Ivoria, Tanith Lee [popular ebook readers .TXT] 📗

nor is he available on any of the five other occasions Nick tries to reach him.

Nick has had an extra security lock fitted to his front door, meantime. The locksmith asked no questions. His whole attitude implied such over-security was equally inevitable and pointless, but who was he to argue.

Only the landline phone rings, and only twice. Once it is someone from the telephone company trying to enlist Nick in a special deal, and once a kindred call from the electricity people.

No messages are left, even when Nick vacates the flat. (He is never away very long now, shopping or eating outside meals hurriedly. He is not due to see any women until the next week.)

His ansa-machine, when played back, reveals solely the old messages it originally hoarded, (not Angela’s, they were wiped), including Jazz’s prelude to the presumed failed attempt to bid him farewell ‘nicely’ and the peculiar male voice which, whenever replayed, seems to sound both increasingly meaningless yet also more threatening: “I have something for you. I have something that it is impert-iv you receive.” Nick reasons he has left these words on the machine in order to play them over to Pond, though Pond had already heard Jazz’s message. Very likely neither message has anything to do with the break-in, or with the elusive Kit Price.

But Pond is evidently not going to contact Nick, and nothing else has happened.

Nick deletes the messages the following Tuesday morning, and that day too he is sent a rather prissy, handwritten, black-bordered card, that tells him the date and venue of Laurence’s funeral. There is no mention of an inquest, or the results of one. No other communication accompanies the card. Nobody otherwise has been in touch.

The funeral is scheduled for ten days ahead and, for some reason Nick finds a mystery, Laurence is to be buried in West Sussex. Nick can only conclude Angela has a Sussex connection. It goes without saying Nick will be expected to attend the funeral. It seems to him nevertheless that he will not. He has spent a lot of his life so far ducking or pushing away the more costive ties of convention, whenever possible. Claudia also had been like that. One did not have to do something simply because it was expected, even insisted upon. One might have to make a gracious excuse, that was all.

Besides, a wild mental picture he has of Angela raving at the graveside - even attacking Nick in person? - does not entice.

Then again, Nick is surprised Serena has not yet called him to dragoon him into some semblance of grief, or at least civil family obedience.

He is surprised as well that the police have not contacted him - since Pond, it seems, was not the police.

The news reports, of Laurence’s death certainly, though Nick had only caught a further couple of these - there may have been more - had merely emphasised the ‘tragic prematurity’ of Laurence’s end. While only one newspaper Nick had spotted had unsubtly mentioned that Richmond Park, just like other such areas, being a ‘nest’ of homosexual opportunity, not to mention drug-taking, any man walking among its trees after dark could well have been mistaken - or ‘mistaken’ - for someone on the look-out for action.

Nick is not curious. He does not care what his brother was doing in the park, or what was done to him. Nick is merely uneasy that the Roman pin, presently under the carpet, may have a bearing on Laurence’s death.

Nick is by now only mildly conscious of the lie he told Laurence, which concerned the square of true or false ivory; that it carried a malediction, a curse.

Nick is entering a strange phase, which he has experienced before. The disturbing and interruptive chaos which now seems gushing all about the tiny island of his individual life, being apparently uncontrollable, mostly inexplicable, immanent and unavoidable yet not, now, immediately intrusive, is ceasing to be real for him. He is glad this is so. He shuts it from him, not knowing what else is to be done. Only in the background does it dimly loom, like a black shadow faded to greyness by the lamp of life, forever there, yet at his shoulder just behind him, almost out of sight.

And the eight-sided moon-window colludes. It floats above all this, unimpaired, uninvolved, a huge eye that witnesses only the sky, indifferent to whatever takes place below, either out on the street, or in the room.

10

Claudia during the filming of her last picture was, part of the time, pregnant.

She had told Nick, however, he had been the perfect gentleman, not making her sick, (as Laurence had, and, she said, Serena - only much worse). Also he had somehow remained virtually undetectable by the camera until the movie was completed late in her fourth month.

She never said, or never concisely, why she had given up the screen after this. She was not yet thirty-six, and looked younger on celluloid. “Oh, it was this and that,” she had been wont to say. “Not you, darling, you were no trouble. And I could have gone back when you were eighteen months. Samson offered me a part. Only it wasn’t anything I cared for really. So I didn’t. And then I just went on didn’ting.” The other children would not have impeded her either, surely. Laurence had been twelve or thirteen by then and away at his serious school; Serena, eight, was in the care of a nanny.

Claudia did of course play other roles, now and then, in the London theatre.

Nick could and always would remember seeing her in Anouilh’s Ring Round the Moon, when he was twelve and Claudia forty-seven. She had played Isabelle’s mother, a part Nick had not even been aware was supposedly less than glamorous. For Claudia had brought to it a definite if acerbic glamour. She had remarked, after the run finished, that she had been far happier “a hundred years earlier” when herself playing Isabelle.