Chapter 10

Sixty pounds didn't go very far these days when you were buying clothes. Having parted with almost all of what his parents had left him on the purchase of the television set, Victor had decided to spend the money he had 'had' from Muriel on a pair of trousers, a shirt, a pair of shoes. He preferred to put it like that, what he had 'had' from Muriel, rather than what he had 'taken'. It was Eating where he went shopping, the district being rather more upmarket. Half the money went on the trousers and half on the shoes, a shirt as well being beyond his means. He was more than ever convinced that he needed a job, and a long way away from here, where so much reminded him of Muriel and Sydney, of his parents and his youth. Victor had never really had any friends. This was probably because his parents hadn't had any. Of visitors to the house he could only remember Muriel and later, once or twice, Muriel and Sydney, a neighbour who occasionally came to tea and a married couple called Macpherson whose society his mother lost because she did not, as his father put it, 'keep friendship in repair'. She had never cared for intruders into the unit formed by her husband and herself. They were all in all to each other, as Victor once heard her tell Mrs Macpherson, and besides this, she found entertaining, even in the most modest way, too much for her, it made her hysterical. When Victor was at school she didn't encourage him to bring other boys home and because of this he seldom got asked back to their houses. It was for his ninth birthday that the idea of a party was mooted. He would never forget the circumstances but he could no longer remember whose idea it had been, his mother's or his father's. The birthday was in June but plans for the party were made weeks ahead. Victor's mother thought invitations ought to be sent out but she didn't know how to word them, so although a great deal of energy was expended on worrying nothing was actually done. If it was a fine day the party could be held in the garden, but who could tell, in England, if 22 June would be a fine day or not? Victor's mother didn't want all those little boysthere were no prospective little girl guests - in her house. She wasn't a houseproud woman but she could not contemplate the idea of all those little boys running about. Victor had not been allowed to say anything about the party at school. He had been forbidden to issue invitations by word of mouth, but of course he had hinted that a party would be held. Then there was the food. It was really a question of which kind of food would be least messy and least trouble to prepare. Victor had been to a party where the children threw the food at each other and he had been unwise enough to mention this at home. His mother talked about the party every day and she talked about it as if it were a watershed on this side of which lay unimaginable stresses and anxieties and problems and on the far side, if it could ever be attained, a glorious peace and freedom. Sometimes she cried about it. One evening - it was the first week of June and no invitations had been sent - she burst out crying and asked why had they ever considered having a party, what had got into them, were they mad? Victor's father calmed her down and cuddled her and said they didn't have to have a party if she didn't want to. This made an amazing difference to Victor's mother, who dried her eyes and smiled and said they really didn't, did they? She immediately became happy and put the radio on and made Victor's father dance with her. She danced and sang 'Mr Sandman' and they never had the party. When Victor was older he sometimes found himself on the perimeter of one of those groups which are formed of a nucleus of two friends with two or three lesser friends and a few hangers-on. Victor was one of those hangers-on. He never had much to say but he wasn't a good listener either. Silent or laconic, he lived in a world of his own, as one of his teachers said in a school report. If a girl at his school didn't have a boy to go out with by the time she was fourteen, she felt less than a girl, inadequate and unattractive, but no such stigma attached to a boy with or without a girlfriend. At the time he went to the polytechnic Victor had scarcely spoken to a girl and he had certainly never been alone with one. Pauline chose him, not he her. His mother, who didn't like her, said she wanted someone to get married to and wasn't too particular about who it was, as long as he was young and nice-looking and with a potential for making a good living. Victor had been very nice-looking in those days, everyone said so. He was somewhat vain of his appearance and was glad when the fashion came in to grow one's hair long. Pauline had friends but he never got on with them. Women's voices irritated him, the pitch of them, their flexibility and rise and fall. Nor did he feel much need for a male friend. Alan was the nearest he ever had to a friend, but they seldom saw each other out of working hours and working hours were spent in separate cars. They had nothing in common but age and sex. Alan had a wife and child in Golders Green, a girlfriend in Camberwell, and was obsessed with vintage cars and rugby football. Victor could take an interest in the cars but that was about all. It wasn't much of a friend, he thought, who deserted you when you were down on your luck, never even wrote you a postcard. He had never had a friend but now perhaps that was about to change. The novelty of it excited him. As he put on his new trousers, his new shoes, he began to feel new himself, a person in the process of being re-made, his past shadowy this morning as if it had all taken place in a previous life- in New Zealand, in fact. And yet, of course, without that past he would never have got to know David. A pretty costly way of making a friend, he thought, as he got into the train, and a picture of prison came before his eyes, notably the night when Cal and the other three had raped him. Why did he have to think of that now? Settling in his seat, opening the first of the magazines he had bought, he wiped it away. It was a beautiful day, the best day they had had since he came out. The sun was as hot as late summer, though it was still only May. Clare had said 'about one' but he intended to be punctual, he intended to get there on the dot of one. Too late it occurred to him that in some circles it was considered polite to take flowers with you on these occasions or maybe a bottle of wine. Flowers would be like coals to Newcastle. Perhaps he could give them New Society, Country Life and Time Magazine, which still looked quite new and as if unread. There were people all over the green, throwing balls about and playing games and exercising dogs. Victor loitered, for it was only a quarter to. He remembered the room at Theydon Bois he had seen advertised on the newsagent's board and he wondered if it were still vacant. The place was so green and peaceful, the air so fresh compared to London, and yet London was only about fifteen miles away. He started walking slowly towards Theydon Manor Drive, feeling the sun on his face, thinking how impressed they would be by his appearance, his trim haircut, his new clothes. The scent of the honeysuckle he could smell all the way down the street and it quickened his excitement, his alert feeling of expectation. He had supposed Clare would open the door to him. This time he didn't make the mistake of pressing the bell but rapped with the Roman soldier door knocker. No one came and he waited. He waited, knocked again, and held his breath, afraid. The door was opened by David, which accounted for the delay. David had reached from his wheelchair and opened the door and sat there with a smile on his face. 'Hello, Victor. Is that right or would you rather be called Vic?' 'I'd rather Victor,' said Victor. He put the magazines down on the hall table. It was the first time he had set foot inside the house, which was cool and rather dark, but not dark in the way Muriel's was, for there was a feeling here that these rooms were a kind of refuge from the sunshine, but that if you wanted it you had only to throw open doors and windows and curtains for light to pour in. The hall floor was carpeted in a glowing ruby red. On the stairs was a lift, which ran on a rail above the bannister and which was large enough to accommodate David's wheelchair. 'It's good of you to come.' Victor couldn't think of a reply to that. Just when he could have done without it, when he needed to make a good impression, the chorea had come back, making his left eyelid twitch. He followed David into the room with the french windows. David was wearing the same baggy slacks he had had on last Monday but on top he wore a tee shirt and he said to Victor to take off his jacket if he wanted to. And help himself to a drink, the drinks were on the sideboard. Victor poured himself a measure of whisky, rather a large measure. He needed it- both to help him talk to David and for the confrontation with Clare which would surely happen at any minute. David, watching him, was lighting a cigarette. 'What about you?' Victor said. He shook his head. Victor felt he was being subjected to a fascinated examination. David seemed to be watching his every movement with a compulsive interest as if he were wondering how it was that this man could perform routine tasks like other men, pour liquid from a bottle into a glass, walk across a room, seat himself. Perhaps he was imagining it, though. Perhaps David was silent, smiling now, only because he too was at a loss for words. Inspiration came to Victor. 'Where's the dog?' he said. 'Mandy?' said David. 'Oh, she died. She got old and died.' 'I saw her in the newspaper photograph,' Victor said. 'She wasn't a puppy when I had her. She was two. They don't usually live past eleven, those labs. I miss her. I keep thinking I see her, you know, in a doorway or lying up against my chair.' Victor didn't say any more because Clare came in. He wondered how he could ever have called her fat, even when he was hating her, when nothing was too bad to think about her. She was one of those women who are both slim and plump. Her figure was perfect. It was just that she wasn't one of those stick-insect girls who pose (he had noticed) in designer clothes in magazines. She wore a dark blue skirt and a white shirt and her face was without makeup. You could see it was without make-up in this midday light; those colours, the rosy-gold and the soft pink and the feather-brown brows were natural. She had written to him and spoken to him on the phone, she expected him to come and knew he had come, but when she saw him her face reddened. She blushed and smiled slightly, putting one hand up to her cheek as if she could wipe the blush away. He held out his hand to her, though he hadn't done this to David. She shook hands with him and he thought how this was the first time he had touched a woman for years and years... Only it wasn't, for he had touched Muriel, held her and shaken her, when first she showed him the cuttings about David. 'Victor, we thought we'd eat our lunch outside, if you'd like that. We get so little summer, it seems a pity not to take advantage of it, but if you hate eating outside please do say.' He couldn't remember that he had ever tried it but he wasn't going to admit to that. Clare had gin and tonic and David white wine mixed with Perrier water, and Victor showed some interest in the Perrier water, which had hardly been around when he went to prison - or at any rate wasn't the universal drink and mixer it had since become. 'Not before you-know-what,' said David and the ice was broken. You could almost hear the tinkling of it as it broke. 'Well, a lot of things have changed,' Victor said. 'I know. I was - out of the world too for quite a while. In and out, anyway. And when I came out I'd always find something new people were talking about or eating or drinking.' 'Or saying or singing,' said Clare. 'Five minutes away and you lose your grip. But you were ten years away, Victor, and you haven't.' The compliment pleased him. 'I read a lot,' he said. They had lunch. It was cold soup, white and green and lemony, and an onion and bacon flanwith a salad. Clare had done the cooking and she was a good cook, which somehow he hadn't expected. The whisky had had an effect on Victor, which the wine they drank reinforced. His tongue was loosened and he talked about the room in Mrs Griffiths's house and Acton and Eating, which, after all, were his native heath, but he added how he would like to move away, move outside London. He'd got a job in marketing coming up, he said, for he couldn't bear them to think him indefinitely unemployed and without prospects. A proper flat was what he would really like with a kitchen of his own so that he too could cook. In fact, he had scarcely cooked anything ever beyond scrambled egg and cheese on toast but as he said it he believed it, and he told Clare what a good cook she was, as from one culinary expert to another. 'You'd think he'd marry me, wouldn't you, Victor? I've proposed to him often enough but he always turns me down.' Victor didn't quite know how to take this. He looked sideways at David. 'I've been living with him for two years now. It's time he made an honest woman of me.' David said gravely, 'I've never made a dishonest woman of you.' A chill seemed to fall across them. It was as if the sun went in. Victor thought he understood what was implied but he wasn't quite sure. Clare said rather brightly, 'After we've had coffee we thought you might like to go out for a walk. I mean, we'll all go. The forest is beautiful in May, it's the most beautiful time.' For a moment he was alone with David once more while she cleared the table. The ice seemed to be forming again and Victor sought desperately for words that would dissolve it. He fancied that, though silent and calm, David kept his eyes on him unblinkingly. The scent of the honeysuckle, still overpowering, was past its best, sickly now, cloying, a rotten sweetness. 'Up there on the horizon,' David said suddenly, 'at night you can see the lights of the new motorway. I say "new" but it's been there three years now. Yellow lights go all the way along it and they're on all night, like a kind of phosphorescent yellow ribbon winding over the fields. It's a pity really, it spoils the rural character of the place. You'll see later on. Sometimes I think of leaving here, of going a long way away- well, of emigrating.' 'I thought of emigrating, but who'd have me? I'd have to be open. Anywhere I'd want to go to, they wouldn't have me, with my record.' David said nothing. He had clasped his hands together and was holding the left hand tightly in the right, making white knuckle bones. Victor began to talk about getting a job when you had a record, about having to tell the truth to a prospective employer, and then he remembered how he had said he had a job lined up. But before he could correct the impression he must be giving David, Clare came back and asked him if he would mind helping her with the dishes. Victor was rather surprised, for he had never done anything about the house while Pauline was living with him and he had never seen his father lift a finger to help his mother. But he followed Clare because he didn't know how to refuse. It was a well-appointed kitchen, full of the usual equipment and gadgets and a lot more unusual ones besides, the kind of bars and ramps and handles specially designed and installed for the convenience of a disabled person. Clare, of course, hadn't always been here to look after David. She handed Victor a tea towel but there weren't many dishes to do as David had a machine which Clare had already loaded. 'I wanted to be alone with you for a moment,' she said. Bending over the sink, she kept her face turned away from him. 'I have to tell you that when I wrote to you and talked to you on the phone - I did that to please David. I wanted to kill you. It seemed unreal, your coming here, I mean you, the man who actually shot David and maimed him for life. And yet at the same time it seemed too real, the right thing, the only possible right outcome - and I couldn't handle it. Do you understand what I mean?' Victor wasn't sure that he did, though he thought she must be praising him for coming here, congratulating him, and he was conscious of a warm feeling of pleasure. 'I thought,' she went on, 'that when you came here I wouldn't be able to keep it up, I mean being nice to you, treating you politely. I've been crazy with worry ever since we spoke on the phone yesterday, wishing I hadn't asked you to come, anything but that. But now you're here, as soon as I saw you in fact - I knew it would be all right. I suppose I'd seen you either as a sort of monster or else as a- well, an instrument of evil, I suppose. And then I saw you again and of course I realised you were just a man, a human being, who must have done what he did because he was unhappy or afraid.' 'The gun went off by accident,' Victor said. Had it? He could no longer remember. 'It just went off in my hand, only no one believes that.' 'Oh, I can believe it,' she said, and she turned to look at him. 'I sometimes think life is all like that, a matter of random happenings and chance and accident.' 'You're right there,' he said with feeling. 'Take me meeting David, for instance. I'm a radiographer at the hospital in Epping, so you'll say that's not chance, that's one of the obvious ways people meet. He must have come to me for X-rays. But he didn't, he's never been to St Margaret's. All his treatment's been at Stoke Mandeville - he's going back there in a couple of weeks time. We met in the dry cleaners in Theydon. The wheels of his wheelchair got locked on the step and I freed them for him - it's wearing out, that wheelchair, he needs a new one. But the point is, it was just chance we met. I passed the shop, not meaning to go in, but the sun had come out and it was warm, and I thought, why don't I take off this jacket here and now and get it cleaned? And I did and David came in and we've been together more or less ever since. That was two years ago last September.' 'Do you live here, then?' Victor asked her. 'Oh, yes.' She laughed. 'I'm pretty committed. I've thrown in my lot with David, there didn't seem an alterna- tive. I told you he's a wonderful person.' She looked at him defiantly. 'I'm lucky.' Every inhabitant of Theydon Bois was out for a walk this afternoon, it seemed. Most of them knew David and spoke and smiled and even those who didn't know him gave him looks of sympathy and admiration. Victor wondered what it must be like to receive people's regard in this way. He walked along on one side of the wheelchair with Clare on the other, past the pond, across the green and up the road that led into Epping Forest. Clare said she thought it one of the most beautiful parts of the forest because it was hilly and with open clearings between the groves of trees. There were silver birches everywhere with pale spotted trunks and a covering of new green leaves like a sprigged veil. The whole place looked as if newly made because of the freshness of the young foliage, the brilliant thick green grass and the flowers that grew among it, yellow and white and star-like. Yet the birches, the preponderance of them, awakened in Victor an uneasy memory which increased the further they walked. For a moment, for more than a moment, the panicky idea invaded him that David and Clare knew, that every detail of his past in all its circumstances was known to them and they were bringing him to the scene of the rape he had committed here to test or mock him. For it was here, on this very spot, that it had happened. The girl had been ahead of him in her car on the Epping New Road, heading north. He was on his way to pick up a couple and their daughter at Stansted airport but he was very early. Where the girl was going he didn't know, but he followed her car round the Wake Arms roundabout, out by the second exit and down this road. He had had no idea that it led to a place called Theydon Bois. But here, at this point where Clare was suggesting they leave the road and follow one of the clay rides among the trees, she had parked her car and left it, to walk her little dog. The dog was too small to help her. Victor recalled how its yapping had maddened him. It was this as much as anything which had made him beat the girl so badly, the only time he had ever done this, punching her face, clasping her head in his hands and pounding it against the ground, finally stuffing her own tights into her mouth. The dog had yapped and then howled, staying by its owner's unconscious form, while Victor drove away, hearing those thin reedy howls in the distance behind him. In the papers it said that the dog had saved the girl's life, for a passer-by heard it and came to find her. By that time Victor was stowing the Stansted passengers' baggage into the boot of the car. He could actually recognise one of the trees here, a gnarled oak with a hole in its trunk shaped like an open screaming mouth. He must have fixed his eyes on that hole in the tree trunk while he was raping the girl and the little dog howled. Sarah Dawson, her name had been. Victor realised by now that Clare and David had no idea of the associations of this place for him. It was simply a place they liked to come to. The rape of Sarah Dawson had taken place at least twelve years ago and they had probably never heard of the case. Why, Clare wouldn't have been more than about fifteen herself then, he thought. How could he have done such a thing? What had impelled him to harm that girl, to cause her such pain and terror, to beat her until her jaw had been broken and she had to have operations and orthodontic treatment? Victor had never before asked himself such questions, they were a novelty to him, and he felt stunned by the enquiries he was making of himself. But they were too much for him and he shirked deeper probing. He knew only that these events were long in his past, far away, never in any circum- stances to be repeated. 'You're a very quiet man, aren't you, Victor?' Clare said as they sat down for a while on a smooth grey beech log. He thought about it. 'I've never had much to say.' 'I must seem an awful chatterer to you.' 'It's all right when there's something worth talking about.' 'David and I talk all day long,' she said. She smiled at David and he reached for her hand and took it in his. They had been talking all the time, Victor realised, on about the people they knew, and the forest and plants and trees, and where they would go for their holiday, and Clare's job and the people she worked with. -It mystified him a little, for such conversation was unfamiliar to him. David began asking him if he liked it here and he said he did, that he thought of living here and looking for work. Victor felt disappointed because neither David nor Clare said they thought this a good idea or that they would help him to find something and keep their eyes open. But when they were back at the house and Clare had left them alone together - to prepare a meal, Victor thought, but afterwards he wondered - David asked him if he would mind if they talked a little about that morning at 62 Solent Gardens... Victor said he didn't mind. David, who hadn't had a cigarette all the time they were out, lit one now and Victor had one too, just to be sociable. 'I've never been able to confront what happened that day fairly and squarely,' David said. 'I mean, I've resented it and raged about it. I've lamented my fate, if that doesn't sound too melodramatic. Well, even if it does sound melodramatic. It was a melodramatic thing that happened there that morning. But what I'm saying is, I've never had a long cool look at it and tried to re-live it. I've never talked it through- even to myself.' Victor nodded. He could understand that David might feel like this. 'I've simply assumed I did it wrong. I've assumed I handled it badly - well, I handled you badly. Do you remember every detail of it like I do?' 'I remember it all right,' Victor said. 'I was in the front garden and I said to you that if you murdered Rosemary Stanley you'd get life. Do you remember that?' Again Victor nodded. He found he was pushing out his lower lip the way Jupp did. 'And you said you wouldn't murder her, you'd just...' David's voice broke off and he wet his lips. He leaned forward in his chair and seemed to be trying to speak. Victor thought he ought to help him out. 'Shoot her in the lower spine,' he said. 'Yes. Yes, you do remember. At the time I - we - all of us - thought it was a terrible thing to say. It was so coldblooded. I suppose it was what someone told me counsel said at your trial: 'a statement of cruel intent'. And then, of course, later, you actually did do that to me. I'm finding this extraordinarily hard to say, Victor. I thought I would and it isn't any easier than I expected. The thing is, I felt you meant all along to - well, do that to someone - and the someone happened to be me.' 'I didn't mean to,' Victor said. 'It was just something to say. I'd read something the night before in a magazine about - what's it called? - paraplegia and being injured down there. I do read a lot. It stuck in my mind.' 'And that was why? Is that really true?' David's voice was full of wonder. 'Of course it is,' Victor said. 'You only made that threat because of something you'd been reading? So if, for example, you'd read about shooting someone in the shoulder and disabling their right arm, you might have threatened that instead?' 'Right,' said Victor. Clare came back then and they had supper. It was cold stuff on a tray, pate and cheese and different kinds of bread, a fruit cake and apples and grapes and a bottle of sweetish flowery German wine. They drank that bottle and David opened another. The evening remained warm and they sat around the table on the terrace, the air pervaded with the heavy scent of honeysuckle, a violet dusk closing over the garden. To protect them from the mosquitoes, Clare had set up a 'zapper' and against this glowing blue ring the insects cast their frail bodies to be electrocuted with a snap and a hiss. Victor was rather amused by this effective method of control and said, 'There goes another!' with great satisfaction each time the device hissed, so that David's attitude astonished him. David couldn't stand it. He said that, if it was a choice between sitting out here and listening to this slaughter and going inside with the windows shut, he'd rather go inside. For an axe-policeman that was almost unbelievable, Victor thought. They did go inside and Clare played records, country music and then some English folk songs, and the dark came down and at last Victor said he ought to be getting back. It was late- though not too late for the last train -and the idea was forming in his mind that if he hung it out long enough they might ask him to stay the night. He wanted to see what the place looked like first thing in the morning, hear the dawn chorus of birds, the garden when the sun came up. He imagined having breakfast here, Clare in her dressing gown perhaps, he imagined the smell of the coffee and the toast. But when he said he must be going neither of them suggested anything about staying the night, though Clare did say they would let him know if they heard of any flats or rooms going and she gave him a copy of the local paper to look at the accommodation page. When he left, they came part of the way with him to the station. The wheelchair set up a squeaking and again Clare said it was wearing out. 'He charges about so much, Victor, he wears them out like other people wear out shoe leather.' Victor thought this a bit tactless but it made David laugh. When they were down on the green, David pointed to the horizon and the crest of yellow lights that spanned the length of it, the bright necklace of the motorway that strung out the whole length of the skyline. It brought London nearer, it made Victor feel Acton wasn't all that far from Theydon Bois. He shook hands with David and then he shook hands with Clare, though this seemed strange with a woman, but it would have been stranger still to have kissed her. He turned back twice and the first time they too turned and waved to him. The second time he could still make out their shadowy figures in the distance but although he looked for a long time, watching them recede into the dark, they didn't turn their heads again. Victor was sitting in the almost empty train, reading the paper Clare had given him, looking out occasionally as Leytonstone was passed and Leyton and the train entered the tube tunnel, when it came to him that he had forgotten all about David's book. He had forgotten about the book and had never mentioned it or whether he might figure in it.

Chapter 11

His mother used to say that you only needed to write thankyou letters to people if you stayed with them overnight. It wasn't necessary just for a meal or a party. How she could make these rules Victor hardly knew, for he had never known her eat a meal (apart from those Christmas dinners at Muriel's) away from her own home, still less stay the night in someone else's house. All day Monday he thought about writing to Clare or David or both of them but he didn't know how he should address the envelope. 'Mr David Fleetwood and Miss Clare Conway' looked clumsy and perhaps tactless and anyway perhaps the 'Miss' should come before the 'Mr'. Nor could he think of anything to write except 'thank you for having me', which was what kids said when they had been to tea. In Victor's life were huge gaps, empty spaces, where other people had social experience. He was only now aware of it. He could phone them but then they might think he was trying to get another invite for himself. He was, but he didn't want them to realise it. The accommodation page in the local paper had afforded him nothing - or nothing that was attractive to him. Only one advertisement looked hopeful but, when he phoned the woman who had a two-room flat to let, she asked for a thousand pounds' deposit. Victor, having put the phone down, thought that of course once Jupp had paid him for the furniture he would be in a better position, but it was essential then that he made no more inroads on his capital. If he didn't hear from Clare or David by the end of the week, and so that they didn't think he was on the cadge, he would invite them to have a meal with him. There must be good restaurants in the neighbourhood, there always were in places like that, and Clare drove a car- well, a Land Rover. He hadn't seen the Land Rover, it was shut up in the garage, but she had told him that they had one and that it was specially equipped to take David's wheelchair. If he hadn't heard from them by Friday, that was what he would do. There were ways of paying for the meal without breaking into his inheritance. Jupp was already there when he got to Muriel's on Wednesday morning. He and Muriel were having coffee in the dining room and a man whom Jupp said was his son-inlaw was starting to load furniture on to the van. For once Muriel was properly dressed with a skirt on and a flowered blouse, stockings and lace-up shoes instead of nightdress and dressing gown. She had combed her hair and smeared some red on her mouth. The only thing unchanged was the camphor smell. She had taken a fancy to Jupp, he could tell that, and they were having digestive biscuits with their coffee and a chocolate Swiss roll. Victor said he would go out and give the son-in-law a hand. Instead he went quietly upstairs and into Muriel's bedroom. This room was over the living room, not the dining room where Muriel and Jupp were, so they were less likely to hear him. At their age they were probably a bit hard of hearing anyway. Muriel had been too busy dressing up for Jupp to make the bed. Two nightdresses, grubby nylon entrails, sagged out of the unzipped belly of the pink toy dog. One of the windows was open, a fanlight. Much more of this and she would be behaving like a normal person. Victor opened the door of the wardrobe and a draught from the window blew the skirt of Muriel's black silk raincoat up into his face. That was the coat she had worn on the evening Victor's mother took her in a taxi to the hospital, and in their absence Victor had gone in and taken Sydney's gun. Perhaps he could get hold of another key of Muriel's and have another one cut from it. The handbags were there in the shelf section in just the same positions as he had left them last time, the black imitation crocodile one at the front. Now, with Jupp keeping Muriel occupied downstairs, he had more timetime to look as well as feel. He unclasped the bag and saw the notes inside, neatly arranged, a wad in each of the bag's stiff corded silk compartments. The familiar feeling of sickness rose into his throat. He tried to breathe deeply and steadily. Why shouldn't he take David and Clare out somewhere really nice, buy them a really good meal? The reading he had done in the past weeks had taught him that a really good meal for three people, even out in the outermost outer suburbs, might cost getting on for a hundred pounds. Why shouldn't he spend a hundred pounds on them? He pulled out one of the wads, emptying the compartment. Some of the notes were fifties, rich-looking, goldengreen. He couldn't remember that he had ever seen a fiftypound note before - they were new, or new to him. This must be Muriel's accumulated pension, he thought, that Jenny next door fetched for her as her accredited agent. There must be some sort of form she had to fill in to appoint an agent to fetch her pension. He should be so lucky! Then what did she use to pay for her shopping and all those magazines? Cheques to the paper shop, no doubt, and maybe cheques to a grocer. Why not? He didn't wonder why she hoarded all this money in cash. He knew why. It made her feel safe having plenty of money about the house, money in every cupboard for all he knew, in every drawer, stuffed inside shoes and the pockets of coats as likely as not. He understood because, in her position, in any position where cash was plentiful, he would do the same. Sydney had left her a lot. The pension was superfluous, icing on a rich cake, but the kind of icing you take off and leave on the side of your plate. She wouldn't know how much cash she had and she certainly wouldn't know how much was missing. He took all the notes out of the next compartment and then distributed all that remained between all the compartments, counting as he did so. The next bag he opened was empty but a red leather one with a lot of gilt decoration on it contained a bundle of tenners fastened together with a rubber band. Victor took twenty notes out of the bundle. That made five hundred pounds. He could hardly believe it. No doubt, later on, he would be back for more and he would want to know whether she had touched the bags in the meantime. His own belief was that she had packed as much into these particular receptacles as she intended to and had moved on to another 'bank', a shelf or drawer or box perhaps not even in this room. He pulled a hair out of the crown of his head and laid it lightly across the clasp of the black crocodile bag. There was no way now that anyone could move those bags without dislodging the hair. Downstairs he heard Jupp's voice. He and Muriel were coming out of the dining room and Jupp, of course, would go straight to the garage where Victor was supposed to be. It probably didn't matter too much but he had better go down. Inadvertently he caught a glimpse of himself in the pier glass. The furtive look on his face, mean, sharp and calculating, took him aback. He drew back his shoulders, squaring them. He raised his head. If Muriel hadn't said that about leaving her property and money to the British Legion, he wouldn't have helped himself to her money. Or at any rate he would have put back what he had taken if the reverse had been true and she had announced she was leaving it to him. Never would he have thought of coming back for more. It served her right. In a properly constituted legal system there would be a law compelling people to leave their property to their own flesh and blood. Jupp didn't comment on his absence or ask him where he had been. He was about to put Victor's father's wheel- chair into the van, was pushing it up the ramp. Almost everything was gone and the curtains lay in a crumpled heap on the floor. Victor had a wonderful idea. David's wheelchair was wearing out, Clare had said so twice. Why shouldn't he give David this one? It was a good wheelchair, anyone could see that, and his father had only used it for about six months. It was an-Everett and Jennings orthopaedic chair, leather and chrome, and Victor thought what a marvellous present it would make for David. Of course David had that house and nice furniture and obviously didn't want for anything, but he would only have some sort of disability pension to live on (not a great hoard of inherited capital like Muriel) and no doubt couldn't just go out and buy a new wheelchair when the fancy took him. 'Want a mint, cocky?' said Jupp, holding out the packet. 'You can give me one,' said the son-in-law. 'I reckon I do you a favour every time I take one of them things, like when a person takes a smoker's fags. It's a kindness to them, keeping them off their poison.' 'I'm not as bad as that, Kevin,' Jupp said humbly. 'I'm a thousand times better than what I was. You wouldn't call me addicted, would you? Dependent maybe, but addicted, no.' 'He's a mintaholic,' said the son-in-law, laughing. 'Joseph Jupp MA, Mintaholics Anonymous.' 'I don't want the wheelchair to go,' said Victor. 'I've changed my mind and I'm keeping it.' 'Now he tells me,' said Jupp. He pulled the wheelchair out from where he had stowed it between a bookcase and a pile of cushions. 'I shall have to knock a bit off the purchase price. No doubt you've taken that into account. Four hundred.' 'Four hundred and twenty,' said Victor. Jupp gave the chair a shove and it careered down the ramp. 'Four hundred and ten and that's my final word. Do you think your auntie'd come out for a drink with me? Or maybe the cinema?' 'She never goes out.' Another mint went into Jupp's mouth. He had finished the packet and he screwed up the paper wrapping and threw it into the back of the van. 'She never got dressed either, did she? But look at her this morning. Quite the glamour girl. I think I shall go and try my luck. Faint heart never won fair lady.' 'Christ,' said the son-in-law. 'Don't be like that, Kevin.' Jupp's hand went to his pocket but the supply was exhausted. He said to Victor, 'I'm a widower, by the way, in case you was thinking it wasn't all above board.' 'It's nothing to me,' said Victor. He held out his hand, palm uppermost. 'I'm a bit pressed for time.' Jupp wrote him a cheque. He was left-handed and he wrote slowly in a sprawly round hand. The cheque smelled of mint. What with his mints and her camphor, they would make a fine pair, Victor thought disgustedly. He let Jupp go back into the house and, leaving Kevin seated on a spur of rock among the purple trailing flowers, he went round the house to see if a key might be concealed somewhere under a loose paving stone or flowerpot. But there was nothing. On the garage floor lay the brown checked travelling rug that had always been draped over one end of the settee. To conceal a cigarette burn made by his father, Victor had discovered when he was about eight. On an impulse, he picked it up, folded it and put it on the seat of the wheelchair. 'That'll have to come off the purchase price,' said Kevin, winking. 'No doubt you've taken that into account.' Because Kevin meant to be funny, Victor managed a smile. He said goodbye and went off, pushing the wheelchair. Instead of going the direct way home, he crossed Gunnersbury Avenue and walked along Elm Avenue towards Eating Common. There was no one about, it was very quiet, a dull weekday morning with rain threatening. Sure he was unobserved, Victor sat down in the wheelchair and covered his knees with the rug. Manipulating it looked easy when David did it. He thought he would have a go and see how easy it was. The wheels had chromed metal hoops attached to them of slightly smaller circumference. These you pushed forward and they drove the larger wheels round. There was something quite pleasant and gratifying about making the chair move along. Victor took one of the paths across the common. He felt rather like the way he had when he had first mastered the technique of riding a bicycle. It brought a new dimension to daily life. A woman was coming towards him with a retriever on a lead. Victor's first thought was that he must get out of the chair because this woman would think it odd or be shocked by what he was doing, but immediately he realised that of course she wouldn't be. She would simply take him for a handicapped person who was obliged to use a wheelchair. And this, in the event, was what happened. It was interesting to observe her behaviour. Although Victor was on one side of the path and she on the other and a good six feet separated them, she drew in the dog's lead, shortening it to less than a yard's length, gave Victor a quick searching glance, then looked away with an assumed indifference as if to say: Of course I know you are a cripple, but to me, sophisticated creature that I am, you are no different from anyone else and I shan't commit the social solecism of staring at you, so don't imagine I am wondering what is concealed under that rug or what brought you to what you are now. Victor was sure he could read all this in her reactions, and it intrigued him. There was no doubt that in a wheelchair one was the centre of attention. He met and passed several more people and the feeling he often had when on foot, that he might as well not be there, that he was invisible, that no one took a bit of notice of him, was replaced by a sensation that in this new guise he affected everybody. No one who saw him was immune from his effect. It might be pity they felt or embarrassment, resentment, guilt or curiosity, but they felt something, those who stared, those who ostentatiously did not stare and those who stole at him sideways glances. When he came to the lights at the big crossing where the Uxbridge Road crossed the North Circular a big man came up to him and said, 'Don't you worry, mate, I'll see you over,' and when the lights changed and the traffic stopped, shepherding Victor, walking along by the side of the chair, 'Let them wait, that won't do them any harm.' Victor thanked him. He was enjoying himself. Something else he realised was that he had always hated walking, though he had never confessed this before, even in his innermost thoughts. One thing about prison, exercise might have been compulsory but there had been nowhere to walk to. For the most of his adult life, prior to prison, he had had a car to drive. The wheelchair was hardly a car and it would be out of the question in bad weather, but in some ways it had advantages over a car, it had attractions, Victor acknowledged, as two gossiping women jumped aside to let him pass, that cars didn't have. He caught himself up on that when he realised the enormity of his thoughts - a man with the full use of his legs wanting to be confined to a wheelchair! It wasn't easy getting the chair up the stairs at Mrs Griffiths's, but there was nowhere to leave it downstairs. Victor thought how good it would be if the phone under the stairs were to ring at this moment and for it to be Clare. He would tell her about the wheelchair being a gift for David and she would be delighted and probably come over as soon as she could in her car and take him and the wheelchair back to Theydon Bois, and this time perhaps he would be asked to stay the night. The phone didn't ring, of course it didn't. Clare would be at work, doing her radiography at St Margaret's Hospital. The wheelchair was more comfortable to sit in than anything provided by Mrs Griffiths. Victor sat in it by the window, looking at the roof of his parents' house and reading Punch. The roof was all that could be seen of the house for the leaves were thick on the trees now and the spotty green and pink and white veil had become a blanket of foliage. In the garden below, weeds had grown up as high as the woodpiles and oil drums: nettles and thistles and a pink flower as tall as a man. Victor counted his cash. With his last social security payment he had just on a thousand pounds in hand. The magazines he had bought contained plenty of advertisements for restaurants recommended in the Good Food Guide or by the AA or Egon Ronay. Victor sat in the wheelchair reading them and wondering where it would be best to go. If he hadn't heard from David and Clare by Saturday, he decided, he would ring them on Saturday morning and ask them to have dinner with him that evening. He had never taken anyone out to dinner before, apart from eating in cafes with Pauline and once or twice going to the steak house in Highgate with Alan. Victor thought he wouldn't go out at all on Friday. It would be awful if he were to go out and David were to phone and there was no one here to take the message. At various times throughout the day, which was very long and passed slowly, he told himself that he had no reason to believe David would phone, he hadn't said he would phone. Probably he and Clare were waiting for him, Victor, to phone them and thank them for last Saturday. At three in the afternoon, when he was bored and sick with waiting, Victor went down and dialled David's number. There was no reply. He sat in the wheelchair reading last Sunday's Observer colour magazine for half an hour and then he went back to the phone and tried again. Still no reply. He would leave it for two hours, he thought, and at five thirty he would try again. On the stairs, coming down at twenty past five, he heard the ringing begin. He ran down and lifted the receiver. It was Clare. Her voice had a strange effect on him. He didn't want her to stop talking, her voice was so lovely, warm and rich and with an accent few women in his circle, such as it was, had possessed. She spoke rather slowly and precisely, yet with a kind of breathlessness that was very charming. He was listening to the tone of her voice and its quality, not the sense of what she said, so he had to ask her to say it all over again. 'It's a flat, Victor. Not here but at a place called Epping Upland. The house belongs to someone my mother knows. Her husband has died and she wants to let part of her house. She's going to advertise but she won't for a week or two, so now's your chance. I haven't said anything to my mother. I thought I'd wait until I'd asked you.' Victor said he would like to see the flat and Clare said he could fix that up with Mrs Hunter himself. She would give him Mrs Hunter's phone number and address. Victor realised she wasn't going to invite him to Theydon Bois or even say anything about seeing him again. The beginnings of nausea cramped his chest. 'There's just one thing I'd suggest, Victor. I'm not advising you to be dishonest - I'm sure you wouldn't take that sort of advice anyway - but I wouldn't say anything about the past to Mrs Hunter if I were you. It's not as if - well, what you did you're likely to repeat. It's not as if you did something likely to affect a person letting you a flat, I mean stole something or- well, committed a fraud or anything. Please forgive me for mentioning it.' Victor swallowed. He said, 'That's all right.' 'David and I have talked it over and we agreed we wouldn't say anything about who you were even to my mother.' 'Thanks,' Victor said, and, 'I thought of changing my name,' though he had not in fact thought of this until that moment. 'That might be a very good idea. Well, fine. Now let me give you Mrs Hunter's phone number. Have you got a pen?' He wrote it down mechanically. Epping Upland was probably miles away from Theydon Bois, almost the other side of Essex, very likely. They wanted him a long way away. Had he done something he shouldn't last Saturday? Had he blown it in some way? 'Right, I'll have to ring off now,' she said. 'We're going out.' 'Clare,' he said, his mouth dry, 'I'd like to - I mean, would you and David have dinner with me tomorrow? Somewhere nice, somewhere out near you. I'd really like to take you out but I don't know any places.' He felt spent with the effort of making this long speech. 'Well...' she said. That single word sounded doubtful. Did it also sound pleased? 'We couldn't tomorrow.' Disappointment was an actual pain. He crouched down on the floor, doubling up his body in an effort to ease it. 'Victor? Are you still there?' 'I'm still here,' he said hoarsely. 'Would a night in the week be possible?' 'Oh, yes. Any night. Monday?' 'Let's say Wednesday, may we? And shall I book somewhere? Would you like that? I'll have to arrange with them about getting David's chair in. We always have to make sure restaurants can do that.' The best place, Victor said. The best place she knew, she mustn't worry about expense. He would call for them, would that be all right? He would rent a car. Why not? 'Of course not, we'll go in ours. Come early, come about six.' He asked her to remember him to David, please to give David his best regards. She sounded surprised when she said she would, surprised and a bit puzzled. Amazed he could afford all this hospitality, he thought, as he returned to his room. Epping Upland wouldn't be all that far from Theydon, very likely no more than three or four miles: He thought he could remember noticing a signpost to it on those trips he used to make to and from Stansted. When he was living in Mrs Hunter's flat he would be able to ask Clare and David over for a meal. By then, of course, he would have a new namer He wondered what he should call himself. His mother and Muriel had had the maiden name of Bianchi. Their grandfather had been Italian, from southern Italy, which accounted for Victor's own darkness of hair and eyes. He didn't fancy calling himself by an Italian name. Faraday then, after Sydney? Pauline's surname (doubtless changed long ago) had been Ferrars but he didn't want to be reminded of her. It would be easy. enough to pick a name out of the phone book. Victor phoned Mrs Hunter, giving the name of Daniel Swift and saying he was a friend of Clare Conway. She said he could come and see the flat on Wednesday if he wanted to. Not knowing how far Epping Upland might be from Theydon Bois and wanting to be absolutely sure of getting to David's by six, Victor said he would come in the morning. He would come at eleven thirty. He forgot to ask what rent Mrs Hunter would want or when the flat would be available. On Tuesday he went out shopping, this time to the West End. He couldn't wear the green velvet jacket yet again. To go out to dinner surely you needed a suit. If only he had a car of his own! The possibility of ever owning a car seemed remote. He went into the men's department at Selfridge's and bought a dark grey suit. It cost him two hundred pounds. To go with the suit he bought a grey and cream striped silk shirt and would have got a grey tie, only the assistant told him flatteringly that this was rather dull for a man of his age and recommended instead a rich leaf green with a single diagonal cream stripe. Dressed in his new clothes, he set off early on Wednesday morning - too early, for he was at Epping by eleven. A station taxi took him to Epping Upland and Mrs Hunter's house. It was rather a long way and Victor hadn't seen any sign of public transport, though there must be some, and he disliked the idea of walking all this distance. He asked the taxi driver to wait and was glad he had done so, for it turned out that, although she had said nothing of this on the phone, Mrs Hunter wanted a married couple for the flat and help in the house in lieu of some of the rent. Victor returned to Epping, the whole empty day stretching before him. At any rate, dressed like this and with money in his pocket, he could buy himself a good lunch in one of the hotels. It was a very good lunch he had and he found himself very respectfully treated, no doubt because of the suit. Victor realised, as he was eating his creme caramel and drinking the last of his wine, that it was nearly two weeks since he had been in a panic or felt angry. Those great angers that took told of him and took control of him, changing him physically so that his skin burned and he felt literally as if his blood was boiling, they seemed remote. So did the panics that enclosed his limbs in an electric suit that tingled and shocked where it touched. He was changing. As he thought this, he was aware once more of a feeling that must be happiness and with it came a gentle luxurious calm. Beginning at the tower end of the town, Victor went into every estate agent to ask what they had in the way of unfurnished flats to let. There was none, but some had furnished flats and houses on their books, their owners protected by leases which stipulated strictly limited tenancies. The DHSS would, of course, pay his rent but would they pay any rent? A hundred pounds a week, for instance? It seemed unlikely. Victor decided he must asks Tom or Judy about that. He bought a local paper, though it was nearly a week old. He had a look at a newsagent's board, not the one he had been to before, and wrote down two phone numbers, both with the Epping exchange. By the time he had tried these two numbers - one advertising a flat, the other a room - and had got no reply from either, it was nearly three thirty. If he walked slowly to the station and got a train and then walked slowly to Theydon Manor Drive, surely he wouldn't be too early at David's? Well, he would be early but only about an hour and David wouldn't mind. Just as a journey can be very long when one is late so it can be accomplished with amazing speed when one has time to kill. The train was waiting and as soon as Victor got into it the doors closed. Last time he had travelled from Epping to Theydon Bois that old woman had been in the compartment with him, the one who ran up and down playing guards and had some live thing with her in a carrier bag. This afternoon he was alone. About an hour ago the sun had come through and it was quite hot, the carriage full of almost static motes of dust suspended in the rays of light. It was still only ten to four when he got to Theydon. He walked very slowly across the green, not wanting to sit down on a seat, still less on the grass, for fear of marking his suit. At ten past four he could bear it no longer. He could feel his calm threatened by a strange stretched feeling that was part boredom, part exasperation with the dilatoriness of time, part an undefined fear. Unwilling to let it mount any further and destroy his new self, he began to walk rapidly towards Sans Souci. The garage doors were open and the garage was empty. Victor knocked at the front door, a smart double rap with the Roman soldier. No one came, so he walked round the side as he had done that first time. The honeysuckle smell had grown stale and petals lay everywhere. On the terrace, in his chair, David sat fast asleep, his head hanging forward at an awkward angle. For a moment or two Victor stood watching him. Hanging like that, David's face looking puffy, the cheeks pendulous. He looked old and sick and sad. Victor moved quietly towards the table and sat down in one of the blue and white canvas chairs. Almost immediately, though Victor was sure he had made no sound, David woke up. He woke up, blinked, and seeing Victor there, made an involuntary movement of recoil. It was a flinch, made with shoulders and head, and at the same time he rolled the chair a foot or two back towards the french windows. 'David,' Victor, said, 'I know I'm early. I thought you wouldn't mind.' David took a moment to recover. He passed his fingers across his forehead. He blinked again. 'That's all right. I was fast asleep.' Victor wanted to ask him if it was he that he was afraid of, that he had flinched from, or if anyone would have had that effect. He would have liked to ask but of course he didn't. David's cigarettes and lighter were on the table and an empty cup that had had coffee in it. Victor didn't look at David but at the wall behind him, where a rambler rose climbed, its stems laden with clusters of creamy buds. David said, 'You look very smart, what my father used to call "Sunday-go-to-meetings".' 'My father called it that too,' said Victor, though he had no memory of his father actually ever saying this. He began telling David about the flat and David said it was pity Mrs Hunter hadn't thought to mention that bit about a married couple to Clare's mother. 'I've got something I want to give you,' Victor said. 'A present. I want you to have it. I couldn't bring it with me though, it's too big and awkward.' 'I'm intrigued. What is it?' 'A new wheelchair. Well, it's not absolutely new, it was my father's. But it's hardly been used.' David looked at him, a steady blank stare. In a way that gave the impression of stiff lips, of lips frozen perhaps, he said, 'I've got a new wheelchair, this one. Didn't you notice? I got it at the end of last week.' And then Victor did notice it, the shiny chrome, the smooth new grey upholstery. He passed his tongue across his lips. The glassy stiff expression on David's face had crumpled and he was smiling. He was smiling in the way people do when they don't want to seem to be smiling, yet at the same time want the person they are talking to to see there is cause for amusement. 'You wanted to give me a wheelchair?' 'Why are you smiling?' Victor said. 'You lack a sense of humour, Victor.' 'I expect I do. There hasn't been much in my life to be humorous about.' 'Never mind, then. It was the irony that struck me, but never mind.' It took Victor a moment or two to see what David meant but he got there, he did see. He got to his feet and stood, holding the edge of the table. 'David, I didn't shoot at you on purpose. It was an accident. Or rather, I lost control through you taunting me. I wouldn't have shot you if you hadn't kept on saying the gun wasn't real.' David breathed deeply, looking at him eye to eye. 'I said that?' 'Over and over. You kept on saying the gun was a replica, that it wasn't real. I had to demonstrate - can't you understand?' 'I never once said the gun wasn't real,' David said. Victor couldn't believe it. He would never have thought David capable of lying. An abyss seemed to open before him and he held on to the table to stop himself from falling m. 'Of course you said it. I can hear you now. "We know the gun isn't real," you said. Four or five times at least.' 'It was Superintendent Spenser who said that, Victor. From the front garden.' 'And you said it too. When we were in that room, you and me and the girl. You've forgotten, I can understand that, but I haven't. That's why I shot you. It wouldn'tit wouldn't do you any harm to admit it now.' 'It would do me a lot of harm to admit to something that never happened.' 'Unfortunately, there's no way of proving it.' 'Yes, there is, Victor. I have a transcript of your trial. Detective Bridges gave evidence and so did Rosemary Stanley. Both of them remembered very clearly what was said. Counsel asked them both if I ever asked if the gun was real or suggested it might not be. Would you like to see the transcript?' Silent now, Victor nodded. 'If you'd like to go into the living room, the room at the front of the house, you'll find a roll-top desk on the righthand side of the door. It has three drawers and the transcript is in the top one.' The house smelled of lemon polish and faintly of David's cigarettes. It was cool and very clean. The living-room door was held open to the extent of about a foot by a stone doorstop that from a distance caused Victor a tremor of alarm but it turned out to be a crouching cat. Victor went into the living room. On one side of the fireplace, its grate laid with a pile of birch logs, was the desk, and on the other, on a low table, stood a photograph of Clare in a silver frame. She wasn't smiling but seemed to be looking at whoever looked at the photograph with a rapt mysterious gaze. Victor opened the top drawer of the desk and took out a blue cardboard folder to which was attached a label with the typewritten words: Transcript of trial of Victor Michael Jenner. Presumably, David meant him to read the relevant part of the trial proceedings outside in his presence. Victor went back to the garden where David, having rolled the chair closer to the table, was lighting a cigarette. He sat down opposite David and began to read. It was quite silent in the garden but for the irregular throbbing hum made by a bumble bee drawing the last pollen from the honeysuckle. Victor read Rosemary Stanley's evidence and James Bridges's evidence. He could remember nothing of any of this. It was a blank to him, the trial no more than a blur, a confused memory of injustice and persecution. David sat smoking, his eyes fixed on the far end of the garden, which was enclosed by trees and a hedge of blossoming red may. The familiar sick feeling was taking hold of Victor, combined with a tingling he knew to be the start of panic. That afternoon, finishing his lunch, he had spoken (or thought) too soon. He forced himself to re-read the evidence. He re-read the cross-examination. An exhalation of smoke from David, a rather harsh sighing sound, made him look up. He became aware, perhaps for the first time, of the angle of the other man's legs, their utter useless deadness. They were like the limbs of dead men seen in battlefield pictures. Victor jumped up. He stood trembling. 'Victor,' David said. Almost without knowing what he was doing, Victor had crashed his fist hard down on the teak slats of the table. Again David rolled the chair back. ~ 'Victor, here's Clare now,' he said. 'I can hear the car.' Saying nothing, Victor turned away and went into the house. It seemed extraordinarily dark in there. He walked blindly across the room and came up against a wall and stood with his forehead pressed against it and the palms of his hands. It was something that had hardly ever come to him before, to understand that he was wrong, that he was at fault. The floor and ceiling of his world had gone and he hung in space, he hung on the wall with his forehead and his hands. Victor let out a low animal moan of pain, turning blindly. He felt his body come up against another body, his face touch skin, soft warm hair veil him, arms enclose his shoulders. Clare had come in and without a word taken him in her arms. She held him lightly at first, then with increasing tender pressure, her hands moving on his back, up to his neck and head, to bring his head into the curve of her shoulder. His lips felt the warmth of her skin. He heard her murmuring gentle comforting things. Holding her now, letting her hold him, indeed pressing his body into hers with a voluptuous abandonment as he had yielded it in the past to warm water or a soft bed, he felt the last thing he would have expected, a swift springing of sexual desire. He was erect and she must feel it. There was no embarrassment, he had gone too far into despair and horror and now a kind of joy, too far into intense emotions, for anything so petty. He was aware only that his feelings, here and now, were new, never before experienced in quite this way or for this reason. He held her hard against the length of his body and, raising his head, moving his face against hers, across the soft skin with a sensuous trembling delicacy, would have brought his lips to her lips and kissed her had she not, with a whispered something he couldn't catch, disengaged herself and moved away. In the next two weeks Victor saw David and Clare several times but Clare never put her arms round him again or kissed him or even touched his hand. They all knew each other well now, they were beyond shaking hands, they were friends, or so Victor expressed it to himself. He had lost his shyness about arranging meetings. It was better for him to phone them anyway. He could hardly hear the phone bell when he was up in his room and most of the time there was no one else to answer it. That evening at the restaurant in the old part of Harlow where they had had dinner, Victor hadn't said much. He had listened to the other two talking. Silence had always seemed to come naturally to him, and when he spoke he used clipped sentences, merely stating facts. He liked the sound of David and Clare's voices, the rhythm of them, the rise and fall, and he marvelled that they could talk so much when they really had nothing to say. How was it possible to go on and on like that about a piece of roast duck and where you had had it done like that before, or about something called 'cuisine naturelle' and something else called 'tofu', or the appearance and ages and professions - all guesswork this - of the couple at the next table? After a time he scarcely heard their words. He thought about David and what he had done to him and how David had forgiven him. Why, all these years, had he convinced himself he had been goaded into shooting David by David himself? Perhaps because he had never quite wanted to admit to himself that he could lose control without provocation. Whatever David said to him or proved by that transcript, he, Victor, was still left asking himself why he had done it and what that provocation could have been. Their talk, though, had brought him closer to David. And much closer to Clare. Victor couldn't help wondering quite what he would have done, how he would have coped. if Clare had not come in at that moment and comforted him. He had no words, or few, to say to her when they were together but-at home he talked to her. He carried on a silent inner conversation with her all the time, something he had never done with anyone before. She never replied but that was somehow unimportant. Her replies were implicit in what he said to her and the questions he asked. He sat in the wheelchair, looking out over the green rustling treetops, talking to her about his parents' house and his parents and the exceptional devotion they had for each other. He asked her if she thought he ought to go out more, take more exercise. It would be better for him to read books, wouldn't it, rather than all these magazines? And then, getting up and going out, he would ask her in the newsagent's which magazine to buy today. Another remarkable thing was how he kept thinking he saw her. She never came to Acton - in fact she had told him she had never once been there - but time after time he fancied he saw her ahead of him in the street or in a shop or getting into a tube train. It was always someone else, of course it was, some other pretty girl with fine-spun flaxen hair and golden-pink skin. But for a moment... Once he was so sure he called her name. 'Clare!' The girl who came down the library steps didn't even turn her head. She knew he was calling someone else. It was funny how David had receded into the background. Of course he liked David tremendously, he was his friend, but he didn't think about him much any more. One way and another, Victor had got hold of a good many ideas about the mind and the emotions, among other things by reading Psychology Today, and he wondered if he had, so to speak, exorcised David by the talks they had had, by the revelation that had been made, by 'talking it through'. It was possible. He realised now how much he had thought about David, how exhaustively he had been obsessed by him, between leaving prison and going for the first time to Sans Souci. Now, when he wasn't thinking about Clare and talking to her, his mind dwelled on his parents and particularly on the love they had had for each other. Once, he now understood, he had resented that love, had been jealous of it perhaps, but he no longer felt like that. He was thankful his parents had been happy together and when he remembered the settee embraces it was with indulgence rather than distaste. He sat in the wheelchair most of the time he was at home. It was comfortable, and if he was going to have to keep it in his room it might as well be put to use. Once or twice he tried an experiment. He sat in the wheelchair and pretended he couldn't move his legs, that he was dead below the waist. This was very difficult to do. He found it easier if he covered his legs with the travelling rug. Then he attempted to lift himself out using only the power of his arms, talking all the time to Clare but unable to decide whether she approved or not. Once he fell over on the floor and sprawled there, lying immobile until he told himself that of course he could get up, he wasn't paralysed. The first time he went to Theydon after the three of them had had dinner together it was to take them a present - well, a present for David really since it wasn't Clare's house and Clare wasn't married to David or even a girlfriend in the usual sense of the word. Since it wasn't possible to give David the wheelchair- and he saw now that this had been a tactless idea - he must give him something else. That was what you did. If you suggested a present to someone and it wasn't acceptable, you found an alternative. What the alternative must be was obvious - a dog. David's dog had died and he missed it, so he must have a new dog. Victor bought Our Dogs magazine. There were a great many advertisements in it for yellow labrador puppies. He was amazed at how expensive dogs were, a hundred pounds was the norm and, for certain less usual breeds, two hundred, wasn't uncommon. Victor rang up the nearest ' dog breeder to advertise and, when he was told puppies were available now, went up to Stanmore. Fortunately, the tube went there, the Jubilee Line that had been enlarged and changed its name since he had gone to prison. He found that you couldn't just buy a dog the way you bought a TV set. The breeder wanted all sorts of promises and guarantees that the ten-week-old bitch would be going to a good home. Victor told the truth. Objections melted away when the dog breeder heard that his puppy's new owner would be the heroic policeman David Fleetwood whose case he remembered well from eleven years back. Victor paid for the dog and arranged to pick it up on Wednesday. It wouldn't be of much benefit to Clare, he thought, in fact might be rather a liability, so he went to the perfumery department at Bentall's and selected a whole range of St Laurent Opium, eau de toilette and talcum and bath stuff and soap, but when he told the salesgirl that Clare was young and blonde she persuaded him to change to Rive Gauche. The dog cost him a hundred and twenty pounds and the perfumes not far short of a hundred. Victor still had his driving licence and it was still valid. He went to the car-hire place in Acton High Street and rented a Ford Escort XR3. By a piece of luck David had wheeled himself round to the front of the house and with secateurs was clipping the dead heads off those spring flowers which were within his reach. Again Victor was early. He had allowed himself two hours to get here from Stanmore and thanks to the motorway had done it in less than an hour. The puppy, in a wicker basket shaped like a kennel that Victor had bought specially, cried all the way. David propelled the wheelchair up to the gate. 'Victor, you've got yourself a car! You didn't tell us.' It's on hire, Victor was on the point of saying. But the admiring light in David's eyes - admiring of him surely, as well as the Escort - he didn't want to see go away and be replaced by that more usual patient polite look. 'It's not new,' he said, remembering the B on the licence plate. 'Well, maybe not but it's very nice. I like that shade of red.' Some explanation was necessary, Victor felt. Suppose David were to think he had stolen the car or the money to pay for it! 'My parents left me a bit,' he said. 'What's in the basket?' David said. The puppy must have fallen asleep. It had been silent for the past ten minutes. He lifted out the kennel basket and at that moment Clare arrived. The Land Rover looked shabby beside the Escort, and Victor felt sorry for her and David but proud at the same time. 'It's not our birthdays, Victor,' she said when he gave her the package wrapped in coloured paper. Savouring his surprise, Victor opened the top of the basket, lifted out the plump, cream-coloured, velvetskinned puppy and put her into David's lap. Afterwards he knew he must have imagined their looks of dismay. He was a pessimist and a bit paranoid sometimes, he knew that; he did tend to think people distrusted him and disliked the things he did. Anyway, within seconds David was cuddling the little dog which snuggled up to him, and stroking its head and saying, how lovely, what a beautiful animal, and, Victor, you shouldn't have. In the back garden the dog gambolled about, examining everything, digging a hole in a flowerbed. Clare said, though she was smiling, 'I don't know how we'll ever train her with me out at work all day. Mandy was trained when David got her. But oh, she is sweet, Victor! What will you call her, David? How about Victoria?' 'Her proper name is Sallowood Semiramis.' 'I daresay,' said David, laughing. 'Dogs should have simple, ordinary names. Sally will do very well.' Victor decided to keep the hire car for a few days because he would be coming back to see them during the following week. In the meantime he drove about the outskirts of London a good deal, looked at two flats in metropolitan Essex, one in Buckhurst Hill and one at Chigwell Row, and rejected both. He imagined Clare sitting beside him in the passenger seat and he talked to her as he drove, though without moving his lips or making a sound. He asked her if she thought he ought to buy a couple of pairs of really good shoes, a raincoat and a spare jacket, and he sensed that she thought he should. Not much now remained of the nine hundred and ten pounds. Returning to MrsGriffiths's house, Victor passed Tom, who was on foot as usual, a long way from West Acton station but evidently bound for there. It struck Victor for the first time how shabby Tom always looked. He was wearing trainers not real shoes, a thin pale blue nylon zipper jacket and badly worn Lois jeans. Tom turned round as Victor pulled up alongside and called his name. His pale puffy spectacled face peered out between black fuzzy beard and black fuzzy hair. 'Hop in. I'll give you a lift.' 'You have come up in the world,' said Tom. Victor said he had a job, out in Essex. He was commuting at present but soon he would move. As soon as he had said this, he realised he could no longer ask Tom about whether the DHSS would pay the rent of a hundred pound a week flat for him. 'You're looking well, Victor. Work obviously agrees with you. What's the job exactly?' Victor told him a lot of lies. The gist of them was that he had been taken on by an estate agent's in Epping, where business at this time of year was brisk. 'Do you want me to jot down your business address in case you move before I see you again?' Victor pretended not to hear. 'Here you are. West Acton,' he said. While he had the car he had another errand to perform. He drove down Gunnersbury Avenue in the stream of airport traffic but, instead of taking the car right up to 48 Popesbury Drive, he parked it round the corner and approached Muriel's house on foot. The idea came to him that he would find Jupp there, a permanent resident perhaps, at least Muriel's steady friends a 'boyfriend', if that wasn't too grotesque a word. Muriel might even marry Jupp and then it would be he and not the British Legion who came into her money. An unexpected sight met his eyes as he came in view of the house. Jupp's van was nowhere to be seen. The front door was ajar. Where Kevin had perched himself, on a broad flat grey stone that protruded from the rock plants, squatted a man in jeans and a vest with a pair of shears in his hands. He had been cutting back the grey attenuated seed heads which were all that now remained of those millions of purple flowers that had hung over the stone ridges like a drapery of thick fuzzy cloth. Victor hung about, not wanting to be seen. The man gathered up armfuls of cut seed heads, laid them on a barrow which he had lugged up on to the cliff top, and humped the barrow away over the stones in the direction of the garage. He went round the side of the house, leaving the side gate swinging behind him. Victor cast a quick glance in the direction of the lowest stones but the shearing hadn't progressed so far and they were still covered. He ran up the steps and in at the front door. There was no one in the hall and the doors to the ground floor rooms were shut. The chances were that Muriel was behind one of them. Victor went upstairs and into a bedroom he could not remember ever having entered before. Like the one where, under the floorboards, he had found the gun, this room contained a bed, a chest of drawers and a chair. The differences were that a woodenframed swinging mirror stood on the chest of drawers, the curtains were a dull yellow-gold and the carpet gold with a dark brown border. Dust covered everything, gathered in fluffy nests in the folds where the curtains were looped back, lying so thickly on the top of the chest that it took a moment or two to see that the wood was partly covered by an embroidered runner. Victor pulled open the top drawer. It was empty, lined with brown paper, on which the activities of woodworm had left small pyramids of sawdust. The second drawer was the same but contained a man's underwear and socks. The bottom drawer was full of money. Not full, that was an exaggeration. At first it looked like the other, empty, lined with brown paper. But it was too shallow. Victor lifted up the sheet of paper that lay at the bottom and the money was underneath, not in bags or in any way wrapped, but in neat stacks of pound notes and fives, hundreds of them, arranged in blocks as carefully as Muriel's magazines. He skimmed the top. He took a quarter of an inch or so from the top of each of the twenty stacks and filled his pockets, glad he was wearing the padded cotton jacket, fashionably bulky, that he had just bought. You could have stuffed pounds of paper into those pockets without it showing. Out on the landing once more, he remembered the hair he had placed over the clasp of the mock-crocodile handbag. It would be as well to check. The house was silent, he could hear nothing. Muriel had made her bed today but for some reason the pink dog, zipped up for once, plump and glassy-eyed, had been placed on the pink satin dressing table stool, from which vantage point it seemed to watch Victor's movements. He opened the wardrobe door, knelt down and looked at the bag. The hair was till there. What would Clare think if she could see him now? The thought came to him uninvited, unwanted, as he crossed the landing. When advising him not to talk about his past to Mrs Hunter, she said, 'It's not as if you stole something...' The circumstances were different, though, he thought. It wasn't stealing in the usual sense of the word, for if he had not been sent to prison unjustly, for something which had been an accident and not deliberate, Muriel would certainly have willed him her money and probably given him some of it in advance as people did (he had read in the Reader's Digest, in an article about Capital Transfer Tax) to avoid death duties. If, if... If Sydney hadn't happened to look into that ditch outside Bremen in 1945, if his attention had been distracted, for instance, by a low-flying aircraft or a vehicle on the road, he would never have seen the dead German officer with the Luger in his hand, so the gun would never have been under the floorboards here and Victor would never have taken it in preparation for it to go off in his hand and paralyse David for ever... He had reached the foot of the stairs and was in the hall when the living-room door opened and Muriel came out with a young woman who looked just like Clare. Or so Victor thought for about ten seconds. Of course she wasn't really like Clare at all, being ten years older and twenty pounds heavier and with a face that was Clare's pushed about and melted and remodelled. But just for a moment, the colouring, the hair, the green-grey eyes... Suddenly Victor knew how Muriel would introduce him. She would say that this was her nephew who had been in prison. But he had misjudged her, she didn't introduce him at all. 'This is Jenny from next door.' The voice was about as different from Clare's as could be, shrill but lifeless, with a false warmth. 'And you must be the nephew I've heard so much about.' Heard? What could Muriel have said about him? 'I expect you'll be wanting to do a bit for her now you're back. We do the best we can, I pop in and out, but it's a drop in the ocean really and we've got out own lives to lead. I mean, you need a team in that garden, not just one man, but now you're back you'll want to pull your weight.' 'Back?' he said, waiting for it. 'Muriel told me you'd been in New Zealand.' Victor couldn't look at her. Was it, could it be, coincidence? Or did Muriel remember thirty-five years back, visiting her sister, and hearing her sister's little boy insist that there was never a time when he wasn't alive, only a time when he was in New Zealand? Certain it was that Muriel was ashamed of his, Victor's, past and didn't want to associate herself with that past. She didn't want her acquaintances, Jupp, this woman, to know. Jenny had taken from her a shopping list so long that the items on it covered both sides of the sheet of paper. With it Muriel handed her a blank cheque which was made out to J. Sainsbury PLC and signed Muriel Faraday. I should be so lucky, thought Victor. Had she seen Jupp again? Had she been out with him? She was dressed - or undressed - as before, in nightdress and dressing gown, brown snood and pink mules. Victor thought she wasn't going to say a word to him, but he was wrong. Her nose twitched, mouse-like. 'What did you come for?' 'I thought I might get you a bit of shopping in,' he said. Jenny chipped in at once, luckily cutting off whatever retort Muriel was preparing. 'Oh, that's all right, no bother, I promise you. I'm not saying that once you get to know the ropes, I mean, once you've settled back and got into a routine, I mean, then you're at liberty to do your bit. But just at the moment - I mean, Brian'll run me to Sainsbury's in the morning and, to be perfectly honest, I do such a big shop there myself that her little bits and bobs don't actually make an iota of difference.' She and Victor had moved towards the front door together while she was talking. Muriel followed them only so far. Not only did she not go out, but she seemed to fear contact with fresh air or even the sight of outdoors from inside. She hovered in the background clutching with both hands the two sides of her dressing gown. Jenny said, 'Bye bye now. You can expect me like six-ish tomorrow, so mind you have the sherry ready and the dry roasted peanuts.' She winked at Victor, pulling the door closed behind her. 'What a life! Might as well be in the tomb already. I never miss a thing, I don't mind telling you, there's nothing goes on down here I don't see from my windows, and I can tell you that, until you came home and that old boy that eats the mints started coming, she never saw a soul but us from one year's end to the other.' 'Have you seen me come, then?' 'This is your fourth time in as many weeks,' said Jenny with alarming accuracy. 'If you want to get past me, you'll have to come Saturday lunchtime. That's when Brian takes me to do my big shop, isn't it, Brian?' Loo, king around him at the garden, Brian said, 'I've not even skimmed the surface, not the surface.' 'If I'm going to start doing a bit for her, I'll have to have a key,' said Victor. He felt awkward but he pressed on. 'Could I have a loan of your key to get one cuter 'We haven't got a key, Vic, not one of our own, that is. Don't you know where the key lives? Well, you wouldn't. I should leave that now, Brian, you'll only overdo it and I shall be up with your back half the night.' She pointed towards the hedge. 'Under the tortoise, Vic. The key's under the tortoise.' 22 June would be Victor's birthday, his thirty-ninth. He couldn't remember ever having celebrated his birthday beyond receiving presents from his parents in those early years. The time his mother and father had talked about a party for him and his mother had grown distraught at the prospect, they had in fact taken him to Kew. There isn't much in botanical gardens for a boy of eight but his mother was fond of Kew. She quoted something about wandering hand in hand with love in summer's wonderland, and she and his father did wander hand in hand, smelling the flowers and saying how beautiful it all was. Victor said to himself, as he drove past Woodford Green where the chestnuts had blossomed and shed their petals, that this year he would celebrate his birthday. He would do something with Clare and David before David had to go back into hospital. The car he had kept for a further day - well, the weekend, for he would return it to the hire company on Sunday evening. He wore his new cotton padded jacket, two shades of grey, dove and slate, with slate binding, Calvin Klein jeans and, not to seem too exclusive, a dark red Marks and Spencer sweat shirt over the grey and cream striped shirt. On the back seat of the car were two bottles of German wine, Walsheimer Bischofskreuz, and two hundred cigarettes. A breeze was blowing and the sun was shining. It wasn't a bad day, warm enough to have the window open on the driver's side. Victor had never been one to play the radio in cars. He liked silence. From the drawer in the chest in Muriel's second spare bedroom he had helped himself to four hundred and sixty pounds. Unable to bear the prospect of waiting, he had counted the notes the moment he was back in the car. How much cash did that mean Muriel actually had in the house? Thousands? As much as, say, ten thousand? It was a well-known fact, one was always reading about it in the papers, that old people stashed away huge sums in their homes. It wasn't unusual, it was more normal than otherwise. The hair had not been moved from the clasp on the handbag, so therefore Muriel had no idea as yet that any of her savings were missing. But suppose she did get that idea, suppose she found out, would she do anything about it? By this, Victor confessed to himself, he meant tell the police. Her behaviour led him to think she wouldn't. She had said nothing about his past or his prison sentence in the presence of either Jupp or Jenny next door, and this must mean she wanted to keep it dark, for she was malicious and uncharitable and there was no way she would have been discreet out of consideration for his feelings. If she discovered that he had been helping himself to the contents of her bags and drawers - to a fraction of what they contained, in fact - the chances were that she would berate him, would demand it back, but would do nothing more. The respectability of her family, as it appeared to other people, was important to Muriel. If only he could acquire a car, Victor thought, he could start his own car-hire company, doing for himself that which in the old days he had done for Alan. He could buy a new car for six thousand pounds or two secondhand ones and take on another driver... With these ideas running pleasantly through his head (a flat in Loughton, for instance, a phone-answering service, journeys to the three London airports a speciality), he took the second exit out of the Wake roundabout and drove down the hill, through the forest, to Theydon. It was a Saturday, so Clare would be at home. Victor's thoughts turned away from David and towards her as he drove into Theydon Manor Drive and he was aware of a mounting apprehensive tension, with a sick edge to it. Last night he had dreamed once more of the road that was his path through life with the significant houses on either side of it. There had been no temptation to enter any of the houses until he reached Sans Souci, which came into view round a sharp bend in the road. The part of the road that bent also passed through a dark wood of fir trees planted very close together in regular rows. Beyond the wood Sans Souci lay bathed in sunshine. Victor went into the front garden and helped himself to the key which was kept under the birdbath. He let himself into the house and called their names. 'Clare!' first and then 'David!' For a while there was no sound and then he heard someone laughing, two people laughing. The living-room door opened and Clare came out with David beside her, only David wasn't in his wheelchair, he was walking. He was well again, not paralysed, and he was walking. Clare said, 'Look, a miracle!' A terrible feeling of sickness and despair had come over Victor, for he knew, he couldn't tell why, that now David could walk again he had lost them both. But almost immediately he had woken up and the relief was tremendous, the knowledge of reality after that strange and frightening -dream. He didn't want to remember it now. He parked the car and walked round the side of the house. David had said he would be sure to find them in the garden if it was a nice day. The honeysuckle smell had been replaced by a scent of roses. Clare was mowing the lawn with an electric Flymo on a long lead and David was watching her from his wheelchair under the blue and white umbrella. She switched off the power and came towards him. 'Hi, Victor!' Smiling, David raised one hand in a kind of salute. They were easy with him now, they accepted him, he was almost like a family member. Clare was wearing a cream-coloured cotton dress with an open shirt neck and big puffed sleeves. The dress was held in at the waist by a wide belt of saddlestitched leather in a shade of deep tan. She had on flat sandals with thongs. Her hair, newly washed perhaps, instead of hanging to her shoulders, stood out in a shimmering gauzy cloud. In his dream she had been much less beautiful than this and when he thought how he had found a resemblance between her and Jenny next door he felt that somehow he had betrayed her. The little dog Sally was on David's lap but she jumped off when she saw Victor, uttering surprisingly mature barks which made them all laugh. 'You shouldn't bring us all these things, Victor,' Clare said when she saw the wine and cigarettes. 'I like to. I can afford it.' 'You're wasting your substance on our riotous living,' David said. 'One day you're going to need that inheritance of yours.' That inspired Victor to tell David about his plans for a car-hire company. David seemed to approve of this, but he thought it wisest for Victor to start in a small way, with just one car. 'We'll employ you when David has to go to Stoke Mandeville,' Clare said. 'Especially if you arrange to have the kind of vehicle the size of a large van with a ramp for taking a wheelchair up and an anchorage for the chair when it gets there and a specially designed seat belt.' David was smiling all the while he said this and Victor didn't think he was mocking him. How could he be? David really did need all those things and Clare's Land Rover did have them. He, Victor, was being over-sensitive and had doubtless imagined the sideways look Clare gave David and the very slight warning frown. Lunch was salmon with a mayonnaise Clare had made green by putting finely chopped herbs in it, cucumber salad and French bread. Victor had never had that sort of salmon before, only the tinned kind and once or twice the smoked. Then they had strawberries and cream. David lit a cigarette. 'Would you mind fetching me something, Victor?' he said. 'You'll find it on the table where Clare's photograph is. In a brown envelope.' 'It's his book,' said Clare. 'There goes my surprise!' 'But, darling, Victor must know about your book. It was the article about your book that told him where you lived.' 'So it was,' said David. His steady gaze rested on Victor and that small ironical smile was again on his lips. David's face had that heavy jowly look today that Clare said it had when he had slept badly the night before. Victor got up and went into the house, into the living room, pushing back the reclining cat doorstop. Clare's eyes met his from the silver photograph frame. He would like to have that picture, he thought, and he wondered if there was any way he could contrive to take it. But it was in such a prominent place and David evidently valued it... The feeling he had was comparable to his sensations when they had taken him for that walk in the forest- that, contrary to all outward evidence, they were in fact mocking him, conspiring together to be revenged on him, leading him to this place only to confront him with the most despicable aspects of his past. Again he felt it as he picked up the large brown envelope. In some form or other inside here was David's book. Was David going to ask him to read it (even read it aloud?) in order to discover terrible revelations made about himself? Was he, Victor, pictured inside and described as a 'psychopath', 'a cold-blooded criminal', 'a sex maniac'? Suppose it were so, what was he to do? He stood, holding the envelope, realising that he dreaded looking inside. There was a sudden temptation to leave the house by the front door, taking the envelope with him, and drive away. He went back through the house and out into the garden once more. The little dog had fallen asleep on the lawn. Clare was bending over David's chair, her arm round his shoulder, her cheek against his. For one who had boasted that he didn't know the meaning of loneliness, Victor felt very alone, an outsider, lost. He thrust the envelope at David. 'Have you ever seen galley proofs before?' David said. 'I must confess I never had. Fascinating!' He was smiling and Victor knew that he was tormenting him. 'I'm supposed to read these and mark them for the printerfind typographical errors, you know, and maybe mistakes of my own.' They were just the pages of a book, page one and two, for instance, on one side of the sheet and three and four on the other. In the text a word had been circled in red and a hieroglyphic made in the margin. 'How do you know what to do?' Victor said. 'Pear's Encyclopaedia has all the proofreader's marks.' There were no pictures, of course, and no cover or jacket, just this thick mass of printed pages. On the first page was the title: Two Kinds of Life by David Fleetwood. Their eyes on him, feeling sick, Victor leafed through the pages, but haphazardly, and blindly, seeing nothing but a dancing mass of black and white swirls. Clare spoke gently. 'Victor, there's nothing to worry about.' 'Worry?' he said. 'I mean, there's nothing about you in there. The book's just what it says - two kinds of life. The life David had as a police officer and all that involved and the life - well, afterwards. It's really to show people life isn't over because one becomes a paraplegic, it's about all the things David has managed to do: get his Open University degree, for one thing, travel, go to concerts, learn to play a musical instrument. Did you know he not only plays the violin, he learned to make violins? That's what the book's all about, it's cheerful and forward-looking, it's full of hope.' 'Poor old Victor,' said David. 'What were you afraid of?' Once Victor had hated and feared him. A wave of that old hatred broke over him now, of bitter resentment, for he knew that David had followed his thoughts every step of the way to this end. David had known how he felt and had kept him tantalised, believing perhaps that Victor had been screwing himself up to ask about the book ever since their first meeting a month before. Little could he have known that Victor had been too happy in his new friendship even to give the book a second thought till now... 'Look,' Clare said. 'Here's She only bit that mentions Solent Gardens.' Victor read it. The thoughts he had had about David evaporated. Perhaps it had all been in his imagination. He knew he was sometimes paranoid, prison made one paranoid, said those supposedly in the know. The siege of Solent Gardens - never much of a siege and of very short duration - has been described too often elsewhere for me to say much about it. In a few words dhen, I was shot and the shot crippled me for life. These days, now chat times have changed, some would say for the worse, the police engaged in that exercise would almost certainly have been issued with firearms and the likelihood is I would not have been shot... But 'jobbing backwards' is a useless and destructive practice. The past is past. I was shot in the lower spine, my spinal cord was severed, and my body below the waist permanency paralysed. My last memory for a long time was of lying in a pool of blood, my own blood, and asking, 'Whose blood is that?' The next months of my life, my second kind of life, were passed in Stoke Mandeville Hospital, which is what the following chapter is about. 'There's to be a foreword by a senior police officer,' said David, 'in which he is going to outline the siege. But without mentioning you by name, we decided on that.' He grinned at Victor. 'My publishers didn't like it, and that's the truth. They were scared of libel, I think. So no pictures, Victor, and no hard words, right?' That might be true, about the publishers, Victor thought, but it was true too, he was sure of it, that David intended him no malice. David understood that it had been an accident. Why then did his eyes, lingering on Victor more constantly surely than usual, hold always that glint of irony, that tolerant amusement? Why did he seem to be watching Victor as if he were waiting - yes, that was it -waiting for him to do something terrible again, to have perhaps another disastrous accident of which he, David, would be the victim? He replaced the proof sheets in the envelope and turned his eyes on Clare, his look full of gratitude. She it was who had read his thoughts and interpreted his anxiety, she who had given him comfort before he asked for it. Her ringless hand lay on the table, the hand on which David refused to place an engagement ring, a wedding ring. Victor longed to cover it with his own and hold it, but he did not dare.

Chapter 13

The birthday was still two weeks off. Victor had cunningly ascertained that David and Clare were doing nothing in particular that Sunday night but would be together at home as usual. He said nothing about his surprise, only taking care to tell them it would be his birthday on that date, for he was confident they would all meet during the next fortnight. Driving home - very late, in the small hours of Sunday morning - he made up his mind that he would leave it to them to phone him. Of course they could get hold of him if they wanted to, he was nearly always at home in the evenings, and if he left his door ajar he could hear the phone. Perhaps it had been a bit over the top going to see them twice in one week; he must be careful not to overdo things at this early stage. Why, they all had years and years before them. It would probably take a whole year or more to become really close friends. Victor wondered as he drove along the empty road between the beech woods, past the dark slopes and the paler clearings of the forest, if the day would come when they might all live together, sharing a house somewhere. The idea was an attractive one, he running his car-hire business and, if it were as prosperous as he thought it might be, Clare working for him, entering into partnership with him, while David, whose book was bound to be a success, entered on a third kind of life, the life of a writer. He wished, though, that he had that photograph of Clare. He could have asked her to give him a photograph. Why hadn't he? Fear of looking silly, he thought. Next time he saw them he would give them a photograph of himself and ask for pictures of them. That way they wouldn't know it was specially Clare he wanted a photo of. Dressed in his new suit, Victor went a few days later to a photographer who had his studio at Eating Green. The photographer seemed rather surprised by his request and assumed at first that Victor wanted his picture taken for a passport. Apparently it was rare for grown men on their own, without wife or child, to want portraits of themselves. And Victor sensed a real disappointment because he didn't smoke a pipe and wouldn't hold a dog or a golf club. However, the photographs were taken and Victor was promised a selection of shots from which to make his choice within the next few days. He bought the Taller, the Radio Times, the TV Times, What Car? and House and Garden and sat in the wheelchair reading them. In the evening he watched his new television set with the sound turned down and the door open so that he should hear the phone. On the Friday Clare did phone - to ask him if he realised he had left his sweater behind. She had parcelled it up and sent it to him by recorded delivery that morning. This was the red Marks and Spencer sweatshirt she was talking about and Victor hadn't missed it for the weather had been very warm, but he wished it had been his jacket he had left behind, or something with a more exclusive label on it. Clare didn't invite him over but she did say, just as she was ringing off, that she would be seeing him. Victor liked that, the casual acceptance of himself as a friend, nothing formal about it, no need to say how enjoyable last Saturday had been, how lovely his wine, how they looked forward to meeting again. That was past, they were beyond that. And he told himself he was glad not to be asked. If he went there this weekend the birthday celebration might be made that much more difficult. There should be pauses in friendship, he thought, there should be breathing spaces. But after she had rung off he stood there in the darkening hall, still holding the receiver in his hand, and then speaking aloud into the mouthpiece what he had not said to her when she was at the other end of the line: 'Goodnight, Clare. Goodnight, darling Clare.' That was not a word he had ever used to anyone before in his whole life. He picked up the pencil off the top of the phone box and wrote on the wood beside David's name and phone number: Clare. In the food hall at Harrod's Victor looked at delicatessen, cheeses and cold meats and fish and salads. He looked at cakes and fruit, pricing items, unable to make any sort of selection in the face of this plenty, this excess, this amazing choice. But he would come back here next Saturday and buy everything he wanted for his birthday dinner. He would hire the car again. It was a pity he couldn't hire a refrigerator. The prints arrived from the photographer, who stressed that they were unfinished, they were rough yet, just a guide. Victor thought that even in their present state they were quite good enough for him. He had not known that he appeared so young. His good looks were less marred by those prison years than he had thought. It was a serious, handsome, rather reserved face that looked back at him, the mouth sensitive, the eyes with their sombre experiences alone betraying that the man in the portrait was past his twenties. In one he was in profile, in the other two he was facing forward with his eyes slightly turned. Should he have the picture for David and Clare framed or simply give it them in the cream-laid deckleedged paper folder the photographer would provide? He put the question to Clare in his thoughts but as usual she did not answer him. Muriel had a refrigerator. Indeed, she had a very large refrigerator with large freezer compartment, necessary for someone who lived as she did. But Victor was lath to ask her if he could keep the food he was going to buy at Harrod's in her fridge overnight. She was quite likely to say no. Besides, he had a curious feeling that now he had begun using her house as a kind of bank there could be no relationship between them any more. They had ceased to be aunt and nephew. She had seen to that really by her aggressive attitude towards him. In a way Muriel's house was like a bank with a machine on the outside (they didn't have them before he went to prison) where you stuck in a card and dialled a secret number and your money came out. Only here you merely needed the key and a certain amount of nerve. At the moment he didn't need any more money, he had enough to tide him over the next week or so. Victor walked along Acton High Street, pausing to look at refrigerators in a showroom window. Once he had his flat he would certainly need a fridge but at present he had scarcely room for one, the wheelchair took up so much space. Returning, he passed Jupp's shop. In the middle of the window, behind the tray of Victorian jewellery, stood his father's writing desk. The price ticket, hanging from a string, was turned so as to be invisible from the street, a technique common to antique and secondhand dealers. But in this case it hadn't been turned quite enough, for by dint of bending his head down almost to touch his knees and twisting his head round, Victor could read, writen in biro, the sum: �359.99. And Jupp had given him only �410 for the whole lot! He must have known even then that the desk was an antique. And if the desk was worth so much, what about the rest? Probably his furniture had been worth nearer four thousand than four hundred pounds. He understood though, as he looked at it and at his mother's pair of matching brass candlesticks which stood on top of it, that it was too late to do anything about this now. But he went into the shop just the same. The doorbell jangled. Prominently placed, some few feet inside, was the brown velvet settee on the arm of which someone had put the stuffed peacock, its clawed feet concealing the cigarette burn his father had made. It was not Jupp or the boy but Kevin who came in from the back. 'He's making a packet out of me, isn't he?' Victor said. 'He's asking nearly as much for that desk as he gave me for the lot.' 'Absolutely. It's daylight robbery,' said Kevin cheer fully. 'Well, he's not in it for his health, is he? And talking of health, you'll never credit it but he's given up them mints. Given them up total, cold turkey.' Victor wasn't interested. The entire contents of his parents' house were spread around Jupp's shop, but for a few items which Victor supposed he had already sold or else transported to the place in Salusbury Road. He walked about reading price tickets: �150 for the dining table and six chairs, �25 for his parents' double bed (scene of so many love transports and cries for more, masked as distress), �10 for the buttoned satin bedhead, �75 for a bookcase and �125 for a glass-fronted china cabinet. 'D'you fancy a coffee?' said Kevin, coming in from the back once more. 'You may as well.' Victor followed him, ducking under the looped-up curtain. A saucepan was starting to boil over on an electric bob, white froth bubbling up and leaping over the sides before Kevin could reach it. 'It's no use crying over spilt milk,' he said. The room was furnished like a kitchen but with armchairs and an ironwork table with a marble top of the kind you sometimes see in pubs. 'Do you live here?' Victor said. 'Are you kidding?' Kevin handed him a mug of boiled milk and water with half a spoonful of powdered coffee in it. 'Sugar? He's been giving your auntie a bit of a whirl, if you can credit it. I don't know what's come over the old Joe of late. He's been taking her out.' 'She never goes out.' 'Well, it's a manner of speaking, innit? "Taking out" -what does it mean? Anything from buying a chick a half of Foster's to screwing her out of her brains. He's got to have something to take his mind off his withdrawal symptoms.' 'He lives here then, does he?' Victor was determined to stick to the point. 'Nobody lives here,' Kevin said patiently. 'The wife and me, we live up in Muswell Hill, and old Joe's got a maisonette over the shop down Salusbury. Satisfied? So why do we have them chairs and a fridge out the back here? On account of if you're in this business you may have long periods of the working day, to say the least, when not a sod comes in. Right?' 'Can I put something in your fridgeto keep overnight? Over Saturday night, that is.' 'What's wrong with your own?' Victor explained that he hadn't got a fridge. Kevin took some convincing. Apparently, it had simply never occurred to him that there might be people - ordinary people living around him, not aboriginals or Amish - who didn't possess refrigerators. 'Would you credit it?' he said, looking at Victor with new eyes, and he began talking about the refrigerator he shared with Jupp's daughter, the largest and most efficient on the British market, of vast cubic footage and equipped with freezer, ice-maker and compartment for chilling drinks and dispensing them from a tap. At last Victor managed to elicit from him that the shop would be open until six on Saturday and he, Kevin, would be 'unofficially' opening it until midday on Sunday. 'Strictly against the law but highly favourable to the tourist trade,' he said. Victor was prepared to point out that Jupp owed him something, the way he had practically stolen his furniture, but Kevin needed no more persuading. They never kept anything beyond milk and maybe half a dozen cans of beer in the fridge here. Victor was welcome. 'About twelve on Saturday then,' Victor said. Suppose Jupp were to many his aunt? Stranger things had happened. And after all it must be this which Jupp had in mind, for he could hardly be interested in her for sex or company. It must be her money. Victor let himself into Mrs Griffiths's house, into the warm musty silence, the quiet of the long day when he would be alone there. The parcel on the hall table was for him, addressed in Clare's hand. The sweatshirt, of course, and with it a current copy of the local weekly paper. Victor hoped for a letter as well, but the enclosure was a postcard with a drawing on it of a statue and a square and some buildings he thought Clare might have done herself but which said on the back: Versailles, Raoul Dufy. She had written: 'I thought you might need this in case we don't meet for a while. Love, Clare.' He took it upstairs with him. He put the sweatshirt on, though it was rather too warm to wear it, and sat in the wheelchair, studying the note again. What did 'for a while' mean? A few days? A week? A month? Of course it didn't really matter what it meant as he would be going over there on Sunday to surprise them anyway. She had put 'love' when she might easily have written 'yours'. Last time she had written 'yours'. She could have put 'yours sincerely' or 'yours affectionately' or even 'yours ever' but she had put 'love'. You didn't write 'love' unless you had quite a strong feeling for a person, did you? He couldn't imagine writing 'love' to anyone - except her... The sweatshirt had been handled by her, folded by her. He could smell her on it, a definite though faint scent of the Rive Gauche that he had bought her himself. Advertised in the paper was a likely-sounding flat. It had probably gone by now, Victor thought, but he phoned the number just the same, standing in the hall with his eyes on Clare's pencilled name on the underside of the stairs. The flat was still available, fifty pounds a week and in Theydon Bois itself. Victor imagined seeing Clare and David every day. They would call in on him on the way back from their walks and sit outside with him under a striped sunshade, drinking white wine. It was a groundfloor flat, large bedsit with 'patio', kitchen and bathroom. A garage was also available for rent, if desired. Victor arranged to see the flat on Sunday afternoon. Without thinking very much about what he was doing, just doing it because it seemed right and what he wanted to do, he bumped the wheelchair down the stairs and out of the front door. Once he was in Twyford Avenue he got into the wheelchair and sat down and covered his legs with the brown checked travelling rug. It was a warm day but not warm enough to make the rug look silly. Victor made his way on to Ealing Common. In the distant past such places had been attractive to him because of their potential. There he could find women alone. There, no one was in earshot of their cries. Dogs he had always found singularly ineffectual in coming to the aid of their owners, though it was also true to say that he had never attacked women accompanied by large dogs. He parked the chair under some trees. A child playing with a ball was called sharply away by its mother - in case it should be a nuisance to the handicapped man, he thought. The rapist he had once been seemed like a different person, and this was not simply because he was currently in the role of a disabled man. Rape itself had become as alien to him as to any normal ordinary citizen. Why had he done it? What had he got out of it? He asked Clare, who was listening sympathetically, but as usual she didn't reply. It was because he was always angry, he thought, and now he wasn't angry any more, nor could he imagine a cause of anger. He turned round and went home. A young girl who looked a lot like Clare came to help him over the crossing at the UxbridgeRoad, walking beside his wheelchair and holding the back of it. His arms were tired by the time he reached the corner of Tolleshunt Avenue, but when he got out of the chair to push it back to Mrs Griffiths's house his legs felt stiff from disuse. Next day he had the hire car again and by a piece of luck managing to get the same one. He parked it in Harrod's car park, securing the last vacant space. In the food hall he bought asparagus and raspberries, smoked trout and quails, which he hoped Clare would know how to cook, tiny English new potatoes, the first of the- season, herb butter, clotted cream, mange tout peas, brie and Double Gloucester and a goat's cheese that looked like a swiss roll with icing on it. He bought champagne, Moet et Chandon, and two bottles of Orvieto. It cost nearly a hundred pounds. Victor hadn't known you could spend a hundred pounds on such a small amount of food. He drove to Jupp's shop. Jupp himself was there, trying in vain to sell an ugly art nouveau lamp to a woman who had obviously come in only to look round. Kevin, of course, hadn't bothered to tell him about the arrangement he and Victor had made. 'Bit of a peculiar request, isn't it?' he said lugubriously to Victor. 'A bit bizarre?' 'Your son-in-law said it would be all right.' 'I daresay. He thinks he owns the place, reckons he's monarch of all he surveys. You do as you like, cocky, make yourself at home.' Jupp was wearing his jeans and the striped waistcoat but an incongruously formal white shirt and tie with a regimental crest. With the tip of his finger he removed some- thing from the underside of a mirror frame and slipped it into his mouth. Victor went back to the car and fetched the box of food, noticing as he came back that his father's desk had gone. Munching his chewing gum, Jupp stood holding the fridge door open. He eyed every item Victor put inside and at the sight of the champagne his shaggy white eyebrows went up. 'Didn't I tell you not to spend it all at once, cocky?' 'You're making enough profit out of it, I should say,' said Victor. Jupp slammed the fridge door. 'All's fair in love and war.' He didn't explain how love or war entered into a straight commercial transaction. Victor said he would be back for the food next morning, and left. In fact he went back quite early, before ten, because he had wakened up in the small hours with the awful thought that suppose they didn't open the shop this particular Sunday, suppose Kevin simply forgot? Kevin, however, was there. He helped Victor re-pack the food, having peeled off and flung away a gob of gum he found adhering to the fridge door handle. 'Disgusting, innit? He's got an addictive personality. He'll be smoking next.' This reminded Victor to buy some cigarettes for David. He also got a packet of Hamlet cigars. Back at Mrs Griffiths's house, he dressed carefully, casual today in a new dark blue tee shirt he had bought, dark blue cord jeans and the two-tone grey padded jacket. It was when he was lacing up his new shoes, perfectly plain fine grey leather, the most expensive pair he had ever owned, that he remembered it was his birthday. All this was in honour of his birthday yet he had forgotten the occasion in the complexity of preparations. He looked at himself in the mirror. Thirtynine today, his fortieth year entered upon. No one had sent him a card - but who was there that knew his address except David and Clare? He was aware though of an uneasy feeling, a slight feeling of let-down, but he refused to let himself think about the reason for it: that David and Clare, who had been told it was his birthday, had not sent him a card. At noon he set off, the box of food in the boot of the car, and in a stout brown envelope on the seat beside him the portrait photograph of himself which had arrived by yesterday's post. Victor had four hundred pounds in the pocket of his jacket, all that was left of the money he had drawn out of his 'bank' at Muriel's. He had lunch in an hotel at Epping and drove down Piercing Hill to Theydon Bois. It struck him that he was living in the kind of style he had always aimed at and never quite achieved before: driving a smart new car, well dressed, lunching in good restaurants, about to choose a new and attractive home for himself, then to entertain his friends to a luxurious meal. The past was there still but it wasn't even like a bad dream, being too distant and imper- sonal for that; it was like someone else's past or something he had read about in a magazine. The flat was part of one of the older houses adjacent to the forest. It was very small, a single room with french windows that had been converted into three. The 'patio' was a little bit of concrete outside these windows with trellis round it, overhung by a clematis at present covered by myriad creamy-white flowers. The woman who owned the house and whose name was Palmer told him it was a clematis and that the blue flower in the narrow border was bugle and that the iron table and chairs were new and of the best quality. Victor didn't think much of the chipboard furniture, the broken wash basin and the haircord carpet, but he imagined living here and eating out on his patio and having David and Clare drop in several times a week. On the phone, remembering what Clare had advised, he had given his name as Michael Faraday and now he repeated it, quite liking the sound of it. Mrs Palmer wanted a deposit of a month's rent and a reference. Victor handed over two hundred pounds and promised a reference, thinking that perhaps Clare would help him there, it being she after all who had suggested the assumed name and discarding of the past. It wasn't yet four. Victor thought David and Ciare might still be out for their walk, if indeed they had gone today. Bright and sunny when he left Acton, it had clouded over and grown colder, and as he drove slowly alongside the green a few drops of rain dashed against his windscreen. He hung about till half past, sitting in the parked car reading Time Out. Rain was falling steadily by the time he drew up outside Sans Souci. They wouldn't be out in the garden today. He rapped on the front door with the Roman soldier knocker, the box of food and bottles at his feet. A curtain in one of the front windows moved and Clare peered out. He couldn't conceal from himself that, at the sight of who it was, her face was overspread with a look of blank dismay. The smile which replaced this was unnatural and forced. He felt suddenly very cold. Clare opened the door. She was wearing white cotton trousers and a blue shirt that made her look very young and holding the puppy in her arms. Clare always looked young, she boas young, but now she looked about eighteen. She said, 'Victor, what a surprise!' 'I meant it to be a surprise,' he said, speaking in an awkward mutter. She looked at the box. 'What have you brought this time?' He didn't reply. He picked up the box and took it into the house and stood there. aware of something different, aware of a sense of something missing or lost. 'I'm afraid David isn't here,' she said. 'They asked him to go into hospital a week earlier than arranged. They specially wanted it and it was all the same to him. He's coming home tomorrow.' Then Victor knew what was missing, the smell of David's cigarettes. 'Don't look so disappointed!' 'I'm sorry. It was just...' 'You'll have to put up with me instead. Come and meet Pauline.' He had a horrible feeling of a possible trick again. She had arranged it, she had fixed it, and Pauline Ferrars was waiting behind that door for him, fetched from her hiding place, discovered, brought here to confront and taunt him. But of course it was quite some other Pauline, some friend or neighbour, a girl of about Clare's own age, dark-haired, pretty, wearing a gold wedding ring. They had been drinking tea and the teapot was there and two mugs and biscuits on a plate. While Clare went away to fetch another mug he tried to talk to Pauline. He said it had been a nice day but it wasn't any more. She agreed. Clare came back and began talking about David, the treatment he was having, some kind of electric shocks to the spine that was still really in its experimental stages. She was going to fetch him home herself, would be taking the day off to do so, because he liked that better than going in the kind of ambulance that had been provided before. Victor felt more than disappointed. He was bowled over and stunned. In this woman's presence he found it impossible to speak and he had already convinced himself that she had come for the day, for the evening. The absurdity of his plan, his 'surprise', unfolded before him and he saw how stupid it had been, indeed how childish, not to phone and check that they would both be at home and free. But when Pauline got up and said she must go- it was nice to have met him, she said. How could it have been? - he felt marginally better. He felt something might be retrieved and, though he was embarrassed, he was also rather pleased when Clare came back from seeing Pauline out to say that she couldn't help noticing the champagne in the box and what were they celebrating? 'My birthday,' he said, and because he couldn't resist it, 'I did tell you.' 'Oh, Victor, of course you did! I do remember. It was just that all this with David and him going to hospital early and getting things ready - it went out of my head.' 'It doesn't matter.' 'You know it does. You know it matters a lot. I think I know what's in the box. Things for a celebration dinner, is that it? Wine and food and lovely things?' He nodded. 'Come on. Let's unpack them and see.' Victor suggested they drink the champagne while they did this. 'Wouldn't you like us to save it till David's home? You could come back one day in the week and we could have it then.' 'Today's my birthday,' Victor said. She was kneeling on the floor and she looked up at him with a sudden smile that was joyous and somehow conspiratorial, perhaps in appreciation of the childlike directness of his reply. She wrinkled her nose. He hadn't felt much like smiling but he managed it. The things that came out of the box made her gasp. 'We couldn't possibly eat all this anyway, just the two of us!' Victor opened the champagne. She had two glasses standing ready. It hadn't been his lot in life to open champagne very often and when he had done so in the past there had been something like an explosion followed by a mess but now the operation was smoothly done and every foaming drop caught in Clare's glass. 'Can you cook all this stuff?' he said. 'I can try. They do look pathetic, the quails, rather like four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie.' 'Cooking will make a lot of difference,' said Victor. 'It had better.' Clare lifted her glass. 'Happy birthday, Victor!' He drank. He remembered her face of dismay appearing at the window when first he knocked at the door. A layer of paranoia seemed to peel itself off his mind; he saw something more rational beneath and all kinds of understanding became less remote. 'If you wanted to be on your own this evening,' he said,'if you'd rather I went, I wouldn't mind. I really wouldn't.' She put out her hand and laid it on his arm. 'I'd like you to stay.' It was clear that she meant it. He was very conscious of her touch, of the weight of that small brown hand, though it lay lightly, almost hoveringly, on his sleeve. He had a curious impulse to bend his bead and press his lips to it. She took her hand away, sat back smiling at him. 'Of course I want you to stay. We owe you a lot, Victor.' He stared, sensing sarcasm. 'I know that sounds strange, considering - well, if it hadn't been for you, David wouldn't have been in this state in the first place. That's true, of course. But we're different people at different stages of our life, don't you think?' Didn't he! Passionately, he nodded, holding his fists clenched. 'The man who shot David isn't the man who's here with me now, he isn't the man that David can talk to and- well, somehow straighten things out, get things into perspective. And even that first man, David doesn't see him as a monster, as evil, any more. He's beginning to understand. Victor, there was a time when I thought David would go - mad. He was heading for a complete breakdown. He couldn't talk about the shooting, he certainly couldn't have written about it, and that's really why it's not in his book - not because of compassion for you, if that's what you thought. And then you turned up. First he thought you'd come to kill him and then, believe it or not, he thought he'd like to kill you.' Silently Victor listened, watching her face. 'Then he started to like you. There is something- I must find the right word - lovable about you. Did you know that? I think it's because you seem very vulnerable.' It might have been the champagne, though Victor didn't think so, but something seemed to move and tremble and unfold inside his body. Her words repeated themselves on his inward ear. 'Yes, lovable,' she said. 'I know David feels it. Forgive me if I say I don't think he quite trusts you yet, not entirely, but think how he has been hurt. He will, he will come to it. He'll adjust himself to life finally through you.' Victor felt as if she had given him a magnificent birthday present. There was nothing material she could have given him to please him half so much. He would have liked to say so but he was unable to express these thoughts, they stuck on his tongue and he was struck silent. He packed the food back into the box and carried it out to the kitchen. The windows were awash with rain, the green and flowery garden a distorted blur through glass than ran with water. She came in carrying the champagne, took his hand and gave it a squeeze. 'Clare,' he said, holding her hand, 'Claret' In the end they decided not to eat the quails but to keep them in the fridge for when David got back. Clare cooked the asparagus and they ate the trout and then the raspberries with cream. They ate at the kitchen table and Victor loved the informality of it, the red and white check cloth Clare laid on the pine table, the red candle in a pewter candlestick that it was dark enough by eight to light, so wintry and twilit did the rain make Theydon Manor Drive that evening. He told her about the flat he had put a deposit on. Clare said what he had fantasised she might say, though had not truly imagined she would. 'We'll be able to drop in when we're out on our walks.' Victor said, 'He's back in hospital now- is there, does that mean there's a chance they'll cure him? Can he get better?' She lifted her shoulders. 'Who knows, one day? It's not a subject I know much about. David knows everything about it, you'll have to ask him.' She smiled at his incredu- lous look. 'Yes, I mean it. It would do him good to talk. But a cure...? Not at present, not at this stage of- well, knowledge. They experiment on him a bit - with his full consent, of course. By his desire even. That's why he's there now. But no miracles are going to happen, Victor. I'm not going to go there tomorrow morning and be met by a reception committee of joyous doctors with David walking in the midst of them. At best his reactions may be giving them some ideas to work on.' He wondered if her mention of the following morning was a hint to him to go. But these suspicions he knew to be symptoms of a paranoia he was beginning to shed. She had asked him to stay, she wanted him here. He helped her with the dishes. He opened one of the bottles of Italian wine. It was curious that, until then, he had really felt no desire for her. Several times he had remembered how she had caught him in her arms that afternoon when David had shown him the proofs of the book, and how he had responded to that embrace. But desire of that kind for women was something he had hardly ever felt, not since Pauline anyway, and to compare Pauline with Clare was a travesty. He recalled his response to Clare as an isolated phenomenon, interesting and even pleasing but something he might never feel again. When she had touched him, laid her hand on his arm and held his hand, he felt something that was distinct from desire, something he might define as mysteriously involved with what she called his vulnerability, his quality of being lovable. Yet things had now changed and he was aware as they moved about the kitchen of an alteration of consciousness, a shifting of his relations with her. He wanted her to embrace him again. She blew out the candle and they went into the living room. The television set was there and he expected they would watch television. He had come to think of this as what you did in the evenings, what everyone did as a matter of course, a way of life. Clare put on a record instead. It was the sort of music he had always told himself he didn't like, sounding old and alien, historical music played on instruments no one used any more. She handed him the 203 sleeve to read and he saw it was a harpsichord suite by Purcell. The cold sweetness of it poured into the room and his contentment went and he was filled with unhappiness, with grief almost and a sense of waste, with loneliness. He said, 'Can I have that picture of you?' 'Can you have it? You? You mean have that photograph in the frame?' He nodded. Then he remembered. 'I've got something for you. Something else, I mean. I nearly forgot.' The envelope containing his photograph he had left on the passenger seat of the car and he got it out but he didn't re-lock the door. He would be going soon. The rain had stopped and the air was bluish, cold, very clear. A white moon had risen, screened by a nimbus, and on the horizon the yellow ribbon of the motorway could be seen, the lights sending a bright shimmer up into the dark sky. She got up as he came in and took the photograph from his hands. The music had changed, was warmer, a dance it sounded like, though still from a long way in the past. 'Did you have this taken specially?' Put like that, it made him sound a bit of a fool. He nodded. 'Thank you,' she said. 'You can't have that picture of me, that's David's, but I'll give you another.' He watched her search through the desk. A conviction formed itself and strengthened and became absolute that he couldn't drive home that night. It would somehow be beyond his powers. The loneliness that would sit beside him would overpower him and take over; like some hitchhiker bent on violence, it would attack and subdue him and leave him for dead. He could tell her some lie, he thought, like not being able to start the car, anything, any subterfuge in order to stay. Without turning her head, reading his mind surely, she said, 'It's late, Victor. Why don't you stay the night? I'll have to leave very early in the morning but you won't mind that.' She laughed, spun round in her chair. 'To tell you the truth, I don't much like being here alone. Pauline's 204 been staying with me but her husband's back from a trip and she's had to go.' He tried to sound casual, offhand, as if it were he doing her the favour. 'I could do, no problem.' The picture she gave him was different from the one in the frame, taken longer ago, a young, almost childlike Clare. He sat staring at it, staring as he would hardly dare to gaze at the living woman. She'd give him the spare room where Pauline had slept, she said, David's room being so full of gadgets and aids for the handicapped. Her voice, he noticed, had taken on a strange, strained note. She had drunk rather a lot of wine, more than he remembered she had permitted herself at other meals he had shared with her. Her cheeks were flushed and her eyes seemed very large. He thought, she will kiss me again when she says goodnight to me. A need to postpone that parting took hold of him. He was looking at her in silence, gazing now as he had gazed at her picture. She had been talking, conventionally enough, about tomorrow's trip, the long drive across country, and he entered into this, asking her questions about the route, offering to drive her himself- an offer which was rejected - and all the time keeping his eyes on her face with a yearning that increased to a nearly physical reaching towards her. At the same time he was aware of a reciprocal reaching in her towards him. He thought he must have imagined this but he wasn't mistaken, he couldn't be, and he remembered she had said he was lovable. Inwardly he trembled, though his body and his hands remained steady. His feelings were quite different from what they had been that time she embraced him, more diffuse, more tender, less rapacious. This was the word he used to himself and it made him shudder. He said suddenly, harshly, 'What do you know about me? My past? What has David told you?' She said steadily, 'That you were in a house with a girl, a sort of hostage, and David had to go in and rescue her and you shot him. Do we have to talk about it?' 'Is that all?' 'I think so.' She got up and he too rose. She stood looking at him, just standing there, her hands by her sides. 'It's late. We don't have to talk about that tonight.' The hungry anxious look she had that he couldn't define. He had never seen it in a woman before. He had never before taken a woman in his arms and cupped her head in his hand and brought her face to his and kissed her lips. It was his thirty~ninth birthday but he had never quite done that before. The feelings it aroused in him were unex- pected and new, tremendous, overpowering yet not somehow clamouring for immediate swift satisfaction. She responded to his kiss quite differently from that last time, for he felt she was as desirous as he. Her kiss explored his mouth and her body pressed its curves into his hard muscles and vulnerable nerves. And then she twisted away, stood for a moment gazing at him in a kind of panic, the back of one hand against her lips. Puzzlement made him silent, left him at a loss. In these matters he had no experience. She left the room and when he followed she had disappeared. The hall was empty. He looked into the kitchen but there was no one there, only the little dog Sally curled up in her basket. He switched off the lights and went up the stairs where the railway for David's lift spanned the bannisters. Upstairs he didn't know the rooms, didn't know where to go and went into David's by mistake. Violins in various stages of construction, one finished, lay on a pine bed. A wide arch led into a shower room big enough to take the wheelchair under the water jets. He turned back. His heart was beating painfully and he half wished he had gone home, even through the cold moonlight, even with loneliness for a companion. The house was silent. Through a landing window he could see the golden thread of the motorway draped across plains and hills. He drew a deep breath and opened a door and saw her waiting for him, sitting naked on the side of her bed, lifting her eyes to meet his, extending her hands to him without a smile. In the night they both awoke at the same time. Victor woke and found that they had slept embraced and now her eyelids moved and her eyes opened. He couldn't remember putting the light out but he must have, for he saw her face now by white moonlight. Her breasts were very full and soft and he held them in his hands, which was another thing he had never done before last night. Lovemaking for him before had been an attack and a swift pumping, an explosive discharge, a gasp and a rolling off; and this not only with the women he had assaulted - that was still something else, something even further removed and less sexual- but with Pauline, who had somehow embarrassed him, had made him treat her body as a hole with a bit of flesh round it. Clare had not had to teach him to make love- he would not have liked that from a woman, any woman- but making love had come naturally with her, came naturally now, as he explored her body with his hands, the delicate tips of his fingers, his tongue and a murmuring stroking whispering of his lips. And he could not have anticipated the rewards, the sensation of her melting and flowing under his touch, of unfolding around him and receiving him with a kind of sweet loving gratitude. She was not an active woman, the kind he had read of in magazines. A thrashing of limbs, a manipulation of his flesh, a riding and exultant cries he could not have borne, could not have coped with, nor any demanding initiative. Easily, with a dreaming reserve, thinking not of present gratification but of a lifetime of rarefied pleasure, he postponed his climax until he felt the pressure of her hands tighten on his back, until her lips joined to his whispered, 'Now!' The night before it had not been quite like that, 207 not as perfect for her as for him, not an absolutely shared moving of the world. Years of dismay and bewilderment tiptoed away. His body filled with light and he knew that precisely the same thing had happened to her, the blood in their veins different, recharged. 'I love you,' he said, unfamiliar words that he had read but never thought to utter. She was gone when next he awoke. The curtains were pulled back and it was a white-grey morning, dull of sky, a white rose, paler than the clouds, blossoming on a rambler, framed in one of the window panes. Clare came in, dressed, bringing him tea, sitting on the bed, dressed like someone's efficient secretary in a grey flannel suit and a red blouse with a bow. She kissed him and pulled away smiling when he tried to take her in his arms. 'Let me drive you. Let me get up and drive you.' 'No, Victor. I have to fetch David on my own. You must see that.' Of course he saw. He could see plainly in her face what she was thinking, nothing changed her affection for David, her loyalty to him, any more than it could change Victor's. She had made a promise and she must keep it. After all, in a way she was David's secretary, his nurse or a loving sister. 'I'll get up and make myself scarce,' he said. 'I'll get off home.' She nodded. 'We'll meet soon. I'll phone you.' 'I'd like to see David, you know.' She seemed surprised. 'Yes, of course.' He heard the Land Rover move out of the garage directly below his bed. He heard it move away, the change of gear, the pause as the bigger road was reached. When he could hear it no longer he got up and dressed and tidied up, washing their cups and her breakfast plate and the teapot. Eating didn't appeal to him, he didn't want breakfast. In the living room he found the photograph of herself she had given him. Clare, he said to the picture, Clare. He gazed at it, sitting in an armchair and holding the photograph in front of him and gazing. Why hadn't he understood all 208 these weeks that he was in love with her? Because it had never happened to him before. His parents' need for each other's exclusive company he now understood and he wondered why he had been so blind and so deluded. He slipped the photograph inside the envelope in which his own had been contained. He left his own lying the table. Originally, he had been going to write across the corner of it, the way famous people do, write a message to both of them and sign it. He couldn't do that now, so he just left it. It was still not eight o'clock. He went out to the car and heard a heavy distant hum like aircraft. It was the motorway, laden with morning traffic. The needs of the day and its pressures began to close on him, ordinary life coming back. He was due to return the car this morning but there was no way now that he could get it back by nine. He would have to pay for an extra day. Mrs Griffiths too must be given notice that he was leaving and perhaps Tom or Judy told. He thought about these things and then Clare, the image of her, the memory of her voice, drove them away. He drove back to Acton with his head full of Clare, his body intermittently excited by awareness of certain aspects of her, but not daring to think too intensely of what she looked like naked or the things they had done together. Even to remember her eyes opening in the moonlight made him tremble and a long shiver run the length of his spine. And what next? They had said nothing about telling David, though Clare had agreed when Victor said he would like to see David, understanding what he implied by this. David himself would probably understand what had happened. He might even be pleased. After all, he might be very fond of Clare, he might share his house with her and depend on her for so much, but he couldn't be her lover, he could never give her what he, Victor, had given her last night. If he were really fond of her he would want her to have a love life and probably be glad it was with someone like Victor who would really love and cherish her and care about her. Victor took the car back and because it was only ten past nine they didn't charge him for the extra day. He walked home to Tolleshunt Avenue, feeling strong and fit and young, in spite of having been thirty-nine yesterday and drinking nearly two bottles of wine. Upstairs in his room he sat in the wheelchair, imagining what it must be like to be David, alive only above the waist, capable of thinking and speaking and eating and drinking and moving the wheelchair but not of much else. Of course if he couldn't do it because the nerves or whatever it was down there were dead, it stood to reason that he couldn't want to do it. Victor knew he wanted to do it because he got erect whenever he even thought of Clarelike that. Sitting in the wheelchair he was erect now, a bulge holding out the brown check travelling rug that he had pulled over his knees. How ridiculous and grotesque! He jumped out of the wheelchair and lay face-downwards on the bed but the bed brought her image to him again and suddenly there came a fierce painful longing for her to be here, painful because there was no hope of that today. Or was there perhaps? When would she get back? When would she phone him? He imagined her driving through June-green England, up the motorways, on the little winding roads through villages, thinking of him surely as he was thinking of her, a goldskinned girl with paler gold hair in a secretarial suit and red blouse with a bow... Presently he made himself get up and sit at the table with the bamboo frame adorned with cigarette burns and write to Mrs Griffiths. A week's notice only he would give her. She wouldn't be the loser, for the DHSS were paying her. He calculated that Clare would just about be there by now but when the phone rang downstairs he thought he had miscalculated and she was already home. As soon as she had got home she was phoning him! He ran downstairs and took off the receiver and a woman's voice asked if that was Curry's. A wrong number. It would be better to go out somewhere than sit here waiting for the phone, but he knew he wouldn't go out. Committing himself utterly to her, he thought about what they would do, where they would live. In the new flat for a while, presumably. He would have to get work, start the car-hire business he had already had ideas about. Would she, he asked himself, would she - one day - marry him? Although it brought a kind of havoc to mind and body, causing him a physical torment of a kind he had never known before, he was unable to keep himself from thinking of how she had responded to him, with such sweet abandonment, almost with relief, as if this was what she had been aching for for a long time. She had given herself to him, old-fashioned expression he had once heard his mother use, though disparagingly - 'She gave herself to him and of course she regretted it.' Clare, he was sure, would never regret it, but it was true that she had given herself, making a joyful loving gift of it, the better to receive. He loved her and she loved him. There was a rightness about it all which had begun the day he saw the name Theydon Bois on the station and after that had begun the search for David. A lucky day for Clare, who had been rescued from a life that was no life for someone as young and lovely and capable of giving love as she was. In the evening she phoned him. It was quite late, about ten, and he had given up hope of hearing from her that day. In a way he hadn't expected to hear and he wasn't unhappy or anxious. But the phone ringing and then her voice, that was a bonus. 'Victor? It's Clare. David's asleep. He's had an exhausting day.' 'When can I see you?' 'David's been asking about you. He wondered how you'd feel about coming over on Saturday.' 'I mean, when can I see you?' She was silent, thinking. He began to understand that there might be difficulties. At first there were going to be difficulties. Of course it wouldn't be all plain sailing. 'I don't suppose you said anything to him, did you?' 'Said anything?' 'Well, told him.' 'No, Victor, I didn't tell him.' He could see her face as clearly as if this were a phone with a television screen. It swam in the darkness of the hall like a spirit face, a beautiful floater on his retina. On the underside of the stairs her name was written: Clare. 'Do you want to see me before Saturday?' 'Of course I do. Don't you want to see me?' 'Yes.' His heart, which had been a prey to doubts suddenly, to terrible groundless fears, leaped with joy. He couldn't sing, had scarcely ever tried, but he would have liked to sing now. Tenors in operas, crowing with love and happiness, grief and tragedy, he could understand them now. 'When, Clare?' 'Not tomorrow. I can't. Wednesday, after work, five thirty in Epping. Could you manage that, Victor?' He could have managed Wednesday at five thirty in Marrakech, he thought. 'Not a pub. It'll be too early anyway. On Bell Common, we could meet there, Victor. I'll park the Land Rover in Hemnall Street, just in from the High Street at the common end.' 'I love you,' he said. It was an awful dream he had- 'unnecessary', he told himself. Why was it necessary for him to be visited with a nightmare like that? Of course, whatever the psychologists might say, you could account for dreams by what had happened to you on the previous day. And on this day, in the Standard he had bought himself, along with Readers Digest and Punch and TV Times, was a paragraph that, though tucked away, leaped to Victor's eye. Things about rape always did, even though it no longer concerned him. This said that the man they called the 'Red Fox' - because he had red hair? A red face?- who had raped a seventyyear-old woman in Watford had now made a similar assault on a teenage girl in St Albans. How did they know it was the same man? Because of the descriptions which the women had given? Victor didn't think about it. Or he thought he didn't think about it. Who knew what went on in the unconscious mind? If you knew, it wouldn't be unconscious, and that was the catch. Before going to sleep he read an article in Reader's Digest about the unconscious mind. And then, very soon after sleeping, it seemed, he fell into this dream. No road this time and no houses. He was in the wheelchair, out for the evening, crossing a common on which were areas of woodland. At one point he came to a bridge across a stream. It was a narrow bridge, of wooden planks, precarious and rickety, with a handrail made of rope on each side. A man on the far side, a kind of bridge keeper, came across to help Victor, walking backwards himself and pulling the wheelchair, telling Victor to close his eyes and not look down over the edge. Victor thanked him and continued along the path, which now entered one of the small dark woods. A woman was walking among the trees. She wore a long duster coat or mackintosh of black silk and over her head an embroidered black veil like a mantilla. When she saw Victor approaching she turned to look at him, standing in an attitude of pity, of yearning sympathy, with both hands clasped in front of her. Victor jumped out of the wheelchair, ran towards her and, seizing her in his arms, threw her to the ground and tore at her clothes. She wore a mass of petticoats, layers and layers of stiff lace petticoats, and he tried to rip them away, burrowing in the starched crackling stuff with his hands, pushing with his face, his nose, like a snuffling pig. There was nothing there, nothing beneath, no flesh, only a clothes prop of wooden sticks. He tore off all the clothes, a wardrobe full, and the veil which was not one veil but two, three, a dozen, a wad of silky dusty black gauze, and underneath, under the last filmy layer, lay the photograph of Clare, her eyes looking up into his. Nightmares recede quickly. Who had ever been troubled by a bad dream for more than an hour or two after waking? Nor could the dream spoil his feeling for the photograph. He took it with him down to Acton High Street and found a shop that did framing three or four doors up from Jupp's. They said they could do it on the spot and Victor chose an oval frame of walnut-coloured wood - perhaps true walnut. In Jupp's window, among the Victorian bric-a-brac and jewellery pieces was a gold locket shaped like a heart with a delicate chasing on it of flowers and leaves. He would have bought it, he would have gone in there and bought it for Clare, even though that meant putting more money into Jupp's pocket, but as he pushed the door open an inch or two and the bell began to jangle he noticed that the brown velvet sofa now had a label with 'sold' in red attached to it. Jupp came into the shop from behind the curtain, masticating gum, but Victor had turned away. He would buy a present for Clare elsewhere. Gold lockets, or gold anything come to that, were thick on the ground in London junk shops. It was a pity that he couldn't have the car, but when he went to the car-rental place all they had available was a small Nissan van, the red Escort being out on hire. Besides, he was getting short of money again and after he had bought Clare a present it would be time to return to the 'bank'. A distaste for these transactions of his now began strongly to affect Victor. He didn't want to deceive her any longer about his possession of a car or lie to her about the source of his income. The idea that she might find out about his raids on Muriel's house appalled him, for he sensed that the justifications he made to himself would weigh nothing with her. 'It isn't as if you went to prison for stealing,' she had said. A vague unformed vision was slowly taking shape in his mind that Clare would lift him out of his past, just as knowing her had already absolved him from anger and panic and violence. By mistake he got into a train that was going no further than Debden, and there he had to get out and wait for the Epping train. It was a warm white-skied day, sultry, the air full of flies. There had been a big blue-bottle buzzing against the windows of the carriage, trying to get out, seeking the sun. Victor had read in a magazine an article about how insects, searching for freedom or a way home, look to the sun to guide them. He had been glad to get out of the train, away from that frantic buzzing. For some reason he fancied that Clare would want to see him dressed as he had been on his birthday, which he thought of and expected always to think of as the day they had found each other. He wore his dark blue cords and the same dark blue tee-shirt but it was too hot for the padded jacket so he carried that slung over his shoulder. Sometimes he caught sight of himself reflected in windows and he thought how much younger he looked since he had come out of prison, how much weight he had lost, and how his good looks, which he had once been proud of, had returned. There was no doubt that he looked years younger than poor David with his jowls and his excess couple of stone. In the train he had been thinking about David and thinking too that there was an alternative way for him to react. He might be bitter and resentful, he might say that Victor had ruined his life and now compounded the injury by stealing his girl. Uneasily, Victor remembered how Clare had said that David liked him but hadn't quite learned to trust him- yet. A train had come in. It wasn't the shuttle service but another train from London, this time going all the way to Epping. Victor got into an empty carriage, the second from the rear. The doors were starting to close when the mad old woman came through them, holding in front of her a covered basket. She put the basket on the floor between the long seats but, instead of sitting down herself, went up and down the carriage opening the windows. Victor looked at the basket, which was covered over with a piece of torn green towelling and which was distinctly moving up and down, a welling and subsiding movement, as if some culture worked underneath. It was the same uneven motion that had caused the shuddering of the carrier bag on that previous occasion. Victor could not keep from staring at it, though he did not want to. No culture, no activated yeast or fungus, could writhe with such vigour. It was as if she kept a pair of snakes in that basket. The train drew into Theydon Bois and Victor got up to go into the next carriage. But the old woman blocked his egress - though surely not purposely - standing between the open doors with her arms in ragged red cotton sleeves spread wide to span them, calling out in accents which were a mimicry of an Indian's sing-song, 'Mind the doors! Please to mind the doors!' He sat down again, too late to reach the other door. What did it matter? She couldn't harm him and in two or three minutes they would arrive at Epping station. He tried to read the Essex Countryside magazine. She was kneeling up on one of the seats at the far end writing something in a tiny cramped hand on an advertisement for mouthwash. Victor's eyes wandered back to the covered basket. There was no longer any movement under the green towel and it might have been eggs she kept in there or a couple of cabbages. Why cover it with a towel then? Perhaps there was no accounting for the actions of the insane. He read a few lines about Morris dancers in Thaxted, then looked, because he could not control his eyes, back at the basket. If it was what it might be under that towel, if it showed itself or part of itself, what would he do, what would become of him? To be shut in this confined space from which escape was impossible with the object of his phobia, at this old creature's mercy too, when once she knew- that was the stuff of which his worst nightmares were made. For know she would, once she saw his reaction. Control would be impossible. Breaking into a total body sweat, he stood up. His eyes were on the basket but from the corner of the right one he could see her, kneeling there, looking at him. The towel moved, slipped back. He gave an involuntary cry. It was a guinea pig's furry snout that appeared, waffling, a guinea pig whose coat was ironically in the colours and combination they call tortoiseshell... He breathed. The train drew in to Epping and the old woman picked up the basket, flinging the towel over the guinea pig with the swift quelling gesture of someone blanketing a parrot's cage. Victor tore off the return half of his ticket. Somehow he didn't think he would be needing it but, on the other hand, if David was sore with him... This business of always being early was something he would have to get out of. Whenever he wanted to be somewhere very much, he was about an hour early and that hour, passing it, was like getting through a day. He walked up from the station, taking it slowly, remembering the last time he had been here, before he knew Clare, when he scarcely knew she existed. If he turned right at the top of the hill he could go along to St Margaret's Hospital and wait outside the gates for her. But the main gates might not be the only exit, he thought, there might be other ways. He wandered through the town instead and in a little antique shop, much smarter and prettier (and more expensive) than Jupp's, bought Clare a Victorian ring of gold clasped hands on a silver band. The shopkeeper put it in a blue velvet box lined with white satin. To kill time he walked Bell Common from one end to the other. The forest looked deep and dense, all the pale green of beech and birch darkened by summer, the grass under his feet starry with white and yellow flowers. In the still heavy air languid insects moved. The Land Rover he saw in the distance, parked along a curve in the road, under chestnut trees. It had arrived while, for a moment, his head had been turned away. He wanted to run to her, though he would look a fool if he ran, but he ran just the same. The passenger door swung open. He climbed up inside and took her in his arms almost before he saw her. She was in his arms and he was kissing her, smelling her skin and tasting her mouth and pushing his fingers through her hair, before he could even have said whether she had make-up on her face or her dress was pink or white. She struggled a little, laughing, gasping, and then he was more gentle, taking her face in both his hands and looking at her, eye to eye. Afterwards he could not remember how she had begun what she had said, the first words she used. Not precisely. And this was a merciful dispensation, for it was bad enough remembering what came later. He could remember only from the onset of his anger. 'You love me,' he said just as the anger began. 'You're in love with me. You said you were.' She shook her head. 'Victor, I never said that.' He could have sworn she had. Or was it only he who had kept saying it? Who had kept saying, I love you. 'I don't understand any of this.' She said, 'Could we get out of here, please, and sit on the grass or something? Sitting so close to you, looking straight at you, it makes it hard.' 'I'm repulsive to you, am I? You could have fooled me.' 'I didn't mean that. You know I didn't.' 'I don't know anything any more,' he said, but he got out of the car into a wilderness of dead white sky and stuffy fly-laden air and dry grass. They walked in silence. She dropped suddenly to the ground, hid her face in her hands, then turned to him. 'Will you believe me when I say I honestly didn't know you felt like this? I know you said you loved me but people do say they love people. It's emotion makes them say it, being happy, it doesn't mean much.' 'It means the world to me.' 'I thought you felt the way I do. I like you, Victor, you're attractive too, very physically attractive. And I'm...' She looked down at the ground, the grasses and the flowers, her fingers pulling a daisy to pieces, stripping petals from the yellow calyx. 'The kind of lovemaking David and I do - it's all right, it's fine. Sometimes though, it's just not enough. I've got to learn to make it enough and I will. I've never,' she said very quietly, 'broken down, weakened, whatever you like to call it, before.' He was horrified. 'You and David - make love? How can you? I don't know what you mean.' She said a little wearily, 'Think about it, Victor. Use your imagination. His hands aren't paralysed. Or his mouth. Or his senses, come to that.' 'It's revolting.' She shrugged. 'Never mind anyway. It isn't your concern, is it? I was attracted by you. Still am, come to that. You were attracted by me. We were looking for comfort too and it was raining and - well, we had too much wine. We were alone together and frustrated and we fancied each other. I'm trying to be honest and not shirk things so I will say that I knew- well, I knew on Monday morning, we wouldn't just pass it over, forget it, I knew there'd be repercussions. That's why I got up so early. I was a bit aghast at what I'd done, Victor. For it was what I'd done. I know very well you wouldn't have touched me if I hadn't - instigated things.' 'Too right I wouldn't,' he said. Ignoring that, she said, 'You're not really in love with me, Victor. You don't know me. You know scarcely anything about me. We've met just six times, and five out of those six times David's been there too.' 'What has that to do with it? I knew I loved you,' he said, believing it himself, 'from the first moment I saw you.' 'When I was so horrible to you?' She was smiling now, tried a laugh. 'When I abused you and used foul language? I'm sure you didn't, Victor. I don't - well, I don't make a practice of sleeping around casually, I've already said that, I think, but this time... Victor, can't we just say that we do like each other very much, we are attracted, and that Sunday night was good and lovely and we'll always remember it? Can't we do that? Look, it's six now. Let's go into the Half Moon and have a drink. I rteed a drink and I'm sure you do.' Anger, at this stage, made him cold and condescending. 'You've already said you drink too much.' 'I don't think I quite said that.' 'In any case, it doesn't matter. None of this matters because I don't believe any of it. You couldn't pretend about something like this. You weren't pretending on Sunday night. It's now you're pretending so as not to hurt David, you're sacrificing yourself for David. Well, I won't have it. D'you hear me, Clare, I won't have it! Aren't I as important as he is? Hasn't my life been spoiled as much as his?' An idea came to him. 'I suppose you haven't dared tell him, is that it?' She turned her head away. 'I didn't think it would be necessary to tell him.' 'Look at me, Clare. Turn round. I want to see your face.' He saw that she had become rather pale. 'Of course you're afraid to tell him. I'll tell him, I don't mind. You wouldn't spoil both our lives for the sake of ten minutes' unpleasantness, would you? Sticks and stones can break my bones,' he said, 'but hard words can't hurt me.' 'You don't understand at all.' 'I understand that you're nervous and you don't want a fuss. Look, why don't you take me back with you now and we'll both talk to David, we'll talk to him together.' 'That's impossible.' 'All right. You go. You go home now and just act as if nothing had happened and I'll follow in an hour. Don't say anything to him, I don't want you upsetting yourself. This is between David and me anyway.' 'Victor,' she said, 'can't you see we're worlds apart, you and I? The way we talk and think, the way we look at life?' 'What does that matter?' he said. 'That's not important. We didn't think like that on Sunday night and we won't again.' 'I would rather you didn't come tonight,' she said carefully. 'When then?' 'Oh, Victor, what's the use? Can't you see?' 'You go back to David now,' he said, 'and I'll follow in an hour.' He smiled encouragingly at her. Her eyes were on him and she had a trapped look. Well, that was understandable, seeing what lay ahead of her. He slammed the door and she started the Land Rover. It occurred to him she must think he had his car with him, could get to Theydon without trouble. That was what he wanted her to think, wasn't it? Momentarily the feeling came to him as he watched the Land Rover turn out into the main road that he would never see her again. That was ridiculous, she wasn't going to run away. It was a quarter past six. There was no need to take that stipulated hour too literally. Anyway, it was he who had stipulated it. He felt excited and energetic, tingling with excitement, but not afraid. David couldn't do anything to him beyond saying a few hard things. It would take him an hour to walk to Theydon and he decided to walk, the alternative being the train. The motorway disappeared into the ground here, came out on the other side of the hill and wandered away, bearing its load across the meadows. But all you could see of it was the wall on top of the tunnel that might have been enclosing someone's garden. Victor walked down a winding country lane without a pavement, green-hedged and overhung with trees, past a golf club, the garden gates of big houses, through a bit of forest, coming out into Theydon by the church. The sun had come out and it was going to be a fine evening. Theydon Manor Drive was full of roses, hedges of white and red, circular beds of roses in many colours, roses climbing over porches and pergolas. Everything is coming up roses, he thought, another expression which he couldn't remember from before he went to prison. Faint heart never won fair lady. Who had said that? Jupp, he remembered, going courting Muriel. It rather annoyed him to think of Jupp - and of Muriel, come to that - in this connection; the comparison with his own case was grotesque. At the gate he paused, though. There was a precipice on the other side of that front door. Clare had put the Land Rover away and shut the garage doors and for some reason that troubled him. He would have expected her to leave it out in the street. But of course she thought he had a car... He went up to the front door but he didn't knock. He lifted the knocker and, instead of letting it fall, restored it quietly to its original position. Not looking in at the windows, he walked round the side of the house, came into the back garden, which seemed full of roses. On Sunday it had been raining too much to notice them. He turned his face slowly towards the house. The french windows were open. Inside the room, just inside the open windows, David was sitting in his wheelchair with Clare very close beside him in another chair. There was an impression that they had retreated in there from outside, for on the garden table was a jug of water with melting ice in it, a glass and David's cigarettes. Victor couldn't remember seeing David and Clare sit like that before, close together, holding hands. The way they were sitting was curious, as if they were waiting together for something awful to happen, for death or destruction, for the ultimate disaster. He remembered a picture he had seen years before, in a school history book. It was of the Goths or Huns or someone coming to Rome and the members of the senate waiting for them, sitting with impassive dignity for a horde of barbarians to come and bring desecration with them. Clare and David reminded him of that. He said, 'David,' and, 'I expect Clare told you I was coming.' David nodded. He didn't speak but his eyes moved from Victor's face down his body. Victor had his hands in his pockets, having placed them there because they had started to shake. David was looking at Victor's right hand in his jacket pocket and Victor knew at once, sensed beyond question, that he thought he had a gun there. Clare had got up. Her face was pale and her eyes seemed very large. She was wearing the cream cotton dress with the big sleeves. Had she been wearing that in Epping when he kissed her? He couldn't remember. He took his hands out of his pockets. They were steady now. Taking a step or two forwards, he came up to the table, as to a barricade set up for battle, and lowered himself into one of the chairs. 'Clare has just said she'll marry me,' David said. Victor shook his head. 'No.' 'I refused to ask her. You know that. She asked me again just now and I've said yes.' 'There are a few things I have to tell you,' said Victor, 'which may make you change your mind about that.' 'I've already told him the few things, Victor,' said Clare. 'Did she tell you I fucked her? Not once, on and on, all night.' 'Of course she told me. Don't be so melodramatic. That may happen again in the years to come - Oh, not with you, there's not much chance of that. With others. She says so herself. I know my limitations, Victor, and she knows them. Neither of us pretends life is what it isn't- unlike you.' 'I want to marry David,' Clare said. 'It's what I've wanted ever since I first got to know him.' Victor trembled. He had a sensation all over his body of vibrating needles in the flesh. 'What did you tell her,' he said, 'to make her change her mind?' 'She hasn't changed her mind.' Victor wouldn't have said it if he hadn't been so angry. 'Did you tell her I'd raped women?' 'No.' Clare made that flinching movement that was like Judy's shrinking away when he had stood beside her at the window. 'I don't believe you,' Victor said. 'Is it true?' said Clare. 'Ask him. He's poisoned your mind against me. I should never have let you go back to him. I knew what he was, I always knew, and I thought - I thought we could be fnends.' He got up and moved, watching with pleasure as David tried to remain still and upright, to hold his ground. But David couldn't keep himself from shrinking, from drawing his hands back and gripping the wheels. Clare made a movement of protest, half shielding David with her arms. Victor saw red. He crashed his fists down on the table and the glass flew off and shattered on the stone. Victor picked up the water jug and hurled that on the ground too. Water flew on to David with splinters of glass and he covered his face with his arm. 'I wish I'd killed you,' Victor said. 'They couldn't have done worse to me than what they did if I'd killed you. I wish I had.' Somewhere in the house the puppy had begun to bark like a real watchdog.

Chapter 15

When he left David's house Victor walked for a while aimlessly, having no idea of destination, unable to think of anywhere he wished to be. Prison might be the best place for him, the only place, and if he killed David he would go back to prison. He hadn't a gun but it was possible to get a gun. It was possible to get anything if you knew how, if you had money. He found himself heading for the forest, passing the house where he had paid a deposit on a flat. He would never live in Theydon now, never set foot in the place again except to see David once more. His head full of images of David shot, David bleeding, David sprawled on the floor, he went up to the door and rang the bell. Mrs Palmer behaved in rather a frightened way. Afterwards Victor thought this must have been because he had acted wildly and talked wildly, he must have appeared scarcely sane to her. Clare had receded from his consciousness and David's image filled it. The woman didn't argue, she said he could have his deposit back and gave him a cheque. Victor thought he would spend the money on a gun. He began to walk up the hill that led through the forest, by means of a steep winding hill, towards the junction of main roads. It was a little after half past eight. Anger had started to boil up in him, taking the form of a fierce energy. He could have walked for miles, he could have walked all the way to Acton, and still not have used up that rage- stimulated energy. It was not Clare he was angry with, it wasn't her fault; she had simply bowed to a greater strength, as women must do. If she hadn't been there, he thought, he would have taken David by the throat and strangled the life out of him. But what power David had! What power a man could have from a wheelchair, a man who was only half alive! Occasionally a car passed him, going up to Loughton or down to Theydon. Once he saw a man walking in the depths of the forest with a big grey gambolling dog, an Irish wolfhound. There were stretches of open green in the forest here, of fine cropped turf, and wide areas where only the unfurling fronds of bracken grew, branched, tall, green as the trees, and there were copses of birches with thin white trunks and trembling leaves. The sun set in a smoky red glow and the sky grew briefly pale, greenish-gold as if stripped, as if peeled of cloud. Victor was angry and full of energy and now he was afraid, because he asked himself what could become of this anger, how could he live with it? What happened to you if anger conquered you? Then he saw the girl in the forest. First he saw the car, which was empty. It was parked at the entrance to one of the rides which lead through the forest, in mud ruts, now dried, made previously by a much heavier vehicle. She was sitting, with her back to the parked car and the road, on a log of wood among the bracken. Victor, who would not have thought of things in this way even a week before, decided that she was waiting to meet a man. Clare had waited to meet him in the same sort of way, an illicit way. This girl too had a possessive jealous commanding man at home, so she had to meet her lover secretly, in a lonely, unwatched place. Only it wasn't unwatched. She was dark and thin, not at all like Clare. It was nine fifteen and she was early perhaps, their arrangement being for nine thirty, but he didn't reason or work things out, he was beyond that. She was quite unaware of his presence, unbearing of his footfalls on the grass behind her, for he could see now what absorbed her. In the dusk she was making up her face. With her handbag open and a small mirror propped on it, she was pencilling her eyelids. Hardly daring to breathe, he stood a yard behind her and watched the red-tipped fingers take hold of the implement that would mascara her lashes. This was an operation to be postponed until she got here, an act that would arouse suspicion if carried out at home. He came a step closer to her, hooked his left arm round her neck and pressed his other hand across her mouth. A scream tried to burst out of her into the palm of his hand. The contents of the handbag went flying. She struggled like a creature in a net, wriggled like a landed eel. He was immensely strong, his own strength amazed him. It was easy to hold her, to manipulate her, to throw her to the ground in a nest of bracken and stuff into her mouth the scarf that had fallen from that handbag. He was erect like a brass rod, hot as fire and painful with anger. His free hand fumbled with his fly but she was limp now, her head and neck twisted to one side, her hands not fighting him but pressed under her body. He dragged down her tights, his fingers going through the filmy stuff as fragile as a cobweb. Dimly he was aware of something cracking. He heard a sharp crack and thought it might be a breaking bone, she was all bones, iron hard and unyielding. He pushed against cold dry resistant flesh and felt, suddenly, a sharp excruciating pain in his chest. It was a stinging blow he felt and he lurched off her body, seeing blood, smelling blood. He cried out in pain and disgust. There came more pain, as of needle pricks, and he heard the roar of a car's engine, wheels crunching on dry clay, the rev of a motor whose driver gives the accelerator a final flip before he brakes. Victor leaped to his feet. Blood was running down his chest. The girl, her mouth full of scarf, red silk trailing from her mouth like more blood, held a triangle of broken mirror in her hand. Underneath her body, on a stone perhaps, she had contrived to snap that handbag mirror and use one of the slivers as a weapon. He plunged for the cover of the trees, doing up his clothes as he ran. Behind him he heard a man's voice call, 'Where are you? What's happened?' A cry, a sobbing, silence as she was caught, held, comforted. Victor didn't dare to stop, though he could feel blood flowing out of the largest of the wounds, pumping out even, a pulse throbbing and a darker stain spreading out over the dark blue tee-shirt. He ran deeper in among the trees, having no idea where he was heading. It would be dark soon, it was nearly dark now. Running in the forest wasn't easy if you left the paths, for underfoot it was all brambles and stinging nettles and the endless bracken. And all the time he was listening for pursuers. They would follow him, he thought, just as, on the day he took refuge in Solent Gardens, Heather Cole and the man in the park had followed him. The brambles caught at his trousers and he stumbled and righted himself, but next time he fell, plunging forward into a damp hollow full of thorny tendrils. Victor knelt there, listening. His hands stung from contact with nettles. He was sure he was still bleeding. There was no sound behind, no sound-anywhere but the faint buzz, insect-like it was so far away, of a distant aircraft. Big splayed chestnut leaves, vegetable hands, damp and cold, touched his face. He got up, still listening. No one was following him and then he knew why. The couple were illicit lovers, each of whom, probably, had given false excuses as to where they were going to a husband and a wife or to other, more legitimate or accredited, lovers. Chasing him, telling the police about him, would be to blow their cover, to bring down the wrath of those others on them, perhaps to end their affair. He shivered with the relief of it. But fear took over almost immediately. How badly had she hurt him? Suppose he bled to death? It was too dark in here to see anything. He could feel the blood on his chest, though, its warm wetness. The sky above him was still visible as a pale glowing greyness, but the tops of the trees were black bunches, festoons of black leaves. There must be a path somewhere, places like this were always traversed by hundreds of paths. It wasn't really country, more like a big park really, not much wilder than Hampstead Heath. The segment of forest he was in, he calculated, must be bounded by the Theydon road he had come from, the road from Loughton to the Wake Arms, Clays Lane and Debden Green. Once, a lifetime ago, he had had to drive someone from Debden Green to Cambridge and he had some idea of the neighbourhood. He couldn't go back the way he had come; in spite of his reasoning, that would be too risky. It was too dark to see what time it was, perhaps no more than ten. David had brought him to this. Why hadn't he killed David that time in Solent Gardens? After a very long time had passed Victor did reach some sort of path or ride. By then he had revised his view of Epping Forest being a kind of outer London park. It was huge and dark and confusing, a maze. He followed the path he had found, or perhaps it was another path, an offshoot of the first one. He had no idea where it went. It seemed to him that he was covered with blood, not only on his body but on his hands, for while groping his way along, he had tried to hold the sides of the worst wound together and staunch the flow. At least he had succeeded in staunching it. The blood had clotted and he could feel the crust of it mixed with forest dirt. He put out his hands to touch the obstruction ahead of him, thinking it might be yet another huge smooth trunk of a beech tree, and came up against a man-made close-boarded fence. Feeling along it, he came upon a gate. It wasn't locked. Victor went through it and found himself in someone's back garden, a vast garden of lawns and trees, shrubs and glistening in the middle of it a pond, a smooth sheet of water in which the stars were reflected. At the far end of the lawn, up by the house, light from a bedroom window fell on to this lawn in the form of two yellow rectangles. With a sense of horror, he thought: I could climb up there and go in and find Rosemary Stanley in bed, and she will scream and break the window and David will come... To reach a road, a way of escape, he would have to pass the side of the house. Victor was afraid to do this, he had had enough, he was aware all of a sudden that he was tired to exhaustion point, he was worn out. Adjoining the fence, by the gate where he had entered, was a wooden shed. The door had a padlock on it but the padlock hung loose and the door came open when he turned the handle. Inside it was dry and stuffy and smelling of creosote. It was also pitch dark but Victor could just make out, lying on the floor, what he thought was a pile of netting, the kind of thing gardeners use for protecting fruit bushes from birds. He shut the door behind him and flung himself face-downwards on the pile of nets. By four it was light. He had no idea how long he had slept, perhaps as much as five hours. Very bright pale light from a newly risen sun was coming in through a small window high up under the eaves of the shed. Victor looked at his hands. He tried to look at his chest but the largest wound was too high up to see and, besides, his tee-shirt was a mess of matted blood sticking to skin and hairs. A way must be found of cleaning this up before he got into a bus or train. Leaving the shed and then the garden itself by the gate in the fence, he came out on to a forest path which led to a road. He saw how near he had been last night to one of the main roads. Not that it would have been of much use to him at midnight. On the other side of this road was a pond, one of the forest ponds which once were gravel pits, its surface clear and brown with long flat leaves floating on it. A truck went past, then, in the opposite direction, a car. But there was very little traffic yet. Victor crossed the road and, kneeling down, bathed his face and hands in the water of the pond. It wasn't cold, nor was it very clean, but brown, rather oily, stagnant. It more or less served his purpose and he dried himself as best he could on the lining of his jacket. The road downhill seemed to lead towards houses and away from the forest. After about half a mile he realised that he was in Loughton, approaching the High Road. The traffic was just beginning and there were one or two people about. He stopped a man and asked him the way to Loughton station and the man told him, not eyeing Victor in any particularly curious way, so he guessed he must be presentable and not a figure of horror. * A scar would always remain. The wound should have been cleaned and stitched, for it was more than an inch long with sides which still gaped and showed dirt inside. Perhaps, even now, it wouldn't be too late to stitch it, but Victor knew he wasn't going near any doctor. The girl might go to the police, there was always that possibility. If she and her boyfriend could think up some story for her being there, she might go to the police. In any case, Victor thought, he could be wrong. She could have been meeting him there because she lived at home with her parents and he lived at home with his and there had been nowhere but the forest to make love. She had made a nasty mess of his chest. Apart from the major wound there was a mass of smaller cuts. It had been painful getting his shirt off. In the end he had given up and lain in the bath to soak it off and the bath water had gone brown as with rust. His jacket would have to be cleaned. He emptied out his pockets and found the cheque and the blue velvet box containing the ring he had bought for Clare. His anger was still there, for he had done nothing to assuage it, but it was simmering indignantly rather than exploding. Also he was now able to reason out how he should have behaved, where he had gone wrong. Of course he should have gone back to Sans Souci with Clare in her car. His mistake had been his own pride, he could see that. Had he sacrificed his happiness and hers out of a refusal to admit that the red Escort was a hire car which had had to go back? If they had gone in there and confronted David together, how different things might have been! David only understood violent action, force, for once a policeman, you were always a policeman. Victor knew he should have gone with Clare and he should have done the talking, told David some home truths, forcibly removed Clare. What could David have done - from a wheelchair? The little ring with the joined silver hands on a gold band - he wouldn't throw it away, he would keep it, Clare would wear it yet. Victor put sticking plaster on his chest and then he dressed, the striped shirt, denim jeans, green velvet jacket. He sat in the wheelchair and counted his money. Under sixty pounds remained, though he had this week's social security payment to come. Still, there was the cheque, his deposit on the flat returned to him, two hundred pounds. He unfolded it. She had made it out to M. Faraday. When he came back from taking his clothes to the cleaners, Victor phoned David. It amused him to remember how shy he had been of phoning David that first time, how unable to speak beyond uttering his name when David had answered. Things were very different now. He dialled David's number and waited impatiently, tapping with his fingers on the underside of the stairs. 'Hello?' 'David, this is Victor. I just wanted to say that thanks to you I had a pretty horrendous night, missed the last train and all that. I'm lucky to be alive, what with one thing and another. I don't think I handled things very well last night but that won't matter in the long run. You'll have to make up your mind, you know, that Clare and I are going to be together, she wants me and I want her and that's the way it is. Right?' David didn't say anything but he hadn't rung off. 'I shall be talking to her later today and making arrangements, but I think we ought to be civilised about this. I think you owe it to me to give me a hearing. Anyway, I'd like to talk the whole thing through with you. You know' it helps us both to talk things through.' It cost Victor something to say this and he didn't really mean it anyway. It was a sop to David. 'I'd like us to go on being friends. I know Clare will want to go on being your friend.' 'Victor, let's get this straight,' said David. 'It was a mistake our meeting in the first place. A lot of harm's been done, maybe irrevocable harm. The best thing we can do now is try to get back to where we were before, pick up the pieces. We shan't be seeing each other again.' This superior attitude made Victor furious, in spite of his determination to remain calm. 'You've lost her, David,' he shouted into the phone. 'Make up your mind to it, you ve lost this war. You're defeated.' He crashed down the phone before David could replace his receiver. Upstairs again, sitting in the wheelchair, he counted the money once more, contemplated the ring. Maybe he could sell it to Jupp. Their love, his and Clare's, had no need of rings, of material bonds. He read the magazines he had found in a wastepaper bin, the Sunday Times colour magazine and something called Executive World, and the Standard, which he had had to pay for. The man they were calling the 'Red Fox' had raped a woman in Hemel Hempstead but there was nothing about a girl being attacked in Epping Forest. He watched Wimbledon on television until six and then he dialled David's number, resolving to put the phone down if David answered. It was Clare who said hello. 'Clare, darling, you know who this is. Have you been all right? I didn't like leaving you with him but what was I to do? I should never have left you to face him alone. We won't make any more mistakes, we'll do the right thing from now on.' Victor thought he had never talked so much or so articulately in his life before. He was proud of himself. 'I'm longing to see you. When can we meet? I'm going to be perfectly honest with you and confess something. That car isn't mine. I only hired it. I just let you think it was mine because - well, I suppose I wanted you to think well of me.' The words streamed out, it was easy. 'Am I forgiven? Well, I know you won't care about that, not really. And you know I'll come any distance to meet you if I have to walk every step of the way. We'll have to face it, it's going to be tough for the next few weeks, making him see reason among other things. But we'll be together and we'll come through all right.' 'Victor,' she said in a small distressed voice, 'this is my fault. I know that, I'm sorry.' 'Sorry?' he said airily. 'What have you got to be sorry about? Absolute nonsense.' 'David didn't want me to speak to you, he said it was better not, but that would have been such a cowardly thing... I still have a lot of explaining to do. I shall always feel guilty if I can't say them.' 'You can say anything you like to me, darling, everything. When shall we meet? Tomorrow? In that Half Moon pub of yours?' 'Not tomorrow,' she said. 'Monday. Six o'clock. I'll tell David what I'm going to do. I-know he'll think it's the right thing.' 'I love you,' Victor said. He replaced the receiver, well pleased with the result of his call. Someone unlocked the front door and MrsGriffiths came into the hall. She was wearing white gloves and a different navy blue straw hat, this time with a small spotted veil. 'Oh, Mr Jenner,' she said, 'you've saved me a climb,' as if his room was up Ben Nevis or on the tenth floor of a liftless tower. He stared blankly at her, his head full of images of Clare. 'Some policemen were here again yesterday, asking for you. At about five in the afternoon.' His heart missed a beat and then steadied. Five o'clock was four or five hours before he had encountered that girl in Epping Forest. 'It isn't pleasant, Mr Jenner.' Mrs Griffiths looked about her, craned her neck to peer up the staircase, said in lowered tones, 'Mr Welch and those after-care people, they did give me to understand there wouldn't be any trouble. However, I do understand from your note that you're leaving and what I wanted to know was - well, precisely when?' Victor had forgotten that he had committed himself to leaving. Writing that letter she called a 'note' seemed so long ago, so much had happened since. He had nowhere to go. 'At the end of next week,' he said, and corrected himself. 'No, this coming Monday.' He wouldn't let Clare go back to Sans Souci this time. He and she would go to a motel, the Post House at Epping, for instance. 'Do you know you're bleeding through your shirt?' said MrsGriffiths. The wound had come open again. Exulting at the sound of Clare's voice, at her calling him by his name, he had flung his arm out wide, expanded his chest. He bathed the wound at the sink in his room, put a fresh piece of plaster on to it, drawing together the sides of the cut. Sitting in the wheelchair, he watched Wimbledon on television, an exciting women's singles. It was one of the tortoise dreams he had that night. He was back in the shed at the bottom of that garden in Loughton, lying on the nets, aware, though it was dark, of a pile of stones in one corner. One of the stones came alive and began to walk, to approach his bed. Victor saw the scaly feet moving rhythmically like very very slow clockwork, the shell swaying, the head that was a snake's yet stupid, myopic, wobbling from side to side as if attached to a rusty pivot. He shouted and tried to get out but the door of course was locked and the window inaccessible, so he backed against the wall and the thing came nearer, dull-eyed, slow, relentless, and Victor screamed and woke up screaming, the sound coming not in a thin cry as was so often the case with nightmare screams but as yells of agony and fear. Footsteps sounded on the stairs and someone banged on the door. It was the same voice that had protested once before, the time Victor had pounded on the floor and walls. 'What's going on in there?' 'Nothing,' said Victor. 'I had a dream.' 'Christ.' He got up, had a bath and changed the dressing on the cuts. At nine, when he knew Clare would have left for work, he phoned David. 'Hello?' David sounded wary. He probably had a good idea who it was and he was scared. 'Yes, it's me again, David,' Victor said. 'I don't know if Clare told you I'm meeting her on Monday and that'll be it. She won't be coming back to you after that, she'll be coming away with me. I think it's best to be perfectly honest about this and keep you informed about everything we plan to do.' 'Victor, Clare isn't planning to do anything with you.' David spoke in a patient slow way as if to a child, which annoyed Victor. 'Clare is going to stay here with me and marry me. I think I've already told you this.' 'And I've already told you Clare is meeting me on Monday and coming away with me. Are you deaf or something?' 'Clare and I will both meet you, Victor, and we'll try and talk sensibly about all this.' 'If you come with her on Monday,' said Victor, 'I'll kill you,' and he rang off. He went out and collected his social security money, his clothes from the cleaners, and, passing Jupp's shop, took the ring out of his pocket and looked at it. There was nothing in the jewellery tray priced at more than fifty pounds, which meant that the most Jupp was likely to give him for the ring was twenty-five. The brown velvet sofa had gone and Kevin was lugging out from the back a rather battered green and gilt chaise tongue to put in its place. Victor stood there for a moment, watching him stand the peacock on top of the big gilt scroll that ran along its back. Victor got into the train at Eating Common and went up to Park Royal. Not to Tom's this time but to the shop next to the wineshop which he remembered from his previous visit and which was called Hanger Green Small Arms. In the window were all sorts of weapons, it was an armoury of a kind, but Victor knew that very little but the shotguns and rifles were real. He went in and asked about a replica Luger. The man hadn't got one but he offered Victor a Beretta instead, the kind James Bond used to have, he said, before he changed to a Walther PPK 9 mm. It was a large heavy automatic pistol, precisely and in every detail the twin of a real one, but it fired nothing, it wasn't even equipped to fire blanks. The price was eighty pounds, which would leave Victor with just four pounds to live on till the next social security came through. But he didn't hesitate. He had had an idea about cashing that cheque. On the way home he bought a magazine called This England that came out quarterly. He couldn't afford it, he could barely afford food, but there was an article inside about Epping Forest. What had become of all the leftover food from Sunday, he wondered. The quails, for instance. Probably David had eaten them. He wasn't going to demean himself by inquiring but he would phone David again just the same. He might as well use up all the coins he had left on phoning David. 'Hello?' 'It's Victor,' said Victor. 'As if you didn't know.' 'I don't want to talk to you, Victor. We've nothing to say to each other. Please don't keep phoning like this.' 'I've got plenty to say to you. I'm coming over to see you tomorrow when Clare's at home and this time you won't get the chance to attack me with broken glass. I think you understand me.' 'What?' 'You heard,' Victor said. 'If I went to a doctor and showed him the wounds on my chest, you could be charged with causing grievous bodily harm. I'll phone Clare later. Just leave her to answer, will you? Have the decency to do that. It'll be about eight.' He rang off. Five ten-pee coins remained in his pocket and a pound note and a pound coin. There was half a loaf of bread in his cupboard, a can of tomatoes and about a quarter of a pound of Edam cheese. Tomorrow he would go and see Muriel. He went out and spent the pound note and the pound coin on twenty cigarettes, a pint of milk, a bar of chocolate and the Standard. There was nothing in it about rape, either in Hertfordshire or Epping Forest. He sat in the wheelchair smoking and.. watching television. When the tennis went off and the news came on, he removed, with considerable pain, the dressing from the biggest wound on his chest and covered it with a fresh strip of sticking plaster. Of course he didn't really think David had made those cuts, he wasn't mad, he knew very well they had been made by the thin dark girl in the forest, but he wanted David to think he thought it. David might begin to believe it himself. Waiting till eight to phone Clare was impossible. He ate some bread and cheese and smoked a cigarette, went downstairs and dialled David's number. It was twenty-five past seven. David answered, though Victor had warned him not to. 'You've no right to stop her speaking to me when it's what she and I want.' 'It isn't what she wants, Victor. And I may as well tell you this is the last time you'll be speaking to me because I'm going to have the phone number changed.' Victor started to laugh, he couldn't help it, because David was going to all that trouble when he, Victor, couldn't phone anyway because he hadn't any coins left. 'Victor,' said David, 'listen to me a minute. I don't bear you any ill will, you must believe that. But I think you need treatment, you're sick. For your own sake you need treatment. You need to see a doctor.' 'I'm not mad,' said Victor. 'Don't worry yourself about me. If prison couldn't drive me round the bend, you won't. And I do bear you ill will, a hell of a lot of ill will. Don't think you've seen the last of me. You can tell Clare I won't let her down, I'll never give her up, right?' But David never answered for the pips started and Victor hadn't another ten-pee piece to put in. He put the receiver back and with the pencil that was kept on top of the phone box blacked out David's name and phone number that he had written on the underside of the stairs. Of course it was Clare's phone number too but that didn't matter because by now he knew it by heart... Tomorrow, he thought, when he had some money, he would go to Theydon Bois and take the Beretta with him. David had been very foolish, last time, refusing to believe in the reality of a real gun, but once bitten, twice shy. This time he would believe. Just as he had once before failed to believe that that real gun was real, so this time he would not fail to believe a fake gun was real. While Victor held David motionless with the gun, Clare could make her escape from the house. They would go in the Land Rover. He was glad now that he had confessed to her about the red Escort only being hired and about the rapes too, come to that. She knew all about him, he had no secrets from her, which was the way it should be...

Chapter 16

He was going to have to lift that thing up, move it to one side and take the key from underneath it. Fearfully he glanced in its direction and then quickly away. Once more he climbed over the rocks and looked in through the diamond panes. Muriel was still asleep in her chair and no amount of ringing at the doorbell, the shrill clanging made by tugging at the iron bellpull, would awaken her. He even wondered if there might be something wrong, if she had perhaps had some kind of seizure. There might be a chance of getting in the back way. Victor went round the side of the garage and tried the back door. It was locked, of course. The back garden had become a hayfield which the wind ruffled and made paths through. Once he had done what he came for, he was going to take the tube to Theydon and remove Clare from that house at gunpoint. The Beretta was in the pocket of his grey padded jacket, heavy, weighing it down a bit on the right-hand side. David had confessed that first time that he was afraid of him, afraid he had come to 'finish the job'. Victor didn't anticipate much resistance from David. The pressing thing was to get into this house. It was already two o'clock and he had been hanging about, ringing that bell, trying door and windows for nearly an hour. Muriel slept on, an empty plate and cup on one of her side tables, magazines, scissors, a paste pot on another. It was a warm day, even the wind was warm, but she had one element of the electric heater on, a single bar glowing red. Victor couldn't smell it out there but he could imagine the stench of burning dust. He climbed over the stones and stood on the one also shared by the rabbit and the frog. Frogs he didn't mind, or snakes, come to that, or crocodiles even. He could cheerfully have touched the skin of a toad. He moistened his lips, swallowed, forced his eyes on to the stone tortoise. It's stone, he said to himself, it's just a lump of stone. They made the thing in wax or clay and then they made a mould round it and then they cast it. They pour some sort of mortar or fine concrete into the moulds. Hundreds, thousands, they make like that, they're mass-produced. Telling himself all this didn't make much difference. I'll have to work on it again, Victor thought, try and finish what I started all those years ago. Clare will help me, Clare's used to healing. Meanwhile, he had to get into the house, therefore he had to take the key from under the- thing. Tortoise, he said, tortoise. The flesh on his upper lip began to jump. He tried to hold it still with his hand. Then he imagined that his finger was a scaly leg pressed against his mouth and a shudder went through him, actually jerking his body. If I touch it I will faint, he thought. Suppose he were to go next door and ask Jenny or her husband to move it for him? That was full of difficulties. They would want to know why. Then when he'd got the door open one of them might come in with him and he didn't want that. He knelt down and closed his eyes. Why did he immediately think of those last moments in the house in Solent Gardens and of David thrusting the girl down the stairs and turning his back? Because of the picture of the praying hands on the stairwell wall? Perhaps. He was kneeling now, with his eyes closed, in a ridiculous attitude of prayer. He told himself to think of anything rather than of what he was doing, about to touch a stone facsimile of the object of his phobia. Think of David, think of those last moments, of the gun going off. Those were bad things but infinitely preferable to this thing. He leaned forward, holding out his hands, clasped the thing, feeling the stone coruscations on its shell. It was surprisingly heavy, which helped. The real thing would not have been as heavy. Holding his breath, he set it down, felt for the key and found it. To replace the thing on the spot from which he had removed it was beyond his powers. He stood up, clutching the key, and retched. His stomach was empty, luckily, he hadn't wanted lunch and was without money, anyway, to pay for it. Twice he heaved and retched, shivering with nausea, but recovered enough to feel the whole street must be watching him. It seemed as if the operation had taken hours but when he looked at his watch he saw that his sufferings had endured for a little over one minute. He unlocked the front door and went in. She awoke immediately, or perhaps was awake before he even put the key in the lock. She called out, 'Is that you, Joe?' Victor thought how he might have saved himself a lot of anguish. He walked into the living room. The heat was stifling, the smell of burning dust as he had imagined it. Muriel had her brown hairnet on but she was dressed, in a flowered silk dress which should have had a belt but didn't and stockings rolled down to her ankles and furlined bedroom slippers. She contorted herself into that peering attitude, hunched forward, head on one side, looking up with nose twitching. 'What are you after?' A gust of anger swept through Victor, or, rather, swept upon him and remained. It seemed to grow, to mount, like yeast working, bubbling up. What had she done to herself, he thought, to make her look so like his mother? It was a resemblance he had scarcely noticed before. If his mother had lived, without his father, would she too look like this now? The notion was almost unbearable. There was something about her face. The jawline was fuller and firmer. She didn't have false teeth, as far as he knew, but she didn't have many of her own left either. It must be a plate she wore, that she should wear all the time, but had put in because of Jupp, to present a more attractive appearance for Jupp. He remembered why he had come. 'I needn't go into details,' he said, 'but I gave this woman to understand my name was Faraday and she's given me a cheque made out to M. Faraday. All I'm asking is for you to sign on the back of it for me.' 'The police came here again,' she said. 'What do you mean?' he said. 'When did they come?' 'When was the day it rained? When Joe was here.' 'How should I know? Monday? Tuesday?' Before his night in the forest, he thought, breathing again. 'They'd been to you,' she said, 'but you weren't there. For rape, they said. It made me go cold all over, it turned me up. The Red Fox they're looking for and maybe that's you, they said.' The Hertfordshire rapist. That was why they had been to MrsGriffiths's then. 'Your poor mother,' said Muriel. 'Never mind my mother. My mother's dead.' His mother's face looked at him, aged, distorted, whiskered, twitching like a mouse, blear-eyed, but still her face. Victor, convulsed now with anger, had the curious sensation that Muriel was a subtle tormentor placed here by some higher power to torture him in most refined and subtle ways, in ways specifically designed to suit him, as if details of what most flicked his raw places had been fed into a computer and the resultant print-out had been presented to Muriel as a guideline. Only Muriel wasn't Muriel but an avenging angel or devil elaborately disguised. Why hadn't they fed in the worst thing? Or had they? Would she, in a moment, open a cupboard and show him...? As if to follow the course of his fantasy, she got to her feet. She lifted up the cup and saucer in her left hand, put two fingers of her right hand into her mouth and drew out a dental plate with seven or eight teeth on it from the lower jaw. Victor, watching in horror, heard himself make a sound of protest. She dropped the teeth into her teacup. 'That's better,' she said, and her face wasn't his mother's any more, but the eyes were, suddenly pale blue and sparkling. Victor closed his own. 'What was it you wanted?' she said. Again he tried to explain about the cheque, but he gagged on the words, anger closing his throat. 'Speak up,' she said, the cup in her hand, the molars all grinning out of it. 'What did you tell them my name for?' He couldn't answer. 'Two hundred pounds. There's some swindle going on, I daresay. It's bound to be crooked if it's you.' She came very close, head turned, peering up. 'What stopped you forging my name?' What had? He had never thought of it. He took her by the shoulders to thrust her away and she cringed under his touch. 'Don't you...!' she cried. 'You'd better not... Oh, no...' Immediately and with horror he understood what she meant. It was rape she feared. Broken old creature that she was, his ruined mother that she was, she feared rape at his hands and, while dreading it, her eyes nevertheless sparkled. She trembled, tense and fascinated. She peered into his face, reached up to take his hands away, shuffled backwards, one step, two steps, the cup with the teeth falling on the floor, rolling across the carpet. He was aware for the first time since entering the house of the gun weighing down his pocket. He put his hand into his pocket and took out the gun and struck at her with it. It struck the side of her head and she reeled, screaming out. Victor struck again and again, raining blows with an automatic hand, energy flowing out of a great bowlful of anger in the centre of his body, running down his right arm in a charge of very high voltage. The blows struck at his mother and at all women, at Pauline and Clare and Judy and Mrs Griffiths. From the first blow he was blind, dealing out anger mindlessly and unseeing, doing what all the rapes had been about. Muriel's screams became moans, then grunts. It was when they ceased, when the silence came, that he opened his eyes. He continued, however, to beat the gun against its target, though that target was no longer solid but a pulpy mass. He was aware, too, that in order to continue this frenzied pounding he had fallen on to his knees. A warm sticky wetness covered him and his hands were gluti nous with it. He rolled on to the floor, rolled away from her, both hands clutching the wet slippery gun. The first thing he did was cover up the body. It was a dreadful sight. He couldn't bear it. He picked up the hearthrug that lay in front of the electric fire, a thin worn vaguely Turkish-patterned thing, and threw it over the bloody mass that had been Muriel. When she was hidden from his sight he felt less as if the end of the world had come. He was able to breathe again. But as he stood there, holding on to the back of the chair Muriel had always sat in, he did ask himself how it was possible for men to do murder and afterwards not die or go mad but carry on with their lives, making their escape, covering their tracks, denying, forgetting. He asked himself and he had no sooner asked than he was doing these things, turning off the electric heater, closing the door, climbing the stairs. In the pier glass in Muriel's bedroom he caught sight of his reflection and gave an involuntary cry. He had known there was blood on his hands and he meant immediately to wash, but this he had not expected. The sight of himself frightened him. He was splashed with blood and soaked in blood as if he had plunged his arms and face into a bowl of it like some wallowing butcher. The cotton padded jacket was dark with blood, his shirt red with it, and a great dark stain spread across the front of his jeans as if from a wound in his own body. It was so horrible that there and then he began stripping off his clothes, feeling the kind of panic that made him in his haste rip cloth and tear off buttons. The blood had seeped through to his skin, thin, pale and dabbled like meat juice. He staggered down the passage to the bathroom, retching and sobbing. Washing would be ineffectual; only a total cleansing by immersion would do. He filled the bath, kneeling on the floor with his head pressed against the cold enamel while the water flowed in. Whatever device heated the water in this house Muriel had kept turned low and it was a tepid bath that he had, shivering as he soaped himself. Rubbing his body dry on a thin grubby towel, he thought of clothes, he must find clothes to put on. The bloodstained heap in the bedroom sickened him again. It was as if a second body lay there. He began pulling open drawers, finding only women's underclothes, pink corsets, their elastic sides stretched out of shape, brown lisle stockings and tan-coloured silk stockings, locknit knickers, bloomers rather, in pink and white, petticoats with wide straps and deep round necks. His own nakedness was horribly alien to him, awkward, embarrassing, a source of shyness. Naked, he moved and walked clumsily, and he realised that he had hardly ever in his life been naked for more than a moment or two, except during those hours with Clare. The thought of her made him shut his eyes and clench his hands on the hard edge of the chest of drawers. Muriel's dressing table contained no male underwear but in the top drawer was a jewel case. Victor left the drawer open and the lid of the jewel case open. He went into the bedroom where he had found the greater part of the money. The chest in this room had Sydney's underwear, what remained of it, in its third drawer. Victor put on old man's white cotton underpants, yellow with age, reeking of camphor, an Aertex vest, a pair of matted navy blue socks darned with brown. The bottom drawer was still half full of money, mostly pound notes. He took them. In the next bedroom he emptied another drawer of five-pound notes. Back in Muriel's bedroom he opened the wardrobe and emptied out all the handbags. They contained hundreds of pounds. Victor dressed himself in a suit of Sydney's in light brown tweed and a cream cotton shirt he found hanging on a hanger with the price tag still on it. How ancient must it be, yet never worn? Sydney had paid two pounds nine shillings and eleven pence three farthings for it. Dressed, Victor felt better, he felt clean and sane and as if to continue with life, some sort of life, would be possible. In Muriel's jewel case the ring with the dome of diamonds lay on top of a pile of gold chains and glass bead necklaces. He put it in his pocket and replaced the case in the drawer. The money he stuffed into his pockets until they bulged with it. The nightdress case dog, pink nylon viscera looping out of its belly, watched him with dead glass eyes. Why shouldn't he clear the house entirely of money? He might as well have it all now. From the cupboard where the gun had been he took a small brown leather case of the sort that his father had used to call an attache case and stuffed the money into it. He searched all the bedrooms, the fourth one as well, the one he hadn't been into before, and he found notes everywhere, in a plastic carrier bag under a pillow, two tenners under the base of a lamp, a bundle of livers in the firegrate basket, tucked under a soot-powdered silver paper fan. There was almost too much money to go into the case and it was with difficulty that he fastened the clasps. The house had grown dark, darker than its normal daytime twilight. Victor had forgotten about time but he thought it must be evening. He looked at his watch and saw that it was not quite three. All this earthquake had taken place in less than an hour. It was pouring with rain, a dense glittering rain, straight as glass rods. Victor went downstairs, noticing when he reached the bottom how, on his way up, he had left bloody footprints on the hall carpet, footprints which faded and grew indistinct as they mounted the stairs. The rain would wash his shoes clean, cleanse the pale leather of chose dark splashes. The hallstand was hung with coats piled one on top of the ocher. It had been like that for as long as he had known it. Mixed up with and supported by the coats were a couple of umbrellas. By unhooking the topmost coat, Victor caused the whole accumulation to subside, sinking in a heap to the floor. From among it he pulled a man's raincoat, Sydney's presumably, left here when it was taken off for the last time a decade ago. It was a trenchcoat, black and shiny, of some plastic or rubberized material, and Victor chose it because it looked totally waterproof. He put it on and did the belt up. It was a bit long for him but otherwise it fitted. He remembered the key, though not where he had left it. Among his clothes? In there with the body? To replace it under the tortoise would in any case be an impossible task. He also remembered the gun. With closed eyes he opened the living-room door and when he opened them he knew that, contrary to the laws of nature and experience, he had hoped to see Muriel sitting in her chair, scissors in hand, the electric element on. As it was, the rug hid the worst of it, and no blood splashes had reached the walls. He crept across the carpet past the dental plate and the teacup, picked up the gun by its barrel between fastidiously extended forefinger and thumb. It was gummy with clotting blood. This was, in a way, the worst part of all, closing the door again, carrying the gun to the kitchen and washing it under the cold tap, seeing the clots swirl in the water and stick at the plug hole, thinking inescapably that it was of this stuff that he too was formed. 'Whose blood is that?' - my own. He hadn't wanted to remember those words. He pushed them away, dried the gun on Muriel's grubby teacloth, stuck it into the raincoat's right-hand pocket. The rain made a glass wall beyond the porch. Victor stepped outside, put up the umbrella and closed the door behind him. Jenny next door's car was parked outside her house, which it hadn't been when he came. Victor remembered something, that it was Saturday and Jenny and her husband went shopping on Saturdays. No doubt they had been at the shops when he arrived and had returned while he wasupstairs. They would have things with them they had bought for Muriel, as soon as the rain stopped would come to look for the key... Probably they had already seen him. Jenny had told him she missed nothing of what went on in the street. Standing by the gate, at the foot of the stone hillside, Victor understood that it was too late to cover his tracks. As soon as anyone entered that house it would be known who Muriel's killer was. He felt calm, caught in an irrevocable destiny. All he could do was postpone the discovery of the body. He mounted a similar flight of steps, through similar escarpments, spars and outcroppings, pulled a similar bellpull, though setting this one in motion resulted in a chime such as a clock makes at the half-hour. Jenny came to the door. He saw the look of Clare again, a debased, spoiled Clare, and he had a sensation of something falling out of his body, leaving him hollow. 'Hello, Vic, I didn't recognise you for a minute. You do look smart. All got up like a dog's dinner.' S unday-go - to -meetings. 'She said to fetch the stuff you got her.' The days of finding an ability to express himself were over. He was inarticulate again, half dumb. 'There was only teabags and a Swiss roll, Vic. You want to come in a minute? OK, if you're pressed for time.' She was away a few seconds, came back with two paperbags. 'Here you are then, but I can easily pop them in later myself.' He saw that she was looking at his shoes, grey shoes into which the blood had soaked in great black patches. 'She's not too good. She doesn't want to be disturbed.' 'Right. I can take a hint. On your bike, Vic. I'll be seeing you.' Because she might be watching he took the two paperbags round the back of the house. And left them on the kitchen window sill to the depredations of the rain. Tomorrow or the next day, he thought, Jenny next door would find Muriel's body. He walked home, carrying the suitcase full of money, and it wasn't until he was nearly there that he asked himself what he was going back to Mrs Griffiths's house for? From the corner of Tolleshunt Avenue he saw the police car. Victor was calm still and he knew very well nobody could yet know about the murder of Muriel. The police had called on him for some other reason, the usual reason. They were still pursuing enquiries about the Red Fox, or else the woman in Epping Forest had complained. He hesitated and as he waited two men, one of them the detective constable he had dubbed Distressed Leather, came out of Mrs Griffiths's house and got into the car. Even then he thought it wasn't going to move off, but at last it did, sending up a spray of water out of the overflowing gutter. They would be back, of course, and very soon. He dreaded meeting Mrs Griffithsor the man who complained about his violent nights. But there was no one. Victor climbed the stairs and let himself into his room. There he changed his shoes, uncaring of the grey ones which he left behind for the police eventually to find. He opened Sydney's attache case and put into it the one thing he cared about taking with him: Clare's photograph. No, there was one other thing- the wheelchair. Victor folded the brown blanket and laid it on the seat. He banged the door behind him, having taken a last look at the cigarette-burn pattern round the bamboo table, the ravioli linoleum and the green rugs, the television set on which most of his parents' money had gone. He bumped the wheelchair down the stairs. Outside the front door he got into it and covered his knees with the rug. The rain had thinned to a drizzle. Victor propelled himself along the street towards Twyford Avenue, down the wet puddled pavement, under the dark green heavy-foliaged trees that dripped water denser than raindrops. The suitcase with the money in it and Clare's photograph were on his lap under the rug. Just as he reached the corner the police car came back, slowed, and passed him. He was not Victor Jenner but a handicapped man in a wheelchair. About a mile from Mrs Griffiths's house, when he had manoeuvred the wheelchair to the limit of his strength, he got out of it and noticed something he had not seen before, that had not occurred to him before. It would fold up. He folded it up and, when a taxi came, took the folded wheelchair into the back with him.

Chapter 17

Victor lay on the bed in his hotel room. This was in Leytonstone, about halfway between Acton and Theydon Bois. The taxi driver had refused to take him any further and Victor had been too tired to think about hire cars or tube trains. While he had been in prison tourism in London had vastly increased and hotels like this one had been opened all over the inner and outer suburbs, conversions of big old houses they mostly were, charging much lower rates than those in central London. Not that the cost need have bothered Victor. He was carrying with him thousands of pounds in his suitcase - how much he didn't know, he was too tired to count. Enough, anyway, more than enough, to find a place for him and Clare to live in, to set up a business or to go abroad if she would prefer that. There was a phone in this ground-floor back room but it was useless phoning her. David would be sure to answer. Much better to leave it till tomorrow, when he would go there with the money and the gun. It was still early in the evening but he had stripped off Sydney's suit and lay in Sydney's curious old underwear, wondering if he ought to dress again and go out to eat, but each time he thought of food he remembered rinsing the clots of blood off the Beretta and nausea came up into his throat. His three possessions furnished the room: the gun, the wheelchair, the attache case full of money. The hotel management had provided a built-in cupboard, a built-in counter with mirror, bed and television set. Victor lay watching television. The news came on, and two or three hours later came on again. But there was nothing about Muriel, nor would there be until Jenny next door went in - perhaps not till next Saturday, he thought. He rolled over and fell asleep. David's phone number had gone out of his head and the only record of it he had he had blacked out on the underside of MrsGriffiths's staircase. Directory Enquiries gave it to him and Victor phoned the number at about ten in the morning, resolving to replace the receiver if David answered. But no one answered. He wrote the number down on the inside of the attache case. They were out for a wale probably. It was a fine day, the clouds and rain of Saturday dispersed, the sky clear and the sun shining. Victor looked out of his window on to old London suburban gardens, shorn weedless grass, pear trees, a yellow brick wall. He couldn't bring Clare here. One of the wounds on his chest had gone a purplish colour and the area around it was swollen. A bit of glass was probably inside there but it hurt too much to squeeze. If he got blood poisoning, David would be responsible, he thought, and in his mind's eye he saw David leaning forward out of that wheelchair, lunging at him with a sliver of glass. But he needn't worry about it, for that was something Clare would deal with as soon as they were together. He asked Directory Enquiries for the number of the Post House Hotel at Epping, phoned them and booked a double room for that night. Trains were less frequent on Sundays and he waited twenty minutes on the platform at Leytonstone, holding the folded wheelchair, carrying the attache case, the rain- coat slung over his left shoulder, for it was too warm to wear it. On the village green at Theydon children were playing ball games, people were walking dogs. He looked for David and Clare, thinking they might be walking Sally but then he remembered that Sally mustn't go out yet, not until she was past her hardpad and distemper immunisation. Victor wheeled the chair along. It was too heavy to carry. He laid the attache case, the brown travelling rug and the raincoat across the seat. Although it was a hot day, all the windows in Sans Souci were closed. He looked through the windows, looked through the side window of the garage and saw that the Land Rover was gone. At the back of the house the french windows were closed and the blue and white sunshade furled. He noticed something else. It upset him disproportionately, yet there was no reason to be upset by something which he could remember his mother once telling him was normal for this time of the year, for the end of June. There were no flowers out. The spring flowers were over and the roses cut, the summer ones and late roses not yet in bloom and the garden was all green, just green. Victor banged on the french windows to make the dog bark but there was no sound from inside. So they had taken her with them wherever they had gone. He decided to go back to Leytonstone and wait there, come back again this evening. The wheelchair was a nuisance but he couldn't very well just leave it in the street. At a newsagent he bought two Sunday papers and read them in the train. In a pub in Leytonstone he had sandwiches for lunch, a glass of wine and then another, aiming to sleep the afternoon away. The idea of getting mildly drunk appealed to him and he had two double whiskies in a pub further along the High Road, a place where urban blight and perhaps a threat of road widening had closed shops and offices and where abandoned houses had their windows boarded up. There was something desolate about the place on this hot sultry day, few people in the streets but lots of traffic and a reek of engine vapours. A long way in the distance, perhaps over Epping Forest, thunder rumbled. ~ The mixture of drinks went to his head, bringing him a carefree feeling. He passed a woman in a wheelchair being pushed along by an elderly husband, so he got into his own wheelchair, covered his knees and propelled himself along. People got out of his way, cast him the familiar looks of sympathy, embarrassment, guilt and fear, took a selfconscious pride in assisting him across roads. Because he was confused and muzzy-headed from the drink it never occurred to him to wonder (until he was inside there) what the people at the Fillebrook Hotel would think about the man who walked out of their front door that morning and returned in the afternoon a cripple. But a different staff was on duty. The girl in reception reacted of course, but not with astonishment or anger, rather by rushing to open further an already open pair of glass doors and running ahead of him to unlock his room door as if he had lost the use of his hands as well as his legs. He lay down on the bed and slept off the drinks he had had, waking with a headache, the kind that seems to prick the inside of the scalp. Before he went to sleep he must have switched the television on, for it was on now, a congregation of devout, earnest-looking people singing hymns. He switched channels on to London Weekend, got what appeared to be a detective series and turned the sound right down. Dialling the Theydon Bois number, he thought that the best thing might be to ask the hotel the name of a local minicab company, then get them to drive him out there and pick Clare up. The phone was answered and David said hello. Of course he wouldn't think it was Victor because for the first time he wasn't calling from a pay phone. 'I'd like to speak to Clare Conway, please.' Victor put on a higher pitched, 'posher' voice than his own and David, though suspicious, seemed deceived. 'This is Michael.' 'Michael who?' 'Faraday,' said Victor. There was silence. He thought it was working all right and then he heard a whispering and Clare's voice say, 'My God!' Victor felt the corner of his mouth begin twitching with live flesh. Clare came to the phone and her voice was strange with a tremor in it. 'Victor, where are you? Please tell us where you are.' Us? He said nothing. His eyes had wandered to the silent television on whose screen had appeared Muriel's house, a Tudor keep standing like a fortress on its rocks, but not a fortress, not inviolable, its front door standing open. He moved the receiver slowly away from his mouth, his arm gradually falling, Clare's voice speaking out of it his name over and over. 'Victor, Victor...' The picture on the screen had been replaced by another, by his own photograph, the one he had given to Clare. Her betrayal stunned him. For quite a long time he was unable to move. He was just capable of putting the receiver back into its rest but not of turning up the sound on the television. What more could it tell him, anyway, beyond the facts that Muriel's body had been found and the police were looking for him? Clare must have given the police his picture. No doubt David had compelled her to do this but just the same.. . He would have died before he gave up hers, Victor thought. That was where she and David had been all day, with the Acton police, for Muriel's body must have been found either last night or this morning. Could they trace his call? Victor didn't know, though he had a vague idea calls from private phones couldn't be traced. Was a hotel number private? He put on the rain- coat, got into the wheelchair, covered his knees with the rug and laid the attache case on the rug. In the right-hand pocket of the raincoat the Beretta felt heavy and bulky. It wouldn't work but it was a comfort to him. Something told him that this would be his last chance to make a phone call for a long time. He dialled the Theydon Bois number, knowing they would answer, knowing they were longing to talk to him. It was David again. 'You know who this is.' 'Victor, please listen to me...' 'You listen to me. I've got a gun and it's real. You'd better believe me. It's a Beretta and it's for real. You make them believe that if you don't want someone else getting what you got.' He crashed down the phone. The photograph he had given Clare - the memory of that giving made him wince with pain - was an excellent likeness. He had a sudden mental picture of the reception girl watching the London Weekend six-thirty news in some back office, seeing that face and then coming out into the hall and seeing it again. The wheelchair protected him, of course; in some subtle way the wheelchair even changed his face. He emerged from the room. The hall was empty. With no idea of where to go, Victor bumped the wheelchair down the single step and out on to the pavement and, turning in the opposite direction from the trains, the railway underpass and the High Road, wheeled himself into a hinterland of Victorian streets that led nowhere he knew. After a time he came to the forest. He had vaguely known that Epping Forest reached all the way down here and he understood that he was facing the southernmost tip of it, urban forest with little grass and no flowers, and only brown trodden earth underfoot. He began propelling the wheelchair along the Whipps Cross Road in a westerly direction. A police car passed him quite slowly. Victor now remembered that he had checked into the Fillebrook Hotel in his own name and understood that it would only be a matter of time, perhaps of minutes, before the management realised who their last night's guest had been. He must get out of the district, think where ultimately to go and what to do. The money would take care of him. With money you could do anything, go anywhere. Taxi drivers who had been out all day wouldn't have seen television. Victor was afraid to get up out of the wheelchair in the open like this. It would be a suspect act, drawing attention to himself. He turned into a side street, got out of the chair and folded it up, dragged it behind him out into the Whipps Cross Road and hailed a taxi. The driver looked at him indifferently, without interest. He seemed disappointed that Victor wanted to go to Finchley and not central London. If he showed signs that he knew or suspected, Victor thought, if he spoke in a suspicious way on that radio phone of his, he would press the barrel of the gun into his back and command him to drive to some deserted country place. But nothing like that happened. It had become a gloomy grey evening, stuffy and close. A fork of lightning flickered in the heavy clouds on the horizon that Victor thought was Muswell Hill. That sharp point sticking up was the spire of St James, Muswell Hill. He would go there. No one would expect him to go there. The storm broke late that evening. In the hotel Victor had found in Archduke Avenue, Muswell Hill, television sets were not provided in the rooms, nor were phones. But they had ground-floor rooms vacant in a single-storey annexe at the rear. Victor checked in as David Swift. The management were solicitous, helpful, opening doors for him, running ahead to check that the room door was wide enough to admit the wheelchair. Everywhere up here, even ground-floor rooms, had panoramic views over London. He sat in the wheelchair and watched the storm fight its way across a sky of cloud plains and cloud mountains. He hadn't eaten since lunchtime but he didn't want to eat. A feeling of malaise had begun to take hold of him in the taxi and was still with him, not the nausea he so often felt in times of stress, but a light-headedness, something like fever. Perhaps it was only that he had drunk too much at lunchtime. He was aware too of a rapid pulse. Before he went to bed he felt in the pocket of the raincoat to make sure the gun was there but he must have felt in the left-hand side, for there was nothing in the pocket but a half-used packet of mints. The gun was in the other side all right. Victor slept and dreamed of David. David was well and walking again, back in the police force and put in charge of the hunt for Muriel's killer. He didn't suspect Victor, in fact he wanted to discuss it in all its aspects with Victor, talk it through. The case must be concluded by tomorrow because David was getting married tomorrow. His bride came into the room in her wedding dress but when she lifted her veil and showed her face it was not Clare but Rosemary Stanley. Victor woke up with a feeling of stiffness in his neck and jaw. It must have been the way he had been lying on this hard mattress and latex pillow. There was something ridiculous, he thought, in a man dreaming of weddings. Only women dreamed of weddings. He slept again, but very fitfully, and got up at seven. The stiffness in his face and neck was still there. It was probably something to do with this choreahe had been having, though there were no jumping muscles this morning. His pulse still raced. He dressed in the same underwear and shirt, having no other, but making up his mind to go out and buy some as soon as the shops opened. It had rained all night and the day was heavy and humid, cold-looking. He had no desire to eat and fancied anyway that it might be a painful process, the way his jaw felt. On the table in the hallway lay the morning papers. Victor, slowly propelling himself in the wheelchair, took a Daily Telegraph back to his room. The murder had made the front page. There was a photograph of Muriel as Victor remembered her from when he was a teenager, at the time of her marriage, a moon-faced smiling Muriel wearing thick make-up and pearl studs in her ears. Jupp had found the body. There was an account of some of the things he had said, such as that he had been going to marry Muriel, that he was 'devoted' to her. On Saturday night he had gone to her house - to see her, yes, but principally to fetch something he had left behind last time. He had a key to the house and had let himself in at about eight in the evening. The first thing he saw was a footprint in blood on the hall floor, only he hadn't of course known then that it was blood. Victor wondered what it was that Jupp had left behind and why the Telegraph didn't say what it was. Surely it would have been more usual to say 'left my umbrella behind' or 'left my scarf'. Perhaps it had been an umbrella and that was the one Victor had taken and abandoned in Mrs Griffiths's house. His knees covered, the attache case with him because he was afraid to leave it behind, Victor manoeuvred the wheelchair along Muswell Hill in search of underwear, socks and a shirt or two. Shop assistants were attentive, polite, one rather embarrassed. He bought the clothes he wanted but the buying of them brought him none of the pleasure he had felt when he had spent money on his grey jacket, his suit and those grey shoes. His head throbbed and he felt as if he were at a remove from reality, out of touch somehow, his grasp of life lost. Even the realisation that Clare was gone from him for ever, that he would never see her again, brought him a resigned sadness rather than pain. Perhaps this was insanity, that might be what it was, the prison years they said drove you mad catching up with him at last. At the pedestrian crossing in Fortis Road opposite the cinema he waited with four or five other people for the traffic to stop. Then a terrible thing happened. Coming towards him from the other side as soon as the cars had pulled up were a man and woman arm-in-arm, and the man was Kevin, Jupp's son-in-law. He glanced at Victor, then stared hard. Victor had no choice, there in the middle of the road, but to move towards him. They came up to each other, eye to eye, but there was no recognition in Kevin's face. He had thought Victor was Victor - and then thought better of it. The wheelchair had disguised him, had kept him from discovery, would save his life. Kevin didn't even look back. He said some- thing to the woman Victor supposed was Jupp's daughter, and the two of them went into a shop. Victor remembered now that Kevin had told him he lived in Muswell Hill. Being in the wheelchair made him invisible or, rather, changed him into someone else. He understood that for safety's sake he must confine himself to it, become a handicapped person, as David was.

Chapter 18

Back in his room, Victor counted the money. There was something over five thousand pounds. He had been right in guessing that Muriel kept thousands of pounds in the house; probably there had originally been as much as seven thousand. He couldn't be certain of the exact sum he had brought away with him, for he seemed to have lost his powers of concentration. Whatever ailed him it couldn't still be half a bottle of wine and two whiskies from lunchtime yesterday. If you could get flu in July, it might be flu he had, for he felt hot and then shivery by turns. He put the money back into the attache case but set Clare's photograph up on the table by his bed. It would soon be twenty-four hours since he had eaten, yet he had no desire for food. He shivered but he felt hopeful, cheerful even. The money would last a good while, so long as he got out of these hotels and found a room. It would have to be a ground-floor room, of course, and the work he got would have to be work suitable for a disabled man, but there were schemes catering for such people, he had read. Getting a job as a handicapped person might be easier, life in this wheelchair as David Swift might be altogether easier and happier. Victor didn't dare have a bath. It would be too complicated and dangerous trying to get the wheelchair along the passage, down steps, into the bathroom. Instead he washed standing up at the basin. The wound on his chest had an ugly inflamed look about it and the edges of it gaped open, ragged snarling lips. He knew he should have had it stitched but it was too late now. There was no mirror over the basin, the only mirror was on the inside of the clothes-cupboard door, so he dressed in his new underwear and shirt before starting to shave. When he opened the cupboard and looked in the mirror he got a shock. It wasn't just on account of the wheelchair that Kevin had failed to recognise him. His face had changed. There was something skull-like, rigid, about it, while the eyeballs seemed to start from his head. His dark skin could never have become really pale but it was livid rather, olivine, deathly sick. It was no wonder after what he had been through, he told himself, no wonder at all. The evening paper would be on the street by now. It was midday. Although it was warm, Victor was shivering with cold and he put the raincoat on. He told himself that he must not only look disabled but think himself into the persona of a disabled man, resigning himself to the confinement of the wheelchair, allowing no possibility of separation from it. It must become as much a part of his mobile self as his shoes were. Fear of meeting Kevin again made him turn the wheelchair in the other direction, towards Highgate Wood. He came to some shops, one of which was a restaurant where he thought he might have lunch. In the newsagent's next door he bought the Standard, What Car? and Here's Health, this last because he thought his condition might be due to not eating properly and it might tell him what he ought to eat. He manoeuvred the wheelchair a little way into the wood and sat reading the Standard. It said that the police were very anxious to interview Victor Michael Jenner, Muriel Faraday's nephew, who had left his home in Tolleshunt Avenue, Acton, and spent the night following the murder at an hotel in Leytonstone, Ell. Victor remembered that he had registered there as Michael Faraday, seeing this now as reckless behaviour. However, he was safe enough here, protected by the wheelchair. A lengthy description of him followed, so lengthy as to be continued on an inside page, but Victor didn't bother to turn the page. The print danced and formed black and white wavy patterns, chevrons and parabolas. His hands felt too feeble to make the effort of holding it and it slid from his lap. Victor watched it fall on to the ground and the magazines after it and he let them lie, lacking the strength to retrieve them. This area of woodland, though dusty and buzzing with flies, yet reminded him of the forest at Theydon where he had attacked the girl long ago, where David and Clare had taken him, where he had tried to rape the woman who sat making up her face and who, breaking the mirror under her in the leaf mould, in the fibrous, spore-ridden, mealy earth, had stabbed... Or had David done that in the garden? Or Clare, with a sliver from the broken water jug? Or he himself? Victor couldn't remember. His eyes closed. He saw before them feverish images, curtains blowing ceiling-high at a broken window, his mother's face and Muriel's, blending, separating, a train roaring out of a black tunnel, and he fancied he could smell honeysuckle. A stuffed peacock perched on a sofa screamed and his mother's voice crooned to Mr Sandman to bring her a dream... He awoke and forced himself to move, though he was weak and disorientated. Eating would be impossible. The little restaurant was called Terrarium and he could see a big green glass tank inside which probably contained trout from which customers chose one to be caught and cooked for them. It seemed to Victor a distant outlandish prospect, a custom from another world. Wearily and slowly he made his way back to the hotel. It was no more than two or three hundred yards but it seemed a mile and sometimes he had the illusion he was travelling backwards, as in one of those frustrating dreams, the kind in which everything is geared to stop you going where you want to go and attaining what you want to reach. The television was on in a kind of lounge place, watched by a single old woman. For a moment he thought it was the old woman in the train, the one who played guards and travelled with a guinea pig, for she was dressed the same and wearing the same woolly hat. But when he looked again his vision seemed to clear and he saw that he had been quite mistaken, that she was even smart with pretty white hair and a blue dress on. He was steering the wheelchair towards the open door when a woman's voice called, 'Mr Swift!' How strange that there should be a real Swift staying here, he thought. 'Excuse me, Mr Swift.' The receptionist spoke it almost into his ear this time. She must think him deaf or mad. 'We found this on the floor of your room.' It was a diamond ring. He was going to deny ownership but, as he stared at the dome of diamonds, he seemed to see Muriel's hand form around it, her dirty-nailed wrinkled finger slipped through it. Hadn't he once thought it should adorn some fair young hand? 'Thanks,' he said through jaws that had grown stiff. He was beginning to find it difficult to open his mouth. When he was counting the money he must have pulled the ring out of the attache case with the notes. He sat for a while, gazing unseeing at the television, his head throbbing with pain. Now he was aware of a kind of spasm in his chest, though a long way from the wound itself. Perhaps he should lie down, try to sleep. A young man had taken over from the girl receptionist while Victor was in the lounge and Victor fancied that he gave him a long and searching look. 'Everything all right, Mr Swift?' It was the kind of question a hotel manager would ask a disabled guest and Victor decided he had been imagining things. He nodded and went on to his room. The wound looked the same, angry, festering, swollen. It must be blood poisoning he had, so what he had said to David had not been far wrong. That would account for the racing pulse and the fever. His forehead felt burning hot and there was sweat on his face. He wondered what his temperature was, very high no doubt, a hundred and two or three, as it had been long ago when he had had scarlet fever and his mother had laid her hand on his forehead like this. He lay on the bed and tried to concentrate on future plans, ignoring his fluttering heartbeat. If he moved out of London and used half the money to buy a car, once the fuss had died down he could leave the wheelchair and set up in the minicab business. Was it possible, even now, that Clare might join him? If only he could see her, if only he could explain... Her photograph seemed to grow very large, her face to float out of it with that mysterious smile, that gaze fixed on a point far beyond him. He wasn't well, of course, hence these delusions, imaginings, near-hallucinations. Perhaps it was due to malnutrition. He read an article in Here's Health about harmful food additives and another one about mineral deficiency in contemporary diets. Not much the wiser, puzzled by his own physical sensations, never before experienced, he fell asleep. The sky had been growing dark with storm clouds before he lay down on the bed and when he woke up it was raining. Victor looked at Muriel's diamond ring, which he had put on the bedside table beside Clare's photograph. That would have been a better ring to give Clare than the little one with the clasped hands but he couldn't see his way to giving it to her, he couldn't even think at the moment of an approach to her. What dim light there was in the room the cone of diamonds caught and flashed, twenty diamonds and a large single one in the centre, Victor counted. There had been nothing in the Standard about a missing ring (or, indeed, about anything missing from Muriel's house) so it might be quite safe to sell it. What a piece of luck if it should turn out to be worth a lot, thousands and thousands, say. Victor felt stiff all over, not just his face. He must expect that, he thought, as the result of sitting in the wheelchair all the time and exerting muscles in his arms hitherto not much used. In time he would get used to it, he would adjust. It probably wasn't improving things to starve himself either. He must eat. He must force himself to eat even if he didn't much want to. The temperature had dropped and it was cold for a July evening. Victor put on the raincoat, wondering for the first time what had possessed Sydney to purchase and wear such an unlikely garment. It was plastic, presumably, not leather, a grainy-ridged surface to the black shiny fabric, and no doubt absolutely waterproof. Sydney had surely been no more than five feet nine and it must have come down nearly to his ankles. Victor came out of his room, finding the propulsion of the wheelchair rather heavygoing. People went in for races in these things, he had seen them on television- how could they do it? His arms felt weary. The girl receptionist was back on duty. In the lounge the old lady and a couple of German tourists, a man and a woman, were watching the weather forecast that followed the six o'clock news. Frontal systems moving across the Atlantic, a deep depression to the west of Ireland, more rain to come. Between the reception desk and the front door was a circle of wicker chairs with a glass table in the middle of them covered with papers. A man Victor hadn't seen before sat in one of the chairs, reading the ABC London Street Atlas, or at any rate looking at it. He glanced up indifferently as the wheelchair passed. Under the dripping trees Victor proceeded up the Muswell Hill Road towards the little restaurant called Terrarium. It had been a chambermaid, he supposed, who had found Muriel's ring on the floor of his room. How much more of his property had been examined, investigated? Had she, for instance, found the gun? It had been in the raincoat pocket, hanging up at that time inside the clothes cupboard. Victor put his hand into the right-hand pocket and felt the gun there. He manipulated the wheels, rhythmically pushing on the hoops of chrome, decided he had better transfer money from the attache case to his pockets before he entered the restaurant, not risk drawing attention to himself by revealing all those wads of notes while seated at a table. The doorway was only just wide enough to admit the wheelchair. A waitress pushed furniture aside so that he could reach a table. Victor felt in the left-hand pocket of the raincoat where he had put two ten-pound notes and his hand encountered the half-used packet of mints. Immediately he knew whose this raincoat was. It hadn't belonged to Sydney but to Jupp. This was the item Jupp had left in Muriel's house and had gone back to fetch on Saturday evening, had forgotten on a previous occasion because it had been raining when he arrived and not when he left. The newspaper had not specified its nature because the raincoat was so distinctive-looking, because they guessed that Muriel's killer would wear it and could be identified by it. Victor broke into a sweat and his body was seized by cramps as in some immobilising-dream. Luckily he was alone in the restaurant but for two girls who sat studying the menu. His instinct was to take off the raincoat but this could only be done with great difficulty while sitting down. Victor asked the waitress where the men's room was. Through that door, down the passage, there were just two shallow steps. The smell of food made him feel sick, he knew he would be unable to eat anything. He must remove the raincoat, hide it, go. As he began to move the chair again he felt something terrible happening to his face, the jaws clamping shut, his eyebrows dragged up as a frown corrugated his forehead. In the men's room he struggled out of the chair, took off the raincoat and tried to roll it up. He transferred the gun and the notes to his jacket pocket and left the raincoat in a heap on the floor. The mirror above the washbasin showed him his frowning face and his teeth bared in a ferocious grimace. I am going mad, he thought. Why do I look like this? As he willed his face to relax, the rigid muscles of his neck to slacken, his body went without warning into a violent convulsion. His back arched as if it would split in two, his arms and legs shot in all directions. Victor gasped with pain and tried to cling to the edge of the washbasin. It was awful the tricks fear and shock could play on you. Trembling and tense, shuddering, he had seated himself once more in the wheelchair when the door opened and the man who had been sitting in the hallway of the hotel reading the London Atlas came in. He nodded to Victor and said good evening. Victor tried to nod but he couldn't speak. Back in the passage, moving towards the door that led into the dining area, he wondered if he should try to see a doctor. If he saw a doctor privately there would be no need of medical cards and National Insurance numbers. With the footrest of the wheelchair he pushed the door open, entering the restaurant for the first time from this angle. Ahead of him, on a table that divided the diners from the cash desk, stood the green glass tank, lit from behind by bright tubular lights, furnished with feathery fronds and weed streamers, swarming with green reptilian shell-backed creatures. He closed his eyes. He drew a long noisy breath. 'They're terrapins,' he heard the waitress say. A kindly tone, a gratuitous piece of information offered to the disabled, who from the look on his face was also very likely mentally wanting. Show the poor man our menagerie, out terrarium... He curled his fists on the chrome hoops. She was moving the chair nearer to the tank to show him. Victor had no control left. He staggered to his feet out of the wheelchair, hearing gasps, hearing one of the girls in the corner give a cry. The waitress was staring at him open-mouthed, her eyes round, her hands still on the handles of the chair. He grabbed the attache case in his left hand. The door from the passage opened and the man who had been in the hotel foyer came in, stopped, took in everything, understood as only a policeman sent there to understand could do. He said, 'Victor Jenner?' Victor pulled out the gun and pointed it at the waitress. She gave a whimpering cry. She was a small dark girl, Indian perhaps, or partly Indian, olive-skinned with black eyes in dark eye sockets. The policeman side-stepped between the tables, wary-eyed, tense. Victor said, 'It's a real gun. You'd better believe me.' That was what he tried to say. Something else came out, some broken mumble, some gagged jerky grunting that was all his locked jaw would allow to escape. But it didn't matter what he said. The gun spoke for him, the gun was enough. Behind him, behind that swarming dreadful green tank, he was aware of more people coming, standing, their breath audible. The two young girls had got under their table, under the overhanging cloth. 'Put that gun down, Jenner. That isn't going to do you any good. Because he knew he couldn't, because it was all right to make this threat this time, Victor said, 'I'll shoot her in the back.' The words came out as a series of grinding jerks. He turned the girl round, spun her with a stiff left hand, stuck the barrel on the Beretta into her thin back, her young knobby spine. 'Out of that door,' he said, and because she couldn't understand, pushed her with the gun towards the passage door. There was no way, ever, he could pass that tank, not if his life depended upon it. Not one of the others moved. They believed in the gun. The waitress was crying with fear, tears flowing down her cheeks. She stumbled to the door, sobbed because she had tried without success to push it open. 'Pull it, pull it!' a woman screamed. Her mother? Her employer? Victor pulled the door himself, spun round because he thought he sensed the policeman make a move. Everyone was still as statues, the woman who had shouted crying, a man holding her. Victor prodded the girl through the doorway, pulled the door shut behind him and turned the key. He said to the girl, 'I need a doctor, I have to see a doctor,' but God knew what sound came out, not that, not what he had said. She stumbled on, holding her hands up now, like a hostage in a film, an old film, kicked open another door that led into a room full of metal chairs and trays. There was a way from here into a back yard, through french windows, bolted top and bottom, and beyond the yard rain falling, a grey board fence, the tree trunks and gloomy aisles of the wood. Victor said to the girl, 'Open those doors, windows, whatever you call them. You open them.' He turned her round to him, pointing the gun. She gave a terrified gasp. 'Do it. Didn't you hear me?' 'I can't understand you, I don't know what you're saying!' 'Don't move.' He could hear sound now, pounding feet, a shaking of the house, the sound of someone running at a door, using powerful shoulders on it. With the gun he motioned her to a stack of chairs. She shrank up against it. Keeping the gun pointed at her, Victor knelt down to undo the bottom bolt on the french window. A muscular spasm, unheralded, convulsed his body, throwing his arms out and arching his back. He cried out through forcibly clenched teeth, tried to get up and was felled to the floor by his own muscles fighting him. His back leaped, bounded, jack-knifed, and he thrashed about the floor, still keeping hold of the gun until the most powerful spasm he had yet known snatched it from his hands and flung it across the room in a high arc, where it encountered the glass of one of the windows, smashed it and passed through. Victor reached out, grabbing empty air. The girl crept towards him, whispering. His back arched, whipped, coiled like a spring and his limbs danced. The girl knelt beside him, asking him what was wrong, what was happening to him, what could she do, and the tears she was still shedding fell on to his twitching leaping face. The door opened just as the series of spasms passed and the policeman who came in stood over him, looking in a kind of hushed horror at the man on the floor whose flesh was fighting him to death.

Chapter 19

The tortoise moved up the garden path at a steady, measured, unvaryingly slow pace, from where it had spent the afternoon under the shade of the rhododendrons. It had seen or smelt or otherwise sensed the small pile of cos lettuce leaves placed for its delectation on the lowest of the stone steps. The little dog watched it but she was used to it now. Patting its shell and seeing head, limbs and tail recede into the horny dome had ceased to amuse her. It might as well be a mobile stone for all she cared. With renewed vigour she applied herself to her marrow bone. David Fleeetwood reached down over the side of the wheelchair and patted the dog's head. He and Clare were fast accumulating a menagerie: first Sally, then this tortoise that had wandered in from nowhere two days ago, and this morning a neighbour had offered him a kitten. But Clare had put her foot down there. The gnats were bothering him and he lit a cigarette to keep them off as much as anything. The evening was very warm, the air already taking on that dark blue look of a midsummer dusk. A big white moth had spread its wings flat on the house wall, waiting for the outside lights to come on, waiting to burn itself to death on the sizzling glass. Clare came out of the house by the french windows. He thought she looked pale and rather tired, but you couldn't really tell in this light. She had a glass in her hand containing what looked like a stiff whisky. She drank too much, not much too much but more than she should. Someone had told her that the other day, she had said, but she hadn't said who. 'Do you want one?' He shook his head, pointed at his half-empty beer glass. 'Are you going to ring the hospital?' he said. 'I already have.' Her face told him. She sat down at the table very close to him and took his hand. He didn't look at her. He looked at the tortoise nibbling lettuce leaves. 'Victor died this afternoon,' Clare said. 'About three this afternoon, they said. If he'd got through today there might have been some hope. Apparently people with tetanus sometimes recover if they survive the first four days.' David said rather violently, 'How the hell did he get tetanus?' He lit another cigarette from the stub of the first. 'That was nonsense about my stabbing him with a piece of glass. I never touched him.' 'I know. It's a mystery. Perhaps it was something which happened that night after he left here. He did tell you he'd had a horrendous night and was lucky to be alive, whatever that meant. If he cut himself somehow.. . They say the soil round here is full of tetanus. I looked up tetanus in a book on bacilli at the hospital. The poison itself is one of the deadliest known. It's excreted by the bacterial cells and carried in the bloodstream to the spinal cord...' David shuddered. 'Don't.' 'There is a sort of irony there, isn't there? If you choose to see it that way.' 'I choose not to. It was the merest accident. It has all been accident, Clare. Victor's shooting me, his seeing my photograph in the paper, taking the train to Epping and seeing where I lived, coming here that night when I was away...' She looked beseechingly at him but it was too dark to see her eyes. 'All accidents. For all we know, his killing the old woman was an accident - or started off that way. There's no answer to it, no pattern. If I've been over it once I've been over it a thousand times, the events that took place in that house in Solent Gardens. I even thought of getting Victor to do a reconstruction of it with me, the two of us trying to recreate the situation in a similar set of rooms with other actors...' He peered closely at her, trying to gauge her response. Her face was in repose, wondering, sad, a little lax and vague from the whisky she had drunk. She held his hand in both hers now. 'I'm serious. I meant it as a catharsis for him as well as me. I thought of us getting together with Bridges maybe, wherever he is now, and perhaps finding Rosemary Stanley, and furnishing the place just as it was down to the pictures on the walls.' 'The pictures on the walls?' 'Oh, yes. It was a nicely furnished house, it was pretty. You know I said, Whose blood is that? because I didn't know it was mine then, I thought what a shame to stain that pale cream carpet, what a waste. There were little pictures all the way down the stairs and on the landing walls. Birds and animals mostly, reproductions of famous prints and engravings. Durer's Praying Hands and the one of the hare and of cowslips, and Audubon and Edward Lear.' 'I thought he wrote limericks.' 'He did lithographs as well, of animals in menageries. There was that bat of his, I remember, and the turtle.' David glanced at the tortoise that was making its slow way back to shelter beneath the rhododendrons. 'That one was right in the centre with the praying hands just above it. When I fell I had my eyes fixed on those praying hands. I had this elaborate idea of reconstructing all that, only I wanted to wait until I felt I could - trust Victor. And that time never came.' Gently David disengaged his hands. 'Put the lights on, Clare, will you?' She got up and went inside the dining room and switched on the lights, one on the edge of the terrace, one on the house wall among the honeysuckle leaves. The moth fluttered off the wall and came to the light to burn its tender white feathery wings.

The End