The Keys to the Street Read online

  The different person, the person who was not in a state, was a joker, facetious, a user of peculiar slang. Everything made him laugh. He was strong, he could do anything, he could certainly do the job for which he had received half-payment. The watch he had often nearly sold but had not yet sold told him it was twelve minutes past one.

  The mark was due to arrive in London on the nine twenty-five train from Shrewsbury, which comes into Euston Station at one-fourteen. Euston was less than a mile away, the nearest of all the London stations. If the train was on time and a taxi was waiting, he had just enough time to make it to St. Mark’s Crescent—nice time, in fact. A mark living in St. Mark’s Crescent was something else to make him laugh, and he did so, but quietly, to himself.

  He walked up Gloucester Avenue, took the fork into Regent’s Park Road and up the fork to the right. The park was invisible, though lying only a few yards behind the tree-shaded walls. Dark shadows and leaves that scarcely rustled. Dustbins awaiting emptying; a cat that padded as silently as the place was silent, listened, froze, smelled or intuited him, and streaked, quick as a weasel, over the wall.

  Lights were on in the houses, but not many. There were no lights on any floor of the house that was his destination. It had a dingy front garden, thick with weed bushes. He knew some of these were brambles because they caught on his clothes as he dropped down among them. A briar tugged at the back of his hand, scratching and puckering, making a zip fastener of blood on the skin.

  It was so quiet that he heard the taxi when it was still in Regent’s Park Road. He felt very calm and happy, wishing only that he had someone to talk to and clown with, maybe put on his hit-man act, talking like a TV actor. The taxi turned the corner and pulled up outside the garden where he was. Its light shone right on him, into his eyes. He kept as low down as he could get. He heard the exchange.

  “Take three.”

  “Thanks very much, guv.”

  The gate opened. The taxi started, moved, began to turn. If the driver had waited till the front door came open he didn’t know what he’d have done. A suitcase was pushed in onto the path and the gate closed behind it and its owner with a soft click. The lights of the taxi dwindled, disappeared, and the throb of its engine faded.

  He stood up and used his bare hands, first his hands, then his feet. One over the mouth from behind, a stranglehold armlock to bring him down, and when he was on the ground, the kicking. Not enough to kill or permanently disable but enough to injure, break a couple of the mark’s ribs, maybe not improve the future prospects of his spleen. Some dental work would probably also be needed.

  He enjoyed it. He admired himself for doing it so well, particularly his skill in doing it in silence. Long practice and the use of his hands had ensured not a sound escaped from that mouth out of which blood now trickled in a thin stream. He knelt down. There was nothing in his brief about robbing the man, but when you came to think of it the fee was laughable. He was entitled. He put his hand inside the jacket, felt in the pocket, and found a wallet. Credit cards were no use to him, there was only one thing he wanted to buy and neither Carl nor Gupta would take Visa. Ten pounds, twenty and another twenty … Joy began to fill the spaces of his body with warmth. Eighty pounds. He stuffed it into his pocket alongside the red velvet bag.

  Then, because he liked a joke and was feeling cheerful, he opened the suitcase and took a look inside. Not surprisingly, it was full of clothes. The surprise was that they were women’s, mostly women’s underwear. It now came back to him that he had heard there was something funny about the mark, though he’d half forgotten what.

  He set about hanging the stuff on the bushes, red silk bikini pants, French knickers, a black bra, a black lace nightie. It looked as if a couple of girls were camping there and had done their washing before they kipped down for the night. Whatever the name of the black see-through thing was, a sort of all-in-one with a fastening in the crotch, he didn’t know, but he draped it over the gate and dropped a couple of suspender belts on the mark’s recumbent body.

  The faint groaning coming from that half-open mouth meant it was dangerous to remain any longer. He left the garden, licking the blood off the scratch on the back of his hand, walking fast, going in the opposite direction this time, toward Primrose Hill. His spirits had begun to sink. Lew had told him about the ten-second effect but said nothing about depression coming back half an hour later. It was too late now. Gupta would no longer be among the Chinese trees, but Carl or Lew might be on the Hill or the Macclesfield Bridge. He headed that way, his gains in his pocket.

  “Jumbo, jumbo,” muttered Hob, and then he sang it to keep his spirits up. “Jumbo, jumbo …”

  2

  The letter came the day she left. There was a postcard from her grandmother, a bill for water, and this letter in a brown envelope with the Harvest Trust logo that looked like a scarlet mushroom, but was not of course that, was something quite other than that. She postponed opening it. Her grandmother’s postcard was from a place called Jokkmokk in the north of Sweden. It said, Dear Mary, I shall be back in London next Thursday, by which time you will be settled in Park Village. Will phone. Surprising heat here and midnight sun. Much love.…

  “I’ll want a check for your half of the water,” Alistair said, very sour and cross, truculent with resentment.

  Mary said nothing about having paid all the electricity bill herself. He had got hold of the other envelope and was looking at the red logo.

  “May I have my letter, please?”

  He handed it to her reluctantly. “They want more, I suppose.”

  “Very unlikely.” She was trying to keep everything she said to him brief, civil, equable. The rows were in the past. “It will just be the update. They keep in touch.”

  “I hope it’s to say he’s dead,” said Alistair viciously.

  It was hard to stay calm in the face of this. “Please don’t say that.”

  “It would be the best and ultimate way to show you how you’ve wasted your time and rubbished your body.”

  “I’m going to finish packing,” she said.

  He followed her into the bedroom. There were two open suitcases on the bed, one half-filled with her clothes. She put the letter and the postcard on top of a blue T-shirt and laid her trouser suit, folded with tissue, on top of that. A week had gone by since she had slept in that bed with him. He slept in it and she had the sofa-bed in the living room. It was easier that way, if her aim was a quiet life for what was left of it for the two of them together. She found her checkbook in a drawer and wrote him a check for half the water rate.

  A nod, no smile, no thanks, and he had put it in his pocket. “If you hadn’t this plushy place to go to you wouldn’t be going, would you? If it was a furnished room, for instance? Or back to grandma?”

  “We’ve been through all that, Alistair.”

  “And when they come back from this protracted holiday—what then? When they kick you out of glitzville? You’ll come back here and say you’ve made a mistake and can you have your old bed back.”

  “Perhaps, though I don’t think so. This is supposed to be a separation.”

  “A trial separation.”

  “If you like.” Why did she always weaken, compromise? “We may both feel differently after four months.”

  “You’ll allow for that, will you? That I may feel differently. That I may no longer want to marry you? That’s going now, you know, that’s been on the wane ever since you deceived me over that harvest thing I’m not supposed to mention. Since you deliberately made yourself ill for nothing, for no more than to get on a feel-good high, to be a martyr, to have ‘done some good in this world’—wasn’t that the phrase?”

  “Not used by me,” she said, and she felt her temper going, slipping away, a ball dropped on a slope, running downhill. She made a grab at it, hung on. “I never said any of those things, never.” Thank God, I never married you, she thought. Things could be worse, I could have married you.

  She closed t
he lid of the suitcase, started filling the other. He watched her, his upper lip slightly curled back, an animal’s expression she had never seen when first they knew each other. “If my grandmother phones, will you give her this number? I’m sure she has it but just in case.”

  She had written it down along with the address: Charlotte Cottage, Park Village West, Regent’s Park, London NW1.

  “Cottage!” he said.

  “The house was thought small when it was first built.”

  “Pretentious,” he said. “A sort of Petit Trianon.”

  “It’s near my work,” she said. “I can walk to work from there.” As if that was why she was doing it, as if proximity to the museum was her reason.

  He had an uncanny way of intuiting these things, of picking up on a weakening. His face changed and he wheedled. He had never wheedled when first they met. “You’ll ask me over, won’t you? Come to that, there’s no reason why I shouldn’t move in there too.”

  “There is a reason,” she said quietly. Her temper was back with her. It had never had much independence, was almost incapable of getting lost, a timid thing like its owner, not much good at standing up for itself. She fastened the second suitcase, picked up her bag, put it down again to get into her jacket. “There are quite a few reasons, Alistair, but there isn’t any point in talking about it.”

  “You don’t seriously believe I’d ever—” he hesitated, looking for a word, a silly word perhaps, a baby word, something that reduced violence to play “—smack,” he said, “smack you again, do you?”

  Yes, she did. Not that there had been much of that, but there had been enough. Enough to change her from the woman, typical, normal, who says, He wouldn’t hit me twice, who says of abused women, Why do they stay? to the half-accepting kind, the it-was-only-once kind, even the kind who says, He was provoked beyond bearing. Except that now she wasn’t staying or accepting or bearing but getting out.

  He stood in the doorway, between her and the hall, and she had to pass him. What was I thinking of, she asked herself then and there, what was I thinking of, staying for even five minutes with a man who frightens me? An unreasonable man who thinks he owns me, body and soul?

  She took a suitcase in each hand and walked by him, every muscle tense, her breath held. Instead of stepping back, he stood his ground and she had to push past him. He didn’t touch her with his hands. Once, she remembered, he had stuck out a foot and tripped her up. That had been in the early Harvest days, when he first found out. He had extended a foot and sent her sprawling and said when she picked herself up, “That wasn’t me, that was your bones, you’ve weakened your bones, you’ve made yourself into an old woman.”

  But he didn’t touch her. “Alistair, good-bye,” she said, a safe distance from him.

  He put out a hand, then both hands, his head a little on one side. “Kiss?”

  And if he seized hold of her, struck her face with one hand, then the other, shook her, threw her to the floor, used his fists …? He had never done anything like that, nothing on that scale, but she found herself shaking her head. She opened the front door. Outside by the lift someone was waiting. Thank God … Alistair said, in his old warm voice, “Good-bye, darling. Keep in touch,” but whether it was for her benefit or the listener at the lift she couldn’t tell.

  She had forgotten to call for a cab to take her to the tube. She lugged the suitcases round the corner, to a point invisible from any window in the flat, and sat on the low wall in front of the estate agent’s, waiting for a taxi to come.

  • • •

  Devonshire Street was the farthest south any of Bean’s dogs lived. This was Ruby the beagle. The next one was Boris the borzoi in Park Crescent, rich dogs both of them, well-fed, with top-grade veterinary insurance, sleek and proud and indulged. But all Bean’s dogs were like that or they wouldn’t have been his dogs. It would have been unthinkable for him to walk a cross-breed or a mongrel.

  With Boris and Ruby on the double leash, he made his way down the slope that leads to the Nursemaids’ Tunnel. This passage connects Park Crescent Gardens on the southern side with Park Square to the north. It passes above the Jubilee line of the Underground and under the Marylebone Road. By day and night the traffic here is heavy, thundering westward to the Westway, the M40, and eastward to Euston and King’s Cross. It never really ceases, not even at three and four in the morning, but in the early mornings and the late afternoons, the times when Bean took his dogs out, it was heaviest. Boom-boom-boom it went above the tunnel roof, shaking this subterranean lane whose brownish walls and damp stone floor were lit by natural light from the open entrances at each end.

  Crossing the road by the other possible means was difficult at any time. The green prancing man was lit up for almost too short a time to get to the island and thence to the other side when you had two dogs with you, both inclined to stop for a sniff without warning. As a resident of the Crown Estates, Bean had his own key to the gardens and hence the tunnel. It was once used by nannies and their young charges and as a place of assignation for lovers. Bean doubted if anybody much used it now but him.

  His route was carefully organized so that the most athletic dogs had the longest run and the small short-legged ones the shortest. He started with the beagle at three forty-five, the borzoi five minutes later, and proceeded to pick up Charlie the golden retriever in St. Andrew’s Place and Marietta the chocolate poodle in Cumberland Terrace, marching them through the terrace passages and out into Albany Street.

  It was a sunny afternoon in late April, not warm but with a chilly wind blowing clouds across the blue face of the sky. The trees were in tender spring leaf and flowers were coming out in window boxes. Bean, at seventy, was a strong, spry, though small man who looked fifty-five from a little way away. Applying, back in 1986, for the last employment he was ever to have, he had given his age as forty-nine and been believed. By design he dressed young, but not absurdly so. Though possessing several of the late Maurice Clitheroe’s suits, all altered to fit him, well-pressed blue jeans, a roll-necked sweater, and a blue padded jacket were his winter attire. Ne’er cast a clout till May be out, they said, and April wasn’t out yet. His hair he had always kept militarily short, but these days he shaved his head to achieve a dense whitish stubble.

  Bean stipulated that he wouldn’t take old dogs or fat dogs or dogs with health problems. Six was his maximum number, never to include dogs the law required to be muzzled. Making a pretty good living at what he did, much more than a supplement to the retirement pension, he had quite a lot of rules, had to be strict, as he explained to a Mrs. Goldsworthy in Albany Street, whose scottie he was taking out for the first time.

  “Seven days’ notice of the dog going away on its holidays, madam,” he said to her, “and a month for termination of contract. Except in a case of illness, naturally. And if anyone else or your good self takes the animal walkies that’s as well as not instead of, if you take my meaning.”

  “Oh, yes, of course.”

  “So this is McBride, is it? Game little dogs, scotties, but a bit short in the leg, so he’ll come in for the medium-scale run along with Lady Blackburn-Norris’s shih tzu.” Bean dropped names unashamedly. It was good for business. “We’ll see you in three quarters of an hour, then.”

  Bean (in his own words) was as fit as a fiddle from all that walking, the old ticker as good as one thirty years younger, and he strode up the long straight street at four miles an hour. He was a vegetarian and it was only on Friday nights that he drank a drop of anything stronger than Coke. Health-conscious and regarding the streets merely as exercise equipment for himself and “his” dogs, he was unaware of the history of the place and its architecture, nor of the park itself. He noticed little of that distinguished building of the sixties, Lasdun’s Royal College of Physicians, and never noticed that the point at which he crossed the road was outside the Danish Church of St. Katharine’s, a not entirely successful copy of King’s College chapel in Cambridge.

  The cre
scent called Park Village West, and also called, especially by those who live there, the most beautiful street in London, debouches from Albany Street at the Camden Town end. Albany Street is a much frequented thoroughfare, free of heavy traffic only by night and on Sunday mornings, but Park Village West is a little haven of peace and rustic charm. It is something like a cross between a country lane and a cathedral close and in the springtime it smells of flowering trees and narcissi and wallflowers.

  Bean and his dogs turned in there under the overhanging trees. “Disarming villas,” these 1840-ish houses have been called, “masterpieces of the Nash school.” Each one stands alone in its embowering garden and each one is different with its own style of classical ornament, blank windows, storied urns, imperatorial busts, Della Robbia medallions, gazebos, weathervanes, and garages disguised as temples to Olympian gods.

  The house where his next call was to be made was separated from the pavement first by a spacious front garden, then by a low wall, freshly painted and with CHARLOTTE COTTAGE incised in its stucco. Bean secured the handle of his leash to a gatepost, and bidding his charges sit quietly, went into the garden and up the path. Last petals were falling from red tulips, baring their sooty calixes. Pansies and auriculas were out and the laburnam soon would be. A clematis with flat blooms like dull blue satin spread its tendrils across the creamy, faintly glossy facade of the house. Fluted columns stood on either side of the blue front door, supporting a pediment with Nash’s gods and goddesses disporting themselves in creamy relief on a blue ground. A downstairs window was open and a woman of about Bean’s age or older put her head out.

  “Is that the time?” she said. “I wouldn’t have put it at a minute after three.”

  “It’s four-sixteen, Lady Blackburn-Norris,” said Bean in his invariably polite way, for good manners cost you nothing. She retreated and after a few seconds opened the front door, carrying the shih tzu, the chrysanthemum dog. Gushi’s coat of golden fronds, petallike and flopping into his eyes, resembled his owner’s strawberry-blond hair, her fringe restrained by a pair of blue-framed mirror sunglasses.