He poured a cup of coffee from the waker and groped to a chair.
He had to find her. Nothing had been so imperative in his life. He had gone to the phone directory on his return home, without much hope, and had been proved right. People as guarded as she obviously was didn’t have phones.
Who would have known her at the party? He hadn’t tried the night before. He had been too’ confused, and guessed that most of the other guests would have been, too—if for more commonplace reasons. The drinks had been flowing pretty freely.
But Gwen, the hostess, should know. He dialled her number. The phone rang a long time. He was just about to hang up when there was a click and a sleepy voice said, “Hello.”
“This is Arnold—Arnold Ash. I, I’m sorry I charged out last night the way I did.”
“Did you?” A sound of yawning. “Oh yes, so you did. You and the girl in the orange dress. I’ll take it as a compliment to the effect of the party. Did you catch up with her?”
“Yes, but I lost her again. Do you know where I can find her?”
“Well, I’m sure she didn’t come back here. Though there are a few bodies lying around.”
Arnold fretted with impatience. “But do you know where she lives?”
“No idea. Never saw her before in my life. She came with—now, who did she come with? The Pillingtons, I believe.”
“Thank you.”
He hung up, then realized that he didn’t know the Pillingtons’ number. Come to think of it, he didn’t even know the Pillingtons, He riffled through the directory. He tried two Pillingtons before he found the right one. But no, they hadn’t brought Claire. Yes, they remembered her, but they didn’t know a thing about her.
He replaced the receiver and swore quietly. He was suddenly aware of the fact that he knew only one other person who had been at the party. Which seemed only too typical. You met faces for a few hours. To one or two you said yes, you’d call, or they said, “You must come to our next party.” Sometimes you did and sometimes they did, and for a few hours you met other faces.
The one that he knew was Gilbert Haggard. He was something in publishing. It was doubtful if he knew Claire. But he called him all the same.
He had already left for his office, a voice told him. Which reminded Arnold. He called his own office and made an excuse for the day. Then, not very hopefully, he rang Haggard’s office.
And he did know Claire.
“Claire Bergen? The black-haired girl? Yes, she came to see me a couple of years or so ago about a job.”
“You’ve got her address, then?”
“Afraid not. The interview was negative. We don’t keep names and addresses on file in such cases.”
“But how did she come to contact you? Please try to remember. It’s very important to me.”
Haggard chuckled leeringly. “I can tell that.”
“Was it about art work?”
“Why, is she an artist? No, it was just a routine job on the production side. Let me see, a chap in the office here put her on to it. He thought she was having a lean time and got her to call. I got the impression she only came along to gratify this chap’s gesture of good will, I don’t think she really wanted the job. She wasn’t material for us, in any case. And that, I’m sure, is all I know about her.”
“Sorry to badger you, but do you know who brought her to the party? She must have come with somebody. Gwen doesn’t know her.”
“Sorry.”
“How about this chap in your office?”
“Hold on.” Arnold heard indistinct talking on another phone, then Haggard came back. “No, he says he only met her at a party—”
Arnold grimaced. A party!
“—but he thinks she lives—lived, anyway—in Notting Hill.”
It was only a small clue, but Arnold by now was grateful even for that. “Notting Hill? That’s not far from me.” He lived in Bayswater. “Many thanks.”
“Any time, old boy. ’Bye.”
Arnold hung up and splashed water on his face. He followed it with depilatory, which he wiped off too quickly, making his face smart. He threw on some clothes, dashed out and hailed a cab. It was only when the driver asked him his destination that he realized the wildness of his search. Notting Hill was only one district of London, but it was big enough. It was also one of the most overcrowded.
“Uh—I’m not sure.” He knew the area. It was a happy hunting ground for curios and old books. He could surely write off that part of it east of the market. It had become the Harlem of London. Claire might be independent, but you had to be physically tough, too, to survive in that square mile.
“Make it the High Street. No—the top end of the market.”
The driver gave him a queer look as Arnold got in. It was a vintage taxi and the noise as the driver changed gears was like a snort.
What, Arnold pondered as the cab picked its way through dense traffic, had he to go on? He had switched from the High Street to Portobello Market on the premise that Claire was not well-off. A painter who didn’t exhibit and who shunned commercial work could hardly be. In that case, it was more probable that she shopped for food in the market rather than in the flashy, more expensive places on the Hill proper.
But could he assume that? It depended solely on a surmise of one of Haggard’s employees. He would have to, for a start.
The taxi stopped at the corner of the market and Westbourne Grove. Arnold paid it off and started his search.
He soon found that it was no use asking stallkeepers. They were too busy to answer him properly, and it was obvious that for the same reason, they hardly noticed the physical appearance of their customers. Quick service, quick returns, seemed to be their motto. What finally decided him against this line of inquiry was when he heard one stallholder address a woman in slacks as “guv.”
Next he tried the cafés and restaurants, exotic or plebian, that lurked in every other side street. But few of their owners, in that cosmopolitan neighbourhood, spoke a recognizable English. The rest were variously apologetic, wary or annoyed that he had not come in to eat—and none of them were of the slightest help. A girl, medium height with big eyes and short black hair? Well, she might wear an orange dress or a white coat. It wasn’t much to go on, was it?
No, Arnold had to agree with increasing hopelessness. No, it wasn’t much to go on.
Three hours later he had come to the despairing conclusion that the only answer was to take a stall himself and wait for days, weeks, months until Claire should happen to pass by. Then he had another idea.
Why hadn’t he thought of it sooner? If she had ever lived here, if she still lived here, if she were an artist—and he remembered Haggard’s surprise; surely it was odd to go to a publisher’s office, even for a job you didn’t want, without taking a few sketches or mentioning your work; there were many people who told themselves they were painters or writers as a pitiful shield against the winds of futility—but no, she was an artist—so what would she need?
Paints, brushes, canvases—there must be dozens of places scattered around London where you could buy those. But frames were a different matter. Even if she hadn’t shown, she would still need frames. Or would she? If she did, she would surely buy them locally in junkshops.
He started off again. Now he mentioned her name, casually, hopefully.
Finally, in a dusty little shop by the local synagogue, the name triggered a response.
“Miss Claire Bergen?” The proprietor, his face as brown and wrinkled as old varnish, plucked a pendulous lip, “Young lady with black hair, short, like the fashion back in 1930?”
Arnold had only a vague idea of the fashions of 1930, but it sounded like a lead. “Yes, that’s the girl. You know her?”
But the old man was off on a reminiscent track.
“They were great days then. Very hard, mind you. But you could get a packet of fags for fourpence. And they were real women then. None of this green hair and blue hair like bloomin’ Martians. When I think—
”
Arnold seethed. “Please—can you tell me where I can find Miss Bergen?”
The proprietor stopped in mid-flight, his eyes focusing back from the mistiness of half a century before to the real world of 1975. A world where a small junkshop keeper found it harder and harder to keep his independence. Where they wanted to pack you off to a job in one of those clattering factories—either that or into a plastic cubicle in an old men’s home. A world where you had to be cagier than the next man.
“I don’t discuss my clients. If someone comes to me for a trunk I don’t ask what they want it for. Whether they want it to go off to Bermuda or stuff their old woman’s body in, it’s no business of mine.”
“I neither want to go to Bermuda nor hide a body,” Arnold almost shouted. “I just want to locate Miss Bergen.”
“Why?”
“Because she’s a friend of mine.”
“If she’s a friend of yours you ought to know where to find her.”
“We—we lost touch,” Arnold said lamely. He brightened. “I want to buy some paintings from her.”
Would that start the wheels? If I buy pictures, she’ll want more frames, she’ll spend more money here. Or would he worry? Junkshop dealers, he had found by experience, were a perverse tribe.
“You can leave a message if you like.”
Arnold looked around the dark, dusty cavern and put the odds against a scrap of paper surviving in that chaos as pretty long. Anyway, what good would that be, even if she got the message?
Then, on a thought, he reached in his pocket. He handed the piece of paper to the old man.
The other looked at it before stuffing it away. “These don’t buy what they used to, neither. Hold on.” He shuffled off.
He came back with a dog-eared invoice book.
“Miss Bergen. Let me see. Craven Yard. I had to deliver some old canvases there six months ago. But don’t say I told you,” he added darkly. “Horrible things can happen round these parts to people who don’t know when to keep their mouths shut.”
“Don’t worry,” Arnold told him joyfully. He could almost have embraced the old rogue. “I won’t say a word.”
Craven Yard was just off the market at the top end. This place would never achieve the status of a mews, its guts to be ripped out by speculative builders and replaced by phoney art nouveau interiors. This was too ungainly—a row of decrepit cottages overshadowed by a dark three-storey building that must once have been a warehouse. A girder, obviously the remnant of a hoist, still stuck out starkly from the top of it like the arm of a gibbet.
The cottages were no longer used for living in. No curtains hung at their dwarf windows. He peered into one and saw the dim shadows of market barrows. In another what looked like an ancient Rolls Royce brooded on past magnificence. He picked his way over the cobblestones to the warehouse. Its windows were curtained. The front door, divided horizontally like a stable’s, was open. He went in.
There was no sound inside, but it was obviously occupied. There was cheap plastic covering on the floor, and a doll’s pram stood in the hall. He knocked at the first door he came to. There was no answer at first, then there came the sound of shuffling feet. The door opened on a man’s face.
“Does Miss Bergen live here?”
The figure took a step forward. Clipped moustache and leather-edged jacket, he looked like an old military man gone to seed in a world of push-button strategy. The way he spoke confirmed the impression.
“Miss Bergen? On the top floor, sir. Mind the low ceiling as you go up the second flight. Shocking piece of construction.”
Arnold thanked him and ascended the stairs. They were unlit, but enough light filtered from the afternoon sky through a fanlight in the roof of the stairwell. He reached the head of the stairs and knocked at the only door.
There was no response. He knocked again, louder this time.
There was still no answer. He tried the old-fashioned brass doorknob. It turned, and the door swung open.
The interior was in sharp contrast to the approach. A long passage was painted in a flat terra-cotta colour. Two white doors were all that broke the long expanse of wall. The floor, also painted white, was covered down the middle with some coarse black material. A long fanlight ran along the ceiling of the passage, flooding it with light. The effect was austere, but not forbidding. It was impersonal—but in a curiously personal way. At the end of the passage a third white door stood open.
He walked quietly down the passage and stopped in the doorway. There, in a room as starkly cool as the hall, but blue-green and white, Claire Bergen sat painting.
He stood there in a silence as profound and real as a cathedral’s, watching her work. Her strokes were small and deliberate. She was no fauve, no tachiste. The painting she was working on, what he could see of it over her shoulder, was a complex of lines on a gesso-white ground. He looked for a model, but saw none. She was weaving this pattern, as formal and emotionless as a microphotograph of cell structures, out of some inner vision. The intensity of her concentration made it quite credible that she had not heard his knocking.
Round the walls were hung several paintings, and he saw them with a shock of recognition. Crystals, plants, skeletal sea creatures, cacti—just as he had seen them in his mind when he had met this strange girl at the party.
He made to speak, but did not. He had no need to. He could feel the faint tendrils of her consciousness twining like smoke from the absorbed core of her being, his own drift out towards hers. But she finished the piece of canvas she was working on to her satisfaction before she laid her brush down and slowly turned in her seat.
“Hello,” she said simply, with a faint smile. There was no trace of the annoyance in which she had left him the night before.
“Hello,” he answered.
She rose. “I’ll get some tea.”
CHAPTER THREE
Arnold sat in a square canvas chair like an old-fashioned film director’s seat. Claire sat in a similar chair, facing him across a low Indian table. She had shown him into this smaller room. A sleeping pad covered in green lay on the black-painted floor. A low bookcase, stuffed with books, ran along one wall which, like the other three, was painted in flat white. An archaic open fireplace, shielded by a canvas screen, completed the scant furniture of the room. It had the appearance of having been cheaply, but carefully, furnished from the local junkshops.
“I ought to have known you would find me,” Claire said. “I suppose you would have to. Now, what do you want to know?”
“I—I’m not sure.” Arnold realized now that he had been too obsessed with the problem of finding her to have gathered his thoughts into any coherent order. “I only know that what happened last night was just a beginning—like a child learning to walk. Last night we only stumbled.”
“I wouldn’t put it like that. It was more like falling over a precipice. ”
“Ye-es, But with more experience couldn’t we learn to go more carefully—to explore?”
“Mr. Ash—”
“Please, not for us of all people, surely—”
Her smile was like a small shrug. “Well, Arnold, then. But, this gift of yours, couldn’t you learn to use it with somebody else?”
“Of mine? It’s not mine.”
“You mean, nothing like that ever happened to you before?”
“Never.”
“Never? No happening to know what’s around the corner? No intuition of something happening before it actually did happen?”
He shook his head. “Apart from the odd times, the little coincidences. They happen to everybody, don’t they? Everybody does so many things in one day even, thinks so many thoughts, coincidences are bound to happen. Even if it isn’t coincidence, if there is something more to it than that, it’s still too commonplace to account for last night. But you—you must have had some experience before. I know you denied it last night but—”
“I assure you I haven’t. Heavens, this is like one of those puzz
les. You know the one, where the boss gives the job to the boy who can first tell which colour cap he’s got on. There are—was it two white caps and one black one—”
“I know the one,” he interrupted.
He looked at her across the table. Was she trying to deflect him? The force that had been unleashed the evening before—he still felt it hovering about them. It seemed to be generated by this strange girl, as if that head, sleek and black-helmeted, were a focal point, an electrode. As if a charge built up about it, until it leaped the gap between her and whoever came near. And he had come near. He felt it now, though he was sure she was keeping a desperate control on it, striving to keep it within the boundaries of her will.
Her will. Was it the very strength of her will that generated the power? This hermetical dedication to her work, did that canalize her main energy—what she thought was her main energy—while this other, unknown force built up, charge by charge. Like a poltergeist? He had read about poltergeists, and thought them the most credible of occult phenomena… those wild outbursts that occurred round some adolescents, breaking objects, hurling them about rooms. Such happenings had been put down to the pent-up drives of puberty exploding violently. The child it happened to wasn’t aware that it was the cause. Could it be the same with Claire Bergen? That she had the power without knowing it?
Or was it…?
“That’s what you’re hiding from,” he accused her. “It’s not your painting that you’re guarding, but this power.”
She leaped to her feet and backed across the room, trembling.
He was shaken by her reaction—as shaken as she had been by his words. “Please… I didn’t want this to happen. Believe me. I hoped we could discuss it quietly.”
He got up to go over and comfort her.
“Stay away. I’ll discuss it. But don’t accuse me.”
The Silent Speakers Page 2