Still Waters (Charlie Resnick #9)(21)

“Of course it is.”

“Then why?”

“Because … Oh, because … He says it’s why I don’t want him any more. Sexually, I mean.”

“And that’s true? Not wanting him, that’s how you feel?”

“Yes, but that doesn’t mean …”

“I know. I know.”

Jane came to where Hannah was sitting and reached out her hand. “It’s just a bloody mess.”

“I’m sorry.”

“And I don’t know what to do.”

Hannah squeezed her friend’s hand and rested it against her cheek.

“I’m frightened. I really am.”

“You’ll be all right,” Hannah said, encouragingly, and then she realized Jane was starting to shake. “Come on,” she said, levering herself to her feet. “Come on over here and sit down.”

“The light,” Jane said.

“What about it? Is it too bright? I can turn it off.”

“No, I want you to come with me, over to the light.”

She pulled free her cotton top, pushed down the waistband of the skirt, and half-turned away: the bruise shone purple–black in the glow of the lamp, slick and fierce as a man’s fist.





Twelve

Grabianski was thinking of his father; the half-sister, Kristyna, he had never seen. The family had fled Poland in the first year of the war—and a slow, cold fleeing they’d had of it, walking, occasionally hitching a lift, hiding beneath the heavy tarpaulin of a river barge: Czechoslovakia, Austria, Switzerland. Kristyna had drowned in the waters of Lake Neuchatel; she had been eleven years old.

His father, a textile worker from Lodi, had flown as a navigator for both the French and British forces; parachuted out over the Channel, plummeting toward the black, unseeing water with images of Kristyna, her stiff, breastless body, trapped tight behind his eyes.

He had survived.

Jerzy Grabianski had been born in South London, his mother a nurse from St George’s, his father sewing by electric light in the basement room in Balham, where they lived. Weekends, when his mother was working, his father would walk him on Tooting Bec Common, sit with him in the Lido, dangling Grabianski’s flailing legs down into the shallow water, never letting go.

What would he think, Grabianski wondered, if he could be here now? His father, who had struggled with such tenacity, stubborn against almost overwhelming odds, each penny counted, every yard, each thread. And Grabianski, who, in contrast, had realized the profits on a stash of antique jewelry he had been saving and bought a spacious flat close to Hampstead Heath, where he was sitting pretty.

He remembered a film he had seen twenty years earlier in a down-at-heel flea-pit cinema in Uttoxeter or Nuneaton: a rancher talking to one of Jack Nicolson’s ramshackle bunch of Montana outlaws. How did it go now? Old Thomas Jefferson said he was a warrior so his son could be a farmer, so his son could be a poet.

Well, maybe that’s what this is, Grabianski thought. This careful, almost silent movement across other people’s lives, a kind of poetry.

When the waiter brought him his café au lait, he ordered eggs Florentine, poached instead of baked.

He was dabbing a piece of French bread at the last of the yolk, lifting spinach on top of that with his fork, when a shadow fell across the door. Resnick, blinking at the change of light, steadying himself before stepping in.

“Charlie.”

“Jerzy.”

Grabianski waved a hand expansively. “Have a seat.”

Resnick was wearing a gray suit with broad lapels, too warm for the changing weather. Taking off the jacket to drape it over the back of his chair, he was aware of perspiration rich beneath his arms, the cotton of his shirt sticking to his back.

“I doubt this is a coincidence,” Grabianski said. “Day trip to visit Keats’ house, the Freud Museum perhaps?”

Resnick shook his head.

“I was afraid not. A disappointment anyway. Especially Freud. Don’t like to think of him here at all. Vienna. Fast asleep on his couch after an overdose of sachertorte.”

The waiter fussed and fiddled with napkins and cutlery until Resnick asked for a large espresso and a glass of water.

“Sparkling or still, sir?”

“Tap.”

“But here.” Grabianski leaned forward, voice lowered, “This place.”

“‘If ever you’re in sunny Hampstead,’” Resnick quoted, “‘start your day at the Bar Rouge on the High Street. I do.’”

Grabianski sat back with a rueful smile.

“Postcards,” Resnick said. “Not exactly high security.”

“I didn’t think you’d have people trawling the mail.”

Resnick’s espresso arrived, not yet the water, and Grabianski ordered another coffee for himself.

“Not quite.”

Disappointment passed across the breadth of Grabianski’s face. “I didn’t know you and the good sisters were so hand-in-hand.”

“Working in the community the way they do, we’ve things in common. Shared interests, I suppose you could say.” The espresso was good, very good. Strong without a hint of being bitter. “Sister Teresa especially.”

Grabianski nodded. “A keen sense of duty. In excess.”