A Week in Paris (36 page)

‘Wait a second while I tidy up a little,’ he said, going in ahead. A light glowed suddenly and she heard the sound of him moving around like some animal, and drawers and cupboards being opened and closed, then his slight figure darkened the doorway and he found her hand and drew her inside, saying, ‘Mind the shoe rack here.’

They were in a large attic room with wooden floors and a sloping ceiling. There was a casement window set high in the gable end. Because the light was on, the glass reflected back at them blackly. The room was chilly and he switched on an electric fire. Immediately it looked more cosy.

‘Oh, Adam, it’s lovely.’ She found herself looking about for clues to his life. Against the highest wall stood a wardrobe and a bookcase full of books. There was a single bed in a corner, untidily made. Much of the rest of the room was taken up by an ancient desk. On it was a typewriter with a leaf of paper scrolled up, haphazard piles of documents and photographs, and a large glass ashtray.

‘What do you do about cooking?’

‘There’s a kitchen on the floor below. The bathroom’s down there, too. I eat out a lot. I’m not much of a cook, to be honest, and I find eating on my own a bit lonely. It’s not easy to invite people here for meals either.’

Although he said this in a perfectly ordinary way, not sounding sorry for himself at all, Fay did pity him. He must have friends here in this city but it could be a solitary life.

‘I like it,’ he said. ‘It’s quieter than you’d think, and I can just shut myself away from the world and get on with my writing. Yet it’s quite central. It doesn’t take long to walk to the office. The other people in the building are pleasant, though they keep themselves to themselves. And there’s one thing about this place that I love above all . . .’ As he said this he went and took a short pair of steps that rested in a corner, positioned them beneath the window and climbed up. Here he unfastened a bar and pulled the window open, then pushed back the shutters.

‘Come on,’ he said, turning to her. ‘It’s perfectly safe. Put on that jacket if you like, it can be chilly.’ When she was ready, he stepped out first then reached down a hand to help her up. ‘Mind your feet there. Now you’re all right.’

They had climbed out onto a flat roof crowded with fragrant plants in pots and edged with a low wrought-iron rail that shone white against the darkness. Instinctively she clutched Adam’s hand, not daring to move, knowing it was so high up, then gradually her eyes adjusted to the light and she saw he was right. There was no dizzying drop to fear. Instead, a jumble of rooftops spread in all directions in a man-made landscape of valleys and hills. She could see other terraces like this one. Ridged roofs and gabled windows jutted up, and all around were the lights of night-time Paris. Further up the hill loomed the dome of Sacré-Coeur, only half-obscured by other buildings. Adam pointed out the flashing light at the top of the Eiffel Tower, in the opposite direction, far in the distance. Overhead was spread the canopy of the sky, with a bone-coloured moon veiled with snatches of cloud, and all around, bright winking stars. A light wind ruffled her hair, and she was glad of the sports coat and the warmth of his hand in hers.

‘It’s completely marvellous,’ she whispered.

‘Isn’t it? I love it up here,’ Adam said. ‘It’s surprisingly peaceful, even in the daytime.’ He was right, the nighttime noises of the street sounded muffled, like the sea. ‘I often bring a chair out here and sit and look at the view and think great thoughts.’

Fay was very aware of him close to her, squeezing her hand, but sensed, too, that he was a little preoccupied.

‘Yes,’ he sighed, ‘it’s a good place to think. It makes you look at the world from a new angle.’

‘It certainly does that,’ she breathed, and noticed far-off spiky towers bathed in a pinkish glow. ‘Look, is that Notre Dame?’

‘Yes, very distinctive, isn’t it?’

She wanted badly to lean into him, to lay her head against his shoulder, but something stilled her – an aloneness about him. And after a while he said, ‘Shall we go down now? I’ve got a bottle of Calvados somewhere.’

Back in the room, the window firmly closed, he pottered about finding glasses and her eye fell on some items on the chest of drawers. A photograph and a wooden carving. There was something about the carving that interested her. She took a step nearer. It was the willowy figure of a woman, about eight inches high, very graceful, and carrying what looked like a bundle or a basket on her head.

‘She’s lovely, isn’t she?’ Adam said, pouring amber liquid into two tumblers. ‘African, I expect you know. A friend here gave her to me.’

‘She’s beautiful,’ Fay agreed. ‘May I?’ And when he nodded, she picked up the object and turned it in her hands, feeling the smoothness of the wood. Although it was simply done, whoever had made it had a natural talent, an affinity with the way the grain ran, and she loved the vitality of the figurine. It reminded her a little of her zebra – there was the same care in its making. It made her feel a connection with Adam to think that he had a carving like she did. That it was something he loved, she was in no doubt. It showed in the way he took it back from her as he handed over her glass, and stood it in its place.

He noticed her curious eyes move to the photograph. ‘
La famille
Warner,’ he said, passing the frame to her. She was standing in shadow and had to move over to the standard lamp to see it clearly under the reflections on the glass. A mother, a father and two children all in best coats and hats outside a church. The boy was about ten, his wide smile immediately recognizable. ‘This is really you?’ she teased and he gave that same smile. ‘And I remember Tina from that picture you showed me in the restaurant. Oh, your mother’s so pretty.’ Mrs Warner was neat and merry-looking with soft blonde hair like her son’s. His father was dark-haired, with round glasses and a felt hat with a brim. It was difficult to read his expression. Surprised? Perhaps he simply didn’t like being photographed.

‘Nice,’ she said, holding it out to him. ‘You look a happy family.’

She knew immediately that she had touched the scar of some old wound, for Adam took the photograph from her and weighed it in his hand before pushing it into the shadows on the chest of drawers.

‘We were happy then,’ he said in a measured tone. Did she imagine the slightest of stresses on ‘were’? He must have sensed her unease, because he laid his fingers on her arm for a brief moment in a gesture of reassurance. She waited, uncertain of what to say.

He dropped his arm, turned away and picked up his glass, took a large mouthful and swallowed. ‘There’s something I ought to have told you before,’ he said.

Raising her eyebrows in reply, she sat down with her drink on the pair of steps, feeling the fiery apple brandy sear her throat as she watched him pace the room. What could be wrong? She wanted to hear it and she didn’t want to. What if it meant he couldn’t love her or that she shouldn’t love him?

Finally he dragged out the chair from under his desk and straddled it, then sat looking into his glass, agitating it so that the Calvados swirled in a miniature whirlpool. ‘It’s wrong not to say. I haven’t before, because I’m ashamed.’ His eyes fastened on hers. ‘I don’t know what you’ll think.’

He still seemed undecided, but now it was like a loose thread in a favourite garment she couldn’t leave alone, even though pulling at it might unravel the material altogether. There could be no lies between them. ‘Adam?’ She looked up at him gravely. ‘You’ve got to tell me. It’s not fair otherwise.’

‘I know.’ He reached into his jacket for his cigarettes and took them out, then seemed to change his mind, for he pocketed them again.

‘All right then,’ he said, with a bitter sigh. ‘Fay, you’ve been spending the last few days with the son of a jailbird.’

Fay blinked. Whatever she had expected him to say, it wasn’t that. For a moment she couldn’t feel anything and her brain refused to function, then she was aware of the life flowing through her. Suddenly everything fell into place. The way he had rarely mentioned his father, a certain vulnerability about him. The fear she’d felt left her and now she was quite calm. Her world had not been turned upside down. They were still here, together, in this room. Nothing had changed between them, or not that she could see. She met his eye with a steady gaze.

‘Go on, tell me about it,’ she said evenly, and watched him breathe deeply and his shoulders relax.

‘You’re not shocked?’

‘Not shocked exactly, but certainly surprised,’ she said carefully. ‘You haven’t told me what your father did yet.’

‘It was fraud,’ Adam said. ‘But even worse than that, he lied, Fay – he lied under oath and betrayed a friend.’

Fraud was bad, but at least it wasn’t murder and still she felt calm. She listened as he told her the whole story. He spoke fluently, as though he’d had to tell it before, or had at least long brooded over it.

Adam’s father, Geoffrey Warner, had been a director of a property company based in the City of London. One of his fellow directors was an old schoolfriend named Rupert Fielding, the other a former colleague of Fielding’s. The three of them had set up the firm together after the war, and because of the national building programme that followed the cessation of hostilities they did rather well. But then Geoffrey had made a mistake, a bad mistake. He’d bought a large family house in Chelsea where he moved with Adam and Tina and their mother, and to pay for the deposit asked Fielding for a personal loan. The man had turned him down. This led him to do something, the reason for which he later said was inexplicable. Unknown to the others, ahead of an expected windfall from a deal that was going through, he’d covertly borrowed some money from the company account, imagining that he’d pay it back quickly and no one would know any the better. The problem was that the deal collapsed because of the unexpected death of the other party, and Adam’s father suddenly had no way of replacing the money he’d taken.

‘What he should have done then, of course, was to sell our house, even though we’d just moved in, but he couldn’t bring himself to disappoint my mother, who has always thought the world of him and was so proud of this concrete sign of his success. He, meanwhile, thought – not unreasonably – that money would soon come in from somewhere, since business was going so well, but before that could happen their bookkeeper spotted the discrepancy in the accounts and it all came out. My father begged his fellow directors not to make anything of it, and offered finally to sell the house and pay back the money. Rupert Fielding was reluctantly in favour of this in order to avoid the scandal,
and
because my father was an old friend of his, but the third director refused to countenance this course of action and called in the police.

‘I was only twelve at the time,’ Adam said, ‘and my parents told me nothing to begin with, but I was old enough to be aware that something was very wrong. Police turned up at the house once or twice and there were long conversations behind closed doors. My mother went around all the time looking as though she was about to burst into tears. They had rows, terrible rows, and I would lie awake listening to them shouting at each other. She had to tell us something in the end. The trial when it happened was a very public affair because the third director was married to the daughter of a government minister, and there were newspapermen camped outside our house. After several days of this, my mother sent my sister and me to stay with our grandparents in the country. The grandparents told us nothing because they wanted to protect us, but this was worse because we worried all the same.’

What happened, Adam went on to explain, was that under all this pressure Geoffrey Warner lost touch with reality. He got it into his head that Fielding had let him down. If Fielding had lent him that money, he thought, the whole situation would never have happened, and, what was more, he latched on to something he claimed Fielding had said and twisted it against him. He said Fielding had told him he could take the money from company funds and that he’d ‘square it’ with the other director, and, against all legal advice, insisted on making this the main plank of his defence. Fielding hotly denied he’d ever said this and in the end the jury believed him rather than Warner. The damage was irrevocable. The business collapsed in disarray. Adam’s father went to prison for six years.

‘You can guess the effect of all this on a twelve-year-old boy and a ten-year-old girl,’ Adam said. ‘It was intolerable, utterly, miserably intolerable. We lost the house anyway, of course. There was a huge legal bill to pay. We moved to live with my grandparents. It was partly a matter of money, but my mother also, somewhat foolishly, thought we’d have a better time of it there, but of course people read the papers, don’t they? Everybody knew. And Tina and I were treated badly at school until the other kids got bored. Some of the children were forbidden by their parents to be friends with us. But worst of all, I think, was . . . oh, Fay, he was my
father
– he’d fought in the war and won a medal, and yet he’d done this awful thing.’ She saw his throat contract as he swallowed and the tic of his pulse.

‘It must have been horrible,’ she whispered. It didn’t take much to imagine how it might have been for him. Like most boys, Adam would have seen his father as a hero, doubly so if he’d been decorated in the war. To have seen him convicted as a thief and a liar – it didn’t bear thinking about. And Adam would have carried all this like a stone in his heart.

‘Oh, Adam,’ she said again. And in a moment of impulse she went to kneel at his feet, laying her cheek against his knee.

‘Hey,’ he said softly, stroking her hair. ‘It’s all right.
I’m
all right. It’s just . . . you had to know.’

‘I did,’ she said, lifting her head. ‘Thank you for telling me.’ Then, ‘If it was six years, I suppose he’s out now, is he?’

‘Yes. It was the year after we met on that school trip they let him out. I was off to university then, and glad to go. For me it was a chance to start again. No one much knew who I was there or thought to connect me with him. The case was old news by then. But he suffered, he suffers still. And it’s been hard for my mother and my sister. Tina getting married has perked everyone up no end. It means a clean sheet for her, you see. People can stop feeling sorry for her at any rate. But for me? Every now and then I meet someone who recognizes the name. “You’re Geoffrey Warner’s son, aren’t you?”
Fingers in the till, eh?
That’s what they think, even if they don’t say it.’