The Keys to the Street (9 page)

He lived a little way away in York Terrace East. Normally, he would have gone back by way of the tunnel but he didn’t want to encounter the key man again. Better brave the Marylebone Road, wait a good two minutes for those lights to change, then belt across before they changed back again. It was easier without dogs pulling him like in some chariot race.

He let himself into his flat. Neat as a pin, spotlessly clean, it was furnished exactly as it had been in the days of Maurice Clitheroe, its former owner, with heavy, highly polished late-nineteenth-century pieces, red and blue Turkey rugs, and in the living room a newish three-piece suite covered in tan-colored hide. This and the huge television and VCR reflected Bean’s own taste. His kitchen was carefully geared for the freezer–microwave culture. There was no oven and there were no pans. The lot had gone on the day of Mr. Clitheroe’s memorial service, along with the piano, the whip and gun collection, and the pictures of two saints undergoing particularly revolting forms of martyrdom.

Maurice Clitheroe had left Bean his duplex in recognition of services rendered. These had sometimes been onerous, particularly in the area of punishment, though here he had always been the executant, never the recipient. He had known where to draw the line, as for example in refusing to gratify Mr. Clitheroe’s demand that both of them should wear spiked dog collars while at home alone. And in spite of this setting of limits, the flat had still been left to him according to a promise frequently made but never entirely taken seriously.

In relation to the flat he loved—he called it a maisonette—and in which he now settled down contentedly to microwave a Linda McCartney vegetarian platter, Bean had only one regret. He had no opportunity to impress his clients with his address, no chance of presenting them with invoices on paper headed York Terrace, NW1. For since the owners of his dogs were unable to claim income tax relief on what they paid him, every penny he received was black money, money in the back pocket, handed over in cash. His earnings from Mr. Clitheroe had never reached the tax floor, for all was found for him, his board, his lodging, even his clothes. The Inland Revenue probably thought he was dead or, more likely, had never been born.

He had a look at the camera and checked that there were three frames left on the film.

•   •   •

In her third week at Charlotte Cottage, Mary was twice invited out to dinner. Her grandmother gave a rather grand dinner party for her. The nine guests and Frederica Jago sat down to deep-fried Crottin de Chavignol with cranberry sauce, roast guinea fowl, and French apple tart with clotted cream. A heavy meal suitable for old-fashioned old people. Everyone but Mary and one of the men she sat next to was very old, so it was plain that the young or youngish man had been invited for her sake.

Much the same thing happened at the other dinner party. This was given by Dorothea in Charles Lane, where she lived with her husband, Gordon, in the house next door to the Irene Adler Museum. Everyone among the eight guests was young, so they ate arugula and corn salad in an orange and walnut dressing, red mullet with couscous and deep-fried sage leaves, followed by cherimoya sorbet with a Sharon fruit coulis. Couples were either married or living together in long-term relationships, so it was apparent to Mary
that the single (divorced) man she sat next to had been invited for her sake.

Of these two men, Frederica’s protégé and Gordon’s friend, the former rang Mary up the next day and asked if she would go to the cinema with him to see
The Madness of King George
. She said no. It was not only that she had seen the film, but that of all activities likely to improve two people’s knowledge of each other, cinema-going must be the least effective. You met in the foyer, you sat side by side in the dark in silence, you had a drink afterward and said good night. Not that she wanted to improve her knowledge of him and nor apparently did he of her, for he suggested no alternative outing. The other man, Dorothea’s, didn’t get in touch at all.

“It’s humiliating,” Mary said to Dorothea the next day in the Irene Adler drawing room. “I wish you hadn’t done it. I wish my grandmother hadn’t done it.”

“Oh, come on. I didn’t do anything. The poor man’s just getting over the trauma of his wife’s running off with the VAT inspector. Gordon and I try to include him in as much as we can.”

“And you thought this poor girl was just getting over the trauma of her boyfriend knocking her about, is that it? They’d be just right for each other? Well, he didn’t think so. I haven’t heard a word from him. And that is humiliating, Dorrie.”

Nearly as humiliating as writing to Leo Nash and getting no reply. She had been so sure of a prompt answer to her letter. What a fool, to imagine the man longing to hear from her, desperate for a word, only waiting with bated breath for the chance to get in touch!

“You’re overreacting,” said Dorothea, and she stood back, trying to decide if the framed photograph of Irene Adler looked best displayed on the mantelpiece or semiconcealed behind the half-open secret panel. It was a question that had exercised her ever since the drawing room had been created in its present mode. “He’s probably just too unhappy to even think of anyone else at the moment.”

“Yes, I daresay. But to me it seems he must have gone home saying to himself, ‘They needn’t think they can catch me so easily. I know a trick worth two of that.’ And then he forgot me.”

As Leo Nash must have looked at the Charlotte Cottage address and the writing paper and wondered what form her patronage of him would take?

“Look, if you fancy him we can maybe manage …”

“I don’t fancy him in the least. I’ll just go on going to the cinema by myself.”

She said nothing to Dorothea about being lonely. Dorothea would have asked her round to Charles Lane every evening, given a dinner party for her every week. School friends, college friends would have rallied round if she had got in touch. Her cousin in Surrey had invited her for the weekend, but she had said no because of Gushi. Being alone and minding it wasn’t the best training for someone who was trying to be strong and independent.

The weekends were the worst. There had been only three of them but they were very bad. She got up late, she read, she walked Gushi until he was exhausted and had to be carried, she walked about the West End, went to the Wallace Collection and the Planetarium. In the evenings she worked on the new catalog and brochure she was compiling for the museum.

It was better on weekday evenings. She and Gushi watched television or played the Blackburn-Norrises’ CDs. At bedtime she had stopped shutting Gushi up in the kitchen, where his basket was, and took him upstairs with her and let him sleep on her bed. During the night he edged closer and closer up toward the bedhead, and now when she woke in the mornings it was to find his frondy face on the pillow beside her and as often as not her arms embracing him.

For the first week, in the mornings, she had awaited the post, but nothing came except junk mail, hire car and taxi cards, fliers from a food delivery service. Her phone number was on the writing paper
and when the phone rang she half expected a diffident, anxious male voice. But the only voice, and it wasn’t diffident, was Alistair’s.

After the early-morning call, he phoned three more times, the first to say he was coming to see her, he would be over the following evening to take her out to dinner. Her protests, her reminder that they were separated, had no effect. If not tomorrow, then the next day, he said. In the end she agreed to the second suggestion and went through agonies all next day and the next, wondering how to deal with him if he came back with her and wanted to stay the night.

Seven came and seven-thirty and at seven thirty-five he phoned to say he couldn’t make it. She was relieved and at the same time angry. Angry with herself as much as with him for the two miserable days she had spent. That afternoon she had been so distracted that she had told an American tourist Irene Adler had lived in St. John’s Wood Terrace and her royal lover had been the king of Serbia.

Alistair phoned for the third time to say he was worried about her health. He had made an appointment for their GP to see her.

“It’s at eight-thirty on Thursday morning.”

“Alistair, as you know I haven’t got a car. Do you really think I’m coming to Willesden at that hour?”

“Of course you’d stay the night here.”

“I’m perfectly well. I don’t need a doctor.” She tried to speak pleasantly to him, to be polite but firm, but when she said good-bye his furious shouting down the receiver made her tremble.

All of it made her ask herself if she had been right to take on this dog-sitting and house-minding at Charlotte Cottage. Of course she could not have stayed with Alistair, that was plain, but should she perhaps have gone first to her grandmother, and then found herself a place in a shared flat? To be with other people …

It was too late now. Outside it was sunny again, a warm still evening. Two people walked by, on their way out into Albany Street,
their arms round each other. Loneliness was worse on fine evenings when the red sun went down over the horizon of a great city and the night sky grew purple, though with no chance of seeing the stars. She took Gushi on her lap and watched television.

The little dog was out with Bean and the others when the post came in the morning. A flier from a company selling exercise trampolines, another from Express Tikka and Pizza, and an envelope postmarked NW1. Her habitual hesitation at opening letters she told herself to abandon now, stop it once and for all. It was all part of the fearful temperament she had to learn to abandon. In a cool, controlled way she went into the living room, picked up the paper knife, and slit open the envelope.

She looked at the photograph first. A passport-size photograph taken in one of those station or supermarket kiosks of a man’s pale thin face in front of a pleated curtain. To herself she was calling it anemic before she realized what she was saying. Of course he was anemic. Anemia had nearly killed him.… The eyes were light and clear, the hair so fair as to be almost white, the features regular, classical: thin lips, straight nose, very high smooth forehead.

A handwritten letter from the Plangent Road address.

6

M
ost of the street sleepers, the dossers, the dropouts, the jacks men, were on the street because they had nowhere else to be. They were without roofs of their own, or roofs rented, to put over their heads. This was not true of Roman, who had had a roof, who had had his own home, but who was on the street because he had no more choice than those others, because the outside was the only option if he was to continue to live.

If he was to live. An alternative there had been, the alternative open to all. “Skipping out” on the canal bank, he had thought many times of sliding into the cold water one night, having first ripped his brain and his senses apart with the meths and water mixture, cloudy white fluid the jacks men called milk. The faith he no longer had stopped him. His Polish mother had brought him up a Catholic and if all of it was gone now, all dispelled by reason and science, vestigial fear remained, some absurd awe of the sin against the Holy Ghost.

So the street it had to be. Because home was unlivable in, a hollow place that howled at him, empty, empty, never to be filled again. A place so haunted that he had to hide his face from the staring walls and stuff bedding into his mouth to keep himself from crying out. And not just that house of his, but any house, flat, hotel, shelter he might move to.

It was as if claustrophobia of a kind never before experienced had come to him with loss. Just as an inability to work had come, to go about among ordinary people. He was obliged to avoid every aspect of life as he had known it, if he was to survive and not curl up somewhere
into a fetus that screwed up its eyes and hid its face in its frog’s paws. Only the outside was feasible to him, where those he encountered took it for granted that he was set apart, that he was to some degree mad. This was the point, that he should be the Wandering Jew, or Oedipus. And if he had not put out his own eyes, nor had he his daughter with him as companion.