Tree of Hands (25 page)

There was a slot to park the car in on the Winterside Down side of the street just by the footpath that led to the Chinese bridge over the canal. She put Edward out of her mind. He lived here no longer, he was the last person she was likely to see.

The lawns of Winterside Down were a bright December green. In the branches of a Norway spruce someone had put a network of Christmas lights. Benet took Jason's pushchair, the original one, out of the boot of the car and debated whether to return it with him. It was old and battered but it was Carol Stratford's and she, Benet, had no right to keep it. On the other hand, they might stop her taking it into the library or suggest she fold it and that would draw unwanted attention to herself. She decided to replace it and leave it in the boot. The clothes Jason was wearing more than compensated for the cost of a new one.

She lifted Jason down out of the car. He looked towards Winterside Down, the rows of redbrick houses, the white roadways, the single tall tower. His cheeks went bright pink in the cold air. As they walked along he kept his head turned towards the estate, his eyes fixed on it, his hand in hers dragging a little. Then he pointed. He looked at her inquiringly, putting the question in the form all his questions took.

‘What's this?' he said. ‘What's this?'

‘It's where you used to live, Jay. It's where you're going to live.' She picked him up. He sat firmly on her hip. ‘I'm sorry, Jay,' she said, for now was her last chance to say it. ‘I'm sorry about it all. It wasn't my fault in the beginning. You and I, we were victims of circumstance. Well, we were victims of poor Mopsa who's ill. And later on – I couldn't do that to Mopsa, could I? I've no excuse for keeping you so long after she went home. I don't really know why I did. I'm a coward, I suppose, or else I'd take you boldly into a police station. I'd take you to your mother over there. But I can't. I haven't the nerve, I'm a coward. So I'm sorry about it, Jay, and I hope you haven't been unhappy, I hope there's been no harm done.' He wasn't looking at her. He was frowning and his lower lip stuck out. ‘Go on,' she said, ‘say something. One kindly word will do.'

‘Dog,' said Jason, pointing at the Dobermann sniffing packing cases outside a fishmonger. And then, shrinking up against her, ‘Mummy!'

The Winterside library was a Victorian building with a Dutch façade and the words
PUBLIC LIBRARY
carved in recess on a red sandstone plaque over the doors. Benet walked up the steps, carrying Jason. An elderly man, a pensioner with an armful of books, held the door open for her.

Two librarians, both women, stood in the area between the
IN
and
OUT
counters, one in the act of stamping a book, the other studying a catalogue. Benet saw that the book which the borrower put out his hand for was her own
The Marriage Knot
in its large, handsome hardcover edition.
Her photograph was on the back of the jacket, a young, heart-shaped, half-smiling face, unrecognizable surely as the gaunt woman who had just come in carrying a child, her head tied up in a scarf to hide the mass of dark shiny hair.

The children's section of the library was still there, though changed, brightened up, the little chairs now painted a variety of colours, and pinned up on the wall a collage poster to make her stare and smile. Was this a recurring motif in current teacher training courses? Or had one of those librarians a child who had been in the hospital where James had been? The poster, though less ambitious in its execution, though small, sparser and less adventurous, was a tree of hands.

Finding it here seemed an omen. But of what? She didn't believe in omens. She sat Jason down on a turquoise-blue chair and found a picture book from the shelves for him. The library was silent now but for the faint footfalls of two borrowers moving between the bookcases and the sound of a man reading today's paper at a table clearing his throat. There was no one in the children's section but themselves. Jason turned the thick cardboard pages of his book, looking at pictures of a dog, a cat, a pair of shire horses.

‘What's this?'

She laid a finger on her lips, then on his, the way she had of telling him to be very quiet. The hands on the tree were all like her own, thin, brown, ringless hands, all the same, all pointing downwards. Her own hands were like those as they dipped into her bag for the label and the pin.

Jason pointed at the book. He whispered because she had asked him to.

‘What's this?'

‘You know what that is, that's a dog.'

He spoke the first real sentence he had yet uttered. It was slowly and perfectly articulated, and he must have been aware of his triumph, for his proud smile began as he spoke.

‘I don't like dogs,' said Jason and, in spite of the sentiment, gave a pleased giggle.

She held the label in her left hand, the pin in her right. She felt sick, almost faint. It had struck her, what she was about to do, the realization. And she saw what lay beyond, this afternoon, tonight, the desert, the loneliness. She looked as if for the first time, yet with eyes which saw very differently from that first time, at the fair-haired, sturdy, small boy whose legs as he sat there were not quite long enough to reach the ground, who laughed with delight at his own cleverness, whose scars would never fade. Of course she wasn't going to label him like some sort of parcel and leave him here. She wasn't going to leave him at all. How could she have imagined it? How was it she hadn't understood what had been happening to her as the days with him became weeks and dislike became toleration, toleration acceptance, acceptance camaraderie and at last . . .

Why, I couldn't live without him now, she thought. Jason was getting down off the chair. He handed her the book and put up his arms. He had had enough of the library, he wanted to go home.

LAST CHRISTMAS, CAROL
had had Tanya and Ryan home. Barry wondered who else had been there with Carol, apart from Iris and Jerry and the children. Terence Wand perhaps or one of those others Maureen had mentioned. Carol didn't even want to talk about Christmas, she said she'd work right through the holiday, she hadn't anything to celebrate. What was the good of saying they'd have Tanya and Ryan home when most of the time she wouldn't even be there?

If his own job had been a bit more secure, he might have been able to persuade her not to put in so many hours for Kostas. But he wouldn't have liked to bet on his having a job at all this time next year. Ken Thompson hadn't any more work lined up once the Finchley job was over. And it almost was over. They were dragging their feet really, Barry knew, because after that, unless someone came in with an order in the next couple of days, there'd be nothing. Ordinarily, of course, Ken couldn't get rid of him, couldn't sack him without very good cause, but it would be another thing if he could prove there wasn't the work about to justify employing him. He couldn't say to Carol to slacken off when any time he might be on the dole himself.

Ken was acting differently towards him anyway. It was hard to put your finger on it, but Barry noticed he had stopped calling him by his first name. It used to be Barry this and Barry that but now he didn't use any name to him at all. And sometimes, while they were putting the finishing touches to the managing director's office, Barry looked round and caught Ken looking at him. Not in any sort of vindictive or disgusted way, it wasn't like that. Barry
thought Ken looked at him as one might steal a glance at something not quite included in humanity, a variety of ape perhaps or a picture of prehistoric man.

At least the police hadn't been back. Was his letter responsible for that? It seemed likely. He imagined Terence Wand being put through those long gruelling sessions with Treddick or Leatham, Terence Wand asked if he saw himself as a nursemaid or if he beat up kids. It would shake him up a bit being fetched away from that fancy house of his in a police car. Barry tried to imagine how anyone with Terence Wand's background could ever have come to own such a house. He must have started himself off in some business when he was very young. Barry knew that was the way it was done and longed to do the same himself, to have a house like that for Carol, a car, only the times weren't right for it; things were different, he'd heard, ten years ago. There was no use in him starting up on his own now when even Ken who was a businessman and known couldn't get the jobs.

Winterside Down was giving him the cold shoulder. The Spicers next door weren't acting the way the Isadoros did or the people in the Bevan Square shops, they weren't staring and then turning ostentatiously away, they were just pretending they hadn't seen him when they had. Barry had to do something in the evenings, he couldn't sit at home all the time on his own watching television. He took to going to the Bulldog for a drink round about seven. The Bulldog was far enough away from Winterside Down for the people in there not to know who he was.

He met Iris and Jerry, coming from the opposite direction, bound for the same destination. That is, he saw them coming a long way off. They were arm in arm, Iris taller than Jerry in her wobbly stilt-heeled sandals. Barry had never thought the day would come when he would be glad to have even Iris and Jerry to talk to. He didn't wave, he didn't feel they had ever reached waving terms, but he quickened his pace a bit. The Bulldog was on this side, only a few yards away now. The brewery had put up a new
sign, a bulldog with a cigar in its mouth and a sailor hat on. Barry saw Iris tug at Jerry's sleeve and whisper something. They weren't anywhere near a pedestrian crossing but they crossed the road, getting halfway and having to wait on the white line, they were that desperate to avoid him.

Barry could hardly believe it. Carol's own mother! She couldn't think he'd murdered Jason. She was as much responsible as anyone for his disappearance, more than anyone really. He was in the Bulldog's doorway now but he stopped, he didn't go in. He could see them on the other side of Lordship Avenue, pretending to look in a shop window, no doubt watching the Bulldog's entrance reflected in the glass.

Obviously Iris was thinking along the same lines as the rest of them. He could hear her state her reason, if reason it could be called, in that placid indifferent whine of hers.

‘There's no smoke without fire when all's said and done, is there, Barry?'

Only she wouldn't call him by his Christian name again, any more than Ken did. He began to walk rapidly on down Lordship Avenue. Put a mile between himself and Winterside Down and he wouldn't feel everyone he passed was thinking child-killer, child-killer. He'd go and have a drink in the wine bar, he thought. Carol would have something to say about Iris avoiding him like that. He imagined her anger on his behalf and her calling him ‘lover' in front of all those people.

It wasn't worth getting a bus now he'd come so far. You could see the wine bar's neon sign a long way off because it was on a curve where the road bent round to the right. It was funny, he thought, how he always saw her lights in the distance and was pulled by fast magnetism towards them.

The wine bar was on the corner of a little side street called Java Mews. Down at the bottom was a pub called the Java Head that was Ken Thompson's local. Barry didn't want to run into Ken now. The awkwardness and the
constraint would be worse than at work. He didn't want to see Dennis Gordon either but there was no avoiding it. The silvery-blue Rolls, a diamond on a rubbish heap, was parked a little way down the mews and directly under a street lamp as if the lamp were there specially to highlight it. Dennis Gordon was getting into the car, was in the driving seat, though the hand with that great gleaming lump of a ring on it still held the door open.

He got out again and waved to Barry. There seemed no reason for his getting out unless it was to show himself off and the cream leather trench coat he wore. He raised his hand with a backward flip at Barry and then he bent over the windscreen to scratch a grain or tiny smear off the glass.

Barry didn't nod at him or acknowledge the wave. It didn't occur to him to be grateful to Dennis Gordon for deigning to notice him. The Rolls moved off quietly, with smooth elegance, like a lovely ship leaving a port that is necessarily squalid with docks and wharfs. Barry thought what a lot of people there were about who had money: Ken, Mrs Fylemon, Kostas, Terence Wand, Dennis Gordon. Sometimes his longing for money or for the opportunity to make it was as great as his longing for Carol. He sensed somehow that if he had it he could keep her for ever.

The wine bar was full of trailing plants, pictures of the sea, posters of ruined temples, very Greek. Alkmini, round, dark, heavy-browed, dressed in unrelieved black, was serving behind the bar on her own. Barry was glad afterwards – insofar as he was glad of anything – that he hadn't betrayed himself by asking for Carol. He hadn't got as far as speaking a word. At the sight of him, Kostas, unsmiling, lifted a brown hand an inch or two off his knee. It was Alkmini who told him.

‘You forget it's Wednesday, Barry?'

He said nothing for a moment. He felt something move involuntarily inside his chest. His face grew hot. He knew at once with the intuitiveness of the lover what Alkmini was implying. Carol still worked at the wine bar, had even
taken on Saturdays, but she had given up Wednesday evenings. She had given up working Wednesday evenings and she hadn't told him.

‘It went right out of my head,' he said.

He hardly cared whether they guessed or not. Or even, when he looked back over his shoulder and saw Alkmini whispering to a customer, whether it was him she was whispering about – ‘That's Carol Stratford's boyfriend, that's the
one
.'

If Carol hadn't told him, it was because she must be going somewhere on Wednesday evenings she didn't want him to know about. Of course he could guess where that was. He got on a bus, the first that came along, hardly knowing where it was going, anywhere to put distance between himself and Winterside Down. A curious idea came to him – but one he quickly pushed away – that she must love him, she must care for what he thought and felt, if she bothered to deceive him. She must still care about hurting him.