“I know.”
“But do you know?
Really
know? Come with me one day. I’ll take you to Limehouse, where I’m being trained.”
“Of course.” He did not want to disappoint her.
They met three days later, on a Saturday morning, outside Limehouse Underground Station. He did not know how to greet her, but she put out her hand. “It’s quiet around here,” she said. They were at the end of a long narrow street dominated on both sides by warehouses of dark brown brick, derelict and empty. “The local people want them torn down. They need council flats. Come on. I’ll show you.”
They walked away from the immediate environs of the river and turned down a side street of dilapidated terrace houses.
These were all multiple dwellings—the front doors were open and there were sounds of babies crying, of voices being raised in small rooms. A group of children was playing in the street, while two or three disconsolate men in tattered suits sat on the front steps and watched them. “Irish,” Guinevere said. “Or Jamaican. Whoever has the least money.”
A settlement of round huts, created out of mud and straw, had once been raised here by the river. Their roofs had been made of thatch, and they had been built in two parallel lines just like these nineteenth-century tenements. The same sounds, and the same voices, had come from these frail huts; children had played in the space between them, and men had watched them as they sat upon the ground by the threshold of their dwellings. Now someone called out, “Peter! Peter!”
Guinevere led him into one of the houses. A powerful smell of damp in the hallway mingled with the stale air. “I visit the family on the first floor,” she said. She walked up the stairs that were covered in chipped and broken linoleum, and knocked on the door at the next level. “Mrs. Byrne,” she called out. “It’s Guinevere.”
A middle-aged woman came to the door. “I’ve just finished feeding them,” she said. “You’d better come in.” Three children were sitting around a Formica table; they were all holding slices of bread, their white faces slightly smeared with jam. They looked up at Guinevere and Harry without expression.
“This gentleman is a journalist,” Guinevere said. “I wanted him to meet you. To see how you were getting on.”
“Oh we get on. We’re not complaining.” Harry observed another room, to which the door was closed. “My husband’s still sleeping. He has the fits.”
“Tell the gentleman how much you live on.”
“Twelve pounds a week. He draws it from the social security.” She looked at the closed door. “Twelve pounds doesn’t go far these days. Not with five of us.” Harry went over to
a window that overlooked the grimy street. As his eyes grew accustomed to the dirty brick and the dust upon the windows, he was astonished to see his brother leaving one of the tenements. There was no doubt about it. It was Sam. He walked down some steps into the street, paused for a moment, and then turned left. Harry took a pace backward when he thought that Sam had stared up at him. Then Sam walked off and was gone.
“That Ruppta,” the woman was saying. “He is a tartar.”
“What was that?”
“We’re talking about her landlord,” Guinevere told him. “Asher Ruppta. Have you heard of him?”
“Yes.”
“He comes down terrible hard on people such as us,” the woman said.
“If they can’t pay one week’s rent, he threatens them with eviction.”
“Out in the street, sir. With three little ones and him with the fits.”
“He owns most of the houses in this street,” Guinevere said. “They were going to be torn down, but then the decision was reversed.”
“Is that so?”
“There are a lot of blacks,” Mrs. Byrne said. “I’ve nothing against them personally.”
Harry experienced a strong desire to leave this small room, and get out into the air. He went over to the window, and looked impatiently down into the street. Guinevere sensed his mood, and reacted accordingly. “We should go now, Mrs. Byrne,” she said. “I just wanted to say hello.”
Harry put out his hand, and then surreptitiously left a ten-pound note on the Formica table. Mrs. Byrne saw it, but she said nothing. Like her children, she stared at him without noticeable expression.
“Thank you for coming,” Guinevere told him as they walked back into the street.
“Thank you for inviting me.”
“I hope you weren’t too bored.”
“Bored? Never.”
“How can it happen?”
“What?”
“This.” She gestured at the mean houses. From one of them came the sound of “Old Man River.”
“That is something to ask Asher Ruppta.”
“How much do you know about that man?”
“Enough.”
“Why don’t you write about him? Expose him?”
“You know,” he said, “you have the loveliest hair.” He felt as if he were poised on a bank beside clear water, about to jump in.
Hilda Nugent’s instinct and secret wish was to marry. On her occasional visits to Southend, her foster-mother constantly brought up the subject. “It’s not right,” she said. “Living in sin.”
“Don’t be so old-fashioned, Mum. Everyone does it nowadays.”
“That doesn’t make it right.”
“We are as good as married.”
“I wouldn’t say that without a ring on your finger. Mark my words.”
And, secretly, Hilda agreed with her. She would allude to the subject, with Harry, from time to time. “Are we putting down roots in Notting Hill?” she might ask him.
“Roots?”
“Are we going to stay for a long time?”
“I really don’t know. What do you think?” He was irritated by her constant use of “we.”
“We have a good routine, don’t we?”
“I suppose so.”
“We are comfortable.”
Yes. You are as comfortable as an old armchair. He did not say it but he considered saying it.
The result of such conversations was always inconclusive. “Sometimes,” she said, “I think I’m living with a stranger. I don’t really understand you.”
“There isn’t very much to understand.”
“There you go again. You’re keeping me away. You don’t want to be touched.
Disturbed
. Sometimes I think I should just get up and walk away.” She had in fact never thought that.
He looked at her and said nothing.
“You just like to use people. You don’t give a damn for any of them. All you really care about is you. Y. O. U.”
“I can spell, Hilda.”
Whenever she considered the possibility of Harry leaving her, she panicked. She expressed her doubt and fear in oblique ways. “It really is terrifying,” she said to him one evening.
“What is?”
“One single little day might change everything. I could be run over. Extinguished.”
He laughed. “I don’t think it’s a question of extinction.”
“How do you know?”
Harry stayed on the track of Asher Ruppta, not knowing where it might lead. He decided to approach him directly, and to seek an interview with him. He telephoned Julie Armitage; he knew all about her from Hilda’s descriptions but, fortunately, he had never met her. That would have been a complication. He told her that he was writing a profile of her employer; she seemed strangely excited, and promised to phone him. He believed that he could hear the rustle of a crisps packet as she spoke to him.
On the following day he received a telephone call from Ruppta himself. “I do not give interviews,” he told Harry. “I keep silent. If I am silent, then I am not disturbed. Good day to you, sir.”
“I just had a few questions.”
“Alas, I do not know any answers.”
“There were some planning permissions—”
“It would be better if you did not come too close, Mr. Hanway. You have an interesting name, by the way.”
He found out that Ruppta owned a large mansion on the corner of a quiet avenue in Highgate, and he drove there one evening, curious to see if he entertained any visitors. The property was protected by iron railings above a brick wall, and there was a large security gate in front of a gravel drive. He parked close by, and waited. It was a quiet late-summer evening in the leafy street, and Harry wound down the window to enjoy the perfume of the luxuriant trees and hedges. On an evening such as this, all London seemed to be still. Then he heard the unmistakable clicking of high heels. A woman was walking quickly along the street. She stopped by the security gate, and looked up nervously at the house. Then she pressed a bell. Harry realised, after a moment’s incomprehension, that it was his mother.
“Hello?” Harry recognised Ruppta’s voice.
“It’s Sally.”
A buzzer sounded, and the gate swung open.
Harry sat in the car, staring straight ahead but seeing nothing. He could not move, or think. He knew that he should drive away, but he had not the strength to turn the key. What was she doing there? Was she still in her own old business? What had Ruppta said to him? You have an interesting name. Ruppta had not threatened him, but he had laid down a warning. Harry now realised that there would be an unspoken pact
between them. He would no longer pursue his investigation of Asher Ruppta.
Harry and Guinevere met for the third time in Fountain Court, part of the gardens of the Inner Temple where a small fountain played into a pond fringed with trees.
“I don’t know anything about you,” she said.
“What is there to know? I’m twenty-one and I’m single.”
“What? Harry Hanway? No girlfriend?”
“I do know a girl, but we’re not really close.” The light of the water gleamed in his eyes. “Actually I don’t see her that often.”
“You never mention your parents.”
“I don’t have any.”
“Oh.”
“They were killed. In a car crash.”
“That’s a terrible thing.”
“I don’t really like to talk about it.”
“Do you have any brothers or sisters?”
“No. Just me. Only me.” Then he leaned over and kissed her.
They continued to meet at Fountain Court. “I think you’re very ambitious,” she said to him one afternoon.
“How can you tell?”
“The way you carry yourself. The way you dress. When you took me to that restaurant last night, you looked at the menu for a moment and then made up your mind. You’re impatient, too.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No. I like it. You know what you want.”
“I know what I like.” He kissed her on the cheek.
“You talk quickly, too.”
“Perhaps I have a lot to say. How is Mrs. Byrne, by the way?”
“She says she is very poorly. My boss is thinking of taking the children into care.”
“Care? Is that the right word? Oh look. There’s a squirrel.”
“There’s a change in the air about you,” Hilda told him.
“What on earth does that mean?”
“I don’t know. But I feel it. I see it.”
“Why are you trembling?”
“I just am.”
“Are you not hungry?”
“I wouldn’t mind if I never ate another thing.”
“What is the matter with you, Hilda?”
“You are the matter, Harry. I think that everything is going to be different.” He looked away from her briefly, as if something had caught his eye in the corner of the room.
“What if I were to get sick?” she asked him on another occasion. “Would you look after me?”
“Of course.”
“No, you wouldn’t. You would tell me, ever so nicely, that it was
my
problem and that you had other things on your mind. Then you would creep away, but not before blowing me a great big kiss from the door.”
“Honestly, Hilda, I just can’t
win
with you.”
“Oh but you have won. And you know it.”
As she hugged him one evening she smelled some other perfume on the lapel of his jacket. She held onto him, clinging for life. “Now what is it?” he asked her. She broke down in tears. “What
is
it?”
“You know what it is.”
Gently he disengaged himself from her, and left the flat.
Hilda sat down, trying to steady herself with the arm of the chair. Some music started playing in the flat next door, and the refrain of the song rang through her head after the music had
stopped. “It’s all about your eyes. They hypnotise.” Slowly she got to her feet, put on her coat, and opened the door of the flat. As she left she heard a child crying in another room, and she realised that she was still crying too. It had been raining, and the pavement shone with the reflected light of the street lamps. The autumn had arrived two or three days before, with a sudden chill in the air. “The Americans,” she said to herself, “call it fall.” As she walked towards Portobello it began to rain again, a slow and fitful shower, but she went on bare-headed without noticing it. Two days later she knocked on the door of the ice-cream van by the beach at Southend. “I missed the Raspberry Wriggle,” she said.
A cat may look
“
S
EVENTEEN
HOURS
of supervision?”
“
Mea culpa
. But I
do
have to admit that I am a trifle
squashed
by the end of term.”
Daniel Hanway, in the middle of dinner, was listening to a conversation between History and Biology at the high table. After completing his doctorate, he had been elected a junior fellow and deputy supervisor in English at his college.
Classics now joined the conversation. “I trust that you acknowledge that it is your job.”
“I would like to say that it is part of my job, as you put it.”
“But I put it so well.”
History was short, with a slightly hooked nose, and a mass of fuzzy hair. He looked as if he had experienced an electric shock. Biology was bushy-haired, bushy-bearded and bushy-eyebrowed; he chortled rather than laughed. Classics was more saturnine; he wore a brown corduroy jacket, brown corduroy trousers, a green tie and white shirt. He had several other ties, jackets and trousers of the same colours so that he could remain in costume for his students.
Mathematics and Philosophy were arguing about the depth of nuclear bunkers. Philosophy “hazarded a guess” at seventy
feet, at which Mathematics smiled politely, if mockingly. “Fifty feet?”
“Oh no.”
“Thirty feet?”
“No, no. The figures are quite wrong. Absurdly so, if I may say so.”