‘It’s just – I thought you were using some sort of contraception.’
‘The pill, you mean? Only married women can get that. And it wasn’t as if I’d gone out to Trencham with a plan. It just happened.’
‘But I asked about it, didn’t I? Afterwards. You said you were sure we were safe.’
‘I thought we were.’ She knew how stupid she had been, to believe the nonsense other girls at school used to say, but there it was. ‘I’d just finished my period,’ she said. ‘And it was my first time. It turns out neither of those things is any kind of a guarantee.’
‘What bad luck – for both of us, I mean,’ he added hastily, as if he was afraid she might think he was trying to escape responsibility.
‘Jimmy, you don’t need to—’
Tess was interrupted by the arrival of the old woman, who seemed slower now, and moved with jagged discomfort. Her hands shook as she lowered the tall aluminium pot to the table, causing its lid to rattle and some of the coffee to slop over the sides.
‘Can’t carry everything all at once no more,’ she said, and set off to fetch their cups from the counter. Tess and Jimmy continued to sit in silence, not quite looking at each other, while the old woman made a third laborious journey for the milk and sugar. This time, before she left them, she peered at Tess.
‘I remember you. You came in here to change your clothes.’
‘Oh yes. That’s right.’ Tess turned to Jimmy. ‘When I came up for my Moncourt interview I wasn’t dressed right. This lady let me use the loo in the cafe to put on my interview stuff.’ To the old woman, she said, ‘It worked. I got into the college.’
Evidently deciding no further comment was required, the old woman turned her attention to another table.
Tess was glad she had told Jimmy. At first she had thought she would find an abortionist, deal with it herself, perhaps with Val’s help or Penelope’s. Now she knew she was going to have it, there would be a child who was his too – whose father he would be, to whatever extent he might want.
‘I’ll have to leave the course, obviously,’ she told him. Saying it saddened her inexplicably. A month ago, she’d wanted to abandon Moncourt. Why should she feel such regret about it now? It was only nostalgia, she supposed, brought out by their being in Ginelli’s, at the same table where only a few months previously she’d sat and hoped above anything in the world that Benedict Garvey would give her a place.
Jimmy’s face had a way of dimpling just below the cheekbones when he was worried. ‘Why would you do that?’ he said. ‘It’s not as if they’d have any right to kick you out, as long as you get your final project done. And honestly, I doubt they’d especially want to. Anyway, you’ve just dragged me back to this place. I can’t say I’m too happy about you deserting me here after that.’
‘It wouldn’t be practical to stay. I’ll need to earn a living. I’ll have to look after the kid.’
‘Don’t rush,’ he said. ‘We can think about what we’re going to do.’
He told her what that meant two days later, in the garden at the Woodrows’. Val, with whom, no doubt, he had prepared his strategy, had brought them some of her revolting lemonade and then gone off pointedly to take Charlie for a walk.
‘Don’t be an idiot,’ Tess replied once he’d made his suggestion.
He pressed on. ‘I thought of offering as soon as you told me about the baby, but I wanted to be certain it was a sensible idea. I’ve thought it through, Tess. Obviously, I couldn’t be a typical husband, but I do want to try to be a good father.’
‘I don’t know, Jimmy. Maybe I want a typical husband.’ She didn’t, and was fairly sure he knew that, but it appeared they had entered some kind of negotiation.
‘We could have a decent life, look after the baby together,’ he said. ‘I can get work in the evenings and at weekends. Maybe we can both sell some of our art. You’d be able to stay on at Moncourt.’
‘Why would we need to be married for that?’
‘We wouldn’t, but it would make things easier in all sorts of practical ways. And we do love each other.’
‘Except I suppose you’d still— that there would still be men? And you and I wouldn’t—’
‘Does that matter?’
A little, perhaps, she thought, but not enough to be a problem.
All she had to do, he reminded her, was pass, to progress into the second year. Her rough sketches and paintings were better than most of her contemporaries’ finished work. She could easily throw together a collection of similarly themed pieces, allow herself this time to be merely good enough. She could be brilliant next year.
‘Actually,’ she said, ‘I may have an idea for something better than that. Go on, then.’
‘Does that mean you accept my proposal? Such as it is?’
‘Such as it is, yes,’ she said.
Jimmy had told his father right away, but Tess wanted to keep both the wedding and the baby secret from her parents; not forever, of course, but long enough to settle herself into the role of married young mother. The deception would be easy enough to handle, she said. Taking advantage of her mother’s unwillingness to come to London, she could make any number of excuses to stay in the city while her pregnancy was visible. Maybe, when it came to it, they would never need to know. She could see Jimmy was unconvinced, but whatever misgivings he had, he kept to himself.
Val Woodrow, however, could be relied on to tell her outright that such behaviour was horribly selfish and would cause far more problems than it solved. In any case, she pointed out, there was the question of parental consent.
‘You can wait until you’re twenty-one to get married, or you can just get it over with,’ Val said. ‘Use our telephone if you like.’
Tess took a seat by the phone in the Woodrows’ hallway. Four times she made it halfway through dialling the number and hung up. On the fifth attempt, she held her nerve. Her mother’s response was not what Tess had expected.
‘Will this young man make you happy, Theresa?’ she said.
She was unsure how to reply. There would be no illusions in Jimmy and her being together. They would be honest and kind with each other. This would be sufficient.
None of that seemed like the kind of thing Mum would comprehend.
‘I love him,’ Tess said. ‘Of course we wouldn’t be doing this if I weren’t pregnant, but it’s what we both want.’
‘Well, as long as you’re sure.’ There was a silence as her mother worked herself up to a delicate suggestion. ‘You know there’s other things you can do than getting wed, don’t you? We’ve a fair bit of money put by for emergencies, if it’s needed.’
This conversation had taken a quite different path from the one Tess had anticipated, and now she had the disconcerting impression that her mother had just offered to pay for an abortion. ‘I’m certain, Mum,’ she said. ‘We’ll just need a letter of permission from you and Dad, for the registrar. It’ll be here in Camden. We’ve already put in our fifteen days’ notice.’ She didn’t add that they had done so a week previously.
‘It’ll be in a registry office, will it? Of course it would have to be. I suppose you don’t want your father and me to be there?’
The disappointment signalled that the crisis had been dealt with. Normal relations could be resumed. At last, here was a manoeuvre for which Tess had prepared herself. ‘It’s not going to be much of a ceremony,’ she said. ‘Just a bit of bureaucracy, really. So if you are going to come down to London, it would mean much more to me, to both of us actually, if you and Dad could be here for the end-of-year show at college. I’d love you to see my stuff and Jimmy’s on display. I’m doing much more modern work now.’
Clever, she thought, after the call was over and her mother had promised to think about it. An art exhibition with much more modern work would be alien and unsettling to them, and they would most likely find some reason not to come.
Tess had miscalculated again. Her parents took her at her word and made arran
gements to visit London for the whole week of the first-year exhibition. Dad booked the time off work. They would stay at the same bed and breakfast in Upper Norwood that Tess and her mother had used the night before her Moncourt interview. Their impending arrival was an uncomfortable prospect, but Tess supposed it had to happen sooner or later, and at least they could get the wedding out of the way beforehand.
Delia and Val had agreed to be witnesses. Jimmy wanted Professor Woodrow to be there, despite the old man’s worsening condition, and Penelope’s presence felt unexpectedly essential too. She was, as it turned out, a closer approximation to a good friend than Tess had thought. Unfortunately, asking her also necessitated inviting Marius, but he was no keener on being there than Tess and Jimmy were on having him, and pleaded a prior engagement.
The wedding took place on a nondescript Thursday afternoon. After meeting at the Woodrows’ house, the six of them set off on foot towards Camden Register Office. They formed a peculiar group, and would have found little to say to each other had Professor Woodrow not been in such a talkative mood. All the way there he maintained an unbreakable stream of anecdotes about other weddings he had attended, holidays he had been on, famous people he had encountered. It didn’t matter, Tess thought, that he never managed to get through more than half a story before drifting into a new one, or into one he had already told, or into the same one from the beginning again; at least his voice filled up what would otherwise be room for doubt. Doubt was not what she needed today.
They arrived half an hour before their appointment. On the road outside the register office, waiting for whoever was currently being married in there, was a vintage Rolls Royce.
‘Isn’t that pretty?’ Penelope said. ‘It’s a Silver Ghost. From the twenties I should think.’
Tess was struck by the car’s primitive glamour, by the way all its panels had so obviously been beaten into geometric shapes and fastened together with rivets. There was something magnificent about that, a kind of perfect made-ness. Its uniformed driver stood on the pavement by the front passenger door, enjoying his association with this beautiful machine. He seemed to believe that the car gave him status; that it belonged to him, rather than he to it. Normally, Jimmy would have had something to say about that, but he had been quiet ever since leaving the Woodrows’.
The just-married couple exited the building. They were almost as young as Tess and Jimmy. The bride wore a sharp-edged, off-white dress, and the groom had on a fashionably cut suit, with a round collar like the ones the Beatles favoured. Their two witnesses, gruff, thick-set men in overcoats, looked more like bodyguards than friends or relatives.
As soon as his passengers appeared, the driver switched from proud custodian to obsequious servant. He nipped around the Silver Ghost, opening doors for them all and gave a tiny bow to the couple as they stepped inside.
‘Who were those two, I wonder?’ Val said, watching the car drive off.
‘Money,’ Delia answered. ‘Can’t tell what sort though.’
‘Old pal of mine had a Roller,’ Professor Woodrow began. ‘We used to motor around Essex in it with fishing rods stuck out the windows—’
‘Hush, Charlie,’ Val said.
Thinking she ought to give Jimmy a last chance to back out if he wanted it, Tess turned to him. ‘How do you feel about this?’
‘Fine,’ he said. ‘You?’
She considered her situation, this peculiar wedding party, and was reminded of something she’d recently discovered concerning Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Marriage portrait. Tess had always assumed the bride in that painting was heavily pregnant, but apparently that was not the case. The young woman looked to modern eyes as if she was carrying a child only because of the way she held her dress. Just a misreading of fifteenth-century fashion.
For herself, Tess half wished she had waited until her pregnancy was properly, scandalously visible before arranging the ceremony. Otherwise, she had no regrets.
‘I feel good about it.’
‘I do too.’
They went in.
18
Delia stood on her old street, watching a tiny paperboy struggle with his bag of evening papers. She recognised him as the one she’d watched stealing lemon suckers from a jar at Jemima’s that morning after Albie Chisholm got himself killed.
It was late on Saturday afternoon: two days after Tess and Jimmy’s wedding and over eight weeks since Delia had dragged her suitcase out of Fenfield. If you’d asked her the day she left, she’d have said she’d never be back – but nothing was predictable, it seemed. At least the disruptions that had caused her departure looked to have abated now. She’d kept an eye on the papers for news of further violence or disappearances, and found none. It seemed like Stella had survived the whole Finlay business after all.
Even so, it was stupid of her to return, she knew that. As regards getting what she wanted, maybe it would be enough just to breathe this air, to feel these streets beneath her shoes. Probably not. Yes, she was moving on, and that was right, but for days the Imps had been scratching away at her, reminding her of what she had to lay to rest. Then, a week ago while she was serving behind the bar at the Enterprise, she had half thought she’d spotted Teddy Bilborough lurking in the crowd. That was when she’d decided she’d have to come back.
She headed for the newsagent’s, where she found Little Maggie Chisholm sitting on the outside step reading a Beezer. There was a rusty brown line in the groove between the girl’s nose and her mouth, and a few similarly coloured spots on the skirt of her grey dress: residues from an earlier nosebleed. She looked up at Delia with neither surprise nor interest.
‘I thought your mum’d taken you to live by the seaside,’ Delia said.
‘That was ages ago,’ Little Maggie replied. ‘Weeks an’ weeks. We went on holiday to Hunstanton with her. I didn’t like it there much. Then Mr Finlay got out of hospital. He came to get Mum in his car, an’ now we’re staying with Auntie Jem again.’
‘Mum too?’ Delia reached into her bag for her purse. ‘You want a sixpence, Maggie?’
‘Ta,’ the girl said, taking the money. ‘Nah. Just me and me brothers.’
‘Where’s your mum now, then?’
‘With Mr Finlay,’ Little Maggie said placidly. ‘Dunno where. She don’t live round here no more.’
There was a ting from the bell above the shop door as it opened. Jemima stepped out and regarded Delia with suspicion.
‘Thought that was your voice,’ she said. ‘What you doing back round here?’
‘I’ve come to give Stella my keys back.’
‘Shouldn’t bother if I was you. She’s let your place out already to some old brass. She’ll have had the locks changed too, most likely.’
‘Still, I ought to give them back,’ Delia said.
In fact, she had posted her keys through the locked door the day she’d left but the lie had served its purpose. She knew now that Stella was still renting out her flats. That meant she must have found a way to survive the Finlay episode. And Finlay had run off somewhere to hide, taking Jemima’s sister with him.
The newsagent turned her scowl on Little Maggie. ‘Go upstairs and wash your face and hands, then find your brothers and tell them it’s time to eat. What have you got in your hand?’
Reluctantly, the girl opened a grimy fist to reveal the sixpence. ‘Delia gave it me,’ she said.
‘Give it back, Margaret,’ Jemima told her. Little Maggie obeyed without complaint, returning the coin to Delia then squeezing past her aunt into the shop. Jemima remained where she was, barring the doorway.
‘I was surprised to see Little Maggie here,’ Delia said. ‘Thought your sister’d taken her and her brothers away.’
‘Yes, well. She came back. She’s with Finlay again, and the kids are with me and Ern.’
‘What about Stella’s other girls?’
Jemima was clearly enjoying this chance to be the one on the inside of something for once, to be more than just a bystander. ‘Ah
, well. A lot of them made themselves scarce, just like you did. The only one who stayed was your little friend with the messed-up face. But none of them were gone more’n a few days. Lulu, Rita, Kathy, they all came back. Everyone did, apart from Itchy Pete and you. And we know why Pete stayed gone, don’t we?’
In the unlikely event that Itchy Pete was still alive, he’d be trying his best to make sure he remained that way. Delia was perturbed to find her story lumped in with his. ‘Nobody thinks I had anything to do with that, do they?’
‘I don’t know,’ Jemima said. ‘All I heard was that you were getting friendly with some funny people right before all this started. You don’t want to hang around here, Dee. If I was you I’d get back sharpish wherever it is you’re staying.’
Obviously, connections had been made in Delia’s absence. Jemima was right: she would be wise to leave as quickly as she could.
‘Listen, Jem,’ she said. ‘I just ran off after it happened ’cause I was scared, same as everyone else. But I’ve been worried about Maureen. She still living in the same place?’
Jemima nodded.
‘I’ll just pop round and talk to her for a few minutes, then I’ll be on my way.’
Standing on the step above her, the shopkeeper was slightly taller than Delia, who now looked up at her, trying to turn this apparent position of weakness into an advantage.
‘I shouldn’t ask you to do this, but I shall. Don’t mention I’m here, will you?’
‘None of my business, is it?’ Jemima said primly. ‘You know I don’t have anything to do with all that. If nobody asks me, I’ll have no reason to tell anyone. I can’t promise more’n that.’
She’d go running to the Lamplighters as soon as Delia was out of sight. No question.
When Delia got to the old flats, someone happened to be coming out of the street door onto Doddington Road. A scrawny, tired-looking old brass.
‘Visiting a friend,’ Delia said as she pushed past. A flicker of distrust crossed the brass’s face, but she let Delia in unchallenged. Perhaps this was the woman who now lived in her old place. Maureen was inside, at the top of the stairs, her broken features full of anxiety.
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