Requiem

by Clare Francis

  ‘Recycled.’ He thought that was quite good, particularly for this stage of the evening. Daisy’s face lit up and she laughed, a light dancing laugh full of amusement, and he flattered himself that it wasn’t just politeness. The evening began to look up; he was glad she had come.

  ‘How d’you know they’ll listen? The gov’ment people.’ He heard the thickening of his speech, the slurring of his words.

  ‘Oh, our work’ll be done under the strictest scientific conditions. They’ll have no choice.’ Her jacket had fallen slightly open, and he saw a dark crescent of damp down the front of her T-shirt. Through his not inconsiderable haze, it dawned on him that she was sitting so stiffly because she was soaking wet, and that it must have been the air-conditioning that made her shiver. He pulled himself forward in his seat. ‘You’re wet,’ he said.

  ‘I am a bit. No, not a bit – ’ That laugh again. ‘A lot!’

  ‘Give me your jacket,’ he said. ‘I’ll put it to dry.’ After a moment’s hesitation, she took the jacket off. Somewhere in the process of getting to his feet, reaching for the jacket and turning towards the bathroom, he had to reach suddenly for the arm of the chair. He shot a quick look at her. Diplomat that she was, she was showing a sudden and absorbing interest in the carpet. But she’d noticed all right, and he minded about that. He always hated anyone to see him in this sort of condition. Anyone being outsiders, people who wouldn’t make allowances, people who would judge him.

  Moving off again, he still hadn’t got it right and barked his shin hard against the table and swore, though not so quietly that she could avoid hearing. By the time he got to the bathroom, he was experiencing one of his periodic bouts of anger and self-contempt. He could imagine what she was thinking: another foul-mouthed performer with more money than manners.

  He went into the bedroom and picked out his favourite Fair Isle cardigan, some five years old but still in shape. Giving the furniture a wide berth, he negotiated himself back to the sitting room and handed it to her.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said. She had to concertina the sleeves before her hands appeared at the ends.

  ‘Shirt?’ he asked, seeing just how wet her T-shirt was.

  ‘This’ll dry soon enough, thanks all the same.’

  ‘Something to eat?’

  ‘Oh …’ She looked undecided. Then her eyes sparked with sudden pleasure. ‘Something nice and junky? I’ve been living off ethnic food for three days.’

  He dialled room service and passed her the phone.

  She took the phone uncertainly, but was soon ordering king hamburgers and fries, with ice-cream to follow. ‘What about you?’ she asked. He gestured a why-not and she ordered the same again.

  She was hungry. She ate like a stevedore at the end of an eight-hour shift, in great gulps, hardly pausing for breath. Her hair was drying now, springing out into a halo of curls round her head, and the freshness had come back into her face. She had a fine clear skin, he noticed, slightly freckled over the nose and almost devoid of lines.

  She may have been nervous when she’d arrived, but she certainly wasn’t now. She was perfectly happy to concentrate on her food and leave the conversation to him – which meant that as often as not she was eating in silence – and to throw him the occasional smile.

  An uncomfortable thought came to him: Was she so relaxed because she thought he’d agreed to her request?

  He tried to get the conversation going again, if only to iron out the possibility of misunderstanding. ‘This money,’ he said, picking his way through the enunciation. ‘How much did you have in mind?’

  She paused with the spoon half-way to her mouth, then returned it slowly to the dish. ‘Brace yourself,’ she said.

  ‘Not suggesting I have another drink?’ The wit. If it hadn’t been such a joke, he might have laughed.

  She grinned fleetingly, then fixed her eyes on him. They were large as lamps. ‘It’s a lot,’ she admitted. ‘We’d need at least two maybe three specialists and several assistants to get through all the work. And then there’ll be the victims’ blood to be monitored for maybe months at a time. That involves a lot of tests. I can’t cost it fully until I get back to the UK and phone around and get estimates – ’

  ‘The UK?’ he asked thickly. ‘But …’ There was a reason he’d asked the question but it took him a moment to remember what it was. ‘The people are in Illinois – how’re you goin’ to test them if you’re over there?’

  ‘Oh, we can manage with the victims in Britain,’ she said. ‘There aren’t so many, but there are enough.’

  Two realizations began to filter through to Nick, both of which caused his heart to sink slightly. The first and the least surprising was that he was rapidly losing his nightly balancing act with the booze. Normally he put up no fight at all – the sooner it was all over the better – but tonight, just when he needed his brain, it was slipping away from him.

  The second realization, which was slower in coming but just as inescapable, was that she was holding back, failing to tell him something, something that he wasn’t going to like.

  In a bid to salvage his brain, he pushed his glass across the table out of reach and braced himself to tackle the hamburger. It was spongy and dry.

  ‘What’s the rest of the story?’ he asked, putting some briskness into his voice. ‘Why’s all this so important?’

  She had picked up the shift in his tone because she started to speak quickly and urgently, in a level voice, very businesslike. ‘There are three reasons,’ she said, striking one finger with the index finger of the other hand. ‘First, all the victims are little people, and the way things are at the moment they haven’t a hope of getting compensation, not without scientific back-up from us.’

  The meat was too much to swallow and, pushing it out from the middle of the roll, he ate the bread with a filling of onions and ketchup.

  ‘The second thing is that as things stand there’s absolutely nothing to stop Silveron getting full approval,’ she continued, bending back a second finger. ‘That means it’ll be used on everything – cereals, vegetables, fruit. A disaster just waiting to happen. Oh, the effects may not be so immediate, but give it a year or two and they’ll start to be reflected in the health statistics. By which time the whole bandwagon will be that much harder to stop. Once a product starts to make money, manufacturers and government agencies become that much more reluctant to admit that anything could be wrong with it. Not until millions of people have been exposed to what may be irreparable damage.’

  He saw that this kind of speech, with its crisp well-used words and ready-hatched thoughts, came easily to her.

  She began to elaborate but he held up a staying hand. ‘Got it,’ he said. Replacing the last of the bread on the plate, he asked: ‘And the third thing?’

  ‘Ahh.’ Her eyes shone with suppressed excitement. ‘We have good reason to believe that the manufacturers are hiding something. It’s even possible that they have falsified their test results, which shows just how desperately unsafe the system can be. But the only way we can hope to prove that is to come up with our own results – ’

  ‘Got it,’ he interrupted. ‘Come up with your own results …’ He focused on her with great care. ‘And?’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Why me? Why should I help?’

  She hesitated, her confidence suddenly plummeted. He was reminded of a child caught out in some minor subterfuge. ‘We have evidence …’ she began slowly, fixed those beautiful clear eyes on him again, ‘to show that Silveron was used illegally on forests in the west of Scotland last year.’ She took her time, anxious not to give him too much too soon. Then, with a deep breath, she added in a rush: ‘And we have reason to believe it was sprayed on your wife. That it was the cause of her illness.’

  He was silent.

  Hastily, she reached down and pulled a file out of her bag and put it on the table. ‘If you want to read the case histories of known Silveron victims, you’ll find the symptoms are almost id
entical.’

  He made no move towards the file, but stretched for the glass he’d carefully left out of reach across the table.

  She began to tell him a long and involved story about an aerial spraying company which had been based to the west of Stirling, and a pilot who admitted to using Silveron in the Loch Fyne area, and how he had admitted to an abortive job on the Fincharn Estate. She went through every lead, explained every connection, described with considerable feeling the state of the sick boy on Loch Fyne – though he noticed that she was careful not to mention the boy’s uncle, that loathsome Campbell – then jumped rapidly to her conclusions, explained them, interpreted them.

  Facts, ideas, connections – they poured out of her like water, and like water they flowed over him and through him until his imagination foundered. Inventing a reason to get up, he went to find some dry ginger. The room swayed. That was a new one. Usually the room got progressively darker, like someone was turning down a dimmer switch.

  He didn’t realize she’d left her seat until she appeared beside him and touched his arm. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘I’m all right,’ he said.

  ‘What about some water?’ She reached for a Perrier.

  ‘No.’ He turned obstinately away and made his way across to the window and stared out into the night. A welter of sensations bumped and crashed around his head. Even if what she was saying were true, what the hell did it matter anyway? None of it was any use now. Investigations, diggings for truth, they didn’t interest him, they were for energetic people like Daisy Field. But then, perhaps that was the point. Perhaps that was why he had let her come here, to let her take charge of it all, to let him work his way free.

  He glanced back at her. She was watching him, her gaze steady, patient. Suddenly he warmed to her. Usually when he was the worse for wear people gave him infuriating looks of compassion, the sort they reserved for newly bereaved people and injured dogs.

  Manoeuvring himself gently round the furniture, he walked past her and into the bedroom. He dug his chequebook out of a drawer and sat on the bed for a while, letting the emotional dust settle.

  He wandered back to the sitting room. ‘How much was it then?’ he asked.

  She stared at him.

  He shrugged extravagantly: ‘How much?’

  ‘Listen, I – ’ She looked trapped. ‘I – don’t know.’

  ‘Thought you wanted money?’

  ‘But – are you sure?’

  He tut-tutted and said with magisterial grandeur: ‘Chequebook’s in my hand.’ He held it up. ‘Pen’s in the other. An opportunity not to be missed. Might not come again.’

  ‘Perhaps you should think about it.’

  ‘This is all wrong,’ he said, suddenly vastly amused. ‘You’re meant to be closing the deal. Meant to be standing over me with a gun.’

  ‘Okay.’ She ran her tongue along her lips and took the plunge. ‘One million.’

  She seemed to be reassured by his silence. She added hastily: ‘It’s possible we could do it for less, but that figure’s a reasonable estimate, allowing for contingencies. Of course I’d keep you in touch, I’d provide full accounts – ’

  ‘Pounds or dollars?’

  ‘Pounds.’

  He took a breath. It was rather more than he’d expected. Even after all these years, he never got used to the noughts on the end of everything. The puritan in him was alarmed by the ease with which money came his way, while the child, the son of the local government official from Chertsey earning ten thousand a year, was terrified it would all slip away.

  A million. Well, it wouldn’t kill him.

  He wrote a cheque.

  Daisy kept sighing: ‘I don’t know what to say.’

  ‘It’s for two-fifty thou,’ he said. ‘More when you need it. Though don’ try and cash it, not till I’ve had words with my accountant.’ He sat back in the chair, holding the cheque up between his fingers. ‘Two conditions.’

  She nodded.

  ‘One, don’ ever link this publicly to me or my wife. No talk of this stuff causing her death. Understand? And no talk of me having anything to do with the money. Okay?’

  She looked disappointed. ‘Okay,’ she said.

  ‘If I hear anything, tha’s it. No more money.’

  She seemed a bit anxious at that, but nodded anyway.

  ‘Two, I don’ wanna know. I don’ wanna see accounts, reports. Nothing. Just get on with it and do what you think’s best.’

  ‘But won’t you want to know how we’re getting on?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘But …’ She bit back whatever she was going to say, then came in on another tack. ‘Your songs – ’

  ‘My songs?’ he echoed.

  ‘I thought, with everything you’ve written …’

  ‘Jus’ songs,’ he said stiffly. ‘Not the same.’ She’d managed to touch something raw in him.

  She couldn’t let it go. ‘Perhaps I didn’t explain … This research – it could blow the lid off a lot of things, it could be really important for the whole movement.’

  ‘The movement? Listen’ – he lurched sideways in his chair – ‘I don’t actually give a shit – ’ This was sounding much worse than he’d intended. He started again. ‘No, I … I mean … Course I give a … It’s jus’ …’ He trailed off, suddenly uncertain of what precisely he was trying to say.

  ‘Your decision, of course,’ Daisy said, edging forward in her seat and pulling her bag towards her. ‘But I just thought … Well, if you were in touch then at least you’d feel that’ – she groped for the right words – ‘that something good was coming out of the whole horrid business.’

  Here was a fine example of instant half-baked wisdom. His blood pressure leapt and he gave an ugly chortle. ‘Listen, if I need counselling I can get it from a shrink at two hun’red dollars a throw.’

  She stared at him.

  He heard the ugly words reverberating through the air and could have bitten his tongue out. He said awkwardly: ‘Sorry … Sorry. I didn’t mean to …’

  She gave a quick bright smile. ‘None of my business.’ She picked up her bag.

  ‘Look, I’m sorry … Please, don’t go, don’t go …’

  She stood up.

  ‘Please. Won’t you, er …’

  ‘I really must go. God, the time.’

  Suddenly he couldn’t bear the thought of being alone, couldn’t bear her to leave with those ugly words still hanging in the air. He got clumsily to his feet. ‘Please stay. I’d like you to stay.’ Then before he realized what he was doing, he reached out and grasped her arm. He knew there was some reason he shouldn’t, realized dimly that there was a risk of some misunderstanding, but by then it was too late: he’d asked her to stay, he’d grabbed at her, it was late and they were in his hotel room; a scenario not open to that many interpretations.

  ‘I’d love to,’ she said, sending out masses of signals to show that she wouldn’t love to at all. ‘But I really can’t. My friends are waiting up for me.’

  ‘Please – I didn’t mean …’ He took a deep breath. ‘What I meant was, how about a film? Or a walk?’

  She regarded him gravely for a moment, then dropped her head and smiled. She said: ‘I thought no one walked in New York late at night.’

  Sixteen storeys down, the rain had stopped. The streets were shining like mirrors and the air was heavy and damp so that the lights on the far side of Central Park were smudged and blurred.

  They turned north along Fifth Avenue. Nick took several gulps of air and felt refreshed and slightly nauseous all at the same time. Daisy, looking small in his oversized cardigan, bounced along at his side.

  They didn’t talk much until they got to East 64th. His head was heavy; everything seemed remote and unfocused. But he recognized the block all right. ‘We used to live up there,’ he said. ‘We – ’ It was hard to shape the right words. ‘Something bad happened.’

  She was silent. A cab turned the corner, hit a pothole
and sent a spout of water onto the sidewalk a few feet ahead of them. ‘Someone attacked Alusha,’ he said.

  She was staring at him. ‘How dreadful.’

  ‘It was stupid, stupid …’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘It was a kid – someone I’d tried to help. I let him do small jobs, deliveries – that kind of thing. But we never thought to check him out … He was a schizo. Unstable. Into drugs.’

  ‘Oh.’

  The lights went to Walk and they crossed the street. Nick’s legs felt heavy; it was an effort to go on.

  ‘Was she badly hurt?’

  ‘Bad enough.’

  Daisy was silent for a moment. ‘And then you went to Scotland?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘A wonderful place.’

  He gave a dismissive grunt.

  ‘You’ll go back?’ she asked.

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Never?’

  ‘Never.’

  He stumbled slightly and she reached for his arm, letting go when he was back on balance.

  How must he seem to her? he wondered furiously. How must he look? Suddenly he felt ashamed and angry.

  ‘It’s touring …’ he said, waving his arm by way of explanation. ‘Gets to me … I don’t mean to … I … After the show, you know …’

  ‘I know all about it,’ she said in a reminiscent tone. ‘My father was a drunk.’

  Drunk. What a word. He winced.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I’m not going to try to talk you out of it. I’m not going to lecture you. I know better than that. My mum wasted thirty years trying to talk my father round.’

  ‘I can stop.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Any time.’

  ‘Sure.’

  He ground to a halt. He heard himself roar childishly: ‘But I can!’

  She stopped and turned to him and said simply: ‘I know that.’ She took his arm and they resumed walking. ‘My father was a very charming drunk.’ That word again. ‘Hid it well from the outside world. Said he got early retirement because of his back, though if his back was bad, it was only because he spent so much time lying across the stairs.’ She gave the ghost of a chuckle, which was more like a sigh.