Alan nodded. He was rather pleased. Somehow he felt that hope for them lay with Ambrose Engstrand, though he didn’t know why or in what form. Perhaps it was only that he thought of the philosopher as prepared to do anything to ensure Una’s happiness.

‘I don’t want to be here when he comes back,’ Una said.

‘But why not?’

‘I don’t know. I’m afraid – I’m afraid he’ll spoil this.’ She moved her hand in an embracing gesture to contain her and himself and the room. ‘You don’t know him,’ she said. ‘You don’t know how he can probe and question and get hold of things that are beautiful and – well, fragile, and make them mundane. He does it because he thinks it’s for the best, but I don’t, not always.’

‘There’s nothing fragile about my feeling for you.’

‘What’s in that drawer, Paul? What were you doing that you had to lock me out?’

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘It was force of habit.’

She made no acknowledgement of this. ‘I felt,’ she said, ‘I thought you might have things of your wife’s there, of Alison’s. Letters, photographs, I don’t know.’ She gave him a look of fear. Not the kind of fear that is based on imaginings and has in it a counterweight of hope, but settled despair. ‘You’ll go back to Alison.’

‘I’ll never do that. Why do you say that?’

‘Because you never see her. You never communicate with her.’

‘I don’t follow that logic.’

‘It is logic, Paul. You’d phone her, you’d write to her, you’d go and see her, if you weren’t afraid that once you’d seen her you’d go back. With me and Stewart it’s different. I haven’t seen him for months but he’ll turn up, he always does. And we’ll talk and discuss things and not care because we’re indifferent. You’re not indifferent to your wife. You daren’t see her or hear her voice.’

‘D’you want me to see her?’

‘Yes. How can I feel I’m important to you if you won’t tell her about me? I’m a holiday for you, I’m an adventure you’ll look back on and sentimentalize about when you’re back with Alison. Isn’t it true? Oh God, if you went to see her I’d go mad, I’d be sick with fear you wouldn’t come back. But when you did, if you did, I’d know where we were.’

He put his arms round her and kissed her. It was all nonsense to him, a fabric of chimeras based on nothing. Fleetingly he thought of Alison Browning with her husband and her little boy and her puppy and her nice house.

‘I’ll do anything you want,’ he said. ‘I’ll write to her today.’

‘Ambrose,’ she murmured, ‘would be so angry with me. He’d say I’d no precedent for reasoning the way I do about you and Alison except what I’d got out of books. He’d say we should never conjecture about things we’ve no experience of.’

‘And he’d be so right!’ said Alan. ‘I said he was a monster, but I’m not so sure. I wish you’d let me meet him.’

‘No.’

‘All right. I don’t meet him and I write to Alison today, now. Will that make you happy, my darling? I’ll write my letter and then we’ll hire the car again and I’ll take you out to Windsor for lunch.’

She smiled at him, thrusting back her hair with both hands. ‘The lights are green and we can go?’

‘Wherever you want,’ he said.

She left him alone to write the letter, and this time he didn’t lock the door. He had nothing to hide from her because he really did write a letter beginning ‘Dear Alison’. It gave him a curious pleasure to write Una’s name and to describe her and explain that he loved her and she loved him. He even addressed the envelope to Mrs Alison Browning, 15 Exmoor Gardens, NW2, in case Una should catch sight of it as he passed through the hall on his way to the post.

His pillar box was a litter bin. He tore the envelope and the letter inside it into pieces and dropped them into the bin, noticing that the last scrap to go was that on which he had written the postal district, North-west Two. Not half a mile away from Alison’s house he had seen the boy with the mutilated finger. Suppose he had asked him that question about the buses and the tube and had got an answer and the voice answering had been Suffolk-cockney? What next? What could he have done? Written an anonymous letter to the police, he thought, or, better than that, made an anonymous phone call. They would have acted on that, they wouldn’t dare not to. Why hadn’t he made the boy speak? It was the obvious thing to have done and it would have been so easy, so easy . . .

Walking back to Montcalm Gardens and Una, he was forced to ask himself something that made him wince. Had he kept silent and fed his incredulity and condemned his over-active imagination because he didn’t want to know? Because all that talk of redemption and vindication was nonsense. He didn’t want to know because he didn’t want Joyce found. Because if Joyce were found alive she would immediately tell the police he hadn’t been in the bank, he hadn’t been kidnapped, and they would hunt for him and find him and take him away from freedom and happiness and Una.

19

‘You haven’t even got a goddamned doctor,’ said Nigel.

But there he was wrong, for Marty had needed a doctor in the days when he had worked. Medical certificates had frequently been required for imaginary gastritis or nervous debility or depression.

‘’Course I have,’ said Marty. ‘Yid up Chichele.’ He clutched his stomach and moaned. ‘I got to see him and get some of them antibiotics or whatever.’

Nigel wrapped a blanket round himself and padded out and lit the oven. He contemplated the bookcase; half a dozen slices of stale bread, two cans of soup and three eggs, four bottles of whisky and maybe eighty cigarettes. Having made a face at these last items, he squatted down to warm himself at the open oven. He didn’t want Marty coming into contact with any form of official authority, and into this category the doctor would come. On the other hand, the doctor would reassure Marty – Nigel was sure there was nothing really wrong with him – and that ignorant peasant was just the type to start feeling better the minute anyone gave him a pill. Aspirin would cure him, Nigel thought derisively, provided it came in a bottle labelled tetracyclin. He wanted Marty fit again and biddable, his link and go-between with the outside world, but he didn’t want him shooting his mouth off to this doctor about not needing a medical certificate, thanks, and his mate he was sharing with who’d look after him and the girl they’d got staying with them and whatever. Above all, he didn’t want this doctor remembering that last time he’d seen him Marty had sported a bushy beard like the guy who had hired the van in Croydon.

A groan from the mattress fetched him back into the living room. Joyce was sitting up, looking warily at Marty. Nigel took no notice of her. He said to Marty, not too harshly for him:

‘Give it another day and keep off the booze. If your belly’s still freaking you tomorrow, I reckon you’ll have to go see the doctor. We’ll like wait and see.’

They had bread and the last of the cheese for lunch, and a tin of scotch broth and the three eggs for supper. Marty didn’t eat anything, but Nigel who wasn’t usually a big eater felt ravenous and had two of the eggs himself. The main advantage of getting Marty to the doctor would mean that he could do their shopping on his way back. A lot more cans, thought Nigel hungrily, and a couple of large loaves and milk and butter and some of that Indian takeaway, Vindaloo curry and dhal and rice and lime pickle. He wanted Marty to go to the doctor now, he was almost as keen as Marty himself had been on Thursday night.

He didn’t seem keen any more when Nigel woke him at eight in the morning.

‘Come on, get dressed,’ he said to Marty. ‘Have a bit of a wash too if you don’t want to gas the guy.’

Marty groaned and rolled over, turning up the now yellow whites of his eyes. ‘I don’t reckon I’ve got the strength. I’ll just lay here a bit. That’ll be better in a day or two.’