It was also that Christmas, at a party Gloria and Matthew held, when I got my first real inkling of Gloria’s problems with men.
Annie’s place turned out to be a squat, narrow terrace cottage at the center of a labyrinth. Banks left his car parked by the green and walked through so many twisting narrow streets and ginnels, by backyards where washing hung out on lines in the evening sun, where children played and dogs barked behind sturdy gates, that he was lost within seconds.
“Why do I keep thinking I should have left a piece of thread attached to the Black Swan?” he said as he followed her down a snicket narrow enough to pass through only in single file.
Annie cast a glance over her shoulder and smiled. “Like Theseus, you mean? I hope you don’t think I’m the Minotaur just because I live at the center of all this?”
Banks’s mythology was a bit rusty, but he remembered being impressed by an ancient vase he had seen on a school trip to the British Museum. It depicted Ariadne outside the Labyrinth holding one end of the thread and Theseus at its center killing the Minotaur.
He had even seen what was left of the Labyrinth at the Palace of Knossos on Crete, where a pedantic guide inflicted with a serious case of synonymitis had explained it all to Sandra and him as they tried to hold back their giggles. “And this is King Minos’s throne, his regal seat, his chair of office… And they carried her body to the hill, the rise, the tor, the mountain.” He remembered the olive trees with their silver-green oily leaves and the orange trees lining the road from Heraklion.
But now wasn’t the time to be thinking about Sandra.
He was about to say that he thought of Annie more as Ariadne, seeing as she was probably the only one who could get him out of there, but he bit his tongue. Considering what transpired between Theseus and Ariadne on Naxos, it didn’t seem like a very good idea.
He followed Annie deeper into the labyrinth.
Her keys were jingling in her hand now. “Almost there,” she said, glancing back at him, then she opened a high wooden gate in a stone wall, led him through a small flagged yard and in the back door.
“Where do you park?” Banks asked.
Annie dropped her keys on the kitchen table and laughed. “A long way away. Look, it’s tiny, there’s not much of a view and very little light. But guess what? It’s cheap, and it’s mine. Well, it will be when I’ve paid off the mortgage. You must have been a DS once?”
“A DC, too.” Banks remembered the early days, scraping and saving to make ends meet, especially when Tracy and Brian were little and Sandra had to take extended periods off work. There were no maternity benefits back then. Not for dental receptionists, anyway. Even now, as a DCI, it was difficult making payments on the cottage. He also had to furnish the place by driving around to local auctions and car-boot sales. There would be no Greek holiday this year. “At least you get overtime,” he said. “You probably make more than me.”
“In Harkside? You must be joking.” Annie led him through to the living room. It was small but cozy, and she had decorated much of it in whites, lemons and creams because of the lack of outside light. As a result, the room seemed airy and cheerful. There was just enough space for a small white three-piece suite, the settee of which would probably seat two very thin people, a TV, mini-stereo and a small bookcase under the window. Several miniature watercolors hung on the walls. Local scenes, mostly. Banks recognized Semerwater, Aysgarth Falls and Richmond Castle. There was also one oil portrait of a young woman with flowing pre-Raphaelite hair and laughing eyes.
“Who painted these?” he asked.
“I did. Most of them.”
“They’re very good.”
Annie seemed embarrassed. “I don’t think so. Not really. I mean, they’re competent, but…” She put her hand to her head and swept back her hair. “Anyway, look, I feel really grubby after being down in that basement. I’m going up for a quick shower first, then I’ll start dinner. It won’t take long. Make yourself at home. Open the window if you’re too warm. There’s plenty of beer in the fridge. Help yourself.” Then she turned and left the room. Banks heard stairs creak as she walked up.
This woman was an enigma, he thought. She had a DCI, her boss, as a guest in her house, yet nothing in her behavior toward him indicated a deferential relationship. She was the same always, with everyone, not adapting herself to the various roles people play in life. He imagined she would even be the same with Jimmy Riddle. Not that she’d invite that bastard into her home, Banks hoped. He heard the shower start. Though it was small, the cottage wasn’t particularly old – not like his own – and it had an upstairs bathroom and toilet. Even so, he guessed Annie must have had the shower installed herself, because it certainly wouldn’t have come with the original building.
First, he did what he always did when left alone in a new room; he nosed around. He couldn’t help it. Curiosity was part of his nature. He didn’t open drawers or read private mail, not unless he thought he was dealing with a criminal, but he liked to look at books, choice of music and the general lie of the land.
Annie’s living room was fairly Spartan. It wasn’t that she didn’t own books or CDs, but that she didn’t have many of either. He got the impression that she may have had to pare down her existence at one time and everything that remained was important to her. There seemed to be no chaff. Unlike his own collection, where the mistakes piled up alongside the hidden gems. Discs he never listened to shared shelf space with some that were almost worn out.
First, he crouched down and checked the CD titles in the cabinet under the stereo. It was an odd collection: Gregorian chants, Don Cherry’s Eternal Now and several “ambient” pieces by Brian Eno. There was also an extensive blues collection, from Mississippi John Hurt to John Mayall. Next to these stood a few pop and folk titles: Emmylou Harris’s The Wrecking Ball, Kate and Anna McGarrigle, some k.d. lang.
The books mainly centered around Eastern philosophy; it was a real sixties treasure trove, considering that Annie was a nineties woman. Banks remembered some of the titles. He had come across them first in Jem’s room, in the Notting Hill days, and he had even borrowed and read some of them: Baba Ram Dass’s Be Here Now; Gurd-jieff’s Meetings With Remarkable Men; Ouspensky, Carlos Castaneda, Thomas Merton, Alan Watts, and old blue-covered Pelican paperbacks about yoga, Zen and meditation.
Seeing them again took him right back to the dim, candlelit room with the melting-butter walls and the jasmine joss sticks, to the first time he smoked hash, with Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant” on the stereo; earnest, all-night arguments about Marx and Marcuse, changing the system, love and revolution, with Banks, more often than not, playing the straight man, the devil’s advocate. Gentle, sweet-natured Jem, his gaunt face always in shadows, dark hair spilling over his narrow shoulders, his soft, husky voice and his unwillingness to kill even the mice that sometimes walked across the room right in front of them as they talked. His record collection: Rainbow Bridge, Bitches Brew, Live Dead, Joy of a Toy.
Strange days. Old days.
Back then, Banks had spent half his time studying industrial psychology and cost accounting and the other half listening to Miles Davis, Jimi Hendrix, Roland Kirk and The Soft Machine. One way led to security and what his parents wanted; the other led to uncertainty and God only knew what else. Poverty and drug addiction, as like as not. Hard to believe now that there had been a time when it was all balanced on a razor’s edge, when he could have gone either way.