by Tanith Lee
“Are you there?” she whispers.
“Yes, I’m still here.” In the kitchen the shadow of a bird passes, reflected through a cold-lit window. The shadow looks quite real for a moment. “It’s all right,” Nick says again.
About four Pond calls Nick, just as the main window becomes opaque and dark blue. Pond suggests they meet in half an hour at Nick’s local. Nick is ready to go out. He agrees.
Some of the regulars in the pub know him, as he had often eaten lunch there until recently.
“Long time no see.”
“I’ve been away.”
“Good trip?”
“Crap, unfortunately.”
“Never mind. You’re back now.”
He gets a lager, and goes over to Pond, who is already seated near the back on a fake oak pew, with a half of bitter.
Pond accepts the envelope with the preliminary cheque. He had been strict about its being a cheque, not cash. (“I may not always like the governmental power, Mr Lewis, but I never try to cheat the obdurate if petty laws of the land.”)
He tells Nick two things swiftly, one of which Pond had already intimated over the phone. Number 14, the flat from which the drawer-man had claimed to issue, has been vacated. It now stands empty, as a call to the appropriate estate agent had verified. The occupants ‘seemingly’ had removed themselves the day after the break-in. They had comprised a man and the woman in whose name the flat had been retained - although she had fallen into mortgage arrears. This woman too had had to go into hospital, with what Pond’s initial source, whoever that was, said had seemed to be appendicitis. “Perhaps that then is the end of it. They would appear to have their hands full. I can give you the name of the estate agents if you want to check out the empty flat yourself. Or of course I can, on your behalf.”
Pond had also, yesterday, recommended a specialist firm of locksmiths “not to be found in the Yellow Pages.” Nick confirms he has since called them. A representative is due to visit tomorrow.
Pond then moves on to the second matter. “A Miss Kitty Price-Andrew used to work at the BBC TV Centre in London in 2005-6. She was some sort of PA, purportedly, or maid-of-all-work, as my source there commented. Definitely not a producer, though she may well have met your brother in Manchester, as she was drafted up there this year. She subsequently left this October. I got a colleague to try the flat where I saw her, in Wimbledon. But he was told Ms Andrew, as she’s known there, has had to go to the USA urgently on account of a sick relative. There are no names on the bells in her block, I may add, or I should have reacted to the name Andrew immediately you mentioned it. My own idea now, though I may be mistaken, is that Ms Andrew took fright when she heard or read of your brother’s death in the media. Psychology is a funny thing, Mr Lewis. Subconsciously she’s probably well aware of her culpability. That might have caused her to run off. In any case, she had no current job, and like your Number 14 lot, may have had to get out in a hurry. Which brings me to the other flat at Marylebone. That belongs to a Mrs Jonquil Franks. This isn’t another Price-Andrew alias. Mrs Franks is known by sight by other tenants. An elderly lady, about seventy, seventy-five. Perhaps we can deduce she lets Ms Andrew use a bedroom in the flat, but we don’t know why, do we, Mr Lewis?”
“No,” says Nick. He does not know either what he feels, whether relived or angry, or only depressed. Really, he finds it hard to concentrate. The insane bits and pieces of these investigated recent events have become - unpredictably trivial to him. Perhaps they are truly over, floating away on some sea tide of life, into the dark.
“What I thought,” says Pond, compactly finishing his beer, “is that we might both pay a call on Mrs Franks. She’s seen neither of us. Or if she did glimpse you the other night we can furnish a reason for that.”
“I have to meet someone,” says Nick. “In about an hour.”
It is almost the exact excuse he gave Laurence, but now it is perfectly true. He is seeing Serena at six-thirty.
“This won’t take very long,” says Pond, composedly. “I have the car outside. Or if you’d rather not, I can do it alone.”
Nick has the crazy notion Pond is disappointed, had wanted to take Nick to the Marylebone flat, display his good workmanship.
Nick says, “All right.” He has felt obliged to, yet as they both get up he thinks Pond actually is only indifferent, had merely given Nick the option. Even, maybe, hoped he would refuse?
Pond’s car is a drab grey Volkswagon Golf, but it obviously handles well, the engine perhaps improved on. They proceed via a strange medley of side roads and near-alleys -some cobbled - somehow avoiding most of the shining, bunching evening traffic. Despite the cars and buses surging along the Marylebone Road, the back streets close on them and sink the noise and all movement in a spurious serenity.
The two, oddly prophetic, trees as before raise their static boughs above the gateway. Pond parks by the kerb.
Tonight the shadows seem flatter yet sharper where they spread along the pavement, and the neat lawn inside the wall. Nick finds he does not want to walk up to the old Georgian house. It will be an act of going back into the past. As soon it will be, too, with his sister. He has not met her, face to face, for nine years. What, after all, will they say to each other? She had asked they meet in a public place, her logic being that there she will not allow herself to break down. (Break-in, break down, break.) But the public place will also enable them to look at and mention other things, if necessary to escape each other behind the theatrical drop-curtains of other people. This she did not say; it is self-evident.
Nick and Pond walk up to the house.
There are a few higher lights on, generally folded behind blinds or drapes. The descent to the basement floor is unlit. Then, at their approach, a security light flashes up. That had not happened either time when Nick came here before. Perhaps it was then switched off, or broken, and is now on or repaired - or just fitted today.
Pond has rehearsed Nick in their roles. They are quite simple ones. Nick had met Ms Andrew when she worked at the BBC. He is looking for her now as he owes her the return of a loan she kindly made him, when he lost his flat last year. Now he is housed again, and wants to repay the money. She had told him she was sometimes at this address, so that is where he has come. Pond, an old family friend, has come along as well to vouch for Nick, in case Ms Franks is concerned. And Pond had pushed a note to this effect through Ms Franks’s door earlier this afternoon.
“Psychology again,” Pond had remarked. “People are more inclined if something is promised rather than demanded.” Meanwhile, he had added, as secondary player, Pond could observe more fully.
Pond gives the knocker a brisk crack.
The dim light is there in the stained glass, Nick now sees, as before. And here again, the muted, almost animal-like sound of slowish footfalls. Someone to open the door…
But the door does not…
But the door does.
It opens on a chain, and something is there, peering out around it with half one glittering eye.
Nick can smell dust and must and female scent, some rather stale. These odours are stronger now. He had, when with Kit, barely noticed them.
“Ms Franks?” asks Pond.
“Mrs. Mrs Franks. Are you the one what put that letter through? Eh? What game are you at? Eh? Eh?”
It is a coarse, cruel voice, the ungrammaticality and impoliteness all fused with a sort of malign belligerence. No timidity here. No real caution. Nick guesses that, if she had not opened the door previously, it had not been due to fear. More perhaps to some kind of mentally-limited little spiteful amusement at keeping him out. He can imagine she would say “‘S my door, ain’t it? Sod’ im. He ain’t got no right just to be let see me.”
What in fact Mrs Franks says as she snaps free the chain from across the door is, “You’re not coming in, you hear? Neither of you couple.”
The chain, strong or fragile as it might appear, has seemed less to ensure her safety than hold
her back from them, like a leopard.
Now there she stands at large, her head lowered, eyes burning, staring and glaring. Overtly dangerous.
Jonquil Franks is a small woman, less than five feet tall Nick believes, and thin as wire. Like some thinner older women she is immensely wrinkled, yet her terrible and ravaged face has a great savage beauty. Her bones are classical, her nose aquiline, almost hooked; her jaw is clean of any sag, only the strings in her skinny neck to mar its angle. Her burning eyes look unnaturally huge, and have been carefully drawn around with black. Her creased lips are blazoned red. No concession, no quarter. Despite this her hair is allowed to grey in fierce silver stripes all through its fading black mane.
Behind her every other door that leads off the dully lighted inner hall is firmly shut. He and Pond are not to be allowed to look into any other room.
Nick has realised, aided in part by her physical appearance and method, that her cockney accent is augmented by another from somewhere doubtless much farther south and east.
“Mrs Franks,” says Pond, equably, “as my note to you explained…”
“Your note explain nothing. What you want to do? Borrow off of her?”
“The reverse, Mrs Franks. Quite the other way round.”
Nick feels, given his ‘role’, he should speak. He says, rather woodenly, no actor at all in the end, “It was Kit - Kitty - who lent me…”
But Mrs Franks the leopard does not wait.
She leaps in over his words, stands on their corpses.
“Get on! Y’couple. You one of her men, eh? Eh?” (This to Nick.) “Dumped you, has she? She always dumps ‘em. They’re alluz coming round ’ere. Angry some of ’em. You angry? Eh?”
“I’m not angry,” Nick says.
“Good, cuz if y’are, I got ways to do dealing with ’em. They don’t scare me. Like them young ones says, Bring it on.” And she grins. Her teeth are stained but all present, and strong, like those of a tough old horse which perhaps smokes.
“Madam,” says Pond, still cool, “Maybe you can tell us where your friend Kitty is, then we can leave you in peace.”
“Friend? She int no friend. Family, Kitty.”
“Your daughter, then,” Pond flatters her bleakly.
And Mrs Franks grins again. “No daughter. What age you think I am? I am Granny.” This title does not suit her. Yet “Granny,” she insists. “And what are you? You one of her blokes an’ all? Bit old int yer?”
Pond says, “She lent Mr Conway here three thousand pounds, very kindly. Now his finances are straight he would like to repay her.”
“Only three thousand?” ‘Granny’ stretches her eyes. “She don’t need your money. She got her plenty. Who’d you think owns this flat? Eh? She does. Bought it for me, for all them years I brings her up, little bitch. So when she says, You go on out tonight, I goes off to my gentleman, and we spends time. Meal, down the pub, back to his and what you think we does there?” She flaunts at them. “Think I’m too old to have a boyfriend, eh? I got one. Older’n me, poor old bugger. Can barely walk himself, but got plenty of petrol in him for the other. Go on, ya filthy bastards,” she adds furiously, as if they not she have mentioned her sexual life. “And her - you lay off of her! So she picks you up and dumps yer. Always she does that. And sometimes out I go and she brings ’em in here. When I get back the mess of ’em. But it’s her flat. She buys it. Stays here. What can a poor old woman do, you think, eh? Eh?”
“Mrs Franks…”
“Get off. Or I call policy men. She change you fellers like she change her hair colours. Now it’s red, now it’s yellah. Want to know what colour her hair is for real? Won’t tell you.” And with that she skips back, a malevolent goat rather than a leopard. “Piss off!” she abruptly shrieks, and slams the door, grinning, in their faces.
Pond and Nick walk back to the gate and the security light goes out behind them.
“A Mediterranean, I’d say,” says Pond. “Perhaps Greek. Probably altered her name for convenience.”
“Like Kitty.”
“It seems, however,” says Pond, as they get back into the grey VW, “to solve some of the mystery. If not of Ms Andrew herself.”
“Or it could all be lies. Stage-managed, a set-up…”
“It could. But life, as it’s been said, Mr Lewis, is stranger than fiction. Life is strange. And coincidences – full of those. Coincidence is a very strange thing I find, sir. Often very misleading. Like the idea of omens and portents in the ancient world. Coincidence can make you believe all sorts of things are happening for a purpose. Part of a pattern. But they’re not. It means nothing at all.”
They part near the National Theatre, where Pond drops Nick off.
It has been arranged tomorrow Pond is to continue seeing what else he can dig up on the drawer-man, or on Kit, if anything looks as if it might need to be. But both these insane composite events now seem to Nick to be played out.
And Nick feels therefore he is being delivered back into the maze of a reality if anything more unwieldy and sinister. Pausing outside the Festival Hall, amid the concrete Toytown of the South Bank, he looks out over the black river splashed with lights, and thinks of taking a boat down to Greenwich, or a train, and so avoiding Serena.
But then, just as had happened when he ran towards her voice and took up the phone, even as he contemplates being elsewhere he begins to walk on towards their meeting, with firm, organised steps.
14
She is not as he remembers. She is much smaller and more slight. Her dark hair is well cut, a long, casual-seeming wave, and it shines like satin. She has a delicacy he has not remembered either. Perhaps, rather than getting older, she has undergone refining during the intervening years. Apart, apparently, from when writing some of her letters. As he approaches her he is struck by the way she looks up at him, smiling yet not quite composed, despite her training, (or does she let him see this deliberately? Even put it on?), and also he is struck by the way he sits down, takes her hand briefly, the very fact he is here with her, this (unknown?) attractive, poised young woman, solvent, and with her career to uphold, yet all alone until his arrival. He is being reminded irresistibly of those other first ‘dates’ he has so often had with women, in his other role. But Serena is his sister.
“I didn’t think you’d turn up,” she says, as they try their drinks.
Nick does not say anything about his thoughts near the bridge. “Of course I’d turn up. Here I am.”
“Yes. You always were - are - you’re very honourable, Nick.”
“No. But this is different.”
“Is it? If I were you I’d never have gone near me again. As long as I lived. Oh Nick - I’m so sorry – what I wrote - Christ. I was just off my head - and drunk – blind drunk. I was sick all night and in the morning - well, I’d gone out and sent the damned letter hadn’t I? I mean I went out at two in the morning to mail it you.” She stops and looks at the fake marble table. “I’m not making excuses. I’ve had a bit of a rough time. A really grotesque relationship I got into - like nothing I’ve ever - never mind. But I got out and then - Laurence.”
Nick thinks about her horrible rounded ugly handwriting, resembling that of a vicious ten-year-old. This Serena might be another person. She would not have written in that hand.
“But - oh, Nicky,” she says, “all that shit I put about when Claudia - when I called you that time in Scotland…”
“I’m sorry too,” he hears himself say. “I just don’t remember. I never have. I know you called, and then it’s a blank. Nothing till the train coming back.” It is almost true. But he has pretended he does not recollect either her side of the call - me - me - fool - you fucking fool - dead, dead, died, dead. Letting her off. Or himself? He does not know; it does not count.
Serena sighs. “We say things we don’t mean when we’re afraid and grief-stricken.” Does she mean herself - or the hidden things he, at eighteen, may have said?
Nick comments, “Or things we do me
an.”
“No. No, Nick. Oh God.”
They look away from each other, she at the table, he across to the bar, where a rich builder in fleece and joggy-bottoms is ordering champagne for himself and his mates. They have ripped someone off, it seems, from their loud asides, someone even more rich, though conceivably now less so.
Serena speaks in a new tone, crisply. “Anyway, it turns out none of us are invited to Laurie’s funeral. Dear Angela threw me out of her house a few days ago, or rather I left. She said I had corrupted him. Or we had, you, I, and originally Claudia. All of us. Laurence would have been an upright faithful guy, but we kept dragging him off to theatre parties or publishers do’s or whatever - as if Laurence would have gone anywhere like that unless he was the only centre of attention. I told her finally Laurence had never been faithful, to anyone or thing. But I added she had made it much easier for him, by being such a fucking deadly cow.” Serena stares at her own words, as if seeing them (in that handwriting?) scratched on the table top. “Christ, Nick. What am I?”
“You said. Grieving, afraid.”
“Yes. It was such a shock - I mean, Laurence. How can Laurence be - how can he be dead?” Now she gazes at Nick, her eyes pleading for an answer or a reprieve. As if Nick might suddenly say, “Oh, he isn’t, Reenie. It was all a joke. Like that trick he played on me when I was a kid.”
“What trick?” she would ask, wonderingly.
And then Nick would have to produce Laurence, maybe from a sack - hey presto! And Serena would probably kick both of them in the cobblers and run out screaming into the night.
Nick says instead, “I know. Laurence dying - it doesn’t seem credible.”
But it does, of course.
That is the really peculiar thing. Once you take it in, it only seems incredible they were ever alive, all those dead, those dead who probably never will awaken. The living make them up, imagine them, mothers, brothers, lovers. And are, in turn, imagined.