Grasshopper Page 44

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘but I want him caught.’

  ‘He wanted revenge and now you do. Revenge doesn’t help.’

  ‘Doesn’t it? Knowing Jonny’s being punished may help Wim a bit when he realizes he’ll never go on the roofs again, when he knows Jonny did that to him to take away the great passion of his life.’

  Silver shrugged. ‘He knows already. When I hear that expression “a fate worse than death” – well, you don’t hear it any more but you read it in books – I’ve always thought it was a bit of a joke. I mean, what’s worse than death? Now I’m not so sure.’

  Andrew and Alison came back into my mind and I was on the verge of voicing my doubts about the rightness of what we were doing. I had the words ready to utter. ‘Are you certain we’re doing the right thing, getting them to Australia? Making sure they keep Jason? Because if there’s a doubt…’ But even in my mind I left the sentence unfinished. I suppose I felt Silver and I were disagreeing too much. I was afraid of reopening a gulf between us. Besides, we were tired, Silver looked tired out, having had only about three hours’ sleep the night before.

  Niall had found himself a girlfriend and was spending the night at her place, was thinking of moving in with her. For the first time since I came to 15 Russia Road, Silver and I were alone. There had been times when I had longed for this, when it had seemed something to dream of, and that if it ever happened all would be bliss, all would be a kind of everlasting honeymoon. But now I felt afraid. I even wondered how we’d be together with no one else to talk to or escape from or complain about. But I was very tired, which perhaps accounted for it, and we had had a bad shock, been through a dreadful time, though not so dreadful as poor Wim had.

  The next day Silver and I were both wanted at the police station. No one said so but it was plain Jonny hadn’t yet been found. A policeman, who I think was a detective inspector, was perfectly polite but I could tell he didn’t believe a lot of the things we said, though we told the strict truth. He had special difficulties with Liv’s living in the flat while Jonny lived elsewhere and was openly incredulous when we said that she had left the house within hours of the attack on Wim. Nor did he seem to believe us when we said we had no idea where she was. We had given him the Almquists’ address and phone number in Kiruna. I told him about her mother’s friend who lived somewhere on the northern fringes of London. Silver told him about the Elgin Avenue hotel. Whether the police ever followed any of this up we never found out.

  We went off on a routine visit to 4E and had a surprise. Two days before, the scaffolding between the end of the terrace and Peterborough Avenue was still there. This evening it was gone. No trace of it remained but a couple of rusty clamps and a plastic bag full of the builders’ cigarette ends lying under the ilexes among the grass and weeds. Its removal seemed unimportant, we had long ceased to get into the flat by that means.

  We had bought food on the way back from the police station, rather a lot of food because we hoped it might be the last we’d ever have to take up to 4E. We were each carrying two Sainsbury’s bags. Our heads were so full of Wim and the police distrust of us, of Jonny and the mystery of where Liv might have gone, that we had forgotten the existence of the Nylands and came up the stairs talking to each other. The bags were heavy and, used to these staircases as we were, we couldn’t run up as we might have done if empty-handed.

  We had scarcely reached the first floor when the Nylands’ door opened and Mrs Nyland came out. She looked older than she had appeared to be in the midnight street but young enough and with the physique, a kind of high-toned stringiness, of a woman who has been an athlete or a dancer. She wore a voluminous T-shirt and shorts which showed long dark-brown well-muscled legs.

  ‘Oh, excuse me!’ There’s a certain kind of middle-aged woman, the county sort of whom I had seen plenty in Suffolk, who never say ‘excuse me’ without prefacing it with ‘Oh’. The tone is authoritative and the last word rises to a high interrogatory note. ‘Oh, excuse me!’ Here was a perfect exponent of the art of it. ‘But where exactly do you think you’re going?’

  It had all happened very quickly. We had never thought of any excuse or reason for going up to Flat E, though we should have done after bumping into Sean Francis. Silver came out with the truth. There was really no choice.

  ‘Some friends of ours live on the top floor.’

  ‘Are you quite sure of that?’

  The door behind her had swung wide open. The hall was unlike anywhere else in the building and quite unlike 15 Russia Road. The carpet was black and the furniture white. A huge black and white abstract in a stainless-steel frame hung on the wall facing us. Silently, walking on sandalled feet, the man we had seen get out of the taxi came out into the hall and stood in front of it. The woman turned her head and spoke to him in a rather softer tone.

  ‘Darling, I caught these people going to the top floor. They say friends of theirs live up there. Rather odd, don’t you think?’

  Nyland came nearer. ‘Not squatters, are you?’

  ‘Look,’ Silver said, ‘let us just get this stuff up there, will you? Then you can come up and check.’

  He told me later he was expecting to have called their bluff. If he invited them up to Flat 4E, in the nature of things they wouldn’t come, they’d be satisfied. But they weren’t. Nyland, who was a very tall skinny man, the Clint Eastwood type, looked even more suspicious than his wife. He said he’d follow us up now.

  Those were a nerve-racking forty-five seconds. With me going first and Silver behind me and Nyland behind him, I thought we had a chance. Luckily, Andrew happened to be just behind the door when I rang our code. I mouthed, ‘Hide Jason.’

  When you’re on the run, when you’re in hiding, you develop a new sense and one that makes you react quickly, Andrew simply called out to us to come in before retreating. We came into the hall one after another, leaving the door open behind us. Alison was nowhere to be seen. Jason, I suppose, had been taken into his bedroom. A radio was on in one of the rooms and chamber music was playing. It was greatly reassuring and gave to the whole set-up a respectable air, so that when Andrew re-emerged, absolutely calm, even smiling, I inwardly congratulated him. Afterwards he told us his manner was the tranquillity born of despair. He thought Nyland was a policeman.

  Nyland, in much the same tone as his wife used, said, ‘I’m so sorry to bother you but actually I’d no idea at all anyone was living up here.’

  ‘My wife and I have been here for three weeks,’ Andrew said.

  ‘Ah, that accounts for it. We went away a month ago.’ Nyland’s suspicions weren’t entirely quietened. ‘Would you mind telling me who exactly let the flat to you?’

  ‘Mr Robinson himself. He’s a friend of my wife’s.’

  This was a mistake, or seemed to be to me, but Nyland was satisfied. He said again, ‘I’m so sorry to bother you, but the times we live in, you know…’ He looked at the Sainsbury’s bags which we’d let drop on to the floor. You could see what was going through his mind. Were these people invalids or agoraphobes (like Liv) that they couldn’t do their own shopping? ‘Well, I’ll say good night, then, and maybe we’ll see you around.’

  The door closed behind him and we heard his feet on the marble stairs.

  ‘Why the hell did you bring that guy in here?’ Andrew’s mood had changed from calm to rage. Relief had released fury. ‘You could at least have warned us. Jason’s frightened out of his wits.’

  ‘We’d have warned you if we could,’ I said. ‘He just came out as we were going upstairs, or his wife did.’

  I’d never heard Silver so aggressive. ‘Come to that, why the hell did you tell us they were old? An elderly couple is what you said. We expected a pair of pensioners. Then out leaps this woman who looks like an Olympic gold medallist. Who said they were old?’

  ‘Louis Robinson.’

  Alison had appeared, holdingJason by the hand. He broke away from her and ran to me. I bent down and he threw his arms round my neck, pressin
g his cheek to mine. He was almost too heavy for me to lift but I managed it and hugged him, falling down into a chair with him on top of me.

  ‘That’s right, isn’t it, Ally? Louis told you those Nylands were old?’

  She looked ill, by now so thin as to be emaciated. Her eyes, which had never looked particularly large in her photographs or when we first met, were huge; frightened, threatened eyes of a faded blue in dark wrinkled nests. ‘Louis told my mother that years ago. It can’t have been long before she died. He told her they were an old couple. I think this may be the son. I think that was the daughter-in-law you saw.’

  ‘A pity you didn’t say so before,’ Andrew snapped. ‘Diana’s been dead for years.’

  ‘Let’s not quarrel. Any of us.’ She sounded tired to death. She had nothing to do and she never went out but she was exhausted. ‘Shall we have a drink? I see you’ve brought the wine.’

  Now everyone had calmed down we had a lot to tell them. Principally, that Morna not Silver would be taking Jason to Sydney. Our idea of introducing her to them had been lost in the awful events of two nights before. Now Alison insisted on meeting her. I’d never known her so firm, so single-minded.

  ‘I can’t entrust my son to someone I’ve never met.’

  ‘My son’ – I hadn’t heard her refer to Jason like that before. ‘Can’t you look on her as just a courier?’

  ‘If it was myself, yes. Not when it’s Jason.’

  Silver said he’d see if Morna would come with us the next day, the Saturday. We discussed the Nylands a little longer. Were they satisfied that Andrew was a bona fide tenant? Would they do anything?

  ‘Like what?’ Alison said. ‘All they could do is get in touch with Louis. He’ll tell them he was a friend of my mother’s.’

  Andrew voiced the fear Silver and I felt. ‘I’m wondering if there’s ever been anything in the papers about people like Louis. I mean, interviews with friends and acquaintances of ours, or even just a mention of their names as people known to us, people who might help us. Because if there has, that ass Nyland might make the connection.’ He turned on Silver again. ‘Why the hell didn’t you tell him your mother lived up here or something?’

  ‘You think that would have stopped him coming up? Let’s not go into that again anyway. The important thing is you’ve only got four more days here and Jason’s only got three. You say Louis Robinson lives in France and he’s hard to get in touch with. By the time Nyland does, if he does, you’ll all be out of here. We’ll bring Morna to meet you tomorrow.’

  But Morna couldn’t manage the next day. She had a date with a new man. In the circumstances, we couldn’t ask her to break it, she was doing enough for us already, or for Andrew and Alison, whose fates in a curious way seemed so bound up with our own. Especially with Silver’s. Whatever happened to ‘don’t worry’? I asked him. What happened to the way he was when first we met?

  ‘I’d nothing to worry about then,’ he said.

  31

  Wim never mentioned Liv’s name. He seemed to have forgotten her existence. Jonny was of no importance to him either, neither as himself nor as the perpetrator of his terrible injury. He was like someone who faces death, who has become used to the inevitability of death, and considers everything in the light of this. Yet there was no question of his dying. The only risk was of a thrombosis occurring in his right leg. The doctors had told him they feared at first his foot would have to be amputated but that was no longer a threat. He would walk again, they said. With time, and if the stretching of the ruptured tendon went according to plan, he’d be walking within months. You’ll never win the long jump, a kindly registrar had told him, thinking this a restriction no reasonable man of nearly thirty would care about, you’ll never run in the Marathon.

  For Wim was nearly thirty. He’d been twenty-nine at his last birthday, a year or so older than we had thought. He told us so as we sat by his bed and the arrangement of pulleys and strings that held his leg up. His story, which we’d never expected to hear, he told us also, his right hand in mine and his left hand in Silver’s.

  His father was a Dutchman who’d been in a circus that travelled across northern France and Belgium, a tightrope walker. A funambule, Wim called him. It was when the circus made a stop in Wimereux that he met Wim’s mother Catherine. She had driven in from the countryside with a crowd of girlfriends to watch him walk the tightrope, which was suspended from one high building to another, right across the town’s main square. It may have been from a church tower to the mairie, Wim didn’t know, but it spanned the square and there was no safety net. Maurits, which was Wim’s father’s name, never used a net. A net would have removed the danger and spoilt the crowd’s awed pleasure. Catherine went out for a drink, then a meal, with Maurits that night and left her girlfriends to go home alone.

  She stayed with him for two months, travelling with the circus up into Belgium, to Liège, to Mons. In a town up there whose name Wim was never told, there were two churches, one on either side of the main square, each with spires about ninety feet tall. The tightrope was suspended from one to the other and Maurits commenced his walk by stepping out of the belfry of the Sacred Heart and heading for the belfry of the Queen of Heaven. No one knew why it happened. Catherine told her cousin he lost his equilibrium because he was so excited at the news she had given him that morning – news which excited her not at all – that she was pregnant. Perhaps he was tired. They had been travelling for most of the day and only reached the place in the early evening. Whatever caused it, he lost his balance halfway across and fell. The crowd screamed, people rushed forward to try and catch him, a vain effort. He died instantly, smashed on the cobblestones of the square.

  Catherine went home to her parents. She was only eighteen. It was 1958, a time when pregnancy outside marriage was still a disgrace. But her parents looked after her. Her father was a wealthy manufacturer, there was plenty of money. They sent her to her aunt in Utrecht and there Wim was born in a small and very select nursing home. Catherine had had months in which to recount her experiences to her cousins, girls whose ages were very near her own, and it was one of them who passed what she knew on to Wim. For Catherine didn’t stay long. One night when everyone was asleep, including the three-week-old baby, she went, leaving the baby behind. It was his prolonged howls which brought one of the cousins to the room and found her gone.

  ‘No one wanted me,’ Wim said, ‘but they thought it their duty to keep me. I stayed a few months with Aunt Marie, during which she had me baptized in a name of her choosing, then a few more with my grandparents, then back to Marie. One of my cousins got married, so it was time for her to take her turn. I was with her for a year and then she had a child of her own, so it was back to my grandparents. They didn’t mind how much they paid to have me looked after. It was just that they found it a bore doing it themselves. I was a nuisance, no one made a secret of that. They used to say so, sighing and smiling. ‘He’s a nuisance, poor little thing, but what can we do?’ My father’s mother turned up when I was eight. I spent two years with her. I think my other grandparents gave her a lump sum.’

  He told all this in his deadpan way, saying nothing of his emotions, criticizing no one. A faint flush mounted into his face but that may have been caused by the exertion of talking so much – an unheard-of amount for him.

  ‘My paternal grandparents sent me to boarding school. It was OK. My cousin Renée told me about my parents when I was about fourteen, the story of the tightrope fall among others. Nobody had heard from my mother since I was three weeks old. Then she turned up. I was a student, I was at the University of Utrecht. She waited for me in the street one Friday evening as I was going home to Marie’s. She was in a nice car and was wearing a fine fur coat. No one minded about wearing fur then. She said she wanted to talk to me with a view to my coming to live with her in Amsterdam. Her husband knew about me, would welcome me, and so would the three children she’d had by him.’

  ‘What did you do?’ Silver asked
.

  ‘Nothing. I just walked on. She called after me but I took no notice. The funny thing was it was on the edge of the red-light district and passers-by must have thought she was a whore, a rich whore or one with a rich pimp. She called after me, she got out of the car and ran after me. People laughed. Someone said, “What’s wrong with you, boy? I should be so lucky.” She was very pretty, you see, and only about thirty-seven.

  ‘She came to Marie’s. She begged me to go to Amsterdam with her. At any rate, for the long vacation. I couldn’t speak to her. I suppose it was wrong of me. But I kept remembering how she’d abandoned me when I was three weeks old.’

  Wim said he had a law degree but he had never been able to hold down a job. He had had several but he couldn’t stand the constraints, the routine, the regular hours. Being an artisan, doing labouring work, he thought might be the answer. He had to work. Once he had graduated Marie and her daughters no longer wanted to know him.

  ‘They would have if I’d stuck to the law and got to be a judge. My grandparents were all dead. I worked on a building site, then doing odd building jobs. One of them was with a roofer. It was in Liège. There were these houses, a terrace, and the person who owned them wanted the leads taken off and tiles laid. I was happy up there. I suppose I was happy for the first time in my life.’

  ‘Why did you come here?’

  ‘First of all, I came on a trip, a tour. Very cheap, just four days. I’d never been to The Hague. I’d not even been to Brussels. The buildings in London were the highest I’d ever seen, that is, seen so many of them. And the roofs were mostly flat. I thought of climbing the Houses of Parliament, I thought of Westminster Abbey. I came here four years ago. I’ve never been able to get building work here, it’s always been in kitchens. But that was good enough.’

  He looked at his suspended leg and, covered though it was in plaster, he shivered. Neither of us said anything. We all thought the same thing, I’m sure of that. What would become of him? What do you do when the great thing in your life, the only thing, is taken away? I thought of Jonny too and the awful life he had had as a child. Was it any worse than Wim’s, the same, better? It was impossible to judge. Had Wim inherited his passion for the heights, for walking in the sky, from his father? Or was that ridiculous, imagining there could be such an inherited tendency? It was more likely that he had wanted to follow his father’s example. Perhaps Maurits had been his hero, a figure to worship. He didn’t say. One thing seemed certain, his father was the only one of his relatives who hadn’t abandoned him, let him down or cold-shouldered him. He had died instead.