Talking to Strange Men (5 page)

Her expression was a little puzzled because he was staring at her. Quickly he looked away, turned back to the shelves. He didn't want to go out with her, it would be boring and embarrassing. And he would end up telling her about Jennifer. My wife's former fiancé turned up out of the blue and she went off with him. Poor you, how awful for you. But she would be embarrassed too, not knowing what to say. He sometimes thought he would never be alone with another woman for as long as he lived. The books were heavy but he made a detour to cats' green just the same. A thin kitten, white with tabby patches, was sitting in the grass at the foot of the central pillar. It retreated a little, mewing, when John came up. He didn't dare touch it in case it started him off coughing and sneezing. The message had gone from inside the upright but a strip of tape remained, one end still stuck to the metal.

It had been a better day than when he was last here. The clocks would go forward on Saturday night and then you would really feel spring had come. There was already a hint of warmth in the air, what his father would have called a balminess, though that sounded strange to John, as if the weather had gone mad. A blue sky showed between the flocks of cloud and from the end of the alley next to the disused church he saw the glint of water. He had walked down here almost without knowing it. A young woman was pushing a child in a pram in the direction of Albatross Street but otherwise there was no one. She was going John's way and it would have been natural for him to follow her but then he thought, it might scare her to have a man walking behind her. It's a bit rough down here and not another soul about. He turned in the opposite direction, heading straight for the embankment and river walk, and found himself suddenly, almost before he knew it, at the head of the Beckgate Steps where Cherry's body had been found.

Immediately it came to him that he had told himself he would know the place by a kind of instinct or intuition, no matter how it had changed. Well, it had changed, it had
changed unrecognizably, only the broad flight of ancient steps remaining as they had always been. The red-brick chapel had gone and the ruined maltings been rebuilt, the huddle of Victorian cottages transformed into a wholesale clothes place and the once-derelict pub refurbished and renamed – and he had not known it. But the steps were the same and the remoteness and the quiet, for the wholesaler's was closed for the evening and the pub not yet open.

At the foot of the steps, beyond the stone-flagged embankment, the river glittered with innumerable wavelets. A segment of it only could be seen with the further bank beyond, trees on that side and blocks of expensive flats with protuberant balconies on every floor. The sun was shining but no sunlight penetrated to the double flight of shallow dark steps. They were made of some kind of black and grey mottled stone those steps, and with an iron railing on each side, polished to silver by the hands of those who descended. He felt a nervous clutching sensation in the region of his heart. He knew his face had contorted, that he had screwed up his eyes, and he was glad there was no one to see him. It was sixteen years since he had been here. All that time he had lived no more than a mile away but he had never returned to this spot. It was right to do so now, he felt that. He couldn't shy away from it for ever.

Slowly, holding on to the gleaming handrail, he made his way down the steps to the bottom of the first flight. For it was on this ten-foot-long break in the staircase or landing, so to speak, not on the steps proper that Cherry had been found. Two weeks afterwards, when the steps were open to the public once more, when the police barriers had been taken away, he had gone there alone to look at the place and imagined how it had been, the body face-downwards, the arms flung out, the legs drawn up towards the red-brick wall. His kind, loving, ugly sister, nineteen years old . . .

John found that he was squatting down, staring at the blackish stones as if he expected still to find there some signs of Cherry's murder. There had been no signs even then. And in two of the intervening winters, before they built the weir, the river rose and water came up the Beckgate Steps as far
as the half-way mark. He jumped up and ran down the steps to the river walk, swinging his bag full of books.

After a few moments he was aware of relief. It had been right to do that, not to go on shunning the place. Going there and looking at it provided a kind of cleansing. Were there other areas in his life, his past, that would benefit from the same treatment? Jennifer, of course, he was going to have to look at all that and decide what he must do. Not give up, not take that defeatist line, but make up his mind how he was going to get her back.

The boldness of this made him shiver as he walked along, though the sun was quite warm and there was scarcely a breath of wind. Her departure had been such a blow – like the physical stroke his father had had, only this was a stroke of the mind – coming as it did when he believed everything was working out for the two of them, just when he was really learning about love-making, when they were learning together how to please each other. John's own thoughts embarrassed him and he would have shirked them but he forced himself to keep on the same tack. It was partly humiliation, he supposed, that had made him sink under the blow, feel that his life was ruined and there was no hope. All he ever did about it was go and stand outside her house and look and wait and wonder if he would catch a glimpse of her. He had never till now considered it might be possible to re-make his marriage. Instead he had looked for external consolation – not what most men would mean by that, some other woman, but in the mystery of cats' green and the messages of a mini-Mafia.

In the light of this, it was extraordinary to find the letter waiting for him on the doormat when he entered his house. The name and address were typewritten and it had come through the post. At first he thought it was an estimate from the builder he had asked to renew the guttering on the rear of the house and he did not open it until he had made himself a cup of tea and opened a can of ravioli for his supper.

The letter was typewritten too. It started Dear John. He knew what a ‘Dear John' letter was but there hadn't been one waiting for him when she left. Face to face she had told him, she had been honest and brave. She had talked to him
and told him everything. He began to read: ‘Dear John . . .' and thought that this was the first letter she had ever written to him. They had been married for two years but she had never had occasion to write to him. That came only – ironically – when they were apart and their marriage apparently over.

It hurt him that she had typed it, though he remembered her handwriting was more or less indecipherable. If he hadn't seen letters of hers before at least he had seen notes to tradesmen.

Dear John,

I don't know if you will be surprised to get a letter from me. I saw you outside this house back in January and, incidentally, Peter saw you too. It would have been civilized to invite you in, I know that, and we did discuss it but by the time I came to the front door you had gone.

John, I think we ought to meet and have a talk. I expect you hate me and think I treated you badly. You would feel more kindly towards me perhaps if you knew how terribly guilty I have felt all these months. It's no use saying that I did warn you, I did say that if Peter ever came back and wanted me I would go to him. Obviously this isn't the sort of thing one should say when one is married. And I'll admit now that it was a stupid and unkind thing to say. I also seem to remember saying that when you get married in a Registrar's Office as we did you don't actually have to make any vows. I'd like to apologize here and now if I made you unhappy saying those things.

So can we meet? Emotions surely won't run so high as they did when we talked last time. I am no longer on the crest of a wave and I expect – I'm afraid, oddly enough – you no longer feel about me the way you once did. There are many kinds of love and I would like to think we can still be fond of one another, that we can pick up the pieces and each of us start again.

I'd rather you didn't phone me. I'll tell you what I'd like us to do. Not for you to come here or me to go to you but for us to meet in Hartlands Gardens, have tea
there perhaps and maybe go for a walk. You took me there in April once and I remember you said it was a good time when the narcissi are out.

So if you agree, what about next Saturday, i.e. April 2nd? Peter will be out that afternoon. I will be at Hartlands Gardens in the tea place, the cafeteria, at three. Will that be all right?

I don't know how to sign this really.

Yours affectionately,

Jennifer

He read it several times, his heart behaving oddly at first, beating hard and irregularly, it seemed, then as he took deep breaths, he gradually accustomed himself to what was in front of him, a letter from Jennifer, a letter from his wife. She had been going to invite him in, she wanted to see him. If he hadn't been such a fool and rushed away he would have talked to her, sat with her . . . Of course Peter Moran would have been there too. His eye once more followed the lines of typing down the page.

She wanted to see him alone. She made a point of saying she wanted to see him when Peter Moran was out. Did that mean she wanted to meet him without Peter knowing? It must do.

John didn't keep much liquor in the house. He wasn't much of a drinker and Jennifer hadn't been much of a drinker, though both of them would have a beer in a pub or a sherry before dinner in a restaurant. But he always kept a bottle of brandy and for that old cliché reason, medicinal purposes. He kept the brandy in the cabinet just as he kept aspirins in the medicine chest. The bottle was three-quarters full. John poured a single measure into an ordinary water glass and drank it down. It made him choke a bit as well as steadying him.

His tea had got cold. He poured it down the sink. It was quite plain that, wasn't it, about picking up the pieces and starting again? Surely she was saying that after what had happened they could never feel quite the same about each other, the starry-eyedness would be gone, but there were
many kinds of love, the quiet mature sort which might be as good as passion – which might be better in the long run.

I dare not think of it like that, he thought, I dare not build on it. She says she's sure I've ceased to care for her, she's reminding me how she always threatened to return to Peter Moran if he turned up. And that nonsense about not making vows. I didn't need to make vows. I won't think about it. I'll go to Hartlands Gardens, of course I will, but I won't think about it between now and then. The unaccustomed brandy affected him, making his hands unsteady. He spilt the tomato sauce from the ravioli can on to the counter and he burned the toast. He wasn't hungry anyway.

The trouble was he couldn't distract his mind from her letter. Why had she said not to phone her? Because she didn't want Peter to answer the phone or even to overhear what was said? It could only mean one thing: that she wanted to come back to him but was hedging her bets. She wanted to make sure she could come back to him before separating herself from Peter . . .

John tried to think of the weekend ahead. He tried to think of Cherry, to remember her, and of Mark who had been engaged to her. It was time he saw old Mark, someone had told him he had moved back here. Why not find out where Mark lived and suggest they meet for a drink? He could go round to Colin's tomorrow and maybe take in a visit to his aunt's, have Sunday lunch there. He stood by the window, looking out into the street he had looked on to since he was a small child. It was hard for him to imagine any other outlook from a window where one lived, anything but the pairs of houses opposite, the monkey puzzle pine in front of the fourth house on the left that he had seen planted when he was eight and which was now a large, ugly, ridiculous but somehow endearing tree. The pink prunus was shedding its petals and they lay like rosy snow, half-covering the scillas. She remembered about the narcissi in Hartlands Gardens and remembered he had first taken her there in April. She must mean this projected meeting as a reunion . . . Stop thinking about it, he said fiercely and aloud. On the seat of the armchair in the bay he had dropped the string bag full of books as, letter in hand, he had walked first of
all into this room. The two Le Carrés, the Philby book, a novel by Disraeli he didn't think he would get round to reading, Rider Haggard's
Allan's Wife
as a substitute for the
King Solomon's Mines
that wasn't in.

John realized that these days before he started on a book he always subjected the first and last lines to the code test. This got to mean he read the last line but he had never been one of those readers who cares about a surprise ending. He tested the six code words in the first message against the first lines of
The Honourable Schoolboy.
Nothing, the merest nonsense.

There are literally millions of books they could have used, he told himself. You'll never find the right one.

MUNGO SAT UP
in his room under the eaves looking at a document headed FTELO –
For the Eyes of Leviathan Only
. Between the end of last year's spring term and the beginning of this one they had secured: advance information on three planning applications, discovered four instances of quite amazing police leaks, recovered fifteen ‘borrowed' books, abstracted any number of architects' plans, rearranged restaurant bookings, secured invitations to a number of official functions, and more or less reorganized to suit their own purposes the plans for the city's annual festival of arts. Not to mention all kinds of rather more frivolous exercises. Since then though, during the past term, things had proceeded less satisfactorily. Undisputed success was a thing of the past.

He was eating dry-roasted peanuts, having an idea they were better for him than chocolate. Nothing gave him spots or did anything to change his extreme gauntness but he sometimes wondered if it was all this eating between meals that helped him to grow so tall. He had some yogurt-coated
hazelnuts as well but these he was saving until after he came back.