Turquoiselle Read online

The upstairs corridor had led, on the eastern turn, to a locked double-doored cupboard. The western end of the corridor went round its corner to a stairhead. The stairs were wide and quite shallow, and descended between the pale clean painted walls to a square hall lit with sidelights, and with brown tiles. Off this to one side opened a cloakroom, with a small high frosted window, a lavatory and washbasin, a mirror, and hooks for coats – nothing hung there. (Everything was pristine, and newish, as everything else seemed to be.) The other room that opened was a sort of storage area, lit from above by a neon strip, with (locked) cupboards. Beyond this, through a square open arch, the kitchen.

  To meet with Mr Croft, nevertheless, they went out a different way, via the fridge-freezer-door, Carver getting by without much fuss, but the fat, very young man in shorts and a loose white T-shirt, making a bit of a scene of it. “Why that bloody door has to be bunged up by that bloody fridge beats me!” he snapped red-faced. Then resumed the smiling pleasantries he had begun with. He was the guide who was to conduct Carver “to Mr Croft’s section”.

  “Hope you slept well?”

  “Sure,” said Carver.

  “Good, good. That’s good.” (Was ‘good’ his Word of the Day?) “Big old place, this. Have you seen the sea?”

  “Yes.”

  “Fabulous day. I mean to do a bit of cycling later. Wonderful weather for it. Do you cycle?”

  “No.”

  “Should, you know. Bloody good for you.”

  The fat health expert had by then got them down a long doorless corridor, windowless and neoned, and hung with pretty photographed images of trees and mountains, and let them both into a steel lift. There were no markers as to the number of floors but, seamless and almost silent, they went up past six. This ‘place’ was tall then, or it was in parts.

  They emerged next in a second doorless corridor with long windows to the left. The view was vast and soaring – rock edges, sea, sky, wheeling gulls with sun-gold wings.

  “Where are we, here?” asked Carver quietly.

  “Seventh floor, old mate.”

  “I mean, the area. The district. The sea.”

  “Yes,” said the cyclist, enthused and beaming, ‘‘it’s fabulous, isn’t it? Beautiful weather too.”

  “England,” said Carver. “Is it?”

  But they were through the corridor and the cyclist-guide was pressing buttons by a tall shut metal door. “Just a sec, old son.”

  And the door slid open, and there was another person beam-beaming, a beaming girl in a summer dress and long fair hair.

  “Mr Carver! Please come in. Thanks, Charlie. Take care.”

  “Please sit down, Carver. That chair is the one I’d recommend.”

  He – Croft – sat against the blinded, lighted window, and was in silhouette. An old trick, clichéd, out of date, filmic, foolish. Effective. A big shape, a big man, tall and broad-bodied, from flesh, bone or muscle, conceivably all three. His voice put him at about forty, but of course that did not have to mean much. He could be in his sixties, seventies even, if he was strong and vocally trained. His hair, against the brilliant blind, looked like a piece, an actor’s wig, convincing only on a stage. But here the glare might deceive. After all, Carver found the sunlight irritated his vision, staring into it, or at the dark mound of the man titled Mr Croft.

  The chair was all right. Not designed to make the sitter either luxuriously comfortable or anything opposite. Another black mug of hot black coffee had been set in front of Carver on the desk-like table, and a jug of water with ice and a lemon slice and a polished glass in reaching distance, before the happy, jolly girl had taken her leave.

  It was doubtless of no use to ask any questions as yet, if ever.

  “Well,” said Croft.

  Not an inquiry. Just a statement.

  The sides of Carver’s tongue were electric with the urge to speak, to demand.

  He did not. Only sat and stared at the actor against the light. And Carver’s eyes pricked and began to water. Carver looked down.

  And there was Croft again, printed white on a blur of floating darkness. Afterimage. Omnipresent.

  Croft shifted. A profile appeared, a large hooked nose and shaven jaw, a heavy-lidded eye that glinted and then grew dark. By the description of the light, the wig was iron.

  “Today’s a sunny day,” said Croft, “rare in England.”

  (Is he telling me that we are not in England, where such sunny days are rare? Or that we are, and so the rarity?) “They say the climate’s changing, of course they do. Bang on and on about it. Slightest unusual weather. Make us all worry, worry. Always all our fault. But I can remember rainy summers and autumns just the same. And waterlogged springs. Even you, probably, saw the same processions of dull grey unwarm days when you were a kid. Snow in May. And not limited to the UK, all across Europe.”

  Carver did not speak. It was not apparently, essential.

  Croft rose. Yes, about six foot three, and of a strongly developed, heavy frame. Approximately two hundred and fifteen pounds. “Why not we go outside, have a stroll in the grounds? What do you say, Car?”

  It was not the voice from the drugged darkness.

  It was not a voice Carver knew.

  In any case, neither the voice nor the man took any notice of Carver’s reaction, even the chance of one. Croft, risen, strode towards the room’s second door, and plainly Carver must get up and go with him. Carver did not prevaricate. What point? He too rose and followed Croft, who opened the door by the previous means of a pressed button-panel in the wall. The door undid itself into another corridor, low-lit, featureless, windowless, and winding. It seemed to take a few minutes to go along it and reach another door operating on buttons. Which in turn undid itself into another lift. Down they flowed, five, six floors – seven? The lift door gave on a dazzle of flooded white and burning green and blue, drowning Carver’s eyes. A terrace, flagged. Stone steps with a safe if ornamental stone handrail. The park – the grounds – beyond, the savage tangles of unpruned bushes and trees, the high-grassed upslopes, the radiance, and the salt-clear smell of the sea from the far side of the house, and the gulls, borne over now by some updraught, noiseless and floating. From the position of the sun, this place had just gone by midday, in somewhere or other.

  They walked up a slope, but the trees were very thick, their trunks often wider than three or four Crofts hugged together. The foliage was a static deluge of green fire. Or was that a yellow leaf there? It might indicate only damage, not a season. One did not see through the trees anyway, to any other slope. The Russian train-carriage sheds were not visible.

  “Ah, here’s the bench. We’ll sit, shall we?”

  They sat, side by side, separated by an interval of about one metre, on the long smooth stone seat. It had a flat and upright back, and arm rests at either end in the shape of – what were they? Griffins, Carver thought. Yes, griffins, eagles’ heads and the bodies of lions. An impossibility, and not what they seemed.

  Nowhere in view was there any sign of a boundary, a wall or electrified fence. No indication of anything significant, beyond the trees.

  Croft stretched, lazily, as if entirely at ease.

  “Lovely place, this. And wonderful weather.” (Would he now suggest they go cycling? He did not.)

  But the big carven head, under its iron cap of real or unreal hair, smoothly turned, and there were the two dark eyes, looking for his.

  Carver met them. His father had had eyes as dark as this, though of a different colour. He himself, Carver thought, had eyes the same as Croft’s. (Cava. Andreas Cava.)

  “The point is,” said Croft mildly, “I want you to relax, Car. I can see that may be difficult for you at the moment. Understandably so. And in light of that, I want to fill in a few of the empty boxes for you, explain how things are, here. You’re safe, Car. Perfectly safe. Safer here, with us, than probably you have been all these past – how many? Let’s see, it’s around eighteen to twenty years, is it? I mean since when
you got into that college out in the wilds of – Suffolk was it? Or West Sussex... Slips my mind, but of course, you’ll remember it well. Rescued from that daft secondary school – called after that bloody woman Vita Sackville-West, I suppose. They started your training off there, at the college, bit by bit. And then recruited you for the Service. Serve your country. Save your land. Anti-any-and-all-others – even our beloved allies, the Godforsaken Yanks, if it comes to it. An interesting job for a boy, a young man. Not boring. What is it Mantik’s slang calls its own people? Life Long Enemies, that’s it, isn’t it, Car? L.L.E. The L.L.E. of all the other oppressive and misguided regimes all over the world, and of all their spies and vandals. The Secret Secret Service. That’s you. Rule Britannia. And then you make one tiny little error, and Mantik puts on its dinner jacket and gets ready to eat you up alive.”

  Croft stopped talking. He stared on into Carver’s eyes, which did not now have to water, in the warm green thoughtfulness of the shade.

  “You’re saying this place has nothing to do with Mantik,” Carver said, flat, neutral.

  “As far from Mantik as the moon, Car. Much, much farther. From here, you can see the moon, now and then.”

  Croft was leaning back again, his jacket removed and slung over his arm of the bench, his legs stretched out, crossed at the ankles. He might be anyone, taking a break, enjoying the summer, or autumn Indian Summer, as perhaps it was. Certainly the many scanning devices that would be discreetly planted around would pick up that pose. And Carver’s too, sitting still, tense and listening. There might be men as well, discreetly planted around, armed and waiting for the chance that after all Carver decided to run for it. But surely, lessoned as he had been at Mantik, he would never attempt such a futile thing.

  “Why am I safe,” he said at last, “with you, if not with Mantik?”

  “We, Car, are the corporation that in turn keeps an eye on them. Somebody has to. I’m certain, if you consider it carefully, you can see the common sense of such a back-up unit. So no, Car, nobody here is asking you to become – that lovely Shakespearianesque word – a traitor. You’re still fully in British hands. Just as you’re on British – English – soil.”

  “Why do you want me?”

  “Why did Mantik want you? Have you never properly asked yourself that? No, you haven’t, you see. We don’t, do we? We all already know we are special. That’s how we survive being alive. And thus, of course they would single you out.”

  “I’m – I was an errand boy.”

  “Jargon. My dear Car, do you really think that was all they wanted from you?”

  “It was just about all I did.” (No point in lying, Carver thought. This set-up, whatever it was, had evidently wrung out of him, with the drugs, the darkness, all those Mantik matters they wanted. Though he had not known much. Maybe, thinking him evasive... Had he even been fully tortured? He had no wounds, of course, no pain, and no memories of such events. But neither had he recalled the bathing, and cleaning of his teeth – yet it had happened. Whatever they had wanted to happen had happened, But why – why did these people, a surveillance team monitoring Mantik, rescue him – if rescue it had been? Why did they want him at all?

  “So I’m special,” Carver said quietly. “Again, why?”

  “Oh, you’ll see in due course. Do you remember the woman called Silvia Dusa?”

  “She’s dead.”

  “So she is, but a while before that tragic occurrence, she contacted us. She alerted us – to you. That was her mistake, you see, Car. And yours was in not realising. Silvia had come over to us. She wasn’t happy about Mantik’s plans. So Mantik set you both up, and then – shall I say helped her on her terminal way in that public house. Just as they would have you, Carver, somewhere or other. Also in due course. But that’s all over now. You’re safe. You’re with us.”

  “Where are we?” said Carver. “England where?”

  “Kent. That’ll do for now.”

  “Who are you?”

  “I’ve told you our nature, but you’d like an actual name? We don’t have one. Not even in our official or office slang. We’re just – us. Welcome to us, Car. Make yourself at home.”

  Thirteen

  In the dream, he saw the coloured flowers blotted on the meadows, the wilder walks around the college. White daisies, red and magenta clovers... And then the huge clipped lawn, with its area for spontaneous rough football, and the river you could swim in. They had taught him to swim, and once or twice he had even played football – those items he had been meant to have had taught to him at the schools. He liked the aloneness and the space – and yet keeping the consolidated steady link to the house. It was a big house, and quite old, 17th Century perhaps. Or bits of it. There was an orchard with apples. He had never liked apples before, but these had a sharp sweet acid kick, better than the gin he had once illicitly tried at age ten and a half. He did not ever like booze any way. He did not like or respond to ‘teaching’ – but here, somehow, he did. He learned other things than swimming and games.

  He learned to read properly, that was, to take stuff in, hold and analyse and so find out what it meant. He learned where countries were, and how they worked, or were believed to, and how to calculate mathematically, multiply, qualify, equate. The correlation of numbers, words, codes. To think things through.

  He learned that.

  Nobody ever forced. Nobody nagged or pursued if you missed some class or talk. But in the end, you did not miss so many. The meals were good, the ‘canteen’. He had his own room, and it was of reasonable if hardly giant size. He had a music centre and TV, ultimately use of a computer, only slightly restricted, for recreation or research. The college was not crowded; its students were ‘selected’ and both male and female. He had sex.

  By then, his horizons partnered, both narrowing and expanding. They were becoming concentrated. He was altered, but altered potentially into himself. He seemed to lose nothing he had wanted. But gained extras. He still stole things. He kept them in the desk in his room, which could be opened by his using – not a key – but a sequence of numbers he had chosen and, presumably, (years later he was not so certain of this), known only to himself.

  In the dream, he saw the flowers in the meadows. He did not care that they were flowers, or beautiful, or helpful for the environment, but they were part of the new life he had had. They were, (then) the Now.

  He was by the river next, in the dream. About fifteen, he thought, or sensed. And he glanced up, and on a rise beyond the slow green summer water, he noticed a stone bench. Heavy was sitting there. Heavy, who he had never seen again after that day in the park, after the advent of Sunderland and the college.

  Heavy was grown up. Thirty or forty, possibly. Incredibly obese and ungainly, yet somehow he had been poured into a vast and elegant grey suit, the kind powerful guys wore in movies from around 1948. He had rested back his peculiar head, and stretched out his froggish legs, crossing them loosely at the ankles.

  Carver was pleased to see Heavy, yet startled, in the dream. He was going to call out to Heavy when Donna moved up close to him across the bed, and put her hands on his spine, and then around him to his stomach, low down, not quite touching his genitals. The dream faltered and started to swirl off.

  He woke in the dark. Yes, she was close up against him.

  Working on him slowly, softly, with a feline determination. In the beginning, the commencement of their relationship, he had made the advances more often than she. But then it came to be almost always Donna who moved first. Lascivious and eager. It was easy for him to respond, of course. Even once she began to alter, to become more impatient, unreasonable in other areas, even eventually in the area of sex: “You don’t like me really, do you, Car? I’m not what you wanted. I saw you look at that bitch in the restaurant. She’s more your type. Isn’t she?” Or, with deadly ‘reasonableness’ – “Don’t if you don’t want to. You’re too tired. No. Another night.” Although he never did make it ‘another night’ but alwa
ys that one, right then, once she had – what? – propositioned him – laid hands on him – her pretty, long-fingered hands, with long painted nails, warm, urgent, fragrant with faintly chemical handcreams, the scent of unreal lilies, of roses, daisy-flowers, clover –

  “Donna...” he said, and turned over, the last papery fragments of the dream crumbling from him into thin air.

  Her scent was different tonight. It was smoky and deeper – a cello note that had been a staccato piping – her skin – was like – velvet – it – There was a faint light in the room after all. There was no pallor to Donna’s skin, or her hair, and under his mouth the texture of her neck was feral but very cool. He lifted away from her. Her eyes were there, abruptly seen, luminous as the eyes of Donna were not. He flung back from her and slammed on the bedside lamp. Both he and she, it seemed, knew to shut their eyes then, to protect them from the glare. And then open their eyes and see. They were ice-blue, her eyes. She was not Donna. She was the woman from the breakfast, Angela or Anjeela Merville.

  “Good evening,” she said, with a softly calm politeness. And then she laughed. “You buzz with electricity. Did you know?

  “What the shit are you doing here?”

  “What do you think I am doing here?”

  Carver swung himself over, off and out of the bed. He was naked, but the disturbed covers now completely revealed that she was too.

  In the low harsh light she looked young, desirable, her full breasts with their black strawberries of nipples, her heavy thighs, the mask of black fur nestled between them. Her hair looked darker too, and longer than he had thought. The smell of her was lush and tasty. Chocolate, honey –

  He swallowed, and the smell and taste of her entered him.

  “Ms Merville, thanks for your visit. I’d like you to get out now.”

  She lay looking at him. She said, “No, you wouldn’t.”

  His body had responded to hers. In the lamplight it was absurdly obvious.