Talking to Strange Men Read online

  He didn’t sleep well. He never did if he got home late. All part of being a conventional, routine-driven person presumably. Next day, waking early, he arrived at work even earlier than usual. There was a delivery to make of trees and shrubs to a house near the estate where Jennifer lived. John had promised to go with the driver and give the purchaser of the trees some on-site advice. It was a big order and he had felt obliged to do this. Much as he wanted to see Jennifer, he hoped the driver wouldn’t go past the cottage where she and Peter Moran lived. He didn’t want to see her while with someone else, especially with someone who didn’t know, though he couldn’t have explained why this was.

  But the driver took another route there and back, mainly on the by-pass, leaving the big road on the return journey by the cats’ green flyover, open at this hour to traffic heading for the city. As they bumped over the pillars, John thought there might be a new message down there, under the wheels of the van, and he said to the driver to drop him off. It was lunchtime and he might as well find his lunch down here as at the café near the garden centre. The bus he caught to work on the days he wasn’t on the Honda started from the garage half a mile from here and there would be one going at one-forty.

  It might be the old message still there, he thought, as he crossed the street towards the green. It was only yesterday, after all, that he had discovered and read the one that mentioned Bruce-Partington. He reached up and unpeeled the tape. A new message. He could tell that at once. He copied it down into his notebook, replaced the package inside the pillar and went off to look for somewhere to have lunch.

  The nearest place would be the pub on the steps. Imagine eating there! Imagine standing on the very spot where . . . John walked up Albatross Street past Ahman–Suleiman, to where the street widened, found a small but clean-looking workmen’s café on a corner where four streets met. The tables inside actually had cloths on them, red check cotton, and there were posters of holiday places on the walls. At the small self-service counter cheeseburgers or ham sandwiches or samosas were on offer, these last perhaps for the Ahman-Suleiman workforce. He took the sandwiches. The least adventurous, he thought. Mark Simm’s estimate of his character still rankled rather. But it was true. If one of the questions in a quiz was: which of these lunch choices would a conventional person make, a sandwich, a cheeseburger, a samosa, the first would be the correct answer.

  He took a cup of coffee and a slice of apple pie too. Without a copy of The Other Side of Silence he could still decipher the message, for he had written the first lines down in his notebook. The book, after all, would soon have to go back to the library. The first word of the message was nine characters long, the second two characters, the third six. John started placing them against the code alphabet. VCHIFUAH FZ LWASZH. Could he have copied the first lines incorrectly into his notebook? This was the first time he had not used the novel itself.

  But he was sure he hadn’t copied them wrongly. He was beginning to be very familiar with the code. If, as seemed likely, the message began: ‘Leviathan to Dragon’, the TH of Leviathan should be AB in the code not TW and the T of ‘to’ would be A not F. John couldn’t understand it. What had gone wrong? He spread the paper out on the table between his place and coffee cup, as if by smoothing it with his hands he could suddenly make all clear. More slowly this time, concentrating, he tried again. VCHIFU . . . And then he understood. He saw plainly what had happened. A new month had begun and they had changed the code.

  They had made an April Fool of him.

  15

  STRANGE, REMOTE MUSIC, a soprano voice singing:

  ‘. . . Ah, Belinda, I am prest

  With torment not to be confest . . .’

  Angus was lying on his bed, flat on his back, lying beside him the record sleeve which had a picture on it of a woman dressed like one of the goddesses on the City Hall Parthenon frieze. He was reading. The curtains were drawn but sunshine made bright lines and spots round their edges. Angus wasn’t keen on morning sunshine. He had his bed lamp on. Mungo knocked politely, though the door was as usual wide open. Everyone in the house had to put up with Purcell or Gluck or whoever it might be until Lucy lost patience and told him to turn it off or shut the door. When Angus saw who it was he said:

  ‘I don’t suppose you happen to know who said, “Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes,” do you?’

  ‘Me? No, I don’t know. Why would I? I came to ask if I could use the computer. As a great favour.’

  ‘You can’t use it, can you? You don’t know how.’

  ‘I thought you could show me,’ said Mungo.

  ‘It would be easier if I just did it for you.’ Angus looked penetratingly at him. ‘You don’t want me to know what it is, do you?’

  ‘I don’t mind. Not really. Only we ought to do it before lunch and catch the afternoon post. I want him to get it tomorrow.’

  ‘Get what?’ Angus got up and sat on the bed but he didn’t turn Dido off.

  Mungo closed the door. His father was out but he wasn’t sure about his mother. She was usually at the hospital on Fridays. He explained about the planning permission and Blake and Charles Mabledene. Angus started to laugh.

  ‘You’re never going to write to Dad and tell him permission’s been granted!’

  ‘Why not?’ Mungo said cautiously. ‘I thought it would look official done on a computer. I’ve got a bit of the right paper. Well, it’s not quite right but Dad won’t know. It’s City Council paper, not City Planning. I’ve had it ever since Hydra got ten sheets for me when we did the rates thing. I want to say there’s been a supplementary meeting held in camera at which it was resolved to grant permission . . .’

  ‘Why in camera?’

  ‘I like the sound of it. It means in private.’

  ‘It really means in a room. Camera oscura, a dark room. Like the inside of your head,’ Angus added, and he offered Mungo a chocolate truffle.

  ‘Will you do it for me, then?’ said Mungo, munching.

  ‘I suppose. You mustn’t sign it with Blake’s name though. You’d better make up someone. And I won’t put that “in camera” bit, it’s crazy. I suppose you’re absolutely sure about this?’

  ‘About it being true? Charles Mabledene is completely reliable. I’d trust him with my life.’ As soon as he had said this Mungo knew he didn’t really mean it. He wouldn’t trust Dragon an inch but he knew he would get his facts right.

  ‘You’re bananas, Bean, do you know that?’ But Angus switched on the computer and sat in front of it, commanding it to edit a new file. ‘Suppose Dad rings up the planning people?’

  ‘Why would he?’

  ‘I don’t know. “Dear Dr Cameron . . .”’ Angus pattered away at the keyboard. ‘What’s your next project, Bean?’

  ‘I’m getting all my officers working on finding out who it was dented in the wing of Unicorn’s brother’s car. And then I want two invitations for Graham and me to the Conservative Association’s cocktail party. I’ve never been to a cocktail party. I reckon we ought to get that all wrapped up before term starts.’

  16

  WITH THE AIM of being honest and open, no secrets, no deceptions, Jennifer had got John to meet Peter Moran on the day she left him. Peter Moran came to Geneva Road in that Citroën Diane of his to pick her up. John had had a few days to get used to the idea, or at least to get over the worst of the shock, but he was still in a stunned or bemused state.

  ‘It’s better for you to meet,’ she said. ‘It’s better for you to see each other. I want you to understand, John.’

  He took that to mean that when he saw Peter Moran her desertion of him for such a man would be comprehensible. Peter Moran would dazzle perhaps by his appearance, his personality, his wit and charm, his sheer cleverness. Jennifer always said how clever he was, how she admired his needle-sharp intellect. John was still in a condition then of believing that in order to attract the opposite sex a person had to be specially good-looking and hyper-intelligent too, and this in s
pite of all the married couples he saw around him. This in spite of long-past evidence of Mark’s love for Cherry.

  And then Peter Moran arrived, laconic, casual, and with that sort of bludgeoned half-awake look, as if he had just come round from deep, perhaps drugged sleep. Not handsome at all, gaunt-faced and pallid. That made it worse somehow, or at least didn’t make it better. It insulted John that Jennifer preferred him. He spoke in an effete public school drawl, spare of words, supercilious, seemingly indifferent to what anyone’s opinion of him might be. And there was more to it than that. Later John thought he must have imagined this, it must be that just anything bad he could think of he had applied to this man, but in fact he had thought at once: there is something nasty about him, something awful. Of sexual deviation he knew little but he could sense its monsters lurking. Such a monster sat behind Peter Moran’s eyes, he had thought, crouching behind those eyes that were dull as stones, screened by the windows of his glasses.

  When he came in he had said hallo but John had not been able to copy him. He had said, very stiffly:

  ‘Good afternoon.’

  There had been a casting up of those eyes at that and a murmur that might have been ‘bloody hell’. To Jennifer Peter Moran said:

  ‘Is this all the stuff you’re taking, Jen? I thought you were coming for good, not the weekend.’

  Since he made no move to pick up her suitcases, John carried them down the path. He had a stupid hope the neighbours would think Jennifer was going off on holiday somewhere and Peter Moran was just her driver to the station. Peter Moran, watching him do this, said:

  ‘Shades of Sacher-Masoch.’

  They went off and John closed the front door and went upstairs. He threw himself down on the queen-sized bed where he had slept alone for several nights by then but he couldn’t lie still, the pain was too bad for that, the sheer pain of her absence. He imagined them in the car together and for some reason he imagined them laughing. Whenever he imagined them together they were laughing which was strange, for Peter Moran seemed like a man who would hardly ever laugh.

  Next time he was at the library John looked up Sacher-Masoch in an encyclopedia and found out that he was a man who derived sexual enjoyment from suffering. He had accompanied his wife and her lover on a tour as their servant in order to witness their most intimate moments together. This, then, was how Peter Moran saw him.

  The dream he had very early on Saturday morning was of the day he and Jennifer had parted, now five months past. In the dream things weren’t as they truly had been but distorted so that some of the events, on waking, seemed absurd. He might have carried her cases a few yards but he had never knelt at her feet and polished her shoes. Why did one dream such things? Peter Moran too had appeared deformed, with a hideous growth on one side of his face, instead of the quite normal-looking man he was.

  John sometimes lay in till nine or nine-thirty on those alternate Saturday mornings when he didn’t have to go to work and he had meant to do that today. But he woke up at seven sickened by this dream and instead of being able to get off to sleep again, his thoughts went immediately to the afternoon, to three o’clock and the meeting with Jennifer. He was excited and he was afraid. The bedroom didn’t look exactly dirty but frowsty and it smelled stale. He got up and dressed, opened the windows and began putting clean linen on the bed. The sheets were fresh from the laundry, white and crisp. John confessed guiltily to himself that he hadn’t changed the sheets for a month but he fancied that men living alone seldom did change linen very often. Mark Simms would be the same. Suppose when he woke tomorrow Jennifer’s head were to be lying on this pillow, on this white linen pillowcase, next to his?

  He had been afraid of love-making. His virginity, which had been nothing before he met Jennifer, which had seemed to him the normal condition of a single person, became a burden no longer willingly carried, a dragging weight and an absurd embarrassment. He would have felt it less if she had been a virgin too, only he knew she wasn’t. There had been Peter Moran and others, for all he knew. More than once she had hinted to him that they ought to live together – his expression, a euphemism – before marriage but he had said not exactly that he respected her too much but that he wanted to save love-making for when they were married, for their wedding night. Smiling, she had accepted. Perhaps he should have minded that she showed no disappointment.

  It was all right on the night. Strange what an application that common phrase could have. It was just all right. An exercise he had never performed before, as using some unfamiliar machine might be, but possible if one followed the directions. The earth didn’t move, nor did he soar to heaven, and he was sure she didn’t. It was enough for him in those early days that he had acquitted himself respectably. He knew how to do it, apparently, and he had certainly done it. The burden had been dropped and left behind in the middle of the road.

  Two days before they were married she said she thought she ought to tell him that if Peter Moran ever came back and wanted her she would go to him. She wouldn’t be able to help herself. Jennifer was tired and a bit weepy and he put this down to pre-wedding nerves. He didn’t really believe her. Peter Moran was in America, she said, teaching at a college in the Middle West, though how she knew that when she never had letters from him John didn’t know. John had laughed and said he would have something to say about his wife running off with an old flame, he would lock her up. Various feeble jokes of that kind had been made. And then, at their Registrar’s Office wedding, she had said suddenly:

  ‘You don’t have to make any vows. Isn’t that interesting? You don’t have to promise anything.’

  He thought he loved her. He really fell in love with her after they were married. What he would have liked was to have laid everything at her feet, the sun and moon and the heaven’s embroidered cloths. All he had was his house and some small savings and an equally small inheritance from his parents. He would have liked to spend that on making the house nice for her but she wouldn’t have it, she wanted nothing changed.

  ‘Leave it as it is,’ she said. ‘I’m not houseproud and it’s the garden you really like.’

  So all he bought was this bed and the beautiful, expensive, old-fashioned bed linen that had to be starched and ironed. Between those sheets she was kind and polite to him, but after a while, after the time of indulgence was over, he didn’t dare ask her for love more than once a week and then not more than once a fortnight . . . But he knew himself, he knew he would never speak to her about it. Frank talking, openness, wasn’t in his line, the kind of thing Mark Simms seemed to advocate wasn’t for him. If their marriage became white, sexless, it would have to be so, he would accept.

  To his astonishment it was she who broached the subject, who said with a sort of admirable simplicity that it was awful, their love-making, boring at best, painful at worst. She couldn’t stand it, it would make her ill. She spoke so softly and gently but she was firm. Couldn’t she, wouldn’t he let her – she baulked a little here, but she came to him and put her arms round him – suppose she were to try to teach him? Suppose they were to try together?

  And there began his happiness, the learning of love with a woman who loved him, or who he thought loved him. That which had been a novelty, a source of satisfaction of various kinds, became a glory and a sensuous triumph. ‘Going to bed’ took on a quite different meaning for him. She would draw back the curtains and fill the room with light, slip back into his arms and nuzzle him and whisper. Sometimes in the day she would embrace him downstairs and quickly lead him up to bed. She promised him she would never pretend to a pleasure she didn’t feel, so he knew that first orgasm she had and all the subsequent ones were real and he had given them to her. Feverishly she talked while he moved and strove, ‘yes, yes, yes’ and his name repeated, and ‘my darling!’ and a cry of such evident bliss – from Jennifer who otherwise never made so loud a sound. Into the midst of this, at the peak of it, it seemed to him, when they had found each other and the heights of mutual sens
uousness, Peter Moran came back and she left and went to him.

  It would have been less, much less, if she had gone during that first year. His potency might have been spoiled for ever, but what use was potency to him without her? She had gone when all was perfect between them, when they touched each other all the time they were together and held hands and acknowledged the other with secret smiles and glances of tenderness and remembrance. There was a night when they made love, in the evening and again at dawn, and then there was the day after on which, walking across Nevin Square, she saw Peter Moran sitting on the stone plinth where stood the statue of Lysander Douglas . . .

  Remembering that time was something John struggled against. The mind is said to block off recollections that are wounding or even disturbing to it, but John had not found this to be so. All sorts of things he fancied would be useful to him he forgot, but these bitter memories were always present and clear. He finished the bed and went downstairs but he wasn’t interested in breakfast. Would she notice how thin he had got?

  It was going to be a beautiful day. English weather has a way of behaving like this, of warming up slowly, half a dozen pleasant days burgeoning at last into the splendour of a heatwave that will endure for a week and then break up with thunder. This being early April, it was hardly a heatwave, but the sky was clear and blue, the sun misty but strong, and John could go outside without a coat on, felt he might sit out there quite comfortably in a deckchair. Did anyone but he still have deckchairs? She had asked him this, laughing, when he had set outside on the little lawn the two seats of striped canvas, the one for her with its detachable leg rest. Old-fashioned and conventional he was, he who had been young in the Swinging Sixties, though they had never swung for him. Perhaps that had been part of the trouble. He had wanted so much to take care of her, because he loved her and because he saw this as a husband’s duty. She had never gone out to work while she was with him.