Talking to Strange Men (10 page)

‘I like the sound of your family,' she said. ‘I'd have liked to know them. If you'd known me then would you have taken me home to meals?'

It was so unexpected he blushed again. He stammered, ‘You're too young. You'd have been a child.'

‘If I was as I am now, would you have?'

‘Of course I would, of course.'

She looked away. ‘My family weren't like that. My father was ill for years too, in and out of hospital, and he made us all suffer for that. It sounds unkind but it's true. My mother had learnt to repress her emotions. Not committing herself, not talking of anything but the weather and the shops and what the neighbours said – that made her feel safe. Do you know what I mean?'

He nodded. ‘I think so.'

Looking down, her eyebrows drawn close together, she said in that voice he had never heard raised, then or later, ‘I'll tell you what happened to me and the man I was going to marry. It was awful. It was the most terrible thing. Can I tell you?'

Don't hurt me, he wanted to say. You can hurt me, already you can. But he only nodded again and her eyes on his, into his, she began . . .

Soon after that he had brought her back here. Then the house still seemed full of ghosts – Cherry holding hands with Mark, his mother's lost laughter – when it didn't seem the emptiest place on earth. The ghosts had gone now but the emptiness was back. John kicked off the switches on the electric fire and then, reaching under the table, he wiped the fur of dust away with the palm of his hand.

THE FIRST DAY
back after a holiday was always busy. People had all the long weekend in which to look at their gardens and decide that only a new shrub here or a row of perennials there would be enough to transform them into Sissinghurst or Kew. There was a run on dahlia tubers and gladioli bulbs, showy things that John didn't much like. He overheard Gavin persuading a woman to buy
Eucalyptus salicifolia
for planting in an exposed north-facing garden where of course only
gunnii
was likely to survive. Gavin didn't like to be told, though John did it discreetly enough and out of anyone else's earshot. There had been a willow-leaved eucalyptus in Hartlands Gardens but the severe frosts of two winters before had killed it. John and Jennifer had gone for a walk there that March and seen the poor gum tree, its trunk like stripped bone, its leaves dried and curled and rattling in the wind.

He walked through the greenhouses, checking on the African daisies, the gazanias and gerberas that he was bringing on from seed. It would be an experience to see them in their natural habitat, in Namaqualand where the dried-up plains, he had read, might remain arid for months or years even, and when at last the rain came burst next day into bloom, into limitless acres of brilliant and glorious colour, as far as the eye could see. That must be the origin of the Bible promise, that the desert should blossom as the rose . . .

Imagining Africa made him think again of
King Solomon's Mines
. He would call at the central library on his way home. It might be in by now. And perhaps he would also see if he could find that novel about Philby, though he had forgotten the name of it and the name of the author. Gavin was feeding the mynah with pieces of brazil nut which it seemed to like. For the first time John noticed that Sharon had painted her
fingernails the colour of imperial jade. There was nothing he could do about that and why bother anyway?

Leaving, he essayed a joke. ‘How many customers have asked you if you've got green fingers, Sharon?'

‘Fifteen,' she said without a smile. ‘I counted.'

The librarian said she knew of several novels based on the life of Kim Philby. He hadn't brought
My Silent War
back with him and he told her he still had it.

‘Oh, yes. Right. There's a book called
The Other Side of Silence
. I mean I suppose it's referring to Philby's own book. Would that be it? It's by Ted Albeury.'

The name rang an immediate bell. The librarian made title and author come up on the computer screen. ‘I'll see if it's in.'

Both books were in,
King Solomon's Mines
and
The Other Side of Silence
. John felt disproportionately pleased. He would have two good books, two absorbing books, to get him through to Saturday.

His front garden was buried under a quilt of pink petals. The high winds had blown the last of them down. It would be light for another two hours and he would have plenty of time to sweep them up, snip the dead heads off the daffodils, and perhaps plant out Siberian wallflowers among the bulbs. This year he was going to have a hanging basket under the porch, a begonia and pelargoniums in it. Jennifer would like that, she liked flowers if not gardens . . . Don't count your chickens, he said to himself, there's a long way to go yet, she's not just going to move back in with you on Saturday night. The thought made his heart move painfully. For suppose it were in fact to be so? Suppose she wanted to do just that? Peter Moran had treated her vilely once and had very likely done so again. A man of that kind doesn't change.

‘We were living together,' she had said. ‘I was the only girl he'd ever been serious about. He wanted to get married and at first I was the one that hung back. We just had this bedsit we shared and then my mother got ill and I had to move back in with her. But Peter and I were engaged by then, we were planning on getting married in August. Mother had cancer but they have remissions, you know, cancer patients, even people as far gone as she was. I don't want to
speak ill of her, that's the last thing, but she liked show did my mother. A big white wedding was what she wanted for me and I gave in and Peter didn't seem to mind. I thought, well, it'll be the last celebration of her life, the last really big event. We sent out invitations to nearly two hundred people.

‘A white dress was ridiculous, wasn't it? Especially the crinoline Mother wanted me to have and the great billowing veil. You'd have liked the flowers I was going to have, though, John. I wouldn't have white, I wanted colour. Peach-pink cactus dahlias and deep pink pompoms and pink zinnias . . .'

He hadn't had the heart – or the nerve – to tell her dahlias and zinnias were the flowers he most disliked, their stiffness, their vulgar show. The flowers he grew were graceful, delicate, rare even. He let himself into the house, dropped the books on to the oak and leather table, kicked on the top bar of the electric fire. In the morning she would get his letter. Would she phone him? It was a possibility. When she read that ‘dearest' she might well decide to phone . . . He made himself a pot of tea with loose tea, not teabags, filled a mug. Maybe he should try to change his ways, have a drink, for instance, when he got home, a small tulip-shaped glass of dry sherry.

Later he would think about eating. Scrambled eggs or pizza or pasta out of a tin. It was always something like that. Before that, though, to try the first of the coded messages against the first lines of
King Solomon's Mines
. Wrong again. No again. He looked at the jackets of both books, undecided which one to start on first. Of course he wouldn't start on either until it got dark. He had the petals to sweep up and the wallflowers to plant out.

They were in a seed tray in the lean-to greenhouse attached to the back of the kitchen, where for want of a garage he also had to keep the Honda. John imagined the orange flowers they would bear in May and June and their rich yet delicate scent. He brought the watering can through the house with him. The water in it had been allowed to stand for two days, for he never used it fresh from the tap. All the time he was working out there, the street remained empty, empty of people on foot, that is. Plenty of cars went past.
When he was young, when Cherry was still alive, there would have been people walking up and down Geneva Road right up till dark and beyond. The sky was overcast and it was warm for late March, in spite of the wind, a west wind that swayed the branches of the monkey puzzle tree. His mother had always liked Geneva Road because through the gaps between the rows of houses you could see the countryside beyond the city, glimpses of green hills. John planted his wallflowers, watered them in, and went back into the house. He washed his hands at the kitchen sink. Scrambled eggs would be the easiest dish to make, scrambled eggs on toast with half a tin of fruit to follow and Longlife cream.

His supper on a tray, he went back into the living room. It felt hot and stuffy and he saw that he had left the fire on all the time he was out in the garden. Wasteful but there was no point in turning it off now. Out of politeness he had never read at table while Jennifer was with him, though at home they had all read books or magazines at mealtimes if they had wanted to and it hadn't seemed anti-social or rude. At home – John realized the phrase he had used. Wasn't this home then? Wasn't this the very same house? Home is where the people you love are, he thought, the people who love you.

He opened
The Other Side of Silence
and read the opening lines. ‘The snow lay thick on the steps and the snowflakes driven by the wind looked black in the headlights of the cars.' Almost mechanically, because he did it with every book he started, he began placing the alphabet against the letters. Not in the book itself, of course, but in his notebook, using a pencil. He took a mouthful of egg on toast. A would be T, B would be H, C would be E, DS, EN, FO, GW, HL. . . . It was going to work out – or was it?

The first word in the coded message he had copied from the pillar at cats' green when he saw the very tall young man was HCRKTABIE. If you used the first lines of
The Other Side of Silence
, that came out as LEVIATHAN. Well, ‘Leviathan' was a word or at any rate a name. ‘To Basilisk', it continued. There followed ‘Take Sterns Childers.' John had a vague idea ‘childers' might be old-fashioned or dialect
English for children. ‘Take Sterns Childers' didn't seem to mean anything.

Never mind. He had more coded messages in the notebook, including the one he had found last night. Feeling disproportionately excited, he began matching letters in this message against letters in those first lines. The results were more comprehensible. The second message when deciphered read: ‘Leviathan to Basilisk and Unicorn. Fifty-three Ruxeter Road stays as safe house.' He tried other messages, those picked up in January and February but here he could not break the code. Nevertheless, John had that feeling common to all humanity in his sort of situation. He had triumphed and now he wanted to tell someone about it. The person he would best liked to tell was Jennifer. He got as far as the phone and dialling the first three digits of Colin's number instead, and then he put the receiver back, asking himself if he wanted to share this with anyone. A more satisfactory thing might be to go to fifty-three Ruxeter Road and see what those people meant by a ‘safe house'.

By now it was dark outside but how much did that matter? It might be better in the dark. He could go up there on the Honda. Across Alexandra Bridge, he thought, and up Nevin Street which after a time became Ruxeter Road. He got into his motorcycle leathers, black and heavier than Jennifer's soft blue jacket.

As he turned into Berne Road he felt the sting of a raindrop on his face. He would regret this adventure if the rain came on like it had last night, he thought. Adventure it was, though. He wondered what he was getting himself into. Nothing presumably that he couldn't pull out of again. There had been a lot in the papers and on television lately about drugs and it sometimes seemed to John as if everybody except himself had taken drugs at some time or other. To hear them and read about them you'd think the whole nation was permanently stupefied by dope and crack. What if these people he had got on to were involved with drugs? What if that was what they were up to and why they needed this code and these messages? They might be drug dealers and drug pushers, what was called a narcotics ring.

The wind had dropped and the river lay calm and flat with
a dark oily surface. At the other end of the bridge the street narrowed, passing under the cathedral walls, then between tall office blocks, widening into Nevin Square where behind green lawns and a fountain that never played after six p.m. stood the city hall. The clock on St Stephen's Cathedral struck an uncounted number of strokes. There were few people about, few cars. On the pedestal of the statue of Lysander Douglas, philanthropist, explorer and former mayor of this city, sat two punk people with bright-coloured hair, dressed in leather far more bizarre than his own and eating fish and chips from paper bags.

John went round the square, leaving by the third exit of the roundabout which was Nevin Street. Neon digits on top of the CitWest insurance tower told him it was nine-0-two and the temperature nine degrees. The whole left-hand side of this street was dominated by the buildings of the polytechnic. The swing doors on the main entrance opened and John saw Peter Moran come out and start to walk down the steps. He had only seen him twice before but he would have known him anywhere. We no more forget the faces of our enemies than of those we love.

This was the man his wife was living with. John told himself this in so many words as he slowed and turned his head and looked at Peter Moran. Fair-haired, nothing special to look at, a lantern jaw and glasses so thick that he must be very short-sighted. Of course John couldn't see the thickness of his glasses at this moment but he had noticed them before on the single occasion they had met, an occasion he remembered with pain but could no more forget than he could forget Peter's face. Peter, of course, didn't see him. A man on a motorbike is the most anonymous, the most invisible, of people. He is scarcely a man, more an adjunct of the bike, furnished in black and chrome and upholstered in leather like itself.

John revved the bike and swung off up into Ruxeter Road.

Two days before her intended wedding day, she had told him on that evening of confidences, that man had said to her he couldn't marry her after all, he couldn't go through with it.