Finer Things

by David Wharton

  Tess realised she’d made an error. This felt exactly like that awful conversation with Jimmy after the march.

  ‘Look, Delia, I’m really sorry if I’ve upset you. It was obviously the wrong thing to say. But I wasn’t thinking of how Maureen looks. A portrait’s never just about showing the outside of a person. Not if it’s any good.’

  Delia softened. She told Tess about the stolen car the girl had got into, how her parents had cut her off, how she’d lost her job at the hairdresser’s, how she’d got herself caught on her very first hoisting lesson, and how all that had led to her going to the borstal where she’d received her injuries. ‘She’s unlucky, that girl,’ Delia said. ‘She’s on an unlucky path. That’s why you shouldn’t paint her picture. You can finish mine, though, if you want to come back on Sunday.’

  Just after midnight, Delia waited outside her front door. Doddington Road was quiet and dark, with dead bulbs in half the street lights. She felt fearful and stupid, tried to hope Bill wouldn’t come tonight after all. Anyone might spot him. The information would get back to Stella. Even if that didn’t happen, sooner or later he was bound to lose interest, cause her hurt. Or if he didn’t, she’d have to betray someone. If only the Imps would give her some indication of the right thing to do. She had no idea what they thought about it, what they wanted. And now here he came, so that meant she was committed.

  He was doing as he’d been told. In dark clothes, a cap, on foot, not whistling.

  ‘I look like a bloody burglar,’ he said, his voice cutting through the night air, alarmingly clear.

  ‘Shh. Come in. Get off the street.’

  He stepped inside and she closed the door. They stood together, hidden from sight now, at the bottom of the narrow staircase.

  ‘I got out on Spendlove Road, like you told me,’ he whispered. His breath against her ear.

  She led the way up, stepping as lightly as she could. ‘Put your weight on the banister,’ she told him, ‘not on your feet.’

  Her precautions must baffle him, she thought. Because who could possibly care what two people in—

  How easy it was to slip that word in. If you weren’t careful.

  She’d left her flat door unlocked, so she could just push it open, no fiddling and scratching around with the key. She dropped the catch noiselessly behind them. Then they went to her single bed, where his urgency and selfishness surprised her. She reached above her head to stuff the pillow between the top of the bed and the wall, to stop it banging. Twice she had to silence him with a hand over his mouth.

  ‘Sorry I was so rough,’ he said afterwards.

  Delia raised herself on one arm. ‘Are you now, Bill? Genuinely sorry?’

  He laughed. ‘Maybe not sorry, exactly. But I haven’t let go like that for— I mean I’d been looking forward to seeing you all day, and—’

  She kissed him.

  ‘I was going to offer myself to you again,’ he said. ‘Only I’m not sure I’d quite have it in me. Maybe in the morning.’

  ‘There won’t be time.’ She rested her head on his chest, listened to his heart, his breathing. They stayed that way for a while, both awake.

  ‘What does this open?’ he asked, lifting up the small key she kept on a silver chain around her neck.

  ‘Nothing any more,’ she said. ‘There was a little money box I had when I was a girl. I left it behind when I was evacuated, and it got destroyed in the Blitz. Just keep the key for sentiment, I suppose. Daft, aren’t I?’

  Sliding her knee across his leg, feeling the scrape of coarse male body hair against the inside of her thigh, Delia wondered if this intimacy was only forced on them by the smallness of the bed. If they’d room to escape each other, would either of them have taken it? Would she have moved away from him into her normal sleeping position, curled into herself, arms wrapped around her knees?

  Perhaps Bill was thinking something similar, because he said, ‘I’ve a double bed at my place. None of the neighbours give a stuff who comes and goes.’

  ‘Sounds wonderful. Next time, maybe.’ She reached for her bedside clock and set the alarm for three, thinking she’d send him on his way before the milkmen started their rounds. Soon afterwards she felt him drop into unconsciousness and she was free then to fall asleep herself.

  When the alarm went off, Bill tried to rise almost immediately, but Delia caught his shoulder, and rolled on top.

  ‘We’ll need to be quick,’ she whispered, guiding him into her.

  Later, on his way out of the flat, he paused in the doorway and said, ‘All this secrecy. I’m not— I mean, I know I’ve no right to ask. And you don’t have to— It’s just—’

  ‘Can’t answer a question you won’t ask, Bill,’ she said.

  ‘Is it another man?’

  She laughed at that.

  ‘Seriously,’ he said. ‘If there is someone, we ought to talk about it.’

  ‘No, it’s not another man,’ she said. ‘You’re the first bloke I’ve been with that way for more than a year.’

  ‘Good,’ he said.

  She was surprised it should be important to him. Such a trivial measure of her honesty. What, she wondered, if he had asked the right question? If he had, she might have told him everything: Stella, Finlay, the spying, the lying. Maybe it mattered less than she feared it did.

  She returned to bed, and lay for a couple of hours in a half-dreaming state of wakefulness, trying to make sense of what her life ought to be. It couldn’t stay like this. Too much was out of her control.

  11

  Usually, Jimmy boarded the bus three stops after Tess and sat with her for the rest of the journey. On Tuesday morning, he didn’t appear. He must still be angry, she thought, had obviously caught an earlier service to avoid her – a childish act that absolved her of any responsibility for Sunday’s argument. After all, she’d only gone on that South Africa march to please him. If he hadn’t dragged her into it, none of the rest would have happened. Now, because Jimmy had probably not covered for her the previous day, she needed to speak to the administrator, Mr Newbolt, about her absence.

  The counter in Newbolt’s office was unattended, but she could make out a blurred human shape through the frosted window of the back room, so she pressed the button marked Ring for Service, triggering the sound of a distant and melodious electric bell. The shape did not respond. There was a clock on the wall. Tess watched its sweep hand tick round three full circuits then she rang the bell once more. This time the blur rose to its feet, the door to the office opened and out swept a fortyish man, bald, long-legged, with a disproportionately short body and arms. The proportions of a flamingo, Tess thought. His shirtsleeves were rolled to the elbow. The fountain pen in his top pocket had leaked a little, making a circular blue stain over his heart.

  ‘I’m not deaf, young lady,’ Newbolt snapped. ‘There’s no need to keep hammering on that button.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Tess said. ‘I don’t want to be late for class.’

  ‘Then you should have come earlier. What do you want?’

  ‘I was absent yesterday. Unwell.’

  Newbolt reached under the counter and brought out a foolscap sheet on which various Moncourt tutors had scrawled the names of the previous day’s absentees.

  ‘You’re meant to telephone if you can’t come in. Did you telephone?’

  ‘Sorry, I was ill. I couldn’t get out. The phone in our house is set to incoming calls only.’

  He groaned with boredom, and plucked the fountain pen from his pocket. ‘Very well. What’s your name?’

  ‘Tess Green. Theresa. I asked my friend to report me absent yesterday. James Nichols. Did he—?’

  ‘No. Roger Dunbar put your name on the list, though. Something of a miracle he could be bothered. Look here.’ He pointed out one inscrutable name among a batch of four. Upside down, Dunbar’s cavalier scrawl looked like Arabic. ‘Why didn’t you come in?’

  ‘As I said, I was ill.’ Never having missed a day before, Tess hadn�
�t anticipated she’d need much in the way of a story. ‘It’s personal,’ she said, lamely. ‘I’d rather not go into details.’

  Newbolt’s pen was poised over the space next to her name on the form. It dropped a splash of ink, and he tutted. ‘I’ll need something specific,’ he said. ‘Ill won’t wash. What was this sickness that made you so ill yesterday you couldn’t manage to struggle to a phone box, yet leaves you so apparently hale and hearty this morning?’

  ‘Stomach ache.’

  ‘Stomach ache? That’s the best you can do?’

  ‘I had a stomach ache,’ she said determinedly. ‘I’m not making it up.’

  ‘I’ll put women’s troubles. Nobody ever questions that. Then we can all get on with our business.’

  ‘Fine. Put that,’ she said. Like she had any choice.

  Against the squiggle she supposed must be her name, Newbolt added six distinct capital letters: PERIOD. He replaced the cap of his pen and slid it back into his shirt pocket. There was, she noticed now, a single long hair growing out of his nose.

  ‘James Nichols?’ he said.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘This person who was supposed to come in and lie for you. His name is James Nichols?’

  She could only just be bothered to challenge the accusation, for the sake of form. ‘I didn’t ask him to lie for me,’ she said. ‘I asked him to report to you that I was ill.’

  ‘Yes, well, be that as it may,’ Newbolt said. ‘I was asking if this honest broker of yours is called James Nichols?’ The nose hair drifted back and forth as he spoke. She felt a strong desire to reach over the counter and pluck it out.

  ‘Jimmy Nichols. Yes, that’s him. Why?’

  ‘Seems he was absent yesterday too. Here’s his name right above yours. And he didn’t telephone either. Perhaps he caught whatever it was you had.’

  Jimmy didn’t return to college the next day, nor for the rest of that week. To distract herself, Tess worked on all the things she’d witnessed during her two visits to Fenfield. She made drawings, colour studies, paintings – recorded the robbery’s vicious surrealism, Tommy’s cheery meat sale in the pub, Delia’s unpredictability, Rita’s coarseness. The cat attacking her outside the Nissen hut. None of it satisfied her. The images were competent, but not good enough, not right.

  On Friday she laid all her pictures out on the studio floor, right across the space where Jimmy would normally work, and she tried to see them as one, to figure out how to pull them together and make something large enough, powerful enough, to encompass her baffled purpose. Maureen, she decided, had to be the key. So she drew Maureen’s ruined face in the upstairs window; Maureen’s arm that didn’t bend quite right. Maureen on the floor of a borstal cell for all those hours, waiting to see if she’d live or die. But that was where it always stopped. Inevitably, she would half see the possibility of the final idea, the artwork she ought to be making. It shimmered there, teasing her, and the longer it stayed just out of reach, the more she both believed in and doubted its existence.

  It might have helped her to talk things through with Jimmy, she thought. Surely he’d be back after the weekend. But he wasn’t. The following Monday Tess rode the bus alone to college, worked alone in the studio, and ate alone in the refectory. On his way to the staff table with his tray of meat pudding and spotted dick, Benedict Garvey paused to speak to her.

  ‘Theresa, isn’t it?’

  For a moment, she had the idea he was wearing his patch on the wrong eye. But no, everything was normal. She was tired. Hadn’t slept enough.

  ‘Work going well?’ he said.

  ‘I don’t know,’ was all she could think of.

  ‘I see,’ he said. ‘Well, that’s often a good sign.’

  This struck her as nonsense. ‘Is that what you really believe, Mr Garvey?’

  He had been about to move away, but he stopped. ‘I have to say, Miss Green, you’re not the most compliant of students.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘No, it’s an unusual quality. A strength. And you’re right. One says that sort of thing automatically, not because it’s true, but to ease a student’s concerns.’

  Tess pushed on. She thought she might as well now. ‘And to ease yourself out of the conversation?’

  ‘Either way, I look to have failed, don’t I?’ He looked across the refectory to where the rest of the first years were braying and laughing. ‘It’ll get better,’ he said, in a way that made it unclear whether he was talking about Tess’s work or about life in general. Whichever he had meant, she was no closer to it by the end of the day, and she had decided it was time to find out what was happening with Jimmy.

  To do so required a little detective work with the directory that hung on the wall next to Moncourt’s payphone. She had never visited Jimmy’s lodgings, but she knew he rented a room from a retired academic couple. They were called Woodrow, she remembered, and the old man was a professor. The phone book listed only one Prof. C. Woodrow in Camden.

  That evening, even with the address and her A-Z, it took her some time to find the house, which turned out to be a spindly three-storey place out on its own off an alleyway at the end of a cul-de-sac. It was surrounded by a high-walled garden with iron gates, on which hung a Beware of the Dog sign in blue enamel. She could see three skylight windows in the roof. Remembering that Jimmy had told her his was an attic room, she looked up and waved, hoping perhaps he might be looking out of one of them right now, and would come down to let her in.

  When that didn’t happen, she peered through the bars of the gate and called ‘Hello?’ twice, before opening it. There probably wasn’t a dog, she thought: the sign was a rust-spotted antique. Nevertheless, she left her exit clear and approached the house warily. A few minutes after she rang the bell, the door opened to reveal a tall, wiry old man, his mouth nearly invisible behind an enormous grey moustache.

  ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘I’m here to see—’

  But he was peering over her shoulder at the open gate. ‘Sorry. Would you mind popping back and closing that? Don’t want the hound getting out.’

  She did as he asked.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said when she returned. ‘She might run off, you see. Our last one did that. Little Westie, name of Hamish. Never came back.’ He squinted at the gate, ‘You did put the catch in properly, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes. I was very careful. I’m sorry I left it open in the first place.’

  ‘Always the chance the dog might run off, you see.’

  ‘I understand,’ Tess said, and tried moving away from the subject of dogs and gates. ‘I’m here to see Jimmy.’

  ‘Jimmy?’

  ‘James Nichols.’

  ‘James what?’

  ‘Nichols. James Nichols.’

  The old man shook his head, not confidently, but as if he was digging around in his memory for an especially tricky concept. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Nobody of that name here. We do have a lodger. Nice young fellow. Jewish, but not exactly religious, if you know what I mean. Works at King’s College. Leon, he’s called. That’s not your chap, is it?’

  ‘No. Jimmy’s an art student at Moncourt.’ She had been sure she had the correct address, but it was possible, she supposed, that some kind of error had been made. ‘I understand he rents a room from a Professor Woodrow and his wife.’

  ‘Well, Woodrow’s my name, yes. Charles Woodrow. And I am a professor. So you’ve got all that right.’

  Perhaps she had misremembered the name and her detective work had brought her to entirely the wrong house. Could it have been something else: Woodville? Woodford? Woodhouse? She was sure she had it right. The bizarre thought came to her that Jimmy had been living here under an assumed identity, as Leon the Jewish lodger. But why on earth would he be doing that?

  Meanwhile, the old man was continuing, ‘Strictly speaking, I’m an emeritus professor – which is to say, I’m retired now. Still do the odd lecture, of course. I’ve got one coming up on the Rockingham Whigs. O
h. You did close the gate, didn’t you?’

  ‘I— yes. A minute ago. You watched me do it.’

  A woman in a gardening smock appeared from behind the corner of the house. She was perhaps a decade younger than Professor Woodrow. Taking off her dirty gloves as she stepped towards Tess, she said, ‘Hello. Is my husband helping you?’

  ‘I’m looking for Jimmy Nichols,’ Tess said. ‘I thought he lived here.’

  ‘I see. Yes, that’s right. Jimmy’s our lodger.’ She turned to her husband. ‘Why don’t you go back indoors, Charlie? I’ll look after this young lady.’

  ‘Would you check the gate, please Val?’

  ‘Before I come in. Yes, of course.’

  ‘We don’t want the dog running off again, do we?’

  ‘I’ll make sure it’s fastened, Charlie.’

  After a final concerned glance up the path, Professor Woodrow said to Tess, ‘Delighted to meet you. I do hope you can track down this boyfriend of yours.’ And he retreated into the depths of the house.

  ‘Jimmy’s not my boyfriend,’ Tess said.

  Mrs Woodrow clapped her gardening gloves together, making a little cloud of dried soil. ‘Of course he isn’t,’ she said. ‘Sorry. We weren’t expecting anyone. I usually try to get to the door before Charlie, but I was busy in the greenhouse just now, and I had the radio on so I didn’t hear the bell. You’ll perhaps have worked out that my husband isn’t as sharp as he was. Our last dog died six years ago. And anyone can tell Jimmy’s not the girlfriends type.’

  Everyone seemed to spot that immediately, Tess thought, except her.

  ‘Is he in?’ she asked. And because it felt like there needed to be a proper explanation for her presence here, she added, ‘He hasn’t been to Moncourt for a couple of days. Nobody’s heard anything from him. I was worried he might be ill.’

  A look of sympathy crossed Mrs Woodrow’s face. ‘Didn’t you know, dear? He’s at home. That is, home-home, rather than home-here. He went back to Kent last week.’

  ‘Oh—’ To her shame and astonishment, Tess burst into tears, and found she couldn’t stop.