The Family Arsenal

24

‘To be born’ — she lingered on the cue. Her arms were upraised in the dark thronged room. A vapour of light from outside Mortimer Lodge — the yellow streetlamps on Wat Tyler Road — was broken by the window slats and it shone in beams on her branched arms and the heads of the people watching her, sharpening the corners of the masks some actors wore. At the end of her phrase, on cue, a spotlight’s dazzling velocity picked her out, and she stood charged with brilliant light, her feet apart, pausing for effect. She was mostly naked, but her skin rubbed with green powder made her seem as if she was wrapped in a tight membrane. Her breasts and hips were criss-crossed by strands of skeleton vines; her hair was cut, and her face, without make-up, was an oval of white that looked as thin as porcelain. She showed her teeth and began again: ‘To be born is to be wrecked on an island.’

She saw fifty people in fifty postures, her actors half-dissolved in shadow. A hush of approval from them and she continued, ‘The man who wrote that did not write this. But how could he know that the spirit he set into motion could be interpreted this way —’

‘She looks so splendid,’ said Lady Arrow. Lady Arrow wore a combination of costumes. She was to play Mr Darling and (or so Araba said) his piratical manifestation, Captain Hook. A copy of the Financial Times in one hand; a hook protruding from her right sleeve; a frock coat and boots. She was pleased — already the party was a success, a great improvement on that other one she’d been to, when Araba lived off the King’s Road, that dreary pageant they’d rehearsed for the rally at the Odeon in Hammersmith. ‘Come over to the Lodge,’ Araba had said. ‘We’re having a cell meeting.’

It was no ordinary cell meeting. For Lady Arrow this gathering of actors — a show of youth, strength and poised optimistic anger — was a glamorous occasion. Many were beautiful. That girl over there, naked under her loose suede overalls, her breasts plumped against the straps of her leather bib, with bare arms and long hair, saying nothing — Lady Arrow could smell her from across the room and she smelled of genius. That boy dressed as a gangster pirate, with a velvet bow on his pigtail and his tight striped suit — she could eat him, clothes and all. She felt lucky, and she looked over the guests, squinting with greed and impatience, frenzied by the choice. The sight of so many perfect faces in that steamy stage-lit room was a shock that left her slightly breathless. Whatever I want. And this time she had a role to play — two roles. It made her almost mournful with excitement, and it was as if she had only acted before, performed a humdrum farce for her friends at Hill Street — her powerful friends: golden pigs and balding mice — and now in this play she was allowed a brief life without pretence.

‘Tonight we improvise,’ Araba was saying. Lady Arrow had no lines. She had a costume — so did the others. But Araba said there was no need to rehearse the best-known English play. It was every child’s first play, a fulfilled vision of his longing, and there was not a child who saw the curtain fall on the last act who did not hate his thwarting parents. By the nimblest magic it showed the fraudulent intrusion of authority and convinced the child ever after that to recapture the rule of Pan was to be free. Araba said, ‘Peter Pan is the saboteur of the bourgeois dream, the best English expression of the beauty of revolt. Remember, Neverland is an island —’

Lady Arrow watched with admiration. Then she looked down and said, ‘Are you all right, my darling?’

Brodie, dressed as Tinker Bell, sat at Lady Arrow’s feet. Her thin legs were sheathed in dancer’s tights, her small breasts and tattoo showed through her blouse of pale silk, and she held a spangled wand. She shifted position and said, ‘I’m nervous. Hey, there’s nobody here my age.’

Lady Arrow was rebuked. They were all young! She offered her snuff box and said, ‘Have some of this.’

‘Yuck.’ Brodie smiled and reached for her pouch. She rolled a cigarette, licked it and puffed. Then she relaxed, rocking slowly back and forth, regarding Araba with wide staring eyes. She laughed, a little drugged giggle, like chatter, causing heads to turn. ‘Fairy dust,’ she said. She made a nibbling face at them and went on smoking.

‘— Or any age,’ Araba said. ‘Now, we begin.’

She snapped her fingers, starting the music — the notes of a single flute, sweetly plangent, trilling as the spot-light dimmed. Araba entered the shadow at the side of the room as an armchair was dragged forward.

‘I’m on,’ said Lady Arrow, and strode to the chair, scowling as if acknowledging applause. There were whispers, a wondering at her size. With the spot-light on her she looked enormous and slightly misshapen; she cast a crooked shadow and made that large armchair seem suddenly rather small and inefficient. She sat down heavily, raised her newspaper and began reading. She crashed the newspaper. She said, ‘I am responsible for it all. I, George Darling, did it …’

I know very little and I hate them, Hood thought, watching darkly from a corner near the door. If I knew more I’d probably kill every one of them. He watched the play proceed, with gaps and accidents freaking the self-conscious design. But it was the play’s own heartless lines that hinted most at menace; the actors, attempting to give it political colouring, only drew attention to themselves.

In the fooling to upstage, improvisation’s risk, it was Brodie who got the laughs. Her popularity was apparent from the outset, and as the play unfolded — Peter battling with Hook for the leadership of the Lost Boys who were trying to liberate the Neverland from the rule of Pirates and Redskins — she realized how she could stop everything by pulling a face or pretending to assault another actor. During one of Wendy’s speeches she rolled a joint and had the room in stitches. Araba called for order and began to deliver a prepared monologue on the power of youth to destroy, but her words were drowned in laughter, for as she spoke, Brodie — who was alone at the side of the stage — clawed her buttocks and then, making a business of it, sniffed her fingers. It ended in farce: Lady Arrow accused Araba of bullying Brodie, and making passes with her hook, caught Araba on the arm and scratched her. Araba screamed and ran upstairs. So the play closed in disorder, incomplete, a collapse; and Hood heard one actor murmur, ‘Beginner’s night.’

He saw Brodie at the far side of the room with Lady Arrow. But Brodie was perfectly alone and self-contained. She pinched a roach in her fingers and smirked at it. He was disgusted, like a man seeing his daughter in an unguarded moment in public, among her trivial friends: her foolishness was exposed but mattered only to him. He was responsible; he had taught her to roll a joint one-handed, and he was to blame for having marked her face with this careless mouth.

Lorna said, ‘They’re not up to much.’

‘Screamers,’ said Hood. ‘They’re trying to start a revolution.’

‘Fuckers couldn’t start a car.’

‘Let’s score a drink,’ he said.

‘I seen enough. Let’s go home.’

He admired that. She held them in total contempt. The costumes they wore, the poses they struck, the selfish jeering in their talk — she dismissed it as nothing. They were not even exotic to her, they had no glamour; she seemed embarrassed to be in the same room with them.

‘Mister Hood!’ Lady Arrow rushed over, and ignoring Lorna, and standing eye to eye with him, said, ‘Araba told me you might be coming. I didn’t believe her for a minute, but here you are! It’s a terrible snub for me — you’ve never come to Hill Street. Or didn’t you know I’d be here? Say you did!’

Hood said, ‘This is Lorna.’

Lorna nodded hello. She wore her boots, her shortest skirt, and the jacket Hood had bought her, crushed velvet, bottle green. She looked away to avoid looking up at the much taller woman.

‘Yes,’ said Lady Arrow, assessing her swiftly. She said nothing more.

‘Isn’t that Brodie over there?’ said Hood.

‘She’s mine now,’ said Lady Arrow proudly. ‘She’s made a great hit with Araba’s friends, I can tell you. Quite a debut — it could lead to something, a real part. She’s so natural. Darling!’

The girl raised her head and threaded her way through the room, walking flat-footed in the drooping tights, the crotch at her knees. She gave Hood a sheepish grin and said, ‘Hey, I didn’t think this was your scene.’

‘Pull up your pants,’ he said.

‘I’m stoned,’ she said. She made her goofy face.

Lady Arrow stooped and embraced her. Brodie resisted, but she was enfolded, and again Hood tasted a father’s disgust. Brodie didn’t seem to mind; perhaps she would never know, lost in that woman’s arms. Hood looked at Lady Arrow’s hands, one tightening on the small girl’s tattooed arm, the other a knot of snails inching across the flawless skin of her belly.

‘I hated that woman,’ said Lady Arrow. ‘The one who dropped Brodie off the other day. She came screaming into the house, and do you know what? She accused me of stealing the Rogier self-portrait! I understand she is the thief. Of course, I told her I had no idea where it is — what a shame if someone’s really stolen it. I let her search the house from top to bottom. She was quite upset, said some rather unkind things about you. I imagine she’s from Basingstoke. I need hardly add that I urged her to find my precious picture.’

Hood said nothing. The painting was at Lorna’s, and he had had a long look at it before coming to the party, studying it for changes as if looking at his own reflection in a mirror. The face was more familiar to him than his own, and unlike his own, a consolation. He wondered if he would ever part with it.

Lady Arrow said, ‘I say, did you see our little effort?’

‘The last part,’ said Hood.

‘The fracas,’ said Lady Arrow. ‘Wasn’t it superb? “And so it will continue, as long as children are gay and innocent and heartless.” ’

‘Putrid,’ said Brodie.

‘You said it.’ Hood glanced around the room. The actors, holding glasses of wine, still wore the costumes from the play, the eye-patches, the cassocks, the spectacular rags. Their voices made the room howl.

‘But I won,’ said Lady Arrow. She smiled at Hood. ‘Araba’s absolutely desolate — but there it is. You can’t always have it your own way. I think it’s a lesson to them. They’re terribly nice people, but their Marxism is so moth-eaten. Things aren’t like that anymore — Marx was an optimist! They stink of sincerity, and they will go on trotting out these old ideas. They sound like my father. But they’re much worse — give up your money and we’ll believe you, property is theft, power to the people. Who are these people they are always talking about? They have study groups, reading lists — these ratty little pamphlets with coffee stains on the covers, Albanian handbooks of social change. Albanian! Have you ever heard of such a thing? And Arabs — these filthy little desert folk — they think they’re revolutionaries! No, I tell them, we are beyond Marxism now and Chairman Mao and your Arabs and that’ — she spat the words — ‘that pin-up, Trotsky. Any right-thinking anarchist would have chucked these primitives years ago. But here’s hope. I must sound awfully negative to you, but there’s hope in this room — you can feel it. Look around. Araba hasn’t the slightest idea of what she’s started, which is so often the case. Her days are numbered as an activist. Before long they’ll be looking to someone like me, and she’ll be back on stage, posing for photographers, searching the paper for mentions, like Jane Fonda and Vanessa and Brando and all the rest of them.’

She had spoken in a single burst and was panting from the effort of it. She smiled, as if satisfied there could be no reply, and hearing none she straightened herself with assurance. Hood shook his head. Lorna sniffed and brushed her skirt.

Then Brodie said, ‘But Araba’s pretty.’

Lady Arrow showed her teeth. It was not a smile. She said, ‘White trash.’

She hurried Brodie away.

Hood thought: Die.

‘She hates me,’ said Lorna. ‘Should be ashamed of herself, with that little girl, touching her up. Do you really know these fuckers?’

‘I want to see the lady of the house.’

‘What’s wrong with me?’

‘I’ll deal with you later.’

‘Listen to him,’ said Lorna, and her face clouded with sadness.

But from the moment they had entered the house he had felt close to her: it was the same desire he had known when he saw her bruised. He did want her and cursed himself for hesitating. He feared betraying her by making her trust him too much. But the consequence of his fastidiousness was her excitement: he had not made love to her and that aroused her more than if he had. She was a hostage to an unspoken promise. He had also feared possession, dependency, complication, blame, any reduction of his freedom, any disturbance to hers. Sex, an expression of freedom, made you less free: the penalty of freedom was a reverie of loneliness.

To act, he knew, was to involve himself; no act could succeed because a11 involvement was failure; and love, a selfish faith, was the end of all active thought — it was a memory or it was nothing. But he had come too far, known too much to evade blame, and he sought to conclude the act he had begun on impulse that summer night. He wished to release himself with a single stroke that would free him even if it left him a cripple — like a fox gnawing his leg so he could drag himself from the trap: an amputation, true terrorism.

They got drinks from the kitchen and stood next to the stairs, watching the drunken actors (some were preening; several sang; here was one doing another’s horoscope). Hood put his arm around Lorna and kissed her hair. He had overcome his horror of holding her. Once, he had not been able to touch her without feeling the pressure of her husband’s corpse; now touching her reassured him and she could rouse him simply by seeming wounded or lost, which, he had come to see, was her permanent condition. Not love — it was more drastic than that, a hunger for her very flesh, and what kept him away was his fear that her hunger was greater than his and almost unappeasable.

They remained on the fringe of the party, watching what could have been another act of the improvised Peter Pan, a cheerier one, noisy and uncomplicated, like a spirited mob scene, all the actors talking at once. Lorna spotted several famous faces — an actor from a film she’d seen; a comedian looking oddly tense; a child star; then a girl who appeared regularly on a children’s programme, and she said without irony, ‘Jason should be here — he’d be dead pleased.’

‘Maybe we should go,’ said Hood. ‘I don’t see the bitch.’

‘That one — he does the Angel Snow advert,’ said Lorna. ‘I seen him on telly.’

It was the young man who had played John. His mask was off but he still wore his top hat and striped pyjamas. He was not tall. He passed by as Lorna spoke and hearing her he stopped, did a humorous double take, and greeted them.

‘Brother. Sister.’

Hood said, ‘How’s the family?’

‘I know you,’ said the man. ‘What company are you with?’

‘General Motors.’

‘He’s funny,’ said the man to Lorna. ‘Does he make you laugh?’

She flinched. ‘Sometimes.’

‘Don’t knock it,’ said Hood. ‘You’re pretty funny yourself. What’s your name?’

‘McGravy,’ he said. ‘You probably know my sister, the so-called Irish playwright. Everyone does, mainly because her plays are banned in Ireland. Censorship made her a household word. She’s not even funny, but’ — he tilted his head and clicked his heels — ‘vee haff vays of making you laugh.’

‘I can do a German accent better than that,’ said Hood.

‘Yeah, well, I guess that’s cause you’re Amurrikan,’ said McGravy in an accurate imitation of Hood’s own way of speaking.

‘Try something hard. Can you do a Japanese?’

‘Hai!’ said McGravy, sneezing the word, Japanese-fashion. Then he said in a halting monotone, ‘I can do bettah than many lidicurous men in crabs. You know crabs? Night-crabs?’

Lorna laughed. ‘He’s like Benny Hill!’

‘Bud Benny Hill is daking doo much of rupees and pinching backsides of vooman, my goodness,’ said McGravy, waggling his head like an Indian. ‘In my country is not bermitted on estage, oh no!’

‘He really sounds like a Paki,’ said Lorna. She was amused; she stared at McGravy’s comic face.

Hood said, ‘West Indian.’

‘What, mun? Trinnydad or Jameeka? It’s a flamin big place, mun. So many i-lands.’

‘Cuban.’

‘Hasta la vista,’ said McGravy, and started to go.

‘Wait,’ said Hood. ‘Don’t go yet. I’ve got a tough one for you.’

‘I’ll bet you do,’ said McGravy, again in Hood’s voice. ‘A real ball-breaker, right?’

‘He’s taking the mickey,’ said Lorna.

‘Ulster,’ said Hood.

‘Catholic or Protestant?’

‘What’s the difference?’

‘Fussically,’ said McGravy, putting his jaw out and speaking in a heavy Northern Ireland accent, ‘there’s no dufference. But the mumbers of the Pro’estant Uni’y Parly tund ta talk like thus. Ya go’ ta swalla some sullables.’

‘Catholic,’ said Hood.

McGravy closed his eyes. ‘Give me something to say.’

‘Say, “Mary had a little lamb.” ’

‘Murry had a luttle lamb.’

‘Say, “Look, I know where it is now.” ’

‘Luck, ah know whirr ut uz nigh.’

‘ “It’s in an upstairs room at number twenty-two.” ’

‘Ut’s un an opstairs rum at number twenty-tow.’

Hood muttered the phrases to himself, then said, ‘I wish I could do that.’

‘If you could, I’d be out of a job,’ said McGravy. ‘Though there’s not a hell of a lot of work around. I do juves — boy parts. It’s my face. I’m thirty-one, but I’m cast as a teenager. If I’ve got this face at fifty I’ll still be doing juves and foreigners with funny accents. I’m not tall enough to play a real man. Who wouldn’t be a revolutionary?’

Hood smiled. ‘That sounds like your real voice.’

McGravy bent close to Hood and said, ‘Kill the bastards.’

‘Why are you whispering? Scared someone will hear you?’

McGravy sized him up, as if trying to decide whether the taunting question deserved a serious reply. After a moment he said, ‘There’s too much shouting.’

‘Are you afraid of that?’

‘Yes,’ said the actor. ‘Sometimes these people scare me more than the police.’

‘They’re safe,’ said Hood. ‘They know what they’re doing.’

‘Sure they do.’

‘Then why are you afraid?’

McGravy said, ‘Because they aren’t.’

‘When you said, “Kill the bastards” I thought you meant the police, the army, the politicians.’ He smiled at McGravy, ‘Now it turns out you want to snuff your friends.’

‘No,’ said McGravy. ‘I know who the enemy is.’

‘What happens if you fail?’

‘We fail.’ He spoke with equivocal emphasis, doubt and certainty subtly balanced, then he added, ‘You see, I’ve played in Macbeth. Fleance, naturally.’

‘It’s your funeral.’

McGravy shook his head. ‘It’s everyone’s fight.’

‘Not mine,’ said Hood. ‘I used to think that, but it’s pride that makes you think you can fight someone else’s battles — in Africa, Southeast Asia, here, wherever.’

‘Pride,’ said McGravy with a touch of sarcasm.

‘Yes, pride, because it’s their weakness that involves you. The illusion that you’re strong is pride. But when they discover how weak they are the only dignified thing they can do is kill you. Notice how often it happens — the Third World is a graveyard of idealists.’ Hood smiled. ‘I’m sympathetic — sympathy is a cowardly substitute for belief. No one dies for it, but if you believe —’

‘What do we have here?’ It was Araba. She had changed into faded tight, blue jeans and a jacket covered with patches. She posed next to McGravy and ruffled his hair. ‘I love his head — it reminds me of Lenin’s.’

McGravy ignored her. He turned to Hood and said, ‘I may see you again — maybe at the barricades.’

‘There aren’t any,’ said Hood. ‘So don’t wait for me.’ But he felt tender towards the man, and it was as if the actor was bearing the most fiery part of himself away: he believed; he might survive his belief.

Araba said, ‘I’m glad you came.’

‘Lorna,’ said Hood. ‘Score me another drink.’

Lorna hesitated.

‘Don’t do it, darling,’ said Araba, touching her on the arm.

Lorna went for the drink.

‘I knew you were the domineering type,’ said Araba.

‘Skip it. I’ve got a question for you. And I know all about you, so don’t waste my time denying anything. I know you used to work for the Provos — running guns on the Continent with an American passport, until you put the burn on them.’

‘That’s a lie.’

‘You didn’t deliver the last batch, did you?’

‘I don’t expect you to believe me.’

‘I don’t care,’ said Hood. ‘I just want to know the name of your contact.’

‘Isn’t it odd, Mister Hood? I invited you here to find out about you, and now you’re asking all the questions!’

‘His name,’ said Hood. He stepped close to her and snatched her wrist. He gripped her tightly, twisting it.

‘That hurts,’ she said. Her eyes were bright with pain, but she made no move to resist. Hood said, ‘If you don’t tell me I’ll slash your face so bad you’ll have to give up acting.’

‘You’re a pig,’ she said. ‘You hate women.’

‘I’m liberated,’ he said. ‘I treat women the same as men. And I’ll cut your nose off if you don’t tell me.’ He realized that he was on the point of hitting her. He checked his fury and growled, ‘Wise up, sister.’

‘Let go of my arm,’ she said.

He threw her arm down hard.

She said, ‘Don’t think I’m telling you because you threatened me. I don’t have to protect anyone. They’re bastards. They let me down. They’ll do the same to you.’

‘Spit it out!’

‘Greenstain — from Libya or somewhere. An Arab. He’s in Rotterdam and he’s a pouf. He might fall for you, but he won’t give you anything.’

‘What about your contact in London?’

‘He was just the delivery boy,’ she said. ‘And I don’t remember his name.’

‘Was it Weech?’

‘Yes, that’s it,’ she said. ‘I thought he was the one who burned me.’

‘How do you know he wasn’t?’

She laughed. ‘Because they killed him.’

‘Who did?’

‘Some fink,’ she said lazily.

‘What about Rutter?’

‘Rutter! I don’t have to tell you anything, do I? You know all the punks. That proves you’re either a clever cop or the biggest crook of them all. And I’ve found,’ she went on, smiling now, ‘that they’re usually the same thing.’

‘So Rutter supplies the Provos,’ said Hood. ‘But he stays put and lets guys like Weech take the rap. And you keep them all in business. You were taking a chance going to the Continent. You must have liked that.’

‘How did you know my passport number?’ she said.

‘I provided it. Without me you couldn’t have left the country for the Provos. Only it didn’t work.’

‘It worked,’ she said. ‘But they hated me. They wanted to expel me all along — they were just looking for an excuse.’

Hood said, ‘Then where’s the arsenal?’

‘The arsenal,’ she said. ‘Is that what you call it? Shit, if I knew the answer to that question I’d be Queen of England. Ask your friends the Provos.’

‘They don’t know.’

‘Of course they don’t or they would have started their offensive. And Rutter doesn’t know either, or he would have flogged it long ago — he must be dying to get his hands on it. I’ll tell you something, Mister Hood. I may be wrong but I don’t think anyone knows what happened to the arsenal.’ She tasted the word again and grinned. ‘I saw it, I paid for it, and then it vanished. Maybe it sank in the Channel. It would serve them right if it did.’ She paused a moment, patted her hair, then said, ‘Haven’t you got a theory?’

‘It’s just a theory,’ said Hood.

‘Tell me.’

‘I have to prove it first,’ he said. He saw Lorna returning with the drinks.

‘Shampoo,’ said Lorna, handing Hood a glass of champagne.

‘It’s a little celebration,’ said Araba. ‘I’m opening tomorrow in Peter Pan.’

‘Break a leg,’ said Hood, and he drained his glass in one gulp. Then he said, ‘That’s funny — I’m not thirsty anymore. Let’s go.’

Araba turned to Lorna. ‘Don’t pay any attention to him, darling. Stick with us. You’re the sort of person we’re trying to reach.’ She made a move to take Lorna’s hand.

Lorna stepped aside. She glared at the actress and said, ‘You fucker.’

Murf was asleep on the sofa when they entered. He lay flat, his face up, his mouth open; he was being steamrolled by a narcotic dream; he was flattened, in a posture of surrender. Hearing the door slam he sat up straight, opened his mouth to shout, then said, ‘What’s the time?’ He yawned, flopped down and turned over without waiting for a reply. There was an ashtray on the floor, and a pipe; and in the air the stale perfume of burnt opium.

Hood and Lorna went upstairs. Lorna undressed first, and Hood helped her off with her boots. She got into bed. He crept in beside her. He made a tender appeal with his hands and kissed her eyes. She stiffened, as if resisting, and then began to cry softly, her tears wetting his mouth. He felt the convulsive pressure under his hand and turned her gently.

She said, ‘I can’t help it. I always cry.’ She lifted her breast to his mouth and parted her legs. He slid between, touching her; she was open, hot with liquid, straining to receive him. She reached down, took him urgently in her fingers and helped him enter, but as he did — seeming to move into fathoms of darkness — she cried out.

‘What is it?’ He paused.

‘No,’ she wept, ‘don’t stop. But don’t hold me so tight.’

She still ached from that beating, and the thought of it filled him with rage. But his anger was displaced. He knelt over her, and she lay back, drowning there under him, her skin as luminous as if under water; she was alone, then he embraced her, joined her, and followed her down to a brief death.

In the morning he awoke before she did and went downstairs, where Murf lay asleep, his mouth open, his yellow feet sticking from the blanket.

Hood carried the telephone into the kitchen. He dialled a number and waited, watching the still dawn-green garden whitened in patches with a dew as thick as frost. Clouds were bulked above the nearby roofs.

The ringing ceased.

‘Sweeney,’ he said. ‘It’s Hood.’

‘It’s seven o’clock in the morning. What do you want now?’

Nigh. ‘Just making sure you’re home.’

‘That’s not funny.’

‘And I wanted to hear your voice,’ said Hood. ‘How’s your wife?’

‘I don’t know. Probably with her family. She lost the painting. It’s the only card we have to play at the moment — I told her not to come back without it.’

‘I want to see you.’

‘You know where I am. I don’t make appointments by telephone.’

‘Oh, and something else,’ said Hood. ‘Do you know a guy named Rutter?’

There was a pause; for a moment Hood thought he had hung up. Then Sweeney asked him to repeat the name. Hood said it carefully.

Sweeney said, ‘No. Why do you ask?’

‘I heard he’d been rumbled. The Yard’s on to him.’

‘Never heard of him.’

‘I’ll see you,’ said Hood. He hung up.

He listened, but the house was as still as the garden, and as cold. He dialled again, referring to a number in Lorna’s schoolgirl handwriting, holding the wrinkled scrap of paper to the window, the first light of day. The phone range and stopped.

‘Rutter,’ he said. ‘Sweeney.’ And before the man could reply he said, ‘Luck, Ah know whirr ut uz nigh —’

25

The line spluttered and seemed to heat as if it had caught fire. There was a scatter of clicks, no ring, then the sudden honk of a human voice, ‘— don’t really know what to do.’

Mr Gawber moved the receiver away from his ear and hid his face, shielding himself from the thing’s eye-like holes.

Another voice, younger, said, ‘But it can’t get any worse.’

‘I feel sure it will.’

‘Depend on it,’ said Mr Gawber, from his stomach, woefully.

‘What did you say?’

‘That wasn’t me.’

‘The market’s firming up.’

‘No, it is not,’ said Mr Gawber. ‘There is a great deal of concern. The market is extremely shaky, and I assure you’ — now he was speaking over squawks of protest — ‘I assure you we’ll have to tighten our belts.’ He put the phone down, silencing the squawks.

That was at nine-thirty, and it stirred him. It triggered compassion: he wondered if he had been too harsh. He buzzed Miss French and said, ‘No visitors, no phone-calls. I’m in purdah. But Monty can bring my tea as usual.’

‘I’ll see that you’re not disturbed,’ said Miss French.

‘You’re so kind.’

He spent the rest of the morning rubbing his eyes, anxiously rehearsing his visit to Albacore Crescent. The ride to Deptford on the Number One bus; the walk up the rising street to the red brick terrace; his arrival; his explanation. His instinct was towards the making of plans, the whole of his life a simple mapping to avoid embarrassment. To be anonymous was to be independent: he had no craving to be singled out by fame or wealth. He did not want surprises to fuel his distraction.

He was anxious because he had been thwarted once before. The last time, unprepared, he had met Araba wearing that drab, unbecoming costume; and the further surprise, Lady Arrow playing hostess. How small London was in these days of distress! He had taken himself away, feeling lamed and foolish. No one had spoken of the very person who belonged there; but where was Mister Hood, and why had he cancelled his standing order with the bank? The young man had left no instructions, his affairs were already in a muddle; the lump sum, which should have been on fixed deposit was dwindling in a current account. Americans were so careless with their money, and the shrinkage alarmed Mr Gawber who from the first had felt almost fatherly towards him. The thought occurred to Mr Gawber that he might meet Araba or Lady Arrow at the house once more. There again, some preparation was required. The one’s income tax was still unpaid, a further demand from Inland Revenue in the pending tray; the other’s insurance claim for the stolen painting wanted an underwriter’s verification. Loose ends, loose ends; and the storm cone approaching as a December shadow hung over the city — a stillness, like the sacking of cloud, warning of a winter that might never end. England tossed; adrift, dismasted.

The calamity was news. The crossed-lines had picked it up. And the previous week a television programme he had watched with Norah foretold a new ice-age. Changes in the sea-currents, freak weather, desert where there had been flowers: the planet was gripped. There had been pictures of Africans — perhaps relatives of the very Mr Wangoosa who lived in style at number thirty — starving and watching with incomprehension as the sand beat their tents to shreds; skinny livestock with sad sick eyes; children with stick-like limbs and swollen bellies. He wanted to cry. The programme had shown a model globe wearing a thickness of ice like a cricketer’s cap. Predictably, there were the historical snippets: snow on the dome of St Paul’s, steel engravings of the Thames frozen over — a fairground in mid-stream, children skimming, a coach-and-four crossing the ice to Westminster. And this morning a Times leader about the coming ice-age, matching in gloom the Financial Times Share Index which had dropped again to its lowest level ever (each day that precise phrase), plunging like a barometer. ‘It’s like the Thirties,’ Monty said. And the office chorus, ‘Terrifying.’ But Thornquist and Miss French were comfortable for the moment, and they didn’t know that terrifying, a humbug word for the pickle they imagined, would not describe the unspeakable hunger and confusion, the nakedness of the event that he had already witnessed beginning.

And strange, this was his season. He had always liked — in the same degree that others hated — the days darkening into winter. Norah feared them. To her, winter was a cold tunnel she might never clear, and lately she had begun to remark on how progressively dark it was getting, how they had their tea at night. She had spent her life waiting for the sun to reach her windows; there was nothing more for her: life was a matter of temperature. She had said a thousand times, ‘I’d like to live in a country where the sun was always shining.’ Mr Wangoosa’s country? Mr Aroma’s? Churchill’s Tobago? Palmerston’s Jamaica? But he bore her yearning with politeness, adding only that hot countries were governed by torturers. He saw her as similar in some ways to the African savage who allowed the riddle of the weather to foreshorten his existence and alter his mood until — and like those pathetic blacks in the television programme — poor Norah would simply sit in the dark and wait to die. But he could not mock Norah. He too had his fantasies, and he imagined death to be something like sitting on the top deck of a Number One bus on a December afternoon, the shop lights flaring and blazing at the windows, the black conductor grinning; a red catafalque racing him into darkness. It was death: you did not get off.

He felt it now; he was on that bus. A month ago he had travelled this way and had seen it all. But today he was reprieved. He alighted at Deptford without incident, deposited his flimsy ticket in the litter bin and started up the street. It was as he remembered it, only drearier. And gusty: the people hurried, simulating panic, as they always seemed to do on windy days. His gloom was deepened when at the brick wall with the torn circus poster — wagging tongues of paper — he saw the words that never failed to still his heart with ice: ARSENAL RULE. A necessary landmark, and yet he wished he had not seen it.

He was rising on the road. The sounds of the river reached him with greater clarity, a boat’s steady poop and a distant hammering at Millwall borne across the water. He gained Ship Street and turned into Albacore Crescent, walked halfway up and stopped. Without the slightest warning, and just as he had once witnessed the demolition of Mortimer Lodge — that embarrassing misapprehension — he imagined number twenty-two bursting into flames. The roof caved in, the windows splintered, and a lighted cloud of bursting sparks and brick fragments was released. A cylinder of horrible fire heated his face. And then, as he watched, the flames died, the splinters met, and every brick fell back into place until the house regained its former solidity and was whole. But there were scorch marks above the windows; had they been there before?

The vision jarred him, and his heart was ticking rapidly as he mounted the steps and rang the bell. The echo droned on; he listened for footsteps, but he was sure on the second ring that the house was empty. No bell sounded louder or more mournful than one in an empty house.

As he turned to go he put his hand on the knob and pushed the door open. From this doorway to the back of the house there was emptiness — none of the clutter he’d seen before, and only the faintest smell of tobacco mingled with dust. Cold air, a wave of it, rolled past him from the creepy interior. He stepped inside and shut the door. A hum, like an electric purr, made him stop; but the hum was in his head, not in the house. He peeked into the living-room: two chairs, no cushions, bare walls. The dining room held a scarred table, and scabs of soot had fallen down the chimney and littered the linoleum in front of the fireplace. The kitchen was empty. He stepped into the back room, a floorboard gave under his foot and for a split-second he was on his way, careering through the first inch of a black hole.

He went upstairs, disturbed by the oafishness of his own banging steps, paused on the landing, and tip-toed down the hall. Then to the top of the house, three rooms: empty.

But as he paused again his mind strayed. The front door had been unlocked: the house could not be empty. He recalled the closed room he had hurried past on the floor below. Not the bathroom, which was shut as if engaged: he could smell the soap. One looked in a bathroom at one’s peril; but that other room?

He retraced his steps: down to the landing, down one flight to the closed door; and he stood in the stale cold air of the hall, taking shallow breaths.

My son is there, he thought. He had touched the doorknob. He was saddened by the chipped paint and the scars, the chill of the porcelain knob. His sadness turned to shame, and it was physical, an infirmity: his arm went dead, his fingers wouldn’t work. His soul rebelled, restraining him with a tug of timid dignity. It was wrong; the place was private. The front door was unlocked: the house had to be empty. It was anyone’s, but not his. For the first time in years he thought of his father and mother in a chastening way, as if when he went home they would stop him and ask him where he had been, what he had done. He had his reply. He withdrew his hand and straightened himself, and as he descended the stairs — softly, to make no noise — he thought: But my son is dead.

She heard his slow descent on the stairs. The front door banged shut, and she shuddered, the nervousness overtaking her now when she was out of danger. It had not been Hood; it was a cautious tread, someone checking the house, a curious neighbour, the gas-man, a meter-reader, a stranger. The keyhole on the bathroom door was sealed, and she had not had the courage to risk a peek. She had shot the bolt and stayed there, where she’d hidden when he entered the house. She cursed herself for not locking the front door, and starting down the stairs she reproached herself for wanting to go and lock it now. The absurdity of it. It was too late; whoever it was had come and gone, and she was safe again.

She climbed back to the landing, where she had been stopped when the front door opened, and she went up the second flight to the top floor. The front bedroom looked no emptier than it ever had. She scanned it for differences, for any change. This was the way it had always been. But the family was ended, he would never return: so emptiness was this knowledge that no particle remained, and only she could know how hollow it really was.

She looked for more, because the day before she remembered how firmly he had said, Don’t come back here. She had half-expected to find him propped on one of those Indian cushions, studying the painting he had begun to covet. She was dispirited; she had nerved herself for a scene and was glad when the bell rang and the door opened; but that gentle step going up and down the stairs was not his.

Dust flew as she rifled the closets. She found the newspapers she had put on the shelves. She wrenched the dented mattress aside. Fur-balls, a button, hairpins, a foreign coin: they aggravated her distress. And as she went through the room, searching for her painting, she could not recall anything of the lovely thing but its thick coat of yellow varnish, its coarsely woven backing, the configuration of cracks that lay over a face she could no longer see. That had always been the way: each time she saw it, it was new to her and she marvelled as if it was just made before her eyes, existing only when she looked at it. Out of sight it was a blank in her mind, and as she searched she prepared herself for the fresh shock of being amazed by the face again. She was certain it was in the house. Don’t come back here: that was proof.

But she had stopped searching. She had opened a low drawer and, on her knees, was reading the old newspaper that lined it. She was calmed, and she remained in this position for a long time, reading effortlessly a large plain story on a browning front page. Old news. It held her, fixed her, as no book ever had.

Downstairs a door opened. She registered the sound, but it vanished without meaning into her depthless mood, and she was so absorbed in the newspaper she did not start until she heard voices: ‘Nothing’ and ‘Better make sure.’ She stood and staggered as if she had been hit, dizzy from her kneeling. She went to the door and listened. They were on the ground floor. She crept along the wall to the landing and made for the place where she had been safe before, the bathroom halfway down the stairs. But she heard them climbing.

‘There’s no one home.’

‘I’ll look up here.’

‘Check all the rooms.’

‘I’ll kill that bastard.’

The voices were loud, careless, shouting back and forth. Not Hood. Obscure rowdy men. Their accents alarmed her; she was afraid, just hearing their brutish mispronunciations. They moved quickly through the house. She padded down the hall, her eyes aching, looking for a place to hide: not a room, a closet — or out the window?

‘Smells like’ — the voice ran ahead of the feet tramping the uncarpeted steps — ‘like someone died here.’

And noises, kickings, downstairs.

‘I don’t see nothing.’

Nuffink: she quailed. She was at a back window. It was painted shut; she struggled to free it from the casement, and as she did — not knowing what lay below here, not caring that it was thirty feet down to a paved alleyway behind the house — she was linking the visit of the first man to this one and seeing how it fit. He had been making sure the house was empty, preparing for the others, and when he left, when she had felt safest, she was in the most danger. Her thoughts moved as clumsily as carpentry. She could not open the window. She had told Murf to paint it, and he had done it like he did everything, with stupid sloppy care. She fought with it, and even as she heard the man in the hall she was blaming Murf and hating the thought of his pinched face, his ugly ears.

‘Well, well, well. I don’t believe it.’

The man, tall, with a killer’s face and strings of hair to his shoulders, stood in the doorway.

‘I’m leaving,’ she said, and still tried to work the window open.

‘Don’t move.’ He was pale, his skin like a sausage casing. He leaned backwards and yelled, ‘Rutter!’

‘You find something?’ It was the man on the ground floor calling into the stairwell.

‘A bird!’

‘What?’

She said, ‘I don’t know what you’re looking for. The house is empty.’

‘Really.’

He was mocking her. She said, ‘I used to live here. There’s no one here now.’

‘Except you.’

‘I thought I left something behind. I —’

‘Who are you?’ It was the second man, shorter, darker, in an overcoat and a small neat hat. He shook out a pair of glasses and used them to look at her. They softened his appearance: she almost trusted him for those glasses.

‘She thinks she left something behind.’

Finks, somefink. The chewed words scared her.

‘Says she used to live here.’

She appealed to the smaller man, whom she could see was in charge: ‘This is my own house. You won’t find anything.’

‘Up against the wall, chicky.’

‘I have a right to know who you are. If you’re policemen you have to tell me.’

‘That’s right, chicky. Flying-squad.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘You heard what he said.’ The taller man stepped towards her. ‘Get over. Palms against the wall, legs apart.’

‘I don’t care what you’re doing here,’ she said, and tried to sound friendly. ‘Just let me go. No one will know.’

‘What’s your name?’

She hesitated. She said, ‘Sandra.’ And it was as if, admitting it she became that person, one she hated. She said, ‘Don’t touch me, please.’

‘We’re not going to hurt you.’

She turned and saw that the smaller one had taken out a pistol.

‘No,’ she said. ‘Please —’

‘Don’t worry,’ said the man. ‘This ain’t for you. This is for him.’ He jerked the pistol at the other man. ‘I don’t trust him with birds, see. I’ll make a hole in him if he starts anything.’

‘I wouldn’t mind and all,’ said the taller man. ‘Let’s do her and get out of here. The place is empty.’

‘Just rooms — empty rooms. Nothing.’ She began to cry. ‘Please let me go. I’ll do anything you say.’

‘You’re giving me ideas,’ said the taller one.

They frightened her, and her awareness of this fear gave her the greatest sense of outrage she had ever known. She wanted them cowering, dead, chopped into pieces. Rape: she would let them; afterwards, she would find them and kill them.

‘Tell me what you want,’ she said.

‘Keep her away from the window.’

‘Off we go,’ said the taller man. ‘Make a funny move and I’ll brick you so fast you won’t know what happened.’

They pushed her into the hall. She thought of running downstairs. They had guns; but something else kept her from making a dash — there was nothing in the house, nothing at all, and remembering that gave her hope. Somehow, they knew about the painting. She hoped they’d find it; they could have it. But no, the house was empty.

She stayed ahead of them, walking along the landing. She said, ‘These are bedrooms. They’re all empty.’

‘How many upstairs?’

‘Two. No, three.’

‘What about this one?’

The voice was over her head. It was rough, unpleasant, deliberately threatening. She trembled; her fear was like penance, purifying her. She felt innocent, a young girl, without any blame, punished for no reason. And again she wanted the men dead, at her mercy.

‘Which one?’

‘Here. The door’s closed.’

‘Empty, like the rest of them.’

‘The rest of them are open.’

‘Let’s have a look.’

They gathered at the door. She remembered the televisions, junk, and Hood saying, We’ll leave them for the next tenant. A hand moved across her shoulder. Don’t touch me. Pure. Most of all she hated Hood: Don’t come back here. You only said that if you had something to hide. She thought: I will do whatever they say, and be safe; the ones who fight, die.

They stepped into the room.

The Number One bus that had taken him to Deptford would take him the rest of the way to Catford, but he had waited twenty minutes and none had come. The queue had lengthened behind him: shoppers, labourers, schoolboys in uniforms. It was dark. He clasped his hands on his paper and relaxed, finding it restful to be so anonymous, in a bus queue in Deptford, among strangers. There were whispers of complaint about the late bus. He eavesdropped, invisible in the shadow of the bus shelter, glad that nothing was required of him but to listen.

‘What’s that?’

The explosion reached him as a muffled roar, too brief for recollection.

‘Smash-up.’

‘That was no smash-up.’

‘Gas-main.’

‘Look!’

The sky was lit, segments of low cloud touched by fire and given majestic detail, and sparks travelling up in gusts, curling above the rooftops. Now the bus queue broke, and all the people ran across the street in the direction of the flames.

Mr Gawber stayed. He boarded the bus and went to the top deck, paid his fare and folded his paper square to complete the crossword. He clicked his pen, but he did not write. He thought: home, Norah, and tonight Peter Pan. It is the end of my world. He put his fingers to his eyes and tried to stop his tears with his fingers.

26

‘Beautyful. Beautyful.’ Murf was at the window, the firelight from the next road flickering on his face, catching his ear-ring and making his ears seem to twitch. Little Jason joined him, standing on tip-toes, his chin on the sill, shrieking at the flames. ‘Went like anything,’ Murf said to the child. ‘It’s still going beautyful. I wish Brodie was here. That cracked it and all. Look at it go!’

The explosion, a tremendous thud, a shower of bricks and glass, had come as they were having tea. It shook their plates and brought a groan from their own house. And Murf, who had just pushed a fragment of kipper into his mouth, stood up, his cheeks bulging, his eyes popping. He threw down the slice of bread he was holding; he choked, trying to swallow, trying to shout. Hood saw black fingermarks on the breadslice. Murf, still chewing, had started out the door, but Hood restrained him, and so Murf had run upstairs to watch the blaze. Then Jason and Lorna; then Hood.

Eruption: the neighbourhood which had seemed to him a district of empty houses, locked and abandoned, was alive; the streets full of reddened people painted by flames, gathered in little watching groups, driven from their houses like ants roused by heat. An ambulance brayed in Ship Street. It came skidding around the Crescent, its blue lights flashing in all the windows of nearby houses. Deptford itself was alight, but this fire, simulating life, reduced it to theatre, and Hood could not bear to watch.

Lorna said, ‘That’s your house!’

‘Not anymore it ain’t,’ said Murf. He laughed; he was dancing. He lifted Jason to see. ‘Look at the little basket — he likes it and all!’

‘What’s up,’ she said. ‘What the hell is this?’

Murf said, ‘That there’s the booby-prize. Hey, where you going?’

‘Downstairs,’ said Hood.

‘You won’t see nothing from there.’

‘Who says I want to?’

Hood left them and went down to the dining room. The eaters had been put to flight. Panic showed in their leavings. The table was covered by the half-eaten meal, bones, bitten pieces still on forks, greasy glasses, the fingerprinted bread, teethmarks everywhere; and outside, the alarm, the excited shouts.

‘What do you know about this?’ said Lorna entering from the hall.

‘You don’t want me to tell you.’

‘Ron.’ She looked at him strangely. ‘Ron would have said that.’ She pushed at the soiled plates. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I don’t want to know.’

‘I have to go. A little business.’

‘You’re running out on me. You won’t come back. Like Ron.’

He took her face gently in his hands. He kissed her and said, ‘I’ll be back.’

‘I’m scared,’ she said. ‘You done something.’

Hood said, ‘There’s nothing for you to be scared of. It’s all over. No one’s going to bother you now.’

Her expression — puzzled, fearful — had not changed. She said, ‘Ron,’ and then, ‘I loved him, and sometimes he loved me.’

Murf was on the stairs, clattering. He looked into the room and said, ‘Hey, there’s another ambulance. I want to see who copped it.’

‘Stay here.’

‘There must be more than one.’

‘If you leave this house, don’t come back.’

‘Okay, okay,’ said Murf. ‘I was just wondering.’

‘People live around here. They must know us. Keep that face indoors — and stop smiling.’

‘They’ll find you,’ said Lorna, moving warily, sensing danger. ‘They’ll do you, they’ll hang you, they’ll take you away.’

Murf said, ‘Well, they’ll be on to Mayo, won’t they? It’s her house, ain’t it?’ He lost his certainty and said, hoarsely, ‘She might cough.’

Hood said, ‘I’m going to Kilburn.’

From the train, high on its track, making its circuit through South-wark, the city looked immense, and he realized how miles of it were unknown to him. Most of it was hidden by the obscuring glare of the sodium lamps, the buildings showing as low dark blocks, and the church steeples indistinguishable from the night sky. There was no skyline; the dark was seamless, a tide of stars on a yellow broken sea. Too large to possess, too deep to be destroyed, deaf, inert, unchangeable; the waters had closed in, the mountain had subsided long ago. So the saboteur was proved ignorant, and his every act revealed him as a stranger. He would drown.

Hood considered this. For every one who used the city as an occasion to perform, a thousand chose it as a place of concealment. In its depths bombs were stifled. His own was local, personal, a family matter; it had not been heard here. On the platform at London Bridge there were travellers still waiting in the shadows, not hiding but hidden. He had thought this world was his to move in, an extension of his own world. But he had seen it grow unfamiliar, and smaller, and he was not moving at will. He had been driven here, to a narrowing space in the vast now featureless city where if he was not careful he would be caught. You were allowed to hide if you made no sound. The city confounded like a sea; it was penetrable, but it was endless and neutral, so wide that on a train tossing between stations — those named places, those islands — you could believe you had gone under and were dead. You verified your existence by taking out the ticket once more. You were your ticket.

Replacing his ticket he touched the rolled-up painting in his inside pocket. The last business. He would surrender that and so surrender himself. He knew the face in the self-portrait now: it was the man he had killed, months ago, and he had become that man.

The train was nearly empty; there were few people at Charing Cross, and from there to Kilburn on the Underground there were only workers returning home late and tired, sitting singly, using the satchels on their knees to doze on. It was the dead hour before the pubs shut, before the theatres let out, a chain of hollow platforms all the way to Queen’s Park. Five miles away there had been a bomb. Here, no one knew. The city dissolved the shock in the slow swell that hid its tide-rip, and it slept on, deaf and dark.

He retraced the route he had taken with Murf, from pub to pub, and found Finn at the second, standing glassy-eyed in a corner of the saloon bar near the telephone, sucking at the froth on a pint of Guinness.

‘Evening, sarge,’ said Hood. ‘Where’s your friend?’

Finn blinked. He had a sliver of discoloured foam on his upper lip. He peered into Hood’s face, searching it as though studying a mirror. He said, his eyes still darting, ‘He’s expecting you, is he?’

‘Stop scratching your ass and find out.’

Finn put his glass down. He nodded thoughtfully at the telephone, then chewing his lips in protest, left the bar. Hood looked around and noticed, as he had once before, that he was being eyed suspiciously by the other drinkers. He chose one and stared until the man turned away. He chose another, and he was still squinting at that man when Finn appeared, snatched up his glass and took a swig. He said confidentially, ‘You can go up.’

‘Smile,’ said Hood. ‘Business isn’t that bad, is it?’

‘You’re keeping him waiting.’

‘Did you say something, sarge?’ Hood went close to him and menaced him with a smile.

Finn muttered. He turned his back to Hood and faced the telephone.

‘If anyone rings, tell them I’m busy.’

Upstairs, the door was ajar, and before Hood could knock, Sweeney called out, ‘Come in!’

The room was unchanged — the dart board, a dirty ceiling, the shades drawn, the large table almost filling the rented space they called the High Command. Sweeney was seated at the far end of the table, in a pretend posture of authority. He put his mutilated hand out, but Hood ignored it and sat down at the opposite end.

Sweeney said, ‘Finn says you slagged him.’

‘Finn needs his engine tuned.’

‘You got me out of bed this morning. What’s the big idea?’

‘Like I said. I heard that guy was rumbled. Rutter. I figured if you knew him you’d better look out.’

‘How the hell am I supposed to know him?’

‘Don’t be so defensive,’ said Hood. ‘That’s why I got you out of bed. To find out.’

‘I don’t know the boyo.’

‘I heard you the first time. But it’s odd. I see him at the dog track now and then. He’s into arms dealing, and’ — Hood smiled — ‘so are you, right?’

‘London’s full of arms dealers,’ said Sweeney. ‘The world is.’

‘But this one was dealing with your actress. I assumed he was dealing with you, too.’

‘Did you now? You seem to know a lot. But you did the right thing. Let me know if you hear anything else.’

‘I won’t hear anything else.’

‘You might. At the dog track — Jesus, I used to go to the dog track. Haven’t got the time these days. Murf knows his way around the fellas. He’ll tell you what he hears. He’s a good lad, is Murf.’

Hood said, repeating it slowly, giving each word equal weight, ‘I won’t hear anything else.’

‘No? And why is that?’

‘Because I won’t be listening.’

‘Listening’s the whole game,’ said Sweeney. ‘If you don’t listen you’re no good to us.’

‘You bet.’

Sweeney laughed without pleasure. He lifted his damaged hand and pointed his scarred fingers at Hood. He said, ‘If you’ve got something to say, man, say it.’

‘I’m quitting,’ said Hood. He knew what he wanted to do next. He put his hand into his inside pocket and felt for the roll of canvas. He had gripped it and was about to throw it on the table when Sweeney lurched forward.

‘Take your hands out of your pockets!’

Hood showed his empty hands.

‘You’re quitting?’ said Sweeney disgustedly. ‘You think you can jack it in just like that?’

‘That’s what I’m doing. Are you going to plead with me?’

‘Listen here. No one quits the Provos. You join for life. That’s what I did — that’s what everyone does, including you. I said, including you. It’s like a family, see. No one quits a family.’

‘I never joined,’ said Hood.

‘Oh, didn’t you? What about that passport you made for us?’

‘A cunt’s passport.’

Sweeney said, ‘That was your membership card.’

‘I smartened up.’

Sweeney spat. ‘The last time you were in here you were full of ideas. I thought we were getting somewhere. I put my trust in you.’

‘Your trust isn’t worth a fart,’ said Hood. ‘I know. I checked.’

‘Where did you check then?’

‘Millwall,’ said Hood, ‘the Isle of Dogs. Don’t tell me you weren’t there. I saw you sitting in his house, waiting for him. He’s a fucker and you’re his friend.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘You’re lying. You’re Rutter’s buddy. What did he tell you? That he was onto something big? Did he say he’d have to beat the daylights out of a woman to find out where the arsenal is?’

‘I’m not saying I know Rutter, and I’m not saying I don’t know him.’ Sweeney shook his head. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘It matters,’ said Hood. ‘Because he’s a creep and that means you trust creeps.’

‘I trusted you.’

‘So much for your offensive.’

‘You know Rutter, too.’

‘I know his victims. I know who he leaned on. You put him up to it.’

‘If you don’t like people being leaned on, Hood, what in the name of Jesus are you doing here?’

It was unanswerable. Again he reached for the painting, to surrender.

‘Hands down,’ said Sweeney, but it was not a threat. ‘You can’t quit. You know too much. You’re part of the family now — you know all our dirty secrets. I can’t let you go.’

‘You won’t miss me.’

‘I will,’ said Sweeney in a friendly way. ‘I like a fella with some fight in him. And what about our English offensive?’

‘It’s all yours — everything.’ He wondered as he looked across the room at Sweeney’s grizzled face and the scar tissue shining on his damaged hand, if he had been right before in thinking that the onset of sympathy was the end of belief, and that sympathy could only curdle into pity. He said, ‘But the English offensive. I hope it never happens.’

Sweeney said, ‘There was a bomb today.’

‘How do you know?’

‘It was on the six o’clock news. Three bodies recovered. No names.’

Hood said nothing.

‘It sounds like the Trots,’ said Sweeney. ‘Do you know anything about it?’

‘Nope.’

‘Southeast London — that’s what they said on the news. You just came from there.’

‘It’s a big place,’ said Hood. ‘And I wasn’t listening.’

‘We’ll be blamed for it,’ said Sweeney.

‘You can take the credit for it.’

Sweeney said, ‘Bombing’s messy. Point a machine gun at a fella and he does what you say. Show him a bomb and he’ll laugh. You might be carrying a sack of flour. You have to blow him up to convince him, and that doesn’t get you anywhere. Well, you know. You were in Vietnam, weren’t you?’ He regarded the two twisted fingers on the stump of his right hand. He said, ‘But Rutter’s got all the guns now.’

Hood stood up. ‘I’m going.’

Sweeney sighed and said, ‘I’ll make an exception in your case.’

‘Don’t do me any favours.’

‘I’ll let you quit. We’ll say you had battle fatigue. You’re an American, you’ve got no business here. It was a mistake.’ He smiled. ‘You did a lot for my wife. She’s the nervous type — she never knew anything. But she really fancied you. You should have heard her talking about you — you’d have thought you were as Irish as Paddy O’Toole, with the sun shining out of your arse.’

Hood said, ‘I met her at Ward’s. She was drunk. She told me a ridiculous story about how she was going to steal a painting.’

‘I hope you didn’t laugh.’

‘She scared me,’ said Hood. ‘She was so drunk. Incapable — isn’t that the word they use? I felt sorry for her.’

‘You’re sounding like a bloody curate.’

‘I knew if I helped her she’d succeed.’

‘Don’t think I’m not grateful,’ said Sweeney. His manner had become genial, his talk soothing. He got up and came around the table to where Hood was standing. ‘Maybe the mistake was mine. I listened to my wife — that’s many a man’s downfall. It doesn’t mean we can’t be friends. What are your plans?’

‘I don’t have any.’ And he thought: It’s over. He was certain now that Rutter was dead: three bodies recovered. How little it had to do with politics. But perhaps Sweeney was more right than even he knew — it had always been a family affair. Weech had brought him to it, and he had had to become Weech to complete his revenge. And though he knew that tactic was a brutal amputation, it was the revenger who was left the cripple. There was nothing more. He reached into his inside pocket again.

‘Keep your hands where I can see them,’ said Sweeney, joshing, as if Hood had misbehaved. ‘A parting of the ways. Let’s do it the Irish way, with a jar of Liffey water.’

Hood said, ‘Some other time.’

‘You can’t deny me a last drink,’ said Sweeney, slapping him on the back. ‘Come on, I know a good pub.’

‘I thought we were in one.’

‘Not this piss-hole. I never drink here. Bad for the discipline if your men see you drunk.’

‘Then why drink with me?’

Sweeney smiled. ‘You’re not my man anymore.’

Hood went first, at Sweeney’s urging, downstairs and out the back door to a side street. Sweeney chatted in his friendly way, his accent broadened by his good humour; he talked about the offensive, about Ulster, about Murf and Mayo. He said, ‘I told her not to come back without the painting — not that I care a tinker’s curse for the bloody thing. But it’s all we have at the moment. And it’s the principle, see. I said, it’s the principle.’

‘How much further?’ said Hood.

They were in a dark street, lined with cars, and something Hood was unaccustomed to seeing in London — a row of trees, all the way to a lighted junction. They were tall, leafless, and looked dead, as if at any moment they might thunder down.

‘Just over the road.’

‘I don’t see any pub.’

‘You will in a minute,’ said Sweeney. ‘Sure, it’s a beauty —’ He stopped speaking, crept behind a tree and looked back. ‘What’s that? Did you see someone down there?’

‘No.’

‘You’re not looking.’ Sweeney had become short of breath. He sounded asthmatic. He said, ‘I think we’re being followed.’

Bein follered. Hood registered the accent. He had been prepared for a deception, but he had not thought it would be so transparent. He obliged Sweeney by glancing down the street, going through the motions, acting at Sweeney’s direction. It was, as he expected, empty. But it was familiar. He saw the wall, the white letters ARSENAL RULE in damp chalk, and he was certain.

‘There’s no one,’ he said.

‘In here,’ said Sweeney, motioning to a door in the wall. He was making a convincing show of fear. He pushed at Hood and Hood could feel in the shove the man’s trembling hand.

‘That’s a cemetery,’ said Hood.

‘It is. Now hurry — I tell you we’re being followed. We can duck out by the side entrance and ditch them.’

Hood thought: The simplest trick of all. There was no pub, there was no pursuer. Sweeney had taken him here to kill him. What he hated most was Sweeney’s lying, his pretence of fear, the acting. Yet Hood remained calm. There was justice in this trap. Lorna was safe, and he, for his murders, deserved to die. The executioner could be ignorant of the crime. But he was appalled by the place, the empty street, the dead trees, and at the cemetery wall he resisted, hardly knowing why — because he thought it would save him, because he thought resistance was expected of him. He would not go willingly to his death. He was empty of rage, but he could play the victim and fight. He said, ‘I won’t go.’

‘Move,’ said Sweeney. ‘There’s someone after us.’

‘You’re lying.’

‘I’m not! Now’ — he pulled a pistol from his coat pocket — ‘get in there and be quick.’

‘You’re going to kill me.’

‘Get in!’ Sweeney screamed into his fist. His face shone with sweat, and still he pretended to cower behind the tree.

To be killed by this jabbering play-actor! Hood walked ten steps to the cemetery gateway and looked in. He saw the dark humps and shadows, the grim London light behind the far wall that gleamed like a tidemark of surf on the highest tombs. Appalling because it was so ordinary, so empty, so dark; it was too cold to die tonight. But he thought: If I had died yesterday before that phone-call, it would have been worse. His life had stopped with that bomb; it had blasted away the ramparts of his heart and he had not been able to face the painting after that. He was too ashamed. He had led himself to this death, this suicide. And yet he fought against the logic. He did not want to die. Tomorrow, tomorrow. But Sweeney was armed. I will run, he thought, and if I’m saved I’ll keep running.

He darted through the door and leaped towards the darkness between two monuments, his legs numb and working clumsily. Ahead of him he saw the eclipse of Sweeney’s shadow in the doorway’s reflection on the burying-ground. He remembered Murf: I hate this boneyard.

Crack!

He tumbled, feeling nothing, a miraculous transparency in his mind, a winded zero in his chest. I’m dead, he thought. But he saw he was still moving quickly on all fours, a monkey motion over a clump of gravestones. He was conscious of a sensation of sudden lightness: the painting had bounced up and dropped from his pocket. He spun round and saw Sweeney on his knees, toppling, trying to aim.

A man in a long coat stepped inside the gate. He fired three more times into Sweeney’s body, then — the long coat jumping like a skirt — ran into the street. A car door slammed, an engine roared, and it sped away until its sound became part of the city’s regular swell.

But Hood had seen the man’s face. A thug: he knew the face and then didn’t. He saw his confusion, the brutal similarity, the shaded features, all brutes looked the same. No — he remembered where he had seen it before, silhouetted like this, in the paddock of whimpering dogs at the track — one of Rutter’s men. Hood was blinded. The painting: he started back for it and saw a policeman enter, flashing a torch near where Sweeney lay. Before Hood turned again the policeman saw him and waved his feeble torch. He called out twice for Hood to stop, but Hood kept running, through the far gate, into the street; away from the shrill police whistle, away from the painting, and into the concealing city.

27

The last thing he’d seen — the image he carried away from Deptford in the ride through London to the station — was the old sweeper solemnly clearing up the mess in Albacore Crescent. But it was a brief glimpse between shifting buildings, a bent figure in a winter coat, with a shovel and a yellow barrel; but it occurred to him later, long after the taxi had veered past the Crescent, that it might not have been the same man. There was no boy.

At Victoria Murf bought a Mirror, and in the compartment he showed Hood the front page story: TERROR BOMB IN SOUTH LONDON KILLS THREE. Hood glanced through the item he did not want to read …. thought to be a bomb factory … three bodies badly charred … no warning beforehand … names will not be released until the next-of-kin have been notified.

Murf said, ‘You seen it?’

‘What?’

Murf took the paper and put his dirty finger on the bottom line, smudging the fresh ink: … the fact that the stolen painting was recovered aroused speculation that this may be the opening volley in a campaign of terror by the Provisional Wing of the IRA. No ransom was paid for the painting. It was found in a cemetery …

Hood’s face darkened. He said, ‘No.’

Lorna said, ‘Don’t show me.’

Murf sang, ‘Boom widdy-widdy, boom-boom.’

‘Look, Mummy. Horses!’

‘Them are cows,’ she said.

Murf said, ‘It’s like a holiday. Put your feet up. Get the benefit.’

The early sun broke through the layers of cloud and struck the low hills, shafts of light sending the lengthened shadows of trees across the rough brown grass. And where the sun didn’t hit, in the grey scooped depressions on the hillsides, there were rounded white patches, like sea-foam drying on a beach, froth that had outrun the surf.

‘Snow,’ said Lorna. Her voice vibrated with the rumble of the train.

‘They get lots of snow down here this time of year,’ said Murf. ‘Not blizzards — nothing like that. But snow, widdy-widdy boom.’

Snow, trees, cows. They were in another country, thirty miles from London. The space, the very air here, oppressed him. Hood studied the fields, sorrowing wordlessly; he had seen these fields when he had arrived in England, the yellow fields of mustard in May. Now they were brown, grief had displaced hope. I have had no life, only a sudden death. And Murf’s voice, that quacking, sounded so awful.

Just before a level crossing the train’s horn squawked twice. Then, at the road itself, they could see the cars backed up and winding bumper to bumper along the country lane.

‘Stop, you bitches!’ Murf smiled, showing the pegs of his teeth.

‘It’s going to be a nice day,’ said Lorna.

Outside, beyond the low hills the downs lay green at the horizon, and close by, in the hedges that ran along the track the sparkle of frost just touched by the sun, becoming dew.

‘How long can we stay, Mummy?’

‘Ask him,’ she said.

Hood said, ‘As long as you like.’

‘I don’t want to go back to that yucky house.’

Hood saw that Lorna was staring at him. He said, ‘He might get his wish.’

She said, ‘I don’t want to think about that. I know something’s up. That’s your look-out. I’m going to Brighton. It’s like winning at the dogs, Brighton. The only thing is, we didn’t win nothing.’ She sighed, then said, ‘They’ll find us.’

‘No,’ said Hood. ‘No one finds you unless you cooperate.’

‘Yeah,’ said Murf. ‘I ain’t cooperating.’

‘Listen to them,’ said Lorna.

‘The little basket wants to go to the loo,’ said Murf. ‘It’s okay. I’ll take him. Put your feet up.’ He left with Jason and slid the compartment door shut.

Lorna said, ‘We left in such a hurry, I forgot my rollers.’

‘We’ll buy some more.’

‘I don’t know if I remembered to pack my heavy sweater. It’s cold down there.’

‘I’ll get you a new one.’

‘And Jason needs shoes.’

‘There are shoe stores in Brighton.’

‘Oh, Christ!’ she said, and he thought she was going to cry.

He put his arm around her and said, ‘Don’t worry. I’ll stay with you.’

‘How long?’

‘Until you chase me away,’ he said. ‘Until you’re safe.’ And as he said it he wondered if she would ever be.

‘You looked old just then,’ she said. ‘I don’t even know you. Who are you?’

The door shot open and Murf helped Jason to his seat. He said, ‘Basket almost fell in!’

Lorna looked appreciatively at Murf. She said, ‘He likes you.’ She was silent a moment, then turned to Hood. ‘Kids need fathers.’

The stations raced by. The train didn’t stop. The countryside, which had appeared so suddenly at the outskirts of London, dropped from view. The square grey backs of houses, the narrow cluttered gardens, the succession of settlements became linked and continued, breaking up the view of pasture, cutting off the sun. Favvers.

‘Excuse me.’ Lorna left the compartment.

‘Put your feet up,’ said Murf. ‘Get the benefit. I wish Brodie was here. She likes a good train ride.’ He took out his marking crayon and smiled at the wall.

Hood said, ‘Don’t.’

‘I wasn’t really going to.’ He put the crayon away.

‘You didn’t have to come.’

‘I’m sticking wif you.’

‘It might not be what you think.’

‘Yeah. Even if it ain’t, I’m sticking.’ He fumbled in the pocket of his jacket and took out his leather stash, his cigarette papers. He began rolling a cigarette.

Hood said, ‘You’ll be all right.’

‘Yeah.’

Hood put his feet up, on the seat opposite.

‘That’s the idea,’ said Murf. ‘Get the benefit.’ He licked the cigarette, giving it the colour of his tongue. ‘But I mean, where are we really going?’

‘Guatemala.’

‘Yeah.’

Jason, sniffing the strong smoke, made a face at Murf. He said nothing. He turned again to the window. Hood sorrowed for his small pathetic neck.

Murf said, ‘Yeah, but what’ll we do when we get there?’

Hood nodded slowly and took Murf’s cigarette. He puffed it, handed it back and put his hands behind his head. The sun striped the compartment with heat; the horn blew again, long and sad, but the train sped them away from its stuttering echo.

‘Smoke,’ he said. Then, ‘Smoke and tell lies.’