To Indigo Read online

  Immediately I was tense. Was he following me?

  Mentally I shook myself.

  No. Not every person I saw was likely to follow me.

  Only one person. And he, for now, was not in evidence.

  All the way up the Crescent I anticipated him. He might step from behind a tree. Out of a house even, with a friendly farewell gesture to some now-collusive occupant, whom he had conned with one more inventive tale.

  When I reached 72, I hesitated. George and Vita weren’t to be seen. No doubt they were at the back, in the kitchen, making afternoon tea and chatting. I envied them sometimes. Their blossoming, undemanding dual companionship.

  On the path I looked round again.

  The man from 88 was watering his lawn with a sprinkler. So many men are at home now during the day, even the young ones; I used to be the exception. A cat was washing itself on the wall of 73, oblivious of the yapping poodle at the front room window.

  Nothing out of place.

  I reached the door.

  Here I had the strangest moment of déjà vu. It was as if, not Joseph Traskul, but my parents had recently been on the premises. As if it had become their house again, I only their son, lodging there, coming and going, as many sons do.

  But I braced myself and put the key in the lock. The door had been firmly shut, and now it opened. The hall lay before me, with four letters scattered on the mat. To my alert gaze nothing seemed amiss. Nothing was wrong.

  The house had an air of silence and immobility, as if the owner had been away a few days. He had.

  No residue of Joseph seemed to linger.

  I was certain now he had not returned here.

  Nevertheless I considered leaving the door ajar. Then thought better of it. I went into the hall. I looked up the stairs. I meant to go to the kitchen first. That was where I’d left him, where he had recovered, thrown up in the sink. Something however made me go instead directly into the front room. As I did so of course I recalled again the vulnerable dog of red glass.

  Maybe this is the most peculiar thing to try to convey at this point. Standing in the door of the room I felt no shock, none at all.

  I suppose it could have been because the piano, which was now installed there against the left hand wall, where the print of Monet’s Sunday at Agenteuil had once been and was no longer, rested in virtually the same place as the previous piano during my parents’ occupancy.

  Unlike my mother, Joseph had set the red glass dog on the piano’s top.

  That night in 1974, Maureen invited me round, and she’d made me what my mother would have called a ‘proper dinner’. It was roast lamb and roast potatoes with all the ‘trimmings’, and cheesecake from Mercers to follow, plus a bottle of decent red wine and some brandy for later.

  Maureen was a good cook. She did it without any fuss either, whipping off her apron and appearing in a sexy dress. In the beginning her attire had sometimes even put me off the food I was so earnest to get her through the bedroom door.

  “This is all really lovely, Maur,” I said. “Thanks.”

  “I want tonight to be special, Roy,” she said. And winked at me. “You wait till you see what I’ve not got on under this.”

  She was fun. Her lust was Chaucerian in its dedication, honesty and humour.

  It was a special night.

  After we’d settled down a little in bed, around 2 a.m. she sat up and lit a cigarette. I seldom wanted one. It was always, “Just take a fag if you want, darling.”

  “I’ve got something to say, sweetheart,” said Maureen Parner in her pretty, Cockney voice.

  “Yes, Maur…” I was half asleep. She hadn’t lied about the new lingerie, and we’d done it justice.

  “Sorry, luv, but you’d better listen. I really am sorry, luv. But tonight – this has to be our last time.”

  “What…?” I too sat up. I was wide awake, and the brandy suddenly sour in my throat. “Last – last what?”

  “Our last smashing time, darling. Oh, Charlie, don’t look so sad.” Her eyes were full of tears.

  Mine were dry and burned like acid. “I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

  “You know there’ve been – one or two others.”

  “Yes, Maur. It’s OK.”

  “You are such a lovely bloke. Trouble is, I’ve met someone. And he – well he is… he’s different, Roy. Roy, look, I’ll be straight. I like him a lot and he wants to marry me. He’s not rich but he’s OK moneywise. I can stop work. We can have a bit of a good time. He’s a bit older than me. Not that much. I’m pretty ancient, you know.”

  “You’re not old.”

  “No. But you’re young, Roy. You’ve got your whole…”

  “Life ahead of me. Christ. You’re dumping me because I’m a kid.”

  Then she started to cry.

  And even in my total hurt and rage and shock, I put my arms round her. I held her, and soon we started to kiss again. We made love again.

  But after that, when she held me, I had the sense to know this would be, as even the song had it, the last time. I wasn’t yet twenty. I’d known her just over one year. She’d put a magic spell on me, I’d changed, growing one inch taller, sloughing acne and sexual insecurity in one bound. Even selling a story to a magazine. I didn’t love her, but she was my love. She was mine. My Maureen. And now, not any more. Never again.

  It hit me. I stood there, stricken, the piano shining, over thirty years too late.

  Not Lynda’s – of course not hers. Joseph was Maureen’s child. Hers and mine.

  Mine. Mine and Maureen’s.

  She had had to marry the other older man. She hadn’t wanted, being as she was, to pile that responsibility on a callow boy of nineteen with an assistant’s job in a library.

  Joseph was my son. He was about thirty – thirty-one-?

  He was my son. Almost exactly as he had claimed to be.

  When I walked dazedly out of the room I saw the letters again, on the mat.

  There had been four. I’d absently counted them.

  Now there were five.

  XIII

  (‘Untitled’: Page 213)

  TO dine in his father’s house was always a custom of anathema to him. Yet here he was, seated at the long table of dark wood, the dishes set about, and his family set around them, conversing in their usual dull manner. Vilmos studied them. As sometimes happened after the talons of the ’micrania had let go of him, he seemed both to hear and to see more clearly. Like a painting on glass, his stout anaemic mother and two pale, weed-like sisters. His older brothers, big, and tonight red-faced by contrast, jested and drank, observant only of the stern patriarch. Should he frown they would lower their voices. But otherwise they were always similarly obedient to him, worked at the offices he had demanded, wed when he told them they must. At or because of Vilmos he did not frown.

  Vilmos was his curse, the devil somehow borne of the consanguineous line of his house. Vilmos he paid no attention at all. That he even suffered Vilmos, his youngest son, to live, albeit intermittently, in the family home, even to sit at table with him, was due only to a horrible and parsimonious religious ethic.

  Meanwhile he did not know what Vilmos had truly done. He was not aware Vilmos had killed three women in the city, and at least eight men – perhaps nine – the fate of Reiner, of course, would never be fully ascertained by any.

  Had he known all this, and of other matters to do with Vilmos, how would the patriarch have responded?

  Vilmos himself sometimes pondered on this.

  At certain times he believed his father would, himself, have summoned an assassin, and had the troublesome offspring excised from the pages of family life. But then again, his religious ethic might restrain him. Rather than murder his son, the father might only confine him in some cellar, feeding him and sustaining him ‘mercifully’, but never allowing him out again into the light.

  Thus not only were dinners at his father’s house irksome and angering, they were potentially danger
ous. For that reason too maybe, Vilmos still occasionally attended them. His whole existence fled along a razor’s edge, pursued by his own demons, and in pursuit of God knew what. Threat was the sea in which habitually he swam.

  But now the father spoke.

  At once utter stillness fell, respectful, or more properly fearful, as the Biblical canon decreed.

  The three wan women, their lips parted, waited as if to receive his words not only through ears and eyes, but by mouth.

  The brothers squared their shoulders, intelligent oxen ready to serve.

  “This goose is dry, Saveta,” said the patriarch to his wife.

  “I am so sorry, Vladis. I will speak to the cook…”

  “Do it. I expect my table, though now impoverished, to serve palatable food at least.”

  Vilmos, before he could prevent it, laughed. The patriarch did not even look at him.

  When one of the brothers glared in Vilmos’s direction, the patriarch spoke directly to this brother, diverting him. “I wish to discuss with you the cloth revenues. We are in arrears, it seems. Follow me to my study.”

  Once these two men had left the room, the women quickly got up. They went into a corner by the fire and took up their tatting.

  The other brothers sat drinking. They had taken out a draughts board and now played a ponderous game.

  Vilmos stayed where he was. He watched the candlelight creep on the ceiling, now and then faltering or flaring up. Two servants came in and cleared the table. The mother called them sharply. In a malicious undertone she berated then both over the goose.

  Vilmos thought, with deep, comfortable melancholy, of Reiner, struggling and sinking in the river where he, Vilmos, had flung him. Reiner could swim a little. Besides debris was everywhere that he might reach and cling to. It was interesting to Vilmos inwardly to debate if his former companion had survived.

  But then the image of the king, crowned with bones and with a rat in his breast, returned, slicing through memory like a knife.

  In his chair, Vilmos sat upright. Something strange in the candlelight seemed to show him the king again upon the ceiling.

  The colours in his torso, yellow, orange and crimson, were those of the three lower illuminated Cakras. They indicated appetite, greed, carnal desire. The added symbols, such as the rat and the snake, indicated blockages and perversions.

  The higher colours, such as the green of the emotive heart, had not been contained in his vision. The piece of tin, when he revived and was shown it, had been burnt, apparently by some dreadful aspect of Vilmos himself. The Master was gone and had explained nothing. The servant, of course, had no tongue.

  Vilmos now brooded on all this.

  Few had ever attained the greater goals of the Order of the Indian Mystery. Few had seen as high as the sky-blue of the Cakra of communication, speech and song. And none, Vilmos thought, had viewed any higher. Unless the Master himself had done so.

  Self-enlightenment, the dominion over self – and so over all other things – was reached only by unleashing the Gem of the Brow. It was the last stage of utter power. Beyond it no man could rise, save to reach up from the physical self into the Infinite, which was both Bliss and Annihilation: Death, Eternity. The Gem was therefore the ultimate state possible while yet living.

  They said, not the Master but his Master, he who had ruled the Order before him, had done this. Armed then with the abilities of a god, he had vanished from the City.

  “I want it,” Vilmos murmured. He clenched both his hands on the table’s edge, gripping it so hard a vibration seemed to pass through the wood.

  When he went out, one of the servant girls, beaten by the cook because of the goose, wept against the panelling. She was about fourteen. Vilmos stared at her with a kind of revulsion. She smelled of grease, and her own unwashed body and hair. What wretched things humans were.

  “Cheer up, my pigeon,” he said to her in passing. “We’re all damned. We’ll all roast in the Scalds of Hell.”

  Her sobs choked to silence. She was afraid of him. He was the Chosen of the Devil. This notion filled him with great joy, and also with trepidation and a leaden disappointment. Why could God not have chosen him? Now he would never rise up beyond the genitals, the bowels and belly, the heart, the voice, into the dark blue sphere of the Elect. Unless, obviously, the Master was mistaken. Vilmos left the house thinking this. He walked through the darkness of the City to the lodging of the harlot Klavdisa. She knew better than to take other custom without his permission. He could practice with her his dominion over others, in case the Master were wrong.

  FOURTEEN

  Two of the letters were printed with my name and address. Two were handwritten.

  The fifth, the last one lying on top of them, was different.

  It was a clean, white ordinary envelope, the kind anyone could buy somewhere like Smiths, neither opulent nor cheap, empty of either name or address.

  I picked it up and found it was sealed in the usual way. I ripped it open so roughly bits of it fluttered off back to the floor.

  One sheet of typing or computer paper was inside, again medium quality.

  Unlike the envelope, the sheet was printed, a font widely used with nothing special about it.

  One word, and three numerals:

  Compasses. 7.30

  I use the name The Compasses for the pub. This isn’t correct. It was the dodgy place Joseph had stayed at in the high street. I’ve changed the name.

  After a while I carried all the letters into the kitchen.

  The table had been pulled back from the door, which had been relocked and re-bolted. Out on the paving his black dustbin-present was now stationed neatly to one side. When presently I opened the fridge, I found he had put the bottle of Wincott’s into the chiller. The fridge had been reconnected too. It was as cold as it should be, and the freezer as well.

  He had washed up the dinner plates and put them to drain, and the cutlery, (all but the missing fork), was standing in its proper section. I’d rinsed the glasses. These he had put away, in the right place.

  There was no mess. In fact the kitchen looked as clean as when Franziska tended to it. There was a faint smell of bleach too, as then.

  I felt a type of nervous curiosity. I went into the library. That copy of my book, Last Orders, lay on the little table. A piece of paper lay on top of it with an erratically written splash of words, (his writing, already recognizable to me). Really brilliant, Mr Phillips. Should have won a prize – or did it?

  Nothing else seemed changed. At least he had not dusted the table.

  Upstairs, the computer had completed its deletions but was still on. I switched it off. Nothing was disturbed that I could see. My bedroom door remained locked and had not been broken in.

  The bathroom and lavatory were virtually as I’d left them, too. It seemed he must have used the lavatory and he had used the bath. One longish black curled hair lay on the edge. I stared at it, impelled. I picked it off. It had fallen from his head and he had not noticed it, or did not care. In some crude past of banes and witchcraft I might have thought I could employ it against him. Now I truly might, if I put it into the sandwich bag with the new note added to the old one from the dustbin, and the fork he had used during our dinner, both of which I’d carried up to London and now brought back. DNA.

  I had to find some access to the police that would make them listen. If he had done this sort of thing before, and they would take me seriously, they might discover him among their records, his DNA already lying in wait to catch him out. Or was it only me, only me as his target?

  And then I sat down on the stair, the top stair where I’d sometimes sat as a child.

  I held the cellophane bag in one hand, and the piece of paper that said Compasses: 7.30 in the other.

  Suppose he really was my son? Mine and Maureen’s?

  Downstairs I’d been certain for all of sixty seconds.

  But now?

  He could play the piano even better than s
he had. Perhaps, like her, he had a singer’s voice. His speaking voice was attractive, musical. It had that element trainers of speech would once talk about, timbre, the distinctive character of a voice, what Maureen herself had referred to as its colour. What colour had hers been? Soft pink, deep grey, silver. And his? It was dark, with a tawny edge. This is fanciful. I don’t often think of things in that way.

  He was mesmerizing me. Had done so. Push it off. Be sensible and wary. Even if he were – mine – he had followed and stalked and harried and played with me. Very likely he had an axe to grind, was enraged at me, his absent, ignorant bastard of a father. He might be capable of anything. And yet -

  The phone in the hall was out of action. I used my mobile to call Duran, my ex-burglar electrician. But his wife informed me he was in Bristol, working on a big job with his cousin.

  “When will he…?”

  “Don’t know, sorry. All he says to me when he calls me is it’s going slow there. At least another month, I’d say.”

  The Compasses was dark, although April was turning towards May, the sun lower but still a good half hour from setting. There was oldish stained-glass in some of the windows, probably fitted circa 1930, when the pub was built. Green tiling had been kept too. The urinals seemed of the same vintage, if less pleasant.

  I arrived ten minutes or so later than stipulated. Joseph played; so I did, if only a little.

  And I meant to be friendly if non-committal. I meant to try to get to the bottom of all this.

  The mirage that he might be my son lay like a flickering light somewhere in the murk of my confusion.

  Unsettled and unsure, whether I was glad or appalled I couldn’t discover.

  In the doorway I looked round.

  To the casual or ill-informed eye, there was nothing very odd about The Compasses. The dealers were fairly discreet. They expected you to know either whom they were, or if not to tip the barman the wink, and await an introduction.

  Some couples, young or middle-aged, sat around, perhaps innocent, just passing through. Small groups of secretive looking men clustered over their pints. In the second room, a gathering watched as two men played snooker with steely concentration and the sharp clack of balls.