by Graham Swift
Sunlight streamed between us. The stickiness had left her eyes and she looked for a moment simply lost. But they all look like that, as if they’d come on purpose but now they seemed to be here by accident. A mistake, the wrong door—they’d meant the Tanning Centre. They came in as the injured party—now they’ll leave in a sort of guilty daze.
That’s why—unless they’re a certain type—you always leave them the option, the margin. You allow for the call that might come the next morning, even the same day. A change of mind, a reconsideration. My services wouldn’t be required after all. And sometimes, though I don’t say it and I don’t like to lose a fee, I think: that’s the best decision you could make.
Rita might have come in and said, breezily: “Mrs. Nash—yesterday morning. We can cross her off the list.”
I said, “You can send the photos—or bring them in if you prefer.”
She seemed to have got stuck to her chair. She still clutched the strap of her shoulder-bag, knuckles squeezed tight.
Someone some day should write a book about handbags, shoulder-bags. Maybe they have. About how women cling to them, as if they’re their closest friend. When all else fails. The things you find inside them. (I’ve lost count of how many I’ve rifled through.)
Where she is now they can’t have handbags. The straps.
And now, of course, I have that shoulder-bag—along with all the other things. In my safe keeping. And, yes, it’s like a pet. I’ve stroked it, talked to it. Inside, all the contents of a precise day, two years ago. November 20th, 1995. That slip of paper, with my terms, folded in four.
A treatise on handbags.
“You should write things, George, write them down for me.”
My teacher.
She clutched the strap, as if she were waiting for the bag to get up first.
“So—” I said. “Unless there’s anything else?”
Like the full story, the whole story. But they don’t have to tell you that. You don’t have to know.
I held out my hand, through the shaft of sunshine. She managed to stand.
Moments later I went to the window to see if I could catch her crossing the street—as if, just by looking, I might stop her stumbling into the path of some car. And there she was, marooned for a moment on the traffic island. The sun on her head. She crossed and turned left, past Jackson’s florist’s, clutching the strap of that shoulder-bag tight.
Rita came in and saw me looking. She was always doing her private assessments: my female clients (she was one once). But I’d never done this before—gone to the window to look. She’d have noted it, definitely. She’s a good detective, doesn’t miss a trick. Later that week she said, “Something’s come over you, George.”
I turned when she came in and, as if to explain myself, said, “It’s a beautiful day. A beautiful day out there.”
“For some,” she said.
She’d brought in a cup of coffee. She cocked her head innocently as if at a third party still in the room. “Not for her, I suppose.”
The sun picks out bursts of frozen fire. Rowan berries, pyracanthas, Virginia creepers in flame. This safe-as-houses land where nothing is meant to disturb the peace.
Rita, a job for you.
Or no job at all. I might never have seen her again, never have learnt the full story (or become part of it), if it wasn’t for my little private passion (and unsuspected talent). A private eye, a private belly. I cook. Even for myself, I cook.
The supermarket, that next evening: Friday. Coincidences happen. I only half believe in them. I’m a detective. We see what we’re ready to see.
She was there. I came round the corner of the aisle. I took a pace back. She was holding a jar, reading the label, aimlessly it seemed, as if she was browsing in a book shop.
I watched, I stepped back. I didn’t have to, but it’s my natural mode, an occupational reflex. And there’s something anyway about that moment that it’s in your power to stretch. You see them, they don’t see you. The strange urge to protect.
Ha—a store detective. (And that could have been me once.) As if she might have slipped that jar suddenly into her coat pocket. And why not, why not? Women in cashmere coats do the strangest things. They walk around in a dream, an aimless daze, they take up shoplifting. When the ugly moment comes they say it’s because my husband doesn’t love me any more.
Madam—would you step this way?
But I think I saw—peeping round the corner of the aisle—how it was for her. What do you do when your husband’s seeing someone else? When life carries on, but around this new and not even secret fact. You go and stand by the Fine Foods section and stare, as if they’re forbidden fruit, at the packets and jars.
I think I saw it. Cooking. It was something for her too, a bit of a thing, a passion. And once life had been, maybe, a kind of constant, regular feast. I saw it, never having lived it, exactly, myself. Dinner parties, pulling of corks. Windows lit up, through the trees.
But what do you do when it falls apart? You still have to eat. (And it’s a well-known substitute.) You even still have to feed him. So you go on cooking. In fact, you cook even more keenly and ambitiously, because—who knows?—that’s one feeble, pathetic way you might get him back.
“I bet,” they say to themselves (it wasn’t a comfort open to Rita), “I bet she can’t cook like me …”
I stepped forward (you watch, you wait, you intercept). The clinching coincidence. She’d come to me, but she might have cried off. Now she’d be held to it.
Besides, you know that moment when a door opens. You enter someone else’s life.
I said, “It’s not bad—the red-pepper tapenade.”
She jumped—as much as anything, I think, at that French word. Coming out of my mouth. (But I can speak French: restaurant, rendezvous, parlez-vous.)
We’re all supposed to stay in our boxes—you don’t meet your doctor in the street. And I was supposed to be Mr. Invisible anyway, seeing but not seen.
“I shop,” I said. “I cook too.”
She looked at me, still holding the jar—a bit like somebody holding a rock. But I must have had the right expression on my face, I must have struck a chord. A cooking detective: not so creepy after all. Maybe the whole idea hadn’t been so mad …
And it was true. In recent years—I’d one day tell her the whole story—I’d learnt to cook. Discovered, in fact, a bit of a flair. I take trouble. I chop and mix. I look up recipes, I’m choosy about ingredients. I stop at the Fine Foods section, even when I’m shopping for basics.
And food counts, I’ll bear that out. In times of trouble, eat well, don’t skimp. Look after yourself. Don’t live out of the microwave. Use love and care. Just because you’re on your own.
I’ll vouch for it, I’ve been there. Just because I was an ex-cop—twenty-four years fuelling up on canteen grub and whatever you could snatch on the hoof.
Even now when I’m out on a night’s job, I don’t do myself down. A thermos of good coffee—or my own tomato-and-basil soup (a tiny pinch of chilli). And Serrano ham with thinly sliced Emmental, on ciabatta, with a few leaves and a smear of Dijon, knocks spots off a cheese-and-pickle wad.
“Seriously,” I said, “I’m not bad.”
I didn’t know then about the kitchen with the copper pans and the oven hood. A kitchen to die for. I couldn’t have guessed that even right then she was thinking of that welcome-home dinner.
“It’s just me,” I said, “but I cook.”
“So what’s it tonight?”
A little line crossed her forehead, but it was a laughter frown. Her lips stayed slightly apart. Simple fun-poking.
“Mushroom risotto, with porcini and vermouth.”
“Vermouth?”
“Of course.”
Now—where she can only eat what she’s given—we still talk about food. I run through every meal. It was a good sign, a good moment, when she said, like an uppity hotel guest, “The food in here, George—it’s awful.” And s
he still says: “What’s it tonight?”
Eat well. Eat well for me till I get out.
Those tables that still get laid for two after the other’s gone.
But it matters, I’ll vouch for that. The stomach is next to the heart. I’ve seen it, had it pointed out to me in autopsy rooms—and then, to be mean and to hard-school him, taken the green young constable I’m with to the nearest greasy spoon. Mud tea and egg-and-chips.
I reached up to the shelf and flipped a packet of dried porcini into my wire basket.
I suppose if we hadn’t met the day before she might have thought I was one of those sad cases who hang around in supermarkets on the pick-up—looking at what they put in their baskets. (And I suppose that could have been me once too.)
I said, “About the photographs. It’s best if you could bring them—if you could find a moment. That way I could look at them and they need never leave your hands.”
I think she may have glanced round—as if spies might have been listening, behind the pasta shelves.
“You mean—you’d just look, and remember?”
“My job. File in the head. But you need a history—a history to go with the face. Then you remember the face.”
She looked away. She was still holding the jar—inside, a dark reddish sludge. If it weren’t for me, she’d have put it back on the shelf.
“You really rate this?”
Trolleys were squeezing past. The Friday-evening, home-from-work rush. In supermarkets you can’t really tell who’s happy or miserable, who’s toppling over the edge. There’s a tunnelled expression. We all have to eat.
I looked at her trolley.
“Nearly done? Me too. You know, there’s the Café Rio, the new place, just over the street. It’s not so busy around now. If you’ve got—ten minutes. Yes, the tapenade’s pretty good.”
7
The sun flashes off the road where the frost has turned to a black dew. I reach the corner of Beecham Close, as if a magnet has pulled me. I didn’t say I would, she didn’t say I should (and I won’t tell her I did). Though it’s hardly a detour. It’s even a short cut, avoiding the Village. Wimbledon Broadway to Putney Vale.
But now I’m almost there I have to pull up. I taste the dark taste again, like a gush of oil in the throat. I have to stop. It’s even hard to look.
Two years and everything is quiet. Frozen. The simple turn into a quiet street. A cul-de-sac with verges and chain-links and houses screened by autumn trees. It could almost be a private road. Private, keep out: not for you.
I stop by the kerb, some yards back from the corner, engine idling. Two years on, and how are these things managed? Is the date remembered? Ignored? Look—it’s a beautiful day.
In number fourteen they must be well settled in by now. Their name was Robinson, I know. I never met them of course. The estate agent’s job—the estate agent’s problem. A challenge, it’s true. But the place had been unoccupied for months by then.
Sell all the stuff, George, get rid of it. As if she might have said: Leave me nothing.
Thank God I was a private detective experienced in tricky situations.
They must have known—the Robinsons. But why should they care? What was it to them? A kitchen to die for. At a bargain price. And now they might even have sold on, for a small killing, the new owners never knowing. Until a little bird tells them. The Nash Case—ring any bells?
And what then? The sudden urge to move again?
It’s out of sight from here, back from the corner. And there’s this gold-and-rust camouflage of trees. A stillness, a crystal light.
I can’t do it. As if there’s a cordon, striped tape, stretched across. The kind of cordon I might have lifted, years ago, and stepped casually under. A police matter, but I was the police. And of course there was a cordon then, and a policeman stepping under it, in charge of proceedings. Marsh, DI Marsh. The Nash Case.
When he found out who I was I saw the shift in his face. An interview room, a statement. I was principal witness, after all, and principal snag in an open-and-shut case. How strange to be there, in an interview room, on the other side of the table. The other side of the law.
The sights and sounds of a nick. The whiff of the cells.
When he found out who I was, he might have leaned on me pretty hard. If it wasn’t for that little admission he let slip in return—the one thing for the other, it almost seemed. That he was retiring in four weeks, that this was his last real case. And they’d put him on it because it was a simple mopping-up. No complications—except me, so it seemed. He might have leaned on me pretty hard, and he did a bit. Grey shifting eyes. So that while he had me there on the spot, and sweating, on the other side of the table, it was as though he too was on the edge of some scary gap, and I was even the one holding out a hand and saying, Come on, you can do it, you can take the jump. Lean on me.
I could see in his face the question he never exactly asked—and that had become less simple anyway, just by meeting me.
What’s it like? What’s it like, not being a policeman?
The Nash Case. Who remembers it? Not every case that finds its way into police files makes the papers as well. It takes something. But even then, in a little while, it’s forgotten. Even right here, maybe, they’ve forgotten. Especially here.
I can’t do it. As if the car doesn’t want to make the turn, wants to forget as well. I rev the engine. A cold sick feeling of betrayal. As if Sarah’s still in that house, locked up in it—it’s her real prison—and I’m leaving her.
But how can I approach that house without bringing back how I approached it, twice, that night? The black taste suddenly filling my mouth as I drove away then, the first time. And I knew what it meant. Or why should I have gone back, turned round and gone back?
I should have understood it sooner, tasted it sooner. I should have stopped him, overhauled him, right here maybe, at the entrance to his own street. Blocked his way. “Mr. Nash? Mr. Robert Nash? I’m a police officer …”
Or I should have overtaken him long before. Got there first. “Sarah—it’s not Bob, it’s me.”
I shouldn’t have just followed him to the corner, watched, then turned away.
He wouldn’t be where he is now. Nor would she.
8
Café Rio. A big stencilled mural on one wall: Sugar Loaf Mountain, parrots, palm trees, beach girls. It’s what you need in Wimbledon at the thin end of October. And they play samba music, smoochy and soft.
Our cars waited for us in the supermarket car park. We’d had to deal with our shopping first. I’d said, “I’m over there,” pointing to my car, near the far corner, “I’ll see you in a moment.” She might have just driven away.
Late October. The clocks about to go back. Now more things could happen in the dark.
I’ve got the job, I thought. I won’t pass it on to Rita.
And she’s got something too, I thought, and knows it: more than the simple job she’ll pay for. Not just a private eye, a private ear. I fetched coffees. This might not have happened, I might just have got her second-thoughts call.
Doctors and patients aren’t supposed to meet by chance, but they do, and there’s a loosening, an unwinding, a Latin-American beat.
“So you want to know the story?” she said.
I hadn’t said I did. I might have given the barest nod. But it helps if you’re going to talk and you need someone to talk to, if that someone’s a stranger, a neutral party, as close as you can get to talking to a wall.
And it helps if you aren’t sitting face to face but side by side at one of those narrow front-window counters, watching the rest of life pass by. The traffic in Worple Road, the homeward rush. That’s why all those places, rooms that are set up for the purpose—two chairs on either side of a desk—have got it all wrong. Doctors’ surgeries. Not to mention police interview rooms with the tape humming on the table—the worst places, usually, for getting anyone to blab.
You couldn’t stare them in the
eye, that never worked. Get up, walk around, let them talk to your back. Better still: two stools at a bar, a couple of drinks and (if it only counted as evidence) you’d have them nailed in a jiffy.
I think Marsh thought (and he was right) that I was judging his technique.
Interview rooms. Grey walls, scuff marks. An ashtray nobody empties.
She sipped her cappuccino, looking straight ahead. That curve the cheek makes up to the hollow of the eye. I know when to pretend I’m not there.
“I’m a teacher,” she said. “I lecture at Roehampton. French and Spanish …”
For a moment I saw her standing in front of the class—to tell them everything she was about to tell me. Today’s lesson will be different, today’s lesson will be special. I pictured myself at a desk in the front row.
Ten minutes … twenty, more perhaps. I hardly risked a word. A teacher of languages.
“It’s all my own fault …” she said.
I go there now, of course. The place is still running, minus its newness. I sit, if I can, where we sat that time. And she’s the one now who’s made herself go invisible—so invisible you’d think she wasn’t there.
I could speak to the air. Our few free moments together. They’d barely add up to a couple of hours. And if I’d never said, “I cook too.”
I look at the palm trees on the wall, the beach girls. As if everywhere’s a prison and we need to peer out at a different world. In Rio de Janeiro, maybe, there’s a Café Wimbledon where they think of cool green lawns.
“It’s all my own fault …”
And what I didn’t know then, what she had no reason to say, was that at that very hour Bob and Kristina—Mr. Nash and Miss Lazic—would have been together at a flat in Fulham. So Mrs. Nash had no need to hurry home.
Afterwards we walked back to our cars. The homeward rush, though not in her case, or his. The supermarket still in full swing. We stood by her car, a silver Peugeot. Her husband had a black Saab. The car I’d have to follow.
She said, “All right. I’ll bring in the photos.”