Authors: Helen Dunmore
‘Hello!’ he says sharply. ‘Are you a friend of Peter’s?’
‘Peter? No, I don’t know any Peter,’ says the man. ‘I am a friend of Giles.’
Are you? thinks Simon. I rather wonder about that. You don’t look in the least Giles’s type. However, the man clearly knows whose flat this is. ‘Just checking,’ he says. ‘One can never be too careful.’
The man is looking at him intently, frowning. ‘Giles asked me to bring some personal possessions to him at the hospital.’
‘Oh, I see.’
‘He has perhaps also asked you to bring something for him?’
‘Not exactly.’ Simon feels a sudden flush of annoyance. Who does this character think he is? ‘Have you got keys?’
In answer the man lifts his right hand and opens it, revealing a set of keys. They look the same as the ones Giles gave to Simon. How many spare sets has Giles got, for God’s sake? He seems to scatter them about like confetti.
‘I’m going now,’ says Simon. ‘Lock up after yourself, won’t you? We don’t want any burglaries.’
‘You are going to see him now?’
‘As a matter of fact, I’m going home.’ The unspoken words
If it’s any of your business
hang in the air between them. He doesn’t want to leave this man in possession of Giles’s flat, but short of marching him out of the door, he’s going to have to. The man seems at ease; not at all furtive. But then, Giles has always
had some pretty odd friends, although most of them are a lot younger.
‘Goodnight,’ says Simon. The man looks down, very deliberately, at the briefcase Simon’s carrying, but Simon is damned if he’s going to offer any more explanations. Let him think what he likes.
How good the air tastes. Fresh and damp. Rain glistens on the pavement, but none is falling. He swings the briefcase in his right hand.
Walking has always been the way Simon makes sense of things. He beats his way on up the empty pavement, and it all takes shape inside him. He thinks of the man at the flat, with his own set of keys, quietly going through things. Making sure. Had he even seemed surprised to see Simon? He was a bit of a brute. Giles had poor taste, true, but usually the poor taste was a lot younger.
Simon lopes up Whitehall. Lily will be asleep by the time he gets back. No point in worrying her. She’s never liked Giles. Maybe, if
he
met Giles now, for the first time, he wouldn’t like him either. That bloody file. How could anybody be such an idiot?
He says the word over and over to himself, as if that will make it true. Giles is an idiot, and he drinks too much. He doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing, half the time. That’s why he rang his old friend Simon.
Bloody careless of me. You were the first person I thought of.
Charing Cross. Simon accelerates along the tiled
corridor, thinking he hears the whoosh of air that means an approaching train, but there’s nothing. There are one or two others on the platform. Now he can hear a train. The briefcase swings. If he turned, like this, and just before the train came, chucked the case on to the rails—
But the train is here. The doors open, and the briefcase is still in his hand.
Simon closes his front door softly. All the downstairs lights are off. Upstairs, the dim landing light still burns, in case Bridgie wakes.
He’s tired, but keyed-up. If the water tank weren’t so noisy he would run a bath to relax. He wants to wash off the hospital, Giles’s flat, that man padding about in Giles’s bedroom. He goes into the kitchen, lights the gas and puts on the kettle, then takes it off again. He wanders into the dining room. Lily has laid the table ready for breakfast, as she always does. Bridgie dropped her rabbit plate, but he mended it: you can hardly see the join.
There’s a bottle of cider on the dresser, back in the kitchen. Lily must have opened it, as a treat while she listened to the play. Her frugality frustrates him sometimes, but more often it moves him to tenderness. She is absurdly careful. If there’s a glut of plums at the market, she makes jam. Their own apples, potatoes, carrots and turnips are carefully stored in the garden shed, well protected from
frost. He takes the stopper from the cider bottle and pours himself a glass.
The mortgage is heavy. His parents gave them nothing, and Lily’s mother had nothing to give. Her father, the mysterious father in Morocco whom Simon has never met, sent a cheque for a hundred pounds when Paul was born. A huge sum. Lily frowned at the cheque, scrutinising it as if it might be a forgery.
‘What a piece of luck,’ said Simon.
‘Let’s see if it clears.’
It did, and she bought the pram, the twin-tub and the sitting-room carpet. Simon’s career – if you could call it that – was not exactly progressing. Now, years later, he’s begun to understand that it never will. He’ll plod on while the high-flyers flap their wings above his head. Already, some of them are a good bit younger than he is. Let them get on with it. He’d rather leave on the dot to do a tricky bit of soldering with Paul. His salary is solid, and Lily has her part-time teaching job. Her job paid for the stair carpet and the scarlet leather sofa and armchairs.
It’s calming to think of money. It worries Lily, though. She makes lists, draws up budgets, calculates whether or not they’ll be able to rent a holiday cottage next summer. But after an hour’s frowning concentration she gets cross with herself, throws down pencil and paper and exclaims, ‘We forget how lucky we are. Look at the garden! Look at this house!’ as if she’d never expected to be allowed such things. And, probably, she hadn’t.
Lily looks so solemn when she’s doing her sums. She must have looked like that when she was a little girl. Serious. Trying to be good. But then, suddenly, everything changes. He’s always loved those summer days of cloud and light. When he’s on a train he likes to watch the shadows fly over the landscape, chased by the sun. Lily throws down her pencil, shakes back her hair and smiles at him. You can’t make Lily smile. He used to try, but it never worked. Her smile comes when you don’t expect it, changing her face utterly.
He pours a second glass of cider, cuts a chunk off the loaf and fossicks about in the larder for the cheese. There’s no pickle. Paul eats everything. He’ll eat pickle out of a jar, with a spoon. Lily says it’s his age and the rate at which he’s growing. Simon tries to think back to himself at that age, but cannot. Doesn’t want to. Touching on his childhood is like pressing a bruise.
He was never much of a Callington. His brothers called him ‘Milkman’ because he was small and dark, and Callington men were big-boned, fair, blue-eyed. He told Lily that once, expecting her to laugh, but she drew her brows together. She’s never thought much of the Callingtons, and in his heart he’s glad of it.
The briefcase squats on the kitchen tiles. He’ll have to put it away, or Lily will want to know whose it is. That damned file.
He opens the briefcase, watching his hands as if they are someone else’s. The file is as it was.
Top Secret.
It ought to have been locked away. It certainly ought never to have left the office in Giles’s briefcase.
But it did. Simon’s hands hesitate, move, are still. His fingers want to open the file again, and read it. No, he tells himself. It’s absolutely off to go poking about. Giles trusted him to collect the file and take it back to the office. To Brenda. Easy-peasy. Obviously Giles hasn’t stopped to think about how bloody odd it might look if Simon were to parade into Julian Clowde’s office and hand his secretary a file like this. No, Giles wouldn’t think of that. Simon can almost hear him:
Surely you can employ a touch of discretion, dear boy?
With sudden decision, he plunges the file back. As he does so, his fingers catch on a side-pocket he hadn’t noticed before. There’s something in there. The briefcase wasn’t empty, as he’d thought. There’s something in it, right at the bottom.
He draws it out, frowns, focuses. Again, his face takes on that look of extreme concentration. He turns the cartridge over. There’s a serial number on the left-hand spool, and on the right it says: ‘36 EXP’.
Very rapidly, face shuttered, he turns to the stove. The good old coke stove that he riddles night and morning. He bends down, picks up the forked-end tool and unhooks the plate. Inside, the coke burns sleepy red. He weighs the cartridge in his palm, then quickly drops it into the fire and replaces the plate. He hesitates again, and then takes the file from the briefcase and opens it. Very quickly, he flicks through its pages and then back to the first page, where three names are typed. By each name there is space for a set of initials. None of the names is Giles. The last of the three names is
Julian Clowde’s, and his initials show that he has read and returned the file. But he hadn’t returned it. The file is in Giles’s possession.
There could be any number of perfectly good reasons for that.
Simon takes the file between his hands, and attempts to tear it, but cannot. He glances at the door, then pushes the file back into the briefcase, takes it into the hall and shoves it to the back of the coats in the hall cupboard, behind the row of wellington boots.
That won’t do. He pulls out the briefcase and rearranges the wellingtons. He’ll take the case to a left-luggage office. He should have thought of that before. Much better than having it at home. He can leave the case in left luggage until he’s decided what to do with it.
His heart is beating fast, as if he’s run a race with Paul. He can still run faster than his son. ‘That’s torn it,’ he says aloud as thick, noisy heartbeats push their way up into his throat. Already, he knows that he won’t be handing the file to Brenda.
He must think. Giles will be in hospital for several days at least. How soon will the file be missed? Clowde’s on leave, but … As for the cartridge … No, he’s not going to think about that now. And why hasn’t he burned the file? Deep in himself, shamefully, he knows that he needs it. It is evidence.
He’s in a state, as Lily would say to the children. He glances up at the clock. Ten to twelve. Only a few hours since Giles rang. None of it has taken long at all, but
it seems to Simon as if his whole life is rushing away from him like a train disappearing down the line. But of course that’s nonsense. Here he is, in his own house, with Lily and the children asleep upstairs. Husband and father, breadwinner. Those words are true and safe but at the same time they don’t sound real. He sees himself: a tiny figure set down in a life he doesn’t really understand, like one of the models who wait for the trains on the platform of Paul’s railway set.
Simon Callington. Look where he is now. All this has come about through his own fault, through not seeing what he ought to have seen, not asking the questions he ought to have asked, refusing to recognise what was right in front of him. That Giles, his old friend Giles – But now, at ten to midnight, with the cartridge melting to nothing in the stove, he might as well call a spade a spade. Giles has been batting for the other side in more ways than one. There may be a good reason for taking such a highly restricted file out of the office, but try as he may, he can’t find one that explains away the film cartridge. How could he, knowing Giles so well, knowing him for so long, have failed to see what was going on?
Failed … Or chosen to fail. It’s the old story he’s been hearing since he was eight years old. ‘Simon is a boy who could go far, but is hampered by his own sheer mental laziness.’ Simon will never climb past the middle of any ladder, let alone to the top. Simon is a reasonably competent civil servant. He quite likes his work. The sense that not too much is expected of him is a
relief rather than a goad. Simon is a good chap. One of us. If a copy of the
Railway Magazine
strays from Simon’s briefcase at lunchtime, it does him no harm.
He ought to have stayed at Cambridge. He might have written a book.
Idiotic. He didn’t get his First. He’d always known he wasn’t going to. He hadn’t a first-class mind.
He must put the briefcase in the shed in the back garden for now, and leave the side gate unbolted. In the morning, he’ll nip up the path and fetch it, after he’s said goodbye to Lily and the children. Then he’ll go straight down to King’s Cross, to the left-luggage office. After that the bloody thing will be out of the way and he won’t have to think of it again.
He listens. Sometimes, even now, Lily gets up to check that the children are all right. But tonight everything is still. They are all fast asleep and they know nothing. Simon looks around the room. There is Lily’s pile of marking, all done. After that she would have laid the table for breakfast. She doesn’t like a mad rush in the mornings …
There are a few twigs of winter-flowering cherry in a blue jug by the toast-rack. She must have gone out in the dark to pick them.
He thinks that he can still smell the cartridge burning.
Simon picks up the receiver and hears heavy breathing. There’s a scrabble, followed by a grunt of annoyance. ‘Dropped the sodding receiver in what passes for breakfast,’ says Giles.
‘How are you feeling?’
‘Bloody awful.’
‘You must be getting on all right, if they let you have breakfast.’
Another grunt, then: ‘I can make a telephone call, if that’s what you mean. How did
you
get on?’
‘At your flat, you mean?’
‘You found the file all right?’
‘Yes.’ Simon runs the telephone cord between finger and thumb, then squeezes it hard in his left hand. The silence develops. He should say something, but what? He nearly gave his own name at the left-luggage office, but remembered just in time and wrote ‘Stephen Cartwright’ on the form. The briefcase is in the left-luggage office at King’s Cross. The cartridge is in the
stove. Simon is at his desk. It all reminds him of Bridgie’s school reading books and he finds he is smiling.
‘I can’t hear you.’
‘I said, “Yes”.’ He is not in Giles’s world, whatever Giles may think. He is in his own. ‘I found it all right.’
And it must all be there in his voice, because Giles is silent, breathing. In the background, Simon can hear hospital sounds.
‘Have you taken it back?’ asks Giles at last, and Simon is back in prep school Latin, learning the form for ‘Questions expecting the answer “No”’.
‘Not yet.’
‘Why the hell not?’ He’s querulous now, but also, Simon thinks, relieved by that weaselly ‘yet’.
‘It’s a bit awkward.’
‘It’ll be more than a bit bloody awkward for me, if you don’t pull your finger out. Or’ – his voice changes, becomes charged with something Simon doesn’t quite want to name – ‘do you mean that it’s awkward at this particular moment?’
He means, is anyone else within earshot? Or is the business of putting the file back turning out to be trickier than Giles thought, for some other reason? Brenda away, for instance? Complicity, that’s what it’s called. I was mistaken, Simon thinks. It hasn’t crossed Giles’s mind that I won’t do as he wants. He thinks he’s got me. Am I going to go on letting him think that?
The plaited telephone cord is printed into Simon’s palm. ‘No,’ he says. ‘It’s always going to be awkward,
Giles, as far as I’m concerned. The file’s in a safe place. I shan’t discuss the matter with anyone. But I can’t muck about with a file like that.’
There’s a hissing, whistling silence, as if the line has been cut. This goes on for a few seconds, and then the receiver clatters into its rest.
And now, drugged to the eyeballs and woozy as he is, Giles swings into action. He is black with fury against Simon. Christ! He sounded like a headmaster chiding some boy about a confiscated dirty book. Who the hell does he think he is? Ask him to do the simplest thing, and he not only cocks it up but has the temerity to make it sound as if Giles is the one at fault. Rage and self-righteousness course through Giles. Simon has left him no choice. Now, if he can get that telephone into position, it should be perfectly possible to take off the receiver, dial and then lift the receiver, all with one hand. He won’t be forced to rely on that fool of a girl to dial for him.
It is bloody difficult. By the time he gets the connection, he is sweating and exhausted, which does nothing to improve his temper.
‘Good morning, is that the Sunbeam Laundry?’ asks Giles.
‘I’m afraid you have the wrong number. This is Wilkes’ Tea Importers.’
‘I beg your pardon. Good morning.’ He replaces the receiver. Time to go through the whole childish performance again. ‘Good morning, is that Wilkes’ Tea Importers?’
‘Yes, Wilkes’ Tea Importers, which department, please?’
‘Put me through to Mr Thompson, would you?’
A series of clicks and whistles. The nurse outside Giles’s room glances incuriously, professionally, at her patient on the other side of the glass. Pulse, temperature and fluids chart in twenty minutes.
Without announcement, a different voice speaks in Giles’s ear: ‘You should not call me on this number. Brown has been to the flat. Everything else is organised. Your chum has taken the subject back?’ It’s the man Giles knows as Alex.
Chum.
Where in God’s name do they learn their English?
‘The thing is, there’s been a slight hitch.’ And then he hears himself go on, stupidly – because of the bloody anaesthetic, that’s what it is; the real Giles would never talk like that: ‘I’m sure I can sort it out. Just give me a chance—’
Alex’s voice sharpens. ‘Go on.’
Giles goes on. The man at the end of the line doesn’t speak until Giles finishes, and then all he says, quite softly, is, ‘How long will it be before the subject is missed?’
‘I’m not absolutely sure. Just possibly tomorrow morning.’ Even as he says it, he knows that Alex knows it’s a lie.
‘This really is a frightful nuisance, old boy.’
Giles hears his own tone coming back at him, mocking him. Now Alex can show his contempt.
Unreliable
, that’s Giles. Bloody drunkard, falling downstairs, risking everything, and then making another balls-up when he
tries to put things right. Alex will sacrifice Giles immediately. He’s always known that.
The bed is rank and sweaty. His leg itches. Silence hisses through the telephone line, but he knows that Alex is still at the other end. Silence is also a weapon. Here Giles lies like a pig on a spit, unable to do a bloody thing. His mind clicks on, measuring the distance it must travel to safety. What the bloody hell did Simon think he was playing at?
I can’t muck about with a file like that.
Too pure to pretend you don’t know what you’re doing, for the sake of good old Giles. You won’t sully yourself. You don’t want to be down in the dirt.
Now it’s rising in him, a groundwater of anger that’s been gathering for years. You married a woman called
Lily
, for fuck’s sake. Pure as the lilies in the sodding dell.
You didn’t want me
, says his mind, lifting layer after layer, finding the raw place. Long-ago rages and humiliations, fresh as the paint on a canvas hidden behind another canvas for decades. And the fear. He’s always had his get-out more than half-fixed, but he won’t be slipping away to Bergen with half a ton of plaster and pulleys attached to his leg. He’s trapped. A sitting duck.
Frith will have him. He’ll sit at Giles’s bedside, night and day, implacable, until Giles is well enough to be taken into custody. Mr Plod. All Giles’s brains and wit and quickness –
all that he is
– won’t help him. They’ll pull out the coils of his double life – all those years,
his
cleverness
– and by the time they’ve finished his guts will be all over the floor.
Everything falls away. Oscar Wilde stood on a platform at Clapham Junction for half an hour, in shackles and prison uniform. Presumably, those in charge of his transfer made sure that there would be that half an hour of utter disgrace. It wasn’t enough for them that he’d lost everything and was on his way to pick oakum. His gaolers looked the other way and left him to it as a crowd gathered to shove and shout and jeer. One man spat in his face.
‘I, once a lord of language, have no words in which to express my anguish and my shame.’
A man in prison uniform covered with arrows, jailed for sodomy. That’s what comes of trying to be so funny. Who’s laughing now?
Have you heard the latest about Giles Holloway?
Marigold says she always knew that there was something not quite right about him.
He’d have cleared off like Burgess and Maclean if it hadn’t been for his accident.
Oh, come on, surely you’re not saying Giles Holloway was in the same league as those two. From what I gather, he was just an errand boy. Yes, I know, getting a bit old for an errand boy …
It’s all rather seedy.
‘I must say to myself that I ruined myself, and that nobody great or small can be ruined except by his own hand.’
A fat, queer traitor, a drunkard and a bungler. Who’s laughing now?
‘I hope that you have got a bright idea,’ says Alex.
Giles has only got one. There’s one way out. Simon.
All day it has been streaming wet, but now ragged holes have appeared in the cloud cover. Sometimes they show the moon. It looks as if it’s racing across the sky, but of course that’s an illusion. Simon has been working late for once, and was just about to go home when he had a message that old Firclough wanted him. After what seemed like hours of Firclough’s mouth opening and shutting, it turned out to be something perfectly trivial: a list of submarine movements that wasn’t completed correctly by some underling who was apparently, suddenly, Simon’s responsibility.
Lights are still on, high up in the buildings; policemen change shift. There are always lights burning, and always policemen on guard.
It’s only a step from the Admiralty to Charing Cross, but he’s going in the other direction, down Whitehall. He’ll go as far as Derby Gate, then along the Embankment as far as Northumberland Avenue, and back up again. The smell of the water will clear his head. He doesn’t want to go home until he has decided what to do. He doesn’t want to bring all this home with him.
He never takes the bus from Highgate: always walks. Up the hill, then along Woodland Gardens and The Chine, across and upward through the narrow grid of streets until he reaches the terrace where he would
never have imagined himself living.
All the way uphill and home.
That’s what Lily tells the children, when they tire and pull on her hands. Lily believes in walking. But he’s forgetting: only Bridgie is still young enough to whinge. When he’s away from Lily, the image that comes when he thinks of her and the children dates from years back: Lily pushing the big pram up the road to the shops against the wind, with the baby as fat as an emperor under the canopy, Sally on a seat across the body of the pram, and Paul alongside, clutching the ivory pram handle. Sally was a hopeless walker, until she went to school. Lily leans forward as she pushes the weight of the pram uphill. Her hair whips over her face. She presses her lips together and pushes harder.
A muscle twitches in his cheek. It’s been the hell of a day, he tells himself, and the banality of the words almost calms him. Once or twice a year he’ll come home and burst open the front door, raging against the whole damned lot of them and how the office is eating up his life. ‘It’s been the hell of a day,’ he’ll explode, and she’ll advance, pushing back her hair, not at all disconcerted, saying something like, ‘The collar on that shirt’s worn, I hadn’t realised – and they’ve given me an extra half-day’s teaching. That’s good, isn’t it?’ and she’ll smile. No matter what his day is or was, her smile says it’s over and it can’t follow him here.
That won’t work tonight. He has got to fetch the briefcase from the left-luggage office. He can’t think
why he was such a fool as to take it there in the first place. He filled out the form and took the ticket, and then suddenly, hours later, while watching the end of Firclough’s nose as he spoke – a little twitch every sentence or so, he’d never noticed it before – Simon realised what he’d done. If Simon didn’t come back for the case, they would look inside it for a name and address, and then they’d find the file. Why the hell hadn’t he burned it, along with the cartridge? But that wouldn’t have solved anything: Giles would have asked where it was, the file would be missed – and that file is the only evidence that Simon hasn’t dreamed up the whole business.
There’s a bit of a flap on about Giles. Comings and goings down the corridor. Rumours that the piles of fag ash and papers on Giles’s desk are being sorted out at last. That man Frith has been in there all day. Giles has come a cropper, they say. Poor old bugger has fallen downstairs and smashed his leg. He won’t be back for weeks. Simon says nothing. The talk of the office washes around him while his heart beats with uneven strokes.
He can’t remember when he last felt like this. Uneasy, as if something toxic is bubbling away inside him. Not knowing, for the life of him, what to do. Maybe it was that first night at Bradenham, after his parents had driven away, when hundreds of other boys surged around him, shoving him out of their way as if he weren’t Simon Callington of Stopstone House, Stopstone, Norfolk, England, the World, the Universe, Outer Space,
but anyone or anything at all. If he’d looked down at his hands and seen them transformed to a pig’s trotters, he wouldn’t have been surprised.
It seems a hundred years since he put on his clean white shirt that morning, upstairs in their bedroom, at half past seven. The light was murky, and the street-lamps were still on. Simon went to the window as he always did, tying his tie with automatic fingers, gazing over the city and its lights.
‘You can see as far as the Surrey Hills,’ the estate agent had boasted when they came to view the house. Simon had never set foot in Muswell Hill in his life. He didn’t know what to make of the narrow hall and long strip of garden that ran down to a disused railway line. Whether or not the house was worth two thousand pounds, he hadn’t the faintest idea. But Lily had gone straight to the bedroom window and leaned out.
‘It’s beautiful,’ she’d said quietly, so that only Simon could hear, and then she’d turned to the estate agent and begun to bargain. He had put out his hand to stop her, before he realised that the estate agent was listening, really listening, as Lily discussed with un-English frankness what they would pay and what they would expect for the price.
Hundreds and hundreds of clean white shirts, a fresh one each morning. How many years of clean shirts? Paul was two, Sally one, Bridgie not yet born when they moved into the house. The children had loved it from the first minute. Lily kept a dustbin full of clay
in the kitchen, and they modelled birds and animals and queer little families to which they gave names he couldn’t remember. They would play like that for hours on end, and then they’d be out in the garden in their siren suits in all weathers. He used to have tiger hunts with them in the dark, when he came home, and then he’d bring them in, Paul and Sally standing on his shoes and clinging to his legs, Bridget in his arms.