‘You seemed to think so. I saw your face light up that time we met her in the cafe.’ Her tone was teasing, though Baines was momentarily confounded that Bella had noticed his reaction and could recall it from almost a year’s distance. He couldn’t help feeling rather pleased about that.
6
THE NIGHT BEFORE the official opening of ‘City by the Sea’ they had held a private view to which a great many more people came than had been invited. It was inevitable, as Baines knew; no one could throw a party in Liverpool without a raucous cavalcade of gatecrashers rolling up. The crowd was so large that people had already edged out of the gallery, stifling under the August heat, and found their way into the Tanquerays’ backyard. Baines felt a bead of sweat start from his neck and proceed to trickle down the length of his spine. The hum of conversation had climbed to a roar, and the mixed odour of cigarettes and perfume and hair oil was beginning to feel oppressive. He slalomed between the revellers and gained the relative tranquillity of the yard.
He leaned against the back wall, where long tendrils of wisteria were scaling the brickwork in an apparent effort to escape. Clusters of people stood around drinking, one or two occasionally glancing upwards, their ears cocked for the distant approach of engines. Ever since the reports came in of Luftwaffe reconnaissance missions over the city they had all become watchers of the sky. Bombs had been dropped, most of them without harm. In Prenton, however, one had crashed through the roof of a house and a maid named Johanna Mandale was killed in her bed. She was the first casualty of German attacks on Merseyside.
At the first-floor window he saw someone waving and beckoning him up. It was Evie. He had been rather enjoying his refuge from the crush, but he thought it might look rude not to join her. Having plucked a beer from the proffered tray he was retracing his steps through the heaving press of bodies – there seemed to be an inordinate number of sweaty men in double-breasted suits, he assumed they were business contacts of Richard’s – when he glimpsed, out of the corner of his eye, a face he thought he knew but hadn’t seen in years. At the same time he was conscious of it as a face he had felt a commanding urge never to see again.
The crowd shifted and he was temporarily lost to view. Could it have been …? The startling possibility nagged at him as he climbed the stairs, which were being swiftly transformed into an obstacle course; some couples were lounging and chatting, oblivious to the traffic passing up and down. He nodded a greeting to Tim, one of the studio assistants, who grimaced comically at the surrounding hubbub: ‘Mad, isn’t it?’
‘Who are all these people?’
‘I have no idea,’ Tim replied, and they both laughed.
He proceeded to the top, and spotted Evie amid a huddle at the far end of the room. The room still smelt faintly of the plum-coloured paint he had lately used on the walls.
‘Hullo, Evie,’ he said, stooping to kiss her on the cheek and noting in the same instant that his small infatuation with her was over. He felt a strange complication of worry and relief, ‘to mourn a mischief that is past and gone’. Evie, treating him to one of her most guileless smiles, had clearly never suspected a thing.
‘I’ve brought some friends from the paper,’ she said, introducing him to an assortment of young women whose names he almost immediately forgot. Just then a doughy middle-aged man in a crumpled navy blazer sidled over.
‘And this feller here might be writing something about you for his column. Adrian Wallace, this is Tom – he sort of organised this.’ Evie handed him on with a surreptitious wink.
‘Ah, the curator,’ said Wallace, pink-cheeked and sweating from every pore of his meaty face. His bow tie was wilting like a parched flower.
‘I only helped out,’ replied Baines, ‘Richard and Bella are the people you should talk to. You’re the diarist?’
‘Oh, diarist, art critic, literary editor – I’ve done most of them in my time.’ He cast a bored, imperious gaze around the room. ‘Amazing what a crowd you get when free ale’s on offer.’
‘Maybe some are here to see the photographs.’
Wallace sighed theatrically and flicked a hand through his wavy, ash-coloured hair. ‘That’s so naive it’s almost charming. The odd thing is, these pictures aren’t bad, either – if only people could be bothered to look.’ He narrowed his eyes, and pointed a stubby finger at a photograph on the wall in front of them. ‘That one, for instance, is really quite striking.’
Baines turned to look at it. ‘Do you know what that is?’
‘I haven’t the faintest,’ Wallace drawled.
‘It’s the front elevation of Janus House, on Temple Street.’ It was one of Richard’s most arresting shots. He had taken it at such a steep angle that the building was foreshortened into a kind of geometrical abstract, its tiers of windows seeming to soar upwards to a distant apex. Baines couldn’t help adding, ‘It’s by a Liverpudlian architect named Peter Eames.’
‘Never heard of him. Liverpudlian, you say? Looks more like a New York skyscraper to me.’
‘He anticipated the skyscraper. That was part of his genius.’
Wallace allowed himself a sceptical chuckle. ‘Dear boy, let’s not get carried away. Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Mozart – that’s genius. A Liverpool architect nobody’s heard of, that’s … quite different.’
‘Oh. I was only quoting Ruskin’s opinion of him.’ In fact, he had read a private letter in which Ruskin had described a visit to Liverpool in the 1870s and merely noted en passant ‘that great glass enigma known as Janus House’; irritated by Wallace’s airy condescension, Baines had decided to gloss the Ruskinian verdict as ‘genius’. His scholar’s instinct baulked at the misrepresentation, but he knew he wouldn’t be challenged on it. Wallace, however, had been distracted by something else.
‘Who is that extraordinary-looking woman?’
Baines followed his gaze: it was Bella, dressed in a silk sheath the colour of old gold that rippled and shimmered against the light. A thin headscarf, mixing shades of glinting copper and flame, lent the disconcerting impression that her hair was on fire. Catching his eye she swayed towards them with her long dancer’s strides, and Baines introduced her.
‘Buona sera, Bella,’ said Wallace, with emphatic suavity. ‘I was just saying what a charming soirée this is.’
Bella fixed him with a bemused smile. ‘Have we met?’
‘Adrian Wallace, from the Echo. Love the show. I’ll be saying so in my column – you should pack them in.’
She looked about the room. ‘Hmm. I wonder if we could get so many without the promise of a drink. This must be the least “private” view I’ve ever attended.’
‘You’ve done a great job,’ said Baines, with prosaic gallantry, and won a smile noticeably warmer than the one she’d just aimed at Wallace, who was now standing a shade closer to her than he had before.
‘Here’s my number,’ he said, flourishing a card which Bella took and examined with a great show of politeness. ‘Come along to Nell’s once you’re finished here – you may know the place. Just give them my name at the door.’ He traced the air with his cigarette as he spoke, and Baines noticed a signet ring flash on his finger: it had the right pompous touch about it.
‘That’s very nice of you,’ said Bella. ‘May I bring my friend here?’ She leaned pertly against Baines and squeezed his shoulder; he felt the gesture both as a skin-tingling thrill and a sly rebuff to Wallace’s familiarity. Here was something to beat quoting Ruskin, or misquoting him, come to that. Wallace glanced at Baines and tilted his head, as if conceding an advantage.
‘I’ll see you later, then,’ he said, flicking at his hair again and sloping off. Once he was out of earshot, Bella turned to Baines and said, ‘What a peculiar man.’
‘He looks a scoundrel,’ said Baines.
Bella laughed. ‘Scoundrel. You sound like someone out of Trollope. Good job you were standing between us – I thought he was going to eat me up.’
‘Yes, he did have a hungry look.’
‘But not a lean one,’ she giggled.
At that moment Jack, in his ARP uniform, appeared before them. He had recently been growing a moustache, which had, to Baines’s amusement, turned out patchy and incontrovertibly ginger.
‘What are you two chortling about?’
‘Oh, nothing much,’ said Baines. ‘Bella just had a close shave with that lardy-looking feller over there.’
‘Talking of close shaves, is that a new moustache?’ asked Bella.
‘Hmm,’ said Jack, dabbing at it distractedly. ‘I thought it would lend me a bit of gravitas as an air-raid warden.’
‘Do you think?’ said Baines. ‘Seems more like a cricketer’s moustache to me.’
‘What’s that?’
He pretended to count the individual bristles. ‘Eleven-a-side.’
‘Less of your cheek,’ said Jack, looking around. ‘Bit of a crush, isn’t it?’
‘Have you just arrived?’ asked Baines, and Jack nodded. ‘Did you happen to notice … someone, by the door, as you came in?’
‘Someone like … who?’
‘Duncan Heathcote.’
Jack frowned for a moment. ‘Heathcote … what, chap we were at the School with? No, I didn’t.’
Perhaps he had been mistaken. The eyes could play tricks – and would he have recognised him in any case after all these years? He would be better off savouring the pleasure of that moment just gone when Bella had innocently squeezed his shoulder.
‘I’ll be back in a minute,’ Baines said, leaving Bella and Jack talking to one another. He had to know. Quickening his steps he got to the stairs and carefully made his way to the turn. The ground floor was now full to the door, and the drone of chatter had raised a high invisible wall across the room. From this vantage he scanned the sea of faces. He lit a cigarette and waited, like a spy, allowing the smoke to plume down his nose. A few minutes went by … he must have imagined it. Somewhere he heard Richard’s booming laugh and spotted him deep in conversation on the far side. He descended into the scrum and began dodging his way towards him, preparing in his head a couple of congratulatory phrases: it was his night, after all. Richard, amid a loose cabal of men whose braying voices seemed to compete with one another, saw Baines approaching and lifted his chin in welcome.
‘Tom, at last,’ he almost yelled – but Baines wasn’t listening, for his envelopment within Richard’s boisterous throng had brought him face to face with the man he thought he had glimpsed before. Now there was no doubt. His hair was receding, but the weakly handsome features had aged very little, and he apparently surveyed the world with the same humourless gaze. Baines felt an ecstatic sort of menace tightening his chest, as Richard gamely ploughed through the round of introductions. ‘… and this is Duncan –’
‘I know who he is,’ Baines cut in, sharply enough for Heathcote’s eyes to focus and harden.
‘Sorry … we – know each other?’
‘Yes. Of old. School of Architecture, during the twenties. I’m Tom Baines.’
Heathcote frowned as he repeated the name under his breath. ‘I don’t think –’
‘You know me,’ said Baines, his tone flat and sinister. Richard, picking up the note of tension, tried to mediate.
‘Sounds like someone’s got a faulty memory, and if I know Tom, it’s not his.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Heathcote, still perplexed. ‘I was at the School, it’s true, but there’s heaps of people I’ve forgotten since then.’ He shrugged, almost apologetically, at Baines, and seemed about to turn away.
‘You can pretend not to recognise me. But I think you’ll remember Alice Thorn.’
Baines saw Heathcote flinch at this, and a faint light of recollection began to glimmer on his face. Richard was looking from one to the other, like a referee preparing to let them box.
‘Yeah. I remember Alice,’ he said, wary now. ‘We used to see each other, years ago. She was – quite unhinged. But what’s this got to do with anything? I still don’t know you from Adam.’
Baines flushed at the dismissive tone. A little white dot that had been pulsing behind his eyes now flared, incandescent, like a filament jammed with current. He sensed Bella arriving at his side, unaware of the little confrontation in progress. Richard began to say something in his jovial conciliatory way, but Baines ignored him, ignored Bella too, as white anger shot blindingly around his skull.
‘What’s this got to do with? Let me explain. I wanted to fucking kill you.’ Now his voice sounded strange and high and mad. He must have stepped towards Heathcote because he felt Richard flailing at him from behind, and a little wave of alarm rippled through the surrounding clamour. Behind him he heard someone say ‘fight’ just as his fist piled towards Heathcote’s nose and made a quick, dry smack against bone.
‘Whoa, Tom, what the –’ Richard said, grabbing hold of him, and suddenly other tall-shouldered men had stepped in and were hustling him, kindly but firmly, away. Heathcote, he could see, was staggering like a newborn calf. The inside of Baines’s head seemed to be caving in beneath some molten avalanche, it was a screaming white-out, and he could feel only the rhythm of his own breathing against the roar.
Out on Slater Street he was calming down, though the blood still pulsed loud in his ears. His hand ached from the impact of knuckle on bone. He leaned his head against a street lamp, its hooded eye extinguished, and took deep breaths, while behind him he heard Richard and Bella talking in urgent low voices. As sanity began to blink on again, he wondered at the sudden way it had just blown its fuses. He felt he had just endured a violent and disabling spasm. After some minutes he turned round to find Bella looking at him, with the air of a doctor assessing a potentially volatile patient.
‘Are you all right?’ she said, and even as he felt damp tentacles of shame begin to palpate him he was grateful that this was the first thing she said, instead of ‘Have you gone mad?’
He nodded, not daring to catch her eye. ‘Sorry’ came out in a croak. He felt her staring, still. Across the road they heard the door of the studio opening as a couple exited, and the muffled roar from inside indicated that the party was continuing blithely without them.
‘I can’t go back in there,’ he said eventually.
‘I know.’
‘But you should. I’ll push off in a minute.’
Bella shook her head. ‘No. we’ll go for a drink, and you can perhaps explain to me …’ She let the sentence hang.
‘Look, I don’t want to ruin your evening. And there’s Richard too –’
‘I’ve told Richard. He’s going to meet us later. Come on – you’re in no fit state to be left alone.’
They walked in silence through the darkening streets. The pubs were beginning to empty, and the frowsy reek of old beer wafted from their open doors to hang in the night air; snatches of laughter and shouted oaths echoed within. Outside St Luke’s Church a chorus of drinkers were stumbling through a ragged repertoire of songs. One would start them off, then after a few uncertain bars his mates would join in, and the tune, doggedly pursued, would gradually subside into bibulous incoherence. Having turned into Hope Street Bella stopped at a tall terraced house, its door overhung by an intricately glazed fanlight. Blackout curtains sealed up the windows.
‘This must be the place,’ she murmured, and thunked the heavy brass door knocker against its plate. A short wait, then the door creaked open and a woman’s face, heavily made up and no longer young, leaned coquettishly against the jamb. Her eyes, raccooned in black, made silent enquiry.
‘Is this Nell’s?’ said Bella.
A pause. ‘Who’s asken, dear?’ The voice carried a satisfying rasp, the sound of a lifetime’s kippering in tobacco.
‘Adrian Wallace invited us.’
A smirk lifted the corner of her mouth. ‘I’ll bet he did.’ She scrutinised them for a few moments longer, then pulled the door back. Candlelight threw wobbling silhouettes on the wall as they proceeded through the narrow entrance hall, their hoste
ss carrying a gas lamp that illumined her features in a hilariously odd parody of Gothic melodrama. She led them up a staircase, its panelled walls lined with the proprietorial faces of gilt-framed grandees, and then into a large L-shaped room with a bar at one end and a lounge at the other; candle flame wavered on tables where a few shadowy drinkers were hunkering down for the night. They settled at a pair of green plush armchairs and ordered brandy and soda.
Bella took in their surroundings with a sidelong look. ‘I used to go to places like this in London,’ she said, rather wistfully. ‘We’d get soused on gin and discuss the redistribution of wealth.’
‘Did you work anything out?’
She smiled. ‘Most evenings it would end in an argument about who should pay for the drinks.’ Leaning into the candle she let the tip of her cigarette catch the flame. ‘Now,’ she said, as though a decent interval had been observed, ‘can you tell me what happened back there?’
Baines, a natural fugitive from disclosure, sensed his behaviour this evening had been sufficiently extravagant to put him under an obligation to explain. He took a swallow of the brandy and felt its liquid fire slide down his throat. ‘That man, Duncan Heathcote –’ it only occurred to him now that he might be a friend of hers. ‘Do you know him?’
She shook her head. ‘He must be one of Richard’s crowd.’
‘Small world,’ he said, consideringly. ‘I knew him from the School of Architecture, years ago, but he obviously didn’t remember me.’
‘I think he’ll remember you now.’
He paused, and gazed into his glass. ‘There was a girl, Alice – Alice Thorn – she was at the university. A music student. We’d met in our final year and became very close, very quickly. She was bright and funny and … different, you know? Quite a strange girl, she had an odd perspective on things. And she had a beautiful singing voice – that definitely appealed to me.’
‘Were you – in love with her?’ asked Bella.
‘I suppose so. But I was too … diffident. I told her once, in a roundabout way …’ He sighed, trying to fix an image of her in his mind. ‘Next thing I knew she was stepping out with Heathcote. I kept in touch, but clearly I’d missed whatever chance I might have had with her. We left the university, and over the next two or three years I’d spot them together here and there. I heard later that things weren’t good between them, that he was having affairs behind her back …’
The Rescue Man Page 12