Quiet City

by Philip Davison

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Hello. I’m just looking for Virginia.’

  ‘Virginia ….’ He was square on, his body limbered for action.

  ‘Virginia Coates.’

  ‘I saw you looking in the windows.’

  ‘I’m a friend.’

  ‘Friend of Stephen’s?’

  ‘Stephen ….’

  ‘You didn’t know Stephen? What’s your name?’

  ‘Richard,’ he blurted, then struggled to stop himself.

  ‘Richard who?’ The man moved aggressively towards him. Came very close with his face. Richard pushed him away, both hands to the chest. The man stumbled backwards and fell on the ground. Richard flung open his car door, threw himself in behind the wheel, started the engine. The red-faced malcontent remained as he was, sprawled on the ground, making no move.

  ‘I’ve got your number,’ he said as Richard drove away, sending a spray of pebbles over the reclining man’s head.

  Richard snaked down the drive at a moderate speed to offset his shock, taking in great gulps of air. As he approached the electric gates they began to close. He dropped his foot on the accelerator and passed through with inches to spare on either side. He swung wildly onto the country lane and took the less acute of two possible arcs. Fortunately, there was nothing coming either way. He slowed to a crawl, then pulled into a neighbour’s gateway, put on the hand-brake and wound down his window. He slid both hands to the top of the steering wheel and rested his forehead on the backs of his hands. He fixed on the sound of the wind in the trees behind the thrum from under the bonnet, but that was broken by the engine growl of a low-slung, souped-up saloon car he could not yet see. The sound triggered a dry retch in his throat.

  A boy racer roared past in a white flash, and was gone. Richard could hear the breeze filtering through leaves again. A sweet floral scent on the air helped him regulate his breathing. He began to laugh. It wasn’t a good laugh. It put a stitch in his tabid heart.

  He had scarcely reached the bottom of the hill, from where the low city skyline was visible, when his mobile phone rang.

  ‘Richard ….’

  ‘Virginia. Where are you?’ The urgency in his voice was unnerving for both of them, but Virginia carried through. She offered no direct answer. She said she wanted to meet.

  ‘I want you to come with me.’ It was the same emphatic seduction she had used outside the dump.

  ‘Where? Come where?’

  ‘To my flat.’

  ‘Where? I’ve just been to the house.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘You know? Who the hell is that at your house, Virginia?’

  Again, no adequate answer. ‘I’ll explain when I see you. I really want to see you, Richard.’

  They arranged to meet on the seafront in Dun Laoghaire. She had cropped her hair. She had a severe French boy cut, but it suited her. On the seafront they embraced like real lovers in angry heat. ‘You came back,’ she said.

  ‘Hell of a greeting I got. Who is he?’

  ‘He shouldn’t have been there. His name is John Miller. The relationship is over.’

  ‘He doesn’t seem to think so.’

  ‘What is he?’

  ‘John?’

  ‘Yes, John. What does he do?’

  ‘He’s in business. Property. What does that matter?’

  ‘Property …. He knows your husband?’

  ‘He knew him, yes.

  ‘Knew him. Sorry ….’

  ‘We both ….’ She didn’t finish the sentence. ‘You want his address? You want to know about him because you got into my bed?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I don’t know where you live,’ she protested.

  Richard told her where he and Gloria lived.

  ‘It’s nice there.’

  He got into the station wagon with her. It was crammed with art materials and domestic goods: nothing fancy, just kitchen utensils, heavy cushions, bed covers, everyday clothes. He didn’t know what he was doing. He would know only when he spoke it out.

  ‘Look,’ she continued, ‘you have just pitched into my life – ’

  ‘I should pitch right out,’ he interrupted. ‘I’m here to say that.’ He hardly had room to move in the seat. He was talking over rolls of canvas, rolls of linen, rolls of paper. His head was tilted forwards, forced that way because of a tightly rolled duvet that was wedged between the car ceiling and the head-rest. ‘And to say: you don’t have to worry – about me.’

  ‘All right. Go. Go to your wife, if you have a wife.’

  But he couldn’t go. Not just yet. He felt compelled to hold Virginia again, to lie down with her and to rut hard and be sorry for what they had done. ‘I have a wife.’

  ‘Go now, Richard. Are you listening?’

  No. He was studying her hair, not listening, and she was glad. She looked at her watch.

  7

  Virginia drove into the belly of the ferry, then they went up on deck before it left port. She leaned on the rail, looking towards land. He leaned back against the rail and looked at her. It was a short crossing to Holyhead, then a long drive to London, to Virginia’s flat: her new studio, new bed, new life. This was to be a brief visit to deliver the jumble she had packed into the car. In London she’d get started on her painting again. She’d be away from all the things that had inhibited her. The house in Dublin would be kept in mothballs.

  When she told Richard her plan, there was nothing about the killing of the cyclist. The clarity that came with the denial was shocking.

  They were still on deck, the ferry slipping out between the two pier lighthouses, when Richard’s phone rang. He saw that it was Gloria. He showed the little screen to Virginia with his wife’s name on it. Had it been the dump-man ringing, she would have been no less resolute. He didn’t answer, and it soon stopped. There was no subsequent message.

  Was Richard leaving Gloria? If he was leaving her, it was good to fill every waking minute with this madness; make it all about taking concrete, fugitive action. He kept his phone out. Got on the internet. Found what he was looking for, scrolled through it with eyes squinting and teeth gritted.

  ‘There,’ he said, positioning the screen of his mobile phone so that she could read the contents of the webpage too. He swallowed hard on the bare facts. Virginia read the few lines in the Irish Times: cyclist knocked down and killed, driver failed to stop. It gave the location where they had done what they had done. The victim was named as forty-six-year-old Michael Tierney, survived by his wife and two sons. She looked at Richard, nodded once with a melancholic smile.

  He saw that she felt a little sick. He wanted to reassure her. ‘That’s all,’ he said. ‘There won’t be anything more.’

  Again, Virginia nodded. He terminated the connection and dropped his phone into his jacket pocket. ‘Are you ready?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes,’ he replied instantly. Ready for what, he didn’t know. Anything, he supposed. He swallowed Michael Tierney, husband and father of two, whole.

  They went and had a drink in the bar. John Miller, she told him, was her husband’s best friend, had nursed Stephen along with her, had fallen in love with her, but it was finished. Dear Angry John was her former lover. He was now safely in the past. You and I are not yet lovers, she seemed to be saying, with her usual patience and directness; not like she and John had been – or, for that matter, her and Stephen. You and I are bound under different circumstances. Ours is a different kind of fucking. Angry John was ringing, but his calls were going unanswered. Virginia had a new number. She had bought another phone since she had taken the last intolerable rant from him demanding to know who this Richard fellow was who had come to her house.

  The vessel cut smoothly through the inshore waters towards the open sea, which was unusually calm.

  Richard slept in the car with bed-covers coming down over his head. On the outskirts of Birmingham he woke with a jolt, said: ‘Sorry-sorry.’ It was raining heavily. There were great
heavy drops pounding the station wagon, demanding that someone speak.

  ‘Aren’t you going to tell me about your work?’ he blurted.

  ‘Talking about it just confuses me. I’ll show you. Show you,’ she repeated.

  He was trying not to look like a buffoon, attempting to show genuine interest. Her answer was not reassuring. He pretended he had not fully woken and, indeed, he went to sleep again a short time later. He didn’t dream of anything. He woke again as Virginia pulled into the Northampton service station.

  ‘You had a long sleep.’

  ‘Did I snore?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Want me to drive the rest of the way?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Good. I don’t think I’m up to it.’

  They drank tea. She took his hand across the table. ‘It will all work out,’ she said, ‘except in the end.’

  ‘You think?’

  She flopped her head back, pretended she was dead. He let out a laugh he didn’t know was inside him, knocked over his tea.

  They were delivered to London inside a great swirling rain-ball which rolled east, leaving them alert and hopeful as they travelled the washed streets to a terraced house in Clapham. It was the last domestic dwelling on Stephen Graham’s books. He had kept it with the intention of renovating it for the family. Virginia had lived there when she was a student at St Martin’s School of Art, she announced. The house was still divided into flats. Richard counted five doorbells, saw the name ‘Coates’ hand-printed on a slip of yellow card second from the bottom. Virginia let them in with a key she had on a Texaco ring.

  The interior was as grand as any house of comparable size and era, with fixtures and struc tural decoration intact, but it was threadbare and fusty. Over the fustiness there was the smell of spicy food - and cats.

  He followed her upstairs to the front first-floor room, which was Virginia’s flat. It was more threadbare than the common area, but was spacious. The walls were dry, the air fresh and damp. That could be explained by the one large sash window, which was wedged open with an ancient lumpy ashtray with ‘Watney’s Red Barrel’ stamped on it. There was an iron bedstead with a thick mattress in one corner, two hard chairs tipped upside down on a box couch, in another. Neat piles of art materials, clothes and tinned food along one wall. Taped above was a series of bold figurative paintings with jagged lines which had been scored into blocks of colour on the canvas with the hard end of a brush. Richard took these in.

  ‘Stephen,’ Virginia said.

  ‘Ah, I see.’ He didn’t.

  ‘Sketches, to work from.’

  ‘Sketches,’ he repeated. She was going to paint up her late husband. Nothing wrong with that. John Miller had probably seen these. There was an ancient upright easel with an impressive crankhandle positioned by the window. Richard’s eyes fell on the easel. Virginia stepped in beside it. He saw that she was happy to be here, but he must have been scowling at her, because she pulled a face.

  ‘The bathroom is on the landing,’ she announced.

  ‘Thank you.’ It sent him shambling out the door, which swung to in his wake. He stood for a moment on the landing, gripping the banister. He listened to the soft babble of other lives behind doors thick with layers of old paint.

  Did he hear Michael Tierney’s wife and two sons wailing and sobbing for the death of their badtempered husband and father? It was to be expected. ‘I’ll get your stuff up from the car,’ he said through Virginia’s door, but there was no reply.

  The last things to come out of the station wagon were a record player with two heavy box speakers, and a stack of LPs. Rock music from the seventies, mostly with some exotic stuff: a few classical boxsets – opera and orchestral. She wouldn’t let him put anything anywhere except in a pile in the middle of the floor. She had a precise plan, and the plan would go according to plan. She made up a second bed for her daughter, Clarissa, who would be coming to visit. Young Clarissa was her champion supporter and inspiration.

  ‘Are you hungry?’

  Yes. He was hungry. They went to an Indian restaurant on Clapham High Street. All orange and gold, with starched white tablecloths and heavy cutlery. This was where Stephen and Virginia had had dinner on their first date. He was already a high-flier, already making money from high-risk investments. He knew she liked Indian food. She was telling Richard all of this while she was stroking the inside of his thigh with a bare foot.

  There was so much not to talk about, Richard was thinking. Fucking was what they both needed, until such time as they could talk about what they had done.

  They had ordered too much food. Wine instead of beer. It was no time at all till Richard was saying: ‘Look, one of those bottles that doesn’t pour.’

  8

  The early-morning sun streaming through the window was making the figures on the wall jump when Richard stood again by the pile in the middle of the room. For a time he watched Virginia sleeping. Then he cast his eyes over the goods they had brought. It really wasn’t very much.

  She was trying to re-create her art-school days, pick up where she thought she had left off, grow again from there. She was desperate to get back a life that could not be recovered. She had cut her hair short, to let it grow again into the length and style it had once been. She was deluded, and Richard saw he was a plug-in. In a weak moment he thought he might be able to change that, but Virginia was painting her dead husband, and, no doubt, there were portraits of lovers. In time, she would paint the dead dump-cop.

  He noticed now that there was a landline telephone sitting on one of the hard chairs. He picked up the handset. The line was live. It occurred to him that if he wanted to contact Virginia later she could easily monitor and reject his calls on her new mobile, but if this old piece rang she’d answer. He returned the handset to its cradle, and noted the number printed on the centre of the dial, in the same handwriting as on the doorbell tag.

  He moved to the window and looked out into a bright London morning. A white flash of sunlight from a car windscreen caught him in the side of the eye. The bolt electrified the ghostly thing that had been crawling around in his head mumbling incomprehensibly since the accident. That milky little creature now lit up with a castrato shriek, then shrivelled and quickly died. Richard had been operating in a state of shock, but was now at exit point. He had a bad feeling.

  ‘Richard,’ Virginia moaned with uncanny innocence, ‘I feel very close to you right now. I feel safe.’ He hadn’t heard her get out of the bed. She was standing naked in the middle of the room, looking at him through the vacant easel.

  ‘Virginia, I think you should go to the police.’ She didn’t speak. She let her eyes wander. ‘I can’t bear thinking about it,’ he continued. ‘We both left him on the road. I’ll go with you. It’s the right thing.’

  ‘We should do the right thing?’ The lightness in her voice was unsettling.

  ‘We should.’ Their creature lunacy had run its course, hadn’t it?

  ‘All right,’ she said. It was an acknowledgement, not a declaration of intent.

  ‘I need some air,’ he said tightly.

  ‘Of course. You want me to come with you?’

  ‘No. You stay. You’ve things to do here.’

  ‘You could go across to the Common,’ she said, awkwardly pulling on her dress, without underwear.

  ‘Yes. I know where that is.’

  ‘Then we can go shopping for clothes and shaving gear. You need to shave.’

  He did go to Clapham Common, where the sun shone on him and the four winds blew and strangers passed with a blessed indifference.

  Mr and Mrs Meadows were childless. There was just Richard and Gloria. They hadn’t been able. It was down to his sperm. The engineer hadn’t been able to engineer a baby. It had been difficult for them. No matter, they had found their way to accepting the fact. They had been good to each other.

  It was this goodness and mercy that rang true now as he sat on a park bench to contemplate his next a
ction in the face of uncommon regret. In life Richard Meadows had stayed alert to opportunities and had, in his reluctant way, been brave. Nevertheless, he had failed to excel at his work. The diagnosis of his heart condition had locked him with fear – until the shower incident, when he had been inspired to act.

  And look where that had taken him. Head clamped in his hands, he studied the universe between his feet, until a crisp-bag blew across the frame and caused a switch to be thrown in his head. He rang Gloria. He was prepared to tell her the truth – a truth – he was in crisis, had had a sexual encounter with a childhood flame. It was a moment of madness. He was so sorry for any hurt he had caused. He was seeking forgiveness and understanding from the woman he loved, the woman he had married; for better and for worse it was still the Richard she knew, but wiser, more emotionally mature – and he had a plan.

  But Gloria didn’t answer her phone. There was a long tally of missed calls from her, and now, no response. Served him right, he thought, but where the hell was she?

  It seemed to Richard that there was little between being afraid and not being afraid. At a certain point they were interchangeable. I’m afraid; I’m not afraid; I’m afraid of something else now. There was, of course, such a thing as bad timing. Of late, he’d hold his little spray canister in front of his face and turn it in his fingers and think that thought.

  He walked to Clapham South Tube station. Got on a train with the intention of going to Heathrow, where he would buy a ticket on the next available flight to Dublin. He squashed some facts together in his head. Virginia was grieving. She was trying to get back what could never be retrieved. She was in denial about the terrible accident. The killing. Her killing. Their running away.

  He had already reached a block. He left the channel open, and waited.

  If the journey across the sea and down the motorways to London had been made in a shellshock haze, the return was fraught with acute sensations and had Richard jumpy and wide-eyed – which was better.