by Sean O'Brien
She shrugged. ‘You don’t know them.’
I didn’t want to criticize Rackham to her directly. It was a matter of self-interest. ‘I think some of them are fascists,’ I said.
‘Some of your boys at Blake’s probably say the same about you.’
‘I’m serious, Shirley.’
‘Course you’re serious. You’re a man, aren’t you? I’m just some daft bint off the estate.’
‘I didn’t mean it like that.’
‘But you should talk to Claes. He’s dead interesting when he gets going about Europe and the Holy Roman Empire.’
‘They’ll drag you down,’ I said.
‘Where from, exactly? Mount Olympus? Look at me. What am I?’ She blinked, suddenly tearful as the drink and the drugs met up. Stan appeared, towel and glass in hand, and shook his head. The other bar was doing a roaring trade now.
TWENTY
‘Come on, Shirley. Let’s get you home,’ I said. I helped her climb off the stool. For a moment her balance on her stilettos was uncertain. It felt as if she must have lost weight. I guided her to the door. When we got outside there was frost in the air. She hung on to my arm.
‘My mam said you were a gentleman. Lovely manners and nice hands.’
‘And what does your mam think of Mr Rackham?’
‘He hasn’t been round for his tea yet.’
‘You do surprise me. He’ll need to be spiritually prepared.’
‘He’s a poet, you know. So he’s dead spiritual.’
We crossed the main road and entered the maze of terraces along the curve of the railway. Within a hundred yards we could have been back in the 1950s, cutting through empty cobbled tenfoots, skirting bombsites and dim corner shops. After a few minutes we came to the edge of a slum area. Shirley stopped outside a shut-down pub on a corner. ‘This is it. I’m upstairs.’
‘Shirley, for God’s sake, you can’t live here.’
‘Why not? We can’t all live on Fernbank or in Vicky Park. I get it rent free. Claes owns the place.’
‘In exchange for what?’ I asked. She shrugged and searched her bag for her keys. She dropped them and I picked them up. I opened the door for her and made to hand the keys back.
‘Are you coming in? Go on.’
‘All right.’ I wasn’t sure she’d manage the stairs. ‘You’d better show me round now I’m here.’ Shirley switched on the light to show a bare staircase and walls painted an ancient brown, as if poverty had arrived at its true colour. There was something frightening in the bareness. From the landing I glimpsed two rooms piled with overflow stock from Claes’s shop – great stacks of pulp novels, as though boredom and waiting had assumed physical form. The stock had found its way on to the landing passage, neat stacks of War Picture Library and Commando Comics alongside American men’s magazines waiting to go back into grimy circulation, giving off their sweet headachy smell. We went up another staircase to the attic. Shirley unlocked the door.
‘So this is the nerve centre,’ she said, switching on a lamp. The place was a bedsit with a sloping ceiling and a dormer window. Off to the side were a tiny kitchen and bathroom. It smelled of patchouli and tobacco and the damp that the city kept in wait for the unwary and the poor. One wall was taken up with books, carefully ordered – the home of a librarian manqué. A table took up the space at the window. On it stood Shirley’s familiar electric sewing machine. There was an armchair and a double bed. It all looked like somewhere someone had ended up, though she’d made cheerful curtains and put up posters of Billie Holiday and Eartha Kitt.
‘Oh, Shirley,’ I said, ‘this won’t do.’
‘I’m a bohemian, me,’ she said. ‘I live for art. Only I don’t do art.’ She put the fur coat on a hanger behind the door. The coat fell down and I replaced it.
‘You could still go to college. There’s still time.’
‘Well, I could. But I don’t think I will. Or after, maybe. I dunno. Have to think about it. Music, let’s have some music.’ She fiddled with an old Dansette and Juliette Gréco started singing ‘Autumn Leaves’.
‘Don’t leave it too long.’
‘That’s what me mam says. Only not about college. About getting married. Having kids. Settling down, being normal. Well, I’m not normal, am I? Anyone can see that.’
‘Most people do get married eventually, I suppose. You never know. Don’t you want kids?’
‘I dunno. Have to see. Me mam had her eye on you. She thinks you should have been the one. Cos of your nice hands.’ She cackled and it turned into a cough. I sat in the narrow armchair.
‘That would have been a very bad idea. I would have made you unhappy. You know that. Anyway, I don’t think marriage is for me.’
‘I’m just telling you what she said, Stevie. I know the score.’
‘Well, it’s always good to see you, and now I know where you are, but I’d better get going soon, really.’
‘Have a fookin drink, man.’
‘Best not.’
‘Just the one. Can’t let a lady drink alone. Be a gentleman.’
‘I’m trying to, Shirley.’
‘It shows,’ she said with sudden bitterness.
‘Go on, then. Just the one.’ She went into the kitchen and came back with a bottle of port and a couple of tumblers. She poured the drinks, then lay across the high bed, facing me, and started rolling a joint. The activity seemed to give her a temporary focus.
‘You’ll be sick,’ I said. She shrugged and completed her work with minute care. Even the joints she made had a feminine elegance. They could have been sold commercially. We sipped at the vile port. She lit the joint and began coughing again.
‘You say Claes owns this place?’ I asked.
‘He’s got several other houses. Some over in the east as well.’ As if the east of the city were another continent, an ocean rather than a bus ride away. She offered me the joint. I shook my head. ‘It’s good draw, Stevie. Shame to miss it. Where was I? Well, there’s some properties that he rents for flats and bedsits, some he uses for storage. He’s got an old stables as well with a big yard. You’d never know it was there, but it’s only round the corner from this place.’
‘And Claes, with his property empire in every corner of our city, is your benefactor. He’s doing this’ – I gestured at the room – ‘out of the goodness of his heart.’ I pictured Claes’s pale, unlined, ageless face, where he sat enthroned among his trash, or standing beside his superannuated armoured car. ‘Aren’t you a lucky girl?’
‘He’s all right. You don’t know him. At least he’s helped me. More than I can say for some people.’
‘Or you could stand on your own feet. Get a proper job.’
‘What, like you? Yeah, yeah. Heard it all before.’
‘He’s a fascist. I know that,’ I said.
‘Why d’you keep saying that? What does it mean?’
‘What do you think it means, Shirley? Come off it. You’ve heard of Hitler.’
‘History is written by the victors,’ she said.
‘Is that what Claes says?’
‘It’s more complicated than – than, you know.’
‘Than what?’ I didn’t know whether to shout at her or laugh.
‘Not everything’s the way it seems. Who’s in control? That’s what you have to ask. Behind the scenes.’
‘Enlighten me, Shirley.’
‘Why don’t you ask your Mr Feldberg?’
‘What on earth are you talking about?’ I was shouting now.
‘Those who have eyes to see will see.’
‘Stop it, Shirley. Where’s all this rubbish come from? You’re an intelligent girl.’
‘Am I?’ She snorted. ‘Right. If you say so, Mister Head of History. Thank you.’
‘Why are you doing this?’
‘Don’t want to argue about it now, Stevie. As I said, it’s complicated. Anyway, look. Have some of this draw.’
‘No, you’re all right. I’d best be getting off.’
‘Look, we don’t want to fall out, do we? Don’t go yet.’
She got up and poured more drink. I sipped again at the sweet, grubby-tasting port.
‘Old women drink this stuff,’ I said.
‘Got to think ahead. A girl can’t go on drinking Babycham forever.’
‘I mean it. I’m worried about you, Shirley.’
‘No need.’ Her voice blurred again. She stubbed out the joint, set about rolling another, then gave up and lay on her side. ‘No need. Anyway, what you gonna do, save me?’
‘What about Rackham?’ I asked.
‘Dark horse, that one.’ She sniggered.
‘Don’t tell him I’ve been here.’
‘No, I don’t want to make him jealous. He can be very masterful.’ She nodded and grinned.
‘So you are together.’
‘Suppose so, on and off. He’s busy.’
‘I bet he is. He’s too old, as well.’
‘I have to disagree with you there, Stevie. He’s full of fookin beans, I can assure you of that.’
‘And what do him and Claes get up to?’
‘Grand strategy.’
‘No, seriously.’
‘They are serious. They play war games. They’ve got this attic in one of the other houses laid out like High Command. And they stage war games. They’re re-fighting the Battle of Kursk at the moment to make sure the Germans win.’
‘And that’s it?’
She shrugged.
‘Have to ask them, if you’re interested.’
I got up to leave.
‘I was a good fuck, wasn’t I, Stevie?’ I nodded, ashamed for the pair of us in that room. ‘Then why won’t you fuck me now? Cause you can, you know.’ She reached out and took my hand.
‘You don’t know what you’re saying, Shirley. You need to get some sleep.’
‘I just need a hug, Stevie. Give us a hug.’ She was tearful again.
I sat down on the bed and put my arms round her. She felt very hot, like a cross child.
‘I know you’re right,’ she said, ‘but I just seem to be stuck. There’s something wrong with me.’
‘You just need a change. You need to get away from here.’
‘But where would I go?’
‘Anywhere.’
‘That’s what I’m afraid of. Come with us?’
I shook my head. ‘You know I can’t do that, Shirley.’
She was fading now.
‘Oh, well. Put us to bed, then,’ she muttered. ‘I feel all shivery.’ She raised her arms and I pulled her dress over her head. ‘Just like old times, eh, Stevie, you having your way with me. Only you’re not. What d’you think of me underwear?’
‘It looks expensive.’
‘It is.’
I removed her shoes and pulled off her tights.
‘Ooh, Sir Jasper,’ she slurred.
I moved her under the eiderdown and into the recovery position, then waited uncertainly in case she woke again and was disoriented. The music had stopped. The damp stood in the air. I went to the window.
After a while, with no clear object in view, I began to search the room. The books were a jumble of literature, pulp and vaguely alternative works of the sort that were popular at the time, including Aleister Crowley’s novel Moonchild, and the works of Eliphas Levi. There was also something purporting to be a grimoire. In the dressing table was an array of new expensive underwear and in a sandalwood box were some cannabis and an empty syringe but nothing to put in it. I thought about waking Shirley to confront her, but she was already deeply asleep.
At the back of the wardrobe I found a shoebox, one I recognized, in which Shirley had kept her photographs. She’d talked about finding time to put them in an album. There was an album there, but it remained empty. In the photographs, there they were, Shirley and two witches from Macbeth – raven-haired Nicky and red-headed Jo, long gone to university and beyond. It was barely five years ago but it seemed remotely historical, the three of them in costume looking naughty and schoolgirlish, and then dressed up in their finery at the cast party, wineglasses in their hands, among the crowd of admiring boys. And there I was, with Shirley at the seaside, in the park, in someone’s forgotten kitchen at another party, then the pair of us at the seaside with Shirley looking chilly in a bikini, then squeezed together in the white light of the station photo booth, a bit the worse for drink, but happy.
And there was one I didn’t remember being taken, of myself and Maggie Rowan at the cast party from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Shirley had not been present that evening last summer. But Rackham had. And from the photograph you could tell by our expressions that something was in the offing. There was also an envelope. It contained half a dozen photos – Shirley in her expensive underwear, then naked, then with two men whose faces were not shown. All of these pictures in the one box, as though all of them formed a record of ordinary life.
Shirley needed saving, but I wasn’t sure I was the man to do it. I became a little afraid. Something was already happening. I turned off the lamp and went to draw the curtains. Outside the frosty rooftops stretched, and the gaps where the bombs had fallen in the heaviest raids outside London. Twenty years and more had still not seen the place rebuilt: it seemed to have given up waiting. The stars glinted. I heard the cough of an engine and looked down. A dark van was pulling away on the other side of the street. It had not been there when we arrived.
When I returned to my flat at about two a.m., the place seemed oddly chilly. I found the bathroom window half-raised. Someone had climbed in from the outhouse roof. I looked around and combed through the contents of my desk, but found nothing taken, nor any other evidence of intrusion or disturbance, from which I concluded that I was intended to know that there had been a visit.
It was, properly speaking, a matter for the police, but that would mean Smales and I decided against it. Had Shirley been following instructions? And if so, what was she getting in exchange? She must be in a worse state than I thought. If Carson was prepared to depend on me, then he must have been very much alone. I knew how he felt. Conspire or die: that seemed to be the lesson. So I would conspire, or try to.
TWENTY-ONE
The next morning was bright and cold. I sat in the kitchen drinking coffee. I hoped Shirley was OK and I wanted to go round and shout at her. The phone rang. I ignored it but it didn’t stop.
It was Maggie. ‘I’m thinking of taking the boat down to Carr’s Point,’ she said. ‘We could take a picnic. I might do some sketches.’ This was the first time I had been invited aboard Lorelei. It was hard to refuse, though doing something in public together was a risk. Perhaps she was testing me.
‘It’s a bit chilly for the seaside,’ I said.
‘You can keep your clothes on.’
‘And anyway, I’m afraid I have a prior engagement. I’m sorry.’
‘So what are you up to? Don’t be secretive.’
‘I’ve arranged to have Carson’s books valued by Feldberg’s. Got to be done. Sorry.’
‘Well, I’ll come and help. I’ve always wanted to see round that place.’ She was not in a mood to be denied another wish.
‘I’m not sure that would be proper. I’m there as the executor. The legal process isn’t finished yet.’
‘Stephen, who’s to know? Honestly! What are you hiding? Have you got a floozy hidden away there?’
‘I’ll see you there at Victoria Park at eleven, then.’
When I arrived Maggie’s green Triumph Herald was parked outside. She got out of the car and came over. She was dressed in painting gear.
‘It’ll be dusty, I imagine,’ she said.
I let us into the wide, dark hall with its chilly black-and-maroon floor tiles. The house smelt of emptiness and something the world had done with. I had only visited the place a couple of times, in connection with work.
‘The study’s on the first floor,’ I said. We went up. I opened the curtains but the day had clouded over now. I switched on t
he desk lamp.
‘So this is the famous Carson lair,’ Maggie said. ‘This is where he’d lean like Caesar over the map. And here we have Herodotus over the fireplace giving birth to history single-handed. I think that one’s Gibbon. Who’s that one?’
‘Macaulay, I think.’
‘God, it’s like a classroom without the boys. It’s morbid. Didn’t the old beggar live, at all?’
‘He was a historian.’
‘You mean he was a history teacher. I repeat my question.’
A familiar folder lay on the desk. I opened it.
‘What’s that you’ve got?’ I showed her. ‘Oh, that. The legendary item.’ She opened a window and lit a cigarette, then leaned back on the ledge. ‘You know it’s fake.’
‘I don’t know that, actually. What makes you think so?’
‘Something my brother said. Old Carson and his Führer fetish, as he put it.’
‘Maggie, please. This is Carson’s house. And it’s difficult for me.’
‘Well, I’m sorry, Stephen. I’ll try to be more humble around the shrine. I just find all this Hitler stuff a bit morbid. I mean, it’s ages since all that business with the war. It was enough of a pain at the time. Why would anyone want to dwell on it?’
Perhaps you should ask your brother, I thought.
‘You’re just being mischievous,’ I said. ‘If you’re bored, don’t feel you have to stay. I can manage.’
‘What? Look, I’ll just go and have a wander round,’ said Maggie. She went out and up the next flight of stairs. I heard her moving restlessly about. Short of a row, how could I have stopped her?
The doorbell rang. Samuel Feldberg stood in the porch in his dark heavy overcoat and hat.
He offered his condolences, then added, ‘Some people seem permanent, like fixed stars. I think your Captain Carson was of that order. But what can we do?’
‘I imagine he would tell us to look at the books,’ I suggested. Feldberg nodded at this. I led the way upstairs.
‘Much of the material here will be familiar to me, since the Captain was a regular customer over many years,’ he said, pausing to look at a print on the landing. Maggie’s footsteps stopped overhead. I guessed she was looking down the stairwell.
