'This place is fantastic,' I said.
She nodded. 'We were so lucky to get it. We've only been here three months, but I think we'll stay for ever.' She pointed to the open roof. This all closes over, you know. There are solar panels that slide across. They say the house is warm all winter.'
I admired everything sincerely and asked if Ted were still teaching. She said without strain that he sometimes taught University courses in computer programming and that unfortunately he wouldn't be home until quite late the following evening. He would be so sorry to have missed me, she said.
'I would quite urgently like to talk to him.'
She gently shook her head. 'I don't honestly know where he is, except somewhere up near Manchester. He went this morning, but he didn't know where he'd be staying. In a motel somewhere, he said.'
'What time would he be back tomorrow?'
'Late. I don't know.'
She looked at the concern which must have shown plainly on my face and said apologetically, 'You could come early on Sunday, if you like, if it's that important.'
CHAPTER 15
Saturday crawled.
Cassie wandered around with her plastered arm in a sling and Bananas jogged down to the cottage three or four times, both of them worried by the delay and not saying so. It had seemed reasonable on Thursday night to incarcerate Angelo with his handiwork still appalling us in the sitting-room and Cassie in pain, but by Saturday evening she and Bananas had clearly progressed through reservations and uneasiness to downright anxiety.
'Let him go,' Bananas said when he came late after closing time. 'You'll be in real trouble if anyone finds out. He knows now that you're no pushover. He'd be too scared to come back.'
I shook my head. 'He's too arrogant to be scared. He'd want his revenge, and he'd come back to take it.'
They str-ed miserably at each other. 'Cheer up,' I said. 'I was ready to keep him for a week- two weeks- as long as it took.'
'I just don't know,' Bananas said, 'how you could calmly go to the races.'
I'd gone uncalmly to the races. Also to the gallops in the morning and to Mort's for breakfast, but no one I had seen could have guessed what was going on at home. Behind a public front I found it was fairly easy to hide an ongoing crime: hundreds of people did it, after all.
'I suppose he's still alive,' Cassie said.
'He was up by the door swearing at four o'clock.' Bananas looked at his watch. 'Nine and a half hours ago. I shouted at him to shut up.'
'And did he?'
'Just swore back.'
I smiled. 'He's not dead.'
As if to prove it Angelo started kicking the door and letting go with the increasingly familiar obscenities. I went into the kitchen and stood close to the barricade, and when he drew breath for the next verbal onslaught I said loudly, 'Angelo.'
There was a brief silence, then a fierce furious growling shout: 'Bastard.'
'The light's going out in five minutes,' I said.
'I'll kill you.'
Maybe the heavily savage threat should have raised my goose bumps, but it didn't. He had been murderous too long, was murderous by nature, and I already knew it. I listened to his continuing rage and felt nothing.
'Five minutes,' I said again, and left him.
In the sitting-room Bananas was looking mildly piratical in his open-necked shirt and his sneakers and his four days' growth of harsh black beard, but he himself would never have made anyone walk the plank. The gloom and doom in his mind deplored what I was doing even while he condoned it, and I could almost sense him struggling anew with the old anomaly that to defeat aggression one might have to use it.
He sat on the sofa and in short order drank two stiff brandies with his arm round Cassie, who never minded. He was tired, he'd said, of us being out of his favourite tipple: he'd brought the bottle himself. 'Have some ice-cream with it?' Cassie had suggested, and he'd said seriously, 'What flavour?'
I gave Angelo his five minutes and switched off the light, and there was a baleful silence from the cellar.
Bananas gave Cassie a bristly kiss, said she looked tired, said every plate in the pub needed washing, said ' Barbados!' as a toast, and tossed back his drink. 'God rest all prisoners. Good night.'
Cassie and I watched his disappearing back. 'He's half sorry for Angelo,' she said.
'Mm. A fallacy always to think that because you feel sorry for the tiger in the zoo he won't eat you, given the chance. Angelo doesn't understand compassion. Not other people's for him. He feels none himself. In others he sees it as a weakness. So never, my darling, be kind to Angelo expecting kindness in return.'
She looked at me. 'You mean that as a warning, don't you?'
'You've a soft heart.'
She considered for a moment, then found a pencil and wrote a message to herself in large letters on the white plaster.
REMEMBER TIGERS.
'Will that do?'
I nodded. 'And if he says his appendix is bursting or he's suffering from bubonic plague feed him some aspirins through the ventilation holes, and do it in a roll of paper, and not with your fingers.'
'He hasn't thought of that yet.'
'Give him time.'
We went upstairs to bed but as on the previous night I slept only in brief disturbed snatches, attuned the whole time to any noise from the cellar. Cassie slept more peacefully than before, the cast becoming less of a problem as she grew used to it. Her arm no longer hurt, she said; she simply felt tired. She said play would be resumed when the climate got better.
I watched the dark sky lighten to streaks of navy-blue clouds across a sombre orange glow, a strange brooding dawn like the aura of the man downstairs. Never before, I thought, had I entered a comparable clash of wills; never tested so searchingly my willingness to command. I had never thought of myself as a leader, and yet, looking back, I'd never had much stomach to be led.
In recent months I had found it easier than I'd expected to deal with Luke's five trainers, the power seeming to develop as the need arose. The power to keep Angelo in the cellar, that too had arisen, not merely physically, but also in my mind. Perhaps one's capacity always expanded to meet the need: but what did one do when the need was gone? What did generals do with their full-grown hubris when the war was over? When the whole world no longer obeyed when they said jump?
I thought: unless one could adjust one's power-feelings perpetually to the current need, one could be headed for chronic dissatisfaction with the fall of fate. One could grow sour, power-hungry, despotic. I would shrink back, I thought, to the proper size, once Angelo was solved, once Luke's year was over. If one saw that one had to, perhaps one might.
The fierce sky slowly melted to mauve-grey clouds drifting over a sea of gold and lingeringly then to gentle white over palest blue, and I got up and dressed, thinking that the sky's message was false: problems didn't fade with the sun and Cain was still downstairs.
Cassie's eyes, when I left, were saying all that her tongue wasn't. Hurry. Come back. I don't feel safe here with Angelo.
'Sit by the telephone,' I said. 'Bananas will run.'
She swallowed. I kissed her and drove away, burning up the empty Sunday-early roads to Mill Hill. It was still only eight-thirty when I turned into Oaklands Road, the very earliest that Jane Pitts had said I could arrive, but she was already up and in a wet bathing dress to answer the doorbell.
'Come in,' she said. 'We're in the pool.'
'We' were two lithely beautiful teenage girls and a stringy man going bald who swam without splashing, like a seal. The roof was open to the fair sky and a waiting breakfast of cereals and fruit stood ready on one of the low bamboo tables, and none of the Pittses seemed to mind or notice that the new day was still cool.
The stringy man slithered out onto the pool's edge in a sleek economical movement and stood shaking the water from his head and looking approximately in my direction.