Make Death Love Me (16 page)

There had been robberies, he thought, in which hostages had been so brain-washed by their captors that they had gone over to the kidnappers' side and had even assisted in subsequent raids. Nigel didn't want to do any Symbionese Liberation Army stuff, he had no doctrines with which to indoctrinate anyone, but there must be other ways. By Friday morning he had thought of another way.

He lay on the mattress in the yellow light that was the same at dawn as at midnight, shifting his body away from Marty who snored and smelt of sweat and whisky, and looking at the plump pale curve of Joyce's cheek and her smooth pink eyelids closed in sleep. He got up and went into the kitchen and looked at himself in Marty's bit of broken mirror over the sink. Beautiful blue eyes looked back at him, a straight nose, a mobile delicately cut mouth. Any polone'd go for me in a big way, thought Nigel, and then he remembered he mustn't use that word and why he mustn't, and he was flooded with fear.

Marty went out and brought back brown knitting wool and two pairs of needles and some proper toilet soap and toothpaste – and two more bottles of whisky. They didn't bother to count the money or ration it or note what they had spent. Marty just grabbed a handful of notes from the carrier each time he left. He bought expensive food and things for Joyce and, in Nigel's opinion, quantities of rubbish for himself, pornography from the Adult Book Exchange and proper glasses to put his whisky in and, now he could afford to smoke again, cartons of strong king-size cigarettes. And he stayed out longer and longer each day. Skiving off his duties, leaving him to guard Joyce, thought Nigel. It maddened him to see Marty sitting there, making them all cough with the smoke from his cigarettes, and gloating over those filthy magazines. He found he was embarrassed for Joyce when Marty looked at those pictures in front of her, but he didn't know why he should be, why he should care.

Joyce scarcely noticed and didn't care at all. She had the attitude of most women to pornography, that it was disgusting and boring and its lure beyond her comprehension. She was having interesting ideas about the gun. One of them was that it wasn't loaded, and the other that it wasn't a real gun. She had written on all her notes – there was a third one tucked inside her bra – that they had killed Alan Groombridge, but now she wondered if this were true. She only had their word for it, and you couldn't believe a word they said. It might be a toy gun. She had read that robbers used toy guns because of the difficulty of getting real ones. It would be just like them to play about with a toy gun. If she could get her hands on that gun and find out that it was only a toy or not loaded, she would be free. She might not be able to unlock the door because the key was on a string round Nigel's neck, but she would be able to run when they took her to the lavatory, or break one of the windows at night and scream.

But how was she ever going to get hold of the gun? They kept it under their pillows at night, and though Marty was a heavy sleeper, Nigel wasn't. Or Robert, as she thought of him, and the dark one, as she thought of Marty. Sometimes she had awakened in the night and looked at them, and Robert had stirred and looked back at her. That was unnerving. Maybe one night, if the police didn't come and no one found her notes, Robert would get drunk too and she would have her chance. She had stopped thinking much about Mum and Dad and Stephen, for when she did so she couldn't keep from crying. And she wasn't going to cry, not even at night, not in front of them. She thought instead about the gun and ways of getting hold of it, for she had as little faith in any plan Robert might concoct as the dark one had. They would keep her there for ever unless she escaped.

They ate smoked trout and Greek takeaway and cream trifle from Marks and Spencer's on Friday night, and Marty drank half a bottle of Teacher's. Everything was bought ready-cooked because Marty and Nigel couldn't cook and Joyce wouldn't cook for them. Joyce sat on the sofa with her feet up to stop either of them sitting there too. She had already completed about six inches of the front of her jumper, and she knitted away resolutely.

‘The fact is,' she said, ‘you don't know what to do with me, do you? You got yourselves in a right mess when you brought me here and now you don't know how to get out of it. My God, I could rob a bank single-handed better than the two of you did. No more than a pair of babes in arms you are.'

Nigel kept his temper and even smiled. He could look pleasantly little-boyish when he smiled. ‘Maybe you've got something there, my love. We made a mistake about that. We all make mistakes.'

‘I don't,' said Joyce arrogantly. ‘If you do what's right and keep to the law and face up to your responsibilities and get steady jobs you don't make mistakes.'

‘Shut up!' screamed Marty. ‘Shut your trap, you bitch! Who d'you think you are, giving us that load of shit? You want to remember you're our prisoner.'

Joyce smiled at him slowly. She made one of the few profound statements she was ever to utter.

‘Oh, no,' she said. ‘I'm not your prisoner. You're mine.'

The man called Locksley came home while Alan was putting his clothes away and stowing the money in one of the drawers of a Victorian mahogany tallboy. The door of the next room closed quietly, and for about an hour there penetrated through the wall soft music of the kind Alan thought was called baroque. He liked it and was rather sorry when it stopped and Locksley went out again.

The house was quiet now, the only sound the distant one of traffic in Ladbroke Grove. This surprised him. Since his landlady had a father-in-law, she must also surely have a husband and very likely, at her age, small children. But Alan felt that he was now alone in the house, though this couldn't be so as, through the French window, he could see light from upstairs shining on the lawn. The two radiators in his room had come on at six, and it was pleasantly warm, but there didn't seem to be any hot water or anything to provide it. After looking in vain for some switch or meter, he went upstairs to find Mrs Engstrand.

He knocked on the door of the room from which the light was coming. She opened it herself and there was no one with her. She was still wearing the jeans and the sweater, not the long evening skirt he had somehow expected.

‘I'm terribly sorry. There's an immersion heater in that cupboard outside your door and you share it with Caesar. I expect he's switched it off. I must tell him to leave it on
all
the time now you've come. I'll come down with you and show you.'

He only caught a glimpse of the interior of the room, but that was enough. A dark carpet, straw-coloured satin curtains, silk papered walls, Chinese porcelain, framed photographs of a handsome elderly man and an even handsomer young one.

‘Caesar's very considerate.' She showed him the heater and the switch. ‘He's always trying to save me money but it really isn't necessary. I pay the bills for this part of the house, you see, so Ambrose won't ever see them.'

He didn't understand what she meant and he was too shy to enquire. Shyness stopped him asking her in for a drink, though he had drinks, having stocked up with brandy and vodka and gin on his way there. The bottles looked good on top of the tallboy. Maybe when the husband turned up, young Engstrand, he'd invite the two of them and this Caesar and the black-haired girl. It would give him an excuse for asking her.

That night and again in the morning he listened to his radio. There was nothing about Joyce or himself, for no news is not good news as far as the media are concerned. He bought a paper in which the front page headlines were
Pay Claim Fiasco
and
Wife-swapping Led to Murder.
Down in the bottom left-hand corner was a paragraph about Joyce's father offering his house for the return of his daughter. Alan wondered what the police and the bank would do if Joyce turned up safe and told them she had been alone in the bank when the two men came, that there had been only two men, and only four thousand in the safe and the tills. It was very likely that she would tell them that. He asked himself if, by wondering this, he meant that he didn't want her to turn up safe. The idea was uncomfortable and disturbing, so he put it out of his head and walked to the back of this rather superior newsagent's-cum-stationer's to where there were racks of paperbacks. There was no need to buy any books as his room was like a little library, but he had long ago got into the habit of always looking at the wares in bookshops, and why break such a good habit as that?

It wasn't really coincidence that among the books on the shelf labelled Philosophy and Popular Science he came upon the name of Ambrose Engstrand. Probably the man's works were in most bookshops but he had never had occasion to notice them before.

He took down
The Glory of the Real
and read on the back of its jacket that its author was a philosopher and psychologist. He had degrees that filled up a whole line of type, had held a chair of philosophy at some northern university, and made his home, when he was not travelling, in West London. His other works included
Neo-Empiricism
and
Dream, the Opiate
.

Alan read the first page of the introduction. ‘In modern times, though not throughout history, the dream has been all. Think of the contexts in which we use this word. “The girl of my dreams”, “It was like a dream”, “In my wildest dreams”. The real has been discarded by mankind as ugly and untenable, to be shunned and scorned in favour of a shadow land of fantasy.' A few pages further on he found: ‘How has this come about? The cause is not hard to find. Society was not always sick, not always chasing mirages and creating chimeras. Before the advent of the novel, in roughly 1740, when vicarious living was first presented to man as a way of life, and fiction took the lid from the Pandora's Box of fantasy, man had come to terms with reality, lived it and loved it.' Alan put the book back. One pound thirty seemed a lot to pay for it, especially as – he smiled to himself – there were a lot of novels in Montcalm Gardens he hadn't yet read.

But it was certain that he had sold his soul and run away in order to find what this Engstrand called the real, so he had better begin by going to the Pembroke Market. The black-haired girl wasn't there, she was taking the day off, and Alan didn't dare ask the man who spoke to him for the number of her house. But he learned that her name was Rose. Tomorrow he would come back and see Rose and find the courage to ask her out with him on Saturday night. Saturday night was for going out, he thought, not yet understanding that for him now every night was a Saturday.

The rest of the day he spent at the Hayward Gallery, going on a river trip to Greenwich and at a cinema in the West End where he saw a Fassbinder film which, though intellectual and obscure, would have made Wilfred Summitt's scanty hair stand on end. There was nothing in the evening paper about Joyce, only
New Moves in Pay Claim
and
Sabena Jet Hi-jacked
. He had been in his room ten minutes when there came a knock at his door.

A man of about thirty with red hair and the kind of waxen complexion that sometimes goes with this colouring stood outside.

‘Locksley. I thought I'd come and say hallo.'

Alan nearly said his name was Groombridge. He remembered just in time. ‘Paul Browning. Come in.'

The man came in and looked round. ‘Bit of luck for both of us,' he said, ‘finding this place. By the way, they call me Caesar. Or I should say I call me Caesar. What they called me was Cecil. I had the name part in Julius Caesar at school and I sort of adopted it.'

‘Do you really know all Shakespeare's sonnets by heart?'

‘Una tell you that, did she?' Caesar grinned. ‘I'm not clever, I've just got a good memory. She's a lovely lady, Una, but she's crazy. She told me she let you have this place because you'd read some essay about Cardinal Manning. Feel like coming up the Elgin or KPH or somewhere for a slow one?'

‘A slow one?' said Alan.

‘Well, it won't be a quick one, will it? No point in euphemisms. We have to face the real, as Ambrose would say. D'you mind if we take Una?'

Alan said he didn't mind, but what about her husband coming home? Caesar gave him a sidelong look and said there was no fear of that, thank God. However, he came back to say she couldn't come because she had to wait in for a phone call from Djakarta, so they went to the Kensington Park Hotel on their own.

‘Did you mean there isn't a husband?' said Alan when Caesar had bought them two pints of bitter. It was a strange experience for him who had never been ‘out with the boys' in his life or even into pubs much except with Pam on holiday. ‘Is she a widow?'

Caesar shook his head. ‘The beautiful Stewart's alive and kicking somewhere out in the West Indies with his new lady. I got it all from Annie, that's my girl friend. She used to know this Stewart when he was the heart throb of Hampstead. Una's about the loneliest person I know. She's a waif. But what's to be done? I'd do something about it myself, only I've got Annie.'

‘There must be unattached men about,' said Alan.

‘Not so many. Una's thirty-two. She's OK to look at but she's not amazing, is she? Most guys the right age are married or involved. She doesn't go out much, she never meets anyone. You wouldn't care to take an interest, I suppose?'

Alan blushed and hoped it didn't show in the pub's murky light. He thought of Rose, her inviting smile, her elegance, the girl of his dreams soon to come true. To turn Una down, he chose what he thought was the correct expression. ‘I don't find her attractive.'

‘Pity. The fact is, she ought to get away from Ambrose. Of course he's saved her. He's probably saved her sanity and her life, but all that dynamic personality – it's like Trilby and Svengali.'