The High Flyer

by Susan Howatch

  The Mercedes was missing. Moreover the parking attendant was able to remember that Kim had taken it out at around six-fifteen. “He came in from the street,” I was told, “so it looked as if he’d come straight from work.”

  This evidence certainly suggested a man in a hurry following a warning call from Mrs. Mayfield that the conspiracy was shot and I would inevitably be Surrey-bound in pursuit of the truth. But again, nothing was proved. Kim could have been in a rush to get down to Surrey but he could equally have been keen to get to the Savoy for his first drink of the evening, and maybe he was old enough not to be bothered by the prospect of driving home after plenty of alcohol. It did occur to me that he would have wanted to stop off at home to shower and change if he had been planning to dine at the Savoy, but then I recalled that he could have done that at the office; he always kept a clean shirt there.

  I was just on the point of convincing myself that he had gone to the Savoy when I realised he would be very reluctant to face a top-level business meeting without his organiser.

  I rode up to the lobby to talk to the porter who had come on duty at six. “Excuse me,” I said, “but did my husband stop by earlier to try to collect a package?” But the porter said he had not seen Kim that evening.

  I withdrew to the lift-lobby. I was now sure that there had been no business meeting with Warren Schaeffer and that Kim had headed straight for Oakshott after we had spoken on the phone.

  The lift arrived. I stumbled inside, stabbed the button and slumped against the far wall. It seemed as if I was being jacked up to a new level of tension, and when I opened my front door a moment later I found I had plunged into yet another nightmare.

  The flat was a shambles.

  VII

  Before I opened the front door I was delayed because I was unable to find my keys; I had reached such a pitch of stressed-out exhaustion that when I found they were not in their usual compartment I proved incapable of tracking them down until I had knelt on the floor, turned my bag upside down and picked over the contents. With the key-ring at last in my hand I wanted to get up but I was too debilitated to do more than slump back on my heels, and it was then that I heard a sequence of banging, clattering sounds in the distance, as if someone were slamming doors in between flinging saucepans around the kitchen. From my position in the centre of the lift-lobby I was equidistant from all three front doors of the thirty-fifth-floor flats. Too dazed to identify which flat the sounds were coming from but knowing that my flat had to be empty, I waited zombie-like for the noise to cease. Only then did I succeed in hauling myself to my feet and opening the front door.

  The moment I stepped into the hall I saw that the door of the master bedroom, the door which faced down the long corridor to the living-room, was closed even though I was sure I had left it open, but I was distracted from this discrepancy by the fact that all the pictures lining the walls of the corridor were askew. Moreover when I glanced through the open door into the second bathroom I saw that the shower-curtain had been derailed from the pole which was sagging from one of its holders. Too stupefied to stop I moved on towards the living-room.

  Here the furniture was wildly awry, the sofa now slanting at a crazy angle and both armchairs tipped on their sides. The étagère had crashed to the floor, and not only all its ornaments but all its glass shelves were broken, the fragments scattered over the carpet. The stack of magazines on the coffee-table had been pitched sideways as if buffeted by a gale-force wind, and again the stool by the telescope had been upturned. But the telescope itself was still standing unharmed.

  Dumbfounded by all this fragmentation I backed away, but when I glanced into the kitchen I saw more mess. The mug which I had used for my black coffee earlier was lying broken on the floor, the kettle had fallen into the sink and the toaster, hanging over the counter, was only saved from falling by its cord, which was still plugged into the outlet on the wall. As I stared in utter disbelief at this incomprehensible scene the lights flickered as if the electrical supply were about to fail, but before I had time to cringe at the thought of a power cut, the disruption ended.

  I rescued the toaster from its dangling position and turned back into the living-room. On the carpet among the slew of magazines and smashed ornaments lay not only Kim’s organiser, which I had left on the coffee-table, but also his key, the key which had dropped out of the Jiffy bag, the key to the flat.

  I stared at that key.

  Because of the porter’s testimony less than five minutes ago I knew Kim had not been in the flat since I had left it earlier; to get in he would have had to borrow the spare set of keys again from the porters’ desk, but the porter had firmly stated that he had not seen Kim that evening. The spare keys would never have been doled out to Mrs. Mayfield—unless, of course, Kim had phoned earlier to give his permission, but the porter had made no mention of such a call and in the context of our conversation I felt he would have told me if he and Kim had spoken to each other. So if the spare keys had not been handed over to Mrs. Mayfield, then Mrs. Mayfield could not have entered the flat.

  But if Kim had not been in the flat and Mrs. Mayfield had not been in the flat and Sophie had not been in the flat, who—

  My brain seemed to give a strange lurch, like a defective car slipping gears. I could not work out this conundrum which defied reason and common sense. I could only stand amidst the mess and say to myself: this cannot have happened so therefore it has not happened. Yet it had happened. I told myself there had to be a rational explanation. But there was none.

  Fear swept through me, and the rush of adrenaline seemed to explode in my mind, wiping out my exhaustion and firing me up to an unprecedented pitch of nervous tension. Again my brain lurched, and suddenly I was seeing the scene before my eyes so clearly that it was as if the rim of every object was edged in black. All the colours seemed to be abnormally bright, even garish. I felt as if someone had injected LSD straight into my head to scramble my brains.

  I looked back at the kitchen and found everything was strange there too, particularly the red rubber gloves by the sink. I knew they were a pale, pinkish red but now they were scarlet. Rubbing my eyes in a futile attempt to clear my vision, I remembered the yellow gloves I had taken from Sophie’s kitchen and knew I should now transfer them from my bag to the garbage. By eliminating this untidy detail I could start the task of reducing the chaos to order, but I did not move. I said aloud: “Order,” but I could only think what a strange sound those syllables made and how senseless they seemed. Order. The word was just five letters of the alphabet arranged in a certain way, and the arrangement was now obsolete. There was no meaning there any more.

  I had just completed this thought when I realised that the balcony’s sliding door must be ajar.

  The curtain was drawn to one side still but even so it partially concealed the door and it was this hidden section which was obviously adrift from the frame; the curtain was shifting in the breeze, and the moment I noticed this I realised for the first time that the room was abnormally cold.

  I picked my way slowly across the littered carpet. The door had to be closed at once because otherwise I might want to go outside, and once I was standing on the balcony I would without doubt want to climb over the rail. In an ordered world I would not want to throw myself off a balcony, but there was no order any more and I felt I was predestined to fall from a great height. Hadn’t there been another high flyer long ago who had flown too close to the sun and fallen to earth when his wax wings had started to melt? My wings were melting now—I could feel the wax dripping down my back—but so long as I shut the door and stayed in the ice-cold room the wax would harden again and I would be safe. Even so I could feel the balcony luring me on to fulfil my destiny. It was beckoning me forward, compelling me to—

  I drew back the curtain and bumped into the glass. The door was closed. Yet it could not be closed because I had seen the curtain shuddering in the breeze. So—

  I stopped. A sound had reached me from the far e
nd of the flat. Someone was behind that closed door of the master bedroom, but of course this was impossible because no one could have entered the flat. So rationally, logically, that meant . . . But I could not think what it meant. All I could think was that those words “rationally” and “logically” were so fragile, so utterly irrelevant in this chaotic world which was driving me inexorably into melt-down. The god Order had been destroyed, and into the vacuum created in my consciousness poured the Principalities and Powers, huge cosmic forces over which I had no control and against which no frail unarmed human being could hope to survive undamaged.

  I heard the sound again. I knew the intruder had to be Mrs. Mayfield, even though I could not understand how she had got in. By this time I was so frightened that I was temporarily beyond displaying fear. With my body on autopilot and my brain still fried as if by chemicals which I myself was manufacturing, I moved like a robot to the threshold of the living-room and stared down the corridor to the door facing me at the far end. For a moment I thought I was too terrified to speak. Then I heard myself call with a bizarre, stilted politeness: “Mrs. Mayfield, could you come out, please, because I don’t like you hiding in there.”

  Instantly the door flew open. It flew open so fast that it hit the wall behind with a bang.

  Beyond the threshold but nowhere near the door a woman stood facing me. I saw the glow of royal blue but I never paused to stare at her clothes because I was so stunned by her face. There was no mistaking her. Every feature was sharply outlined, my enhanced perception ensuring that I saw her with abnormal clarity.

  It was Sophie.

  For one long moment we stared at each other. Then as the door slammed shut to enclose her again, I began to scream and scream as if a madman were butchering me with an axe.

  PART THREE

  FRAGMENTING IN THE DARK

  The open door; and the closed door. It is a profoundly religious theme, because religion has always dealt with what anthropologists call “thresholds,” those periods of significant transitions in life, the passing through a new door into the unknown . . . They are potentially dangerous moments . . . And the question of who stands at the door, and whether doors are perceived as open or closed, and what we expect to find on the other side of them, is more than a nice piece of religious imagery. It has to do with our capacity to change, and with the kind of security needed to cross some major threshold.

  JOHN HABGOOD

  Confessions of a Conservative Liberal

  TEN

  Our defences and securities vary . . . But underlying them all is the fact of agonised fragility. Just facing this truth of our own fragility is a major step in the formation of a heart.

  DAVID F. FORD

  The Shape of Living

  I

  The world had been turned inside out. It had been blasted off its axis and rendered incomprehensible. No words could have described the abyss into which I was now falling, the abyss where my intellect and my will no longer operated, the abyss where the saving power of my hard-won independence and my proud self-sufficiency was exposed as a grand illusion. The high flyer’s wings had melted. I was in free fall, plummeting not only to earth but to an earth which was so chaotic, so entirely devoid of familiar landmarks, that it resembled an alien planet.

  I screamed until I ran out of breath. Then I found myself hurtling out of the flat, slamming the front door and racing down the emergency staircase. I was too terrified to wait for the lift. Down and down the stairs I pounded but eventually my knees trembled, my calves ached and I had to sit down. I was still about twenty floors above the podium. Finally I staggered to the nearest lift-lobby. Still breathing hard I watched the door to the stairs in case Sophie burst through it in pursuit of me, but no one came and at last I remembered I had to summon the lift. I went to the wall by the nearest shaft but there were no buttons. Belatedly my brain served up the memory that in a Barbican tower block the lifts were summoned by buttons placed on top of a cylinder which stood in the centre of the floor.

  The lift came. I pressed the lowest button for the car park, but when I reached my Porsche I realised numbly that I could go no farther. I had no car-keys. I had no keys of any kind. I had no money. I had no charge cards. I had rushed out of the flat in such a state that I had forgotten my bag, and now I had nothing, nothing at all. I felt as if I were stark naked and staked to an anthill.

  I leaned panting against the Porsche, and with that same eerie clarity of vision which had allowed me to see every feature of Sophie’s face, I saw how fragile my world was and how insignificant. It was as if after focusing on my heavily defended fortress, a camera had pulled back to reveal that the fortress was no more than a grain of sand in a desert, while beyond the desert lay a vast multicoloured landscape which I had never even begun to imagine.

  I tried to think. I could get the spare keys from the porters’ desk, return to the flat and retrieve my bag. That was the logical, sensible thing to do. But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t go back to that flat in case Sophie was waiting to drive me off the balcony. So that meant . . .

  I suddenly realised that if I lingered in the garage much longer Sophie might give up waiting in the flat and come after me. Immediately I began stumbling towards the entrance of the car park. I passed the attendant, who looked at me strangely, and emerged into the Beech Street tunnel which was brightly lit. There I saw cars travelling between Aldersgate Street in the west and Finsbury Pavement in the east as if life were still continuing normally in some dimension to which I no longer had access. I walked west out of the tunnel, and when I saw the Barbican tube station ahead of me at the junction I longed to escape into the Underground but of course I had no money for the fare. All I could do was walk, and I knew I had to keep moving because when I looked up at the night sky I saw the velvety darkness, the voluptuous darkness which had made Mrs. Mayfield salivate, and I knew it was waiting to suffocate me if I failed to find a safe place to hide.

  Turning left into Aldersgate Street I hurried down the west side of the Barbican, the side where the ramparts and turrets and slit windows of the walkways rose high above the street like the walls of a medieval castle.

  I was trying to think whom I could approach for help. I pictured several acquaintances who would at least start by showing sympathy, but the sympathy would certainly be short-lived if I were to turn up late at night and say: “My flat keeps getting wrecked and I think my husband killed his ex-wife—oh, and by the way, I’ve just seen her ghost.” That was the road to the asylum, and once word got around that I was suffering a breakdown of some kind I’d be finished. Obviously I’d fallen through a black hole into another universe but I had to believe I could crawl back. The only trouble was that I could not crawl back on my own. I was lost, shredded, wiped. I needed a fixer whom nothing would faze.

  Immediately I thought of Tucker and remembered his part-time voluntary work listening to people in trouble. He would listen to me. He would know what to do. He would cope with the fact that I was calling at such a preposterous hour and in such a pathetic condition.

  Giving a sob of relief I broke into a run for a few yards before slowing to a reasonable pace. I had some way to go. I had to conserve my energy.

  Aldersgate Street was a drab place by day and a dingy place by night, but the City was quiet at that hour and at least I did not have to endure the kerb-crawlers who would now be hard at work in the West End. I began to feel calmer. The weird clarity of vision had ebbed, and as I moved through the neon glow it was possible to forget that above the glow was the dark, waiting to drop on me the instant I lost my nerve.

  I felt like losing my nerve when I saw ahead of me the dark tower of the Museum of London, a circle surrounded by high buildings where Aldersgate Street met London Wall. Here too there were neon lights, but the high buildings seemed as if poised to crush me and the sinister tower of the Museum reminded me of Kim, talking neurotically of the Powers.

  I began to increase my pace. I was now horribly afraid of br
eaking down, but I felt that if only I could get past that circle I might still succeed in holding myself together.

  I found it helped to pretend I had an invisible companion. I said aloud to him: “Please beat back the Powers. Please lighten the darkness,” and the strange thing was that when I spoke these words I felt that someone was indeed falling into step beside me. I told myself this was mere wish-fulfilment—how could it be anything else?—but I was puzzled by the fact that my invisible companion was not at all as I would have wished him to be. Given the choice I would have hired a muscleman pumped high on steroids and toting a Kalashnikov, someone who could respond to violence with violence, but I knew this stranger was quite unarmed. Moreover he was helping me not because he had been hired to do so but because he had been where I now was and he knew that what I needed most at that moment was companionship, encouragement and the inspiration just to keep on keeping on when my world was in ruins, my body was exhausted and my mind was so bruised that I hardly recognised it as my own.

  Yet although the stranger had no weapon of any kind, the darkness parted before him as he escorted me to the first exit out of that sanity-splitting circle, and when I finally rounded the long curve of the road which led into King Edward Street I saw ahead of me, high on Ludgate Hill, a great explosion of light. The dome of St. Paul’s was floodlit. The sky around it was pitch-black, so black that the grey dome seemed white, and the cross on the summit shone like molten gold on a slab of jet.

  I hurried uphill, past the old graveyard called Postman’s Park, past the rose-garden in the ruins of Christ Church Greyfriars, until finally I veered left towards the parallel street of St. Martin’s Le Grand which linked Aldersgate Street with Cheapside. So many of the City’s streets had ancient names, far more ancient than Wren’s version of the Cathedral which was now so close that it seemed to be erupting above the drab modern office buildings which still separated me from it. I remembered all the times I had glanced casually at that floodlit dome through my telescope. I had been so remote from it, so sealed off from its powerful reality, yet now, dragged from my ivory tower and flung out into the dark, I felt as if I were seeing not just the dome but the whole Cathedral for the first time. How vast it was, rising so high above all those acres rebuilt after the war and linking the resurrected City with a past which was still vibrating in the names of the streets—and as my companion steered me on towards the light I knew that if I were to recite those names the sound would soothe my mind and keep me sane.