by Ann Purser
“She’ll be with the others,” she said. “Safety in numbers.”
Derek shook his head. “There’s no safety anywhere these days,” he said. “I’m goin’ to have a look down the road.”
He was half out of the front door when he heard Lois shout, “Hey! Wait a minute – there’s somebody round the back!”
Derek rushed into the kitchen, and wrenched open the back door, shouting, “Who the hell is that?”
Lois pushed past him and peered out into the darkness. She heard Josie’s giggle. “S’me, Dad – me and Melvyn.”
“Who the bloody hell is Melvyn!” said Derek, pulling his daughter into the kitchen. Whoever Melvyn was, he’d vanished into the darkness, and Josie giggled some more before sliding gently on to the floor. “Well, now,” said Derek, “and what’ve we got here!”
The sickly smell of cheap wine wafted under Lois’s nose as she bent over a smiling but unconscious Josie.
“Don’t be like that, Derek,” she said. “There’s always going to be a first time. Give me a hand, and we’ll get her upstairs to bed.”
“You’re very calm about all this,” puffed Derek accusingly, as they struggled up the narrow stairs. “She’s only bloody fourteen!”
Lois heaved Josie on to her bed, and began to undress her. “Never been fourteen?” she replied, and followed it up with a swift chaser. “And anyway, you’re not much of an example. Remember last Saturday week? Josie woken up by you tryin’ to jump into your pyjamas?”
Derek stumped downstairs muttering, and when Lois finally sat down heavily next to him, he said sternly, “She wasn’t at The Hut, that’s for sure. They’re very strict about no alcohol. She’s only a kid, Lois.” He looked at the papers still strewn over the table. “Are you sure you’re goin’ to have time to see to the kids properly, clean other people’s houses every day, and join the cops as well?”
Lois leaned back against the cushions and closed her eyes. She was quiet for a minute, then said slowly, “Dunno. Worth a try, maybe. Find out more about it. I don’t have to decide right now, do I? By the way,” she added, “better put a bowl by Josie’s bed when we go up.”
∗
Wednesday, and it was Lois’s day at the small redbrick cottage of Long Farnden’s community nurse, Gillian Surfleet. Lacking the outward charm of Miss Hathaway’s thatched teacosy next door, it was nevertheless warm and comfortable, filled with knick-knacks and souvenirs from grateful patients. Lois liked this job best of all, because Nurse Surfleet was seldom there, being out on her rounds in neighbouring villages, and enabling Lois to get on without interruption. When she was at home, Lois was glad to see her, though ten minutes’ conversation with Gillian was like a pep talk from the games teacher at school. Nurse Surfleet was brisk and optimistic, and had no time for what she frequently referred to as ‘the miseries’. Lois wondered how this went down with the clinically depressed, and could imagine herself in such circumstances telling her to sod off. Typical nurse, she supposed. And yet Lois had seen a warm side to her. Once, when there’d been a ding-dong over the fence with Gloria Hathaway, she’d seen Gillian Surfleet in tears. She’d quickly recovered when she remembered Lois was there, but it had been a pathetic sight. Women living on their own, Lois had thought. Nobody to confide in. Although apparently very popular in the village, in the same way as her colleague Dr Rix, Nurse Surfleet seemed to have few real friends, and Lois, breaking her own rules, always sat down for coffee with her if she was not out on her rounds.
∗
Gillian’s neighbour, Gloria Hathaway, was one of the few people who could upset her. Lois had witnessed more than the one sharp conversation over the garden fence, but found Gillian unwilling to talk about it. “Gloria’s a bit difficult, Lois,” she had said shortly. “Can be a misery, but a nice woman at heart. Most people are, you know.” Lois reflected that she’d seen little of Miss Hathaway’s good heart. She was apparently a keen gardener, always bent double with a border fork and a galvanised bucket for the weeds, though the garden had a neglected air. She never looked up as Lois walked down the path, though once or twice Lois had glanced back and caught Miss Hathaway staring unsmiling in her direction.
“Saw your friend, Gloria,” she said now, “cutting down some dead stuff in the garden, and not a hair out of place!”
“You’d never catch Gloria in dirty trousers,” Nurse Surfleet said flatly, and swiftly changed the subject. “Help yourself to biscuits, my dear. I’m off to an old lady at Ringford Lodge. Nasty case of ‘flu, and dangerous at her age. See you next week, perhaps.” She was off at a cracking pace out of the little gate onto the footpath and away down to her car, but Lois noticed that she looked furtively into the garden next door.
Lois had half an hour left and found she’d finished the routine work, so collected up some of the brass knick-knacks, spread old newspapers over the table and began cleaning. She hated this job. The cleaning fluid had a powerful smell that made her feel dizzy. Still, the result was worth it. Shining brass that flickered in the firelight certainly added a cosy feel to the place. Must comfort Gillian Surfleet in her long, lonely evenings. Lois rubbed away at the tarnished metal, reflecting that the woman was probably not lonely at all. Only too glad of a bit of peace and quiet in front of the telly after a day listening to moans and groans.
It was quiet in the cottage. Sometimes Lois put on the radio and listened to music. She never did in the doctor’s house, even when they were out. But here it was all right, so long as she remembered to put it back to Radio Four before she left. This morning, though, she didn’t mind the quiet. Derek had made a scene at breakfast time, determined not to let Josie off lightly, and Lois was glad of the time to think about it. He was right, of course, but she remembered her own youth and knew that coming down on her like a ton of bricks was the surest way to encourage her to do it again.
A loud rattle in the backyard startled her, and she rushed out to see a scrawny ginger cat leaping away over the coal bunker. “Get off!” she yelled after it, and turned to go back in. A movement in the garden next door caught her eye, and she saw the tail end of a figure in a greenish jacket disappearing into Miss Hathaway’s front porch, under a rose-covered trellis that was a picture in summer. The ginger cat saw its opportunity and slipped in after it. Funny, she thought, I could have sworn that was Prof Barratt’s old Barbour jacket…still got that oily stain on the sleeve…ah well, there’s plenty of Barbours about in this village. Like horses, she said to herself. More horses than people in Farnden, and Barbours to go with them, women as well as men…Probably Rachel Barratt borrowed it to go round bothering people. Not enough to do, that woman. Rachel was scared of horses, she’d admitted to Lois, but liked to be thought of as one of the set.
She returned to the table and finished off the brass. I hope that lasts for a few weeks, she thought, sneezing, as she washed the dirty dusters. Her thoughts wandered on inconsequentially as she took the dusters out to the washing line. No sign of anyone now in Gloria’s garden – she wondered if it had been the Prof, and if so, what was he up to? From what Gillian Surfleet had said, her neighbour didn’t socialise much in the village, being very choosy about her friends.
Ah well, none of her business. She hurried round now, anxious to finish and be off. She had planned to drop in on that woman the Prof had mentioned – Janice Britton, the Special Constable. If she was at home, that is, and willing to talk to Lois for a few minutes.
∗
Janice Britton glanced out of her window, and saw Lois walking up the path. She knew who she was, having seen her around, in and out of various houses in the village. A nice woman, she’d thought, and attractive. Always smiled, if they met in the shop. She went to open the door.
“Excuse me,” said Lois, “sorry to interrupt…”
“I’m not busy,” replied Janet. “Do you want to come in?” She was used to hearing tales of woe, marriages degenerating into violence, youngsters off the rails, drugs found in school bags.
“Just wondered if I could have a quick word with you about being a Special,” said Lois, standing awkwardly in the middle of the room. Janice persuaded her to sit down, and soon had Lois talking about her own life, her teenage daughter and young sons, and her own ambitions. It made a change from the usual appeals for help.
“It’s not all that glamorous, you know,” she said, noting Lois’s dark good looks and her natural grace even in working clothes. “Some people think it’s all smart uniforms and flirting with the blokes. But it’s not like that at all, as you can imagine.” She started with the success stories; reuniting lost children with their mothers, settling differences in a street punch-up, helping old ladies across the street. Then moved on to the tragedies, failures and disappointments that figured largely in her work. She told her of extricating a middle-aged postwoman from under lorry wheels, letters spilled all over the road and the bicycle and post-woman mangled into a twisted heap. She described her feelings when a fourteen-year-old girl, who’d taken an overdose, died in spite of all the help that could be given. At this, she noticed Lois’s face lose colour, and recalled her mention of Josie. She wondered whether Lois’s real reason for wanting to find out about being a Special was a fear that her daughter might be in trouble. But she knew better than to pry, and quickly moved on again to the long hours when boredom was the greatest hazard, like the time when she’d been on a five-hour vigil in an empty car park, waiting for action, and nothing had happened.
After Lois had gone, Janice cleared away coffee mugs and prepared for duty. Had she answered the questions honestly? Had she herself really known what she was getting into at the beginning? The truth was, you never knew from one day to the next what would happen. That was part of the attraction, she supposed. And she could not imagine anything more boring than cleaning other people’s houses. She had said as much to Lois, but later had reason to eat her words.
∗
Josie arrived back from school looking pale and tired. She had insisted on going that morning, partly to get away from her ranting father. As Lois had watched her walking off down the road in her school uniform, long thin legs wobbling on clumpy heels, head down against the bright sun, she’d almost cried. Such a little girl, really. If only they wouldn’t grow up.
Josie sat down wearily at the kitchen table and looked up at Lois. Her eyes were deeply shadowed, her pale face snowing up the freckles that peppered her nose and cheeks. “Cuppa tea goin’?” she said bravely.
“Headache?” said Lois gently. Josie nodded, and bit her lip. Lois put her arms around her and rocked her quietly to and fro. “It’s all right, baby,” she said. “Just so long as you’ve learnt…”
Much later, when Josie and all the others were in bed, Derek and Lois did what they’d never done before; they looked carefully through Josie’s school bag, putting everything back in its place. They found nothing – nothing but innocence – and were reassured.
Five
The post came early on the Churchill Estate. The postman went round as quickly as possible, occasionally throwing a bundle of post into an unlocked door, avoiding, with a skill learned of bitter experience, dangerous Alsatians and Jack Russell terriers. He stopped for two cups of tea only, one with old Fred, his uncle, and the other with Lois’s next-door neighbour, a youngish, flashy-looking blonde with no kids and a succession of ‘friends’ who came and went at all hours of night and day.
“We’d get our letters a lot earlier if Postman Pat had more sense than to join the queue at Marge’s,” Derek said, running a hand through his thick fair hair, and giving Lois a peck on the cheek. “Be back a bit late,” he said, and was gone.
Lois was on the way out when Pat O’Henry came smiling up the path. “One for you, Lois,” he said with a smirk. “Police…what you bin’ up to now?”
“Bugger off,” said Lois, snatching the letter from him and retreating into the house. She ripped open the envelope and found what she had hoped for. There were a couple of vacancies in Tresham for Specials, and she was given an appointment for interview next week. “Derek!” she yelled, and then remembered she was alone in the house. Excitement rising inside her, she tucked the letter behind the clock in the kitchen and went off to work.
Thursday was Lois’s day for the Reverend Peter White, bachelor, and inevitably suspected by most of Farnden of being gay. Lois, however, knew otherwise. She had found the magazines by mistake, thinking she would give the laundry basket in his bedroom a good turnout and wash some of the grubby socks that had lurked at the bottom for as long as she could remember. And then, underneath them all, she’d seen a picture in glorious colour of a plump, pink, naked female on all fours, pneumatic boobs dangling like udders, with a dog biscuit between her regular white teeth, and a tartan lead clipped neatly round her neck. Oh, my God! she’d muttered, and sifted through the small pile, all of the same genre, before putting them back as she found them. Kinky he may be, she’d said often enough since, but gay he is not. She’d never told how she knew, though, and never would.
You’ve got to feel sorry for the silly fool, she said to herself as she dusted round the laundry basket and saw again the tell-tale magazines through the wickerwork. Anybody who has to rely on that muck for getting it up is in a bad way.
“Lois?” It was him, the Reverend, calling her for coffee. He was another who would have liked her to sit down and have a chat. “I promise not to try and convert you,” he’d said playfully one morning. “Just keep me company for a few minutes.”
Why not? Lois had thought. He’s probably lonely. Even a suspect bachelor vicar is put on a pedestal and finds it difficult to make real friends. But Lois had reminded herself of her rules, and said she’d never get through if she stopped, and had left him sadly stirring his coffee.
This morning, however, she needed to tell someone her news. “Do sit down, Lois,” he said, as always. He was tall and thin. Everything about him was thin: thin, mousy hair, thin beaky nose, thin lips and thin, scrawny neck, with a prominent Adam’s apple that moved up and down like a frog swallowed by a snake. In the pulpit it was hypnotic, and many a good Farnden church-goer had been kept awake during the sermon watching its efforts to escape. His fingers, wrapped around the coffee mug for warmth, were long and thin with chewed nails. His eyes, pale behind thick glasses, were shifty, never focussing on anything for longer than a few seconds.
Not a happy man, thought Lois this morning, as – to the Reverend’s great surprise – she sank down onto a kitchen chair and accepted his offer of a coffee before she began her work.
The kitchen was cold, its early morning warmth having vanished quickly; the central heating programmed for economy. The vicarage was modern, built when the old one was sold for a large sum of money to a rich couple reputed to have won the lottery. (All newcomers who paid fancy prices for old village houses were unreliably reported as having won the lottery.) Peter White was the first to occupy the new vicarage, and found it small, anonymous, and either freezing cold or overwhelmingly hot. It was nothing like he’d imagined when he applied for the job. No oak-panelled study, no large kitchen with a comfortable old cook providing plain but delicious meals, no elegant drawing-room where he could entertain the gentry. In other words, it was what the Church Commissioners, in their lack of wisdom, thought suitable for a modern man of God. Parochial church council meetings in his study were a fuggy squash, making the already prickly members even more argumentative and un-Christian. The garden was much too small for the summer fête.
He’d never tried inviting gentry for a cocktail, as the sitting room overlooked the sewage works, and even when the fast-growing fir trees had burgeoned into a dense, high hedge and he could no longer see it, there was no time of the year when he could not smell it.
“Wind’s in this direction this morning,” said Lois, sniffing.
Peter – he had asked everyone to call him by his Christian name, but none did – nodded sadly. “Did I ever tell you how Maisie fell – ”
Lois quickly inter
rupted to say, yes, he had told her, several times. It had been a gruesome story. One awful afternoon Peter White’s ancient cairn terrier, Maisie, had got out through a broken fence and wandered into the sewage beds. She’d mistaken the greenish crust, always present on the village’s excrement, for a grassy place to roll, and would have met a disgusting death by drowning had not Miss Hathaway been passing along the nearby footpath and climbed in to the rescue. Maisie had run into the house, shaken herself vigorously, and Miss Hathaway and the vicar had taken it in turns to shower off the evil-smelling mess. For Peter, there had been a glimpse of a surprisingly generously endowed Gloria Hathaway reaching for a towel. She had gone home in borrowed trousers and jersey, all of which had made the occasion even more memorable for Peter. These last details he omitted when telling the story, of course.
Reminded of Miss Hathaway, Lois said, “Do vicars still call on the sick?” Miss H. was the churchy sort, surely? Ever since she’d discovered the magazines, she’d had a contrary respect for Peter White. His particular frailty had made him more of person, more like the rest, and because of that, more approachable.
Peter White looked round nervously, as if a queue of the halt and the lame was forming at his door. “Ah yes…Miss Hathaway,” answered the vicar. “Just a little out of sorts, it seems. I called this week after noticing she was not at Evensong, and was assured that it is nothing serious. I must go again, though, to make sure.”
“Yes, I should,” said Lois firmly. As she took her coat from the cloakroom, she took a look at the untidy array of dingy coats and jackets. She could spare the time to put them straight, maybe suggest taking one or two to the charity shop. She sighed. Poor man needed a good woman, but who would even look at him in his present state? She began to sort through, and found a greenish-black cloak that needed a couple of buttons, an old tweed jacket that smelt of dog, and a scruffy Barbour with none of its waterproof quality left. She would take these three, anyway. Then she noticed the dark stain, spread across the sleeve of the Barbour, and was reminded of Gloria Hathaway’s visitor. She sniffed at it curiously. Mmm…not sewage, thank heavens. Must have been him, then, though it had looked more like the bulky professor. She bundled up the coats, checked that it was all right to take them, and was told that he needed the Barbour. The others she could take. With a cheery, “Bye! See you next week!”, Lois left the vicarage, unaware of the pale face of Peter White at his bedroom window, clutching his Barbour and watching her. It was not until half way home that she remembered she had not told him about being a Special, after all.