Levkas Man (2 page)

But there was nothing in the satinwood drawers, only sheaves of paper covered with notes in his minute, spidery writing, and when I slid back the writing-top to reveal the secret cavity below, there was nothing there but letters; the leather-covered book he had always kept there—his journal, a diary, or whatever it was—had gone. The letters were in two bundles, each tied with string, the larger from somebody in Cambridge who signed himself Adrian. But it was the other bundle that caught and held my attention, for the writing was the same as in the letter I had found announcing my birth. They were signed Ruth, which was my mother's name, and they were love letters, each beginning
My Darling
or
Darling Peter
.

I sat there for a long time, staring at that bundle of letters—not reading them through, not wishing to pry, but disturbed, almost appalled, by the thought that they had once loved each other. I had never understood why, following the death of my parents, I had been sent half across the world to live with a man whose whole life was devoted to dusty digs and anthropology. He had never told me and I had never dared to ask. Now at last I knew, and the knowledge shocked me in a way I did not quite understand—as though a door, previously barred to me, had suddenly swung partly open.

I could only just remember her—tall and serious, full of warmth and a dark-eyed vitality, at moments very emotional. My father had been the complete opposite, a broad, sunburned man with a moustache and a voice that carried through the bush like the roar of a lion. It was the country I remembered mostly, and those last moments when the Mau-Mau had come to the farm.

I put the letters back unread, slid the writing-top over the cavity and unlocked the cupboard under the flap. But all I found there was an album of snapshots, myself mostly at various ages between ten and nineteen, though the first few pages were taken up with faded pictures of an old stone farmhouse, of himself as a boy with his parents—Edwardian figures against a background of overhanging cliffs and a winding river. A cutting from a French newspaper had been pasted in and a letter signed ‘H. Breuil'. His boyhood, I remembered, had been spent in France. Also in the cupboard were some models of boats I had made and a chess set; he had tried to teach me ohess once. At the back were old copies of the
American Journal of Anthropology
, but nothing of value, and I got to my feet, looking round for something I could raise some money on.

The two Greek statues on the mantelpiece were no longer there and the clock was too heavy. The wind outside had dropped and in the stillness I could hear it ticking. It was an eight-day clock and he had always wound it first thing Sunday morning. The sound of it, so faint, yet so persistent, held me rooted to the spot for a moment. Somebody had been in this room, somebody who knew his routine.

The key was where he had always kept it, in the old clay tobacco jar to the right of the mantelpiece, and when I fitted it into one of the holes in the clock's white face, it only turned twice before the spring was fully wound. Whoever it was had been in the study within the last two days. I wiped my fingers across the clock's marble top, down the whole length of the mantelpiece, but no dust showed. The bureau was the same, the desk, too. I couldn't understand it. He had never had a housekeeper or even a woman in to clean. He had always looked after the place himself, and we had made our own beds, got our own meals—a bachelor existence.

In the tiny dining room opposite the study, everything was clean. But the bits of silver, the salvers and the rather ornate candlesticks, were gone, put away perhaps for safe keeping. I went upstairs. In the spare room I found blankets and an eiderdown neatly stacked at the foot of the bed, and in the drawer of the dressing table there were hairpins and a dusting of powder. The room had a faintly alien smell, quite different from the rest of the house.

I crossed the landing to my own room. The bed was completely stripped and nothing had been altered since my abrupt departure. I stood for a moment in the open door, a world of memories flooding back. My first chart, stolen from a vessel in the docks, had been studied at that table by the window. The window was closed now, but on summer nights … it looked out on to the backs of houses, each window, as the lights went up, revealing glimpses of other boxed-in worlds, and of that girl; my eyes switched involuntarily to the second-floor window of the old grey house opposite, where she had undressed so slowly through the hot nights of that last summer.

I closed the door quietly, shutting out the tawdry memories of adolescence, and was standing at the head of the stairs, considering what to do next, when I heard the click of the front door closing, and then the creak of the stairboards, the sound of somebody climbing, slowly, hesitantly.

I thought at first it was the old man and my body froze. But then a woman's voice called out, ‘Who is it? Who's there?'

I shrank back into the shadows and the house was suddenly still.

‘Is anybody there?' Her voice sounded scared. I thought I could hear her breathing. The footsteps started to climb again.

There was no point in staying where I was. The light was on in the study and she would see my suitcase. I went down the stairs and I could feel her waiting, breathless, on the landing. We met outside the study door and she said, ‘Who are you? What are you doing here?' Her voice was pitched high, barely controlled. I could almost smell her fear as she stood very still, peering up at me in the half-light that filtered through from the fanlight at the bottom of the stairs. Then she gave a little gasp. ‘You're Paul Van der Voort, aren't you?'

‘Yes.'

Her face was no more than a pale oval, her head, outlined in silhouette, was bare.

‘What are you doing here? How did you get in? I saw the light …' And then: ‘You had your keys, of course.' And she added, the whole timbre of her voice changed, ‘There's nothing for you here, no money—nothing that would interest you.' The nervousness was gone, cold anger in its place: ‘And if it's his Journal you're after, you won't find it. There's nothing for you here—nothing at all. They shouldn't have sent you.'

‘What the hell are you talking about?' I stepped past her and thrust open the study door. ‘Come in here where we can talk.' I wanted to see who she was, what she looked like.

‘No. I'll go now.' The nervousness was back in her voice. ‘I'd no idea it was you. I thought …' But by then I had her by the arm and had pushed her through into the light. She was younger than I had expected, a plain-looking girl with large eyes and wet, straw-coloured hair cut like a boy's. She wore a plastic mac that dripped water.

‘Now then,' I said, closing the study door. ‘Let's start with your name.'

She hesitated, then said ‘Sonia Winters.'

‘English?'

‘Half-English.'

‘How did you recognize me?'

‘The photograph in his bedroom. Another in your old room.'

‘You don't look like a housekeeper.'

She shook her head.

‘Then why have you got the keys to the house?'

She didn't say anything, but just stood there, staring at me with hostile eyes, her breath coming quickly as though she had been running.

I was certain she wasn't a relative. I don't think he had any relatives—either he had alienated them or else they were all dead. And then I remembered the pile of opened letters on the desk. ‘You were acting as his secretary, is that it?'

‘I did some typing for him. I live just across the canal. And then when he became ill I looked after him.'

‘When was that?'

‘About three months ago.'

‘And you lived here?'

‘For a week or two. It was pleurisy. He had to have someone to look after him.'

‘And where is he now?'

She hesitated. ‘Somewhere in Macedonia. I'm not sure where. He wouldn't think of writing to me. But my brother's with him and I had a card from Hans recently, posted at Skopje, which is in the south of Yugoslavia.' She stared at me. ‘Why are you here? What have you come back for after all these years?'

‘I need some money and a roof over my head.'

‘Well, there's no money here,' she snapped. The house is mortgaged, even the furniture, everything's sold that could be sold.'

‘You mean he's pawned the house to go looking for bones in Macedonia?'

That seemed to get her on the raw. ‘You don't understand him, do you?' she blazed. ‘You never did. He's one of the world's most brilliant palæontologists and it means nothing to you. No wonder he spoke of you with contempt. You owed him everything—education, your upbringing, a roof over your head, even the food you ate, everything. And what did you do? Got yourself expelled, mixed with the riff-raff of the docks, stole, lied, beat people up, landed in jail …'

‘You seem to know quite a lot about me.'

‘Yes, I do—and everything I've heard about you sickens me. You left him like a thief in the night, and now you come back—'

‘It wasn't all my fault,' I said quietly. ‘He's a very strange man and he expected too much.'

‘You took everything—gave nothing. Of all the heartless, selfish people … you didn't even answer his letters.'

‘I came to see him two years ago. But he was away. He always seemed to be away.'

She sighed. ‘You could still have answered his letters. He was lonely. Didn't you realize that? No, I suppose not. You wouldn't understand what it's like to be alone in the world. But you could have written. That was the least you could have done.' She gave a little shiver and drew her dripping mac tight to her body. ‘I'll go now. I can't stop you staying here, but I warn you, if I find anything missing, I'll call the police.'

She was halfway through the doorway when I stopped her. ‘Have you any Dutch money on you?'

She turned, her eyes wide. And then after a moment she felt in the pocket of her slacks and produced a 20-guilder note from a purse. She seemed surprised when I offered her two pound notes in exchange. ‘No,' she said quickly. ‘No, it's all right. I expect you need it.' She looked at me speculatively for a moment, and then she was gone. I listened to her footsteps on the stairs, the sound of the front door closing, and from the window I watched as she crossed the bridge by the house barges and walked quickly down the other side of the canal, head bent against the rain and the lash of the wind. The house she entered was almost directly opposite.

It was unfortunate. She'd probably talk and I wondered what her father did. It would take time for them to trace me to Amsterdam, but it was dangerous and I'd need to move that bit faster. I switched out the light, put my raincoat on and went quickly down the stairs, cursing myself again for having involved myself in somebody else's troubles. I could still see the look on the man's face, the heavy jowls, the small eyes wide with sudden fear—bastards like that shouldn't be allowed to do their dirty political work in a free country.

I could have shipped out in a tanker that night. Stolk tipped me off in the Prins Hendrik by the Oosterdok. But it was bound for Libya, a quick turn-round and back to Amsterdam again. And anyway I was tired of ship routine. I had a feeling that this was a sort of crossroads in my life, that what I had done must lead me on to some new road. The sea was all I knew, but the sea is wide—Australia or South America, I thought. I wanted a new world, a new life. I was twenty-seven.

Dusk was falling, the night sky darkening over the Amstel river, when I finally found my way to Wilhelm Borg's shop on Amsteldijk. I hadn't seen him since the days when I'd been mixed up with his gang of dockside toughs. Quite a few Dutchmen had crossed my path in the five years that I had been at sea and Borg was reputed to handle anything from fake antiques to a lorry-load of Scotch. He had put on weight since I had seen him last. He looked prosperous now and the old oak furniture and brasswork in his shop were certainly not fakes.

He took me through into an office at the back, gave me a drink and listened while I talked. His round face was as innocent-looking as ever, but his eyes were colder. ‘You want a change, eh—something different. Why come to me?' He spoke Dutch with a Groningen accent. His family, I remembered, had been barge people from Delfzijl.

‘Why does any man come to you?' I left it at that, not telling him I was on the run, but I think he guessed it.

I was talking to him for about half an hour before he said, ‘There are some things I want out of Turkey, collectors' pieces. You could be just the man.'

‘Smuggling?' I asked.

He smiled. ‘For you it would be just a pleasant little holiday. The sort of break I think perhaps you are needing. You charter a boat—out of Malta, I think—for a cruise in the Aegean. You go to Crete and Rhodes, behaving all the time like a tourist—eating in the tavernas, visiting the ruins of Knossos, the fortress of the Knights of St John. And then you go north to Kos, possibly to Samos. Both these islands are very close to Turkey. It's not organized yet, but you will almost certainly be making delivery to my clients somewhere off the Tunisian coast.' He lumbered to his feet. ‘Think about it, eh?'

It was something, the escape door opening. Dangerous probably, but I didn't care. The Eastern Mediterranean, full of islands—you could lose yourself there, change jobs, change a name. ‘How much?' I asked.

He laughed and patted my shoulder. ‘You make up your mind, then we talk business.'

I got him to change one of the two fivers I had with me, and that was that. It wouldn't get me to Australia or South America, but it was something to fall back on if things went wrong. I went to the
Bali
and stuffed myself full of Indonesian food.

It was about ten before I got back to the house, and when I switched the light on in the study, I found the curtains drawn and a note placed carefully on top of my suitcase. It said:
Dr Gilmore is in Amsterdam. He is another ‘bone' man and he would like to see you. I will bring him to the house at 11 a.m. tomorrow. Please be in
. The writing was round and feminine. She hadn't bothered to sign it.