by James Lasdun
Something in her expression, a look of deliberate challenge, made him think of the things he’d heard her tell Grollier; all that crap about blackmailing Charlie.
“No, I wasn’t. It just happened to be the truth.”
“You weren’t trying to—” She broke off.
“What?”
“I don’t know . . . damage his reputation or something?”
“Huh?”
“Right before his deal goes through?”
So that was what Charlie had thought! As usual his cousin was a degree or two more cunning than him in his thinking. Chloe faced him again.
“I mean, it wouldn’t be good if his partners knew he’d been brought in for questioning in connection with a murder, would it?”
“Why would I want to spoil his deal?”
“I don’t know. Maybe you have something against him?”
She was looking at him more coolly than he liked.
An urge to set her straight seized him. Why not tell her? he thought. It wasn’t as if keeping the damn thing to himself all these years had done him any good. He’d told no one; not his mother or sister, not even Dr. McCubbin. It would have seemed a kind of special pleading, a bid for mercy or—worse—pity, and he’d had too much pride to allow himself that, even as a fourteen-year-old. Pride, courage, dignity . . . all those fine qualities were supposed to be their own reward. But really, what good had they done him? What difference had it made to be a proud wreck, a dignified fuckup?
“How could I possibly have anything against him?” he said, and then added, with careful nonchalance, “I mean, aside from that business when we were at school together. But that was a million years ago. Besides, I never held it against him.”
“What business?”
“He hasn’t told you about it?”
“No.”
“You knew I was thrown out, though?”
“Yes . . . but I didn’t think it had anything to do with Charlie.”
She looked a bit apprehensive suddenly, which was certainly better than that coldly appraising stare.
“Ha. That’s funny, I thought he would have told you.”
She caught his eye, and he could tell she knew he was being disingenuous. He didn’t care, though.
“I mean, it was nothing, really, just schoolboy stuff. I wouldn’t have mentioned it if I didn’t think you already knew . . .”
He paused, savoring the look of alarm on Chloe’s face. Something actively malignant seemed to have awoken inside him.
“What are you trying to tell me, Matthew?”
“Nothing at all. I’ll stop right now if you don’t want to hear it.”
“What did Charlie do?” she said quietly.
“Oh, you know, he’d been through a rough time. His mother had just died. He’d started a year late at this very English school, not knowing anyone, except me, of course, but obviously feeling he deserved a place somewhat higher up the social hierarchy. You know how Charlie is. He did rise pretty quickly, but there was a little cabal at the top of our year that he couldn’t crack; kids friendly with the year above, which was where girls started—below that it was still all boys—which in turn meant parties and clubs and all that stuff. There was one kid, some sort of delinquent aristo with access to high-grade drugs, who kept the group supplied till he was busted smoking a joint in St. James’s Park and the headmaster expelled him. Charlie stepped into the breach.”
“Dealing?”
“Yes. Right away, before he even knew where he could procure anything, he let it be known to this group that he was open for business. This all happened in the period right after my father’s disappearance, by the way. Our household had been turned upside down. My mother could barely put a sandwich together for our meals. My sister, who was supposed to be going to university, went off to live with some Anglican nuns instead. I was just in a sort of zombie state most of the time, too confused to know what I was feeling. Helping Charlie find a supplier seemed a perfectly natural thing to do. I took him to the Kensington Market, which was this place full of goths and punks and old gray-haired hippies. We were offered grass right away and for a while Charlie just bought the stuff there and resold it at school for a small profit. But then he realized he could do better buying it wholesale. Also people were asking for other things—speed, acid, coke . . . Anyway, we persuaded the guy we were buying from to introduce us to his dealer—”
“We? You were partners in this?”
“No, not really. I was more like his assistant, his gofer. Or maybe ‘apprentice’ would be the word, given the illustrious career I went on to later. We’d fetch the stuff from our new friend Rudy out in Hounslow together and bag it up in my bedroom, and sometimes I’d be the one who actually handed it over to the kids buying it. But it was his operation. All the money was his—incoming as well as outgoing. Anyway, there was this girl in the year above who bought a tab of acid from Charlie. Henrietta Vine. She dropped it at a birthday party in Manchester Square and ran out into Oxford Street on her way home while she was hallucinating. She thought the buses and taxis were weightless as balloons.”
He paused again, aware of the tension in Chloe’s body in her chair opposite him.
“What happened to her?”
“She was hit by a taxi. She had both legs broken and most of her ribs cracked. The school moved quickly to find out where she’d got hold of the stuff. It didn’t take long for our names to come up.”
“Yours and Charlie’s?”
“Yes.”
“But . . . Charlie wasn’t thrown out?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Why do you think?”
She looked uncomprehendingly at him a moment, until it dawned on her.
“He got you to take the blame?”
Matthew shrugged.
“Well, as Charlie said when we were told to report to the headmaster’s office, ‘After all, Matt, things are already screwed for you, so you might as well.’ ”
She was staring at him, her eyes very wide, and he stared back, feeling the words go in hard and deep.
“And . . . you agreed?”
“It seemed reasonable to me.”
“Reasonable?”
“I mean, I’d have been kicked out anyway, so why not at least try to save Charlie’s skin? There was no point both of us going down if we didn’t have to, was there?”
“Why you, though? Why not him?”
“Oh, because he was right. Things were already screwed for me.”
His voice had started thickening, he realized. Telling her the story was having an unexpected effect on him. It was as if he were hearing it himself for the first time, and only now grasping the full extent of its implications.
He looked away; unsure, suddenly, if he was speaking out of a wish to avenge himself on Charlie or just, somehow, to account for himself to Chloe. Maybe the two motives had become inseparable.
“That’s what the whole incident made clear—really for the first time,” he said, managing a dry smile. “I hadn’t actually seen my father’s disappearance as quite the unmitigated disaster it was until Charlie pointed it out, if you can believe it. But he was right. So, yes, I agreed to take the blame.”
He cleared his throat.
“But, you know . . . it’s all water under the bridge as far as I’m concerned. Extremely ancient water under an extremely far-off bridge.”
Chloe looked acutely distressed.
“Oh, Matthew,” she said. It wasn’t much, but it seemed to him he’d never heard anything quite so sympathetically anguished in his life; not on his behalf. He’d never wanted pity—hers or anyone else’s—and he hoped that wasn’t what she was feeling now. But whatever emotion was filling her eyes with that look of infinite tenderness, it seemed to be doing him good.
In the silence that followed, he became aware of a familiar ticking sound behind him, in the entranceway to the kitchen. He turned around. Charlie was standing there. Judging from his posture, fully immobile
and utterly silent except for the ticking of his Patek Philippe, he’d been there for some time. Chloe must have seen him appear and decided to let him listen. He looked right through Matthew. Chloe spoke:
“You never told me any of that, Charlie.”
A scoffing sound came from Charlie.
“You should have told me,” Chloe said.
Abruptly, Charlie stepped forward into the room, grabbing his rain jacket.
“I’m going into town to get something decent to eat,” he said. “I’ll see you later.”
He strode out through the front door, slamming it behind him.
“Charlie!” Chloe shouted. A moment later she ran out after him. Matthew could hear her calling Charlie’s name in the rain, then the slam of a car door and Chloe yelling, her voice louder than he’d ever heard it: “Don’t you dare! Don’t you dare, Charlie!” followed by the pounding of a fist on the car roof: hard enough to dent the paneling, by the sound of it. Charlie must have got out of the car then: Matthew heard the car door close again, more quietly, and Charlie’s voice, very controlled, saying: “I don’t have to defend myself against that little shit,” followed by Chloe, her voice audibly constricted with rage, answering: “You’d better, Charlie, or you’ll regret it.” There was a long pause, then Charlie’s voice hissed: “Not here.” Matthew heard their brisk footsteps crunch on the gravel as they walked around the side of the house. A few minutes later they came in through the glass doors and went silently upstairs. For some time, as he cleared up the kitchen, Matthew heard voices through the ceiling. He’d never heard them fight before, and would have liked to hear what they said, but he couldn’t make it out. Still, the anger in Chloe’s muffled voice was unmistakable, and it seemed to him inconceivable that there weren’t going to be some painful repercussions for Charlie, down the line. Chloe might be capable of loving a man she was betraying, but he seriously doubted she’d be able to go on living with a man she despised. And how, he wondered, allowing himself for the first time a steely satisfaction in what his words had surely wrought, how could she not despise Charlie after this? He felt as though he’d discharged himself of some indissolubly corrosive substance. Now let it spread its ruin somewhere else.
• • •
It was still raining when he went to bed. The pines stood dripping behind the guesthouse, dark and immense. Glittering strings ran from the unguttered octagonal eaves. He opened the door and slid the suitcase out from under the bed, half expecting, as he always did, the things inside to have rearranged themselves, so bristlingly volatile had they become in his imagination. They lay exactly as he had left them. Still, that was something to look forward to: getting rid of this junk. It made him nervous having it there. Several times he’d been on the verge of taking it out; bringing it to the town landfill with the rest of the household garbage. But the thought of some dogged detective or beady-eyed municipal worker spotting something had held him back. Better to dump it all in the city.
It came to him as he lay in bed that he should put the knife in Charlie’s safe.
The idea filled him with a strange delight. He pictured the knife lying there, where the Tiffany bracelet had lain at the beginning of the summer. There was something apt and satisfying about the image. It was where Charlie himself would have put it, he decided, if he really had killed Grollier: stashed it there till he came up with a foolproof spot to get rid of it once and for all. Or no, perhaps he’d want to keep it there: hold on to it as some sort of perverse souvenir; the next best thing to the actual scalp of his wife’s lover . . .
He imagined Detective Fernandez turning up in Cobble Hill after an anonymous tipoff, armed with a warrant; Charlie’s disdainful grin as he showed him the safe and keyed in the date of his mother’s death; the look turning to bewilderment as the steel door opened . . . That would be a sight to behold! But of course I’d be long gone by then, Matthew remembered . . . That seemed to be an indispensable element in the idea taking shape in him; the sense of himself radically elsewhere, under a hot blue sky in some place well out of reach of Detective Fernandez and the East Deerfield Sheriff’s Department. Because Charlie, knowing Charlie, would surely wriggle out of it one way or another, and sooner or later the trail would resume its original course and destination.
Not that you could physically disappear anymore. That option, such a primordial human yearning, had gone the way of those off-the-grid backwaters that had once made it possible. But you could still vanish by becoming someone else. There’d been endless talk about that when his father ran off. People had suggested he might have found his way to Belize or somewhere in Southeast Asia; acquired a false passport through one of the document-forging operations in Port Loyola or Bangkok, and started life afresh in some tropical hideaway.
Why not follow in his father’s footsteps? The idea had a certain inexorable logic about it, after all, or at least a certain fateful appeal. And it wasn’t as if he hadn’t thought about it before. It had been present in his mind intermittently throughout his adult life; a fantasy of familial reconvergence that had often comforted him in times of stress.
Of course, there was the little matter of money to consider. His father had had the equivalent of well over a million dollars with him when he disappeared, whereas Matthew, when he last checked, had a little under five grand. The disparity made him smile in the darkness of his room. What a failure he was, compared to his old man! How petty and unambitious the field of his own endeavors!
It was only at this juncture in these drifting nocturnal ruminations that what might have been obvious from the start, had he been more willing to accept the role of vengeful malcontent that life seemed so eager to confer upon him, became apparent. Not that the timing of it altered its complexion in any fundamental way; he was aware of that. But it meant something to him that the idea hadn’t been premeditated.
The money would come from Charlie’s safe.
The knife would go in and the money would come out.
It was so simple, and so obvious, that the registering of it felt almost irrelevant; as if it had been arranged long ago by providence, and had always been going to happen, whether or not he knew it in advance.
He saw, in his mind’s eye, the blocks of cash in the shadows behind the Cipro bottles, stacked in towers of different heights like their own little Financial District. A million and a half dollars: Wasn’t that what Charlie had told him?
He remembered how disappointed Charlie had seemed by his reaction to the sight of all that “moolah.” He’d seemed to want Matthew to be impressed, and so Matthew had obligingly pretended to be. But in the peculiar mood that had risen in him now—a sort of euphoric clairvoyance—it occurred to him that perhaps Charlie had wanted something else too: that he’d wanted him not just to be impressed by the money, but to take it.
Was that possible? Was that, at some half-conscious level, why Charlie forgot the bracelet in the first place and had Matthew go back and open the safe and see what it contained? Had he been offering me the money? Matthew wondered. Hoping I’d scoop it up and disappear out of his life once and for all? Was Matthew’s failure to do so the real reason why Charlie was sending him back to the house now?
Absurd! And yet there was something persuasive about the notion; an insidious plausibility that seemed to require him to weigh it seriously in his mind.
Because Charlie owed him; there was no doubt about that. And Charlie knew it too. He surely remembered as well as Matthew those words he’d spoken as they crossed the schoolyard to the headmaster’s office a quarter century ago. Or even if he’d forgotten the words themselves, he couldn’t have forgotten the intent behind them. Because he’d certainly given every indication of regretting that intent. Even of wanting forgiveness for it. God knows he’d been eager enough to fork over the little loans Matthew had been compelled to ask for at moments of desperation over the years; often throwing in a few hundred dollars extra as if to convey his awareness that it was he, Charlie, who was getting the real relief fr
om these transactions, the real easing of burdens . . . And judging from his behavior these past few weeks, he’d have been happy, more than happy, to make one last act of contrition in order to secure the permanent disappearance of his problematic cousin.
A million and a half dollars. It wouldn’t seriously harm Charlie, but it was a decent sum. Not excessive, considering the fact that, in addition to everything else, Matthew had also done Charlie the favor (he hadn’t seen it in quite this way before, but it was indisputable now that he thought of it) of eliminating his wife’s lover. But certainly an acceptable sum. A person could surely get whatever it took to start life afresh, with a million and a half bucks, and still have plenty left over. It wasn’t as if he intended to be idle. He’d go somewhere quiet, low-key. Buy a place with a little land. Find some locals to go into business with. Plant gardens and orchards with them; raise chickens and goats. He’d always liked the idea of a communal enterprise; the company of some like-minded people to nourish the spirit and soften the drudgery of work. He’d accepted too unprotestingly the isolating conditions of work in London and then New York; the ethos of every man for himself. His new life would be more openhearted, more spacious and purposeful, than the mere getting-by he’d settled for in the past. He’d always known there was something narrow and aimless, something wearyingly selfish, in the way he’d gone about things in the past. An absence of thought for anything beyond the limits of his own immediate wants and needs. It was never the life he would have chosen, but choice had never seemed a very serious component in his existence. You just grabbed what you could from the few things that presented themselves. Even when he’d gone in with those others—an entertainment lawyer, a couple who invested in artisanal food start-ups, a former City Hall official who knew how to oil the wheels of the city’s permit bureacracy—on that farm-to-table project, they’d each been in it purely for their own private gain. It was just business; only ever just business, which was perhaps why it hadn’t excited him in the end, even though he’d made a little money out of it.
Well, here was his opportunity to do things differently. To be a better person; live a more generous life! Wasn’t that what he wanted, more than anything? Wasn’t it what everybody wanted? He could work hard; physically as well as mentally: he knew that. Everyone could work hard under the right conditions, and it was possible to enjoy hard work, even the most numbing, backbreaking toil. But you had to have a sense of participating in some greater good than just the maintaining of your own small existence; some human quorum or congregation of a size sufficient to align you with the world instead of against it. The imagination had to be fired, and kept alight. The heart had to feel the presence of joy and warmth. He saw that very clearly now, and for a moment he seemed to see himself as if in a dreamlike film, surrounded by kindred spirits at the warm center of some bustling enterprise in which food, wine, starlight, warm breezes and the sounds of human conviviality combined like the elements of some ancient ceremony to plunge the parched spirit back into the flow of life’s inexhaustible abundance.
