Still Waters

Eight

“You’ve got all this, all this tightness up here, the upper part of your body. The shoulders and … there, feel that. Can you feel that?”

Grabianski could feel it right enough, pointy tips of her fingers driving into him like sticks, the heel of her hand.

“Feel that now?”

It was all he could do not to call out.

“It’s all seized up, blocked; all that energy blocked and we have to find a way of letting it out. It’s because of what you do, the way you’re always having to use your imagination, the creative part of you.”

He had never told her what he did, not a thing.

“And here, of course. Down here. Feel that, in the chest? This is where it all stems from. See? That tension? Stiffness. That’s where the source of the trouble is, that’s where you’re all clenched up. There, around the heart.”

She tapped him on the shoulder and he could feel her leaning back from him, sliding away.

“Turn over now, okay?”

At first when he’d met her, Holly, met her on the street, Grabianski had thought she was just another pretty girl-that area he was now living in so full of them, sometimes he had to remind himself to look. But there she’d been, backing away from the window of this place selling second-hand designer clothing, Grabianski with his mind set on how he was going to find a buyer for a brace of nicely engraved solid silver pieces, eighteenth century, and the pair of them had collided, surprise and apologies. Holly wearing royal blue crushed velvet trousers, a cerise top that stopped several inches short of the plain gold ring in her navel. A delicate oval face with brown eyes and browner hair. Not English, not entirely. Eurasian? They were yards away from the wicker chairs and tables set up outside the Bar Rouge.

“How about some coffee?” Grabianski had said.

Holly smiling; guarded, but smiling just the same. “I’m picking my daughter up from school.”

Grabianski put her at late twenties, possibly thirty-one or thirty-two.

“Some other time,” she said and he forbade himself from watching her walk away, crushed velvet tight over that neat little behind: Grabianski, a natural voyeur, practicing self-control.

He didn’t see her for weeks and then he did, coming out of the post office across the street. Wearing a white dress today, simple and straight, hair pinned high, bare legs. Let it go, Grabianski had told himself, she won’t remember you anyway.

She called to him from the pedestrian crossing, raised her hand and waved.

She ordered herb tea, camomile, and the waiter, recognizing Grabianski, brought him a café au lait. It was then that she told him her name, Holly, and, making conversation, he asked her what she did.

“Massage.”

“Really?”

“Of course.”

The elderly lady from the fruit and vegetable shop alongside where they were sitting was carefully arranging bundles of asparagus and Holly leaned toward her and lifted a plum between forefinger and thumb.

“Pay you later?”

“Like usual.”

Grabianski watched her teeth bite into the yellow flesh. “What kind of massage?”

“Shiatsu. Shiatsu-do.”

“Oh.”

He was aware of her looking at him appraisingly, bulky beneath a pale blue shirt open at the neck. “You should come some time, it would do you good.”

Whenever she saw him after that, every few weeks on average, differing times of the day, she would smile and remind him about the massage. Once she had her daughter with her, a freckle-faced child of no more than five who didn’t look Eurasian at all.

“Here,” and she gave him her card. “Make an appointment. Phone me.”

He had already begun to think about lying there naked, just a towel across him, how his body would behave when she touched him. Visions of unguents and oils.

“Make sure you’re wearing something loose,” she told him when finally he phoned.

The address was close to where he himself was living, above a shop selling candles and hand-printed fabrics. “Take off your shoes and leave them there,” Holly pointing to where several other pairs were lined up, her daughter’s and her own.

In the low-ceilinged living room a white sheet was stretched out across the center of the rug; beyond it a cloth lay draped across a wooden chest, turning it into a kind of altar with fruit and pieces of dried wood arranged in metal bowls. Incense in the air.

“Lie down,” Holly said, indicating the sheet. “On your tummy first. That’s it, head to one side, so you can breathe.”

But it had taken his breath away, the force with which she could press into him with her slight body, slim wrists and hands.

“Breathe in … and slowly out. All right, why don’t you turn over onto your back.”

After the first time, he had not gone again for almost a month and on their next meeting she had chided him gently on the street; since then, it had fallen into a pattern, he would visit her once every couple of weeks. She would work on him for nearly an hour, advise him on diet, assign him exercises which he forgot. Sometimes, squatting over his body, she would simply chat: something her daughter, Melanie, had done or said; once, mention of Melanie’s father, who lived in Copenhagen, where he worked as an artist, computer graphics and videotape.

Now she eased herself back onto the balls of her feet and from there, in one smooth movement, rose to her feet.

“Have you been doing those exercises I showed you?” she asked.

Grabianski was afraid he might blush. “Maybe not as often as I should.”

“You were really bad today.”

“I was?”

“Across your shoulders again, your neck. I couldn’t move it at all.” Holly smiled. “It’s stress, of course. You’re worried about something, that’s what it is.”

What was worrying Grabianski, worrying him specifically, was that since he had acquired two rare Impressionist paintings on Vernon Thackray’s behalf, of Thackray neither hide nor hair had been seen. That was without this business with the nun. Why, Grabianski was already asking himself, why had he succumbed to temptation, sent her another card?

He had first met Thackray some, oh, four or five years before, when he and Grice had been working a circuit that took them from Manchester in the West to Norwich in the East, Leeds in the North to Leicester in the South. It had been worth getting a yearly season ticket with British Rail.

His old partner, Grice, was still detained at Her Majesty’s displeasure, and no substantial loss where Grabianski was concerned; a great third-floor entry man, one of the best, but unable to see beyond the newsagent’s top shelf when it came to culture.

And Thackray-Thackray had been living in Stamford then: a mid-Victorian brick house with columns at the front and high arched windows looking out over a sunken pond and three-quarters of an acre of shrubbery and graveled paths. A gallery on the second floor, in which he could show off his select collection of British art. A small oil by Mabel Pryde aside-a self-portrait, dark, the shadow of her husband barely visible in the background-there was nothing that couldn’t leave the premises for the right price, courtesy of Federal Express.

Thackray, meanwhile, had relocated to Aldeburgh on the Suffolk coast, drawn there by migrating poets and the annual music festival in honor of Benjamin Britten. Grabianski considered this a retrograde step. Thanks to a brief, early relationship with a middle-aged psychotherapist, he had once endured Peter Pears singing Britten’s settings of English folk-songs-an experience so graphically engraved on his memory as to provide him with an instant definition of Purgatory. It also meant that Thackray was no longer calling distance away. Save by telephone, that is, and both of his lines-the one displayed in the directory and the other only available to select business acquaintances-were permanently out of order.

The last occasion on which Grabianski had seen him, it had been embarrassingly necessary to explain how it was that having broken into the house where the Dalzeils were kept, he had walked out again empty-handed.

They had been sitting in a hotel bar in Market Harborough, shaded through the long afternoon, dust prancing in the low shafts of steeply angled light. Thackray had been less than pleased: this left a good customer to be pacified, a matter of principle, of re-establishing trust.

“Tell him to be patient,” Grabianski had said. “Tell him you always keep your word.”

Which, in so far as his word to Grabianski was concerned, had since proved untrue. The paintings freshly acquired, he returned to the same bar and sat there for two hours, sipping wine, waiting in vain for Thackray to arrive. It made Grabianski uncomfortable: whatever else he was, Vernon Thackray was not a man to miss an appointment. Promptness, reliability, these were Thackray’s cardinal virtues. But perseverance, patience-save for the occasional rush of blood, those were two of Grabianski’s own. If one buyer could no longer be found, well, he would find another. Simple as that.

Even so, as Grabianski approached the southern edge of Hampstead Heath, it continued to nag at him, and he had walked beyond Parliament Hill itself and down into the first thickening of trees before the splendor of his surroundings eased it from his mind.