Finer Things

by David Wharton

  Once again, he understood that she wasn’t going to tell him more, and he didn’t ask her to. She liked that about him, his instinctiveness.

  After the meal, they walked together past the theatres. Delia could go to his house, he said, if she wanted, or he’d go to hers if she preferred. She was tempted, but Stella knew she’d been with him today, and would have eyes on Delia’s door. There was also the arrangement she’d made for Tess to come to Fenfield the next morning. Wisest to return home alone tonight, she decided.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ she said, and gave him her address. ‘Come late, after midnight, and wear dark clothes. Take a taxi, but not all the way. Get out on Spendlove Road and walk the rest. Not too quick, not too slow. Keep your head down. Don’t whistle or anything like that.’

  ‘Jesus, Delia. Is there anything else? A password? Should I bring a gun?’

  ‘Have you got one?’

  ‘No, I—’ He realised she was joking.

  ‘I’m not allowed men where I live,’ she said. ‘Just being discreet, that’s all.’

  He accepted the explanation, but she could see he knew there was more, that he would likely push for it later. She’d need to be ready. She waved down a cab and left him there on the street. She’d no illusions. This wouldn’t last. But he stood on the street and watched the taxi carry her home. Her secret man, half-melancholy, half-joyous, who would soon enough be heading towards her bed.

  10

  On Monday morning, conscious of her instructions, Tess set out for Doddington Road carrying only a small sketchbook and pencil, both hidden in her handbag. She’d been uncertain what ‘wear something ordinary’ meant, but had borrowed a beige jacket from one of the house-sharing secretaries, to which she’d added her dullest pinafore dress and a pair of flat shoes.

  Delia came down to the front door ready to leave. She was almost unrecognisably dowdy in a long black coat and maroon headscarf.

  ‘You’ll do, for a librarian,’ she said, straightening Tess’s jacket collar. ‘Ever seen a robbery?’

  Tess shook her head.

  ‘Well that’s what we’re doing today, watching a robbery. A gentleman acquaintance of mine is going to rob a butcher’s shop. I thought you might find that interesting.’

  Tess agreed. She certainly would find it interesting.

  ‘Good. A friend’s going to take us to where it’s happening. Well, she’s more a colleague actually – her name’s Rita. And just so you know, I’ve told her you’re thinking of learning the business, maybe becoming a hoister yourself. Can’t tell Rita you’re an artist – she wouldn’t understand that at all. Wouldn’t like it. So I’ve said you’re my cousin from up north. Can you remember all that?’

  ‘Yes. I’m your cousin from up north. I want to learn how to shopl— to hoist.’

  ‘And you’re called Julie. Don’t think I’d have a cousin Tess. Doesn’t ring right.’

  Tess was unconvinced by the explanation. It seemed to her that Delia had set out purposely to make her day difficult, to put her through a sort of exam, and she was just going to have to pass it.

  At a bus stop outside a pub, they met the friend-or-colleague: a slender woman whose fashionable bleached-blonde hairstyle framed a hard, thin-lipped face.

  ‘This your niece, then?’ Rita said to Delia.

  ‘Cousin. Her name’s Julie,’ Delia said. ‘Down from Yorkshire.’

  Tess had recognised Rita immediately. She recalled the chirpy astringency of her voice cutting through the noise of the Les Jensen Trio at the Gaudi, telling some kind of story, Tess remembered, about animals in a forest. That night, Rita had looked a good deal more glamorous. Today in a dark grey mackintosh, she appeared as drab as Delia. She gave the newcomer a judgemental look.

  ‘Never been in London before, girl?’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘Funny. You look familiar.’

  ‘There’s an actress a lot of people say I look like,’ Tess replied. ‘Perhaps that’s who you’re thinking of?’

  ‘Oo’s that then?’

  ‘Susan something or other. She’s on television, I think. Mainly does comedies.’

  Rita peered at Tess. ‘Must be who I’m thinking of, I s’pose. Can’t have seen you in Yorkshire, that’s for sure. I ain’t never been north of Fulham. What’s it like up there, then?’

  Tess paused to give the impression she was considering the question carefully, then said, ‘S’all right.’

  ‘Christ! Proper chatterbox, this one, Dee. Can’t shut her up, can you?’ Rita directed her attention towards the approaching bus. ‘Here we are. Number fourteen. All aboard, girls.’

  After they disembarked on Ealing Broadway, Rita led the way through a series of back alleys until they emerged onto an affluent shopping street. They stopped outside a florist’s. Pretending interest in a bucket of white roses, Rita tilted her head to indicate a butcher’s on the opposite side of the road.

  ‘That’s the one,’ she said.

  A few shoppers, mainly housewives and pensioners, ambled up and down the street. There was a bank here, Tess noticed. A jeweller’s too. Butchers had money, she supposed, like the one who had bought the picture from her fellow student in Leeds. She focused her attention on the details of the shop. It was called Faraday and Son, Family Butchers. In the window a grinning automaton in a striped apron raised and lowered his cleaver again and again. The motto Pleased to Meet You: Meat to Please You had been painted in white along the bottom of the glass.

  She could see clearly what was happening inside the shop. The proprietor (a young man, more likely ‘son’ than Faraday) reached into the window display, lifted out a string of grey-skinned sausages and carried them to his scales. On the other side of the counter a queue of customers waited patiently: all well-to-do women, some accompanied by children, some not. Doctors’ wives, accountants’ wives. Professional wives. Before the war, they would have kept servants to do their shopping and cooking for them. Now they were fending for themselves.

  ‘Here he comes,’ Delia said.

  ‘Tommy the Spade.’ Rita spoke the name under her breath, but it was an announcement.

  ‘Tommy the—?’ Before Tess finished her question, she saw the answer – in the form of the person heading up the road towards them on an old delivery bicycle. Tommy the Spade was heavy and swarthy: a massive man of the type in whom muscle and fat were indistinguishable from each other, and he was too big for the bike. He rode standing on the pedals, rocking from side to side. Sweat ran liberally down his face. He carried two large empty shoulder bags with their straps crossed over his chest. Along the top of the handlebars, he held a garden spade, reminding Tess of a tightrope act.

  ‘Look at him go!’ Rita cackled with delight and clapped her hands as Tommy the Spade jumped his bicycle up the kerb and onto the pavement, scattering a few pedestrians from his path. An old man in a tweed suit stomped furiously towards him. Tommy turned his back and leaned the bike against the butcher’s window.

  Though physically tiny, the old man seemed used to the deference of others. He drew himself to his fullest height, and reached up to tap Tommy on the shoulder. Tess thought he might be a retired army officer, or perhaps just a lifelong bully.

  ‘Young fellow—’ he began.

  Tommy spun around, swung the spade above his head like a war hammer and let out a hideous bellow.

  How swiftly the world could be overturned. Tommy’s roar and that upward sweep of his spade changed the meaning of everything. Passers-by became witnesses. A garden tool became a murder weapon. Everything froze into testimony. This awful thing was about to happen in front of these people, in front of their children, and nothing would prevent it. Tess knew with absolute certainty that she was about to see a human head smashed open with a garden spade; hear the wet crunch of steel through bone. Yet she neither shut her eyes, nor put her hands over her ears.

  After that moment, events lurched for a while in strange discontinuity, from one completed tableau to another.

&nb
sp; Now the terrified old man hadn’t been killed after all. He had landed on his backside, and sat on the pavement, his skull unexpectedly intact.

  Now Tommy was inside the shop, directing the butcher to empty the cash register into one bag, pointing out all the cuts of meat he wanted to go into the other.

  Now Rita said, ‘I asked him to get me some nice pork chops. I hope he remembers.’

  Now, exiting the butcher’s, Tommy stepped gently over the still-dazed old man and remounted his bike.

  Now he dropped his spade to the pavement, and as the clang it made died away, Tess became aware of the bells of distant police cars.

  Now Tommy, spadeless, dangerously imbalanced by the two stuffed bags he carried, wobbled away on his bicycle.

  Now Delia was no longer by Tess’s side. She was helping the old man back to his feet.

  Now she was back with Tess and Rita. ‘Poor sod’s in a right state,’ she said. ‘I bet that’ll give him nightmares for months.’

  And time began running normally again. Bystanders unfroze. Someone from the bank brought out a chair for the old man, and he sat on it. A woman brought him a cup of tea, and he sipped at it. The butcher came out of his shop and stood staring at the spade on the pavement, as if it could provide some explanation of what had just happened. The injury Tommy had inflicted on this place had already begun to heal over.

  ‘Time to go,’ Rita said.

  As the women escaped into the same side street by which they had arrived, three police cars drew up outside the butcher’s.

  Rita was sulky on the walk back to Ealing Broadway.

  ‘Could’ve got us all caught, Dee, going over to help that old sod,’ she said when they were on the bus back to Fenfield.

  ‘Sorry. I wasn’t thinking.’

  Rita addressed Tess in a tone of the highest seriousness. ‘If you want to keep out of the nick, girl, you got to learn how to blend in. What Delia done there means someone might remember her afterwards, and that’s the last thing you want. Course, sometimes you can’t help being noticed. That’s when you’ve got to make sure it’s for the wrong thing.’

  ‘Misdirection, you mean?’ Tess said.

  A quizzical expression crossed Rita’s face. Delia interjected immediately, ‘Grammar school girl. Likes her big words.’

  ‘Oh yeah? Don’t remember you mentioning that before, Dee.’ Rita looked out of the window and said, ‘You got qualifications and all that, Julie?’ Her tone was breezy, but not to be trusted.

  ‘No,’ Tess said. ‘Spent too much time hanging around with boys. Ended up failing all my exams.’

  ‘Shame. You got a job, now then?’

  She remembered something Jimmy had told her about his late mother. ‘I’m a canteen girl in a shoe factory,’ she said. ‘Been there since I left school. Five years.’

  ‘What’s that like?’

  ‘Stinks.’

  ‘The shoes or the food?’

  ‘Both. And the men who work there. You can smell the place for miles around. You ever been in a tannery?’

  Rita gave her a supercilious look. ‘What do you think, Julie?’

  ‘It’s revolting,’ Tess said. ‘It takes all sorts of horrible stuff to turn the skins into leather. Great big tanks of piss and shit and bile. You can’t get the smell off your skin. You can’t wash it out of your hair. I’ve had enough of it.’

  Rita looked down at the boots she was wearing and swung her toes back and forth. ‘It’s like the pie factory, ain’t it? You don’t want to ask what goes on there.’

  Delia said they could go to a local pub later to watch Tommy selling off the stolen meat. Rita went off in advance, to make sure she got the pork chops he’d promised her, and Delia took Tess back to her flat. Tess wondered if William Shearsby had stayed here last night. If so, there was no sign of him now.

  She sat and drew pictures of the robbery in the little sketchbook she’d brought with her. With thick, brutal lines she outlined the spade, ready to smash down into the old man’s brains.

  ‘Would he have done it?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ Delia said, looking over Tess’s shoulder at the drawing. ‘He’ll do an assault, but not a battery. Menaces, it’s called. If he gets caught, that’s not such a long sentence as violence against the person. And if you kill someone in the commission of a robbery, they can hang you for it. You got to take all that into account, course you do, but Tommy wouldn’t want it on his conscience either. Doing that to some old bloke who’s just come out to post a letter. Not that there aren’t some round here who’d have bashed his brains in, for fun.’

  ‘He made it look so real. I genuinely thought it was going to happen.’

  ‘That’s part of the job. It’s just acting. Were you scared?’

  ‘Not at all,’ Tess said, putting the drawing aside for now. ‘If you’d asked me before we went, I’m sure I’d have expected to be terrified, but when it came to it, I was just waiting to see what would happen next.’

  Delia laughed. ‘You’re a hard case, aren’t you?’

  ‘I was worried about Rita, though. I kept thinking she might remember me from the Gaudi.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have brought you along if I’d thought there was a chance of that. She was half-cut the other night, and I doubt she even noticed you. I must say, though, you can’t half spin a yarn. Was that true – what you said about how they make the leather?’

  ‘Maybe.’ Tess vaguely recalled reading somewhere that the Ancient Romans used to tan animal hides in a solution of dog faeces and human urine. Perhaps that was still how it was done. ‘I’ve no idea, really.’

  ‘I could believe it, though,’ Delia said. ‘Most of what people do has something disgusting about it.’

  There was something unexpectedly vulnerable in the way she said that. On an impulse, Tess scribbled her address on the back of the drawing and ripped the page out of her sketchbook.

  ‘Listen Delia,’ she said. ‘If you ever need somewhere to go, somewhere away from here. This is where I live.’

  Word must have spread quickly. By the time Tess and Delia arrived at the pub, which was called The Three Acorns, the queue reached out of the door. Inside, they found Tommy standing behind a stall of two tables pushed together, covered with lino, on which he had set out his produce. No longer playing the berserker of the robbery, he dealt amiably and patiently with each customer, negotiated prices, pointed out the excellent qualities of his goods, and praised the skill of the man who had cut the joints and stuffed the sausages. Tess was impressed to note that in the heat of the robbery Tommy must have had the foresight to make the butcher give him a sheaf of wrapping paper and a ball of string, so he could now close each deal by assembling and handing over a trim, white parcel.

  When he spotted Delia’s neighbour, Maureen, waiting near the back, he waved and called her forward. A couple of pensioners began grumbling volubly, until they saw the look Tommy was giving them and immediately shut up.

  After she’d been to see Tommy, Maureen came to join Delia and Tess, and laid the package he’d given her on the table.

  ‘He didn’t charge me nothing for it,’ she said, through her broken grin. ‘There’s bacon in there and black pudding. I’ll make us breakfast tomorrow if you want, Dee.’

  ‘That’ll be lovely,’ Delia said.

  ‘I got eggs too. Not off Tommy. Stella gave me them yesterday. Do ’em scrambled, shall I?’

  ‘Nice. And I’ll go down the bakery first thing, get us a fresh loaf.’

  They continued watching Tommy make deals until the last of the meat was sold. Then Maureen left.

  ‘In case you’re wondering,’ Delia said after Maureen left. ‘She got beat up in the nick.’

  Tess had indeed been wondering, and had not known how to broach the subject. ‘By other prisoners?’

  ‘Couple of screws. Guards. The bastards broke her jaw and her cheekbone. Knocked out four of her teeth. Smashed her arm too.’

  ‘God. That’s awful.’


  ‘And they left her in her cell afterwards. Didn’t tell anyone. It was a night and a day before another screw come looking for her and got her to the hospital. Doctors did their best, but none of it set right. That’s why Maureen looks the way she does. Luckily, she doesn’t remember much about it.’

  Since the march, Tess thought often of Sharpeville, trying to work out how anyone could do what those policemen had done. She’d concluded it must have been necessary for them to believe they were on the right side, to imagine they were protecting themselves and their families against some terrible threat. And on top of that they were following orders, obeying authority. It was not their choice. So when a white policeman squeezed his trigger, the consequences were distant from him. He was only a step in his bullet’s journey, no more responsible for its consequences than the Birmingham factory worker who had packed it, the sailors who had shipped it. When it reached its final destination in the soft back of a running child, they all shared the blame.

  So how could she comprehend what had happened to Maureen? This act of intimate personal hatred. As they’d pounded the girl with their fists and boots, those two borstal guards would have felt her bones give way. Her blood would have been on their hands, not metaphorically but actually. They would have had to wash it off themselves before going home to their families. And what story could they have told to make sense of this terrible act against someone as obviously harmless as Maureen? They would have needed to work hard to find reasons to hate her, to pretend she was their enemy. And because they had wanted to, they had worked hard. Because they wanted to license themselves.

  She said, ‘Do you think she’d like to sit for me? For a portrait.’

  ‘Because she already looks like one of those Picassos, is it?’ Delia said acidly. ‘Save you a bit of work?’

  ‘Look, if you don’t think it’s a good idea—’

  ‘Not for me to say, is it? She’s her own person. Ask her if you like.’

  ‘I wouldn’t want to hurt her. Honestly.’

  ‘Up to you.’ Delia looked at her watch. ‘I should think you’ll need to get back soon.’