Talking to Strange Men (22 page)

The Beckgate was open, on this summer evening spilling patrons out on to the steps. The hanging basket of ivy-leaved geraniums that hung above the saloon-bar door he had sold the licensee himself, wincing when the man gave his address. John went up the double flight and straight on ahead, trying to imagine Mark's feelings after the deed was done, after he knew Cherry lay dead behind him. But it was impossible. He could only think of his mother at home growing more and more anxious, of having to go next door and use the phone because they hadn't got one, of Mark at last coming to Geneva Road and seeming so
normal
. . .

He had walked a long way without much noticing the route he took and now he found himself on the pavement opposite cats' green. It was feeding time and though there was no cat to be seen, the pans of milk and plates of tinned food were being set out among grass that had by now grown as high as the woman's waist. A faded, middle-aged woman with a gentle face – but what was she really? Another such as Cherry, as lascivious and insatiable, as uncaring of loyalty and faithfulness, of common decency?

She saw him watching her. It made her hurry to pick up her milk cartons, the empty cans, yesterday's empty plates. She takes me for some sort of would-be molester, John
thought, and the idea, though fantastic, didn't altogether displease him. Why not he as much as any other man? In a world full of terrible things, why should he be set apart, islanded? Men were dangerous and women, in their way, dangerous too. He started to cross the road and felt a very real pleasure, a pleasure that was almost sexual, in seeing her hasten away, walk far more quickly than was natural across the road, look back once, plunge into one of the narrow alleys.

Shame quickly succeeded that pleasure. Wickedness is contagious, he thought, I am catching it from others. Somewhere, once, he had heard or read the phrase: Evil communications corrupt good manners. The Bible or something Victorian? It didn't sound like the Bible. He looked up at the rumbling bouncing flyover and saw, there inside the central upright, five or six feet up, a plastic package secured with tape.

They were back. They had survived whatever had kept them away, arrest or even imprisonment, and started up again.

THE LAST OF
the capsicum planted and watered in, John turned his attention to the tomatoes. None of the fruit had yet begun to redden. He would stop the stems after four trusses, but next week would do for that. He began mixing plant feed into a can of water and could not prevent himself catching sight of his watch which told him it was five past eight. They were due at eight. He watered the tomato plants, flooding the pots, forcing his thoughts back to the message he had found at cats' green. He had copied it into his notebook – strange how he had gone on carrying that notebook even when he thought his mini-Mafia disbanded – and as soon as he got home had applied it to the first lines of ‘The
Bruce-Partington Plans'. But as he feared, they had changed the code. They were logical. Court appearances, imprisonment, whatever it had been, they stuck to their monthly routine. It was June now, so the code had changed.

Twelve minutes past eight. He had better, at any rate, wash his hands. How could she be late for something so important? But perhaps it was Peter Moran who made her late. John washed at the kitchen sink. He had begun to feel sick. There was just time to run upstairs and change his clothes. Up he went two at a time, flung off baggy trousers, check shirt, put on white shirt, new tie, grey flannels, his heart racing. A car was stopping outside. Wait, he told himself, don't have the door standing open before they get up the path. Holding his fists clenched, he looked at them through the bedroom window. Both doors of the car opened simultaneously and they both got out. John's heart squeezed and seemed to move a little at the sight of Jennifer in her cotton dress, her sandals, the long bright hair tied back with white ribbon. He transferred his gaze to Peter Moran and then he turned quickly away and ran downstairs.

Inside the door he made himself pause before opening it. Waiting those few seconds was like waiting through a lifetime. If they don't ring that bell, I will throw myself at that door, he thought, I will beat it down with my fists. Yet when the bell did ring he jumped. And still he waited, counting. When he had counted thirty, it was impossible to do more, it was beyond his strength, he had to open the door.

Jennifer said, ‘Hallo, John.'

She looked neither sad nor happy. Her face was composed as it always was. Not for her the careless untidiness of a frown, a puckering of the lips or a half-smile. Peter Moran didn't say anything, but John didn't think this was through embarrassment. Again he was aware of that indifference to the opinions of others.

‘The garden looks nice,' said Jennifer.

He was happy because she didn't say ‘your garden'. They walked into the living room and he saw her look at the lamp, the jugs, the two new books that lay on the coffee table. He found it hard to keep his eyes off her and he had to compel himself to stop looking. He had forgotten all about making
plans to give them food or drink. There was no coffee in the house, not even instant. Wine he had. Two bottles of wine were in the kitchen somewhere, last remnants of those sessions with Mark Simms.

‘Would you like a drink?'

She looked surprised when he offered wine. It made him hope, it made him think she might like the new John better.

‘Thanks. Wine would be nice.'

Peter Moran still hadn't spoken. Without appearing to look at him, John had taken in every detail of his appearance, the thick glasses, the floppy fair hair, the rather pasty face. His skin had a greyish look, his hair was greasy, his ill-fitting loose jeans stained. For this important visit, this meeting which was to decide his fate, he hadn't even been bothered to have a bath and put on clean clothes. He looked bored; he looked – ‘laid-back' was the expression, John thought, casual, relaxed, not so much in control as uncaring as to who might be. Cool, Jennifer had called him. John fetched the wine, uncomfortably aware that it should have been chilled, not brought straight out of the cupboard that was next to the immersion heater. Jennifer said:

‘Muscadet – that's my favourite.'

Why hadn't he known that? It suddenly seemed terrible not to know what was your wife's favourite wine. He found it actually physically difficult to pour wine for Peter Moran and hand it to him. Peter Moran still hadn't sat down or spoken, he was still moving idly about the room. But now he took the glass out of John's hand, not looking at it or him or saying thanks. John might have been a waiter.

It went against the grain to start drinking without raising one's glass in some sort of a toast but John couldn't think what to say, he couldn't bring himself to say Cheers! It was Jennifer who settled it by lifting her glass, looking hard at Peter Moran, and saying in a deliberate, almost ritualistic way:

‘To our futures – all our futures.'

That sent a chill down John's spine. It sounded so final and so somehow loaded against himself.

‘Right,' Peter Moran said, and he took a long sucking draught from his glass, emptying it at one go. He pushed the
glass across the table towards John and John was so surprised he found himself re-filling it. Jennifer began speaking in a nervous monotone, very quickly for her.

‘John, you know why we've come and we have to start talking about it. It's very nice of you to – well, sort of entertain us and all that but we mustn't lose sight of why we're here. I do want a divorce and I want it as soon as possible. You know that, I've explained about that. We made a mistake, you and I, and it's no good, I'll never come back, even if you won't divorce me I won't come back. Don't you understand that?'

‘I think that in time, if I don't divorce you, you may come to see you're better off with me.' John spoke coolly, surprising himself.

She shook her head vehemently. ‘I love Peter and he loves me. We want to get married. We want to make a public statement of our commitment to each other and marriage is the way to do that.'

‘You've made one of those already – to me.'

‘I've told you, that was a mistake. And what use is all this? You can't keep us apart. We'll still live together. All that will happen is that instead of getting married in six months' time we won't for five years – well, four and a half years now. Only' – Jennifer essayed a smile at him, a rueful inquiring smile it was, and his heart moved – ‘only we'd sooner it was in six months.'

‘We?' he said, and he was aware of a breathlessness. ‘We? I don't hear his views in all this.'

She looked at her lover. The midsummer evening light fell on the lenses of his glasses in such a way as to seem to change them into planes of opaque metal. He had pushed his empty glass across the table a second time but John ignored it. At last he spoke. His voice was beautiful, John had to admit that, it was the sort of voice you associated with Oxford and the diplomatic service and aristocrats. It was Received English Pronunciation and more than that. The words he used seemed to have an intellectual cast and to John at any rate they were incomprehensible. It was Sacher-Masoch all over again.

‘He thinks he has the lodestone,' he said.

‘What does that mean?'

‘Never mind,' Jennifer said, sweet-voiced, like a teacher to a class of little boys. ‘Never mind, what does it matter? What does any of it matter? We just have to make John understand we're serious, we're committed to each other and we aren't going to have a change of heart just because . . .'

It was at this moment, before she had finished her sentence, that the front door bell rang.

For no particular reason John was certain it must be Mark Simms. It would be just like him, after getting the receiver put down on him and no answer at all to his further calls, to come round. Probably he hadn't done with his confession and there was more he wanted to say, more details to fill in. The bell rang a second time.

‘Aren't you going to see who it is?' Jennifer said.

He left them and went to the door. The caller was Colin Goodman. His car was at the gate and his mother was sitting in the passenger seat. Something in John's face made him say:

‘It's all right, we're not coming in, not if you're busy. It's just that I was giving Mother a run out and as we were passing this way . . .'

John never learned what his intention was in calling – to invite him to join them perhaps? – for at that point the sitting-room door opened, Peter Moran came out and said in his polished newcaster's voice:

‘Where's the loo?'

John was affronted. ‘Upstairs,' he said coldly. ‘Upstairs and to your left.' In order to reach the foot of the stairs Peter Moran had to come nearly up to the front door, so John had no choice but to introduce him to Colin. Would Colin remember who this man was, that he was Jennifer's lover? John couldn't remember if he had previously told him the name.

‘Colin Goodman, Peter Moran,' he said.

There was nothing in Colin's face to show that it meant anything to him. He had that rather weary resigned look he usually wore when he was taking his mother anywhere. In these circumstances it wasn't unusual for him to call on
friends or acquaintances for half an hour or so of their society. He retreated down the two steps, though slowly.

‘I won't stop, seeing you've got company.'

And as John glanced again at the car – an aged Triumph Dolomite but far smarter than Moran's dirty Citroën – old Mrs Goodman looked up and rapped on the window. Having summoned her son, she waved cordially to John. Peter Moran had disappeared upstairs.

‘Look, sorry, I'll ring you,' John said. He forced himself to wait until Colin reached the gate before closing the door.

Jennifer was alone in the living room. Husband and wife looked at each other in silence and then John said very simply.

‘Please come back to me, darling. I do love you very much.'

‘I can't,' she said, her voice very low and gruff.

‘No one could love you as I love you, don't you know that?'

‘But I love him like that,' she said.

It was a blow that made him close his eyes as if he feared a fist in his face. Peter Moran came back. In pain, with a pain that was physical, John forced himself to look at him, pondering the mystery of love. What was there about the man? True, he was four or five years John's junior and an inch taller – but all this was nonsense. Somewhere in the man's make-up must be some secret ingredient. His mouth was full and slack, his eyes lazy, bored. Looking at Jennifer now, he gave the ghost of a wink – or John thought he did, he couldn't be sure. And Jennifer's face remained grave and unhappy. The awful silence endured. She broke it, her tone anxious, tentative. John thought in a kind of bitter triumph, I've moved her, I've upset her by what I said.

‘John, will you think about it, please? Would you, say, take a week and give it some thought? I mean, about how we're going to settle all this? If you won't divorce me for adultery, will you divorce me on grounds of incompatibility after two years? That is, next November twelve months?'

‘I'll think about it,' he said. ‘I think about it most of the time anyway. But I won't change.'

Peter Moran poured the last of the wine into his glass,
drank it down. ‘We're wasting our time here,' he said. ‘I don't know why we came.'

The old John would have accepted that meekly. The new John said:

‘For free-loading, by the look of things.'

Jennifer looked from one to the other, pleading, ‘Please don't quarrel!'

‘I won't divorce you. And one reason is you'll be better off with me than him,' John said. ‘I'm better for you. He'll only make you unhappy.'

‘For God's sake,' said Peter Moran, ‘let's go.'