The Lake of Darkness (3 page)

“He won’t keep that flat on, he’ll buy himself a house.”

“He could become an underwriting member of Lloyd’s.”

“There’s no reason why he shouldn’t buy a country cottage
and
keep the flat.”

“He could buy a house and have the maximum twenty-five thousand mortgage …”

“Do go and get the champagne, Walter. What
are
you going to do with it, dear? Have you made any plans?”

Martin had. They weren’t the kind of plans he considered it would be politic to divulge at the moment, so he said
nothing about them. The champagne was brought in. Eventually they sat down to the casserole, the inevitably overdone potatoes, and a Black Forest cake. Martin offered his parents ten thousand pounds which they graciously but immediately refused.

“We wouldn’t dream of taking your money,” said his father. “Believe me, if you’re lucky enough these days to get your hands on a tax-free capital sum, you hang on to it like grim death.”

“You don’t fancy a world cruise or anything?”

“Oh, no, thank you, dear, there really isn’t anything we want. I suppose you’d, really rather we didn’t tell anyone about it, wouldn’t you?”

“I wasn’t thinking of telling anyone but you.” Martin observed his mother’s look of immense gratification, and this as much as anything prevented him from adding that there was one other person he felt obliged to tell. Instead he said, “I’d rather keep it a secret.”

“Of course you would,” said Walter. “Mum’s the word. You don’t want begging letters. The great thing will be to live as if nothing whatsoever out of the way had happened.”

Martin made no reply to this. His parents continued to treat him as if he had earned the hundred and four thousand pounds by the expending of tremendous effort or by natural genius instead of the merest chance. He wished they had felt able to accept a present of some of it. It would somewhat have eased his conscience and helped him over the guilt he always felt on Thursday nights when he had to say good-bye to his mother and go home. She was still after nine months inclined to ask, plaintively if by now rhetorically, why he had seen fit to move out of Copley Avenue and go far away to a flat on Highgate Hill.

Into this flat, 7 Cromwell Court, Cholmeley Lane, he now let himself with the feeling of deep satisfaction and contentment he always had when he entered it. There was a pleasant smell, a mixture, light and clean, of new textiles, furniture polish, and herbal bath essence. He kept all the
interior doors open—the rooms were impeccably neat—so that when you walked through the front door the impression was rather as of entering the centrefold of a colour supplement of
House and Garden.
Or so he secretly hoped, for he kept such thoughts about his flat to himself, and when showing it to a newcomer merely led him through the living room to exhibit from the picture window the view of London lying in a great well below. If the visitor chose to comment on the caramel Wilton, the coffee table of glass set in a brass-and-steel frame, the Swedish crystal, or the framed prints of paintings from the Yugoslav naive school, he would look modestly pleased, but that was all. He felt too deeply about his home to enthuse publicly, and along with his gratitude to goodness knows whom, a certain fear about tempting Providence. There were times when he dreamed of its all being snatched away from him and of his being permanently back in Copley Avenue.

He switched on the two table lamps which had white shades and bases made from blue-and-white ginger jars. The armchairs were of rattan with padded seats, and the sofa—or French bed as the furniture-shop man had called it—was really only a divan with two bolsters at the back and two at the sides. Now he had won that large sum of money he would be able to replace these with a proper suite, perhaps one in golden-brown hide.

From the coffee table, between the ashtray with the Greek key design round its rim and the crystal egg with the goat for Capricorn-his birth sign-etched on it he picked up and studied the list he had made on the previous evening. On it were four names: Suma Bhavnani, Miss Watson, Mr. Deepdene, Mr. Cochrane’s sister-in-law. Martin inserted a question mark after this last. He wasn’t sure of her eligibility for his purpose, and besides he must find out what her name was. Some doubt also attached to Mr. Deepdene. But about Suma Bhavnani he was quite sure. He would call on the Bhavnanis tomorrow, he would call on them after he had seen Tim Sage.

Martin went over to the window. The temples and towers of London hung black and glittering from the sky like the backdrop to some stage extravaganza. He pulled the cord that drew together the long dark green velvet curtains and shut it out. Tim Sage. For days, ever since, in fact, he had heard that he was to benefit from a fifth share in the Little-woods Pool’s first dividend, he had avoided thinking about Tim Sage, but he was going to have to think about him now because tomorrow Tim was coming into the office to talk about his income tax. It would be the first time he had seen Tim for a fortnight, and before three tomorrow he had to decide what to do.

What to do? He had suppressed that remark to his mother about being obliged to tell one other person, but that was because he had been unwilling to hurt her, not because he was in doubt as to the right way to act. As soon as he allowed himself to think of Tim he knew without a doubt that Tim must be told. Indeed, Tim ought to have been told already. Martin’s gaze travelled speculatively over towards the gleaming dark green telephone. He ought to phone Tim now and tell him.

Martin’s father always said that one should never make a phone call after ten-thirty at night or before nine in the morning-except, that is, in cases of emergency. This was hardly an emergency and it was ten to eleven. Besides, Martin felt strange about phoning Tim at home. He had never done so. From Tim’s own veiled accounts, his home was a strange one, not to mention his domestic arrangements, and who, anyway, would answer the phone? Tim didn’t live in a place like this where everything was open and above-board as well as immaculate in a more literal sense.

He turned his back on the phone and switched off the ginger-jar lamps. On second thoughts he helped himself to a small whisky from the glass, brass-and-steel cabinet. It would be silly to phone Tim now when he was going to see him tomorrow. As he drank his whisky he reflected that, of
course, it was because he was going to see Tim tomorrow that he hadn’t troubled to phone him before.

Martin was a well set-up healthy man of medium height with rather too-broad shoulders. In an overcoat he looked burly and older than his age. He had a big square forehead and a strong square chin, but otherwise his features were shapely and refined, his nose being short and straight and his mouth the kind that is sometimes called chiselled. His dark brown curly hair was already beginning to recede in an M-shape from the broad and prominent forehead. He had greeny-blue eyes, a curious shade, very bright and clear, and even white teeth for the attainment of whose regularity Walter Urban had paid large sums to orthodontists in Martin’s early teens.

Following in his father’s footsteps, he always wore a suit to work. To wash the dishes he put on an apron. Martin wouldn’t have worn an ordinary apron, that would have been ridiculous, but the joke kind made of oilcloth were trendy and amusing and perfectly suitable for men. His mother had given him this one which was orange and brown and represented a gigantic facsimile of a Lea and Perrins Worcester Sauce label. He changed the sheets on his bed, a regular Friday morning task, but he did no other housework because Mr. Cochrane was due at half-past eight.

That his cleaner was a mister and not a missus was due to the Sex Discrimination Act. When Martin put his advertisement in the
North London Post
he had been obliged by law not to state that he required female help, and when Mr. Cochrane turned up similarly obliged not to reject him. He was lucky to get anyone at all, as his mother pointed out.

Mr. Cochrane usually arrived just after the postman and before the newspaper delivery, but this morning the newsboy must have been early-it was unthinkable for Mr. Cochrane to be late-and Martin had already glanced at the
front pages of the
Post
and the
Daily Telegraph
before his help rang the doorbell. Always at this moment he wished that he was about to admit a large motherly charwoman, an old-fashioned biddable creature who, if she didn’t exactly call him sir, might nevertheless treat him with respect and show some consideration for his wishes. He had read about such people in books. However, it was pointless to indulge in day-dreaming with Mr. Cochrane outside the door and likely to appear outside the door every Friday for the next ten years. He liked his jobs, of which he had several, in Cromwell Court.

Martin let him in.

Mr. Cochrane was about five feet two and spare and wiry with a little scrap of dust-coloured hair fringing a bald pate. His face was exactly like a skull with lampshade material stretched tightly over it and ornamented with a pair of bifocals. He carried the cleaning gear he didn’t trust his employers to provide about with him in a small valise.

“Morning, Martin.”

Martin said good morning. He no longer called Mr. Cochrane anything. He had begun by calling him Mr. Cochrane and had been called Martin in return, whereupon he asked his christian name which Mr. Cochrane, flying into one of his sudden rages, had refused to give. It was about this time that a neighbour and fellow-employer told him of his own experience. He had suggested that Mr. Cochrane call him by his surname, to which he had received the reply that it was a disgrace in this day and age to expect an elderly man, a man nearly old enough to be his grandfather, to call him Mr. It was sheer fascism, as if he, Mr. Cochrane, hadn’t done enough kowtowing all his miserable downtrodden life. He had been, apparently, a manservant to some more or less aristocratic person in Belgravia. A butler, said one of Martin’s neighbours who also employed him, but this Martin didn’t believe, for to him butlers were less real a bygone race than dodos.

As a cleaner, he was wonderful. That was why Martin,
and presumably the others, kept him on in spite of the familiarity of address and the rages. He cleaned and polished and scrubbed and did ironing all at high speed. Martin watched him open his suitcase and take out of it the khaki canvas coat—like an ironmonger’s—he wore for work, the silver-cleaning cloths, and the aerosol can of spray polish.

“How’s your sister-in-law?” said Martin.

Mr. Cochrane, wearing red rubber gloves, had begun taking the top of the stove apart. “She’ll never be better till she gets another place, Martin. The blacks was bad enough, and now they’ve got the pneumatic drills.” He was a ferocious racist. “She’ll never be better stuck up there, Martin, so you may as well save yourself the trouble of enquiring. Three hours’ pneumatic drills in the mornings she gets and three hours’ in the afternoons. The men themselves can’t keep it up more than three hours, and that tells you something. But it’s no use moaning, is it, Martin? I say that to her. I say to her, what’s the good of moaning at me? I can’t do nothing, I’m only a servant.”

“What’s her name?”

“Whose name?” said Mr. Cochrane, wheeling round from the sink in the sudden galvanic way he had. “You’re always wanting to know folks’ names. My sister-in-law’s name? What d’you want to know that for? It’s Mrs. Cochrane of course. Naturally it is. What else would it be?”

Martin forebore to ask the address. He thought that, from Mr. Cochrane’s persistent descriptions of the North Kensington block of flats and its geographic location, he could discover it for himself. If he still wanted to. Ten minutes in his cleaner’s company only made him feel there must be many far more deserving candidates for his bounty than the Cochrane family-Suma Bhavnani, Miss Watson, Mr. Deepdene. He pocketed the list lest Mr. Cochrane should find it and pore over it paranoidally.

As usual he left for work at ten past nine, taking the route by way of the Archway and Hornsey Lane. Sometimes, for the sake of variety, he drove up to Highgate Village
and down Southwood Lane across the Archway Road into Wood Lane. And once or twice, on beautiful summer mornings, he had walked to work as he had done on the day he met Tim in the wood.

The offices of Urban, Wedmore, Mackenzie and Company, Chartered Accountants, were in Park Road, in the block between Etheldene Avenue and Cranley Gardens. Walter Urban was the expert on matters relevant to the Inland Revenue, Clive Wedmore the investment specialist, while Gordon Tytherton had all the complexities of the Value Added Tax at his fingers’ ends. Martin didn’t specialise, he called himself the general dogsbody, and his room was the smallest.

He knew Ik would keep at this job for the rest of his life, yet his heart wasn’t in it. Although he had tried, he had never been able to sum up that enthusiasm for manipulating cash in the abstract which his father had, or even understand the fascination which the stock market exerted over Clive Wedmore. Perhaps he should have chosen some other profession, though the leanings and longings he had had while still at school had been hopelessly impractical-novelist, explorer, film cameraman. They were not to be seriously considered. Accountancy had chosen him from the first, not he it. Sometimes he thought he had passively let himself be chosen because he couldn’t bear to disappoint his father.

And the safety of it, the security, the respectability, satisfied him. He wouldn’t have cared for a job or a life style such as Tim’s. He was proud of the years of study that lay behind him, of the knowledge acquired, and was always determined not to let a lack of enthusiasm lead to omissions or oversights. And he liked the room he had here which looked out across the tree tops to Alexandra Park, the park and the trees which he had known as a child.

Martin had no clients to see that morning and no phone calls to make or receive. He spent nearly three hours unravelling the zany and haphazard accounts of a builder
who had been in business for fifteen years without paying a penny of income tax. Walter looked in to beam on him. The news of the pools win was making him behave towards his son much the way he had done when Martin got his A-Levels and then his degree. After he had gone Martin asked Caroline, who was their receptionist and whom Gordon and he shared as secretary, to bring him Mr. Sage’s file.