Isvik Page 7

  ‘It’s on the table, dear.’

  Sometimes I felt the world outside of East Anglia wasn’t real to him.

  ‘A nice sunset. Your father always liked it best at this time of the evening, so long as the sun was setting in a clear sky.’

  She was standing in the doorway, taking off her apron. ‘Come along now.’ I took the apron from her and tossed it on to the desk, where it lay like a faded flower piece sprawled across the typewriter. I put my arm round her shoulder. ‘I may be going away for a bit,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, when?’ She always took my movements in her stride. Thank God, she had become accustomed to my coming and going. ‘Where are you going this time?’

  ‘Punta Arenas,’ I said.

  ‘Spanish?’

  ‘Sort of.’ And I left it at that. I didn’t tell her how long I might be gone. And anyway I didn’t know, or even whether I would go at all.

  ‘You’re very quiet,’ she said as I slashed my knife through a beautifully crisped sausage. She always was a perfectionist in whatever miserable object she was cooking. ‘Something on your mind?’

  ‘You know my mind, Mum. Empty as a returned beer keg.’

  ‘I don’t drink.’ She stared at me uncomprehendingly. She was solid Saxon-and-Dutch East Anglian. Loyal as anybody could possibly be, but completely devoid of humour. My father’s little jokes had just bounced off her like hailstones off a swan’s back. Perhaps that’s what had made them such a good match. Dad’s wit sparked on half a dozen cylinders at least. He was an East Ender, pure Cockney. His father had emigrated from Stepney to Norfolk after the First World War when land was cheap. He’d sold his winkle stall in Aldgato Market and bought a few acres at Cley. I hadn’t known him, only my grandmother, who had been born in Eastcheap and had a cackling laugh. She and my father were very close, and when she was gone, he had turned his attention to me. We had had a lot of fun together for we were on the same wavelength you might say.

  And then he’d had that stroke. Odd, the human brain. It’s everything – the personality, the bright intelligence, the humour, everything. And in a flash it’s gone, a blood clot sealing off blood vessels, starving the brain cells. Suddenly they’re dead. And brain cells are the one and only part of the human body that cannot repair themselves. He had never been the same again, all the fun we’d had gone. God, how I had loved that man!

  I loved my mother too, of course. But not in the same way. Fred Kettil had had that something, a different sort of It to Marilyn Monroe, but still an It. The times we’d had, the laughter. And then suddenly, nothing. Just a blank stare. Why? Why take a man like that in his prime? What the hell is God up to? ‘You used to laugh at Dad’s jokes, Mum,’ I said. ‘Why not at mine?’

  ‘You know very well I didn’t understand them. I just laughed because he expected it. But not at the rude ones,’ she added archly. ‘You remember a lot of them were very Clacton Pier. But he was fun. He was always great fun.’ And her eyes glimmered in a very personal way so that I was afraid she was going to burst into tears. She cried very easily.

  I suppose it’s a question of imagination, and I sat there silent for a moment thinking about imagination and what exactly it was, as I tried to spear another of her crisp little sausages. Why should one person have it and another not? What goes on inside that skull of ours, what makes it tick? And when we die …?

  I was still thinking about that, and what I might be letting myself in for, when I went up to bed. And in the morning the courier arrived almost ten minutes ahead of time, a Polish kid, thin as a lath, on a big BMW motorcycle strapped round with panniers. He glanced at the envelope I handed him. ‘J. Crick Esq.’ And he read off the address. ‘I know where. Soho.’ He stuffed my passport into a pannier already bulging with packages. ‘Good day, I think.’ He had turned his helmeted head to stare at the distant line of shingle, bright yellow in the sunlight.

  It was the sun that had woken me, slanting in through the north-east-facing side window of my bedroom and shining full on my face. ‘Yes, it will be another lovely day.’

  He nodded, still staring out across the saltings. ‘Same where I come. Too much flat. I like flat.’ He smiled at me, and added, ‘London no good. A12 no good. Better here.’ He pulled his visor down, gunned the big engine and with a wave of his hand roared off in the direction of Cromer and the road to Norwich.

  I took a walk then, out as far as the first hide. There were curlews piping, several waders – sandpipers, a godwit, but whether black-tailed or bar-tailed I couldn’t be sure, and I thought I saw a greenshank. These in addition to the ducks and swans and the inevitable gulls, the shapes and the plumage brilliant in that crystal-clear light with the sun climbing up the pale blue, almost greenish early morning sky.

  Now that the courier had gone off with my passport, I felt almost light-headed. I had made the first decision. I had taken the first step towards the Antarctic. Nothing I could do now until I collected my passport from the travel agent in Windmill Street. Even then I wouldn’t be able to make a final decision because in fairness I would have to deliver Ward’s passport to him. That would be the moment of final decision, and standing there by that hide, watching the movement of the birds, the incessantly changing flight patterns, I fined it down to just two questions: why the haste, and how had he made his money?

  If Iris Sunderby had been alive I would have found it so much easier to make up my mind. There was something about Ward … But I was thinking of that battered body lying in an unrecognisable mess of flesh and bone in that morgue, the memory of it suddenly so vivid that I no longer saw the geese thrashing across the dawn sky, the growing brilliance of the sun as it cleared the high ground by Sheringham. If only I could have talked it over with her.

  What a dreadful way to die. Had she known who it was? I shook myself free of the morbid memory, turned abruptly and headed back home.

  Two questions, and on his answers to those questions, and the way in which he answered them, would depend whether I went with him or not. Telling me on the flight wasn’t good enough. I’d have to get the reason for his haste out of him before we moved into the departure lounge. Just those two questions, that would settle it one way or the other. It was out of my hands.

  Freed of the need to make up my mind immediately, I went about organising such business as I had, determined that no client should feel let down if I did decide to go with Ward. I had less than thirty-six hours in which to arrange everything and I found the problem of what clothes to take more difficult than dealing with my business. Several times I tried to contact Ward. I wanted to know exactly what he had meant when he said he had arranged for cold weather clothing to be flown out. I needed a list. What about underwear? And gloves? I seemed to remember that layers of gloves were essential, also layers of leg coverings and socks, special boots. But the first three times I tried to get through to him his phone was engaged, and after that there was no reply. I would have liked to have got hold of Lewis’s book. Somebody who had read it said he thought it included a checklist in one of the appendices. Unfortunately it wasn’t available at Cromer and I hadn’t time to drive down to the big Norwich library.

  It was a very odd experience packing and organising for an absence that might be longer than the Whitbread, knowing at the same time I might be back home in Norfolk by Sunday evening. A rush of enthusiasm to get the job done resulted in its being more or less finished by midday, so that for a while I was left in a sort of vacuum of suspended animation. But then, as people realised I would be away for some time, the phone began to ring.

  Even my mother, to whom time had never meant very much, got the idea that I might be away for longer than usual. ‘You will remember, dear. The Flower Festival. I’m relying on you.’

  Ćley’s St Margaret’s, looking over the Glaven valley to something of a mirror image of itself at Wiveton, is a wonderful old fourteenth-century church. It was built by the men who shipped the Norfolk wool out of Cley when it was a real port to the Flemish weavers acr
oss the North Sea. The services there were always rather special to me for the parapetted clerestory has great cinquefoil-shaped and cusped circular windows through which the light pours, and when it was massed with the glorious colour of innumerable flower arrangements it really took one’s breath away, it was so beautiful. ‘It’s one of the things I’ll miss,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, but you can’t. What about me?’

  ‘I’ll miss you, too,’ I said, putting my arm round her thin shoulders.

  ‘Oh, don’t be silly.’ She shrugged me off. She was a very independent person. ‘You know I don’t mean that. It’s the flowers. An awful lot of them, and all in buckets of water.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. I had helped her each year since my father had died.

  ‘And then there’s the watering and the spraying.’

  She said all this again when we were back on the Saturday evening from the Ledwards who ran an antique furniture shop in King’s Lynn. It was his boat I had borrowed. I think she had forgotten that Maity’s wife, Mavis, had arranged it at the last moment as a farewell dinner party for me. But then she saw my gear stacked in the tiny hallway and she began to cry. I told her I hadn’t made up my mind yet whether I was going or not, but that in any case I’d be with her in spirit.

  ‘Spirit’s no good,’ she said, ‘when it comes to buckets of flowers, and now that Fred’s gone …’ She went on like that all the way up the stairs. Wine always made her a little petulant.

  I said goodbye to her outside her bedroom, pushed her in and gently closed the door. What else could I do? And that old cliché jumped into my mind: A man’s gotta do … Shit! I didn’t know what I was going to do. I still hadn’t made up my mind, and I went to sleep wondering whether I ever would, even when Ward had answered those two vital questions.

  I was up and watching at the door when Sheila’s little Volvo drew up at the gate. I had already humped my suitcase and the canvas bundle with my sleeping bag, oilskins and cold-weather clothing to the roadside. I closed the door gently and walked down the path. It was not yet six, a dull grey dawn with low cloud and a cold damp wind out of the north. I don’t think she heard me leave. At least there was no sign of her at the windows when we drove off.

  ‘Julian sends you his love and hopes to God you know what you’re doing.’ She grinned at me. ‘So do I.’ Sheila was Julian Thwaite’s wife, a big, bosomy girl who had once been his secretary and now did the odd bit of typing for me. To keep her hand in, was how she put it, and she had refused to charge for the time she had put in during the last two days. ‘He’s gone fishing, otherwise he’d have driven you himself and I could have had a nice lie in.’ She went through Salthouse at over sixty, nothing on the road, and we were on the A140 and driving south by six-thirty.

  I was catching the 07.10 inter-city from Norwich and we arrived at the station with a quarter of an hour to spare. ‘Got your ticket? Money, traveller’s cheques, passport – no, you’re picking that up, of course.’ She swung my suitcase and canvas roll on to the roadway.

  ‘You’ll make a good secretary yet.’ I grinned at her, and she grinned back.

  ‘Find that ship, get yourself some more clients and I’ll leave Julian to do for himself and come and secretary for you full time. Okay?’ She suddenly put her arms round me and gave me a hug, kissing me full on the mouth. ‘You look after yourself, my boy.’ She got back in the car, smiling up at me as she added, ‘Just remember, the Weddell Sea isn’t exactly the Norfolk Broads.’ And with that, and a final wave, she was gone.

  I was alone then, her words reminding me of the future, the risk and the possible reward, so that when I boarded the train the Antarctic seemed to have moved a step nearer.

  THREE

  All the way up to London I sat thinking it over, wondering about Ward. I knew so little about him. How had he made his money? And when I got to Crick’s office, I found he wasn’t a travel agent at all. He was a lawyer. I hadn’t expected that.

  The office was on the second floor of a somewhat dilapidated building at the far end of Windmill Street. There was no lift and I was sweating by the time I had dragged my baggage up two long flights of stairs. ‘J. Crick & Co. Solicitors’ showed black on the frosted-glass panel of the door, and it was Crick himself who opened it. I didn’t see anybody else there, and he didn’t invite me in. ‘You’re late.’ He said it quite affably, his voice so quiet it was almost a whisper.

  ‘The train was late,’ I said. ‘In any case, it wasn’t due in to Liverpool Street till nine-forty-five and I had to queue for a taxi.’

  ‘It don’t matter.’ He smiled. He was a balding, bustling little man with large horn-rimmed glasses. I don’t know what race he was, middle European probably, certainly not English. ‘You wait here,’ he said, peering down at my baggage. ‘Keep an eye on it.’ And he disappeared into an inner office before I could ask him any of the questions that were in my mind.

  He was back almost immediately with two stiff manilla envelopes. ‘Here is Mr Ward’s passport.’ He handed me one of the envelopes and a form. ‘You sign for it please. All the visas are there, all he asked for.’ He produced a pen and I signed. ‘And there is yours. Bolivia is not possible, not in the time. But I think perhaps you don’t go to Bolivia. Explain please to Mr Ward. The others are difficult enough.’

  I started to ask him how he had managed it at such short notice, but he shook his head, smiling. ‘You don’t ask. It is done, that is all that concern you.’ But he looked pleased.

  ‘Mr Ward referred to you as his travel agent, but I see you’re a solicitor.’

  ‘Yes.’ The smile had vanished, replaced by a wary look. He began to shut the door, but I had moved my canvas roll into the gap. ‘You must have an interesting variety of clients,’ I said. ‘So many Chinese in Soho, all those strip joints and blue cinemas.’

  ‘I deal only with ladies of the stage, ladies who are in trouble, you understand. No Chinese.’

  ‘Prostitutes, you mean?’

  ‘We call them ladies of the stage. They prefer that. Most of them have been in front of the footlights at one time or another.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Now, Mr Kettil, if you’ll excuse me. I only came in this morning because of you.’ He pushed my canvas roll out of the way. ‘My regards to Mr Ward please and tell him any time …’ He nodded, smiling again as he closed the door and locked it.

  Back in the street and humping my gear laboriously to Piccadilly Circus Underground, I thought his clients probably included blackmailers as well as prostitutes, or perhaps he did the blackmailing himself. It was the only explanation I could think of that would produce visas like rabbits out of a hat. And if he was a blackmailer, what was Ward? Thinking about that as the Piccadilly Line took me out to Heathrow, I began to consider espionage as possibly his real occupation.

  At the airport I had over an hour to wait, and since I had no ticket, I couldn’t check in and get rid of my baggage. I bought a paper and sat reading it over a cup of coffee until it was the time Ward had said he would meet me. But one-thirty came and went, and no sign of him, the minutes ticking away relentlessly as I stood by the BA desks, watching the endless flow of passengers checking in. I began to think he might not turn up. Having geared myself to face the challenge of an expedition that might cost me my life, I suppose I was mentally on a high, for I now became fearful lest he might have abandoned the whole project.

  And then suddenly he was there, with a porter and a great mound of baggage. He also had a woman with him. I hadn’t expected that. ‘Mrs Fraser,’ he said. ‘Otherwise Kirsty – my secretary.’ She gave me a little nod and a perfunctory smile. She had the tickets in her hand and moved into line to wait her turn at the desk. He turned to me. ‘Ye got the passports?’

  I nodded. ‘There are one or two questions …’ I began.

  ‘Later.’ He took the manilla envelope I handed him, slit it open and ran quickly through the pages, turning them with the thumb of his left hand as he checked the visas. ‘Good.’ He slipped it int
o the pocket of his Norfolk jacket. His secretary was by then handing the tickets to the BA receptionist and the porter was swinging the baggage, item by item, on to the scales. ‘You are overweight,’ the girl at the desk said, and he grinned. ‘Of course Ah’m overweight. Always have been since Ah could afford to eat well.’

  The girl didn’t smile. Maybe she’d had a long day already, or perhaps it was just that she didn’t have a sense of humour. ‘Your baggage,’ she said. ‘You will have to pay excess.’ I don’t know what nationality she was, but her English was very precise.

  ‘Of course.’ He left his secretary to deal with that. ‘Must have a leak before we board. See you in a minute.’

  ‘We haven’t much time,’ I said, and he waved his hand as he disappeared into the mêlée, his head, with its dark unruly hair, raised as he sniffed around like a bloodhound in search of the toilet indicator.

  They were already announcing the final call for the Madrid flight when he rejoined us and we hurried along the passageway to the boarding gate. His secretary was still in attendance. Apparently she was coming with us as far as Madrid, and when I asked him why, he said curtly, ‘Business.’ And then, apparently thinking I was due some explanation, he added, ‘Spain is becomin’ important industrially. Ah’ve been developin’ some contacts there. Kirsty’s very good at that.’

  She was just ahead of me, and looking at the trimness of her figure and the swing of her hips, I couldn’t help it – I said, ‘I can just imagine.’

  He looked at me and grinned. ‘It helps,’ he muttered. ‘But she’s also a clever businesswoman.’

  She turned with a quick smile. ‘I’ll have that in writing, please.’ There was the trace of an accent, but it wasn’t Scots, and though the blonde hair gave her a Scandinavian look, she was too small and it was bleached anyway. It was difficult to guess her origins and I wondered what their relationship really was. The easy familiarity between them suggested a long association, at least a close one, and when we had boarded the plane I found myself in an aisle seat separated from them by two rows.