Dispossession (33 page)

So I sat there musing on Deverill and me and yesterday, and
there was a brisk rapping on the door, and I unthinkingly let Suzie go to
answer it. Worse, my mother had already checked the wad of notes in the
envelope, slipped it into her handbag and was now on the other sofa and back on
my computer again, typing something fast and two-fingered to get it down, she’d
said, before it escaped her. No hint of self-preservation in her, no signs of
her scuttling to the privacy of a bedroom; she just looked up distractedly to
see who it was, with never a worry that whoever it was—Deverill, policeman, our
wannabe burglars come back for a second try—would see her also, and might have
come here precisely for that reason.

Suzie opened the door, and a woman’s voice asked for me. I
stood up, ever the gentleman, and here was yesterday walking into the flat: not
Deverill, not Dean but Mrs Tuck. Smart two-piece, sensible shoes and a handbag,
and had she come to handbag me?

To which the answer was yes, in a way. “Jonty,” she said,
with no preamble and no allowances for being overheard, “you left us very
precipitately yesterday.”

Suzie’s eyes on me, silence from my mother’s still fingers
on my keyboard: what could I be but brave? Braver than yesterday... “Yes, well.
I didn’t like the postprandial entertainment.” Lawyerly-brave, brave with words
comfortably after the fact, and here came that disgust again like a resurgent
tide of sickness. I could taste it in my mouth, feel it twist in my head,
leaving me dizzy and weak and wanting to sit down.

She made a little gesture of distaste. “Neither did I. Not
my idea of fun, but Vernon likes to make these little gestures. Preferably with
witnesses, I don’t know why. I expect it does something extraordinary to his
ego; that seemed to be what powered him best when we were married, and I don’t
believe he’s changed. But what I wanted to say, Jonty, I’m sure it’s not
necessary, but—well, I wouldn’t like to think that what you saw yesterday would
prejudice your relationship with Vernon. He’s a hard man, but he’s been very
generous with you.”

That much at least I was sure of, and the subtext was
equally clear. This was my second warning: first Dean on the steps of Deverill’s
house, and now Mrs Tuck in my own home, or the closest approximation I had now.

“I’m very protective of my ex-husband,” she went on,
apparently not content to leave what was obvious unsaid. “Not that he stands
much in need of my protection, you’ve seen how he looks after his own
interests; but it’s not a good idea to turn suddenly against those interests,
that’s the message. Am I getting through?”

“Entirely,” I said.

“That’s good. Not a wasted journey, then. And you’ll carry
on trying to find out whatever happened to poor Mr Nolan?”

“Oh, I will that,” I said.

“Excellent.” And then she gazed around her, and I’d hate to
say that either one of them was outfaced, but Suzie suddenly interested herself
in the documents she carried, and my mother ran a corrective eye across the
computer screen.

And when Mrs Tuck said, “Mrs Marks?” they both of them
startled, like two guilty things surprised. And I cursed silently in my head,
for the information given away there in the jerk of my mother’s head; and just
as well we were getting her out of the country pronto. Her
Journal
might be secret still, though I might not
have laid much money on it at that time; but she was a hostage to fortune, a
hostage accessible to Deverill’s hand so long as he knew where to find her. She
and Suzie both now, if ever he felt the need to intimidate me.

Mrs Tuck smiled with the certainty of a job well done, and I
wondered if this was what she’d come for: if all she’d really wanted—no, all
they’d
really wanted, she must surely be here
with Deverill’s blessing, if not on his instructions—was to confirm that the
third party they’d seen in the car and now in the flat was indeed as they’d
guessed her to be, my mother. And to make that confirmation public, to let me
see that they knew now, which would get the message over very nicely, thank
you.

Certainly Mrs Tuck had nothing of import to say to either
Mrs Marks: she only said goodbye nicely and walked towards the door, at a speed
nicely judged to give me just enough time to get there ahead and open it for
her. Which of course I did; and behind me I heard my mother trying too late to
cover herself, to make out that she was so totally absorbed in her work she’d
barely noticed that we had a visitor.

“Jonty,” she said loudly, aggressively and speaking as much
to Mrs Tuck as to me, “does this so-smart machine of yours not even count my
words for me?”

How would I know? I was as ignorant as she was, with the
programs that machine ran now. And so I told her, once the door was safely
closed and Mrs Tuck was gone; and then I asked her again what she was writing,
what was so urgent that it had to be done now, when she was so urgent to be
gone.

“Just notes, darling,” she said, blithely copying
whatever-it-was onto a floppy and slipping that into the shoulder-bag that lay
at her feet, packed and ready to go. “Everything you’ve told me about Deverill,
it’s all grist to the mill. It’s strange, how we’ve both been working on
different sides of the same story. Don’t you think it’s strange? I think it’s
strange.”

“Yes, Ellie, it’s very strange. Are you ready to go?”

“You weren’t very cooperative, though, the first time. When
you came and told me to disappear. You won’t remember, but you absolutely
refused to tell me anything that time. Too dangerous, you said, and I should
get out while the going was good and leave Deverill to people who understood
him. Very domineering, you were. This has been much better,” and she patted my
cheek lightly as she stood up, fit reward to a son for moling for his mother.

Actually, I’d not told her that much this time either. Not a
word about the girl beaten and abused in his stableyard, though I’d gathered
that was pretty much standard practice, just his way of doing business. I could
live with my shaming memory, just about, but I couldn’t talk about it. That was
one corroborative detail my mother’s exposé would have to get by without. No
doubt she’d have gleaned other stories on her account. Pillow talk from Nolan,
perhaps: I was sure she could be really turned on by whispers of brutality, if
that kind of sadism-by-proxy response was what it took to get the information.

It seemed that she wasn’t quite ready to go yet. She had
nothing to read, she said, and she couldn’t start a journey without a book. So
she went back to the spare bedroom to raid my library, leaving the computer
switched on and humming on the sofa. Prompted by her example, I fetched a disk
from the bag it lived in, and discovered that indeed it was possible to copy a
password-protected file. Read it I couldn’t, but I could make as many copies as
I liked.

Just one for now, because I had a cautious soul and I
always, always made back-ups. I might make a batch later if it came to that and
spread it around some computer-friendly friends, see if they could crack the
code for me. Disk went into pocket, mother came out of bedroom with a
double-handful of books, we all trooped down the stairs one more time. Being
ultra-cautious, I had Suzie lock the fire door behind us.

Took Ellie to the hotel car park, gave her the keys and
watched her drive away, and followed down all the ramps to the exit to make
assurance doubly sure that she was gone; and then walked back to the flat to
find a message for me on the answering machine.

A message from Carol, who had been so definite that she
never wanted to see or speak to me again, who had threatened me with
injunctions to be sure she never had to: a message saying come, come quickly,
come now...

Well, what she actually
said
,
she said, “Jonty, it’s Carol. Luke’s here, he’s looking for you...”

And that was all. Her voice sort of died, there was a pause,
she put the phone down; and that in itself, that hesitancy in the precise and
punctilious Carol was enough to say
help
,
to say
get over here right now, where the hell are
you when I need you?
And Carol called for help so rarely, she would have
to have been
in extremis
to do it at any
time, let alone now when she was still so angry with me.

But then, Luke was enough to drive anyone to extremes. Yes,
she’d need rescuing; and yes, I was sole candidate for that particular job.

“On my way,” I said stupidly to the machine, not bothering
to waste a minute by ringing Carol back. “Can I take the car, Suze?”

“No.”

I was already holding my hand out for the keys; I drew it
back slowly, scowling at her. “Why not? You heard, it’s urgent.”

“Yeah. I’m coming too.”

“Oh, what? It’s not you he’s looking for. What are you going
to do, be sisterly and supportive with Carol? I don’t think so...”

“I let you out of my sight,” she said, “you go off and have
adventures without me. You disappear for hours or days at a time, things happen
to you you won’t talk about,” and I had a flash in my mind, a girl being
methodically kicked around a stableyard, and I realised for the first time that
she was seeing it too, or something like it, “and all I can do is worry,” she
went on. “And I won’t
do
that any more,
Jonty. I’m coming with. Besides, I want to meet Luke. Even if he doesn’t want
to meet me.”

She had a point. And besides, I also had wanted her to meet
Luke. I remembered threatening him with her when I left him last, as apparently
I had also the time before.

“Come on, then,” I said. “But can I drive? Please? I know
the short cuts.”

“Is there that much hurry, then?”

“Oh, yes,” I said.

o0o

Short cuts make long delays.
I might know and use them all, but I didn’t know the car. Nor did I fit it very
well: I was too long in the leg or it was too short in the body, depending on
whether you listened to Suzie or to me as we grouched on that hurried, awkward
journey across town, as I kept missing gears and she kept wincing and every
bone in her stiff and wary body kept saying what was undeniably true, that we’d
have been quicker far going a slightly longer way with her at the wheel,
comfortably in tune with her machine.

If the journey had been longer, perhaps I would have
stopped, we would have swapped: perhaps. I don’t think so, though. Not for
reasons of male pride, though my
amour propre
certainly was offended, that I was making such a hash of this. I think I
particularly needed to be at the wheel, to feel the responsibility laid firmly
and irrevocably across my own shoulders as I brought my wife to the house I had
shared with my lover. Though actually it seemed to me to be entirely the other
way around. What I had had with Carol was a marriage,
pace
the Archbishop of Canterbury and the laws of
the land; while Suzie felt at best to me like some new and casual fling, an
erotic passion that went only skin-deep, bruise-deep, for all the bruises I had
to show for it.

And if the journey had been longer, perhaps I would have
lost some of the urgency en route, realising how very much I didn’t want to do
this. But there was no time for cold anticipation to break through the
hurry, hurry
heat of moving, of doing. I felt
vaguely smug, like a knight-errant called to the aid of a lady who had spurned
him before; but nothing more than that, nothing more honest, there simply wasn’t
the time.

Door-to-door I drove, and got out of the car still grumbling
about the shape of it, how awkward the pedals and how stiff the gears. Suzie I
think was no longer listening at all; she slipped her hand into mine as we
stood there on the pavement, and it was that touch of chilly fingers that
pulled me down, that rooted me in what was real: that I stood here hand in hand
with the girl I’d left Carol for, and there was Carol opening the door already,
must have been watching for us through the window.

And Carol didn’t seem to notice, or if she noticed she didn’t
seem to care: which said a great deal about the current state of Carol’s mind,
and how she was coping with her house guest.

“Jonty, he’s in the front. Will you, will you just take him
away? Please?”

“Do my best,” I said.

She held the door open, and we both stepped in; and no, she
wasn’t cutting Suzie dead, she wasn’t trying to look straight through her
because I saw their eyes meet and Carol’s linger for a moment, and it was Suzie
who looked away. There was even a vestigial curiosity in Carol, I thought, as
if she remembered now that she’d been blazingly angry with me, and here was the
cause of it all; but no sign of that anger now, against either one of us. We
were here to do a job that she desperately needed doing, and for a little while
she’d be nothing more than grateful.

What Carol called the front wasn’t at the front of the house.
It was a tag she had grown up with: to her it meant the living-room, the main
social centre of the house, and it just so happened that in this house it was
at the back. She wasn’t going to change her language to suit a temporary
geography; she’d changed mine instead. “What’s important comes at the front,”
she used to say, “just think of it like that and never mind which way you’re
facing or where the street is.”

That was the way it worked, why I’d always been happy to let
her change my habits of speech or thought or whatever she wanted changed:
because things made sense under her eye and within her philosophy. She could
always find a reason. Nothing was ever unexplained. It had made life easy, to
share it with someone so grounded in certainty.

Which was presumably why she was having so much trouble with
Luke: because he was inexplicable, he didn’t fit her world, he challenged the
very ground she stood on. Literally, as well as metaphorically. She used to
wave me off to see him, “Go on,” she’d say, “go see your fallen angel,” but she
never offered to come with, or asked to meet him. I guess in her heart she
never believed in him for what he was, she only labelled me credulous and him
some kind of romantic blond fakir. But today he was in her house, and even if
he wasn’t doing tricks he was so untouched by earth or any significant breath
of humanity there could be no doubting now.