Grasshopper Read online

  ‘D’you want one of us to get you an air ticket? We could go to the airline and that’d be cheaper than you phoning a travel agent.’

  ‘I am not buying an air ticket, Silver. I am staying here.’ It was I who received the look then, the wary elliptical glance so characteristic of Liv at her games. ‘Mor and Far are not worrying themselves, they know I am here. It is only that I am not going home.’

  ‘Liv, if you’re afraid to go out in the street,’ I said, ‘one of us will go with you. We could go early before anyone’s about.’

  ‘Oh, yes, I am afraid of that but that is not the matter.’ Her English naturally got worse at times of stress. ‘It is that I am not buying a ticket because I am keeping the money. I start saving again with this money, and again I have a little redagg.’

  ‘A nest egg,’ Silver said, guessing. ‘All right. Do as you like.’

  He told me later he’d have liked to throw her out but he couldn’t. He hadn’t the nerve or the callousness to put a frightened girl out into the street and leave her there, even though she had £2,000 in old Mrs Fisherton’s dining room and £200 in his bank account. Liv seemed elated to have a new nucleus for her savings. She asked Silver to draw it out and give it to her. She had a shower and washed her hair, not a very regular proceeding with her, to make herself beautiful for when Wim came. Only he didn’t come and Jonny did, for the first time in three days. She looked very taken aback to see him. I think she had made up her mind that he’d stay away for a long while after the police had been here and searched the place. He took no notice of her but opened one of the bottles he had brought to toast Silver and me in malt whisky. He was the only one to drink it until Liv reached for the bottle and poured herself a hefty slug into a glass she had been drinking gin from earlier in the day.

  ‘Thanks a million, mate,’ he said to Silver. ‘You’re a pal.’

  ‘What for? You were here.’

  ‘Of course I was. I didn’t even know that Sandra bint. They should have got that Wim or whatever he calls himself helping them with their fucking inquiries. Some mate of his lives on a boat down there.’ He gave Liv a vicious glare. ‘I might tell them that next time they come sticking their dirty noses in my business.’

  In fact, Wim only slightly knew the man who lived on the boat called Cicero. He was the one I had seen him talking to the first time I encountered him. But he knew him the way I knew Mrs Clark next door, just well enough to say good morning to and did she know there had been another lot of thefts from parked cars in the street. He had spoken to him no more than three times, as he told us that night, after Jonny had pulled Liv into his bedroom and switched the television on at top volume and we had gone out on the roofs and met him by chance on Peterborough Avenue.

  Americans say you live ‘on’ a street and not ‘in’ it the way we do, but we really were ‘on’ streets, on top of the houses. It was midsummer, the longest day just past, and only twilight at nearly ten. We saw Wim a long way off, his head and upper body appearing first as he rope-climbed over a distant gable end. The sky still had a lingering stain of dark red and his black spider shape stood stark against it. Another scaffolding had been put up at the end of the last Torrington Gardens terrace before the first one had been taken down, so we could range a long way before coming to uncrossable abysses. We walked along the Peterborough Avenue leads, just inside the parapet, holding hands.

  Wim met us halfway along the terrace, embracing us both in his strange silent way. He had been in Belgravia, on the roofs of Eaton Square, which is supposed to be the finest address in London. We sat on the stone shelf that formed the top of a dormer, in deep shadow high above the street-lamps in their net of plane-tree leaves, and Wim gave us chocolate bars. We lit cigarettes and looked down on the spangled map London becomes at night, lines and rings and studs and stars of light. Our cigarettes made three more, bright gleams of orangey-red in the dark.

  There ought to be a period in everyone’s life when time is of no account. It happens when you’re a small child before you know about time. Your mother thinks about it for you, tells you when to do this and that and looks after you. But once you go to school you have to learn about time and that’s when you may become its slave, always clock-watching, your fate determined, whether you’re going to be a permanently late person or a punctual person. There’s school and then there’s some kind of further education and then a job and maybe a time never comes again when time doesn’t matter. For us, our timeless time was that summer, when we had no need to get anywhere at any particular moment or count the minutes to something or set an alarm or even make a date. We never had no-time again, it went away in September never to return, and for the past eleven years I’ve been as much time’s fool (Silver’s expression, from Shakespeare, I think) as anyone else.

  But that night we were in the midst of our timeless time. I don’t know how long we three sat up there, not talking much and then not talking at all, smoking, eating Wim’s chocolate and looking at the lights, watching the moon rise and set or just disappear behind a cloud, to be driven in through the window finally by the cold that comes stealthily after midnight. Silver came back with me for the first time to old Mrs Fisherton’s and together we crept down the iron staircase. The following morning wasn’t Beryl’s day and Selina never put in one of her surprise appearances before ten. I still felt nervous about it, telling myself I was indulging in too much deceitful behaviour, and resolved to clear at least one matter up the next day. I’d tell Max I’d been given my marching orders from the Grand Union Polytechnic. While Silver was asleep with Mabel stretched out alongside his back, I went into the dining room and checked on Liv’s money. It was in the drawer, quite safe, all £2,000 of it.

  *

  By a coincidence that might have been an unpleasant one, Selina did come downstairs and into old Mrs Fisherton’s some time during the morning. Silver had only just gone. From the front window Mabel had watched his departure up the iron staircase and then gone out herself. I had opened some windows to get rid of the cigarette smoke, so all in all I thought I’d had a lucky escape from many perils.

  Selina brought me a letter which had come with the morning’s post. The handwriting on the envelope was Guy’s and this time no one had steamed it open. She was dressed and made-up as carefully as ever, her eyelids matching the dark blue of her trim little linen suit. I thought she looked far from well. For the first time I noticed a row of little vertical lines on her upper lip, the kind of wrinkles you associate with a much older woman. I told her I’d like to see Max some time that day and would she arrange it, please. Any time would do.

  ‘He hasn’t come back yet,’ she said. ‘He takes much longer over his jogging these days.’ She looked around her distractedly. ‘You know, darling, what people aren’t aware of is that it’s not only my taste that’s made this house the way it is today. Oh no, it’s my money. I suppose you’re like everyone else, you think it was Max that paid for all this.’ She waved a hand vaguely above her head, presumably indicating the yellow drawing room. ‘I mean, when I came here, the whole place was like that study of his, that dump. You thought that, didn’t you, darling? Now be honest.’

  I said, with perfect truth, that I’d never thought about it. I was still recovering from the shock of hearing her criticize Max, an activity I’d have thought impossible.

  ‘Everyone thinks that, but nothing could be further from the truth. After all, when all’s said and done he’s only a lecturer at a university.’ Selina made it sound as if such people were two a penny. ‘And what they earn is cat’s meat, chicken feed.’ She seemed to seek about for more animals’ meals metaphors but failed to find them. ‘Anyway, he hadn’t two halfpennies to rub together, darling, if you know what halfpennies are at your age. I’ve even heard people suggest I married him for his money when the truth is I married him for his mind and because I was so desperately in love with him. I’ve given him everything, my youth, my money, my love and devotion. I must have been mad. Oh,
don’t look at me like that, darling, just because you don’t understand. You’re so young, you haven’t lived, you know nothing, nothing.’

  At this point Selina really did begin to wring her hands. I said I was very sorry, though I didn’t know what I was being sorry for, and could I get her anything? A cup of tea?

  ‘I don’t want anything. Not unless you’ve got some arsenic.’ She laughed a peal of theatrical laughter. ‘When you think, I could have bought myself a delightful little house in Chelsea, with a wisteria growing over it and window boxes. I could have been in the middle of things. Instead I spent everything I had on this barrack, up here, practically in Kilburn. For him. But he can go too far, he thinks I don’t know what he’s up to but I know only too well. I wasn’t in repertory all those appalling bloody years for nothing. I’ve seen life, darling, and God knows it holds no surprises for me.’ She seemed to realize quite suddenly that I was there, a flesh and blood creature standing before her, and that she hadn’t been talking to herself and replying to herself but had had an audience. ‘Oh dear, oh God, did you say you wanted to make an appointment with Max? He’s very busy, you know. He’s got the copy-editor’s emendations to his book to go through and there are zillions of them.’

  ‘I’d really like to see him today, Selina.’

  Suddenly weary, she passed a hand across her forehead. ‘Oh, I expect we can manage something. Why don’t you come up about lunchtime? When he’s having his coffee? He’s always better, isn’t he, when he’s got some food inside him? Well, I think so, and God knows, I should know.’

  Once she had gone I opened Guy’s letter. He wrote that he was sorry to have missed me when I was home at Easter. He’d be in London on a certain date in early July and would I have dinner with him? It was another world he lived in, quite different from mine. Did I want that world, even occasionally? I’d have to borrow Beryl’s daughter’s black skirt again. Dinner would be in some other fine restaurant and I’m afraid all I wondered about was what kind of roof it had and how accessible that roof would be.

  I took my washing to the launderette and found Morna there, reading Harpers & Queen and watching a couple of T-shirts and a lot of men’s underwear spinning round in the dryer. I asked her what she was doing in Maida Vale at this hour, for no one ever called at Silver’s before noon, and she said her brother lived in Elgin Avenue. He had sprained his ankle and couldn’t walk so she was doing his washing for him.

  ‘I think I’ve just seen Andrew Lane,’ she said.

  ‘Who?’ I said, which was inexcusable since Beryl had been talking about him only the day before.

  ‘That guy who took away the little boy when the social services told him not to. Him and his wife did.’

  I asked her what she meant by saying she had seen him.

  ‘I recognized him from his photo. Dark-haired guy with a sort of square face and thick eyebrows. It was in Elgin Avenue, the bit where the shops are. He was coming out of the supermarket with two bags of shopping.’

  ‘Hundreds of people have square faces and thick eyebrows and dark hair,’ I said. ‘Thousands. It’s quite an ordinary way to look.’ I nearly said she looked like that herself but stopped myself in case she didn’t think it very flattering. ‘It could have been anyone.’

  ‘No, it was him. I know it was. What d’you think I ought to do about it?’

  Morna was always recognizing people in the street. Usually, famous ones. The previous week she had insisted she had seen Margaret Thatcher in Whitechapel. But although I didn’t believe she had actually seen Andrew Lane, I felt a surprisingly strong urge to stop her telling the police. Up till then I’d thought very little about him and Alison Barrie, I hadn’t considered what my attitude to them and what they’d done should be, but in that moment my sympathies were for them, perhaps only because one is usually on the side of the hunted.

  ‘What d’you think I ought to do about it?’

  ‘What can you do? You’ve only got to look at the papers to see the police get to hear of hundreds of sightings. They’ve been seen in a train in Scotland and on a ferry to Holland and in a Butlin’s, but none of those people were really them. What makes you think you’re different?’

  ‘Because I saw him with my own eyes.’

  ‘I expect that’s what they all said.’

  ‘He was nervous. He kept looking round over his shoulder.’

  ‘Afraid of getting mugged, I expect,’ I said. ‘It can be a bit dodgy round there.’

  Morna remained unconvinced. She asked me if we were still going on the roofs and when I said we were she told me we were all mad. On the way home with my washing I thought about Lane and Barrie and Jason and imagined them living in a caravan on a site on the Essex coast somewhere. Andrew Lane would drive for miles to do the family shopping, maybe fifty miles, which was about what it would be from Southend to Maida Vale. It was harder to convince myself that if he had driven fifty miles he wouldn’t go to a bigger and better foodstore than a supermarket in Elgin Avenue. But then it hadn’t been Andrew Lane that Morna had seen, had it?

  I calculated that Max would have finished his lunch by half past one and be just reaching the coffee stage, so I went upstairs at twenty-five to two. Selina was outside the dining-room door, carrying a tray with used plates on that she was taking to the kitchen. She made the kind of face people do make when a conspiracy is afoot, a pursing of the lips and raising of the eyebrows. Yet we hadn’t conspired together in anything. It occurred to me then that she was afraid of Max.

  He was as he had been at our previous encounter, sitting at the table with his coffee cup in front of him, but this time with a book propped up against a tall pepper pot and open at a page of statistics. As was his custom, he continued to read for a few moments before turning his eyes on me. His appearance surprised me. His glasses he seemed to have discarded. He looked fit and well and younger. His protuberant eyes were bright, the whites clear and porcelain-like, and his jowls seemed firmer. The tracksuit he inevitably wore was a new one, or new to me, the velvety chenille kind in quite a smart dark blue.

  ‘I know what has brought you here, Clodagh,’ he said. ‘I’m one jump ahead of you there.’

  ‘GUP told you?’

  ‘Oh yes, the day before yesterday, and I was glad they did. It has given me a little time to think.’

  I was none too pleased about this. After all, I was two years past my majority, I was a grown woman of twenty. Max wasn’t my guardian or in any way responsible for me. The way I saw it I was just his lodger – but a lodger who paid no rent. It was this factor which kept me quiet when the truth was I wanted to ask him what business it was of his. GUP had wasted no time. The principal must have got straight on the phone to him.

  ‘Of course, you were warned. You had Moses and the prophets but you refused to hear them.’ I had no idea what this meant and have none now, but it has stuck in my mind. ‘Now, frankly, I don’t think the Grand Union Polytechnic would be too happy to have you back even if you changed to a different course. The long and the short of it is, they don’t want any truck with you.’ Max laughed, appreciative of his own wit. ‘I must say I’ve revised my opinion of that establishment, it seems admirably run and with some excellent people on the faculty. But now to your future. History? English? Economics? I seem to remember you were not at all bad at history when you were a small girl. Now, shall I make some inquiries and see what kind of courses are available?’

  I should have been grateful. In a way I was. But all I really thought about was that he obviously wasn’t going to turn me out of old Mrs Fisherton’s. Provided I went along with him and acquiesced in these educational plans, I could stay. Of course, I was never going anywhere to study the subjects Max had mentioned. It would only be the same story as at GUP all over again. By the time we were discussing this in his dining room I knew I wanted to turn my back on academe in any form and work in the building trade. I’ve said going on the roofs and being alone up there and silent had helped teach me to know mys
elf and sort out what I wanted from life. What I wanted, I was beginning to see clearly, was to work with my hands and to do so with the utmost knowledge and expertise that could be achieved.

  I knew what would be the result of saying any of this to Max. My steeplejack rejoinder still rankled, though he said nothing about it on this occasion but asked me if I’d told my parents. ‘Not yet,’ I said.

  ‘Tell them, Clodagh. Tell them. Open confession is good for the soul, remember.’ He sounded quite jolly all of a sudden. ‘And better drop a word about spending at least a week with them in the long vacation. I know how keen you young ones are on London but your people miss you. Remember that.’

  Who would have thought that only two weeks later he’d have evicted me?

  14

  A letter came from my husband this morning. He writes about the great heat and the conditions of a once green country drying up and becoming a desert. And he’s bothered, as he sometimes is, as he probably always is, by the problem of aid workers having food while the starving population they’re ministering to have practically none. Of course, he knows the Famaid people must be adequately fed if they’re to do their job, and the food they have is very basic and not plentiful, but still it troubles him when he eats and the children in the camp cry with hunger. It makes him eat less because every mouthful is a reproach. He writes that he’s losing weight and jokes about rapidly returning to the figure he had when first I knew him.

  He’ll be home at the end of July. I can’t wait but I must. Writing this helps me when I start missing him too badly. And I tell myself – and I tell Mabel – that I mustn’t be a fool, he’s not in any danger, he has had too many inoculations to catch anything, and he won’t be kidnapped. Those poor people are too enfeebled from want to try hostage-taking. And I have my work and good friends and this place high up in the sky.

  By the way, I should clear something up now. If you thought Mabel was the same cat as I had at old Mrs Fisherton’s, I’m afraid you’re wrong. She’s not. This one is also a tortoiseshell but she’s only three and she’s the second cat I’ve had called Mabel. She looks very much like her predecessor and she’s just as affectionate but she has quite a different personality and, of course, she can’t go out hunting. I must say, she has never shown any desire to do so. When my parents come here, Mum always says, ‘The first Mabel you had, I often think she might be alive today if your father hadn’t been so obstinate.’