Criminals

by Margot Livesey

  She picked up the weaving and carried it outside to the dustbin. A few scraps blew over towards the lilac bushes, where shortly they would merge with the purple flowers. Back indoors, Mollie began to dress the loom. She wanted to make a blanket for Olivia, something that combined the yellow of the poncho which had kept her safe on the floor of the Gents, the grey of Ewan’s suit, and the brown of the baby’s own eyes. A couple of years ago she would’ve insisted on dyeing the wool herself—gathering the lichens and roots, carefully boiling and distilling until, after perhaps a dozen attempts, she had the ideal shade. Today she simply scanned her rows of wool, lifted down a skein of moss-brown yarn, finely spun, and began to measure out the weft.

  As she wound the wool, she caught sight of the postcard pinned to one end of the loom: the three Fates at work, spinning, measuring, and cutting. She didn’t have to look to remember the brief message on the back. Darling Mollie, Chae had written, keep spinning. And for a long time she had thought of their life as something they were spinning together. Recently, however, she had suffered the fierce attentions of the third Fate. Snip, snip. Now she was weaving the new life she wanted, a life with Olivia, of which the blanket was a promise.

  When the knock came on Wednesday afternoon, Mollie was sitting by the stove, feeding Olivia. For a few seconds she was paralysed. She hadn’t locked the back door, and it was quite possible, according to country manners, that the caller would feel free to try the latch and step inside. At the second knock, Mollie jumped up with Olivia and raced from the room. Not daring to venture the stairs, she went into the parlour, pulling the door behind her. The shutters, still closed since last Saturday, gave the room the dim quality of a dirty aquarium; the overstuffed furniture floated like slow fish.

  Crouched behind the sofa, Mollie heard the back door open and a voice call, “Anyone home?”

  It was Lorraine. When Mollie told Ewan she had no friends, she was, in her bitterness, discounting several people, of whom Lorraine was the most significant. She and Taylor had moved up from Gloucester five years ago and bought a house on the outskirts of town; together they ran an antiquarian book business, and Lorraine knitted intricate cardigans and jumpers, no two alike. Soon after she arrived, she had phoned Mollie to ask where to buy wool, and their similar interests had blossomed into friendship.

  “Mollie,” Lorraine called again. “It’s me.”

  Mollie stared at the faded beige print of the sofa and did her best to hold the bottle steady in Olivia’s mouth. She heard Lorraine moving around, a chair scraping, the trickle of water, the clink of a glass or cup being replaced on the draining board, and, at last, the precious sound of the back door closing. In the ensuing silence Mollie sank to the floor and simply sat there, her back to the sofa and her eyes closed.

  She was rescued by Olivia, who needed burping. Her attention, as usual, was perfectly focused on the lineaments of her small world. Mollie patted her and, on her own behalf, tried vainly to resurrect the breathing techniques of a long-ago yoga class—blue, red, yellow, green. She stood up and tiptoed into the kitchen. Just as Olivia burst into wails, she raced to the back door and slid the bolt across.

  For a few minutes Mollie could do nothing but sit at the table, crying inconsolably, while on her lap Olivia wailed away. At last they both fell quiet. Mollie dried her eyes and drank a glass of water. Lorraine had left a note beneath the pepper grinder, flecks of pepper dotting her words like additional punctuation.

  Mollie,

  I was driving by and stopped in to say hello. Sorry not to have been in touch. School holidays! Let’s talk soon.

  Love, Lorraine

  P.S. I like your new piece—great colours!

  “Love,” sneered Mollie. She crumpled the paper and hurled it to the floor. For a month Lorraine had neglected her. No calls, no trips to Perth. Now she strolled into the house without so much as a by-your-leave. Swollen, angry thoughts buzzed in Mollie’s brain, making it easy to forget their last meeting, the week after Chae left, when Lorraine had urged her to take him back and Mollie had screamed that she never wanted to see either her or Taylor again.

  Gradually the buzzing subsided. Lorraine wasn’t important, but what she had shown Mollie was. Stopping occasionally to run a hand through her hair, or adjust her grip on Olivia, Mollie paced back and forth in front of the stove. This was not simply a matter of being more careful; she had to be more clever. To think she could keep Olivia a secret was madness. Sooner or later someone would discover her, and then even the best explanation would seem suspicious. She had to invent a story that explained this baby’s presence.

  She put Olivia down in the chair and from among her cookbooks retrieved a notebook of recipes, only half filled. Armed with this, a pen, and a cup of coffee, she settled herself at the kitchen table, just as Ewan would have done. Could she have adopted a foundling? For a moment, given her own history, the idea was immensely appealing. But no, she thought. That would be fraught with problems. She didn’t know enough about the mechanics of adoption; and if anyone enquired, her ignorance would be plain and some local social worker might hear rumours and investigate. How did people get babies—from friends? Rather unlikely. She recalled a girl at school, Heather, who had lived with her aunt and uncle. Mollie couldn’t imagine why; it had not seemed to her, or anyone else, worth enquiring. Bridget, she thought. Her faraway sister was the answer.

  At once everything seemed possible. Bridget had visited Mill of Fortune a few times, although not for several years, and people still remembered her. Sometimes they’d ask Mollie about events in the States—Clinton, Waco, the World Trade Center—as if she might have special information. Yes, Bridget had had a baby. The father was black, of course; that fitted perfectly with life over there. But why had she given her daughter to Mollie?

  Against her will, The Dark Forest came to mind. She recalled Leo’s assumption at the beginning of the novel that Roman was ill. People were always ready to believe in illness, the worse the better. Bridget, she wrote, cancer. After a pause, she added breast, then stared, slightly horrified, at what she had done. Briefly she felt the tug of superstition, as if her words could cause the cells in Bridget’s breasts to become malignant. She raised a hand to her own chest. Once again she’d forgotten to check. Next month, she swore, and wrote down Check breasts in a separate column.

  So Olivia was Bridget’s daughter, but how had she got to Mill of Fortune? She’d sent the baby over with a nurse to the one person she could trust. No, that was a wartime fantasy, when people had dispatched neatly labelled children on enormous journeys. The logical thing would’ve been for Mollie to go to Boston, where she could care for both her sister and the baby.

  Mollie tapped her pencil against the table. Was this, she wondered, what it was like for Chae when he wrote his books? One event leading to the next, almost without volition, much more like life than she had supposed. And for an instant, seeing how blithely she’d given her dear sister cancer, Mollie felt a feather of sympathy drift down onto the vast stony landscape of her fury. Then she turned back to her task. She needed to get the details straight so she could tell the same story to everyone and believe it herself.

  Suppose Bridget were in London. Perhaps she’d come back to see her old doctor, in whom she had tremendous faith. And Ewan had brought the baby up from London. “You should’ve seen him,” Mollie heard herself say, “carrying a baby in his pinstripe suit.” Yes, yes, this was good. Didn’t they say in crime novels that the best alibi was the one closest to the truth, alter only what you absolutely have to? There had, after all, been other passengers on the bus. So Olivia had come to stay with her Scottish aunt. “It does me good,” Mollie would say. “I’ve been down in the dumps since, well, since that business with Chae. Nothing like a baby to cheer you up.”

  This way they could go into town together, take walks, talk to people; they would no longer need to live like outcasts. Mollie did not consider her promise to Ewan of coming to London, nor the dwindling bank account
on which she’d already written several large cheques. Most especially she did not think of Olivia’s true origins, and of the man with a local accent who knew the phone number at Mill of Fortune. None of these quibbles disturbed her pleasure as she went over the details one more time. The one thing she did not quite like was the naming of her relation to Olivia: “Aunt” had an unappealing, Dickensian ring.

  That afternoon she took Olivia into town to meet Mrs. Tulliver. If she could tell the story successfully to her, she could tell it to anyone. She parked opposite the chemists and hurried in with Olivia. Mrs. Tulliver wasn’t behind the counter, and for a moment Mollie thought it must be her day off. Then she spotted her in the corner, arranging the shampoos. Hastily Mollie chose two kinds of lotion and approached. “Excuse me?”

  Mrs. Tulliver turned, a green bottle in each hand. “Hello, Mollie. How are you keeping?” she said, then her eyes widened. “What’s this, a baby?”

  “It’s my niece, Olivia. I was so flustered the other day I didn’t get to tell you what had happened. My brother, Ewan, showed up with her unexpectedly, from London.”

  Mrs. Tulliver was bending over Olivia, stroking her cheek. Olivia smiled her best smile. “She’s Ewan’s bairn?” she said, sounding puzzled.

  “No, no. He’s still the swinging bachelor. She’s my sister Bridget’s daughter.”

  She fluttered the coat-tails of her story, just enough for Mrs. Tulliver to say how dreadful but try not to worry. “I’ve a cousin in Dalkeith. Ten years since he was diagnosed, and he’s fit as a fiddle. It’s wonderful what they can do nowadays.”

  Mollie agreed. “Which of these is best?” she said, holding out the two bottles. Mrs. Tulliver explained that she herself favoured the one with lanolin.

  Back in the car, Mollie burst out laughing. “We did it!” she said to Olivia. But Olivia’s good humour had fled, and all the way home she cried as if every bump and sway of the car were taking her further from where she wanted to be.

  Chapter 10

  Walking back from the bus station, Kenneth stopped at the betting shop on Leonard Street and put two quid, all that was left of his mum’s money, on Easy Does It to place in the two-fifteen. Then he drifted round the corner to the pub. He had just enough change for a pint. The last time he’d been here, a Saturday night a couple of months ago, the room was crowded with people his age, in their twenties. He’d got into a heated argument about euthanasia and gone home, his head jangling with comments about deep freezes and villages in China. Now, the lunch hour rush over, it was almost empty, with only a few old dossers reading the paper and some kids at the video machines. Skiving off, Kenneth thought, recalling his own school days. One of the few things he missed about the infirmary was that puffy sense of self-importance when you had to get out of the pub and go to work, telling people and complaining all the while. He’d enjoyed that part, maybe a bit too much, and been fired for being late three times in a single week and having beer on his breath. “Reeking” was the word the supervisor used, sounding not angry but—and Kenneth found this infinitely more upsetting—bored.

  He leaned on the bar and sipped his beer. The bartender, a beefy bloke whose face and neck were the same shade of pink from his scrubby brown hair to his collar, was checking the fridges. When he handed Kenneth his pint, he spilled a little and made a tired remark about the weather. Don’t I even rate Princess Di? Kenneth wanted to ask.

  The clock above the bar read ten to two. In a little over an hour, Joan would be home from work, and he’d need some excuse for Grace’s absence. He wished he could remember more about that baby in America, but you didn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to know that the longer these people hung on to Grace, the better. If they gave her back right away, they’d just be doing their duty. They had to keep her at least a night or two to be good and guilty. He heard himself saying, “You kept the baby for how long?” He could make that wee sentence sound full of big, sinister suggestions.

  Meanwhile, what to say to Joan? He thought longingly of those places where women still obeyed men—Egypt? Iran? He wasn’t sure, but he knew there were countries where he could simply have told Joan not to bother him about Grace and bring him his bloody tea, and that would be that. Even though she was a foreigner, she wasn’t that kind. Still, the situation was easier than if she’d been a Perth girl. He remembered his old girlfriend Brenda, who had thrown his clothes out of the window just because he came home two hours late one night and then, when she caught him with Margaret, had followed him from pub to pub, playing “Tainted Love” on the jukebox. Joan would never do anything like that, but in her quiet way she might make a stink. She could go to the police, he thought. Or tell people at the infirmary. He had a vision of the bored supervisor pricking up his ears at her story.

  What was an okay thing to do with a baby? You couldn’t lend or lose her. A friend wanted her? Fat chance. Research? Beyond the pale. He tried to recall what Joan did with Grace when she was at work. As far as he knew, either her mother came round—she worked odd hours as a live-in laundress at the Salutation Hotel—or Joan took the baby downstairs to Mrs. Kemp. Well, they were both useless as excuses. He drank some beer. It had lost that first bite of coldness and slid down effortlessly. On the telly behind the bar, his race was coming up, the horses prancing round the enclosure. The grass was a nasty shade of green. “Can you fix that?” he asked the bartender.

  “ ’Fraid not. Been that way since Wimbledon.” He guffawed, and his overall pinkness deepened.

  “What about sound?”

  “That we can do.” He turned up the volume. Easy Does It was a chestnut filly whose jockey wore a custard-yellow outfit. Kenneth was instantly depressed. No one who wore togs like that could ride a decent race. He stared gloomily at the screen. The next horse, Pretty Thing, now there was a good-looking beast; her jockey had a nice blue and purple outfit and was promisingly small. “Do you have anything on it?” asked the bartender.

  “Pretty Thing, to place.”

  “Pretty Thing? Never heard of her. Not that that means much these days. I promised my missis I wouldn’t bet in any way, shape, or form until my birthday. A month and four days to go.”

  “How would she know?” said Kenneth, interested in spite of himself.

  “She’d know. If I win, I foam at the mouth. If I lose, I weep. Wouldn’t be any fun having to keep it to myself.”

  “Why’d she make you promise?”

  “Last year Lester Piggott came to me in a dream and told me the winner of the Derby. I bet a week’s wages. Didn’t even place. Daft, really.”

  “I never dream.”

  “May be as well.” The bartender shook his head and wiped his hands on the dish towel slung over one shoulder.

  The race was off, and they both leaned towards the screen. As the horses accelerated, so did the announcer’s voice, slurring the names into an endless sentence. After a slow start, Easy Does It, with her bilious-yellow rider, began to move forward, past High Noon and Christopher Columbus. Kenneth cheered wildly, pounding the bar so hard the ashtrays rattled. The horse came in second, while Pretty Thing lagged home in sixth place.

  He became aware of the bartender watching him, fish-mouthed. “Didn’t you bet on Pretty Thing?”

  “I just said that not to jinx things. Easy Does It! Look, there she is, the beauty.” He raised his glass to the screen, where Easy Does It was walking nimbly behind a chap in one of those sheepskin jackets.

  He went next door to collect his winnings. To his delight the cashier gave him four fivers, still crisp from the wrapper. He had always loved new money; it seemed worth more before a thousand sweaty fingers faded the pictures of Walter Scott and the Queen. As he strolled down the street, patting his pocket from time to time, he thought he might take Joan out for a meal. Or maybe a take-away? No, a restaurant. And then it came to him: his mum.

  She sometimes baby-sat for the brat downstairs. Why could she not baby-sit for Grace, in fact keep her for the night? After all, she was the ot
her granny. In one fell swoop he embraced paternity, at least for now.

  He let himself into the flat and heard the radio on in the bathroom. He wished he’d been here first, but not to worry. He went to the kitchen sink and bent over the faucet, rinsing the beer out of his mouth. The water beaded on the gleaming metal. He felt slightly sick and realised he’d had nothing to eat all day. Two bus journeys, and not a single bacon roll. He reached into the bread bin, took out a slice of bread—brown, unfortunately—and ate it dry, in quick bites, not wanting Joan to catch him. She emerged as he swallowed the last mouthful. “Kenneth,” she called.

  “I’m in here.”

  She came in wearing billowy trousers and a black cardigan he’d watched her buy last spring from the Oxfam Shop. Her hair was down in the girlish way he liked. At the infirmary, she had to wear one of those stupid paper bonnets, pink or blue, for hygiene. It was when he saw her without the hat, in the cafeteria, her hair hanging nearly to her waist, that he’d asked her for a drink. “Joan,” he said, edging round the table to meet her.

  “Where’s Grace?”

  “I’ve a wee surprise for you.” He had made a mistake. Her mouth was opening, and he could feel her scream coming, like the gust of air from an onrushing train. “Grace’s spending the night at Mum’s,” he said quickly. “I thought it was time they got acquainted. No use having a granny you never see.”

  “Your mother,” she said, not quite a question but not acceptance either.

  “Yes, you know, my mum—like your mum, only Scottish.” God, what a blithering idiot! He went over and put his arms around her. He was nearly six inches taller, another thing he liked. Nuzzling her spicy hair, he could tell from her stiffness that she had not yet succumbed to his story. He glimpsed the road ahead, hard work. “Joan,” he said softly, “don’t you want Grace to get to know her Scottish gran? My mum’s brilliant with kids, better than that old bag Kemp. All the kids are mad about my mum.”