‘What on earth were you going to do with it?’ he asked.
Larry shrugged. ‘I meant to chuck them away in the plane.’
‘Why didn’t you?’
‘That’s not the point any more. The point is getting it back. I’m pretty certain it’s not in the bedroom. I stripped the mattresses. Emptied out the drawers. But she’s good at this now. It could even be in the garden. Can you talk to her? She likes you.’
‘What am I supposed to say? Give Daddy back his pill?’
‘Just try and get it into her head how serious this is.’
‘I’ll try.’
‘Thanks.’
‘I can’t believe you had it.’
Larry rubbed at his eyes with the heel of his palm. ‘I feel like I haven’t slept in a year.’
‘What did you do with the others?’
‘Others? Flushed them away. A little late, I know.’ He shook a cigarette from the pack and lit it.
‘I didn’t know things had been so difficult,’ said Alec.
‘Since Sun Valley. Before then, I guess.’
‘You didn’t say anything.’
‘You’ve had troubles of your own.’
‘I’m all right.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Yeah.’
Larry laughed – sheer fatigue as much as the whisky. He put a hand on his brother’s knee. ‘You’re a complete fucking mess,’ he said.
‘I manage,’ said Alec.
‘Sure. Do you remember when I went to America for the first time and you were about to spend your year in Paris? You remember that?’
‘Yes,’ said Alec.
‘It feels like the last time I spoke to you.’
‘That was ten years ago.’
‘I know. I’m sorry.’
Alec shrugged.
‘Did you like it?’
‘What?’
‘Paris.’
‘Yes.’
Larry nodded. ‘That’s good.’ He was looking over the potato field to where night was finally tidying away the tower of the church. It was a view so long etched on to the retina of memory it made him soulful. He saw himself as a boy, and Alec too. He saw Alice as a vigorous woman, and even his father as a man not yet on the edge, his shadow striding across the garden. All of them, their lives flitting like the little bats that dived and swooped around the eaves of the house.
‘I suppose we should have a plan,’ he said. He was starting to drawl. ‘What do you think? Should we have a plan?’
8
On Thursday evening Kurt Engelbrecht returned to rue Delambre with two plastic bags of groceries in either hand. He carried them into the kitchen, put them on the table and called for László. He had bought more cassis, and there was still half a bottle of white wine in the fridge from the previous evening. At eight o’clock it was early and late enough for an aperitif.
At the bottom of the sink he saw László’s plate, knife and coffee cup from lunch, the plate still with its debris of apple skin and olive stones and cheese rind. It was one of László’s habits – if something so casual, so unconsidered, could be called a habit – together with getting flecks of toothpaste on the bathroom mirror, and now and then forgetting to flush the toilet, that Kurt found mildly provoking, but which he never mentioned in the belief that László was operating a similar restraint in regard to the little blindnesses of his own.
He began to unpack the first bag, putting the vegetables on the wooden rack and arranging the fruit in the big glass bowl. Then he went into the passage and called a second and a third time. There were several reasons for László not to be there: he had stepped out with the mail, or had gone to the tabac for more cigarillos (though with his chest troubling him he had promised to leave them alone for a while); or he had simply gone down on to the boulevard to enjoy the warmth of the evening, buy a paper, chat to Madame Favier at the patisserie. He might even be taking the rubbish out, all credible explanations for his absence, so it seemed strange to Kurt, looking back on it later, strange and significant, that he should immediately have gone to the study with his heart thudding, and opened the door there with such a feeling of dread.
What had he expected to find? A smashed glass? An overturned chair? A body? But the room, quarter lit by the setting sun, was quite innocent. No sign of any haste or trouble. No air of menace. Yet far from reassuring him, this calmness, the sheer order of the place, convinced him that something had indeed occurred, and that his unease of the last week, the fear of some unspecified event, some violent alteration to the steady progress of their days together, had at last been realized. On László’s desk the papers of his manuscript were gathered into a neat pile, the pens lined up at the side, the little ashtray emptied and wiped. Even the chair had been slid under the desk, as though no one would ever need to sit there again, as though it were all done with and finished.
Propped against the bottom edge of the computer monitor on his own desk was a blue oblong envelope with his name on it. He stood a moment, looking at it, then went back into the kitchen and touched the china of László’s cup as if he hoped to feel some trace of warmth in it still. Then he washed it, washed the plate and the knife, and put them away in their proper places. There were spits of grease around the gas rings on the cooker. He cleaned the cooker. There were crumbs on the floor beneath the breadboard. He swept the floor, then vacuumed it, and was on the point of filling a bucket with hot water to scrub it when he recognized the folly of such tactics. He left the half-filled bucket in the sink, rolled down the sleeves of his shirt, and went back into the study. It was darker now. He turned on the green-shaded lamp and slit open the envelope with the little Opinel penknife he kept in his desk drawer. Inside the envelope were two sheets of paper written over on both sides in black ink. He could tell from the handwriting that they had been written slowly and were probably not a first draft. He carried them to the window and read them standing up, one hand, the tips of his fingers, pressing on the surface of László’s desk.
My dearest Kurt,
I am writing to you in some confusion, though also with a clear sense that what I am doing now is necessary, and that could I possibly lay it all before you in the right way you would approve. You will be angry that I have not shared my plans with you, but there were reasons for this that have nothing to do with you. It has no significance. I would trust you with my life and without a moment’s hesitation. There is no one in the world I can be surer of.
I will be away for some days – I do not know precisely how long – performing a small task that is, I hope, a valuable one. The task is political and covert, though not dangerous, and will require from me no very particular talents. Of course, in an affair like this there is always the old problem of intentions and consequences – meaning to do good we do harm and must take responsibility for that harm – but the group in whose interests I am undertaking this journey (into the labyrinth?) have a just and urgent cause, and for far too long I have left it to others to act in the world. I have made futility into a fetish, as though nothing effective could ever be done, all endeavour doomed to end in confusion, treachery or failure, an evasion with its origin in that episode from my past of which you already know something, the broad strokes if not the detail. That day long ago when, as a result of my weakness, a young man lost his life. Since then I have never been entirely free of the guilt and sorrow that hour brought to me, and while it may be precisely such difficulties that made a writer of me (the most confessional of the arts) as a man I have been weakened in ways I can no longer accept. I cannot – to borrow an image from Jules Supervielle – go into the garden and just see the garden. There is always an extra shadow. Always, in any silence, the shout that I did not answer.