Taking Lives (9 page)

A woman, bare-breasted, holding a root up like a torch, a vermilion sash about supple brown legs. Then a soldier, bare with a bow and arrow and a ring of crimson round his head, absurdly like medieval millinery. A chief, mitred and robed like a bishop. A mother, a tiny baby clinging to her neck.

‘The Germans tried to get the albums back from Cracow, I think. That could be trouble,’ I said. ‘We’re not very plausible heirs to the Prussians.’

‘The law does not permit the Museum to alienate anything in its collections. Anything. So, of course, we insist on keeping them.’

Reluctantly, I left the woman with the sash. I felt I had been in her company a moment, that I could turn back and ask her things: how the cold of a vault felt after the forest.

‘It’s possible,’ I said, ‘that whoever stole the pages simply wanted to sell them. He wouldn’t find it hard. They’re rare, portable, exquisite and anyone could appreciate them. There’ll be some sausage king of Saxony who has them in his private safe. Or some banker.’ I withdrew my hands reluctantly, as though the books had been touching me back. ‘You could hang them in your drawing room quite safely, too - nobody ever published them, and almost nobody has seen them for the past fifty years.’

‘Perhaps.’ The Deputy Director tumbled his fingers against the desk. ‘I did wonder something else. I wondered if the pages were meant to be sources for an argument, Hart’s argument,’ he said. He was outlining a crime he wanted to commit, I could see that. ‘Perhaps he wants to control them, so he controls the story he’s telling.’ The offence changed: from a theft, something banal and greedy, to an affront to everything the Museum was supposed to represent.

‘Perhaps he wants to destroy them, so nobody can argue with him,’ I said.

The idea stood in the room for a moment, as shocking as a leper.

‘This is a community of scholars,’ the Deputy Director said. ‘I suppose we must acquire the habit of suspecting each other. Body searches as you enter, body searches as you leave. Metal detectors and X-rays. Warrants for everyone’s libraries. But I would have thought from Hart’s reputation, from the papers I’ve read, that I knew him.

‘We really must talk to Professor Hart.’

I knew the ‘we’ included only ‘me.’

Christopher Hart, so Arkenhout told me, bought his rail ticket from Amsterdam to Cologne with his credit card. No problem. He had his passport with him, but nobody needed to see it at the German border.

He caught the tram to the end of a suburban line in Cologne, and walked up three flights of stairs to a flat where an Indian with bloodshot eyes took his papers away. There was no receipt, nothing written.

He nursed a beer for four long hours.

When he went back, his face matched his name. The Indian - and his two cousins - mended identities like shoes, and with the same professional indifference. He paid in cash. The Indians accepted most currencies.

On the way back to Amsterdam, the dull, grey border station at Emmerich acquired something like glamour: a place of ordeal. He could see grey-uniformed policemen on the long, empty platforms. He wanted to show his passport to one of them, to be examined and searched and proved to be Christopher Hart, professor. Nobody came.

Then he asked himself: Did I really give a name to my mother? Did I really say out loud that now I am ‘Christopher Hart’?

I left early, through a fire door into the public Museum. Crowds roared at me, on their way to shop for cultures, gods in the nude, all those unbiddable spirits of river and earthquake and birth that we hold behind strong, official glass. Occasionally, someone would be stopped by the huge brown eyes of - say - a Coptic portrait, would stand against the crowd for a moment; and then would scuttle on to the next obligatory sight.

I watched the guards watching all this. They were older men who certainly drank beer and ate pies, who had been dutiful in the army and would not answer back, who paraded through the galleries at night and shut them down. They tolerated cameras and sensors and the mumbo-jumbo of security, but only because they knew in the end it came down to their nightly ceremony of big iron keys.

I thought they belonged to the same world as my father: people who ate Marmite, knew the name of Max Jaffa, knew what they meant by ‘tradition’.

My father was on my mind, anyway. He had left messages on the answering machine, all starting uncertainly as though he felt self-conscious talking to himself this way with only a vague hope someone would sometime find the message. I called him, but he was out. He liked to spend the late afternoon in the Portuguese cafes along Ladbroke Grove, talking without the nagging burden of perpetual translation. He’d be drinking little coffees, and eating cakes with eggs and almonds. I don’t know what he discussed.

Anna wasn’t home yet.

My father’s story is an old one. He came to Britain as a labourer, became a waiter, polished himself up until he was running a hotel restaurant. All this time, he made sure I would never be him. He turned me into a dark, nostalgic Englishman, attached to cricket and kings and chestnut trees like nobody English could ever be again.

But my father, I came to realize, did not like the process. With his friends, he still spoke Portuguese. When I came home from school, even my ‘Hello’, my ‘Good afternoon’, the word ‘Dad’ were betrayals of true, Portuguese language. Fish fingers, gobstoppers, stuck him in the heart. But he couldn’t say anything about betrayal. He had already slipped across enemy lines and into the bed of the Englishwoman who became my mother.

She died of a cancer so quick it was like a special effect, as though she’d briefly relaxed and all her defences crashed at once. I was ten. I know now what my father did. He made me safe at all costs. The highest of those costs, to him, was Englishness. Other families went back to Portugal when the girls were thirteen, just when Englishness might get between their legs; but I was his son, his only child, and I could stay on to become an alien myself.

I went to university, which nobody in my family ever did before. My father was proud, soft and nervous. I got my higher degree, because I was to be proofed against digging or serving for a living.

I can’t imagine how my father explained all this to friends who ached for home.

My father was home at half past six. He said he wanted to go to Essex on Saturday, to take a boat out fishing for dabs. I knew there was no way to refuse him.

Anna still wasn’t home. I felt her absence, a coldness where she should be occupying a chair or standing at a window. She was preoccupied, of course. Her life went by the rhythms of the college where she taught - breaks, exams, committee crises - and to the frequent, brutal pain in her head that beat her down. But she was more preoccupied than usual. I thought she was wholly involved in something, someone else, and she could not even pretend that things were normal. It was more comfortable than admitting to the distance between us.

Anna came home, but I still felt her absence.

I have the police file here, copies, anyway: neat reports, no paragraphs, sometimes a note in the margin. The file says that, around this time, Inspector van Deursen and Sergeant Visser went out from Amsterdam to interview the Arkenhouts. One or other of them has scrawled at the bottom of the first page: ‘Nice people.’ And then: ‘artificial fire in hearth, gave off no heat at all’.

They asked if Martin Arkenhout had tried to contact his parents. His mother said, ‘No, actually.’ I think she must have said it with shame.

‘You haven’t moved in the past ten years?’

‘No.’

‘And this man on the tram - he gave you some other name?’

‘He said he was Hart. Christopher Hart. He said it in English, but, you see, I’d spoken to him in Dutch.’

‘You’re quite sure you could not be mistaken?’

‘Yes.’

‘You know there are penalties for wasting police time?’

At the end one of the policemen had made a light, pencil note: ‘Very practical. Very distraught but couldn’t show it. Drugs?’ His colleague had annotated the note: ‘Prescription drugs. Husband a doctor.’ He had underlined the word ‘prescription’ fiercely.

My father took the oars while I pushed the rowing boat out on to the flat estuary water. I couldn’t have stopped him. He was seventy-six, wiry still, proud that he could wear the same suits as at fifty. His hair was a white, immaculate helmet, set on a Brylcreem boy grown old. The tendons of his arms looked thin, though, and they were wattled with spare flesh.

He fell asleep once on the drive out from London. He was bright, almost young when he was animated; but I looked sideways at him, his mouth gaping, and I saw the skull exposed beneath the skin.

But at this moment he was heroic, his eyes bright with a kind of exasperation.

‘Hurry up,’ he said.

I didn’t know if we were about to miss the fish, the tide, or perhaps some imaginary train going home. He couldn’t wait any longer; he had lost the resigned patience of middle age.

I jumped into the boat, and he pulled away. Occasionally, the oar feathered the water, but usually his muscles remembered as acutely as his mind. After a dozen strokes, he said: ‘You can row later.’

I said, ‘Oh. Thank you.’

He rowed into the channel. The mud bottom slipped away under us. The skies were enormous and pale, and there was a mean little wind and a burning sun all at once. I could see the marshlands around us: vetch in bloom, salt channels cut in the mud and rushes.

He was going out to sea. The strokes were already an effort, but he concentrated hard. He didn’t speak, so as not to show that his breath might be short, and he didn’t smile.

I said, ‘Isn’t it a bit late in the day for dabs?’

He said nothing. I looked back at the flat shore, the fence of reeds. A grey heron in an attitude at the edge of the water.

He put down the oars quite abruptly. I wondered if he had run out of energy, or if his heart was troubling him, but he looked strong and bright.

‘Get the lines,’ he said.

We hooked and baited the lines, then cast them over the side. The little rowing boat was caught in their grid, and we stayed put on black water, waiting.

I knew better than to talk. I sometimes used to talk on walks in Surrey when I was a kid - Green Line bus, a few hours in the woods - and it was my fault the cuckoo or redstart or fieldfare or siskin flew away, and never came back the whole day.

‘We came out too late,’ my father said, accusingly.

‘I was afraid of that,’ I said. ‘Aren’t we too far out, anyway?’

We had both set our backs to the monument on the estuary: the towers and blocks of a nuclear power station. We were determined to see only water and marsh.

‘I have this account. Poupanca Emigrante,’ my father said.

‘I don’t understand.’

‘A bank account in Portugal. For emigrants.’

‘But you’re English.’

‘I’ve sold the house,’ my father said.

I didn’t, for a moment, know where to look. The marsh was a black line in the bright light. The sky was washed pale. There was no particular cloud in which to find faces or a map, as I used to do as a child with my father. There were no other boats out on this kind of eccentric expedition.

‘I said, I sold the house.’

‘I heard you,’ I said.

‘I’m leaving next month.’

‘You’re leaving?’

‘I’ve been building this house in Portugal. I want your advice on it.’

The boat turned a little, uneasy on the change of the tide. The lines looked likely to snag, and I started sorting them, pulling one in, straightening another, like someone tidying a room.

After a while, I said, ‘I don’t understand.’

‘I’m going home. To Portugal.’

‘You always said England was your home.’

‘I said a lot of things,’ my father said. ‘We’re not going to catch anything out here at midday.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘You and Anna must come and see me, when I’m settled. Meanwhile, I’m putting the rest of the money in a Portuguese bank. Sixteen per cent interest. Can’t get that here.’ He always was concerned with money, not skilled at it but interested. He once asked if he could make money buying and selling the kind of paintings I know about.

‘You’re sure -‘

He stood up in the boat. If he’d slipped, moved suddenly, moved in anger, he’d have tipped the boat to one side and the dark river water would have soaked into our clothes and tangled us in long, green weeds. I wanted him to be calm.

He stretched himself, arms high behind his neck, and let his knees sag for a moment to stretch out his hamstrings. ‘Surprised you, didn’t I?’ He was grinning.

I took the oars this time, and I took us back into shore so fast the water sounded against the bows. He’d said nothing about this, nothing about a house in Portugal, or wanting to go back, or about selling the house in Stockwell where he had lived so long with my mother, and with me, in the smell of bay leaves, coffee and pine disinfectant. It was shocking how little he had ever said.

The boat beached under us. ‘Steady,’ my father said. ‘Steady.’ He looked into the pale sky and said, ‘There’s rain coming.’

Anna came into the room after me and lay down on the bed. I could tell she was making a point by not touching. ‘He never said anything,’ I said. ‘He must have been thinking about this for months. Years, maybe. It takes time to sell a house. It takes time to build one, for Christ’s sake.’ He wasn’t settled, after all; he was thinking of, maybe longing for Portugal, planning a house there with particular rooms and doors and gables. ‘He never said anything. He never even wanted to travel. Remember when I wanted to take him to -‘

Her stillness interrupted me. It was louder than words.

‘You bother me,’ I said.

And she did: caught my eye, caught my breath at the most unexpected moments, broke into my planning and reading and left me smiling. I always had to wonder how long she could hold on. She hadn’t asked any questions, which was a bad sign. She’d been once to the bathroom, for medicine for her head.

‘Maybe I should go with him,’ I said.

‘You’re the one who wanted him to be so independent. You’re proud of him, really.’