The Claw

Three

Liz and Anna were waiting at Norwich. Liz was at the barrier as the train rolled in. When she saw Alan, picking his way through the Saturday shoppers back from London and the families of holidaymakers searching for luggage trolleys, she waved, and Anna came running over from the station bookstall. 'Look, daddy,' Anna cried, as he fumbled with his ticket and his luggage at the barrier, 'they've got some of your books.'

'Have they? Well, good for them.' He hugged Liz and Anna until he realized he was holding up the queue at the barrier. A man with a briefcase glanced at them as he squeezed by, and Alan could see he thought they were as beautiful as he did himself. Anna looked more and more like her mother: the same red hair and blue eyes, oval face, small pert nose, and long slim limbs. She was tall and lithe for her age – there again she took after Liz – and the pair of them had grown as tanned in Norfolk as Alan had in Nigeria. No wonder the man with the briefcase looked envious.

The car was parked on the station forecourt. They emerged beneath a bright July sky patched with dazzling clouds, into a light shower. The warm rain was refreshing, just what he needed right now. Anna danced along beside him 5 clutching his hand. 'Was Africa lovely? Did you see any native dancers? Did you meet a tiger? I'd love to meet one

…'

'Now, Anna, leave daddy alone for a few minutes. You know he likes to unwind after he's been away.'

'It's all right,' Alan said. 'I don't mind.' He put an arm round each of them as they reached the car, and felt secure.

He hadn't realized how much he needed this – to feel that some things could be trusted not to change.

As they drove out of Norwich toward the coast, the clouds drew back to the edge of the sky, an iris as wide as the horizon. The rain had stopped, leaving the gentle landscape even greener. They passed villages among the sparkling fields, a few streets of houses white as sugar cubes, gone almost as soon as they appeared. Waterways glittered beside the roads, leading cruisers into the network of the Broads. Once Alan glimpsed the towers of Liquid Gases, where he'd researched The Cold Cold War.

For a while Anna chatted to him while Liz concentrated on driving. As she turned off the main road onto the first of the winding lanes that led to their part of the coast, Liz said, 'Was your trip a success, then?' 'I think so. Until I got to Heathrow, anyway.' His tone made her glance at him. 'Why, did something go wrong?'

'I don't know if I'd put it quite like that.' Again he felt queasy with nervousness. 'It was my own fault. I should have known better,' he said. 'Only in a reckless moment I agreed to bring over a parcel for some anthropological foundation in London. You won't believe it, but I didn't think to ask what was in the parcel, even though I hardly knew the man who wanted me to take it. Well, of course this had to be the only time I've ever had my luggage searched at Customs, and you should have seen this character's eyes light up when he found the parcel.'

Liz grimaced sympathetically. 'One of those, was he?'

'One of the best. Mr Hitler Youth of 1980.'

Anna was growing impatient. 'What was in the parcel?'

He thought it best to tone down the truth for her. 'It was what anthropologists call an artefact,' he said, hoping she would be more easily satisfied than the Customs youth had been. Alan would have been happy to leave the parcel for the Foundation to collect, but the uniformed youth hadn't allowed that – a regulation had been contravened, nothing and nobody was going anywhere until the situation had been resolved according to the book. Eventually the argument had attracted the attention of a Customs officer old and wise enough to know when to bend the rules.

Anna wasn't satisfied. 'What's an artefact?'

He leaned menacingly over her in the back seat. 'The opposite of an artichoke,' he said, and tickled her until she begged him to stop. The danger was past; she'd forgotten her question. Nevertheless he said quickly to Liz, 'What's new with you?'

'Well, let's see. I looked in at the hotel nursery today. They've got a little boy called Hilary who's so polite he doesn't like to ask where the toilet is. Leaves little piles about the place when nobody's looking. The Phantom Crapper Strikes Again.' She grew more serious. 'No improvement between Derek and Jane. Tell you later,' she said, meaning after Anna had gone to bed.

The lane was winding downhill toward the coast now. Before long they saw the sea above the hedges, the steely water trembling with white fire all the way to the horizon. Beside the coast road, trees downtrodden by the constant wind stooped close to the ground. Liz drove along the coast road, past huddles of caravans in fields at the top of the cliffs, tents set out like wedges of cheese on a board, a village with a lighthouse. As the car sped through the village, two jet planes tore overhead from the RAF station nearby.

Soon they were home. Alan always felt a shock of pleasure at the sight of the tall white house overlooking the sea. Sea breezes rippled the lawns, flowers nodded in the flowerbeds. Liz eased the car into the left-hand garage and switched off the engine, and suddenly the only sound was the soughing of the waves.

While Alan lugged his case upstairs and dumped it in the master bedroom, Anna went out to talk to the goats that were grazing on the cliff-top, waiting to be milked by Pam from the dairy. The bedrooms were on the middle floor, below Alan's workroom and a room full of books. Not only the rooms but the landings had large windows.

Daylight was everywhere in the house, and views of the sea.

Alan was opening the suitcase when Anna came running upstairs. 'I started writing a book while you were away. Do you want to read it?'

'Well, not right now.' She looked so crestfallen that he said, 'All right, darling, I'll read it now.'

The first page of the exercise book was painstakingly inscribed The Castle People. The next few pages were covered with careful straight lines of handwriting, which looked determined to be neat, to please him. The title had made him expect a historical story, but she had written about little people who came onto a beach at night after the children had gone and who lived in the sandcastles, shoring them up with bits of driftwood, until the sea washed the castles away. He especially liked a description of the little people wearing shells for hats and daring one another to stand at the edge of the waves. 'It's good. You ought to see if you can carry it on,' he said, as Liz called them down to dinner.

Wine and Liz's lamb kebabs made him more talkative. Before long he'd convinced Anna that Africa was as mysterious as she wanted it to be: secret paths through giant forests, echoing with the shrieks of parrots that repeated your every call, the great eyes of tigers glowing green from the bush… Could he use some of this in his novel? He was beginning to wonder if bis trip had given him enough of a sense of West Africa as it really was.

After the meal Anna scampered away to tidy her playroom and get ready for bed. By the time Liz and Alan had washed up the dinner things, she'd had her bath and was waiting to be cuddled and put to bed. She was proud to be left alone to bath herself. Alan sat by her bed and told her an impromptu fairy story. He had no idea how to end it, but fortunately before he reached that problem, she was asleep.

He sat for a while and gazed at her. Her long eyelashes shadowed her closed eyes softly, her hair spread out on the pillow, each filament smouldering redly in the curtained light. He had never seen anything more peaceful than her face.

He was closing the door quietly when he heard Liz gasp. She was in the master bedroom, at the far end of the hall. As he hurried to her he was seeing the sea in two windows at once, and he had the unsettling impression that the house was drifting like a ship. As he reached the bedroom, Liz was standing at the open suitcase with her back to him. She had found Marlowe's box.

She turned at once. 'What is it? Is it for me? It's beautiful.'

'You should have been with me at Customs – maybe you could have persuaded him.'

'Oh, is this the artefact?' She looked disappointed. 'I assumed you would have posted it by now.'

'The post offices were shut by the time I got through Customs. Besides, you can see it needs wrapping up. I could have taken it to the Foundation when I got to London, but nobody was answering the phone. Presumably they don't work Saturdays.'

She had lifted the metal claw out of the box and was gazing at it rather wistfully. 'What is it exactly? I thought it was a sculpture of some kind.'

'I suppose it does look rather like that.' It was strange: at Customs he'd had to agree that it looked like an especially vicious weapon. You could imagine someone holding it by the long handle and using the four curved claws to tear flesh, to gouge – but Liz must have communicated her sense of it to him, for now it looked abstract and graceful, elegant in its simplicity. Only the dullness of the grey metal suggested how old it must be.

Liz replaced it reluctantly in the cotton wool. 'I expect it's very valuable.'

'I'm sure it is.' That had been one of the problems at Customs: the young man had wanted to know why, if this was such a valuable item, there was no return address on the wrapping – perhaps because Marlowe was coming back to England? 'Anyway,' he said, 'we'll have it to ourselves until next week. I'll give this Foundation a call first thing Monday morning.'

She still looked wistful. 'I'm sorry I didn't bring you back a present,' he said.

She smiled at once. 'Just so long as you brought yourself back, that's all that matters.'

'Couldn't do without me, eh? You didn't join Derek's harem while I was away?'

'Alan, that's a terrible thing to say!' She threw a balled-up shirt at him, hard enough to hurt. Quick as a flash he'd dragged the suitcase off the bed and flung her onto the sheets. 'Want a fight, eh?' he growled. 'Want a fight?'

'No, listen, be serious for a moment,' she said breathlessly. 'That situation really is getting out of hand. Jane's desperate. Someone ought to speak to Derek about it, for her sake.'

'All right, we'll talk about it.' He was struggling with the zipper of her skirt. 'But not just now, all right?'

She smiled at his erection, which was pressing against her. 'Well, maybe not just now.'

In a minute they were frantic for each other. They had no need of foreplay, and no time. As he raised himself to go deeper into her, she wrapped her legs around him. They came almost at once. It felt as though their bodies were exploding in mid-air, a long, shuddering explosion.

They subsided limply on the bed, side by side in each other's arms. After a while she wriggled her shoulders ruefully. 'It's about time you cut your nails.'

'They help me turn pages,' he joked. He was half-asleep now, hardly aware of what he was saying. He just wanted to lie here peacefully, holding her, hearing the long subtle chords of the sea. All at once he got up irritably; Anna was whimpering. Couldn't she leave them alone for five minutes? But soon the child was quiet, and Liz relaxed in his arms again. Just a nightmare, that was all.