The Nameless Read online

  are not the first to ask me such a question. You understand what I am saying? You are not alone. If it is a consolation, there are others driven by the same forces as you."

  Santini saw Bannon's hand strike the table. It looked like a claw, ready to scratch. Maybe he would attack the psychiatrist, that might be a kind of justice. For the first time Bannon's voice was ragged. "But can you tell me what the forces are?"

  "Yes, I believe I can," Ganz said, just as Santini heard the unlocking of the door at the end of the corridor. He turned to see his fellow line-man, two uniformed policemen, and the warden. "He's in there," the line-man said. "Where Santini's standing."

  Santini strained to hear what Ganz was saying, but he could hear nothing over the approach of the four men. "The nerve of that guy," the other line-man said to him. "He's no more a psychiatrist than I am. He's been giving them that line from here to Alcatraz. He'd never have got by here except for all the trouble with the governor." He lowered his voice as they converged on the interrogation room, and hissed to Santini: "You could make out you waited because you suspected something. Might look good for you."

  Things were happening too fast for Santini to think of scheming. He could only watch bewildered as they unlocked the interrogation room, then step forward belatedly in case there was trouble. It was obvious at once that there wouldn't be any from Bannon, who looked stunned by whatever Ganz had told him. He looked as if he would rather not have heard.

  The tall man rose to his full height as the policemen closed in on him. "Kaspar Ganz," one said, "also known as Jasper Gance--was

  The policeman was met by a look of contempt so intense that he faltered. "Arrest me if you think you have ------------------------------------com11

  to," Ganz said indifferently. "It won't change anything. You can't stop what's happening, you don't even know what it is. You wouldn't be capable of understanding." His eyes glittered so brightly that Santini's stomach churned. "You won't know what it is," Ganz said, "until it's too late." ------------------------------------com12 ------------------------------------com13

  13

  One: 1979

  At ten to five he began to gnaw the rim of his glass, and she was afraid it would break. "It's too late," he said. "They've had second thoughts."

  "Not at all. It's early yet, believe me. They like to take their time."

  "I wouldn't blame them if they did have second thoughts." He sat down again, but not for long. He'd been wandering between the chairs and the couch all afternoon, as if he were trapped in a lonely game of musical chairs. "I tried to read the books myself last night, and I couldn't get into them. They just seemed self-conscious and tedious."

  "Paul, they're the best thing you've ever done. If they weren't best-seller material we wouldn't be sitting here waiting for bids."

  "I don't know, Barbara. I'm not so sure. You liked my other books, and look what happened to them. I saw the ------------------------------------com14

  last one selling for pennies just the other day in the remainders, and still nobody wanted to know."

  "Never mind your other books. Mario Puzo wrote two commercial failures before The Godfather."

  "Maybe, but that's Mario Puzo. Who the hell am I?"

  "You're Paul Gregory, and A Torrent of Lives is going to be a best-seller." We know it is, she told the photograph of Arthur in front of her on her desk. Nevertheless Paul's restlessness was making her edgy, less able to ignore the stagnant July heat, the grumbling of traffic which dodged in from Piccadilly and Bond Street only to wrangle beneath her window, the singing of the Jewish demonstrators in the office of Soviet Airlines. Whenever he went to the open window his shape loomed on the high white ceiling.

  Now he was lifting a book from her shelves, only to find that the pages were blank. He stared at that as if it were a novel he was forced to write. "I couldn't get past the civil war scenes in Torrent," he said. "They just go on and on. They never come alive."

  "Just listen, Paul. Sit down for a moment and listen to me. I sent only the first volume to Pan and Fontana and Penguin, and each of them rang up the following day for a look at the other two volumes. That's how enthusiastic they are."

  "Well, I didn't think the first one was too bad overall. It's the others that lumber along like dinosaurs that won't die. I mean, I quite like some of the writing, but I just can't write the kind of thing that people want to read. Suppose I wasted two years of my life?" He was picking through the magazines beneath the glass-topped table, Publishers Weekly and Bookseller, in search of distraction. "My life and Sybil's and the children's," he said dismally.

  She was growing exasperated, though she'd had some of these doubts herself until he had shown her the books at ------------------------------------com15

  last. He'd gambled everything on them, he'd given up his job in advertising, only to find that they took considerably more than a year to write. By then he and his family were besieged by bills and bank loans. When he had typed out the books and brought them to her office he'd looked almost ashamed of them, but they were a revelation, an astonishingly complex structure interweaving the fortunes of several families, ending as a kind of science fiction set one hundred years ahead. Perhaps it fell short of his ambitions for it, perhaps that was all he could see.

  When the phone rang he glanced up too quickly, then tried to pretend he wasn't nervous. She gave him a smile that was meant to calm him down as she said, "Barbara Waugh Literary Agency." Her instincts had told her not to expect too much, and it was only one of her authors calling to say that he'd finished his new novel. No doubt he was suffering from the novelist's usual postpartum depression. When she told him that she was conducting an auction, he rang off.

  "Jesus, who'd choose to make a living this way?" Paul was rubbing the top of his head above his wraparound hair as if to warm up his thoughts. "Writing must be a form of madness."

  He gulped his Scotch and poured himself another. He'd found last week's Sunday supplement among her magazines and was trying to read the article about her. "If they did have second thoughts," he muttered, "would they call to tell you so?"

  "They don't have second thoughts at this stage. That isn't the way things are done." Of course there was always a first time but not, she told herself, for A Torrent of Lives. Paul was trying to watch the clock without her noticing. She knew it was twenty past five, that was still quite early. Arthur continued to smile at her; he could hardly do anything else. Everything would be all right, his ------------------------------------com16

  smile said, and the phone was ringing. "Barbara Waugh Literary Agency," she said, cool as a recorded message.

  When she sat forward and reached for her pen Paul sat up, crumpling the supplement. She listened and nodded and said "Thank you" neutrally as she scribbled on her pad. She tore off the page and pushed it across her desk as she began to call the other bidders. Paul gaped at the page and looked afraid to smile in case he was reading it wrong. "I have a floor price of thirty thousand pounds," she said for the second time, and nodded at him.

  "Good Lord. That's pretty good, isn't it?" He seemed not to know where to look.

  "We can do a lot better." She was confident now. "Just wait," she told him.

  They waited. Perhaps time seemed even slower now to him. He went back to reading the article about her. She could tell when his face changed that he'd reached the paragraph about Angela. She wished they hadn't found out about that--but here was another bid, and she could lose herself in making the calls, lose herself in her work and forget about Angela, as if she could ever forget. "We are now up to forty thousand," she said.

  Beneath her window, commuters were streaming toward the underground, footsteps and voices merging into a blur. The traffic had grown intermittent before she received another bid. She read Publishers Weekly, she drafted a few letters, she checked her diary--lunch with a Fontana editor tomorrow, lunch with an author on Friday, Ted's birthday dinner on Sunday. The last scrap of sunlight crept off the cei
ling, leaving behind all the heat. Paul was mopping his forehead. Auctions were slower than the slowest poker game.

  Mayfair was quiet except for a few strolling tourists before the auction finished. She called the bidder of the floor price. "I have a final bid of one hundred thousand pounds." ------------------------------------com17

  She was so certain he would exercise his topping rights that she had already scribbled down the amount: the final bid plus ten percent. When he did so she tore off the page and handed it to Paul. "That's yours," she said.

  He seemed limp with shock or Scotch. "Thank you, Barbara. That's wonderful," he said, kissing her awkwardly. All at once he grew anxious. "I must call Sybil," he said.

  Had his wife been waiting by the phone? Certainly she answered at once. He told her the amount of the advance and said, "I don't believe it yet. I feel unreal." In a moment Barbara learned why he had been anxious. "I hope I haven't spoiled dinner," he said. "I didn't expect this to take so long."

  She watched him as he hurried toward Piccadilly. He was halfway there before he noticed that he was still clutching the page and stuffed it into his pocket. She closed the window, smiling to herself. How many readers realized that half the best-sellers were written by people like him, ordinary domesticated men and women, perhaps more nervous and insecure than average, who happened to be able to tell stories? No wonder they needed agents to look after them.

  She emerged through the empty outer office. Louise would be back tomorrow, having survived hay fever. Barbara lingered for a moment in the entrance porch, whose stone pillars felt warm as flesh. Everyone in Dover Street seemed to have gone home but her: Christie's art dealers, Longman & Strongi'th'arm the jewellers, the Oxford University Press, its windows set in crusty piebald arches that looked barnacled. She strolled down to Piccadilly and crossed into Green Park.

  Now that the auction was over she felt drained, oddly depressed. Perhaps that was caused by her feeling that the whole thing was a game in which expert play could bring enormous success while poor play with the same stakes led ------------------------------------com18

  to abject failure. Or perhaps the cause was the business of agenting, where as well as negotiating on behalf of your authors you had to mother them, sympathize with their domestic problems if you couldn't solve them, build and rebuild their confidence, calm their nerves, sometimes act as midwife to their books--and those were only the easy authors. Still, it was the most satisfying career she knew.

  In the park she walked beneath the trees. The whitish sky held down the heat, but it was cooler beneath the mat of leaves. Deck chairs striped like mattresses lay back on the green; silvery pigeons polished as shells ransacked the grass. Soon she felt in gear again, and hungry. Pausing only to direct a couple of tourists across the park to Buckingham Palace, she returned to her office for a manuscript to read.

  As she reached the porch, a phone began to ring. It was late for a business call, but it might well be Paul, apologizing for not inviting her to a celebratory meal; certainly the phone was ringing in her office. She had to slow down on the stairs, for all at once the heat seemed to focus on her: her body was sprinkled with hot sparks, the edges of her vision charred. No wonder, when she had been rushing on a day like this.

  She unlocked her door and grabbed Louise's phone. "Barbara Waugh Literary Agency," she said breathlessly.

  Was that an indrawn breath, or a hiss of static? She heard someone dialing on another line, a stray twang of electricity, the microscopic ringing of a phone; a voice chattering in Arabic drifted by in the distance. Otherwise there was silence. She was about to replace the receiver when a voice said "Mummy."

  So it was a wrong number. "Barbara Waugh Literary Agency," she said patiently for the umpteenth time today.

  This time the girl's voice didn't pause, though it sounded rejected. "Mummy," it pleaded. ------------------------------------com19

  It must be Louise's daughter, however odd it seemed that she would mistake Barbara for her mother--or, for that matter, that she would think Louise was here. Barbara spoke more sharply than she meant to, but she wanted to be rid of the lump of apprehension in her belly. "This is Barbara Waugh herself speaking."

  Then she grabbed the back of Louise's chair and lowered herself to the seat for fear of falling, for the girl's voice had said, "Yes, Mummy, I know."

  "No, it can't be," Barbara said, but she wasn't as sure of herself as she tried to sound, which was why everything-- her office, the phone in her hand, her hand itself--was dwindling away from her, and a charred blackness was rushing in. ------------------------------------com20 ------------------------------------com21

  21

  Two: 1966

  She woke convinced that Angela was in danger. Perhaps that was what she had been dreaming. She struggled to waken fully, for Arthur was home at last, and she wanted to watch him when he saw their baby, the absolutely peaceful sleeping face, the plump microscopic fists held above her head as if Angela were playing cops and robbers in her dreams.

  Barbara lay there for at least a minute before she realized what she was thinking, and then she was near to collapsing into grief. She mustn't, for Angela's sake. She got up quickly, to waken herself. In any case, Angela was stirring in the crib at the foot of the bed.

  As soon as she saw her mother, Angela began to make her sounds of greeting, squeals and delighted growls. She flipped herself over on her front and began to crawl back and forth, shouting at her confinement. Barbara hugged ------------------------------------com22

  her for a while, to make herself peaceful, then she changed her, no mean feat when Angela was determined to turn herself over now that she was able to. Barbara could hardly recall the minute sticky helpless creature that had squeezed out of herself.

  She'd slept longer than she had intended. The wedge of sunlight from Arthur's workroom was halfway across the landing now. Lately, on his infrequent visits home, Arthur would retreat in there with wads of paperwork in order to pretend he had no problems, which meant only that even when he was at home he would seem distant, sometimes hardly there at all. Perhaps he'd hoped to get closer to her by agreeing without question that they ought to have a baby before they were too set in their ways, or perhaps he had wanted to make sure that she wouldn't be lonely: how far could he anticipate? Her eyes were blurring moistly, but she couldn't allow that, not when she was carrying Angela downstairs. Barbara strapped her into the buggy and wheeled her out into the August afternoon.

  Beneath a sky like Wedgwood the Kentish hills looked mossy with trees. Outside her house the Palace Field led to the ruined gatehouse and tower of the Archbishop's Palace, where a terrace of cottages was wedged between the ruins; people sat reading or sewing in their gardens. Angela laughed at the glittering stream in the field. Everything was still new to her, but Barbara had taken this walk so often it had grown tedious as a television commercial.

  Further into Otford the trees outnumbered the houses. Beside the duck pond on the rotary, ducks sat like oval stones, introverted as tortoises. The inn was a block of white light, the police station--a two-story red-brick building exactly like a suburban house--was ablaze. The dazzle made her grasp the handles of the buggy more firmly. Whenever she crossed a road with the buggy she was afraid that the handles would slip out of her hands. ------------------------------------com23

  In the village a giant razor blade dangled outside the hairdresser's, rifles the color of storm clouds gleamed ominously in the gunsmith's window. People stooped to admire Angela. "Doesn't she look like you," they said. She left her outside the greengrocer's, and had to keep glancing back. Whenever anyone stopped to look at Angela outside a shop Barbara would tense, ready to sprint for the door.

  Now someone was looking, but it was only Jan, in a T-shirt so misshapen it was large enough even for her. "Ba ba ba," Angela was shouting at her, clapping her hands inexpertly and laughing. Jan waited with her children until Barbara emerged. "The Gripewater Kid is lively today," Jan said.
<
br />   "Active and demanding. Still, I'd rather have her than a dumpling baby."

  "So would anyone with sense. Don't run ahead, Jason, help me wheel the buggy, there's a good boy."

  For a moment Barbara was poignantly aware of threeyear-old Jason; once they'd known that she was pregnant Arthur had played with him, bounced him and flown him, laughed when he made Jason laugh. For that moment she could hear Arthur's voice more clearly than Jason's. "Dust," the little boy said impatiently. "Dusk."

  "That's right, Jason," Jan said, as she glanced at the headlines outside the news dealer's, "ducks." The ducks were unfolding beneath the willows by the pond, shaking themselves out like cloths. "At least the Moors Murderers are locked up safely," she said fiercely to Barbara. "So now we all have to pay to keep them alive. I'd like to see anyone do something to a child while I was around."

  Barbara had glimpsed a headline about Saudi Arabia. She turned away, eyes blurring. Jan clasped her arm moistly with one big mannish hand. "Don't worry about it. I'm sure we're safer living here." ------------------------------------com24

  "Things like that were just news items to me before I had Angela." That was true, but it wasn't the reason she had been momentarily upset. Still, she didn't want to be overwhelmed by Jan's large loose emotions, however kindly meant. "Things like that student in Texas who shot twelve people the other day for no reason at all," she said.

  "Sometimes I think the world's going mad. All these people on drugs, as well. What in God's name do they think they're looking for?"

  "Maybe they won't know until they find it, if they ever do." They pushed the buggies side by side across the field; Angela and baby Nigel kept holding hands. "By the way," she remembered, "there was something else I had to ask you."

  "Expert advice on all problems of child care. Just look at the stream, Jason, it isn't for paddling."

  "It's hardly what you'd call a problem. I was wondering if children of Angela's age ever have imaginary playmates."