Grasshopper Read online

  Sean was half-asleep. He had been through a gruelling week of filming which hadn’t ended until quite late the previous night. His relationship with Judy seemed to be getting serious. She had been down to Lyme Regis to stay with him in his hotel, even though she had seen very little of him between six in the morning and eight at night. I wondered if Silver would say anything to Judy about his discovery. My jealousy of her was past but I knew they had been lovers for a year when they were both nineteen – it had ended quite amicably long before Silver and I met – and I was sure he must have told her about his abduction. But we had all been together no more than five minutes when I saw that he was going to tell her no more. He might even be regretting those earlier revelations. The outcome had affected him very powerfully and his only recourse was silence.

  The others must have noticed he was subdued. Or perhaps they were too wrapped up in one another to see anything much outside the bell jar of mutual attraction that enclosed them. Seeing that Silver didn’t speak, I asked Sean if he’d take care of the distraction of Vivien Nyland. He protested that he didn’t know her, had never spoken to her beyond saying hello.

  ‘That doesn’t matter. You can ask to borrow something or complain about the noise from her TV or – and this is better – say you’ve workmen coming in and you hope they won’t object to the hammering.’

  Surprisingly, it was Judy who objected on his behalf. ‘And if you and those people are caught, the police will come and get Sean too. For conspiracy or something.’

  ‘That’s a bit far-fetched, isn’t it?’

  ‘Not really. It’s been bad enough me taking the photos. They could find that out too.’

  Sean put an end to this rather sharp exchange by saying he’d think about it. He’d think about it and let us know.

  ‘You’ll remember you’ve got less than forty-eight hours to let us know in, won’t you?’ Silver had broken his silence. ‘Morna will be coming to pick up Jason at ten tomorrow morning.’

  We were nearly there. We both felt that once Jason was safely gone, our troubles were over. Without him, Andrew and Alison would be the ordinary not-worth-a-second-glance Mr and Mrs Rogers on their way to spend a long holiday with a relative in Sydney.

  ‘I wish I hadn’t come to dislike them,’ Silver said. ‘It makes things much harder.’

  For me, what made things harder was the awareness that if the social services had known in the first place what we knew, they’d never have so much as allowed Alison to foster Jason, let alone adopt him. It’s very disquieting to find out that the objects of your good deed may be unworthy of it. But we both agreed it was far too late to back out. Much earlier than was usual with us, at about six, we walked round to Torrington Gardens to make the final arrangements.

  I had read in the paper that day about a woman who had been sent to prison for three years for travelling with a man who had a false passport. The charge was something to do with trafficking in human beings. I decided to say nothing about it to Silver.

  33

  It was twilight. The evenings had begun to draw in and the nights to lengthen. It was dry but cold, a wind blowing in short sharp gusts. There would be a time of calm and then a rush of wind, enough to hold you still if not blow you off your feet. The tarpaulin on the roof of the burnt houses moved up and down with a melancholy flapping sound. We stopped for a moment to look at the now derelict façade, top windows boarded up, water streaks staining the plaster like black tears.

  The police car was no longer there. We let ourselves into 4 Torrington Gardens, closing the door as quietly as we could behind us. Putting my ear to the keyhole, I could hear Sean’s television, most likely a video of one of his films he had put on for Judy’s entertainment. He had never let us know what he had decided to do about distracting Vivien Nyland. We had been trying to get in touch with him but he must have unplugged his phone. The voices from above we heard as we began to climb the first flight of stairs, Vivien talking to a man. The voice wasn’t her husband’s. We went back down. The hall, from which Sean’s front door opened, bent round at a right angle at the end where a cupboard held electricity and gas meters. Hidden in this small lobby, we couldn’t see the man come downstairs but we saw him step across the wide area of hall and head for the front door. He was just a man. Young middle-aged, going bald, wearing grey flannel trousers and leather shoes and a green anorak. Silver said only policemen dressed like that, a remark I thought a wild exaggeration.

  We went very carefully upstairs, shoes in hand once more. There were a thousand reasons why a police officer, if police officer he was, might have called on the Nylands. I remember Liv’s panic when one had called on us. Their car might have been broken into. They might have had their car stolen and the policeman come to say it had been found. Or they had had a burglary, or Vivien had lost her purse in the supermarket. A thousand reasons. The last thing the policeman had been thinking about was who lived upstairs and if Vivien had ever seen them. If he was a policeman. Very likely he was her brother-in-law or the man next door or someone from the Maida Vale Society.

  Her door was shut. We went on up, relieved to be out of her range. Silver dreaded seeing Alison. He was in a curious relationship with her, an embarrassing, intensely awkward kind of closeness. There was something sexual about it which he hated. She had bathed him and fed him and, no doubt, cuddled and kissed him, yet his attitude towards her couldn’t be what it might have been to someone who had been his nanny or baby minder, for Alison’s brief presence in his life was illicit. He said it made him feel the way he imagined you would if you had been seduced into a one-night stand when drunk by someone years older than yourself, someone you wouldn’t normally have looked at and whose character and personality and manner of speech were repugnant in the cold light of day.

  ‘I’m making a fuss, I know,’ he said. ‘Ignore me. I’ll shut up.’

  We gave them our signal on the bell and Jason came. He wanted to know why we hadn’t brought Morna. His face registered bleak disappointment. Why do we mind so much when children who have been fond of us suddenly prefer someone else? It might be natural if it was our own child or a child we’ve been caring for for years, but we feel it when it’s a stranger’s child, any child. I wouldn’t have cared a bit if Andrew or Alison had liked Morna better than me or if Wim or Niall had. It must be because we know children’s emotions are genuine and can’t be disguised. They haven’t yet learnt dissembling and subterfuge. I couldn’t show my feelings, of course, so I pretended not to miss the kiss I usually got. In the circumstances, it was good for him to like Morna best.

  They had been packing. You could tell by the state of the suitcases, the things already in and the things discarded, that they were having to make agonizing choices. Alison, with what I thought amazing insensitivity, said, ‘I’d give you the ship in a bottle, Michael, only it’s not mine, it’s Louis’.’

  ‘Silver,’ said Silver. ‘Not Michael.’

  ‘Would you like one of the birds? You’re welcome if you would.’

  ‘No, thanks. Have you all got your passports? If Jason’s wearing a jacket his should be in his jacket pocket by now.’

  They showed us the passports. It reminded me of going on a school trip abroad, something I’d done once or twice, and the passport inspection that went on in the history room the day before we left.

  ‘And your money,’ Silver said. ‘How are you carrying that?’

  ‘I don’t know. I hadn’t thought about it.’

  ‘Would you like me to change it into £50 notes for you tomorrow? It would be less bulky. I’m sorry, I should have thought of that before.’

  Andrew gave an unpleasant laugh. ‘You wouldn’t have thought of getting your hands on it, I don’t suppose?’

  Silver went bright red, the way only people with transparent white skins can. But what he’d have said I never knew. There came a sound I hadn’t heard before in that flat. It was like the unmusical twittering of a flock of birds, the kind that chatter not sing
.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘The front-door bell,’ Alison said.

  Andrew looked at her, then at Silver. ‘No one ever rings that bell. Well, they do. On a weekday morning maybe, the gas-meter man or whatever. We don’t answer. We have to send the bills to Louis. No one ever has called in the evening.’

  He went to the window. The twittering began again. Insistent, prolonged, as if the little birds were anticipating a shower of crumbs. Andrew went to raise the sash.

  ‘Don’t!’ Alison shouted. ‘Don’t put your head out!’

  ‘There are two police cars down there. The two officers who’ve been at the door are going back to their car. They’re talking to someone inside. A chap’s getting out. He’s a guy about my own age, going bald, in a green jacket.’

  Silver said, ‘The only thing for you to do is to go. Now. Get the money and your passports. Leave everything else.’

  Down there, entering Torrington Gardens from the Peterborough Avenue end, a siren began to wail. It was a familiar noise but it sounded different, menacing, powerful, a real threat and therefore frightening. We couldn’t hear ourselves speak for the noise. As the wail died away on a series of short sharp cries, Andrew said, ‘Go where? Down into the street? Into the lion’s mouth, that would be.’

  ‘We’ll go over the roofs,’ Silver said.

  Three minutes was about what we had. That was the time we calculated it would take them to summon Vivien Nyland to open the front door, come in and climb the eight flights of stairs. Andrew complied with Silver’s order but he argued all the time. The money he insisted on carrying himself. If he was caught he was afraid of being found with a false passport on him.

  ‘I’ll carry all your passports,’ I said, and no one disagreed. That’s how I happen to have them now, the three of them with their photographs and their false identities.

  ‘Change your shoes,’ Silver said to Alison. ‘Quick. Now.’

  Jason was wearing the new trousers we had bought him. We had never noticed before that Alison always wore shoes with heels, most of them high. She had no flat shoes, no trainers, no walking shoes. I couldn’t imagine her on that mansard in pumps with two-inch heels. Both she and Andrew grabbed a coat. I pulled a sweater over Jason’s head. He was excited, full of enthusiasm at the idea of escaping his pursuers by a rooftop flight.

  ‘We’ll go out of a back window,’ Silver said. ‘If we try the front on to the balcony they’ll see us. This way we’ll be quite safe.’

  Alison reached for one of the china birds, the greenfinch I think it was.

  ‘Leave the bloody bird,’ said Silver in a voice I’d never heard him use before. He went to the front door, opened it. A ghost of the twittering we had heard was coming from the flat below. Then, soon, came the clatter of Vivien Nyland’s shoes on the marble treads. Silver closed the door and shot both bolts. It would take additional minutes to break it down.

  Andrew had a small bag with him. It was the kind of thing that has replaced the satchel schoolchildren carry, a canvas backpack. As soon as Jason saw it he wanted to carry it himself. It was his. I was surprised when Andrew said no. He and Alison were usually indulgent parents. We climbed out of the window in their bedroom, it faced the rear and there was no mansard. Jason was better at it than they were, showing promise of being as skilled as once poor Wim had been. He shinned up over the stone ridge at the top of the architrave and began to shout that he had done it, he was on the roof. Silver, close behind him, told him to be quiet and laid a finger on his own lips. I gave Alison a hand, took her shoes from her and threw them up on to the leads. She scrambled up, cutting her hands and scraping her shin. Andrew needed a lot of help from Silver but finally we were there, all five of us, safe on the flat roof of Torrington Gardens, the long wide empty road. Then Silver had to go back.

  We dared not leave the window open. Silver reminded me that the police knew the man who had attacked Wim had come across the roofs and entered by the window. They might remember that. He slipped down, stood on the ledge made by the architrave of the window below, and pulled down the sash. What he couldn’t do was fasten the catch on the inside. We banked on their not noticing. The open suitcases might deceive them into believing the family was still living there. They’d conclude they had gone out for the evening and maybe they’d wait outside for their return. Long before that we’d have them safe in 15 Russia Road and Exodus could as easily take place from there as from Louis Robinson’s. More easily, whispered Silver, climbing back up, because there’d be no Vivien Nyland living in the middle of the house and no Sean Francis to keep everyone dangling while he made up his mind.

  ‘We should have done it before. We should have moved them out earlier.’

  ‘We didn’t know,’ I said. ‘How were we to know?’

  For a while we lingered, trying to hear if anyone was attempting to enter the flat. We were as much concerned with their hearing our footfalls as with our hearing movement from them. A heavy silence had fallen. No more sirens, no police conversation, no bird-like bells twittering. The only sound was the wind. Alison retrieved her shoes, sat down on the parapet and put them on. The whole roof area was scattered with the green leaves of the plane trees, blown off by the high wind. A gust caught us now, sweeping the leaves along with a rattling sound, nearly making Alison topple backwards.

  ‘Be careful,’ Silver said.

  We had had no chance to say anything about this rooftop journey to each other. It had begun without warning, it had seemed the inevitable, the only, course to take. But I knew we were both thinking of the climb down the nailhead steps on the end gable, the climb up the other side, the trek across the uneven roofs of the single house, the ascent on to the last terrace in Russia Road. Were any of them afraid of heights? Andrew shook his head, Alison shrugged. It was Jason who shouted an unqualified ‘No!’ and jumped up and down, waving his arms, until Silver hushed him.

  Into the silence and the wind came, all of a sudden, a heavy reverberating crash from immediately below us. The roof shook as the room had shaken when Andrew had slammed the window. This was more like an explosion, as if a bomb had been detonated to smoke the family out.

  ‘They’ve broken the door down,’ Silver said. ‘They’ve broken the bolts. Let’s get moving.’

  It was at this point that the wind rose. From a sharp but sporadic gustiness, it blew up into a gale, fierce, violent, ripping leaves from the trees. A sudden swirl of torn leaves descended, almost hiding us from each other. As it died and before the next blast came, we started across the roof, keeping close to the rear where no one in the street stood a chance of seeing us. By then it was dusk, it must have been close on seven, and below us the street-lamps were coming on. We could see them in Sutherland Avenue and Delaware Road. The gale tore at a bunch of papers stuck on someone’s windscreen and flimsily held in place by the wipers. They struggled against its onslaught like living things until at last it tore them free and tossed them into the air so that they separated and floated high, borne up by the wind. We came round the back of first one chimney stack, then another, we alone, we two making a guess at what we would see. In front of us was the tarpaulin. It was still, just about, covering the burnt roof timbers but the wind had stripped half of it away so that you could see the black depths underneath.

  A couple of times we had stepped across it ourselves and not felt we were in much danger. Now, because of the gale, the materials used to cover that gaping hole and protect the top floors from the weather had almost ceased to perform their function. Another few gusts like the one that struck us now, almost toppling Alison over on her high heels, and the tarpaulin would be ripped off. I’ve often wondered since how differently things would have turned out if it had been a quiet evening, the sky sleek and cloudless, the air still.

  Silver told Alison to take off her shoes. Her feet were bare, she wore neither stockings nor tights. They looked vulnerable, white and tender. Her shin was bleeding where she had grazed it climbing out of the
window. Andrew’s leather shoes were less than ideal for the crossing ahead of us but at least they were flat lace-ups. Jason was proud of his new trainers, stopping to stare at them and once retying the laces. At a lull in the wind, when the storm seemed to pause and catch its breath, I knelt down and tried to restore the tarpaulin to its former position across the exposed timbers. Andrew helped me, but we had no tools, nothing but our bare hands, and though we pulled the rough heavy stuff under the battens which had once held it firm, a sudden sharp flurry of wind tugged away a corner and hurled it high into the air.

  ‘I can’t cross that,’ Alison said. ‘I’ll fall, I could break my leg.’

  Andrew was leaning over the parapet. ‘We could go along the balcony.’

  ‘The roof is safer,’ Silver said.

  ‘How do you know? Are you a civil engineer?’

  Silver didn’t answer. He too was eyeing the balcony, the broad irregular crack which divided it into two sections. How could fire nearly split a stone and concrete structure in two? I didn’t ask. No one would have known. They were all looking at the ruined balcony now. It was about fifteen feet long and less than three feet wide, intended as an ornament to the façade, not for use. Railings of painted iron lacework ran around its edge but these had been bent and twisted, not by the fire but probably during measures taken to put the fire out.

  Between us and the balcony came first the parapet, then a step or shelf of stone, decorated in the ‘running dog’ pattern of repeated scrolls, then the row of windows, for there was no mansard in this section of the terrace. If we were to use the balcony, Silver was saying, it would be essential to hold on to the step. By gripping this three- or four-inch wide projection, it should be possible to swing along hand over hand, arms and hands taking the weight and feet on tiptoe, just touching the balcony floor.