Come to Grief (36 page)

“She doesn’t. It hasn’t been hard to keep it all away from her. She never talks about Silverboy anymore. Being so ill... she hasn’t much interest in anything else.”

“She’s terrific.”

“Will Ellis Quint go to prison?”

How could I say “I hope so”? And
did
I hope so? Yet I had to stop him, to goad him, to make him fundamentally wake up.

I said, dodging it, “It will be for the judge to decide.”

Linda hugged me. No tears. “Come and see Rachel in her bubble?”

“You couldn’t keep me away.”

“God . . . I hope . . .”

“She’ll be all right,” I said. “So will you.”

Patient Teledrive took me back to London and, because of the fixed hour of Linda’s departure to the hospital, I again had time to spare before meeting India for dinner.

I again ducked being dropped in Pont Square in the dark evening, and damned Gordon for his vigilance. He had to sleep
sometime
... but when?

The restaurant called Kensington Place was near the northern end of Church Street, the famous road of endless antique shops, stretching from Kensington High Street, in the south, up to Notting Hill Gate, north. Teledrive left me and my overnight bag on the northwest corner of Church Street, where I dawdled awhile looking in the brightly lit windows of Waterstone’s bookshop, wondering if Rachel would be able to hear the store’s advertised children’s audio tapes in her bubble. She enjoyed the subversive Just William stories. Pegotty, she thought, would grow up to be like him.

A large number of young Japanese people were milling around on the comer, all armed with cameras, taking flash pictures of one another. I paid not much attention beyond noticing that they all had straight black hair, short padded jackets, and jeans. As far as one could tell, they were happy. They also surged between me and Wa terstone’s windows.

They bowed to me politely, I bowed unenthusiastically in return.

They seemed to be waiting, as I was, for some prearranged event to occur. I gradually realized from their quiet chatter, of which I understood not a word, that half of them were men, and half young women.

We all waited. They bowed some more. At length, one of the young women shyly produced a photograph that she held out to me. I took it politely and found I was looking at a wedding. At a mass wedding of about ten happy couples wearing formal suits and Western bridal gowns. Raising my head from the photo, I was met by twenty smiles.

I smiled back. The shy young woman retrieved her photo, nodded her head towards her companions and clearly told me that they were all on their honeymoon. More smiles all around. More bows. One of the men held out his camera to me and asked—I gathered—if I would photograph them all as a group.

I took the camera and put my bag at my feet, and they arranged themselves in pairs neatly, as if they were used to it.

Click. Flash. The film wound on, quietly whirring.

All the newlyweds beamed.

I was presented, one by one, with nine more cameras. Nine more bows. I took nine more photos. Flash. Flash. Group euphoria.

What was it about me, I wondered, that encouraged such trust? Even without language there seemed to be no doubt on their part of my willingness to give pleasure. I mentally shrugged. I had the time, so what the hell. I took their pictures and bowed, and waited for eight o‘clock.

I left the happy couples on Waterstone’s corner and, carrying my bag, walked fifty yards down Church Street towards the restaurant. There was a narrow side street beside it, and opposite, on the other side of Church Street, one of those quirks of London life, a small recessed area of sidewalk with a patch of scrubby grass and a park bench, installed by philanthropists for the comfort of footsore shoppers and other vagrants. I would sit there, I decided, and watch for India. The restaurant doors were straight opposite the bench. A green-painted bench made of horizontal slats.

I crossed Church Street to reach it. The traffic on Sunday evening was sporadic to nonexistent. I could see a brass plate on the back of the bench: the name of the benefactor who’d paid for it.

I was turning to sit when at the same time I heard a bang and felt a searing flash of pain across my back and into my right upper arm. The impact knocked me over and around so that I ended sprawling on the bench, half lying, half sitting, facing the road.

I thought incredulously, I’ve been
shot.

I’d been shot once before. I couldn’t mistake the
thud.
Also I couldn’t mistake the shudder of outrage that my invaded body produced. Also . . . there was a great deal of blood.

I’d been shot by Gordon Quint.

He walked out of the shadows of the side street opposite and came towards me across Church Street. He carried a hand-gun with its black, round mouth pointing my way. He was coming inexorably to finish what he’d started, and he appeared not to care if anyone saw him.

I didn’t seem to have the strength to get up and run away.

There was nowhere to run to.

Gordon looked like a farmer from Berkshire, not an obsessed murderer. He wore a checked shirt and a tie and a tweed jacket. He was a middle-aged pillar of the community, a judge and jury and a hangman... a raw, primitive walking act of revenge.

There was none of the screaming out-of-control obscenity with which he’d attacked me the previous Monday. This killer was cold and determined and reckless.

He stopped in front of me and aimed at my chest.

“This is for Ginnie,” he said.

I don’t know what he expected. He seemed to be waiting for something. For me to protest, perhaps. To plead.

His voice was hoarse.

“For Ginnie,” he repeated.

I was silent. I wanted to stand. Couldn’t manage it.

“Say something!” he shouted in sudden fury. The gun wavered in his hand, but he was too close to miss. “Don’t you
understand?
”

I looked not at his gun but at his eyes. Not the best view, I thought inconsequentially, for my last on earth.

Gordon’s purpose didn’t waver. I might deny him any enjoyment of my fear, but that wasn’t going to stop him. He stared at my face. He didn’t blink. No hesitancy there. No withdrawal or doubt. None.

Now, I thought frozenly. It’s going to be now.

A voice was shouting in the road, urgent, frantic, coming nearer, far too late.

The voice shouted one despairing word.

Ellis ...
Ellis
. . . Running across the road waving a five-foot piece of black angle-iron fencing and shouting in frenzy at his father, “
Dad
. . . Dad ... Don’t ... Don’t do it.”

I could see him running. Nothing seemed very clear. Gordon could hear Ellis shouting but it wasn’t going to stop him. The demented hatred simply hardened in his face. His arm straightened until his gun was a bare yard from my chest.

Perhaps I won’t feel it, I thought.

Ellis swung the iron fencing post with two hands and all his strength and
hit his father on the side of the head.

The gun went off. The bullet hissed past my ear and slammed into a shop window behind me. There were razor splinters of glass and flashes of light and shouting and confusion everywhere.

Gordon fell silently unconscious, face down on the scrubby patch of grass, his right hand with the gun underneath him. My blood ran into a scarlet and widening pool below the slats of the bench. Ellis stood for an eternity of seconds holding the fencing post and staring at my eyes as if he could see into my soul, as if he would show me his.

For an unmeasurable hiatus blink of time it seemed there was between us a fusing of psyche, an insight of total understanding. It could have been a hallucination, a result of too much stress, but it was unmistakably the same for him.

Then he dropped the fencing post beside his father, and turned, and went away at a slow run, across Church Street and down the side road, loping, not sprinting, until he was swallowed by shadow.

I was suddenly surrounded by Japanese faces all asking unintelligible questions. They had worried eyes. They watched me bleed.

The gunshots brought more people, but cautiously. Gordon’s attack, that to me had seemed to happen in slow motion, had in reality passed to others with bewildering speed. No one had tried to stop Ellis. People thought he was going to bring help.

I lost further account of time. A police car arrived busily, lights flashing, the first manifestation of all that I most detested—questions, hospitals, forms, noise, bright lights in my eyes, clanging and banging and being shoved around. There wasn’t a hope of being quietly stitched up and left alone.

I told a policemen that Gordon, though unconscious at present, was lying over a loaded gun.

He wanted to know if Gordon had fired the shots in self-defense.

I couldn’t be bothered to answer.

The crowd grew bigger and an ambulance made an entrance.

A young woman pushed the uniforms aside, yelling that she was from the press. India... India... come to dinner.

“Sorry,” I said.

“
Sid
. . .” Horror in her voice and a sort of despair.

“Tell Kevin Mills . . . ,” I said. My mouth was dry from loss of blood. I tried again. She bent her head down to mine to hear above the hubbub.

With humor I said, “Those Japanese people took a load of photos ... I saw the flashes ... so tell Kevin to get moving ... Get those photos ... and he can have ... his exclusive.”

India. wasn’t a newspaperwoman for nothing. The front page of Monday’s
Pump
bore the moderately accurate headline “Shot in the Back,” with, underneath, a picture taken of Gordon Quint aiming his gun unequivocally at my heart.

Gordon’s half-back view was slightly out of focus. My own face was sharp and clear, with an expression that looked rather like polite interest, not the fatalistic terror I’d actually felt.

Kevin and
The Pump
had gone to town.
The Pump
acknowledged that its long campaign of denigration of Sid Halley had been a mistake.

Policy, I saw cynically, had done a one-eighty U-turn. Lord Tilepit had come to such senses as he possessed and was putting what distance he could between himself and Ellis Quint.

There had been twenty eyewitnesses to the shooting of J. S. Halley. Kevin, arming himself with a Japanese interpreter, had listened intently, sorted out what he’d been told, and got it right. Throughout his piece there was an undercurrent of awe that no one was going to be able to dispute the facts. He hadn’t once said, “It is
alleged
.”

Gordon Quint, though still unconscious, would in due course be “helping the police with their inquiries.” Kevin observed that Ellis Quint’s whereabouts were unknown.

Inside the paper there were more pictures. One showed Ellis, arms and fence post raised, on the point of striking his father. The Japanese collectively, and that one photographer in particular, had not known who Ellis Quint was. Ellis didn’t appear on the TV screens in Japan.

Why had there been so much photo coverage? Because Mr. Halley, Kevin said, had been kind to the hon eymooners, and many of them had been watching him as he walked away down Church Street.

I read
The Pump
while sitting upright in a high bed in a small white side room in Hammersmith hospital, thankfully alone except for a constant stream of doctors, nurses, policemen and people with clipboards.

The surgeon who’d dealt with my punctures came to see me at nine in the morning, before he went off duty for the day. He looked a lot worse for wear by then than I did, I thought.

“How are you doing?” he asked, coming in wearily in a sweat-stained green gown.

“As you see... fine, thanks to you.”

He looked at the newspaper lying on the bed. “Your bullet,” he said, “plowed along a rib and in and out of your arm. It tore a hole in the brachial artery, which is why you bled so much. We repaired that and transfused you with three units of blood and saline, though you may need more later. We’ll see how you go. There’s some muscle damage but with physiotherapy you should be almost as good as new. You seem to have been sideways on when he shot you.”

“I was turning. I was lucky.”

“You could put it like that,” he said dryly. “I suppose you do know you’ve also got a half-mended fracture of the forearm? And some fairly deep trauma to the wrist?”

I nodded.

“And we’ve put a few stitches in your face.”

“Gteat.”

“I watched you race,” he said. “I know how fast jockeys heal. Ex-jockeys, too, no doubt. You can leave here when you feel ready.”

I said “Thanks” sincerely, and he smiled exhaustedly and went away.

I could definitely move the fingers of my right hand, even though only marginally at present. There had been a private moment of sheer cowardice in the night when I’d woken gradually from anesthesia and been unable to feel anything in my arm from the shoulder down. I didn’t care to confess or remember the abject dread in which I’d forced myself to
look.
I’d awoken once before to a stump. This time the recurrent nightmare of helplessness and humiliation and no hands had drifted hor rifyingly in and out, but when I did finally look, there was no spirit-pulverizing void but a long white-wrapped bundle that discernibly ended in fingernails. Even so, they didn’t seem to be connected to me. I had lain for a grim while, trying to consider paralysis, and when at length pain had roared back it had been an enormous relief: only whole healthy nerves felt like that. I had an arm ... and a hand... and a life.

Given those, nothing else mattered.

In the afternoon Archie Kirk and Norman Picton argued themselves past the No Visitors sign on the door and sat in a couple of chairs bringing good news and bad.

“The Frodsham police found your car,” Norman said, “but I’m afraid it’s been stripped. It’s up on bricks—no wheels.”