The thin rain that had met her when she exited Barkers seemed to have covered the entire city. She sat at home all that afternoon, prepared herself to talk to Stella, and watched it fall, soft, cool and melancholy, outside her windows. It was still waiting for her in the evening when she set out for the Lamplighters.
She saw Lulu approaching from the opposite direction, and readied herself for a few minutes of unwanted chatter, but perhaps on account of the weather, perhaps because she too had somewhere important to be, Lulu hurried past with barely an acknowledgement.
Tommy the Spade was standing on the street outside the Lamplighters’ front door, miserably pulling on a soggy Woodbine. Stella must have posted him on guard duty. That sort of public gesture was out of character, and it must mean something had shaken her pretty badly: something worse than the police, maybe; some consequence of this business with Itchy Pete pushing a bloke under a car. Whatever it was, Delia thought, it could be a good development. In the circumstances, the boss might be grateful for any support, might be less picky than usual about the details.
Almost certainly Delia would have to give her Bill Shearsby as a token of loyalty, and, after the shopwalker that morning, she was ready to do it. The most important thing now was to edge herself back into good terms with the Imps, to save herself with Stella, to re-engage the cogs of the world’s clockwork and get it all running right again.
‘Pub’s shut,’ Tommy said as she approached.
She looked at her watch. ‘It’s gone opening time.’
A black Humber drove by. Tommy’s eyes tracked it to the end of the street. ‘Pub’s shut,’ he repeated absently, still looking at the corner where the Humber had turned off and gone out of sight. ‘Stella ain’t opening tonight.’
‘Why’s that, Tommy? Is something wrong?’
‘Flu, that’s all. You’d best go home, Delia.’
‘I need to talk to her.’
‘Like I said, she ain’t well. And it’s catching.’
He fixed his eyes on the road, trying to indicate with his silence that the conversation was over. Maybe the police already had Pete in custody, Delia thought. They’d keep his skin medicine away from him. In a few hours he’d be desperate. Some detective could be grinding away right now at his resolve, trying to convince him it was in his best interests to grass up as many of his friends as possible. Pete scratching and itching and scratching, more and more desperate. He was going down anyway. And if that bloke he’d pushed under that car should happen to die—
Stella was meticulous. Surely Pete couldn’t tell the police anything that could do her too much harm. But if he couldn’t lead them to her, could he lead them to anyone else? To Teddy and Tommy maybe – to the jobs they did on the side. To Stella’s girls. To Delia. Once this all started falling down, it could land on anyone. Even so, there had to be more to this than the coppers. More and more, it seemed essential to get through this door, to find out.
She gave Tommy one last try. ‘Can’t you ask her if I can go in? I’ve got something I need to tell her.’
‘What’s that, then?’
There it was. Her persistence had opened a little crack of possibility.
‘It’s to do with Finlay,’ she said.
‘What about Finlay? You tell me and I’ll tell Stella. I promise.’
‘Can’t do that. She’d want to hear it from me.’
They both knew now he’d have to let her in. Anything to do with Finlay could be important. Still, he kept plodding on through the motions. ‘Tell me and I’ll tell her right now,’ he said. ‘That’s all I can do for you. Honestly, Dee, she won’t see nobody.’
Delia turned as if to go. ‘Just have to leave it until tomorrow, I suppose. Stell’s not going to be happy when she finds out. But if you can’t disturb her—’
He gave in. ‘Wait here,’ he said, pulling a bunch of long brass keys from his pocket.
The pub door was fastened with two mortice locks: one at the top, one at the bottom. As Tommy undid them he kept a careful eye on the street. Once inside, he closed the door on Delia and did up the locks behind him.
While she waited another car drove by, a red Hillman this time. A few minutes later, she heard the keys turn once more, and Tommy reappeared.
‘Can’t be sure,’ she told him, ‘but I reckon that same car just went past again.’
‘Humber, was it?’ he asked. ‘Black one?’
‘Think so. It was black, but I can’t tell one sort from another.’
He stepped out of the doorway to let her through. ‘Thanks. In you go then.’
Stella sat on a tall stool behind the bar in the otherwise empty pub, drink in hand. Delia took a seat opposite her. Stella sloshed down the contents of her glass, then carelessly refilled it with two more measures from a gin bottle. In the process, she spilt a little on the bar and didn’t bother to wipe it up.
‘I am not in the habit of partaking, as you know,’ she said with the punctilious, almost scripted, care of a person pretending to be either less drunk or drunker than she really was. ‘But this has been a very trying day, and I do believe I have earned a dose of the old mother’s ruin.’
‘You all right?’ Delia asked. Before Stella could reply, the door at the rear of the bar opened and in slunk Teddy.
He gave Delia a suspicious look. ‘What’s she doing here?’
Stella rolled her eyes. ‘I told you where to be, Teddy. Get back there.’
‘What’s the point? Ain’t nobody going to come that way. You’d have to climb over half a dozen garden walls. Most of ’em’s got broken glass cemented on top.’
‘Just go and do as I asked.’ There was a snappish, exhausted quality in place of Stella’s usual imperious calm. Teddy did as he was told and left, presumably on his way to stand outside in the rain and guard the back door.
‘Fuckin’ weakling,’ Stella muttered, loud enough for her brother to hear.
Delia waited until she was sure Teddy was gone before she spoke. ‘I wanted to let you know I’ve decided to go further with Bill Shearsby.’
Stella squinted at her over the bar. ‘You what?‘
‘I’ve thought about what you and Finlay wanted me to do. I know I said I wouldn’t, but—’
‘Oh.’ Stella knocked back half the contents of her glass. ‘That.’
‘Can I have one of those?’ Delia said. She didn’t much like gin, but it seemed a good idea to join Stella. To be women drinking together. ‘I’ll pay for it.’
‘No, no. You’re my guest, ain’t you?’ She took a second glass from the back of the bar and filled it for Delia. ‘Won’t even put it in The Book.’
‘Cheers.’ Delia sipped a little. The gin tasted worse than she remembered. Smelt like perfume, burned her throat.
Stella tipped the rest of hers into her mouth, and immediately refilled her glass. ‘I don’t know why you’re telling me this now, Dee. Ain’t you had that old bastard round yours four times in the last fortnight; fucking him? Dirty cow. You think I wouldn’t know? Sneaking him in. Well there ain’t nothing goes on around here I don’t hear about. Nothing.’
‘I wasn’t keeping it from you, Stella,’ Delia said, glad she’d been cautious. ‘Course I wasn’t. I’m here telling you now, ain’t I? And you asked me to do it, you and Finlay. I was doing like you asked.’
‘Liar. You done it because you fancied it. You don’t never do nothing for anyone apart from yourself, Dee. Most likely you’ve worked out I probably knew, so you’ve come over here to try and get yourself out of trouble.’ Stella grinned viciously. ‘You’re in love with him, ain’t you? You think he’s going to take you away from all this.’
‘Course not,’ Delia said, quickly but without conviction. She was beginning to realise she’d got it wrong. The Imps didn’t want her back with Stella after all. Stella’s world was falling down. Whatever had happened here had to be something far worse than Itchy Pete pushing some stranger under a car.
‘Well,’ sneered Stella. ‘Lucky
for you, it don’t matter now. None of it. Bill Shearsby, the fucking Richardsons, Finn-fucking-Leeee. So if you’ve nothing useful to tell me, you can piss off.’
Stella’s authority had always been an illusion. Now she looked as if she’d stopped believing in it herself, was desperately trying to hide her vulnerability behind this cruelty. It was important for Delia to stay calm, to collect as much information as she could.
‘What do you mean, Stell? What’s wrong?’
‘Oh, you ain’t telling me nobody’s told you what Pete done?’
‘Maureen said he pushed some bloke in front of a car last night ‘cause he was itchy.’
Stella snorted. ‘Since when did Maureen know anything? It weren’t just some bloke. It was fucking Finlay. Pete pushed Finlay in front of a car last night. And he didn’t do it ‘cause he was fucking itchy. He done it for the Krays.’
When Delia left the Lamplighters, the rain had finally stopped. It was dark now. Tommy grunted something at her as she passed, then busied himself with securing the door again. That night she slept well. It had been a tiring day and still nothing was certain. Maybe Bill was meant to be her way out after all. Anyway, Fenfield wasn’t safe for her now. She’d leave tomorrow.
13
Penny had evolved with startling rapidity from the perfect model of an art student into the perfect model of a private school art mistress. In preparation for a job starting after the summer, she’d swapped her mannish workwear and eighteenth-century make-up for flimsy dresses, mid-heeled shoes and bright, flirtatious colours: thoroughly modern, thoroughly conventional and thoroughly marriageable.
‘It worked rather well,’ she told Tess after her interview at the school in Hampshire. ‘The headmaster just stared at my tits the whole time. No pretence about it. When he offered me the job, he told me there was no need for me to finish my DipAD if I didn’t want to.’
Nevertheless, she had decided she would stay the course at the Slade. There were only a few months to go, she said, and one never knew, the diploma might be useful sometime in the future. On the other hand, she’d be lucky to scrape a pass so while it was certainly disgusting that a young woman’s education should matter less than how she presented her bosom, she had to admit that in some ways it was also a bit of a relief.
Tess couldn’t decide what she disapproved of more: the headmaster’s lechery or her friend’s pragmatism. She also suspected that Penny’s main reason for staying in London was not to finish her diploma but to secure her future as Marius Shearsby’s Tory wife. Having given up all her bohemian friends, and the bars and cafes she used to haunt with them, Penny now accompanied him to his Conservative Club twice a week. ‘It’s terribly boring, but surprisingly unpolitical,’ she claimed. ‘All about business contacts, really.’
As if that made it any better, Tess thought. Naturally, however, Marius was delighted with the metamorphosis. He’d always known there was a ‘proper girl under all that nonsense’, he said, proving once again what an idiot he was, how little comprehension he had of beauty.
Tess had been struggling with her monthly letter to her parents. Everything that actually mattered to her was too personal, too painful or too incomprehensible to share with them, and all that remained was drab repetition and dissembling. Her housemate’s arrival at her bedroom door came as a welcome distraction.
‘Fancy walking to a church?’ Penny said. ‘I’ve found a good one.’
The school in Hampshire was denominationally C of E, and Penny was expected to replace her careless, orthodox atheism with equally uncommitted faith. So far unable to face attending an actual service, she had decided to work up to it by purchasing A Guide to London’s Historic Churches by Mrs Josephine Winstanley and visiting all the locations it described. This, she thought, should help her ‘get used to the religious atmosphere’. Tess was normally happy to join her on these excursions. With Jimmy away, and still no word from him, they suited her mood.
An hour after Tess abandoned her letter home, she and Penny stood under a violet sky in the graveyard at St Pancras Old Church, looking at the Hardy Tree. According to Mrs Winstanley, hundreds of gravestones had been disinterred here in the 1860s to make way for the new railway line. As a young architecture student, Thomas Hardy had supervised their relocation into a pile around the roots of an ash tree. The sculpture they had formed after a century of erosion reminded Tess of puppies crawling over each other to get at their mother’s teat.
An explosion of noise interrupted her thoughts. In the tree above them, four magpies were raucously attacking a blackbird nest. Two of the predators drew off the parents, while another pair swooped in to grab the chicks. At first, the adult blackbirds darted anxiously back and forth, their instincts divided between protecting their young and their own self-preservation. Then, accepting it was hopeless, they flew off disconsolately into the evening, leaving the marauders to divide their winnings.
Tess thought she might draw the blackbirds’ return later that night, to sit a silent vigil over their bloodstained nest: a final scene from a gory nursery rhyme. It wasn’t a bad idea, but she hadn’t tried seriously to make any kind of picture since her visit to the Woodrows’ house. For the last fortnight she’d turned up day after day at Moncourt to do nothing more than doodle. As for the Fenfield project that she’d once found so inspiring, it had simply drifted out of sight. After Jimmy’s disappearance she hadn’t felt like a third visit to Delia, and she hadn’t gone. So that was the end of that, most likely.
‘Conventicle,’ Penny said.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘I’ve been trying to remember the collective noun for magpies. I’m sure it’s conventicle. Because they look like nuns, I suppose. Ugh. Look at that. How horrible.’
Two of the magpies perched on a gravestone and pulled at a half-dead chick in a tug of war.
‘I don’t think a conventicle has anything to do with convents,’ Tess said. ‘It means a sort of secret protestant religious group.’ She was certain that was right, though she couldn’t place the source of the knowledge – history at school, perhaps, or some book she’d read.
‘Well, that isn’t as good as nuns.’
The chick came apart. They watched the magpies gobble up half each and fly away into the dusk.
‘I might leave Moncourt,’ Tess said. She was just trying the idea out, seeing how it sounded if she said it aloud. It was more believable than she had expected. ‘I can make a decent enough living as a graphic artist. Benedict Garvey said that at my interview. Maybe he was right. And like your headmaster said, a girl doesn’t need qualifications.’
‘Oh, I’m no sort of an example, Tess. Anyway, you’re not like me. You’ve got genuine talent. You need to be a real artist.’
What right did Penny have to say that? To spout nonsense about duty to one’s talent? Surely she should understand how it felt for Tess to turn up each day to classes she had no interest in; to make picture after picture, unable to care any longer that none of them were any good. Two weeks since Jimmy had gone, and she’d still not heard from him. Her friend, who had kept almost everything from her. Whom she would never have expected to miss so much.
The next day, following yet another unproductive morning, she considered walking down to Ginelli’s for lunch, but settled as usual for a solo meal in the refectory. A group of her fellow first years at the next table were chattering with infuriating enthusiasm about the possibility of a mystery dealer on the exam panel. How ridiculous they were, how vain, to imagine themselves of interest.
She finished her meal quickly and silently. As she left, she heard Olivia Rackham mention the name Veronica Wilding. It seemed Jimmy’s guess had been right: the mystery dealer really was the same woman who had bought Tess’s picture that day by the Thames. Well, nothing had come of that, had it? Only fifteen pounds spent long ago on paint and pencils, used up in empty, valueless work.
It was still the middle of the lunch hour when she returned to the studio. Roger Dunbar was a
lone there, eating sandwiches from a paper bag. Everyone knew his wife had thrown him out. Now with nobody to iron his shirts or dry-clean his suits, he had grown ragged, his breath so rancid that when he could be bothered to lean over your work and offer you advice you had to turn your head away. Tess would have felt sympathetic, except he was at least in part to blame for whatever it was that had driven Jimmy from Moncourt.
As soon as she entered the studio, Roger grabbed up a piece of paper from his desk. ‘I’ve received this memorandum from Mr Newbolt,’ he declared. Bizarrely he spoke over the top of her, as if he were addressing a full room, and not just one person. ‘It seems a large number of student pigeonholes are over-full, leaving no room for important college communications. All students, therefore, are instructed to check and empty their student pigeonholes immediately.’
She looked blankly at him. The words, delivered in the manner of a pneumatic drill, had not made any sense to her.
‘Well,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you go to your pigeonhole and see if you can sort it out to Mr Newbolt’s satisfaction? Take your time, by all means. Make sure you do a proper job.’
The first-year pigeonholes were kept in a basement with mousetraps around its skirting and a smell like someone had recently lifted the lid of a neglected biscuit tin. To reach it, Tess had to walk to the far end of the college and down a narrow concrete staircase. There was nobody else there.
Like all the other students, she had checked her pigeonhole quite regularly during her first fortnight at Moncourt, and then, like all the other students, she had entirely forgotten its existence. They were all now so jammed with paper it would have been impossible to squeeze in another page. Much of the blockage in hers, she found, was formed of copies of The Moncourt Review, a sixteen-page magazine produced once a fortnight by a couple of third years with ambitions in journalism. Christ only knew what they filled it with, and Tess certainly had no wish to find out.
Finer Things Page 18