by Paul Hoffman
‘Steven?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s Tom . . . Tom Clavell.’
‘Hi.’
‘Look, there’s been a bit of a problem.’
‘I see.’
‘The fact is that the meeting has gone on longer than I’d thought. I don’t think we’ll be able to get to it today.’ There was a pause. ‘Look, to be honest, Steven, I don’t think they’re going to buy the idea. I’m sorry. Perhaps we could look at it again in six months.’ There was another silence. ‘Steven?’
‘I’m still here, Tom.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Of course.’ There was another silence. ‘I’ll talk to you next week.’
‘Things are a bit hectic at the moment. The meeting is asking for a few changes. To be frank, Steven, they’re worried about how much we’re spending on freelance contracts. We’ll need to cut back for a bit. I’ll call you when things settle down.’
Grlscz could hear busy corridor noises at the other end of the line which were slightly muffled as Clavell put his hand over the mouthpiece, clearly under the impression that this would cut the sound out. ‘I’m finished here,’ he heard him say obsequiously. ‘I’ll be right with you.’
Grlscz considered hanging up, but he did not.
‘Right, Steven, I’ll call you. I have to go.’
‘OK, Tom. We’ll talk again.’
He arrived back at his flat at two. If they were still there he would leave quietly. He did not want to discuss what had happened in front of Martin Beck or, indeed, talk to him at all. Fortunately he had finally got someone to mend the flat’s sticking door and made his way in without any noise. If they were still there he had to be careful to prevent them hearing him because the lobby door into the living room was slightly ajar. He heard voices and groaned silently. He was about to leave when she laughed and curiosity drew him to the door to listen to what they were saying. It was her teasing laugh, the one she used when she was about to dismiss someone’s sense of being hard-done-by. ‘Can you believe it?’ he heard Beck say, indignantly.
‘I can, actually,’ she said. ‘I used to have dreadful cramps but my mother was always telling me I’d just have to put up with it. It seemed to exasperate her for some reason. Older women are like that, God knows why. It was always unmentionable.’ She laughed. ‘I’m not sure it still isn’t. You should see the expression on the faces of most men when the subject comes up.’
‘I’m not like that,’ said Beck defensively. ‘They should have told me. It made it look to my form as if that’s what I thought about them – that there was something too . . . I don’t know . . . distasteful about them, shameful.’ There was a pause.
‘Well, that’s very admirable,’ she said, and he could hear the mocking tone, not cruel, but Beck was certainly going to get it.
‘What do you mean?’ asked Beck.
‘What I mean’, she said, and Steven could hear her smiling, ‘is that I wonder if she wasn’t right when she asked if you would have been happy to go off and talk to thirty fourteen-year-olds about their periods. What do you know about it, anyway?’
‘What’s that got to do with it?’ he said, and it was clear to Steven that he knew she was getting ready to go for him. ‘Look, I’m a teacher. I’m always talking with authority about things I’ve never done myself.’
‘Making a joke of it won’t get you off the hook. Answer the old bat’s question: Would you have gone?’
There was a brief pause.
‘Yes,’ he said firmly.
‘You know, I think you would have gone. But only out of bravado, only to prove that it didn’t bother you, that you’re on our side. Is all this indignation really about more than your vanity?’
He didn’t say anything in reply but Steven could imagine the expression on his face and he was pleased.
‘You know, Martin, I wonder if the inventive little rebuke left for you outside the staff room might not have been deserved.’
‘That’s not fair.’ He was annoyed now.
‘Don’t be angry,’ she said sweetly. ‘You’re right . . . OK . . . not completely deserved.’ She paused. ‘Just a little bit.’
He did not say anything in reply. Steven could imagine Anne touching his arm not as a retreat but to say that it wasn’t important, it wasn’t meant to hurt.
‘All right, maybe it was,’ Beck conceded finally. Then he laughed. ‘It’s tricky, isn’t it, indignation?’ There was another silence, pleasant and friendly. ‘Maybe it’s just the effect of being browbeaten by you but it’s getting incredibly hot in here,’ said Beck, just as Steven had decided to slip away. He heard her get up and the sound of her walking towards the window, he assumed, which would involve her passing the slightly open door. He moved backwards, thinking there was something odd about the sound of her footsteps. She passed by and he watched her for the three or four seconds it took to reach the window. She was naked.
The thing that’s really upsetting about infidelity is the sudden change in point of view involved. One naturally assumes oneself to be at the centre of one’s life. You are the main plot, the focus of the narrative – others are players, great or small. The vertiginous collapse that happens to your insides on learning that your wife or husband’s fucking someone else has less, at first, to do with a sense of betrayal than with the speed at which your inner narrative is reassigned. Your centre now consists of being someone else’s perimeter. A nasty thought and a nasty journey to undertake at faster than the speed of light.
The window was high up which meant that there was little chance of her being seen, so she was as relaxed as she always was when walking naked around the flat. Both he and Beck would be watching her as she stretched to fix the window open wide enough to get a reasonable breeze. Others in his position would by now be feeling somewhere inside, I am betrayed; Steven differed only in that what he felt was, I am dead. Otherwise it was the same sense of being overtaken by shock while at the same time searching for an interpretation which would allow nothing of what he’d seen to be what it unequivocally was. It’s not what you think. Thank God for that. She turned and walked back towards the other side of the room. A few seconds later he heard the creak of the springs of the sofa-bed. The part of him not in shock wondered why she had used the sofa rather than the bedroom. Presumably it made her feel better about what she was doing. An unaccustomed malice made its presence felt in him and he almost allowed it to surface, imagining a confrontation a good deal bloodier than usual.
Something pulled him backwards, out through the door, down the stairs and into the street. He started to walk quickly, hyperventilating as he went, trying to order the terror engulfing him. You’re going to die, he thought, walking towards the Thames, You’re going to die, as he drifted through shoppers emerging from the Underground in Leicester Square. On Blackfriars Bridge the comprehensive fact of death and nothing else knotted the muscles in his throat, turned his stomach in Zoah Place and warmed his extremities against the freezing wind on Crucifix Lane and Druid Street. Through Unicorn Pass he went, then back through Roper Lane, filling up in Snowsfield, leaking internally like a winter thaw bringing a flood from damage hidden by the frost. Wet with despair in Tyler’s Gate, he crossed back to the north by Tower Bridge emerging into the City with a sudden insight that would save his life.
Deceiving people was a waste of time. Giving people what they wanted was bound to end in tears because no one could fool anybody better than they could fool themselves. A true forgery described a shape into which the mark could pour himself. An authentic work of art was hard. It had a shape. It took you on. A fake needed to be soft, easy to impress, lacking anything but a desire to please. There should be no surprises, nothing particular in a fake, and if there were, the forger had to root them out. He had been knocking up personalities that were indistinguishably real. His mimes were full of snags, paradoxes, things his victims had to swallow or decide to make allowances for. How could they fail to disappoint? What he had contrived to shape acros
s the years with subtlety and guile had been the very things to bring him to the point of death. He needed to be no more like the real thing than a fishing fly. Presentation was all that mattered to the trout, how it moved over the water. A thoughtfully designed lack of similarity to the real thing was what was required. Complex and rich emotions could be taken just by employing the right kind of lure.
His mistake lay in thinking that at some level she had the image of a perfect love buried like an ancient king ready for an archaeologist to uncover, all scalpels and camel-hair brushes, who only required a capacity for taking pains to lay the body bare. This was their delusion and he’d swallowed it hook and line, a gullible, wide-eyed yokel of the heart. People could not be satisfied. Nothing you could ever do would be enough. He’d built himself for her like one of those museum creatures hypothesised in clay and wire, based only on a fragment of the original beast: a cheekbone here, a thighbone there, a delicate impression in the clay of something that had vanished long ago. That’s what he’d been up to all this time and his genius for doing so was what had led him up the garden path: the bits and pieces came from different animals, the impression of something like a skin was only the action of water on dissolving rock. He didn’t need to worry about what she wanted in a man as long as he avoided doing anything to make it clear it wasn’t there in him. Given sufficient softness, obscure desires would impress themselves upon his carefully collected set of absences. An angry dependency would be his bait. If possible he must catch them in the act. Shock, guilt, remorse, a despairing attempt at suicide should do the trick. He pulled over a taxi in the Minories and ordered it home. It wouldn’t take long this time and it would be infinitely easier. She’d get fed up with it in time, he knew, but this was something to be cultivated. He wanted her to start to find his neediness a touch oppressive so that every other fear would be allayed. She’d trust his dependency even if it had begun to weary her. This was the only tricky bit; he mustn’t allow this to be too strongly felt. Like Maria there would be a moment when she buried something that she knew she ought not to feel but bury it so quickly she would hardly be aware of having buried it at all. Before then he would kill her.
The cab dropped him off at the end of the street and he walked past his old Mercedes. He stopped when he saw his briefcase in full view on the passenger seat. He unlocked the door and bent to take it out, leaning across the driver’s seat.
‘Hello, what are you doing here?’ said a bright voice behind him.
He jerked up in surprise, cracking his head on the roof. ‘Shit! Jesus Christ, Anne, that fucking hurt,’ he said, holding his head in his hands as he stood up. His irritation was partly due to pain and partly to his having failed to return in time to catch them. She reached up and touched his head with that paradoxical smile that women reserve for small boys and men who have hurt themselves but not badly. She gently rubbed the side of his head. Martin Beck hovered, detached.
‘What are you looking at?’ she said, smiling but not taking her eyes from his head. He pulled her hand away and keeping hold of it said, ‘A cat can look at a king. Hello, Martin.’
Beck looked startled at being addressed by someone who wasn’t looking at him. ‘Oh, hi,’ he replied shiftily.
Steven looked at him. ‘Going somewhere?’ he asked.
‘I told you we might take a trip to Oxford,’ said Anne.
‘Bit late, isn’t it?’
‘The museum is tiny – there’s only one exhibition. It won’t take more than half an hour. We thought we might have dinner at the Elizabeth. Anyway, what are you doing here?’
‘I left some papers behind. I was past junction twenty-eight before I realised. Bloody nuisance.’
‘Can you get there in time?’
‘For the important bit. It’s a pity I missed the lunch but it’s not vital.’
‘Cancel it and come with us,’ she said. She was sincere, and for the briefest of moments he scanned the evidence of the naked body and the sofa-bed, recognising the absurdity of this even as he did so.
‘I’m tempted, really, but I’d like to see if I can get this off the ground.’ She squeezed his arm and for the first time he felt that affection could be as powerful an emotion as sexual desire or jealousy. They turned together and walked back towards the flat and her car parked outside. She smiled at Steven as they parted but didn’t kiss him goodbye. Beck waved awkwardly as he got in the car and Steven watched them drive away. As the old BMW turned the corner at the end of the road, he thought he saw her turn back briefly to look at the spot he should by then have left.
He waited five minutes then followed. He did not need to stay close as it was motorway nearly all the way and Steven’s old Merc, because of its size and comparative rarity, was easy to spot. He was glad of the chance to drive on sparsely populated open carriageway. There was enough traffic to keep his mind occupied but little enough so that he could begin to calm down. About half an hour into the journey he found himself rocking backwards and forwards in his seat like a jockey absent-mindedly urging his horse to go faster. Ten minutes later he found that he was doing it again.
As he approached the enormous white scar cut into the hill outside High Wycombe, which enabled the motorway to fall towards the plain that led towards Oxford, the flashing squares on the arches sporadically placed above the road signalled there was a delay ahead. He joined the tailback which slowly shifted to the outside lane. The clutch was heavy on the Mercedes making the stop and start especially aggravating and he felt the painfully gentle pull as it irritated his sciatic nerve. Slowly the traffic filtered to the right with the inevitable twerps and spivs charging down the inside lane to jump the queue. He could see what the problem was now. An enormous double-trailered lorry had crashed into the almost vertical wall of chalk that sided the cut into the hill. It skewed across the two inner lanes of the motorway with the tail-end trailer pushed forward so that it formed a V-shape, an unsettling angle that gave it the appearance of a badly broken leg. It must have happened recently because several policemen were guiding the traffic while men in DayGlo waistcoats set up the traffic cones to create a space around the accident. In single file the cars moved by and he could sense the sympathetic curiosity of drivers and passengers glad that it was nothing to do with them. As he moved slowly to the front of the accident, he realised that something had been caught between the giant cab of the lorry and the wall of chalk. Even before he saw it properly, he knew that it was Anne’s car.
Perhaps the events of the morning had drained his capacity for shock. Now he felt something close to extreme cold on an exposed limb. It was both painful and insensible to pain at the same time. Emerging from the line of traffic, he pulled over to the hard shoulder just where the cut gave way to open countryside. He walked back up the hill, its sheer sides and yellow whiteness making him feel like someone walking, infinitely small, through a polluted glacier. A policeman met him as he approached. ‘What the bloody hell do you think you’re doing?’ he called, from ten or fifteen yards away.
‘The car,’ Steven said, nodding up the hill. ‘I think my . . .’ he cast around for the right word, ‘fiancée was in it. The car.’ The policeman was caught off guard and said nothing in reply. Passengers in passing cars gawped sombrely at them as they stood, sharply outlined, against the yellowy white wall.
‘I see,’ said the policeman gently, as he looked down the hill to check the Mercedes. ‘If you give me your keys, I’ll, bring your car up here. It’ll be safer.’ Steven handed them over and the policeman took him by the arm with great delicacy and shepherded him towards the monstrous accident. A short man in civilian clothes walked towards them. The policeman pulled him to one side and talked softly to him. The man looked over to Steven and nodded.
‘I’ll just go and bring it up,’ said the policeman, gesturing at the Mercedes, and set off down the hill.
The short man approached. The constable tells me you think your fiancée was in the car.’ Steven nodded.
‘Wel
l, I have to tell you there’s something rather odd.’ The man looked nervous, reluctant. ‘I can’t be sure, I can’t be sure at all, but there doesn’t seem to be anyone in the car. Was there anyone with her?’
‘A man.’
‘Well, I still can’t be sure but I’ve been doing this job for twenty years. I mean, you can see the impact.’ He moved aside slightly to give him a clear view of the crushed car. ‘It’s half its original length.’ He stopped again clearly unsure how to go on.
Steven just looked at him.
The impact, well, it must have been terrible. Thirty tonnes at sixty miles an hour. Two bodies, well, there’d be a sign. After all we’re talking about – sorry – fifteen pints of blood. There’s no sign, nothing at all.’
‘I don’t understand,’ said Steven.
‘Look, I’m not saying they’re not in there, mind you. I can’t say that. All I am saying is that I don’t think there can be anyone inside. Not without a sign. I can’t be sure. You can never tell with accidents.’
‘I see.’ Steven said nothing for a while and the short man shifted uncomfortably, then spoke again.
‘Perhaps . . .’
‘Where are they if they’re not in the car?’ interrupted Steven.
The man felt happier answering a direct question and there was a distinct matter-of-factness about his reply.
‘Well, at first we thought they’d gone to report a breakdown on one of the motorway phones and that the lorry had ploughed in while they were away. But the phones are only a mile apart whichever way you go. They’re not on the motorway and there haven’t been any reports of a breakdown in this area.’ He began to look uncomfortable again.
‘Tell me what you can,’ said Steven.
‘If it was parked on the hard shoulder then the lorry could have pushed it from much further up the cutting. The only witnesses were from behind the lorry and it was so big it hid the front of the accident. A few months back one of the policemen over there booked someone for parking up where the cutting starts and going for a walk on top of the hill. He tells me it happens quite frequently. The view is impressive. Bloody stupid thing to do,’ he added and regretted it. Someone signalled to him and he nodded back decisively. ‘Look, I’ve got to go. Why don’t you sit down over there?’ he said, pointing at a step eroded into the chalk. ‘I’ll let you know what’s going on.’