by Barbara Vine
‘I've never been here before.’
She nodded. ‘You can wait for him if you like, but he may be very late.’
‘Where is he?’ His voice was suddenly louder, rougher.
‘How should I know?’
‘Are you his girlfriend? His wife?’
‘I just live here,’ she said. ‘I have a room here. Two or three of us have rooms here and Tina and the children have the flat.’
Again that intuitiveness of his surprised her. He was looking at the door marked Remove. ‘Can I wait in there for Jarvis?’
‘Well, it is his room…’ She hardly knew why she said that. He already knew. Jarvis must have told him. ‘Who is it you want to see? Jarvis or Tina?’
He made no answer. He opened the door of Remove and stepped inside. Alice went back to Tina's front door and pushed the envelope under it. She hardly knew what to do. Perhaps she should fetch Tom, ask Tom what to do about this Axel Jonas who had made his way into the house and was now alone in Jarvis's room with the door shut. A great impatience with Tom took hold of her. She did not want him fussing about. Somehow, she knew he would be proprietory in the presence of this man. He would call her ‘darling' possessively.
Alice did nothing. She wondered what she would do if she opened the door of Remove and found Jonas looking through Jarvis's desk or reading his papers. She would not know how to act. It was best to do nothing, dissociate herself from all of it. She went down to the kitchen because she had had no evening meal, had eaten nothing since lunch. There was nothing in the fridge but some stale cheese, a re-corked bottle of Bulgarian red wine. She ate some cheese with white bread. The house was very quiet. It was as if it was empty.
Listening to the silence, protracted now, lasting a whole ten minutes, Jasper came out of the cloakroom, followed by Bienvida. They crept out. There was no one in the hall, no unmasked Phantom, no Dracula. The two men had come and, failing to find the boy they were searching for, had left again.
The security of his own bed had become very attractive to Jasper in the past half-hour. In the cloakroom, he had made contingency plans. If it looked as though Axel Jonas was searching the house for him, as it seemed from the one sentence clearly heard that he would be, ‘Where is he?’, they would sneak up the stairs, go to the second floor and ring the bell. Pursued by Axel Jonas, he would ring the school bell, toll it out over West Hampstead for help.
‘It would be better to phone the police,’ said Bienvida.
This he ignored. He could see she was shivering, she looked as if she was going to cry. She said it again as they approached the front door of the flat.
‘We could phone the police, Jas.’
‘I shall never phone the police as long as I live,’ said Jasper recklessly.
Snivelling a bit, Bienvida produced her key and they let themselves in. On the doormat was an envelope he immediately recognized. The letter inside it, one of Damon's forgeries, asked his teacher Miss Finch to excuse his absence on the grounds of glandular fever. Jasper knew what had happened. The letter must have fallen out of his jacket pocket in the pizza house. Axel Jonas had been here merely to bring it back. On the other hand, it meant the man now knew his address. There would be no need to toll the bell tonight but they would remain locked inside the flat, to be on the safe side.
‘Stop crying,’ he said. ‘It's going to be OK.’
‘It's not.’
‘Look, if you'll shut up I'll show you something. I'll show you my tattoo.’
‘You haven't got a tattoo.’
‘Want to bet?’
He took off his sweater and his T-shirt. Bienvida contemplated his back with awe. She stuck out one finger.
‘It's beautiful. Would it be all right if I stroked the lion?’
‘Do you mind?’ said Jasper. ‘No, it bloody wouldn't be all right. You can look all you want but don't touch. And don't go telling anyone I haven't got a tattoo on my back.’
Tom intended to prepare a surprise, something to make up for his behaviour to Alice. He had quickly become contrite about her. He should not have taken her to that squalid place where harm might have come to her and he could not have protected her. No wonder she had been upset.
His swings of mood troubled him but he would not think about that now. The room was cold, the electric heater warmed it inadequately, and it seemed it would be a good idea to light a fire in the grate. Accordingly, he went on a hunt for coal.
Although he had never seen it or even been told such a region existed, he was sure a house of this size and this age must have a cellar. If they had a cellar, old people such as his grandmother kept coal in it. He went down in the direction of the kitchen and the various other ‘usual offices’, bootrooms and sculleries that were in this part of the building, and opened one door after another. The fourth door he opened gave on to a stairway. Tom went down, pressed the light switch and found it worked. A light bulb of low wattage came on.
Coal there had been once upon a time. An area was closed off with low wooden walls. Inside it was deep in soot and a kind of coke-like gravel but no coal remained. There was no wood either nor indeed anything in the cellar, which looked as if no one had been into it for ages.
He gave up the fire idea and went out for Chinese takeaway, which he set out on the table in Four and opened a bottle of white wine. Then he tapped gently on the door of the Headmaster's Study to summon Alice. He smiled proudly, ushering her in, showing off his surprise. The room had warmed up, a fire was not necessary.
Alice was no longer hungry. She could only think of the money he had spent on this food, this wine. He made a pittance busking in the tube, she made the money, you could say this unnecessary food had all been bought with her money. She did not say it. She kept thinking how she must not hurt him, how she had done too much hurt already to others, she must not now hurt Tom.
The face of the man downstairs, the man who was surely still downstairs waiting, she could see like an afterimage when she had been looking at something bright and had closed her eyes. It seemed printed there on some inner screen, a pale grave face with eyes that were not grave but bright and searching. An urge to see him again, to find what he was doing down there, made her unable to relax. She would have liked quiet in which to speculate about him. Tom made her feel impatient with his questions as to how she liked the wine, did she prefer Chinese to Indian, shouldn't they do this more often, go out to eat sometimes.
‘We are supposed to be saving money,’ she said.
He shrugged. The hurt in his face which should have restrained her only provoked exasperation. She hardly ever noticed his hand any more but now she found herself looking at it, the very slightly distorted knuckles, the stiff little finger. It brought her an inward shudder, though it was not in any way grotesque, it was not even very obvious.
He said in a colder voice, ‘I've never told you about my grandmother, have I?’
‘You've said you had one. Why?’
‘My grandmother's rich. When she dies she'll leave me her money. Perhaps you think I shouldn't talk like that – I mean, they call it waiting for dead men's shoes or something, don't they? – but it's only realistic to admit she's going to die. She's eighty.’
Yes, and she might live fifteen years, thought Alice. Women do, some women. She did not say it aloud. She said what he had predicted she would: ‘I think you shouldn't talk like that.’
‘I keep upsetting you today, don't I, darling?’
‘I don't want to sit in judgement on you. Who am I to judge anyone?’
‘You can judge me. You can say anything to me.’
It was just not true. The idea of arguing about that made her feel weary and exasperated.
‘Tom, will you excuse me, please? Will you please not ask any questions? There's something I have to do downstairs?’
Of course he asked. ‘What do you mean, something you have to do?’
His voice was the same but she could hear the temper rising in it. She was getting to know him
well.
‘I'll explain later. Please, Tom.’
He lifted his shoulders in a shrug that was at the same time baffled and bitter. Alice ran downstairs into the dark hall. She put no lights on. There would be lights on inside Remove and Jarvis there and Axel Jonas gone. Telling herself this, she knocked on the door before opening it.
He was sitting in Jarvis's armchair with only a table lamp on, reading or looking through a book. When he saw her he got up. He laid the book down on the desk and came towards her. Alice had closed the door. She had been going to say, had been rehearsing on the stairs what she would say, that he must go, she should never have let him come in here, that it was wrong for him to be in Jarvis's room, however much a friend of Jarvis's he might be.
‘I've been hoping you'd come back,’ he said.
‘Have you?’
‘But you're too late. I have to go. What are you called?’
‘Alice.’
Her name had a curious effect on him. Even in the half-dark she could see his face change and a look of pain, of disbelief, cross it. The expression was almost immediately wiped away. His eyes which she had supposed dark grey she saw were blue.
‘Alice,’ he said, and repeated it. ‘Alice.’
He came very close to her. She found herself unable to move. He did not embrace her. He took her face, her chin, in his hand, and brought her mouth to his mouth. She felt his mouth smiling as it approached hers, then not smiling but kissing deep, as the hand that held her face tightened its pressure on her jawbone.
Alice did not put up her hands. She stood, being kissed, joined with him at the mouth only as he let his hand fall, kept his lips on hers, his tongue pushing her lips apart and entering her mouth to search it. It endured while her brain became a red screen of slowly turning indefinable images. It was over abruptly with a kind of shock of loss. She was shaking, she thought she would fall. His voice came from a long way off. Her eyes were closed and to open them involved an effort, a difficult process to be learned anew.
‘We'll meet again soon.’
Afterwards, she wished, wished passionately, she had gone to the door with him, spoken to him, asked what that meant, that meeting again soon. Instead, she stood there, opening her eyes on to the dimly lit room. Doors must have closed but she did not hear them. She came slowly out of Remove into the empty hall, went back to switch off Jarvis's light.
She was not thinking, she was only feeling, not yet asking herself what she had done, if she had done anything. Tom's door was closed. She prayed he would not open it and put his head out as she passed. He did not. As she came to the Headmaster's Study she heard people let themselves into the house. She stood and listened until she heard the voices of Tina and Daniel Korn. If she had not gone down and encountered Axel Jonas again, if she had not encountered him in the half-dark and returned his strange kiss, Alice knew she would have spoken of him to Tina, would later or tomorrow have mentioned him to Jarvis. Now she would not.
In bed in Lilac Villa, Cecilia lay awake. This was unusual. The pattern of her nights was that she fell asleep quickly, woke at four and remained awake. Daphne had told her, she having got it from Peter, that finding it hard to get to sleep is a sign of anxiety, waking too early a sign of depression.
Cecilia did not think of herself as chronically depressed but rather as one who tried to look on the bright side of things. The bright side at present would be to bask in the good things Jasper and particularly Bienvida had told her that day. How, for instance, they would be going out with Brian again at the weekend. Brian, who once used to meet them outside at some prearranged place, now actually came to call for them at the School, had a cup of coffee in the Headmaster's Flat with Tina, was on pleasant conversational terms with Tina. Bienvida had even suggested it as likely Tina would accompany them when they all went to the Tower Bridge exhibition on Saturday.
This did not sound like Tina. Cecilia admitted it, faced it. She did not believe everything Bienvida told her, perhaps believed less than half. That Brian and Tina would get together again, might even marry, was Cecilia's dearest wish. She was thinking once more about what to do with her house. A possibility might be to make over the house to Tina on condition she lived in it with Brian. And then she, Cecilia, would move in with Daphne.
But she knew it was not in her nature to make such a condition, even if it were possible, legal, workable. She had long ago made a will, leaving everything unconditionally to Tina, her only child. Tina would not agree to any such conditional arrangement, she was sure, and sure too that it was wrong even to attempt to manipulate people in this way. At least the children had not mentioned other men in Tina's recent life.
Cecilia allowed herself to imagine Tina's wedding to Brian with the children in attendance, a page and bridesmaid. Such a ceremony would have seemed very shocking to her once, but she had adjusted to things, she had adapted. She knew there were many people who lived together and had children and then married with the children there at the wedding. Daphne and she had discussed it, though more in connection with Peter than Tina. As she dreamed of Tina settling down, so Daphne dreamed of Peter ceasing to love men, moving in with the right girl and later marrying her.
But thinking of Peter brought to Cecilia a sense of great fear, of impending doom, as she envisaged for her friend terrible unhappiness coming to her through her son. She tried to re-direct her thoughts, lying there in her bed in the big, dark empty house, and found them straying to Daphne's own wedding, so long ago but so clearly remembered, at which she had been a bridesmaid.
Daphne's new husband had given her a present, as was correct, but Daphne herself had chosen it, a cameo brooch, the cameo carved from deep pink and very pale pink coral. Several times over the years Cecilia had thought of giving this brooch to Tina but she never had. It was not the kind of thing Tina wore, with her preference for Indian or African jewellery. One day perhaps Bienvida would have it.
Thinking of the brooch made Cecilia wonder where it was, made her put the light on and get up and begin searching for it. At last she found it in a box in a dressing-table drawer in one of the spare rooms – perfectly properly put away, neatly packed in pink cotton wool, tidy as all her things were. But she reproached herself for having hidden it away there, for years perhaps, it was possible it had been there for ten years.
She brought it back to her own bedroom and put it in her jewel case, no longer in its box but pinned to the velvet padding with which the case was lined. This move, this nocturnal act, brought Cecilia a deep satisfaction, a sense of having restored things to order and righted an obscure wrong. She fell asleep at once.
14
Hooded, his feet still and steady in their jesses, Abelard perched on Jed's wrist in the far corner of the Piccadilly Line car. It was a Saturday and they were going up to the end of the line, to Cockfosters.
Jed had decided it would be unwise to go back to Hampstead Heath at present. He had had some strange looks while flying Abelard up on the Heath behind St Columba's Hospital. Believing it to be an unfrequented part, he had nevertheless encountered several groups of people. One woman had actually spoken to him and in a censorious way, asking him if he knew there were more than 150 different kinds of wild bird inhabiting the Heath, and that these were protected species.
He would not have dreamt of setting Abelard on to anything but pigeons and rabbits, but it was true he could not always, or even often, control what the hawk did. There had been, after all, the incident of the magpie that had so distressed Tina's little girl. Up at Enfield Chase he would have more scope, more space and solitude.
The tube car had been full as far as Wood Green, but gradually the passengers had got out and now he was alone but for one other man, a black man in the uniform of London Transport Underground. This man had been sitting two seats from Jed, had looked curiously once or twice at the hawk, but after a while had moved away to the other end of the car. Jed knew this was because of the rank smell that came off his hawking jacket, a foul r
eek that repelled people but seemed to comfort Abelard and keep him quiet.
At Cockfosters he got out, holding Abelard, poised, silent, hooded, on his wrist. When the hawk was quiet like this Jed felt a deep warm love for him, the kind of love he could not see as different from what he had once felt for a woman and a child. He wanted no other companion, required no more response than Abelard showed by simply being there, remaining perched on his arm, without attempts at escape.
But the week gone by had been terrible. No more terrible than all the weeks preceding, it was true, but no less either. The dreadful cries had begun at dawn, ceased only at feeding time when Abelard fastened upon his food, his meagre ration of food as Jed saw it, and had begun again before Jed left for work. The cries met him as he returned. He was afraid to ask the occupants of the School if they ceased at all during the day. He did not want to know the answer.
Jed weighed him. He knew that if the bird were overweight he must withdraw even the rations he was having – an ounce would be too much, half an ounce ominous. But he prayed for Abelard's weight to have declined so that he could feed him well and suppress that screaming. Yesterday had been a good day, a happy day, the weight loss considerable, surprisingly high, and oh, there had been such pleasure, such loving delight, in doubling the ration of steak pieces, in watching those flashing eyes, that gobbling beak. It was a quiet, contented hawk, sleeping on its perch, that he had left to go out and join the Safeguards on the southbound Victoria Line duty.
Together they made for the Triangular Wood. There were rabbits and Jed released Abelard from his jesses, watched him fly, swoop, circle and at the prescribed whistle, return to his hand for the chick reward.
The day was mild, damp, grey. Only the oaks still kept their leaves, brown and shrivelled. The grass was a bright sharp green from autumn rains. Abelard swooped into the misty sky, pursued a pigeon, obeyed Jed's command to fly to the tall trees at the far end of this grassy clearing. Or did his best to obey. To Jed's sensitive eyes, his flight seemed impeded by something indefinable, seemed stayed, clipped for an instant, before he attained the low-hung branch that was his destination.