Katherine Brooks - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 106, No. 4 & 5. Whole No. 648 & 649, October 1995

“Yes, I swore too.”

“How naive we were. As if you gave up actions or ideas because of the date on a calendar. I feel I’ve got more energy and ideas now than I’ve ever had, don’t you?”

I forget what I answered, but the atmosphere lightened. We went back to speculating about what Welbrand might be doing. She wondered if we’d even recognise him.

“He might be anyone. He might have been there with my tribesmen in Afghanistan, or standing next to you in the taxi queue at Heathrow. For all we know he might be that waiter over there.”

She gave a little jerk of the shoulder towards the waiter standing by the doors to the kitchen. He was certainly about the right height and colouring for Welbrand, with a drooping moustache that looked false but probably wasn’t. At that stage of the dinner it set us both laughing until she worried that the waiter might think we were laughing at him. When he came over to offer more coffee she made a point of being specially nice to him and insisted that I should leave a tip well over the normal rate. She made no fuss about letting me pay the bill, but as we went out she insisted:

“Next year it’s my turn, and it’s your birthday we’ll celebrate.”

It was a good year for me, as if the memory we’d raised of that summer nearly thirty years ago had brought back with it some of the confidence and trapeze-poise of being young. If I’d met Welbrand that year, I’d have laughed at him. And yet, in spite of having more than enough to do, I somehow made sure I was in London in the week of my forty-ninth birthday. Two days before it, she rang.

“You remembered? There’s this rather good Armenian place I found in Camden Town.” She named an address. “Shall we meet there? Is eight o’clock all right?”

There was a lack of warmth in her voice, almost sharpness. I decided that must be because she was phoning from her office.

I was there before eight, drinking dry sherry in an anteroom pavilioned in hangings of ivory- and copper-coloured damask, probably bought from her firm. She arrived ten minutes late in a clattering of doors and apologies.

“Peter darling, do forgive me. Happy birthday.”

Her voice was too loud. She was wearing a beige linen suit and brown silk blouse that accentuated sharp angles in her face, a wariness in her eyes. Over the spicy little dishes they served as a first course, I asked if she’d been working too hard.

“Yes. No... I don’t know. This damned recession. You think you’re riding it, but it takes... you know.”

She waved a gold-chained hand, took a gulp of wine. I was sure that whatever was worrying her was more than financial. I asked after her partner. Oh, he was fine. I really must meet him one day. And mine? Fine also, and currently doing some coaching in Paris. Yes, when she was next in London we must make up a foursome. There was something not quite right about the way she was focussing. Sometimes her eyes would be fixed on mine very intently then they’d slide away, around the room and back towards the door.

A second bottle of wine arrived with the main course. She filled our glasses too full.

“To your birthday, Peter. How does it feel to be forty-nine?”

“You’ll know in five days.”

“It’s nonsense, isn’t it? As if one feels any different just because...” She waited to be interrupted, fork poised in the air like a spindle of the Fates. I waited too. When she did begin speaking again the words poured out in a mumble so that I had to lean across the table to catch what she was saying.

“Only we do change, don’t we? We’re not the same people we were twenty years ago. We’re not even the same people we were yesterday. I mean, you do change between one birthday and the next, of course you do, so why shouldn’t it be on one particular day that you... oh.”

A muffled wail. She threw her fork down on the tablecloth. A waiter glanced at us and away again, another waiter with another moustache. I put my hand over hers, made her look at me.

“You’re talking as if change must always be for the worse.”

“Can you honestly look around you and say that it isn’t? Can you feel your own mind, your own body, going slow and pulpy and say that it isn’t?”

We were both of us, mentally and physically, a long way from being slow and pulpy. I told her so. She smiled, picked up her fork, and began eating again, but stopped after a few mouthfuls.

“Peter, you remember we talked about Welbrand last year?”

“Of course.”

“I... I think I’ve seen him. Several times.”

“Where?”

“Once in a hotel lobby in Glasgow, once in Regents Park with some children. Then, just last week, I came out of our front door and there he was feeding a parking meter across the road.”

“Did you go over and speak to him?”

“No.”

“Because you weren’t sure?”

“Because I was nearly sure he wasn’t.”

She stared at me, wide-eyed.

“You thought he was but you’re nearly sure he wasn’t?”

“Please don’t laugh at me. I’m trying to explain. I don’t really think it was Welbrand any of the three times. But it so nearly could have been that I felt he couldn’t be far away, just around the comer out of sight.”

“Not logical.”

“Of course not logical. But it’s going to happen all the same. He knows what year it is as well as we do.”

She saw something in my eyes and pounced.

“It’s happened to you too, hasn’t it?”

“In a way, yes.”

“Where?”

“Paris. You know the Place de Trocadero, all those Algerians selling beads and mechanical birds and so on? One of them turned round suddenly and stared at me and he wasn’t an Algerian at all. For a moment I could have sworn it was Welbrand and he’d expected me to be there.”

“You didn’t say anything either?”

“No.”

The waiter came to inquire if we’d finished and reproachfully removed half-full plates.

“That oath,” she said, “do you remember the rest of it?”

I’d thought about this beforehand and had decided to deny it, to say that we were all too high and too drunk that evening to remember all that we’d said. But the denial wouldn’t come when I needed it. She leaned towards me until our foreheads were almost touching.

“You remember, if we got to fifty and hadn’t killed ourselves, what we’d do.”

“There’s no point...”

“That we’d kill each other.”

She sat back and looked at me, a little smile on her face.

“Welbrand meant it.”

“Perhaps he did, but he’ll have grown up since then too.”

“And don’t think he’ll have changed. Anyway, he’s right, isn’t he? We’ve none of us done what we wanted to then.”

I started to speak. She waved at me to be quiet.

“I know what you’re going to say. Creative careers, friends, family, and so on. But it’s not what we’d have settled for then.”

“Don’t you think that Welbrand will have settled for much the same things wherever he is, or would like to if he hasn’t?”

“No.”

She said it quite flatly. I felt angry both with her and this superior Welbrand she was setting in judgement over us.

“Fat, forty-nine, and director of a double-glazing firm, that’s what Welbrand might be now.”

She smiled as if she knew better, making me even more angry.

“So he’s lurking out there somewhere, is he, planning to kill both of us when we get to fifty, then kill himself because we couldn’t make the world do backflips for us? Is that what you think?”

“Yes,” she said, very quietly. “Yes, that is what I think. And you think it too, Peter.”

Suddenly, artificially bright, she poured the last of the wine into our glasses, asked the waiter for the bill. When it arrived she scrabbled in her big leather shoulder bag for her wallet of cards.