The Odd Flamingo

by Nina Bawden

  I thought, once or twice, that she was on the point of waking. She rolled her head restlessly on the pillows and it slipped even further sideways, coming up with a sharp jerk that I thought must wake her. But each time this happened she sighed and went on sleeping.

  Then she cried in her sleep, softly and with a sharp note of alarm, so that when she opened her eyes I was not surprised to see them quite senseless with terror, staring and very bright.

  She saw me at the end of the bed and for a moment she watched me without comprehension. I was afraid she would cry out; I went close to her and bent over the bed.

  I said, “It’s all right, Rose. You’re all right now.”

  The little room was not completely separated from the rest of the ward; the partitions did not go all the way up to the ceiling, so that I could hear the other patients moving and muttering in their beds. If we talked too loudly we would be heard and one of the nurses would come.

  She said, “What do you want? It’s night-time.”

  I said, “It’s all right. I want to ask you something. Did you have a bad dream? Has something frightened you?”

  She said nothing, her black eyes were fixed on my face.

  I said gently, “I won’t hurt you, Rose. What are you afraid of? No one can hurt you here.”

  The sweat ran in glistening threads down her face. Her hands groped separately across the counterpane and clasped together until the knuckles went white.

  I searched in my mind for the tiny thing that had perplexed me. “Rose, who was the poor old man? What happened to him?”

  She made a low, shapeless sound like a hurt animal and cowered back into the pillows.

  I said, “What happened to Jasmine? Do you know?”

  She moved her head from side to side on the pillows. She made no further sound.

  I said, “Is it anything to do with Piers Stone? You both knew him, didn’t you? Why did Jasmine have your handbag?”

  She said, “She took it when she ran away. They were the same, hers and mine.”

  I said, “Why did she run away?”

  She said desperately, “Go away. I don’t know. I don’t know.”

  I said, “Rose, if you were afraid of something that might happen to you in London, why did you go back? You didn’t have to, did you?”

  She said, “Jasmine made me. I had to. They’ll get me if I tell.” There was a sudden gleam in her eyes and she said more coherently, “I’m ill. I don’t know what I’m saying.”

  She was speaking more loudly and I glanced over my shoulder. I could hear someone coming down the ward with the flat, clumping steps of a woman in low-heeled shoes.

  I said, “Rose, it’s important. You must tell me what happened. I won’t let them hurt you. Can’t you trust me?”

  I longed for her to trust me, for her to let me enclose her with protection and love. But she began to cry weakly, putting her arm across her eyes. It was a young, thin arm, the skin stretched tautly from the elbow to the arm pit and the bones stood out sharply.

  I said, “Rose, dear Rose, don’t cry. Tell me about the bad dream. About the poor old man.”

  She screamed at the top of her lungs. The partition door jerked open and a nurse ran to the head of the bed. She was a probationer, even younger than Rose, and her round face gleamed with health and honest anger.

  She wrapped protective arms round Rose. She said, “Sister says you must go.” And she turned to Rose and held the dark head to her apron front.

  She said, in a soft croon, “There, there. It’s all right. You’re all right now.”

  Across the bent, black head she looked indignantly at me and I felt both shame and a desire to vindicate myself before her clear-eyed anger.

  I said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t want to upset her. But it was important.”

  The girl blushed brightly as though it were a great effort not to say a great many things that she would have liked to say. In the silence her eyes said them for her. I felt that I had had the worst of it.

  I left the little room and closed the door gently behind me. I could hear the nurse’s voice muffled through the door, talking in a gentle sing-song. The night sister was in her office as I went past and she must have heard me but she did not look up.

  When I went out into the night it was dark and still; the starless sky pressed heavily down over London.

  I think it was chance that took me to the Sandown Road; I did not, in fact, realise where I was until I was near the end of the road and saw the wooden fence that bordered the canal and the black sky above. The street was busier than most streets at this time; it wasn’t until I saw the women standing singly in the shadows of the tall houses that I realised why.

  And then I heard a woman scream. The scream came from high up in one of the old houses. I stopped the car and switched off the ignition. The screaming went on in a shrill, regular fashion like a steam engine. I got half out of the car and stood with one foot on the running board. At that point the screaming stopped abruptly.

  One of the women moved out of the shadows and up to the car.

  I said, uneasily, “Oughtn’t we to do something? Is there anything wrong, do you think?”

  The woman chuckled. “Lor bless you, no,” she said. “That’d be trespass. You don’t go interferin’round here, you know. You wouldn’t’alf cop it if you did.”

  She paused a moment and added a professional enquiry. I said that I was in a hurry just now.

  She chuckled again in a nice way and said, “No offence taken, I’m sure.” She seemed to be in an excellent temper.

  I got back into the car and drove away. No one seemed to have taken any notice of the screaming; I wondered, abstractedly, whether it was always the same in that kind of street.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Jennings said, “He was arrested early this morning. In London. He will be charged with the murder.”

  His face was scarred like a nut. The room was full of sunlight like yellow water; it shone on Jennings, small and dusty behind his big official desk.

  I had known all along that it was inevitable; knowledge did not lessen the shock, the physical numbing of despair.

  I said, “How did you find him?”

  “He went to his brother’s flat. His brother told us he was there.”

  I said, “Piers?” and Jennings nodded. I stared at him and he blushed slowly as if he was embarrassed on my behalf, his skin turning a brownish red.

  I banged my pipe out on the sill of the opened window. Outside there was a flurried sky and the first leaves were falling gustily from the tall plane trees.

  Then I told him about Piers and The Odd Flamingo and the drugs. He listened to me, his face as blank as a piece of clean paper.

  He said, “Yes, we know. We’ve known about it for some time. We were waiting for more information.”

  “You don’t think it had anything to do with the murder?”

  He said, “Why should it? As far as we know, the girl knew nothing. Wherever you look in that sort of society you find some kind of dirty business. It doesn’t follow that it has any relevance.”

  He shrugged his shoulders in weary acceptance of expected evil; his eyes looked sad as if he were sorry for me.

  I asked him about the old man called Menhennet and I told him about Rose’s nightmare.

  He nodded. “We know about that, too,” he said. He sounded tired and omniscient. “He was killed. Robbery with violence. We didn’t get anyone for it. It was small fry; it had that kind of mark on it. A bungled business.”

  I said, “How did he die?”

  “He was old. They gagged him and tied him up and he died, in the end, of shock. He shouldn’t have been at home at that time of the day—he had some kind of a job at the council offices. So it is unlikely that his murder was intended. That morning he hadn’t been well and he’d stayed at home. He was something of a miser and he’d talked about it. He kept about thirty pounds in a jar on the mantelpiece and it was gone. He lived with a niece
; she said he didn’t trust the post office.”

  I said, “Why should Rose be so frightened about it?”

  I thought that he looked wary suddenly. He played with his paper knife without looking at me and then he said, “It was a frightening way to die, wasn’t it?” His voice trailed off into silence; he dug at the blotting paper before him with the blunt point of the knife.

  I saw Humphrey at the police station, briefly, and with a policeman in attendance. The days he had been on the run had completed his disintegration; he was, now, an exhausted, shambling man with a look in his eyes that was a little mad. Even his anger added nothing to his stature. It was natural that he should be obsessed with the sense of injustice done to him, but somehow he turned a show of innocence and indignation into petulance and whining. I felt stifled all the time I was with him and I was glad to come away. I was ashamed because I felt like that. It was a kind of betrayal.

  The Ealing street was comfortable and middle-class with detached, double-fronted houses that had no architectural merit but looked solid and permanent and sound. The years and the inclination of the inhabitants had grown high hedges and thick shrubberies around each house, so that when I opened the gate and walked into the gravelled drive I knew that I could not be seen from the neighbouring windows through the screen of laurels and damp yews.

  There was a board displayed on the front porch that said the house was for sale and gave the address of the local estate agents.

  The woman who opened the door was perhaps in her late forties. She was stout and neat and indeterminate in feature so that afterwards I was unable to remember what she looked like. She was drab and uniformly grey.

  She said, without interest, “Have you come about the house?” and I was glad that she had given me such an easy and obvious excuse.

  I nodded, adding, in case there should be trouble later, that I had not been to the agents but that someone had told me about the house and that, as I was passing, I had hoped that someone might be in.

  She said ungraciously, “Well, you’d better come in as you’re here.”

  I went into the hall. She showed me over the house without, apparently, feeling any curiosity about me or indeed, any particular interest in the house itself. It was a dull house with a great deal of dull furniture in it; it was as insignificant as the woman herself so that by the time we had looked into every room and into every cupboard I felt a kind of despair at the thought that people should live in it.

  We went into the drawing-room. It was comfortable and dreary and little used. The chairs and the carpet were fairly new and looked expensive.

  She said, “Of course, I wouldn’t be selling, only I’d like a smaller place. It’s too much for one and I’m out all day. I thought of a nice flat—no stairs to clean, you see. Somewhere central and nice and bright.”

  She looked round the room we stood in with a groping puzzlement as though she knew there was something wrong about it and was not sure what it was.

  I said, uncomfortably, “Yes, it’s a big house for one person, alone.”

  “Of course I haven’t been alone till now,” she said. “When my husband was killed—he was a warden and a bomb destroyed the post when he was on duty—my uncle came and lived with me. He used to live in Chelsea but he was too old to be on his own in London. He’d had a stroke some years back, you see. He passed on a few months ago and since then I’ve been thinking about selling the house. All my friends said I was silly to stay here but I didn’t make up my mind, really, until a couple of weeks ago.”

  She gave me a sudden, sly look as if she were wondering how much I knew.

  I said, “I read about your uncle in the papers. It must have been a shock to you.”

  She flushed and said, “Oh—then you do know? My friends said that it might make it difficult to sell the house. People are funny about that sort of thing, aren’t they? I mean, don’t you think some people might be put off, knowing what had happened?”

  I said, “It wouldn’t worry me. But it must have been very distressing for you.”

  “Oh. Yes, it was.” She stared at the floor and then she said, with a sudden glow of excitement, “You know, it happened here, right in this room. I found him when I came home from the office. I was late—we’d been stocktaking—and it was getting dark. I’d had a bite to eat with my friends in town and it must have been about ten o’clock. I thought it was funny that there wasn’t a light and then I thought perhaps he’d gone to the club. A nasty place that he used to go to in the Fulham Road. Not that he spent any money there—a real old skinflint he was, though I suppose I shouldn’t speak ill of the dead. He never paid me a penny for his board and lodging all the time he was here and he liked his comforts, I can tell you. My friends said they didn’t know how I put up with him. He saved every penny of what he earned—not that it was much, mind you, but he had his pension as well. He used to keep some of it on the mantelpiece—about thirty pounds he had there, I think. He kept it in other places in the house too but they didn’t get the rest of it because he’d hidden it too well. Up in the loft, mostly, and sewn into his mattress. The trouble I had finding it all, you wouldn’t believe! And there’s still some of it left, I shouldn’t wonder. I used to tell him we’d be murdered in our beds and he used to laugh at me. Well, I was right, wasn’t I? That’s the first thing I thought when I saw him lying on that sofa there, stiff as a board. Tied up like a sack, he was, with his head hanging over the end. Of course I was properly upset; my nerves haven’t been the same since it happened. They got away with about thirty pounds. It’s a mercy it wasn’t more.”

  It wasn’t really that she was hard, I think; merely mercenary and quite unself-conscious about it. I wondered if, in the beginning, she had made any attempt at grief.

  I said, “Did many people know about the money? Did he talk about it?”

  “Oh yes, he talked about it all right. Though whether he was believed is another matter. He hadn’t one good suit. I can tell you, I used to be ashamed for people to know he was my uncle. But it wasn’t my place to buy clothes for him when he had all that money, now was it? He was just an old miser, almost like something in a book.”

  “Had you told anyone locally about the money?”

  “I don’t know many people here now. It’s working in London, you see, and besides all my friends have moved away. It used to be a really nice district before the war; ever such nice people used to live in this road but it has gone down since then. Of course I know my neighbours in a manner of speaking, but they’re not the sort of people I’d like to make friends with.”

  I said, “Then someone must have listened to your uncle. When he boasted about his money.”

  “Oh,” she said, “I don’t think anyone would listen to him. He was an old fool. Everyone used, to laugh at him—the people at his club and all. He used to get really nasty about it sometimes—he’d come home here in ever such a temper and say he’d show them he wasn’t going to be treated like that. He used to talk about something that he was going to tell to the police—just a lot of foolishness, of course, and I never paid any heed to it. Nor would anyone in their senses.”

  I said, “Then how did they know about the money?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “There was the girl, of course. The police wanted to know a lot about her—there was a man here only yesterday—but I don’t think she can have had anything to do with it. Ever such a nice girl, she was, nicely spoken. A good-class sort of girl.”

  I asked, “Why did she come?” and she gave me a sudden, suspicious look, a glance that was both mean and cunning, but then her face assumed its ordinary blankness and she told me about it.

  The girl had come on a Saturday morning about two weeks before old Menhennet had been killed. She had stood in the front porch with a timid, frightened air, facing the door but with her body half-turned towards the gate as if she were ready to run away. Her manner gave credibility to her story; it was shy and faltering as if she were indeed, as she s
aid, homeless and looking for shelter. She had come, she said, because someone had told her there was a room to let in the house. This was, in a way, true; the woman had been thinking of taking a lodger and she had mentioned her intention to several people locally although she had, by this time, decided against doing so. But for some reason she did not say so at once, something both desperate and forlorn in the girl’s appearance sharpened her curiosity and she asked her to come in.

  When the door was closed and they stood together in the dark hall the girl said, “I must have somewhere to go. There’s nowhere. I can’t go home.”

  She seemed on the verge of tears and exhaustion and the woman, who was already regretting bringing her into the house, offered her, grudgingly, a cup of tea.

  While she drank the tea the girl said, “You will think me a dreadful person, coming into your house like this. I wouldn’t have come, but what else could I do? She said I was to get out and not to come back again. She threw a saucepan at me.”

  She had rolled up the sleeve of her light dress and shown a dark, purpling bruise on the delicate arm.

  The woman asked her what had happened and the girl hesitated. Then she said, “I mustn’t trouble you, really. It’s my worry, not yours.” But she went on, “I must tell someone. It’s all bottled up inside me—do you mind? You see, my mother hates me. That sounds silly, doesn’t it? But it’s true. She’s jealous of me because I’m young and she’s not and because my father and I are such good friends. We’ve always loved each other in rather a special way. Daddy has been out East for most of his life, you see, and when I was younger I used to be with him. My mother stayed in England a lot—she used to say the climate didn’t suit her although I don’t think that was true. Then, when Daddy retired and came home she didn’t like the way we were so fond of each other. She’d got to look a lot older and she’d started to drink a lot. It was awful. She’d get drunk and then she’d come into the room where Daddy and I were sitting and make a terrible scene. She didn’t like us being together at all—she was always on at me to go out and find some friends of my own. Then, this morning, she screamed at me because I was late for breakfast. She told me to get out and she threw a saucepan at me and hit me. She smelt of whisky—it was horrible. I didn’t mind what she did to me, if he’d wanted me to stay I’d have put up with anything. But he was in the room when it happened and when he went out without saying anything and looking sort of beaten and tired, I knew I couldn’t stay any more. So I packed a case and came away. I’ve been walking about all day looking for somewhere to go.”