Ivoria Read online

  After she died he had been unable to watch her films for three whole years - and they had run two seasons of them on TV. (Serena had bought box sets of videos, then DVD’s, as they became available, of Claudia’s movies. She had the lot, in many versions, including a very flickery one dubbed into Polish. She showed them, Laurence had said, when friends dropped round.) In the fourth year, one evening Nick came in about midnight and turned on the TV without thinking, and saw Claudia in old, faded colour, and the spike that had long ago dissolved punched a hole through his abdomen. That was when he should have cried, perhaps. But still he had not. He had only sat there on the couch with the coffee going cold in his hands, staring at his mother, his own age that night, and in a turquoise frock, drinking a vermouth in a make-believe bar in an invented Paris.

  He had never called her mother, nor by any form of title, nothing like that. Virtually everyone had called her Claudia. And she called him Nick.

  When the film on TV ended, he had just gone on sitting there holding the cold coffee, in that flat her legacy had bought him, the flat before the one he lived in now that had the eight-sided window.

  Sat there. And he saw he had at last learned she was a long way off. That was the only thought he had - not that she was dead, or alive in another better world. Only that she was, and now would always be, a long way off. As if she were on the moon perhaps, up on the moon, the real unreachable one where nobody had ever landed; there.

  Without remembering he re-activates the mobile at 9 a.m. the next morning.

  There are three messages. The first two are in the voice of the unknown woman from the previous evening. She sounds increasingly more wild and furious. “Listen, you bastard, you don’t get rid of me that easily. If you haven’t got the guts, get the arch-bastard to call me himself!” This is message number one. The second is this: “For Christ’s sake, Nicolas - this is mental cruelty - it is sadistic - fucking call me you bastard! I want you to know I have already contacted the police. I won’t stand for this from him. Nor from you.” The third message comprises only two or three strangled noises, a kind of wordless explosion of violence.

  Nick drinks the coffee he has just prepared and thinks that, due to the repetitions, the woman’s voice now does seem slightly familiar.

  Who is the other ‘he’? Presumably some partner or lover.

  He picks up the notebook with his own story in it, and begins to check and amend some of the pages. He always writes long-hand, then verbally records the result. Robyn then types it up on her computer. Theirs is a different business arrangement, platonic. She performs the service, he pays her in cash.

  The phone goes again. It is not the mobile but the land-line.

  Nick has a sudden odd premonition that this caller will be his brother Laurence. But Laurence was here only - what was it? - only four nights back. It would not be like him to call again so soon.

  People do unexpected things sometimes. Nick is faintly curious to find that although he gets up, he skirts the shrilling phone, and instead walks down the room to where the stair leads to the little gallery and the entry to the loft bedroom overhead. Coffee and notebook in hand, he climbs the stair, crosses the gallery, enters the bedroom and shuts the door. It is by contrast a low-ceilinged room, with a tiny porthole version of the lower window. Below in the cul-de-sac, lots of big vans are delivering mysterious things to other flats. The vehicles are parked nose to tail all around the U shape of the road, which loops in off and back out to the busy main artery of traffic.

  Downstairs Nick has heard the ansa-phone accepting a message, but due to the acoustics of the flat, up here he has not caught a word.

  There is another stranger in the main lobby when Nick walks down there about 11 a.m. But the whole building is always presenting strangers, most of whom are the occupants of the other flats. Due to remarkably good sound-proofing, which probably was not even planned, no flat ever hears much from another. Nick in his upper apartment, has always had the sense of being entirely alone.

  The stranger, unusually however, turns and looks fixedly at him.

  “Sorry to trouble you,” says the man, who is tallish, slim, nondescript. “Did you see a drawer down here - oh, about a week ago - Monday I’d guess.”

  “A drawer. What sort of drawer?”

  “Out of a desk.”

  Nick looks back at him. The man frowns sheepishly. “I was - er - staying with my girlfriend, Flat 14. Moved a few of my things in. Then we had a bit of an argument. While I was away - it seems she slung my gear out - some of my clothes, my computer - well, that’s gone, obviously. General bits. But I had a desk drawer with stationery - paper, envelopes, paper clips, pens, a few books - that kind of stuff. I didn’t really think anyone would be that keen on any of it but it looks as if they were - either that or she dumped it in one of the bins.” The man now appears embarrassed. “Well, win some, lose the lot. There we go.”

  Nick says, “There were some books on that table. They were there a couple of days. I took them. Chekov stories, and Katherine Mansfield. Were they yours? I still have them, would you like them back?”

  “Oh - no, that’s OK.”

  “You’re sure? Can I pay you for them?”

  “No, no. Yeah, I’ve got them in hardback somewhere anyway. It’s the notebooks that were the thing really, some schedules and dates for work, nothing vital - just a nuisance.”

  “I’m sorry,” says Nick. He is regretful. He knows he would hate to lose his own notebooks, with their ideas and fragments.

  “Oh well,” says the stranger. “C’est la vie.”

  Nick buys some cut ham and Greek bread at the deli, some green and red fruit, and Brazilian coffee. He lunches at the pub on the corner.

  He has now forgotten the ousted man in the lobby, though at the time Nick felt rather sorry for him. He looked the sort of guy who often gets a raw deal, and for whom nothing very good ever happens, who is used to it, accepting, mostly bored with life’s callousness and lack of imagination. Years ago, about 1970, he might have said ‘mustn’t grumble’. Now he said C’est la vie. But that didn’t improve anything.

  Even so, walking back into the lobby, Nick has an abrupt sense that the stranger is still there. He even glances about, to see if the man is sitting on the polished bench near the side corridor, but he is not.

  Nick goes up the stairs. There has never been a lift here, nor has Nick ever needed one, despite the complaints of the removal men years before, lugging up the dismantled bed and couches.

  When he comes out on his own landing, the top one, Nick finds he is completely unsurprised to discover the stranger again, now sitting in the window embrasure outside Nick’s door. Deep within Nick’s body, the very sluggish yet seldom, in humanity entirely quiescent muscle of unease, flexes itself. Then Nick sees this is not the stranger with the lost drawer. It is another stranger, nondescript in rather the same manner, resigned-looking, standing up now to show he is a little more stocky and a fraction taller and a touch more hard than the previous model.

  “Mr Lewis?” asks the Mark 2 Stranger.

  And Nick thinks, Ah. A policeman.

  4

  The policeman, (plain clothes) if so he is, gives his name as Pond.

  For a moment Nick thinks he says Bond.

  Luckily Pond seems unaware of any possible filmic audial dysfunction. He simply stands quietly by the door, and when Nick says nothing and makes no further move, Pond adds, noncommittally, “Perhaps, sir, if this is your flat, we might go in.”

  No ID has been shown.

  Nick, he is uncertain why, does not demand any. Perhaps Pond’s credentials are utterly self-evident. He unlocks the door, and he and Pond enter.

  Pond flicks a look round the big room. “An impressive window.”

  “Yes.”

  “My wife would love a place like this. I suspect too pricey for us. And too small. Maybe once we boot the kids out.”

  Chat, to put the civilian at his ease?

  Nick goes u
p to the kitchen and slides the ham and fruit into the fridge.

  “Would you like a drink, Mr Pond? Or a coffee?”

  “Very kind, sir. Not just now.” Pond stands there, awaiting Nick’s return. He has made no correction to the title ‘Mr’. Nick takes a small bottle of Volvic, opens it, and comes back. “Water. Very healthy,” says Pond.

  Nick thinks, aslant as it were, that with such a name, (assuming it is real) Pond might not care to drink much water.

  After this Nick stands, relaxed enough, looking at Pond. In point of fact, Nick is not relaxed, but somehow, having had a mother who was an actress, observing so many actors, even acting in front of cameras, not to mention those brief excursions around drama schools, has given him a subcutaneous lesson or two.

  Nor does he speak. He will let Pond tell him what Pond wants. Anyway, presumably it is to do with the madwoman who called. And surely not with the book-and-drawer man.

  “I believe,” says Pond, “you have a brother, a Mr Laurence Adrian Lewis. The writer and TV personality.”

  Nick is startled.

  “Yes.”

  “When did you last see Mr Lewis, Mr Lewis?”

  Nick stares at Pond, stupidly fixated on the weird syntax Pond has just used, so that what he has actually said makes no sense. But in those moments Nick hears the madwoman’s voice in his inner ear again, and Nick realises something he consciously had not known, not recalled, either yesterday or earlier today.

  “Angie. Angela called me,” Nick says, more to himself than Pond.

  “Yes, sir. Mrs Angela Lewis did indeed call you. Seven times, according to Mrs Lewis. About her husband, Mr Laurence Adrian Lewis.”

  “Why?”

  “Your brother, sir, seems to have disappeared.”

  “Christ.” Nick does not know why he said that. It is as if he has had to make a reply, and with a suitably shocked emphasis.

  Pond says, “Mrs Lewis called several of Mr Lewis’s contacts, including the BBC studio, but everyone assured her Mr Lewis caught the London train on Friday afternoon. This is even backed up by a guard who checked his ticket, and identified Mr Lewis from the repeat of a TV programme on the - let me see - Norman Conquest.”

  “Yes,” says Nick.

  “Mrs Lewis also told us that Mr Lewis had called her on Friday morning from Manchester, mentioning he was due to see you, sir, when he got back to London. He was unsure how long he would be with you, but said the two of you might make a night of it.”

  Nick feels a wave of peculiar fear. Laurence and he have never, in their entire lives, except when forced to in family company, made a ‘night of it’. They did not and do not like each other.

  “Therefore,” Pond adds, rather thoughtfully, “Mrs Lewis eventually called you yesterday evening. She said that she has, now and then, been used to her husband’s not returning after various junkets with his friends, and thought he might well have stayed on at your flat. However, when you pretended not to know who she was and refused to take her calls…”

  Nick blurts, “It was a bad line, I didn’t recognise her voice…”

  “And she was, I suspect, quite hysterical by then. Besides, one gets so many unwanted calls nowadays.” Pond nods.

  There is silence. Pond just keeps standing there, waiting, and Nick stands there, not drinking the Volvic.

  And then the landline rings loudly, and both he and Pond turn to glare at it, like two animals who have been engaged in some face-off, when a third animal of some other type bounds between them.

  He had been eleven, Laurence around twenty-three, when Laurence played the joke on him. He realised afterwards Serena was almost certainly in on it too. But he was never sure of that. He had been with Claudia to London. It was a celebratory drinks party, arranged by the director that Claudia always called Samson, though that was not his name. The affair had something to do with successful funding for a movie by the US, and they had asked Claudia along, despite her not working in film since the 1970”s. She was forty-six.

  Nick could recollect nothing very special about this party. It was like many he had been at, with Claudia. He was usually struck by then more by the sheer ordinariness of most ‘stars’ when seen in the flesh, or else by the alien oddness of the ones who were not ordinary. But after all he was used to his mother’s glamour. She had stayed glamorous, and besides had that strange inbuilt magic which can be seen without make-up, just out of sleep, or even aging. They were a scruffy lot often too, the new stars. Bashing about in expensive favourite old jeans or similar tatty clothes. Even when dressed to kill, they no longer ever had, for Nick, the fizz and glitter that reproduced on celluloid. In fact, he had once or twice witnessed scenes shot that looked like nothing, yet which came into vivid and gleaming life when viewed on the big screen. Or even on TV.

  Claudia and he were due to drive back from the party together. But then it seemed there was to be some other thing to which Samson persuaded Claudia she really must come. Did she not know X might be there - even Y and Z?

  She laughed, and said she would ‘obey’. But the extra event was scheduled to go on past one in the morning. So Nick, due for school the next day, had to travel back alone to the country house in the car, driven by one of the studio chauffeurs who knew the way from long practice. It would only take a couple of hours. Claudia would stay over at the house in Highgate.

  Nick was reasonably philosophical. No lover of school or organised education, yet he grasped in this his father had to be propitiated. Once or twice Nick had escaped, going home with Claudia at 2 or 3 a.m., getting the next day off. But that had to be an occasional treat, never a foregone conclusion.

  Joss Lewis’s country house then was a rambling red brick mansion, about a mile outside a village they all called, disparagingly, St Clucks, for its church and duck pond.

  The house, lying behind iron railings and up a long drive massed by enormous trees, loomed out suddenly, red-faced as if with alarmingly high blood-pressure, its ranks of windows winking. There was a housekeeper, and even servants - who were never referred to as such. It was like stepping back into a curiously skewed 1925. Or, on to a film-set, Nick had later thought.

  It was about 6 p.m. when he got there.

  He went upstairs and into his room, a spacious attic bedsit, and pushing school impedimenta under the desk, took out his latest story and began to work on it.

  His father was in Belgium, some business venture in which Nick had no interest at all. Laurence, thankfully, though just down from his university, was in London. As for Serena, God knew. Staying with friends on someone’s yacht somewhere most likely.

  Nick worked on his story until almost eight o’clock, then went for a stroll round the gardens and in the woods belonging to the house. It was dusk by then. Birds were realigning themselves with their nests or perches in the trees. The sky and the house faded from crimson to blue.

  He had dinner in the small dining room. He got soup and burnt steak and the usual sloppy service, of course, reserved for an eleven-year-old kid. But Nick never minded that. Why the hell should they be nice to him? He did not pay their wages.

  He slept deeply, as ever, after having spent half an hour watching bats circling the carriage lights by the drive.

  At seven thirty the following morning, (dressed and reluctantly ready for the walk to St Cluck’s and the school bus) he was eating toast when the phone went. It was Laurence.

  “Where is she?” demanded Laurence without a greeting. He sounded tousled and irascible, but what was new?

  “Who?” asked Nick.

  “Bloody Claudia. Our mother. Who else, you twot?”

  Nick said, “At the London place. You know? That big white skinny house with…”

  “Shut up. Listen. I know she is meant to be here, at Highgate. I am here. I am waiting for her. She and I are meant to be having lunch.”

  “All right,” said Nick. At this juncture he was only slightly confused, not really thinking anything, or only that fucking stupid Laurence h
ad got something wrong again. “She went to some late night private preview stuff yesterday, after the first…”

  “I know. Stop telling me crap I know. She told me all that when I spoke to her yesterday. But she was going to stay last night at Highgate. And so was I. So I said, let’s have lunch.”

  “OK. Well. She’d have been out late. Maybe she came in after you went to bed.”

  “I didn’t get back until three.”

  “Maybe she was earlier then. You missed each other. And now she’s asleep.”

  “She isn’t. Marj,” (Marj was the au pair) “says Claudia didn’t come in before me. She’d have heard her because Marj was awake and ‘entertaining’ as she puts it, in her room. And anyhow Marj has now gone up with Claudia’s breakfast, since Claudia had asked her for an early call, and the bed’s empty. She didn’t come home, Nick. I called that Samson guy - got his PA - said Claudia left them in a cab before one. So where the fuck is she?”

  Nick laughed. It came out like a silly childish giggle.

  Laurence blew up. He shouted down the phone.

  But Nick grasped instantly his laughter had been that of abrupt and total fear.

  For all her life-style, he had never known Claudia to change a plan without telling her family, where it concerned them, she never let them down. She had always been scrupulous in that.

  Anything could have happened. She might well have ended up too far away to want the drive back to Highgate - Samson’s PA being mistaken. But she would have let Laurence know. She would even have let Marj know, come to that, if Marj had been expecting her return.

  When Laurence stopped shouting, Nick started to say something, and Nick heard his own voice then, sounding remote and frightened. His voice was beginning to break anyway, something that he detested but which he knew was an unavoidable part of growing up. Now this unreliable voice splintered and became only that of a scared little boy, about four or five, and the toast was turning to bile in his guts. And this was the moment Laurence slammed down the phone.