Grasshopper Read online

  It was bad being alone up there. A pang seemed to pierce me, a thrust of pain and longing for what had been and for Silver. How could he have abandoned me? How could we have been so quickly and easily parted? The only explanation seemed to be that he no longer cared for me, yet his look had been full of love, our old early love, when he said I had saved his life.

  I hung down over the parapet, Wim-wise, to look in at the window we had always used. It was shut. All the windows were shut, it was a cold raw day. It gave me a shock, what I saw inside, for someone else appeared to be living there. The old furniture was gone, the leather sofa, the scuffed chairs and the gateleg table, the old stained threadbare carpet. The walls had been painted duck-egg blue, the same colour as the covers on the three-piece suite, only these had pink and yellow flowers on the blue chintz. I could see a calendar of Venetian scenes and a bookcase containing the Encyclopaedia Britannica. It was enough. This was no place for Silver.

  I walked to the end of the terrace, dropped over the edge on to the house that stood alone, climbed up the nailhead steps and on to the roofs of Torrington Gardens. The tarpaulin was gone, the burnt area replaced and the leads back. I looked down over the parapet, saw a builder’s truck parked below and a pile of builder’s rubbish in the front garden where Alison had fallen to her death. Remembering made me wince and I felt the pain again.

  The broken-off piece of balcony hadn’t yet been restored. I suppose they had put the roof on first to make the place weather-tight for the winter. Here Andrew had leant over and seen Alison fall and Jason, in his innocence, had undone the strap on the school bag and released the money. I put my hand into the cavity at the base of the chimney stack. The passports were still there.

  They went into the pocket of the pea-jacket I was wearing. Back in Max’s house I left the key to old Mrs Fisherton’s on the hall table and let myself out of the front door. It brought me a small flicker of amusement to think of Max or Caroline finding that key and wondering where it came from. Then I had a piece of luck. I met Beryl coming in. One of the great things, the many great things, about Beryl is that she is never shocked and never much surprised by anything. To use her own phrase she ‘takes things as they come’.

  ‘Made it up with the Professor, have you?’ she said. ‘That’ll be her doing. She’s done wonders for his nasty temper, he’s a changed man.’

  I assured her I hadn’t seen the Professor but had got in with a key I had no business to have. And then, with my heart in my mouth, I asked her about Silver. She could tell, she knew how I had felt, but there was no way she could soften the blow.

  ‘I only know what his mum says, love, and as you’re well aware, she’s not a frequent visitor to these parts. He’s gone to one of those places in Africa as starts with a M. I said to her, I just hope he’s taken enough of that sunscreen, that’s all, him with his colouring.’

  If she saw how this affected me, she gave no sign of it. She said a young couple were renting the top flat, she was the daughter of a friend of Erica’s, they were ‘yuppies’ and worked ‘all the hours God gave’. Then she told me about the money and the people coming to pick up the notes, adding inevitably that this was all she knew and it was no good my asking because I now knew as much as she did. On an impulse I asked her if she had heard of anyone with a room to let.

  ‘There’s me,’ she said.

  I went home first. To get my things and the £50 I had saved from my gardener’s pay and hung on to. After that was gone I’d get a job or go on the dole.

  ‘But what are you going to do?’ my mother wailed.

  ‘With your life?’ said Dad. ‘You’re nearly twenty-one years old,’ as if I was already far over the hill.

  I told them. I’d like to be able to say I chose the trade I did because of the pylon, because if I hadn’t been so ignorant I’d never have climbed it and brought about Daniel’s death. A kind of redress or compensation. But that wasn’t the reason. I said the first thing that came into my head, put there by the fact that this was what Beryl’s son did, the one who had moved out of the room I was going to rent.

  ‘I’m going to be an electrician,’ I said.

  My parents exploded. Dad reminded me this was his own father’s trade and asked me if I was returning to the working class out of spite. Mum said a woman couldn’t be an electrician. No one would employ her. All this made me begin to like the idea. From coming out with something wild, a mere association of ideas, I was getting quite keen. I’d do it properly, I thought, I’d get a degree in it or the nearest thing, I’d get as highly qualified as I could. And I did. I went to college – well, two colleges – for a total of four years, and worked in the students’ canteen for the last one because my grant ran out. I said none of this and predicted none of it but answered them that being an electrician was a useful trade.

  September was when I began, just a year after our ill-fated Exodus. Up till then I had been living with Beryl, right on the top of one of the highest tower blocks in west London. That suited me fine. I kept off the dole and took odd jobs, helped along by the wonderful and varied references she wrote for me, and studying basic electrics from a library book on wiring and lighting. Unwise, as it happened, because I had to relearn all I had picked up.

  Silver I had never heard from. I had long ago stopped writing to Russia Road and hardened my heart, as you do in this sort of situation, telling yourself that if he doesn’t want you, you certainly don’t want him. And so forth. I even found myself another boyfriend, an Indian called Romesh. Just before I went off to my college in the north of England, Beryl told me Silver was back from Africa but never came to Russia Road. His mother said he was due to return to university to read, in Beryl’s own words, ‘social services’. I thought that meant Queen Mary College. Hearing about him brought me such a pang, in spite of Romesh and my well-planned future, that I wrote to him there but got no answer.

  I had done three years and gained my membership of the Institute of Electrical Engineers when I came back to London to see my friends: Beryl first, Lucy, who had got married to Tom and had a flat in Tufnell Park, then Niall and his girlfriend, who were living together in a house they had bought in a not-yet-fashionable part of Islington, and Guy and his wife. He had married his father’s secretary, a very beautiful girl who had taken the job once intended for me.

  I’ve never completely got over my fear of underground places, though I’m much better than I used to be. But I don’t believe in causing oneself unnecessary suffering, so I went to Tufnell Park on the bus. It was while I was walking along Dalmeny Avenue that I met Jonny. The first I saw of him was an unmarked white van parked at the kerb.

  It could have been anybody’s. It’s very unlikely it was the same one Jonny had before he went to prison. But women don’t look into the cabs of vans. If by chance they catch the driver’s eye, he’ll take it as a come-on. I walked past with my eyes averted and suddenly Jonny was in my path. He had jumped out and stood there blocking my way.

  ‘Long time no see.’

  ‘I thought you were in jail,’ I said.

  He grinned. ‘Fancy a cuppa or something stronger?’

  ‘Not with you.’

  I probably only dared talk to him like that because there were a lot of people on the street. He took it with an amiability strange to him. Or new. ‘Don’t be like that. Give me a nice smile. No? OK, do be like that. I’ve got questions for you I’d like answered and I bet you’ve got plenty for me.’

  I sat down on the wall of someone’s front garden. ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘That Liv, the one I used to go about with, what’s with her? Where did she go? And there was a big dark girl –’ he sketched in the air a grotesquely curved female shape – ‘I don’t recall her name. I wouldn’t have half minded getting in there.’

  ‘Liv disappeared.’ Judy had told me Morna had got a university post in Japan but I resisted passing that on. ‘I don’t know any of those people any more.’ I thought of Wim, wondering about
him as I so often did. ‘I haven’t plenty of questions for you. I haven’t any.’

  The amiability was all gone, the pseudo-friendliness. He stood in front of me, bending towards me, his hands on his hips. ‘You’ve got one.’

  ‘Have I?’ I started to get up.

  ‘You sit down. I won’t keep you. Don’t you want to know how the bill knew where those three were, the two of them and the kid? Of course you do.’ He paused, smiling, keeping me in suspense, for by then it was suspense. ‘I told them.’ He said it triumphantly. ‘Silv, he was banking on me never saying a word to the police. Nor I would’ve but they’d got me in custody. I told them in the hopes I’d get a lighter sentence.’

  Through him Alison had lost her life, Jason his happy childhood, Andrew his life savings, and I’d lost Silver and he me. ‘And did you?’

  He shrugged. ‘I got off. They hadn’t got nothing on me. No one to identify me, see?’

  ‘So something good came of it,’ I said, though knowing he wouldn’t appreciate irony, and I got up and walked off without saying goodbye.

  And that’s nearly all.

  I had another year to do at college. By then I was having a half-hearted relationship with a fellow-IEE. And I thought of Silver every day. I was living at Beryl’s again, for my college was in London, and her place felt more like home than anywhere I had ever lived apart from Silver’s flat in Russia Road. One day I ran into Judy by chance. It was near Lisson Green. I had just walked through the passage above the canal that leads through from Aberdeen Place to Lisson Grove and there she was, coming down from the Grove End Road direction. We hugged each other, there in the street, we were both so pleased.

  She and Sean were living in Violet Hill and had been for two years. It was one of those unhappy non-coincidences that we hadn’t met a dozen times before. My heart in my mouth, I asked her if she had ever heard from Silver.

  ‘We see him sometimes,’ she said. ‘He got his degree. I think it’s some charity he’s working for, but it’s here in London. He asks about you all the time but we didn’t know where you were.’

  I was so flooded with joy and bliss I wanted to shout aloud and dance. Judy said I had gone dark red and my eyes as bright as live coals. ‘Tell me where you live and I’ll pass it on.’

  I wrote my address down on the back of a bus ticket, adding that the bit of the Harrow Road where Beryl’s block stood was opposite the turning into Cirencester Street. After that I waited to hear from him. It was quite a long time before I found out Judy had lost the bus ticket. She tried to remember Beryl’s address but somehow got it into her head I was living in Cirencester.

  One evening I saw in Beryl’s Evening Standard that a George Rathbone, of Blaker Street, Brighton, had been found drowned. His fully clothed body had been washed up on the beach. There was nothing to show whether it was murder, suicide or an accident. Jonny’s father had been called George Rathbone and Jonny had told Silver he intended to kill him as soon as he had enough money. On the other hand, this man was eighty, younger than Jonny’s father would have been, I had never heard he lived in Brighton, and I couldn’t see why you needed to be rich to drown someone.

  It must have been a week or so after that, perhaps a fortnight, that the electrics in Beryl’s tower block failed. A couple of men were working on it when I got home. I went over to talk to them about it and at first they didn’t take me seriously but once I had convinced them I knew what I was talking about, they were quite pleased and forthcoming. (The story of my life as an electrician, incidentally.) Still, unless I was prepared to wait down there for an hour or two, I’d have to walk up.

  ‘Go round the corner for a pint, why don’t you?’ one of the men said, hugely amused by his own wit in treating me like the man they thought I ought to be or wanted to be.

  I walked up. Beryl’s block is twenty storeys high and there are two flights to every storey. It’s a long haul, forty flights of stairs. And it’s not as if there’s anything to look at on the way, only grey concrete and graffiti. If I had known what was waiting for me at the top, I’d have done my best to run. I didn’t know and I toiled up, once pausing to give myself a Polo Mint out of a packet in my bag, the second time to blow my nose. A woman came out on to the seventeenth landing and said it was a disgrace, all councils were a disgrace, she had lived in seven blocks like this one all over London and the lifts were always breaking down. She seemed somewhat cheered when I told her work on the lifts was progressing satisfactorily.

  At the seventeenth floor I wished I had taken the men’s advice and gone down to the pub. At the nineteenth, for variety, I ran up the first stairs two at a time and turned on to the final flight. Silver was sitting on the top step, looking down at me and smiling. He put out his arms and I ran up and threw myself into them, toppling him over backwards and me with him.

  Shall I resist the trap Silver says so many women writers of fiction fall into and, quoting Jane Eyre, write: Reader, I married him? Anyway, this isn’t fiction. It’s an account of things, as much for him when he comes home as anyone. So: Reader, I married you?

  I suppose it was easy to guess the identity of the husband I’ve been referring to. There was no one else for me really, and no one else for him. He had found me (after scouring Gloucestershire) by studying a London guide, spotting a Cirencester Street off the Harrow Road where he knew Beryl lived, and putting two and two together. It was fitting that we who loved heights were reunited in a high place, at the top of a long hard climb. The next day I moved in with him, into the flat he had near Morna’s in the East End. He had got rid of three-quarters of his grandmother’s money but kept enough to put down a deposit on this place.

  ‘Is that allowed?’ he said, laughing.

  ‘It’s allowed.’

  We had grown up. Or perhaps, as our parents had said, we had corrupted each other. They came round very quickly – in both senses. We were forgiven and occasionally visited. I finished at college in the summer, went to work for a firm of electrical engineers with a good reputation and planned setting up my own company. When I said I’d be a Stoic and learn to bear it if he had to be out of the country for months at a time, Silver changed his job and moved to Famaid. All the time we searched for Wim.

  The trouble is, we hardly knew where to begin. There were a lot of ‘if onlys’ at that time. If only we had found out where he had that room ‘in south-west London but north of the river’, where he worked in the sandwich bar, even the name of his mother’s family or some other relatives. If only we had asked him when he told us his story. Sometimes we had fantasies about going on the roofs again and dreams that if we did we’d meet him up there, scaling the heights, restored to his old agility and grace. But we had done with the roofs, they held unhappy memories that spoilt them for us. We looked up at them less than once we had and we turned our backs on Maida Vale. That’s why, when we married, we chose Highgate.

  Both of us remembered, all too well, Wim’s last words to us when he said he’d kill himself. But his leg might have got better, might have been completely mended, strong again and supple. Liv (or so we thought then) might have found him or he her. Silver set himself the task of searching for Smiths or Van de Smiths in London electoral registers, but the former were legion and the latter non-existent.

  We tell ourselves that someday we’ll find him. We refuse to believe in his death. Perhaps, if he sees my advertisements or reads Silver’s name in a Famaid story, he’ll find us. But I’ll have no news of him for Silver when his taxi arrives, any minute now, and he comes up to me in the lift.

  I’m looking down now from my roof garden. The taxi has just turned in. Before he pays the driver or starts to get his bags out, he looks up straight into the sun to wave to me. And I wave back and run to open the front door.

 

 

 
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