Henry and Cato (39 page)

‘You got to write another letter. They want your sister to bring the next lot of money.'

‘My sister? No, no,
no
—'

‘Your stuck-up sister. The girl you thought was too good for me. She's got to come. And you got to write and tell her to come. See? Cato.'

‘No,' said Cato. Rage obstructed his tongue and he could hardly articulate as if his mouth was filled with rages. ‘No. Leave my sister alone, leave my sister alone, leave her alone, leave her out of this—'

‘Too grand for me, your precious bloody sister, eh?'

‘No, no no-oo—' Cato wailed. Then he cried out again, as he received a violent blow on the side of the head. He fell back on the bed. The light was blotted out.

Dear Henry,

They want the rest of the money quick, but don't come yourself, Colette is to bring it. No one else must know. Tell her to come to the same place. There will be someone there at one o'clock for the next three nights. Keep well away yourself and tell no one else if you want to go on living. Don't go near the police or it's the end.
Colette must come.
Otherwise they'll start sending pieces of me. Believe this. Cato.

‘What's the matter?'

‘You're dropping cigarette ash on the sheets.'

‘What's the matter, what's the letter?'

‘Nothing.'

‘You're thinking about something.'

‘A man can think.'

‘What is it?'

‘Nothing, nothing, nothing.'

‘I'm so unhappy, nobody tells me anything. You won't stay with me tonight and I shall have nightmares again.'

‘I can't here, how can I, everything's horrible.'

‘It wouldn't be horrible if we lived here.'

‘Well, we're not going to live here. We're probably not capable of living anywhere.'

‘What do you mean? Are you going to leave me? What do you mean?'

‘Of course I'm not going to leave you. But some married people just live in a suitcase all their lives. We're like that. We're just suitcase size.'

‘You do love me, don't you? You will look after me, won't you?'

‘Yes, yes, yes, but for God's sake stop whining and moping. The doctor said there was nothing wrong with you.'

‘Well, there is. You don't know what it's like when things are terrible in your mind. You don't understand, your mother doesn't understand, you're healthy people. Oh if only we could stay here in this house for ever, I feel safe here, it's all so big and so real, I don't want to go back to London, that flat's like a tomb, I'll go mad there, oh I so much want to stay here. You don't know what it's like to be me, you don't know what it's like to be all tattered and destroyed inside—'

‘I wish you'd stop smoking,' said Henry, ‘this room is like a bloody gas chamber.'

It was after eleven o'clock at night. The letter from Cato had arrived by the late afternoon post. Henry felt as if a bomb had exploded in his mind. He could not act or think. He had been carrying on a mechanical conversation with Stephanie for nearly an hour simply to pass the time.

Stephanie had spent the day in bed. The doctor had visited her and pronounced her fit. He had prescribed some tranquillizers and Gerda had fetched them from the chemist in Laxlinden. Stephanie was lying in the big brass bed in the cherry blossom room, which had remained unchanged since Burke's father's day, and which smelt of the past, a mean musty powdery pompous smell which made Henry shudder. Better life in a suitcase. The shutters were closed, pale green and faded between huge looped-up billows of lace curtains. A similar mountain of lace crowned the bed, wound about like a turban, yellowing with dust and age. The cherry blossom wall paper, depicting Japanese scenes, had faded too and retired behind a spotty pale brown haze. Upon a slope of pillows very white by contrast, Stephanie lay with an almost ostentatious awkwardness. She was breathing quickly and her face was flushed. She was wearing a frilly pink nightdress, tight in the bodice and a little too small for her. A frilled shoulder strap cut into the flesh making it bulge on either side. She kept jerking and twitching with nervous irritation, lacking the will to move and make herself comfortable. Henry roved about. His hand, which he had not shown to the doctor, was hurting. He looked down on Stephanie with a mixture of pity and annoyance and possessiveness and sheer blank responsibility which seemed to make up his love for this odd untidy woman. Yes, untidy, physically and spiritually untidy. Her big heavy chin was greasy, her almost round eyes were moist and glowing, hot with some kind of secretive emotion. A subject for Bonnard, Vuillard, better still Degas. A large overflowing ashtray was balanced on her stomach while her hand, holding a lighted cigarette, trailed about like some sort of independent distracted animal. Even in his distress he found her exasperating, attractive. Only the centre of his mind, where it was all blown away, was occupied with Colette.

‘You're thinking about that girl Colette.'

‘I'm not. Take your sleeping pills.'

‘I wish I had a hundred. I don't want to go to America. Please, darling, try to understand. I know you've got to be you. But I've got to be me too.'

‘I daresay that's a tautology.'

‘And there's all sorts of things I ought to tell you—'

‘You mean about the past, about Sandy and all that—'

‘Yes.'

‘I don't want to know. Sandy doesn't matter. He doesn't exist any more.'

‘You speak so cruel, it hurts. I know you don't mean to. You think that I'm just weak like a coward is. But I'm so unhappy in my mind and I can't do anything to stop it.'

‘Look out, you're burning a hole in the sheet.'

‘Your mother thinks I'm just a—'

‘Look
out
—'

‘I don't care, and you don't care since you're giving it all away—'

Stephanie jerked up and strewed the contents of the ashtray together with her glowing cigarette, all over the early nineteenth-century patchwork counterpane.

Henry lifted the ashtray and began to brush the glowing sparks and ash off onto the floor where he trampled them into a grey mess on the Persian carpet. He looked down with exasperation at Stephanie's hunched shoulder and at a large round dark-rimmed hole in the sheet. Then he reached down and grabbed one of the frilly shoulder straps with both hands and snapped it. Stephanie's flushed face became suddenly smooth and bland and she relaxed, lying back among the pillows and gazing up at him with her hot eyes.

Henry touched her cheek. Then put the ashtray carefully on the glass top of the dressing table and then left the room closing the door quietly. He went downstairs.

‘What is it?' said Gerda.

Henry was standing in the doorway of the library. A television programme was on, showing a picture of a hijacked aeroplane standing on the tarmac at an African airport. Gerda, dressed tonight in a dark red robe, was sitting in an armchair. One lamp was on. A last yellow flame flickered in the grate.

Henry said nothing. He turned off the sound of the television, then came forward and sat astride on the club fender, one foot dabbling in the ashes of the log fire, the other rucking up the red and brown Kazak rug. The rug was covered with little burnt patches where hot embers had leapt onto it from the fire.

Gerda stared at her son as he sat there, pale faced, small headed, curly haired, dangling his long legs and poking the ashes intently with his foot. She said, ‘You've decided not to sell the house?'

‘No,' said Henry, kicking up a cloud of ash.

‘How is your hand? I wish you'd let me—'

‘It's all right.' He said after a moment, not looking at her, gazing down at his ashy shoe. ‘What did you mean about not living at Dimmerstone? Wouldn't you like to live at Dimmerstone?'

‘No.'

‘Why not?'

‘A man may do what he likes with his own,' said Gerda, ‘and I cannot complain since I am, as you say, old and have had my time, but I do not want to stay here and see what is done to this place which I love. When the house is sold my life here will be over and finished. I shall leave and not come back.'

‘O.K.,' said Henry, after a moment. ‘Where will you live then?'

‘In a flat in London.'

‘O.K. They're jolly expensive now, you know. You'd better have Sandy's. I don't want it. There's a view of Harrods.'

Gerda was silent, staring at him. She was wearing a white flannel nightdress under her red robe, and had pulled the collar of it up around her neck. Her large magisterial face seemed smooth and unwrinkled in the dim light. Her dark hair, a little tossed and unkempt, was piled inside the white collar. She said again, ‘What is it?'

Henry took Cato's letter out of his pocket. It was a little crumpled and he smoothed it down. He handed it to Gerda.

Gerda read it, frowning. ‘Whatever is this?'

Henry swept his leg over the fender and sat facing her. ‘Well you may ask.'

‘What does it mean?'

‘Listen,' said Henry. ‘Something absolutely awful has happened. I've got to share this with somebody, especially now. Cato has been kidnapped by some gangsters. I think it was the idea of a delinquent boy, one of his flock. This boy got wind that I had a lot of money, and now this gang have got Cato and are blackmailing me. I've given them twenty thousand and I'm supposed to give them some more. But now this has come. I don't know what to do. I can't send Colette to those swine. I daren't go myself now. I daren't do nothing in case they start maiming Cato. I don't know what to do, I think I shall go mad.'

Gerda read the letter through again. ‘You're sure this is genuine?'

‘Yes. It's Cato's writing. And I've met the boy. It's all genuine all right.'

‘What an extraordinary letter to write,' said Gerda. She returned it to Henry. ‘Who have you told?'

‘Nobody. You.'

‘You haven't told the police?'

‘No! How can I?'

Gerda reflected. She said, ‘Wait, I'm going to change. I think we should go and see John Forbes.'

Henry was sitting at the big scrubbed kitchen table at Pennwood, his elbows on the table and his face in his hands. He felt a mixture of profound relief and pure terror. Gerda and John Forbes were talking. ‘It's a matter of eliminating possibilities,' John was saying.

John Forbes had expressed no surprise when Gerda had telephoned just before midnight to ask if she could come to see him. He had shown only the briefest flicker of emotion at the news that his son was kidnapped and his daughter on demand by gangsters. He had blushed as a man might when he was insulted. They had arrived to find the lights on in the kitchen, the stove radiantly hot with open doors, the room, which Henry had not entered for so many years, tidied for visitors. He read Cato's letter, and then, while Henry was telling the rest of the story, offered, tea, coffee, beer, whisky. Chocolate biscuits. Gerda refused refreshment. Henry accepted whisky. He thought, I never realized how free I was before this fear came. Even if we get Cato out I'll be afraid now for the rest of my life. Oh God, why did this have to happen. Stupid bloody Cato, it's all his fault. He drank some more whisky. He had answered many questions and now left the discussion to the other two.

‘It's just as well Colette isn't here,' said Gerda. In spite of the warmth of the room she had kept her tweed coat on.

‘Yes. She went to London this afternoon to see her Aunt Pat. You know, Ruth's old friend, Dame Patricia Raven. She'll stay the night there.'

‘I agree with you,' said Gerda, ‘there just aren't any other possible moves.'

‘Obviously we can't let Colette go to those men, either alone or with an escort, we agree on that, don't we? If Henry does he may be in danger. There was perhaps some point in Henry playing for time by giving them some money and promising more. I don't blame him for doing that. After all, the situation wasn't even clear till then. But I don't think there's any point in feeding them more money now. That won't ultimately save Cato's life. Now they've got some they'll probably be prepared to wait and bargain a bit. This boy that came, Henry, the one you'd seen before with Cato, you said you thought he was just a sort of pawn?'

‘Cato said he was a petty criminal,' said Henry, lifting his head. ‘He's very young. I suppose he's just got into the clutches of those people.'

‘Exactly. Now it's absolutely no good our trying to play the detective about this on our own. We've agreed on that too. We've nothing to go on. This place where Cato is may be anywhere. The postmark is certain to be misleading and this letter gives us no clue.'

‘I can't think how he can have written such awful letters,' said Gerda. ‘It's a terrible thing to do, to involve other people like that. Henry might have got hurt.'

‘I did.'

‘A pity you destroyed the other letter.'

‘There wasn't any more clue in the other one,' said Henry sulkily, his chin nearly down on the table.

‘No, this tells us nothing,' said John Forbes, inspecting Cato's letter. ‘The only positive thing that can be done is to lay hands on this boy. You said he had someone with him, Henry?'

‘Yes.'

‘Did you see the other man?'

‘No, but he said there was someone outside and it stands to reason he wouldn't come alone.'

‘These people must be ambushed. Henry must go once more and—'

‘I don't see why Henry—' said Gerda.

‘Neither do I,' said Henry.

‘Anyway this is a question for the police,' said John Forbes. ‘It's a technical question, a question for experts. I think Henry should be prepared to—'

‘If we agree to tell the police then let's do so at once,' said Gerda. ‘I wanted to ring them immediately. Where should we telephone, here or London?'