Nocturnes_ Five Stories of Music and Nightfall - Kazuo Ishiguro [22]
“Yes. That is, I see a hint of an escape route, but …”
“All right, I’ll spell it out. This is what you tell Emily. The door went, you answered it, this couple are there with Hendrix tugging at the leash. They tell you they’re Angela and Solly, good friends needing their cup of tea. You let them in, Hendrix runs wild, chews up the diary. It’s utterly plausible. What’s the matter? Why aren’t you thanking me? Won’t quite do for you, sir?”
“I’m very grateful, Charlie. I’m just thinking it through, that’s all. Look, for one thing, what if these people really turn up? After Emily’s home, I mean.”
“That’s possible, I suppose. All I can say is you’d be very, very unlucky if such a thing happened. When I said they came round a lot, I meant maybe once a month at most. So stop picking holes and be grateful.”
“But Charlie, isn’t it a little far-fetched that this dog would chew just the diary, and exactly those pages?”
I heard him sigh. “I assumed you didn’t need the rest of it spelt out. Naturally, you have to do the place over a bit. Knock over the standard lamp, spill sugar over the kitchen floor. You have to make it like Hendrix did this whirlwind job on the place. Look, they’re calling the flight. I’ve got to go. I’ll check in with you once I’m in Germany.”
While listening to Charlie, I’d had a feeling come over me similar to the one I get when someone starts on about a dream they had, or the circumstances that led to the little bump on their car door. His plan was all very well—ingenious, even—but I couldn’t see how it had to do with anything I was really likely to say or do when Emily got home, and I’d found myself getting more and more impatient. But once Charlie had gone, I found his call had had a kind of hypnotic effect on me. Even as my head was dismissing his idea as idiotic, my arms and legs were setting out to put his “solution” into action.
I began by putting the standard lamp down on its side. I was careful not to bump anything with it, and I removed the shade first, putting it back on at a cocked angle only once the whole thing was arranged on the floor. Then I took down a vase from a bookshelf and laid it down on the rug, spreading around it the dried grasses that had been inside. Next I selected a good spot near the coffee table to “knock over” the wastepaper basket. I went about my work in a strange, disembodied mode. I didn’t believe any of it would achieve anything, but I was finding the whole procedure rather soothing. Then I remembered all this vandalism was supposed to relate to the diary, and went through into the kitchen.
After a little think, I took a bowl of sugar from a cupboard, placed it on the table not far from the purple notebook, and slowly tilted it until the sugar slid out. I had a bit of a job preventing the bowl rolling off the edge of the table, but in the end got it to stay put. By this time, the gnawing panic I’d been feeling had evaporated. I wasn’t tranquil, exactly, but it now seemed silly to have got myself in the state I had.
I went back to the living room, lay down on the sofa and picked up the Jane Austen book. After a few lines, I felt a huge tiredness coming over me and before I knew it, I was slipping into sleep once more.
I WAS WOKEN UP by the phone. When Emily’s voice came on the machine, I sat up and answered it.
“Oh goody, Raymond, you are