‘You see, I’d like to be sure, you know…’ The explanation or excuse or whatever it was somehow seemed irrelevant the moment he spoke.
‘Yes,’ she said again. Then she gave several brief, quick nods. ‘No, you’re quite right. I’m just as uncertain as you are, just as much of an idiot. I may have to go back to New York or somewhere in a couple of days.’
He did not respond. The statement had something irreversible about it. Then she added:
‘There’s a contract. I’d have to give notice.’
This impelled him to admit he had to find out something as well.
‘And when will that be?’
‘When I know who I am and what I’ve got to do.’
It sounded so lame and evasive she sat up abruptly and swung her legs to the floor. ‘You’ve got to work this out for yourself, I can see that! When you know who you are! I mean, what silly nonsense is that?’
Her indignation challenged him. He ran his hand lovingly down the curve of her naked spine. She held herself in readiness for his touch, breathing slowly.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘This is an out-of-work idiot who loves you. I really do. But…’
She wriggled away from him, stood up and pulled on the discarded dressing gown.
‘Stay where you are, you bourgeois filth!’ she instructed. ‘You’re out of work, you’ve got no clothes and you’ve twisted your ankle! You’re not capable of making a commitment, so you’d better stay where you are and have a good rest while I go and give myself a good wash.’
He closed his eyes. She padded out of the bedroom and he heard water running in the bathroom. He felt sleepy and relaxed.
6
Leaning on one elbow, she was looking down at him the instant he awoke. Her anxious, chestnut-bright eyes peered as if out of a narrow casement made by the twin tresses of auburn hair on either side of her face. She saw he was awake and gently smoothed her hand over his bare chest in an almost weightless, hugely sensual movement.
‘I’ve been thinking.’
‘What?’
‘Don’t, Joe, please.’
‘What?’
Her lips were pressed tightly together for a moment in trying to frame her next remark. ‘Why do you have to bother about that strange man?’
He tried to lift himself up. ‘Do you mean Ben? I promised him.’
‘Why, Joe, why?’
‘He’s my monster.’
‘I say Don’t,’ she said. ‘I’ve been thinking. After that thing on your wrist, don’t!’
His arm had been outstretched above the duvet while he slept. She had obviously seen its raw redness more closely than before. He raised it to see for himself and conceded he had better put something on it, the earlier plaster having come off.
‘You’re involved in something nasty, I know you are. Don’t!’ She made him look straight into her eyes. ‘Listen to me, Joe! Don’t!’
He smiled up at her in polite readiness to accept her warning, except that he knew he could not afford the luxury of giving up on Ben Leyton or on Leo Kamen, not to mention what it might do to his conscience and self-esteem.
‘I can handle it.’
‘I’m worried, that’s all. Please don’t go on with it.’
Something like marriage, he felt, loomed behind her words. He sat up quickly and kissed her on the lips. The bedclothes fell away to reveal her naked shoulders and bosom.
‘I can handle it, I mean it.’ He was not so much dismissing her advice as relishing its concern. ‘I’ve got to sort things out, that’s all. The first thing is…’ Catching her in a tight embrace, he pressed her against him and said softly into her left ear: ‘I don’t think there’ll be any problem. Ben’s a source. You said he’d got more work for me. I’ve got to find out what it is.’ Her hair tickled his cheek. ‘Please don’t worry.’
His whispered words were hardly any comfort to himself. She suddenly pushed away the remaining bedclothes in angry rejection of his attempt to appear strong and heroic. ‘Oh, no, I won’t worry. I know you’ll do whatever you like.’
He tried to justify himself. ‘You know if Ben came here last night it must be something urgent and I feel I’ve got to…’
‘All right, all right, I understand!’ She sprang out of the bed. ‘I’ll get you something for your wrist.’
She did. It was Inchbald Terrace, her world. She did what she wanted in it. Like sleeping with him and pulling on a wrap and banging about in the kitchen to find the Band-Aid for his wrist. After which she showered.
Conversation over breakfast was polite, unsubtle, practical, not even gifted with awkward eye contact or embarrassment after the intimacies of their night together, let alone with any leftover sweet talk. Both knew they were still on a learning curve of re-discovery. He recognised how keenly she wanted commitment from him. His creation, Ben, was therefore dangerous in his strangeness. He made commitment impossible, at least for the time being. Even her perfectly caring and understandable query about his ankle seemed to be a kind of reproach when he first heard it, except that she surprised him by putting down her piece of toast the moment she saw his reaction.
‘I care, I really do care, Joe.’
He felt off-kilter. ‘I know, I know…’
‘I don’t think you know how much.’
‘I care, too. I mean it. Just let me keep my promise.’
She bit into her toast, grinning as she did so and slowly shaking her head. ‘No, you mustn’t let the monster down.’
‘I won’t let him down,’ he assured her and added in an awkward tone of voice, almost unemotionally: ‘And I won’t let you down.’
At that she burst out laughing. ‘Oh, we won’t let each other down! Of course we won’t!’
He heard the sudden increased whirring of a milk float out front as it moved off and footsteps from the room above that signalled the start of further, louder footsteps as the neighbour from the flat above began descending the metal fire escape. It had been too soon. They had wanted each other, but that much commitment wasn’t enough. He knew he should admit he had to some extent taken advantage of her by supposing that lovemaking would somehow banish their separate worries. Perhaps he shouldn’t have come to Inchbald Terrace at all.
She poured him coffee. ‘I must be going. You-Know-Who will have to know. Shall I tell him?’
‘Tell him what?’
‘About the people from Scythian Gold. About that man called Ollie and the stuff on your laptop. And what’s happened to you.’
‘Why should he need to know?’
‘Well, you were asked, weren’t you? You know what I mean.’
He knew very well what she meant. The arrangement when he joined RGD had involved a briefing of sorts. Yes, the You-Know-Who had asked him to report. The booming voice that had boomed its way through corridors of power and international conferences, earning its owner in the process a reputation for prescience and diplomatic legerdemain in conducting all manner of difficult negotiations, had boomed at him: ‘On a voluntary basis, on a voluntary basis,’ and Joe had respected the large, well-shaped face and intimidating eyes of You-Know-Who especially when, in confiding intimacies in defence of whatever related most pertinently to national interests, the voice became a work of sultry sotto voce art exuding a right royal authority in its controlled sovereign range and resonance.
‘You-Know-Who will be grateful,’ she added.
He grinned at her. Any reluctance seemed not only churlish, but silly. The concerned look on her face was genuine. A short silence was filled by the simultaneous sound of a distant train and a heavy vehicle passing along the road out front that caused a windowpane to rattle faintly. Then she asked:
‘You’re not in too deep, are you?’
‘No, no.’ He gave a brief dismissive wave. ‘It’s not that. Not too deep. Very shallow, in fact.’ He pulled at the lobe of his right ear, a habit of his since boyhood. ‘Last night, after I was dumped, I was sure I was a patsy, right in the middle between Leo and
the world of commerce, on the one side, and that ideological high priest, on the other, with his talk about Old Believers and their branding iron. I’m being paid blood money by one and being branded by the other. And for what? For a letter that makes no sense. And maybe isn’t genuine at all. Or maybe it isn’t worth a Russian oligarch’s money and that’s what makes it so interesting. Which is why I’d like you to keep this, if you would. Please.’ He held out the thumbnail-size stick. ‘I’ve coded it.’
‘That’s the stuff about birds, is it?’
‘Yes. Just keep it safe, please.’
She smirked. ‘Will do, James Bond.’
‘Tell M if you like,’ he said. ‘Moneypenny.’
‘Fool!’ she said, laughing again.
They kissed goodbye. Awkwardnesses vanished into pools of quiet as the door of her flat closed. From the sitting room window he saw her dance out into a scattered procession of other people busily walking station-wards. Children were already streaming towards school along paths across the area of parkland and vehicles were steadily going along the road both ways, providing successive little billowings of sound like steel balls running smoothly into holes in the morning’s quiet. It was a normal autumnal morning, grey with low cloud. No sun yet. No rain.
He got Ben’s message out of the pocket of his already dried jacket, carefully unfolded it and looked again at the little row of words. They would form a code, because that was the way Ben worked. Usually he used Russian words, but this use of English words made the whole thing seem a quite plain, ordinary invitation or instruction:
WE ARE TO EXPECT RETURN LATE ON OVER TWELVE TO SO-ON. SEG.
It took only a moment or so for the simple code to become clear. The first letters of each word were the clue. Then, if there was a repetition of letters or an obvious rhyme or some equivalent signature, this might well authenticate the message and indicate a time or a date or a destination. All of which was there, he recognised at a glance. The noise of work being done in the flat below interrupted his thoughts for a moment until, in a dramatic flash, he saw the likely meaning. It was too obvious, too childish! The childishness, though, was a good disguise.
The signature was LATE ON and the instruction was to buy a return ticket. He could tell where from, but the destination was unclear. He searched out Jenny’s laptop, opened it and found the South West Train schedules. Remarkably there was a train time that fitted exactly. Midday.
He studied the message again. SEG, of course, was no initial or pet name, let alone an acronym. Knowing Ben’s love of secrecy, he held the sheet of paper up to the light. It did not entirely surprise him to find a single numeral had been carefully written into a corner of the paper in some kind of invisible ink. The numeral was the date that day. In other words, he had to act on the message today, the confirmation being in SEG. Segodnia. The urgency was understandable since, if Ben had tried to find him here the previous evening, he must have been very anxious to make contact. The code in the row of words would merely have been a kind of aide memoire to ensure Joe followed the instructions that Ben had hoped to give him in person. He had to assume he had guessed correctly.
If he had, he knew he might be in too deep. Maybe he was paranoid. On the way to his hotel by tube Jenny’s warnings about Ben throbbed at the back of his mind. He was left fretting with self-doubt. Once he had ascended to street level, he realized the silliness of his fears. If he was letting himself get in too deep, it was because he was keeping a promise. However silly the coded message might be, it was merely another kind of text in need of recreation in a different form, given life and meaning though a translator’s sullen art. He had to act on the coded message, if only to prove his own competence. He was on a swift, smooth and unstoppable escalator of events dictated by Ben Leyton. He had to follow it because he knew very little of value occurred in life by jumping off escalators or deliberately running against their flow.
The translator knows this better than anyone. He is at best the author of a very good replica, always following the escalating text. He is never God, he only produces a very good copy. And it is an honourable and honest vocation in the service of greater human understanding. It was largely Joe’s reason for being as he was. It was his reason for making this impromptu journey to an Oz that certainly had no Wizard, unless he was prepared to think of Ben as able to change his life with some unpredictable password.
After leaving his hotel room, he bought a ticket, gave himself time to find a window seat and let the train take charge of his supposed destiny. By half way on his journey he had eaten, dozed and now sat facing a bank of empty seats opposite and a table displaying two empty sandwich packs, orange peel and a can of beer. The blue and green of the upholstery vaguely resembled kilt patterning and looked reasonably smart save for the slight darkening on the curved headrests. On leaving Waterloo his carriage had not exactly been full. Approaching its destination the occupants had thinned to a party of men with kit bags and hand luggage who talked loudly to each other and, farther down the carriage, several women who seemed to laugh from time to time. He was not close enough to overhear any conversation. One female voice spoke at length into a mobile phone in a language unknown to him and two seats forward a male voice conducted a lengthy one-sided discussion on a business matter. Once or twice a man in a blue raincoat passed along the carriage and several women with children. The general movement of passengers up and down the central aisle soon became so frequent he lost interest. He had vaguely contented himself with the assumption that Ben himself might have been on the train. In fact, there had been no sign of him. Then a loudspeaker voice began announcing the approach of their final stop. All passengers were thanked for travelling by South West Trains and reminded they should take all their belongings with them when they alighted.
At a somewhat dead time of the afternoon he left the station and looked round him. The smell of the sea filled his nostrils for the first time in several months due to a strong ocean breeze. It sent seagulls spinning against clouds above the rooftops. The scene was urban. Docks, passenger terminals and the promise of exotic climes were no doubt close-by, but he was alien to it all and redundant. He had no idea what he was expected to do. Taxis pulled up, passengers got out. Sudden sunlight sparked gleams of high-gloss paintwork off car roofs and shop windows and endowed everything, especially the already copper tints of leaves, with an appearance of technicolor novelty and brilliance. He stood in a small pedestrian precinct beginning to feel a right idiot. It crossed his mind to do the correct idiotic thing and start shouting ‘Ben Leyton, where the hell are you?’ He didn’t. He leaned as comfortably and conspicuously as possible against a low concrete wall.
He watched two young men talking beside the open back doors of a British Gas van. There it was, his metier! Russian gas! The very idea was ridiculous, but it reminded him of being attacked after the lunch at Scythian Gold. Now, in this open-air pedestrian space, what had happened seemed so distant and unreal he could scarcely make himself think about it in detail, except that the ache in his shoulder revived and he instantly put his right hand down to feel the mark on his left wrist now hidden by Jenny’s Band-Aid and his wristwatch. As he did so he felt his raincoat being tugged from behind.
‘For Uncle Ben?’
It was a child’s small voice. He looked round and there was a girl of about six or seven, he supposed, blue-eyed, round-faced, with hair drawn back under a blue woollen cap. She was peering up at him without fear, rather commandingly in fact, and her bright red lips were parted in a look of total certainty that she had just identified Father Christmas. She repeated her question.
He nodded.
‘Please,’ she said and pulled his coat. At the same moment he saw her glance back. A woman standing some distance away had obviously been watching. The girl meanwhile kept a firm hold on his coat. She marched him across the precinct. When he tried asking her what her name was and where she was taking him, she simply went on pulling him along, only looking up at him from time
to time with her startling large blue eyes. They turned a corner and she pulled him along more vigorously still, almost at a run. He saw a short way ahead of them the woman who had been watching. She was now standing beside a BMW in a small parking area with both nearside doors held open. The girl jumped into the back of the car instantly and Joe was waved into the front seat.
‘It is for Ben, isn’t it?’
He agreed. In a moment she was beside him in the driver’s seat, small, bright-eyed, smartly dressed, putting on gold-rimmed tinted spectacles.
‘Sorry we kept you waiting. I’m Gloria Billington. You’re Mr Richter, I believe.’
He admitted it. She had the car moving almost the instant her seatbelt was clicked into place.
‘Dolly, are you all right?’
‘Yes, Mummy.’
‘Belt on?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good girl. I thought it must’ve been you.’ Gloria Billington began to ease away from the curb.
‘He was by a wall,’ Dolly said.
‘Yes, I thought it was you leaning against that wall. Ben wouldn’t come himself. Did you know we were on the train?’
‘No. So you mean…’
He looked at her. What struck him was the evidence of wealth in her clothes and in the smartness of the large BMW. There was a further hallmarking provided by an expensive and musky perfume. She looked every inch English and well-heeled and she drove with an almost jeering nonchalance as though the commonplace suburban streets through which she went deserved the kind of disdain that her driving showed for them.
‘So you mean you were on the train all the time?’
‘Dolly and I were on the train.’
He heaved a sigh. Marvellous! he told himself. ‘Where are you taking me?’
‘Never mind. You’ll know soon enough.’
‘And why isn’t Dolly at school?’
He noticed her lips tighten, as he’d expected. His question had been designed to provoke. She did not take her eyes off the road.
‘I thought the trip to London would be a nice change for her. She’s not been well recently. Anyhow, I was rather hoping you wouldn’t turn up at all. Then we could’ve stayed in London much longer.’
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