Grasshopper Page 34

  ‘She’ll have to go out now,’ he said, bored. ‘She’ll have to go and visit him. Have another biscuit, Clodagh. The coconut ones are great.’

  Of course Liv soon appeared, fetched out by the sound of Wim’s voice. She had washed herself and combed her hair. The tear marks were eradicated and she had put on a clean white T-shirt, more a low-necked vest, that showed off her splendid breasts and tiny waist. Wim’s boredom went and he looked interested. Strange he might have been but he was, after all, a man.

  Giving me a resentful glance, presumably because I was sitting next to Wim, Liv got down on the floor at his feet and when he showed no reaction beyond giving her a small smile, leant her head against his knees. Silver drew breath and told her about her father, that he was in hospital with a fractured skull. I expected a violent reaction but she only stared, nodded and said, ‘So that is where he has been.’

  ‘Your mother’s here. She’s with him. I don’t know where she’s staying.’

  ‘Oh, she has a friend in Elstree.’ It was the first we’d heard of it. ‘My papa isn’t liking her a lot,’ she said by way of explanation, I suppose, for Håkan Almquist’s staying in an hotel. Then the inevitable, ‘Where is my money?’

  Now Silver and I didn’t exactly know. We only knew that the police hadn’t mentioned the backpack. But there were a lot of things left unmentioned. Silver said Liv would have to go to the hospital. She’d have to go to the police and tell them the whole story, or part of the story presumably, leaving out the fact that she had stolen the money in the first place, if she wanted answers to that.

  Liv became hysterical. I had never seen her like this before. She was crying and laughing at the same time. She rocked back and forth, uttering short sharp yelps of laughter, the tears pouring down her face. I knew she wouldn’t go to that hospital. Even if her father was dying she wouldn’t go. We looked at each other in despair. It was Wim who saved things. He took hold of her, pulled her up, said, ‘I can’t stand that noise. Come to bed. That will shut you up.’

  She was taken care of for another hour or so. Silver and I decided to take our washing to the launderette.

  ‘Why haven’t your parents got a washing machine?’ I grumbled.

  ‘They did have. It wore out and when they got a new one they took it with them to St Albans.’

  I emptied pockets and turned socks inside out. In the right-hand pocket of the jeans I had worn two nights before, I found the fragments of the little china bullfinch broken by Silver and Andrew while they fought. Silver looked at the pieces in my hand with a strange expression on his face. If I hadn’t known he never worried and was seldom afraid, I’d have fancied I saw anxiety there or even fear.

  ‘Are you thinking it might be mended?’ I said.

  ‘No, no, it’s beyond repair.’ He sounded as if he was talking of something entirely different, of a quite other possibility, which struck a little chill into my heart. Then he smiled at me and gave me a quick kiss and all was well.

  24

  Going through that eleven-year-old diary, I find that Silver and I visited Andrew and Alison that Saturday evening and on three occasions in the following week. Once Wim came with us, at first frightening them inexcusably. They thought we had betrayed them and brought the police, though anyone less like a policeman it would have been hard to find. Apparently they saw his yellow tunic as a disguise. Then Alison identified him as our friend, who had been with us the first time we showed ourselves to them.

  Once the confusion about Wim was over, we were established as their shoppers. They need never go out again until the time came for them to leave. I was going to say that we wanted no gratitude but of course, privately, we did. Still, expecting people to be grateful is such a shameful thing that Silver and I left any feelings we had about it unexpressed, even to each other. Alison was always profuse in her thanks, saying she didn’t know what they’d have done without us, that we were ‘life savers’, and Jason’s face lit up when we brought him chocolate or a half-melted ice cream. There was something pathetic and, more than that, distressing, in the way he liked us, always kissed me and put his arms round my neck, not, I’m sure, because of our personalities or something in us he found attractive and charming, but purely because we brought him delicious things to eat.

  It was different with Andrew. At first he actively disliked us, though from the first he showed a very unwelcome sexual interest in me. Gradually his defences went down but never very far. I doubt if he ever came truly to trust us. And perhaps it was because of this, because distrust begets distrust, that when Alison asked for our surnames I said we were both called Brown. I didn’t want them to look up Silverman in the phone book, find our address, our phone number. Neither of them seemed to see anything odd in this, or perhaps they thought we were married to each other.

  Our shopping for them, carried out solely to save the family from discovery, Andrew only grudgingly admitted to be of assistance. Strange as it sounds, I think part of his mind rebelled against what we were doing. Going out was dangerous for him but just the same he had enjoyed it, it was a brief taste of what freedom might be, it took him out of that flat and into the open air. It allowed him to see other people, other faces apart from Alison’s and Jason’s. I used to wonder (according to the diary) if, while cautiously going from shop to shop in Elgin Avenue or Clifton Road, he had ever had a wild thought of never returning but of filling his pockets with the money they had brought with them and running away.

  For they too, like Liv, had a secret hoard. Where they kept it no one told us for a long time. But it was unlikely they had taken up a floorboard and hidden it underneath. After all, it was legitimately theirs. It was a substantial sum, it must have been, for they had emptied their joint bank account and sold all their assets before they left, and, after that early staying in an hotel and a B and B, had spent very little. But having no income, only this capital, they were anxious about it. They watched it dwindle. They had nightmares, Alison told me, about having nothing left, about need compelling them to give themselves up.

  Meanwhile Liv’s worries obsessed her. Someone must find out what had happened to the black leather backpack. Did we think an insurance company would pay the money she had lost? I find it extraordinary how many people think insurance companies will compensate you for any loss, almost irrespective of whether you have a policy with them, that this is what they exist for, to keep irresponsible wastrels happy. Liv had no insurance of any kind but she still seemed to think application could be made to someone or other for repayment of the lost money. When we said it was impossible she shrugged and smiled as if she had secret knowledge and turned her attention to her father. He must be visited, someone must go to the hospital. She couldn’t, she was ill again, since seeing James and Claudia she was worse than she had been before her agoraphobia therapy began.

  The locksmith came on the day Silver and I went to the hospital to visit Håkan Almquist. We had to ask Morna to come so that there was someone there to let him in. Liv’s father was getting on quite well, dressed and sitting in a chair, though with a big bandage round his head. He remembered nothing about the attack on him and very little about what had gone before. The name of the hotel he had recalled only when the police reminded him, but he had forgotten where his daughter was living and Elsie Almquist seemed never to have known, beyond the fact that it was in London. Into the great gaps in his memory had fallen everything to do with the backpack and its contents. The first the police knew of its existence was when Elsie asked them where it was. She insisted that her husband had taken it with him to London and suggested that the hotel had stolen it.

  Treading carefully, Silver and I introduced ourselves as friends of Liv’s, come to inquire after Mr Almquist because his daughter couldn’t. Naturally Elsie wanted to know why she couldn’t. Where was she? Didn’t she know about her father? Was she ill herself? Elsie’s English was inferior to her husband’s but she managed to convey to us that, having rushed to London as fast as she c
ould get a flight, she had had the added worry of her daughter’s irresponsible behaviour.

  Håkan Almquist sat there in his chair beside the high white bed, one of many men in that ward, some walking about on Zimmer frames, others helped to take a few steps by a wife or girlfriend, two or three in bed with cages holding the bedclothes up off their legs. His Liv-like face was rather pale but otherwise he looked well. The holes in his memory seemed not to trouble him. I looked at his left hand and noticed that his wedding ring was gone.

  ‘I forget,’ he said, resuming his seat and stretching out his legs. ‘What can I do about that? At first I try to remember – for the police, you know – but it is hopeless. Everything is gone for four, five days before I am mugged.’

  Elsie said something to him in Swedish and he, apologizing to us, answered her in that language. Silver and I were in a dilemma. If we told them where she was, Liv would be sure they’d tell the police and consider we had betrayed her. But the alternative was worse. She trapped us in a corner by asking the crucial question.

  ‘So, where is my daughter?’

  Silver answered. He said to me afterwards that he had to answer and he had to tell the truth. We weren’t in the business of protecting Liv to the extent of lying to her parents. ‘Her address is 15 Russia Road, London w9.’

  He wrote it down and wrote the phone number too. It gave him an uncomfortable feeling of laying his private sanctuary open to unwanted investigation and exploration. How would he cope with Liv if the police came and asked to talk to her? Suppose she locked herself in and threw the key out of the window? Suppose she tried to kill herself? Even while we were speaking and he was unwillingly betraying Liv, the locksmith was in Russia Road, making her bedroom door secure.

  Elsie wanted to know if she lived there alone, if she was still an au pair, and once more, why couldn’t she come and see her parents instead of her parents having to go to her?

  ‘You must ask her yourself,’ said Silver, who had had enough of this.

  The one bright spot seemed to be that if Elsie came round that evening, as she said she would, she could be a sitter with Liv while we went out. We discussed this on the bus going home, and we also discussed the black leather backpack. It wasn’t a comforting thought that, apart from the person who had stolen it, no one knew what it had contained but Silver, Liv and me. If we told the police, if Liv let us tell them, would they believe us? We enumerated to each other what it must have contained. The Russia Road address and phone number among other things. Håkan Almquist’s wallet, if he possessed one. Traveller’s cheques and credit cards, surely. The hotel door key and the door key to his own house, only this was so far away up in the Arctic Circle that its absence presented very little threat. And had his wedding ring been in there too?

  ‘I don’t see why he’d carry his wedding ring around in a backpack,’ Silver said. ‘Anyway, I thought only women had them. Are you sure he had one?’

  ‘Positive. Of course it might be in that locker drawer in the hospital. As for carrying it about in a backpack, if he did he may have been in the habit of picking up ladies he didn’t want to know he was married.’

  ‘Oh, you are so sophisticated,’ Silver said, laughing.

  ‘Aren’t I? And you are so untouched and pure – I won’t say naive.’

  We walked through from Lisson Grove hand in hand along the canalside. The place was thronged with people. It was very hot.

  ‘One day, when you marry me, will you have a wedding ring?’

  My heart thudded a bit, which was absurd because I knew he loved me. ‘I will if you will,’ I said, and a kind of excitement welled up inside me, threatening to choke me.

  But I grew calm again, I was able to speak in my normal voice, and we talked, only half-seriously, about how good it would be if you could get married anywhere you wanted (you couldn’t, then), not just in a church or a registry office. Silver said our ceremony could be on the roofs, the priest or registrar could be hauled up in a hoist and the witnesses standing on the balcony below, but that was the last time he spoke to me of marriage. The next proposal I had came, as it might have to some Victorian miss, in a letter, and my wedding was conventional enough, a quiet affair at St Michael’s, Highgate.

  Not that evening but the following one Alison talked confidentially to me. We were in her bedroom, sitting on the bed. Silver and Andrew were in the kitchen, arguing about the cost of the provisions we had brought. Well, Silver never argued, he just stood his ground, saying he knew food was expensive, it was more expensive in London than up north where Andrew and Alison came from, and especially so when bought at these small local supermarkets. Andrew moaned about what would become of them when their money ran out. As it happened, Silver had offered to pay for some of what we brought, a generosity that angered me and made me tell him afterwards that this was what came of having money left one when one was too young to understand how to manage it. Andrew grumbled and scrutinized the receipts we had given him and Alison and I went into her bedroom, closing the door behind us.

  She told me how she’d had an abortion when she was seventeen. Something had gone wrong, this was just before the 1967 Act legalizing abortion, and her fallopian tubes were blocked. She didn’t know until she got married and tried to have a child.

  ‘That wasn’t Andrew, though?’ I said.

  ‘That was my first husband, Charles Barrie. We were divorced, but I kept his name. My mother didn’t like the idea of me using my maiden name – well, things were different then.’ She made a face. ‘Later on I lived with Andrew and we got married when we wanted to adopt a child.’

  I said I knew that, though admitting this knowledge made me feel like a gossip, memorizing details from newspaper stories.

  ‘Men often don’t care whether they have children or not,’ she said. ‘It’s been my luck, or maybe my ill-luck, that the two significant men in my life both wanted children. Charles didn’t. Life’s strange, isn’t it? Between Charles and Andrew I had a boyfriend who was a doctor from Kerala. If he hadn’t wanted children so much we’d maybe have married.’

  ‘Kerala? That’s India?’

  ‘That’s in the south of India. If I’d married him, the social services wouldn’t have stopped us adopting Jason. We’d have been the right mix for taking a mixed-race child. Ironical, eh?’

  That was ‘what if’ if ever I heard one. But I thought, as I always do, even when dwelling on ‘what ifs’ of my own, how about all the imponderables, the different places you might have lived in, the different people you’d have known, the quite other way your thought processes might have developed, not to mention your desires and needs and the level of your happiness or its reverse? The possibility Alison cited scarcely seemed ironical to me but just appeared the complicated way life arranges itself.

  ‘Jason’s not really a mixed-race child at all,’ she said. ‘He had an Asian mother but he’s been brought up – if you can call it that – by white people exclusively. In the children’s home where he was there were black children, but if he’d been white, I mean if he’d been one of the white children, black children would have been there as well. I didn’t put that very well.’

  I said I knew what she meant. I put my hand over hers and she gave me a watery smile. ‘I told Andrew about his father. He was very upset. He had a sort of wild idea he could go to the funeral in disguise. Of course that was completely stupid, he didn’t really mean it. Has there been anything more in the papers?’

  ‘Nothing about you for two or three days,’ I said and then we went back into the living room. Andrew got out an album they had brought with them and showed us photographs of the street they lived in and Jason in their garden and their house. It was very much like my parents’ house, thirties Tudor. I made the comparison in my mind and I think that was the first time I thought of my old home as my parents’ house and not ‘ours’. The car on the garage drive was a Mercedes. This was middle-class prosperity, to which the social services would have objected less if Andr
ew had been that doctor from Kerala.

  Looking about me at the contrast, at Louis Robinson’s bleak fourth floor, I reflected on what some people will risk for the sake of having a child and what they will sacrifice. Would I? What made it harder to understand was that surely most of such ventures failed, perhaps all failed. I said something like that to Silver on our way home. His reply surprised me, for he said that this wasn’t so, we only got to hear about the ones that failed because that made a better story. For instance, the parent of a child or children who failed to win custody, usually the father, often successfully managed to abduct those children and take them abroad. I must have read of cases that only came into the news when the mothers tried to get those children back. Their efforts were usually in vain.

  Handing back the photograph album, Silver asked Andrew how they proposed leaving this country. He didn’t answer at once. Alison’s sigh was audible. Her talk to me had left her in a state of heightened emotion and she said almost passionately, ‘If I could keep Jason, if we could, I’d be willing to stay here for ever. Even in these circumstances, even never being able to go out, see our friends, talk on the phone to people, I could put up with that for him.’

  ‘Well, I couldn’t.’ I suddenly noticed how much rage Andrew was suppressing. Veins that stood out on his forehead looked as if they’d split under the pressure. ‘And he couldn’t. He has to go to school. Oh, all right, we teach him but we need books, we need a school curriculum. We’re prisoners here. And things happen outside that we’re powerless to do anything about. I mean, my father dying. I can’t even go and bury my father.’ The anger began to pour out of him, but in measured words, not incoherently. His face was very flushed. ‘I’ll tell you what a typical day is like here – in this place. In prison. Starting first thing in the morning. It’s like this. We might as well stay in bed but we can’t because Jason gets us up at seven. One of us makes tea, usually me because I’m a morning person and Alison isn’t. She and Jason will be having their morning love-in, their cuddle.’ This rather pretty sentence he uttered scornfully and Alison looked away. You could see how imprisonment was straining their relationship. ‘Then it’s getting up and having showers and getting breakfast. Once, at the beginning of April, by the way, and April was bloody cold if you remember, the heating went off. We hadn’t any hot water. We couldn’t send for a plumber and the downstairs people have their own water heaters. We had to get in touch with Louis in Cannes and eventually he sent his grandson round. He’s not a plumber but he fixed it. We’d been without hot water for a week. And then we had the added worry of someone else now being in the know.’