The Loop

by Anabel Donald

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, then he cleared his throat, and got ready to say something he expected would be unwelcome. ‘The thing is, Alex, you’ve had a wasted journey out here. I’ve been thinking. Jacob’s my friend. I don’t see that I should talk about him to you. His life’s his own business, right? Whatever he wants to do, I guess that’s up to him.’

  ‘Maybe you could tell me the names of some of his other friends who’d be prepared to help.’

  ‘That wouldn’t be so easy. He’s not – he doesn’t make friends quickly.’

  ‘How come he did with you?’

  ‘We were in the same seminar. We’re working in the same field. We just – took to each other. I helped him out some.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Socializing. Like that. He’s not a great mixer.’

  ‘Is there something wrong with him?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Something that makes him not fit in? Is he an oddball?’

  ‘He’s unusual, sure. His upbringing, I guess. You know he’s very religious? Partly that. He’s a serious person. Very – clear. Very directed.’ Then he remembered. ‘But I’m not prepared to talk about it, all right?’

  ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘I understand. But I’m working for someone who loves him, who’s concerned about him, who thinks he’s in some kind of trouble.’

  ‘And who would that be?’ he said.

  ‘Jams Treliving,’ I said.

  He took a deep breath. Of relief? ‘Jacob hasn’t been in touch with her?’ he said.

  ‘You know who I mean?’

  ‘Sure. The woman he met on the flight.’

  ‘What did he tell you about her?’

  ‘Alex, I’m not going to discuss it.’ He smiled apologetically. It was a very charming smile: self-deprecating, conspiratorial. I smiled back.

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘But where do you think he is? Did he mean to give up his Ph.D. course? It’d be odd, surely. He’s spent three years on it already and presumably he still intends to work in universities. So he needs to get the qualification, to get a job.’

  ‘That’s his decision.’

  ‘Of course it is, if he made it. But he didn’t sign off from the university, did he? And that sounds as if he meant to come back.’

  ‘How do you know?’ he said, sipping his Coke, looking me up and down with his heavy-lidded, young-Robert-Mitchum eyes. Or maybe young-Al-Pacino eyes. Tasty as hell, anyway. I recrossed my legs and wished they were longer, better, sexier, and involuntarily fiddled with my hair then stopped my fiddling fingers because that’s the deadest giveaway of all. He mightn’t have known that, of course, though he probably would because a man like him would have been around block after block, surely.

  Concentrate, Alex. This is work. ‘I’ve contacts in the university,’ I said. ‘I know he paid the tuition fees for the autumn quarter. Which suggests he expected to be back to attend the courses.’

  He cleared his throat, gestured with his hands. He had great hands, long, narrow, brown and strong-looking. ‘See here, Alex, do you understand my position? I’m in a dilemma. If something serious has happened to Jacob, and maybe I could help, then that’s one thing. I’ll give you the address of the hotel we were supposed to meet, no problem. But as to telling you anything else, anything that was told me in confidence as a friend, well that’s another consideration altogether.’

  ‘I understand,’ I said, though even through my lust it struck me as garbage. How confidential was a decision to drop out of university? ‘Did he ever talk to you about a loop?’

  ‘A loop? Do you mean the Loop, downtown?’

  ‘I don’t know what I mean. He mentioned it to Jams and said it was important, but he didn’t say what it was.’

  Carl shook his head. ‘Not that I recall.’

  ‘But he did talk to you about his feelings? You were close friends?’

  ‘Were?’ he said. ‘You think he’s dead?’

  ‘Jams does.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because she believes they fell in love, and nothing but death or terrible accident would prevent him getting in touch with her. She’s a romantic.’

  ‘And you’re not?’

  ‘I didn’t come here to talk about me.’

  ‘I wish you had,’ he said. ‘How’re you fixed for the rest of the evening?’

  Much too sudden. Were the courting customs in America so different? Was I sending out the wrong signals? Was it just the new tasty quick-scoring Alex, was he a nutter, was he hiding something?

  I smiled non-committally. I didn’t want to close him out completely, but I didn’t want to have to wrestle with him either. ‘I’m over here with a friend,’ I said. ‘I’m meeting him later, but thanks anyway . . . Look, it does seem as if Jacob’s disappeared. I’m not asking for any confidences. Just a clue about his plans.’

  ‘I’m sorry, that was out of line,’ he said, and he blushed. His skin looked even more beautiful and I warmed to him further. Not a smooth operator: possibly sincere.

  ‘Not at all,’ I said Englishly. It was a pleasure, after Barty, to be dealing with someone less sophisticated than I was. ‘Come on, help me out about Jacob. Jams is really worried. Should she be?’

  ‘I guess so. He planned on coming back for the autumn quarter. He left most of his stuff here with me.’

  ‘Great,’ I said briskly. ‘Let’s take a look.’

  Half-an-hour later I’d sorted through the things Jacob had left, and apart from finding out that the top of his sartorial range was Marks and Spencer and the bottom the cheapest of cheap market gear, that he wore boxer shorts until the waist elastic went without staining them (were there panty-liners for men?), that he had tiny writing and took good clear notes, that he liked classical music, particularly Bach and choral works, and that his doctoral dissertation was based around an eighteenth century sect-founding ex-vicar called Thomas Tubmaster, I was no further.

  There were no personal letters at all, no diary, no address book, no photographs: as far as I could see, no clues. I sat back on my heels and surveyed the material. One suitcase, full of clothes. Four boxes, two of books, two of papers and notes and filecards and floppy disks and CDs, one portable CD player, one empty holdall.

  We were in Carl’s bedroom. It was just about big enough for a double bed and an old wardrobe. When he took Jacob’s things out from under the bed and down from the top of the wardrobe, there was no floor space at all. So he’d been lying on the bed and watching me as I searched.

  I replaced the floppy disks in the last box and said, ‘Where’s his computer?’

  ‘I’m using it right now. Mine’s been in the shop a week.’ He sounded defensive: it seemed reasonable to me.

  ‘Notice anything interesting on the hard disk?’ I asked.

  ‘No.’

  I could look myself: I could hunt through the floppies. I didn’t get the feeling Carl would like that, or maybe even allow it. I wouldn’t push it, for now. Jams could, if it was necessary later.

  I picked up the final unsearched object, the empty holdall, and began running my fingers along the, seams and under the stiffened card lining the bottom. Carl was watching me intently. ‘Alex—’ he said. He sounded husky.

  ‘Hang on,’ I said. ‘I think I’ve found something.’ It was small, button-shaped, stuck just at the reach of a fingertip. I prodded it, wiggled my finger, tipped up the bag hoping to shake it free. It didn’t budge. ‘Have you got a screwdriver? Or a pair of scissors? This is stuck.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I don’t know. A button?’

  ‘Give it here.’ He took the bag, went into the front room and moved about. I started pushing the boxes back under the bed.

  He came back with the bag and, on the palm of his hand, a button. A black plastic shirt button. ‘There you go. Is it a clue?’

  I took it, turned it over. ‘Hardly,’ I said.

  ‘Then you’re finished here?’

  ‘Yes.’

 
‘Please come and eat with me. Please. I know a really good little Italian place, and I want to get to know you better.’

  We went to his little Italian place which would never, unless it sacked the chef and the singing waiter, expand into a big Italian place. We exchanged the kind of edited and glamorized highlights about ourselves that you do with someone whose bones you want to jump, and then went back to his apartment and, by midnight, there was precious little of me that he didn’t know. Physically, that is.

  And by midnight I wanted to leave, profoundly. I was feeling bad because, although I’d never made any promises to Barty, I knew he wouldn’t like it if he knew where I was and what I’d been doing. And because Carl was involved, however indirectly, with a case, so he was not only a bit on the side but an unethical bit on the side. And because I really wasn’t interested in Carl Nabokov, and he was trying so hard to be nice. He’d given me his all, pleasurably, twice, and now he was cuddling me, complimenting me and telling me about his feelings and his childhood.

  Most women would have been delighted, I suppose, that he wasn’t snoring and hogging the duvet. I’d have preferred it if he had, because then I could slip away leaving a note, and wrestle with my guilt alone.

  As it was I lay supine, smelling his skin – musky, at first delicious, now over-sweet – and rationalized for Europe. I hadn’t behaved really badly because: 1) I’d never see him again 2) I was abroad, and everyone knew abroad didn’t count 3) I’d made it clear that I already had a regular lover 4) he’d used condoms, of course.

  ‘What do you think? Hey, Alex, what do you think?’

  I had no idea. When I tuned him out he’d been talking about Miss Maclellan, his inspirational high school English teacher, who sounded like a self-indulgent power-freak who’d shortly be featured in a made-for-TV biopic. He couldn’t want my opinion of her.

  ‘Sorry, Carl, I didn’t hear.’

  ‘How about we get together again?’

  ‘I’m not likely to be in Chicago for a while.’

  ‘Not here. In London. I’m flying over Thursday, for six weeks, to work at the British Library. Isn’t that great?’

  It was deeply ungreat. I didn’t quite say so, but nearly. Not nearly enough: he didn’t get the message. And he already had my London telephone number, on my card. And then we discovered that we were going to be on the same Thursday flight.

  He was pleased. I suppose it served me right.

  Wednesday, 30 March

  Chapter Eight

  I was due to meet Barty for breakfast in the Blackstone Grill at eight-thirty.

  I always liked breakfast. I wasn’t so mad on meeting Barty because I swung between fearing that a scarlet letter might appear on my forehead, and thinking that it was nothing to do with him if I chose to go to bed with someone else. The conflict made me irritable, as did the guilt. But I knew the only way not to let him suspect what I was feeling was not to feel it myself, so while I dressed I concentrated on Jacob and the case.

  Then I rang Jams.

  Her little-girl voice was flat, resigned, even before I’d told her what I knew. She listened in silence. Then she said, ‘He told me about Carl Nabokov. His best friend. Jacob taught him for the exam.’

  ‘Jacob taught him? What exam?’

  ‘An oral thing, where they have to answer questions on books. Lots of books. Jacob knew them all, because he’d been to Oxford, and Carl didn’t. So he taught him. It was the first real friend he’d ever had.’

  ‘That’s good,’ I said, although it struck me that twenty-six was a bit late for your first real friend, and that Carl hadn’t seen the relationship in the same way. He’d thought he’d been doing Jacob a favour. Maybe Jacob’s lack of social skills led him to misinterpret. Or maybe Carl had been trying to impress me: he was the cool one, extending a streetwise hand to the isolated nerd.

  ‘Jacob was a giver,’ said Jams. ‘He said he liked to give. What was hard was finding the right people to take. Anyway . . . Thanks, Alex. What are you going to do now?’

  ‘Follow it up in England. Go to the London hotel Carl says he was staying at. Go up to his address in Doncaster.’

  ‘But you don’t expect to find him alive, do you?’

  ‘He could be.’

  ‘He could be. But you don’t think he is.’

  ‘I don’t know what to think.’

  She was crying. I could hear the sniffs. ‘You’re being tactful,’ she said. ‘I’m sure he’s dead, and so are you.’

  I wasn’t sure of much except that Jacob’s disappearance wasn’t simple, and neither was Jacob himself. So I said nothing, and listened to her sniffs. ‘I’m back in my flat in London on Saturday,’ she said finally. ‘I’ll ring you then.’

  ‘Take care,’ I said.

  ‘Why?’ she said, and rang off.

  So by the time I sat down in the corner booth behind the door of the coffee-shop that I’d come to think of as mine, Jams and Jacob filled my mind, insofar as I have one until I’ve properly woken up. Barty wasn’t there yet. As usual, I ordered two eggs over easy because they didn’t have blueberry muffins, and come to think of it Spenser always made his own, and dived into my first cup of coffee.

  A foursome in the booth behind me were talking, loudly. They had sharp accents, like buzz-saws. I wished I could place US accents: New York everyone knew and Deep South was unmissable, mostly because it took them a decade to finish a sentence, but otherwise—

  This lot were a family. Father and mother, early sixties. Daughter and son-in-law, late thirties. Middle-class, neatly dressed, the children as from Lands’ End, the mother in a dress and jacket, the father in a drip-dry beige suit and open-neck white shirt. They were talking about the past. A football game.

  The father was talking. ‘Fran danced, that day. He threw that ball. He danced all over the field . . .’

  Barty arrived, and sat down, in his visiting-Chicago expensive casual clothes, looking his usual self. He isn’t good-looking – his face is too bony and Irish for that – but he always looks distinguished. Tall, rangy, tough and self-assured.

  He ordered scrambled eggs and bacon and asked how I’d got on with Carl. I told him.

  They were still reliving the football game, behind me, in what sounded like a script by Arthur Miller.

  ‘I think I have a photograph of it . . . It was ridiculous, twenty bucks a ticket – we were so high up, I tell you birds were flying lower than us. We were on the oblique . . .’

  Then I noticed something. A smell. Of aftershave. From Barty.

  He normally wears aftershave, but very little. Certainly not enough to cut through the powerful coffee-shop smell of frying bacon and weary grease.

  I sniffed again. It must be him, because it was Trumper’s special, the elite Curzon Street barber’s own brand. I’d cleaned round the bottle on my bathroom shelf often enough.

  So I looked more closely at Barty. He seemed distracted and tense, though a casual observer wouldn’t have noticed because he’s very controlled.

  I liked him too much to duck it. ‘What’s the matter, Barty?’ I said.

  He put down his cup, cleared his throat and said, ‘Alex, will you marry me?’

  I hadn’t been expecting that. Not then. I’d thought some extrasensory perception of his, or just experience, had told him that I’d spent the previous night rolling about in bed with Carl, so I was knocked sideways. A bit guilty, a bit annoyed at the timing, a bit pleased. More than a bit pleased.

  But I had no idea what to say, and the silence lengthened, to accommodate our neighbours’ voices.

  ‘You lived in Freeport, then, didn’t you? We were in Rockford, weren’t we? We could have been in Bloomington . . . That was 1980 ... Oh, cut off of it ...We went to Davenport 1970 ... We had seven days to find a house and we made an offer on the sixth . . . I never liked that house . . .’

  Barty was looking at me. I had to say something, so I said ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I love you. Because I want us to have ch
ildren. Because I’m forty-five next birthday.’

  The waitress topped up my coffee. I spooned sugar in, and stirred it. ‘I think I love you too,’ I said. ‘But I don’t know.’

  ‘What don’t you know?’

  ‘I don’t know anything, much.’

  He laughed. ‘Be specific. It’s not like you to be girlish.’

  ‘I’m not being girlish. I’m trying to be honest. I don’t know if I want to settle down. I don’t know if I want children. I don’t know if I love you enough.’ I didn’t want future breakfasts stretching out in front of us in which I wasn’t mentioning the person I’d been to bed with the night before.

  I also didn’t want to be the lesser partner. He had more money, more power, more education, more experience, more class. His brother was an Earl, for heaven’s sake. I’d hardly fit in to his family, would I? And my children would also be his, so they’d belong to his family as well. Maybe they’d grow up to look down on me, in Little England where the classes are still just about where they were when Moses came down from the mountain carrying the tablets of stone with the orders of precedence for the second and subsequent sons of a Marquis chiselled on them.

  The family behind me was leaving. Those marriages had hung on. They must have thought it was worth it, even through all the moving about and the football games and Fran dancing, whoever Fran was. Maybe they’d managed to hang on because they were moving about. Whereas Barty and I and our children would live in Notting Hill, because no way was I going to move to the country. We’d live in Notting Hill and I’d go to bed with one man and I’d be Barty’s wife—

  ‘Do you want to talk about it?’ he said.

  ‘Not now.’

  ‘Do you want time to think about it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why?’

  No reason. Every reason. Because I didn’t want to commit myself and I didn’t want to lose him either.

  A half-truth was the best I could manage. ‘I need to find out who my father was, first. In case of the children. I haven’t exactly got the greatest bloodline. My mother’s a schizophrenic, remember. And she’s got Alzheimer’s.’