Ivoria Read online

  It has a queasy logic. No need to break in at the main door below - the creep from Number 14, paramour of June, is living in the building again. God knows, maybe even all the complex locks of flats here have a careless similarity, should anyone try to gauge them. Then add a criminal crony or two…

  Nick can envisage it. “Bugger took my stationery. I was only gone a couple of hours. I know it’s him.”

  “Yeah, right out of order, mate. Leave it to me and Ginger.”

  Will this retrieval be the end of it though? So far only the stolen goods have been made off with. (His own notebooks remain.) A just antagonist? Improbable. Number 14 must be off his head as well, or why bother? He lost a computer, he said, and Nick had not had that. Thank God.

  Nick circles the phone, but who is he going to call - Ghost Busters?

  Then he thinks of Pond. The police generally are out of the question, but Pond - is he with the police, Mr Pond? – whatever he is, seems to be a type of freelance. And after all, he has already associated himself with Nick, via Angela.

  Nick sits by the table, pulls the phone forward and types out on it Angela’s number.

  After a few shrills a young female voice answers.

  “I’d like to speak to Angela, please.”

  “I’m afraid that isn’t possible. Whom may I say has called?”

  Nick tells the voice, which repeats his name, and then there is a horrible cacophony. It sounds as if something huge and heavy, perhaps on wheels and out of control, has collided with the girl who answered the phone. There comes a sort of thud, almost the sound of blows - except they cannot be blows, can they? - and a thin wild shriek, more like the cry of a mouse than anything human.

  Next the older coarser voice of Angela, Laurence’s wife, tumbles into his ear.

  She had sounded mad to Nick before. Now she sounds homicidal.

  Angela is screaming at him at full volume, as if he is across a vast mountain gulf, and only by this means can he be made to hear.

  “You cunt, Nick! Why are you calling me? You fucking heartless little cunt!”

  He holds the phone away from him, feeling bemused and offended in the most silly of ways. But in fact terrified, not by her frenzy, but by the stone age quality of this ultimate disintegration. Her howls before belonged in an X-rated movie from the past. But this seems to find its métier in some arcane ritual of sacrificial rending, in a time when even Ancient Rome was only a gleam in the eye of the future.

  “Angela, I…” he attempts.

  But her voice roars in again, the primordial sea, female and raging, not to be denied.

  “He’s dead - he’s dead…”(So like that other time, that time with Reenie, in Edinburgh, the cold stone floor under his feet, the winter clasping the small grey house, and Claudia lying miles off “dead, dead, died, dead.”) The rest of the torrent is now beating by him, the tidal wave rushing inland. “They found him. It is Laurence. I’ve seen. So - unspeakable… It’s Laurence, it’s Laurence, he’s dead…”

  Somehow behind the tidal wave, Nick can just make out other voices calling, and then abruptly a deep male voice, no one Nick knows, or thinks he knows, “Angela, come on, now. Let me… That’s right…” And the phone falls with a crash. Nick looks at his phone, still there in his hand, with the crash of the other phone still echoing in it. He is about to cut the signal when the deep-voiced man speaks to him through it instead. “Is that Nicolas Lewis?”

  Nick speaks too. “Yes.”

  “Nicolas, you’re Laurence’s brother, am I correct?”

  “Yes. Laurence’s brother.”

  “I’m very sorry you had to hear, like that. I am Angela’s doctor - Dr Telby. I’m afraid it’s true. We went to the police station about an hour ago. It is Laurence, I’m afraid. There’s no doubt, despite the length of time, and the - activity, shall I say. There will have to be an inquest, naturally.”

  Nick’s ears seem to be glazing over, the way that only eyes are supposed to do.

  He is neither alarmed nor mortified to hear that Laurence is, in fact, dead. Nick feels nothing. He had believed Laurence would turn up, and part of Nick, it seems, still does believe that. Except that Laurence has turned up, demonstrably, and his condition is not that of the living.

  Dr Telby stops talking. Nick says, “There was a man -a man called Pond.”

  No doubt the doctor is accustomed to the random bad manners of shock.

  He replies mildly, “Oh yes. Some sort of private investigator Angela hired. I don’t know much about him. I’m afraid she went to him because she felt the police were being rather complacent.”

  Nick knows his request is inappropriate, and in stinking taste. He should, he supposes, be yowling like a male version of Angela. But he says, humbly, “Could you see if his number is there anywhere? I know this isn’t the time, but it’s - rather urgent.”

  9

  The TV carries it on the lunchtime news. By 5 p.m. the radio has it. Of course, Laurence had taken part in programmes sponsored by both. The circumstances of Laurence’s death remain vague. But it transpired his body had been found in Richmond Park; neither Angela nor Dr Telby had told Nick this.

  However Telby’s curious choice of word - ‘activity’ - may now be explained. If Laurence had been found in a park, maybe the cold would have preserved him slightly, but also animals might have nibbled the body. How long had it all been? About twelve days… But then, why assume Laurence had died that same night he called on Nick? True, he had failed to go home to Angela, but it seemed he had not intended to, telling her earlier he was ‘making a night of it’ with his brother. She had even angrily anticipated Laurence would be gone longer, and so had not even called Nick to rant at him until the evening of that first Monday.

  Nick has left a message on what Telby had assured him was Pond’s mobile number.

  But Pond does not return the call, nor is he available on any of the five other occasions Nick tries to reach him.

  Nick has had an extra security lock fitted to his front door, meantime. The locksmith asked no questions. His whole attitude implied such over-security was equally inevitable and pointless, but who was he to argue.

  Only the landline phone rings, and only twice. Once it is someone from the telephone company trying to enlist Nick in a special deal, and once a kindred call from the electricity people.

  No messages are left, even when Nick vacates the flat. (He is never away very long now, shopping or eating outside meals hurriedly. He is not due to see any women until the next week.)

  His ansa-machine, when played back, reveals solely the old messages it originally hoarded, (not Angela’s, they were wiped), including Jazz’s prelude to the presumed failed attempt to bid him farewell ‘nicely’ and the peculiar male voice which, whenever replayed, seems to sound both increasingly meaningless yet also more threatening: “I have something for you. I have something that it is impert-iv you receive.” Nick reasons he has left these words on the machine in order to play them over to Pond, though Pond had already heard Jazz’s message. Very likely neither message has anything to do with the break-in, or with the elusive Kit Price.

  But Pond is evidently not going to contact Nick, and nothing else has happened.

  Nick deletes the messages the following Tuesday morning, and that day too he is sent a rather prissy, handwritten, black-bordered card, that tells him the date and venue of Laurence’s funeral. There is no mention of an inquest, or the results of one. No other communication accompanies the card. Nobody otherwise has been in touch.

  The funeral is scheduled for ten days ahead and, for some reason Nick finds a mystery, Laurence is to be buried in West Sussex. Nick can only conclude Angela has a Sussex connection. It goes without saying Nick will be expected to attend the funeral. It seems to him nevertheless that he will not. He has spent a lot of his life so far ducking or pushing away the more costive ties of convention, whenever possible. Claudia also had been like that. One did not have to do something simply because it was ex
pected, even insisted upon. One might have to make a gracious excuse, that was all.

  Besides, a wild mental picture he has of Angela raving at the graveside - even attacking Nick in person? - does not entice.

  Then again, Nick is surprised Serena has not yet called him to dragoon him into some semblance of grief, or at least civil family obedience.

  He is surprised as well that the police have not contacted him - since Pond, it seems, was not the police.

  The news reports, of Laurence’s death certainly, though Nick had only caught a further couple of these - there may have been more - had merely emphasised the ‘tragic prematurity’ of Laurence’s end. While only one newspaper Nick had spotted had unsubtly mentioned that Richmond Park, just like other such areas, being a ‘nest’ of homosexual opportunity, not to mention drug-taking, any man walking among its trees after dark could well have been mistaken - or ‘mistaken’ - for someone on the look-out for action.

  Nick is not curious. He does not care what his brother was doing in the park, or what was done to him. Nick is merely uneasy that the Roman pin, presently under the carpet, may have a bearing on Laurence’s death.

  Nick is by now only mildly conscious of the lie he told Laurence, which concerned the square of true or false ivory; that it carried a malediction, a curse.

  Nick is entering a strange phase, which he has experienced before. The disturbing and interruptive chaos which now seems gushing all about the tiny island of his individual life, being apparently uncontrollable, mostly inexplicable, immanent and unavoidable yet not, now, immediately intrusive, is ceasing to be real for him. He is glad this is so. He shuts it from him, not knowing what else is to be done. Only in the background does it dimly loom, like a black shadow faded to greyness by the lamp of life, forever there, yet at his shoulder just behind him, almost out of sight.

  And the eight-sided moon-window colludes. It floats above all this, unimpaired, uninvolved, a huge eye that witnesses only the sky, indifferent to whatever takes place below, either out on the street, or in the room.

  10

  Claudia during the filming of her last picture was, part of the time, pregnant.

  She had told Nick, however, he had been the perfect gentleman, not making her sick, (as Laurence had, and, she said, Serena - only much worse). Also he had somehow remained virtually undetectable by the camera until the movie was completed late in her fourth month.

  She never said, or never concisely, why she had given up the screen after this. She was not yet thirty-six, and looked younger on celluloid. “Oh, it was this and that,” she had been wont to say. “Not you, darling, you were no trouble. And I could have gone back when you were eighteen months. Samson offered me a part. Only it wasn’t anything I cared for really. So I didn’t. And then I just went on didn’ting.” The other children would not have impeded her either, surely. Laurence had been twelve or thirteen by then and away at his serious school; Serena, eight, was in the care of a nanny.

  Claudia did of course play other roles, now and then, in the London theatre.

  Nick could and always would remember seeing her in Anouilh’s Ring Round the Moon, when he was twelve and Claudia forty-seven. She had played Isabelle’s mother, a part Nick had not even been aware was supposedly less than glamorous. For Claudia had brought to it a definite if acerbic glamour. She had remarked, after the run finished, that she had been far happier “a hundred years earlier” when herself playing Isabelle. Nick did note the part was far smaller than he had anticipated.

  In 1990, when Claudia was forty-eight, she played the nurse-chaperone Clemence, in the 18th Century drama The Scholar’s Handicap. This was a contrastingly large part, the character a wicked, meddling schemer and poisoner, formerly a beautiful courtesan in her own right. Nick, at thirteen, had been better satisfied. Yet he knew Claudia was not. He had only understood long after, by five years initially, and then again in a slow-burning revelation as his knowledge of women increased, that Claudia, exactly like Clemence herself, flinched at and loathed the comments of the play’s other characters on her former extreme attractions, now lessened, or even “Withered like dying violets” by age.

  That previous afternoon about five years on, when Nick was eighteen, he had come out on the lawn at Joss’s current country house, and paused, to inhale the sunshine.

  It was October, but the weather had stayed faultless.

  A long, smooth lawn here sloped gently down to a picturesque bank, where the river idled by, brown and hung with reeds. Claudia was lying on a blue recliner under the cedar tree, and Laurence, (looking strikingly handsome and perhaps misleadingly adult at thirty) was sitting out on the grass in the sun, drinking beer. He wore a white Ax-Creston shirt and tailored jeans, stretching his long legs before him. And Claudia, though she lay in shade, wore a dark red bathing suit under a black and red cotton skirt.

  From the distance, she looked actually younger than Laurence. Her short blonde hair, now always flawlessly peroxided to conceal any greyness, flamed white against the deep blue horizontal of the chair.

  Nick stayed where he was, observing her.

  He had always loved to see her, to look at her, to be around her. Both he and she often liked utter privacy too, and each fully grasped that need in the other. They had never impinged, never got on each other’s nerves. They had always seemed to know exactly when to stay, or to vanish.

  Not so Laurence. Because Nick did not like Laurence, he wondered if he should shunt Laurence off now, saying so-and-so had called him and asked if Laurence could call straight back. Laurence’s ire later on would only be funny, and would not matter either, as tomorrow Nick was going to Paris with a woman of twenty-three who was paying the fare. Laurence had to go off on some dig, too, in Ireland, by the end of the week.

  Nick did not think they had seen him.

  Birds, unsinging, lulled by the heat, were winging to and fro, or feeding by the tennis court where unlucky worms and beetles proliferated. It was very quiet. A plane glinted in the upper sky, disembodied and too high to offer sound.

  So he heard Claudia speak very sharply.

  It carried knife-like to where Nick stood.

  “Stop it, Laurie. For Christ’s sake.”

  They had not looked as if engaged in any type of argument. And even now Laurence shrugged, and murmured something with a relaxed wave of his hand.

  But Claudia said again, sharply, her actor-trained voice crossing the auditorium of the lawn, “I said shut up. It’s none of your bloody business anyway, and you know nothing about it. Go away. I’ve had enough.”

  At that Laurence rose indolently, brushed himself down in case any single mote of loose grass had marred his jeans, and said, also now heard by Nick, “All right. You know best. A mother always knows best.”

  “Fuck off,” said Claudia.

  And she turned on her left side away from him, and also indirectly from Nick.

  As Laurence approached Nick en route to the house, Nick made no attempt to obscure either his presence or the fact he had overheard the last of their exchange.

  Laurence smiled at him, a sneer of white teeth in his very tanned face.

  “Better go and calm the old girl down.”

  “Why? What have you done?” Nick had not meant to blurt this out, but out it had blurted.

  “I have done nothing. Life has done it. Even she can’t blame me for that. Stupid bitch.”

  Two years before Nick would have tried to punch Laurence. Sometimes he had or might have succeeded. Generally, physically taller, heavier, older, and reared in a public school, Laurence could get the better of him.

  Now Nick said, “Why upset her?”

  “Because, you cretin, if I don’t, a lot of other people will. Dad is useless. He lets her do what she wants. And Serena lies. Even that cunt Samson lies. He’s been a regular in Claudia’s knickers if you ask me…”

  “Did anyone ask?” Nick had said.

  But Laurence only shrugged once more. “Go and ask her about it.
”

  “About what? Samson?”

  Laurence sighed, and raised his eyes to heaven.

  “Some berk has offered her a part in a movie. It’s just some fucking awful cameo, some Sc-Fi crap, some aged temptress, God knows, in some pile of US rubbish. And she is considering doing it. Even Torvind apparently advised against.”

  “If she wants to - why not?”

  “Why not? Apart from the moronic movie itself, go and look at her, Nicky. Go on. Pull the rose-stained specs off your face and look. She can’t do that any more, in front of a camera. Why spoil it for all her so-called legions of fans. Let them remember her golden bloody days.”

  “You mean you think she will look too old…”

  “She is meant to look old in the movie. That’s why they want her. Only Claudia hasn’t got that sussed yet. And she will look even older, if she does it, than in real life. She’s in her fifties, Nicolas. All she can play now are slobs and grannies and has-beens and never-wases.” He scowled. “She embarrasses me. But you’re such a muppet, you think she’s still fucking eighteen.” He walked straight by Nick, and into the shadows of the house.

  “Hello,” Nick said softly when he reached her.

  “Hello, darling,” she said. “Just a moment, I fell asleep.” She had not yet turned to face him, and he saw that she touched her face, or her eyes, before she did so. By then she did look sleepy, as if just woken from the deeper sort of catnap. “Isn’t it a lovely afternoon?”

  He bent over her and kissed her forehead.

  Nick had seen something only ever glimpsed before during one of her films. The luminous last shine under her eyes of tears.

  He wanted to say, What is it? But clearly she did not want him to say it, or see it, preferably. And anyway, he knew.

  Nick had a sudden vision of finding some venomous plant in the copses behind the house, putting it in one of Laurence’s endless vodkas. But such thoughts were histrionic and immaterial.