The Keys to the Street (21 page)

She was looking at herself in the mirror, at that phenomenon of the reddening cheek, watching the color die away, when the doorbell rang. For once she didn’t speculate as to who it might be. She heard a taxi move off as she was opening the door.

Leo stood on the doorstep, paler than she had ever seen him, even his lips drained of color.

“I’ve been in the hospital,” he said. “I didn’t want you to know.”

The explanation she should have thought of but hadn’t. “But why not, Leo?”

He hesitated. “May I come in?”

“Of course. Of
course
.” She remembered what Dorothea had said, but she couldn’t help herself. “I’m so glad to see you.”

He came in diffidently. She closed the door. Already she was wondering how she could have listened to Dorothea’s reasoning, could have doubted her own judgment.

“I felt I’d failed you,” he said. “I’d let you down. You’ve done so much for me and I’d reneged on you. I’d been overdoing things, apparently. I know I had, I’m well aware of it. But you must be able to guess why I had.”

She shook her head.

“How shall I put it? I don’t want to upset you, Mary.” He paused and seemed to be thinking what to say that would not be hurtful. “I’ve been overexerting myself because I’d met you,” he said. “There. I’ve said what I’ve been afraid to say. I so wanted to be a—a normal man for you.”

“Leo …” She took both his hands in hers.

He let them lie passively. His eyes were bright, too bright, as with fever. “I was going to—well, to let things slide between us. Slip away out of your life, if you understand me. It means so much to me that
you should never see me as ungrateful or indifferent, but at the same time, I’d rather you felt that than that—you—you saw your donation had been in vain.”

“But you’ve said you’re all right. You’ve said—I think you’ve said—the leukemia hasn’t come back.”

“I didn’t know that when they took me in.” He turned his face away. “I was so afraid, Mary.”

She tightened her grip on his limp hands. This time he made her a small return of pressure. “Then your letter came. You’d said very little, but I think I knew what your grandmother meant to you. I couldn’t any longer stay away.”

Their faces were very close. He reached a little forward and kissed her on the lips. It was just such a kiss as she might have given him in the unimaginable situation of her making the first advance, light, gentle, dry but lingering. He put his arms round her and held her close to him in a brotherly hug. She felt his bones through the meager flesh, birdlike, fragile. A pulse in his neck was beating fast. Still holding her shoulders, but feather-lightly, in a ghost’s clasp, he looked into her face.

“I am afraid to say too much, Mary. When you’ve been ill, like I have, when you’ve been so near death and thought you were near death again, your emotions get very—very febrile, very wild and hot, you think and fancy all sorts of things. But you mustn’t—
I
mustn’t—express them too soon. I have to keep telling myself, there
is
time, I
have
got years ahead.”

Leo went into the living room and sat on the sofa, perfectly still, as if in a trance. Unusually for him, he put out no hand to fondle the little dog as it pressed itself against his legs. He said in a curiously intense tone, “Tell me about your grandmother. Tell me all about her and your childhood and everything.”

It was what she had wanted. She began talking to him of things never previously aired. The idea of telling Alistair of the day when, newly orphaned but not yet knowing it, she had been brought to her
grandparents, how she had felt, was unthinkable. But she could tell Leo, who sat listening intently, his eyes sometimes meeting hers, his lips sometimes parting in a smile. She spoke of those early days. Frederica had seemed old, but when you are eight all grownups seem old. Children are quickly won over and a devotion in them is easily awakened. The oddest thing was that from the first Frederica was nicer than her own mother had been.

“It seems disloyal. It’s something people don’t say, that their adoptive parents were better than their natural parents. But mine were. My parents were very young, my mother was only twenty-one when I was born. They only married because I was going to be born. And afterward they wanted to go on living the same sort of life they always had. I think my mother must have resented me. I remember her as indifferent and rather rejecting. Why am I telling you all this?”

“Because I asked you.”

“And that’s enough? Maybe it is. My parents died when someone’s private plane they were flying in from an airfield in Essex to France came down in the Channel. I was unhappy at first, of course I was. I think my grandparents were very unhappy, they’d lost their only child, but they never showed it to me. She was called Helen, my mother. That’s why I took the name when I had to write that note for you. Guilt, I expect it was, though, not love.

“I loved my grandparents. I adored my grandmother. And, you know, the air crash, which was so terrible for them and supposed to be for me—I once overheard a woman say to my grandmother that it was the great tragedy that had blighted my childhood—it was romantic, it was something to have and almost to boast about, it set me apart in a rather dashing way from the other girls at school. If some power, some genie, had asked me if I would like my parents back, I’d have said no. But I’d never have told anyone; I’d have been ashamed.”

“But you’re not ashamed to tell me?”

“No. Strange, isn’t it?”

He said, “I want you to think you can tell me anything. I want to be the person you can talk to.” He stood up, a little unsteadily, she thought, and for a moment he put his hand on his forehead. “I must go now. May I come back tomorrow?”

“I’ve tired you,” she said.

“No. You’re the last person to tire me. You refresh me.” He spoke like a child, a very young boy. “Can I have a proper kiss?”

She nodded. He put his arms round her and kissed her, but very softly, very gently. His mouth tasted of some scented spice, cinnamon perhaps or cardamom. Afterward she thought it had been like no other kiss she had ever known, and if she had had to explain what she meant she would have said it was nonphysical, like a kiss in the mind, or like kissing someone not of this world, a wraith, a spirit, a ghostly visitant.

“You will come back?” she said eagerly.

“I promise.”

He looked less ill the next day, though his thinness was extreme. She had the illusion that she could see through him as he passed through the hall and came into the living room, could see the shapes of furniture and the colors of cloth through his transparent form. They drank wine and she made lunch for them. He told her about his feelings for his brother.

“I love him and he loves me,” he said. “Does that sound terrible to you, coming from a man?”

“Of course it doesn’t.”

“He’s done everything for me. Given up everything too. He was at drama school, he’s a wonderful actor, but he gave that up to be with me every day when I was so ill, so that I’d never be alone. He’s been more than a father to me.”

“I’d like to meet him.”

He didn’t answer that but said rather abruptly, “I’m moving out, I’m getting a place of my own.”

“But why, if you get on so well?”

“Because it’s not fair on him, Mary. I drag him down. I spoil his privacy. Besides, it’s his place but he gives up the bedroom to me and sleeps on the sofa.”

He had found a flat in Primrose Hill, in Edis Street, no more than a room with kitchen area and shower really, but it would do. She searched her mind for ways of putting it, finally came out with, “Leo, I’m going to be quite rich. My grandmother left me a lot of money. If there is anything I could—”

He cut her short. It was like that first time when he had reacted so peremptorily to her offer of paying her share of the bill. “Absolutely not. Please don’t even think of it.”

They had left the table and were once more side by side on the sofa, Gushi at their feet.

“I very much dislike the idea of your being rich,” Leo said. There was an unprecedented distaste in his voice, though rather than rising in volume it had sunk almost to a whisper. “You may say that it’s none of my business but—but I want things about you to be my business, Mary.”

He looked deep into her eyes. She felt her face flood with color. Seeing the flush, he put up one finger to touch her cheek. The other hand followed. He took her face in his hands and kissed her with the gentleness of a woman kissing a child. Then, when she was unresistant, he began a soft delicate kissing, his lips on hers, then brushing her cheek, the tip of her nose, her mouth once more. The gentleness of it, the slowness, aroused her. She expected every moment a crushing embrace, hard lips, a tongue that prized her mouth open and reached chokingly, like some surgical probe, for the back of her throat. Leo kissed her lips and stroked her cheek. Her body, which she now felt to have been stiff and tense for weeks, the muscles held rigidly, began to slacken and melt.

“There is something I would very much like to do,” he whispered.
“May I ask you? If you say no, we’ll just go on sitting here, but if you say yes …”

“What is it, Leo?”

“I would like to lie down and hold you. That’s all, just hold you.”

She nodded.

“I mean just hold you,” he said. “Not anything more.” He gave a dry unhappy laugh. “That has to be all, I think.”

They went upstairs. He seemed quite unselfconscious when he took off his outer clothes. She looked at a skeletal but still beautiful body, straight, smooth, as white as her own. It would have seemed ridiculous, in anticipation or retrospect, to go to bed with a man in her underclothes, he in underpants, she in bra and tights, but in the present, as a happening, it was natural. She wondered where he had received the transplant but could see no mark on him.

In bed he held her in his arms. She had always found this position a difficult one with Alistair, for if maintained for more than a few minutes, the arm under his body would “go to sleep,” as would his under her, while the other possibility, that of embracing him with one arm and folding the other behind her, brought an intolerable ache to her shoulder. But Leo held her without demanding that she hold him. She laid one arm across his chest, the other on her own breasts. He held her firmly but not tightly, and if the arm under her body grew numb he gave no sign of it. He did not speak. She had to remind herself that he was six years younger than she, for he held her as an innocent father might hold his child.

Not since she was a child herself, not since those days when she was laid down for a rest in the afternoon—by that mother who was only too glad, if the truth were known, for an hour of peace—had Mary slept in the daytime. But she slept now and Leo slept. His, she thought, waking after the unbelievable period of two whole hours, was the heavy slumber of a man who has missed out on sleep for too long and has a hundred hours to make up. She raised herself on one
elbow and looked at his face, the narrow lips relaxed in sleep, the pale skin in places prematurely lined, the veined lids over his closed eyes, membranes like purplish leaves. When he was a child his hair must have been white, for even now it was only faintly colored, the shade of sun-bleached straw.

Something told him she had moved away, for blindly in sleep he reached for her. But not in the way other men had done, not as Alistair had done, seizing her roughly and pulling her down into a hard embrace and bruising kisses that made her lips sore and her gums bleed. Without opening his eyes, Leo felt for her hand and, taking it in his, brought it to his mouth. He kissed her hand gently, the wrist, the back of it, the knuckles. She thought, what is happening to me? Am I falling in love with him? Is it the strangeness of him that fascinates me, or is it that I feel an ever and ever stronger need to look after him?

I do need that. I need to bring him here and care for him. It is as if I have begun the process of healing him and I must carry it through. Soon I must let him go, I must let him go home, but I am afraid that when he goes, when he is out of my sight and my care, he will fail and fall and become ill again. Oh, if only I could keep him here I know I could restore him and then, one day …

Bean was back. The bell rang once, then again insistently. She put on a dressing gown, picked Gushi up into her arms and went down to answer the door. Bean smiled his obsequious smile, his eyes cold and empty. He thrust a package into her hand.

“Photos of the little chap, Miss,” he said. “Just to take a look. No obligation to purchase.”

14

W
hile in Maurice Clitheroe’s employ Bean had drunk heavily. Sometimes he had drunk to excess. There was always a lot of liquor in the house and he had helped himself. If Clitheroe knew, and he must have known, he never said anything. Perhaps he understood that Bean couldn’t do the job he did without a stimulant and a sedative. It was no joke, as Bean often said to himself, being the companion, servant, pimp, and nurse of a serious masochist.

Most of the young people who came to the house in York Terrace were in it only for the money. They took no more pleasure in beating a fat old man than Bean did in doing his shopping and cooking his tournedos. But one or two were different. Bean, admitting them to the house, could see it in their faces and in the fixed stare of their half-mesmerized eyes. They were sadists, and when the whip or the cane was in their hands there was no stopping their frenzy.