and two for Mrs. W. He told Mrs. W he really missed her chicken soup. He told Carole-anne he really missed her fortune-telling and wondered if this Irish lass he presently had his arm around was in the cards.
Ha ha, she thought, winding the tape back and listening again to his last message and wondering again what the background noise was, all of that loud yelling and what sounded like exploded glass. Was it bombs going off? Or just a room full of loud people breaking windows in their drunken, loutish ways?
He hated e-mail, too. He’d said, “There was always that bit of suspense after you wrote a letter, thinking about the other person reading it and wondering when and what he’d answer. And the self-righteous feeling of, There that’s done. Proud of yourself because you’d finally written that letter. But now? You send e-mail; before you can even think or feel those things, the answer’s back, no thinking between yours and theirs. It’s all too fast; everything’s immediate, now now now.”
He didn’t think she listened to him. Well, she did. Now she went to the calendar tacked up on the wall and took it down and filled in another square. She wrote in all sorts of things she and the Super had done, like going down the pub or to the Nine-One-Nine to listen to Stan or seeing some film or other. Again, she wondered why he’d gotten it. It was put out by some farming association and she couldn’t see how the Super would have been put on their mailing list. Each month had a picture of a farm animal. September’s was a cow, with its head turned to face the camera, looking squarely at her as if it knew she was filling the squares in with false information.
He’d been gone for nearly a month. September was filling up with all the entries she’d made. Wouldn’t he be surprised to see how busy he’d been? She looked back at August. Nothing, blank squares all. It was the same for July and June. Why did he have a calendar, if there was never anything on it? Her own calendar was so heaped up with entries she had to write along the sides.
Yet she thought it was strange that his July and August looked full, and when she pictured her own calendar in her mind it looked empty. Carole-anne wondered if there were people that, when they weren’t there, it made you wonder if
Holding the calendar, trying to think of something to write in for today (how many times could they go to the Angel?) she went over to the phonograph. It was the only one she’d seen and it fascinated her. She had tapes and CDs (The whole world is miniaturized, he’d said), but he had actual records. He had “September in the Rain.” She put it on and lifted the arm over the record.
For a hard surface, she put the calendar against the window and wrote in
Into the square for the last day of September she wrote
Down in what was referred to as the “garden flat” but was really a basement, Mrs. Wassermann sat in her favorite overstuffed chair, hands folded. There had been a few days she had even spent in bed, but she forced herself up and dressed at a decent hour, mustering what self-regard she had.
For three weeks now, except the times when Carole-anne had insisted, she had not been out of the flat, not on her own. The world beyond the door could be pitiless, unless you were protected by amulet, charm, or spell. It was the way she’d been years ago, just sitting and looking out of her low window upon the feet of passersby. She’d been this way until Mr. Jury had fitted the door with extra locks, “Locks not even a bunch of drunken Irish rebels could kick through.”
The trouble was that he wasn’t here. Oh, she’d not minded when he’d gone out of London other times, for he’d only been away a few days at a time. But this time it had been nearly a month. And he’d gone to Ireland-
Mrs. Wassermann sighed and propped her head on her hand, her elbow on the arm of the chair, and watched feet walk by her window.
Detective Sergeant Alfred Wiggins sat at his desk in New Scotland Yard and looked dejectedly over at the other desk, behind which no one sat. He had lined up his usual anodynes: nose drops, eyedrops, black biscuits, Bromo Seltzer, apricot juice, a few herbs, and Fisherman’s Friends. He looked at all of them without spirit, without interest, without needfulness. He did not feel headachy, croupy, nauseated, muscle- sore, or feverish. That was the trouble; he missed his ailments. He needed them, usually.
One would think it would be a relief, this failure of need. But it wasn’t. It had always been a bit of a lark, mixing up the apricot juice with a tablet of Bromo Seltzer (that cure-all he had found when they’d gone to Baltimore), maybe with a little rue; or tossing back a few pills with the afternoon tea, which he would drink with a black biscuit or two. When he knew Superintendent Jury-his guv’nor-was going to Northern Ireland, Wiggins had made him up a travel packet of small vials with precise “indications” (Wiggins fell quite easily into pharmaceutical jargon).
He had been gone for nearly a month now. When Mr. Jury was sitting over there at the other desk, hands behind his head, watching one or another procedure of Wiggins’s mixing potions, commenting on the vanity of it all, quipping, Wiggins felt it was worth it. But now he felt more like the tree fallen in the forest with no one around to hear.
Was he, then, there?
As if to test out his there-ness, the phone by his hand rang.
The next best thing. Wiggins smiled.
Fiona Clingmore sat at her desk, looking at her sponge bag, her Cucumber QuikFix facial, the new mascara wand and eyeliner, sighed, and with her forearm swept them into her desk drawer. Hardly seemed worth it these days.
But to put a good face on it, when Alfred Wiggins came into the office, she picked up her shell comb and ran it through her hair, before using it as an anchor to hold it on one side. She said to Wiggins, looking at the cat, Cyril, sitting and watching the door to the outside corridor, “Cyril does that all the time. He thinks your guv’nor must be going to walk through it any moment now.”
“Maybe he needs the vet,” said Wiggins, having the urge to cheer things down. “Maybe he’s sick.”
Fiona waved a deprecating hand, sweeping away such a suggestion. “Cyril’s not like you. I’ll tell you this, though. He”-and here she bent her head in the direction of the inside door to Chief Superintendent Racer’s office-“hardly knows what to do with himself with Mr. Jury gone. Why, he can walk right past Cyril, here, without so much as a ‘bloody damn’ or trying to kick him or setting those sardine traps. It’s like all the starch’s gone out of him. It’s like when you don’t get any sleep and then you don’t have any dreams, so you go kind of queer all over. Kind of crazy, you know. That’s him. When Mr. Jury’s not here it’s like he”-she nodded again at Racer’s office door-“goes berserk; he doesn’t have anyone to put a lid on him and so he keeps blowing off. You know, kind of like a pressure cooker exploding.” Fiona shook her head and sighed as she went about rubbing some cream into her cuticles.
For the cat Cyril, it was like imagining fish; he could look at the water until a darkness, a blotch, or a shadow in the riverbed slowly surfaced. Even if it wasn’t a fish, even if it was only a bit of paper that had unhooked from a rock, or maybe it would be a fortune cookie or a Christmas cracker, a shoe or a shark.
But the shark was already there, wasn’t he? On the other side of his office door, flapping and splashing, going at Cyril whenever he could, too stupid to be an imagined fish.
Cyril sat still as still water waiting for Him to come through the door. Any moment now. He always did sooner or later, but if Cyril stopped watching, He wouldn’t. He’d get away like a fish’s shadow. Cyril was sure if he put his whole being into watching, and not be distracted by sardines and fax machines, he could open the door and have Him come through it. Just like that.
Presto.
