I wish I was like that, Helen thought later, still wondering what strange and guilty fit of domestic conscientiousness had led her to purchase the vegetables. There were some days in which a weary stupidity seemed to take over and she was easily mesmerised by a shop or a stall. I wish I was nineteen and careless, energetic and about to fall in love, adopt a new career, go out giggling and screwing men every night, although not perhaps the rookie policemen from the section house with their fresh and pimply faces. Geoffrey Bailey had once been one of those, and the thought stopped her in her tracks as she struggled from the bus and into the supermarket. The thought of Bailey did not bring joy: it brought instead a dull weight of anxious dread and a feeling of guilt.
Geoffrey Bailey was not by any manner of means a vain man, but his own embarrassment at the public vision of his beaten-up face made him feel uncomfortable. He should have been too old to care, and as Ryan had said, ‘You were scarcely an oil painting to begin with, were you, sir? Who do you think will notice?’ Ryan did not quite do him justice. Bailey’s appearance was never less than dignified. He was long and lean with a face of surprising asceticism for a man who knew how to handle himself in a fight, although the lines betrayed an age well beyond forty and a malnourished youth. Ryan had also been heard to say that Bailey got promoted because he looked so good in a suit, and that was not quite fair either. Ryan could not understand his master’s obsession with fairness and conscience in a world which was supplied with neither. Bailey looked impeccable and unyielding in a suit, frightening to some, unless he was decorated with the comic effect of a black eye above. The eye throbbed with the foolishness of its own existence and Bailey had endured quite enough teasing for one day. The rest of him smarted for reasons quite unconnected. Helen West was his lover (he hated the word mistress, which implied an element of financial dependence and there was certainly none of that), and he had been gratuitously unkind to her the night before. It did not matter that the unkindness was mutual, but he had called her unreliable, selfish, self-absorbed. There were other epithets, far more extreme, from which he had refrained and the guilt was for things left unsaid, for the pathetic failure even to have a proper row with pots and pans flying. It had ended with mutual apologies and witch hazel placed on his eye by Helen, using all the kindly and remote consideration of a nurse. Today had begun with promises of killing some fatted calf to celebrate his departure which he suspected she viewed with as much relief as sorrow. The guilt had inhabited his day and led him to the supermarket which he knew, by instinct rather than information, she would visit on the way back to her place. Her turn to cook.
He yawned. Your place, my place, no place to go. He was never in the right place to find the shirt which went with the tie. He might as well shack up in the back of a caravan in the middle of a field, that was what he had wanted to say the night before. I do not mind any of this, Helen, but could you please relinquish just a little more of yourself than you do? I admit being born forty-five years ago with the expectation that a woman might cook my supper for life; I have shed that hope and did not particularly like it when it was offered, but I would indeed like it if you occasionally volunteered, although I cook far better than you. It becomes the yardstick of what we feel about things, this business of shopping and feeding. Nor can I rid myself of a notion which you have proved absurd, namely that a woman should be soft and have an interest in babies by the age of thirty-five. You accord with none of my expectations. I love you dearly, but there are times, especially latterly, when I have to say it in order to feel it, and you do not say it at all. You have become brittle, my dearest, the sugar spun hard, but I cannot speak too loud, because ten years ago, before I recovered my compassion, let alone my sanity, I was as hard as nails.
Guilt for things unsaid had him standing in the light outside the supermarket against the backdrop of a dozen brazen advertisements, ‘Nescafé! 10p off! Jaffa oranges! 20p!’ Absently, fond of oranges, fonder still of tangerines which reminded him of the Christmas they had just had, he went indoors and selected oranges, grapefruit, apples, potatoes. At least he would leave her with some supplies.
He saw her behind aisle one (soaps, detergents, bleaches, toilet rolls), already overburdened with a briefcase and three white bags of bulging plastic. Even in this cruel light, she was beautifully distinctive. He saw her first in the television monitor which hung above the door; his height allowed him to see above the corridors of produce, and he had thought, Darling, you could never rob a bank, you are so unmistakable. A big wide forehead, with that faded scar disguised by worry lines, the thick, dark hair pulled back into a slide which could not quite contain it, and the face which had always reminded him of some exotic dancer blessed with oddly imperfect beauty and enormous eyes. You could not even guess her nationality with those saturnine looks, and here and now, despite the casual elegance of her fine, swinging coat, you could not guess the authority she held. She looked lost. She stood at the counter labelled FISH! paralysed with uncertainty. Supermarkets did this to her. On a market stall it was different, but here, she failed to function. In an instant, he understood her better, loved her better, though the liking was still in doubt. He saw that she had bought vegetables and so had he.
People looked at her, without her ever seeing, he noticed, but they were not drawn to a man with a black eye as he went his aberrant way, tipping all he had chosen back on to the fruit and vegetable aisle. He looked like a thief who had abandoned the expedition, a reprobate who could not pay, and he felt a fool, for being ludicrously tidy in his replacement of what he knew she had already bought, putting back potatoes with potatoes, fruit with the same breed of fruit, plastic bags where they belonged. Bailey, who was willing to bet she had selected worse produce from her stall and paid more, replaced his goods with an element of regret. Then he walked up to where she stood, still immobile. The red coat crumpled as he placed his hands around her waist and whispered in her ear.
‘Fancy a night on the town, then? Take you away from all this? Man with a black eye, asking for you.’
She did not move, leant back against him.
‘I never go out with strange men,’ she said. ‘I stay in. Do you want cod or plaice? I can’t even spell the others.’
They might answer to their names, but he doubted they could spell them. At ten past ten, Sergeant Morgan examined the relief for night shift, E division, King’s Cross. They paraded for duty in whatever shambolic order they chose and not for any other purpose than his counting them. You didn’t brief them these days. Although the sergeant would have liked it to be different, half of this relief were probationers, rookies from the country with accents you could cut with a knife and as far as he could see, scarcely a good one among them. He was grateful he did not have to examine their consciences, but counting them was easy. Out of ten, three were missing. Those present, who had come via various routes to work, could not explain the absence of the contingent from the section house.
Sergeant Morgan sent the oldest constable, PC Michael, all of twenty-four, a handsome pugilist with a broken nose, and a temperament of surprising gentleness until he approached a fight and even then he seemed able to control his scarred fists. Michael was of a size which looked ridiculous in a panda car and the bulk of him made the door of the section house appear small by comparison.
Inside, PC Michael could smell the conflict although the place looked as empty as a closed shop. Late turn, the two-till-ten shift, were still on their way home, while early turn, who would work from eight till two tomorrow, were all still out on the town. Following a nose for blood, Michael broke into a run up a flight of stairs where the sounds of violence were now unmistakable. A hoarse yelling, grunting, the noise of falling furniture, a slow dancing of malice-filled steps, the vicious sounds of bone on bone and a cry of enraged pain led his progress. There was a bedroom door ajar through which the central light swung drunkenly from a low ceiling, casting a beam like a moving flame on the scene beneath. He could see a stereo system smashed
, a cheap bedside lamp in fragments. In the far corner, illuminated as the light swung back, a wardrobe door hung on its hinges, supported from falling by the slumped figure of a slight youth with his left hand shielding his eyes, the other arm outflung to the edge of a rumpled bed on which sat a girl with spiky hair, balled into the furthest corner. Her knees were clasped to her chest and her hands were over her ears in an attitude which suggested both fear and indifference. Centre stage, two young men in half police uniform, with navy serge trousers beneath blue shirts, one ripped but both still buttoned, wrestled and punched with the savagery of fighting dogs. ‘You cunt, you bastard.’ Guttural, meaningless insults, as ineptly delivered as the blows which nevertheless made sounds of bruising flesh.
They were equal in weight, size and hatred, but neither had half of Michael’s disciplined bulk. He stepped towards them, crunching over broken glass, and seized each rutting youth by the collar. He took a fistful of stiff cotton shirting in each hand, twisted it, yanking the material against each throat, and with this purchase, braced himself and flung them apart. One staggered backwards against the wall, his head striking with a sickening thud, the other reverberated against the wardrobe door, falling half across the crouching youth and the girl, who shrank further away. In the silence of panting breath, Michael noticed that she held her skirt over her naked loins and on the floor, in the brief moment when the light swung back, he saw a tracery of lace underwear. The room smelt strongly of sweat, fish, cooking meat; a stench of smells, with the last scent of blood carrying the taste of iron into his mouth. Gradually, the light slowed its wild arc and the faces became clear.
‘Parkin? John! Williams! You clowns! Will you wash your faces now and report for duty? Or you’ll catch it.’ The radio on Michael’s belt crackled: they all remembered who and what they were, moved in a dream of automatic response to orders. In stumbling from the room, all but the boy crouched on the floor, whose room it was, cast a look of venom in the direction of the girl on the bed. PC Michael glanced at her in sheer dislike and left her there. It was only on the way back he felt sorry for his behaviour. At half-past ten, Police Sergeant Morgan convened the nightshift parade again and shouted at them all, innocent or guilty, including PC Michael, for repeating the cock-and-bull story he had been told, designed to exonerate them all. Michael stared straight ahead with his mild eyes; the rest were silent and resentful. Third from the end, the smallest of the relief, PC Williams, displayed a swelling eye, now pink, soon to be purple. He kept his mouth closed to relieve the pain of a broken tooth, but he could not prevent himself crying like a baby, raising his fist to his swollen mouth to prevent the shameful sound of a boy whimpering.
‘I knew you wanted steak really. You could have put it on your eye, then I could have cooked it.’
‘Bit like getting a dog to bury it in the garden to tenderise it. You have the sort of ideas to encourage a vegetarian. Did you read that one in the book?’
‘Fish is good for you. Isn’t it? Protein without fat? But think of how they catch it, all that thrashing around—’
‘You could do with a bit of fat. Slender’s one thing, being thin, another …’
‘Now look who’s talking. You look as if you could snap in half.’
‘Well, if you want to try,’ Bailey said, ‘I’m all yours. Be gentle with me, though. I’m not a well man.’
Helen laughed, like the old days, when she had first sat on the worn but brilliant colours of his junk-shop sofa and admired the barrenness of his walls. She didn’t even think of the journey home, the cold outside, the balcony cat which had sat on her pristine blouse and made it grey without any comment from either of them. Even then, he had been haunted by the vision of keeping her thus, a fixture in his life instead of this ever-moving, ever-tantalising target. He supposed a woman as handsome as this, as kind but as definite as this, was bound to be this way. Bailey could no longer distinguish between the deficiencies and the necessities of their existence, could not see where they should go from here, only where they had been. He was humbled by the conclusion which had formed over the last twenty-four hours and found it difficult to articulate. Helen might have been relieved at the prospect of his enforced absence, but he did at least now know that she was not the only one. He was relieved too, even though she was in the crook of his arm, dressed in nothing but a shawl, her small athletic limbs bare beneath, enough to make a man forget his pain, the absence of dessert and the dry fish. Clinging to him, but with so light a clinging her finger’s touch had all the weight of a feather.
‘I forgot,’ she said, deliberately drowsy. ‘Do they let you out from Bramshill every weekend, or once a fortnight?’
‘I don’t know,’ he replied, restive with the lie. ‘I’ll only know when I get there tomorrow.’
‘I’ll miss you,’ she said, simply. Nothing more. He was not sure what he had hoped for. Remembered the hymn singing of his childhood. Oh, thou who changest not, abide with me.
Down the hill, far beyond the wilderness which was in turn far beyond the reaches of the football stadium, lit by arc lights still although the crowd was gone, Rose Darvey ran. She bore in her stride nothing but the encumbrance of her short skirt, her brutal shoes, a quantity of vodka and the dizzying effect of a light bulb swinging across her eyes. She knew she was pursued, knew she should not have stopped once to hide and howl quietly, should have known better than to give way to her fear of the dark. The car lights hit her full beam on the corner: the man who pursued her had gone round the back. She shrank into one of the hedges which skirted the tiny front gardens. Waited. A car door was shut carefully, with the deliberate movement of someone who was preoccupied. She breathed easier. Then footsteps came in her direction, hesitated, moved past with unerring pace, stopped, came back. If he had slammed the door, she would have maintained her hope: she was accustomed to such sounds, but the quiet precision made her want to scream. ‘Come out, will you?’ A voice equally careful, but harsh. ‘I know where you are. Come on out. Don’t be silly.’
When she moved, though, obeying him slowly, he caught his breath. He had expected a hard-bitten face and saw instead the beautiful eyes of a haunted child.
CHAPTER THREE
Mrs Mellors reached out her hand and stroked the head of the blond child who stood in front of her as they waited for the bus. She did so because she could not resist it. The child shook her head as if to dismiss a troublesome fly, then clapped her hand to her golden locks as the stroking continued, turned round, ready to be angry. When she saw who it was she grinned instead, the toothless smile of a six year old who had lost the top set of milk teeth early and was waiting for their replacements. She was an ugly little cuss, apart from the hair, a screamer and yeller, the kind Margaret Mellors particularly liked because there was something in Margaret which always applauded a talent for noisy hysteria. She didn’t want to emulate it and besides, it was too late now to change the gentle habits of a lifetime, where the only vice was two drinks a night when she got the chance, but she still had an artless admiration for those born rowdy. Her own extraordinary patience with awkward children was one of many reasons to explain her popularity with the young parents in Legard Street. Yuppies did not live here. The newly partnered who started their dynasties in these tiny houses were not those who could employ nannies: they catered for their broods and their mortgages via more hazardous routes. There was the occasional father at the primary school gate, but mostly it was a question of babes in arms being ferried hither and thither by mothers grey with exhaustion.
Margaret Mellors had never advertised the fact that she would willingly look after any of the children with all the skill of the apple-cheeked grandmothers who featured in their books but not otherwise in their lives, but such news did not need to be shouted. In the last four years which had marked both a vacuum in her life as well as changing fortunes for the street, news of her willingness had spread into a kind of fame and her house had become inundated with children. Only now she was stroking that irre
sistible blond head with a tentative touch, because she had sensed a slight shift in attitude towards her from the mothers of children like this. There had been a perceptible if slow alteration in their willingness to leave children at her house. At first, Margaret thought it was all about the onset of winter and the deep suspicion held by all these young people for the old-fashioned decrepitude of her spotless abode, but she had come to recognise it as something more. The disparity of the lives somehow made the grapevine of unwelcome gossip appallingly slow, as well as inaccurate, but still Mrs Mellors was being sent to Coventry by those who needed her most.
‘Hallo, Margaret! How are you? Say hallo, Sylvia, will you please. Nicely.’ The warmth of the mother’s greeting made Margaret relax and the acceptance of the child gave her a feeling of authority. Whatever it was that had blighted the reputation of her own home, it was not herself. No-one despised her bird-like body and her clean, talcum-powder smell. She hoped not, but in a way she would have preferred it if the opposite was true; if only they did not all dislike poor darling Logo as much, and if only they could realise that the lies which framed him were utterly and completely unfair. Talk about screamers and shouters, he was certainly one of them, but essentially a good boy, despite the Bible and the singing, if only they would see it. The problem around here was they were all so busy.
‘Hallo to you too! Where are you going then? Shopping? God save us, you won’t have much chance, will you?’ Margaret’s hand was still in the child’s hair, touching the delicious warmth of the neck lightly. She knew when not to irritate and the child did not resist, squirming happily before she came to rest straddled over the old woman’s leg, resting against her stomach and her stick, biding her time for attention.
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