Mr Frankenstein
Page 16
I know now that he is gone forever. The single solace left me is the belief that I am stronger, more of a woman, from having known him. Father says I am now responsible enough to have the legacy, because my conduct in breaking off the relationship with G has proved it. I take no pride in having done what must seem sensible and adult. Before, when I was in some many ways a girl, not a woman, I had an innocent confidence in the ways of the world. I believed then in the homely, ordinary, unselfish relations that Mother always extolled as the best means of knowing people and helping them.
She was loved by dozens of people in the neighbourhood. In her fashion she was an angel, though you will not believe such a thing, I know that. Day after day she went visiting; day after day she received visits from those in need, the sick, the unfortunate, the downtrodden. Hers was not a charity provided for the alleviation of distress. It was love given to all who suffered. In that world of Mother’s universal love I was innocently sure I knew the meaning of happiness. Now I know all happiness, like every aspect of human experience, is a forever-changing skein that becomes woven into our lives more by accident than by design. Once it is there we must let it follow its patternless way from one day to the next. We must not break it. I know that I can never break away from the happiness of Mother’s love. I will love my child as Mother loved me, with that forgiving, nurturing love she showed to all who suffered and sought her help…
But now Mr R tells me you are going to Switzerland. Oh, no, this is too much! You know what it means, don’t you? It means I will be branded as an adulteress! I will be a pariah! The only chance of escape will be to use the legacy…
Perhaps I will be free now to follow dear G. But you MUST PROMISE never to let anyone see any part of what I have written to you! Never! YOU MUST PROMISE!
Joe instantly saved his translation to the USB stick. What on earth did it mean? He was more certain than ever that the original had been in English. The only name, after all, was Elfort Road and a London street map confirmed there was an Elfort Road, N5, in Highbury. That reference and the reference to Victoria Station in the earlier section were convincing enough evidence of the text’s English origin. So what conclusion could he reach?
It was in Russian, so the addressee must have been Russian. Exactly what the connection was between the diarist and the addressee, whether the relationship went beyond that of teacher and pupil, whether the diarist’s profession of love had some specific object, or – more particularly– whether ‘my child’ referred to G or the addressee, remained enigmatic and hidden. But a promise had been broken, that was for sure, otherwise he, Joe Richter, wouldn’t have been able to translate the letter, let alone be puzzled by its provenance or its meaning.
The memory stick was still in the computer. Keep faith, he told himself. Having finished one bottle of wine during the translation, he opened the other one and contemplated what still had to be done. Apart from the two letters addressed to Dear Mr Richter, page after page of entries followed with details of meals, etc., all, it seemed, related to the domestic arrangements of running a household for her father. No mention was made of an addressee. Although something of a jumble, it all seemed impersonal and business-like, with many capital letters and numbers suggesting initials and dates. Why were they there? It was a puzzle he felt too tired to concentrate on.
So he sipped more wine and leaned back in the black leather armchair. Again he watched the trains. Suddenly the musical phrase recurred. His smartphone had come to life.
The police! No, he saw it wasn’t. He cleared his throat, about to speak. Then Billy’s voice exploded next to his ear.
‘Uncle Ronnie, he’s… he’s…’ A long pause. ‘Is that?’
‘What?’
‘Is that… Oh, I forgot your name. Rich…’
‘Richter. Joe Richter.’
‘Oh, yes, Joe.’
‘That’s Billy, isn’t it? Your uncle’s what?’
‘He’s out of A&E. He’s in a nearby ward. Look, I didn’t do it! I didn’t hit him! It was someone looking for you! That’s what he says. He says it was your laptop. He says he knows it wasn’t you.’
‘I know it wasn’t me. Who was it?’
‘Dunno. He got hit. Seriously bad cuts to his face. Really seriously bad. And a bruised rib. And concussion. He’s in St Thomas’s now. Well, the police want to talk to you is what they say. So where are you?’
‘I’m…’
‘Where are you?’
So long as they didn’t know where I am, he thought, I can’t be found and I can’t be talked to, and so long as I can’t be talked to I won’t have to explain or make excuses. And so long as I’m thinking like this I’m like the boxes of trains going slowly backwards and forwards along the embankment I can see through the window. They go in silent slow motion backwards and forwards in irregular tides, sometimes two, three, four at a time, sometimes singly, and then there may be minutes when all the movements stops, nothing happens, life seems to have ended until quietly, as if asserting itself, a new box shape snakes along the horizon line of the embankment from one side to the other.
‘I’m not available.’
It was silly of him to say it. He snapped off the phone. Enough said.
Whatever time it was, morning or afternoon, he couldn’t tell. Relief as much as exhaustion weighed down his eyelids. There was no way he could keep his head upright to watch the trains or read more text. He let the soft, intoxicating inducements of the wine slowly overwhelm him.
13
One word printed on it in Cyrillic:
ZHULIK
He stumbled to his feet and stared at it as if it were a sign of plague.
‘I didn’t know what it meant,’ she was saying.
‘Yes, I can see…’
‘Does it mean something serious? I notice you’re looking…’
‘No, I’m a bit… you know…’
‘Well, I think it’s a very strange thing to stick on a door.’
Her voice cut the air sharply in a mixture of reproach and disgust. He took the slip of paper from her. The word had been obviously written quickly with a ballpoint pen.
‘You see, it means I’m known.’
Why the hell did he say that? He blinked and tried to appear fully conscious. This woman shouldn’t be here, he insisted to himself, standing here in this room while he was, er, you know, a bit hung-over. And she’d woken him up!
‘Yes, I know. I think you’ve been here since yesterday, haven’t you?’
‘I’ve been here since yesterday?’
‘You’re Joe, aren’t you?’
‘Yes, I am.’ He guessed she was Jenny’s mother though he had never met her before. ‘You mean I’ve been here since yesterday?’
‘Yes, you came yesterday. I found you fast asleep in here last night. In that same black leather chair. You’d left the desk light on.’
She spoke as if he was a child who had left toys on the floor. It was unbelievable. Worse, it was shameful. He could not have been asleep for that long. But the second bottle was there at his feet, empty, and Jenny’s mother was there right in front of him, dressed in a blue overcoat, in the same small room overlooking the back garden. He glanced at his wristwatch. It showed him 8.30 a.m.
‘You mean you came in and I was asleep…’
‘Don’t look so astonished! Jenny thought you’d probably be coming, but I didn’t know if you were here or not. I came in to see if everything was all right. I’ve got a key.’
She held it up. Jenny’s mother was in her late fifties, handsome, round-faced with neat, powdered features, discreetly bright lipstick and smartly coiffured grey hair. Shrewd blue eyes confronted him as she smiled more out of politeness than pleasure in a studied, uncertain way as if his face was to be scrutinised as closely as she might study her own in a mirror. Fleetingly, if through an overlay of age, he saw Jenny look at him, only for the image to vanish as her mother pursed her lips and began speaking again in her strong, authoritative voice.
She was rather rudely interrupted by a shrill trumpet voluntary coming from inside her handbag. She fished out a mobile phone.
‘Oh, do excuse me, it’s probably…’ She held the instrument up close to her ear so abruptly its casing gave a small click as it struck a pearl earring. ‘Hello, yes?… You’re just outside… Oh, yes, good… What?… Oh, yes, just one suitcase… No, nothing else… Oh, that’s very kind of you, yes, yes, I’m ready, I’ll be there.’ She closed the phone, replaced it in her handbag and smiled affirmatively by way of apology. ‘My taxi’s arrived and the suitcase is out in the hall. I must be off. I’ll be away a week. Here’s the key and this is the address up in Edinburgh. It’s been so nice meeting you. So sorry it couldn’t be longer.’
She gave the brief wave of a gloved hand followed by a blown kiss and that was that. Her abruptness may not have been intentional, but the sound of her hurried footfalls out in the passage and then voices from the hall as she no doubt spoke to her taxi driver seemed to suggest such sharp disapproval that he felt reprimanded and the combination of seeing the empty bottle and hearing the front door bang shut confirmed it for him. She had caught him out. Ashamed by the evidence of his long sleep, he had obviously been hung-over and she had been too polite to mention it. He stared down for a moment at her handwritten note on the tabletop along with the key to her flat and clicked his tongue.
Oh, hell!
And then it didn’t matter. What mattered was what she had left him with earlier, what he was still holding. This time, looking down, his heart began pounding. He felt beads of sweat break out on his forehead.
So they knew! He had been followed! All his movements had been known! He was overtaken by an access of panic so sudden he had to stand stock still for a couple of minutes to try to regain a sense of proportion.
It was then nothing but silence. It came in like a sea. It filled the flat. No sound came from the road out front or the railway embankment at the back. No sound from the basement flat or the flat above. Alone there in that sea of silence the fright came to him like an approaching iceberg, as if the old high-ceilinged Edwardian room seemed ready to crush him beneath its weight as a cheat, an intruder, an ungrateful freeloader in Jenny’s love life and the tidiness of her private world. The feeling was exaggerated by the way the sound of his fingers tearing up the slip of paper had the ferocity of a scream.
Disbelief came first. No, he wasn’t going to believe it! The Russian word screamed as it was torn to bits. Then there was suddenly no more silence. The noise of vehicles passing along the road out front reverberated through Inchbald Terrace along with the distant, spiky shrieks of children’s voices and laughter from the parkland out front and somewhere or other the sound of a police or ambulance siren.
CHEAT
He stripped off his wristwatch. The Band-Aid was superfluous now because the mark was no longer livid. He was reminded briefly of what Ben had said, the threat it posed, but he so resented the violation implied by the mark on his skin that his overwhelming reaction was anger against himself for having taken fright at seeing the Russian word and, worse, for having slept so long. The anger redoubled his determination.
As for Ben’s talk of a threat, what the hell did that mean? Why was he being branded a cheat? It was nonsense. Was translating a form of cheating? No! And he knew enough not to let obscure threats frighten him, let alone deter him from completing the translation work. He would finish it, what he had started, with due ‘secrecy and speed’, as Ben had insisted, despite the increasing sense that it was all trivial stuff, or what looked like trivial stuff, the lists of foodstuffs, the daily menus, with so many shorthand entries and apparent acronyms such as MD and IAR, not to mention the G that had been so prominent in the letters, sometimes combined with RG. But P was there often enough (obviously Papa) accompanied by little exclamation marks and such statements as ‘P doesn’t know,’ ‘P objects,’ ‘I can’t tell P.’ Finally, as an almost daily occurrence there were lists of initials followed by numerals, and he assumed these must refer to her ‘pupils’ and the times she had fixed for their language lessons.
The skim reading of the Russian text determined him. He did what he had to do – he had to shave, run a bath, wash away any hangover, recover from the night’s overlong sleep, dress, make breakfast. He did all these things and he knew by the end of it he couldn’t stay much longer in Jenny’s flat. He couldn’t risk their surveillance, their potential for violence. The determination began to be replaced by frustration. He once again sat in the black leather chair and stared out at the back garden thinking about why. Why was he here? Why was he exhausting himself with this translation? Why was all this stuff happening to him?
Time drifted by. No answers came to him. He refused to look at his watch. He refused to be reminded of the brand on his wrist. All he stared at was bright autumn sunlight flashing in the windows of passing trains like so many eyes winking at him. Maybe they knew he was there, maybe they watched him just as he watched them. Their saucy little flashes of light, though, were everywhere. They winked at him from the wet foliage of the trees and shrubs and the strip of grass now free of building materials where Ben had stepped past him in the darkness only a few nights before. None of all the little flashes of light gave him any answers.
Suddenly he remembered his smartphone. It had been switched off. He looked at the voice mail. There it was, a voice, not Jenny’s:
‘Hello Frankenstein. Your monster needs you. Please help. Please come. And please bring the material. I must see you. I’ll be waiting. Please.’
******
Emily Boscombe opened the front door and said his grandmother was asleep.
‘Isn’t it a bit late, Mr Joseph? It’s nice to see you again, but you were only here a short while ago. Only a few days ago, wasn’t it? What’s wrong?’
Nothing, he admitted, the rain dripping on his hair as he stood at the front door. She was about to urge him to come in, but he said he just wanted to make sure the car was working. He hadn’t taken it out for two weeks. And hadn’t she said the next-door neighbour wanted to buy it?
‘Oh, yes, Mr Davis is interested. But it’s so late. And it’s raining quite hard.’
‘I meant to check it when I came last time. Now it’s getting dark it’ll be a good time to do it.’
It was lame, but not entirely surprising. He had abandoned his own car once he had left RGD and it was one of his self-appointed duties as a fixer for the parental home that he should look after the parental car garaged at the Wimbledon house. The keys were duly handed over. Emily Boscombe shook her head, blinked, muttered about it being silly to take the car out on such a night, but the sound of her mutterings soon merged into the sound of raindrops from overhanging trees resonating with a dull metallic drumming on the car roof as he turned the key in the ignition, gratefully felt the engine start, set the sat-nav and reversed down the short driveway. After all, he knew the car, he knew where he had to go. He drove the first few miles of suburban streets almost automatically. The swish of windscreen wipers and wet tyres seamlessly vied with engine noise to fill the car’s chill interior. By the time he reached the A3 everything hummed. He was warm. He was on his way.
He reckoned he’d be followed. Probably he’d been seen getting the bottles of wine. Probably he’d been followed to Waterloo. Probably they knew he’d be going out to Wimbledon. If the rear-view mirror showed him a blurred firework display of following headlights, somewhere in that blur he imagined there’d be watching eyes. Residual fears caused attacks of shivering as he let the idea take hold, although he knew it was silly and suppressed it immediately by telling himself if he were branded a cheat, he’d behave like a cheat, meaning he
’d cheat his supposed followers, cheat them, cheat the watching eyes. He’d cheat them of a much more startling truth. Maybe he was a Frankenstein who created a monster but this monster needed protecting. By responding to that final ‘Please’ in the voice mail, he was driving to the rescue. He was rescuing what Ben needed, that urgent need for ‘secrecy and speed,’ and at the same time he was escaping from that responsibility for her sake.
Which is why he had cheated all day. He had translated everything, all the diary entries, etc., saved it all, deleted what remained of the original material and kept three things only – the little memory stick, the DNA phial and the sepia photo. Ben had insisted so firmly on the need for secrecy that he mulled over several likely scenarios. Ben’s fears were real fears and he knew Ben was right if he feared something. He decided therefore to take the doubtless silly precaution of wrapping all three objects in a handkerchief that he then taped into his left armpit with strips of Jenny’s Band-Aid. Silly, James Bond stuff. So he was being silly. Silly Joseph Richter.
But it seemed to set him free. He did not know why exactly. He felt he was rescuing himself as much as escaping from his past. He was rescuing himself from the RGD concern with Gazprom’s Blue Stream1 or Blue Stream2 or the more pressing matter of Nord Stream, the issue of costs, of liquefied natural gas and re-gasification along with the provision of new terminals, the role of lobbyist that had brought him to You-Know-Who and Jenny and a whole abyss of concerns, from which this journey seemed the simplest of escapes. He stared into the limited vista created by the headlights ahead of him, the tarmac and cats-eyes and white lines and shapes of vehicles and knew it was no escape really, merely what duty beckoned him to do. The summons to him as Frankenstein made him see his responsibility now as remedial. He would help Ben and in helping Ben by doing what he had asked he would also be helping her. The ‘Please’ was what mattered. It was an insistent reminder far exceeding in importance the brand on the inside of his wrist.