Dannie stopped and made him stop with her, and they stood facing each other.
“Teddy Sumner,” she said, “tell me why you aren’t shocked that Francoise should be trying to make people think your father murdered my brother?”
“Were you trying to shock me?”
“Yes-of course.”
He smiled his sly smile. “You should know by now that I’m unshockable.”
“Your father didn’t, by the way-do it.”
“Well, I hardly thought he had.”
“Oh, I don’t know. He might have. They were always fighting, Richard and your father.”
But Teddy was thinking of something else. “Do you talk about all this to Sinclair?”
“A little. Not much. He doesn’t ask.”
“But you do talk to him about it.” She walked on and he trotted after her. “You do tell him secrets, I’m sure you do.”
“I don’t. I don’t tell anyone my secrets.”
“Even me?”
“Especially you.” They stopped on a rise from where there was a view over the roofs of the city sweltering in the quivering heat haze. “I wish this weather would break,” Dannie said.
“You know I knew your brother quite well,” Teddy said, in a tone of studied diffidence.
“Did you? How?”
“There’s a sort of club we were in-I mean, that he was in, and that I’m still in, I suppose.”
“What club?”
“It doesn’t matter. More a sort of an organization. He got me in, Richard did. He said it would be”-he gave a bleak little laugh-“just the thing for me.”
“And was it-is it?”
He kicked moodily at the grass with the toe of his two-toned shoe. “I don’t know. I feel a bit out of my depth, to tell the truth.”
“What do they do, in this club?”
“Nothing much. They visit places…”
“Like, abroad?”
“No, no. It’s a charity thing. Schools.” He whistled briefly, softly, squinting out over the city. “Orphanages.”
“Yes?” She felt herself grow pale. What did he mean? “I wouldn’t have thought that was quite you, Teddy,” she said, forcing a light tone, “visiting schools and being nice to orphans.”
“It isn’t me,” he said. “At least, I didn’t think it was. Until your brother convinced me.”
She could not go on looking at him, and turned her face towards the city. “When did you join this club?” she asked, her voice wobbly.
“When I left college. I was at a loose end, and Richard-Richard encouraged me. And I joined up.”
“And started visiting places.”
“Yes.”
He turned to her, and there was something in his look, a kind of anguish, and suddenly she understood, and now she did not want him to say any more, not another word. She turned on her heel and set off back in the direction of the car. There were those deer again, in their moth-eaten pelts, with those disgusting black channels at their eyes as if since birth they had been weeping, weeping, weeping.
“Pooh Bear,” Teddy called after her softly, pleadingly, in his Eeyore voice, “oh, Winnie!” But she went on, and did not look back.
She was glad he did not try to catch up with her. She hurried down the hill to the park gates and crossed the river and got a taxi outside the railway station. Her mind was blank, or rather it was a jumble of things-like an attic in an earthquake, was how she thought of it. For she knew this state well, the state that she always got into when one of her anxiety attacks, or whatever they were, was coming on.
She must get back now to her own place, and be among her own things.
So hot, the evening, so hot and close, she could hardly breathe.
The taxi man had bad breath; she could smell it from the back seat. He was talking to her about something over his shoulder but she was not listening.
Orphanages.
When she got to the flat in Pembroke Street she filled a tepid bath and lay in it for a long time, trying to calm her racing mind. There were pigeons on the sill outside the window, she could hear them, cooing in that soft secretive way that they did, as if they were exclaiming over some amazing piece of scandal that was being told to them.
After her bath she sat in her dressing gown at the kitchen table and drank coffee, cup after cup of it. She knew it was bad for her, that the caffeine would make her thoughts race all the faster, but she could not stop.
She went into the living room and lay on the sofa. She felt cooler now, after bathing in the cool water. She wished she had something to hold on to, to hug. Phoebe Griffin had confessed she still had her teddy bear from childhood. Something like that would be good-but what? She had nothing like that; she had never had anything like that.
Thinking of Phoebe’s bear made her think of Teddy Sumner, even though she did not want to. Silly name, Teddy. And yet somehow it suited him, even though he was nothing like a teddy bear.
In the end she called David Sinclair. She knew it was not fair, calling him when she was like this. It was not as if she were anything more to him than a friend. David was kind-what other man would come and take care of her, as he did, without getting something in return?
He was not at home, so she looked up the number of the hospital where he worked and phoned him there. When he heard who it was he said nothing for a moment or two, and she was afraid he might hang up. She could hear him breathing. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I can never think who else to call.”
He arrived at the flat an hour later, and sat with her and held her hand. He gave her the old lecture about “seeing” someone, about “talking” to someone, but what good would seeing or talking do? The damage had been started so long ago, and the marks of it were scored so deeply into her that she pictured them like jagged grooves gouged in some kind of stone-marble or what was that other one, alabaster? Yes, alabaster. She liked the sound of it. Her alabaster skin. For she was beautiful, she knew it, everyone had always told her she was. Not that it helped her, being beautiful. A doll could be beautiful, a doll that people could do anything with, love or cuddle or beat or-or anything. But David was so good to her, so patient, so kind. He prided himself on being a tough guy, she knew, but he was not tough, not really. Guarded, that was what he was, wary of showing what he felt, but behind the hard front that he put up he had a soft heart. Someday she would tell him all the things that had happened to her, that had made her as she was, this shivering creature huddled on a sofa with the curtains pulled while everyone else was outside enjoying the summer evening. Yes, someday she would tell him.
He stayed, as he always did, until she was asleep. She did not take long to drop off-he was her sedative, he ruefully told himself-and it was still early, not yet nine, when he slipped out of the house and turned left and walked up towards Fitzwilliam Square. The car that had been parked on the other side of the road when he arrived-a green Morgan, with the top up and someone inside it, a shadow behind the wheel-was no longer there. He walked on.
There was a hazy green glow over the square and mist on the grass behind the black railings. The whores were out, four or five of them, two of them keeping each other company, both skinny and dressed in black and starkly pale as the harpies in Dracula’s castle. They gave him a look as he passed by but made no overture; maybe they thought he was a plainclothes man out to trap them. One of them had a limp-the clap, most likely. One day, not so far in the future, he might fold back the corner of a sheet and find her before him on the slab, that thin face,
