The Keys to the Street (14 page)

“He is just the sort of dog I’d expect you to have.”

“Why?”

“Small but strong, gentle and appealing, loving, childlike. Not
like
you but the sort of things you like. Am I right?”

“About the things I like or his being my dog?”

They had come into the living room and sat down. He had glanced at the work Mary had been doing on the Irene Adler brochure and she expected him to ask her about it, but instead he said, looking a little disconcerted, “Isn’t he yours?”

Raised eyebrows, a half smile, his hands deep in the dog’s fur. She had never seen such clear eyes, like glass, water in a smoked glass. He was in jeans this morning, a check shirt, a denim jacket. These boy’s clothes restored his youth.

“I am beginning to wish he was,” she said. “I’ve got very fond of him.”

“You’re looking after him for someone?”

“The owners of this house. Did you think this house was mine, Leo?”

He looked about the room, his eyes resting on a vase, a cabinet, then meeting hers again. “I suppose so. Isn’t it yours?”

“I’m looking after it for an old couple who are friends of my grandmother.”

He smiled. “The assumptions one makes!”

“They’ve gone on holiday to Central America and the United States. They’ve no children and no one to look after the house and the dog. My grandmother’s away too, but only for a couple of weeks. She lives in Hampstead and she’s not up to coming in here every day. She’s over eighty.”

“I’m glad you don’t own this house.”

“Why?”

He was serious now. A pair of frown lines appeared between his eyebrows. “You haven’t seen where I live. I thought you must be rich. I’ll tell you something. When I saw your address on the letter I almost didn’t reply.”

“Is that why it took you so long?”

It was a question, she now understood, that had bothered her for
weeks. Why he had waited, why he had condemned her to waiting for the post, to rushing to the phone when it rang. She just stopped herself saying, “So that’s why!”

“I wanted to reply, I wanted desperately to meet you. You still don’t fully realize the depths of my gratitude. But when I saw that address I was—well, deeply disappointed. Taken aback, that may be a better way to put it. I came down here, you know. I came one evening and sneaked a look at the house.”

“How devious,” she said lightly.

“I concluded you were rich and privileged. It was a natural assumption to make. You were rich and therefore not for me, never for me.”

“For
you
?” she said, the color flooding into her face.

“A figure of speech,” he said. “I’m sorry. Already I—I think of us as close. I can’t help it. You know what the Victorians used to say, flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone.”

“That was husbands and wives. That was the one flesh of the old marriage service.”

“They didn’t have transplants then.” His sidelong glance and half smile took away her discomfort. “It’s a lovely day. Where shall we have lunch?”

“You must let me give you lunch.”

“Why not? I will now I know you’re not rich.”

9

R
oman’s children had been fond of the British Museum. Elizabeth seemed to have passed her affection for it on to Daniel and several times they had accompanied him, both particularly attracted by Egyptian antiquities. It was the museum then that drew him when he felt the need to absent himself for a few days from his usual haunts, and he set up the nearest thing to a home he had on a doorstep in Russell Street.

The temperature had dropped and it was cold, but not cold like winter. He passed a lot of his time in Coram’s Fields, reading Bunin’s stories, which he bought in a secondhand shop in Theobald’s Road. One day, after a visit to the baths and an attempt at smartening up, he went into the museum, and on another, unprecedentedly, to the cinema. His flight from Regent’s Park had been brought about by the discovery of Decker’s body, though he had not known it was Decker then.

For a few minutes he and Effie had stood there, not looking at it, but aware more than they were aware of anything, that it was there. In spite of himself and in spite of what he thought of as his new toughness, the result of true street wisdom, Roman had felt his throat rise and the awful black weakness that precedes vomiting take hold of him. But he had turned his eyes from that hand with the clawed fingers, from those booted feet and the blackened blood on the railing, and looked up at the cold purity of the morning sky. And slowly, while he held on to Effie and she clutched him, the nausea had passed. Whatever Effie felt, trembling and pale, looking up at
him for help, also passed. He heard her sigh throatily.

The street was still deserted, the place still silent. Only now was the traffic beginning to swell in Wellington Road and its muted thunder to reach them. A van passed, its driver staring straight ahead.

“You go, Effie,” he said. “Go into the park. Go back through the churchyard into the park. And say nothing. You haven’t seen this. You haven’t been here. Say nothing.”

There was little fear of that. She could speak, but she seldom did more than mutter or curse passersby who cringed from her. He looked into her face. It was blank, snub-nosed, the eyes round and protuberant, the pink-brown skin smooth like a child’s. The woolen scarf that wrapped her head smelled of old damp sheep.

So ingrained was his middle-classness, his education, his
gentility
, that it was impossible for him ever to feel the same toward a woman as he had before he made love to her. Strange term for what had passed between him and Effie, but what other to use that would not also revolt his middle-classness? He and Effie, though in grotesque circumstances, had performed that act that must make him forever feel some tenderness for her. He could never be otherwise than aware of a bond between them, though she hadn’t spoken his name, was probably unaware of what it was.

He put his arms round her, hugged her tightly, and sent her off with a gentle push along the path. Then he too left the churchyard, uncertain what to do, uncertain whether to do anything. What he and Effie had seen on the railings back there he was very nearly sure no one else had seen before them. Except whoever had done this deed, always excepting him.

He tramped up St. John’s Wood High Street—the meaning of the word “tramp” had been made manifest to him this past year and a half—until he came to a phone box. There he calculated his chances. All calls could be quickly traced, he was sure of that, but he had his voice to rely on. An anonymous call made in the accent of Westminster
School and Cambridge would hardly lead police to the vagrant with his barrow.

He made his call. He reported a dead body impaled on the railings in Wellington Place. The second time they asked his name, he put the receiver back. Once, in the past, he had spent several nights asleep on the doorstep, under the Corinthian portico of the Connaught Chapel, once a church, now film studios—O times! O customs!—but it was too obvious, too open. Instead, in Ordnance Hill, in the garden of an empty house with uncurtained windows and a “sold” sign outside, he made his bed on concrete steps and rolled himself into his sleeping bag. Chilled and suddenly hungry, he was unable to sleep, and after a few minutes, perhaps ten, he heard the wail of sirens on police cars.

Later in the day, he crossed into the park by the Macclesfield Bridge. The canal walkways here were narrow lanes, for the embankments were so thickly overgrown as to be like woodland descending to the water. Planes and limes and hornbeams grew there, their trunks buried among the greenery and white fronds of cow parsley. Something less than two years ago he had brought the children here and told them how an earlier bridge had been destroyed when a gunpowder boat blew up underneath it in 1874. Now he stood on the center of the three segmental arches, looking down onto the narrow paving below him where police were questioning the jacks men. They were not in uniform, but he could tell they were police. Their denim jeans were pressed and their leather jackets glossy; they were well fed and they would not die at forty-seven.

Roman thought it foolish to mock or vilify the police, but he didn’t love them either. His taking to the streets had removed him from that law-abiding company whose side they are on to another society that lies beyond the pale and where the police are enemies. He watched one of the jacks men, a thin gray-faced Ulsterman he had once or twice talked to, go sluggishly off with the two policemen to the car parked up in Albert Road. To help in their inquiries, no
doubt, to be questioned until his meths-addled brain reached a point of incorrigible confusion.

The moment they spoke to him, Roman, they would know he was different. A crank, a dropout, therefore suspicious. His voice would alert them to his eccentricity while his clothes and barrow proclaimed his vagrant status. He walked on, going southward, through the park, out the other side into the Marylebone Road, across it and through what Dickens, he remembered, had called “the awful perspectives of Wimpole Street, Harley Street, and similar frowning districts.” Four or five days should do and then he would go back. The sky was gray and the ramparts of these tall Georgian houses gray too, not a tree in sight, the traffic a river of shiny metal running down to Cavendish Square.

When Saturday came he returned. In the sunshine of early June he came back into the park by the York Gate, turning immediately to the left, to the water’s edge and bobbing ducks, the tree-shaded lawns and the seats where Effie sometimes sat. But she was not there this morning. There was no one but the dog man with a borzoi, a beagle, and a golden retriever tugging on his leash.

•   •   •

They had gone out and had their lunch. He had let her pay for it, repeating his remark about its being all right because she wasn’t rich. Afterward they walked down to Covent Garden in the sunshine and listened to a students’ orchestra playing Mozart. The Flute and Harp Concerto, Leo said, the only one for these instruments Mozart wrote, composed for a rich patron and his daughter to play together. When the music stopped and the players began packing up their instruments, he had taken her hand. Not in a handshake but gently lifted as if he meant to bring it to his lips.

She looked at him, into his eyes, wondering with a small flutter of excitement, what next? What will he say next? What shall we do now?

He squeezed the hand he was holding, let it fall. “I’m going to leave you here.”

She almost thought she had misheard.

“I must go,” he said. “I have to meet my brother.”

Did he mean her to come too? “We can get the tube if you like.”

She fancied a note of impatience. “No, I thought I said. I have to meet my brother. Alone.” Then, belatedly, “Will you be all right?”

“Of course.”

Disappointment came later. At first she was only astonished at this sudden departure. A kiss on the cheek was to be expected, but he didn’t kiss her. She watched him go off in the direction of Floral Street and the tube, that casual loose-limbed walk of his, his thinness so that his bones showed through whatever he wore, his bright fair hair. He didn’t turn back to wave.

She was left to go home on her own at that worst time of the week to be alone, five on a Saturday afternoon. Walking back, at last getting into the tube herself, she reflected that he had said nothing about seeing her again, seeing her soon, phoning her. In an age when the merest business acquaintances kissed at a second meeting, he hadn’t kissed her.

She tried to think what she had said, done, implied, how she might have offended. Nothing came to mind.

I didn’t know it till now, she thought, but I want to see him again. I want to see him very much.

10

N
o man had ever brought her flowers before. She had believed it an outdated custom. Why did Alistair have to be the first? The flowers were carnations and that white stuff with myriad tiny blossoms whose name she could never remember.

Alistair had turned up without warning. There had been no more phone calls. She had even allowed herself to think there would be no more. He had given up, she had thought; perhaps he had met someone else.