Grasshopper Page 42

  The taxi risk would be smaller this second time. Anyone looking for Andrew and Alison would be looking for Jason too. I’d accompany them to Heathrow, though I couldn’t see what use I’d be beyond bolstering up their courage. When I had seen them into the passport control queue I’d leave them, go back home and wait for Silver to return the next day. Andrew and Alison would have collected Jason from the hotel and, if everything had gone according to plan, we’d never see any of them again.

  ‘We won’t know how to pass the time,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, yes, we will. This is our crossing point, remember? Life begins afterwards.’

  It had to be another go at university for both of us. This year we were too late for the October intake but some places would take you in January or we could postpone things till next year. Do some sort of course perhaps, or voluntary service overseas. Silver wanted to read social sciences, he couldn’t understand why he hadn’t known that before. I wondered about agriculture. I knew the countryside, I enjoyed growing things. We both decided we had had enough of communal living, we’d have a single room somewhere that we’d share. If we could get to the same university or to colleges close together.

  So we made firm plans for the Exodus and vague plans for when it was past. One afternoon, it was September 16th, after we’d been sitting at a table outside a café in Clifton Road drinking cups of tea, then coffee, we trailed slowly home by way of Randolph Avenue to find Jonny’s van parked on a meter at the Castlemaine Road end and Jonny sitting in the cab, smoking a cigarette.

  You hear a lot today about the prevalence in London of unmarked white vans. There are allegedly thousands of them about, no one knows who buys them or who owns them and there’s generally said to be some malign reason behind possessing one. None of this was thought of, as far as I know, eleven years ago. If Jonny’s white van, which he always kept immaculate, looked sinister to me, this was only because I associated it inevitably with him, and later came to be reminded of him by every white van I saw. He waved cheerfully at us and opened the driver’s door.

  ‘Let us in, will you, mate? I need a word with Liv.’

  I suppose Silver reasoned that she could come to little harm with the rest of us there. Anyway, he said yes, all right, whereupon Jonny got down, carrying two bottles of wine and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. He preceded us up the path and Silver unlocked the front door.

  Liv was walking short distances in the street now without screaming or shivering or passing out. But at this point she seemed to have called a halt. It was plain she didn’t want to go home or, come to that, go anywhere. She was a bit like Alison in that respect. Both of them felt safe where they were and very unsafe elsewhere. Before we came along, Alison was presumably waiting for the unlikely event of the social services relenting. Liv was waiting to see what Wim would do. That he would do anything requiring a positive decision on his part, anything in the nature of setting up house with Liv, was even more improbable than Alison’s local authority letting her keep Jason. But Liv hoped. And meanwhile she was staying put.

  We found her in the living room, lying on the sofa asleep. The windows were shut. It had been a chilly day in comparison with the weather we had had in August. Wim usually had to tap on the glass when he came unless Liv had opened one of the windows for him, something she often did far too early in the evening, making the rest of us shiver. Jonny, first making a face of disgust at the sight of her lying there on her back, her mouth open, her skirt rucked up around her thighs, stamped his feet and let out a yell that made us jump.

  ‘Wake up, you lazy cow!’

  She shot upright. She blinked at the light and, when she saw Jonny, screamed. She rolled over on to her front, hiding her face in the sofa cushions. He spoke to her fairly gently for him.

  ‘Come on, girl, there’s nothing to be scared of. It’s only Jonny, it’s only your old Jonny, right?’ He resorted to nursery rhyme. ‘Only old Jonny who never did you any harm but killed the mice on your father’s farm.’

  A sentiment hardly likely to appeal to Liv. But she sat up and asked him what he wanted. Silver went into the kitchen to make tea but Jonny said we should have a drink, let’s open one of his bottles. Liv was never averse to alcohol, though she was drinking a lot less than she must have done while with the Hindes. Silver had wineglasses but Jonny never used them. They were too small for his taste and it was four tumblers he filled with his Portuguese green wine.

  ‘I’ve come to take you back with me, my love,’ he said.

  ‘I am not going. I am telling you over and over I am not going. I go home to Sweden.’

  I had never known Jonny so reasonable. He started speaking almost like a rational, socially aware human being. ‘Now listen to me, Liv, my love. What are you going to do with yourself back there? Have you got work there, have you got a place to live? Nope. I can get you good well-paid work, not bad hours, and no questions asked about permits and NI number and all that shit.’ The unpleasant idea came to me that what he meant was prostitution. I dismissed it because I thought I was too inexperienced to know about these things but now, looking back, I’m pretty sure I was right. Jonny the cat burglar, Jonny the mugger and now Jonny the pimp. ‘I’ve got a place to live. It’s not grand. To be perfectly honest with you, it’s a dump. But I’ll change all that. I’ll buy a place, a nice little flat in a nice neighbourhood. How does that grab you?’

  If only it had been Wim talking. We who knew could read that in her face. It was a much prettier face by then. Love and nights with Wim must have done that. The red blotchiness was gone, her nose was no longer pink, the cold sores to which she’d been prey even in summer had disappeared. She washed her hair every day and it was golden and glossy. Never cut, allowed to grow, it was even longer than mine. My grandmother used to say that teenage girls had what she called ‘puppy fat’ that melted away when they got older. I don’t know if this is true but Liv, in spite of taking no exercise and eating and drinking quite a lot, had become slimmer in these past weeks. She was very nearly beautiful. Jonny looked at her with hungry eyes.

  ‘I am thinking about it,’ she said. Her English too had improved a lot. ‘I will think about it,’ she corrected herself. ‘You ask me again – next month. No, next week. How is that?’

  Perhaps it was better than Jonny expected. Silver and I went into our room for a while, leaving them to work this out alone. Liv told me the next day that Jonny had said that when she came she could bring the £2,000 as her contribution to ‘household expenses’. It sounded more as if he was planning to set up some sort of suburban establishment rather than the more sinister arrangement I had imagined. She told him the money was gone, the mugger took it when he hit her father and fractured his skull. Jonny, who knew more than she guessed, said her father hadn’t been carrying the money and where was it? Liv denied any knowledge of it, said she was resigned now to its loss. She thought Jonny would ‘try to fuck me’ but he didn’t. She used the word, as many of our contemporaries did, in its correct sense and as part of ordinary conversation, but with her it carried no force, no self-consciousness or weight of associations, so that it sounded almost shocking coming out in that accent from those pretty pink lips.

  He and she finished the wine and had a couple of whiskies each. This sent Liv back to sleep. Jonny was gone by the time we came out of our room. He never worried about driving when about ten times over the limit. He’d told Liv before he left that he was going to begin ‘house-hunting’. Silver phoned Morna and asked if we could come over. There was something we’d like to discuss with her.

  She shared a flat with three other girls in a Whitechapel back street. I had never been there before. The flat wasn’t in one of the tiny terraced houses, now preserved and, for all I know, listed, but in a faceless sixties red-brick block, of which there were many in the area. I don’t know if it belonged to a college or if they rented it privately. I was more concerned about the means of getting there. Silver, knowing the way I was – how could he forget, he said
, considering the way we met on the best day of his life? – had already planned the three buses we must take. So it would take a long time? We had all the time in the world until Exodus Day One.

  Morna insisted we have supper. It was a rich vegetable-laden beef stew and the first red meat, almost the first meat, I’d eaten since I’d last gone out to dinner with Guy in March. Two of Morna’s flatmates were out and the other was in her room among her biochemistry books. She said she’d willingly drive Silver and Jason to Heathrow, and if she couldn’t borrow her mother’s car she’d hire one. That was something we had never thought of, hiring a car. But she had a better idea.

  ‘Why don’t I take him to Sydney?’

  We just looked at her. ‘You’ll have to get a visa.’

  ‘They’ll take less notice of a woman than a man. I can say I’m his aunt. Look at me, I might be his aunt.’

  Morna was dark-haired and dark-eyed and her skin was sallow with no red flush on the cheeks, she was tall and big and voluptuous, her neck and arms deeply tanned, but somehow just the same she looked like what she was, a Celt born of Irish parents in Dublin. No sensitive person would have taken her for Asian but perhaps passport-control people weren’t very sensitive. Still, her offer was too good to turn down. She was a better bet than a young blond man.

  We said Andrew and Alison would be very grateful, though we weren’t really sure they would be.

  ‘If they’ve any qualms, tell them I was the first to see Andrew Lane. I spotted him when no one knew where he was. But hadn’t I better come and see them myself first?’

  We agreed and said we’d take her there. The most important thing was for her to meet Jason and, if possible, get him to like her and want to go with her. Morna agreed to Friday, produced for our pudding course a large apple crumble, and began on a long involved tale about how she had seen Lauren Bacall in Fortnum’s, but it couldn’t have been her because she’d seen a photograph of her at some Hollywood première the very same night.

  ‘Maybe she can be in two places at once,’ Silver said. ‘There’s a priest called Padre Pio that can. I read about him in the paper.’

  I kept my diary quite meticulously from that day forward, noting the weather and the temperature and the comings and goings of visitors to the flat. Somehow I knew this time would be important and should be recorded. Of course, I didn’t know it would be important in a quite different way from what I had expected. The day Morna offered to go to Australia in Silver’s place was Thursday 16 September. On the 17th I was up early because I had to take our washing to the launderette – the first time either of us had gone since Silver’s discovery of Guy’s letter – and then go to work at the Houghtons’. I had just made tea when Wim came out of Liv’s bedroom. He’d already been down and brought up the newspapers.

  ‘I’ll take her in a cup,’ he said, astonishing me.

  I’d never before heard him offer to do anything for her, still less wait on her. I handed him a mug of the milkless tea she preferred and he surprised me again by showing he knew her tastes and tipping into it two spoonfuls of sugar. This made me long to ask him if he meant to find somewhere for them both and take her away. Neither Silver nor I knew if he had a room to live in like Jonny or if he’d given it up when he began regularly spending nights with Liv. I longed to ask. Something about Wim, his remoteness, his seeming lack of ordinary human impulses, fears, needs, hopes, as usual held me back. So I made the tea and took a mug to Silver with one of the newspapers and hoped, when I came out of the bedroom again, that Wim would confide in me. He didn’t. He ate bread and marmalade, three or four slices of it, and hunted around the uninhabited rooms in the flat for two bars of chocolate he said he’d put in a safe place the night before. I read the other newspaper, the one Silver hadn’t got. Still unable to find his chocolate, Wim departed through the window.

  It was a cool morning with a sharp wind blowing. Clouds like the froth on soapy water scurried across the sky. I watched Wim climb the mansard swiftly and gracefully. It was the last time I was ever to see him go up on the roof.

  I closed the window, keeping the cold out.

  *

  Mr and Mrs Houghton had gone away on holiday. Before they left Mrs Houghton gave me a key to the house. ‘To keep an eye on things’ and, ironically, to perform the very tasks we’d used as an excuse for being in another elderly couple’s home, watering the houseplants.

  I had had the key since the previous Monday and nearly mentioned it to Wim that morning. The houses in Randolph Avenue at this particular point in the terraces were exceptionally tall. I wondered if Wim would like me to take him into the house and let him climb out of one of the top-floor windows. Would it be a betrayal of trust? Neither Mr nor Mrs Houghton had asked me not to take anyone into their house. Probably they took it for granted I’d invite my boyfriend in. They had met him and liked him. Wim would do no damage, would steal nothing, would want to take no advantage beyond climbing out of a bedroom window and perhaps climbingback again. I couldn’t decide. I’d ask Silver.

  Inside the house it was like old Mrs Fisherton’s, full of furniture old-fashioned even when the Houghtons were young. There was a smell of old fabrics never washed or cleaned, of stuffiness and of substances used to keep away moths. If you’re an untidy housekeeper in London, if you don’t clear up crumbs and put away food at night, mice will come. They had come to Mrs Houghton’s kitchen. I recognized their traces from the signs left behind by Liv’s mice. One, or several, of them, having eaten the crumbs, had gone to work chewing up a cookbook. I watered the already dry and drooping ivy and cissus and maidenhair fern, and then I went outside to treat the lawn with hormone broad-leaf weedkiller and grass seed.

  Silver came for me at four. I asked him about Wim and the Houghtons’ roof.

  ‘I don’t know. I suppose you have to apply the Golden Rule.’

  ‘What’s the Golden Rule?’

  ‘Do as you would be done by. You ask yourself: if you owned a house, would you mind your gardener taking a friend in to get out of your window and climb on your roof. You wouldn’t and I wouldn’t, but would you if you were seventy and scared of burglars and whatever?’

  ‘You mean, better not?’

  ‘Better not,’ he said. ‘I feel I’m growing old when I say that –’ and almost petulantly – ‘I’m sick of people making me an oracle on morals. What do I know?’

  The way he spoke did a lot to restore my faith in him. I took his advice. But just the same my belief that everything he said came from some fount of integrity and wisdom was shaken. He had read my letter. I realized that if I had been asked by someone who didn’t know him for a sketch of his character I’d have described him as being as unlikely to read someone’s private correspondence as to steal their wallet. And, though this is the melodramatic way of putting things Silver so disliked, the poison seeped into other areas of our life. Up till then I had believed entirely in the rightness of what we were doing for the people in 4E. But that day, as we walked home to Russia Road, the doubts began. I didn’t voice them. I told no one. But I set them down in my diary.

  Suppose Sean Francis was right and Andrew and Alison were not the suitable parents for Jason they thought they were? Was it possible that the social services knew best? I’d read what the newspapers said. Andrew and Alison were rejected because Jason was of mixed race and they weren’t. But there could be other reasons for that rejection, additional reasons. You wouldn’t have called theirs a loving relationship, for instance. Perhaps it had been once but by now all the love seemed on Alison’s side. Andrew was impatient with her, rude and bad-tempered, and, although he had almost got what he apparently wanted, discontented. The fact couldn’t be got away from that they had abducted Jason. For all I knew, that might be a crime, it was certainly a serious offence. Silver had felt he was growing old when he warned me off inviting Wim into the Houghtons’ house, and now, feeling the pull of prudence, I too seemed to be moving into an unwelcome maturity.

  I thrust
it away. Roll on September 22nd, it couldn’t come soon enough for me.

  We went to the cinema. We went to the pub afterwards. Now we had time to kill we had started behaving like other people. On the way home we made a diversion to check that the scaffolding between the end of the terrace in Torrington Gardens and Peterborough Avenue was still there, though it no longer mattered very much whether it was there or not. We mostly entered by the front door and the stairs. All the lights in 4E were out, and not only those. The whole house was in darkness. We were walking slowly along Torrington Gardens towards the burnt houses when the sound of a taxi’s diesel engine made us turn round. It had drawn up outside No. 4. Two people got out of it, we could see them quite clearly in the lamp-light. The man paid the driver and he too got out to help them with their luggage, some of which was piled on the seat beside him. The woman ran up the steps and opened the front door.

  We looked at each other. These must be the Nylands. I tried to remember who had told us they were an elderly couple. Was it Andrew? Had he ever seen them? When you’re our age you think everyone over forty is old but Andrew was forty. I’m bad at ages and no doubt was worse then, but these two were younger than my parents. They seemed smartly dressed, though it was hard to tell from that distance. They were thin, strong and light on their feet. She had been carrying a case in each hand when she ran up those steps. We said to each other simultaneously, the same thought coming to each of us, that we were glad the scaffolding was still there. For safety’s sake we might have to use it.

  At Silver’s all the lights were out too. This was unusual. It never seemed to happen that the last to leave or go to bed put out the lights. Darkness and silence make you feel you have to creep about. Someone had left one of the windows open and a wintry breeze was blowing in. I shut the window and we went to bed.

  I’ve never suffered from insomnia but that night I couldn’t get to sleep. First of all, I lay spoons-fashion close beside Silver, his arm round my waist. Then, restless and uncomfortable, I turned over and gently pushed him over, this time embracing him. That didn’t work either and at last I got up and walked about, searching my mind for what was keeping me awake and finally deciding it must be those doubts I had had earlier. Those doubts and the return of the Nylands, such different people from what we had expected. I told myself what Silver would have told me, that worrying was useless and destructive. If one was doing what one knew was right, there was nothing to worry about. But was it right?