Grasshopper Read online

  ‘Come in,’ she said, in the voice of an undertaker talking to the bereaved. ‘I suppose you saw them?’

  ‘I’d no idea she was his girlfriend.’

  She spoke to me as if we had parted from each other half an hour before. ‘Well, darling, I did say I didn’t blame you. I’m sure it was done in all innocence, you introducing them, I mean. But it was on your account she was always phoning here. And once they’d met, if you can credit it, but he swears it’s true, it was love at first sight.’ We might have been close friends on intimate terms. ‘Come up to the drawing room. My poor drawing room that I loved so much and that I’ll have to leave behind. I’m leaving, you know. I’m going on Friday, and I suppose I shall have to look on all this for the last and final time.’

  I looked about me. There were fluff and hairs on the emerald carpet, dust on the once shining surfaces and the flowers in the Chinese vases were dead. The ashtrays, surprisingly in that household, were full of ash and cigarette ends.

  ‘It hasn’t been cleaned for weeks, darling. I haven’t let Beryl clean it. I couldn’t really tell you why, it was a sort of gesture on my part. I suppose I feel I shan’t mind leaving it so much if it’s all filthy and spoilt. Do you remember the party we had for your birthday? We were all so happy then, weren’t we? You and me and Max, just like a family. I mustn’t cry. I’ve used up all my waterproof mascara and I haven’t replaced it. There are so many things that have just lapsed, darling.’

  This hardly seemed the time to mention the actor, but when would be the time? She was leaving at the end of the week. I asked her tentatively, trying to think of a reason for wanting to know and failing to find one. This mattered not at all as Selina was quite uninterested in me, in what I might be doing, where I was living or anyone I might have seen or met.

  ‘Oh, him, darling, yes. He’s called Sean Francis. Terribly dishy, don’t you think? Lovely eyes and those sort of soft features. He was the guest star on Streetwise for two episodes. Not that he’s a star, just amazingly fanciable. I only wish I was ten years younger, but that’s all water under the bridge or ships that pass in the night or something, isn’t it? I’ve given Max my best years and he’s thrown them aside like an old fag end. Did I tell you I’ve started smoking again? It’s a great comfort. I only gave it up to please His Majesty.’ She passed me the silver cigarette box as if we’d never had those inquests about the smell of smoke in old Mrs Fisherton’s. ‘It keeps me thin, too, I can get into a size six.’

  I asked her where she was going to live and she said she’d taken a flat in Dolphin Square for six months. ‘It’s packed with Members of Parliament, darling, and you never know, do you?’

  Returning home in reflective mood, I thought about Max and Selina and saw that though I was in no possible way to blame for Max falling in love with Caroline Bodmer and she, presumably, falling in love with him, but for me they’d never have met. But for the towpath being impassable on a certain day and this leading to my failure to keep my appointment with Caroline, she’d never have phoned 19 Russia Road. And another result of that was that I had met Silver. So I’d found my love and Selina had lost hers because a woman had been murdered on the canal bank. I thought of the great causal chain of events, trying to get back beyond that murder to the man who had carried it out, perhaps just someone who had flown into a rage because the dead woman had refused him money or sex. Or been unfaithful to him. As Max had been to Selina and perhaps Silver would be to me.

  Letters had begun arriving from Sweden. The Almquists, who had never written to Liv before, now bombarded her with daily admonitions. Håkan wrote in English. I can only suppose this was so that Liv could show his letters to the rest of us and he’d thus win our support in sending her home. They phoned too, and almost every day. One morning, when I answered the phone, Håkan launched into a great defence of himself in respect of the missing money. He had no memory of ever having been given it, I must believe that, he said, he couldn’t remember coming to 15 Russia Road that day or leaving it or carrying the money with him or being mugged. He knew only that he had been told these things were so. I had to fetch Liv out of bed. Since Wim had been sleeping with her on an almost regular basis – that is, for the past three nights – she had been calmer. She got up now with a smile on her face and stood there quite naked, rotating her body, showing off its magnificence. I think she was saying to me, look at this, you can’t compete with this, and to Wim that it was all for him. He watched her with greedy eyes, a look on his face I had never seen there before. She bent over and kissed his mouth before pulling the T-shirt he had discarded on to the floor over her head and going off to talk to her father.

  Wim’s attention to her and his love-making were the best therapy she could have had. Or so it seemed then, so it seemed. And when I took her downstairs – it would never have crossed his mind to do this – she took almost jaunty steps down the path, stood at the gate and looked quite boldly up and down the length of Russia Road.

  ‘Soon I am walking in the street, Clodagh.’

  I said optimistically that this meant she’d soon be able to go home to Sweden.

  ‘That is a possibility, yes, but I don’t think so. Better Wim and I go somewhere away from here, a long long way, and get work and are happy.’

  Very unlikely, as far as Wim was concerned. I tried to imagine him in a domestic situation, being a breadwinner, or even half of a breadwinning couple, having an ordinary conversation, eating proper meals, watching television. I tried and failed.

  That was the day, according to my diary, meticulously kept at this time, that Silver saw Jonny. He saw him in a street off the Holloway Road where he had gone to buy something for Andrew Lane, an attachment for the shower at 4E, something that couldn’t be found nearer home. Jonny was coming down the front steps of a shabby grey house in a terrace of such houses in a street without trees or anything green and where the front gardens were full of dustbins and chained-up bicycles. Silver called out something, hi or hello, but Jonny wouldn’t look at him and passed him by as if they had never met before.

  ‘Did he look prosperous?’

  ‘Not so’s you’d notice. It’s not very salubrious where he’s living, if he’s living there, not what your mum and my mum would call “a nice part”.’

  I said that perhaps it was just as well Jonny had ignored him. He had said himself, I pointed out, that it would have been better for everyone if he had never been friends with someone like Jonny and invited him into his home.

  ‘He’s not “someone like”, he’s himself.’ Silver’s tone was cold and remote. ‘And it’s not the way I want to be, only knowing respectable people.’

  His coldness I attributed to the presence of Judy in the flat, although she had been absent since the night we began on our Andrew and Alison exit plan. I didn’t know, he never said a word at that time, that it was Guy Wharton coming between us, that Silver was beginning to believe I was deceiving him with Guy. And it wasn’t only that Lucy, coming round with Tom while I was at work, had told him, perhaps with no malice, that she had seen me kissing Guy that morning in the Warwick Avenue gardens after we had met at the nursery. There was more to it than that.

  So much for the openness and frankness of young people, the absence of jealousy and recrimination in their liberated lives. So much for their new attitude to sex, suspicion fled and passion simplified. Silver and I slept in the same bed and sometimes made love, though as I imagine middle-aged people, tired of a long marriage and of each other, make it. Dutifully, almost sadly, a simple preface to sleep.

  Sometimes I thought that all that held us together was our determination to do what we could for the escape of Andrew, Alison and Jason, to carry out the plan we were formulating. And I remembered with sadness Silver’s talk of marriage as we walked the canal bank and our love-making that warm evening on the roof.

  26

  August came to an end and on its final day a newspaper carried a big story about Andrew and Alison and Jason. We had
taken little notice of the recent accounts of sightings. This story was different. This time a woman who lived in Inverness Terrace had told the police and the newspaper she had seen Andrew shopping in Westbourne Grove.

  If you get there by way of the underpass, the one where I was so frightened and where I met Silver, Westbourne Grove is about half a mile from Torrington Gardens. This was serious, this was getting very near home. But Andrew had stayed in since we had started fetching things in for them. Or had he?

  The scaffolding between Peterborough Avenue and the first terrace in Torrington Gardens was still there, though the redecoration was long finished and the new paint already spattered with pigeon droppings. Though this seemed unlikely, we wondered with optimism if the removal of the scaffolding and repair of the burnt roof might coincide.

  Jason was once more on the balcony waiting for us. I put my arms round him and he kissed me soundly on both cheeks. At the moment all was well enough, he was hidden behind a screen of leaves, but in autumn when they fell the people in the houses opposite would be able to see him. I had failed to understand then what risks prisoners will take for a glimpse of liberty, a breath of air, a sight of sky not looked at through glass.

  We had brought the newspaper with us and we showed it to Andrew, certain then that the woman who claimed to have seen him had just made a guess that was unlucky for them but a breakthrough for the police. He took a defiant stance. Yes, he had been out.

  ‘I couldn’t stand being everlastingly cooped up in here. I felt I was fighting for breath. I’ll tell you something. Before all this started I promised Jason a mynah bird, he was crazy to have a talking bird, but if we ever get out of here he won’t. I’ll never keep a caged bird. Every time I looked at it or heard it talk, I’d think of this place, this dump.’

  Jason began to whine. ‘Dad, you promised, you promised, Dad.’

  ‘I know how hard it is,’ Silver said, ‘but you mustn’t go out. That’s the way you’ll be found.’

  ‘No, you don’t know how hard it is. No one knows who hasn’t been through it. I didn’t need to go shopping. You do that for us and I’m sure we’re very grateful.’ He didn’t sound grateful, he sounded resentful. ‘I had to go out. I had to be free just for half an hour. I felt that if I didn’t go out, I’d have a breakdown, I’d start screaming out of the window.’ He added, in a few words taking away my impulse to shout at him, what about Alison, what about her having a breakdown, ‘It was such a lovely day.’

  ‘You’d better get a false beard,’ said Silver, ‘or grow one. But then you’ll look the way you did before you left your home. How about a moustache? Could you do that? In time for when my friend comes to take your passport photos?’

  ‘My’ friend, not ‘our’. ‘When’s that going to be?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ll have to ask her. Meanwhile, could you just not go out? You won’t be here much longer, you won’t be here for the winter. I promise you that.’

  It was a promise that would be fulfilled. Even then I was sure it would be. I had faith in Silver and you could see they had, or Alison had. Andrew said no more. Did Alison ever reproach him? Had she ever said a word to him about his imprudence, about the danger he ran into through his need for immediate freedom? She laid her hand on his arm, caressing it for a moment before sitting down at the table to read the newspaper account. Silver gave them the outline of our plan.

  The greatest risk was from Sean Francis on the ground floor. There was a good chance of his seeing them if they went downstairs with their suitcases and waited in the hall for a taxi. The elderly couple he thought we had no need to worry about. He meant to get to know Sean Francis, find out what sort of a person he was and if, even, we could take him into our confidence. Here Andrew interrupted to say he didn’t care for that. You could trust no one.

  ‘You trust us,’ Silver said.

  ‘Only through force of necessity. Did we have a choice?’

  Silver turned his head so that he seemed to be addressing only Alison and Jason. I could see the red flush on the back of his neck. Judy would take their photographs, he said. He was pretty sure he could get passports for them through someone he knew. There was one thing he had to say to them they might not like. But that could come later. It must be Jason’s bedtime and we’d like to take him to bed, have a look at his new curtains.

  No one objected. Each holding a hand, we took Jason into his bedroom and were shown the curtains Alison had made to replace the strip of floral green cloth that had covered the window. With no sewing machine she had stitched them by hand and lined them. The material was patterned with zoo animals. Jason said Alison had found it, carefully folded and laid in the bottom drawer of a chest.

  ‘She said Mr Robinson wouldn’t mind. She said he’d have forgotten it was there.’

  He looked incredulous. Such a failure of memory was beyond him. He put on his pyjamas and got into bed. I read to him for ten minutes, disappointed because Silver, who would once have stayed to hear of the activities of hobbits, went back to join Andrew and Alison. I kissed Jason good night, careful not to let my tears touch his face. I wiped my eyes before returning to the living room.

  With Jason absent, Silver explained his strategy, or explained what he’d like them to consent to. The stumbling block, the difficulty, in any escape plan was Jason. His looks put him outside the possibility of being their natural child. He might, just, be taken for Spanish or Portuguese, but never of Anglo-Saxon parentage. So, if the escape was to work, they must be split up.

  ‘No!’ Alison shouted.

  We all listened for some sound from Jason. There was nothing. ‘Hear me out,’ Silver said. ‘My idea is that I should take him. I don’t need a new passport, I’ve got one, and I’ve got an Australian visa. I went there a couple of years ago with my family. I’ll never pass Jason off as a relative. He looks even less like me than like you. But I think I could say he was my stepson I’m taking home to his mother. That’s just an idea. I may come up with a better. I did say this was an outline plan.’

  Alison was staring at him. She kept her eyes on him the whole time he was speaking.

  ‘You’d travel together, of course. No one will question you. Why should they? The only one to attract attention is Jason and he won’t be with you. We won’t go on the same flight. I’d suggest I go with Jason on, say, a Sunday and you follow on the Monday. We meet by prearrangement – in a hotel, say – I hand him over and go back on the next flight.’

  ‘I can’t agree to this,’ Alison said.

  Andrew gave her a cold look. ‘Why not? What’s wrong with it apart from the expense? It’s going to be bloody expensive.’

  ‘The money doesn’t matter.’ She made a throwing-away gesture, flinging out her hands. Her lined face contorted into wrinkles. ‘If this makes us destitute, my father will look after us. But I can’t be parted from Jason. And even if I could be, if I could bear that, Andrew and I couldn’t travel on the same plane. Suppose it crashed? Suppose we were both killed? Jason would be left alone again.’

  ‘You know, I’m amazed sometimes at the nonsense people talk,’ Andrew said. ‘Have you ever known someone set out on a car journey and ask what would happen if they were in a smash-up? No, of course you haven’t. But they’ve only got to get on an hour-long flight from London to Edinburgh to start imagining it’s going to crash.’

  Silver looked from one to the other of them. ‘Would you think about it? Discuss it? You may be able to improve on it.’ He paused. ‘And don’t worry. Don’t worry about the money.’

  Once more we went down through the inside of the house. It was just after ten. There was no way of telling whether the Nylands were in bed or not, but as we passed on down the last flight of stairs, trying to be silent but not succeeding, the soles of our trainers slapping on those marble treads, the front door of Flat B opened. A man came out into the hall and looked up the stairs. Looked straight at us.

  There were other people behind that door as we could tell by the
sound of voices and laughter, but I supposed from Selina’s description that this must be Sean Francis. He was tall and thin and dark with that sort of feminine face that later became so fashionable, short nose, full mouth. I saw him in a television play last week and he seemed not to have aged at all. I suppose he was in his late twenties at that time. He said in a sharp voice, ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Calling on the Nylands,’ Silver said promptly.

  ‘No, you can’t have been. They’re away.’

  One of the great things about Silver was the way he always rose to the occasion, kept his cool, was never wrong-footed. ‘Clodagh Brown and Michael Silverman,’ he said. ‘How do you do? Mr Francis, I presume?’

  ‘Well, yes.’

  ‘My friend and I have been watering Mrs Nyland’s houseplants. We run a home-tending service for clients away on holiday.’

  Whether he swallowed this we’d no idea at the time, but he went back into his flat and closed the door. I said to Silver as we came out into the street, ‘Can we talk? Can we go on the roofs and talk?’

  He nodded. He seemed to understand. Not only were the roofs our element, they were also almost the only place, apart from his bed, we could go and be sure of being alone. We climbed up the scaffolding and walked along inside the parapet, not holding hands this time. While we were together in the past we had talked all the time, we could never make an end of finding new things to say to each other, but that night we walked in silence, looking upwards at the heavy clouds, lit to a deep sepia brown by the yellow chemical lights below. The wind was warm. It carried with it the faintest scent of green curry from a restaurant in Sutherland Avenue. We sat on the slates between a chimney stack and the tarpaulin. Silver gave me a cigarette.