by A. N. Wilson
To Lennox, the young woman seemed as polite as could be hoped for, from a person whose generation had never been taught manners.
‘It’s just a bit of luck yer wife got the saliva of one of the men on her fingers,’ observed this officer. ‘It’s hopefully going to make a DNA identification that much easier.’
The police were clearly puzzled, and when the evidence of the original delivery boy, Ahmet Hussein, was collated with that of Mrs Mark and Frau Fax, it was harder still to build up an accurate picture of what had happened. Whereas Ahmet believed he had been attacked by one black youth wielding a knife, Mrs Mark was insistent that it was a twenty-five-year-old white man with a moustache who had invaded her property, accompanied minutes later by a short tubby man, possibly Asian. Frau Fax believed both men to be older, perhaps in their thirties, and she asserted as something beyond doubt that they were Turks. When pressed on the matter, she said she had heard them talking Turkish, or a language which sounded very much like it.
So the police were on the look-out for three men – perhaps two Turks with an African, or Afro-Caribbean accomplice.
The other puzzling thing was the timing of the intrusion. Ahmet Hussein was found unconscious in the Brompton Road at 4.50 by a passer-by. It was estimated that he had been attacked about quarter of an hour or twenty minutes earlier. Yet the alarm button at 16 Redgauntlet Road was not pressed until ten past six, at the very moment the police were calling at the house anyway, following the trail of Ahmet’s blood.
It was unfortunate that some of the areas which might have yielded forensic evidence had been cleaned. Brasso’d doorknobs gleamed and banisters shimmered with Pledge. Mrs Mark’s bathroom, which had been chaos when Lennox half glimpsed it that morning, was now scintillant – the scrumpled bathmats stowed in a laundry basket, clean new towels folded on the heated rail. It seemed more like a bathroom in an hotel than a private home.
‘I’m sorry – we have no staff this week and I was doing some housework when these men burst in.’
That was Martina Mark’s explanation.
‘And you’d say the men were in the house ten minutes?’
‘Less, less,’ Frau Fax had interrupted with her thick accent. ‘As soon as I pressed ze buzzer zey were gone like birds.’
This, the CID thought, was truer than she could know, since they had left no muddy footprints on the carpets in spite of the dank drizzle of the evening – no fingerprints anywhere.
Lennox – lordly, benign, concerned – found his manner with the three police officers becoming more conciliatory. (When they’d finally gone, Martina privately asked him what need there had been to stick his tongue up their arses.) The more puzzling their story and the clearer it became that Martina had lied to them, the more ingratiating he became, offering them glasses of Seven-Up, Jaffa Cakes, sausage rolls, biscuits, all refused.
‘Obviously now we’ve got statements from your wife and,’ the CID officer looked at the floor, ‘her mother,’ she swallowed before continuing, ‘we’ll proceed with our investigations. The great thing is, your wife had the foresight not to wash her hands, so as I say, hopefully the DNA tests should show up something.’
Lennox could see that his attempts to be amiable with the police were irritating Martina, and that he would pay for this later with a tongue-lashing. His chief emotion, in spite of being puzzled – and in spite of dreading her sarcasms – was relief. Lennox Mark loved his wife, he was in love with her. The thought of her being in danger had reduced him to utter misery. In the long traffic-jams in which so unbearably the Bentley was delayed on his way there, Lennox had contemplated the possibility that Martina might have been badly injured, even killed. He had realized that the death or non-existence of this woman whom, presumably, everyone else on the planet regarded as a monster of rudeness and selfishness would be unendurable. The grief would be terrible, beyond bearing.
He therefore spoke truly when he said to the police, ‘The main thing is that my wife is safe – safe and well.’
He put his arm around Martina as he spoke and she managed to move the sewn smile into an approximation of a grin as she rested her beautiful copper locks against his pale-grey lapels.
THIRTEEN
Mercy felt uneasy in her mind about discussing with Kevin Currey her past. In quite different ways and for quite different reasons, it was hard to revisit those days with her mother. The past was simply that: passed. She had momentarily believed Kevin: thought that by giving Peter’s unknown dad a name, she would help the boy to become more rooted and settled. She had blurted out the name, almost at random, for a number of reasons which seemed good at the time: one reason was that Lennox was certainly the richest of the candidates, and if Peter were to have a father, why not choose one who would provide some good material compensations? Another reason was that she wanted to spare Lily the knowledge of the truth: namely that as a young woman, her daughter had been very promiscuous. Thirdly, more specifically, there was one possible father whose identity Mercy wanted at all costs to keep secret: the knowledge would break him, destroy Lily. So, the words ‘Lennox Mark’ had come most readily to her lips when asked to supply Peter with a dad: especially when she recollected how both she and Lennox had behaved at the time of her pregnancy becoming known. She had been resolute in her ungraspingness. Vengefulness was no part of her open nature. But Justice was another thing and if money might help Peter, was there not a case for calling in the chips?
Now, Kevin was telling her that maybe it had not been such a good idea after all, telling her son the name, or a name, of his father.
‘It’s not a question of being judgemental …’
That was one of the words in the armoury of Kevin’s claptrap. Mercy wondered how it could be a question of anything else. We make judgements all the time. Mercy, as the only daughter, and for much of her childhood the only companion, of Lily d’Abo, had grown up in an atmosphere of judgements. Lily judged everything and everyone, finding almost all wanting: ward sisters, doctors, greengrocers, hairdressers, teachers. (Only in the case of priests did she suspend disapproval.) As she sat beside her radio or TV set, Lily would sound as if the newsreaders, weather-forecasters, actors in soaps, presenters of natural history documentaries were all performing a series of auditions: that their future in broadcasting was contingent on her approval.
‘You’ll have to speak more distinctly if you’re going to get me listening to you mumbling away at the news,’ she would admonish Richard Baker.
To the man from the Met Office – with many a chuckle – ‘Call that a tie to tell me the weather in!’
Similarly, just as the cast of the TV soaps would be constantly talked over, corrected, interrupted by Lily as she watched, so the morals of her neighbours in Crickleden were under constant review and surveillance.
‘There she goes, off to the Baptist church, and that’s a heresy for a start!’ Laughter. ‘But I ask you, what’s the point in setting yourself up as an elder of the Baptist church and leaving your dustbins in that kind of a state? That’s what I’d like to know. She swears blind she did not steal our dustbin lid – but how come our dustbin lid disappears one night and hers appears the next morning? Answer me!’
Of another neighbour, a clerk in British Rail who commuted each day to Clapham, ‘He’d be dog-whipped if we had fairness in this world. Just look at him now, walking down to the High Road! It’s disgusting. Forgiveness of sins? No, excuse me. Let Almighty God forgive that man’s sins if He has a mind, but there are some sins no woman should be expected to put up with.’
These were the daily, the repeated judgements of Lily. Mercy grew up with them constantly sounding in her ears.
‘Look at that one’ – as she moved aside the lace curtains for a better view. ‘Look at that hemline! Why not put up a red light bulb in her bedroom and have done with it? Her husband’s a fool to put up with that.’
As Mercy herself grew up and flowered, Lily’s censures were perpetual. Mercy learned to live with them, a
nd she also learned almost by a necessary survival instinct how to absorb and believe the value-judgements while also ignoring them for the most part in her own life. Naturally, with just two women sharing a small flat, there were repeated spats in which Lily declared that she would not leave the house, come shopping, go to a cinema with a daughter wearing that or with her hair, lips, nails, ears, shoes or neckline in that condition. Lily seemed eternally to disapprove, but beneath the surface quarrels there existed friendship between the two of them. Lily did allow Mercy to have boyfriends. She seemed to recognize that in her early teens, her daughter had blossomed into a beautiful young woman who was overpoweringly attractive to boys and men.
Lily went back to nursing, first part-time, then full-time, as Mercy flowered. The mother could not be the daughter’s policewoman. Between them, there had existed a fiction that Mercy, however many admirers she might have had, was still a virgin. When the two went to church together each Sunday, Mercy still approached the altar to receive Holy Communion. Mercy did not feel shy with God about this, though she sometimes felt guilty about the deliberate deception of her mother.
To God, she’d said, ‘You gave me this body. What did you expect me to do with it? Wrap it up in cellophane until I met Mr Right? Then why didn’t you create men who treated women a bit better? Eh? Answer me that, Lord God! Or am I meant to wait until I fall in love? Oh – puh-lease!’
He’d seemed to take it on the chin, her candour. Not so many people believed in Him at all these days. Maybe He couldn’t be so choosy about who His friends were. Maybe once upon a time He could say He’d only be friends with those who offered the right sacrifices, or said the right prayers, but now He had to put up with a few sinners to believe in Him. Mercy cherished in secret the reverent hope that God might be earthier than Lily and the Puritans imagined. Supposing the Indians were right, with all their erotic deities? Suppose God had given us sexual appetites because He actually liked the idea of us enjoying them?
That had been Mercy’s uninhibited decision, made some time during her teens. She’d never since allowed much of a conflict in her mind between sex and religion, though she continued to make examinations of conscience when she said her prayers. In her teens, she still sometimes followed her mother’s custom of going to confession: but if she did so, she’d confess to being greedy, or to minor acts of dishonesty, or to malicious talk about her friends. If she’d been clubbing, though, and the night had ended up, as in ideal circumstances it would, between the legs of a man she’d fancied, she wasn’t going to give the priest cheap thrills by telling him about that.
Nevertheless, as she and her mother went to church together and she joined Lily kneeling at the altar, she knew that she was deliberately sending a misleading signal to her mother. Mercy knew that Lily was the old-fashioned type of Anglo-Catholic who thought that if you were in a state of mortal sin, you had to go to confession; otherwise, when you next knelt to receive the bread and the wine, you would be eating and drinking your own damnation. That was what Lily had learnt from old Father Richardson, who had prepared her for confirmation in Nassau, and it was what she believed still.
If Lily had so much as French-kissed a man, she would have been off to confession before she dared show her face at mass again. Not that such a thing was imaginable. Mercy’s dad had done a runner when she was still a little girl. She had grown up without him – seeing him at first occasionally. Then never. (He went back to the Bahamas when she was six.) She had never especially felt the absence in her life and wondered whether the psychiatrists had exaggerated the necessity of belonging to a two-parent household. After all, during most periods of history, children grew up when men were away at war, or working all day long. They survived.
When Lily was left, she formed no new partnership. Over thirty years later, she was still a handsome woman. Never in her whole life could Mercy remember her mother responding to the attentions of a man. If flirtation or condescension (both manifestations of the same attitude of mind) were offered, Lily, normally a polite and warm-hearted person, would be glacial. A curled lip and a sniff were all she had ever offered in response to male attempts at charm, whether from smoothy hospital-doctors, vicars or neighbours.
To such a mother, seventeen Christmases ago, it had not been easy to break the news that she was pregnant.
‘You aren’t going to midnight mass in that skirt! Kneel down in that and the people behind you will see – everything.’
Or – next morning when they were dressing up, before spending the day in Lambeth with some cousins – ‘This flat smells like a courtesan’s boudoir … What’s that scent you’ve got on? … You’re not wearing those shoes?’
Even by that Christmas Day, Mercy knew. The period was two weeks late; but she let another month pass, realizing that she would by then be eight, nine weeks gone. Then, quite suddenly one morning before she left for work, she had blurted it out.
‘It’s a freezing cold day and you think that strip of leather skirt’s going to keep out the cold? You’ll get chilled in the kidneys. What’s it supposed to be – Puss in Boots outfit?’
(Lily was incapable of innuendo.)
‘Mum, I’m pregnant.’
There’d been the longest silence in the history of the universe, in fact lasting about forty seconds.
They were washing up in that flat in Crickleden where her mum still lived and where Peter had now taken refuge.
Lily was four inches shorter than Mercy, even in stockinged feet. When the mother was wearing fluffy bedroom slippers, and the daughter was wearing big high-heeled boots, the difference in height was more like seven inches. They had stared deep into one another’s eyes and for one bleak, deep second, Mercy had feared that Lily would smack her face.
‘Come here!’ said Lily.
Somehow, in spite of the disparity between their heights, she had felt her cheeks being squeezed vehemently against Lily’s, and she was enfolded in her mother’s arms. It was the warmest, and the most accepting of embraces.
Mercy realized that her mother’s love was unconditional. It had never been anything else. She could not, however, bring herself to shock Lily with the truth, namely that she did not know who the father was. How, without deeply hurting a mother who had reposed in her such trust, could she be open about the way, during that heady year, she had been living?
Trained in secretarial skills, Mercy had worked at a West End temping agency which brought in higher wages, even less the agency commission, than an ordinary humdrum office job. She was sent from week to week to different offices, sometimes working as a receptionist, sometimes as a typist, sometimes both. There was hardly a week when she was not propositioned by a man in one of these offices. She had her pick. Joyously, rapturously, greedily she enjoyed the attention and, for the most part, the sex. Boyfriends as such came and went: their possessiveness bored her, and though she shed a few tears, and felt tenderly about many lovers, she was never seriously in love.
About six months before Peter was conceived, Mercy had landed herself a permanent job. The agency had sent her as a temp to the offices of The Daily Legion. She worked in the Deputy Editor’s office answering the telephone and doing minor secretarial chores. She was an instant success, and they asked her to stay on permanently.
Lily, who read The Daily Legion each morning over her elevenses and regarded its pages as only a little less authoritative than those of Holy Scripture, was overjoyed that her daughter was working for her favourite newspaper, in its last days in the old Legion building in Fleet Street. Within days, Mercy was thrilling her mother by saying that she had actually seen, or more excitingly still, spoken to some of the legendary writers on the paper. Old ‘Dr Arbuthnot’ the gossip columnist had held open for her the cage of the creaking lift. She had seen Philip Warrener the astrologer seated at a desk, and presumably casting horoscopic predictions for the next day. She had taken messages to the strange cigarette-filled room where ‘Stan’ the cartoonist sat swigging champagne from a bott
le and composing his stereotypical vision of England (he’d pinched Mercy’s bottom but that she did not tell her mother); she’d seen Peg Montgomery, interviewer extraordinaire and expounder of Women’s Problems. She had seen the famously acerbic younger columnists – Martina Fax and L. P. Watson – and overheard the gossip (once again, not repeated to Lily) that Martina, who was Swiss, was conducting a lesbian affair with the fashion editor, Mary Much.
Mercy had loved the whole world of the Legion, adapted immediately to the camaraderie of the shared life of a large office, and felt as if she had been adopted into the crew of a vast, jolly piratical ship. She quickly formed gossipy friendships with the other secretaries. She enjoyed the flirtations of many of the men in the building. There was no obvious racism. The whole experience, she felt in retrospect, had sent her, not crazy but something which is almost the same, euphoric. Going to work each day felt like going to a vast and slightly naughty party.
Anthony Taylor, the Deputy Editor, who was her immediate boss, did genuinely appear to be an example of that rare species The Happily Married Man, but nearly all the other men flirted with her, some tried it on, and some succeeded. Within six months, she had – while trying to avoid behaviour blatant enough to get her labelled the office bicycle – a list of conquests. Most of these were regular dates which took place out of office hours. A gorgeous lad on the sports desk was the first to take her out; Wilf, who worked in Classified Ads, was another lovely man, about her age. One week, when she had slept with both of them on successive nights, she was aware of an enormous increase in her own libido. She’d made Wilf late for work by insisting, before they left his flat, that they do it again, even though they had done it all ways, all through the night. Euphoric now, not simply with the piratical jollity of the old Legion in its Fleet Street manifestation, but with sex itself, she knew that she was like a tigress on heat. She felt so randy that within hours of arriving in the office, she had deliberately gone into the cartoonist’s room with a trumped-up excuse, and for the first time, she had let the old goat do just what he’d been panting to do for months, drop his trousers to the office floor and slip easily into her from behind as she sprawled over the unfunny drawing on the board.