She squeezed her eyes shut, but the tears kept coming. Her lip had begun to bleed again. She held herself by the shoulders, trembling.
— They were waiting for us on the corner, she said. They made him go with them.
Felix looked up and down the street, then leaned down to her again, with his hands on his knees, and smiled.
— They, now, he said. Who were they, exactly?
She shook her head.
— Ah, he said. Strangers. Tell me, my dear, would you say they were, perhaps, seafaring gentlemen? Yes?
He glanced at me, still smiling.
— Well well, he said, a pair of jolly tars, no less. I wonder, now, who they can have been.
He skipped down the steps and stood on the pavement, peering about the street again, more carefully this time. Then he came back. He examined Liz’s face closely, squatting on his heels in front of her and shaking his head.
— You don’t look at all well, he said, do you know that? Not at all well.
She watched him warily, snuffling, running a hand through her matted, ash-coloured hair. He smiled at her and lifted his eyebrows, holding his head to one side.
— Tell you what, he said, how about a treat, to make it all better. What do you think? Wouldn’t that be nice?
He brought out from an inside pocket a tiny square plastic envelope and held it up for her to see, wagging it gaily under her nose. At once she sprang at him and tried to snatch it, but he drew back, grinning.
— Ah ah! he said. First, a question. What did they want, precisely, these sailor laddies?
She watched the little envelope, licking her broken lips.
— You, she said. It was you they were looking for.
He stared in mock astonishment, clapping a hand to his heart.
— Me? he gasped. Me? Good gracious!
He laughed, and rose from where he had been squatting and turned away from her. With a cry she scrambled after him on her knees, clutching at the tail of his mackintosh. He paused.
— Oh, your fizz-bag, yes, he said. Here.
He tossed the envelope on the step. She grabbed it, and clawed it open, and with her fingers drew down her swollen lower lip and shook the contents into the crevice between lip and gums. Then she crawled back and sat down at the door again, hugging her knees to her chest. She was crying, we could hear her as we walked away into the dusk.
At a phone box on the corner of the square Felix stopped. He cradled the receiver under his chin, holding the door open with his knee and winking at me as he spoke.
— Yes, Chandos Street, yes. I think she must have taken something, she looks very … What’s that? Me, officer? Oh, just a citizen, doing his duty. Bye bye, now.
He let the door bang shut behind him, and turned up the collar of his coat and rolled his eyes.
— The plot thickens, he said, eh, Watson?
It was in the final editions, foul play down the docks, the body of a young man taken from the river, severe injuries to head and face, unrecognizable. Police were keeping an open mind.
24
THE CITY I HAD THOUGHT I knew became transfigured now. Fear altered everything. I scanned the streets with a sort of passion, under the glare of it things grew flustered somehow, seemed to shrink away from me, as if stricken with shyness. They had never been noticed before, or at least not like this, with this fierce, concupiscent scrutiny. I saw pursuers everywhere, no, not pursuers, that’s not it, that’s too strong. But nothing was innocent any more. The squares, the avenues, the little parks, all my old haunts, they were a façade now, behind which lurked a lewd, malignant presence. Panic smouldered in me like a chronic fever, ready to flare up at the smallest fright. Walking along the street I would suddenly speed up my steps, until I was flying along, head down, heart hammering, my breath coming in little cries, yet when I stopped at last, exhausted, and looked behind me, there was never anything there, only a sense in general of low, gloating laughter. Twilight I found especially alarming, that hour of shadows and dim perspectives, I fled from it into the fluorescent sanctuary of the white room, where everything seemed its own source of light, and surfaces were impassive, without deceptive depths, and the atmosphere was neutral and inert, like a thin, colourless gas.
There was little to do there now. The transmissions from abroad had ceased altogether. The professor paced and scowled in furious silence, a man betrayed. The telephone was left permanently off the hook. Some nights he did not appear at all, and Leitch and I were left alone in a fraught, uneasy intimacy. Leitch was restless too, he prowled about softly in his slippers, his hands stuck in the drooping pockets of his trousers. No matter where he was in the room I fancied I could hear him breathing. He told me his jokes, and offered me choice tidbits from his foodbag. I had preferred the old animosity to this somehow menacing warmth. I felt as if I were holding on to a tether in the dark, at any moment what was at the other end might rear up and savage me. He tended the machine now with a kind of frenzied vigilance, watching over it like a thwarted, jealous parent, cursing it, kicking it, throwing crusts of bread at it. The thing suffered these affronts in silence, dully, its attention somehow averted, as if it were thinking about something else entirely. It maddened him, its imperturbability, its complete, ponderous, irredeemable stupidity.
— It knows nothing, the professor said, nothing it has not been told.
Leitch drew his great head down into his shoulders, his bruised dark gaze wandering here and there about the room.
— Yes, he said bitterly under his breath, just like us.
One night he came up behind me in the lavatory and put his arms around my waist. I tried to free myself, and we tussled briefly, rolling from side to side in a sort of laborious hornpipe. We staggered out the door into the corridor, where our grunts and gasps echoed like the sounds of a real fight. I got an elbow into his chest at last and gave him a tremendous push. He fell back, winded, and leaned against the wall with his mouth open and a hand pressed to his breastbone. His cravat was twisted under one ear, and he had lost a slipper. He glowered at me with a smeared eye.
— What’s up with you! he said. He told me …
He paused.
— He told you what, I said. He told you a lie.
I wanted to kick him, I could almost feel my foot sinking into that soft belly, could see him on all-fours puking up his sticky supper. I was angry not because he had laid hands on me, but because I knew that now I could not be there any more.
— Look at you, he was saying, Jesus, what a freak.
He turned his face to the wall and wept, in sorrow and in rage, his chubby shoulders shaking. I went out into the night. The air was black and wet, foghorns were blaring in the bay. The building towered above me, seeming to topple slowly in the drifting mist, all windows dark. No one was about. I walked away. Another sanctuary was gone.
Adele sat on a chair beside her bed, brushing her hair with slow, stiff strokes. She was wearing an old dressing-gown tied with a frayed cord. Her face, bare of make-up, was pale and blurred, as if she had scrubbed at it so hard the features had become worn. She gazed before her dully. Father Plomer stood at the window, facing the room, with his arms folded and his head thrown back. Behind him the sun shone on the flat roof and the smoking funnel, and far away a tiny aeroplane glinted, crawling athwart a clear blue sky. His face was in shadow, the silvery lenses of his spectacles gleaming like coins. Matron was there too, standing behind Adele, quite still, and leaning forward a little, in that way she had, her arms hanging. They seemed posed, the three of them, as if they had been placed just so, for a group portrait. Adele did not look at me, as if she did not know that I was there. I had brought cigarettes for her. Matron put out a hand silently and took them.