Grasshopper Page 40

‘If it’s invested,’ I said, knowing very little about these things, ‘didn’t you have to give them notice you wanted to draw such a large sum? Didn’t you have to get your stockbroker or whatever to sell some of them?’

  He didn’t answer but turned away and went into the kitchen. I saw then, I don’t know how, that he had taken those steps weeks before. He had prepared for this rescue, laying his plans in advance. I went to the Houghtons’ and while I worked on building a structure with wooden uprights and chicken wire to house a compost heap, I thought about Silver and me and wondered if we were coming to the end of the road, our road. If what had been so lovely, a real passion and joy in one another’s company, had worn itself out because we were so young and perhaps hadn’t worked at our relationship. And perhaps too because I had said things that implied Silver had too much money, couldn’t handle money and failed to understand what the lack of it meant to others. So I was sad and maybe seemed sullen. I kept thinking that the time was coming when I’d have to leave this place and live alone once more. Yet life was unthinkable without him. I wondered how I had existed before I met him, all those lonely months at old Mrs Fisherton’s. I see I’ve written in my diary for that day that only the job we had to do together, our rescue mission, kept me there with him. We had to see that through but when it was done I’d go. Unless things changed, unless he came back to me.

  Another sad thing was that we seemed to go on the roofs less and less. There was no real need to approach 4E along the balcony and enter through the window. It was quicker and simpler to walk to the end of Torrington Gardens, go up the steps to the front door and let ourselves in with the key Andrew had given us. The roofs were just for the fun of it and we had fun together no longer.

  Once inside the house our only fear had been of encountering Sean Francis but in the few days since she had made herself known to him, Judy and he had spent a lot of time together. He accepted our visits to the house, still I suppose believing we were there to water the Nylands’ plants, for Judy had said nothing to him about who lived on the top floor. One disquieting thing, though. He knew someone was up there. Once, before we began to do the shopping for them, he had seen Andrew, seen him only from the back as he let himself out of the front door, but that had been enough to intrigue him. Up till then, he had believed the top floor unoccupied. The next time he had spoken to Mrs Nyland he had asked her if she had heard anything overhead and she had told him that once or twice she had been aware of a child’s running feet. One very warm day when her windows were open she thought she had heard a woman’s voice, but it might have come from the house next door. All this had been imparted to Judy, who was waiting for the right moment to tell Sean who was actually up there. Or not to tell him if she sensed his sympathies wouldn’t be with us.

  The Nylands were due back in the following week. That meant, of course, that our excuse of watering their plants would no longer work. Judy would have to tell him the truth or we would have to resume our visits from the roof. And if he remained in ignorance of what we were really doing in the house, he might, almost certainly would, mention us and our activities to Mrs Nyland.

  But none of this worried us much that evening. Upstairs, on the top, we always rang the bell, though we had a key to Flat E as well. It was as if we now only went there as invited guests. We had a code for the doorbell, two long rings and a short one. Jason let us in, ecstatic as usual to see us. We were invited into his bedroom to see a painting he had done that day, which Alison had stuck on the wall with the Blu-Tack we had brought in with the rest of the shopping. It was a picture of a ship in a bottle, he had used the real one he had as a model, but on the deck stood a boy obviously intended to be himself, waving at something or someone, the shore perhaps, a desert island or a crowd on the beach. Who knows? A psychologist might have said that instead of just drawing a boy on a boat he had drawn a boy on a boat in a bottle because the bottle represented his prison walls, transparent but also impassable. Silver picked up the bottle itself, seemingly fascinated by it as he had been when we were once before in that room.

  ‘I’ve read about these things,’ he said, ‘how they put the masts on hinges and attach strings to them so that when the boat’s been got in they can pull the strings and the masts and sails stand up, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a real one before. And yet I seem to remember one. Looking at Jason’s picture, I feel as if I can remember being where he is, standing on the deck of a ship in a bottle – but it’s all nonsense.’

  He put the bottle down and we went back into the living room and told Alison and Andrew the cost of the passports. Andrew said it was impossible, he couldn’t pay that. Suppose the whole venture went wrong? He had had in mind less than half the sum Silver had mentioned.

  ‘But we’ve got it,’ Alison said. ‘Is there anything better we could spend it on?’

  ‘A car,’ Andrew said, ‘a house, or the start of paying back a loan on a house, clothes, schooling for Jason. Hundreds of things, our fares to Australia included.’

  ‘We can’t go at all without passports.’

  Silver promised to try and get the cost reduced. He’d never succeed with Jonny and I knew that, while telling Andrew, as he would, that the price had been cut, he’d pay the surplus himself. He so passionately wanted to get these people and this child safely out of the country and safely received in Sydney that, if necessary, he’d impoverish himself to do it.

  28

  I still have those passports. They’re in front of me now. How they came into my hands and remained in my possession I’ll tell you later. They’re no use to anyone, you might say they’re not real passports, they’re false, illegal documents, but they cost so much, they represent such a sacrifice and such resolution that I have kept them as a memento of those things and of the best-laid plans going wrong.

  When I look at the photograph of Alison, I wonder how we ever thought it could be accepted as of a real woman who naturally looked like that. The make-up on her face, the mouth drawn wider and fuller than her natural mouth, the eyes painted with black lines and the eyelashes caked with mascara. Andrew’s is almost as bad, for his has that rogues’ gallery wanted-man’s look as he glowers from under an eyebrow-overhanging fringe. Jason looks beautiful, he looks flawless, and when my eyes rest on his photograph with a kind of pity and longing I can understand why makers of commercials and advertisements want to use younger and younger models.

  Alison’s passport describes her as being called Pamela Mary Rogers, a British citizen, born on 19 March 1949. In his passport Andrew is Gerald Rogers, born on 3 June 1951. Jason has become James Desai, and because he was tall Silver had decreed his date of birth to be ten not eight years before, but kept to its true date of 7 November lest anyone ask him. In some circumstances you could ask a child to lie but not about his birthday. It must be the most important date in his year. Each passport has an Australian visa in the appropriate place, or perhaps I should say a false Australian visa. Only in Silver’s was the visa authentic.

  We took the passports round to 4E as soon as Silver had collected them from Jonny. Andrew contemplated them in silence, shaking his head.

  ‘Five thousand pounds,’ he said at last, and repeated it. ‘Five thousand pounds.’

  ‘We don’t have a choice,’ Alison said.

  ‘When I was a child, a man earning £5,000 a year was rich. You could buy a very nice house for £5,000. You could buy a house and a car.’

  This seemed irrelevant to me. After all, when his father was a child you could probably buy a house and a car for five hundred pounds and in his grandfather’s youth for fifty. What was clear was that he was going to demur at the cost and not just demur, refuse to pay. Silver, who had already taken £2,000 off, said, ‘I negotiated a price. It’s come down to £3,000.’

  Of course he hadn’t negotiated a price. He was going to pay it out of his own pocket. If Andrew saw this he gave no sign of it. He just said a grudging ‘all right’, picked up all three passports and put them in t
he table drawer. Alison asked about flights to Australia. How? When? Silver suggested two weeks’ time. It might be a good idea to fix a date immediately and he would buy the tickets. Economy class, Andrew said, he hoped that was understood. Silver was on the edge of anger but he controlled it.

  ‘Look, I’m taking it that you do want to do this? You want to get away from here and to Sydney?’

  ‘Of course we do,’ Alison said, ‘and we’re enormously grateful to you. I don’t know why you should have done all this for us, we think it’s angelic of you. You must never think we don’t appreciate it.’

  Silver nodded, unsmiling. ‘So shall we say September 18th? It’s a Saturday, just over two weeks from now. I’ll take Jason that day and I suggest you follow twenty-four hours later on the Sunday.’

  ‘If you like.’ Alison looked nervous now things were becoming so definite. ‘I don’t mean that, I mean anything you say, we’re in your hands.’

  I saw that she was afraid to go. More than that, she wanted to remain where she was. It was too big a step, they had suffered enough, the venture might fail and all be lost. Here they were safe. Departing was to come to the edge of the abyss and leap blindfold. I looked at Alison’s face and thought, you won’t sleep much till September 18th, you’ll lie awake worrying all those nights between now and then.

  ‘Does he, I mean Jason, does he have to go with you?’ she asked.

  Silver said those words we should be very careful about saying, the words that make too enormous a promise unless we’re absolutely confident we can fulfil it. ‘Trust me.’

  ‘I trust you. I’m only saying you ought to know how hard it will be for me to – well, surrender Jason into your hands.’

  ‘Think about it less melodramatically,’ Silver said. ‘Better still, don’t think about it. Don’t let it bother you. Leave it to us. I’ll book the flights, I’ll buy the tickets.’

  Andrew made no move. As I have said, we had no idea where they kept their hoard except that it wasn’t in that room. Unless it was in the table drawer, but all that had seemed to contain was their passports. A memory came back to me from five or six years before. A man, a former friend of my father’s, had come to our house ostensibly to repay a loan. Dad had lent him £1,000. He stayed for hours, he drank tea, he ate biscuits, he drank gin and tonic, beer, and at last got up to go without mentioning the loan. He was halfway to the door and then Dad had to speak, embarrassed, hating it, saying what I now said.

  ‘You owe us some money.’

  ‘All right, all right. I was going to give you something.’ Andrew sounded quite irritable, as if we were beggars who had approached him in the street. ‘I’ll just remind you that we can’t earn, we don’t have jobs like you, we don’t have an income. What we have diminishes a bit every day. Even when we get to Australia these visas you’ve got us don’t entitle us to work. If we work, we’ll have to do it illegally.’

  ‘You should be used to that,’ I said. ‘You’ve been doing something illegal for seven months.’

  None of them thought me capable of speaking like that and I had rather surprised myself. Alison said, ‘Please don’t be angry. Please don’t think we’re ungrateful. It’s just that we’re in – well, a very nervous state.’ She looked near to tears. ‘Andrew doesn’t mean it,’ she said when he’d left the room to fetch their contribution to our expenses. ‘I wish you could hear what he says about you when you’re not here. He’s always singing your praises.’

  This I found hard to believe but I said no more. I used to wonder a lot about Andrew Lane. It was plain that he loved Jason, and loved him as much as Alison did. Once he must have loved Alison. He must have wanted to draw their money out of the bank, leave home, run from hotel to B and B to caravan, make arrangements with Louis Robinson, hide up there. But the way of life he had chosen was more than he could cope with. He longed for freedom, and he was unsure that he wanted Jason at any price. Imprisonment was destroying his love for Alison. He simply wasn’t strong enough, steadfast enough, and perhaps he was always tugged by the memory of what they had had before, good jobs, an income, a nice house, friends, neighbours, freedom. But no Jason. Was Jason worth it? I was thinking all this when he came back with a wad of £20 and £10 notes. He dealt out £2,000, put the notes into Silver’s hands and asked him to count them.

  ‘I’ll give you some more when you’ve got our plane tickets.’

  This meant, of course, that Silver was going to have to buy the tickets out of his own pocket. Neither Andrew nor Alison showed any surprise that a boy of twenty could find the sort of sums we were talking about. It seemed not to occur to them. I suppose that when they lived in the real world they had both earned so much that they assumed those still out there did also.

  The letter from Guy was still on the desk where I had left it. Wondering why I had bothered to keep it once I had read it, I tore it up and dropped the pieces in our wastebin.

  Silver, watching me, said, ‘Are you going to?’

  ‘Am I going to what?’

  ‘Marry him. This guy Guy.’

  I could hardly believe it. I stared at him. ‘Of course I’m not going to marry him. I’m too young to get married.’

  ‘Is that the only reason?’

  What I knew wasn’t pleasant. ‘Have you read my letter?’

  He sat down on the bed and lit a cigarette. He didn’t give me one. ‘You left it in your jeans pocket. I took your jeans to the launderette and when I was clearing out the pockets I found it. Classic, isn’t it? It’s what women are supposed to do when their husbands are unfaithful. I’ve read about it in books.’

  ‘And you read my letter?’

  ‘I did. Dreadful, wasn’t it? You must be very shocked. It’s something to be ashamed of, isn’t it, reading other people’s letters? I don’t care. I don’t give a shit. I opened it and read it. It didn’t give me any pleasure reading it, or any sort of satisfaction. In fact, it made me bloody miserable and bloody angry too.’

  ‘Is that why you’ve been all cold and sulky?’ I said.

  ‘What do you think?’

  He said he was going to sleep on the sofa. I could have the bed but he’d prefer me not to invite anyone else into it while he was in the flat.

  I lay in that bed feeling all sorts of guilt and all sorts of resentment. I wrote nothing in my diary. What I’ve set down here is what I remember. I may not have got every word and every phrase right. How deeply engraved on our concept of what honour ought to be is the principle that however you may deceive and lie, prevaricate and deviate, you must never never read someone else’s letters. Silver had seemed to me the soul of honour. If anyone had asked me what I saw in him, I’d have said I found him attractive, I found him funny and clever and the best company in the world, but first and foremost I loved him for his integrity. What became of that when he had read my private letter?

  And I didn’t care for Guy at all. I felt a sort of loyalty to him and a great deal of gratitude but that letter, which implied I was looking for a husband and a home and what I believe is called a meal ticket, had killed the little affection I had. Silver, my calm and laid-back, clever and funny Silver, had been perturbed by that letter? Did that mean he was less than what I had thought and I had been deluded? Or was it that I had no understanding of jealousy? You must understand that I’m asking myself this now, I didn’t ask it then. But I remembered Judy and how I had been afraid of her and I fell asleep feeling less furiously indignant than I had when Silver first left me to spend the night on the sofa.

  We made it up the next day. He said he was sorry he had read the letter, he knew it was an awful thing to do, and I explained it was so unimportant to me that I had no interest in who read it. I hadn’t even done so myself for ages.

  It wasn’t one of my Houghton days, so I sat down and wrote to Guy, saying no to his proposal and that it might be best if we didn’t see each other again. I offered to show the letter to Silver who said I was like a Victorian bride, writing to former suitors under h
er husband’s instructions, and refused to look at it.

  ‘Come up on the roof,’ he said.

  We climbed out of the window. Dusk was violet-coloured and warm, untouched as yet by any chill of autumn. We spread the blanket we had brought with us on the slates and sat side by side up against the chimney stack, watching the lights go on across west London and the aircraft cross the darkening sky, like meteorites homing on Heathrow. I said that we had made it up, and so we had. Each had forgiven the other but not forgotten. The roof at twilight was our place of romance as others might have some restaurant or beauty spot where they had been happy. We made it up but things were not the same.

  That, of course, doesn’t necessarily have a forlorn meaning. For me, with the quarrel and the hard things that were said (harder, I think, than I can now remember), the innocence had gone out of our relationship. Perhaps it was also the case for him, but I could no longer delude myself that I read his mind and guessed his thoughts. That had gone too. Perhaps it was only that we had grown up a little more but in a leap and a bound instead of at the usual gradual pace. Eve looked on Adam as a god when she first came to Eden. ‘He for God only, she for God in him,’ Silver once said to me, quoting something. But I think that after they were turned out of the garden in disgrace, their life together became more real because there was no more illusion and she knew he was only a man. Silver was only a boy and I wasn’t sure if my love could withstand knowing that. He knew that another man had wanted me and thought that I had wavered, so that I was changed in his eyes.

  But we were happy up on the roof, kissing and talking (and apologizing), and neither of us said a word about money, spending it, lending it or trying to rid oneself of inheritances. And when it got very dark and we had smoked all our cigarettes we went back into the flat and to bed.

  Young people feel enormously magnanimous and kind when they go home to visit their parents. I still feel a bit that way, though it’s now something I sternly repress. I had been regularly speaking on the phone to Mum, and Dad too when he was at home or it wasn’t news time. They had my phone number at Silver’s and somehow they had learnt the address. From Guy, was my guess. I had been intending to go home for a long time. You’ll have realized what stopped me, that the major stumbling block was how to get to Liverpool Street Station. Nothing would have got me down into that tube again and a taxi costing £15 was beyond my means. In the end I took the No. 6 bus to Oxford Street and the No. 8 from there to Liverpool Street. It took nearly an hour.