by Nina Bawden
“You think he was up to something wrong?” I said.
The pain in my head was very sharp.
She shrugged her huge shoulders. She seemed as boneless as a jelly fish. The kettle came to the boil and she made the tea.
“Reelly, I don’t know.” She turned on me with curiosity. “What d’you want to know for?”
I told her a little of the truth. I said I was looking for a girl. I said that I thought she had known Jimmie Callaghan. I hinted, gently, that she might also have known Jasmine Castle, the girl they had found dead in the canal.
Her eyes shone with a peculiarly repulsive excitement. She knew all about Jasmine Castle. The neighbourhood had talked of nothing else. She added a few details that I had not heard and had no wish to hear.
“But it wasn’t Jimmie’s girl,” she said. “I saw her photo in the papers, so I know.”
“What was Jimmie’s girl like?” I asked. “What was her name?”
She shook her head. She didn’t know the name, but she had seen the girl.
“She was a little thing,” she said. “Ever so pretty, though she ’adn’t much colour to’er, if you know what I mean. Nicely spoken she was, quite the lady. She gave me a box of chocolates once. She was too good for that Jimmie. Big black eyes she had like grapes. It was because of her that I gave’im notice.”
After a little prompting she told me the story. She had no liking for Jimmie.
She was vague about the date but it seemed as if it had all happened about a fortnight before Rose had come to London on that fatal final visit. The landlady had been to the pictures and she had come home when the cinema closed, at about eleven o‘clock. She would ordinarily have gone straight down to her basement but there had been a leak in the cistern of the first floor lavatory and the plumber had promised to come in that evening and put it right. So she panted up the stairs to see if he had done so. After she had come out of the lavatory she had heard Jimmie shouting at his girl on the floor above. She had been annoyed because of the other tenants but she would have done nothing about it beyond speaking to Jimmie in the morning if she had not heard the girl scream.
It was a high-pitched scream, broken off in the middle with frightening suddenness. The woman had heaved herself up the next flight of stairs and gone into the room and closed the door behind her.
They were standing by the window. Jimmie had his hands round the girl’s throat and he was shaking her backwards and forwards. He was saying, over and over again in a kind of angry mutter, “You won’t get out of it this way. I’ll see you in hell first.”
It was an unexpected and terrifying scene; it was to the woman’s credit that she acted as she did. She did not call for help; she went to the window and dragged the boy away. It was not easy; his fingers were crooked round the girl’s throat as though he could not let her go.
When they were separated at last he stared at his landlady as though he did not really see her. His eyes were bloodshot and half-closed. He was very pale and almost quite drunk. He was swaying a little as though he could not stand upright.
The girl had fallen back against the window sill. She was cringing a little and there were dark marks on her neck but she seemed, after a moment, to be completely calm and self-possessed. She said with an odd, bright smile, as if nothing out of the way had happened:
“I really am so sorry to trouble you. It wasn’t anything. Jimmie got upset at something I told him. He didn’t mean to hurt me.”
Rose—I was quite sure it was Rose—was trying hard to put a good face on it, to make it seem like an ordinary lovers’quarrel. It was gallant and useless and pathetic. She thought, I suppose, that it wasn’t quite nice to be found with a young man who was trying to kill her; I thought of her defending her sad little notions of respectability and it wrung my heart.
Jimmie said, “If you squeal, you bitch, I’ll get you if I swing for it.”
The woman pushed in front of them with a vague idea of protecting Rose. She spoke of the girl all the time with what seemed, in her, unusual gentleness. She had said to Rose, “I think you’d best go, lovey. And if you ask me I shouldn’t come back.“
Rose said, “Where can I go?”
It was a cry of despair. She had gone very white. And then her control went. She started to shake all over and she clutched with both hands at the window sill as if to prevent herself from falling.
She said, “You mustn’t blame him too much. You mustn’t tell anyone. It’s all my fault. I gave him a shock.” A bright blush spread over her face and throat. “It was something I had to tell him.”
The landlady said, “Whatever you done there’s no call for him to go murdering you. If you ask me, it’s a case for the police.”
She said piteously, “Oh, no. Not the police. You see it really was awful what I had to tell him. I’m going to have a baby. Someone else’s baby.”
The boy made a move towards her. He said, “She’s a lying little sow.” His voice was both bitter and thoroughly surprised as though he had not properly understood before. He put his hands to his head and sat down.
The girl looked at him, her eyes enormous in her small face and with a fixed, frightened smile.
She said, “It’s true, isn’t it, Jimmie? You haven’t forgotten what I told you, have you?”
There was a kind of unhappy bewilderment on the boy’s face. He said, “I’ll get you for this. See if I don’t.”
There was no real menace in his voice. He got up from his chair looking as if he were going to cry. He moved uncertainly towards Rose, spat a filthy word at her and left the room.
The woman took Rose down to her basement room. She gave her a cup of tea and witch hazel for her throat. When Rose had drunk the tea she had cried a little.
The woman said, “I felt reel sorry for her, I can tell you. Such a pretty, soft little thing she was. And it was such a sad story, just like the pictures. You see, there was this other man—he was a lot older than she was and ever so handsome and he was in love with her. They couldn’t get married because he was married already. But she was going to have his baby, see? And when she told him about it’e wouldn’t’ave any more to do with her. She didn’t know what to do—she was scared to tell her mother. Then she’d met this Jimmie and ’e was ever so much in love with’er too. Only she couldn’t forget the other man, see? And she couldn’t marry Jimmie, not without telling him about the baby. Poor, silly young thing.”
Her hard little eyes had surprising and quite genuine tears in them.
I said, “Have you any idea where Jimmie Callaghan has gone?”
“Back to’is mum, I reckon. She lives out Staines way.”
“Can you find the address?” I asked.
“I’spect I can. I’ve got it somewheres. ’E gave it to me once when he went to stay with’is mum for a couple of weeks. I’ll say that for’im—he’s fond of his mum. Thinks the world of’er.”
She rummaged in a blue and white willow pattern mug that stood on a shelf above the stove, and produced a torn envelope with an address written on it in a round, uneducated hand. I asked her if I could take it and put it in my wallet.
As I went out, she said, “I should’ave a stitch put in that cut, if I were you.”
I went to a chemist’s shop in the Kilburn High Road. The man washed my head with spirit and said that it would be all right. He pushed the edges of the cut together with a strip of plaster and the place seemed to take on a new lease of pain and throbbed and smarted intolerably. The whole side of my face was stiff and sore.
I sat in the car and wondered whether I ought to go to the police. I didn’t want to. They thought her dead; I felt a smouldering resentment against them because they thought her dead.
It was seven o’clock. I looked at the map and decided that it would take me about an hour to get to the address near Staines. I turned the car and drove back towards the canal, over a bridge and into Queensway and the Bays-water Road. I drove fast and I tried not to think.
There was very littl
e traffic on the road once I had got out of Hammersmith and I made better time than I had expected. I stopped at a pub on the way and had a drink and a sandwich.
The house was off the road; it stood alone at the side of some gravel pits that had been abandoned and filled with water. There were scrubby little islands standing up in the water so that the place looked rather like a desolate, natural lake. There was a rubbish shoot just off the road, strewn with tin cans and ancient tyres and heaps of what looked like coffee grounds; it gave off a pungent, sickly smell.
The house was a rickety impermanent affair consisting of a large Nissen hut with a few wooden outbuildings that had been joined on to it haphazardly. It was surrounded by a dirt yard where a few sick-looking chickens scratched at the ground.
The door of the hut was open and I could hear a wireless playing and a child screaming. I went up to the doorway and looked in. The interior was dark after the bright sun. There were two children playing on the threshold; they stopped their game and stared at me, their fingers in their mouths.
One of them shouted, “Mum,” and after a minute or so a woman appeared from the back of the hut with a baby clinging on her hip.
She was a tall woman with a big, slack body. She had a round, unlined face and she gave me a curiously sweet, supine smile. I thought that she must have been a pretty girl.
I said, “Are you Mrs. Callaghan?” and she nodded and smiled and said in a gentle Irish voice, “That’s my name. If it’s my Bridget you’ve come about, she’s got the worms. The doctor said she wasn’t to go to school with the worms.”
I said, “I haven’t come from the school, Mrs. Callaghan. I want to see your son, Jimmie. Is he here?”
Instantly the smile vanished, her whole face tightened up and she said, “What d’you want Jimmie for?”
I said, “I just wanted to ask him some questions. That’s all.”
She came outside the hut, sweeping the children behind her and closed the door on them. Then she said, “He’s not here. What was it you wanted to know?”
She was a bad liar. I said nothing and she went on nervously, “He’s a good boy, my Jimmie. There’s not many boys who are good to their mums. He’s a real good’un.”
She was looking uneasily round her, particularly in the direction of the river which lay some way off across the flat fields, shining like a white, satin ribbon.
I said gently, “I’m not from the police, Mrs. Callaghan.”
She said wildly, “Why should I think you was the police? My boy’s done nothing. He’s a good boy.”
She came closer to me. She smelt sour with sweat. The baby she held on her hip was very thin and small; his pale, white head was too big for his midget limbs and there were red sores round his mouth and under his nose.
She said, “If you’re that probation officer he was talking about, he’s going straight now. Got a good job and doing nicely. He bought me the television last month.”
I said, “I’m not a probation officer. I just wanted to see your son. Are you sure you haven’t seen him to-day?”
She shook her head; the baby on her hip let out a dreary wail and she bounced it up and down automatically and it went on wailing.
I walked back down the lane to the road and drove the car about a quarter of a mile back towards the town. I went to the lane again and scrambled through the hedge that divided it from the gravel pits. I waited for perhaps half-an-hour.
When the little boy came out of the Nissen hut he wriggled through the hedge some way away from me and ran towards the water. There was an old and leaky punt tied up at the bank. He jumped into it and began to untie the frayed rope. He was so intent on his task that he did not notice me until I spoke to him. Then he looked up, startled but not, apparently, afraid.
He grinned in a friendly way and said, “’Ullo, mister.”
He was a very thin little boy, his legs were crooked and shaky as pea-sticks but his eyes were sharp and blue.
I said, “Like to earn half-a-crown?”
He said warily, “What for, mister?” and he glanced towards the hut. We could not be seen from the yard, only the tin roof of the Nissen was visible.
I squatted on my haunches so that my face was on the boy’s level. I said, “I want to talk to your brother Jimmie. Is he here?”
The child said, “Are you a flattie?”
“No,” I said. “I just want to ask him something.”
“Give us the dough, brother,” the boy said in a very creditable imitation of an American accent.
I took half-a-crown out of my pocket and held it out to him. He made no move to take it so I flipped the coin into the flat bottom of the boat and he picked it up and put it in his pocket. He sniffed and rubbed his sleeve across his nose.
He said, “’E was’ere just afore you come. You ain’t going to put’im in the nick, are you?”
“The nick? No, I shouldn’t think so.”
The boy pointed. “Down the river. In the Dinky Sue.“ Then he giggled. “Cor, I shan’t’alf cop it if mum finds out.” He didn’t appear to be especially alarmed.
He went back to untying the rope. When he had finished he took a stick out of the bottom of the punt and began to pole himself out into the middle of the water.
Before he went I asked him, “Where is your father? Is he at home?”
At once the child looked both furtive and scared. “No, ’ e ain’t,” he said. He pushed the boat away from the shore. It was something of a triumph for him to move the big punt at all, he was so very small, but he got it across to one of the islands where there was a dump of empty tins and as I went back to the road he was scrambling over the dump, dragging a dark sack behind him.
Chapter Eleven
As I walked to the river the day was dying in a splash of scarlet; the tall poplars were dark and still at the water’s edge. Along one side of the river there was a sandy tow-path, on the other the fields ended in an expanse of blue-green rushes. From where I stood, on the bridge, I could see a few small boats tied up at their mooring places on the tow-path side. Except for a long converted landing craft they were all dinghies or small punts.
It was not a pretty part of the river; the fields were flat and there were no houses, probably because the land lay low and flooded in the winter. There was nobody about. I went down off the bridge and on to the tow-path and walked in the direction of the landing craft. It was big and clumsy and painted a dirty grey. The owners had built a permanent gangway from the path; the sound of the wireless came out through the open window and the lights were on. There were people inside, a man and a woman and a couple of children. They were moving about the boat and talking and laughing. Except for the small boats there was nothing else in sight.
I went back to the bridge and crossed the road to the other side. Here there were no boats that could be seen from the bridge but about a hundred yards away the river bent sharply away from the road and the banks were invisible. Looking across the fields I could see the little islands in the gravel pit and the top of the Callaghans’ Nissen hut. There was a track through the field and I walked along it, by the side of the river, until it met a clump of bushes and turned inland.
Then I saw the boat. She lay on the opposite bank, snugly hidden among the rushes. She was a small grey craft with a humped cabin, not more than fifteen feet from stem to stern. She looked a very home-made affair. The light was going fast but I could just make out the name on the bows. It was the Dinky Sue.
There was no immediately obvious way of getting to her. I looked for a dinghy and then I saw that it was tied up to the boat, rising and falling on the water. I could hear the faint creak of the rope.
I went back to the bridge and crossed to the other side, pushing my way through a thin thorn, hedge that fenced the field from the road. Even now, in summer, next to the river the ground was soggy underfoot. I was surprised to find how near I was to the gravel pit; I could see the scrubby islands although the Nissen hut was hidden behind the trees.
I looked behind me and saw a caravan site further away from the road between the pits and the river. I could not see very well but I thought there were four or five caravans, pitched close together. There was a light shining in one of them; I could see a man moving about outside and I heard, faintly, a child crying.
It took away a little from the crushing sense of loneliness that had descended upon me.
I went along the path through the reeds and came upon the boat and the water’s edge. The craft was moored to a gravel beach that was little more than a shallow bite out of the river bank.
Close to, the boat was squat and clumsy and not very sound. It listed sideways a little as though it was aground on the gravel. There were tiny windows in the side of the cabin; they were tightly covered by flowered curtains.
I waded up to my knees in water that was surprisingly cold. I stepped over the gunwale and shook the handle of the cabin door. It was locked.
I shouted, “Hullo, there,” and my voice sounded hollow and strange in the silence of the evening.
If Callaghan had been there he was not there now. I waited for a moment and then I let myself down into the water and stepped back on to the little beach. I stooped down to wring the water out of my trousers wishing, regretfully, that I had not been wearing my best light suit.
As I straightened up I saw Jimmie Callaghan standing above me on the bank.
He said, “That’s my boat. What d’you want?”
He looked out of place by the silent river, a little London spiv in bright yellow shoes. The soft dusk made his face look ridiculously young and, in a curious way, almost vulnerable.
He said, “What have you come here for?”
I said, “I might also ask what you hit me for. I haven’t come about that. I wanted to ask you some questions.”
The boy peered at me. In the quiet and the uncertain light it all seemed oddly unreal.