‘You sound amazingly calm.’
‘I can’t help sounding calm, sometimes I wish I could. It’s so boring having this voice that sounds as if I don’t care about anything.’
‘I could wait outside and see who it is.’
‘How? He’d see you.’
‘Not if I was sitting in a car.’
‘Would you really? That would be fantastic.’
There was also the possibility that it might make me feel less useless. For the first time in weeks, life seemed to have regained its savour. I bought a sleeping bag from the army surplus stores, checked whether the old thermos leaked and bought a new one when I found it did. Thick socks were important, Helen thought. She offered to share the vigil, but it seemed necessary that she should return home in the normal way, perhaps show herself at the window and turn out the light, in case the pervert liked to watch these things first before depositing his evil gift.
The first night, a moonlit Wednesday, it was impossible to find a parking space within a hundred yards of her front door.
‘And I can’t see round the corner either, whichever way I face.’
‘I’ll lend you a hand mirror.’
So I sat at the end of the darkened street holding up the mirror across the passenger seat. Sometimes the moonlight caught it and the empty street took on a dreamlike quality. Sometimes as I rested my weary arm, I caught sight of my own tired panicky face, like an animal that has been chased to the edge of a cliff. But nothing happened.
The next night I fell fast asleep almost as soon as I took up position.
‘In fact, you’ve been wasting your time,’ Helen said. ‘I’ve been looking back in my diary and it only happens on Monday and Friday, so we’re due for one tonight.’
That night I parked the car early and then took Helen out for an Italian meal. We sat silent most of the time, like an old married couple. Then she went back on her own, and I had another glass of wine and followed half an hour later. The night was dark, with rain at about midnight and the trees dripping on the car roofs after the rain had stopped.
Just after three-fifteen, a small man in a raincoat walked along the pavement on Helen’s side with brisk skippy little steps. He went fifty yards past her front door, then turned round and came back again. He looked both ways and began to go up Helen’s steps. I reached him just as he was turning round after leaving something wrapped in newspaper on the doormat. He wriggled a bit as I grabbed him by the hem of his raincoat which flapped open to reveal some kind of greyish uniform.
‘Let me go.’
‘What are you doing that for?’
‘Doing what for?’
‘Leaving that thing on the doormat.’
‘It’s nothing to do with me.’
‘I saw you put it there.’
It was about now, a minute or so after grabbing him, that I realised it was a chauffeur’s uniform he was wearing and in the same instant I realised whose chauffeur he was.
‘No you didn’t. I was just looking to see what it was.’
‘Did somebody make you do it?’
‘You’re her boyfriend, aren’t you? That’s what it’s all about.’
‘Who paid you?’
‘Nobody paid me.’
‘Was it a woman – a woman with her hair tied back?’
‘Well, if you know so much, why do you ask?’
‘Look, please don’t do it again, she won’t know you haven’t done it. Just don’t, that’s all. I promise I won’t –’ but before he could hear my stammering offer of immunity, he had shaken free of my grip and was off down the street, the soles of his polished shoes slapping the pavement in the silent dawn.
I bent down and picked up the package on the doormat. Inside the rolled newspaper were some pieces of offal already leaking through the paper and smelling vile. I put them in the dustbin and rang Helen’s bell and explained.
‘Why do people do such things?’
‘It is peculiar, I agree. How do you say to someone, here’s this disgusting bit of tripe or whatever, go and leave it outside this address after midnight and don’t let it drip on the seat? Still, I expect he’s paid pretty well.’
‘I didn’t mean him, I meant her,’ she said. ‘Even if she had any cause to be jealous, how would it help? If I really was going out with you, it wouldn’t frighten me off. The opposite, I think. In fact it’d be more likely to scare you off her, wouldn’t it?’
She looked at me, not accusingly, for there was nothing to accuse me of, but in a musing hypothetical way.
My mind had drifted a little, to fix on the little rat-faced chauffeur, now presumably half-way home, probably wondering what he should say to Jane the next morning: had a bit of bother last night, madam, I would advise desisting from this course. For some reason, my imagination gave him a Jeeves-style voice although in reality he spoke old-fashioned flat cockney.
‘Would it scare you off?’ Helen repeated the question.
‘Well, it certainly wouldn’t make me any keener to see her again,’ I said. ‘Being mad isn’t attractive, is it? That’s the sad thing about it. You can be much worse things, like cruel, and that can make you more attractive, but not mad.’
‘So you think she’s just mad, do you? Did you think she was just mad when you were, uh, working for her? When she was all over you, did you think this is a madwoman assaulting me?’
Helen was cool but friendly, like a doctor talking me through my symptoms.
‘No, not at all, well, I suppose I wasn’t what you might call thinking much. I was overwhelmed really.’
‘Poor you’ – now there was a sardonic edge – ‘overwhelmed by a woman half your size and twice your age.’
I was suddenly depressed by Helen’s contempt. She didn’t seem to see that it was really quite easy to go mad.
‘Anyway,’ Helen said, ‘what exactly did she see in you? I mean, you’re quite tall, but otherwise . . .’
‘She said I had white teeth.’
Helen jumped up from the armchair she had been sitting sideways on and clasped my jaw firmly to pull it open, like someone checking a horse’s age.
‘White-ish,’ she said.
‘I think she was, well, I suppose rather lonely somehow.’
‘Spoilt is the word you’re groping for. Had everything done for her since she was nought. Never had to worry about where the next dress or sports car was coming from, or come to that, boyfriend. I bet she expected them to queue up, so she could moan about never finding true love. Then she could have a breakdown and go to a shrink and be all anguished and interesting. They’re all the same underneath.’
‘Who are?’
‘The rich.’
‘How the same?’
‘Oh smarmy and considerate when you first meet them – except the ones who are openly shitty of course – but that’s only the surface, or the opening gambit. When it comes to it, all they’re doing is deciding what they want and then demanding it and usually getting it, sometimes in the nicest possible way, but usually not, specially not if they’re meeting any resistance.’
‘All of them?’
‘All the ones I’ve met which isn’t many, not compared to your vast acquaintance. Certainly all the ones at “the Ville”.’ She gave the phrase inverted commas as big as mudguards.
‘The rich are never idle when they’re feathering their nests.’
‘Mm, must be a quote. Who said it?’
‘My friend Moonman.’
‘Oh you mean the one who does that funny magazine? What’s he like? Is he a laugh?’
She brightened at the mention of Moonman (Gerald to his mother I dare say, but nobody else). This surprised me as I hadn’t put her down as a reader of Frag, which had just started and was then full of japes and jollities, not yet having acquired the serious satirical purpose indicated by its title – the word GIs in Vietnam used for shooting an unpopular officer in the back.
‘No, not a laugh really. He’s solemn and strange like a dodgy
sort of priest, except he’s an atheist like you.’
‘I think I’d admire him, admire what he’s done, I mean, starting something.’
‘You like Frag?’
‘Haven’t read it yet. But it’s a good thing it’s around, don’t you think?’
She stopped and smiled and I realised how seldom she asked for my opinion or even asked to have hers confirmed. I didn’t mind that. She seemed like someone who ought to have opinions. The opinions wouldn’t need to be ferocious or dazzlingly original. Helen was just opinionated, if you could use that word without being offensive. Anyway it gave me pleasure to hear her give them an airing. It was like overhearing someone with a good voice start singing without much thought of who might be listening. You didn’t want to break the spell by starting up yourself.
‘Why are you staring at me like that?’
‘Was I? I’m afraid that’s what happens to my face when my mind wanders. It freezes.’
‘Well, don’t let it, or it’ll get slapped. It’s rude to stare, especially when I’m giving you the benefit of my views. Anyway, I can stare back. There, isn’t that disconcerting?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘That’s what you look like.’
‘Sorry.’
But her stare was not really disconcerting. There was something quizzical, even unconvincing about it as though she had just told an obvious lie and was daring you to challenge her.
‘Oh all right then.’ She came towards me and gave me a big luscious kiss on the mouth. A fraction later, no more than a couple of seconds, she placed my hand on her left breast, firmly so that I could feel the lace of the bra through her shirt.
Outside, a delivery van changed gear on the corner and the rain was dripping on to some flat roof now and then, erratically as though a person thinking of something else was idly playing a hose upon the asphalt. And behind that the gentle unappeased murmur of London at night. My hand began to stroke her, somehow remotely as though it was burrowing of its own accord.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Not now. It’s been too much already tonight, don’t you think?’
Written down, her words sound tentative, almost inquiring, but the way she said them was final. Not this night meant not any night, ever. Nobody wanted to prolong a duet with a Cherubino who was too late. If you were too slow to realise you were in love with someone until after she had just told you that you hadn’t a hope in hell, then you deserved everything you didn’t get. Perhaps if Jane hadn’t – no, you couldn’t blame other people for the opportunities you had missed. I should have fallen in love with Helen the moment I first saw her coming towards me on the beach. Could there be a ‘should have’ about such things? Yes there could and I should have.
‘Anyway my life is complicated enough as it is,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ I said, thinking that her life was probably quite simple, certainly the bit of it which didn’t include me.
‘But anyway, thanks again.’
Curiously her thanks, plain almost curt, affected me even more than the kiss, because they seemed to come from somewhere nearer her heart and what I liked most about her was that plainness. Right from when we first met, when she accused me of looking down on people who did science, that was what had got to me, the direct response which fell just short of being rough though it was challenging in a friendly way, like a stick tossed for a dog to run after. That, and how fair her hair was.
‘Come and see me at Woodies.’
‘What?’
‘The Woodland Institute of Food Science, place I’m doing my training at.’
Woodies and Padders
THERE WAS A man crying by the gatepost. Not convulsive sobs, just crying quietly like a drizzle that keeps on all day. He looked up at me and I could see the tears on his cheeks and running on to his frayed collar. He raised his hand to me in salutation, then checked it half-way as though someone had told him not to.
‘There’s a man crying at your gate,’ I told the man in uniform standing by the glass door of the little domed building.
‘He’ll be from next door. They often cry when they let them out. This place used to be part of it, still is, if you ask me. When they talk about Woodies down the pub, it’s the funny farm they mean, not us.’
I looked at the brown door-plate behind him which had WOODLAND INSTITUTE OF FOOD SCIENCE in cream lettering, then under it a couple of other names painted out.
‘Proper madhouse here, too,’ he went on. ‘Who did you want to see?’
‘Helen Hardress.’
‘Ooh you lucky man.’ The porter or whatever he was, a slight austere figure in sky-blue uniform who didn’t look at you when he spoke, gazed up at the sky, standing with his hands clasped behind his back like an airman in a British war picture. The huts attached to the little building which must once have been the hospital’s sports pavilion had a wartime look too. Perhaps the whole place had been some hush-hush research establishment for the duration before becoming a hospital again.
The porter went to look for Helen. I peered through the big window at the dripping trees which came close enough to brush the flat tops of the huts. Beyond the huts some kind of boiler house or laundry was emitting steam from an old brick chimney. The steam was swallowed by the mist so quickly that I wondered whether it wasn’t an illusion and there was nothing coming out of the chimney at all.
‘Here’s your boyfriend, Helen. I’ve told him he’s got to behave himself on company premises.’
‘Piss off, Dave,’ she said.
‘Going down Trotter’s, are you? Mine’s a pint.’
‘Get it yourself then,’ Helen said, as she opened the glass door and let in the damp air and a little whoosh of leaves.
At the end of the short avenue of scrubby sycamores, fifty yards long at most, the crying man was waiting, still crying.
‘And how are you today?’ Helen asked.
‘Very well,’ said the crying man, ‘very well indeed.’ He had a light voice, like the way people talk in old musical comedies. When he spoke, you wouldn’t have known he had been crying at all.
‘Is he all right there?’
‘That’s where he likes being. The nurse comes and keeps an eye on him now and then but he won’t go back to the hospital till dark.’
She had to shout the last words because the traffic was so noisy. The little avenue opened straight on to a bit of the North Circular where the lorries were changing down so they could slalom through the next roundabout, then jamming on the brakes when they found they couldn’t. At the roundabout we went off to the left and crunched across the broken tarmac of a huge car-park, almost empty. Behind the car-park there was a field with the mist still breathing through the thistles and a couple of shaggy ponies cropping the grey ectoplasmic skeins. At the end of the car-park stood a big half-timbered pub with its lights on, the Jolly Highwayman, with a creaking sign depicting some olden footpad of the North Circular.
‘But what do you actually do – two ploughmans please, yes, and a pint of bitter and a half of lager – what’s the lab for?’
‘We test things, like how much preservative do you need to put in to make some pickle or ice-cream last x months. Or how little you need, to be more precise.’
‘Couldn’t they cut out the additives entirely?’
‘I knew you’d say that. Have you got any idea how many people die of food poisoning each year? Because that’s what happens if you don’t put in any preservatives. Stupid people go on eating it long after the sell-by date. That’s the trouble with your marvellous organically grown produce. It just goes off.’
‘I didn’t say anything about organically grown produce.’
‘No, but that’s what people like you think. Just because Woodies is funded by a company which happens to make a profit, you –’
‘Oh,’ I said, ‘I thought it was a government thing, I didn’t realise it –’
‘It’s Swiss,’ she said firmly.
‘How are you today, young lady? Mind if
I park myself here’ – but he was already sitting down, this man, thirtyish, narrow-faced, dark and pale, could have worked for an undertaker’s, had a huge crevice in his forehead as though some small meteorite had dented it. ‘Still poisoning the populace, are we?’ He grabbed my hand across Helen’s lap, kissing her lightly on the cheek as he leant across. ‘Don’t think I’ve had the pleasure. Tolly d’Amico, with an apostrophe, all the way from sunny Italy by way of Trotter’s Corner. Tolly, short for Tolomeo, Ptolemy to you lot.’ When he smiled, he didn’t look like an undertaker’s mute at all, or only an undertaker’s mute off duty having a quick cigarette behind the hearse and sharing a macabre joke with his colleagues.
‘Didn’t think you’d be in so early’, said Helen.
‘Thought you were safe, did you? Don’t worry, Tolly always gets the girl in the end. What’s your line then, mate?’
‘I’m in the civil service.’
‘Tax, customs, anything of that type?’
‘No, no.’
‘Thank God for that then, otherwise we might have had a conflict of interest.’
‘So what do you do?’
‘What don’t I do? What would you say I did, Helen my love? How would you describe my occupation?’
She laughed kindly but without enthusiasm. ‘Oh he’s a sort of villain.’
‘A. sort. of. villain. Oh thank you very much. That’s all the gratitude I get for all that lager not to mention those cherry brandies I’ve poured down you.’
‘All right then, you say.’
‘I am a trader, my love, that’s what I am.’
‘Same thing,’ she said.
‘Same thing? You mock the ancient calling that has made this country great. This country is a nation of traders, isn’t that right, sir? Napoleon said it shortly after he captured the Balls Pond Road. Now the moment you’ve all been waiting for, it’s my round, comes up every ten years so don’t miss your golden opportunity.’
She pushed out her glass for a refill. How easy she was anywhere, with anyone. Yet she didn’t put herself out at all. Sometimes you had the feeling that she wasn’t much impressed by people. She clocked in who they were and what their line was, but they didn’t make much impression on her. That was what put men on their mettle, especially the men who were used to making an impression.
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