Grasshopper Read online

  Jonny’s had been a brilliant revenge, a stroke of genius. The same day as when Wim told us his story, the police picked him up. Where or how they found him I don’t know. Later we discovered he had appeared in the magistrates’ court, been charged with causing grievous bodily harm to Wim. Just as we never again saw Liv, so Jonny passed out of our lives. But not entirely, not for ever.

  I’ve seen him twice since then, the first time to talk to. The second time was last year, a few days before I got married. Knowing me now, you won’t be surprised when I say I didn’t wear a wedding dress on the day, but nor did I intend to go to the altar in jeans and a pea coat. I was coming out of a shop in Sloane Street with the blue dress and jacket I had just bought in a golden carrier more grand than my outfit, when I saw him sitting at the wheel of a huge cream-coloured Bentley parked round the corner in a side street. He was wearing a suit, a white shirt and a very sleek silver-grey tie, smoking a cigarette and dropping the ash out of the window. There’s a point in Sloane Street where the pavement gets very wide, facing the gardens of Sloane Square. I sat down on a wall and watched him. Did he see me? I don’t know. If he had I doubt if he’d have acknowledged me. If he thought about me at all, he was probably happily anticipating what I was going to witness in a moment.

  I thought he was someone’s driver. That would account for his dropping his ash out of the window rather than sully the interior of the car. He lit another cigarette from the stub of the last. A woman of about twenty-five came out of the shoe shop on the corner, laden with shoe boxes in bags as smart as mine. She might have been a clone of Liv as she now was. Perhaps her hair was a brighter blonde, her make-up heavier, her legs an inch or two longer. I knew Jonny wasn’t her employee when he didn’t get out to open the car door for her. She threw the bags into the back, got in beside him, kissed him on the cheek. She took the cigarette out of his mouth, drew on it and handed it back. I saw him make a playful swipe at her, not something I’d like him to do to me, playful or otherwise, put one hand to the wheel and move out into the traffic stream.

  Another success story. Silver had forecast it or something very like it as we walked along the canal bank on our way to Torrington Gardens. Jonny was irrepressible, he said, nothing would get him down for long. He’d end up a rich man, a big-time crook.

  ‘Won’t he get years and years in prison for what he’s done to Wim? It’s not the first time. Remember the Gilmore Hotel. And what about what he did to Liv’s dad?’

  ‘They’ll never prove that,’ Silver said. ‘He may not even be convicted. It will only be Wim’s word against his. We didn’t see him. Liv won’t go to court, she’s disappeared.’

  We were passing the spot where the woman who lived on the boat had been murdered in April. They’d never found the murderer. Had it been Jonny? As far as we knew he had never actually killed anyone, though he had come close to it. Still, if a miss is as good as a mile in any circumstances, it’s never so true as between killing someone and nearly doing so. The trees that border the canal here had crowns of dense faded leaves, the water was flat, rocking a little like liquid in a shallow plate, the same dark green as the leaves. Someone had planted a garden near the towpath, bright and variegated as a florist’s shop. I said suddenly how unpleasant it would be if it was some act of Jonny’s which had brought Silver and me together. It was bad enough recalling that it was the violent death of someone which had done so, for if that woman hadn’t been murdered down here and the police cordoned off the towpath, I’d never have hazarded the underpass or been saved from my terrors by Silver.

  ‘It doesn’t matter what it was,’ he said, ‘so long as it happened.’ And looking into my anxious face, ‘Don’t worry,’ which made us both laugh, though the voice he had used was like a ghost of the confidence he had once had.

  Wim’s fate overshadowed us. But it drew us together again as we clung to each other for support. Silver kissed me and a man coming out of the Prince Alfred whistled. We waved at him as we crossed the street into Torrington Gardens. For a moment I was filled with joy, exhilarated beyond words, at this, Silver’s first spontaneous sign of love for a long time.

  The street lights were almost lost in the heavy dark foliage of the plane trees. Where the scaffolding had stood, shrubs crushed by the uprights and putlocks were uncurling and spreading upwards, released from their confinement. In the half-dark a squirrel ran through the long grass and leapt for the trunk of an ash tree. Its eyes glittered. I smiled at it, I was smiling at all the world. We used our key, came into the hall. There we took off our shoes and carried them, so as to pass the Nylands’ door as silently as we could.

  Lights suddenly came on above and below us. We were flooded with light, caught ascending a staircase with our shoes in our hands, clearly intent on performing some act by stealth. The people on the landing above us, the first we saw, we had never seen previously. It was apparent they had been the Nylands’ guests for the evening. The Nylands were just inside their front door, with a black and white abstract for a backdrop, saying good night. We hadn’t realized how late it was. People of our age never do realize how late it is. I doubt if either of us was wearing a watch. A clock inside the flat ominously struck eleven as Mrs Nyland came out on to the landing and asked us once more what we thought we were doing, this time not prefacing her question with an ‘Oh, excuse me!’

  ‘Visiting our friends.’ Silver’s voice was very abrupt. I wondered if he had gone too far when he said, ‘If you don’t like it, I suggest you call Mr Robinson in the south of France. He’ll vouch for them and us.’

  ‘What I don’t like is your tone –’ Mrs Nyland began but she was cut short by her husband’s sharp utterance of her name.

  ‘Vivien!’

  ‘You can put your shoes on now. We know you’re here. You needn’t creep about like cat burglars.’

  ‘Vivien, that’s enough!’

  The departing guests were embarrassed. I sensed a full-scale row breaking out between the Nylands after the rest of us had gone and their door was shut. No one said any more. We advanced up the next flight, still carrying our shoes, feeling foolish. The lights went out as suddenly as they had come on and I nearly fell over backwards down the stairs. I clutched to Silver and whispered that maybe we were too late and they’d have gone to bed but he said to go on, they’d rather get up to open the door than not see us at all.

  Perhaps he was right but there was very little sign of it in Andrew’s manner. He was fully dressed, though complaining he had been just about to go to bed. Alison, he said, was asleep and so was Jason. I was sure this was true of Jason but doubted if Alison ever slept much these nights, and the thought had barely taken form in my mind when she came out of their bedroom in a dressing gown whose sash tied her waist so tightly that it looked as narrow as my thigh.

  We sat in the living room. Silver said we’d be bringing Morna to meet them the next day. Then he asked Andrew for the money they owed him. It was nearly £5,000, not including the cost of Morna’s return ticket. Andrew again came up with his excuse that the money was in Jason’s room.

  ‘Could you see that it isn’t in his room when we come tomorrow, please?’

  Andrew raised his eyebrows. ‘Are you insinuating I don’t intend to pay you?’

  ‘Look, you can think what you like,’ Silver said, and while he talked his eyes had gone to the little china birds, a greenfinch, a thrush, a wren, clustered on the bookshelf. ‘You can think what you like, but I’ll just ask you one thing. Don’t you understand that with anyone else of our sort of age, you’d have to have given them the money for all this first, not expect them to fund you and you owe it to them? Don’t you?’

  ‘Why are you looking at those birds?’ Alison said as if he hadn’t spoken.

  ‘I don’t know. I think I’ve seen them before but I don’t know.’

  Andrew said, ‘How much is it? How much do I owe you?’

  Silver seemed in a dream. From the birds he had moved his gaze to Alison. He was s
taring at her as if he had never seen her before. Women of her age, when their faces are free of make-up, can look surprisingly young. The only light in the room came from a low-wattage table-lamp. He looked at her and seemed to have difficulty wrenching his gaze away. ‘It’s £5,000 but I don’t expect you to pay Morna’s fare.’

  ‘I should think not,’ Andrew said, though why he should think not was a mystery, since she was going to Australia in his service as courier to the child he regarded as his.

  ‘The bill comes to £3,890. I’ve a receipt but I haven’t got it with me. I’ll show you the cheque-stub if you like.’

  A conman could write anything he liked on a cheque-stub, was what was going through Andrew’s mind. And then I could see – for the first time – that in their eyes we might not be the creatures of probity we were in our own. It was true we had procured passports for them and Silver had the airline tickets in his hand but they had no guarantee these were genuine. Experienced forgers could produce airline tickets with ease. They had our promise but only our promise to take Jason to Australia and get them safely out to Heathrow a day later. Only a promise from people they knew nothing about…

  Silver pulled his chequebook out of his pocket. It had been folded in half and looked rather shabby and disreputable. He had forgotten and I had forgotten we had told them, weeks ago, that we were both called Brown. We live in a society in which surnames have less importance than they have had since perhaps the Middle Ages. To them we were Silver and Clodagh. Andrew looked at the cheque-stub and looked at the next, unused, cheque in the book.

  ‘Who’s this M. R. Silverman?’ he said.

  ‘Me, of course.’

  Silver realized then. He was going to explain, would have done so, but for the gasp that came from Alison. She stood up. I thought she was going to fall and I jumped up myself, to seize her by the arm. She stood as still as a statue, looking at Silver, and he, as he had been doing a few moments before, looked at her.

  ‘You have seen the birds before,’ she said in a thin, remote voice, quite unlike her usual rich tone. ‘And you’ve seen me before. Oh, Michael, don’t you remember?’

  32

  We went home at last, forgetful of Vivien Nyland. No doubt she was asleep. It was two in the morning. The lamps were out, no one was in the streets and all was as silent as the countryside but for the hum from the arterial roads. Silver looked very pale in the light of our hall, even paler than usual. His hands were icy to the touch.

  ‘How long have you known?’ I asked him.

  ‘I don’t know. Not to say known. I had a feeling sometimes, a kind of déjà vu. When you took the broken bits of the little bird out of your jeans pocket, I was really upset. I had that sort of sensation of the sun going in, do you know what I mean?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Jeans pockets have got a lot to answer for.’

  We went upstairs and straight into our bedroom. We lay on the bed. ‘And then when Andrew talked about Diana, said that Alison’s mother was called Diana, I was nearly sure. I didn’t want to be. I suppose I realized then that I didn’t want to know who’d abducted me.’

  ‘The ship in the bottle?’ I said.

  ‘I told you I had this memory of a boat. Because it was on the coast, it was the seaside, everyone thought that meant I’d been taken somewhere in a boat. Small children talk about boats, not ships, but what I remembered was that ship in a bottle.’

  The china birds, Alison said, they had brought with them from their home because they were home to her. It upset her a lot when one of them was broken. The ship in the bottle she hadn’t seen for years until she saw it again here, in 4E, on a shelf in the bedroom that was to be Jason’s. She liked to believe Louis Robinson had put it in there for Jason, but probably that was only wishful thinking. Her mother had given it to Louis’s late wife Helen on one of her visits to London because Helen had admired it on one of her visits to Cornwall. It was here that Andrew had interrupted. I realized then that he hadn’t known, that Alison had never told him. Had she thought he wouldn’t understand?

  Frowning, he said, ‘Are you saying your mother abducted a three-year-old? Just snatched him and took him away?’

  ‘Like we abducted Jason.’ She nodded. ‘Snatched him and took him away.’

  ‘That’s quite different and you know it.’

  ‘Is it? As I see it, it’s the same woman desperate for a child.’ She gave a deep sigh. ‘Not my mother, Andrew, me. I abducted Michael. That was what he told me he was called, Michael.’

  He looked at her and his face underwent a radical, dreadful change. He aged years in a moment. ‘I don’t believe it. You’re mad. This place has driven you mad.’

  I saw that an abyss had opened between those two, and though I longed to know the rest of the story, the why and the how, I was afraid of the explosion that might ensue if any more at all was said. Yet more had to be said. Silver sat silently, leaning forward, his head bent and his elbows on his knees. The lamp-light gleamed on his thatch of pale hair. I noticed he had clenched his fists. To stop himself trembling? I had seldom before seen my calm and steady Silver so affected. Alison saw it too and a great tenderness came into her face. It was the way she sometimes looked at Jason.

  Outside, down in the street, an ambulance siren began to howl. Andrew went to the window and shut it with a slam. The room shook. ‘I don’t understand.’ His voice was cold. ‘I’d like you to explain.’

  ‘I knew I’d have to one day,’ Alison said. ‘I knew there’d be a day of reckoning. Well, it’s a night, isn’t it? This is the night.’

  Silver looked up. The way he spoke was quite unlike his usual light and pleasant tone. ‘Go on, please. I want to know.’

  She glanced at me, I don’t know why, perhaps because I was the only other woman there. She got up and sat in one of the straight-backed chairs at the table. Perhaps she needed to sit upright while she told us. ‘You said I was mad. I suppose I was – then. I was twenty-three. I was only eighteen when I got married. Charles Barrie was fifteen years older than me, but that didn’t make him so very old. He left me after four years, he said he couldn’t stand me always going on about wanting a baby. He said I didn’t talk about anything else. Even our love-making, he said, I only wanted so that I could have a baby.’

  Andrew made a sound of disgust. She shrugged her thin shoulders at him. ‘They told me the abortion had damaged me, it had been done by some woman who’d been a nurse, I’d very likely never have children. That was after Charles had gone. I was living alone in our house in Falmouth and one day I drove over to see my mother. She’d not been well, it was summer flu or something. I stopped outside a shop, a sort of village general stores, and bought her some milk and a bottle of aspirins and the morning paper. Isn’t it strange how you remember these things? Every detail? I went back to the car and saw this little boy standing on the edge of the wood. Well, it wasn’t really a wood, more a strip of trees between the road and the field on top of the cliff. He looked at me and said, “I want my mummy.”’

  Silver made an inarticulate sound of pain or memory. I couldn’t tell which. Alison looked as if she wanted to touch him. If she did, I thought, if she just laid a hand on his arm, he’d strike her. It was a mad idea, he’d never do that, never, not Silver. She sat quite still, her hands on the table.

  ‘Do you know what I thought? Suppose he was saying that about me? Suppose it was me he was missing and wanted? And I said to myself, I’ll make it me. I’ll make him want me. I said to him, “I’ll take you to your mummy,” and I picked him up and put him in the car.’ She turned to Silver. ‘I should say, I picked you up and put you in the car.’ He gave no sign he noticed what she had said. He was in the same position, sitting quite still. ‘I didn’t go to my mother’s. I never got the milk and aspirins and paper to her. I turned round and drove home. You told me your name was Michael. When I got you home and your mother wasn’t there you started crying.’

  Silver spoke then. ‘I can do withou
t the details.’

  She seemed genuinely surprised. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t imagine it would – well, hurt you. Not after so long.’

  ‘Your imagination was at fault.’

  Andrew seemed to approve what he had said. He nodded to himself. And suddenly everyone was ranged against Alison, I among them. I tried not to show how I felt because I was sorry for her too.

  ‘I kept you three days. I looked after you, I gave you everything you wanted. I loved you. You had all the sweets and chocolate you wanted. I got toys for you.’ Alison was crying by then. Her face wasn’t contorted but the tears ran down her cheeks. ‘My mother came over unexpectedly. She was terribly angry, not a bit understanding. I hadn’t seen any newspapers, I hadn’t watched television or listened to the radio. I’d just concentrated on you, Michael. I didn’t know there’d been all that hue and cry. My mother said I either let her take you back or she’d go straight to the police.’ She wiped her eyes with her fingers.

  ‘It was all right for her. She’d had three children. She took you back. I thought I’d die, I was distraught, I was really mad then. I couldn’t bear to look at that ship in a bottle because you’d loved it, you’d played with it, put it by your bed at night. I asked my mother to take it away, get it out of my sight.’

  Andrew got up and walked out of the room. He slammed the door just as he had slammed the window. Alison was sobbing now, her head down on the table. Her body shook. Silver stood over her. Just as I’d thought she was going to touch him ten minutes before, so I fancied he was about to touch her. He didn’t.