The Keys to the Street (33 page)

A hot wind blew the trees and raised litter on dust clouds. McBride came sleepily out of the house in Albany Street, disinclined to walk, stopping every thirty seconds to scratch himself, but Marietta was quite sprightly, her chocolate skin looking as if it had been shaved, and perhaps it had. He didn’t even have to ask Lisl Pring.

She seemed to have forgotten his reproof or never to have taken it in. She said she’d just had a phone call from a friend who’d been ill. The friend had a lively young spaniel and was at her wits’ end to know how to get it exercised.

“Where would she be living, miss, this friend of yours?” Bean said. “Not too far away, I hope.”

“I’ll have to think. I mean, I’ve never been to her place. Gloucester Avenue? Or was it Gloucester Place? Same difference, you know what I mean.”

Bean didn’t. He thought there was all the difference in the world, about half a mile’s difference.

“I don’t mind asking her to give you a ring.”

“Thank you very much indeed, miss,” said Bean, but she didn’t notice the sarcasm. She wouldn’t.

Miss Jago was out at work. He let himself into Charlotte Cottage and, with Gushi running about him, jumping up his legs, had a quick look round. A postcard from Lady Blackburn-Norris, all about the weather in some far-off place and saying nothing of interest, a bunch of junk mail, fliers from a dry cleaner. Bean tucked Gushi under his arm and went out, back to the other dogs.

Once in the park, he took a photograph of Spots and McBride, looking sweet side by side. A beggar materialized from nowhere, the way they did, an oldish man with brown teeth and stubble on his
face. He held out a hand that was more like one of those toadstools that grow on tree trunks than part of a human being.

“Change for a cup of tea, guv?”

“Bugger off,” said Bean. He’d have liked to kill them all. Whatever they said about that Impaler, his was a mentality he could understand.

•   •   •

It was the hottest day of the year. No one would have chosen to walk across the open center of the park, treeless and exposed to the heat of that sun. Walking home, she kept to the shady Outer Circle. Two men were running on the oval track by the Primrose Hill Bridge but they were dark-skinned and perhaps interpreted the heat as pleasant warmth. She crossed the Circle at the Gloucester Gate and glanced down over the low wall. The man with the beard was lying asleep on a groundsheet spread between the two round shallow pools, a book open and face-down beside him, a bottle of something standing in the water to keep it cool.

Next time they encountered each other, should she give him money? She had always given to beggars, but since her accession of wealth she had carried five- and ten-pound notes to distribute. Was he the kind of man who would welcome alms? He seemed to be sleeping in total peace, as if he had no cares, or had discovered some secret of life. She walked home and she must have been early, for Gushi was still out.

He trotted in, clearly affected by the heat, five minutes afterward. Bean’s face was glistening and beaded with sweat. He was an old man to be walking so far in temperatures in the upper eighties. She paid him for his week’s dog-walking. Gushi in the kitchen noisily lapped water. Mary went with Bean to the gate and was introduced to the dalmatian, a docile dog who licked her hand.

“A member of the company due to your good offices, miss,” said
Bean. “Your reference went down a treat with Mrs. Sellers.”

His obsequious manner always embarrassed her. But now it was accompanied by the kind of leer only to be expected from a much younger man. He looked her up and down, as if making some kind of assessment or calculation. She went quickly into the house.

It was too hot to eat, or too hot for human beings. Gushi had recovered enough to wolf down a can of Cesar and she picked at bread and cheese and salad. When the time came to leave she would miss the little dog. Perhaps she and Leo could have a shih tzu of their own. She wrote a letter to Judith in Guildford, inviting her to the wedding, and another to Anne Symonds, who had been at college with her; and then with Gushi on the lead she went out to post her letters.

The pillar box on the corner was out of use, the two slots sealed up. The only other one she knew of was under the main arch of Cumberland Terrace. It was still very warm at nearly nine, the kind of evening that comes only after a day of exceptional heat. A few days before, in a sudden high wind, there had been a premature falling of leaves, plane leaves turning yellow and dropping onto the pavements. Or perhaps it was not premature but a normal happening that occurred always at this time of the year, an early warning of autumn. The leaves, dried and shriveled, crackled under her feet. She walked through the passage at the Cumberland Terrace.

A haze hung over the park, soft and mysterious. The trees had become purplish-gray shapes, utterly still. The air smelled of diesel and lavender, a curious combination. Few people were about. They would all be at café tables on pavements, in the gardens of pubs. She posted her letters, watched the locking of the park gates. The park police went in, it was said, and rounded up the dossers who tried to spend the night in the shelter of the restaurants and pavilions, but some always escaped their vigilance, sleeping among the bushes or
under the lee of the zoo. That reminded her of the man she had seen asleep that afternoon, and carrying Gushi now—“You are just a baby,” she murmured into his fur—she made her way back into Albany Street at the Gloucester Bridge.

Mosquitos danced in swarms above the water of the pools. The air was crowded with wheeling insects, moths with dusty wings, gnats, blue flies. They seemed not to bother him. He sat among the rocks, resting on a rolled-up sleeping bag, reading his book. It came back to her that once, to herself, she had called him Nikolai, because she had seen him reading Gogol. When he saw her he got up, just as a man might when a woman comes into the room.

“Good evening,” she said.

He smiled. “Good evening.”

It was an opportunity. He had come a little way up the slope and was looking at her with what she interpreted as concern, though it couldn’t be. She could go down there and sit with him and talk. But what about and why? It was an absurd idea. Besides, Leo was coming, would be there in ten minutes. Even more absurd was what she said, in the light of what she had just said.

“Good night.”

He nodded, as if confirming something he had suspected. He had very blue eyes, intelligent and kind.

“Good night,” he said.

She remembered as she walked away that she had intended to give him money, but she had had none on her and now, anyway, it seemed an absurd idea, insensitive and wrong.

•   •   •

It was a man’s voice on the phone and somehow he had expected a woman. Well, he hadn’t really expected ever to hear another word about it. Not from that Lisl Pring, that butterfly brain. The funny thing was that he’d been watching her on television.
Eastenders
was a
favorite program of his and he never missed an episode. Lisl Pring had been doing her stuff, looking quite different from in the flesh, if that was the term for someone as bony as she, looking fatter for one thing, quite well-covered and shapely, and the credit titles were coming up, when the phone rang. If the program hadn’t been more or less over he wouldn’t have answered it.

The voice said what its owner was called, or he supposed it did, and then something about a dog.

“Are you a friend of Miss Pring?” he had said because he hadn’t caught the name.

“I just said. It’s really urgent. I’d like to see you as soon as possible.”

Bean hadn’t cared for the tone. “I shall want to see
you
,” he had said, “and the dog. I’m not sure I’m prepared to take on a lively young spaniel. It
is
a spaniel, right, and a puppy?”

“Not a puppy. He’s two years old and he’s been to dog-training with me.”

“Well, I’ll see,” Bean said grudgingly. “She said Gloucester Avenue.” Or had she said Gloucester Terrace? “That’s seriously out of my way, you know.”

“As a matter of fact, it’s Gloucester Place, the top end.”

Maybe the top end wouldn’t be so bad. He was starting to say so, not sounding too enthusiastic, when the voice said, “But I’m moving. I’m moving to Upper Harley Street in a month’s time.”

Just exactly where he wanted another dog, halfway between Ruby and Spots.

“I could look in tomorrow,” Bean said. “About this time tomorrow?”

“Make it half an hour later.”

He’d enjoy himself all the more in Brighton if he knew he’d got six dogs to come back to. Six was a good round number, a number he should make a point of sticking with.

“Say nine o’clock then?”

“Nine will do very well.”

Bean switched off the television and went back to his packing. He always packed a little bit every night for a week before he went away and so made sure of not forgetting anything. But he left out the red baseball cap and the elephant T-shirt. He’d travel in those.

22

A
nother job for the old dog man. Putting it like that made Hob laugh. It didn’t take much to make him laugh these days. And this would be the biggest job ever. The money on offer made him feel dizzy just to contemplate it. He saw it as putting an end forever to all states, with such a huge sum states could be kept at bay indefinitely, he would always be as he had until now hardly ever been, the happy dancing joker, the Power Ranger, the laid-back man, the laughing man.

He’d come down very low, waited outside the women’s toilet at Chester Road and when he’d seen a woman go in and had made sure she was alone in there, gone after her, found her washing her hands. While she screamed he’d taken her handbag. Seventy pounds in cash. Everything else he’d left in the bag, and he’d left the bag on one of the seats so she’d be sure to find it. Coming home, the cash converted into crack, he’d unlocked his front door and stumbled into the hot darkness. Strips of light lay across the floorboards looking as if someone had drawn on them with orange chalk. At first he hadn’t seen the note. It was a folded piece of paper, lying on the floor just inside the front door. An envelope was with it. Hob wasn’t much good at reading. Somehow he’d never got the hang of it and he was worse when in a state, as now. The note and the envelope on the floor beside him, he crumbled up one of his rocks and dropped it through the mouth of the watering can rose, then came the cap, the straws, the tin lid, finally the lighter applied to the perforations. He breathed in, a long hauling breath, as if his lungs were engines for
dragging and tugging. The smoke in his windpipe felt like the first time he’d tasted ice cream.

Happy as the day is long, he was at his reading best. The envelope had a letter in it from the council, something about putting new windows in at nine
A.M
. on the fifteenth and to be sure to be in to admit the operatives. Or that’s what he thought it said. The note was from Carl, harder to read because it was in handwriting. He was to go up that evening and Carl might have something for him.

It was a long time since Hob had seen either Carl or Leo. He thought Leo had left and he wouldn’t have been surprised if Carl had gone too, though where he couldn’t begin to guess. No doubt he came back from time to time. Leo was going to die, you didn’t have to be a doctor or have Carl’s brains to know that. Hob got up and did a little dance, punched the air, sang one of his mum’s nan’s funny old songs, and then he sang “I’ll Be Your Sweetheart” and “Night Train to Memphis” because he wasn’t going to die, whatever might happen to Leo. The mice must sleep in the daytime. He pictured them asleep behind the skirting board, looking like Jerry in the Tom and Jerry cartoon, or Mickey Mouse on his cushions, but furry and soft too. Maybe there were hundreds of them, curled up and cuddling each other. All that boarding up made the place airless, but the kitchen smelled fresher than the rest of the flat. He took two Weetabix out of the packet and crumbled them up on the living room floor in front of the telly. The crumbling made him giggle because maybe the Weetabix was for the mice like crack was for him. Then he went upstairs.

It would have been too much to expect the lift to be working still. It wasn’t. The stairs were nothing to him when he was well and he pranced lightly up the seven flights, making a noise about it presumably, because Carl must have heard him. He was standing there, holding the door open, looking as miserable as sin and his face as pale as Leo’s.

“How’s Leo doing, then?” Hob said, which he never would have if he hadn’t been fit and raring to go.

Carl didn’t answer, just shrugged and looked away. “I’m going out,” he said. “This won’t take long. You can make two K out of it, which is the entire extent of my resources, all I’ve got till the week after next, rather.”

“Two
K?
You mean, two
grand?
”

“It’s no use haggling because, as I said, it’s all I’ve got.”

“I’m not haggling,” said Hob.

“And five hundred grams of E, so long as you’ll take the yellows.”

“That’s fine by me, Carl.”

•   •   •