‘I’ll walk you home,’ Hettie said, removing her sucked locks from her mouth.
‘Don’t be silly,’ the American woman said. ‘He’s got me to walk him home, or he’s there to walk me home, one of the two.’
‘Dear little Hettie,’ Kenyon said unkindly. ‘How sweet you can be, sometimes.’
23.
The streets of Hanmouth wound away from the four stately avenues in unpredictable ways. In the uneven, curving and incomplete pathways and half-roads running between the major arteries, anything at all could be found, and had been built. There were alms cottages round a pocket-handkerchief of green, and square Georgian houses with cats in the window; there were Stanley Spencer Edwardian villas with a gap in their bow windows where a phantom aspidistra surely stood. There was a pair of white art-deco semis, curving out superbly like a liner, flat-roofed and iron-windowed; the builder had envisaged the sun, and they were gloomy, streaked and with a tendency to leak in the rain. Builders and architects had put up any number of houses without much thinking of the appearance of their neighbours. Only in recent years had inhabitants, thinking of adding to their property with a conservatory or a roof extension, found themselves being asked whether it would fit in with the town’s appearance.
Halfway down Powell’s Lane, there was a house that had been built in the 1890s, then altered in the 1930s, and added to after the war. Originally a prosperous shopkeeper’s house, it had been rented by a pair of artistic lesbians; washed towards St Ives in the 1950s, they had got no further than Hanmouth, and the one a novelist and travel writer, the other a potter, had settled down there. An unexpected popular success had come to the writer too late in her career to think of moving to anywhere more glamorous. Instead, the book about travelling from London to Syria by train, which had found itself under many Christmas trees in Hanmouth and well beyond at the end of 1973, ended up paying for a grand studio with top-lighting and a new electric kiln for Bettie at the bottom of the garden.
Over the glass roof, creepers of ivy and wisteria lay; the glass had not been cleaned since Sylvie had bought the house from the two ladies when they retired to Aleppo. Ten years ago, at least. The light filtered through a layer of brown leaves from the apple tree, fallen last autumn and the autumn before that. Sylvie would clear up the leaves on the lawn and in the flowerbed; she kept that tidy enough for the sake of avoiding the neighbours’ comments. But to get a ladder up and clear the glass roof of the studio was more than she could contemplate. She liked the beige light, too.
At the moment, she was sitting with a cup of tea and Radio 4 on. There was an ancient kettle, filled from the sink, and two mugs in the studio—not because of guests, who weren’t invited to hang around, but because it was always easier to have one mug on the go and the other on the draining-board. One said Best Aunt In The World; the other was a pink-and-blue junkshop treasure, a pre-war present from Lydd. Woman’s Hour was running its course with a report on cookery classes for girls in a violent inner-city neighbourhood in America. The concern of the voice spooled on, against a backdrop of kitchen clank and bong. Sylvie was hardly listening. She was clutching her mug and staring contemplatively at her huge old kitchen table, squarely in the centre of the studio. On it were five folders, bellying with small cuttings, postage-stamp-sized representations, all of the same thing, collected by Sylvie in fits and bursts, roughly torn out of magazines she had travelled a hundred miles to buy fifteen of. She had caused astonishment in every shop she had been to, and could never go back there, ever again. The cuttings were organized according to a principle of Sylvie’s own devising. It was time to begin the Work: her gallerist would be on the phone some time today to ask about it.
The door to the studio was pushed from outside; it jammed, and was pushed again.
‘I wondered what you fancied for lunch,’ Tony said. He was forty-four; trim, white-haired and bearded, with the jeans and check shirt of his youth.
‘Any old thing,’ Sylvie said. ‘Cheese on toast.’
‘Here at the Betty Shabazz Community Center,’ the radio said, ‘Honore and LaWonda are putting the finishing touches to their tarte aux framboises. They’ve been in patisserie class for—’
‘We can do better than that,’ Tony said. ‘I was going to go over to the farmers’ market this morning.’
‘Don’t go to any trouble,’ Sylvie said. Tony, who taught, like her, at the new Barnstaple Academy—German, though, not art—had been living with Sylvie since his wife had thrown him out two months before. She liked Tony well enough, and had offered one of her two spare bedrooms ‘for as long as you need it’. The trial separation, as Tony had initially described it, seemed to be turning into a proper one. Sylvie didn’t know Tony’s wife Christa, though she had heard a good deal about her in the last couple of months, how they had met in Leipzig just after the unification of Germany— ‘Practically dancing on the Wall,’ Tony had said. It had seemed as if they had fallen in love immediately, and married without waiting. Now, Tony said, he wondered whether his main attraction, eighteen years ago, had been as a meal ticket out of Leipzig and its long slow future rebuilding. He couldn’t now imagine—Tony said—what a girl of Christa’s age would be doing with an old fart eight years older than her. There was always a little pause here for Sylvie to point out that he had only been, what?, in his twenties—late twenties, but twenties. The gap between Tony and Christa had always been, it seemed, the point on which their relationship rested; perhaps if, when you started, the girl was seventeen, it would always feel like that.
But Sylvie never did point that out. She wondered how long he was going to stay. She didn’t mind him being there—he was tidy, quiet and no trouble. She believed that, soon, he would stop offering to help around the place, wondering what she would like for lunch, bringing little presents for the kitchen, which he couldn’t help noticing she didn’t have, depositing an egg-whisk in the second kitchen drawer for her to find. She just wanted him to stop coming into her studio.
‘I went past the community centre last night,’ Tony said.
‘There was something going on there, I saw,’ Sylvie said.
‘Do you know that little girl? The one who’s been kidnapped?’
‘No, I can’t say I do,’ Sylvie said. ‘Was that what it was all about? Everyone seems very concerned.’
‘Ironic, really,’ Tony said. ‘I came down here expecting to get some peace and quiet, escape from all that, and instead it follows me down.’
‘I don’t think it really follows you down, Tony,’ Sylvie said. ‘I don’t think it’s got anything to do with you at all.’
She regretted saying it as soon as she saw the look on his face. He was quite nice, after all. But she could not stop herself saying these brutal things, simply because he was somebody who was living with her. It came with the territory.
He bent down, and picked up one of her scraps of paper. ‘You’ve dropped one,’ he said. ‘Where shall I put it?’
‘Oh, anywhere,’ Sylvie said, observing him place it carefully down on the table, evidently conscious that it formed the raw material of her work of art. He couldn’t help it—nobody could. He cast a glance at what was on the little torn square of paper, and looked away rapidly. It was interesting to see how people looked at an image, even as small as this, of the subject Sylvie had chosen and collected. Tony had served his purpose for the morning. He had reminded her that her subject, after all, was interesting and striking.
‘I’ll be off now,’ Tony said, stiffening and not looking her directly in the face. ‘Work well.’
‘And you,’ Sylvie said. She watched the door close behind him; it stuck and he had to give it a proper tug from the outside. Then she got up, placed her mug on the table, and picked up the cutting that Tony had found on the floor. She examined it; it was a photograph of an erect penis, detached from any context. After a moment, she placed it in the orange folder, together with nine hundred and forty-six others of the same subject. The time was coming when she
ought to stop collecting photographs of erect penises, and start work properly. Tony couldn’t look at one of them in isolation. She wondered, without much interest either way, what his erect penis looked like. She thought, when her hundreds of cuttings were mounted and glued onto the disco mirror-balls resting under the table, she might call the piece ‘Erect Penis’. That would be striking.
‘We start the young people off by teaching them how to make shortcrust pastry,’ the radio said. ‘And in a week or two, they’re ready for their first tarte Tatin.’
24.
Tony closed the garden gate behind him, and for a moment could not decide whether to turn left or right. A right turn would take him up towards the railway line, the meadows beyond the borders of the town and then the farmers’ market in a new purpose-built centre, where he had told Sylvie he would be going. Leftwards was the main street of Hanmouth. That was cheaper, and made him feel more like a local—the rich of Barnstaple and around drove to the farmers’ market and drove back to their homes with their expensive vegetables and artisanal cheeses. He went left.
It had been good of Sylvie to offer her spare room. She had been teaching at the academy for a couple of years. When word had got out that a proper artist had been headhunted, Tony had been sceptical. It sounded like window-dressing on the part of the new go-ahead chief executive, Ahmed Khalil. He had passed around an article about Sylvie’s work from a specialist contemporary art journal, describing it in terms that Tony couldn’t make sense of. He prepared himself to be unimpressed. But when Sylvie arrived, she was small, tidy and modest in appearance, and in a few weeks had proved herself to be good with the students. You heard them mentioning her name in the corridors, the tasks she’d set. She also turned out to live in Hanmouth. Most of the staff had imagined a more metropolitan figure, brought down—Jean Stevenson, the head of media, said— ‘from some squat in Hoxton’. That was in her favour.
Even without Sylvie, her department was on the rise, anyone could see that. The kids were taking to art in large and increasing numbers. The same couldn’t be said for Tony. When Tony was at school, German had seemed like any other subject; Germany had seemed, to him and to everyone else, like a European country you might go to. If anything, it had seemed more fascinating than other European subjects, with the Cold War and the Wall; he had led a sixth-form trip to the enclosed Berlin in 1987, and they’d gone over to the other side; that was something that those now thirty-something-year-olds would always remember. Some change had occurred since then; the smallest of ripples from the great event, the collapse of the Wall, had ended up in a West Country classroom. The numbers taking German had fallen steadily, year after year. They didn’t want to study foreign languages anyway, but German had gone into single figures. The year before, Tony had realized that all but one of the students beginning German A level had some kind of family connection. He had paused, just as he was about to start a pop quiz on adjective endings, and gone round the group asking them, honestly, what the other kids in the year, the ones that weren’t taking German, thought of their choice of subject. The shamefaced answer came back: no one thought the subject was cool enough to be worth all the trouble. Adjective endings, for instance? Yes, adjective endings. And Germany—the music, the food, the people, the football—a full hour of humiliated denigration had followed. Tony couldn’t understand it; and in any case the demands made on students had got easier over the years. It wasn’t as if adjective endings had ever been cool.
He never asked a group of students again, but after that he felt that his days were numbered. The incredible, horrible news of university departments of German closing down for lack of demand kept arriving. One day, towards the end of the summer term, Ahmed Khalil had called him in. ‘Just an informal sort of chat,’ he said. ‘A sort of discussion about long-term strategy.’ Tony knew what it was about. It was indeed informal: Ahmed Khalil had got up from behind his desk and placed first Tony, then himself in the armchairs about the coffee-table on which cups of coffee quickly appeared, brought by the smiling secretary. Not a sacking, then. (Could you sack somebody because the language they taught had stopped being cool?)
He found himself being asked whether he had any interest in teaching other foreign languages, Spanish, for instance. He didn’t: he didn’t speak Spanish, though he told Ahmed Khalil that he was sure he could ‘get up to speed’ quickly enough, and he supposed that was true in its own way.
At the top of Sylvie’s road, there was a T-junction. On the other side of the road, the white picket gate that crossed the railway line. Tony looked to left and right conscientiously before going over. The alley that led beyond the line towards the water-meadows and the farmers’ market was a dark, overhung place. If it had been in Barnstaple or a bigger city, you would have thought twice about walking down it alone. Tony felt a small tug of caution as he saw three figures twenty yards away, underneath a hanging slab of ivy. But they were children; one quite small. He carried on towards them, and the middle one looked. It was a girl; she made a sort of inarticulate noise. Pulling her arms into her, hardly hesitating, she ran in the other direction, followed by the two other children. At the end of the alley, a car was idling. The driver leant over, opening the passenger door, and the girl got in. The car reversed, then drove quickly forward and away, leaving the other two children behind. When Tony got to the main road, there was no sign of any of them.
Tony had been following the story about the missing girl, like everyone else in Hanmouth and well beyond. The girl—the one who had gone off freely enough in the car—had certainly looked like the missing child. Had this happened to him? Was he the one to have seen the child? He paused where he was, gathering himself. The child had been wearing a pair of white trousers, not very clean, and pink trainers—no, not trainers, they had been those rubber perforated shoes said to be comfortable. And a hooded grey sweatshirt. He tried to remember what the other two children had been wearing—it hadn’t registered, though their appearance had been clear enough. The biggest had looked kind of lumpy, on the edges of adolescence and carrying herself awkwardly. He remembered that flying run of the child into the car; she was younger, she ran as if she had never considered what running looked like. The car—silver. Every car was silver, these days, that was no good, but it had been a small runaround, a Fiat maybe. He hadn’t had a chance to see the number-plate. But he had, surely, seen the driver. Thirty, perhaps; mixed race, wiry, a Zapata moustache, or could that have been a trick of the light?
He went home. In twenty minutes, two police officers were sitting at Sylvie’s kitchen table with a notebook taking down the details, and their colleagues for thirty miles around were roaming the roads, looking for a silver car, a Fiat maybe.
25.
‘I tell you what, Heidi,’ the police officer said. ‘It’s just making it hard for you, having the children at home all the time. I’ll take Hannah and Harvey out for a ride in the squad car.’
‘Hannah and Harvey are fine,’ Ruth said. There was a persistent unspoken hostility between this police officer and Heidi’s family. She was always making little suggestions like this, and in the last day or two, Heidi had started confronting the clear implication by saying things like ‘I know you think I’m a bad mother, don’t you?’ But she didn’t, or so she said.
The front room of Heidi’s house was hot and filled with smoke. It had become a public space, and police officers, case workers, victim-support officers, spokesmen, Mr Calvin and half a dozen others came in and out at will. A succession of police officers stood at the front door, like Number 10 Downing Street, Ruth said. They kept the journalists out, mostly, and stopped the photographers getting close enough to press their cameras against the glass. But they let a dozen authorized figures in, and they came in without ringing the doorbell. Upstairs was sacrosanct from the casual visitor, and that had been searched thoroughly, three times. The downstairs area was as open and febrile as a 7/11, and people came and went, bearing files, notebooks, bags of groceries, reple
nishments of tea, biscuits, toilet paper, takeaway food. The windows stayed firmly shut, and the atmosphere inside was sweet and putrid. Heidi’s hair was lank and oily; her eyes baggy and haunted. Two weeks before, she and Micky had made an unlikely couple. Now, she had grown to look much like him, and was even wearing an old T-shirt of his, advertising an Italian designer. The campaign T-shirts, reading Save China, were laid out on the back of a black leather easy chair, to be put on when the media had to be faced.
‘I know they’re fine,’ the policewoman said. ‘They’re coping very well, all things considered. It would be nice for them to have a small break, and it’s a treat to ride in the back of a police car. You’d like that, wouldn’t you, kids?’ She gritted her teeth; she was not someone with the gift of talking to children.
Hannah and Harvey looked at each other, from either end of the sofa where they perched. Hannah was a stolid sort of girl, more like Micky than her mother, though that was impossible; Harvey the sort of pug-faced child whose appearance suggested potential for evil underneath a shock of dark-blond screw curls. They had said nothing for days to the police, and their accounts of the crucial afternoon had been brutally amnesiac when the time had come for the professional child-handler to interview them. Nothing had been got out of them. Occasionally, when they were upstairs and alone, an outbreak of immense violence, of objects being hurled and voices raised in threat or wailing distress, suggested to the many visitors that their silent downstairs tolerance, like a lion and a hippopotamus in separate but adjacent enclosures, might not be the whole story.
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