by Alan Isler
Yours ever,
Stella
So that was it! Kraven felt something akin to disgust. His disappointment was swamped by anger. Decrepit Robert and his mincing-virtuous wife were in hot pursuit of dewlapped Didi and her magical potion. ‘Perhaps we’ll look her up.’ He tore Stella’s letter to shreds, crumpled the fragments, and threw them into a nearby rubbish bin.
What now was he to do? His career was at an end, an ignominious, farcical end. His past, his present, his future, all gone. He had no home, no profession, no reputation. And now Stella too had gone; indeed, had never really been there. He got up from the bench and distractedly wandered the park, his misery gathering strength, seeping through him.
THIRTEEN
A DAY OF bleak despair gave way at first to numbness, then to an itch to be doing something, anything, and finally to thoughts of Candy Peaches. He phoned the Inn on the Park and was obliged to hold on for a moment.
‘Nicholas?’ said Candy.
‘Yes. How did you know it was me, for pity’s sake?’
‘I just knew.’
He suggested they meet at the first bench to the left through the entrance to Green Park, near the underground station, and she said, ‘See ya.’
* * *
KRAVEN ARRIVED EARLY. He sat on the bench and, idly patting his pockets, discovered at his left hip an unexpected hardness. It was the envelope he had been given at the English-Speaking Union. Within was Stella’s diaphragm case. It belonged to another life, not this. He opened it. The rubber dome, drily powdered, puffed clinically upward. He sat upon the park bench and contemplated its rotundity.
‘Hey, what y’got there, Nicholas? You gonna get that bronzed?’
Candy Peaches stood before him grinning widely.
‘Found it on the bench,’ said Kraven, ‘wondered what was in it.’ He snapped the diaphragm case shut and tossed it with the envelope into a waiting receptacle.
They went to a coffee shop in Shepherd Market. Candy brought Kraven up to date. Bobby’s wife had arrived unexpectedly: ‘A ball of yarn walking on toothpicks, an old broad with a yecchy Kraut accent, with this face, y’know, kinda looks like Bugs Bunny?’ Candy, leaning towards him, exposed her upper teeth, drew back her jaw, and narrowed her eyes. Diotima, without question. She had left Dolly’s suitcases outside the door. ‘Poor old Bobby.’
Dolly had taken her ouster philosophically. You win a few, you lose a few. She had got in touch with her agent, who had found her an immediate booking in Paducah, Kentucky, where only two years before her Scheherezade number had won her a silver ribbon and a civic gold star from the Chamber of Commerce. Dolly and Sugar had left for the airport that morning.
‘But you stayed on?’
‘I like it here.’ The British Library had proved more fruitful than she could have imagined, the British themselves were refreshingly polite, the atmosphere was ‘conducive’. She hoped to finish out the academic year in London. Right now, she was looking for a flat or for rooms she could afford.
Kraven was reminded that he had a house in Hampstead, one which was soon to become vacant, but he said only that he might have a lead for her. Would he be able to get in touch?
Good old Bobby had paid for her room at the Inn on the Park through the end of next week.
‘How about you, Marty?’
‘Nicholas, remember?’
‘Nickleby, I bet. When are you going back to the States?’
‘It’s a long story,’ said Kraven ruefully. ‘I’m not sure you have the time.’
‘It’s worth a try.’
In that instant Kraven realized that he wanted nothing more than to pour his many sorrows into the charming ears of this beautiful, willing and receptive young woman.
‘You asked for it,’ he said. ‘But not here. Let’s go outside.’
They wandered slowly hand in hand through London streets. The warm sun smiled on them. He told her how in a single week his life had fallen in ruins about him, how his expectations of the future had been reduced to smithereens. He told her everything, held nothing back. He was lucky, she said. His slate was clean. Now he could do whatever he wanted with his life, write, travel, anything at all. And Kraven, purged, began to feel growing in himself something of her optimism. Seize the day! Why not? He would move back to London. He had his savings, not inconsiderable, from a lifetime of work. Not only that, he was now, he had learned, the Blum heir.
And so he told her, hesitantly at first but soon enthusiastically, about Tickety-Boo. Valueless, he said, fledgling stuff, private spurts of mental masturbation, mere finger exercises. Yet he believed they revealed a talent, small perhaps, dormant still, but worth the rousing.
They were standing on the Victoria Embankment, across the sparkling Thames from the Jubilee Gardens. He caught her in his arms and kissed her exultantly. She did not object.
* * *
ONCE AUNT CICELY’S PROFESSOR OF INTERPERSONAL DYNAMICS had moved out, Kraven invited Candy to look over the Hampstead house.
‘It’s a bit gloomy,’ said Candy doubtfully.
‘I’m going to throw all this stuff out,’ he said. ‘Paint the place inside and out, refurnish, remodel the kitchen, the lot. In fact, I thought you might be willing to help. Pick fabrics, that sort of thing. A woman’s touch.’
‘I’m not that sort of a woman. Haven’t you noticed?’
‘Even so…’
‘What is it you really have in mind?’
‘I have it in mind to woo you, win you, and wed you. But for the short term, I know you’re looking for a place to stay. Why not move in here with me?’
She frowned as if in deep thought. ‘No hanky-panky, huh? Landlord and tenant?’ She bit her lip, then smiled. ‘Okay, sure, we’ll give it a try.’
For Kraven, her smile irradiated the gloomy room. He restrained an impulse to take her into his arms. They shook hands with mock solemnity.
* * *
ONE AFTERNOON FISHBANE PHONED.
‘Perce here. Thought you might’ve forgotten me. Circumstances force me to wonder what’s become of our little agreement.’
‘Sorry?’
Fishbane dropped his voice to a horrible whisper; Aunt Cicely must have moved within earshot. ‘The hunt for Miriam Pechvogel, a course; the hunt for Percy Fishbane’s only son. How’re you going to conduct an investigation from over here, tell me that? You was supposed t’be returning to the bleeding Hew Hess of bleeding Hay.’
‘Ah, yes, that. Well, as you know, my life has somewhat changed direction since we spoke. I shall be living here for the foreseeable future. But I shall be going to New York in a couple of months, three at the outside. I’ve things to do there, an apartment to put on the market. I can begin making discreet inquiries then.’
‘Time and tide,’ whispered Fishbane. ‘Time and tide. Don’t delay more than you have to. As he told you himself, who knows how much longer Perce has got?’
‘Rely on me,’ said Kraven, meaning it.
* * *
ONCE THE LAST OF THE WORKMEN HAD LEFT and the minimal furniture and household needments were in place, life for the couple at 15 Beauchamp Close settled into a pleasing routine. Kraven had begun writing a novel and spent his weekdays at the desk in his study. Candy spent her days in the British Library or in her study, writing her thesis. On most evenings they sampled Hampstead’s restaurants, returning home to read and listen to music.
A day came when Kraven, convinced that he had more than demonstrated his bona fides, let alone his heroic self-restraint, handed Candy a poem he had written for her, a poem with a carpe diem theme:
Youth’s here now and gone tomorrow –
Cause a-plenty, love, for sorrow.
Now, therefore, whilst time is fleeting,
Now, whilst blood is strongly beating,
Let us, on Love’s altar lying,
Like the Phoenix, ever dying,
Burning in our sacred fire,
Kiss and see the flames leap higher.
; Come, embrace me, four-and-twenty,
Healthy bodies need Love’s plenty.
He watched her eagerly as she read, her beautiful head bowed over the page; he watched her when she looked up at him, the strangest of smiles on her lips, and with slow deliberation tore the poem in half, and then in half again. There was to be no hanky-panky.
The weeks sped by. Summer was in the offing, and Kraven was talking of returning to New York ‘to settle his affairs’. They had eaten at Cerubino’s, their favourite restaurant in Hampstead, and gone home in a mood of satisfied somnolence. The lights in the lounge were dim and warm and gentle. They listened to music on the radio. Kraven was stretched out in his leather chair nursing a scotch on the rocks; sunk into hers, her ankles tucked beneath her, her short skirt revealing a breathtaking expanse of white thigh, the light behind her glinting in her abundant and gorgeous hair, Candy nursed a stinger.
On the radio, the programme ‘Windows on Spain’ began to play a recording of Ravel’s Bolero.
‘Bardic Follies,’ said Candy, smiling. ‘Remember?’
‘Hamlet, act three, scene four.’
Their eyes met and held as the sensuous music slowly, exquisitely slowly, increased in tempo and volume, its rhythmic repetitions taking hold of them, attuning their breathing, carrying them along, until, louder and louder, faster and faster, swollen beyond bearing it burst into its dissonant climax.
Candy suddenly leaped to her feet. ‘Let’s go!’ she said, and held out her hand.
* * *
HE LAY ON THE BED AND WATCHED HER UNDRESS, a wondrously sensuous performance, erotic, self-mocking, exquisitely slow and teasing, limber and graceful. ‘O my America, my new found land!’ Majestic in her nakedness and beauty, her divine shapeliness, she came to him. ‘Oh my,’ she said, ‘what’s this?’ and guided him into his place.
Later, he was struck by a sudden thought. ‘Candy Peaches must be your name in Burlesque. What’s your real name?’
‘Candida,’ she said. ‘Candida Pechvogel.’
‘And your mother’s?’ he asked eagerly.
‘Miriam Pechvogel. Mimi. Why?’
Kraven took her once more into his arms. He kissed her cheeks, her nose, her lips. ‘Cock-a-doodle-doo!’ he crowed, ‘Cock-a-doodle-doo!’
* * *
KRAVEN GOT UP BLITHELY THE NEXT MORNING, prepared coffee against Candy’s wakening, and went out for a vigorous walk on the Heath. He returned almost two hours later, a bag of fresh poppy-seed bagels in his hand, to an empty house and a note taped to the hall mirror:
Dear Nicholas,
I’m going back to the States. No, it’s not some crazy impulse – I’ve been booked for a month.
It wouldn’t have worked out anyway. Not with us. Look, I like you a lot. Honest. It’s been great. Last night was great. But you were getting too serious. (Or playing at it – with you it’s sometimes hard to tell.) The point is, all I ever wanted was friendship. Nothing too heavy, no unnecessary complications. (Does ‘Nicholas’ mean ‘complications’? The same root, maybe – in the original Sanskrit, or something?)
I’ve got plans I’m not about to change: student teaching next term, getting a start on my PhD, a career that’s just beginning. I need space. Let’s leave it at that.
Candy
From his slack hand the bag of bagels, bought for Candy, dropped down and shed the seeds across the floor. He stood for a moment, pale and speechless, then ran from room to room calling her name, half-trusting to find her. He rooted in vain within their common laundry bag, hoping to find in soiled T-shirts, panties, bras, an assurance of her continued presence. Alas, alas. In desperation, he phoned Heathrow and had her paged; miraculously, they found her and she came to the phone.
‘Nicholas?’
‘Don’t go,’ he said.
‘My flight’s boarding. I’ve got to go.’
‘I’ll come to New Haven. We’ll talk.’
‘Give a girl a break.’
‘Give me a break. I need you, Candy. Besides, I’ve found your fa –’
‘Nicholas,’ she said firmly but kindly, ‘grow up.’
A click, and the line was dead.
FOURTEEN
BETWEEN THE SIDE of the house and the stone wall that had separated the Kravens from their Harrogate neighbours grew a magnificent old oak. It stood there still, although it would probably not survive the transformations the building speculators had in mind. The tree was already in leaf, already concealing what had been Nicko’s most secret place. Kraven made his way through the wet high grass and stood with his hand on the great wrinkled trunk, looking up. No, not even from here: the secret place was invisible beneath the huge green umbrella, hidden by the very arms that formed it.
About fifteen feet up, the central trunk diverged into three heavy upsweeping gnarled branches, which then became the source of all subsequent ramifications. At their common base these three formed a hollow, like the inside of a small barrel or the crow’s-nest of the HMS Victory, and quite roomy enough for a small boy. Nicko had even been able to sit down in it, for a natural ledge, a kind of arboreal goitre, bulged halfway down one inner wall. Here had been his mizzen mast, his mountain peak, his fortress turret, his Spitfire cockpit.
Two feet or so beneath the secret place, a single sturdy branch, a sport, a bastard growth, sprang from the central trunk. It hung downwards, heavy with offspring of its own, to form a leafy bridge from the parent tree to the stone wall. Here it rested before turning skywards itself. This branch, this drawbridge, gangplank, mountain trail, had been Nicko’s route to his secret place. Once on the wall, it was as easy as toffee.
Nobody had known about the secret place, certainly not Marko. Kraven patted the friendly trunk. Perhaps still up there, up aloft in the castle keep, was the treasure box. He strove to remember its contents; A catapult made by Wipers Willie (much-decorated hero of Flanders in the First World War, the Kraven’s gardener and Home Guard defender in the Second) and capable, Willie had said, of smiting battalions of Nasties hip and thigh; some pre-war marbles in a fine net bag, cat’s-eyes, blood-eyes, aggies of all sorts; a Wisden’s Cricketer’s Almanack for 1938, a wad of cigarette cards secured by an elastic band, a genuine police whistle.
He walked back to the paved path through the tall wet grass, over the track he had recently beaten down. Turning he looked back at the oak, at its overarching green immensity. Perhaps also up there still were Nicko’s bow and arrows. They had been up there that morning and all through that day in the spring of 1941, when the trees had burst into their first leaf and the flowers exploded in vivid colour, and hidden in his secret place Nicko had taken careful aim at the Beast, and the Beast had suddenly clutched his heart while reaching for a rose, had clutched his heart, crumpled up and died.
* * *
KRAVEN HAD GONE UP TO LEEDS BY TRAIN and rented a car at the station. He could have changed trains, but arrival by car had seemed somehow grander. He had left Harrogate a little boy; he was returning a man (in a Ford Cortina). Why he had travelled north he could not have precisely said. The fact of Candy’s abrupt departure offered no obvious explanation. He had phoned Percy Fishbane to tell him of his discovery.
‘A girl, you say?’ The old man was indignant.
‘Yes. Candida. She calls herself Candy Peaches.’
‘Naow, you must’ve got it wrong. A girl! What about her mum, then?’
‘There’s no mistake. Miriam Pechvogel is alive and well, and owns a strip joint in Sausalito.’
‘Strewth!’
‘Your daughter’s a graduate student at Yale. A letter should reach her there without trouble. D’you want to take down the address?’
‘No hurry. Bit of a shock, this. Not a son, then? Needs chewing over.’
‘But you said –’
‘Never mind what I effing said. What I’m saying now is, no effing hurry.’ And Fishbane had abruptly cut the connection.
It had been drizzling in London. The drizzle had grown into rain and
the rain into downpour as the train hurtled northwards. Leeds was awash. He stood at the bar of the Queens Hotel looking glumly past the barman’s shoulder and out of the window at the traffic island, fighting the paralysis of the will soaking into his marrow and gluing him to the spot.
Traffic around the island had been heavy. Several major arteries converged there. (Had Nicko actually released the arrow?) On the island itself Edward the Black Prince, Hero of Crecy and Poitiers, Flower of England’s Chivalry, Upholder of the Rights of the People in the Good Parliament, grandly equestrian, was growing wetter and wetter. (Probably Nicko hadn’t released the arrow at all, and even if he had, the distance from the boy’s perch to the spot in the garden where his father had died was far too great for an arrow from a toy bow to have travelled. Besides, Nicko’s arrows had been tipped with suction cups, for pity’s sake!) Growing no less wet than princely Edward were four Leeds Worthies, native sons, representatives of all the centuries from the sixteenth to the nineteenth, each in an admirably sober attitude, together forming a restraining rearguard for the flamboyant Plantagenet. (‘Good,’ Nicko had thought as the Beast fell. Kraven distinctly remembered Nicko thinking that.) In the van, as it were, and neatly counterbalancing the Four Worthies, near-naked nymphs danced in wanton gaiety, each holding aloft her lamp, together determined to lead the Hero, Flower and Upholder down the primrose way to the everlasting bonfire. They too were wet, but in their case a certain shiny lubricity seemed quite suitable. (Yes, when the Beast fell, Nicko had most certainly thought, ‘Good! Serves him right!’) Kraven ordered another whisky.
From the Queens Hotel Kraven drove to the cemetery, but the gates were locked, no one responded to his summons, and he returned to the car wet and yet relieved. He sat for a moment considering what to do. Harrogate, then. But the road to Harrogate took him back through the city. In a mutable world the ugliness of Leeds was a rare earnest of permanence. The rain, far from washing clean, had only slimed over the city’s characteristic grimy red brick. On Swinegate stood an idiot holding up for the passing motorist’s distraction a sign whose clumsy lettering dripped in the downpour: ‘THE LORDIS OOMPA88IONS FAIL NOT; THEY ARE NEW EVERY MOANING. Lamentations 3:22.’ Kraven drove on. His route brought him at last to the A61, the Harrogate road.