Giles clings to these remarks. Soon he will be out of here, out and about, one of thousands of old coves who have more metal inside them than the Bank of England. The wound – everyone calls it that, impersonally, as if it’s only accidentally part of Giles – is a textbook example of maggot therapy. He’s been lying in a hospital bed for days – weeks – doing bugger all except when he is released from all the contraptions and Sister bullies him on to his feet. So why doesn’t he feel better? That’s not a question he can ask Anstruther or any of the nurses. He hasn’t had a drink since the night of the fall. Doesn’t even feel like it. The thought of a glass of whisky makes him nauseous. Smoking’s off the cards too: the one time he tried, he coughed until he choked. He is diabolically weak. It feels as if not only his leg but his entire body has been smashed up, beaten to a pulp deep inside where no surgeon will be able to get at it. The worst thing is the way he sweats at night. It must be the drugs they give him. He wakes up cold and drenched, with his pyjamas soaked through and the sheets clinging. They say his temperature is still wrong.
‘Nurse Davies is going to take you along to the Orangery this morning,’ says Sister. ‘Mr Anstruther thinks it may be beneficial.’
The Orangery is a big conservatory on the ground floor. It faces south, and even in winter it is warm when the sun shines. The nurses help him into a wheelchair, and he goes down in the lift, like a child in its pushchair. The Orangery is a surprise. It is so bright that it makes his eyes sting. There are rows of day-beds, tubs of dusty lemon trees and a smell of trapped, heated air and citrus leaves. It has already been explained to him that exposure to sunlight, even through glass, is good for bone healing. It is the Vitamin D in sunlight that does the trick. Giles would have thought this could have waited until he was in the convalescent hospital. If he’s well enough to be wheeled down to the Orangery, then why the hell aren’t they transferring him to the King David?
The day-beds, too, are wheeled. Nurse Davies and another nurse help him out of the wheelchair into the bed. He lies back, utterly exhausted, sweating and out of breath. He feels a hand take his wrist and fingers on his pulse.
‘Just lie quite still. You might not think it, but it’s quite an effort, the first time a patient comes down here.’
Her voice is so kind that tears gather behind his eyelids. For Christ’s sake, man, you’re getting maudlin. With an effort, he unsticks his eyes. The nurse is gazing into the distance, her face perfectly calm. Everything must be all right. After another half-minute she releases her hold on his wrist, lays his hand down carefully at his side and nods as if thoroughly satisfied.
‘I’ll just take your temperature,’ she says, whipping a thermometer out of its holder and inserting it beneath his tongue. His mouth is so used to this routine by now that it opens meekly at a word. But he is still out of breath, even though he’s lying down. She seems to know this, because she calls another nurse and they raise the back-rest on the day-bed so that they can prop him up into a sitting position.
‘I’ll have a word with Mr Anstruther,’ says the other nurse, who seems to be in charge of things here.
‘Yes, Sister,’ says Nurse Davies.
The day-beds are set to face the light, and here the patients lie, waiting for the pale winter sun to creep from behind the clouds again. Giles drowses, and then wakes suddenly at the rasp of a snort from the back of his nose. Has he been making that noise all the time? No one turns. Each is in his own world, preoccupied with the advance and retreat of his own pain. And Giles lies there, one of them.
Enough snow has fallen in the night to coat the roofs of the prison, and the air is raw. There’s slush in the exercise yard, and the screws stamp their feet to keep warm. Christmas, thank God, is over. Simon has taken to attending chapel. One must do something. His mother has put in a request for a visit, but he has refused. He cannot have her here, to see him stripped bare. She’d sit there, taking in everything, asking the same idiotic questions she used to ask when she came down to visit him at school. She might make observations about the other men and their visitors, in her voice that was always slightly too loud.
‘What does it matter if they do hear, Simon? For heaven’s sake, why are you always so touchy?’
After the visit, she’d take the train back to Stopstone, rearranging the day in her head as she planned what she would say to Pa and his brothers. Her day had been simply frightful, but it was over now. His brothers would telephone Stopstone that evening to hear how things had gone. They would be very manly and stern and careful of her.
He must get money for Lily, he thinks suddenly. Perhaps he ought to have allowed his mother to visit him. He could have tried to make her see that whatever she thought about him, it mustn’t affect Lily and the children. They are her grandchildren, for Christ’s sake. Lily’s mother, who has nothing, puts ten-shilling notes into birthday cards and sends each child a five-shilling book token at the start of the summer holidays. His own mother talks endlessly about the terrible drain of running Stopstone. She will pretend to think that Lily can manage perfectly well, with her job and the little house in Muswell Hill. He hasn’t told his parents that Lily has left London. He hasn’t even told Pargeter. The less that they know, he thinks, the better for Lily and the children.
Pargeter is running out of steam. Every case, even the most hopeless, can be transformed by conviction. He smiles at his own double-entendre. The other side will pick up every sign of weakness and make sure that the jury does too. They won’t even know why they don’t believe a word that comes out of Callington’s mouth; they simply won’t believe him.
There’s a smell to a case which has little to do with the facts. And this one not only smells bad, but the facts are against Callington as well. He’s as stubborn as a mule, and refuses to accept that the jury will want to know a little more than that ‘someone’ must have put the camera in his desk, although he has no idea who that someone might be, or why they might want to incriminate him. Pargeter taps his pen cap. The whole thing stinks to high heaven.
If he had any choice in the matter he wouldn’t put Simon Callington on the stand. He might well come apart spectacularly. Pargeter has his reputation to consider. He can’t afford to be made a B. F. by Simon Callington in Court No. 1. Clients who hold back material facts from their own defence and think that they won’t be pulled apart by the other side are the worst, and thank God he hasn’t had to deal with too many of those in his career. Soon, it’s going to be time to have a very frank word indeed with Callington. And now there are the Portland arrests. God knows whether that will make matters better or worse for Simon. The evidence against the Portland trio looks as if it will be pretty damning. Anyone who reads the newspapers – any jury – will now know that spies can perfectly well live next door, in a bungalow in Ruislip, without a cloak or dagger in sight. Or in a terraced house in Muswell Hill. But on the other hand that bungalow seems to have been an Aladdin’s Cave of evidence, whereas at the Callington home they found nothing at all. So it cuts both ways.
Even so, Pargeter is losing hope of getting home on this one.
After conviction, Simon knows that he might be sent to the other end of the country. How will Lily manage then? She’d have to find the fares to visit him, on top of all the other expenses. She said she was pleased about the rent that she’d negotiated with the Americans, but still worried about how their savings were dwindling. She’s found a part-time job as housekeeper to a retired solicitor called Austin, who had lost his wife in April. It always amuses him when people use that expression, as if the wife might be somewhere in the attic or coal cellar, waiting to be found. The solicitor’s house was already going to pot. A nice man, Lily said. When she went for her interview, she found him in the scullery with his sleeves rolled up, peeling potatoes with a scout knife. He had taken off so much peel that there was hardly any potato left to cook.
She was happy with the housekeeping job. Things were cheap in East Knigge, compared to London. The woodshed was
almost full. The farm sold milk and eggs for two-thirds of what they cost in Muswell Hill. They wanted to charge her visitors’ rates at first, because they knew she was from London, but they didn’t try that any more.
‘What do people there think you’ve done with your husband?’ he asked Lily on her last visit.
‘I don’t know,’ she said.
‘Perhaps they think you’re a brave little widow.’
Her mouth twitched, but she answered calmly, ‘Of course they don’t think that. Why should they?’
‘The children must say something at school.’
‘I don’t think anyone’s very curious. We’re outside the village, and the lane doesn’t go anywhere. Only to the beach. Nobody sees us. You might be coming home every weekend, for all they know.’
She had put a card in the village shop window, advertising private French lessons.
‘Do you think that’s a good idea?’ he asked.
‘How else am I going to get pupils? I’ve written to the grammar school in St Mary Regis but I haven’t heard anything.’
‘Simmery Regis? Is that where Paul will go?’
‘It’s Saint Mary really, but they say Simmery.’
And so do you now, he thought. She was picking up local ways. God knows what people in a little village in Kent thought when they saw a postcard advertising French lessons. He kept getting pictures in his head and they wouldn’t go away. There was Lily in front of him, sitting on one of the mean iron-framed chairs that were put out for visitors. She wore her navy suit and her hair was up in a chignon. She looked cool and remote but he knew that she had dressed like this on purpose, to give herself confidence as she walked in through the gates. She glanced from side to side, nervously. Her mouth was set.
He knew he should praise her courage and good sense. It was all he could have expected and more, but his heart was so flooded with bitterness that he didn’t dare open his mouth. He could do nothing for Lily or the children. The more he tried, the more he was a drag on them. He’d suggested to Lily, before they went to East Knigge, that it might be a good idea to change the children’s surname. His name would be in all the papers when the trial came on. The children would be going to a new school, and it was a chance for a fresh start. She’d refused. The children were who they were. She could never explain to them why they couldn’t be Callingtons any longer.
‘But you changed your name when you came to England,’ he’d said. ‘You changed your language. That was a much bigger thing. You told me that you never spoke German, even at home. You changed your whole life.’
‘That was different. It was to fit in, not to hide anything.’ Even as she said it, she wasn’t sure it was true. They had hidden themselves in Englishness. Her mother had known what they had to do.
But Simon knew what English villages were like. As soon as the trial opened, someone would see the name Callington in the papers. There would be details about his family. They might even say that his wife and children had left the family home in Muswell Hill for an unknown destination. Journalists used that kind of language, to make something perfectly innocent sound sinister. Anybody who lived in an English village miles from anywhere and had never been to London would be perfectly capable of putting two and two together in less time than it took to walk home from the village shop, newspaper under arm. Not very curious! They’d have been talking about her for weeks. A woman with three children, suddenly appearing in East Knigge, with no connection to the place, no sign of any husband, not much money from the look of it, taken a job with Mr Austin, shouldn’t wonder if she was after his money. Nothing would be said to Lily. No questions would be asked, but the news would seep into every house in the village. Lily would be watched, weighed up, judged and condemned.
He must say something, he thinks now. There she sat on the chair. She had travelled for four hours to get here. She looked tired.
‘The children like the cottage,’ she said. ‘They finish school at half past three and then they run down to the beach and don’t come back until dark. They collect driftwood and last week they found some sea coal. There was a colliery near the beach once, apparently, and coal washes up. Paul seems to know all about it.’
‘I can imagine.’
‘Sally told me that the teacher asked all the children who had ever been to London to put up their hands. Only two hands went up.’
‘Sally’s and Paul’s?’
‘No. There were two others, out of sixteen. People don’t go anywhere.’
She’d already told him that there were only thirty children in the whole school. Bridget was in the Infants’ class, and the elder two were together in the Junior class.
‘Thank God Paul took the Eleven-plus in London.’
‘He says they don’t bother much about it. No one’s gone to the grammar from East Knigge for three years.’
Lily didn’t add that the children’s accents were already changing.
‘I can’t be Queenie, I gotter git ‘ome,’ she’d heard Bridget yell across the playground. No, it wasn’t quite ‘git’. It was a new sound that she’d never heard from Bridget before. Lily had opened her mouth to correct Bridget, but caught the words back. She herself had done the same when she first came to England. Lili had become Lily.
‘I brought you some soap,’ she said, ‘but they wouldn’t allow it. I gave in a postal order too.’
‘You shouldn’t have done that. You and the children need all you’ve got.’ His anger had risen again. How could she be so naïve as to think they’d let her bring in a cake of soap? ‘And I don’t want money.’
‘It was stupid about the soap. I can see that now,’ she said, looking down at her lap. She was upset. Why hadn’t he been nicer about the soap? he asked himself. They were terrible, these visits. You could say nothing. It was as if he wanted to hurt her, because they were so terrible. He could not stop thinking of her in another man’s kitchen, peeling potatoes for him.
‘You’d better go,’ he said. ‘It’s going to take you hours to get back, and the children are on their own. What if it started to snow again and the trains were cancelled?’
‘They’d be all right. There are three of them; they look after one another.’
‘They have to, I suppose.’
She looked up and her eyes flashed. ‘I’m doing my best for them, Simon.’
‘For God’s sake, I know you are.’ Was he supposed to keep on praising her, cheering her on? Visiting time was almost over. He half rose from his seat, then sat again. He felt utterly defeated, as if they had been apart for a thousand years. She knew it. Her mouth quivered. ‘I’m sorry, Lil,’ he said.
Eagerly, instantly, she answered, ‘It’s all right,’ even though she must have known, they both knew, that nothing was right. ‘I’ll come again next Thursday.’
‘It’s too far for you to come every week. You look worn out.’
‘I want to come.’ And then, to his amazement, she leaned forward and said in a murmur that he could only just make out, like the murmur of the exercise yard, ‘Seeing you is the only thing that keeps me going.’
She needed him. She didn’t mind the hours on the train or the cold eyes of the female warders, brought to search female visitors. She was fumbling with her gloves now. Soon she would walk out into the grey January afternoon, but he wasn’t angry with her now. All that had dissolved. He felt as if she were Bridget venturing to school for the very first time, her hand in his, and then saying, ‘You can go now, Daddy,’ when he could see that her whole being longed to hide itself in him. She had to go. He wanted to lift her to him, hold her, keep her.
‘Put your scarf on,’ he said to Lily. ‘Don’t get cold.’
22
The Full Picture
In Kent the snow lies thick and the light is yellow. After school, Sally, Paul and Bridget race to the end of the lane and on to the pebbled beach. They never go straight home unless it is pouring with rain. It doesn’t rain as much here as it used to in London, and it’s
colder. The other children talk about being snowed-in, and the time that the school bus got stuck in a snowdrift.
Mum is never there after school. One day a week she goes to London, to see Dad. The other afternoons she is at Bourne House, looking after Mr Austin.
‘Can’t he cook his own dinner?’ asked Bridget rudely.
‘He is paying me, Bridget. It’s a job. Besides, he’s a nice man. His wife died nine months ago, and he’s very lonely. Once I’ve got everything straight up there, I shan’t be working every afternoon. I’ll finish after I’ve washed up his lunch things.’
The three children look at each other. How many months has Dad been gone now? Not as many as six. Not even three, but it seems as if years have passed since the time when six o’clock meant Mum running upstairs to comb her hair because Dad would soon be home. When they look back they almost feel sorry for those idiots, that other Paul, Sally and Bridget, who didn’t know any better than to think their lives would go on like that for ever.
They go to the beach most days, and scour up and down the tideline for driftwood. Once they found a plank that must have been eight feet long, and they dragged it home. Paul has learned to use the axe to chop wood, but for the plank he needed the saw. They aren’t the only ones who scavenge for wood. Sometimes the beach is dotted with dark, crouching figures who drag sacks behind them. They are not friendly. When the sea coal washed up after a weekend of rough weather, everybody pounced at once. Some had waders so they could go deeper and get the most coal. You have to dry it out or it won’t burn properly. Mum doesn’t understand any of this. She thinks they go to the beach for fun.
When it gets dark they have to go back to the cottage, and then it’s Paul’s job to light the fire and stoke up the stove. Sally makes the children’s tea: bread and butter, jam sometimes, boiled eggs sometimes, cake if Mum made one at the weekend, cocoa. They all have second helpings of everything at school dinners.
Exposure Page 21