Trial by Fire hw-2

by Frances Fyfield

  Helen thought, I should tell him about the committal proceedings. Then she listened to his polite praise of Branston and held her tongue

  CHAPTER NINE

  Shops. Oxford Street filth drifting on pavements that needed rain. Judging from the sky, they were shortly to be blessed with it. Of course, no one went to Oxford Street to look at the sky. All of them looked ahead or sideways, never upward, occasionally down to see what was entangling their feet, keeping handbag in front and pockets clear.

  Helen was streetwise, used to standing for hours in Marlborough or Bow Street court prosecuting queues of pickpockets, dippers in every colour with quicker fingers than Fagin's children, smiling benignly as they passed on the escalator with a wallet already gone to the one behind, netting thousands a day. She was careful in the shops, too, once versed in the Can-I-help-you? conman: urbane and immaculate on the floor of a department store otherwise devoid of helpers, assiduous in assisting with choice of scarf, jacket, tie, before offering to take those traveller's cheques, dollars, yen, Visa card, whatever you were needing change of.

  Take a seat, ma'am, I'll be back shortly, and you will sit here for ever if you're waiting for me. Famous characters when not in prison. Policemen patrolling this fairground of shops for the parvenues of the cheap to the merely priceless called it simply 'the Street'. The Street was dirty, shabby, crowded, and jostling, downmarket, upmarket, middle market. No one spoke English or walked in a straight line. Rudeness was customary.

  Pretend stolen goods as well as real were sold on pavements along with tacky souvenirs, overpriced fruit and dangerous toys. Shop assistants either crowded around customers like flies or studiously ignored them. Litter bins overflowed, and the three underground stations were frankly sinister. Bargains and impolite robbery were equally available. There was nothing essential to life or decent to eat within a mile, and there were bomb scares.

  Helen loved it.

  Nothing better for a shopping addict. She loved shops, full stop. Here her essentially serious nature took off into harmony with the frivolous world. Helen could not shop with any precision, a facet of her that irritated Bailey to the extent he could never accompany her on any expedition unless she set out to buy one item in an emporium that sold nothing else – paint in a paint shop, for instance, nails in a shop that sold only nails. This suited Helen, who preferred to shop alone or accompanied by another female of kindred spirit who understood that when shopping you looked at everything: duvets and food in Marks and Spencer even when you went there to buy a skirt; washing machines, carpets and coats in John Lewis, even if you had gone for a plug. And if you had embarked on a vague search for clothes, there would never be an end to it, not even a beginning.

  Bailey could not understand how she could return from such a foray armed with nothing but exhilaration, replete with things seen, people met, and everything else, but without a parcel in sight – although that was rare. Something always got hold of the purse, but it mattered not if the product of four hours' wandering was no more than two pairs of tights and a pineapple, one lipstick and a newfangled potato peeler, two light bulbs and a free sample of perfume.

  Today she intended to do better: this was a prearranged frolic with itching credit card.

  Helen was looking for the boost of a new autumn coat, replacements for down-at-heel shoes, and a new pair of trousers to make her look at home in ultracasual Branston. Having decided on that, she would not be disappointed to return with a tube of toothpaste. The looking was the thing: that was the way it was with shopping, the way she liked it.

  Helen sat on the train, thought of the day ahead, armed with the inevitable book, forgetting to read in an almost empty carriage, so empty she felt the sense of secret holiday.

  Really, she and Bailey were equally bad. What harm would there have been in mentioning that she had seen part of his case and had met Evelyn Blundell in the process? But she had said nothing, and had allowed last evening's garrulous neighbour to exhaust them.

  They had gone to bed when she left, Bailey for an early start, she for a piece of truancy like this. What the hell. She was dreaming, gazing out of the window into a lowering sky, nothing ahead but dirty London and crowded shops. She wriggled a little with the sheer pleasure of it, ate an apple for late breakfast, watched the world. Thirty-five minutes by train on a good day from Branston into Oxford Circus, more usually exceeding an hour: never travel without a book for distraction or enough thoughts to fill the time.

  The Central Line rolling stock, running on Central Line rails, operated as a bone-shaker fit to disgrace any subcontinent, requiring restraints between stations, gathering speed with a threat to throw any unbraced passenger from her seat into the arms of the one opposite.

  Rush hours with strap hangers lurching around like drunkards only became more comfortable when passengers were packed like sardines, each avoiding the eye of the other as they stood in intimate stability, swaying in unison within the purgatory of the train, bottoms and stomachs joined like serried Siamese twins. Emptier carriages made others unwary: neglected parcels on a dozy afternoon would leap from their bonds between Debden and Theyden as the tube rattled and shook with the effort of speed, braked in fury for a deserted stop.

  Out of office hours the train was depopulated by the further reaches of outer London, as if places like Branston had ceased to exist. Once people moved away as far as this, unless commuting with the herd, they were supposed to remain where they lived. Otherwise, the floor-shaking, arm-bracing Central Line, as stable and sweet as a wagon train, became their punishment.

  But in those languid hours, there was the mixture of views that drew Helen into the vortex of beloved London every time she caught the surroundings blurred by the consistently dirty windows of the carriage. Surprising fields around Branston, signs of harvest; then, seen near the rails, looking like an outpost, prefabricated 1950s buildings resembling Nissen huts, postwar construction still standing in lurid pastel colours. Debden melting into the background. Theyden Bois next, known locally as Theyden Boys, somewhat more settled than Debden, but scarcely visible.

  A tunnel of green approaching Snaresbrook, the presence of trees a sign of prosperity, homes with lawns, mock Tudor, mock Spanish, and older Edwardian houses with outbuilt conservatories, hidden to all but Central Line passengers. She had once sat in a train stopped by signal failure between stations, a frequent hazard of the Central Line, at this very spot, and watched mesmerized as a naked man washed while singing in front of a window, reaching to a shelf out of sight in all his glory, unconscious of the silent audience.

  Helen had nudged the woman next to her in case she missed it. 'Look at that,' she'd said, unable to resist sharing it, both of them sniggering like children. She thought of it every time she passed the place.

  Greater prosperity still as the train chuffed away from Snaresbrook, downhill from the territory of lesser showbiz, and East End crooks seeking new life in security-alarmed houses, into the duller safety of South Woodford's narrower avenues. Earnest small blocks of flats to augment neat tree-lined streets, the territory of hopeful artisans, bank clerks, teachers, and the more modestly prosperous of the age. A tasteless place, safe and dull but green enough to pass. Then a quicker descent to reality: street after street of stocky row houses coming into Leyton, mean back yards bearing signs of loving devotion, covered in washing, a place of crowded roads.

  On the right, a vast graveyard that looked as if it might have held every corpse found in London over a hundred years. Plunging away from Leyton, another graveyard, this one for cars, bodies of metal in clumps piled up like weeds, rusty and shiny lorries, mangled cars, shells awaiting redemption, looking jaunty perched one on top of the other, cheerful scrap heap, metal stripped of all the aspirations and images once invested in the living machine.

  Mine belongs here, thought Helen; I might like it better without wheels.

  Then Stratford and a quickening of heart among even meaner houses, the train plunging underground as
the city began. The rest of the journey a crowded blur, onset of the true metropolis, train rattling slower, stopping to open its doors for engorging crowds at Mile End, taking in the city-bound people laden with bags and haversacks, holdalls and cases, bound on business, for shops, trains, aeroplanes. Liverpool Street, a pause for breath with more of the same in skin of every perspiring colour. Tick, tick, tick, doors closing, opening again as if indecisive, ever unwilling to take travellers from the east, unwilling to go on, sighing and moving with a jolt.

  Crashing into the gloom of St Paul's to collect a gaggle of brochured tourists speaking in tongues, panting into Holborn via Chancery Lane for lawyers' clerks, Tottenham Court Road for all the world plus wife, and then Oxford Circus, ever late for waiting crowds with shopping bags, four deep on the platform, doubting the train would ever arrive. The uninitiated pushed in and out, forever terrified of being carried on or left behind with doors closing on the skulls of half their families:

  'Come on, Jack, we'll miss it. You'll be lost for ever. Get on, get on, quickly, quickly.' Helen stirred with the languor of a native, ambled off the train as the others boarded, unhurried, unfazed by multitudes, refreshed with the blessed familiarity, the sheer anonymity of it all.

  From the heaving mass of foreign confusion in the foyer, circulating in search of the right exit, she stepped leisurely into the roar of the circus and thus began the business of the day.

  There was, of course, no method at all to the business of Helen's shopping; it did not matter how or where she started, stopped, or progressed.. The nearest likely shop was the beginning, the last one the end. In the course of a very slow perambulation around dozens of departments she would stop for coffee in three or four different back streets, cappuccino or black as the mood dictated, teeth-defying bread or stale pastry for energy, cigarette for sheer joy, and back into the fray. Food was irrelevant but part of the haphazard pleasure.

  Over a space of hours she would try on an assortment of garments, most of them unsuitable; would be happily tired of taking off clothes and putting them on, wishing she had worn something better suited to the purpose like a track suit without buttons and more comfortable shoes; would look at herself in mirrors and detest what she saw, the existing skirt, even the clean underwear beneath it, dead and grey against the backdrop of all the newness.

  She would shake with suppressed laughter in communal changing rooms at the vision of herself looking like a dartboard in a dress of vivid yellow check; would give and receive opinions, joke, help to fasten hooks and eyes. She would rehang neatly on hangers everything she had taken off because she knew what it was like to be a shop assistant and she would try to be pleasant, however rude or pushy they were, making them laugh in the process. She would pull a dozen faces; considered herself obscenely fat on the beam, too muscular in the arms, too skinny in the shank; be hideously depressed by her own silhouette, obscurely and maliciously cheered by the vision of another infinitely worse, if she could find one.

  She would be shocked at the prices, discuss them with others in whispered tones, swear at buttons, zips, and the endless obscurity of the ladies' loo that seemed necessary at any given time; would drink her coffee like an addict while recognizing on her wrists the perfume sampled at counters under eagle eyes, by now a cacophony of scents. I smell like a tart's parlour, she told herself finally, while all original ideas of what she had wanted to buy drifted by the board.

  An excellent afternoon.

  She had spent one thousand pounds in her mind and acquired no more than a bar of soap, admired fabric for curtains she would never buy, sat on a three-piece suite she could not own, wondered how the world could be as rich as it seemed and who bought these things, and debated the purchase of a microwave. She dreamed of eating a baked potato and promised herself chocolate on the way home. Not now, later.

  Stuck in the bowels of Selfridge's, looking at do-it-yourself items for reasons she could not and did not want to fathom, since both subject and the practice of it were anathema to her, she even forgot the time. Helen could always forget the time without Bailey to remind her. He never forgot, but with Bailey all this would never have happened. Moving upstairs, thinking vaguely she should go home now and wasn't it time the store closed and forced her on to the street, she also remembered she had first set out in search of a coat, and for the first time in several hours, she went to look at coats.

  `Can madam be helped?'

  `Well, yes, if you'd tell me where you keep my size. Nothing else, really. Please don't trouble because I probably shan't buy, if you see what I mean. One of those days when indecision is rampant and I'm feeling fat.'

  Ah, yes, I know what you mean: nothing suits a fat day, madam, nothing at all, but please look.'

  The shop was becoming empty when she tried on the coat, the first one on the rack, a brilliant non-conservative blue, soft as cashmere, a coat with swing enough for Helen's stride, room enough for Helen's business suits, sleeves and hem corresponding to Helen's size and with style that took away her breath and left her delighted. In other words, a coat in which to live and die after too many changing rooms had reduced her self-image to that of squat scruff with scowling countenance, face slightly drained of colour. But in this coat she was transformed. Six inches taller, suddenly elegant and authoritative. She examined the label and groaned out loud.

  `That's our designer range,' said the assistant, beaming approval. It would be,' said Helen.

  There then followed a procedure as mandatory as it was pointless, quite inevitable all the same. It involved Helen progressing through the racks of coats in the hope of finding similar inspiration in a cheaper equivalent, furiously calculating as she shrugged them off on the hows and whys of affording the first, rounding up three alternatives like sheep in a pen, and looking at them all.

  `The first,' said the assistant.

  `But the price,' wailed Helen.

  It's the best,' said the assistant. 'I wouldn't lie to you, madam, honest I wouldn't. It does things for you, madam. And we close in five minutes, madam. Nearly seven o'clock, it is. Long day.'

  Oh, Christ,' said Helen, 'late night shopping. I'm two hours behind.'

  And the coat, madam?' She grinned conspiratorially.

  `Yes, the coat, I'll have it. I have to have it, you knew all the time I would.'

  Taking home the jewel-coloured coat, skipping into Bond Street station, she felt guiltily reborn, and bugger the bills. Bailey would like it, Bailey never resented extravagance, always mean with himself he positively encouraged her to spend lavishly and besides had a rare masculine eye for style. What else was there to tell him that was fit for the retelling? The desire to relate her adventures to Bailey was stronger than ever, which was saying a lot.

  He enjoyed shopping as long as the experience was secondhand. Ah, yes, she would describe the woman asking the seller to wrap her silk shirt as small as possible so she could get it into the house without her husband noticing. Assistant nodding without blinking, understanding perfectly, a common request, folding the silk into a myriad creases and the size of an envelope. At least Helen did not have a spouse like that, and such reflections, plus the comforting bulk of the coat, were enough to arm her for the rigours of the Central Line.

  This red line out of London was ever erratic, as if sulking from time to time. Nothing unusual to find the thing promising to go to Branston, but fussing to a halt at Mile End and refusing to go farther: This is your Central Line information service. All change, please. This train terminates here. The few passengers were resigned. Seven-twenty in the evening, downtown London suffering a lull while the population arrived home from work, not ready yet to re-embark disguised in different attitudes, towards the night's entertainments.

  The platform at Mile End was a secretive, vulnerable place, double-edged, unguarded underground pavement for two sets of trains travelling east as well as west, a long and gloomy island punctuated by large flat pillars and copious freestanding signs giving directions. People lean
ed on the signs or lurked behind them seeking anonymity, making the station appear empty as Helen walked from one end to the other in search of a seat and the same anonymity.

  She sat down on a bench hidden by a pillar, clutching the coat bag and the overstuffed handbag, from which she extracted the book, reconciled to the world because of the coat, ready to endure the next forty minutes with the help of the printed page, when she heard whispering as diffuse as underwater humming.

  Oh, I'll be late, I'll be so late. They'll be cross. I told you I didn't like the tube: it never works.'

  Oh, shut up, William, shut up. I'll be late, too. It doesn't matter. Nobody's going to hit us, are they? Be sensible, will you? No one will know if we're late. We're often late. You watch out for the train, will you? You might make it come faster.'

  Helen slid to the edge of her seat, craned her neck so as to look behind the pillar, caught a glimpse of William Featherstone at the extreme edge of the platform and only a few feet away, standing with hands in pockets, gazing down the tunnel as if willing a train to emerge. He was completely absorbed, tense with anxiety, looking first at the tunnel, then at the tracks.

  Oh, look, Evie, look: mice, real mice.' A whisper of excitement.

  From behind the wall, where Evelyn squatted against the support, Helen heard a muttered expression of boredom. Her first response was amusement: two children at play, well, well, well. So they had known one another with the familiarity she had imagined; how coincidental to confirm their secret so far from home. The next reflection contained the thought that theirs was private mischief in which she should not intrude. The tube was as good a place for hiding as any; let them be. Helen might have moved away if their next moves had been as innocuous.

  William knelt at the extreme edge of the platform, riveted by the mice who lived below the rails, a phenomenon that had often riveted her own eyes. While he watched, making odd little cooing noises to the mice, his voice echoing slightly in the tunnel entrance, Evelyn stood upright on her plimsolled feet, ran towards him, stopped short of him, turned and paced back to her spot. She did this twice, as if counting the yards between them, the second time retreating farther so that her distance from him was slightly greater. Then ran a third time, as silent and light as a bird, the extra yard allowing extra speed, retreated again, as if satisfied.