Хилари Боннер - A Deep Deceit

He took me into a small book-lined sitting room, slightly shabby but homely and comfortable, fed me coffee, then gave me his letter from Carl. It held no surprises. It was just as Frank Harvey had told me, but I found it quite moving to hold it in my hand and to see Carl’s neat, carefully formed handwriting again.

I have a new identity and a new love in my life. Her name is Suzanne and she means everything to me. I dream of one day being able to bring her back to Key West, but I do not know if it will ever be possible. I would have to live as the person I now am, not Harry Mendleson any more. Would anyone there remember me, apart from you, do you think?

Carl had included a Post Office box number in Penzance, something else I hadn’t known about.

‘I replied, but I’ve never heard any more,’ said Frank Harvey.

‘By the time your letter arrived in Penzance, Carl was probably already in jail,’ I reflected wryly.

The doctor nodded. Then he picked up another envelope from the table beside his chair, removed a photograph from it and passed it across to me.

The picture was of a man and a woman with a small boy. I knew instinctively that the boy was Carl, even though I had never before seen any photographs of him as a child. The man looked a bit like Carl did now, only his reddish-blond hair was much longer, almost down to his shoulders, and he had a full beard.

It was the woman who was the shock. I could almost have been looking at a photograph of myself.

I gasped. ‘Is that why you said “should have known it” when you first looked at me properly in the bar last night?’

Frank Harvey nodded and gestured towards the picture. ‘Harry with his parents,’ he remarked unnecessarily.

I studied the photograph more closely. When it was taken, Carl’s mother would probably have been a little older than I was now, in her early thirties, I thought, and her hair was approaching waist length, very Seventies. But the likeness to myself was staggering. ‘All three of us are alike. Claire looks just like her too,’ I said quietly.

Frank Harvey nodded again. ‘Yep. That worried me from the start. And Harry married her within six weeks of meeting her. I reckoned he was looking for his mother more than for a wife and Claire was never going to be that. Harry felt that he had let his mother down, not looked after her properly. I never managed to change his mind about that. It’s what turned him anankastic in the first place, I’m sure of it. He kept trying to put it right, you see, I think that’s how he saw it. That’s what he did with Claire, and he failed. Tragically...

‘Then you came along and he tried to do the same thing with you.’

I thought again, as I did so often, about my first meeting with Carl. So that was why he had approached me in the way he had. He had seen his own mother sitting there on that old decaying tree trunk, his mother crying those awful, desperate tears. That was why he had loved me so obsessively and why he had always been so determined to protect me. Fleetingly I wondered if that was all there had ever been behind his love for me.

‘Can an anankastic be cured?’ I asked suddenly.

Frank Harvey looked thoughtful. ‘Probably not,’ he replied. ‘But his condition can be controlled. I reckon Carl managed to do that a lot of the time, from what you’ve told me, didn’t he.’

I nodded agreement. I had nothing to say. I was shaken by just how little I had known of the man I had shared my life with.

Over the next few days I despatched Mariette to ride the Conch Train through the city streets, visit Hemingway’s house and take part in the other tourist rituals that were almost obligatory for visitors to Key West, while I looked for Carl.

This was all I wanted to do. It was what I had come to America for. And I was happiest alone. I prayed that I would catch sight of him around every street corner, in every bar I hoped to meet someone who had seen him. Most didn’t even seem to grasp what I was saying, or maybe that was just the impression they gave, and appeared to regard me merely as possible pick-up material.

At night Mariette and I had dinner together and maybe visited a bar or two, while I tried desperately not to spend the entire time pumping everyone we encountered about Carl. Mariette, of course, fitted into Key West as if it were a pair of old slippers – as, indeed, to anyone born and bred in St Ives it more or less was. I truly felt there was a strange kinship between this idiosyncratic island at the southernmost tip of America and the little Cornish seaside town in which we had made our home. Those who are left of the indigenous population of Key West are a weird and wonderful lot. Curious though it may seem, I really could believe that you could swap them with the remains of the indigenous population of St Ives with not a lot of trouble. Carl had been right about that. They would fit easily into each others’ environments. So strange to come halfway across the world and feel this.

Mariette, of course, denied it hotly. ‘When we go back you can try asking for a margarita down the Sloop and I’ll just watch,’ she said, deliberately refusing to understand what I was trying to say.

I gave up, then. But I still believed I had discovered a truth.

Every evening at sunset, while Mariette drank margaritas at Mallory Dock and flirted outrageously with the waiters, something of a reflex action for her, I reckoned, I got in the habit of walking by the sea. I had a vague belief that I would find Carl on a beach somewhere at this time of day, away from the masses of people on the pier, all alone watching the sun go down.

Mariette and I had bought the cheapest air tickets available and were locked in to a flight home after ten days. Having spent eight of these in Key West, fruitlessly searching for my lost man, it was time to head back towards Miami. With a heavy heart, now, I went for my last evening beach walk. I had lost my initial optimism, my stubborn belief that Carl must be here somewhere. I was coming to have to accept that the world was a pretty big place. He could be anywhere.

As far as Key West was concerned my search had become merely automatic. I no longer believed Carl was there.

On this last night on the island I walked along the beach over by the big hotels at the back of the old town with my head down, kicking my toes in the sand, not even bothering to look around me.

I heard the music first, those familiar haunting strains wafting through the cooling evening air.

Then I saw him. He was sitting on the sand with his back to me, hunched into some kind of dark coat, silhouetted against the setting sun. I could just see the top of his head, the familiar sprouting of spiky fair hair. The music was coming from a ghetto blaster by his side.

For a second or two I stopped in my tracks. I stood absolutely still. Then I began to run, calling his name, but still he did not turn round.

By the time I reached him the tears were pouring down my face. I flung myself on to the sand in front of him and reached out my arms towards him. His head was slumped almost on to his chest. At last he looked up.

His eyes were glazed and bloodshot. His skin was filthy and covered in red blotches. His hair was actually peroxide white, black at the roots and filthy. He stank. The eyes stared, the trembling, cracked lips began to shape a parody of a smile. ‘Who are you, then, sweetheart? Come to keep me warm in the night, have you?’

He swayed his body towards me. I recoiled sharply, at the same time noticing the empty syringe nearby on the sand. From the ghetto blaster I vaguely heard the voice of a disc jockey. ‘And there we have it, folks, an ultimate sound of the Seventies...’