The Portable Door (1987) (18 page)

It was a very long afternoon.

“Anyway,” Sophie said, as they walked out through reception at 5:29. “We’re getting there. If we really crack on with it tomorrow, I think we might get it finished.”

Paul nodded. He wasn’t really listening.

Out through the door; she was telling him how she couldn’t wait to get back to their rotten little office, after three days in that horrible cold strongroom. They reached the corner; her that way, him this. She stopped.

“Well,” she said.

Paul looked up; he’d been staring at his shoes. “Sorry?” A second dragged by. An oak tree could have grown in that second. Paul had the feeling she was waiting for something, but his mind was elsewhere.
Decapitation
, he was thinking,
for fuck’s sake. And seventy grand in the Abbey National, Chelmsford. But I’ve never even been to bloody Chelmsford
.

And then he realised she was looking at him, and for some reason she was furiously angry. “Well, see you tomorrow,” she snapped, and walked away very quickly.

A better man, or at least a biped with one working brain cell, would’ve chased after her. Paul didn’t. He shook his head, and trudged to the bus stop.
Australia
, he was thinking;
no, not Australia, that’s where they’ve found all that fucking bauxite. Ontario
. Surely if he went there, he’d be safe, they’d never follow him all that way. Would they? And besides, who were
they
, anyhow?

My darling Paul
—He made a decision. What he needed, he decided, was a drink; something fierce and strong and vicious, with teeth and claws, and possibly a cube of ice and a slice of lemon. He drifted across the road to a pub, only remembering as he sat down with his drink that on the last occasion he’d been there, she’d been sitting over by the door, with her pint of Guinness. A large bald man with a thick neck was in her place now. That didn’t seem right, somehow; it was like removing the statue of Eros from Piccadilly Circus and replacing it with a ten-foot plastic Mickey Mouse.

This being no time for faint hearts or false economies, he ordered a full pint of lemonade shandy, and sat down in a corner where nobody was likely to tread on his feet and break his concentration. Are we sitting comfortably? Then we’ll begin.

The letters. He took them out, patted the spilled beer off the table top with his sleeve, and put them carefully down. Next he picked out the one he’d started to read earlier, and opened it.

My dear Philip
—He blinked three times, and looked at the envelope. It was addressed, quite clearly in sharp, slanting handwriting, to Lieutenant Philip Catherwood, The Parsonage, Norton St Edgar, Worcs. The postmark was 22 April 1877.

Fuck, he thought.

He checked the rest of the letters. All addressed to the same person, in the same handwriting, dating from 22 April 1877 through to 12 January 1879, by which time Lieutenant Catherwood was serving in South Africa. Paul stopped there. He’d spent most of his history lessons at school drawing sheep in the margins of his textbooks, but he’d seen
Zulu
three times and read articles about the Zulu War in his military modelling magazines. 22 January 1879; British army wiped out at Isandlhwana. Somehow he knew exactly what had happened to Philip Catherwood. Terribly sad; but that wasn’t the point. At least he’d had someone writing love letters to him—(He checked. He felt awful about reading them, and he only flicked through. He was shocked. He had no idea they did stuff like that back in the 1870
s
, and especially an officer and a gentleman. He put the letters away quickly and hoped nobody had seen him reading them.)

Think
, he ordered himself.
Implications
.

If the love letters that had been addressed to him a few hours previously were now somebody else’s, then wasn’t there a decent chance that the rest of the stuff—all that money, and of course the death certificate—maybe all that stuff was somebody else’s too. He shunted his consciousness into serious mode, and considered the alternatives.

He was hung-over, residual alcohol sloshing through his veins like the Severn Bore, and he’d imagined the whole thing. He was cracking up, and it was starting to get embarrassingly obvious. In his haste, he’d grabbed the wrong bundle of letters, and the Dear Paul stuff was still wedged in the rack in the strongroom. The letters had been written to him when he first looked at them, but now they weren’t. The letters were written to him as long as he was inside the doors of 70 St Mary Axe, but as soon as he stepped over the threshold, they morphed into a slice of tragic Victoriana. The letters were written to him, but on his way out through reception, someone had picked his pocket and replaced them with fifteen instalments of forged nineteenth-century soft porn.
She
had written the letters but never posted them; instead she’d stashed them in JWW’s safe, and when she saw they’d gone she’d guessed he’d found them, surreptitiously swiped them and replaced them with something vaguely similar she’d found on the shelves, to make him believe he’d imagined the whole thing.

Paul reviewed these alternatives and decided that, on balance, it’d be better for his mental health to quit speculating and wait till tomorrow, when he’d have a chance to look at all the other stuff. If the bank books and house deeds (and the death certificate) were all still there, that would at least allow him to run a blue pencil through some of the alternatives. (Another explanation: the air in the strongroom was laced with some form of hallucinogenic compound, possibly sewer gas escaping from the building’s medieval plumbing, and he’d imagined the stuff with the letters because he’d been as high as the rate of inflation all the time he’d been down there. It was as plausible as several of the others, and about as much help.)

He glugged another mouthful of shandy, and the fizz went up his nose, making him sneeze. It wasn’t any good, he told himself, focusing on these damned letters, or the money, or even the death certificate. What he needed to do was address the whole issue of weirdness, which he’d been shying away from for just over a month, partly because he was a coward but mostly because he was in love. Weirdness, he thought; swords and bauxite and men with dragons’ claws on chains round their necks buying him lunch at cosy little Uzbek restaurants. One of the aspects of the human condition that elevates mankind above the lesser primates is the inquiring mind, the urge to find out, to know the essential truth; but there has to come a time when the inquiring mind stops inquiring, finds a late-night travel agency and books a one-way flight to Canada. Another aspect, of course, is romantic love, something that Paul had always reckoned God slipped into the design schematics late on Day Eight, while rubbing His hands together and sniggering.
If I quit at J.W. Wells, I may never see her again
. Of all the bloody stupid arguments; and yet it was the only one that mattered.
Hell
, he thought.

Yes
, he said to himself,
but the death certificate
—And then he put his beer glass down and stared at the darkened window opposite, because he’d suddenly remembered the date on the certificate, the day and month on which he was due to be beheaded. 22 January.

Oink
, he thought.

Calm down
, he thought. In fact, that made perfect sense; because if he’d been imagining things and the letters belonged to the late Philip Catherwood, wasn’t it likely or at least possible that all the other items were Catherwood papers too, and the form his delusions had taken was simply reading his own name every time he saw that of the poor dead subaltern. In which case, assuming he was right about Philip meeting his death in the shadow of the horned mountain, then of course the date would have been 22 January—22 January 1879, the day of the battle. Actually, it was probably even simpler than that. It was dark in the strongroom, right? And the handwriting—well, he could read it all right here, in a well-lit pub, but down there, with a hangover and under a single sixty-watt bulb, wasn’t it at least conceivable that he’d misread Philip Catherwood as Paul Carpenter, and mucked the dates up as well?

He could feel clenched muscles relaxing all over his body. Of course, he realised, that was all there was to it. Easy enough to figure out how it’d happened; the booze, of course, and the cold, and a certain degree of mental imbalance caused by his addled love for the thin girl, combined with his vivid imagination making mountains out of the molehills of minor weirdness he’d experienced over the last month—and as for them, he was absolutely confident that he’d be able to explain them all, given time and a few extra brain cells. The claw-mark, for instance; so one of the cleaners had a large, boisterous Alsatian, which for some reason she brought to work with her one day, and it got off the lead and scratched some paint. Big deal. The bauxite? Well, maybe he had actually dowsed or scried it; there were little men with hazel twigs who did it for a living, he’d seen TV programmes about it; or else it was just coincidence, exaggerated by his overheated imagination. The round, red eye through the letter box? That Alsatian again. Or Mr Tanner, temporarily bloodshot after smoking a cigar right down to the last knockings of the stub. That really only left the sword in the stone, and he’d been through all that already. In short, there was a simple explanation for every single thing. Probably it was all just something to do with J.W. Wells trying to fiddle its tax bill. Practically anything in the world becomes suddenly credible if you tag the magic words
doing it for tax reasons
on the end.

He finished his drink and stood up. All that panic and fuss over a silly misunderstanding.

In which case
, Paul asked himself as he sat in the bus,
what about me and Sophie?
Well, now there was no more weirdness to worry about, there was no reason to quit the job, so that was all right. But if there was no weirdness, then—He frowned so ferociously that the woman sitting next to him got up and moved to the back of the bus. If there was no weirdness, then by implication all that stuff that Professor Van Spee had told him was just guesses, from someone who fancied himself as a bit of a Sherlock Holmes, and accordingly unreliable at best, most likely worthless. A similar line of argument could be used to dispose of the Gilbert and Sullivan thing. In which case, she probably didn’t love him after all.

Oh
, he thought.

For crying out loud
, he told himself. Life wasn’t like that. Your cake, to have and to eat, from this day forward, in weirdness and in health. You couldn’t decide to keep the nice bits of the crazy stuff, and take the rest of it back to the shop for a refund. Anyhow: wasn’t it better to be living in a universe where things worked like they were meant to, where claw-marks were made by big dogs, hung-over idiots misread old, faded letters in dark rooms, good-natured employers took new trainees out to lunch on their first day, and girls didn’t fall in love with pathetic wimps with no redeeming features whatsoever?

Well, yes
, he said to himself.
Of course, naturally. I suppose
.

But then he remembered something that had been lurking at the back of his mind.
It can’t be too bad
, he told himself. (And if he was smirking a little, so what? There was nobody to see.)
She can’t absolutely hate the sight of me, or she wouldn’t have agreed to go out with me tonight…

Pause. Rewind. Delete smirk.
Shit!

Well, at least that explained why she’d stomped off in a huff when they’d parted outside the office door. She—against all the odds, she’d actually said yes when he’d asked her out, thereby giving him an option on being the happiest man on earth and having all his dreams come true; choirs of angels were waiting in the wings, blue skies were lurking at the edges of clouds all over the western hemisphere, Berkeley Square was knee-deep in nightingales practising scales and arpeggios, and he’d
forgotten
. A stupid, trivial little thing like the fear of death had been enough to flush it out of his mind, and now here he was, conclusively and comprehensively stuffed in perpetuity. Idiot. Tea-bag memory. Of all the bloody stupid things…

It was raining when Paul got off the bus, and his coat was back in St Mary Axe. He pulled his jacket lapels round his face, like he’d seen them do in the movies, but it didn’t do any good at all. The hallway of the house was pitch dark—the bulb had gone, and nobody could be buggered to replace it. He was wet through, and his suit smelt of rain. He opened the door of his bedsit, groped for the light switch and stumbled in.

No light switch. Either that or some clown had moved it. But people don’t break into houses and move the electric fittings around, or at any rate not in Kentish Town. Feeling annoyed and stupid, he stood in the doorway, pawing at the wall, but he couldn’t seem to locate the bloody thing. For a moment he wondered if he’d blundered into someone else’s room by mistake—but that wasn’t possible, he could distinctly remember unlocking the door, and here was his keyring, still in his hand.

But still he couldn’t find the goddamned light switch. Nothing for it; on the mantelpiece, he knew for a fact, right in the middle between the 2
p
-coin jar and the petrol-station carriage clock his parents had given him for his eighteenth birthday, there was a candle. He lit it occasionally for ambience, though it generally went out after thirty seconds or so. Next to it there should be a box of matches, for lighting the gas fire. He headed for it, remembering to sidestep where the sword in the stone should be, and traced the wall with his fingertips. Sure enough: mantelpiece, candle, matches, precisely where he’d left them. He struck a match and lit the candle.

Oh
, he thought.

It wasn’t his room. Well, it was the same room he lived in, because this was his candle, there was the stupid bloody sword, there were the window and the bed, there was the table, there was the damp patch on the wall that looked like a map of Turkey drawn by Salvador Dali. But it wasn’t his room. He thought about it, and about various other things, including several stately homes he’d been taken to as a child, picture postcards from the Victoria & Albert museum, and various bits of the
Antiques Roadshow
he’d sat through at various times, waiting for
Star Trek Voyager
to come on. It was, he decided, the way the room he lived in would probably have looked a hundred or so years ago.