by John Harvey
At the head of the main table, the guest of honor drank peppermint vodka on the quarter hour and chainsmoked small dark cigars pressed upon him by his eager sons-in-law, mindful of what might one day soon be theirs. His daughters brought out a cake, festooned with chocolate flakes and candles and icing in red-and-white horizontal stripes: the committee made him a presentation and in the middle of his speech of thanks, the old man lost interest and sat back down to light a fresh cigar.
Resnick and Marian waltzed and polkaed and once essayed a nifty quickstep, until Resnick’s subliminally remembered fishtail came to grief amongst the swirl of small children that jigged about his legs.
After that they ate pieroqi, and when the treasurer tapped Resnick on the shoulder, he reached for his checkbook without delay.
“You see, Charles, you should join us more often. Then you would not look, always, so sad.” She touched the backs of her fingers lightly to his face. “Here it is a haven; here you may forget.”
The accordion player did a passable job on Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B Goode” and then led the band into an old Polish dance that had the men dropping alternately to right knee and left, lifting their partners off the ground and whirling them round.
Marian clapped along until her hands glowed.
Someone came and whispered in her ear and she blushed and agreed, excusing herself from Resnick to climb on to the stage and stand well behind the microphone. In a small, strong voice, to a lilting tune, she sang about a young girl who has been abandoned by her lover and still waits for him at the field edge, before a bank of tree.
When my hair turns white
Will you remember
that I was once young here?
I’ll keep faith forever
till only death overtake me.
There was a pause and then applause, those at the rear slapping the tables, stamping their feet. The band began a waltz and she stepped off the stage towards Resnick, hands outstretched. What else could he do? They made two circuits of the small floor to more applause, before others joined them and when the dance at last ended there was scarcely room to move.
“I sang that once when I was twelve,” Marian said. “We were all here, my family, your family. My father lifted me upon to a chair to sing and when it was over, your mother pushed you forwards to give thanks. Do you remember?”
“Yes,” Resnick said, remembering nothing. Surely it had been another boy, not him at all?
As they walked back towards their table, Resnick was aware of people looking at them, weighing their futures in the balance.
“At least,” Marian smiled, seeing his embarrassment, “they’re not saying what a lovely couple we make.”
“Oh, but you do!”
The exclamation came from close behind and as both Resnick and Marian turned, a woman lurched towards them, dark hair and wild eyes.
“You do, you really do.”
Startled moments before Resnick recognized his former wife, before he recognized Elaine: sunken cheeks and patched skin, fiercely hacked hair, eyes that glowed back at him as if from the center of another face.
“Well,” Elaine said. “Old times. Me and you and Marian. This place.” She was standing unsteadily, never quite still. If she stops waving her arms, Resnick thought, she might fall down. “Pretty wonderful out there, the two of you, prancing about. The light fantastic. Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire.”
She smiled lopsidedly, slipped, and when Resnick reached out a hand to steady her, she flapped him away.
“Got to hand it to you, Marian,” she said. “The way you’ve prized him out of his shell. More than I could usually manage.”
Marian’s eyes focused on Resnick, distressed, appealing. Around them people were ceasing to drink or talk, no longer pretending not to be watching.
“One quick turn round the floor at the end of the evening,” Elaine was saying. “If I was lucky.” She smiled conspiratorially at Marian. “It gets like that towards the end. They lose interest. All of them. You’ll see.”
Marian looked away but it didn’t matter: the words weren’t really for her, and Resnick and Elaine both knew it.
“Elaine,” Resnick said. “Please.”
“Please, Charlie? Is that pretty-please, or is it the other kind?”
Resnick sighed and looked towards the floor.
“Don’t look so hangdog, Charlie. It’s just girl talk. Marian and I having a nice little chat …”
“Elaine,” Resnick said.
“Yes?”
“This isn’t the place.”
“Oh, but it is. You’re here. She’s here …”
“No.”
“Charlie, you’re not embarrassed? Don’t tell me you’re embarrassed? Not after watching Marian singing about a late lamented lover. Some people might have thought that was a bit of a spectacle, Marian pretending to be a sweet little virgin, but there you were, Charlie, clapping along with the rest of them.”
Tears of shame in her eyes, Marian pushed her way towards the exit. Resnick started after her, stopped, turned back.
“Difficult, isn’t it?” Elaine said. “Which way for that famous bleeding heart to jump? Your lover or your wife?”
“She’s not …”
“Your lover? I daresay. And I’m not your wife.”
The band had stopped playing. There were hardly any other voices to be heard.
“But you know all about that,” Elaine said, backing towards the dance floor, looking all around. “Charlie’s tragic divorce. You were at the wedding, some of you. Remember? Whom no man shall put asunder. Except you, Charlie. Not so much put asunder as shut out. And you know the reason? I expect you all know the reason, but just in case …”
“Elaine …”
“Just in case you don’t …”
“Elaine …”
“The reason was I didn’t want to have babies …”
“Elaine, for God’s sake!”
“Pretty little babies to make him tall and proud …”
Resnick slid his face slowly down into his hands.
“… and call him Da-da.”
Resnick didn’t move. Blood was pumping fiercely inside his head, against his ears and he didn’t move.
“What’s the matter, Charlie?” Elaine said. “Too near the truth?”
He lowered his hands, opened his eyes and looked at her, anger thick in his face.
“You’d rather everyone thought you chucked me out because you caught me on the mattress of someone else’s bed, fucking another man. They’d understand that, not, but not … No, Charlie, let me finish. Don’t pull me! Don’t touch me! Let me finish telling them what kind of a caring, compassionate man you really are. Let me tell them about the letters, Charlie. All the letters I sent you, the ones you never answered. All the times I rang up in pain and you hung up without a word.”
He wanted to strike her, hit her, wanted to smother her mouth, shelter from the taunt of her words and eyes. Her words broke over him as he turned and walked away.
“Stay and tell them about all that, Charlie. How you helped me with everything I’ve been going through. How you fucking helped …”
The sudden rush of cold air rocked him on his feet; a lorry climbing the hill missed a gear and he jumped. A black and white cab turned up from the city with its roof light shining and Resnick flagged it down, bundling himself into the warm upholstery of the back.
“Where to?” the driver asked.
“Anywhere,” Resnick said. “Just drive.”
Thirty-one
“Shit!” Calvin exclaimed, stepping barefooted into the splashes that his father had left around the toilet bowl. “Grown man, might have thought he’d’ve learned to piss straight!” He finished his own business, dabbed at the soles of his feet with a towel, tore off some sheets of paper and wiped up the floor. Might as well do the rest while I’m at it. Calvin used more paper around the rim and just a little way down into the bowl, dumped it inside and flushed. Now rinse your han
ds under the tap. Last thing he wanted to do, catch some kind of disease, end up in hospital: last place he wanted to be. Let those doctors get their hands on you and you never knew where it was going to end.
His father was in the kitchen, drinking black tea with lemon-his Sunday favorite-and reading his way through the News of the World. What was the matter with Sunday Sport, that’s what Calvin wanted to know? Women with 62-inch chests and three-headed babies, something truly gross to get the day on its way.
“You ready to eat?” his father asked, scarcely looking up.
“Just about.”
“Pancakes?”
“Why not?”
Every week the same little ritual. The batter was already mixed, buckwheat flour and plain, a nub of lard that his father would wipe round the inside of the pan, barely greasing it over before cooking each one. Sugar. Lemons. Strawberry jam. Calvin checked to see if there was any juice in the fridge, but was out of luck. He flicked on the kettle and reached for the huge caterer’s tin of Nescafe his father had found on one of his foraging trips. Special offers, past-the-sale-date bargains, he would cycle halfway across the city to save fifty pence.
“You got in late last night,” his father said, refolding the paper.
“So?”
“Nothing. Simply a remark.”
“Yeh, well,” Calvin said, stirring hard to prevent the powder from collecting on the top of his mug, “keep them to yourself, right?”
His father hummed a few bars of some old song Calvin vaguely recognized and lit the gas beneath the pan. “How was your mother?”
Calvin shrugged, hunched over his drink, thin-backed in black. “Same.”
“Sister?”
“Same.”
“Damn it, boy!”
“What?”
A rare anger flared briefly in Ridgemount’s eyes and then it was gone. Shaking his head, he turned back to the stove, tilting the pan this way and that before pouring in the first of the batter. Calvin read the soccer reports. His father shook the pan to make sure the pancake wasn’t sticking, tossed it through a lazy somersault, and set it back down on the gas for a final minute.
“Your mother and me, we were together a long time. I just want to know how she is.” He slid the pancake, speckled brown, on to Calvin’s plate. “That so difficult to understand?”
“Yes.”
His father shook his head slowly and looked away.
“She left you. Walked out. Now she’s living with some other bloke, won’t hear your name mentioned in the house. Minute I walk into it, he sods off down the garden into his shed or takes their pathetic dog for a walk. No, I don’t understand.”
“She had her reasons.”
“Yeh, didn’t she just!”
“Calvin …”
“Yeh?”
But his father was back at the stove, the next pancake soon on its way. “Marjorie,” he said, eyes on what he was doing, “she asked about me, didn’t she? Asked about her daddy?”
“Yes,” Calvin said, through a mouthful of breakfast, “course she did. I told her you were fine.”
“You say I was missing her?”
“That, too.”
“Good, good. Now here,” lifting the pan, “you get ready for this one. I’ll make mine next.”
Marjorie had asked about him, Calvin was thinking, just found time to stick her head round the door and squeeze the words out. Looking like she’d just spent more getting her hair done than Calvin had to spend in a week. Two weeks. “How’s school?” Calvin had said, but she was already lost to sight. “She has such a lot of friends now,” his mother had said. “Nice young people.” Calvin had watched a film with his father once, about a girl whose skin had been light enough for her to pass as white. Nice young black people, he wanted to ask his mother, or now you’re stuck out here in Burton Joyce isn’t there any such thing?
He squeezed some lemon juice, sprinkled sugar. “How is your dad?” she had asked. “Still having his attacks?”
“What attacks?”
“Oh, you know, nightmares. Whatever you want to call them?”
“No,” Calvin had said. “No, he doesn’t have them any more. He’s fine.”
“Ready for another?” his father asked.
“In a minute. Do your own.”
How would he know the frequency of his father’s screams, used as he was to falling asleep with the sounds of Aerosmith or Led Zeppelin throbbing in his ears, leaving the headphones in place all night long.
Certain that after his confrontation with Elaine he would never be able to sleep, Resnick had been fast off the moment his head had eventually hit the pillow. When he awoke, it was to the rhythmic clawing of the cats and the rasp of an eager neighbor’s hedge trimmer. His hair had been matted to his scalp by sweat and his sheets were a damp, cold tangle from which it was difficult to move.
He got ready as soon as possible, listening all the while for evidence that the previous night had not been a guilty dream. Now, more than before, when the telephone rang his first fear would be that it was Elaine. A taxi drawing up outside, ringing at the door-he didn’t know when she would come, yet suspected that she would. Where had she gone at the end of that ghastly evening? Where in the city might she be staying? Questions that Resnick needed answering; answers he didn’t want to know. He held his breath as he opened the front door, glanced along the street in both directions before letting himself into the car. Relax, Charlie, she won’t skulk in shadows. Not now. She’s spat all that out of her system, hawked the worst of the anger off her chest. Resnick slipped the engine into gear, indicated and pulled away. Now, he smiled ruefully, that she’s broken the ice. Reaching the main road he turned right. We all know what waits beneath the ice, black, cold, and seemingly unending.
He parked outside Marian’s house and rang the bell.
Upstairs the curtains were forbiddingly drawn across; otherwise there was no sign of life. He could understand if today Marian had no inclination to speak to anyone, himself least of all. Still he tried again and waited. If she weren’t inside, waiting for him to leave, she would be at Mass. Resnick considered, but only for moments, waiting outside the Polish church for her to leave. All too easy to picture the scorn and curiosity on the faces of the congregation when they walked out of the incense and into the daylight, staring at him from their state of grace.
He got back into his car and set off towards the hospital. While there he would be able to buy some flowers, leave them on her doorstep with a note, Dear Marian … Perhaps in another six months he would pick up the phone and she would answer, perhaps not. Now, thank God, there was police business to attend to.
Karl Dougherty was no longer in intensive care, back down on the same ward as Fletcher, though not the same bay. A nurse approached, smiling warily, about to shoo Resnick away until the start of proper visiting, but his warrant card and a returning smile won him access to the bedside and the expected warning. “Don’t stay too long now. He’s still quite weak. Don’t want to tire him out.”
Dougherty looked pale but pleased to have a visitor, sucking up pineapple juice through a bendy straw. “I’ve been talking to a friend of yours,” Resnick said, the conventional queries and formalities over.
“Paul.”
Resnick nodded.
“Yes, he told me. Apparently he’s your prime suspect.”
“I wouldn’t call him that, exactly.”
Dougherty managed a grin. “I’m sure you could do better. At least, I hope so. Wouldn’t want to think that whoever did this was about to do it again.”
“I suggested to Paul you’d been having a row before you left Manhattan’s. He didn’t deny it.”
Dougherty was quiet. A domestic walked past, pushing a heavy, insulated trolley. Late breakfast, Resnick thought, before reasoning that it was early lunch.
“What were you arguing about?”
“The usual.”
“Which is?”
“Oh, you know, Inspector. Who’s
the greatest psychologist, Jung or Freud? If you had three people in an air balloon, Mother Teresa, Bob Geldof, and Princess Di, who would you throw out first and why?”
“Seriously,” Resnick said.
“Geldof,” said Dougherty. “He’s the worst singer.”
“No, I mean seriously.”
“Sex,” Dougherty said.
“When, where, or how?”
Dougherty smiled and shook his head. “If.”
“Paul was interested and you weren’t, is that it’?”
Dougherty nodded. “Just about.”
“Why carry on seeing him?”
“Because I liked him, because ordinarily he’s good company. Because he isn’t a nurse. I was prepared to overlook the final five minutes of why won’t you come back to my place, why can’t I come to yours?”
“And that’s what you were arguing about? That evening?”
“It was a routine Paul went through. We both expected it.”
“Then why leave early?”
“What?”
“Why leave early? You left early, left Paul there to finish his drink. If it was no different to the end of any other evening, why did you do that?”
“Paul,” Dougherty said after a moment, “he was getting more and more insistent. Said that it was as if I was ashamed of him, he said I was using him, he said a lot of things. I didn’t want to listen to it any more.”
“You walked out on him?”
“I suppose so. I suppose you could say that, yes.”
“That’s the way he would have seen it?”
“He might.”
“He was angry with you already. Frustrated.”
“He didn’t do this.” Dougherty glanced down and Resnick imagined the wounds beneath the blanket. “He couldn’t.”
“He could have followed you from the club, seen where you were going.”
“I didn’t mean that. I mean, psychologically, he couldn’t have done it.”
“Is that according to Freud or Jung?” Resnick asked.
Dougherty almost smiled. “Both of them, probably.”
“Physically,” Resnick said, “could Paul Groves have attacked you?”
