The Faithful

by Juliet West

  But the girl didn’t run away. She dropped the cigarette and trod on it with the sole of her sandal. He felt self-conscious standing on the wall, poised to jump as though he had something to hide. Slowly, he bent his knees and attempted to crouch so that he was closer to her level.

  ‘Don’t look so worried,’ she said. ‘I do believe you. About the birds.’ She glanced down to his pyjama bottoms. Of course she wasn’t scared of him. Who’d be scared of an intruder who came dressed in his pyjamas?

  ‘All right . . . Thanks.’ He turned away, thinking that their conversation was at an end, that he was free to leave. But again the girl spoke, and it seemed for all the world as if she actually wanted to keep him there a moment longer, to chat quite normally as if they’d just met at the Saturday dance.

  ‘I was at your meeting this evening,’ she said.

  She tilted her head up towards him, and the moon was bright enough for him to get a good look at her face. She was about his age, he reckoned, maybe a little younger. Her fair hair was cut quite short, just below her ears, and it was very curly. Not the carefully styled curls that the girls all wore in town. This was more of a corkscrew frizz, no style to speak of. She had a very wide, friendly mouth. He liked how she looked. If you ignored the hair, you could say there was a touch of Ginger Rogers.

  ‘At the theatre?’

  Damn it, why did he mention the theatre? Now he’d good as admitted that he was a blackshirt. She could report him yet, and the police would come calling at the camp, first light tomorrow.

  ‘Yes. I sat with Lucia and Edith. They’ve invited me to visit your camp.’

  ‘Can’t say I know them. We’ve come from all over.’

  In fact the names did ring a bell. Lucia and Edith. Bossy posh girls. They’d been in charge of rallying the greyshirts for the tug-o’-war tournament that afternoon, and Lucia had drafted him in as referee.

  ‘Where are you from?’ she asked.

  ‘Lewisham. That’s in London.’

  ‘Yes, I do know. I used to live in Bloomsbury.’

  Bloomsbury. Blackshirts had a thing about Bloomsbury types. Loose morals. Bohemicus Bloomsburyus, he’d heard them called. Bloomsbury Bacilli. ‘I work near there,’ he said. ‘Fleet Street. The News Chronicle.’

  ‘A reporter?’

  He hesitated. ‘Yes. Cub reporter. They don’t let me cover the big stories yet. Magistrates’ Court, mainly. Drunk and disorderly.’

  She smiled and patted the pocket of her cardigan. He wondered if she kept her cigarettes in there. Usually he could take or leave them, but right now he could just fancy a smoke.

  ‘What about the eggs, then?’

  For a moment he was baffled. Then she nodded towards the tree, and he remembered why he was here.

  ‘Only, I’m going in now.’ She smiled and he noticed a small chip in her front tooth. ‘I won’t tell anyone about our meeting. My friend’s brother is an egger too. You’d better take them before he does. Go on, promise I won’t say.’

  ‘N-no. It’s too dark really.’ He couldn’t climb up there now, couldn’t be sure she wouldn’t squeal in the end. Maybe it was a tactic to keep him on the property while she fetched her father. ‘I ought to get back. It’s very late. Just that I couldn’t sleep.’

  ‘Me neither. I’ve been tossing and turning, reading . . . but I just couldn’t drop off. It was such an exciting meeting, don’t you think?’

  He shrugged. ‘Not particularly. I’ve heard it all before.’

  ‘Oh. Aren’t you a . . . supporter?’ She looked disappointed. If she expected him to start swanking about the movement, she’d picked the wrong person.

  ‘It’s my mother really. She’s the Mosleyite.’

  ‘My mother says blackshirts are cranks.’

  Tom bridled. Did she think he was a crank? ‘I wouldn’t go that far. Membership reached forty thousand last year. It’s a serious party. You thinking of joining?’

  ‘Perhaps.’ There was a distant tap and creak, like the sound of a window being opened. The girl looked over her shoulder towards the dim outline of the house.

  ‘I’d better go,’ she said.

  ‘Might see you at the camp, then?’

  ‘Yes. And if you change your mind, you can come back for the eggs. I like to wander down here, you know, when I can’t sleep. You can’t imagine how dull this summer has been.’

  Tom wasn’t sure how to reply. For a moment he dared to picture himself returning tomorrow night, to picture the girl undressing in the summer house, beckoning him in with her wide smile, no, dragging him in by the string of his pyjamas, whether he liked it or not. He felt his cheeks flush. Thank God the clouds had blotted out the moon.

  As he dropped back onto the beach he felt a throb in his left hand and remembered the cut. Shit. Blood had dripped onto his pyjama bottoms. He picked up the towel and pressed it hard to the wound.

  6

  Francine sat in the lukewarm bath water, eyeing Charles’s toiletries. They were laid out neatly on a glass shelf above the sink: toothbrush and paste; cologne; the silver rectangular box that contained his razor. A few of Carolyn’s things were there too: a bottle of skin tonic and some vanishing cream. No sign of any make-up. Carolyn must have taken her cosmetics case (if she possessed such a thing – her style was rather country) when she decamped to Gloucestershire. Shame, thought Francine, because the red lipstick she’d brought on the journey had melted in the heat, and the coral was down to the last scrapings.

  He had disappeared at eight that morning, kissing her as she lay dozing in bed, and apologizing again for the unexpected appointment. She didn’t mind terribly – he would be gone only a few hours. They had arranged to meet in Soho at one, at a new bistro that had become quite the rage.

  She pulled the bath plug and let the water drain around her, enjoying the feeling of rushing emptiness, as if she might be swallowed, too. Her head was fuzzy from yesterday’s champagne, and then of course there were the nightcaps they’d drunk back at Bruton Street. Yes, she probably had been a little tight when she went to bed. Still, lunch would clear that. She would have an iced tonic water, with just a dash of gin. Gripping the sides of the bathtub, she eased herself up and stepped onto the carpeted floor. The towel smelt of Charles, lemon soap and cologne, but it was musty too, in need of a wash. This housemaid he employed, Jean. She was hopeless. Couldn’t bring up a pot of tea without tripping on the stairs and cracking a saucer.

  Casting the towel onto the rail, Francine looked down at her body, pulled in her stomach and ran warm hands over her skin. Her breasts seemed as full and as firm as they had when she was twenty, and her waist was still trim. The figure was holding up for now: it was the face that suffered, once one reached forty. Thank Christ for the marvel of Max Factor.

  Francine found a tin of primrose-scented talc in the mirrored cabinet above the lavatory. She patted the powder under her arms and between her legs, then sat on the bed and rubbed talc around her toes. It was so hot again. She would wear her cerise dress today, with the Oriental wrap that Charles had so admired. Assuming Jean had managed to press her things without mishap.

  Sunlight beamed through a gap in the curtains, and her eye was drawn to the chest of drawers where Charles’s gold cufflinks winked from the little porcelain jewellery dish. He had worn pewter cufflinks this morning, with the cornflower-blue shirt and a light linen jacket. In his breast pocket he’d folded a matching blue spotted handkerchief, finest silk from Jermyn Street. Smart as hell, yet somehow still raffish.

  This woman he was meeting today, what would she be like? Charles was given only the most basic details before an appointment. It was better that way, he’d explained, to guard against any form of attachment. Occasionally there would be an advance meeting, if the client was particularly jittery, but this wasn’t advised.

  Important not to dwell. Francine opened the drawer of the bedside cabinet (Carolyn’s side), pulled out a leather-bound New Testament and opened a page at random. It was the Book o
f James. He who doubts is like a wave of the sea, driven and tossed by the wind. Oh, not the sea again. She’d only just managed to get away from all that: the salty Sussex air with its threat of seaweed; those ugly green-brown mounds that would clump, fly-infested, over the shingle come late summer. No, the city was what she craved. How had she ever let Paul persuade her to move away from London? He’d put up a good argument, claimed that Aldwick Bay was attracting all sorts of interesting characters: intellectuals and artists, pens and paintbrushes in hand ready to capture the beauty of the Sussex coast and the Downs, so hidden and unspoilt. It would be better for Hazel, he’d said, to grow up away from the city. The talk of war would not go away, and if the doom-mongers were right, who knew what hell Germany would unleash on London this time? ‘And if we don’t like Sussex,’ Paul had said, ‘we can think again. Nothing is permanent.’

  Well, he’d been right about that last bit.

  In the taxi, she spotted Charles walking down Wardour Street. It was his Gladstone bag she noticed first, though why he needed that lumbering thing she had no idea. There was never anything in it but a half-bottle of brandy. Perhaps he felt it lent him an official air, the look of a learned medical man.

  ‘Pull up here, please.’

  The driver huffed, stepping too sharply on the brakes, and Francine almost slid off the seat. She had planned to ask Charles to join her in the taxi, but if the driver was going to be like that, she’d get out at this very spot and they could walk the rest of the way to the bistro. She paid without speaking, and didn’t leave a tip.

  ‘Charles!’

  His face broke into a smile when he saw her and she felt her heart lift. He was just too handsome, with those ridiculously blue eyes and the light brown hair that was thick and shiny as a schoolboy’s. But it wasn’t just his looks, it was his manner, too. Such a change from the diffident boy he’d once been. Charles as an adult seemed surprisingly carefree, so different from Paul – different, in fact, from any other man of her acquaintance. Perhaps it was because Charles hadn’t fought in the war. There was a lightness to that, and a sense of equality between them. Equality, yes, that was it. Hadn’t they shared their own horror, long before the guns started firing in France?

  ‘Frangipane, darling. How was your morning?’ His face was a little red, she noticed. Was it because of the heat, or the exertion of his appointment? A snip of resentment caught her, but she kept her smile wide, tilted back her neck and lifted the brim of her sun hat so that he could kiss her on the cheek.

  ‘Wonderful,’ she said. ‘Yours?’

  ‘Satisfactory in every way.’ He ran his finger down her arm, tracing the lotus-flower pattern on the silk wrap.

  ‘Every way?’

  ‘Naturally, I can’t know for sure. But all the signs were . . . promising.’

  When they reached the restaurant on Old Compton Street the waiter apologized and said their table wasn’t quite ready. They were shown to a small, sloping anteroom with velvet-upholstered armchairs that listed on the crooked floorboards. The waiter offered cocktails on the house, and as they waited for their drinks they played the guessing game. There were five categories and she had never scored full marks.

  ‘Auburn hair,’ she said.

  He raised an eyebrow. ‘Correct.’

  ‘Straight not shingled.’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘Twenty-eight-inch waist.’

  ‘Hmmm . . . close.’

  ‘Blue eyes.’

  ‘Wrong. Brown as mud.’

  She laughed, leaned across to his armchair and prodded his shoulder. ‘How do I know you’re telling the truth, anyway? You could say what you liked and I’d never be any the wiser.’

  ‘A matter of honour,’ he smiled. ‘And if you don’t believe me, you could ask Dr Cutler to show you her files. She records everything in great detail.’

  ‘I’ll bet she does.’

  Francine had met Dr Cutler only once – a diminutive woman with a severe bun and wire-framed pince-nez. Hard to believe that someone who looked so coiled and Victorian could be so avant garde in her thinking.

  ‘Do excuse me,’ said Charles. ‘Nature calls.’

  Francine crossed her legs and picked up a copy of Punch from the small table. Above the hubbub from the restaurant she heard a muted rustling sound. A smatter of soot fell from the chimney onto the screwed-up newspaper in the grate. Then came a frantic beating against brickwork and, with a light thump, a speckled bird tumbled into the hearth. It was a starling. The bird lay dazed for a fraction of a second, before flapping off towards the closed sash window, crashing into the glass with a horrible thud and landing on the windowsill. Francine sprang up from the chair. She would open the window and free the poor thing. But then the bird rose again and flew straight towards her. She screamed.

  ‘Open the window!’ Francine shouted as Charles shot through the door. The bird was on the carpet now, one wing tucked in, the other outstretched and held at a strange angle. Charles bent to lift the bird from the floorboards, cupping it in both hands, gently at first, then tightening his grip. There was a sharp, jerky movement and then a snapping sound: light, almost delicate, like an eggshell breaking. It took Francine a second to realize that Charles had wrung the bird’s neck.

  ‘But it might have flown away,’ she said. ‘You just . . . killed it.’

  Charles smiled. ‘Darling, it was injured.’ He walked over to the window, lifted the lower sash and tossed the corpse down into the alleyway at the side of the restaurant.

  ‘And how is Paul?’ Charles asked. He cut a thin wedge of Camembert and placed it on a cracker.

  Francine took a sip from her gin. Generally, they didn’t speak about their spouses; it was an unwritten rule. ‘There was a letter, a fortnight ago, I suppose. He’ll be in Paris until October at the earliest. Apparently the clients are proving difficult.’

  ‘So I have you to myself for at least three months.’

  Francine flushed. ‘I’m completely yours, darling. But once he’s home we’ll have to be more careful.’ She sighed and stabbed a grape with a dessert fork. ‘Hypocritical goat.’

  Charles put his hand over hers and stroked it. She drained her drink and let an ice cube slip onto her tongue.

  ‘Is Paul serious about the divorce?’

  ‘I’m not convinced he can afford it. And it would be unfair on Hazel. He feels that, I’m sure. He wants the best for her. I just wish he’d agree to a truce, and then we could jog along, make the best of it. If one or other of us has a dalliance, what’s the harm? It’s how most marriages survive, isn’t it? Look how marvellously it’s worked for you and Carolyn all these years.’

  ‘This separation might make him see sense. When Paul comes home from Paris and sets eyes on your irresistible face, you can be sure he’ll melt.’

  Francine crunched the remains of the ice cube. ‘And is that what you want?’

  ‘Want doesn’t come into it. It’s about making the best of our situations. As you said yourself, Frangie.’

  They sat in silence during the taxi journey back to Mayfair. Francine’s thoughts returned to the starling, the blue-black shimmer of its speckled feathers. Odd that such a drabseeming bird could be so beautiful at close quarters. There had been flocks of starlings in the hawthorns at Lostwithiel, she remembered. Always a mess of droppings on the ground underneath.

  The taxi swayed through the streets of Bayswater, and she felt a little sleepy after the gin, could almost imagine herself back in Cornwall, lazing in the Lostwithiel garden, the hammock under the oak tree pitching gently back and forth, back and forth . . .

  ‘Bruton Street,’ the cabbie called. Francine fumbled for her handbag, but she needn’t have worried. In no time Charles had paid the fare, and now he was holding the car door open, waiting for her to climb out.

  Was it the echo of Lostwithiel that had made her feel suddenly desolate? She rarely allowed herself to think of those times, still less discuss them with Charles. This was another of th
eir unwritten rules, and one she was happy to embrace. What was the use in talking about that summer? Unpicking the events would only reopen the wound. Really, she must not give in to memory.

  7

  Hazel had been awake for several minutes before she remembered the boy. She had dreamed of Lucia, and Edith too, the three of them diving in the water off the rocks at Pagham. The dream had migrated to a beach in France, and Edith disappeared, buried under a sand dune, a paper kite stuck atop the mound like a bizarre headstone. The boy didn’t feature at all, and when she remembered the midnight conversation at the bottom of the garden, she couldn’t help wondering whether the boy on the garden wall was actually a dream, and the swimming with Lucia and Edith was perfectly real.

  She heard Mrs Waite’s slow tread up the stairs, the three quick raps on the bedroom door.

  ‘It’s after nine,’ called Mrs Waite. ‘I’ve left your breakfast out.’

  The mention of food made Hazel suddenly ravenous. She had eaten such an early supper yesterday, and then nothing whatsoever after the meeting. All she could taste now was the musty after-effect of the cigarettes that she’d smoked – without coughing – in the moonlit summer house. How fortunate that she’d been smoking when the boy appeared. The Pall Mall had lent her courage.

  Hazel stayed in her room until she heard the click of the latch on the front gate. Mrs Waite would be walking to the shops to place the orders.

  In the dining room, she found four triangles of cold toast propped in the rack and a pot of stewed tea. She ate quickly, not bothering to butter the toast. It would be better to go out now, she decided, before Mrs Waite arrived home. She raced up to her room, dressed in cycling shorts and a tennis shirt, and put her purse into her haversack. At the top of the stairs she paused, then ran into her mother’s bedroom. Ideal Marriage was on the bookshelf, exactly where she had replaced it last night. She dropped it into the haversack. In the kitchen, she scribbled a note: Gone bicycling with Bronny. Having a picnic lunch. Back this afternoon. She cut some cheese and two slices of bread, wrapped the food in greaseproof paper, and took the garage key from the hook by the kitchen door.