Kraven Images (26 page)

A day came when Kraven, convinced that he had more than demonstrated his
bona fides
, let alone his heroic self-restraint, handed Candy a poem he had written for her, a poem with a
carpe diem
theme:

Youth’s here now and gone tomorrow –

Cause a-plenty, love, for sorrow.

Now
, therefore, whilst time is fleeting,

Now
, whilst blood is strongly beating,

Let us, on Love’s altar lying,

Like the Phoenix, ever dying,

Burning in our sacred fire,

Kiss and see the flames leap higher.

Come, embrace me, four-and-twenty,

Healthy bodies need Love’s plenty.

He watched her eagerly as she read, her beautiful head bowed over the page; he watched her when she looked up at him, the strangest of smiles on her lips, and with slow deliberation tore the poem in half, and then in half again. There was to be no hanky-panky.

The weeks sped by. Summer was in the offing, and Kraven was talking of returning to New York ‘to settle his
affairs
’. They had eaten at Cerubino’s, their favourite restaurant in Hampstead, and gone home in a mood of satisfied somnolence. The lights in the lounge were dim and warm and gentle. They listened to music on the radio. Kraven was stretched out in his leather chair nursing a scotch on the rocks; sunk into hers, her ankles tucked beneath her, her short skirt revealing a breathtaking expanse of white thigh, the light behind her glinting in her abundant and gorgeous hair, Candy nursed a stinger.

On the radio, the programme ‘Windows on Spain’ began to play a recording of Ravel’s
Bolero
.

‘
Bardic Follies
,’ said Candy, smiling. ‘Remember?’

‘
Hamlet
, act three, scene four.’

Their eyes met and held as the sensuous music slowly, exquisitely slowly, increased in tempo and volume, its rhythmic repetitions taking hold of them, attuning their breathing, carrying them along, until, louder and louder, faster and faster, swollen beyond bearing it burst into its dissonant climax.

Candy suddenly leaped to her feet. ‘Let’s go!’ she said, and held out her hand.

* * *

HE LAY ON THE BED AND WATCHED HER UNDRESS, a wondrously sensuous performance, erotic, self-mocking, exquisitely slow and teasing, limber and graceful. ‘O my America, my new found land!’ Majestic in her nakedness and beauty, her divine shapeliness, she came to him. ‘Oh my,’ she said, ‘what’s this?’ and guided him into his place.

Later, he was struck by a sudden thought. ‘Candy Peaches must be your name in Burlesque. What’s your real name?’

‘Candida,’ she said. ‘Candida Pechvogel.’

‘And your mother’s?’ he asked eagerly.

‘Miriam Pechvogel. Mimi. Why?’

Kraven took her once more into his arms. He kissed her cheeks, her nose, her lips. ‘Cock-a-doodle-doo!’ he crowed, ‘Cock-a-doodle-doo!’

* * *

KRAVEN GOT UP BLITHELY THE NEXT MORNING, prepared coffee against Candy’s wakening, and went out for a vigorous walk on the Heath. He returned almost two hours later, a bag of fresh poppy-seed bagels in his hand, to an empty house and a note taped to the hall mirror:

Dear Nicholas,

I’m going back to the States. No, it’s not some crazy impulse – I’ve been booked for a month.

It wouldn’t have worked out anyway. Not with us. Look, I like you a lot. Honest. It’s been great. Last night was great. But you were getting too serious. (Or playing at it – with you it’s sometimes hard to tell.) The point is, all I ever wanted was friendship. Nothing too heavy, no unnecessary complications. (Does ‘Nicholas’
mean
‘complications’? The same root, maybe – in the original Sanskrit, or something?)

I’ve got plans I’m not about to change: student teaching next term, getting a start on my PhD, a career that’s just beginning. I need space. Let’s leave it at that.

Candy

From his slack hand the bag of bagels, bought for Candy, dropped down and shed the seeds across the floor. He stood for a moment, pale and speechless, then ran from room to room calling her name, half-trusting to find her. He rooted in vain within their common laundry bag, hoping to find in soiled T-shirts, panties, bras, an assurance of her continued presence. Alas, alas. In desperation, he phoned Heathrow and had her paged; miraculously, they found her and she came to the phone.

‘Nicholas?’

‘Don’t go,’ he said.

‘My flight’s boarding. I’ve
got
to go.’

‘I’ll come to New Haven. We’ll talk.’

‘Give a girl a break.’

‘Give
me
a break. I
need
you, Candy. Besides, I’ve found your fa –’

‘Nicholas,’ she said firmly but kindly, ‘grow up.’

A
click
, and the line was dead.

BETWEEN THE SIDE
of the house and the stone wall that had separated the Kravens from their Harrogate neighbours grew a magnificent old oak. It stood there still, although it would probably not survive the transformations the building speculators had in mind. The tree was already in leaf, already concealing what had been Nicko’s most secret place. Kraven made his way through the wet high grass and stood with his hand on the great wrinkled trunk, looking up. No, not even from here: the secret place was invisible beneath the huge green umbrella, hidden by the very arms that formed it.

About fifteen feet up, the central trunk diverged into three heavy upsweeping gnarled branches, which then became the source of all subsequent ramifications. At their common base these three formed a hollow, like the inside of a small barrel or the crow’s-nest of the HMS
Victory
, and quite roomy enough for a small boy. Nicko had even been able to sit down in it, for a natural ledge, a kind of arboreal goitre, bulged halfway down one inner wall. Here had been his mizzen mast, his mountain peak, his fortress turret, his Spitfire cockpit.

Two feet or so beneath the secret place, a single sturdy branch, a sport, a bastard growth, sprang from the central trunk. It hung downwards, heavy with offspring of its own, to form a leafy bridge from the parent tree to the stone wall.
Here
it rested before turning skywards itself. This branch, this drawbridge, gangplank, mountain trail, had been Nicko’s route to his secret place. Once on the wall, it was as easy as toffee.

Nobody had known about the secret place, certainly not Marko. Kraven patted the friendly trunk. Perhaps still up there, up aloft in the castle keep, was the treasure box. He strove to remember its contents; A catapult made by Wipers Willie (much-decorated hero of Flanders in the First World War, the Kraven’s gardener and Home Guard defender in the Second) and capable, Willie had said, of smiting battalions of Nasties hip and thigh; some pre-war marbles in a fine net bag, cat’s-eyes, blood-eyes, aggies of all sorts; a
Wisden’s Cricketer’s Almanack
for 1938, a wad of cigarette cards secured by an elastic band, a genuine police whistle.

He walked back to the paved path through the tall wet grass, over the track he had recently beaten down. Turning he looked back at the oak, at its overarching green immensity. Perhaps also up there still were Nicko’s bow and arrows. They had been up there that morning and all through that day in the spring of 1941, when the trees had burst into their first leaf and the flowers exploded in vivid colour, and hidden in his secret place Nicko had taken careful aim at the Beast, and the Beast had suddenly clutched his heart while reaching for a rose, had clutched his heart, crumpled up and died.

* * *

KRAVEN HAD GONE UP TO LEEDS BY TRAIN and rented a car at the station. He could have changed trains, but arrival by car had seemed somehow grander. He had left Harrogate a little boy; he was returning a man (in a Ford Cortina). Why he had travelled north he could not have precisely said. The fact of Candy’s abrupt departure offered
no
obvious explanation. He had phoned Percy Fishbane to tell him of his discovery.

‘A
girl
, you say?’ The old man was indignant.

‘Yes. Candida. She calls herself Candy Peaches.’

‘Naow, you must’ve got it wrong. A girl! What about her mum, then?’

‘There’s no mistake. Miriam Pechvogel is alive and well, and owns a strip joint in Sausalito.’

‘Strewth!’

‘Your daughter’s a graduate student at Yale. A letter should reach her there without trouble. D’you want to take down the address?’

‘No hurry. Bit of a shock, this. Not a
son
, then? Needs chewing over.’

‘But you said –’

‘Never mind what I effing said. What I’m saying now is, no effing hurry.’ And Fishbane had abruptly cut the connection.

It had been drizzling in London. The drizzle had grown into rain and the rain into downpour as the train hurtled northwards. Leeds was awash. He stood at the bar of the Queens Hotel looking glumly past the barman’s shoulder and out of the window at the traffic island, fighting the paralysis of the will soaking into his marrow and gluing him to the spot.

Traffic around the island had been heavy. Several major arteries converged there. (Had Nicko actually released the arrow?) On the island itself Edward the Black Prince, Hero of Crecy and Poitiers, Flower of England’s Chivalry, Upholder of the Rights of the People in the Good Parliament, grandly equestrian, was growing wetter and wetter. (Probably Nicko hadn’t released the arrow at all, and even if he had, the distance from the boy’s perch to the spot in the garden where his father had died was far too great for an arrow from a toy bow to have travelled. Besides, Nicko’s
arrows
had been tipped with suction cups, for pity’s sake!) Growing no less wet than princely Edward were four Leeds Worthies, native sons, representatives of all the centuries from the sixteenth to the nineteenth, each in an admirably sober attitude, together forming a restraining rearguard for the flamboyant Plantagenet. (‘Good,’ Nicko had thought as the Beast fell. Kraven distinctly remembered Nicko thinking that.) In the van, as it were, and neatly counterbalancing the Four Worthies, near-naked nymphs danced in wanton gaiety, each holding aloft her lamp, together determined to lead the Hero, Flower and Upholder down the primrose way to the everlasting bonfire. They too were wet, but in their case a certain shiny lubricity seemed quite suitable. (Yes, when the Beast fell, Nicko had most certainly thought, ‘Good! Serves him right!’) Kraven ordered another whisky.

From the Queens Hotel Kraven drove to the cemetery, but the gates were locked, no one responded to his summons, and he returned to the car wet and yet relieved. He sat for a moment considering what to do. Harrogate, then. But the road to Harrogate took him back through the city. In a mutable world the ugliness of Leeds was a rare earnest of permanence. The rain, far from washing clean, had only slimed over the city’s characteristic grimy red brick. On Swinegate stood an idiot holding up for the passing motorist’s distraction a sign whose clumsy lettering dripped in the downpour: ‘THE LORDIS OOMPA88IONS FAIL NOT; THEY ARE NEW EVERY MOANING. Lamentations 3:22.’ Kraven drove on. His route brought him at last to the A61, the Harrogate road.

As Leeds thinned out and began to merge with the countryside, the sky lifted and brightened. Scraps of blue appeared. The sun shone, at first hesitantly from behind torn shreds of white, soon boldly from a deep blue sky. Kraven opened the Cortina’s window and began a favourite hum.
The
road dipped and lifted its way through the margins of the glorious Yorkshire Dales.

Entering Harrogate, the A61 led past the West Park and the War Memorial – alas, poor Willie, a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy, dead now surely, long since gone – down Parliament Street and up Ripon Road. Kraven had half intended to put up at the Majestic, a massive red-brick pile with many gables and green turrets that stood on a vast park-estate, four stars, very grand indeed. But he drove past the Majestic and turned left instead just short of Duchy Road into the spacious forecourt of the Barrow. The Barrow would serve well enough, two stars, solidly provincial. It was built on a generous Victorian scale of the sooty grey stone that distinguished Harrogate architecture.

He was given a large airy room on the Barrow’s north side. From his window it was possible to see, across the tennis courts and beyond the far bordering trees, Duchy Road. In fact, he found he was looking directly at what had been the Kraven house. The suddenness of its appearance before his eyes, the sheer unexpectedness of it, gave him what Aunt Cicely would call ‘the willies’. It had been his plan to lead up to a first sighting only after a preparatory wandering about the town. Assuring himself that all he had seen, after all, were the roof and the upper storey, he left the hotel and began his tour.

Harrogate had not changed much physically in thirty years. Well, the railway station was new, or somewhat new, its sterile modern exterior no more than a superficial skin over its gamier predecessor; the Central Cinema had become a bingo hall; the St James’s had disappeared altogether. Farrah’s (Estd. 1840) Harrogate Toffee was sold all over town, everywhere but in the original Georgian shop, which was now maintained as a sort of tourist attraction, ‘a glimpse of Harrogate’s colourful past’.

Nobody came here for the waters any more, the myth of their sulphuric medicinal efficacy having apparently been exploded. Why, even the Pump Room itself had been turned into a museum! The poorly among Yorkshire’s ‘quality’ and ‘brass’ no longer convalesced here. But others came with jingling coin, the conventioneers, TUC, IBM, ITV, CPC, and a healthy number of See-Britain-Firsters. Nor was it surprising. What had never entered Kraven’s mind until today was the fact of Harrogate’s beauty.

His route took him past the Kursaal, whose very name evoked its origins in the spacious days of Victoria and her beloved German princeling and from whose stone and iron façade flowers in ornamental baskets now depended, past the Royal Baths, and up Parliament Hill to the Memorial and Prospect Square. There were flowers everywhere, and well-trimmed public greens, benches where the weary might recreate themselves, neatness, cleanliness. The New Yorker he had become was awed.