The High Flyer (26 page)

IX

“Well, well, well!” said Mrs. Mayfield, finally finding her tongue. “No prizes for guessing who
you
are! It’s Nicky, isn’t it? Or at least that’s what one lady calls you, the lady who’s giving you so much trouble at the moment!”

“Spare me the psychic parlour-tricks,” said Nicholas bored. “I’ve seen them all before.” Picking his way through the broken ornaments which littered the floor he began to move away from the window.

“Don’t you come over all high and mighty with
me
, my love! I know things about you which you wouldn’t want these nice people to hear!”

Nicholas drifted closer to Tucker and said to him: “For your information, Eric, let me point out that Mrs. Mayfield’s behaviour is typical of a corrupt psychic. She affects to recognise me by psychic power, but in fact she would have known by this time that I’m involved in the case; Kim would have told her. She would also be familiar with my name; I have a reputation in the world she inhabits, and I’m sure she’s heard I’m getting divorced. Because of this she feels it’s a safe bet to assume either my wife or some other woman is causing me difficulty, and as my name’s Nicholas it’s an even safer bet to assume the lady in question calls me Nick or Nicky.” Wandering past Tucker he circled the table to my side. I was gripping one of the dining-chairs to stop my hands shaking.

“You’re all right now,” he said, looking straight at me. His grey eyes were brilliantly clear, so clear that they seemed almost blue. “You’re all right.”

I nodded. When he said I was all right I
knew
I was all right. There was no doubt in my mind, and when he briefly covered my hands with his I found I could let go of the chair.

“Eric,” he said, “come and stand by Carter for a moment to help her feel quite safe.”

“You shouldn’t have let Nicky touch you, Kate,” said Mrs. Mayfield sharply. “That man’s a rapist.”

Nicholas naturally paid no attention to this fantastic accusation. Moving on around the table to Kim he said: “I think it’s time you put down that knife.” But Kim’s knuckles only whitened as he increased his grip. He was sweating.

Nicholas looked back at Mrs. Mayfield. “Tell him to put it down.”

Mrs. Mayfield just smirked. “He’s not yours, dear,” she said. “He’s mine.” And as Kim transferred the knife to his right hand in order to wipe the sweat from his forehead with his left, she added abruptly to him: “We’re leaving. I don’t care for the company your wife keeps.”

Immediately Nicholas said to Kim: “You don’t have to go. There’s a choice.”

“Don’t listen to him, pet,” said Mrs. Mayfield, as Kim transferred the knife back to his left hand. “All clergymen are such liars. The rubbish they talk about a convicted Jewish criminal! It shouldn’t be allowed.”

Nicholas paused, looking her up and down. Then he said casually: “Let’s hear you say his name.”

Mrs. Mayfield turned away. “Come along, Jake dear. Off we go.”

At once Nicholas said strongly: “You do have a choice, Kim. Never doubt that there’s a choice. And never doubt that if you choose to stay I’ll give you every possible support.”

Mrs. Mayfield swung back to face him. “Leave him alone, you bastard! He’s mine,
mine
, MINE!”

“He’s not yours, Mrs. Mayfield. You’re lying over and over again and you’re lying because you’re frightened. In fact you’re so frightened that you can’t even say the name of—”

“I’ll do a deal with you,” she said. “You keep the girl—I’ll leave her alone in future—but I keep the man.”

“I don’t do deals, Mrs. Mayfield. I follow a man who never did deals, and it’s in his name that I’m ordering you now to leave this flat, leave it at once and leave it on your own.”

“Fuck you!” shouted Mrs. Mayfield, but she was moving towards the door. “Fuck you and curse you!” Then suddenly she was rushing back, spitting at him and screaming: “Curse you, curse your wife, curse that fat bitch you keep—”

“Lord Jesus Christ,” said Nicholas rapidly, somehow keeping his voice level, “protect me, protect Rosalind, protect Alice—”

“Who’s fucking frightened now!” jeered Mrs. Mayfield, after automatically stepping backwards as if in revulsion. Stepping forward again she added violently: “And he won’t protect you, you know! You’re going to sicken! You’re going to rot! You’re going to—”

“IN THE NAME OF JESUS CHRIST,” declaimed Nicholas, blasting the attack apart by jacking up his power to a new level, “LEAVE HERE AND NEVER RETURN!” But although Mrs. Mayfield recoiled and although she was temporarily speechless, she still managed to spit at him again and suddenly Nicholas seemed to run out of energy. “Lewis!” he shouted. “Help me escort Mrs. Mayfield to the front door!”

Mrs. Mayfield found her tongue. “Calling in the cavalry, dear?” she taunted, but she was backing away from him. I was just thinking numbly that she had at last conceded defeat when she turned and came face to face with Lewis in the doorway.

“Oh, for God’s sake, woman!” he exclaimed in disgust. “Stop making such a pathetic exhibition of yourself!” And to Nicholas he added: “What a very common, vulgar female—and how boring women are when they resort to four-letter words!”

Mrs. Mayfield turned scarlet with rage. Then all hell broke loose as she flung down her handbag and attacked Lewis head on.

X

I find it hard to describe what happened next but I must try. I must try because I was ultimately responsible for it. It was my idea to go to the flat early without seeking advice from the experts. It was my idea to take Tucker with me. It was my note to Alice which brought Nicholas and Lewis hurrying to protect me from the worst-case scenario, and my talk of clergymen to the car-park attendant which enabled them not just to leave their car in the garage but to gain admittance to the building. Afterwards I kept saying to myself: “If I hadn’t done this . . .” and: “If I hadn’t done that . . .” Once one starts saying “if” one can speculate interminably. I did indeed speculate interminably after it was all over, and the speculation proved to be a most effective form of mental torture.

All I can do now is state the facts. Mrs. Mayfield flew at Lewis. He was taken by surprise, I saw that, and I saw too—we all saw—that although he recovered quickly she was suddenly endowed with abnormal strength. Nicholas said later that some people can summon up a huge adrenaline rush to perform feats they could never achieve in ordinary circumstances, and I was immensely relieved he was able to come up with that scientific explanation; I was immensely relieved I could say rationally that having witnessed the clash of two exceptionally powerful personalities, the clash decked out and hyped up by their conflicting world-views, I had then witnessed someone gripped by a huge surge of adrenaline. Yet still I feel there was something about these abnormal events which lay far beyond the boundaries of any rationalist’s vocabulary.

Lewis had a heavy, thickset frame but she shoved him against the wall so hard that he slid sideways, lost his balance and fell across an upturned chair. Nicholas was there in a flash but Mrs. Mayfield, undeterred, attacked him as well. Nicholas was at least six feet tall, with a strong, lean build, but she felled him. He scrambled up at once but she moved in again and he was forced to wrestle with her to keep on his feet. Meanwhile Lewis was trying to get up but he was apparently disabled by pain. It was then that Tucker left my side and rushed into action.

Mrs. Mayfield saw him coming. “Jake!” she shouted, and added a brief sentence in German which I was long past being able to interpret.

Kim moved abruptly forward. I moved too then, wanting to grab his arm and pull him back, but I was too late; everything happened so quickly and there was no time. Time had run out for all of us in that scene, and besides, it’s only in dramatic representations that violence is lengthy and elaborately choreographed. In real life violence is usually just a short, sharp, shattering mess.

Mrs. Mayfield finally flung aside Nicholas with a huge display of force.

He cannoned directly into Tucker.

And Tucker, no longer wearing the jacket which might have protected him, reeled straight into the path of the knife which Kim had so stubbornly refused to discard.

I

All I can remember now are the fragments, as if Mrs. Mayfield’s unnatural force had exploded out of the dark to shatter my memory to pieces. It was like a bomb atrocity: destruction by fragmentation, thousands of pieces hurtling away from the centre at thousands of feet per second. Then after the blast came the long silence followed by the despair that the pieces could ever again be reassembled into a pattern which had meaning and value.

II

The knife went in below the shoulder.

Lewis made all the phone calls, including one to the doctor who worked with Nicholas at the Healing Centre. Too shocked to speak I knelt down by Tucker, but Nicholas was already there; he was gripping Tucker’s hand and saying: “Hold on. I’ve got you. Just hold on.” Tucker was still conscious. I heard him say: “It’s like a war, isn’t it? I’m a front-line casualty,” and as I began to cry, Nicholas slipped off his cross so that Tucker could clasp it.

I heard Tucker whisper: “Say a prayer, Nick. I can’t think of the words.” Then Nicholas prayed, although I cannot now remember what he said; all I can remember is thinking that a man was dying and it was all my fault.

But Tucker held on.

III

He was in the intensive care ward at the hospital for twenty-four hours, a fact which meant no one but his family could visit him. I was far beyond tears by this time. Other things were going on, most of them excruciatingly painful, but the only person I could consistently focus on was Tucker. After a while it occurred to me that this wordless concentration—this other-centred, self-forgetting—was a form of prayer. I had tried praying in words. I would have done anything to try to save him, and even an irrational endeavour such as prayer seemed more endurable than nothing, but all I had been able to produce was a boardroom speech which reduced the entire activity to bathos.

Yet that night, very late, when sleep was something other people did in another universe, I sat by the window of my Rectory bedroom and looked for a long time over the rooftops as I listened to the silence of the City. And as I waited, my whole being focused on willing Tucker to live, I experienced a feeling of minds all flowing into one another and I knew that somewhere beyond all the fragmentation was an immense, indestructible unity. That was when I realised that my focus on Tucker was a form of prayer. It was as if, in the mansion of my consciousness, I had stumbled into a huge hall which connected every room in the house, and in the centre of that hall was a white-hot core of energy which seized my agonised thought patterns and transformed them, with a single burst of light, into an irresistible force.

I instinctively squeezed my eyes shut to protect them, and as the image of the mansion faded I saw my consciousness as just a droplet in the river of multiconsciousness, and I knew the river was flowing steadily towards an unending sea. I wondered how I could make myself heard above the roar of the water, but the next moment I knew there was someone on the riverbank. He came down into the river and he walked upstream towards me, and as my consciousness slipped gears again, losing the image of the river, I knew I was back once more on the corner of Paternoster Row as my unseen companion, unarmed but unassailable, rolled back the darkness of the Principalities and Powers.

I said to him: “If Eric Tucker dies, help me live with the guilt without going mad.” But then it occurred to me that this request was very self-centred, focusing on my own uncomfortable feelings and hardly dwelling on Tucker at all, so I added: “No, forget about me, just concentrate on him.” And I added: “Please,” as an afterthought, although what I was doing talking to this psychological construct as if it were a person was quite beyond my power to rationalise.

Paternoster Row faded. For a second I saw the streets of the City forming a pattern like a vast spider’s web, and as I stared I saw that one of the threads of the web was damaged, spoiling the beauty of the design. And the next moment I was exclaiming to my companion: “Oh, let me help you fix it! Whether Tucker lives or dies, let me help you make it all come right!” And then the molten core at the heart of my multiroomed mansion burst with light again before subsiding into a steady, hissing white noise which I recognised but could not identify.

I woke up. The hiss was rain, hurling itself against the pane and streaking the rooftops of Egg Street, but beyond the darkness the sky was pale as dawn broke at last over the City.

At nine o’clock that morning Gilbert Tucker phoned to say that his brother was out of intensive care and expected to recover.

IV

After that I cried for a whole day. I was still at the Rectory. Nobody seemed to mind. So was Alice. Nobody seemed to mind that either. I was not constantly attended but I knew I was always within reach of people who cared what happened to me. I had no desire for twenty-four-hour attendants anyway. I was too preoccupied with my own personal version of Niagara Falls.

“I can’t understand it,” I said to Val Fredericks, the doctor who worked with Nicholas. “Anyone would think Tucker had died! Why am I crying like this?”

“There’s often a lot of grief in our lives which we suppress because it’s too painful to deal with. Perhaps Eric’s brush with death threw open the hatches which you’d battened down for so long.”

“I didn’t think I’d suppressed anything,” I said, opening another box of Kleenex.

“Maybe that was the problem,” said Val.

V

The next day the tears finally stopped. I went out, hiding my swollen eyes behind a pair of dark glasses borrowed from Alice, and bought some make-up. It was a Saturday, so I also kept my appointment at the hairdresser’s. Afterwards I bought a new suit. Two of the Healing Centre’s “Befrienders” had performed the saintly task of clearing up my flat and packing a suitcase of clothes for me, but they had packed the wrong outfits and I was still unable to face returning to Harvey Tower to retrieve the right ones.

I felt better once I was smartly dressed with my hair styled, my face made up and my nails manicured. At a florist’s I bought a dozen muscular red tulips which conjured up an image of masculine vitality. Then I took a cab to the hospital to see Tucker.

He had a room to himself but unfortunately he was not alone when I arrived. A female in the early stages of old age was present, the lioness guarding her mauled cub. She had golden hair, the result not of chemicals but of red hair turning white, and a plump figure togged up in the fashions of thirty years ago. As I entered the room she gave me a sharp, shrewd, snobbish, judgemental look which indicated that she recognised me as a typical specimen of modern womanhood and found me very seriously wanting.

“Mrs. Tucker? Good afternoon,” I said, falling back upon the iron courtesy which I used to trim the claws of scratchy clients. “I’m Carter Graham.”

“How very kind of you to call, Mrs. Betz,” she said in the sort of voice middle-class women use in the presence of anyone whom they deem “common,” “but unfortunately Eric isn’t up to seeing visitors at present.”

“He’s well up to seeing this one,” said the invalid in the bed.

“Darling, you know the doctor said only one visitor at a time—”

“Do me a favour, Mum, and find a nice vase for those flowers Carter’s brought.”

Mrs. Tucker pursed her lips and patted her Mrs. Thatcher hair-do to make sure everything was standing on end beneath the lacquer. “Two minutes,” she said to me, “and that’s all. He’s still very unwell.” And leaving me no time to reply she swept from the room.

Tucker sighed. There were shadows beneath his eyes; his pallor was marked; his extreme languor hinted that he had a fever; his left forearm was hooked up to a drip. Still clutching my tough tulips I sank down in the chair by the bed and somehow managed to say: “I’m so sorry for everything. I’m so very, very sorry.”

“Hey, that’s my line! I wanted to apologise for making such a mess of looking after you . . . Are you all right?”

I nodded, scrabbling in my bag for Alice’s dark glasses, but my eyes were so full of tears that I could no longer see what I was doing. Abandoning the search I hid my face from him by sniffing the flowers, but I only succeeded in shedding a tear onto the most macho tulip in the bunch. Beyond the muscular red petals, all standing stiffly to attention, the black stamen had a hard-edged, pumped-up look.

“Ms. G, stop making love to those fleshy floral numbers, stop feeling guilty and just listen for a moment. I’m glad you’re here. I’ve got to talk to you about what Mrs. Mayfield said to me.”

“Mrs. Mayfield!” Forgetting my tears I finally raised my face from the tulips. “For God’s sake, what’s there to say? That woman was all lies and phoney ESP!”

“Maybe most of the time, but she got me right. I did live off that woman she described. It was back in my twenties and I was such a mess then, it’s hard to describe what a mess I was, but—”

“Tucker, you don’t have to talk about this—”

“Oh yes, I do! Listen, I lived with women and I lived off women because I was so damned arrogant and so damned deluded that I thought I was some kind of literary genius who was too grand to work for a living—God, how pathetic it all seems now, but that’s where I was, that was the kind of life I was living, and of course it all went wrong and I wound up homeless and penniless on Gil’s doorstep—couldn’t go to my parents, I was too ashamed, and my other brother had long since washed his hands of me—”

“But it’s so easy to make mistakes in one’s twenties!”

“These weren’t just mistakes. My entire way of life was a cataclysmic balls-up which destroyed my self-respect and made a lot of people, including myself, very unhappy. But when I was thirty and wound up broke on Gil’s doorstep, I finally started getting my act together. Gil said I had to have a reliable way of earning my keep, a way which would allow me some self-respect, and that was when I did my first round of officeskills courses—I didn’t want to, I thought secretarial work was just for women and wimps, but Gil was implacable. He said: ‘You’re a spoiled, pigheaded, self-centred, immature bastard, but do you really have to be a sexist bastard as well?’ So I borrowed the money from him to do the courses, and I stayed with him rent-free and I washed dishes in the evenings at a Covent Garden restaurant to earn some pocket-money. Then I worked in the West End as a secretary full time—I had a dirt-cheap room in Lambeth, and gradually I shaped up and grew up—and it was all because of Gil, all because of the brother I’d despised for being gay, but when the chips were down he cared enough to stand by me, and that kind of caring makes you think, it makes you believe you might possibly be more than a pile of shit, it makes you hope and strive for better things, it gives you courage.

“So I turned my life around, thanks to Gil—but no, it wasn’t just thanks to Gil, because beyond Gil was . . . well, never mind all that. No, wait a minute,
I
mind, what am I doing not calling a spade a spade just because you’re an atheist? I’m such a bloody coward sometimes, but listen, here’s the way it really was: I turned my life around by the grace of God through Jesus Christ and the power of the Spirit, as Christians say—and now you can laugh just as much as you like, but—”

“I’m not laughing,” I said.

“—but all I can tell you is that’s the best way of describing what happened. Then I got a book published—and another—and in the end I could afford to adopt this pattern of doing office-work part time instead of full time, and I moved out of my Lambeth dump into a neat little pad in Fulham, just one room, but there was a tree outside the window, I loved that tree, and then . . .

“Well, last year I had a relapse. Gil says the spiritual journey’s often a bumpy ride, and I hit a bump—although ‘bump’ is hardly the word to describe the married model with expensive tastes who—well, all I need say is that I wound up dead broke and homeless again on Gil’s doorstep, but I’ve got over that now, I’ve got my finances sorted out and I pay Gil rent and when my next book’s published I’ll get a room of my own again and have another shot at living happily ever after.

“Well, Ms. G, that’s all I have to say, but I had to say it because truth matters, doesn’t it, and I’d like to think I would have been truthful about my past anyway in due course without Mrs. Mayfield forcing my hand. But you and I hadn’t reached the stage where we could have swapped pasts, had we, and probably we never would have done, since you’re all bound up with someone else, so this scene between us now—this scene now—it’s like—it’s like—God, I’m going fuzzy, my brain’s closing down, but I must finish what I want to say—”

“This scene now—”

“This scene now’s like a moment out of time, but when you remember me in future I don’t want you to think: ‘What a gigolo, what a shit!’ I want you to think: ‘He was an honest man who told the truth,’ and then perhaps there’s a chance you’ll remember me without wanting to wipe the memory from your mind.”

All I could do was weep.

Mrs. Tucker returned to the room and evicted me.

Back at the Rectory I destroyed yet another box of Kleenex.

VI

And Kim? Where was he while all these tear-drenched scenes were going on? Whereabouts in the wasteland created by the explosion was the split-off fragment which contained him?

Directly after the stabbing I could focus only on Tucker, but once Nicholas had left with him in the ambulance Lewis and I hurriedly searched the flat. The police were present by that time, but all the questions had had to wait until Tucker was on his way to hospital.

We found Kim in the small bedroom where his junk was stored. When we entered the room we saw he was sitting on the floor with his back to a packing-case, his arms clasped tightly around his knees.

All he said was: “If I move I’ll disintegrate.”

As Nicholas’s colleague, Val Fredericks, joined us Lewis said to Kim: “Our doctor’s got the medicine which’ll keep you in one piece,” and Val, taking in the situation at a glance, said strongly to the police who were trying to crowd into the room: “Stand back, please—this man is clearly ill.”

So the police withdrew, and as Lewis knelt down by Kim and Val opened her black bag for the hypodermic, I watched from the threshold, my fingers clinging to the frame of the door. I found myself staring at Val, whom I had not met before, and trying to visualise her working in partnership with Nicholas. She was a woman in her thirties, plump, with carelessly dyed short blonde hair, large gold earrings and no make-up except for scarlet lipstick with a high-gloss finish. Beneath her red anorak she was wearing an off-beat combination of a formal white blouse with denim dungarees. It may seem bizarre that I paid so much attention to Val at that harrowing moment, but I found it easier to look at her than to look at Kim’s contorted form and distorted expression.

“If you could just slip out of your jacket—”

“I can’t move.”

“Lewis will hold you. He’ll stop you splitting.”

“He can’t.”

“Yes, I can,” said Lewis, and gripped him hard.

This sort of dialogue continued for over a minute. Both Lewis and Val were so patient and kind while all I could do was shiver with revulsion and rage.

“Carter,” said Lewis at last, as if he could feel the whole range of my violent emotions, “would you mind waiting in the passage, please?”

As I withdrew I heard Kim whisper: “I didn’t mean to kill that man.”

“He’s not dead.”

“Then why am I being given a lethal injection?”

I stumbled into the shower-room, far from all the windows, and waited, panting and shuddering, for the ordeal to end.

A second ambulance eventually took Kim to a mental hospital in south-east London. Val went with him in the ambulance and so did two of the police, but since by that time he was unconscious they never had the opportunity to question him.

Lewis and I stayed on at the flat to be interrogated at mind-numbing length by their colleagues.