Talking to Strange Men Read online

  ‘Because you could reach the end of the book before you came to the end of the alphabet,’ said Colin patiently. ‘And you’ve got a clue in these recurring words, names probably. HCRKIABIE and SIDKCKDM and OQIUFE.’

  After he had gone John had tried testing out the coded messages against the first sentences of a selection of books. His father had been a great reader of detective stories and there were a lot of these in the house as well as nineteenth-century novels which he enjoyed because they offered him a more absolute escape from day-to-day life in this city in the eighties than any modern fiction could do. But it seemed to him quite probable that if one wanted to base a code on the first sentence of a book one might choose the Bible or Shakespeare. He was not surprised to find that the first line of Genesis was: ‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.’ But he had not expected his Shakespeare to start with: ‘“Boatswain!” “Here, Master, what cheer?”’

  Anyway the code was based on neither of them. Nor, when he tested it against the opening lines of all Dickens’s novels, Jane Austen’s, the Brontës’ and George Eliot’s, was he able to find any enlightenment. In spite of what Colin said, he tried final sentences. He moved on and tried the first and last lines of Kipling, Trollope, Hardy and Conrad. He tried John Creasey and Agatha Christie. Sometimes he found himself devoting whole evenings, and once practically a whole Sunday, to trying to discover the book that the code maker had used.

  It was rather cold in the living room. There was no central heating. He would have had it put in for Jennifer but she had been indifferent when he suggested it. He reached out with his toe and switched on both bars of the electric fire. The three books he had borrowed from the library that afternoon lay on the low stool on the right-hand side of the fireplace: She and Wisdom’s Daughter by H. Rider Haggard and John Le Carré’s A Small Town in Germany. He seldom read anything but novels. One of these was as likely to have been used by the code maker as anything else, he thought. On the other hand, there was no reason to suppose the code maker had used a book at all. He might have used a sentence or paragraph from a newspaper, from a magazine. He might have used – chilling thought! – part of a page from the telephone directory.

  But John refused to let himself dwell on that one. Pen and notebook in hand, he began setting the letters of the alphabet against the letters in the first line of She: ‘In giving to the world the record of what, looked at as an adventure only, is I suppose one of the most wonderful and mysterious experiences ever undergone by mortal men . . .’

  3

  IT WAS THE heart of the city that Mungo was bound for, specifically a tall narrow early Victorian house on the corner where Hill Street met Church Bar. From its upper windows, especially from the windows of his headquarters on the top floor, you could see everything, Fonthill Heights and the hills beyond, a segment of the gardens, a gleam of the river, a buttress of the cathedral, all but the tower whose green digits blinked. You could see the green dome of the city hall, or part of it, and a corner of the polytechnic’s shabby black brickwork, and the opening in the old wall they called the Fallowgate.

  The front door was approached by a flight of steep steps and it had long sash windows in which the glass seemed particularly clear and glowing. But Mungo let himself into its garden by a gate in the wall. It was a green door rather than a gate and with a curved top which fitted the arched opening in the wall of white bricks that in the summer would be thickly overgrown with a round-leaved climbing weed. On the left-hand side of the door was a brass plate on which was engraved: Dr Fergus J. Cameron MB, FRCP and under it, Dr Lucy Cameron MB, MRCP.

  Mungo closed the gate behind him and entered the house by a stained-glass door in the side wall, a door which was kept locked only at night. Inside it was quite silent. Then, from high up in the house, he heard music playing very softly, the peculiarly civilized, lilting baroque music Angus liked even when he was working. Mungo began to climb the stairs. There were fifty-two to the top of the house but it was seldom that anyone but he ever went beyond the second floor. The door to Angus’s room was open and Angus could be seen sitting at the table at work on his computer. He had had the computer only a few days and was teaching himself to use it. Boccherini tinkled out of the record player.

  Mungo went up behind him and read on the VDU screen: Well done, Angus, that wasn’t so bad, was it?

  ‘Isn’t it a bit uncanny the way it talks back at you?’ Mungo said.

  ‘Christ, you made me jump.’

  ‘Sorry. But isn’t it?’

  ‘It’s only while I’m doing the lessons. Shall I get it to say something to you?’

  ‘No, thanks,’ Mungo said, as Angus called up on to it a column of figures. ‘Could it do codes?’

  Angus took his hands from the keyboard and started to laugh.

  ‘What are you laughing at?’ Mungo said, though he knew.

  ‘Was I ever as keen as you?’

  ‘I don’t know. I think you were.’

  ‘You’ve been up to something now, haven’t you? Some cloak and dagger stuff. You’ve got that furtive look.’

  Mungo didn’t say anything.

  ‘Mum’s taking Dr Marsh’s surgery on account of he’s got flu and Dad’s been called out to a private patient.’

  ‘I’m starving.’

  ‘Yes, well, Mum’s bringing takeaway in with her. She won’t be long. Sometimes I think what I like most about the holidays is being able to eat junk food.’

  ‘It’s because they’re doctors,’ said Mungo. ‘Doctors always approve of junk food. It’s the amateurs want you to be eating brown rice. Can I have one of your truffles?’

  Angus always kept a bag of chocolate truffles in his desk drawer. They were rum-flavoured, rolled in chocolate vermicelli. ‘You can have one. They’re expensive.’

  ‘O God, I could eat fifty of these.’

  ‘Why don’t you buy yourself Mars bars?’

  ‘I’ve got gourmet tastes in chocolate.’

  Angus made everything on the screen vanish but for a small dancing green arrow. He switched the computer off at the plug. Red-haired, ruddy-faced, the shortest of them though not short, he looked up at Mungo’s great height.

  ‘How old are you now, Bean?’

  ‘Fourteen. I’ll be fifteen in July. You’re my brother, you ought to know how old I am.’

  ‘I scarcely know how old I am myself.’

  ‘You’re seventeen,’ said Mungo. ‘You had that thing for your seventeenth birthday. Right? Why did you ask how old I am, anyway?’

  Angus didn’t answer him directly. ‘You must be about six feet four.’

  ‘Six feet three but I don’t think I’ve grown since Christmas. I worry about it sometimes, Ang. I think, suppose I’ve got acromegaly.’

  ‘What the hell is acromegaly?’

  ‘It’s when your pituitary goes wrong and you grow and grow and they have to take it away and it makes you sterile.’

  ‘I thought that was gigantism. For Christ’s sake, you’ve got both parents doctors and you think they wouldn’t know about a thing like that? The whole family are giants. Ian’s taller than you. Dad’s taller than you.’

  ‘Yes, but Ian’s twenty and God knows how old Dad is, about fifty.’

  ‘I didn’t ask you how old you were because I thought you were too tall. I asked because I was wondering how you felt about Spookside.’

  ‘We don’t call it that any more,’ Mungo said rather loftily. ‘What do you mean, how do I feel?’

  Angus had an air of choosing his words carefully. ‘I mean are you still keen?’

  ‘Sure I am. Of course. Why?’

  ‘Well . . . Nothing. You’re only fourteen. OK, forget it. There’s Mum. I heard the car.’

  Mungo went up to his own room. It was gradually returning to the state which prevailed in the holidays, the order of term time (which had appalled him when he looked on it two days before) quickly giving place to a comfortable chaos. Mungo liked to drop his clothes on to t
he floor when he took them off and when the pile got too big he took it down to the washing machine in the basement and put the lot in, dark and light together. All his clothes gradually took on the same muddy blue colour as a result of this, which was why his mother snatched his school shirts off him on the day Rossingham broke up. His room was a crow’s nest up here, the ceiling sloping, following the lines of the roof. It was so big because a hundred years before it was shared by the four maids who kept the house clean. The two windows were round, set under eyelid dormers, and from them you could see over the tops of leafless trees across old slate roofs and new tiled roofs to that wonderful view.

  Unease troubled Mungo, slightly marring what had been a happy and busy day. It’s because of what Ang said, he thought. What did he mean? Why had he said that? After all, it was he who began it, he and Guy Parker, he who handed it on, a finished and beautiful thing, to his heirs. Mungo liked that phrase and he repeated it to himself. A finished and beautiful thing to his heirs. He might become a writer. There was too much of this medicine thing in their family. Could it only be that Angus regretted giving up the directorship himself?

  Mungo dropped his jacket absent-mindedly on to the floor. He picked up a book, turned the pages, considering. Then he pulled the blinds down over the round windows that were a bit like ship’s portholes. His stomach reminded him that his mother was home. There reached him, as he started down the third flight, a scent of Indonesian takeaway, his first favourite.

  4

  THE GARDEN CENTRE was on the old by-pass. Once it had been nearer the city centre and then it had been called a nursery. That was when John Creevey first went to work there as a school leaver aged seventeen. In those days he had been the boy who swept up, graduating to become the boy who put the compost in the seed trays, the ‘nurseryman’, the assistant manager. He was nurseryman when Cherry died and by the time Jennifer came in to buy something suitable for window boxes, Trowbridge’s had doubled its size, called itself a garden centre and moved out to the by-pass. And John was more or less the boss, the then manager being on an extended sick leave that was to become permanent.

  He had recommended fuchsias to Jennifer, plus a couple of pelargoniums, trailing lobelia, white alyssum, the usual stuff, and a canary creeper which was a bit more out of the ordinary.

  ‘Why is it called that?’

  ‘Canary creeper?’ he had said. ‘You wait and see. Its flowers look like yellow birds.’

  Those had been the first words they had ever said to each other, apart from the requisite good morning and hallo and can I help you? It all came back to him now because he was in the main greenhouse, checking on the fuchsia cuttings, all in their individual fibre pots. Alice Hoffman, Jennifer had had, and Thalia. And later, when she had invited him to the flat, he had seen how well they were doing. They looked wonderful, those window boxes, he couldn’t have done better himself. He couldn’t understand, though, why she hadn’t held on to her mother’s house that had a garden to go with it. It had never crossed his mind to sell the house when his own parents died. That was one of the things they had in common, he and Jennifer, it had struck him at once, both of them losing their mothers within weeks of each other.

  ‘My mother died a year ago and I came in for her house, so I sold it and bought this flat. I moved in two weeks ago and there were these empty window boxes.’

  ‘My mother died a year ago too – well, a year and two months.’

  She smiled at him, rather sadly. She was a quiet-looking girl. Modest was the word that came into his mind. He could remember exactly what she had been wearing on that first occasion: a pleated skirt in a check pattern, two shades of brown, a camel-coloured sweater over a white shirt, brown shoes, very well-polished, with low heels but not flat shoes. Not a scrap of make-up, she never wore make-up. Her hair was a bright sparkling yellow-brown that hung to her shoulders. No, not ‘hung’, flew out and curled in its abundance like a chrysanthemum. He had never seen a face so soft as hers and so expressive. The skin was soft and the lips, the rather full cheeks, the thick furry eyebrows and the liquid eyes. Of course it was Cherry she looked like, though he hadn’t realized that then, not understanding at that time that one woman can resemble another though one is ugly and the other beautiful.

  He had packed up all the plants in two cardboard boxes for her and carried them out to the car a friend had brought her along in. Of course it wouldn’t have crossed his mind then to ask if he could see her again. He didn’t go out with girls. But she came back to replace Thalia and the alyssum because they had died or something had eaten them up and it was then, because they hadn’t another Thalia in stock, that he said he would bring one round to her as soon as they came in. There was in fact no question of their ‘coming in’, Trowbridge’s grew all their own fuchsias, but John had selected one of his own plants for her from his own greenhouse.

  When was all that? May? June? The May of nearly three years ago, he thought. It can’t have been on that occasion but maybe the next time they met that she told him about Peter Moran and he told her about Cherry . . .

  Most of the fuchsia cuttings had taken and were looking good. John had a look at the thermometer. Fifteen degrees – which he was getting used to saying instead of sixty – not bad for the end of March with the heat only on low. Easter was coming. Tomorrow would be Good Friday. John didn’t enjoy holidays these days. Marriage had taught him loneliness. Maybe Colin would come over. And there was always his aunt to whose house on the other side of the city he had a standing invitation. Don’t go over to Jennifer’s, don’t hang about outside Jennifer’s, he found himself muttering as he returned to the shop. Sharon at the check-out eyed him.

  ‘Just reminding myself to take a look at the fish before we close up, Sharon.’

  He didn’t really approve of garden centres selling goldfish and birds and whatever, but you had to keep up with the times. Shubunkins swam around in a leisurely fashion among the elodia and the water hawthorn. They looked healthy enough. It was a mystery why they all seemed to die as soon as customers got them home. Still, he wasn’t a fish expert. Trowbridge’s had better get an ichthyologist in if it bothered them, some out-of-work ex-college boy. Everyone seemed to have degrees nowadays, he wouldn’t be surprised if even Sharon had a BSc in computer sciences.

  It was a natural progression from this to think of Peter Moran. Peter Moran had been educated at a famous university and had taught at a less famous one. Or so Jennifer said. Any time he unwillingly summoned it up John could hear that mocking voice with its perfect diction, its scathing or incomprehensible utterances. But I won’t think of him, I mustn’t, John thought. It’s bad for you, it makes you sick in your mind, thinking of people you hate. I don’t hate Jennifer, I never have. I love her still. Sometimes I think I love her more.

  He took off his brown canvas coat and hung it up in the office. If the weather holds, he thought, I’ll have the weekend in the garden. It’s a funny thing with gardening, you never get tired of it, you never get bored. Those snowdrops that multiplied so, I’ll have them out. And I’ll get a bed ready for the pink lilies, the nerines. What I will also do is take a look at cats’ green – it must have had a name but he always called it cats’ green – and see if anyone’s been there and taken that last bit of paper. John had his library books with him in a string bag: She, Wisdom’s Daughter and A Small Town in Germany. He said goodnight to Sharon and Les and told Gavin to lock up after him. Gavin was the new assistant manager, only twenty-three, a graduate of the local horticultural college. Latin names tripped off his tongue. He was the only person John had ever known who didn’t pronounce aubrieta as orbreeshia. The mynah bird, which he seemed fond of, he had given the name of Grackle – from its designation of Gracula religiosa, he explained. Only that afternoon John had heard him promising to obtain for a customer a fremontodendron, whatever that might be.

  ‘Ciao, chief,’ said Gavin in a multi-national lingo he used when he wasn’t talking Latin.

  The
central library was so much better than his local branch that he used it just as frequently. She was a wonderful book but he hadn’t thought much of Wisdom’s Daughter. That was often the way with sequels. They hadn’t got King Solomon’s Mines in at the library. John felt disproprotionately disappointed. He had always been like that about books, wanting some particular book specially, building on it somehow, thinking of the evening ahead when he would be reading it, and feeling absurdly fed up and resentful if he couldn’t get hold of it. When he was younger he would have been prepared to chase from branch to branch in pursuit of it. But not now. Too many things had happened to him for him to get that worked up over a book. John Le Carré didn’t let him down. Both Smiley’s People and The Honourable Schoolboy were in. Of course they would be a good deal less easy to read than Rider Haggard. John liked espionage books but he hadn’t read many of them. He asked the girl what she could recommend.

  ‘Do you like it all made up or sort of founded on fact?’

  John had never thought about it like that.

  ‘I mean something like The Riddle of the Sands would be founded on fact while Ian Fleming wouldn’t be.’

  ‘I like a bit of realism,’ said John and immediately wondered why he had said that because surely it was escape he was seeking?

  ‘This one’s non-fiction. My Silent War by Kim Philby. I expect you remember about him going over to Russia.’

  It was ancient history to her, something the grown-ups talked about when she was a child. John took the book from her.

  ‘I’ll try it.’

  She was smiling at him in a friendly way. He thought, I could ask her to come out with me. I know how it’s done. I didn’t once, I hadn’t a clue, but I do now. You chat for a while and find out what she likes doing, walking, for instance, or seeing films, or going to fairs or botanical gardens (that would be a piece of luck) and you say, We might go for a walk some time or we might take in that film together at the Astoria and if she looks keen you just say, How about tomorrow evening then? I’ll call for you, shall I?