Staring At The Light Read online

  ‘They should,’ Sarah said. ‘Although I’d rather not be telling you. John Smith is Cannon’s brother. Brother-in-law to Julie Cannon, who, I think, you have grown to like.’

  ‘I don’t just like her,’ Pauline interrupted, ‘I love her. I care for her profoundly. A girl who drops out of school, chucked by family, and brings herself round from drugs … clever … decent …’

  ‘I thought it might be useful for you to see a John Smith property,’ Sarah continued, ‘because it might give you some idea of his attitude to possessions. He can’t relinquish or respect either people or things. This includes his brother as well as his properties. He wants his brother back, body and soul. Dangerous men don’t understand their own motives.’

  They were surrounded in a grey cloud. The cold stuffiness made smoke linger in the air.

  ‘So how comes it, niece, that you understand them? Are you so well versed in the mind of man you can decode it at a glance now you’ve slept with so many of them? Is that it?’ She blew smoke into the air, the action somehow contemptuous, the words quiet. ‘You used to seek attention as a child, you know,’ Pauline continued. ‘Not that you got it the few times I saw you, for all your trying. Such a fine little storyteller, with just that grain of truth.’ She snapped her fingers to show how little. ‘Don’t know why I chose to believe you now but, then, I suppose I live by faith. One way and another.’

  ‘You know what he can do. You didn’t learn that from me.’

  ‘I know what someone can do. Did do. To Julie. She has this quality of goodness which is appallingly addictive. She shines.’ Pauline spun on her heel, gripping the beads of the rosary. The habits of silence were instinctive. It seemed wrong to make a noise here, even though she wanted to shout. ‘He whipped her,’ she said wonderingly. ‘You told me and I believe you because I saw the result. He got to her, a fat man, just before Cannon was due out of prison. He and another man brought her to a place like this, had her whipped and tortured for the sheer impertinence of being alive. Covered her face so he wouldn’t have to see it. He thought she would run. She didn’t. You found her. She told me she knew it was him because of his teeth, I ask you.’ She slapped her palm against the wall, which felt wet to the touch, withdrew it hurriedly. ‘I want to know why … and how you know why. And don’t tell me,’ she went on furiously, ‘don’t dare tell me that Cannon is an innocent just because his wife is so clearly that. Don’t make him into a hero for me. I’ll never believe you. You are such a romantic. Don’t tell me that this villainous brother put him away into prison simply to detach his wife.’

  The cigarette in the other hand was finished. Pauline held the filter tip between her thumb and finger, looking at the dead end of it longingly. Sarah hesitated. An empty flat, with the promise of what it might become, seemed to make her want to slur and hurry the words. She and Pauline were sometimes awkward together in the manner of those who loved but would never understand one another.

  ‘No. Not quite. John Smith masterminded a complex business, mainly legitimate, admirable even. Building, property development. The arrangement of explosives was a sideline. You wanted a building to come down before the bureaucrats told you to save it, they were your men. I don’t know who they supplied – Cannon’s too ashamed to say. There was certainly money in it. Then Cannon fell in love, married quick, became the total renegade in his brother’s eyes. The illicit end of the business was discovered when Cannon wouldn’t co-operate any more. He took the blame for it totally and went to prison for the best part of two years. Not before he’d pocketed a fair chunk of his brother’s money. Hates explosives now, even fireworks make him crazy. He’s a man of many talents.’

  ‘Could he bomb the bishop for us, do you think?’

  ‘No. He has a mysterious affection for clerics. One of them married him to Julie, after all. He’s grateful.’

  ‘I never know when you’re exaggerating, niece, but you never fail to give me food for thought, and prayer. You’re like a tabloid newspaper in that respect – I never quite know what to believe and I can never complete the crossword puzzle. Do they have anything else in common, these brothers? Any weaknesses, apart from lack of conscience?’

  ‘Teeth.’

  Pauline ignored this as facetious. ‘We must go,’ she announced. ‘I, at least, must. You can sit here and dream if you want. I can’t. I take your point. Your only real point. Only a devil would leave a flat to rot when a thousand other people need a room. He must be wicked. It doesn’t follow he’s a sadist.’

  ‘Cannon says he is. I have to believe Cannon. Noone else knows John Smith.’

  Sarah waved from the front window to the girl in the car outside. Unsmiling, she came to the door, let them out, locked up and got back into her car again. They walked a way down the street, Sarah carrying the duvet box, crossed the road, rested against the railings and looked at the water of the canal. It looked like black jet in the lamplight.

  ‘What a shame J. Smith owns that house,’ Sarah said. ‘I’ve always wanted to live by the water.’

  ‘How many places like this?’

  ‘Oh, ten, fifteen, at any given time. All of them interesting.’ She lit another cigarette and did not offer the packet. ‘Ironic that Cannon, after destroying his own house, hides in a property belonging to his brother. Possibly the last place for his brother to look. Can’t work in the long term. Smith is looking for his brother, but not very hard. The person he’s really seeking is his brother’s wife. He wants to cut her into little pieces and hang her out to dry. And then he thinks Cannon will come home to him again.’

  Pauline gripped the railing. ‘Would Cannon do that? Abandon her? Oh, for God’s sake, I sound like a litany. Why?’

  ‘I don’t know. Cannon and John were everything to one another for most of their lives. I don’t know what he’d do. But Cannon’s wife is the biggest insult Johnnyboy has suffered in his whole existence. She’s the one who took Cannon away. No question in his mind of Cannon going of his own accord. Anyway, it isn’t a question of what Cannon would do – no-one can predict that. It’s what his brother thinks he would do.’

  ‘She might die if she lost him. She couldn’t stand any more violence either,’ Pauline said. ‘She’d crack.’

  ‘Cannon thinks she would be destroyed if his brother found her. He’s sure of it.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  Sarah hesitated. A car swung into the street, catching them in the headlights. A nun and a still young woman, staring at the water, the nun crossing herself, her head bowed. A tableau for the curious: a scene of conversion on a route to Damascus, perhaps; the older woman exhorting the younger to mend her ways. It could have been an argument about the box that stood between them.

  Pauline shivered.

  ‘I have to be sure. I can’t take the risk of not believing. You’ll keep her, won’t you? Only until Christmas. A few more weeks. That’s the deadline Johnny’s set.’

  ‘Of course. Did you ever doubt it? Answer me two more questions. Now.’ She counted them on her fingers. ‘How do you have all this knowledge? Papers? What you lawyers call hearsay? Cannon? Pillow talk? And then why do you care?’

  A duck swam on the dark water, a calm and lonely thing. Sarah began to explain, keeping her voice low in deference to its tranquil progress.

  ‘I met Cannon when he turned up at the firm – he’d seen the name on one of John’s letters – and he was sent up to me as just another loser. I like him and I care because he and Julie exhibit a kind of love of which I would never be capable. I admire it beyond reason. I believe beyond reason. And what I know, yes, I’ve learned from pinching office files, listening to the gossips, and I’ve got a spy, my boss’s wife, who tells me the real lowdown on clients because she gets the information he’d never share with me. Mrs Matthewson and I are friends. And I’ve listened to Cannon, and yes, I believe, because somebody must. And yes, I’ve got close to an estate agent or two to get the gist of this property angle, but I might well have done that anyw
ay. I like that sort of thing. Men are such fountains of knowledge.’

  Pauline picked up her box. ‘Julie reads all her spare time. She tries to improve her mind.’

  ‘Don’t you dare to subvert her beliefs, will you?’ Sarah shouted. ‘Don’t make her question this love of hers. You’d do it, I know you would. Look after her, but leave her mind alone. She has more virtues than I, Sister. At least she endeavours to save herself. I’m beyond all that.’

  Pauline leaned forward and kissed her cheek, touched her face with the rough knuckle of one hand lightly. ‘Hush, niece. You’ve the most generous heart I know. I’m not criticizing. Do I ever?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sarah. ‘You do.’

  ‘Only when I’m tired. Imelda keeps me awake.’

  Sarah pecked her on the cheek. ‘Take her to a dentist. I’ll find you one.’

  Pauline returned the kiss. ‘She wouldn’t go any more than I would. I’d rather face the fiery flames of hell.’ It was cold. Pauline looked for something to say. ‘If the interrogators of the Inquisition had hired dentists as torturers, there’d be no martyrs to the faith. They’d have killed themselves first. Why didn’t they think of it?’ A bus drew into sight.

  ‘There weren’t any dentists.’

  ‘Don’t be pedantic. And, if we really need one, God will provide. Yours would be far too expensive.’

  Know thine enemy. Always the way – they would part on a waspish note, Sarah Fortune and her dead mother’s sister, leaving each other with love and a rising tide of sheer irritation. Blood, forever coursing thicker than water; the presence of God in one life and the lack of it in the other stirring the brew. We are, Sarah Fortune told herself, the most worldly women of our acquaintance, and yet, and yet … she never accuses me and all the time I know she might. There was a resurgence of old longing for family love, to be accepted and admired. Pauline could never do either; the knowledge left Sarah bereft.

  She walked down the wide street, looking into windows. I could live here, and my life would be different; I could live there and my life would be different again. I could have had a different husband, raised a cricket team and made them sandwiches; I could have been a nun. I have nice teeth and a body covered with scars, and I want for nothing but a new house and the fulfilment of some perverted, romantic urge. Don’t tell me about hellfire, Aunt. I know. If I can’t save myself, I’ll save who I damn well can.

  Good advice, even that held on the cusp of the tongue and only mentioned in prayers, had always been the worst as far as Sarah was concerned. Pauline always resurrected second-degree guilt. Sarah slammed the door inside her flat, changed her clothes, made her way back to the West End environs she had passed in the morning, toothbrush inside handbag. She was shyer of the bathrooms of her male acquaintance than she was of their bodies.

  If in doubt, don’t think, do. Look in shop windows and visit a lover. Do all of that which would make Pauline disapprove.

  Wet pavements and a million cars; a loquacious taxi driver. The Bond Street lights beginning to suggest the promise of Christmas, a bedding-down into winter and serious spending. The taxi chugged in the traffic, slow enough to allow the gaze to travel across shop windows. Into St James’s, with the beautifully tailored houses of dealers in art and gambling, so remote, so aloof, so arrogantly exclusive that she could see the temptation to destroy them as well as admire them. The taxi stopped. She walked through an arch into a courtyard, rang the bell on a heavy door, glanced at the window display. Inside were paintings of heroic significance. Oil-painted scenes of battles and oratory. Hunting scenes; portraits of glum dogs in packs; portraits of generals and elders of the parish; nothing suitable for a boudoir. And, beyond the paintings, a small dapper man, waiting to feel important. A nice, lonely man who liked living alone, but not all the time. Another lover and a fellow frivolous hedonist.

  I like him, too, Sarah told herself, as she waited. I like all my friends and all my lovers. That’s the problem. There is no rhyme or reason to my liking, no discrimination. It makes my knowledge of the world extremely eclectic. It hides the fact that my heart is cold.

  ‘Hallo, Mr Mole,’ Sarah said, when he came to the door. ‘Why do you always look so anxious?’

  Drip … drip …

  Late in the evening Cannon wanted to write furious letters, but he had never had much patience with words. Letters of love to Julie; begging letters to his brother, if he were not afraid of making even that contact. Johnny might regard a letter as part of the game; might use it as an excuse to renege on his promise.

  There was a steady drip of water from the ceiling windows of his garret, which puzzled him since it was not raining. The roof seemed to store rainwater until long after the event, then release it into the room in minute quantities. The dripping was irregular, so that while at first he had steeled himself for the next plop! he was now content to ignore it as he might have done an irregular metronome guiding someone else’s piano lesson. He put the battered armchair beneath the site of the drip, so that the sound changed from plop to plip, and was satisfied with that.

  No light but inadequate electric light, and it was all his own fault. He had, after all, destroyed the house, which was theoretically his own but it had never been his house anyway. What Johnnyboy purchased never belonged to anyone but himself. The destruction was a gesture of contempt that Johnny, of all people, should have understood. What was he to do? Live in it and wait for the State to take it while waiting for Johnny to cease his own, incessant calls, in case he was there? That was his last piece of destruction, his very last, and now he was hiding for fear of Johnny’s presence and Johnny’s voice and what it might persuade him to do.

  No light meant no colour except primary colour. Poster paint, powder paint, the sort they had used as kids for lack of anything else, aerosol cans far beyond the price of what they could afford. Johnnyboy got bored with it; he never did. From graffiti to oil paint on canvas, he was never bored. This was what he had always wanted to do. From a background such as theirs it was a miracle he had ever learned.

  He had meant to work on the Sarah portrait, but the quality of light forbade serious endeavour. The colours would be all wrong; the result would be garish, the paint on the palette too strong for the daytime tones he had sketched. Such lovely skin, she had. He could not resist for a minute working on the skin, including those features lodged in his memory. Little white flakes on her breasts, like tiny soap-flakes … there! Then he put more brown in the hair. The rich auburn hair with which she played had disturbed him; a little more brown made it less luminous. Stop: he would ruin it. It was artistically dishonest of him to try to turn the portrait of one woman into that of another simply because he wished the model had been his brown-haired wife.

  He had caught the facial likeness, though. They were the same height, Julie and Sarah. Perhaps it was not a cheat to change the colour of the hair, provided he did not alter the distinctive shape of it, curling down to the shoulders. He wished Julie would grow her hair into the way it had been when she visited him in prison. She had laughed at the suggestion and said she would, when they were together in a setting where vanity could be indulged.

  Oh, Johnnyboy, you fool. Johnnyboy had refused outright to meet Julie. Refused that privilege repeatedly, even turned his face away from the photographs Cannon had shoved into his hand, saying, Look, look, isn’t she beautiful? They had fought when Johnnyboy had tried to tear them up, but it was useless fighting with Johnny. He won with contemptuous ease. Johnny had muscle, one of their many differences. They were no longer identical in feature and physique, not notably similar even, apart from a familial likeness only apparent when anyone saw them together. In the bed shared as children, and somehow never quite relinquished even after Johnny began to bugger him, Cannon had admired his brother’s muscular development against his own skinny chest. It had not seemed an unnatural thing to do: he had massaged Johnny to order; made love to him to order; loved him, feared him, and then abandoned him. He stared at th
e gap on the wall where the painting of the woman had been, the one he had bought with Johnny’s money. Johnny was the first lover.

  Never easy to excise love, whatever kind. He knew only of this incestuous kind, and the love of Julie. One love did not replicate another: it simply predominated, so that the old one had to be hacked out of the system, the wound cauterized to prevent infection. Johnnyboy had not done that. Cannon thought he had, but at times it came back like a rogue virus, with symptoms of guilt, sentiment and a feeling of weakness so intense it immobilized him completely. He was the first. The love virus did this even after what Johnnyboy had done to Julie – returned, made him feel septic with it all over again. Brother; lover; twin; same flesh, same DNA. Oh, for a child. If they had a child, Johnny would know it was too late, and ever since he’d loved her he’d wanted her child. To be the father he had scarcely had. To prove himself.

  Enough of that. In the absence of light sufficient to distinguish subtle colour, he would not paint, he would draw with a big fat brush dipped in vitriolic black ink. The head emerged as if it had grown from the stark white paper. Johnnyboy’s smooth black hair, slicked back into control, like the rest of him; the frown-line between the bushy eyebrows he had once plucked, seeking that Valentino look in a broad face that would never allow it. One ear slightly larger than the other; the creases in the cheeks; the fold of flesh beneath the jaw that made him look as if the whole of his face was sinking; the scar to the left of the mouth.

  Remembering, too, how Johnny had got that scar. So frightened of the lady dentist, they’d tried a general anaesthetic to deal with his teeth, with Cannon waiting for him in the outer room because he wouldn’t have gone at all otherwise – any more than he could stay unconscious for more than a few minutes, whatever they did. But it had been long enough for the boiling-hot handpiece she had left hooked inside his lip to burn through the flesh, so that he woke screaming. Both of them staggering out of there, fighting like rats, two undersized urchins on the run. Back home to hugging in bed. She hadn’t meant any harm, of course, but they blew down her door anyway. That was the day they became lovers: they owed her that. Even the first painful buggery had been provoked by pain.