by William Boyd
Talbot put the newspaper down feeling a palpable cold shock spread through him, remembering vividly his last encounter with Anny in Paris, as she sat outside that café in her raincoat and forage cap, how he lit her cigarette for her—before that lout of a boyfriend punched him in the face. Poor, poor girl, he thought, very shaken at this news. What an awful thing to happen to her. What were they implying—that she had been assassinated by the FBI or the CIA? Anny Viklund? It seemed inconceivable. The complicated ramifications of Ladder to the Moon had rippled far beyond Brighton.
He stood up and wandered unhappily through the open French windows into the garden, hands in pockets, wondering futilely if he could have done anything different, could have changed things. No, he thought, he had begged her to return, promised her every legal assistance. It was no consolation to think that if she had returned she would still be alive. What must Jacques Soldat be thinking? Maybe his stupid, perverse idea of a press conference had been the final pound of pressure on poor Anny Viklund…Then he thought of Troy Blaze and wondered what the collateral damage would be on him. Jesus, what a fucking mess. How horrible and unnecessary. We cannot control most aspects of our lives, he thought, but those we can try to control, or at least influence, we should protect and cherish.
He paused. He suddenly knew exactly what he wanted to do next. A firm kind of certainty and conviction took hold of him, a different confidence in his judgement that almost surprised him in its audacity, suggesting a course of action that the old Talbot of a month ago would have dismissed in a second as both risky and potentially undignified. He found it strange that it had taken the news of Anny Viklund’s death to set him on this course. What was it about Anny’s miserable lonely death in a car park in south-west France that had suddenly cleared his vision? In her short, baffled, beleaguered life maybe she had inadvertently arrived, at its desperate but willed-for end, at a truth about her existence—and therefore, by extension, every human being’s. Talbot understood what she meant by that act, that cry of pain.
He strode back inside, picked up the phone and dialled Directory Enquiries.
“Hello,” he said. “Do you have a number for Hicksmith Scaffolding Ltd.? Muswell Hill, London. Yes.”
* * *
—
Talbot called the number he had been given and a young woman’s voice answered the phone with a perky, “Hicksmith Scaffolding! How can I help you?” Talbot said he needed to speak to Mr. Hicksmith and was told that he was out of the office on a job in Chalk Farm. I’ve got a big contract for him, Talbot lied, and was immediately given the address where Gary and the crew could be found.
He drove up to Chalk Farm in the Alvis and parked a street away from the address he’d been given. He took a few moments in the car to compose himself. He realised that, if what he hoped was going to happen next actually happened, then his secret life wouldn’t be secret any more, or for very long. But that would be the right thing. That would be good. It was the protection that his secret life had given him that had now brought him here to Chalk Farm, here to Gary Hicksmith. The flat, the gallery, his photographs, his models, his solitude, being Mr. Eastman, had served their purpose. He had wanted to know who his real “self” was and now he did.
He stepped out of the car, locked it, and walked circumspectly round the corner to where Modbury Gardens was to be found, not wanting to be spotted by Gary before he was absolutely ready for their encounter. It would be decisive, one way or another, he knew. It had to be. And that was exactly what he wanted.
The job turned out to be a modest terraced house that needed repainting. One of the “small domestics” that Gary had said he would be starting out with, his essential bread and butter. A couple of scaffs were on the second floor finishing off the job, one of them affixing the sign “Hicksmith Scaffolding Ltd.” to a high tube.
Talbot saw the flatbed lorry parked opposite the house. Gary was sitting in the passenger seat, the window wound down, punching numbers into a calculator, frowning. Talbot walked over to him.
“Hello, Gary,” he said quietly.
Gary looked up and almost managed to hide his total surprise.
“Jesus…” he said.
“How are you? I see you’re up and running.”
“What the fuck do you want?” Gary said.
“I want to apologise.”
Gary sat back, put down his calculator and rested his left forearm on the windowsill. With his right hand he ran his fingers through his hair.
“Yeah, yeah. Forget it, Talbot.” He emphasised his name, as if to underline some remembered impatience. “It’s well over.”
“Good to see you’re underway.” Talbot gestured at the house opposite. “Hicksmith Scaffolding. Tremendous.”
“No thanks to you.”
“So much the better, don’t you think? Did it all on your own, no help from anyone.”
Gary looked up at the ceiling of the cab and allowed himself a rueful smile and a small chuckle, half incipient laugh, half throat-clear.
“Yeah. It’s a point, I suppose.” He tugged at an earlobe, thinking again, his eyes unfocussed, half-looking at something through the windscreen at the end of the street. Talbot saw that he hadn’t shaved for a day or two.
“Listen, Gary.” Talbot took a step forward. They were closer now, no one could hear what they might say to each other, but still he dropped his voice a tone. “I want to say how sorry I am. How sorry I am that I got everything wrong—that day at my place. I don’t know what I was thinking, what stirred me up. It was…It was unjust. And stupid of me. I felt I had to see you again—simply to say that.”
Gary was about to reply but Talbot held up his hand to pre-empt him.
“You don’t need to say anything. No need to respond,” Talbot said. “Just ‘message received,’ that’s all I need to hear.”
Gary frowned, and pouted in that way Talbot now recognised as something Gary did when he was considering an answer or a course of action, with due seriousness. The fingers of his right hand drummed on the steering wheel.
“All right,” he said. “Message received.”
“And I owe you fifty pounds,” Talbot said. “And a print of the photograph, if you want it. It’s very good. Or so I think.”
Talbot hesitated—and then he gently placed his hand on Gary’s forearm. He wanted to touch him. It was a test. Gary didn’t flinch or draw his arm away. Talbot felt the warmth of Gary’s skin heat his fingers. He squeezed gently.
“Will you accept my apology.”
“Nothing to apologise for, Talbot. All forgotten.”
They smiled quickly at each other, Talbot feeling a sense of pure relief flood through him.
“And, well, fifty pound is fifty pound. Could be useful,” Gary said.
“I owe it to you. I’ll pop it in the post.”
“No, I’ll swing by,” Gary said. “I’d like to see the photo, and all.”
“Right. Great,” Talbot said, removing his hand. “I’m around at the weekend. All weekend,” he added.
“I’ll call you next Saturday,” Gary said. “Thanks.”
They made their easy farewells and Talbot turned away, heading back to where he’d parked the Alvis. He felt a strange buoyancy about his person, as if he were suddenly lighter, filled with helium like a balloon, suddenly standing an inch or two taller. A hand was placed upon an arm. The warmth of that contact—palm on arm—was registered. And the arm was not removed. It wasn’t a lot to go on but he would settle for that. He closed his eyes and opened them. Yes, it was the same old world and he was still walking down a road in Chalk Farm towards his car. It was late August, 1968, a cloudy, cool day.
13
It must still be August, Elfrida thought—surely?—though it was a cloudy, cool day. She had lost track of the days of the week and now the months were becoming hard to remember. A small late-summ
er storm had whirled through the valley in the night and she was out with her rake gathering the torn leaves into piles and breaking up the deadwood that had fallen into kindling-sized pieces ready for winter and the convent’s open fires.
She picked up a small dry branch, ripped from an oak tree, and started snapping it briskly into bits. Her hands were calloused and her nails were short and dirty, she saw. She enjoyed being busy, doing mundane tasks, and she found herself wondering if that was why Virginia Woolf liked doing housework. Don’t think of Virginia, she told herself, that was your other life, Elfrida’s. Once you’ve finished here, you’ve got to get the Allen Scythe out and attack the long grass and the nettles in the orchard. She placed the kindling twigs in the wheelbarrow and went to drag away another branch that had fallen on top of the boundary wall. A rook or a raven was cursing raucously; somewhere, something must have disturbed it.
And then she heard a kind of indeterminate cheeping noise in the air all around her and looked up to see the sky above the oak trees filled with flashing, darting birds. Swifts.
Swifts. All at once, she remembered an incident that had occurred on a holiday—was it Cyprus? South of France? Crete? Anyway, she had been alone by the swimming pool in the villa they had rented, Reggie and the friends they had invited were off on some jaunt but she had decided to stay behind and work on a book review that she had promised to deliver. It was midday and hot, she remembered, as she sat with her book in the shade by the pool, and there had been a midday crescent moon in the blue sky above, a thin translucent sickle of moon. The pool was limpid, as clear as mineral water. Suddenly a flock of swifts—a scramble of swifts, a flurry of swifts—appeared overhead, their treble cheeping very audible as they darted about.
And then, one by one, the swifts dived down to the pool to drink. She sat and watched them, amazed and mesmerised, as, oblivious to her presence, they banked and fell, barely decelerating, to skim the surface of the pool, making a million micro-calculations so that they were able to dip their beak into the water as they swooped. Ripples spread from the split-second contact. When they dived to drink they stopped their thin, high calls, and all she heard was the percussive thrum of their wings as they pulled up and out from the pool—after their miraculous manoeuvre, their vertiginous dive to drink—and swerved off and away into the empty blue sky again.
Gratitude and Acknowledgements
The Film-Makers
Scott Meek, Dame Joan Collins, Ashley Luke, Frederic Raphael, Richard Attenborough, Jack Gold, Jim Clark, Luca Mavrocordato, Mark Tarlov, John Fiedler, Frazer Fennell-Ball, Suzi Fennell-Ball, Pat O’Connor, Steve Clark-Hall.
The In-Crowd
Dr. David T. Evans, Christopher Hawtree, Gudrun Ingridsdottir, Thomas Mogford, Alison Rea, Theo Fennell, Louise Fennell, Derek Deane, Bruce Frankel, Peter Peterson, Nicholas Maddison.
A Note About the Author
William Boyd was born in 1952 in Accra, Ghana, and grew up there and in Nigeria. He is the award-winning author of sixteen highly acclaimed novels and five collections of stories. He divides his time between London and France.
What’s next on
your reading list?
Discover your next
great read!
Get personalized book picks and up-to-date news about this author.
Sign up now.