The bush did not completely hide him. From where he stood he could see the mansion block quite clearly through the fret of leaves, and in the gathering dark was glad to note lights coming on above the doors. But the pavement in front of him, the road beyond, and the path behind were getting busier now. Cars drove past him frequently, obstructing his view. Children were starting to appear, a good sign, with mothers or perhaps with nannies, walking home from school. None of the women looked anywhere but straight ahead; some of the children darted quick glances to the side. Even in the depth of his preoccupation it struck Stephen how sharp-eyed these children were, how full of curiosity and yet accepting of a man standing silently inside a hedge with rain seeping down his upturned collar. One small girl stopped and watched him solemnly, before giving him a little wave. He waved back, and put his finger to his lips in a gesture of complicity that made her smile, and without a word she ran off after her mother, who had paid no notice to the dawdling child.
His life had been empty of children since he was himself a child, and even then he was seldom in their company, except at school. Other people had younger brothers and sisters, nephews and nieces, little cousins. It must be a fine feeling, to hold a trusting child’s hand in yours. He would like to be a father.
Apart from the children and their chaperones, there were few pedestrians. Stephen reviewed all that he knew of Helen’s daily routine. She went to school by bus, he was almost sure, and the school was somewhere near Sloane Street. He had not seen any bus stops on the road between the station and the mansion block, and certainly no buses passed him. Therefore she must make the last part of her journey on foot, coming in all likelihood from an easterly direction.
He waits. A young woman on her own is what he waits for. A woman with two children unlocks the second of the doors on the façade; an older woman, grey-haired, comes out of the third door with a dog. The rain has eased but now the dark is deep. It is impossible to distinguish features clearly or even to make out figures unless by the glow of street lamps or the entrance lights.
Older children are arriving now, in clusters or alone. Cyclists spin past. A dog-walker under an umbrella marches briskly towards the park gate; the dog stops to inspect the waiting man. Stephen listens to the sounds: footfall, the rustle of twigs and leaves beneath his feet, voices, wheels swishing on the wet surface of the road, raindrops weeping off wet leaves. Invisible in the black branches of a tree a bird sings out with sudden and startling clarity, as if it had forgotten this was a winter afternoon, as if it wished to pierce the dark, to try the power of song against it. From the river to the north, the cry of gulls. And then, on the tarmac path behind him, the sound of rapid footsteps, purposeful, heels tapping, someone walking fast. Stephen swivels round as best he can while at the same time burrowing deeper into the thicket; the path is a few yards away and he is reasonably well concealed from it, but it is essential that he is not seen. Because the woman coming closer must be Helen.
He knows the sound of Helen’s footsteps. This woman walks as Helen walks: lightly, quickly, without flurry, as light on her slim feet as a gazelle. He should have known that she would walk home through the park. A woman like Helen would never choose a flinty, shit-smeared pavement, a loud exhaust-choked road, over a green path in a green shade, a soft way, a way through flowers and leaves. She walks in beauty, heralded by birdsong, she is silver, she is starlight in the night.
Stephen rages against the night. There are no lights on this stretch of the path. The woman is in a raincoat, pale-coloured, cream or fawn, a moth against the dark. She has a hat pulled down over her head, which hides her hair, and a scarf around her neck. She is carrying two bags; one slung across a shoulder, the other, seemingly heavy, in her hand. She is wearing boots. He strains his eyes but it is hard to see her clearly. He dare not make a movement to get closer – he scarcely dares to breathe lest his breath dislodge a leaf. It is vital that she should not be frightened by this watcher in the undergrowth, that she feels safe, that she is safe, that angels guard her so that she will not hurt her foot against a stone.
She walks past Stephen without a single glance. The whole world around her holds its breath to watch her go; the bright bird falls silent in salute. When she is gone a trace of her sweet scent lingers on the damp and heavy air.
His sixth sense is right. The woman leaves the main path to take the fork towards the gate and Stephen, safe from observation now, frantically pushes through branches of ivy as thick as a man’s wrist to get closer to the railings. On the pavement she halts for a passing car and then she crosses the road. Stephen can hear the thudding of his heart. On the other side she turns right towards the side-street; he tears and tramples the shrubbery about him to keep pace. Now he can see her more distinctly in the lamplight as she walks straight up to the side door of the mansion block and stops to search in her shoulder bag for keys. She unlocks the door. It is overwhelming; he forgets to note the time.
*
Pale figure in the twilight, swansgleam, moonkiss, pale and slender as an evening lily. All that evening Stephen cradled her image in his heart, hidden like a treasure known only to its owner, like a medallion worn next to the skin, like an icon that cannot be exposed for adoration until the world is sleeping and the solitary worshipper is shielded by the night. He was almost afraid to bare it even to his mind’s eye as he made his way home and once there did ordinary Thursday things. The thought of food was curiously distasteful, almost sacrilegious, as if he, like a man entrusted with a vision, should be fasting until dawn. But he was very thirsty and from the corner shop he bought an extra bottle of wine and a bottle of whisky.
His neighbourhood seemed strangely full of light. The pub, the betting shop and the funeral parlour glowed; even the chapel of rest next door to him had a low light showing through its curtains. He could hear the telephone ringing inside his flat while he was fitting his key into the lock but it stopped before he reached it. Unlikely to be his mother, on a Thursday. He supposed whoever it was would try again.
He was home much earlier than usual, having realised it would not be wise to defy Louise by returning to the office. The flat seemed different at that time. What do people do by themselves when it is dark but not yet evening, before they draw the curtains and hide themselves away, uncork the bottle of wine? He looked round the room, trying to see it as if for the first time, or as if through Helen’s eyes. There was not much in it: a sofa, covered in a nubbled, brownish weave, that Coralie had found in a sale and thought would be hard-wearing, three chairs and a table at which he could eat, if he did not always do so standing up, or with his plate on his lap in front of the television. A bookshelf. The carpets and the curtains were there when he took the lease of the flat; they are rather tired now, and a little drab. He ought to think about replacements. A coat of paint would spruce things up. Or simply a spring clean. There is a veil of dust on every surface. Certainly he would not wish her to see his bedroom in its present state. Paint is flaking off the window frames; he finds fragments of it, yellowish-white, like broken bits of shell, scattered on the floor. It is a long time since he remembered to wash the sheets. The truth is that he does not mind their sour smell, their greyness: they smell of him, familiar and consoling, they bear the marks of his own body, like a shroud. He chose the bed himself; a double. A patch of damp has drawn its contours on a wall. If he were not accustomed to the mingled smells of damp and sweat, he might worry about the added taint of mould.
What is Helen doing now, this moment? He will do the same: he will have a cup of tea, watch the television news, listen to his newly bought Schubert Impromptus; he has to make up quickly for knowledge yet unlearned. How can he have lived so long in ignorance of music? Helen will be sifting through her music and flexing her fingers, stroking one soft hand against the other, entwining them, before she starts to play. She will sit quietly at the piano for a while, her head bowed and her hands clasped as if in prayer. If you press your index finger hard against somebody else�
��s and rub the two together with the thumb and index finger of your free hand, you will not be able to tell which one is yours. Both the conjoined fingers will feel familiar and strange; moulded into one and borderless. Helen, I knew thee before the world began; in the silence of eternity we loved.
Later, on the television, Charles Ryder kisses Julia for the last time, before a fountain in a garden in the moonlight: do you remember the storm? Stephen in the shadows watching; Helen too. Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss. Her soft lips yielding, rose petals and the taste of honey. Oh, it is hard to be alone on a night like this, and the west wind blowing and the lady as remote as if there were an ocean in between and yet only a few miles away in measurable distance. Can I get there by candlelight? Yes, and back again.
It is half past ten. Helen is alone in a bedroom full of flowers and flinging her window wide onto the night. Seizing the chance for which it has been waiting, the wind at once will come storming in to wrap her in its wild embrace. And the moon and stars, struggling vainly to be free of the confines of their orbits, can only look on jealously while their rival runs his fingers through her hair. But she will brush away the trespasser and, leaning from the window, will look down at the dark expanse of parkland where, among the dead leaves and the roots of ivy, the small creatures of the night halt their rustlings to lift their beady eyes to her in adoration. Stephen opens a window too. The outside air is fraught with cold and city smell. Please, take a message to her, Stephen asks the wind.
Friday
On Wednesday night Helen was talking about young men on hunger strike, starving themselves for their quixotic cause. ‘I just can’t get them out of my mind,’ she said. ‘Those images, they haunt me.’ They were having a conversation over dinner, she, PHOENIX and a third, another man. There had been a telephone call from a call-box at 18.55: PHOENIX to his wife asking if he could bring Michael home with him. They had bumped into each other at the traffic lights – not literally, of course – had been to have a quick drink, really good to see him after too long, now he’s at a loose end, just broken up with that boyfriend whom we didn’t care for, he’d love to see Helen, would she mind? No, of course not, she’d love to see him too. They could pick something up on the way back if they needed more for supper? No, no, she’s going to make risotto; it will stretch.
When Jamie and the man called Michael arrived at the flat and Michael greeted Helen, Stephen recognised his voice. Out of context it was difficult to place. An actor familiar from film or television? Someone from the Institute? And then he remembered, and with that memory came a sharp reminder of a steep stone staircase, an archway open to the air, a wooden board with his own name inscribed on it in neat italics, other names, and that name: M. W. R. Bennet-Gilmour. Loud and confident voices shouting in the night, young men laughing loudly. Could they really have laughed that much, for so much of the time? Did they ever stop to listen to themselves? Did they ever cry? Their footsteps on the staircase as they ran up and down at speed, forever late, forever urgent, forever in a rush to get to pubs and theatres and parties. To the river, on summer mornings. Smell of sweat and games kit, smell of mud, of cold air, dampness, beer and marijuana.
Stephen sets the memory aside to concentrate on what the three are saying. Jamie, having not had time for lunch because things at work are hectic, says he’s ravenous; Michael, are you starving too? Michael, lightly, says that’s a word his mother did not let him use when he was a child if what he meant to say was he was hungry. She knew hunger, and she never forgot the things she saw in Poland during the war. And besides, there’s no one more likely to be a language purist than someone who learned English later on in life.
‘Jamie’s mother’s favourite adjective is “blood-stained”,’ Helen says.
‘But everybody says things like that,’ says Jamie. ‘We say we’re dying for a drink, could kill for a cigarette. Words are metaphors, you know.’
‘I think they should be truthful,’ Helen says. Stephen can hear the sound of cutlery, of metal against metal, as Helen is speaking; the three are in the kitchen area, at a little distance from the microphone – against the noise of cooking some of their words are lost. ‘It’s to die for,’ Michael says of something Stephen did not catch, and the other two laugh. Later, when they are eating, he goes on:
‘Everyone who survived the war has hang-ups about food. My mother, yes, of course. She knew that people really could kill for a crust of bread. But other people too, even those who didn’t have such a hellish time.’
‘Yes,’ Helen agrees, ‘my dad really used to hate it when we didn’t finish the food we had on our plates. He’d eat our left-overs himself rather than see them go to waste.’
‘It’s to do with wanting to be safe, isn’t it?’ Michael says. ‘You only feel safe when you know you won’t go hungry, when there’s always enough food.’
‘My father told me about a man, in fact his oldest chum, they’d been in the Army together, young subalterns in the war, you know; anyway, they shared a house together, with some other men. And one day, they were looking for this bloke and he’d vanished; they couldn’t find him anywhere, although they called and called for him. So, they were just about to leave, for the pub or whatever, without him, when somebody opened the airing cupboard, one of the ones that are actually the size of a small room, and there he was, hunched up on a slatted shelf, with a saucepan of potatoes. He’d hidden away to scoff them by himself.’
‘Raw?’
‘No, of course not. Boiled, I suppose.’
‘Poor devil. He must have been mortified when they caught him.’
‘My father found it comic,’ Jamie says.
‘I don’t think that sort of thing is funny at all,’ Helen demurs. ‘I’ll never forget, when I was a little girl, seeing an old woman sitting on a window ledge outside a shop, all by herself, eating a packet of butter. Rectangular and yellow, wrapped in silver foil. Her attention was completely focused on it; she was like a miser with her treasure, hungrily licking away. I thought it was the saddest thing I’d ever seen.’
‘Why sad?’
‘Because it was butter? Because she was old and on her own? Later I came to think that it was probably not butter but ice cream.’
‘Did that change the memory? Did it no longer seem so sad? When you realised she was simply an old biddy giving herself a little treat?’
‘No. Butter or ice cream, it didn’t change the way she was huddled over it, in her shabby winter coat, shielding it as if it might be stolen from her. Anyway, even a young and happy woman eating ice cream on her own would make me feel sad.’
‘That’s silly!’
‘Seagulls steal ice cream from children at the seaside.’
‘It’s a primal urge. The fear of starving is our oldest fear.’
‘Is that why hungers strikes are so disturbing? Because they show that for believers there is something even more important than that basic need?’
‘I can’t get them out of my mind. Those images …’
The talk goes on. Stephen, invisible fourth at the table, today’s man at the day-before-yesterday’s meal, listens carefully to every word. Bobby Sands, victims, heroes, the beauty of the hero, Bobby Sands the image of Christ, and Che Guevara, dying for a cause. To care enough about a cause to give your life for it? Any cause, you name it. Pro patria mori? Not us, not any more, no thank you.
‘To starve to death. Ah, how terrible. Would you know that the end was coming, or would you be unconscious long before you reached that stage?’
‘Like a prisoner on Death Row. Isn’t that the cruellest thing, to let a man know in advance the moment of his death? The key turning in the lock of the cell door at exactly ten to seven.’
‘And the saddest thing, the condemned man’s final meal.’
‘Steak and pizza, usually. And a Coke. Not what I’d choose. What would you choose, Helen?’
‘How could anybody want to eat, on the eve of death?’
It takes as lon
g to listen as the exchange itself took, protracted over drinks, risotto, cheese, more wine, and coffee, going on till nearly midnight. It was considerate of Michael Bennet-Gilmour to leave before the clock struck twelve, Stephen thinks, before this tape ran out and the new one began, with the inevitable hiatus. But, while Helen and Jamie are still talking, he is interrupted anyway, by Rollo Buckingham materialising through the long room’s permanent haze of cigarette smoke with yesterday’s report sheet in his hand.
‘Cube?’ says Stephen, forlornly.
‘Haven’t time. I’ve been in Wales all morning and I must get back tonight.’
‘Wales?’
‘Wales,’ Rollo says, impatiently. Naturally Rollo has other cases to investigate, about which Stephen does not know. In Stephen’s imagination Rollo thinks of nobody but PHOENIX. But in fact he knows the opposite is true: Rollo is a busy man; the Institute is at as great a risk of penetration as an ancient beam of wood is from the worm. Rollo does not have time for small talk now, or ever.
‘To get to the point,’ he says, ‘let’s be very careful what we say, although as everyone in here is wearing headphones, we’re as safe as anywhere, I guess.’
The Long Room Page 10