Mary read it aloud. She said: "How very strange. Plangent Road can't be far from here. It's North-West One like this is." "Maybe, but it's not much like this," Frederica said drily. "It's Somers Town. And you know nothing else about him? nothing except that he's twenty-three and male?" "Twenty-four by now," said Mary. "Do you know all these months I've longed to meet him, and now I can I don't know whether I want to or not. It's a mistake to meet people in these circumstances, isn't it? One's always disappointed." "These circumstances aren't within my experience, Mary. I don't know. It's old-fashioned to say this but I am old-fashioned. It would be unnatural if I wasn't." "Say what?" "I was going to say, I _am saying, that it's best to meet people through being introduced by your friends or family. Or at work perhaps, only I've never been to work, so I can't say. This young man owes you a lot, he is under a great obligation to you, and that isn't the best basis for a friendship.", "A friendship!" said Mary. "He may not even answer my letter. If he feels he's under an obligation he probably won't want to meet me." "Is it true that we dislike those who have done us a service?" Frederica asked. "If so, the greater the service perhaps the greater the dislike. And it's hard to imagine a greater service than saving someone's life. He may feel he owes you more than he could ever repay. _And then if he sees -how shall I put this? Mary, you're very pretty and - well, graceful and sweet; you're obviously educated and gifted and living in a lovely place. Won't that be a burden for him too? A poor, sick, deprived young man from what sounds like a council estate behind Euston Station?" Mary looked at her. She felt stricken by a small panic. "I wish you hadn't been away," she said. "I wish we could have had this conversation before I asked for his address." "And if I'd advised you, would you have taken my advice? Of course you wouldn't." "It isn't too late," Mary said slowly, "I haven't been in touch with him. I just know his name and where he lives. What would your advice be." Frederica laughed. "Are you passing the buck? Laying the responsibility on me?" "I don't know. Perhaps. I'm in the habit of doing that. Or I used to be. Advise me." "Tear the letter up, give me the pieces and on my way home I'll drop them in a litter bin." "So I couldn't get them out and piece them together again? It wouldn't be any use, I'm afraid. I know his name now. I have the address by heart. Wouldn't I always regret it if I didn't write to him? But perhaps he won't answer." Frederica laughed. "He'll answer." On the front doorstep in Albany Street Edwina Goldsworthy gave Bean formal notice that she would be going away on holiday in ten days time and Mc Bride be taking up residence in kennels. Bean disapproved of kennels and his manner became chilly. But he had to go inside for the necessary paperwork, having first tied his dogs up to a lamppost, and this delayed him. "Don't be surprised if he loses weight in there, madam," he said, and he cast a critical eye over Mrs. Goldsworthy's bulky form before adding, "Pining does more than diets, as I always say." She was dependent on him; she couldn't say much. None of them could. They were in his power. Without him they would have to leave their beds an hour earlier, sacrifice their cocktail hour, get up off their arses and muddy their shoes. Bean smiled to himself. Power was not something he had personally experienced in his years as the late Anthony Maddox's and then the late Maurice Clitheroe's servant, but now he was making up for lost time. Absolute reliability, "sirs" and "madams" sprinkled among his remarks, a genuine love of dogs, punctilious punctuality - all this made him indispensable. He disliked being even five minutes late, for this detracted from his power, and he quickened his pace as he and the dogs made for Cumberland Terrace, home of Marietta, the chocolate poodle. The actress Lisl Pring hadn't noticed the time. She kissed Marietta and had her make-up licked off. Bean had never seen anyone as thin as this woman, except in famine photos. They said telly made a person look fatter, which was no doubt the reason. He wondered how she did it. lived on salad, no doubt, or maybe she was like that model he'd read about who had nothing in her fridge but a lemon. He reminded her of his seven-days-notice-of holidays rule and she shrieked something about never having a moment to go anywhere, darling. If it wasn't shooting it was rehearsals from five am till midnight, believe it or not. Bean nodded. He didn't really believe it. She must be rich. Up here in the hinterland of the terrace was like being in some Georgian spa, learning ton or Cheltenham, all mellow stone and ivy, blossom coming out and ferns uncurling, a smell like the country, green and sharp. Bean thought he wouldn't half mind living here himself, only he'd never afford it the way things were. He must put his power to wider use. The bag lady with the green plastic bundles was meandering slowly up the Outer Circle as he came out of Cumberland Terrace. Her name, he knew, was Effie but in his mind Bean called her a horrible cow. Boris and Charlie and the rest of them always wanted to sniff her. This propensity of theirs, sometimes seeming to prefer people who smelt nasty to people who smelt nice, was his only objection to dogs. He tugged the leashes away with an artificial shudder. The bag lady told him to fuck off and gave him instructions about the kind of sexual activity he and his dogs might mutually engage in. Bean thought it a pity that the cleaning-up of London, begun some three years before, had not included purging the streets of dossers, beggars and foul-mouthed slags. Before returning him to Mr. and Mrs. Barker Pryce in St. Andrew's place, Bean took a photograph of Charlie the golden retriever. He was a handsome dog and made quite a picture standing there, head raised, tail up, in the sunshine. Charlie's owner answered the door himself, cigar in hand. Mr. Barker-Pryce was a Member of Parliament for some London constituency and it was a wonder how he managed in the House of Commons Chamber, having to go without his cigars for maybe a whole two hours. Bean and the borzoi proceeded on alone to Park Square. Here Bean used his key to let himself into the gardens in the centre of the square. These gardens, nothing to look at from the street -a wire fence, a scrubby (but impenetrable) hedge, the tops of the trees - are a park themselves when you get inside. They might be the grounds of some great country house with their green lawns, curved flower-beds, tall trees and flowering shrubs, lovely in their peace and tranquility. Bean never noticed the beauty but he liked exclusivity. He liked anything that put him among an elite, permitted privileges and pleasures few might enjoy. Here was an opportunity for another shot, a red blaze of flowering shrub that might serve for someone's Christmas card. The path to the Nursemaids' Tunnel descends in a shallow sloping curve between brick walls to the portico which is the tunnel entrance. It gave Bean a bit of a shock to find himself not alone in the tunnel. There was someone in there, far up ahead. He would have thought nothing of this if the figure had been on the move, striding towards him or away from him, but whoever it was was leaning against the wall on the left-hand side at the Park Crescent end, holding a bottle to his lips. A street sleeper. Another of Effie's ilk. Like most people, Bean was afraid of the street people, and particularly afraid when with one in a confined space. He was a small man, far from young, and borzois, though large dogs, bred to hunt the wolf, are fine-boned and seldom aggressive. Bean could have turned back. He could have gone back and crossed the Marylebone Road at the lights by Regent's Park tube station. But he didn't want the man with the bottle to see this happen, to see him turn tail and of course understand perfectly why he had retreated. For he, Bean was a man of power and if he turned he would have yielded power into the hands of this dirty reject, this piece of flotsam fit for nothing but a city's siewers. He imagined broken drunken laughter echoing down the passage, reverberating off the damp walls. He hadn't much money on him but he didn't want to lose his camera. It was a Pentax and, like so much in Bean's possession, had once belonged to Maurice Clitheroe. If he'd only thought of it five minutes before he could have slipped the camera inside his jacket. How had the man got in here? They were careful with their keys, the Crown Estates. In order to obtain one you had to be a resident of the Square or the Crescent, or the adjacent terraces and mews. He touched the camera like someone fingering an amulet, and quickly drew his hand away. He walked on, somewhat more slowly than he would have done if the man with the bottle hadn't been there, but not so slowly as to show his fear. The borzoi took its normal delicate steps, loping on tiptoe, but very steady in its progress. The light at the end showed Bean a gaunt thin figure with long black hair and a beard stained blue. A momentary flashback took him sixty years into the past and a village school in Hampshire, the teacher telling them how in the distant past the inhabitants of these islands had painted their bodies with woad. Maybe the blue stuff on this roughneck's beard was woad. Bean determined not to look as he passed him, to walk past at a steady pace as if the man wasn't there or as if for some reason he hadn't _noticed that he was there. He pulled the leash tight so that Boris was close up to him on his right side. This was the kind of thug that wouldn't think twice about kicking a dog. The man turned his head to stare when Bean was about two yards from him. And Bean had to look, he had to return that stare for a single second before jerking his eyes away. In that second he received an impression of metal, of glitter, as of the man being covered in slivers of metal. It reminded him unpleasantly but irresistibly of Maurice Clitheroe's indulgence in S-M -Bean had no idea what those initials stood for but he knew what it was all right - and of some of those who came to the flat in Mr. Clitheroe's time. Leather, zip fasteners, body piercing -there had been a lot of that - and a great deal of metal in many shapes and forms, most of it sharp. Thinking of all this got Bean past the man, and the dog past the man, up the steps and out into the light. His mind had been distracted at exactly the right time. Safe, unmolested, his camera safe, he indulged himself in a spot of what the late Anthony Maddox called __l'esprit de _l'escalier and thought what he might, ought to, have said. Like, "What authority do you have to use this tunnel?" or "By whose permission are you in this private foot passage?" James Barker-Pryce CMG, MP would have done that. So would Bertram Cornell. They had the right accent; they had been to the kind of school where they taught you to think of yourself as a king of the earth. Money did that for you too. As Bean walked out of the gardens and crossed the road to the Park Crescent pavement, he realised what those metal things were. They were keys. The man had keys hanging off him everywhere and no doubt one of them was the key to this garden. Something would have to be done. Boris's home was not the house where the blue plaque testified to Marie Tempest's having once lived there, but a few doors along. The Cornells' housekeeper did what she always did and opened the basement door in the area. What was wrong with the front door? If she didn't know it, his days of being treated like a servant were over. Her attitude meant he had to go round the corner into Portland Place and all the way down the iron staircase. The borzoi trotted in, ignoring the housekeeper, leaving Bean without the least sign of affection, without a backward glance. It pushed a door open with its long nose and disappeared into the room beyond, a cold dog with no feelings. "It's Russian, you see," said the housekeeper as if that explained everything. Bean nodded. "Mr. and Mrs. Cornell away, Valerie?" The housekeeper said her employers were in France, coming back tomorrow. Even they called her Miss Conway. Apart from her friends, only Bean took upon himself the right to call her by her given name. She was getting up her nerve to tell him not to, but she hadn't got it up yet. Her revenge was to make him walk down those steps and necessarily, of course, up again. She told him there had been another burglary in the Crescent, two in fact, one of them only next door. "That must make you nervous being here on your own," said Bean. It did. But she disliked being reminded of it. "I've got the dog." Bean laughed lightly, shaking his head. "More of a pussy cat, that one," he said. "there are some rough characters about. I just saw something barely human in the tunnel, more like an alien. You don't want to open your front door to no one." "Thanks a bunch," said Valerie. She slammed the door. Bean winced a little to show his sensitivity for the benefit of any passers-by who might be watching. He favoured the statue with a passing glance, Queen Victoria's father, Prince Edward, Duke of Kent, standing on a plinth at the end of the gardens and looking down Portland Place. Someone had once told Bean he was the spitting image of the Duke and after that he had never passed the bronze figure without giving it a look. He lived a little way away in York Terrace East. Normally, he would have gone back by way of the tunnel but he didn't want to encounter the key man again. Better brave the Marylebone Road, wait a good two minutes for those lights to change, then belt across before they changed back again. It was easier without dogs pulling him like in some chariot race. He let himself into his flat. Neat as a pin, spotlessly clean, it was furnished exactly as it had been in the days of Maurice Clitheroe, its former owner, with heavy, highly polished late-nineteenth-century pieces, red and blue Turkey rugs, and in the living room a newish three piece suite covered in tan-coloured hide. This and the huge television and video reflected Bean's own taste. His kitchen was carefully geared for the freezer-microwave culture. There was no oven and there were no pans. The lot had gone on the day of Mr. Clitheroe's memorial service, along with the piano, the whip and gun collection and the pictures of two saints undergoing particularly revolting forms of martyrdom. Maurice Clitheroe had left Bean his duplex in recognition of services rendered. These had sometimes been onerous, particularly in the area of punishment, though here he had always been the executant, never the recipient. He had known where to draw the line, as for example in refusing to gratify Mr. Clitheroe's demand that both of them should wear spiked dog collars while at home alone. And in spite of this setting of limits, the flat had still been left to him according to a promise made but never taken seriously. In relation to the flat he loved - he called it a maisonette - and in which he now settled down contentedly to microwave a Linda Mc Cartney vegetable platter, Bean had only one regret. He had no opportunity to impress his clients with his address, no chance of presenting them with invoices on paper headed York Terrace, NW1. For since the owners of dogs were unable to claim income tax relief on what they paid him, every penny he received was black money, money in the back pocket, handed over in cash. His earnings from Mr. Clitheroe had never reached the tax floor, for all was found for him - his board, his lodging, even his clothes. The Inland Revenue probably thought he was dead or, more likely, had never been born. He had a look at the camera and checked that there were three frames left on the film. In her third week at Charlotte Cottage Mary was twice invited out to dinner. Her grandmother gave rather a grand dinner party for her. The nine guests and Frederica Jago sat down to deep fried _Crottin _de _Chavignol with cranberry sauce, roast guinea fowl and French apple tart with clotted cream. A heavy meal suitable for old-fashioned old people. Everyone but Mary and one of the men she sat next to was very old, so it was plain that the young or youngish man had been invited for her sake. Much the same thing happened at the other dinner party. This was given by Dorothea in Charles Lane where she lived with her husband Gordon in the house next door to the Irene Adler Museum. Everyone among the eight guests were young, so they ate roquette and corn salad in an orange and walnut dressing, red mullet with couscous and deep-fried sage leaves, followed by cherimoya sorbet with a sharon fruit could is Couples were either married or living together in long-term relationships, so it was apparent to Mary that the single (divorced) man she sat next to had been invited for her sake. Of these two men, Frederica's prot g and Gordon's friend, the former rang Mary up next day and asked if she would go to the cinema with him to see __The madness of King _George. She said no. It was not only that she had seen the film, but that of all activities likely to improve two people's knowledge of each other cinema-going must be the least effective. You met in the foyer; you sat side by side in the dark in silence; you had a drink afterwards and said goodnight. Not that she wanted to improve her knowledge of him, nor apparently did he of her, for he suggested no alternative outing. The other man, Dorothea's didn't get in touch at all. "It's humiliating," Mary said to Dorothea next day in the Irene Adler drawing room. "I wish you hadn't done it. I wish my grandmother hadn't done it." "Oh, come on. I didn't do anything. The poor man's just getting over the trauma of his wife's running off with the VAT inspector. Gordon and I try to include him in as much as we can." "And you thought this poor girl was just getting over the trauma of her boyfriend knocking her about, is that it? They'd be just right for each other? Well, he didn't think so. I haven't heard a word from him. And that is humiliating, Dorrie." Nearly as humiliating as writing to Leo Nash and getting no reply. She had been so sure of a prompt answer to her letter. What a fool to imagine the man longing to hear from her, desperate for a word, only waiting with hated breath for the chance to get in touch! "You're overreacting," said Dorothea, and she stood back, trying to decide if the framed photograph of Irene Adler looked best displayed on the mantelpiece or semi-concealed behind the half-open secret panel. It was a question which had exercised her ever since the drawing room had been created in its present mode. "He's probably just too unhappy to even think of anyone else at the moment." "Yes, I daresay. But to me it seems he must have gone home saying to himself, they needn't think they can catch me so easily. I know a trick worth two of that. And then he forgot me." As Leo Nash must have looked at the Charlotte Cottage address and the writing paper and wondered what form her patronage of him would take? "Look, if you fancy him we can maybe manage..." "I don't fancy him in the least. I'll just go on going to the cinema by myself." She said nothing to Dorothea about being lonely. Dorothea would have asked her round to Charles Lane every evening, given a dinner party for her every week. School friends, college friends would have rallied round if she had got in touch. Her cousin in Surrey had invited her for the weekend but she had said no because of Gushi. Being alone and minding it wasn't the best training for someone who was trying to be strong and independent. The weekends were the worst. There had only been three of them but they were very bad. She got up late, she read, she walked Gushi until he was exhausted and had to be carried, she walked about the West End, went to the Wallace Collection and the Planetarium. In the evenings she worked on the new catalogue and brochure she was compiling for the museum. It was better on weekday evenings. She and Gushi watched television or played the Blackburn-Norrises' CDs. At bedtime she had stopped shutting Gushi up in the kitchen where his basket was but took him upstairs with her and let him sleep on her bed. During the night he edged closer and closer up towards the bed head and now when she woke in the mornings it was to find his frondy face on the pillow beside her and as often as not her arms embracing him. For the first week, in the mornings, she had awaited the post, but nothing came except junk mail, hire car and taxi cards, fliers from a food delivery service. Her phone number was on the writing paper and when the phone rang she halfexpected a diffident, anxious male voice. But the only voice, and it wasn't diffident, was Alistair's. After the early morning call, he phoned three times. The first was to say he was coming to see her; he would be over the following evening to take her out to dinner. Her protests, her reminder that they were separated, had no effect. If not tomorrow, then the next day, he said. In the end she agreed to the second suggestion and went through agonies all next day and the next, wondering how to deal with him if he came back with her and wanted to spend the night. Seven came and seven-thirty and at seven thirty-five he phoned to say he couldn't make it. She was relieved and at the same time angry. Angry with herself as much as with him for the two miserable days she had spent. That afternoon she had been so distracted that she had told an American tourist Irene Adler had lived in St. John's Wood Terrace and her royal lover had been the King of Serbia. Alistair phoned for the third time to say he was worried about her health. He had made an appointment for their GP to see her. "It's at eight-thirty on Thursday morning." "Alistair, as you know, I haven't got a car. Do you really think I'm coming to Willesden at that hour?" "Of course you'd stay the night here." "I'm perfectly well. I don't need a doctor." She tried to speak pleasantly to him, to be polite but firm, but when she said goodbye his furious shouting down the receiver made her tremble. All of it made her ask herself if she had been right to take on this dog-sitting and house-minding at Charlotte Cottage. Of course she could not have stayed with Alistair, that was plain, but should she perhaps have gone first to her grandmother, and then found herself a place in a shared flat? To be with other people... It was too late now. Outside it was sunny again, a warm still evening. Two people walked by, on their way out into Albany Street, their arms round each other. Loneliness was worse on fine evenings when the red sun went down over the horizon of a great city and the night sky grew purple, though with no chance of seeing the stars. She took Gushi on her lap and watched television. The little dog was out with Bean and the others when the post came in the morning. A flier from a company selling exercise trampolines, another from Express Tikka and Pizza, and an envelope postmarked NW1. Her habitual hesitation at opening letters she told herself to abandon now; stop it once and for all. It was all part of the fearful temperament she had to learn to overcome. In a cool controlled way she went into the living room, picked up the paper knife and slit open the envelope. She looked at the photograph first. A passport size photograph taken in one of those station or super-market kiosks of a man's pale, thin face in front of a pleated curtain. To herself she was calling it anaemic before she realised what she was saying. Of course he was anaemic. Anaemia had nearly killed him... The eyes were light and clear, the hair so fair as to be almost white, the features regular, classical: thin lips, straight nose, very high smooth forehead. A handwritten letter from the Plangent Road address. __Dear Mary _Jago, she read, __I am the man whose life you saved with your more than generous donation. You not only saved it, you made it good again, worth living. I want you to know that I am well now, thanks to you. __Since you have given me your name and address, I think you must want us to get in touch. I hope I am not being presumptuous in saying that you may want us to meet as much as I want it. __I will not put you to the trouble of phoning me or writing back. In fact, I should make a comfession and tell you I have no phone. Today, as I write, is Monday and you will get this letter by Wednesday at the latest. If I do not hear from you to tell me you would rather not meet me, I will be at an outside table at the Rese Garden restaurant in Regent's Park, the one north of the lake, from 5dd30 till 630 on Friday. __I won't say, do come. But I hope you will come. Yours sincerely. Leo Nash.

Chapter Six

Most of the street sleepers, the dossers, the dropouts, the jacks men, were on the street because they had nowhere else to be. They were without roofs of their own, or roofs rented, to put over their heads. This was not true of Roman, who had had a roof, who had had his own home, but who was on the street because he had no more choice than those others, because the outside was the only option if he was to continue to live. If he was to live. An alternative there had been, the alternative open to all. "Skipping out" on the canal bank, he had thought many times of sliding into the cold water one night, having first ripped his brain and his senses apart with the me ths and water mixture, cloudy white fluid the jacks called milk. The faith he no longer had stopped him. His Polish mother had brought him up a Catholic and if all of it was gone now, all dispelled by reason and science, vestigial fear remained, some absurd awe of the sin against the Holy Ghost. So the street it had to be. Because home was unlivable in, a hollow place that howled at him, empty, empty, never to be filled again. A place so haunted that he had to hide his face from the staring walls and stuff bedding into his mouth to keep himself from crying out. And not just that house of his, but any house, flat, hotel, shelter, he might move to. It was as if claustrophobia of a kind never before experienced had come to him with loss. Just as an inability to work had come, to go about among ordinary people. He was obliged to avoid every aspect of life as he had known it, if he was to survive and not curl up somewhere into a foetus that screwed up its eyes and hid its face in its frog's paws. Only the outside was feasible to him, where those he encountered took it for granted that he was set apart, that he was to some degree mad. This was the point, he should be the wandering Jew, or Oedipus. And if he had not put out his own eyes, nor had he his daughter with him as companion. It was possible to have been too happy. He knew that now and because, at first, after it first happened, he lamented that he had been as happy as that, wished his had been a bad or broken marriage, his children ugly and stupid - because of these indefensible thoughts he had cut himself off from everything, expelled his family from his mind, and then expelled everything else from his life. The idea was to have nothing to remind him, to make everything different; no roof over his head, no job, no friends, no social life, no familiar things around him. If he was going to run away, and he was, it had to be a proper running away, complete, absolute, the old life shed in every aspect. Until the fair girl spoke to him and he spoke to her. He had been up to Primrose Hill where nuns give out tea and bread and butter to the home_ so at five in the afternoon. It was in some novel of Graham Greene's that he had come upon that phrase "a phony and a fake", and he applied it often to himself. For he had a home he had put into the hands of agents and sold. The money derived from that sale stopped him using the hostels and the day centres, to which others had a better right than he; it stopped him taking money passers-by offered him; but he drew the line at the nuns' tea. He drank the tea and ate the bread and butter and left a pound coin on the table. A lot of Irishmen were up there from the gloomy Victorian hostel in Camden Town. Their life expectancy, he had read somewhere in Talisman Press days, was forty-seven. The me ths would do for them - that and the cold and the poor diet. What you learn when you drop out of life! Roman wandered down Regent's Park Road and took the St. Mark's bridge over the canal. He counted seven houseboats moored alongside each other in Cumberland Basin and one in front of the Chinese teahouse. On its flat roof a woman lay sunbathing in a green bikini. The finger of the minaret pointed into a pale blue sky on which the tiny clouds made a net. He thought of Omar Khayyam and the Sultan's turret caught in a noose of light. The sun made the Mosque's golden roof too bright to look at. He crossed the Outer Ciracle and came into the Broad Walk. It was wild and thickly treed up here, no flowerbeds, the neat lawns distant. Roman sat down for a while on one of the seats by Sir Cowasjee Jehangir's drinking fountain. An engraved legend told him it had been put there from gratitude for a benevolent Raj's mercy to Parsees. A man's face in stone looked out from the column above the inscription. Since its foundation, how many thousands had drunk its water, how many horses once refreshed themselves at its troughs? The Parsees placed their dead on towers of silence for the vultures to take, to eat and pick their bones. He had been so placed, awaiting his fate. From the zoo behind him came an animal sound, a loud grunt or trumpeting. He and Sally had never brought their children to the zoo but had taken them only to Parkland where the big cats run free, to Woburn and Longleat. Slipping into his meditative mood, his remembering time, he recalled the Longleaf day: the glorious weather, Elizabeth drawing pictures of a lioness and cubs on her sketch pad, the whole of it rather marred for him by his ridiculous anxiety. The car's windows opened automatically at the press of a switch; they weren't the wind-down kind. He had heard of those windows going wrong, of sticking either in the open or the shut position. What if something should go wrong, one of the children open a window and the window refuse to close again? If lions surrounded the car, if the car broke down... Later, when they were home again, he discovered that Sally had been thinking in just the same way, with exactly the same fears. But it was often so. They had shared thoughts, fears, happiness, read each other's minds. Strange then that he had never prevised what had actually happened to his children, to his wife. His fears had been no more than fantasies or sops to a providence in whom he had no belief. They were never actual anticipations of real disaster with the corollary of what will I do if they are all taken from me? How will I feel? How will I survive? And when it happened he had been without fear for some time, had rid himself of all but normal anxiety now Elizabeth was nearly fifteen and Daniel eight. Roman did not usually think of that day. He did not relive the moments in which the news had been brought to him. For one thing, he could hardly remember what his feelings had been. An amnesia had descended and left him with a memory of beforehand and -horribly, agonisingly- twelve hours afterwards. The lost hours between he no longer tried to recapture. But he did think sometimes - and he thought now, as he got up again and walked away from the stone column, the tower of silence -of that later aftermath, of the awful recurring disbelief, of sleep which came so readily and so easily, sleep in which everything could be buried, but which had to be resisted, for when he woke the truth returned as fresh and new as when it was first told him. Sleep, which is supposed to be a blessing, "the balm of hurt minds", could be a curse too. Who would want a painkilling drug that when its effects wore off, brought worse suffering? It was different now. Denial was past and forgetfulness never came. He lay down to sleep on some doorstep in the full acceptance of what had happened and his waking was to the naked knowledge of their doom and his fate. There was no longer room for illusion. But in those early days before he took to the street, he would wake in the morning, turn to the pillow beside his and wonder where Sally was, up so early. Then, like some slow rumbling explosion, growing in magnitude before the final roar, it had all returned to him and he groaned aloud his irrepressible pain. He whimpered and groaned and relived his homecoming that evening - the arrival of the police on his doorstep, their kindness and their total inability to soften what they called "the blow". That was when he had taken his decision to deny, expel, bury, pretend. Now he had reached a point in the progression of his survival when he could control his memories. He was no longer at the mercy of these things bursting and breaking into the fabric of his general sadness. They were there, always there, the trigger of his madness, but he need not relive them nor see ouat in reality he had never seen: the crash explode, metallic and black and red, on his inner eye. He could expel them and think instead of another happy time - of Daniel's last birthday, dinner at Mc Donald's for fifteen little kids and __Beauty and the _Beast at the cinema afterwards. Elizabeth had come, a great concession, a considerable kindness, from a teenager to a small boy. Roman turned into Chester Road and entered the Inner Circle by the golden gates. Sally had always liked the Rose Garden, but later than this, a month later, when the roses were in bud and their scent was still a delicate breath on the air. The precision of the garden had pleased her, its order, the considerable taste that had gone into its arrangement. He left the gardens by the gate at the Open Air Theatre and walked on. As he crossed the Long Bridge over the northern arm of the lake he heard footsteps behind him and looked back. It was the fair girl. She was late, she was running, and he wondered if she was meeting someone. It surprised him very much that she spoke to him. This was their third encounter and in any other circumstances that would have been enough to merit a greeting. But Roman had learned that street people merit nothing and those who see them every day still ignore them with averted eyes. Thousands never see them at all, any more than they notice the litter that lies everywhere. So when she smiled and said "Hallo," he was too astonished to reply. He could only stare at her. "It's a lovely day," she said. He found his lost ve ice "Nes," he said: "Yes, it is. Lovely." Instead of continuing to walk, he paused and leant against the parapet of the bridge. He didn't want her to think he was following her and perhaps be frightened. For a moment she had made him feel like a man again, an insider, and he was not at all sure that he wanted that. The Rose Garden restaurant had a romantic sound. It turned out to be a building like a cluster of mushrooms, little domed roofs bunched together, and on a terrace little hexagonal tables. Mary took care to approach from the direction he wouldn't expect her to come from. She wanted to see him before he saw her. Not that there was any idea in her mind of turning tail if it should be someone who appeared uncongenial sitting there, but rather to prepare herself. Preparations were a commonplace in her life. She prepared herself before opening envelopes for what might be inside them, before answering the phone, before meeting someone new. She must make sure. She must compose her face, her smile. There might be several lone men sitting at tables, waiting for women. All she knew of him was from that photograph and that he was six years younger than herself. He would expect her to come from the Inner Circle or perhaps up the path and past the kiosk on Holme Green. Instead, she came out of the gardens. Most of the tables outside the restaurant were occupied, couples, foursomes, two men together, three women together, one man alone, but he was forty at least. She was standing still now, her eyes travelling from table to table. Then she saw him. It was a boy she expected but this was a man, yet unmistakably the original of the photograph. Unexpected heat came up into her face and she felt it colour her cheeks. As she had thought, he was watching for her to come from past the lake and across the road, but he turned his head as if that flush had communicated itself to him. She moved then and made her way to his table. He stood up then and held out both his hands, a tall very thin man. "Mary Jago," she said. "Leo Nash," he said, "or Oliver." He had dropped his left arm as if he thought the act of taking both her hands, which he had evidently planned to do, was too forward. She put her hand into his and found it cold. He looked older than his age, a little worn, which was natural after so much illness and stress and surely fear. His features would have been handsome but for his pallor. Light grey eyes met her green eyes and she thought, with a little shock, that he and she were alike to look at; they might have been brother and sister. "Now I'm here and you're here," he said, "I don't know what to say. And that's ridiculous because I've rehearsed things to say so many times. I've made speeches to myself, trying to express my gratitude but I'm dumbstruck in your presence." "Not quite." She tried a laugh but she was breathless. "I'd call you highly articulate." "Only in a nothing-to-say kind of way. At least I can ask you if you'd like some tea. Would you? Or a drink? Or tea and cakes? What would you like?" He hadn't had a phone which meant he was seriously poor. His clothes were just the young man's uniform, jeans, a T-shirt, a sweatshirt draped over his shoulders, giving nothing away. "Tea would be fine," she said. While he gave the order to a waitress, she sat looking at him in silence. Whatever she had expected it was not this. His appearance, yes, but not her feelings. The knowledge that this fragile, thin, pale man's body contained the marrow from her own bones, a healing elixir which had restored his health affected her so profoundly that she felt almost faint. She hung forward in her chair and closed her eyes. It was as if she had slept with him the night before for the first time - no, it was more than that, almost as if she were in love with him. He spoke gently: "Are you all right?" Her hands were over her eyes: She took them away, and looked at him. His face was concerned, a little taken aback. "I'm sorry," she said. "You must think me an awful fool." He shook his head. "You expected someone different?" "Oddly enough, no. I can't say I expected you but you're not a surprise. I had your photograph." She made a great effort. "I mean, I'd prepared myself to see you and I had a good idea what you'd be like, but really seeing you, really sitting here with you - well, it's a strange sensation." "Strange, but good. For me, at any rate." "Would you - would you tell me how it's been for you. I mean, your recovery. Or is that an intrusion on your - well, your privacy?" He laughed, but gently. She was finding it hard not to look directly into those clear grey eyes. The spell of them was broken by the arrival of tea. Cakes came for him, fruit tarts, a cream horn. "I am supposed to eat a lot," he said. "Eat well, they're always saying to me. I expect they mean fruit and vegetables, not cream cakes." This time she could smile. "Would you tell me about it?" "The transplant, do you mean?" "Yes, I think so. The whole thing. Your illness, the transplant, all of it. I want to hear it from you." "Wouldn't that be very self-indulgent on my part?" Her self-confidence was growing. "Think of it as indulging me." "All right. That certainly makes it easier." He hesitated. He was eating a cream slice with a child's enjoyment. It amused her to see him lick the cream from his fingers, look up and give her a wide frank smile. "I'd just finished university," he said. "I was looking for work. I was getting anxious I'd never find anything, and at first I thought the pain was - well nerves. That's how it started, with this awful pain." He wrinkled up his eyes, remembering. "A sharp pain in my side. I thought it was appendicitis. I went to my GP and he said it was gastro-enteritis. But I'd never had anything like it before, I couldn't believe what he said. Then the pain got intense, acute. Do you really want to hear this?" "Of course I do." "I've got an older brother. He's important to me - he's like a best friend. I told him and he rushed me to Casualty. The hospitkl found my spleen was three times its normal size. It had a lot to cope with. It had taken over the function of my white blood cells. They told my brother and then they told me." "It must have been a great shock." "Like being stunned by a totally unexpected blow. One minute I was a normal healthy man, or so I thought, a man with a pain in his stomach, and then - this. They operated and took out my spleen. They told me I had AML -Acute Myeloid Leukaemia. I thought it was a death sentence." "But you went to the Harvest Trust?" "Not at first. I'd been told I should have a bone marrow transplant. With siblings the chance of matching tissue is one in four so I was hoping against hope my brother would match. He was willing." She saw him clench his hands. He spoke with intensity. "He was more than willing. He was longing for the chance to help me. We're very close." "But his tissue didn't match?" "As I said, I'd felt under sentence of death. When they told me about this one in four chance all that changed. I was so sure it would be all right. You know, if you were told you had to have surgery and there was a one in four chance of coming out of the anaesthetic you'd be sure you'd die, wouldn't you? I would. I was sure one in four meant my brother's tissue would match. I was so confident I didn't even think much about it. He was my brother; we had the same genes, the same colouring, the same sort of looks. I knew it would be all right." "They tested him and he wasn't compatible. I couldn't believe it at first. I thought they must have made a mistake. But they hadn't." He sighed, then brightened. "Still, if my brother had been able to make the donation I wouldn't have met you." "I doubt if that would have bothered you much," Mary said. "You wouldn't have known I existed" He put his head a little on one side, as if considering what she had said. "My brother tried to find a donor. He had leaflets printed and put them through a thousand doors. Can you imagine? Most people just ignored them but a lot came forward for tests. One of them was compatible, but he turned out not to be suitable. I knew I'd die unless a donor was found. That's a very unpreasant feeling. It throws you into a panic, knowing you've got something that can be cured, or at any rate arrested, and the drug, serum, whatever, is everywhere, maybe even quite common, but you can't find it. It's hidden away; it may be inside lots of people you see in the street but you can't get at it. Then the hospital told us about the Trust." "Go on." He recalled the day the Harvest Trust told him there was someone prepared to make the donation and his happiness at this good news, his excitement, later on his realisation of reprieve. "I'd lived with the dread that I'd never see twenty-two. That was going to be my next birthday. Now here was a bunch of people telling me the chances were I would. I'd tried to get used to despair, to my fate, and now I had to get used to hope." There was a setback when they were afraid his condition had deteriorated too far for him to be eligible for the transplant. But he seemed stable and they had gone ahead. While this was going on, he said, he thought of her all the time. "I thought of "Helen". Maybe I'm a bit of a hero-worshipper. I worshipped my brother, still do, and now here was this woman for me to worship, this unknown woman. You were a saviour to me, a sort of saint." She disliked the ease with which she blushed. Never in her life before had she had such cause for blushing. Her face flooded with colour. "But it was _nothing," she said, surprising herself by her own vehemence. "It was _nothing." "I'm not at all sure _I would have done it," he said. "Getting over the transplant, I had a lot of leisure to think. I thought about it a lot - what would I have done if I could have made a donation, and I decided I wouldn't have. I'd have been afraid." His eyes seemed filled with adoration. Embarrassed, awkward, but unable to stop looking at him, she tried to leave the subject, to deflect things. "What about work? You couldn't have worked while all this was going on. How have you lived?" Again she had perhaps gone too far. "I'm sorry, I couldn't ask..." "You can ask me anything." The words fell calmly. His total openness almost frightening. The sense of intimacy made her shiver a little, for although they had been there less than half an hour it was as if she had known him for a long time. "No, I'm sorry," she said again, weak now with attempting she hardly knew what. "I have no right to pry like this." "_You can ask me anything. After all, I'm yours, aren't I?" "What do you mean?" she said. "Nothing to make you look so - so fearful. Don't you know that when you save a man's life he belongs to you? Like a servant. In the true sense of that word, I mean. Someone who will devotedly serve you." Her hands were on the table surface and he put his over them. The hands he had reached out to take hers and had withdrawn from shyness or some sense of decorum, he now placed over her hands and let them rest there with increasing pressure. The touch was extraordinarily comforting. "My brother kept me," he said. "I have a job now. It's only part-time and it's not much. I work for him, my brother. It's not the kind of thing I had in mind. I'd been to a great university, I had high hopes of my future, but still, it's work. I was glad of anything once I knew I was going to live." She waited for him to say what he did, what the work was, but he didn't say. The bill came. As he was taking it from the waitress's hand, Mary said: "No, let me." This time he laughed. The girl was standing there listening, but he didn't seem to mind. "You're remembering I said I hadn't a phone. I only meant I hadn't a phone of my own. I've been sharing a flat with my brother since I got ill. I had to, I couldn't manage on my own." Her hands felt cold now he had taken his away. She was aware that with the coming of evening it was no longer warm. She stood up. "I'll walk you to Park Village, shall I? Oh, don't look like that. I'm quite well. You've made me well, remember? I can walk long distances, Mary." It was the first time he had used her name and she was unprepared for the rush of pleasure it brought her. They passed into the Broad Walk and made their way northwards. The bearded man she had encountered earlier was once more on one of the seats, once more reading. She prepared to smile at him and say hallo, but he kept his eyes on the page. Leo began to talk of the curious coincidence of their living so near to each other. He called her Mary again and managed to give the name a prettier sound than anyone else had. She looked back once but the man on the seat had gone.

Chapter Seven

There had not even been a period of wondering where they all were, of apprehensiveness, doubt, the tickle of speculation, fear growing from unexplained absence and the silent phone. He knew, or thought he knew. They were in Woodbridge, at his motherin-law's. It was school holidays, the October half-term, and Sally had driven herself, Elizabeth and Daniel, up into Suffolk to see her mother who had been ill. They were to stay overnight. Afterwards, in a kind of mad obsession with figures, dates, sums, he had tried to calculate how often she had made that journey in the previous fifteen years; how often she and he and all of them had made it. Two hundred times? More? Looking back over the years, consulting his diary, he eventually came to the precise figure of two hundred and twenty-three times. Anything to distract his mind, keep it, if only for minutes, in the emotionless drought of measurements and number. That number of times she had driven it without incident, without event almost, with nothing approaching a narrow escape. He hadn't been anxious. Of course he hadn't. Not once had he been tempted to pick up the phone and check. They were there with Sally's mother. Perhaps they would phone him and then perhaps they wouldn't. When he had eaten he might phone Sally's mother and ask how she was. But he doubted later if he had thought those things at the time. He hadn't been thinking of them at all. His mind had been elsewhere, concerned with a manuscript purporting to be the diary of a runaway slave who had married a Havasupai woman that Talisman might buy if it could be authenticated and the price wasn't too hcgh. He had brought a copy of it home with him. It lay on the kitchen table, open at page four. Strange that now he couldn't even remember whether or not Tom Outram had bought that book. He was pottering about, getting himself a meal. Not defrosted pizza but baked beans, because he preferred tins to the microwave. He read another paragraph while he was opening the tin. There was a bottle of Meursault in the fridge, halffull (or half-empty If you were a pessimist, though he never had been), its neck corked with one of those wine-saver stoppers. He had poured himself a glass of wine while he was heating up the beans. The slave's diary probably wasn't genuine, was fiction, but might be all the more publishable for that... The doorbell rang at one minute to seven. He thought it was someone collecting for a charity. He went to the door feeling for his wallet in his pocket. The police officers gave him no details then. That came later. He learned all about it later. Then, at one minute to seven, his glass of wine half-drunk, his baked beans burning on the stove till the police-woman turned off the plate, they asked him to sit down; they told him of an accident, then of serious consequences, then of fatality. He had stared at them. He remembered asking them to repeat what they said, he was so certain his hearing was playing tricks. He _couldn't have heard that, this _couldn't be happening to him. For a long time he associated the smell of burnt tomato sauce with the collapse of his life, the loss of all that made his happiness. Once he had smelt it in a workmen's cafe in Camden Town and felt as sick as if he had swallowed poison. The day after the police came he learned that Sally had been driving carefully, prudently, obeying all the rules, within the speed limit. Elizabeth was beside her in the passenger seat, Daniel in the back. The car had come to a stop at a level crossing over the Eastern Region railway line somewhere near Ipswich. It was at the foot of a hill. The lorry behind her, a twenty ton container from the docks at Felixstowe with defective brakes, came down the hill too fast and slid into the back of the car, precipitating it through the closed crossing gates into the path of the oncoming train. The three of them were killed instantly. The driver of the train was injured but all the passengers were unhurt. As for the lorry driver, he had a bang on the head and badly bruised knuckles. Two hundred and twenty-three times it had been alright and all those times that two hundred and twenty fourth time had been waiting to happen, coming nearer every time, with the force of destiny. If you believed that sort of thing. Roman didn't. He didn't go to the inquest but he went to the funeral. He _was the funeral. Sally's dying mother was there and Sally's sister but he hadn't wanted anyone else and had told people not to come. He slept heavily that night and woke in the belief that Sally had got up early, would appear in a minute with tea for him. The knowledge and pain pouring back tore from him cries of violent protest. Two weeks afterwards, having resigned from the Talisman Press, he put his house on the market and took to the outdoors. The funeral, that surreal occasion, was the event he thought had tipped him over the edge into insanity. Or whatever the condition was he had developed and had lived with. The three coffins, carried up the aisle of that stark crematorium by men in black coats, made a picture Ernst might have painted, or perhaps Magritte. He saw the se ene over and over as such a picture, stuck somewhere on the other side of reality in that world where bad dreams live and drug induced hallucinations. Curiously, since he had admitted the past, it was liable to come back at all sorts of odd times and print itself in front of his eyes. Now was one of those times as he walked across Prince Albert Road, making for St. John's Wood churchyard, called "Church Gardens". Cars had stopped for him at the pedestrian crossing but he hardly saw them. One of them hooted to hurry him along. Before his eyes the three coffins passed, carried by strong young men, the kind of young men only seen dressed like that at funerals, their fresh faces lugubrious, their eyes downcast. There had been no flowers. Of course not. How could anyone suggest anything so ludicrous? Well, no one had suggested it. His whole life, his past, his present and his future, lay in three wooden boxes. He sat, unresponsive, in a pew, looking at the boxes while a very young man with an Adam's apple like a swallowed toffee going up and down in his throat, talked in a Potteries accent about the resurrection and the life. The picture dimmed as he reached the opposite pavement. By now the light was fading as the cruel vision had faded. The churchyard would soon be closed. Police patrolled the Park to clear it of vagrants before and after closing time but Roman had found he could sometimes elude them in this shady place outside its gates and make himself a bed among the old tombs. He blinked his eyes and saw only the green turf, the flowerbeds, and the trunks of plane trees, their bark like grey skin peeling here and there to show the lemon colour beneath. The leaves of planes, the beeches and the white beams looked very pale and tender in the fading light. All white things shone with a curious radiance. Having walked many miles this fine day, Roman walked further. He did as he always did in the church gardens and looked at the grave of John Sell Cotman, the watercolourist who had died a hundred and fifty years ago, and at Joanna Southcott's, the religious visionary, she of "the Box", dead before the Battle of Waterloo. On most of the grey gravestones the lettering was no longer decipherable but eroded by time and weather. The bluebells were nearly over but the borage aped their colour and the cow parsley shimmered as in a country lane. He sat down on one of the seats, leant back his head and closed his eyes. Once he had been a man very conscious of comfort, one who chose a mattress with care, sparing no expense. Armchairs had to be soft and have footrests. But in his wanderings he had lost all interest in comfort and scarcely noticed whether he lay down to sleep on paving stones or on the comparative luxury of a lawn. After a while he was aware of the presence of someone else in the gardens. Not the police, that was not their tread. It was Effie's footsteps that he heard. He opened his eyes. She came up to the seat and sat down on the other end of it, giving him a shy sideways glance, looking away, saying nothing. Only another dosser sits on the seat where a dosser already is. She was quite a young woman, younger than he, though at first he had taken her for old. Her stoop made him think so - that and her wizened hands and thick bandaged legs. But when she took off the old cap she wore and unwound the woollen scarf from her head, it was a round unlined face he saw with a full vulnerable mouth and the ox eyes the Greeks said Hera had. It was in his own first winter that he first encountered her, for she had been on the street a shorter time than he. A mild March had still been March, damp and by night very cold. In this same churchyard, though not on this same bench, she had sat beside him and as darkness came - it seemed like night but it was only six -laid her hand first on his knee, then shifted it to close the fingers between his legs. Once he would have been shocked. He would have recoiled from her and left in haste. But a mild interest was all he felt, that and curiosity and a wonder that after long celibacy, after five months of banishing sexual thoughts, his flesh responded to this tramp woman's touch and it was a full erection she held in her warm, surprisingly feminine hand. Even then he had not shaken off his old, ingrained sense of superiority, of belonging to an elite, and as he moved with her on to her blanket spread on the grass, into the well of darkness between tombstones, it was a favour he felt he was doing her. He was being kind. He was enduring the earthy smell of her, the fishy smell, the burrowing of her hands, out of generosity. The unknown, dark and glutinous place into which he slid was honoured by him; God knew what he risked, by this grace of his. But when it was over and for the first time since he had known her he saw her smile, felt the arms that had gone round him squeeze in a hug, he understood in a blinding revelation that she believed _she had been generous to _him. Hers was a proud smile and the arms that held him almost maternal. Out of pity perhaps or empathy, she had given him the only thing she had to give. It was a lesson to him. He was ashamed. Only later, when she had left the churchyard, dragging her bundles, he recalled with a shiver of relief at whatever had reprieved him, how near he had been to paying her, to handing over a ten-pound note with a word of thanks. Now, with Effie seated beside him again, he felt nothing of what he had once felt before he was married and encountered by chance and alone a woman with whom he had had a one-night stand: embarrasment, awkwardness, a threatening presence. The streets and the street people had changed him. Social graces and social inhibition had departed and with them the fear of what others might say or think. He would have no more sex with Effie but it would cost him no embarrassment to tell her so or show her so. Turning his head, he smiled at her, and reaching into the bag in his barrow, said: "Do you want a drink? I've only got coke." She shook her head. She was one of those who had bad days and, less often, good days, and he could tell from the way she contemplated her hands, turning them palms upper must then on to the palms and back again, muttering softly, that this day was bad. What it was she saw on her hands - blood perhaps, or a rash, stigmata or ineradicable dirt - he could not tell. The hands looked like any woman's to him, but rough and prematurely aged. She turned them over and back, examining them more and more closely. "I'm going to bed now," he said. "I'm going to sleep." She turned her hands, looked at the dirty nails with the concentration of a woman who has just painted hers and admires them. "Goodnight, Effie." He would have been surprised if she had answered. She put her hands on her knees, then sat on them. She aimed a kick at one of her bundles as if it disgusted her, its weight, the need always to carry it, the ugly mud-green colour of the plastic. The bundle rolled a few feet away along the path. Roman sometimes felt the streets were one vast sprawling psychiatric ward and he just as much an inmate as any of them. He got up, walked for a little and found himself a place to sleep between two flat granite slabs, from which the lettering had disappeared. The turf in there was composed of short grass and moss in equal proportions. Beyond the railings, lit now by the wash from yellow lamps, loomed the fronts of a huge block of flats, Byzantine, white and terra cotta The traffic climbing up to Hampstead on the Lord's side sounded like the sea, the tide coming in over a shingle beach. But in here now it might have been a country churchyard, Stoke Poges perhaps, quiet, serene, with that indefinable air of resignation and rest and deep peace that prevails in all places where graves are. Roman spread his ground sheet for he had experienced the results of doing without one, and over it his sleeping bag. Into this he climbed and lay relaxed, looking out at the red brickwork and the white stucco between the long slender stems of churchyard weeds. He had long forgone the use of a pillow. Because it was appropriate he recited what he could remember of Gray's _Elegy. Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire; Hands, that the rod of empire might have sway'd, Or waked to ecstasy the living lyre. Halfway through the next verse he fell asleep. Darkness is not long enduring in the middle of May and dawn comes at five. It was growing light but not yet sunrise when Effie woke him, shaking his shoulders, her face close up to his face. At first he thought this was another overture she was making to him, though even by the standards of her world and his, it would have been a rough method. "No, Effie," he said. "No." And because any excuse he might make or reason he might give would be false and a prevarication, he said, "That was just for once. No more of that." For answer, she grasped a handful of the pullover and T-shirt covering his right shoulder, and with her other hand flung out, pointed northwards towards Wellington Place. It was a gesture melodramatic, almost Gothic, in intensity. Her face worked. She always found speech difficult, from some natural impediment or later trauma, and now she managed only: "On the rails! See the rails!" He made an immediate association with trains. She must mean the Jubilee Line that passed underneath them on its way to St. John's Wood Station. He got to his feet, stretched his stiff legs and flexed his arms. Sleeping outdoors sometimes felt good but it left a dull numbness in the bones. One had a clear head but aching limbs and back. He rubbed his eyes. He followed Effie along the path where she preceded him with steps that flagged more and more until they stopped altogether. "Where is it, Effie?" She was shaking her head, not to deter him but as if the only hope for her was to deny what she had seen, what she wanted to show him. "Where do you want me to go?" She pointed. Her plump vulnerable face, turned to him with pleading in every feature, was full of grief. The finger she extended trembled. On an impulse he seized her hand and held it tightly in his own. The sky was lightening but here among the trees in the dense boskiness, it was still dark, the shadows blacker than they ever are by day. She seemed to be leading him to the churchyard's northern boundary. There was no sound of traffic, no wind blowing, only a heavy silence. He seldom saw the early morning, for he slept most deeply in those hours just before and just after dawn. The sky astonished him. It was a clear jewel-like unclouded blue. Effie clutched his sleeve. She pulled him up the path towards the main gate in Wellington Place that faces Cochrane Street. There, on the railings to the left of the gates, he saw it. The rails, she had said, the rails. Now he saw what she meant. The man's body seemed to be impaled on the spikes of the railing. The upper part of it hung head downwards into Wellington Place and a single hand showed, half-clenched, claw-like. The lower part of the body was on this side, in the churchyard. Booted feet drooped and thin bony ankles showed below the ragged hems of dark dirty jeans. Effie began to make gibbering sounds, throwing her hands about. He hesitated, his heart beating fast. Then he went up to the railing, reached between the bars and touched the dead man's cold hand. That was how he knew he was dead, because the hand was so cold. He fancied he recognised the face but he couldn't be sure. The clothes that were nearer to rags showed him to be one of the street people. There was never any mistaking that. When he saw the place where the spike had entered the body and the blood, now dry and black, en crusting spike, rags and wound, he turned away from that tower of silence and looked instead up at the clear, blue, remorseless sky.

Chapter 8

Most callers at the Irene Adler that day and the next came to ask directions to the site of the murder. They bought entrance tickets but few of them lingered. It was the murder scene they wanted, and to waste no time getting there. "Turn left into St. John's Wood Terrace, left again into the High Street and take the first turning on your right. You'll know it by the scene-of-crime tapes." Mary and Dorothea could have recited that formula in their sleep, though neither of them had been to look at the site. If for nothing else, it was good for business. Apart from the direction seekers, there was a troop of tourists who had come on from Wellington Place, anxious to sample what else was on offer in the neighbourhood: first the boutiques of St. John's Wood High Street, the caf s for a drink; then the Irene Adler; finally the murder site to round off a day's entertainment. "I shall throw up," said Dorothea, "if anyone else tells me that poor devil died of knife wounds and the spike was just incidental decoration." Mary was squeamish and disliked hearing about it, even in reported speech, but it had not occurred to her to feel nervous about walking through the churchyard or the Park. The visitors did their best to make her afraid. "I wouldn't set foot in the Park now," said a woman in the Hat Room. "Alone or accompanied. Not even with my Great Dane. You're asking for trouble if you take a short cut that way." "But it didn't happen in the Park," said Mary. "Not that one, no. But how do you know the next one won't?" The woman began closely examining a rose-coloured hat, swathed in pink ostrich feathers. "Women were safer in those days, weren't they? Not allowed out much, protected, respected by men, always in a carriage." Mary wanted to say, not if you were working class and how about Jack the Ripper, but she didn't. It seemed unlikely that anyone who chose to kill one of the me ths drinkers from the canal bank would single her out as his next victim. When she had first heard of the murder she had thought at once of the man she had met in the Park and then she remembered the morning she had found him waking up on the Irene Adler doorstep. It was absurd the way she found herself hoping quite desperately that the corpse on the railings was not he. A photograph in the evening paper was no help. One dark-haired bearded man looks very like another, and this blurred print gave no more clues to identity than his name: John Dominic Cahill. "Irish," said the woman, now studying a black hat with a white egret apparently flying from its crown. "I suppose one mustn't be prejudiced." Mary wondered if it were she or some other visitor to the Irene Adler who had left behind, by accident or perhaps sinister design, a sheet of paper listing crimes reported in the Park during the previous year and the year before that. Stacey found it on the counter, lying beside the guides. "One grievous bodily harm, three actual bodily harms," read Dorothea aloud. "Two assaults on the police, two indecent assaults, four indecent exposures - why tell _us - nine cases of misuse of drugs, sixteen burglaries. But last year there weren't any bodily harms or assaults on the police and only five criminal damages, but _thirteen misuses of drugs." "It doesn't seem very much, any of it," Mary said. "Not in a year." She walked home by her accustomed route. As on this evening and the one before that, she was hoping to see the man that in her own mind she called Nikolai. She had read in the paper, among the many stories about vagrants and beggars that had appeared, that the street people all had nicknames. Whether this was true she didn't know but she named the bearded man Nikolai from that moment because that was Gogol's name and he had been reading _Dead _Souls. His voice interested her. Perhaps she was a snob, but she had not expected a man such as he to have a voice and an accent like his. Nor to have been reading what he was reading, come to that. She looked for him on her way home, hoping he was not John Dominic Cahill, whose nickname, the paper said, was Decker. She hoped very much that Decker and Nikolai were not one and the same. But he was nowhere to be seen. She even took the long route, crossing the Long Bridge and entering the Inner Circle. It was dull and rather windy, therefore unlikely that he would be on one of the seats in the Broad Walk. She made a detour through the shady shrubberies in the southeast corner but he was not there either. A waste of time, she told herself, and then that it would have been rather awkward if he had been there and they had suddenly come face to face along one of the dark paths. Leo Nash was taking her out to dinner. He had phoned and asked her two evenings before. Mary was gratified because she had thought her behaviour to him, her reticence, her caution, might have discouraged him. And now she hardly knew where that coolness had come from or what purpose it had served. He had walked back to Park Village West with her leaving the Park by the Gloucester Gate. It all seemed familiar to him and when she asked he told her he had always lived near the Park and always, since a small boy, loved the terraces, the villas, the lake, the glimpses of wild animals behind the zoo fencing. "And you're called Nash!" she had said. He looked at her uncomprehending. "That's right" "Nash," she said, "John Nash. He was the architect of the Park." "Ah. I've never thought of that before. I never made the connection." "Perhaps he was an ancestor." He laughed but she thought he looked disconcerted. "There are an awful lot of us in the phone book." They passed the Grotto and took the turn into the crescent of Park Village that was the longer way round. The lilac was past and it was too early for the roses. Crimson and gold wallflowers and the orange Siberian kind scented the air. Someone was cutting a lawn, the buzzing of the motor a country or suburban sound. It smelt like a florist's shop, he said, as if he had never been in a garden before and had only known cut flowers, forced flowers in pots and boxes. Mary stopped outside the gate of Charlotte Cottage. The rock garden was a mass of white and yellow and blue al pines and the first geraniums were coming out in the tubs. "What a lovely garden," he said. "The house is pretty nice too." She fancied the look he gave her was a strange one, puzzled, as if he were suddenly adrift. She had been on the point of asking him in. For a drink, a cup of coffee. We have to have these excuses, she thought, or women do. But something stopped her, some sudden feeling of distance between them. The rapport she had felt up till then was gone, reminding her that he was a stranger. After all, she didn't know him. They had only just met. What did they have in common but shared marrow in their bones? "It has been very good to meet you at last," she said, as if such warm words would soften her rejection of him. At once, in her own ears, they sounded like cold words. They sounded rigidly formal. She held out her hand, making things worse. "I hope we'll see each other again." She could see she had hurt him. He pursed his lips the way a man may do when he feels he has committed some solecism, when he has put a foot wrong but does not know where or how. "I hope that too. May I phone you?" "Of course." "Then I will. Soon." "Thank you for walking me home," she said, and she had gone quickly to let herself into the house, picking up Gushi and hugging him the moment she was inside. After that it was a relief when he phoned. She could repair the damage, make all things well between them. She had waited for him to phone but wouldn't have been surprised if he hadn't, and then she would have had to think how to get in touch with him. But he had phoned, and surely at the earliest opportunity that he could have done so without seeming too eager. His voice had been warm and friendly and had evoked from her just such a warm response. The call seemed to have released her to talk about him. When her cousin Judith phoned she spoke to her of the new friend she had made, the man who was the recipient of her transplant. She told Dorothea, who wanted to know if he was "Personable", if he was "fanciable" -when was she seeing him again? "That would be one in the eye for old Alistair." "I've only met him once, Dorrie." She told her grandmother. Frederica Jago was going to Crete on the following day with some people called Tratton, old friends who had a house there. "I know one shouldn't ever say I told you so but I did tell you he'd reply, he just took a long time about it. And he's nice?" "I think so. I think he's very nice." "Not a -what do they call them? -not a yob? My darling Mary, you needn't look like that. We do judge people by the neighbour hoods they come from." "He's a clever welleducated, quiet and, I think, rather sensitive man." "And you found that out in how long? An hour?" Mary laughed. "A bit less. Perhaps you can meet him when you get back from Crete. I must go. I've been here much longer than I meant to." Frederica insisted on calling a taxi for her. She was not to wait out in the street. The murder had been too near for comfort. "And take her right to the door, please," she said to the driver. "Into the crescent and right to the door, not just to the Albany Street corner." Mary kissed her. Her grandmother smelt delicately of vanilla. She had looked back at the house and waved as the cab pulled away, at the great late Victorian pile, stucco, red shingles, red tiles, all gleaming in yellow lamplight, and Frederica's neat tiny figure on the steps under the big bulbous portico. Leo was a little early. He had a taxi waiting, and though he came in, it was only to the hall while she shut Gushi into the drawing room. He wore a suit and this reminded her of Alistair, who dressed formally most of the time. She came back to find him studying a framed print of Christ Church in a series of Oxford college etchings on the hall wall. "I was at the House," he said. "It looks just the same." Did people still call Christ Church that? "Yes, you said you were taken ill just after you'd got your degree." He smiled at her. The smile pulled his young face into a network of radiating lines. She thought he looked ill, suddenly aged, pale as a sick old man. "Are you all right?" "Yes. Why? I'm naturally a bit wan. It's the curse of the very fair-skinned." He took her to an Italian restaurant in Paddingten Street, off Marylebone High Street. It was a place recommended by a friend of his brother's. The distance could easily have been walked. But was he fit to walk half a mile? She very much wanted to ask him how he was now. Would he stay well? Was he, in fact, _cured? She doubted if such a thing was possible. As soon as they entered the simple little restaurant Mary sensed that the food would be good, the service efficient and discreet. It was a pretty place, with wooden tables and comfortable seats instead of the rickety glass and wrought-iron kind, mirrors and paintings on the walls, flowers on every table and candles lit. While they ate he talked of the first donor who had come along. Their tissue had been compatible. in fact, it was a perfect match, as close as a brother or sister. But the man was generally in poor health and he was found medically unfit to donate marrow. "It was the most appalling disappointment. I was sure I was going to die. I tried to teach myself to be resigned to it. I even wrote out instructions for the kind of funeral I wanted to have" "Your Mother wasn't compatible?" His face was impassive. He no longer met her eyes. "My mother wasn't tested. She -well, she was afraid of the anaesthetic, of going under. She's never had anaesthesia. I can understand." This had been _her grandmother's fear. Perhaps it was common, this dread of loss of consciousness, loss of control, a brief experience of death. "There were no other relatives, then?" "Cousins. Two were tested but it was no use. Then you came along." He smiled. "In the nick of time." "I'm sure there would have been others." "No, I think not. You were the only one in the world." There was an intensity in the way he said it and the look he gave her that made her glance away. He seemed to sense her embarrassment and began to talk of indifferent things - his brother's business, a vague merchandising that meant nothing to her; the place they lived in that he would like to leave when their mother moved out. A roof over one's head was not something to be lightly abandoned. The bill came and she offered to go halves. His expression became stern, a little impatient. "No. Don't suggest it again, please." She recoiled. His severity was unexpected and, gentle herself, she reacted painfully to brusqueness in others. It was almost like being struck and she put up her hand to her cheek, remembering Alistair, fearing verbal attack almost as much as physical. Leo's smile, warm and somehow conspiratorial, a small, sharing, intimate smile, restored them to where they had been before. "The only one in the world," he said again. "You may not care for the idea but I can't help feeling that makes for a special relationship." She hesitated, then said quietly as they came into the street, "Oh, no, I feel that too. I don't see how anyone in our situation could escape feeling that." "Shall we walk back?" It was not for her, she felt, to suggest he might be incapable of walking. But now the half-mile she had first thought of as the distance between here and Park Village, in a more realistic estimate became at least a mile. "If you like." She tried to say it grudgingly. Her unwilling tone was assumed to give him the impression walking found no favour with her. If it did he chose to ignore it and they walked side by side up towards the Marylebone Road and the York Gate. To her relief he had said nothing about the murder. He was the only person she had spoken to in the past three days who had not talked of the murder. Even her grandmother had touched on it with her injunction to the taxi driver. She asked Leo about his parents and he told her his father was dead and his mother lived in Scotland, had married again after his father's death. His brother Carl was ten years older than he, a clever gifted man, he said, and he added with a smile that he was nearly as much a life-saver as she. Though Leo didn't say so, Mary had the impression Carl was gay. Leo only said that he was rather solitary, mysterious about his private life. At the utterance of this last word, the word "life", Leo put out one hand to support himself against a shop front. In the artificial light it was hard to see but Mary thought his pallor had intensified. He stood there breathing carefully, then lowered himself to sit on a wall that reached to waist height. "You shouldn't be walking." she said. "It's too far. It's too much for you." He nodded. "I'm afraid it is. I'll be all right in a moment." The smile he managed reassured her. "This still happens. They warned me it would go on happening." He seemed to be considering whether what he wanted to say would be wise. The words came out in a rush. "I'm on low-dose chemotherapy. It's--" he sought for a word " a bore." "We'll get a taxi." Quite a long time passed before one came. It was nearly eleven and Mary, who had been determined this time to ask Leo in, make coffee for him, explain to him how she came to be there and show him over the house, now saw that all this must be postponed. He opened the taxi door for her and she heard him tell the driver to take them first to Park Village west and then take him on alone to Plangent Rd. "May I see you again tomorrow? he said." "To make up for making a fool of myself tonight? In a subtle sort of way you warned me not to try walking, didn't you?" "I wanted to make you believe _I was reluctant. I couldn't do more." He turned away and said in a muffled voice, "You do everything quite perfectly." She blushed in the dark. Her cheeks burned. She wanted to tell him how glad she was he hadn't mentioned the murder, but to say anything about it would defeat the purpose of the remark. As the taxi turned into Park Village West he took both her hands in his. His hands felt warmer tonight. They exerted a strong pressure on her, not the grip of a sick man. "Tomorrow then." "Tomorrow's Saturday," she said. "All the better. May I come in the morning? May I come at ten?" "Of course." Things seemed to be progressing very fast, but why not? What harm could it do? What had she to lose? "Look after yourself," she said. "Rest. Have a good night's sleep." She was aware of the chill of the night as she stood there for a moment. All the flowers were out, gleaming monotone in the pale cold light from street lamps. From a house nearby music was coming softly but she heard a window close and then all was silent. The inside of Charlotte Cottage felt warm and Gushi like a soft comforting muff. She buried her hands in his golden fur. The weekend ahead would be the first one she had spent there that would not be lonely and herself forlorn. She took Gushi up to bed with her and dreamed of Leo Nash, a dream in which she came upon him sitting in the Park in front of an easel. He was making an architect's drawing of Sussex Place with its ten oriental domes and array of Corinthian columns. As she approached he tore the sheet off a drawing block and handed it to her saying; "You may like to see a compatible tissue type The thin paper was icy in her hands and before she could look at the drawing it had melted like snow and dripped from her fingers. A clock somewhere that she hadn't yet located was striking the last note of ten when he arrived. He put out his hand as if for a formal hand-shaking but when she placed hers in it, covered it with the other in a warm intimate gesture. The little dog came running out and without hesitation he picked it up and held it in his arms. "He is just the sort of dog I'd expect you to have." "Why?" "Small but strong, gentle and appealing, loving, childlike. Not _like you but the sort of things you like. Am I right?" "About the things I like or his being my dog?" They had come into the living room and sat down. He had glanced at the work Mary had been doing on the Irene Adler brochure and she expected him to ask her about it but instead he said, looking a little disconcerted; "Isn't he yours?" Raised eyebrows, a half-smile, his hands deep in the dog's fur. She had never seen such clear eyes, like glass, water in a smoked glass. He was in jeans this morning, a check shirt, a denim jacket. These boy's clothes restored his youth. "I am beginning to wish he was," she said. "I've got very fond of him." "You're looking after him for someone?" "The owners of this house. Did you think this house was mine, Leo?" He looked about the room, his eyes resting on a vase, a cabinet, then meeting hers again. "I suppose so. Isn't it yours?" "I'm looking after it for an old couple who are friends of my grandmother." He smiled. "The assumptions one makes!" "They've gone on holiday to Central America. They've no children and no one to look after the house and the dog. My grandmother's away too, but only for a couple of weeks. She lives in Hampstead and she's not up to coming in here every day. She's over eighty." "I'm glad you don't own this house." "Why?" He was serious now. A pair of frown lines appeared between his eyebrows. "You haven't seen where I live. I thought you might be rich. I'll tell you something. When I saw your address on the letter I almost didn't reply." "Is that why it took you so long?" It was a question, she now understood, that had bothered her for weeks. Why he had waited; why he had condemned her to waiting for the post, to rushing to the phone when it rang. She just stopped herself saying, "So that's why!" "I wanted to reply, I wanted desperately to meet you. You still don't fully realise the depths of my gratitude. But when I saw that address I was - well, deeply disappointed. Taken aback, that may be a better way to put it. I came down here, you know. I came one evening and sneaked a look at the house." "How devious," she said lightly. "I concluded you were rich and privileged. It was a natural assumption to make. You were rich and therefore not for me, never for me." "For _you?" she said, the colour flooding into her face. "A figure of speech," he said. "I'm sorry. Already I - - I think of us as close. I can't help it. You know what the Victorians used to say, flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone." "That was husbands and wives. That was the one flesh of the old marriage service." "They didn't have transplants then." His sidelong glance and half-smile took away her discomfort. "It's a lovely day. Where shall we have lunch?" "You must let me give you lunch." "Why not? I will now I know you're not rich."

Chapter Nine

Roman's children had been fond of the British Museum. Elizabeth seemed to have passed her affection for it on to Daniel and several times they had accompanied him, both particularly attracted by Egyptian antiquities. It was the Museum then that drew him when he felt the need to absent himself for a few days from his usual haunts, and he set up the nearest thing to a home he had on a doorstep in Great Russell Street. The temperature had dropped, and it was cold, but not cold like winter. He passed a lot of his time in Coram Fields, reading Bunin's stories which he bought in a second-hand shop in Theobald's Road. One day, after a visit to the baths and an attempt at smartening up, he went into the museum and on another, unprecedentedly, to the cinema. His flight from Regent's Park had been brought about by the discovery of Decker's body, though he had not known it was Decker then. For a few minutes he and Effie had stood there, not looking at it, but aware more than they were aware of anything, that it was there. In spite of himself and in spite of what he thought of as his new toughness, the result of true street wisdom, Roman had felt his throat rise and the awful black weakness that precedes vomiting take hold of him. But he had turned his eyes from that hand with the clawed fingers, from those booted feet and the blackened blood on the railing, and looked up at the cold purity of the morning sky. And slowly, while he held on to Effie and she clutched him, the nausea had passed. Whatever Effie felt, trembling and pale, looking up at him for help, also passed. He heard her sigh throatily. The street was still deserted, the place still silent. Only now was the traffic beginning to swell in Wellington Road and its muted thunder to reach them. A van passed, its driver staring straight ahead. "You go, Effie," he said. "Go into the Park. Go back through the churchyard into the Park. And say nothing. You haven't seen this. You haven't been here. Say nothing." There was little fear of that. No doubt she could speak but she seldom did more than mutter or curse passers-by who cringed from her. He looked into her face. It was blank, snub-nosed, the eyes round and protuberant, the pink-brown skin smooth like a child's. The woollen scarf that wrapped her head smelt of old damp sheep. So ingrained was his middle-class ness his education, his _gentility, that it was impossible for him ever to feel the same towards a woman as he had before he made love to her. Strange term for what had passed between him and Effie, but what other to use that would not also revolt his middle-class ness He and Effie, though in grotesque circumstances, had performed that act that must make him for ever feel some tenderness for her. He could never be otherwise than aware of a bond between them, though she hadn't spoken his name, was probably unaware of what it was. He put his arms round her, hugged her tightly and sent her off with a gentle push along the path. Then he too left the churchyard, uncertain what to do, uncertain whether to do anything. What he and Effie had seen on the railings back there he was very nearly sure no one else had seen before them. Except whoever had done this deed, always excepting him. He tramped up St. John's Wood High Street - the meaning of the word "tramp" had been made manifest to him this past year and a half -until he came to a phone box. There he calculated his chances. All calls could be quickly traced, he was sure of that, but he had his voice to rely on. An anonymous call made in the accent of Westminster School and Cambridge would hardly lead police to the vagrant with his barrow. He made his call. He reported a dead body impaled on the railings in Wellington Place. The second time they asked his name, he put the receiver back. Once, in the past, he had spent several nights asleep on the doorstep, under the Corinthian portico of the Connaught Chapel, once a church, now film studios O times! O customs! -but it was too obvious, too open. Instead, in Ordnance Hill, in the garden of an empty house with uncurtained windows and a "sold" sign outside, he made his bed on concrete steps, and rolled himself into his sleeping bag. Chilled and suddenly hungry, he was unable to sleep, and after a few minutes, perhaps ten, he heard the wail of sirens on police cars. Later in the day, he crossed into the Park by the Macclesfield Bridge. The canal walkways here were narrow lanes, for the embankments were so thickly overgrown as to be like woodland descending to the water. Planes and limes and horn beams grew there, their trunks buried among the greenery and white fronds of cow parsley. Something less than two years ago he had brought the children here and told them how an earlier bridge had been destroyed when a gunpowder boat blew up underneath it in 1874. Now he stood on the centre of the three segmental arches, looking down on to the narrow paving below him where police were questioning the jacks men. They were not in uniform but he could tell they were police. Their denim jeans were pressed and their leather jackets glossy; they were well-fed and they would not die at forty-seven. Roman thought it foolish to mock or vilify the police but he didn't love them either. His taking to the streets had removed him from that law-abiding company whose side they are on to another society that lies beyond the pale and where the police are enemies. He watched one of the jacks men, a thin grey faced Ulsterman he had once or twice talked to, go sluggishly off with the two policemen to the car parked up in Albert Road. To help in their enquiries, no doubt, to be questioned until his me ths-addled brain reached a point of incorrigible confusion. The moment they spoke to him, Roman, they would know he was different. A crank, a dropout, therefore suspicious. His voice would alert them to his eccentricity while his clothes and barrow proclaimed his vagrant status. He walked on, going southwards, through the Park, out the other side into the Marylebone Road, across it and through what Dickens, he remembered, had called "the awful perspectives of Wimpole Street, Harley Street, and similar frowning districts". Four or five days should do and then he would go back. The The sky was grey and the ramparts of these tall Georgian houses grey too, not a tree in sight, the traffic a river of shiny metal running down to Cavendish Square. When Saturday came he returned. In the sunshine of early June he came back into the Park by the York Gate, turning immediately to the left, to the water's edge and bobbing ducks, the tree-shaded lawns and the seats where Effie sometimes sat. But she was not there this morning. There was no one but the dog man with a borzoi, a beagle and a golden retriever tugging on his leash. They had gone out and had their lunch. He had let her pay for it, repeating his remark about its being all right because she wasn't rich. Afterwards they walked down to Covent Garden in the sunshine and listened to a students' orchestra playing Mozart. The Flute and Harp Concerto, Leo said, the only one for these instruments Mozart wrote, composed for a rich patron and his daughter to play together. When the music stopped and the players began packing up their instruments, he had taken her hand. Not in a handshake but gently lifted as if he meant to bring it to his lips. She looked at him, into his eyes, wondering with a small flutter of excitement, what next? What will he say next? What shall we do now? He squeezed the hand he was holding, let it fall. "I'm going to leave you here." She almost thought she had misheard. "I must go," he said. "I have to meet my brother." Did he mean her to come too? "We can get the tube if you like." She fancied a note of impatience. "No, I thought I said. I have to meet my brother. Alone." Then, belatedly, "Will you be all right?" "Of course." Disappointment came later. At first she was only astonished at this sudden departure. A kiss on the cheek was to be expected but he didn't kiss her. She watched him go off in the direction of Floral Street and the tube, that casual loose-limbed walk of his, his thinness so that his bones showed through whatever he wore, his bright fair hair. He didn't turn back to wave. She was left to go home on her own at that worst time of the week to be alone, five on a Saturday afternoon. Walking back, at last getting into the tube herself, she reflected that he had said nothing about seeing her again, seeing her soon, phoning her. In an age when the merest business acquaintances kissed at a second meeting, he hadn't kissed her. She tried to think what she had said, done, implied, how she might have offended. Nothing came to mind. I didn't know it till now, she thought, but I want to see him again. I want to see him very much. ----------Chapter Ten No man had ever brought her flowers before. She had believed it an outdated custom. Why did Alistair have to be the first? The flowers were carnations and that white stuff with myriad tiny blossoms whose name she could never remember. Alistair had turned up without warning. There had been no more phone calls. She had even allowed herself to think there would be no more. He had given up, she had thought. Perhaps he had met someone else. "How absolutely over a man, sick and tired and done with him you must be," Dorothea said, "When you find yourself hoping he's met someone else." "It would be simple relief. I don't think I'd have a moment's regret." A fantasy she had while walking across the Park involved a nice strong-minded woman for Alistair, handsome in a no-nonsense kind of way, someone who would laugh at him and stand up to him. The difficulty lay in imagining Alistair's response. Was the sad fact that he was a bully who needed not a worthy adversary but a victim? She was thinking about him as she approached the house so that seeing him on the doorstep, peering through the letter box as if he thought she was hiding from him, was like a thought miraculously and unpleasantly made real. Holding up the bunch of flowers and looking constricted in his dark suit, with his black hair slick and short, he seemed like an illustration to P. G. Wodehouse. And in a Wooster-ish way he said: "Aren't you going to let us in?" "Oh, Alistair..." She was distracted; she hardly knew what to say. It was Leo she had hoped would come this evening. She might have been thinking about Alistair but it was Leo she wanted to see, Leo who had made no sign since the previous Saturday of wanting to see her. But in spite of his absolute silence, she half-expected him and still half-expected him. It was impossible that a man should have said the things he had said, looked as he had looked, and then quitted her life with a quick touch of the hand. There was no question, though, but to let Alistair in. That fantasy woman might have shut the door in his face but she was different. She took the flowers from him, standing aside to let him come in. "I wished you'd phoned," she managed to say. "Do people in our situation really need to phone and make appointments?" She wanted to say, what situation? We are in no situation. We are separated, this is a separation that we are in, and that word "trial" was just a sop to both of us. But she said nothing. He was looking round him at the hall, up the stairs, into the the living room, his eyebrows rising. "Go in" she "said. I'll put the flowers in water." Which vases were for use and which for decoration only? The Chinese ones looked valuable and frail. She opened cupboards, found a pottery jar and a glass vase and tried to arrange the flowers. Irene Adler could probably have done it but now it was a lost art. She carried vase and jar into the living room. Alistair was sitting on the sofa in the act of repelling Gushi's advances with the toe of his shoe. It was such a classic tableau, the former lover now cast as villain proving his worthlessness by kicking the dog, that she found it impossible not to laugh. Gushi had scarcely made contact with Alistair's shoe. She knew very well that he disliked dogs. But she laughed, thinking of Leo who was already Gushi's best friend, and the scene briefly endeared Alistair to her. "What's funny?" he said. "Nothing. Poor Gushi. Shall I put him outside?" He shrugged. "This is quite a place you've secured for yourself." "Hardly for myself, Alistair. The owners will be back in September." "Didn't you say they had no children? No family at all?" "So far as I know." The flicker of tenderness she had felt for him was dwindling. "Would you like a drink?" "I thought I could take you out to dinner," he said rather peevishly. She was in a dilemma. Having dinner with Alistair was not the way she would have chosen to spend the evening. On the other hand, she didn't much want Leo to phone her while Alistair was in the house. If he phoned he might suggest coming over. It was not so much a matter of the men as rivals - Leo was a friend only, through the whole weekend they had barely touched hands - as the awkwardness of introducing him to Alistair as "Oliver", the recipient of the transplant. What would Alistair do? Insult Leo? Abuse him? _Hit him? "I'll phone a restaurant and book a table," Alistair said. "Have you any ideas? You live here." A quick decision must be made. She must not involve herself in prevarication, plotting, strategy, but tell herself the truth, that she had nothing to hide. Wouldn't it be wonderful if Leo came, whoever else might be here, whatever the consequences? And it was nonsense to think of Alistair hitting anyone. She had magnified a mild belligerence into a full-blown tendency to unprovoked violence. "We'll stay here," she said. "I'll cook something." He put the phone receiver down. "I hoped you'd say that. I mean that we could stay in. I don't care about food. Bread and cheese will do for me and we can have a bottle of wine. You do have wine?" She nodded. Suddenly she had no idea what to say to him. No topic of conversation presented itself. The idea of spending a whole evening with him was dismaying, as if they were strangers, as if they hadn't lived together for nearly three years. What had they talked about? How had they passed a thousand evenings? She found herself looking at him in despair, a misery not apparent, it seemed, from her expression for he said in a jovial way: "You don't know how I've missed you." He looked at her sideways. "That flat in Willesden," he said as if it were a place he had remotely heard of, not somewhere he and she had lived in for so long, "It's grim. It's a dump. I can't tell you how depressing I find it. And of course it's much worse now you're not there." "If you dislike it so much you'll have to move." She heard her grandmother's briskness in her own tone and was glad of it. "Yes," he said. "Yes, you're right. The fact is, darling, I want to do what I should have insisted on doing in the first place..." "I'll get that wine," she said. "I've got a salad made and there's some salmon. Will wine do or do you want gin or something?" "I should have insisted," he said as if she hadn't spoken, "On moving in here with you." The confrontation she had hoped to avoid was approaching, was almost there. "I'd rather not talk about that. I'll get the wine." She opened the bottle in the kitchen, so that he couldn't wrest it from her and demonstrate male skills. Leo came into her mind, Leo opening just such a bottle of wine for them to share before lunch that Saturday. He had raised his glass and said. "To you!" She tried to understand how so much warmth had changed abruptly to indifference, to an apparent need to get away quickly from her presence. How much of that was her imagination and how much real? Every time the phone rang she thought it must be he but it rang seldom and once or twice she had found herself willing it to ring into the oppressive silence. She put the bottle and glasses on a tray, took the food out of the fridge, refilled Gushi's water bowl, washed her hands. Alistair was exploring the room, examining the Blackburn Norrises' porcelain. "What on earth have you been doing!" he said. "Been down the cellar, selecting a choice vintage?" "I buy my own wine. I don't drink theirs." He made her churlish. He brought out the worst in her. She handed him a glass with a forced smile. He raised it and said: "To us!" There is no "us", she thought, but she said nothing, drinking in silence. Leo had said, "To you!" but, like Alistair's toast, it had meant nothing... "For one thing," he said, "I don't like you being alone here, not with people getting murdered in the vicinity." "One person. A man. Some poor down-and out And St. John's Wood is hardly "the vicinity"." She must stop being tactful, discreet, cowardly. It was hard but a beginning must be made somewhere. "Alistair, that's just an excuse. Why don't you say what you mean? You want to live with me again. Well, I'm afraid I don't want to live with you." He was looking disbelieving. Not hurt or angry but simply incredulous. "Then why did you?" "That was three years ago," she said. "People change. I've changed. I don't know if you have. I think you have but it may be that I never really knew you. And you may never have known me." His answer was cut off by the phone ringing. Mary jumped, as she had known she would if the phone rang, but she was powerless to prevent her reaction. Her heart began to pound. It must be Leo. Leo, who had made no contact with her since Saturday, was phoning to ask her out or even to tell her he was on his way to Park Village. Alistair, on his feet again, put his hand out to lift the phone. "No!" She had never, in all their time together, spoken to him with such force. She had hardly ever spoken to anyone so peremptorily. Astonishment stopped him in his tracks and he turned on her a shocked look. She picked up the receiver, said a quiet "Hallo" and gave the number. The voice was not Leo's but a woman's, elderly, educated, gentle. Mary was aware at first only of a huge disappointment, a let-down that made her want to cry out in frustration. She had no idea who this was. The name Celia Tratton meant nothing. "We have met, once, a few years ago. At Frederica's. At your grandmother's." "Yes, of course." Enlightenment came quickly. "I'm so sorry. My grandmother's staying with you, isn't she?" "Mary, I have very bad news. I'm sorry." "Bad news? She's ill?" "Well, yes, she was ill. I suppose she was." Mary said flatly, "She's dead." "Yes. This afternoon. She can have known nothing about it. We were sitting out on the terrace, in the shade. One moment she was talking to us and the next she was dead. A stroke. It was so absolutely sudden, a terrible shock..." She had been as near as a mother. Mary spoke the necessary formal mechanical words. She replaced the receiver with slow deliberation, then shifted it, making sure it was correctly in its rest. Her mind had emptied and she felt cold. She was aware of Alistair's arm sliding round her shoulders and Alistair's hot cheek pressed against hers. Gushi came over and sat close up against her leg. Alistair tried to toe him away. Oh, stop doing that!" Mary cried. "Leave him alone. Why do you have to act so in character?" She began laughing and crying at the same time. She expected him to smack her face but he didn't. "I'm sorry," he said. "I didn't want him bothering you." "My grandmother died. Did you realise that?" "Of course." She moved her face from his, took his arm away. "Darling," he said, "She was old. She'd had her life. She was bound to die soon anyway." Mary thought, I would like to get up and point to the door and tell him to go, to get out; I would like to have the power and the clout to do that. Instead, she leant back, closing her eyes, and saw her grandmother quite vividly, her bright lined face, the sharp green eyes that were full of youth and thought, she can't be dead. It can't be true; there must be a mistake. "She must have been all of eighty-five," said Alistair, pursuing his technique of comforting. "She felt no pain. She was just snuffed out like a candle. We should all be so lucky when our time comes." "Yes, all right." "Imagine how it would have been if she'd lingered for months. Think what you'd have been through, seeing to all that, nursing her - you'd have had to, you were all she'd got." "Yes, all right, Alistair. I know." "She'd had a good life and a lot of people would say she'd made a fortunate end." I am a poor meek thing, Mary thought, and I like quiet, meek, gentle people like myself. I liked, I _loved, my grandmother who treated men's and women's feelings as if they were made of brittle glass and who handled them with fine dextrous fingers. I like people who go slowly and feel their way and are discreet and careful of their words, people who move delicately and tread on no one's dreams. "Civilised" is my favourite word. That being so, how could I have lived for years with this man? And why can't I tell him to go away? Alistair brought her some wine and she sipped it. He told her she really should eat something and when she said she couldn't said that _he would. "I'm hungry and I don't mind admitting it. Life has to go on." He brought himself a plate of salmon and salad with a hunk of granary bread. While he ate he talked about his day at work to "distract" her. Not listening to what he said, she put Leo in his place, wondering what Leo would be saying if he were here now, imagining sensitivity but not the form it would take. After a while she excused herself and went upstairs. The door had a lock and a key, so she locked it in case Alistair came up. Then she unlocked it because locking it was absurd. She lay on the bed and thought, I would like Dorothea here, or Judith. I would like someone just to be with me. I would like Leo. I hardly know him. I've only spent a few hours with him but I would like him here now. Anyone but Alistair. Why does it have to be Alistair? __She can't be _dead. But of course she can be. She was old, very old. The age of the person who has died doesn't make any difference to those left behind. It's just as bad for them to lose someone of 85 as someone of 45 or 25. Leo would understand. He knew about death and she needed someone who knew about it. When she went downstairs again Alistair was watching television. He turned his head. "Feeling a bit better?" She nodded, though the nod meant nothing. "There's nothing for you to do. I washed up my own plate and our glasses." It was an effort to stop herself thanking him but she made the effort and succeeded. "I'm going to stay the night. I should never forgive myself if I abandoned you." In the tone of someone who expects to be told no spare room would be needed, he could sleep with her, he said archly, "Isn't there a spare bedroom going begging?" She suddenly remembered telling her grandmother that she and Leo must meet when her holiday was over. Tears ccme into her eyes. She said goodnight, picked up Gushi and took him upstairs to bed with her. She locked the door and this time it stayed locked. After a while she heard Alistair padding about, searching for an airing cupboard, then fumbling in it for bed linen The night was long but she slept at last.

Chapter Eleven

In the days when he lived in Bryanston Square as manservant to the late Anthony Maddox, Bean had come to hate his employer. Anthony Maddox had a dog, a spaniel, whom he never treated with much kindness, though it was an affectionate creature, and when one day during a bout of teasing it bit him, Maddox made Bean take it to the vet to be destroyed. It was not in Bean's nature to feel self disgust but he many times reproached himself for obeying Maddox's order in this matter. He should have said no. He should have given in his notice rather than have Philidor put down. Meekly, though with sorrow in his heart, he had taken the spaniel to the veterinary surgery and asked for the deed to be done. But after that he took a slow, if largely concealed and invisible, revenge. In ways of which Maddox knew nothing until the day before his death, Bean made his life a misery. He never guessed that into every bowl of soup Bean brought him, his manservant had first spat. Nor that a spoonful of Bean's urine went into cups of tea and coffee. The caterpillars which Bean harvested from plants in the Park (and in relation to which Maddox had a phobia) he did see, only to be told by Bean that increasing shortsightedness made cleansing lettuce of these creatures impossible. Maddox was very fond of salad but he stopped eating it. He was three times summoned for non-payment of rates because unbeknownst to him, Bean had appropriated the local authority's demands before they reached him. He parked his car on the Residents' Parking to which he had a right in the City of Westminster but many times, during the night, Bean moved it on to a double yellow line. Valuable books he borrowed from the London Library unaccountably disappeared. His electric blanket caught fire. Bean contaminated his goose liver p t with a culture he had made out of a ham and cheese waffle removed from a Park dustbin and gave him gastro-enteritis. At first the doctor thought it was salmonella and this pulled Bean up short. He didn't want to kill the man and be done for murder. Anthony Maddox had a stroke on his sixty sixth birthday. It seriously affected his speech. Bean cared for him devotedly but on the day before Maddox was due to be transferred permanently to a nursing home, he unburdened himself totally to his employer. Maddox was having his lunch. That is, it was lunchtime and Bean was feeding him, or about to feed him, soup followed by peach yogurt. The soup was a delicate pale green, prepared by Bean from fresh Aldeburgh asparagus, chicken stock and cream. He was quite aware of the incongruity of these three ingredients with the fourth. It was from such anomalies that he derived his entertainment. He would have called it his sense of humour. A damask napkin, washed, starched and ironed by Bean" was spread across Anthony Maddox's shrivelled throat, concave chest and protuberant belly. The old man's mouth was drawn down to one side and his eyes bulged. They seemed, but probably were not, fixed upon the glorious prospect visible through the long Georgian window, of Sir Robert Smirke's church, St. Mary's, Wyndham Place, its pediment, its columns and its Tower-of the-winds capitals. The sun shone upon its cupola, turning the brownish stone to a rich coppery gold. Lifting the spoon to his employer's parted lips - they were always parted these days - Bean said: "I spat in this soup while I was heating it up, sir. It's been a habit of mine to do that these fifteen years." Maddox's eyes bulged further and he recoiled from the spoon. His mouth worked. "Some mornings I've brought up a lot of phlegm, sir, and that's gone into your soup too." Bean spoke in his customary deferential tone. "Smarmy" was the word applied to it by one of Maddox's friends. "I've pissed in your tea and coffee. Not every cup, probably every third cup. You drink rather a lot of those beverages, sir, and I couldn't keep up the pace." Maddox vomited the soup he had already taken. His face was paper-white. Bean was very tender with him, giving him a blanket bath, making him comfortable, but Maddox had a heart attack and died in the night. Few people kept a manservant in the Eighties. Single men living on their own got in a team of cleaners once a fortnight, ate take away or TV dinners from the microwave, had their washing done and delivered by the mobile laundry and never needed to make their beds because they used duvets. Bean had his name on the agency's book for months. He was living on his savings in a rented room over a news agent in Lisson Grove. Anthony Maddox had left him nothing in his will, which made Bean even more pleased with himself for confessing about the spit and urine. One day he got a job offer. The man who interviewed him was, in Bean's own words, "weird". He was plump and bald with a fringe of thin reddish hair growing round the naked pate and although it was ten in the morning, wore a black silk suit over a shirt with a frilly jabot. The apartment - you couldn't call something on two floors a flat - had weapons hanging round the walls, mostly whips, but guns too with ornament also stocks. There was a picture of a nearly naked young man with a halo round his head and his body stuck full of arrows and an even larger one of another hal oed man being grilled like a piece of steak. Not that Bean ever ate steak but he sometimes cooked it -and sometimes spat on it - for Anthony Maddox. His interviewer was called Maurice Clitheroe, a stockbroker, though he told Bean nothing of this at their first meeting. His voice was high and fluting and his way of speaking rather puzzled Bean because it seemed that everything was "painful" to him and he "suffered" a lot. "I am _painfully aware of the need of someone to _look _after me," he said. "Of course I realise that you would _contribute to my _sufferings but that I could _endure if not with equanimity, with _resignation. I am afraid you may find me rather a _sore _subject." Bean had no idea what all this meant but he took the job. Beggars can't be choosers and, living in Lisson Grove, he saw quite a lot of beggars. On bad days he imagined joining them, sitting in a porch, cap on the pavement, a dog maybe to keep him company and supply pathos. It was at first a matter of regret that Maurice Clitheroe had no dog but later when he understood about the whips, the visitors to the apartment and the meaning of Clitheroe's funny talk, he was glad. God knows what might have become of a dog in all the excitement that was so often the order of the day in York Terrace. The boys who came had been in the straightforward beating business and some of them hardly knew their own strength. Several times Bean had to put Clitheroe to bed with arnica on his bruises and cortisone cream on his weals. The young ladies were more refined, put saddle, bridle and bit on Clitheroe and rode him up the stairs and through the bedrooms. Once or twice since his employer's timely death and his coming into his inheritance, Bean had happpened to see one of those visitors in the street. He was out and about so much, it was inevitable. She was soliciting in Baker Street and wearing very poor quality thigh boots and a mini-skirt with a broken zip. Bean was in his new bomber jacket and baseball cap. Taking him for an American, she asked him in a mid-Atlantic accent if he would like to buy her a cocktail. For answer, he gave her one of his looks, a stare and then a sudden swift baring of the teeth. She recoiled before telling him to sod off. That look of his always made people wince and few recovered as fast as this girl. He went into Europa Foods, which stays open late and bought himself some pot noodles, a jar of minced sun-dried tomatoes, button mush roms in brine, a blueberry and almond practically fat-free yogurt and a can of Sprite. The only other person of his acquaintance he met on the way home was the Cornells' housekeeper out with a man friend. They looked as if they were on their way to the Screen on Baker Street for the eight-fifteen showing. Remembering how she had sent him up and down those area stairs some four hours earlier and again some three hours earlier, Bean said loudly "Good evening, Valerie. Lovely evening." From the pavement newsstand in the Marylebone Road opposite the station he bought an _Evening _Standard. He wasn't a newspaper reader, or indeed much of a reader at all, but stuff whizzed past so quickly on the telly that sometimes you couldn't take in the details. The story about the impalement on the churchyard railings had by now been relegated to an inside page. The inquest had found that John Dominic Cahill, known as Decker, had died of stab wounds, principally of a stab wound that pierced the left ventricle of the heart. The body's being stuck on the railing spikes was merely an artistic touch, what the coroner described as evidence of the perpetrator's "evil and degraded sense of humour." Bean read all about it while the microwave was heating up his pot noodle, dried tomatoes and button mushroom mixture. The verdict was of murder. No nonsense, Bean observed, about "unlawful killing" or manslaughter. He was a hundred percent in favour of the death penalty himself. If he had his way executions would be in public, not to mention putting lesser offenders in the stocks. Drinking his Sprite, which had had five minutes in the freezer for a quick chill: he read an interview with Cahill's sister, a Bernadette Casey from County Offaly, who though admitting she hadn't set eyes on her brother or spoken to him for twenty-eight years, described him as a "lovely person" whose death had devastated her and all his other eight brothers and sisters. It was incredible to her that Johnny should have been living rough on the streets of London and she still hoped and prayed there was some mistake. The police hadn't got very far with finding who had done it. You could read that between the lines. Of course, it was probable that, like him and any other law-abiding citizen, they didn't _care who had done it. Wasn't this just another bit of human detritus swept up off the streets and thrown away like litter? Bean switched on the television. It was news time but the murder no longer merited space on the national news. He leaned back in his chair and gave himself up to dreams: the dog of his own he wanted and would one day have when he had decided on the breed and could afford a pedigree animal, sired by a Crufts champion; ways of augmenting his income; could he manage a third daily round of dog-walking? At this point Bean's thoughts turned to his clientele, to the Barker-Pryces, the Blackburn-Norrises, Mrs. Goldsworthy, Lisl Pring and the rest of them. He had hoped to discover, when he first began walking these people's dogs, secrets of their pasts, incidents they would not want known and might pay to keep secret. But they barely admitted him to their houses, they never confided in him; they presented to him only blank and blameless facades. He sometimes thought that living for eight years with Maurice Clitheroe had given him an exaggerated idea of what the average West End dweller's home life was like. Perhaps they really were all innocent, happily married (or happily celibate), chaste, incorruptible, exemplary citizens. As to the secrets he did know, if they were secrets, there was no use threatening with exposure the girl who had approached him in Baker Street, for she would very likely regard this as welcome publicity and in any case she had no money. He cheered up a bit when the notion came to him that Lisl Pring might well be bulimic. Now she was starring in a successful sitcom, she might not be thrilled to see the _Sun running a story about how she binged and then stuffed her fingers down her throat. Bean went out to the kitchen to fetch his yogurt. Next time he went to fetch Marietta he'd give the place a good sniff, checking for vomit. The hamburger stall outside Madame Tussaud's smelt the same as human sweat. Very strong human sweat. Bean knew all about it. He had smelt plenty of it in Maurice Clitheroe days, especially when one of the young men came round. The hamburger stall was doubly offensive to him, for that reason, and because it emanated from meat. He wondered what had possessed him to come this way round instead of taking York Gate or Park Square, and as he passed the stall, pushing his way through the milling throng of adolescents from all over Europe, he held a tissue ostentatiously over his nose or mouth. Nobody noticed, or if they did they thought he was protecting himself from traffic emissions in the Marylebone Road. Waxworks. Bean couldn't see the point. He had been in there once, into the Chamber of Horrors - where else? -with Maurice Clitheroe to look at someone hanging up on a hook and that French chap stabbed to death in his bath. Maurice Clitheroe liked that sort of thing and frequented Tussaud's. Bean fancied it had been less busy seven or eight years ago. These days it was almost impossible to make one's way along the pavement, but he refused to be driven into the road and used his elbows. A young woman with three rings in her left ear and two in her right tried to sell him a copy of the _Big _Issue but drew back at the glare she got and the bared teeth. The beggar with the dog - that was how Bean thought of him - was sitting in his usual place, halfway between Tussaud's and York Gate. A plastic box that had once held a video cassette lay open on the pavement for the receipt of alms and the dog sat on the man's knees, sleeping, snuggled up with its nose in a jacket pocket. The dog Bean's expert eye identified as a beagle, lemon and white, a pedigree without a doubt. He bared his teeth at this man too. It was a grimace that was always effective, due perhaps to its shock value. People always recoiled. Armed as usual with his camera, he stepped back to the pavement edge and took a photograph. The beggar put his arms up over his face but by that time it was too late. Boris the borzoi was the first dog he picked up. As usual Valerie Conway made him walk all the way down the area steps. She had a message for him, she said, from Mr. and Mrs. Cornell, to keep his wits about him because there had been an epidemic of dog-stealing. "Those dossers pinch dogs, you know," said Valerie. "They want them to keep them warm at night and then there's the pathos factor." "The what?" said Bean. "I mean, the British feel more sorry for a dog than a human, don't they?" Bean stored up everything he learned on the chance it might come in useful and when he came to the flat in Portland Place to collect Ruby the beagle, he passed this new information to Erna Morosini. "Beagles are particularly in demand," he said. "For example, that down-and-out sits outside Tussaud's, he's got a beagle. You can see it's registered at the Kennel Club." His powers of invention came into play. "They drug them to keep them quiet all day. Valium's the favourite but Largactil runs it a close second." "I wish you hadn't told me," said Mrs. Morosini. "We all have to face facts, don't we, madam? I'll be taking some photos of Ruby in the coming week. If you're interested they'll be very reasonably priced." The eyes of the Duke of Kent met his as he came back into Park Crescent and Bean composed his features into a similar stern and haughty expression. He let himself into the gardens and he and the two dogs made their way down the sloping path to the Nursemaid's Tunnel. On this mild afternoon of hazy sunshine it was deserted as usual and there was no sign of the key man. The gardens of Park Square were equally empty but for pigeons and sparrows on the sunlit grass and a squirrel which ran down the trunk of one tall green tree and up the trunk of another. It being Saturday, the park itself would be crowded. Bean told Mr. Barker-Pryce about the street people stealing dogs, in his version substituting golden retrievers for beagles. Barker-Pryce said nastily that since Charlie only went out twice a day and always with Bean it was up to him to see that no such theft took place. Bean said, "You're right, sir," but with rage in his heart. He didn't mention photographing Charlie and obviously the time wasn't right to say anything to Lisl Pring about pictures of Marietta. He'd told her poodles were currently the beggars' favourite prey and she'd reacted unexpectedly. "They can have her. She's just shat all over my kilim." "You don't mean that, Miss Pring." Bean was shocked, by the sentiment and the language. Waiting in the hall while she went to fetch Marietta, sniffing like a hound, he opened a door that looked as if a cloak from would be on the other side, but it was only a cupboard. A long embroidered dress on a dummy and a suit of armour, standing up as if it had a man inside it, startled him and he closed the door quickly. Reremembering what Lisl Pring had said, he was deterred from saying anything to Mrs. Goldworthy about scot ties as dogs coveted for their pathos factor or bed-warming value. The tall dosser with the beard and the Oxbridge accent passed him as he walked up Albany Street. This, at least, was one that didn't smell. Caught short one morning, Bean had tied his dogs up to the railings and popped into the public convenience just off the Broad Walk. The tall one had been in there, strip-washing himself and drying his hair under one of the hand dryers. Bean hadn't spoken to him and he didn't now. He looked the other way. These people were a health hazard. Who knew _why he'd been washing? The young lady that was house-sitting Charlotte Cottage looked a bit pea ky this afternoon. She was wearing black, which meant little on its own, but she had someone in there Bean recognised as one of the undertakers from a firm in the Marylebone Road. His curiosity, always active, quickened. As he took Gushi from her, he said in his most respectful tone, "No bad news of Sir Stewart and Lady Blackburn-Norris, I hope, miss?" She wasn't the sort to pin your ears back and he despised her for her gentleness. "Oh, no, no'" she said in a sad abstracted way. "I'm sure they're fine. I had a card from Costa Rica." Bean decided not to pursue it. He wasn't interested in her personal tragedies. He hustled the dogs up to the Gloucester Gate and let them off on the broad expanses beyond the Parsee's fountain. The Park was crowded as he had expected, young people lying about on the grass in various stages of undress, though the weather was far from hot and the sun kept going in. Charlie was the most friendly and uninhibited of the dogs and it brought Bean a good deal of amusement to see him go up to some of those cuddling couples and poke his nose into their crotches and bottoms. They shrieked and cursed him. Gushi and Marietta found a picnic party and Marietta ran off into the bushes with half a Swiss roll. Usually, Bean preferred the Park to be deserted but this was the next best thing - a real crowd, most of whom seemed irritated and incommoded by the activities of dogs. Even the sight of the woman walker with her orderly troop strolling the long path that bisects the Park couldn't entirely dispel his mood of cheerfulness. It was payday. He would collect from everyone on the way back, as he always did on Saturdays. The undertaker had left by the time he took Gushi back. The young lady's eyes were red. Either she'd been crying or she it was conjunctivitis. He reminded her he needed paying, and she actually apologised to him when she handed over the notes. With one hand Mrs. Goldsworthy pulled Mc Bride into the house and with the other thrust his money at him. It sounded as if she had a drinks party on the go which Bean thought decadent at five-fifteen on a summer afternoon. He'd have bared his teeth at Lisl Pring if he hadn't relied on her custom, her goodwill and the money she owed him. She came to the door in shorts and a halter top, skinny midriff bare as the day she was born, and a fellow behind her also in shorts with his arms round her waist. Mr. Barker-Pryce stank of cigars so badly that even the dog flinched. He counted out Bean's money very slowly and then, like a bank cashier, did it all over again. Bean had to tug at the notes to extract them from the nicotine-stained fingers. He said, "Thank you very much, sir," and the door was shut smartly in his face. Digging out the key from under the new wads of money, he let himself into the gardens of Park Sguare. A squirrel ran across the path no more than three feet from him and Ruby the beagle gave a great tug on the leash in pursuit of it. She nearly pulled Bean over. The borzoi growled at her and curled back his lips in much the same way as Bean did when displeased by the sight of someone or something. In spite of the number of keys to the gardens which must be in circulation, the lawns and walks were deserted and the seats were empty. The wind had dropped, or had dropped in here in the sunlit space between tall trees. Flowers, unidentifiable by Bean, scented the air and almost masked the stench of fumes from the Marylebone Road. A blackbird sang. The grass was not worn away by many feet and there was no litter to disfigure the walks or overflow from bins. A pity dogs were not allowed to run free in here. If they were he'd never go into the Park again. He made his way down the steep walled path to the tunnel, Boris and Ruby padding side by side ahead of him. He never came down this path without a fris son of tension. His muscles always flexed and he had to keep his hands from tightening into clenched fists. But there was no sign of the key man. The tunnel was empty as it almost always was. And it was never dark at this hour, even in the middle, but invariably quite adequately lit with natural light from both ends. A momentary nasty idea came then, that the key man might be waiting at the other end, outside, just round the corner, and would step out, glittering and clinking, to fill the tunnel mouth as he reached it. But he gave no thought to what might be behind him and was almost at the other end, having heard no foot falls, no indrawn breath, when something struck him on the crown of his head. It was like hitting his head on the beams of a low ceiling or the lintel of a door. But rather worse, for he staggered and fell over, first to his knees, then sprawled on his back. There was a moment of darkness with dazzlement, a seeing of stars, tailed comets and satellites whizzing across a black sky, and in it he must have relinquished his hold on the leash. Bean thought he felt a hand fumbling in the pocket of his bomber jacket. He groaned and made feeble movements. Then he did hear footsteps, running away, back into Park square. He sat up. His baseball cap had fallen off but it had been on his head when he was struck and Bean had no doubt it had saved him from worse damage. Gingerly he felt his scalp and looked at his fingers. There was no blood. He hated the idea of falling and wondered if he could have broken something. Osteoporosis was not confined to elderly ladies, he had read in a health magazine. His camera! It was gone. For a moment he thought that perhaps for once he had left it at home, but he knew its strap had been round his neck when he took the money from Barker-Pryce. As for his keys... They had been in his jeans pocket: the key to York Terrace, the keys to Charlotte Cottage and Lisl Pring's and the one to these gardens. He ran his hand down the side of his leg, feeling for the ridges of metal, then thrust his hand inside. The keys were all there, but the pocket of his bomber jacket was empty. The wad of notes from four of his clients was gone and with it the best part of two weeks' retirement pension. Bean's stomach turned over. It was just as if his stomach had dropped on to the floor and done a somersault, turned itself over its heels. At any rate he could get up. His legs were all in one piece. And he could see. The blow hadn't detached his retinas, which was another thing his extensive medical reading had told him could happen. The two dogs were gone. Bean told himself they couldn't get out of the gardens and dismissed wild imaginings of the two of them under the wheels of container lorries in the Marylebone Road. In vain he called them, his voice weak and reedy. Of course he had to go looking for them himself. Boris he found rolling on the rotting corpse of a pigeon and Ruby, still attached to him by the leash, running round in angry circles. Wearily he picked up the leash, his head throbbing. One thing was for sure, he refused to go down the steps. When the Cornells' housekeeper appeared in the area he shouted at her that if she didn't open the front door he would leave Boris tied to the railings. "What's got into you?" she said. "I've been mugged, that's what's got into me. Open the front door, Valerie. I'm not feeling at all well. I've probably got concussion." After rather a long while the front door was opened. Bean saw white carpet, gilded furniture and red lilies in a Venetian glass bowl. He unclipped the leash and Boris entered the house, as if he always went that way, padding silently, to push a door open with his long nose. "I don't have to remind you my remuneration is due, do I, Valerie?" It was appalling to think of the sum that had been taken from him. He would have to plunder his savings. And the camera. Why had he never thought to insure the camera? He put up one hand to massage the lump that was swelling up on his scalp. The housekeeper came back with his money in an envelope. She seemed to be keying herself up to say something unpleasant. "I'll see you tomorrow morning," said Bean. "And when you do, I'll thank you to call me Miss Conway!" She had gone red in the face with the effort of it. Bean shrugged, pocketed the envelope and walked home to York Terrace. If you lost consciousness, however briefly, it was concussion and you were supposed to go to the doctor. But had he lost consciousness? On the whole he thought not. As soon as he was inside he phoned the police and told them he had been assaulted and all his money stolen. An officer would call, they said. Meanwhile he should see a doctor. "I know who my assailant is." said Bean. "You saw him?" "I didn't exactly see him but I know him. He's a vagrant, a down-and-out, goes about all covered with keys." "Your own keys are missing?" Bean admitted they were not but he was tired of this officer sounding so bored and indifferent, and said he would come down to the police himself.

Chapter Twelve

Mary had thought people would take the loss of a grandmother less seriously than, say, the death of a parent, but it had not turned out like that. Dorothea's husband had a week's holiday due to him and he took over her job. The Trattons in Crete saw to the arrangements for returning Frederica Jago's body. The undertakers were helpful if grimly lugubrious. Alistair arrived and shepherded her to the registering of the death, the ordering of flowers, the passing on of the news to solicitors. "It's just the same as if you'd lost your mother," he said, his attitude quite changed from what it had been that evening the news came. "It's the same kind of grief. We do wrong when we judge the bereaved person's feelings by some level of kinship." This man was the same one that only a week before had told her she should be thankful not to have had to nurse her grandmother through a lingering end. Alistair had not mentioned money or the disposal of the house in Belsize Park. He had not mentioned sex either or staying overnight. And nothing had been said about the transplant or the Harvest Trust. There had been nothing from Leo. She had met him only three times but she missed him. "Desperately" was the word that came to mind. She told herself not to be so extreme, hysterical almost. How could she feel an intense longing for the company of someone she hardly knew? She had begun to dream about him, once in an erotic and romantic scenario that shocked her awake. Flesh of my flesh, she remembered, bone of my bone. Those words of his had been the high point of an emotional moment when she had felt briefly that years of intimacy lay behind them. Was it unnatural or presumptuous to have believed then that years of closeness lay ahead of them? He had disappeared into nothingness. The day after the dream in which he held her, kissed and caressed her, she had the strange feeling that if she never saw him again, if he had gone from her life as swiftly as he had entered it, those few hours they had spent together would remain with her always. Sorrow at her grandmother's death competed with the emotions Leo had aroused, but it failed to drive him from her mind. If he had come to her she could have talked to him about Frederica Jago. He would have listened, would have wanted to hear. Alistair cut short her reminiscences. Memories and recollections weren't to his taste. "I did know your grandmother, darling. I knew her better than I know my own relations." And Dorothea said dwelling on the past was upsetting. Once the funeral was over she should put all that behind her. "I don't agree with all this talking things through. It just makes it worse. Look at all those people who talked things through and discovered they'd been abused as kids. Wouldn't they have been better off not knowing?" "It isn't that kind of talking I mean. I don't want a therapist." "You want to live in the present," said Dorothea. Leo, Mary somehow guessed, would have listened and asked all the right questions, would have been patient with her, spent hours if necessary hearing about the grandmother who had been a mother and friend and a great consolation for the trials of life and whom no one could replace. But she was half-afraid she would never see Leo again. She went back to work before the funeral. It was better to be at the Irene Adler than in Charlotte Cottage alone. An evening talking to Celia Tratton -who had come back from Crete the day before - made her feel calmer, more able to accept. The number of tourists visiting the museum had fallen off since the murder had ceased to be a talking point and no longer had its place in newspapers, and Mary used a half-hour when no one came to try to phone Leo. It had taken a good deal of self-persuasion to get her to this point. She had reminded herself of all the things he had said to her, the kind and flattering things, how almost everything he had said at that first meeting and on the Friday, had indicated that he wanted them to be friends. His last words, tinged with impatience, she did her best to banish the picture she had of his abrupt departure. Something had happened to prevent his getting in touch, perhaps something to do with his brother. Or it might be that he had tried to phone her but had given up because the line had been so frequently engaged since her grandmother's death. Reminding herself of that, she had on the previous evening attempted to phone him at his brother's number, three times, but there had been no reply. Had she ever told him precisely where she worked? He had told her only that he was employed by his brother and had a part-time job. Whether that was at home or in some office he hadn't said. There was no mystery about it, of that she was sure; there simply had been no occasion to go into details about the job. By now she was beginning to ask herself what she would say if he did answer. Why haven't I heard from you? Can we meet? All were impossible for someone like her. She wanted an explanation but knew she was incapable of asking a man she had only met three times why he had dropped her. He could hardly be put into the category of an inconstant lover. Perhaps she could just ask him how he was, make some bland empty enquiry. She dialled the number and again there was no reply. It rained on the day of the funeral. Alistair took time off work and was there to hold an umbrella over her. The man she had met at Frederica's dinner and who had asked her to the cinema with him came to the church with a woman who was clearly his girlfriend. The elderly friends were there, all but the Blackburn Norrises. Mary made a mental note to phone their hotel in Acapulco and break the news gently to them. Frederica's solicitor, who had also been at that dinner with his wife, sat in a front pew, and when it was all over, and the dismal gathering afterward in Belsize Park was all over, he stayed behind. Mary wondered why, vaguely thinking that perhaps she had done something wrong in inviting mourners to a place which was not hers, or not yet legally hers. But she had supposed it would be even more heinous to hold any sort of party in Charlotte Cottage. However, Mr. Edwards had remained behind for a very different reason and one which Alistair, refilling his sherry glass, seemed to know all about. Suddenly a staginess took over from the funereal atmosphere. Mr. Edwards whispered something to Alistair and Alistair said: "I am sure my fiance is quite up to hearing it now." The two of them retired with measured tread to Frederica's dining room. Mary was so indignant at being called Alistair's fiance that she hardly noticed the door had closed and they were in there together. It opened after a few seconds; Alistair put his head out and he asked Mary in a low, very serious voice if she would come in and join them. Mr. Edwards had seated himself at the head of the table. Alistair sat at the foot. But when Mary came in he got up, held a chair out for her and stood behind it. He went on standing behind it after she had sat down, like a husband in a Victorian photograph, she thought. "Mr. Edwards is going to tell you the contents of your grandmother's will, my dear." "My dear" was another departure. The two of them were taking her over in a patronising paternalistic sort of way and the idea came to her that if only Leo were there he would stop this happening. But she restrained herself, nodded to Mr. Edwards and told him please to go ahead. With a small deprecatory cough, he told her what she knew already, that this house was now hers, and told her too what she had never dreamed of, that her grandmother had left her everything she possessed just under two million pounds. If Mary had for a moment thought that somehow - she couldn't begin to guess how - Alistair had _known, that he and the solicitor had been in cahoots, one look over her shoulder at his face dispelled that. It was like someone else's face, someone she had never known, for it had crumpled and grown soft, his eyes very wide open, his mouth slack. He pulled out the chair next to hers and sat down on it. She half-expected him to throw his arms across the table and lay his head on them, but he remained quite still, staring at a picture on the opposite wall. Mr. Edwards was talking about small bequests, little sums to little charities. She scarcely heard him. She was asking herself why it was she had never guessed her grandmother had had so much. He stopped talking quite suddenly and turned on her a bright almost gleeful smile, as if he had not, some two hours before, attended the funeral of an old and valued friend and client. "Thank you," Mary said. Alistair took hold of her hand and held it hard. She saw Mr. Edwards looking at them benevolently, as at a young couple on the thresh hold of their married life made happy by a windfall of gargantuan proportions. They could hardly reallise it yet, he must be thinking, the joyful shock had half-stunned them, but in a few moments... Even the tone of his voice had changed as he began talking about probate, the law's delays. Mary nodded. Alistair found the tongue that she thought must have been cleaving to his palate and said: "Yes, absolutely. My fiance is in no immediate need. And afterwards- well, I am in banking as no doubt you know, and I can take care of all that." The rain had begun again by the time Mr. Edwards left. He put up his umbrella and made his way at a half-run towards the street and a taxi. Alistair had phoned for one for them. They travelled back to Charlotte Cottage in silence. Having closed the front door, he turned to her and tried to take her in his arms. Worms turn, she thought, and I have not even been quite a worm, more of a trapped insect that can still sting. She held his hands, took them down from her shoulders and stepped back. "It's a strange thing," she said, "that while I was living with you I was your girlfriend and now I've left you I'm your fiance. How do you account for that?" "You're going to say it's the money, aren't you?" "No, I'm not going to say that, Alistair. You've said it. You've said what I couldn't bring myself to say." "Perhaps it's slipped your mind that I've been here seeing to things practically every day since your grandmother died. I didn't know what kind of money she'd left." "You made an intelligent guess. You're a banker, as you told Mr. Edwards; you know about these things." "Darling," He said, "Darling, I want to marry you. All right, I didn't know that until you'd left me. Is that so bad? I didn't value you as you should be valued while you were with me, but when you'd gone I missed you so desperately." "Darling" and "My fiance" - - I think of them as expressions people use when they don't want to say someone's name." He said angrily. "What's that got to do with it? I said I wanted to marry you. I told you why. You've no right to hold the past against me. Those things will never happen again, I've promised you that." He clenched his hands. "You haven't even noticed, have you?" "Noticed what?" "That I haven't once mentioned the transplant, that harvest thing, whatever you call it. I've put that behind me. I made myself a promise never to say any more about it and I've kept to that. What more do you want" It grew easier with every sentence. Her strength increased at an almost alarming rate. "I don't want anything, Alistair." "What does that mean?" "From you. I don't want anything. I thought I'd explained that." "No, you've got everything, haven't you? What you've been waiting for. Independence. You don't _need me is that what you mean." He made a kind of running jump at her, taking her by surprise. He seized her by the shoulders and began to shake her. His face had changed back to what it used to be, flushed dark red, the eyes very black. "You're mine; you can't get away from me like that. Just because you're rich now, you think you don't need me, after everything I've done for you, after what we've been..." The doorbell rang. His hands tightened, then faltered and she twisted away from him. Her teeth were chattering. She put up her hand to cover her mouth as if its pressure would stop the shaking. The bell rang again and she went to answer it, speechless, trembling, unable to speak to Bean who stood on the doorstep, wearing his polite obsequious smile. "Good afternoon, miss. Little fellow ready for his walkies, is he?" The borzoi, the beagle, the golden retriever, the chocolate poodle and the scottie were tied to the gate post. A large sticking plaster covered most of the bald part of Bean's head. Mary looked at it in a dazed sort of way before fetching Gushi. Alistair followed her to the door, said a hearty "Good afternoon" to Bean and that it was far from ideal weather for dog-walking. "Needs must, sir, when the devil drives," said Bean ambiguously. Mary shut the door. Alistair was leaning against the wall. "Look, I'm sorry about that. But you can be so exasperating I get carried away. I suppose I just have this feeling I can shake some sense into you." "You ought to know by now that you can't." She opened the door again. She was struggling hard not to cry and succeeded better with the door open, with Bean and the dogs still visible, and the man in the house opposite braving a shower to deadhead his roses. "I'd like you to go. Please just go." There was a moment, no more than a few seconds, in which it seemed he might wrench the door from her, slam it shut and lean against it, confronting her. He must have thought of it, then maybe postponed such action until a later date. Something had struck him as dumb as she had been with Bean, perhaps a too-late realisation of what he had done, how he had reverted to the behaviour he said he had put behind him. He took his raincoat from the hall stand and went out into the rain, walking very fast. Alone, she could cry now but she found she no longer wanted to. She went into the living room, sat at Lady Blackburn-Norris's desk and began writing a letter to Leo. The nuns on Primrose Hill had dispensed tea to Pharaoh the key man at five on Saturday afternoon along with Racker and Dill and some of the jacks men and himself. Roman told the police all this and that he had spoken to Pharaoh, insofar as it was possible to have a conversation with anyone so distracted and strange and out of touch with reality as the key man was. He understood that he had supplied Pharaoh with an alibi for something that had occurred at five, though no one told him what. When he asked what had happened, in his middleclass way, the way that expects explanation from authority, they said they were unable to tell him that. For a moment he thought the officer was going to call him "sir". Bewildered by his accent and perhaps by a very different manner from that of the jacks men, the young policeman was indeed on the verge of calling him "sir", until he reminded himself this was a vagrant he was talking to. Roman might have told the police something of Pharoah's life but they hadn't asked him and he had learned, while on the street, not to offer gratuitous information. There was no reason for them to suspect him of being the repository of Pharaoh's secrets, if indeed he was; if the story told him one night on the canal bank was even true. Roman believed it was. Francie Quin who had recounted it was no more drunk on "milk" than he normally was and he offered the story without bursting into the jacks men's mad laughter or their occasional growling belligerence. Everyone knew Pharoah's real name was Jimmy Clancy but only Quin had discovered where his sobriquet came from. Back in the Seventies, when very young, when still in his teens, he had been attached to a religious cult that roamed the country in battered vans and trucks, and like strolling players of old, performed on the roadside or in a field its own version of miracle and mystery plays. In one such play, a dramatised "Moses in the Bulrushes", Clancy had played the King of Egypt whose daughter finds Moses and brings him up. The title had stuck and he was Pharaoh thereafter. It was in those days too that he had first, as was fashionable, put the blue tint on his hair. Or rather, his sister, a hairdresser, had done it for him. Quin fancied he had been schizophrenic since his teens, since before the time he joined the cult. Most of the members heard God talking to them, so there was nothing strange to be noted in Pharaoh's behaviour. "Though it was more Satan than God, if you ask me," said Quin. "An imp of Satan tormenting him. He was supposed to find the Keys of the Kingdom, whatever they might be." "The Keys of the Kingdom of Heaven. Christ is said to have given them to Peter," said Roman, and because he didn't want to seem a fount of knowledge, "or that's what I've heard. Something like that. The Pope would have them now." "They real then, are they? I mean, like what they lock up the Park with?" Roman said he didn't think so, more a symbol, or a way of speaking, but Quin seemed to know what he meant. In the dark canal a full moon was reflected, like a round white light under the water. Trees trailed thin branches across its surface as if to catch the moon in their net. It could have been some broad sluggish river they sat beside, with dense vegetation growing down to its banks, a mass of complex leafiness that might have stretched, for all that could be seen, back across the city for miles, covering buildings in a dark wilderness. Perhaps the Nile had been like that, where Moses floated in his rushy cradle. A reddish London sky was all scudded over with wisps of black cloud. Distantly the tall Edwardian blocks, palely lit with sodium and neon, gleamed like palaces, the castles in the sleeping wood. The sounds of the city, as light as they ever became, thinned and rarefied, throbbed softly through the earth. The rest of the jacks men had gone home to their hostel in Camden, a place Quin avoided if he could elude the police and sleep in the Park. He had collected his DSS money that day, so had brown ale instead of me ths and water and he passed the bottle. Roman took a swig so as not to be stand-offish. "When he got bad they sectioned him and he was in this bin for most of the Eighties. He come out four or five years back to what they call care in the community." Quin gave a soft derisive laugh. "His mum gave him a bed for two nights. After that her and his stepfather changed the locks and he couldn't get back in. He didn't know and he came back and tried his keys in the locks. Them was the keys he started with, the ones that wouldn't open her door." "Where does he get them from? The rest of the keys, I mean?" "Nicks them, God knows. He don't never _use them. They're not the right ones, they don't open the doors he wants open." "Lift up your heads, O ye gates," Roman muttered wishing immediately afterward that he hadn't. But Quin seemed gratified. "That's right. Say some more." So Roman said, "Lift up your heads, O ye gates and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors, and the King of Glory shall come in..." "You want to say that to Pharaoh," said Quin. "He'd like that, would Pharaoh." But remembering the religious cult, Roman said "I've no doubt he knows it already." Whether the police had actually spoken to Pharaoh he couldn't tell. He looked at news boards half-expecting to read of another murder, but there was nothing. Of Effie there had been no sign since the day they found John Dominic Cahill's body and he had told her to leave the gardens. But he sensed among the men and the occasional woman who slept rough on the borders of the Park, a new tension, an awareness of danger and threat, as if nemesis had come to disturb their precarious peace. The weather was mild, though still cold at night. He took his clothes and one of his blankets to the launderette in Baker Street. His old winter worn trainers he threw away and bought a new pair. The best time of year was coming for the street sleepers. It was not until you slept on doorsteps that you realised real summer only comes to England after midsummer is past, and in those short months perhaps a mere four or five nights will be warm. On one of those, in the first week of June, he slept in the open on Primrose Hill, hoping to see the stars. But even up there the sky was overcast by some unnatural vapour and suffused from below by a reddish light. He lay awake for a long time, remembering Elizabeth's interest in astronomy and how he had read it up to keep pace with her, just as he had bought himself a book on pond life so that he might know what Daniel was talking about. But very little life of any kind remained in English ponds -fertilisers and insecticides had seen to that - and the stars were no longer visible from a West Hampstead garden. He could conjure up their three faces as they had been when last he saw them, but now as he did so he thought how he had frozen them in the ice of his present. Had they lived they would no longer look like that. Sally might but Elizabeth would be nearly seventeen now, a young woman, and as for Daniel -at perhaps no time once babyhood is past does the face change so much as it does between eight and ten and Daniel would be ten now. So he, their father was looking at a mirage, at outdated photographs, at lost lives gone beyond any real recall. For the first time since he had taken to the street he thought of the future. Up until this moment there had only been the past and the present, for he had supposed, though he had never put this into uttered or silent words, that he would not long survive, that life could not support so much pain. Men have died from time to time, he quoted to himself, and worms have eaten them, but not for love. Not of grief either, it seemed. The future stretched before him, the door to it had opened at last, and on the other side he saw, white and rolling uphill, an infinite street on which the homeless slept and he among them. If Carl had said it once he had said it a hundred times, that he didn't want Hob coming upstairs. Well, he could come up for a social call if he wanted but Hob never made social calls. He only wanted one thing and Carl was ready enough to supply it, but not at home, not in front of Leo. Hob knew all that but he was desperate. He wasn't just in a state, this was the mother of all states. It was the worst he'd ever known since that time he'd spent all one night in a cell and they wouldn't give him anything, not even one of those new antihistamines. They'd had a good laugh at his expense. It had been the funniest thing they'd seen in months. He knew he was getting bad when he could hear the mice. According to Carl there was a mouse for every person in the British Isles, which made about fifty-eight million, and most of them lived in the walls of Redferry House. Or that was Hob's opinion. Another thing he'd heard was that no matter where you were, city or countryside, you were never more than six feet from a rat. His sister had told him you could be sitting somewhere really up-market, like the bar of a classy hotel, and there'd be a rat lurking inside the wall behind you or outside the window with the velvet curtains. But it was mice he heard, running around and scratching behind the skirting board. Or, rather, he heard them when he was in a state. The rest of the time he didn't hear them or else he didn't care. He'd start feeling shaky, weak and old, and his muscles would jump and he'd hear the scratching. It was hard to say what came first, the panic attack when everything frightened him - the ai rather itself, the light, just having his eyes open, any sort of movement - or the mice scratching. There was very little furniture in his first-floor flat, only a brown vinyl couch with Mickey Mouse scatter cushions and the mattress he slept on and of course the TV, and there was never much food. He usually kept in a packet of Weetabix and one of cream crackers, for his health's sake. But the night before he'd drunk a lot of vodka in lieu of anything better, eaten a Weetabix to get something on his stomach and fallen asleep in the middle of it. When he woke up at dawn or something like that, light anyway, there'd been droves of mice round his feet eating crumbs. He'd yelled out and they'd fled but he felt so bad that afterwards he'd wondered if they were real mice or not. And if they were real, could he have seen fifty of them, which was what he thought? So what with the mice and nothing in the flat but the last of the vodka and six morphine tabs prescribed for his stepfather's ex-wife's cancer, he had to go upstairs and see Carl. The way he saw it he didn't have a choice. For once, the lift was working. If it hadn't been he reckoned he'd have lain down on the floor and died. His mother's man, who was ninety-five, sang a song that went: I have no pain, dear Mother, now, But oh, I am so dry, Attach me to a brewery, And leave me there to die. It wasn't a brewery he wanted, more like a chemistry lab, but the song writer had the right idea. He growled the tune, going up in the lift, but had to stop because he was shrieking. Carl and Leo lived on the seventh floor. Carl had painted the front door quite a nice shade of yellow but someone had tried to break in and though they hadn't succeeded, they'd gouged a great slash out of the woodwork from the keyhole to the letter box. A long time passed before the door was answered. Carl came at last. He looked Hob up and down. "I thought I told you not to come here." "I'm in a state," Hob said. "My home is out of bounds, Hob," Carl said. "You know that." "I'm in a state. I just want one rock to see me through the weekend." He pushed past Carl into the flat. "I got to have it, you know me." "One rock wouldn't see you through a revolving door," said Carl sadly. "Say hallo to Leo. He's not feeling too good." "Him and me both. Hi. I got to have it, Carl, don't fuck me over." Leo was lying on the sofa. He didn't look any worse than usual, or not in Hob's opinion. When Hob was in a state he hadn't much time for other people's ailments. Leo was reading a letter. He looked terrible when he laughed, his face more like a skull than usual. "Now you're here you'd better sit down. Turn your visit into a social call, right? How about a cup of tea?" Hob shook his head feebly. Sitting down in the brothers' flat he could sometimes convince himself he was in a kindly rehab centre. There was carpet on the floor, and armchairs, and if the rest of the furniture was of a slightly lower standard than the kind you see exposed for sale on the pavements of Kilburn High Road, it was furniture and it gave some semblance of home to the place. Carl kept it warm too, for Leo's sake. Last year, just before Leo came home from hospital, Carl had made an attempt to paint this room but had abandoned the task halfway through, so that two of the walls were green, one white and one half green and one half white. Hob's mum, who'd known Leo all his life, said Carl was more like a father to him than a brother, thought the world of him, worshipped the ground he walked on - which wasn't much like Hob's experience of the paternal role. And Carl didn't have a very tender heart where others were concerned. Now he had Hob seated in a chair with a mug of tea in front of him, he was back conversing with Leo as if there wasn't anyone else there. Hob didn't know who this woman was they were talking about and cared less. The tea tasted like mice piss, anyway. The woman had written to Leo, it sounded like; she was halfway to being his girlfriend, which was crazy on account of everyone knew Leo was on his way out. Carl wasn't going to talk about it in front of him anyway - Hob might be in a state but he didn't miss that tiny shake of the head Carl gave Leo. Maybe he'd mouthed something about walls having ears, only Hob couldn't see. His voice came out in a whine. "I got to have something, Carl." "The Fountain then, the old drinking fountain. Ten. When it's dark. If it's not me it'll be Gupta." "You not got nothing now? No shit?" Carl said remotely, "Absolutely no shit, Hob, in all senses of the word." "A couple of Es? Some cycles?" "You're the expert, Hob. I don't even know what cycles are but I bet they're on the controlled list." "Some jellies?" Hob said hopefully. "You're too scared of the needle, you know that," said Carl. "It's time I took payment in kind again, I think." He took the letter from Leo. "Nice handwriting she's got." "She's got nice things to say." Carl laughed. He put the letter in his pocket. "I've never done a violent act," he said conversationally. "Never drawn a drop of blood or caused a moment's pain in anger. The pain I caused gave infinite pleasure. How does it feel, Hob, doing what you do?" "I don't know," said Hob. "I'm in a state. I'm fucked." "I'll have a job for you one of these days. How would you like that, Hob? A job that was big enough to keep you in rocks or that elephant dope for the rest of your life?" Hob said with as much eagerness as he could muster, "Have you got a job for me, Carl? I don't mind work, I'll work all the hours God gave." Carl started laughing. "I bet you will. You're a scream, did you know that? You know that old dog man, the one in the baseball cap that walks the dogs?" "I don't know him. Why would I?" "I can't tell you why you would, Hob. Can't you stop that shaking? You're rocking the room and Leo's not a well man. The old dog man may have something for you if you're in the Park around half-four in the afternoon. Mind you, I'm only guessing but I reckon he'll have something. It's what I've heard. You'd better go now. I'll see you later or Gupta will." Leo was looking at him with those great glassy eyes in his skull face. Hob was beginning to feel very sick. He knew he wouldn't be sick because he hadn't eaten anything to bring up, but he needed to be out in the air. Carl kept the flat very warm for Leo's sake. "Say goodbye nicely to Leo," said Carl. "He's not feeling very bright." Downstairs again, Hob forgot about the fresh air. He'd had an idea. There was just a chance, not much of one but a faint chance, that he'd left a tab or even some blow - who was he kidding? -in the pockets of his clothes. Everything he possessed lay in heaps on the bedroom floor, some of it piled on the blankets on the end of his mattress to help keep him warm on cold nights. The best he had came from charity shops; the worst, which was his daily wear, out of litter bins or off skips. He started fumbling through the smelly welter of garments - the pockets of an old red cardigan, stiff with dirt and food stains; jeans with missing knees and ragged hems; a scuffed leather jacket that had been his grandfather's decades ago. The pockets yielded nothing but dead matches and old scratch cards. His searching became manic and, frustrated, he flung stuff across the room: aged T-shirts that were greyish or blackish, sagging vests, a pair of striped pyjama pants. The movement must have disturbed the mice, for the scraping noises began again, and a scurrying and a faint high-pitched squeaking. Hob lay down on the mattress as the panic attack started and buried his face in the old clothes, uncertain now whether the sounds he heard were made by the mice or by himself. A huge empty loneliness isolated him and he whimpered. He pounded his fists on the floor boards and all the mice fled like an army in the full tilt of retreat.

Chapter Thirteen

Boris and Ruby lugged Bean across the Marylebone Road at the lights between Park Square and Park Crescent. They were never red for long enough to satisfy him and he bared his teeth and shook his fist at impatient drivers. But he wasn't going back through that tunnel while the key man was still at large. He had given the police a precise description, from the long black hair and beard dyed a fierce cobalt blue to the feet in split and filthy leather boots. The keys, he believed were fastened to his clothes with safety pins, and he described them as like an armour plating, a kind of chain mail worn for protection. Several times, because no arrest was made and nothing seemed to be done, Bean went back to the police and harried them. He wanted an identity parade so that he could pick the key man out. They told him they were working on his case and if anything developed they would get back to him. Bean had no faith in them. Though he knew a large number of people, he had few friends, and those he had were acquaintances he met in the Globe on a Friday night, the only evening out he had. There was Freddie Lawson, who worked as odd-job man for the Crown Estates, and Peter Carrow, a Park attendant, whose life had changed very much for the better when he was issued with a vacuum cleaner for sucking up the litter in the Broad Walk and round the pavilions. Lawson, a widower, and Carrow, whose wife had left him long ago, both drank far more than Bean did, drank away their wages in the Globe or the Allsop Arms every night, but it was on Friday that they met him in the Globe and it was there that Bean recounted to them his experiences with the key man. Carrow, who knew most of the dossers by sight at least immediately recognised Bean's description and was even able to tell him the key man's name. By now Bean had convinced himself he had seen Clancy when he was mugged. He believed it. The two encounters had become blurred in his mind and he told Lawson and Carrow that it was just after he passed Clancy in the tunnel that the key man had stepped away from the wall and struck him on the back of the head. A number of other people, including the inevitable tourists, heard him say this. "And the Bill won't do nothing for you?" said Lawson. Lawson always called the police the Bill. Carrow called them the Filth. "They're protecting him," said Bean, "for reasons of their own." He tried to enlist the help of Valerie Conway. Since their confrontation over the matter of her given name, Bean had called her nothing. All kinds of styles and titles were in his repertoire -Miss, Miz, Madam, Ma'am, as well as surnames preceded by Miss or Miz -but he called her nothing now and she was on her guard when he asked her if it wasn't a fact that he had described to her his encounter with Clancy, calling him an "alien". "That wasn't the same time as when you were mugged," said Valerie. "Oh, please," said Bean. "Don't give me that. I came here with the dog and for once you opened the front door to me on account of me being in such a state. I was on my knees. I couldn't hardly see straight." "Maybe, but you never said who'd done it to you. If you want my opinion, you're confused. You can't expect me to make a fool of myself going to the police with a story that's a figment of your imagination." "Perhaps you'll fetch the dog," said Bean. Victory to Valerie, she thought, shutting the area door behind them. Bean crossed the road and went to pick up Charlie the golden retriever in St. Andrew's Place. James Barker Pryce, a wet dead cigar plugged into the left corner of his mouth, brought the dog to the door. Bean advised him to be careful if he was thinking of going out. There was a dangerous vagrant at large, identifiable by his blue-dyed hair and the keys pinned all over him. Barker-Pryce said he hoped Bean hadn't been drinking. He never gave credence to anything told him by a member of the working class, never had and never would; they had always been mentally subnormal and were now even more reduced by television and drugs. Bean told his tale to Mrs. Goldsworthy and then to Lisl Pring. "I wouldn't like anything to happen to Marietta," was all she said. Incensed, Bean forgot his usual deference. "Thanks very much," he said. "Never mind me." He added ridiculously, a belated, "Miss." Lisl Pring started laughing. When she laughed she sucked in her diaphragm and you could count her ribs. She wouldn't have cared what Bean said to her so long as the poodle got its walks. "I shall be going on my holidays to my sister in Brighton the first week of August," he said and watched her face fall. "I'm telling you well in advance so as you can make other arrangements." Up in Park Village Miss Jago showed more sympathy. She asked him if he was fully recovered, if the police had found whoever was responsible. Bean wondered what she was after. He had no belief in altruism. Maybe she was running short of cash in the absence of Sir Stewart and Lady Blackburn-Norris and thought soft soap might secure her a discount. "There's no doubt who was responsible, miss," he said darkly, shaking his head in the way people do when they wish to convey exasperation and disillusionment. "Kind of alien a lady like yourself would no more notice than you would a bit of muck on the pavement. I wouldn't even ask you if you'd come in contact with him." She came back with the dog in her arms, cuddling him like a baby. "Every penny I'd got on me he took. And my camera. Luckily, I used up the film with the shots on it of these lovely dogs. Would you be interested in acquiring a portrait of the little Shih Tzu?" She said it wasn't her dog. That was a matter for Sir Stewart and Lady Blackburn Norris. He had guessed she'd say that and didn't much care. Mrs. Goldsworthy had said she'd love a portrait of Mc Bride or even an album of pictures. It was common knowledge he was to be found in the Park every day around eight-thirty in the morning and four-thirty in the afternoon, say a quarter of an hour on either side of those times. Bean thought afterwards that this must account for it. But before the man came up to him he had set the dogs free and was walking the long exposed path toward the bridge and the new pond by the Hanover Gate. It was warm enough to do without his bomber jacket and he tied it round his middle by its sleeves the way the youth did. For the baseball cap, smart protection from the sun's heat on his poor head, he was starting to feel a greater affection than he had for any human being. It had prob ably saved his life when Clancy attacked him. By the railings that enclosed the grounds of The Holme, the big house that overlooked the lake, the woman was walking her dozen dogs. Not one of them was on the lead and all walked sedately, the little ones at her heels, the bigger ones in as orderly a fashion as if they had all been to training classes. Perhaps they had. The woman wore jodphurs and a check shirt and her long dark hair flowed down her back. She must have one of those whistles inaudible to the human ear, for when a labrador lagged behind Bean saw her put something to her lips and the labrador come running obediently. Three of his dogs were close at his heels and the other three at the lake's edge - Marietta barking at a red-headed duck, the Shih Tzu and the scottie drinking from the scummy brown water -as Bean stepped on to the bridge that here crosses a loop of the lake enclosing an island. It was shady and dim, a dusty place, overshadowed by tall trees. Birds thronged the nearly stagnant water, pochards, mandarins, swans, mallards, pin tails coots and divers and now, in the mild humidity of June, there was a powerful stench of decaying vegetable matter. He was halfway across when a man approaching from the other end stopped in front of him and asked for a light. Bean might have said, "Sorry" or "I'm afraid I don't carry one" but in fact he said, "I don't smoke," in such a way as to put smoking on a par with snorting cocaine. Instead of passing on, the man looked him in the eye. He was young, skinny but with a jowly face, a round head and a crew cut, too young and strong for Bean to push past him. He had the sort of eyes Bean had heard addicts had, dull and with pinhead pupils. A flicker of fear plucked at his chest. But he was not alone. He could see Sunday crowds on the sunlit grass by the Hanover pond; footsteps were approaching behind him and two girls with linked arms had come on to the bridge ahead. "My mate heard you shooting the shit," the man said. "Or it come over the grapevine." "I done _what?" The man took no notice. "I'm not talking about wasting. If you want him attended to it'll cost you a Hawaii." Bean managed a mental translation but the last bit escaped him. "Fifty smackers." "Chance'd be a fine thing," said Bean. "I haven't got it. It was three times that he took off of me. And my camera. Bastard with blue hair and all over keys." He tried to collect his thoughts. "Fifty- that's a lot of money." It wasn't true he hadn't got it, but he couldn't easily afford to part with it. Once again Bean thought how imperative it was to find ways of augmenting his income. He watched the round-headed man return the way he had come and head towards the Hanover Gate. The idea that someone young and strong might "attend to", which presumably meant "beat up", the key man was very inviting. With recollections of certain episodes in the domestic life of Maurice Clitheroe -once he had spent three days in bed as the result of an encounter with a young giant from Salisbury Street - Bean thought longingly of Clancy in a similar state. And in Clitheroe's case it had been _play. It was only the cost that stopped him running after the round-headed man. Of course it was cheap at the price, but only if parting with the price didn't hurt. The golden dome of the Mosque, heaving into view, was somehow reassuring. The man would be there again next Sunday. It was a week since she had written to him but he hadn't even phoned. What had happened that first time she had written to him disclosing her identity giving her address, was happening again. Dorothea, in whom up to a point she confided, said that perhaps he was one of those men who only want women who are hard to get. Women who were forthcoming and made overtures frightened them away. That wasn't much comfort to Mary, who was remembering with some degree of shame the warm phrases in her own letter and how she had reminded him of the special friendship they had. It had been to some extent an appeal, her own loneliness cited and her bereavement. When Saturday came she had given up. He had dropped her. She had said or done something to upset him or he had changed his mind about her. Alistair had phoned and asked her to have dinner with him and though she had refused, putting the phone down after a quick goodbye, she had wondered if next time she would yield, if Alistair with his small violent acts, his petty aggression and his overbearing ways wasn't better than no one at all. When she thought of those small violences the blood came up and heated the cheek he had slapped. She was looking at herself in the mirror, at that phenomenon of the reddening cheek, watching the colour die away, when the doorbell rang. For once she didn't speculate as to who it might be. She heard a taxi move off as she was opening the door. Leo stood on the doorstep, paler than she had ever seen him, even his lips drained of colour. "I've been in hospital," he said. "I didn't want you to know." The explanation she should have thought of but hadn't. "But why not, Leo?" He hesitated. "May I come in?" "Of course. Of _course." She closed the door. Already she was wondering how she could have listened to Dorothea's reasoning, could have doubted her own judgement. "I felt I'd failed you," he said. "I'd let you down. You've done so much for me and I'd reneged on you. I'd been overdoing things, apparently. I know I had, I'm well aware of it. But you must be able to guess why I had." She shook her head. "How shall I put it? I don't want to upset you, Mary." He paused and seemed to be thinking what to say that would not be hurtful. "I've been overexerting myself because I'd met you," he said. "There. I've said what I've been afraid to say. I so wanted to be a - - a normal man for you." "Leo..." She took both his hands in hers. He let them lie passively. His eyes were bright, too bright, as with fever. "I was going to -well, to let things slide between us. Slip away out of your life, if you understand me. It means so much to me that you should never see me as ungrateful or indifferent but at the same time, I'd rather you felt that than that - you - you saw your donation had been in vain." "But you've said you're all right. You've said -I think you've said- the leukaemia hasn't come back." "I didn't know that when they took me in." He turned his face away. "I was so afraid, Mary." She tightened her grip on his limp hands. This time he made her a small return of pressure. "Then your letter came. You'd said very little but I think I knew what your grandmother meant to you. I couldn't stay away any longer." Their faces were very close. He reached a little forward and kissed her on the lips. It was just such a kiss as she might have given him in the unimaginable situation of her making the first advance, light, gentle, dry but lingering. He put his arms round her and held her close to him in a brotherly hug. She felt his bones through the meagre flesh, birdlike, fragile. A pulse in his neck was beating fast. Still holding her shoulders, but feather-lightly, in a ghost's clasp, he looked into her face. "I'm afraid to say too much, Mary. When you've been ill, like I have, when you've been so near death and thought you were near death again, your emotions get very - very febrile, very wild and hot, you think and fancy all sorts of things. But you mustn't _I mustn't -express them too soon. I have to keep telling myself, there _is time, I _have got years ahead." Leo went into the living room, sat on the sofa, perfectly still, as if in a trance. Unusually for him, he put out no hand to fondle the little dog as it pressed itself against his legs. He said in a curiously intense tone: "Tell me about your grandmother. Tell me all about her and your childhood and everything." It was what she had wanted. She began talking to him of things never previously aired. The idea of telling Alistair of the day when, newly orphaned but not yet knowing it, she had been brought to her grandparents, how she had felt, was unthinkable. But she could tell Leo, who sat listening intently, his eyes sometimes meeting hers, his lips sometimes parting in a smile. She spoke of those early days. Frederica had seemed old but when you are eight all grown-ups seem old. Children are quickly won over and a devotion in them easily awakened. The oddest thing was that from the first Frederica was nicer than her own mother had been. "It seems disloyal. It's something people don't say, that their adoptive parents were better than their natural parents. But mine were. My parents were very young, my mother was only twenty-one when I was born. And afterwards they wanted to go on living the sort of life they always had. I think my mother must have resented me. I remember her as indifferent and rather rejecting. Why am I telling you all this?" "Because I asked you." "And that's enough? Maybe it is. My parents died when someone's private plane they were flying in from an airfield in Essex to France came down in the Channel. I was unhappy at first, of course I was. I think my grandparents were very unhappy, they'd lost their only child, but they never showed it to me. She was called Helen, my mother. That's why I took the name when I had to write that note for you. Guilt, I expect it was, though, not love. "I loved my grandparents. I adored my grandmother. And, you know, the air crash which was so terrible for them and supposed to be for me I once overheard a woman say to my grandmother that it was the great tragedy that had blighted my childhood - it was romantic. It was something to have and almost to boast about; it set me apart in a rather dashing way from the other girls at school. If some power, some genie, had asked me if I would like my parents back, I'd have said no. But I'd never have told anyone, I'd have been too ashamed." "But you're not ashamed to tell me?" "No. Strange, isn't it?" He said: "I want you to think you can tell me anything. I want to be the person you can talk to." He stood up, a little unsteadily, she thought, and for a moment he put his hand on his forehead. "I must go now. May I come back tomorrow?" "I've tired you," she said. "No. You're the last person to tire me. You refresh me." He spoke like a child, a very young boy. "Can I have a proper kiss?" She nodded. He put his arms round her and kissed her, but very softly, very gently. His mouth tasted of some scented spice, cinnamon perhaps or cardamom. Afterwards she thought it had been like no other kiss she had ever known and if she had had to explain what she meant she would have said it was non-physical, like a kiss in the mind, or like kissing someone not of this world, a wraith, a spirit, a ghostly visitant. "You will come back?" she said eagerly. "I promise." He looked less ill next day, though his thinness was extreme. She had the illusion that she could see through him as he passed through the hall and came into the living room, could see the shapes of furniture and the colours of cloth through his transparent form. They drank wine and she made lunch for them. He told her about his feelings for his brother. "I love him and he loves me," he said. "Does that sound terrible to you, coming from a man?" "Of course it doesn't." "He's done everything for me. Given up everything too. He was at drama school, he's a wonderful actor, but he gave that up to be with me every day when I was so ill, so that I'd never be alone. He's been more than a father to me." "I'd like to meet him." He didn't answer that but said rather abruptly, "I'm moving out, I'm getting a place of my own." "But why if you get on so well?" "Because it's not fair on him, Mary. I drag him down. I spoil his privacy. Besides, it's his place but he gives up the bedroom to me and sleeps on the sofa." He had found a flat in Primrose Hill, in Edis Street, no more than a room with kitchen area and shower really, but it would do. She searched her mind for ways of putting it, finally came out with: "Leo, I haven't told you but I'm going to be quite rich. My grandmother left me a lot of money. If there is anything I could..." He cut her short. It was like that time in the Italian restaurant when he had reacted so peremptorily to her offer of paying her share of the bill. "Absolutely not. Please don't even think of it." They had left the table and were once more side by side on the sofa, Gushi at their feet. "I very much dislike the idea of your being rich," Leo said. There was an unprecedented distaste in his voice, though rather than rising in volume it had sunk almost to a whisper. "You may say that it's none of my business but - but I want things about you to be my business, Mary." He looked deep into her eyes. She felt her face flood with colour. Seeing the flush, he put up one finger to touch her cheek. The other hand followed. He took her face in his hands and kissed her with the gentleness of a woman kissing a child. Then, when she was unresistant, began a soft delicate kissing, his lips on hers, then brushing her cheek, the tip of her nose, her mouth once more. The gentleness of it, the slowness, aroused her. She expected every moment a crushing embrace, hard lips, a tongue that prised her mouth open and reached chokingly, like some surgical probe, for the back of her throat. Leo kissed her lips and stroked her cheek. Her body, that she now felt to have been stiff and tense for weeks, the muscles held rigidly, began to slacken and melt. "There is something I would very much like to do," he whispered. "May I ask you? If you say no, we'll just go on sitting here, but if you say yes..." "What is it, Leo?" "I would like to lie down and hold you. That's all, just hold you." She nodded. "I mean just hold you," he said. "Not any thing more." He gave a dry unhappy laugh. "That has to be all, I think." They went upstairs. He seemed quite unselfconscious when he took off his outer clothes. She looked at a skeletal but still beautiful body, straight, smooth, as white as her own. It would have seemed ridiculous, in anticipation or retrospect, to go to bed with a man in her underclothes, he in underpants, she in bra and tights, but in the present, as a happening, it was natural. She wondered where he had received the transplant but could see no mark on him. In her bed he held her in his arms. She had always found this position a difficult one with Alistair, for if maintained for more than a few minutes, the arm under his body would "go to sleep", as would his under her, while the other possibility, that of embracing him with one arm and folding the other behind her, brought an intolerable ache to her shoulder. But Leo held her without demanding that she hold him. She laid one arm across his chest, the other on her own breasts. He held her firmly but not lightly and if the arm under her body grew numb he gave no sign of it. He did not speak. She had to remind herself that he was six years younger than she, for he held her as an innocent father might hold his child. Not since she was a child herself, not since those days when she was laid down for a rest in the afternoon - by that mother who was only too glad, if the truth were known, for an hour of peace - had Mary slept in the daytime. But she slept now and Leo slept. His, she thought, waking after the unbelievable period of two whole hours, was the heavy slumber of a man who has missed out on sleep for too long and has a hundred hours to make up. She raised herself on one elbow and looked at his face, the narrow lips relaxed in sleep, the pale skin in places prematurely lined, the veined lids over his closed eyes, membranes like purplish leaves. When he was a child his hair must have been white, for even now it was only faintly coloured, the shade of sun-bleached straw. Something told him she had moved away, for blindly in sleep he reached for her. But not in the way other men had done, not as Alistair had done, seizing her roughly and pulling her down into a hard embrace and bruising kisses that made her lips sore and her gums bleed. Without opening his eyes, Leo felt for her hand and taking it in his, brought it to his mouth. He kissed her hand gently, the wrist, the back of it, the knuckles. She thought, what is happening to me? Am I falling in love with him? Is it the strangeness of him that fascinates me, or is it that I feel an ever stronger need to look after him? I do need that. I need to bring him here and care for him. It is as if I have begun the process of healing him and I must carry it through. Soon I must let him go, I must let him go home, but I am afraid that when he goes, when he is out of my sight and my care he will fail and fall and become ill again. Oh, if only I could keep him here I know I could restore him and then, one day... Bean was back. The bell rang once, then again insistently. She put on a dressing gown, picked Gushi up into her arms and went down to answer the door. Bean smiled his obsequious smile, his eyes cold and empty. He thrust a package into her hand. "Photos of the little chap, miss," he said. "Just to take a look. No obligation to purchase."

Chapter Fourteen

While in Maurice Clitheroe's employ Bean had drunk heavily. Sometimes he had drunk to excess. There was always a lot of liquor in the house and he had helped himself. If Clitheroe knew, and he must have known, he never said anything. Perhaps he understood that Bean couldn't do the job he did without a stimulant and a sedative. It was no joke, as Bean often said to himself, being the companion, servant, pimp and nurse of a serious masochist. Most of the young people who came to the house in York Terrace were in it only for the money. They took no more pleasure in beating a fat old man than Bean did in doing his shopping and cooking his _tournedos. But one or two were different. Bean, admitting them to the house, could see it in their faces and in the fixed stare of their half-mesmerised eyes. They were sadists and when the whip or the cane was in their hands there was no stopping their frenzy. It was then, hearing Clitheroe's screams and unable to sort pain from pleasure - or were they the same? that Bean took the brown ale chasers with glass after glass of cheap Spanish brandy. Some times he was almost too far gone to see the visitor off the premises, but he had to persevere. He had to keep as steady as he could, for it was afterwards that Clitheroe needed his ministrations. Once he found him unconscious. On another occasion he wanted to take his employer to Casualty, but Clitheroe, gasping on the floor, open weals on his naked back that bled into the Turkey carpet, fortunately predominantly crimson already, forbade his phoning for an ambulance on pain of dismissal. Bean passed out himself later, on brandy and brown ale. There was one young man, nameless but called by him The Beater, that he particularly remembered. If the eyes were the windows of the soul, as Anthony Maddox said they were, he had no soul, for looking into his eyes was like looking into empty holes. There was nothing beyond. The tip of his nose and his upper lip were pinkish as if he had rubbed them with sandpaper. He walked gracefully, his body straight and relaxed, his shoulders permanently lifted and his knees ever so slightly bent. After his visits Maurice Clitheroe was in a worse state than after any other beatings or being ridden up the stairs or having sharp objects threaded into soft parts of his body. He was sixty-seven, Bean's own age. His body was covered with scars, as a constantly abused slave's must be. Bean had never seen anything like it. He advised Clitheroe not to let The Beater come again but his employer took no notice. Bean was not fanciful - he admitted with some satisfaction that he had no imagination - yet he thought to himself that, peculiar though it was, Clitheroe was _in _love with The Beater. He was obsessed by him. He desperately needed him. And The Beater killed him. Or that was Bean's view of it. The beating Clitheroe got that evening was the worst Bean had ever known. Of course he was not a witness to it - he never was - and when the screams began, he swigged brandy directly out of the bottle and hid himself in his bed with the quilt stuffed into his ears. The Beater let himself out and Bean never saw him again. Clitheroe had a haemorrhagic stroke. His doctor, from Harley Street, just across the road knew all about Clitheroe's proclivities. He didn't look at the old man's body below the neck. By the time Clitheroe died ten days later the worst of the evidence had faded, though Bean had sometimes wondered what the undertakers thought. So long as no one blames _me, was his philosophy, and no one did. He gradually stopped drinking once the funeral was over. He was interested in getting fit before it was too late, and now it had come down to one whisky and two bottles of brown ale in the Globe on a Friday night. Freddie Lawson called the Globe "a real pub, all spit and sawdust and sausage sandwiches" and Bean's dinner on a Friday was not exactly a sausage but a veggie-burger sandwich with Branston pickle and sometimes a plate of chips. He wanted to find out the identity of the round headed man who had asked for a light on the bridge last Sunday. Freddie knew nothing about it and Peter Carrow refused to say anything until Bean told him why he needed to know. The air in the Globe was blue with smoke. It made Bean hoarse and he had to raise his voice. Several people stared at him. "Who d'y think you're looking at?" Bean said belligerently. An American tourist turned his face away. Bean dipped a chip in Branston pickle and popped it into his mouth. "There's a feller I'm on the lookout for. Got a pal with a head like Mussolini." "Who?" said Carrow, who was a mere forty-five, and without waiting to hear, "What d'you want him for?" Bean told him, not lowering his voice much. "It must be him overheard me talking in here." Freddie Lawson started laughing. "A Hawaii! Where did he get that from? A Hawaii!" "I can't afford it," said Bean. "Shame, because I reckon Mussolini'd do a good job." "It's a terible thing," said Carrow, "When a working man has to do the filth's dirty work for them." The American tourist, on his way out, whispered to Bean, "Hawaii Five-O, right?" "And you can keep your nose out of my business," said Bean. The round-headed man's friend failed to declare himself and Bean had to go home unsatisfied. While he was out at the shops next morning he considered walking over to the cash dispenser outside Barclays in Baker street. Perhaps Mussolini wouldn't want it all at once but would accept twenty five before the assault on Clancy and twenty five after the deed was done. He started to cross the Marylebone Road before the lights changed but he was too late and retreated angrily when a van nearly mowed him down. The driver stuck up two fingers in response to Bean's raised fist. A few years back, someone _had been hit by a van just about here. Well in Luxborough Street, same difference. A laundry and dry cleaner van it was. The one who was in the way had only been one of those beggars, so it didn't matter much. After that the van had skidded and hit a wall and the driver, who wasn't wearing a seat belt, had been thrown out and found by the ambulance men draped over the spiked railings of the mansion flats. Bean remembered the case well and Mr. Clitheroe reading it out of the paper to him as he often did; he liked reading aloud. The beggar had been killed instantly - hadn't felt a thing, no doubt- but the driver, for all he'd three broken ribs, had been found guilty of manslaughter, not just careless driving, and he'd gone to prison. Not for all that long, though going to prison at all Bean thought a monstrous injustice. But it went to show how dangerous the streets were round here. With Clancy incapacitated he would be able to use the tunnel again. Mr. Cornell came to the door. In the time it had taken Bean to exercise Boris, Valerie Conway had gone away on her summer holidays. Cornell, at any rate, was a gentleman, coming to the front door, not expecting Bean to go down into the area. Bean told him about the photos he'd taken of Boris and Mr. Cornell seemed interested, said that if Bean would drop a selection in sometime he'd like to have a look. With no Valerie to needle or be needled by and no stairs to climb, he got to Devonshire Street five minutes early and saw through a downstairs window Erna Morosini kissing a man. They were both in dressing gowns. The man wasn't her husband, Bean was sure of that, and maybe he could make something of it; maybe it would lead to an augmentation of his funds. The trouble was that Mrs. Morosini looked not at all disconcerted when she answered his ring, but was all smiles, happier than he'd ever seen her. "I'd love to see photos of Ruby. Will you drop them in. Not naughty ones, mind!" That made up his mind for him. He could afford it. He was going to increase his income, would buy a new camera and draw out fifty pounds for Mussolini. The beggar with the beagle was sitting outside the Screen on Baker Street when he got over there and talking to him, or standing beside him and wearing a typically evil expression, was Clancy, the key man. His hair had the blue sheen of a peacock's feather and the sun shining on his keys made a breastplate of them and made Clancy look, in Bean's eyes, like some demon god in a Hammer film. Bean went into one of the Sherlock Holmes souvenir shops and bought the red baseball cap with a picture of Holmes in a white circle he'd seen in the window. It was summer weight, with a perforated crown. On Sunday he felt quite excited. It started to rain as soon as he got into the Park. He was wearing his heavier weight cap and over his jacket a raincoat of clear plastic, so he was all right. Just the same, he would have preferred to keep under the trees but that would mean staying in those parts of the Park where dogs were not permited to run loose, Queen Mary's Rose Garden or the surroundings of the lake. But once their pads touched grass Charlie and the borzoi pulled so hard that Bean could scarcely keep his feet. He had to set them free and the others with them. A veil of rain, low hanging clouds of it, half-obscured the Mappin Terraces of the zoo, brown man-made mountains, and the ranged blocks of flats of St. John's Wood, red and white and Sixties grey rough-cast. The few highrise buildings loomed out of the mist and to the south the spaceship head on the stalk of the Post Office Tower stood out distinct, but greyer and uglier than on a sunny day. Bean stuffed his hands in his pockets, feeling the roll of notes. Water began to drip off the peak of his cap, so he turned it backwards, the way he'd seen kids do in American TV programmes. He took pride in doing his job well but there were limits. The rain had come on more heavily and now the Mappin Terraces and all the trees to the north had disappeared behind a grey-out. None of the dogs seemed to notice except for Gushi, who stood close to Bean's feet, shaking himself and whimpering. Bean began calling them. As was always the case with dogs - except the woman walker's -some were obedient and some were not. Experience told him Charlie wouldn't come. He whistled shrilly while clipping Gushi, Marietta and Mc Bride on to the leash. Ruby bounded up, throwing herself on top of the scottie in a simulated act of sexual intercourse, gender not much affecting role in dogs. Bean shouted at her and resumed his whistling. All the dogs shook themselves, their loose skin rattling. Bean wished he had invested in waterproof trousers when he bought the plastic raincoat. There wasn't a sign of Charlie, though Boris suddenly appeared out of the gloom, like the Hound of the Baskervilles Bean had seen in a Sherlock Holmes film. He padded up with lowered head and dripping ears, growling unpleasantly when Bean grabbed his collar. He thought he had allowed plenty of time but he looked at his watch and saw that it was nearly twenty to five. With five dogs on the leash, he stood not knowing which direction to go in. Where would Charlie go? One of the refreshment places maybe, to root about in a bin or beg for food. Not that anyone would be eating out-of-doors in this weather. Neither was in the direction Bean wanted to go. Right up till this moment, he had been in two minds about Mussolini, hoping to meet him and give him the go ahead and fearing to meet him. But now doubt had fled and he desperately wanted to see the man again, to reach the bridge, carry out his negotiations and set the process in motion. As he plodded along the path, tugged by his troop of dogs, he saw the key man once more in his mind's eye, the blue hair and beard, the cruel eyes, the clanking chain mail. He mustn't miss his chance of teaching the key man a lesson... Charlie was nowhere around the restaurant. Did that mean he had to traipse all the way back to the Broad walk? Ahead of him the path led down to the Long Bridge, crossing a different arm of the lake from the one where Mussolini would soon arrive, where he might already be... Bean had never lost a dog, never had a dog go missing for more than a minute or two. But Charlie had disappeared, had been absent now for a quarter of an hour. It was five to five. To the north of the lake, where ducks disported on the sodden grass or bounced on the little waves, Bean stood and cursed. The dogs, taking advantage of a pause, shook themselves vigorously. Bean began whistling again. Whatever happened, whatever he must forgo, he couldn't go back to Mr. Barker-Pryce and his bristling eyes and cigar without Charlie. There was a sound of scuffle and splashing, a quacking and honking, as three pink-footed geese and a white duck rose in a flurry of panic stricken feathers from the water's edge. Charlie was behind them, joyously leaping, his paws muddied to the hocks, his appearance so changed by total immersion that he looked as thin as the borzoi and as dark as the poodle. Bean made a grab for him and the retriever, understanding that the game and the glories of liberty were over, drew his whole body together and relaxed it in a massive series of shakes. Bean and the other dogs were soaked in water and flying mud. Even Bean's face was spattered with mud, his hands red and wet, his feet squelching in inundated shoes. But he ran. With all six dogs galloping ahead of him like a husky team - if only he had a sledge! -he made for the bridge over the loop of the lake. The sky was lightening and the rain easing up. Under the trees that led to the bridge it was almost dry. Bean took a deep breath and clenched the fist that held the leash. But of course Mussolini wasn't there; even if he had been there he wouldn't be any longer, not at five past five, not half an hour after the appointed time. He ran across the rest of the span. The rain had almost stopped and the sun was coming out through the drizzle. Bean took the path towards the Mosque, whose golden dome the sun had set glittering like an old coin, like a coin when they still made them of precious metals. He fancied this was the way Mussolini had gone last time. But there was no sign of him. There was scarcely a soul about but for the man tying up the paddle boats to the island in the Hanover pond. He was never late but he was going to be late getting his dogs back. Their owners would worry. They wouldn't listen to excuses about Charlie's truancy. Bean hurried to the path that runs parallel to the Outer Circle towards the Clarence Gate, and lifting his eyes to scan the green prospect and the lake edge, searching still for the round headed man, saw a rainbow form itself in a brilliant arc, one end in Madame Tussaud's and the other far away in Camden Town.