Reconstruction (20 page)

‘Being private is not the same as lonely,’ Jaime was saying.

Ben said, ‘That’s true.’

‘And you were his friend too, yes? He spoke of you.’

He was losing it – Eliot was losing it. He hugged his children closer, the effort of maintaining a gentle pressure beyond him. And he looked at Louise again, and this time their eyes met, and for Eliot that moment felt like sanctuary – carried him out of the here and now to a place with-out guns, and reminded him, as precisely as an anatomical drawing, of the first time they’d shared a glance, in a school up the north end of the city. It didn’t seem likely right now that that could have happened. On the other hand, it hadn’t seemed too realistic at the time, either.

Something in Louise’s eyes clouded, then cleared. She was remembering too, he realized. And as she looked away he hugged his boys tighter, and allowed himself the release of stepping back in time five days.

He had been roped into it, was the funny thing – not that he couldn’t do quizzes. His general knowledge, he guessed, probably ranked in the top ten per cent nation-ally; his particular strengths being those of any graduate his age: contemporary literature, seventies TV, late eighties pop and pre-Blair politics – well, contemporary lit minus the last four years. Having children was a learning curve all its own, but did tend to exclude you from other fields of knowledge. Anyway, perhaps he’d mentioned this once too often at the office, because suddenly he was on a team for a quiz event, raising funds for a local school.

‘I won’t know anyone there,’ he’d told Christine. ‘Just Lizzie.’ His colleague, who’d pressganged him. ‘And seven hours a day of her’s more than enough.’

Chris said, ‘Oh, go. At least you won’t sit slumped in front of the box all night.’

While I do all the work
was her unspoken corollary – by which she meant, of course, all the work he didn’t do, which included washing up, laundry, playing with the boys while she spent an hour in the bath; not to mention actually going out and working all day long. A typically unfair accusation, then, and all the more so for remaining unspoken. He wasn’t even allowed to defend himself. If he tried, she’d point out she hadn’t said anything.

Slumped in front of the box, too: that wasn’t him. He didn’t do that. Using the remote, he’d switched it off, and reached for the paper. ‘Okay, then,’ he’d said. ‘It’s next Tuesday.’ So I won’t be around to do the washing up was what he meant, but that, too, remained unsaid.

So the following Tuesday, mid-evening, Eliot caught a bus up the other end of the city: this because Chris needed the car first thing in the morning, and it was outside the house right then, but they’d lose the space if he used it, and then she’d have to cart the boys round the block look-ing for it and . . . Nothing was ever simple any more. Even the simple stuff was complicated. Eliot couldn’t fill the kettle without being told he was doing it wrong, and if the stated reason for whatever error he was committing always sounded reasonable at the time, it nevertheless felt like Chris was pursuing a hidden agenda, designed to underline how useless he was at everything.

At the school he made his way to the hall without seeing anyone he knew, and for a few moments stood watching people clustered round tables, laughing and talking. It occurred to him that he could slip quietly away now and do anything he wanted – go to the pub, go to the cinema – but before either of those things could happen, Lizzie hailed him. ‘Eliot! You made it!’ Everybody turned to look. Lizzie was not a quiet woman. ‘We’re on Table 4! They all have numbers! On a piece of card!’ Soon she’d be describing what a number 4 looked like, and possibly explaining counting: to forestall this, he told her he’d see her there, and made his way across the hall indelibly marked as the loud woman’s companion. Table 4 was occupied by an attractive brunette; familiar, though Eliot couldn’t pinpoint why at first – she had grey eyes, was early thirties; wore jeans and a white collarless blouse, open at the neck to reveal a pendant on a thin silver chain. Lapis lazuli, he thought, irrelevantly. He had no idea what lapis lazuli looked like.

Louise had said, ‘Oh, hello. Aren’t you Gordon and Timmy’s dad?’, and as soon as she spoke, he realized who she was.

‘And you’re their teacher. How come you’re at this table? Sorry, I didn’t mean that as rudely as it sounded.’

‘I do T’ai Chi with Lizzie. I’m Louise. Louise Kennedy.’

‘I remember. And I’m Eliot. Colleague of,er, Lizzie’s.’ He sat. ‘I didn’t realize she did T’ai Chi. That’s a martial art, isn’t it?’

Lizzie was still the other side of the room, chatting. Lizzie, he reflected, really was large and altogether too loud;
jolly
, obviously, was the adjective most often applied to her – well, apart from
fat
– but every few months she’d have an emotional meltdown, and lock herself in a toilet or leave work hurriedly mid-morning. One or other female member of staff would then spend the rest of the day on Lizzie-duty, while the men studiedly refrained from noticing anything amiss. Chris knew all this, of course, which doubtless accounted for her equanimity about Eliot com-ing out for the evening. If she’d known Louise would be of the party – or any other thirtyish attractive single woman – she might have been less encouraging. However little interest she had in Eliot these days, she didn’t want anybody else taking up the slack.

Meanwhile Louise was smiling politely, but with a visible tightening round her mouth; far from being about to take up Chris’s slack, she was evidently wondering what she’d let herself in for . . .
Stop living in your head
, he told himself. Talk to the woman. And for fuck’s sake don’t start thinking she fancies you just because you’re sitting next to her and she hasn’t yet called for help.

Eliot said, ‘I suppose it’s too much to hope they’ve got a bar here,’ and the tightness left Louise’s smile, which this time reached her eyes.

‘You’re a friend of Miro Weiss.’

‘Yes.’

‘His boyfriend.’

‘We were lovers, yes.’

‘I didn’t know.’

‘You did not know he is gay?’

‘I’d got that far. I just didn’t know he had a boyfriend,

Jaime. I thought he was . . . ’

Ben looked for the right word.

‘I thought he was lonely.’

Jaime gave that some thought. ‘He was private man,’ he said at last.

‘I know.’

‘Being private is not the same as lonely.’

‘That’s true.’

‘And you were his friend too, yes? He spoke of you.’

‘Nothing but good, I hope.’

Jaime looked blank.

‘I mean, I hope he didn’t say anything bad about me.’

‘He said you were his friend.’

‘I’m glad he said that, Jaime. But it wasn’t exactly true.’

‘You were not his friend?’

‘I didn’t know him that well. We worked together, yes. But like you say, he was a private man. He didn’t open up much.’

‘Open up?’

‘He had his secrets. He never told me about you, for instance.’

‘He said it would be best if people did not know about us.’

‘Because you’re gay?’

‘He said people would not understand.’

‘It’s not the 1950s, Jaime. I’m not sure anyone would care.’

‘He said where you worked, they do not like such things. Being boyfriends. Being gay men.’

Ben said, ‘Once upon a time. Things are different now.’

‘You are gay?’

‘That’s the second time I’ve been asked that this morn-ing. I might change my aftershave.’

‘I do not understand.’

‘I’m sorry. Trying to be funny. No, I’m not gay.’

‘Then you do not know what it was like for Miro.’

‘No, I suppose I don’t.’

Was this going well? Ben couldn’t say.
Let me handle this
he’d told Louise Kennedy, and she’d quietened down, either in direct response to instruction or because that’s what she’d planned on doing anyway. And the boy, Jaime, was at least talking freely, and
you’ve got to establish normality
– that was what Ben had been told. Don’t forget about the gun, but don’t act like it’s all there is. Not for-getting about the gun was going to be the easy part. But at least Jaime was talking freely, and maybe the gun would fade into an unimportant accessory; something that might be dangerous if misused, but otherwise could be safely ignored, like a ballpoint pen, or a corkscrew.

Keep talking.

‘Have you seen him lately, Jaime? Been in touch?’

‘He is dead.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘If he is not dead, he would contact me. He would not just disappear. He would not go without goodbye.’

‘Well, that’s the thing. When he disappeared, Jaime, he made a lot of people very unhappy. Not just you.’

‘He did not disappear,’ Jaime repeated. ‘He is dead.’

‘Dead people turn up sooner or later.’ They float to the surface, thought Ben. Or the smell gives their location away. ‘And when Miro disappeared, a lot of money dis-appeared with him. An awful lot. People jumped to the obvious conclusion.’

‘You think he took this money?’

‘That’s what people say.’

‘He is not a thief.’

‘It surprised a lot of us.’

‘So why you think he is a thief?’

‘Well . . .’

‘Because everybody say he is? Everybody where you work?’

‘. . . Yes, Jaime. That’s pretty much what everybody where I work said.’

‘I do not think you are much of a friend. If people say bad things about my friend, I do not believe them. I believe my friend.’

‘Except we weren’t exactly friends. And Miro wasn’t there to put his side of the story, Jaime. He was gone just like the money was.’

‘He rob your safe?’

‘In a manner of speaking.’

‘He steal hundreds of pounds?’

‘A lot more than that, Jaime.’

‘Thousands?’

‘A quarter of a billion, Jaime. That’s how much money went missing when Miro disappeared. A quarter of a billion pounds.’

The joke was, they’d called it
real
money – telephone numbers; serious dosh. She’d earned real money too. But she’d never seen that, either; for several years, Louise had barely carried cash, beyond the odd fiver for emergencies. Life and shopping had been conducted with plastic. The realer money was, the less you had to confront it. It operated differently; you never fished it from a pocket and counted it out, but its presence lent weight to your daily existence, enabling you to see things others didn’t, and ignore things that shouldn’t be there. Real money’s weight was a buffer against the unpleasant. Louise had eaten in restaurants where they didn’t put prices on the menu, and hadn’t even noticed at the time.

‘There is lot of money involved.’

‘Sometimes.’

‘Miro was good at his job,’ Jaime said.

Louise had been good at hers.

Good at it, but had found a way to screw it up all the same: sleeping with the boss, it turned out, was a terrible idea. Who’d have thought it? There was a man with a gun not ten feet away, and another man trying to talk him down from whatever ledge he was on, but although she was listening to these men talking – ‘He could tell you square roots of big numbers, from his head. With no paper.’

‘That’s quite a talent.’

– part of her mind was on Crispin Tate, and the reason for that was stamped on the calendar.
Today, of all days, he
was likely to weigh heavy on her mind
. Even before all this, he’d been rattling in her head, because she could remember exactly where she’d been two years ago.

But every day was an anniversary; something had always happened, good or bad. And sometimes whichever it was shaded from one to the other with the passage of time; last year, today had been a good anniversary; this year, it was bad . . . Last year Louise and Crispin had celebrated their first anniversary, returning to the restaurant they’d first visited (of course), where she’d even – a blush-making admission – chosen the same dish from the same, unpriced menu. And had assumed the evening would be ending in the same fashion, but
Darling, I’m so sorry – I have
to be home, it’s Charlie’s birthday tomorrow
. So how come it hadn’t been Charlie’s birthday tomorrow last year? But she hadn’t thought of asking until he’d left. And anyway, by then, Louise had grown used to abrupt departures and curtailed conversations; to being placated instead of wooed.

In well-arranged marriages, brides learned to love their husbands one quality at a time: a particular habit of kindness, the curve of an elbow, the occasional display of tact. For other women, when their poorly arranged affairs ended badly, the problem was neatly reversed, with no shortage of qualities to learn to hate – the assumption that she’d be there when he wanted her; the cancellation of dates without warning. His particular habit of being married, with children. The name
Crispin
was hardly a bonus, either. Such matters began small, but grew and grew. She wasn’t sure she hated Crispin yet, and knew she was lead-ing a better life now – felt a fuller person. But also knew that he’d come out of it unscathed; that she’d been the one forced to make changes.

Changes which had left her here.

The spy and the gunman, Jaime, were still at it; the name
Miro
flashing back and forth, as if the two were on their own separate page.
Are you the lady?
Jaime had asked. She was the only lady here, since you couldn’t count Judy. Maybe Eliot had had it right, and he’d meant Claire Christopher, who’d chosen today of all days to have a dental appointment – unless that had been deliberate . . . And as soon as the thought formed, Louise knew she was starting to lose it. Claire involved with gunmen? That was about as likely as . . . Louise herself being here, now.