Birdman

21

Lucilla Hartevelt, having failed to shift the medically recommended six stone, suffered a second MI in 1985. This one produced uncontrollable arrhythmias and was fatal within thirty minutes.

After the funeral Henrick came back to Greenwich with Toby and they walked together in the park. In the shadow of Henry Moore's Standing Figure, Henrick paused. He turned, unprompted, to his son and, quietly, in his rich, Gelderland accent, began to tell the story he'd kept to himself for nearly sixty years. She had been a Dutch nurse, he explained; he'd last seen her on Ginkel Heath, 20 September 1944. Later he was told she'd perished in the chaos of the Arnhem battle — along with the members of the South Stafford Brigade she was tending. He had continued to believe this until thirty-five years later, when she resurfaced — freshly widowed by a wealthy Belgian surgeon and working in an orphanage in Sulawesi.

Toby stared past Henrick as he spoke, down into the valley, where the pale pink colonnades of the Queen's house glowed like the inside of a shell. Slowly it was dawning on him that for most of his parents' marriage his father had been marking time.

A month after the conversation Henrick sold the Wiltshire estate, passed another £2 million to his son and moved to Indonesia.

With his father abroad and the new money, Toby slipped further out of the mainstream: he rarely went into the Sevenoaks office. Now the only time he put on a business suit was for committee meetings at St Dunstan's — the rest of the time he stopped shaving and dressed, as if on permanent vacation, in linen suits, expensive shirts — sleeves rolled up, espadrilles or calfskin shoes on bare feet. The opium, and later the cocaine and heroin, were doing their job; they blotted up his worst impulses, they tamped and quietened, leaving no evidence that they had harmed him physically. He was careful not to keep a large supply in Croom's Hill, using the lonely little Lewisham flat as a safe house. None of his contacts knew the address and he could visit, replenish his stocks incrementally.

For over a decade he maintained a shaky control of his life.

By the late Nineties, however, the parties had taken on a different hue, a new casualness. Now, along with the chilled glasses of Cristal and Stolichnaya, came cocaine served in willow-pattern Japanese miso bowls. Girls he had met in Mayfair clubs slouched against the walls, smoking St Moritz cigarettes and tugging at the hems of their miniskirts. He shopped closer to home too, using a discreet network of contacts to guide him to resource pools. Some of his acquaintances lingered on, but they were soon hopelessly outnumbered by the new breed of guest: the girls and their tag-alongs.

'This is wild, isn't it?' one said to Harteveld, who — seconds-fresh from a heroin hit — was lowering himself into the walnut highback in the library.

'I'm sorry?' He looked up, hazy. 'I beg your pardon?'

'I said it's wild, isn't it.' She was a tall, calm girl in her mid-twenties, fine-boned, with swinging chestnut hair and long supple legs. He had never seen her before. She was oddly out of place in her pared-down make-up, buttoned grey wool dress and low pumps.

Is she really one of the girls? Really?

'Yes,' he managed. 'Yes, I suppose, I suppose it is.'

'I've never seen anything like it. Apparently the guy who's throwing it shoots up for people if they want. Just go into the bathroom and he's there — oh — handing it out like candy. Even shoots it for you if you're going to be a baby about it.'

Harteveld stared at her in disbelief. 'Do you know who I am?'

'No. Should I?'

'My name is Toby Harteveld. This is my house.'

'Ah.' She smiled, unrattled. 'So you're Toby. Well, Toby, it's nice to meet you at last. You've got a lovely house. And that Patrick Heron on the landing — an original?'

'Indeed.'

'It's exquisite.'

'Thank you. Now—' With an effort he pushed himself out of the chair and held out a shaky hand. 'Regarding the heroin. I take it an invitation to partake would not be rejected?'

'No.' She shook her head, still smiling. 'Thanks, but I'm crap with drugs. I'd only throw up or something pathetic.'

'Very well. A schnapps perhaps? In the orangery. There's a, let me see, a Frida Kahlo in there. I believe you'd be interested.'

'A Frida Kahlo? You're joking, aren't you? Of course I'm interested.'

The orangery, piggy-backed onto the house, was chilly. Mango loops of light from the party fell on the potted trees, casting plush grey shadows on the stone floor. In here it smelled of plant food and cold earth, the voices of the guests were muffled. Harteveld scratched his arms, his thoughts meandering. Now why were they here? What was it he wanted?

The living blue of her veins. Toby, raised and frozen. Her hair soaked and smoothed away from her forehead.

The girl turned and looked up at him. 'Well?'

'I'm sorry?'

'The painting? Where is it?'

'The painting,' he echoed.

'Yes. The Kahlo?'

'Oh, that—' Harteveld scratched his stomach, looking down at her soft-edged face. 'No, I've got it wrong. It's not in the orangery. It's in the study.'

'Oh, for Christ's sake.' She turned to go but he gripped her arm.

'Look, there's something I need you to do. Usually—' His head was swarming. 'Usually I give two hundred, but with you I'd make it three.'

She gave him an incredulous look. 'I'm not on the game, you know. I came with my flatmate. That's all.'

'Come on!' he said, suddenly alarmed by her rejection. 'Four hundred, make it four. And I'm not hard work — all you have to do is keep still, that's all. I don't—'

'I said, I'm not working.'

'I don't take long.' He tightened his grip. 'If you keep very still I'm over in a few minutes. Come on—'

'I said no.' She shook her arm to loosen his fingers. 'Now let go or I'll scream.'

'Pleas—'

'NO!'

Harteveld, shocked by the new imperative in her voice, dropped her arm and took a step back. But the girl had been ignited, wasn't dropping it. She matched his movement, advancing on him, furious.

'I don't care' — she lashed out, catching him under the chin with clean, pink nails. Drawing blood — 'Who the fuck you are—'

'Shit.' He grabbed his neck, stunned by her sudden viciousness. 'Shit, what did you — what did you do that for?'

'You learn to take no for an answer.' She turned on her heel. 'Get it?'

'You!' he called after her, clutching his neck. 'You. Listen, little bitch. You're not welcome in this house. Understand?' But her soft black pumps retreated across the stone floor. Smug, self-fulfilled. 'You come here and take my hospitality, my wine, my drugs — and do this, you little cow. You are no longer welcome!'

But she was gone, and he knew, as he pulled his hands away and examined the dark streaks, that his control was slipping, that trouble was near the surface.

He didn't return to the party. The cleaner found him the next day, coiled on a sofa where he had dragged himself in the small hours, his hands folded crab-like over his head, tears on his face, blood crusted into his collar. She said nothing, flinging open the windows and noisily tidying away ashtrays.

Later she brought him coffee, sliced fruit and a glass of Perrier, setting the tray on the Carrara marble table and giving him a pitying look. Harteveld rolled away and sniffed the bright air coming in through the windows. There was a promise of winter in it, of cloud and snow. And something else. Something bad in the distance was coming to town. It smelled to him like crisis.

December the fourth, his thirty-seventh birthday. And it arrived.

He found the girl under the piano just before 3 a.m. when the party was beginning to break up. Her eyes were rolled back in her head, her arms hugging her shoulders. From time to time she moaned and wriggled gently like a fat cocoon. She was very plump, and wore a short baby-blue dress. There was a tattoo on her bicep which looked as if it had leaked through her skin and whitish strands of matter webbed her mouth.

Amused by her, he rested his elbow on the piano and leaned in to look at her. 'Hey, you. What's your name?'

Her eyes rolled back, trying to focus on the noise. Her mouth opened and closed twice before sound came out. 'Sharon Dawn McCabe.' In the three words she had identified herself as a child of the Gorbals.

'You know you're out of your head, don't you?'

She hiccoughed once and nodded, her eyes closed. 'Ah know ah am.'

So he carried poor, fat Sharon into his bedroom, undressed her in the dark and put her to bed. He fucked her very quickly and silently, dry-eyed, holding on to her cold breasts from behind. She didn't move or make a sound. Downstairs the party ended, he could hear the caterers clearing glasses. Outside snowflakes hurried past the dark window.

Next to him Sharon Dawn McCabe started to snore very loudly; he fucked her again — she was too drunk to know it had happened, he reasoned — and fell asleep.

He dreamed he was back in the anatomy lab at Guy's that winter afternoon, crouched on the floor, watching in horrified excitement as the fat security guard improved the thin stump of his erection with a soft white hand and, standing on tiptoe against a dissecting table, a look of intense concentration on his face, slid the hips of the lifeless woman to meet his.

Harteveld could bear it no longer; he let his breath out in a thin sigh.

The security guard stopped, frozen in the fading light, his eyes rolling as he tried to spy out who was watching him. He wasn't a tall man, but to Harteveld, crouched on the floor, he seemed to block the horizon. His eyes were wet and cold.

There should have been a chance to stand up, protest, disassociate himself from this tableau, but Harteveld was dead-locked with fear. And in the second he chose not to move, the security guard, sweat streaking his forehead, recognized that the thin med student in his scrubs had been waiting in here in the darkness for the privacy to do exactly what he was doing.

The moment shimmered a little. Then the guard smiled.

Harteveld woke, years later, in the Greenwich house, mewling like an animal, the image of the smile hot in his mind. It was still dark in the room, a thin crack of moonlight coming through the curtains. He lay in a deep sweat, staring at the ceiling, listening to the juices of his heart slowing, waiting for his thoughts to settle.

I understand, the smile had said. I am like you, the inhuman and sick cannot stay apart for long. They will collide.

Harteveld ran his hands through his hair and groaned. He rolled onto his side, saw what lay next to him on the pillow, and had to stuff fingers into his mouth to stop a cry coming out.