Frozen (15 page)

Good question, Harry, and where were you?

Fourth message; the new one. “Verity? It's Erica again. Erica McKelvie.” This time, the voice was nervous and unsure. “I just wondered if you were all right, dear. It's pension day tomorrow. I didn't know whether you had gone away, perhaps.” There was a long, uncertain pause. “Do call, darling.” Another long silence, as though she wanted to say something more, and then a click.

“Harry,
insurance
.” Sam was standing watching me, Marigolds on hips.

I was avoiding it, of course, though I have no idea why. I think I was overwhelmed by the huge amount that needed doing—and now I had to add tracking down Erica McKelvie to the list.

The kettle clicked and Sam went back into the kitchen.

I stared round the room for inspiration. I started to call to Sam, “Any idea where—” and then stopped, because I had caught sight of the answer. In the middle of the room was Verity's precious sofa, one end of it blackened and burned away. The foam from what remained of the cushions was tarry and molten. I muttered something under my breath.

“Any idea what?” Sam said. She was standing in the doorway, balancing two mugs, the Marigolds finally removed. I ignored her.

The fire had burned a hole right through to the base of the sofa. I peered in. It was full of ash and blackened springs. Charred edges of paper hung from them. “Shit!” I yelled, and kicked the side of the sofa angrily. The ashes settled a little, and black motes rose into the sunlight, filling the air with the reek of stale smoke.

“No insurance papers,” I snarled. “In fact, no papers at all.” I booted the sofa again.

“Harry, sit,” Sam said firmly. She pushed a coffee cup across the table towards me. I felt terribly weary. I sat.

“There's nothing left,” I mumbled. “I'm going to have to chase down the whole damn lot, aren't I? I know there was a phone bill and a credit card. I'll have to ring and get duplicates. God knows what else there was.”

“You didn't find papers anywhere, then?” In answer, I pointed at the sofa. Her eyes widened. “They burned the lot?”

“I've looked everywhere else. Oh,
shit
... how the hell am I supposed to work out who her insurance company even
was
?”

Sam's eyes crinkled, her lips pressed together in sad sympathy.

“We,” she said gently. “Not you. We. And don't worry, we'll work it out. Maybe she had them in her Filofax. Or the bank will tell us who she paid bills to. We'll get there.”

Her words solved nothing, but they helped. I wasn't alone, and that made all the difference. I put my hand over hers and squeezed. We sat silently amid the wreckage for a while. Occasionally I sipped my coffee—I have to admit, it was better than when I made it—but I put my hand back on hers afterwards.

She stood and announced it was time to get back to work. The Marigolds reappeared, and once again she was all business. Watching her bustle round Verity's flat, though, I could see the pain in her eyes. Her skin seemed flushed and fragile.

Nice bum, though.

She caught me looking at her, and cocked her head at me; then she threw me a flirtatious kiss.

And a duster.

*

When we drew up outside Sam's house, it was late, somewhere past eight o'clock. We sat in the car, both unsure what to say. “What a day,” was hardly going to cover it.

“Okay. I'm going to ask you in for a drink,” she said. 'You won't take it the wrong way, will you? Only I damn well need one, and I don't fancy being alone.” In answer, I shut off the engine and climbed out. I hadn't been looking forward to staring at my own empty walls either.

Sam's flat was large, and simple to the point of austerity. The walls were white. The furniture was pale wood and cane, upholstered in rough, undyed canvas. The sitting room was dominated by a single abstract painting in vivid blues and yellows that somehow managed to suggest both the sea and a prison.

“Like it?” She handed me a strong gin and tonic. It was sharp and bitter, and the fumes drove through my head. It helped.

The painting must have been eight feet square. It wasn't in a style I recognised, but it was definitely an original; I could see the lumps in the oil paint. I squinted to make out the signature, but it was illegible. She looked at me, amused. “Before you pronounce judgement, I'll tell you. It's one of mine.”

I was astonished. It was good. But now she wouldn't believe me when I told her. I did anyway, and she seemed to accept it.

I wasn't used to people who were secure enough to accept a compliment. I found it unnerving. I was baffled by Sam—but I liked her too. What was strange was not quite knowing who it was that I liked. She was still staring at the picture. “I did it as a backdrop for my graduation collection,” she said. “The clothes were crap, but everyone loved the painting. Ironic, really. I'd been working on the collection for the best part of three years. The painting only took me half an hour.”

She crossed the room to a sofa. I followed.

“I'd say you've got a whole new career there.” I meant it.

She snorted softly into her gin, drained it, and half-got up. She looked at me enquiringly. I knocked back what remained of my own drink and handed her the glass.

While she fixed the drinks, I looked at the painting. Aquamarines in soft-edged curves, barred rays of gold and fine black lines. It was beautiful. It spoke to me of order and regret. It made me think of trees—and of Verity, now lost to the implacable truth of her fall.

Sam came back in and slumped next to me. Her eyes were watery. Guilt shot through me again. I turned sideways on the sofa to face her, and gently stroked her knee.

“I... don't really know what to say,” I mumbled. “I keep being selfish. Sorry.”

She looked at me and then away. Her lip trembled and she sniffed fiercely. She took my hand and swung it back and forth aimlessly. Her eyes were brimming.

“And we will get there. You were right,” I added.

She leaned over and settled against my chest. I wrapped my arms round her. I could feel the sobs shaking her. I let her finish before I spoke again. “I miss her, Sam.”

She straightened. Her face was marked by dried tears. Her lashes were matted and her eyes were reddened, and her hair was in a mess. She looked fragile and strong all at once—like her painting. I brushed away a lock of hair that was getting in her eyes. She leaned her face towards my hand—and I kept it there.

We looked at each other for a long while. Then she took my hand and led me to her bedroom.

*

It wasn't the best sex in the world, for either of us, and it didn't mean anything much—but who cared? We both needed it, we were both adults, we both did it—and I suppose we both got what we wanted from it. For a small while, during and after, I felt a little less alone. Sam seemed content enough to lie next to me. Don't ask me why we did it, because I don't know. I don't think Sam had planned it any more than I had. Maybe it was for comfort, maybe to forget. Whatever. It was urgent and basic. Neither of us was thinking. I'm sure we both knew there would be embarrassment afterwards, awkwardness and uncertainty. But, of course, we didn't let that stop us.

Afterwards we were both quiet, making no demands, expecting nothing. When we started to fidget, Sam mumbled something about another drink. I volunteered and wandered naked into the kitchen. There was a bottle of white wine in the fridge and I found a corkscrew in the drawer under the hob. There was something comfortable about finding things so easily in her kitchen. They were in familiar places. And, of course, it was secretly thrilling to be naked in someone else's flat. I felt airy, liberated. When I walked back through the sitting room, the feeling evaporated as I noticed it was dark outside, the room lights were on and the curtains open. Then I thought,
What the hell? It's not my place anyway; who cares?
And I padded back with the bottle and two glasses to the bedroom, free as you like.

While I was gone Sam had put on her dressing-gown and switched on the television. Some cookery show was on, with two chefs-cum-drama-queens and a load of pointless celebrities, struggling to do something inventive with tomato sauce, half a courgette, and a bar of chocolate. I handed Sam a glass and sat next to her, glad not to have to talk. She patted my leg absentmindedly, and then pulled her hand back on to her lap.

The wine had a cool perfume. Like the sex, it felt good: ordinary, undemanding, safe. I poured us both another glass.

When the bottle was finished I felt self-conscious. I was naked, and she wasn't. The TV was boring. Neither of us was speaking.

“Look, it's getting late,” I said. “I ought to...” She looked at me. I smiled weakly and muttered, “Yeah. Er... thanks.”

It was awkward. I got dressed. She switched off the television and watched. She hovered by the door to the flat while I prowled round the living room collecting my things. At last I was ready, and I stood in front of her.

She didn't quite know what to do with her eyes. Neither did I—not least because her dressing-gown was gaping open. I remembered her small breasts, soft skin. Her bum had been as nice as I had thought.

“Well...” she said.

“Well...” I agreed.

I glanced at the door-latch, but did not reach for it. She put a hand on my chest and slipped a finger in between the buttons.

“Harry... stay,” she murmured.

I looked at her. Her eyes were earnest, pleading.

“Stay,” she said again.

And I did.

I HOPE I HAVEN'T shocked you. I never claimed to be celibate.

I had flings and one-night stands and not-quite-girlfriends, but nothing you might call even semi-permanent—and in between, I wondered what might have happened if that childhood kiss had been the beginning of something, and not its end. But you can't build your life on a fantasy, can you? The point is, my blood is as red as anyone's. Why
shouldn't
I sleep with Sam? This may be Verity's story, but it's not as though I had nothing else in my life.

I woke next to Sam, aglow after that strange, restless sleep of a night in bed with someone new. Sam woke a little later, and we made love again, slowly this time, and with more purpose and attention than we had the night before. We sat opposite each other at the breakfast table, me clutching a cooling mug of tea, neither of us knowing what to say, my thoughts whirling impossibly fast.

The shadows of the trees outside threw complex patterns across Sam's huge painting, flattened reminders of the street below, the sinews and bones of living shapes. I have always loved trees: their stillness, their strength, the lightness of their beams. Now, suddenly, I needed to capture that feeling on film. I made my apologies, gave Sam one last kiss—which I enjoyed enough to come back for another before I'd even reached the door—and headed for home. There, I scooped up my cameras, and headed for Battersea Park.

Perhaps I was trying to recapture the long-ago magic of when Verity and I kissed, or the lightness and comfort of my night with Sam. Or perhaps it was a memorial of sorts, a way of recording Verity's passing. Perhaps it was just therapeutic. Whatever: it worked.

As I sank into the work I actually began to
feel
properly. For the first time in days, the numbness lifted. I became what I was doing, absorbed in each shot. Massive branches arching up into a hot sky. Crazed silhouettes of twigs and leaves, blurred by the sunlight bleeding through them. Vast, impassive trunks in ordered rows, one with a small boy crouching by its bole to touch a squirrel. The texture of flaking bark. I was in love with all of it. I laughed aloud. I cried. Everything was intense; the world was heightened. It was hard to bear. It was a kind of ecstasy.

And when I came home, I called Sam; she came over, and did not leave until morning.

*

Perhaps I should tell you a little more about myself, about the bits of me you otherwise won't see.

I was born in north Oxford, thirty-four years ago. My dad, David Waddell, made precision instruments for a small local firm, mostly serving the university labs. He was a partner in the company; our family was doing the north Oxford thing, climbing the slippery ladder for all we were worth.

Mum is Carol. She spent three days a week as a medical secretary at the John Radcliffe Hospital, sorting out the private practice of a bushy-browed man she called the Prof: his eyebrows and his flapping white coat are all I can remember, I don't even know what his speciality was. The other days she spent at home. I'm not sure what she did with her time. I was at school mostly, and in my spare time, as I grew up, I would wander further and further afield; I was hardly there except for meals and bed.

A gang of us used to cycle down to Port Meadow, to ride the smooth-swept bumps that led down to the floodplain like a rollercoaster. Sometimes we'd fish for chub in the Cherwell or the Isis, or race our bikes (illegally) in a circuit round the courtyard of the Bodleian. We were a loose group and only a few of us would meet up on any particular day; the combinations were always changing. They were school friends mostly, and a couple of neighbours.

We lived in a big house—but it can't have been big enough, because Mum and Dad were always talking about moving somewhere better. I was at a private school, New College Choir School, which was one of the very few acceptable schools to discuss at north Oxford dinner parties and was costing the family more than we could easily afford. It was a high-pressure environment, and I never quite managed to keep up. This was more out of attitude than inability; I was averagely good at most subjects. I was good at English and maths, top in art (except for pottery), and I was lousy at the sciences and French. I detested Latin and it detested me.

Our garden was large, and Dad had put a rope pulley from one side of it to the other. In summer we would set up the water sprinkler and dash through the spray, and the grass was slippery and cold and tickled our bare backs when we fell.

I loved Oxford, and the house and my friends. I loved my parents. I was an only child, but I truly do not believe that my parents spoiled me—well, maybe a bit, but I also remember being kept firmly in line; there were rules and lectures as well as treats. I was never starved of company. Unfashionable though it is, I have to confess that I grew up mostly happy.

Then, when I was twelve, Dad's firm went bust.

There must have been a day when he came home and it was all over, but I don't remember. There must have been agonising months while he looked for another job, and failed to find one. Bigger firms were taking over—German firms, Japanese firms. The craft had gone out of instrument making, he grumbled. It was the big boys now, just like everything else. And the big boys weren't interested in the skills of a man who had left school at fourteen, served his apprenticeship at an old firm with grime on its tiny windows and an interior of dark wood benches and peeling varnish. Dad had worked with the same firm all his life and, in a way, his life ended when the firm's did. He lost weight. His temper became worse. He paced through the house. When he sat, he seemed to grind his way into the chair. Doors that were normally silent screeched when he opened—or slammed—them. He never recovered his peace.

Christmas came and went, joylessly.

At the time I didn't understand why we had to move, and Mum and Dad never chose to explain. Each day's post contained sheaves of house descriptions, photocopied images of squat bungalows, a few terse lines of measurements. Most of them were strewn on the outsize table in the dining room in complicated piles, interspersed with blank sheets covered with spidery calculations. They would occasionally bundle all these papers up and vanish in the car for hours; they would come back grim and hardly talking. Then, one day, some men came with a van and took away half of our furniture, and I never saw it again. The day after that there were packing-cases in the hall, and Mum and Dad began to fill them with what remained.

My most powerful memories are of the empty house. The wood floor in the hall echoed loudly as I staggered across it, my heavy suitcase clasped in both arms, uncomfortably high to avoid crashing against my knees. The place smelt different when it was empty, dry and light, as though it was already waiting for the dust to settle.

The suitcase went in Mum's car (Dad's car had been sold some time before), and we drove off—Dad had gone ahead with the removal men. We drove up the Woodstock Road, turned left at the roundabout, down into Wolvercote. Mum said nothing, all the way. She led me up the narrow path to a post-war two-storey semi. It was small, cream-painted, with ungenerous square windows. I lumped up the path, with my suitcase brushing the tops of the overgrown shrubs that hung over the paving. She unlocked the door, and we stood in the hallway like a couple of timid ghosts. She told me that this was where we were going to live.

It was the start of a new life, and a new me.

The local comp was tough for me. The children didn't have much fondness for boys from private schools. They called me Waddle; they used to make a line behind me, paddling along with their hands stuck out like penguins. Very funny. When they played football, they made a point of not inviting me—because, they said, I was too posh for a “common” game. I ignored them, and only cried after school when I sneaked away to play in the woods on my own. But there was not much violence, and what little there was stopped after I hit back.

It was an accident as much as anything. It all happened at the measured, predetermined pace of a ballet. It was towards the end of my first term at the school, his name was Greg Winston, and I hated him. A small group of boys had backed me into a corner of the playground, needling me and shoving me. Greg swaggered through his cronies and swung a hefty, badly aimed kick at my crotch, flinging his arms out for balance. It was a lazy swipe, he was showing off, not trying to damage me—but I was scared, and I was already pressed as far back against the wall as I could go. As the heavy-booted foot rose up, I squeezed back another few millimetres by twisting away from the blow. That brought my shoulders round, and my hands were suddenly under the rising arc of his leg. I clamped them round his ankle and pushed outwards to deflect the strike. He was after points for style, not strength or accuracy: it was the sort of kick that sends the kicker tumbling if they don't connect and all I did was stop him connecting. As the leg rose, his own momentum lifted him. He jerked off the ground and fell from waist-height, flat on to the Tarmac.

His whole back hit the ground at once. There was a faint pneumatic squeak as the air smashed out of his lungs—the kind of noise you get in children's toys—then the wooden knock of the back of his head, then the clatter of his leathery boots, then silence. The other five or so boys looked down at their leader in confusion, perhaps waiting for him to show them his brilliant final move, which the fall was obviously leading up to, but he just lay there, his eyes bulging wide, and a barely audible sigh coming from him. His hands were lifted, twitching and waving, the fingers splayed.

I was not thinking a single conscious thought. Acting out of some ingrained (private) schoolboy idea of honour, I reached down, grasped one of his hands and pulled him to his feet in a single heave. (Actually, this was the only thing I did that was impressive because he was incredibly heavy. Of course, no one noticed it.) He stood, bent double, the breathless whine still trickling out of him. He grabbed one of his cronies' waistbands for support and, handover complete, I walked away.

My hands started shaking violently after about three paces. There was no sense of victory, just fear and unease. The fear was first: fear that I had done him some permanent harm. I would be found out and punished. Perhaps he would die, and I would end up on trial, innocently imprisoned, the jury deaf to my pleas. Then came the nausea, and the fascination of replaying the incident over and over, letting him crunch into the hard ground, again and again and again, detecting the subtle squelch of blood as his head struck, the sharp mechanical crack of ribs. It's horrible when you really think about an injury, and doubly so when you inflicted it; there's a wrongness about the idea of bodies bending and breaking and slicing open that makes me feel sick. I can work myself up into a state even about minor cuts if I really try—but this time there was no need because Greg's fall had been very nasty indeed. So I huddled in a corner of the playground and muttered to myself, and in front my eyes there he was, hitting the ground again and again and again, skull crumpling, backbone cracking, rib shards scything through his lungs and bowels.

Five minutes later he came up to me, unharmed. He put out a large rough hand and mumbled, “Truce.” I took the hand, and we hardly spoke again for months. Some of his hangers-on tried following me around and being friendly. I played with them sometimes, kicked a ball around with them or went swimming, but even when I was with them I kept my distance. I preferred my own company.

At home, I felt like a stranger. The house had its own moods, mysterious rhythms—rages, sadnesses, the grim silences that swept through Mum and Dad. They performed the functions of their lives with blank eyes and bitten-in faces. I woke each morning, wondering what the house would make them say and do that day. Would they be full of brittle cheeriness and enthusiasm? Or would the house make them bitter, Mum hacking savagely at the bread over breakfast, Dad dry and bent and stalking restlessly from room to room? Sometimes the days were soft and sad; Dad would retreat peacefully to his shed to work on unspecified jobs that needed doing but never seemed to be done, and Mum would sit in a hard nylon-covered chair in the living room, staring at the electric fire. Sometimes I saw tears on her cheeks, but I never asked her about them. No one talked much.

Dad moved out soon after my thirteenth birthday, just before the summer term began. I hardly noticed. In truth, he was already long gone.

We ground on through May and June, Mum and I. Puberty, the move, my parents' separation, all reinforced my isolation. Mum didn't know how to cope with my moods, and neither did I. I was confused and unhappy. Looking back, I think Mum blamed herself—but it's just what happened, a combination of chance and the kind of boy I was. I played on my own a lot. I cycled along the canal to old haunts, sitting alone and taking a certain pleasure in loneliness. Some time that term I discovered Wytham Woods. I would spend my weekends climbing trees, or imagine that I was a paratrooper behind enemy lines and stalk the gamekeepers. They must have known I was there, but they gave no hint. On one of those visits I discovered the treehouse. It was my secret and my refuge. Mine alone.

Then came the summer holidays.

And then there was Verity.