Ancient Images (5 page)

    The next time she saw Graham, he might almost have been asleep. His eyes were closed, his lashes two delicate silvery crescents. His full lips looked satisfied, though untypically prim. His long cheeks were faintly powdered, as if he had no further reason to conceal his femaleness. He was wearing his favorite blue suit. His hands were folded on his chest, no longer reaching out desperately. "Thanks, Toby," she murmured, and left him beside the coffin, where she could tell he was ready to weep.

    It had been his idea that she should visit Graham before the funeral; she hadn't realized how much it would help her. The tranquilizers had only postponed her reaction further. Phyl had sat with her while she watched the broadcast about Graham, in which even her own script seemed to have nothing to do with her. Graham's fall had followed her home and back to Metropolitan, where she was able to work, though her head and her hands and the world had felt brittle. She'd agreed to Toby's suggestion so as not to upset him. She hadn't realized how renewing it would be for her to see Graham at peace.

    He would want her to be at peace too. Allowing her failure to save him to grow cancerous in her was no way to preserve his memory, it was simply unfair to him. She lifted her face toward the sun as she came out of the undertaker's. A plane too high to hear was chalking the cloudless sky. A wave of birds rose from a grassy square, a football beat like a heart on a schoolyard wall. The world was coming back to life for her. "You can still be proud of me," she whispered, happy to imagine that Graham could hear.

    By the time she rose from the Underground at Marble Arch she was remembering Graham introducing her as if she was the brightest talent at his soiree, Graham in the Metropolitan lobby performing a dance routine with her and refusing to stop until she identified the musical, Graham buying her and Toby dinner at a hotel on Park Lane and solemnly producing a magnifying glass to pore over his portion of cuisine minceur: "That's what I call a
minute
steak," he'd said… The thought of his fall made her wince and brought tears to her eyes, but so it should. She went into Metropolitan and worked on a tape of children being rescued from a crashed school bus.

    She was rounding it off with the image of two of the survivors embracing so hard that they had to be helped into the ambulance together when Lezli came over, smiling tightly. "Can you see the improvement? I've just got disengaged."

    "Lezh, I m sorry."

    "Don't be. Best decision I've made this year. Let's have a coffee to celebrate."

    They took the lift to the staff restaurant on the top floor. "Here's to trusting in ourselves," Lezli said, raising her cup.

    "Did you feel you hadn't been?"

    "That's what men want, isn't it? Men basically just want one thing."

    "Sometimes we do too, don't we?"

    "I don't mean horizontal dancing. I mean they want to undermine our confidence and make us dependent on them."

    "Let them try."

    "This one nearly did until I savaged his view of life. He kept going on about security as if it was me who should need more of it instead of him that did. He started barking and snarling when I asked him if he knew where all the money his firm invests comes from, though. Pop goes my Christmas on his family's estate that daddy runs like a little kingdom, so that's a relief."

    "I see he's left his mark on you."

    "Only till I get to a sunlamp," Lezli said, making a face at the ghost of his ring on her finger. "Do you know the kind of shit he'd been storing up for me? He would have wanted me to promise not to make any more films in case they drew attention to him as well. That came up because of Graham Nolan."

    "Did he know Graham?"

    "No better than anyone else who reads about him in the paper."

    "Which paper?"

    "Last night's." She seemed to regret having mentioned it, especially when Sandy said "I'd like to see it."

    Lezli went reluctantly down to the newsroom and produced a copy of the
Daily
Friend.
SUSSEX SAYS STAY OUT, SPONGERS,
said a headline above the tabloid's version of the progress of Enoch's Army. She turned to the film column by Leonard Stilwell, who Sandy gathered was the kind of reviewer who emerged from film shows bearing flaws like trophies. Lezli flicked the last paragraph with her fingernail and gave Sandy the comment to read.

    "Another film world death to mourn, though Graham Nolan never made a film. Film buffs will be grateful to him as the perfectionist film buyer for Metropolitan TV. Pity his last months were wasted on a wild-goose chase after a fictitious film. Now he's with his idols where he deserves to be, and all of us film buffs will miss him."

    Sandy wondered if the writer had a special key that typed the word "film." She read the paragraph twice in case she had missed something. "His remark about the wild-goose chase, is that what you meant, Lezli? Shows he doesn't know as much about films as he pretends to."

    "Well, I'm glad you can take it that way. Quite a few of us thought it was unfair to Graham."

    "If you're writing to the paper, count on me to sign." But the mistake seemed trivial, and she didn't think it would have mattered to Graham.

    She did her best to persuade Toby of that when he rang her at home to share his rage with her, but he wasn't convinced. "I won't have Graham called a liar," he vowed. "The
Daily
Friend
is instant litter, but its readers don't know it is. I'm going to make this parasite admit in print he was wrong."

    "Let me know if he does," Sandy said, and thought as soon as she'd replaced the receiver that she should have put him in touch with Lezli. Still, her impression was that Lezli and her colleagues would stop short of complaining to the tabloid, and she couldn't blame them. After all, it was only a film.

    

    

    The day after Graham's funeral she went to the latest Alan Ayckbourn play, and found herself laughing longest at jokes Graham would have liked. After the performance she drank with friends in a pub off Shaftesbury Avenue. Both of the unattached men in the party offered to see her home, but she refused gently. She was feeling wistful and relaxed and private, carrying memories of Graham that seemed worth more than anything he might have bequeathed to her, not that she would have expected him to. But the next morning Toby called her to say he had something Graham would have wanted her to have.

    She found Toby at the railing by the Thames, his face solemn as the lowing of boats on the river. He looked paler than ever; so, disconcertingly, did his ginger hair. "It's soothing here, isn't it?" she said.

    "I used to think so. Let's go up," he said as if he wanted to get it over with.

    In the lift he blinked every time the glowing numbers changed. He unlocked the flat and stood aside for her. Sunlight streamed into the main room, which felt cold and deserted. His steel and glass tables had gone. "You aren't living here," she said.

    "I stayed the first night, but after that it began to get to me. I was having to keep all the lights on. Not because of Graham. I don't know what it is, except there's a dead smell about the place. Let me give you what I found and then we'll go."

    He took down several volumes of an encyclopedia, revealing a wall safe between two bookshelves. "Where are you living?" Sandy said.

    "With my parents while I put myself back together. Would you believe they're trying to fix me up with a nice girl? If I don't move out soon they'll be turning me into a stockbroker like the old man, training it into the City five days a week with my bowler on my lap and my portfolio stuffed with lunch." He pulled back his cuffs like a safecracker. "Shush a minute."

    She was glad he felt able to put on a show for her, though she knew it was also for himself. The sunlight was creeping toward the bedroom, where a dressing gown lay on the bed. The tumblers clicked, and Toby reached into the safe. "This will mean more to you than it does to me," he said.

    It was a dog-eared red notebook. At the top of the first page Graham had written TOWER OF FEAR in elaborate capitals. Each of the next few pages bore a different name and address and telephone number, all scored through lightly. "I decided against giving it to the police." Toby said. "It didn't seem right to have the police upsetting more people for no reason. Graham said most of them were old and frail."

    "They're the ones he contacted about the film."

    "Most of them worked on it, I think. It's not as if any of them would have come here after the film," he said with a hint of defensiveness. "At least the police seem to have crossed me off their list of suspects, though they couldn't find any prints." He closed the safe and walled it up with books. "Maybe that notebook can prove our friend at the
Daily
Friend
wrong."

    "Did you call him?"

    "What I called him is what you should be asking, except it's not for your delicate ears. And I wanted to know if he cared to set his reputation against Graham's. He blustered and then he shut up. I expect to read an apology next week."

    "Did you tell him you'd seen the film yourself?"

    "I only saw a snippet, old Boris up a tower watching someone being chased across a field at night, and to tell you the absolute truth, I wasn't anxious to see any more. Neither of us wanted to be the one who switched off the lights that night."

    "It must have been some film if it could do that to you both."

    "It must have been the film, yes. What else could it have been?"

    She hadn't meant it that way, and his response made her feel unexpectedly nervous. The sunlight had reached the bed now, and she realized that a shadow on the duvet must have been the long shape she'd mistaken for a dressing gown. Toby was right about the dead smell, she noticed, a faint stench like stale charred pastry that reminded her of the last time she was here. "I'm glad you thought I should have this," she said, slipping the notebook into her handbag, and made for the door.

    She walked Toby to Victoria Station and left him at the barrier. On her way into the Underground she thought he'd followed her, but there was nobody to be seen behind her on the escalator that sailed downward with a faint inconsolable squeal. She sat on a bench on the empty platform, the breaths of oncoming trains stirring the hairs on the back of her neck. She leafed through Graham's notebook, but couldn't concentrate; she found she had to keep glancing along the platform toward the tunnel. Some fault in the mechanism made the train doors reopen after she boarded, as if someone had leaped on at the last moment. The galloping rush of the wheels made her think of a hunt in the dark.

    Someone was walking a dog in Queen's Wood. Sandy couldn't see the owner, but she heard the animal in the undergrowth. Once she glimpsed its ribs through a gloomy clump of bushes. Even if it was a greyhound, it looked in need of feeding. She would have shouted to the owner to call it off if its sounds hadn't stayed in the undergrowth as Sandy reached the gate.

    Neither Bogart nor Bacall came to greet her as she unlocked her door. They prowled the main room while she examined the notebook, wondering if Graham might have indicated which of his informants he suspected had a copy of the film. Few of the names scattered across Britain and abroad meant anything to her. "Come on if you're so anxious to return to the wild," she said to the pacing cats, and took them out for a walk.

    Perhaps the dog in the woods was a stray. No wonder the cats stayed close to her. She thought she saw its eyes glistening, but they turned out to be weeds blurred by shadows. "I think we're safer at home," she said to the cats, which raced into the house as soon as she opened the door.

    She took the notebook with her while she baby-sat for the young accountants on the ground floor. She was beginning to think Toby had meant the book as a plea to her. She had a busy week ahead, editing a play whose male lead had fallen ill before his reaction shots could be filmed. She had made nothing of Graham's notes before the newspaper reviewer responded to Toby's call.

    She read the paragraph in the lift at Metropolitan, newsprint soiling her hands. "Sorry if any of my faithful readers thought I was getting at Graham Nolan last week. A very close male friend of his rang up to shrill at me for saying Nolan could ever have been wrong, but believe me, the last film Nolan tried to find wouldn't have been worth finding even if it existed. Even Karloff and Lugosi didn't want to own up to it, and anyway someone owns the rights, so if Nolan had really had a copy he would have been breaking the law. I say let him rest in peace now. He earned it."

    Sandy tore the column out of the page and placed it in her handbag before dropping the rest of the newspaper in the bin next to her desk. She felt tense all day, even more so when she let herself into her flat. She had time only to get changed and hurry out again to dinner in Chelsea.

    When conversation at the far end of the table in the conservatory her friends had built onto their apartment turned to Graham, at first she didn't realize that it had. A headmistress with several combs in her hair was saying, "Not that I'd wish it on him, but at least he went before he could infect the world with whatever the film was."

    Sandy wouldn't have listened if their hosts hadn't been trying to hush the woman surreptitiously. "I'm sorry, what was that?" Sandy said.

    The headmistress stared at her as though Sandy had entered her office without knocking. "We were discussing the television fellow, the one who fell off the roof. I was saying that if he didn't want to go that way, perhaps he shouldn't have been so eager to revive horror films. Some of my children watch nothing else."

    Sandy paused to be sure of speaking calmly. "He told me the film was a classic, and I believe him. Thank you very much for dinner," she said to her hosts, "and now if you'll all excuse me, I mean to prove him right." The incident was almost worth it for the way the headmistress was gaping at her, but Sandy was perspiring with rage by the time she came up from the Underground. As soon as she reached home she made the first phone call.