by Sarah Dunant
He, or rather they—for this had to be the work of more than one pair of malicious hands—had done an expert job. In the living room the sofa and chair had been disemboweled, their guts scattered over upturned tables and piles of books. In the bedroom every drawer and cupboard had been emptied, my filing cabinet dismantled. The kitchen was even worse. Systematic destruction. Anything large enough to have contained the cocaine had been overturned or smashed. Had they seriously believed I would have hidden it in the sugar jar? A kind of paralysis descended. In the living room I sat heavily on what remained of a chair, trying to adjust to the scope of the violence around me. Burglary as violation. The stubborn courage which had fueled my Scottish lies seemed in danger of deserting me now.
“You’d better not be lying about the cocaine. Because if I find out—and I will find out …” Had he already known then that the cupboard was bare, or had this been the result of last night’s work? A quick job for the boys as I sat watching the moon from an Intercity sleeper. Maybe he had even expected me to be here. That last idea made my flesh crawl. Then I thought of something that made me feel even worse. The telephone was buried under the wreckage, the receiver off the hook, but the whining sound told me it was still connected. Eventually the dialing tone returned. I punched the buttons too fast, and the number didn’t connect. I made myself do it again, more slowly. It rang. I imagined it sitting on the little Queen Anne table next to the armchair.
“ ’Ello.” A woman’s voice, high and singing like a bird trill.
“Gem?” Alive and well and living in Paris.
“Qui est-il?”
“It’s me, Marla.” I think I was laughing. I must have sounded like a lunatic. “Are you all right, Grandmère?”
“All right? Bien sûr. I am all right. Qu’est-ce que tu penses? Elaine has poisoned me? Where are you, Marla? You sound very strange. You said …”
She jabbered on, talking, as always, too loudly, as if she could never quite believe that the mouthpiece wasn’t really a megaphone. No, there had been no visitors. No one came to visit such an old lady. Even her own family. My cousin Etienne had called to say … I stopped listening, and the wave of paranoia began to recede. “Safe and nearby.” Those had been the words I had used to Elly. To Lenny I had sworn I’d never left Charles de Gaulle Airport. Two lies might surely make a truth. Why should he bother Gem? He knew nothing of her, not even her name. I interrupted the lava flow of words gently. There was someone at the door. I would have to go, but I would ring again soon.
It was only as I untangled the cord to put the phone back on the hall table that I noticed the answering machine. It was lying on the floor, its working days over. But whoever had smashed it had not been interested in its contents. The tape was still there. I prized it out of the machine and carried it back into the bedroom. Amid the mountain of papers that used to be my filing cabinet, I found a small tape recorder which I used to record lecture notes. Too small to contain drugs, it had been left intact. I slid the tape in and wound it back. Elly’s voice jumped into the room, giving me again the address of the Inverlochy hotel. I listened in a kind of horror. A pause. Then a bleep. Nothing. Another bleep. Then, incredibly, Elly’s voice again—but different, tired and still. “I think you’d better come, Marla. As soon as you can. And bring the luggage with you. He wants it.” Silence.
I grabbed the machine and whirled back the tape. Again the bleep, again her voice in my hands, flat and subdued. “I think you’d better come, Marla. As soon as you can.” And frightened? Was that the shadow I could hear stalking the words? There was something hollow inside her. Where had she been when she made that call? In her room with Lenny sitting over her? Or at the reception desk, a secret hurried call … or in the lobby of an Ullapool restaurant while Lenny paid the bill? And was it fear, or simply tiredness, the end of a long story? I would never know. That was part of the pain, the fact that her last days belonged to him and not to me. But for a few words …
Lenny had been wrong when he said the money was her bequest to me. It was not. My inheritance was what I held in my hands. An order for the disposition of property. “Bring the luggage with you. He wants it.” Elly Cameron’s last will and testament. Don’t worry, Elly. He will get it. That I promise you.
eighteen
Elly’s funeral took place a week later in a large rambling cemetery somewhere near the North Circular Road in London. It was a quiet, tasteful affair. Dorothy cried throughout the service, leaning on her husband’s arm. Patrick Cameron, on a flying visit, stood stony faced, thinking perhaps about business. I shed no tears. Neither did I attend the reception afterward, held at Dorothy’s sister’s house in Pinner. I stayed on for a while after everyone had left. The day was golden, warm, and sunny. The end of August, and already some of the trees were turning copper, their leaves beginning to fall.
For two months I did nothing. Life returned to a dull, plodding normality. There was a time—just after the funeral—when I thought I was being followed. A man with dark hair and a variety of leather jackets seemed to keep crossing my path. One evening on my way home from work I recognized him standing beside me on a rush-hour platform just as the train was pulling in, and I had to force myself back into the crowd to get away from him. Another time, he—or someone very like him—accompanied me to Kew Gardens for the day. I contemplated digging a few holes to give him some kind of satisfaction, but in the end I just lay on the grass and watched the sun arch its way over the sky. By the time I got home he was gone. And by mid-October he seemed to have faded away altogether. If anyone replaced him, he or she was much better at their job, because I never spotted them.
Term came and dragged on—another bunch of acned, eager faces waiting for London to explode in their laps, a fireworks display of life, sex, and drugs. They found me boring, I could tell.
I heard from no one. No letters with American stamps, no phone calls, no formal or informal visitors. It was as if it had never happened.
Winter came early, crisp and cold, with the weatherman forecasting a white Christmas. On the last Saturday in November I took a train to Dover and then the hovercraft to Calais. It was a miserable day, wet and gray, and the crossing made me travel sick. From Calais to Paris, where Gem fussed and grumbled over me, told me I was looking dreadful, wasted and sick. She force-fed me broth and vitamins and asked me all kinds of searching questions, to which I lied. That night in the spare room I lay awake waiting for the house to sleep. Then, in the darkness, I dragged the chair to the cupboard and pushed my hand into the cave at the back. The bag was covered in dust. The balls felt heavier than I recalled. I sat cradling them in my lap: my inheritance, to do with as I liked. I packed them at the bottom of my holdall, covering them with a couple of bottles of wine and a hideous silk scarf that Gem had forced upon me. Braving the storm of her displeasure, I cut a long weekend short and went home the next day, arriving back in Dover on the last boat. In the customs hall, no one stopped me. Back in my castle, I locked the balls in the bottom drawer of a new filing cabinet. Unless there was another sack of Carthage, no one would find them.
Then I waited a little longer. It had become almost a kind of pleasure, the anticipation, like gratification deferred. I knew, you see, exactly what I was going to do. I had known it for months, ever since that first night when I lay curled and uncomfortable on a mattress half disemboweled, the bedroom door barricaded shut with the remains of a bookcase. To overcome my fear, I had set my imagination to work on revenge. The idea was perfected over an age of sleepless nights, shaped and polished until it shone. It was with me always, hovering in the back of my mind in lecture halls and seminars, perched on my shoulder as I sat amid walls of books in the London Library: comfort and warmth through the coming of winter. I fed on it like placenta, until I was ready for the birth.
Step-by-step preparations were made. At the beginning of December I rang Blackwell’s in Oxford to check on an overseas account they had in the name of Dr. L. Ascherson, resident of New York City. I
was a close friend, I said, due to travel to the States in a couple of weeks, and I wondered if there were any books he had ordered that I could pick up and take by hand. Save them the time and expense of postage. The young man treated my request as if it were a reasonably normal one. He came back ten minutes later to say, yes, and could I confirm the address? In front of me sat a Blackwell’s invoice, which I’d discovered in one of the volumes borrowed from Lenny’s library on that last New York afternoon. I read out Lenny’s address, typed neatly at the top: P.O. Box 743, New York City 10022. The very same. Yes, Dr. Ascherson did have a request in for a couple of books: a new biography of Napoleon, translated from the French, and Clerkenwell’s major study of the dissolution of the monasteries. But neither book was available yet. Publication dates were not until January. That would be too late for me. Yes, indeed it would. Never mind. I thanked him warmly for his trouble.
A week later I had to go to Oxford for a two-day conference. On the Saturday afternoon I made a trip to Blackwell’s, where I bought a large number of books, for which I paid cash. I separated out two of the bigger volumes, a recent biography of Oliver Cromwell and a glossy tome on the Carolingian churches, and asked the girl at the desk if she would wrap them for airmail. I held the package in my lap all the way home on the train. Just feeling the weight of it gave me pleasure. Step by step …
Term ended and Christmas came, gray rather than white. I spent it alone. The twenty-fifth, Christ’s birthday and the four-month anniversary of Elly’s funeral. A very special day. I woke early, anticipation prizing my eyelids open while it was still dark. After checking that the door was still firmly bolted from the night before, I took a leisurely bath and a good breakfast. Then I rang Gem to avoid her ringing me. I sounded, she said, much better. Happy almost. I wished her Joyeux Noël, then took the phone off the hook. In the bedroom near my desk, I put on the radio, loud. The announcer was full of good cheer, introducing a concert of carols to be followed by a recording of Handel’s Messiah. Music while you work. I arranged my tools on the desk. To one side the twenty leather juggling balls. To the other the package of Blackwell’s books, a sharp new Stanley knife, and a pair of plastic gloves, my Christmas presents to myself.
I put on the gloves and began cutting through the leather skins, lifting out the inner plastic bags one by one, harvesting the crop, pure and fertile. Then I turned my attention to the books. They were wrapped in a padded bag, well stapled. Gently I removed the staples from one end: the surgeon removing stitches, intent on making the wound as neat as possible. I pulled out the books. They were plump and heavy, joined together by a rubber band and a Blackwell’s compliment slip. Putting aside the picture book, I began with the biography. On the radio the opening chords of Messiah blasted into the room. It took me to the celebration of Christ’s birth to disembowel Oliver Cromwell. “Rejoice, rejoice greatly, rejoice, O daughter of Zion.” I worked slowly and with pleasure, leaving the flyleaves and the title pages with their dedication to Anne, “without whom this book would not have been possible” (thank you, Anne), then cutting into every page a large rectangular hole; marking it with a ruler, and gouging along the line with the Stanley knife. Precise and painstaking. There was a lot to say about Oliver Cromwell, a life’s work, eight hundred pages including the index, and their removal made a deep and satisfying grave. “Then shall be brought to pass the saying, that death shall be swallowed up in victory.” Oliver and Messiah finished, I started work on the Carolingians. By the time the second grave was dug, I was sweating lightly, and a man on the radio was reading Dickens.
Next came the packing. I had known the books would be too small to take all the cocaine. But the bags were tightly packed, and with pushing and persistence I managed to get three into Oliver and four into the Carolingians. It was enough. I didn’t want to be greedy. The drugs weighed less than the words, but not so much as anyone would notice. I closed up the books and secured them with their Blackwell’s label and rubber band. Cromwell’s face regarded me with a cold, unforgiving stare. Lenny would have approved: a man of will and substance. I put both books in their bag and stapled it closed, using, as far as possible, the original holes. It looked, I thought, a very academic package.
Then I sat down with a pile of old newspapers and magazines and began cutting out words: enough words to write two letters. It took a long time. At some point during the afternoon the radio played the National Anthem, and Her Majesty told me of the pleasures of grandchildren and the Commonwealth, with rounded vowels like pebbles in her mouth. There followed more carols and another concert, and eventually I finished. There was one last task.
I took the rest of the plastic bags into the kitchen and poured the contents into the sink. I did this carelessly, deliberately without ceremony. Then I turned on the hot tap. The mound of white powder disappeared slowly down the plughole, all two hundred thousand dollars’ worth. Outside it was dark. The wind rattled the windowpanes, and the central heating grumbled its way warmer. I opened a bottle of wine saved from my trip to Paris and toasted myself. Merry Christmas, Marla, and goodwill on earth to all men. Except for one, that is. Then I took a sleeping pill and went to bed.
During the night of January 4 it snowed. I woke to feel its haunting stillness, muffling the city sounds. I got up, packed the books into the faithful canvas bag, and called a cab. Outside it was bitter cold. We crawled along gritted roads to Paddington, where trains to Oxford were running late. At midday I caught the 11:05, clutching a cheap day return in my gloved hand. The journey was dazzling, miles of white fields shimmering under a winter sun. The city center still had its Christmas decorations up, and the streets had turned to slush under the feet of an army of bargain hunters in the New Year sales. I pushed my way through them to the main post office, where I stood patiently in line. The man took the Blackwell’s parcel without comment, weighed it, then counted me £8.45p of stamps. I moistened them on the little piece of sponge provided—I would not be identified by my saliva—then stuck them on, with as much care and symmetry as my gloved hand would allow. On the customs declaration form, I wrote the word BOOKS in childlike capitals with my left hand. I handed him the package and watched it disappear into a sack behind him. If there was a moment of glory, I expect that was it. From another queue nearer the door I posted the letters. Special delivery. Guaranteed to arrive within four days. It was pension day, and the place was packed. If the woman had time to read the addresses she certainly didn’t seem interested. Head of the Drug Enforcement Agency in Washington and the Chief of Police for the City of New York. Both had names as well as titles. Names I had checked through international telephone calls made from my office. You couldn’t be too careful. Which was why both envelopes had been typed on a machine from the Geography Department.
It was midafternoon. I stood outside and wondered what to do next. I felt suddenly numb, as if all the anticipated triumph and pleasure had been used up in the waiting, and now there was just the anticlimax of it all; the beginning of the rest of my life. I walked through the town and down to the river. From pavement to earth. On the ground, the snow had frozen into a thin layer of ice, which cracked and crunched under my feet. The backs were deserted, no one mad or sad enough to brave the cold. I began walking. And as I walked I thought of Elly. For the first time in many months. Not since the cemetery, when I had banished all memory of her for fear of the pain it would cause. Instead I had fed on hatred, and the promise of revenge, and that had been enough for me. But now all that was over, I opened up and let her in.
At first it hurt so much I couldn’t bear it. The sight of her, the memory of her tearstained face in a darkened hotel room on that last afternoon, all hope and optimism splintered and gone. But then the picture changed: another Elly in another climate, sitting in the California sunshine, smiling and sure. From there I traveled further back, back beyond the time of Lenny to the years when she was exclusively mine. And as I thought of her in that crisp, clear winter’s afternoon, I realized I was feeling somethi
ng else, something as well as the grief, something that soothed and quietened. There was, inside me, almost a sense of her again. The images were familiar ones. This was the Elly I had cultivated over two years’ absence: a deliberate attempt to construct a companion out of memory, a way of living without her. I had, during that time, almost acclimatized myself to memory rather than reality. Maybe, just maybe, I could do the same again. In which case she would always be there for me, at least through a past if not a future. It was better than nothing. Because without her what was there left?
I imagined her walking with me along the path, head down against the wind, hands clutched under her armpits for warmth, scuffing ice and leaves with the tips of her boots. She hated the cold. Always had done, even when we first met: would do anything to avoid hockey practice on a winter’s day.
“You should wear more clothes,” I said under my breath. “No wonder you’re freezing.”
I heard her groan softly, wind in the trees. “God, you sound just like my mother.”
“I know. That’s why I said it.”
Above, a blackbird burst out of the tree and took off over the fields. I stopped to watch him go, lazy winged, a speck of black against the gray snow sky.
“Wouldn’t you have liked to go to Oxford?” she said suddenly. “We came here once, remember? On a school outing. I was sick on the coach. You spent the whole time mooning around the cloisters like some female Rupert Brooke. In anyone else it would have looked like affectation. With you it just felt like destiny.”
“I remember doing it.” I did. “You were right. It was affectation.”
“Poseur.” She laughed, but the sound was whipped away by the wind. The cold bit into my face. “Come on,” I said, turning back along the path. “We’ll freeze to death out here. Let’s go back to the central heating.”
And so I took her hand and led her back through the streets of Oxford to the station. And she sat next to me all the way home.