At some point she took the broken piece from him and pressed it successfully in its place. “You were holding it the wrong way,” she told him.
“I’ll pay for the damage,” he said.
A big-boned, athletic woman, horsy-handsome in the English fashion, she winked at him. “It’s our secret,” she said, leaving him.
Terman let himself into the bathroom and locked the door. His face was out of focus in the mirror, eyes like worm holes in an apple. He held his prick in his hand like a marksman and fired point blank into the void. While he peed in endless profusion, he thought he heard the phone ring and he held fire until the ringing stopped. It was not that he wanted to hear from Tom but that he felt he ought to want to hear. No one called him to the phone. His burden slipped away, vanished unexpectedly, then returned.
Terman woke during the night, tumbled from dreams into blackness. A sharp thought like a bramble pricked him. The only thing to do was to go back to London and collect his son. He climbed out of bed and dressed himself blindly in yesterday’s clothes. Isabelle raised her head, said something the matter? Nothing, he said.
He tiptoed down the unfamiliar stairs, the house silent and dark, invested in shadows. There was a light on in the kitchen, calling attention to itself. He pushed open the door and looked in. Marjorie was sitting at the table, wearing a man’s silk dressing gown, the sleeves rolled up. “I’m going back to London to get something,” “What a bore!” she said, putting her head down on the table. He had the idea she had been crying and closed the door behind him, was closing it when she called his name in a world-weary voice.
“Do you have a cig?” she asked.
“No,” he said.
“What good are you?”
There was a car parked directly behind his in the driveway and his first inclination was to see fate as his implacable opponent and return to bed. Even as he opened the door of Tumsun’s Bentley and released the handbrake, he could imagine Marjorie saying with that casual contempt that seemed bred into the voice, “You’re back, are you, even before you started.” The car obstructing his path was difficult to move, adamant about its right of place. He threw his shoulder repeatedly against the left fender, rolling the car back a few feet at a time. Whenever he stopped to catch his breath, the Bentley tended to slip forward. Someone, he sensed, was watching him from the house, taking pleasure in the extravagance of his effort.
He breathed rage. A cold hour passed before there was room for him to get out and by then he was shivering from the exertion, hot and cold at the same time, his face glazed with sweat. Once he was on the road, the trip, despite the veils of fog, seemed to make itself. He was back in London with the first light, parking across the street from his house. He noticed even before he parked the car that there was a light on in one of the third floor windows. His idea was that Tom had come back, had moved back in his absence.
The light was coming from Tom’s room, but the room was untenanted, showed no signs of having been otherwise employed. Terman didn’t recall leaving the light on, was all but positive he hadn’t, which meant that Tom (or someone else) had visited the room briefly. He lay down on the bed and closed his eyes, tested the bed, woke as he saw something rush from the closet toward him. He sat up in the bed in an empty room, the overhead light glaring. He turned the light off before leaving, recalled to himself the act of pushing the wall switch down with the index finger of his right hand.
He fixed himself a cup of instant coffee, though he had no taste for it once made and poured it down the sink. What did his son want from him? “Tom,” he shouted from the bottom of the stairwell. “Are you there?” His voice rattled the walls. “Where the hell are you?” He expected no acknowledgement of his cry and was fulfilled in that expectation alone.
He went to his study to check something in an early draft of The Folkstone Conspiracies — then called The Last Days of Civilization — found himself turning out the drawers of his desk, looking for something else. The gun wasn’t where he remembered putting it and he persuaded himself, not wanting to believe it had been stolen, that he had absent-mindedly moved it to another place. Where else might he have put it, wanting it at the same time out of sight and at hand?
He went through every drawer in the desk, systematically emptying and refilling, searching for the gun as if it were an object half its size. The box of ammunition was also missing. He had left Ramsgate in the dead hours of the night, paralyzed by exhaustion to discover that Tom had stolen a gun from his desk. There was some comfort in having his most disheartening suspicions borne out.
Returning from Europa Foods with a bag of croissants, two oranges, and a bottle of white wine, Terman rang his own bell before letting himself in with the key. The mail had been delivered through the slot; otherwise the house was as he remembered leaving it, though also different, changed by time, by modifications in the patterns of light and shade, by the actuality or potentiality of another presence. There was a letter from Magda, one from his agent in New York that included a check he had been expecting, and one, written on American Express stationery, that he suspected was from Tom. It was already nine o’clock (actually two minutes to nine) and he dialed Ramsgate to tell Max he was on his way back. Marjorie answered, said Max was still sleeping, but that she expected him up and about any time now. “What are you doing in London?” she asked.
“Looking for a gun,” he said.
“How positively bloody-minded of you! I hope you didn’t make anything of last night. I’m the kind of person who can do without sleep altogether if it comes to that.”
“An enviable quality,” he said.
“Hurry back to us,” she said.
Terman returned to his study and took one final turn through the drawers in his desk. The news was inescapably the same. He composed a note to Tom, demanding the return of the gun, then tore it up and dropped the scraps in the wastebasket. Someone else might have taken the gun — others had keys to the house — or he might have displaced the gun himself out of distraction. As he was going down the stairs he had an image of Tom sitting on the floor of his study piecing the note together.
Terman nodded off for prolonged stretches, waking to find himself straddling two lanes, a horn trumpeting in the background.
He pulled off the Motorway first chance he had, parked the car with the object of taking a nap, then he remembered the letter from his son and opened that instead. He wondered why he had waited so long to deal with it.
He screened his eyes as he read as if to avoid the direct rays of the sun. There was no mention in the letter of the missing gun, no direct mention. The letter started out as an apology, and ended up as a bill of grievances. There was nothing new except an edginess in tone and with it an air of undefined threat. The letter was typed on an electric typwriter with the same or similar typeface as the one he had in his study in the Holland Park house. Was that the real message, the implicit confesson of intrusion and theft? He sensed that there was something else in the letter beneath the litany of complaints (“Whenever we’re together you act as if you wish you were somewhere else.”), an unspecified request, an asking for something while refusing to ask.