Talking to Strange Men (17 page)

Mungo went into the library. Those who preferred to do their flexi-prep in here were sitting about at desks or the long pine tables that occupied the central aisle of the reference section. The supervising prefect, by a piece of luck, was Angus.

‘I confiscated your essay, Bean,' Angus whispered, ‘plus the obscene illustrations.'

‘They're only a rabbit's innards,' Mungo protested.

Angus gave him the two sheets of paper. ‘What are you up to?'

‘Counter-intelligence, of course.'

Angus announced that it was eight twenty-five. Five minutes to clear up in and he'd be closing and locking the doors. Mungo slipped out before he could get asked any more awkward questions. The drop was at the back of the cricket pavilion, on the other side of the pitch that was said to be the finest piece of grass in the west of England. Mungo had to skirt round it, keeping close to the hedge. The essay he had folded up and stuck inside his pullover, for the rain had begun again. A loose brick to the left of the foundation stone when removed revealed a deep cavity. Mungo eased it out and withdrew from inside a paper in a plastic bag. It was still just light enough to see the paper. Charybdis to Leviathan, he read, but for the rest of it he would need the Bruce-Partington key . . .

MARK SIMMS AND
John sat in John's living room, sharing a bottle of wine. The television was on and they were watching a programme of no interest to John and of little, he suspected, to Mark. But he was sick and tired of Mark and of his conversation, his criticism of John and defence of himself, his curious obsession with Cherry and his memories of Cherry. Having this quiz programme on was a way of preventing or perhaps only postponing talk.

John knew that he had brought all this on himself. On that Saturday four weeks ago when Jennifer had told him she wanted a divorce and in his rage and misery he had walked away from her and out of Hartlands Gardens, he had been visited by a desire to get drunk. This was something he hardly ever did. He drank very little. The idea of getting drunk as even a temporary solution to his problems astonished him at the time. But it was what he needed, or thought he needed, as much because he dreaded being alone that evening as for the solace of alcohol. Hardly thinking, not permitting himself to reflect or reason, he had gone home and first phoned Colin Goodman, then when Colin said his mother wasn't well, Mark Simms. Mark, whose life seemed as lonely as his own, had jumped at the chance.

They had gone to several pubs, then bought wine and taken it back to Mark's flat. John had not meant to say a word about Jennifer to Mark but the drink in its well-known way had overcome his inhibitions and later that night he had come out with it, all of it. Mark hadn't been very sympathetic. He was a tremendous egotist, too self-centred to care much about the suffering of others and his comments had been of the ‘Forget her' and ‘Make a clean break' kind. In a way this had been more acceptable to John, certainly later if less so at the time, for he was pretty sure Mark had
forgotten all that had been said to him, even supposing he had ever taken it in. John had only to pause for Mark to deflect the conversation to himself, to Cherry or rather to his own feelings for Cherry, to her death, his loneliness, his own disastrous marriage.

Without actually disgracing himself, John had succumbed to the unaccustomed amounts of wine and fallen asleep. He was obliged to stay the night on Mark's settee. Since then – and he realized he had only himself to blame – there had been no possibility of putting Mark off. Indeed, Mark rather took it for granted that they should spend the greater part of their free time together. Yet John didn't think Mark particularly liked him or preferred his company over that of others. He was just an ear that listened, a voice that interjected, a presence instead of a void.

He hadn't mentioned Jennifer again, though he had come to believe that it was only while he was with Mark and perhaps to a lesser extent while he was dealing with customers at work, that he was not thinking of her. It seemed to him imperative that he shouldn't divorce her. She had written to him twice during the intervening time, letters of a very different kind from that which he had received asking for the meeting in Hartlands Gardens. The first was cold, the second pleading. John had replied to the second one, refusing to meet her and Peter Moran as had been suggested and reaffirming his intention to remain married to her. Curiously, since writing that letter, his heart had ached less. Action, decisiveness, made him feel strong, convincing him he might prevail. This morning, though she had not asked for it, he had wrapped the blue leather jacket up in a parcel and sent it off to her with a covering letter saying he knew she would return to him, it was only a matter of time. And then he had cleaned up the living room, taking curtains and chair covers to the dry cleaner's and on the way back made a detour to cats' green to look inside the flyover upright.

There was nothing there. There had been nothing there since he had found the second message in the current month's code. That had been on 9 April, the day he had made up his mind not to consider a divorce. Feeling if not more cheerful at least more positive, he had gone to the flyover and found
the message. Of course he had been unable to decipher it. A search of the city's Hatchards and its six other bookshops, new books and secondhand, had failed to discover a Bruce-Partington among the authors. But the searching had been good for his morale. Now, though, the messages had ceased to appear. Did that mean they were no longer using the cats' green location or did it mean something more sinister?

Another thing that had changed was his level of drinking. Under Mark's influence he was drinking a lot for him. Not spirits but beer and wine, a lot of wine, at least a bottle every time they met. It had the effect of making him sleep heavily and not think about Jennifer during those vulnerable night hours, and for some reason not even dream about her. He reached across and re-filled Mark's glass, laughing because it seemed expected of him at some outrageous reply made by a contestant in the quiz game. Because the windows were uncurtained all the headlights from all the cars that passed made bands of light that rushed across the ceiling and down the walls. Both bars of the electric fire were on. The programme came to an end and football started. Mark reached for his glass. No longer feeling it necessary to keep replenishing bowls with crisps and nuts, John picked up the
Free Press
. He had lately got into the habit of going through it story by story to see if there was ever anything that might give him a clue to the group he called the mini-Mafia. Some drugs gang, he thought vaguely, or maybe something to do with horse-racing. The missing boy called James Harvill had never been found and no one now expected him to be alive.

Mark watched the football for no more than ten minutes. He switched the television off without asking John.

‘The way those lights keep flickering across the ceiling is very irritating,' he said. ‘It makes it impossible to relax. Why don't you have curtains or blinds or something?'

‘I told you, they're at the cleaner's.'

‘You should have had them done express,' said Mark. He began on one of his favourite criticisms of John, his condemnation of what he called John's ‘cheeseparingness'. John caused himself absurd inconvenience by penny-pinching. The absent curtains were a case in point. And why did they have to bring wine and beer in by the bottle and
can when anyone else would have beer in the fridge and a rack full of wine? His face, though handsome, had a peevish look, John noticed not for the first time, a sour down-turning of the mouth, a pinching of the nostrils. A permanent frown sat on Mark's much-lined forehead.

He started to talk about his marriage, the elision from John's meanness to his former wife's profligacy being quite naturally made. John did have one further bottle of wine in the house and he went out to the kitchen to fetch it. The back garden, even in this dismal weather, was a little orchard of shimmering fruit blossom, the pink and white shining in the radiance of distant unseen lamps, the pond a dark glowing mirror in a circle of stones. Under the trees all John's tulips were out, no colour by night, but scarlet and purple and yellow and gold by day. He took the wine bottle out of the fridge and went back with it, no longer caring whether Mark went or stayed, quite unhurt by his fault-finding. In fact the wine had so thoroughly quelled his social inhibitions that he even picked up the paper again and searched idly for some reference to a gang or disreputable syndicate.

Drink never mellowed Mark.

‘The least you could do is give me your attention while I'm telling you these things. You must be the only living soul I've opened my heart to in this way. It's rather galling, to say the least, that you prefer the columns of the local rag.'

John said he was sorry. Another part of his mind was wondering if the two men charged the day before at the Crown Court with possessing heroin could have anything to do with these messages. One of them was called Bruce, though his surname was Chambers. Mark, suddenly, asked him what he was thinking about. He could tell he had something on his mind. John didn't make it up or say it because he thought it would please Mark. It came, unsummoned, into his head.

‘I was just remembering something about Cherry.'

‘What? What were you remembering?'

‘How she used to spend a lot of time with an old neighbour of ours, a more or less bedridden woman, a Mrs Chambers. She used to go shopping for her and sit with her, just drop
in and sit with her. She was a very kind thoughtful girl, wasn't she? But of course you know that.'

‘You know nothing at all about women, John,' Mark said. ‘You've had three women in your life, your mother and Cherry and that wife of yours and you don't know a thing about any of them. You don't know a thing about women.'

‘You talk about women as if they were a different species,' John protested.

‘That's just what they are.'

‘I don't agree. Women have the same sort of emotions and thoughts as we do.'

‘Utter bullshit. Let's have some more wine. My God, you haven't got the cork out yet. Give it to me.' Mark began driving the corkscrew into the cork of the long-necked hock bottle. ‘The way you talk about Cherry proves you didn't know her. You saw what you wanted to see, not what was really there.'

‘Are you saying she went to old Mrs Chambers for some ulterior motive or something? Is that what you mean? I don't see how she could have. She wasn't like that, Mark, really she wasn't.'

‘Oh, forget old Mrs Chambers. I'm not talking about that.' He pulled the cork out with a long whoosh and John saw how red his face had become. The wine was poured – slopped, rather. John took his wet slippery glass. ‘I knew Cherry, I knew her too bloody well.'

John had begun to feel very uncomfortable. He hadn't realized how drunk Mark was. Mark must have been drinking before they met that evening to be in a state like this. Twin streams of light, more than usually dazzling, poured across the ceiling and, because of the position he had taken up at the end of the settee by the table, down Mark's face and over his hands. John saw that those hands were shaking. And Mark's face, in that rush of light, looked ghastly as if he were wincing from some inner pain. In trembling fingers he lifted his wineglass to his lips and drank the wine down as if he were parched and it were water.

For the first time John had begun to wonder what Cherry's life would have been like had she lived to marry Mark Simms. But surely he had been a very different person in the days
when he was engaged to her, when she wore that opal ring on her broad stubby left hand? John confessed to himself that he couldn't remember very well. His father hadn't much liked him and it was this which had given rise to John's mother's defence of Mark and to her calling him ‘Cherry's choice'.

‘He's a nice enough boy,' she had said, ‘and we have to remember he's Cherry's choice.'

They had laughed at that and his father had said it sounded like a kind of jam. But he had privately thought that Cherry hadn't had a choice, with her appearance she was lucky to get anyone, incredibly lucky to have got hold of someone like Mark. And then he had castigated himself for having such thoughts about his dear sister whom he loved.

‘Poor Cherry,' he found himself exclaiming.

Mark started to laugh. He lay back against the settee cushions, bare and crumpled without their covers, and laughed in drunken whoops. He reached for the bottle and drank from it, the wine slurping down his throat. John picked up the glasses and the bowls that had had nuts in and took them to the kitchen. Cherry must have been unkind to Mark, he thought while he rinsed the glasses under the tap. Had her unkindness perhaps only been a refusal to grant sexual favours? He could easily imagine that. Cherry was the sort of girl, chaste as ice, who would never have anticipated marital pleasures . . .

The man who killed her had not assaulted her sexually. John remembered being glad about that. And his mother, sitting here in this kitchen on a hard upright chair, her hands in her lap ever on the move, wringing and twisting, his mother had said:

‘At least he didn't interfere with her. I hold on to that, I say to myself, be thankful for that, she wasn't interfered with.'

This kitchen had become a kind of hiding place for his mother after Cherry's death. When she sat in the living room she was afraid of people passing along the street looking in and seeing her. She sat on one of the two windsor chairs with her elbows on the table, and after ten minutes or so she would get up and potter about, wash something up,
wash some garment, return to her chair and sit there, looking at the window. But looking at it, not through it. That was when he took to gardening. People said they would have thought he had had enough of gardens all day without starting on his own in the evenings. But working with the soil, planting and tending, was a kind of therapy, it began the healing process. When he was in the garden he could accustom himself to Cherry's death, he could bow before it and accept.