Twenty-nine
Hannah had devised strategies so as not to think about him, this big, bulky man with the sad eyes. That day, at work, it had not been too hard. The demands of thirty adolescents at a time, so often eager for anything but learning, failed to allow her much space for personal daydreaming. Her attempts to draw Nicky’s former classmates into a discussion on gender politics, based around Lady Macbeth’s cry of “unsex me now,” had foundered disastrously. But when, discussing with her sixth-form group one of her favorite Jayne Anne Phillips stories, in which a former dancer visits her dying father, she found herself thinking, not about the restraint and control in the writing, but the surprising grace with which Resnick could walk across a room, she knew, restraint or not, she was going to call him the first chance she got. And when what she got was Lynn Kellogg’s peremptory voice informing her that the inspector was busy and he would try to call her back later, Hannah thought it no more than she deserved.
Whatever had happened to cool?
Back home, she watered the tubs of flowers and the hanging baskets in the backyard, pulled a few weeds away from around the shrubs which were newly planted along one side of her small front garden, and considered cutting the grass; finally she brought out a mug of peppermint tea and the lemon cream biscuits she had bought on the way home, and sat on her front step, sweater round her shoulders, reading Marge Piercy. She found herself feeling so fiercely angry at the efforts the central character was prepared to make to hang onto a husband forever having affairs with younger women, that she forgot to ask herself if anger wasn’t precisely what Piercy wanted her to feel.
When the phone called her indoors, a part of her sang with a sweet degree of expectation, but it was only her mother and when the two women had talked long enough for Hannah to realize she was no longer listening, had not really heard anything her mother had said for at least five minutes, she made an excuse and hung up.
She took a ready-to-heat mushroom bake from the freezer and slid it into the microwave. Pouring herself a glass of wine, she began to make a list of all those fiddling little jobs she would do that evening, another of all the friends she should call.
Considering what it had cost, the wine was surprisingly good. The mushroom bake, as usual, was fine. Wanting some bread to go with it, and regretting that she had forgotten to stop for bread on the way home-the biscuits had come from her corner shop, but the bread they stocked was pre-sliced and not worth considering-she found some oatcakes in the back of the cupboard, carefully enough wrapped that they had not lost all their bite.
The first two people she called were seemingly out and Hannah declined their invitation to speak after the tone; the third one was engaged, the fourth had for some reason been disconnected. In the living room she channel-hopped for all of five minutes before switching off. It was either too late or too early to take a bath. She would do some more reading, listen to the stereo. The way she was behaving was extraordinary: all right, she had slept with the man once but it had not exactly been like Paul on the way to Damascus. No startling revelations, no blinding lights. Just competent, almost comfortable sex. She remembered to switch off the Gregson and Collister CD before it got to “Last Man Alive,” but then realized she had listened three times in succession to “Baby, Now That I’ve Found You”-not the old original version by some pop group she vaguely remembered from when she was a child, but this new one, bluegrass, sung by Alison Krauss. Now that I’ve found you, dum, de-dum, dum, dum, da-dum, gonna build my life around you. Madness, Hannah was certain, that way comes. Time for a slow, hot bath and an early bed.
She was tipping in the peach and honey cream foam when the phone rang again.
“Oh,” Hannah said, flushing, “it’s you.” And, “Yes, okay.” And, “You want to come here?” And, “No, no, half an hour would be fine. Till then, okay, goodbye.”
God, Hannah, she thought, checking the temperature of the water before slipping in, are you a cinch or what?
In the event it was just short of the hour by the time Resnick’s cab had dropped him off near the entrance to the recreation ground and he had walked along the shrouded strip of unmade road, once again past the house where Mary Sheppard had died. So many parts of this city from which Resnick now averted his eyes without ever being able to shut the images from his mind.
The front door to Hannah’s house was open and his adrenaline immediately began pumping, sensing an intruder, a burglary, something worse. But, no, it was only Hannah, shooing a ginger cat along the narrow hallway, the animal pausing on the front step to look back at her balefully, ears flat to its head.
“Not yours, I take it?”
Hannah made a show of shuddering. “Can’t stand them, I’m afraid. That one especially.” Taking in Resnick while she was talking, the effort he had made to look informal, pale-blue shirt, the top two buttons unfastened, light-gray trousers, a dark tweedy jacket that had seen better days. “I woke up one night, not so long ago, that wretched animal must have sneaked in somehow and stayed-anyway, I heard this sound, just light, you know, but like someone else in the room, breathing, and there it was, stretched out on the bed next to me, paws right out, fast asleep.”
“Some people,” Resnick said, “would consider that an honor.” It didn’t come out sounding exactly the way it was meant, but like some corny line, the kind he could imagine coming from someone like Divine. “The cat, I mean,” Resnick said, trying to retrieve the situation, “it must have felt comfortable, trusted you.”
“Yes, well, when it comes to who’s sharing my bed,” Hannah said, “I like to do the choosing myself.”
Resnick bent towards the animal, which was sitting there cleaning itself, unconcerned. Watching him stroke the cat’s head, Hannah imagined him wearing one of those loose linen suits, creased and a little baggy, cream colored, or, no, stone; that was it, stone.
She gave a wry smile. “You obviously don’t feel the same way? About cats?”
“There’s something easy to like about them. Independence, I think.” The ginger one was now purring quite loudly, a little saliva issuing from its jaw. “I mean, they’ll take any amount of this fuss, all you can give, but as soon as it’s over, that’s that. It doesn’t seem to matter if you never go near them again.”
Not such a bad description, Hannah thought, of men. Some, at least, that she’d known. “You’ve got one of your own?”
He did that smiling thing with his eyes. “Four.”
“Four cats?”
“It was sort of accidental. I didn’t intend it to happen.”
Hannah laughed. “Nobody can have four cats by accident.”
“Well …”
“And how many of them get to share your bed?”
“Oh, one or two.”
Then thank God you’ve come here, she thought. “Why don’t you come in?” was what she said.
The wine was already open. They sat in the small front room, made smaller by his presence, and chatted back and forth. Resnick asked her about her day. He asked her if she’d heard about the policeman who’d been found by the Trent, murdered, and when she said, yes, she had, a little, told her that was what he was working on.
“Is that what you always do? That kind of thing?”
“Murder, you mean?”
Hannah nodded: maybe it explained the look, vaguely haunted, behind his eyes.
“Not always,” Resnick was saying. “Despite what you might read, there aren’t so many of them. But yes, I suppose, yes, quite often.”
Hannah edged forward on her seat. “But doesn’t it get to you? I’m sure it must.” Something about Macbeth, so far steeped in blood.
“Sometimes. It depends.” What got to Resnick, what really touched him, was the whole thing: everything he saw. The way people could be with one another, the things they could do: the things they could be made to do in extreme situations-guilt, impotence, poverty, love.