monday. The men don’t come back from holiday till Monday.’
‘What men, for God’s sake?’
‘My Daddy’s men. He has more than twenty men work for him.’ She glinted lunatic irrelevant pride. ‘He has the demolition contract with the District for that side of the city – after fires and things.’
So much for Daddy. He must be rich beyond the dreams of Annandale – or at least of its farm labourers’ sons.
It seemed the time for irrelevancy.
‘Why don’t we get married?’ I asked her.
She widened those extraordinary eyes at me. For a panic-stricken moment, I thought she was going to accept.
‘I don’t think he’ll be able to stay there all night,’ she said. ‘He’s getting worse. He can’t be there when the men come in on Monday.’
She hadn’t even heard me, it seemed. A number of good things about being married to her came into my head.
‘Come back with me!’ she said. In her concern for emphasis, she leaned close. It reassured me to find that sex put danger out of your head in the real world. ‘He’ll listen to you.’
I had given up trying to explain that Kilpatrick was no friend of mine.
‘Why was he so sure you’d help him?’ I heard myself ask. ‘Why did you?’
She blushed. It was unmistakable. Not, despite the year, merely an allergic reaction or the reflection of a holocaust on the far side of the hill. It started out of sight, under the shirt in the soft dark, and spread up until it warmed her neck and the high bones of her cheeks.
‘You must be pretty close,’ I prompted.
‘We’re good friends.’
There was no answer to that.
‘Come on!’ I got to my feet and she looked up at me without stirring. ‘If we’re going, let’s get started.’
The flush ebbed from her skin and it was white under her mane of black hair.
‘You won’t come?’ she whispered.
It wasn’t what I meant, but her misunderstanding gave me one bonus chance, the last; to be sensible. It was a pity my idea of myself didn’t square with walking off and leaving her to her troubles. The girl being beautiful and frightened and helpless were poor reasons for putting my head on the block.
‘That’s not what I said. Apart from anything else, if we don’t move they’ll lock us in the park.’ I started to walk and she came into step with me. Close to me, even her sweat smelt of tears and honey. She moved with a loose graceful stride that almost matched mine. I wanted to stroke her hair and touch her. It didn’t make any sense, but I felt marvellous. The vast stone head of Thomas Carlyle peered at me across the twilight, and I wanted to yell at the old fraud, You’re dead, but I’m alive! I laughed out loud, and when she stared said to cover it, ‘We’ll have to spend the night in here.’
Innuendo would be my speciality; common sense could be someone else’s.
‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘We could climb the gate. I’m good at climbing.’
I wondered if she could be mentally retarded. Kilpatrick might have won her heart by poking nothing more sinister than Crunchie Bars into her.
I put an arm round her waist. She shied like a skittish horse, then relaxed against me, but when we came into the street she took my hand and lifted it away, not unpleasantly but as if it was the proper thing to do.
We walked until we came to a subway station for she had decided against bringing the car from her father’s yard. Going down the steps, I remembered trips on the subway as a child when we had visited the city.
‘It used to smell differently,’ I said. ‘It used to smell of ozone.’
She looked at me uncomprehendingly as we went down side by side.
‘Stuff that you get at the seaside,’ I explained. ‘You take deep breaths. Makes you feel better.’
Waiting on the platform, I began to laugh. It was as if I had been drinking and had taken too much. She looked at me as if I was mad and I remembered a silly story as an explanation.
‘My Uncle James lived in Largs when he was a boy. Do you know Largs?’
She nodded.
‘I’ve never been there. But he used to tell me how with the other boys he’d walk out to the Pencil – it’s a monument thing outside the town.’
‘It commemorates the Battle of Largs,’ she said seriously. ‘The Scots defeated the King of Norway.’
‘We were the people,’ I said. ‘Anyway, I laughed because I remembered him telling me how the tourists would stand on the sea wall out there and take deep breaths – aa-ah! aa-ah! And in those days the boys knew they were standing right above the pipes where the town’s sewage emptied. So much for ozone.’
The train poked its snout out of the tunnel. We travelled in silence. The walls of the tunnel slid past; then a station, two or three people, an Indian with a whistle who waved the train out again; more walls.
‘This is ours,’ Margaret said.
When we came out of the station, it was night. Between the pools of light from the streetlamps, it was dark. I wondered about putting my arm round her again, but before I could she said, ‘Please God, let him be all right.’
I thought she wanted to draw me into that feeling, but maybe she just wanted to share it. She must have known I would not turn back at this stage. We came into a main road with sulphur lamps set on long swan necks. In that street, her eyes turned some shade from outer space for which the name had yet to be invented. Out of it, we defiled into a wadi of darkened tenements. It was a place for ambushes. I felt endangered.
‘Margaret, he must have told you who hurt him and why?’
‘No.’ She turned her head away from me.
‘That’s hard to believe. Did you ask
him?’
‘No.’
She stopped walking and we were outside a shop. I had been looking for a wall or a fence round what she called her father’s yard. There was a lane though at the side big enough for a lorry to go through. Her father’s name was over the door of the shop front.
‘Well,’ I said. ‘Have you a key?’
Her breath hurried in little gasps.
‘I didn’t ask him,’ she said. ‘I don’t ask him any questions.’
‘Have you got a key? Give it me and I’ll go in first.’
She shook her head.
‘I don’t know what he’d do.’ Her voice was so quiet I could hardly hear it. ‘It’s better if he knows I’m here – so it’s all right.’
She had opened the door before I thought of the obvious. I caught her by the arm.
‘Has he another gun? One of his own, I mean.’
I felt her trembling.
‘I don’t know.’
But she pulled away from me and I followed her inside. There wasn’t enough light from the street to see anything. We stopped and she called, ‘Peter! Peter? It’s only me. Peter?’
In the silence I could hear the sighing beat of my blood, the sound of her breathing, a faint thrum of traffic from the main road we had left.
‘Oh, God!’ she said. ‘He’s unconscious.’
When I tried to follow her, I blundered into the edge of a counter. It caught me on the left side under the ribs with the force of a punch. I couldn’t find another door. I had a touch of panic I’d felt as a child sleeping in a cupboard bed. I would waken and feel around in the dark until I was sure there was no opening but only walls on all four sides.
A light came on in the back shop.
‘He’s not here.’
Her voice was drained of life.
I pushed past her into the room: a desk, filing cabinet, a battered table supporting a typewriter and a pile of clip folders.
‘Shut the door of the shop,’ I told her. ‘Or we’ll have somebody wandering in off the street.’
She went through obediently. I heard the door bump shut and then her locking it. Beyond the back shop there was a smaller room with an electric cooker and sink. There was a bed against the wall. I lifted back the soiled grey blanket that covered it. On the sheet there were rusty smears like the marks on the cloth that had wrapped the gun.
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