Chapter 9 Like Air Bubbles Rising
“Mr. Sullivan, it is you. I wasn’t sure. May I join you? What are you drinking?”
It was Saul’s third time dropping into the King’s Arms in the hopes of seeing Jimmy, and now here he was, sitting at the bar.
“Call me Jimmy,” he said cheerily, nodding at the barman to come and take Saul’s order. “And I won’t say no, thank you. I’ll have a pint of mild and bitter.”
Saul asked for a scotch and sat on a barstool. He looked around him and was about to remark on the congeniality of English public houses. But then he remembered to pose as a jaded habitué. “Do you come here often?” he said. “I don’t believe I’ve seen you here before.”
“Oh, you know, now and again,” said Jimmy, accepting a cigarette. “This your regular local, is it?”
“Mm, yes.” The barman placed Saul’s drink in front of him. To his surprise, Jimmy said, “I’ve read your poetry. I can’t claim to be any sort of expert, but I enjoyed it very much. Do you like Sassoon? Your style reminds me of his. Especially your sonnet ‘Last Day,’ which I—”
“You’re very kind,” interrupted Saul. The boy couldn’t possibly know (or could he?), but “Last Day” was about his daughter, Marya. “Fancy you reading my work. I’m touched.”
Jimmy nodded self-consciously. Perhaps he didn’t ought to have said anything. The day after meeting Mr. Reznikov in Honor’s drawing room (was it really only three weeks ago?), he’d gone to Chelsea Library and, under a sort of helpless compulsion, read the poetry collection cover to cover.
In tracking down Honor, Jimmy’s intentions had been perfectly reasonable.
He needed a place to stay, and money to get back on his feet.
Introducing some long-overdue discord to her unjustly cushy life was the icing on the cake.
To find Mr. Reznikov living there, after all this time, was the last thing he had expected.
But by then his plans had gathered an unstoppable momentum.
And it didn’t matter, he told himself, especially given the size of the house.
He’d simply stay out of the man’s way. Of course, he’d meant to stay out of everyone’s way, and look how that had worked out.
“Is that how you know Mrs. Wilson, then?” he asked. “From being a poet?”
“In a manner of speaking, yes,” said Saul. “Though we’re old friends now.” He paused. “And you? I think I recall you and Honor knew each other as children?”
“Something like that, yeah.”
“But she’s some years your senior, surely?”
Jimmy laughed. “Don’t let her hear you say that.” He quickly resumed a straight face. “I only mean—women don’t like to be asked their age, do they? I’ve never seen why it matters, myself.”
“Talking of Honor, I gather she was displeased about your consorting with George.”
He rolled his eyes. “She tell you that, did she? Seems like it’s all anyone can talk about. It was only a drink. Beats me why she gives two hoots.”
“I suppose she feels a certain… a certain responsibility for the young people living under her roof.”
“Well. If she wants to be George’s moral guardian, she’s got her work cut out for her.”
“What on earth do you mean?” said Saul, chivalrous to a fault.
Jimmy drank, then carefully placed his glass on a beer coaster. “I don’t mean anything. The girl seems quite spirited, that’s all. Her parents couldn’t keep her in line, so why should anyone else?”
“All the same. It should be better, shouldn’t it, if you remained on cordial but, but…” But what? wondered Saul. “Formal terms with the girls in the house.”
To this Jimmy gave a salute—a sarcastic gesture, suspected Saul, but it reminded him to ask about the army.
As far as he could tell, the account Jimmy offered was consistent with the one he’d given George.
He’d had asthma, though it had quite disappeared now, and he was deemed not medically fit to serve.
“Not even a desk job?”
“Nah.” Jimmy tapped the ash from his cigarette, then lowered his voice: “What happened to you, then, when Hitler went on his march?”
Saul smiled. A clever if unsubtle way to redirect the conversation. “You don’t want to hear about all that.” He looked at the boy; did he resemble Honor? It was difficult to say. “So you knew Honor when she was a child—I can’t picture it! What was she like then?”
“You imagine, don’t you, that she appeared on this earth fully formed. Smoking and refreshing her lip paint. Criticizing people’s dress sense and table manners. But yeah, she’s always been the same. Except she used to have long fair hair. Not blond. Sort of mouse color.”
“No!”
“Yeah! She was much fatter, too, as a girl.”
“Goodness me.” Saul shook his head in wonder. “And you must know her parents—does she resemble them?”
“I think her parents are both dead, now, aren’t they?”
“But you knew them? What was her father’s job?”
After a pause, Jimmy said, “I’m not sure, you know. You’d have to ask her.”
“Honor doesn’t like to talk about herself. Perhaps you’ve noticed.”
He nod-shrugged noncommittally. Saul, not wishing to belabor the point and make his motive plain, glanced at his wristwatch, then finished his drink. “And I really mustn’t talk your ear off all evening.”
They wished each other good night, and Jimmy watched Saul leave the pub. “Here, Graham,” he said to the barman, “that fella I was just talking to. You ever seen him here before?”
Graham looked up from polishing a glass. “Can’t say I have, mate, no.”
Jimmy wasn’t sure of Mr. Reznikov’s game.
Did Honor send him to have a word, make it clear that George was off-limits?
Except Honor, surely, should hate the idea of Mr. Reznikov and himself in a cozy tête-à-tête.
And all the questions he was asking—he was obviously suspicious about something, even though he couldn’t have been nicer and friendlier.
There was no chance, then, that he’d caught even a whiff—a molecule of a whiff—of who Jimmy really was.
The whole thing was puzzling. But it was Honor’s problem, he reminded himself, not his.
And once she stumped up enough money, he’d be on his way without a backward glance.
Disappearing on Robbie should be his only regret.
He felt an odd ripple in his solar plexus.
A mad idea flashed across his mind. Immediately, he quashed it.
But the thought kept returning, like air bubbles rising to the surface of a dark pool.
It was this: He might ask Robbie to come away with him.
They could go to a place where no one knew them and live together in a little house with window boxes.
And cats, boy and girl golden Persians. Jimmy would get a job and Robbie would stay at home and write his books.
The more he thought about it, the less mad it seemed.
Couples, he’d always assumed, tolerated each other’s perpetual company because they had no choice, because pairing off was just what you did.
Now he understood that another person’s presence in your life could suddenly feel essential, like water or sunshine.
The trick, he supposed, was finding that person among the whole rotten morass of humanity.
And yet, he thought, surveying the pub’s denizens critically, surely it was less a matter of haphazard searching than of fate.
If meeting Robbie was random, it followed that their rapturous affinity was commonplace.
And at some bone-deep level, Jimmy knew that it wasn’t.
Robbie knew it, too. He hadn’t said so, but he didn’t need to.
Finishing his pint, Jimmy remembered the words of Miss Lapham, the probation officer whom he saw fortnightly.
On Friday, he had arrived at his appointment fizzing over with irrepressible joy, prompting her to remark on his good spirits.
His reply had tumbled out: “Well, you see, I’ve met someone special.
” When she pressed him for details, he hastily described George.
A half truth, after all, was more convincing than a whole lie.
Indeed, Miss Lapham seemed unsuspecting, even approving.
“For many a young man who’s passed through my supervision,” she declared, “marriage has been the making of him.”
Back at Tregunter Road, Saul poured himself another drink and sat down at his typewriter to compose a letter to Her Majesty’s Prison Service. Had anyone glanced in from the street, they’d have seen a picture of brow-knitted concentration, the task at hand seemingly a matter of life and death.
It was a Sunday evening, customarily the time for languor and lethargy.
Yet Saul’s alertness matched the mood all around the house.
Three floors up, George was counting and recounting every penny she owned; it came to nearly twenty pounds.
Not bad. Perhaps, she thought, she’d continue with the Camera Club even after the deed was done.
It was better money than sitting for painters, and the men were far more appreciative.
Some of them, she suspected, didn’t even bother putting film in their cameras. But that was their business.
Across the hall, Robbie was in the bathroom, having spent longer than usual in his weekly bath.
Critically, he examined himself in the mirror.
Should he start doing push-ups, or lifting weights?
His body had never occupied his thoughts—it was just there, and it worked well enough—until this metamorphosis had occurred: this abrupt coming into being.
The writer in him squirmed at the hackneyed phrase, but none other was as apt: He finally understood what all the fuss was about.
Downstairs, Mina arrived home from work and went to make herself a cup of tea.
It had come to her, quite suddenly, what was the matter with George: She was up the spout.
The other morning she was chucking up something terrible.
And wasn’t she bound to get caught eventually, the way she carried on?
Mina couldn’t fathom such recklessness. Honor would have a fit.
Honor, sitting in bed reading The People, remained in ignorance of George’s unfortunate condition.
For now, she was absorbed in an article about a séance during which Douglas Fairbanks, communicating from “the other side” in an “abyss of repentance,” had apologized to one of his wives for his infidelity.
He took his time, thought Honor; he’d been pushing up daisies for more than ten years.
Gerald, she reflected, had been notably silent since his passing in 1947.
She looked up at the ceiling and said softly, “Is there money hidden anywhere, darling? If not, you might let me know the next Grand National winner. That’d be super.
” She paused and lit a cigarette. “Even better, could you please arrange for Jimmy Sullivan, currently of this address, to join you in the spiritual realm?”