But she couldn’t see her, and when they were both back in the living room she said abruptly, ‘So, what do you think? Cheltenham today? Or should I leave it for awhile? Honestly, Theo, I’ll do as you say. I want you to tell me.’
‘Gloucestershire. It’s a bit of a drive – look, love, I know you’re feeling better today but – no, not today. Give it a rest. I’ve got to go in to the office – there’ll be things to sort out over Hot Quince, and you and the boys – I’ve got to go in. But –’
‘I’ll go spare here on my own all day.’
‘I know. Why not try this Mort again? Walthamstow’s not too far. And like I said, maybe he’s remembered something more by now.’
She thought for a moment, remembering that frightened quivering man crumpled in a chair in his cluttered office. Mort, scared silly. And his young men –
‘I think I will. I’ll tell him he needn’t be – that I won’t say anything about anything – and maybe he’ll be better this time. You never know –’
The journey seemed incredibly familiar, considering she had only done it twice before. Each corner she had to turn beckoned her as she reached it and familiar buildings and landmarks kept appearing as the car swept through the acres of London streets, heading east. So that she arrived relaxed and pleased with herself, like a child who has just found her way to the middle of a maze.
There was a big van outside the house, and she looked at it curiously as she went up the path, her feet crunching on the old gravel. A removal van?
The hall was bustling with men carrying furniture and a couple of black-suited civil servants being busy with sheets of paper on clipboards, and she stood on tile doorstep for a while watching, trying to work out what was going on, and then, as the furniture men wont pushing past her, went across to the nearest of the black-suited civil servants.
‘Seventeen, Boone? Is that all? Are you sure? Oh, but this is going to take a lot of – yes, what is it? I’m afraid we’re very busy. Any queries really must be taken to the Town Hall. Phone them if you like –’
‘I’m looking for Mr Lang,’ she said and the man looked up, his face suddenly avid with interest. ‘What?’
‘Mr Lang, Mortimer Lang. He – oh, he’s an old friend, you see. I’m not here on business of any kind. It’s just that he’s an old friend and –’
‘Oh. Well, yes. Oh,’ the man said, and his eyes flicked sideways at his partner. ‘This lady, Boone, says she’s a friend of Mr Lang – not here on business – an old friend.’
‘Oh. An old friend?’ The other man looked at her and frowned portentously. ‘Oh, dear me. Well, now, this is really very difficult. Very difficult –’
‘Where is he? What’s happened?’ She could feel herself sharpening with tension, and her source of relaxation began to harden in her muscles. ‘Is there something wrong?’
The first of the men shook his head, heavily, clearly finding a good deal of satisfaction in what he was doing. ‘I think you’d better sit down, my dear, while I explain, don’t you, Boone? I mean, I really don’t think –’
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, man!’ She said it sharply, drawing away fastidiously, for he had put one hand on her arm. ‘What on earth are you –’
‘I’m afraid Mr Lang has passed on,’ the man Boone said, more portentous than ever, and looking at her with a deeply mournful expression. ‘I fear we must be the givers of bad tidings. I am so sorry. That was why Mr Ellis here wanted you to sit down. He was afraid – there, you see? You do feel out of sorts! Quick, Ellis, a chair –’
‘I’m all right,’ she said curtly. ‘Just – surprised.’ She pulled away again, for once more the man had taken hold of her arm. ‘What happened?’
‘Oh, I don’t think we’re at liberty to divulge –’ Boone began but the other man shook his head and said quickly, ‘Well, why not? I mean, it was in all the papers, the local ones, I mean. There was even a photograph on the front page of the Evening Standard – you know, the “News in Brief” column. It’s not exactly a secret –’
There was a sound on the stairs, even above the noise the furniture men were making, and she looked up and saw the shape of a woman there. She moved then, coming further down the stairs and now Maggy could see her more clearly. It was Sally Lang, the square dumpy woman she had met briefly that afternoon when she had last come here to see Morty, but the change in her was startling. She seemed to have collapsed in on herself and her squareness had dissolved into a heavy shambling shapelessness that made Maggy suddenly want to cry.
‘Mrs Lang,’ she said quickly and moved across the hall towards her, her hand out. ‘I’m so sorry. I just heard – I had no idea – I’m so sorry.’
‘Who is it?’ The woman peered up at her, frowning, and then nodded, slowly. ‘Oh, yes. I remember. He said he’d known you when – what do you want?’
‘I didn’t know. I’m so sorry. I just came to see him. I had no idea –’
Maggy stopped, staring at the woman on the staircase who stared back at her with dull heavy eyes. She shouldn’t ask, she knew she shouldn’t ask, but she had to.
‘Mrs Lang, what happened? Can you tell me? We – I did know him a long time ago and –’
Sally Lang nodded, heavily. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It was an accident. A car accident –’
‘A car –’ She saw it in front of her eyes, like a scene from a bad cops and robbers thriller on television. A car being chased, pushed off the road, going over and over down a hillside –
‘Well, not exactly an accident, eh, Mrs Lang?’ the man Ellis said, his eyes suddenly avid again. ‘I mean, the papers said – no other car was involved, was it?’
‘No. But it was still an accident.’ She lifted her chin and some of the shape seemed to come back to her sagging body. ‘He was a very hard-working man, and I believe he was tired, quite desperately tired, and he just – he fell asleep, and the car went off the road and into that tree – that was what it was. He told me as much himself –’
‘He told you?’ Maggy said sharply, trying to hold on to reality.
‘He didn’t die at once. The other one did, but he didn’t. He was in intensive care at the hospital for three days, and he was quite lucid. Some of the time,’ Sally Lang said dully. ‘He told me some of it.’
‘I – is there somewhere we can talk, Mrs Lang? On our own?’ Maggy looked at the men with distaste. ‘In confidence? I knew him so long ago, you see and –’
‘The back kitchen hasn’t been started yet,’ Ellis said fussily and Boone nodded, like a mandarin, his eyes glued to Sally Lang’s face. ‘We’ll be in there later, of course, but we’ve got all these other rooms to finish first. Why not go there? No one’ll disturb you there –’
The back kitchen turned out to be a scullery, stone-floored and smelling of potatoes and mildew and dirty washing, and Sally Lang sat down heavily at the wooden table in the middle of it and looked up at Maggy, trying to smile.
‘I’m sorry I can’t look after you better, but you know how it is –’ She waved her hand vaguely in the direction of the two men outside. ‘The council here and all –’
‘They aren’t throwing you out, are they? My God, how could they be so –’
She shook her head. ‘It doesn’t matter. It was Mort who was employed here, really, you see, not me. I did a lot, of course, but I was just his wife. It was his place. His job. So I’ve got to get my stuff out of the flat – that’s what the removal men are doing, clearing my flat – and there has to be this inventory, you see, before I can get Moil’s last pay cheque.’ She grinned then, a thin grimace. ‘Not that it matters. We spent every penny we had on this place and on the boys. His pay cheques and my money. My father’s money. That was how Mort wanted it, so we did. Every penny. They could have had his last pay cneque as well, for all I care. I shan’t bother with it –’
‘But where will you go? What will you do?’ I hardly know her, Maggy thought, but it matters, it really matters. The poor creature – ‘Where will you go?
’
Sally Lang shrugged, looking down at her hands on the table. ‘I don’t know. Don’t care very much.’
‘But my dear, you’ve got to – I mean, when they’ve cleared your furniture – where are they taking it?’
She shrugged again, and was silent.
‘Is there anything I can do?’ Maggy said, and came closer, and after a moment touched the other woman’s arm. She had never used physical contact much in any of her relationships, but she felt a need to reach out to this woman, and it expressed itself in a light touch on her shoulder. But then she pulled her hand away and said again, ‘Is there anything I can do?’
‘No. Thanks all the same. I’ll be all right. I can manage. Don’t fret over me. I’ll be all right.’
Outside a man’s voice was raised in a shout and then someone else expostulated and the shouting sank to a low rumble, and Maggy looked up and round the narrow bleak little room almost in desperation. Oh, God, now what? Here I am stuck with a woman who doesn’t seem to want to say anything and I said I wanted to talk to her, and now what do I do?
She tried again, almost despairingly. ‘Please, Mrs Lang – Sally, isn’t it? Please, Sally, what can I do? I knew Mort, you see. He was – he was quite kind to me when I was a child and –’
Sally looked up and very slowly nodded her head. ‘Yes, I’m sure he was. He was always kind to children. He liked children.’
‘Yes. So let me help you, if I can. I can’t do much, I know that, but –’
‘You know how he died, then?’ Sally said and looked up at her, her eyes bright and yet heavy, like polished pebbles. ‘You know how he died?’ ‘You said – a car accident – falling asleep at the wheel –’ Sally Lang shook her head, as heavily as just before she had nodded it.
‘He killed himself. That was what he did. He committed suicide. How can anyone help me after that?’
25
Beyond the room the sounds went on; footsteps on the stairs, men’s voices, and from further away the traffic in the road outside and Maggy looked at the heavy shape sitting there at the table and shook her head.
‘Suicide? But how – what –’
Sally took a sharp little breath, almost irritated, and then spoke in a clear careful voice as though she were talking to a child. ‘He deliberately went off the road. Aimed at the tree. He meant to kill both of them. But the other one was luckier. He didn’t have that week of – it took him seven days to die, Mort. You know that? Seven days. That’s a long time when you’re – when you don’t want to be alive. And you hurt.’
Maggy swallowed. ‘Who was the other man?’ She didn’t really want to know. She really couldn’t have cared less but she could see all too clearly the picture of Mort, in pain, in hospital, that Sally was staring at with her dead shining eyes. ‘Was he a friend?’
Sally grinned then, a wide incredible grimace that made Maggy look away; it was too painful to see it. ‘A friend? No. He was – his name was Ernest Gibbs. He was a private investigator. Isn’t that ridiculous? A private investigator. A nasty little man in a pin-striped suit. I didn’t know people like that existed. I thought they were just invented for television. Nasty little men who look so ordinary they can’t be real. Whoever could have thought such things were real? But he was real. And he was with Mort.’
‘In a pin – Oh God!’ Maggy whispered, and needed to sit down, and pulled the chair out from the other side of the table. ‘A little man who looked like a city clerk? I thought I’d imagined him.’
Sally looked at her, her face taking on some sort of expression for the first time.
‘What?’ She frowned sharply. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I kept seeing someone like that, following me. I thought – I thought I was imagining it. Getting paranoid. He looked the same but somehow different every time. A little man with hair that you know isn’t really growing on top of his head the way it pretends to be. It’s sort of pulled over from the back –’
‘Why should he have followed you? What – did you have something to do with all this? With Mort dying. Did you? You came here and then – it was after that –’
‘No!’ Maggy almost shouted it. ‘It was nothing to do with me! He was frightened when I came but I didn’t know why, I really didn’t know why. But then he frightened me. Those boys – he sent those boys to see me off, and –’
‘Mort’s boys.’ Sally bent her head again, to look down at her clasped hands, quiet again. ‘I knew, of course, I pretended I didn’t, but I knew. I just kept hoping it would be all right. That – but there was no point in saying anything, was there?’
She lifted her head again, looking at Maggy. ‘Was there? If I’d said anything he’d have got all upset, and tried to stop, but it would have been no use. He’d have just started again. He thought I didn’t know but I did. I’m not as silly as I look. So I said nothing and hoped for the best. It suited the boys so they couldn’t have said anything – and it suited me. I can’t lie about it. It suited me.’
‘What did? I don’t understand. I’m so – Sally, it was nothing to do with me – what happened. It couldn’t have been. How could it?’
Sally sighed, a tired heaving of her shoulders. ‘He was gay, you see. Isn’t that a stupid word? Gay – when it made him so miserable, so – all his life it drove him nearly mad, when it came on him. He never said, we never talked about it, but I knew. They were the times he wouldn’t leave me alone, you see. No sooner in bed but he was – then I knew it had come again. The way it did sometimes. Then there’d be the in-between times when he was just working and working and left me alone. And that was awful. Then it was me who felt bad. But I knew it’d be all right again, when the need got to him.’
She lifted her chin. ‘Silly, wasn’t it? The only time he loved me properly was when he wanted boys. So I had to say nothing, didn’t I? If I’d fussed, tried to change him, I’d never have had any part of him. So I never said anything. And he thought it was a secret and that was why they could do it to him.’
‘Do what?’ Maggy said it almost despairingly, floundering, but just beginning, dimly, to see what the woman was saying, just beginning to glimpse, far away and in a blur the pattern of their lives together. The hunger of this square dull woman for a man who hungered for sleek boys with narrow flanks and flat bellies, when all she had to offer was wide hips and heavy breasts and a vast, patient, uncritical love. The trap she had twisted and turned in, finding her own needs satisfied only when his guilt about his own drove him to seek the warmth of that burgeoning female flesh. ‘Do what to him? I don’t understand.’
‘He used to come and get money from Mort. This Gibbs. Every week he came and got money, and Mort used to make entries in the books, such clumsy silly entries and then I had to tidy them up, in case the council realized – but it was all right. We managed well enough. I’m a good manager. But then it all changed. After you came –’ she shook her head, weary again. ‘What does it matter, anyway? He’s dead. What does it matter?’
‘It matters a lot. I can’t let it seem it was because of me – that I had anything to do with his dying! You can’t expect me to live with that –’
Sally looked at her and again that wide painful grin filled her face. ‘Poor you. Oh, poor you,’ she said, and Maggy felt her face darken as blood rushed up from the well of shame that suddenly filled her belly.
‘Oh, I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to sound so – but I do want to know. Please? And I want you to know.’
‘All right. You want to know. I’ll tell you. This man, this Gibbs, after you came he was here more often. Mort said to me he was an old friend, and then he said he was in trouble and could we put him up and I said – well, what could I say? Mort looked dreadful, as though someone had – well, dreadful, anyway, and he was so loving, so very loving, over and over again. It was awful, it was marvellous – oh, God!’ And she bent her head again, so that Maggy couldn’t see her face.
There was a silence and then Maggy said, ‘And he came to live
here?’
‘Yes. And Mort gave him more and more. Before, at least it had been different. The same every week, steady, you know? But now it was different –’
‘Do you know why?’
‘Yes. He told me.’ She stretched then, lifting her shoulders and said unexpectedly, ‘I’m thirsty. I’ll make some tea,’ and got up and moved about the scullery, fetching chipped beakers and tea bags and putting on the kettle. She made the tea by pouring hot water over the bags and leaving them in the beakers, so that the brew became heavy and black, and then she thrust one of the beakers at Maggy, offering her neither milk nor sugar, and they sat facing each other, sipping, silent, each locked in her own thoughts.
‘You see, the whole situation had changed.’ Sally spoke suddenly, as though there had been no break in the talk. ‘Gibbs used to come for money for someone else. That was what Mort said. There was someone in America, who knew all about him. Knew about the boys, everything. I think he and Mort, once – well, anyway. There was this Andy and –’
‘Andy.’ Maggy put her beaker down so sharply that it splashed tea onto the table. ‘What did you say?’
‘Andy. A man in America called Andy. It was him Gibbs got the money for. But then he suddenly started to get it from Mort by himself. He sent him telegrams.’ She shook her head, almost smiling, reminiscent. ‘Mort tried to hide them from me, said it was just messages from the council, but I knew they never sent telegrams. But what did it matter to me? There was nothing I could do. So I just said all right, and went on with what I had to do, didn’t I? Making beds. Meals. The washing –’
‘So this man Gibbs –’
‘That was the trouble. He’d started to get money from Mart as well, you see. Mort talked and talked there in the hospital. He was all strung up, like – it made me think of cat’s cradle. Did you play cat’s cradle when you were little?’
Reprise Page 27