Chapter Three #2
“Send Charlie to fetch her, would you? It would be good if she
could stay over for a couple of days.”
“Yes, of course. But…aren’t you going to be home, Master
Laurie?”
“Yes. I will, most of the time. I want somebody who can stay
with her overnight, though, sleep in her room, and if I do have to
go out…I just want her to have a companion. Do you understand?”
Gibson, who plainly wished she did not, nodded sadly. “Tell Hannah
she’s been having nightmares. I’ll square it with my mother and Sir
William. And I’ll pay.”
* *
*
Laurie waited until Hannah had arrived, bright-eyed and
flushed with the cold, and was installed with the delighted Clara
in the games room, laughing and shrieking over High School Musical 3 or whatever
similar god-awful DVD the child seemed able to watch with
undiminished joy as often as she got the chance. He sat with them
through the trailers, then as soon as the male lead’s moony face
appeared, retreated to the library, waving a thanks, but no thanks at their
efforts to make him stay. He moved Clara’s books from the table,
packed them neatly into her satchel, and got out his own. Dutifully
he worked through Sanderson’s elaborate stratagem for making him
understand and apply the pi concept, as opposed to reciting its
value in the manner of a doomed Wagnerian hero or
Valkyrie.
He left
the library door open but saw no more of his father. Probably he
had gone out to dinner and his club if his wife was not coming
home. Laurie tried to concentrate on his work and the happy noise
seeping out from the games room. At the proper hour for an
eight-year-old’s bedtime, the well-trained Hannah emerged with
Clara in tow, and he bade them both a casual good night. Once they
were gone, he tried not to let every creak in the floors above,
every unidentifiable sound, become the bogeyman. Tried not to lapse
into infantile fears. His father had seldom laid a hand on him—and
never in that way—but his looming, angry bulk, especially when
stinking of scotch, had been enough to place the fear of God in
Laurie’s heart, a fear he was still too young and trapped to place
in context and dismiss.
And
there was another shadow self in Laurie’s head, one even less
worthy than the equivocator who had gone down to the kitchens and
tried to arrange some kind of inadequate shield for his sister.
That one, when the house was quiet, folded up his books, went
upstairs, and, creeping into his mother’s bedroom, found by touch
in the street-lit darkness the drawer where she kept her pills.
Temazepam, in Laurie’s experience, produced a strongly amnesiac
effect. Three or four of them would not only ensure he slept, but
might also wipe his mind clear of what he’d seen this afternoon.
Hannah’s presence in the house might puzzle him, but he’d find a
way around it.
He was
halfway up the vast carved staircase before he knew he had moved.
God, the temptation was strong! Laurie, who normally did his best
not to think of how often he had fallen back on this escape route,
now made himself count the times. Over school holidays, maybe once
or twice a month, when the rows had been bad or his fear of his own
nightmares strong enough to keep him from sleeping at all. Had she
never noticed her supplies were going down? Possibly not—she seemed
to have several prescriptions from different doctors.
Pills for his mother, booze for his dad. Laurie knew, again
from the Guardian,
that children of substance-abusing households were much more likely
than average to become addicts themselves. That was nice, he
thought. If he didn’t, it was a bit of a victory, kicking the
trend, and if he did—well, it was on the cards, wasn’t it? Not
entirely his fault.
He sat
down on the steps and buried his head in his hands. It would be a
rich comfort to him, no doubt, fucked-up and lurching in and out of
rehab in his twenties, to be able to think he wasn’t to blame.
Loneliness went through him like a knife. He seldom let himself
consider this: his isolation, in this house, in his glittering
social matrix, surrounded by friends who wouldn’t give a toss if he
disappeared tomorrow as completely as the other nineteen thousand
nine hundred and ninety-nine…
The pain, now that he let it rise up, was almost unbearable.
Flinching from it, he tried to think of something else, any
associated train of thought he could ride out on. What else had he
read in the Guardian lately? Yes, a review of the statistics on the numbers of
migrant workers entering the UK since membership of the European
Union had been extended two years ago. That was it; that was the
thought that had been tugging at his mind since he had learned
where Sasha was from. Romania had been admitted. What did it mean?
Laurie did try to retain facts like these as part of his
student-of-politics persona, but he knew he’d been flicking through
the paper for cinema times and the Steve Bell cartoon. It meant, he
thought, that Romanians could enter the country without a visa.
They were free to travel here, work here.
Perhaps
there was no need for Sasha to be in hiding at all. He was Roma, a
gypsy, part of a societal underclass who perhaps did not have
access to such information, who instinctively stayed beneath radar.
Maybe he didn’t know. Laurie got up. This thought was inspiring to
him, driving off the shadows of his day. Sasha had tried to make
him promise not to seek him out again, but this would be in a good
cause. After Sanderson’s classes tomorrow, he would go down to the
Embankment.
For now,
though, he would go to bed. Without pills and without guilt. He had
done as much as lay within his power. Laurie felt his mind
clearing, and remembered the night sky he had seen above the
Strand, that unlikely perfection of starlight. The house no longer
felt threatening around him, and he made his way calmly to the
front door for a breath of fresh air before turning in, to see if
tonight was the same.
Opening
the door into the black-and-white tiled porch, he gasped. The
massive old house cost a fortune to heat, but Sir William had
several fortunes sensibly invested, and his mother, delicate
hothouse plant that she was, liked the place kept at subtropical
temperatures. Stepping from hall to porch was like diving into cold
water. Ice flowers painted the delicate stained glass on the
inside. Shivering, feeling his lungs catch with the change, Laurie
went to touch them. They did not melt but slightly adhered the skin
of his fingertips to their wild fractal ferns and blossoms, burning
him as he pulled back.
He
unlocked the front door and stood on the top step in the golden
glow from the fanlight and the carriage lanterns that adorned both
marble pillars. Yes, the skies were clear again, eerily lucid, each
star like a separate human cry. He could scarcely breathe. This
night would sweep like a scythe through London’s lost
souls.
They were legion. Laurie couldn’t help them. His father’s
voice said, Damn good thing. Cull the
buggers like foxes. “Fuck you,” Laurie
whispered fiercely, turning back indoors. You just did what you
could, didn’t you? And he could rescue one.
He made
his way downstairs and tapped cautiously on the door to the
chauffeur’s rooms. It was after eleven, and he knew Charlie liked
to turn in early on nights when he wasn’t needed. But Charlie
opened up straightaway, his dressing gown over his day clothes.
“You all right, son?”
“Yes. Are you waiting to hear from my father? Do you reckon
he’ll want the car again tonight?”
Charlie
shrugged. He had been Lady Fitzroy’s driver since before her
marriage, and Laurie was aware that he had no illusions about her
or her husband. Probably Gibson had already spoken to him. “If he
does, he can call a taxi, for my money. Do you need me to take you
somewhere?”
Laurie
considered. It was tempting—he was a decent driver, but the Daimler
was like a whale in the narrow London streets. He didn’t have the
right, though, to ask Charlie to collude in what he was doing or
acquiesce to it, even by his silence. “No,” he said. “I’ve just got
cabin fever from all this cramming. I fancy a run.”
Charlie
nodded sympathetically. He was a practical soul. No doubt he
thought the young heir ought to be out chasing girls and getting
into trouble like a normal embryonic baronet, not taxing his
unremarkable brains over textbooks. “Off you go. She’s got a full
tank. Have her back by morning, that’s all, and don’t bloody
speed.”
* *
*
Driving
through the winter night. It felt to Laurie more like sailing, in
this vast car whose suspension absorbed every bump in the road. He
touched buttons and heard invisible whispering fingers wipe away
steam on the windows’ insides before it could form. Unreal.
Floating past brilliant shop displays, the wealth of the world laid
out in them, absurd bathrooms of Carrara marble, bedrooms, dining
suites, beneath whose unreal outward-looking windows huddled unreal
human souls—stripped of reality, of human status, by poverty.
Laurie, having chosen one of them to save, was now beginning to
understand his hypocrisy in ignoring the rest. He told himself that
he would never accept the injustice. But nor would he let it make
him bring the Daimler to a halt until he found the object of his
search. He swallowed down the contradictions with an effort. He had
to find Sasha; that was all.
His
place in the doorway to Lindley’s was vacant. A dull ache of
anxiety went through Laurie. Had he drawn too much attention to
Sasha the other night, only succeeded in driving him from his patch
to somewhere even less hospitable? Continuing down the Strand,
looking out for police cars and trying not to go conspicuously
slow, he scanned the pavement. A taxi braked sharply in front of
him, and he missed its rear end by three inches, drawing his
attention fiercely back to the road. He could not afford an