Out of the Sun (3 page)

FOUR

Beer was a lover who never tired of Harry's attentions, a friend who never turned him away. The slurred damn-it-all indifference he could summon up under its influence was his for the rest of the day, expanding with each pub he visited on his erratic route home, until, at his last port of call, even the barman's reluctance to serve him did not dent his sang-froid

"Don't you think you've had enough, mate?"

"Oh, of many things. But not of beer. "Look through the bottom of a pewter pot, to see the world as the world's not." Truest thing I ever read."

"We don't allow poetry in here."

"No? Well, looking at the decor, I can see what you mean. Still, a pint should improve the view."

"All right. Just one, mind."

"Absolutely. Just one. As God's my witness."

It was an oath he regretted breaking next morning, after waking late and leaden-headed to the discovery that even the curtain-filtered light of Foxglove Road, Kensal Green, could be painfully dazzling to those who have just single-handedly boosted several brewers' prospective dividends to their shareholders.

He stumbled to the kitchenette, coughing over his first cigarette. There he filled the kettle, started it boiling, downed a pint of London tap-water and commenced the quest for the Holy Grail of a clean coffee-mug. Before he had abandoned it, the telephone rang.

"Hello?" he said in a gravelly phantom of his own voice.

"Harry?"

"Yes. Who It was Iris. Disbelievingly, he fell silent. Surely it could not be. But it was.

"Am I ... disturbing you?"

"Er .. ." He leant over and turned off the gas. "No. You're not. Really."

"The thing is ... well... I'm sorry about what I said yesterday. How I reacted. It was .. ."

"Understandable." He gave his forehead a vigorous massage with his free hand. It made nothing any clearer. "Honestly."

"It was the shock, actually. After all these years. The shock and .. ."

"There's no need ... to explain."

"Oh, but I think there is. I think I owe you that much, now you know about David. Could we meet, perhaps?"

"Well, of course. Why not? I mean .. ."

"You mean that's what you wanted to do yesterday and I prevented it. You're quite right. I can only apologize. You're probably wondering what's brought about this change of heart."

"We've both had the chance to sleep on it, I suppose." Though whether the stupor Harry was still recovering from could be called sleep he was not at all sure.

"Quite. Anyway, I suggest somewhere other than the hospital. I sometimes take tea at the Hotel Russell after visiting David. Do you know it?"

"Yes." Of course he did. It was the terra cotta pile he had passed on his circuits of Russell Square yesterday afternoon. The thought reminded him that he had, as predicted, failed to stock up with Greek cigarettes.

"I'll meet you in the lounge at four o'clock."

"Fine." Such a time would necessitate an early departure from Mitre Bridge. Perhaps he would just go sick instead. He felt ill enough to make it almost genuine. Although, strangely, his condition seemed to have improved since picking up the telephone. "I'll be there."

"Right. Well '

"One thing, Iris." His mind was sharpening now, even without the aid of coffee. A suspicion was growing on him that her conciliatory tone might amount to a confession. "If you had this number all along, why did you phone me at the garage on Monday?"

"Because I didn't phone you, Harry. I called your mother in Swindon this morning. She gave me this number. Oh, don't worry. I didn't tell her who I was. But the message you got wasn't from me. I realized later how stupid what I said about you being on the make must have sounded. Even if you had read about David, you wouldn't have connected him with me, would you? Or with you."

"Who did call me, then?"

"I don't know. Nobody but David and I know, Harry. That's the point."

"Know that I'm his father, you mean?"

There was a lengthy silence Harry steeled himself not to break. Then Iris said: "Exactly."

FIVE

His neck chafing against the unfamiliar constriction of a tie, his eyes scarcely registering the wood-panelled elegance of his surroundings, Harry took the cup of Assam tea Iris had poured for him and leant back in his chair. He felt as he feared he looked: out of place and ill at ease.

Iris Yenning or Hewitt, as he was struggling to think of her -appeared, by contrast, perfectly in tune with the hushed and al coved environment. She was wearing a simple but flattering outfit Mrs. Tandy would probably have called a tea-dress. It certainly confirmed that Iris had kept her figure. Whereas even a double-breasted blazer could not disguise the paunch Harry had acquired since the summer of 1960, a season his thoughts, and doubtless hers, were bound to return to, however careful they might be to avoid mentioning it directly.

Indirectly, the events of that distant summer were the only reason they had met this wintry afternoon. Without them, David John Yenning would never have been born. Nor would he be lying now, comatose and unaware, a few short streets away. Time could devise its revenges from beginnings as well as endings.

"Are you diabetic, Harry?" asked Iris, as he declined the offer of sugar.

"No."

"I'd thought you might be, you see. I'd thought David might have inherited the disease from you. It developed in his teens. Oh, he came to terms with it readily enough. The injections and the diet. He made no fuss about it. It was just a problem to solve. He's always been good at that. Solving problems. But this time .. ."

"How did it happen? The coma, I mean."

"I don't know. I don't understand it. He was alone. In an hotel room out at Heathrow. He was staying there overnight before flying back to America. He's lived and worked in the States for, what, nine years now. He's a mathematician, Harry. Quite brilliant, as a matter of fact. But it's all over my head. What he does. What he thinks about. Yours too, I expect."

"A brilliant mathematician?"

"Yes. Amazing, isn't it? At an age when you were still reading the Beano, he was devouring Newton's Principia. And making things too. Cardboard do decahedra Hypercubes. God knows what. He really was a prodigy. Senior wrangler at Cambridge. Ph.D. at twenty-three. We were so proud of him."

"You and Claude?"

"Yes. Claude died the year after David went to California to do post-doctoral research at UCLA. That's where he met his wife. In Los Angeles."

"So he's married. Any '

"No. No children. David and Hope are divorced now, anyway. Maybe you've heard of her. She's married again since. To the film star, Steve Brancaster."

"I don't think so."

"It doesn't matter. David was well rid of her. She'd only have held him back."

"From what?"

"Academic success. She always wanted him to go into the commercial sector. Got her way in the end with the Globescope job. Globescope's an international economic forecasting corporation based in Washington. David was working for them until the spring of this year. But I don't think his heart was really in it. When he came to see us last month, he was full of a new project that was pure research."

"Us meaning you and your new husband?"

"Yes. Ken was a golfing friend of Claude's. He was very good to me after Claude's death. We've been married five years now. He runs an engineering company in Stockport."

"You still live in Manchester, then?"

"Wilmslow, actually. But I've been staying with my sister in Chorleywood since this happened. Which brings us back to where we started, doesn't it? David had been over here drumming up interest in his new project. He's secured a lot of funding in America already and seemed confident it would get off the ground. A specialist institute to investigate the mathematics of higher dimensions. Don't ask me what they are. I've never understood such stuff. But David was full of it. And very excited about the prospects. He could hardly wait to get it up and running. That's what makes the suggestion of attempted suicide so utterly She caught his shocked look. "I'm sorry. Perhaps I should have explained more fully from the start. But it's not easy. Explaining all this to someone I never expected to ... Someone who never .. ."

"Who never knew he had a son, Iris. Remember that. I had no idea."

"Would it have made a difference if you had? Would you have stood by me if I'd come back to Swindon a few months after leaving and announced I was carrying your child? I don't think so, Harry, do you?"

He shook his head slowly in surrender to his own memory of himself as much as the force of her argument. "No. I expect he was better off with Claude as a father. But you said this morning he knows. About me, I mean."

"I told him after Claude died. I thought he was entitled to know. But he didn't make much of it. Mathematics had always been more important to him than human frailty. Another reason why suicide would never have entered his head."

"Why do they think it did?"

"Because the coma was precipitated by an overdose of insulin. Too big an overdose for him to have taken accidentally. If a chambermaid hadn't found him when she did, he'd certainly have died. As it is .. ." She sighed. "They don't think he's going to recover, Harry. They don't think he's ever going to wake up."

So that was it. The final irony. Perhaps a disembodied voice of fate had left the message for Harry. So he could learn he had a son only when it was too late to claim him. "There's no hope?"

"Realistically, not much. So the doctors tell me, anyway. Miracles do happen, of course. But they reckon the chances of a full recovery are virtually nil. And that, even if he did emerge from the coma, he'd have permanent brain damage. Can you imagine what that would mean for a brilliant mathematician?"

"I'm not sure I can, no."

"They've suggested taking him off life support." She looked straight into Harry's eyes. "Letting him die."

"I see."

"Do you? Do you really see where that leaves me?"

Torn, I imagine."

"Yes. Torn very nearly in two." She glanced away. He was tempted for a moment to reach out and take her hand. To offer physical comfort where words seemed likely to fail him. But they had not touched each other in David Venning's lifetime. And perhaps they never would. "I sometimes wish .. ."

"Don't say it."

"I'm sorry," she said briskly, looking back at him. "This isn't your problem."

"Isn't it?"

"No. Absolutely not. Ken and I will '

"What does Ken think you should do?"

She pursed her lips. A flicker of weakness passed across her face. Harry reckoned he knew what Ken thought without her needing to say. If he was right, Iris might have made the anonymous telephone call after all so that she could enlist his help without having to beg for it.

"I don't think you should let yourself be talked into taking any action you might later regret."

"How very level-headed of you, Harry."

"Whoever left that message for me obviously thought '

"It wasn't me."

Then who?"

"I simply don't know. I'm more or less certain David kept what I told him to himself."

"He might have confided in his wife."

"You wouldn't say that if you'd ever met her."

"Or a close friend."

"No. I was nervous about telling him. But I needn't have been. He made it obvious he regarded it as a matter of no importance."

"You can't be sure of that."

"No? Well, did he track you down, Harry? Did he seek you out when he had the chance?"

"He might have found that difficult. I was living abroad."

"Yes. In Rhodes." Her look hardened. "I read about you in the papers. Six years ago, wasn't it? Something to do with a girl who disappeared on holiday."

With weary fatalism, Harry confronted the moment he had known was coming all along. The skeleton in his cupboard that was no skeleton at all. And yet so much more famous than the real ones. "Something, yes. But the press made more of the mystery than its solution. As they always do."

"Well, I shouldn't think the story made the American papers. And I didn't send David any cuttings. So he was probably blissfully unaware of your brush with notoriety."

"Iris, you can't think '

"How exactly did you end up in Rhodes? I'd always imagined you whiling away life as a council clerk."

"I left the Council five years after you moved to Manchester. Opened a car sales business in Maryborough Road with an old National Service chum, Barry Chipchase. Went bankrupt, I'm afraid." He decided not to mention his partner's treacherous role in the episode for fear he would not be believed. "After that, I worked for a marine electronics firm in Weymouth. The job fell through after a few years." The phrase was another triumph of reticence. He did not think Iris was ready to hear how he had been falsely accused of embezzlement. "A friend offered me a caretaking job at his villa on Rhodes around the same time, so .. ."

"This friend would have been the disgraced government minister Alan Dysart?"

"Yes. But he wasn't a minister then. And he hadn't been disgraced."

"How did you come to know him?"

"He worked for Barry and me when he was a student." Harry shifted awkwardly in his chair. "Look, where's all this getting us?"

"The present, Harry. Your present."

"I live at 78 Foxglove Road, Kensal Green. I have a flat on the first floor. My landlady and her cat live downstairs. I pay the rent by working part-time at a nearby garage. I get by. I live from day to day. I survive. What more do you want to know?"

"Never married?"

"Since you ask, yes. Just a few years ago."

"But you don't live together?"

"She moved to Newcastle to find a job. She has a cousin who's a solicitor there. He took her on as a secretary." Growing caution prevented Harry explaining that he had married Zohra in order to save her from being deported back to Sri Lanka. It had been an act of unambiguous generosity. But somehow he did not think it would sound like it. "That's enough about me. What about you? And David?"

She drank some tea, palpably playing for time before answering.