Grasshopper Read online

  I, who pride myself on being observant, hadn’t noticed.

  ‘A good thing for Jonny,’ said Liv in a bitter voice.

  ‘People think they’re safe from burglars if they’re on the fourth or fifth floor,’ Silver said, ‘so they leave their windows open and don’t put bars on them.’

  We went through our own open window. Neither Wim nor Jonny had returned. Liv drifted off to Jonny’s room where she put the television on. I sat on the broken leather sofa with Silver, filled with peace and joy, and he kissed me, very softly and gently but not like that first time at the gate, not like that at all. I had to go, I said, I had to go home to old Mrs Fisherton’s.

  ‘Don’t go,’ he said. ‘Stay the night. Stay with me.’

  10

  Leaving windows open on the top floor is all very well. To do so in a basement is unwise. But I had left my bedroom window open and it was as well I had: Mabel had come in during the night and was asleep on my bed. She woke up when breakfast was put down for her and I told her how I’d been on the roofs. Maybe I’d meet her up there one night but I cautioned her to be careful. I, after all, would be unlikely to leap off a mansard in pursuit of a butterfly.

  I’m not going to say much about the night, my first with Silver, except that it was lovely and I was happy. I was happy for the first time since Daniel died on the pylon. I told him a bit about Daniel, just that I had been in love with someone who had died, and he told me about his ideas of life. He’d been at Queen Mary College in the University of London but he had dropped out, it wasn’t for him. Unlike me and my shilly-shallying, he had left correctly, informing the authorities that he had had enough and was going. At the age of sixteen Silver had inherited enough from his grandmother to provide him with an income. He had refused to apply for a grant but had paid his own way, just as he gave his parents rent for the flat. Jack and Erica Silverman despaired of him. Their daughter and their other son were so conventional, so normal. Erica sometimes wondered, while saying she knew this was absurd, if something had happened to him, during that lost weekend I was yet to hear about, that had left a trauma which would affect him always.

  Silver and I became lovers and were what Jonny called an ‘item’. At that time each of us believed that there could be no one else for us, it was almost laughable to think of some intervening third. He had a poem he used to quote, something about your face in mine eye, mine in yours appears, I don’t suppose I’ve got it right, but that’s how it was for us. And the funny thing was, considering I was just twenty and he was due to become twenty in a month’s time, that ours was a mature love, the kind that middle-aged people long to achieve after a lifetime of mistakes and painful break-ups. Or so we thought and told each other. Pompous, weren’t we? Proud of being in love. Starry-eyed, sitting entwined on the rooftops, we solemnly declared to one another how each had fallen in love at first sight. I could do even better, for I had loved him before we’d met.

  If I was grown up in my love, I can hardly say I was in other aspects of my life. The following week trouble began at GUP. It was naive of me to suppose that I was hidden and anonymous at 19 Russia Road. When I had registered, back in the previous October, I had given this address, if not this phone number. The admissions officer also had my parents’ address. Max’s number was obtained from them and on two successive days my supervisor phoned three times. I had no idea Caroline Bodmer was such a persistent strong-minded woman. She had given me a very different impression of a vague preoccupied creature. Selina had searched for me – I, of course, being up at Silver’s or on the roofs – but the third call came at nine in the morning and, entering as she invariably did without knocking, she found me coming out of the bathroom wrapped in towels. It was difficult ever to get into the bathroom at Silver’s, there were always too many people competing for it. Fortunately Mabel had eaten her breakfast and gone out five minutes before.

  ‘She’s holding on, darling. She sounded rather – well, cross.’ Selina shook her head at my appearance, a gesture of Max’s she had caught. She herself was immaculate in a yellow linen dress. ‘You can’t go up like that. Max might see you. Oh dear, now what shall I do? Shall I tell her you’ll be just two minutes or maybe you could call her back? Yes, I’ll say you’ll call her back, darling, but you must do it. You must promise. Or she’ll blame me, won’t she?’ This was exactly the sort of pointless fretfulness Silver deplored. ‘Or I could say you’ll see her at the college. Had I better do that?’

  ‘I’ll call her back.’ Just give me five minutes to invent something to say, I thought. ‘Oh, and thanks, Selina.’

  ‘You’re welcome, darling, only the woman has phoned three times and the other two times Max had to answer the phone himself. You know he does find answering the phone very trying. Still, he had the opportunity to have a long talk with her. When you come upstairs you’ll remember he’s starting work now, won’t you? He’s doing his index and that’s fearfully demanding, so you must be as quiet as a mouse.’

  ‘I won’t make a noise.’

  ‘One more thing, darling. I don’t suppose you ever go down on the canal bank, do you? No, of course you don’t, but if ever you were tempted, remember that poor creature who was murdered there last week or whenever. She was beaten to death with a lump of wood. It’s all in today’s paper, it came out at the inquest. It used to be so safe round here.’

  How did she know? Before she married Max she had had a flat in Baron’s Court. I got dressed and went upstairs. The yellow drawing room was full of flowers. I suppose Selina had carefully chosen them to match the furnishings, for they were exclusively yellow and reddish-brown with emerald leaves and ferns, and arranged them herself in two big vases and an urn. The urn stood on something that I think is called a jardinière, a big iron construction, all scrolls and spirals. The whole effect was less of a room designed to be lived in than a set piece constructed to be photographed for a glamorous interiors magazine. It smelt strongly, not of the flowers but of one of those sprays whose scent is not that of the fresh meadows it claims to simulate but of cheap aftershave. I tiptoed in, looking uneasily about me. I wonder if I’ve ever been anywhere that made me feel more uncomfortable, with the exception, of course, of tunnels and underpasses.

  In the five minutes’ grace I had been given I had thought mostly about Max. It was Max who had answered the phone on those two previous occasions. I disliked the sound of that long talk Caroline Bodmer had had with him. Had she asked him where I was? Was I ill? This took some thinking over. Max, even at that moment, up in his disordered eyrie, might be less preoccupied with his index than with retribution and venting his anger on ungrateful me. The form that would take was pretty obvious. However, at least five minutes had gone by, nearer seven minutes. I dialled the number.

  I spoke to her. If I hadn’t met Silver and become his lover, if I hadn’t wanted to stay with Silver and go back on the roofs and discover more roofs, if I hadn’t wanted to keep my hold on old Mrs Fisherton’s because if I lost the flat I’d either have to go home or do what Liv had done, if all those things weren’t true, I would have told her I had changed my mind about the course and was dropping out. Instead I said I had had shingles.

  ‘You’re very young to have shingles.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘My GP told me he’d never come across it before.’ I don’t know if what I said next is true but I dredged it up from some half-remembered village talk. ‘At my age he’d have expected it to come out as chicken pox.’

  If you lie, always supply circumstantial details. They convince. She expressed sympathy. When would I be back? Next week, I said. Yes, well, that would do. Did I realize I had missed several lectures, the social science seminar and the management placement? I’d do my best to catch up, I said.

  ‘You do realize, Chloe, that student performance is under review, don’t you, and at the end of the year, which is not far off, not at all far off, you could simply – well, not to mince matters, be asked not to come back in October?’

/>   I had a picture, not a very pleasant one, of matters being minced, of a long strip of flesh, maybe a fillet of pork, pushed through a food processor. Nothing was going to take me back to GUP for a second year, but October was a long way off, all kinds of things could happen before October. All kinds of things did, though not what I meant when I vaguely considered the future that morning in Selina’s yellow drawing room. Mostly, though, I thought how a whole week would pass before I need go back.

  I half-expected a summons from Max and one came, brought of course by Selina, just as I was off to meet Silver in the café on the bridge at Maida Hill. Instead of his study Max was in the dining room, where that first evening I had had dinner with them. Since then, as Beryl had foretold, it had been redecorated. Below ground I had scarcely noticed the comings and goings of builders. But they had been there and done the room in the colours, as Beryl put it, of a can of Heinz baked beans, wallpaper in bright peacock blue and black, dazzling white paintwork. The old black carpet looked deeper and darker than before. Still seated at the table, from which all the lunch things but the small coffee cup in front of him had been cleared away, Max looked at me over the top of the gold-rimmed glasses which had slid down his nose, chin tucked in, round jowls prominent. When he had made sure it was me and not some intruder, ghost or hallucination, he pushed the glasses back to the bridge of his nose with both hands and held them there while he stared, lips pursed. He was wearing one of his tracksuits, pants in a pale shade of cocoa, top in cocoa and bitter chocolate stripes.

  It’s a successful technique with those weaker or younger or more vulnerable than yourself whom you seek to control: look at them for some seconds without speaking while wearing a expression of deep disapproval, delaying as long as is reasonable what there is to say. I had experienced a lot of it in my short life and usually I had sat there under the censorious scrutiny, taking it mutinously but in silence. But we change fast at twenty and I had changed since coming to Russia Road. I said as firmly as I could, ‘Please don’t look at me like that, Max. I know you’re angry with me and I’m sorry, but would you just come out and say it?’

  He might have responded by asking me how I dared speak to him like that or even telling me to come back when I was in a more tractable frame of mind, but he didn’t. Standing up to bullies is supposed to work and sometimes it does. I swallowed hard but invisibly, I think. He turned his head to the window as if he had found something very interesting in the garden (Mabel tightrope-walking the trellis, maybe) and said, ‘Why haven’t you been to that polytechnic of yours?’

  I couldn’t tell him I had had shingles. I opted for the truth or half the truth. ‘I don’t like the course. It’s not what I want. I didn’t know that before I started. I’m not interested in business.’

  The head-shaking began. Actress she might be, but Selina would never learn to do it as well as he did. It was such a tiny subtle movement, perhaps through no more than twenty degrees of the circle, the merest tremble, but perfectly controlled, of vertebra on vertebra. It signified far more than disapproval: wonder at folly as well, ruefulness for my misspent past, amazement at the youth of the day.

  ‘I ask myself if you realize, Clodagh, how fortunate you are to be one of those who have the opportunity to enjoy higher – I should say, further – education totally free of charge. It may not always be so, no doubt the time will come when students will once more pay their own tuition fees as I had to, as my poor grandmother whose last home you currently occupy had to on my behalf, working her fingers to the bone.’ Max censured a cliché on the lips of others but never minded using one himself. ‘No, that time will come under some future government, but it hasn’t come yet. Students arrive from all over the world to benefit from our free education – did you know that? Do you think they abandon a course just because the discipline is temporarily not to their taste? Do you think they fail to understand that in this life the rough has to be taken with the smooth?’

  I wasn’t sure whether Max meant ‘discipline’ in the sense of control or in the sense of a mode of instruction. It didn’t much matter. ‘I don’t want to work in an office,’ I said, ‘and I don’t want to be a social worker working in an office.’

  ‘No, you want to be a steeplejack. I’ve never forgotten that ambition of yours, Clodagh, and I don’t think I ever shall.’ Max looked at his cup, picked it up and, thinking better of finishing the coffee in it, set it down again. ‘Needless to say, I took it less than seriously. That being so, what do you propose to do now?’

  I’d been thinking quickly. ‘Go back to the Grand Union Polytechnic and ask Dr Bodmer to let me change my course.’

  ‘They have PhDs on the faculty, do they? I am surprised. Change to what?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’ll let you know. I’ll —’ I sought for a term and came up with the worst I could have – ‘keep you in the picture.’

  ‘A young woman who uses stale metaphors of that sort might be best suited to – Journalism and Media Studies, do they call it?’

  ‘In the picture’ was no worse, as far as I could see, than ‘working one’s fingers to the bone’. Max, his head oscillating in that controlled tremor, said I could go, called me back when I got to the door to say that he hoped I had discussed all this with my parents. Next time I phoned home he’d like a word with my father. I escaped. Silver was waiting for me in the café, drinking black coffee and eating croissants. He had found a shop where they sold diamanté cat collars and he presented me with a green velvet one, sparkling with brilliants, for Mabel.

  ‘Suppose Max throws me out at the end of term,’ I said.

  We were holding hands across the table top. Can you imagine very pale water-grey eyes nevertheless being warm and full of love?

  ‘There’s no problem. You can come and live with me.’

  We made plans. I’d abandon GUP and find somewhere else, a place where I could learn something I really wanted to learn. If Max turned me out, I’d go to Silver’s and take my cat with me. To that end I went back to 19, fetched Mabel and put the new collar on her. I introduced her to Silver’s place and to Wim who was lying on the sofa. Although he seemed indifferent to her, she took an immediate fancy to him and weaved in and out between his feet, rubbing her face against his legs. We’d been there no more than five minutes when Liv came out of Jonny’s room. I can’t be certain, it was just instinct, but I think she and Wim had been making love and I think it was the first time. At any rate, she had been making love and not with Jonny. Jonny was at his work in the car park. She looked at Wim as she came into the room, giving him a diffident smile. We might not have been there, for all the notice she took of us. Wim beckoned to her. When she came up to him, standing in front of him with a look of adoration on her face that was so naked and intense it was embarrassing, he bent over and kissed her on the mouth. He was smiling. I swear he was smiling throughout that kiss. He touched her shoulder lightly, opened one of the windows and climbed out. A moment later his face appeared at the closed casement, upside-down, to say he’d see us later. When I think of Wim that’s how my mind’s eye sometimes sees him, the shaven head, then the cool yellow eyes, mouth at the top.

  Mabel, who’d been ‘marking’ everything in the room with her soft cheek, approached the window and jumped on to the sill. I suppose there’s never been a cat since the world began, or since windows were invented, who, seeing an open casement, has failed to use it as a door and gone to see what’s outside. Mabel was on the mansard before we could stop her.

  ‘Curiosity kills cats, as we know,’ Silver said.

  He climbed out, caught up with her as she reached the chimney stack and brought her back in his arms. He rubbed his mouth on the top of her sleek head.

  ‘It seems strange,’ I said, ‘that it’s safer for us up there than it is for her, yet she’s much the best climber.’

  ‘She doesn’t know what we know,’ Silver said, ‘and she can’t know. That’s the difference.’

  ‘I’ll have to
take her to my parents’ once Max evicts me. My mother loves cats. It would be nice and safe for her in the fields. She could go hunting something more exciting than squirrels.’

  Liv, who hadn’t spoken, who had thrown herself face-downwards on the sofa, suddenly sat up and said, ‘Are you meaning the apartment at No. 19 will be for rent?’

  Simultaneously Silver and I knew what was in her mind. We found that out when we compared notes afterwards. While she was at Silver’s she was with Jonny, had to be with Jonny. If she lived down the road, she’d be free to be Wim’s girlfriend. I could as easily imagine Max and Selina allowing Liv to rent old Mrs Fisherton’s as I could picture them letting it to a homeless family. I said nothing of this, Liv looked so hopeful and pathetic, but I did explain that they only let me have the place because I was a sort of relation. Liv shrugged.

  ‘What am I to do?’

  ‘Stay here and sort yourself out, I should think,’ said Silver. He added in a kindly tone, ‘You don’t have to share that room with Jonny. Not if you don’t want to. You can still be here, we’ll find a corner for you. There’s nothing to worry about.’