II
The knife went in below the shoulder.
Lewis made all the phone calls, including one to the doctor who worked with Nicholas at the Healing Centre. Too shocked to speak I knelt down by Tucker, but Nicholas was already there; he was gripping Tucker’s hand and saying: “Hold on. I’ve got you. Just hold on.” Tucker was still conscious. I heard him say: “It’s like a war, isn’t it? I’m a front-line casualty,” and as I began to cry, Nicholas slipped off his cross so that Tucker could clasp it.
I heard Tucker whisper: “Say a prayer, Nick. I can’t think of the words.” Then Nicholas prayed, although I cannot now remember what he said; all I can remember is thinking that a man was dying and it was all my fault.
But Tucker held on.
III
He was in the intensive care ward at the hospital for twenty-four hours, a fact which meant no one but his family could visit him. I was far beyond tears by this time. Other things were going on, most of them excruciatingly painful, but the only person I could consistently focus on was Tucker. After a while it occurred to me that this wordless concentration—this other-centred, self-forgetting—was a form of prayer. I had tried praying in words. I would have done anything to try to save him, and even an irrational endeavour such as prayer seemed more endurable than nothing, but all I had been able to produce was a boardroom speech which reduced the entire activity to bathos.
Yet that night, very late, when sleep was something other people did in another universe, I sat by the window of my Rectory bedroom and looked for a long time over the rooftops as I listened to the silence of the City. And as I waited, my whole being focused on willing Tucker to live, I experienced a feeling of minds all flowing into one another and I knew that somewhere beyond all the fragmentation was an immense, indestructible unity. That was when I realised that my focus on Tucker was a form of prayer. It was as if, in the mansion of my consciousness, I had stumbled into a huge hall which connected every room in the house, and in the centre of that hall was a white-hot core of energy which seized my agonised thought patterns and transformed them, with a single burst of light, into an irresistible force.
I instinctively squeezed my eyes shut to protect them, and as the image of the mansion faded I saw my consciousness as just a droplet in the river of multiconsciousness, and I knew the river was flowing steadily towards an unending sea. I wondered how I could make myself heard above the roar of the water, but the next moment I knew there was someone on the riverbank. He came down into the river and he walked upstream towards me, and as my consciousness slipped gears again, losing the image of the river, I knew I was back once more on the corner of Paternoster Row as my unseen companion, unarmed but unassailable, rolled back the darkness of the Principalities and Powers.
I said to him: “If Eric Tucker dies, help me live with the guilt without going mad.” But then it occurred to me that this request was very self-centred, focusing on my own uncomfortable feelings and hardly dwelling on Tucker at all, so I added: “No, forget about me, just concentrate on him.” And I added: “Please,” as an afterthought, although what I was doing talking to this psychological construct as if it were a person was quite beyond my power to rationalise.
Paternoster Row faded. For a second I saw the streets of the City forming a pattern like a vast spider’s web, and as I stared I saw that one of the threads of the web was damaged, spoiling the beauty of the design. And the next moment I was exclaiming to my companion: “Oh, let me help you fix it! Whether Tucker lives or dies, let me help you make it all come right!” And then the molten core at the heart of my multiroomed mansion burst with light again before subsiding into a steady, hissing white noise which I recognised but could not identify.
I woke up. The hiss was rain, hurling itself against the pane and streaking the rooftops of Egg Street, but beyond the darkness the sky was pale as dawn broke at last over the City.
At nine o’clock that morning Gilbert Tucker phoned to say that his brother was out of intensive care and expected to recover.
IV
After that I cried for a whole day. I was still at the Rectory. Nobody seemed to mind. So was Alice. Nobody seemed to mind that either. I was not constantly attended but I knew I was always within reach of people who cared what happened to me. I had no desire for twenty-four-hour attendants anyway. I was too preoccupied with my own personal version of Niagara Falls.
“I can’t understand it,” I said to Val Fredericks, the doctor who worked with Nicholas. “Anyone would think Tucker had died! Why am I crying like this?”
“There’s often a lot of grief in our lives which we suppress because it’s too painful to deal with. Perhaps Eric’s brush with death threw open the hatches which you’d battened down for so long.”
“I didn’t think I’d suppressed anything,” I said, opening another box of Kleenex.
“Maybe that was the problem,” said Val.
V
The next day the tears finally stopped. I went out, hiding my swollen eyes behind a pair of dark glasses borrowed from Alice, and bought some make-up. It was a Saturday, so I also kept my appointment at the hairdresser’s. Afterwards I bought a new suit. Two of the Healing Centre’s “Befrienders” had performed the saintly task of clearing up my flat and packing a suitcase of clothes for me, but they had packed the wrong outfits and I was still unable to face returning to Harvey Tower to retrieve the right ones.
I felt better once I was smartly dressed with my hair styled, my face made up and my nails manicured. At a florist’s I bought a dozen muscular red tulips which conjured up an image of masculine vitality. Then I took a cab to the hospital to see Tucker.
He had a room to himself but unfortunately he was not alone when I arrived. A female in the early stages of old age was present, the lioness guarding her mauled cub. She had golden hair, the result not of chemicals but of red hair turning white, and a plump figure togged up in the fashions of thirty years ago. As I entered the room she gave me a sharp, shrewd, snobbish, judgemental look which indicated that she recognised me as a typical specimen of modern womanhood and found me very seriously wanting.
“Mrs. Tucker? Good afternoon,” I said, falling back upon the iron courtesy which I used to trim the claws of scratchy clients. “I’m Carter Graham.”
“How very kind of you to call, Mrs. Betz,” she said in the sort of voice middle-class women use in the presence of anyone whom they deem “common,” “but unfortunately Eric isn’t up to seeing visitors at present.”
“He’s well up to seeing this one,” said the invalid in the bed.
“Darling, you know the doctor said only one visitor at a time—”
“Do me a favour, Mum, and find a nice vase for those flowers Carter’s brought.”
Mrs. Tucker pursed her lips and patted her Mrs. Thatcher hair-do to make sure everything was standing on end beneath the lacquer. “Two minutes,” she said to me, “and that’s all. He’s still very unwell.” And leaving me no time to reply she swept from the room.
Tucker sighed. There were shadows beneath his eyes; his pallor was marked; his extreme languor hinted that he had a fever; his left forearm was hooked up to a drip. Still clutching my tough tulips I sank down in the chair by the bed and somehow managed to say: “I’m so sorry for everything. I’m so very, very sorry.”
“Hey, that’s my line! I wanted to apologise for making such a mess of looking after you . . . Are you all right?”
I nodded, scrabbling in my bag for Alice’s dark glasses, but my eyes were so full of tears that I could no longer see what I was doing. Abandoning the search I hid my face from him by sniffing the flowers, but I only succeeded in shedding a tear onto the most macho tulip in the bunch. Beyond the muscular red petals, all standing stiffly to attention, the black stamen had a hard-edged, pumped-up look.
“Ms. G, stop making love to those fleshy floral numbers, stop feeling guilty and just listen for a moment. I’m glad you’re here. I’ve got to talk to you about what Mrs. Mayfield
said to me.”
“Mrs. Mayfield!” Forgetting my tears I finally raised my face from the tulips. “For God’s sake, what’s there to say? That woman was all lies and phoney ESP!”
“Maybe most of the time, but she got me right. I did live off that woman she described. It was back in my twenties and I was such a mess then, it’s hard to describe what a mess I was, but—”
“Tucker, you don’t have to talk about this—”
“Oh yes, I do! Listen, I lived with women and I lived off women because I was so damned arrogant and so damned deluded that I thought I was some kind of literary genius who was too grand to work for a living—God, how pathetic it all seems now, but that’s where I was, that was the kind of life I was living, and of course it all went wrong and I wound up homeless and penniless on Gil’s doorstep—couldn’t go to my parents, I was too ashamed, and my other brother had long since washed his hands of me—”
“But it’s so easy to make mistakes in one’s twenties!”
“These weren’t just mistakes. My entire way of life was a cataclysmic balls-up which destroyed my self-respect and made a lot of people, including myself, very unhappy. But when I was thirty and wound up broke on Gil’s doorstep, I finally started getting my act together. Gil said I had to have a reliable way of earning my keep, a way which would allow me some self-respect, and that was when I did my first round of officeskills courses—I didn’t want to, I thought secretarial work was just for women and wimps, but Gil was implacable. He said: ‘You’re a spoiled, pigheaded, self-centred, immature bastard, but do you really have to be a sexist bastard as well?’ So I borrowed the money from him to do the courses, and I stayed with him rent-free and I washed dishes in the evenings at a Covent Garden restaurant to earn some pocket-money. Then I worked in the West End as a secretary full time—I had a dirt-cheap room in Lambeth, and gradually I shaped up and grew up—and it was all because of Gil, all because of the brother I’d despised for being gay, but when the chips were down he cared enough to stand by me, and that kind of caring makes you think, it makes you believe you might possibly be more than a pile of shit, it makes you hope and strive for better things, it gives you courage.
“So I turned my life around, thanks to Gil—but no, it wasn’t just thanks to Gil, because beyond Gil was . . . well, never mind all that. No, wait a minute, I mind, what am I doing not calling a spade a spade just because you’re an atheist? I’m such a bloody coward sometimes, but listen, here’s the way it really was: I turned my life around by the grace of God through Jesus Christ and the power of the Spirit, as Christians say—and now you can laugh just as much as you like, but—”
“I’m not laughing,” I said.
“—but all I can tell you is that’s the best way of describing what happened. Then I got a book published—and another—and in the end I could afford to adopt this pattern of doing office-work part time instead of full time, and I moved out of my Lambeth dump into a neat little pad in Fulham, just one room, but there was a tree outside the window, I loved that tree, and then . . .
“Well, last year I had a relapse. Gil says the spiritual journey’s often a bumpy ride, and I hit a bump—although ‘bump’ is hardly the word to describe the married model with expensive tastes who—well, all I need say is that I wound up dead broke and homeless again on Gil’s doorstep, but I’ve got over that now, I’ve got my finances sorted out and I pay Gil rent and when my next book’s published I’ll get a room of my own again and have another shot at living happily ever after.
“Well, Ms. G, that’s all I have to say, but I had to say it because truth matters, doesn’t it, and I’d like to think I would have been truthful about my past anyway in due course without Mrs. Mayfield forcing my hand. But you and I hadn’t reached the stage where we could have swapped pasts, had we, and probably we never would have done, since you’re all bound up with someone else, so this scene between us now—this scene now—it’s like—it’s like—God, I’m going fuzzy, my brain’s closing down, but I must finish what I want to say—”
“This scene now—”
“This scene now’s like a moment out of time, but when you remember me in future I don’t want you to think: ‘What a gigolo, what a shit!’ I want you to think: ‘He was an honest man who told the truth,’ and then perhaps there’s a chance you’ll remember me without wanting to wipe the memory from your mind.”
All I could do was weep.
Mrs. Tucker returned to the room and evicted me.
Back at the Rectory I destroyed yet another box of Kleenex.
VI
And Kim? Where was he while all these tear-drenched scenes were going on? Whereabouts in the wasteland created by the explosion was the split-off fragment which contained him?
Directly after the stabbing I could focus only on Tucker, but once Nicholas had left with him in the ambulance Lewis and I hurriedly searched the flat. The police were present by that time, but all the questions had had to wait until Tucker was on his way to hospital.
We found Kim in the small bedroom where his junk was stored. When we entered the room we saw he was sitting on the floor with his back to a packing-case, his arms clasped tightly around his knees.
All he said was: “If I move I’ll disintegrate.”
As Nicholas’s colleague, Val Fredericks, joined us Lewis said to Kim: “Our doctor’s got the medicine which’ll keep you in one piece,” and Val, taking in the situation at a glance, said strongly to the police who were trying to crowd into the room: “Stand back, please—this man is clearly ill.”
So the police withdrew, and as Lewis knelt down by Kim and Val opened her black bag for the hypodermic, I watched from the threshold, my fingers clinging to the frame of the door. I found myself staring at Val, whom I had not met before, and trying to visualise her working in partnership with Nicholas. She was a woman in her thirties, plump, with carelessly dyed short blonde hair, large gold earrings and no make-up except for scarlet lipstick with a high-gloss finish. Beneath her red anorak she was wearing an off-beat combination of a formal white blouse with denim dungarees. It may seem bizarre that I paid so much attention to Val at that harrowing moment, but I found it easier to look at her than to look at Kim’s contorted form and distorted expression.
“If you could just slip out of your jacket—”
“I can’t move.”
“Lewis will hold you. He’ll stop you splitting.”
“He can’t.”
“Yes, I can,” said Lewis, and gripped him hard.
This sort of dialogue continued for over a minute. Both Lewis and Val were so patient and kind while all I could do was shiver with revulsion and rage.
“Carter,” said Lewis at last, as if he could feel the whole range of my violent emotions, “would you mind waiting in the passage, please?”
As I withdrew I heard Kim whisper: “I didn’t mean to kill that man.”
“He’s not dead.”
“Then why am I being given a lethal injection?”
I stumbled into the shower-room, far from all the windows, and waited, panting and shuddering, for the ordeal to end.
A second ambulance eventually took Kim to a mental hospital in south-east London. Val went with him in the ambulance and so did two of the police, but since by that time he was unconscious they never had the opportunity to question him.
Lewis and I stayed on at the flat to be interrogated at mind-numbing length by their colleagues.
VII
And Mrs. Mayfield? What happened to her?
She vanished. Well, she would, wouldn’t she? When Tucker fell she must have paused only to pick up the files from the table before slipping down the corridor, gliding into the lift and flitting away across the podium to lose herself among the rush-hour crowds streaming out of the Barbican tube station.
The police wanted to question her but she was never found. The house in Fulham turned out to be rented to an organisation with a box office number in the Cayman Isles, and she left no forwarding
address. No charge card issued in the name of Elizabeth Mayfield was ever used again, and no further cheques were written on the one modest bank account which was uncovered. So swift and so complete was her disappearance that the police assumed she must have had a parallel life somewhere else in London, a trick which would have enabled her to withdraw at any time into her other identity, and despite extensive enquiries she was never traced. Her groups were questioned but had no information to offer, and no investigation proved that they had been engaged in illegal activities.
Nicholas made various entries on his computer and left the file open. “She’ll be back,” he said. “She’ll resurface in that other identity, but I’ll pick up her trail from the victims she’s bound to leave behind, and one day our paths will recross.”
I phoned a friend who specialised in criminal law to check that Mrs. Mayfield had committed no offence in the flat, but even a charge of inciting Kim to threaten me with a knife fell flat when I had to admit the threat had been a fake with no intent to cause harm. My friend thought any attempt to charge Kim with Tucker’s wounding would fail too, since the witnesses could only testify that it had been an accident. There had been no criminal intent. It was not an offence for a man to remove a knife from his kitchen, use it in a bout of play-acting and later be too mesmerised to put the knife down when the scene so suddenly exploded into violence. Besides, Kim’s mental breakdown meant that any action against him would be most unlikely to succeed.
“The truth is,” I said to Alice, after explaining the legal position, “it was Mrs. Mayfield who was responsible for the mayhem. It was she who refused to order Kim to put down the knife after he started behaving like a zonked-out zombie, and she who shoved Nicholas at Tucker and sent Tucker reeling into Kim.”
“But if no charges can be brought against her,” said Alice puzzled, “why should she embark on this total disappearance?”
The High Flyer Page 33
