“He should be there by now,” Avery said.
“That’s right, John. He should be there, shouldn’t he? One hour to go. One more river to cross.” He began singing. No one took him up.
They looked at each other in silence.
“Know the Alias Club at all?” Johnson asked suddenly. “Off Villiers Street? A lot of the old gang meet up there. You ought to come along one evening, when we get home.”
“Thanks,” Avery replied. “I’d like to.”
“It gets nice at Christmastime,” he said. “That’s when I go. A good crowd. There’s even one or two come in uniform.”
“It sounds fine.”
“They have a mixed do at New Year’s. You could take your wife.”
“Grand.”
Johnson winked. “Or your fancy-girl.”
“Sarah’s the only girl for me,” Avery said.
The telephone was ringing. Leclerc rose to answer it.
Twenty
Homecoming
He put down the rucksack and the suitcase and looked around the walls. There was an electric outlet beside the window. The door had no lock so he pushed the armchair against it. He took off his shoes and lay on the bed. He thought of the girl’s fingers on his hands and the nervous movement of her lips; he remembered her deceitful eyes watching him from the shadows and he wondered how long it would be before she betrayed him.
He remembered Avery: the warmth and English decency of their early companionship; he remembered his young face glistening in the rain, and his shy, dazzled glance as he dried his spectacles, and he thought: He must have said thirty-two all the time. I misheard.
He looked at the ceiling. In an hour he would put up the aerial.
The room was large and bare with a round marble basin in one corner. A single pipe ran from it to the floor and he hoped to God it would do for the earth. He ran some water and to his relief it was cold, because Jack had said a hot pipe was dicey. He drew his knife and carefully scraped the pipe clean on one side. The earth was important; Jack had said so. If you can’t do anything else, he’d said, lay your earth wire zigzag fashion under the carpet, the same length as the aerial. But there was no carpet; the pipe would have to do. No carpet, no curtains.
Opposite him stood a heavy wardrobe with bow doors. The place must once have been the main hotel. There was a smell of Turkish tobacco and rank, unscented disinfectant. The walls were of gray plaster; the damp had spread over them in dark shadows, arrested here and there by some mysterious inner property of the house which had dried a path across the ceiling. In some places the plaster had crumbled with the damp, leaving a ragged island of white mildew; in others it had contracted and the plasterer had returned to fill the cavities with paste which described white rivers along the corners of the room. Leiser’s eye followed them carefully while he listened for the smallest sound outside.
There was a picture on the wall of workers in a field, leading a horse plow. On the horizon was a tractor. He heard Johnson’s benign voice running on about the aerial: “If it’s indoors it’s a headache, and indoors it’ll be. Now listen: zigzag fashion across the room, quarter the length of your wave and one foot below the ceiling. Space them wide as possible, Fred, and not parallel to metal girders, electric wires and that. And don’t double her back on herself, Fred, or you’ll muck her up properly, see?” Always the joke, the copulative innuendo to aid the memory of simple men.
Leiser thought: I’ll take it to the picture frame, then back and forth to the far corner. I can put a nail into that soft plaster; he looked around for a nail or pin, and noticed a bronze hanger on the beading which ran along the ceiling. He got up, unscrewed the handle of his razor. The thread began to the right, it was considered an ingenious detail, so that a suspicious man who gave the handle a casual twist to the left would be going against the thread. From the recess he extracted the knot of silk cloth which he smoothed carefully over his knee with his thick fingers. He found a pencil in his pocket and sharpened it, not moving from the edge of his bed because he did not want to disturb the silk cloth. Twice the point broke; the shavings collected on the floor at his feet. He began writing in the notebook, capital letters, like a prisoner writing to his wife, and every time he made a full stop he drew a ring around it the way he was taught long ago.