Becoming Strangers (28 page)

He felt for the traveller's cheques wallet. Inside, there were a very thin couple of notes. He pulled them out. Two hundred quid. He could see that a few cheques had been detached. They'd only spent one hundred by traveller's cheque at the resort—the rest he'd done with their bank card. They'd started off with five. Two missing.

He went to nudge Dorothy, but stopped himself. What had she done with them? Perhaps they'd been nicked. He thought of the woman who'd looked after their room. No, he couldn't see it. Perhaps there'd been a break-in? Dorothy murmured something and when her lips settled they were out of place and ajar. He let her be.

'R
YDER (JUNIOR) IS AN INVESTOR OF SORTS
. He has an income, privately, and he uses it to play the markets mostly. Obvious stuff. I know his father better. Former
Chairman of Nabisco. Big gun. Bad guy with a heart of gold. He's kind of somebody. His son isn't. How are your financials shaping up?' Burns filed the email message in his folder titled 'head honcho.' The information we need always seems to come after we need it, he reflected. He perused the financials on the Excel program, considered how the deduction of certain salaries might improve the bottom line, considered—with a quick spin of his chair, feet against the wall—how much work it might add to his lot and on a whim, went back to his email program to check incoming mail. There was a cosy-looking message from
[email protected]
entitled 'young girls crazy for you' which he deleted, there was a circular joke purporting to offer twenty differences between the sexes from a friend of his working in Birmingham; that was all. When he deleted every one of his mail folders, the keyboard chimed like a fruit machine. He could reverse the procedure. But it felt good to go naked, and he decided to make the entire desktop look as anonymous and enticing as if the machine were new. He dragged up his resignation letter, revised the formal gentlemanly tones of its statements (using much qualification he had explained how he was unsuited to the job) in favour of a more blunt version, and with a final 'hereby' omitted he looked at the two words that remained, 'I resign.' After that, he tidied away his real desktop, putting all the papers stacked in piles into drawers. He went through his in-tray and found a large hotel envelope with his name on it in old person's handwriting, complete with an 'Esq.'.

Opening it he found two smaller envelopes and a note to him. One of the envelopes was addressed to
Adam Watts Esq.
and the other to
Charlotte, on Sugartown Road. (Adam knows the location.)

Dear Mr. Burns,

I should be very grateful if you would see that each of these envelopes gets delivered as soon as possible. With cordial thanks,
Mrs. Dorothy Davis.

As
neither envelope was sealed, Burns was able to lift the flap and take a quick look at the contents. Inside each one was a traveller's cheque for a hundred pounds. He sat back in his chair and put his bare feet on his desk, crossing them at the ankles. He flexed his toes and smiled. The old girl's savings. Why Watts? he wondered. Perhaps she too owed him for services rendered. He grinned.

'It was like running a knocking shop,' this was what he'd say to the lads back home, over a beer. Running a real knocking shop would be fun, good clean fun, and he could make some money. And do some good, unburden a few sad souls. Now that was worth thinking about. He could do some research on line, starting with Miss Joanna Hotlips. He put one hand on his lap and the other on the mouse. Oddly, from nowhere, came to him the sudden and firm conviction that he should complete his commission for Mrs Davis. Joanna and the thousands like her, suspended in a sort of eternal limbo of apparent sexual surprise, all pursed lips and pink parts, well, they would wait.

T
HEY WENT THROUGH THE DARKNESS
of the Caribbean night to the European daytime, the plane urging itself on through the night, hurrying home.

Annemieke was by the window, on her side, turned away from Jan. She considered the economy of her tears; emerging with the timing of hiccoughs, each tear made its way from her left eye, which was above the other, over her nose and fell into her right eye, gathering more mass and momentum before dropping out on to the armrest and beneath the seat. She lay like that for a few hours. No one could see her or hear her. Jan would have thought she was asleep.

They arrived in the morning in Brussels. The weather was typically Northern European, she saw, raising the shade on her window and looking at the miniature world below moving about its business. Landed on the tarmac, she saw the fine drizzle at the window. They went down the stairs to waiting buses. Sunshine can be ignored, forgotten, but rain penetrates. The baggage handlers had their collars up, they went about their business frowning, warding off the weather with efficiency.

Their eldest son, Marcus, was there to meet them and Jan took the front seat while Annemieke sat in the back. After they had answered his questions they
turned each of them to their windows, examining the rain, watching fields shake hands with hedges and homes. Two or three times her son looked in the mirror to find her face. She gave him half an answer, no more.

When they were home, and her son had gone to pick up some milk and bread, she excused herself and made a phone call. Then she went back into the kitchen where Jan sat with a cup of lemon tea and told him what arrangements she proposed.

'You were busy those days, locked away in our hotel room,' he said. 'You have managed to create a new life.' They sat opposite each other at the small kitchen table at which they'd taken all their smaller meals for many years, breakfasts, teas, coffees, late-night drinks. 'I suppose there is nothing I can say now in any case.' He rose and went to lie down in the spare room, the one that had been Ben's, while she packed a bag in their bedroom.

'I don't want you to go,' he said, alone in the dark, next door.

When she heard her son in the kitchen she went to him and motioned that he should step outside. She held the door handle all the while she spoke, facing him, with her back to the home, the cold drizzle on her face. She explained that they were going to live apart, that she was going to be with André De Vries. He offered her whatever help she needed and gave her a solemn embrace. His face was drawn and dour, just like his father's.

'This is not a fairy-tale ending, but we must be sensible, I suppose,' he said as they stepped back inside out
of the cold. 'We must do as you both wish. It has been hard for you, Mum. Personally I might wish you could have waited to the end.' Then, reading her face, he added, 'but the end, it is true, has been a long time coming. Don't worry, we will all help you through this, both of you.' He looked up at the small ledge in their kitchen where she arranged the knick-knacks the family had accumulated in its lifetime. There were the children's handmade clay pots, a stray egg cup, framed photos of the grandparents, a Delft tile from her grandmother's kitchen, a vase the boys had bought her one birthday; the worthless bric-a-brac of any family. Then he ducked his head—he was over six foot—and stepped through the doorway into the rest of the house, calling softly, 'Father?' although his habit had been to call his father by his first name in recent years.

She heard the low tones of an exchange between them and Jan emerged with his hand on his son's back, ushering the young man out of the house, shaking his head and protesting that he would be fine.

'What did Marcus say to you?' she asked him.

'He said we ought to be happy here and now, we ought to forget about the past. He said nothing else mattered now.'

He turned his back on her with the pretext of going to get a book. In fact his son had embraced him and spoken apologetically. He'd said, 'I am so sorry for all of this. I feel terrible about it. We have all made mistakes, Dad. All of us. No parent is all wrong, no child all right. I hope you know that Ben and I, we love you.'

Jan had replied, 'You ‹ire the son; you are allowed to make mistakes. I hope you learn from mine.'

He looked at his son in that room with his mouth opening and closing between thoughts and he saw his own face unlined—cleaner, fresher, more noble, more peaceful. It might have been possible to escape himself, after all, once. He could have moved away from himself the way a foot moves out of a shoe.

H
ALF AN HOUR LATER
, Annemieke let herself out of the kitchen door without saying further goodbyes, took their small car, a Renault Clio, and left him with the Audi. It hadn't been hard to pack. She had not taken her good things away with her to the Caribbean, they were fresh and folded in her drawers. She only needed enough for a few days. She was to meet André in the lobby of the Hotel Boudewijn on De Markt, in the centre of Brugge. He was there when she arrived, looking aghast, excited. They asked each other in turn if everything was all right and then they went directly to the room he had arranged; it was one of the best, with a view over the market square and a four-poster bed. There were English toiletries in the bathroom, thick towels and silken sheets and bedspread; there was even a fireplace, and a fire had been lit. She took off her clothes and put on a bathrobe while he watched her
from an armchair, sitting in his ironed raincoat, his eyes serious as a cat's. After a bath she put on a La Perla nightgown, light brown with soft cream-coloured lace around the neck of it. She dabbed a spot of Jean Patou's 'Joy' on either wrist. Then she brushed and dried her hair in the bathroom and when she came out she saw that he was in boxer shorts, sitting on the bed, with a glass of champagne in his hand.

'A new life?' he asked, swallowing. She nodded and he took a filled glass from the bedside table and stretched across to hand it to her, holding his stomach in all the while, she saw. He looked her over as she drank. Then he took a deep breath through his nose. He saw that she wore diamonds in her ears, and a wine-coloured lipstick. He closed his eyes for a moment. As he undressed he'd looked at her Louis Vuitton carryall at the foot of the bed, he'd seen the stockings and fluffy slippers, some lingerie, and the soft fabrics of her folded outfits.

All of these things—the hotel room, the toiletries, the champagne—were the tokens of a formal love affair. It was not wrong. These objects served to establish a distance between them that constituted perfection. When he took her into bed alongside him, they would be strangers, allied only by this moment, with no claims upon each other.

'You want me, don't you,' she murmured into his ear as he moved over her. He silenced her by kissing her mouth with vigour.

W
HEN
J
AN QUIT
B
ELGIUM
he went by train from Brugge to Brussels and then on the fast train to Paris. From the train window, Belgium looked like a misplaced section of Eastern Europe, suffering cement raindrops blown over from Polish skies. He saw the small grey huts, beside the train tracks, innocent of purpose as if a board game had been abandoned; beyond them lay a lachrymose landscape, flat, grey. Churches that were never cathedrals despite their size were decked with scaffolding. It was green enough, the countryside, when you got up close to it, there were plenty of leaves, plenty of nettles and brambles. The houses were neat and unobtrusive. The 1960s and 1970s buildings with their conformist aspirations for 'one society' were of geometrically simple shapes, hewn in shades of pastel blue and brown. A wrought-iron balcony here and there hinted at Frenchness, but the windows were stained by acid-rain. Against this sobriety something silly would brush up occasionally. He noticed a rather risqué advertisement, with a double entendre tenuously linking the image of a woman's nipple to a car dealership, and a white delivery truck painted to depict a red-haired character, naked apart from a fig leaf promising that 'Willy Van Den Est' was holding a
'slaapfestival.'

Aboard the train a group of four men barked and encouraged each other like billy goats, rearing up on
their machismo. Their handlebar moustaches would have marked them as homosexual anywhere else in the world. Here, their well-kept women sat together across from them in another four, holding their words, their hands on their bags, practising to be widows.

Jan watched a handsome little girl who was sat alongside her heavyweight mother. The girl blue-eyed, heavy-lidded, solemn but fresh, the mother blown-out, dark-rooted and jaded. This woman sat with her eyes closed to preserve her energy; great ham shanks of arms were stacked atop her breasts. Her head slumped into her chest like a Big Top circus tent being let down.

Something in the stupor of the girls eyes recalled a little German girl who used to play with his sons, her parents having moved from Hamburg into their suburb of Brugge. Even though she could only have been six or so when he knew her, the little girl unsettled him. She used to come round to their house and say in a frank way, 'I need something,' and her eyes were all of a reverie whilst her mouth proclaimed her need. Was it drink, food, a certain toy? A cookie surely? No, no, no. She would get herself into a state of agitation, with both boys quite lovestruck, and then, finally, she would take a lungful of air, and declare that that was it; she'd only needed air, after all.

He thought of Laurie, who was like the little girl, both in her directness and also her air of being puzzled by the body she had been trapped in, unsure of how to use it. Perhaps that was what made her lovely. When
her eyes alighted upon you, for a moment, you thought that it might after all be you that she needed.

After Madrid, I will be at the Hotel Trois Etoiles in Paris, for two weeks, then I will go back,' Laurie had told him, 'unless ... well, unless I change my mind.' They had said their goodbyes in reception at the resort. When he saw her coming across the room to him, he had the sudden conviction that in a moment he could change everything, he had felt wild, as if he could choose life over death. When she came up close to him he felt his heart subside and submit, and he had to stand aside, to step around the pair of them, as if there were a tree falling.