Dispossession

by Chaz Brenchley

  “I was holding out on you, Jonty. Private money, for emergencies.”

  What, and I was supposed to be outraged? Apparently, yes; but in fact I only wanted to applaud the wisdom. So fast a marriage, of course she should take precautions. I hoped I’d had the sense to do the same. And I must go and see my bank manager, talk things through with him and learn what my financial situation actually was, how much of Deverill’s generosity I had to hand and what other prospects he and I could find between us.

  Actually I thought, after yesterday, I’d rather like to pay Deverill all his money back, if only to send him the message that I was not the corrupt solicitor I’d been pretending to be, that actually he couldn’t buy my silence. Though however I’d do that I wasn’t at this time pretending to imagine. Even if I found another job—and there was a superfluity of solicitors in the system just now, too many for the market to bear, and here I was with my reputation in tatters of my own choosing—it looked like being the kind of debt I’d need a mortgage to repay. Suzie could do it, no doubt, with the club or the flat or both to offer as security; Suzie would do it, no doubt of that either, to buy her husband out of an intolerable situation; I wouldn’t dream of allowing her, and that too was not subject to doubt.

  So I sat there musing on Deverill and me and yesterday, and there was a brisk rapping on the door, and I unthinkingly let Suzie go to answer it. Worse, my mother had already checked the wad of notes in the envelope, slipped it into her handbag and was now on the other sofa and back on my computer again, typing something fast and two-fingered to get it down, she’d said, before it escaped her. No hint of self-preservation in her, no signs of her scuttling to the privacy of a bedroom; she just looked up distractedly to see who it was, with never a worry that whoever it was—Deverill, policeman, our wannabe burglars come back for a second try—would see her also, and might have come here precisely for that reason.

  Suzie opened the door, and a woman’s voice asked for me. I stood up, ever the gentleman, and here was yesterday walking into the flat: not Deverill, not Dean but Mrs Tuck. Smart two-piece, sensible shoes and a handbag, and had she come to handbag me?

  To which the answer was yes, in a way. “Jonty,” she said, with no preamble and no allowances for being overheard, “you left us very precipitately yesterday.”

  Suzie’s eyes on me, silence from my mother’s still fingers on my keyboard: what could I be but brave? Braver than yesterday... “Yes, well. I didn’t like the postprandial entertainment.” Lawyerly-brave, brave with words comfortably after the fact, and here came that disgust again like a resurgent tide of sickness. I could taste it in my mouth, feel it twist in my head, leaving me dizzy and weak and wanting to sit down.

  She made a little gesture of distaste. “Neither did I. Not my idea of fun, but Vernon likes to make these little gestures. Preferably with witnesses, I don’t know why. I expect it does something extraordinary to his ego; that seemed to be what powered him best when we were married, and I don’t believe he’s changed. But what I wanted to say, Jonty, I’m sure it’s not necessary, but—well, I wouldn’t like to think that what you saw yesterday would prejudice your relationship with Vernon. He’s a hard man, but he’s been very generous with you.”

  That much at least I was sure of, and the subtext was equally clear. This was my second warning: first Dean on the steps of Deverill’s house, and now Mrs Tuck in my own home, or the closest approximation I had now.

  “I’m very protective of my ex-husband,” she went on, apparently not content to leave what was obvious unsaid. “Not that he stands much in need of my protection, you’ve seen how he looks after his own interests; but it’s not a good idea to turn suddenly against those interests, that’s the message. Am I getting through?”

  “Entirely,” I said.

  “That’s good. Not a wasted journey, then. And you’ll carry on trying to find out whatever happened to poor Mr Nolan?”

  “Oh, I will that,” I said.

  “Excellent.” And then she gazed around her, and I’d hate to say that either one of them was outfaced, but Suzie suddenly interested herself in the documents she carried, and my mother ran a corrective eye across the computer screen.

  And when Mrs Tuck said, “Mrs Marks?” they both of them startled, like two guilty things surprised. And I cursed silently in my head, for the information given away there in the jerk of my mother’s head; and just as well we were getting her out of the country pronto. Her Journal might be secret still, though I might not have laid much money on it at that time; but she was a hostage to fortune, a hostage accessible to Deverill’s hand so long as he knew where to find her. She and Suzie both now, if ever he felt the need to intimidate me.

  Mrs Tuck smiled with the certainty of a job well done, and I wondered if this was what she’d come for: if all she’d really wanted—no, all they’d really wanted, she must surely be here with Deverill’s blessing, if not on his instructions—was to confirm that the third party they’d seen in the car and now in the flat was indeed as they’d guessed her to be, my mother. And to make that confirmation public, to let me see that they knew now, which would get the message over very nicely, thank you.

  Certainly Mrs Tuck had nothing of import to say to either Mrs Marks: she only said goodbye nicely and walked towards the door, at a speed nicely judged to give me just enough time to get there ahead and open it for her. Which of course I did; and behind me I heard my mother trying too late to cover herself, to make out that she was so totally absorbed in her work she’d barely noticed that we had a visitor.

  “Jonty,” she said loudly, aggressively and speaking as much to Mrs Tuck as to me, “does this so-smart machine of yours not even count my words for me?”

  How would I know? I was as ignorant as she was, with the programs that machine ran now. And so I told her, once the door was safely closed and Mrs Tuck was gone; and then I asked her again what she was writing, what was so urgent that it had to be done now, when she was so urgent to be gone.

  “Just notes, darling,” she said, blithely copying whatever-it-was onto a floppy and slipping that into the shoulder-bag that lay at her feet, packed and ready to go. “Everything you’ve told me about Deverill, it’s all grist to the mill. It’s strange, how we’ve both been working on different sides of the same story. Don’t you think it’s strange? I think it’s strange.”

  “Yes, Ellie, it’s very strange. Are you ready to go?”

  “You weren’t very cooperative, though, the first time. When you came and told me to disappear. You won’t remember, but you absolutely refused to tell me anything that time. Too dangerous, you said, and I should get out while the going was good and leave Deverill to people who understood him. Very domineering, you were. This has been much better,” and she patted my cheek lightly as she stood up, fit reward to a son for moling for his mother.

  Actually, I’d not told her that much this time either. Not a word about the girl beaten and abused in his stableyard, though I’d gathered that was pretty much standard practice, just his way of doing business. I could live with my shaming memory, just about, but I couldn’t talk about it. That was one corroborative detail my mother’s exposé would have to get by without. No doubt she’d have gleaned other stories on her account. Pillow talk from Nolan, perhaps: I was sure she could be really turned on by whispers of brutality, if that kind of sadism-by-proxy response was what it took to get the information.

  It seemed that she wasn’t quite ready to go yet. She had nothing to read, she said, and she couldn’t start a journey without a book. So she went back to the spare bedroom to raid my library, leaving the computer switched on and humming on the sofa. Prompted by her example, I fetched a disk from the bag it lived in, and discovered that indeed it was possible to copy a password-protected file. Read it I couldn’t, but I could make as many copies as I liked.

  Just one for now, because I had a cautious soul and I always, always made back-ups. I might make a batch later if it came to that and spread it around
some computer-friendly friends, see if they could crack the code for me. Disk went into pocket, mother came out of bedroom with a double-handful of books, we all trooped down the stairs one more time. Being ultra-cautious, I had Suzie lock the fire door behind us.

  Took Ellie to the hotel car park, gave her the keys and watched her drive away, and followed down all the ramps to the exit to make assurance doubly sure that she was gone; and then walked back to the flat to find a message for me on the answering machine.

  A message from Carol, who had been so definite that she never wanted to see or speak to me again, who had threatened me with injunctions to be sure she never had to: a message saying come, come quickly, come now...

  Well, what she actually said, she said, “Jonty, it’s Carol. Luke’s here, he’s looking for you...”

  And that was all. Her voice sort of died, there was a pause, she put the phone down; and that in itself, that hesitancy in the precise and punctilious Carol was enough to say help, to say get over here right now, where the hell are you when I need you? And Carol called for help so rarely, she would have to have been in extremis to do it at any time, let alone now when she was still so angry with me.

  But then, Luke was enough to drive anyone to extremes. Yes, she’d need rescuing; and yes, I was sole candidate for that particular job.

  “On my way,” I said stupidly to the machine, not bothering to waste a minute by ringing Carol back. “Can I take the car, Suze?”

  “No.”

  I was already holding my hand out for the keys; I drew it back slowly, scowling at her. “Why not? You heard, it’s urgent.”

  “Yeah. I’m coming too.”

  “Oh, what? It’s not you he’s looking for. What are you going to do, be sisterly and supportive with Carol? I don’t think so...”

  “I let you out of my sight,” she said, “you go off and have adventures without me. You disappear for hours or days at a time, things happen to you you won’t talk about,” and I had a flash in my mind, a girl being methodically kicked around a stableyard, and I realised for the first time that she was seeing it too, or something like it, “and all I can do is worry,” she went on. “And I won’t do that any more, Jonty. I’m coming with. Besides, I want to meet Luke. Even if he doesn’t want to meet me.”

  She had a point. And besides, I also had wanted her to meet Luke. I remembered threatening him with her when I left him last, as apparently I had also the time before.

  “Come on, then,” I said. “But can I drive? Please? I know the short cuts.”

  “Is there that much hurry, then?”

  “Oh, yes,” I said.

  o0o

  Short cuts make long delays. I might know and use them all, but I didn’t know the car. Nor did I fit it very well: I was too long in the leg or it was too short in the body, depending on whether you listened to Suzie or to me as we grouched on that hurried, awkward journey across town, as I kept missing gears and she kept wincing and every bone in her stiff and wary body kept saying what was undeniably true, that we’d have been quicker far going a slightly longer way with her at the wheel, comfortably in tune with her machine.

  If the journey had been longer, perhaps I would have stopped, we would have swapped: perhaps. I don’t think so, though. Not for reasons of male pride, though my amour propre certainly was offended, that I was making such a hash of this. I think I particularly needed to be at the wheel, to feel the responsibility laid firmly and irrevocably across my own shoulders as I brought my wife to the house I had shared with my lover. Though actually it seemed to me to be entirely the other way around. What I had had with Carol was a marriage, pace the Archbishop of Canterbury and the laws of the land; while Suzie felt at best to me like some new and casual fling, an erotic passion that went only skin-deep, bruise-deep, for all the bruises I had to show for it.

  And if the journey had been longer, perhaps I would have lost some of the urgency en route, realising how very much I didn’t want to do this. But there was no time for cold anticipation to break through the hurry, hurry heat of moving, of doing. I felt vaguely smug, like a knight-errant called to the aid of a lady who had spurned him before; but nothing more than that, nothing more honest, there simply wasn’t the time.

  Door-to-door I drove, and got out of the car still grumbling about the shape of it, how awkward the pedals and how stiff the gears. Suzie I think was no longer listening at all; she slipped her hand into mine as we stood there on the pavement, and it was that touch of chilly fingers that pulled me down, that rooted me in what was real: that I stood here hand in hand with the girl I’d left Carol for, and there was Carol opening the door already, must have been watching for us through the window.

  And Carol didn’t seem to notice, or if she noticed she didn’t seem to care: which said a great deal about the current state of Carol’s mind, and how she was coping with her house guest.

  “Jonty, he’s in the front. Will you, will you just take him away? Please?”

  “Do my best,” I said.

  She held the door open, and we both stepped in; and no, she wasn’t cutting Suzie dead, she wasn’t trying to look straight through her because I saw their eyes meet and Carol’s linger for a moment, and it was Suzie who looked away. There was even a vestigial curiosity in Carol, I thought, as if she remembered now that she’d been blazingly angry with me, and here was the cause of it all; but no sign of that anger now, against either one of us. We were here to do a job that she desperately needed doing, and for a little while she’d be nothing more than grateful.

  What Carol called the front wasn’t at the front of the house. It was a tag she had grown up with: to her it meant the living-room, the main social centre of the house, and it just so happened that in this house it was at the back. She wasn’t going to change her language to suit a temporary geography; she’d changed mine instead. “What’s important comes at the front,” she used to say, “just think of it like that and never mind which way you’re facing or where the street is.”

  That was the way it worked, why I’d always been happy to let her change my habits of speech or thought or whatever she wanted changed: because things made sense under her eye and within her philosophy. She could always find a reason. Nothing was ever unexplained. It had made life easy, to share it with someone so grounded in certainty.

  Which was presumably why she was having so much trouble with Luke: because he was inexplicable, he didn’t fit her world, he challenged the very ground she stood on. Literally, as well as metaphorically. She used to wave me off to see him, “Go on,” she’d say, “go see your fallen angel,” but she never offered to come with, or asked to meet him. I guess in her heart she never believed in him for what he was, she only labelled me credulous and him some kind of romantic blond fakir. But today he was in her house, and even if he wasn’t doing tricks he was so untouched by earth or any significant breath of humanity there could be no doubting now.

  She stood back against the passage wall; I squeezed past and Suzie followed me, her fingers hooked into a belt-loop on my jeans, here where there was no space for holding hands. I didn’t know if Carol noticed, or if it was done for Carol to notice, or if it was a genuinely nervous need to cling. All I hoped was that she wouldn’t be difficult, that neither of them would get in the way. Managing Luke was never easy, even one-to-one and without distractions. I was starting to feel nervous myself, only now starting to wonder what the hell he was actually doing here, why in the world he would have come.

  Only once before had I ever seen Luke in a city, the time I’d brought him to this house. He’d asked me to do it and I’d done it, though only because I was sure Carol would be away till he was gone. No consequences for me or for her, or not directly. The consequences for others had been appalling. Not my fault, not my responsibility, not mine to carry; but with me still none the less, and I had forebodings, premonitions that this time would be no better and very possibly worse.

  And I felt Suzie’s puzzled little tug as I walked past th
e doorway into what should be, what would be to her, what architecturally-speaking undoubtedly was the front room; and I ignored it, and pushed open the door ahead.

  And God in heaven yes, there was Luke; but this was Luke as I had never seen him even on that other city trip, this was Luke all but shed of his skin. What lay beneath, his older and greater aspect burned through him, and he was wickedly hard to look upon.

  Is it self-defence, I wonder, is it just a mental game of duck-and-cover when you come upon something momentous and your thoughts flick into a kind of random relevance, an oh-that-reminds-me mode?

  I stood there with Luke filling my sight in his ice and steel rage, and what I thought was that this was the first time ever I’d come to him and there had not been water rising to the boil.

  Nor did he say, “I’ve been expecting you,” or anything like it. But of course we both knew that, he’d sent for me; and that was another first, though it was also the first time he’d had the means. Luke didn’t use phones.

  Ordinarily, he didn’t use phones by proxy either; ordinarily he didn’t have the need. Today transparently was not ordinary, and I was not nervous any longer. I was deep-down, dark shit scared.

  I thought he didn’t need the hiss and steam of water on a fire to greet me. I thought I could hear the hiss of blood or ichor or whatever it was that he had in his veins, ice turned liquid, perhaps, bitter and scalding. I thought I could see steam about his body, where ordinary mortal air met the reality of him and was burned or frozen or otherwise cruelly changed.

  He was wearing white, which was new also, a change from his usual dull earth-colours: white jeans and trainers and a torn white T-shirt, and maybe there was meant to be a message in that, maybe he was robed in light as near as he could make it. But there was mud on the carpet where he had walked, mud cracked and drying on his trainers, mud and other stuff on his jeans, darker stains I didn’t want to wonder about.