Yes, Laura. Poppy didn’t hear a word of Mr Meakin’s closing speech or notice how the meeting ended. She found herself standing near the doors, looking vaguely round. Janet was up at the other end, surrounded by an excited group. The votes wouldn’t be counted till tomorrow, and the union block vote added by some arcane formula, and then the result would come shambling out in a typical Labour Party manner, but already the mood of congratulation around Janet was obvious. Poppy wanted no part of it. Janet could triumph through the constituency like Joan of Arc, calling on the peasants of Ethelden to rise up and drive out the alien forces of Capstonism and Thatcherism from their beloved motherborough, and they would follow her as if to a crusade, starry-eyed, while only Poppy stood apart, a crone by the wayside watching through rheumy eyes and mumbling unheard forebodings.
She walked slowly home, trying to sort herself out to be ready for John Capstone’s visit. Contented physicality, combined with intellectual zip. Never had she felt less like either. She would have to tell him about the telephone calls. Not the moment he was through the door, but as soon as he was settled. She would demonstrate by touch and voice that she was glad to see him, get his supper on to the table, and perhaps then …
She needn’t have bothered. He never came.
3
Systematically Poppy chopped the cold chicken-breast into cat-sized chunks, and mixed them in with some of the cooked rice and a dollop of cream and parsley sauce to make it all cohere. Elias, normally alerted to the concept of food by the click of the opener on the Whiskas can, came lethargically down from the dresser and gazed at the pale mess in his bowl.
‘Go on, you silly beast,’ said Poppy. ‘It’s an adventure in living. Somebody might as well enjoy it.’
He might have phoned, she thought. This morning if he couldn’t last night. There’d be a perfectly good reason why he hadn’t, and she’d accept it without question, but for the moment her resentment demanded its head. Though when she’d got home last night she’d been too nervous to know whether she really wanted him to come, at eleven o’clock, having decided he wasn’t going to, she’d lain in her bath and wept. She left Elias purring over the lickings of his bowl.
It was a bright, early-winter morning after the long late autumn. As she turned the corner out of her cul-de-sac she saw Nell striding towards her with Nelson in the push-chair, wrapped like a Michelin man against the cold and clutching his tortoise.
‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Were you coming to look for me? Or Elias? I’ve got to go and take care of Toby. You got home all right?’
There was a wariness between them, a shared knowledge of a web to be mended which a clumsy move might tatter irretrievably.
‘No problem,’ said Nell. ‘We’ll walk round with you.’
‘Lovely, and then Nelson could play with Toby. If you’ve got time, of course … I mean … Oh, dear, I wish I’d told you before about Janet, Nell.’
‘Forget it. She’s going to win, easy.’
‘I expect so. We’ll know this evening. Did some of your friends see you home?’
‘You’ve got it wrong, Poppy. I’m not with them any more. I came because I’ve got a vote still, and I met Buzz on the pavement and he told me to get ready for a walk-out. That’s all.’
A pause while they waited at the Channing Avenue zebra.
‘That explains it,’ said Poppy as they reached the far pavement. ‘I didn’t really believe you knew what they were going to do. Do you want to talk about it?’
‘I don’t know. Will she be there—your daughter-in-law?’
‘Whirling off on her bike the moment we get in. It’s all right, she won’t eat you … I didn’t mean that … I’m sure you’d give as good as you got … I’m making it worse, aren’t I?’
Poppy had never seen Nell laugh, but her quick grin made her face for a moment innocently wicked, Pan-like, before good and evil.
‘Do you spend all your time worrying about personal relations, Poppy?’
‘Of course not. Well. Quite a bit, I suppose. Not exactly worrying, but … Are you teasing me? Hang on a mo—this is where I buy my paper, then it’s just a couple of streets.’
Janet in fact had already left. Hugo was waiting in the living-room with his overcoat on, reading his FT. He eyed Nell briefly as he rose.
‘Hi,’ he said. ‘The great white queen’s gone to rally the nation. I couldn’t make it last night. Were you there?’
‘She was terribly good,’ said Poppy. ‘She had them eating out of her hand in the end.’
‘No doubt. She says there was some sort of hoo-ha put on by the loony left—something to do with that chap they found in the park.’
‘That’s right. Where’s Toby?’
Hugo looked round the room, miming vague surprise at his son’s absence.
‘I think I heard him going downstairs,’ he said.
‘I’d better look. This way, Nell, and we’ll make a pot of tea.’
She scurried down the stairs, muttering under her breath. He was so like Derek sometimes, just as egocentric, just as coldly determined to prove he couldn’t be trusted with responsibilities he regarded as a nuisance. Toby had dragged a chair out of the kitchen, put it against the forbidden door of the utility room, climbed up, opened the door, dragged the chair on into the room and used it to climb on to the top of the washing-machine. He was now filling the detergent dispenser with a mixture from the packets and bottles on the shelf behind. The dispenser had begun to fizz interestingly. Pinkish foam was welling out of it and drooling down the front of the machine. The air reeked of ozone.
‘Do wash,’ he said earnestly.
Poppy snatched him up before he could paw his hands into the rapidly reacting solvents. She heard the front door bang as Hugo left.
‘No darling,’ she said. ‘Nasty. Hot. Not ordinary hot, but ouch! There’s acids there, you see. Or alkalis, or something.’
‘Do wash!’
‘Not now. Look, Nelson’s come to play with you.’
This was sufficient distraction, so he made only a token struggle and then let her carry him into the kitchen. Nell was still bringing Nelson one step at a time down the stairs.
‘Men!’ snarled Poppy, and took Toby to the sink to sponge off any of the chemicals that might have got on to clothes or skin, but he seemed to have been characteristically deft and there was only what seemed to be ordinary Persil in one shoe. Nell started to unparcel Nelson. Poppy gave Toby a wooden spoon and the most resonant of the saucepan lids and went back to the utility room to clear up. Wearing rubber gloves, she used a yoghurt pot to scoop what she could of the now quiescent pink goo into a bucket, which she filled with water and tipped down the sink. She sponged the overspill off with plenty more water, took the dirty clothes out of the machine and ran it. And if the mixture clogs its intestines, she thought, or rots its seals, or the whole thing explodes, Hugo can bloody well explain to Janet. It’s not my fault. But if I can get Hugo alone I’ll tell him what I think of him—not that it’ll do a blind bit of good.
By now Toby’s peremptory voice was coming from the kitchen, cries of ‘No!’ and ‘Mine!’ mixed with Nell’s placating murmurs. The machine embarked on its cycle with a contented-sounding chunter, so Poppy went back to help. For the last few weeks Toby had been into tower construction with any materials that came to hand. He’d become quite expert in judging the moment of ultimate teeter, and would knock his edifices over with maximum mess and clatter just before they collapsed of their own accord. Nelson had a more primitive view of the delights of demolition. One brick on top of another was worth his attention, so there was a conflict of interest.
‘Let’s have some tea and take them upstairs,’ said Poppy. ‘There’s more toys there. Honestly, my son!’
She let her anger, overtly with Hugo but in fact as much with John, stream out as she made the tea. By the time she’d finished h
er tirade she was half-way up the stairs, mug in one hand and Toby (far too grand to be carried when there were strangers watching) gripping her other forefinger.
‘There’s a way out of all that,’ said Nell behind her. ‘You don’t have a man. And you don’t have a washing-machine.’
She spoke in her usual dry voice, so there was no way of knowing how much it was a joke. Poppy stopped, turned and looked down.
‘You know the worst thing about splitting up with Derek?’ she said. ‘It was knowing that from now on perhaps no one would ever love me again.’
‘You can get by without.’
‘I can’t.’
Toby was in an unusually show-off mood. He got out all his soft toys and arranged them in a wide semicircle on the floor to form an audience. Nelson got the idea and contributed his tortoise, then climbed contentedly into Nell’s lap to watch, with his thumb in his mouth. Toby made Poppy move up close to Nell so that there was room on the sofa for the blue elephant. These preparations took some time and kept him fully occupied, while Nelson seemed happy to do nothing.
‘I’ve been thinking about what you said about personal relations,’ said Poppy. ‘You’re right—there really isn’t anything else I know or care about. All the rest, I mean all the other ways of dealing with people, politics and so on—they’re such an impossible mixture of rights and wrongs. Have you ever tried sorting out a bag of old knitting wools which have come unrolled? You have to tease them apart, humour them, and then if you’re patient you may be able to ease the one you want out and roll it up into a ball you can use, but if you try and tug it out all you do is make a lot of tight knots you’ll never untangle. Not without scissors, anyway. That’s what people who know they’re right keep doing. They don’t seem able to see how their rights are all mixed up with their wrongs, and everyone else’s rights and wrongs as well.’
Nell shrugged, not totally dismissively.
‘People who know they’re right do dreadful things,’ said Poppy. ‘They shoot boy soldiers in the back, they make tired old men and women sleep out in the streets, they let villages starve because they want to topple a government. They can’t see that all they’re doing is adding to the wrongs on their own side so that in the end, even if they were right when they started, the balance tips over the other way. It makes me weep.’
‘That’s men.’
‘I bet you, women would have been just as bad if they’d been given the chance.’
‘Are you talking about last night?’
‘Partly. But I’m not getting at you, Nell. If you don’t want to talk about it …’
‘I don’t know. I really don’t know.’
‘Would it help if I guessed, and then you could tell me if I’m wrong. Yes, darling?’
Toby, having arranged his audience to his satisfaction, had been gazing round the room as if in imitation of his father’s absent-minded puzzlement, seeming by now to have forgotten the subject of the demonstration he had intended to lay on. He’d resolved his problem by coming and thumping Poppy on the knee.
‘Gamma do it,’ he said.
‘I’m too big, darling,’ she said. ‘Shall I get it out for you and you can show us?’
She fetched the spare bit of bookshelf from the slot beside the tallboy and the cylindrical log Janet had brought up from the cottage to use as a doorstop. This may not have been the equipment he’d intended to use, but it was something he’d invented a few weeks back and it satisfied him now. He laid the log on its side in the middle of the floor and balanced the shelf across it to make a simple, low-level see-saw. After making sure that Nell and Poppy were watching he edged up the ramp, waited posed and tense at the point of balance until you could all but hear the imaginary drum-roll, tilted the shelf over and charged down the far incline, deliberately falling flat on his face when he reached the carpet. Repetition kept him happy for a while, and then he taught the polar bear and tiger and Kermit the trick. By then Nelson was sufficiently sure of his new surroundings to want to join in, though he seemed to get enough excitement out of a simple charge and tumble, without going through the palaver with the see-saw. This meant that Nell and Poppy could talk almost coherently in the intervals between applauding.
‘Well,’ said Poppy, ‘I’d better start by saying I was very relieved by what you’ve just told me. I really couldn’t believe you’d have come last night if you’d known what your friends at Sabina Road were up to.’
‘I don’t know. No, I don’t think I would.’
‘What’s more, I think you must have been even more shocked than the rest of us when his body was found in the play centre. You knew him, didn’t you? And you knew who’d put him there.’
Nell shook her head.
‘It wasn’t like that,’ she said. ‘I knew him, of course, living in the same house, but I didn’t know it was the same man they found. I wasn’t living there any more, remember, and the drawings in the papers weren’t that good. It wasn’t till we were talking at Little Sue’s next day. And I still don’t know it was Mark and the others put him there.’
‘Oh, I think it must have been. Whoever it was didn’t do it just for a joke. They wanted to distract attention from themselves by using the fact that he’d come to the play centre and we’d all got pretty angry and upset. That means somebody must have told them about that. That was you, wasn’t it? I remember you didn’t react like the rest of us. You were just as angry, but you were going somewhere, to do something about it. I expect you went and told your friends they’d got to get rid of him.’
‘He’d been hanging around Nelson already. I said either he went or I went. Mark said they’d talk to him. They called me in that evening and said he’d given them an explanation which they accepted; I blew my top.’
‘I can imagine! What on earth kind of explanation … ?’ Nell shrugged.
‘Doesn’t mean there was one,’ she said. ‘Mark’s Mark. Dirwana gets a kick out of making people do things they don’t want. Proofs of loyalty, she calls it. And Buzz had brought Jonathan in in the first place. He …’
‘Don’t you mean Simon?’
Nell hesitated.
‘Look,’ she said. ‘I may have split with them, but it’s not going to be me who lands them in the shit. I’d still go along with them in most things, in the political line and such. It’s just the way they do it … Hell!’
Some kind of social security fraud, thought Poppy. Buzz had ‘brought him in’. You house and feed a number of the harmless hopeless, help claim their social security, perhaps under more than one name, dole them out pocket money and keep the rest … it would be a good reason for not wanting the police all over the place investigating a suicide.
‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘Let’s call him Simon, so we know who we’re talking about. You didn’t leave at once?’
‘It wasn’t like that. I mean Dirwana wanted me out, but she wasn’t going to make it easy, and the others don’t like people going. I’d been there a good time. It wasn’t easy for me, either, Poppy. I just don’t want this kind of life.’
Nell gestured with her head towards the rollicking children, the fitted carpet, the walnut tallboy, the music centre.
‘All right,’ said Poppy. ‘Let’s talk about Simon. Did they make him shave off his beard, do you know?’
‘Not before I left. Dirwana wanted that, I’d heard. Proof of loyalty again, see? But he was sticking out.’
Poppy nodded. She could too easily imagine the rigid little tyrannies embedded in the apparent democracy of the commune. Dirwana had wanted Nell out, because Nelson had been a loyalty beyond her sphere. The poor, sad young man had been proud of his beard. Perhaps it was the only thing in his life he had ever achieved for himself. Had he killed himself because Dirwana had won? Or had they shaved it after he’d died, so that he wouldn’t be recognised? Did it matter, now?
‘There must have been
a car or something,’ she said. ‘Buzz ran an old pick-up.’
‘Could Simon have got the keys?’
‘No keys. The door locks were bust. Buzz started it by clipping a pair of wires together.’
‘What was he like, Simon?’
‘A no-hoper. You were sorry for him, at first. Very quiet. He’d a bit of an American accent, but he’d picked that up. Underneath it was Eton or somewhere. Always wanting to prove himself, but as soon as he started on anything he came running to you for help. Pathetic.’
‘I don’t suppose he had a job.’
‘No chance.’
‘He must have had some money though. He pretty well chain-smoked.’
‘Not in the community, he didn’t. Mark wouldn’t have it. He’d have drawn four quid a week from the pool.’
‘His clothes looked quite good.’
‘Right. There was one time he’d got himself new jeans, and Buzz wanted to know where he’d found them. If you got money from somewhere you’d got to put it into the pool.’
Yes. A picture formed in Poppy’s mind. That roasting summer. The path just inside the play-centre gate. Laura, grim with mysterious outrage. (Deborah beyond her shoulder, cornering the market in trikes.) ‘There’s some of them will rob you blind.’
‘Laura,’ she said.
‘Laura?’
‘Something she said—I think it must have been about that. I’m fairly sure she knew Simon … oh, several things. For instance, do you remember her suddenly having that outburst against the police, that afternoon at Little Sue’s … ?’
‘He hadn’t got a record. Buzz was always very careful about that.’
‘That doesn’t mean he hadn’t been in trouble with them, some time. And another thing, when you came and stayed here that time you told me a bit about Mr Capstone. How did you know that?’
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