Bannerman shrugged and nodded. The young woman untied her apron and lifted her coat from over the back of the settee. ‘You still want me for tomorrow night, Mr. Slater?’
Slater nodded distractedly. ‘Yes, yes.’
‘Only I won’t be able to make it on Sunday.’
Slater’s head snapped up. ‘Why the hell not?’ His anger was sudden and unexpected and even she seemed surprised.
‘Personal business,’ she said defensively.
‘Damn!’ he muttered. He opened the door of the child’s room and went in, slamming it behind him, leaving Bannerman and the girl in an embarrassed silence.
She tried a smile which didn’t quite work. ‘Well, it looks like we’re dismissed. I’m Sally Robertson.’
Bannerman picked up his coat. ‘Hello, Sally,’ he said. ‘I’m Neil Bannerman. It seems I’m taking you home.’ He paused for a moment. ‘Or since I’m going to have to eat out maybe I can take you to dinner.’
Sally smiled again, and this time it was her real smile, lips spread wide across a disarmingly open and pretty face. And her green, impish eyes smiled even more than her mouth. ‘I’d like that,’ she said.
Outside the night air was thick, almost humid, great dark clouds clustering overhead, having blown in from the west during the day. There was still a winter edge of cold, but when you walked you were warm and the air felt warm on your face.
‘Leave the car,’ Sally said when they got out of the apartment block. ‘We can walk and then take the Metro. It’s a good night for walking.’
Bannerman allowed her to take his arm and they walked the length of the Rue de Commerce and turned up into the Rue de la Loi. ‘I suppose you must feel pretty bad about the child,’ she said. He gave no sign that he had even heard. ‘They’re all pretty much like that, autistic children,’ she went on. ‘A break in the routine, a stranger, or maybe a pet phobia. Any of these can set them off on a screaming fit. Sometimes it can last an hour, or two hours, or even more. But they always come through.’
Bannerman kept an even pace and did not look at her. Ill-pasted posters flapped on the hoardings, behind which workmen sweated under floodlights on excavations for the foundations of yet another office block. ‘What’s she like?’ he asked. ‘The child.’
Sally swept her hand through a vague gesture. ‘It’s difficult to know,’ she answered. ‘She doesn’t speak, you see. It’s not that she can’t speak, physically I mean. It’s just that... well, she doesn’t. She can write a little when the mood takes her, but she can’t construct sentences. She gets what she needs by gestures. A kind of sign language. But you’ve got to know her pretty well to understand it. The doctors say she understands what is going on around her, but her only positive responses to anything are the fits. She takes it all in, but she can’t seem to communicate what it all means to her.’
Bannerman tried to imagine what it might be like. To be trapped like that. Your body like a cage. The world can come in but you can’t get out. He pictured the child. Shoulder length brown hair cut straight. A small, plain, expressionless face dominated by large, dark eyes. The grey jumper and skirt. Heavy black shoes. The clumsy limbs. ‘But she can draw like I’ve never seen a child draw,’ Sally said. ‘Fantastic living drawings that she makes with a pencil. Drawings that leap out of the page at you. She has this tremendous sense of depth and perspective. They’re worth seeing.’
The streets were poorly lit and quiet here, still in the commercial sector, and they climbed the hill then in silence to the Metro at Schuman below the Berlaymont. There no longer seemed a need to speak, and the lack of words between them was an easy thing. Bannerman felt relaxed in the company of this woman with her hair cropped short like a boy’s, but with a smile and touch and smell that were warm and feminine. But still, he could not shake off his distress, and she seemed to appreciate his distance and disquiet.
The child had touched some inner nerve end, a severed memory, and in his mind he kept replaying the scene in Slater’s flat. Her eyes were always the focal point. Sad, appealing eyes, deceptive in their dark passivity, even at the height of the screaming. Only now, with the short passage of time, were they having their full effect on him. He knew why. Somewhere inside he knew why, but would not or could not admit it.
He remembered the small, gloomy office of the weekly newspaper where he had first got a job as a reporter. A raw young man full of anger at the world. But his cynicism then had not fully blunted the power of his youthful idealism and romanticism. He had always been arrogant, a kind of self protection, and had not endeared himself to the other reporters. They had made it hard for him there, and he had learned the toughest way you can learn — without friends. And it was in this period, the transition from adolescence to adulthood, that the relationship had formed. A relationship that had moulded his future, sealed his insularity.
She had been a timid girl in tele-ads, fresh out of school, impressed by his self-confidence, starry-eyed at what she saw as the romantic world of newspapers and newspaper men. He had embodied all that she, as a young girl, might have dreamed of in a young man. And he had grasped her vision of him, as a lonely man does, and played to it, built on it.
He had allowed her adoration to fill out his ego, and he would lie awake at night in his attic digs overlooking the canal, playing the game, making the rules and breaking them. He felt the way it gave him power to have her love him when he did not love her. Though when you play that kind of game, sometimes the division between fantasy and reality becomes blurred and that is when it can become dangerous.
It had been a small, cold room high up in the roof of the stone terrace, and he had hated it. The dull, damp wallpaper. The miserable view out across the canal, the railway line and the dark empty trees. The dirty, threadbare carpet over the blackened linoleum and the smell of stale cooking that drifted up from the floor below where an old woman lived in a cluttered room. She peed in a bucket, the students in the room below her said. They would wake up at night and hear the squirt of the old lady’s urine against the side of the galvanised bucket. They hoped she had a good aim, they said. And Bannerman had lain in the darkness, hating himself for all the falseness that he needed, remembering how he had made the girl from tele-ads cry, how they had fought and he had made her unhappy. And there had been his own tears in all this unhappiness, there in that room, the tears of a callow eighteen-year-old boy trying to find in himself what others always seemed to find with such ease, but resorting in the end to the hollow pursuit of self-deceit. It had never really occurred to him at the time, in the midst of his own selfish unhappiness, that it was not only himself that he was hurting, but that piece by piece he was also destroying another human being whose trust and love he was betraying.
He had thought of her as a rather foolish, if attractive, girl, and he thought bitterly now how he could not even remember her face, how he had never seen the child she bore him.
They went down into the Metro on escalators, through vast, empty, ersatz marble halls. Sally bought them tickets and they queued on the platform under fluorescent lights. ‘Where do you want to go?’ she asked. ‘We can ride anywhere in the city on these tickets.’
Bannerman looked at her. ‘Somewhere to eat and get a little drunk and talk,’ he said.
A shining new orange carriage whisked them through the new Brussels Metro, through broad lit tunnels to De Brouckere where they changed and caught one of the trams that run on the Pré Metro below the city centre before burrowing upwards like moles to run overground into the suburbs. They ate in a steak house on the Boulevard Adolphe Max; steak au poivre washed down with a strong red wine. Their conversation was desultory, a little awkward, each inhibited by the other’s strangeness and the memory of the scene at Slater’s flat. But Bannerman liked the smell of wine on her breath and the way she wore no make-up except on her fine lips. He found it easier to look at her than to talk. He saw now that she was older than he had first thought. Her thick, short hair was a rich auburn flecked with the first signs of a premature grey. Her eyes, below finely stretched lids, were a deep, solemn green speckled with brown, only the finest of lines etched out from their corners betraying her youthful appearance. Her nose was short, but not too short, and a little pinched around the nostrils. It was a delicately structured face without being beautiful, and you thought you could tell from her smile and her eyes that she knew how to look after herself. She had a bright laugh, and always when she laughed she flicked back her head in a small, careless way, and Bannerman guessed she must recently have worn her hair long. She must have been about thirty, he thought.