There was no answer except the buzzing. He saw the deep-blue wallpaper in the hallway, the dark passage lit at intervals by bars of light from open doorways along its length and, at the end, the door to the newly decorated bedroom. He supposed the flat had been left empty while its owner went out. Justifying himself with this excuse, he strode quickly down the passage, pushed open the door to the bedroom at the far end and was confronted by the unmade bed where he had slept, his pyjamas and some sheets of typing paper he had left on the table. His laptop, though, had gone. He searched about but couldn’t find it. Maybe it had been removed for safekeeping.
Seizing his pyjamas, he crept back along the passage, aware now of the amalgam of stale overnight smells in the flat. It meant, he thought, that Ronald Salisbury was perhaps still asleep. He glanced in the kitchen and bathroom; both were empty. The door to the principal bedroom stood open but a glance inside told him there was no one there. Peering into the little drawing room he saw very little because the curtains were still closed. He thought it was empty at first. Then his eye was caught by the sight of a couple of bare feet near the fireplace.
He crept in. They were Ronald Salisbury’s bare feet. He lay flat on his back dressed rather fancily in a red kimono belted at the waist. So he was dead drunk now, Joe told himself. He had tanked himself up very well indeed. That was the first impression. Looking a little closer, he saw his elderly neighbour was lying with one arm raised behind his head and the other flung to one side. He did not look drunk at all. He looked awkward, as if he had fallen awkwardly or tripped or someone had hit him. Then he saw his face was smeared with blood.
Blood seeped from his nose, from a wound to his mouth and one eye seemed to be no more than an enlarged blister. He had been hit more than once, violently. Joe sprang back. Then he did what first aid had taught him. He sought for a pulse. He could find none. He searched again. Panic made his own hand shake so much he could not be sure and there seemed to be no sign of breathing.
It meant, he thought, Ronald Salisbury was dead. He stood up straight. Too late for an ambulance. Too late for first aid. He had to think fast. He had to…
Then he knew he was being watched. Gazing straight at him in the room’s half-light, out of the dark frame of her portrait, with a fixed intensity that suggested love quite as much as the need to maintain a rigid pose, were the beautiful eyes of Ronald Salisbury’s mother. He had to…
The fast thinking told him this was what the boy had seen! But had he done it?
No. Someone much more violent and much stronger had done it.
Immediately he sensed his own guilt. His laptop had been stolen. But who would be blamed for it? On the instant he was reminded of the man called Harlow. Perhaps the phone call had been about this. Someone had been here, attacked Ronald Salisbury, searched the flat, pinched the laptop, maybe at the very same time Harlow had been speaking to him in Silvester’s!
That’s what it was! Whatever happened, it also meant he would be the prime suspect! He was known to be violent. He could have done it!
Fast thinking told him that much. He also knew he had stopped making sense, had stopped thinking straight. Billy’d be bound to tell someone. He felt sure about that. The quicker he was out of here, the better. Then he heard once again the low buzzing. He realized what it was. It was the security alarm at the front door. He remembered Ronald Salisbury saying it was connected to a security firm. They would be coming any minute now.
He dashed down the stairs. With luck, he told himself, he probably could… Probably…
He went right down to the basement. The building was still silent. The door out to the back garden remained bolted. Moving the rusty bolts set up such a grating resonance he felt it might be heard out in Courtier Street. Finally the door swung open. He faced the area of tall wet grass that lay neatly in regularly alternating depressions where he had stepped earlier. No one had been there since. He was both shocked to see such telltale evidence and at the same time reassured by the fact that there was only one set of footprints. He found the Sainsbury bag where he had hidden it, checked that all the material was in it, thrust his pyjamas in as well, rebolted the door and started up out of the basement.
As he did so, he heard the front door close. It made the usual clangorous noise, succeeded by the sound of at least a pair of footsteps ascending the stairs. There were voices. He knew he had to take a chance. The alarm had finally brought the security men. So he glanced quickly round once he reached the hallway, took the one chance left to him and went out once again into Courtier Street, making sure the front door closed as softly as possible.
Suddenly there was the usual, discreet melodious summons and, despite hurrying, he saw Jenny was texting him. She had to say goodbye. Everything was ready for him if he wanted it. Kisses, kisses.
He would go to Inchbald Terrace. It seemed the only sensible thing to do.
12
He still had a key, so he let himself into her flat or ‘apartment.’ She always spoke of it in a mock up-market accent. Now her voice wasn’t there. The ‘apartment’ was silent. Inchbald Terrace was now as quiet as 17 Courtier Street. Cautious through uncertainty about his right to be there, he went almost gingerly on tiptoe from room to room. Jenny, as he might have expected, had left everything very tidy. The furniture in the faint dusk of drawn curtains and all she had arranged for her own comfort left him feeling he was resented by its very neatness.
Then there was the envelope with his name on it. The hastily written message inside told him please to look after everything. ‘M’ would be going up to Edinburgh, so her downstairs, newly renovated flat would be empty as well and they would be glad if he could keep an eye on everything.
‘Sorry, but when You-Know-Who says jump, I have to. All I can tell you is it’s not NY this time. I’ll get in touch just as soon as there’s clearance. 10 days!!! I’ve made up a bed in the spare room and there’s stuff in the fridge. Keep a happy home. Love you. J. xxx’
More than enough had been done to meet his needs, he knew that. Maybe absence would make the heart grow fonder, but he also knew just as clearly that her apartment was no longer a building site where he could come and go in a supervisory way. It was hers, her place and he was now at best a freeloader or maybe just an intruder. He could consider her apartment a refuge where he might be safe for a day or two, though its very tidiness emphasized her absence. Or he could simply regard himself as caretaker or guardian of hers and her mother’s property while they were away.
He knew a gap had opened. It was unspoken, of course. He had not even put it into words for his own sake. It was partly because his role in her life was beginning to be more than usually peripheral. He was a minder, a hanger-on, an occasional lover, never a partner. The very fact of being invited to ‘keep a happy home’ in Inchbald Terrace seemed so ironic it tended to prove the point.
The gap was due of course to the gap in his career prospects. It was as if, by contract, her own successful career gave her a kind of right to patronize him. Silly. A whingeing, self-pitying, craven idea. It rankled. It left a footprint of resentment on his hopes for his stay. It so annoyed him he felt the very emptiness of the flat was a relief best experienced in the oddly silent little bedroom at the back of the house, once a pantry and now double-glazed, where he drew back the curtains and settled himself into a large black leather armchair which he knew Jenny always used when she worked at her computer.
The armchair had been issued to her, she had told him, by someone in management on the understanding that it would only be used ‘in a work environment’ and could be returned to the pool of office furniture when needed. It was so comfortable in its capacious embrace of soft leather and ergonomic design that its unofficial status among Jenny’s things gave him a sense of entitlement to it. He felt welcomed by it as he seated himself, although what really preoccupied him was the sight of the trains at the end of the garden going silently along the embankment.
After staring at them for some mi
nutes as if they were the vague scenery to a daydream, he found panic itself beginning to pressure him to make up his mind. Would the police trace him, for example? If Ronald Salisbury had been killed, how long would he be safe here? And did he want to be safe, did he want to hide? If, again, as he suspected, the Old Believers were involved, that could implicate him even more directly. On top of which was the commitment to Ben in the shape of the little memory stick in his trouser pocket.
Of course he should do what he had promised. Jenny’s printer and laptop were ready and waiting. The pressure of the panic remained, naturally, but ‘secrecy and speed’ had to be uppermost. Then there came the questions. Would this little ex-pantry of a room, so cell-like he could hardly avoid feeling imprisoned in it, really be the place to translate the next ‘Dear Mr Richter’ letter? How safe would it be? In any case, did he really want to involve himself any longer? The earlier letter had left him utterly bewildered by its candour, not to speak of its relevance. If the next letter were the same, why on earth should he have to have his eye pressed to the keyhole of another’s intimate private life?
He decided. He leapt out of the chair, locked the flat and went down the whole length of Inchbald Terrace to a Tesco Extra store where he bought two screw-top bottles of New Zealand wine. It was a postponement, that’s all. On returning to the little room and the comfortable chair, the effort of reaching any kind of decision on priorities, let alone taking the memory stick out of his trouser pocket, could only be dispelled by pouring himself a large glassful. He sipped. Maybe at some point his eyes closed. He fell into a daydream.
He remembered what his father had said to him once when he had gone to the Wimbledon house. ‘All my life’s been regulated. It’s been arranged, my life has. Did you know that, Joe, old boy?’ ‘Joe, old boy.’ The awkward phrase intended as a mark of paternal affection never failed to have precisely the opposite effect. Rather unthinkingly Joe said he didn’t know. Latterly his father had tended to use the phrase mostly after having had a good deal to drink. ‘My own father, bless him, though I never really knew him – think of that, never knowing your own father! – he regulated, you know, regulated everything, everything. From a distance, regulated everything from a distance.’ Joe remembered the slurred, repetitious speech, but he had paid little attention to the drunken words. He had grown used to this kind of talk from his father at the height of the quarrels with his mother. One thing only he knew for sure: he had never known any grandfather, so it never surprised him that his father should claim he really never knew his own father. ‘Just think of it, old boy, someone who turned up only once at my wedding and claimed – claimed, mind you, that’s all, – he claimed to be my father! It’s what I was told. Tall, good-looking man. But Mother, your grandmother, she wouldn’t let him near me. I saw him drive off. A lot later she admitted she should’ve told me. She should’ve been honest and told me he regulated everything. From a distance, regulated my life and everything from a distance.’ But Joe never asked him what all this meant. He wanted to keep his own distance from it, a distance, that is to say, as real, as immediate, as of the moment as the trains still doing their slow, noiseless snaking along the embankment, though now with a kind of regular urgency, it seemed, in anticipation of some special purpose.
Their movements challenged him. He would do what he had to do. He made himself strong coffee in Jenny’s brand-new kitchen and a bacon sandwich, found crackers, cheese and chocolate, ate, yawned and acted. He stuck the memory stick in her laptop and up came the Cyrillic script. He was back at what he knew he should be doing, one word after another crawling on to the adjoining screen just like the increasingly busy trains.
Dear Mr Richter,
I scarcely know how to apologise so that it should seem as sincere and heartfelt as I want it to be. All I have thought about since the letter I sent you is how embarrassed you must be by my candour. I am ashamed at what I described. I can only excuse myself by saying I have been under such pressure since dear Mother’s death that I have been a little out of my mind.
You were so stern with me about feelings, weren’t you, during our English lesson last week. For me it is always my feelings that are the one guarantee of life itself. Where would we be if we did not feel? My Mother always insisted we should be guided by our feelings, not of course for ourselves but for others. Their needs were the star that would lead us ultimately to the cradle of God’s being. It was one of her sayings.
I have been grieving. I know now that to lose a parent or a sibling or someone very close is to feel more than a loss, it is to have some part of the person you are yourself made smaller and lessened by knowing you cannot ever be sure of saying ‘Oh, I’ll tell you next time we meet’ or ‘I’d love to know what happened’ or anything at all, because THAT PART of you has gone and all you’re left with is the absolute certainty that you should have been more caring and more loving and more aware how precious that part was and how precious it would always be.
Conscience, of course. But my conscience is not bad, however keenly I feel the loss of Mother and grieve over the absence of what was our life, Mother’s and mine. No, part of it – and I know how silly and complicated this must sound to you – is because my infatuation with G, the passion I felt for him, coming so soon after Mother’s death, was at heart a compensation, although I know it was temptation too. I was tempted. I admit it. I knew it was wrong. But I also knew I HAD TO DO IT! I HAD TO BE TEMPTED! You will probably not be able to understand this. I also couldn’t at the time, which was why I became so nervy and wretched and agreed to have that holiday in Brittany with my aunt.
I am telling you the truth. You said you wanted a true account of what happened. Then I must tell you that G left yesterday. Father had refused to talk to him for a week. I had been with him to a room he had rented in Elfort Road (you must know how close that is). He pretended it was going to be his surgery, but I knew he could not afford to open a surgery so close to father’s. When father heard of it he quite lost his temper, as I think he was entitled to, but G stubbornly insisted he deserved better treatment and complained he was never allowed to see any of the richer patients. Poor G, he is always so muddle-headed in his socialism.
I longed for him simply to put aside his pride for a moment and say how sorry he was. I longed for that as much as I longed for the strong, smooth feel of his body against my own softness. I longed for his arms to hold me as they had done when we first made love in that hotel room beside the sea. I know he had opened me to that yearning. I cannot deny any longer the sensuality of my own nature. But now I know I need a husband and a father for my child.
G pretends it is no business of his. He says he cannot afford the bourgeois luxury of fatherhood at present. I was stern with him. I would not allow him to do more than kiss my hand. Though I longed for his embraces and his love, I was adamant in my refusal of him. I have been trying, you see, to persuade myself that there will be someone else who will gladly want me as a wife and mother. Until then I will try to curb all my wanton feelings.
Two evenings ago G spoke to me in the front parlour. He looked ill, but his voice was strong. He told me he should not have made love to me. I tried to answer it was nothing of the kind, but suddenly I couldn’t think what to say. He was emphatic that it was seduction and a mistake or, perhaps worse, a sin for which he would receive the due reward of divine punishment. He would not let me interrupt him as he spoke, so I listened to him with my hands folded in my lap and my head lowered
He said he had fallen in love with me, that he had grown to recognise this fact over the past six weeks since the ending of what he called the ‘escapade’ and the holiday in Brittany. He said he did not expect me to believe him and he most certainly did not expect me to share or reciprocate his feelings. He declared I would always be the dearest and most precious experience in his life. No other woman, he said, would ever replace me in his heart. My presence had become a torment of love and desire for him that could only be ended by his departur
e. He wanted me to understand that, if he had had it in his own nature, he would have asked me to be his wife, but it was not in his nature to submit to such a bourgeois convention as marriage. He then kissed me on the head and abruptly left the room. I stared ahead of me and saw through the chintz curtains the people moving in the street and the carriages going by. For some reason I could think of nothing at all. I searched myself for emotions and found no more than an emptiness filled with the slow deep ticktock of the grandfather clock in the corner. There had been nothing shocking in what he had said, nothing to surprise me and very little to sadden me. I found myself so much in control of my feelings that they had become non-existent. I felt totally empty.
A cab came for him this morning. Father grumpily emerged from his room next the surgery, shook hands with G, said a few formal words of thanks to him for his work as a partner, wished him success and then went back into his room, shutting the door firmly. G was disconcerted but tried not to show it. His face was drawn and there was a greyness of fatigue beneath his handsome eyes. Otherwise he looked as trim and self-confident as always. He kissed me lightly on the cheek and said: ‘Goodbye, Miss…’ and the excessive politeness of it all, so clearly due to the presence of Amy and Dorothy, suddenly seemed so wretched and unreal that I flung myself at him and kissed him passionately in return, not caring who saw it. He allowed himself to hold me close for one moment. I caught the fragrance of soap from his cheeks and the warmth of his body that I had once loved so much. Then he let go of me. I stood back. He said he was going to a post promised to him in California. I could hardly believe it. The news meant he was going as far away as possible. He knew it. So he kept his eyes away from me, jumped in the cab, tapped the roof with his stick and immediately was jerked away, right out of my life.
Mr Frankenstein Page 15