Lonely Hearts

Twenty-Eight

To the north of the Old Market Square was the site of the Black Boy Hotel, designed by Watson Fothergill and where Resnick and his friend Ben Riley used to drink early on a Saturday night before things started to move too fast. Now it was an expanse of ugly brick wall barely disguised as a Littlewood’s store. On the south side the front of the Running Horse hotel was dated 1483, but the rubble behind it was more recent. On their rare trips up from Hayward’s Heath to visit, his in-laws had stayed there and complained about the service and the sound of the traffic.

The steps between the stone lions were peopled with punks and kids in leathers, girls in coats from Top Shop or Miss Selfridge trying not to keep looking at their watches, a couple of lads in shirtsleeves being “tough.”

Half of them, Resnick thought, have me figured for a copper on duty, the rest are imagining something worse. He knew Rachel was in the square before he saw her, a tensing of the nerve-ends turning his head and opening his eyes. She was crossing behind one of the fountains, hands resting easily inside the pockets of her camel coat, face glowing in the street lights and the shine of wet paving. The heels of her boots clicked a crisp rhythm against the steps as Resnick stepped out to greet her. Her hair was up and her face lifted towards him, smiling.

“See. I’m not late.”

“Not very.”

The corner of her mouth when it brushed against his cheek was almost warm, though her face was cold.

“Come on,” Rachel said, linking her arm through his and turning him to walk up King Street. “We’re going this way.”

He had no sense of it still raining.

The restaurant was on the first floor, alongside a Chinese supermarket. There were tables lining both sides of an L-shaped room, most of them occupied. The waiter who took their coats said, “Good evening, Miss Chaplin,” in a voice that was already more East Midlands than either Hong Kong or Peking. He showed them to a table by the window and Resnick knew that this was where she usually sat, those times she had been there with Chris Phillips, possibly with others too; her place, her territory, her celebration.

A waitress in starched white brought Resnick a bottle of Chinese beer and Rachel a vodka and tonic.

“Cheers,” Resnick said, lifting his glass. “To whatever.”

“Independence,” Rachel said.

The waiter opened large, leather-bound menus in front of them and stepped discreetly away.

“I’d never seen you as anything else,” said Resnick.

“All I can say is, I wish others saw me through your eyes.”

“You mean Chris?”

She drank a little more vodka. “We had it all spelled out, the two of us. What it was about and what it wasn’t. Lots of dos and don’ts. Top of the list: don’t become possessive, don’t become dependent. We spent evening after evening talking it through, testing one another, what we thought we wanted.” She laughed disparagingly. “Making lists.”

Love, Resnick wanted to ask, what about love?

“Lists are all right for Tesco’s,” he said.

“And as long as you remember to take them with you.”

“You’re saying Chris got forgetful?”

She shook her head. “We both did.”

Resnick was wondering for how much of his marriage his wife had lain aside her ten-point plan: how to find true happiness in easy stages and still be one of the six percent in the country to own a dishwasher.

“Eighteen months…”

That long, thought Resnick.

“…and it was as if nothing had ever been said. We were like everyone else. What time will you be back for a meal? Saturday night we’ve been invited to a party, to dinner, a wedding anniversary.”

“Sounds pretty normal.”

Rachel looked at him over the rim of her glasses. “Normal, Charlie? Is that the way you live?”

“The way I live may not be altogether through choice.”

“All right, but still that choice is yours.”

“Is it?”

“Yes.”

“How can you be so certain?”

She didn’t answer. “I’d stopped thinking of myself as myself,” she said. “I wasn’t me, I was part of a couple.” She finished her drink. “I didn’t like it.”

“Couple or not,” said Resnick, “I can’t see you-what? — feeling threatened, submerged, losing your identity.”

“Nor could I until it began to happen.”

The waiter was hovering, an encouraging smile around his eyes.

“Well, Rachel Chaplin,” Resnick said, taking her hand, “there’s no doubt in my mind exactly who you are.”

“That’s what I’m banking on,” Rachel said, moving her hand away to turn a page of the menu. “Now, shall I tell you what’s good…?”

The monkfish and black beans spat and sizzled from a patterned iron plate.

“Sit back, Charlie. No sense in spoiling a clean shirt.”

It had taken him minutes to find one, dry and rumpled and needing water splashed liberally over it before it could be ironed. He had used his thumbnail to remove a blob of horseradish sauce from his best tie, dark red with diagonal white stripe. The shoes that he had quickly rubbed over had soon had the shine splashed out of them while walking to meet Rachel.

Rachel was wearing a pale blue blouse, ruffed and tight at neck and wrists. Silver drop earrings that caught the light whenever she tilted her head.

“Stop staring at me, Charlie,” she scolded, not seeming unhappy about it at all.

“It’s difficult,” he said.

“Don’t waste your breath, Charlie. It doesn’t suit you.”

“What?”

“Whatever you were about to say. Flattery.”

“All I was going to say was…”

“Charlie!” She pointed a chopstick towards him, admonishingly.

“All…”

“Just don’t!”

He grinned and diverted his attentions to lifting rice to his mouth. Even if you picked the bowl up from the table and lowered your mouth it wasn’t easy. Broccoli, pieces of chicken, slices of pepper, they were easy, but rice…

“How long do you think you’ll stay there?” he asked.

“At Carole’s? I don’t know. Till I feel it’s time to move or until I sense that I’m getting in the way.”

“Then you’ll get a place of your own?”

“Yes,” she said. “What else?”

Keep your eyes on the food, Resnick ordered himself, and don’t say it. Don’t as much as think it, because if you do, she’ll know.

She knew anyway.

Men! Rachel thought, with a slight shake of the head. Why do they never learn?

“It upset you, didn’t it?” Rachel asked between mouthfuls. “The verdict.”

Resnick took his time before answering. “Only because it made me think about it again.”

“Then you still don’t want to talk about it?”

“No, far from it. I do-with you-only…I don’t know what I want to say.”

“Or think? What do you think about it, Charlie, the sentence?”

“That it wasn’t enough. That it could never be enough.”

“Charlie, what good…?”

“I know, I know. All the arguments. Revenge and not reform. Lock a man up and the longer he’s inside the worse he’ll be when he comes out.”

“You say it as though you know it without believing it.”

Resnick picked up the wine bottle and Rachel set her hand over the top of her glass; he refilled his own.

“There’s nothing that clear-cut. I understand about the loss of dignity, about recidivism…”

“But your job…”

“And what I do, more often than not, more often than probably I think is wise, results in criminals being shut away. It’s what happens, Rachel. It’s the law, part of it. At the moment you can’t have one without the other, and if I believe in most of what I do, I seem to have to accept the rest.”

“Like Sharon Taylor’s father getting three years?”

“That’s easier to take than most.”

“Not for him.”

“Christ!” exclaimed Resnick. “Don’t expect me to feel sympathy for him.”

Heads were angled towards them, conversations lowered. “Everything all right, sir?” The waiter bowed to one table. “Everything satisfactory, madam?” to another.

“I don’t.”

“He’ll be out and on parole in two, less.”

“You know what they’ll do to him inside, as soon as they know what he’s in for.”

“Yes.”

“You make it sound as if that’s what he deserves.”

“It’s hard not to think it.”

Rachel slowly shook her head. “I don’t understand how…Charlie, I may not know you very well, but I don’t think you’re that kind of man.”

“What kind of man is he, for Christ’s sake?”

“Charlie, don’t…”

“All I know, if that had been my child…”

“Oh, Charlie.” She took his hand which had closed into a fist between hers and held it for a moment against her cheek. “Don’t punish yourself more than you have to.”

What am I doing? Rachel Chaplin thought when he was away from the table. On my own for what, a week, and I’m calling up this nice, shambling man and dangling things before his eyes I know he can’t have. And why? Because I’ve been in too many nights in a row? Because I needed something other than Carole’s too-sensible chatter to wind down with after work? Because I always did like to do the things I know are courting danger?

She turned her head as she heard him coming back towards the table, a big man with broad shoulders who moved a little like a dancer. Was it then just because she found herself fancying him, this Charlie Resnick? No more nor less than that? The muscles of her stomach wall tightened, knowing that she could go to bed with him now, that evening as soon as the meal was over, and knowing that she wouldn’t.

Reaching out with her chopsticks to take the last prawn, Rachel realized there were goose-pimples along her arm. Who are you not being fair to? she asked herself, dipping the prawn in the remainder of the plum sauce before putting it in her mouth.

Neither of them had driven. Walking down the hill back into the center of the city, they hailed an empty cab almost opposite the pub where they had first gone for a drink. Resnick suggested that they drop Rachel off first and, although it was furthest away, she agreed.

They leaned back against the seat, one of Resnick’s arms across her shoulders, the back of her left hand resting against his leg. After all the talk during the meal, neither spoke until the driver turned into the street where Carole lived.

“Charlie,” Rachel said, turning to face him, “I’m really pleased you were in when I called, pleased you came. I’ve had a good time tonight.”

Resnick tensed, waiting for the but.

“I like you, Charlie Resnick, at least I think I do, I enjoy being with you, but nothing more.”

“What more is there?”

Rachel laughed and threw back her head. “You’re impossible!”

Resnick leaned forward and kissed the stretch of muscle of her neck. She twisted slowly against him, moving her head until he was kissing her mouth. As the cab slowed to a halt, Resnick’s lips parted and her tongue slid over his.

“Time to go, Charlie.”

Resnick sighed, “Sure.”

Rachel opened the door, reaching for her purse with the other hand.

“On me,” Resnick said. “You paid for the meal.”

“Okay,” she said, getting out.

“Next time we’ll swop around,” Resnick called.

Rachel raised a hand. “Next time you phone me.”

“Right.” Resnick closed the door and the driver swung the cab into a U-turn. He looked through the side window, but she had already turned away and was walking slowly up the path towards the front door. A few seconds and she was almost lost to shadow.

Rachel shook her bag, patted her pocket, where had she put the key? There were no lights showing in the house which meant either that Carole was out or had already gone to bed, tired out. She didn’t want to stand around in the cold and damp and neither did she want to ring the bell and risk waking Carole. The sound of the cab taking Resnick away had already faded.

“Never do it, can you?”

Harsh, the words broke the darkness for a moment that for her was timeless, Rachel’s heart stopped. The bag slithered between her fingers towards the path. At first she could not place even the voice, much less where it came from.

“Always amazed me, someone as organized as you, half an hour to find a front-door key.”

Rachel’s fear became anger as Chris Phillips stepped from the shadows towards her. She wanted to hurt him for frightening her, but he caught the swing of her arm easily and held it above the wrist.

She could see that the upper sections of his raincoat were close to sodden; he was bareheaded and his hair stuck close to his scalp.

“How long have you been spying on me?” Rachel asked, shaking herself free.

“For about as long as you’ve been lying to me.”

“I haven’t lied.”

“No?” Chris angled his head slowly back towards the road, looking in the direction that Resnick’s departing cab had taken.

“You said there wasn’t anybody.”

“There isn’t.”

“What was that then? Some fucking apparition?”

“That was a friend.”

“I’ll bet!”

Rachel turned away and walked to the front door; a light had gone on in the hall, Carole alerted by their raised voices. Her finger was almost upon the bell when an open hand smacked past her, shaking the door on its hinges.

“Don’t you turn your back on me!”

“It’s too late for that, Chris,” Rachel said, facing him once again. “I already did.”

“Oh, you’re so clever, aren’t you?”

“I’m not trying to be clever…”

“Comes natural, does it?”

“Chris…”

“Like lying!”

“How many times, I have not been lying. Why should I? What would be the point?”

“And whoring!”

Carole was standing behind the door, her silhouette fractured by the glass. “Let me in,” Rachel called and before she had finished speaking the door was open on to the hall.

“Hello, Chris,” Carole said in a neutral tone. He ignored her, staring at Rachel with the same mixture of hatred and desperation she recognized from so many of her clients. He made as if to follow her and smartly Carole pushed Rachel inside and leaned against the door. Phillips was trapped with one side of his body jammed up against the wall.

“Carole, you’d better let me in!”

“I don’t think so, Chris.”

“Rachel and I have got things to talk about.”

“No, we haven’t,” called Rachel.

“You heard her, Chris,” said Carole.

He leaned his weight against the door and forced her back some way but not far enough for him to squeeze inside.

“You shouldn’t be doing this, Chris,” Carole said. “Go home.”

“Not until that lying bitch comes back out here to talk to me.”

“I’ve nothing left to say to you,” said Rachel, back at Carole’s shoulder, “and if I ever did, this has made me see the pointlessness of it. Just go.”

“Go, Chris,” echoed Carole.

“And if I don’t?”

“Don’t be even stupider than you have already,” said Rachel.

“Send for the police, why don’t you? Your friend the fascist can come roaring up on his charger and practice a bit of that well-known police brutality. That’s what turns you on these days, is it? Handcuffs and truncheons in the back of a blue van.”

Rachel wrenched the door back from Carole’s hands and slammed it forward again with all her weight and anger behind it. If Chris Phillips hadn’t jumped back in time, he would have lost a couple of fingers at least. As it was, one of the panels of glass splintered across from corner to corner and the whole door reverberated in its frame for several seconds.

Deftly, Carole slipped the bolt into place, followed by the chain; lastly, she turned the key in the second, mortice, lock.

“Leave him,” she said.

They sat in the kitchen at the back of the house, Carole drinking tea, Rachel gin. Each time there was an unexplained sound they thought it was Chris, moving around outside the house, but neither of them referred to it. Rachel told her friend about the Chinese meal in specific detail, not missing a flavor or a dish. On several occasions during her narrative she considered going to the phone and calling Resnick, but she always stopped herself.

At half-past midnight, Carole went upstairs and, without switching on any of the lights, looked out. Chris Phillips was standing much where he had been the best part of an hour before, hunched in the middle of the path. She went quietly back down and poured Rachel another drink.

When next she went to look it was a few minutes short of one o’clock and both the path and the street were empty.