His nameless, imaginary wife, a woman who had come with no price attached (although it was above that of rubies), lived with him in a cottage that was in a perfect village from which you could get up to London in an hour if you so wished. The cottage they lived in was chintzy and had beams and a lovely garden and was very like Mrs. Miniver’s. Martin had recently watched the sequel to Mrs. Miniver-The Miniver Story-on early morning TCM and was still nursing an outrage that they had killed off poor Greer Garson for no reason whatsoever, as if there were no further use for her in the postwar world. Which there wasn’t, of course, but that wasn’t the point. And she hadn’t even fought back against her un-named (but obviously cancer) illness, her only concern was to make her death no bother to anyone else. No sickness, vomiting, blood, and pus, no brain matter spattered round her living room, no raging against the dying of the light, she just kissed her hus-band good-bye, went up the stairs, and closed her bedroom door. Death wasn’t like that. Death happened when you least expected it. It was an argument in the street, it was a crazy Russian girl opening her mouth to scream. The littlest thing.
His noble postwar wife knew, Miniver-like, how to mend and make-do, she knew how to soothe troubled brows and how to lift drooping spirits, she had known tragedy but she was stoic in the face of it. She smelled of lilies of the valley.
It was usually early spring, the sky pale and austere, the wind sharp, new daffodil shoots spearing their way out of their earth silos in the garden outside. It was also nearly always Sunday morning for some reason (probably to do with spending weekends in a boarding school). A leg of lamb (no animal was harmed in the making of this fantasy) was sizzling in the old cream Aga in the kitchen. Martin had already chopped mint, grown in their own garden. They sat in the living room, in armchairs covered in William Morris’s “StrawberryThief ”fabric, and each drank a small sherry while listening to a recording of the Goldberg Variations.This woman with no name harmoniously shared his taste in all music, poetry, drama. After they had eaten their lamb (with gravy and peas and roast potatoes), they had a homemade custard tart-a trembling pale yellow with a freckling of nutmeg. Then they did the washing up together at the old-fashioned porcelain sink. She washed, he dried, Peter/David put away (“The serving spoons go in this drawer, darling”). And then they shook the crumbs from the tablecloth and went for a walk, naming the birds and the early spring flowers, climbing over stiles, splashing through puddles. Laughing. They should have a dog, a friendly terrier full of vim. A boy’s best friend. When they came home, flushed and fit, they would drink tea and eat something homemade and delicious from the cake-tin.
In the evening they made sandwiches from the leftover lamb and did a jigsaw together or listened to the radio, and after Peter/David was in bed they each read their books, or they played a duet together, her on the piano, him on the oboe. To his ever-lasting sorrow he had never learned a musical instrument, but in his imagination he was proficient, occasionally inspired. She did a lot of knitting-Peter/David’s Fair Isle sweaters and rather effeminate cardigans for Martin. In winter they sat by a roaring coal fire, sometimes Martin would toast pikelets or teacakes on a brass toasting fork. He liked to read poetry to her occasionally, nothing too modern.
Then, of course, it was their own bed time. Martin wound the clock, checked the locks, waited while the woman had done whatever she did in the cold, slightly damp bathroom. One day, inevitably, this cottage would be modernized, bathroom suites and kitchen units, electric cookers and central heating installed, but now there was a certain sense of privation about it necessary to its time and place in British social history. Then he too would climb the stairs (narrow pine, a runner and brass rods) and enter their bedroom beneath the sloping eaves of the roof, where she would be waiting for him in a flower-sprigged nightdress, sitting up in their mahogany bed from a previous century, reading her book in a homely pool of light from the parchment-shaded lamp above the bed. “Marty, come to bed.”
No, that was wrong, she never called him Marty. That was wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Martin, she called him Martin, the ordinary name of an ordinary man whom no one ever remembered.
The mother of the boy in the Toyota came hurrying out of the garage shop, clutching crisps and cola and chocolate bars. She glared at Martin (for no reason at all as far as he could see) and passed the results of her foraging to the boy in the backseat before driving off in a haze of exhaust. The boy turned to face Martin and held one finger against the glass of the window in an unmis-takable gesture.
It was only when he went inside the shop to pay that he remembered he didn’t have his wallet.
When Martin pulled up on the street outside his house, he discovered his driveway had been cordoned off with crime-scene tape and was being guarded by a uniformed constable. Martin wondered if there had been a fire or a burglary at his house, won-dered if he had inadvertently committed a crime-perhaps during those hours of oblivion at the Four Clans. Or had they finally come for him? Had he been traced through Interpol and now they were coming to arrest him and extradite him to Russia to make him face the music?
“Officer,” he said, “has something happened here?” (Was that what people said-“officer”-or was that what people said on American TV? Martin still felt horribly befuddled.)
“There’s been an incident, sir,” the policeman said. “I’m afraid you can’t go up to the house.”
Martin suddenly remembered it was Wednesday. “It’s Wednes-day.” He hadn’t intended to say that out loud, he must have sounded like an idiot.
“Yes, sir,” the policeman said, “it is.”
“The cleaners come on a Wednesday,” Martin said. “Favors-it’s an agency-has one of them had an accident?” Martin had only briefly met one or two of the pink-clad women who cleaned his house, he didn’t like the idea of being there while they scrubbed and polished around him, servants doing his dirty business for him, and he always tried to escape from the house before they saw him.
Had one of the “maids” electrocuted herself because he had faulty wiring, slipped on an overpolished floor, tripped on a badly fitted stair-carpet and broken her neck? “Is one of the cleaners dead?”
The constable muttered something into the radio on his shoul-der and said to Martin, “Can I have your name, sir?”
“Martin, Martin Canning,” Martin said. “I live here,” he added and thought perhaps he should have mentioned that earlier in the conversation.
“Do you have any identification on you, sir?”
“No,” Martin said, “my wallet was stolen last night.” It didn’t even sound convincing to his own ears.
“Have you reported the theft, sir?”
“Not yet.”On Leith Walk he had turned his pockets out and found four pounds and seventy-one pence. He offered to write an IOU for the rest, a proposition that was greeted with hilarity. Martin, who believed everyone should be treated as if he were honest until he proved himself otherwise (a policy that frequently left him fleeced), felt surprisingly pained that no one would afford him the same grace. In the end the only thing he could think of was to phone his agent, Melanie, and ask her to pay with her credit card.
The policeman on guard outside his house gave him a long, level look and muttered something else into his radio.
An old woman walked by slowly with an equally old-looking Labrador. Martin recognized the dog rather than the woman as a neighbor. Dog and woman lingered by the gateway. Martin realized there were several people on the other side of the road- neighbors, he supposed, passersby, a couple of workmen on their lunch break-who were all loitering in the same way, he was reminded for a moment of the spectators yesterday at Paul Bradley’s bloody street theater.