Shuttlecock (11 page)

The old bastard.

He turned, moved back towards his desk but did not sit. I watched his limp – a slight drag of the right foot, a lean forward with the shoulder. Crippled body: warped mind? Each of his little probing questions was delivered in an odd, contorted way, as if aimed simultaneously to provoke and deter.

‘But – with respect, sir – I don’t see why this is an official inquiry. The interests of Z’s son aren’t an official matter. They don’t concern us.’

‘Oh you think that, do you? Don’t you think that’s a rather easy distinction, Prentis – the personal, the official? We upset people’s private lives with our inquiries and then we have the gall to say that private matters don’t concern us – not official business. Our investigations
caused all the stir, they created the mess – don’t you think we should clear it up?’

‘I – er – I’m confused.’

‘You’re confused. You’re confused!’

He gave me a merciless look. ‘You’re confused. You don’t know what to think?’

Then a strange thing happened. Standing by his desk, he made a delicate, sweeping, almost magician-like gesture with his hand, as if smoothing out some imaginary rough surface. His face changed, relaxed and put on that old mask of benevolence (or had the mask just been dropped?). I thought: this is madness too. Like the inmates in Dad’s hospital: one day they smile and babble affectionately, the next day they glare at you with eyes of steel.

And suddenly I remembered very clearly the face of Mr Forster (hands delving in the bright green cage): a subtle gaze; sly mouth; that strawberry mark above the lip: the face of someone who knows what you don’t.

‘Well, Prentis.’ Quinn pulled back his leather chair. ‘Shall we shelve the matter then, you and I? Go no further? Leave well alone? You know what it’s like in my job.’ He raised both hands, palms upwards. ‘You have to carry the can for ordering investigations, for giving information, which might have God knows what consequences.’

I thought: this is it. All this is a fantastic preamble to the subject of my promotion.

He lowered himself into the chair. As he sat down his air of good intention, familiarity increased. He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes and forehead. A gesture of simple tiredness – or of final, candid concession? Quinn is cracking; he isn’t in command at all. He is going to tell everything, confess everything, to treat me (‘You and I’)
as an equal. It may sound odd, but I had the feeling a child has when it knows its parents are happy and everything in the household is harmonious and secure. From along the corridor came the patter of typewriters; the ring of phones; outside, the cherry tree swayed. Quinn rubbed his brow, head lowered, so that I faced the bald, pink part of his scalp. So unprotected. Martin’s head under my cricket bat. For the first time I thought of Quinn outside the office, as a private person. At home he would wear cardigans, take in the milk in his dressing-gown. But all this – don’t think I had entirely lost my guard – was tempered by the fear that at any moment he might say something to make that icy feeling return. An idea was forming in my mind that I was half afraid Quinn could somehow see. The strange pertinency of his questions, and the C9 case. What did he know about me? About Dad, Marian and the boys. All this talk of investigation. Supposing Quinn were investigating me?

He raised his head, replaced his glasses and spread his hands on the desk. Now –

But he did not speak of my promotion. Every line in my face must have shown him that I was hoping he would do so.

‘So we drop it then? Let it lie?’

He pushed his head forward and peered hard at me. Grey-blue, alert eyes, like Martin’s. What did he want me to say? The eyes flickered, behind the lenses of his glasses, as if some crucial issue rested on my answer; as if some conflict in Quinn’s own conscience hung upon it.

I gave the coward’s response.

‘I really don’t know, sir. Is this such a special case?’

‘Every one of our cases is special for someone, Prentis.’

He looked me up and down. An officer assessing some picked man.

‘To get back to my original point, Prentis. About the past histories of X and Z – and Z’s son, if it comes to it. I take it that you did
look
at what there was on that?’

‘I’m afraid – there wasn’t anything, sir.’

‘Wasn’t anything? But you looked at file E?’

‘File E, sir?’

‘File E.’

I tried to meet his eyes. ‘File E wasn’t on the shelves, sir.’

‘Oh, not on the shelves? Is that so? Is that so, Prentis?’

There was a long pause – long enough for a challenge, or an explanation. And suddenly the mask – the face – was gone.

‘Right, that will be all, Prentis.’

He picked up a pile of papers on his desk, shuffled them, put them to one side, picked up another pile and, with the air of some tireless robot, began working through them, as if I were no longer in the room.

‘Well, what are you waiting for man?’

I must act soon.

It is almost the end of May. The weather is getting hotter. In the Tube at rush-hours people are getting restless. I can tell by their quick eyes, by the way they
barely tolerate each other’s sticky, jostling bodies, each other’s need to occupy space of their own. Something must happen soon. All this packing together of nature into unnatural circumstances must lead to something.

Two or three times, when I’ve emerged at Clapham South onto the pavement, I’ve had this urge to take off my tie, my socks and shoes – to go no further – and simply to walk away; as if Clapham Common were some endless, enveloping savannah. But, of course, I don’t. I turn to my left, along Nightingale Lane, and shamble home, like any man returning from work, clad in his weariness, his perplexities, his frustrations. If you were to pass me by, it would not surprise me if you noticed my brows contract tightly every so often (I have inherited from Dad that intermittent little knot of lines above the nose and between the eyebrows, though in my case it makes me look simply harassed, not nobly thoughtful) and my lips move and mutter indistinct, garbled words. They say if you want to see a man as he really is, catch him unawares, when he isn’t thinking of being seen. Well, that’s the time to catch me. When I’m not under the eye of Quinn or of my family – and I’m free from the scrutiny of the Tube. That’s when I am what I am, I don’t deny it. But recently I’ve been keeping a check on myself, even during these permissive moments. I’ve been developing an eager, erect carriage as I step homeward, a brisk, confident pace (in this heat) and imitating the zeal of some of my fellow commuters. For not all of them drift home like zombies capable of walking under a bus without noticing it. Some of them launch themselves from the station with an energy unsapped by the rigours of the day, shirt collars seemingly undirtied, briefcases and papers jauntily gripped, and sail buoyantly along the pavement, eager to embrace wives, dandle
children and nurture gardens; and whether they are acting or not I don’t know. But I’ve been induced to ape them in a quite fraudulent manner myself.

That evening – after I’d seen Quinn about C9 – as I came up out of the Tube, I had the distinct sensation of being watched. I don’t know whose eyes I expected to see – suddenly averted when they met my own, peering maybe from a parked car or from behind some screening newspaper – or whether I felt less under the gaze of particular eyes than of some nebulous presence. I brushed the feeling aside. But it suddenly struck me later, when I was half way home and I had lapsed into my usual distracted manner: what if someone with an interest in me were really to see me, slouching home like this, my expression vexed and brooding, mumbling inanely to myself? That would hardly bear investigation. If someone had their spies … I had been thinking – so absorbedly that I was scarcely conscious of my route along the pavement – of that afternoon’s bizarre interview, of C9, of what Quinn would do next, what I should do; and then suddenly, as if, had I looked behind me, Quinn himself or Quinn’s agent would have been there, I automatically straightened my shoulders, smartened my pace and put on an alert, ebullient expression. I had to look normal, cheerful and undaunted, not to betray my confusion, my suspicion. Even when it least seemed I could be under inspection.

And it was just then, as I walked along the edge of the common that I really did discover someone watching me. It was not Quinn. It was Martin. He was standing some thirty or forty yards away, out on the common, and such was his attitude when I saw him that I somehow knew we hadn’t just spotted each other by accident: he had been following me at a distance, stalking
me, perhaps all the way from the station. I stepped onto the grass, raised my hand, and was about to shout ‘Martin!’ when he turned abruptly and began walking off in another direction, as if pretending he hadn’t seen me or I had made some mistake. But I knew it was Martin. He was wearing Martin’s yellow T-shirt and jeans. I don’t believe in mirages on Clapham Common. What was he doing? I readily admit that I have this recurring hope (which is not such a far-fetched and fantastic hope, after all) that one day my sons will come to meet me at the station. That seems the sort of gesture that children who care for their fathers are glad to màke. And, believe me, I’d be chuffed to bits if they did. But Martin hadn’t come to meet me. If he had he would have been waiting by the newsagent’s or the florist’s. He had come to observe his father, as one observes some creature under glass, at just that time of day when I am most, so to speak, in my natural state. And it struck me – even as I stood with my hand half-raised and my mouth open as he walked away – that he must have witnessed enough to label me as a pretty sickly specimen; a shuffling, half-crazed figure; a figure who scarcely merited his esteem – if that had not already been established by the episode of Dad’s book. And not only this, but he must have seen, just before I spotted him, that sudden change come over me as if I were putting on a disguise and pretending to be a different man. Would he have interpreted this as the seal upon my patent hypocrisy – a little process I went through every evening in order to present myself to my family? Or as a guilty reaction (nearer the immediate truth) to the fear of being observed? Either way, a complete sham. I stood at the edge of the grass watching Martin’s yellow back slipping into the shadows of the chestnuts. I thought of calling him again, but I didn’t.
And why had he walked away like that? As a deliberate display of spurning me? Or as some subtle indication of our relations? Shadowing me all the way from the station, like some Indian brave watching the pale-face pass along the trail, and then turning at the moment of being, perhaps quite calculatedly, glimpsed, as if it were for me to settle the question of our future hostility or friendship. I remembered the feeling I had had that morning Martin gave back Dad’s book, that I must make amends to him, not he to me; that I was the one to seek forgiveness, not he. I lost Martin’s yellow T-shirt. All around – I had scarcely noticed them up to now – people were relaxing in the evening sun, playing games or lounging on the grass, like inmates in some institution allowed time for recreation.

Almost the first thing I said when I got in was: ‘Where’s Martin?’

‘He went out.’

‘Where?’

‘He just said “out”.’

Marian was washing lettuce for a salad and she said nothing more and scarcely looked up. I have noticed she is getting like this of late. Quieter, shrinking, far-off. More and more thrifty with her words, as she is becoming, in bed, more and more thrifty with her body.

‘You mean you just let him wander off and you haven’t a clue where he’s going?’

Peter came down the stairs from his bedroom. I am still trying to work out whether he was in on the business of Dad’s book. He has a way now, when I get in from work, of coming dutifully to the front door and saying mechanically, ‘Hello, Dad.’ But there is this anxious, timid look in his face which, until very recently, both pleased me and puzzled me. I’ve arrived at the explanation
now. It’s not that he’s in awe of me. Not at all. But he’s in awe of his brother. Whether he was an accomplice to it or not, he’s impressed by Martin’s daring, and for the first time in his little life he is feeling the onus of something to live up to. He wonders if he could do what Martin did, if he could be so bold. It’s a strange thing how your own kids suddenly start to reveal to you the implicit shape of their lives. If Martin will take after his grandfather, Peter will take after me. Poor mite. Already, in these few weeks, Martin’s face seems to have become firmly moulded; Peter’s is soft and elusive.

‘Hello, Peter. Know where Martin is?’

His eyes sharpen. Of course, all my theories could be wrong.

Then I said, to both of them: ‘Well, didn’t he say when he’d be back?’

They looked at me without speaking, as if they had detected some tell-tale symptom in my behaviour.

Then it almost seemed that a cloud passed over my eyes. Supposing they’re all in it, all together? Quinn and Martin and Marian and Peter?

There is nothing to stop me making inquiries of my own. In fact there is every facility to assist me. I have only to procure the standard forms and covering letters from the office and send them to the right addresses. Such requests for information, of course, should really be authorized
and signed by Quinn, but it is ten-to-one in my favour that, given the obtuseness of bureaucracy, they will be taken in by the official documents and not query my own signature. I know where the forms are kept. How many times have I filled up at Quinn’s behest these formidable sheets of paper headed sternly ‘
STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL
’? In fact, only now does it strike me – perhaps I am a naïve and simple-minded creature, after all – what opportunities exist for such as I for delving into untold privacies, for obtaining almost unlimited access into the darker byways of other people’s lives. All I have to do is to pick out the forms, draft my request – ‘Details of the personal histories of X and Z prior to their employment in H.M. service’ – have it typed – not by Quinn’s secretary, I will ask Maureen, who won’t be aware of what she is doing – and have it franked and despatched. The only risk is if Quinn or any of my colleagues catches me at it. I will have to choose some time when the office is quiet. Not at night, after normal hours. Quinn will be working late too. That is the one time when I will look most suspicious. At lunch-time perhaps. Or, better still, early in the morning. Quinn himself rarely appears before half past nine, and I can invent some pretext for the office messengers to let me in before eight. I can have everything done by nine and then take it through to the typing pool with a batch of routine items later in the day.