Enduring Love (27 page)

I stopped in Streatham High Street to give Johnny his money and drop him off. He leaned in the open passenger door to say goodbye. “When you’ve finished with the gun, don’t keep it or sell it. Chuck it in the river.”

“Thanks for everything, Johnny.”

“I’m worried for you, Joe, but I’m glad I’m getting out.”

The midafternoon traffic in central London was surprisingly light, and I reached my road an hour and a half after the phone call. I turned off before the apartment building and parked behind it. Round the back, where the dustbins were kept, was a locked fire escape for which only the residents had the key. I let myself through and went up quietly onto the roof. I hadn’t been out here since the morning after Logan’s accident, after Parry’s first phone call. There was a stain on the table from my breakfast coffee. It was bright up here, and to see through the skylight I had to get down on my knees and cup my hands over the glass. My view was across the hallway and into a portion of the kitchen. I could see Clarissa’s bag, but nothing else.

The second skylight gave me a reverse sight line along the hall, into the sitting room. Fortunately, the door was wide open. Clarissa was sitting on the sofa, facing in my direction, though I could not make out the expression on her face. Parry was seated directly in front of her on a wooden kitchen chair. His back was to me, and I guessed he was doing the talking. He was thirty feet away at most, and I indulged a daydream of taking a shot at him right then, even though he was too close to Clarissa and I didn’t trust my aim, or understand enough about guns to know how the glass of the skylight might deflect the bullet from its course.

This fantasy had little to do with the actual gun, which was beginning to weigh in my pocket. I went back to the car and parked round the front and sounded the horn as I got out. Parry came to the window and stood partly concealed by the curtain. He looked down and we exchanged a glance, inverting our usual perspective. As I went up the stairs, I felt for the gun and located the safety catch and practiced releasing it. I rang the doorbell and let myself in. I could hear my heart under my shirt, and the pressure of my pulse made my
field of vision throb. When I called out Clarissa’s name, my thickened tongue glued itself between the
c
and the
l
.

“We’re in here,” she replied, and then she added on a rising pitch of caution, “Joe—” and was cut off by a shushing sound from Parry. I went slowly toward the sitting room and stopped in the doorway. My dread was of provoking sudden action. He had moved the kitchen chair to one side and was sitting on the sofa, with Clarissa close by him on his left. We looked at each other, and she closed her eyes for half a second, which I took to mean it was bad, he was bad, watch out. He looked young and gawky with his hair cut. His hands were shaking.

Since I had appeared before them there had been complete silence. To fill it I said, “I preferred the ponytail.”

He glanced away to his right, to the invisible presence on his shoulder, before meeting my eye. “You know why I’m here.”

“Well …” I said, and took a couple of paces into the room.

His voice cracked on a higher note. “Don’t come any closer. I’ve told Clarissa not to move.”

I was looking at his clothes, wondering about the weapon. He had to have one. He hadn’t come to kill me with his bare hands. He could easily have borrowed or bought from the men he had hired. There was no obvious bulge in the beige cotton jacket he was wearing, though its cut was loose and it was hard to tell. An edge of something black, a comb perhaps, protruded from his top pocket. He wore tight-fitting jeans over gray leather boots, so whatever he had was in the jacket. He sat right up against Clarissa, with his left leg touching her right, almost squashing her into the arm of the sofa. She was perfectly still, her hands palm downward on her knees, her body radiating disgust and terror at his touch. Her head was turned a little toward him, ready for whatever he might do. She was still, but ripples of
muscle and tendon at the base of her neck suggested that she was coiled, ready to spring away.

“Now you’ve got me here,” I said, “you don’t need Clarissa.”

“I need you both,” he said quickly. The tremor in his hands was so bad he clasped them. Sweat was beading on his forehead, and I thought I could smell the sweet grassy tang. Whatever he had in mind was about to happen. Even so, now that he was right in front of me, the idea of pointing a gun at him seemed ludicrous. And I wanted to sit down, I was suddenly so tired. I wanted to lie somewhere and rest. I felt let down by the adrenaline that was meant to bestow alertness. I couldn’t help myself yawning, and he must have thought I was being very cool.

“You forced your way in here,” I said.

“I love you, Joe,” he said simply, “and it’s wrecked my life.” He glanced at Clarissa as though acknowledging a repetition. “I didn’t want any of it—you knew that, didn’t you? But you wouldn’t leave me alone, and I thought there must be a point to it. You had to be leading me on for a reason. You were called to God and you were fighting it and you seemed to be asking me to help you …” He paused, looking across his shoulder for his next thought. I suffered no failure of attention, but my anxiety about his closeness to Clarissa continued to grow. Why wouldn’t he let her move? I remembered a moment during my visit to the Logans when I had grasped what it might mean to lose her. Should I be doing something now? I also remembered Johnny’s warning. As soon as I took out the gun, I would be giving Parry permission to kill. Perhaps the danger could be dissipated in talk. My one certainty was that I should not contradict him.

Clarissa’s voice was very quiet and small. She was taking a risk, trying to reason with him. “I’m sure Joe didn’t mean you any harm.”

The sweat was fairly rolling off Parry now. There was something he was about to do. He forced a laugh. “That’s debatable!”

“He was actually very frightened of you, you know, standing outside the house, and all the letters. He didn’t know anything about you, then suddenly there you were …”

Parry tossed his head from side to side. It was an involuntary spasm, an intensification of his nervous sideways glance, and I had the feeling we were catching a glimpse of the core of his condition; he had to block out the facts that didn’t fit. He said, “You don’t understand. Neither of you do, but you especially.” He turned toward her.

I put my right hand in my jacket pocket and felt for the safety catch, but I was fumbling too hard and couldn’t find it.

“You’ve no idea what this has been about. How could you? But I haven’t come here to talk about it. It’s all in the past. It’s not worth discussing, is it, Joe? We’re finished, aren’t we? All of us.” He trailed a finger through the sweat along the line of his eyebrows and sighed loudly. We waited. When he raised his head, he was looking at me. “I’m not going to go on about it. That’s not why I’m here. I’ve come to ask you something. I think you know what it is.”

“Perhaps I do,” I lied.

He took a deep breath. We were coming to it. “Forgiveness?” He said on a rising interrogative note. “Please forgive me, Joe, for what I did yesterday, for what I tried to do.”

I was so surprised I could not speak immediately. I took my hand out of my pocket and said, “You tried to kill me.” I wanted to hear him say it. I wanted Clarissa to hear.

“I planned it, I paid for it. If you wouldn’t return my love, I thought I’d rather have you dead. It was insanity, Joe. I want you to forgive me.”

I was going to ask him again to let Clarissa move away when he turned toward her, thrust his hand in his top pocket, and pulled out a short-bladed knife, which he drew through the air in a wide semicircular motion. I had no time to move. She raised both hands to her
throat, but he wasn’t aiming for that. He brought the tapering point of the blade right up under his own earlobe and held it there. The hand on the knife was shaking, and pressing hard. He turned right round to show her, and then he showed me.

He pleaded in a kind of rising wail, an unbearable sound. “You’ve never given me a thing. Please let me have this. I’m going to do it anyway. Let me have this one thing from you. Forgiveness, Joe. If you forgive me, God will too.”

Surprise was making me stupid, and relief was confusing my responses. It was so extraordinary, such a reverse, that he was not about to attack Clarissa or me that the fact he was about to slit his throat in front of us presented itself with numbing slowness. I managed to say, “Drop the knife and we’ll talk.”

He shook his head and seemed to press harder. A plumb line of blood ran down from the knife’s tip.

Clarissa too seemed paralyzed. Then she was stretching a hand toward his wrist, as though she might bring him back with the touch of a finger.

“Now,” he said. “Please, Joe. Now.”

“How can I forgive you when you’re mad?”

I aimed at his right side, away from Clarissa. In the enclosed space the explosion seemed to wipe out all other senses, and the room flashed like a blank screen. Next I saw the knife on the floor and Parry slumped back with his hand to his shattered elbow, his face white and his mouth open in shock.

In a world in which logic was the engine of feeling, this should have been the moment when Clarissa stood, when we moved toward each other and folded into each other’s arms with kisses and tears and conciliatory murmurs and words of forgiveness and love. We should
have been able to turn our backs on Parry, whose thoughts must have shrunk to a brilliant point of pain, to his ruined ulna and radial (six months later I came across a chip of bone under the sofa); we should have been able to leave him behind, and when the police and ambulance men had carried him away, when we had talked and caressed and emptied the teapot twice over, we might have retreated to our bedroom to lie face to face and allow ourselves to be carried back to the pure familiar space. Then we could have set about rebuilding our lives, right there.

But such logic would have been inhuman. There were immediate and background reasons why the climax of the afternoon could not have been in this particular happiness. The narrative compression of storytelling, especially in the movies, beguiles us with happy endings into forgetting that sustained stress is corrosive of feeling. It’s the great deadener. Those moments of joyful release from terror are not so easily had. Within the past twenty-four hours Clarissa and I had witnessed a bungled murder and an attempted suicide. Clarissa had spent the afternoon under the threat of Parry’s knife. When she had spoken to me on the phone, he had held the blade against her cheek. For my part, aside from the stress, the accumulation of horrible certainties borne out by events brought no immediate comfort in vindication. Instead I felt cramped by a flat and narrow sense of grievance. It was a passionless anger, all the harder to bear or express because I intuited that being right in this case was also to be contaminated by the truth.

Besides, there isn’t ever only one system of logic. For example, the police, as always, saw things differently. Whatever they might have had in store for Parry, they were quite clear in their minds, when they came to the flat twenty minutes after the shooting, about their business with me. Possession of an illicit firearm and malicious wounding with intent. Parry went his way on a stretcher while a
police constable and a sergeant formally, and even a little apologetically, arrested me. An exception was made to the usual procedure where guns were involved, and I was permitted to walk downstairs unhandcuffed. On our way we passed the police photographer and forensic specialist going up. A routine, I was assured, in case one of us changed his story. My third visit to a police station in twenty-four hours, the third in my life. More random clustering. Clarissa was asked to come too, as a witness. Inspector Linley was off duty, but my file was brought out and read and I was treated pleasantly enough. All the same, I was held in custody overnight in a cell next door to a bawling drunk, and the following morning, after a long interview, I was bailed to return in six weeks. As it turned out, following a letter from Linley to the director of public prosecution, no charges were ever brought against me.

No caresses, then, that night, none of the kitchen table talk and bed that had held us together in the evening after John Logan’s death. Worse, though, at the time, was an image that afflicted me during my sleepless night in the cell and lingered for days afterward. I saw the knife on the floor, I saw Parry slumped back on the sofa clutching his arm—and then I saw the expression on Clarissa’s face. She was on her feet and she was staring at the gun in my hand with an expression of such repulsion and surprise that I thought we would never get past this moment. Lately my worst suspicions had tended to be confirmed. I was getting things right in the worst possible way. My score was depressingly high. Perhaps we really were finished.

Dear Joe,

I’m sorry about our row. I’m not being sardonic—I really mean it, I genuinely regret it. We always prided ourselves on being able to get by without the occasional fights that other couples told us were necessary and therapeutic. I hated it last night. I hated being angry, and I was scared by your anger. But it’s there now, it can’t be unsaid. You said again and again that I owe you a profound apology for not standing with you “shoulder to shoulder” against Jed Parry, for doubting your sanity, for not having faith in your powers of rationality and deduction and your dedicated research into his condition. I think I gave you that apology several times last night and I’m giving it again now. I thought Parry was a pathetic and harmless crank. At worst, I thought of him as a creature of your imagining. I never guessed he would become so violent. I was completely wrong and I’m sorry, really sorry.

But what I was also trying to say last night was this: your being right is not a simple matter. I can’t quite get rid of the idea that there
might have been a less frightening outcome if you had behaved differently. That apart, there’s no question that the whole experience has cost us dearly, however right you were. Shoulder to shoulder? You went it alone, Joe. Right from the start, before you knew anything about Parry, you became so intense and strange and worked up about him. Do you remember his first phone call? You waited two days to tell me about it. Then you were off on your old track about getting back into “real science,” when we’d agreed that there was no point. Are you really saying this had nothing to do with Parry? That same evening you stormed out of the flat, slamming the door on me. Nothing like that had ever happened between us. You became more and more agitated and obsessed. You didn’t want to talk to me about anything else. Our sex life dwindled to almost nothing. I don’t want to go on about it, but your ransacking my desk was a terrible betrayal. What reason had I given you to be jealous? As the Parry thing grew, I watched you go deeper into yourself and further and further away from me. You were manic, and driven, and very lonely. You were on a case, a mission. Perhaps it became a substitute for the science you wanted to be doing. You did the research, you made the logical inferences, and you got a lot of things right, but in the process you forgot to take me along with you, you forgot how to confide.