Grasshopper Page 32

  ‘We’ll prove our – our good faith,’ Silver said. ‘We’ll go now.’ He finished his wine and, as if on cue, I too emptied my glass. ‘You’ll know we mean what we say when you hear nothing. We’ll come back tomorrow, we’ll come back at nine. Nine in the evening, I mean.’ He stood up. I stood up and he put his arm round me, but he was still looking searchingly at the people he was talking to. ‘If nothing has happened by then, and nothing will, when we come back you’ll know we’re friends. Right?’

  Neither of them said anything. Jason had fallen asleep in his foster father’s arms. We said, ‘Good night.’

  Still no one spoke. They watched us. Silver said, ‘We’ll replace your wine. We’ll bring you lots of it.’ And, characteristically, ‘Don’t worry, please don’t.’

  Silver opened the window. He pushed down the top sash and pushed up the bottom sash. We climbed out. We walked along the balcony. The light inside the window we’d come out of went off almost immediately, but though we waited a while and listened, no one shut the window.

  ‘They’ve left it open,’ Silver said, ‘because they think nothing matters any more, they think this is the end of the world.’

  The night was still warm. We went down into the street and walked home in an ecstasy of love and triumph. Upstairs, in the flat, all was still and silent, the living room empty, the windows wide open. Silver smiled at me, his face a mask of bruises, his cheeks skinned and scraped and his left eye like a boxer’s after a fight when the other man gets disqualified. In spite of always saying not to worry, he was concerned about Liv and he opened her bedroom door very quietly to check she was all right. She and Wim lay side by side on the bed, the covers on the floor, their bodies gleaming with sweat in the half-dark.

  We went back on to the roofs. It must have been by common consent, for no word was spoken. We took blankets with us and the pillows from our bed and slept up there under the stars. The blurred, vapour-cloaked stars. But first we made love and in spite of what Silver had said about limits, there were no limits. It was the one and only time on the roofs. We were awakened terribly early by the singing of birds that has become so much louder and richer in town gardens than in the sterile countryside. I watched the dawn come but poor Silver could hardly see out of his swollen eye.

  We had nothing else to talk about. To Wim, to an uncaring, uninterested Liv, we poured out our news and our discoveries the next morning.

  ‘I might come with you this evening,’ Wim said.

  Liv looked up. ‘I can never come. I have my problem.’

  ‘So you do,’ said Silver. ‘Time for therapy.’

  And he took her downstairs and outside once more. I followed and together we walked her down two steps before she stopped, dug in her heels and refused to move. Curing her of her phobia, if that’s what we were doing, was a slow process.

  Her mother hadn’t called her back and when she’d tried again, as soon as she’d got up, the answering machine was still on.

  ‘Doesn’t your mother work?’ Silver asked her.

  ‘She is still on her holidays. Remember she and my papa are going to Gotland, was going to Gotland, I am meaning, but he is coming here instead. Where is he? What shall I do?’

  In the light of what we discovered later, I think Liv really was more concerned about her father than the money. Or was she most intent on giving an impression of concern? I said I’d call at the hotel on my way to work at the Houghtons’ but first I wanted to write my diary. The difficulty was always in finding privacy. Silver alone left me undisturbed while I was writing. I usually went into our bedroom and closed the door, but that morning Liv kept coming in to make more attempts to reach her mother. The answering-machine tape would soon be used up, I thought, for every time the unmistakable voice of Håkan Almquist came loudly out of the receiver and the long beep sounded, she left a message. All at Silver’s expense too.

  ‘Are you sure she still has this number?’ I said when she’d made the fifth call.

  ‘You are right, Clodagh. It is possible she is losing it. I will give it.’ And she made a sixth call.

  Soon after that I heard a shrill scream from the living room. It was hard to tell whether it was uttered in pain or pleasure but there was no doubt it was Liv’s scream. Her father’s come, I thought, he’s come back from wherever he’s been and, please God, he’s got the money. But it wasn’t Håkan Almquist, it was Jonny.

  ‘The bad penny is back,’ he said when he saw me.

  ‘Why aren’t you at the car park?’

  ‘Listen to her. You’d think she was a schoolteacher.’ He curled back his upper lip. ‘“Why aren’t you at the car park?”’ He used a shrill affected voice, not much like mine, I hope. ‘I’ll tell you why, Miss Brown. I’m not proud. I’m not at the car park because I’ve resigned. I’ve left. Asked for my cards. Does that satisfy you?’

  Instead of the top half of a suit, he wore a black leather jacket, jeans into which someone had ironed creases – highly unacceptable to Silver and me, to whom creases in jeans were in as bad taste as high heels with trousers would have been to my mother–and black suede designer trainers. Wim, who’d seldom taken much notice of him, stared in fascination and only with difficulty took away his eyes. As to Liv, she had retreated to the end of the sofa and her English–Swedish dictionary.

  When I left, Silver walked part of the way with me. He was going to shop for wine, biscuits, crisps and bananas, further evidence to 4E of our good faith. ‘I won’t come to the hotel,’ he said. ‘They know me. But you could say you’re Almquist’s daughter.’

  ‘I’m not Swedish.’

  ‘They won’t think about that. They’ll tell you more if you say he’s your father.’

  He was right. I went into an office and talked to the manager. Håkan Almquist had never returned. The previous afternoon they had cleared his things out of his room and packed his suitcase. It was currently in a side room. I could see it if I liked. He showed me a not very large blue Revelation case.

  ‘Weren’t there any other bags?’ I asked, thinking of the black leather backpack.

  ‘Only this. All his things went into it. Oh, and we have his passport.’

  At that time I had never stayed in an hotel on my own, I had scarcely stayed in an hotel at all and certainly not abroad. I didn’t know if this was standard practice on the part of an hotel, to retain a foreign guest’s passport. The manager explained.

  ‘We don’t usually hang on to passports. Of course, we collect them and give them back to the guest next day. Your dad –’ I had to think who he meant – ‘asked us to hold on to his. He seemed to think it was safer with us.’

  This document was shown to me. It wasn’t helpful. As usual with passports, the photograph was unrecognizable. ‘May I look in the suitcase?’

  He shrugged. It was all the same to him. I lifted the somewhat scuffed canvas lid. I was looking, of course, for the money. Mr Almquist’s clothes held little interest for me. I’d have been very surprised to find £,2,000 in notes lying between the jeans and the sweatshirts. Suddenly I thought of his hotel bill. I didn’t want to ask about it in case the manager expected me to pay it. That was what might come of saying I was his daughter. But I did ask.

  ‘We’ve an imprint of his credit card. You needn’t worry about that.’

  After this I went to the Houghtons’. It was going to be as hot as the day before. I pulled out more nettle root systems, I grubbed up more groundsel and docks with tap roots eight inches long. Mrs Houghton brought me out a long cold drink whose principal ingredients, she said, were lemongrass and ginger. I didn’t expect Silver to come round and fetch me but as I was putting the tools away he appeared, walking down the path with Mrs Houghton.

  ‘Such a nice boy,’ she said the next day. ‘Is he your fiancé?’

  I couldn’t answer that, for I didn’t know what was requisite and what had to happen before a betrothal was finalized. Mrs Houghton looked sympathetically at the bruises on his face and his black eye
, now quite closed.

  ‘Have you been in a fight?’ she asked in the sort of tone that indicates the speaker is joking. Silver said that was exactly right, though it wasn’t of his making, and Mrs Houghton, still disbelieving but amused, fetched arnica – whatever that may be – and dabbed it on his bruises.

  At home nothing more had been heard of or about Mr Almquist. Silver called it the Case of the Disappearing Swede, which he said sounded like the title of a Sherlock Holmes story. As we walked along I told him about the suitcase and the passport.

  ‘That means he can’t have left the country.’

  ‘He’ll have to come back for his passport some time,’ I said, ‘and then I suppose everything will be explained.’

  When we saw Andrew leaning out of the window waiting for us, expecting us, we both felt things would be all right now. For him and Alison and Jason everything was changing for the better. We set out our wine bottles on the table, the chocolate finger biscuits, the crystallized fruits, the bananas and the Battenberg cake. Jason, who had been kept up to meet us, though wearing the teddy-bear pyjamas ready for bed, saw the bananas and reached for one, hesitating and looking at Alison as he remembered he had to say please.

  ‘Of course you can!’ she said. ‘They’re for you. Our new friends brought them for you.’

  That made Andrew frown. Hardly a mark, souvenir of the fight, showed on his dark skin. He might have been waiting for us and been quite welcoming when we arrived, but he hadn’t yet reached the stage of calling us friends.

  ‘Why are you doing this?’ he said.

  Why were we? I’m not sure if I could have answered. ‘I suppose because we think you’re right and the social services are wrong,’ Silver said, and then, changing the subject, ‘Who’s Robinson?’

  For a moment they seemed not to know what he meant. Then Andrew said, ‘Ah, yes, Robinson. Just someone we know, someone who presumably feels as you do. That we’re in the right and they’re not. Would you say that was so, Alison?’

  ‘He’s a dear friend who lent us this flat for as long as we want it. He owns the house but he’s hardly ever here. He’s a widower and he’s mostly in the south of France.’

  ‘And how long will you want it?’ Silver asked.

  She looked distressed. ‘I don’t know. We’ve got some ideas – would you like to see over the flat?’

  Jason finished his banana and skipped on ahead. The flat was his little world, the only one he had now, and he knew every inch of it. As well as the living room there were three bedrooms, a bathroom and quite a large kitchen. From the bedroom that was Andrew and Alison’s you could look down on to a neglected garden, worse than the Houghtons’ before I started. Elders and buddleias, the weed trees of inner London, grew where once there had been flowerbeds and a field of hay where once had been a lawn.

  ‘Who lives underneath you?’ I asked Alison.

  ‘No one in the flat immediately below. That’s for Louis Robinson’s use when he’s here. An elderly couple on the two floors below that, and on the ground floor a young man. The basement’s used as a store for some of Louis’s furniture.’

  The flat had the unmistakable look of a place in which transients have lived, no one having any interest in how it was decorated or furnished, scarcely noticing these things. Not that it was particularly shabby, the pale fawn carpet looked quite new, you could see that Louis Robinson was no slum landlord, but that everything was bland and bleak, the predominant colours cream and buff and that fawn, the furniture the sort that appears in a chain store’s autumn sale. In recent years I have seen pictures like the ones on those walls in motel bedrooms, photographs of famous buildings, St Paul’s, the Arc de Triomphe, the Empire State, the Audubon bird prints, and of course the tiger in the rain forest, all in frames that looked like steel but were probably aluminium.

  Plainly Alison had added touches of her own. It was a home-making effort which must have been restricted by how much they could bring with them and carry up those stairs. Most of the improvements, I guessed, had taken place in Jason’s room. This small area, perhaps eight feet by ten, he showed me with great pride, the bookshelves, his own paintings on the walls and his newspaper and magazine cut-outs pinned to a cork board. He had rather a small box for his rather small toys, miniature cars and trucks mostly. Bigger things wouldn’t have been portable. Silver took a particular interest in the ship in a bottle, which stood on the top shelf, studying it with his good eye. The bottle was of pale blue glass and the ship a three-masted schooner with a painted hull and yellow sails.

  ‘It was mine,’ Alison said. ‘It was given to me for my sixth birthday and I was terribly disappointed because I wasn’t allowed to play with it. I got to like it later on.’

  ‘I’m not allowed to play with it,’ said Jason, but not as if this prohibition much bothered him. ‘I’m only allowed to look.’

  ‘When you’re older you’ll find there’s plenty that comes into that category,’ said Andrew and I decided that I didn’t like him much. He’d spoken in that tone some men use for certain kinds of sexual innuendo, wry, worldly wise, cynical. He had looked at me appraisingly and as if we were entering into a conspiracy.

  We went back into the living room. Silver stopped Alison opening the wine. It was for them exclusively. Jason said good night to us, coming up first to Silver to say the words gravely, then to me. He hesitated as I bent towards him, then kissed my cheek.

  ‘I should be so lucky.’ Andrew cast up his eyes in mock envy. Then, before I could say anything, though I had no words ready, he took Jason off to bed.

  There was silence. Silver broke it by asking Alison how long they had been there. It was really an invitation to tell us the circumstances of their flight, and this was how she took it. She sighed. But first she said, ‘I think we can trust you, but of course I don’t know. You may be just very clever actors. You may be criminals. For all I know, because we hardly ever see a newspaper, there may be a reward offered to whoever finds us and you may be after that. But I reason this way, if you are, you’ll give us up and our story will all come out, while if you’re not, you’re the best thing that’s happened to us since Louis let us have this place. Either way it makes no difference if I tell you what happened or if I don’t. So I shall.’

  She looked from one to the other of us and nodded. ‘When they said we’d have to give Jason up they fixed a date for when they’d come and fetch him. All this has been in the papers, I think, only the papers didn’t always get it right. Anyway, what do I know about the papers? There’s not much of it on television, though I expect there would be if we were caught. They made this date and we decided we’d have to get out two days before. By then we’d stopped protesting, not because we’d given up, far from it, but we knew that if we made public protests our – well, our intention to escape would be known. The bank, for instance, would have been suspicious when we drew out everything we had. Maybe the building society would when we sold our shares. So we didn’t tell anyone except Gordon, my half-brother. He lives a long way away, in Exeter. I wasn’t sure I could trust my half-sister but I know I could trust him. I told him everything and up to a point we’ve kept in touch. We told the woman who cleans for us we’d be away three months but not why or where and we paid her in advance for that, so no doubt she’s stopped coming.’

  ‘According to the paper,’ I said, ‘she’s still going into your house to keep an eye on things.’

  ‘Bless her. She’s got a kind heart. We left everything, nearly all our possessions, our books, our clothes. We left our car behind. We just walked out of our jobs, we didn’t resign, we didn’t give the requisite notice. That too would have attracted attention to us.’

  ‘One thing,’ Silver said. ‘You may not know this. Andrew’s father died.’

  She put up her hand to her mouth, took it away in a fist. ‘Oh, no, Oh God. You mustn’t tell him, I must tell him.’

  ‘We won’t say a word.’

  ‘They were very close. He was an on
ly child and his mother died years ago. He’ll take it very hard. It’ll be worse because he wasn’t there. I wonder if he asked for him – oh, I hope it didn’t break his heart Andrew not being there. What did he die of?’

  ‘The paper didn’t say.’

  She was silent for a moment, a pause in time during which Andrew came back. She lifted her head and gave him too bright a smile. ‘I’m telling them about our great escape.’

  He nodded, if not very enthusiastically, but he evidently felt the same as Alison. Revealing everything to us would make no difference to the final outcome.

  ‘I was saying how we left everything behind and how we’d only told Gordon and, up to a point, our cleaner. We knew someone who had a caravan on a site near Orford in Suffolk, we’d been there in the summer and we still had the key. We reasoned that no one would be there in February and we were right.’

  But the bitter cold of that North Sea coast in winter had been too much for them, that and the fear that the very unlikelihood of anyone’s wishing to live in a holiday caravan at that season and in that weather would draw attention to them. They had already aroused the suspicions of the caretaker who made the rounds of the place a couple of times a week. Ironically, among all the false sightings by people with active imaginations, this man who had had a true sighting and who probably knew it told no one. They went by bus, a train, a tube train, another train and another bus to a place near Guildford and into an hotel. All this, of course, was an adventure to Jason. The hotel was a place people went to to play golf. In the winter the few guests played bridge. Andrew, who had been a keen bridge player some years before, joined in, mainly not to draw attention to himself. He had shaved off his beard and Alison had managed to buy a brunette wig in Ipswich from a shop near the station while they had an hour-long wait for the London train. Only Jason eluded disguise and this frightened them.

  The hotel was comfortable and warm, the food good, and no one seemed suspicious. But it was too expensive. They had no income now, only capital to live on. They moved into a cheaper place, a B and B in Bognor Regis, one of the few open in winter. By this time it was the beginning of March. Alison kept in touch with her half-brother by phone. When she and Andrew were thinking of moving on again, Jason attracting too much attention from the woman who ran the B and B – she was always asking about him, where did he come from, he couldn’t be their child with that colouring, did he come from ‘one of those places out East’ – Alison got a letter from Gordon. He had spoken to Louis Robinson about their plight, pretty sure he could trust him, but saying nothing of their whereabouts or the name they were using.