Straight

17

I stood blindly on the sidewalk oblivious to the passersby finding me an obstacle in their way. The swamping tidal wave of fury and desolation swelled and broke and gradually ebbed, leaving me still shaking from its force, a tornado in the spirit.

I loosened a jaw I hadn’t realized was clamped tight shut and went on feeling wretched.

A grandmotherly woman touched my arm and said, “Do you need help?” and I shook my head at her kindness because the help I needed wasn’t anyone’s to give. One had to heal from the inside: to knit like bones.

“Are you all right?” she asked again, her eyes concerned.

“Yes.” I made an effort. “Thank you.”

She looked at me uncertainly, but finally moved on, and I took a few sketchy breaths and remembered with bathos that I needed a telephone if I were ever to move from that spot.

A hairdressing salon having (for a consideration) let me use their phone, Brad came within five minutes to pick me up. I shoved the crutches into the back and climbed wearily in beside him, and he said, “Where to?” giving me a repeat of the grandmotherly solicitude in his face if not his words.

“Uh,” I said. “I don’t know.”

“Home?”

“No...” I gave it a bit of thought. I had intended to go to Greville’s house to change into my suit that was hanging in his wardrobe before meeting Clarissa at seven, and it still seemed perhaps the best thing to do, even if my energy for the project had evaporated.

Accordingly we made our way there, which wasn’t far, and when Brad stopped outside the door, I said, “I think I’ll sleep here tonight. This house is as safe as anywhere. So you can go on to Hungerford now, if you like.”

He didn’t look as if he liked, but all he said was, “I come back tomorrow?”

“Yes, please,” I agreed.

“Pick you up. Take you to the office?”

“Yes, please.”

He nodded, seemingly reassured that I still needed him. He got out of the car with me and opened the gate, brought my overnight bag and came in with me to see, upstairs and down, that the house was safely empty of murderers and thieves. When he’d departed I checked that all the alarms were switched on and went up to Greville’s room to change.

I borrowed another of his shirts and a navy silk tie, and shaved with his electric razor which was among the things I’d picked up from the floor and put on his white chest of drawers, and brushed my hair with his brushes for the same reason, and thought with an odd frisson that all of these things were mine now, that I was in his house, in his room, in his clothes... in his life.

I put on my own suit, because his anyway were too long, and came across the tube of the baster, still there in an inner breast pocket. Removing it, I left it among the jumble on the dressing chest and checked in the looking glass on the wall that Franklin, Mark II, wouldn’t entirely disgrace Franklin, Mark I. He had looked in that mirror every day for three months, I supposed. Now his reflection was my reflection and the man that was both of us had dark marks of tiredness under the eyes and a taut thinness in the cheeks, and looked as if he could do with a week’s lying in the sun. I gave him a rueful smile and phoned for a taxi, which took me to Luigi’s with ten minutes to spare.

She was there before me all the same, sitting at a small table in the bar area to one side of the restaurant, with an emptyish glass looking like vodka on a prim mat in front of her. She stood up when I went in and offered me a cool cheek for a polite social greeting, inviting me with a gesture to sit down.

“What will you drink?” she asked formally, but battling, I thought, with an undercurrent of diffidence.

I said I would pay for our drinks and she said no, no, this was her suggestion. She called the waiter and said, “Double water?” to me with a small smile and when I nodded ordered Perrier with ice and fresh lime juice for both of us.

I was down by then to only two or three Distalgesics a day and would soon have stopped taking them, though the one I’d just swallowed in Greville’s house was still an inhibitor for the evening. I wondered too late which would have made me feel better, a damper for the ankle or a large scotch everywhere else.

Clarissa was wearing a blue silk dress with a double-strand pearl necklace, pearl, sapphire and diamond earrings and a sapphire and diamond ring. I doubted if I would have noticed those, in the simple old jockey days. Her hair, smooth as always, curved in the expensive cut and her shoes and handbag were quiet black calf. She looked as she was, a polished, well-bred woman of forty or so, nearly beautiful, slender, with generous eyes.

“What have you been doing since Saturday?” she asked, making conversation.

“Peering into the jaws of death. What have you?”

“We went to...” She broke off. “What did you say?”

“Martha and Harley Ostermeyer and I were in a car crash on Sunday. They’re OK, they went back to America today, I believe. And I, as you see, am here in one piece. Well... almost one piece.”

She was predictably horrified and wanted to hear all the details, and the telling at least helped to evaporate any awkwardness either of us had been feeling at the meeting.

“Simms was shot?”

“Yes.”

“But... do the police know who did it?”

I shook my head. “Someone in a large gray Volvo, they think, and there are thousands of those.”

“Good heavens.” She paused. “I didn’t like to comment, but you look...” She hesitated, searching for the word.

“Frazzled?” I suggested.

“Smooth.” She smiled. “Frazzled underneath.”

“It’ll pass.”

The waiter came to ask if we would be having dinner and I said yes, and no argument, the dinner was mine. She accepted without fuss, and we read the menus.

The fare was chiefly Italian, the decor cosmopolitan, the ambience faintly European tamed by London. A lot of dark red, lamps with glass shades, no wallpaper, music. A comfortable place, nothing dynamic. Few diners yet, as the hour was early.

It was not, I was interested to note, a habitual rendezvous place for Clarissa and Greville: none of the waiters treated her as a regular. I asked her about it and, startled, she said they had been there only two or three times, always for lunch.

“We never went to the same place often,” she said. “It wouldn’t have been wise.”

“No.”

She gave me a slightly embarrassed look. “Do you disapprove of me and Greville?”

“No,” I said again. “You gave him joy.”

“Oh.” She was comforted and pleased. She said with a certain shyness, “It was the first time I’d fallen in love. I suppose you’ll think that silly. But it was the first time for him too, he said. It was... truly wonderful. We were like... as if twenty years younger... I don’t know if I can explain. Laughing. Lit up.”

“As far as I can see,” I said, “the thunderbolt strikes at any age. You don’t have to be teenagers.”

“Has it... struck you?”

“Not since I was seventeen and fell like a ton of bricks for a trainer’s daughter.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing much. We laughed a lot. Slept together, a bit clumsily at first. She married an old man of twenty-eight. I went to college.”

“I met Henry when I was eighteen. He fell in love with me... pursued me... I was flattered... and he was so very good looking... and kind.”

“He still is,” I said.

“He’d already inherited his title. My mother was ecstatic... she said the age difference didn’t matter... so I married him.” She paused. “We had a son and a daughter, both grown up now. It hasn’t been a bad life, but before Greville, incomplete.”

“A better life than most,” I said, aiming to comfort.

“You’re very like Greville,” she said unexpectedly. “You look at things straight, in the same way. You’ve his sense of proportion.”

“We had realistic parents.”

“He didn’t speak about them much, only that he became interested in gemstones because of the museums his mother took him to. But he lived in the present and he looked outward, not inward, and I loved him to distraction and in a way I didn’t know him...” She stopped and swallowed and seemed determined not to let emotion intrude further.

“He was like that with me too,” I said. “With everyone, I think. It didn’t occur to him to give running commentaries on his actions and feelings. He found everything else more interesting.”

“I do miss him,” she said.

“What will you eat?” I asked.

She gave me a flick of a look and read the menu without seeing it for quite a long time. In the end she said with a sigh, “You decide.”

“Did Greville?”

“Yes.”

“If I order fried zucchini as a starter, then fillet steak in pepper sauce with linguine tossed in olive oil with garlic, will that do?”

“I don’t like garlic. I like everything else. Unusual. Nice.”

“OK. No garlic.”

We transferred to the dining room before seven-thirty and ate the proposed program, and I asked if she were returning to York that night: if she had a train to catch, if that was why we were eating early.

“No, I’m down here for two nights. Tomorrow I’m going to an old friend’s wedding, then back to York on Thursday morning.” She concentrated on twirling linguine onto her fork. “When Henry and I come to London together we always stay at the Selfridge Hotel, and when I come alone I stay there also. They know us well there. When I’m there alone they don’t present me with an account, they send it to Henry.” She ate the forkful of linguine. “I tell him I go to the cinema and eat in snack bars... and he knows I’m always back in the hotel before midnight.”

There was a good long stretch of time between this dinner and midnight.

I said, “Every five weeks or so, when you came down to London alone, Greville met you at King’s Cross, isn’t that right, and took you to lunch?”

She said in surprise, “Did he tell you?”

“Not face to face. Did you ever see that gadget of his, the Wizard?”

“Yes, but...” She was horrified. “He surely didn’t put me in it?”

“Not by name, and only under a secret password. You’re quite safe.”

She twiddled some more with the pasta, her eyes down, her thoughts somewhere else.

“After lunch,” she said, with pauses, “if I had appointments, I’d keep them, or do some shopping... something to take home. I’d register at the hotel and change, and go to Greville’s house. He used to have the flat, of course, but the house was much better. When he came, we’d have drinks... talk... maybe make love. We’d go to dinner early, then back to his house.” Her voice stopped. She still didn’t look up.

I said, “Do you want to go to his house now, before midnight?”

After a while she said, “I don’t know.”

“Well... would you like coffee?”

She nodded, still not meeting my eyes, and pushed the linguine away. We sat in silence while waiters took away the plates and poured into cups, and if she couldn’t make up her mind, nor could I.

In the end I said, “If you like, come to Greville’s house now. I’m sleeping there tonight, but that’s not a factor. Come if you like, just to be near him, to be with him as much as you can for maybe the last time. Lie on his bed. Weep for him. I’ll wait for you downstairs... and take you safely to your hotel before the fairy coach changes back to a pumpkin.”

“Oh!” She turned what was going to be a sob into almost a laugh. “Can I really?”

“Whenever you like.”

“Thank you, then. Yes.”

“I’d better warn you,” I said, “it’s not exactly tidy.” I told her what she would find, but she was inconsolable at the sight of the reality.

“He would have hated this,” she said. “I’m so glad he didn’t see it.”

We were in the small sitting room, and she went round picking up the pink and brown stone bears, restoring them to their tray.

“I gave him these,” she said. “He loved them. They’re rhodonite, he said.”

“Take them to remember him by. And there’s a gold watch you gave him, if you’d like that too.”

She paused with the last bear in her hand and said, “You’re very kind to me.”

“It’s not difficult. And he’d have been furious with me if I weren’t.”

“I’d love the bears. You’d better keep the watch, because of the engraving.”

“OK,” I said.

“I think,” she said with diffidence, “I’ll go upstairs now.”

I nodded.

“Come with me,” she said.

I looked at her. Her eyes were wide and troubled, but not committed, not hungry. Undecided. Like myself.

“All right,” I said.

“Is there chaos up there too?”

“I picked some of it up.”

She went up the stairs ahead of me at about four times my speed, and I heard her small moan of distress at the desecration of the bedroom. When I joined her, she was standing forlornly looking around, and with naturalness she turned to me and put her arms loosely round my waist, laying her head on my shoulder. I shed the confounded crutches and hugged her tight in grief for her and for Greville and we stood there for a long minute in mutual and much-needed comfort.

She let her arms fall away and went over to sit on the bed, smoothing a hand over the black and white checkerboard bedspread.

“He was going to change this room,” she said. “All this drama...” She waved a hand at the white furniture, the black carpet, one black wall. “It came with the house. He wanted me to choose something softer, that I would like. But this is how I’ll always remember it.”

She lay down flat, her head on the pillows, her legs toward the foot of the bed, ankles crossed. I half-hopped, half-limped across the room and sat on the edge beside her.

She watched me with big eyes. I put my hand flat on her stomach and felt the sharp internal contraction of muscles.

“Should we do this?” she said.

“I’m not Greville.”

“No... Would he mind?”

“I shouldn’t think so.” I moved my hand, rubbing a little. “Do you want to go on?”

“Do you?”

“Yes,” I said.

She sat up fast and put her arms round my neck in a sort of released compulsion.

“I do want this,” she said. “I’ve wanted it all day. I’ve been pretending to myself, telling myself I shouldn’t, but yes, I do want this passionately, and I know you’re not Greville, I know it will be different, but this is the only way I can love him... and can you bear it, can you understand it, if it’s him I love?”

I understood it well, and I minded not at all.

I said, smiling, “Just don’t call me Greville. It would be the turn-off of the century.”

She took her face away from the proximity of my ear and looked me in the eyes, and her lips too, after a moment, were smiling.

“Derek,” she said deliberately, “make love to me. Please.”

“Don’t beg,” I said.

I put my mouth on hers and took my brother’s place.

As a memorial service it was quite a success. I lay in the dark laughing in my mind at that disgraceful pun, wondering whether or not to share it with Clarissa.

The catharsis was over, and her tears. She lay with her head on my chest lightly asleep, contented, as far as I could tell, with the substitute loving. Women said men were not all the same in the dark, and I knew both where I’d surprised her and failed her, known what I’d done like Greville and not done like Greville from the instinctive releases and tensions of her reactions.

Greville, I now knew, had been a lucky man, though whether he had himself taught her how to give exquisite pleasure was something I couldn’t quite ask. She knew, though, and she’d done it, and the feeling of her featherlight tattooing fingers on the base of my spine at the moment of climax had been a revelation. Knowledge marched on, I thought. Next time, with anyone else, I’d know what to suggest.

Clarissa stirred and I turned my wrist over, seeing the fluorescent hands of my watch.

“Wake up,” I said affectionately. “It’s Cinderella time.”

“Ohh...”

I stretched out a hand and turned on a bedside light. She smiled at me sleepily, no doubts remaining.

“That was all right,” she said.

“Mm. Very.”

“How’s the ankle?”

“What ankle?”

She propped herself on one elbow, unashamed of nakedness, and laughed at me. She looked younger and sweeter, and I was seeing, I knew, what Greville had seen, what Greville had loved.

“Tomorrow,” she said, “my friend’s wedding will be over by six or so. Can I come here again?” She put her fingers lightly on my mouth to stop me answering at once. “This time was for him,” she said. “Tomorrow for us. Then I’ll go home.”

“Forever?”

“Yes, I think so. What I had with Greville was unforgettable and unrepeatable. I decided on the train coming down here that whatever happened with you, or didn’t happen, I would live with Henry, and do my best there.”

“I could easily love you,” I said.

“Yes, but don’t.”

I knew she was right. I kissed her lightly.

“Tomorrow for us,” I agreed. “Then goodbye.”

When I went into the office in the morning, Annette told me crossly that Jason hadn’t turned up for work, nor had he telephoned to say he was ill.

Jason had been prudent, I thought. I’d have tossed him down the elevator shaft, insolence, orange hair and all, given half an ounce of provocation.

“He won’t be coming back,” I said, “so we’ll need a replacement.”

She was astonished. “You can’t sack him for not turning up. You can’t sack him for anything without paying compensation.”

“Stop worrying,” I said, but she couldn’t take that advice.

June came zooming into Greville’s office waving a tabloid newspaper and looking at me with wide incredulous eyes.

“Did you know you’re in the paper? Lucky to be alive, it says here. You didn’t say anything about it!”

“Let’s see,” I said, and she laid the Daily Sensation open on the black desk.

There was a picture of the smash in which one could more or less see my head inside the Daimler, but not recognizably. The headline read “Driver shot, jockey lives,” and the piece underneath listed the lucky-to-be-alive passengers as Mr. and Mrs. Ostermeyer of Pittsburgh, America, and ex-champion steeplechase jockey Derek Franklin. The police were reported to be interested in a gray Volvo seen accelerating from the scene, and also to have recovered two bullets from the bodywork of the Daimler. After that tidbit came a rehash of the Hungerford massacre and a query, “Is this a copycat killing?” and finally a picture of Simms looking happy: “Survived by wife and two daughters who were last night being comforted by relatives.”

Poor Simms. Poor family. Poor every shot victim in Hungerford.

“It happened on Sunday,” June exclaimed, “and you came here on Monday and yesterday as if nothing was wrong. No wonder you looked knackered.”

“June!” Annette disapproved of the word.

“Well, he did. Still does.” She gave me a critical, kindly, motherly-sisterly inspection. “He could have been killed, and then what would we all have done here?”

The dismay in Annette’s face was a measure, I supposed, of the degree to which I had taken over. The place no longer felt like quicksand to me either and I was beginning by necessity to get a feel of its pulse.

But there was racing at Cheltenham that day. I turned the pages of the newspaper and came to the runners and riders. That was where my name belonged, not on Saxony Franklin checks. June looked over my shoulder and understood at least something of my sense of exile.

“When you go back to your own world,” she said, rephrasing her thought and asking it seriously, “what will we do here?”

“We have a month,” I said. “It’ll take me that time to get fit.” I paused. “I’ve been thinking about that problem, and, er, you might as well know, both of you, what I’ve decided.”

They both looked apprehensive, but I smiled to reassure them.

“What we’ll do,” I said, “is this. Annette will have a new title, which will be Office Manager. She’ll run things generally and keep the keys.”

She didn’t look displeased. She repeated “Office Manager” as if trying it on for size.

I nodded. “Then I’ll start looking from now on for a business expert, someone to oversee the cash flow and do the accounts and try to keep us afloat. Because it’s going to be a struggle, we can’t avoid that.”

They both looked shocked and disbelieving. Cash flow seemed never to have been a problem before.

“Greville did buy diamonds,” I said regretfully, “and so far we are only in possession of a quarter of them. I can’t find out what happened to the rest. They cost the firm altogether one and a half million dollars, and we’ll still owe the bank getting on for three-quarters of that sum when we’ve sold the quarter we have.”

Their mouths opened in unhappy unison.

“Unless and until the other diamonds turn up,” I said, “we have to pay interest on the loan and persuade the bank that somehow or other we’ll climb out of the hole. So we’ll want someone we’ll call the Finance Manager, and we’ll pay him out of part of what used to be Greville’s own salary.”

They began to understand the mechanics, and nodded.

“Then,” I said, “we need a gemologist who has a feeling for stones and understands what the customers like and need. There’s no good hoping for another Greville, but we will create the post of Merchandise Manager, and that,” I looked at her, “will be June.”

She blushed a fiery red. “But I can’t... I don’t know enough.”

“You’ll go on courses,” I said. “You’ll go to trade fairs. You’ll travel. You’ll do the buying.”

I watched her expand her horizons abruptly and saw the sparkle appear in her eyes.

“She’s too young,” Annette objected.

“We’ll see,” I said, and to June I added, “You know what sells. You and the Finance Manager will work together to make us the best possible profit. You’ll still work the computer, and teach Lily or Tina how to use it for when you’re away.”

“Tina,” she said, “she’s quicker.”

“Tina, then.”

“What about you?” she asked.

“I’ll be General Manager. I’ll come when I can, at least twice a week for a couple of hours. Everyone will tell me what’s going on and we will all decide what is best to be done, though if there’s a disagreement I’ll have the casting vote. Right or wrong will be my responsibility, not yours.”

Annette, nevertheless troubled, said, “Surely you yourself will need Mr. Franklin’s salary.”

I shook my head. “I earn enough riding horses. Until we’re solvent here, we need to save every penny.”

“It’s an adventure!” June said, enraptured.

I thought it might be a very long haul and even in the end impossible, but I couldn’t square it with the consciousness of Greville all around me not to try.

“Well,” I said, putting a hand in a pocket and bringing out a twist of gauze, “we have here five uncut diamonds which cost about seventy-five thousand dollars altogether.”

They more or less gasped.

“How do we sell them?” I said.

After a pause, Annette said, “Interest a diamantaire.”

“Do you know how to do that?”

After another moment’s hesitation, she nodded.

“We can give provenance,” I said. “Copies of the records of the original sale are on their way here from Guy Servi in Antwerp. They might be here tomorrow. Sight-box number and so on. We’ll put those stones in the vault until the papers arrive, then you can get cracking.”

She nodded, but fearfully.

“Cheer up,” I said. “It’s clear from the ledgers that Saxony Franklin is normally a highly successful and profitable business. We’ll have to cut costs where we can, that’s all.”

“We could cut out Jason’s salary,” Annette said unexpectedly. “Half the time Tina’s been carrying the heavy boxes, anyway, and I can do the vacuuming myself.”

“Great,” I said with gratitude. “If you feel like that, we’ll succeed.”

The telephone rang and Annette answered it briefly.

“A messenger has left a packet for you down at the front desk,” she said.

“I’ll go for it,” June said, and was out of the door on the words, returning in her usual short time with a brown padded Jiffy bag, not very large, addressed simply to Derek Franklin in neat handwriting, which she laid before me with a flourish.

“Mind it’s not a bomb,” she said facetiously as I picked it up, and I thought with an amount of horror that it was a possibility I hadn’t thought of.

“I didn’t mean it,” she said teasingly, seeing me hesitate. “Do you want me to open it?”

“And get your hands blown off instead?”

“Of course it’s not a bomb,” Annette said uneasily.

“Tell you what,” June said, “I’ll fetch the shears from the packing room.” She was gone for a few seconds. “Alfie says,” she remarked, returning, “we ought to put it in a bucket of water.”

She gave me the shears, which were oversized scissors that Alfie used for cutting cardboard, and for all her disbelief she and Annette backed away across the room while I sliced the end of the bag.

There was no explosion. Complete anticlimax. I shook out the contents which proved to be two objects and one envelope.

One of the objects was the microcassette recorder that I’d left on Prospero Jenks’s workbench in my haste to be gone.

The other was a long black leather wallet almost the size of the Wizard, with gold initials G.S.F. in one corner and an ordinary brown rubber band holding it shut.

“That’s Mr. Franklin’s,” Annette said blankly, and June, coming to inspect it, nodded.

I peeled off the rubber band and laid the wallet open on the desk. There was a business card lying loose inside it with Prospero Jenks’s name and shops on the front, and on the reverse the single word, “Sorry.”

“Where did he get Mr. Franklin’s wallet from?” Annette asked, puzzled, looking at the card.

“He found it,” I said.

“He took his time sending it back,” June said tartly.

“Mm.”

The wallet contained a Saxony Franklin checkbook, four credit cards, several business cards and a small pack of banknotes, which I guessed were fewer in number than when Greville set out.

The small excitement over, Annette and June went off to tell the others the present and future state of the nation, and I was alone when I opened the envelope.