The Keys to the Street (13 page)

His voice interested her. Perhaps she was a snob, but she had not expected a man such as he to have a voice and an accent like his. Nor to have been reading what he was reading, come to that. She looked for him on her way home, hoping he was not John Dominic Cahill, whose nickname, the paper said, was Decker. She hoped very much that Decker and Nikolai were not one and the same.

But he was nowhere to be seen. She even took the long route, crossing the Long Bridge and entering the Inner Circle. It was dull and rather windy, therefore unlikely that he would be on one of the seats in the Broad Walk. She made a detour through the shady shrubberies in the southeast corner, but he was not there either. A waste of time, she told herself, and then that it would have been rather awkward if he had been there and they had suddenly come face to face along one of the dark paths.

Leo Nash was taking her out to dinner. He had phoned and asked her two evenings before. Mary was gratified because she had thought her behavior to him, her reticence, her caution, might have discouraged him. And now she hardly knew where that coolness had come from or what purpose it had served.

He had walked back to Park Village West with her, leaving the park by the Gloucester Gate. It all seemed familiar to him and when she asked he told her he had always lived near the park and always, since a small boy, loved the terraces, the villas, the lake, the glimpses of wild animals behind the zoo fencing.

“And you’re called Nash!” she had said.

He looked at her, uncomprehending. “That’s right.”

“Nash,” she said, “John Nash. He was the architect of the park.”

“Ah. I’ve never thought of that before. I never made the connection.”

“Perhaps he was an ancestor.”

He laughed, but she thought he looked disconcerted. “There are an awful lot of us in the phone book.”

They passed the Grotto and took the turn into the crescent of Park Village that was the longer way round. The lilac was past and it was too early for the roses. Crimson and gold wallflowers and the orange Siberian kind scented the air. Someone was cutting a lawn, the buzzing of the motor a country or suburban sound. It smelled like a florist’s shop, he said, as if he had never been in a garden before and had only known cut flowers, forced flowers in pots and boxes. Mary stopped outside the gate of Charlotte Cottage. The rock garden was a mass of white and yellow and blue alpines and the first geraniums were coming out in the tubs.

“What a lovely garden,” he said.

“The house is pretty nice too.”

She fancied the look he gave her was a strange one, puzzled, as if he were suddenly adrift. She had been on the point of asking him in. For a drink, a cup of coffee. We have to have these excuses, she thought, or women do. But something stopped her, some sudden feeling of distance between them. The rapport she had felt up till then was gone, reminding her that he was a stranger. After all, she didn’t know him. They had only just met. What did they have in common but shared marrow in their bones?

“It has been very good to meet you at last,” she said, as if such warm words would soften her rejection of him. At once, in her own ears, they sounded like cold words. They sounded rigidly formal. She held out her hand, making things worse. “I hope we’ll see each other again.” She could see she had hurt him. He pursed his lips the way a man may do when he feels he has committed some solecism, when he has put a foot wrong but does not know where or how.

“I hope that too. May I phone you?”

“Of course.”

“Then I will. Soon.”

“Thank you for walking me home,” she said, and she had gone quickly to let herself into the house, picking up Gushi and hugging him the moment she was inside.

After that it was a relief when he phoned. She could repair the damage, make all things well between them. She had waited for him to phone but wouldn’t have been surprised if he hadn’t, and then she would have had to get in touch with him. But he had phoned and surely at the earliest opportunity that he could have done so without seeming too eager. His voice had been warm and friendly and had evoked from her just such a warm response.

The call seemed to have released her to talk about him. When her cousin Judith phoned she spoke to her of the new friend she had made, the man who was the recipient of her transplant. She told Dorothea, who wanted to know if he was “personable,” if he was “fanciable”—when was she seeing him again?

“That would be one in the eye for old Alistair.”

“I’ve only met him once for half an hour, Dorrie.”

She told her grandmother. Frederica Jago was going to Crete on the following day with some people called Tratton, old friends who had a house there.

“I know one shouldn’t ever say I told you so, but I did tell you he’d reply, he just took a long time about it. And he’s nice?”

“I think so. I think he’s very nice.”

“Not a—what do they call them?—not a yob? My darling Mary, you needn’t look like that. We do judge people by the neighborhoods they come from.”

“He’s a clever, well-educated, quiet, and, I think, rather sensitive man.”

“And you found that out in how long? An hour?”

Mary laughed. “A bit less. Perhaps you can meet him when you get back from Crete. I must go. I’ve been here much longer than I
meant to.” Frederica insisted on calling a taxi for her. She was not to wait out in the street. The murder had been too near for comfort.

“And take her right to the door, please,” she said to the driver. “Into the crescent and right to the door, not just to the Albany Street corner.”

Mary kissed her. Her grandmother smelled delicately of vanilla. She had looked back at the house and waved as the cab pulled away, at the great late Victorian pile, stucco, red shingles, red tiles, all gleaming in yellow lamplight, and Frederica’s neat tiny figure on the steps under the big bulbous portico.

•   •   •

Leo was a little early. He had a taxi waiting, and though he came in, it was only to the hall while she shut Gushi into the drawing room. He wore a suit and this reminded her of Alistair, who dressed formally most of the time. She came back to find him studying a framed print of Christ Church in a series of Oxford college etchings on the hall wall.

“I was at the House,” he said. “It looks just the same.”

Did people still call Christ Church that? “Yes, you said you were taken ill just after you’d got your degree.”

He smiled at her. The smile pulled his young face into a network of radiating lines. She thought he looked ill, suddenly aged, pale as a sick old man.

“Are you all right?”

“Yes. Why? I’m naturally a bit wan. It’s the curse of the very fair-skinned.”

He took her to an Italian restaurant in Paddington Street, off Marylebone High Street. It was a place recommended by a friend of his brother’s. The distance could easily have been walked. But was he fit to walk half a mile? She very much wanted to ask him how he was now. Would he stay well? Was he, in fact,
cured?
She doubted if such a thing was possible.

As soon as they entered the simple little restaurant, Mary sensed that the food would be good, the service efficient and discreet. It was a pretty place, with wooden tables and comfortable seats instead of the rickety glass and wrought-iron kind, mirrors and paintings on the walls, flowers on every table and candles lit.

While they ate he talked of the first donor who had come along. Their tissue was compatible. In fact, it was a perfect match, as close as a brother or sister. But the man was chronically mildly ill himself and he was found medically unfit to donate marrow.

“It was the most appalling disappointment. I was sure I was going to die. I tried to teach myself to be resigned to it, I even wrote out instructions for the kind of funeral I wanted to have.”

“Your mother wasn’t compatible?”

His face was impassive. He no longer met her eyes. “My mother wasn’t tested. She—well, she was afraid of the anesthetic, of going under. She’s never had anesthesia. I can understand.”

This had been her grandmother’s fear. Perhaps it was common, this dread of loss of consciousness, loss of control, a brief experience of death. “There were no other relatives, then?”

“Cousins. Two were tested, but it was no use. Then you came along.” He smiled. “In the nick of time.”

“I’m sure there would have been others.”

“No, I think not. You were the only one in the world.”

There was an intensity in the way he said it and the look he gave her that made her glance away. He seemed to sense her embarrassment and began to talk of indifferent things, his brother’s business, a vague merchandising that meant nothing to her, the place they lived in that he would like to leave when he could, but that had come to them when their mother moved out. A roof over one’s head was not something to be lightly abandoned.

The bill came and she offered to go halves. His expression became stern, a little impatient. “No. Don’t suggest it again, please.”

She recoiled. His severity was unexpected and, gentle herself, she
reacted painfully to brusqueness in others. It was almost like being struck and she put up her hand to her cheek, remembering Alistair, fearing verbal attack almost as much as physical. Leo’s smile, warm and somehow conspiratorial, a small, sharing, intimate smile, restored them to where they had been before.

“The only one in the world,” he said again. “You may not care for the idea, but I can’t help feeling that makes for a special relationship.”

She hesitated, then said quietly as they came out into the street, “Oh, no, I feel that too. I don’t see how anyone in our situation could escape feeling that.”

“Shall we walk back?”

It was not for her, she felt, to suggest he might be incapable of walking. But now the half mile she had first thought of as the distance between here and Park Village, in a more realistic estimate became at least a mile.

“If you like.”

She tried to say it grudgingly. Her unwilling tone was assumed to give him the impression walking found no favor with her. If it did he chose to ignore it and they walked side by side up toward the Marylebone Road and the York Gate.

To her relief he had said nothing about the murder. He was the only person she had spoken to in the past three days who had not talked of the murder. Even her grandmother had touched on it with her injunction to the taxi driver. She asked Leo about his parents and he told her his father was dead and his mother lived in Scotland, had married again after his father’s death. His brother Carl was ten years older than he, a clever gifted man, he said, and he added with a smile that he was nearly as much a lifesaver as she. Though Leo didn’t say so, Mary had the impression Carl was gay. Leo only said that he was rather solitary, mysterious about his private life.

At the utterance of this last word, the word “life,” Leo put out one hand to support himself against a shop front. In the artificial light it
was hard to see, but Mary thought his pallor had intensified. He stood there, breathing carefully, then lowered himself to sit on a wall that reached to waist height.

“You shouldn’t be walking,” she said. “It’s too far. It’s too much for you.”

He nodded. “I’m afraid it is. I’ll be all right in a moment.” The smile he managed reassured her. “This still happens. They warned me it would go on happening.” He seemed to be considering whether what he wanted to say would be wise. The words came out in a rush. “I’m on low-dose chemotherapy. It’s—” he sought for a word “—a bore.”

“We’ll get a taxi.”

Quite a long time passed before one came. It was nearly eleven and Mary, who had been determined this time to ask Leo in, make coffee for him, explain to him how she came to be there and show him over the house, now saw that all this must be postponed. He opened the taxi door for her and she heard him tell the driver to take them first to Park Village West and then take him on alone to Plangent Road.

“May I see you again tomorrow?” he said. “To make up for making a fool of myself tonight? In a subtle sort of way you warned me not to try walking, didn’t you?”

“I wanted to make you believe I was reluctant. I couldn’t do more.”

He turned away and said in a muffled voice, “You do everything quite perfectly.”

She blushed in the dark. Her cheeks burned. She wanted to tell him how glad she was he hadn’t mentioned the murder, but to say anything about it would defeat the purpose of the remark. As the taxi turned into Park Village West he took both her hands in his. His hands felt warmer tonight. They exerted a strong pressure on her, not the grip of a sick man.

“Tomorrow then.”

“Tomorrow’s Saturday,” she said.

“All the better. May I come in the morning? May I come at ten?”

“Of course.” Things seemed to be progressing very fast, but why not? What harm could it do? What had she to lose? “Look after yourself,” she said. “Rest. Have a good night’s sleep.” She was aware of the chill of the night as she stood there for a moment. All the flowers were out, gleaming monotone in the pale cold light from street lamps. From a house nearby music was coming softly, but she heard a window close and then all was silent.

The inside of Charlotte Cottage felt warm and Gushi like a soft comforting muff. She buried her hands in his golden fur. The weekend ahead would be the first one she had spent there that would not be lonely and herself forlorn. She took Gushi up to bed with her and dreamed of Leo Nash, a dream in which she came upon him sitting in the park in front of an easel. He was making an architect’s drawing of Sussex Place with its ten Oriental domes and array of Corinthian columns. As she approached he tore the sheet off a drawing block and handed it to her, saying, “You may like to see a compatible tissue-type.”

The thin paper was icy in her hands and before she could look at the drawing it had melted like snow and dripped from her fingers.

•   •   •

A clock somewhere that she hadn’t yet located was striking the last note of ten when he arrived. He put out his hand as if for a formal hand-shaking but, when he placed hers in it, covered it with the other in a warm intimate gesture. The little dog came running out and without hesitation he picked it up and held it in his arms.