The Keys to the Street (26 page)

“Nothing. I don’t know. I never saw him.”

“You
what?
” Marnock was standing over him again.

“I mean, I saw him once, he never came back, I never saw him
again
. I went back but he never turned up. He never did, I swear it.”

“What was he going to do,” said Marnock, “for this princely sum?”

“I said, I never saw him again.”

“Kill Clancy, that was it, wasn’t it?”

“Not kill him,” Bean protested. “Not that. I never wanted that. Rough him up a bit—and why not? He’d mugged me, he’d taken a good bit more than fifty quid off me, I can tell you. Mussolini, whatever his name is, him, he was going to do the same, that’s all, he—” A gradual, awful realization was dawning. The railings, the second vagrant, the vital part of the news he’d missed to make his tea. “I want a lawyer,” he said. “I can have a lawyer, can’t I?”

“Of course you can, Leslie,” said Marnock. “I think that’s a very good idea.”

•   •   •

Their natures and ways were uncannily the same. And this was wonderful to discover, each shared emotion, reaction, approach, a relief to find. It was not just that he kept his home precisely as she
kept hers, clean, neat, airy, that he dressed simply, got up early, was as good-tempered and warm first thing in the morning as when they at last put out the lights, but that they seemed to like and need and want all the same things. She had only to mention a taste or preference for him to confess a similar leaning. He even had the same sort of food in his fridge as she had in hers. In his bathroom, when she went to take her shower, was the brand of soap she used.

It was almost as if he had set out to make himself the same kind of person. When his phone rang he answered it by giving the number, as she did; he said “good-bye,” not “bye-bye”; and when someone downstairs slammed the front door he winced and smiled at his wincing, which would have been just her own reaction.

Their lovemaking, when it finally happened, was what she had wistfully envisaged but never before quite known. With Alistair, and with a boyfriend or two before Alistair, she had tried to achieve the ideal she had made for herself long before. But, reluctantly, she had faced what seemed a universal truth, that her particular wish and need were not acceptable to men. They might not be violent or aggressive, but they were urgent, demanding, determined to make the rules, certain of what was right. If they acceded to her—and from time to time they did—there was always a feeling she had that they were keeping her sweet, being “patient,” giving in so that they might get their own way next time. She had been called frigid by each of them, when they lost their tempers. Until Leo, she had almost reached a point of seeing herself as wrong and the Alistairs of this world as right. She had almost resolved that next time, whenever that was and with whom, she would accept the male attitude and try somehow to teach herself to like it. No doubt, that, like anything else, could be learned. But with Leo there had been nothing to learn or unlearn or make decisions about. She needed to ask him nothing, nor direct his hands, nor resist his urgency, nor pull away from the hardness of lips and teeth. He was as gentle as she, as languid, and—until the end when she, for once, was imperative and demanding—as
slow and delicate with his caresses. But at that end she had cried out as those others had always expected her to cry and had held him in an embrace she was fearful of afterward, in case her strength was greater than his.

That had been three nights earlier, the time of her flight from Alistair. The next evening Leo came to her and, though she worried that Alistair might arrive, might turn up on the doorstep at any moment, she forgot him after a while. Discovering Leo, she forgot everything, lying in his arms, talking to him,
caring
for him. For it was inescapable, that feeling she must look after him, that he needed her as much to watch over his health, his fragile body, as for a lover.

Side by side in the warm evening, they were each as white as a marble statue, not a mark, a flaw, a flush of color on their milky paleness. She could scarcely see in the dusk where the skin of his thigh ended and hers began. Only his face, in repose, the bluish eyelids closed, looked more tired than hers, looked, she fancied, older than hers. But that perhaps was the fantasy of a woman of thirty, wishing to be nearer her young lover’s age.

Their hair was nearly the same color, hers of a slightly finer texture, a clearer gold. The down on her arms was the same thistledown stuff as his. Each had the same kind of freckle sprinkling, pale gold, sparse, on the bridges of their noses. If their features were quite different, it was only as a brother and a sister’s may be, each taking genes from a different parent. Their skin was the same matte-fine white, skin that perhaps lined early, though hers, in spite of her seniority, had fewer lines than his. She looked at those lines tenderly, touching them with a warm fingertip.

They had talked, earlier, of this similarity and Leo had pointed out what should have occurred to her but for some reason had not, that in people whose blood and tissue types matched so perfectly, resemblance was more likely than not. Wouldn’t it have been far stranger if one of them had been dark and the other fair or one heavy and big-boned and the other slight? She had searched among the
trust’s literature and found one of its leaflets, the one with a happy smiling photograph of two young men, donor and recipient, and yes, Leo was right, they were much the same height, with the same coloring, the same smile. “We may even be distantly related,” she said.

“I’m your lover,” Leo said. “I don’t want to be your cousin.”

He stayed all night with her. She slept better than she had since coming to Charlotte Cottage. Gushi came upstairs in the small hours and snuggled into the space between their feet. Leo didn’t mind. He got up first and made her tea. It was gone eight and she was still in bed when the phone rang. He took the receiver off and handed it to her. The voice said it was Edwina Goldsworthy and Bean wouldn’t be taking the dogs out. Maybe he wouldn’t be taking them out for a couple of days. He was ill. Some sort of inflammation of the throat, Lisl Pring had said.

So she and Leo had taken Gushi into the park and in a way she had been glad of Bean’s bad throat because it meant she could spend the next night with Leo, of course taking the dog with her. For the first time she was feeling the constriction imposed by becoming a house-sitter. She was bound to remain at Charlotte Cottage until September, and once Bean was back, remain there every night because of Gushi. Alistair, in Leo’s place, would have told her not to be bound to the Blackburn-Norrises, there had been no formal contract, but Leo did not. In his eyes the agreement was just as binding as if it had been drawn up by a solicitor and witnessed. In short, he felt the same as she did. “And I don’t think I could quite move in with you,” he said.

She hadn’t suggested it, they had known each other only a few weeks, but it was what she wanted.

“There would be something—not sordid exactly, but not what I want for us, if they were to come back and—well, find us. It will be better for us to be forced to wait until September.” He spoke very seriously. “I would like everything to be aboveboard.”

She said softly, “What is it that you want for us, Leo?”

“At the moment,” he said, “I’m still teaching myself to believe what’s happened. That you’re who you are, the woman who saved my life, that I’ve met you, and that you’re—” he hesitated and his face flushed the way hers did “—the other half of me.”

“Yes,” she said, “yes.”

“I’m falling in love with you, of course I am, but it’s almost as if I was in love with you before we met, I’d made an ideal image of you and by a kind of miracle you are that image come to life.” He smiled at her, took her in his arms. “It’s not easy getting used to that,” he said. “I don’t want us to have any secrets, Mary. May we tell each other everything about ourselves, tell our whole lives?”

So they had begun doing that. He told her about his childhood with ambitious failures for parents, a father whose career as an athlete had been ruined by a ruptured Achilles tendon while training to run in the Olympic team and a mother who had twice failed to acquire through correspondence courses and evening classes the degree she longed for.

The result had been for them to expect him and his brother to fulfill hopes that in their cases had been dashed. They must be great sportsmen or great scholars, preferably both. His brother, Carl, had gone to drama school, incurring their father’s anger and disgust. Acting wasn’t a man’s job. The only work Carl could get for a long time was modeling, more cause for outrage. Their father had died. That was when he discovered that all these years his mother had had a lover. Once her husband was dead, she had gone to Scotland to join him, leaving her sons with scarcely a good-bye. It had hurt Leo, for she had seemed never to take his illness seriously and had refused outright to be tested for tissue compatibility. Without Carl’s devotion, he hardly knew what would have become of him …

“And the rest is history. That was where you came in.”

“Yes. That was where I came in.”

“I’m afraid my mother never forgave me for failing to run a three-minute mile and get a double first. Leukemia’s not hereditary, you see. That’s known for sure now.”

She looked at him. “I’m not sure that I understand.”

“If it were, she might be able to blame herself and my father. I mean, it wouldn’t be their fault if one of them carried a faulty gene, of course it wouldn’t, but people blame themselves for handing on to their children a poor genetic inheritance. Conversely, as I’ve discovered, they like not having to blame themselves, not having the grounds for it.” He spoke not bitterly, but with amused resignation. “There’s always the suggestion there, it’s not explicit but it’s there, that somehow I must have caught it or done something I shouldn’t have to bring it on. My mother actually said once that nothing like that had ever happened to Carl.” His rueful laughter took the sting away. “Still, grown-up people shouldn’t live at home with their parents, do you think?”

“It’s not something I know much about,” she said, “but, no, you’re right.”

She was appalled by what he had told her. The mother he had not much wanted her to meet, though not much discouraged her either, she now wanted to keep away from until the time came when she and Leo …

“As soon as your time is up at Charlotte Cottage,” he said, “I’m going to want you to come and live with me. I’m giving you advance notice. Will you, in this tiny place?”

“But, Leo, we won’t have to. I’m rich—had you forgotten?”

His face, so ardent and eager, changed. “I’m afraid I had,” he said. “I wish I could.”

In the post the next morning came two letters. One, she could see by the handwriting on the envelope, was from Alistair. She opened the other first. It was from Mr. Edwards, asking her if she was in need of “funds,” as there would be no difficulty in advancing to her from her grandmother’s estate any reasonable sum. Bean arrived
while she was reading the letter. He looked tired and old. She could see he had been ill. For the first time—perhaps she had previously not taken much notice—it was apparent to her that he was an old man, vigorous, well-preserved, but old.

He launched into an involved apology. It was all due to circumstances beyond his control, it wouldn’t happen again. Mary hardly understood how you could guarantee you wouldn’t get a throat infection a second time, but Bean didn’t mention his throat. He said, to her astonishment, that he hoped Sir Stewart and Lady Blackburn-Norris would “never have to know.”

“What, that you were ill?”

“That I missed taking the little chap out, miss. I’d feel easier in my mind if they didn’t know.”

Pathetic, the sadness of age. “I shan’t tell them,” Mary said warmly. “I shall have forgotten it by the time they get back.”

She told Leo and they laughed about it. He had stayed the night but waited until Bean was gone before coming downstairs. Formerly, she would have waited until she was alone before opening Alistair’s letter, but no longer, not now that she and Leo were so close. She said, “Here,” and held it up. He put his arm round her and read it over her shoulder.

Alistair wanted to know why she had run away from him earlier that week. What was she afraid of? He wondered if she should be undergoing therapy, she was so strange, so unbalanced. Did she realize that in a hysterical outburst she had actually said she didn’t want to see him again? He was treating that with the indulgence he was sure she now wanted. In other words, he would forget it.

Could he arrange a therapist for her? He would be happy to do that. Meanwhile, they should meet and talk about money. Where did she want to live and what would she think a reasonable sum to spend on a flat or house, given their changed circumstances?

“I’d like to throw it away and not answer it.”

“But you won’t do that,” he said. “You’re too much like me. Too
polite and reasonable. You’ll answer it and be firm but nice and repeat what you said about not seeing him again.” His voice took on a stronger note. “You won’t see him again, will you, Mary?”

“I won’t if I can help it.”

He held her. “Please, Mary. For me.”

•   •   •

The police had given him the phone book to look up solicitors. He knew the names of the man who had acted for Anthony Maddox and the man who had acted for Maurice Clitheroe, but the last thing he wanted was Marnock’s attention drawn to his late employers. He found a firm to phone in Melcombe Street and after a little while a young woman turned up. Bean began to feel a whole lot better when she started telling them they couldn’t hold his client for more than twenty-four hours without arresting him. Did they intend to arrest him? She told them firmly that they had no evidence against him.

But even Bean could see that they had. By the time the solicitor came he had already told them everything they wanted to know, all about the mugging, about Mussolini and his offer, the money and his failed attempt to meet Mussolini again. He had admitted he wanted some injury done to Clancy and, when pressed, that he hadn’t been particular as to whether this injury was serious or, indeed, fatal. He hadn’t meant to say any of those things, but they fetched it all out of him, and once begun there seemed no point in holding anything back.