Grasshopper Page 39

  When nothing happened Silver thought, nothing venture nothing have, and that if Jonny moved he could get outside and slam the door on him. He said, ‘What did you do with the money?’

  ‘Don’t you worry about that,’ Jonny said in a parody of Silver’s own often repeated advice. ‘I know where the fucking money is. It’s where no one else will find it.’ And he started laughing.

  It’s not megabucks, for God’s sake, I thought. Silver went downstairs and out into the street. All public transport but night buses had stopped and there were none of those about. He had got as far as Archway when a taxi came.

  ‘That’s another way of getting rid of your capital,’ I said, more nastily than I had ever spoken to him.

  He didn’t say any more.

  What is seen can’t be unseen. What is said can’t be unsaid. The cruel epithet, the insults and accusations, these may be forgiven but not forgotten. And surely forgiveness implies forgetting, because without forgetfulness all that was said and seen remains. It’s said that when the Catholic receives absolution for the sins he has confessed, he knows not only that they are forgiven but that they have passed utterly from the mind of God.

  Silver and I were unable to forget but we could accept. I’ve accepted and now I can look back and, remembering, smile.

  We had few private places of our own in Silver’s flat, no sanctums, but I did have the old desk which was a reject of his father’s and which stood in a corner of our bedroom. On its scuffed red leather inlay I laid my notebooks and wrote my diary. It was there, the next morning, that I found the letter from Guy in its envelope, rather creased, lying on the red leather and precisely lined up alongside the right angle of its lower left-hand corner. I took it out and started reading it, immediately realizing that I hadn’t read it before. In it, in an old-fashioned courtly way, he proposed marriage.

  Guy knew I had someone else, yet in this letter he had seemed to assume that Silver – he didn’t know him by name – was just a stopgap while I and he made up our minds, or else that he was someone used to make him jealous. He took it for granted I wanted to be married, that I was waiting for him to ask. When I read that I wondered how much he had talked to my mother and what she had said to him of her own hopes.

  I read on, sitting on the bed in which Silver lay fast asleep. Guy wrote that he understood I needed time to make up my mind. But he reminded me that we had known each other a long time and that he alone (according to me) supported me when everyone turned against me after the pylon. He made it sound as if he had kept me, I mean given me money. Then he wrote about the job in his father’s firm and again he referred to this as if it had been seriously proposed and seriously considered by me. I had no real job, no training, only a truncated education, but if I married him I’d never need to work again, a way of life he put to me as if it was the answer to my prayers, the ideal, any woman’s ambition. Besides that, we loved each other. We had been so close, he wrote, that giving each other up now would be impossible and wrong. We belonged to one another.

  It shocked me very much. In a way it frightened me, because I wondered what kind of a man this was, who could insinuate to a woman that being her friend was supporting her and that eating a few meals together, sharing a drink and parting with a kiss was passion. But that was all I was afraid of. If I thought about it, I supposed Liv or Wim or Niall had found the letter on top of the wastebin, suspected it had been thrown away in error, rescued it and put it on my desk. And opened it first? I didn’t like that but there was nothing I could do about it then, so I went off to the Houghtons’ before Silver was awake.

  Judy developed the photographs herself. She showed them to us that evening. No one could have identified Andrew and Alison as their true selves from those pictures. Somehow, very cleverly, while taking shots which were plainly the kind acceptable to immigration officials, that is full-faced, looking straight into the camera, she had made them look subtly different due to the angle of their heads, Andrew’s hair and moustache and Alison’s make-up. But Jason looked like himself. This was the boy of the newspaper prints. Not just any handsome Asian or part-Asian child but entirely himself, unmistakable to any observant person who had taken minimal interest in the media versions of the case.

  He was good-looking, but not with the rather dull good looks that show themselves in classical features. His upper lip was short, his mouth full and tilted upwards at the corners. In spite of the undoubted trials of his short life, he seemed always on the brink of a smile. His eyes were large, bright and steady, not shifting away or furtive but always fixed on whomsoever he was listening to. These things couldn’t be disguised. If his skin in the photo looked paler than in reality, there remained plenty in his face that could never have had its origins in Europe. He was the Indian youth in the wall painting. Except that it sounds too fanciful, I’d say he was Krishna dancing with the milkmaids.

  ‘Shall I take another shot of him?’ Judy asked.

  Silver had been scrutinizing the picture. He said he didn’t think it would matter as when the escape began Jason would be with him, they’d be travelling first and alone together. He looked at me, perhaps waiting for more inquiries as to where the cost of it was coming from. I say ‘perhaps’ because, sadly, I could no longer intuit what Silver was thinking, just as he could no longer guess my thoughts.

  We went to 4E, Wim accompanying us, not that we had any news to impart or any shopping to carry beyond that day’s papers, but because we had got into the habit of paying nightly visits. For reassurance, for comfort, to relieve the monotony of their dreadful days and interminable evenings. And we wanted to show them the pictures, the several versions Judy had produced. Andrew seemed fascinated by his own face, so greatly changed by the moustache (now more luxuriant) and the fringe of hair covering his forehead. With one of his laughs which were shrill and unkind, he called Alison a ‘painted hussy’ and hinted he might find her more attractive if she looked like that all the time. Silver asked what they wanted to be called on the passports and Alison suggested Blythe, her half-brother’s name. It was Wim, rather surprisingly, who objected. The police would know everything about their backgrounds, he said, all their past, all previous names and connections. It didn’t mean they hadn’t got it fully documented just because there was no mention of it in the papers. There were things they would keep dark in case revealing them hampered their inquiries.

  Andrew sat at the table and looked through The Times and the Mail. For the first time since the hunt for the three of them had begun, Jason’s natural mother had appeared on the scene and given her story to a journalist. The newspaper was weary of reproducing the stale old photographs and no doubt delighted to feature instead this portrait of a very good-looking woman in her twenties. Nelima Patel looked a lot like Jason, or perhaps I should say he looked very like her. I was desperate for him not to see this picture, not to ask who it was and perhaps guess without being told. Eager to read anything he could get his hands on, he often snatched the papers we brought. Andrew and Alison had told him a good deal about their escape with him, they’d had to, they’d had somehow to justify the hiding away, the necessity of staying indoors, his lack of companions. He was fond of reading about himself. Especially when he had been seen on the seafront at Weston-super-Mare, say, when he knew perfectly well he had been in Maida Vale. But this time his attention was held elsewhere, concentrated on the photographs. There were twenty-four of them from which three must be selected. He shifted them about on the table as if they were cards in a patience game.

  A name they chose, Silver said, had better be one that had no connection with their past or present. Not even a cousin’s name or something taken from a W9 street or a current newspaper story, nothing that rhymed with their names or simply had the initial letter changed. Not, for instance, Fane or Parry. Alison fetched the phone book and finally they chose to call themselves Mr and Mrs Rogers, Gerald and Pamela Rogers.

  Jason, who wouldn’t be travelling with them, would seem to h
ave no connection with them, would become James Robert Desai.

  His mother’s story, which I read while they picked the photographs they thought approximated least to the reality and most to their disguised selves, sounded like the invention of a romantic novelist, and an old-fashioned one at that. It read as if the words had been put into her mouth by someone whose whole concept of present-day existence involved hard-done-by young women, virtuous, brave and selfless, and attractive, callous, mean-minded men bent only on seduction. Nelima Patel had been married and divorced since Jason’s birth, her husband also having deserted her. She had three more children and a new partner, was unemployed as was he, living on the dole, bitterly regretting, according to the journalist, abandoning Jason into the care of the local authority. Once he and his abductors were found, she would fight to get him back. While no one was looking, I took the double page on which the story appeared out of the paper and stuffed it, all screwed up, into my pocket.

  ‘I saw you. You did the right thing,’ Silver said to me when we were climbing down the scaffolding. This was the only sign of approval I had had from him for some time.

  ‘What would Jason have thought if he’d seen it? I can’t imagine it. People fighting over – well, ownership of you. Your real mother with three more kids but not with you.’

  We dropped to the ground. Wim had gone. His new interest in Liv couldn’t keep him from the roofs and he had departed along the highway of Sutherland Avenue towards the Harrow Road. Silver started talking about the lost three days of his life, the time someone had taken him away, hidden him, cared tenderly for him, and then, inexplicably, returned him near the place he had been snatched from. For Diana Lomax to find and take back to Jack Silverman. He talked as if to himself or to an unseen audience, not to me.

  ‘Suppose the person or people who took me hadn’t taken me back? I often wonder what made them take me back. After all, they might have got away with it. Andrew and Alison have. Or they have for seven months. When we’ve got them out of the country they’ll have got away with it for good. It would be easier for me to understand my own situation if the police had burst into wherever it was and arrested whoever it was and restored me to my sorrowing parents. But she – he – whoever – took me to that little beach, precisely under the cliff where I was taken from, and left me there. I was three. What kind of a person leaves a child of three alone on a beach, in a cove, with the tide coming in?

  ‘Suppose instead they’d kept me and I’d never been found. What would they have done for me? How would I have been brought up? And where would I be now? A fatalist would say everything would have been the same in the end, because that’s my destiny, to be walking along Torrington Gardens, W9, at ten-thirty on 3rd September, come what may. But I don’t believe that. I think maybe I’d have grown up in Cornwall or south Wales or even America with a different name and different parents and different siblings too. Now I’d be at the University of Cardiff or New York State and I’d never have walked on the roofs.’

  I waited for him to say that he’d never have met me, but of course I was disappointed in that. He spoke not another word until we got to the end of the street where the house on its own stood amid its shadowy garden of evergreens and fading roses. Then he said, quite abruptly, that he wasn’t coming back with me but going straight to Holloway to hand the photographs over to Jonny and tell him the passports were to be for Gerald and Pamela Rogers and James Desai.

  I’ve been with Darren and Junilla and his children to Disneyland, Paris, on the Eurostar. We stayed overnight and came back the next day with carrier bags full of wine and packs of cigarettes for him and Lysander. Both children were with us so that Campaspe could have a weekend with her new man.

  I had a good enough time but I don’t really know why I went. Because I was invited? Because I was lonely? These last few weeks, only three now, are dragging badly. When my husband comes home I should throw a great party to welcome him, Junilla says. She’d have a party every weekend if it was practicable. But I don’t want anyone there but me when he comes home. I’m hungry to see him. It’s as if my eyes ache from not seeing him. I devote a lot of mind-space between working and writing this to imagining the cab bringing him home draw up down there on the drive-in and to seeing him get out and pay the man and hump his bags. I ought to go down and help him up with them but I don’t – in my vision of this, I mean – but I wait here to hear the faint slithering hiss of the lift as it brings him up to the penthouse floor. The doors slide open and click shut behind him, and then he comes to this door, his bags bumping and sliding, and I hear his key turn in the lock.

  ‘Hiss’ is Swedish for a lift. Niall said it must be an onomatopoeia, a term I’d never heard until he brought it out, the word echoing the sound a lift makes. But Liv, who had used it, saying ungratefully that 15 Russia Road was impossible without a ‘hiss’, insisted that was nonsense, it came from the old Norse.

  ‘What, those old Vikings had lifts? In their ships maybe?’

  Liv didn’t much like Niall. She said he was always picking on her. And it’s true he was a pedantic person, always saying things like, ‘It all depends on what you mean by so-and-so,’ and ‘Can you define that?’ He’s a professor of something or other now at one of those universities that come very high up the league tables. But at that time he was a spotty boy with red hair who boasted that he passed his exams without doing any work. I suppose he fancied Liv. They say that men who trump up arguments with women and are critical of their appearance and way of life are really attracted by them. Perhaps Niall was. At any rate, he took over my job of escorting Liv downstairs for her therapy walk, though bullying her in a whiny voice and nagging her to do better. The walk now extended as far as 7 Russia Road, which was in the next terrace. Liv probably walked a yard more every day, but she wouldn’t cross the road. She had some idea that a favourite contract-killing method was to run the victim over. James and Claudia, in her feverish imagination, were just the kind of people to employ a hitman in a big Mercedes.

  Silver, of course, thought it wiser and kinder not to pass on Jonny’s message to her. It would only upset her. Besides, when she eventually left his place she’d naturally go back to Sweden. With no money but her air fare, still in Silver’s bank account, she had very little choice. Jonny had received the photographs, at first with no comment. But he returned to them after a few minutes, staring long and hard at the shot of Jason. Silver knew he never read a newspaper, on account of reading being a problem for him, but he had watched a lot of television while in Russia Road and might have access to television still, though there was no set in that room.

  ‘He’s that kid,’ he said at last. ‘The Paki kid.’

  Usually so calm, Silver was filled with rage at this description of Jason, whose mother, according to the paper, had been born in Bradford, the child of Brahmins from Varanasi. But he had to hold his tongue if he wanted those passports.

  ‘These two are the folks that kidnapped him, are they?’

  Silver nodded, not trusting himself to speak. Afterwards he thought he should have said, ‘They might be,’ which Jonny would have understood.

  ‘A real dog, that one,’ he commented of Alison. ‘There’s some ugly women make me sick, I mean puke. Don’t tell me you’ve got this lot up in your place.’

  ‘I wasn’t going to tell you that.’

  ‘Come on, Silv, where are they?’

  Silver had to tell him. He had to tell him and explain. He wouldn’t have put it past Jonny to go calling at 4E and perhaps try some blackmail, always supposing anyone let him in. He told me, he was bitterly regretting ever having befriended Jonny, ever having let him have a room in his flat, and the worst of it was that at the time he had thought it dashing and rather smart to have a friend who was a burglar. And the consequence was that he found himself plunged into crime in that foul room at two o’clock in the morning, Jonny’s grin cold and his expression full of contempt. So much for friendship, so much for having an open mind.r />
  But he needed those passports. Of all of us I think it was Silver who was most committed to the protection and ultimate rescue of the people at 4E. Wim and I, Judy, even Liv, wished them well, felt they had been badly treated and wanted to get them out of there and safely bound for some distant freedom. But if the difficulties had seemed too great, the odds too stacked against us, we’d have given up. We’d have told them there was no more we could do beyond bringing them food. Silver went much further than that. Rescuing Andrew and Alison and keeping Jason with them was a passion, nothing deflected him from his object. So however bad Jonny might be, however nauseating it was to listen to his insulting words and understand that everything he did was motivated by greed and a compulsion to take revenge on society, Silver knew he needed him and that without his help he couldn’t proceed with our plan. He waited for Jonny to ask for some of the payment in advance and Jonny did ask. He had upped the figure and now wanted £7,000 for the three passports, £2,000 to be a down payment.

  ‘I thought I was a sort of citizen of the world,’ Silver said, ‘free and classless. A Robin Hood/Scarlet Pimpernel kind of character, equally happy in the company of villains as of nobs. As at home with the crooked as with the straight. I’m learning how deeply conformist I am. I offered him a cheque. He laughed. That laughter taught me a lot, among other things that my belief he liked me was just illusion. He never liked me, he never thought about it. I was useful and he used me. Of course he wouldn’t take a cheque. He was amazed, he said, that I hadn’t brought cash with me. As soon as the bank opened this morning he came with me and I drew the money out.’