The Echo

by Minette Walters

  "You might as well drink your coffee before you go."

  He longed for escape as well. The room smelt of roses again and he couldn't bring himself to intrude his rancid breath and rancid sweat into the scented air. What had he said to her last night? "To be honest, I'd rather leave now."

  "I expect you would," she said with emphasis, "but at least show me the courtesy of drinking the coffee I made for you. It will be the politest thing you've done since you entered my house."

  He came into the room but didn't sit down. "I'm sorry." He reached for the cup.

  "Please—" she gestured towards the sofa—"make yourself comfortable. Or perhaps you'd prefer to have another go at breaking the antique chair in the hall?''

  Had he been violent? He gave a tentative smile. "I'm sorry."

  "I wish you wouldn't keep saying that."

  "What else can I say? I don't know what I'm doing here or why I came."

  "And you think I do?"

  He shook his head gently in order not to incite the nausea that was churning in his stomach. "This must seem very odd to you," he murmured lamely.

  "Good lord, no," she said with leaden irony. "What on earth gives you that idea? It's quite the norm for me these days to find middle-aged drunks slumped in heaps on my floors. Billy chose the garage, you chose the drawing room. Same difference, except that you had the decency not to die on me." Her eyes narrowed, but whether in anger or puzzlement he couldn't tell. "Is there something about me and my house that encourages this sort of behavior, Mr. Deacon? And will you sit down, for Christ's sake," she snapped in sudden impatience. "It's very uncomfortable having you towering over me like this."

  He lowered himself onto the arm of the sofa and tried to reknit the fabric of his tattered memory, but the effort was too much for him and his lips spread in a ghastly smile. "I think I'm going to be sick again."

  She took a towel from behind her back and passed it over. "I find it's better to try and hang on, but you know where to go if you can't." She waited in silence for several seconds while he brought his nausea under control. "Why did you say you'd devoured your parents and that your unutterable torment was renewing? It seems an odd comment to make."

  He looked at her blankly as he wiped the sweat from his forehead. "I don't know." He read irritation in her face. "I don't KNOW!" he said with a surge of anger. "I was confused. I didn't know where I was. Okay? Is that allowed in this house? Or does everyone have to be in control of himself at all bloody times?'' He bent his head and pressed the towel over his eyes. "I'm sorry," he said after a moment. "I didn't mean to be rude. The truth is, I'm struggling a bit here. I can't remember anything about last night."

  "You arrived about twelve."

  "Was I on my own?"

  "Yes."

  "Why did you let me in?"

  "Because you wouldn't take your finger off the doorbell."

  Sweet Jesus! What had he been thinking of? "What else did I say?"

  "That I reminded you of your mother."

  He lowered the towel to his lap and set about folding it carefully. "Is that the reason I gave for being here?''

  "No."

  "What reason did I give?''

  "You didn't." He looked at her with so much relief in his strained, sweaty face that she smiled briefly. "Instead you called me Mrs. Streeter, talked about my husband, my brother-in-law, and my father-in-law, and implied that this house and its contents came from the proceeds of theft."

  Hell! "Did I frighten you?"

  "No," she said evenly, "I'm long past being frightened by anything."

  He wondered why. Life itself frightened him. "Someone at the magazine recognized your face from when you were questioned at the time of James's disappearance," he said by way of explanation. "I was interested enough to follow it up."

  The tic above her lip started working again, but she didn't say anything.

  "John Streeter seemed an obvious person to talk to, so I telephoned him and heard his side of the story. He has—er—reservations about you."

  "I wouldn't describe calling your sister-in-law a whore, a murderer, and a thief as 'having reservations,' but perhaps you're more worried about being sued than he is."

  Deacon put the towel to his mouth again. He was in no condition for this conversation, he thought. He felt like something half-alive on a dissecting bench, waiting for the scalpel to slice through its gut. "You'd win huge damages if you took him to court," he told her. "He has no evidence for his accusations."

  "Of course not. None of them are true."

  He drained his coffee cup and put it on the table. '"Devourer of thy parent; now thy unutterable torment renews' is a line from William Blake," he said suddenly, as if he had been thinking about that and nothing else. "It's in one of his visionary poems about social revolution and political upheaval. The search for liberty means the destruction of established authority—in other words, the parent—and the push for freedom means every generation suffers the same torment." He stood up and looked towards the window and its view of the river. "William Blake—Billy Blake. Your uninvited guest was a fan of a poet who's been dead for nearly two hundred years. Why is this house so cold?" he asked abruptly, drawing his coat about him.

  "It isn't. You've got a hangover. That's why you're shivering."

  He stared down at her where she sat like a radiant sun in her expensive designer dress in her expensive, scented environment. But the radiance was skin-deep, he thought. Beneath the immaculate facade of her and her house, he sensed despair. "I smelled death when I woke up," he said. "Is that what you're trying to mask with the potpourri and the air freshener?''

  She looked very surprised. "I don't know what you're talking about."

  "Perhaps I imagined it."

  She gave a ghost of a smile. "Then I hope your imagination returns to normal when the alcohol's out of your system. Goodbye, Mr. Deacon."

  He walked to the door. "Goodbye, Mrs. Streeter."

  Outside the estate he found a small grassed area with a bench seat overlooking the Thames. He huddled into his coat and let the wind suck the poisonous alcohol out of his system. The tide was out and on the mud bank in front of him, four men were sorting through the debris that had been washed up overnight. They were men of indeterminate age, muffled like him in heavy overcoats, with nothing to show who they were or what their backgrounds were, and whatever assumptions he made about them would probably be as wrong as their assumptions about him. Deacon was struck again, as he had been when he met Terry, by how unremarkable most faces were for he realized that he would not recognize these men in a different setting. Ultimately the various arrangements of eyes, nose, ears, and mouth had more in common than they had apart, and it was only adornment and expression that gave them individuality. Change those, he thought, and anonymity was guaranteed.

  "So what's your verdict, Michael?" asked a quiet voice beside him. "Are any of us worth saving or are we all damned?''

  Deacon turned to the frail old man with silver hair who had slipped quietly onto the bench beside him and was studying the industry on the shore with as much concentration as he was. He frowned, trying to recall the face from his past. It was someone he'd interviewed, he thought; but he talked to so many people and he rarely remembered their names afterwards. "Lawrence Greenhill," prompted the old man. "You did an interview with me ten years ago for an article on euthanasia called 'Freedom to Die.' I was a practicing solicitor and I'd written a letter to The Times pointing out the practical and ethical dangers of legalized suicide both to the individual and to his family. You didn't agree with me, and described me unflatteringly as 'a righteous judge who claims the moral high ground for himself.' I've never forgotten those words."

  Deacon's heart sank. He didn't deserve this, not when he'd been through one guilt trip already this morning. "I remember," he said. Rather too well in fact. The old bugger had been so complacent about biblical authority for his opinion that Deacon had come close to throttling him. But then Greenhill hadn't known
how touchy he was on the whole damn subject. Suicide in any form is wrong, Michael ... We damn ourselves if we usurp God's authority in our lives...

  "Well, I'm sorry," he went on abruptly, "but I still don't agree with you. My philosophy doesn't recognize damnation." He stubbed out his cigarette, while wondering if he even believed what he was saying. Damnation had been real enough to Billy Blake. "Nor does it recognize salvation because the whole concept worries me. Are we being saved from something or for something? If it's the former, then our right to live by our own code of ethics is under threat from moral totalitarianism, and if it's the latter, then we must blindly follow negative logic that something better awaits us when we die." He glanced pointedly at his watch. "Now you'll have to excuse me, I'm afraid."

  The old man gave a quiet laugh. "You give up too easily, my friend. Is your philosophy so fragile that it can't defend itself in debate?"

  "Far from it," said Deacon, "but I have better things to do than stand in judgment on other people's lives."

  "Unlike me?"

  "Yes."

  His companion smiled. "Except I try never to judge anyone." He paused for a moment. "Do you know those words by John Donne? 'Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.' "

  Deacon finished the quote: " 'Therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.' "

  "So tell me, is it wrong to ask a man to go on living, even though he's in pain, when his life is more precious to me than his death?"

  Deacon experienced a strange sort of dislocation. Words hammered in his brain. Devourer of thy parents ... now thy unutterable torment renews ... Is any man's life so worthless that the manner of his death is the only interesting thing about him... He stared rather blankly at Lawrence. "Why are you here? I remember going to Knightsbridge to interview you."

  "I moved seven years ago after my wife died."

  "I see." He rubbed his face vigorously to clear his head. "Well, look, I'm sorry but I have to go now." He stood up. "It's been good talking to you, Lawrence. Enjoy your Christmas."

  A twinkle glittered in the old man's eyes. "What's to enjoy? I'm Jewish. Do you think I like being reminded that most of the civilized world condemns my people for what they did two thousand years ago?"

  "Aren't you confusing Christmas with Easter?"

  Lawrence raised his eyes to heaven. "I talk about two thousand years of isolation and he quibbles over a few months."

  Deacon lingered, seduced by the twinkle and the outrageous racial blackmail. "Enjoy Hanukkah then, or are you going to tell me that that's impossible, too, because there's no one to enjoy it with!"

  "What else can a childless widower expect?" He saw hesitation in the younger man's face, and patted the seat. "Sit down again and give me the pleasure of a few minutes' companionship. We're old friends, Michael, and it's so rare for me to spend time with an intelligent man. Would it relieve your mind if I said I've always been a better lawyer than I've been a Jew, so your soul is in no danger?"

  Deacon persuaded himself that he sat down only out of curiosity but the truth was he had no weapons against Lawrence's frailty. Death was in the old man's face just as clearly as it had been in Alan Parker's, and Deacon's sensitivity to death was always more acute as Christmas drew nearer.

  "In fact I was thinking how alike we all are and how easy it would be to drop out of our boring lives and start again," said Deacon, nodding towards the men on the shore. "Would you recognize them, for example, if the next time you saw them was in the Dorchester?"

  "Their friends would know them."

  "Not if they came across them in a different environment. Recognition is about relating a series of known facts. Change those facts and recognition becomes harder."

  "Is a new identity what you want, Michael?"

  He scraped the stubble on his chin. "It certainly has its attractions. Did you never think about dropping out and wiping the slate clean?"

  "Of course. We all have midlife crises. If we didn't, we wouldn't be normal."

  Deacon laughed. "To be honest, Lawrence, I'd rather you'd said I was different. The last thing a red-blooded male with unrealized ambitions wants to hear is that he's normal. I've done damn all with my life and it's driving me round the bend."

  "I tend to give Christmas a wide berth," said Deacon, lighting a fresh cigarette. "I'd rather be at work than pretending I'm enjoying myself."

  "What does giving it a wide berth usually involve?"

  Deacon shrugged. "Ignoring it, I suppose. Keeping my head down till it's all over and sanity's restored. I don't have any children. It might be different if I had children."

  "Yes, we suffer when we have no one to love."

  "I thought it was the other way round," he said, watching one of the men tug at a piece of wood in the mud's embrace. No woman had ever held on to him as tenaciously as the mud held the wood. "We suffer when no one loves us."

  "Perhaps you're right."

  "I know I'm right. I've had two wives and I fucked my brains out trying to express my love for both of them. It was a waste of time."

  Lawrence smiled. "My dear fellow," he murmured. "So much fucking for so little result. How terribly exhausting for you."

  Deacon grinned. "It clearly served some purpose if it amuses you."

  "It reminds me of the woman who gave her husband a do-it-yourself kit when he told her he wanted a good screw."

  "Is there a moral to this story?"

  "Five or six at least, depending on whether it was a genuine misunderstanding or whether the wife was teaching her husband a lesson."

  "Meaning she thought he was taking her for granted? Well, I never took either of the Mrs. Deacons for granted, or not until it was obvious the marriages were on the skids. It was they who took me—" he drew morosely on his cigarette—"for every damn penny they could. I had to sell two bloody good houses to give them each a half of my capital, lost most of my possessions in the process and now I'm shacked up in a miserable rented flat in Islington. Is there anything in your morality tale to account for that?"

  Lawrence chuckled. "I don't know. I'm a little confused now about who was screwing whom. What was the purpose of these marriages, Michael?''

  "What do you mean 'what was the purpose'? I loved them, or at least I thought I did."

  "I love my cats but I don't intend to marry any of them."

  "What is the purpose of marriage then?''

  "Isn't that the question you need to answer before you try again?"

  "Do me a favor," said Deacon. "I don't intend to have my balls chopped off a third time."

  "You sound as if you're sulking, Michael."

  "Clara—she was my second wife—kept accusing me of going through the male menopause. She said I was only interested in sex."

  "Naturally. Wanting babies isn't a female prerogative. I still want babies, and I'm eighty-three years old. Why did God give me sperm if it wasn't to make babies? Look at Abraham. He was geriatric when he had Isaac."

  Deacon's rugged face broke into a smile. "Now you're sulking, Lawrence."

  "No, Michael, I'm complaining. But old men are allowed to complain because it doesn't matter how positive their mental attitude, they still have to persuade a woman under forty to have sex with them. And that's not as easy as it sounds. I know because I've tried."

  "I can't pretend it was anything other than lust. Clara was—is—beautiful."

  "Who am I to argue? I had to have my tomcat neutered six months ago because the neighbors kept complaining about his insatiable appetite for their pretty little queens."

  "I wasn't that bad, Lawrence."

  "Neither was my tom, Michael. He was only doing what God programmed him to do, and the fact that he preferred the pretty ones merely demonstrated his good taste."

  "I don't think I ever told Clara I wanted children. I mentioned it to Julia a couple of times but she always said there was plenty of time."

  "There was, until you deserted her for Clara."

 
; "I thought you were trying to persuade me to feel less guilty about that. Didn't I do it out of desperation to keep the Deacon line going?"

  "There's no excuse for inefficiency, Michael. If children are what you want, then you must find a woman who wants them, too. Surely the moral of the DIY story is that people have different priorities in life."

  "So where do I go from here?" asked Deacon with wry amusement. "Singles bars? Dating agencies? Or maybe I should try an ad in Private Eye?"

  "I think it was Chairman Mao who said: 'Every journey begins with the first step.' Why do you want to make that first step so difficult?"

  "I don't understand."

  "You need a little practice before you throw yourself in at the deep end again. You've forgotten how simple love is. Relearn that lesson first."

  "How do I do that?"

  "As I said, I love my cats but I don't plan to marry them."

  "Are you telling me to get a pet?"

  "I'm not telling you anything, Michael. You're intelligent enough to work this one out for yourself." Lawrence took a card from his inside pocket. "This is my phone number. You can call me at any time. I'm almost always there."

  "You might live to regret it. How do you know I won't take you up on it and drive you mad with endless phone calls?"

  The old eyes twinkled with what looked to Deacon like genuine affection. "I hope you will. It's such a rarity for me to feel useful these days."

  "You're the most dreadful old fraud I've ever met."

  "Why do you say that?"

  "It's such a rarity for me to feel useful these days," he quoted. "I bet you say that to all the waifs and strays you pick up. As a matter of interest, does everyone get emotionally blackmailed or am I peculiarly privileged?"

  The old man chortled happily. "Only those who inspire me with hope. You can only feed the hungry, Michael."

  It was a startling trigger to Deacon's memory. Images of skeletal Billy Blake floated to the surface of his mind. He felt for his wallet and took out a print of the dead man's mug shot. "Did you ever talk to him? He was a derelict who lived in a warehouse squat about a mile from here and died of starvation six months ago on that estate behind us. He called himself Billy Blake but I don't think it was his real name. I need to find out who he was."