‘Yes,’ she replied, matter-of-factly, as if unable to understand why he would have doubted that she would.
‘Shall we go somewhere for a coffee?’
‘No. I do not have much time. They think I am in the laundry room with the children’s clothes. The mother is reading them bedtime stories. We can talk here.’
From the corner of his eye Joe could see the tramp weaving towards them again.
‘Okay,’ he said, gesturing towards a bench. ‘Do you want to sit down? This is my son, Hugo.’
‘How do you do, Hugo?’ She shook the boy by the hand and they walked to the bench. It took the tramp a few seconds to realign himself to follow them.
‘This man,’ he told the nanny when he finally caught up with them, ‘is a bloody gentleman. Not like those bastards.’
The girl looked him straight in the eye, appearing not even to notice the smell which he gave off. ‘Please,’ she said. ‘This is a private conversation. You go away and leave us alone now.’
For a few moments the man swayed like a tree in the breeze as he took in her words. Then, with another salute, he turned smartly around, marched half a dozen steps and tripped over the flapping soles of his boots, sending a cloud of pedestrian pigeons into the air as he hit the ground.
‘There was a Doris at the house,’ the girl said, taking advantage of the fact that Hugo was laughing too much at the man’s antics to concentrate on anything she might be saying. ‘She was a Filipino. A maid, but they treated her more like a slave. Working all the time. No days off. I was sorry for her. She was a nice girl. Stupid, but kind to the children.’
‘Where is she now?’ Joe asked.
‘I don’t know. She vanished. One morning the butler was asking for her because he wanted something scrubbed or polished. We were all searching for her but no one could find her. Mrs Montgomery told us she had been stealing or something, so good riddance. They told me that I should not mention her to anyone. To forget that I knew her. She talked about loyalty to the family and discretion.’ The girl rolled her eyes. ‘Then she told me I would have to do all Doris’ work now.’
‘She ran away?’
‘Maybe. But where would she go with no references? She was too stupid to get any other sort of job and she was frightened of everything. She was ugly too, so she couldn’t have found a boyfriend. Maybe she was taken by someone.’
‘Taken by whom?’ Joe was momentarily disappointed by the news that Doris was ugly. A pretty face would have been an asset for selling a book about sex slavery.
‘There was a man.’ The girl glanced around her, apparently nervous for the first time since her arrival in the square. ‘He came to the house a few times to see her.’ She shivered at the memory. ‘He was disgusting.’
‘Who did she say he was?’
‘She said he was just a friend, but I knew she was frightened of him.’
‘What was his name?’
‘She said he was called Max and once he called on the telephone. She was asleep and he told me to get her to ring him when she woke. I wrote down the telephone number, but when she woke she told me she already had the number. So it was still in my pocket.’ She passed over a crumpled piece of paper with an out-of-London number and the name Max scrawled on it.
‘Do you have an address for him?’ Joe asked.
‘If I had an address I would give it to you.’ She looked at him as if he was as stupid as the girl.
‘Doris is a strange name for a Filipino, don’t you think?’
‘She was the first one I ever met. I don’t know what names they have.’
‘She said someone had stolen her breasts. What did she mean?’
The nanny shrugged. ‘She was stupid. I think she had an operation. I never wanted to ask her too many questions. She was confused all the time. It made me cross to try to have a conversation with her.’
Joe imagined that this dour woman had little in common with any of the people she was working with below stairs.
‘Why are you working as a nanny?’ he asked. ‘You don’t seem the type.’
‘I am waiting to go to university. It is good to travel to foreign countries.’
The tramp was back on his feet and restoring his spirits from the beer can which had, magically, remained unspilled in his grip throughout his encounter with the pavement. Hugo was watching him with an absorbed look on his face.
‘Why did your employer deny Doris’ existence to me?’ Joe asked the girl.
‘Perhaps she is stupid too. The children would tell you about her if you asked. They liked her. She used to sing American songs to them.’ She stood up, obviously ready to go.
‘Why did you want to tell me all this?’ Joe asked.
‘It is the right thing to do.’ She seemed surprised that he even needed to ask. ‘She was my friend. I think she might need someone to help her.’
Joe gave her a piece of paper with his telephone number and address on it. ‘Will you call me if you find out anything else? Or if Doris comes back.’
‘Sure,’ she shrugged and walked away without saying goodbye.
Joe returned his attention to the tramp, who was trying to persuade Hugo to have a sip from his beer can. ‘Come on Hugo,’ he called and the boy skipped over to join him.
‘Good night,’ they both said in unison and the tramp gave them a final salute, remaining like a statue until they had crossed the road and disappeared behind the shops.
They walked back to Earls Court, stopping in Gloucester Road for a pizza, most of which found its way down the front of Hugo’s jumper. Joe thought that the exercise might tire his son out, but the boy was still talking non-stop when they finally arrived back at the flat in Bramham Gardens.
Annie, a model having some difficulty getting her career started, was on the telephone as they walked in. She covered the mouthpiece when she saw Joe.
‘A girl came round to see you,’ she told him. ‘Said she was a friend of yours. I showed her into your room. Hope that was all right.’
‘Is she your girlfriend?’ Hugo asked loudly as Annie went back to talking on the phone.
‘No, she’s one of my flatmates. I told you, I haven’t got a girlfriend.’
‘Who’s this girl in your room then?’
‘I have no idea.’
As Joe opened his bedroom door Hugo pushed past him. Cordelia quickly pulled Joe’s duvet up to cover her nakedness, but not quickly enough to stop the pose which she had been preparing for Joe being imprinted indelibly on his eight-year-old son’s memory. Her hair, which had been the colour of honey a few days before, had turned a metallic pink.
CHAPTER THREE
The musical bleeping entered Joe’s dreams and then brought him uncomfortably to a confused state of wakefulness. His eyes remained closed. He knew it wasn’t his alarm clock – it was completely the wrong sound for that, and it wasn’t loud enough to be a fire or smoke alarm. Even if there was such a thing in the flat! He couldn’t understand why his back and neck ached so much or why his bed felt so hard. He opened his eyes and the sliver of light which came through the closed curtains was enough to show him that he wasn’t in his bed.
Slowly, as the bleeping continued to drill into his brain, he realised he was lying on the floor, in a sleeping bag, and his memory started to return at a dizzying speed. The noise seemed to be coming from near the bed. He crawled out of the sleeping bag and fumbled his way towards it. His hands came in contact with something soft and furry, making him cry out in shock. He realised it was Cordelia’s shoulder bag. The beeping was emanating from inside. He wondered if he should wake her to ask her permission to go in after the offending sound, but decided not to bother. He dived in amongst a clutter of small objects and crumpled tissues. His hand came in contact with a mobile phone. He pulled it out and pressed the answer button.
‘Hello?’ he enquired tentatively, his voice low so as not to disturb the two sleeping children, neither of whom showed any sign of stirring.
‘Who th
e fuck is that?’ Len demanded to know.
For a second Joe thought about hanging up, but then realised that would be futile. Better to brazen it out.
‘Hi, Len,’ he said, as cheerily as he could manage. ‘It’s Joe Tye.’
‘What the hell are you doing at Rita’s?’ Len rasped.
‘I’m not at Rita’s.’ Joe had never met Len’s ex-wife, but he had heard enough about her from Len to feel that he was on first name terms with her. ‘I’m at home.’
‘Have I dialled the wrong bloody number? I wanted to talk to Cordelia.’ Len was now confused and Joe knew he needed to come clean if he didn’t want to risk sounding as if he had a guilty conscience.
‘No. She’s here. She turned up last night. I think she and Rita had a row. She’s still asleep. Do you want me to wake her?’
‘No,’ Len sounded disinterested in the details. ‘Get her to ring me when she wakes up. Tell her I’ve got a little job for her if she wants to earn some pocket money.’
‘Okay. I will.’ Joe hung up with a sigh of relief. He had no idea whether Len wasn’t worried that his sixteen-year-old daughter had spent the night with a man old enough to be her father, or whether he trusted Joe, or whether it simply didn’t occur to him that anything would happen.
He replaced the phone in the bag and pulled on a pair of trousers and a jumper. He could see Cordelia’s face in the shaft of light, her pink hair spread out across the pillow. There was no question she was a beautiful child.
He could also make out the top of Hugo’s head in the other sleeping bag, his hair sticking out in every direction. Joe left the room quietly. Apart from a few snuffling noises from the sleeping bag, neither of them showed any sign of waking.
Annie was in the kitchen, the room opposite Joe’s, wearing only a T-shirt, which covered nothing of her endless legs, and a pair of dark glasses to hide the fact that her mascara had spread in the night. She was eating a fried breakfast and reading Vogue. Joe had just opened his mouth to say good morning when the doorbell rang.
Panic seemed to grip Annie as she heard Angus letting someone in the front door and conducting them down towards the kitchen. The panic spread to Joe as he realised that the visitor was Fliss and she was heading for his room in search of Hugo.
He sprang out into the corridor to intercept her. He was quite capable of imagining how she would react to finding a beautiful sixteen-year-old girl in his bed with her eight-year-old son asleep on the floor.
‘Hi. You’re early,’ he said cheerily.
Fliss looked at his dishevelled state and then at her watch. ‘It’s eleven o’clock.’
‘Is it that late?’ Joe said, with what he hoped sounded like a carefree laugh. ‘Hugo’s still asleep. Come into the kitchen for a coffee while I get him sorted out.’ He heard Annie give a squeak of horror at the thought of being seen by another woman in her morning disarray.
For a moment it looked as though Fliss wasn’t going to allow herself to be deflected from finding her son but at the last moment she swerved into the kitchen, visibly startled by the sight of Annie with a final dripping forkful of fried egg halfway to her mouth as she scurried towards the bin to try to dispose of the evidence of a heavy cholesterol habit.
‘This is Annie, one of my flatmates,’ Joe said quickly. ‘She’ll make you a cup of coffee while I get Hugo up.’
Fliss gave the stained state of the kitchen a distasteful look and Joe managed to dodge out of the room as Annie emitted a half-strangled bleat of outrage. Both Cordelia and Hugo were still fast asleep, oblivious to whatever was going on in other parts of the flat. After a long game of Monopoly, borrowed from the accountant down the corridor, neither of them had got to sleep much before one o’clock – a fact which Joe hoped Hugo wouldn’t impart to his mother. Discovering Cordelia in the room had distracted Hugo from his disappointment that his father didn’t have a computer set up on which he could play his new games.
Joe had been impressed with the way in which Cordelia had adapted her act from potential seducer to Hugo’s big sister as the evening wore on. When the time came to end the game it had seemed perfectly natural that she should have the bed while the ‘men’ used the sleeping bags on the floor.
Joe realised that Fliss was unlikely to see the situation in quite the same light, but could think of no way of explaining it away to her without asking his son to lie – and that was not something he was prepared to do. He was still more than a little concerned that once Len had had time to think about the situation there might be some uncomfortable questions to answer from him as well. He was just going to have to tough it out and hope for the best.
He unzipped the sleeping bag around his son, trying to be as quiet as possible. The two bags were among the few things that he had been able to claim as his when he was collecting up his worldly possessions to separate from Fliss. The first one had travelled several times round the world with him. The second he had bought for Fliss when they first met in Thailand. She hadn’t put up any argument when he insisted on keeping them. They obviously held less sentimental value for her, a fact that had hurt him more than he would have expected.
He could hear Fliss’ voice carrying clearly through the wall from the kitchen as she patronised Annie. He lifted Hugo into a sitting position in the hope of being able to pull his clothes onto him before he woke fully. The boy’s eyes popped wide open. He beamed at his father.
‘Morning, Dad,’ he said loudly, throwing his arms around Joe’s neck and toppling him off balance so that they both ended up sprawled on the floor. Joe could feel the warmth of his son’s newly wakened body and was suddenly aware of all the mornings that he wasn’t around for in Hugo’s life. For a flashing moment Joe hated Fliss for what she had stolen from him.
‘What’re you two doing?’ Cordelia asked from the bed.
‘Don’t worry,’ Joe said, putting a finger over his son’s lips. ‘Go back to sleep. I’m just getting Hugo up for his mother. You stay there.’
‘I need the bathroom,’ Cordelia complained.
‘You’ll have to hold on a few minutes. I’ll tell you when the coast is clear.’
Hugo, infected by the air of conspiracy without fully grasping what was going on, stayed quiet as his father gathered up his stuff and shooed him out to the kitchen.
‘Good God, Hugo,’ Fliss stared in disbelief at her crumpled child as he blinked in the bright light of day and struggled into his trousers. ‘What time did you get to bed last night?’
‘He’s just had a bit of a lie-in, that’s all,’ Joe jumped in quickly, trying to pull Hugo’s fleece over his head and smooth his wayward hair down at the same time. Behind him he was aware that Cordelia was coming out of the bedroom and heading for the bathroom. Annie slapped a mug of coffee down in front of Fliss. Several drops landed on Fliss’ pale grey jumper and she leaped up as if she had been scalded.
‘Come on, Hugo,’ she said, nervously. ‘I’ve promised we’ll meet Granny for lunch.’
‘How is she?’ Joe asked, without really caring. He was fairly sure that Fliss’ mother had encouraged her daughter to leave him for the polo player. Having left Fliss’ father many years before, she had often seemed keen that her daughter should do the same, pointedly singing the praises of a life free from domestic slavery. Not that either of them had ever been over-troubled by housework. Joe had always hated going to visit his mother-in-law in the stately Onslow Gardens flat which Fliss’ father had been forced to buy her after their separation and which was so filled with priceless ornaments that Hugo had had to remain strapped to a chair whenever he had been included in the invitation.
‘She’s fine,’ Fliss said, taking over the grooming job from Joe as Hugo wriggled and protested beneath her attentions. Within three minutes they were walking down the corridor, leaving the coffee untasted on the kitchen table. Just as they passed the bathroom the door opened.
‘’Bye Cordy,’ Hugo called out cheerfully. ‘See you soon.’
‘See you, Hugs,’ s
he laughed. ‘Don’t go buying too many of those houses in Mayfair now, will you.’
‘We played Monopoly,’ Joe heard Hugo explaining to his mother as they went out. ‘I won.’
‘Did you, dear?’ Fliss replied, absent-mindedly. ‘That’s nice.’
When Joe returned to the room Cordelia was back in bed. She looked at him mischievously as he tried to find the right tone of voice in which to remonstrate with her for letting herself into his bed uninvited the previous evening. He couldn’t think how to phrase it.
‘Len phoned while you were asleep,’ he said instead. ‘He wants you to call him. He says he has a job for you.’
‘Pass the phone then.’ She indicated her bag, which had been moved onto the faded green armchair at the end of the bed. The gesture made the duvet fall away to show that she had shed the T-shirt that he had lent her as a nightie. She made no effort to cover herself. Joe tossed the bag onto the bed and sat down in the chair which Angus had bought from a house clearance deposit somewhere south of the river, and which still smelled of other people’s dust.
‘Len,’ she told the phone and it dialled automatically. ‘Hi, it’s me. Yeah…yeah…okay, I’ll be there.’
She snapped the phone shut and climbed out of bed, completely unconcerned about her naked body, apparently confident of its flawlessness.
‘Are you going?’ Joe enquired, unable to take his eyes off her.
‘Yeah. My dad wants me to meet a man about some business.’
‘Where have you got to meet him?’
‘The Metropole Hotel.’
‘I don’t know it,’ Joe confessed, intrigued to know what sort of business a sixteen-year-old girl might be conducting in a London hotel on behalf of her father.
Pretty Little Packages Page 3