Rosie Thomas 4-Book Collection

by Rosie Thomas

  Robin was gone, however, the old Robin. Those images of him coalesced with this morning’s – was it only this morning? In future she would only talk to him about Winwood and things like Winwood, and soon enough she would hear that he had found someone else he wanted to marry and who would not elude him.

  She hoisted the heavy tray and smiled at her mother. ‘It’s getting late. Let’s all have something to eat.’

  Lying in her old bed that night, listening to the over-familiar sounds of the house, Harriet found that she could not sleep. She tried to discipline herself into drowsiness, but only grew more alert. At last she got up again, dressed herself and crept down through the house. Silently she let herself out into the soothing darkness.

  At once she began to breathe more easily. She felt that in the dark she could see further and more clearly. It was becoming a habit of hers to walk at night. When the activities of the day were over she found that she was often anxious, possessed by a formless kind of anxiety that she could do nothing to solve, and walking helped her to contain it. Sometimes she would walk a long way, crossing and recrossing her own path; at other times not more than ten minutes in the anonymous dark was enough to calm her. Then she would go back to bed, finding either that she could sleep at once, or identify specific worries, and so begin to unpick the knots of them. She never felt afraid of the dark.

  Tonight she walked for a long time, thinking of how Simon had taken the same route in the early morning. She imagined him passing through these suburban streets, brushing past the laurels and the viburnums, heading for the railway line in its deep cutting. She tried to will herself closer to him so that she might understand what had driven him up on to the bridge. Over and over again she came back to the same answer. Simon had felt hunted, and in the distorted landscape of his mind the hunters had cornered him. At last he had turned his back on them, and jumped.

  Harriet stopped, putting out her hand to steady herself and feeling brick gritty under the palm of her hand. The image of the train and the shining rails and Simon falling before being thrown up again, parts of himself instead of the whole, was as vivid as if it was happening in front of her, filling the empty and silent street with noise, and rushing wind, and terror. Harriet felt her own body lurch forward into emptiness and then cartwheel downwards.

  She closed her eyes and then forced them open again. There was only the street, alternate pools of light and shadow under the streetlamps. She pushed herself away from the wall, staggered and then steadied herself against the dizziness that had taken hold of her. She made herself walk on, in and out of the lamplight.

  She was close to Simon now.

  And even as she realised it she faltered, slowing her pace and then quickening it, because she heard footsteps behind her. They were soft at first, almost echoing her own, but seeming to come closer. Harriet reached a corner and turned, darting a sideways glance, but she could see no one. The new road stretched in front of her, with the wider main road at the end of it leading back towards Sunderland Avenue. She walked faster but the footsteps quickened their pace too, and with the greater speed they grew louder. She thought now that the noise was of more than one pair of feet – perhaps even as many as four or five. The individual footfalls merged together into a kind of patter, gentle at first but growing louder, and closer, threatening her.

  There were the lights of passing traffic at the end of the road. Harriet didn’t want to run because she didn’t want the pursuers to run, but she could not stop herself. As she ran the sound of others running was almost at her back.

  She was panting for breath when she reached the main road. A night bus swished past her as she hesitated on the corner and Harriet caught a glimpse of blue-lit faces inside it, dead faces drained of colour, incuriously staring out at her. A scream rose inside her but she pressed her hand to her mouth and watched the bus shrink in the distance, a tail of cars drawn after it. She wondered if the blue-white faces had turned and were now staring back at her, and she understood Simon’s fear with immediate and sickening clarity.

  Harriet didn’t hesitate any longer. She caught her breath and ran, as fast as she could, towards her mother’s house.

  It was as if she had become Simon. She was watched and hunted as he had been. Each breath she drew sobbed in her throat, and although she ran in silence she kept going in case she should hear the whisper of following feet again. Just once a figure stepped out of a gateway, into her path. She whimpered with terror as she almost collided with it, and then saw that he was a startled pensioner with a big dog on a lead. The dog snarled its threat but the old man called after her, ‘Here, are you all right?’

  She flung an incoherent word back at him and ran on, until she came to the slope of Sunderland Avenue itself. The familiar, suburban stretch of it calmed her. She slowed to a walk and toiled up the hill with her hand pressed into her side. She looked back, and there was nothing there. She had fled, like Simon, although there was nothing to run away from.

  Harriet came home, opening and closing the blue gates and entering through the glass porch with its moist leaf-scent. Her fear had evaporated as completely as it had earlier possessed her.

  Upstairs she sat down on her bed, still in the darkness, her hands hanging down loosely between her knees while her breathing slowly returned to normal.

  She discovered in a moment that the night had, in a way, worked its accustomed trick on her. She understood quite clearly now that neither she nor Kath could have stopped Simon once he was running, and that at the end of Simon’s run there could only have been the jump, while for herself there was the return, and the even breathing, and the quiet again. Because she was strong and sane, and Simon was not. She was also certain that if she had left him alone, if there had been no journalists or anyone else coming to his door, he might not have begun running at all. If she had left Meizu as the piece of cracked board from Shamshuipo, or even if she had tried harder, thought carefully enough, to disguise his identity properly, then he might still be safe within the shell of his house. But she had done none of these things, and she had tried to compensate him for her failings with her clumsy money.

  That was her guilt, and that was what she would have to live with now that Simon was dead.

  ‘I can catch you!’ Linda screamed.

  She ran down the long slope in pursuit of Harriet, her arms circling and her feet in red sneakers skipping over the clumps of rough grass. Harriet ran too, down the hill toward the children’s playground and the running track and the railway line beyond which small trains fussed in a loop around north London.

  ‘You can’t.’

  Harriet ran as fast as she could, but Linda was faster. Before she reached the bottom of the hill Linda flung herself forward, wrapped her arms around Harriet’s waist and hung there, almost dragging both of them to the ground.

  ‘OK, OK,’ Harriet gasped. ‘You win. Let me go. You’re the fastest child on Hampstead Heath.’

  ‘Hey, look up there.’

  They turned back to see the slope that they had descended. At the summit of Parliament Hill the kites they had climbed to watch were bright, dipping squares and lozenges of colour against the sky. Linda and Harriet had walked up the other side of the hill together, from Harriet’s flat, in the gentle current of Saturday afternoon strollers on the Heath.

  ‘I don’t like walks,’ Linda had protested when Harriet suggested it. ‘We have to do walks at school, endlessly, and it’s vacation now.’

  ‘You’ll like this on.’

  She had been predictably sulky at first, but as soon as she saw the kites above them she forgot her displeasure. ‘Look at the bird one,’ she shouted, and then they reached the top of the hill and she caught sight of the city spread out below.

  ‘You never said there was a view. It’s so big. I should think it’s as big as LA, only there’s no ocean,’ she added, amusing Harriet with her loyalty to home. ‘What’s that round thing?’ she asked, pointing.

  ‘Linda, that’s the
dome of St Paul’s Cathedral. Don’t you recognise it?’

  Linda shrugged. ‘I guess not. Should I?’

  ‘Come over here.’

  They hung over the metal plaque that indicated the principal landmarks. Harriet was startled by how little Linda seemed to know, but she was touched by her interest in the green and brown shade of the city. Her questions about it showed her intelligence. Harriet answered with enthusiasm, their heads close together as they pointed and squinted ahead into the grey air.

  Linda turned and grinned at her. ‘It’s pretty neat. I like it because there’s so much green stuff.’

  The heavy, domed heads of trees descended to the fringe of the railway line, became a green swell that spread across to Regent’s Park further away, and then fractured into the mosaic of city squares beyond that.

  ‘The trees are beautiful,’ Harriet agreed.

  Linda glanced at her again. ‘You really love this place, don’t you?’

  ‘London? Yes, I do. It’s home, I’m safe and comfortable here. It’s important to feel that you belong somewhere, don’t you think, like you in Los Angeles?’

  ‘I wish I lived there all the time instead of at lousy St Brigid’s,’ sighed Linda.

  ‘You’re going home tomorrow, so be glad of that,’ Harriet said bracingly. She had discovered that briskness worked better with Linda than sympathy did.

  Caspar was back in London. While Harriet and Linda were walking on the Heath he was having lunch with a director and some money men, and they planned to meet later and take Linda for supper at the Hard Rock Café. It was a last-evening treat; tomorrow Linda would be put on a flight to the West Coast, to spend the second half of the summer holidays with her mother in Hollywood.

  ‘Yeah, I can’t wait,’ Linda said uncompromisingly. But she did add, ‘I’ll miss you.’

  ‘I’ll still be here when you get back.’

  ‘Hey, I bet I can beat you down to the bottom there.’

  Harriet didn’t wait. She began to run, sailing over the hummocks, but Linda was too swift for her. They clung together on the level ground at the bottom, panting and laughing.

  ‘Can we go in the playground?’

  ‘You’re too big.’

  ‘Who says?’

  Linda slid, and swung, and swarmed up the climbing frame among the Saturday afternoon park-goers in their dungarees and slogan T-shirts and coloured hair-ribbons. Harriet sat and watched from the sand-pit wall, with the fathers in sweaters and mothers who smoked and gossiped and pushed buggies backwards and forwards to keep the smallest babies quiet. Harriet was surprised by the liveliness of it all. She couldn’t remember ever having taken a child to a playground before. When she thought about it, she supposed that Charlie and Jenny must spend Saturday afternoons in enclosures like this, with the other families, and the shouts from the swings, and the splashing from the paddling pool in its separate compound.

  Soon it would be Jane’s turn.

  Watching the children, the smallest ones who walked in a series of collapsing lurches, their faces puckered with concentration, Harriet wondered how it would be to possess one of her own. To be possessed by it.

  ‘Harriet? I want to go in the water.’

  Harriet followed Linda into the paddling pool area. Here was a greyish expanse of shallow water in a concrete saucer, the blue paint long ago flaked from its sides. It was a mêlée of fat, pale little bodies and drooping wet pants and flying plumes of spray. Linda stuck up like a stork, paddling up to her thin ankles in the soupy trough.

  A little train clicked past beyond the fence. Linda watched it pass, and then sloshed her way out of the pool.

  ‘It’s funny here, it’s all so small, like a toy town or something?’ Harriet knew what she meant. Looking at the scene she thought it was more like a nursery or classroom poster with the bright, primary colours and the train and the triangles of the kites, and a jet homing in the sky.

  The city was homely and safe, as she had told Linda on the hilltop, but it also made her think of Simon, for whom it had been neither. Harriet heard the toy-town train braking as it came into the miniature station around the curve of the track.

  ‘What’s the matter? Are you thinking about your friend?’

  After the inquest and Simon’s funeral, Harriet had told Linda that a friend of hers was dead, and also a little about his life. She had listened intently to the story of Meizu.

  ‘It’s good you made it into a real game,’ she judged, ‘so more people can play it, kind of remembering him without knowing him.’

  Harriet looked at her now, startled by her perception. She mumbled, ‘Yes. I was thinking about him.’

  Simon was with her all her waking hours. She did not so much think of him as work and live in a continual awareness of what had happened, and of what she had unthinkingly done. She knew the necessity of living with her guilt day by day, and the guilt itself was sharpened because there was no possibility of assuaging it. The real Simon was gone, out of her reach, replaced by this memory. The pitiful fortress of his house. The railway bridge. Ken’s old coat, and what Ken had seen at last.

  Nothing Harriet could do, none of her cleverest efforts, could change any of this. She couldn’t bring Simon back.

  Linda was asking, ‘What shall we do next?’

  With an effort, Harriet diverted her thoughts.

  ‘We could walk down to Marine Ices, if you like.’

  ‘OK.’

  They went on down the hill together and the circle of Harriet’s thinking resumed. She could do nothing about what was past, only about what was to come. As she always did at the same point, she told herself, You can make sure in the future. Whatever you do, whoever you deal with, you must never risk doing damage. Whoever it is, Kath or Linda, Jeremy Crichton, Graham, Robin – even Robin. You must take care. The resolution, reiterated every day, focussed on Linda now. She could take care of Linda, because Linda needed her.

  They came to the ice-cream shop. Harriet shook off the effect of her meditations till they came round again, and followed Linda inside. Five minutes later they stood side by side at the kerb, licking their double cones and surveying the dense traffic. Trucks and taxis seemed to cleave through a pall of atmospheric grime.

  ‘It’s pretty ugly and dirty here,’ Linda said unnecessarily.

  ‘Dirt’s part of it. Do you want to walk on down to the market?’

  ‘Market?’ The suggestion was greeted as suspiciously as the original walk had been.

  ‘There’s a big weekend market. Open-air stalls selling records and sweatshirts and bags, neat stuff, Linda. I’ll buy you a going-home present.’

  ‘Yes, pul-lease. But we’ve walked a pretty long way already. How’ll we get back in time for Daddy?’

  Harriet had been going to say oh, by taxi. But something made her suggest, instead, ‘We’ll catch the 24 bus.’

  Linda goggled at her. ‘A proper red London bus, one of the ones with an upstairs?’

  ‘A double-decker. Yes, one of those exactly.’ Linda’s arms shot around her, ice-cream hanging at a reckless angle. ‘Harriet, going out with you is so unbelievably, perfect fun.’

  For a Bel Air baby, Harriet supposed, a bus ride home from the market would indeed be a kind of fun.

  ‘And for me with you,’ she responded gravely, as they headed arm in arm towards the fried-onion air of the canal-side.

  ‘How was your afternoon, ladies?’ Caspar asked when they were sitting in the hamburger restaurant.

  Linda beamed. ‘The best. You know what we did?’ She had enjoyed everything, but she loved the bus ride best of all. She described everything, in detail, and Caspar sat drinking Budweiser and smiling at her. ‘Harriet’s so great,’ she concluded.

  ‘I know that.’

  Harriet blushed, a weakness she thought she had grown out of.

  ‘We had a good time. How was your meeting?’ It was odd to find herself sitting there, eating french fries and raising her voice to make herself heard over th
e music, exactly as if she was part of a family. Linda was chattering and sucking up her milk shake and Caspar acted the benevolent father. He was in good humour. He was a little drunk, after his long lunch, but particularly benignly so.

  ‘Ah, a classic of its kind. Bull-talk of turning a development project into a go project as of right now. “Caspar, we’re going all the way with this one and we want you in there with us, because without your name up there, Caspar, this isn’t a movie at all.”’ Caspar’s Shakespearean tones flattened and broadened, his eyes narrowed to match and he turned into a movie man. ‘“Believe me, baby.”’

  Harriet laughed. ‘Who were these people?’

  ‘Producer.’ Caspar puffed out his cheeks and leaned forward to drop a heavy hand over hers. ‘Director.’ His face hollowed and he rubbed a hand through his hair, boyishly charming. ‘A couple of lawyers,’ with sharp eyes and wide smiles. By the time he came to the accountant, pursing up his lips and adding columns of figures on a folded paper napkin, Linda was giggling and Harriet was laughing helplessly.

  ‘These are the people I have to deal with, while you two are riding the buses.’

  Caspar was a brilliant mimic. Harriet felt suddenly shy of him, and the scale of his talent. She also felt impatience, because he drank and dissipated it. She had seen his last two films.

  ‘But it will be a good movie, won’t it?’

  ‘It will be a lousy movie,’ Caspar drawled, ‘but the bucks will be fine. Darling?’ The young waitress jumped to his summons. ‘Bring me another nice cold beer, will you?’

  ‘Is that a good enough reason for doing it?’ Harriet asked, prim even in her own ears.

  Caspar stopped with his glass on the way to his lips. ‘If you were going to mention integrity, or the Jensen Lear, then I advise you not to. Hollywood is where it happens. It’s shit, as you’ll readily point out, but it smells sweet enough to me.’

  Linda looked warily from one to the other.

  ‘However,’ Caspar continued. ‘There is a small ray of light, Open Secret. I told you about it, Linda, do you remember? Harriet will approve of that one.’