What he heard was the scrape and scurry of mice.
‘Irene, Irene …’ Leaning on one elbow he would place a restraining hand on the crook of her arm, his only touch these days. ‘You know that’s impossible.’
And he would turn away, his broad, flannelled back a reproach. All his refusals were absolute.
‘Mrs North?’ Mrs Blessed repeated, calling her back.
Irene wished she wouldn’t keep using her name like that. It was proprietorial, somehow, as if it was hers to bandy about, as if she had some claim to it.
‘Oh, just the one.’
‘Not from these parts then?’ Mrs Blessed said as she penned Irene’s name in the register. ‘I detest a Southern accent.’
Irene shook her head.
‘On a visit then?’
‘Mm … yes,’ Irene faltered. ‘The hospital…’
‘Nothing serious, I hope?’
‘Oh no, not me. No, there’s nothing wrong with me.’
‘A friend, then?’ Mrs Blessed prompted.
‘Yes, that’s right. She’s just had a baby.’
‘Isn’t that nice! And you’ve come all this way …’
Was she being pleasant, Irene wondered, or just fishing.
‘When I was having mine, I can’t tell you how pleased I was to see my girlfriends,’ she confided. ‘I used to get weepy, you know. And men, men are no good at a time like that. I won’t have a word said against my Eric, God rest him, but they just don’t understand, do they?’
She turned and lifted a key from the rack behind her.
‘Whereas we do,’ Mrs Blessed said looking at Irene meaningfully, ‘don’t we?’
Irene blushed with a secret pride; she had been mistaken for a mother.
‘Number two, I think.’
‘No, no, it’s her first one.’
Mrs Blessed chuckled.
‘We seem to have our wires crossed. I’m putting you in room number two.’
‘Home sweet home!’ Mrs Blessed said, throwing open the door of number two with a flourish.
They had travelled to the top of the house, up several flights of stairs carpeted in whorled crimson, geese flying in formation on the flocked fleur-de-lis wallpaper, a gilt tureen housing an asparagus fern on the return. None of it had prepared Irene for this barren interior. It was a white attic room, long and narrow, with a window at the far end under which two single beds were wedged, a locker squeezed between them. The timbered ceiling which sloped to one side had once been painted but it flaked and blistered now as if afflicted by a leprous disease. There was a curtained cavity for clothes. Over the bricked-up fireplace a picture of the Virgin hung.
‘It’s really for two, as you can see,’ Mrs Blessed said, bending to smooth one of the pink candlewick spreads. ‘But in your case, I won’t charge.’
In your case. Irene pondered on this.
‘My radio officers were in here, bless their hearts. Lovely lads. But my, what a racket they made. They used to practise their Morse code at the table, clinking their spoons against the cups. Sending messages to one another, if you don’t mind!’ She folded her fat arms.
‘Now,’ she said, ‘rules of the house!’ She tapped a notice which was tacked to the back of the door. ‘The Ten Commandments, I call them! No baths after ten, bathroom’s across the landing, and no men in the rooms, but I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that.’
She fidgeted briefly with the waistband of her skirt as if she longed to inch the zip down just a fraction.
‘Breakfast at eight sharp and we like our guests to vacate by nine.’
She turned to leave, worrying at a stray strand of hair that was curling around her earlobe.
‘Oh yes, I nearly forgot. The front door is locked at midnight. I tell my girls I only keep Cinderellas!’
And with a merry laugh, she retreated.
An hour later, dodging Mrs Blessed, Irene slipped out. She knew the hospital was close by – it was why she had chosen the Four Provinces – and she wanted to see it, just from the outside. From the step she could see its jigsaw of roofs and gables, and the dome of a copper cupola rising above them. She prowled around the perimeter of the building. It took up almost a block. There was the lullaby hum of a generator somewhere in its juggled heart, and steam gasping from the laundry into the dark night. It was pot-bellied in front, bulging into a pillared rotunda, as if the builders had vainly tried to fence in its fecundity. Irene sheltered in a pub doorway opposite the entrance and watched as visitors streamed through its portals. They were mainly fathers, some with children, ham-fistedly attired, buttoned incorrectly into their coats. Even temporary motherlessness seemed to give them an unkempt, woebegone look. Irene was loath to leave her vantage point. Like a woman bewitched by the house of love she examined the sooted curves of the portico, each lighted window.
Her child was in there, after all, and this place would become part of her history, however briefly. Some day Irene would have to describe this – the raw night, the soft drizzle leaving a glistening film on her cheeks. Her hair lay damply on her forehead. The wet, chilly air made her seem oddly feverish. Was this a maternal bloom, an anxious glow on the eve of birth? Or was it the old disease come back? At that thought, she pulled the collar of her coat up and hurried back to the Four Provinces.
‘How’s your friend, Mrs North?’ Mrs Blessed called out cheerily as Irene pushed the front door open gingerly. She was bent over her books at the desk, worrying over calculations, her mound of black hair just visible over a red tasselled lampshade. Irene had hoped to get past without having to engage in conversation.
‘She’s fine, thank you, just fine.’
‘And the baby’s doing well?’
Irene hovered at the foot of the stairs, one hand on the banisters.
‘Boy or a child?’
‘Pardon?’
‘Is it a boy or a girl?’
‘Oh, it’s a little girl,’ Irene replied. ‘Pearl.’ She bit her lip; she must be careful.
‘What a pretty name … oh, look, you’re soaked through. Here, take those wet things off. What you need is a nice cup of tea to warm you up.’
‘No, really, it’s quite alright,’ Irene protested.
But there was no arguing with Mrs Blessed. So Irene surrendered to her blandishments. She was ashamed of the effect such random kindnesses had on her. She did not understand how a hand on her shoulder or a man opening a door for her could bring unbidden tears to her eyes. She would bat them away feeling foolish and monstrous. It wasn’t as if she weren’t loved. Momentarily, as she sat in Mrs Blessed’s warm kitchen sipping the welcome tea, she remembered Stanley. If he knew … she shook the thought off. Mrs Blessed mistook it for a shiver.
‘There, you see, you’ve got a chill.’
She must not succumb to any muffling tenderness she might still feel for Stanley, Irene thought, as Mrs Blessed threw a warm towel around her shoulders and dried the wet ends of her hair. She was doing this for him too.
Irene did not unpack her things. She wanted to leave no trace. She sat on one bed, and then the other, testing the springs. Both sagged in the middle, worn into an accommodating hollow by the sleep of strangers. The austerity of the room reminded her of Granitefield, where only illness had a personality so that the white bedsteads and lockers, the regulation counterpanes and curtain screens, had a dogged neutrality. They refused to be owned. The noises of the house reached her through the thin walls. The squeal and rush of a toilet somewhere below, the gurgling of a cistern. The thud of a door. The pock of a light switch. A gargler in the bathroom. She tried to visualise the other guests but all she could come up with were identikit pictures, a juggled collection of cruel noses, narrowed eyes, thin, twisted smiles. She did not wish to meet any of them. She listened intently at her door before opening it and crossing the landing to the bathroom. It was a large, draughty room painted an icing blue. All the fixtures were at one end like a capsizing ship. It catered for the cleansing of several bodies n
ot intimate with one another. A few gnarled knobs of soap lay in the wire tray over the bath. There was a green stain under one of the taps like the ghost of a waterfall. The beaker clamped to the mirror above the basin, which should have held a cheery array of toothbrushes, was empty and foul-smelling. The ill-tempered geyser shuddered noisily into action when she turned it on, issuing a jet of boiling water into the sink and sending clouds of steam wafting towards the ceiling. The mirror became opaque. Irene stood in the seamless fog, her hands pale and blameless beneath the still surface of the water, and felt cleansed. Forgiven. It was not too late for her. An impatient rattling of the door knob shattered the moment. Hurriedly she splashed her face. She brushed her teeth fiercely. Then, furtively checking at the door, she slipped back across the landing and into the haven of number two.
She undressed self-consciously. She couldn’t remember the last time she had disrobed in a room where no one was looking. As she climbed into bed she caught a glimpse of the small patchwork of city visible through the thinly curtained window – the lapping slate roofs, a trio of chimney pots, puddles in the valleys, the splutter of a broken drainpipe streaming heedlessly below. She was naked; there was nobody to see her. The feel of her own unobserved skin next to her was strange and lurid. She stroked the crowns of her nipples; she sought the cleft of moisture between her legs. A shiver of joy made her gasp. She was, at last, invisible.
The morning had a glowering air, a sulky, hangover feel. Seagulls swooped, brayed and scattered. Irene wrinkled her nose at the smell, from the brewery, she guessed, yeasty, like chicory. Street hawkers passed her pushing prams stacked with pyramids of apples glistening from a dawn shower. A few grizzled old men stood listlessly in doorways dragging on flattened butts. A street sweeper gathered armfuls of wet leaves and deposited them lavishly in a barrow. The dismal streets made her melancholy, reiterating her sense of homelessness. It was only eight-thirty and she had several hours to kill. She felt resentful at having been turned out of the Four Provinces after breakfast. House rules indeed! They just didn’t want her here. She turned on to Gloucester Street. She made a mental note of it. She could not afford to get lost. If she did she might have to ask for directions and they would know she was a stranger. Afterwards somebody might remember. In fact, nobody remembered the gaunt woman in a black beret and severely belted maroon coat and rubbed-looking gloves with a pearl at the wrists. The girls playing piggybeds among the peelings or swinging languidly from a lamppost barely looked up as she wandered, like a careful ghost, through the battered landscape of their games. It was the season for skipping. Thwack of rope and a strange, sour chanting. Or they stood idly in twos and threes chewing the split ends of their hair as Irene threaded her way through them, intent only on their own whispered secrets. There were small boys crouched in knots over games of marbles, their mittens sewn with elastic to their hand-me-down coats. They seemed in thrall to the glassy baubles shot through with seams of ochre and Prussian blue and would have registered Irene only as another pair of mottled female legs passing by.
A bald infant propped up in a large, spoked carriage on the path gnawed on a dummy and watched her solemnly. She was the only one to meet Irene’s eye. For a brief, mad, moment she considered lifting the child out, so grateful was she for this trusting gaze. She could dance the baby in her arms as she had seen other women do quite naturally. As she stood there a lorry rattled past with three boys hanging from the back.
‘Scut behind, Mister!’ someone shouted out.
Startled, Irene turned around thinking that she would find a grimy child pointing a finger at her. Then she checked herself; she had done nothing. Yet. The lorry screeched to a halt and a beefy driver leant out the window. The boys leapt off nimbly and scattered. The driver lumbered from his cab and made a vain attempt to chase them. Then he gave up and with a loud curse and a fist waved indiscriminately in the air, he heaved himself aboard the cab and drove off. Though Irene had stood transfixed, the incident had barely caused a ripple on the street. She found herself gripping the handle of the pram. And then she noticed with relief that the baby was strapped in with a pair of reins. She was safe. Quite safe.
Irene turned back. From the brown hallways of the tenements she could hear the clangour of plumbing and the slop of laundry in tin baths. At the doorways young women gathered, slovenly and insolent to Irene’s eye. ‘Holy Jesus …’ she heard one swear. Another broad-beamed, plump of breast and heavily pregnant, was confiding mirthfully: ‘Gene only has to look at me, know what I mean?’
‘Pius?’ a red-haired woman roared, wiping her hands on her apron. ‘Pius!’ A whey-faced toddler looked up from the gutter.
Irene hurried on glad that her child was not going to be brought up here.
IF MICHAEL CARPENTER had not hanged himself, Mrs Blessed might have made the connection between the Baby Spain kidnap and Mrs North but the violence perpetrated in the Four Provinces drove all else from her mind. She had only noticed something was amiss when the top bathroom was engaged for over an hour, a gross violation of the house rules. It was a Saturday morning. She allowed her regulars to sleep in at the weekends if they were prepared to forgo breakfast. Usually it was no sacrifice; sore heads were the order of the day. She didn’t reach the top of the house until ten forty-five (that’s how she put it when the police asked; it sounded more official that way and also gave the impression that she timed her household chores). The bathroom door was locked. She knocked and tried the handle.
‘Anyone in there? Hello?’
There was no response.
‘Hello?’ she ventured again.
The lock had always been faulty; there had been trouble with it before. All it had taken then was a quick jiggle of the knob. Mrs Blessed tried again. Long years as a landlady had sharpened her instinct for trouble; she knew there was somebody in there, but who she could not work out. She made her way downstairs; she would check the register. By a process of elimination she could work it out. On the landing below she bumped into the commercial traveller in number six. She had a soft spot for him. He had been staying at the Four Provinces on and off for years. A real card, he was, though fond of a drop. He looked a bit rough this morning. When this mess was sorted out she would take him into the kitchen and give him a feed.
‘What’s the problem, Mrs B?’ he asked noticing her air of preoccupation.
‘Top bathroom. Locked or stuck, I don’t know which.’
‘Let me take a look at it.’
He bounded up the stairs two at a time. She heard him put his shoulder to the door. There was a sharp splintering of glass as he smashed in one of the frosted glass panels.
‘Holy Jesus,’ she heard him gasp.
She hurried up the stairs, imagining a domestic disaster, a burst pipe or the bath overflowing. She always felt a mild panic about these alarums and the acute absence of a man about the house.
‘I don’t think you should go in there, Mrs B,’ the traveller said pulling the bathroom door to.
Mrs Blessed caught a glimpse of a pair of hairy legs and Michael Carpenter’s bloated member. She blessed herself swiftly.
Michael Carpenter was one of Mrs Blessed’s radio officers. To her he was a happy-go-lucky boy with a black mop of curly hair and a bridge of freckles across his nose, whose only sin was to wear his socks in bed. She would find them in the mornings, lost among the sheets, and would have to open wide the window to rid the place of their vile smell. He wolfed his food, mopping up after his fry in the mornings with handfuls of extra bread (strictly rationed in Mrs Blessed’s establishment). But beyond his healthy appetite she had noticed nothing, nothing to account for this. She did not realise that he used his socks to masturbate into. Nor that he and Conway (they always called one another by their surnames; it was a form of intimacy) indulged in half-naked horseplay in their room that stopped just short of buggery. Conway had a girlfriend which meant that he would not go all the way. He had gone to visit her that weekend leaving Carpenter to that particular
boredom of the young in rented accommodation. It was a furtive kind of indolence, a lethargy in search of oblivion. He had heard somewhere – probably in the lavatories at the naval college – that a constriction around the neck enhanced erection. With a fetishist’s care he had bought a length of washing line several weeks previously in a hardware store in the city. As he fastened a knot around the skylight in the bathroom, he remembered entering the shop past the mournful clanking of the buckets, bins and watering cans hung up outside.
‘How many feet will she be wanting?’ the man behind the counter had asked, presuming that the washing line was for the young man’s mother.
Michael climbed up on to the chair he had brought from his room, testing to see if the rope would hold. He was pleased with the result. Knots were his speciality, after all. The bath was running as he did this, to disguise the sounds of his labour. He checked the lock on the door once more, then undressed quickly in the foggy room and climbed, shivering, on to the chair. Despite the steam, his skin bristled. He tugged on the rope once more then slipped the noose he had fashioned around his neck, and tightened it. He braced himself, then out of habit made a brief sign of the cross before stepping out into mid-air. As he did, Irene Godwin, tried the handle of the door outside. He saw a woman’s outline through the dimpled glass and scrambling to regain the chair, his legs wheeling, he tipped it over with his right heel. He watched with horror as it keeled over. The blood rushed to his loins and flailing and kicking, eyes bulging with disbelief, Michael Carpenter had the biggest orgasm of his life.
Mrs Blessed searched in vain for a note. It gave her an excuse to rummage through his belongings. She was certain there was a girl involved, she told the police. Maybe he had left something in code.
‘In code?’ the detective asked.
‘You know, dots and dashes,’ Mrs Blessed explained obligingly.
‘Morse, you mean?’
‘Yes, he used to send messages to his friend, spoons on the teacups.’ The detective shut his notebook resignedly. The world, he was convinced, was going mad.
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