The High Flyer (14 page)

IV

Tucker was wearing an eye-zapping shirt—sky-blue but with wide cream stripes—and a silver-buckled belt which slunk sinuously around the waistband of his tight black trousers. The open neck of the shirt revealed curly dark hair which might or might not have had a reddish tinge when exposed to strong sunlight, and his sleeves were demurely buttoned at the wrists, a fashion statement which would no doubt have sent all the office fluffettes into a fresh frenzy of speculation. I almost felt fluffy myself but decided this was just the result of drinking Alice’s sherry.

“Greetings, Ms. G!”

“Hey, Tucker! Why aren’t you in seclusion, toiling away on your book?”

“I got hungry. We starving authors are notoriously reliant on good women who throw us a crust every now and then in the name of Christian charity!”

I said poker-faced: “So glad you’re getting a change from champagne.”

“Talking of crusts,” said Alice, “do stay to dinner, Carter! There’s plenty to eat and you’d balance the numbers so beautifully—do say you’ll stay!”

For one long moment I thought how pleasant it would be to remain in that warm, welcoming room while I jousted with the tiger-thumper and traded quips with Tucker and displayed feminine solidarity with Alice, but I knew I had to go. I could not bear to keep fulfilling Mrs. Mayfield’s prophecy—or rather, her outrageously lucky guess—and anyway there was no point in being drawn further into a world which had no place in my life-plan.

“Thanks, Alice,” I said, “but my husband’s expecting me. I’ve got to get back.”

“I’ve a feeling we’ll meet again,” said the tiger-thumper, giving me a very straight look with his sharp black eyes, “but meanwhile I wish you well.”

Another prophet! Repressing a shudder I murmured a politeness and edged away.

“Drop in at the St. Benet’s Healing Centre some time!” said Tucker impulsively. “I’m there every Thursday evening as a Befriender, doing the late shift!”

“Befriender?”

“Trained listener for people in trouble. We’re like the Samaritans.”

I was quite unable to stop myself lingering. “You mean you do voluntary work?”

“It’s the condition I have to fulfil in order to live at my brother’s vicarage . . . By the way, how’s the chap who went native in Beijing?”

“Still faxing quotes from Confucius.”

I heard him laugh. I longed to stay. My hand even faltered before it reached the catch which opened the front door.

“Thanks for your help, Alice,” I said in the hall. “If ever you want moral support, just give me a call.”

Alice seemed delighted by this offer. Indeed it was touching how grateful she was. I found it amazing that a London woman could reach her mid-thirties and still appear so unspoiled by the sheer nastiness of so much urban life, and I wondered if she had spent her twenties being a nun, marooned in some place where life had passed her by. She had the air of a Cinderella who had not been too long at the ball, and I felt unexpectedly protective of her, as if she were in some strange way a reflection of my younger self, the self who had arrived in Oxford to play Cinderella in the 1970s.

Having grabbed a cab in Farringdon Road I cruised south to the Barbican. The slim, sharp-edged tower-blocks were visible ahead, conjuring up images of sharks’ teeth, and the thought of sharks reminded me with a shiver of Kim. I had lied to Alice. My husband was not waiting for me at home. It was Tuesday evening and he had gone to the Simmonses’ flat in Wapping to say goodbye to the group. He had told me he would be home by nine and I knew I had to spend the intervening time figuring out what I was going to say to him, but the trouble was my mind was now shying away from Alice’s firm opinion that Sophie was sane. I could not face the implications. I was too tired—and too shell-shocked still from the revelation that Kim had no desire for children. My mind now only wanted to close down.

I was half afraid I would find the flat in disarray again, but to my relief everything was in order. Suddenly my exhaustion overwhelmed me. Stumbling into the bedroom I flaked out on top of the duvet.

When Kim woke me later by shutting the front door, the darkness at once made me wonder what time it was, and remembering his promise to be home by nine I glanced at the luminous figures of the bedside clock.

The hands pointed to twelve minutes past midnight.

V

I shot off the bed, flicked on the lights in the passage which led from the hall to the living-room and caught him as he padded noiselessly away across the thick carpet.

“What the hell’s going on?”

He swung to face me but remained calm. “Didn’t you get my message?”

“What message?” I said before remembering that I had flaked out without checking the new answering machine. “Sorry,” I said confused. “I goofed.” Following him down the corridor I entered the living-room and played back the message. He had said: “I’ll be leaving the group early, as promised, but I’ll be back later than I anticipated. I’ll explain later.”

“So explain,” I said, resetting the machine.

“I had to take Mrs. Mayfield home.”

“Damn the woman! Okay, you had to go all the way from Wapping in the east to Fulham in the west and then double back as far as the City, but in the evening you could do that journey without getting stuck in traffic jams. Why the long delay?”

“Mrs. Mayfield asked me in.”

“What for?”

“A cup of tea.”

“You sat drinking tea for”—I did a quick calculation—“well over two hours? What on earth were you talking about?”

“This and that.” He yawned, wandered into the kitchen and filled a glass with Evian water. I stared at him. The mildness of his reactions and the languor of his movements made me wonder if he was drunk. It was as if someone had put a stifling hand on his personality and caused it to blur at the edges.

“How did the parting with the group go?” I said sharply, changing tack to give myself more time to analyse his behaviour.

“Fine. No problem. Mrs. Mayfield saw to that.” He yawned again before drinking more water.

“Excuse me asking,” I said, keeping my voice as calm as his as I followed him to the bedroom, “but what exactly did you discuss with Mrs. Mayfield?”

“What I always discuss with her: my problems. I hadn’t realised how steeply my stress levels had been rising as the result of Sophie acting up and Mandy spilling the beans and you saying you wanted children, but as soon as I started talking—”

“For Christ’s sake!” I was shocked to the core. “Kim, that conversation of ours was private! How dare you go repeating it to that woman!”

“But she was great! She made me feel laid-back. I’m fine now.”

A horrific thought struck me as I watched him clumsily unknot his tie. “Kim, have you been taking drugs?”

Instantly he sharpened up. Now it was his turn to sound shocked. “Not unless you count Mrs. Mayfield’s herb tea! Give me a break, Carter—you know I’d never do such a thing!”

I was silent. I did indeed know we had identical views on the subject of drug-taking, a practice which was becoming increasingly frequent among the City’s white-collar workers, although only a lawyer with a yearning to self-destruct broke the law by toking up at work. Curtis, Towers had a policy of instant dismissal if anyone was caught abusing illegal substances, and Graf-Rosen’s rules were similarly tough. What the whippets and fluffettes did outside the office was their own affair, but no high flyer who wanted to stay aloft risked ruin for a drug habit, just as no high flyer risked becoming too dependent on alcohol. One needed to keep one’s wits razor-sharp. At work I never even drank in the lunch-hour. My drinking was strictly an after-hours activity.

I heard myself say levelly: “Nevertheless you’re giving the impression you’ve taken a hit. Just what was in Mrs. Mayfield’s herb tea?”

“Sweetheart, you’re being paranoid about Mrs. Mayfield!”

“Look,” I said, trying hard to stay calm but not altogether succeeding, “this woman makes no secret of the fact that she thinks I’m bad news. Can’t you understand how hurtful it is to me to know you’ve consulted her behind my back and told her about that very private conversation we had this morning?”

“I’m sorry, but I felt I just had to get advice about how to put things right—”

“But we’d have worked everything out! I still don’t see why you—”

“I’ve got to go to the bathroom,” he interrupted, and escaped.

I shed my clothes, pulled on my robe and sat bolt upright on the edge of the bed. My brain, soothed by several hours of deep sleep, was now firing on all cylinders, but in contrast Kim’s brain was clearly cob-webbed. If I was going to hit him hard for crucial information this was the time to do it, and although the thought of another row was appalling, I felt I had to know what the truth was about Sophie and the disorder in the flat.

To psych myself up I pictured Kim confiding in Mrs. Mayfield. That certainly triggered the adrenaline rush I needed, and as I took a deep breath to prepare for blast-off, Kim wandered back from the bathroom. “My pupils look normal,” he commented. “I think we can exonerate Mrs. Mayfield’s herb tea.”

“Well, ain’t that grand!” I snapped. “But it’s you I’m interested in exonerating! Now just you tell me this: did you make that mess in the flat yesterday and encourage me to blame Sophie?”

His eyes widened. I could see him struggling to work out first if he had heard me correctly, second how I could have come up with such a theory and third how he should react, but unfortunately this sequence was proof of neither innocence nor guilt, only of the fact that I had stunned him. I decided to twist the knife.

“You could have made that mess yesterday morning before you left for the office,” I said. “In fact that’s the most obvious explanation.”

He said flatly: “You’re out of your mind,” and slumped down on the bed before demanding: “What was my motivation, for God’s sake?”

“You tell me.”

He groaned and began to unbutton his shirt. “All I’m going to say is that I’m dead beat and in twenty seconds from now I’m going to be unconscious. We’ll talk tomorrow.”

“It
is
tomorrow. Kim, if I didn’t love you so much, I’d let this ride, but—”

“You can’t be serious about such a grotesque theory!”

“I’m certainly serious in thinking there’s something profoundly off-key going on and that it’s all connected with Mrs. Mayfield!”

He flung his shirt on the floor and stood up again. “Let’s try and get this straight. You’re upset because you feel I’ve betrayed you by talking to Mrs. Mayfield about a private matter. But my conversations with her are entirely confidential, and if she were a qualified therapist you wouldn’t think twice about what I’ve done!”

“But she’s not a qualified therapist! And how can she possibly give you objective advice about your marriage anyway when she’s admitted she’s utterly opposed to it?”

“I think she’ll come round to the marriage. I think that in time—”

“What time? You told me you were going to break with her as soon as possible!”

“Yes, I know I told you that, but if she comes to accept the marriage—”

“My God, she’s been trying to make you go back on your decision to junk her! Kim, can’t you see how she’s manipulating you? Can’t you understand what’s happening?”

“It’s you who can’t understand!” Suddenly he had sloughed off his sleepiness as easily as he had stripped off his shirt, and had fired himself up to counter-attack. “The trouble with you,” he said exasperated, “is that you refuse to acknowledge the spiritual dimension of life—you’re so keen to escape reality that you’re like a horse in blinkers, only able to see the scenery straight ahead and missing the view on either side!”

“Well, if the view on either side encompasses horrors like Mrs. Mayfield, thank God for blinkers, that’s all I can say! Too bad you don’t have any blinkers of your own!”

“Shut up and listen,” he said seizing control of the conversation, but I hadn’t lost the game, not yet, not by a long chalk, because he was now so annoyed that he might commit an indiscretion which I could use to open him up and drag the truth kicking and screaming into the light of day.

Sensing the conversation was about to move into an even more disturbing phase, I leaned back against the wall to fake an air of relaxation and waited for the chance to move in for the kill.

VI

“I may have given you the impression I don’t believe in God,” Kim was saying strongly, “but in fact what I meant, when I was telling you about my spiritual quest after my visit to Auschwitz, was: ‘He wasn’t there for me.’ I do think God exists somewhere, but he’s a very second-rate deity— he’s withdrawn from the world after making a mess of it, and so the forces we have to deal with on a day-to-day basis are the Powers and Principalities. Mrs. Mayfield just calls them the Powers.

“I lived with those Powers when I was growing up. I saw them all around me, I saw what they did to people, I saw what they did to my parents, but I had no power over the Powers, I had no more power than the little kids who died in the camps. I was regularly beaten up by the Powers, but there was nothing I could do except promise myself that one day—
one day
—I’d get the power to beat them back. And that was why I started chasing money and success. I worked and I worked and I worked and I did get power, but the power was never enough—the Powers still pursued me, I couldn’t throw them off, and finally there came a time, the time of the blackmail, when I thought I was done for, but Mrs. Mayfield saved me. She saved me because she had
real
power—she had power over the Powers, she could manipulate them, bend them to her will because she could access that Supreme Power, that primeval force, which ultimately controls them. So don’t ever ask me again what I see in Mrs. Mayfield, because when I’m wrestling with the Powers, she’s the one who knows how to rescue me. She’s the one who can send them back to their source, that primeval source from which they come.”

He slumped down on the bed as if exhausted by this outburst, but a second later he was on his feet again, too strung up to keep still.

“It’s evil which constitutes reality in this world,” he said, pacing up and down, “and what human beings long for most is to escape pain and suffering. Schopenhauer got that right—but of course you wouldn’t have read Schopenhauer. You never read anything except the latest laws on tax!”

“I may be very ignorant,” I managed to say, “but there’s one thing I do know and I didn’t need to read a book in order to find it out. What people want most of all is to love and be loved.”

“Don’t hand me that romantic rubbish! Love’s nothing but a built-in biological imperative to perpetuate the human race!”

Without hesitation I said: “That’s the nastiest speech I’ve heard for a long time, and to make matters worse it’s absolute crap!”

“But there are plenty of people who think as I do!”

“Yeah—people like Mrs. Mayfield! Power-junkies hooked on domination! Kim, can’t you honestly see that once you downgrade love like that you downgrade human beings, and once you downgrade human beings you’re squarely on the road to Auschwitz?”

“If you’re calling me a Nazi, I swear I’ll—”

“I know you hate the Nazis!” I cried. “But that’s exactly what makes this conversation so appalling! You’re talking as if your next line of dialogue is going to be: ‘
Heil Hitler!
’ ”

“Bullshit!” he shouted. “You don’t understand a single thing I’ve said! The Third Reich was generated by the Powers and Hitler abused his power to go along with them—he did everything he could to help them win! But my aim is always to defuse the Powers by controlling them and subjugating them. That’s the only way to feel safe and secure! That’s the only way to ensure a decent, normal life!”

“All right,” I said rapidly, recognising that his distress was genuine, “you’re basically one of the good guys. But I still think there’s something unreal about this world-view of yours. There’s a sort of nothingness about it . . . a sort of absence of something . . . an absence of the good perhaps, yes, that’s it; you’re concentrating all the time on the darkness of evil, but what about the light? What about beauty and joy and all the experiences which make one feel it’s great to be alive? For instance, what about that terrific sex we had last Friday? That was such a great way of expressing our love for each other—are you seriously trying to tell me it was nothing but a manifestation of a biological drive?”

All his aggression vanished. Painfully he said: “I was unsure how well you liked that.”

“My darling Kim—”

“You shouldn’t have faked it.”

“Okay, I’ll come clean: I was getting sore. But that doesn’t alter the fact that it was great sex! I felt really guilty that I needed to call a halt—I felt you didn’t deserve to be disappointed by a partner who was less than perfect, and that was another reason why I—”

“For God’s sake, you were making love, not sitting the Law Society examinations!” he said, still too upset to laugh but struggling for a humorous response to end the quarrel, and a second later we had blundered into each other’s arms.

“Surely you can admit now,” I said at last after we had embraced fiercely, “that love’s more important than power?”

“But love’s dependent on power.”

“What do you mean?”

“When I watched my father go to pieces after the war I realised that a man’s got to be macho and he’s got to have power if he wants a woman to keep on loving him. Otherwise she just goes off and screws someone else.”

I was appalled. “Not if she loves him!”

“Now you’re being romantic and sentimental again. Admit it—it was the power which first attracted you to me! I could see how the power turned you on as soon as you found out what I did and could figure out how much I earned!”

I forced myself to answer steadily: “In the beginning I wasn’t looking for love, just for sex. But our relationship’s travelled a very, very long way since then.”

“If I lost my job tomorrow you’d leave me.”

“Don’t be absurd!”

“If you found out I was powerless you’d be gone. That’s the way of the world. That’s rock-bottom reality.”

“No,” I said stubbornly. “You’re wrong. Rock-bottom reality is that I love you. Rock-bottom reality is love.”

He moved blindly back into my arms again and I hugged him with all my strength. For a while neither of us spoke but when he released me at last he whispered: “I’d like to believe that. I really would.”

“Can’t you at least believe that I love you?”

“Yes, but I’m afraid the Powers will smash your love up unless I’ve got the means to beat them back. I’ve got to have the strength,” he said, turning away from me, “to keep wrestling with the Powers, and at the moment Mrs. Mayfield’s the one who ensures I have that strength, Mrs. Mayfield’s the one who can control the Powers so that they don’t overwhelm me. One day,” he said, “I believe I’ll be strong enough to do without Mrs. Mayfield, but I’m not quite strong enough yet. I’ve been through so much. I need more time.”

There was a long silence. Finally I said: “Okay, let’s leave it at that for now,” and standing on tiptoe I kissed him on the cheek.

But he barely heard me. “Carter, you don’t really think, do you, that I arranged that mess in the flat yesterday?”

“No, that was just a forensic trick to get you to open up. Let’s forget it,” I said, unable to summon either the nerve or the energy to return to the subject, but later I lay awake haunted by all my anxieties until dawn began to break again over the City.