Tree of Hands (29 page)

The dress she was wearing was the black and white zig-zag one. Her black lacy tights he remembered her saying she had pinched from a stand in a fancy newsagent's up in Highgate. Had she also stolen the watch on her left wrist that looked as if it were made of diamonds?

There was a long angry bruise on her arm where the sleeve was rucked up. The watch covered the end of the
bruise. Barry remembered with a kind of inner wince that time she had wanted him to strike and hurt her, how she had seemed to enjoy pain. She was laughing now at something on the television, reaching for her cigarettes. He knew he wasn't going to be able to ask her about the bruise and the watch any more than he had brought himself to ask her where she was that night the motorbike boys nearly killed him.

TERENCE LAY IN
bed on the futon with Mrs Goldschmidt. Both of them had fallen asleep and she still was. Waking, he didn't know where he was and scarcely who he was, let alone who the naked blonde with her face buried in the pillow was. For a few seconds he guessed Carol Stratford but that was wishful thinking. This was Mrs Goldschmidt – or Rosemary as he knew from the contract and only from the contract – with whom he had gone to bed some hours before. She slept on, occasionally giving a light girlish snore. Terence now wished very deeply and passionately that he had not succumbed to her.

She had called unexpectedly. Terence was increasingly alarmed by these surprise callers. After a morning spent writing a reference for the bank for John Howard Phipps in the name of Terence Wand, he naturally expected when the doorbell rung that it was the police. His stomach squelched. He made himself go to the door and open it, clenching his teeth but unclenching them into a sickly smile when he saw who it was. She wore a pale green knitted dress with, over it, a fur coat made of innumerable tiny skins as if uncounted thousands of mouse-size creatures had given their lives to make it.

This time there was no ambiguity about the reason for her visit. She walked upstairs, Terence following. At the top she put her arms round him and kissed him with silent voracity. She proceeded to the room where the futon was, took off her coat and let it fall to the floor. It lay there like a slumbering bear. Terence had a feeling of being borne helplessly along on one of fate's tides. Sometimes he thought it was his timidity which attracted him to them,
what Freda had called his ‘feebleness', which made him theirs to do as they like with, to boss or mother or eat up.

Mrs Goldschmidt ate him up. But what choice did he have? If he had said no perhaps she would have gone home to her husband and told him not to sign the contract, she had changed her mind. He had had some experience of the fury of women scorned. On the other hand, he couldn't now help thinking, she might be one of those who confessed to their husbands, in which case Goldschmidt's own fury would stop him signing.

He looked at her despondently. Rosemary. The name didn't suit her. His gaze had its effect and she opened her eyes, got up and made her way to the
en suite
guest bathroom. Terence put on his underpants and went downstairs. He put the whisky bottle and a bottle of Perrier from the fridge and two glasses on to a tray. At the point where the stairs turned at a right angle, he paused and looked out of the window into the court. The lights on the catalpa had been taken down the week before. Someone had dropped a white plastic carrier on to the cobbles and the wind was blowing it about, in and out between the light and the dark, finally pasting it up against one of the low walls. The sky was a brownish-purple with a few smudged stars showing. Terence hadn't set foot out all day but it looked cruelly cold. Under the arch a young man was standing, looking up at the house and towards Terence so that it seemed to him as if their eyes met. He quickly turned his away. The watcher resembled the younger of the two policemen who had called on him but he couldn't be positive they were the same.

Mrs Goldschmidt was dressing, the lights on and the window blind up. Terence pulled down the blind.

‘I thought you'd like a drink, Rosemary.'

‘Katie.'

‘Pardon?' said Terence.

‘I'm called Katie.'

He nodded, remembering her second name was Catalina.
It didn't suit her any better than Rosemary. She slid her feet into bronze high-heeled shoes.

‘Would you consider parting with any of the furniture?'

He was nonplussed. He lifted his shoulders helplessly.

‘Only I'd take that futon off you if the price was OK.'

They had their drinks. Terence screwed his courage to the sticking place and asked her if she and her husband had yet signed their contract. It was waiting at home, she said. It had come by the second post that morning and they were going to sign it tonight. In fact she thought she had better get off home and sign it. Terence wasn't going to quarrel with that. She wrapped herself in the multi-mouse coat, remembered about the futon and wrote him a cheque. He was glad of the money, though it did rather give him the feeling he was being paid more directly than usual for his services.

The first time Jason picked up the phone to answer it himself the caller was Ian. It was Ian who heard him shouting, ‘Mummy, Mummy, there's a man!' So that was all right. The next time it was John Archdale from Marbella, and when she came to the phone, Benet thought she heard wonder in her father's voice and a kind of relief. He would accept the fact of the child now, no longer think of him as some sort of monster or skeleton in the family cupboard.

The first night she spent with Ian, she felt guilty because Jason was in the house. Waking very early with Ian's arms still round her, still holding her close to him spoons-fashion, she thought at once of Jason, of how it would be if he were to walk in and see them there together. It was strange because she wouldn't have felt like that if James had lived and it had been he sleeping in the next room. When she had had a child, she had not planned on remaining celibate until he was old enough to leave home. She got up and went into Jason's room.

Immediately it struck her how he had changed. His own mother doubtless would know him still. No one else would. She had had his hair cut the day before and the trim
symmetry of the cut changed him from a toddler into a little boy. Yet in an odd way, she thought, he looked
younger
. His body was thinner and taller but his face had become more soft and full. Except to a mother's knowing intuitive eye, Jason Stratford had disappeared as entirely as might a person who has had plastic surgery. In that moment she knew he would never be Jason to her again. Letting down the side of the cot, she bent over him and kissed his firm, round, pink cheek.

When she came back with the tea on a tray, the cot was empty and he was in bed with Ian. Her life seemed suddenly full to overflowing and she caught her breath. She hesitated only for a moment before getting into bed with them, Jay between them, snuggling up.

In the middle of the morning the phone rang. It stopped so she knew Jay had answered it. But when she came downstairs the receiver was back and Jay was playing the xylophone. She asked him who had phoned.

He smiled. He used a made-up word, a combination perhaps of ‘ugly' and ‘ghastly'. ‘Gugly,' he said.

With a faint sinking of the heart, she guessed what he meant. ‘Jay, do you put the phone back without telling Mummy if you don't like the person's voice?'

‘Yes,' said Jay and he nodded vigorously to give more emphasis. ‘Gugly man.'

That made Benet laugh though it left her uneasy. Probably she had been wrong in thinking he had answered the phone only twice before. There might have been many times when he hadn't liked the sound of the caller so had simply replaced the receiver. Any brusqueness or even embarrassment would do it, she thought. She took Jay on her knee and explained carefully to him that he must always tell her when someone phoned. If she were upstairs and the bell was switched off there, she might not hear it and then she wouldn't know who had called her. Did he understand?

Later in the day the publicity director from her publishers phoned. They wanted her to go on a promotional
tour of the United States in May to coincide with the American paperback publication of
The Marriage Knot
. Benet asked if he had phoned before. Yes, once, he said in his rather sharp, abrupt voice, but her little boy had answered and then cut them off.

Benet was immediately relieved, though she didn't quite know why.

The woman whose shape he had seen at Terence Wand's window Barry was certain wasn't Carol. She was dressing, raising white arms above her head and her hair was short and blond. There were too many hours in the day for him and not enough to do with them. Or that was what he told himself was his reason for taking himself over to Hampstead.

He hadn't been able to get another job, though Carol had. An additional one to Mrs Fylemon and the wine bar. Part-time hotel receptionist. Barry was a little over-awed. It seemed such a middle-class thing, verging on a profession really. He scarcely knew anyone who had been trained for anything, who sat at a desk answering the phone and filling in forms.

‘Did you answer an advert, love?' he said to her. ‘You never told me.'

She was vague. ‘This guy who runs it saw me in the wine bar. He told Alkmini he thought I was a model.'

Serving drinks on trays? Barry thought this but he didn't say it aloud.

She had her Diagem watch on and a ring with a red stone she said she'd got at Christmas at Iris's. It was like no ring Barry had ever seen come out of a cracker. ‘He said he'd be willing to pay the earth to have someone like me at the Rosslyn Park.'

‘I hope he is,' said Barry.

To look in and see her, he should have turned left out of the tube station, not right and up the hill towards the Heath. But he hadn't come to Hampstead to see Carol. Why would he do that? She'd think he was checking up
on her. He turned right and went up the hill and into Spring Close instead. It was soon afterwards that he had seen the woman dressing. That was why he hadn't stopped there long. Once he had seen her, he left, a bit excited and a bit embarrassed. It wasn't Carol, he knew it wasn't Carol, and surely he ought to know, he had seen her dressing and undressing often enough. Yet when he was in the tube again and later when he was crossing Bevan Square, he couldn't help asking himself how he was so sure it wasn't Carol. What single thing was there about that woman he could positively say made her not Carol? Wasn't it just that he didn't want her to be Carol?

Hoopoe and Stephanie Isadoro and Black Beauty and a couple of other kids were sitting on the seats in the square eating Turkish takeaway out of waxed-paper cartons. Whenever Barry saw Hoopoe, he remembered the feel, like an electric pain, of that pointed boot kicking his ribs. None of them took any notice of him. He put his hand into his jacket pocket and through the split lining and felt the gun. He wasn't going to need it but it was a comfort feeling it there, just as a wad of money in one's pocket was a comfort or a word of love remembered.

Had it been Carol in Terence Wand's bedroom? He had been sure at the time it wasn't but he wasn't so sure now. Perhaps he had only been certain it wasn't because he knew Carol was at the reception desk at the Rosslyn Park Hotel. His eyes went to the phone on the shelf with the framed photograph of Dave beside it. He didn't know the number of the Rosslyn Park but he could ask Directory Inquiries. If she were there now, of course, that wouldn't do anything to prove she had or hadn't been in Spring Close an hour ago.

He dialled Inquiries and got the hotel number but that was as far as he went. It was a mystery why he should suddenly feel so enormously cheered up to be told the phone number of the Rosslyn Park, almost as if he hadn't really believed in its existence.

Barry changed the sheets and vacuumed the bedrooms and took the washing round to the laundrette.

When he had been told contracts were exchanged, the deposit in the hands of Goldschmidt's solicitor and the completion date confirmed for 15 February, Terence went into a travel agent near where his mother lived to book a flight to Singapore on that date. When it came to the point, Terence's courage, such as it was, failed him at the idea of being alone with a suitcase full of money in Central or South America. He would go to Singapore and there board plane or ship for Bali.

All this would depend, of course, on what time the Singapore flight left. Goldschmidt's banker's draft would come into John Howard Phipps's account at noon on the fifteenth and that gave Terence three and a half hours before the bank closed to draw it out again. He had to allow for that and for getting to Heathrow. The idea of spending the night of the fifteenth in London appalled him, his nerves wouldn't stand it. The Goldschmidts' removal van full of furniture would arrive at Spring Close soon after lunch. The house would be full of furniture too, Freda's furniture, and Freda's car in the garage. That would matter a good deal less if, when they made this discovery, he was already on his way to the airport.

It was therefore a relief to find that the Qantas flight, stopping at Bahrain and Singapore, left at nine forty-five in the evening. He booked himself a seat, economy class, and at a reduced rate owing to his paying for it a month in advance. His new Barclaycard which had arrived that morning took care of that. By the same post his solicitors had sent him a document called ‘Transfer of Whole' which was something to do with land registration and required his signature. His and another's, for this time a witness was needed. Terence drove down the hill to the wine bar to have lunch there with Carol Stratford. He had given her a ring as soon as he saw that transfer.

‘No news, I suppose?' said Terence.

‘Not a sausage.' Carol was used to being asked, as a preamble to any sort of conversation, if she had had news of Jason.

‘He wasn't mine, you know, Carol.'