Three Brothers

by Peter Ackroyd

So Sam became a courier, and messenger, for Asher Ruppta.

  VIII

  What is it?

  HARRY HANWAY began to rise among the journalists of the Chronicle. He had become chief news reporter, and his byline now appeared on the front page almost daily. He had not forgotten about Cormac Webb; indeed he had kept all the material for possible use at a later date, but he had been willing to suppress the story at the request of Sir Martin Flaxman. This prompt and willing acquiescence recommended Harry to the proprietor of the Chronicle, who started to invite him to parties at his house in Cheyne Walk.

  For the first time in his life Harry was being introduced to the powerful and to the merely famous. Most of them were cordial and self-deprecating, although Harry realised that success had made them so. It was extraordinary that they all knew, or professed to know, each other; a television presenter was on first-name terms with a businessman or a bishop. It seemed to Harry that, for them, the rest of the world did not really exist.

  He began to understand, too, how alliances and affinities might be formed. Here was an admiral talking to a leading businessman; there was a politician talking to a pop star. Despite the air of bonhomie, what brought them all together was self-interest.

  “They call me a muck-raker.” Sir Martin was talking to a small group of people. “What’s wrong with raking muck? If you spread enough shit, something may begin to grow.” He laughed very loudly. “But you have to get the best journalists. Like Harry here. Most of them are arse-lickers. Tame poodles pretending to be guard dogs. But not Harry. He knows what he is. And he likes it.” The little group broke apart, aimlessly colliding with other little groups.

  Harry stepped back, and found himself standing beside Cormac Webb. Webb looked at him without betraying any feeling. There had been a flash of recognition, and resentment, but this had been followed by an impassive expression; he was pretending not to remember him. “How are you, sir?” Harry asked him.

  “Tremendous.” He smiled. “Nose to the grindstone.” He was oddly chastened. Harry noticed that there were white specks of dandruff on his dark pinstriped suit. He seemed shorter, and slighter, than Harry had remembered; he was more vulnerable, as if he had suffered some loss of power.

  Sir Martin took Harry aside, put his arm around his shoulders, and whispered to him. “I’ve been told that Webb is about to retire. For personal reasons. No more use to me now. He won’t be coming here again.” Then he added, under his breath, “And here’s another cunt.” Harry looked up and saw a Conservative front-bench spokesman holding an animated conversation with an actress. “He wants to get into her knickers.” Sir Martin took Harry over to him. “Robin,” he said, “let me introduce you to Harry Hanway.” The actress walked away.

  Robin Green concealed his annoyance very well. He had a smooth and well-oiled manner, with a delicate persuasive voice. “Delighted,” he said. When he smiled he showed his teeth.

  “Harry’s my boy. He can sniff out secrets like a pig can scent truffles. Secrets smell. Do you have any secrets, Robin?”

  “Alas no.” He did not look at Harry, but glanced in his direction. “Sorry to disappoint you.”

  “I don’t believe you, Robin.” Sir Martin was as always very emphatic. “Every man has a secret.”

  “And every woman, too,” Harry added.

  “Is that so?” Sir Martin looked at him with amusement. “You must tell me about her some time.”

  “Her?”

  “I’m sure you had someone in mind.” Harry had been thinking of his mother. “You must meet my daughter, Harry. Guinevere! Guinevere! Come over here.”

  A girl of nineteen or twenty reluctantly crossed the room. “I sent her to finishing school,” he told the two men. “I wanted her to become a toffee-nosed bitch and marry a millionaire.”

  “Dad!”

  “Now she wants to be a social worker. I told her to get a proper job.”

  Harry was drawn to Guinevere. She had long dark hair, and large brown eyes; her lips were slightly parted, as if she were about to speak. For some reason Harry saw her swimming in the ocean. She was suspended in the bright blue water.

  “Are you one of Dad’s attack dogs?” She was smiling.

  “I’m probably a poodle.”

  “But poodles can bite.”

  “I am tame.” They looked at one other for a moment, held by the mutual gaze. “So you want to be a social worker?”

  “Don’t laugh.”

  “I am not laughing. It’s a very good thing.”

  “Now you’re making fun of me.”

  “I’m not. I promise you. I would hate to make fun of you.”

  “Would you?” She looked at him with genuine gratitude. “That’s all Dad ever does. I don’t think he likes women.”

  “I don’t think he likes anybody.”

  “I don’t know why I’m telling you this. What was your name again?”

  “Harry.”

  “The trouble with Harry.”

  “What?”

  “It’s a novel.”

  “I never read novels.”

  “Good for you.”

  “I don’t see much point in them.”

  “But you journalists write novels, don’t you? You call them stories. Dad is always going on about ‘good stories.’ ”

  “It’s just a term,” he said.

  “God, I hate these parties.” She looked quickly around the room. “Mum always stays in the country. She can’t stand his friends. She says that it’s a dance of death.”

  “I can see why.”

  “Do you know why I want to be a social worker? I want to get away from all this. Do you know how people are forced to live? One family in a room. No hot water.”

  “I know.”

  “But do you know? Really know? Come with me one day. I’ll take you to Limehouse, where I’m being trained.”

  “Of course.” He did not want to disappoint her.

  They met three days later, on a Saturday morning, outside Limehouse Underground Station. He did not know how to greet her, but she put out her hand. “It’s quiet around here,” she said. They were at the end of a long narrow street dominated on both sides by warehouses of dark brown brick, derelict and empty. “The local people want them torn down. They need council flats. Come on. I’ll show you.”

  They walked away from the immediate environs of the river and turned down a side street of dilapidated terrace houses. These were all multiple dwellings—the front doors were open and there were sounds of babies crying, of voices being raised in small rooms. A group of children was playing in the street, while two or three disconsolate men in tattered suits sat on the front steps and watched them. “Irish,” Guinevere said. “Or Jamaican. Whoever has the least money.”

  A settlement of round huts, created out of mud and straw, had once been raised here by the river. Their roofs had been made of thatch, and they had been built in two parallel lines just like these nineteenth-century tenements. The same sounds, and the same voices, had come from these frail huts; children had played in the space between them, and men had watched them as they sat upon the ground by the threshold of their dwellings. Now someone called out, “Peter! Peter!”

  Guinevere led him into one of the houses. A powerful smell of damp in the hallway mingled with the stale air. “I visit the family on the first floor,” she said. She walked up the stairs that were covered in chipped and broken linoleum, and knocked on the door at the next level. “Mrs. Byrne,” she called out. “It’s Guinevere.”

  A middle-aged woman came to the door. “I’ve just finished feeding them,” she said. “You’d better come in.” Three children were sitting around a Formica table; they were all holding slices of bread, their white faces slightly smeared with jam. They looked up at Guinevere and Harry without expression.

  “This gentleman is a journalist,” Guinevere said. “I wanted him to meet you. To see how you were getting on.”

  “Oh we get on. We’re not complaining.” Harry observe
d another room, to which the door was closed. “My husband’s still sleeping. He has the fits.”

  “Tell the gentleman how much you live on.”

  “Twelve pounds a week. He draws it from the social security.” She looked at the closed door. “Twelve pounds doesn’t go far these days. Not with five of us.” Harry went over to a window that overlooked the grimy street. As his eyes grew accustomed to the dirty brick and the dust upon the windows, he was astonished to see his brother leaving one of the tenements. There was no doubt about it. It was Sam. He walked down some steps into the street, paused for a moment, and then turned left. Harry took a pace backward when he thought that Sam had stared up at him. Then Sam walked off and was gone.

  “That Ruppta,” the woman was saying. “He is a tartar.”

  “What was that?”

  “We’re talking about her landlord,” Guinevere told him. “Asher Ruppta. Have you heard of him?”

  “Yes.”

  “He comes down terrible hard on people such as us,” the woman said.

  “If they can’t pay one week’s rent, he threatens them with eviction.”

  “Out in the street, sir. With three little ones and him with the fits.”

  “He owns most of the houses in this street,” Guinevere said. “They were going to be torn down, but then the decision was reversed.”

  “Is that so?”

  “There are a lot of blacks,” Mrs. Byrne said. “I’ve nothing against them personally.”

  Harry experienced a strong desire to leave this small room, and get out into the air. He went over to the window, and looked impatiently down into the street. Guinevere sensed his mood, and reacted accordingly. “We should go now, Mrs. Byrne,” she said. “I just wanted to say hello.”

  Harry put out his hand, and then surreptitiously left a ten-pound note on the Formica table. Mrs. Byrne saw it, but she said nothing. Like her children, she stared at him without noticeable expression.

  “Thank you for coming,” Guinevere told him as they walked back into the street.

  “Thank you for inviting me.”

  “I hope you weren’t too bored.”

  “Bored? Never.”

  “How can it happen?”

  “What?”

  “This.” She gestured at the mean houses. From one of them came the sound of “Old Man River.”

  “That is something to ask Asher Ruppta.”

  “How much do you know about that man?”

  “Enough.”

  “Why don’t you write about him? Expose him?”

  “You know,” he said, “you have the loveliest hair.” He felt as if he were poised on a bank beside clear water, about to jump in.

  Hilda Nugent’s instinct and secret wish was to marry. On her occasional visits to Southend, her foster-mother constantly brought up the subject. “It’s not right,” she said. “Living in sin.”

  “Don’t be so old-fashioned, Mum. Everyone does it nowadays.”

  “That doesn’t make it right.”

  “We are as good as married.”

  “I wouldn’t say that without a ring on your finger. Mark my words.”

  And, secretly, Hilda agreed with her. She would allude to the subject, with Harry, from time to time. “Are we putting down roots in Notting Hill?” she might ask him.

  “Roots?”

  “Are we going to stay for a long time?”

  “I really don’t know. What do you think?” He was irritated by her constant use of “we.”

  “We have a good routine, don’t we?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “We are comfortable.”

  Yes. You are as comfortable as an old armchair. He did not say it but he considered saying it.

  The result of such conversations was always inconclusive. “Sometimes,” she said, “I think I’m living with a stranger. I don’t really understand you.”

  “There isn’t very much to understand.”

  “There you go again. You’re keeping me away. You don’t want to be touched. Disturbed. Sometimes I think I should just get up and walk away.” She had in fact never thought that.

  He looked at her and said nothing.

  “You just like to use people. You don’t give a damn for any of them. All you really care about is you. Y. O. U.”

  “I can spell, Hilda.”

  Whenever she considered the possibility of Harry leaving her, she panicked. She expressed her doubt and fear in oblique ways. “It really is terrifying,” she said to him one evening.

  “What is?”

  “One single little day might change everything. I could be run over. Extinguished.”

  He laughed. “I don’t think it’s a question of extinction.”

  “How do you know?”

  Harry stayed on the track of Asher Ruppta, not knowing where it might lead. He decided to approach him directly, and to seek an interview with him. He telephoned Julie Armitage; he knew all about her from Hilda’s descriptions but, fortunately, he had never met her. That would have been a complication. He told her that he was writing a profile of her employer; she seemed strangely excited, and promised to phone him. He believed that he could hear the rustle of a crisps packet as she spoke to him.

  On the following day he received a telephone call from Ruppta himself. “I do not give interviews,” he told Harry. “I keep silent. If I am silent, then I am not disturbed. Good day to you, sir.”

  “I just had a few questions.”

  “Alas, I do not know any answers.”

  “There were some planning permissions—”

  “It would be better if you did not come too close, Mr. Hanway. You have an interesting name, by the way.”

  He found out that Ruppta owned a large mansion on the corner of a quiet avenue in Highgate, and he drove there one evening, curious to see if he entertained any visitors. The property was protected by iron railings above a brick wall, and there was a large security gate in front of a gravel drive. He parked close by, and waited. It was a quiet late-summer evening in the leafy street, and Harry wound down the window to enjoy the perfume of the luxuriant trees and hedges. On an evening such as this, all London seemed to be still. Then he heard the unmistakable clicking of high heels. A woman was walking quickly along the street. She stopped by the security gate, and looked up nervously at the house. Then she pressed a bell. Harry realised, after a moment’s incomprehension, that it was his mother.

  “Hello?” Harry recognised Ruppta’s voice.

  “It’s Sally.”

  A buzzer sounded, and the gate swung open.

  Harry sat in the car, staring straight ahead but seeing nothing. He could not move, or think. He knew that he should drive away, but he had not the strength to turn the key. What was she doing there? Was she still in her own old business? What had Ruppta said to him? You have an interesting name. Ruppta had not threatened him, but he had laid down a warning. Harry now realised that there would be an unspoken pact between them. He would no longer pursue his investigation of Asher Ruppta.

  Harry and Guinevere met for the third time in Fountain Court, part of the gardens of the Inner Temple where a small fountain played into a pond fringed with trees.

  “I don’t know anything about you,” she said.

  “What is there to know? I’m twenty-one and I’m single.”

  “What? Harry Hanway? No girlfriend?”

  “I do know a girl, but we’re not really close.” The light of the water gleamed in his eyes. “Actually I don’t see her that often.”

  “You never mention your parents.”

  “I don’t have any.”

  “Oh.”

  “They were killed. In a car crash.”

  “That’s a terrible thing.”

  “I don’t really like to talk about it.”

  “Do you have any brothers or sisters?”

  “No. Just me. Only me.” Then he leaned over and kissed her.

  They continued to meet at Fountain Court. “I think you’re ve
ry ambitious,” she said to him one afternoon.

  “How can you tell?”

  “The way you carry yourself. The way you dress. When you took me to that restaurant last night, you looked at the menu for a moment and then made up your mind. You’re impatient, too.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No. I like it. You know what you want.”

  “I know what I like.” He kissed her on the cheek.

  “You talk quickly, too.”

  “Perhaps I have a lot to say. How is Mrs. Byrne, by the way?”

  “She says she is very poorly. My boss is thinking of taking the children into care.”

  “Care? Is that the right word? Oh look. There’s a squirrel.”

  “There’s a change in the air about you,” Hilda told him.

  “What on earth does that mean?”

  “I don’t know. But I feel it. I see it.”

  “Why are you trembling?”

  “I just am.”

  “Are you not hungry?”

  “I wouldn’t mind if I never ate another thing.”

  “What is the matter with you, Hilda?”

  “You are the matter, Harry. I think that everything is going to be different.” He looked away from her briefly, as if something had caught his eye in the corner of the room.

  “What if I were to get sick?” she asked him on another occasion. “Would you look after me?”

  “Of course.”

  “No, you wouldn’t. You would tell me, ever so nicely, that it was my problem and that you had other things on your mind. Then you would creep away, but not before blowing me a great big kiss from the door.”

  “Honestly, Hilda, I just can’t win with you.”

  “Oh but you have won. And you know it.”

  As she hugged him one evening she smelled some other perfume on the lapel of his jacket. She held onto him, clinging for life. “Now what is it?” he asked her. She broke down in tears. “What is it?”

  “You know what it is.”

  Gently he disengaged himself from her, and left the flat.

  Hilda sat down, trying to steady herself with the arm of the chair. Some music started playing in the flat next door, and the refrain of the song rang through her head after the music had stopped. “It’s all about your eyes. They hypnotise.” Slowly she got to her feet, put on her coat, and opened the door of the flat. As she left she heard a child crying in another room, and she realised that she was still crying too. It had been raining, and the pavement shone with the reflected light of the street lamps. The autumn had arrived two or three days before, with a sudden chill in the air. “The Americans,” she said to herself, “call it fall.” As she walked towards Portobello it began to rain again, a slow and fitful shower, but she went on bare-headed without noticing it. Two days later she knocked on the door of the ice-cream van by the beach at Southend. “I missed the Raspberry Wriggle,” she said.