Dispossession (32 page)

I could take the file to a genuine computer whizz, I
supposed, someone who would know how to crack uncrackable passwords. Some
teenage genius with spots and adequacy problems, no doubt, whose contemptuous
fingers would unriddle this in moments.

But I didn’t know any, nor where to look to find them; and I
was reluctant even to step outside the flat with the computer on my shoulder,
in case anyone was watching. There were burglars out there who wanted
something, after all. My money was on this.

Maybe I could copy the file onto a floppy, and take that? I
didn’t know if protected files would copy; I should find out. I should do that
right now, top priority.

But I didn’t, I only sat there staring at that uncooperative
screen, utterly defeated. Every time I looked away from it, all I saw was a
girl in a stable yard being kicked unconscious and whipped awake while a man
stood watching in a window. So I looked back at the screen again, better defeat
than disgust. And then a figure caught my eye, moving beyond it; and that was
Suzie come to fetch me to the futon.

“You’ve been ages,” she said. “And you’re not getting
anywhere, are you?”

“No.”

By then she was sitting beside me on the sofa, reaching to
dig her thumbs into my shoulders. “Stiff as a board,” she grunted. “Uncle Han’s
for you in the morning, you can’t treat your body this way. Turn that thing off,
have a shower, clean your teeth and come to bed.”

No fight in me, I was all surrender. And when I’d done what
she told me in the order that she said, I found her lying naked under the duvet
and waiting for me, wide awake and intentional.

Most people do what they want to do; in a world without
choices, you only do what you must. I shucked off the kimono and joined her,
naked as she was and craven with doubt.

“Suzie...”

“It’s all right,” she said, “it is allowed. We’re married,
remember?”

Which was the problem, of course: that I didn’t remember,
that I was a monogamous man by instinct and still none of my physical loyalty
lay with her, that it didn’t seem all right at all and shouldn’t have been
allowed.

Only that she was there, all too much there suddenly. Warm
and hungry, lithe and alien, exotic and unfamiliar; and God in my confusion I
needed something to cling to, something tonight I needed that wasn’t failure or
fear or disgust. My hands closed on her slender shoulders, and not I think to
push her away.

She may have been unsure herself, just for a moment, whether
my touch meant yes or no, acceptance or its opposite. At any rate she grinned
into my eyes, just at the moment that I touched her, and she said, “Besides,
you know, we have done it before.”

Damn right we’d done it before, that was self-evident. These
at least of my secrets she’d been made free of, she knew all the private
touches that could chase my soul like silver in the light.

Briefly I felt at a tremendous disadvantage, unable to
reciprocate, knowing nothing of her body beyond what was obvious, what was
universal. But cooperative or competitive, whichever it was, that sense of
inadequacy slipped away; I stopped feeling anything beyond her fingers and her
mouth, sharp teeth and hair and hot slippery flesh and the mind-numbing
generosity of her.

Generous once, at least, generous the first time. Then I was
knackered, I wanted nothing but the comforts of sleep, though I was quite happy
to sink into them with a friendly body pressed close and warm to mine. But not
she was sleepy, she wanted more; I called her greedy, and she impugned my
masculinity in a hissing whisper hard into my ear, and ultimately what the hell
choice did I have?

At some point during that unhasty, exploratory, all but
sleepless night, I remember her groaning on a giggle, saying she supposed she
was going to have to train me all over again, and she’d had no idea before that
men could grow up so ignorant. In response I kissed her breathless, and she had
fine breath control; and the touch of Carol that came into my head then—
“Don’t, Jonty, you know I don’t like that. Like two
oysters wrestling in a single shell. Gross. I like California kisses. Dry lips,
no tongues, just sharing air...”
—was suddenly itself alien, and
unwelcome, and not at all guilt-inducing.

o0o

I guess we did both of us sleep in the end, or doze at least
in the dawnlight. Me, I remember being too weary to move, too brain-dead to
talk any more; but those memories are chopped into fragments, so most likely I
was dipping in and out, barely there at all. And I remember her breathing too
slow, too sonorous for consciousness. I also remember her wide-eyed and
watching me, though I don’t remember the change, one to the other.

No clocks in that room, nothing to stir us or tell us that
we ought to stir. I gazed at the light, I tracked the sun across the window, I
felt no inclination to shift at all; at last it was Suzie who awoke us to the
day and the day’s demands. She stropped her cheek gently against my stubble,
her hair tickled my nose and she said,

“Will you come and watch me have my shower?”

“I might,” I said; and she led me by the hand from futon to
kimonos and so decently through the flat, and thank God we were decent because
my mother was sitting on the sofa where I had sat last night. She had my
computer in her lap and was playing or working or snooping, whichever; and
however glad I was of the kimonos they felt actually like no defence, no
decency at all because her acidly satisfied gaze seemed to burn heedlessly
through to the flesh and bones and bruises underneath, all the physical history
of the night just gone.

o0o

I watched Suzie shower, too weary to feel the slightest
desire now even in my head as she twisted and lathered and rinsed under a
scalding jet. She looked almost a boy, with her small tight body and her
cropped hair in the blurring steam; nothing boyish in what my skin remembered
of her, though, this last twelve hours. Sometime, somehow I was going to have
to deal with this, to find how I felt about what she’d done and how I’d
responded. For the moment, though, what I felt most was grateful. She’d done it
without knowing what it was that she did, perhaps, she’d done it for reasons of
her own—
because she loves me
, a hard
accusatory whisper in my head, as though her love were my fault and therefore
certain to be betrayed—but she’d found me a way through the tangled thorns of
my self-loathing. And if that way only led eventually to a deeper valley and a
darker sky, what of it? Sufficient unto last night particularly were the evils
thereof, and she’d got me through them. The next lot I didn’t have to face till
sunset came around again. For now, I’d sit with my face in the light and not
worry.

Which was absolutely my mother’s philosophy, and none of
mine; but just then I felt it truly, which should have been enough in itself to
throw me into a flat dizzy spin of panic. That it didn’t, I could only put down
to exhaustion...

Suzie stepped out of the shower, and I fetched her a towel.
When I draped it around her shoulders she worked herself wordlessly like a cat
against my hands. Senseless to be shy or wary of her body now, so I dried her
quickly, then shucked off the kimono for my own shower while she sat on the
toilet seat still rubbing at her hair but watching me, her face unreadable
through steam and water.

My turn to stand still and be dried off when I was done,
though I flinched where she had not, earning a giggle and a gentler touch, and,
“Hey, did I do that?”

“Well, I didn’t do it myself. Will it scar?”

“You’ll probably never play the euphonium again. What is a
euphonium?”

“Big and brassy,” where this wife I didn’t remember choosing
was a flute, I thought, slender and quicksilver, light and breathy and
surprising. And I wanted to play on her again, and wasn’t sure I’d ever let
myself.

If the decision were ever left up to me...

o0o

My mother was still smug half an hour later, when we had
come together to the table for breakfast. Suzie and I sipped tea and coffee
respectively, clean and refreshed, haggard and unspeaking; Ellie seemed to
regard this as some kind of personal triumph, unless she was simply amused by
our youthful excess. Any minute now, I thought, she’d be offering unsolicited
advice on how better to manage our sex-lives.

To forestall that, I said, “What were you doing on my
computer, then, what are you up to?”

“An addendum,” she said, “for the
Journal
. I’ll send you a copy.”

“That’s the issue about Deverill?” And when she nodded, “You’re
not still going ahead with that, for God’s sake?”

“Yes, of course I am. Why not?

“Because it’s had you in hiding for weeks, is why not.
Because it’s put you in fear for your
life
is
why not.”
Because sometimes you appal me and
always you madden me and you’ve never been any good at it nor really cared that
much but you’re still my mother, is why not...

“I wouldn’t say fear,” she said. “It was you that was
afraid. Touching in a son, but fortunately not catching. I’ve never killed an
issue yet, and I don’t intend to start with this one. If ever a man needed
stripping naked in public, that man is Vernon Deverill. Besides, I don’t
believe it’s Deverill who’s been threatening my life. Do you?”

After yesterday? I opened my mouth to say yes, but then
never gave the word a shape. Oh, he was capable of killing, I was sure of that,
and exposure in
Jonathan’s Journal
might do
him enough damage to put him in a killing mood; but no, all the evidence said
she was right, it wasn’t him she should be scared of.

Not yet, at least, not till after she published. And she’d
had other big fish killing-mad at her, but she’d always relied on anonymity for
protection, and no one had ever broken through that to find her.

Thus far.

Her life, her choice; I wasn’t easy with it, but what did
that matter? To her, not a whit.

“Where’ve you been, anyway?” I demanded, abruptly shifting
ground. “Where’ve you been hiding?”

“With friends,” she said. “You told me not to tell you
where.”

“Can you go back?”

“Of course.”

No “of course” about it: not friends but self-immolating
heroes in my book, if they were willing to put Ellie up, put up with Ellie for
weeks at a stretch. Especially if they could pack her off one day and welcome
her back the next, for another indeterminate stay.

“I think you should, then,” I said. “This morning. Right
now,” as she glanced at her watch, as her mute comment pointed out that it was
barely morning still, we’d been that late getting up.

“I’ve got a better idea,” Suzie butted in suddenly. “If you’ve
got your passport with you, Ellie?”

“My passport I’ve got,” she said. “For what?”

My wife the wise woman had my mother sussed. Always she had
her passport with her, always her eyes on the distant horizon; and very little
it needed to send her away. “I think you should go to Spain,” Suzie said. “Mr
Nolan’d like a visit, I’m sure, he won’t be seeing anybody except the consul
and his lawyers and anyone Deverill sends, he’s probably dying for a friendly
face out there. And you could ask him what he knows about SUSI. Whether it was
them set him up, or what. As it’s you, he’ll tell you anything he knows, he’ll
be so glad to see you; and I bet he knows a lot. He’s got to know something.”

She was right, even my mother had to admit that. A minute’s
thought, a brisk nod, and, “Yes, I’ll do that. Jonty, can you phone the airport
while I pack? First plane to Madrid, please.”

“Hang on a minute,” I said. “The police are looking for you,
remember? There’s not going to be a nationwide alert or anything, you’re not
that important,” and oh, how I loved telling her that, “but Chief Inspector Dale
might have asked the local airport to keep an eye out for you. He’ll be half
expecting you to head to Spain, and I think he half suspects you’re around here
somewhere. Better if you drive down to Manchester or London and fly from
there.”

“No car, darling.”

“Take the one I hired. It’s a national firm, they’re sure to
have an office, whichever airport you go to. Hand it in there. You might have
to pay a bit extra, but...”

“All right. Good. Has anyone got any cash? I’d rather not
leave a trail behind me, if that nasty policeman’s put a trace on my credit
cards.”

Cash on that scale I didn’t have. The gold card would
probably produce it; but before I could offer, Suzie went to the sideboard and
rummaged among napery, coming back with a fat envelope. She glanced at me
shamefaced as she handed it to my mother.

“I was holding out on you, Jonty. Private money, for
emergencies.”

What, and I was supposed to be outraged? Apparently, yes;
but in fact I only wanted to applaud the wisdom. So fast a marriage, of course
she should take precautions. I hoped I’d had the sense to do the same. And I
must
go and see my bank manager, talk things
through with him and learn what my financial situation actually was, how much
of Deverill’s generosity I had to hand and what other prospects he and I could
find between us.

Actually I thought, after yesterday, I’d rather like to pay
Deverill all his money back, if only to send him the message that I was not the
corrupt solicitor I’d been pretending to be, that actually he couldn’t buy my
silence. Though however I’d do that I wasn’t at this time pretending to
imagine. Even if I found another job—and there was a superfluity of solicitors
in the system just now, too many for the market to bear, and here I was with my
reputation in tatters of my own choosing—it looked like being the kind of debt
I’d need a mortgage to repay. Suzie could do it, no doubt, with the club or the
flat or both to offer as security; Suzie would do it, no doubt of that either,
to buy her husband out of an intolerable situation; I wouldn’t dream of
allowing her, and that too was not subject to doubt.