Pleasure and a Calling (16 page)

‘But what is it?’ Clearly I had upset her.

‘Nothing. I’m just not feeling too good. And I need to get back to the office. I have a ton of things to do.’

‘Do you think it might have been the venison, or—’

‘No, I’m
fine
. Just …’

‘But how will you—’

‘It doesn’t
matter
.’ She waved away my concerns and headed for the rear exit leading out into the car park.

Now I saw Abigail and Sharp preparing to leave too and I
tried to catch the attention of the waitress, who seemed to see me but swept past twice. It was several minutes before I could cancel the coffees and get the bill. I paid in cash and hurried to the exit. I had to stop for a couple who were entering, and I got outside just in time to see Zoe leaving in a taxi. Abigail and Sharp, though, were nowhere to be seen. I started my car and pulled out on to the main road. They surely couldn’t have got very far, but there was no sign of them on the almost empty road. I saw Zoe’s taxi turning into a filling station, and sped past. Just when I thought I’d lost them, I rounded a bend and caught sight of Sharp’s vehicle some way ahead, delayed by a large flock of cyclists. I kept my distance. After a few moments he seized the opportunity to overtake, somewhat dangerously, leaving me behind. He was getting further ahead, but then instead of staying on the road to town, he took a left turn. I reached the turning and followed, but couldn’t see him. A narrow lane now took me winding through copses and fields. Perhaps he knew a short cut. I put my foot down but could see nothing on the bends visible ahead as the road ribboned down towards the valley. They seemed to have simply vanished, but then, as I passed a wooded area on my right, I saw a glimmer of white amid the trees and bushes.

I slowed and pulled into a gravelly bay some way down the lane, then walked cautiously back to the spot. There was a track into the woods, the entrance almost concealed with hanging branches and undergrowth. It was probably used – though evidently not often – by forest rangers. I crept in, not too badly camouflaged in my brown-green tweed suit. The track didn’t go very far and I spotted it immediately through the thicket of branches and thorns, squatting darkly in the green shadows –
its mirror chrome, its curve of halogen lights set like precious stones, its inscrutable smoked-glass windows. I didn’t dare get any nearer. I just waited and watched, until the body of the car began almost imperceptibly to tremble, and I could watch no more.

L
ET
’
S SAY
I’
M TEN
years old. My father is at his office, so it can’t be the weekend. Perhaps it’s the school holidays. Directly below my window I see Aunt Lillian standing by the Austin calling for cousin Isobel to hurry. I don’t know where they are going – it’s too early for a dance class and her piano lesson is Saturday – but Aunt Lillian has said they won’t be too long. I’m allowed in the park on my own. It’s only a short walk, but I haven’t decided whether to do that or not. The scariest part is the walled stone steps that turn halfway down so that you can’t see what bigger boys or fierce dog might be coming up, or waiting at the bottom. A garden of evergreen bushes and shrubs rises to the side like a dark jungle. Beyond is the huge, bright square of the bowling green and the safety of its old men playing on Sunday. But today isn’t Sunday. I sense its quietness from the top of the steps and decide to go no further.

At home, from my window I look down at the Damatos’ house. Mrs Damato is busy upstairs. The bedroom window is open and, below it, the door is propped open, as it always is on a sunny day. I can hear music. The Damatos, my aunt has told me,
are Italians. In the front garden little Anthony is playing. Who is that with him? I can’t see because of the hedge, but they have toys with them.

When Aunt Lillian said ‘You know what you did’ in her dramatic way, I suppose this was the day she was talking about.

I steal into Mrs Damato’s kitchen. There are no cakes cooling today but she has a huge biscuit tin. Distracted from his play, Anthony watches me enter and then re-emerge, a smile of wonder on his dark little face. His friend has blonde-white hair, white socks, new white leather sandals. Her name is Angela. She holds a small stuffed bunny-rabbit to her chest and looks up to Anthony as he looks up to me. I have a delicious coconut biscuit for them both. The sunny day is ripe for adventure. The street is deserted. I tell them to hold hands as we walk along. At the top of the stone steps I can smell the grass, hear faintly a motor mower. We skirt the empty bowling green, a forbidden square of perfection held by white stones. No one is using the putting green; likewise the tennis court, which has weeds emerging at the crumbling edge of its asphalt surface. On the distant field boys are hoofing a football, their cries just audible; and beyond them, in a dip of the land, the protruding giant ‘A’s of the swings and slide, too far away to discern activity.

We’re not going to the swings. I have a little house, I tell them. We can play there. Excitedly they chat together as we walk, or rather they each issue small announcements about themselves.

‘I’ve got a bunny-rabbit,’ says Angela.

‘What’s for tea in your house?’ Anthony asks me.

‘Wait and see,’ I say.

The truth was, my aunt knew little about what I had done. Guessing at it was enough to horrify her, to feed her imagination, her fear of what I might one day do.

T
HINGS STARTED TO MOVE
. I saw Sharp’s dog again while walking back to town on the Friday, having been to see a client. For no good reason I had decided on a route that would take me down Boselle Avenue, and there he was – Barney, a Jack Russell cross, cartoon-cute and staring from a fading poster fastened to a lamppost. MISSING, it said. REWARD. The Sharps’ name and number was written beneath in marker pen. Further down I could see a second poster and a third, leading my eye to the uphill path that led off Boselle and eventually to the town’s Victorian cemetery with its iron railings and shady trees. Even in their polythene envelopes, the posters were weather-beaten and sodden. Clearly they had been up for weeks. My hand automatically reached out to take one – an act indistinguishable from the routine, omnivorous collecting that had been a part of my life’s work and pleasure since childhood. It was a scrap of colour in Sharp’s blizzard of moments. How easily I was sucked into this. I thought about Abigail – a prize to be wanted above all others – and felt myself losing focus, allowing what I felt for her to be drowned in the mundane fact of Sharp. I felt the need for
purity and my senses tingled at the thought of her. She was a pinhead of light, pulsing through the tumbling cumuli of events, constant but no nearer.

At the office, Zoe was working with studied care at her desk. She had barely spoken to me directly since our lunch together, and only two mornings before I had seen her perhaps twenty yards ahead of me walking past the entrance to the Common, quickening her step as if she had eyes in the back of her head. At work she maintained a level of cheer that hung around the office like static. Her behaviour reminded me of the time immediately following our break-up – the same grim scrupulousness in the brightness of her speech and demeanour that signalled one thing but meant another. I could say nothing to her that she would want to hear.

Wendy buzzed through with the news that a tenant had been found for the Damato flat.

‘Let’s hope he, or she, is more reliable than the last one,’ I said.

‘He’s a he,’ Wendy said. ‘Name of … Mario? Something foreign. Contract’s in the file, three months in advance, and the key’s on my rack if I’m out when he comes. I’m on my lunch break soon.’

I waited till she’d gone, then lifted the key – labelled Marrineau – from the hook and headed for the riverside apartments. I rarely went down there. That whole affair seemed like something from a different era now. I had bought one floor of the development – or, rather, Damato Associates had – as part of the original deal, and had acquired the freehold to the building when the property company ran into trouble two years later. I still let out the middle floor, to single professionals or couples. This flat – an open-plan space with a view of the rear of
the bowling alley and cinema – was shiny and anonymous and smelled of cleaning products. The furniture, now absent, had left prints in the carpet. I stood at the window. Another fine day. On the opposite side, people were eating at café tables the bowling-alley people had put out on a deck. It was a fine apartment. What had brought me here under this amusing alias? I could easily have re-let the place. Perhaps I sensed the need for a safer refuge from Zoe’s inquisitive gaze. Standing there I thought about Marrineau and the time I had looked out from his window. Where was he now? What had become of his famous fringed rawhide jacket?

Perhaps you think I am haunted by the past. On the contrary, I draw from its proximity and heart. All the lessons I have learned are there. You will recall that I took Mrs Luckham’s name for the tenancy of my flat; now Marrineau’s for this one; and of course Damato for my company. It’s not significant, but I cannot help but think of them sometimes. How we leave our passing imprint on the lives of acquaintances and strangers alike. I have woken from dreams of Mr Stamp searching in vain for his ball of rubber bands, or Mrs Wade flummoxed to find a new wing mirror on her dented but otherwise well-cared-for cherry-red car. It’s not so much remembering as wondering how I am remembered, even as a phantom, by others.

My phone started ringing. Being caught here, it made me start, but it was Wendy calling about a valuation.

‘What, now? Is Katya not around?’

‘No, it’s her afternoon off.’

‘Zoe?’

‘She said she would, but now she’s too busy.’

‘Well, is it urgent?’

‘That was my impression. The lady wants to sell. But, no,
she’s at work right now and I said we’d get back to her. She wants to know if we can come at seven this evening.’

And then she told me the address.

For a moment I was speechless. It seemed like a nonsense, or a trick. But then I remembered the flyer I had left on the doormat.

‘Are you sure that’s the address?’

‘Yes, why wouldn’t I be? It’s right here, number four. And it’s a Mrs Sharp – S-H-A-R-P. And, yes, I’m sure. And we’ve sold the house before. It’s in the file.’