The Keys to the Street Read online

  Other people took no notice. They expected him to be different from them, demented, drug-crazy, drunk, ungoverned, mad. It was because of these things that he was where he was and they were where they were. Only Pharaoh, leaning against the door of a shop closed for the night, eyed him with some feeling of kinship and, holding out the bottle from which he had been drinking, said, “Here, mate, want a sup?”

  Roman had long ago ceased to worry about catching things from drinking out of other people’s bottles and, though he didn’t want it, God knows what it was, he accepted and took a swig. Rioja and meths, he thought. Wiping his mouth on his sleeve, the way he had learned from Dill and Effie, he sat down on the stone step and looked up at Pharaoh. He never stopped hoping to see some change in the man’s face, some improvement. By that he meant that madness would be less evident there, that the slipping away of sanity would have halted so that something human still remained, some kindly light in the feral bloodshot eyes, some relaxing of the mouth so that the lips were neither curled back nor sucked together in a whitened rigidity.

  But there was no change and the sign of humanity Pharaoh had given in offering a drink to a man in tears, was a rare happening. Soon even that would cease. He squatted down and thrust his haunted face into Roman’s, his black beard that he streaked with dark blue dye into Roman’s beard.

  “Have you got a key for me?” he said.

  Roman shook his head. Anyone who looked more closely at Pharaoh—no one ever looked closely—would have seen the hundreds of keys that hung round him, strung there on the rope that served him as a belt, pinned to his clothes with safety pins, brass and steel and chrome, Yale keys and Banhams, front door keys and backdoor keys, keys for opening suitcases and keys for locking padlocks. From the irregular bulges in his clothes Roman suspected his pockets too were filled with keys. He clinked and rattled when he walked, shuffling in and out of doorways, going where his voices sent him in search of the ultimate key.

  Where did they come from? Whose had they been? Pharaoh never said and Roman never asked.

  “The keys of the kingdom,” Pharaoh said.

  His black eyes rolled. When he looked about him he made jerky startled movements. One of his voices told him that when Christ said, “I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven,” it was an actual bunch of keys that He handed to Peter. These were lost, had been lost for two thousand years, but it was Pharaoh’s mission to find them. He speculated constantly as to their nature and appearance.

  “They’ll be made of gold, won’t they? Purest gold? Only gold’d unlock the gates of heaven.”

  Pharaoh should not be here at all, an outsider, on the street, but in the kind of place that had no existence these days, a place that was comfortable and clean and civilized, where he could have some dignity, where caring people would look after him and doctors well versed in the tragedy of his existence would put him on a regimen of drugs. Roman had no idea whether he was autistic or schizophrenic or mentally handicapped. He preferred the word “mad” to all these because he knew that he too was mad and that being mad was a prerequisite of what he had done in becoming an outsider.

  Patting Pharaoh on the shoulder—from which the man with the blue-streaked beard started back, recoiling and snarling like a wildcat poked with a stick—Roman got up and continued on his course toward the Marylebone Road and across it back into Gloucester Place. It amused him to reflect that being addressed by Pharaoh would once have alarmed him very much. He would have been frightened, though not admitted it, would have pretended not to hear. And to have entered into a conversation with such a creature would have been unthinkable. He was such a creature himself now, or not far off.

  Turning into Crawford Street, he waited before crossing the road for the red and white food delivery van to pass. What would Express Tikka and Pizza say if he phoned from a call box and asked for a delivery of Chicken Masala to the third seat on the left going up the Broad Walk from Chester Road? A verbal equivalent, he supposed, of the look he got in the sandwich bar where he asked for cheese and pickle.

  They looked askance, but they served him. It was his accent, Roman knew, it made them think that maybe they were wrong, that this was no dosser but an eccentric, an absentminded professor who forgot to have baths. He would have lost his accent if he could, but his attempts to do so sounded like grotesque parodies. Tomorrow, he was reminded, he had better have an all-over wash, in a public convenience somewhere. Keeping clean, or avoiding utter filthiness, was one of the grimmer problems the outsider faced, and one that no insider ever took into account.

  Turning into Old Quebec Street, wondering where to settle down and eat his supper, he came under the windows of Talisman, the environmentalist publishers. He wore no watch but told the time by the state of the light and traffic and the movement of people, and he guessed it was seven. The staff, such as it was, would have gone home an hour ago. To the front door Talisman’s logo of a lyre-tree leaf was attached with its name and that of its editor-in-chief, Tom Outram. Once his name had been there too, but that, like so much in his old life, was water under the bridge, flowing into the sea of his memories.

  4

  No one but Alistair would phone so early. Urgency was always implicit in phone calls made before nine in the morning.

  Bean had called and collected Gushi. It was half past eight. Mary thought she knew who her caller must be and she hesitated before picking up the receiver. But there was always her grandmother to think of. Her grandmother was strong and healthy but very old.

  “How are you settling in?”

  He had never spoken to her like that before. It was the phrase of an elderly parent delivered in a tone that was solicitous but querulous, too, and aggrieved. She tried to sound brisk and cheerful.

  “Fine,” she said. “I’m all right. It’s nice here. I’ve been walking a lot.”

  As soon as she had said it she knew it was an unwise thing to say, for he immediately countered by telling her not to overdo things. She was not strong, she was a fragile creature. He managed, without putting this into words, to imply that by her irresponsible and thoughtless conduct she had put her health in jeopardy.

  “When am I to be allowed to come and see you?”

  “Alistair,” she said, “we’re having a separation, remember?”

  “A trial separation.”

  She tried again. “I have left you. We’re apart. We’ve discussed it, we decided. My coming here was to mark the beginning of our separation.”

  “Oh, come on,” he said, “that’s just a figure of speech. The mistake was mine in giving any of that stuff credence. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, that’s the real reason, isn’t it?”

  Hers or his? There was no need to ask. He implied that being parted from him would increase her affection for him. Affection—that lukewarm word. Even of that she felt very little. If you were like her, receptive, anxious to please—euphemisms, she told herself, for passive and ingratiating—you found it hard to understand how anyone thought love could be won by bullying. He set about bullying her now.

  “You can’t escape me so easily, you know, Mary. I’m not the kind of man to wreck two people’s lives for a woman’s whim. Haven’t I proved in the past that I know what’s best for us?”

  She should have refuted that, but she feared the storm that would ensue. She had left him, hadn’t she? That great step had been taken, she need not learn to fight him. She told him she was in a hurry and must go.

  “All right. I know that tone of voice. There’s no getting a word out of you when you’ve decided to sulk. You’ll soon get over that. I’ll be over very soon.”

  As if she had invited him …

  “No,” she managed to say. “Please, no.” The effort of refusing always made her tired, as if she really was the delicate creature she looked.

  “I’ll drop in one evening,” he said as if she hadn’t spoken. “I’ll take you out somewhere.”

  Mary went back into the kitchen and p
oured herself a second cup of coffee. It was going to be harder getting away from him than she had thought. The strength of will she hoped she was learning would be needed, but what of the strength that women can never acquire? She would never come near to matching him physically. Like stigmata appearing at certain triggers, her face suddenly stung from the blow on the cheek he had given her when he saw those puncture marks. She looked in the mirror and saw the flush that bloomed there, brighter on the right side than the left. Alistair was left-handed.

  They had been making love. He drew away from her and, extending his right hand, touched those marks with the tips of his fingers.

  “What’s that?” he said. The tone told her he knew. “Scorpion bit you? Poison ivy? Barbed wire?”

  There is something terrible about the mood of lovemaking, so tender, languorous, exciting in that uniquely warm and breathless way, being broken by a harsh voice, sarcasm, barely suppressed rage. Nothing comes so quickly as sexual desire and nothing ebbs so fast as sexual willingness. It was like feeling cold water poured over her body.

  She turned her face away. “The bone-marrow harvest,” she said. “I told you I meant to do it.”

  “You deceived me,” he said and, taking hold of her face in an iron grip with fingers that dug, struck her cheek with the flat of his hand, the hardest blow she had ever received. Until then, the only blow.

  It was not quite a beating up he gave her. You could hardly call a slap on the face, a shaking, another slap, a pulling upright, and a throwing to the ground, beating someone up. She had crawled away and shut herself in the bathroom. Her cheek was bruised the next day and she had bruised her leg when she fell.

  He apologized to her, he crawled, he didn’t know what had come over him, only that it never would again. Predictably, he showed the other aspect of the bully’s character. It was this wretched temperament of his, he excused himself, his love of physical perfection, his worship of the ideal.

  “You’re so perfect, I can’t bear to think of your body assailed, plundered.” He was almost crying. “I can’t bear to think of all that beauty endangered.”

  Except by him, she thought later, except by him. He had touched her bruised cheek with tears in his eyes.…

  Still, that would never happen again. None of it would happen, it was all over. She had left and, under another roof, could withstand any onslaught. Upstairs she dabbed at her cheek with pale powder, as if it were still red and marked by Alistair’s hand. Her eyes had that panicky look he had lately induced in them, but as she made herself breathe deeply, her face smoothed and grew calmer, her shoulders relaxed. Gushi was brought back just as she was leaving. She showed him his freshly filled water bowl, gave him a quick caress, and, running now, caught up with Bean and his troop on the corner of Albany Street: Boris the borzoi, Charlie the golden retriever, Marietta the chocolate poodle, McBride the scottie. Only Ruby the beagle was absent.

  “Gone on her holidays to Ilfracombe,” said Bean. He had a camera on a strap round his neck, like a tourist. “She’ll be missing the park. Them hounds need a lot of exercise.”

  “Won’t she be able to run on the beach?”

  He never answered questions. She wondered why she bothered to ask. Bean countered questions with a statement or a question of his own as competently as any politician trained to do this on television. Sometimes his statements were relevant, sometimes not.

  “A hound can run twenty miles and think nothing of it,” he said.

  She felt like saying, but can hounds think? Instead, she remarked on Bean’s expertise in the handling of so many dogs. He nodded, accepting the praise as his due, and said in the tone that sounded disparaging, though probably was not, “I’ll say good-bye then, Miss. We mustn’t detain you.”

  “Good-bye.”

  “Mind how you cross the road. The traffic’s very treacherous in these parts.”

  Had he once been a butler? Perhaps. His manner was that of a superior upper servant—well, a superior upper servant in a film of the fifties. Her experience of the real thing was nonexistent. The grandparents who had brought her up, though by no means poor, had only run to a cleaner who had come in twice a week. She took the lower path, the one that runs close up against the fence of the Abika Paul Memorial Gardens, the better to see the cattle and deer.

  Her grandmother had sometimes brought her in here as a child, had once taken her to the zoo with a friend who lived in Primrose Hill. A sheltered childhood and youth it had been, she supposed. Her grandparents had been discreetly wealthy, what they called “comfortably off.” Such strange expressions, “comfortably off,” “well off”—off what? Off the poverty line, the breadline?

  Their income had never been mentioned, money never talked about. Even now she had no idea how much Frederica had, even if she was rich or genteelly poor. Alistair had shown an interest, but her grandmother had never been forthcoming to Alistair, had never liked him. If she had agreed with Alistair in anything it had been over the bone marrow donation, and her opposition had been mild compared to his, had been no more than a fear of “unnecessary” anesthesia and a conviction, despite all evidence to the contrary, that Mary must be as vulnerable as she looked.

  People were a mixture of subtle contrasts. Malleable, weak, diffident she might be, but she had gone ahead with her resolution. She had persisted. It’s a man, the trust had told her, twenty-two years old, suffering from acute myeloid leukemia. The donation would take place in this country, they said, but they had not told her whether the recipient was British or of some other nationality.

  After the transplant they gave him the card she had written to him and they gave her the letter he had written to her. Both were unsealed, both had been scrutinized to make sure identification of either donor or recipient was impossible. His name was Oliver, but they smiled when they said it, making clear this was a pseudonym. Her name, that she was told to put on the card, was Helen, and they had told him she was twenty-eight and in perfect health. She had chosen “Helen” because it was her dead mother’s name and she wondered why he had picked “Oliver” or if it had been chosen for him.

  She had not known what to write on the card, so had done no more than call him “Dear Oliver,” wish him a speedy recovery, and sign herself, “Yours sincerely, Helen.” It was rather ridiculous. What could it mean to him? His letter to her was typed, not very expertly. It was formal, lifeless. “Dear Helen, I want to thank you for what you have done for me,” but ended as if emotion had broken through, “In undying thankfulness, Oliver,” and she wondered that they hadn’t demurred at that, that most unfortunate word, for he very likely would die, in spite of the donation; he was rather more likely to die than to live.

  Then came the updates from Oliver’s transplant center. He was well at three months and at six. There was a delay, she heard nothing for six months and was sure he was ill again, was dying, then the nine-month report and the twelve-month came simultaneously. Oliver continued well. She kept the updates away from Alistair but inadvertently let out that Oliver was thriving.

  Alistair claimed to have seen a decline in her own health since the donation and a fading of her looks. She told him she was perfectly well, she looked just the same. Her grandmother, in spite of earlier opposition, had remarked on her appearance. Perhaps it was bringing Frederica into it that had set him off. He had taken hold of her by the shoulders.

  “You need some sense shaken into you,” he had said, and had proceeded to shake her, gently at first, then with a kind of frenzy. She had fallen against a table, dislodging a glass vase, which had broken and cut her leg. He had had to take her to the hospital, to the emergency room, and when her leg had been stitched and strapped up, had wept all over her, bemoaning the loss of her beauty, the draining away of her “life-blood.”

  “Why did you make that stupid sacrifice? Why did you destroy your health and your looks? Now you can see what it’s led to.”

  It was the beginning of the end. Some of the worst of it for Mary was the r
ealization of her own poor judgment. How could she have loved him or even have thought she loved him? Why hadn’t she detected this behavior in him before? And then there came back to her the slight unease she had always felt when he seemed to judge people by their physical appearance. She met his mother and found this aging woman doing the same thing. Like Sir Walter Elliot in Persuasion, Marina Winter remarked constantly on the propensity of those around her “to lose something of their personableness when they cease to be quite young,” and made irrelevant comments on “freckles, and a projecting tooth, and a clumsy wrist.”

  Discovering where this trait in Alistair had come from went some way to excusing it in Mary’s eyes, but later on she came to wonder how it would be if they stayed together and when she too aged and began to lose her looks. Would he call her a dog as she had once or twice been shocked to hear him describe an older woman? Would everything else she was, her closeness to him, the sexual life they enjoyed, the gentle tranquillity she knew was hers, her skills as a crafts-woman, would all this go for nothing when lines came on her face and gravity pulled her earthward?

  She had found out sooner than she expected. He punished physical diminution, not with words but with blows. Remembering, she felt the blood mount into the cheek where he had struck her. She felt it settle there and burn the skin.

  5

  With Gushi in her lap, Frederica Jago said, “Where will you go when the Blackburn-Norrises come back?” And without waiting for an answer, “Come back and live with me.”

  Mary laughed. “That’s a rash invitation. I might take you up on it.”

  “It’s your home, my dear. Where else would it be natural for you to go?”

  “To a place of my own.”

  “Of course my house is much bigger, but it’s not in the same league as this one. But what is, when you come to think of it? Still, you would have the run of it and you’d often have it to yourself. You know I’m always away.”