On the other side of the road, the Old Tank and Boiler Shops were still in existence, but weed-choked and forlorn, as if aware what fate had been reserved for them. As for the workers whom Harry could recall holding up the traffic when they streamed through the gates on foot or bicycle, flat-capped and overalled to a man, they had vanished forever.
Depressed by the speed and scale of the changes being visited on his home town, Harry set off back towards the centre. Cars and lorries seemed everywhere about him, their noise and fumes attaining levels which he was amazed the residents were prepared to tolerate. To think how he had complained about a few motorcyclists in Lindos only proved Kostas’s point: he had not known when he was well off.
The Brunel Centre offered a haven from the traffic, but only at a price. Christmas shoppers clogged the walkways, electronic carols blared above the tumult and Harry found difficulty knowing which route to follow in the shop-lined maze. A wizened old man was playing a concertina at one corner, the tune inaudible against a synthesized jingle of artificial sleigh bells. Convinced for no good reason that he was a former railway worker, Harry dropped a fifty pence piece into his hat, but the old man did not catch his sympathetic look.
Harry was aiming for the Central Library, which lay to the south, but, when he at last emerged from the pedestrianized labyrinth, he realized that he had headed east instead and there, in front of him, was an object described over breakfast by his mother, which he had found hard to envisage. The Amazing Blondinis was a ten-feet high bronze statue of two trapeze artists, one male, the other female. The man was poised as if on a tightrope, with the woman sitting on his shoulders and balancing a spotted parasol on her forehead. Both were adorned in pink tights and yellow leotards and had been cast, he gathered, in the railway works foundry as a final send-off before closure.
He must have been standing gape-mouthed in front of the statue for some minutes when a woman’s voice reached his ears from close behind.
‘Harry?’
He swung round.
‘It is Harry. My life, it is.’
At first, he did not recognize her. She was a woman of about forty, trying, not altogether unsuccessfully, to look nearer thirty, in pin-striped suit and flounced white blouse, with artfully layered make-up and loosely curled blonde hair, every inch, it appeared, the sophisticated businesswoman. But that voice? That voice was familiar – and far from sophisticated. It belonged to Jackie Fleetwood, the mini-skirted secretary who had become first Barry Chipchase’s mistress, then his wife and finally little better than his partner in crime.
‘I’ve been reading about you in the papers, Harry. Haven’t we been a naughty boy? Why not tell me all about it over a cup of coffee?’
Why he was unable to resurrect the anger he had felt sixteen years ago Harry did not know. Jackie Oliver, formerly Chipchase, formerly Fleetwood, had come up smelling of Chanel perfume since she and Barry had vanished from Swindon in the summer of 1972 and Harry, left to face the creditors alone and to devise exquisite retributions for those who had deserted him, could not decide now whether to laugh or cry, whether to applaud her shamelessness or demand an apology.
Jackie sat opposite him at a tiny corner table in a garishly lit coffee shop. Her legs were extravagantly crossed, displaying several shapely inches of sheer-stockinged thigh, she was sipping cappuccino and smoking king-size cigarettes in such a way as to ensure he never lost sight of her diamond-encrusted engagement ring, and her overall demeanour was that of a woman who expected her fleshly charms and obvious prosperity to forbid complaint even if they did not command admiration.
‘I ditched Barry soon as I realized he couldn’t keep his hands off the señoritas. Ran a chalet franchise in Benidorm for a few years, then I came back to this country. I married Tony in ’83 and, when he was looking to relocate his business, I thought of the old home town. I’ve branched out on my own now and opened a hair salon: Jacoranda Styling. It’s just round the corner. Maybe you saw it?’
‘Can’t say I did.’
‘Why not try us out? You could do with a trim and it’d be on the house. For old time’s sake, eh?’ She gave him a wide, lipsticked grin and he found himself trying to remember whether her teeth had been quite so white and regular when she had first minced into his life.
‘I think I’ll give it a miss. But thanks anyway.’
‘Up to you. Here …’ She leaned closer, treating him to a vista of cleavage as the negligently buttoned blouse gaped. ‘Did you see Al on the box last night?’
‘Al?’
‘Alan Dysart. Handsome devil, isn’t he?’
‘I suppose he is.’
‘If only I’d known twenty years ago that he was going to be a power in the land …’ There was a hint of regret in her faraway look, regret, Harry assumed, for having chosen the wrong man at Barnchase Motors to make a set at. ‘It’s funny, isn’t it?’ she continued. ‘Everybody at Barnchase went on to better things, ’cept …’
‘Me?’
She smiled. ‘Well, you said it, Harry. Must say, though, I don’t see you having done what the papers seem to think you’ve done. After all, you never tried it on with me, did you?’
‘No, Jackie, I never did.’ Despite, he refrained from adding, ample encouragement.
Her eyes played for a moment with the implication that he would not have been disappointed had he tried to exploit their working acquaintance, then she leaned back in her chair, exhaled a plume of cigarette smoke and said: ‘Have The Courier got something against you?’
‘Not as far as I know.’
‘I thought they must have, the way they wrote about you the other day.’
‘What did they write?’
‘Haven’t you seen it?’
‘No.’
She arched her plucked eyebrows in surprise. ‘Really?’ Then she glanced at her gold-banded wristwatch. ‘Christ, is that the time? I must dash.’
Harry made no move to finish his coffee, having already decided he would prefer to leave alone. As Jackie rose, however, she opened her handbag, took out a five pound note and slipped it under his saucer.
‘Pay with that, Harry,’ she said. ‘My treat, eh?’
Harry listened to the tap of her high-heeled shoes retreating towards the door and watched the cigarette smoke disperse in her absence. It would have been better, he felt, if they had argued about the past, or simply pretended not to recognize each other. Anything would have been better than to confront his own inability to sustain a justified grudge. Or to realize that even Jackie Fleetwood regarded him now as a deserving case for charity.
Harry found what everybody else seemed already to have read about him in the reference section of Swindon Central Library. Page five of The Courier for Sunday 20 November featured an article headed HOPES FADE FOR MISSING ENGLISH GIRL ON GREEK ISLAND, credited to none other than Jonathan Minter:
If a week is a long time in politics, it may be an eternity in the search for a missing person. Heather Mallender, an Engish schoolteacher who was staying on the holiday island of Rhodes as a guest of Westminster MP and junior Defence minister Alan Dysart vanished without trace from a mountaintop in the island’s interior on November 11 and already seems destined to join the ranks of those who disappear and are never found. Meanwhile the one person who might be able to shed some light on what happened to her, odd-job man Harry Barnett, is saying and doing nothing to aid the search. When I spoke to 55-year-old Barnett last week in the Rhodes bar where he spends much of his time, he gave the impression of a man more concerned to avoid incriminating himself than to help those still looking for a girl he claims to have known merely as a friend. If he is reluctant to talk about what occurred when he and Miss Mallender went for a drive on the fateful afternoon, he is even less eager to talk about his own chequered past and dubious present. Harry Barnett, in short, is a man with plenty to hide …
Harry closed the newspaper. He did not need to read any more. In truth, he could not bear to read any more. The inaccuraci
es were not what hurt: they were only to be expected. But ‘a man with plenty to hide’, ‘concerned to avoid incriminating himself’: was that really what Minter had thought of him? Harry could not believe it. Yet why, if not, should he have painted such a harsh and biased picture?
All the way from his table to the librarian’s desk, and beyond that to the exit, Harry sensed that people were watching him, watching him because they knew who he was and why he had asked for The Courier of 20 November. It was absurd, of course, for his photograph had not been in the paper and nobody in Swindon (bar Jackie Oliver) was likely to recognize him, yet he could not rid himself of the sensation.
As he emerged from the library, reflecting gloomily on the injustice of life, he very nearly bumped into somebody who had stepped forward to meet him. Pulling up sharply, he saw, to his astonishment, that it was Alan Dysart.
‘Hello Harry,’ Dysart said, smiling and clapping him on the shoulder. ‘I didn’t think we’d meet again so soon.’
With an effort, Harry smiled back. ‘Neither did I.’
‘You’re probably wondering how I knew where to find you.’
‘Well … yes.’
‘I’ve been to Falmouth Street, of course. Your mother told me how put out you were by The Courier article, so I reckoned you’d want to read it for yourself as soon as possible. I got here just as you were going in.’ Another smile. ‘Thought it best to wait.’
It never failed, Harry thought, Dysart’s ability to predict the reactions of others. Perhaps that was the secret of his success he had failed to identify last night. Perhaps that was what invested his words and actions with such a relaxed and maddening certainty. ‘I’ve booked a table at the Goddard Arms for lunch,’ Dysart went on. ‘Trust you’ll join me?’
The Goddard Arms was the perfect if ironical choice. It was the ivy-clad Georgian inn in Old Swindon where Harry had taken Barnchase’s better-heeled clients in palmier, far-off days. He would like as not have left Dysart to mind the shop on such occasions and now the wheel had come full circle: Dysart was the indulgent host, Harry the indigent guest.
‘My car’s just round the corner. What do you say we go straight there?’
And Harry said what he always said when confronted by Dysart’s irresistible generosity. He said yes.
The head waiter made a face at Harry’s dishevelled appearance, but clearly recognized that Dysart was a person of importance and therefore raised no objection. A window table was swiftly arranged and, within minutes, Harry found himself sipping Chablis and picking at smoked salmon in a mannered travesty of his normal eating habits.
‘I got your message,’ Dysart said. ‘I don’t blame you for leaving Lindos. I imagine the atmosphere must have become distinctly uncomfortable.’
‘Yes, it did.’ Harry had no intention of revealing what had really prompted him to leave. ‘But I’m sorry to have left you in the lurch.’
‘Don’t worry about that. I’m sure we can rely on Kostas to keep an eye on things. When are you planning to go back?’
‘I’m not sure.’
‘Well, there’s no hurry. How does it feel to be home?’
‘I’m not sure about that either. I feel … disorientated. As if the England I’ve come back to isn’t the England I left.’
‘It isn’t, Harry. It’s moved on, by rather more than nine years, I fancy. You left stodgy old post-war England. You’ve come back to the high-tech enterprise culture. Didn’t anyone tell you?’ Dysart smiled, declaring as he did so the extent to which he was guying his own description as much as Harry’s confusion. ‘Did you catch me on the television last night?’
‘Yes. You were very impressive. As always.’
Dysart leaned across the table and lowered his voice. ‘Balls. I was slick. I was witty. I was word-perfect. That’s just training, Harry, nothing more. All mind and no heart. Not that much mind, if it comes to it. We’re all ad-men now. Didn’t you realize?’
‘Ad-men?’
‘Image is everything, presentation is all. McLuhan had it right: the medium is the message.’
‘Are you serious? What about patriotism? Last night, you said—’
‘ “Neither outmoded nor unworthy”? A nice phrase, wasn’t it? The truth is, Harry, patriotism is a cage, from which the bird has long since flown. I’m not complaining – it got me into Parliament, for God’s sake – but let’s not …’ His voice trailed into silence. He relaxed back into his chair and gazed for a few moments through the window into the bustling High Street. Harry had experienced such lapses into introspection on Dysart’s part before. They seemed to signal dissatisfaction with whatever he was expressing at the time, a temporary loss of faith or confidence that came as inexplicably as it went. Accordingly, Harry was content to wait patiently until his companion had recovered himself. ‘Let’s not talk about politics,’ Dysart said at last. ‘Let’s talk about you. You said over the telephone that you couldn’t just sit in Lindos waiting for Heather to be slowly forgotten.’
‘That seemed to be what was happening.’
‘I hope you don’t think I was encouraging the process by hastening Roy on his way. How is the head, incidentally?’
Harry smiled shamefacedly. ‘Fine. I’ve been meaning to say how grateful I was—’
Dysart held up his hand. ‘Please don’t. It was the least I could do. I felt partly to blame myself, for not foreseeing what Roy might do.’ Then he fixed Harry with an enquiring stare. ‘I do hope you haven’t come back to even the score in some way.’
Harry shook his head. ‘No. The less I see of Roy Mallender, the happier I shall be.’
‘Then how do you intend to ensure Heather isn’t forgotten?’
‘By finding her, if I can. Failing that, by establishing what really happened to her.’
For an instant, Dysart looked surprised, as if he had seen in Harry something he had not expected. He plucked the bottle of Chablis from its nearby ice-bucket and recharged both their glasses, then said quietly: ‘Is that why you’ve come home, Harry? Is that what you hope to accomplish here?’
‘In part, yes.’
‘But Heather vanished on Rhodes. Why look for her in England? Unless …’ He paused long enough to imply that he had guessed the reason. ‘Unless, of course, you know something the police don’t. Has some clue come your way – some piece of—’
‘No, nothing like that.’ Harry smiled and shrugged his shoulders, but he sensed his interruption had been counter-productive. It had been too abrupt and too emphatic. Dysart’s keen-eyed gaze would not leave him now, would not cease to probe until it had found what it sought.
‘Then why start here?’
It was a fair question, but, even to Harry, his answer sounded unconvincing. ‘Because this is where her friends are. This is where those who know her better than I do are to be found.’
Dysart stroked his chin musingly. ‘What do you hope to learn from them?’
‘Her true state of mind, I suppose. It’s pretty obvious I misread it.’
‘Did you?’
‘It seemed to me that she’d put her psychological problems behind her.’
‘What makes you think she hadn’t?’
‘Well, it would explain her running away, wouldn’t it? If that’s what she did.’
‘As you say, if that’s what she did. For what it’s worth, I’d agree with you: when I suggested she make use of the villa, it was because I thought she’d finally recovered from the effects of her sister’s death. I suppose I felt responsible in some way for what happened to Clare – still do, if it comes to that – so I was keen to help Heather come to terms with it in any way I could. She must have secretly wished I’d been the first to go aboard the Artemis that morning, rather than Clare, though she never said as much. At all events, as I saw it, she deserved any assistance I could give her.’
Dysart had never told Harry much about the circumstances of Clare Mallender’s death. There was nothing strange in this, since he had been similarly reticent
about his various brushes with death in the South Atlantic. Now, however, he seemed willing for once to break his vow of silence.
‘Survivors always tend to feel guilty. Everything happens at the time in a split-second. Later, you re-run the experience slowly in your mind, calculating how you could have saved those who were killed, or prevented the incident taking place at all. It’s a futile activity – but an inevitable one. Heather wanted to hear precisely how her sister had died, so I told her. Perhaps I told her too well. Perhaps that was the start of her troubles.
‘It happened in the middle of the election campaign. I’d spent Sunday at Tyler’s Hard, writing speeches for the following week. Clare drove down from London first thing Monday morning to go through them with me. We were due to meet my agent for lunch. Sunday had been fine and I’d worked aboard the Artemis. It’s a weakness of mine to think best afloat. I’d left the speeches on board overnight, which I only remembered when Clare arrived at breakfast time. She went out to fetch them. I was standing in the kitchen with Mrs Diamond, the cleaning lady, when we heard the explosion. The Artemis was blown to pieces, and most of the pontoon with it. Clare must have been killed instantly: that’s about the only blessing. The bomb had been wired up so that simply opening the cabin door detonated it: textbook stuff. If I’d remembered leaving the speeches aboard sooner, or if Clare hadn’t offered to go and get them … Well, life and death turn on such chances.
‘The problem is that if you devote too much thought to how vulnerable we all are – how much we all owe to pure luck, be it good or bad – the mind may lose its equipoise. Heather didn’t have a breakdown because of how cruel fate was to her sister, or because she was grief-stricken to lose her, or even because of the senseless way terrorists select their victims. In my opinion, she didn’t have a breakdown at all. She merely ceased to observe the normal social conventions about what to say and think and what not to say and think. That the frailty of life makes our careful planning for the future ridiculous is a commonplace truth. But how many of us really believe it? How many of us really imagine we might walk under the proverbial bus at any moment? The answer is very few, and most of those who do we call insane, because to live for the present is to realize how barren the present is. I saw it happen to several good men in the South Atlantic. And I saw it happen to Heather. The road back from that state of mind is a long and difficult one. But I thought Heather had successfully made the return journey, until …’
Into the Blue Page 11
