Zipping himself up, Janus said, ‘So where were you?’
‘I’m here,’ said Bill, ‘we’re both here.’
‘Where’s Angelica?’
Steve snapped his fingers and laughed.
‘Not in there,’ said Bill, ‘I don’t know where she is. She doesn’t come to the pub with Guy these days.’
‘Let’s do something,’ said Steve, ‘let’s go somewhere. I want to go somewhere.’ Then he cackled.
‘Why didn’t you call for me?’
‘I was going to,’ said Bill, ‘I was on my way. Look,’ he looked at his watch, ‘we can get to The Owl before closing. I know someone there who’s a member of The Buckingham. He can get us in.’
‘What’s the fucking Buckingham?’ said Janus.
‘It’s a club round the back of Southgate tube. You can drink there till three in the morning. The bloke’s called Des, let’s get to The Owl.’
To get to The Owl they walked along Parsons Lane, a broad avenue of ludicrously wealthy dwellings, where the rich elite of Windhover Hill lived. Their houses stood behind great striped lawns under canopies of majestic trees. Often the houses had names derived from these trees – High Beeches, The Oaks, Whispering Willows. The pavements of Parsons Lane were herringbone quarry tiles, the lamp-posts ornate wrought iron, there were grass verges and benches.
‘The revolution,’ said Bill as the three walked side by side along this road ‘when it begins, will begin here. This very road will go down in history as the place where it all began, when the gates of bloody’ (taking the name of the house they happened to be passing, a modernist affair of swish concrete, ceramic mosaics and glass domes) ‘Lonely Birches were stormed by the workers of The Quiet Woman . . .’
Steve laughed.
‘. . . and we’ll be patrolling these boulevards with cocked machine guns, strapped across our shoulders, Havana cigars in our mouths, the corpses of the capitalists swinging from the lamp-posts above us . . .’
‘Cliff Richard lives in that one,’ said Steve, ‘or he used to anyway. He’s a famous bloke.’
‘A famous capitalist entertainer. His body shall swing from this lamp-post riddled with machine gun bullets,’ said Bill. ‘That one’s owned by the bloke who owns Meccano,’ said Bill. ‘We could start by taking him hostage, we could use his empire to build munitions for the revolutionary militia . . .’
‘Why don’t we do it now?’ said Janus, suddenly.
‘Yeah,’ said Steve, thinking Janus was joking, but Janus was walking along the path towards the owner of Meccano’s house.
‘Remember what Lenin said of the events of 1917,’ called Janus, ‘ “Power was lying in the streets just waiting for someone to pick it up.” That is the situation now. We could break in, start the revolution, come on . . .’
‘Better come back, Janus,’ said Bill, who’d stopped, suddenly rather concerned. The owner of Meccano’s house was an imposing mock Georgian edifice with Doric columns supporting an entrance portico, tall windows, three flashy cars parked outside. Janus crunched his way across the gravel towards the front door, whooping as he did so.
The toy-magnate’s house showed no response, and Janus, noticing that Steve and Bill were very slowly edging their way away from the house, returned to the pavement.
‘Pathetic,’ said Janus, as he caught up with them, ‘Call yourselves revolutionaries? Lenin would have been ashamed of you.’
The rest of the journey along Parsons Lane was passed in a rather embarrassed silence, the brisk walk and the cold night air having sobered the trio slightly. Occasionally Janus gave drunken cries and whoops at passing Rolls-Royces, and at a small roadworks he jumped about on some stacked paving tiles.
Outside The Owl Janus had another piss, noisily visible, the cascade splattered on the pavement as passers-by tried not to observe.
‘We’ll see you inside,’ said Steve, as he and Bill walked towards the door of the pub. Janus didn’t reply but went on peeing, so much of it, clattering at his feet, forming rivulets and tributaries that trickled and snaked along the gentle gradient of what was now Goat and Compasses Lane. So much of it.
Entering the pub, however, he was soon aware that he’d been tricked. Bill and Steve were nowhere to be found. They must have passed straight through the pub and out of the other door. How they must have run to be out of sight so quick. Janus could see from the back door the view of Goat and Compasses Lane as it swept downhill past the entrance of Redlands Park, then up again, their only possible escape route, and they were nowhere in sight.
‘Cunts,’ said Janus to himself, and went back into the pub.
The bell had rung already for last orders, now it was being rung for closing time. He didn’t bother trying to get a drink but left the pub vaguely in the direction he thought Bill and Steve must have gone, with even vaguer ideas of trying to find this Buckingham Club Bill had been talking about. But they couldn’t get in without meeting this bloke in The Owl. Surely they hadn’t had time to meet him and take him with them? Perhaps they were going to wait outside this club for him? Janus felt confused, slightly tortured. He felt like a stranger in a foreign country, suddenly. He sat for a while on the wall of a front garden, the houses here were back to normal size.
‘Kill Bill,’ he said to himself, ‘Kill Bill, kill Bill, kill Bill. Such a pretentious creep. So false. Such a hypocrite. A toadying, slimy, pseudo-Marxist butcher bastard . . .’
‘Hello,’ said Mary.
‘Hello,’ said Janus, without looking up, but recognizing the voice.
‘I saw you in The Owl. Ron lets me go early so I can get my bus. I have to walk up to the stop outside the tube, but I don’t like it much. It gets a bit creepy. Where are you going now?’
‘I don’t know,’ Janus groaned, wondering if he was going to be sick, holding his head in his hands.
Janus had known Mary since she was a small girl, being one of Juliette’s childhood friends. She’d even come away on holiday to Wales once with them when Mary was about thirteen. That was the first time Janus really took any notice. He understood that she was beautiful, but he didn’t find her beauty attractive, he wasn’t sure why. She had pale skin and chocolaty hair, mauve lips and sweet, dark eyes. On her neck there were three large dark freckles, as though a lame vampire had tried to have a go at her, and failed. But she was too clean, too new. Unsullied. Not like Angelica, Janus’s coeval, with her well-used, weatherworn face and thickened body, that coarse-grained skin of hers, the little wrinkles that appeared at the tops of her breasts when she was showing her cleavage. Angelica was a well-farmed landscape of woods and streams where you could walk all day over stiles and little footbridges getting covered in mud and burrs and thorns. Mary was a little desert by comparison, where one’s own footprints are a sort of monument.
‘Well,’ Mary said, ‘I’ll see you.’ And she began walking away. Janus then realized that she’d been hinting that she needed an escort along the dark, parkside upper reaches of Goat and Compasses Lane, and so he swayed to his feet and walked with her, uncomfortably fatherly.
To their right Redlands Park was dark behind its spiked railings. Janus suddenly thought that Bill and Steve must have gone into the park, that would explain their sudden disappearance. There was a gap in the railings they could have slipped through. Janus passed through the gap into the park. Mary followed reluctantly.
‘Where are you going?’
‘For a walk.’
Why was she following him? He should have clung to this young woman for all he was worth, she was his only friend in the world at that moment, and yet he was running away from her. And she was following.
To the left was the putting green, a blue lawn full of holes, to the right the pitch and putt, a sinister moonlit slope of fair-ways and roughs. ‘Golf is a very stupid game,’ said Janus. The avenue of ornamental cherries formed a tunnel of leafless, creaking branches which they passed through. Janus thought he would find Bill and Steve whooping it up on the swings and ro
undabouts of the children’s playground, and so they went there, but it was empty, a motionless machine of glossily painted iron, glinting.
‘I don’t like it here, Janus, can we go back?’
Janus didn’t reply. The park seemed to him a rather magical place after dark. All that space and not a soul in it. Huge sweeps of rolling pastures leading up from the playground almost to the horizon, above which a few rooftops peaked. On the other side were woods, a dense thicket of tall oaks and holly bushes that was all that was left of Windhover Hill Woods, which themselves were the last remnant of the Great Forest of Middlesex, which had once covered most of that extinct county.
Just visible in the other direction, near the lake, was Redlands Mansion, once the home of a Middlesex grandee, now a convalescent home for those recovering from traumatic surgery. Sometimes you could see nurses wheeling them around the grounds, old men cocooned in blankets, taking some air, the stump of a limb protruding.
‘The police sometimes exercise their dogs here after dark,’ said Janus, as they sat on a roundabout.
‘Not too fast, Janus,’ Mary suddenly said, as Janus gave the roundabout a heave, sending it spinning at a nauseous rate. He left to have a go on the witch’s hat, then a plummet down the polished slope of the slide, getting stuck halfway down. Then he sat on the rocking horse, a six seater contraption whose mechanism was concealed beneath the wooden body of the animal, whose face grinned madly as Janus worked the beast back and forth.
Mary’s roundabout had slowed down by now, and she was rotating in a rather stately way, though Janus could hardly see her in the dark.
‘Can we go back now?’ she said, ‘I’ll miss my bus otherwise.’
She couldn’t go on her own, not through the midnight black park with all its owls and bats. She was trapped here with him.
‘This was all somebody’s garden once,’ said Janus as his horse slowed to a canter.
‘I suppose it was,’ said Mary.
‘Beautiful, to have a garden that big. As big as a piece of countryside.’
‘Yes.’
‘I wish I had a garden as big as this.’
‘So do I,’ said Mary.
As they left the playground Mary asked if she could hold Janus’s hand, saying she was worried she’d fall over as it was too dark to see the path.
‘It is a very dark park,’ said Janus as he felt Mary’s hand slip into his. He didn’t know what to do with this hand. Should he hold it, and if so, how tightly? It reminded him of the times he’d held a baby, when James and Juliette and Julian were born, the alarm he always felt at having a living thing suddenly squirming in his arms, the awful sense of future history, of someone’s whole life packed up in the neat parcel of a baby. They shouldn’t be so light, he always felt. He couldn’t understand why babies didn’t weigh the same as full-grown adults, in the same way that acorns should be as heavy as oak trees. Mary’s hand was a little insistent portion of life trying to push its way into his. He tolerated her soft grip for a while as they walked together back along the path, passing the side of the lake, but after a while he loosened his hold, and Mary’s hand, after hanging on for a little while, very slowly fell away.
The lake was of an impressive size for a suburban park, a graceful stretch of water with two densely wooded islands. For several weeks the council had been cleaning the lake, all the rising land between the lake and the mansions had been excavated into a series of terraced steps down which the lakewater, having been pumped to the top by a machine that worked night and day called a Mudcat, trickled down through a series of sluices and filters, cascading through a warren of U-turns and countless little waterfalls, until it returned, purified, to the lake. Janus and Mary could hear the rasping engine of the Mudcat from its anchorage out on the lake, and the drowsy answering gurgle of the filter trenches to the right.
The trenches were bounded by a low picket fence, easily crossed, and Janus then swiftly did so, Mary following reluctantly for fear of getting lost.
‘I’m climbing Mount Kilimanjaro,’ said Janus.
Once, when bored, Janus had decided to learn by heart the names of the principal mountains of every country in the world, and the knowledge had stayed with him.
‘Now I’m on the summit of Pik Kommunizma. Now I’m on Popocatépetl. Voorstradt (highest peak in the Netherlands) . . .’
‘I don’t like it here, I’m scared,’ said Mary, who couldn’t keep up with Janus as he scaled peak after muddy peak, ‘It smells.’
A rich odour of rotting pond life, of the sludge of countless fallen leaves, the sunken treasure of a hundred autumns, lurked in all the blind channels.
‘Let’s get back to the path,’ Mary called, seeing Janus only as a vague silhouette on a muddy peak. Mary tried clambering after him, but she was unsure of her footing, the ground was steep and slippery, her feet were becoming heavy with mud. Janus, she could see, had his arms outstretched and was slowly rotating, as though addressing an all-encompassing multitude, then Mary took a stumble and sat in a puddle of purified water, and she cried.
When she next looked up Janus was gone.
8
Aldous had become afraid of his front door. Whenever there was a knock he dreaded what it might portend, and he would always hesitate before answering it. He thought sometimes that he should change the knocker because the current one was too heavy – a broad grin of chrome-plated steel that, no matter how lightly it was used (a little girl asking for her ball back) always gave a deafening report, as though a giant was nailing the house down with a silver nail. Sometimes he felt a desire to wrap the knocker in wool, or replace it with something made from softer materials. A doorknocker of felt and feathers would have done. Sometimes he thought of wiring up a doorbell to ring softly in the kitchen, or one of those musical chimes, a couple of tubular bells that would ding-dong gently in the hall. You could adjust the volume of those, so Aldous understood. No matter how urgent or frantic the caller, always it would be the same gentle ding-dong in the hall.
Often the caller was a steeplejack offering to dismantle the tall redundant chimneys that teetered on the top of the house, or a tree surgeon with a truck full of ladders and saws offering to lop, pollard, topple and completely remove the acacia tree in the front garden, which had grown to a considerable size. Aldous had watched this tree grow from tender sapling to its present form, larger in volume than the house, and yet he’d not noticed its growth at all. As with his children, the last thing he knew he had a baby in his arms, now his house was full of men and women who claimed to be his offspring. Likewise Aldous hadn’t really noticed the acacia tree until the steeplejacks and lumberjacks and others with ladders had begun offering to cut it down. Where the hell had that tree come from? It was enormous, he had to admit. The roots were drying out the foundations, so they told him, desiccating the lower walls. A crack had appeared in the brickwork, zigzagging through the courses. On the pavement the stones had been upset, a little trap that could cost Aldous thousands of pounds in compensation should anyone injure themselves falling over them. That’s what the passing arborealists said, but Aldous always shut the door on them, murmuring that when the time came to lop the acacia he would do it himself. But he never did anything about the tree. It had grown so immense, had spread itself so widely, filling every window at the front of the house, extending scabby limbs of pale bark across the pavement and out into the road, that he felt reluctant to interfere with it. The roots of a tree mirror in size and spread the above-ground network of branches. Then the roots of the acacia must have a grip on next door’s foundations as well, and it was likely to have coiled its tubers around the sewerage, electrical conduits, gas mains, water pipes and telephone cables. Should Aldous saw some branches off, who knows what effects that might have on the subterranean self of the tree. It might cause the tree to tighten its grip on a gas main and thus rupture it. In truth he had an inkling that the tree was somehow holding the house up. Besides, he found the tree attractive. It was like ha
ving another garden in the sky. From the windows there was a view of a hanging tapestry of foliage that in the autumn became a collage of pale yellow sticker-dots stuck to the pavement.
It was a policeman’s knock that came that Saturday morning. Aldous was alone in the house, for once. Colette had taken Julian to buy a new pair of shoes, and was to be out for most of the morning. Aldous had taken the opportunity to work on his fountain in the back bedroom. With James away at university Aldous had gradually reclaimed a small portion of the territory they’d donated to their children. In the bay window of that room he’d set up a small worktable (in fact the dining table from Meg’s old house). There he kept his brushes in jars, his pens and their nibs in other jars, his pencils, boxes of charcoal, and his paints. There was a bottle of dried cow-parsley heads. He had a drawing board set at a pleasing slope on some old art books. He would retreat here to make paintings from the numerous sketchbooks he kept, or simply to draw the view of tangled trees and wedged-in gardens that filled the window. But this morning he was working on his fountain. He’d brought a pack of clay home from school and was assembling the model from the working drawings that he hoped had impressed the monks of Durham. Brother Head was still providing no definite answers to his letters. The bishop of Durham had prevaricated. He had committees and working parties to consult. Brother Head’s letters were always cheerily optimistic, a tone which unintentionally conveyed a kind of indifference to Aldous’s plight. No other commissions had come as a result of that piece in the Telegraph. This fountain was the only route he could take towards a future life of lucrative public art. Besides that, he could do with some money now, just for the amount of work he’d put into the design. Colette was always telling him, he had a right to some payment even if they never built the bloody fountain. Then another letter from the monastery would come: ‘My, don’t the months pass quickly . . .’
Such worries melted away for Aldous when he worked, however. Drawing the radial structure of a cow-parsley head, or painting the buttressed architecture of a Hertfordshire church with its slender copper spire, required a level of engagement with the material world that made abstractions like money seem meaningless. This was how he felt as the doves took shape in his fingers. He had a baseboard fitted with a vertical copper pipe to represent the central pipe of the fountain, and he was assembling his doves, cut from rolled-out clay, shaped and textured with fingernails, a comb, a toothbrush, wire wool, anything Aldous had to hand, then moistened and fitted together in a clamouring spiral of ascending flight. When nearly dry he would cut the completed structure into sections that could be separated for firing and glazing in the school kiln, then reassembled again at home and made ready for despatch to Durham. Once they had the working model in their possession the monks could surely not refuse to offer the commission. Or at least some sort of payment.
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