No Peace for the Wicked

by Pip Granger

  I hurried on, wincing inwardly at my tactlessness. ‘Sundays were the worst of course, but Maggie and Bert have been very kind, along with Mamma Campanini. They didn’t let me sit alone on Sundays for a long, long time and wouldn’t let me now, if I didn’t insist that I am mostly all right on my own. If I wasn’t at one flat for Sunday lunch, then I was at the other. And of course, I have my sewing with Sugar, which I enjoy, and the evenings at the club. So, I suppose what I’m saying is, I manage with the help of my friends and by keeping busy.’

  I asked the obvious question, working on the theory that he probably wanted me to. ‘How are you managing? You know, since Pat passed on?’

  He sighed and looked down. ‘I miss her,’ he said simply. ‘I miss her every day. But, God forgive me …’

  He couldn’t go on, so I finished the sentence for him. ‘You feel released. And you’re grateful that she is too.’

  There was a long silence from the other side of the table and then he whispered, ‘How did you know?’ He laughed a bitter little laugh. ‘I’m an idiot. You know because you felt it too.’

  ‘Yes,’ was all I could say for a while. ‘I felt terrible about feeling that way. I felt so guilty, I thought I’d never learn to live with it, but it was Madame Zelda who put me straight.’ I took a deep breath. ‘I’ll pass on her pearls of wisdom if you like; they helped me.’

  I waited until I saw him nod. ‘I broke down one day and told her all about it. About how, just before the end, I’d stood over my child with a pillow, willing myself to smother her to put her out of her misery. She was so ill and every moment had become a struggle for her. But I couldn’t do it, and I don’t know what made me feel worse: wanting to do it, or not being able to. Then, when Jenny went – I mean the instant she stopped breathing, I felt a rush of relief. That was my first feeling – relief …’

  My voice cracked and a lump the size of Liechtenstein formed in my throat. I couldn’t speak any more for a while. A warm hand found mine and squeezed very gently. We sat like that for quite a time before I could pull myself together.

  ‘But Madame Zelda was lovely. All matter of fact, the way she is. She told me it was the most natural feeling in the world, to want a loved one’s suffering to come to an end. What’s more, she said it was also natural to be relieved for myself, that I was to be free of the sick-room. I can hear her now. “It’s only one of your feelings, petal, just one among many. It’s the life force. It’s selfish by nature and there ain’t nothing you can do about it because it’s elemental to all living things. Nothing to do with your will or your brains, any more than breathing is.”

  ‘What she meant was, I had to go on living and the relief was part of that. The worst thing was the waiting for the inevitable. You must know that: you did it for years. There’s always part of you, once you accept that they’re going to leave you, that wants them to just jolly well hurry up about it, so you can get on with the inevitable pain of grieving.

  ‘Of course, another part wants to hang on to them until the last possible second. There’s no real logic to it. You swing from one to the other all the time. But I think that’s what Zelda meant about being allowed to be relieved and the life force and all of that. It’s natural to feel that way.’

  T.C. didn’t say anything; he simply stared at a potted palm in the cafe window. His warm hand squeezed mine again and he coughed once. At last he squared his shoulders, turned to me and smiled sadly.

  ‘Thanks for that,’ he said. ‘What do you fancy doing now?’

  We wandered back across the park and wound up having lunch at a Lyons Corner House. After much wrangling, he allowed me to pay for my own omelette at least. Nothing I could say or do would persuade him that I could stand him his liver and bacon, though.

  ‘I may be hard up, but I’m not that hard up. Anyway, I think I may have a commission.’ He grinned enigmatically.

  ‘What sort of commission?’ I was interested, I hadn’t realized you could commission ex-coppers.

  ‘Sugar wants me to look into some missing stock, and he thinks the till’s been a bit light on occasions, too,’ T.C. told me quietly. ‘He wants me to keep an eye on Malcolm. I know he’s mentioned his suspicions to you, so I’m not talking out of turn.’

  I remembered their private talk on that Friday when I began to help out at the bar. Sugar was convinced that the poet was ‘liberating’ the odd bottle of booze from the stock cupboard and occasional sums of money from the till. He’d tried to tell Bandy about it and had had a large soup tureen thrown at his head for his trouble. Relations were certainly strained in the flat above mine.

  ‘He says he’ll pay me the going rate, whatever that is. I said it didn’t matter, but he said that it did, that professionals ought to get proper fees and that he’d look into it. Do you reckon he just feels sorry for me?’ T.C.’s brow creased in concern. ‘I mean, I know life’s taken a downturn and all that, but I’m not up for being a charity case – not yet.’

  I hastened to reassure him. ‘Oh no, it’s not that. He needs proof. He says the dinner service can’t afford to lose the other tureen.’

  ‘And there’s something else,’ T.C. continued. ‘Apparently Sugar recommended me to a rather grand young lady, who he met just a couple of nights ago, through a friend. She wants me to find out if her old man’s playing away.’ He paused. ‘I’m not sure I want to get into that game, meddling in people’s private lives. Seems mucky to me.’

  He smiled sadly at me. ‘And I’m hardly in the position to throw mud about, am I? After all, I did father an illegitimate child while married to another woman. It seems a bit too much like the pot calling the kettle a kitchen utensil to me.’

  ‘I can see your point,’ I answered quietly, not wanting the whole of Joe Lyons to know every little detail of T.C.’s private business. I’d noticed the couple on the table nearby leaning in our direction, to hear us better. ‘But on the other hand, investigating is your area of expertise, you are broke and you do need to find something to do with your time. Time hangs really heavily when you’re lonely, as you very well know.’

  T.C.’s eyes crinkled again, making my heart give a peculiar little lurch, and he held his hands up in surrender. ‘You’re right, I know you’re right.’ He laughed.

  I smiled back. ‘And anyway, just because you may look into it for the lady, it doesn’t mean you’re setting yourself up as some kind of judge and jury. You’d simply be reporting the facts to her, that’s all.’

  ‘You’ve talked me into it. I promise I’ll meet this lady and find out what exactly she wants me to do.’

  We raided the market on the way home, laying in provisions for tea and for Sunday. It seemed natural to invite T.C. to tea at my place and he accepted gratefully. ‘It’s been a nice day,’ he said. ‘Thanks. I’ll buy the cakes at Pierre’s. How about that?’

  Luckily, my tiny flat was tidy and it didn’t let me down. The living room warmed up in a jiffy and I laid the small table in front of the fire. I had a pretty linen tablecloth, embroidered by Sugar with a twining pattern of nasturtiums, and my grandmother’s good plates. I’d found a Susie Cooper teapot in a tiny shop hidden down an alleyway still lit with gas lamps and the cups came from a shop at Seven Dials. I took them out of the sideboard and placed them beside the tea plates on the table, then went to the kitchen to fill the pot, returned and placed it on a brass trivet in front of the fire.

  I was proud of my treasures and the way they looked in the flickering light of the gas fire and the small lamp on the bookcase. It was cosy, with just a touch of elegance, I thought. We had potted shrimps on toast, then toasted crumpets on a fork in front of the blue, yellow and orange flames given off by the small gas fire and ate them with some of my Aunt Dora’s raspberry jam. To finish off, we each ate a cream horn from Pierre’s.

  We didn’t talk much, just listened to some music on the wireless and to the rain battering against the window. The sunny day had given way to a dreary, wet and windy evening. The strains of the
Moonlight Sonata faded into silence and T.C. sighed gently and stood up. To my utter astonishment he began to collect up our plates and cups. What on earth was he doing?

  ‘I’ll just give these a rinse,’ he said.

  ‘It’s all right, I’ll do them.’ I headed towards the kitchen at a clip.

  ‘How about if you wash and I wipe, then?’ T.C. suggested, and so it was settled.

  My kitchen’s tiny – minute. Passing one another was out of the question, so I was rooted to the sink, which was near the small yellow table that overlooked the street, while T.C. stood in the narrow space between me and the door. I could smell the comforting scent of his Harris tweed jacket, he stood so close. A Hebridean woman once told me that the distinctive Harris tweed smell came from lanolin in the sheep’s wool and the memory of the peat fires that heated the crofters’ weaving sheds.

  Whatever it was, it made me want to snuggle into it for warmth and safety, and I blushed deeply at the thought of it. I stared hard at the soapy water, willing my flaming cheeks to return to normal. T.C. dried each item carefully and stacked them in the hatch between the kitchen and the living room. He’d noticed that my china lived in the sideboard, but then he was a policeman; he was trained to notice things. I finished the washing, and gave the sink and draining board a brisk wipe around with a cloth. Satisfied, I turned away from the sink. T.C. finished the last saucer, looked up from the task and smiled.

  ‘Here,’ he said. ‘Here, you’ve got a blob of cream on your chin.’

  He moved towards me and tipped my face up to the light to wipe at my chin with a corner of the tea cloth. For a moment, we stared into each other’s eyes. His seemed dark blue-grey, like the sea on days when the weather can’t make up its mind between sunshine and showers. We stood close and still for what seemed an age. Then he tipped my face a little further and moved a shade closer. I could smell Aunt Dora’s raspberry jam on his breath. I could hear ragged breathing – his or mine, I wasn’t sure – and I could feel my heart hammering.

  I went rigid, as if set in stone. My skin became clammy and my breathing shallow with blind panic. I remembered Sid, sneering at me as he left for the last time. ‘You’re such an ugly cow. But it hardly matters, does it? I mean, who looks at the mantelpiece when he’s poking the fire? But you’ve got no fire neither. Shagging you is like trying to shag a plank.’

  T.C. saw the panic in my eyes and let me go immediately. His voice was husky. ‘I’m so sorry. I … er … didn’t mean to take advantage. I think it’s time I went.’ He hurried into the living room and gathered up his coat, hat, scarf. Before I knew it, he’d thanked me for a lovely day and gone. And I was left with the lingering memory of distant peat fires and raspberry jam.

  10

  I slept very badly that night, partly because I kept kicking myself for my frigid response to T.C. I wished like mad that I had done things differently. Sadly, wishes at three o’clock in the morning change nothing, and the next day I was still plagued by the memory of his hurt, bewildered embarrassment and hasty departure.

  The other reason for my wakefulness was yet another furious argument raging in the flat above. The occasional crash of china hitting the walls testified that Bandy was involved and the sound of two masculine voices and another female one led me to believe that the entire household had joined in. There was one point when I felt like putting on my dressing gown, marching up the stairs and having a go myself, but I thought better of it.

  It was a relief to see the first chilly fingers of dawn creeping over the chimney pots. As it was Sunday, I was still in bed, with a cup of tea and the latest Ellery Queen. I had found that reading was a great antidote to anxiety and loneliness, especially when it was too early in the morning to seek out human company or to make a noise doing the housework.

  I heard a slight scratching at my front door. At first I thought it was a mouse in the wainscoting and tried hard to ignore it, but soon the scratching turned into a tentative knocking. I got up with a sigh, put on my velvet dressing gown and opened the front door to find Peace looking a little desperate on my doormat.

  ‘Come in, Peace. You needn’t explain, I heard the fighting last night. Have you had breakfast?’

  A small shake of her head sent me to the kitchen. I lit the oven for warmth and put the kettle on. ‘Sit at the table and I’ll rustle us up something to eat.’ I looked in my cupboard. ‘Tea and toast do you, will it?’

  Another small nod accompanied by a whispered, ‘If it is no trouble, Auntie Liz.’

  It wasn’t long before I was sitting opposite her and tucking into my breakfast with enthusiasm. It was nice to have another person across the table from me first thing in the morning. It had been a long, long while. I smiled encouragingly at my guest. ‘So, what was it all about this time?’

  I thought Peace wasn’t going to answer at first, but she finally raised her eyes from the table and looked at me sadly. ‘Everything. It is about everything. Aunt is angry with me because I will not agree to go back to school. Aunt is angry with Mr Sugar because he does not like Mr Malcolm and because he keeps disappearing when she needs him to help her. And Aunt is angry with Mr Malcolm because we are overcrowded and his flat is not clean enough for her to want to stay there instead. Aunt is angry about everything and with everybody.’

  I could imagine that squeezing four people into a flat no bigger than my own would be troublesome for someone whose life was as busy and as complicated as Bandy’s life was. I munched my toast in silence for a while, then a thought struck me. ‘What will you do about your education if you don’t go back to school? I understand that you’re a bright girl. It would be a pity not to make full use of a good education.’

  ‘I suggested that I attend a day school, but Aunt says that still leaves the problem of my living quarters.’ Peace looked so forlorn that my heart ached for her. It was hard to reconcile the little scrap before me with the tigress that had taken on her formidable aunt a few nights previously and had held her ground to an honourable draw. Bandy had not carried out her threat to bundle Peace on to the first train back to school, or any other train for that matter.

  I made another pot of tea and we drank it quietly, each deep in our own thoughts. The beginning of an idea was stirring, and I wanted to think through all the possibilities before I put it to Peace. It could well solve several problems at once. I made up my mind.

  ‘Do you think it would help if you came to stay in my spare room? It’s not that big, mind, but you could make it comfortable.’

  Peace’s face began to glow with tentative hope. ‘I would be very good. I would be no trouble. I would help very much with the cooking and cleaning,’ she assured me earnestly. ‘Do you think Aunt would allow it?’

  ‘I have no idea,’ I told her honestly. ‘We’ll just have to ask her and find out.’

  In the end, I left Peace to wash up our breakfast things and climbed the stairs alone, a little worried about the reception I might receive.

  Bandy and Malcolm were up and eating croissants at the kitchen table. A coffee pot stood between them, along with a muddle of used plates, cups, saucers, cutlery and a brimming ashtray. It was easy to see that Sugar wasn’t around much. He would never have tolerated such squalor. Sugar was the housekeeper when he and Bandy lived alone, but he’d obviously gone on strike once Malcolm had moved in. I understood Bandy’s ineptitude in the housewifery department: she’d been brought up with servants in Hong Kong and an army of skivvies had cleaned at her boarding-school.

  Most men, in my meagre experience, expected household chores to be done by women: mothers, sisters, wives or a ‘daily’ who came in and ‘did’ for bachelors. Malcolm’s domestic habits came as no surprise at all to me. It was Sugar and, indeed, Bobby Bristowe who were the shockers, because they seemed to enjoy cleaning, and what’s more they were good at it.

  ‘Take a pew,’ suggested Bandy through a haze of cigarette smoke. ‘Care for a coffee? It’s fairly fresh.’

  I took a deep breath.
‘No thanks, I can’t stop for long. I’ve got Peace downstairs and I’ve had an idea that might help ease the overcrowding for you …’

  I went on to outline my plan. Bandy listened intently as Malcolm yawned and scratched a bit. I could see why Sugar loathed him so; there was something repulsive about the man. He was just beginning to run to seed for one thing. His skin wasn’t a good colour and he was getting a tiny bit flabby around the middle. And there was something about the fleshy, red lips that spoke, somehow, of unwholesome appetites. I shook myself, and waited for Bandy’s reply.

  ‘It’s very kind of you, Elizabeth, and it would certainly help in the short term, but I am hoping to persuade her to return to school eventually. Still, it would certainly help to overcome our immediate problem. Perhaps if Sugar gets his room back, he’ll spend more time at home.’ There was a long pause while she took a deep draw on her cigarette, then seemed to come to a decision. ‘Thank you, Elizabeth, I think it would help enormously. Now about the rent …’

  We argued a little about the idea of rent for such a tiny room, but in the end we settled on a contribution towards gas, electricity and food. Bandy stuck her hand out and shook mine. ‘It’s a deal,’ she said firmly, and we were both happy. I had company again, Bandy had more room and Sugar would get his own room back. Of course, to make his life complete, he’d have to get rid of Malcolm, but it was a small step in the right direction.

  Peace was relieved and happy when I told her the news, and set about moving her things down the stairs immediately. Round about lunchtime, Sugar appeared. We celebrated the new arrangement with cauliflower cheese because that was all that I had in my larder. Then we spent a happy afternoon sewing and gossiping while Peace arranged and rearranged her room until she was satisfied.