Tom latched on. The road-widening for the village bypass, that’s what Bullman meant. Tom muttered agreement and sucked at his cider. An ant was coursing along the worn fabric of his working trousers. He brushed it aside, his hand broad and strong, a hand that heaved sheaves, steadied a ploughing team and lifted stone for walls.
Kear said, “Forgive my saying so, Tom, but it’ll be a good day for this village when the new road opens.”
Tom’s family had resisted the scheme. It was robbing them of a swath of land and a greedy part of the wood. The cottage where Mary had lived, and which weekenders now owned, would survive but its outlook would be tarmac.
Tom let Kear’s comment float by. He picked up Bullman’s point about the dangerous bends in the lane and recited the names of the locals who’d misjudged it, not fatally but sufficiently to damage property and pride.
Bullman laughed, plucking at his throat where age had let down the skin in leathern folds. “I’ll bet you wouldn’t mind a jug of cider for every time you’ve put the stones back in that wall.”
“’Tis so,” said Tom. “Mind, I always had a taste for walling. There be some tasks about a farm I can’t abide, but walling, now there’s one I do enjoy.”
“Just as well,” contributed Kear, still trying to join in. “Remember when the cattle truck ripped a great section of it down, back in…oh, when was it now?”
They both knew. It was the year they had the difficult conversations, the year Mary’s baby disappeared.
Tom shut his eyes against the burden of sunlight and called up a thirty-year-old picture of Kear. Slimmer, lean almost, and sweating in his regulation shirt sleeves. “Tom, are you quite sure you didn’t see anyone near the cottage?”
“Quite sure, Sergeant.”
And because no one else had seen anyone, Tom had never needed to veer from that denial. There was a search, there was repetitious questioning and there were appeals in the newspapers for information. But the baby remained missing and the village drew its own conclusions.
Sergeant Kear had put it to him: “Tom, the mother claims the pram was in the garden. Says she put it in the shade of the laburnum tree and walked into the village. Too hot to push the pram, she says. Are you sure you didn’t see anyone go near that pram?”
“Quite sure,” Tom repeated.
So Mary became known as a careless, ignorant mother who left her baby unattended in the shade of a poisonous tree, who delayed reporting him missing for two hours because she feared the wrath of authority and because she bred the wild hope that her sister had come home from work early and taken the baby somewhere with her. In days, rumour hardened against her: Mary had killed her own son and was concealing the body and the truth.
“Tom, you’re the only one who doesn’t accuse me,” she blurted out when he met her crying in the lane while he was repairing the ravages of the cattle truck. Usually vehicles toppled a few stones at the apex of the bend but the truck had flattened yards of it. Tom, always slow, was taking his time, making a good strong job of it, making sure it didn’t all come down again.
“What do folks say to ’ee, Mary?”
She scrubbed a balled handkerchief over her eyes. “Oh, it isn’t what they say. They don’t say much but they look. It’s the way they look at me.”
He touched her then, for the first time. His fingers marked her bare arm with stone dust. “Don’t ’ee cry, Mary. That’s the way folks do be. It don’t mean nothing.”
She pulled away, slightly, exactly enough for his hand to fall free. “Oh, Tom!” And she bowed over the broken wall and cried, not a delicate weeping that he might have attempted to console but passionately, with all the rawness of her anger and her loss.
Tom stepped away from her. Her grief put her beyond reach. He understood then that she had always been out of his reach. Firelit dreams and nonsensical plans evaporated before her intensity. Tom stared as she wailed, oblivious of him. Then he stretched out a roughened hand and took up a jagged hunk of grey stone which he added to his wall.
Bullman cocked an ear. “A short break they gave themselves.”
The machinery had started up again, drowning out the cuckoo and the murmurous wood pigeons. Out of sight, round the flank of the hill, men were destroying the landscape in preparation for the new road.
Kear said, “The sooner they get it done the better.”
“Won’t be long, the speed they’re going,” said Bullman. “They’re up to the copse field already. Could finish that stretch today, maybe.”
Tom didn’t think they would. He sensed Kear peering at him. The fat man used to watch people while pretending to be doing no such thing, but since leaving the force he’d abandoned pretence. Kear had used his special way of watching when Tom was made to point out the places on the farm where a baby might have been hidden. The pond in the bottom field, the brook, the clamps. But the weed on the pond was unbroken, the nettles by the brook untrampled, the clamps undisturbed. In a day or two Kear’s superiors had other work for him and he went away, not necessarily satisfied.
Tom breathed the spiciness of the pub’s honeysuckle that was just breaking into flower. A reddish flower, it was. The one at the cottage was a golden tumble from the porch to the stone seat by the old-fashioned pump. If the bird annually conjured Mary for him, then it was honeysuckle that revived the day the baby vanished.
The pram hadn’t been visible from where Tom was working. The porch cut off his view. He ate his lunch in the field, the combination of sun and cider spurring him to call on Mary again. Several times he’d done so and several times she’d said no, the baby took all her time.
Kear was wrong about the pram being in the shade. No doubt it was when Mary left it but the protection had crept away. The handle burned Tom’s palm as he swung it round to wheel it into the lee of the house, once he realised Mary was out.
The jerk woke the baby. It cried, screamed. Tom lifted it, to pacify. The baby stiffened itself over his arm, resisting him with all its puny strength. Its bawling frightened him. He shook it. Silenced it. Killed it.
Thirty years he’d lived with the secret. For thirty years…
The silence he was expecting came. Sun scorched his cheeks and a bee brushed his ear. He stirred, opened his eyes.
Bullman was looking into his glass as he drank. Kear had his eye on Tom. Tom squirmed to rub his shoulders against the stone behind him and made a show of relaxing.
“Cuckoo. Cuckoo.”
Presently a car droned along the lane to the village, right up to the pub. Through the door to the bar they heard one of the men from the roadworks asking for a telephone. He tagged on an explanation. “We’ve found something up there, under a wall.” The landlord took him to a back room where there was a pay-phone.
Tom drank the last of his cider. Bullman was admiring swallows slicing the sky. Kear and Tom studied each other.
Kear said softly, “I wonder what they’ve found.” He said it like a man who wasn’t wondering at all.
Some fragments of bone, some shreds of rag, thought Tom. Nothing to show who hid the tiny body there. He met Kear’s eyes with a look that said nothing. Then, as the church clock struck two, he said goodbye to Bullman, took his glass into the bar and began the slow trudge down the lane and up to the top field where his brothers were turning hay.
In Those Days
Liza Cody
11 Dock Road,
London
Dear Mr. Harvest,
I am writing to you on the very sad occasion of your sister’s death because it may be a comfort for you to understand what actually happened. I know that in my own case, when my poor Arthur went with his kidneys, I could not really lay him to rest until I had found out exactly what went amiss. Afterwards I felt better. I don’t know why. But in those days there were people to talk to, especially the Kings next door. You can get things out of your system if the
re’s someone to talk to. Don’t you agree? I hope you have someone. A death in the family is hard to bear when you are on your own.
I know you are Selina’s brother because of that postcard I took to the letter-box two weeks ago, the one with the old-fashioned picture of bathing beauties with paper bags over their heads which said ‘Shame about the face’ on the back. I shouldn’t have read it, I know, but I was struck by the picture and wondered who your sister could be sending it to. Someone with a sense of humour, I decided. Anyway, people don’t write secrets on postcards, do they? I wasn’t entitled, but I wasn’t really prying either.
Anyway, as you know, Selina came to live in my house four months ago. Well, you know she came to live at this address, but you probably don’t know that it is my house. It was all my poor Arthur had to leave me and I have hung on to it through thick and thin ever since. Your sister must have told you a lot about it, and I can’t imagine what you must think of me. But I would like you to know that it has only recently become the sort of house it is now.
You see, the neighbourhood has come down from what it was. A few years ago there were still business gentlemen staying here and one or two engineering students and a dental nurse. Respectable people, all of them. But times change and, what with container transport and everything, the area isn’t what it was. I couldn’t afford to sell the house even if I wanted to, not with the property market the way it is.
Beggars can’t be choosers, I always say. The government doesn’t look after old people the way it used to when this country was a welfare state. In those days, a pension was a pension. Not any more. I would be out on the streets if I didn’t take rent from whoever is willing to pay it. I can’t be as fussy as I’d like. I don’t approve of what goes on here but I suppose it is a service of sorts. The only thing a person like me can do is maintain some small standards in the way of cleanliness, safety and hygiene.
It always puzzled me why Selina chose to come here. I know she said that photographers needed authenticity. But wouldn’t it have been safer for her to stay closer to her home and take nice pictures of the people she knew? Then she wouldn’t have had to come so far out of her way to find authenticity, and what happened wouldn’t have happened. Really, a well-educated, nicely spoken young lady like herself has no place in Dock Road. I know, because I do not really belong here myself any more even though I have lived here for over seventy years. I should have moved out when Mr. and Mrs. King left for their son’s place in Slough. They were the writing on the wall, if you get my drift. But I didn’t move and now it is too late. Maybe if I hang on long enough the district will come up again. They have started developing about a mile down the river and built some lovely little flats and shops. But they seem to have missed out Dock Road, which is a pity.
Your sister used to say that this area was ‘the real thing’. Although why it is any more real than Slough or Theydon Bois I honestly couldn’t say. It seemed real enough to me when the only girl staying in one of my rooms was a dental nurse. I mean, things don’t have to be dirty to be real, do they? Or girls, for that matter. I have always been respectable and I’m not less real for that.
I hope you don’t think I’m criticising. I enjoyed having Selina here. She raised the tone, and heaven knows it needed raising. And she never talked down to the girls, although to be honest most of them won’t understand you if you don’t talk down. But of course, as her brother, you know Selina better than I did, so it won’t surprise you to learn that some of her conversations were over people’s heads. I myself was never quite sure what she meant at any given moment and, though I say it as shouldn’t, I regard myself as being quite well read – by Dock Road standards, anyway. Certainly I was one of the few who knew where to find the public library in the days when there was one. The girls these days leave school scarcely able to read the names of their lipsticks let alone a newspaper or a magazine. No wonder the poor little things are reduced to what they are reduced to.
All they ever care about is money. I honestly don’t think your sister ever realised how much. They do what they do for money and that’s the be-all and end-all of it. They aren’t interested in their customers. They aren’t even interested in the job. They just want to do it as quickly as possible, get paid and on to the next. You can’t blame them, can you? Not when you see the sort of customers they get in Dock Road. What on earth is the point, I often ask myself, of paying good money for whatever it is they pay for when they are so drunk they throw up all over my stair carpet? I wouldn’t have allowed my poor Arthur inside the house in that condition, let alone my bed. And who has to clean up after them, I ask you? Well, it isn’t the girls. They wouldn’t even know how.
I mustn’t judge. Girls these days aren’t brought up the way they were in my youth. We were taught how to polish a stair rail and how to turn a mattress. These girls don’t even think it’s necessary.
But I do think the old ways are the best so please don’t think I’ve let things go completely at 11 Dock Road. As I said to Selina when she first came, I said, “I can’t vouch for what has gone on in this room but I can say, hand on heart, that the sheets were fresh on this morning. And you won’t find dust balls under any of my beds.” I always scrub the baths out with Flash every day because you never know, do you? A person with a superior education, like your sister, will have appreciated that. Even if her clothes and shoes left something to be desired, she kept her books beautifully. There was never a speck of dust on them. But you can’t get nasty diseases from books, can you? Whereas sharing a bathroom with a dirty person might give you something catching.
I am returning the books under separate cover. No one touched those.
They are intact and just the way she left them. I can’t answer for the clothes and toiletries though. There seems to be a shortfall somewhere in spite of the police locking the door.
What really worries me is your sister’s camera. I know it was very valuable, and I can’t seem to put my hands on it at all. If you ask me that camera went walking long before the police arrived. None of the girls will admit to even seeing it, but you can’t trust what they say. I know for a fact they all had their pictures taken. And got paid for it too. To tell you the truth, those pictures weren’t the sort you’d want to frame and put on your mantelshelf, I’m afraid.
I like a nice photograph. It was lovely when photos stopped being black-and-white and you could see the colour of the hats and frocks. I always wore a hat for any picture taken of me. Young ladies wore hats then. Now all my old hats are on top of the wardrobe in plastic bags, but no one wants to take my picture any more, not even Selina, so I suppose it makes no odds. When the time comes I’d like to be buried in a hat – the lavender one with the feather which I wore to Mrs. King’s eldest’s wedding. I used to love a good wedding but you don’t get them in Dock Road any more, and I can’t see any of the girls at No. 11 getting wed. I mean, who would want to marry them after what they’ve done?
But you can’t tell them anything. They think of me as a silly old woman, as if I was always the age I am now and as if No. 11 was always the sort of house it has become. And sometimes I ache for someone my own age to talk to. Yet, when I think of the shame of it I’m glad there’s no one left. You see, I remember Mrs. King – Susan Brown as she was then – I remember how we sat in the stalls of the old Majestic and watched Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly sing ‘True Love’ in the moonlight. We were young women then and nothing much had happened to us, but we sat in the dark with tears in our eyes for the romance of it all. I know she had tears in her eyes because of the way she took her handkerchief out of her sleeve. That’s another thing you don’t see any more – a lady’s handkerchief. And gloves. I sometimes ask myself where all those little white gloves and hankies went to. Hats, gloves, hankies and romance all disappeared from Dock Road years ago, and I wish I knew where they went.
I did try to explain it to Selina once. She kept photos pinned to a cork board in
her room where she could see them. I was in there with the vacuum one day, and I said, “How can you bear to look at these awful things all day?”
And she said, “They aren’t awful. This is the most fundamental transaction in the world.” Or something like that. We were always talking at cross-purposes.
But they were awful. They were of the girls and their boyfriends and the customers. There was one photograph I particularly hated. She must have taken it from her window because it showed the derelict house opposite. One of the girls was leaning against the wall smoking a cigarette. And the man had just got out of his car and was sort of looming over her, talking to her. You could see from the way he stood and from the expression on her face just what they were talking about. It’s funny, isn’t it, how a picture can be disgusting without being actually rude.
So I said, “Why don’t you take pictures of nice, pretty things?” Because I suppose I was thinking of Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly, and how in the old days you used to see pictures that made you want to weep they were so lovely: things like brides and waterfalls and swans. Your sister’s photos had the opposite effect, I’m sorry to say. It wasn’t as if they were bad photos: you could see every detail, even the brand name on the cigarette packet and the number plate on the car. But you felt miserable and not quite clean just from looking at it.
She said, “This is reality, Mrs. B. Reality isn’t nice or pretty.”
“It used to be,” I said and I finished vacuuming her room. I was wondering if your sister ever suffered a personal tragedy in her life to make her so bitter against reality. Because Selina was a well-spoken young lady with lovely manners, and she should have been married with a family, and not taking photos about the terrible things that happen in Dock Road. I mean, she had the chance, didn’t she? She had all the advantages. She wasn’t like the girls here who, I sometimes think, were born for trouble.
Vintage Crime Page 16