The Lake of Darkness (5 page)

Martin nodded. He was struck by what Tim had said. That was exactly how he had felt that morning while recalling all the chances there had been against the meeting in the wood happening at all. “Is that a quotation?”

“Arnold Bennett.”

“Humanity treads ever on a thin crust over terrific abysses …” Of course there weren’t inevitably abysses, sometimes only shallow ditches, Martin thought. Novelists were very prone to exaggeration. “Let’s have a look at all this bumf then, shall we?” he said.

“I’ve had a demand for nearly five hundred pounds tax. That can’t be right, can it?”

Martin got out Tim’s file. He had a look at the demand. Tim wanted to know if he could get an allowance for the use of his car and if a library subscription he had taken out was tax-free. Martin said no to the car and yes to the subscription and asked Tim some questions and said he would lodge an appeal with the inspector against the five hundred demand. There wasn’t really anything more to say, as far as business went. Tim was on his second cigarette.

“And how’s life been treating you, love?” said Tim.

“All right,” said Martin carefully. It was coming now. He felt nervous, he couldn’t imagine saying it, couldn’t bear to think of Tim’s initial disbelief, his dawning wonder, his gleeful congratulations. He said in a tone that sounded in his own head artificially bright, “I had that carpet laid in the flat, the one I told you I thought I’d, have.”

“Fantastic.”

Martin felt himself redden. But Tim’s expression was quite serious, even interested and kind. “Oh, well,” he said, “I don’t lead a very exciting life, you know.”

“Who does?” said Tim. He sat silent for a moment. It seemed to Martin that his silence was
expectant.
Then he stubbed out his cigarette and got up. Martin found that he had been holding his breath, and he let it out in what sounded like a sigh. Tim looked at him. “Well, I mustn’t keep you. I’m having a party tomorrow week, Saturday the twenty-fifth. Any chance you might be free?”

This caught Martin unprepared. “A party?”

“Yes,
you
know,” said Tim, “a social gathering or entertainment, a group of people gathered together in a private house for merry-making, eating and drinking, et cetera. A feast. A celebration. In this case we shall be celebrating my thirtieth birthday, thirty misspent years, my Livingstone. Do come.”

“All right. I mean, of course I will. I’d, like to.”

“The place is unsavoury but the food won’t be. About seven?”

Martin felt a lightness and a relief after Tim had gone. He hadn’t asked. He hadn’t so much as mentioned football or gambling, let alone the pools, and he had hardly mentioned money. Probably he had forgotten ever having introduced Martin to the pools. How absurd I’ve been, thought Martin, telling myself he would be bound to ask and I would be bound to reward him. As if I could give money to Tim, as if I could even offer it. All the time Tim had been there he had felt as if he were walking on that fragile crust over that chasm, and yet he hadn’t really-the ice had been inches thick and perfectly safe to skate on.

Caroline came in with a request from Clive Wedmore for the Save as You Earn literature he had lent Martin the day before.

“Mr. Sage is very attractive, isn’t he?” said Caroline. “He reminds me of Nureyev, only younger.”

He wouldn’t be much good to you, my dear, were the words that sprang immediately into Martin’s head. The vulgarity of this thought was enough to make him blush for the
second time that afternoon. “Be a good girl and take that ashtray away, would you?”

“It smells like being in France.”

She bore the ashtray away, sniffing it as appreciatively as if it had been a rose. Martin wrestled with the builder’s tax for another hour or so and then set off down Priory Road to the tobacconist and newsagent’s kept by the Bhavnanis. He felt rather excited. He tried to put himself in Mrs. Bhavnani’s shoes, imagining how she was going to feel in five minutes’ time when she understood that someone cared, that someone was going to give her son life and health and a future. Possibly she would cry. Martin indulged in a fullblown fantasy of what would happen when he made his offer, only breaking off when he remembered that one should do good by stealth so that the right hand knoweth not what the left hand doeth.

It was an old-fashioned little shop. When he opened the door a bell rang and from the back regions appeared Mrs. Bhavnani in a green sari with a bright blue knitted cardigan over it. Her face looked dark and wizened and full of shadows in contrast to these gay colours, and when Martin said he wanted to speak to her privately it grew grim. She turned the sign on the shop door to Closed. Martin stammered a little when he explained to her why he had come. She listened in silence.

“You are a doctor to operate on Suma?” she said.

“No, no, certainly not. It’s just that—well, my mother told me about him, and what I’m saying is that if it’s a fact you can get this operation on his heart done in Sydney—well, I could help pay for things.”

“It will cost a lot.”

“Yes, I know that. I mean,
I
could pay. I
will
pay. I’d, like you to let me pay for you and him to fly to Sydney and for your accommodation there and for the operation, that’s what I mean.”

She looked at him, then lowered her eyes and stood passively
before him. He knew she didn’t understand. Was her husband in? No, not at present. Martin asked the name of their doctor.

“Dr. Ghopal,” she said, “at Crouch End.” The dark mournful eyes were lifted once more and Mrs. Bhavnani said, as if he were some importunate intruder, if that munificence had never been offered, “You must go now, the shop is closed. I am sorry.”

Martin couldn’t help laughing to himself, and at himself, once he was out in the street. So much for the philanthropist’s reward. Of course it would have been far more sensible and business-like to have got Dr. Ghopal’s name in the first place and to have written to him rather than make that romantic direct approach. He would write to him tonight. He would also, he thought as he began the drive home, make the preliminary manoeuvres in his project for using half the money. Suma Bhavnani was merely a sideline. The really serious business was his scheme for giving away fifty thousand pounds.

He could concentrate on that now that Tim Sage was off his conscience.

Martin had found these letters very difficult to write. He abandoned temporarily the one to Mrs. Cochrane because he still hadn’t found out her address. Dr. Ghopal must have had his letter by now, though he hadn’t yet replied to it. It was pleasant to think of the incredulous delight of those two elderly people when the post came on Monday morning. They would understand without resentment, wouldn’t they, what he meant by asking them to choose homes away from London? If he was to benefit four or five people, he couldn’t rise to London property prices. He posted the letters on his way to have his usual Saturday lunchtime drink with Norman Tremlett in the Flask.

Dr. Ghopal phoned him at the office on Monday morning. He would be seeing Mrs. Bhavnani that day and then he hoped to be in touch with the great heart surgeon in Australia. The accented voice that always sounds Welsh to English ears cracked a little as Dr. Ghopal said how moved he had been by Mr. Urban’s more than generous offer. Martin couldn’t help feeling gratified. His mother had said Suma was reputedly good at his schoolwork. Suppose, as a
result of his, Martin’s, timely intervention, the boy should grow up himself to be a famous surgeon or a musician of genius or a second Tagore?

Gordon Tytherton came in in the middle of this daydream to say that he and his wife had a spare dress circle seat for
Evita
on Saturday night and would Martin like it and come with them? Martin accepted with alacrity. He passed the rest of the day on the crest of a wave, and it was some time before it occurred to him that perhaps he ought to have asked for Dr. Ghopal’s discretion in the matter of the source of the money. Still, you could hardly imagine a doctor, a general practitioner, telling the press a thing like that. He thought very little more about it until Thursday when, as he came in from lunch, Caroline told him Mr. Sage had phoned and would call back.

Had Tim found out, maybe from the Bhavnanis? Not that Martin had said anything about the source of his wealth to Dr. Ghopal, but Tim was no fool. Tim would put two and two together. If Tim wanted a story for the
Post
tomorrow, this would be just about his deadline, Martin calculated. He pictured the headlines in thirty-six point across the front page …

“If he does call back, tell him I’m not available, will you?”

“What, even though you’re really here?”

“I’ll be too busy to talk to him this afternoon.”

Caroline shrugged and pouted her shiny, blackberry-painted mouth. “Okay, if that’s the way you want it. He’s got a lovely voice on the phone, just like Alastair Burnet.”

Whether Tim had phoned again Martin didn’t bother to enquire. It would now, in any case, be too late for this week’s
Post.
He went alone to the house in Copley Avenue, his father having an engagement with a client in Hamp-stead, and on an impulse told his mother about his £50,000 charity and his offer to Suma Bhavnani. She listened, drinking oloroso, and Martin could see that she was
torn between admiration for his magnanimity and a natural maternal desire to see him spend the whole hundred and four thousand on a house for himself.

“I suppose I shouldn’t ask why,” she said.

It would have been embarrassing to give his reasons, that life had been extraordinarily kind to him, that he felt he owed the world a living and a debt to the fates. He didn’t answer. He smiled and lifted his shoulders.

“What does Dad say?”

“I haven’t told him—yet.”

They exchanged a glance of veiled complicity, a glance which implied that while they could they would keep this, to him highly disconcerting, information from Walter Urban. Martin refilled their sherry glasses. Later, after they had eaten, Mrs. Urban said:

“You know, when you said what you were going to spend that money on I couldn’t help thinking of Mrs. Finn.”

“Who’s Mrs. Finn?”

“Oh,
Martin.
You remember Mrs. Finn. She was my cleaner. It must have been—oh, while you were still at school, when you were a teen-ager. A very thin fair woman, looked as if a puff of wind would blow her away. You must remember.”

“Vaguely.”

“I’ve made a point of keeping in touch with her. I go there regularly. She lives in such a dreadful place, it would break your heart. A room smaller than this one divided into
three
, and where the bathroom is goodness knows. I was dying to spend a penny last time I was there, but I didn’t dare ask. There are such strange people in the house. It’s a real warren. There’s a son who’s a bit backward, I think, and he’s got a room downstairs. He’s a plumber or a builder’s labourer or something. Of course, Mrs. Finn herself has had mental trouble. The misery and squalor they live in, you can hardly imagine it.”

There was a good deal more of this and Martin put on a
show of listening attentively, but he felt that since Mrs. Finn had a son whose responsibility she was, she hardly qualified for his bounty. Besides, he had two elderly women on his list already. Wouldn’t it be better to complete it with perhaps a young couple and a baby?

It surprised him that he hadn’t yet heard from either. Miss Watson or Mr. Deepdene. There was nothing from them in the morning. Mr. Cochrane and the newspapers arrived simultaneously, and Martin leafed quickly through the
North London Post
, looking for a story about Suma Bhavnani or, worse, about Suma Bhavnani in connection with himself.

“I said it was a nice morning, Martin,” said Mr. Cochrane severely, putting on his ironmonger’s coat. “I said it was considerably warmer than it has been of late. I suppose you don’t think it’s worth answering the pleasantries of a mere servant.” His eyes bulged dangerously in their bony sockets.

“I’m sorry,” Martin said. The newspaper made no mention of the Bhavnanis or himself. Its front page was devoted to the murder of a girl in Kilburn, a story which carried Tim’s by-line. “It
is
a nice day. You’re quite right, it’s a lovely day.” He saw that he had just managed to deflect Mr. Cochrane’s incipient rage. It was like looking at some kind of meter on which, when oil or water is poured into the appropriate orifice, a needle oscillates, wavers and finally sinks away from danger level. “How’s your sister-in-law?”