The One Safe Place (21 page)

"Do you two know something I don't? Sorry for... ?"

"About what happened."

"The machine breaking down this afternoon, you mean?" A moment after Susanne mistook that for the issue, she knew. "This is about my visit from the police."

Both students nodded, looking so uncomfortable that Susanne said, "It was nothing to do with you, though, was it, surely? You're not telling me it was."

Rachel cleared her throat, then Liu did. "We did know Elaine was selling pirate videos," the Chinese girl said.

"But we never thought anyone could connect them with you."

"We saw some of them, and they weren't like yours. Most of them had Dutch subtitles. Some had Greek."

"So the police ought to be able to see they couldn't have been copied from yours. We were saying, not just us, we'd say so in court if you like."

"That's kind, Rachel, kind of all of you. Maybe they'll have the sense not to push it that far, not with some of the movies they took. Just now I don't know what's in store for us, but thanks."

The two students clearly felt they hadn't said enough. "Was your son upset?" Liu asked.

"He's no fonder of intruders than the rest of us, but he's stopped lying awake waiting for another invasion."

The girls made sympathetic noises, and Rachel said, "How about your husband?"

"He's pretty good at getting a night's sleep."

Rachel seemed to take this answer as a mild rebuff, though Susanne had meant it to lighten the mood. Liu coughed again and said, "We think Elaine went into selling those videos to get back at her mother."

"Her mother's worse at home than she was with you on television, Elaine says."

"I rather gathered as much."

"And Elaine was selling them to make up her grant," said Rachel.

"Only she didn't get the idea from your course, Mrs. Travis."

"So you shouldn't feel responsible because her mother's taken her away."

"I'll try not to," Susanne said. "Was that all? The player should be fixed tomorrow, or I can borrow one from Politics until it is, so let's make the most of our early finish and be ready to startle one another in the morning.

"Thanks for your support," she felt bound to call after them. They seemed to feel they hadn't helped, or not enough. She squared a pile of essays on her desk and transferred them to her briefcase. A police siren went off like a distant alarm as she let herself out of her office and locked the door.

Students were chasing their echoes along the stony corridors. Somewhere outside was a muffled thudding which felt as though it had lodged in the unreachable depths of her ears. She was rubbing the corners of her jaws beneath them, switching her briefcase from hand to hand, when she encountered Clement Daily on the wide stairs near his office. He tilted his head to peer over his cheekbones at her briefcase. "Ah, Susanne. Leaving us?"

"Just for the rest of the day. Technical problems with a player."

"Player of, ah."

"Video recorder."

"Of course, that kind of, obviously. And please don't think for an instant that I was, it goes without saying we'll be seeing you tomorrow. Let me reiterate the department is behind you, and if there's anything we can, within reason, you understand."

"I do," Susanne said, which might sound like a sly joke at the expense of his fractured syntax. "I appreciate it."

"Give my regards to the bibliopole, and your young also."

"I certainly will."

"I hope you'll excuse me if I, a meeting in, dear me, I should be there now."

Susanne couldn't think of a verbal response to that. She gave him a smile with her lips shut and went down to the courtyard where students leaned against trees or cycled across the stone flags. Beyond the red-brick buildings, which were still bleeding with the recent downpour, the thudding sounded like a failing heartbeat. As she reached Oxford Road, which bisected the campus, she saw a man wearing overalls and headphones, or rather protectors to keep out the sound of the pneumatic hammer with which he was smashing the sidewalk. Behind him in the window of a block of small Georgian houses was a sign she hadn't previously noticed, directing customers to a relocated bookshop. That was worth telling Don when he came home, though maybe she'd say only that she knew something he would want to know until he told her whatever he was keeping from her.

She found her way through the maze of vehicles in the parking lot and squeezed between her Honda and its neighbour. She had to steer the Honda back and forth six times before she was able to manoeuvre it past the vehicles which had been parked too close to its bumpers, and that was quite enough to make her mad at Don for thinking she wasn't aware he had been less than honest about his plans as he'd left the house.

She coasted through a strolling crowd of students and restrained herself from more than touching the horn. The tires emitted a furious screech as she swung at last onto Oxford Road and outdistanced the cars which a pedestrian crossing let fly at her. Once the Indian restaurants began to multiply she turned left into the side streets, which became progressively quieter, so that by the time she drew up alongside the house there were no sounds but hers and those of a breeze scattering raindrops from plants on both sides of her path.

Of the three the family had planted, Don's was putting on the best show by far. She picked a bud and rubbed it between finger and thumb to smell the scent before admitting herself to the house. Marshall wouldn't be home for at least an hour. She listened to the reassuring emptiness and extracted a pair of noonday bills from their dun envelopes, then flattened them on the hall table while the answering machine's tape gibbered backward until it was ready to talk.

"Don Trovis? Jum Peesley hair frum Olster. Cuddn't reese yu at your shoap. I see yu've books by Ostin Forchaild in yure nu cotolog. I wus begunnung tu thonk I was the only follor whu'd hoard of hom. Raid hom yuresolf uf yu're ofter a gud loff. I'd lake yu tu sond me
Daith of a Bodgie
ond
Socks un Rostoronts.
Thonks."

"You're welcome," Susanne murmured, reflecting that she would have to ask Don whether the second book was concerned with socks or sex. The machine held its breath for a couple of seconds before beeping to indicate the end of the message, and then she heard Don's voice. "Hi, Susanne?"

"Hi."

"Are you home?"

"Can't you tell?"

"Are you home yet?"

"I'd say so."

"Pick up the phone if you are."

"Hey, Don, you can tell I'm..."

"Sounds like you aren't, huh?"

"If you'd waited maybe just a few minutes..."

"I was only going to tell you, well, that's what I'm doing in fact, no, I'll wait until I see you."

"Don, you're really starting to make me itch."

"Let's just say why don't you come to the shop and bring Marshall if he finishes his homework, and we'll eat at the Turkish joint we all liked."

"Are we celebrating something I don't know about? I hope you're going..."

"You know, I'm beginning to think we might like to stay in this country for good."

"I take it you're not about to share your reasons. You're not, are you? I don't believe this conversation."

"Call me. I'll wait here until you do."

"I'm glad you at least realise..."

"By the way, I love you."

"I should hope so after all that," Susanne retorted, a response which was pierced by the beep. If he'd called a while ago perhaps he might have left a more recent message.

"Don Trovis? Jum Peesley ugon. I shude hov sod the nombors hum yure cotolog. Twonty-sucks and twonty-sovon. Ony chonce I cud hov fofty-sucks as wull, thot's
Sockung the Volcano,
and suxty-tu,
Laije us a Murror?
Thonks os uvor."

"Don't monshon ot," Susanne couldn't resist saying as the beep put an end to him. She waited for Don to come up with an afterthought, but after the beep was only the silence of a caller who'd decided not to speak. Few traits irritated Susanne more, and this particular absence made her anxious to know who might have been there. No doubt she would never know. When the machine beeped again she stopped the tape so that Don would be able to rerun the messages from Jim Paisley of Ulster, and phoned the shop. Had the silent caller bothered her so much that she'd misdialed? Instead of ringing she heard a long lugubrious note like an alarm. She dialled again, and then again before she was convinced the shop phone was out of order.

"Well, that's just fine," she said aloud. How long would it take Don to realise she couldn't return his call? More than once he'd come home hours late, apologetic every time, having lost himself in cataloguing books, and she knew better than to expect a little thing like the silence of the phone to intrude on his concentration. She could be at the shop in half an hour—less if she parked on the street outside. Maybe she should wait for Marshall to arrive home, though on second thought he wouldn't have found her there if her teaching hadn't been cut short. She tramped into the kitchen to brew herself coffee while she attempted to decide what to do, then switched off the lukewarm percolator.

She slid the pencil out of the rings of the pad beside the phone and began to scribble before she was entirely certain what she meant to write.
Gone to the shop. Phone there out of order. Call you as soon as I've spoken to your father.
Wasn't that enough?
Don't worry, everything's fine.
It had to be, the way Don had sounded. She propped the pad against the answering machine and turned on the alarm and locked the house and ran, although there seemed no reason for her to run, to her car.

Vehicles were sniffing one another's tails on both sides of the main road, trying to beat the rush hour. It took Susanne five minutes to nose the Honda across the road and into the cortège heading for Manchester, by which time she'd thought of several new words for the drivers who'd prevented her from crossing sooner. She was able to drive straight for a while, and as steadily as the multitude of traffic lights would allow. But in the city centre, where the traffic was heaviest and least accommodating, a series of diversions bullied her off the route she knew.

She spent time in a confusion of back streets rendered even narrower by trucks almost as windowless as the warehouses outside which they were parked. The sight of a main road came as such a relief that she'd driven several miles before the architecture alerted her that she was leaving the city behind. She performed a U-turn at a traffic light, muttering "I'm a crazy foreigner" at the drivers who blared their horns and flashed their headlamps at her, and rubbed one palm and then the other dry on her skirt as she retraced her route.

Just past the intersection where she'd emerged from the back streets she caught sight of an indication of a way to the cathedral. Only when she'd swung across a starting line of cars at yet another traffic light did she realise that the signpost identified a pedestrian route. To add to the frustration which made her scalp feel as though the hair was growing into her head, the street along which she'd turned was one way only. All the paving stones of the right-hand sidewalk were upended and fenced in with orange tapes, and plastic cones lay flattened in the roadway. On the left-hand sidewalk was a line of parking meters, all of them wearing canvas bags over their heads as though awaiting execution. The old brown office buildings on both sides were so dusty from the roadwork that the street looked abandoned, and Susanne was wondering whether to take that as a sign she could park at one of the unwelcoming meters, especially since the road a few hundred yards ahead was barred to cars by two discs on poles, when she saw that the farthest meter had its head bared.

Even if it was jammed, she was going to park in its sketch of a box on the roadway and argue later if she had to. But it was quite prepared to swallow her change and give her credit for it, and over her sneezes at the dust in the air she heard a main road, its blurred sounds underlaid by a clanking of trains and threaded by the whine of a tram, all this not far ahead. Two minutes' walk along the middle of the street brought her a view of the spiny spires of the cathedral. She ran across the main road in stages as various sections of traffic reluctantly acknowledged red lights. She was alongside the cathedral, and striding toward the Corn Exchange, when nervousness started to creep through her like a fever.

At first she couldn't understand what was producing it, which made it worse. Then she saw that around the corner of the Corn Exchange where Don's shop occupied a basement, the air was flickering faintly blue. Maybe a power line had been exposed or someone was using an acetylene torch, except that in either case she would have expected to hear more than an ominous silence. She hurried to the corner, almost tripping over the edge of a flagstone tilted by too many illegally parked vehicles. Three police cars with their roof lights flashing not quite in unison were drawn up alongside the Corn Exchange, the nearest of them outside Don's shop.

An orange police line tied to metal poles roped off a large patch of sidewalk in front of the doorway. Each pole kept sprouting a bunch of faded bluish shadows as the roof lights turned a stain on the patch of sidewalk black and then let it revert to dark red. The dimness beyond the doorway appeared to be pulsing, trying like an injured heart to establish a regular rhythm, but that was all she could distinguish in the shop. She ducked under the line, the blue glare jabbing at her eyes and almost blinding her, and a policeman who was keeping a group of spectators at bay on the opposite side of the roped-off patch swooped toward her. "You mustn't go in there, miss. Stay out, please."

Parts of her felt constricted, not least her brain. "Where mustn't I go?"

"Anywhere inside there." He stooped beneath the tape, and his reddish rather chubby face came up pale with determination. "Please come out, or I'll have to escort you."

At least three policemen were in the shop, one of them leafing through books on the counter. She lurched toward the steps, and the blue pulse brought the doorway flickering forward to meet her. The policeman's hand closed on her upper arm, and she turned on him. "Don't even try to stop me," she said, hating her voice for threatening to shake. "What's going on here? This is my husband's shop."