Grasshopper Page 46

  ‘Stop crying, Alison.’

  His use of her first name helped. He said it again.

  ‘Stop crying, Alison. Stop it now.’

  She lifted her head. Her face was red and swollen, a wet terrain of puffs and pouches. Even her hair was damp. She ran the fingers of one hand through it. ‘I suppose you won’t want to do anything for us now. You won’t want to helpus.’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ he said. ‘It makes no difference.’

  But it made an enormous difference. As we lay on our bed side by side later on that night, I sensed for both of us that our whole attitude towards them had changed. Andrew we had always distrusted and, while making allowances for his situation and the plight he found himself in, rather disliked. But Alison had been a perfect woman, self-denying, maternal, enormously patient and kind. If we had lately seen Andrew as a less suitable father than we had thought at first, Alison had remained the ideal parent, so that the social services’ bias against her, for any reason, seemed groundless and cruel. Now she emerged as a woman who would have had a criminal record if her mother hadn’t intervened. We both wondered how many other attempts at securing a baby there had been, for we couldn’t believe she had been content with childlessness for the sixteen years between the abduction of Silver and fostering of Jason.

  I asked Silver what the connection between Diana Lomax and the Robinsons had been. He reminded me of his father’s gratitude to her and her (now explained) embarrassment at his effusiveness.

  ‘Dad knew Diana had friends somewhere in Maida Vale. He wanted to know who they were and where they lived, he wanted to ask them all to dinner while Diana was staying with them. I remember she wouldn’t tell him. I remember her one visit to this house when she came on very strong. She actually said she’d done nothing, she didn’t want gratitude and he forced her to say that she thought it was best to leave things as they were. She meant not to get to know each other any better. She asked him not to write to her and not to phone her. I remember that because the atmosphere got quite nasty. I was about eleven.’

  ‘What was she afraid of?’

  ‘Oh, principally, I think, that if the families grew close, which was what Dad wanted, I might see Alison and recognize her. Or I might see something I recognized from that house. Diana had moved in to share with Alison then.

  ‘Mum was completely in agreement. She didn’t want us to keep on knowing Diana, she said she and Dad had nothing in common with her, and it was time Dad realized after eight years that Diana had only done her duty, it was what anyone would have done. As for Diana, I can see it was natural for her to be embarrassed. After all, it was her daughter who was at fault. She hadn’t found me and brought me back out of duty or public-spiritedness or whatever but to save her daughter’s skin. All she wanted was to put a lot of time and space between her family and us Silvermans. She only succeeded by dying. Dad had gone on pursuing her with letters and phone calls. I don’t think he could bear the idea of someone not wanting to be friends with him. He was a bit like a stalker, only he didn’t actually stalk. When I was older I wondered if he’d been attracted by her and that accounted for it, but I don’t think it was that.’

  ‘Does Alison look like her?’

  ‘She does a bit. I saw that too when we first met them but I didn’t know it. I think it’s what drew me to them, a kind of familiarity. Not that Alison reminded me of the woman who had taken me away but that she looked like Diana Lomax. I was saying my dad wasn’t attracted by her. For one thing, I’m sure he’s strictly monogamous, he adores Mum, and for another, Diana – I don’t like saying this about a woman, it reminds me of Jonny – but she was quite plain. I expect she’d been prettier a long while ago but she was very wrinkled by then and very thin and sort of scrawny.’

  ‘I’m thin,’ I said.

  ‘You’re young. Oh, Clodagh, hug me, hold me. Let’s go to sleep.’

  Morna came with us to see Wim. She was excited about her new man and the long night they had spent together. Her face was radiant, her eyes brilliant, and I wondered if I too had been given something approaching beauty when I was first with Silver. Wim barely seemed to know who she was. He had a drip going into his arm, suspended from a kind of hat-stand affair, and was on anti-coagulants because a blood clot had formed in the injured leg. He turned his face away from us. Our hands were not to be held that day.

  After a while he found a voice. The police had been with him most of the morning. Jonny had been charged but they wanted more information. Where had the axe come from that Jonny used? How did he get into the flat? What did he mean, across the roofs? They had questioned the Asians, Dr and Mrs Clark and even Max and Caroline Bodmer, so convinced were they that Jonny must have come out of the window of another house in the terrace.

  We had brought Wim several half-pound bars of fruit and nut chocolate. He let them lie on the bedside cabinet, barely looking at them. Five minutes before we left he pulled himself up a little and said, without preamble, with nothing to preface such a declaration, ‘When I get out of here I shall kill myself.’

  What does one say? ‘You’ll feel differently when you get home’ or ‘You mustn’t talk like that’? Where, anyway, was home? What do you do when your true home is no longer accessible to you?

  We kissed him, Morna and I on the lips, Silver on his forehead. I felt near to tears as we walked down the hospital stairs. I had seen evil and its results and it was the first time I had seen it. What I had thought of as evil before was just ignorance and folly and failing to understand. That day before my wedding, when I saw Jonny at the wheel of that luscious car, I remembered the evil he had done and the tendency I had to smile at his success and inwardly congratulate him on pulling that flashy blonde, all that vanished in the smoke of his cigarette.

  *

  If the prisoners of 4E were satisfied with Morna as a courier and temporary guardian of Jason, they gave no sign of it. They shook hands with her, they thanked her in a perfunctory kind of way and, of course, offered her a glass of the wine we were all having. She was ebullient, full of enthusiasm for the task ahead, rapidly making friends with Jason, who took her by the hand to show her his room, his possessions, the ship in a bottle. Alison and Andrew were subdued. The atmosphere of a quarrel not long past was almost palpable in that room. Andrew was the kind of man who harbours a grudge. I thought he might hold what Alison had done against her for ever. While Morna was out of the room she began talking once more about Diana Lomax, speaking in a low voice.

  ‘My mother thought it a terrible misfortune that your father wouldn’t – well, let her go, Michael. She was afraid he’d somehow find Louis and Helen Robinson and get to know them and, through them, try to get closer to her. She’d been at school with Helen, they’d been friends for ever, but after that day when your father wouldn’t be discouraged she said she’d never go and stay with the Robinsons again. She got paranoid about it, she thought she might meet him by chance in the street or meet him and your mother while she was out with Helen and Louis. I know your father meant well, Michael, but she saw it as persecution.’

  ‘Would you mind calling me Silver, please? Everyone does.’

  ‘Oh, yes. Yes, of course.’ After that she went back to doing what she had done before, calling him nothing. I had seen him wince every time she had used his first name. ‘The Robinsons still came down to stay with us. Well, with her. I was in Plymouth by then, doing a Business Studies degree.’ That nearly made me laugh, remembering as I did GUP, but laughing was inappropriate. ‘They were in Falmouth when my mother was dying. She was in hospital and she died while they were there.

  ‘We kept in touch. Helen was my godmother. Things changed a bit later on. I was living in the north and Andrew didn’t much care for them, did you, darling?’

  ‘I hope I appreciated the great kindness Louis Robinson did us in letting us live here.’ Andrew spoke very stiffly. ‘My liking them is neither here nor there.’

  Morna came back, Jason pulling her by the ha
nd. I saw I had been supplanted in his affections and that was all to the good. She kissed him goodbye and said it wouldn’t be long before she saw him again. They were going to the opposite end of the world together.

  ‘Where the water goes down the plughole the other way round,’ Jason shouted.

  ‘That’s right. Absolutely. See you on Wednesday.’

  He wanted to go out on the balcony to wave to her as she passed along the street. Andrew opened the window for him and he climbed out. We watched him waving vigorously, going on much too long as children do. Morna must have turned her head to look back at him many times. Alison continued on as if she had never been interrupted.

  ‘When Helen died I wrote to Louis. I managed to get down to London for the funeral but Andrew couldn’t make it. Louis went to live in their house in France after that. They’d always gone there for quite extended visits. My mother had stayed there with them and I’d been as well. But Louis decided to settle there. This place, this house, was pretty much the way it is now. From living in the lower half of it while owning the whole, Louis and Helen had just kept the third-floor flat for themselves. The lower two were sold and the top and basement flats left empty. I think Louis thought that if he decided to make France his permanent home he’d sell off the third and fourth floors as a duplex.’

  Andrew had been growing more and more impatient. ‘Do we have to have this schedule? You sound like a bloody estate agent.’

  ‘I’m sorry. When the trouble over Jason started we didn’t get in touch with Louis, he got in touch with us. He took the English papers and kept reading about us. He offered us this place as a bolt-hole if things got desperate, and after the caravan and the hotel and the B and B, they did. I knew the Silvermans lived round here somewhere, but what did that matter? We would never go out. Besides, it was my mother they’d known, not me, and –’ she looked almost fearfully at Silver – ‘the little boy would be grown up.’

  ‘It’s a strange coincidence,’ I said.

  Andrew shook his head. ‘It’s not a coincidence at all. The only parallel circumstances are that the mother of the criminal who snatched a child happened to have friends living within half a mile of that child’s parents.’

  It was true. But it wasn’t so much the truth of Andrew’s statement that struck me as its savage coldness, which told me that his marriage with Alison was doomed, was perhaps over. It had been secure while they lived in affluence, had a nice house and car, jobs, money in the bank, but not strong enough to withstand being cooped up together in this flat, prisoners, fearful, desperate. They were no support to each other. They each loved Jason, I could see that, but they loved him separately, as individuals. It wouldn’t be long before each was asking him to take sides, to back one of them against the other. I was watching them, thinking about all this, again doubting if we were doing the right thing, when Silver asked very politely if he might remind Andrew that he owed him £3,890. Perhaps he’d see to it now, before Jason went to bed, since it was apparently kept in his room.

  ‘You’re not going to like this,’ Andrew said, ‘but just the same, if you don’t mind, I’ll wait to pay you until I’ve seen Jason on his way.’

  ‘In that case, I shall hold on to your tickets.’

  ‘That’s your decision.’

  In some strange way the discoveries of the past twenty-four hours had hardened Andrew against Silver. Instead of sympathy he felt resentment. It was almost as if Silver had been a party to Alison’s weight of distress, or perhaps Andrew simply saw him as the cause of it. Or it was a case of simple jealousy, the kind that endures even after love is gone.

  ‘It would be better,’ Silver said, ‘if we didn’t quarrel.’

  ‘I’m not quarrelling. I’m simply looking after my own.’

  But who was his own? Certainly not Jason, who, if he was anyone’s, might be said to be the local authority’s. A painful thought. Not Alison, who was his wife but, I suspected, hadn’t been his lover for some time. Her eyes went to him when he uttered those words but his own refused to meet them.

  ‘It’s Jason’s bedtime,’ she said. ‘Say good night, Jason.’

  He made no protest. He came up to us, kissed me, held out his hand to Silver, and in that gesture became a little old man, grave and courteous. We didn’t wait for Alison to come back but left, giving Andrew a curt goodbye. I expected him to slam the front door behind us. Instead he left us to see ourselves out.

  Silver was angry, with a cold silent anger. Our shoes in our hands, we tiptoed past the Nylands’ door. He whispered to me that if it hadn’t been for Jason, if he hadn’t been convinced being with these imperfect parents was far better than with none at all, he’d have given up the whole enterprise.

  ‘You hate her,’ I said.

  ‘Let’s say I’m trying very hard not to. At least I know now I wasn’t abandoned on a beach with the tide coming in.’

  The first instalment of Nelima Patel’s life story had appeared in the Sunday paper. She might have had a strong personality, an interesting character, but whatever she had, none of it came through. It had clearly been written for her by a journalist who specialized in clichés and well-worn metaphors. I took the page out and kept it folded up inside my diary. I’m looking at it now. What use I thought it would be I don’t know. True, it told me a lot of things about a young girl who had been born in Bradford of parents born in Varanasi, but nothing very personal and nothing about Jason at all. He was not to exist until the next instalment.

  Eleven years turn newsprint yellow and bring out the smell of printer’s ink. The blurred photograph, a much enlarged snap, shows Nelima with her parents, her three sisters and her brother in a tiny, cramped, untended garden against a backdrop of chain-link fences and the rears of small terraced houses. The clear photograph is a glamour shot of a good-looking if heavy-cheeked young woman with satiny black hair, a pendant hanging over her forehead and a jewel stud in her nose. The headline reads: ‘Why Did I Ever Give Up My Son?’

  ‘I hope I never have a child,’ Silver said.

  He was thinking of what people do to children. Give birth to them without thought or care, bandy them about, abandon them, transfer them, fight over them, above all, steal them. It took him a long time to get over knowing that it was Alison who had taken him away on his lost weekend. That morning, after we had read ‘Nelima’s Story’, he spent hours trying to recreate details of those days, believing as he did for a while that what she had told us would open windows in his memory. It didn’t. All it had established was what the nature of the boat was and what the birds were. Playing with Alison, eating the food she gave him, sleeping in a bed with the ship in a bottle beside him, none of that came back. There was no enlightenment.

  ‘I wish she’d at least admit she did wrong,’ he said.

  ‘She doesn’t see it as wrong. She thinks a woman who wants a child is justified in anything she does to get one.’

  ‘You don’t feel like that, do you?’

  I said I hoped I’d have a child one day but not like Nelima did or as Alison was doing now, but in the natural course of things and with someone I loved. He looked at me abstractedly.

  ‘Maybe with me?’

  ‘You don’t want children.’

  ‘Come back all I said. Isn’t that a funny expression? My grandmother, the one that left me the money, she used to say it. Only you can’t call back what you’ve said.’

  ‘You can,’ I said. ‘I’ll let you.’

  So you can see that we were nearly restored to our former happiness. Set to be together for ever and ever. As far as ‘ever and ever’ means anything when you’re twenty. Apart from the faint anxiety of a great sympathy with Silver and an understanding of his disturbed feelings, I felt happy. I saw our future plain and clear. It never once occurred to me – why would it? – that I had once seen my own just as brightly, Daniel and Oxford and science in academia, before the pylon.

  *

  Wim was sitting up in a chair, though the drip was
still there and the pulleys and weights on his leg. He looked very uncomfortable. Silver told him that as soon as he came out of there he was to return to the flat. It would be his home as long as he wanted. Poor Silver hadn’t seen, though he soon did, that Russia Road would be the last place on earth Wim would want to be in. I won’t say ‘set foot in’, for anything of that nature seemed a long way off. Looking back, reading the diary, I can see that Silver and I never really understood Wim’s feelings, we never gauged the full dreadfulness of what had been done to him. We knew and discussed the magnitude of Jonny’s intent, but Wim as a suffering being, a strong carefree man disabled and broken, that never really came home to us. Silver once said he was like Samson, blinded, put to the mill with slaves, but I see now that this was just a metaphor, all right to give you an idea, not much when it comes to real agony, real loss of all that makes life worth living.

  We meant well. I can see now that meaning well, which is supposed to pave hell, ruled us. It paved our lives, covering shifting sands.

  I sometimes saw policemen walking in pairs along the streets of Maida Vale but I had seldom seen a police car parked with a driver at the wheel and another man sitting beside him. In this case it was a woman officer at the wheel and a man next to her. The car was parked a little way down Torrington Gardens, on the same side as the burnt houses. We passed it, coming back from the hospital. It was quite unimportant, nothing to get alarmed about. Beryl had told me a few days earlier that there had been looting in those houses and had given a graphic description of some of the horrors vandals had left behind. That would account for the presence of the police car.

  Judy had told us Sean’s filming schedule had been changed. It had been put forward a week and was now over. We were meeting them both for lunch at Crocker’s Folly across the Edgware Road in St John’s Wood. This was policy as well as pleasure, an occasion to remind Sean of all the arrangements. Now there was something we wanted him to do and this would mean his coming out from his passive role. Would he go upstairs and call on Vivien Nyland just before we were due to go downstairs with Andrew and Alison? Distract her so that we could pass down the stairs unimpeded?