Single & Single Page 3

  “Hoban. Tiger. Hoban. Listen to me. Stop looking at your watch! Bunny. Stop! Mirsky. Wait! What have I done to you? Nothing but good, I swear it! Tiger! All my life! Wait! Stop!”

  By the time he had blurted these words his English had begun to labor as if he were interpreting from other languages in his head. Yet he possessed no other languages, no Russian, no Polish, no Turkish, no French. He stared round him and saw Monsieur François the surveyor standing up the hill, wearing earphones and peering through the sights of a movie camera with a spongecovered microphone fitted to its barrel. He saw the black-masked and white-shrouded figure of Hoban posed obligingly in the shooting position, one leg histrionically set back, one hand folded round the gun that was trained on Winser’s left temple and the other clutching a cell phone to his ear while he kept his eyes on Winser and softly whispered sweet nothings in Russian into the extended mouthpiece. He saw Hoban take one last look at his watch while Monsieur François made ready, in the best tradition of photography, to immortalize that very special moment. And he saw a smear-faced boy peering down at him from a cleft between two promontories. He had big brown unbelieving eyes, like Winser’s when he was the same age, and he was lying on his stomach and using both hands as a pillow for his chin.

  2

  “Oliver Hawthorne. Come up here immediately, if you please. At the double. You’re wanted.”

  In the small south English hill town of Abbots Quay, on the coast of Devon, on a sparkling spring morning that smelt of cherry blossom, Mrs. Elsie Watmore stood in the front porch of her Victorian boardinghouse and bawled cheerfully at her lodger Oliver, twelve steps below her on the pavement, where he was loading battered black suitcases into his Japanese van with the assistance of her ten-year-old son, Sammy. Mrs. Watmore had descended on Abbots Quay from the elegant spa of Buxton, in the north, bringing her own high standards of decorum. Her boardinghouse was a Victorian symphony of furled lace, gilt mirrors and miniature bottles of liqueur in glass-fronted cabinets. Its name was the Mariners’ Rest, and she had lived there happily with Sammy, and her husband, Jack, until he died at sea within sight of his retirement. She was an abundant woman, intelligent, comely and compassionate. Her Derbyshire twang, lifted for comic effect, resounded like a band saw over the plunging seaside terraces. She was wearing a rakish mauve silk head scarf because it was a Friday, and on Fridays she always did her hair. A mild sea breeze was blowing.

  “Sammy darling, jab your elbow in Ollie’s ribs for me and tell him he’s wanted on the telephone, please—he’s asleep as usual—in the hall, Ollie! Mr. Toogood from the bank. Routine papers to sign, he says, but urgent—and he’s being very polite and gentlemanly for a change, so don’t spoil it or he’ll be cutting down my overdraft again.” She waited, indulging him, which with Ollie was about all you could do. Nothing stirs him, she thought. Not when he’s inside himself. I could be an air raid and he wouldn’t hear me. “Sammy will finish loading for you—won’t you, Samuel? Of course you will,” she added by way of further incentive.

  Again she waited, to no avail. Oliver’s pudgy face, shadowed by the onion seller’s beret which was his trademark, was locked in a ferocious pout of concentration as he passed Sammy another black suitcase for him to fit into the back of the van. They’re two of a feather, she thought indulgently, watching Sammy try the suitcase all ways on because he was slow, and slower since his father’s death. Everything’s a problem for them, never mind how small it is. You’d think they were off to Monte Carlo, not just down the road. The suitcases were of the commercial traveler’s sort, rexine-covered, each a different size. Beside them stood an inflated red ball two feet in circumference.

  “It’s not ‘Where’s our Ollie?’—it’s not like that at all,” she persisted, by now convinced the bank manager had rung off. “It’s ‘Kindly have the goodness to bring Mr. Oliver Hawthorne to the telephone,’ more like. You’ve not won the lottery, have you, Ollie? Only, you wouldn’t tell us, would you, which is you all over, being strong and silent. Put that down, Sammy. Ollie will help you with it after he’s spoken to Mr. Toogood. You’ll drop it next.” Bunching her fists she plonked them on her hips in mock exasperation: “Oliver Hawthorne. Mr. Toogood is a highly paid executive of our bank. We can’t let him listen to a vacuum at a hundred pounds an hour. He’ll be putting up our charges next, and you’ll be the one to blame.”

  But by then, what with the sunshine and the languor of the spring day, her thoughts had taken their own strange turn, which with Ollie they tended to. She was thinking what a picture they made, brothers almost, even if they weren’t that similar: Ollie, big as an Alp in his gray-wolf overcoat that he wore all weathers, never mind the neighbors or the looks he got; Sammy, haggard and beaky like his father, with his cat’s tongue of silky brown hair and the leather bomber jacket Ollie had given him for his birthday and Sammy had hardly taken off since.

  She was remembering the day Oliver first arrived on her doorstep, looking crumpled and enormous in his overcoat, two days’ beard and just a small suitcase in his hand. Nine in the morning it was; she was clearing breakfast. “Can I come and live here, please?” he says—not, Have you got a room? or, Can I see it? or, How much for a night?—just, “Can I come and live here?” like a lost child. And it’s raining, so how can she leave him standing there on the doorstep? They talk about the weather, he admires her mahogany sideboard and her ormolu clock. She shows him the parlor and the dining room, she tells him the rules and takes him upstairs and shows him number seven with its view of the churchyard, if he didn’t find it too depressing. No, he says, he’s got no objection to sharing with the dead. Which is not how Elsie would have put it, not since Mr. Watmore went, but they still manage to have a good laugh. Yes, he says, he’s got more luggage coming, mostly books and stuff.

  “And a disgraceful old van,” he adds shyly. “If it’s a bother, I’ll shove it down the road.”

  “It’s no bother whatever,” she replies primly. “We’re not like that at the Rest, Mr. Hawthorne, and I hope we never will be.”

  And the next thing she knows, he’s paying a month in advance, four hundred pounds counted onto the washstand, a gift from heaven considering her overdraft.

  “You’re not on the run, are you, dear?” she asks him, making a joke of it, but not quite, when they’re back downstairs. First he puzzles, then he blushes. Then to her relief he cracks a five-star sunny smile that makes everything all right.

  “Not now I’m not, am I?” he says.

  “And him over there’s Sammy,” Elsie says, pointing to the half-open parlor door because Sammy as usual has tiptoed downstairs to spy out the new lodger. “Come on out, Sammy, you’ve been spotted.”

  And a week later it’s Sammy’s birthday and that leather jacket must have cost fifty quid if a shilling, and Elsie fretted herself sick about it because these days men got up to everything, never mind how charming they were when they needed to be. All night long she sat up beating her brains to guess what her poor Jack would have done, because Jack with his years at sea had a nose for them. He could smell them as soon as they came up the gangway, he used to boast, and she was fearful that Oliver was another and she’d missed the signs. Next morning she was halfway to telling Ollie to take that jacket straight back to where he’d bought it—would have done, in fact, if she hadn’t been chatting to Mrs. Eggar of Glenarvon in the checkout queue at Safeways and learned to her astonishment that Ollie had a baby girl called Carmen and an ex-wife called Heather, who’d been a no-good nurse up at the Freeborn, into bed with anybody who could work a stethoscope. Not to mention a plush house on Shore Heights that he’d made over to her, paid and signed, not a penny owing. Some girls made you sick.

  “Why did you never tell me you were a proud father?” Elsie asked Ollie reproachfully, torn between the relief of her discovery and the indignity of receiving sensational intelligence from a competing landlady. “We love a baby, don’t we, Samuel? Baby mad we are, just as long as they don’t bother the lodgers, a
ren’t we?”

  To which Ollie said nothing: just lowered his head and muttered, “Yeah, well, see you,” like a man caught in shame, and went to his room to pace, very lightly, not wanting to disturb, which was Ollie all over. Till finally the pacing stopped and she heard his chair creak, and knew he’d settled to one of his books piled round him on his floor although she’d given him a bookcase—books on law, ethics, magic, books in foreign languages—all sipped at and nibbled at and put down again on their faces, or with bits of torn paper stuck in to mark the place. It made her shudder sometimes, just to wonder what a cocktail of thoughts he must have churning away inside that shambling body of his.

  And his binges—three there’d been till now—so controlled they scared the wits out of her. Oh, she’d had lodgers who took a drop. Shared a drop with them sometimes, to be friendly, keep an eye. But never before had a taxi pulled up at daybreak, twenty yards down the road so as not to wake anyone, and delivered a deathly pale, mummified six-foot-something hulk who had to be nursed up the steps like a bomb casualty, with his overcoat hung round him and his beret straight as a ruler across his forehead—yet was still able to fish out his wallet, select a twenty for the driver, whisper, “Sorry, Elsie,” and with only a little help from her, haul himself upstairs without disturbing a soul except Sammy, who had waited all night for him. Through the morning and afternoon, Oliver had slept, which is to say Elsie heard no creak or footfall through the ceiling, and listened in vain for the knocking of the water pipes. And when she went upstairs to him, taking a cup of tea as an excuse, and tapped on his bedroom door and heard nothing, and fearfully turned the handle, she found him not on his bed but on the floor and on his side, still wearing his overcoat, with his knees drawn up to his tummy the same as a baby, eyes wide awake, staring at the wall.

  “Thank you, Elsie. Just put it on the table if you would,” he said patiently, as if he had more staring to do. So she did. And left him, and back downstairs had wondered whether she should call the doctor, but she never did—not then, and not the other times that followed.

  What was burning him? The divorce? That ex-wife of his was a hard-nosed tart by all accounts, and neurotic with it; he was lucky to be rid of her. What was he trying to drink away that the drink only drove deeper down in him? Here Elsie’s thoughts returned, as latterly they always did, to the night three weeks ago when for a terrible hour she had believed she was going to lose her Sammy to a home or worse, until Oliver rode up on his white horse to rescue them. I’ll never be able to thank him. I’d do anything he asked me to, tomorrow or tonight.

  Cadgwith, the man called himself, and waved a shiny visiting card at her to prove it—P. J. CADGWITH, AREA SUPERVISOR, FRIENDSHIP HOME MARKETING LIMITED, BRANCHES EVERYWHERE. Do Your Friends a Favor, said the fine writing underneath. Earn Yourself a Fortune in Your Home. Standing where Elsie was standing now, with his finger on the doorbell at ten o’clock at night, and his slicked-back hair and copper’s polished shoes glistening in the fish-eye, and a copper’s false courtesy.

  “I’d like to speak to Mr. Samuel Watmore, if I may, madam. Is that your husband, by any chance?”

  “My husband’s dead,” said Elsie. “Sammy’s my son. What do you want?”

  Which was only the first mistake she made, as she realized when it was too late. She should have told him Jack was down at the pub and due back any minute. She should have told him Jack would give him a good leathering if he so much as put his dirty nose inside her house. She should have slammed the door in his face, which Ollie afterward told her she’d a perfect right to do, instead of letting him walk past her into the hall, then almost without thinking, calling out, “Sammy, where are you, darling, there’s a gentleman to see you,” a split second before she glimpsed him through the half-open parlor door, on his tummy with his bottom in the air and his eyes closed, wriggling behind the sofa. After that she had only bits of memory, the worst bits, nothing whole:

  Sammy standing in the center of the parlor, dead white and his eyes closed, shaking his head but meaning yes. Mrs. Watmore whispering, “Sammy.” Cadgwith with his chin back like an emperor, saying, “Where, show me, where?” Sammy groping in the ginger jar for where he’d hidden the key. Elsie with Sammy and Cadgwith in Jack’s woodshed, where Jack and Sammy used to make their model boats together whenever Jack came home on leave, Spanish galleons, dinghies, longboats, all hand carved, never a kit. It was what Sammy had loved doing best in the world, which was why he went and moped there after Jack died, till Elsie decided it was unhealthy for him, and locked the shed up as a way of helping him forget. Sammy opening the shed cupboards one by one, and there it all was: heap upon heap of sales samples from Friendship Home Marketing, Branches Everywhere, Do Your Friends a Favor, Earn Yourself a Fortune in Your Home, except that Sammy hadn’t done anyone a favor or earned himself a penny. He’d signed himself on as agent for the neighborhood and he’d stored everything away for treasure to make up for his lost dad, or perhaps it was a kind of gift to him: costume jewelry, eternal clocks, Norwegian roll-neck pullovers, plastic bubbles to enlarge your TV image, scent, hair spray, pocket computers, ladies and gentlemen in wooden chalets who came out for rain or sun—seventeen hundred and thirty quids’ worth, Mr. Cadgwith reckoned back in the parlor, which with interest and loss of earnings and travel time and overtime and the date added in, he rounded up to eighteen hundred and fifty, then for friendship’s sake down again to eighteen hundred for cash, or up again to a hundred a month for twenty-four months with the first installment due today.

  How Sammy had ever put his mind to such a thing—sent away for the forms and faked his date of birth and everything, all without anyone in the world to help him—was beyond Elsie’s comprehension, but he had, because Mr. Cadgwith had the documentation with him, printed up and folded into an official-looking brown envelope with a button and a cotton loop to fasten it, first the contract that Sammy had signed, giving his age as forty-five, which was how old Jack was when he died, then the impressive Solemn Undertaking to Pay with embossed lions on each corner for extra solemnity. And Elsie would have signed everything on the spot, signed away the Rest and whatever else she didn’t own, just to get Sammy off the hook, if Ollie by the grace of God hadn’t happened to shamble in from his last gig of the day, still in his beret and gray-wolf coat, to find Sammy sitting on the sofa looking dead with his eyes open—and as to herself, well, after Jack went she thought she’d never weep again in her life, but she was wrong.

  First of all Ollie read the papers slowly, wrinkling his nose and rubbing it and frowning like somebody who knows what he’s looking for and doesn’t like it, while Cadgwith watched him. He read once, then frowned more fiercely still and read again, and this time as he read, he seemed to straighten up or shape up or square up, or whatever it was that men did when they were getting ready for a scrap. It was a real coming out of hiding that she was watching, like the moment in a movie she and Sammy loved, when the Scots hero strides out of the cave with his armor on, and you know he’s the one, although you knew it all along. And Cadgwith must have spotted something of this, because by the time Ollie had read Sammy’s contract a third time—and after it the Solemn Undertaking to Pay—he had gone a bit poorly looking.

  “Show me the figures,” Ollie ordered, so Cadgwith handed him the figures, pages of them, with the interest added in, and everything at the bottom of the page printed red. And Ollie read the figures too, with the kind of sureness you see only in bankers or accountants, read them as fast as if they were just words.

  “You haven’t a bloody leg to stand on,” he told Cadgwith. “The contract’s a lot of codswallop, the accounts are a joke, Sam’s a minor and you’re a crook. Pick up and piss off.”

  And of course Ollie’s a big fellow, and when he’s not speaking to you through a wad of cotton wool he’s got the voice—a strong, upright, officer-class voice, the sort you get in courtroom melodramas. And he’s got the eyes too, when he looks at you properly instead of at the floor t
hree yards ahead of him. Angry eyes. Eyes like those poor Irishmen had after years in jail for things they’d never done. And being tall and big, Oliver stood close to Cadgwith, and stayed close to him all the way to the front door, looking attentive. And at the door he said something to Cadgwith to help him on his way. And though Elsie never caught his words, Sammy heard them plainly, because over the next weeks while he was recovering his sparkle he repeated them at any odd moment like a motto to cheer him up: “And if you ever come back here, I’ll break your dirty little neck,” in a nice low, measured, unemotional voice, no threat intended, just information, but it kept Sammy going through his recovery. Because all the time while Sammy and Ollie were in the woodshed packing up the treasures to send back to Friendship Home Marketing, Sammy went on muttering it to keep his spirits up: “If you ever come back here, I’ll break your dirty little neck,” like a prayer of hope.

  Oliver had finally consented to hear her.

  “I can’t talk to him now, thank you, Else, I’m afraid it’s not convenient,” he replied, manners perfect as always, from inside the darkness of his beret. Then he stretched himself, one of his writhes, arching his long back and shoving both arms down behind him, and his chin tucked in like a guardsman called to order. Standing his full height this way, and his full width, he was too tall for Sammy and too wide for the van, which was red and upright and had UNCLE OLLIE’S MAGIC BUS painted on its side in pink bubble writing defaced by bad parking and vandals.

  “We’ve got a one o’clock in Teignmouth and a three o’clock in Torquay,” he explained, somehow cramming himself into the driving seat. Sammy was already beside him clutching the red ball, banging his head against it, impatient to be off. “And the Sally Army at six.” The engine coughed, but that was all. “They want bloody Take That,” he added over Sammy’s howl of frustration.