Twice Shy Read online

  There was no noise from inside the house. I listened to the distant hum of traffic and the nearer hum of bees around a tub of dark red flowers, and pressed the bell again.

  No results. If I hadn’t wanted to find Ted Pitts so much I would have given up and driven away at that point. It wasn’t even the sort of road where one could inquire at a neighbor’s: there were houses on only one side, with a steep wooded hillside rising on the other, and the houses themselves were far-spaced and reclusive, drawing themselves back from public view.

  I rang a third time out of indecisiveness, thinking that I could wait, or come back, or leave a note begging Pitts to call me.

  The door opened. A pleasant-looking woman stood there; not young, not yet middle-aged, wearing a loosely flowing green sundress with broad straps over suntanned shoulders.

  “Yes?” she said inquiringly. Dark curly hair, blue eyes, the brown glowing face of summer leisure.

  “I’m looking for Ted Pitts,” I said.

  “This is his house.”

  “I’ve been trying to locate him. I’m the brother of an old friend of his. A friend he had years ago, I mean. Could I see him, do you think?”

  “He isn’t here at the moment.” She looked at me doubtfully. “What’s your brother’s name?”

  “Jonathan Derry.”

  After the very slightest pause her face changed from watchfulness to welcome; a smile in remembrance of time past.

  “Jonathan! We haven’t heard from him for years.”

  “Are you . . . Mrs. Pitts?”

  She nodded. “Jane.” She opened the door wide and stepped back. “Come in.”

  “I’m William,” I said.

  “Weren’t you”—she frowned—“away at school?”

  “One does tend to grow.”

  She looked up at me. “I’d forgotten how long ago it was.” She led me across a cool dark hall. “This way.”

  We came to a wide stairway of shallow green-carpeted steps leading downward, and I saw before me what had been totally invisible from the higher roadway—that the house was large, ultra-modern, built into the side of the hill and absolutely stunning.

  The stairs led directly down to a huge room whose ceiling was half-open to the sky and whose floor was partly green carpet and partly swimming pool. There were sofas and coffee tables nearest the stairs and lounging chairs, bamboo with pink, white and green cushions, dotting the far poolside, out in the sun; and on either side wings of house spread out protectively, promising bedrooms and comfort and a life of delight. I looked at the spectacular and pretty room and thought no schoolmaster on earth could afford it.

  “I was sitting over there,” Jane Pitts said, pointing to the sunny side. “I nearly didn’t answer the doorbell. I don’t always bother.”

  We walked around there, passing white-trellised alcoves filled with plants and cushioned bamboo sofas with bathing towels casually thrown down. The pool water looked sea-green and peaceful, gleaming and inviting after my trudging search.

  “Two of the girls are around somewhere,” Jane said. “Melanie, our eldest, is married, of course. Ted and I will be grandparents quite soon.”

  “Incredible.”

  She smiled. “We married at college.” She gestured to the chairs and I sat on the edge of one of the loungers while she spread out voluptuously on another. Beyond the house the lawn sloped grassily away to a wide sweeping view over northwest London, the horizon lost in misty purples and blues.

  “This place is fantastic,” I said.

  She nodded. “We were so lucky to get it. We’ve only been here three months, but I think we’ll stay forever.” She pointed to the open roof. “This all closes over, you know. There are solar panels that slide across. They say the house is warm all winter.”

  I admired everything sincerely and asked if Ted were still teaching. She said without strain that he sometimes taught university courses in computer programing and that unfortunately he wouldn’t be home until quite late the following evening. He would be so sorry to have missed me, she said.

  “I would quite urgently like to talk to him.”

  She gently shook her head. “I don’t honestly know where he is, except somewhere up near Manchester. He went this morning, but he didn’t know where he’d be staying. In a motel somewhere, he said.”

  “What time would he be back tomorrow?”

  “Late. I don’t know.”

  She looked at the concern which must have shown plainly on my face and said apologetically, “You could come early on Sunday, if you like, if it’s that important.”

  15

  Saturday crawled.

  Cassie wandered around with her plastered arm in a sling and Bananas jogged down to the cottage three or four times, both of them worried by the delay and not saying so. It had seemed reasonable on Thursday night to incarcerate Angelo, with his handiwork still appalling us in the sitting room and Cassie in pain, but by Saturday evening she and Bananas had clearly progressed through reservations and uneasiness to downright anxiety.

  “Let him go,” Bananas said, when he came late after closing time. “You’ll be in real trouble if anyone finds out. He knows now that you’re no pushover. He’d be too scared to come back.”

  I shook my head. “He’s too arrogant to be scared. He’d want his revenge, and he’d come back to take it.”

  They stared miserably at each other. “Cheer up,” I said. “I was ready to keep him for a week, two weeks, as long as it took.”

  “I just don’t know,” Bananas said, “how you could calmly go to the races.”

  I’d gone uncalmly to the races. Also to the gallops in the morning and to Mort’s for breakfast, but no one I had seen could have guessed what was going on at home. Behind a public front I found it was fairly easy to hide an ongoing crime: hundreds of people did it, after all.

  “I suppose he’s still alive,” Cassie said.

  “He was up by the door swearing at four o’clock.” Bananas looked at his watch. “Nine and a half hours ago. I shouted at him to shut up.”

  “And did he?”

  “Just swore back.”

  I smiled. “He’s not dead.”

  As if to prove it, Angelo started kicking the door and letting go with the increasingly familiar obscenities. I went into the kitchen and stood close to the barricade, and when he drew breath for the next verbal onslaught, I said loudly, “Angelo.”

  There was a brief silence, then a fierce furious growling shout: “Bastard.”

  “The light’s going out in five minutes,” I said.

  “I’ll kill you.”

  Maybe the heavily savage threat should have raised my goose bumps, but it didn’t. He had been murderous too long, was murderous by nature, and I already knew it. I listened to his continuing rage and felt nothing.

  “Five minutes,” I said again, and left him.

  In the sitting room Bananas was looking mildly piratical in his open-necked shirt and his sneakers and his four days’ growth of harsh black beard, but he himself would never have made anyone walk the plank. The gloom and doom in his mind deplored what I was doing even while he condoned it, and I could almost sense him struggling anew with the old paradox that to defeat aggression one might have to use it.

  He sat on the sofa and in short order drank two stiff brandies with his arm around Cassie, who never minded. He was tired, he’d said, of us being out of his favorite tipple: he’d brought the bottle himself. “Have some ice cream with it?” Cassie had suggested, and he’d said seriously, “What flavor?”

  I gave Angelo his five minutes and switched off the light, and there was a baleful silence from the cellar.

  Bananas gave Cassie a bristly kiss, said she looked tired, said every plate in the pub needed washing, said “Barbados!” as a toast, and tossed back his drink. “God rest all prisoners. Good night.”

  Cassie and I watched his disappearing back. “He’s half sorry for Angelo,” she said.

  “Mm. A fallacy always to t
hink that because you feel sorry for the tiger in the zoo he won’t eat you, given the chance. Angelo doesn’t understand compassion. Not other people’s for him. He feels none himself. In others he sees it as a weakness. So never, my darling, be kind to Angelo expecting kindness in return.”

  She looked at me. “You mean that as a warning, don’t you?”

  “You’ve a soft heart.”

  She considered for a moment, then found a pencil and wrote a message to herself in large letters on the white plaster.

  REMEMBER TIGERS.

  “Will that do?”

  I nodded. “And if he says his appendix is bursting or he’s suffering from bubonic plague, feed him some aspirins through the ventilation holes, and do it in a roll of paper, and not with your fingers.”

  “He hasn’t thought of that yet.”

  “Give him time.”

  We went upstairs to bed, but as on the previous night I slept only in brief disturbed snatches, attuned the whole time to any noise from the cellar. Cassie slept more peacefully than before, the cast becoming less of a problem as she grew used to it. Her arm no longer hurt, she said; she simply felt tired. She said play would be resumed when the climate got better.

  I watched the dark sky lighten to streaks of navy blue clouds across a somber orange glow, a strange brooding dawn like the aura of the man downstairs. Never before, I thought, had I entered a comparable clash of wills, never tested so searchingly my willingness to command. I had never thought of myself as a leader, and yet, looking back, I’d never had much stomach to be led.

  In recent months I had found it easier than I’d expected to deal with Luke’s five trainers, the power seeming to develop as the need arose. The power to keep Angelo in the cellar, that too had arisen not merely physically, but also in my mind. Perhaps one’s capacity always expanded to meet the need: but what did one do when the need was gone? What did generals do with their full-grown hubris when the war was over? When the whole world no longer obeyed when they said jump?

  I thought: unless one could adjust one’s power-feelings perpetually to the current need, one could be headed for chronic dissatisfaction with the fall of fate. One could grow sour, power-hungry, despotic. I would shrink back, I thought, to the proper size, once Angelo was solved, once Luke’s year was over. If one saw that one had to, perhaps one might.

  The fierce sky slowly melted to mauve-gray clouds drifting over a sea of gold and lingeringly then to gentle white over palest blue, and I got up and dressed thinking that the sky’s message was false: problems didn’t fade with the sun and Cain was still downstairs.

  Cassie’s eyes, when I left, were saying all that her tongue wasn’t. Hurry. Come back. I don’t feel safe here with Angelo.

  “Sit by the telephone,” I said. “Bananas will run.”

  She swallowed. I kissed her and drove away, burning up the empty Sunday-early roads to Mill Hill. It was still only eight-thirty when I turned into Oaklands Road, the very earliest that Jane Pitts had said I could arrive, but she was already up and in a wet bathing suit to answer the doorbell.

  “Come in,” she said. “We’re in the pool.”

  “We” were two lithely beautiful teenage girls and a stringy man going bald who swam without splashing, like a seal. The roof was open to the fair sky and a waiting breakfast of cereals and fruit stood ready on one of the low bamboo tables, and none of the Pitts seemed to mind or notice that the new day was still cool.

  The stringy man slithered out onto the pool’s edge in a sleek economical movement and stood shaking the water from his head and looking approximately in my direction.

  “I’m Ted Pitts,” he said, holding out a wet hand. “I can’t see a damn thing without my glasses.”

  I shook the hand and smiled into the unfocused eyes. Jane walked around with some heavy black frames, which converted the brown fish into an ordinary short-sighted mortal, and he dripped around the pool beside me to where his towel lay on a lounging chair.

  “William Derry?” he said, blotting water out of his ears.

  “That’s right.”

  “How’s Jonathan?”

  “Sends his regards.”

  Ted Pitts nodded, toweled his chest vigorously and then stopped abruptly and said, “It was you who told me where to get the form books.”

  All those years ago—information so casually given. I glanced around the amazing house and asked the uppermost question. “The betting system on those tapes,” I said. “Did it really work?”

  Ted Pitts’s smile was of comprehensive contentment. “What do you think?” he said.

  “All this—?”

  “All this.”

  “I never believed in it,” I said, “until I came here the other day.”

  He toweled his back. “It’s fairly hard work, of course. I shunt around a good deal. But with this to come back to . . . most rewarding.”

  “How long—” I said slowly.

  “How long have I been gambling? Ever since Jonathan gave me the tapes. That first Derby . . . I borrowed a hundred quid with my car as security to raise some stake-money. It was madness, you know. I couldn’t have afforded to lose. Sometimes in those days we had hardly enough to eat. It was pretty well desperation that made me do it. But of course the system looked mathematically OK, and it had already worked for years for the man who invented it.”

  “And you won?”

  He nodded. “Five hundred. A fortune. I’ll never forget that day, never. I felt so sick.” He smiled vividly, the triumph still childlike in its simplicity. “I didn’t tell anybody. Not Jonathan. Not even Jane. I didn’t mean to do it again, you see. I was so grateful it had turned out all right, but the strain ...” He dropped the damp towel over the arm of a chair. “And then, you know, I thought, why not?”

  He watched his daughters dive into the pool with their arms around each other’s waists. “I only taught for one more term,” he said calmly. “I couldn’t stand the head of the math department. Jenkins, his name was.” He smiled. “It seems odd now, but I felt oppressed by the man. Anyway, I promised myself that if I won enough during the summer holidays to buy a computer, I would leave at Christmas, and if I didn’t, I’d stay and use the school’s computer still, and be content with a wager now and then.”

  Jane joined us, carrying a pot of coffee. “He’s telling you how he started betting? I thought he was crazy.”

  “But not for long.”

  She shook her head, smiling. “When we moved out of our caravan into a house, bought it outright with Ted’s winnings, then I began to believe it would last, that it was safe. And now here we are, so well off it’s embarrassing . . . and it’s all thanks to your dear brother Jonathan.”

  The girls climbed dripping out of the pool and were introduced as Emma and Lucy, hungry for breakfast. I was offered bran flakes, natural yogurt, wheat germ and fresh peaches, which they all ate sparingly but with enjoyment.

  I ate as well but thought inescapably of Angelo and of Cassie alone with him in the cottage. Those planks would hold. They’d kept him penned in for two whole days . . . no reason to think they’d fail this morning . . . no reason, just a strong feeling that I should have persuaded her to wait with Bananas.

  It was over coffee, when the girls were again swimming and Jane had disappeared into the house, that Ted said, “How did you find me?”

  I looked at him. “Don’t you mean why?”

  “I suppose so. Yes.”

  “I came to ask you to let me have copies of those tapes.”

  He breathed deeply and nodded. “That’s what I thought.”

  “And will you?”

  He looked at the shimmering pool for a while and then said, “Does Jonathan know you’re asking?”

  “Yeah. I asked him where the tapes were now, and he said if anyone knew, you would. You and only you, he said.”

  Ted Pitts nodded again and made up his mind. “It’s fair. They’re his, really. But I haven’t any spare tapes.”

  “I bro
ught some,” I said. “They’re out in the car. Can I fetch them?”

  “All right.” He nodded decisively. “I’ll change into dry clothes while you’re getting them.”

  I fetched the computer-type tapes I’d brought for the purpose, and he said “Six? You’ll only need three.”

  “Two sets?” I suggested.

  “Oh. Well, why not?” He turned away. “The computer’s downstairs. Would you like to see it?”

  “Very much.”

  He led the way into the body of the house and we went down some carpeted stairs to a lower floor. “Office,” he said succinctly, leading the way into a normal-sized room from which one could see the same wide view of London as upstairs. “It’s a bedroom really. Bathroom through there,” he pointed. “Spare bedroom beyond.”

  The office was more accurately a sitting room with armchairs, television, bookshelves and pinewood paneling. On an upright chair by one wall stood a pair of well-used mountain-climbing boots, with the latest in thermal sleeping bags still half in its carton on the floor beside them. Ted followed my glance. “I’m off to Switzerland in a week or two. Do you climb?”

  I shook my head.

  “I don’t attempt the peaks,” he said earnestly. “I prefer walking, mostly.” He pulled open a section of the pine paneling to reveal a long counter upon which stood a collection of electronic equipment. “I don’t need all this for the racing programs,” he said, “but I enjoy computers.” And he ran his fingers caressingly over the metal surfaces with the ardor of a lover.

  “I’ve never seen those racing programs,” I said.

  “Would you like to?”

  “Please.”

  “All right.” With the speed of long dexterity he fed a tape into a cassette recorder and explained he was putting the machine to search for the file name “Epsom.”

  “How much do you know about computers?” he said.

  “There was one at school, way back. We played Space Invaders on it.”