Blame It on the Bossa Nova (27 page)

We passed through pleasant, undemanding countryside, undulating and dotted with Georgian and other villas. The landscape bleached white, it still gave off the vibrations that are the essence of English unspectacular rurality. But it gradually flattened out into the good air force base terrain whose irresistible convenience, for a while, threatened to get England blown off the map. The going was tough, many side roads were frozen and blocked and the A10 itself was no great feat of road engineering in those days. More than once we slithered across the road spinning out of control, once coming to a halt facing back to London, half way up a grass bank. Chris in the back was ignorant of the problem until it was over, then typically, over-reacted wretchedly. I was forced to drive slowly and in many places, where the council gritting machines hadn’t yet ventured, very slowly. As we turned temporarily westward with a bend in the road we were all suddenly aware of a beautiful magenta sunset suffusing the whole of the Western sky. Even Chris in the back could see it. None of us spoke for a while, just taking in the scene of snow white fields stained slightly pink, the horizon of skeletal trees and the backdrop of slowly deepening purple. I thought of the first time we three had driven together - me in the back that time - on our way to the party on the night of the Cuba crisis. Chris and Pascale had hit it off that day too as we pulled away from London’s magnetic field.

The road deflected slightly and we could now only see the sunset out of the side window. Chris couldn’t see it at all. It grew in intensity as its shades darkened imperceptibly until, before we had seen it go, it was night and black.

Honey was off at Granchester but we were still hungry so we parked along Queen’s Road and Pascale and I stood blowing puffs of dragon’s breath into the freezing night air as Chris crawled out of the van and stamped hard on the ground to get the feeling back into his left leg. The wind rushed at us and buffeted us as we walked through the Backs and over the bridge to Queen’s College.

“Makes you appreciate the van doesn’t it, Chris?”

“You’re going in the back next time.”

“Fine. I’m not the fugitive from justice.”

The choir was practising in King’s Chapel and the occasional student crossed our path flitting into darkened recesses. It was nearly seven o’clock and the place was like a ghost town. We walked into the market square with its shoe shops and cinemas, through the other city where the work slaves did commerce and were entertained. Cambridge was hostile. There were people I could have looked up but the message in the air was ‘Don’t bother, you shouldn’t have come back, your place at the table is no longer laid.’

Half way to the station, back in Real World we found a cafe where places weren’t laid, you served yourself and we all ordered our individual variations of a fry up - I think Pascale had an omelette with chips - and thick mugs of tea and slices of bread.

“Remember you can be anything you want - RAF pilot, freedom fighter...” I said to Pascale as she looked at her omelette prior to eating. The atmosphere was gloomy. Chris shivered in his well-tailored long overcoat and Pascale, never the type of player to rally a losing side, withdrew into her own thoughts. I was hungry, I ate my grub, but as I did so I couldn’t restrain myself from imagining the tragic irony that I suspected Chris saw in his current circumstances. The peeling Pepsi Cola advert on the wall, the spelling mistakes on the blackboard menu, the pinball machine and its solitary player. All these were the final brush strokes of an unseen genius. In a way it was also my triumph. It was I who had introduced Pascale and Chris to this world of grubby cafes and oily A35 vans, previously as remote to them as the anthropological excursions of Levi-Strauss.

We walked back quickly through the stricken city again encountering scarcely a soul. Chris persisted in his earlier intention of driving so I found myself in the back. Pascale got a half bottle of whisky out of her large bag and handed it round which made life temporarily a little brighter. Chris’s nervous state was brought into sharp relief by his driving which initially was far too fast. We skidded through some red lights while we were still in Cambridge as he jammed late and hard on the brakes, but there was nothing coming and we got away with it. I told him to keep on the A10 and head up to Kings Lynn through Ely. It was going round two sides of a triangle, because at Lynn we would have to turn sharp right, but it was better to keep to main roads. As the heater got going I relaxed in the back and for a long while didn’t notice the snow flurries that danced in the headlights. Chris calmed down as we got on the lonely open road and the countryside flattened even more - not that I nor any of us could see it. As we turned a corner the headlights picked out a pretty little mock gothic lodge.

“What a lovely place, Chris,” said Pascale - Victorian and Edwardian is the only ace in our architectural history that could possibly even start to give a Frog a complex. Chris pondered on this for a moment or two.

“D’you think so?...... Yes I suppose it is... The trouble is you can grow to hate the most beautiful place on Earth if you live in it long enough.”

On this sobering reflection we drove on in silence and into Norfolk, pondering on the wisdom of Buddha.

It was past ten o’clock when we arrived at the cottage, having eluded the police dragnet, real or imagined. Things had gone smoothly until just before Fakenham when we had turned left off the Cromer Road and started on the last ten miles of our journey up a narrow B Road. There had been no vehicles preceding us to make a safe track and we immediately hit black ice and skidded off the road. We all had to get out and push the van back on. It was the final shaft that shot Chris’s nerves to pieces. He went to get in the back but I stopped him and told Pascale to climb in. He was in a really bad way and for all our sakes I wanted him to get there without further deterioration. He was embarrassingly grateful for being allowed to sit in the front.

I had only visited the cottage during halcyon Cambridge summers when the rural working classes are out winnowing or haymaking or whatever it is they get up to. Now, with the snow, everything was different and my only signposts were remembered pubs in the two villages we passed through and even then it was only the names that struck chords, the buildings themselves bore no resemblance to their casual outdoor hospitality in summer. I remembered that the cottage was in a row of five, detached from the north end of the village by a couple of fields, but when our headlights picked it out I got no pang of recognition. It was only after I’d pulled off the road onto the strip of gravel outside the front door and, peering through the windows, had identified the skulls of sheep and birds that adorned the window sill that I knew with certainty that we had arrived. I signalled to Chris that this was it, but he was too far gone to care. I went to the van and told Pascale I was going to get the keys from an old girl who lived in a detached house back down the road. I knew she’d give them to me without any problem, she had long been accustomed to the casual practice of people turning up without prior notification. However, I had reckoned without the traumatising effect of the severe winter, my ring on the door was greeted by cries from within of surprise and alarm.

“Who is it?” a voice said. I knew they wouldn’t remember me.

“Alex Marshall........ a friend of Damien’s. Remember me?”

Satisfied that this was not the response of a thug with intent to burgle and rape, they opened the door. It gave access direct into the living room. An old boy was sitting with a smock on watching television, a middle-aged woman was cutting his hair.

“Excuse us,” said the old girl with gratuitous servility, “... my daughter’s just cutting dad’s hair... You’ll be wanting the key then, though I can’t understand what’s brought you up in this weather.”

As I walked back I saw Pascale had managed to get Chris out of the van. He was leaning heavily on the bonnet surrounded by the trappings of civilization, his shopping bags. He looked washed out and even Pascale was shocked, to the extent that she was whispering words of encouragement and pressing his hand in hers. We got him into the cottage, supporting him on either side as we made the twenty paces to the divan just inside the door. I was shit scared he was going to have a heart attack.

The cottage itself was freezing of course, and Spartan in a way that suggested that holidays in the country are not meant to be enjoyed. Chris remained slumped on the divan and Pascale just stood around looking bored as I made the fire. I got it to catch with the last page of the Daily Mirror I had bought that morning outside Harrods. The sheet I was holding over the fireplace suddenly caught fire as the flames flared and the roar intensified behind it. Half digested strips of newsprint shot up the chimney, but after the flares had died down a tiny red glow of flame remained. For fifteen minutes I nurtured it until I was confident enough that it wouldn’t go out if I stopped looking at it. But it didn’t give out any real heat for over an hour. There were bedrooms upstairs but they were ice cold. Pascale made a cup of tea and I gave Chris three vallium. We got his shoes and coat off and spread the coat over him like a blanket and got a pillow from upstairs. He didn’t argue and very soon he slept. Pascale and I sat on the floor in front of the fire and looked at the flames and passed the whisky to each other without talking. Very slowly I felt myself getting warmer. I went outside to where I knew they kept the logs for the fire. They were covered in snow and hissed as we put them on.

“He’s all in,” I said.

“Yes.”

“Poor bastard.”

She didn’t reply.

“Is he still asleep?” I asked. She looked and nodded.

“Don’t you think he’s a poor bastard?” I pursued the matter, wanting an answer.

“Yes...... I suppose he is.”

I watched the melted snow trickle down a log. There was still some left on top, not yet melted.

“He shouldn’t have come up here,” I said. “... What’s the point?”

“No point at all,” said Pascale. I passed the bottle back to her.

“Still, I suppose at least he feels safe here. It’ll take some time to find him here.”

“I shouldn’t think it will take them too long.”

“Why not? Why should anyone come looking for him here?”

“Perhaps because I telephoned them and told them where we were going.”

“You did what?”

“I telephoned the police and told them where we were going.”

She spoke the words clearly and distinctly as if talking to a cretin. I hit her hard across the mouth with the back of my hand and she dropped the bottle and the last of the whisky ran out onto the floor, but she still sat there passive and without emotion.

“And when did you do that?” I said.

“When we stopped at the garage and I told you I was going off for a piss. They had a phone out the back..... I gave them a quid.”

“What’s he done to you?”

“Have you forgotten why we know each other, Alex? Everyone wants Chris out of the way, the UK…the U.S. …. There’s been a tacit understanding for some time now. Why d’you think you weren’t picked up by that cop car when you drove back to London after the party?” My mind sought out that night. I saw again the thick faces of the coppers and remembered my cockiness, thinking I’d tricked them.

“…Even then we were all working together without saying anything.”

I suppose at that moment I could have interrupted her and told her about my heightened relationship with Toby, about the way he could order cabinet ministers about, the way he could organize it for people to get imprisoned or beaten up to order, about the fact that he was a double agent.... Perhaps I could have told her the skids were under Chris through no action of hers but because Frank had a crush on me. For some reason I didn’t bother to stop her.

She carried on talking. “You never could read me, Alex. I like you a lot. The day that Toby disappeared I wanted you to take me back to your place and take me to bed again...... That was a good way of getting you to do it.” Again I thought back and reflected on her behaviour and my lack of comprehension. She was right, I didn’t understand her. I never would.....We had gone into this thing as complete strangers, we would come out of it really good acquaintances. Again she gave me that Françoise Hardy look. This time it didn’t seem so derivative, there was something attractive in it.

“Poor old Chris, he’s the most innocent out of the lot of us,” I said.

“.... and you Alex. You’re an innocent... Everything you did, you did for money. Not one of your actions was morally motivated - I don’t count the odd instinctive outburst.... Money means a lot to you, doesn’t it, Alex? That’s a form of innocence, it suggests an unawareness of the more important things in life.... In some people that would be called greed, but not you. I’ve given you the benefit of the doubt. In your case it’s innocence.” I was quite happy to have my actions filed under that classification.

“And now we haven’t got a drink because you made me hit you,” I said.

“I knew you’d hit me. I wanted you to. I wanted to make you angry. It’s so easy, and it makes you seem more real.”

She was doing it again, upsetting my cock, getting him all nervous and agitated..... Battersea, the flat, my first night with her. How could I want someone as cold as her, with her ruthless acceptance and implementation of her own universal truths, trampling over and through other people’s lives? How? I wondered as I felt myself moving over towards her and taking hold of her. How could she be so desirable and compliant and so perfectly sensitised to the moment? But then I stopped wondering and we lost ourselves in the moment. We fucked on the floor, knocking over Victorian china pots containing dried flowers, and scattering and damaging the loose rush matting. But we didn’t disturb Chris. He slept through it all, like a baby.