by Susan Moody
Later, he sat in the huge area which constituted his living space, contemplating a glass of La Mouline Rhone, a treat he rarely allowed himself but which he tasted tonight because not only had he already had alcohol at Gordon’s house (though it had been somewhat inferior to the wine which he held in his hand) and a glass or two more wouldn’t hurt, but also because he felt he needed to. He had done all the embarrassing kind of wine-taster’s stuff like sniffing, rolling, shooting out his lips like a carp and pulling air back in over it, tasting with mouth open, swallowing with mouth closed (it was almost impossible to do otherwise), the kind of behaviour in which he would never have indulged in public, and now he gave way to thoughts of his mother, a woman who remained dimly in the distance, disliked rather than liked, and definitely not loved, who had swum into his consciousness more clearly this afternoon than she had in the whole of the near-decade since her death. It was Gordon’s curtains, he decided, which she must have chosen. She’d had a surprising weakness for toile de Jouy, those crinolined ladies and flute-playing shepherds in vaguely Chinese settings which seemed entirely at odds with the combative, almost masculine persona she presented both to her family and to the world. Looking back, tears pricked his eyes. Rhoda Bailey – Mum – fiercely resisting convention, sternly refusing to take the name of either of her husbands on the grounds that to do so would diminish her (‘Why shouldn’t they take my name?’), had always been out there fighting for the things she believed in, be they whales, gay marriage, establishment prejudices, or even sea-cucumbers. She should have lived in another epoch when there were real struggles to be fought, standing shoulder to shoulder with Annie Besant (‘no more hungry children’), working with Marie Stopes (‘no more unwanted children’), throwing bricks alongside the Pankhursts, chaining herself to railings. And like a damascene flash, he wondered whether the attraction of Gordon was the fact that he had plenty of money to fund her Causes; it would explain an awful lot.
But there was another reason he sat contemplating the wine and his mother, and that was the reactivated itch which he recognized as having lain unscratched for far too long, one which he had long ago categorized as ‘the thrill of the chase’ – in other words, a sense that if he could only put together details recently seen (or heard), he would have the answer to at least one of the puzzles which currently confounded him, though for the moment he could not quite focus on what any of them were. Something half-heard, half-glimpsed, half-observed – what the hell was it? He knew from experience that it would eventually come to him, if he would only stop picking at it.
In the neighbouring flat, Jean-Claude Bisset, a banker from Bordeaux, began his nightly ritual of loudly playing music composed by his fellow-countrymen, mostly St Saëns, Debussy, Satie, Messaien. Jefferson poured a careful half-glass more of wine – he preferred to sip it slowly, charting the way the wine evolved over an evening, perhaps not in such spectacular fashion as a Bordeaux but nonetheless in a manner which proved greatly pleasing – and dropped briefly into a daydream of the cellar he would one day own, temperature controlled, professionally racked, its slate-shelved magnificence filled with wondrous and mostly unobtainable Haut-Brions, Chateau d’Yquems, Chateau Pétrus, Lafite Rothschilds, Margaux, and lesser wines, St Emilions, La Rhônes . . . Stop! He could do this for hours.
Most of the rest of the La Mouline failed to dislodge the fly in his ointment (how exactly flies get into ointment in the first place was a question he had often pondered, suffering, as he had in his youth, from flexural eczema which involved large tubs of tar-smelling unguent of the appearance and consistency of fresh hummus, standing open while Matron at school applied the stuff to the insides of his elbows and the backs of his knees, but for which flies never once made a beeline, or even a fly-line) and eventually it occurred to him that he ought to take advantage of the evening to complete the task of trawling through his father’s papers, anything rather than go on listening to Satie filtered through a double thickness of brick wall. But with rather more drink taken than he had intended, by the time he had risen to his feet and walked somewhat unsteadily towards the bathroom for a pee, sleep seemed a softer and far more pleasant option.
The Headmaster’s secretary moved clumsily through his slumbers, a dumpy woman in slightly musty skirts made of brown or bottle-green serge (another small puzzle: why would the French name their sons after a type of cloth, it would be like christening a child Corduroy or Seersucker) and blouses of some man-made material which clung unappealingly to her upper body, revealing far more of her underwear and what it contained than Jefferson had ever wished to know, a woman, moreover, to whom the world seemed little more than a vehicle for furthering the welfare of her unprepossessing son.
What was Melvin Buonfiglio up to now? Behind bars, probably, Jefferson thought hazily, rising out of wine-tinged sleep as a car-alarm klaxoned in the street below and continued to do so until slumber was no longer possible. He’d read somewhere that after twenty minutes any alarm will stop, but by that time, the thieves, if that’s what they were, would be long gone, though it was quite possible that thieves had nothing to do with the infuriatingly continuous noise outside. He’d once had an alarm system installed which literally, according to the salesman, would go off if a spider tiptoed past, which indeed it did, so often that Jefferson had come to the conclusion that his new home was infested by a contagion (or possibly an entire subspecies) of tiptoeing spiders and he had, in the end, been forced to change to a different system altogether.
Why had Buonfiglio’s mother been in his thoughts, even subconsciously, he wondered, and reached for the bedside light with a view to starting the book he’d bought that very day at the bookshop next to TaylorMade Travel (chosen in the hope that he might see Kate as he passed, in fact the only reason why he had suddenly decided to buy the book at all), highly recommended as it had been during his flight home from Quito by an American student studying English literature at Brandeis, and perhaps it was the image of Kate, flitting like a melancholy Victorian heroine through his mind which brought back his trip to Ecuador, the hotel room from which his file had been stolen (for what purpose?), the man in the restaurant whom he knew he’d seen somewhere before.
Abruptly it came to him. The man he’d seen in Quito (probably devouring not just one but several guinea pigs) was Melvin Buonfiglio, of course he was. Older, fatter, and undoubtedly nastier (and, incidentally, as close to being the human embodiment of a sea-cucumber as any man could be), and though disguised (disfigured?) by the black beard, instantly recognizable, once you realized who you were recognizing. What the hell was someone like him doing in Quito – though he had, Jefferson was fair-minded enough to concede, as much right to travel to all known parts of the earth and beyond as Jefferson himself – but somehow it now seemed like a coincidence too far, that’s all he was saying. But flipping the pages of the Brandeis-recommended novel (‘ohmigaaaahd, it’s like, totally awesome!’), the back half of his brain still churned and he knew it had little, if anything, to do with the resurrected memory of Melvin Buonfiglio. Eventually, noting that it was still barely half past ten, he placed the totally awesome novel neatly beside his bed, got up and walked more or less straight towards the small office where he kept his business papers, with a view to finally completing the task Romilly had set him some weeks before.
The car alarm suddenly stopped, its echo ringing round the wharf area like ripples in a pond, and he heard unmistakably the sound of someone whispering near at hand, followed by the irritating little squeak one of his desk-drawers gave when pulled out; he’d been meaning to dab some oil on it but only remembered when he was on the train to London or standing in the checkout queue at Sainsbury’s, his forgetfulness now proving a blessing, as he grabbed the heavy wrought-iron candlestick which he and Mary-Jane had bought years ago in Habitat, and tiptoed (like a spider) across the living room towards his office. He could see shadows against the light from the street, two men bending over his desk and he knew at once that they must be af
ter his father’s papers.
‘Pak choy!’ he yelled at the top of his voice, praying that they weren’t armed, at least not with guns – or knives, come to think of it. ‘Choo chee plah ga-pong!’ – ingredients he remembered from a Thai cooking course he’d taken once, which sounded far more menacing, he thought, than plain English (unless you were a Thai gourmet). He stood back from his office door, giving them a chance to make a break for the entrance to the flat. ‘Pad Thai!’ he roared, smashing his candlestick hard against the floor, as the two of them looked up, startled (‘Bloody ’ell!’) and then made a rush for the door of the office, temporarily log-jamming as they both tried to get through at the same time, leaving behind them a thick scattering of papers which fell to the carpet like pollen. One of them did indeed produce a gun and once through the door of the flat, leaned back inside and let off three shots, all of them well wide of Jefferson, while his companion, still racing towards the exit, took the opportunity to fly at Jefferson and strike him hard across the face, knocking him to the ground, and kicking him painfully in the ribs several times, but not before Jefferson had managed an almighty sweep with his wrought-iron weapon, which caught the man painfully across the forearm and resulted in a loud crack. ‘Buggering scumbag,’ the man swore, clutching at his elbow, ‘he’s broke my fucking arm, Jase, I’m outta here,’ then the two of them were racing down the stairs to the ground floor one storey below.
Jefferson writhed a bit, blood pouring from his nose. His ribs hurt, one at least must be broken, he thought, and he could see shards scattered like flowers across the parquet, the remains of a brilliantly coloured Italian ceramic dish which had been a gift from Romilly and the children and upon which the gunman had scored a direct hit. ‘Fuck it!’ he said, and decided he had been quite correct in calling upon his limited store of Thai, the English expletive sounding feeble and undangerous in comparison with a choo-chee plah ga-gong! (‘snapper in thick red curry sauce’) uttered in a sufficiently explosive manner.
He pulled himself upright, and limped towards the kitchen, where he took a packet of frozen peas from the freezer and applied them to his nose. Not broken, thank God – he moved it carefully from side to side but felt no grating of bone or cartilage – though some of his teeth seemed to stir loosely in their sockets. In a minute, he would begin to sweat and shake at the realization that he had actually been standing directly, or almost, in the line of fire from a gun armed with live ammunition. Holy fucking cow! he would think.
Moving painfully into his study, he surveyed the mess there, breathing stertorously through his mouth, kicking now and then at the pieces of old paper which littered the floor, some of which rose languorously into the air and fell back, the rest of which just lay there, clotted with rusty paper-clips, or half stuck together with something sticky (Dad liked to eat jam tarts when he was working, perhaps to make up for the otherwise sour atmosphere generated by Jefferson’s mother). It gave him a different kind of pain from the one currently attached to his nose to see, here and there, fragments of his parents’ writing, annotations, handwritten letters, memos, envelopes.
Bending painfully (thanks to a broken or certainly cracked rib), he plucked a sheet of paper from among these, glanced over it and immediately a great many things suddenly became clear. In the past few weeks, his powers of observation had not served him as well as he might have expected, but were now able to be brought fully into play. He looked at his watch, it was 22:49, an hour too late to telephone people except in an emergency, which this, he decided, most definitely was, though it came to him that if he did, he might not be understood. ‘Mamma mia,’ he tried experimentally, ‘here I go again,’ and heard the plaintive echo of his voice, filtered through a bloody pack of by-now half-frozen peas. Babba bia, here I go aggedd . . . so not the phone, then.
All Together Now . . .
Twenty-Four
‘Magnus, that was delicious.’
‘Yes, indeed,’ agreed Janine. ‘Thank you very much.’
Kate closed her eyes. ‘I’ve drunk far too much, so if I fall asleep and start snoring, you’ll have to be tolerant.’
‘Aren’t I always?’
‘I envy you two.’ Janine flipped back her black hair, smoothed her leather trousers. ‘I’ve got a brother too, but I haven’t seen him for years, and don’t want to, either. Funny thing is, my mother dotes on him; even when he was sent to prison, she never stopped saying how wonderful he was.’
‘Prison? Wow,’ Kate said, and closed her eyes again.
‘Doting is what mothers are for,’ Magnus said, though how he knew with such certainty was difficult to say since he hardly ever thought of his mother, dead so many years ago; he just knew, that was all, in an entirely non-academic, purely instinctive way, that whatever depraved or crooked thing he did, his mother would still have doted on him, not that he was given to depravity or crookedness, but he could have ‘gone to the bad’ in his teens – smoked, shoplifted, done drugs – and she would still have been there for him. She’d been half-Finnish and he saw her now as one of the icons of the Madonna which hung on his walls, pale-faced, sombre-eyed, all-loving, ready to forgive if ever forgiveness was needed.
‘Siblings have to stick together,’ declared Kate, ‘especially when there’s no-one else.’
‘If you’d ever met my brother, I doubt if you’d want to stick to him,’ Janine said.
‘If he’s anything like you, I’d be quite happy—’ Magnus began gallantly, then stopped, pushed his half-moon glasses back up his nose, and nodded vigorously. ‘That’s right, Kate. Stick together we must, we’re all the family we’ve got now.’
‘Once, though, there were more of us,’ Kate said, words slurring gently, addressing Janine, who seemed to waver a little between the tall candles Magnus had set on the table, though whether the wavering came from Janine or from herself, Kate was not entirely sure, for all at once, as though someone had flicked a switch and turned her memory on, she was on holiday again in Quito, at the end of her second year at university. She saw the streets outside Dad’s apartment, the spiky black shadows thrown by the palmettos, brightly shawled peasants in black felt hats mingling with businessmen in razor-sharp suits and secretaries in high, high heels and pretty blouses, all sparkling in the sunshine. Brown skin, dark eyes, and that indefinable, exciting menace hidden behind the smiling faces, and she saw, too, the winding road up into the mountains, the parrots among the creepers, Annie’s hot little hand on her knee (‘It’s ever so ’citing, Katie, isn’t it?’), the faint scent of Luisa’s perfume from the seat beside her, Ms Bailey in front, and Dad driving so slowly through the heat, along the pitted road, trying to avoid the potholes, the group of men suddenly materializing from the shadows, one of them stepping forward and raising an arm, raising a gun, oh my God!, aiming it through the windscreen, Luisa screaming as glass shattered, the man aiming again, a boy peering huge-eyed round the corner of a whitewashed house, and in the front seat, Ms Bailey clutching at her chest, keeling over against Dad (‘I knew it, I knew i—’), a third shot, Dad’s tiny indrawn ‘pffft’, and a fourth and then the car swerving over the edge of the road, and the stink of burning rubber, the sound of exploding glass, blistering metal, fire, flames rushing into the sky, her leg, the smell of roasting meat . . .
‘Oh, God!’ Kate suddenly stood up, pressing her palms hard against her heart. ‘Oh, my lord.’ She walked distractedly over to the window, breathing hard, her fingers clamped tight against her temples, as though she had been struck on the head. ‘What the hell happened, did somebody hit me on the head or something, it’s all come back . . .’
Janine and Magnus had risen to their feet.
‘What’s on earth’s wrong, Kate?’
‘What the matter?’
She walked unsteadily to the table, held on to the chair-backs for support. ‘After all these years . . . I knew I’d seen him before, I knew it, only I thought it was George Clooney, you see, oh God, oh God, it’s like seeing a ghost, it was the same
guy, out there in the village.’ Her legs wobbled and she clutched tighter at the back of Janine’s chair. ‘He was younger then but I know it’s the same guy, and I thought his face was kind, I can’t believe it, I just . . . it wasn’t Dad at all, oh shit, I’m going to throw up . . .’
Janine pushed her down into a chair. ‘Sit with your head between your knees,’ she ordered. ‘Magnus, get a bowl or a bucket, quick.’
Magnus rushed to the kitchen and came back with a yellow plastic pail, and a glass of cognac.
‘Be sick into this, or drink that,’ he said.
Kate tried to grin. ‘Hope I get it the right way round.’ Her head felt like a pillow, stuffed with green feathers, blood, Annie’s leg, the thick thud of something hitting Ms Bailey’s T-shirted chest, Dad’s head spilling over the back of his seat, Luisa’s screams suddenly cut short, no time to say goodbye, oh God, and she bent horribly over the pail, clutching at Janine’s hand, Janine who had somehow got hold of a wet tea towel which she was pressing against Kate’s forehead, murmuring softly, reassuringly. She’d make someone a good wife, Kate managed to think; she’d make Magnus a good wife . . .
Eventually she sat up and sipped slowly at the brandy. ‘Sorry about that,’ she said, though Magnus wasn’t really listening as he watched Janine efficiently remove the bucket. ‘Magnus . . .’
‘What?’ He dragged himself back to his sister.
‘I’m sorry about all your lovely food.’
‘As long as you’re OK.’
‘Yes.’
‘I presume you’re going to explain what that was all about.’