Grasshopper Page 30

  ‘Isn’t this going to make it harder for us to show ourselves to them when we do?’

  I asked this after we’d gone down the scaffolding and were walking back along the street. To our surprise Wim was still with us. I always thought there was something incongruous about seeing him at ground level, though that was where I had first seen him. He turned to me.

  ‘I shan’t be there. You’ll do it alone.’

  ‘Is that why you won’t be there? Because you think it was you who principally scared them?’

  Wim first yawned, then smiled. ‘Not really, Clo. I’m not interested.’

  I was still on the alert for police sirens, knowing too that the three of us, with our dirt-smeared faces and grubby clothes, would be prime targets for the police to stop and question, to ask what we were doing out at that hour and where were we going. But there were no sirens and no police. I hoped that the three in Flat 4E were in bed and asleep, no longer frightened, but somehow I doubted that. We climbed the stairs at 15 Russia Road, I especially feeling weary after my hard day’s work in the Houghtons’ garden.

  ‘We know it’s them now,’ I said.

  ‘We know it’s them.’

  Silver went to make us tea while I washed my hands and face. Wim went into the bathroom immediately after me and emerged with his long sheepskin coat covering his nakedness. He disappeared into Liv’s room, closing the door behind him. Silver looked at me and put up his eyebrows.

  ‘It makes a change for him to go to her.’

  ‘Yes, but where’s Jonny?’

  ‘Gone for ever, maybe. I guess he’s found someone else. Or some scam that’s more important than sex.’

  Owing to my great tiredness, it was the next day before I asked Silver what we were going to do now we knew the occupants of 4E were who we thought they were.

  ‘Go and look after them,’ he said.

  But not that day. The rain was torrential, pouring down in relentless straight rods. It was too wet to venture out and go to the launderette. Instead I went downstairs and chatted to Beryl while she pursued her pointless task of dusting rooms no one had occupied for weeks and no one else would enter for months. The ‘new girl’ had moved into old Mrs Fisherton’s and it was her belief we should soon see ‘Mrs’ moving out.

  ‘D’you mean she’s Max’s girlfriend?’

  ‘He’s always down there, love,’ said Beryl, ‘and I’ll tell you something else. His side of the bed’s not been slept in this past week. You can always tell. It’s a king-size and his side’s all straight and smooth. His hairs used to be all over the pillow, handfuls of white hairs, reminds me of a sheepdog we had when my old man was still alive, always shedding, that dog was, but there’s no hairs there now. He’s doing his moulting down in the basement.’

  ‘A bit tough on Selina, isn’t it?’

  ‘If she’d any self-respect she wouldn’t put up with it,’ said Beryl and then the doorbell rang.

  She went to answer it – ‘to save poor Mr Silver’s legs’ – and let in Håkan Almquist.

  Liv’s father had been in London for nearly a fortnight. It must have cost him a fortune even at the not very luxurious hotel in Elgin Avenue. But his motive for staying seemed only partly his concern for his daughter’s welfare. It was true that he called at 15 Russia Road every day and while he was there harangued and scolded Liv, but he never stayed long and, according to her, spent the rest of his time at drinking clubs, pubs and dubious places in Soho. All his life, in Kiruna, he had been a quiet, respectable, upright sort of man, devoted to his family and hardly ever having a day off work. This was his annual holiday he was taking, though the original intention of himself and Liv’s mother had been to spend it on Gotland and Bornholm. It was twenty years since he had been to London and it had apparently gone to his head. Apart from those daily hectoring visits, he seemed to have forgotten why he had come in the first place. If London was such an attractive holiday place, Liv’s mother could have joined him, for she too was taking her annual leave. As far as I know no one suggested this and perhaps Håkan Almquist, breaking out and letting rip at last, felt her presence might have interfered with his pleasures.

  That rainy morning he arrived carrying a large and rather beautiful umbrella, the silk on its steeply domed frame printed with a picture of the Basin of St Mark’s in Venice, all done in glorious colours on a deep blue background. He shook it out in the hall, splashing walls and carpet and leaving the mess for Beryl to clear up. He also carried or wore, as usual, one of those smallish backpack bags that today are fashionable for women but which at that time I had never seen on the back of man or woman. I went ahead of him upstairs with the intention of alerting Liv before he got there in case she was still in bed with Wim, though it was past eleven. But Wim was nowhere to be seen and she was up and about, far more brisk and cheerful than usual, bathed and dressed, her hair newly washed and looking its shining blonde best.

  Instead of showing her usual sullenness, she greeted her father with enthusiasm and broke at once into rapid Swedish. He, frowning in a schoolmasterish way, reproved her for the ‘unpoliteness’ of speaking in what was to me a foreign language, but she only laughed. I knew what she was saying, anyway. She was talking about handing the money over to him. I observed his look of wonder, then calculation. Liv said, ‘Come with me,’ and took my arm.

  We went into the bedroom. She lifted up a corner of the carpet and one of the boards underneath it. Her excavations with an unsuitable tool had made a mess of that floor. A package was underneath, wadded and wrapped in cling-film. I thought of the curious existence those notes had had since they were so carelessly and prodigally handed over by James or Claudia, first living in a chocolate tin in a bedroom cupboard, then travelling everywhere with Liv in a money belt, later packed between a television set and a video, hidden by me below ground in a table napkin drawer, parcelled up in food wrap and buried under floorboards, finally – or would it be finally? – handed over into the safe keeping of a presumably responsible person.

  Håkan Almquist took the package in silence, turned it over and back again, unharnessed himself from his backpack, opened one of its many flaps and put the money inside. He seemed to have forgotten all about ‘unpoliteness’, for more rapid interchanges in Swedish took place. Liv told me afterwards he was once more urging her to come back with him while she was telling him that she would, she soon would, but she had to get herself used to going down to ground level and then to the ultimate bugbear, the street. To that end she went downstairs with him, I following because I was afraid she might have some nervous crisis the further she descended and I feared Håkan Almquist would do nothing to help if she did.

  He told her, in English, I suppose for my benefit, and in a gloomy tone, that he’d go back to Sweden the next day. I don’t know whether his reluctance stemmed from returning without her, facing his wife after his long absence or leaving the pubs and pleasures of London. In the hall he kissed Liv austerely on both cheeks and shook hands with me. He seemed to regard me as some kind of stabilizing influence on her, in which regard he could hardly have been more wrong.

  The front door was opened, the rain had almost stopped and greyish damp air came in. Liv turned pale. She shrank back from the airy void where the door had been as if some threatening thug stood on the step. I closed it quickly. We went into the Silvermans’ living room, newly dusted and vacuumed by Beryl, and watched the bearer of Liv’s hoard make his way through the drizzle across Russia Road in the Torrington Gardens direction. A taxi with its light on appeared from Castlemaine Road, cruising slowly. I expected him to take it but he let it pass him and turned towards the roundabout and Elgin Avenue.

  ‘He will not spend his money on a cab,’ said Liv, speaking, it seemed, from experience.

  I congratulated her on her fortitude in being able to stand there at ground level and contemplate the street. She nodded, her expression still dismal.

  ‘I am a brave woman. Perhaps you did not know this. I am working
to overcome my handicap.’

  ‘That’s good,’ I said.

  ‘But always I am thinking, Clodagh, what will I do now if Claudia and James come and ask for their money? Now my papa, my daddy, has it. This is not easy.’

  Back at Silver’s I phoned my parents, then Guy Wharton. It was weeks since I had spoken to him or heard from him, not surprising since I had moved out of 19 Russia Road and left no forwarding address. There was no reply and he had switched off his answering machine.

  This wasn’t one of my days at the Houghtons’. When the rain had lifted and a weak sun come out, Silver and I did something very unusual for us. We went down to the pub, the Prince Alfred, and had beer and sandwiches, and then we walked along the canal from the St John’s Wood side of the Maida Hill Tunnel. Passing through Regent’s Park, we saw a zoo keeper with a lynx on a lead. It was more like a dog than a cat, trotting along and sniffing at every tree trunk. I recorded its appearance in my diary that evening along with all the experiences of the day and the day before, because it was once more too wet for roof-climbing. Rain descended in torrents, streaming down the windows and rattling on the slates. I wrote and read what I had written and asked Silver for a history of the canal and he told me how the coming of the railways had made this once busy commercial waterway into no more than a route for pleasure traffic. Then we talked about the denizens of 4E. They would never let us in, Silver said. We must enter the room by the window and sit there quietly, waiting for them to come in, and then assure them of our good intentions. But I said they would be too frightened and there must be another way.

  All the time I had been writing, Silver had been reading and, while we talked, Liv had been going into our bedroom to use the phone and call the hotel where her father was staying. She must have done it five times and by then it was past eleven at night. Wim came in at the window off the wet roof and sat with us, drinking wine, a rare departure for him. I could see a lot of her weight of care fall from Liv’s shoulders at the sight of him. She was suddenly lighter and prettier and much happier. If he drank wine, he must intend not to go back on the roofs. Therefore he’d stay here and sleep with her.

  But she still needed to speak to her father. To check on the money. Had he put it in the hotel safe? Surely he hadn’t carried it down to the West End with him? Was he there now? She could hardly believe it, not at almost midnight. His flight was due to leave before nine in the morning, which meant he’d have to leave for Heathrow at seven. He had always been an early riser and early to bed. What had come over him? What had London done to him?

  Liv phoned for the last time at exactly midnight. The night receptionist at the hotel told her Mr Almquist wasn’t in his room. The hotel bar was closed. When had he last been seen? The receptionist knew nothing about it. He’d only come on at eight. Liv asked if he had put anything into the hotel safe, for the place wasn’t of the standard to have private safes in rooms, but the receptionist said in a shocked tone that he was in no position to tell her things like that over the phone.

  Liv came out of that room looking thoughtful, but when Wim beckoned to her she went to him as a needle goes to a magnet and I saw that her arms and hands were faintly trembling. He took her on his knee and held his wineglass to her lips.

  21

  I’ve spent the day at a dolls’ museum in Hampstead, rewiring one of its prize exhibits, a doll’s house valued at £12,000. It’s a perfect facsimile in miniature of a Victorian Gothic mansion, three storeys high and with pitched roofs and castellated turrets. It was made in the twenties so had electric light installed, which the museum’s curator had decided needed renewing. Driving home up Downshire Hill from South End Green after completing this enjoyable and peaceful task, I saw Håkan Almquist and his wife. Truth to tell, I had purposely gone that way when South End Road and Fleet Road might have been the better option, in the hope of catching a glimpse of Liv or even of Angus Clarkson himself, it being seven by then. What Liv had become from what she had been exercised a kind of fascination over me. It seemed such an unlikely success story, if you measure success in those terms. But I didn’t see Liv or her husband. I saw her parents.

  They were in the front garden of her extravagant house, apparently waiting for something or someone. I pulled in a few yards up and on the opposite side. Håkan Almquist looked just the same as when I had last seen him and he still carried his little bag strapped to his back, perhaps even the same little bag into which he had placed Liv’s package that day eleven years ago. He was dressed in the kind of casual clothes Scandinavians wear on holiday, even when that holiday is in a city, jeans and open-necked shirt, anorak and walking boots. His wife wore the same sort of gear and looked the same, the only difference between them being that her hair, though short, wasn’t crew cut and her anorak was blue not green. The front door opened and the au pair came out with the two children, retreating immediately as if glad to see the back of all four and shutting the door rather loudly. Almost simultaneously a taxi drew up outside and they got into it, propelling the children in front of them, the little girl yelling in protest. I wondered where they were going. To some theatre or cinema? It was too late for Madame Tussaud’s or the zoo. This, at any rate, was one cab Liv’s father hadn’t minded spending money on. But perhaps Mr Clarkson paid.

  Parents notoriously put aside all resentment and reproaches when their children succeed in life. Or succeed according to their judgement criteria. I think mine would have respected me more if my life had followed Liv’s course, if I had found a rich husband and had a boy and a girl, instead of what Dad called my ‘messing about with wires and fuse-boxes’. Still, they’re proud of me now, if in a grudging and puzzled kind of way (‘But, why, dear? How did you ever come to want to do such a thing?’), just as Liv’s parents would have become proud of her and probably without such reservations.

  I asked myself how she had managed to prevent those parents from revealing, by a chance remark, the kind of life she led and company she kept while living at 15 Russia Road. Had she bought their silence as she had tried to buy mine? I imagined them subjected to a daily nagging, constant adjurations from Liv, while Angus Clarkson was off stockbroking or entrepreneur-ing, not to dare say a word, not even to hint at events of that past time.

  On the other hand, Håkan Almquist knew very little about what went on, despite his daily visits. He had met Jonny and had good cause to remember him. But would he particularly link him to Liv? And the chances were that he had never recovered his lost memory. To Liv’s great relief, surely, he might retain only a confused recollection of that fortnight in London on his own, a trip which had started with the aim of fetching his daughter back to Kiruna, turned into a living-it-up he might prefer to forget, and ended in a hospital bed.

  That night eleven years ago, when Liv failed to get hold of him at the hotel, we were none of us particularly concerned about his fate. No doubt he had left the money in his room or in the hotel safe and was even at that moment enjoying himself at Stringfellow’s or some such place. The fact that he had to make an early start the next day counted for nothing. He could sleep on the plane. Liv said that sounded very unlike Far, but as Silver put it, did fun and games in Soho sound like Far?

  Her anxiety wasn’t enough to wake her early the next morning. Wim came out of the bedroom before she did and set about cooking eggs and bacon for himself and me and Silver. When Liv finally emerged at about ten she began at once on her phobia therapy, for which she required my support, creeping down the stairs with me ahead of her to shield her view of what lay below. Silver said it reminded him of a girl he had once seen on an underground escalator being escorted down this phobic staircase by a railway official. Only she had had another one behind her as well. I, of course, had only one tube memory to revert to, but having an irrational fear myself, I could understand Liv’s.

  The rain had cleared and it was a fine misty morning. I asked her if going down into the hall on the ground floor would be sufficient for today or would she like the front
door opened? She shook her head vigorously, so I took her into the living room as I had done the day before and raised one of the windows a couple of inches. Whether it was the feel of the air coming in or the sight of Russia Road from this level which reminded her – how could she have forgotten, even temporarily? – I don’t know, but she suddenly exclaimed that she must phone the hotel, she must find out if her father had come back the night before.

  Perhaps because she refused, from some obscure paranoid motive connected with James and Claudia, to tell the receptionist she was Håkan Almquist’s daughter and had consistently refused to do so the night before, he would tell her nothing beyond the fact that Mr Almquist was not in the hotel at that moment. She asked if he had caught his flight and was told they were in no position to tell her. Liv looked thoughtful. She nodded her head once or twice, then said to me, ‘You must go there and find what is happening.’ She seemed to realize that this was rude even by her standards and flushed a deep mottled red. ‘Please you will go, please. You know that I cannot, I cannot go in the street.’

  It was Silver who went to the hotel. He spoke to the manager. No one knew if Håkan Almquist had returned to the hotel in the night. The night receptionist had no memory of seeing him but this man was not behind his desk for every minute of every hour.

  ‘He’s got to go out for a pee sometimes, hasn’t he?’ the manager said.

  The key to Room 12 was missing from its hook but Mr Almquist was one of those who carried his room key about with him instead of handing it in. They had made the key fobs as heavy as they reasonably could, the manager said bitterly, but that never deterred these people. He had never been able to understand what was so fascinating about a key with a great lump of metal hanging from it that you had to carry it about with you wherever you went. Silver went home and told Liv she ought to phone the police. Or he’d do it if she liked. This brought on a storm of raving and tears and in the end he had to promise to do nothing.