People Die (15 page)
Authors: Kevin Wignall
He looked confused for a second but then turned to JJ and said, “Sorry. It’s not you. It’s like, dinner and stuff, you know? And I have like, plans, which my mom kind of knows about.”
“No need to apologize,” JJ replied. “If I was fourteen I wouldn’t want to have dinner either.” Jack smiled at Susan, as though he’d just been vindicated, and Susan smiled back, a brief silent conversation of playful facial expressions passing between them.
Ed spoke then, saying like he’d just remembered it, “Oh, I have to go down to Washington in the morning, just for a day or two. Someone’s in town and I want to see him before he goes again.”
“Which reminds me,” JJ said to Ed before Susan could respond, “I’ll go and get that phone number for you, while I think of it.”
“Thanks,” said Ed.
“Well this all sounds very intriguing,” Susan said, looking at Ed for an explanation.
“That’s why you wouldn’t have made a spy, Susan. Don’t see connections when they’re not there. See, the phone number JJ has for me is an old friend from Berlin who lives in Paris nowadays.” She asked if it was anyone she knew, and JJ excused himself as Ed answered.
He went back through into the inn and up to his room, picking up the passports and putting them in his pocket, finding a piece of paper and writing what looked like a Paris number on it. When he got back to the kitchen though, Ed wasn’t there. Susan looked up from her paperwork to say, “He’s gone up to his room, third door on the left-hand side.”
“Thanks,” said JJ and walked up to Ed’s room, a guest room that looked similar to JJ’s a little way beyond the partition.
Standing in the open doorway, he went through the form of giving him the phone number, chatting inanely while handing over the passports. Ed responded likewise, talking about nothing as he flicked through them and put them away. They parted then, saying they’d see each other at dinner, Ed closing his door.
As JJ walked back toward the top of the stairs he noticed one of the other doors he’d passed half open, giving a view of the room from that direction, a narrow glimpse of what looked like the girl’s room, a few posters on the wall. He slowed down, staring in as he passed, suddenly noticing the reflection in the mirror above the cluttered dressing table, the girl herself and her boyfriend, asleep on the bed like two entwined children, a spellbound sense of stillness about them.
Seeing them there reminded him of a winter afternoon years before when he’d been about her age, sleeping fully clothed with his girlfriend, waking a little and watching the light fade, feeling her close, one of those rare moments that had been beautiful at the time and not just in the recollection.
He hadn’t thought of it in years but did now because of seeing them, the sleeping September-lit room pumping blood back into that part of his memory. And he felt envious too, of their youth, their clean slate, or perhaps just of the boyfriend, for having someone or something to hold on to, for having her.
Because despite what Ed had said, it still seemed hard to believe that he’d ever find a balance like that again. There had been Aurianne for a while, and for a while that had felt like something stable, but he hadn’t even loved her, and the worst part of that was knowing how devastated he’d have been now if they had been in love.
No doubt Ed would have countered that the present situation was a one-time thing, nothing to govern life choices by, but they worked in a business that had a way of throwing up one-time situations like that. If it was just him that wouldn’t matter, but he didn’t see how he could ever invest in a life beyond himself, not fully invest, not knowing what he knew.
Bostridge perhaps had been lucky. He’d been an amateur, not a real player. So it had been only Bostridge himself who’d been killed. Apart from his death, as much of a loss as that must have been, his family had been immune, to the extent that here they were blindly playing host to two people intimately involved with the killing and yet able to continue with life as normal: boyfriends, discussions about work and school, dinners with the friends of friends.
Following Jack’s exit JJ had reckoned on just the three adults having dinner, but when he got there the kitchen table was set for four. There was no food cooking, though. Susan brusquely dismissed her own cooking skills, explaining that the meal would be brought in, double-checking that JJ liked beef.
The three of them were already sitting down when Jem came in, a vague smile on her face, like a contentment spilling over from some other part of her life. She was wearing a summery dress but with a white T-shirt under it, showing up the light tan of her skin, the dress offering brief hints of the figure beneath as she moved, her breasts, hips, all subtle promise.
JJ started to stand up but thought better of it, not wanting to embarrass her, rising from his seat only to shake hands when Susan introduced them. Her hand was soft but with a firmer grip than her brother’s, determined, her eyes pale green, searching again as if trying to read code.
She was sitting opposite him but didn’t speak for a while, listening instead as JJ and the others made small talk. A couple of times their eyes met but averted quickly, the girl looking mildly flustered each time. There was something amusing about it, and something strangely reassuring too, that there was already some indistinct chemistry between the two of them, a girl almost half his age, a teenager whose father he’d killed when she’d still been a child.
The food came, beef in a rich sauce, mushrooms, beer perhaps. Ed tasted his and said, “Wonderful. JJ should eat with us more often.” Susan laughed at the backhanded insult to her cooking, and Jem joined in then, speaking for the first time since sitting down. “No, Mom, this is like, so good.” The same affected hesitancy as her brother and what seemed like most other American kids.
“Honestly, JJ,” Susan said, “my cooking isn’t wonderful but it really isn’t as bad as all that.”
“I’m sure it isn’t. This is very good though.”
Ed cut in, picking up on what Susan had just said. “I like that chicken thing you make. But really, Susan, there’s no shame in not being a great cook.” He turned to JJ then. “She was raised on the Upper East Side and the Hamptons; till she was eighteen she thought food came ready-cooked.”
Susan and Jem laughed, Jem suddenly saying a little too hastily afterward, “So like, why do they call you JJ? I mean, when your name’s William Hoffman.”
He wondered if she’d checked his name in the register, maybe after first seeing him the previous night. “Childhood nickname,” he said. “Doesn’t mean anything.”
“And why are you called Hoffman?” He felt a slight charge, the fact that she was curious about him, bemused at the same time that it mattered to him.
“It’s my father’s name.”
“But it’s not English, right?”
“Nor is he. He’s Swiss. I live in Switzerland too.”
“Oh.” She seemed to think about it for a second or two and then added, “Cool.” She said no more then for the rest of the meal, just listening again, more relaxed now though whenever their eyes met, even smiling a couple of times in response.
They’d finished eating when her boyfriend appeared behind her in the doorway. Susan introduced him to JJ and the kid said, “Yeah, we met, kind of. Hey.”
“Hello, Freddie.”
“So, um ... ,” Jem said to her mother questioningly, like she wasn’t sure of the polite thing to do.
“Well, Freddie could join us,” said Susan, “but as we’re not in formal society I think we can probably spare the two of you.” The girl smiled, excusing herself, offering a general good-bye to the room as much as to the people in it, Freddie saying bye to each of them, an innate politeness forcing its way out past the surface cool.
Susan waited till they’d gone and said quietly then, “I do worry about them. They’re in love, there’s no doubt about that, but I have a bad feeling Freddie Sales will break her heart.”
She actually seemed fairly relaxed about the prospect, but Ed looked stern and said, “Then he’ll be making a big mistake, won’t he, JJ?”
“She’s a beautiful girl,” he agreed. Susan looked flattered, but Ed looked nonplussed, saying, “I don’t mean that! I mean he’ll be messing with the wrong people.”
“Speak for yourself,” said Susan quickly, “JJ and I are the right kind of people.” Ed acknowledged the wordplay. JJ felt flattered this time, by her tone and by the feeling around the table of complete acceptance, as if they’d known him for years rather than days.
And the fact that they’d been connected for almost two years hardly seemed to matter as they sat there, or what connected them. On the surface it was a freak encounter that the four of them had been brought together at that table, the way storms left strange fish sharing the same rock pools. But at some deeper level it felt right to be there, a place where he seemed to belong.
It was the feeling he got with Jem, too, based on no more than a few glances, on the indefinable attraction he felt toward her, that there was something prewritten between them, some unspoken territories that they already shared. It was ridiculous, a grown man losing sight of things because of the attraction of a pretty girl, but that was how he felt, Berg, Naumenko, and everything else almost fading against the thought of her.
13
There were fewer people at the breakfast table the next morning. Kathryn ran through the guests who’d departed the previous day or who’d eaten early and departed that morning, pointing out that it would be a full house again by the evening.
It was Lenny and Dee’s last day too. JJ went through the ritual of tea and coffee in the lounge with them, though without the papers this time, the couple talking instead about the trip home and how they couldn’t wait to see the kids again.
He saw them off when they were leaving, Dee hugging him, Lenny giving him a business card with their address and phone number written on the back, an open invitation to visit, all for someone they’d known perhaps four or five hours in total.
Once they’d gone he stood there for a minute, trying to decide whether to walk down to the village but not moving, preferring to enjoy the moment, another blue sky and the faint hollow chill in the air, the winter’s promise that was loaded into autumn mornings.
Suddenly Jem walked past wearing jeans, heavy boots, a flannel shirt, her hair hanging down over the back of it, almost flaxen in the early sun. After a few paces she stopped, as if realizing who was standing there. She turned and looked at him, covering her eyes against the sunlight. “Hey, JJ.”
“Good morning.”
“Are you walking?”
“Just to the village.”
“Me too. I mean, if you wanna tag along?”
“Sure,” he said and walked with her, saying, “No school today?”
“It’s Saturday,” she replied, looking at him like she couldn’t believe how out of touch he was. It was a shock to him too, that he’d visited Viner that Sunday and then lost himself afterward, time blurring, life blurring, a week falling away from him.
“So shouldn’t you be, oh, I don’t know, at the mall or something?”
“I hate malls. Honestly,” she said, glancing at him. “I’m like, so untypical of your average American teenager. I mean, what is this teenager thing anyway, right? It’s just like some kind of marketing thing.”
“I think the whole of life is a marketing thing.”
“I guess you’re right.” She pointed at a knotted old tree and said, “We used to have a tree house up there. One winter when I was like, ten or something, it just fell apart.”
“I had a tree house when I was a kid.”
“What happened to it?”
“It’s still there,” he said, thinking of it now, thinking how it didn’t even seem that long ago. There were still remnants visible in the tree Jem had pointed at too, hidden to strangers but there all the same, just as the whole of the surrounding area was probably filled with the markers of her childhood, places that were significant to her alone.
“So what’s it like,” she asked, “where you live?”
“Where I live now? Geneva. It’s a city but it’s okay. It’s on a lake.” For the first time since flying to London he thought about going back there, what it would mean, whether he still wanted to be there. He was pretty certain now that one way or another he’d have that option of return, that sooner or later it would be safe again, but the city itself suddenly seemed alien in his memory. “I’m thinking about moving sometime soon,” he added, the thought spilling out as it occurred to him, “maybe to the mountains.”
“Do you have a girlfriend?”
“No. I just broke up with someone, after two years.”
“Oh. That sucks.”
“Yeah,” said JJ, knowing that breaking up wouldn’t have sucked, that what sucked was Aurianne being beaten, abused, bruised with the cold metal of the barrel, a bullet thumping her down into the carpet; that was what sucked.
Suddenly he heard Jem say, “Are you okay?”
He laughed, responding, “Sorry, I’m fine, I was just thinking about something.” She smiled back at him, a smile that looked tinged with admiration somehow, a look he didn’t quite understand.
“I know how you feel,” she said. “I guess I’d feel the same way if me and Freddie broke up, which we will I guess but, you know, it’s like we’ve been together for, well, kind of forever really.” He returned her smile, amused more than anything by the stumbling delivery, by the perception of time. Yet as she talked on about Freddie he felt his earlier envy returning, a sense that for all the hassles of being a teenager, and despite the loss of her father, she was still living through halcyon days. He had a sense that she knew it too, a level of self-knowledge that constantly evaded him in his own life, a life that was lived blind, forever stumbling from one piece of furniture to the next.
They passed the first few houses, a woman waving at Jem from an upstairs window, Jem waving back like she hadn’t seen her in months. There was more traffic on the roads, more people too than there had been during the week, an occupying army that probably left the locals ambivalent about how picturesque their town was.
Jem stopped when they got to the church, set back from the road but with a handful of tourists wandering around on the lawn, staring, photographing it like it was an architectural wonder.
“Where were you heading?” she asked JJ then.
“Nowhere in particular.”
“Oh, right, only, this is where I’m going.”
“To church?”
“No,” she said, laughing. “My dad’s grave. I mean, if you wanna come, it’s okay and everything.” JJ felt his system grind up a gear as he got it, a sudden hammer-blow awareness of the obvious, that Bostridge was buried there, that there had been a funeral, that they visited his grave.
Surprisingly until now, even being among them, the link between him and the Bostridges had hardly seemed to matter, like it was nothing more than a metaphysical exercise to pass the time, no basis in reality. And in the family too it had seemed like no one was missing, that there were no gaps, but there was a gap and here he was facing it. “Perhaps I won’t,” he said, stumbling a little over the words. “I’m sure you’d rather be alone.”
“Okay,” she replied breezily, seeing his discomfort maybe. She laughed then and said, “It’s okay, you know. I won’t be like, overcome with emotion or anything. I just like to visit.” He could see that she wanted him to go with her, and felt embarrassed that he’d come across as so retentive, like he couldn’t have dealt with the possibility of her being upset at her father’s grave.
They walked along the side of the church, passing a few graves; most of them were to the rear though with trees among them, the leaves catching the breeze. As at the front there were tourists, studying the headstones, their voices occasionally audible against the papery rustling that rose and fell on a wind too slight to be felt.
Bostridge’s headstone was simple, understated, the barest facts and the simple quote “So we’ll go no more a-roving.” JJ recognized it, a poem by Byron, and wondered if it spoke of a man he couldn’t have imagined from their brief programmed encounter, a romantic, someone in whose imagination the world had been colored by his dreaming. That sounded more like the person Holden had described too, a person who, had he been removed from the visceral truth of it, might even have found his own death romantic. Perhaps if JJ hadn’t been there he’d have been able to see it that way too.
There were flowers in front of the headstone but Jem didn’t touch them or the stone itself, just stood at the foot of the grave, praying perhaps or speaking her thoughts to him or simply lost in thought, her face serenely composed, like time had suspended itself around her. JJ stood to the side and back a pace, conscious of intruding.
He studied her as she stood there, struck again by the way she looked, the way she was, the kind of prettiness that was hard to reduce to specifics. She was still a kid, beyond reach in his own way of things, but he was drawn to her all the same, drawn at a level hidden beyond reasoning, neurons firing along unfamiliar pathways. And maybe the way she looked was only part of it anyway, because there were plenty of young girls who were as beautiful, a shallow swell of beauty that was everywhere with girls of that age.
Briefly he wondered if the attraction was in the connection with Bostridge himself or even with the girl in Moscow, a girl who’d drawn him just as much, tapping into his psyche, burying an image of herself there, a girl he’d thought of too when he’d first seen Jem. It was a simpler attraction than that though, the kind of subconscious recognition of compatibility that happened all the time in ordinary lives, the fact that she was David Bostridge’s daughter merely a cruel trick of fate.
She turned and smiled, signifying that she was finished, and as they walked away said, “Would you like to go for a coffee or something?”
“Or something would be nice; I don’t drink coffee.”
“Me either,” she said, like it was a massive coincidence.
“Oh, and as long as it isn’t the Cheese Press or the Old Maple Tavern.”
“No, there is another place.” She laughed then and added as if to herself, “This town is so weird!” They went to a small cafe that also sold local crafts, pottery, carved ornaments; people browsed around them, looking at the goods on display as they talked and drank lemon tea.
They talked for a long while, background filling, getting to know each other. It was something he was used to, used to lying his way through, a lie that was like his own life but off-kilter, an information drift that left his real existence in the shadows. Even Aurianne had known only a rehearsed version of himself.
But as easily as all of that came to him, it wasn’t what he did with Jem; the real JJ spilled out instead, devoid only of the death and the killing that usually dominated his life but here seemed to leave no readily apparent blank spaces, Jem satisfied that she was talking to a full, rounded person.
It was only in the innocuous detail of his life that he was being open with her, but those had been the details he’d been most cagey about in the past, like they were the key to cracking him open and getting the rest. And he didn’t know why he was choosing to be open with her like that, perhaps because of having met Jools again or because of the easiness he’d found in Holden and the rest of them, perhaps only because the last week had taught him that being cagey didn’t deliver very much.
Whatever the reasons, it was liberating to sit there with her and share stories of their childhoods and families, and of love, relationships, of the common ground they had between them. It was liberating for once to meet someone new and feel only an unhindered desire to share personal histories, with no caution, no uneasiness, and, maybe most ironic of all, with no baggage.
He liked being with her, liked the way she spoke, the way her eyes came alive when she was talking about something, the way she broke into an easy smile, becoming bashful then when he asked what she was smiling about. He liked simply sitting opposite her, being able to look into her face.
It was just one of those rare encounters, a language quickly emerging between them, and it was something again that reminded him of being her age, of the growing teenage awareness that there were other people out there to connect with, the feeling of no longer being isolated.
They walked back to the inn together afterward, a sense of having come to know each other well in the hours since they’d walked out together, and as they passed the church she said, “I’m glad you came to my dad’s grave with me.”
It was a strange thing to say, even now, and he let a note of confusion creep into his voice as he asked, “Why?”
“I don’t know,” she said, “It’s just like, kind of cool that you came.”
“You must miss him,” JJ said, thinking maybe she’d shared the same closeness with her father that Jack had with Susan.
“Not really,” she said, answering casually, backing herself up then. “It was Thanksgiving when it happened.” That was right; it had been a Thursday, Thanksgiving, and Bostridge had chosen to spend it there, inadvertently choosing the day of his execution, inadvertently tainting every future Thanksgiving for his family too.
“So?” asked JJ, questioning the statement as a matter of form.
“So it wasn’t like, unusual for him to be away for Thanksgiving and stuff. I guess what I’m saying is, it’s hard to miss someone who wasn’t there that much.”
“I suppose you’re right. A lot of people are in the same position though. You know, business.”
She looked at him earnestly, as if he needed to be reassured. “Oh, I don’t like, blame him or anything. And I guess I miss what we might have had together but ...” She trailed off, adding then, “Let’s not talk about my dad. I’m glad you came to his grave, that’s all.” She seemed bored by the subject rather than uncomfortable with it; she’d probably spoken about it a lot in the time since, everyone wanting to talk about it with her, demanding catharsis the way people did.
So they chatted about other things for the rest of the way, talking less though. And when they got back to the inn they stood in the lobby and said bye to each other, dwelling a little over it, stilted pauses before she said finally, “Am I keeping you? I mean, do you have plans or anything ?”
“No, not at all,” he said quickly, the signal clear. She smiled again in response, an edge in her eyes he couldn’t quite read.
“Good,” she said then. “There’s something I wanna show you.” She led him into their side of the house, a stillness in there, of stopped clocks, nobody else home. As he followed her up the stairs he realized they were going to her room, the one where he’d seen her lost in sleep with Freddie; a low-level buzz of anticipation caught him at the thought of it.
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