Talking to Strange Men (28 page)

What had he expected? That she would promptly repudiate Peter Moran and throw herself into his, John's, arms? Or that she would defy him and declare herself loyal to Peter Moran whatever he had done? One or other of these he had expected while knowing things are never as you anticipate them. At home, pottering about the garden after an almost sleepless night, John tried to tell himself things were good, the outcome of their interview had been the best possible. He must allow for the effects of shock and simply wait for it to wear off.

Nothing that could happen now would surprise him, he felt. If Peter Moran himself arrived raving or Mark Simms turned up as a self-appointed intermediary, if Colin rang to say it was a different Peter Moran, he had made a mistake, if Jennifer phoned asking for time to make up her mind, she was no longer anxious for a divorce – if any of those things happened he would be prepared. For half the day, though, he felt he shouldn't go far from the phone. But when it didn't ring and no one came, as the hot sultry day shambled on towards afternoon, he took his books back to the Lucerne Road library and on an impulse walked the further half-mile down to the flyover and cats' green.

There was a message inside the upright. John opened the plastic package, copied down the message and deciphered it there and then. ‘Leviathan to Charybdis,' he read, ‘Martin Hillman, Trevor Allan, investigate and report.' Who were these people? Shopkeepers, proprietors of small businesses the gang wished to intimidate? And why did he care? Surely he had more pressing personal matters to concern him. He replaced the message in the upright.

There were no cats about today – or was that a gleam of yellow fur under the last stunted bush where the curve of the road dipped to meet the ground? John hardly knew why he went closer. Perhaps because of the stillness of it, the
absence of glinting eyes. He pushed through the dusty coarse grass, the litter of picked bones.

The king cat lay stretched out dead, its eyes open and glazed, in this heat the flies already busy. Yet there seemed no mark on the body, no blood. The stiff muzzle had a white frosting, he had been an old cat, perhaps old enough to die a natural death. John didn't even like cats and this one had been no purring pet but a savage near-wild animal, yet he felt absurdly moved, distressed even by this death in the heat, this untended corpse left a prey to scavengers. If it had been possible to bury the cat he would have done so but all he could do, in a futile gesture, was pull up handfuls of grass and cover the body with it. By the time he had finished he was choking and gasping for breath. Whatever it was in feline biology that promoted asthma, it survived death.

It was a slow homeward journey he made, his chest full of phlegm and his eyes weeping. He might actually have been crying, he thought, for the king cat and for his own loneliness and Jennifer's pain and for Cherry. But no one he passed looked at him. In stupefying heat people didn't look at each other, they lost their alertness, their desire to observe. The phone was ringing as he entered the house. He thought it must be one of them, any of them, Jennifer, Mark Simms, Colin, even Peter Moran. But it was only Gavin.

‘I thought you'd like to know Grackle is OK again.'

For a moment John couldn't remember who Grackle was. Then, when he did realize, he thought aggrievedly that it was only because he was alone, a kind of widower who never went away or did anything exciting, that Gavin thought he could call him up like this and talk nonsense. Gavin was going on and on in his barely comprehensible slang about the mynah's illness, some kind of bird virus, and its B-cells, whatever they might be. He had taken it to the vet three times.

‘I suppose the firm is expected to foot the bill,' John said and immediately wished he hadn't, for after all the mynah belonged to Trowbridge's and was worth a lot of money.

‘I'll pick up the tab for that,' said Gavin.

The phone didn't ring again. This was his holiday, John thought when it got to seven, and he hadn't been anywhere,
he hadn't even been to see his aunt. Constance Goodman answered when he phoned Colin's home and seemed to take it for granted that the invitation to go out somewhere for a drink would include herself, so John found himself in the snug of an unpopular country pub where the tables were dirty and the licensee indifferent, apparently committed to an evening of conversation with Mrs Goodman on the subject of the decline in standards of British primary school education. No one mentioned their last meeting or Peter Moran but after a while Mrs Goodman began to talk in a very dogmatic way about modern marriage, how glad she was Colin had never married, for he and his wife would surely have split up by this time. Mrs Goodman scarcely knew of any marriage in which the parties were under fifty which had lasted. She enumerated the many she knew of that had come to grief. Colin yawned.

‘I'm sorry if I'm boring you, Colin. If that's the way you feel I'm sorry I gave in when you insisted I should come.'

‘I insisted? That's rich, that is. That's very funny. John rang up and you'd rushed in where angels fear to tread before I even got into the room.'

‘Are you calling me a fool, Colin?'

They went on sparring like that until John got up and said he had to get back. He and the Honda returned to the city via the village of Ruxeter and down Ruxeter Road. A glance at 53 told him nothing, for the house was in darkness and the windows of the lower storeys still boarded up. The clock on the CitWest tower registered nine fifty-three and twenty-one degrees. A bright star, a smaller, more brilliant winking light, passed behind the green digits and reappeared on the other side, a meteorite or a satellite perhaps or just an aircraft very high up. John went over Alexandra, over the glassy still river, reflecting lights like a mirror, down into the hinterland of the east, into Berne Avenue, Geneva Road. It wasn't until afterwards that he noticed the car, the Diane. There were so many cars parked on both sides of the street at night. He was humping the Honda up over the pavement to shove it through the gate and down the side way, when she came to him out of the shadows like a ghost, she seemed to glide
from under the branches of his flowering tree, to stretch out her hand and lay it on his arm.

‘Jennifer!'

‘I've been waiting for you for two hours,' she said and her eyes were glittering in a wild white face.

THE ADMIRING CIRCLE
round the mynah's cage broke up when John came in, Sharon drifting back to her check-out, Les resuming his sweeping of the floor, and only Gavin and the two customers, a young couple, remaining to hear the mynah utter once more and incredibly:

‘I'm an empty nester!'

John was late.

‘Thought you'd forgotten it was back to work today,' Sharon said.

He tried to smile. The young couple went off towards the fertilizers and seed packets with their wire basket. Gavin turned to John.

‘Did you hear that? Did you hear what he said? I taught him.'

‘Congratulations.'

‘What's with you, then? A right Tafubar, by the looks.'

‘A what?' said John.

‘Things are fucked up beyond all recognition.'

‘I'm an empty nester,' said the mynah bird.

‘
Gracula religiosa
,' said Gavin, ‘is the world's best talker, better even than your grey parrot.'

It was Monday morning. John put on his canvas coat and walked through into the greenhouse where the chrysanthemums were, their bitter scent which he rather disliked making a tingle in his nostrils as he opened the door. Rain drummed on the roof and ran down the glass walls so that all you could see of outside was a blur of various greens. The
heatwave had broken on the previous night in a spectacular thunderstorm which kept John awake, though he probably wouldn't have slept anyway.

A deep depression, a trough of low pressure, the meteorological people said. This change in the weather had a similar effect on him, casting him into his own deep depression. For up until yesterday evening, though unhappy, devastated, almost distraught, he had still been full of rage, a need to fight, a desire for revenge. It was in that mood that he had gone back to cats' green and taken that curious step, an action he couldn't explain to himself at the time or later, of taping his own coded message into the central upright of the flyover. Someone had taken away the cat's body. He had approached the place shrinking a little, expecting a swarm of flies, a foetid smell, but when he looked towards the pile of grass he had made, when he forced himself to look, there was nothing. Even his grass had gone. Had there ever been anything, a death, the covering of a corpse? Was the cat dead or had he imagined it?

In the heat of the day, the sun that made sizzling mirages on the deserted roadways down here, the melting tarmac, in the absence of the cat's body, John had a sense of unreality, a feeling of being in an uncomfortable dream. Without thinking, or thinking only of his hatred of Peter Moran, whom nothing could expel, whom nothing apparently could dislodge from Jennifer's consciousness, he had removed the message from its plastic envelope and substituted another of his own devising . . .

He passed along the central aisle of the greenhouse and on into the next one where the seedling alpines were and the begonia leaf cuttings. Gavin had taken care of everything efficiently in his absence. The plantlets were damp but not wet, green and healthy-looking, the place swept clean. But John could feel no enthusiasm for it, only aware of a dreary sensation that he might as well be here as anywhere else, he might as well be here as at home.

For a while he had believed that his interview with Jennifer marked the last occasion on which they would ever meet and this certitude returned to him now. Yet when she had come up to him, white-faced, out of the shadows, he had
thought with a leap of the heart that she was returning to him. And she had said nothing, only preceded him into the house when he unlocked the front door, gone straight into the living room ahead of him as if it were still her home, as if he and she would sit down in there together, have a nightcap perhaps, turn out the lights and go upstairs to bed.

What had actually happened was that she turned to face him as soon as they were together in that room. He switched on the new table lamp. The atmosphere was warm and rather stuffy. Her face was grim, almost tragic. He had never seen her look like that before, a changed woman.

‘I decided to come and tell you what you've done,' she said.

He said nothing, he just looked at her.

‘I've been waiting for you for hours but I'd have waited all night.'

To repeat that he had made that revelation to her for her own sake suddenly seemed the rankest hypocrisy. He stood facing her. Oddly, the settee was between them, she holding on to the back of it as if to a barricade.

‘I'll be honest,' he said. ‘I told you to put you against him. I was in possession of a piece of information that I thought would turn you against him. I saw it as being to my own advantage and I used it – as a weapon.'

She nodded, as if he had confirmed what she already knew. ‘The police came – after that little boy went missing, the one who was found drowned. Drowned,' she said, her voice hoarse, ‘after being – abused. The police came to question Peter. I didn't know why. How could I? They talked to him alone, J wasn't there. Did you send them?'

‘Of course I didn't. They go to people like him as a matter of course when something like that happens.'

‘I hate you, John.' Her voice was still sweet, she couldn't change that. ‘As if Peter would hurt a child . . . Whatever he may have done he wouldn't do that.'

‘I don't know.' John was still wincing from what she had said. ‘I don't know what he would do.'

‘You thought telling me would get me back. I want you to know it was the worst thing you could have done. Do you think that makes you love a person, telling them a thing
like that? You hate any bearer of bad news, it's well known. And when it's that sort of news – John, I was angry with you before, I was bored with you, I was sick of it all but I didn't hate you. This has made me hate you.'

He shivered under the onslaught. His body shook. Instead of defending himself, he said:

‘You can't still love someone who has done what he's done. You can't love a man who molests little boys.'

‘I hate you for telling me,' she said, her tone growing calmer, colder. ‘You didn't have to tell me. If you love someone the way you say you love me, you ought to want their happiness, you ought to want to protect them from suffering.'

That one didn't work, he knew that, though he couldn't have said why.

‘What good did it do, telling me? What did you think, that I'd jump into your arms and say it had all been a dreadful mistake?'

Some curious intuition, some reading of her mind that was in itself an agony because it bore witness to their mutual knowledge, made him say with slow realization:

‘It's made you feel differently about him though, hasn't it? It has changed you. You don't care for him so much.'

A wave of pain passed across her face, or rather it was as if something under the skin, inside the features, dragged briefly at the muscles. She wouldn't lie to him, he thought, she never would, even though now it would have been easy, it would almost have been expected of her. She said remotely, in the tone of one who has been dealt a blow:

‘It has made a difference, yes. I don't feel the same about Peter. How could I? You did that, you're responsible for that.'

‘I'm not sorry.'

‘No, you wouldn't be. But I'll tell you something. It's made me understand he needs me to look after him more than ever, he needs me to protect him – from himself as well as other people. While he wants me I'll stick to him whether you divorce me or not. And there's another thing, John. Maybe you never considered this. I know why he left me the way he did before our wedding. It wasn't for another woman
or because he didn't love me, I know that now. It was because he thought what he'd done would come out and he might go to prison.'