Текст книги "Brond"

Автор книги: Frederic Lindsay

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SIX

The Reading Room consists of a set of concentric circles, the lending counter at the centre, department sub-libraries in rooms round the gallery. The entire structure acts as a reflector of noise; a shuffle echoed round the place. It was such an atrocious drawback in a library I was sure the architects must have won a clutch of awards. On my second circuit, heads came up, signalling fury or hope. At night when everybody was bored or desperate with studying it was a good place to pick up a girl.

As it happened the one I wanted was not there.

I was leaving when I wondered about the department rooms in the gallery. What else had I to do? My first plan had been to go to check the newspapers. The lure of old newspapers was not strong; I was tired and did not want to find out more that night. I was not sure if I wanted to find out more any time or ever. I was walking with only one stick. Properly, they should have a rubber ferrule on the end. Mine did not. My heel came down with a bump; my stick tapped. As I circled the gallery, all the heads below swung up like blind moles sniffing the air.

She was in the history library, a room about fifteen feet long, books on the walls, a table and half a dozen chairs in the middle. I looked at her through the glass. As if feeling my eyes, she glanced up. Her look was not welcoming.

I pushed the door. When it shut behind me, we were alone. All the coughs and sighs from below were shut out. In this echoing house of glass, the department rooms felt deceptively private. A character in one of my classes had claimed that one night about ten to nine, just before the building closed, he had glanced into the theology library and seen a couple on the job under the table. I tended to disbelieve the bit about the theology library – no sense in spoiling a good story.

‘History library,’ I said, ‘or English possibly. Sociology very likely. Theology too good to be true.’

‘What?’ she said looking frightened or maybe just bewildered.

‘I was thinking of something a guy told me.’

Impulse again; or a defence against the look on her face when she had seen me.

The look came back – only worse – when she noticed the parcel. It was still under my free arm; a kind of fixture. I hefted it gently in the air – it was heavy as Jackie had said – and laid it on the table in front of her.

‘Yours, I think.’

She pushed it back at me as if it was hot. Too hard, for it slid off and landed at my feet. I picked it up hoping it had ripped but its web of string and tape was intact. If it was to be opened, it wouldn’t be by accident.

‘I don’t know what you think you’re doing. I told you it would be collected. What’s the point of carrying it around with you?’

‘It started to tick.’

‘What?’

‘You know – tick. As in tick, tick, tock. Tick, tock. If it’s going to explode, I thought I’d bring it along so we could share it together.’

To my astonishment, she went white. Like a rabbit from a conjuror’s hat, instantly white, and ready to disappear. Shame and sympathy took me out of myself so that I went round the table to comfort her. She wrestled away from my arm and my hand took her breast which put me rapidly back into myself.

It was when she pressed back further from me that I realised I was holding the parcel by her head.

‘Please.’ I said. I put it back on the table and pushed it away from us. The memory of her breast’s weight lingered on my palm and fingers. ‘I was just being stupid.’

‘Why would you say it was a bomb? What made you say that?’

Suddenly I was infected by her fright.

‘Jesus! It isn’t, is it? You wouldn’t have—’

The passion of my cowardice persuaded her at once. In a blink, she went from terror to rage.

‘I can’t conceive of a mentality like yours. Do you ever read the papers or look at the television news? And it’s not funny!’ As usual when I was embarrassed, I was grinning. If I had been a puppy, I’d have rolled over to show her my belly. ‘Babies in prams burned. And people all torn to bits. While fools like you make jokes. You’d think God would strike you down!’

I had thought of that myself – about people being struck down all the time and how you could hardly ever see it as God’s work.

A shape moved past on the other side of the glass. If we went on like this a janitor would come up and throw us out. I sat down and tried to still her with my eye. It probably didn’t work with tigers either. She was scrambling up out of her seat when I caught her by the upper arm. For an instant she resisted and I felt the strength of her body and caught its scent, sweet with powder and sweat.

‘Sit down, you bitch!’ I heard myself saying. ‘Just hold everything for a minute.’

On the far side of the gallery, behind the closed doors of another library, a girl stared across for a long moment before she lowered her head. Perhaps she had decided it was all right; perhaps she had not even been aware of us, looking up unseeingly from the book she was studying. I wished I was across there beside her; we could worry together over some textual crux. After all, I had come to the city for the academic life.

‘Go if you want,’ I said without unclenching my fist from her arm. ‘But take your bloody Christmas present with you.’

‘You’re hurting me,’ she said.

At home, they always said I didn’t know my own strength.

‘I didn’t mean to. Will you please sit down?’

She rubbed her arm, pushing up the sleeve of her sweatshirt.

‘You can see the marks of your fingers.’ She turned her arm round and craned to see. ‘And your thumb. It’ll be black and blue.’

By the time she had finished saying all that she sounded judicial, almost cheerful.

‘See?’ she said. ‘I’m not running away.’

‘That’ll be a disappointment to her,’ I said nodding towards the girl across the gallery. She had lifted her head again to watch us. Lots of people were not made for the academic life.

‘She’s getting her eyes filled,’ Margaret said, original as ever.

‘She thinks we’re having a lovers’ quarrel. She’s bored with her book – Anglo-Saxon poetry or, I don’t know, mercantile law, and she’s looking at us and wishing somebody would push open the door and say, Come out of there, and I’ll show you some life.’

‘And she says, being a lawyer, caveat emptor.’

My mind went blank on the Latin tag then cleared. “Let the buyer beware.” I didn’t see the joke, but it sounded dangerously close to being witty. Of course, Kennedy would have explained, the RCs did a lot of Latin at school.

I indicated the parcel, cautiously so as not to upset her.

‘It’s not a bomb and so why not take it back?’

‘No one in his right mind would have thought it was so why don’t you keep it?’ she said.

It was a good question.

‘I wouldn’t mind. Why should I? Only I’m thinking of going back home. I can’t get a job so I’ll go home. No use Brond coming to collect it, if I’m not there. That’s all I was thinking . . .’

I trailed off. It would have made a reasonable story if I had worked it out before seeing her. Now, after all the melodrama, my reasonableness sounded weirdly unreasonable.

‘Why don’t you leave it with the people in the house? I can’t see why they’d mind.’

‘I tried that. My landlady wouldn’t touch it with a barge pole. To tell you the truth, she told me to get rid of it.’

Margaret had forgotten all about wanting to get away. She fixed those enormous eyes on my mouth as if she could read the words as well as hear them.

‘That’s terribly strange,’ she said. ‘What did you say that made her feel that way?’

‘Nothing. I told her you’d met Peter Kilpatrick; he’d given you it and asked you to give it to me. And I told her somebody was to call for it.’

‘Did you tell her Brond would send for it?’

I thought about that. I could remember Jackie’s arm and the knife chopping down on to the wooden board. Funny, I had caught hold of Jackie by the arm too.

‘Does it matter?’

‘I can’t see why it should.’ She looked offended. ‘It’s just very strange that she should talk that way.’

‘Maybe not. Since I was ill, they’ve decided to adopt me.’ I appointed Jackie an honorary member in Kennedy’s concern. ‘She was just being protective.’

‘Your landlady, you mean? Was that her that opened the door to me?’

‘That’s her. We call her Jackie. As a joke, you know . . . because her name’s Kennedy. It’s not very funny.’

As she showed no reaction, I thought it would be like her never to have heard of the ex-Mrs Onassis.

But when she did speak it was on a different track altogether.

‘If you think she’s old enough to be your mother, your eyes want tested. And another thing,’ she went on without taking a breath – inadvertently I kept monitoring the extraordinary evidences of her taking one – ‘where do you get off swearing at me?’

‘Me?’ I was astonished. ‘When have I sworn at you?’

‘Just now. You called me a– you know what you called me.’

We discussed lady dogs and then we found we were both ravenously hungry. Excitement does that to you. I had no money but she said it would be her treat. As we left, the girl in the other library watched us wistfully, which was a consolation although I still had the parcel under my arm.

SEVEN

The parcel lay on the bench seat between Primo and me. When it had occurred to me that it was still a fixture under my off-side arm, I had put it there between us as a gesture of goodwill. Looking at Primo's fingers on the steering wheel like a bunch of bananas, I felt goodwill was in season.

‘Primo?’

‘Uh–huh.’

‘I never did thank you for getting between me and that maniac Davie.’

The car swung into the side and stopped as abruptly as that length of executive metal could.

‘Don’t whine,’ Primo said seriously. ‘You were beginning to whine there. Sometimes it’s more dignified to say nothing. Believe me, ‘sincere advice.’

That was a long speech for him. Even when he had appeared outside the restaurant, he had only grunted what amounted to an invitation to climb in. He hadn’t explained why but then I hadn’t asked him. I had sat in the passenger seat looking up at Margaret.

‘Not you,’ Primo said to her. ‘Let’s keep it simple.’

When I twisted to look back, she was alone on the pavement like a girl who had been stood up by her date.

Now, as we drove, curry and two glasses of wine rumbled in my stomach. ‘My treat,’ Margaret had said. ‘I’m hungry too.’ She even beat me to paying for the wine; which was easy since I only had the price of a coffee. I had begun to ask myself what my chances were of getting somewhere with her. Why else, I asked, tossing my head, should a girl ply me with wine? Well, two glasses. After that Primo appeared with an invitation to join him that only his size prevented me from refusing. He had been sitting in the car waiting for us to come out.

After a while, I recognised a street like the one where Andy had collected Primo in the mornings, then another one like it and another. We rolled across potholes in an alley like a cart track and came into a street surrounded by black space. Tenements had been knocked down and, as the main beam flicked on, light lanced out across a plain of rubble. The road took a long curve uphill and we were back among decayed tenements with bricked-over windows like old men’s filmy eyes. When he switched off the ignition, it was very quiet. He came round the front of the car and opened the door on my side, which made it seem that he wanted me to get out. I got out.

‘Don’t forget the parcel,’ he said.

I had left it on the seat. He was holding the door open with his hand folded over the top. With all my strength I kicked the door shut and in the same movement turned to run for it. A vice caught me by the shoulder and turned me back. The door swung juddering.

‘Get your parcel,’ he said.

His voice sounded the same, no louder than before. I scrabbled inside and reached out the package. Curry and wine came up at the back of my throat.

We climbed the stairs. On the first and second landings the bulbs were out, probably smashed. Primo’s voice came out of the darkness.

‘I’ll say this for you,’ he said. ‘You can listen to advice.’

On the top landing, a gas jet flared blue. Primo laid the palm of his hand across the rough holes where a nameplate might have been torn out. He didn’t knock. Across the fingers under the first knuckles a welt of black and purple flesh was rising. It didn’t make him more human. I could hardly imagine how he had ignored the shock and pain or how fast he must have reacted to catch me. His voice had been level and low but as he bent his head, waiting, I saw sweat glitter on his cheeks.

In the flickering glare of the broken gas mantle, raw tears showed on the panels of the door. It looked as if it had been attacked with an axe. Squalor, poverty, I could imagine the flat behind the door. I was wrong though. Certainly the hall we entered, when the door had been opened by someone who went off too quickly for me to see him, was bare enough; but the first room into which Primo led me was comfortably furnished and the remnant of a meal showed where someone had eaten; wine glasses chimed as I brushed past the table. Primo nodded me towards the door into the next room.

Brond got up out of a deep armchair. He was wearing slippers and had the air of a man at home. There was a decanter on the little table beside the chair and he had a glass in his hand. He held out the other to me in what I thought was greeting until he tugged the parcel from under my arm.

‘You’ve brought my little surprise at last.’

I felt an astonishing relief at parting with it.

‘You’re welcome,’ I said. ‘I’m glad to be shot of it.’

I assumed the demeanour of someone getting ready to leave, but he offered me a drink in a tone that didn’t allow for refusal.

I sat in the chair facing his. My feet gave me messages about the depth of the carpet and between the curtained windows there was a tower system hi-fi deck flanked by tapes and records, lots of them. He seemed to be a man who was fond of music.

‘Whisky?’ he asked again patiently.

‘Please.’

‘You have a preference?’

I didn’t understand.

‘A favourite blend or a malt perhaps?’

‘A malt,’ I said.

He smiled.

I twisted in my chair to watch him. There were shelves of bottles.

‘Water, soda . . .?’

‘Water,’ I said.

Usually when I drank whisky I filled up with lemonade – a very sound lemonade. Just recently I had discovered tonic water and liked better than anything the odd sharpness it added.

‘Ideally,’ Brond said, ‘the water should be from the burn that feeds the distillery. I had business once with the managing director of—one of the malt whiskies, and he took a flask out of the safe in his office. It was water from the well in Ross-shire they used in reducing the malt for maturing.’ As he spoke, he poured a little water from a tall beaker into each glass. ‘Is that admirable or fanaticism? Either way we can only manage water from the tap here. Fortunately, it’s the softest city water in the world.’

He held up his glass and smiled at me through its amber light.

‘Here we are,’ he said, ‘in this warm room with a glass of Laphroaig. What can we have done to deserve it?’

Everything under my eye was clear and sharp-edged so that I knew about the grain of the table as well as the light changing in the glass and each of Brond’s words separately like objects you could weigh in your hand. He sat opposite me. The table stood just at the height of my knees as I lay back in the deep chair. The parcel lay on the table between us.

‘Slainte!’ he said, grinning as if at a private joke.

The whisky plucked at my temples.

‘So what’s inside?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You’ve been carrying it around, quite reluctant to be parted from it and yet you weren’t curious?’

‘I didn’t say I wasn’t curious.’

‘To take a peep inside must have been a temptation.’ He turned the box and I saw the dent from its fall when Margaret pushed it away in the library. ‘Was that how this happened?’

‘The wrapper’s still across it. There’s no way of telling what’s inside.’

He picked at the tape. It held firm and he eased place after place till it curled free. Once started it lifted off in one piece bringing with it a skin of brown paper. Unhurriedly, he picked at the tape until he had cleared the top. Gently then he started to tease out the knots on the string. I must have let out a breath for he smiled at me.

‘Like sharpening pencils,’ he said, ‘one of the not quite mechanical tasks that soothes.’

‘Wouldn’t scissors be faster?’

Just then, though, another knot parted and he folded back the wrapping paper. I could have cursed to see the box inside was also taped.

‘No need to be consistent,’ Brond said and he pushed his fingers in under the edge and ripped off the lid. It tore and shredded against the tape and he brushed the wreckage aside until the opening was cleared.

I craned forward so that our heads almost touched. Brond sat back.

‘Satisfy your curiosity.’

There was a towel folded round something. The cloth was stained, dull patches like fruit stains.

‘Someone’s been hurt,’ Brond said. He lifted the bundle out and laid it beside the box. All down each side of the cloth was marked. ‘Someone’s been hurt badly.’

Using the tips of his fingers, he flipped the bundle open.

‘Recognise that?’

‘I’ve never seen it before,’ I said.

‘You know what it is though?’

‘I’m not blind. It’s a gun.’

His smile seemed genuinely amused.

‘I suppose,’ he said, ‘you would have to drop this little box into the Brazilian jungle before there would be a chance of a finder who wouldn’t recognise that much.’

‘Has it been fired?’ I looked uneasily at the stains on the cloth.

‘More than once. Someone has been angry or frightened. I wonder which.’

The towelling would soak liquid up and there was so much staining. I was afraid. I had done nothing but, as I had learned the shapes of guns without handling them, heard them fired in films, seen newsreel deaths, so I had learned being innocent was no excuse.

‘I’ve never seen that thing before. It was a parcel I was trying to get rid of.’

Brond gathered the cloth round the grip and lifting the gun pointed it towards me.

I knew the function of a gun; its operations as a mechanism and their consequences. I understood what Brond was doing when he put his finger into a fold of the cloth and laid it on the trigger. I expected to die. I watched the slow pressure of his finger as he squeezed.

‘You were telling the truth,’ Brond said. ‘You don’t know anything about hand guns.’

‘You must be bloody mad. I might have died of fright.’

‘Young healthy man. You’re not fragile.’ He laid the gun down. ‘Czechoslovakian. A favourite weapon of terrorists.’

He put more whisky into a glass and laid it beside the one I had only sipped.

‘Neat this time, eh?’

I drank it off, choking a little, but the warmth ran down the centre of my body. I put my hand to my face and the index finger of my left hand touched my lips. They trembled and I willed them to be firm. Then as my upper lip pressed against my finger I felt the strong beating of my heart. I was alive.

‘A gun, a cloth that tells its own story – though pages are missing. If it tells of an end, we should be even more anxious to hear the middle and the beginning.’ He tipped up the box, stirred the wrappings with his hand. ‘No letter, no cryptic message. Only yourself and the question what is to be made of you.’

‘All this is nothing to do with me. I was asked to keep it—’

‘For a friend.’

‘No, for you.’

‘I had asked you to keep this for me?’

‘The girl who was with me in the restaurant. She brought it to my digs. She said she’d got it from Peter Kilpatrick.’ I waited but he gave no sign of recognising the name. ‘She told me Kilpatrick was going away and I was to keep the parcel. She told me you would collect it.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know why. Jackie wouldn’t keep it for me and I wanted her to but she wouldn’t. And I—’

‘You got suspicious.’

He sipped whisky and I looked down to avoid his eyes. He was a good listener; at least he hadn’t interrupted me to ask who Jackie was. It was possible, of course, that he didn’t need to ask. The shoe on his right foot had a raised platform sole. With a shoe like that, you would limp; the upper body dipping at each step. When I looked up, his eyes were on my face. It felt as if he was reading my thoughts.

‘The girl interests me,’ he said. ‘Tell me about her.’

‘Her name’s Briody. Margaret Briody. She’s a student – in her first year. I think – yes, it must be her first year, she’s in two of my Ordinary classes. You know her. She was at the Professor’s party.’

It tumbled out, whatever I knew; if I had known more, I would have told him. I had not thought of myself as being like that, but at the time I had no shame.

‘ “I want to be shot of it.” You said that a moment ago.’ Brond looked at me thoughtfully. ‘It’s an idiom, but an odd one. Yet you had no idea what was in the package?’

He picked up the gun again. My stomach clenched, but this time he pointed the muzzle at his own head.

‘The package you want to be shot of.’

In the silence, I could hear the parts slide across each other as he squeezed the trigger for a second time.

‘Russian roulette,’ he said, ‘devised in an obscenity of boredom. Your turn.’

‘For God’s sake!’

He put the barrel in his mouth and pulled the trigger, then pointed it at my stomach. I had had enough. I clutched my stick and headed for the door. Brond made no attempt to stop me. I tore it open.

Primo was sitting astride a chair facing me. Without getting up, he shook his head in warning. His hands rested on the chair back. The flesh across his fingers was pulpy and liver-coloured. It looked bad, as if one or more fingers might be broken.

I closed the door on him.

‘You still have some of your drink left,’ Brond said.

Slowly I went back and sat down. Since there was nothing better to do, I drank the whisky. It was a taste in my mouth, nothing more.

Brond brought the bottle and put it between us. We had a still life – the whisky, a muddle of wrapping paper, a length of marked towel, a gun.

‘I don’t want any more to drink.’

‘Nonsense.’ He poured into both glasses. ‘You’re what – six feet? With a sound pair of kidneys, excited as you are, you could finish the bottle and keep your wits.’

It was easier to drink than to argue.

‘We’ll have a longer chat another time. You’re an interesting young man. When I’m less pressed for time, you’ll tell me all about yourself.’

The absurd idea came into my head it was like a job interview; only instead of a knife to see if you balanced peas on it as a test there was malt whisky and a Czech gun.

‘I’m a student,’ I said. ‘I was given a parcel to keep. I wish I’d never seen it.’

Into the silence a clock behind me spaced sweet chimes.

‘What an uncomplicated young man you make yourself sound.’

He stood up and I followed him to the far door. With Brond leading the way, we passed through another room, a passage, another room. They were places we crossed – Brond in front, Primo behind me. No one knew I was here. Perhaps Margaret . . . No. She only knew I had gone away in a car.

We came into a small entrance hall. It looked very much like the one I had come in by, but smaller. When he opened the door, I saw across the landing the other door with its raw gouged panels.

I stepped over the threshold on to the dirty grey stone landing like a prisoner released.

‘Wait!’ Brond said. ‘This won’t do!’

Stopping me then was like a cruel joke. He touched my shoulder.

‘Your stick,’ he said. ‘You’ve left it behind. It must be by the chair in the study.’

Primo turned back into the flat. I concentrated on keeping upright; I wanted my face to be without expression. Don’t whine, had been Primo’s advice; don’t whine. On the door there was a piece of cardboard with a name printed on it: Anders.

‘Not an alias,’ Brond said following my glance. ‘A simple forename. Anders Brond.’

‘Anders,’ I said. The name Anderson and its history came to my mind. ‘That’s a Swedish name.’

‘Or you’ll find it in Finland. The Swedes are the aristocrats of Finland.’

A door closed inside and Primo appeared again. I took the stick from him and felt the difference at once.

‘It’s not mine,’ I said, and cursed my stupidity. Yes, it’s mine. Let me take it and go. Any stick does to lean upon. To walk away.

‘Never mind,’ Brond said. ‘I’ll make you a present of it.’

For some reason, perhaps because I was exhausted, perhaps because I had been sitting for so long, walking was harder than it had been since my accident. I needed the stick. All my weight fell on it. With great labour, I crossed to the stairs.

‘Wait!’ Brond said for the second time.

I stopped. It seemed as if the cruel play was to be ended. As I waited, I saw a body, as if it had never been mine, lying by the side of a road with rain falling on it.

Brond came close.

‘It’s only fair to the Finns to add,’ he said, ‘that a time came when those proud Swedes lost their university posts and their comfortable places in the civil service.’

At what he had chosen to say or at the look on my face, he burst into laughter and tapped me on the chest. Even when the door closed behind him, the laughter hung with the echo of what he said last, ‘Things change.’ I was alone on the landing of an old tenement that smelled of a hundred and fifty years of betrayal.

As I stood, a child whimpered. The sound shocked out of the darkness below me. The bulb above my head lit the two doors and the boarded window at the turn of the stair. From somewhere beyond that, a child whimpered out of the dark.

At the second flight I stumbled, afraid of a fall. There was a rustling whisper in the dark. I slid one foot until I found a step then gripped the bannister edging my way down. In a field last summer a pheasant had sprung up from under my feet. It was like that: an uprising turbulence and I could see nothing and threw out my hands. There was a cry of pain and a child’s voice, ‘I’m sorry.’

Under my hand a thin shoulder. Without letting it go, I passed my other hand up to her face.

‘Who are you? What do you want?’

I whispered the questions as if it were a trap. The child’s voice wheedled at me out of the darkness.

‘Don’t hurt me,’ she said.

‘What do you want?’

‘I live here.’

‘For Christ’s sake then, knock and go in.’

‘My daddy put me out.’

Why did I have to meet her?

‘I’ll knock,’ I said. ‘You can’t sit here alone in the dark.’

I had dropped my stick and now, holding her, I felt around my feet for it. I wanted it in my right hand when a father like hers opened the door to my knocking. The wood brushed my hand and I pulled it to me.

‘What are you doing?’ the child whispered.

‘My stick. I wanted my stick.’

She moaned and took my hand from her shoulder and carried it in both of hers down between her legs. I felt the bone under the heel of my hand, and my fingers curled into her.

‘Don’t hit me,’ she said.

And I pushed her away. I heard the thud of her hitting the wall but she made no sound. Flailing, crippled, stumbling in the dark, I fell from flight to flight until I reached the outer world.

I left that street and the next before I stopped. It was moonlight and I put a hand across my eyes and was weeping.