Make Death Love Me (27 page)

The idea of at last getting something to eat made him hungry again. The saliva rushed, warm and faintly salty, into his mouth. He could revive and perhaps bribe Joyce with food. She came out of the lavatory and he hustled her back into the room. Then he hunted in there and in the kitchen for an envelope, but he had no more luck than Joyce had had when she wanted to write her note, and he had to settle as she had done for a paper bag or, in this case, for part of the wrapping off Marty's cigarette carton. Nigel wrote: ‘In bed with flu. Could you get me large white loaf?' Of all the comestibles he could have had, he chose without thinking man's traditional staff of life. He folded the paper round a pound note. Joyce was lying on the sofa face-downwards, but let him only be out of sight for more than a couple of minutes, he thought, let him start down those stairs, and she'd be off there raring to go as if she'd just got a plateful of roast beef inside her. The saliva washed round the cavities and pockets of his mouth. He went out on to the landing and pushed the note under Mr Green's door, having remembered to sign it: M. Foster.

Mr Green went out most days. He had lived for years in one room, so he went out even if he had nothing to buy and although climbing back again up those stairs nearly killed him every time. The note, which suddenly appeared under his door when he was making himself his fifteenth cup of tea of the day, worried him intensely. This wasn't because he even considered not complying with the request in it. He was afraid of young people, especially young males, and he would have done far more than make a special journey to buy a loaf in order to avoid offending the tall fair one or the small dark one, whichever this Foster was. What worried him was not knowing whether his neighbour meant a cut or uncut loaf, and also being entrusted with a pound note which still seemed to Mr Green a large sum of money. But when he had drunk his tea he took his string bag and put on his overcoat and set off.

A young man in a bluejacket caught him up a little way down the road. Asking the way to somewhere, Mr Green supposed. He did what he always did, shook his head and kept on walking, though the young man persisted and was quite hard to shake off. Because the cut loaf was more expensive than the uncut Mr Green didn't buy it. He bought a large white tin loaf, crusty and warm, carefully wrapping it in tissue paper himself, and in the shop next door he bought the
Evening Standard.
This he paid for out of his own money. Then he went for a little walk in his own silence along the noisy Broadway, returning home by a different route and not taking too long about it because it would be wrong and inconsiderate to keep a sick man waiting.

Half-way up the stairs he had to stop and rest. Bridey Flynn, coming home from the Rose of Killarney, caught up with him and passed him, not speaking to him but reading out of curiosity the note which lay spread out on the flat top of the newel post. She disappeared round a bend in the stairs. Mr Green placed the change from the pound note, a fifty-pence piece and two tens and a one, on the note and carefully wrapped the coins up in it. Then he laboriously climbed the rest of the stairs. At the top he put the folded newspaper on the floor outside Marty Foster's door, the loaf on top of the newspaper and the little parcel of coins on top of the loaf. He tapped on the door, but he didn't wait.

Nigel didn't at once go to the door. He thought it was probably old Green who had knocked but he couldn't be positive and he had cause to be nervous. Between the time he had put the note under old Green's door and now, the doorbell had rung several times, in fact half a dozen times. The second time it rang Nigel pushed Joyce up into the corner of the sofa and stuck the barrel of the gun, safety catch off, hard into her chest. She went grey in the face, she didn't make a sound. But Nigel hardly knew how he had borne it, listening to that bell ringing, ringing, down there. He gritted his teeth and tensed all his muscles.

It was about half an hour after that that there was a tap at the door. Nigel was still, though less concentratedly, covering Joyce with the gun. At the knock he jammed it against her neck. When he heard the sound of Mr Green's whistling kettle he went cautiously to the door. He opened it a crack with his left hand, keeping Joyce covered with the gun in his right. There was no one on the landing. Bridey was in the bathroom, he could see the shape of her through the frosted glass in the bathroom door.

The sight of the bread, and the smell of it through its flimsy wrapping, made him feel dizzy. He snatched it up with the newspaper and the package of change and kicked the door shut.

Joyce saw and smelt the bread and gave a sort of cry and came towards him with her hands out. He was still pointing the gun at her. She hardly seemed to notice it.

‘Sit down,' said Nigel. ‘You'll get your share.'

He didn't bother to cut the loaf, he tore it. It was soft and very light and not quite cold. He gave a hunk to Joyce and sank his teeth into his own hunk. Funny, he had often read about people eating dry bread, people in ancient times mostly or at least a good while ago, and he had wondered how they could. Now he knew. It was starvation which made it palatable. He devoured nearly half the loaf, washing it down with a cup of water with whisky in it. Now his hunger was allayed, the next best thing to bread Mr Green could have bought him was a newspaper. Before he had even finished eating, he was going through that paper page by page.

They had found the Escort in Dr Bolton's garage. Not that they put it that way – ‘a shed in Epping Forest'. They'd be on to him now, he thought, via the commune, via that furniture guy, that school friend of Marty's. He turned savagely to Joyce.

‘Look, all I ask is you lie low for two goddamned days. That's a thousand quid a day. Just two days and then you can talk all you want.' Inspiration came to Nigel. ‘You don't even need to keep the money. If you're that crazy, you can give it back to the bank.'

Joyce didn't answer him. She hunched forward, then doubled up with pain. The new bread was having its effect on a stomach empty for five days. As bad as Marty, as bad as that little brain, thought Nigel, until he too was seized with pains like iron fingers gripping his intestines.

At least it stopped him wanting to eat up all the remaining bread. The worst of the pain passed off after about half an hour. Joyce was lying face-downwards on the mattress, apparently asleep. Nigel looked at her with hatred in which there was something of despair. He thought he would have to give her an ultimatum, she either took the money and promised to keep quiet for a day or he shot her. It was the only way. He couldn't remember, but still he was sure his fingerprints must be somewhere on that Ford Escort, and they'd match them with his prints in the commune, his parents' home, every surface of it, being wiped clean daily, he thought. John Something, the furniture guy, would link him with Marty Foster and then . . . How long had he got? Maybe they were already in Notting Hill now, matching prints. Had Marty ever been to the commune? That was another thing he couldn't remember.

If he was going to South America it wouldn't make much difference whether he shot Joyce or not. He would try to do it when the house was empty but for old Green. And he would like to do it, it would be a positive pleasure. Although he knew the view from the window by heart, could have drawn it accurately or made a plan of it, he nevertheless went to the window and looked out to check on certain aspects of the lie of the land. This house was joined to only one of its neighbours. Nigel eased the window up – the first time it had been opened since Marty's occupancy – and craned his neck out. Joyce didn't stir. He was seeking to confirm that, as he remembered from the time before all this happened and he was free to come and go and roam the streets, no curtains hung at the windows of the second-floor flat next door. This was in the adjoining house. It was as he had thought, the flat was empty and there would be no one on the other side of the kitchen wall to hear a shot. Very likely the people in the lower flats were out at work all day.

He had withdrawn his head and was closing the window when he noticed a man standing on the opposite pavement. Nigel closed the window and fastened the catch. There was something familiar about the man on the pavement, though Nigel couldn't recall where he had seen him before. The man was wearing jeans and a dark pullover and a kind of zipper jacket or anorak, and he had thickish fair-brown hair that wasn't very short but wasn't long either. He looked about thirty-five.

Nigel decided he had never seen him before, but that didn't make him feel any better. The man might have been waiting for someone, but if so it was a strange place to choose, outside a church in a turning off Chichele Road. He could be a policeman, a detective. It could be he who had kept on ringing the bell. Nigel told himself that the man's clothes looked new and his get-up somehow contrived, as if he wasn't used to wearing clothes like that and wasn't quite at ease in them. He made himself turn away and sit down and go through the paper once more.

Ten minutes later when he went back to the window, the man had gone. He heard Bridey's door close and her feet on the stairs as she went off to work.

Alan was almost sure he had got the wrong room. The young man with the fair hair, who just now had opened the window and leant out as if he meant to call to his watcher, must be the Green whose name was on the third bell. After the window had closed and the angry-looking face vanished, Alan had crossed the road and pressed that third bell several times, stood there for seconds with his thumb pressed against the push, but no one had come down to answer it.

He walked away and was in the corner shop buying a paper when he saw the girl called Flynn go by. He would talk to her just once more, he thought. The Rose of Killarney was due to open in ten minutes.

This was the second time since Monday that he had come to Cricklewood. He would have come on Wednesday and made it three times, only he couldn't do that to Una, couldn't keep on lying to her. Besides, he thought he had exhausted his powers of invention with Tuesday's inspiration which was that he had to see his solicitor about Alison. Una accepted that without comment. She was busying herself with preparations for their departure on Friday, writing letters, taking Ambrose's best dinner jacket to the cleaners, ordering a newspaper delivery to begin again on Saturday. But Tuesday's sortie did him no good, he was no forrarder. Although he had spent most of the afternoon watching the house and walking the adjacent streets, he had seen no one, not even the Irish girl, come in or go out.

When he got back he had to tell Una he had been with the solicitor and what the man had said. It was easy for him to say that he would be giving up his share of his house to Alison because there was a good deal of truth in this, and he was rather surprised as well as moved when Una said this was right and generous of him, but how he must feel it, having worked for so many years to acquire it!

‘You must think me very weak,' he said.

‘No, why? Because you're giving up your home to your wife without a struggle?'

Of course he hadn't meant that, but how could she know? He longed to tell her who he really was. But if he told her he would lose her. He had done too many things for which no one, not even Una, could forgive him; the theft, the betrayal of Joyce, the lies, the deceitfully contrived fabric of his past.

That evening they had gone out with Caesar and Annie, but on the Wednesday they spent the whole day and the evening alone together. They found a cinema which was showing
Dr Zhivago
because Alan had never seen it, and then, appropriately, they had dinner in a Russian restaurant off the Old Brompton Road because Alan had never tasted Russian food. When they got home Ambrose phoned from Singapore where it was nine o'clock in the morning.

‘He was sweet,' said Una. ‘He said of course he understands and he wants me to be happy, but we must promise to come back and see him for a weekend soon and I said we would.'

Alan thought he would feel better about Joyce once he was in Devon and couldn't sneak out up to Cricklewood in the afternoons, for he knew he was going to sneak out again on Thursday. It was Una who put the idea into his head, who made it seem the only thing to do, when she said she'd buy their tickets and make reservations and then go on to the hairdresser. He could go out after she had gone and get back before she returned. He would definitely get hold of the Irish girl or of Green if Foster didn't answer his bell. It ought to be simple to find out what time Foster came home from work, and then catch him and, on some pretext, speak to him. With pretexts in mind, Alan picked up from the hall table in Montcalm Gardens a brown envelope with
The Occupier
written on it, and which contained electioneering literature for the County Council elections in May. He put it into his pocket. After all, it would hardly matter if Foster opened it in his presence and saw that it was totally inappropriate for someone who lived in Brent rather than Kensington and Chelsea, for by then Alan would have heard his voice.

It was a cool grey day, of which there are more in England than any other kind, days when the sky is overcast with unbroken, unruffled vapour, and there is no gleam of sun or spot of rain. Alan was glad of his windcheater, though there was no wind to cheat, only a sharp nip in the air that lived up to its name and seemed actually to pinch his face.

He began by pressing Foster's bell several times. Then he walked a little before trying again. It was rather a shock to see an old man come out of the house, because he had somehow got it into his head by then that, in spite of the names on the bells, only the Irish girl and the fair-haired young man inhabited the place. The old man was deaf. Alan caught him up a little way down the road and tried to ask him about Foster, but it seemed cruel to persist, a kind of torment, and he felt embarrassed too, though there was no one else about to hear his shouts.