Grasshopper Read online

  ‘OK, but who is Louis Robinson?’ Silver asked. ‘An old family friend or something?’

  ‘His wife and my mother were at school together, it goes that far back. She died and he went to live in the house they had in France. He’s quite old, about seventy. This house is where they used to live.’

  Louis Robinson had been just about to leave Cannes for London when Gordon spoke to him. They arranged to meet and did so two days later. Louis offered Alison and Andrew this flat rent-free for as long as they wanted it.

  ‘He apologized for its being on the top floor,’ Alison said. ‘We were so grateful we didn’t care about things like that, we were just so happy to have a place of our own.’

  Andrew raised his eyebrows. ‘It hasn’t been the most convenient option, though, has it? I mean, if he’d let us have the lower-ground floor, we’d have had the use of the garden for Jason. I suppose Robinson didn’t want the hassle of moving his furniture out.’

  Alison seemed a bit embarrassed by this show of ingratitude. ‘We came here in March, a month after we left our own house. We’ve never seen Louis, he went back to France, and we’ve never seen the old people, I think they lead a very quiet life. Andrew’s seen the man on the ground floor, but he’s lucky, people don’t recognize him without his beard.’

  Silver told her about the picture in the paper, the identikit, if that’s what it’s called, which showed a very passable likeness of Andrew as he now was.

  ‘Maybe I should grow my beard again and fool them. After all, I’ve all the time in the world and I hardly ever go out. I won’t be able to go out at all now and no doubt we’ll starve to death.’

  We’d shop for them, we said. We’d do their shopping, get anything they wanted and bring it in somehow. That reminded Andrew, he said, that he owed us for the wine and the chocolate and stuff, but Silver said that was a present, a token of goodwill. We’d get supplies for them tomorrow and they could pay us when we brought them. He told Alison to make a list, and while she was doing this, asked what their plans were for the future.

  ‘You can’t stay here for ever.’

  ‘We know that. For one thing, Jason will have to go to school. At present we teach him ourselves. Alison’s a trained teacher and I’ve got a BEd. But he needs friends, people his own age. He needs to be in the open air and at the moment he never is.’

  ‘What we’d like,’ said Alison, handing Silver her shopping list, ‘is to go and live abroad. My father’s in Australia, in a suburb of Sydney. He was a few years younger than my mother, he’s only sixty-five now. They were divorced when I was twelve but we’ve written to each other, I’ve seen him every time he’s been over here, I’d like to see him again. I’d like to live near him. But we can’t get out of this country.’

  ‘We’ve very little money left,’ said Andrew. ‘We can’t sell our house without its being known where we are. If we went I’d want to take my father with us, he’s getting on now and he’s not a well man.’

  I dared not look at Alison. Silver dared not look at me. We obviously weren’t going to get any further with settling their future, so we said it was time for us to go. Andrew opened the window for us and, leaning out after we’d climbed on to the balcony, said he still wasn’t sure about us, he couldn’t understand our altruism, it wasn’t what he was used to.

  ‘How about Louis Robinson, then?’ Silver said.

  Andrew didn’t answer. ‘If you betray us I’ll never forgive you, I’ll get you. The mess your face is in is nothing to what it’ll be. And that applies to her too.’

  Silver said gravely, ‘Good night. See you tomorrow. Don’t forget to leave the window open.’

  ‘That wasn’t very nice,’ I said as we climbed down the scaffolding.

  ‘I suppose he’s under a lot of pressure. I couldn’t very well tell anyone in his situation not to worry, could I?’

  It was from that night or perhaps from the night before that our interest in the roofs underwent a change. We no longer climbed on them for their own sake. Our passion for them, never anywhere near Wim’s, cooled. From that night scaling the roofs had really only one purpose for us: to get to 4 Torrington Gardens and into the flat without being seen by the other occupants.

  We walked home a different way. The wine bar in Lauderdale Road was still open. We sat at a table outside and each had a glass of Merlot. Silver raised his, we clinked glasses and he said, ‘To you. To love.’

  Returning in this particular direction, we entered Russia Road from the other end, the way I seldom went by day for fear of seeing Max or Selina. But by then I no longer much cared whether I saw them or not. I had Silver, I had a place to live, I had work. And I was always afraid of becoming even a little bit like poor Liv.

  But as we passed 19 I couldn’t resist glancing at the house. And I was rewarded, if that’s the word. Max was coming furtively up the iron staircase from old Mrs Fisherton’s. He was wearing his chocolate-coloured tracksuit, as far as I could see by the street-lamp’s light. I heard the woman he had been visiting close the door behind him. Instead of looking in our direction, he kept his head lowered and let himself in quietly by the front door. I began to laugh, I couldn’t help it, and covered up my mouth with my hand.

  23

  Silver was firm. ‘I can’t let you phone her any more, Liv. I’m sorry. I can’t afford it.’

  ‘When I am finding my papa I will pay you back.’

  ‘It’s still no.’

  She began to cry, a fierce bawling. Wim had disappeared again. There was no sign of Jonny. When she had recovered a bit and was only snivelling I walked her downstairs and down the front steps. She set foot upon the path itself, lifted up her head and looked into the bright sunlit street. It was another fine hot day. The sun shone on her swollen tear-marked face and made her blink. But I think she was really making progress, might within a week or so have reached the point when she could have been got across the pavement and into a taxi – if the police hadn’t come. But that was later. That wasn’t till the afternoon.

  At the time I was optimistic, though my cheerfulness took a downturn as we mounted the staircase and she told me what had happened the previous night.

  ‘Jonny has violated me.’

  She must have looked that word up in her dictionary. ‘Rape’, which she certainly knew, wouldn’t do for her, she saw it as too mild and perhaps too hackneyed. I asked her when this was and she said it had been soon after we had gone out.

  ‘Nobody cares about me. Wim doesn’t want to hear. To Jonny I am prostitute.’ She added, as if remembering it was expected of her, ‘My money is gone, stolen by my own father.’ She looked at me, her mouth working like a crying child’s. ‘I am thinking I must kill myself.’

  ‘You mustn’t say that,’ I said. ‘I care about you and Silver cares. Oh, Liv, don’t start crying again.’

  ‘I am not first with anyone,’ she said through her tears and sobs.

  We sat down on the stairs between the third floor and the fourth. My thoughts went back to a year past and I remembered how I had felt like that, not first with anyone. With Daniel gone and my parents so condemnatory, I’d thought everyone had someone they loved more than me. Even with Guy Wharton, who was kind to me, I could never have said I came first in his thoughts and heart. I put my arms round Liv and hugged her. Presently we started up the stairs again and once we were in the flat and she’d gone to her room, I told Silver about Jonny’s rapist activities. He knocked on Liv’s door.

  ‘I can’t keep him out of here, Liv,’ he said. ‘He’s got a key. And if he hadn’t, he’d use the window. I’m sorry about this, I know how it sounds.’ It was useless telling her to call the police and complain of rape, he had said to me. They’d want her to go to the police station with them, go to the rape crisis centre. ‘I’ll have a locksmith round to put a lock on your door. I don’t believe Jonny would break the door down.’

  I’ve sometimes reflected since then that almost every helpful suggestion made to Liv she reject
ed. Oh, no, she couldn’t lock her door. There might be a fire. She might lose the key. It was my opinion, later confided to Silver, that in locking Jonny out she feared she’d also lock Wim out. Poor Silver was beginning to feel his non-paying tenants a great trouble to him. It comes very hard on young people when they have a sneaking suspicion their elders may have been right all along. Apparently his father had warned him, when letting him have the flat, that while having a girlfriend to stay with him was all very well (Jack Silverman, though cranky, was an enlightened man), bringing home dubious homeless pals might be a mistake.

  ‘My chickens are coming home to roost,’ Silver said, ‘though why that should be a hardship I don’t know. I’d have thought one would have wanted one’s chickens at home, not laying eggs for someone else.’

  ‘Your chickens don’t lay any eggs,’ I said. ‘They just peck each other to bits.’

  He laughed and said to Liv, who had listened to this exchange with angry suspicion, that the best solution was for her to persevere with her therapy so that she could get herself back into the outside world. Even if the £2,000 was lost, he had her air fare in his bank account, and she should get back to Sweden as soon as possible.

  ‘My money is not lost. My money will come back to me.’

  It seemed doubtful.

  ‘You don’t want me here,’ she said dolefully.

  He couldn’t deny it. He said nothing. Liv, who had been crying again, dried her eyes and said she’d like to go all the way down to the basement and try how it would be going up the area staircase. She said it as if it was an inspiration of her own rather than Silver’s idea. It was a Saturday and I didn’t have to go to work, so we both took her all the way down to the lower-ground floor. It wasn’t a bit like old Mrs Fisherton’s but bare of furniture, all the walls painted a stark white that made it seem fairly light. I still felt the walls and the whole mass of the house above us as oppressive weights and the absence of the sight of a sky as suffocating. But I said nothing of this to Liv in case she decided to become the world’s only claustrophobic agoraphobe. The area door was unlocked. we got her outside into the moss-grown well, always damp as these places are even in the heat, and slowly mounted the stairs.

  There was a gate at the top, exactly the same as at Max’s, a wrought-iron gate in a wrought-iron railing. I went first with Liv behind me and Silver following her. Things seemed quite promising as we stood on the paving, feeling the sun lay a skin of heat on our faces and looking over the low hedge at the street beyond. Then the last thing Silver and I wanted happened.

  Two people appeared on the other side of Russia Road, walking along from the right-hand side towards us, a man and a woman in their thirties, she too well-dressed for a Saturday-morning stroll, in a smart blue-silk trouser-suit, he in jeans and a sports jacket. Liv screamed when she saw them. She covered her mouth with her hand but too late, as such gestures always are. Her scream brought them to look in our direction, but as far as I could see they gave no sign of recognition, simply checking, I suppose, that no one was in trouble.

  Whether they were James and Claudia Hinde I had no idea, but Liv thought they were. She turned and fled down the staircase, tripping on the bottom step and falling flat on her face. Luckily she wasn’t hurt apart from grazes on her hands. We picked her up and between us carried her up as far as the second floor, where we set her down and told her to walk. She sat down and refused to budge. She must hide, she said, she must be hidden somewhere secret in the house. At any moment James and Claudia would ring the front-doorbell, either that or come back with a policeman. Silver said there wasn’t any secret place in the house and he wouldn’t hide her. We all sat there for about ten minutes, which is a long time when you’re not doing anything and don’t know what to say. Liv kept looking at the grazes on her palms, from which a little blood was trickling. At the end of those ten minutes the doorbell did ring. I’ve seen plenty of people jump but never the way Liv did, leaping galvanically off the stair, all her muscles locked, her hands clawed. She gave a wolf-like howl.

  Silver went down. I said to Liv, like some awful old-time psychiatric nurse, that she must get up, pull herself together, get up those stairs. For some reason it worked and she began to run, surprisingly fast for someone who had taken no exercise for months. It was only Morna and Judy at the front door. Silver brought them upstairs. Their arrival was a godsend, for after what had happened we’d never have been able to leave Liv alone while we did our shopping, and they seemed quite willing to stay with her. If only Wim were a more reliable person. We both thought it but we didn’t say it aloud. We were beginning to feel like the parents of a two-year-old, except that most parents love the child and happily bear the curtailment of their freedom, while we felt ours as an intolerable burden.

  We couldn’t ask Morna to stay behind while the rest of us lunched out. Besides, I didn’t care for a threesome with Judy. She was very pretty. Now I knew she had been Silver’s girlfriend she seemed much prettier than she had at first. I resolved firmly, as I had done before, not to be jealous, but it was a struggle. We ate at home, conjuring up something from what we had. Scraps, said Silver. That was what it meant, ends of two loaves, cheese rinds, two stale eggs and half a dried-up fruit cake. We had shopped for Andrew and Alison but forgotten to get anything for ourselves. It was about half an hour after Morna and Judy left that the police came.

  Silver and I were in bed. Desire had seized us simultaneously. I hoped very much that on his part it wasn’t actuated by seeing Judy again, but I didn’t seriously think this. Liv was in her own room and we were lying side by side having a post-coital cigarette when the doorbell rang. Silver can get dressed faster than anyone I know. He pulled on a T-shirt and stuck his head out of the window. I heard him say, ‘I’ll be right down.’

  I followed him, fastening my jeans, running my fingers through my hair. He didn’t really think this could be something to do with James and Claudia, did he, I asked him as we ran down.

  ‘I’m wondering if it could be about Liv’s father,’ he said.

  He was right. The hotel manager had told the police. They didn’t tell us how they discovered where I lived but Silver thought it probable the manager had spotted me in Mrs Houghton’s garden, it being quite near the hotel, and asked her where I lived. This in fact was the case, as Mrs Houghton herself told me rather apprehensively the following Monday. Had she done the right thing? She hadn’t known what to do. For my part, I was quite gratified to learn that she was unwilling to lose her gardener.

  Silver took the police into his parents’ charmingly furnished living room, all cleaned and polished by Beryl, and they were obviously impressed by its respectability. There were many facts we’d have liked the answers to that they didn’t reveal. I suppose they never do. For instance, it was a long time before we found out why the manager had called the police. They took me, quite reasonably, for Håkan Almquist’s daughter. I denied it at once. Silver and I hardly knew what to do, how to act. Why did they want his daughter?

  ‘He’s in the Royal Free,’ the older policeman said. ‘He was mugged. Hit on the head. He’s got a fractured skull but he’ll be OK. His wife’s come over and she’s with him.’

  Something, at any rate, was explained.

  ‘We know his daughter,’ Silver said. ‘We’ll tell her.’

  That was the end of the police responsibility, apparently. Looking round him, the younger one said that was a nice picture, he was fond of landscapes. Silver said, ‘Was he robbed of anything?’

  They looked cagey. Then the older one said, ‘A wallet perhaps. When he was found he hadn’t a wallet on him. He had loose change in his jeans pocket and a Swedish identity card and driving licence in his jacket breast-pocket. That’s how we knew who he was.’

  ‘You’ll let the daughter know, won’t you?’ This was the younger one. He cast a longing look behind him at Erica Silverman’s painting of a Scottish glen.

  They gave the impression of not caring much now Elsie Almquis
t had been located. Had she been sent for? Or, informed, had decided she wanted to be with her husband? I had the mean thought, not expressed aloud, that all those phone calls made to Kiruna had been a waste of money.

  ‘No mention of a black leather backpack with £2,000 in it, you’ll have noticed,’ said Silver as we went back to the flat. ‘Do we tell them?’

  ‘I suppose so. I don’t know. We’ll have to tell Liv.’

  She was still asleep. Wim turned up before she woke, descending gracefully through the window in spite of carrying a bag of cans of fruit juice in one hand and another full of chocolate biscuits, crisps, cakes from the patisserie and pizzas in the other. It was unusual for him to cross the roofs resplendently clad, but that afternoon he wore a new (or new secondhand) tunic of lemon-yellow silk embroidered with birds. I said it reminded me of a vase Max had called famille jaune and he laughed and said he had never been called fragile before. I was to remember that remark of his – with bitterness.

  We made tea and told him about Liv’s father. You could see he didn’t want to know. He never treated her the way Jonny did, he had too much finesse for that. He never used her and I’m sure he gave her great sexual pleasure, but he wanted nothing serious to enter their relationship, nothing that might hint at commitment. Perhaps any liaison he had with any woman would have been the same.