Three Brothers (11 page)

“It has a ring to it.” Daniel was still thoroughly bewildered by the events of the evening. Why had this good-looking stranger taken such an interest in him? Had they really met by accident or coincidence?

“I’ll tell you about the time when I met a very kind lady. She took care of me when I was broke. She looked after me. One day you may meet her. When you come up to London.
Have you got a pen on you?” Then he wrote down a telephone number. “Ring me the week before. Then I can give you my address.” He leaned forward and whispered in his ear. “You can suck my cock.” So began Daniel’s “transcription” of The Sparkler Papers.

Whenever Daniel went up to London, he told Stanley Askisson that he was visiting his father. In truth he had forgotten all about his family. It was something from which he had escaped. So in the vacations, instead of returning to Camden, he resumed his job at the university library. He was allowed to stay in his college rooms, too. Except for his one day a month in London with Sparkler, he devoted his time to work among books.

Daniel and Stanley stood outside the examination schools, where their finals were to be held. Daniel had not been able to sleep the previous night. He was filled with such alarm that he was sick that morning, retching violently into the hand basin in his bedroom. The world spun about him. Only when he had washed and dressed did he regain some semblance of ordinary life. Outside the building he dug his hands deep into his pockets to keep them from shaking. Stanley was smoking a Players cigarette, and was making nervous jokes about running out of ink.

Three months later the results were published. Daniel had obtained a first-class, and Stanley a second-class, degree.

“Now I see things from the point of view of failure,” Stanley said. Then he burst into tears.

Daniel put his arm around him. “It will be all right,” he said.

“No. It won’t be all right. It will never be right again.”

“You’re taking it too seriously.”

“And you’re not?”

There was an immediate change in their relationship. They were no longer intimate. In fact they tried to avoid one
another as much as possible. Daniel had performed so well that he was offered a research fellowship by the college, a post that he accepted with enthusiasm. This was the place in which he now wished to settle and to prosper. Stanley Askisson drifted to London where, after taking a civil-service examination, he found himself a junior clerk in the Ministry of Housing. Soon enough he was working directly for Cormac Webb. Daniel Hanway, meanwhile, had begun work on his dissertation on “The Criminal Element in Eighteenth Century Literature.” He continued to see Sparkler in London.

Red red robin

I
T WAS
raining, a mild and gentle rain that shrouded the city in a pearl-grey light. Sam was walking through what was for him still an unfamiliar part of London, south of the river. He sensed a difference of atmosphere; there was no urgency, no energy, in the air. The rain billowed around the houses like a bland mist. He pushed open a gate and walked up a small front path between patches of grass; he rang the bell, and the door opened a fraction before he was admitted.

Fifteen minutes later he came out across the threshold. It was still raining. He was accompanied by a middle-aged woman, who stopped and put her hand up to a pocket in her jacket. “I almost forgot,” she said. “Take it.”

“I don’t want this, you know.”

“Still, I like to give it to you.”

He took the envelope and, without looking back, went into the street. He did not look up until he passed St. George’s Church in Borough High Street. An old woman was sitting on its worn steps, her hair tied together with rags. Sam reached into the pocket of his jacket, and gave the envelope to her. He knew that it contained a five-pound note. He was given the same amount every week, and always handed the money to the first vagrant he saw. And who was the woman in the house
from whom he had received the money? Sam had found his mother at last.

Three months earlier he had entered the church of Our Lady of Sorrows in Camden, where he had first seen the statue of the Virgin. He had been hoping, ever since, that the chapel and the statue would somehow reappear and that the nuns would also return. What had come and gone might come again.

He sat at the back of the church, his hands clasped in front of him; he repeated some words that the nuns had recited to him. “
Ave maris stella, virgo et puella
.” The door leading from the porch was suddenly opened, and there stepped a woman into the nave wearing a white raincoat and a blue scarf. She entered one of the pews, and Sam saw her for a moment in profile. Hurriedly he left the church and stood on the gravel path outside the porch. What should he do? Should he talk to her? Would she recognise him? He feared another rejection—that was how he put it to himself—and so he decided to wait in the street where she would not notice him. A few minutes later she left the church and came out, taking off her scarf as she swung open the wooden gate in front of her. She turned left and walked quickly away. Sam decided to follow her, at a careful distance.

She entered the underground station at the top of Camden High Street, and stood in line for a ticket. Sam hated this station. It had an acrid smell of old machinery, and the booming sound of trains echoed from the depths; the dank atmosphere was filled with foreboding. He did not appreciate the world under the ground. Yet he waited in the queue, unwilling to let his mother out of his sight, and then followed her down the escalator to the southward-bound platform of the Northern Line.

He sat at the other end of the carriage, from where he kept on glancing at his mother. He had known her at once, in the
supermarket and in the church, but he had not recognised her by sight; he had recognised her by feeling. He had been drawn to her by some bond of sympathy or perception that was instinctive and unassailable. She was staring straight ahead, immersed in her own thoughts. She seemed to Sam to be troubled; he wanted to approach her, and to comfort her, but he could not do anything so bold.

She left the train at Borough and Sam followed her through the wind-haunted passages, past the peeling advertisements and the grubby white tiles, past the piss-stained corners and the rusted metal grilles, until she came out into the hall of the escalators. He watched her rise slowly, and then himself stepped on the moving stairs so that he would not lose her. She came out onto Borough High Street and began walking south, taking the old pilgrim trail from Southwark. Sam felt curiously light-hearted as he followed her. Eventually she turned up the path of a small terraced house.

There was a low wall on the other side of the road, bordering a wild waste of garden in front of an untenanted house. Sam sat there, and waited. At regular intervals cars drew up to the parking spaces in the road outside. Individual men would then enter the house, leaving after an hour or so. Two young women came up, arm in arm, and were admitted. They did not leave.

Sam came again the next day, and then the next. He did not know what he was waiting for. He knew only that this was what he was supposed to do. He noticed that all the curtains of the house were drawn, and that he could hear no noise. Then on the third day he walked up the narrow path and rang the bell. A young woman, holding a plastic cup in her hand, came to the door. “Can I help you?”

“I’ve come to see Mrs. Hanway.”

“Who? There’s no one of that name here.”

“I know her.”

“Let him in.” It was his mother’s voice.

The young woman moved aside, and Sam crossed the threshold into a hall decorated with crimson flock wallpaper and a number of watercolours of pastoral scenes in heavy gilt frames. He went towards his mother standing at the end, at the foot of a staircase.

“Well, Sam, you have found me.”

“I saw you in the church. In Allington Street.”

“I go back there sometimes. I like it.”

“So do I.”

He looked away from her for a moment, but she did not look away from him. “I would know you anywhere, Sam. Your hair is not as light as it used to be. Come in here. Mary, will you make us a pot of tea?” She led him into a small room with a window overlooking an empty yard and a brick wall. A blue vase of tulips had been placed on the table at which they sat. “I haven’t seen you for a long time,” she said.

“I was seven.”

“You’re nineteen now, aren’t you?”

“Eighteen.”

They were silent for a moment as Mary brought in the tea.

“So you’ve left school.”

“Yes.”

“What are you doing now?”

“Nothing.” She stared at him for a moment, with a fixed attention. “What do
you
do?”

She threw her hands up in the air. “This.” Then she questioned him about Harry, and about Daniel, listening eagerly as he tried to remember all the details of the immediate past. She never once mentioned Philip Hanway.

“Why did you go away?”

“Why does anyone do anything? No. That’s unfair on you. I was in trouble. That’s all I want to say.”

“Where did you go?”

“I went away. It doesn’t matter where.” He remembered now the paleness of her pale blue eyes. “I didn’t want to leave you. I didn’t mean to leave you. Your father wanted it. He didn’t want to see me again. It wasn’t easy.” She paused for a moment. “It was the hardest thing in my life.”

“You thought it was for our own good.”

“Yes. That’s it. Your own good.”

“We knew that something was wrong.”

“What did your father tell you?”

“He didn’t. He never said a word.”

“Didn’t you ask?”

“We talked about it to each other. But we never wanted to mention it to anyone. I think we felt guilty for something, but I don’t know …”

“
You
felt guilty? How do you think I felt? I have never felt anything else.” She reached over and touched the vase of tulips. “You never spoke to your father?” Sam shook his head. “You boys were always very private. You never gave anything away. You were the strangest boys in the world. Nothing will stop Harry. Nothing will trouble Harry. Danny is more fragile. And you were always the dreamer. I was always most concerned for you. Do you remember the time when—No. Let’s not talk about the past. You’re grown-up now. You’re an adult.”

“So what should we talk about, as
adults
?”

“How do you get by?”

“Get by?”

“If you have no job, what do you do for money?”

“Dad helps me. I live at home. I don’t cost much.” He laughed. “I’ve nothing to spend it on.”

“Don’t you have a girlfriend?” He looked at her, and said nothing. “Don’t you have
any
friends?”

“Who would want to be friends with me?”

“Don’t say that.”

“I just did.” He looked at the vase of flowers. “There are lots of people in the world who have no friends. Sometimes I see something interesting. Or I feel something. But I know that I have no one to tell.”

“And the red red robin comes bob bob bobbing along.”

“What?”

“Nothing. It was a song I knew as a kid.” They stared at one another. “Now that I’ve found you,” she said, “I’ll never let you go.”

“Is that another song?”

“No. It’s the truth.” She stood up and left the room, returning a few moments later with a five-pound note in her hand. “Here. Take it.”

“I don’t want it.”

“Take it. I need to give it to you.”

“To buy myself a friend?”

“Buy whatever you want, Sam.”

So began the series of their strange meetings. On the same day each week, at the same time, he would ring the doorbell and would be admitted. He looked forward to the pot of tea brought in by Mary; he looked forward to the fresh flowers in the blue vase. He looked forward to hearing his mother’s voice. It was nothing she said in particular, but the soothing syllables of her conversation induced in him a feeling of repose.

“I see faces before I go to sleep,” she said to him one afternoon. “I don’t know them, but I think somehow I recognise them.”

“Ancestors?”

“Do you think so? That
is
a nice idea. One of them did look a bit like you. He had your smile.”

“Sometimes,” she said on another occasion, “I smell the strangest things. The smell of burning rags, where there is nothing burning. Sometimes I smell the perfume of roses on a busy street.”

A fortnight later Sam said to her, “I’ve got a job.”

“Oh yes?”

“As a nightwatchman. I’ll still be able to come around in the afternoon.”

“That’s what your father used to do.”

“He was the one who found it for me.”

In fact Philip Hanway had become more and more concerned about his youngest son. When he eventually discovered that Sam had no work, it occurred to him to contact his old employer: there was no qualification needed to be a nightwatchman. So, on Philip’s recommendation, Sam was hired.

“You may get lonely,” his mother said to him.

“Me?”

“Your father used to complain.”

“I’ll get used to it, I expect. I get used to everything else.”

“Have you mentioned me to your father?” she asked him a week later.

“Do you want me to?”

“No. Some things are better left unsaid, don’t you think? What about your brothers?”

“What
about
them?”

“Have you seen them?”

“I don’t think so.”

“And what does that mean?”

“Sometimes I think I see their reflections. Sometimes I think I see them across the street. I see them in my dreams all the time.”

“You know, Sam, you baffle me.”

“Just begin at the beginning. You’ll find your way.” He looked at the blue vase. “How do you pronounce it? Vase as in stars? Or vase as in maze?”

On another visit he spoke to his mother about his work as a nightwatchman. “I like it. I like to sit and think. Why do I prefer blue to red? If colours were words, what would they say? Why do eyes get tired?”

“Some questions, Sam, have no answers.”

“Do you know who you remind me of? The unknown soldier. You don’t have much expression, do you?” It was Julie Armitage. Sam had been given work at a newly built office block along Kingsway; just before his arrival, the property business of Asher Ruppta had taken premises in the same building. Julie immediately felt sympathy for one whom she considered to be a fellow sufferer in the world. “Here. I’ve made you a nice sandwich. Do you like Spam? I
love
it.”