Talking to Strange Men Read online

  He admitted quite freely to himself that he was afraid to try making love to a woman. How did you go about it? How did you begin? How would you know you were doing right? He could not imagine the first move. Well, the kiss he could imagine. By then he had kissed Jennifer many times. But how to take the next step? And what would the next step be? Her breasts, the books said. He shrank with diffidence and shyness at the thought. It seemed an assault. How could you get hold of a girl’s breasts and feel them? By what right? She was not a virgin, he knew that. She had lived with Peter Moran. Therefore she would know what was due to her, she would know what men who were real lovers did . . .

  When the new bed came he put the old one, his parents’ bed, into Cherry’s room beside her single divan. Cherry had been innocent, a modest, chaste girl. He had thought her plainness kept her that way until he had seen her with Mark Simms and seen the way Mark looked at her, with passion, with devotion. Then he knew she was naturally pure or pure by conscious choice. One day she said to their mother that she and Mark planned to save their money, they wouldn’t have a honeymoon. Holidays abroad could wait till later on, till they had their home together. And their mother said maybe that would be too late, maybe she would have other commitments, and though he had known what she meant, that Cherry might have children, Cherry herself hadn’t. There had been explanations and Cherry had seemed quite put out, offended even, which was almost unheard of for her, and their mother had said – very practically, John thought – that children would come unless Cherry took precautions to see they didn’t. He had made some excuse and left the room after that. He was not so much embarrassed as somehow aware of the affront to Cherry’s modesty. It was strange though that all the time he had sensed Cherry’s underlying anger and something impatient or even derisive in her manner.

  Perhaps there was something about their family, something in the individual members of it, that shied away from sex. Jennifer had been so kind to him, so good. Once she understood what the problem was, the lack, she had been patient and caring and together they had . . . He pushed the memory of it along a shelf in his mind until it crashed off the end. No more of that! He turned over in the empty queen-sized bed, seeking elusive sleep, not unhappy though, full of hope.

  It was possible, indeed it was likely, she might be back with him here on Saturday night. Those terrors were gone now. Thanks to her, with her, he would be masterly and knowledgeable. As he thought of it his penis uncurled itself inside his pyjama leg, stiffened. Not for the first time he thought, why was it arranged this way, this awkward embarrassing way, by God or whatever? Why couldn’t it all have been done by lips and hands or even by thoughts?

  Or as flowers managed, or fish. It wasn’t long ago, a matter of months, that he had discovered the way fishes procreated, the males merely releasing spermatozoa into the water in which the fecund females swam. Trying as an experiment to grow galia melons at the garden centre, he had fertilized the female flowers with a pastry brush – clean, hygienic, fastidious!

  John knew very well how inhibited he was. He longed for a perfect himself in a perfect world in which he would not be ashamed or shy or pained and he knew also he had a possibility of finding this with Jennifer. He laid his hand upon his stiff penis and, contrary to what should have happened, it shrank under his touch. He turned his face into the pillow, his arms crossed now, a hand on each shoulder, and felt like a child waiting for his mother to come in and say goodnight.

  11

  FERGUS ALWAYS DROVE a Volvo, kept it five years and then turned it in for a new one. The latest came from Mabledene’s, which had opened its city branch about two years before.

  ‘Extraordinary name,’ said Fergus.

  ‘Is it?’ said Mungo. ‘There’s a Charles Mabledene in my house at school.’

  ‘It must be the same family. Poor chap. I daresay he gets teased.’

  ‘Teased? Why would he?’

  Fergus gave him a look indicative of sorrow that his youngest son was simple-minded. ‘Well, Mabel. I suppose he gets called Mabel, doesn’t he? He would have been in my day.’

  Mungo didn’t know what his father meant. He had never heard of Mabel as a girl’s name.

  ‘Things have changed since your day,’ said Lucy.

  Girls in the Sixth Form, she meant. People called by their christian names. They had girls in at all levels at Utting, and Stern’s new second-in-command was a girl. Mungo thought what a funny thing it was that his father and he didn’t seem to speak the same language. It was rather as if, while both speaking English, they had each learned it in parts of the world separated by thousands of miles, in countries where the customs and traditions were totally disparate. He sat at breakfast after his father had gone off to his morning surgery, trying to fathom what he had meant about someone deserving pity because they might be called by a girl’s name no one had ever heard of. But after a while he gave up. You couldn’t, anyway, imagine feeling sorry for Charles Mabledene, he wasn’t that sort of person. Charles Mabledene had defected and Stern had been furious. No wonder. Agents of Charles’s brilliance didn’t grow on trees. He had been in the junior school at Utting, in Andrade House with Stern’s brother Michael, and it was just after they had both taken the Common Entrance that he phoned Mungo. The situation, Angus said when told about it later, rather paralleled his own experience with Guy Parker. For the nub of Charles’s conversation with Mungo that evening was that, without saying a word to Ivan or Michael Stern, or indeed anyone but his own parents and the powers-that-were at Rossingham, he had elected to come to Rossingham not Utting when term started in September.

  He meant, of course, more than this. He meant he wanted to defect to the West and be enrolled by Mungo.

  ‘Recruited,’ Mungo corrected him kindly. ‘It’s enemy security officers who are enrolled.’

  Then Charles said what he would bring with him as evidence of good faith. For a long time Mungo had dreamt of getting his hands on Guy Parker’s code book. Guy was still nominally head of Moscow Centre at that time, though he was to hand everything over to Stern during the summer holidays. The codes he used were not based on the first lines of books, or any lines from books, but on secret sentences in this code book which Angus had long suspected was entirely in foreign languages, and probably obscure foreign languages such as Serbo-Croat and Friesian. On countless occasions he had sent people in to attempt the theft of this book, or better still make a copy of it. The double agent Hydra, who was in the Lower Fourth at Utting with Stern, had tried to get hold of it. But Guy Parker, alerted to what was going on by a clumsy attempt, took to carrying the book around on his person, opened and pressed flat against his chest between his shirt and his vest.

  Mungo didn’t believe Charles Mabledene could get hold of it, and it was to be months before he learned how this had been effected. July and August went by and he heard not a word. Term began on 8 September, Mungo moved into the Upper Fourth and into a study in Pitt that he shared with only three others instead of the former nine. Angus, in the Lower Sixth now and a prefect, went along to the new ones’ studies at lights-out to give them his pep talk. He reported back to Mungo the presence of Charles Mabledene. But by that time a photocopy of the code book was in the drawer under his bunk. He found it there when he went to get out his pyjamas.

  The safe house they were using then was one of the rooms in the old physics lab. New labs had been completed in the previous year but the original Edwardian buildings still stood, their fate being undecided. A proposal to convert them into two gardeners’ flats was later rejected on grounds of expense, and demolition was begun. But back last September the rooms still stood, and stood empty and locked up. Charles Mabledene, of course, got the keys and had copies cut. He could get any keys, could Charles, make his way in and out of anything, come to that. Before he was ten he had been no mean conjurer – a tregetour was what he called himself – and he was studying escapology.

  Mungo de-briefed him in the old physics lab. Charles told him everythin
g Parker and Stern had been doing and everything they planned to do. He found out from Charles how Parker had discovered their code system and the drops they were currently using, the one here outside the squash courts and the one in town in the old wall by the Fevergate. For weeks he had been wondering how it was that his efforts to secure four invitations to the mayor’s garden party had been continually frustrated, had ultimately failed. It was Charles who told him that Hydra was a double agent and that the mayor had two sons at Utting. And Charles told him how he had got the code book. It was on Sports Day when Guy Parker was swimming in the hundred metres. He thought he was safe because all the changing rooms had lockers with keys. But opening a locker was nothing to Charles Mabledene. He used credit cards and not even old ones but Mabledene’s personal cards they issued to their customers. Using a sharp knife he cut them into hooked shapes and serrated shapes and could open most things with them, but not Yale or Banham locks. He was working on Yale and Banham locks. Charles took the code book over to Technology about a hundred yards away, photocopied it and had it back in Parker’s locker by the time he was emerging from the water.

  Then began a period of triumph. The other side continued to use the code book all that term and Mungo was privy to all their secrets. Months of work were undone by the loss of the code book, Stern’s Deputy Controller Rosie Whittaker was reputed to have said. It was Christmas before they found out about the code book and then they thought an agent of their own was the traitor. Mungo would have welcomed this agent, he would have liked him to come over, but he wasn’t all that bright and Rossingham didn’t want him. Charles Mabledene, on the other hand, was one of those rare people who had been awarded a scholarship on his Common Entrance results. He didn’t even have to apply for it. His parents must have got a pleasant surprise when the letter came saying he had not only passed but they would be getting five hundred pounds off their annual fees bill.

  Those were the days when Mungo had led Michael Stern a dance all over the city at Christmas time and locked him up in the warehouse; when he had been shown all Stern’s drops and substituted all Stern’s messages with his own; when he had actually entered Stern’s safe house which, of all places, was the Douglas family mausoleum in the cathedral precincts. He had lain on the floor behind Lysander Douglas’s enormous stone sarcophagus and listened to Ivan Stern and Rosie Whittaker and two other people he didn’t know hold their meeting and then, at half-term, had witnessed Stern’s de-briefing of Cyclops whom Mungo hadn’t even suspected of wanting to go over to the East.

  There, on the cold dusty floor, out of the reach of Stern’s candle flame, his face separated only by a thin stone wall from old Lysander’s bones, he had heard Cyclops tell Stern everything, including the defection of Minotaur whom Stern had thought of up till then as a sleeper in the enemy territory, waiting only to be awakened. Cyclops was leaving Rossingham of course, going with his parents to live in Toronto and attend Upper Canada College. They were welcome to him, Mungo thought bitterly. He wondered what he would do if, when Stern left the mausoleum, he locked the door behind him. Charles Mabledene knew he was there, of course, but Charles Mabledene wouldn’t come looking till the morning . . .

  Stern didn’t lock the door. Mungo came out into a white world, into a snowstorm, hardly noticing the weather though, feeling this awful setback . . . Since then, during this past spring term in spite of what had been accomplished, they had known few real triumphs, it seemed to him. For one thing, Moscow Centre had formulated its new code, a marvellous code that began with a number and ended with a longer number and defied all attempts to decipher it. And then there was the dawning possibility that Stern had a mole in the very heart of the department. But if he could pull off this Blake business much would be paid for, much made equal. It seemed to entail getting inside a man’s mind, though. How would you do that? How would even Charles Mabledene do that?

  Mungo climbed the stairs up to his room, passing on his way Angus’s open door and Angus seated at the computer. He had the remains of his breakfast, which he had fetched on a tray, beside him on the desk: two empty eggshells, half a French breadstick, a tin of golden syrup. Gluck came wafting out of the record player. ‘What is life to me without thee?’ Eurydice was singing. Mungo went on up and into his own room and closed the door. It was 31 March and he had two things in mind: one, to play an April Fool’s trick of some sort on the other side and two, to formulate a new code.

  For the code he had more or less decided to use Erskine Childers’ The Riddle of the Sands. This was the book he had, at half-term, got Basilisk to abstract from Stern because he was pretty sure Stern was using it as an arbitrary source for code-making. But it occurred to him that Stern would quickly guess that the Childers was being used, had probably guessed already and was anticipating this. Mungo looked round his own bookshelves and took down a thick volume, turned the pages and read: ‘In the third week of November, in the year 1895, a dense yellow fog settled upon London. From the Monday to the Thursday I doubt whether it was ever possible from our windows in Baker Street to see the loom of the opposite houses.’ That would do. What was the loom of a house anyway? Mungo didn’t think it mattered.

  Before he worked that out he would set up an April Fool situation for Rosie Whittaker. Why not, for instance, send her to the Mabledene garage drop where she would find a dud message in Childers code? It would mean they could never seriously use the Mabledene garage drop but Mungo had gone off it anyway, it was too close to parental territory to be safe.

  12

  GETTING INTO HIS leathers to go home for his half-day off – early closing was on Thursdays – John felt in his jacket pocket and pulled out the piece of paper he had taken from the wall at 53 Ruxeter Road. ‘Chimera, Leviathan, Dragon, Basilisk, Medusa, Scylla, Unicorn, Charybdis, Empusa, Hydra, Minotaur’ were printed on it in two columns. John felt disappointed. It seemed meaningless, though he had come across three of those names in the coded messages.

  He didn’t want to take any books out but he called in at the Lucerne Road library to look those words up in the dictionary. At home he only had a pocket one. The words on the list all turned out to be the names of fabulous animals or mythological monsters. But the reason for their being there remained a mystery. John had no doubt however that they related in some way to the gang or society or group that was sending the coded messages. He made a detour and went home via cats’ green where, inside the central pillar, he found a fresh message. This he copied down into his notebook, taking care this time that when restoring the plastic package to its place the tape adhered precisely to the site from which he had unpeeled it.

  There were no cats about. A licked-clean saucer and baking tin showed that they had eaten the food provided and withdrawn to sheltered spots, perhaps to sleep. A few cars passed. In a yard at the back of one of the factory buildings a man was sawing wood. John had never been there in daylight before. He cruised the bike slowly round the green and took one of the narrow lanes that led riverwards. The flight of steps looked quite different today. An almond tree was in blossom outside the converted maltings. It was sunny and warm, very mild for the end of March, and patrons of the pub were sitting outside at tables and some of them actually on the steps or on the parapet with their legs dangling through the railings. The water gleamed blue and sparkling below.

  John felt pained by the sight. It was irrational this feeling, he knew that, for what was he saying? That every place where someone had died a violent death should be kept sacred? That no one should ever again tread where she had died, still less chatter and drink and laugh? The sound of a man’s uncaring laughter made him wince. He drove home, trying to expel it from his mind, wishing he hadn’t gone that way, turning his thoughts instead to the coded message he carried with him.

  He had made no plans for the afternoon. A few weeks ago he might have gone to Jennifer’s house to wait outside and try to catch a glimpse of her, but he had put this sort of behaviour behind him. To his way of thinking it hinted
at neurosis, at mental aberration. Normal people don’t behave that way. John had a dread of something happening to his mind, of ‘nervous breakdown’. Even the wearing of her blue leather jacket now seemed not quite normal and he resolved not to do it again. It was almost warm enough to sit in the garden and read. Perhaps he would weed the rosebed and the left-hand border and then sit down for a read. But the coded message first. He applied the letters to the key he had made.

  ‘Leviathan to Dragon and Basilisk,’ he read. ‘Ignore all Tosos commands. Bruce-Partington commences Friday.’

  That told him at any rate what the list of fabulous beasts implied. Leviathan was some kind of boss and Dragon some kind of servant or agent. But what was Tosos? Another imaginary animal? He tried the pocket dictionary but it wasn’t there. Later on he might go back to the library and see if he could find it in Chambers’ Twentieth Century. Bruce-Partington, presumably, was some new man they had taken on, some recruit to whatever racket they were involved in.

  He had been out in the garden for half an hour, a trug full of weeds beside him, when he heard the phone ringing. He had half a mind to let it ring – but suppose it was Jennifer? Suppose it was Jennifer changing the time on Saturday or even the day, or even saying she wanted to come here to the house instead? His hands were earthy and there was dirt in his nails. You couldn’t garden properly with gloves on. He ran indoors, not pausing to rinse his hands. The prospect of hearing her voice hung a weight on his chest, constricting his breathing. She had a soft, quiet, unhurried voice that never became impatient, but when excited was infinitely sweetened and enriched . . . He lifted the receiver in his earthy hand.

  It wasn’t Jennifer. It was Mark Simms. John had difficulty in suppressing an actual cry of disappointment.

  13