The Count of Eleven (46 page)

“If that’s what it’s like I’m glad it was only nearly.”

When he’d recovered, however, he turned on his back and let the water buoy him up. All he needed to do in order to float was relax, and he thought he was entitled to relax at last. He counted the seconds as another wave returned him to the beach: eleven, twelve, thirteen, and pebbles grazed his shoulders. It was lucky that he didn’t need to swim, he thought, struggling to his feet and trudging through the waves.

“That was impressive,” Julia said, paddling to meet him; then her smile faltered. “What have you done to yourself?”

“Didn’t you see me fall on the rock?”

“Oh, Jack.” She made to touch his shoulders and grimaced sympathetically instead. “Have a shower before the salt gets in.”

Despite her sympathy, he thought that she also welcomed his clumsiness. The Count had existed to look after her and Laura, and now she was happy to take care of Jack. As he stood beneath a shower outside the reception office the Birmingham couple strolled by, both of them giving his crotch a disparaging glance. “I left it for the fish,” Jack said, not caring whether they heard.

Julia interrupted her swim on seeing him returning to the beach. “Better?” she said.

“As never.”

“You shouldn’t have tried so much so soon. We’ve nearly a fortnight if you want to learn to swim.”

“I think I’ve seen the end of my adventures. You go ahead, and I’ll catch up on my sunshine.”

He lay face down on the towel while she and Laura swam and came back with tales of caves and of fish that pretended they were patches of the sea floor. So long as they didn’t tell him they’d found a blow lamp he would be content, and even if they did, it no longer had anything to do with him. The sun felt like balm on his head and shoulders. When Julia and Laura began to welling themselves in the golden light he was able to sit up quite steadily. “If you’re hungry, we are,” Julia said.

The family changed in their rooms and met outside Laura’s door. A green lizard skittered down the steps, above which generous red blossoms on vines were closing their petals around bright yellow candles dusted with yellow pollen. Old women dressed from head to foot in black were converging on a graveyard by the sea; beyond the stones and glassed-in marble shrines to the dead Jack saw a ship at anchor. The Orchards meandered for a while, past a restaurant on the ground floor of a building from which the roof had been omitted to save on tax, round the harbour where old men sat sipping ouzo outside cafes and watching the somnolent bobbing of yachts, up a hill where tavern as spilled onto the pavement and young Greeks sped past on motorcycles with girl tourists on their pillions and candles flickered in the gilded gloom of an Orthodox church. At the top of the hill palm trees shaded a square, off which they found a restaurant called Itanos that served wine from barrels into tin carafes and displayed its food behind a glass counter. They chose their meals and ordered a litre of wine and sat near the open end of the large hall, watching a donkey being led through the twilight. “Well, here we really are,” Jack said.

Thanks to Pete and Cath,” said Julia.

“Here’s to them.”

“Pete and Cath.” The Orchards touched their glasses together, and Julia said “I wouldn’t have dreamed they could be so kind.”

“Putting our bill in the draw when we hadn’t paid, you mean.”

“That as well.”

“As well as what?”

“Jack.” She glanced at Laura and decided that Laura had no illusions about it. “Don’t tell me you didn’t know they let us win.”

“They couldn’t have stopped us, could they? Not that they would have wanted to.”

“Dad,” Laura said as though he was carrying a joke too far.

“You’re saying they ‘

“They fixed it for us to win because of what happened to Laura.”

“Are you telling me they told you so?”

“They didn’t have to tell us,” Julia said, and Laura agreed: “I knew.”

If they hadn’t been told, Jack tried to think, it was possible that they were wrong, but he felt as if they were forcing him to own up to having known. Surely it didn’t matter if they weren’t here because of their luck, and in any case, perhaps they were: perhaps if the Count hadn’t worked to preserve it some unforeseen event would have obstructed them. He concentrated on tearing up a piece of bread to dip into taramasalata. “Anyway,” he said, ‘it’s good to have friends to count on.”

That’s because you like counting,” Laura said through a mouthful of hoummus.

“What do you mean?”

“What should she mean? It was a joke.”

“I know, love,” he said quickly to Laura. “I didn’t quite hear what you said at first. That’s why you shouldn’t speak with anything in your mouth.”

Laura looked as if she felt that comment deserved a retort, but she only said “I just meant you like numbers.”

“Some more than others.”

He thought she was going to ask which were which. Instead she looked pensive. “Dad?”

“Address me.”

“What’s the power of thirteen?”

“Something multiplied by itself thirteen times.”

“Like that letter.”

“Which was that, now?”

“That silly letter you sent thirteen copies of to people.”

“I sent The waiter removed their used plates, and Jack had to make himself breathe. As the man moved away Jack tried to sound amused. “You said I sent ‘

“You’re as silly as that letter. I meant you were supposed to, not that you did. Have you got a piece of paper?”

“What for?”

“I want to work something out.”

“I may have.” Jack groped in his pocket and touched a crumpled piece of paper. “This is the letter you’re talking about, isn’t it?” he would have had to say if he had given it to her. “I haven’t any,” he told her. “Can’t you do it in your head?”

She gazed at the arched ceiling and moved her lips silently as the waiter brought their meals. “Don’t let it get cold,” Julia said to her after a minute or so.

“Right, Dad. How many people are there in the world?”

“I haven’t counted lately. A good few.”

“If you sent thirteen people a letter, and each of them had to send it to another thirteen people, and then those hundred and sixty-nine all had to, and those She closed her eyes for a couple of seconds. those two thousand one hundred and ninety-seven did, and on and on like that, how long would it be before all the people in the world were used up?”

“Beats me.”

“More than thirteen times all that?”

“It would have to be.”

“Bet it wouldn’t be much more.”

“I don’t know, and I’m not going to try and work it out when we’re supposed to be on holiday. Besides,” Jack said with a mixture of relief and triumph, ‘not everyone does what the letter tells them.”

“How do you know?”

“Are you saying I did?” the Count said.

“No need to speak to her like that, Jack, just because she’s given you a problem.”

“You’re right,” he said, and smiled at Laura until she was convinced he meant the smile. “You win.”

What she’d pointed out was irrelevant now after the fact, he told himself, and tried to put it out of his mind as he finished his meal. Afterwards they walked down the far side of the hill to a lake surrounded by young tourists dining at tables beneath awnings. A path led the Orchards above the lake, which was full of inverted luminous hotels, and down to a children’s playground where they all had a swing in the dark. Another street took them over the hill again, past shops that seemed to have been abandoned half-built among their thriving neighbours, and eventually the Orchards came back to the road to the hotel. In the cemetery flames in jars stood on graves; stars flickered above the hushed almost invisible sea. “I’m beginning to wish we could never go home,” Julia said.

“Have you had enough of where we’re living?” Jack said.

“I don’t mean that. I just mean I love it here.” She was silent while they watched a bat like a scrap of the night flutter out of a cypress opposite the graveyard. “When we do go home,” she said, ‘maybe we need to think of making a few sacrifices so that we can move.”

“I’ve made several,” the Count wanted to respond. “Let’s see what we all can think of,” said Jack.

“I do want to go home,” Julia declared as if he’d implied the reverse. “Though I don’t mind telling you, when the woman by me on the plane asked where I was from I was ashamed to say, seeing she was reading the paper.”

“What difference did that make?”

“Of course, you didn’t see it. You were busy catching up on your shuteye. Just a report of what that Mersey maniac did to a mother and her little boy,” she said. “I didn’t want to admit I came from anywhere that could produce such a monster.”

Thank God, it had all been a dream except for their being in Crete. At the end of the holiday Jack would reopen Fine Films while Julia went back to Rankin’s. The credit card hadn’t been stolen, and Jack had never had to confront the bank manager; but what had he forgotten which was threatening to disturb his sleep? Of course: he needed to insure Fine Films in case there was a fire, or because once it was insured there would be, providing them with cash to help them move house and giving him an excuse to find a better job. Though that didn’t quite make sense, surely he needn’t ponder it now; if he didn’t put it out of his head it was liable to spoil the holiday. But he’d forgotten something else, which felt like an inexorable slow explosion in his brain, and it did worse than mar the holiday it wakened him.

He was lying alone in thick sweaty darkness, and held down on the bed by a sodden sheet. For a moment he thought he had been incarcerated in a Greek asylum, then he realised he was in the hotel room. He could hear Julia’s breathing across the room. There wasn’t space for the two of them to sleep together on either of the beds, but he felt as though she was trying to stay away from him. If she found out who he was she would, and he would be the last to blame her. He only wished he could dissociate himself.

He hadn’t killed Janys Day’s child. That much he’d learned from Julia. A neighbour had reached the child’s room with a ladder and smashed the window and brought the child out safe before the fire had penetrated the room. Jack imagined flames swarming up the cot, trapping the toddler in a cage of fire, and tried to writhe away from himself. Even the thought of the neighbour carrying the toddler, no doubt struggling and screaming in her arms, down the ladder above the fire brought him close to fainting. He hadn’t killed the child, but he might have. He had killed five people, and Julia was right to loathe him.

He couldn’t reassure himself that she didn’t know who she was loathing; that only made him feel more outcast. He couldn’t tell himself that he’d killed in order to protect her and Laura; he was no longer certain that he’d needed to. In any case, he had no right to hold her and Laura responsible. He was.

Acknowledging that didn’t help either. It seemed as if all he could do was wait to be found out, and he didn’t think he could bear to wait for very long. You could get used to anything, he reflected, and crammed the sheet into his mouth to stifle a cry of disgust at himself. “Who?” Julia mumbled, then turned over with a sigh, and Jack began to shiver from trying to lie absolutely still until he was certain she was asleep.

Judging by last night, now that he’d awakened he could look forward to hours of wakefulness. The charred darkness felt as if it was as much within him as outside him. When he opened his eyes he saw vague smoky lights, when he closed them his eyes felt almost too raw to suffer the weight of their lids. Whenever exhaustion seemed about to let him doze, one or other of the thoughts he’d already had flared up again in his skull. He could hardly believe that he slept, but at one point he found the room had grown perceptibly less dark without his noticing, and then sunlight was streaming through the windows and Julia had left a kiss on his forehead. “Wake up or we’ll miss the coach for Knossos,” she called from the bathroom.

When he heard the bathroom shower reduced to a drizzle he pushed himself off the bed. He felt as though the night had left a sooty residue on his eyeballs. He was trying to grasp an impression that there was something else he should remember, something crucial. He stood under the shower, hoping that the water might rouse his thoughts, but he’d had no success by the time he felt obliged to go to Julia for fear that she might wonder why he was delaying. He dressed, trying not to avoid meeting her eyes, and collected Laura on the way to breakfast. Appearances had to be maintained, he heard one of his voices remark.

The breakfast room above the bar was already almost full. There were tablefuls of tanned young Germans, a blind Norwegian and her female companion, the couple from Birmingham. Jack loaded his plate with bread rolls and feta cheese and cold meat and bade the Birmingham couple good morning, and received stares and mumbles in response. They had every reason to be dubious of him. Might one or both of them be police? He almost welcomed the idea, except that the prospect of being arrested in front of Julia and Laura, or even of their learning about him, was unbearable. “Aren’t you hungry, Dad?” Laura said, and he made himself pick at the food on his plate.

On the way into town the sun felt like a light in an interrogation room, the sea appeared to be glittering a relentless incomprehensible message at him. The coach would meet the Orchards at a telephone kiosk on the near edge of town. Jack found his attention drawn to the phone, and then he could hardly speak but had to. “I’m just going round the corner,” he managed to say in his ordinary voice.

“So long as it isn’t round the bend,” Julia said.

“Don’t be long, Dad. The bus might come.”

Once they were out of sight he began to snarl through his teeth like a ventriloquist “You clown, you clown, you clown.” A fisherman on his way up from the harbour with a pole full of squid glanced reprovingly at him, but Jack was nearly blinded by dismay. The names of his victims spelled out his name; the police had only to decode the numbers of the pages in the phone directory. “You clown,” he snarled, he didn’t know how loud.

But could the names of the people he hadn’t harmed be used to trace him? Since the Count hadn’t made his later visits in alphabetical order, could they be seen to spell Jack’s name? He closed his eyes and faced the sun while he recalled the order of the names. Burning figures pranced in his head. He was safe after all, he was invisible; the Count had taken care of him. He dodged into a store and grabbed a litre of water from among the bottles of retsina and Metaxa, and almost dashed out without paying when he heard the coach. For a moment he thought it was leaving without him. One panic felt much like another just now, yet the notion of being left behind by Julia and Laura seemed momentarily welcome. But the coach was drawing up beside the telephone kiosk. “Here’s Dad now,” Laura said as if she had been close to panic.