Over the business of the school meals Manfred, as usual, got his way and Leo was made to take the little blue suitcase.
He had sat with it on his lap in the school dining-room and while the others were having beefburgers and chips, or sausage and chips, or something and chips, he would delve surreptitiously into it and pull out a piece of cold chicken or a Marmite sandwich.
One day, soon after he had gone to the school, one of the supervising teachers saw him at his special lunch and, frowning, asked him if it had any religious significance. Was it kosher?
Christ, Leo thought, it was like tying a label round his neck. It had stuck. And for all the time he was at his junior school they had called him ‘Kosher’. He supposed it was better than Yid or Jewboy. Anyway, it wasn’t that kind of school. There were plenty of Jews in North London. But the other Jewish boys at his school hadn’t taken kindly to him either. His exposure made them feel threatened.
A boy called Myron Sapperstein had opened his suitcase and thrown the contents on the ground and then hit him in the face. Leo hadn’t understood the reasons then, but he did now. It was what he thought of as the ‘camouflage syndrome’ and it applied not only to Jewish boys but to all boys: don’t stand out in a crowd.
Sapperstein’s aggressiveness had two beneficial effects on Leo. First, he realised he didn’t have to eat the food in the suitcase. On the day Sapperstein had thrown it on the ground Leo had simply eaten what he could get in the canteen. The following day he threw away his home-cooked food before he ever got to school.
The second was that it made him realise he couldn’t run to his mother if something happened in the school playground. He had to sort it out himself. But he was small for his age, so instead of using his muscles he used his brain.
Zoe stirred and came slowly awake.
‘I dreamed you hadn’t come home,’ she said, turning to him and throwing an arm over his stomach. ‘What’s the time?’ He turned to look at the clock but she said, ‘It doesn’t matter. It’s Good Friday.’ She was silent for some moments and then said, sleepily, ‘Leo?’
‘Right here.’
‘I love you.’
‘That’s what they all say.’
Pause.
‘Leo?’
‘Still here.’
‘Why don’t we get married?’
‘Why don’t we get some sleep first?’
Chapter Nineteen
‘Tea, sir? Coffee?’
Jack Benson woke with a start. ‘Coffee, please.’
The air hostess poured him a plastic cup of black coffee. ‘Milk, sir? Sugar?’
‘Just sugar. Sweet and hot.’
She had heard the phrase a thousand times but smiled gamely and moved on to the next row of seats. Benson watched her as she bent across to a passenger on the other side of the aisle. Her briefs were outlined against the tight skirt. Good legs, he thought. Good bottom. He’d often had success with air hostesses. They lived strange insomniac lives and were grateful for dates who would stay awake with them into the small hours as they tried to adjust their internal time clocks. Especially the ones who had never been to Hong Kong before. He’d been able to show them a really good time before carting them off to his flat in Stanley.
The Far Eastern Airlines jumbo was half empty. He’d picked up the flight in Karachi. It seemed he had been travelling for weeks instead of days. He had criss-crossed the Far East and the Pacific, flying from Perth to Sydney, from Sydney to New Guinea, from New Guinea to India and finally to Karachi. He’d never left the transit lounges of the airports and had bought his next-stage ticket at the last possible moment. Perhaps it wasn’t perfect but he couldn’t think of any better way and he was pretty sure he was not being followed.
He drank his coffee and lit a cigarette. The man in the middle aisle looked at him disapprovingly. To hell with him, Benson thought, he was perfectly within his rights.
He checked the suitcase at his feet. It had never left his side from the moment he had taken it from his office. Some of the money was gone, of course, for air travel was expensive, but there was so much left it was hardly possible to see that some was missing. He’d bought clothing in India for himself and a silk sari length for Maria. She had always loved exotic prints. He tried to imagine her wearing it and it made a pleasant picture.
He was not as tired as he might have been. Fortunately, he was a good traveller. Put him down anywhere and he could drop off in a minute. What he wanted was a bath, a decent breakfast, a sleep, an hour or so in an outfitters in Regent Street – and then he’d be ready for her.
Good old liebchen, he thought. Wonderful days. He remembered she’d called them her Berlin Days. But the trouble with liebchen was that she always became serious. And that complicated things. Keep it light had always been his motto. Never get into the heavy stuff. But with Maria it had been talk of the future. And nothing scared the boys off faster than that. He’d never promised her a thing. He’d shown her a good time in Berlin and taken her on holiday to France. And she seemed to have got the wrong impression.
When someone says, ‘When we have a place of our own,’ or something like that and you’ve just made love, or are just about to, you don’t say, ‘Look, liebchen, we aren’t going to have a place of our own.’ You just nod and give her another kiss – and then it’s the old one-two.
He regarded the long legs of the air hostess with renewed interest. Maybe, if he played his cards right . . . He could always phone liebchen and tell her he’d picked up a bug. People were always picking up bugs in aircraft.
But then, he thought, why bother? Not too long ago he’d met a young hostess in Hong Kong and she’d laughed at him and called him sugar daddy. That hadn’t been nice. He wasn’t all that old. No, Maria was a known quantity and, if she was feeling the way her voice suggested she was feeling, then she must be hungry.
And disenchanted with Richard. Well, he had it coming. You didn’t leave a good-looking woman like Maria for an Easter weekend and expect her to be tucked up in bed with a book when you got back. Or maybe Richard did.
Breakfast came but Benson waved it away. There were the usual queues at the loos. Then the plane began its descent.
He had planned exactly what he was going to do. He had a British passport so he had no problem at Immigration. Then he took the Green Exit through Customs. As far as he knew there was no law which said he couldn’t bring a large amount of mixed currencies into Britain but that was only as far as he knew.
By the time he reached the Green hall he realised that something was up. Instead of passengers flowing through, many were being asked to open their baggage. Two young Pakistani men were wheeling their trolley just behind him. He slowed, they moved ahead. There was only one Customs officer free. He looked quickly from Benson to the Pakistanis. For a second there was indecisiveness in his eyes, then he said to the two men, ‘Have you read the notice?’ He pointed to the wall.
Benson ambled past and reached the arrivals hall. Only then did he realise what a fool he’d been to take a plane from Pakistan. It was the major heroin route into Britain.
He decided on a cab and sank gratefully on to the seat. As they drove off to join the motorway into London he looked out of the window to the grey flocky sky, the blue smoke of car exhausts, the dirty snow still lying by the roadside. It wasn’t Hong Kong. It wasn’t where he particularly wanted to spend any time. But it had one immeasurable asset. There was no Mr Shao.
*
‘Caesar! Come, boy!’
Maria stood in the hall waiting for Caesar to appear from the kitchen. She had closed up the house, double and triple checked each windowlock and each tap. It was only 9 a.m. and she was not due to meet Jack until the evening but she knew if she waited any longer she wouldn’t go.
‘Caesar!’ She went to the kitchen. The dog was in his basket eyeing her apprehensively. ‘Come, we’re going to your lovely kennels.’
Normal dogs bounced about with joy when they saw the lead, but not Caesar
. She slipped the hook on to his collar and dragged him from his basket.
She had put her overnight bag into the car and now let Caesar on to the back seat. She did one final check of the house, set the burglar alarm, closed and locked the front door and drove down the drive. She felt wound up as tight as a violin string. The past twenty-four hours had been a nightmare. Ten times she had decided not to go. Ten times she had reversed that decision.
As she turned out of her drive on to the street she noticed the little white car again. They really should have a Neighbourhood Watch scheme, she thought. If they had she would report this car. She stopped and wrote down its number. The man in the car was wearing a trilby and she could not see his face clearly but she stared aggressively at him just to show she was marking him down. She drove off telling herself she was being socially responsible.
The kennels were about four miles away on what had once been a farm but which had now ‘diversified’. Barns had been turned into apartments, there was a trout lake, and the kennels. It was a seedy-looking place but was reasonably clean.
She was greeted by the owner, Mrs Gore, a heavy woman with hands like coarse sandpaper, who walked amid a flock of yapping Yorkshire terriers so small and mobile they gave the impression of leaves being stirred by her feet.
‘Going off for a break, dear?’ she said as she gave Maria a receipt for the dog.
‘Just to London for the night.’
‘That’s nice. Nothing like a break, dear.’
She took Caesar’s lead. He seemed quite pleased with the transfer.
‘Anything special?’
‘Our wedding anniversary,’ she said, to put a stop to the conversation.
‘That’s lovely. Mr Gore and I used to go to Birmingham. His mother lived there. You know Birmingham?’
‘No.’
‘Horrible place.’
Maria drove out of the farmyard. There was no putting it off now. The motorway beckoned. London beckoned. Jack beckoned. Her stomach felt tight and she had a tension headache at the back of her neck.
Wedding anniversary.
She shouldn’t have said that. It was like pretending someone was ill. She didn’t like lying about personal things. She always had the feeling that the Fates would intervene – and not in a nice way.
She drove across country and picked up the motorway. She hardly saw a car. This, she thought, was how England might look after an atomic holocaust. Just herself, if she was unlucky enough to survive, and a few others.
Don’t be morbid, she told herself. You’re on your way to your lover, be excited, be happy. But the business about the wedding anniversary sat like a stone in her stomach.
She wasn’t really superstitious. She touched wood and didn’t walk under ladders, but that was about all. Except for lying about things like illness. And her wedding anniversary. Just at this moment it seemed such an important date. She tried to excise it from her mind but she couldn’t. In another six weeks she and Richard would have been married for eight years. So the seven-year itch was over, or should be. If only she’d had the baby. She wouldn’t be driving along a grey, deserted motorway, that was certain. She would be at home now, probably giving him? her? breakfast. And she wouldn’t have Caesar. She’d have a dog to amuse her and give her companionship.
So it wouldn’t matter so much that Richard was working over the holidays. She would have had her own family within the family. And later there would be other babies. Three or four. It was what she had always really wanted.
Instead, after she and Richard were married, she had put her inheritance into a kitchen shop in Maida Vale. It had done well. So, she had bought a second. It did well too, which was fortunate because Richard’s business had not done brilliantly at first. But then it had picked up and for a time they had been well-off. Smart cars. Holidays in Alaska and Central Asia, a trip through South America. And still there was plenty of money in the bank. It all seemed a dream come true.
She’d worked damned hard and so had Richard. The time was right to start a family. And then – crash. Everything seemed to go wrong. She lost the baby. Richard’s business went into a nosedive – at least the Far East part of it did – so finally she had this big old house in the country which they couldn’t sell, and a smelly dog for company.
Now came the final touch: the other woman! It wasn’t unusual, she supposed. She knew a dozen couples the same ages as themselves who were having problems. Especially if the wife worked as well. Then the couple inhabited different spheres and in those spheres met other people who were also occupying different spheres. No wonder the divorce rate was so high.
The thought of Richard in bed with someone else brought a flush of anger to her cheeks. Bugger him, she thought. If he was having it off – then why couldn’t she?
Chapter Twenty
Zoe was still asleep when Silver let himself out of the apartment. London was dead and Pimlico as silent as the grave. The curtains were drawn in every window and there was not a living soul to be seen except the milkman. And it wasn’t going to get much better, he thought. He drove through Sloane Square and into the King’s Road. It no longer had the reputation it once had when London was supposed to be the swinging capital of the world, but even so there were one or two groups of Japanese tourists with their cameras.
He had had a restless and disturbed night, kept awake by a mixture of things. There was something still nagging him about Foster’s flat, and there was Macrae and the second Mrs Macrae; he had come in on the tail end of that marriage and very nasty it had been.
And then, of course, he had begun to think about Zoe. She was talking about marriage more frequently and there would come a point where his light prevarications would no longer be accepted.
On the surface things were good between them. He loved her, he was sure of that, and she loved him, or at least she said so often enough. The sexual chemistry was usually marvellous. But there were the dark times, like last night, which had to be endured.
What worried him was why Zoe wanted to marry him. He couldn’t simply accept that it was a need that came from love and affection. There was too much of the past in the present for that.
He thought it might be the other way round: love and affection produced by a need; a need for security, a need for someone to lock the locks and bolt the doors, for someone with whom she could feel safe, whose job itself was a symbol of security.
He didn’t want that. He didn’t want marriage because of his job. He wanted marriage because of who he was, everything about him.
He turned up Sydney Street and into the Fulham Road and drove past a rash of wine bars and boutiques. What if he had been a solicitor, like Ruth? Or a piano teacher, like his father? Would she still have wanted to marry him? But he wasn’t. He was a policeman, whatever his mother said. And this was something they all found it hard to believe. Why would a bright Jewish boy become a policeman?
What if he really told them? Would they be able to take it? He couldn’t come out with a logical set of phrases. But what if he told them of the hazy and obscure forces which had combined to place him where he was? They would be hurt, of course. But would they understand?
It had started on his thirteenth birthday. He was at his senior school then, a good one. How good and how expensive he had only found out later.
His mother gave him a party. The guests consisted of boys from his school. They were the sons of businessmen, architects, doctors and barristers. They could not fit Silver’s family into any known category, but even that might have been all right if it had not been for his father.
Manfred had declined to register that a party was to take place even though Lottie had told him the date three times. This was normal behaviour. Things he did not like he did not contemplate. So that on the day of the party he expressed surprise mixed with horror.
‘What for?’ he said.
‘What do you mean what for?’ Lottie had said. ‘Everybody gives parties. They don’t ask what for. A party is a par
ty. It’s for pleasure.’
‘Whose pleasure?’
‘The people who come, of course. Maybe they didn’t give parties in Mödling. But in Vienna we gave parties. In London people give parties.’
‘And what about me?’
‘You’re not coming to the party.’
‘Oh?’
‘It’s not for us it’s for Leo’s friends.’
‘Young boys are savages.’
‘Manfred!’ When she called him that things were serious.
‘What must I do, sit in the lavatory?’
‘You must go out.’
‘Out! You want to send me from my own home?’
‘Go to the movies. Go to the chess club. Go anywhere. But don’t come back before eleven.’
With much cajoling and finally with threats she had at last succeeded in getting him out of the flat.
‘Don’t let them in the music room,’ he had said on the doorstep. ‘For God’s sake lock it.’
It had been an ordinary party. Several of the boys had brought beer mixed with cider in soft drink cans and three boys had been sick.
Manfred had managed to stay out until ten-thirty. When he returned he found Lottie sitting quietly in the bedroom, and a dozen young guests in the music room. There were empty drink cans ringing the top of the Bosendorfer and one boy was vamping tunes on the keyboard.
It was like the arrival of Attila the Hun. Manfred had instantly stopped the party, made them wash their hands, and then sent them, against Lottie’s violent appeals, to wait on the pavement until their parents came to fetch them.
Dirty Weekend (Macrae and Silver Book 1) Page 14