The Light of Day: A Novel (3 page)

5

I cross back over the Broadway and make for the side-alley where I leave the car. If Rita’s watching she’ll have lost me now. Well, if she wanted, she could sneak out and shadow me all day, the office left on hold. If she did it carefully, how would I know? Under surveillance by my own staff—all one of them. It’s what happens. You train them up . . .

The car, tucked in, by old arrangement (and annual rent) against the side wall of Leigh’s yard, is like an ice-box, though it’s only been standing a couple of hours. There’s still an oval of unmelted frost on the roof.

I put the flowers on the back seat. The wrapping (silver and grey stripes) is almost superfluous, since I mean to take them out and lay them just by themselves and flat. There are those little perforated pots you can get, made for the purpose, I don’t know where from. Florists maybe. And the cemetery must have water taps. But it’s November, a cold snap: they aren’t going to last long, either way. And the flowers themselves are almost superfluous. It’s the thought that counts.

“Will you do it for me, George?”

“Yes, of course.”

I don’t know how she gets through this day. This night. November 20th. Is the second year easier than the first? Is that how it works—it’s time that serves you? Does it get any more possible to say (how can it?): that was someone else, another person, not me?

Like the photo of yourself as a kid, staring at you from another world, another planet. Was that me, really me ? And the kid stares back as if he doesn’t know you either, never seen you before in his life.

Time: it’s really on your side?

I switch on the engine. The dark taste again. The old faded sign on the wall says “Leigh’s—Bathroom and Sanitary Ware.” Then I creep out from the shadow of the wall and turn into the glare of the sun in the alley, grabbing my shades from the dash.

“Yes, of course I’ll go. And take flowers.”

And report back.

It’s the first time this has happened (though it’s only the second year)—this day and my visit coinciding. It won’t happen again, maybe. Every two weeks (and it can’t always be Thursdays). Two years now, and—we don’t know— another eight, if we’re lucky, maybe nine. Another five before we’ll even know the chances. By then she’ll be somewhere else, again. She’ll have done the rounds. But now two years have gone, she knows, we know, we don’t have to think about it any more: I’m here for the duration.

And wherever she goes . . .

The time’s gone when she used to look at me coldly, almost with hate. (She had to do it, I know, turn herself to ice.) You won’t keep this up, George, you’ll stop, just wait, just you see. The time’s long gone when she first let the look change—if she didn’t risk the words. Please come back. Please be here next time.

Now it’s a different look still. It’s just a look that passes between us, a look that could pass through a wall.

Where would I be without you, George?

In prison, I suppose.

Eight more years. Maybe. Five before we’ll even have a clue.

A photo of Sarah when she was five years old. I wanted a picture, I don’t know why it was important, of when she was small. She told me where I could find the albums, the loose photos, a whole collection of stuff, tokens, souvenirs, little things her parents had put away once. (Thank God, she said, they were both dead.) Treasures from another life.

“Burn it all, George. Fucking burn it all.”

But I didn’t. I’m their secret curator now (I think she knows).

And there—would you believe it?—in a white embossed-card frame, behind a flap of gauze-paper, was a photo of Sarah aged (I’d say) five. And it was taken in my father’s studio—his stamp on the back—in Chislehurst High Street, in nineteen fifty-something (she’d lived in Petts Wood then).

The things that wait and lie in store.

The sun feels warm through the windscreen, but the street’s full of people hunched in coats, chins buried in scarves. I drive along the Broadway, past the station, towards the Hill. From Wimbledon’s lower end (my end) to the snooty Village on the hill. Past Worple Road. Then at Woodside I turn right, and then left into St. Mary’s Road, and I’m into the leafy, looked-after, quiet zone of houses set back from the street, of lawns and drives and hedges and burglar alarms. Rooftops backed by trees.

I have to do it. I didn’t say—nor did she. But I have to do it, today. Beecham Close. Number fourteen. Someone else lives there now. Another world, another planet. I could find out all about them, check them out. It’s how I make my living, after all.

A zone, as you climb the hill, of verges and double garages and wrought iron and speed bumps and private nursery schools. But don’t knock it. If you make your living how I do, then make it where they’ll pay your fees, and where—with all they’ve got—they can still (you’d be surprised) do the strangest things.

And don’t knock it anyway. This home-and-garden land, this never-never land where nothing much is ever meant to happen. These Wimbledons and Chislehursts. What else is civilization for?

6

Money for old rope. I might have passed the job to Rita.

“These are my terms, Mrs. Nash.” I handed her the slip of paper. “For a job like this I won’t ask you to sign anything—and I won’t assume I’m hired until I get precise instructions. The rule is—for obvious reasons—you contact me, I don’t contact you.”

They blink, a little startled. They’ve already entered a conspiracy, a pact.

Sunlight streamed between us. The stickiness had left her eyes and she looked for a moment simply lost. But they all look like that, as if they’d come on purpose but now they seemed to be here by accident. A mistake, the wrong door—they’d meant the Tanning Centre. They came in as the injured party—now they’ll leave in a sort of guilty daze.

That’s why—unless they’re a certain type—you always leave them the option, the margin. You allow for the call that might come the next morning, even the same day. A change of mind, a reconsideration. My services wouldn’t be required after all. And sometimes, though I don’t say it and I don’t like to lose a fee, I think: that’s the best decision you could make.

Rita might have come in and said, breezily: “Mrs. Nash—yesterday morning. We can cross her off the list.”

I said, “You can send the photos—or bring them in if you prefer.”

She seemed to have got stuck to her chair. She still clutched the strap of her shoulder-bag, knuckles squeezed tight.

Someone some day should write a book about handbags, shoulder-bags. Maybe they have. About how women cling to them, as if they’re their closest friend. When all else fails. The things you find inside them. (I’ve lost count of how many I’ve rifled through.)

Where she is now they can’t have handbags. The straps.

And now, of course, I have that shoulder-bag—along with all the other things. In my safe keeping. And, yes, it’s like a pet. I’ve stroked it, talked to it. Inside, all the contents of a precise day, two years ago. November 20th, 1995. That slip of paper, with my terms, folded in four.

A treatise on handbags.

“You should write things, George, write them down for me.”

My teacher.

She clutched the strap, as if she were waiting for the bag to get up first.

“So—” I said. “Unless there’s anything else?”

Like the full story, the whole story. But they don’t have to tell you that. You don’t have to know.

I held out my hand, through the shaft of sunshine. She managed to stand.

Moments later I went to the window to see if I could catch her crossing the street—as if, just by looking, I might stop her stumbling into the path of some car. And there she was, marooned for a moment on the traffic island. The sun on her head. She crossed and turned left, past Jackson’s florist’s, clutching the strap of that shoulder-bag tight.

Rita came in and saw me looking. She was always doing her private assessments: my female clients (she was one once). But I’d never done this before—gone to the window to look. She’d have noted it, definitely. She’s a good detective, doesn’t miss a trick. Later that week she said, “Something’s come over you, George.”

I turned when she came in and, as if to explain myself, said, “It’s a beautiful day. A beautiful day out there.”

“For some,” she said.

She’d brought in a cup of coffee. She cocked her head innocently as if at a third party still in the room. “Not for her, I suppose.”

The sun picks out bursts of frozen fire. Rowan berries, pyracanthas, Virginia creepers in flame. This safe-as-houses land where nothing is meant to disturb the peace.

Rita, a job for you.

Or no job at all. I might never have seen her again, never have learnt the full story (or become part of it), if it wasn’t for my little private passion (and unsuspected talent). A private eye, a private belly. I cook. Even for myself, I cook.

The supermarket, that next evening: Friday. Coincidences happen. I only half believe in them. I’m a detective. We see what we’re ready to see.

She was there. I came round the corner of the aisle. I took a pace back. She was holding a jar, reading the label, aimlessly it seemed, as if she was browsing in a book shop.

I watched, I stepped back. I didn’t have to, but it’s my natural mode, an occupational reflex. And there’s something anyway about that moment that it’s in your power to stretch. You see them, they don’t see you. The strange urge to protect.

Ha—a store detective. (And that could have been me once.) As if she might have slipped that jar suddenly into her coat pocket. And why not, why not? Women in cashmere coats do the strangest things. They walk around in a dream, an aimless daze, they take up shoplifting. When the ugly moment comes they say it’s because my husband doesn’t love me any more.

Madam—would you step this way?

But I think I saw—peeping round the corner of the aisle—how it was for her. What do you do when your husband’s seeing someone else? When life carries on, but around this new and not even secret fact. You go and stand by the Fine Foods section and stare, as if they’re forbidden fruit, at the packets and jars.

I think I saw it. Cooking. It was something for her too, a bit of a thing, a passion. And once life had been, maybe, a kind of constant, regular feast. I saw it, never having lived it, exactly, myself. Dinner parties, pulling of corks. Windows lit up, through the trees.

But what do you do when it falls apart? You still have to eat. (And it’s a well-known substitute.) You even still have to feed
him.
So you go on cooking. In fact, you cook even more keenly and ambitiously, because—who knows?— that’s one feeble, pathetic way you might get him back.

“I bet,” they say to themselves (it wasn’t a comfort open to Rita), “I bet
she
can’t cook like me . . .”

I stepped forward (you watch, you wait, you intercept). The clinching coincidence. She’d come to me, but she might have cried off. Now she’d be held to it.

Besides, you know that moment when a door opens. You enter someone else’s life.

I said, “It’s not bad—the red-pepper
tapenade.
”

She jumped—as much as anything, I think, at that French word. Coming out of my mouth. (But I can speak French:
restaurant, rendezvous, parlez-vous.
)

We’re all supposed to stay in our boxes—you don’t meet your doctor in the street. And I was supposed to be Mr. Invisible anyway, seeing but not seen.

“I shop,” I said. “I cook too.”

She looked at me, still holding the jar—a bit like somebody holding a rock. But I must have had the right expression on my face, I must have struck a chord. A
cooking
detective: not so creepy after all. Maybe the whole idea hadn’t been so mad . . .

And it was true. In recent years—I’d one day tell her the whole story—I’d learnt to cook. Discovered, in fact, a bit of a flair. I take trouble. I chop and mix. I look up recipes, I’m choosy about ingredients. I stop at the Fine Foods section, even when I’m shopping for basics.

And food counts, I’ll bear that out. In times of trouble, eat well, don’t skimp. Look after yourself. Don’t live out of the microwave. Use love and care. Just because you’re on your own.

I’ll vouch for it, I’ve been there. Just because I was an ex-cop—twenty-four years fuelling up on canteen grub and whatever you could snatch on the hoof.

Even now when I’m out on a night’s job, I don’t do myself down. A thermos of good coffee—or my own tomato-and-basil soup (a tiny pinch of chilli). And Serrano ham with thinly sliced Emmental, on ciabatta, with a few leaves and a smear of Dijon, knocks spots off a cheese-and-pickle wad.

“Seriously,” I said, “I’m not bad.”

I didn’t know then about the kitchen with the copper pans and the oven hood. A kitchen to die for. I couldn’t have guessed that even right then she was thinking of that welcome-home dinner.

“It’s just me,” I said, “but I cook.”

“So what’s it tonight?”

A little line crossed her forehead, but it was a laughter frown. Her lips stayed slightly apart. Simple fun-poking.

“Mushroom risotto, with porcini and vermouth.”

“Vermouth?”

“Of course.”

Now—where she can only eat what she’s given—we still talk about food. I run through every meal. It was a good sign, a good moment, when she said, like an uppity hotel guest, “The food in here, George—it’s awful.” And she still says: “What’s it tonight?”

Eat well. Eat well for me till I get out.

Those tables that still get laid for two after the other’s gone.

But it matters, I’ll vouch for that. The stomach is next to the heart. I’ve seen it, had it pointed out to me in autopsy rooms—and then, to be mean and to hard-school him, taken the green young constable I’m with to the nearest greasy spoon. Mud tea and egg-and-chips.

I reached up to the shelf and flipped a packet of dried porcini into my wire basket.

I suppose if we hadn’t met the day before she might have thought I was one of those sad cases who hang around in supermarkets on the pick-up—looking at what they put in their baskets. (And I suppose that could have been me once too.)

I said, “About the photographs. It’s best if you could bring them—if you could find a moment. That way I could look at them and they need never leave your hands.”

I think she may have glanced round—as if spies might have been listening, behind the pasta shelves.

“You mean—you’d just look, and remember?”

“My job. File in the head. But you need a history—a history to go with the face. Then you remember the face.”

She looked away. She was still holding the jar—inside, a dark reddish sludge. If it weren’t for me, she’d have put it back on the shelf.

“You really rate this?”

Trolleys were squeezing past. The Friday-evening, home-from-work rush. In supermarkets you can’t really tell who’s happy or miserable, who’s toppling over the edge. There’s a tunnelled expression. We all have to eat.

I looked at her trolley.

“Nearly done? Me too. You know, there’s the Café Rio, the new place, just over the street. It’s not so busy around now. If you’ve got—ten minutes. Yes, the
tapenade
’s pretty good.”