The Deadly Space Between (10 page)

‘You had a good time?’

‘Oh, I’m pleased about that.’

‘The food’s always excellent at L’Escargot.’

‘He’s a nice man, isn’t he?’

Nice was the very last word any sane person would use to describe Roehm. Nice people were simply not on that scale.

‘I dreamed about him last night,’ I said, suddenly spiteful, courting a reaction.

‘Oh, did you?’ She walked out of the kitchen and locked herself in the downstairs lavatory.

At last, I had drawn blood.

_{*  *  *}

Luce’s house looked different. I couldn’t work out how or why. Here were the patterned cobblestones and the bower of ferns, neatly cut back for the winter, the tiny trimmed evergreens and the bank of Dutch bulbs, recently mulched, and all professionally cultivated by the landscape design team. No one ever pottered in Luce’s garden. It was kept under control by uniformed officials. The original creator of her courtyard landscapes had enriched his portfolio of ideas by a visit to Japan. The bamboo was strategically placed in relation to a group of stones and a still pool containing three lilies and a flotilla of psychotic carp. They circled endlessly, staring. The light over the front door signalled the end of the Japanese theme. Here beginneth modernism. One of the architects who built the Centre Pompidou at Beaubourg had also designed Luce’s house. The interior was all parquet floors and huge service tubes suspended from the ceiling, even in her abattoir kitchen. Luce owned a painting by Tamara de Lempicka, which represented two women intertwined. The figures also contrived to look like steel tubes. The place bristled with burglar alarms. There was one just inside the door. You had thirty seconds to switch the thing off before the entire house exploded with wailing sirens and the security service employed to watch the house from all angles, at all times, arrived in military-style armoured cars. There were tiny red eyes in the corners of every room which followed you around even when the alarm was supposedly at rest. The red eyes also operated outside the house. One of them was trained on the carp pool. I looked at Luce’s house and at the lady herself, sunk into her raw silk white sofa, and wondered how I could have spent my life with women.

It was as if they talked in secret codes, like Freemasons. Luce, Iso and Liberty settled down to look at one another, to observe shifts, changes, tiny lines, hardening around the eyes, the gentle sea tides of each other’s appearance. They studied one another carefully, in case one of them needed instant rescue, but was unable to voice her plea. If all was well within their kingdom they would begin to build their conversational card houses. Each of them added another card to the edifice and even when they contradicted one another they never disputed the point or began an argument, because that would interfere with the programme of steady construction. They simply picked up the opposing point of view and ran with that. The link in the chain was always more important than either the subject or their differences. I had never noticed how the women talked before. It all seemed unnecessarily complex and pointless.

I made all the usual gestures, reported on my A-level work, opened the wine, carried the sizzling prawns to the table. But I noticed the silences in Iso’s chatter. She had no intention of telling them about Roehm. We did not even need to discuss this. If she said nothing then he remained our secret.

Our hidden complicity gave me an odd rush of pleasure. But I was now outside the triangle of women, observing them and their carefully tended trellis of love, which they built across their divisions. Luce boasted of her forthcoming certain triumphs in Paris and America. Her unspoken assertions were suddenly clearer to me than they had ever been and so was the fact that they were addressed primarily to Iso.

‘There’s a spring showcase of British fashions and British designs on at the Arches. Next year’s collections. You will both come, won’t you? I’ve got your invites here. And some more for the people at the gallery. I think it would be wonderful to hold a show at the gallery, Iso. When you’ve hung the next exhibition. But that’s a long-term plan. The Arches will be mostly dealers and people in the trade, but I’ve got a whole section of my stuff being presented. Two young women who want to make themselves rich and famous. Don’t we all? They’ve got talent, but no backing. I didn’t charge my usual. Should’ve, I suppose. But they’re great girls and no one gave me a hand when I was starting out. We all need a leg-up sometimes. Especially when you’re young. Beauty doesn’t always pay the bills, does it, Iso?’

‘I needed you,’ replied my mother simply and all three women exchanged a long look of intimate sympathy. It was as if they were completing a quadrille. No one else knew the steps of the dance nor did anyone see how they circled one another. Why had I never seen this? Luce was profligate in her love and reassurance. She never counted the cost. I am doing all this for you. I make money so that I can protect you, provide for you, care for you. Liberty and I were included in her largesse. We too were her beneficiaries. But the person my great-aunt loved most in all the world was my mother.

‘Your mother was an awkward bugger when she was your age, Toby. She never admitted that she needed anybody then.’ Luce waved her cigarette in the air, then puffed like a dragon. ‘Who’d like a chocolate?’

Liberty leaned her elbows on the table and sniffed the perfumed deadliness of her Poire Williams.

‘Did you get this in France, Luce?’

‘Well, they don’t sell it here.’

Luce turned to Iso.

‘Do you remember when we were in Normandy, and we’d rented that dreadful draughty house, and Toby was at the bucket and spade stage of seaside holidays and we were bored out of our minds and that old codger offered to take us round the Normandy landings? And I was all for it, well, anything to get off that beach, and you said, “No thanks, I don’t want to take my son on a tour of bellicose artefacts,” and I was so desperate that I said, “Nonsense, the boy needs a thorough grounding in murder techniques.” And you made a scene, right there in front of the antique war veteran who was all but sporting rows of D-Day medals.’

‘I remember. Oh my God, I remember.’

‘And you shrieked a lot of mad statements about nuclear weapons, Greenham Common and the
force de frappe
, replete with statistics, while the dear old hero gibbered on about sacrifice and our boys and so I trudged all round a bloody museum, full of dotty jingoistic balderdash, being polite to a sad old man who’d left most of his friends behind in French graveyards and couldn’t forget them. And when I escaped I bought you the bottle of Poire Williams to make up for being tyrannical.’

‘And that’s the last of the Poire Williams.’ Liberty drained her glass. ‘Have some Calvados instead, Toby. It’ll awaken your fighting spirit.’

‘Don’t encourage his masculinity. We’ve kept it under wraps till now. Iso, my sweet,’ Luce turned to my mother, ‘we must arrange our trip to France at New Year.’

‘I haven’t got my diary, Luce.’

She was making excuses, backing off. Luce didn’t see it. But I did.

We drove home from the overflowing supper table well after midnight. Iso was slightly drunk. I offered to drive. Encouraged by a crime report in the local paper, I’d been practising up and down our road when she wasn’t there. Two children, aged six and eight, had stolen a Mercedes. They were both too small to drive the car alone, but one stood on the seat and clutched the wheel and the other worked the pedals. They had got as far as the motorway before the police and the social workers caught up with them.

‘You don’t even have a learner’s licence, Toby, and I haven’t put you on the insurance.’

‘I drove the tractor last summer in Cornwall.’

‘That was in a field, not on a road.’

‘I’m eighteen.’

‘OK, OK. So get yourself a provisional licence and I’ll teach you to drive. But not tonight.’

Iso swerved.

‘You’re pissed.’

‘So’re you.’

We stopped at a red light. The roads were empty, evil in the orange glow. Why had I never seen how streetlights unmasked the dark? Why did I, suddenly, unbidden, long for nights without cities or stars? The car jerked away from the kerb.

‘Keep an eye out for the fuzzies,’ Iso giggled.

‘If you lose your licence, you’re screwed.’

‘Don’t tempt fate.’

We pulled off the dual carriageway onto the slip roads curling out towards our suburb. I squinted into the polluted gardens spinning past.

‘We could’ve stayed over at Luce’s.’

‘Yeah, we could’ve.’

‘Iso, why didn’t you say anything about Roehm?’

Suddenly she was sharper, sober, listening.

‘Why didn’t you? You were out with him till all hours last night.’

I had not expected her to attack me so directly.

‘But it’s up to you to tell Luce and Liberty if you’ve got a boyfriend. I’m not going out with him. You are.’

‘Well, you could’ve fooled me. It was nearly two when you came in.’

She was shaking with anger.

‘You’d missed the last train. I was worried sick.’

‘Why? You’ve never worried before. You knew who I was with.’

‘Oh God, you don’t notice anything, do you?’

I waited before I answered this. What should I have noticed? We turned into the avenue of nearly barren trees.

‘You knew where I was. Why are you so upset?’

She stamped on the brakes and the car stopped dead some fifty yards short of the house. The back tyres skidded slightly into a bank of wet leaves and rain speckled the windscreen. Then the engine stalled. She turned off the lights. We were jutting out into the road like a beached ship.

She turned towards me.

‘Look, Toby. I haven’t said anything to Luce because I know she won’t approve of Roehm. She’s going to America. Leave it till she gets back. OK, so I’m a coward. But I can’t face Luce.’

I was genuinely mystified.

‘Why should she be cross?’

‘Maybe you haven’t registered the fact, but Roehm is even older than Luce is.’

‘So what?’

‘Luce hates Germans.’

‘No, she doesn’t. And anyway, he isn’t German, he’s Swiss.’

‘What do you know about him?’ she yelled. ‘You know nothing whatsoever.’

Then she sat silent, biting her lip.

‘Oh, shut it, Toby. I’m going to bed.’

She banged the car door shut, leaving the keys swinging in the ignition. I sat still for a moment, astonished. Iso was rarely so irrational. The wind plucked at my sleeve as I leaned on the window, shivering slightly. I locked up the car and went straight up to my room. She had slammed the front door with all her force. Some of the beading on the architrave had come adrift. I snapped it off.

Hours later I awoke to hear her steps in the dark, mounting the staircase, pushing the door open, crossing the boards. She trod on one of my trainers, kicked it aside, and muttered ‘Shit’ to herself as she did so.

‘Toby? You awake?’

‘I am now.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘I know. Doesn’t matter. Come to bed.’

‘No. I’d fall asleep. I can’t.’

But she stood there, her shadow increasing the volume of dark in the room.

‘Goodnight, then.’ I turned over.

Did she feel dismissed, pushed away? I listened carefully to every creak and echo on the descending stairs.

_{*  *  *}

We sat waiting for the show to begin. It was as if we were sitting in a theatre expectantly watching the footlights, spots and chandeliers. The Arches had once been a railway shunting shed for old stock under the nineteenth-century vaults near King’s Cross. The venue was long and thin. All the audience were equally close to the stage and the back wall was covered with obscure graffiti, huge coloured block letters, the sort you always see on trains and bridges, but which you can never quite read. We were perched on the rim of a dais, just a little higher than the first two rows. The programmes were covered in glittering silver spangles, tiny shiny triangles, which the girls in my school stuck to their cheeks when they wanted to make an impact at the disco. I had loitered outside the disco on several occasions. I wanted to watch the girls. I watched them going in through the dark doorway. I watched their skirts stretched tight across their opulent backsides. But I had never bought a ticket and I had never been inside. The spangles came off in my hands.

The seasonal fashion shows appeared to exist in a vacuum, suspended outside time. It was the beginning of November and we were to see the spring collection, a mass of light, bright colours and short, swirling skirts, while the external world faced a descending curtain of wet leaves and the increasing dark.

‘I rather like that,’ said Iso, ‘it gives you hope.’

There was free white wine and cheese squares laid out in the foyer. The sausages topped with real cubes of pineapple vanished at once. Iso and I wolfed the last lot as if we hadn’t eaten for months, grinning at each other. There was peace once more between us. She had not seen Roehm for over a week. She was never late home and the panzer did not appear in our street. I checked the answerphone several times a day. In his absence the old intimacy reasserted itself. We were friends again. We never mentioned Roehm. She tucked her arm through mine as we sat close together and peered at the disintegrating programme. The music was thudding techno. I thought about the Chinese dragon festival. But I said nothing to my mother.