Three Brothers (27 page)

“Healthy living, Maud.”

“That’s what I like to hear. I don’t doubt it for a moment. Do you, Guinevere?”

“What? No. Harry is always good to me.”

“I gather from Mrs. A. that you have a healthy appetite. Even for her food. You are very brave.”

“He eats carefully, Mummy.”

In fact the Hanways remained polite and good-natured in each other’s company; they had so few mutual interests that they found it unnecessary to quarrel. They shared the house. That was all.

Harry always took a shower after he had returned from an encounter with Lady Flaxman, and then climbed into bed smelling only of almond-scented gel. He felt no guilt about the matter. It was, as Lady Flaxman had said, business. Already he had been promoted to the post of chief executive, with a large rise in salary; the more money he earned, the more fervent became his lovemaking.

One evening Harry, on a visit to Cheyne Walk, heard the sound of high-pitched laughter from behind the closed door of Martin Flaxman’s sickroom. He put his ear to the door, and made out the voice of Lady Flaxman. “Look at you, you old tart,” he heard her say. “You’re all knocked up. Finished. I just wanted to let you know that I am spending your money and fucking your editor. Or whatever he was. Enjoying myself, sweetheart, I really am. That’s never happened before. Oh, one other thing. I always hated you touching me. I despised you. But I don’t want you dead. Oh no. I want you to be a vegetable. While I’m having fun. Now look. You’re dribbling. Does that mean you can hear me? Is that your new way of crying?”

Lady Flaxman was always capable of surprising Harry. “That day is coming,” she said to him at the beginning of March, “the holy day.”

“What day is that?”

“Mother’s Day. It has always been a sacred day in my book.” She had in fact consigned her ailing mother to an inexpensive care home in Bromley, and had never visited her there. “Is it for you, Harry? Is your mother that special person in your heart?”

“I have told you that my mother is dead.” He looked back at her impassively.

“Oh yes. Sorry. I forgot.” She put her hands upon her hips and began to sing. “ ‘Sally. Sally. Pride of our alley. You’re more than the whole world to me.’ Lovely old song, isn’t it? Wartime. Gracie Fields. Our Gracie.”

He looked away.

Lady Flaxman began to inflict on him little humiliations. She once handed him his tie neatly cut in half. “I do hate that colour,” she told him. “It makes you look like a cinema attendant.” On another occasion she ordered him to gargle with an antiseptic. “The smell of drink on your breath is so vulgar.”

The resentment, and the instinct for revenge, were by now deeply planted in him. At night, while lying beside Guinevere, he would entertain fantasies of following Lady Flaxman and striking her down unseen and unknown.

One morning he went into the drawing room of the house in Cheyne Walk, and found her standing beside a small and highly polished oval table. “I’ve had enough,” she said. “I have decided to tell Guinevere. She ought to know what kind of husband she has. How can I keep a secret like that from my own daughter?”

He looked at her curiously, not clearly taking in what she had said. “I don’t understand what you mean.”

“It’s very simple, Harry. I intend to tell Guinevere about us.”

Slowly he comprehended the fact that his life was about to change for the worse. “Why do you want to do that?”

“What can I tell you? Life’s a bitch. And so am I.” She paused to consider. “Why does anyone want to do anything? I do it because I
can
. I do it because I
like
it. I like you, Harry, hard though it is to believe.” He stepped towards her, but she looked at him defiantly. “Have you ever wanted to do the one thing you know you should not do? Wouldn’t that be a great relief? To press the button that might destroy you? And then it becomes more like a need. The need to fling yourself off the cliff. It would not be right, of course. But what are right and wrong anyway? Just words.” She shook her head. “I can’t explain. I just want something to happen, Harry.”

“You can’t do it.”

“I can do anything. Watch.” She picked up the telephone on the oval table, and began to dial a number. So he went towards her, snatched the telephone from her hand, and began to wrap the cord around her neck. She seemed not to resist, or perhaps he did not notice her resistance. He pulled the cord tight and watched her eyes as he throttled her; they soared upwards.

He shook her, enraged by her weak response, and then pushed her violently to the floor; the telephone fell upon her left shoulder, but she was no longer moving. He stood over her for a minute or so, waiting patiently for any sign of life so that he could extinguish it. He realised then that she was staring at him in surprise, almost as if he had made a sudden and unexpected remark.

He left the house and, closing the front door very quietly, he walked across the street towards the Thames. As he approached the river he stopped, and looked around. It was a dry clear day, and the air was very still. A small flock of pigeons, animated with one purpose, landed on the green that
lay between the house and the river. He started walking on the embankment road, thinking of nothing. His mind was completely clear and untroubled, doing nothing more than receive the impressions of the world around him.

When he reached Battersea Bridge he was invaded by a sudden fear; he fled in panic. Although he did not know who his pursuer was, he did not dare look over his shoulder. Then it occurred to him that he was trying to run away from himself. At that point his panic subsided; he stopped, his shirt damp with sweat, when he came up to Vauxhall Bridge. He did not think about what had happened. It held no meaning for him.

There were sounds all about him—horns, whistles, bells, shouts and cries surrounded him. He might have drowned in the clamour. Yet he had the strangest sensation that all this noise emanated from himself. He was the source of the commotion. He sat down on a bench beside the river. Wait and hope. Wait for what? Hope? He could see only darkness for him; darkness behind, and darkness ahead.

He was coming up to Westminster Bridge, where the landing stages for the river-boats lined the bank. Ticket sellers were calling out “Kingston!” and “Richmond!,” “Greenwich!” and “Kew”; for a moment he contemplated the choice of one of these destinations. One would be as good as another. But then he changed his mind. He walked onto the bridge. As he approached the rail overlooking the river, he wondered what Sam and Daniel were doing at this particular moment. He tested the rail with his hand, and as Big Ben tolled midday, he eased himself across it and jumped into the water. A dog barked somewhere. It was just an ordinary day.

Surprisingly good

D
ANIEL
H
ANWAY
approached the television studios of Shepherd’s Bush in a state of terror. What if he could not master or remember his words, or sweated uncontrollably, or said quite the wrong thing? He had been asked to participate in a panel discussion on a biography of Mary Shelley, a new novel by Graham Greene, and a history of New York. None of these subjects remotely interested him, but he had forced himself to concoct opinions on all of them. He wrote these opinions on small pieces of paper, and then memorised them.

As he approached the reception desk he felt a curious lightness in his head. He allowed himself to be conducted into a lift, and then into a passage, and then into a small room where he was greeted by a young woman who called herself a researcher. “I’m Camilla,” she said, “you’re the first. Tea or coffee?”

He was in a kind of trance. “Yes,” he said, “that will be fine.”

“Tea or coffee?”

“Neither, thank you.” He did not believe that he had the strength to swallow anything.

The two other guests, on the book panel with him, were a biographer and a journalist who had been the New York
correspondent of the
Chronicle
. Daniel knew both of them by reputation, such as it was, but had not met either of them. They seemed to him to be making every effort to appear calm and casual at the prospect of the ordeal.

The biographer was an easy-mannered middle-aged man who seemed to be the very epitome of bland equability. Every word was correct, every expression and gesture measured. He purred his words, and gently chuckled at his own wit. Daniel did not trust him. The journalist was sharp and, even to a stranger like Daniel, a little acerbic; his words came out in a volley, his voice rising and falling in continual exasperation. Daniel was wary of him. He did not pause to contemplate, however, what impression he was making on them.

They were led into a studio, a brightly lit room chill with the air of vacancy; it was unreal, with an abstraction of two sofas and a bookcase. There was a coffee table with a neat pile of books and four glasses of water upon it. A small microphone was being clipped to the lapel of his jacket as the presenter of the programme walked onto the set. Daniel had seen Helen Gurney before, as a participant in various documentaries connected to the arts. She had short dark hair, and wore a large pair of glasses that seemed to magnify the earnestness of her gaze. She spoke forcefully in a low voice, carefully modulated, but seemed to be half-apologetic about introducing anything as vulgar as a book panel. Her favourite phrase was “it seems to me.…” “Do you not think,” she asked Daniel as the camera turned upon him, “that feminism has changed the terms of the debate on Mary Shelley herself? It seems to me that her narratives must be deconstructed with much more care.”

How he managed to survive the half-hour of filming he did not know. His voice sounded forced and clumsy in this airless room; he believed that he was talking nonsense, despite the fact that he had carefully memorised most of his lines. It had been an entirely meaningless exercise, in which all of the
participants were in some way degraded. “Yes,” he said at the end, summarising the study of New York, “surprisingly good.”

“And on that note we must leave it. Goodbye from everyone on
Book Ends
.”

When he came out onto the street on the west side of Shepherd’s Bush Green, he welcomed the cold wind as it cleansed him. The Green itself was largely grey, the earth getting the better of the grass, and unlovely. Daniel did not know this western part of London well; it did not have the freedom and the airiness of Camden Town and the rest of North London. It seemed intimate and over-familiar. This was the effect that certain areas of the city had upon him.

He passed a small boy in the street, muttering to himself, shrugging his shoulders, raising his hands into the air and gesticulating wildly. “What am I supposed to do?” the child was asking with such a look of misery and helplessness upon his face that Daniel turned away. But then he felt the pavement beneath his feet, and the obduracy of London began to enter him. He decided to go underground at Holland Park, and travel to Liverpool Street where he could take the Cambridge train. The lift took him down to the east-bound platform, the sound of its metal gates following him as he walked through the passage. He did not know the Central Line well. He was accustomed from his childhood to the Northern Line, which seemed always to carry with it the sensations of the northern heights of Hampstead and Highgate. The Central Line was closer and more intimate; the platform was warmer, and the sound of the train as it entered the station less harsh.

He settled in the carriage with a sigh of relief. It was already midday, when the majority of people were at work, and there was a sense of illicit pleasure about the journey. It was almost luxurious. He passed through Notting Hill Gate and Queensway, when the train came to a sudden halt before it reached Lancaster Gate; the brakes shrieked and the train slid a few
feet before becoming still. Daniel looked at one or two of the passengers, but there was no sign from them of disquiet or alarm.

He remained still, and looked out of the window at the darkness all around him. This tunnel had been bored through the London Clay, laid down some forty million years before. He was travelling within prehistory, held up by the remains of an unimaginable past. There was a noise as of sudden thunder ahead of the train. He imagined a vast invasion of water or, perhaps, a reawakening of some prehistoric life. But the noise passed; it was that of another train entering a tunnel.

He left the tube at Liverpool Street and made his way along one of the white-tiled passages that conveyed travellers to various parts of the world above-ground. A mild breeze surprised him. It seemed to have come up from the depths and, at the same time, he heard the sound of drums being played somewhere in the distance. It was clear that this was the work of a busker, but that did not lessen his unease; he always felt a slight tremor of anxiety when he passed such people, and he avoided looking at them.

The drums were beating out a recognisable tune in the confined space, where they mixed with the sound of hurrying footsteps. He walked along the curve of the passage, and saw the busker halfway down; he was leaning against the white tiles with the drums strapped around his waist. It was an oddly casual or capricious stance. As Daniel came closer he sensed something familiar about the man. He looked more carefully, and saw that it was Sparkler. His instinct was to turn and run back down the passage, but that would draw attention to himself. He walked on, holding himself rigidly erect; he did not look at Sparkler directly, but he knew well enough that Sparkler’s eyes were following him. He expected him to speak, or to call out, but the only sound was that of the beating of the drums. They were beating more loudly as he walked on.

The two young men had been so close, so intimate in the past. Now Daniel had not stopped, had not spoken. He had glanced at Sparkler, and then walked away. Sparkler had seen him—he was sure of that—but had made no attempt to call him back.

The drumming stopped, and Daniel was suddenly convinced that Sparkler had decided to come after him; he fled down the passage and bounded up the stairs, two at a time.