The Keys to the Street (12 page)

He sat down on one of the seats, leaned back his head, and closed his eyes. Once he had been a man very conscious of comfort, one who chose a mattress with care, sparing no expense. Armchairs had to be
soft and have footrests. But in his wanderings he had lost all interest in comfort and scarcely noticed whether he lay down to sleep on paving stones or on the comparative luxury of a lawn.

After a while he was aware of the presence of someone else in the gardens. Not the police, that was not their tread. It was Effie’s footsteps that he heard. He opened his eyes. She came up to the seat and sat down on the other end of it, giving him a shy sideways glance, looking away, saying nothing. Only another dosser sits on the seat where a dosser already is.

She was quite a young woman, younger than he, though at first he had taken her for old. Her stoop made him think so, that and her wizened hands and thick bandaged legs. But when she took off the old cap she wore and unwound the woolen scarf from her head, it was a round unlined face he saw with a full vulnerable mouth and the ox eyes the Greeks said Hera had.

It was in his own first winter that he first encountered her, for she had been on the street a shorter time than he. A mild March had still been March, damp and by night very cold. In this same churchyard, though not on this same bench, she had sat beside him and as darkness came—it seemed like night, but it was only six—laid her hand first on his knee, then shifted it to close the fingers between his legs. Once he would have been shocked. He would have recoiled from her and left in haste. But a mild interest was all he felt, that and curiosity and a wonder that after long celibacy, after five months of banishing sexual thoughts, his flesh responded to this tramp woman’s touch and it was a full erection she held in her warm, surprisingly feminine hand.

Even then he had not shaken off his old, ingrained sense of superiority, of belonging to an elite, and as he moved with her onto her blanket spread on the grass, into the well of darkness between tombstones, it was a favor he felt he was doing her. He was being kind. He was enduring the earthy smell of her, the fishy smell, the burrowing of her hands, out of generosity. The unknown, dark, and
glutinous place into which he slid was honored by him; God knew what he risked, by this grace of his.

But when it was over and for the first time since he had known her he saw her smile, felt the arms that had gone round him squeeze in a hug, he understood in a blinding revelation that she believed
she
had been generous to
him
. Hers was a proud smile and the arms that held him almost maternal. Out of pity perhaps or empathy, she had given him the only thing she had to give. It was a lesson to him. He was ashamed. Only later, when she had left the churchyard, dragging her bundles, he recalled with a shiver of relief at whatever had reprieved him, how near he had been to paying her, to handing over a ten-pound note with a word of thanks.

Now, with Effie seated beside him again, he felt nothing of what he had once felt before he was married and encountered by chance and alone a woman with whom he had had a one-night stand: embarrassment, awkwardness, a threatening presence. The streets and the street people had changed him. Social graces and social inhibition had departed and with them the fear of what others might say or others might think. He would have no more sex with Effie, but it would cost him no embarrassment to tell her so or show her so. Turning his head, he smiled at her, and reaching into the bag in his barrow, said, “Do you want a drink? I’ve only got Coke.”

She shook her head. She was one of those who had bad days and, less often, good days, and he could tell from the way she contemplated her hands, turning them palms uppermost, then onto the palms and back again, muttering softly, that this day was bad. What it was she saw on her hands, blood perhaps, or a rash, stigmata or ineradicable dirt, he could not tell. The hands looked like any woman’s to him, but rough and prematurely aged. She turned them over and back, over and back, examining them more and more closely.

“I’m going to bed now,” he said. “I’m going to sleep.”

She turned her hands, looked at the dirty nails with the concentration
of a woman who has just painted hers and admires them.

“Good night, Effie.”

He would have been surprised if she had answered. She put her hands on her knees, then sat on them. She aimed a kick at one of her bundles as if it disgusted her, its weight, the need always to carry it, the ugly mud-green color of the plastic. The bundle rolled a few feet away along the path. Roman sometimes felt the streets were one vast sprawling psychiatric ward and he just as much an inmate as any of them.

He got up, walked for a little, and found himself a place to sleep between two flat granite slabs, from which the lettering had disappeared. The turf in there was composed of short grass and moss in equal proportions. Beyond the railings, lit now by the wash from yellow lamps, loomed the fronts of a huge block of flats, Byzantine, white and terra-cotta.

The traffic climbing up to Hampstead on the Lord’s side sounded like the sea, the tide coming in over a shingle beach. But in here now it might have been a country churchyard, Stoke Poges perhaps, quiet, serene, with that indefinable air of resignation and rest and deep peace that prevails in all places where graves are. Roman spread his groundsheet, for he had experienced the results of doing without one, and over it his sleeping bag. Into this he climbed and lay relaxed, looking out at the red brickwork and the white stucco between the long slender stems of churchyard weeds. He had long foregone the use of a pillow. Because it was appropriate he recited what he could remember of Gray’s Elegy.

Halfway through the next verse he fell asleep.

Darkness is not long enduring in May and dawn comes at five. It was growing light but not yet sunrise when Effie woke him, shaking his shoulders, her face close up to his face. At first he thought this was another overture she was making to him, though even by the standards of her world and his, it would have been a rough method.

“No, Effie,” he said. “No.” And because any excuse he might make or reason he might give would be false and a prevarication, he said, “That was just for once. No more of that.”

For answer, she seized hold of a bunch of his clothes, T-shirt and pullover that covered his right shoulder, and with her other hand flung out, pointed northward toward Wellington Place. It was a gesture melodramatic, almost Gothic, in intensity. Her face worked. She always found speech difficult, from some natural impediment or later trauma, and now she managed only, “On the rails! See the rails!”

He made an immediate association with trains. She must mean the Jubilee Line that passed underneath them on its way to St. John’s Wood station. He got to his feet, stretched his stiff legs, and flexed his arms. Sleeping outdoors sometimes felt good, but it left a dull numbness in the bones. One had a clear head but aching limbs and back. He rubbed his eyes. He followed Effie along the path where she preceded him with steps that flagged more and more until they stopped altogether.

“Where is it, Effie?”

She was shaking her head, not to deter him but as if the only hope for her was to deny what she had seen, what she wanted to show him.

“Where do you want me to go?”

She pointed. Her plump vulnerable face, turned to him with pleading in every feature, was full of grief. The finger she extended trembled. On an impulse he seized her hand and held it tightly in his own.

The sky was lightening, but here among the trees, in the dense boskiness, it was still dark, the shadows blacker than they ever are by day. She seemed to be leading him to the churchyard’s northern boundary. There was no sound of traffic, no wind blowing, only a heavy silence. He seldom saw the early morning, for he slept most deeply in those hours just before and just after dawn. The sky astonished him. It was a clear jewellike unclouded blue.

Effie clutched his sleeve. She pulled him up the path toward the main gate in Wellington Place that faces Cochrane Street. There, on the railings to the left of the gates, he saw it. The rails, she had said, the rails. Now he saw what she meant.

The man’s body seemed to be impaled on the spikes of the railing. The upper part of it hung head downward into Wellington Place and a single hand showed, half-clenched, clawlike. The lower part of the body was on this side, in the churchyard. Booted feet drooped and thin bony ankles showed below the ragged hems of dark dirty jeans. Effie began to make gibbering sounds, throwing her hands about. He hesitated, his heart beating fast. Then he went up to the railing, reached between the bars, and touched the dead man’s cold hand. That was how he knew he was dead, because the hand was so cold.

He fancied he recognized the face but he couldn’t be sure. The clothes that were nearer to rags showed him to be one of the street people. There was never any mistaking that.

When he saw the place where the spike had entered the body and the blood, now dry and black, encrusting spike, rags, and wound, he turned away from that tower of silence and looked instead up at the clear, blue, remorseless sky.

8

M
ost callers at the Irene Adler that day and the next and the next came to ask directions to the site of the murder. They bought entrance tickets but few of them lingered. It was the murder scene they wanted and to waste no time getting there.

“Turn left into St. John’s Wood Terrace, left again into the High Street, and take the first turning on your right. You’ll know it by the scene-of-crime tapes.”

Mary and Dorothea could have recited that formula in their sleep, though neither of them had been to look at the site. If for nothing else, it was good for business. Apart from the direction seekers, there was a troop of tourists who had come on from Wellington Place, anxious to sample what else was on offer in the neighborhood, first the boutiques of St. John’s Wood High Street, the cafés for a drink, then the Irene Adler, finally the murder site to round off a day’s entertainment.

“I shall throw up,” said Dorothea, “if anyone else tells me that poor devil died of knife wounds and the spike was just incidental decoration.” Mary was squeamish and disliked hearing about it, even in reported speech, but it had not occurred to her to feel nervous about walking through the churchyard or the park. The visitors did their best to make her afraid.

“I wouldn’t set foot in the park now,” said a woman in the Hat Room. “Alone or accompanied. Not even with my Great Dane. You’re asking for trouble if you take a shortcut that way.”

“But it didn’t happen in the park,” said Mary.

“Not that one, no. But how do you know the next one won’t?” The woman began closely examining a rose-colored hat swathed in pink ostrich feathers. “Women were safer in those days, weren’t they? Not allowed out much, protected, respected by men, always in a carriage.”

Mary wanted to say, not if you were working class and how about Jack the Ripper, but she didn’t. It seemed unlikely that anyone who chose to kill one of the meths drinkers from the canal bank would single her out as his next victim. When she had first heard of the murder she had thought at once of the man she had met in the park, and then she remembered the morning she had found him waking up on the Irene Adler doorstep. It was absurd the way she found herself hoping quite desperately that the corpse on the railings was not him. A photograph in the evening paper was no help. One dark-haired bearded man looks very like another and this blurred print gave no more clues to identity than his name: John Dominic Cahill.

“Irish,” said the woman, now studying a black hat with a white egret apparently flying from its crown. “I suppose one mustn’t be prejudiced.”

Mary wondered if it was she or some other visitor to the Irene Adler who had left behind, by accident or perhaps sinister design, a sheet of paper listing crimes reported in the park during the previous year and the year before that. Stacey found it on the counter, lying beside the guides.

“One grievous bodily harm, three actual bodily harms,” read Dorothea aloud. “Two assaults on the police, two indecent assaults, four indecent exposures—why tell
us?
—nine cases of criminal damage, seven cases of misuse of drugs, sixteen burglaries. But last year there weren’t any bodily harms or assaults on the police and only five criminal damages but
thirteen
misuses of drugs.”

“It doesn’t seem very much, any of it,” Mary said. “Not in a year.”

She walked home by her accustomed route. As on this evening
and the one before that, she was hoping to see the man that in her own mind she called Nikolai. She had read in the paper, among the many stories about vagrants and beggars that had appeared, that the street people all had nicknames. Whether this was true she didn’t know, but she named the bearded man Nikolai from that moment because that was Gogol’s name and he had been reading
Dead Souls
.