Players at the Game of People (16 page)

After which, when he stretched out on his enormous bed, a companion
would present her(?)self, and there would be further gratification,
often as remarkable as the food.
Gradually he came to realize that there was no reason why he should have
gone to Bill's to inquire about the fate of Gorse; that there was no
more reason why he should concern himself with her than with Patricia,
or Elvira, or Kate, or Lucy, or Guinevere, or . . .
The list was far too long for him to review.
And yet something remained: an insoluble residue. He combated it as best
he might; it proved resistant.
It was a fact that for the first time ever he had felt impelled to inquire
after one of his recruits. It was a fact that, for the first time ever, he
had infringed the unspoken courtesies which obtained between . . . well,
between himself and those who were like him. (He knew no more precise term.)
It was a fact that instead of enjoying rest, refreshment, and reward from
his latest payment for services rendered he had --
Stop. Thinking back to that was unbearable, particularly to the (shy away!)
timeless time when he had been abandoned.
But . . .
All right! So he had been in a pet! Was the way he had been treated
justifiable, even in a pet?
Like a stone in his shoe, that possessed the power to irk. Having nothing
to do, nowhere to go, compelled to wait for Hamish's report, he fretted
ceaselessly as though he were an oyster doubtful about the advantages
of becoming parent to a pearl.
Without having the faintest idea whether one would emerge.
All his sources of gratification wore away. Daily he inspected the street
through rain-washed windows smeared with bird shit, expecting the blond
woman to be there. At first he could turn away from frustration when she
was not and seek solace in one of the strange, even weird, liquors and
drugs which now were being furnished to him . . . and which, on the
unconscious level, he was beginning to understand. One mealtime he set a
forkful of food to his mouth just long enough to taste, and withdrew it,
exclaiming to the air, "I know how that was done!"
It was extraordinarily delicious. It drew on a cuisine he had never
imagined. It had been -- he was instinctively certain -- dipped in liquid
nitrogen before cooking. As if to mark some sort of achievement in his
life, the partner who came to him that night extorted amazing pleasure
from his body.
Yet in the morning when he woke to carnival in Bahia his mouth was full of
the taste of ashes. He was reminded of the hangovers he had once endured.
And felt cheated. It should have been part of the bargain that there would
be no more.
He found himself beginning to wish he had a copy of his contract, well
though he knew it could never have been written down.
The phone rang. Weary of his outlook on the Piazza San Marco, Godwin
reached for it, thankful for the least distraction.
It said, "Hamish. Meet me at Whitestone Pond."
"You found out who she -- " Godwin began eagerly, but the line went
dead. For a moment he was annoyed; then he began hastily to dress.
Lately he had not used the car, thinking it too conspicuous,
but now he was in too great a hurry to consider the hell of public
transport, the agonies of delay, the overcrowding and constant risk of
breakdown. Ignoring speed limits whenever traffic allowed -- and that
meant most of the way, for although, as he realized with surprise,
this was a Sunday morning, there were very few people out and about
except the omnipresent trios of police, two men and a woman, charged
with a different kind of duty than arresting drivers for speeding --
he reached his destination in less than twenty minutes.
Hamish was waiting for him on a corner where in the old days there had
always been numerous speakers on Sunday morning, advocating political,
social, or religious causes, who always attracted at least a dozen
vaguely interested listeners. Today there were none, and the fact that
the sky was once more gray and overcast did not suffice to explain the
whole reason. But that was no concern of Godwin's, or Hamish's.
Linking arms affectionately and leading the way toward the pub a few
hundred yards away, Jack Straw's Castle with its improbable crenellations,
the detective said with warm enthusiasm, "My dear God, I'm indescribably
obliged to you! What a fascinating challenge you offered! I've quite
neglected my tame discs since I last saw you. Every moment of my time
has been devoted to unraveling your little mystery."
"Have you found her?"
"Found? If you mean have I made face-to-face contact with the lady --
scarcely, old man! But I know who she must be, and I can tell you where
to look for her yourself."
He paused, relishing the recollection of his achievement -- and it was
one, as Godwin readily conceded; perhaps nobody else in the world could
proceed to a sure conclusion on such flimsy evidence. That, though, was
what Hamish had struck his bargain for, so it was not he who deserved
praise for his success.
"Come on!" -- impatiently. "Out with it!"
He unlinked his arm, for the few passers-by, bound like themselves for
the pub as opening time approached, were giving them suspicious and
hostile looks.
"Very well," Hamish sighed, glancing around to make sure they were not
overheard. But they had passed the pond itself, a shallow artificial
bowl where two or three bare-legged children were wading in pursuit of
toy yachts under the bored supervision of parents or nannies, and the
vacant near-countryside of Hampstead Heath stretched away on either hand.
"Her name is Barbara Tupper, alias Simpkins. Age going on fifty, five feet
five, slim build, naturally fair hair worn long, divorced, one child
not
by her ex-husband . . ."
In a monotonous professional drone he reeled off item after item that he
had learned about her, and with every phrase Godwin's heart sank more.
"I think you know her," Hamish said suddenly, breaking off and staring
keenly at him.
"Yes."
Who, after all, was more likely to be on Gorse's trail than her mother?
"How?"
But there was no chance for Godwin to answer, to explain that in fact
he didn't know her, had only recognized that she must be someone he had
heard of.
Not waiting for a reply, Hamish spun on his heel, almost tripping over
his own feet in his hurry, and strode back the way they had come. A few
incurious strollers noticed but paid no attention.
Godwin halted, staring. He thought of calling out, but it seemed
pointless. Hamish had always been a strange and unpredictable person;
perhaps he had been struck by a crucial idea which he felt he must act
on instantly. One riddle having been solved, there must be another,
or he would grow bored with his mere existence, as witness the lengths
he went to to invent problems for himself.
When he had gone twenty or thirty paces, though, he looked distractedly
from side to side as though intending to cross the road from the pond
side to the East Heath, and wanting to check for oncoming traffic. There
was some -- a couple of motorbikes roaring up from the direction of the
Bull and Bush and a group of three cars approaching more slowly from
Central Hampstead.
Instead of waiting, he disregarded their presence and walked into the
middle of the road, where he began to twitch and jerk and fidget and
mouth nonsense, his eyeballs rolling upward in their sockets. Like a
marionette controlled by a crazy puppet-master he shook and swayed and
jumped up and down and beat his face with his fists until blood began
to run from one corner of his mouth, after which he raised his arms
higher and started to rip his hair out by handfuls. All the time his
lips were moving in soundless curses. Shortly he wet himself; by then,
most of his hair was gone, leaving huge raw patches on his scalp, and
he turned to clawing at his forehead first, then his eyes.
Before anybody reached him among the few onlookers who were not too
frightened to interfere, he had gouged both eyeballs out and with horrific
and appalling strength he had torn open the sides of his throat so that
his Adam's apple fell forward in a gush of blood and he tumbled to the
roadway and was dead.
Godwin could do nothing to help. He stood so completely paralyzed by the
pangs of punishment that he could not even shut his eyes and escape the
sight of what was happening.
Police appeared from everywhere, at least twenty of them, some running
up the steep slopes of the Heath, some emerging from dark green hedges
behind the pond, some seeming to materialize from thin air. Godwin still
stood helpless. He was not the only person, though, who to outward view
had simply been transfixed by shock. Half a dozen mostly elderly folk
nearby were crying and having to lean on each other for support, while
the children who had been playing in the pond were being whisked away,
screaming.
That was what had been most horrible of all: the fact that Hamish had
not uttered a sound while he was destroying himself.
Or, to put it another way: being whipped to death.
At long, long last Godwin was able to move stiltedly away and return
to his car. Carefully, slowly, thinking about every single movement, he
drove home, half certain of what he was going to find when he got there,
and likewise half eager and half terrified.
As he approached his home street he thought his sight was being blurred
by tears, but it was rain once more; people were ducking into shelter
to avoid it, a mere drizzle thus far but portending heavier downpours
later on. By the time he left the car in the garage and made for home
it was coming down in steady rodlike streaks, warm but harsh.
And there, standing in the same porchway on the other side of the road,
was the woman. He had somehow known (but if she had not been there he
would have forgotten his premonition -- of course, and as usual) and
was anyhow prepared.
She was wearing old jeans and a grubby brown jacket and a plastic snood
that failed to cover her hair. Her face was
the
face: the one which had
haunted too many of his dreams since he won his George Medal. Until this
moment, he had been able to forget in his waking hours just how many such
there had been. It was aged to correspond with what Hamish had told him.
But nothing fitted! Nothing,
nothing
! He could not have gone back to
a past reality! If she was fifty now, she could not have been ten during
the Blitz!
Poised to enter his home, he checked. She was approaching, glancing up
at the rain much as Hamish had glanced left and right as though to avoid
oncoming vehicles --
stop it!
She was proffering something for him to
look at, and waving. He waited under the porch of his home with a sense of
foreboding. The downpour redoubled just as she arrived on his side of the
road, soaking her from head to foot. But she paid no heed. She flourished
before him a scrap of newspaper in a transparent plastic envelope.
And said something, drowned out as a boy on a noisy motorbike roared
along the street, attracting all the attention of all the kids who had
been, as usual, turned out of their houses to fend for themselves, to
go to school or not as they chose, their parents having given up caring.
"What?"
"I said" -- shouting now -- "I want to know who the hell you think you are!"
"Why?"
"You can't be
him
! You can't!" She was staring at him with huge sad eyes,
rain dripping from the rat-tails of her blond locks. "But you look so
like -- ! And where the hell is my daughter?"
She clutched his arm; he shook her off, turning away. "I think you must
be out of your mind --
madam
!" he said cuttingly, and resolved that if
she persisted, he would invoke the flex. Probably he should already have
done so.
"Explain this, then!" she shouted, thrusting the plastic-clad press
cutting under his nose. "Go on! Explain!"
"Get lost, you maniac!" Godwin barked. And had to dodge, at risk of
losing his footing on the worn steps, as she shot her right arm out
toward him. But she was not intending to hit him, only to catch hold
and make him look at what she was clutching.
"It's your face!" she cried. "And it's impossible -- it can't be true!
But -- oh, damn you, why can't you understand? It is your face!"
All of a sudden, despite the rain smears on the clear plastic, Godwin
recognized a pattern on the paper: to the left, a column of text, to
the right, a series of four photographs, a headline spanning both.
And the world seemed to come to a petrified halt.
At long last he said, hearing his voice gravelly and rough, "Where did you
get that?"
"I've kept it all my life. Do you recognize it?"
"You think" -- he was calming now -- "one of those photos is of me?"
"No, of course not. It's of somebody exactly like you called Flight
Lieutenant Ransome who rescued me from my parents' home when a flying
bomb landed on it in 1944. But I've not only carried this with me ever
since. I've carried the clearest possible memory of the face of the man
who rescued me. I've been in love with it -- not with him, with it. I can
scarcely bear to look at you because you wear the face I remember. But
I must. I have to, because so far as I can find out you were the last
person to see my daughter alive."
She dropped her hands to her sides and stood before him, a foot lower
on the steps of the house, with rain pelting down on her head, like a
penitent at the shrine of some strict but not unkindly water god.
"Alive?" Godwin said after a while.
"They think she must either have been murdered and very well hidden,
or kidnapped out of the country. There's a big demand for European
girls in the Arab countries, and -- so they tell me -- the wealthy
men out there are now too sophisticated to worry about whether or not
they're virgins. Just so long as they're good at what becomes their job
. . . But I know Dora. I know she's never been a person to obey -- me,
or anybody. So I think it's far more likely that she's dead."
There was a dead pause, during which the noise of the motorbike finally
faded into silence and Godwin compared -- point for point -- these
features with his recollection of the little girl he had known as Greer.