Krysalis: Krysalis (31 page)

“She read them?”

Mrs. Elwell nodded. “It was naughty of her, but … but it’s nonsense to talk of psychiatrists, there was never any question of that. Our G.P. gave her a good talking-to, that’s all. Psychiatrists, indeed!”

This was the first time David had heard the story. He could see, however, that Mrs. Elwell knew it all too well,
and that in some way she was lying.
She was not the sort of woman who lied easily. What secret seemed so terrible to her that it had to be covered up at all costs, even if that meant deceiving Anna’s own husband?

He must not resent her. This was too important to let petty dislikes get in the way.

“She got over the change of school,” he said uneasily, and was it not true? For Anna had never mentioned the episode to him….

“Of course she did.”

“But perhaps it affected her … changed her in some way, do you think?”

“It was marriage to you that changed her, if anything did.”

The watery eyes remained glued to her needles, determined to avoid David’s gaze.

“Changed? In what way?”

“Made her less communicative. Except right at the start. She used to phone us a lot then.” Mrs. Elwell resumed her knitting. Click, click, click. “When you were away. Or late back from the office.” Click. “When Anna was unhappy.”

He stared at her; she could not see the intensity of his look but she must have felt it, for she went on. “Her attitudes and yours were very different. She needed pushing, if she was to get anywhere. I told her not to be so silly. I pointed out that when young people are recently married they often want to give in.”

“Give in?”

“She used to say she couldn’t stand it. Life with you.”

“She actually said that?”

“She implied it, let’s say.”

For a long time he was aware only of the clack-clack-clack of her knitting needles as they created some seemly garment in a delicate shade of green.

“What was wrong with me?” It sounded so lame!

“A lot of things, I imagine.”

“Like what?”

“She wanted a child. Desperately.”

“She told you that?”

“A mother always knows.”

“I wanted one too.”

“Not at the beginning, I believe.”

“Well … we both had our careers.”

“Didn’t you understand how much it meant to her? With her background? She’d been adopted, although of course she got over that, but … anyway. She’d been adopted. Juliet was always a problem child. Anna wanted to make everything right. Didn’t you
see
that?”

She continued to gaze at her son-in-law, until it became obvious he wasn’t going to answer. “Having a child of her own, by you, born into a secure home, that would have made such a … well, you won’t take it from me, I’m sure.”

“She never said anything. Never.”

“Anna found it hard to talk to you, about certain things. I could see that easily enough. You didn’t know?”

David shook his head. But then his mind jumped back to the meeting with Duncan Broadway, and even beyond that, to the summer of 1987, the year of the quarrel. Their disagreement had simmered, with neither of them able to find an honorable compromise. Ostensibly they had been fighting over Juliet’s future. Now he allowed himself to admit, for the first time, that they had fallen out over something quite different.

It would have been ridiculous for Anna to have another child at her age. And her career! She could kiss good-bye to the silk gown, the judgeship…. Yet in his bones David knew that this was no lie. Anna wanted another chance at motherhood, to compensate for her failure with Juliet. Not just wanted.
Needed.

“Your backgrounds were so different,” Mrs. Elwell said. “Not at all the same outlooks on life. Quite a shock for her, I should imagine.”

“I’m common, is that what you mean? The wrong accent?”

She smiled and raised her eyes for a second, as if to say, “You see?”

“Sorry, didn’t mean to shout. I know you think I went to a rotten university. I know you think civil servants are beneath contempt. But I fell in love with your daughter and she happened to love me.”

“What do young girls know about love?”

“When Anna married me she was almost
thirty!”

“Shared attitudes. Common assumptions. They’re more important to a marriage than any amount of love, as you call it.”

“Why, what would you call it?” He stared at her,
unable to cross the divide, until it occurred to him that this was becoming too absurd for words. Mrs. Elwell, faced with an uncommunicative daughter who’d betrayed her by marrying not once but twice, had constructed this ridiculous figment of the imagination as a means of covering up the hurt. He felt sorry for her.

“So.” He sat back in his chair. “She’s left me because she’s unhappy, is that what you’re saying?”

Click-clack-click.

“Yet I notice she hasn’t come running home to mother.”

“You sound very pleased about that.”

“Ecstatic.”

“You’re a bitter person, David. Chappy was saying so only last night.”

“Is that why she left me? She’s got her share of bitterness too, you know.”

“She had nothing to be bitter about. She was a sweet child.”

“A sweet child who unfortunately got herself pregnant and had to marry Eddy—”

“That’s an appalling—”

“On
your say-so.”

Mrs. Elwell laid aside the knitting and sat with hands clasped in her lap. She might have been fighting for self-control or she might have been silently praying. “What a monstrous thing to say.” Her voice was hardly a whisper.

“She never felt loved. Never. That was her trouble. You gave her things, you forked out, pushed her, but somehow in all of that love got over the wall.”

“Strange she never complained.”

“How could she, when you managed every waking thought?” Now his dormant anger was rising to the
surface, leaving him powerless to prevent it. “And even if she did assert herself, on those rare occasions, you moved the goal posts, pretending that that was what you wanted all along.”

When Mrs. Elwell spoke again her voice contained a hardly audible demisemiquaver of doubt. “You make it sound as though everything’s our fault.”

“She came out of this house, into the world … feeling she was bad.”

“She told you that?”

“Often. I didn’t realize why, but now I’m beginning to. She felt it was her fault those girls were expelled, didn’t she? If she’d been stronger, kept her mouth shut, there wouldn’t have been any problem. All her fault, for being a bastard.”

Another lengthy silence followed. Mrs. Elwell broke it by picking up her needles and getting back to work. Now, however, she knitted less stridently. “I’m glad you came,” she said.

David heard how the demisemiquaver had ceased to taint her voice and felt his heart sink. “Why?”

“I understand things better now.” She sounded satisfied with her judgment of men and affairs. “Things between the two of you, I mean. If you spoke to her … as you’ve spoken to me …”

David considered this in silence. The momentary flash of sympathy he had felt earlier scarcely survived its birth. So he rose and walked out of the room, without saying good-bye, and he closed the front door behind him with all the respectful, lower-class deference that his despicable, lower-class soul could command.

This was a tidy neighborhood, where people owned garages and used them for their intended purpose.
Apart from David’s Rover, only one car stood in the roadway. He heard its engine start the moment he left the house, and remembered that M15, like the poor, were always with him.

FRIDAY

CHAPTER
24

Albert knew things were getting really tiresome as soon as he clapped eyes on the ait.

“Ait” was just a fancy word for island, and in his world it did not necessarily mean anything to do with the sea. It signified a position surrounded by space with good lines of sight in every direction and adequate defense mechanisms. They called it “ait” rather than plain old island because the former encoded comfortably as “8” and the latter did not, one of those things.

Never mind, he thought. You need to see Anna’s first husband, because he’ll be hard on her. He will give you clues to her instability. He can help build a case against her, leaving room for only one conclusion: that she is too dangerous to live. Like all the other vicious, communist rats that lurk inside this sewer of a twentieth-century world….

The “ait” comprised a Victorian house, standing all alone off Manchester Road in London’s East End, with a view across the Thames to Delta Wharf and a gas
holder, its silhouette like a huge confectioner’s basket of spun sugar. Beyond the gates lay a brief stretch of lawn, giving way to gravel. Crunchy gravel, Albert thought to himself, you could market breakfast cereal under that name, people would buy it, there’s one born every minute … up to the front door comes a visitor, crunch, crunch, crunch. An ait. A bloody ait.

He had a bet as to what he would find around the side of the house: an alley with a Porsche 944 parked half on and half off the pavement, the driver’s door conveniently placed opposite a steel shutter capped with a closed-circuit TV camera. A camera not unlike the one that would be mounted in the front porch.

Albert got out of the car. As he drew near he glanced up to see that a camera was indeed regarding him with apparent unconcern. He arranged his body between the lens and the bank of buttons. An American Express card materialized in his right hand. The front door was on an ordinary night latch; it yielded within seconds.

Somewhere close by a typewriter clacked intermittently, and, as Albert listened, a phone began to chirrup. The stairs were at the back of the house. He climbed three floors in swift silence, noting how anonymously the tenants kept themselves to themselves, and paused on the last landing.

His instincts had suddenly started to become very edgy. He went up the next flight on tiptoe, craning his head to see the corridor now coming into view on his left on the other side of the banister.

He stopped while still five steps short of the top. Three doors: one to the right of the stairwell, one opposite him, another down at the far end, toward the front of the building. Albert completed the climb and stood still, head on one side, listening. Here there were no
typewriters, no phones rang. On the door opposite the stairs was fixed a minute ebony plaque bearing the
Words ASIÁTICA LIMITED.

Albert’s fingers brushed the door handle, dithered an inch or so above it, withdrew. Because he was concentrating on the ebony plaque he was almost too late.

As the right-hand door swiftly opened, he felt the draft of air and turned, one hand already groping for an inside pocket. A blur of browns and blacks. Something long coming down fast. Human, male, beard, tall, tough. Without thinking, Albert jabbed his left hand up to intercept whatever might be about to land on his skull. A shock ran the length of his arm, nothing smashed, tendons okay, back off,
mind the bloody stairs!

His assailant looked Arabic. As Albeit retreated a couple of steps he saw that the man was holding a blackjack; no wonder his arm hurt like hell.

The Arab went into a crouch, jumped upright, feinted left. Albert read the series of movements correctly and spun around to put his back against the wall, minimizing the target. His attacker’s rush brought him opposite Albert instead of sending him headlong into him, as he’d intended. Albert stuck out his foot. The Arab saw it, tried to jump aside, but succeeded only in entangling one hand in the rails of the banister. He cried out at the pain, then had the sense to follow through, swinging his whole body around in a semicircle so that he was facing Albert, who still had his back against the wall.

This time, however, there was a difference. The Arab was starting forward, off the banister, when he caught sight of the gun in Albert’s hand and froze.

The door bearing the plaque opened first a fraction,
then some more. Another Middle Eastern type, fatter than his colleague, cautiously emerged, nodding his head to right and left like a bird searching out worms. He, too, saw Albert, registered the gun, and did a comical doubletake.