The Keys to the Street (11 page)

“But you went to the Harvest Trust?”

“Not at first. I’d been told I should have a bone marrow transplant. With siblings the chance of matching tissue is one in four, so I was hoping against hope my brother would match. He was willing.” She saw him clench his hands. He spoke with intensity. “He was more than willing. He was longing for the chance to help me. We’re very close.”

“But his tissue didn’t match?”

“As I said, I’d felt under sentence of death. When they told me about this one in four chance all that changed, I was so sure it would be all right. You know, if you were told you had to have surgery and
there was a one in four chance of not coming out of the anesthetic you’d be sure you’d die, wouldn’t you? I would. I was sure one in four meant my brother’s tissue would match. I was so confident I didn’t even think much about it. He was my brother, we had the same genes, the same coloring, the same sort of looks. I knew it would be all right.

“They tested him and he wasn’t compatible. I couldn’t believe it at first. I thought they must have made a mistake. But they hadn’t.” He sighed, then brightened. “Still, if my brother had been able to make the donation I wouldn’t have met you.”

“I doubt if that would have bothered you much,” Mary said. “You wouldn’t have known I existed.”

He put his head a little on one side, as if considering what she had said.

“My brother tried to find a donor. He had leaflets printed and put them through a thousand doors. Can you imagine? Most people just ignored them but a lot came forward for tests. One of them was compatible, but he turned out not to be suitable. I knew I’d die unless a donor was found. That’s a very unpleasant feeling, it throws you into a panic, knowing you’ve got something that can be cured, or at any rate arrested, and the drug, serum, whatever, is everywhere, maybe even quite common, but you can’t find it, it’s hidden away, it may be inside lots of people you see in the street but you can’t get at it. Then the hospital told us about the trust.”

“Go on.”

He recalled the day the Harvest Trust told him there was someone prepared to make the donation and his happiness at this good news, his excitement, later on his realization of reprieve.

“I’d lived with the dread that I’d never see my next birthday. Now here was a bunch of people telling me the chances were I would. I’d tried to get used to despair, to my fate, and now I had to get used to hope.”

There was a setback when they were afraid his condition had
deteriorated too far for him to be eligible for the transplant. But he seemed stable and they had gone ahead. While this was going on, he said, he thought of her all the time.

“I thought of ‘Helen.’ Maybe I’m a bit of a hero-worshiper. I worshiped my brother, still do, and now here was this woman for me to worship, this unknown woman. You were a savior to me, a sort of saint.”

She disliked the ease with which she blushed. Never in her life before had she had such cause for blushing. Her face flooded with color.

“But it was
nothing
,” she said, surprising herself by her own vehemence. “It was
nothing
.”

“I’m not at all sure
I
would have done it,” he said. “Getting over the transplant, I had a lot of leisure to think. I thought about that a lot, what would I have done if I could have made a donation, and I decided I wouldn’t have. I’d have been afraid.”

His eyes seemed filled with adoration. Embarrassed, awkward, but unable to stop looking at him, she tried to leave the subject, to deflect things.

“What about work? You couldn’t have worked while all this was going on. How have you lived?” Again she had perhaps gone too far. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t ask.…”

“You can ask me anything.”

The words fell calmly. His total openness was almost frightening. The sense of intimacy made her shiver a little, for although they had been there less than half an hour it was as if she had known him for a long, long time.

“No, I’m sorry,” she said again, weak now with attempting she hardly knew what. “I have no right to pry like this.”

“
You
can ask me anything. After all, I’m yours, aren’t I?”

“What do you mean?” she said.

“Nothing to make you look so—so fearful. Don’t you know that when you save a man’s life he belongs to you? Like a servant. In the
true sense of that word, I mean. Someone who will devotedly serve you.” Her hands were on the table surface and he put his over them. The hands he had reached out to take hers and had withdrawn from shyness or some sense of decorum, he now placed over her hands and let them rest there with increasing pressure. The touch was extraordinarily comforting.

“My brother kept me,” he said. “I have a job now. It’s only part-time and it’s not much. I work for him, my brother. It’s not the kind of thing I had in mind. I’d been to a great university, I had high hopes of my future, but still—it’s work, I was glad of anything once I knew I was going to live.”

She waited for him to say what he did, what the work was, but he didn’t say. The bill came. As he was taking it from the waitress’s hand, Mary said, “No, let me.”

This time he laughed. The girl was standing there listening, but he didn’t seem to mind. “You’re remembering I said I hadn’t a phone. I only meant I hadn’t a phone of my own. I’ve been sharing a flat with my brother since I got ill. I had to, I couldn’t manage on my own.”

Her hands felt cold now he had taken his away. She was aware that with the coming of evening it was no longer warm. She stood up. “I’ll walk you to Park Village, shall I?” he asked. “Oh, don’t look like that. I’m quite well. You’ve made me well, remember? I can walk long distances, Mary.”

It was the first time he had used her name and she was unprepared for the rush of pleasure it brought her. They passed into the Broad Walk and made their way northward. The bearded man she had encountered earlier was once more on one of the seats, once more reading. She prepared to smile at him and say hello, but he kept his eyes on the page. Leo began to talk of the curious coincidence of their living so near to each other. He called her Mary again and managed to give the name a prettier sound than anyone else had.

She looked back once but the man on the seat had gone.

7

T
here had not even been a period of wondering where they all were, of apprehensiveness, doubt, the tickle of speculation, fear growing from unexplained absence and the silent phone. He knew, or thought he knew. They were in Woodbridge, at his mother-in-law’s. It was school holidays, the October half-term, and Sally had driven herself, Elizabeth, and Daniel up into Suffolk to see her mother, who had been ill. They were to stay overnight.

Afterward, in a kind of mad obsession with figures, dates, sums, he had tried to calculate how often she had made that journey in the previous fifteen years, how often she and he and all of them had made it. Two hundred times? More? Looking back over the years, consulting his diary, he eventually came to the precise figure of two hundred and twenty-three times, anything to distract his mind, keep it, if only for minutes, in the emotionless drought of measurements and number.

That number of times she had driven it without incident, without event almost, with nothing approaching a narrow escape. He hadn’t been anxious. Of course he hadn’t. Not once had he been tempted to pick up the phone and check. They were there with Sally’s mother. Perhaps they would phone him and then again perhaps they wouldn’t. When he had eaten he might phone Sally’s mother and ask how she was. But he doubted later if he had thought those things at the time. He hadn’t been thinking of them at all. His mind had been elsewhere, concerned with a manuscript purporting to be the diary of a runaway slave who had married a Havasupai woman that
Talisman might buy if it could be authenticated and the price wasn’t too high. He had brought a copy of it home with him. It lay on the kitchen table, open at page four. Strange that now he couldn’t even remember whether or not Tom Outram had bought that book.

He was pottering about, getting himself a meal. Not defrosted pizza but baked beans, because he preferred tins to the microwave. He read another paragraph while he was opening the tin. There was a bottle of Meursault in the fridge, half full (or half empty if you were a pessimist, though he never had been), its neck corked with one of those wine-saver stoppers. He had poured himself a glass of wine while he was heating up the beans. The slave’s diary probably wasn’t genuine, was fiction, but might be all the more publishable for that.…

The doorbell rang at one minute to seven. He thought it was someone collecting for a charity. He went to the door feeling for his wallet in his pocket.

The police officers gave him no details then. That came later. He learned all about it later. Then, at one minute to seven, his glass of wine half drunk, his baked beans burning on the stove till the policewoman turned off the plate, they asked him to sit down, they told him of an accident, then of serious consequences, then of fatality. He had stared at them. He remembered asking them to repeat what they had said, he was so certain his hearing was playing tricks, he
couldn’t
have heard that, this
couldn’t
be happening to him.

For a long time he associated the smell of burnt tomato sauce with the collapse of his life, the loss of all that made his happiness. Once he had smelled it in a workmen’s café in Camden Town and felt as sick as if he had swallowed poison.

The day after the police came he learned that Sally had been driving carefully, prudently, obeying all the rules, within the speed limit. Elizabeth was beside her in the passenger seat, Daniel in the back. The car had come to a stop at a level crossing over the Eastern Region railway line somewhere near Ipswich. It was at the foot of a hill.
The lorry behind her, a twenty-ton container from the docks at Felixstowe with defective brakes, came down the hill too fast and slid into the back of the car, precipitating it through the closed crossing gates into the path of the oncoming train.

The three of them were killed instantly. The driver of the train was injured, but all the passengers were unhurt. As for the lorry driver, he had a bang on the head and badly bruised knuckles. Two hundred and twenty-three times it had been all right and all those times that two hundred and twenty-fourth time had been waiting to happen, coming nearer every time, with the force of destiny. If you believed that sort of thing. Roman didn’t.

He didn’t go to the inquest, but he went to the funeral. He
was
the funeral. Sally’s dying mother was there and Sally’s sister, but he hadn’t wanted anyone else and had told people not to come. He slept heavily that night and woke in the belief that Sally had got up early, would appear in a minute with tea for him. The knowledge and the pain pouring back tore from him cries of violent protest.

Two weeks afterward, having resigned from the Talisman Press, he put his house on the market and took to the outdoors.

The funeral, that surreal occasion, was the event he thought had tipped him over the edge into insanity. Or whatever condition it was that he had developed and had lived with. The three coffins, carried up the aisle of that stark crematorium by men in black coats, made a picture Ernst might have painted, or perhaps Magritte. He saw the scene over and over as such a picture, stuck somewhere on the other side of reality in that world where bad dreams live, and drug-induced hallucinations.

Curiously, since he had admitted the past, it was liable to come back at all sorts of odd times and print itself in front of his eyes. Now was one of those times as he walked across Prince Albert Road, making for St. John’s Wood churchyard, called “church gardens.” Cars had stopped for him at the pedestrian crossing, but he hardly saw them. One of them hooted to hurry him along. Before his eyes the
three coffins passed, carried by strong young men, the kind of young men only seen dressed like that at funerals, their fresh faces lugubrious, their eyes downcast.

There had been no flowers. Of course not. How could anyone suggest anything so ludicrous? Well, no one had suggested it. His whole life, his past, his present, and his future, lay in three wooden boxes. He sat, unresponsive, in a pew, looking at the boxes, while a very young man with an Adam’s apple like a swallowed toffee going up and down in his throat, talked in a Potteries accent about the resurrection and the life.

The picture dimmed as he reached the opposite pavement. By now the light was fading as the cruel vision had faded. The churchyard would soon be closed. Police patrolled the park to clear it of vagrants before and after closing time, but Roman had found he could sometimes elude them in this shady place outside its gates and make himself a bed among the old tombs.

He blinked his eyes and saw only the green turf, the flowerbeds, and the trunks of plane trees, their bark like gray skin peeling here and there to show the lemon color beneath. The leaves of planes, the beeches, and the whitebeams looked very pale and tender in the fading light. All white things shone with a curious radiance.

Having walked many miles this fine day, Roman walked farther. He did as he always did in the church gardens and looked at the grave of John Sell Cotman, the watercolorist who had died a hundred and fifty years ago, and at Joanna Southcott’s, the religious visionary, she of “the Box,” dead before the Battle of Waterloo. On most of the gray gravestones the lettering was no longer decipherable, eroded by time and weather. The bluebells were nearly over, but the borage aped their color and the cow parsley shimmered as in a country lane.