‘Did you find what you were looking for?’ I asked.
He was standing in front of the restored Procol Harum poster. ‘I’ve seen enough,’ he said. ‘This inquiry is not over, Mr Engleby. You never close a case like this.’
He was more disturbing now that he was being polite, oddly enough. When he shouted at me he had just reminded me of Chief Petty Officer Dunstable in a factitious rage on the Chatfield parade ground. This seemed sincere and powerful – and he was, after all, more than twice my age.
‘We never give up. Jennifer was a young woman who was much loved by her parents. One day you might understand that, if you ever have kids of your own.’ His voice suggested he thought this unlikely.
‘To lose a life at that stage,’ he went on, ‘when she had it all before her. It’s a very serious crime. The public and the police think the same way on this. It’s as bad as they come.’
He looked round my room as though one final glance might yield a clue that four officers over three days had failed to dig up.
‘One day,’ said Peck, doing up his coat, ‘we’ll discover what happened to Jennifer Arkland. I promise you that.’
‘So you do think she’s dead.’
‘Yes, I do. I’m sure of it.’
He looked so sad then that I had to look away.
When I turned my eyes back to his face, he was staring at me.
I met his gaze, and for five or ten seconds we looked one another in the eye without speaking.
‘If it’s not me,’ he said eventually, ‘it’ll be my successor. The files, the paperwork, the notes will all be left meticulous. Marked up, indexed, cross-indexed. And you, Mr Engleby, are going in the file marked “Unhappy”.’
‘Tu quoque,’ I said.
‘What?’
‘You’re going in my unhappy file, too.’
He didn’t say anything else, he just brushed past me and went loudly down the wooden stairs.
I moved back completely into my room. They’d done a pretty good job of putting it all back together. The first thing I did was put my hand up the chimney and double it round on to the ledge. The dope was still there.
Next, I clattered downstairs to the bathroom on the half-landing and climbed on to the toilet seat. I was confident the diary was safe, because otherwise I would have heard about it. I dropped my hand over the top of the ironwork and down into the dusty crack. I felt the the crinkled polythene and the book inside.
I ought really, I thought, to find a better hiding place, though in some ways where better than the obvious? Wasn’t there some corny story about someone hiding a brooch by wearing it? Also, where better to hide it than a place that had just been done over for three days by the cops?
What I ought really to do, I thought, was return it to Jen’s parents. But I didn’t want to do that till the heat had died down a bit.
There was also a slight ethical problem. The book was private. It was bad enough that I’d given way to temptation, but it was clear she particularly didn’t want her parents to read it. ‘Can’t bear even to imagine how upset he would be’ she’d written at the thought of her father knowing about her private life.
So behind the cistern was the best place for the time being; then maybe I’d take it back to Reading in the vacation.
Over the next few days I began to feel a lot better. Although I knew Peck was free to come back any time (there was obviously no double-jeopardy rule in interviewing) there was something in his tone that made me think he’d got no questions left to ask.
Had he checked my movements? Did they find Steve in Christ’s or Corpus – Steve I was supposed to have talked to at the party? ‘And how did Mike Engleby seem that night?’ Did they ask the porter what time I got in? Not that he’d have the slightest idea; he didn’t keep a log or anything. I didn’t care; it didn’t matter. I was going to be left alone.
All the clothes the police had taken were returned, minus a couple of things, but I didn’t chase them up. It was no worse than the average return from a service wash in the launderette.
Term ended, and during the vacation I saw a lot of Julie, whose work was ‘showing promise’ at school. My mother was only working three days a week at the Waverley; she’d got some sort of infection in the wound after the hysterectomy and it had taken a lot out of her. Jules said they thought at one time she had septicaemia and that she was going to die.
She looked old and worn down. I did a week’s work in the paper mill and gave her most of the money. She found it hard to grasp what I was saying when I said I was going into the Foreign Office. ‘Is that abroad then?’ she asked. I think maybe she thought I’d still be working for the paper mill, but in its foreign office.
I did a fair bit of Nat Sci work. There wasn’t much else to do in Trafalgar Terrace. Stellings, who lived in London, said he might be in Reading one day and if so he’d look me up, but mercifully he didn’t.
I’m back in Clock Court and it’s warm. The trees are in leaf. It’s that time of year when you find you don’t have the right clothes on so you’re always peeling off, and then you’re suddenly cold again.
People have forgotten about Jennifer Arkland. At the Sidgwick Site and all over town they’ve taken down the Missing posters.
It’s worse than when they were up. At least her face was there before. She was, if not alive, present. Now you look at the plate glass of the gown shop on the corner of St Mary’s Passage and King’s Parade and where her eyes used to be it offers just a blank view on to college scarves and ties in different colours. Through the window of Fitzbillies cake shop you can now see sponges and éclairs. In my old Greek restaurant you can make out the potted palm and the greasy fan uninterrupted by a picture of that laughing girl in Tipperary.
The sight of ties and cakes and palms is bought at a price. Their presence is her absence, and it’s ubiquitous.
The air on King’s Parade is lighter. People are laughing at the outdoor tables by the river at the Anchor. She’s gone.
In the warm spell, they’ve started punting on the river. Finals are coming, and she won’t sit them. She’ll never get her youknowwhat.
She’s gone. Doesn’t matter how many times you say it, because it never fully registers.
She’s gone . . .
I went for my interview in London yesterday, in Carlton House Terrace, a big Nash building, scruffy and echoing inside. A secretary with fat legs and glasses made me wait. There were three others. We were told not to introduce ourselves; but to me they were Francis, Batley and McCain: nervous, dim, their own group. It was as though I was caught in a loop of time. Woodrow had told me to wear a suit and I’d bought one from the Oxfam shop near the University Arms.
I was interviewed in a room overlooking the Mall. It was completely bare except for a desk, two chairs and a man in a chalk-stripe suit. It seemed formulaic, barely more than checking my identity. You get used to this sort of thing as a student. You haven’t yet done anything, so you just present and re-present your initials and your home address and your exam results and hope they please.
The man, who never told me his name, then gave me ten pounds for travel expenses. ‘You can blow it all on taxis or go by bus and keep the change.’ He gave me an address in Knightsbridge, where he said a doctor was waiting for me. I had a fair amount of cash on me from a Glynn Powers subcontract, so I took a cab in Pall Mall.
The doctor was not from the Benbow-Vaughan school. He had a gold watch chain, silver-blond hair and a smooth manner. He didn’t examine my crotch by torchlight, squeeze my scrotum or tell me to stop drinking; he merely listened to my chest, looked in my eyes, ears and mouth and took a history. Diabetes? No. Tick. Heart disease? No. (I didn’t want to drag my father into this.) Tick. He wrote on a pad with a shiny fountain pen. I couldn’t think what his bill would be but felt sure it would be in guineas.
When I left, he handed me a piece of paper with another address on it, this time near Hyde Park. I hadn’t done anything like this since Julie’s tent
h birthday treasure hunt.
This time there were four or five men at a table, again in an otherwise empty room. They looked like a convention of private school geography teachers. They asked me hypothetical questions.
‘If you’re on a train, do you always notice who’s in the compartment with you?’
Depends if I’m sober. ‘Yes,’ I said.
‘If you find yourself alone in a foreign city, what do you do?’
‘I buy a map, walk around to orientate myself and go to a museum or a bar and try to make friends with some local people.’
Alternatively, I might score some high-grade hashish in the market square, find a hotel room, take back a litre of duty-free and watch television. When had I last been in a foreign city on my own anyway? Istanbul? And more on the way home. Split, Ljubljana, Venice, Geneva, Paris. I couldn’t remember what I’d done in any of them. I do have these blanks.
An old-fashioned telephone on the table started to ring. The bald man answered it in a language I didn’t recognise, then passed the receiver to me.
Someone was speaking to me in French. No one had done that since Mug Benson in the dry run for the O-level oral. (The board examiner himself, in our one-to-one, had been happy to chat in English.) Had Woodrow overcooked my ability as a linguist? I said ‘très bien’ quite a bit and gave a short speech about who I was and where I came from that I still remembered, word-perfect, from Mug’s revision group. Then, while I was still on the front foot, I put the receiver down and pushed the telephone back to the bald man.
They asked me for the names of two referees so that I could be ‘positively vetted’. I offered Waynflete, my Nat Sci don, and, after some thought, the manager of the paper mill, John Symonds, who always seemed a bit shifty about my father’s early death.
After a few more questions they seemed to lose interest and I was allowed to go. It wasn’t the glorious opening to my ambassadorial career that I’d expected, but once I’ve sat the Foreign Office exams, which I do in early June, three weeks after finals, I presume the process will become less seedy. By the New Year I suppose I’ll be a Washington insider, lunching in Foggy Bottom, dining in Georgetown.
It’s 11 May, nine days before finals blast-off, and a strange tension hangs over the town. McCaffrey, my one-time King Street Run jockey, has returned from Newmarket and has been seen in the college library. (He’s doing a four year vet’s course.) Stewart Forres has come back early from the film festival at Cannes. Yesterday Stellings walked down to the Sidgwick Site but was appalled to discover how far away it was and, before his revision lecture began, accepted my offer of a lift back to college in the Morris 1100. The only way he can get himself to look at his law notes is by spreading them on the floor, standing on the desk and reading them through McCaffrey’s binoculars.
I finally lent him Moving Waves by Focus with a note telling him where the sublime moments were. ‘Track Five (“Focus II”) at 0.39 and at 1.35. Track Six (“Eruption”) at 5.08, 6.14 and 9.17 – when he bends the note. Skip the rest.’
He read it. ‘Christ, Groucho,’ he said, ‘you’re even more bonkers than I am.’
Anne and Molly, compelled to cook since Jen’s disappearance, have made two-gallon vats of brown rice and vegetarian stew to last them through the long barricaded days. They know they’ve left it too late to do all the work they should have done; they need more time – yet they also want the exams to come soon, to end the waiting.
I think we’re all wondering in different ways how Jennifer would have managed the countdown crisis. Would her instinctive balance have deserted her? Would her moderation have failed her at the last? Would she have thrown up her hands a week early, shouted Qué sera, sera and dashed off to the Mitre to get drunk? Or would she have toiled all night on methedrine and jumbled up her head with unassimilated bilge?
I think not. I think she would have found that middle way, turning up the pressure on herself a little (early nights and longer days) but retaining her perspective, the intuitive sense that never failed her: that always knowing the right thing to do. What a gift that is. Where does it come from? I don’t think you can learn it. I sometimes think that she and I were polar opposites. My life has been marked by an instinct for the wrong thing to do: yes, in any given situation you can trust old Toilet to take the duff option.
Folk Club was a rather muted one. Even the second-years have Part One exams, so the crowd was mostly first-years – or ‘schoolboys with a summer holiday’ as Dr Gerald Stanley once described his freshmen, putting them at their ease as only Dr Gerald Stanley can.
I’m not going to miss all this, am I?
I think about that as I lean against the sweating pillar in the college bar, listening to the music with a glass of red vermouth in my hand.
What I’ll miss least is the winsomeness, the use of citric humour as defence; the Maoist geographers, the smilers with the knives.
And yet I did warm to it. This town, it street names, its immanent past: the river mist in the beautiful courts of Queens’. What I liked about it was a version lived by others.
For instance, by Jennifer. I enjoyed her time here. I don’t think her view was blinkered or deluded; she was in most ways unillusioned, almost as much as I am. No, I think that to see it as she saw it and play it as she played it was reasonable. It’s a pity that it wasn’t a way open to me.
I left Folk Club early, in the middle of Split Infinitive (back by ‘popular request’), and took my car out into the evening. Within twenty minutes I was in high hedgerows, in the warm darkness. I stopped at a Wheatsheaf and took a drink into the garden.
Then I walked into the lane. It was entirely silent and I tried to breathe its peace.
I’ve tried this in the past. You need the air to be warm, not hot, but balmy with a smell of grass or hawthorn. You need the black outline of branches against a sky that, while dark, still has a blue shade to it. What you’re trying to do is get plugged into the depth of history going down through these villages, these houses, these lawns panting with their garden scent at evening.
And in that history you’re trying to connect to something that once was yours – to something purer, better, something that you lost. Or something, maybe, that you never knew but that you feel you knew.
Inhale and hold the evening in your lungs. It needn’t have been a ‘perfect’ afternoon (by which people usually just mean very hot); it doesn’t have to be Midsummer’s Day. Better if it’s slightly early, slightly late, if the village has an ugly pylon, roadworks or a ruined telephone exchange. Sometimes you can get more easily to the universal through something that isn’t typical. Something that’s too representative can blind you with its own detail – like a painting by Canaletto – and stop you seeing through it.
I breathed and breathed and did feel some calmness enter in, though it was, as always, shot with a sense of loss. Loss and fear.
I found I’d wandered some way from the pub and was standing by a high brick wall, from the other side of which music was playing. A little further along was a wooden gate with an iron latch; the bottom of it scraped on the ground as I pushed it, but opened easily enough.
I was in a large garden with a well-lit marquee. With my pub glass still in hand I walked slowly towards the party that was spilling off the wooden flooring of the tent, over the stone terrace and into the house through two open doors. Most of the people seemed to be about my age and I imagined it was probably someone’s twenty-first. Inside the marquee, people were dancing to a discotheque, pretty standard stuff, ‘Maggie May’, ‘satisfaction’. Over to one side was a table with a man in a white tuxedo who was in charge of drinks. I held out my glass to a silver punchbowl and he ladled me out some reddish liquid with fruit in it. I lit a cigarette and stood to one side by a thin pillar wound about with paper streamers. The boys had dinner jackets, but most of them had taken them off to dance and were in white shirts with bow ties dangling. In the dim light I didn’t particularly stand out.
The boys we
re boisterous as boys are on summer evenings, drunk. It was indeed someone’s party and he made a speech, interrupted by his ribald friends to whom he brayed back happily, then thanking his parents with a sudden change of voice into a solemn key that must have made them gulp.
I had a few more drinks and danced a little, not something I enjoy, but there was a sort of melee and I would have stood out too much if I hadn’t jigged around a little. One of the girls, a dark-haired one in a strapless scarlet dress, smiled at me as she shook herself, like a dog emerging from water.
The boy whose birthday it was went past me, glass in hand, and said, ‘Are you enjoying yourself?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Good.’ He patted me lightly on the back. ‘You’re quite welcome here.’
I went back to the pub car park soon afterwards, disturbed. I don’t like being rumbled, I like to be invisible.
Six
Stellings has got a small first-floor flat in Arundel Gardens, Notting Hill, sandwiched between a bongo player and a junior anaesthetist. So if one makes too much noise at night he can apply to the other for relief, I pointed out. And so he does. The anaesthetist, who lives above, is a party man with an uncarpeted floor; the bongo player below, who bongoes only for an hour each day at noon, has an Alan Greening-like pharmacopoeia. If all else fails, Stellings puts on headphones and listens to Abba, by whom he has become obsessed. He goes on about ‘Phil Spector wall-of-sound production’ and ‘lesbian Beach Boy harmonies’.
The street’s a bit run-down and Stellings’s flat’s only a few yards off the smoky throughway of Ladbroke Grove, but he tells me Notting Hill’s the coming place, next year’s Bohemia but with bigger houses – ‘the thinking man’s Chelsea’. I suspect his father bought the flat for him. In return, Stellings has to study at the College of Law.
Me, I’ve got this room in Paddington from which I watch the toms get picked up by the men in cars. The toms are mostly girls who’ve been moved on from King’s Cross, having arrived from some grimy Northern town where the mills have closed. They have swollen purple legs and dyed hair. Their skirts are too short and too tight because although they’re starving and they give most of their money to the pimp, they’re still fat. Sometimes, on my way home from the Tube, I give them cigarettes or drugs. I don’t want what they offer in return. Imagine. That broth of germs.