Brainfire (10 page)

“Routine,” Rayner said.

Gull got up. He stepped around the desk and laid his hand on Rayner's shoulder. “Look, John. What the fuck can I say?”

Rayner stared down at the floor, at the royal-blue rug that looked as if it had never been stepped upon. His eyes watered. Goddam. Sitting here in front of Gull and crying like a moron. What was this—this falling apart? He shut his eyes, fumbled around for a handkerchief in his jacket, blew his nose.

“Okay,” Gull was saying. “It's okay.”

Yeah, Rayner thought. It's okay, everything is okay. He reached for his damp raincoat and pulled it toward him.

“Go home, John. Come in tomorrow if it feels comfortable. But go home.”

Rayner stood up—and what he was thinking of again was how Isobel had looked in the Departures Lounge at Heathrow, how that pale beauty, which had so besotted Richard and which Rayner had always thought of as being as lifeless as immaculate china, how that beauty had become a wasted thing, a ruin. And none of it, none of what she had said, made any goddam sense. It was gibberish, irrational. A man complains of a headache one moment, then the next—

He let George Gull help him into the raincoat. They shook hands again.

“Call me in the morning,” Gull said. “If it feels right.”

Outside, crossing Grosvenor Square, walking quickly toward Hill Street in the rain, Rayner thought: If it feels right. If it feels right. He imagined Isobel in the clouds, jet streams across the Atlantic, her white face pressed to the window. Go home, he thought. But that was the last place he needed right at this moment in his life.

2.

By the time the early darkness had come he had found his way into Soho. The night was sodden, ripping apart all around him like wet paper. Being faintly drunk was no antidote. Along the black pavements lay the reflected lights of bars, strip joints, restaurants. He walked down Brewer Street, crossed Greek Street, moved in the direction of Soho Square. A drunk wandered in front of him, mumbled something unintelligible, then hurried on. Somewhere around here, Rayner thought—somewhere around here; and he found himself crossing Oxford Street against the traffic. Somewhere around here there was a bar where he might find Dubbs, if there was any point in finding Dubbs right now. He looked at his wrist and realized he must have left his watch someplace. Christ—how had he passed the afternoon? There was a memory of glistening tiles, a cistern flushing, some inebriated Scotsman trying to impress upon him the fact that there was some virtue in being a Celt—but it was disjointed, pointless. He had withdrawn into a vague alcoholic blur.

Now he wanted to see Dubbs, if only he could find the place. Tottenham Court Road. He walked until he came to the corner of Goodge Street, where he paused, imagining he could feel the reverberations of an underground train rolling beneath him. Goodge Street, darkness. Dubbs would be fine consolation. He went inside the first bar he came to, passing unsteadily through the door, crossing the floor, conscious of men throwing darts, of two young guys dressed like rock stars slumming, of a clutch of secretaries laughing in a corner booth. He reached the bar and was about to order a drink, anything, when he felt Dubbs alongside him and he turned, turned a little too quickly, colliding with the Scotch that Dubbs held in his hand.

“My dear Rayner,” Dubbs said. “I had an intuition, call it what you will, that I would be seeing you this very night. This very wet and miserable night.”

Rayner had to work to bring Dubbs into focus. A rotund little man with the face of a red cherub. Black coat, astrakhan collar, three-piece suit—only the vest; the
waistcoat
, was a different color. Camel's hair. Black suit. There had been times when Dubbs reminded Rayner of something that had been ejected from heaven, a tiny angel evicted after an altercation with whoever manned the pearly gates. But Dubbs—Dubbs would not last long in heaven. There would be a clash of some egotistical kind between himself and God.

Dubbs put his hand on Rayner's sleeve. “You're terribly wet, John. I had a friend once who fell asleep on a park bench, slept through a rainstorm, and woke up with awful pneumonia. Have you been lying on park benches?”

Rayner turned to look at the barman, making a gesture with his hand that was either ignored or overlooked. And he was angry again, angry with everything: a feeling that focused on the manner of the barman.

“How the fuck do you get a drink round here?” he said.

Smiling, raising one eyebrow as if to scrutinize a specimen, Dubbs said, “Annoyance gets you nothing with a fellow like that. Uncouth type. Works better if you wave a fistful of money around. Here. Let me do it.”

Dubbs pressed himself against the bar, ordered two Scotches, gathered up his change slowly. He looked around the room and nodded in the direction of an empty table. “Shall we?”

Something in the way Dubbs walked. How did you get to move like that? He appeared to glide, as if he were propelled forward on casters. Rayner followed him, conscious of his own clumsiness, his own awkward physical self. Drunk, he thought. And he tried to remember why, why he had needed to find Dubbs, what it was that had driven him through the rainy night. He sat down facing the other man, conscious of Dubbs waiting, waiting for something to be said. The silence all at once unnerved him; and it seemed to him that his memory, his recall, had gone off the rails somewhere along the way.

Dubbs lit a cigarette, a cocktail Sobranie. Pink with a gold tip, lit with great flourish from a Dunhill lighter. Dubbs, who seemed to find prolonged silences abhorrent vacuums, said, “Do Americans still say, Spill the beans, kid?”

Rayner closed his eyes, trying to concentrate.

“You've had too much, my dear,” said Dubbs. “Methinks a further ingestion of usquebaugh would totally upset your already delicate mechanisms.”

Isobel, Rayner thought. A whispered conversation in the Departures Lounge. But it makes no sense. It made no sense then, even less now. He squinted at Dubbs, who was flicking a flake of ash from his astrakhan collar.

“Well? Are there beans to be spilled, John?”

“Don't you know, Dubbs? Didn't you hear about it?”

The little man looked puzzled. “Crosswords and cryptograms and other such puzzles have always struck me as a profound waste of time, my dear. Speak to me.”

“Richard—”

Dubbs inclined his head and momentarily Rayner had the feeling that all the superficial theatricality was laid back, that something menacing was barely visible beneath the surface. Richard. Yes, Richard.

“Your brother?” Dubbs said.

“Not a suicidal type, not Richard—”

“Straight, John. I need to hear things straight.”

“Richard is dead.”

Dubbs looked into his Scotch a moment, then raised his face and said, “How?”

“How?” Rayner turned, stared at the barman, watching him polish glasses with a grubby towel. Go home, he thought. Punch a hole through the wall, punch something out of that barman's face—an exercise in futility, that was the bottom line. How had Richard died? How?

Dubbs tugged at the sleeve of his raincoat. “Richard,” he said. “You were telling me about Richard.”

Rayner reached for his glass, spilled it, watched the whiskey soak through the paper napkin.

“John,” Dubbs said. “
Please.
”

“You don't expect to believe it, Dubbs. You
won't
believe it. He killed himself.”

“How? How did he do that?”

“He jumped, Dubbs. Out of a fucking window.”

What else was there to tell? What else was there to say? Moscow, Lindholm's delegation, suicide, a sadly beautiful widow—what for Christ's sake was there left to add to that? He looked at Dubbs as if he might find there, in that round red face, in those dark-blue eyes, a consolation, an explanation—but you chase reasons as prospectors become crazed in deserts, wild obsessions in dark places, and you go on digging regardless. That was the way madness lay; that was Whacko Avenue. Dubbs said nothing for a time, smoked another of his strange cigarettes, drained his drink, crumpled a strand of cellophane.

“You remember Richard, don't you?”

“Yes,” said Dubbs. “I remember him well.”

“Not the type, Dubbs. Not the type to kill himself. Right?
Right
?”

“I don't know the answer to that, John,” Dubbs said.

“Career going along at your average pace. Marriage—tolerable, bearable, if not exactly a hothouse of sexual experiment. Now where, you tell me where, Dubbs, in the humdrum bits and pieces of his life is the reason for jumping,
jumping
, Jesus Christ, out of a fucking window!”

Dubbs did up the buttons of his coat, shivered as the door of the bar opened and a young couple came in. “John, I'm sorry about your brother. I'm really sorry. Let me drive you home.”

Rayner felt a sudden weight descend on him, his head intolerably heavy, sleep coming on—sequences of shadows. He laid his face on the surface of the table. Dubbs shook him, helped him to stand, led him outside into the rain, where some strand of awareness came back. And he was remembering Isobel.
He looked as if he had never seen me before in his life. He just stared at me and said it wasn't worth going on. And then, then he went to the window, he opened it, then
—But this isn't Richard, he thought. Other men took their lives; not Richard. You could see Richard sink, slip into depressions, drop over the edge into despair, into the worst of times; and he would have gone to his physician because that was the kind of man he was. He would have gone to a doctor long before writing himself off. No, Rayner thought. None of this is Richard.

Dubbs was looking up and down the dark street. “Where did I leave my damned car?” he said. And then they were walking through the rain, Rayner's arm linked through Dubbs's. The car was a white Mini. Rayner slumped into the passenger seat, conscious of motion, of Dubbs changing gears.

Somewhere along the way, somewhere halfway up Baker Street, Dubbs said, “If he didn't take his own life, John, then you have to admit that something
very
curious is going on.”

Curious? Rayner thought. Curiouser and curiouser: small lacquered Chinese boxes. What could be more curious than Richard falling?

Dubbs stopped at a red light and glanced at him. “His wife said he jumped, didn't she? Then either he really did take his own life or his wife is lying. And if you are quite unprepared to accept the former, what do you propose to do with the latter?”

No, Rayner thought. The brain couldn't cope. The terminals and the connections had been blitzed. He couldn't absorb Dubbs now, couldn't think his way clearly through Dubbs's logic. He blinked, staring out through the window. They had passed Lord's, heading for St. John's Wood. White houses in the rain. White houses and dark gardens.

Dubbs parked the Mini outside a Victorian house that had been butchered into a series of small apartments.

“Do you want me to come in with you, John? Would that help?”

“Tired,” Rayner said. “Dead tired.”

Dubbs patted the rim of the steering wheel. “Believe me when I say how sorry I am, John. Believe me.” For a moment he was silent. Rayner could hear the rain on the roof of the small car. Dubbs appeared to rummage around for a cigarette, sighing when he failed to find one. “If you doubt this suicide, John, let me see what I can turn up tomorrow. Can I call you?”

Rayner looked toward the house, the dark windows. What could Dubbs turn up? What could Dubbs—grubbing around the undersides of groups of expatriate Poles, insane Latvians, Czech malcontents who cried into their beers—what could Dubbs turn up out of that collection of the disenchanted, the homeless, the betrayed?

Rayner fumbled with the handle, stepped out, then leaned back into the car and smiled at Dubbs. “Call me. Call me tomorrow. And thanks.”

“Sleep, my dear,” Dubbs said.

Rayner watched the white car drift down the street, then turned toward the house. He took his keys from his coat, dropped them in the shrubbery, padded around on hands and knees before he located them again. He opened the front door, stepped into the hallway. Goddam house, he thought. Dark little flats. Dreary cooking. He turned on the light switch and moved toward the stairs. He paused beside the table at the foot of the stairs. Mail. Letters, bills. He saw how the landlady had arranged them in tidy piles, one pile to each tenant. He picked up his own. Blearily, he flipped through it. Telephone company. Overdue library books. And a letter, in an airmail envelope, addressed to him in the handwriting of his dead brother.

3.

Ernest Dubbs, who lived in a basement flat in Fulham with a rather vicious parrot he had christened Rasputin, did not go immediately home after dropping Rayner off. Instead, he drove back by way of Lord's—thinking how glad he was that the wretched cricket season was months away, that one would not have to put up with the obnoxious English penchant for that slow and silly game in the meantime—and down Baker Street. He found a parking space in Manchester Square and sat for a moment in his silenced car, wondering if he should have put young Rayner to bed after all. Tucked him up tight, as it were: you could not predict the directions of grief with any accuracy. Sighing, he got out of his car and crossed the square, hurrying against the rain with his head slightly bent. Damnable weather. Ducks and drakes might find this to their liking, but not Dubbs, who was often beset by the notion that he had been born in quite the wrong country—that at heart he was a Mediterranean person: parasols on a white terrace, ice in the old Campari glass, a wedge of lemon, a slow sea falling on some stunning beach. So be it: he was stuck with a vengeant season and an accident of birth.

He took a key from his coat pocket and unlocked the door of a building, an old house stuck between a couple of the new plate-glass monstrosities. He stared absently at the brass plaque that bore the words T
HE
M
ARLBOROUGH
T
ITLE
& T
RUST
C
OMPANY
—all perfectly meaningless, of course. He entered, shut the door behind him, pretended he did not notice the smell of carbolic that hung in the air with the density of a heavy drapery. In the distance he could hear the rattle of metal—the janitor, Malcolm, mopping the tiled floors, dragging his old bucket behind him. Let us not have discussions with Malcolm this night, Dubbs thought. How are you? How's your cat? How's your parrot?