Grasshopper Page 36

  It was hoped her husband would be discharged from hospital in two days’ time. She managed to say this in quite good English, while apologizing all the time for her failure to master this phrase or that. Her husband and she would go back to Sweden very soon. She was due to return to work the following Monday.

  ‘We will go back and we will bring Liv with us. That is the best way.’

  By then Liv was looking drowsy. She quite often fell asleep in the middle of the day with conversation going on all around her. But her mother’s words electrified her. She leapt up off the sofa, stood there, convulsed like someone on TV who has been shot and at any moment will fall, and began shouting at her mother in Swedish. No one could understand a word but we all knew what she was saying: she wouldn’t go, she was unable even to go outside, and someone had taken her money. At least she had stopped accusing her father of stealing it.

  Summoning up what English she could remember from her schooldays, Elsie threatened Liv with the law. ‘I will ask a policeman to come here and make you.’

  But all of us, Elsie included for all her brave words, knew that was impossible. Liv was nineteen, she was an adult and could live where she pleased. She muttered something to her mother, then addressed everyone, ‘I stay here, in this flat. Silver is liking me here and Wim is.’ She looked sternly at me. ‘Wim is, very much. Maybe it will be years and years. I don’t know. I must get back my money. But it is here I stay.’

  With that, she went into her bedroom and we heard the key turn in the new lock. It was then, at this point, Silver told me later, that he understood what had happened to the £2,000. He didn’t know how he understood, it just came to him out of the air in a sudden revelation. We were on our way to Cricklewood on the bus, it being one of those evenings we didn’t go to 4E Torrington Gardens. The day had been sultry and humid, very warm but sunless, and now at eight the sun shone at last, low in the sky, a dark red globe glaring out between bars of black cirrus. We sat on the top, at the front, the better to contemplate awful Kilburn High Road and the incongruously pretty streets that turn off it, the dusty trees, the sari shops and secondhand clothes shops, the squalid clubs, the supermarkets absorbing and disgorging crowds, the Tricycle Theatre and the pubs. The bus stopped approximately every thirty seconds at a red light.

  ‘It was Jonny,’ Silver said. He looked into my face. ‘You’re not all that surprised are you?’

  ‘I’m not surprised,’ I said.

  ‘He knew about that money from the first. Well, we all did, but none of us had designs on it. I think he knew everything that happened to it, you taking care of it, you bringing it back, Liv hiding it for a second time. I don’t think he knew where it was hidden the first time but he did the second. He was probably thinking of taking it when I exiled him from her room.’

  ‘He must have kept watch on the house. But he still had his job then. I don’t see how he could have.’

  ‘He was just lucky. He saw Liv’s father come and knew the sort of time he came. As for the date of his return to Sweden, Liv very likely told him herself. He guessed she’d hand the money to him the day before. And he need not even have guessed. She may have told him everything, that her father was going home and taking her money with him.’

  We sat in silence, reflecting no doubt on the unwisdom of Liv’s behaviour, and never seeing that we ourselves were just as foolish and improvident, never understanding that in our whole policy towards Andrew and Alison, our attitude to Liv and our dealings with someone who was, after all, a criminal, we were quite as imprudent as she if not as unbalanced.

  The house in which Jonny had a room lacked the graciousness of Maida Vale terraces. It was tall and solid with a ponderous bay on the ground floor and three pairs of sash windows above, its façade unadorned by anything but heavy stone windowsills and branching drainpipes. A man of about Jonny’s own age came to the door. He was as unlike Jonny as could be, being skeletally thin and with a sparse fair beard and long straggly hair. Jonny wasn’t there, he said, he’d moved out the week before. He hadn’t himself seen him leave but the man who owned the house, his landlord, knowing he wanted a room for his friend, had told him Jonny’s was vacant.

  ‘You don’t know where he went, I suppose?’ Silver asked.

  ‘You suppose right, mate. I’ve never even spoken to the guy.’

  So Jonny had no job and no known address. ‘What are we going to do?’ I asked as we went slowly back to the bus stop. ‘We could tell the police.’ I said this very doubtfully, not yet cured of the Lawless Teenager Syndrome. ‘I suppose we could. But then they’d come and question Liv. D’you think it’s possible for someone to die of fright? I sometimes think Liv could.’

  Silver said he didn’t know but he knew what I meant. Besides, Jonny had been his friend. He couldn’t betray his friend, it would be wrong. On the other hand, Jonny hadn’t just stolen the money and treated Liv brutally, he had hit Håkan Almquist over the head as well and fractured his skull. If he had, if he did.

  ‘You see, we don’t know. It’s all guesswork,’ he said. ‘We haven’t any evidence. It may have been someone else. All we really know is that Jonny’s left his job and moved house, but that proves nothing. Oh, and he’s got some new clothes. He may not have known about the money, he may think Liv let you or me put it in our bank accounts.’

  Silver, who had only half an hour before been so certain of Jonny’s guilt, had now half-persuaded himself he was innocent, or innocent of this particular offence. And so we argued ourselves out of our strong belief. We did nothing. Jonny was somewhere, probably still in London, but we’d no idea where. Liv was still in the flat and likely to remain there perhaps, as she’d said, ‘for years and years’. Three days later, Håkan Almquist was allowed to go home to Stockholm and thence to Kiruna.

  Wim too had apparently vanished. The pattern of occupation of the flat was changing. A friend of Morna’s called Niall, a student at the School of Oriental and African Studies, had also come to stay. Failing to persuade Silver to let her have Jonny’s room, Judy camped in the living room. I tried very hard not to mind Judy’s being there, but I did mind.

  I’ve heard older people say that my generation, born in the late sixties and early seventies, is the first to grow up free from sexual guilt and sexual pressures. We don’t need to clock up a lot of partners, we don’t need the experience that comes from variety. Free to enter a relationship without shame and without concealment, we are open about our sex lives and frank with each other about our feelings. Jealousy is absent and so is subterfuge. The notion of passion being heightened by tension and danger is foreign to us. In the age of Aids we accept a full and rewarding sex life with just one person without covert longings or secret desires. All I can say is, I haven’t noticed it. No one I know is like that and I’m not myself, though we might wish to be. As everyone, I imagine, since the world began has wished to be.

  So Judy’s occasional presence in the flat was a cloud across the sky of my sunny days, as Wim’s was across Jonny’s. And although I never knew it till the end, my presence was a threat to Liv, for she feared Wim’s obvious fondness for me, as Guy’s very existence was to Silver. None of us brought these things out into the open. We never discussed them. They festered and oozed inside us. Particularly bad for me were the days when Judy spent the night in the flat, on the living-room floor, and was still there when I had to go off to work at the Houghtons’. As I mowed the lawn and dead-headed the dahlias, I’d imagine her and Silver sitting there talking about old times (those were the days and do you remember?), unchaperoned, Liv locked in her room fast asleep. And that week Silver never once came to Randolph Avenue to collect me at the end of my day’s work.

  My consolation was that Judy could never accompany us on to the roofs. She was much too afraid of heights. But Silver had told her about the occupants of 4E Torrington Gardens, which I thought a risky thing to have done.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, in that mantra of his. ‘Judy’s all right. She won�
��t talk.’

  ‘But why did you tell her?’

  ‘Because she’s a friend of mine. Because I like her.’

  ‘Because she used to be your girlfriend?’

  ‘If you like,’ he said, but in the distant tone he used when voicing his disapproval.

  They were rather alike to look at, he and Judy. They might have been brother and sister. (How I wished they were.) She too was white-skinned and fair-haired, though her hair was darker than Silver’s. Their eyes were the same shade of bright silver-grey. And, what I found most deeply disquieting, she was Jewish. I hardly knew Silver’s parents then, I knew nothing of their views, but my imagination supplied a semi-orthodox couple who expected their son not to ‘marry out’, who in the past had looked with favour on Judy and would like to do so again. Even her name seemed in her favour. In some feminist book I’d read while still at school, Judith was praised as a great heroine. ‘Strengthen me this day, O Lord God of Israel!’ she cried as she plunged the sword into Holofernes. Sometimes I felt I couldn’t compete.

  But she never came on the roofs with us. We left her behind to look after Liv, though the possible threat from Jonny seemed to grow less every day. And up there we were united again, close again. Because crossing the burnt roof had made us nervous that first time, we hadn’t tried it again but, in the third week of August, on an evening when we had nothing to carry to 4E, we decided to make another attempt. The masonry was warm to touch, although the sun was now gone, and the slates under our feet were dry and smooth, not at all slippery. No rain had fallen for so long that drifts of pale dry dust lay in the guttering inside the parapet. An early drop, heralding that later fall two months off, had shed leaves from the plane trees and some had blown up here. They lay on the tarpaulin, yellow-green, shrivelled, but still as big as dinner plates.

  Silver set first one foot, then the other, on to the tarpaulin. The timbers underneath creaked but they held. I followed, trying to tread lightly, as if going on tiptoe would somehow reduce my weight. Safe on the other side, he put out his hand to me, I took it and jumped the last bit on to the firm slates. We went into each other’s arms, hugged and kissed because we had achieved the crossing without coming to harm. It must be rare in life to regret not meeting with an accident but later I had good reason to be sorry that the tarpaulin had held that night, that it didn’t sag and give way, dropping us, perhaps without serious injury, in among the burnt joists and ruined masonry beneath. And that the broken balcony hadn’t subsided under the shock.

  We let ourselves into the flat to find Andrew and Alison sitting in the living room, clearly doing nothing but waiting for us. Jason had gone to bed. Silver and I had no idea how much our visits had come to mean to them. We thought of ourselves in this context as simply messengers and carriers of provisions. To them, though, as Alison later told us, we were messengers of the gods, angels, which she said is what the word means. Our appearance on the balcony and our entry through the window was the high spot of their day, while the times we didn’t come were lifeless and dreary. We were something to look forward to in their prison, the long hot summer waning away outside, life going on but inaccessible to them, suspended as they were in that place, the innocent Jason serving time for an accident of birth.

  We asked for their shopping list, we told them what the papers said about them, we reported that they had been seen in Aberystwyth, in Columbus, Ohio, and in Paris. The Mail on Sunday had published a letter purporting to come from Andrew, setting out conditions under which they’d be willing to return home. The Sunday Mirror carried a photograph, taken on a Leeds shopping malls closed-circuit television, of a man and a woman and a little boy hurrying through the crowd as if afraid they’d been spotted. Andrew said he had written no letter. If he had, we’d know because we’d have posted it. As for Leeds, they had none of them ever been there.

  Principally we wanted to talk to them about the plan we were formulating for getting them out of there. First of all, it would be necessary for us to find out more about the people who lived on the lower floors, the young man on the ground floor and the elderly couple who had what Andrew called the ‘duplex’. How much did they know? Had they guessed anything? What did they think about these people who never went out? Did they know there was a child up here?

  Passports would have to be acquired and air tickets bought. Silver revealed for the first time – he hadn’t explained this to me – that he had told Judy about them because she was a good amateur photographer and could take pictures of them for their new passports.

  ‘I don’t know how,’ I said, ‘if she’s scared to come across the roofs.’

  ‘She’ll come up the stairs. By then we’ll know the movements of the people on the lower floors. We’ll know if they’re likely to see anyone coming up to the top flat.’ He said to Andrew, ‘Do you know any of them? According to the bells, there’s a couple called Nyland and an S. Francis.’

  ‘Mr and Mrs Nyland are quite elderly,’ Alison said. ‘The man on the ground floor’s an actor.’

  ‘He’s quite famous.’ Andrew began sneering. ‘In TV circles, that is, by TV standards. He’s the baddie in some sitcom.’

  I thought of Selina, who perhaps should be thankful she was the goodie. Andrew said they had never seen any of these people, all they knew of them they had from Louis Robinson. In the days when he used to go out shopping he had once encountered someone visiting Mrs Nyland. A younger woman had put her head round her front door just as he was crossing the landing.

  ‘The daughter, I expect it was. She must have heard me coming down the stairs, they’re not carpeted, they’re sort of marble stuff. She calculated just when I’d pass her mother’s door. People like that, they’ve nothing else to do but poke their noses into others’ business.’

  ‘We’ll go home that way,’ Silver said. ‘Down the stairs instead of up on to the roof.’

  ‘Where exactly do you live?’ Andrew often sounded very suspicious. ‘Not far away, I suppose?’

  ‘Not far,’ Silver said, smiling.

  They saw us out. For a moment they were like ordinary people saying good night to friends who had dropped in for the evening. But they closed the front door rather quickly behind us. The light went off. We waited, taking a while to get used to the darkness. Through windows in the stairwell a little dull moonlight leaked in. Silver went first. There were two flights to every storey and we went down four, bypassing Louis Robinson’s unoccupied flat, then two more to the inhabited part of the house. It was about half past ten by then and all was silent but for the patter of our feet in trainers on the treads which were, as Andrew said, made of ‘marble stuff’. If the old people slept upstairs in their two-storey apartment they were very likely to be asleep somewhere behind that newly painted black front door. Someone, probably that very day, had polished the brass knocker and letter-box and doorknob so that they shone like eighteen-carat gold. Caught in the letter-box, under the flap, was an envelope.

  Silver pulled it out slowly and gently, one finger under the flap lest it slam shut. Why the letter was there, why it hadn’t been properly put into the outside box with the rest of the post, there was no telling. Perhaps it had been wrongly delivered to the man downstairs and he had brought it up here. It was addressed to Mr and Mrs J. L. Nyland, Flat C, 4 Torrington Gardens, Maida Vale, w9, confirming what we already knew.

  We pushed it through the door and went on down through the silence. When we were outside and looked back, we saw that no lights were on there or above. The actor was more likely to be out than in bed. We walked home through the streets, both perhaps feeling we’d have been happier and more comfortable fifty feet above. Liv and Judy and Niall were in the living room and Wim had come after an absence of nearly two weeks. Watching him with Liv, I asked myself if he was less detached, if he might even be growing fond of her, for as she pressed herself up close to him on the sofa as she often tried to do, he had his arm round her and let her rest her head on his shoulder. If he was staying, he�
��d have to share her bed, for Niall now occupied his usual space. Judy announced that she wouldn’t stay the night, she was going home, and I told myself it was wrong to be glad, to hope she’d never come back.

  It was my idea to try asking Selina if she knew anything about the actor. Silver agreed, though he was surprised that I was willing to renew contact with her and Max. But I was changing, and with the rapid progress that happens when one is twenty. Whatever I may have told myself about my feelings, I realized that I had been afraid of Max. He had embodied all the authoritarian figures I’d ever known. Selina hadn’t frightened me but all the time I was with her I used to feel alienated and confused, as if I was trying to understand a foreign language spoken by someone who could have talked English if she had chosen to.

  Should I try to avoid Max? I was no longer up early enough to call at the house while he went out for his morning run. Besides, even if I stirred myself and managed to be outside by seven, Selina would still be in bed and would look less than kindly on someone who fetched her to the door in a dressing gown and without her make-up. I decided I’d have to brave Max and face the consequences. I bundled up our dirty clothes into a pillowcase for Silver to take to the launderette and I went out into the street just before ten. But as I looked across at No. 19 from the top of our steps, something it was quite possible to do above the low porch walls and between the narrow pillars, I saw an astonishing sight. A woman in a blue tracksuit was coming up the area staircase. She paused at the top to close and fasten the gate just as Max, in his chocolate running gear, came out of the front door. The woman was my former supervisor, Caroline Bodmer.

  They met on the path and kissed. Max held the street gate open for her and the two of them set off at a jog trot in the direction of Paddington Recreation Ground. No doubt on her account, Max had changed his exercise time. What I had seen gave me much to think about. Certain unexplained remarks of Selina’s fell into place. I understood her reference to ‘scruffy academics’. I watched Max and Caroline Bodmer disappear round the corner into Lauderdale Road – they hadn’t once looked in my direction – and walked round to No. 19. Selina opened the door so quickly she must have been standing just inside it. Her face was grim, more lined than I had ever seen it, the make-up on her skin like plaster applied with a trowel. She wore a skimpy silk suit in that hardest of all colours to wear, lemon yellow, and a lot of gold jewellery.