Turquoiselle (2 page)

Carver
had really only to listen, be an appreciative audience. He was good (Stuart’s Word
for the Day again) at that.

It
had been his stock-in-trade, when he decided to apply it, from his early years,
being able if he must to listen, and to offer, now and then, the correct
response. He did not suppose he had learnt this from the bullying of his
father, from the
terror
his father had
imposed. It was not self defence, rather absenting of self – absenteeism.

Avondale
had rambled on since the car first brought them to the restaurant. And in the
bar, as the golden evening melted into the nocturnal version of the London
ceiling, and was slit all over in neon slices, Avondale continued. He drank
quite a lot, and talked a vast amount during their meal – for him, alefish, and
then some sort of exemplified liver stew. (It was a quieter menu for Carver.)
Rattles had been reputedly so named for its more exotic dishes, curious fish
and fowl and flesh, including rattlesnake.
And
the bill, when
established, after the dessert and cheese, coffee and brandy, was fabulous, but
the courtesy card took care of it, and the petty cash took care of the tip.

The
limousine and driver came back promptly at twenty minutes to nine.

“There’s
a matter I’d really like to run through with you, we didn’t get to it this
evening,” Avondale said, in the last two minutes before his journey to the
docklands and the plane. “A venture – I’d like to cut you in, Carver. It might
be lucrative.”

Carver
had nodded, smiling, looking pleased but not too much so. Such proposals were
broached sometimes, freelance like this, here and there. A couple had been bizarre
(a man called Simpson) and one discoloured enough Carver had carried
it
straight
back to Stuart. Most were cigar-dreams, brandy-fantasies, not worth even
recollecting, and this one, unspecified, seemed exactly like that.

They
shook hands out in the stuffy chilliness of an autumn London night.

“Take
care, son,” said Avondale, as the immaculate door was shut on him.

Carver
watched as he rode away between the prickly bristles of the city lights, red-faced
and gentle with false sentimentality, irrelevant and over. The end of another
day.

And
now, for Carver, back to Trench Street, drop off the Third Person, then the
short wait to get his car, and next, his own long drive home.

Though with
regular irregularity Carver varied his homeward route, he knew all the
variations by now quite well. Tonight he got across the London miles, cutting
out through the suburbs into Peckham and Lewisham, eventually reaching the
narrow by-lanes of Kent. Tree-massed dark then, but for the scaley wink of the
catseyes, and the isolated gleam from a closed-up pub, cottagey terrace, or the
sudden towering gate of some secretive club. He passed the abandoned school
with broken windows, the distant vague group of squatting towers on the hill.
The woods were thick, jet-black on moonless navy clumps of sky. Black leaves
caught the headlamps and grew wetly drily green. At intervals a fresh blinding
blaze of lights announced wider thoroughfares, then it was back again into the
uncoiling serpent’s bowel of the lanes. Eight or ten years before, this late,
often there was not that much else on the road but for Carver. But now many
cars light-splashed by, or the tottery jingling behemoths of giant lorry-transports,
like robot things from some computer game.

Carver,
a careful, intelligent driver, alert but not involved, had again space to
think. He thought over the day, assessing its routine, and any short moments
it had had of the unusual – Stuart’s promptness at his appointment, the fat
woman in the canteen who had lost her temper, as he passed her, over some
disarrangement of her food, the new file Latham had given him that afternoon to
read, with the latest on Scar.

All
told, Carver had made slow time tonight. Reception after nine had been old BBS,
(nickname Bugger Back-Scratcher), who could be officious and over-detailed, so
that returning the Third Person, and putting in the receipt and card from
dinner, took nearly half an hour. The London traffic was augmented too by some
maintenance work near the park; Carver had wondered if this was a cover for
something else, as roadworks so often were. Whatever it was had caused more
delay. As he finally gained the approach to the village, his watch showed
almost 1 a.m.

He
doubted Donna would still be up. He hoped she would not be. Mother Maggie had
probably come over. They would have watched TV and drunk wine, (or orange juice
for Donna perhaps, if she thought she was pregnant). Maggie tended to come by
cab for such evenings, and to take a cab back to her own place at Beechurst before
eleven, and then Donna, alone, wandered about, had a bath and went to bed, read
and fell asleep with the bedside lamp turned on full – to welcome or chide, as
she said, when he arrived “hours” after. Of course, sometimes it
was
hours after,
three or four in the morning. “Mag thinks you have a girlfriend,” Donna had
said.

“Oh,
does she?”

“Yes.
But I don’t.”

“That’s
all right then.”

“Do
you?” she asked at once.

Carver
had shaken his head. “No.”
No
, he thought. Donna was more than enough.

As
he drove into the village, the car sliding slow now, with a long soft feral
purr, he saw dim yellow in the curtained side window of The Bell. The purring
note might be a signal the engine, as before, was about to play up. And The
Bell was having another lock-in late drinking session.

Carver
pulled over and parked in the yard. He did this now and then, Ted at the Bell
did not object.

“Oh,
it’s you, mate,” said Ted, letting him cautiously through under the porch like
a secret lover. “What’ll you have? Usual?”

“Thanks,
Ted.”

“Long
old day for you, up town?” Ted asked the ritual question.

“Yes.
Too long.”

“Here
you are, then. Lock Heim.” Ted added the Jewish good wish with his emphatic
regulation phonetic misspelling.

“Cheers.”

Carver
drank the black coffee in a corner of the bar, away from the rest of the small
group who were habitually here during a lock-in, and after harder stuff, not
always limited to alcohol.

He
would spend a quarter of an hour, leave the car and walk the rest of the way.
By doing that he could be home about 1.30. She must be asleep by then for sure.
Donna slept easily and deeply. He would not wake her. The spare room was fine.

A
bird was singing in the lane, up among the trees with the stretch of fields
behind them; there was unbroken woodland on the other side, behind the house.
Despite this nocturnal aria it was not a nightingale, though musical enough. A
blackbird, very likely, but roused by what? The lane’s few and isolated street-lamps
had failed to come on tonight; often they did not work.

No
lamps showed in the house. Occasionally Donna did turn them out, even in the
hall and inside the glassed-in front door. Only a security bulb flared on
therefore as he got near, as it did anyway for every fox, badger or
neighbourhood cat.

Carver
unlocked the entrances, using another three keys, here, one for the glass panel
and two for the main door.

Having
gained the inner doorway, he glanced out again, and noted the night staring
back at him as the security bulb extinguished: the primal and unnegotiable
darkness. Quietly he shut outer and inner doors.

Living
sound sprang up without warning, not twenty feet away in the unlit enclosure.

For
a moment Carver, if anyone could have seen, became an invisibly distended and
sparkling electric wire of attention. But in another moment, just before the
lightning strike came of all the hall lights bursting on together from a master
switch, he had relaxed, shrunk down again into an uninterested traveller re-entering
his home.

“Where
the
fuck have
you been
?”
Donna screamed, standing between the main room and the hall, vivid with
incandescent irritation and a sort of fear.

Carver
looked at her.

“You
know where I’ve been.”

“
Do
I?
Where
?”

“At
work, and then at the bloody dinner for the client afterwards. As I told you I’d
probably have to be.”

“Yes,
told
me. You
told
me. Do you know
what fucking time it is?”

“Thirty-three
minutes past one.”

“You
said – you
said
– if you were
going to be later than midnight you would
call
me.”

“No,
Donna, I didn’t say that.”

“You
did
. You
did
– and then no
call – and when I tried your mobile it’s off – as it always
is
off when you’re
out–”

“No,
Donna. Only I can’t always get a signal or clear reception when I’m driving.
You know that.”

“I
know so
much
, don’t I? Not
enough though.
Where
have you been
? There
is
someone, isn’t there? Some shitty bitch you’re seeing – and I’m
pregnant
, Carver, I’m going
to have your
baby
–”

Donna
was crying. “Look,” he said, “let’s go and sit down. I’ve been held up by
roadworks all the way. Let’s have a drink...”

“I
can’t
have a fucking
drink
–
can
I – I’m
fucking pregnant
–”

He
returned her into the room, her unseen sparks of frustration and rage and
sorrow flying off her – he could sense her own primitive electricity; in the
half-light that now illumined everything, he could almost see the glitter of
it. He organised her sitting on the couch. He went out to the kitchen and
brought her back half a glass of white wine from the fridge. “It won’t hurt
you.”

“It
will
. You
want
it to hurt me.”

He
sat beside her as her momentum ran down, (like the batteries he had visualised
inside the doll-people between Trench Street and Holland Row). She sipped the
drink, staring at the enormous, currently blank screen of the TV.

“You
misunderstood what I said, Donna,” he told her.

“I
thought you’d been in an accident,” she whimpered, “I thought you were dead.”

When
finally he had got her up to bed, helped her undress, and arranged the duvet
over her, fetched her hot rosehip and camomile tea, tucked her in, he left her,
with the bedside lamp on the lowest turn of the dimmer, like a difficult child
scared of a monster under the bed. Presumably there would soon be two of those,
two children, her and the child; maybe two monsters as well. As he passed the
spare room on the way downstairs again, he abruptly registered unexpected proof
of the intention of this.

On
top of the double bed was spread a magazine. It demonstrated, in articles and
garish photographs, how the changing of such a space might be accomplished:
spare room to something suitable for a baby, a toddler, a kid of five to
fifteen.

Below
in the kitchen Carver turned off the light. He stood looking out into the
garden behind the house. The night remained, still on watch and staring back.
But, his eyes adjusting, he could see stars now, sharply bright as if with
frost, between the trees of the wood beyond. He had a late start tomorrow, did
not need to leave the house until twelve o’clock.

Carver
placed his hand inside the pocket of his coat. He turned an object there
loosely over and over, but not removing it. Tomorrow morning he would put the
object out in the shed. With the other stuff. He could just see the shed’s
glimmer from here, faintly. It might only be starlight. One could never be
certain, until closer. On nights of full moon you could not be sure at all.

Once
a thief, always a thief. Heavy had pronounced the word
Theave
however, those
countless ill-assorted years ago.

Carver
went to sleep swiftly, but Donna woke him about 5 a.m., being sick in the
second bathroom nearest the spare room, instead of in the more private en
suite. He listened, monitoring her now, but the noises soon stopped. She
retreated to her bed again, slamming the door, with a strong healthy
vandalistic crash.