Cutting Edge (19 page)

“Do you know him?”

Carew shook his head. “I read about him. Poor guy.”

“Yes.”

“How’s he coming along?” Carew asked. “On the mend?”

Sarah nodded. “Slowly, yes.”

Carew angled his head back a little and seemed to refocus on her face. Sarah knew that he was going to change tack, ask her to meet him after work, something of the sort. She was conscious of the roof of her mouth turning dry.

“Well,” Carew said, “nice to bump into you.” Stepping away. “Maybe I’ll see you again some time.”

And he was on his way out of the shop, a thick head of hair, good, muscular body, something of a bounce to his walk. Perhaps, Sarah thought, I was being a bit harsh on him, maybe he isn’t so bad after all.

There were days and far too many of them when the only time Bernard Salt felt free of pressure was when he was in theater. Anesthetized in front of him, a problem to be solved and he knew the surest, the safest way to solve it. Of course, there were surprises, emergencies even. But they were what kept it alive: and they were surmountable. Within the span of his knowledge, of his hands. He stood there and at his bidding instruments were put into his hands, sterile, sharp. If something was rotten you cut it out.

As to the rest of it …

Twenty-four years of a marriage that had decently laid itself to rest. A mixture of rapaciousness and boredom that had driven him to find a solace for which he no longer had the inclination or the need. Why couldn’t she accept that? Let go. That eternal whining, you promised, you promised. Of course he had promised. Wasn’t that what he was supposed to do? A married man. Senior consultant. Seven, eight years ago when it had started, he would have promised her anything. Had. Now he would promise her anything to leave him alone, only she no longer believed him. Not without words on paper, evidence, commitment. All the times you said what we might do if only you were free.

Well, now he was free and fully intending to stay that way.

She was waiting by his car again and he considered abandoning it, heading back to the hospital and calling a taxi, but she had seen him.

“Helen,” Salt said, resting his briefcase on the roof of his car, fingers in his jacket pocket circling around the keys, “how long do you think you’re going to keep this up?”

She had changed out of her uniform into a white blouse and navy cardigan, a calf-length pleated skirt and, unbelted at the waist, a camel coat. Her hands were small, tight fists. “For as long as it takes,” she said.

“And if I say no,” Salt asked.

“That’s easy,” Helen said. “You know what I’ll do then.”

He drew his breath. In the masked fluorescence of the car park, her skin looked sallow and old. “All right,” he said, “no. The answer’s no. Once and for all, no.”

Helen Minton slid a half-step sideways and steadied herself against the side of the car. Her mouth opened and there was a sound, harsh and hissing, like stale air making its escape. She almost slipped as she turned away, recovered, and walked quickly between the avenues of other cars. Salt hesitated, started after her without conviction, and when she was lost to sight behind the door leading to the lifts, he stopped.

He had done it: said it.

Only then, quite still, did he realize the extent to which his own breathing had accelerated. He made himself stand for a full minute before heading back towards his own car.

Fitting the keys in the lock, fumbling a little, his head suddenly came up, alert. A movement off to his right, behind him. Moving then stopping. Salt looked off along the line of roofs, shadows. His first thought had been that it was Helen, calmed down, back to make her peace, apologize. He could see nobody: no doors opened, engines fired.

“Hello?” Salt’s voice was oddly uncertain, hollow.

Then there was somebody, someone he knew, a fellow consultant making his way with crisp steps towards his Rover, waving: “Hello, Bernard. Communing with the old carbon monoxide?”

Salt let himself into the car and waited until the Rover had slid from its space, reversing out and following it towards the exit.

By the time Calvin Ridgemount got home it was late. He let himself in, dropping his sports bag at the top of the stairs before going into the kitchen. There were two cartons of milk in the fridge, one already opened, so he opened the other and drank the contents down in four long swallows. From the living room he could hear the sound of recorded voices and soundtrack music, his father’s laughter.

Calvin smeared plum jam on two digestive biscuits and put them together, taking a bite as he went towards the back of the house.

His father was sitting back on the settee, one leg hooked over the side, can of Red Stripe in his hand, laughing at something Barbra Streisand had just said to what’s-his-name? The one whose daughter married the tennis player Calvin couldn’t stand. It didn’t matter. He had seen it before, the film, something really stupid about boxing. His father had fetched it from the corner shop, two videos for a pound if you brought them back next morning, but this was being shown live, on TV, now.

“Where’ve you been?” his father asked, still smiling at what he’d seen.

“I told you,” Calvin said. “Out.”

“Where you going now?”

“To bed.”

In his room, Calvin tossed the bag towards the far wall, below the window. Without bothering to switch on the light, he slipped
Fair Warning
from its case and switched the cassette player on. Lying back on his bed, he stared up at the ceiling, eyes growing accustomed to the blackness, watching the stars come out, one by one.

Twenty-five

Time was, Resnick thought, you would have walked into Manhattan’s in the happy hour, and said the joint was jumping. Of course, he didn’t know that for a fact. Just another bit of America that had found its way into his life via a record label. Thirty-seven or -eight. Herman Autrey on trumpet, Gene Sedric on tenor. Fats Waller and his Rhythm. Resnick had an uncle, a tailor with thumbs like sheet metal and fingers like silk; instead of coming to England in the months before the outbreak of the war, he had shipped out with his family to the States. Haif a dozen of them sleeping toe to tail in a tenement off Hester Street. After VJ Day, the uncle had uprooted himself again, more opportunities in a smaller pond. Time had proved him wrong.

But Resnick could remember, as a boy, climbing to the upper floor of the house in St Anne’s and poring over the enormous pile of 78s, black and brittle in brown covers of paper or card printed over with slogans for Vocalion, HMV. Sitting there, cross-legged, on his own, he had read the labels with fascination, inventing stories about the owners of those names before ever hearing their music: Count, Duke, Fats, Willie the Lion, Kid and King.

When first he heard them played, his friends were beginning to listen to—what?—Tommy Steele, Bill Haley and the Comets. Resnick had sat in hushed silence with black tea and dry cake while his uncle handsewed buttonholes and hems and his cousin swayed her legs softly to the Ink Spots, the Mills Brothers, four voices and a guitar. After a while, his uncle would tap his thimble on the table and wink at Resnick and then they would listen to Mildred Bailey, Billie Holiday, Luis Russell’s “Call of the Freaks,” Fats Waller and his Rhythm, “The Joint is jumpin’.”

“You came back,” Maura said, as Resnick tried to edge into a space at the bar.

Her hair seemed to be suspended around her head, a mixture of fine gauze and candy floss. Since Resnick had last seen her, its color had shaded from auburn towards orange. She was wearing a halter top, bright flowers on a black background. Rings on her fingers, earrings that brushed against her shoulders as she turned.

She set a bottle and a glass down in front of him and inclined her head towards the far side of the room, past the console where a hip black DJ was playing something Resnick was relieved not to recognize.

“I know,” Resnick said. He had spotted Groves as he walked in, sitting at a table against the wall with a couple of friends, back towards the door.

“You’re not going to arrest him? In here?”

“What for?”

When Maura shrugged, her engraved metal earrings jingled. “I’ve never seen anyone arrested, only on television.”

“That’s where it happens most.”

She went back to serving customers and Resnick poured his beer, drank enough to get the remainder of the bottle into the glass and stood away from the bar, between there and the steps, occasionally glimpsing Paul Groves’s prematurely balding head through the mass of drinkers. When he had finished his drink and Groves had shown no sign of leaving, Resnick moved to him around the edge of the dance floor and tapped him on the shoulder.

“Sup up,” Resnick said.

Beneath the volume of the music, Groves might not have heard the actual words, but he caught their meaning. One of the young men with him, a white shirt with rolled-back sleeves and a wide paisley tie, looked as if he might be about to tell Resnick to mind his own business, but Groves shook his head and said it was all right and then stood up, leaving his lager unfinished.

“I’ve been reading your file,” Resnick said. They were crossing on to the pedestrian street that would take them to the rear of the Council House, the old Boots building. Usual for the time of year, it couldn’t make up its mind whether or not to rain.

“I thought you might,” said Groves. His hands were in his trouser pockets, flaps of his jacket bunching back along his arms.

They were passing McDonald’s, across squares of pavement on which a street artist had lovingly copied a madonna and child.

“What you are,” Resnick said. “It doesn’t matter, not to me. It doesn’t make any difference.”

“Then why …?”

“Except in so far as it’s relevant.”

“Is it?”

“That’s what I want to know.”

“You want to know if Karl and I were involved.”

“Were you?”

“What difference would it make?”

“I’m not sure. But your relationship with him, it would be different.”

“If we were both queer.”

They went right towards the square, past the girls with skimpy dresses and anxious eyes waiting between the lions, the Goths and Skins and would-be bikers gathered around the wall above the fountains, and sat on a wet bench in front of half-a-dozen damp and hopeful pigeons.

“How long have you known him?” Resnick asked.

“A year. More or less a year.”

Having learned when to question, when to listen, Resnick waited.

“I met him at the cinema. Late afternoon. It was my day off and Karl, well I suppose Karl’s, too, or he’d worked an early. It doesn’t matter. There we were in the smallest screen, the two of us and an old woman who ate her sandwiches and then fell asleep.” He gave Resnick a quick glance. “We weren’t sitting together, not anything like that. About as far apart as you could get. Karl spoke to me on the way out, something about the film, I don’t remember what. We got outside and we were walking in the same direction. ‘I’m going for a pizza,’ he said, and laughed. ‘It’s a wonder you didn’t hear my stomach grumbling all through the film. I had half a mind to go and ask that old dear for one of her sandwiches.’ I laughed and there we were, sitting in the Pizza Hut, drinking large Cokes and arguing over which of us could build the biggest salad.”

A line of young women wearing fancy dress was congaing their way across the opposite end of the square, shrieking and singing. Paul Groves slipped both hands beneath the lapels of his coat.

“After that we’d meet up, usually once a week, go to a film, have a pizza, or if Karl couldn’t get off in time we’d just go for a drink. Once in a while, after one of us had got paid, we’d go out for a meal. Karl wanted to go to that Japanese place, down in Lenton. Raw fish and it cost an arm and a leg.”

Resnick was aware of cramp spreading down his right leg, but didn’t budge, didn’t want to distract Groves from what he was saying.

“I nearly got him to come on holiday once. Greece, one of the small islands. Keen as anything until it came to paying the deposit and signing the forms.” Groves’s voice was little more than a whisper; the conga line had moved off towards the Dog and Bear, to be replaced by a gang of jostling youths in Forest shirts, chanting and clapping their hands. The first of the police dog vans was parked at the north-east corner of the square. “I went round to his place a couple of times. He had all these photos on the walls from when he was in the States, posters, more books than any normal person would read in a lifetime. Made a great thing out of grilling these hamburgers and having California wine. He’d never come back to my place, not once. Made excuses till I stopped asking.”

Groves moved his hands until they were gripping his knees.

“I touched him one time and you’d have thought I’d stuck a knife right in his back.”

“For Christ’s sake,” Mark Divine said. “What’s your hurry?”

Naylor hesitated long enough for Divine to order two more pints.

“Fucking Friday night,” Divine said, elbowing his way towards a space by the doorway to the Gents, calling back over his shoulder. “That’s what it is.”

He glowered at a couple of underage lads and they slunk off.