Grasshopper Page 19

  We climbed out of the small sash window on to the roof. The evening was fine and sunny and it was still hot up there at half past six. I could feel the heat coming off the roof through my trainers and when I touched the slates my finger tingled as if I had held it close to a flame. We meant to walk all the way down to the Edgware Road on the leads and the slates in one direction and back to the street that leads to Paddington Station in the other. But roof gardens and little cottagey fences put up to divide the plots from one another got in our way. We could get no further than the hotel next door and there something very odd happened. We were lying on the roof, looking down over the guttering and thinking of going back to the room and then home. I shifted along so that I could look through the top pane of a small window where the curtains were drawn back. In the room inside, in a double bed, lay a man and a woman asleep. I recognized the woman, though I’d only seen her once before. She was the cushion designer I had met at the birthday lunch Max and Selina had given for me.

  So I had been wrong about people no longer using houses of call. Seeing them like that made me feel low, like a voyeur. I told Silver and he said, ‘All right, we’ll never look through windows again.’

  ‘It’s not really excusable, is it? Even if one’s motive is just being interested in other people, it’s still an invasion of privacy.’

  ‘We’ll try to be good,’ Silver said. ‘We won’t just not be bad, we’ll try to do positive good. How about that?’

  I never have difficulty in remembering those words and what they led to. But at the time I don’t believe we had any plans for the good we’d do. We never looked into rooms again, though, but the once. And that once was what precipitated us into disaster. I specially remember that night, not only because of our visit to the Gilmore and what I saw through that window, but because when we got back to Silver’s we found Liv alone, convulsed with terror.

  By then it was dark. She used to ask Jonny to buy candles for her, which he grudgingly did, but for once she had lit no candles, put on no lights. The whole house was in darkness. I could hear her mice scuttering about in the kitchen. Liv was huddled into a corner of the sofa, embryo-shaped, her arms round her drawn-up knees and her head on her knees. The only light came from outside the window and Silver’s place was too high up for there to be much of that. She lifted her head when we came in and stared at us, her eyes bright with fear. It’s odd how eyes can shine in a dark room, how they can be the only part of a face that’s visible. Without a word she got up and threw herself into my arms. Silver struck a match and began lighting the stumps of candles left over from the night before.

  ‘The doorbell is ringing,’ Liv mumbled into my shoulder, ‘and I go into Silver’s room and look out of the window, there in the front, and is a policeman down there outside the door.’

  ‘I don’t suppose he’d come for you,’ Silver said in that voice I always found so completely reassuring. ‘He may have been after Jonny but most likely it was something about my dad’s car.’ Jack Silverman left one of his cars permanently parked, it seemed to me, in Russia Road. ‘A lot of cars were broken into last week. He probably wanted to check the radio was still there.’

  In fact, this was exactly what the policeman had called about, as Silver found out the next day. But Liv wouldn’t believe him. She was sure Claudia and James had discovered her whereabouts. ‘I trust you, Clodagh,’ she said. ‘I don’t trust Jonny.’ Silver she didn’t mention, nor Wim. ‘Will you take the money for me and hide it in your place?’

  ‘I thought you were saving it to give back when they rumble you,’ said Silver.

  ‘Rumble? What is rumble?’

  ‘Catch you. Bring you to justice.’

  ‘I have told you, I cannot. My hands would not do it. My brain will but my hands, no.’ Liv began to cry. ‘I have to have this money. To live. To escape.’

  I don’t know what made me take a stand I’d most likely associate with people twice my age. Perhaps it was because I was happy and had friends, most of all had Silver, was never going to be a business manager or a secretary or married to Guy Wharton, and I had come to understand at last how worried Mum and Dad must have been over me after the pylon and when I was so ill and so totally apathetic and unresponsive.

  ‘I’ll look after your money,’ I said, ‘on condition you’ll go and phone your parents now and tell them you’re here and you’re OK.’

  Silver looked at me. ‘You don’t have to do this, Clo.’

  ‘I know. I know as well that it’s perfectly safe here and she’s safe but she doesn’t believe that.’

  Liv said incongruously, ‘It is too late, past eleven o’clock at home. Sweden is one hour ahead of here.’

  ‘And it’s broad daylight in Kiruna,’ said Silver. ‘They’ll be enjoying the midnight sun.’ He had come round to my point of view. If he never worried himself, he was aware that others did, and while he’d have liked to cure the world of anxiety, he knew it couldn’t be done by feeding fear. ‘Go on, give them a nice surprise, and when you come back we’ll have lit fresh candles for you.’

  The mice fled as I put on the kitchen light. The sink was full of filthy plates and cups, the table and counters a jumble of food packages and tins mixed up with empty packets and used, unwashed cans, ashtrays that contained pyramids of ash and stubs, smeary wineglasses, cups with brown dregs in them. Too many things had been spilt on the floor for anything to restore it to cleanliness but a complete scrub. I found some candles, we put them out and Silver lit them. The lights out in the kitchen and the door shut, the mice came back. We could always hear them come scuttering out from their holes. Liv fed them regularly but there was no need when there was so much from which they could help themselves.

  She was using the phone in Silver’s bedroom. We could just hear her voice and were pretty sure she really was talking to her parents, not from her words, which we of course couldn’t understand, but from the placatory tone designed to reassure that was entirely familiar to us. We used it ourselves. Very soon she came back.

  ‘They ask me to go home.’

  ‘There’s nothing to stop you,’ I said. ‘All you have to do is buy an air ticket and you’ve got the money.’

  ‘My father will send me the money. He will send by tele-something if I have a bank account but I have no bank account.’

  ‘Telegraphic transfer,’ said Silver. ‘You can use my bank account if you like.’

  Liv had no reason not to trust Silver, rather the reverse. She had lived in his flat rent-free for more than two months, eaten his food and drunk his drink, smoked his cigarettes and used his water and electricity, all for nothing. In return she had given him a plague of mice. But she trusted no man, she had some deep-rooted prejudice against the male sex in practical matters. She gave me a sidelong look and her meaning was plain.

  ‘You want to use mine?’ I said. ‘OK, you can, but wait a minute. If you’ve got the money why does your father have to send you your air fare?’

  Liv sat down. She looked me straight in the eye. She put up her hands and pushed her long wispy fair hair away from her face. ‘I am not using that money, Clodagh. That is my saving – is that right, saving? – for my future. It is to start. Then I put more with it and more and one day be rich.’

  There was no more talk of keeping the money to give it back to Claudia and James. Or offering it to the police as a way of getting out of drunk-driving charges. She had learnt her lesson from Jonny. I had a curious feeling she would never spend the money, never even dip into it. And I felt then, perhaps for the first time, that people’s attitude to money only takes shape when they earn or acquire or even perhaps steal their first sizeable sum. That’s when you see generosity develop or profligacy, meanness or what psychiatrists call anal retention. Liv belonged in this last category. She had got the money and passionately needed to keep it, every penny, there should be no dipping into it, no spoiling or even touching the inviolate sum. It must be preserved intact, like some heirloom, in its enti
rety.

  She hadn’t kept it in any of the obvious places, that is, wrapped up in plastic and floating in the lavatory cistern or in a parcel under the mattress. It was in the bedroom she shared with Jonny, lying, unwrapped, between the television set and the video recorder on which the set stood. From a short distance away the notes, all of them lined up, edge to edge and corner to corner, were invisible. You’d only have seen them if you peered closely while sliding a cassette in and out, and since Jonny was uninterested in videos because he only watched sport, he’d never even looked in that direction. While Silver lifted up the television Liv slid the notes out. She began to count them.

  I counted too. The sum was exactly £2,000. Now it’s not really credible that Liv could have appropriated that exact amount unless she had stopped when the figure was reached, not at all a likely proceeding. The money she had on her when she ran away from the Range Rover crash was more probably just under £2,000 – I dismissed the idea of its being just over – so she must have acquired the shortfall somehow. It was typical of her compulsive nature to be satisfied only by a round sum. I wondered where she had got the rest since she had never been out of the Silvermans’ house. She must have stolen it, and stolen it from Jonny – a dangerous act, I’d have thought, but I said nothing. Silver refrained from comment on that aspect of the matter too, but he did say one firm decisive thing.

  ‘I know you don’t trust me, Liv, but you’ll have to trust me with the telegraphic transfer. Clo isn’t going to take it into her bank account as well as looking after your two grand.’

  Liv had to give in to that. Maybe she thought we’d settled this between us while she was on the phone, but in fact Silver’s refusal on my behalf was the first I had heard of it. She didn’t argue. She handed the money over to me. It made a not very thick wad but still I realized I had never seen so much in one pile before. I divided it into two and put one half in my jacket pocket on the left side and the other in the pocket on the right. Liv stared in a kind of anguish. I don’t know whether this was caused by the apparently cavalier attitude with which I was handling her treasure or the act of handing it over at all.

  I wasn’t spending every night with Silver. In fact, though we’d usually be alone in his room until midnight or later, up till then I had spent few whole nights in his flat. For one thing, there was Mabel to look after and since her too adventurous sortie on to the roof I had never taken her back to Silver’s. I felt too that Max and Selina would somehow know I wasn’t there, conclude that I didn’t really want old Mrs Fisherton’s and throw me out. One weekend Jack and Erica Silverman came for the Friday and Saturday nights, a cue for all Silver’s friends to stay away or, in the case of Liv, lie even lower than usual.

  As it happened, I could have stayed every night at Silver’s and Max would never have known. It was to be Liv’s money that was my undoing. But that was a while ahead. On that night in June I felt perfectly secure, especially as I had been into college several times since the talk with Caroline Bodmer, the canal bank being open again a few days after the murder, and I had a feeling, which later proved true, that Dr Bodmer kept Max informed of my movements.

  To find a hiding place for the money I braved old Mrs Fisherton’s horrible green dining room. It was no gloomier by night than by day since almost no more light penetrated at noon than at midnight. The wallpaper and the green carpet gave it a subaqueous look, as if the room were part of an old wrecked ship. I was very uncomfortable in that room. I not only felt I was in a trap but also that the place was growing smaller while I looked for somewhere to stash the money. In the trolley had been my first idea, inside a kind of hotplate with a lid, and then I thought, suppose Beryl switches the thing on by mistake when she’s hoovering.

  Mabel came dancing in after I had turned my attention to the rest of the furniture. She seemed surprised that the door to the dining room was open and I inside, as well she might be, and pleased, she leapt on to the top of the sideboard and rubbed her face against my arm.

  The sideboard drawers weren’t full of silver cutlery and damask tablecloths as I had expected. I had forgotten for a moment that old Mrs Fisherton had been poor for the greater part of her life and was not likely to have accumulated that kind of thing. The objects she had brought with her when Max installed her in the basement of 19 Russia Road were the kind you see on stalls at country antique fairs. I had been to one with my mother before the pylon and I recognized what in her words were ‘old lady’s paraphernalia’: pokerwork napkin rings, cross-stitch matchbox cases, a pomander, numerous glass and pottery ashtrays, a pincushion, combs for the kind of hair you put up, egg cosies, a china toast rack in the shape of a row of butterflies, a pottery jam dish with a silver handle and a spoon suspended from it, and more, much more. Mabel, of course, got into the top drawer and began an ecstatic licking of one of the egg cosies. I lifted her out and tried the drawer below. It contained nothing but three plates, the kind some people hang up on walls, one white with a dark blue and red and gold pattern, one green and shaped like a layering of cabbage leaves and the third blue and white in what I suppose now was a willow pattern. The drawer below was full of neatly folded blue and white striped table napkins. I put Liv’s money in the back of it.

  When I’m working on a house that’s been converted I always think about the metamorphosis of buildings, how they started one way maybe 150 years ago, were altered twenty years later, had another makeover early in the last century, were added to, divided up, split into flats, had other radical changes made to them and finally (only it won’t be final) were practically rebuilt, as the Gilmore has been. I sometimes think that all the avatars of those buildings are still there, the Victorian versions, the Edwardian, the thirties flats, the mid-century apartments and penthouses, and that they might occasionally appear like phantoms or come in dreams. An earlier version of Max’s house did come to me in a dream the night I hid the money. The yellow drawing room was divided by double doors and all three resulting rooms were small and crowded. In the smallest, overlooking a garden tenebrous with ilexes and holly, a little boy was sitting on a rocking horse, crying. I’d never seen him before, he was no one I knew, a dark brown boy with black curly hair, the tears on his cheeks like pearls. Before I could go to him and ask what was wrong I woke up, put out my hand and touched Mabel’s wet fur, the raindrops on her whiskers. It had poured in the night and was still raining.

  I’ve never had that dream again. It’s Daniel who still comes to me. So was the boy Jason Patel? Was seeing him in tears a premonition? Hardly. Jason looked like a white boy, his skin was the colour of cream and his brown hair was straight. Only his eyes showed his Asian origin on the mother’s side, dark brown irises floating in a white-blue like mother of pearl.

  The dream was forgotten to surface again in memory a month or two later when I encountered Jason himself. First, I had other things to think about. I felt virtuous going off to college when there was strictly no need for me to do so, the lecture I might be expected to attend and Caroline Bodmer’s tutorial not taking place until the afternoon. In fact, I went to neither. A message from the principal awaited me and was handed to me with a lowering look the moment I arrived in what, with fearful presumption, GUP called the Undergraduate Common Room.

  Everyone had been on tenterhooks about their work assessments and whether they’d be considered good enough to come back the next year. Sometimes I thought dismissing me might be the answer to my problems and sometimes that this would be the worst that could happen. When the principal said, in highly uncompromising terms, that I could hardly be assessed on my course work since I had done none and I wouldn’t be welcome back in October, I felt a marvellous lightness of being. They had done it for me, I need not do it, I need never see the place again, it was over. I even relished looking for the last time at the horrible view from that walkway, the old still soot-blackened warehouses, the new cuboid blocks of council flats, the ancient shot tower, the chimneys, the lock-up garages, the building sites and rub
ble heaps, the grey wispy grass between scabby brick ruins.

  To tell Max or not? To tell Mum and Dad? As it turned out, the only person I told at that stage was Silver and then we were interrupted by Liv who came into his bedroom without knocking to ask if the money had come from her parents.

  ‘Give them a chance,’ Silver said. ‘It’s not much more than twelve hours since you gave them my bank details.’

  By this time she knew what the policeman had come about and that it hadn’t been about her. She was having second thoughts. Why had she panicked and phoned her parents?

  ‘It is all your fault,’ she said to me. ‘Now they are knowing where I am.’

  It was too wet to go on the roofs that night, a situation that was worse for Wim than the rest of us. Even he resisted braving the slates and leads, the dormers and parapets, when surfaces were as slippery as icy roads and the rain coming down in cataracts. He sat on the sofa next to Liv and told us how the night before, while Silver and I were on the modest heights of Sussex Gardens, he had climbed the green copper roofs of Whitehall, the ones you can see from St James’s Park. I suppose everyone has stories to tell, but it seemed to me that the thing about us which drew us together was that we each had big experiences to recount. In Wim’s case it was his ongoing escapade on the roofs, in Jonny’s the murder he had attempted and in Liv’s her abandonment of the children after the crash. That Silver had one I knew nothing of then, nor that when he told me his I would tell him mine.

  Liv, of course, had a new story, though not much of a one in my opinion. Jonny, it appeared, had stayed away the night before, so hadn’t heard about Liv’s experience. Everyone supposed he had been burgling but perhaps not. At any rate no one asked and Liv launched into the tale of the policeman coming to the door and her subsequent terror. We were all there but it was Wim she looked at while she talked. Lounging back against the cushions, dressed in the yellow silk tunic and black jeans, he listened or appeared to listen with an expression of ironic calm, his habitual look when anything but his particular kind of mountaineering was being discussed.