Restless - Boyd William - Страница 67

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'What do I say?'

'How about: "Good evening, Mr Romer, can I have a word?" I only need a couple of seconds.'

She seemed very calm, very strong – whereas I thought I might burst into tears at any moment, might bawl and blub, I felt suddenly so insecure and inadequate – not like me at all, I realised.

The Bentley stopped, double-parking with the engine running, and the chauffeur opened the door and stepped out, walking round the car to the rear. He held the back door open on the pavement side and Romer climbed out with some difficulty, stooped a little, perhaps stiff from the journey. He had a few words with his driver, who then got back into the car and pulled away. Romer went to his front gate; he was wearing a tweed jacket and grey flannels with suede shoes. A light came on in the transom of number 29 and simultaneously the garden lights were illuminated, shining on the flagged path to the front door, a cherry tree, a stone obelisk in the hedge corner.

My mother gave me a shove and I opened the door.

'Lord Mansfield?' I called and stepped out on to the road. 'May I have a word?'

Romer turned very slowly to face me.

'Who are you?'

'I'm Ruth Gilmartin – we met the other day.' I crossed the road towards him. 'At your club – I wanted to interview you.'

He peered at me. 'I've nothing to say to you,' he said. His raspy voice even, unthreatening. 'I told you that.'

'Oh, but I think you have,' I said, wondering where my mother was – I had no sense of her presence, couldn't hear her, had no idea which way she'd gone.

He laughed and opened the gate to his front garden.

'Good-night, Miss Gilmartin. Stop bothering me. Go away.'

I couldn't think what to say next – I had been dismissed.

He turned to close his gate and I saw behind him someone open the door a few inches, left ajar for easy access, no bother with keys or anything as vulgar as that. He saw I had remained standing there and his eyes flicked automatically up and down the street. And then he became very still.

'Hello, Lucas,' my mother said from the darkness.

She seemed to materialise from around the box hedge, not moving – just suddenly standing there.

Romer seemed paralysed for a moment, then he drew himself erect, stiffly, like a soldier on parade, as if he might fall over otherwise.

'Who're you?'

Now she stepped forward and the dusky late evening light showed her face, caught her eyes. I thought: she looks very beautiful, as if some sort of miraculous rejuvenation were taking place and the intervening thirty-five years of ageing were being erased.

I looked at Romer – he knew who she was – and he kept himself very still, one hand gripping the gatepost. I wondered what this moment must have been like for him – the shock beyond all shocks. But he gave nothing away, just managing to produce a small erratic smile.

'Eva Delectorskaya,' he said, softly, 'who would have thought?'

We stood in Romer's large drawing-room on the first floor – he had not asked us to sit down. At the garden gate, once he had recovered from the shock of seeing my mother, he had composed himself and his old bored urbanity re-established itself. 'I suppose you'd better come in,' he'd said, 'no doubt you have something you want to tell me.' We had followed him up the gravel path to the front door and into the house, where a dark-haired man in a white jacket stood waiting cautiously in the hall. Down a corridor I could hear the sound of dishes clattering in a kitchen somewhere.

'Ah, Petr,' Romer said. 'I'll be down in a minute. Tell Maria to leave everything in the oven – then she can go.'

Then we followed him up the curving staircase into the drawing-room. The style was English country house, 1930s: a few good dark pieces of furniture – a bureau, a glass-fronted cabinet with faience inside – rugs on the floor and comfortable, old sofas with throws and cushions, but the paintings on the wall were contemporary. I saw a Francis Bacon, a Burra and an exquisite still life – an empty pewter bowl in front of a silver lusterware vase containing two wilting poppies. The painting looked lit but there were no picture lights – the thickly painted gleam on the bowl and the vase did that work, astonishingly. I was looking at the paintings as a way of distracting myself – I was in a strange giddy panic: a combination of excitement and fear, a mood I hadn't truly experienced since childhood when, on those occasions when you wilfully do something wrong and proscribed, you find yourself imagining your own discovery, guilt and punishment – which is part of the heady appeal of the illicit, I suppose. I glanced over at my mother: she was looking fiercely but coolly at Romer. He would not meet her gaze, but stood proprietorially by the fireplace, looking thoughtfully at the rug at his feet – the fire laid, unlit – his elbow resting on the chimney-piece, the back of his head visible in the tarnished freckled mirror that hung above it. Now he turned to stare at Eva too but his face showed no expression. I knew why I felt this panic: the air seemed thick and curdled with their crowded, turbulent, shared history – a history I had no part of, yet was now compelled to bear witness to its climax: I felt like a voyeur – I shouldn't be here, yet here I was.

'Could we open a window?' I said, hesitantly.

'No,' Romer said, still looking at my mother. 'You'll find some water on that table.'

I went over to a side-table that had a tray of cut-crystal glasses and decanters of whisky and brandy on it as well as a half-empty carafe of visibly dusty water. I poured myself a glass and drank the warm fluid down. The noise of my swallowing seemed terribly audible and I saw Romer glance over at me.

'What relation do you have to this woman?' he said.

'She's my mother,' I replied instantly and felt, absurdly, a small stiffening of pride, thinking of everything she'd done, everything she'd been through to bring her here, now in this room. I went and stood closer to her.

'Jesus Christ,' Romer said. 'I don't believe it.' He seemed profoundly disgusted in some way. I looked at my mother and tried to imagine what could possibly be going on in her head, seeing this man again after so many decades, a man she had genuinely loved – or so I believed – and who had also taken diligent pains to organise her death. But she seemed very calm, her face set and strong. Romer turned back to her.

'What do you want, Eva?'

My mother gestured to me. 'I just want to tell you that she knows everything. I wrote everything down, you see, Lucas, and gave it to her – she has all the pages. There's a don in Oxford who is writing a book about it. I just wanted to tell you that your secret years are over. Everyone is going to know, very soon, what you did.' She paused. 'It's finished.'

He seemed to chew his lip for a moment – I felt that this was the last thing he had expected to hear. He spread his hands.

'Fine. I'll sue him, I'll sue you and you'll go to prison. You can't prove a thing.'

My mother smiled at this, spontaneously, and I knew why – this was already a kind of confession, I thought.

'I wanted you to know that and I wanted to see you for one last time.' She took a little step forward. 'And I wanted you to see me. To let you know that I was still very much alive.'

'We lost you in Canada,' Romer said. 'Once we realised that was where you must have gone. You were very clever.' He paused. 'You should know that your file was never closed. We can still arrest you, charge you, try you. I just need to pick up this telephone – you'd be arrested before the night was over, wherever you happen to be.'

Now my mother's slight smile proclaimed her moment of power – the balance had shifted, finally.

'Why don't you do it, then, Lucas?' she said easily, persuasively. 'Have me arrested. Go on. But you won't do that, will you?'

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