The Lake of Darkness (25 page)

Martin said softly, “She lived all that time …?”

“She wasn’t conscious. Have some more gin?”

Tim refilled their glasses. He lit another cigarette. The only sign of emotion he gave was the way he drew on that cigarette, with nervous, greedy gasps.

“Right,” he said. “Question time.”

The gin was making Martin hot and dizzy and brave. “Were you
married
to Francesca?”

Tim laughed, a sound that had nothing to do with amusement. “You know better than that. You’re my accountant.
Wouldn’t I have had to tell you if I’d, been married? Francesca was still married to a guy in Ilford. He’s called Russell Brown,
he
really is.”

“But that piece in your paper …”

“Pieces in the paper are of human origin. They’re not messages from some infallible source of truth.” Tim shrugged. “I made it up, bar the names. You found the house yourself. I didn’t tell you she lived at 54 Fortis Green Lane and, incidentally, neither did she. You fabricated it. You made conjecture into truth just as you did when you saw those bruises on Francesca and thought Russell had put them there. In fact, she’d, fallen over on the ice like several thousand other people did that day.”

Martin was silent. Then he said slowly, “Do you mean that it was all a conspiracy between you and Francesca? All of it?” The enormity of what had been done to him was now breaking over Martin in waves. He could feel a pulse drumming in his head. “You both of you set out to con me, to get”-he understood now-“a flat out of me? You were two-criminals who did that?”

“At the beginning,” said Tim, “Francesca set out only to get money or a piece of jewellery. I knew about your pools win, of course. I’ve known from the first. You must have forgotten that though I’m not much of a success at things I’ve got a spectacularly good memory.” He took a gulp of gin and it made him shudder. “You aren’t the soul of generosity, are you? I got nothing and she got nothing until you hit on your bright idea of a tax dodge. By that time, as you accountants might say, she was in for a penny, in for a pound.”

Martin had got to his feet. He swayed and steadied himself. There was one thing still, one last thing. If she had been unfaithful to Russell Brown with Tim, she had been unfaithful to Tim with him. He looked into Tim’s eyes and the voice which he meant to be defiant, spitting revelations, came out falteringly.

“She slept with me! Did she ever tell you that?”

Tim had half-risen, his mouth smiling, his eyes dead. He shrugged. “So? It was hard work. There was no question of mixing pleasure with business.”

Without thought or preparation, Martin hit him. He doubled his fist and swung and struck Tim on the jaw. Tim let out a grunt and fell back into the chair, but he was up again straightaway, leaping on Martin with both hands raised. Martin ducked and struck out again and fell across the table, knocking over the lamp which rolled on to the floor and went out.

The room was dark but for the fierce red glow from the wall heater, so that redness lay on the air and on the furniture and on Tim, backed against the door, a demon, a fallen angel, painted with red light. He came at Martin again, punching to his face, but this time Martin seized him by the shoulders, by his thin hard rib cage. For a moment they remained upright, locked together, struggling, then they tumbled to the floor and rolled, clutching each other, into the deep dark shadows of the floor and across the thick, old, rumpled rug.

Tim was trying to grab his shoulders so as to beat his head against the ground. Martin was stronger. He was bigger and heavier than Tim, and more powerful. He got hold of Tim’s wrists and held them behind his back, wrapping him in his arms.

With this success, this subduing of Tim, a tremendous excitement seized him. He was wrestling with Tim, he was doing what he had longed to do in those dreams. And in the pressure of Tim’s hard flesh, the friction of his body writhing and turning so that they rolled this way and that, embraced so tightly that each body seemed to penetrate the other and fuse with it, he felt himself charged and stiff with desire. He felt a passion which made his relations with Francesca seem thin and cold.

Whether Tim realised or not he didn’t care. He was lost
to all caution and all inhibiting restraint. He spoke Tim’s name in a hoarse whisper and the struggling slackened. There was a moment in which Martin hardly seemed to breathe and then, because he couldn’t help himself, he put his mouth over Tim’s and gave him a long, enduring kiss. The release that came with that kiss seemed to take with it the repressive burdens of a lifetime. He rolled away from Tim and lay on his face.

Tim got up first. He did what he would do on the gallows or at an H-bomb early warning. He lit a Gauloise. His mouth quirked up on one side at Martin and he gave a sort of half-wink. Martin was flooded with shame, the burdens of a lifetime were still there. He got to his feet and sat, hunched, in one of the fireside chairs.

“Don’t put the light on.”

“Okay, not if you don’t want.”

“I’m sorry about that. Just now, I mean.” Martin tried not to mumble. He tried to look at Tim through the red gloom, to meet his eyes and speak lucidly. It was nearly impossible. “I don’t know why I did that.”

“It was the military gin. The fact is, it’s meant for guardsmen and you know what guardsmen are.”

“I’m not queer, gay, whatever you call it.”

“It was the gin, love,” said Tim.

He had perched himself on the edge of the table. Martin managed to focus on him now, and if he was flushed it didn’t show in that light. “Perhaps I am, though,” he said in a low voice. “Perhaps I am really and I never knew it. Why have there been so many things I didn’t know and couldn’t see, Tim?”

“ ‘Humanity treads ever on a thin crust over terrific abysses.’ I remember I said that to you before all this started. We’ve both fallen in with a crash, haven’t we?”

Martin nodded. He was embarrassed still and ashamed still, but a warmth that had nothing to do with the heater was slowly engulfing him. He loved Tim, he knew it now.
Nothing that Tim had done to him mattered any more. He said,

“That flat, the one Francesca was going to move into, you can have it. I want you to have it.”

“Is it yours to give, my dear?”

“Well, I …” Technically, legally, it wasn’t. It was the technical, the legal, aspect which mattered, though.

“It’ll be shared between four people, I should think. Francesca had a husband and a child and parents. Lindsay will get some of it and I suppose Russell Brown will get most of it.”

“Tim, I’ll give you …” What? He had nothing left to give. “I want to do something. We’ve both lost’Francesca, that ought to bring us together, it ought to … what are you smiling at?”

“Your naivety.”

“I can’t see that it’s naive to want to help someone because you feel you owe it to them. Look, I could sell my flat and buy a small house somewhere-well, not so nice, and you could bring Lindsay and come and live there with me and … We have to be friends, Tim.”

“Do we, my dear? I’ve injured you and we dislike those we’ve injured.” Tim walked across the room and switched on the central light. It was bright, glaring, uncompromising. “I’m sorry for what I did now, I bitterly regret it, but being sorry doesn’t make me like you any more. I wouldn’t dream of sharing a house with you, and if you offered me money I should refuse it.” He stubbed out his cigarette, coughing a little. “It’s time you went home now. I have to fetch Lindsay and put her to bed.”

Martin got up. He felt as if he had been hit in the face with something cold and wet, a wet glove perhaps.

“Is that all?” he stammered. “Have we said it all?”

Tim didn’t answer. They were out in the icy dank hallway now and from upstairs, distantly, came a wail, “Lindsay wants Daddy.”

Tim opened the front door. “The inquest was today. Accidental death. Cremation Monday, three o’clock, Golders Green. A hearty welcome will be extended to all husbands, real, imaginary, future, and common law.”

Martin walked down the steps and into the street without looking back. He heard the door close. His head was banging from bewilderment and incredulity and gin.

It was a quarter past seven. He had been with Tim for less than an hour. In those forty-five or fifty minutes his whole life, the past as well as the present and the future, had been changed. It was as if the world had tilted and he been thrown sliding down the slope of it to hang there, breathless, by his hands. Or as if, as Tim said, the thin crust had given way.

His head was hurting him now. He had drunk a lot of that gin, probably a tumblerful. But he didn’t feel drunk, only sick and headachy and drained. He was tired as well, but he didn’t think he would sleep; he felt as if he would never sleep again.

For a long time he sat in the car in Samphire Road. He only drove away because he was afraid Tim might come out and find him still there, and even then he parked again almost immediately, in one of the streets that had been turned into a cul-de-sac by the crater of devastated land.

It was quite dark now and the rubble-covered waste was totally unlighted. The edges of it only were visible, a horizon of black jagged roofs, punctured with points of light, against the crimson-suffused sky. Francesca had lived here, come from here every morning, returned here each night. It seemed to him infinitely strange, something he would never fully understand. She was dead and had been dead for nearly a week now. In her dying she had somehow come back to him-there had been no terrible betrayal. How could Tim know how she had felt? How could Tim tell that
for all her early motives she hadn’t, at the end, come to prefer the new man to the old?

From taking a vicious pleasure in the fact of her death-he had felt like that when he first began to understand-he found he could now think of her with a pitying tenderness. They would never have been happy together, or not for long, he could see that. He was getting to know himself at last, he thought.

His head wasn’t going to get any better just sitting here. If the place had been more attractive-less downright sinister, in fact-he would have gone for a walk, walked to clear his head, for it was a mild evening with that indefinable smell and charge in the air that heralds spring. But he couldn’t walk here. He started the car and drove away into Hornsey Rise.

Someone walked across a pedestrian crossing ahead of him. He braked and waited rather longer than usual. He thought of the manner of Francesca’s death. Who could do such a thing? Knock someone down and drive away to leave her dying? She had taken a night and a day to die. He shivered uncontrollably. Whoever it was, the police would find him, the police would be relentless … Martin reflected that he shouldn’t be driving at all, he had had far too much to drink, a lot over the permitted limit. Perhaps Francesca’s killer had also been drinking, had sobered up in terror when he saw what he had done, and terror had made him flee. Martin drove home over the Archway, the road in its deep concrete gorge flowing northwards beneath him.

He put the car on the hard-top parking in front of Cromwell Court, parking it between an orange-coloured Volvo and a small grey van. The Volvo belonged to a doctor at the Royal Free who lived on the ground floor. The grey van was probably some tradesman’s, though Martin felt obscurely that he had seen it somewhere before, and recently, and in a context he couldn’t at the moment recall. It
couldn’t be of the slightest importance. He walked across the asphalt to the entrance of the block, aware that someone had got out of the van and was also coming in.

But he didn’t hold the door open. He let it swing shut and made for the stairs, wishing not for the first time that there was a lift here as there was in Swan Place. Should he get Adrian to fight for Swan Place against that family of Francesca’s? Was there any chance of success? At least, he thought as he climbed the third flight, he could now tell Adrian and Norman and his parents the melancholy truth, that Francesca was dead.

The soft but regular footsteps which, lower down, he had heard coming behind him he could now hear again. They were coming up to the top. The driver of the grey van must be calling at one of the other three flats on this floor. Martin got to the top and crossed the corridor to his own front door. There, standing on the threshold of his home, he was suddenly and sharply visited by the memory of himself and Tim embraced in Tim’s red-lit kitchen, and of kissing Tim and holding him in his arms. What would become of him if this was what he wanted? What must he look forward to? He released his pent-up breath and put his key into the lock.

As he did so he heard a low cough behind him. It made Martin jump and he wheeled round. Standing about a yard from him, in grey woolly hat, yellow pullover, black-velvet waistcoat and a black scarf with coins sewn round it, was Finn. Martin hadn’t really noticed before what extraordinary eyes the man had. They were almost silver. The man with the silver eyes …

“Well, well,” said Finn. “I’ve been waiting long enough.”

The flat was warm and very stuffy. For most of the day the sun must have been shining on that big window. It was rare for Finn to be a guest in anyone’s home. He could count on the fingers of his large, splayed hands the number of times it had happened: twice at Mr. Beard’s, once at Mrs. Go-garty’s, three or four times in girls’ rooms.

He stood looking about him. At the structure and the paintwork mainly; he had a business interest in things like that. He took off his woolly hat but kept his gloves on.

Martin Urban was getting a brandy bottle out of a drinks cabinet. You would think he had had enough, he stank of gin. Finn could tell that something had frightened or upset him. His hands trembled and made the bottle chatter against the glass.

“Brandy? There’s no whisky but there’s vodka and martini and sherry.”

“I don’t drink,” said Finn.

The voice sounded both weary and awkward. “Look, I’m sorry about the money. I’ve had a lot on my plate and I’m afraid I forgot all about you. I could give you a cheque here and now, only you will insist on cash.”

Finn didn’t say anything.

“Sit down, won’t you? I’m sorry you’ve come all the way here for nothing. You should have phoned.” He sat down and drank his brandy at a gulp as if it were medicine. Finn watched him curiously, watched a flush mottle his skin. He wasn’t going to sit down. What would be the point?