One Good Turn

THURSDAY
36

Arooster crowed. There was no better alarm clock. He remembered it was Sunday, his favorite day of the week, and he stretched all four limbs luxuriously in the bed. No need to get up and go to work. He was no longer writing, thank God, he had found an odd kind of liberation in donning a suit and tie every weekday morning and commuting up to London to toil in a con-servative office with high ceilings and big old-fashioned desks, a place where the juniors and the secretaries called him “Mr. Canning” and the chairman clapped him on the back and said, “How’s that wonderful woman you married, old chap?” He didn’t know what he did in the office all day, but at lunchtime he went out to a restaurant where the waitresses wore white broidery anglaise aprons and little caps on their heads and brought him oxtail soup and steamed puddings with custard. And in the afternoon, at three on the dot, his secretary (June, or perhaps Angela), a cheerful young woman with crisp shorthand and soft twinsets, brought him a cup of tea and a plate of biscuits.

The rooster didn’t know it was a day of rest. He was soon joined by the other birds, Martin could pick out the thread of the joyful warble of a blackbird from the tapestry of birdsong, but the identity of the other birds in the pattern was a mystery. His (wonderful) wife would know, she was a country girl, born and bred. A farm girl. A wholesome, milk-fed farm girl. He propped himself up on an elbow and studied her wholesome farm-girl face. In repose, she was even more lovely, although it was the kind of loveliness that inspired respectful admiration in other men rather than lust. Even the idea of lust would have sullied her. She was beyond reproach. A strand of her soft brown hair lay across her face. He moved it gently away and kissed the priceless ruby bow of her lips.

He would make her breakfast in bed. A proper breakfast, eggs and bacon, fried bread. For lunch today they would roast a piece of good English beef, meat was still on the ration but the village butcher was a friend. Everyone was their friend. He wondered why he was so frequently a carnivore in this other life.

The morning would follow its usual happy Sunday pattern. When lunch was nearly ready-the gravy thickening, the beef resting-he would laugh (because it was their little joke) and say to her, “A little preprandial, darling?” and bring out the Waterford sherry decanter that had belonged to her parents. Then they would sip their amontillado and sit on the armchairs covered in “StrawberryThief ”and listen to Schubert’s Trout Quintet.

He could hear a tap running in the bathroom and the tread of feet along the hallway and down the stairs. Peter/David was making airplane noises, fighting the Luftwaffe single-handed. Martin heard him say, “Take that, you filthy Nazi!” before making the ack-ack sounds of a machine gun. He was a good boy, he would grow up like his father, not like Martin. Yesterday evening when they had been sitting in their cozy living room (roaring fire, etc.), Martin toasting crumpets, his wife knitting yet another Fair Isle pullover, after Peter/David had kissed them both good night and gone up to bed, his wife paused over her needles and said with a smile, “I think he deserves to have a little brother or sister, don’t you?”A moment to treasure in a life of treasures.

He stretched again and put his arms round his wife and smelled her lily-of-the-valley hair. She wriggled a little, a sign that she was awake and willing. He put a hand inside the folds of her night-gown and found the apple roundness of a breast and pressed his body against hers. He should say something loving at this point, something tender. He always had trouble with the intimacies of conversation with her for some reason, perhaps if he gave her a name it would help. She rolled over and returned his embrace. “Marty,” she said.

He woke with a start. The cheap digital clock radio on the bed-side table informed him that it was six o’clock in the morning. He wondered if he should check under the covers to make sure he hadn’t turned into a giant insect.

Daylight had already overtaken the streetlamp outside and fil-tered through the thin orange curtains, bathing the room in the glow of a postnuclear sunrise. The lurid Lucozade light washed over Martin’s face. He couldn’t imagine how he would get back to sleep again. The walls of the room were tissue thin. Every toi-let flushed, every hawking phlegmy cough, every sexual act attempted or achieved, all seemed to be finding a direct conduit to Martin’s room.

What if somehow he was stuck here, if he had entered some surreal loop where he must wake up every morning in a different room at the Four Clans? How many rooms were there in the hotel? What if it was an infinite number, what if it was one of those Twilight Zone places with a nonexistent thirteenth floor and a staff who were really the ghosts of previous guests? A hotel you could never check out from.

He knew, in the sober light of day, that it was not Richard Mott who had phoned him last night. Which was most likely, after all- that Richard Mott was phoning him from the afterlife or that the person who killed Richard Mott had stolen his phone? A mur-derer phoning him was preferable to a corpse phoning him. Of course this was something he should tell the police about, but the idea of having to encounter Sutherland again was too depressing. He wondered what Richard Mott’s killer would have said to him if his phone hadn’t run out of battery power. “You next,” perhaps. An eye for an eye.

He had said to Melanie last night that he was going to cancel his appearance at the Book Festival, but now it struck him that it would be a badge of courage to turn up. “Pull yourself together, boy! Face the thing you’re frightened of.” He might have been reduced to a plaything of the gods, but he was still Alex Blake. This was his life, this was his arena, it may not have been a very noble one, but it was all that was left to him.

He had lost his laptop, his wallet, his novel, his home, and his identity over the course of the previous forty-eight hours. All he had left was Alex Blake.

Reception was now being manned by a boy in a striped satin waistcoat and a bow tie who looked as if he belonged in a bar-bershop quartet.

“Can I use the phone?” Martin asked, and the boy said, “Cer-tainly, Mr. Canning. My mother’s read all the Alex Blake books, she’s your number one fan.”

“Thank you, thank her. That’s very kind.”

From his pocket he fished out the flyer that had been given to him a lifetime ago. “Can I help you?” he had said. Well, he did need help. He needed just one person to be on his side. “Face the thing you’re frightened of. Pull yourself together, you fucking fairy.You’re an old woman, Martin.”

He was not going to be cowed by unfounded suspicion, nor by dead men phoning him. He was going to hold his head high and carry on. Cosmic justice could come and get him, but it would be on his own terms.

He dialed the number and, when it was answered, said, “Mr. Brodie? I don’t know if you remember me?”