Talking to Strange Men (38 page)

‘I have to warn you I never make comments on the weather, however extreme.'

Charles smiled, saying nothing. He hoped the cinema would be crowded. They were directed into what was no more than a large room, carpet-lined, air-conditioned, claustrophobic – and empty. It was Charles's first moment of real fear. He had the sensation that he wouldn't have been able to get out if he had wanted to, of the doors having been locked behind them, though this of course must be nonsense. Their tickets were not numbered and Peter Moran chose to sit four rows from the front and in the centre. That at any rate was better than being at the side up against the wall. A curtain of black velvet with a gold pattern on it hung in front of the screen. It was silent when they entered but as soon as they sat down music of the popular classical kind began playing and Charles couldn't escape the rather uneasy conclusion that it had only started on account of their presence.

It wasn't the sort of cinema where they sold ice cream and soft drinks. Peter Moran had brought a bag of wrapped chocolates with him and these he passed to Charles while he talked about Rossingham. He talked about starting at Rossingham and the people he knew there and Pitt House and the man who was housemaster there before Mr Lindsay. Charles knew that this was what it was all about, it must be. This had to be the object of the exercise. Sooner or later Peter Moran was going to tell him some vital fact and he sensed too that he would know it immediately he heard it. But he couldn't help noticing Peter Moran's smell. He smelt
very clean, of soap and possibly even some sort of cologne. And he had washed his hair which stood out soft and yellow with ragged split ends – with a mother like Charles's you observed that kind of thing – and which also smelt scented.

Just before the lights dimmed three more people came in. Being English, they sat as far away from each other and from Charles and Peter Moran as was possible. The curtain was swept aside and the ads and previews, followed by a cartoon, began. Charles felt better having the other people there. The lights came up again and Peter Moran excused himself to go to the men's. Charles hoped the other people would note his appearance and Peter Moran's just in case anything happened and he went missing and they needed witnesses. He stared into the faces of the two behind him, trying to give them a good view. Peter Moran came back and at last the Japanese picture started, almost an hour after they had come in.

It seemed darker in the cinema than during the cartoon. The film was not dubbed but sub-titled and there was not even much of that, for on the whole the characters, of whom there were dozens, didn't talk. It was beautiful to look at, Charles could see that, and there was some elaborate stylized dancing but just the same it was incomprehensible. Peter Moran seemed fascinated by it. Not so absorbed though as to keep from putting his arm lightly round Charles's shoulders. The arm was only on the back of his seat at first. When he felt the hand touch him, though he was expecting it, he couldn't help a sort of leaping flinch. But he controlled himself, he made himself relax. And then he could almost feel the gratitude in the hand, the fingers pressing with relief at not being flung furiously away.

In this small auditorium it was quite cold. The air conditioning created the temperature of an autumn day. Charles was rather glad of the cold, of feeling he wasn't wearing quite enough clothes, for it distracted him from his revulsion and his gradually increasing fear. Soon, he thought, he would start shivering. The film was fairly noisy, with drum beats and strange music and the clash of weapons if not with talk, but Charles could hear an occasional heavy rumbling as well. If this had been about the Second World
War or Vietnam or something like that he would have thought it gunfire. Then there came a crash like a bomb and Charles knew it was thunder, outside and not in the film, that he was hearing.

The film seemed interminable. In a lighter sequence, the screen lit with Japanese sunshine, Charles looked at his watch and saw that it was already past eight. By the time they got out of here it would be getting dark. The thought horrified him. But then, before another five minutes had gone by, without any apparent warning in the story, it was all over and the lights were coming on. Peter Moran's arm had been quickly withdrawn.

‘Strange stuff,' he said, ‘or was it all crystal clear to you?'

‘I couldn't follow it at all.'

‘I'm sorry about that. My mistake.
Mea culpa
, as housemaster Lindsay might say. Should I have taken you to
A Hundred and One Dalmatians
?'

They were leaving the Fontaine and a brilliant lightning flash, followed by a clap of thunder sounding like wooden planks tossed on to a concrete floor, cut off Charles's answer. True to his claim never to speak of the weather, Peter Moran said:

‘I expect you're hungry. I've got something to eat in the car. I mean I brought it with me. As I may have told you, I'm an impecunious beggar, erratically supported by my woman who sometimes lets a few crumbs fall in my direction.'

Charles had eaten nothing since his lunch but the two Yorkies washed down with a cup of tea someone had given him at the garage and two of Peter Moran's chocolates. He wasn't in the least hungry though, he felt very slightly sick, his throat gagging. As they crossed the road, passing the front of Pentecost Villas, the first drops of rain began to fall, making big black circular splashes on the pavement. Once he got into that car, he thought, he would have no control at all over his movements. Peter Moran could drive them anywhere, out into the country perhaps, to some remote place of heath or woodland. And by then it would be dark.

The car was now in sight and Charles had a premonition Peter Moran would suggest they run for it before the rain
came on harder. He thought of the safe house, empty, supplied with candles, well known to him and not known at all to Peter Moran. A truly ‘safe' house in that it contained rooms into which one could if necessary lock oneself.

‘I used to live there,' he said. ‘My family used to live there. We moved out because they're going to turn it into flats. The middle one was our house.'

Peter Moran had a parking ticket stuck under one of the windscreen wipers. He tore it off, cursing. He hadn't put enough money in to last from five till six-thirty when metering ended. Opening the car door and feeling inside, he said:

‘Who lives there now?'

‘Nobody lives there now. I've got a key.'

‘Have you now?' Peter Moran looked at him. It was a strange look, Charles couldn't have said what it expressed, but he didn't like it. He didn't like the tightening of the facial muscles and the moistening of those pale lips with a curiously pale tongue. ‘Are you saying we could go in there and eat our grub? Shelter from the rain?' He began to smile. ‘Better than a car, maybe?'

‘We have to go in the back way,' said Charles.

Peter Moran removed from the back of the car a half-full carrier bag from which the neck of a wine bottle protruded.

‘Tuck,' he said. ‘You'll have to see if they still call it tuck at Rossingham. I get the impression you rather like hearing me talk about Rossingham, don't you?'

‘Very much.'

The rain began in earnest as they turned the corner into Fontaine Road. As the thunder receded to grumble softly in the distance, the heavens seemed to open.

‘Can we run for it?'

‘Sure,' said Charles.

He opened the gate into that wilderness of a garden. The back of the house reared up like a cliff. Lightning flared and showed them a rampart with blank or broken windows, a peeling facade hung with dying creeper. Charles went ahead knowing he must get there first so that Peter Moran wouldn't see he didn't actually have a key. Some deft deceiving finger movements were made and the door pushed open.

Down here it was pitch dark but there were candles in the table drawer and matches beside them. Charles lit the candles and pocketed the matches. He felt the knife there, the small useless penknife.

‘You come here often, I can see that,' said Peter Moran.

‘We'll go upstairs. It's nicer upstairs.'

Charles led the way. It grew lighter as they climbed. He held two candles and Peter Moran one. The rain roared on the windows, throbbing through the house. Charles was quite wet, his shirt sticking to him and water dripping from his hair. The first thing he looked for on the threshold of the big room where the furniture was, was the key. He looked on the inside of the door and the outside but the key wasn't there.

‘Nice place you have here,' Peter Moran said, holding his candle aloft and looking round. ‘I particularly like the day bed.'

The long windows shimmered and looking out of them was like looking into an aquarium, flowing water only, streams of water, and distantly beyond it, dark blueness and a goldfish speck of light. A stuffy dusty warmth made Charles feel he was steaming. The food and drink was tumbled out on to the metal garden seat, a couple of wrapped pies, biscuits, a can of Coke. Peter Moran felt the wine bottle and pronounced it warm.

‘But I don't suppose you have a fridge?'

Charles shook his head. The place was subtly different. It was changed, things had gone, two of the chairs, for instance. The long ragged pink curtains and as far as he could see most of the cobwebs had gone. And the keys had gone. Unless they were inside the doors, and London Central had never kept them inside, all the keys on this floor were gone.

‘You're soaking wet,' Peter Moran said.

‘So are you.'

‘I could dry you on my jacket. I've got a jacket in here.'

In the bottom of the carrier, a woolly thing. Charles closed his eyes and felt a sinking of the heart, of more than that, as if all the organs of his body dropped, at his folly in coming in here, in coming up here. The cataracts flowing down the glass seemed to close them in more firmly than mere bricks
and windows. He could see beyond the waterfall something green and distant winking on and off. The woolly folds of Peter Moran's sweater, sheep-smelling as soon as it absorbed the water, enveloped his head. Hands began a gentle rubbing. The two candles on the arms of the metal seat burnt with elongated steady flames. Their shadows were cast long and black, a Frankenstein monster, thin and stretched, Peter Moran looked like, grasping in its paws some hydrocephalic creature, strangling it perhaps or punching its wobbly head.

Charles broke free but not in a panicky way. He pushed his fingers through his damp hair, smoothing it. Peter Moran was very close to him, looking at him without actually touching him. He said:

‘Come and sit down. We can have the food.'

He sat on the rotting silk cover of the chaise longue, patted the seat beside him. Charles felt himself creep to it, feeling his way as if he were blind.

‘Come here.'

No power on earth, no act of will or need could have made Charles move nearer. The rain had become even more violent and the crashing it made against the facade and windows of the house gave Charles the illusion it was in his own head, his blood roaring. Peter Moran shifted up close to him, said in a bashful nervous monotone:

‘When I was about your age and starting at Rossingham I was very lonely, I felt alone and abandoned. I was very happy at home and I didn't want to go away to school. I couldn't settle in at Rossingham, no one seemed to like me and I didn't like anyone.'

Charles was thinking about upstairs, about getting out on to the roof. It was quite possible, Mungo and probably Graham too had done it. You went up through the trap into the loft, pulling the ladder up behind you, and out of the loft on to the slates through a sort of hatch . . .

‘There was this gardener at Rossingham, a groundsman I suppose you'd call him. Just an ordinary working man, young you know, about twenty. He was kind to me, he was loving to me – do you know what I mean?' Peter Moran's voice was breathy and excited. ‘I'm talking about physically
loving. I made him happy and after a bit I was happy too, I wasn't lonely any more.'

‘I'm not lonely,' Charles said, his voice coming out as a squeak, babyish, terrified.

He was curiously hypnotized, unable to take his eyes off Peter Moran's pale windowed unblinking eyes. A paralysis held him still, listening to the sounds that might be the noises of storm or his own blood beating. Yet there was still a cold intellectual core somewhere a very long way inside him, a mind that said, is this it? Is this what I am supposed to discover? Peter Moran put out his hand and laid it on Charles's thigh. It burned through his jeans like a hot iron and he jumped up, grabbed one of the candles and ran to the door. The flame streamed and the shadows flew like a flock of monstrous birds. Peter Moran shouted:

‘Ian, come back!'

Charles was out of the door and running up the last flight. Hot wax poured down the candle and the flame guttered. Peter Moran came out of the room holding the other candle. At the top of the steep stairs Charles leapt across the landing to the open door, the keyless door, and his candle went out. He turned, dreadfully at bay, the rooms, the doors, useless to him. Peter Moran stood two stairs from the top, lit by the flame he held, his own features and his glasses casting shadows on his face, and a great black shadow of the whole of him stark on the wall behind.

‘You little devil. What the hell do you think you're doing?'

Charles's hand crushed the matchbox in his pocket. His thumb flicked out one of the small blunt blades of the penknife. In the light from the single candle he could see wound round the cleat the rope that held the heavy double ladder close up to the ceiling. The worn bit on the rope showed, no one had replaced it. Charles pulled the knife out of his pocket. He dropped the candle and the saucer broke. Peter Moran was looking at the knife and somehow Charles could see he thought he was going to throw it. He came up one stair. He said:

‘Give me that.'