The Keys To The Street Ruth Rendell

For Don

Chapter One

Iron spikes surmount each of the gates into the Park, twenty-seven of them on some, eighteen or eleven on others. For the most part the Park itself is surrounded by thorn hedges but thousands of feet of spiked railings still remain. Some of these spikes are blunted, as on those enclosing the gardens of Gloucester Gate, some are ornamented and some take a bend in the middle. On the tall railings outside one of the villas the spikes have claw-like protuberances, six on each, curved and sharp as talons. A certain terrace has spikes on pillars, splaying out and blossoming like thorn trees. If you started counting spikes in the region of the Park and its surroundings you could reach millions. They go well with the Georgian architecture. By night the Park is closed to people. Of the living creatures which remain within its confines most are zoo animals and waterfowl. The spiked gates open every morning of the year at six and close every evening at dusk, which is at four-thirty in winter but not until nine-thirty in May. Its 464 acres of land fill a circle. Inside the ring of streets which surrounds it lies another ring and within this, widely separated, the equilateral triangle of the London Zoo, the lake with its three arms and four islands, and around the ornamental gardens a road which on the map looks like a wheel with two projecting spokes. The Park is deserted by night. That is, the intention is that it should be deserted. The Park Police patrol between dusk and dawn, paying special attention to the restaurant areas that make likely shelters and to the Park residences, the expensive properties and Winfield House where the American Ambassador lives. No vagrant could sleep undisturbed under the lee of the pavilions or the bandstand but the police cannot search everywhere every night. The canal bank remains as a place of concealment and the wide green spaces and, in summer, the long grass under the trees. To the north of the Park, beyond the zoo and Albert Road lie Primrose Hill and St. John's Wood; here are St. John's Wood Church, Lord's Cricket Ground and, turning south eastwards the London Mosque. Park Road runs down towards Baker Street and Sherlock Holmes by way of the London Business School and St. Cyprian's Church - Anglo Catholic white and gold inside and scented with incense. The Marylebone Road, the Plaanetarium, Madame Tussaud's waxworks - most popular of all London's tourist attractions, more visited than the Tower and Buckingham Palace- the Royal Academy of Music, Park Crescent and Park Square with their secret gardens and the tunnel passing under the road that links them. And so the Park is encircled, here by Albany Street, running from Great Portland Station due north, as straight as a Roman road, to meet to meet Albert Road and Gloucester Alenue. The streets of Primrose Hill in a shape like a tennis racquet and Gloucester Avenue is its handle. There are railings everywhere, their spikes straight and pointed, twisted at a right angle or ornate and blunted. Albany Street is not leafy and sequestered like almost every other street in the vicinity of the Park but wide, grey, without trees. Barracks fill much of one side but beyond the other side of it lie the grandest and most lavish of the terraces - Cambridge, Chester and Cumberland, with their colonnades, their pediments, their statuary and their wealthy occupants. Beyond the barracks on the other side the area quickly becomes less respectable, though it has a long way to go before sinking to the level of Somers Town between Euston and St. Pancras Stations. From one of these streets, near St. James's Gardens, a young man was walking across Munster Square, heading for Albany Street. The name everyone called him by was Hob, the three letters of which were the initials of his two given names and his surname. Apart from this, the feature that distinguished him from his contemporaries was the size of his head. His body was solid and thickset but his head still looked too big for it. When he reached fifty, if he ever did, his jowls would be down on his shoulders. His fair hair was cut an inch long all over his big head and gleamed in the yellowish light. It was an unusual combination, that of fair hair and brown eyes. His eyes were a curious textured brown, like chocolate mousse, and the pupils were sometimes as big as a cat's and sometimes the size of a full stop on a keyboard. Hob had a job to do, for which he had just been paid half his fee of fifty pounds. That is, he had been paid twenty-five pounds. This he intended to put with everything else he had, to buy what he needed before he could do anything at all. Often he wished he were a woman, because for women making money was quick and, as far as he could see, easy. One of the first things he remembered hearing from a grown-up -it was an uncle, his mother's boyfriend -was that every woman is sitting on a fortune. He was in a state. That was how he put it to himself, the phrase he always used for his present condition. One of his stepsisters had described her panic attacks to him and in her description he recognised his own state. But his was longer-lasting and somehow _bigger. It took in the whole world. It made him afraid of everything he could see and hear and just as frightened of what he couldn't see and of silence. As the state intensified a huge bubble of fear like a glass ball enclosed him so that he wanted to beat and thrash at its curved walls. Sometimes he did, even out in the street like this, and people crossed the road to avoid this madman who punched at the empty air. He did not yet have pain or nausea. But beyond walking to his destination, up this long, wide, grey street where there were no people to avoid him or to stare, he could have done nothing; certainly not the job for which he had received half the fee. Walking became mechanical. Even in a state he sometimes thought he could have walked for ever, on and on, over the dark lawns, the green peak, the hills of north London, to the fields and woods far beyond. But walking miles would be unnecessary. Gupta or Carl or Lew would be on the other side of the Cumberland gate where the Chinese trees were. He walked through the wells and alleys and up the slope at Cumberland Terrace. His shadow was a lumbering black cut-out on wrinkled cobbles. Lights shone up on walls and behind cascades of leaves. The Outer Circle, so busy by day, was deserted at night and no single car was parked on its gleaming surface. The great terraces, palaces in woodland" slept heavily behind dark foliage, and though many of their eyes were shuttered, some were alive with orange light. Lamps were lit along the pavements as far as he could see in each direction. The spaces between them were filled with shiny darkness. He crossed the road. The Cumberland Gate was locked and had been for nearly three hours. The railing of which the gate was made was topped with iron spikes, eighteen on each gate. When he was well - the term he used for his condition when not in a state - he would have thought nothing of climbing the gate. Now he scrambled over it like an old man with an old man's caution and fear of puncturing flesh and breaking bones. On the other side an expanse of half-dark lay - grey lawn, pale paths, black trees, spindly black Chinese trees that made him think of scorpions. The police patrolled in cars, on foot, on bicycles, sometimes with dogs. It was a principle of his, and of Carl's, that they cannot ever be everywhere. Mostly they were not where he was or Carl was. He walked into the trees. He meant not to make a sound but when a young scorpion leapt off its parent's back and grew wings and turned into a pterodactyl - it was a pigeon flying from a treetop - he let out a cry of fear. A hand came from behind and went over his mouth. He wasn't afraid, he knew who it was. Gupta said: "Are you crazy?" "I'm not well." Even in the dark he could see Gupta's bloody teeth when he spoke. They looked as if he'd been chomping on raw steak but in fact it was betel he chewed. All the money Hob had was exchanged for what Gupta produced, a zip lock bag holding a small block of something like a white pebble but rough and irregular, not smoothed by the sea. Automatically, he thought of his strength and Gupta's frailty and of the other white stones in the yogurt carton, enough to keep him well for a long time. But it was no use. Retribution would be swift. He'd carried out some of it for them so he knew. They'd start by breaking his legs. He doubted if he would even get beyond the first thump of his fist into Gupta's skinny belly. It was strange, but he had stopped trying to understand it. The state was so awful, so why did he want to prolong it? He always did. That uncle - or one of them - would have said it was like banging your head against a wall: it was so good when you stopped. But that wasn't quite how he felt; rather it was as if the pain and the state, the panic and the total meaninglessness of everything, became pleasure when he knew he had the means of ending them. The state became almost enjoyable and he walked inside his glass bubble, rolling his head and mouthing something like a smile. If he headed for Chester Road and the inner circle he would be bound to encounter the police, so he turned back. But instead of climbing the Cumberland Gate once more, he kept close along the dark grass under the hedge, aware now that he was cold. The night was cold as nights in April are. The sweat which kept on breaking out on his face and chest dried cold and salty. He could taste the salt when he licked his dry upper lip. Soon if the state were too long prolonged, trembling would start, and the sick feeling, and the great weakness as if he was ageing years in as many minutes. It was a matter of striking the happy medium. Again he climbed a spiked railing -this time at the Gloucester Gate - and this time it was harder, he was an even older man with worse arthritis and more frightened bones. He got over the gate and waited at the lights at the top of Albany Street. Some seconds, a whole minute probably, passed before he understood that the lights had changed from red to green and back to red again. A solitary car stopped and waited. He went across, holding on to the wall of the bridge now, just another drunk to passers-by, turning clumsily into Park Village East and pushing open the gate into the ruined garden. They were doing up the house that loomed above him in the darkness. Its windows were gone, leaving black pits. The builders' materials lay in heaps -timber, bricks, a ladder. He nearly blundered into a concrete mixer, a thing like a great pale zoo animal with heavy backside and tiny stupid head. Down the slope, black but with the gleam of water in its depths, lay the Grotto. He scrambled down, scratching his hands on brambles, trying to avoid the coils of barbed wire. There, at the bottom, his seat on the coping lit by a thin shaft from a lamp on the bridge, he shivered and hunched his body before feeling in the pocket of his jacket for his materials. They were kept in a red velvet bag, the kind of thing a box containing a ring or necklace is put into in a jeweller's shop. He had found it in a waste bin in York Terrace where the rubbish is of high quality. From the bag he took first another find, the metal rose from a galvanised iron watering can, then a tin lid that by chance (he had searched for quite a long time) exactly fitted over the rim of the rose. Then came the screw top from a vodka bottle with __Purveyors to the Imperial Russian _Court and the dates 1887-1917 printed on it in red, then a drinking straw still in its plastic wrapping (he had helped himself to this from the counter at the refreshment place near the Broad Walk), and finally, a cigarette lighter. First he took the white crystalline substance he had bought from Gupta between finger and thumb. His hand was shaking but that didn't matter as all he had to do was crumble the substance up. He dropped it through the neck of the rose on which he had bored two holes about a centimetre apart. He removed the drinking straw from its wrapping, cut it in half with nail scissors and inserted the two halves to a length of about three centimetres into the holes in the neck. It was just light enough to see to do this, but he could have done it in pitch darkness. Having checked by feel that the straw halves were inserted to the correct length - very important this - he struck the cigarette lighter and set the flame to the perforations on which the rock rested. The second it caught he closed the lid over the base of the rose, took the straws into his mouth and drew in a deep inhalation. At this, the first draw, he always made a noise. It was a sound of joy, of orgasmic happiness, but to others it would have seemed like a groan of despair. No one heard him. There was no one to hear. When educating him to work for them, Lew had told him jumbo took just ten seconds to reach the brain. He told him it would change him from one kind of person into another kind and he had been right. Hob grunted his satisfaction. A car passed along the bridge and the trees shook a little. The state began to recede like something evil in a dream being sucked away out of a door. It struggled as it went but the door closed and clouds of warmth filled up space, and sweet singing and hope. He closed his eyes. Once, when he first used the watering can rose, he had simply turned it upside down and inhaled through the perforations, but he found you wasted a lot that way. Waste was a crime. After a while he removed the vodka cap from the neck of the rose, shook out the rose and the lid, put them back into the jewel bag and threw the straws away into the bushes. He had begun to feel strong and immensely happy. That was just the start. Traffic was at its lightest - no heavy lorries or containers, only private cars. There are always people in Camden High Street, no matter what the hour. After midnight, for a while, London throbs softly but it still throbs. Chemical lamps colour the darkness greenish white and dull orange, and the traffic lights change from green to amber to red to amber again and to green silently and often to an empty street. At such a place, where the lights changed to no purpose, to a deserted roadway, he crossed to Albert Road, to Parkway. When he was well he was a different person and he walked springily. The different person, the person who was not in a state, was a joker, facetious, a user of peculiar slang. Everything made him laugh. He was strong; he could do anything. He could certainly do the job for which he had received half-payment. The watch he had often been tempted to sell told him it was twelve minutes past one. The mark was due to arrive in London on the nine-twenty-five train from Shrewsbury which comes into Euston Station at one-fourteen. Euston was less than a mile away, the nearest of all the London termini. If the train was on time and a taxi was waiting, he had just enough time to make it to St. Mark's Crescent -nice time, in fact. A mark living in St. Mark's Crescent was something else to make him laugh, and he did so, but quietly, to himself. He walked up Gloucester Avenue, took the fork into Regent's Park Road and up the fork to the right. The Park was invisible, though lying only a few yards behind the tree-shaded walls. Dark shadows and leaves that scarcely rustled. Dustbins awaiting emptying. A cat that padded as silently as the place was silent, listened, froze, smelt or intuited him, and streaked, quick as a weasel, over the wall. Lights were on in the houses, but not many. There were no lights on any floor of the house that was his destination. It had a dingy front garden, thick with weed bushes. He knew some of these were brambles because they caught on his clothes as he dropped down among them. A briar tugged at the back of his hand, scratching and puckering, making a zip fastener of blood on the skin. It was so quiet that he heard the taxi when it was still in Regent's Park Road. He felt very calm and happy, wishing only that he had someone to talk to and clown with, maybe put on his hit-man act like a TV actor. The taxi turned the corner and pulled up outside the garden where he was hiding. Its light shone right on him, into his eyes. He kept as low down as he could get. He heard the exchange. "Take three." "Thanks very much, guy." The gate opened. The taxi started, moved, began to turn. If the driver had waited till the front door came open he didn't know what he'd have done. A suitcase was pushed in on to the path, and the gate closed behind it and its owner with a soft click. The lights of the taxi dwindled, disappeared and the throb of its engine faded. He stood up and used his bare hands, first his hands, then his feet. One hand over the mouth from behind, a stranglehold arm lock to bring him down, and when he was on the ground, the kicking. Not enough to kill or permanently disable but enough to injure, break a couple of the mark's ribs, maybe not improve the future prospects of his spleen. Some dental work would probably also be needed. He enjoyed it. He admired himself for doing it so well, particularly his skill in doing it in silence. Long practice and the use of his hands had ensured not a sound escaped from that mouth out of which blood now trickled in a thin stream. He knelt down. There was nothing in his brief about robbing the man but when you came to think of it the fee was laughable. He was entitled. He put his hand inside the jacket, felt in the pocket and found a wallet. Credit cards were no use to him. There was only one thing he wanted to buy and neither Carl nor Gupta would take Visa. Ten pounds, twenty and another twenty Joy began to fill the spaces of his body with warmth. Eighty pounds. He stuffed it into his pocket alongside the red velvet bag. Then because he liked a joke and was feeling cheerful, he opened the suitcase and took a look inside. Not surprisingly, it was full of clothes. The surprise was that they were women's, mostly women's underwear. It now came back to him that he had heard there was something funny about the mark, though he'd half-forgotten what. He set about hanging the stuff on the bushes -red silk bikini pants, French knickers, a black bra, a black lace nightie. It looked as if a couple of girls were camping there and had done their washing before they kipped down for the night. Whatever the name of the black see-through thing was - a sort of all-in-one with a fastening in the crotch -he didn't know but he draped it over the gate and dropped a couple of suspender belts on the mark's recumbent body. The faint groaning coming from that half-open mouth meant it was dangerous to remain any longer. He left the garden, licking the blood off the scratch on the back of his hand, walking fast, going in the opposite direction this time, towards Primrose Hill. His spirits had begun to sink. Lew had told him about the ten-second effect but said nothing about depression coming back half an hour later. It was too late now. Gupta would no longer be among the Chinese trees but Carl or Lew might be on the Hill or the Macclesfield Bridge. He headed that way, his gains in his pocket. "Jumbo, jumbo," muttered Hob, and then he sang it to keep his spirits up. "Jumbo, jumbo"

Chapter Two

The letter came the day she left. There was a postcard from her grandmother, a bill for water and this letter in a brown envelope with the Harvest Trust logo that looked like a scarlet mushroom, but was not of course that, was something quite other than that. She postponed opening it. Her grandmother's postcard was from a place called Jokkmokk in the north of Sweden. It said: __Dear Mary, I shall be back in London next Thursday, by which time you will be settled in Park Village. Will phone. Surprising heat here and midnight sun, Much _love "I'll want a cheque for your half of the water," Alistair said, very sour and cross, truculent with resentment. Mary said nothing about having paid all the electricity bill herself. He had got hold of the other envelope and was looking at the red logo. "May I have my letter, please?" He handed it to her reluctantly. "They want more, I suppose." "Very unlikely." She was trying to keep everything she said to him brief, civil, equable. The rows were in the past. "It will just be the update. They keep in touch." "I hope it's to say he's dead," said Alistair viciously. It was hard to stay calm in the face of this. "Please don't say that." "It would be the best and ultimate way to show you know you've wasted your time and rubbished your body." "I'm going to finish packing," she said. He followed her into the bedroom. There were two open suitcases on the bed, one half-filled with her clothes. She put the letter and the postcard on top of a blue T-shirt and laid her trouser suit, folded with tissue, on top of that. A week had gone by since she had slept in that bed with him. During that week, he had slept in the bed and she had had the sofa bed in the living room. It was easier that way, if her aim was a quiet life -for what was left of it for the two of them together, anyway. She found her cheque book in a drawer and wrote a cheque for half the water rate. A nod, no smile, no thanks, and he had put it in his pocket. "If you hadn't this plushy place to go to you wouldn't be going, would you? If it was a furnished room, for instance? Or back to grandma?" "We've been through all that, Alistair." "And when they come back from this protracted holiday - what then? When they kick you out of glitz ville You'll come back here and say you've made a mistake and can you have your old bed back." "Perhaps, though I don't think so. This is supposed to be a separation." "A _trial separation." "If you like." Why did she always weaken, compromise? "We may both feel differently after four months." "You'll allow for that, will you? That _I may feel differently. That I may no longer want to marry you? That's going now, you know, that's been on the wane ever since you deceived me over that Harvest thing I'm not supposed to mention. Since you deliberately made yourself ill for nothing, for no more than to get on a feel-good high, to be a martyr, to have "done some good in this world" -wasn't that the phrase?" "Not used by me," she said, and she felt her temper going, slipping away, a ball dropped on a slope, running downhill: She made a grab at it, hung on. "I never said any of those things, never." Thank God, I never married you, she thought. Things could be worse, I could have married you. She closed the lid of one suitcase, started filling the other. He watched her, his upper lip slightly curled back, an animal's expression she had never seen when first they knew each other. "If my grandmother phones, will you give her this number? I'm sure she has it but just in case." She had written it down along with the address: Charlotte Cottage, Park village West, Regent's Park, London NW1. "Cottage!" he said. "The house was thought small when it was first built." "Pretentious," he said. "A sort of Petit Trianon." "Its near my work," she said. "I can walk to work from there." As if that was why she was doing it, as if proximity to the museum was her reason. He had an uncanny way of intuiting these things, of picking up on a weakening. His face changed and he wheedled. He had never wheedled when first they met. "You'll ask me over, won't you? Come to that, there's no reason why I shouldn't move in there too." "There is a reason," she said quietly. Her temper was back with her. It had never had much independence, was almost incapable of getting lost; a timid thing like its owner, not much good at standing up for itself. She fastened the second suitcase, picked up her bag, put it down again to get into her jacket. "There are quite a few reasons, Alistair, but there isn't any point in talking about it." "You don't seriously believe I'd ever--" he hesitated, looking for a word, a silly word perhaps, a baby word, something that reduced violence to play "--smack," he said, "smack you again, do you?" Yes she did. Not that there had been much of that but there had been enough. Enough to change her from the woman, typical, normal, who says, __He wouldn't hit me _twice, who says of abused women, __Why do they _stay? to the half-accepting kind, the it-was-only-once kind, even the kind who says, __He was provoked beyond _bearing. Except that she wasn't staying or accepting or bearing but getting out. He stood in the doorway, between her and the hall, and she had to pass him. What was I thinking of, she asked herself then and there, what was I thinking of, staying for even five minutes with a man who frightens me? An unreasonable man who thinks he owns me, body and soul? She took a suitcase in each hand and walked by him, every muscle tense, her breath held. Instead of stepping back, he stood his ground and she had to push past him. He didn't touch her with his hands. Once she remembered, he had stuck out a foot and tripped her up. That had been in the early Harvest days, when he first found out. He had extended a foot and sent her sprawling and said when she picked herself up, "That wasn't me, that was your bones, you've made yourself into an old woman." But he didn't touch her. "Alistair, goodbye," she said, a safe distance from him. He put out a hand, then both hands, his head a little on one side. "Kiss?" And if he seized hold of her, struck her face with one hand, then the other, shook her, threw her to the floor, used his fists His He had never done anything like that, nothing on that scale, but she found herself shaking her head. She opened the front door. Outside by the lift someone was waiting. Thank God Alistair said, in his old warm voice. "Goodbye, darling. Keep in touch." But whether it was for her benefit or the listener at the lift she couldn't tell. She had forgotten to call for a cab to take her to the tube. She lugged the suitcases, round the corner, to a point invisible from any window in the flat, and sat on the low wall in front of the estate agent's, waiting for a taxi to come. Devonshire Street was the farthest south any of Bean's dogs lived. This was Ruby the Beagle. The next one was Boris the borzoi in Park Crescent, rich dogs both of them, well-fed, with top-grade veterinary insurance, sleek and proud and indulged. But all Bean's dogs were like that or they wouldn't have been his dogs. It would have been unthinkable for him to walk a cross-breed or a mongrel. With Boris and Ruby on the double leash, he made his way down the slope that leads to the Nurse-maids' Tunnel. This passage connects Park Crescent Gardens on the Southern side with Park Square to the north. It passes above the Jubilee Line of the Underground and under the Marylebone Road. By day and night the traffic here is heavy, thundering westwards to the Westway, the M40, and Eastwards to Euston and King's Cross. It never really ceases, not even at three and four in the morning, but in the early mornings and the late afternoons, the times when Bean took his dogs out, it was heaviest. Boom-boom-boom it went above the tunnel roof, shaking this subterranean lane whose brownish walls and damp stone floor were lit by natural light from the open entrances at each end. Crossing the road by the other possible means was difficult at any time. The green prancing man was lit up for almost too short a time to get to the island and thence to the other side when you had two dogs with you, both inclined to stop for a sniff without warning. As a resident of the Crown Estates, Bean had his own key to the gardens and hence the tunnel. It was once used by nannies and their young charges and as a place of assignation for lovers. Bean doubted if anybody much used it now but him. His route was carefully organised so that the most athletic dogs had the longest run and the small short-legged ones the shortest. He started with the beagle at three-forty-five, the borzoi five minutes later and proceeded to pick up Charlie the golden retriever in St. Andrew's Place and Marietta the chocolate poodle in Cumberland Terrace, marching them through the terrace passages and out into Albany Street. It was a sunny afternoon in late April, not warm but with a chilly wind blowing clouds across the blue face of the sky. The trees were in tender spring leaf and flowers were coming out in window boxes. Bean, at seventy, was a strong, spry though small man who looked fifty-five from a little way away. Applying, back in 1986, for the last employment he was ever to have, he had given his age as forty-nine and been believed. By design he dressed young, but not absurdly so. Though poses sing several of the late Maurice Clitheroe's suits - all altered to fit him - well-pressed blue jeans, a roll-necked jumper and a blue padded jacket were his winter attire. Ne'er cast a clout till May be out, they said, and April wasn't out yet. His hair he had always kept militarily short but these days he shaved his head to achieve a dense whitish stubble. Bean stipulated that he wouldn't take old dogs or fat dogs or dogs with health problems. Six was his maximum number, never to include dogs the law required to be muzzled. Making a pretty good living at what he did - much more than a supplement to the retirement pension - he had quite a lot of rules. He had to be strict, as he explained to a Mrs. Goldworthy in Albany Street, whose scottie he was taking out for the first time. "Seven days' notice of the dog going away on its holidays, madam," he said to her, "and a month for termination of contract. Except in a case of illness, naturally. And if anyone else or your good self takes the animal walkies that's as well as not instead of, if you take my meaning." "Oh, yes, of course." "So this is Mc Bride, is it? Game little dogs, scot ties but a bit short in the leg so he'll come in for the medium scale run along with Lady Blackburn-Norris's Shih Tzu." Bean dropped us unashamedly. It was good for business. "We'll see you in three-quarters of an hour then." Bean (in his own words) was as fit as a fiddle from all that walking, the old ticker as good as one thirty years younger, and he strode up the long straight street at four miles an hour. He was a vegetarian and it was only on Friday nights that he drank a drop of anything stronger than Coke. Health-conscious and regarding the streets merely as exercise equipment for himself and "his" dogs, he was unaware of the history of the place and its architecture, or of the Park itself. He noticed little of that distinguished building of the sixties, Lasdun's Royal College of Physicians, and never noticed that the point at which he crossed the road was outside the Danish Church of St. Katharine's, a not entirely successful copy of King's College chapel in Cambridge. The crescent called Park Village West, and also called, especially by those who live there, the most beautiful street in London, debouches from Albany Street at the Camden Town end. Albany street is a much frequented thoroughfare, free of heavy traffic only by night and on Sunday mornings, but Park village West is a little haven of peace and rustic charm. It is something like a cross between a country lane and a cathedral close and in the springtime it smells of flowering trees and narcissi and wallflowers. Bean and his dogs turned in there under the overhanging trees. "Disarming villas", these 1840ish houses have been called, "masterpieces of the Nash school". Each one stands alone in its embowering garden and each one is different with its own style of classical ornament, blank windows, storied urns, imperatorial busts, Della Robbia medallions, gazebos, weather vanes and garages disguised as temples to Olympian gods. The house where his next call was to be made was separated from the pavement first by a spacious front garden, then by a low wall, freshly painted and with Charlotte Cottage incised in its stucco. Bean secured the handle of his leash to a gate post, and bidding his charges sit quietly, went into the garden and up the path. Last petals were falling from red tulips, baring their sooty calixes. Pansies and auriculas were out and the laburnum soon would be. A clematis with flat blooms like dull blue satin spread its tendrils across the creamy, faintly glossy, facade of the house. Fluted columns stood on either side of the blue front door, supporting a pediment with Nash's gods and goddesses sporting themselves in creamy relief on a blue ground. A downstairs window was open and a woman of about Bean's age or older put her head out. "Is that the time?" she said. "I wouldn't have put it at a minute after three." "Its four-sixteen, Lady Blackburn Norris," said Bean in his invariably polite way, for good manners cost you nothing. She retreated and after a few seconds opened the door, carrying the Shih Tzu, the chrysanthemum dog. Gushi's coat of golden fronds, petal-like and flopping into his eyes, resembled his owner's strawberry blonde hair, her fringe restrained by a pair of blue-framed mirror sunglasses. "Whatever is that beagle doing to the borzoi?" "Best ignore it, madam," said Bean. If she didn't know by this time he wasn't in the business of telling her. He took the Shih Tzu from her and as he was attaching a free branch of the leash to its collar, fending off Ruby's overtures, a taxi came round the corner and drew up outside Charlotte Cottage. The young woman who got out of it, and lugged out two suitcases from the seat next to the driver, must be the Blackburn-Norrises' house-sitter. She looked very young to Bean, though he admitted that the greater part of the population looked young to him, and he could no longer tell whether someone was eighteen or thirty. This woman - girl, he thought -had an appearance of fragility, as if the wind could blow her away. She was slim and for some reason made him think of a lily, long-necked, white skinned and very fair. Not the sort to take Gushi out for long walks herself by the looks of her, and that was all to the good. He nodded and said good afternoon. He could see that many would have called her attractive, even beautiful, but she held no attraction for him. What he had known of sex, particularly in later years, had seemed to him at best grotesque and at worst frightening. When Maurice Clitheroe died he put all thoughts of it away for ever with a sigh of something stronger than relief. It crossed his mind to help the young lady up the path with her cases -crossed it and fled. His hands were full with the dogs. Besides she shouldn't bring heavy suitcases with her if she couldn't handle them herself, and if she tipped him it would be the average woman's ludicrous offering, twenty pee or at most fifty. By this time the dogs were straining and pulling, impatient to be off, anxious for the real outing to begin. He crossed the street and the Outer Circle, taking them into the Park by the Gloucester Gate, and on the broad expanse of green south of the Zoo he unfastened the leashes and let them run free. In the distance the woman who exercised a dozen dogs, but behaved more like a nanny with her charges, was playing ball with three labradors and a boxer. Bean gave her one of his looks but she was much too far awan to see. "We are starting out in Brazil," said Lady Blackburn-Norris, "then on to Mexico and Costa Rica. California after that, Utah for the great national parks or whatever they call them, and New England for the autumn colours. We shall be back by early September, shan't we, darling?" Her husband had a face and figure very much like the borzoi Mary had seen at the gate, even to the spindly legs, bent shoulders and anteater's proboscis of a nose. "If it hasn't killed us," he said. "I expect we seem far too ancient to you, Miss Jago, to be doing this at all. And you would be right. I am eighty-two and the madam is seventy-nine." "My grandmother is older and she still travels a lot," Mary said. "Oh, dear Frederica. If only she was coming with us. But she's still in Sweden and apparently she has a long-standing engagement to go with the Trattons to Crete next month. I can't tell you how grateful we are to her, Miss Jago, for bringing us you. Without someone really reliable in the house we couldn't be going away at all, could we, darling?" Sir Stewart Blackburn-Norris said in his dry restrained way that indeed they could not. Frequently, in the past weeks, he had entertained murderous thoughts towards his wife's best friend Frederica Jago for making this protracted trip of theirs possible. Notifying the police was all very well and they had a dog - if Guci could be called a dog- but nothing equalled __someone in the _house. Without __someone in the _house even his wife would have thought twice about going. Of course he didn't want to go. With his intimates he made no secret of it. He wanted to stay here, to stroll down to his club in Brook Street every morning and lunch there; every afternoon to take a cab back to Park Square for a chat with his friend, the director of the Crown Estates, in his sanctum, a temple-like building next to the Nursemaid's tunnel entrance; to go on eating his dinner at Odette's three times a week, at Odin's three times a week and at the Mumtaz on Sundays. "It was not to be," he said aloud but didn't explain when Frederica's granddaughter looked inquiringly at him. He showed her how to work the heating and his wife showed her how to work the video recorder. They gave her a list of useful phone numbers and indispensable services. She was instructed on no account to take Gushi out between eight and nine in the morning or four-fifteen in the afternoon, Bean would do that, but she could take him out at other times if she - and he - felt like it and had the strength. "I doubt if I will," said Mary. "I'll be at work during the day." "Oh, yes, you work, don't you?" said Sir Stewart as if he had just about heard of women pursuing this freakish course, as if maybe one in a thousand did so due to esoteric pressures or rare idiosyncracy. "At that Sherlock Holmes place in Baker Street, wasn't it?" Mary laughed. "No, no. Not Sherlock Holmes. Irene Adler. I work at the Irene Adler Museum in Charles lane." She thought the name might mean something to them but it evidently didn't. "That's St. John's Wood. I can walk to work from here." Sir Stewart insisted on looking it up in his Geographer's London Atlas. He was calculating the distance, deciding perhaps whether it might be too far for her to walk, too far for _anyone to walk, let alone someone as fragile-looking as she, when Bean came back with the dog. Introductions were made and then Bean said: "I'll see you at eight-fifteen am then, miss." No one had ever called her "miss" before. It made her feel like the daughter of the house in a Victorian novel. Fondled and spoken to nicely, Gushi launched himself at her, licking and snuggling, settling into her arms like a bunch of chrysanthemums. "Get down, bloody dog," said Sir Stewart. Mary said, "Why Gushi? I mean, where does the name come from." "Gushi Khan ruled Tibet in the seventeenth century, didn't he, darling?" "God only knows," said Sir Stewart. "His first owner named him. I'd have called him Sam." Mary wandered through the rooms while the Blackburn-Norrises put the final touches to their packing. It was a pretty house, comfortable and elegant, furnished charmingly yet in distinguishably from the interiors of a thousand houses and flats that bordered on the Park. Chintz, velvet, Wilton, Chinese porcelain, Georgian silver, poppy heads and peacock feathers, button back chairs, chaise longues, rent tables, Hope chairs, and one that might have been a Duncan Phyfe. She knew about these things, sometimes hoped wistfully for something different, to come upon an interior that might surprise or delight. One day, no doubt, she would have a house of her own to furnish. There were shutters at the windows and these would help with security. No lace curtains hid the lattices or obscured the view. She stood looking out on the garden with its pergolas, and its ornamental pond, and beyond it to the green space that divides the two segments of the village. At this time of the year trees and shrubs were luxuriant, flowering creepers sprawling across every wall and height, brickwork hidden under a complicated leafy tapestry, so that nothing could be seen that might not have been in the depths of country-side. If sky scraping towers were somewhere out there, the trees clothed in fresh green and jade and golden-green hid them. Aircraft trails that scored broken white lines across the blue sky might have been streaks of cirrus. In the garden a white lilac thrust its spires of blossom between those of a late forsythia and the snowy net of a spiraea. For some reason, the beauty of it added to her sudden, unexpected loneliness. It was a long time since she had lived alone and in half an hour she would be quite solitary. Except, of course, for Gushi, but Mary was not one of those who find the companionship of an animal equal to that of human beings. She stroked the dog's head, for the thought seemed a shade treacherous. The taxi came early. Mary opened the door to the driver. The Blackburn-Norrises were still upstairs. Sir Stewart, as soon as he heard voices, began shouting for the driver to come up and lend a hand with the cases. Five minutes of chaos ensued, the driver arguing and grumbling about his back, Lady Blackburn-Norris fluttering in circles and suddenly and surprisingly, kissing Mary goodbye, Sir Stewart inexplicably choosing this final moment to tell her how the window locks worked. They went. The dog had gone to sleep. Mary continued to look out of the window until long after the taxi had disappeared. It was very quiet, silent as the country, and though she strained to listen she could hear nothing of the throb and hum of London. Alistair came into her mind and she thought of what it meant to be afraid of someone you had once loved and admired. He would very likely phone this evening. She wondered what would happen if she failed to answer it, if she let it ring, and the caller was a friend of the Blackburn-Norrises. The idea of speaking to Alistair was suddenly very terrible. Perhaps she could go out for a walk or go to the cinema. There was a cinema by Baker Street Station and two in Camden Town. Wouldn't it be irresponsible to leave the house and the dog immediately she had got here? She went upstairs and began to unpack. Her bedroom looked out over the garden and the gardens of Park Village East and across the railway line to Mornington Crescent. A gas balloon, segmented red and yellow, floated up in the sky over Euston Station. She emptied the first case and hung things up in a mahogany wardrobe with claw feet. The clothes on the top of the second case went into drawers. She lifted out the trouser suit. Underneath were the postcard from Mokkmokk and the letter from the Harvest Trust. Mary sat on the bed and looked at the envelope in her hands for a few moments before opening it. This was normal for her with letters from the Trust. She wanted to know and she dreaded to know, so she always hesitated like this, bracing herself, being prepared. Could you prepare? Wouldn't the worst thing, the thing she dreaded, be a shock, however much she anticipated it? Alistair had said he hoped the man she knew only as "Oliver" was dead. No doubt he had not absolutely meant that - he was illogical, unreasonable, about everything to do with the donation -but "Oliver" might be dead. This letter might be telling her so. When had she last heard? She thought back. Before Christmas, October or November, more than six months. But that, of course, was normal, the way things should be. She had asked the Trust to supply information after three months, after six, nine, twelve and eighteen months, nearer twenty, since the harvest was taken. He might be dead. The success rate was only twenty to fifty per cent. In fact, he was rather more likely to be dead than alive. Prepared, or as near prepared as she was likely to be, she opened the envelope quickly, tearing the flap with her thumbnail. The letter was from the Harvest Trust's donor welfare officer. It reminded her that she had "requested anonymity be relaxed after one year and a half if all continued to go well". Therefore, subject to her consent, her name and address would be supplied to "Oliver" and his, with his consent, to her. Or, having obtained "Oliver's" address she might go ahead and make contact with him herself. It was advisable for the parties to correspond with each other before arranging a meeting. The donor welfarae officer would be happy to assist in every posiible way. She hoped "Helen" would consult her if she had any problems, and she signed herself, Deborah Cox. Mary read it again. She had been given something to occupy her first evening.

Chapter Three

Irene Adler, adventuress, beauty, one-time mistress of the King of Bohemia, resided, according to Conan Doyle, at Briony Lodge, Serpentine Avenue, St. John's Wood. But this is fiction and the only street in London designated Serpentine is in West Two not North-West Eight, so the founders of the museum that bears her name had to be content with a house in a turning off St. John's Wood High Street. It holds no memorabilia of her. How could it? The only woman that Sherlock Holmes ever loved - or at least, admired - appears in one single story. No sooner had he set eyes on her than she had married Mr. Norton, leaving nothing behind but a photograph of herself for Holmes to treasure. But the objects in the museum are the kind of things she might have possessed: a collection of late nineteenth - and early twentiethcentury dresses, Pre-Raphaelite paintings, numberless exercises in the Art Nouveau, furniture of the kind with which the Blackburn Norrises furnished their house, jewellery in silver and jet, pinchbeck, cairngorms and moonstones, a few treasured copies of the _Yellow _Book, Swinburne, Watts Dunton, a great many Beardsley drawings, and a first edition of _Zuleika _Dobson. Mary Jago's introduction to it was soon after she left art school and set up on her own, restoring costumes. It had not been a lucrative business but it brought her into contact with Dorothea Borwick who ran the Irene Adler and who later offered her a partnership. For the museum, largely ignored by Londoders, was a success with tourists, particularly Americans. Sometimes Mary and Dorothea even had to restrict admittance, roping off the entrance for half an hour, their hearts gladdened by the sight of a queue forming and extending round the corner into St. John's Wood Terrace. Dorothea never came in on Mondays just as Mary never did on Saturdays, and when she got there it was still only twenty-past nine and Stacey who sat at the ticket office and served in the shop, had not yet arrived. Mary had left Charlotte Cottage as soon as the dog-walker had brought Gushi back. She was uncertain as to the whereabouts of a pillar box in which to post her letter to the Harvest Trust, but she had found one at once, at the point where Park Village west debouched from Albany Street. A good deal of thought and careful deliberation had preceded the writing of that letter. It had taken up most of the evening, causing her to give up ideas about a visit to the cinema. Did she for instance, want the Harvest Trust to have her new address? Was there any point when it was only temporary? The Blackburn-Norrises would be back by early September and then, unless she felt very differently, unless she was utterly changed and had decided to go back to Alistair, she must find a place of her own. But the reply to this letter would be very important, the revealing at last of "Oliver's" identity. She almost decided to phone instead, but would they tell her on the phone? Of course not - she might be anyone, an investigative journalist, a spy. No one at the Trust would recognise her voice. Back to the letter then, the blank sheet of paper on which she had not yet even written an address. If she put Chatsworth Road, Willesden, now she no longer lived there, would Alistair send the Trust's reply on to her? Or would he take pleasure in destroying it? The simplest plan would be to head the paper with her grandmother's address. She had a key to the house and, besides, Frederica would be home in a day or two. After this letter from the Trust, there would very likely be no more, for information about his condition would come straight from "Oliver". She wrote c_sto Mrs. FM. Jago in the top right-hand corner, Lamballe House, Belsize Park Gardens, London NW3. The substance of the letter was to ask for "Oliver's" real name and his home address. This way it would be out of Alistair's reach. In the past year and a half he had become angrier and more resentful of what she had done, not less so. In some curious way he had seemed to want revenge on this man he had never seen and she had never seen, whose only offence had been to suffer from Acute Myeloid Leukaemia. As she walked across, the Park crossing the Broad Walk, and took the path that runs along the Southern boundary of the Zoo, she thought once more of Alistair's inexplicable behaviour. She thought of how her action had seemed to change him and turn him into an unreasonable and at times cruel man. The Harvest Trust had recommended a discussion with one's family before the decision to be a donor was finally taken. Alistair and her grandmother were her family - she had no other - but while her grandmother had been supportive once she'd conquered her initial anxiety, from Alistair she had had nothing but anger, incredulity, rejection. The Trust's very name had provoked shudders. He seemed to have a gift for picking out from its literature every point that might be construed as ominous. "A harvest, they call it a harvest what they do. Doesn't that tell you something? They're harvesting the marrow out of your bones." And then, "They insure you for a quarter of a million pounds. Look, it says so here. Do you think they'd do that if it wasn't dangerous?" "I'm young and healthy," she had said. "They wouldn't take me if I wasn't suitable. I just look fragile but I'm not." And that was before she had been asked to give the donation, when she had only put her name on the register. To give in to him, to what was after all a quite unreasonable demand, she had felt would be weak and positively wrong. She knew that she belonged in the victim category, the quiet gentle type, usually female, who yields for the sake of peace, who placates and smiles and who, of course, brings out the worst in the bully. It was a casting, a role, she had lately been setting out to resist. But when the Trust came back to her with a potential recipient and asked her to attend the centre for a medical examination, she had not been able to stand up for herself. She said nothing to Alistair. She went for the medical in her lunch hour. Of course, she still intended to tell him. Ironically, if things had been going badly for them she might have told him. She might have been made stronger by adversity, but their relationship was in a successful and happy period - why spoil it? Just the same, she meant to tell him well in advance of the harvest date. She would have to tell him, she knew that. The bank sent him to Hong Kong. He was to be away a week and it was during that week that the donation was to be made. Donors should be met, it was advised, on leaving the hospital and accompanied home. She would have to do without that, or she would have to do without Alistair. Dorothea would meet her, Dorothea was discreet and would say nothing. Perhaps Alistair need never know. Whatever advances she had made, she had by then reverted to type, and telling herself she was a coward and a fool made no difference. Mary relived all this as she walked through the Park to the Monkey Gate, over the canal bridge and into Charlbert Street. It had been a day like this, sunny and breezy, but autumn not spring, when she went to the hospital for the harvest collection. The only risk, contrary to what Alistair suggested, was that associated with general anaesthetic, the same as if undergoing any operation. She was "out" for about two hours, during which time they took a litre of marrow and blood, or five per cent of the total in her body. Coming round, she had felt at first excitement. It was done, she had done it. She had been able to do it, use her own good health to repair someone else's ill-health, to mend nature's mistake. If she had done nothing much up till now, no good deeds, if she did none in the years to come, she had performed this one act to justify her existence. To no one on earth would she actually have said those words; to Dorothea when she came in to visit she made light of it, saying it was nothing, a breeze. But in her heart she experienced a deep satisfaction. Even if it failed, if the transplant was useless, she would have tried. She would have done what all philosophies and all religions told us we were here to do: love our neighbour and with positive intent. This emotional high was not long enduring. The words she had used, though silent and unspoken, now embarrassed her. She came back swiftly to practical things. Dorothea accompanied her home in a taxi, made a meal and shared it with her, telling her to take it easy, not to come back to the museum till the following week. Mary had been tired and a little stiff but otherwise well. She ate three meals a day, went for gentle walks, took the iron pills prescribed for her and waited for Alistair to come home. It was something she had never been able to account for, to explain to herself, why she had not once looked at the place on her body from which the harvest had been taken. She knew precisely where it was: the cavity of the hip, the iliac crest. It would have been normal surely, natural, to have studied these punctures on the smooth pale skin, even though she had been assured they would not leave a scar. Some revulsion, if not regret - never that - must have kept her eyes from the spot while she undressed, while she took a shower. Some unwillingness to see what altruism had done to a body that was perfect, without a blemish? Alistair saw the marks. He saw them when they made love and the bedroom was flooded with autumn sunshine, soft golden light falling on her nakedness, her whiteness and its single flaw. The first-comers made straight for the shop where Stacey sold them calendars and postcards of Lillie Langtry and Eleanora Duse, leather-bound reissues of the novels of Ada Leverson, painted fans, beaded bags, batik, appliqu work and very expensive mock-Fortuny Knossos scarves. Mary set to work in the hat room, mending a silk brim, reattaching black ostrich feathers. "A crab shelled in whalebone" was Aldous Huxley's description of the Edwardian lady and he called her plumed hat "a French funeral of the first class". There were more than twenty such hats in this room, all huge gateau-like confections, pearly-white, rose-pink, blue, yellow, black, festooned with roses, ribbons, feathers. On one wall a _Vogue cartoon from 1909 of a tiny woman wearing a hat as big as an umbrella on whose brim sat a rabbit gobbling up a cabbage. When she was in here or in the corset room, Mary often thought Irene Adler's incursions into male attire - as when she whispers "good evening" to Holmes in Baker Street -entirely understandable. The crab in whalebone stays, the buckled and webbed bodices, the crustaceous layers, and those furbelowed cart-wheel hats. Other pictures on the walls showed Edwardian women attempting to mount stairs, board trams and manage their hats on windy days. The first visitors began wandering through and Mary put her work aside. The Americans asked the most questions and there was a preponderance of Americans. She had expected a quiet, slack day, as Monday usually was, failing to take into account that the tourist season was approaching its height. "How did they handle those trailing skirts in the rain?" someone asked. It was a stock question and one she could scarcely answer. "What about ordinary women?" was another. It was asked more and more often. "What did the poor do? The ones who couldn't afford maids to dress them and cabs to ride in? How did they manage?" And always, "Who was Irene Adler?" They sold more copies of the Sherlock Holmes story __A Scandal in _Bohemia (Irene as crab on the front cover and in jacket and breeches on the back) then all the catalogues and brochures put together. A favourite place was the facsimile of Irene's drawing room, as it must have been at Briony Lodge with the secret panel to the fireplace where the compromising photograph was kept hidden, open for all to see the secret spring. Gustav Klimt had not painted her, for he was real and she was fiction, but the mock Klimt portrait of Irene in sequins and pearls posed against a gold-leaf screen, framed in narrow gilded wood, went back to hang on the walls of many a Midwest condo. Business was too brisk at lunchtime for Mary to leave the museum. It even looked at one point during the afternoon as if admission would have to be restricted for half an hour. But the crowd dwindled as five approached, by which time the shop had run out of calendars and Knossos scarves and Stacey was on the phone to the sales rep. Mary worried a little about Charlotte Cottage. Would Bean have let himself in satisfactorily at four-fifteen, found Gushi and by now have brought him back? Would he have secured the front door behind him? She considered taking a taxi back, for she had had one good walk that day. But the sun was still shining and the wind had dropped, and once she had entered the Park she forgot about a reluctance to walk, she forgot about Charlotte Cottage and Gushi and turned southwards across the broad open space. Strange, how seldom she had come in here while she lived in Willesden, and, though working at the museum, had scarcely ever crossed the canal or even set foot south of Prince Albert Road. Taking the path that leads down to the boating lake, she noticed for the first time how open the Park was, how relatively treeless in its centre, a great plain of green fringed with the towers and landmarks of London: the gold dome of the Mosque, the slender column of the minaret beside it, the Art-deco edifice of the Abbey National in Baker Street, the Post Office Tower, and behind her, the Mappin Terraces of the Zoo. There were trees on the north bank of the lake and at its shallow rim a cluster of waterfowl, pochards, mandarins and a black swan, squabbling over the spilled slices from a cut loaf. She crossed the Long bridge and paused for a while to look at the heron perched on one of the island trees. It should have been possible to turn left and head for the Cumberland Gate but there was no way through. She was learning that this was characteristic of the Park, perhaps inevitable in a design based on two circles, one within the other, that were not concentric. Paths seldom led where you thought they would, and it was very easy, especially in this vicinity, to take what you thought were all the right directions yet find yourself heading back for the zoo and St. John's Wood. __Through the looking _Glass was what it was like, the bit where Alice notices that the path which seems to lead straight to the garden does not and is afraid of going back through the glass into the old room. I, at any rate, shall not go back to the old room, the old life, Mary thought, and with that she came out into the Inner Circle by the Open Air Theatre. It was a short distance from there, through the golden gates and along Chester Road, to the Broad Walk. The new fountains were playing. Flowers spilled over the rims of the lion tazze and the Roman vases. The flowerbeds, formal rectangles that flanked the wide path, were filled with polyanthus in bloom, with pansies and yellow jonquils. All the way along, from Park Square to Chester Road, and up beyond where there were no flowers but only trees and a certain wildness, seats faced each other, most of them occupied by two or three people. But on the seat nearest to the point where the road crossed the Broad Walk a man was sitting alone. People of his sort always did sit alone, unless another of their kind joined them. No one would choose to sit on the same seat as he. Mary, approaching along the path from the west, sought about in her mind as she had often done before, for the right word for him. Dosser? Street person? Street sleeper? Not beggar, he wasn't begging. Not tramp, that was from her grandmother's time. Perhaps there was no word and perhaps there should be none. He was reading. That made him different, set him apart. He seemed oblivious to everything and everyone, concentrating on his book. The barrow that contained his possessions rested against the metal arm of the seat. From the rag tied round his neck to the boots on his feet, his clothes were well-worn denim, rumpled wool and threadbare polyester. He wore a dark coloured quilted jerkin. His hair was dark, the thick bushy beard that covered the greater part of his face iron-grey. She thought she had seen him somewhere before without being able to remember where. It was his hands which recalled this previous sighting or meeting. They were long, narrow, beautiful hands, sun-browned but smooth, and on the left one was a gold wedding ring. He looked up as she passed and for a moment, infinitesimal, fleeting, their eyes met. His were blue, a strong sea-blue. He lowered his eyes almost immediately to his boo ok and turned the page in a precise controlled movement. Trying to remember where she had seen him that first time - in Baker Street? Outside Madame Tussaud's? But she hardly ever went that way - Mary walked along the path where the gingko trees grow, the Chinese Maidenhair trees, towards the Cumberland Gate. Had he asked her for money? Had he perhaps been selling the _Big _Issue? At the sound of her key in the lock, Gushi made three sharp barks. She called his name and he came running. If he was tired from his walk he gave no sign of it. She squatted down and he jumped into her arms, nestling there and burying his chrysanthemum face in her neck and shoulder. If Mary Jago failed to remember where she had previously seen Roman Ashton, he had no trouble in placing her. She was the young woman who, arriving two hours earlier than usual at the museum in Charles Lane, had come upon him waking up on the doorstep. Irene Adler, the place was called. It had a glass-covered porch outside its front door that extended to the pavement across a small forecourt. For several nights he had slept there, dry and secluded, but he never went back after she had discovered him. "I'm so sorry," she had said, not wanting to step over him, also perhaps afraid. A great many people were afraid of them, himself and his kind. "I woke you up. I didn't know anyone was sleeping here" It was a principle of his not to speak to the "public", to speak only to his fellows, though that had its own problems, its own guilt. There was no reason for him to speak to people. He had no need to beg and never did, so if they addressed him he merely nodded or shrugged or gave no sign of having heard them. The delicate looking slender girl, fair and somewhat fey-like, merited more than that. She had spoken to him as politely as if he had been a respectable house-holder. So he nodded, got to his feet and rolled up his bedding in a quick deft movement, stepping aside to let her pass. "Sorry about that," he said. "I'm going." She must have heard it as a mutter, a low growl. She was not to know those were the first words he had uttered to anyone apart from the street sleepers for a year. The first sentence to escape him since he had closed up his house and taken to the outdoors. And now he had seen her again. For a moment he thought she was going to speak to him and he wondered what reply to make, if any, whether to be as he once had been - a pleasant, courteous, easy-going sort of man -or as he now was, forbidding, grave, dour. But she had not spoken; she had not recognised him. It was just as well. Conversation with ordinary people was not for him; they spoke different languages. For a little while he continued to read _Dead _Souls, or tried to read it, but the doings of Chichikov no longer held his attention. He had been distracted, not so much by the sight of the pale fair-haired girl with the swinging stride as by the emotion and the reflections thinking back to that earlier time had evoked. He put the book into his buggy, a wooden barrow with four wheels and a handle like the shaft of a spade, and, pushing it ahead of him, began ambling along one of the paths in a westerly direction. He had no clear idea where he was going, a common state for him to be in, for one of the benefits of his condition was perfect freedom. It was a warm still afternoon and this he enjoyed after the winds of the past weeks, the cold spring, the long damp winter. If happiness was denied him for ever, was something exclusively for others, he could feel pleasure and that sometimes more intensely and sensuously than those who lived under roofs and slept in beds. His appreciation of the sun on his face and the soft balmy air was luxurious and profound. It almost made him smile. Another of his principles was never to make plans during the afternoon or evening as to where he would sleep that night, for to do so was to abrogate that freedom, and freedom was all he had. Everything else had been taken away or he had taken it away himself. He would give some thought to his night's "lodging" when it was dark and the streets were empty, the cars had gone, the pubs had closed and those like himself came into their own. He crossed over York Bridge and entered the sequestered part of the Park on the southern shore of the lake. On the seats along here his fellows were often to be found - Effie with her bundles wrapped in green plastic; Dill who would be accompanied by his dog, but encumbered by so little, a nylon back-pack, a couple of coats tied round his middle by their sleeves - but there was no one today. He knew Dill could live that way because he mostly had a bed in the Marylebone Road shelter or the one in the Edgeware Road, something Roman's guilt and sense of being always a phony and a fake would never allow him to have. After all, how many of those others had possessed a house of there own; possessed it, sold it and banked the money? For much of each day Roman lived in the past. And this was deliberate, a purposeful exploration of the time of his happiness, a reliving. Sometimes this dreaming occupied him for several hours on end as he walked across the Park and along the streets which made a network like the weaving of a nest around its centre. He would select a particular happening from that past and enter it again. It might be the birth of one of his children and the things he said to Sally and she to him, or even earlier, his first meeting with Sally at university. Once he had been quite unable to do this, had been afraid to do it, more than afraid, terrified. The sight of that delicate fair girl reminded him that when they first encountered each other had been the time of his beginning this process of recall. Walking away from her, his bedding in the buggy, he had thought that speaking to an ordinary person, a dweller in the world he had left, should serve as a sign for him and there and then he decided to put an end to the time of denial. Total change, absolute alteration of circumstances, utter abandonment of the past - all these had served their purpose. Now it was time to move on and take the plunge into pain. He would rip the scar tissue off the wound and lay a cold probe against the rawness. He had nothing to lose. It had to be done and now was the time to begin. He had started by a kind of meditation, his eyes on his wedding ring, the symbol of what had been and what was lost. Since then, in this world he had chosen for himself, both unreal and more real than any reality he had ever known, he had re-experienced every day his lovely history, a chapter of it or part of a chapter, and it did not heal the pain or come near healing it. But something else was happening. He was more aware than he had ever been of what it was to be a human being and it was as if, in all his joyous and contented days, he had never really known this before. And self-pity, so rebellious and consuming, was utterly gone. He had become unaccommodated man, perhaps even what those existentialists said man should be -free suffering, alone and in control of his own destiny. Now he chose for his excursion into the past a holiday he and Sally and Elizabeth had had in Crete. It was ten years before, almost exactly ten years. Elizabeth had been four or five. They had chosen May for the wild flowers that cover the island with blossom at that time and because the sun was warm but not yet hot. He chiefly remembered from that holiday the colour of the sea, the blue of Elizabeth's eyes, the languor and the sweet idleness and his and Sally's lovemaking, the best since their honeymoon. They had been the young ardent lovers of seven years before and in those two weeks Daniel had been conceived. With a pain that made him gasp Roman remembered their bed and waking in the morning naked, uncovered by bedclothes, and Sally naked beside him. Like gods they were, discovered by the morning light. As he left the Park by the Clarence Gate, he found himself able to summon up from that past time the things they had said to each other and even the expression in Sally's eyes, the tranquillity and sometimes the passion. He remembered walking on the beach with his daughter and carrying her because the sand was too hot on the soles of her small tender feet. "Daddy, Daddy," she had said, lifting up one foot, "my soul is burning!" Or that was what it sounded like and they laughed, he and Sally, for what did he know then of burning souls and hellish torment? Across Gloucester Place he walked and into the hinterland of Marylebone Station where the shabby streets make so extreme a contrast with Nash's palatial terraces. He took the steps down into Boston Place and through Blandford Square into Harewood Avenue. The sight of a corner shop reminded him that he must buy food for his supper. Sometime or other it must be done, but shops were always open till all hours in these streets. He came into Lisson Grove and turned south, conjuring Elizabeth's face in his mind, its innocence and its rapture, and as sometimes happened, the tears came into his eyes and fell down his cheeks. Other people took no notice. They expected him to be different from them, demented, drug-crazy, drunk, ungoverned, mad. It was because of these things that he was where he was and they were where they were. Only Pharaoh, leaning against the door of a shop closed for the night, eyed him with some feeling of kinship and holding out the bottle from which he had been drinking, said, "Here, mate, want a sup?" Roman had long ago ceased to worry about catching things from drinking out of other people's bottles and though he didn't want it - God knows what it was - he accepted and took a swig. Rioja and me ths he thought. Wiping his mouth on his sleeve, the way he had learnt from Dill and Effie, he sat down on the stone step and looked up at Pharaoh. He never stopped hoping to see some change in the man's face, some improvement. By that he meant that madness would be less evident there, that the slipping away of sanity would have halted so that something human still remained, some kindly light in the feral bloodshot eyes, some relaxing of the mouth so that the lips were neither curled back nor sucked together in a whitened rigidity. But there was no change and the sign of humanity Pharaoh had given in offering a drink to a man in tears, was a rare happening. Soon even that would cease. He squatted down and thrust his haunted face into Roman's, his black beard that he streaked with dark blue dye into Roman's beard. "Have you got a key for me?" he said. Roman shook his head. Anyone who looked more closely at Pharaoh -no one ever looked closely - would have seen the hundreds of keys which hung round him, strung there on the rope which served him as a belt, pinned to his clothes with safety pins: brass and steel and chrome, Yale keys and Banhams, front-door keys and back-door keys, keys for opening suitcases and keys for locking padlocks. From the irregular bulges in his clothes Roman suspected his pockets too were filled with keys. He clinked and rattled when he walked, shuffling in and out of doorways, going where his voices sent him in search of the ultimate key. Where did they come from? Whose had they been? Pharaoh never said and Roman never asked. "The keys of the kingdom," Pharaoh said. His black eyes rolled. When he looked about him he made jerky startled movements. One of his voices told him that when Christ said, "I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven," it was an actual bunch of keys that He handed to Peter. These were lost, had been lost for two thousand years, but it was Pharaoh's mission to find them. He speculated constantly as to their nature and appearance. "They'll be made of gold, won't they? Purest gold? Only gold'd unlock the gates of heaven." Pharaoh should not be here at all, an outsider, on the street, but in the kind of place that had no existence these days, a place that was comfortable and clean and civilised, where he could have some dignity, where caring people looked after him and doctors well-versed in the tragedy of his existence put him on a regimen of drugs. Roman had no idea whether he was autistic or schizophrenic or mentally handicapped. He preferred the word "mad" to all these because he knew that he too was mad and that being mad was a prerequisite of what he had done in becoming an outsider. Patting Pharaoh on the shoulder - from which the man with the blue-streaked beard started back recoiling and snarling like a wildcat poked with a stick - Roman got up and continued on his course towards the Marylebone Road and across it back into Gloucester Place. It amused him to reflect that being addressed by Pharaoh would once have alarmed him very much. He would have been frightened, though not admitted it, would have pretended not to hear. And to have entered into a conversation with such a creature would have been unthinkable. He was such a creature himself now, or not far off. Turning into Crawford street, he waited before crossing the road for the red and white food delivery van to pass. What would Express Tikka and Pizza say if he phoned from a call box and asked for a delivery of Chicken Masala to the third seat on the left going up the Broad walk from Chester Road? A verbal equivalent, he supposed, of the look he got in the sandwich bar where he asked for cheese and pickle. They looked askance but they served him. It was his accent, Roman knew; it made them think that maybe they were wrong, that this was no dosser but an eccentric, an absent-minded professor who forgot to have baths. He would have lost his accent if he could but his attempts to do so sounded like grotesque parodies. Tomorrow, he was reminded, he had better have an all-over wash, in a public convenience somewhere. Keeping clean, or avoiding utter filthiness, was one of the grimmer problems the outsider faced and one which no insider ever took into account. Turning into Old Quebec Street, wondering where to settle down and eat his supper, he came under the windows of Talisman, the environmentalist publishers. He wore no watch but told the time by the state of the light and traffic and the movement of people and he guessed it was seven. The staff, such as it was, would have gone home an hour ago. To the front door Talisman's logo of a lyre tree leaf was attached with its name and that of its editor-in-chief, Tom Outram. Once his name had been there too, but that, like so much in his old life, was water under the bridge, flowing into the sea of his memories.

Chapter Four

No one but Alistair would phone so early. Urgency was always implicit in phone calls made before nine in the morning. Bean had called and collected Gushi. It was half-past eight. Mary thought she knew who her caller must be and she hesitated before picking up the receiver. But there was always her grandmother to think of. Her grandmother was strong and healthy but very old. "How are you settling in?" He had never spoken to her like that before. It was the phrase of an elderly parent delivered in a tone that was solicitous but querulous too and aggrieved. She tried to sound brisk and cheerful. "Fine," she said. "I'm all right. It's nice here. I've been walking a lot." As soon as she said it she knew it was an unwise thing to say, for he immediately countered by telling her not to overdo things. She was not strong, she was a fragile creature. He managed without putting this into words, to imply that by her irresponsible and thoughtless conduct she had put her health in jeopardy. "When am I to be allowed to come and see you?" "Alistair," she said, "We're having a separation, remember?" "A _trial separation." She tried again. "I have left you. We're apart. We've discussed it, we decided. My coming here was to mark the beginning of our separation." "Oh, come on," he said, "that's just a figure of speech. The mistake was mine in giving any of that stuff credence. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, that's the real reason, isn't it?" Hers or his? There was no need to ask. He implied that being parted from him would increase her affection for him. Affection - that lukewarm word. Even of that she felt very little. If you were like her, receptive, anxious to please - euphemisms, she told herself, for passive and ingratiating - you found it hard to understand how anyone thought love could be won by bullying. He set about bullying her now. "you can't escape me so easily, you know, Mary. I'm not the kind of man to wreck two people's lives for a woman's whim. Haven't I proved in the past that I know what's best for us?" She should have refuted that but she feared the storm that would ensue. She had left him, hadn't she? That great step had been taken, she need not learn to fight him. She told him she was in a hurry and must go. "All right. I know that tone of voice. There's no getting a word out of you when you've decided to sulk. You'll soon get over that. I'll be over very soon." As if she had invited him... "No," she managed to say. "Please no." The effort of refusing always made her tired as if she really was the delicate creature she looked. "I'll drop in one evening," he said as if she hadn't spoken. "I'll take you out somewhere." Mary went back into the kitchen and poured herself a second cup of coffee. It was going to be harder than she had thought. The strength of will she hoped she was learning would be needed, but what of the strength that women can never acquire? She would never come near to matching him physically. Like stigmata appearing at certain triggers, her face suddenly stung from the blow on the cheek he had given her when he saw those puncture marks. She looked in the mirror and saw the flush that bloomed there, brighter on the right side than the left. Alistair was lefthanded. They had been making love. He drew away from her and, extending his right hand, touched those marks with the tips of his fingers. "What's that?" he said. The tone told her he knew. "Scorpion bit you? Poison Ivy? Barbed wire?" There is something terrible about the mood of lovemaking - so tender, languorous, exciting in that uniquely warm and breathless way - being broken by a harsh voice, sarcasm, barely suppressed rage. Nothing comes so quickly as sexual desire and nothing ebbs so fast as sexual willingness. It was like feeling cold water poured over her body. She turned her face away. "The bone marrow harvest," she said. "I told you I meant to do it." "You deceived me," he said and, taking hold of her face in an iron grip with fingers that dug, struck her cheek with the flat of his hand, the hardest blow she had ever received. Until then, the _only blow... It was not quite a beating up he gave her. You could hardly call a slap on the face, a shaking, another slap, a pulling upright and a throwing to the ground, beating someone up. She had crawled away and shut herself in the bathroom. Her cheek was bruised next day and she had bruised her leg when she fell. He apologised to her; he crawled. He didn't know what had come over him, only that it never would again. Predictably, he showed the other aspect of the bully's character. It was this wretched temperament of his, he excused himself, his love of physical perfection, his worship of the ideal. "You're so perfect, I can't bear to think of your body assailed, plundered." He was almost crying. "I can't bear to think of all that beauty endangered." Except by him, she thought later, except by him. He had touched her bruised cheek with tears in his eyes Still, that would never happen again. None of it would happen; it was all over. She had left and, under another roof, could withstand any onslaught. Upstairs she dabbed at her cheek with pale powder, as if it was still red and marked by Alistair's hand. Her eyes had that panicky look he had lately induced in them but as she made herself breathe deeply her face smoothed and grew calmer, her shoulders relaxed. Gushi was brought back just as she was leaving. She showed him his freshly filled water bowl, gave him a quick caress, and running now, caught up with Bean and his troop on the corner of Albany Street: Boris the borzoi, Charlie the golden retriever, Marietta the chocolate poodle, Mc Bride the scottie. Only Ruby the beagle was absent. "Gone on her holidays to Ilfracombe," said Bean. He had a camera on a strap around his neck, like a tourist. "She'll be missing the Park. Them hounds need a lot of exercise." "Won't she be able to run on the beach?" He never answered questions. She wondered why she bothered to ask. Bean countered questions with a statement or a question of his own as competently as any politician trained to do this on television. Sometimes his statements were relevant, sometimes not. "A hound can run twenty miles and think nothing of it." he said. She felt like saying: But can hounds think? Instead she remarked on Bean's expertise in the handling of so many dogs. He nodded, accepting the praise as his due, and said in the tone that sounded disparaging, though probably was not: "I'll say goodbye then, miss. We mustn't detain you." "Goodbye." "Mind how you cross the road. The traffic's very treacherous in these parts." Had he once been a butler? Perhaps. His manner was that of a superior upper servant in a film of the Fifties. Her experience of the real thing was non-existent. The grandparents who had brought her up, though comfortably off, had lived modestly, with a cleaner coming in twice a week. She took the lower path, the one that runs close up against the fence of the Abika Paul Memorial Gardens, the better to see the cattle and deer. Her grandmother had sometimes brought her in here as a child, had once taken her to the zoo with a friend who lived in Primrose Hill. A sheltered childhood and youth it had been, she supposed. Her grandparents had been discreetly wealthy, what they called "comfortably off". Such strange expressions, "Comfortably off", "well off" -off what? Off the poverty line, the bread line Their income had never been mentioned, money never talked about. Even now she had no idea how much Frederica had, even if she was rich or gent eely poor. Alistair had shown an interest but her grandmother had never been forthcoming to Alistair, had never liked him. If she had agreed with Alistair in anything it had been over the bone marrow donation and her opposition had been no more than a fear of "unnecessary" anaesthesia and a conviction -despite all evidence to the contrary - that Mary must be as vulnerable as she looked. People were a mixture of subtle contrasts. Malleable, weak, diffident she might be, but she had gone ahead with her resolution. She had persisted. It's a man, the Trust had told her, twenty-two years old, suffering from Acute Myeloid Leukaemia. The donation would take place in this country, they said, but they had not told her whether the recipient was British or of some other nationality. After the transplant they gave him the card she had written to him and they gave her the letter he had written to her. Both were unsealed; both had been scrutinised to make sure identification of either donor or recipient was impossible. His name was Oliver, but they smiled when they said it, making clear this was a pseudonym. Her name, that she was told to put on the card, was Helen, and they had told him she was twenty-eight and in perfect health. She had chosen "Helen" because it was her dead mother's name and she wondered why he had picked "Oliver" or if it had been chosen for him. She had not known what to write on the card, so had done no more than call him "Dear Oliver", wish him a speedy recovery, and sign herself, "Yours sincerely, Helen". It was rather ridiculous. What could it mean to him? His letter to her was typed, not very expertly. It was formal, lifeless. "Dear Helen, I want to thank you for what you have done for me," but ended as if emotion had broken through, "In undying thankfulness, Oliver", and she wondered that they hadn't demurred at that, that most unfortunate word, for he very likely would die, in spite of the donation. Then came the updates from "Oliver's" transplant centre. He was well at three months and at six. There was a delay - she heard nothing for six months and was sure he was ill again, was dying - then the nine-month report and the twelve-month came simultaneously: "Oliver" continued well. She kept the updates away from Alistair but inadvertently let out that "Oliver" was thriving. Alistair claimed to have seen a decline in her own health since the donation and a fading of her looks. She told him she was perfectly well, she looked just the same. Her grandmother, in spite of earlier opposition, had remarked favourably on her appearance. Perhaps it was bringing Frederica into it that had set him off. He took hold of her by the shoulders. "You need some sense shaking into you," he had said, and had proceeded to shake her, gently at first, then with a kind of frenzy. She fell against a table, dislodging a glass vase which broke and cut her leg. He had to take her to hospital, to Casualty, and when her leg was stitched and strapped up, wept all over her, bemoaning the loss of her beauty, the draining away of her "life-blood". "Why did you make that stupid sacrifice? Why did you destroy your health and your looks? Now you can see what it's led to." It was the beginning of the end. Some of the worst of it for Mary was the realisation of her own poor judgement. How could she have loved him or even have thought she loved him? Why hadn't she detected this behaviour in him before? And then there came back to her the slight unease she had always felt when he seemed to judge people by their physical appearance. She met his mother and found this ageing woman doing the same thing. Like Sir Walter Elliot in _Persuasion, Marina Winter remarked constantly on the propensity of those around her "to lose something of their personableness when they cease to be quite young", and made irrelevant comments on "freckles, and a projecting tooth, and a clumsy wrist". Discovering where this trait in Alistair had come from went some way to excusing it in Mary's eyes, but later on she came to wonder how it would be if they stayed together and she too aged and began to lose her looks. Would he call her a dog as she had once or twice been shocked to hear him describe an older woman? Would everything else she washer closeness to him, the sexual life they enjoyed, the gentle tranquillity she knew was hers, her skill as a crafts woman -would all this go for nothing when lines came on her face and gravity pulled her earth wards She had found out sooner than she expected. He punished physical diminution, not with words but with blows. Remembering, she felt the blood mount into the cheek where he had struck her. She felt it settle there and burn the skin.

Chapter Five

With Gushi in her lap, Frederica jago said, "Where will you go then when the Blackburn Norrises come back?" And without waiting for an answer, "Come back and live with me." Mary laughed. "That's a rash invitation. I might take you up on it." "It's your home, my dear. Where else would it be natural for you to go?" "To a place of my own." "Of course my house is much bigger but it's not in the same league as this one. But what is, when you come to think of it? Still, you would have the run of it and you'd often have it to yourself. You know I'm always away." It was true. While Mrs. Jago's husband was alive they had never set foot west of Cornwall or east of Suffolk, for Lucian Jago had a fear of flying and a tendency to seasickness. Since his death and Mary's departure, if she had not wandered the earth, she had taken every available package tour - to India, to Tashkent and Samarkand, the rose-red city of Petra, up the Yangtse and down the Nile, California, New England. Lately as she passed eighty, she had restricted her travelling to Europe, forsaking the travel agent's recommendations and visiting out-of the-way places. She was a small, thin, pretty woman, bird-faced with a crest of white wavy hair, her granddaughter's green eyes and indeed very much as Mary would one day be, her bones more apparent than her flesh, the shape of her body still uncannily like a young girl's. Having arrived at Charlotte Cottage in a taxi with a gift for Mary from Lapland and a bottle of champagne, she renewed her friendship with Gushi. She had brought him a dog-chewing bar, that she assured him was made from reindeer skin, and feeling for it in her bag, brought it out first and then an envelope. "I nearly forgot. This came for you." Mary took it. "I was going to ask but I thought it would be too soon." "Too soon for what?" Frederica gave Gushi the chewing bar and he rolled on his back on the carpet, grasping it in his paws and growling. "What is it? More about your bone marrow man?" "I hope it's his name and address." She hesitated, as she had done with the Trust's last communication, turning the envelope in her hands, looking at the logo, the stamp, the postmark. "I shall know at last. It's rather daunting." "Don't be daunted. Would you like me to open it?" "No. No I don't think so." "My darling Mary, you don't have to open it in my presence. I shan't be offended. Keep it till I've gone." Mary shook her head. "I'm going to open it now." It would, after all, only be a name. An ordinary sort of name, probably, and a number and a street anywhere in the country, in a city or a town or a village. She had been told it was in the British Isles, that he was British, that was all. There was no need, this time, for preparation, for bracing herself. Timidity was ridiculous when the contents of this envelope could not possibly contain any threat. Frederica handed her a paper knife from the desk, ivory handled, with a long thin blade. She had probably seen the Blackburn Norrises use it. Mary slit along the top of the flap and took out the enclosure. The letter was short. It said.

Dear Ms Jago,

We note that not have not asked us to pass your own name and address on to "Oliver" and therefore assume you will do this yourself. He is now willing to be identified. His name is Leo Nash, and his address Flat 24, Redferry House, Plangent Road, London NW1. I should like to take this opportunity of wishing you a pleasant and rewarding meeting with Mr. Nash.

Yours sincerely,

Deborah Cox