Exposure

by Helen Dunmore

  ‘That was a bad idea,’ said Giles. ‘I’ll ask your Mrs Thing for a chamber pot.’

  Simon lay with his eyes shut, exhausted. There were voices on the stairs, and then footsteps. He felt Giles come back into the room.

  ‘I’ve told her to look in on you. Your meter’s fed as high as it’ll go and there’s a pile of shillings beside it. Don’t play the fool and overdo it. You’ll be as weak as a cat for a day or so. See you next Saturday.’ He stroked the hair back from Simon’s face then, and smiled at him.

  The door to the past closes. Here is Giles, lying hooked up to the pulley. Poor old Giles, it really was a rotten thing to happen. He’ll be laid up for weeks, if not months. He’s not asking for much. It’s a perfectly simple matter to fetch the file and get it back to Brenda.

  ‘Bloody careless of me. I’m sorry, dear boy, I really am most frightfully tired.’

  He looks it. Drawn, yellowish, all the purple drained to the lees. He looks as if he might be going to die, Simon thinks, and then doesn’t know what to do with this thought, or the slight but pungent relief that it brings. What kind of a selfish bastard am I? I’ll have to say yes, even though it’s probably just Giles flapping. The file can’t be all that important, or it would never have left Julian’s office.

  ‘All right. I’ll go in the morning.’

  Giles lifts his head, winces, drops back on to his pillow with closed eyes and mutters, ‘Tomorrow’s no good. You might as well not go at all.’

  ‘You mean you want me to go now?’

  ‘You were the first person I thought of,’ says Giles.

  Simon has the keys to the flat in his hand when the nurse comes in, frowning, to take Giles’s temperature and pulse. ‘I think you’d better go now,’ she says to Simon, rather severely, ‘Mr Holloway needs to be kept quiet.’

  Chastened, furious, Simon says, ‘Goodbye, then, Giles.’ There’s no response. Perhaps Giles is already asleep, or unconscious, or, now that he’s got what he wants, he has switched himself off.

  Simon knows the flat well, but tonight it’s strange to him. Everything is extremely tidy, and there is a strong smell of disinfectant. He switches on the hall light and advances past the sitting room, past the kitchen and the dark, narrow little dining room that Giles never uses, into the bedroom corridor. There’s the door, just like a cupboard door, as Giles said. He’s either not noticed it before, or assumed it was the linen cupboard. The key fits. How on earth did Giles manage to lock it, with his leg in that state? He might have asked the ambulance men to do it, Simon supposes. Inside the attic stairwell, the smell of whisky is strong. There are dark splotches on the drugget. The stairs are steep and narrow. Servants’ stairs. Why have a study up here? It was an accident waiting to happen. Giles must have been half-cut to fall like that. He usually was, any time after six o’clock.

  The single bulb on the landing is unshaded and gives out a sallow light. The study door is open. Simon feels like a burglar, going in without Giles here.

  The attic is cold, and stuffy. It smells of whisky in here, too, and the fug of trapped cigarette smoke. The ceiling is yellow with nicotine. He might open the window for a minute, to clear the air …

  How extraordinary: the bottom of the window-frame is nailed to the sill. Giles is such a fresh-air fiend. He must be worried about cat burglars, coming over the roofs. You’d have to be a bloody good climber to get up here, thinks Simon, looking at the wet, steep tiles.

  There’s the file, on the desk. He picks it up, turns it over, holds it as if weighing what it contains, and then opens it. He is still. His son Paul would recognise the look of extreme concentration on Simon’s face. It’s how he looked when he tried to mend the broken piston on Paul’s steam train.

  His breath hisses through his teeth. What an oceangoing idiot, to leave this kind of stuff lying about. What the hell was Giles doing taking it home? Up to his eyes … Yes, in whisky. He’s in a bad way. Worse than anyone knew. Losing his grip completely.

  Suddenly, Simon’s memory flashes back to a crowded pub years ago. He’s sitting with Giles, crammed into a corner table. He’s talking too loudly, and heads are turning. Giles is trying to shut him up: Get a grip, Simon.

  Giles is the one who has lost his grip; or who simply doesn’t care any more. No wonder he was so keen for Simon to get the file safely back. He must be getting slack, not keeping up with things, taking files home …

  The explanations circle in Simon’s head, going faster and faster, tightening like a band. He sees the stiff hospital gown with the number stamped on to it. Giles’s face, discoloured against the white hospital linen. He looked shrunken – reduced. Giles would hate Simon to pity him.

  Better get on with it. The file ought never to have left Julian Clowde’s desk, except to be locked away. He’ll get the bloody thing back to Brenda and that’ll be the end of it. Never to be spoken of again, or even acknowledged between them, like so much else.

  He can’t go on the Tube with something like this tucked under his arm. Better find a bag. Or better still …

  Beside the desk there are two briefcases. One, he knows: Giles’s familiar dark-brown leather. The other is a dusty, battered pigskin, not at all Giles’s style. It looks like the kind of thing a father might give to a son. He’ll put the file in there, get it back to the office and then he can return the case to Giles later on.

  Simon looks around for something to wipe off the dust, but the room is bare. No curtains, no rug. Just a small picture on the wall. Never mind. He takes out his own handkerchief, but then sees that the area around the fastenings isn’t dusty. He opens the case, which is empty. In goes the file.

  At that instant, he is sure that there’s someone else in the flat. Did a door shut downstairs? Another sound comes, muffled, indistinct but closer. Simon is on the balls of his feet, skin prickling. Probably it’s the cleaner, come to take a last look round. She’s devoted to Giles, apparently.

  Simon knows that’s a nonsense. What cleaner would come at this hour of night? He scans the room for something heavy. Nothing. Downstairs, another creak as if an internal door is being opened, quite softly—

  In a rush, briefcase in hand, Simon swarms down the stairs and through the cupboard door, barking, ‘Hello? Who’s there?’ Burglars are damned cowards, he knows that. All they want is to get away.

  But it’s not a burglar who appears at the door of Giles’s bedroom. It’s a heavy-set man with a curiously blank face, dressed in a suit. Frightful cut, thinks Simon automatically.

  ‘Hello!’ he says sharply. ‘Are you a friend of Peter’s?’

  ‘Peter? No, I don’t know any Peter,’ says the man. ‘I am a friend of Giles.’

  Are you? thinks Simon. I rather wonder about that. You don’t look in the least Giles’s type. However, the man clearly knows whose flat this is. ‘Just checking,’ he says. ‘One can never be too careful.’

  The man is looking at him intently, frowning. ‘Giles asked me to bring some personal possessions to him at the hospital.’

  ‘Oh, I see.’

  ‘He has perhaps also asked you to bring something for him?’

  ‘Not exactly.’ Simon feels a sudden flush of annoyance. Who does this character think he is? ‘Have you got keys?’

  In answer the man lifts his right hand and opens it, revealing a set of keys. They look the same as the ones Giles gave to Simon. How many spare sets has Giles got, for God’s sake? He seems to scatter them about like confetti.

  ‘I’m going now,’ says Simon. ‘Lock up after yourself, won’t you? We don’t want any burglaries.’

  ‘You are going to see him now?’

  ‘As a matter of fact, I’m going home.’ The unspoken words If it’s any of your business hang in the air between them. He doesn’t want to leave this man in possession of Giles’s flat, but short of marching him out of the door, he’s going to have to. The man seems at ease; not at all furtive. But then, Giles has always had some pretty odd friends, although most of them are a lo
t younger.

  ‘Goodnight,’ says Simon. The man looks down, very deliberately, at the briefcase Simon’s carrying, but Simon is damned if he’s going to offer any more explanations. Let him think what he likes.

  How good the air tastes. Fresh and damp. Rain glistens on the pavement, but none is falling. He swings the briefcase in his right hand.

  Walking has always been the way Simon makes sense of things. He beats his way on up the empty pavement, and it all takes shape inside him. He thinks of the man at the flat, with his own set of keys, quietly going through things. Making sure. Had he even seemed surprised to see Simon? He was a bit of a brute. Giles had poor taste, true, but usually the poor taste was a lot younger.

  Simon lopes up Whitehall. Lily will be asleep by the time he gets back. No point in worrying her. She’s never liked Giles. Maybe, if he met Giles now, for the first time, he wouldn’t like him either. That bloody file. How could anybody be such an idiot?

  He says the word over and over to himself, as if that will make it true. Giles is an idiot, and he drinks too much. He doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing, half the time. That’s why he rang his old friend Simon.

  Bloody careless of me. You were the first person I thought of.

  Charing Cross. Simon accelerates along the tiled corridor, thinking he hears the whoosh of air that means an approaching train, but there’s nothing. There are one or two others on the platform. Now he can hear a train. The briefcase swings. If he turned, like this, and just before the train came, chucked the case on to the rails—

  But the train is here. The doors open, and the briefcase is still in his hand.

  5

  The Cartridge Burns

  Simon closes his front door softly. All the downstairs lights are off. Upstairs, the dim landing light still burns, in case Bridgie wakes.

  He’s tired, but keyed-up. If the water tank weren’t so noisy he would run a bath to relax. He wants to wash off the hospital, Giles’s flat, that man padding about in Giles’s bedroom. He goes into the kitchen, lights the gas and puts on the kettle, then takes it off again. He wanders into the dining room. Lily has laid the table ready for breakfast, as she always does. Bridgie dropped her rabbit plate, but he mended it: you can hardly see the join.

  There’s a bottle of cider on the dresser, back in the kitchen. Lily must have opened it, as a treat while she listened to the play. Her frugality frustrates him sometimes, but more often it moves him to tenderness. She is absurdly careful. If there’s a glut of plums at the market, she makes jam. Their own apples, potatoes, carrots and turnips are carefully stored in the garden shed, well protected from frost. He takes the stopper from the cider bottle and pours himself a glass.

  The mortgage is heavy. His parents gave them nothing, and Lily’s mother had nothing to give. Her father, the mysterious father in Morocco whom Simon has never met, sent a cheque for a hundred pounds when Paul was born. A huge sum. Lily frowned at the cheque, scrutinising it as if it might be a forgery.

  ‘What a piece of luck,’ said Simon.

  ‘Let’s see if it clears.’

  It did, and she bought the pram, the twin-tub and the sitting-room carpet. Simon’s career – if you could call it that – was not exactly progressing. Now, years later, he’s begun to understand that it never will. He’ll plod on while the high-flyers flap their wings above his head. Already, some of them are a good bit younger than he is. Let them get on with it. He’d rather leave on the dot to do a tricky bit of soldering with Paul. His salary is solid, and Lily has her part-time teaching job. Her job paid for the stair carpet and the scarlet leather sofa and armchairs.

  It’s calming to think of money. It worries Lily, though. She makes lists, draws up budgets, calculates whether or not they’ll be able to rent a holiday cottage next summer. But after an hour’s frowning concentration she gets cross with herself, throws down pencil and paper and exclaims, ‘We forget how lucky we are. Look at the garden! Look at this house!’ as if she’d never expected to be allowed such things. And, probably, she hadn’t.

  Lily looks so solemn when she’s doing her sums. She must have looked like that when she was a little girl. Serious. Trying to be good. But then, suddenly, everything changes. He’s always loved those summer days of cloud and light. When he’s on a train he likes to watch the shadows fly over the landscape, chased by the sun. Lily throws down her pencil, shakes back her hair and smiles at him. You can’t make Lily smile. He used to try, but it never worked. Her smile comes when you don’t expect it, changing her face utterly.

  He pours a second glass of cider, cuts a chunk off the loaf and fossicks about in the larder for the cheese. There’s no pickle. Paul eats everything. He’ll eat pickle out of a jar, with a spoon. Lily says it’s his age and the rate at which he’s growing. Simon tries to think back to himself at that age, but cannot. Doesn’t want to. Touching on his childhood is like pressing a bruise.

  He was never much of a Callington. His brothers called him ‘Milkman’ because he was small and dark, and Callington men were big-boned, fair, blue-eyed. He told Lily that once, expecting her to laugh, but she drew her brows together. She’s never thought much of the Callingtons, and in his heart he’s glad of it.

  The briefcase squats on the kitchen tiles. He’ll have to put it away, or Lily will want to know whose it is. That damned file.

  He opens the briefcase, watching his hands as if they are someone else’s. The file is as it was. Top Secret. It ought to have been locked away. It certainly ought never to have left the office in Giles’s briefcase.

  But it did. Simon’s hands hesitate, move, are still. His fingers want to open the file again, and read it. No, he tells himself. It’s absolutely off to go poking about. Giles trusted him to collect the file and take it back to the office. To Brenda. Easy-peasy. Obviously Giles hasn’t stopped to think about how bloody odd it might look if Simon were to parade into Julian Clowde’s office and hand his secretary a file like this. No, Giles wouldn’t think of that. Simon can almost hear him: Surely you can employ a touch of discretion, dear boy?

  With sudden decision, he plunges the file back. As he does so, his fingers catch on a side-pocket he hadn’t noticed before. There’s something in there. The briefcase wasn’t empty, as he’d thought. There’s something in it, right at the bottom.

  He draws it out, frowns, focuses. Again, his face takes on that look of extreme concentration. He turns the cartridge over. There’s a serial number on the left-hand spool, and on the right it says: ‘36 EXP’.

  Very rapidly, face shuttered, he turns to the stove. The good old coke stove that he riddles night and morning. He bends down, picks up the forked-end tool and unhooks the plate. Inside, the coke burns sleepy red. He weighs the cartridge in his palm, then quickly drops it into the fire and replaces the plate. He hesitates again, and then takes the file from the briefcase and opens it. Very quickly, he flicks through its pages and then back to the first page, where three names are typed. By each name there is space for a set of initials. None of the names is Giles. The last of the three names is Julian Clowde’s, and his initials show that he has read and returned the file. But he hadn’t returned it. The file is in Giles’s possession.

  There could be any number of perfectly good reasons for that.

  Simon takes the file between his hands, and attempts to tear it, but cannot. He glances at the door, then pushes the file back into the briefcase, takes it into the hall and shoves it to the back of the coats in the hall cupboard, behind the row of wellington boots.

  That won’t do. He pulls out the briefcase and rearranges the wellingtons. He’ll take the case to a left-luggage office. He should have thought of that before. Much better than having it at home. He can leave the case in left luggage until he’s decided what to do with it.

  His heart is beating fast, as if he’s run a race with Paul. He can still run faster than his son. ‘That’s torn it,’ he says aloud as thick, noisy heartbeats push their way up into his throat. Already, he know
s that he won’t be handing the file to Brenda.

  He must think. Giles will be in hospital for several days at least. How soon will the file be missed? Clowde’s on leave, but … As for the cartridge … No, he’s not going to think about that now. And why hasn’t he burned the file? Deep in himself, shamefully, he knows that he needs it. It is evidence.

  He’s in a state, as Lily would say to the children. He glances up at the clock. Ten to twelve. Only a few hours since Giles rang. None of it has taken long at all, but it seems to Simon as if his whole life is rushing away from him like a train disappearing down the line. But of course that’s nonsense. Here he is, in his own house, with Lily and the children asleep upstairs. Husband and father, breadwinner. Those words are true and safe but at the same time they don’t sound real. He sees himself: a tiny figure set down in a life he doesn’t really understand, like one of the models who wait for the trains on the platform of Paul’s railway set.

  Simon Callington. Look where he is now. All this has come about through his own fault, through not seeing what he ought to have seen, not asking the questions he ought to have asked, refusing to recognise what was right in front of him. That Giles, his old friend Giles – But now, at ten to midnight, with the cartridge melting to nothing in the stove, he might as well call a spade a spade. Giles has been batting for the other side in more ways than one. There may be a good reason for taking such a highly restricted file out of the office, but try as he may, he can’t find one that explains away the film cartridge. How could he, knowing Giles so well, knowing him for so long, have failed to see what was going on?