Gabriel's Moon, page 18
Bennet Strum had asked him for a piece about his trips to Andalusia, concentrating on his impressions of everyday life in Franco’s Spain. ‘Not too much culture and cathedrals,’ Bennet had said. ‘We want to know how the old bastard is destroying the country.’ Gabriel was happy to be commissioned: it was easy and well-remunerated work. He lit a cigarette and started to type, feeling a kind of contentment creep over him. No more the useful idiot, the compliant bagman. His old, comfortable, solitary life had returned.
Tyrone reported back on his surveillance of Faith Green a week later. They went to the Goat and Crow one lunchtime and Gabriel bought him a pint and a pie. He was drinking a large gin and tonic. He felt his head a little light, his throat dry, as Tyrone began to outline what he’d discovered. He wondered, not for the first time, if he was being too audacious, having a member of the British Secret Intelligence Service spied on in this way. Spying on the spy. But it wasn’t to do with espionage, he told himself, this was all about emotion, an affair of the heart – his heart.
‘Well, it took a couple of days hanging about Long Acre, but then I spotted her instantly,’ Tyrone said. ‘Classy-looking woman, Gabriel. Nice bit of stuff. Good choice. Are you actually, you know, doing the deed—?’
‘Don’t go down that road, Tyrone. Just tell me what you found out.’
‘She leaves the office around six. Goes to the Covent Garden Tube. Then she gets a train to Ealing Broadway, with one change at Holborn – which is actually only one stop from Covent Garden. Kind of odd. Nearly lost her.’
Tyrone went on. She disembarked at Ealing Broadway because that was where she parked her car.
‘Very nice motor. Mercedes-Benz 190 SL. She earns a bob or two, Gabe, I tell you.’
‘I know about the car. What then?’
‘I was on foot. She drove off.’
‘Oh. So you lost her.’
‘How was I to know she had a car there? Do me a favour.’
‘Apologies.’
‘So, the next day, end of the working day, I drives to Ealing Broadway Tube and parks up near her car. Sure enough, she comes out of the station, close enough to seven p.m. Gets in the car. I follow.’
She drove down the A40 towards Oxford, Tyrone said, then turned off and headed into the Chilterns, to the village of Great Missenden.
‘She has a house on the High Street. Small house, painted white, window boxes, two storeys. Lives there alone.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I asked a neighbour. Said I was looking for a couple I knew. Lived in the village. I’m not stupid, Gabriel. I could be a detective.’
‘Let’s leave that discussion for another day. What number is it?’
Tyrone told him. Gabriel went to buy more drinks. While he stood at the bar he wondered again if he was being a fool. What was he going to do with this new information? Go to Great Missenden and knock on Faith’s front door? He could almost foreshadow her astonishment and then her fury at being tracked down in this way. The fact that her commute to the Institute was so elaborate: car, then Tube, then change of station. The fact that Holborn was only one stop from Covent Garden was significant: she could walk directly to Holborn from the Institute – no, that meant that this was procedure, as much as anything, a routine way of covering her tracks. She could have caught a train from Great Missenden to Marylebone. She could park her car in Covent Garden, if she wished. No, it was a precaution. She would not be happy to see him.
He took the drinks back to their table.
‘Cheers. Oh, yeah, one other thing,’ Tyrone said. ‘This neighbour, right chatty old biddy, told me that your Miss Green was off on holiday for two weeks. And she told me where.’
‘Where?’
‘Could I have the thirty quid you owe me?’
Gabriel had come prepared. He took out his wallet and gave Tyrone the six £5 notes and watched while the usual full-concentration double count took place. Tyrone folded the notes up tightly and pushed them into a trouser pocket.
‘It was called South—’ He stopped, frowned. ‘What was it? South-something, anyway.’
‘Southampton? Southend? Southsea? South Uist?’
‘Southwold. That was it.’
7.
Southwold
Gabriel wondered, as he journeyed to Southwold, if he was going a little insane. He would have to talk this over with Katerina Haas when they next met for a session. He took the train to Norwich, then a stopper to Aldeburgh. From Aldeburgh he caught a bus to Southwold and found a room in a large pub-cum-bed-and-breakfast called the Albion, a few streets back from the beach. He booked himself in for a week.
He had done nothing for a couple of days after Tyrone had delivered up his intelligence but then the idea had seized him. Go to Suffolk, go to Southwold and find her. In Southwold such an encounter could be passed off as a coincidence – lots of people holidayed in Southwold. He’d been there once himself in his teens and remembered it vaguely – patchy memories of a huge white lighthouse in the town itself and the malty smell of brewing beer filling the streets. He recalled bright beach huts, a pier, odd open green spaces in the town, a sand-and-shingle beach and a keen, scowthering wind off the North Sea. It wasn’t a big place so it shouldn’t be hard to find her. He packed his bag and headed off.
The next morning, he went to a newsagent’s and managed to find a local Visitors’ Guide with a street map of the small town. More like a large village than a town, he thought, spreading the map out. He began systematically to prowl the streets looking for the Mercedes-Benz.
After a fruitless day’s searching he realized that she could just as easily be staying in a cottage a few miles away, deep in the countryside – there was no reason to suppose that she should be in Southwold itself. The thought depressed him and again made him question his sanity. But, he reasoned, if he had to go further afield, then he would. He bought a second-hand bicycle for £3 from a scrap-merchant’s yard and began to venture into Southwold’s environs.
It was warm for early September; only the chestnut trees were beginning to turn into their sere autumnal yellow. There was also a constant distant clattering hum in the air, as he cycled the lanes, of tractors farrowing the harvested fields. There were small yachts and dinghies, canoes, motorboats and long thin barges on the many silvered creeks and waterways around the town. The bird life out in the country was remarkable: ducks, geese, plovers, gulls, cormorants, terns, redshanks – and goodness knew what else. He began to feel as though he was on a holiday himself, and started to enjoy his jaunts into the countryside, on his creaking bone-shaker of a bike, looking at cottages and farmhouses, checking to see if by chance a silver Mercedes-Benz was parked outside. Southwold was close to the estuary of the River Blyth, where it emptied itself into the North Sea, and he played with the idea of including the Blyth in his book. At least then, if he didn’t encounter Faith, the trip and its expense wouldn’t have been entirely wasted.
George Orwell’s family had lived in Southwold and Orwell himself had spent many months in the place in the 1920s. These literary associations made writing about the river – a rather placid and undramatic one, he had to admit – all the more meaningful and the Blyth began to appear as a serious candidate for inclusion. Sometimes, as he roamed about on his bicycle, he forgot for an hour or two about the quest for Faith, though he quite liked that description of his Southwold excursion – ‘The Quest for Faith’. It sounded like a religious vocation, or as if he were an armoured knight-errant on his trusty steed searching for his personal grail. Would Faith Green save him from himself? Then sober common sense intervened. He rebuked himself for his frivolity. Maybe he was indeed going mad. Maybe he should go back to London.
And then, on the third day in Southwold, walking along the North Parade, he heard a powerful engine and looked round to see the silver Mercedes 190 speed by. He felt an adrenaline surge of elation, immediately quelled by the suspicion that there had been two people in the car. And why not? he told himself. Why would she have a holiday on her own? The other person – he couldn’t tell if it was male or female – might be a sister or a cousin, or a friend. Entirely natural, normal, unexceptional. But she was here – she came into town.
Over the next couple of days he renewed his bicycling with concentrated intent. He stopped at garages and filling stations and asked if anyone had seen a silver Mercedes 190. Some people had – a rare car in this part of the world – but they knew nothing more. He mooched about the principal streets of Southwold – the High Street, the Market Place, Pier Avenue, Victoria Street – hanging around the supermarket, the butcher, the off-licence. She had to eat, so she had to shop – maybe there was more hope in this process rather than aimlessly cycling around Suffolk’s flat, beguiling landscape.
He began to despair again and tried to fill his day with more meaningful projects. There was an ancient ford on the Blyth, he read in his Visitors’ Guide. Perhaps he should go and take a photograph. He headed off on the road to Blackwater, telling himself he would only give the search one more day – and then he saw it.
The Mercedes was parked in the driveway of a rather ordinary 1930s brick bungalow with dormer windows and an enormous bush of pampas grass on the small front lawn – very un-Faith Green, Gabriel thought – and there was an Austin Cambridge parked beside the Mercedes. The other person’s car, he supposed, whoever she or he might be. He looked around. They were on the very outskirts of Southwold. There was a farm up the road and opposite the house was a wooden bus shelter – he might be spotted there in the daytime, but in the night he could easily survey the house from there. A little way down the lane was a culvert over a stream with fairly lush vegetation around it, lots of elm and ash, plentiful suckers giving good camouflage – he could certainly hide himself there in daylight, unobserved, and watch the comings and goings. Elation overtook him again. He had found her. He had found Faith – all he had to do now was to somehow engineer their encounter. The trip to Southwold had been worth it, after all.
Early the next morning, making sure he was unobserved, he pushed his bicycle into the undergrowth beside the culvert and settled down, well out of sight, to watch and wait. He wished he had a pair of binoculars. Perhaps that was for tomorrow, he thought. Where could he buy binoculars in Southwold? Maybe he’d have to visit Aldeburgh down the coast, a bigger and more sophisticated township. For the moment his eyesight would have to do.
Surveillance was very boring, he acknowledged after two hours. What was the American expression? A ‘stake-out’. He had provisions, anticipating a long wait. He ate a cheese-and-tomato sandwich. He drank some of the fizzy cola he’d brought. He urinated into the small stream that flowed through the culvert. No sign of life from the bungalow.
Around noon – it seemed like three weeks to Gabriel – the front door opened and Faith came out with a man. Tall, slim, dark-haired – that was all he could see at this distance. But he was thinking, a man . . . He had a sizeable golf bag slung over his shoulder and he loaded it into the boot of the Mercedes. Gabriel analysed the body language and it suggested to him that they were very relaxed in each other’s company. This was no cousin, no old university friend. He felt an acid-bite of jealous nausea in his throat as the two drove off together in the Mercedes to their game of golf. Gabriel decided he had done enough surveillance for the day.
He was late arriving at the bungalow the next morning. He had drunk too much the night before in the Albion’s capacious saloon bar and had lost fifteen shillings in several games of incompetent bar billiards. By the time he’d shoved his bike into the undergrowth and dozily taken his surveillance bearings he realized there were no cars – no Mercedes, no Austin Cambridge – parked in front of the bungalow. Where had they gone?
He climbed out of his thicket and crossed the road. He rang the doorbell, confident there would be no answer. And, no answer coming, he followed a gravel path round the side of the house, stooping to pick up a large stone on the way. He could smash a window and clamber in, he thought. But no need, the back door to the kitchen was unlocked. This was the countryside, the English provinces – unlocked doors were not an invitation to thieves, just a sign of the mutual respect neighbours had for each other. Thank you very much, he thought, and pushed the door open.
He went straight up the stairs to what he assumed was the main bedroom. He knew instantly, instinctively, that this was not Faith’s house – it was the man’s. It was too bland, too traditional for Faith, he thought: no soul, no individual verve. Patterned fitted carpets, unremarkable sofas and armchairs, chintzy lampshades, a wheeled brass drinks trolley, bad local watercolours on the walls. Artificial flowers! But the bedroom upstairs revealed more bitter evidence. The man and Faith were clearly sleeping together. The unmade bed, the twin dents in the paired pillows, told their own story.
He sat on the end of the bed for a moment, taking things in. She had a lover; she had a sex life. He told himself that, actually, this was good news – she wasn’t just the super-efficient, ice-cold, calculating spy-catcher that she presented to the rest of the world – no, she was a living, breathing, sensuous woman. That was some consolation, even if her sensuousness was not directed his way.
He stood up and looked around the room. He jolted, physically, suddenly seeing one of his books on the right-hand bedside table. It was his second book, Travels without Maps. She was reading it, halfway through, nearly – there was a comb as a bookmark. He picked it up to see what chapter she was at: Southern Italy, Bari. He put it down carefully. He felt a kind of absurd gratitude. She must have thought of him from time to time as she read – all was not lost.
He felt suddenly overwhelmed, and the obsession returned, the sexual obsession that he’d experienced in Dublin. Maybe it was the sight of the bed and its redolence of lovemaking. He closed his eyes and conjured up an image of Faith’s pale face, smiling, eyes narrowing knowingly, that way she had of scrutinizing him . . . He reached down to his crotch and touched and felt his thickening penis. He had no idea what made him do this – he wasn’t going to masturbate, that was for sure – but he wanted to acknowledge this feeling as a sign of his presence, his male sexual presence in this room, in this house she was staying in, even if she would never be aware of it; a kind of token, carnal counter-offensive launched against the clear evidence of the coupling that had taken place.
He wandered around for a few moments, lifting up an aquamarine jumper that was obviously hers from the back of a chair, smelling her lavender perfume on it. He went into the bathroom and spotted her various lotions and unguents, neatly laid out in rows, saw one of her velvet Alice bands and picked it up and put it down. Then he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror with her jumper in his hand and felt suddenly creepy and ashamed, a pervert discovered. What kind of weird effect did this woman have on him? he asked himself. My God, he’d never done anything like this before . . . He told himself to calm down. What was he doing wandering around her house – or her lover’s house? What if they suddenly came back? He carefully replaced the jumper on the chair, hurried downstairs and let himself out through the kitchen door.
He booked himself in for another three days at the Albion. They were very pleased to have him staying there, so the staff said. He had quietly, modestly, let slip the information that he was a fairly well-known writer who was thinking about including Southwold in his next book, cashing in on the very low-grade minor-celebrity value that such a writer might claim with non-readers. He went to Southwold’s only bookshop and, to his astonishment, found a dusty paperback of The Wine-Dark Sea. He bought it and dedicated it to the Albion and its wonderful staff, with undying gratitude, Gabriel Dax. It was propped behind the bar by the till for all to see and marvel at.
The next morning, he was secure in his culvert hiding place just after eight a.m. He had borrowed a pair of binoculars from Alex, the bar manager, and was now able to see the shadowy figures of Faith and her nameless lover moving around in the bungalow’s rooms. An hour later he watched them emerge, both in stout boots with rucksacks on their backs. Off for a protracted ramble, he assumed, how sweet. He watched them head off up the road to Blackwater and saw the man reach for Faith’s hand. He felt the sharp pang – almost a pain in his stomach. He stood up. They would be gone most of the day, he assumed. For a moment he was tempted to go back into the house and see how many more pages she might have read of his book, but decided against.
He cycled back to Southwold, thinking. They were lovers; and he was some sad, prowling, lone man, lovelorn, rejected – no, not even rejected – trying to engineer a futile meeting. As far as Faith Green was concerned he was simply the author of the book she was reading in between bouts of lovemaking with the real man in her life. He felt ridiculous. He’d give it one more day, he thought, then he’d go back home and continue with his new book – his métier, his reality.
‘Fool!’ he said out loud. Then louder, shouting it out to the heedless sky as he cycled onwards: ‘Idiotic, ridiculous, fucking FOOL!’
Just to fill the time in the rest of the day, he bussed to Aldeburgh to buy his own set of binoculars. Why he didn’t have a pair already he had no idea. It should be one of the essential tools of the travel writer’s trade. He would treat himself – maybe they would come in useful when he went to Krems. He found a camera shop that also had a line in monoculars and binoculars. Birdwatching country, Suffolk, of course, he reasoned. He bought a small but powerful pair by Leica – expensive, dense black, heavy in the hand, wonderfully sharp focus. He’d try them out on Faith tomorrow. Maybe he might see her naked through the bedroom window; the thought came to him before he realized, with attendant shame, that not only was he a stalker, but now also a potential voyeur. His descent into turpitude and degeneracy was increasing.
