by Barbara Vine
At teatime in Lilac Villa, Cecilia, Jasper and Bienvida watched television. Now that Daphne was with her all the time and there was no six o'clock phone call to be made, Cecilia could watch the early evening news without interruption. She sat on the sofa-bed, restored to its sofa state from nine until nine, with her feet up and a rug over her legs. She wore the cameo brooch Arthur Bleech-Palmer had given her pinned to the collar of her dress. The children were at the table but both on the side from which the screen could clearly be seen. Daphne waited on them all. There was a homemade chocolate sponge with white chocolate icing and toffee ice-cream.
The first item on the news was Romania and then there was something about people who were HIV positive, which Cecilia hoped Daphne would stay out of the room long enough not to see, and then an account of a man's body pulled out of the canal at Little Venice. The man had been called Nicholas Mann, was unemployed and of no fixed address. None of them was much interested even when the newscaster said police were treating the case as murder. They wanted to get to the bit about the Duchess of York's baby, or Bienvida did, in spite of Jasper's sneers.
Cecilia was no longer able to walk the children home. Still, as Daphne said, it was only round the corner and Jasper was accustomed, it appeared, to roving about all over London. Cecilia did not like to ask Daphne to go with them. She managed to accompany them to the door herself, leaning on her stick and with Daphne holding the paralysed arm. Halfway there the thought struck her that it would be nice to give them some spending money each, say a pound coin each, and she asked Daphne, for only the second time since her stroke, if she would fetch her handbag.
Daphne sat her down in the chair just inside the front door and went to look for the bag. She came back empty-handed, saying she could not exactly lay her hands on it, but produced two coins of her own. She helped Cecilia back to the sofa after Jasper and Bienvida had gone and Cecilia had another piece of chocolate sponge with white chocolate icing.
‘That white chocolate will be my undoing,’ said Cecilia.
‘I can't imagine it will hurt you.’ In the months to come Daphne often remembered how she had said that.
‘It's a beautiful cake. I know you say you can't cook, you're so modest, but you're a much better cook than I am. I wonder why you couldn't find my handbag.’
‘I'll have a proper look in a minute.’
‘I don't seem to have seen it for ages. Not since before this trouble. I don't know when I last saw it. You know the one I mean, don't you? A dark brown leather. If only I could remember what happened before II was taken ill.’
Daphne could remember. Or, rather, she could remember everything that had happened on that platform, and there had been no handbag. Returning to the scene of it, she saw herself sitting on the grey bucket seat with Cecilia and the doctor bending over them and the people around. Why hadn't she looked for that handbag, at least asked where it was? Unthinkable now that Cecilia, like some young girl of today in jeans and pocketed jacket, would go out without a handbag.
There had been a shopping bag, rather a smart one of hessian with a red printed border. That was why she had not inquired. She had assumed Cecilia's purse and keys were in the shopping bag. Oh, there had been so much else to think of, the most important thing to get Cecilia home to her own house before they could carry her off to hospital
She said, ‘I'll look for it, Cessie. It must be somewhere.’
If it was lost, which meant stolen, could she possibly deceive Cecilia? Daphne knew there would not only have been money in the handbag but keys and credit cards and even Cecilia's long-unused driving licence. There would have been a chequebook. That brought a wave of fear breaking over her. She went about the house, making a show of looking for the bag. The show must have been made for herself or so that Cecilia downstairs could hear her busy footsteps.
In their long, deep friendship they had not been open with each other. They belonged in a generation which had been conditioned to conceal, to place courtesy above all, not to talk about distasteful things, to put others before oneself, even though this might give rise to resentment. But somewhere between them had been an inner honesty, an unspoken trust, a sense that each could rely upon the other and not be let down. They had acted too on the principle of each putting herself in the other's shoes, or as Cecilia who was the reader put it, being like Mrs Doasyou-wouldbedoneby. Daphne, in Cecilia's shoes, would want to know. She would want the credit card company to be told and the bank, new locks fitted to the doors perhaps. She told herself it was no good hanging about, putting off the evil day, and she went down to Cecilia and told her.
The same thing happened to Cecilia as had happened to her. Daphne could tell. A wave washed through her, of shock and panic, but in Cecilia's case it was much stronger and more physical. After all, the lost things were Cecilia's. She leant back on the sofa and closed her eyes. After a while she opened them and said, ‘How long is it?’
‘I'm afraid it's nearly three weeks.’
‘Someone must have taken it while we were on the platform.’
‘Oh, surely no one would do that,’ Daphne cried. ‘Not seeing you so ill. Oh, surely not. People are not as bad as that, are they?’
‘Daphne, I know it sounds silly and unlike me, but do you think I could have a drink?’
‘Of course you could. I'm sure it won't hurt you. What would you like? Sherry? A little whisky?’
Cecilia said she would have a glass of dry sherry. Daphne had one too. She said she would phone the bank and the credit card companies in the morning and Cecilia said thank you and laid her hand on hers.
Three hours later Daphne was telling the doctor that the shock had brought on Cecilia's second stroke. The doctor thought she was being kind in disagreeing. She was so relieved at not having to find a hospital bed for Cecilia at eleven at night and that this capable old woman would keep her at home and nurse her that she told Daphne rich food and alcohol had brought on Cecilia's vomiting and it was that which had sent up her blood pressure.
Cecilia lay asleep on the sofa-bed which had become a bed again.
Tom had spent hours in the Art Room. This was to make Alice believe he had left for Bristol. He and Axel had eaten a meal together but had drunk nothing. Axel had said it would be unwise to drink. At some time during the evening they had gone across to Five. Axel had packed his backpack with the camera, a torch, a pair of leather gloves, some tools and a bunch of keys.
The contents of the backpack Tom had not actually seen. It stood there, propped up against the side of the bed, a very large khaki-coloured thing on a frame. Tom went to lift it, just to feel the weight because it looked heavy, but he had hardly raised it an inch from the ground when Axel said sharply, ‘Don't touch!’
Tom had the rope in his own pack. It was long, far too long for their purpose, Tom thought, but Axel said it was better to be on the safe side. As it was, he had cut half of it off and put the other half in the bicycle shed, up at the end where the roof was still intact. At some point during the evening the sound of music reached them from downstairs. It was Alice playing the violin in her room immediately below them. Tom did not recognize the music, it was very likely the solo part from a Mozart concerto, and it sounded to him infinitely sad and forlorn.
Axel behaved as if he could not hear it. He said, looking at himself in the mirror, ‘“Mr Verloc, who by a mystic accord of temperament and necessity, had been set apart to be a secret agent all his life.”’
‘What's that?’
‘Conrad.’
The music had stopped before they went down. Someone had turned off the electrolier. The house was still. The streets were not empty but they saw only three people between Cambridge School and the alley that led to the bridge and they were all men on their own, walking home fast.
It was a damp night. A pale moon had a fuzzy look, as if it had been soaked in water. The wooden steps seemed more than usually slippery as they crossed the bridge. A light condensation like dew lay on the grey metal
latticework. They were on their way to West End Lane to pick up a taxi, it being too late to catch a train. Each carried a backpack, Axel walking with balanced deliberation as if his was very heavy. They looked like students starting out on some trip across Europe, for Axel, for the first time in Tom's experience of him, was not wearing the long dark overcoat but a thick black sweater.
They had a long time to wait. Two taxis came, both without their lights up but only one with a fare. The third had its light on. Axel asked the driver to take them to Oxford Street, anywhere in Oxford Street would do. He closed the glass partition between them and the driver, said to Tom in a low voice, ‘It's wiser. We can walk from there.’
Tom looked at Axel and away. His unease strengthened, became something which took hold of him. It was the first time this had been put directly into words, that what they were about to do might get them into trouble, might be against the law and reprehensible. And yet of course he must have known it was. It was not just a lark, an adventure that at worst would merit a reprimand from some London Transport policeman, like busking did.
He said, ‘You're only going to take a photograph.’
Axel gave a short laugh. ‘Don't think about it.’
He could back out now, there was still time. The money Axel had given him was still untouched and he could return it. Tom, shifting uneasily in his seat, thought it was not the £1,000 or the £9,000 to come that stopped him, but simple fear of Axel's reaction. No, not fear, not quite, more embarrassment, awkwardness, he did not want the man's disgust, his incredulity. How weak I am, thought Tom.
The taxi dropped them a little way west of the Circus. They started walking. Tom asked if it was much further and for answer Axel pointed to his own backpack, which weighed two or three times what Tom's did, so Tom said no more and they plodded down New Oxford Street. Axel led the way along High Holborn and turned right through Little Turnstile into Gate Street and Twyford Place.
It was all new to Tom, who had never been there before. The place was, of course, lit, but not very brightly and it was quite deserted. They entered a street behind a building Axel said was the Soane Museum. It was a mix of late-Victorian houses, now all offices, and small, purpose-built blocks. An alley between the last in the row of these houses and the first block seemed to be where Axel was heading and at the end of this narrow passage he stopped at a solid-looking door, inserted a key into its upper lock and another into its lower. Inside, three feet away, was another door. Another key from Axel's ring unlocked it. They were in a small entrance hall. Tom switched on his torch and Axel switched on his. The torch beam showed him a counter with two phones on it, a small computer terminal on a shelf behind, notices on the wall that it was too dark to read.
‘I don't want to use the lift,’ said Axel. ‘We'll walk up.’
The stairs were steep but quite wide. Tom was very aware that for the first in his life he was on premises he had no right to be on. He was trespassing. There were seventy-two stairs to the top and on the way they passed through three floors. The first landing had a sleek decor, carpet-like tapestry on the walls and tapestry-like carpet on the floor, a melange of blues and blacks. The next floor up, after another fourteen stairs, was a metallic cavern with etched gilt panels grown shabby and tarnished. The name of a publisher Tom had never heard of glimmered from the wall in the light of his torch.
At the top they came out into a hallway that seemed much more utilitarian than any floor they had passed. The floor was not carpeted but tiled. The walls seemed to be painted a dull buff colour. Doors to rooms stood open, it was rather as if they had come into someone's flat, for playing his torch inside one he saw a bed and in another kitchen fitments.
Afterwards Tom was to tell himself he had a sick feeling at this point. A sense of impending disaster laid a cold touch on him. But afterwards he was equally sure he could not have felt this, he could not have foreseen. There had been nothing up till then to warn him. The name of the publishing house meant nothing, struck no chord out of his past, the blue and black carpeting, even the faint smell that pervaded the whole building, a citrus yet chemical smell as of fruit-scented soap, none of that evoked anything.
It was impossible that he had been less than innocent. He must have approached this decisive spot in contented ignorance, even jauntily.
Along the passage they passed the lift. It was the merest chance that made Tom direct his torch beam on to the wall facing the lift doors. The wide circle of light showed him, lettered there in black and chrome, followed by an arrow pointing to the right, the name: Angell, Scherrer and Christianson.
He swung the torch beam down. Axel's own torch beam made a circular pool of light ahead of him. Tom directed light up once more. He nearly cried out that this was Alice's company, this was where she worked. Some realization, although of what he did not then know, stopped him. He felt as if on the brink of an awful chasm. Later on, when he was recalling it and his premonitions, he thought that what had stopped him shouting it out was the sight, ahead of him in the torchlight, of the bunch of keys swinging from Axel's hand.
Mechanically, he went on walking. He went on following Axel. They came to a narrow flight of stairs, at the top of which was a door. There was no need to find a key to it. The key was in the lock. Axel unlocked the door, opened it and stepped out. A rush of damp air came to meet Tom. It felt cold and sharp, striking him backwards, though the night was quite mild. He followed Axel out into the night.
They were on the roof. It was dark but vaguely moonlit, and beyond and below the flat expanses ahead of him the street lights glowed yellow and misty, so that the roofs were like a vast raft floating on a shining sea. Underfoot was tarmac. All kinds of excrescences bulged or protruded out of it, posts and funnels, chimneys and ventilators. Attached to the top of a tank was a television dish, to another an aerial. Axel led the way across the roof, keeping to the centre, away from the edge and the railing that was only high enough to keep a small child from falling over.
Tom had a stunned feeling. It was as if he had entered, down there, a zone that paralysed all emotion. He could think of practical things, he could calculate, but feeling had been turned off. He could calculate that they must be proceeding across the roofs of those Victorian houses of which the solicitors' office building was the last in the block. He was quite used to the darkness now. It was far from absolute darkness and it almost seemed light to him. Ahead and to the left, protruding from another roof, that of a block behind this street, he could see a kind of turret. It was about ten feet in from the edge which on this level and this building was bounded by a low brick wall with a concrete coping. All this his mind registered, perhaps more lucidly than it would normally have done.
Axel vaulted the wall and Tom followed him. All the time he could see Axel ahead of him, a different Axel in these different clothes, thin and tall and carrying the heavy pack. He must have been here before to know the geography of the place. Perhaps he had been many times. He had keys to Alice's office. The building they had entered, the building whose stairs they had climbed, belonged to the company for which Alice worked.
Tom repeated this to himself several times. Stopping when Axel stopped and swinging the pack from his back when Axel swung the pack from his, he saw again the place they had passed through, that top floor which he had thought at the time seemed like someone's flat, a private apartment, if not a very luxurious one. He saw the open door and the bed inside. At once, the image changed to Alice sitting on a bed, waiting on a bed. Waiting for Axel.
Axel was looking at him. He was giving him a long, intuitive look. It was light enough to see that. ‘What's wrong with you?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Right, then. Good. We aren't going to sit here all night, admiring the view, I hope.’
Tom thought, I must speak. I must say something, ask, do something, and now before we do any more, go any further. Emotion returned as his body, his mind, his inner self, adjusted to shock. He had fixed his eyes on that bunch
of keys that Axel, apparently careless of them now he and Tom were in and up here and more than halfway to accomplishment, had dropped on to the flat metal lid of the tank where he was sitting. Axel saw him looking. He did something strange, something Tom thought he would not do to anyone no matter how much hatred he felt, and Axel had no cause to hate him.
The long thin fingers reached for the bunch of keys. He picked them up, tossed them once in the air and caught them, like a boy playing fivestones. His smile widened, he was almost laughing. The look he gave Tom was knowing, it was contemptuous. It told Tom everything. He had no need to ask, he knew now, and Axel knew he knew and did not care. For a moment he thought Axel was going to reach across to him and pat his shoulder. He was going to, but Tom jumped to his feet, opened the backpack and, taking out the rope, began to unwind it.
‘Is it down there you're going?’
Axel nodded. He walked to the turret, the rim of which was about four feet high, and looked down inside it. Tom said, ‘Will it be dark?’
‘In the shaft it will. Not in the tunnels, not entirely dark. Some of them may be, the small ones. It's all disused down there but it's not abandoned, they inspect it, they patrol it. The point is it's all the ninety-year-old stuff with the old tiles and the old brickwork and the shafts where the stairs used to be and the lifts. Except for the Signals Room that's modern, that's in use. You could say it's the heart or the brain of the system.’
‘And that's what you'll be photographing? Will you use a flash? Won't there be someone on duty? I mean some electrician or signals operator or whatever.’
‘You ask too many questions.’ Axel was taking a small case of tools from his pack. There was a screwdriver, a hammer and a spanner. ‘Yes to the first and I'd use a flash for what I'm doing if it was broad daylight. There won't be anyone on duty. What would they be on duty for? The trains don't go through here till six, remember?’