The Italian Girl

Home > Other > The Italian Girl > Page 11
The Italian Girl Page 11

by Patricia Hall


  “Do you want me to bath you?” she asked, but Daniel shook his head gravely.

  “We’re allowed to go by ourselves now so long as I test the water with my fingers before we get in.”

  “You’re growing up, Daniel,” Laura said. Nathan, the younger brother, chubbier and more devil-may-care, was already struggling out of his tee-shirt, his eyes sparkling in anticipation.

  “Come on, Danny,” he commanded. “Hurry up.”

  When the boys had gone upstairs, Laura stretched out with a groan.

  “Bad day?” Vicky asked, wiping Naomi Laura’s sticky mouth and settling her in a baby-chair on the floor before pouring two generous vodka and tonics.

  “One way and another,” Laura said, taking her glass circumspectly, aware that tears were not far away.

  “What is it?” Vicky asked softly, sitting down on the floor close to her daughter who was burbling sleepily. “Is Michael giving you a hard time. I thought when he moved in you might be able to pin him down at last.”

  “Michael? No, he’s just very busy,” Laura said. “In late and out again very early this morning. Par for the course.”

  “So?” Vicky pressed. “Come on, Laura. Something’s wrong. You can’t fool me.”

  “It’s Joyce,” Laura said, her voice breaking dangerously. “I went to see her at lunch-time and she seemed quite poorly. She hates it in that place and usually she’s full of it, how awful the matron is, how badly the more helpless residents are being treated, how she’ll have their guts for garters before she has the place closed down. But today she seemed just apathetic, somehow. As if she didn’t care any more. And then she fell asleep in her chair, looking so old and worn out that I couldn’t bear it.”

  “It doesn’t sound like the Joyce we all know and love,” Vicky said.

  “I spoke to the matron and she just said it was old age. They all went like that in the end. But not Joyce! I’ve got to get her out of there, Vicky. It’s doing her no good. It’s killing her.”

  “What about a private home?”

  “This is a private home, but the council pays for the places. Anyway, she’d hate to go private completely,” Laura said morosely. “And I certainly can’t afford it on my salary. I think I’ll have to talk to my father.”

  “It’s his responsibility more than yours,” Vicky said.

  “I don’t think he quite sees it like that,” Laura said. “She’s always turned down his offers of help. He’s just as pig-headed as she is.”

  “Runs in the family,” Vicky said, laughing.

  “Well, one of us is going to have to swallow our pride,” Laura said.

  “Stay to supper? David will be home soon.” Laura shook her head regretfully. She seemed to find little time these days for these, the friends she had shared her student days with.

  “I’d better get back in case Michael comes in wanting something to eat,” she said.

  “How very domestic,” Vicky mocked. “It sounds as if the taming is coming on a treat to me.” Their eyes met for a moment and neither of them was smiling. Laura stood up quickly, picked up her namesake and gave the sleepy child a fleeting kiss, knowing that anything more would betray her completely..

  “I should be so lucky,” she said with a lightness she did not feel. “I must go, though. Love to David, and you take care of your mummy, Naomi Laura. You’re both precious.” Vicky took back her daughter and stood at the front door with her in her arms, watching Laura as she drove away.

  “Bloody men,” she said into the baby’s silky red hair. “Why do even the best of them end up behaving badly?”

  It was after midnight again when Michael Thackeray returned to Laura’s flat, but this time he found her sitting in front of the television watching a late film, wearing the silky pyjamas of soft gold which they both knew he liked to the point of distraction. She turned slightly in her chair and watched him as he hung up his coat and saw at once that her preparations might have been in vain. He looked gray with fatigue and avoided her eyes as he went into the kitchen and came back with a glass of milk.

  “You’re up late,” he said, flinging himself into an armchair. “Are you not working tomorrow?”

  “As ever,” she said. “There’s the grand opening of the movie museum coming up and I haven’t nearly finished my profile of John Blake. But I didn’t think I’d sleep if I went to bed.” She flicked the TV off.

  “I need to talk to you,” she said, unaware of the effect her words had on his heart-rate in spite of the resolute distance he was keeping.

  “Can it wait till tomorrow?” he asked. “I’m shattered. There’s been a death which could be linked to the murder of the Italian girl. But it’s the devil’s own job to know where to start with an inquiry that’s forty year’s old.”

  “Then indirectly we’re into the same problem,” she said, and his sense of panic subsided slightly. “Joyce can help you with that one, I’m sure she can, but I’ve got to get her out of that place she’s in. The matron, superintendent or whatever she calls herself, must have done her training in Holloway, by the look of her. I swear I’ll do a major piece on granny-bashing, but not till I’ve got Joyce well out of her clutches.”

  “Come on, Laura, it can’t be as bad as all that,” Thackeray said wearily, knowing as soon as he had uttered the words that they were a serious mistake. Laura’s cheeks flushed pink and her eyes sparkled.

  “It can be and it bloody well is,” she said with conviction. “It might even be police business. I think they’re doing something to keep them quiet. Tranquillisers, probably. Joyce just wasn’t herself today. I’ve never known her so quiet and depressed.”

  “If she - or you - are going to make allegations like that you need some concrete evidence, “ Thackeray said. “She may still be suffering from shock after her fall. It can take people a long time to get over an accident at that age.”

  “It’s more than that. I’m going to call my father tomorrow,” Laura said flatly. “I want him to come over and help me sort this out.”

  “I’ll not say no to that, though it might cost me a trip to Portugal,” Thackeray said quietly. “I think I want to talk to him myself. It looks as if I’ll have to talk to everyone who knew the Italian girl after all, and that includes your father.”

  “He was only a child,” Laura said. “I can’t imagine he’ll remember very much.”

  “Everyone remembers where they were on the day of the Coronation, I’m told,” Thackeray said. “It’s like the day Kennedy was shot or Maggie Thatcher resigned.”

  Laura grinned.

  “I got so drunk that night,” she said pensively. “We had a celebration party after work. David Mendelson always said he’d dance in the streets the day she went, so we made him do it - not something you often see an august member of the legal profession do. It’s just a pity things didn’t improve. Still, we live in hope with the new lot.”

  “Your father will remember Coronation Day,” Thackeray said. He did not share Laura’s intermittent faith in the political process, a legacy of a childhood hero-worship of her combative grandmother.

  “Joyce will remember more,” Laura said. “But you’d better catch her while she can remember anything at all.” Her face reflected the return of the anxiety which had gnawed her all day. She looked bereft, Thackeray thought, and the fear that he could only offer her more pain twisted like a knife in his stomach.

  “Do you want me to go?” Thackeray asked, not looking at her.

  “Go? What do you mean? Go where?”

  “Leave. So that you can bring Joyce to stay here.” Laura looked at him with such a mixture of shock and disbelief that it hit him like a physical blow.

  “You know I never want you to leave,” she said, her voice choked with emotion. “Joyce can’t live here, three floors up. We’ve talked about that. You know it’s not an option.” She moved to sit beside him and he responded to her embrace in spite of himself.

  “Are you trying to seduce me?” he said eventual
ly.

  “Do I need to?” she asked, unbuttoning his shirt and running her hands possessively down his naked back. Just for a moment he hesitated before accepting that there was nothing he could do to resist. But as his mouth closed over hers and he wrapped her in his arms a small, chilly voice at the back of his mind reminded him of all that he had intended to say that night, which would now remain unsaid, and of how much he despised himself.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Laura drove up to the Laurels at lunch-time the next day and went in, leaving her car engine running and the passenger door open. She found her grandmother in the hall-way in her wheelchair and her heart contracted in pain as she saw how shrunken and frail Joyce looked.

  “Are you ready?” she asked, glancing around for help to get Joyce out of the building and into the car. “Is there no-one here? Are you warm enough in that jacket?”

  “It’s never warm in this place,” Joyce said with surprising asperity, and Laura realised that although she appeared to be lolling wearily in her chair her eyes were bright. “You sound just like my mother, and that’s going back a bit,” Joyce whispered. “Now you listen to me. Pick up those crutches by the door so we don’t have to take this dratted chair….”

  “I think there’s room for it in the car…”

  “Not with Alice in as well there isn’t,” Joyce said. “Alice is coming with us, but we’ll have to pick her up round the back. I don’t want anyone to see us.”

  “Alice?” Laura said.

  “Alice Smith. She used to live near me. They’ve put her on these pills that they tried to get me to take. But I flushed mine down the lav this morning. Shut up pills, I call them. Keep folk quiet when they’ve no business being quiet.”

  “We can’t take her out without telling anyone,” Laura protested weakly, not needing much of a push to let her outrage at what her grandmother was saying overcome her scruples about deceiving the staff of The Laurels.

  “Why not?” Joyce administered the push sharply. “We’re over twenty-one. This isn’t a prison, as far as I’m aware. Why the heck shouldn’t we go out if we want to?”

  “Pensioners’ lib, is it?” Laura’s delight at seeing her grandmother apparently restored to something like normality finally overcame her qualms. “Where do you want me to take you then?”

  “Up to my place,” Joyce said firmly. “I can cope up there on the level. I know you’ve got to go back to work, pet, but we can wait there till you’ve finished and then you can come and fetch us.”

  “I’d take the afternoon off but I have to go to a do at the town hall about tourism and the cinema museum. I simply can’t miss that.”

  “Don’t you fret. We’ll be fine,” Joyce said. “Just you get that man of yours up to Peter Hill an’all. He wants to know about Peter Street on Coronation Day, doesn’t he? Well, Alice and I’ll tell him, don’t you worry. I reckon there’s not a lot Alice and I can’t remember about what was going on in those flats if we put our minds to it. You’ll see. I got her to promise not to take her pills either, so she’ll be in her right mind, all being well.”

  Laura pushed Joyce out into the car-park and helped her, with difficulty, into the back seat of the Beetle. She noticed how Joyce winced with pain as she tried to arrange her limbs comfortably to accommodate the plastered leg.

  “Have you not had your pain-killers?” she asked. Joyce shook her head, her lips compressed.

  “Chucked them away too,” she said. “I’ll take nothing in there. They’re different from the ones my doctor prescribed and I won’t have my head interfered with by that woman.”

  Laura glanced back at the blank windows of the nursing home but did not comment. She would, she determined, make an opportunity soon to find out just what was going on at The Laurels. For now it would have to be enough to get Joyce and her friend away for a while. Joyce might joke about her sounding like her mother, but she suspected that she was as aware as she was herself that their relationship was inexorably changing as time went by. Joyce might hope she could still lead where Laura would follow, but increasingly Laura knew that she was taking the decisions for Joyce.

  “Where’s Alice?” she asked.

  “She’s waiting round the back by the kitchen door,” Joyce said. “You can drive round. There’ll be no-one about now. We’ve had our dinner and the kitchen staff go home after. They only give us a cold tea and the care assistants dish that up, what there is of it. Bread and scrape usually but most of them are too far gone to complain. There’s not one of those girls in a union, you know? Thirty bob an hour and not one of them in a union.”

  Joyce shook her head in incomprehension at the careless ways of the younger generation as Laura slipped the car into gear and drove slowly round to the back of the building. Sure enough a slight figure in a droopy purple cardigan and a long skirt of a colour grown indeterminate through too much washing was standing in the porch giving onto the back door.

  Laura got out of the car again and wrinkled her nose in disgust as she passed three enormous dust-bins overflowing with garbage. Her curiosity aroused, she looked through the doorway into the kitchens which even at a cursory glance she could see were littered with unwashed dishes and looked distinctly greasy. Alice Smith followed the direction of her horrified gaze, a malicious smile lighting up her face for a moment.

  “I’ve seen worse,” Alice said. “But not much. Old Mrs. Brook found a cockroach in her salad the other day, and she’s doolally enough to have eaten it if the care lass hadn’t spotted it in time. A bit crunchy, that would’ve been.”

  “Are they all on pills?” Laura asked faintly, as she absorbed the full extent of dirt and grime in the kitchen.

  “Most on’em,” Alice said. “Those that aren’t genuinely ga-ga, any road. And I expect they’re on summat to stop them roaming. Here, look, I kept mine this morning and I feel a sight better for it, an’ all.” She held out her hand to reveal two damp and slightly sticky white pills adhering to her palm. Laura took them off her, wrapped them in a paper tissue and stowed it away in her handbag. She would find out somehow just what it was Betty Johns was dosing her patients with, she thought to herself as she took Alice’s arm and steered her towards the car.

  “Come on, Alice,” Joyce called, leaning out of the car door perilously. “If you don’t get a move on Dracula’s daughter’ll notice we’re both AWOL and put us to bed without our supper.”

  Alice walked slowly over to the car and with some difficulty slotted stiff limbs into the passenger seat. She pulled at her cardigan fretfully as Laura fastened the seat-belt around her.

  “You know I never did have a purple cardy,” she said. “Horrible colour. I always hated it. This belongs to that poor Mrs. Ellis who died.”

  “So where are your own clothes?” Laura asked, crashing the car into gear and accelerating out of the home’s driveway at a speed which pushed her two passengers back into seats.

  “Steady on, love,” Joyce said. “There’s nowt to be gained by rescuing us from Morticia and putting us straight into hospital with multiple injuries.”

  “Sorry,” Laura said, flashing her grandmother a grin over her shoulder as she swung more circumspectly into the main road to begin the climb up to the council estate known universally in the town as Wuthering Heights where her grandmother lived in a bungalow in the shadow of three dilapidated tower blocks of flats. “It’s just the thought of them muddling your clothes up. You’ll be getting the wrong specs and dentures next.”

  “It’s been known,” Joyce said dryly.

  “Jesus wept,” Laura said, anger welling up like a red tide. She glanced at her watch.

  “I’ve got to be back at the office in fifteen minutes,” she said. “But I should be able to get away after the town hall tea-party. I’ll see you back at your place about four. Is that OK?”

  “She’ll have missed Alice by then,” Joyce said. “She’ll be throwing a wobbly. And a damn good thing too.”

  Laura had to admit that John Blake wa
s a pro. Exhibiting all the actor’s ability to blossom and glow under the lights, he had spent an hour glad-handing the middle-aged worthies of Bradfield’s municipal and theatrical establishments, joshing with the men, from the mayor in his heavy worsted to the chairman of the local arts committee in his too-tight denim, and indiscriminately flattering the women, from those in high heels and unwisely permed hair to the aging hippies in flowing florals and beads.

  Keith Spencer-Smith and Lorelei Baum had hovered in the background as their protege charmed his way around a reception at the Town Hall to promote Blake’s Jane Eyre project and the new museum. The cameras flashed encouragingly as Blake ended his charmingly modest speech with a self-deprecating anecdote about his near miss at the Oscars all of twenty years ago. John Blake’s fortuitous visit to Bradfield had been too good an opportunity to miss to promote tourism in Bronte country, Spencer-Smith confided. The Jane Eyre film and the new museum, to be opened in just two days, were a heaven-sent gift for Bradfield.

  “It was quite a coup to get a Hollywood star here,” she said. “You’ve known John Blake some time, then, have you?” “Yes, yes, I’ve met him before,” Spencer-Smith said. “In London. And I had a trip to Hollywood a few years ago.” Laura was about to probe further but her attention was distracted as Blake himself approached, flushed with pleasure at his reception, with Lorelei a step behind him, in a fuschia suit, cut low at the neck and short at the skirt above knee high patent boots.

  “Laura, darling, did I do all right, do you think?” Blake asked, catching up with her as she pulled open the heavy mahogany doors leading out to the town hall square.

 

‹ Prev