The Third Angel (30 page)

She believed that people could lose themselves.

The sky in Scotland was inky and beautiful and the air smelled different. Maybe this is what that doctor who took the rabbit home was talking about, the blank space of the universe, so endless that people and their petty concerns didn't matter. They stopped in a pub so Lucy's father could have a drink. Lucy had a ginger ale and her father had a glass of port. They ordered cheese and pickles and a plate of haddock and potatoes.

“I think this thing with Charlotte isn't going to work out,” Ben Green said while they were having their dinner. “I'm sorry I put you through that.”

Lucy hadn't told her father that she was the reason two people had died. She never intended to tell him. He had no idea that Charlotte had called Teddy Healy because Lucy dropped the letter. He would never know that Lucy heard Michael Macklin's cry all the time, in the back of everything. She couldn't get rid of it for a second.

“If I'm being asked my opinion, I prefer Rebecca,” Lucy told her father.

Ben laughed. “Me, too.”

They remained in Edinburgh for four days before heading off to the countryside.

“We'll be back,” Lucy told Mrs. Jones, who'd been teaching Lucy to knit. In the afternoons, after they'd been sightseeing, when Ben went to take a nap, Lucy had sat in Mrs. Jones's kitchen, where she learned how to do simple stitches: knit and purl, yarn over, knit two together. Mrs. Jones had given Lucy a skein of yarn that smelled like heather and salt, a purplish gray shade the color of dusk. Their landlady never talked about the children in the photograph, and there were no signs of children in the house, so Lucy never did ask. Mrs. Jones made jam tarts and Ovaltine so Lucy would gain back the weight she had lost. Once Lucy said, “My mother would have taught me how to knit if she was still alive.” She didn't know what made her say that; it just slipped out. Mrs. Jones didn't even glance up, but she insisted that Lucy and her father stay for supper, and for dessert she gave them slices of sour cream and green pear cake, which sounded bad but tasted delicious.

Now that it was time to go, Lucy didn't want to leave the hotel.

“You'll be back at the end of your trip,” Mrs. Jones said, and she offered Lucy some more yarn and a pair of wooden needles of her own so she could keep up with her knitting. This ball of yarn was even softer, the color of old leaves.

Ben rented a car and tried his best driving on the wrong side of the road. He made Lucy nervous. Once he nearly went into a stone wall.

“You're not going to kill us, are you?” Lucy said.

“Not if I can help it.”

They drove around the city until he got the knack of it. Lucy was nervous, and then she wasn't. Her father was a good driver. He was practical and adaptable, and he was a patient man. In little more than an hour it seemed as though he'd always been driving on the wrong side of the road.

“North, south, east, or west?” he asked Lucy before they really headed out.

They were living that way now, day-to-day. Everything was up in the air. Lucy thought it over.

“Definitely north,” she said.

T
EDDY HEALY HAD
not gone back to work or returned to his flat. His brother, Matthew, said there were things that happened in this world that people couldn't understand and certainly couldn't control; he suggested they go together to the church and talk to the minister, but Teddy had refused. Teddy had checked into a nearby hotel, one that had a view of the road where Bryn had died. It was morbid, but he didn't feel he was there for morbid reasons. He stayed there so that when he woke in the morning he could go to the window and remember. He was not going to pretend it hadn't happened. It had. There was no way to deny it. After a while, Teddy went to speak to the minister himself; the minister embraced him and told him it was not his place to question but to accept. Teddy shook the minister's hand, and he didn't go back to church.

The moment he most often replayed was not the one when Bryn's sister phoned, or when Charlotte met him on a bench near the Serpentine to hand him the letter his beloved had written to Michael Macklin; it wasn't even when he read it and discovered that Bryn loved someone else. It was when he'd first seen her, in Paris, sitting in the Tuileries, just across from the Musée d'Orsay. He had a meeting with a real estate firm in Paris, and if he hadn't, if Barry Arnold had gone from the London office in his place and Teddy hadn't taken off the afternoon and walked through the garden, he wouldn't have looked up to see a beautiful young woman with long, pale hair sitting in the sun. As it was, he'd watched her doze off, already falling in love with her. When she opened her eyes that was it.

Now Teddy felt like a science experiment gone wrong. What had attracted him to her? Her scent? The shade of her eyes when she looked up at him? The fact that the lilacs looked pink in the afternoon air? The sound of pigeons and of doves? His own metabolism? His own history? Paris?

He had asked her to lunch, where she told him that she was in love with someone. She tried to be honest with him, but he didn't want to listen. They ate sandwiches and olives and drank white wine. She was on a trip till the end of the year; she had gone to Amsterdam before coming to Paris, but she'd never been to London. She leaned over at one point, after she'd had too much to drink, and she'd said, I want someone to save me. That was the instant that had stayed with him more than any other. Another man might have run, but not Teddy. He and Matthew had lost their parents very early, in a train accident, and had been raised by an aunt. There was not a day when Teddy didn't think the situation might have been different if he'd been on that train rather than playing football at school. He might have heard the squeal of the brakes, he might have thrown open the window, helped his parents climb out of the wreckage. He might have done something.

He and Bryn spent the night together. She had cried at first and she'd said there was someone else, but she was lonely and in the end she was the one who asked him to stay. She came to London because of that loneliness, because Teddy was the only one she knew in Europe and she didn't want to stay on in Paris alone, because he was kind, because he was so in love with her.

When her parents heard about him after her older sister Hillary visited London, they wrote Teddy a letter to say how happy they were that Bryn had found love; they insisted they would pay for the wedding. They hadn't discussed marriage, but after that letter from her parents Teddy had thought, Of course, we should get married, and he'd gone out to look for the ring. Bryn slept late and went to bed early, so he left the ring on the table before going to work and when he came home that evening the diamond was on her finger. It was much more than he could afford, but Teddy wanted his love to be obvious; he wanted her to know how he felt. He didn't notice when she took off the ring; they were no longer engaged and he'd never even known it.

Matt came to visit him at the hotel where he was living. It was called the Eastcliff and it had neither a bar nor a restaurant. Teddy brought his own liquor up to his room; he'd been drinking hard and he hadn't showered. He was twenty-eight years old. Matt was older by eighteen months, but Teddy now seemed like an old man.

“You can't let this kill you,” Matt said. “It was terrible, all right, but unexpected things happen in life. No one knows that better than you and I.”

Matt was an organizer; he worked at the same bank as Teddy. Now he went into high gear. Matt rented his brother a new flat, got rid of the old furniture, especially the things that would remind Teddy of Bryn, the bed for instance, and his wedding suit, and all those gifts that had arrived. He got Teddy a week's leave, and at the end of that week Teddy had been moved into the new flat near Lancaster Gate and was ready to go back to work, more or less. People approached him tentatively, as though he'd been through a grave illness and was still quite weak. He did his work, true enough, but on the way home he had begun to stop at the Lion Park bar. It turned out that he was weak. He began to drink in earnest.

When Teddy opened the door on the night he saw them together in bed, everything he thought he knew and believed in had shifted. In a way, he'd made it happen. He couldn't just walk away; it was exactly as it had been when he'd met her and he'd refused to listen. He had stopped at the desk when he arrived at the Lion Park and demanded the key from the night clerk, who seemed too confused by his request to deny him. Then he'd run up the stairs. He knew it was bad, knew it was over. Why had he needed to see for himself? Because he needed proof? Because he didn't really believe it? They were utterly tangled together, in the midst of making love; he barely recognized Bryn, it was her back he saw at first, long and white and beautiful. She hadn't even heard the door open.

He started shouting and he couldn't stop. Not when she turned to him, not when she stayed where she was, stunned, while the man she was with moved quickly to cover her with a sheet. He said she had betrayed him. That she was committed to him and had to marry him. He didn't recognize his own voice. Who would want a woman who didn't love him? Who would never really belong to him?

He grabbed her while she was hurrying to pull on her slip. She tried to explain it wasn't about him; she was already married when they'd met; she'd been wrong to make any promises. He pulled her close and said something horrible. That was the instant he could never forget. That was what drove him to the bar at the Lion Park each night. You don't deserve to live is what he'd said. He'd turned on the man then, and hit him straight on, and that's how Bryn managed to get away. The other man, the one Bryn loved, had finally punched him back in order to go after her.

Teddy Healy drank his whisky neat, and sometimes the bartender would put a sandwich or a bowl of stew in front of him. Sometimes he ate and sometimes he kept to his drinking. One night, when he was good and drunk, Teddy Healy went upstairs. He had never done so before this night. It was raining and his bones hurt as though he were an old man. It was late September by then and chilly and the hotel was not as full as it had been over the summer. On the seventh floor there were strips of wallpaper torn from the lower wall from the time when the pet rabbit had wandered off. The hallway was downright cold.

Teddy went to what had been Michael Macklin's room and knocked. There were no guests, so he opened the door. He smelled something. Lilacs. He backed away, but before he could leave he heard a man's voice. He leaned his head against the wall and the oddest thing happened: He saw himself in the doorway, shouting, in a rage. It was impossible and yet it was true. There he was.

Teddy went back downstairs to the bar and drank even more. Every night afterward he went upstairs at the very same time, and every time he found himself there, the man he used to be, the person he no longer knew, someone who'd believed in things.

“She's not here, man,” the bartender said one night when Teddy could barely stand by the end of the evening, when he dragged himself off his stool in order to go upstairs at the appointed hour. “It's not her ghost up there, so you might as well stop looking.”

“Have you ever felt that you lost something and you can't get it back? As though it's been stolen right out from under you?”

“Sure,” the barman said. “It's called life.”

There was only one person who could ever understand. The girl, Lucy Green, who had seen everything. That night Teddy had spied her in the doorway after Bryn and the other man had run out. He had seen the expression on her face. It was as if an angel had been trapped in a cage of blood and bones, torn apart from the inside out. She looked stunned; she shouldn't have been there. They stared at each other and in that instant Teddy felt something he had never in his life felt before: a total connection of thought and emotion. They were there in the same exact moment, having the same exact thought.

Then the girl turned and ran. That was the difference. Teddy stayed in the room that smelled like lilacs while Lucy fled. She had seen everything, all that ugliness. As for Teddy, he hadn't wanted to see anymore. He sat down on the bed where Bryn had been with that man, and he didn't even cry.

As a penance, Teddy joined a group that did clean-up work in parks throughout the city. He enjoyed working outside and was amazed by how much wildlife there was in London. He saw foxes in the middle of the city one morning, startled by his presence as he used a long net to collect trash from a fens. He was struck by the way the foxes ran off together, looking behind them to make sure he wasn't following them. Teddy sat down on the grass. He was wearing high rubber boots, a mac, and old paint-splattered trousers that he used for such chores. Sometimes Teddy thought about Lucy Green and what she had seen and he just couldn't bear it. The oddest thing would put him in mind of the look on her face, just as the foxes had.

The following Sunday, he went back to his church; he had missed it. He talked to his minister about the existence of a soul; he tried his best to understand. The goodness within a human being was what he'd thought it must be, the innocent spirit, but his minister had said no, it was the essence of a person. Pure and simple. The deepest, most complete part, the part that was called to God.

And without that a person goes to hell? Teddy had asked.

Without that you live in hell, the minister said.

T
EDDY REALIZED THAT
his life had been altered by a letter. The only letters he'd ever written were thank-yous to his aunts and cousins on the occasion of his birthdays when he'd been sent presents; the only ones he'd received were from relatives he'd never met in Australia, sympathy notes after his parents had died. But one letter written by Bryn had changed his life, and then in October came another. It arrived at the Lion Park with his name on it. It was actually several days before he received it. The hotel clerk was marrying the cook and everyone was in a tizzy. The wedding was to be held in the Lion Park restaurant and everyone who worked there was invited. One night when Teddy arrived the barman said, “Sorry Teddy, but we're closed for the evening. Private party.” He handed Teddy the letter. “Dorey's been so caught up in her arrangements, she forgot to give you this. Lord knows why it was sent here.”