The Keys to the Street (37 page)

She knew she must tell him about this, must ask him, but she postponed asking him. He seemed so happy when he got up, suggesting they go out to eat somewhere when it was late, when the warm dusk was giving way to dark. What about that little Italian restaurant they had gone to the first time, the day after they first met?

In the meantime Gushi must be walked. It was too hot to go far. The people in the park were mostly prone, sprawled on the yellowed grass.

“They look dead,” said Leo. “They look like bodies after the battle is over.”

It was an opportunity. She spoke gently, lovingly. “Why do you cry in your sleep, Leo? Your face was wet with tears.”

“Wet with sweat,” he said lightly and quickly.

If he had been a frightened child her voice could hardly have been more tender. “It was tears, my love. You were crying. Really.”

“I had a bad dream. We all do sometimes.”

“It must have been a very unhappy dream.”

He refused to say any more but began instead to talk about people who lay in the sun, about sunbathing being a mid-twentieth-century fad that would disappear as fast as it had become fashionable. They put Gushi on the lead and walked back, past the children’s playground to the Gloucester Gate.

A police car was parked outside Charlotte Cottage. The officers had left the car and sought the shade of the porch. When Mary and Leo came up to the door the elder of them produced a warrant card.

“Detective Inspector Marnock.”

The other man, the sergeant, muttered a name Mary couldn’t catch. “May we come in?”

It was Leo who said, “What’s this about?”

“And you are, sir?”

“Leo Nash.”

“Well, Mr. Nash, it’s about Leslie Bean. You know a man called Leslie Bean?”

Mary’s hand tightened on Leo’s arm. “What’s happened to him?”

They were all in the living room. Gushi, a hot bundle of fur, jumped for the sergeant’s lap and lay there, gazing into a not very prepossessing face with slavish worship.

“Can you tell us what’s happened to him?” Leo said.

“Perhaps. With your help. And yours, Miss Jago. I understand you knew him. He walked your dog. You saw him frequently?”

“Yes. Every day.”

“So you would recognize him?”

“Of course I would.”

She had the feeling that Marnock was struggling with an inhibition on saying too much to the public. It would be ingrained in him to say, “That I am not at liberty to tell you” or “We can’t answer that,” but he was plainly making up his mind how much he could reveal without total indiscretion, and how much he must reveal in order to gain their compliance.

“A Miss Bean has contacted us to report her brother as a missing person. He has not been seen since the evening of Friday the fourth.”

“And?” Leo said sharply.

“On Saturday the fifth the body of an unidentified man was found in the vicinity of the Kent Terrace.…”

“But that was one of the street people,” Mary said.

“We thought so at first. We haven’t for some days. You don’t want to believe everything you read in the papers. Nor do we think this was the work of the man the tabloid press calls The Impaler.”

“But why not?”

“That,” said the sergeant when Marnock hesitated, “we are not at liberty to tell you.” Evidently a dog lover, he fondled Gushi’s ears.

“The clothes on the body weren’t his own. They were put on him after he was dead.”

“As some sort of joke, no doubt,” said Marnock. “Psychopaths can have an unfortunate sense of humor. Now, Miss Jago, Mr. Nash, we’ve been unprecedentedly frank and open with you. For a reason, of course. We want you to do us a favor. Mr. Bean’s other lady clients feel a natural distaste …”

“For what?” said Leo.

“For identifying the body, sir.”

Horrified, Mary said, “Surely his sister could do that!”

“She’s eighty years old,” said the sergeant. “Besides, she hasn’t seen him in twenty-five years.” Suddenly more confiding, he gave a little laugh. “Oh, yes, we know it’s peculiar, it’s that all right. He stopped in her house while she was away and left before she got back. Every year. Year in and year out. They’d not set eyes on each other for as you might say a quarter of a century.”

•   •   •

They both went.

Inside the mortuary it was cold and there was a strong icy smell. Mary thought it must be the smell of death, of decomposition impossible to mask, but Leo told her it was formaldehyde.

She was there to identify, if she could, the body, Leo to support and comfort her. He had only once seen Bean, and that briefly, in the evening, by artificial light.

The bodies were in drawers, green metal, like filing cabinets. It seemed to her a dreadful depository of a man’s life, even though it was not a final resting place. One of the drawers was pulled open and a plastic sheet lifted.

She had expected to feel violent shock and revulsion and had tried to prepare herself all the way here, but when she looked on the face it was calmly and with no particular feeling. The dead man was Bean, there could be no doubt, but it looked more like a waxwork of
Bean from Madame Tussaud’s. This sculpted head and rigid face seemed as if they had never been alive but had been cast in this shape and turned out of a mold.

“Yes,” she said. “That is—is Mr. Bean.”

“Quite sure, Miss Jago?”

Had she sounded dubious? Impossible to explain to this policeman the awe death induced in this pitiful place, the wonder she felt at what man came to at the last, an effigy in a metal drawer.

“I am quite sure,” she said.

It had shaken them both. She and Leo were subdued, refusing the policeman’s offer of a lift home, needing to be away from the police and talk of dead Bean. They would make their own way back. All ideas of revisiting that little Italian restaurant were abandoned, for Mary didn’t feel like eating. They walked, hand in hand, sometimes giving each other rueful glances until Leo said, “Smile. Please. For me. You were wonderful in there. Cool as a cucumber. Why are cucumbers cool, anyway? They are. We all know that. But why are they, when marrows aren’t and melons aren’t?”

“You’ll have to ask a botanist or a vegetable gardener.”

“The tiresome thing about all this for me is that I have to go to a funeral tomorrow.”

She turned to him, distracted by this flat statement where none of his attempts at distraction could succeed. “You didn’t tell me.”

“No. It’s an old friend of my family’s. A bore—I mean the funeral is, not the friend was.”

He said no more until they were in the house. She noticed that his eyes were puffy as if he had been suppressing tears. His voice had a ragged sound.

“The funeral is in the afternoon. My mother will be there and I’ll have to go back with her afterward. I probably won’t see you all day.”

“Leo, if your mother is in London, can’t I meet her? And wouldn’t she come to our wedding?”

He beckoned her to him, took her face gently in his hands.

“You’re so beautiful. I shall never tire of looking at your face. Never a day goes by when I don’t want to gaze and gaze at you.”

She smiled. “I asked you about your mother.”

“I’m leaving my family behind after tomorrow. I’ll say good-bye to them tomorrow. They won’t know it’s for the last time, but it will be.” She knelt down in front of his chair and he bent forward to put his arms round her. “So I’m not going home tonight. Wild horses couldn’t drag me home.”

“We won’t let the wild horses try,” she said.

26

T
hat night he again cried in his sleep. He made no sound, but when he turned his face to meet hers the wetness touched her cheek. It was dawn and she could just see. The tears glistened.

In the morning he was up before her, bringing her tea in bed and the post, the newspaper, more fliers, a tax demand for Sir Stewart Blackburn-Norris, hire car cards. He was so cheerful, pulling rueful faces but making light of the ordeal ahead, that she decided to say nothing. His intention to wear a dark suit for the funeral pleased her, for it was in accordance with her own ideas of what was decorous and civilized.

Still he was unwilling to talk about the funeral, who this family friend was, why his mother would be there. It made her wonder if it was for this dead friend that Leo’s nightly tears were shed. She felt she couldn’t ask. Perhaps one day he would tell her. He held her hand at the breakfast table. Together they took Gushi into the park and there, by the Parsi’s fountain, Leo left her and went off toward St. Mark’s Bridge and Primrose Hill.

His parting from her brought back that afternoon in Covent Garden. She watched his receding figure as she had on that previous occasion. He had never satisfactorily explained why he had gone after apparently intending to spend the day with her. Did it any longer matter? This time he had kissed her tenderly, held her in his arms, and whispered that he loved her.

•   •   •

A party of eleven children came into the museum at four. They were Scots from Lanark on a school trip to London who, having done the Sherlock Holmes house, had come up here in their minibus. Mary showed them round and gave them the guided tour because their harassed teacher preferred that to a Walkman and a tape for each child.

It was the kind of day when she longed for air-conditioning, wholly impractical for this little house of small rooms in a climate where the heat would endure for only a short time. The street door and the window in the shop stood open, but it was still almost insufferably hot. The sun blazed and the air was motionless. In the shop, where the children, like so many visitors, showed more interest in the artifacts for sale than in the museum exhibits, papers and prints on the counters had begun to curl in the heat.

By five it was no cooler and Alistair still hadn’t come. Mary supposed she would just have to wait. Running away from him was something she was now ashamed of. There was a childishness about it she wanted to eradicate from her character but knew that Alistair, though censorious, rather liked. Weakness and folly in women made him feel more powerful and in control, more able to justify a superior stance.

Once Stacey had gone home, Mary went outside and sat in the shade on the low wall that bounded the courtyard. On such warm summer evenings London acquired a pavement life. Restaurateurs were putting out tables and chairs and striped umbrellas in preparation for those who preferred to dine outdoors. Shopkeepers, in the half hour before their shops closed, sat on their doorsteps. Every sun-blind was down and at the café opposite in St. John’s Wood Terrace someone was casting bucketfuls of water over the flagstones.

She watched steam rise from the wet pavement. Her thoughts were full of Leo as they had been for most of the day. She sensed that being in the company of his mother and brother might be as troublesome and painful as the funeral itself. The relationship he had with
his brother became each day more mysterious. If he loved him so much why break with him? She was resolving never again to ask Leo if she might meet his mother or brother when she looked up and saw Alistair coming down Ordnance Hill from the direction of the tube station. The present must be very small. He wore no jacket and carried only the thin flat briefcase she had once given him but had thought even at the time too small to accommodate more than a few sheets of paper and a diary.

He waved when he saw her but did not quicken his pace. It was too hot to rush. She couldn’t fail to remember how once, seeing him approach from a distance, her heart had leapt and a thrill run through her body. She felt nothing for him now, no faint lingering regret. He looked uncomfortably hot, his face red and beaded with sweat, his hair wet with it and sticking to his scalp. His hot hand felt wet through the thin stuff of her blouse as he laid it on her shoulder. She freed herself and began walking back toward the museum. Then she thought, as she had not thought before, this may be the last time we shall ever meet, we shall very likely never see each other again. We were lovers, we once thought we loved each other, perhaps truly did, though impermanently—how sad and awful to terminate it like this.…

“Alistair, let’s go over to the café and have a drink.”

His eyebrows went up. She hadn’t noticed till then, but now she saw how unpleasant his expression was, how grim. “Sure,” he said, “and while I’m inside ordering two Perriers you’ll do another of your famous flits.”

“No. I promise I won’t.”

They had turned back and were crossing the road, he somewhat reluctantly. “I don’t think we ought to part,” she said, “without some …”

“Ceremony?”

“I was going to say, without saying good-bye properly, and without saying perhaps that we have no hard feelings for each other.”

He laughed. A waitress came up and he ordered without asking Mary what she wanted. “You seem to think,” he said carefully, “that I still feel for you what I used to. I suppose it pleases your vanity. Well, I don’t. I’m over you. As for hard feelings, I’ve plenty of those. You could say, those are all I have. And now I want, frankly, to get shut of you.”

She could find nothing to say. Perrier came, a large bottle of it, with ice and lemon in two glasses. He poured their drinks. She had a sudden dreadful feeling he would fill another glass with water and throw it in her face. She even edged her chair back a little. Her life, she realized, had been shot through for a long time with imaginings of what Alistair might do, fantasies far exceeding what he actually ever did. He drank the last drops in his glass, reached down, opened the briefcase, and took out a small flat parcel. It was about the size of a videocassette, rectangular, less than an inch thick. The gift-wrapping, pink and silver paper, narrow silver ribbon falling from its knot in curlicues, looked nevertheless as if he had done it himself. The corners were clumsily folded, the ribbon twisted. On a card he had printed her name in rather large but uneven capital letters.