Ivoria Read online

  Practiced, he says, “Don’t worry. I’ll get your brandy.”

  “No - just wine - dry white, thanks. Thank you.”

  “Glass or bottle?”

  She laughs again. “Just a glass.”

  When he comes back though he brings a bottle and two glasses, and pours both half way full.

  The wine helps her loosen up, and he also helps. He is accustomed. Women have been uneasy before, at first, in his presence, even when everything has been arranged. Concentrating on easing her out of it, he keeps forgetting how like Claudia she is, then being reminded; caught by it with a jolt and electric surge neither horrible nor pleasing. It defies his analysis.

  He had, while standing at the bar, wondered - if it comes to it - if he will be able to make love to her. He will have to ask her to talk to him, he concludes, because her voice is not at all like his mother’s, unless, of course… if Kit’s voice had been actor-trained in the era when Claudia began to act - not prissy or over-clipped, but more of the latter day school of the Oliviers… Would she then have sounded like Claudia?

  She tells him a little about her life. She says she is not quite another career girl, does not dislike her job but would rather paint. She does that in her spare time. The only men she meets are types she says she detests, or if she does like them then they are unavailable. And because of that - she naively, or honestly, confesses - she has been sexually inactive for two years.

  When the bottle is empty she asks him to join her for a meal. He accepts. They go to a decent place on the Strand.

  By the end of the meal they are joking a little and chatting.

  He enjoys this, but then he always does. He likes women, being with them, caressing them, fucking them.

  She pays serenely for the food with a platinum Visa card.

  Outside then, in the nine o’clock frost-cold air, London glowing and beaming with its coloured accents of neon, she grows serious and softly asks, “Shall we meet later in the week, Nick?”

  “We can, that would be good,” he says. “Or we don’t have to stop here, if you’d like to continue the evening.”

  “A club? Another drink?” she says.

  “If you’d like to. Or we can do something else. Something more physical.”

  “I…”

  “Not if you’re not ready. We take this at the pace you prefer.”

  “But if you came to my flat - for you, it would be all right?” she asks, her eyes on his. In the neon glow they look no longer blue but blacker than the light-polluted sky.

  “It would be sensational,” he calmly says.

  “You wouldn’t mind?”

  “No, I wouldn’t mind. I’d be looking forward to it.”

  They get a cab (she pays) and go to her basement flat. It lies on one of the quieter back roads behind Harley Street, among the mild pale yellow fake Victorian street lamps.

  He is curious now, more than perturbed, by his reactions.

  He had never seen his mother naked, only in bathing costumes, and sometimes bikinis, faultless even in her late forties.

  Kit’s nakedness, when he sees it, is only that of another attractive streamlined body. But her skin is exceptionally soft and smooth, even whiter than on her face and throat. Her breasts are larger than they had seemed when she was dressed, still firm and high, though with a lush, heavy fullness. She has a tiny scar on her stomach, just above the navel, a couple too on one thigh. She does not refer to them, nor he, naturally.

  Lying under him, where it seems she is most comfortable, her face is like anyone’s, or like any woman’s contorted by the mad joys of orgasm.

  They make love three times, before he leaves her around half past two. She pays him as Sonia does, getting up apologising to produce money from the bedside drawer, plain unhidden notes, but without the actorly ribbon bow.

  In the street trees stand jet black, bare and attenuated against the lamplight. The trees, the pavement seem very hard, very cold. He must make a note of this for the story. It is as if he had never before registered the hardness of such surfaces, as if, even, they have only just begun to harden.

  8

  When he re-enters his flat he is struck instantly and again by a sense of something icily metamorphic and alien.

  He thinks for a moment it is the same feeling he experienced walking back to the Marylebone Road.

  Nick turns on the lights.

  He sees immediately five things which have altered.

  One: the bathroom door, which had been open, is now closed. Two: the kitchen door, which had been open, is now only halfway open. Three: a coffee mug he had put in the kitchen is standing back out on a table. It still has dregs in it. Four: a sweater he had left on the arm of a couch is on the floor. Five: his notebook is lying face down on the table, but it had been lying face up, pen resting on one page - the pen has gone. He knows he does not imagine these alterations.

  Nick is frozen.

  Then he moves.

  He runs up the two stairs and into the kitchen. Aside from the mug he had left there, nothing looks different. But then the mixer tap drips. It never drips unless hot and cold are incompletely turned off, and so he always turns them off completely.

  In the bathroom nothing is disturbed that he can see.

  He sprints upstairs and, as he passes, notes a photograph of a rainy London street, positioned over the short gallery, is askew.

  In the bedroom someone has pulled his bed apart. It does not look particularly uncouth, only rather the way he does it himself, when changing the bedclothes and duvet cover.

  There are no rips or daubs, no knife marks, piss or excrement sprinkled and smeared.

  Nothing else seems to have happened.

  He goes back down, moving slowly now, and undoes the old cigar box on his larger table. There had been a couple of hundred pounds in it when he went out. There still are.

  The flat then has not been burgled, not even vandalised, rather it has been penetrated, and by person or persons familiar with unviolent break-ins, using the most subtle and knowledgeable criminal methods - there was no mark on the main door, either inside or out. But more to the point, they have taken some pains to show him they were here. They have left their visiting cards of misplacement, and if he had been too stupid to register those, of unmissable disruption - the bed.

  He is certain they will have left no clues. No fingerprints, probably no DNA - or if they have, it will relate only to those who are not on any police file.

  Nick does not consider either calling the police.

  Another thought nudges him. That the girl, Kit, might have been a decoy, to remove him from the flat.

  He decides to contact Sonia in the morning.

  He does not know if the break-in has shaken him up.

  Nick thinks not. Yet its nature has, rather.

  Despite other possibilities he keeps thinking of his brother Laurence. He keeps thinking of Laurence, coming back out of nowhere, and Laurence breaking in, and searching for the Roman pin, and not finding it. And yet of all of it, that is the most preposterous plot-line.

  Nick has already locked, but now barricades the main door, pushing one of the couches hard against it. This seems inadequate, but maybe a concrete block would seem so. He sits on the moved couch, staring back into the room.

  In the end he goes to bed. He does not sleep. Nor does he get up until 6 a.m.

  Unlike his other ‘regular’ lovers, Sonia has never given Nick a personal number. He rarely needs to call any of them anyway, they call to make dates, or when arrangements fluctuate. Or, like Jazz, perhaps, when they become unobtainable.

  Sonia’s work-number however, with its personal extension, soon puts him in touch with her.

  “Nick! What a lovely surprise! Or is it? Do say you don’t have to stand me up next week.”

  “No, that’s fine, Sonia. I’m looking forward to it. I just wanted to ask you something.”

  “Yes, please. Just like last time - with the little extras. That was -
nice.”

  They laugh.

  “I’m afraid this is something else. Do you know a woman called Kit?”

  “Kit…” Sonia sounds blank. “Does she have a second name?”

  “She gave it as Price.”

  “Doesn’t ring a bell.”

  “No. The reason I’m asking, she called me and said you had mentioned me. She wanted to meet me.”

  “Christ,” says Sonia, thoughtfully. “I take it you mean I’d blabbed about our - er - arrangement.”

  “I gathered you had recommended me very flatteringly.”

  “No, Nick. I don’t - wouldn’t - do that. I mean, I certainly could, very very flatteringly. I just would not. Certainly not to someone I don’t think I even know, if you see what I mean.”

  Nick pragmatically describes Kit. Her beauty he classes, for Sonia, as “good-looking”. Sonia listens.

  “She could be anyone, apart from the hair. I really don’t know any really well-peroxided blondes - oh, apart from my mum, but she’s knocking fifty. But you met her, then, this Kit?”

  She sounds now - is she jealous? Sonia is well aware that Nick sees many women, all on the same ‘professional’ if friendly terms as herself. Just this time though, there is a definite note in her voice.

  “I’m afraid so. If it was a trick, I fell for it. She did describe you, and the place where you work. All that was accurate enough. I assumed she was bone fide.”

  “God, Nick. Well - I really haven’t a clue. Are you OK? Did you…?”

  “Oh, we just had a drink, to check each other out. But I wanted to run this past you before it goes any further.”

  “Right. Well, sorry. I don’t know.”

  “No.”

  Sonia abruptly says, “Oops. Rog Ratface is just peering into next door’s cubicle. He’ll be in here in a moment - have to go, babes. See you next week, lover. Can’t wait.”

  Nick is unsure if he quite believes Sonia. She had seemed a little flustered and then too cool - she has been an actor, so can still act if she has to. Lying? Maybe. If she knows Kit, perhaps they had a few drinks, and the subject of Nick spilled out with other chick-chat. Now Sonia regrets it - both the glamorous Kit getting her teeth into him, and also breaking what both Sonia and he have assumed so far to be a confidential arrangement.

  He has no phone number for Kit. (He had noted it was withheld when she called him yesterday. But why not? He was a stranger.) On the other hand he knows, as they say, where she lives. Is that taking this right past sane limits? It is probably a coincidence, after all, that he was with her when Persons Unknown penetrated the flat.

  Nick thinks suddenly of the night he had gone to meet Jazz and waited for her, and how she had not arrived. He had been away then two, three hours. Coming back he had no sense of anyone’s having been here. But had they? If they were able to break in, then why not then? The difference being only that, on the first occasion, they had left no deliberate markers of their intrusion…

  No, that was crazy.

  But it was all a little crazy by now, was it not?

  At seven o’clock that evening Nick goes out. He is half way down the stairs when he wants childishly to go back and clamp some non-existent metal mesh across the flat’s main door.

  He is actually in the lobby when it occurs to him they must have broken in down here too. Unless another tenant let them in. Someone then may have seen them, or at least spoken to them via the door intercom. And, of course, promptly forgotten.

  His notebook, the one they had replaced face down and from which they had abducted the pen, had not been damaged. His story and the notes were intact. He had not expected anything else - or had he? Had he actually expected, picking up the book finally and inspecting it, that they would have crossed through each page, even smeared there some of the human muck they had not utilised elsewhere. Defacing his words. Rubbing out what he had created. Aware that this, in every ordinary way less than all else, was the only thing of value?

  Nick takes the tube, gets out at Marylebone, and walks behind Harley Street to the Victorian lamplit Georgian houses where Kit Price, if so she is, had let him into her basement rooms.

  He recalls the house exactly. A pair of huge trees lour over the gateway, the ones he had registered as so cold and hard, made of obsidian not bark. In tonight’s darkness they are only winter trees.

  Reaching the steps he looks down at the doorway. There is a name above the bell. He fails to remember that as being there before, the name. But very likely he only took no notice. He knew her name, of course. Then.

  Reaching the steps’ bottom he reads the name. He feels no startlement. J.P. Franks.

  Nick knocks with the iron knocker.

  Dimly, through a narrow stained glass pane, he can make out a distant muffled light. But that may mean nothing. She -or whoever this is - should be home by now. But then, they could be having a few drinks before returning, spilling secrets, foisting themselves on reluctant siblings in order to hide things, breaking into other flats…

  Footfalls. Someone to open the door.

  But the door does not open. Nick believes someone is there, sees a faint suggestion of a shadow through that slot of glass. (Somehow he is sure this shape is not that of the blonde woman, not Kit.) But still, anyway, neither is the door undone.

  “Hello,” Nick calls.

  Is there anybody there? Did he imagine the sound of approaching feet, the shadow? Now there is no movement. The shadow has melted, or had never existed.

  He thinks, in a brief swirl of inappropriate literary memory, of de la Mare’s poem, The Listeners. The traveller knocking, and unanswered. The phantoms crowded, listening, in the house, neither replying or admitting him.

  He tries to think what he saw of the flat last night. Very little. Back in the early 1800’s this would have been, he guesses, the kitchen area, but not now. Instead Kit, or ‘Kit’, had taken him straight into a big bedroom with an en suite bath, herself gone out and come back with some wine. The rest of the place had been in darkness, a rambling sort of dark, that suggested several rooms and a corridor that twisted and turned - but there was no sense of anyone else’s being there. There had been, now he thinks of it, a background dusty, musty odour, but a basement might be prone to that, however smart.

  Nick now calls loudly, “I’m trying to reach Ms Price.”

  No answer.

  The door stays shut.

  Returning upstairs to his flat, Nick discovers he is starting to shake.

  He makes it to the door, opens it, slams on the lights, (perhaps they like violence for their turn on - they definitely seem to flare up with vast brilliance), scrutinises the main room and judges that nothing is changed. He does all this with enormous care, and then his eyes blacken over. It passes swiftly. In a funny way he feels better after, not shaking, steadier. As if he had been sick and so got rid of something that was poisoning him.

  He checks the whole flat then, quite thoroughly. And all is well.

  But he cannot simply leave this situation, can he? He does not know its meaning, which seems doubly sinister since it is veiled.

  Is it that someone is after the Roman pin that Laurence hid here? This would appear to be the most likely cause. They have found out, while Laurence himself has gone to ground, leaving Nick holding the fort, as it were. Mostly he feels impeded, irritated. (And also threatened, if he is honest, in the most primal way.)

  Unusually he stays in for dinner and eats a cold meat sandwich and drinks a bottle of Beck’s.

  He writes a few paragraphs in the notebook, is dissatisfied with them and himself crosses them through. He is tired too. He has not slept. He repeats the couch-block of the door. He then has a bath and goes to bed and thinks, as sleep claims him, that the penetrators could return at any moment, once more entering so silently no one else in the building will notice. But he does not believe they will. He wonders if he has somehow fantasized all of it. He asks himself if the now untraceable Kit is even real. Or, more pertinent
ly perhaps, did she lace his glass of wine in the bedroom with some unorthodox substance which he failed to identify, but which thereafter made him see the pavements and trees were turning into fossils, and demon callers had entered his home, shifted his possessions and unmade the bed on which he must - and now does - lie?

  Deep in the night he wakes up. The phone had been ringing. Had it?

  If so, the landline or his mobile? He falls back to sleep before he can decide to investigate.

  At first next morning, he does not recollect hearing the phone, but while he defrosts and eats two croissants the idea re-emerges. He tries the ansa-machine but it has nothing, and his mobile is the same. A dream, then.

  He dumps the plate and mug in the dishwasher, but then is somehow driven to look in various drawers and cupboards, all of which seem to be in the proper order - or disorder - that he himself left them in.

  Kitchen seen to, he crosses to the bathroom and opens the store cabinet, but this is exactly as it was, apart from a new toothpaste and toothbrush-in-waiting, and some extra soaps he bought yesterday. He learns he wants to undo all the packaging and look inside all the individual soap boxes. He resists, then goes along with it and does so. Each box has a bar of soap, nothing else. The new toothpaste contains a tube of toothpaste.

  Nick moves back out into the main room and checks the scatter of books and boxes on the bigger table, and the rack of CDs and DVDs by the TV and music centre, the bookshelves. Then he goes to the cabinet to open both doors and stare inside.

  He had not thought to do this before, yet as he flings wide the doors he is thinking if this keeps up, he may need to seek a psychoanalyst.

  But he forgets that quickly. Because although most of the stuff that he keeps in the cabinet is present, there is also one major composite omission. It comprises several items, but each of them was, in its own way, connected to the others, and all are gone. A kind of psychic hole seems to remain, gaping before him. What has been removed is every single article from that drawer he saw in the lobby and appropriated - envelopes, staples, paper clips, pens, loose paper, and all the notebooks from whose vitals he had so painstakingly torn their originally used pages of dates, schedules, places, times and obscure directions.