Talking to Strange Men (16 page)

His heart wasn't put to the test. She continued to read. She turned a page. He walked to the next set of steps, experiencing now that sensation we have when tremendous anticipation is over, when the end is achieved and the consummation come – an absence of thought and blankness of mind. Like an automaton he approached her table and she, hearing his footfalls, turned and got up, standing there and gradually managing to smile.

He understood very quickly that of course he couldn't kiss her or shake hands with her or even touch her hand.

She said, ‘Hallo.'

He said, ‘Hallo, Jennifer.'

The long tweed skirt hung like a bell. She held her hands clasped up against her chest. Her fingers were bare, the wedding ring gone.

‘It's good to see you.'

She nodded. It might mean anything.

‘Would you like a cup of tea? Shall we have tea and cakes?'

‘I don't want anything,' she said. ‘You have cakes if you like. You've lost a lot of weight, haven't you?'

‘I expect it's better for me.' He watched her pick up her magazine, fold it, start to put it into the big carrier of woven straw she had with her. ‘If we're not going to eat,' he said, ‘we could go for a walk. We could walk to the white garden. I've just come from there, it's beautiful, you'd like it.'

‘I'd rather sit here. We may as well stay here.'

He knew then. He knew from her tone and the look on her face, a bored, rather miserable expression, anticipating an unpleasant task ahead, that she wouldn't be coming back with him. She sat down and he sat opposite her. The sun hadn't gone in but he had a feeling that it had. She put her left hand on the table and made nervous finger movements like someone testing the tone of a piano. And suddenly it seemed to him that sheepishness, passivity, would no longer do. What had he to lose from speaking? What to gain from this devoted humble patience? He had already lost everything.

‘Why did you ask me to come here, Jennifer?' He surprised himself with the sharpness of his voice. ‘What is it you want?'

‘A divorce,' she said, looking him straight in the eye. ‘I want a divorce.'

The clean sheets on the bed, he thought. He had made a fool of himself, if only to himself.

‘Are you going to marry him?'

She nodded.

‘And what guarantee will you have this time that he won't turn tail and leave you two days before the wedding?'

‘That's my problem,' she said. The blood came up into her face and he exulted because he could still upset her. ‘He won't though. It's different this time.' She said quickly, in a rush, ‘I don't want to wait two years. I want you to divorce me for adultery with Peter.'

‘Why should I?'

‘Because I ask you, John.' He winced at her use of his name. ‘It was a mistake our marrying in the first place. We made a mistake.'

‘I didn't make a mistake.' He found out of his misery a wonderful articulateness. He was able to express himself as he never had before, with perfect heartfelt lucidity. ‘I fell in love and I married the woman I loved and as far as I was concerned I hoped and meant to stay married until I died or she did. I'm still in love and I still want that.'

‘It's impossible!'

‘You're my wife. Doesn't that mean anything? You said you were sorry you said that about not having to make vows or promises.' He lost the thread of what he had been about to say. Cold realization seemed to cut him to the bone. He would go home alone. He would always be alone. And she would go back to Peter Moran, relieved no doubt, glad to have got it over, this necessary interview, would throw herself into Peter Moran's arms and kiss him, sob her disappointment – and be comforted. ‘What is there about him? He's not good-looking or good company as far as I can see.'

‘He's clever and he's cool, he's an intellectual. He's funny. He makes me laugh. We speak the same language.'

That was bitter to hear. ‘He hasn't a job, he can't even provide for you properly.'

‘You don't love people because they're good breadwinners.'

‘He deserted you once, he left you more or less at the altar. Did you ever find out why?'

‘It doesn't matter,' she said. Her face looked as soft and vulnerable as one of those paper-petalled flowers that bloom for a day, that bruise at a touch.

‘I'll never divorce you,' he said. ‘You'll have to wait five years. But he'll have left you by then.'

He jumped up and walked rapidly away. He was determined not to look back and he didn't, keeping his eyes fixed on the green lawns ahead, the blue sky, the white shimmering mass of narcissi. Very nearly colliding with a woman walking towards him, he was surprised that there were other people in the world. He looked about him, saw children, a man with a dog on a lead, and felt dazed, stunned. For half an hour he and she had been the only man and woman on earth – and now there was only himself.

Two days afterwards there was a piece on the local television news about Lady Arabella's Garden. Even the white butterfly – perhaps the same white butterfly – appeared in the film, fluttering about. But the main item was concerned with the missing schoolboy. A boy of twelve, a pupil at Hintall's the prep school, had disappeared on Saturday afternoon while out on a supervised nature walk. The last anyone had seen of him was by the river on the other side of Nunhouse where a group of boys, keeping very quiet and still, had been observing the behaviour of herons. During this silence and stillness James Harvill had vanished.

Any mention of Nunhouse caught John's attention. But it was to be quite a long time before he connected the disappearance of the boy with something in Jennifer's letter.

HE WAS ONE
of those small neat people, the kind that never look ungainly or, come to that, anything but spruce and spotless. Beside Mungo he seemed very small indeed. He had elfin ears, the tops of them not pointed but not rounded either, ever so slightly peaked. His pale hair was always newly-washed and well cut. The squeaky voice that, nearly a year before, had told Mungo on the phone that its owner wanted to defect, was still unbroken. Trimly dressed in the clothes ordained for Rossingham casual wear, grey flannel trousers, dark green pullover, without a tie because it was after six, he accepted Mungo's offer and sat down at the study counter in the chair that was normally used by Graham O'Neill. There he cast the eye of one who is insatiably inquisitive over the books Mungo had been using for his French prep.

Mungo reached across and slid his attempt at a translation out of that eye's range and as he did so an arm came out and produced first an egg from his pullover sleeve and then a couple of dozen yards of paper streamers from his trouser pocket.

‘Don't do that,' said Mungo. ‘You make me nervous.'

Charles Mabledene smiled with his lips closed. That was a habit with the Moscow Centre lot, they picked it up from Guy Parker, and it served to remind Mungo of Dragon's antecedents, as if he could ever forget them. His trousers fitted him snugly and his pullover was even rather small on him, far too tight to conceal an egg and all those streamers, yet egg and paper had unaccountably appeared and as unaccountably vanished.

‘Why are you called Mungo?'

‘After Mungo Park, the explorer. He was Scottish too and a doctor and we're all doctors in our family.'

‘I've heard your brother call you Bean. Is that because of mung beans?'

Mungo felt irritated. ‘I think so. I've forgotten.' He added, ‘No one but my brothers call me Bean, absolutely no one.'

The smile reappeared.

‘I got you down here to ask you how you got that piece of information out of Mr Blake.'

‘My mother asked him.'

‘Your
mother
? All right, go on.'

‘My mother wants to open a new salon . . .'

‘A what?'

‘A salon. A hairdresser's. I got her to ask the Blakes to dinner. She didn't know them but she does Mrs Blake's hair or one of her stylists does. And Mrs Blake kept on saying she wanted to see my mother's sauna. I'd told my mother I'd heard the doctors' place was coming up for sale, that a friend of mine had told me and that was all I needed to say. Mr and Mrs Blake came to dinner and I knew she'd tell them, I knew that was why she'd invited them. Blake said he was surprised to hear that as he understood the doctors would be extending their premises.'

Simple. Mungo looked at diminutive Charles Mabledene, a child in looks if not in mind and guile. Still, no doubt he was reckoned sufficiently adult to be present at his parents' dinner parties . . .

‘I wasn't there,' Dragon said. ‘I taped it.'

‘You what?'

The door opened and Graham came in, wearing tennis whites and carrying his racquet. Charles Mabledene got up courteously to give up his chair but Graham waved him away.

‘It's OK. I'm going to have a shower.'

Coming out of the adjoining room where their two bunks were he slung the towel he had gone to fetch over his shoulder and six tennis balls all dyed different colours bounced out of it. Charles Mabledene's eyebrows went up and he smiled, without modesty.

‘I was just saying,' he said, ‘that I taped the conversation. Of course it's a bit muzzy and parts of it you can't hear at all on account of my having to conceal the recording device
behind some dead grass. I mean, my mother goes in for these dried-flower arrangements and I stuck it behind that.'

‘Do you often do that?' asked Graham.

‘If I think something useful might be said, yes.'

‘Useful?'

‘Something I could put to use,' said Charles Mabledene, and he began juggling with his coloured tennis balls.

After he had gone Mungo pondered for a while before returning to the passage from de Maupassant he was rendering into English. His father had believed in the letter and acted accordingly, or rather, not acted. By now, presumably, it being the last week of April, he would have had a real letter about the decision of a real meeting but Mungo wasn't going to worry about that. Fergus might find it odd but everyone was always saying how unaccountable councils and bodies like that were in their behaviour, apparently you came to expect anomalies. Dragon had done very well. Mungo asked himself why he found his methods distasteful. Or was it Dragon himself he found – well, not so much distasteful as somehow cold and repellent? After all, there wasn't anything strictly wrong about recording a conversation when the end you were going to use it for was good, was there? Mungo thought he had heard some saying or principle or whatever about the means being justified by the end or was it the end by the means? He would have to find out.

Half-term would be coming up in three weeks' time. Sports Day on the Saturday and then home on the Sunday until the following Monday week. So far no one had been able to discover the perpetrator of the damage to Unicorn's brother's car, though Mungo had had Basilisk, Empusa, Charybdis and Minotaur all working on it. Charybdis, whose real name was Nigel Hobhouse and who went to a day school in the city, might be getting somewhere by now. The great advantage he had over other agents, at any rate in Rossingham term time, was that his parents had a weekend cottage at Rossingham St Mary which meant that Charybdis could use the school grounds drop.

Mungo wrote the two last sentences, closed his dictionary and put it back on the bookshelf. He still had maths to do
but that could wait. Out in the corridor he met Graham coming back from the showers and then Mr Lindsay. The Pitt housemaster was a zealous man, frequently on the prowl, his aim to keep every man in his house usefully occupied from morning till night. ‘You look as if you might be at a loose end, Cameron (or O'Neill or Mabledene or Ralston)' was a favourite phrase of his.

This time, it being out of school hours, he addressed Mungo by his christian name.

‘I left my biology essay in the New Library, sir,' said Mungo.

This was true, as a matter of expediency as much as ethics. Mungo had taken care to leave his half-completed explanation of the working of a rabbit's alimentary canal on the desk where he had begun flexi-prep at six.

‘That was careless of you.'

Mr Lindsay's speech was as spare and ascetic as his physical self. He seldom used adverbs; adjectives, sparsely indulged in, were never qualified. He had been a classical scholar, was reputed to have taken a Double First at Oxford but had few calls on his knowledge at Rossingham where Greek was no longer taught and Latin only as a special subject. This was a source of permanent frustration to him. By way perhaps of compensation, he laced his speech with Latin words and phrases.

‘Our
biblioteca
will be locked up by eight-thirty, so you had better hurry. Oh, and Mungo . . .'

‘Yes, sir?'

‘If you are going to prowl about the grounds at dusk, may I suggest you slip into track suit and trainers? Running is one of the best forms of exercise, I'm told.
Currite, noctis equi
, or in this case
noctis pueri
.'

That meant Mr Lindsay must have spotted him going out to the drop. He didn't miss much but Mungo realized he must have been careless. Mr Lindsay now turned his attention to a member of the Lower Fourth heading for the common room and known for his addiction to commercial television.

‘Finished your flexi-prep, Stephen?'

The New Library stood on its own, a rotunda, or at any
rate an octagon, built only the year before Mungo came to Rossingham. In the same style of architecture as the physics and technology wing, nineteen-eighties Victorian, it was constructed of fashionably dark materials, dark red brick, black woodwork, dark grey polished slates. The trees for which Rossingham was famous, mostly limes and chestnuts, made a high screen behind these buildings, a screen on which the new young leaves looked livid at this hour. The fine weather of early spring had given place to a chilly greyness with sharp spurts of rain.