Make Death Love Me (19 page)

Her expression was such a comical mixture of merriment and rue that Alan couldn't help himself, he burst out laughing. That made her laugh too. He realized he hadn't laughed aloud like this since he ran away from Childon, and perhaps for a long time before that. Why did he have this strange feeling that laughter with her too had fallen into disuse? Because he knew her history? Or from another, somehow telepathic cause? The thought stopped his laughter, and by infection hers, but her small flying-fox face stayed alight.

‘It doesn't really matter,' she said. ‘Ambrose thinks I'm hopeless, anyway. He'll just say he's very disappointed and that'll be that. But I mustn't keep on talking about him – Ambrose says this and Ambrose says that. It's because I'm with him so much. Tell me about you.'

Until then he had had to tell remarkably few lies. Neither Rose nor Caesar had asked him about himself, and he had hardly spoken to anyone else. He had lied only about his name and address. Rather quickly and with uncertainty, he told her he had been an accountant but had left his job. The next bit was true, or almost. ‘I've left my wife. I just walked out last weekend.'

‘A permanent break?' she said.

‘I shall never go back!'

‘And that's all you brought with you? A suitcase?'

‘That's all.' Involuntarily, he glanced at the tallboy where the money was.

‘Just like me,' she said. ‘I haven't anything of my own either, only a few clothes and books. But I wouldn't need them here. There's everything you can think of in this house and lots of things twice over. You name something, the most way-out thing you can think of. I bet Ambrose has got it.'

‘Wineglasses.'

She laughed. ‘I asked for that.'

‘Before you came here,' he said carefully, ‘you must have had things.'

The sudden sharpening of her features, as if she had winced, distressed him. He was enjoying her company so much – so surprisingly and wonderfully – that he dreaded breaking the rapport between them. But she recovered herself, speaking lightly. ‘Stewart, that's my husband, kept the lot. Poor dear, he needs to know he's got things even if he can't use them. Ambrose says it's the outward sign of his insecurity and it's got to be worked through.'

Alan burst out, knowing he shouldn't, ‘Your father-in-law is worse than mine! He's a monster.'

Again she laughed, with delight. She held out her glass. ‘More, please. It's delicious. I
am
having a nice time. I suppose he is rather awful, but if I say so people think it's me that is because everyone thinks he's wonderful. Except you.' She nodded sagely. ‘I like that.'

In that moment he fell in love with her, though it was some hours before he realized it.

Una stayed till eleven, Fitton's Piece Cinderella hour. But she didn't ask him whatever time it was or cry out that, Good heavens, she had no idea it was so late. After she had gone, he tidied up the room and washed the glasses, thinking how glad he was that Caesar and his girl friend hadn't been there. He was even more glad Rose hadn't been there. Una had talked about the books she had read, which were much the same as the books he had read, and he had never before talked on this subject with anyone. There was something heady, more intoxicating than the vodka he had been drinking, about being with someone who talked about a character in a book or the author's style with an intensity he had previously known lavished only over saving money and the cost of living. What would Rose have talked about? During the hours with Una, Rose had slipped back into, been engulfed by, the fantasy image from which she had come. He could hardly believe that he had ever met her or that she had been real at all. But he went over and over in his mind the things Una had said and the things he had said to her, and he thought of things he wished he had said. It didn't matter, there would be more times. He had made a friend to whom he could talk.

Before he went to bed he looked at himself carefully in the mirror. He wanted to see what sort of a man she had seen. His hair wasn't greased down any more, so that it looked more like hair and less like a leather cap, and his face was – well, not exactly brown but healthily coloured. He who had never got a tan while living in the country, had got one in a week of walking round London. His belly didn't sag quite so much. He looked thirty-eight, he thought, instead of going on for fifty. That was what she had seen. And he? He conjured her up vividly, she might still have been sitting there, her small face so vital when she laughed, her eyes so bright, the curly hair escaping from the ribbon until, by the time she left, it had massed once more about her thin cheeks. Tomorrow he'd go upstairs and find her and take her out to lunch. The idea of taking her out and ordering food and wine didn't frighten him a bit. But he was very tired now. He got into bed and fell immediately asleep.

At about three he woke up. The vodka had given him a raging thirst, so he went into the kitchen and drank a pint of water. After that it would have been natural to go back to bed and sleep till, say, seven, but he felt wide awake and entirely refreshed and tremendously happy. It was years since he had felt happy. Had he ever? When he was a child, yes, and when Jillian was born because she was the child he had wanted, and in a strange way when he was driving off with the money. But he hadn't felt like this. This feeling was quite new. He wanted to go out and rush up and down Montcalm Gardens, shouting that he was free and happy and had found the meaning of life. A great joy possessed him. Energy seemed to flow through his body and out at his fingertips. He wanted to tell someone who would understand, and he knew it was Una he wanted to tell.

So this was being in love, this was what it was like. He laughed out loud. He turned on the cold tap and ran his hands under it, he splashed cold water over his face. The room was freezing because the heating went off at eleven, but he was hot, glowing with heat and actually sweating. He fell on to the bed and pulled the sheet over him and thought about Una up there asleep somewhere in the house. Or was she awake too, thinking about him? He thought about her for an hour, re-living their conversation and then fantasizing that he and she lived together in a house like this one and were happy all the time, every minute of the day and night. The fantasy drifted off into a dream of that, a long protracted dream that broke and dissolved and began again in new aspects, until it ended in horror. It ended with his hearing Una scream. He had to run up many staircases and through many rooms to find where the screams were coming from and to find her. At last he came upon her and she was dead, burnt to death with charred banknotes lying all around her. But when he took her body in his arms and looked into her face, he saw that it was not Una he held. It was Joyce.

The cold of morning pierced through the thin sheet, and he awoke shivering, his legs numb. All the euphoria of the night was gone. He had no idea of how one went a-courting. It would be as difficult to speak of love to Una as it would have been to Rose, more difficult because he was in love with her – that was unchanged – while for Rose he had felt only the itch of lust. He was alone in the house with Una, he must be, and thinking of it terrified him. Inviting her out to lunch was impossible, making any sort of overtures to her was unthinkable. He was married, and she knew it. He had a notion, gathered more from Pam's philosophy than from novels, that if you told a woman you loved her and she didn't love you, she would slap your face. Especially if you were married and she was married. It was apparently, for no reason he could think of, in some circumstances an insult to tell a woman you loved her. He dressed and went out, thinking he would collapse or weep if he were to meet Una in the hall, but he didn't meet her.

Ex-priest Marries Stripper
and
Torture ‘Hotly' Denied
said the Sunday papers. They were searching potholes in Derbyshire for the bodies of himself and Joyce. The silver-blue Ford Escort, last observed at Dover, had turned up in Turkey, its passengers blamelessly on their way to an ashram in India. Alan had a cup of coffee and a sandwich which made him feel sick. He noticed, after quite a long while, that it was a nice day. They were back to the kind of weather of the week before he ran away, just like spring, as Joyce had said. The sun on his face was warm and kind. If he went into the park or Kensington Gardens he might meet Rose, so he made for the nearest tube station, which was Notting Hill, and bought a ticket to Hampstead.

Una had lived in Hampstead. He didn't remember that until he got there. He walked about Hampstead, wondering if she had lived in this street or that, and if she had walked daily where he now was walking. He found the Heath by the simple expedient of following Heath Street until he got to it. All London lay below him, and, standing on the slope beside the Spaniards Road, he looked down on it as Dick Whittington had looked down and, in the sunshine, seen the city paved with gold.

His gold lay down there, but it was nothing to him if it couldn't give him Una. He turned abruptly and walked in the opposite direction, through the wood that lies between the Spaniards Road and North End. It wasn't much like Childon Fen. In the woods adjacent to great cities the trees are the same as trees in the deep wild, but at ground level all the plants and most of the grass have been trodden away. A sterile dusty brownness lies underfoot. The air has no moist green sweetness. But on that sunny Sunday morning – it was still morning, he had left so early – the wood seemed to Alan to have a tender bruised beauty, spring renewing it only for further spoliation, and he knew the authors were right when they wrote of what love does, of how it transforms and glorifies and takes the scales from the eye of the beholder.

When he emerged from the wood he had no idea where he was, but he went on walking roughly westward until he came to a large main road. Finchley Road, NW2, he read, and he realized he must be in Paul Browning country. Strange. Paddington was West Two, so he had supposed that North-west Two must be nearby. It was now evident that Paul Browning banked in Paddington not because he lived but because he worked there. Alan took out his London guide, for even though he would never speak to Una again, never be alone with her again, he ought to know the location of his old home.

The street plan showed Exmoor Gardens as part of an estate of houses where the roads had been quaintly constructed in concentric circles, or really, concentric ovals. Each one was named after a range of mountains or hills in the British Isles. It seemed a long way to walk, but Alan didn't know if there was any other means of getting there, and he felt a strange compulsion to see Paul Browning's home. In the event, the walk didn't take so very long.

Most of the houses in Exmoor Gardens were mock-Tudor, but a few were of newer, plainer design, and number 15 was one of these. It was bigger than his own house at Fitton's Piece, but otherwise it was very much like it, red brick and with picture windows and a chimney for show not use, and a clump of pampas grass in the front garden. He stood and looked at it, marvelling that by chance he should have chosen for his fictional past so near a replica of his actual past.

Paul Browning himself was cleaning his car on the garage drive. The front door was open and a child of about eight was running in and out, holding a small distressed-looking puppy on a lead. There was a seat on the opposite side of the road. It had been placed at the entrance to a footpath which presumably linked one of those ovals to another. Alan sat down on the seat and pretended to read his paper while the child galloped the puppy up and down the steps. Paul Browning gave an irritable exclamation. He threw down his soapy cloth and went up to the door and called into the hall:

‘Alison! Don't let him do that to the dog.'

There was no answer. Paul Browning caught the boy and admonished him, but quietly and gently, and he picked the puppy up and held it in his arms. A woman came out of the house, blonde, tallish, about thirty-five. Alan couldn't hear what she said but the tone of her voice was protective. He had the impression from the way she put her arm round the boy and smiled at her husband and patted the little dog, that she was the fierce yet tender protector of them all. He folded his paper and got up and walked away down the footpath.

The little scene had made him miserable. He should have had that but he had never had it, and now it was too late to have it with anyone. He felt ridiculously guilty too for taking this man's identity and background, a theft which had turned out to be pointless as well as a kind of slander on Paul Browning who would never have left his wife. Alan asked himself if his other theft had been equally pointless.

The path brought him out at the opposite end to that where he had entered the oval, and his guide showed him that he wasn't far now from Cricklewood Broadway which seemed to be part of the northern end of the Edgware Road. He walked towards it through a district that rapidly grew shabbier, that seemed as if it must inevitably run down into squalor. Yet this never happened. Expecting squalor, he found himself instead in an area that maintained itself well this side of the slummy and the disreputable. The street was wide, lined with the emporiums of car dealers, with betting shops, supermarkets and shops whose windows displayed saris and lengths of oriental silks. On a blackboard outside a pub called the Rose of Killarney a menu was chalked up, offering steak pie and two veg or ham salad or something called a Leprechaun's Lunch. This last appeared to be bread, cheese and pickles, but the thought of asking for it in the blackboard's terms daunted Alan so he ordered the salad and a half of bitter while he waited for it to come.

The girl behind the bar had the pale puffy face and black circles under her eyes of someone reared on potatoes in a Dublin tenement. She drew Alan's bitter and a pint for an Irishman with an accent as strong as her own, then began serving a double whisky to a thin boy with a pinched face whose carrier bag full of groceries was stuffed between Alan's stool and his own. Alan didn't know what made him look down. Perhaps it was that he was still surprised you could go shopping in London on a Sunday, or perhaps he was anxious, in his middle-class respectable way, not to seem to be touching that bag or encroaching upon it. Whatever it was, he looked down, slightly shifting his stool, and saw the boy's hand go down to take a cigarette packet and a box of matches from inside the bag. It was the right hand. The forefinger had been injured in some kind of accident and the nail was cobbled like the kernel of a walnut.