On the way home his father had said, casually, ‘Better not tell your mam.’ And then he’d sat him astride his shoulders and carried him all the whole way home, all the way up the street with everybody looking, his meaty hands clasped round his son’s thin white thighs. For once he’d ridden home in triumph. And he hadn’t told his mam, though he’d stood by her sick bed and listened to his father describe a visit to the park. He’d been invited to join the great conspiracy and even at the age of five he knew the value of it. He wasn’t going to jeopardize future outings by telling her anything.
That night he’d woken up, hot and sticky, knowing he was going to be sick. He started to cry and after a long time his father came in, blundering round and stubbing his toes before he found the light. He looked up at him, the huge man, looming over the bed. Then, slowly, erupting from his mouth, the jelly babies returned – intact, or very nearly so – while his father stood and gaped.
It must have been quite a sight, Prior thought, helping Sarah out of the cab and turning to pay the driver. Like watching a sea-horse give birth.
Once inside the flat he lit the gas fire and made two mugs of strong sweet tea, while Sarah went to take off her wet clothes. She came back wearing his dressing-gown, shivering from the cold. He sat her down between his knees and towelled her hair.
‘You know you were saying about the bit you liked best? For me it’s your hair,’ he said, feeling his tongue thick and unwieldy, getting in the way of his teeth. ‘It was the first thing I noticed. The different colours.’
‘You told me,’ she said, twisting round. ‘And you needn’t make it sound so romantic. You were wondering which colour was down there. Weren’t you?’
He smiled. ‘Yes.’
They sat sipping their tea. She said, ‘Well, are you going to tell me?’
‘Yes.’ He picked up two handfuls of hair and tugged on them. ‘But it’s worse than you think. I need
you
to tell
me
what happened.’
‘When?’
‘On the boat.’
Her eyes widened, but she didn’t argue. ‘You gave your seat to that woman and got a cup of tea and then you went and stood over by the bar. I didn’t see what
happened then, I was looking at the bank. Then the sun came out and some of the girls went out on deck and this woman thought she ought to go and keep an eye on them. So next time you came back there was a seat next to me. I asked you which bridge we were going under and you didn’t answer. I could see you were in one of your moods. So I left you to it. Then when we got out, that man in the Palm House was waiting at the top of the steps. He said something about me – I honestly didn’t hear what it was – and you hit him. He came back at you, and you lifted your cane and you were obviously going to brain him, so he backed off. He went across the bridge, and you got hold of me and dragged me into the Abbey. I kept saying, “What’s the matter?” I couldn’t get an answer, so I thought, sod it. And I went off and looked at things on me own.’ She waited. ‘Are you telling me you don’t remember all that?’
‘I remember the first bit.’
‘You don’t remember hitting him?’
‘No.’
‘Who is he?’
‘Doesn’t matter.’
‘It does bloody matter.’
‘It’s got nothing to do with you.’
Her face froze.
As she pulled away, he said, ‘No, look, I didn’t mean it like that.’ He buried his head in his hands. ‘I’ll tell you all about him if you like, but that’s not the bit that matters. What matters is that I can’t remember.’
‘It’s happened before?’
‘It’s been happening for oh… two months.’
He could see her mind busily at work, trying to minimize the significance. ‘But you lost your memory once before, didn’t you? I mean, when you came back from France you said you couldn’t remember anything.’
She switched to a tone of condemnation. ‘You’ve let yourself get run down, that’s what you’ve done.’
‘Look, I need you to tell me about it.’ He tried to sound light-hearted. ‘You’re the first person who’s met him.’
‘Don’t you mean “me”? Well, it
is
you, isn’t it?’
Prior shook his head. ‘You don’t understand.’ He leapt up and took a piece of paper out of the top drawer of the sideboard. ‘Look.’
Sarah looked down and read:
Why don’t you leave my fucking cigars alone?
‘I found some cigars in my pocket. I threw them away.’
‘But it’s your writing.’
‘
YES
. How can I say “I” about that?’
Sarah was thinking. ‘When I said it was you, I didn’t just mean… the obvious. I meant I… I meant I recognized you in that mood. Do you remember the first time we went out together? That day on the beach.’
‘Yes, of–’
‘Well, you were like that then. Hating everybody. You were all right on the train, but once we were on the beach, I don’t know what happened, you just went right away from me and I couldn’t reach you. I could feel the hatred coming off you. It was like anybody who hadn’t been to France was
rubbish
. Well, you were like that on the boat. And there’s no talking to you when you’re in that mood. You just despise everybody.’ She hesitated. ‘Including me.’
‘It’s not a mood, Sarah. People remember moods.’
In bed that night, coiled round her, he kissed all along her spine, gently, so as not to wake her, his lips moving from one vertebra to the next.
Stepping stones to sanity.
But the day after tomorrow, she would be gone.
Sarah left early on the Monday morning. They clung together by the barrier at King’s Cross, breathing in coke fumes, and did not say goodbye.
He worked late, putting off the moment when he’d have to face the empty flat. On his way home he kept telling himself it wouldn’t be too bad, or at least it wouldn’t be as bad as he expected.
It was worse.
He wandered from room to room, searching for traces of her, trying to convince himself a dent in the sofa cushion was where her head had rested. He sat down and put his own head there, but this simply provided a more painful vantage point from which to survey the emptiness of the room.
It’ll get better, he told himself.
It didn’t.
He took to walking the streets at night in an effort to get tired enough to sleep. London by night fascinated him. He walked along the pavements, looking at place-names: Marble Arch, Piccadilly, Charing Cross, Tottenham Court Road. All these places had trenches named after them. And, gradually, as he walked through the
streets of the night city, that other city, the unimaginable labyrinth, grew around him, its sandbag walls bleached pale in the light of a flare, until some chance happening, a piece of paper blown across the pavement, a girl’s laugh, brought him back to a knowledge of where he was.
He got a letter from Sarah and put it on the mantelpiece, under a small china figure of a windblown girl walking a dog, where he would see it as soon as he came through the door.
Often, on his night-time walks, he thought about Spragge, and the more he thought the more puzzled he became. The man’s whole sweaty, rumpled, drink-sodden appearance suggested a down-and-out, a man blundering through life, and yet the effort required to watch the flat and follow him all the way to Kew revealed a considerable degree of persistence. It didn’t make sense.
One obvious explanation was that he was working for Lode, but Prior distrusted the idea. The atmosphere in the Intelligence Unit was such that baseless suspicions were mistaken for reality at every turn. It was like a trick picture he’d seen once, in which staircases appeared to lead between the various floors of a building. Only very gradually did he realize that the perspective made no sense, that the elaborate staircases connected nothing with nothing.
His landlady, Mrs Rollaston, turned up on the doorstep, cradling her bosom in her arms as women do when they feel threatened. ‘I thought you’d like to know there’s somebody coming to do the bins. I know I said Monday, but I just couldn’t get anybody.’
She was obviously
continuing
a conversation.
Prior nodded, and smiled.
He could recall no occasion on which he’d spoken to Mrs Rollaston about the bins.
He needed to see Spragge, but the address on the file, as he discovered standing on a gritty, windswept pavement in Whitechapel, was out of date. The bloodless girl who peered up at him from the basement, a grizzling baby in her arms, said she’d lived there a year and no, she didn’t know where the previous tenant had gone. The landlady might, though.
The landlady, traced to the snug bar of the local pub, confirmed the name had been Spragge. She didn’t know where he was now. Did
he
know this was the very pub Mary Kelly had been drinking in the night the Ripper killed her? She’d known Mary Kelly as well as she knew her own sister, heart in one place, liver in another, intestines draped all over the floor,
in that very chair
–
He bought her a port and lemon and left her to her memories. Odd, he thought, that the fascination with the Ripper and his miserable
five
victims should persist, when half of Europe was at it.
He was losing more time. Not in huge chunks, but frequently, perhaps four or five times a day. In the evenings, unless he was seeing Rivers, he stayed at home. He knew the flat was bad for him, both physically and mentally, but he was afraid to venture out because it seemed to give
him
more scope. Nonsense, of course.
He
could and did go out, though sometimes the only sign was the smell of fresh air on Prior’s skin.
One morning Lode sent for him.
‘I just thought I’d share the good news,’ Lode said. ‘Since there isn’t much of it these days. They’ve caught MacDowell.’
Prior was knocked sick by the shock, but he managed to keep his face expressionless. ‘Oh? When?’
‘A few days ago. In Liverpool. Charles Greaves’s house. They got Greaves too.’
‘Hmm. Well, that is progress.’
‘Good news, isn’t it?’
Prior nodded.
‘You know,’ Lode said, watching him narrowly, ‘I used to think I understood you. I used to think I had you taped.’ He waited. ‘Ah, well. Back to work.’
Prior wondered why Lode’s endless patting and petting of his moustache should ever have struck him as a sign of vulnerability. It didn’t seem so now.
The nights were bad. He was still taking sleeping draughts, sometimes repeating the dose when the first one failed to work. Rivers strenuously advised him against it, but he ignored the advice. He had to sleep.
That evening, fast asleep after the second draught, he was awakened by a knocking on the door. The bromide clung to him like glue. Even when he managed to get out of bed, he felt physically sick. For a moment, as he pulled on his breeches and shirt, he thought he might actually be sick. The knocking went on, then stopped.
Presumably whoever it was had got tired and gone away. Prior was about to fall back into bed when he remembered he’d left the door open. Of all the bloody stupid things to do. But it was the only way of getting some air into the place.
It was no use, he’d have to go and close it.
The passage was full of the smell of rotting cabbage. The area round the bins had not been cleaned, in spite of Mrs Rollaston’s promise. Prior stumbled along, hitching up his braces as he went.
The door was open. He looked out. The sky was not the normal blue of a summer evening, but brownish,
like caught butter. He went back inside and closed the door.
He was walking past the door of the living-room when he heard a movement.
Slowly, he pushed the half-open door wide. Spragge was sitting, stolidly, in the armchair, thick fingers relaxed on his splayed thighs. He looked up with a sheepish, rather silly expression on his face. Sheepish, but obstinate. ‘Well?’ he said. ‘What do you want to see me about?’
‘Do you always walk into people’s houses uninvited?’
‘I thought I heard you say come in.’ He didn’t bother to make the lie convincing. ‘I knew you must be in because the door was open. You want to watch that. You could get burgled.’ A glance round the room pointed out that there was nothing worth taking.
Prior was angry. Not because Spragge had walked in uninvited; it was deeper, less rational than that. He was angry because of the way Spragge’s fingers curled on his thighs, innocent-looking fingers, the waxy pink of very cheap sausages.
‘I’ll get up and knock again if you like,’ Spragge said, pulling a comical face.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Prior said, sitting down. ‘What do you want?’
‘What do
you
want?’
Prior looked blank.
‘You’re the one who’s been chasing me.’
Spragge was drunk. Oh, he hid it well. There was just the merest hint of over-precision in his speech, a kind of truculence bubbling beneath the surface.
‘What about a drink?’ Prior suggested.
‘Yeh, all right.’
Prior needed time to think, to work out how he was going to approach Spragge. He went into the kitchen where he kept the whisky. The trouble was he detested
Spragge to the point where the necessary manipulation became distasteful. You didn’t
manipulate
people like Spragge. You squashed them.
He poured a jug of water and, in the sudden silence after he’d turned off the tap, heard a movement, furtive, it seemed to him, in the next room. Rapidly, he crossed to the door.
Spragge was removing Sarah’s letter from underneath the ornament on the mantelpiece. No, not removing it.
Putting it back
.
‘Have you read that?’ Prior burst into the room. He was remembering how explicit Sarah’s references to their love-making had been. ‘Have you read it?’
Spragge swallowed hard. ‘It’s the job.’
‘You shouldn’t’ve done that.’
‘Aw, for God’s sake,’ Spragge said. ‘Do you think she’d mind? I saw her in the Palm House, she virtually had your dick out.’
Prior grasped Spragge lightly by the forearms and butted him in the face, his head coming into satisfying, cartilage-crunching contact with Spragge’s nose. Spragge tried to pull away, then slumped forward, spouting blood, snorting, putting up an ineffectual shaking hand to stop the flow.