The Professor of Truth (26 page)

“What has this to do with me? Maybe this is why I know you. But it has nothing to do with me.”

“It is to do with your husband, Martin Parroulet. Maybe he has spoken to you about me. He has mentioned my name or shown you my picture.”

She shook her head.

“I must speak to him. Ask him some questions.”

“Are you police?”

“No. I told you. I lost my family in the bombing.”

“What questions? There are no more questions.”

“Yes there are. I need to find out the truth.”

Abruptly she stood up and came towards me. I still felt weak and wasn’t sure what would happen if I got to my feet. She stopped right in front of me and brought her face, her eyes, close to mine.

“What are you doing, Alan Tealing, bringing all that here? Yes, I know your face. I know what you said about that trial. You said it was wrong. You said it was the wrong man. But that is over, all gone. It has nothing to do with me or my husband any more. Go away and leave us alone.”

“I wish I could.”

“How do you come here? Nobody knows to come here. And why do you come with this stupid story about buttons and
pockets? You think
I’m
stupid? You think I don’t see you have other reasons? Why not tell the truth, if you want truth?”

“I was afraid he would not see me.”

“He won’t see you. I knew you were no good. I wish I never took your stupid clothes to mend.”

“Then why did you, if you knew?” I asked.

“I never turn away work.” A strange defiant pride was in the words. “Never. Not even from you.” Then she returned to the attack. “Why do you come? What do you want with my husband? He won’t see you. He left all that behind. He came here to have a new life. Why do you come to spoil everything?”

To my amazement, she let out another trill of laughter. But then I saw it wasn’t laughter. She wiped furiously at her eyes. She sat down behind the table again, but slumped this time, resting her forehead on one hand.

I said, “I don’t wish to cause you distress, but I must see your husband. He is the only one who can help me.”

She said, “I knew this was going to happen. One day someone would come. I’ve waited for it all this time. Him too. This is why he never goes out. Now you are here. But he won’t see you. I won’t tell him about you. So you can just go away now.”

“I can wait too,” I said. “I’m good at it. I’ve been waiting many years.”

She put her hands back on the table, made herself upright once more, apparently challenging me to sit it out, to see who gave up first.

“Can you imagine,” I said, “what it is like, to lose your wife and your only child in such a way?”

She looked away, as if something else had caught her eye.

“No,” she said. “I cannot imagine that.”

“Well, then.”

She turned on me again. “ ‘Well, then’? What does that mean?”

“You are a humane person,” I said. “You have already shown that. I know you are.”

“You know nothing,” she said. And once more she seemed to look at something I could not see. Then she repeated her earlier question: “How do you know to come here?”

“Somebody gave me information,” I said.

“Somebody?”

“A man came to my house. In Scotland. An American. He told me where your husband was.”

Emotion of some kind flickered in her eyes.

“Then you are just the first. Others will come.”

“He told only me.”

“He will tell others.”

“No. He is dead.”

Again, her eyes showed something, but whether fear or courage I could not say.

“He was ill,” I explained. “He was dying of cancer.”

She nodded, as if slightly reassured. “But others must know.”

“Perhaps. I don’t think anyone else will come.”

“You can’t be sure.”

“No, I can’t be.”

She pondered this for a few moments. She said, “A man came to your house. Then you came to our house.”

“Yes. Yesterday, and the day before. I pressed the buzzer. You were there, or someone was. I am sure of that.”

All this time the big table had been between us. Now, as though she had suddenly made a decision, she re-emerged from behind it.

“Okay, that’s enough,” she said. “You are not sick now. You must go.” She bustled around me, forcing me to stand, and as soon as I did she folded the chair and put it against a wall. “Go. Go away now.”

“Please,” I said. “Don’t do this.”

“I need to think. I can’t think with you in here. Go away. Come back later.”

I could hardly believe the rush of hope that those last three words supplied. “When?”

“One hour. Give me one hour.”

My legs felt so weak. If I returned to the hotel, surely in an hour she would have locked up and gone. I wouldn’t have the strength to go back out to Sheildston, not walking. And anyway by the time I got there she’d have warned Parroulet, and they’d have left.

She seemed to read my thoughts. “Leave the clothes. You come back for them in one hour. I will stay till you come back.”

What could I do? She was my only means of getting to Parroulet.

I said, “One hour.”

Outside, the heat was as intense as ever. It was the middle
of the afternoon. I heard the shop door shut and lock. I began to walk.

Something had changed. It took me a minute to work out what it was. An odour was in the air, so faint it was hardly there, but it was, and it was different from the usual cooking smells of the Strand. A kind of perfume, medicinal, sweet and bitter at the same time: the scent of the bush burning.

The heat drove me from the street. I went to my room and lay down. I felt drained—I was, literally—but at least the poison was out of me. I knew I’d escaped lightly. I thought of my mother. She’d have been right round to that restaurant to complain. I, on the other hand, didn’t want to go near the place ever again. Did that make me a coward?

Was Kim Parr testing me? I thought so. Despite my anxiety that she would have fled, I forced myself to undergo the test. With five minutes to go before the hour was up I set out again.

Street signs, bollards, lamp posts danced in my vision. A small creature crouched in the doorway of her shop. A dog or a cat? As I drew near, it metamorphosed into the plastic bag that contained my repaired clothes. And the scooter was no longer parked against the kerb.

So this was what it had come to: another deceit. I pushed and tugged at the door, hammered on it with my fist, peered through the glass to see if she was still inside. Nothing moved.

Enraged, I pulled the trousers and shirt from the bag and shook them, turned the bag inside out, seeking a note or some other sign that she had not tricked me. But it seemed clear that she had.

Then suddenly the anger went, and was replaced by utter exhaustion. I had not the strength to rage. All struggle was beyond me. I was up against yet another prison wall, and this one felt too thick, too hard for me to dig through.

I slid to the ground, my back against the glass door. It seemed all I was fit for now was to collapse. One collapse after another. My hands clawed at the clothes, drew them into my chest. I wanted, desperately, somebody to hold, to be held by somebody. But the street was deserted, and I was alone. In twenty-one years I had never felt so alone. Was this what I had come for? To be, finally, here in this empty alley, defeated?

I put my face into the shirt. Once I had started to weep I found I could not stop.

T IS NO GOOD RUNNING AWAY,” THE WOMAN’S VOICE
said. Her shadow fell on me as she spoke. I was blindly stuffing the clothes back in the bag and gathering myself to get back to the Pelican, the first stage of my total retreat.

“Not you,” Kim Parr said. “Me. I got three hundred metres and found I had a flat tyre.” She smiled briefly but the smile became a frown. “You have been crying.”

There was no point in denying it. I moved aside and she unlocked the door.

“You better come in. The garage is mending the tyre but it will take an hour. I could have waited there but I came back.”

“Why did you?” I said.

“Like I said, running away is no good. We have not finished talking.”

“You appeared to have.”

She held the door for me. “Go in. Sit down.” She switched on lights and the fan, and unfolded the chair I’d sat on before. This time she did not go behind the table, but brought out another chair and sat opposite me. Our knees were almost touching.

She stared at me.

“What?” I said.

“You asked me that question,” she answered. “You said, can I imagine your loss? You thought I could not.”

“You said so yourself.”

“And that was true. But you assumed it. ‘Well, then,’ you said. As if that settled something. As if you had scored a point against me.”

“I don’t know what you are talking about,” I said.

“No, you don’t. This is what I am telling you. I have my own loss, it is with me every day. You are not the only one.”

“I have never been so stupid as to think that,” I said.

“Well, then.”

I rubbed my eyes. Everything in the room was flickering, strange and unreal to me.

“Tell me,” I said.

“My family were Chinese people, from Vietnam,” Kim Parr said. “My father’s father came to Saigon from the north. He was a farmer but he came to the city for a better life. Not easier, but better. More chance to prosper. He bought and sold rice and other food in the market. This was in the 1930s. There were many Chinese in Saigon then, with good jobs. They helped each other make money. The Vietnamese did not like them much, but the French liked them because Chinese people worked hard for their money. My father worked in the market too, but then he became apprentice to a tailor and later he started his own business. He did well. He married my mother, who was Vietnamese. This is another thing
Vietnamese people did not like much, and my father’s family did not like it at all because they looked down on local people, but my parents did it anyway. They had three children, a son and two daughters. I was the youngest.

“When they got married it was the ’60s. Vietnam was divided, north and south. The French had gone but the Americans came instead. The war was bad, but not bad for business. Lots of American soldiers wanted suits, shirts, things to take home to their families, cheap but high quality. Then the Americans lost the war and the Communists took over. Time to settle old scores. You suffered if you didn’t know the right people. My father knew only wrong people. We got by for a few years, but the Communist government squeezed us Chinese because we were good business people, knew how to make money, and they took what they liked and we let them because we knew they could take it all. Life was very tough. Lots of people, not only Chinese but anyone against the Communists, left on boats, but my father said this was too dangerous. Other Chinese people made the long journey north to China, but he said why go there, another Communist country only bigger? Then there was war with China and things got even worse. My father said one day, it is time to leave. I was eight years old, my sister was eleven and my brother was thirteen. My father paid most of the money he had left to Communist officials to let us go, then more money to get on a boat. It was a hard time but we were together and we thought it couldn’t get worse. We were wrong.

“The boat was very small and it had too many people in it. More than a hundred, crowded on deck under the sun. After
three days we had no water. The crew made us pay for water, which they kept from us with guns. They were supposed to take us to the Philippines or Hong Kong but we just drifted in the sea. Then another boat came with more men with guns and machetes. We had heard that there were many pirates from Thailand attacking people like us so we hid the little money we had left, some gold and precious things. The men in our boat argued with the pirates. I thought they were trying to protect us but now I know they were bartering for us. They had been waiting for the pirates to come. I saw money go between them. The pirates ordered all men, young and old, to go to their boat. They shot in the air so we knew they must be obeyed. My father told my brother, who was small for his age, to stay with us. He hugged my mother and kissed us, it felt bad, like he was saying goodbye. When all the men had gone some of the pirates came on to our boat and took everything we had, gold, rings, earrings, money, they were very rough and hurt anyone who resisted. They found my brother and pulled him from us and when he fought back one of them held him out in his hands like a dog and another one shot him in the head and they threw his body in the water. I saw this thing done. Then they left us and took the men and boys away. I did not see my father again. Never. We never knew what happened to those men and boys, but I think when the pirates had taken all their possessions they threw them in the sea.

“So now we were only women and girls on this boat, terrified, thirsty, hungry. We did not know where the crew was taking us. After two more days we reached a small island,
and the crew put us ashore with some food and sailed away. We were glad to be on that island but we soon found we were not alone. There were others there already, miserable people like us, betrayed, abandoned. The world did not know about us. No government cared about us. Pirates came and went from that place and when they came they did terrible things. They stole any valuable thing anyone still had. When there was nothing left to steal worse things happened. They took my mother away, they took my sister. When they came back they were not the same people. I hid and I was small so they did not find me. We had left Vietnam because it was a very bad place for us but we went to hell instead.