I gestured to the phone. ‘Ring down and tell them. They’ll find you something more suitable. But I thought you’d want a bit of company.’
In fact, I’d wanted to keep an eye on her, and a shared room seemed to be the obvious way. Friendship didn’t enter into it. I wasn’t yet certain of my own feelings on this matter. It was she who’d seemed to be in need of a friend — but she didn’t encourage this sentiment.
‘Why did you follow me here?’ she demanded.
I shrugged. ‘You seemed to be in trouble.’
‘Nobody asked you.’
‘Nobody had the time. I had to make a decision.’
She pouted, dismissing the decision. ‘It’s none of your damned business.’
‘I’m interested. You seemed to need help.’ I was still being very gentle with her, determined not be be insulted into retreat.
‘You? Who’re you to help?’ she demanded, crossing quickly to the window and looking out. ‘Nobody asked you,’ she repeated.
But I could remember that expression in her eyes. ‘I had the idea we were friends,’ I suggested quietly. ‘At least, I’ve got a shoulder you can cry on.’
She whirled on me. ‘Cry? Who wants to friggin’ cry? I need to strangle somebody, kick a door down, smash something.’
‘It’s not in the script.’
‘Then tell me how they knew!’ she challenged. ‘They were waiting. I haven’t been in England for ten years. But they were waiting. Some bastard tipped ‘em off. If it was Jay, I’ll kill him.
I swear it.’ She thrust a cigarette between her lips, snapped the lighter at it, and nearly choked herself trying to speak at the same time. ‘After ten bleedin’ years!’ she gasped.
‘So it must be important.’
‘What?’
‘That the police still wanted you. That’s what makes it important.’
‘For questioning. Questioning.’
‘It must matter to them, though.’
‘Yeah — to them. They call it murder. They can’t even prove he’s dead, though.’
‘Who?’ I almost breathed it. We were getting to basics.
‘My father. Where’s the blasted bathroom?’
‘That door there.’
She flung a small case on to the right-hand bed and ransacked it for what she wanted, drifting underwear all over the floor. Then she marched into the bathroom.
‘No bloody shower!’ she shouted.
‘Have a good soak then. And hurry it up. I want a bath, too.’
I heard the water flowing. ‘Ye gods, it’s brown!’ she howled.
‘It’ll run clear.’ I went to stand in the doorway. Stripped, she demonstrated the fact that she needed no artificial aids for her figure. Slim, perfectly proportioned, beautiful. Why is it that some people have the lot? It just is not fair! She settled herself in for a good old soak, as I’d suggested, so it soon became clear that I’d have to wait a long while for my turn. She was a wallower. We would be too late for dinner downstairs, and I was starving. But I waited, and I listened, because the water soothed her and the fury soaked out of her, and she gave me the facts I’d been dying for. Threw them at me. Discarded facts.
‘My mother died,’ she told me, ‘when I was about four. There were two of us, me and my sister Tonia, two years younger than me. I say mom died. I still don’t know. We were little kids ... I suppose my father didn’t know what to tell us. Said she’d gone away, then later, when I was about twelve, he changed it to died. But I’d heard. You know, around the town. She’d gone away with a man. But it doesn’t sound right, does it? A mother leaving two little girls! No. I didn’t know what to think.’
It didn’t sound right to me, either. I said, ‘So it was your father who brought you up?’
‘If you can call it that. Oh, it’s all right when you’re little, but he was… well, funny. You know. With girls. The odd pat on the behind that was close to a squeeze, and touching, touching… Hell, I’ve lost the soap. Where’s the bloody soap?’
Oh God, I thought. Not that! ‘And as you got older?’ I prompted.
She seemed to answer a different question. ‘He was one of these easy-going types. Always good for a laugh, my father was. Good old Rowley, they called him. Rowland, really. Rowland Fields. He thought he could get away with anything if he made a joke out of it, and usually he did. Like when we were older, me and Tonia. I was seventeen, she fifteen. We shared a double bedroom. Great friends. I hear that’s rare with two sisters. Supposed to fight like cat and dog. Jealousy or something.’
She stepped delicately from the bath, wrapping herself in a huge towel. ‘You can have the bath, now,’ she said grandly.
‘Thank you.’ But the transition didn’t really suit me. I’d had control of the situation, standing in the bathroom doorway, but now the control would be hers. Yet now she was launched, swooping down the slipway of her memory, and nothing was going to stop her. She stood and watched as I stripped down. As a sister of a sister she would be used to it. Not I. The embarrassment was there.
‘You’ve got a good figure,’ she said. I couldn’t decide whether she was condescending. ‘Why the hell don’t you dress for it?’
‘I’m not out to make an impression.’
‘Make the best of what you’ve got,’ she advised. ‘And you’ve got it, kiddo.’
Kiddo! I stepped into the water, which was now running clear, averting my face to hide my reaction. She was treating me as her kid sister, blast her. The bath was old-fashioned, huge, perched on four legs. The hotel supplied bath oil, but Bella had used most of it.
‘Shared a room, you said,’ I prompted.
‘Well yes. Did I? Yes, I did. You know, two girls together, we romped a bit, had fun. But father, he used to come bursting in. Didn’t matter if we were in the rude. He’d just shout out, “Hello, girls. In the pink I see,” and try to get his hands on you. All fun, of course. Good, clean fun. But it wasn’t so funny for us.
‘You could’ve put a bolt on the door.’
‘We did. You can bet your life on that. But he had it off. Said he wasn’t having any secrets in his house. But a girl’s got secrets. He was a filthy pig, no getting away from it. We hated him.’
‘I can understand that,’ I said, just to keep her going. I’d met them, covering their leery attitude with a veneer of snide joviality. Great fun, girls, let’s see you laughing.
She walked away into the room, but she didn’t stop talking. Perhaps she didn’t want to face me with this part of it. ‘I came home one day. Growing up by then, we were — I could fend him off. He knew he had to watch for my knee. Tonia was more scared. Like a rabbit. I walked into our room and his hands were all over her. Swine! I near brained him with a vase. That kept him away for a while. It seemed to make up our minds for us. We’d been talking about walking out on him, you see. I’d been doing some acting, and Tonia wanted to be a model or something, and that room of ours got to feel like a prison. We couldn’t ever be alone in it — had to stay together.’
She was back at the bathroom door now. The water was cooling. She leaned on the door frame, a cigarette between her fingers, lounging, floozy-like. One of her poses. I realized, now, why she’d objected to the double room. It brought back unwelcome memories, with me as the surrogate sister.
‘Not much chance for either of you in this town,’ I suggested.
‘It’s a dead hole, no getting away from that. You finished?’
‘About. So you both left him, I suppose.’
‘The other way round,’ she told me casually. ‘He went first. What time’s dinner?’
‘About two hours ago.’
She threw back her head and laughed. ‘We’ll have to go out on the town.’ Abruptly she seemed years younger.
‘In what way’, I asked, towelling briskly, ‘do you mean? The other way round, you said. He went first.’
‘Oh… him! Yeah. Well, we’d told him - it’d come to that point - told him it was him or us. Said we’d kill him. There
were so many other things involved, you’d never believe. He was out and around with half the women in this dump, but we weren’t supposed to have men friends. So we made the situation clear. And he went. Probably with a woman.’
‘Went?’
‘Here one day, not the next. It was like heaven. The police thought we’d done him in,’ she said casually.
‘But Roma… Bella… a grown man can disappear if he likes. It’s not a police matter. So why are we talking about murder?’
‘Do we have to go on nattering about him?’
‘They were waiting for you at Southampton. Why?’
‘Drop it, shall we?’
‘Why?’ I repeated, following her into the room. ‘Why was murder suspected?’
‘Because,’ she said, staring me in the eyes, ‘he left with nothing. Took no clothes, no money, and his bank account wasn’t touched. He hadn’t taken anything to drive in, and he had a choice. Had a garage - did I tell you that? No? Well, he did. But he didn’t take a car, didn’t catch a bus, didn’t take a train from the station. Just went. Phutt! Like that.’
‘I see.’
But she seemed to dismiss it from her mind, pouncing on one of her cases, throwing it beside the other on the bed and foraging in it for what she wanted. I noticed that she’d instinctively chosen the right-hand bed, as though this had been so when she’d shared with her sister, Tonia.
‘We’ll go to Fletcher’s,’ she told me, her mood suddenly changing. Years seemed to have fallen from her. She was a teenager, rushing to throw something on for a date.
‘Famous, Fletcher’s is.’ She straightened, holding a T-shirt against her ample chest. I Love George Bush, it declared. ‘Fish and chips,’ she said. ‘A restaurant. Don’t wear your sable jacket.’
‘Haven’t got one. You wearing those jeans, are you?’
On the face of it they looked tatty old things, but when she’d fought her way into them I realized they’d been tailored for her. That and the T-shirt, and (having glanced out of the window and checked it was still raining) a short and possibly waterproof jacket, and she was ready, an eager and sparkling young woman, all set for a great adventure.
‘I can’t match that lot,’ I said, hunting for my oldest slacks.
She was doing something to her face, standing in front of the mirror set in the door of the ancient wardrobe. I was slipping on a jumper and my anorak. It would be cold outside. When she turned she was eighteen again, and all in a few seconds. I’d have expected her to spend hours on make-up, but… a deep red lipstick, too much eye-shadow, a touch to her eyelashes, and there she was, a bubbling teenager going out for a meal at a fish and chip restaurant, and it was suddenly the highlight of her dreary life. She bounced with immature excitement.
‘A headscarf,’ she suggested. ‘Your hair will be ruined.’
Not mine. Nothing would budge it. But she flu7g a silk square over her own hair and tied it beneath her chin. She’d gone back a dozen years, physically and emotionally. We clattered down the marble staircase, clattered through the lobby and into the drizzle and mist of the main street, almost deserted now, the lamps dim, the shops with mesh-protected windows. She took my arm. We were Bella and Tonia, walking the tired streets. Almost instinctively, I checked. A shadow followed us on the opposite pavement.
‘Three weeks we stayed on,’ she told me, apparently picking up the thread of her story. ‘They warned us not to leave the district. Questioning. When they found anything to question us about, and they didn’t find much. So there we were, hanging about, wasting time, when I’d got a chance at a stage production in Dublin. Why they’d picked on us, I don’t know. They knew we’d hated him, we told ‘em that, but so did half the town. He could laugh anything off, most of the time, but there were other things… it’s down here.’
She did an abrupt right turn. Now we seemed to be on the far edge of the town. The street-lights were more economically spread. A hundred yards away, light spilled out on the pavement. Groups cluttered the gutters, scattering paper and chips.
She pushed through them, throwing out the odd, ‘Hi!’ As though she’d seen them the evening before. It wasn’t Fletcher’s any more, it was Soo Long’s. But the expertise had been preserved; the atmosphere, hot and oily, was solidly there. We pushed past the take-away into the rear, the restaurant. Formica-topped tables, tubular steel chairs, ketchup and HP Sauce bottles with messy tops. It was crowded. We had to share a table with two sex-starved kids, who couldn’t wait to get out into the night.
She was known, remembered. She was our Bella. The older people leaned over and chatted with greasy lips. Our Bella. I didn’t think they knew her as Roma Felucci. After all, she now looked ten years younger than Roma, and the star of Colossus would be seen as ‘just like our Bella’. But it was all too close, too difficult to make the mental adjustment that it was a local girl who had become a famous American actress, who could not possibly be sitting now in a fish and chip restaurant down the dingy side street, splashing vinegar on her chips.
When the young couple left we had the table to ourselves for a few minutes. Bella had cod and chips and mushy peas, me the plaice. The batter was crisp, the fish melted in the mouth. I asked casually, ‘And where is she now?’
‘What? Who?’ She was handling a huge mug of tea like an expert, her eyes huge over the rim.
‘Your sister. Tonia.’
‘God knows. She got tired of waiting for the coppers to let us go. She just went. Like my father.’
‘Went? In the same way, you mean? No luggage or anything.’
‘How far would she’ve got, carrying a case? They were watching the house. She just said to me, “I can’t stick this anymore, Bell.” One night, this was. In the morning she’d gone.’
Then she deliberately turned her mental back on the subject.
This evening was her nostalgia trip. The good old days — which sounded lousy to me. We called into a pub on the way back. Even more, she was recognized there. There were her contemporaries. There was not one mention of Colossus. She was the teenager they’d known. Certainly, now with a few drinks inside her and her hair flying loose, her mouth a bit loose too, she was three thousand miles from Roma Felucci.
I had difficulty getting her back to the hotel, difficulty getting her up the stairs. She was giggling, maudlin — alternating.
I tucked her up in bed. Her bed. Half asleep, she muttered, ‘G’night, Tonia.’ I thought she was weeping.
In the morning she was terrible. I had difficulty forcing her back into reality, but over breakfast she recovered a little. ‘I’ll take you out in the car,’ I offered. ‘A look at the countryside.’
‘Ugh!’ she replied, and, ‘Why go out?’ she grumbled, in the lobby.
‘We’ll go mad, sitting around in here.’
‘The police...’
‘I know. They’ll be watching you. Let’s give ‘em a run for their money.’
She brightened. It appealed. ‘Yes. Let’s do that.’
The drizzle outside was so fine it felt like a damp cloth on my face. The mist was constantly changing, plunging us into heavy gloom, then lightening. Easing the car out of the yard behind the hotel, I asked, ‘Which way?’
‘I’ll show you the house.’
‘Oh… goodee.’ I didn’t want to see the blighted place.
‘Left, then right when we get to the crossroads.’
I wished I hadn’t suggested it. The visibility was tricky, the wipers seeming to do nothing. It was as though the glass was permanently misted.
‘I only stayed another fortnight,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘After Tonia left. There was this offer in Dublin, see.’
‘You mentioned it.’
‘I sneaked off and caught a train. Easy.’
I’d had the impression that Jay had come for her. Or was that to Dublin? Perhaps she’d so slanted the truth for the police that it was no longer real and solid. It was no wonder they’d been waiting for her.<
br />
‘And you’ve heard from her since?’
‘Who? Oh… Tonia. No. How could I? I didn’t know where she’d gone and she didn’t know where I had.’
‘She’d have recognized you in Colossus, though.’
‘I suppose. Turn right here, and then left, under the trees.’ Under the trees it was worse. I put on the lights, but they weren’t much help.
‘Hold on,’ she said suddenly. Her hand clamped on my arm. ‘There was a row of cottages...’
I stopped. She wound down her window. ‘They’ve gone.’ The loss seemed to choke her.
I drove on, slower now because she seemed disorientated. ‘The chapel!’ she cried out. ‘Where’s the old chapel?’ It was as though it’d been taken away to annoy her.
There was a throbbing in the air that I couldn’t identify. Theoretically, we were in a quiet residential area, running into country. But there was an undeterminable noise. The right-hand side of the road was piled high with earth, bricks, chunks of wood.
‘Where is it?’ she moaned as we drifted along.
‘There!’ I said, leaning forward. ‘Isn’t that a house? Up on the left. Short drive. Is that it?’
‘Yes, yes. But there were trees,’ she whispered. ‘What’ve they done with our trees?’
I left the Rover nose-in to the drive, as I didn’t think I could drive up it. There was nothing but mud, where the trees each side had been torn up by the roots, leaving earth and stray rootlets now under our feet. Bella clambered out of the car in a panic, trying to run but slipping, falling to her knees and struggling up again. The roaring, snarling noise was louder now, just beyond our vision to the right. She was whimpering and moaning, heading towards the heavy dark shadow that was the house, tripping on the first step because she was looking up, looking round, everywhere but at her feet.
The front steps were crumbling. There was no front door. The bay window to the right, which was about as far as I could see, was glassless, the frame smashed. I followed her into the hall, but slower. The wood block floor was slimy and damp, the blocks lifting. Bella ran for the stairs, but I managed to reach her and hang on to her arm. The banisters were sagging, the treads broken in places.
Bury Him Darkly Page 3