13

Boris and Ruby lugged Bean across the Marylebone Road at the lights between Park Square and Park Crescent. They were never red for long enough to satisfy him and he bared his teeth and shook his fist at impatient drivers. But he wasn’t going back through that tunnel while the key man was still at large.

He had given the police a precise description, from the long black hair and beard dyed a fierce cobalt blue to the feet in split and filthy leather boots. The keys, he believed, were fastened to his clothes with safety pins, and he described them as like an armor plating, a kind of chain mail worn for protection. Several times, because no arrest was made and nothing seemed to be done, Bean went back to the police and harried them. He wanted an identity parade so that he could pick the key man out. They told him they were working on his case and if anything developed they would get back to him. Bean had no faith in them.

Though he knew a large number of people, he had few friends, and those he had were acquaintances he met in the Globe on a Friday night, the only evening out he had. There was Freddie Lawson, who worked as odd-job man for the Crown Estates, and Peter Carrow, a park attendant, whose life had changed very much for the better when he was issued with a vacuum cleaner for sucking up the litter in the Broad Walk and round the pavilions. Lawson, a widower, and Carrow, whose wife had left him long ago, both drank far more than Bean did, drank away their wages in the Globe or the All-sop Arms every night, but it was on Friday that they met him in the Globe and it was there that Bean recounted to them his experiences with the key man. Carrow, who knew most of the dossers by sight at least, immediately recognized Bean’s description and was even able to tell him the key man’s name.

By now Bean had convinced himself he had seen Clancy when he was mugged. He believed it. The two encounters had become blurred in his mind and he told Lawson and Carrow that it was just after he passed Clancy in the tunnel that the key man had stepped away from the wall and struck him on the back of the head. A number of other people, including the inevitable tourists, heard him say this.

“And the Bill won’t do nothing for you?” said Lawson.

Lawson always called the police the Bill. Carrow called them the Filth.

“They’re protecting him,” said Bean, “for reasons of their own.”

He tried to enlist the help of Valerie Conway. Since their confrontation over the matter of her given name, Bean had called her nothing. All kinds of styles and titles were in his repertoire, miss, miz, madam, ma’am, as well as surnames preceded by miss or miz, but he called her nothing now and she perceived that he had won that round. Therefore she was on her guard when he asked her if it wasn’t a fact that he had described to her his encounter with Clancy, calling him an “alien.”

“That wasn’t the same time as when you were mugged,” said Valerie.

“Oh, please,” said Bean. “Don’t give me that. I came here with the dog and for once you opened the front door to me on account of me being in such a state. I was on my knees, I couldn’t hardly see straight.”

“Maybe, but you never said who’d done it to you. If you want my opinion, you’re confused. You can’t expect me to make a fool of myself going to the police with a story that’s a figment of your imagination.”

“Perhaps you’ll fetch the dog,” said Bean.

Victory to Valerie, she thought, shutting the area door behind them. Bean crossed the road and went to pick up Charlie the golden retriever in St. Andrew’s Place. James Barker-Pryce, a wet dead cigar plugged into the left corner of his mouth, brought the dog to the door. Bean advised him to be careful if he was thinking of going out. There was a dangerous vagrant at large, identifiable by his blue-dyed hair and the keys pinned all over him. Barker-Pryce said he hoped Bean hadn’t been drinking. He never gave credence to anything told him by a member of the working class, never had and never would, they had always been mentally subnormal and were now even more reduced by television and drugs.

Bean told his tale to Mrs. Goldsworthy and then to Lisl Pring.

“I wouldn’t like anything to happen to Marietta,” was all she said.

Incensed, Bean forgot his usual deference. “Thanks very much,” he said. “Never mind me.” He added, ridiculously, a belated “Miss.”

Lisl Pring started laughing. When she laughed she sucked in her diaphragm and you could count her ribs. She wouldn’t have cared what Bean said to her so long as the poodle got its walks.

“I shall be going on my holidays to my sister in Brighton the first week of August,” he said and watched her face fall. “I’m telling you well in advance so as you can make other arrangements.”

Up in Park Village, Miss Jago showed more sympathy. She asked him if he was fully recovered, if the police had found whoever was responsible. Bean wondered what she was after. He had no belief in altruism. Maybe she was running short of cash in the absence of Sir Stewart and Lady Blackburn-Norris and thought soft soap might secure her a discount.

“There’s no doubt who was responsible, miss,” he said darkly, shaking his head in the way people do when they wish to convey exasperation and disillusionment. “The kind of alien a lady like yourself would no more notice than you would a bit of muck on the pavement. I wouldn’t even ask you if you’d come in contact with him.”

She came back with the dog in her arms, cuddling him like a baby.

“Every penny I’d got on me he took. And my camera. Luckily, I used up the film with the shots on it of these lovely dogs. Would you be interested in acquiring a portrait of the little shih tzu?”

She said it wasn’t her dog. That was a matter for Sir Stewart and Lady Blackburn-Norris. He had guessed she’d say that and didn’t much care. Mrs. Goldsworthy had said she’d love a portrait of McBride or even an album of pictures.

It was common knowledge he was to be found in the park every day around eight-thirty in the morning and four-thirty in the afternoon, say a quarter of an hour on either side of those times. Bean thought afterward that this must account for it. But before the man came up to him he had set the dogs free and was walking the long exposed path toward the bridge and the new pond by the Hanover Gate. It was warm enough to do without his bomber jacket and he tied it round his middle by its sleeves the way the youth did. For the baseball cap, smart protection from the sun’s heat on his poor head, he was starting to feel a greater affection than he had for any human being. It had probably saved his life when Clancy attacked him.

By the railings that enclosed the grounds of The Holme, the big house that overlooked the lake, the woman was walking her dozen dogs. Not one of them was on the lead and all walked sedately, the little ones at her heels, the bigger ones in as orderly a fashion as if they had all been to training classes. Perhaps they had. The woman wore jodhpurs and a check shirt and her long dark hair flowed down her back. She must have one of those whistles inaudible to the human ear, for when a labrador lagged behind, Bean saw her put something to her lips and the labrador came running obediently.

Three of his dogs were close at his heels and the other three at the lake’s edge, Marietta barking at a red-headed duck, the shih tzu and the scottie drinking from the scummy brown water, as Bean stepped onto the bridge that here crosses a loop of the lake enclosing an island. It was shady and dim, a dusty place, overshadowed by tall trees. Birds thronged the nearly stagnant water, pochards, mandarins, swans, mallards, pintails, coots and divers. Even in the winter a sour smell rose from the water and now, in the mild humidity of June, there was a powerful stench of decaying vegetable matter. He was halfway across when a man approaching from the other end stopped in front of him and asked for a light.

Bean might have said, “Sorry” or “I’m afraid I don’t carry one,” but in fact he said, “I don’t smoke,” in such a way as to put smoking on a par with snorting cocaine.

Instead of passing on, the man looked him in the eye. He was young, skinny but with a jowly face, a round head, and a crew cut, too young and strong for Bean to push past him. He had the sort of eyes Bean had heard addicts had, dull and with pinhead pupils. A flicker of fear plucked at his chest. But he was not alone. He could see Sunday crowds on the sunlit grass by the Hanover pond, footsteps were approaching behind him, and two girls with linked arms had come onto the bridge ahead.

“My mate heard you shooting the shit,” the man said. “Or it come over the grapevine.”

“I done what?”

The man took no notice. “I’m not talking about wasting. If you want him attended to it’ll cost you a Hawaii.”

Bean managed a mental translation but the last bit escaped him.

“Fifty smackers.”

“Chance’d be a fine thing,” said Bean. “I haven’t got it. It was three times that he took off of me. And my camera. Bastard with blue hair and all over keys.” He tried to collect his thoughts. “Fifty—that’s a lot of money.”

“Suit yourself. If you change your mind I’ll be here next Sunday. Same time, same place.”

It wasn’t true he hadn’t got it, but he couldn’t easily afford to part with it. Once again Bean thought how imperative it was to find ways of augmenting his income. He watched the round-headed man return the way he had come and head toward the Hanover Gate.

The idea that someone young and strong might “attend to,” which presumably meant “beat up,” the key man was very inviting. With recollections of certain episodes in the domestic life of Maurice Clitheroe—once he had spent three days in bed as the result of an encounter with a young giant from Salisbury Street—Bean thought longingly of Clancy in a similar state. And in Clitheroe’s case it had been play. It was only the cost that stopped him running after the round-headed man. Of course it was cheap at the price, but only if parting with the price didn’t hurt.

The golden dome of the mosque, heaving into view, was somehow reassuring. The man would be there again next Sunday.

•   •   •

It was a week since she had written to him but he hadn’t even phoned. What had happened that first time she had written to him, disclosing her identity, giving her address, was happening again. Dorothea, in whom up to a point she confided, said that perhaps he was one of those men who only want women who are hard to get. Women who were forthcoming and made overtures frightened them away. That wasn’t much comfort to Mary, who was remembering with some degree of shame the warm phrases in her own letter and how she had reminded him of the special friendship they had. It had been to some extent an appeal, her own loneliness cited and her bereavement.

When Saturday came she had given up. He had dropped her. She had said or done something to upset him or he had changed his mind about her. Alistair had phoned and asked her to have dinner with him; and though she had refused, putting the phone down after a quick good-bye, she had wondered if next time she would yield, if Alistair, with his small violent acts, his petty aggression, and his overbearing ways wasn’t better than no one at all. When she thought of those small violences the blood came up and heated the cheek he had slapped.

She was looking at herself in the mirror, at that phenomenon of the reddening cheek, watching the color die away, when the doorbell rang. For once she didn’t speculate as to who it might be. She heard a taxi move off as she was opening the door.

Leo stood on the doorstep, paler than she had ever seen him, even his lips drained of color.

“I’ve been in the hospital,” he said. “I didn’t want you to know.”

The explanation she should have thought of but hadn’t. “But why not, Leo?”

He hesitated. “May I come in?”

“Of course. Of course.” She remembered what Dorothea had said, but she couldn’t help herself. “I’m so glad to see you.”

He came in diffidently. She closed the door. Already she was wondering how she could have listened to Dorothea’s reasoning, could have doubted her own judgment.

“I felt I’d failed you,” he said. “I’d let you down. You’ve done so much for me and I’d reneged on you. I’d been overdoing things, apparently. I know I had, I’m well aware of it. But you must be able to guess why I had.”

She shook her head.

“How shall I put it? I don’t want to upset you, Mary.” He paused and seemed to be thinking what to say that would not be hurtful. “I’ve been overexerting myself because I’d met you,” he said. “There. I’ve said what I’ve been afraid to say. I so wanted to be a—a normal man for you.”

“Leo …” She took both his hands in hers.

He let them lie passively. His eyes were bright, too bright, as with fever. “I was going to—well, to let things slide between us. Slip away out of your life, if you understand me. It means so much to me that you should never see me as ungrateful or indifferent, but at the same time, I’d rather you felt that than that—you—you saw your donation had been in vain.”

“But you’ve said you’re all right. You’ve said—I think you’ve said—the leukemia hasn’t come back.”

“I didn’t know that when they took me in.” He turned his face away. “I was so afraid, Mary.”

She tightened her grip on his limp hands. This time he made her a small return of pressure. “Then your letter came. You’d said very little, but I think I knew what your grandmother meant to you. I couldn’t any longer stay away.”

Their faces were very close. He reached a little forward and kissed her on the lips. It was just such a kiss as she might have given him in the unimaginable situation of her making the first advance, light, gentle, dry but lingering. He put his arms round her and held her close to him in a brotherly hug. She felt his bones through the meager flesh, birdlike, fragile. A pulse in his neck was beating fast. Still holding her shoulders, but feather-lightly, in a ghost’s clasp, he looked into her face.

“I am afraid to say too much, Mary. When you’ve been ill, like I have, when you’ve been so near death and thought you were near death again, your emotions get very—very febrile, very wild and hot, you think and fancy all sorts of things. But you mustn’t—I mustn’t—express them too soon. I have to keep telling myself, there is time, I have got years ahead.”

Leo went into the living room and sat on the sofa, perfectly still, as if in a trance. Unusually for him, he put out no hand to fondle the little dog as it pressed itself against his legs. He said in a curiously intense tone, “Tell me about your grandmother. Tell me all about her and your childhood and everything.”

It was what she had wanted. She began talking to him of things never previously aired. The idea of telling Alistair of the day when, newly orphaned but not yet knowing it, she had been brought to her grandparents, how she had felt, was unthinkable. But she could tell Leo, who sat listening intently, his eyes sometimes meeting hers, his lips sometimes parting in a smile. She spoke of those early days. Frederica had seemed old, but when you are eight all grownups seem old. Children are quickly won over and a devotion in them is easily awakened. The oddest thing was that from the first Frederica was nicer than her own mother had been.

“It seems disloyal. It’s something people don’t say, that their adoptive parents were better than their natural parents. But mine were. My parents were very young, my mother was only twenty-one when I was born. They only married because I was going to be born. And afterward they wanted to go on living the same sort of life they always had. I think my mother must have resented me. I remember her as indifferent and rather rejecting. Why am I telling you all this?”

“Because I asked you.”

“And that’s enough? Maybe it is. My parents died when someone’s private plane they were flying in from an airfield in Essex to France came down in the Channel. I was unhappy at first, of course I was. I think my grandparents were very unhappy, they’d lost their only child, but they never showed it to me. She was called Helen, my mother. That’s why I took the name when I had to write that note for you. Guilt, I expect it was, though, not love.

“I loved my grandparents. I adored my grandmother. And, you know, the air crash, which was so terrible for them and supposed to be for me—I once overheard a woman say to my grandmother that it was the great tragedy that had blighted my childhood—it was romantic, it was something to have and almost to boast about, it set me apart in a rather dashing way from the other girls at school. If some power, some genie, had asked me if I would like my parents back, I’d have said no. But I’d never have told anyone; I’d have been ashamed.”

“But you’re not ashamed to tell me?”

“No. Strange, isn’t it?”

He said, “I want you to think you can tell me anything. I want to be the person you can talk to.” He stood up, a little unsteadily, she thought, and for a moment he put his hand on his forehead. “I must go now. May I come back tomorrow?”

“I’ve tired you,” she said.

“No. You’re the last person to tire me. You refresh me.” He spoke like a child, a very young boy. “Can I have a proper kiss?”

She nodded. He put his arms round her and kissed her, but very softly, very gently. His mouth tasted of some scented spice, cinnamon perhaps or cardamom. Afterward she thought it had been like no other kiss she had ever known, and if she had had to explain what she meant she would have said it was nonphysical, like a kiss in the mind, or like kissing someone not of this world, a wraith, a spirit, a ghostly visitant.

“You will come back?” she said eagerly.

“I promise.”

He looked less ill the next day, though his thinness was extreme. She had the illusion that she could see through him as he passed through the hall and came into the living room, could see the shapes of furniture and the colors of cloth through his transparent form. They drank wine and she made lunch for them. He told her about his feelings for his brother.

“I love him and he loves me,” he said. “Does that sound terrible to you, coming from a man?”

“Of course it doesn’t.”

“He’s done everything for me. Given up everything too. He was at drama school, he’s a wonderful actor, but he gave that up to be with me every day when I was so ill, so that I’d never be alone. He’s been more than a father to me.”

“I’d like to meet him.”

He didn’t answer that but said rather abruptly, “I’m moving out, I’m getting a place of my own.”

“But why, if you get on so well?”

“Because it’s not fair on him, Mary. I drag him down. I spoil his privacy. Besides, it’s his place but he gives up the bedroom to me and sleeps on the sofa.”

He had found a flat in Primrose Hill, in Edis Street, no more than a room with kitchen area and shower really, but it would do. She searched her mind for ways of putting it, finally came out with, “Leo, I’m going to be quite rich. My grandmother left me a lot of money. If there is anything I could—”

He cut her short. It was like that first time when he had reacted so peremptorily to her offer of paying her share of the bill. “Absolutely not. Please don’t even think of it.”

They had left the table and were once more side by side on the sofa, Gushi at their feet.

“I very much dislike the idea of your being rich,” Leo said. There was an unprecedented distaste in his voice, though rather than rising in volume it had sunk almost to a whisper. “You may say that it’s none of my business but—but I want things about you to be my business, Mary.”

He looked deep into her eyes. She felt her face flood with color. Seeing the flush, he put up one finger to touch her cheek. The other hand followed. He took her face in his hands and kissed her with the gentleness of a woman kissing a child. Then, when she was unresistant, he began a soft delicate kissing, his lips on hers, then brushing her cheek, the tip of her nose, her mouth once more. The gentleness of it, the slowness, aroused her. She expected every moment a crushing embrace, hard lips, a tongue that prized her mouth open and reached chokingly, like some surgical probe, for the back of her throat. Leo kissed her lips and stroked her cheek. Her body, which she now felt to have been stiff and tense for weeks, the muscles held rigidly, began to slacken and melt.

“There is something I would very much like to do,” he whispered. “May I ask you? If you say no, we’ll just go on sitting here, but if you say yes …”

“What is it, Leo?”

“I would like to lie down and hold you. That’s all, just hold you.”

She nodded.

“I mean just hold you,” he said. “Not anything more.” He gave a dry unhappy laugh. “That has to be all, I think.”

They went upstairs. He seemed quite unselfconscious when he took off his outer clothes. She looked at a skeletal but still beautiful body, straight, smooth, as white as her own. It would have seemed ridiculous, in anticipation or retrospect, to go to bed with a man in her underclothes, he in underpants, she in bra and tights, but in the present, as a happening, it was natural. She wondered where he had received the transplant but could see no mark on him.

In bed he held her in his arms. She had always found this position a difficult one with Alistair, for if maintained for more than a few minutes, the arm under his body would “go to sleep,” as would his under her, while the other possibility, that of embracing him with one arm and folding the other behind her, brought an intolerable ache to her shoulder. But Leo held her without demanding that she hold him. She laid one arm across his chest, the other on her own breasts. He held her firmly but not tightly, and if the arm under her body grew numb he gave no sign of it. He did not speak. She had to remind herself that he was six years younger than she, for he held her as an innocent father might hold his child.

Not since she was a child herself, not since those days when she was laid down for a rest in the afternoon—by that mother who was only too glad, if the truth were known, for an hour of peace—had Mary slept in the daytime. But she slept now and Leo slept. His, she thought, waking after the unbelievable period of two whole hours, was the heavy slumber of a man who has missed out on sleep for too long and has a hundred hours to make up. She raised herself on one elbow and looked at his face, the narrow lips relaxed in sleep, the pale skin in places prematurely lined, the veined lids over his closed eyes, membranes like purplish leaves. When he was a child his hair must have been white, for even now it was only faintly colored, the shade of sun-bleached straw.

Something told him she had moved away, for blindly in sleep he reached for her. But not in the way other men had done, not as Alistair had done, seizing her roughly and pulling her down into a hard embrace and bruising kisses that made her lips sore and her gums bleed. Without opening his eyes, Leo felt for her hand and, taking it in his, brought it to his mouth. He kissed her hand gently, the wrist, the back of it, the knuckles. She thought, what is happening to me? Am I falling in love with him? Is it the strangeness of him that fascinates me, or is it that I feel an ever and ever stronger need to look after him?

I do need that. I need to bring him here and care for him. It is as if I have begun the process of healing him and I must carry it through. Soon I must let him go, I must let him go home, but I am afraid that when he goes, when he is out of my sight and my care, he will fail and fall and become ill again. Oh, if only I could keep him here I know I could restore him and then, one day …

Bean was back. The bell rang once, then again insistently. She put on a dressing gown, picked Gushi up into her arms and went down to answer the door. Bean smiled his obsequious smile, his eyes cold and empty. He thrust a package into her hand.

“Photos of the little chap, Miss,” he said. “Just to take a look. No obligation to purchase.”