"Phew!" Fraser said after she'd gone.
"What do you mean,
phew!
" I said sharply. I knew perfectly well what he meant by
phew
. Just about every male in the college, student or staff, felt
phew!
when they stood next to Mandy. It was like standing next to the open door of a furnace. But it enraged me that he'd just heard about the death of one of the five girls in the photographs and his only response was this oily flirting with my girlfriend.
"I'm just saying you're a lucky guy," Fraser said.
"Yeh? Well, don't say anything, right? Say nothing."
"Keep your hair on!"
I had a nine thirty lecture to think about. Alexander Pope. I made a quick decision that I was going to have to miss it. I told Fraser he was going to have to miss his lecture, too. Ignoring his protests, I collected up our respective trays and returned them to the serving hatch, and then I marched him back to Friarsfield Lodge.
I'd decided he was going to show me exactly what he'd done.
"What, you want me to repeat the ritual?"
"No, you moron, I just want you to describe exactly what you did and how you did it."
"It's not connected, you know. This thing we just heard about Sandie."
"I know that, you fucking freak. Do you think I'm simple? I just want to know what you did."
Fraser let me back into his room, which I'd now decided had an odour of mushrooms and toadstools. He showed me a few trinkets—candle holders, salt vats, various incense sticks like sandalwood and myrrh and patchouli. Then he started to describe how he'd drawn the markings on the floor of the attic and repeated a set of incantations.
I interrupted him. "But how did you know what to do? What to draw on the floor? Which words to use? All that?"
He blinked at me. "I got it from a book."
"What book, for fuck's sake?"
"Well, I'd been collecting books on the subject for a while. Then I found one by accident."
"So you just followed the instructions? Doesn't it tell you how to . . . get rid of . . . whatever."
"No, it wasn't complete."
"Complete?" I had a sudden bad feeling about this.
"It wasn't all there. It was a book and a manuscript I found in the attic."
The room swam. "You found a manuscript in the attic?"
"It was just lying around up there. Almost like it was waiting for me to find it."
"Show it me! Show me the book!" I felt dizzy. I wanted to throw up.
"Okay, calm down. It's here."
He had a hiding place for it, obviously to keep it well away from the attention of Dick Fellowes. He pulled a drawer all the way out of a cupboard and turned it over on his bed, emptying its contents of socks and underwear and t-shirts onto the scruffy duvet. Taped to the underside of the drawer was a brown padded envelope. He opened the envelope and withdrew the book he'd been referring to. Or to be technically correct, it was part of a yellowing book. The cover had gone astray, the spine had been torn off and perhaps the entire back half of the book was missing. Interleaved with some of the remaining pages were several sheets of onion-skin paper, on which were etched in black India ink and in fine, elegant handwriting a series of diagrams and descriptions of rituals.
I felt faint as I took the thing from Fraser's hands. You see, it was quite familiar to me. The book belonged to me. What's more, I was the author of the supplementary manuscript.
We drank five or six glasses of wine each in the Plumber's Arms that afternoon, and we talked about I know not what. After the second glass I'd said I had work to get back to; and Yasmin said so had she. But I said oh heck let's have another and she said heck why not. After that third glass she dialled her employer on her mobile phone and said she'd eaten something at lunchtime that had disagreed with her and that she wouldn't be in. She looked me in the eye as she made the call.
That's youth for you. The cavalier lie. The irresponsible fib. The offhand disrespect for consequences. The casual dishonesty that conjures the excitement of an open narrative for their lives. I took out my own mobile and dialled Val, and told her I was feeling a little under the weather and that I probably wouldn't return to the office that afternoon.
Neither of us commented on what we'd just done, or the significance of the fact that we'd just cleared the next few hours simply to be together. But we'd changed into a smoother, less grinding gear, and we both felt the pleasure of the open highway ahead. We celebrated by ordering a fourth glass of wine.
Is it possible to fall for someone because of the way they hitch the strap of their dress? Why would that bundle of contingencies we call love fasten and feed on such a small thing? But as we talked I kept waiting, almost impatiently, greedily, for her to do it again. And there was another thing: this feeling that she reminded me of someone. Yet I didn't take that too seriously because it had happened when I'd got mixed up with Fay. It's a conjuring trick of nature, a phantom and a deception. You somehow feel that you must have known this person in another life; that you were waiting for them to slot into your world, like a missing jigsaw piece, or a lost chord. It's in the eye: there in the compression of the pupil or the glitter around the iris. You recognize that person and yet you don't, so therefore it can't be the hideous randomness of biology; it has to be destiny, it has to be a spiritual reunion of some kind, a rediscovery, a planetary alignment, a coming home.
This is the fraudulent demon of falling in love. It is categorised by Goodridge as demon number five hundred and sixty-seven. Almost everyone is prey to this demon at some time in their lives; for some fools, several times over. (And do not be tempted to attribute any special significance to its number, because if you do so you will fall victim to the numerologist's demon, which weaves its vicious web out of mere coincidence.)
I don't believe in this notion of "falling in love." I think we fall in sex, and after sex we have to either stand up for love or scarper. By which I mean love won't take things lying down. By which I mean the four glasses of wine were affecting me more than they would normally, and the things I was thinking were alarming me.
Most of all I was thinking: please don't let this turn into a love story at my time of life. Anything but that, because noone has any sympathy for that any more. And anyway I'd been banned from being in love. I'd inoculated myself.
"How old are you?" I asked her.
"Twenty-nine. But inside I'm older. Wiser."
"How did you come by your wisdom?"
Ah, then she did that thing: lightly hitched the strap on her shoulder, and looked round at the slowly emptying pub. Lunchtime was over, and most of the customers were not stuck there, like I was, like a fly in a spoon of honey. She said, "Do you think it's possible that some people could live a full life, let's say live through wars, fall in love many times, see regimes change around them and go on to die without being any the wiser?'
"I'm sure it happens."
The thing is, we were saying all these things but it wasn't like a real conversation. We were just making noises. Singing to each other, almost. Finding points of harmony. Exchanging old jokes. It didn't have to mean anything. After the sixth glass of wine—or was it the fifth or the seventh?—we were the only people left in the bar besides the staff. Tucked in a little corner. Her graceful, pale hand still lay flat upon the table. Mine too, fingertips a few centimetres from hers. Yet the gap between those fingertips was a canyon, a rocky desert. I knew that like a superhero I could leap that chasm in a single bound. I also knew that I must not. Would not.
I stumbled out to the toilets at the back of the pub. There I washed my hands and threw some cold water on my face. I stood there for a minute or two regarding myself in the mirror. For some reason I thought of how it would sound to Stinx and Diamond Jaz; or to my secretary Val; or to Fay and the children for goodness sake.
"What? What?"—and here's the mad thing: I actually said this to myself in the mirror, as if I was having a real argument with the man reflected there—"We had a few glasses of wine together, that's all!"
This robust defence with self was interrupted by a barman who swung into the Gents. He'd clearly heard me barking because he looked at me oddly before disappearing into one of the stalls. I pretended I'd been singing some death metal rock lyrics of the kind my son used to play in his bedroom at maximum volume. I don't think I convinced the barman in the stalls.
And of course it
was
nothing. Just a few drinks with a strange and pert young woman, about whom I knew nothing. I pulled myself together and returned to find her in the bar.
"Thought you'd abandoned me," she said lightly.
"I wouldn't do that."
Because it wasn't nothing. It was too much of something. I could feel myself going into a crash, so I had to pull out. I sat back in my chair. I looked at my watch.
She sensed the line go slack, so started talking about the television. She said she might have been mistaken but she thought she'd seen my face picked up by the news cameras the night before, outside Buckingham Palace.
"Bloody awful business," was all I could think of saying about it.
There was an uncomfortable pause and then, "Shall we go for a stroll along the Embankment? It's what I like doing best in all the world."
I was relieved, and eager to leave the Plumber's Arms, but the question of where to next was more than I could resolve. I was so way out of practice with women—and certainly with women of her generation—that I feared the obvious. If she'd said,
Your place or mine?
I would have needed to turn her down without knowing how. Then again, I was thrilled by her proximity: I'd spent the last few hours wanting to trace the blue veins on her pale white arms; plus something about her scent was maddening me; plus I wanted to taste on her mouth the wine we'd been drinking. But I wasn't ready or willing for any of this. The curve of descent was too steep.
But neither did I want to stop the conversation, whatever it was about. So we walked along the Embankment, from Lambeth Bridge, past the Houses of Parliament and on. It was cold, but dry cold. She linked her arm in mine, quite naturally, and though I stiffened at first I quickly relaxed. There was a diffuse sun, spinning a hint of lime on the Thames. London hurtled along at its breakneck business on either side of the river, but not where we were. We strolled all the way up to Blackfriars Bridge and it seemed but a few steps. I've walked there a hundred times, but on this occasion it was all new-minted. The chill wind from the water only made me more sensitive to the warmth of her body beside me; the winter light flaking the air seemed like a bright stage radiance; the engine of the city diminished to a purr, far away, harmless to our inviolable space.
At Blackfriars we stood for a while, trying to say goodbye, not knowing what to do next. I saw the flapping ghost of the Vatican banker hanged by his enemies under the arch of the bridge at low tide just a few years ago: it was just a phantom, mere history, fading.
"Shall we see each other again?" she said.
"You want to?"
"I just said so, didn't I?"
"When?"
I wanted to say,
In five minutes
.
Now
. I wondered if the next night would be too soon. Then I remembered it was the Candlelight Club the next night. I felt a stab of irritation that I had to see Stinx and Jaz when I wanted to be with Yasmin. I hadn't even left her company and already I was prepared to ditch my good friends to be with her again. Where is the sense in that? "Thursday? Can you do Thursday?"
"Where?"
"Do we have to decide now? I'll call you."
"Okay."
She stood with her arms at her sides, looking at me without blinking. I leaned over to offer a farewell peck on her cheek, but in my clumsiness, or maybe
our
clumsiness, our lips grazed each other's. A dry-lipped kiss, a kiss on lips made cold by the chilly air. But I felt something pass between her lips and mine, a fine thing, like smoke but sweeter, like a promise but less precise.
And yet it wasn't even a kiss. If she was Ellis's spy, she was taking the game all the way.
A tugboat on the river hooted its pleasure or derision at us, I didn't know which. The light was fading fast as I watched her hail a passing taxi and climb in. I already envied the cab driver her company.
Naturally I didn't say anything about all this to Stinx and Diamond Jaz when I met up with them in the Viaduct Tavern the following evening. I say "naturally," when in fact the Candlelight Club was formed, and ostensibly still met, as a talk-shop; a tool for charting the contours of our respective romantic lives. That is to say, Jaz persisted with his chronic treks through green valleys and glittering mountain peaks of a Shangri-La that always turned overnight into some wind-blasted icy crevasse of doom; Stinx adhered to the rolling hills and dark forests of his affair with Lucy; and I stalked the flat, arid planes, reporting on nothing but my intermittent communication with Fay and the children. I didn't want to tell them about Yasmin. Not yet anyway. I wanted to protect her, us, from the gallows laughter that characterized an evening with the Candlelight Club.
Stinx looked at me, wiping creamy Guinness foam from his upper lip. "Somethin' different about him," Stinx said to Jaz.
Jaz took a light swig from his bottle of designer lager and squinted at me. "You're right. There is."
I glanced around the pub in a futile effort to dodge their attention. Wrong move. It only confirmed for them that they were onto something.
"Come on, my son. Out with it."
The Viaduct Tavern is definitely one of my personal favourites, not so busy in the evenings, and an original gin-palace. Dark mahogany carved wood made airy by gilt, silver mirrors and engraved glass. On the marble wall are huge paintings of three busty maidens representing Agriculture, Banking and the Arts. The Arts is wounded, bayoneted in the buttock by a drunken solider during the First World War. The pub is built on the site of the old Newark hanging prison and the cellars are former prison cells for the cut-throats and scum of Victorian London.