Stephanie Page 5

  ‘Mark you, you are still quite uncommitted so far,’ said Shyam. ‘You are free to say no to my friends. They will bear you no ill will. You can walk away right now – although at five this afternoon you will be expected to produce the necessary for Mr Mohamed, and you know the consequences if you do not.’

  ‘I wish to go further,’ Nari said, speaking with a thick tongue.

  ‘Then come with me. It is only two streets away. Have you ever met Dr Kabir Arora?’

  Nari shook his head.

  ‘I think you could still withdraw,’ said Shyam, ‘ but then they wouldn’t like it because they would think you might talk. And if they thought you had talked then you would be in the deepest trouble it is possible for any man to be in. Two broken legs would be nothing, my dear old chap.’

  Nari stopped again.

  ‘What must I carry? Tell me. You are my friend – or have pretended to be.’

  ‘Just little packets. But let Dr Arora explain.’

  III

  ‘Swallow them!’ screamed Nari. ‘What are you asking me to do? It is not possible!’

  ‘It is not even difficult,’ said Dr Arora. He was a short man with a white, opaque left eye and a chain of holy beads round his neck. ‘You will see. Many have done it. Few have failed. It is only a matter of practice.’

  ‘Practice!’

  ‘Yes. With grapes. We have two weeks before you need to go. We will start tomorrow.’

  Nari glared wildly round the bare little room, seeking some escape. There were a few empty medicine bottles on the table, an open attaché case containing pillboxes, a consultancy couch with broken springs, a framed diploma. There was a heavy smell of jasmine in the air, and a holy garland hung round the neck of a small statue of a monkey god in a corner. How could this man, a Punjabi by his accent, be doing such work, have any religious beliefs at all – even of the most depraved kind?

  ‘I could not do it! And retain them in my stomach for more than twenty-four hours! Never!’

  ‘They will remain in your bowels, not your stomach,’ Dr Arora said. ‘And about that you have no cause to worry. You will first take half a dozen pills. They are the pills used by astronauts to slow down the bowel motion. You will pass no motion for four days. It is quite simple, I assure you. It is quite foolproof. There is no need to worry.’

  ‘And if I say no! If I refuse! If I want no part of this!’

  Arora exchanged glances with Shyam, then he shrugged. ‘ Your friend will have told you you have now gone too far to say no. Now you know too much, Naresh Prasad. You have become one of us.’

  The windows were shut, the scent of the jasmine oversweet, like an anaesthetic.

  Dr Arora shifted his stomach to a more comfortable position. His wall eye stared straight ahead. ‘This time tomorrow at one? We will be starting with a few grapes.’

  Shyam put a heavy, now friendly arm round Nari’s shoulders. ‘Think what you gain, bhai. Your debts discharged! Four weeks in England to visit your cousins! And a thousand pounds sterling in cash to spend or to bring home – am I right, Kabir? I am right – a thousand pounds sterling in cash to spend in England or to bring home! Many men would give their ears for such a chance!’

  ‘And if I am caught? Ten years in a British jail!’

  ‘You won’t be caught! This is too clever a device.’

  ‘What am I swallowing? If one of the packets breaks open the contents will kill me!’

  ‘They don’t break open,’ said Dr Arora. ‘It has never been known to happen.’

  Nari felt faint, he felt he wanted to die. The heat in here was intense, claustrophobic.

  ‘I do not know if I can do it. I do not think I can swallow –’

  ‘Tomorrow at one,’ said Dr Arora. ‘ We will be starting with a few grapes.’

  Chapter Three

  I

  It was a sunny day towards the end of April when James Locke had the telephone call from his daughter. He never had an overcoat but wore a motoring cap and a muffler to protect himself from the chill wind. He was in a distant part of his garden looking at two specimens of the rhododendron Loderi Venus which he had grown from cuttings and which were almost ready to plant out in their permanent places. It was a good piece of land here, with a few tall beeches and pines and a nice woodsy acid soil of around pH 4–5. Not moist enough, but judicious spraying did the trick. About him were a number of his earlier plantings, macabeanum, which had flowered for the first time last year, falconeri, not too happy in spite of all its cosseting, a fine magnolia, Leonard Messel, in full bloom, another, campbellii alba, a big tree now but one for which he knew he would have to wait some years yet for the first bud.

  He had a cordless telephone attached to his wheelchair and as soon as it buzzed he wiped his soiled hands and picked it up.

  ‘Daddy?’

  ‘Hello, poppet. Safely back, then?’

  ‘You know I am. Rang from Heathrow. Remember?’

  ‘Perfectly. I consider the last thirty miles of your journey the most hazardous.’

  ‘Ho-ho. Look, I could come home this weekend.’

  ‘What’s stopping you?’

  ‘Only you, if you have anything on.’

  ‘Not a stitch. You know I’m a lonely old man.’

  ‘Oh, come off it. So you don’t mind if I hazard my life on the Oxfordshire roads?’

  ‘Not in such a good cause.’

  ‘Brilliant. See you Sat’day. Lunch on Sat’day?’

  ‘I’ll tell Mrs Aldershot.’

  ‘How is she, by the way?’

  ‘Very well. I see her approaching.’

  ‘Daddy, why don’t you marry her?’

  James Locke was thinking of the appropriate reply when his daughter rang off. He hung up the telephone and pressed the electric button to activate his chair. He met Mrs Aldershot where the path came out of the woodland and the herbacious borders began.

  Locke was now nearly sixty-five, markedly handsome though becoming stout, with greying hair streaked with white, a slim aristocratic nose and lips, a man who looked more a cleric than a gardener, certainly far more the bookish epicure than the war hero he had once been. A limp, which thereafter had been his, grew worse and in the last four years he had been in a wheelchair, though perfectly capable of getting out of it, to take a bath, to go to bed, to tend his garden, to write his gardening articles, to sit at table. He was seldom ever quite out of pain, but the discomfort was minimised if he took pills and did not try to stand or walk too much.

  Mary Aldershot was forty-five, his housekeeper, long divorced, still attractive, capable in all domestic things, strongly opinioned on a few. She had been with Locke almost since his wife left him. He called her Mary but she still called him Mr James. Stephanie would not have had the cheek to put such a suggestion to her father face to face, but over the telephone it was easier.

  In fact James had asked Mrs Aldershot to marry him four years ago and she had refused.

  ‘Was that Miss Stephanie?’ she asked. ‘I took up the phone until I heard you answer.’

  ‘She’s coming for lunch on Saturday and staying the night. She may, I suppose, stay Sunday night too, but the chances are she’ll drive back on Sunday evening, leaving here at some ungodly hour when all decent girls should be safely asleep.’

  ‘Duck,’ said Mrs Aldershot. ‘She loves that, and Maker’s had some lovely ones in last week.’

  ‘Be sure there’s plenty on them.’

  She patted his shoulder. ‘As if I would not. And smoked salmon. Cheese. Cheese and fruit – would that do to end? What about Sunday?’

  ‘We’ll think it over. How long’s lunch today?’

  ‘Twenty minutes.’

  ‘Caviar, I suppose.’

  ‘Wait and see.’

  ‘Be off then. If you ring your bell I’ll be in one of the greenhouses.’

  II

  Janet Locke, a clever febrile artistic wayward young woman, had left her husband when Teresa was nine and Stephanie six.
She had met Frederick Agassia, a rich young Brazilian, at a function in London and presently the attraction was too much for her and she very regretfully abandoned James and their two daughters and went away with Agassia to Rio. Five years later she was killed in a car crash, so James became a widower de facto as well as de jure. In those days he had been much more mobile; but the desertion had cut a deep ravine in his mind which he was careful not to show.

  Of his daughters Teresa was the cheerful conformist, Stephanie the cheerful rebel. These days, of course, everyone had affairs at the drop of a hat, marriage being the non-U word, but Stephanie’s overt liaison with this Errol Colton was a little too reminiscent for comfort of her mother’s sudden upsurge of passion for Frederick Agassia.

  True, that had seemed to last. He had reluctantly gone through with the divorce, and, so far as he knew to the contrary, Janet and Frederick had been living in unalloyed bliss when the bus driver coming towards her dozed off to sleep. So it could be that Stephanie, side-stepping her mother’s early marriage, had found the love of her life at almost the first shot. James very much wanted to meet Errol. He knew, of course, that even if he disliked him on sight he would be unlikely to influence Stephanie – she being a girl who knew her own mind. Nor, God help him, would he ever attempt to.

  But Errol Colton had been married twice already and presumably was still living with his second wife and daughter; he was well-to-do in some not precisely defined way connected with tourist development, and he was a lot older than Stephanie. How much more easy and unperturbing Teresa was, meeting and quickly marrying a talented young accountant, settling in suburbia and thoroughly enjoying it, expecting her first child in July. She and her husband seemed quite uninfluenced by the modern fashion which would have condemned their way of life as stuffy and old-fashioned.

  Stephanie arrived in her yellow Mini at 12.30, and, since it was another fine day, James whirred himself down to the gates to meet her. Since going to Oxford she had seen very little of her father, even though he lived a bare fifty miles away. All the same, their being together was always pleasant, and whenever she left she told herself it wouldn’t be so long next time. But it was.

  At the house he ran his chair up the ramp to avoid the three steps and kissed her and hobbled with her into the drawing room. Presently Mary Aldershot came in and they shook hands and all had a drink together. Then the older woman went off to prepare lunch, refusing Stephanie’s cheerful offer of help.

  It was a large enough house for Mrs Aldershot to have her own set of rooms. Dinner she had every night with James; at breakfast and lunch they kept to their separate apartments. Over lunch Stephanie chatted brightly about her fabulous trip to India, her lovely trip to India, and was only waiting for an opportunity to go again. James had been once, briefly, to Calcutta and had found the poverty appalling. Travelling as Stephanie had travelled, she had seen little of it, and she thought conditions had much improved since her father was there.

  James had sensitive antennae where his daughters were concerned, and he thought there was a shade of darkness in Stephanie he had not perceived before. In spite of her tan she did not look particularly well. Of course, for two years now she had lived a life that at one time would have been called rackety. She moved in a fast set, kept unearthly hours, took quite a lot of drink. Young, optimistic, with perfect health, she had taken life in her stride. Well, the clear bell of her nature was still ringing, but somewhere there was a hairline crack. Errol was referred to casually and without the least discomposure, but James’s perception was that he was not mentioned often enough. Since there had always been great frankness between father and daughter, it seemed unlikely that she was restricting her references to spare him embarrassment.

  As always when home, she was full of interest in the garden and they spent a couple of hours after lunch looking at the things he was growing, and discussing them. Even though it was still only April, the mild winter had brought things forward and there was a show of early bloom.

  Looking at her, blonde ponytailed, slim and elegant and leggily feminine, James was visited by a sudden rush of affection for his younger daughter. He had been in love with his wife, and Stephanie was in many ways like her, impulsive, overtalkative, nervously acute, with a glowing aliveness and a total inability to dissemble. He was not often a man to show his feelings, but sometimes they bubbled up and made him emotional. He turned away from Stephanie to hide his expression and glowered at a Tai-haku cherry which was holding back from bloom as if undeceived by the false sunshine.

  ‘Do you know about drugs?’ Stephanie asked, plucking at a weed.

  ‘Drugs? What sort? The forbidden sort? No. Why?’

  ‘There’s a fair amount in Oxford, of course. Not just among undergraduates but in the town. I’ve tried smoking a joint a few times and eating some other stuff but it doesn’t seem to work for me. At least, it works after a fashion but I get a filthy head the next day.’

  ‘Ah,’ said James. ‘ Good thing, I suppose.’

  ‘Yes. Maybe.’

  They talked about plants for a bit, then James brought the subject back.

  ‘I’ve lived an average life and seen a fair share of the seamy side. But, honestly, where drugs are concerned I’m a newborn babe. I don’t know the first thing about them.’

  She smiled slowly. ‘You’re the wrong generation.’

  ‘Pretty well, yes. They were certainly never a major problem. Though I did know one youngish woman …’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Husband killed in the war, so she went to live with her brother, who was a doctor. Somehow she got her hands on the morphine. Started injections, two a day – went up to four, then to six, before he found out.’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘She went for a cure. Came out after two months. Completely cured – for a bit. Then went on the streets to get the money to buy the stuff. I’m not sure what happened to her in the end.’

  ‘There was a case in Headington last month,’ Stephanie said after a minute. ‘Nothing to do with the university. A chemist’s assistant. He was hooked – on heroin, I think – and took an overdose and died. It didn’t make the headlines.’

  They moved between two shrub borders. ‘ Damned birds,’ said James. ‘ They’ve taken nearly all the forsythia.’

  ‘I thought you liked birds.’

  ‘In their proper place. But they’re mischievous little buggers … Why this sudden interest in drugs?’

  ‘It isn’t a sudden interest. I just feel maybe if I take no notice of it I’m living with my head in the sand. Time I woke up, observed the world as it is today, took an attitude.’

  ‘Attitude?’

  ‘Well, not like the Statue of Liberty! But this is the new scene for our generation, isn’t it, and I thought maybe I should make up my mind about it.’

  ‘Whether to take them or not?’

  ‘No, no. I’m not even interested. Whether I’m actually against them – in other people, I mean.’

  ‘Pro or con?’

  ‘Pro or con. I’ve always taken the view that what other people do is not my business. If somebody finds that smoking a reefer gives them a lift and enables them to enjoy life more fully, well, then, that’s their affair. Isn’t it? We go our own way, live our own lives. None of this “for whom the bell tolls” rubbish. Correct?’

  ‘Correct enough.’

  ‘It’s too bad if the marijuana smoker finds it not doing its stuff any longer and drifts into the hard drugs, really gets hooked and finally kills himself. Along the way there’s a lot of suffering and crime, but there’s a lot of suffering and crime in the world anyhow. What business is it of mine?’

  ‘Indeed. None at all, I might say.’

  ‘You might say … Of course I like my drink. So do you. But I don’t see any signs of addiction in you, and I hope I shall not see any in me. But some girl at St Martin’s might get addicted to good old mother’s ruin, and her downfall, if less dramatic, could still take place. Couldn�
�t it? There she is, a soak, sitting on the pavement outside a pub with a bottle in her hand, too gassed to find her way home. That isn’t the new scene; that’s the old scene. A great one in Victorian times! But is it any more my fault or my responsibility or your fault or your responsibility than the man with the syringe or the pills?’

  They had moved as far as that part of the garden given over to the purely acid-loving plants.

  ‘These are new yakushimanum hybrids,’ James explained. ‘It’s been one of the finest rhododendron finds of the last forty years, and it’s going to give rise to scores of new plants, all small and sturdy, and of almost all colours. Unfortunately, most of the hybrids don’t have the marvellous leathery-tomentose leaves of the parent. I have high hopes of a couple of them.’

  ‘What a name! Where does it come from?’

  ‘Japan. It’s an island there, Yakushima. Stephanie.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’m not sure yet why you feel you have to take a pro or con attitude to the particular problem at this particular time. As a direct decision not as a generality? Is that what you mean? Something has come up and you need to make a choice.’

  He studied the curve of her cheek, which was all he could see just now. She said: ‘I suppose you could say that.’

  ‘Some special friend of yours is in danger of getting hooked, and you want to know how far you’d be justified in trying to stop him?’

  ‘Not altogether that.’ Stephanie fingered the furry brown underside of a rhododendron leaf. ‘Rather more than that. I’m thinking of the distribution side.’

  James activated his chair to move around her so that while apparently looking at a plant he could get a better view of her face.

  ‘Distribution. Ah yes, well, that’s rather another kettle of fish.’

  ‘Why is it?’ she said. ‘Tell me why it is.’ Her tone was sharp, aggressive.

  Surprised, he said: ‘I would have thought that evident, wouldn’t you?’