Make Death Love Me (12 page)

The remark and the circumstances would immediately have recalled to Alan Groombridge's mind Faulkner's
Sanctuary
or even
No Orchids for Miss Blandish
, but in fact Marty had said what he had out of bravado. Being twenty-one and healthy, he naturally fancied pretty well every girl he saw, and in a different situation he would certainly have fancied big-busted long-legged Joyce. But he had never felt less sexy in his adult life, and he had almost reached a point where, if she had touched him, he would have screamed. Every sound in the house, every creak of stair and click of door, made him think it was the police coming. The sight of the unusable radio tormented him. Joyce, however, was resolved to sell her honour dear. She summoned up her last shreds of scorn, told him he had to be joking, she was engaged to someone twice his size who'd lay him out as soon as look at him, and she'd sleep on the sofa, thanks very much. Marty let her take two of the four pillows off his bed, watched her sniff them and make a face, and grab for herself his thickest blanket.

She lay down, fully clothed, covered herself up and turned her face to the big greasy back of the sofa. Under the blanket she eased herself out of her skirt and her jumper, but kept her blouse and her slip on. Marty sat up, holding the gun and wishing there was some wine.

‘Put the light out,' said Joyce.

‘Who're you giving orders to? You can get stuffed.'

He was rather pleased when Joyce began to cry. She was deeply ashamed of herself but she couldn't help it. She was thinking about poor Mr Groombridge and about her mother and father not having their party, and about Stephen. It was much to her credit that she thought about herself hardly at all. But those others, poor Mum and Dad, Stephen going to announce their engagement at the Toll House that night, Mr Groombridge's poor wife, so devoted to him and ringing him at the bank every day. Joyce sobbed loudly, giving herself over to the noblest of griefs, that which is expended for others. Marty had been pleased at first because it showed his power over her, but now he was uneasy. It upset him, he'd never liked seeing birds cry.

‘You'll be OK,' he said. ‘Belt up, can't you? We won't hurt you if you do what we say. Honest. Get yourself together, can't you?'

Joyce couldn't. Marty switched the light off, but the room didn't get dark, never got dark, because of the yellow lamps outside. He got into bed and put the gun under the pillow and stuffed his fingers in his ears. He felt like crying himself. What the hell was Nigel doing? Suppose he didn't come back? The room vibrated with Joyce's crying. It was worse than the traffic when the lorries and the buses went by. Then it subsided, it stopped and there was silence. Joyce had cried herself to sleep. Marty thought the silence worse than the noise. He was terribly hungry, he craved for a drink, and he hadn't been to bed at this hour since he was fifteen.

At the point when he had almost decided to give up, to get out of there and run away somewhere, leaving the money to Joyce, there came a tapping at the door. He jumped out of his skin and his heart gave a great lurch. But the tap came again and with it a harsh tired whisper. It was only Nigel, Nigel at last.

Joyce didn't stir but he kept his voice very low.

‘Had to hang about till the goddamned gasmen went. The car's in the garage. I walked to Chingford and got a bus. Christ!'

Nigel dropped the bunch of Ford keys into the carrier bag with the money. He found a bit of string in the kitchen and threaded it through the big iron key and hung it round his neck. They turned off the oil heater. They put the gun under the pillows and got into bed. It was just after midnight, the end of the longest day of their lives.

When Alan woke up he didn't know where he was. The room was full of orange light. Great God (as Lord Byron had remarked the morning after his wedding, the sun shining through his red bed curtains) I am surely in hell! Then he remembered. It all came back to him, as Joyce would have said. The time, according to his watch, was five in the morning, and the light came from street lamps penetrating a tangerine-coloured blind which he must have pulled down on the previous evening. He had slept for eleven hours. The money, now dry and crinkly, glimmered in the golden light. Great God, I am surely in hell . . .

He got out of bed and went into the passage and found the bathroom. There was a notice inside his bedroom door which said in strange English:
The Management take no responsibilities for valuable left in rooms at owners risks.
He put the money back in his raincoat pockets, afraid now of walking about with his pockets bulging like that. All night he had slept in his clothes, and his trousers were as crumpled as the notes, so he took them off and put them under the mattress, which was a way of pressing trousers advocated by Wilfred Summitt. He took off the rest of his clothes and got back into bed, listening to the noise outside that had begun again. The noise seemed to him symptomatic of the uproar which must be going on over his disappearance and Joyce's and the loss of the money, the whole world up in arms.

It struck him fearfully that, once Joyce was set free or rescued, she would tell the police he hadn't been in the bank when the men came. He thought about that for a while, sweating in the cold room. She would tell them, and they would begin tracing his movements from the car to the bus station, the bus to the train. He saw himself as standing out in all those crowds like a leper or a freak or – how had Kipling put it? – a mustard plaster in a coal cellar. But she might not know. It all depended on whether they had blindfolded her and also on how many of them there had been. If she had seen his car still in the yard, and then they had blindfolded her and put her in their car or van for a while before driving away . . . He clung on to that hope, and he thought guiltily of Pam and his children. In her way, Pam had been a good wife to him. It seemed to him certain that, whatever came of this, he would never live with her again, never again share a bed with her or go shopping with her to Stantwich or yield to her for the sake of peace. That was past and the bank was past. The future was liberty or the inside of a jail.

At seven he got up and, wearing his raincoat as a dressing gown, went to have a bath. The water was only lukewarm because, although he had three thousand pounds in his pockets, he hadn't got a ten-pence piece for the meter. Shivering, he put his clothes on. The trousers didn't look too bad. He packed the money as flat as he could, putting some of it into his jacket pockets, some into his trouser pockets, and the rest in the breast pocket of his jacket. It made him look fatter than he was. Mr Azziz didn't provide breakfast or, indeed, any meals, so he went out to find a place where he could eat.

Immediately he was in the street, he felt a craven fear. He must be a marked man, he thought, his face better known than a royal prince's or a pop star's. It didn't occur to him then that it had never been a habit in the Groombridge or Summitt families to sit for studio portraits or go in for ambitious amateur photography, and therefore no large recognizable image of his face could exist. By some magic or some feat of science, it would be brought to the public view. He slunk into a newsagent's, trying to see without being seen, but the tall black headlines leapt at him. He stood looking at a counter full of chocolate bars until he dared to face those headlines again.

It was Joyce's portrait, not his own, that met his eyes, Joyce photographed by Stephen Hallam to seem almost beautiful.
Bank Girl Kidnap,
said one paper; another,
Manager and Girl Kidnapped in Bank Raid.
He picked up both papers in hands that shook and proffered a pound note. The man behind the counter asked him if he had anything smaller. Alan shook his head, he couldn't speak.

He had forgotten about breakfast and wondered how he could ever have thought of it. He sat on a bench on Shepherd's Bush Green and forced himself to look at those papers, though his instinct, now he had bought them, was to throw them away and run away from them himself. But he took a deep breath and forced his eyes on to those headlines and that smaller type.

Before he could find a picture of himself, he had to look on the inside pages. They had put it there, he thought, because it was such a poor likeness, useless for purposes of identification, and adding no character to the account. Christopher had taken the snapshot of himself and Pam and Wilfred Summitt in the garden of the house in Hillcrest. Enlarged, and enlarged only to about an inch in depth, Alan's face was a muzzy grinning mask. It might equally well have been Constable Rogers or P. Richardson standing there beside the pampas grass.

The other newspaper had the same picture. Were there any others in existence? More vague snapshots, he thought. At his wedding, that shotgun affair, gloomy with disgrace, there had been no photographers. He became aware that the paralysis of terror was easing. It was sliding from him as from a man healed and made limber again. He saw the mist and the pale sun, the grass, other people, felt the renewal of hunger and thirst. If he couldn't be recognized, identified, he had little to fear. The relief of it, the slow easing that was now quickening and acquiring a sort of excitement, drove away any desire to read any more of the newspaper accounts. He forgot Joyce, who even now might be safe, might be at home once more with only a vague memory of events. He was safe and free, and he had got what he wanted.

A cup of tea and eggs and toast increased his sense of well-being. The papers he dropped thankfully into a bin. After a few minutes' exploration, he found the tube station and got a train to Oxford Circus. Oxford Street, he knew, was the place to buy clothes. Every Englishman, no matter how sheltered the life he has led, knows that. He bought two pairs of jeans, four tee-shirts, some socks and underpants and a windcheater, two sweaters and a pair of comfortable half-boots. Jeans had never been permitted him in the past, for Pam said they were only for the young, all right for Christopher but ridiculous on a man of his age. He told himself he was buying them as a disguise, but he knew it wasn't only that. It was to recapture – or to discover, for you cannot recapture what you have never had – his youth.

He came out of the shop wearing his new clothes, and this transformation was another step towards ridding him of the fear of pursuit. People, even policemen, passed him without a second glance. Next he bought a suitcase, and in a public lavatory deep below the street, he filled it with his working suit and that money-loaded raincoat.

The case was too cumbersome to carry about for long. No ardent reader of fiction could ever be in doubt about where temporarily to rid himself of it. He caught a train to Charing Cross, and there deposited the case in a left-luggage locker. At last he and the money were separated. Walking away, with only his wallet filled as he had so often filled it during those secret indulgences in his office, he felt a lightness in his step as if, along with the money, he had disburdened himself of culpability. So he made his way up to Trafalgar Square. He went into the National Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery and looked at the theatres in St Martin's Lane and the Charing Cross Road, and had a large lunch with wine. Tonight he would go to the theatre. In all his life he had never really been to the theatre except once or twice to Stantwich Rep and to pantomimes in London when the children were younger. He bought himself a ticket for the front row of the stalls, row A and right in the middle, for Marlowe's
Dr Faustus
.

Next to the theatre was a flat agency. It reminded him that he would need somewhere to live, he wasn't going to stay at the Maharajah longer than he had to. But it wouldn't be a flat. A few seconds spent studying the contents of the agency's window told him anything of that nature would be beyond his means. But a room at sixteen to twenty pounds a week, that he could manage.

The girl inside gave him two addresses. One was in Maida Vale and the other in Paddington. Before he could locate either of them, Alan had to buy himself a London guide. He went to the Paddington address first because the room to let there was cheaper.

The landlord came to the door with an evening paper in his hand. Alan saw that he and Joyce were still the lead story, and his own face was there again, magnified to a featureless blur. The sight of it revived his anxiety, but the landlord put the paper down on a table and invited him in.

Alan would have taken the room, though it was sparsely furnished and comfortless. At any rate, it would be his to improve as he chose, and it was better than the Maharajah. The landlord too seemed happy to accept him as a tenant so long as he understood he had to pay a month's rent in advance and a deposit. Alan had got out his wallet and was preparing to sign the agreement as A. J. Forster when the landlord said:

‘I take it you can let me have a bank reference?'

The blood rushed into Alan's face.

‘It's usual,' said the landlord. ‘I've got to protect myself.'

‘I was going to pay you in cash.'

‘Maybe, but I'll still want a reference. How about your employer or the people where you're living now? Haven't you got a bank?'

In the circumstances, the question held a terrible irony. Alan didn't know what to say except that he had changed his mind, and he got out of the house as fast as he could, certain the landlord thought him a criminal, as indeed he was. No one knew more than he about opening bank accounts. It was impossible for him to open one, he had no name, no address, no occupation and no past. Suddenly he felt frightened, out there in the alien street with no identity, no possessions, and he saw his act as not so much an enormity as an incredible folly. In all those months of playing with the banknotes, he had never considered the practicalities of an existence with them illicitly in his possession. Because then it had been a dream and now it was reality.