The Keys to the Street (31 page)

Instead of leaving wet weather in its wake, the storm had just made things hot. Summer had come at last. All the rain had made the grass in the park very green and fed the roses so that dicy grew lush with dark shiny foliage. The sun shone on velvet lawns and sparkling dewdrops. By noon the temperature had climbed to eighty degrees, and in the evenings people watched performances at the Open Air Theatre in sleeveless dresses and T-shirts.

Calling for Gushi on the first really hot morning, the sky cloudless, the air clear, he asked Miss Jago for the third time about that reference. She looked genuinely aghast, he had to give her that.

“I
am
sorry. I’m so sorry. I’ll have it done for you by this afternoon.”

“I don’t see you in the afternoons, Miss,” Bean said in his most respectful tone.

“I’ll try to be home by the time you bring the dogs back. Or else you can be sure it will be here when you come in the morning.”

The woman who walked ten dogs was out with her troop. It was all right for her, she wasn’t a day over thirty-five. She had given up waving at Bean since the day he returned her greeting with one of his looks. But nothing could stop their dogs fraternizing. Ruby made the Cavalier King Charles spaniel her prey. It was a lot smaller than she was and those dogs always had poor sight. Bean had to rescue it from gang rape, for McBride and Boris had followed Ruby’s lead.

The woman watched his efforts without offering to help. Then McBride found a heap of horse dung—How did a horse get in here?
Under a mounted policeman?—and rolled his fat wet body in it, shaking smelly brown liquid all over Bean’s trousers. It was no way to make a living, he told himself, he’d be seventy-one in September. But he had to have an income, he couldn’t live on the pension, especially in a luxury maisonette designed for a fifty-thousand-a-year man.

Valerie Conway was waiting in the area doorway, well out of the rain of course. Boris would never go down the stairs alone, Bean had to take him, otherwise the borzoi would lie down on the top step and refuse to budge.

“You got the dalmatian on your books yet?” Valerie said as he descended.

“Why do you ask?”

“Just being friendly. As a matter of fact I’d like to think business was good because Mr. Cornell has given me a message for you.”

“What message?”

“He’s giving you two weeks’ notice. Your services won’t be required after the twenty-eighth.”

Bean stared at her. He took his hand slowly from Boris’s collar and the dog slunk through the doorway, drawing its body to one side so as not to touch Valerie as it passed her.

“What’s brought this on?”

Valerie could hardly contain her pleasure and triumph, he could tell that. “They’re going to live permanently at their place in the country. And I’m moving in with my boyfriend.”

“Well, thanks very much. Thanks very much for the courtesy of
two
weeks’ notice.”

“I consider I’ve done very well by you, Leslie Bean or whatever your name is. Why d’you think I found you a new customer? You ought to be down on your bended knees thanking me.”

He looked hard at her. He would have liked to say she could keep her two weeks’ notice and she needn’t think he’d ever have another thing to do with that foul-tempered dog, that cold-hearted, evil Russian,
the animal that hadn’t even attempted to defend him when he’d been mugged. But he couldn’t, he needed the money.

“Thank you, Valerie,” he said, and was about to add that he’d see her later, but she had slammed the door.

The sun grew almost unpleasantly hot by three-thirty. Bean never thought he’d be complaining about the heat, but he would gladly have missed out on the afternoon walk. Marietta, always the least controllable of the dogs, the liveliest, the bounciest, went too near a family of cygnets and got a peck on the chest from the swan. She screamed as if she’d been stabbed with a knife, but Bean couldn’t see a mark. Little Gushi was too hot under his thick shaggy coat, puffing and whimpering until at last Bean picked him up and carried him. The dog was heavy for his size and he panted, his tongue hanging out.

All this made Bean late getting back to Charlotte Cottage. He rang the bell, hoping Miss Jago was home as she had said she would be. But there was no answer, so he let himself and Gushi in with his key. She kept it very clean, he always noticed. What he would really have liked was to have taken Marietta in there and left her to run about shaking and splashing the pale walls and silk chair covers with muddy water. But, thinking of his reference, he left the other dogs at the gate, carried Gushi into the kitchen, and refilled his water bowl.

Taken all in all, it had not been a pleasant day. Bean had still not been back to the Globe. It was not that he was any longer afraid to go there, or that he believed the police would watch him go there, but he saw himself as punishing the place by ostracizing it. All the trouble he had been in was due to the Globe and the Globe’s clientele telling tales. Bean had an obscure feeling that a well-run pub wouldn’t have those sorts of customers.

So, for the past three Fridays, he had been going to the Queen’s Head and Artichoke. He knew no one there but that bothered him very little. He went there to drink and this evening he felt particularly in need.

Someone in the pub the previous week had buttonholed him and
started giving him a history of the place, how the original house that had stood here had been built by one of Elizabeth I’s gardeners, hence its name. Bean wasn’t interested and he looked cautiously about him now so that he could give the historian a wide berth, but the man wasn’t there this evening. He asked for a double whiskey, Bell’s, and ginger ale, and took it to a table in the corner.

Without the whiskey he would probably never have thought of going up to Park Village. A second double emboldened him. After all, he was already in Albany Street, and it was a beautiful evening. At just after nine-thirty, the sky was clear and cloudless, violet-colored and still stained red in the west. So near the park, the air smelled of the scents distilled by the sun from grass and leaves and roses.

Twenty to ten, which was the time he would get there, was not too late to pay an evening call. He remembered Anthony Maddox’s rules about that—he was talking of the phone but it came to the same thing—“nothing before nine
A.M
. or after ten
P.M
.” Besides, she couldn’t complain, she had promised him that reference over and over again. On the spot, he could stand over her till it was done. Well, stand there and perhaps be offered a drink while she wrote it.

•   •   •

When she said she was going to be married, Dorothea assumed it was Alistair.

“It’s Leo I’m marrying.”

Dorothea had to think who that was. “How awfully romantic,” she said.

“It is, isn’t it? But I’m so glad you think so, I’d thought you’d disapprove. We haven’t known each other very long.”

“Knowing the person very long isn’t necessarily important. You can have an instinct about someone being right for you.”

“That’s exactly it. I have an instinct about it. But I do wish my grandmother were alive to see us, to see
him
.”

“You thought I wouldn’t approve but she would?”

“Oh, maybe it’s that her generation expected marriage, they thought in the terms of marriage, whereas ours doesn’t. I suppose I’m getting married to make, as they say, a public commitment.” And, she thought, but didn’t say, because he may not live long. “I’m older than he is. Why should I wait?”

“Do you know what I’d really like, Mary? I’d love you to wear one of Irene’s dresses. Why not
the
wedding dress?”

They looked at it in its glass case. Irene Adler had never existed, nor had Godfrey Norton; she had never been married to him, so never had had a wedding dress. This one had been worn by some Edwardian bride, long dead. It was white lace with a high boned collar and long embroidered train. Mary laughed.

“I’m getting married at Camden Register Office. Can you imagine
this?
I shan’t even have anything new for it. We don’t care about things like that, he doesn’t any more than I do. And we shan’t have a honeymoon. We can’t, I have to stay at Charlotte Cottage for another five weeks. He’ll go back to his place and I to mine, I expect—and then, I don’t know. But I think we’ll be happy, Dorrie.”

“And what about Alistair?” said Dorothea.

Since she had run away from him and hidden herself among the trees on Primrose Hill she had seen and heard nothing of him, apart from the letter. She had not yet been able to face replying to it.

“He wants me to let him invest my grandmother’s money. He says I’ll never find anyone more competent and more cautious. But I haven’t got the money yet and shan’t have it for ages.”

“You sound as if you don’t much want it.”

“That would be silly, wouldn’t it? We all want money. Now that I’m going to marry Leo I want somewhere nice to live.”

She said good-bye to Dorothea and took the path straight across the park, but their talk had delayed her and it was only when she reached the gate of Charlotte Cottage that she remembered telling
Bean she would be home early, that she would be home before he came back and would give him his reference. He couldn’t have been gone long. Gushi, with fresh water brimming his bowl, was lying exhausted on the kitchen floor.

Mary sat down to write Bean’s reference, the little dog on her lap. It took her a long time because she had never done it before and had no idea what was requisite to say. And to whom did you address it? She had written
To whom it may concern
and “Mr. Bean”—should she try to find out his first name?—when Leo arrived. He looked white and tired and said he had had a hard day, he would have to lie down for a while.

The reference finished, she decided to write to Alistair. She would tell him she was getting married in three weeks’ time to Leo, and she had begun, had rejected “My dear Alistair” for plain “Dear Alistair,” when Leo called her from upstairs. She came into the bedroom and he started to say rather peevishly that she had promised to look after him, to care for him, but although she knew he was exhausted she had virtually ignored him since he got home.… And then, suddenly, he was laughing at himself, apologizing, saying how absurd he was, he was only making excuses for wanting her.

So she went into his arms and after a while he began his gentle delicate lovemaking, his fingers with the soft gossamer touch of a moth’s wing, his lips as cool as petals, so that it was like being in bed with a phantom. She closed her eyes and thought, when I open them there will be no one there but a shadow. And then his movements strengthened and his body grew real and seemed infused with a sudden great heat. The sound wrenched out of him was like a groan of pain.

They slept and woke to see a red sunset behind the trees of the village and the double spires of St. Katharine’s. The red dimmed and the sky was blue covered with tiny pink feathers. Mary got up, had a shower, put on loose cotton trousers and a T-shirt, and began
to make their supper. But Leo came down while she was tearing lettuce for a salad and gently shepherded her away: He would do it, he was fine now, he wasn’t ill.

He laid the table, opened the bottle of wine he had brought. She finished her letter to Alistair. Everything she wanted to say had presented itself clearly, she had had no difficulties with it, and what had seemed an insurmountable problem resolved itself into a simple telling of the plain facts, kindly, precisely, without emotion.

It was nine before they sat down to eat, his pasta dish with black olives having taken detailed preparation. She ate and was glad to see him eating so heartily, a second helping and another slice of
ciabatta
. Remembering Alistair’s suggestion, she asked him if they should start house-hunting this weekend. They would be bound to like the same things, they always did, so it should be a delightful exercise. If he agreed, she had quite decided to sell the house in Belsize Park.

The idea seemed to appeal to him and he speculated about houses. Buying a house, buying any property, had never come in his way before, he confessed, it was something that the grown-ups did. And she laughed because she felt just the same. It was not for them, they were children to whom such businesslike adult stuff had never occurred, but now they must, they must be serious, they must realize that, give or take a little, they could have whatever they wanted. He had got up and come round the table, had put his arms round her, and was holding her close in a bear hug, when the front doorbell rang.

Mary said, “It’s Alistair.”

“Yes, I expect it is.” Leo hesitated only infinitesimally. “I’ll go. It’s time we met.”

She jumped up. “I don’t want him to hit you!”

Leo laughed. “He won’t hit me.”

She wondered how they would look together, side by side, the one so slight and fair and with the unearthly pallor, the other dark
and heavy-set and choleric. Leo came back. The man with him was Bean.

“Not wanting to put pressure on you, miss, but I shall be going on my holidays in a couple of weeks’ time …”

“Your reference,” Mary said, stammering. “Your—yes, I—yes, I have it here. I’ll just get an envelope.”

When she came back into the room Bean was sitting on a chair at one end of it and Leo at the table facing him. She handed over the reference.

“It’s for a dalmatian,” Bean said.

That made Leo laugh. He laughed almost crazily, throwing back his head, and when Bean had gone, he shouted the words, still laughing. “It’s for a dalmatian! A dalmatian! A reference for a dalmatian! What’ll it do with it, d’you think? Eat it? Bury it?”

She had never known him so noisy, so wild. She laid her hand on his shoulder but he still shouted, his face convulsed, “A dalmation? Can you imagine it reading it? Does it wear glasses? A dalmatian!” And then, suddenly, he was weeping, the tears streaming down his face. He clutched her, pulled her down to him and knelt with her on the floor. His arms held her so tightly she wanted to cry out.

“Mary, Mary, I don’t want to die. I want to live, I want to live with you. Why can’t I live to be old like others will? I don’t want to die!”