13

At Hammersmith station Tom was waiting for her in the ticket hall. He had suggested they play there for an hour and he had brought her violin. He handed it to her as if they had made some prior arrangement.

Alice resented Tom’s bringing her violin. It seemed to her an act of possession. She imagined him going into her room and looking for the violin, opening the cupboard, finding it there and lifting it out, touching her things, pushing things about to find the case, then carrying the violin about with him, leaving it on the dirty floor in the Underground concourse with his and Peter’s jackets and the flute case. She resented his taking for granted that she would want to go back to being a busker.

‘Why do you want me to?’ she said. ‘We won’t make much. We’ll be lucky if we make as much as your fare home.’

‘You used to like it.’

‘I didn’t exactly like it. It was all there was.’

They had walked about for a while, arguing. Alice thought Tom ought to get a real job, though she did not say so. She said she would not be very pleased if someone from the office saw her playing her violin down there. That made Tom laugh.

‘You’ve got very respectable all of a sudden, darling.’

Alice hated being called ‘darling’. It was what her father sometimes called her mother. She thought of it as a possession word, an ownership word, exclusive to wives or wives designate, besides being old-fashioned. But again she did not say so. Even as she did not say so, she realized there were many things, an increasing number of things, she did not say to Tom. When they first met she had told him everything.

She did as he wanted and went down into the underpass with him. Using her violin case as a receptacle for their takings seemed a sullying, a desecration, but he nodded and smiled encouragingly at her when she put it in front of them, so she left it there. The underpass was dark and dirty and there were stains and patches of grease on the floor that she shuddered to look at too closely. Footsteps echoed hollowly from a long distance away.

‘I’ll tell you why it’s a good place to play,’ Tom said. ‘Women are scared of going through here. Seeing us here will reassure them. They’ll feel more confident, they’ll be grateful and their gratitude will make them generous.’

But there were no women. All the passers-by for a long while were young men who behaved as if Alice and Tom were not there, as if they were no more than the concrete uprights, the peeling walls of this dark underground passage. For a long time only one coin was dropped into the violin case. When Alice peered at it she saw that it was foreign, a Dutch guilder.

She would not have believed it possible to recognize a hand. One man’s hand is surely very much like another’s. But the only other hand to drop money into the case that evening she thought she recognized, a man’s left hand, with a wedding ring on it.

Tom was singing love songs, an artia from Falstaff and then ‘Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen’ from The Magic Flute. She looked up and the bow became motionless in her hand. The man who had dropped the money was walking away, his back to her. Around that back were the straps of a baby harness. It was Mike.

Alice’s heart felt as if it had ceased to beat. It started again with a sensation in her chest like nausea. He had not seen her. He had dropped the money into the case because, perhaps, he always did this when he passed buskers. How would she know? She had never known him well, had forgotten most of what she knew.

Where was he going? What was he doing in Hammersmith? She followed him with her eyes, watching him hungrily as he walked away through the underpass. A feeling of relief came to her that she had not seen Catherine, but it was immediately succeeded by a longing to see the baby, by an impulse to run after him.

Tom stopped singing. ‘What happened to my accompanist?’

She must tell him. ‘Nothing,’ she said.

Mike had gone, had disappeared up the steps. He must be on holiday, visiting some friend he had made since her departure. She said to Tom, ‘Let’s go.’

‘We’ve only been here for twenty minutes.’

‘It’s a bad place. No one’s going to give us anything. Let’s go home.’

In the train he took her hand. ‘Something’s upset you. What is it, darling?’

‘I don’t want to play down there any more,’ she said. ‘Not anywhere in the tube. It damages me. Every time I do it, I play worse.’

‘You once called it your element.’

He was angry and when they got home he went to his room and she to hers. Alice tried to put Mike out of her head by thinking of Brussels, of going to Brussels to study when she had enough money. Then she began to think of Tom. The money she was making would send him back to university to do his final year. He would be here and she would be in Brussels. She thought of the money she had earned as buying off Tom, or paying him off like a redundancy payment or love’s golden handshake.

When the doorbell rang she did not at first consider going down. Others were surely in the house, Jarvis perhaps, Tom certainly, Tina and the children, though in the Headmaster’s Flat you could not always hear the bell. It rang again and Alice thought, as she had done once or twice before at the sound of the bell, it could be Mike, it could be Mike come to find me. A rapid fantasy showed him recognizing her after he had passed, following her home.

Did she want him to come? She supposed that, perversely, she was hurt by his not wanting her, though she did not want him. No letter from him had ever come, no phone call, no message even. It was galling to have discovered that his indifference to her was as great as hers to him. The worst was his passing her by this evening, not knowing her, not recognizing her playing nor her hands, nor her body, nor bent head.

The doorbell rang again.

Alice went downstairs. The front door had stained-glass panels in it and through them you could see a caller’s height and shape. She could see enough to tell it was not Mike. Disappointment dropped through her, as if her heart had lost its balance and fallen. How could she be disappointed not to see the husband she had left with such relief?

She opened the door. The man who stood on the doorstep was tall and thin and dark. His face was like a monk in one of El Greco’s paintings. Alice, who knew nothing about painting, had once told a friend who was an art student that all the young men in El Greco’s paintings had the same face. The art student had been cross and said that was nonsense, that was ignorance, but still Alice saw them as all the same, all narrow and pale, with dark eyes, with dark pointed beards and dark hair and expressions of controlled hunger.

This man had that face and expression. He looked at her for a moment in silence and she stood looking at him, feeling that he might do some sudden violent thing.

Instead he said, ‘Is Tina in?’

Alice said, ‘I don’t know. I’ll see.’

She left him standing there, went down the passage to the front door of the Headmaster’s Flat. There was no bell, no knocker. She banged on the door with her fist. While she waited she thought, he might have said that to get into the house and steal something, and when she went back, having got no answer from Tina, he was in the hall. He was standing with his back to her reading the list of names incised into the pitch pine panelling, the Ediths and Dorothys with their pathetic Matriculations.

Turning round to face her, he said, ‘Are you a teacher here?’

She shook her head. ‘It’s not a school any more.’ She felt a little afraid now that he was inside. He had closed the front door behind him. ‘Tina’s not in. Can I give her a message?’

For some reason that made him smile. ‘You can give her this.’

It seemed to be a letter. The envelope was not sealed.

‘Jarvis not in either?’ he said, and added, ‘My name is Axel Jonas.’

She was relieved. He was not an intruder, there was nothing sinister in his behaviour, he was a friend of Jarvis. He knew Tina. Yet his knowledge did not extend to awareness that the School was no longer a school. He surprised her by reading her thoughts.

‘I’ve never been here before.’

She nodded. ‘You can wait for him if you like, but he may be very late.’

‘Where is he?’ His voice was suddenly louder, rougher.

‘How should I know?’

‘Are you his girlfriend? His wife?’

‘I just live here,’ she said. ‘I have a room here. Two or three of us have rooms here and Tina and the children have the flat.’

Again that intuitiveness of his surprised her. He was looking at the door marked Remove. ‘Can I wait in there for Jarvis?’

‘Well, it is his room…’ She hardly knew why she said that. He already knew. Jarvis must have told him. ‘Who is it you want to see? Jarvis or Tina?’

He made no answer. He opened the door of Remove and stepped inside. Alice went back to Tina’s front door and pushed the envelope under it. She hardly knew what to do. Perhaps she should fetch Tom, ask Tom what to do about this Axel Jonas who had made his way into the house and was now alone in Jarvis’s room with the door shut. A great impatience with Tom took hold of her. She did not want him fussing about. Somehow, she knew he would be proprietory in the presence of this man. He would call her ‘darling’ possessively.

Alice did nothing. She wondered what she would do if she opened the door of Remove and found Jonas looking through Jarvis’s desk or reading his papers. She would not know how to act. It was best to do nothing, dissociate herself from all of it. She went down to the kitchen because she had had no evening meal, had eaten nothing since lunch. There was nothing in the fridge but some stale cheese, a re-corked bottle of Bulgarian red wine. She ate some cheese with white bread. The house was very quiet. It was as if it was empty.

Listening to the silence, protracted now, lasting a whole ten minutes, Jasper came out of the cloakroom, followed by Bienvida. They crept out. There was no one in the hall, no unmasked Phantom, no Dracula. The two men had come and, failing to find the boy they were searching for, had left again.

The security of his own bed had become very attractive to Jasper in the past half-hour. In the cloakroom, he had made contingency plans. If it looked as though Axel Jonas was searching the house for him, as it seemed from the one sentence clearly heard that he would be, ‘Where is he?’, they would sneak up the stairs, go to the second floor and ring the bell. Pursued by Axel Jonas, he would ring the school bell, toll it out over West Hampstead for help.

‘It would be better to phone the police,’ said Bienvida.

This he ignored. He could see she was shivering, she looked as if she was going to cry. She said it again as they approached the front door of the flat.

‘We could phone the police, Jas.’

‘I shall never phone the police as long as I live,’ said Jasper recklessly.

Snivelling a bit, Bienvida produced her key and they let themselves in. On the doormat was an envelope he immediately recognized. The letter inside it, one of Damon’s forgeries, asked his teacher Miss Finch to excuse his absence on the grounds of glandular fever. Jasper knew what had happened. The letter must have fallen out of his jacket pocket in the pizza house. Axel Jonas had been here merely to bring it back. On the other hand, it meant the man now knew his address. There would be no need to toll the bell tonight but they would remain locked inside the flat, to be on the safe side.

‘Stop crying,’ he said. ‘It’s going to be OK.’

‘It’s not.’

‘Look, if you’ll shut up I’ll show you something. I’ll show you my tattoo.’

‘You haven’t got a tattoo.’

‘Want to bet?’

He took off his sweater and his T-shirt. Bienvida contemplated his back with awe. She stuck out one finger.

‘It’s beautiful. Would it be all right if I stroked the lion?’

‘Do you mind?’ said Jasper. ‘No, it bloody wouldn’t be all right. You can look all you want but don’t touch. And don’t go telling anyone I haven’t got a tattoo on my back.’

*

Tom intended to prepare a surprise, something to make up for his behaviour to Alice. He had quickly become contrite about her. He should not have taken her to that squalid place where harm might have come to her and he could not have protected her. No wonder she had been upset.

His swings of mood troubled him but he would not think about that now. The room was cold, the electric heater warmed it inadequately, and it seemed it would be a good idea to light a fire in the grate. Accordingly, he went on a hunt for coal.

Although he had never seen it or even been told such a region existed, he was sure a house of this size and this age must have a cellar. If they had a cellar, old people such as his grandmother kept coal in it. He went down in the direction of the kitchen and the various other ‘usual offices’, bootrooms and sculleries that were in this part of the building, and opened one door after another. The fourth door he opened gave on to a stairway. Tom went down, pressed the light switch and found it worked. A light bulb of low wattage came on.

Coal there had been once upon a time. An area was closed off with low wooden walls. Inside it was deep in soot and a kind of coke-like gravel but no coal remained. There was no wood either nor indeed anything in the cellar, which looked as if no one had been into it for ages.

He gave up the fire idea and went out for Chinese takeaway, which he set out on the table in Four and opened a bottle of white wine. Then he tapped gently on the door of the Headmaster’s Study to summon Alice. He smiled proudly, ushering her in, showing off his surprise. The room had warmed up, a fire was not necessary.

Alice was no longer hungry. She could only think of the money he had spent on this food, this wine. He made a pittance busking in the tube, she made the money, you could say this unnecessary food had all been bought with her money. She did not say it. She kept thinking how she must not hurt him, how she had done too much hurt already to others, she must not now hurt Tom.

The face of the man downstairs, the man who was surely still downstairs waiting, she could see like an afterimage when she had been looking at something bright and had closed her eyes. It seemed printed there on some inner screen, a pale grave face with eyes that were not grave but bright and searching. An urge to see him again, to find what he was doing down there, made her unable to relax. She would have liked quiet in which to speculate about him. Tom made her feel impatient with his questions as to how she liked the wine, did she prefer Chinese to Indian, shouldn’t they do this more often, go out to eat sometimes.

‘We are supposed to be saving money,’ she said.

He shrugged. The hurt in his face which should have restrained her only provoked exasperation. She hardly ever noticed his hand any more but now she found herself looking at it, the very slightly distorted knuckles, the stiff little finger. It brought her an inward shudder, though it was not in any way grotesque, it was not even very obvious.

He said in a colder voice, ‘I’ve never told you about my grandmother, have I?’

‘You’ve said you had one. Why?’

‘My grandmother’s rich. When she dies she’ll leave me her money. Perhaps you think I shouldn’t talk like that – I mean, they call it waiting for dead men’s shoes or something, don’t they? – but it’s only realistic to admit she’s going to die. She’s eighty.’

Yes, and she might live fifteen years, thought Alice. Women do, some women. She did not say it aloud. She said what he had predicted she would: ‘I think you shouldn’t talk like that.’

‘I keep upsetting you today, don’t I, darling?’

‘I don’t want to sit in judgement on you. Who am I to judge anyone?’

‘You can judge me. You can say anything to me.’

It was just not true. The idea of arguing about that made her feel weary and exasperated.

‘Tom, will you excuse me, please? Will you please not ask any questions? There’s something I have to do downstairs?’

Of course he asked. ‘What do you mean, something you have to do?’

His voice was the same but she could hear the temper rising in it. She was getting to know him well.

‘I’ll explain later. Please, Tom.’

He lifted his shoulders in a shrug that was at the same time baffled and bitter. Alice ran downstairs into the dark hall. She put no lights on. There would be lights on inside Remove and Jarvis there and Axel Jonas gone. Telling herself this, she knocked on the door before opening it.

He was sitting in Jarvis’s armchair with only a table lamp on, reading or looking through a book. When he saw her he got up. He laid the book down on the desk and came towards her. Alice had closed the door. She had been going to say, had been rehearsing on the stairs what she would say, that he must go, she should never have let him come in here, that it was wrong for him to be in Jarvis’s room, however much a friend of Jarvis’s he might be.

‘I’ve been hoping you’d come back,’ he said.

‘Have you?’

‘But you’re too late. I have to go. What are you called?’

‘Alice.’

Her name had a curious effect on him. Even in the half-dark she could see his face change and a look of pain, of disbelief, cross it. The expression was almost immediately wiped away. His eyes which she had supposed dark grey she saw were blue.

‘Alice,’ he said, and repeated it. ‘Alice.’

He came very close to her. She found herself unable to move. He did not embrace her. He took her face, her chin, in his hand, and brought her mouth to his mouth. She felt his mouth smiling as it approached hers, then not smiling but kissing deep, as the hand that held her face tightened its pressure on her jawbone.

Alice did not put up her hands. She stood, being kissed, joined with him at the mouth only as he let his hand fall, kept his lips on hers, his tongue pushing her lips apart and entering her mouth to search it. It endured while her brain became a red screen of slowly turning indefinable images. It was over abruptly with a kind of shock of loss. She was shaking, she thought she would fall. His voice came from a long way off. Her eyes were closed and to open them involved an effort, a difficult process to be learned anew.

‘We’ll meet again soon.’

Afterwards, she wished, wished passionately, she had gone to the door with him, spoken to him, asked what that meant, that meeting again soon. Instead, she stood there, opening her eyes on to the dimly lit room. Doors must have closed but she did not hear them. She came slowly out of Remove into the empty hall, went back to switch off Jarvis’s light.

She was not thinking, she was only feeling, not yet asking herself what she had done, if she had done anything. Tom’s door was closed. She prayed he would not open it and put his head out as she passed. He did not. As she came to the Headmaster’s Study she heard people let themselves into the house. She stood and listened until she heard the voices of Tina and Daniel Korn. If she had not gone down and encountered Axel Jonas again, if she had not encountered him in the half-dark and returned his strange kiss, Alice knew she would have spoken of him to Tina, would later or tomorrow have mentioned him to Jarvis. Now she would not.

In bed in Lilac Villa, Cecilia lay awake. This was unusual. The pattern of her nights was that she fell asleep quickly, woke at four and remained awake. Daphne had told her, she having got it from Peter, that finding it hard to get to sleep is a sign of anxiety, waking too early a sign of depression.

Cecilia did not think of herself as chronically depressed but rather as one who tried to look on the bright side of things. The bright side at present would be to bask in the good things Jasper and particularly Bienvida had told her that day. How, for instance, they would be going out with Brian again at the weekend. Brian, who once used to meet them outside at some prearranged place, now actually came to call for them at the School, had a cup of coffee in the Headmaster’s Flat with Tina, was on pleasant conversational terms with Tina. Bienvida had even suggested it as likely Tina would accompany them when they all went to the Tower Bridge exhibition on Saturday.

This did not sound like Tina. Cecilia admitted it, faced it. She did not believe everything Bienvida told her, perhaps believed less than half. That Brian and Tina would get together again, might even marry, was Cecilia’s dearest wish. She was thinking once more about what to do with her house. A possibility might be to make over the house to Tina on condition she lived in it with Brian. And then she, Cecilia, would move in with Daphne.

But she knew it was not in her nature to make such a condition, even if it were possible, legal, workable. She had long ago made a will, leaving everything unconditionally to Tina, her only child. Tina would not agree to any such conditional arrangement, she was sure, and sure too that it was wrong even to attempt to manipulate people in this way. At least the children had not mentioned other men in Tina’s recent life.

Cecilia allowed herself to imagine Tina’s wedding to Brian with the children in attendance, a page and bridesmaid. Such a ceremony would have seemed very shocking to her once, but she had adjusted to things, she had adapted. She knew there were many people who lived together and had children and then married with the children there at the wedding. Daphne and she had discussed it, though more in connection with Peter than Tina. As she dreamed of Tina settling down, so Daphne dreamed of Peter ceasing to love men, moving in with the right girl and later marrying her.

But thinking of Peter brought to Cecilia a sense of great fear, of impending doom, as she envisaged for her friend terrible unhappiness coming to her through her son. She tried to re-direct her thoughts, lying there in her bed in the big, dark empty house, and found them straying to Daphne’s own wedding, so long ago but so clearly remembered, at which she had been a bridesmaid.

Daphne’s new husband had given her a present, as was correct, but Daphne herself had chosen it, a cameo brooch, the cameo carved from deep pink and very pale pink coral. Several times over the years Cecilia had thought of giving this brooch to Tina but she never had. It was not the kind of thing Tina wore, with her preference for Indian or African jewellery. One day perhaps Bienvida would have it.

Thinking of the brooch made Cecilia wonder where it was, made her put the light on and get up and begin searching for it. At last she found it in a box in a dressing-table drawer in one of the spare rooms – perfectly properly put away, neatly packed in pink cotton wool, tidy as all her things were. But she reproached herself for having hidden it away there, for years perhaps, it was possible it had been there for ten years.

She brought it back to her own bedroom and put it in her jewel case, no longer in its box but pinned to the velvet padding with which the case was lined. This move, this nocturnal act, brought Cecilia a deep satisfaction, a sense of having restored things to order and righted an obscure wrong. She fell asleep at once.