by Trevor Hoyle
But which was real – this or the room above Mr Patundi’s shop? I couldn’t hold them together in my mind. I found it impossible to believe that I had stepped into a car in Brickton and twenty minutes later I was sitting opposite Diane Locke in a baronial country house sipping something from a fluted glass that stung my tongue with cold fire. Somewhere along the road we had crossed the dividing-line. We had arrived in the land of Oz. On this side there was a sufficiency of everything, not on vulgar display, but there, simply and unquestionably there. Your table was reserved, as was your share of the plunder, and you had every right to it. While on the other side of the dividing-line, over there – beyond the invisible boundary we had crossed without noticing it – there were sickly children with burning eyes, tattooed thugs who dealt in drugs, and pale bodies curled up in the harbour mud.
‘Have you found somewhere to stay? A hotel or something?’ Diane Locke had taken off her coat. She wore a pale grey silk blouse gathered in by a black leather belt and a long woollen skirt of small checks which fell in graceful folds over black soft leather boots. She was perfectly at home in these surroundings, dressed for the part, even to the single strand of pearls at her throat.
‘Nothing as grand as that,’ I said. ‘It’s just a room above an Indian’s shop.’ But not a room I could return to – not after Wayne’s social call.
‘Why there? I thought you’d come into your inheritance.’
‘Yes, well … probably I will move. I’ve been thinking about it.’
‘And did you find what you were looking for in Brickton?’
‘I found who I was looking for.’
‘Ah, of course!’ She nodded and smiled. ‘The mythical Benson.’
‘Is that what you think – that I invented him? The mad in pursuit of the imaginary.’
‘You’re a curious case, aren’t you?’ Diane Locke said. ‘At least I think so.’
‘It takes one to know one.’
She laughed. It was a warm, full laugh, not the nasal tittering you usually get from so many women.
‘Is that why you’re interested in me?’ I asked.
‘Who says I’m interested in you?’
‘I think you are.’
She sipped her drink, and then said, ‘Well yes, I have to admit … dammit, why am I being so coy? I’m curious about what happened to you, yes, and about your wife. You told me she was dead.’ I just nodded at this, and she went on, ‘Was it that that caused your … why you went into the clinic?’
‘No. That started before then. Months before. She was unfaithful and I found out about it.’
‘You didn’t want to lose her,’ Diane Locke said. She went on rather wistfully, ‘When you love someone you’d do anything to keep them.’
‘I did something all right,’ I said.
‘What did you do?’
‘I went to pieces.’
‘You must have loved her very much.’
‘Yes I loved her, and I hated her.’
‘But not enough to harm her.’
I grinned at her transparency. ‘You think I killed my wife and they had me put away?’
‘Did you?’
‘Whatever I say you won’t believe me.’
‘Yes I will.’
‘Okay,’ I said, ‘for what it’s worth, I didn’t kill her. Benson did.’
An elderly couple had entered and sat down – he looked like a regulation-issue retired colonel, with a toothbrush moustache startlingly white against a florid complexion, she was bent and concave-chested, a bird of prey wrapped in a shawl, with a long, wizened, prune-like face. I assumed they had driven up in the bottle-green Rover. Distantly knives and forks clinked on plates and I could smell rich food. I began to feel faintly nauseous.
Diane Locke sipped her drink and put the glass down without a tremor. ‘This man Benson killed your wife. How?’
‘They called it an accident but it wasn’t.’
‘What happened?’
I said quickly, to get it over with, ‘She went off with him, left me, and three months later she was dead, drowned.’
I drained the last drop of liquid and held the glass tightly in my hand. ‘They didn’t tell me straight away. Or they might have told me – it didn’t sink in. I was having treatment for clinical depression and the stuff they give you, the medication and shock therapy make you forget. You can remember your childhood, it brings all that back, the red bike you got on your eighth birthday, the time you fell off the garden swing and cut your knee. But it wipes out recent events. You exist in the past, in distant memories.’
Diane Locke said slowly, ‘So you were in the clinic when it happened? You’d had the breakdown before she died …’
A grin came to my face. I said, ‘That makes you happier, does it? Clears your mind of any lingering doubt.’
The elderly man looked up at the sound of my voice, and then he blinked and decided urgently he had to look at his watch.
I put the glass down and wiped my hand on my knee.
‘No, I was only thinking, Peter … your mind was confused at the time. You’ve admitted that. And it must have come as a shock when you learned about your wife’s death. Perhaps it didn’t happen in quite the way you think it did.’
‘Oh?’ I laughed shakily. ‘She drowned herself because she couldn’t bear the happiness – is that your theory? Is that what you have your characters do? They throw themselves off cliffs in a lovers’ pact because life is unbearably sweet? In that case Susan kept to her side of the bargain and Benson didn’t. He carried on living. He’s alive now.’
‘But you’re assuming rather a lot. How do you know that your wife – I mean, perhaps she came to realise she’d made a terrible mistake and couldn’t live with it? By leaving you, I mean. That’s possible, isn’t it?’
‘It’s convenient,’ I said. ‘It lets Benson off the hook. He’s innocent, right? Is that what you’re saying?’
‘I don’t know if he is or he isn’t.’
‘No, but I do.’
She kept her eyes downcast, fiddling with her glass on the beaten copper table. ‘You must have loved your wife very much – even though you say you hated her – to come here looking for him.’ Now she looked at me directly. ‘Why did you come?’
‘Benson owes me a life,’ I said giddily. ‘Wouldn’t you say? I spent over two years in that place thinking about it. You can build up a lot of hate in two years. But taking his life, straight off, wouldn’t get rid of it.’ I grinned at her. ‘Think I still belong in there? Locked away in my little cubicle, pumped full of drugs, eating mush with a plastic knife and fork, a happy vegetable? That’s how they like to keep you, like children, as if you don’t know what’s going on. Of course you do know. Your mind never stops. You have nothing else to do all day long. All the time in the world to think, and think, nothing else but think …’
A man in a white jacket appeared at my elbow and spoke across me. ‘Miss Locke – when you’re ready your table is waiting.’
She smiled and finished her drink.
I said, ‘Why do you call yourself Locke? You told me you were married.’
‘I was married. I’m now divorced. Why should I keep the man’s name when I’ve got rid of the man?’
We stood up. To my surprise she slipped her arm through mine and clasped my hand. My heart was beating fast. Close to, inches away, her eyes looked into mine, and we walked from the bar into the dining-room holding hands.
Chapter Eight
1
The room was long and narrow and panelled in dark wood, and not much wider than the dining-car in a train, with a minstrels’ gallery at the far end. We were seated about halfway along, on the window side. Fewer than half of the tables were occupied; it was early and the expense-account crowd hadn’t arrived. None of the people eating paid the slightest attention to us. They were of the class, I presumed, which pretends to take no interest in anything outside of themselves. Or perhaps it was a genuine, unfaked disinterest: they truly beli
eved theirs to be the central axis around which the world, indeed the whole universe, spins, and anything beyond is shadow play, a trifling distraction.
I ate sparingly. The food was in small portions but very rich, and I knew what would happen if I gorged myself. There was salad of smoked chicken with avocado to start, and then Roulade of Dover sole with a winter salad of fresh vegetables. Diane Locke drank a heavy red wine with the meal. I had just the one glass and then went on to mineral water. I felt light-headed enough, as if I were swaying on a sea. I had ‘confessed’ to her: she now knew as much about me as anyone did. I had listened to the words coming from my mouth as if from an actor’s. But then this was the land of Oz, where such things could be said – the most shameful secrets revealed – and it was perfectly okay, because the surroundings reduced everything to inconsequential chatter. At the next table they were admitting incest, over there in the corner discussing a tax swindle, behind us paedophilia; the colonel with the toothbrush moustache was holding his wife enthralled as he described to her how he had sodomised half the regiment. The conventions held. The starched linen tablecloths and the silver cruet sets and the white-jacketed waiters moving silently and attentively to and fro kept everything in the correct proportion. You could plot political assassinations here, the subversion of democracy by the secret services, the infiltration by hired lackeys into the BBC’s board of governors – providing of course that you modulated your voice and knew which dessert fork to use.
We were drinking our coffee when a pretty dark-haired young woman came in with an older woman, smartly dressed, with short silvery-blonde hair. I felt in my pocket for my spectacle frames and put them on, in the fatuous hope that Benson’s daughter wouldn’t recognise me. She and the older woman, who was also quite attractive in a hard, intractable way, were seated near the door. Diane Locke choked and dribbled coffee down her chin. ‘You might have got a pair with lenses in them.’ She dabbed her mouth and looked round over her shoulder. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘I have to leave right away.’
‘What’s wrong?’
I pushed the crisp, stiff notes across. ‘Settle the bill, I’ll see you outside.’
‘It’s all right, don’t get worried. I’ll pay my share—’
‘Take it,’ I said. The hoarseness in my voice made her blink. The notes lay on the white cloth, screaming out their newness, as if I’d minted them myself that morning. I walked stiffly between the two rows of tables, consciously keeping my spine straight to stop myself hunching into a dwarf.
I had to halt and edge round the waiter who was handing a menu to Ruth Benson. She might have glanced up with a smile to thank him, and if so would have seen me, but she wasn’t the type to thank waiters. I went on and out through the bar, belching up fumes of Roulade of Dover sole.
It was starting to rain. I sat on the low brick wall, the Datsun between me and the windows. There wasn’t a black Mercedes in the car park; Ruth Benson must have arrived in her companion’s car.
After a few minutes Diane Locke appeared and saw me sitting, or rather crouching, on the wall. She raised one eyebrow. ‘You’d better get in, Peter, before your glasses get smeared.’
We drove out through the stone gateway and turned left away from the hump-backed bridge, in the opposite direction to Brickton. Closed ranks of pine trees surrounded us, rising in tiers to the bare smooth contours of the mountains in the middle distance.
‘Which one were you trying to avoid – the woman or the girl?’
I tried to think of an evasive lie, but my head ached. ‘The girl,’ I said. ‘Benson’s daughter.’
‘Would she know you?’
‘She might recognise me.’
‘How?’
‘I stole something from her car. Well, her father’s car, actually.’
‘And she saw you do it?’
‘As good as. I was the only one there – the only stranger – so it wouldn’t take Sherlock Holmes to figure it out.’
‘You bloody idiot, Peter,’ Diane Locke said wearily. ‘What a web you weave. What was it you stole?’
After I’d told her she said faintly, shaking her head, ‘I don’t believe this. I don’t believe it. Are you telling me that the meal was paid for with stolen money?’
‘You’re not involved, so it doesn’t—’
She cut me short with a harsh, cynical laugh. ‘I’m not involved? Not involved? Listen, you dummy. They know me at the restaurant. I’ve been going there for years. And if you remember I’m the one who paid the bill. Those notes were brand-new, they’ll be easy to trace. Did you never think of that?’ She gave me a hard searching look. ‘Are there any more cute little tricks I ought to know about? Any more skeletons rattling in the closet?’
‘Nothing that I remember,’ I said.
‘That’s something I’ve noticed about you, Peter. You have a very convenient memory.’
‘Doesn’t everybody?’
Suddenly Diane Locke thumped the wheel with her fist. ‘Oh my God. You put something in the boot of the car, the family heirloom, wrapped in a cushion cover. Was that … ?’
I nodded.
‘Did someone actually see you take it?’
‘No, there was nobody around. But they must know it was me. I was in the office at B-H Haulage, asking about a job.’
‘Wonderful. Did you give them your name?’
‘No.’
‘Ah, now I understand.’ Diane Locke’s voice was heavy with irony. ‘Hence the disguise. The man of a thousand faces. For God’s sake don’t take to crime seriously, Peter, you’re not cut out for it.’ She lit a cigarette, her movements tense and fretful. ‘One thing you haven’t told me, and I want to know. Why the police are looking for you.’
‘I’m armed and highly dangerous.’
‘You released yourself from the clinic, presumably against medical advice,’ Diane Locke went on, ignoring me. ‘All right, I can accept that, and you’ve told me why you had to do it. But why should they alert the police? Is it you they’re looking for or someone else? You haven’t done anything, have you?’
I sat and stared ahead through the streaky windscreen: the wiper on the passenger side hadn’t been mended. The road twisted through the hedgerows, giving glimpses of flat furrowed fields swept by misty curtains of rain.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Not to my knowledge.’
‘What the hell does that mean?’
‘I’ve already told you about the treatment and what it does … you forget your own history.’
‘So you had to invent one. I see.’ She drew deeply on her cigarette. ‘If you don’t know what you’ve done, I wonder who does?’
We stopped at a main road, crossed over the gleaming tarmac and entered once more the spider’s web of half-submerged lanes which dipped and curved through the sodden countryside. The light was drab, pearl-grey, exhausted after straining through the thick blanket of cloud.
‘I don’t know what to believe and what not to believe,’ she went on. ‘All that about your wife, and her affair with Benson, and why she killed herself. Maybe it’s all invented. Maybe I’m sitting next to a man who …’ She stubbed out the cigarette in the ashtray, sending up a cloud of ash.
‘Murdered his wife?’ When she stayed silent I said, ‘There is one way to find out the truth, Diane. Ring Dr Morduch at the Clinic. You’ll believe him won’t you? Ask him what happened. And while you’re about it ask him about Smith too, since you don’t believe he exists.’
I could feel myself building up into a rage. It shouldn’t have mattered one iota that Diane Locke doubted me – what was she to me? – but it did matter. I wanted her to believe me and to trust me, as she had done, without the slightest justification, that first night when we met on the highway. To receive someone’s unqualified trust had renewed my faith and belief in myself, and I didn’t want to lose them; so I suppose that was why I felt angry.
‘You’re thinking I had a motive for killing her,’ I went on, trying to make myself soun
d reasonable, ‘and that’s true, I did have a motive. No one likes to be deceived.’
‘My husband deceived me and I didn’t kill him.’ Diane Locke paused, then said in a low voice, ‘Though if I’d met her, wonder-woman, and had a knife in my hand, I would have pushed it into her.’
‘We’re not so very different then,’ I said.
We turned off the narrow lane and stopped in front of the house. Diane Locke opened the boot and I took out the attaché case. I had told her about the money but said nothing about the notebooks and tapes. This would have only led to more fantastic tales – the comic opera in the council chamber, the wild young man with the bloodshot eyes and the dumping of bodies through the public baths’ discharge pipe which ended up in the harbour mud. Such absurdities would have confirmed what she was halfway to believing: not only an invented past but an imagination at the end of its tether.
In the twilight of the hallway the bakelite telephone crouched on the little table beneath the varnished banister like a shiny black toad. The wall of books and periodicals mounted the stairs in dusty disorder. Diane Locke motioned me to put the attaché case in its moquette cover next to the hallstand, in which jostled together a collection of walking sticks and two large black umbrellas, like unfurled bats. I straightened up and felt her cold face against mine and her warm lips impress themselves upon me.
2
She pushed my overcoat off my shoulders. As I struggled to free myself she was loosening my clothing and unfastening my belt. She unzipped the front of my trousers, then held my hardening penis through my underpants. I tried to kiss her, holding her awkwardly by the shoulders, but she turned away from me, and bent forward, slipping both hands underneath her long skirt, rolling her tights over her thighs, and holding the sausage of material in her hands kicked off her shoes and extricated one foot and then the other. She lifted her skirts and pulled her pants off.
She sat down on the stairs and lifted her skirt to her waist. Her head was thrown back, elbows close to her sides resting on the thin carpet, her long white legs, tapering from heavy thighs, bent slightly at the knees, spread apart.