Talking to Strange Men Read online

  He loved Cherry and she loved him. In their family they all loved each other, they were happy, they were content with each other’s company. Perhaps appearances didn’t matter much to them. For himself John didn’t mind Cherry being ugly but he began to wonder what would become of her. Would any man ever want her? Would anyone ever want to marry her? When she was older he noticed that she had developed a good figure, large breasts and shapely legs, and she had beautiful hair, thick and of a rich light chestnut colour, but that did nothing in his eyes to redeem those coarse ill-fashioned features. One day he saw a reproduction of a picture by Velasquez and the court dwarf in it had a face just like his sister Cherry’s.

  He wondered how she came to look like that. He knew he wasn’t bad-looking, ordinary but passable, and his father was much the same while their mother was positively pretty. Then when he was looking through an album of old photographs he saw a family group with his father’s father and his father’s aunt in it and then he knew. Genes behaved like that. He started watching her as if she were an invalid, someone with a dormant disease whose terrible symptoms would one day show themselves. She wasn’t even clever. She couldn’t be a teacher or a secretary. The job she got when she left school was sending out the invoices for a builder who had an office in a wooden hut down on the west side of Rostock. Sixteen she was then and with a host of friends, all pretty girls, it seemed to John. It made him sad to see her with those girls and her not even aware of the contrast. Maitland the builder had the reputation of being a womanizer, in spite of being married and with children and grandchildren, but that never worried John. A man like that wouldn’t give Cherry a second glance.

  And then one day she met Mark Simms. Mark was handsome and tall, with fine straight features and good teeth and dark eyes, broad shouldered, slim. And he had a nice personality and a good job. John couldn’t believe it when she told him they were engaged. He thought she must have made a mistake, she was so innocent she’d mistaken some remark of his for a proposal. But he met Mark and knew at once it was all genuine, it was all as Cherry said, and the amazing thing was it wasn’t one-sided, it wasn’t a case of Mark being sorry for her or indifferent, he was crazy about her. You only had to see the way he looked at her to know that.

  It was in this very room in the house in Geneva Road that Cherry had introduced him to Mark. Seventeen years ago it must have been, nearer eighteen. And here was Mark back again, still slim and handsome, still with those nice white teeth, his hair going a bit grey but that was all. A failed marriage behind him and seemingly half if not entirely forgotten. John didn’t think he had forgotten Cherry though. He might have found someone else eventually and got married but the place in his heart was for Cherry.

  He and Colin Goodman were watching snooker on John’s television. They had all been to a pub and thence to an Italian restaurant, and now here they were, all three of them, sitting here drinking Carlsberg, Mark smoking his pipe, both bars of the electric fire switched on. He hadn’t seen Mark for years, ten years probably, but when they met in the pub tonight there had been no constraint between them. All had been as in the days when Mark was courting Cherry and expecting to become John’s brother-in-law. I resented him marrying that woman, John thought, that’s what it was, I expected him to keep faith with my dead sister for ever and ever. What a fool I am! The marriage didn’t even work out. I might have saved myself all that misery and resentment, reproaching him, poor Mark.

  John wasn’t interested in snooker. Sport in general bored him. He waited on the other two, bringing in more beer, fetching Mark a clean ashtray, producing a bowl of cheese crackers and another of peanuts. They had talked throughout the Italian meal but it had been small talk, not real. And now John wondered if the truth was that he had only asked Colin to join them to make any heart-to-heart unburdenings impossible, to rule out the possibility of confidences. Yet it seemed to him there hung in the very air a yearning for confession, for openness. He knew he would never do it yet on another level he longed to tell Mark about Jennifer and listen while Mark spoke to him of Cherry. They had much to say to one another but they would not say it while Colin was there.

  The snooker came to an end and no one wanted to see the play which followed it. John switched off the set. Kim Philby’s My Silent War lay on the low table which stood between the settee where Colin and Mark sat and the television. The table, like almost everything else in the house, had belonged to John’s mother. It was of oak with an inlay of olive-green leather and his mother had kept it highly polished. John noticed how dusty and fingermarked it had become. On the crosspiece that joined the four legs together a few inches from the floor dust lay like grey fungus. Generally men don’t notice these things, John thought, only women notice them. It wasn’t the dust that Mark had been looking at but the Philby book which he now reached forward to pick up. John remembered that Mark had always been a great reader, though it was almost unknown for Cherry to open a book. For his part he had not much enjoyed My Silent War. Indeed he had begun but not finished it. A romantic man – well, sentimental, why not say it? – it was fiction that he liked. What really happened didn’t much interest him, he had enough of that in his own life. Mark was slowly turning the pages, absently helping himself to peanuts with the other hand.

  ‘Still racking your brains, are you, over that code?’ Colin said.

  John nodded.

  ‘John’s got this pal sends him letters in code, only he can’t read them.’

  Mark didn’t seem much interested. John wouldn’t have said this to anyone else but it was all right thinking it. Mark wasn’t interested in others and their affairs. His favourite word was ‘I’, John’s father had once said, with ‘me’ a close second. John had thought this a bit unfair at the time but now he wasn’t so sure.

  ‘Nineteen sixty-eight, this was published, the year I met Cherry. I always think of it as the year I met Cherry.’

  ‘Was it really that long ago?’ Colin looked embarrassed, sounded gruff.

  ‘We were engaged for nearly two years,’ Mark said.

  His eyes met John’s and it seemed to John that they were full of sorrow – no, more than that, full of grief. He was sure then that Mark was going to say something more, that in spite of Colin’s presence, he was going to speak of his love for Cherry that still endured. And John felt mean for thinking him such an egotist. But instead Mark put the book back on the table and said in quite a different tone from that he had used when talking of her:

  ‘There’s rather a good novel I read about him, about Philby I mean. Well, a thriller. By Ted Allbeury. I can’t remember what it’s called. They’d know at your library, I should think.’

  John said he would ask them. If he remembered, he added to himself. Colin was looking at his watch. They had come in Mark’s car so there was no question of last buses, but it was late, it was after eleven. The rain that was forecast had started and John offered them an umbrella to the car but they didn’t want that. Mark shook hands with him rather formally. He hadn’t mentioned Jennifer all evening which made John think Colin must have said something before he got to the restaurant. John imagined them in the car, Mark asking what exactly did happen about his wife, and Colin saying, she left him, went off with some chap she used to be engaged to.

  Colin would add that the marriage was over. But John refused to think of it in those terms. He preferred to say to himself that they were temporarily apart. It made him cringe a bit to think of those two – though he liked them, though they were his friends – talking about his failed marriage, comparing it maybe with Mark’s own experience.

  He had replied to Jennifer and posted his letter on the way to the restaurant. Well, not on the way really, for he had made a detour to take in cats’ green. There he had unpeeled the plastic envelope from the inside of the pillar and copied down the coded message into his notebook. Perhaps because of the damp he had some difficulty in making the tape adhere to the metal once more. As he was walking away he saw an elderly woma
n cross the street with a bottle of milk in one hand and a carrier bag in the other. She was going to feed the cats. He didn’t think she had seen what he was doing and now, in any case, he was very purposefully making for the pillar box on the pavement outside the church building.

  He posted his letter. It wouldn’t go out till the morning but she should get it by Wednesday. She had asked him not to phone but had said nothing about not writing. Perhaps Peter Moran went out in the mornings before the post came, though would an unemployed man do that? He had begun his letter: ‘Dearest Jennifer’. Of course he would meet her, he was longing to meet her, he had written. Hartlands Gardens at three p.m. next Saturday. I hope the sun will shine on us, he went on and then crossed that bit out which meant he had to begin the letter all over again . . .

  Emptying Mark’s ashtray, putting their glasses into the sink, he came back to the living room, sat down in front of the electric fire once more and picked up the Philby book. Philby had been a spy, these were spy memoirs. Why shouldn’t the sender of the messages have used the first lines of this book for his code? It seemed as likely as any other. John got out his notebook and tried the coded messages against the first lines of My Silent War. Wrong again. No again. Why do I bother? John asked himself. And he was aware that since the arrival of Jennifer’s letter cats’ green and the messages had meant less to him, they had been less of a diversion. They had not served to distract his mind as efficiently as he expected. He would look at the coded words and speculate and then gradually feel speculation being displaced by images of Jennifer and by memories of when they were together. Above all he would have this very vivid recollection of the second time they went out together and he had told her about Cherry and she told him about Peter Moran.

  ‘I suppose we were really very dull ordinary sort of people in our family,’ he had said to her. ‘Not interesting, nothing special, any of us. My dad worked for the Post Office. I don’t think Mother had ever had any sort of job, it wouldn’t have crossed her mind. We were such a happy family, we honestly never had a cross word, I suppose we just didn’t disagree about anything. We – my sister and I – didn’t want to rebel and our parents didn’t try to stop us enjoying ourselves. We were always doing things for each other. I mean when someone wanted something one of us would jump up and say I’ll get that or I’ll do that. We all liked each other, you see. And we liked to see the others happy. We were always laughing. Does that sound crazy? I mean we had little family jokes and catchwords and we’d tell each other funny things that happened at work. It was a regular thing every evening and Mum would say, “Don’t you do any work, you lot? It’s all play by the sound of it.”’

  She was looking at him dubiously. Her expression was kindly but puzzled too. ‘It doesn’t sound like you – well, what I know of you.’

  ‘I was different. I changed. We all changed. A death like that, it blows a world apart.’

  ‘Your sister was going to be married?’

  ‘In two months’ time. Her fiancé used to be with us most days. I mean he and Cherry would go out together, of course they would, but we weren’t the sort of people to keep a friend to ourselves. Cherry and I brought our friends home. It was natural to her to bring Mark home to eat his meals with us and stay the night sometimes.’

  She was looking at him inquiringly. He felt the colour come up into his face.

  ‘We only had the three bedrooms but Mother would make up the couch downstairs for him.’

  ‘What happened?’ she asked.

  ‘One evening she just didn’t come home from work. It was winter and the evenings were dark. Mark called round at the place she worked, down at Beckgate. He had been going to pick her up and they were going out somewhere, but she had already left and the place was locked up. They found her body lying on those steps that go down to the embankment below Rostock. She’d been strangled. They never found the person who did it. There were no witnesses, nothing.’

  ‘And that changed you all?’ she said. ‘That broke your family up?’

  ‘It was like,’ he said, ‘you imagine being struck by lightning. We were – blasted. The next year my father had a stroke. Oh, they said it had nothing to do with Cherry’s death, it would have happened anyway. Perhaps it would. He was more or less bedridden for years. My mother looked after him. It sounds melodramatic, it sounds exaggerated, but I don’t think she ever laughed any more. I never heard her laugh. We clung to each other for support, the three of us, but we couldn’t support each other. Can you understand? There was no comfort to give.’

  ‘You stayed with them? You lived at home?’

  He had never considered an alternative. Jennifer seemed astonished, as if he had made a sacrifice. He told her about his father’s death and his mother’s but said nothing about his own loneliness. She looked at him. She had a way of looking intently into one’s eyes. Her face was wide at the temples, full-cheeked, the pale skin freckled, deep charming dimples at the corners of her pretty mouth. And everything about her was soft, it was in this that her uniqueness lay, her voice, her gaze, her touch. Oh, beyond all, her touch! Of course he had known nothing of that then. Those were early days. But even then he had recognized her apartness from all other women, her quality of hushed velvety sweetness. He enjoyed looking at art books, the kind that have reproductions in them of famous paintings. And he would identify the looks of people he knew with the subjects of portraits. If Cherry was the Velasquez dwarf, Mark Simms looked like El Greco’s picture of the poet-scholar Paravicino and Jennifer – well, Jennifer was Rembrandt’s Juno.

  ‘I like the sound of your family,’ she said. ‘I’d have liked to know them. If you’d known me then would you have taken me home to meals?’

  It was so unexpected he blushed again. He stammered, ‘You’re too young. You’d have been a child.’

  ‘If I was as I am now, would you have?’

  ‘Of course I would, of course.’

  She looked away. ‘My family weren’t like that. My father was ill for years too, in and out of hospital, and he made us all suffer for that. It sounds unkind but it’s true. My mother had learnt to repress her emotions. Not committing herself, not talking of anything but the weather and the shops and what the neighbours said – that made her feel safe. Do you know what I mean?’

  He nodded. ‘I think so.’

  Looking down, her eyebrows drawn close together, she said in that voice he had never heard raised, then or later, ‘I’ll tell you what happened to me and the man I was going to marry. It was awful. It was the most terrible thing. Can I tell you?’

  Don’t hurt me, he wanted to say. You can hurt me, already you can. But he only nodded again and her eyes on his, into his, she began . . .

  Soon after that he had brought her back here. Then the house still seemed full of ghosts – Cherry holding hands with Mark, his mother’s lost laughter – when it didn’t seem the emptiest place on earth. The ghosts had gone now but the emptiness was back. John kicked off the switches on the electric fire and then, reaching under the table, he wiped the fur of dust away with the palm of his hand.

  9

  THE FIRST DAY back after a holiday was always busy. People had all the long weekend in which to look at their gardens and decide that only a new shrub here or a row of perennials there would be enough to transform them into Sissinghurst or Kew. There was a run on dahlia tubers and gladioli bulbs, showy things that John didn’t much like. He overheard Gavin persuading a woman to buy Eucalyptus salicifolia for planting in an exposed north-facing garden where of course only gunnii was likely to survive. Gavin didn’t like to be told, though John did it discreetly enough and out of anyone else’s earshot. There had been a willow-leaved eucalyptus in Hartlands Gardens but the severe frosts of two winters before had killed it. John and Jennifer had gone for a walk there that March and seen the poor gum tree, its trunk like stripped bone, its leaves dried and curled and rattling in the wind.

  He walked through the greenhouses, checking on the African dais
ies, the gazanias and gerberas that he was bringing on from seed. It would be an experience to see them in their natural habitat, in Namaqualand where the dried-up plains, he had read, might remain arid for months or years even, and when at last the rain came burst next day into bloom, into limitless acres of brilliant and glorious colour, as far as the eye could see. That must be the origin of the Bible promise, that the desert should blossom as the rose . . .

  Imagining Africa made him think again of King Solomon’s Mines. He would call at the central library on his way home. It might be in by now. And perhaps he would also see if he could find that novel about Philby, though he had forgotten the name of it and the name of the author. Gavin was feeding the mynah with pieces of brazil nut which it seemed to like. For the first time John noticed that Sharon had painted her fingernails the colour of imperial jade. There was nothing he could do about that and why bother anyway?

  Leaving, he essayed a joke. ‘How many customers have asked you if you’ve got green fingers, Sharon?’

  ‘Fifteen,’ she said without a smile. ‘I counted.’

  The librarian said she knew of several novels based on the life of Kim Philby. He hadn’t brought My Silent War back with him and he told her he still had it.