He found that he could remember the wording of Clover’s suicide note. He sat one day, doing nothing, trying to think nothing, and found the words projected in his skull like a silent cinema show from the days of childhood. He could see the words, terse as a caption card, filling in the action one never got to see, substituting for the dialogue one never got to hear.
Just to be certain, he sat at his desk and wrote them down. His fancy, quasi-Russian hand, all flow and loop, replacing her stickman letters, scarcely joined up at all.
I’m sorry to do this to you, and I know it’s a mess. But it pays to know when it’s all pointless. You been great – really you have – but this was always there, always with me, and it was never going to go away. Was it?
Why was it pointless? What was it that was always there and never going to go away? She wrote this as though she thought he knew. Did suicides ever calmly jot anything down beforehand? Didn’t death by pills mean that what was written was written as the narcolepsy hit? Why should Clover’s words mean a damn thing? Written, as they probably were, through a haze of pills that whacked you sideways, shoved your brains into your loins and then puffed you off to never-never land with a stupid grin of satisfaction on your face?
Clover had her ups and downs. The woman he’d encountered at Uphill was surly, secretive and rude. The child Onions had delivered into his inadequate care was peevish, distraught and rude. He’d seen both personae evaporate in hours. Surly Clover had given way to the self-assured tart who’d strolled across Uphill Park with him wearing only a fur coat and wellies. Peevish Jackie had turned herself around almost as soon as her grandfather had left to become a city girl, professing a greater wisdom of the streets than he pretended to himself. And buried beneath both was a romantic who was touched by Jules et Jim and bowled over by his sparse account of Mayerling.
He did not know the woman. Had not known the woman. He had no idea of what she was capable – except change.
If there was one person of whom he knew less than he knew of Clover Browne, it was Frederick Alexeyevitch Troy.
He sat in Embankment Gardens, stranded out of season in the nearest bit of municipal green to his house, on a grey autumnal afternoon, feeling tormented by the sound of seagulls flocking on the Thames, depressed by the optimism of a man who still put out deckchairs at this time of year – and summed up his life.
Not long turned forty-eight, separated but not divorced – unless Fitz was wrong and she had divorced him in absentia in some foreign part.
A small man, used to be a looker as Clover herself had put it. Thin as the dying Chatterton in somebody-or-other’s famous painting in the Tate, though gaining weight; his bathroom scales told him he was eight stone four now.
Jobless – he never would get back to the Yard. By the time he could muster a clean bill of health, a full year would have passed and a new order come into being. His career was over; he had better accept that. More fuck-ups to his record than he dare count – it seemed to him he was surrounded by the dead. A small mountain of bodies to his name – Diana Brack, Norman Cobb, now Clover Browne. He had killed her with neglect as surely as he had killed the other two with bullets.
No appetite to speak of. No appetite, either, for books or music – he did not read, he did not play, he did not listen.
All in all, it was a good recipe for suicide. Chatterton had topped himself at seventeen. Just like Clover. Except that the recipe simply didn’t fit. It was him, not her, who had recognised the pointlessness of it all. Of course, it paid to know when it was all pointless. But that was him talking. His words, written by her, framed by her. But meant for him. What possible reason could she have for dying? He knew what her grandfather would say – given the chance, Troy knew he would most certainly say it any day now – she had ‘so much to live for, her whole life ahead of her’. He would wait and say nothing and nod his agreement when Stan did say it. But he knew – he had nothing to live for, his life was behind him. Good bloody grief, had the woman breathed in his despair between his sheets, as he had breathed in the tubercular bacillus on some crowded Moscow streetcar? Had this been his protection – to infect her with his own misery?
The bloke who collected money for deckchairs had finally seen the light – or seen the lack of it; the sun had not so much as peeped all day – and was gathering up the chairs with a tuneless clacking of wood on wood. A bold, a tame, seagull stood near Troy’s feet, ripping the frankfurter from the mustard heart of a day-old hot dog. If he was quick he could leap on the wretched bird and throttle the life out of it before it could utter one more of it’s ear-splitting squawks, wrap his hands around its rotten feathery neck and squeeze until the bugger choked.