They grinned. Cath pointed towards the desk.
‘Is that how it looked when you came in?’
Jane nodded.
‘Are you sure?’
The nod became more definite. Cath shut the door very quietly behind them and, rolling her extraordinary portrait with great care, led the way downstairs, the first line of ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ bubbling in her throat. She put the gift in her bag which lay on the hall floor, felt a moment of happiness. They love me, she thought, they really do. They think I’m lovely. Like Damien thought I was lovely. She caught hold of Jane’s hair as they approached the kitchen at the back, pretended to drag her in.
‘Look who I found, playing all by herself in her room like a good girl,’ she said.
‘Hmmm,’ said Emily, tearing at the cellophane covering of a packet of biscuits with her teeth. ‘Not the last time I looked.’ And then with the sudden change of subject which often took Cath’s breath away, she asked, ‘Cath, what’s that bruise on your arm? You didn’t have that yesterday, did you? It looks jolly sore.’
Cath glanced quickly to the point of her right arm where she had pushed up the sleeve of her blouse well beyond the elbow. Casually, without showing the hot flush of guilt which crept across her, she pulled the sleeve down.
‘Oh, that? Oh, I’m not too sure.’
‘You must know,’ said Emily, equally casual.
Cath pretended to think, taking the proffered cup of coffee, sitting down slowly. The kitchen table still held remnants of breakfast, a movable feast in this house. Her brow cleared.
‘Now I have it, I do remember, yes I do. You know I go to your friend, Helen, on Tuesdays? Well, I was doing out her bathroom, yesterday afternoon, leaning in to do that big bath of hers, you know, and I sort of fell in. Bang, with my arm right against the taps. Stupid, wasn’t it? Doesn’t hurt,’ she finished, addressing her remarks to Jane who sat pressed so close to her, the warmth of her skin passed into her own.
‘You fell in a bath?’ Jane chortled. ‘Silly!’
Emily laughed too. ‘Really, Cath! Listen, you must tell Helen. She’ll have to pay you danger money. Are you sure it doesn’t hurt? Only I’ve got all sorts of liniment, stuff like that …’
‘No,’ said Cath, firmly. ‘No, it really doesn’t hurt at all.’ Not here, it didn’t. Not in this house, in this sun-filled kitchen where a child drew a picture showing the cleaning lady as a glamour queen; where people really cared for her. At that moment, nothing hurt. Nothing needed fixing.
‘Tell me,’ said Emily, still casual but consumed with curiosity, ‘is Helen’s flat really as dirty as she claims?’
Sometimes Joe went home in the afternoon. If the lunchtime trade had been rich and the afternoon trade promised nothing, Mickey told him to use his sense and shut up shop for a while. It took almost an hour with the number 59 crawling through daytime traffic, so that he never had time to stop for long before turning back in time to open again at half-past five. He never quite knew why he bothered, unless to see if Cath was in; he hated the sight of his own front door with the peeling paint in the bright and unforgiving light of a fine summer’s afternoon. Walking away from it in the morning, he did not look back; coming home after dark, he did not notice the outside either, but in the afternoon he did. He looked at it with disgust, and considered what a raw deal his life had given him. Nothing was fair; nothing ever had been, not since he had been a little kid with parents who gave him everything and promised him the earth.
His bedroom had been full of toys, anything he wanted, and their new house full of new things, until Dad disappeared and Mother found a grateful widower who had no room for a spoiled son. Joe had left them as soon as he could, and never gone back. He did not think of his parents with gratitude, he remembered only the bitterness of their defection.
A new house in the place where he grew up was what he knew he deserved in life, if only he could fight his way through the conspirators who combined to keep it from him. It was never his own fault that he had failed to become a First Division football player or a champion boxer, that he managed to leave the Army after seven years without the beginnings of a trade, that he could not concentrate, had a problem with drink, relationships and, unless motivated by the fear he had for Mickey Gat, laziness. Nothing to do with him: it was them; they were gunning for him.
Afternoon journeys on the bus could render him incoherent with self-pity, especially if he was forced into a seat next to someone who smelt. Bus people hardly entered the conspiracy against him, but he hated them anyway. Not as much as he had hated his brother-in-law Damien; a different kind of hate, a fearful, envious loathing of someone who, drunk or sober, remained the epitome of everything he was not. Joe unlocked the door and trod upstairs. The heat was stuffy, stuffier still when he went up to the attics. It was not true that he had secured this substandard flat through an army friend as he had told Cath; Damien had got it for them. Just as Damien had got him the job with Mickey Gat. Damien had been a fixer. Everyone loved Damien, including his sister. His sister loved the sod 100 per cent, he could not do wrong in her eyes.
It took a person who hid things in his own house to know when someone else did the same. When he had come home last night, he had heard her hurried footsteps descending from the attics as he opened the door and met her bright, guilt-tinged smile of welcome. Cath did not much like the attic rooms; he knew she did not. She would watch him receive yet another parcel from the mail-order firm with tight-lipped disapproval, murmuring nice, very nice, then buttoning her lip, as the package was all wrapped up again and consigned to one of the rooms. She would not willingly go upstairs, he thought, as he often did, to gloat over the colour TV, the camcorder, the three-piece luggage set, the patio furniture, the barbecue, the tool boxes and the wealth of smart kitchen equipment they somehow never used. Knives in a block, a fish kettle when they never ate fish, the blender, the coffee maker, the gadget for scooping ice cream; she just could not think the same way about these things. She simply did not see that they were the way to a better life.
Joe forgot how these goods made him feel rich, as well as safe. The first room was gloomy, with three boxes obscuring the light from the window, and yes, he was right, something had been moved: they had not been there before. He moved to one side a telephone, a twenty-four-piece dinner service, a set of casserole dishes, all encased in packing. There, beneath the window, was the shrine in all its obscenity. He almost expected to see a lighted candle, but found only three photographs of Damien, covered in clear polythene bags, sitting on a tray among three small vases of dying flowers.
For a moment, he wanted to tear at the flowers with his teeth. He plucked them from their containers and crushed them underfoot, for fear of contamination. He picked up the first photograph, gazed at it briefly and tore it in half, put the two pieces together neatly and tore it again. Then he took a lighter from his pocket and holding the other photographs together, held the flame to the corners. They were slow to ignite, the polythene melting rather than burning, the photos inside curling grey then brown. It took a matter of minutes to create a pile of slightly sticky ash, and in that time the trembling of his own limbs did not improve. The lighter flame scorched his thumb, but he ignored the pain until it was done.
Oh Cath, with all she owed him, would she ever learn how to love him best?
CHAPTER SIX
Thou shalt be cured, brother. The course of justice ran as smooth as a saloon car over boulders. More like an engine heated beyond endurance in a summer’s-day traffic jam. The courtroom faced south at the back of an old building with a view of railway lines, there were blinds across the windows, diffusing a sulky light as the heat poured in. Air-conditioning had been abandoned: it was louder than the trains.
Helen’s allotted place was uncomfortably close to the witness-box, so that when the woman inside it made her nervous gestures, Helen could feel the drops of perspiration, gathered from the armpits into the palms, flick across her own face, lik
e a kind of spittle she could not avoid. The pages she turned were damp.
‘Fifteenth of March, this year. Can you recall that date?’
‘Yes.’ Voice no more than a whisper, fingers moving uncertainly, looking for something to hold.
‘Speak up a little, if you would. Questions come from me, answers to the magistrates. You don’t have to look at the defendant. Please.’
Her voice barked the series of orders, plaintive to her own ears, brisk to others, merely compelling to the witness. The defendant looked harmless.
‘We’ve established you live with the defendant. What time did he come home that evening?’
‘About eleven thirty.’
‘Normal time?’
‘More or less.’
‘Did you have any conversation?’
‘Yes. He said he wanted something to eat and I said there wasn’t anything. He got angry.’ She was gaining confidence now, going faster.
‘What happened next?’ (Oh for a pound sterling in the bank to mark every occasion she had prompted a witness with such a neutral question.)
‘He hit me.’
‘Can you give us a bit more detail?’
‘He … he head-butted me. You know, bashed his head into my face. I felt my nose go, there was blood everywhere, I started screaming and the baby woke up and …’
‘Could we take this just a little bit slower? You see that lady writing down what you’re saying. If you could just watch her pen.’
Phrase by phrase. The words, the blows, the crying of the baby, the decisions, should she go first to the child or to the bathroom for fear the blood would touch him. Helen’s hair was piled neatly over a crawling scalp.
She leant towards her opponent. ‘No argument about calling the police, is there? Can I lead on that?’ She turned over another damp page, as if she did not know it by heart. Behind her, she could feel Mary Secura relaxing slightly.
‘You called the police. What time was that?’
‘A bit later. About half an hour.’
‘Why delay? Why not do that at once?’
The skin on the girl’s face was flushed a dull red, swollen with the first signs of anger.
‘I only called them when I saw what he’d done.’
‘Do you mean your injury?’ There was an impatient gesture of denial; another flicker of moisture landed on Helen’s hair.
‘No. He’d only gone into the kitchen and eaten the baby’s food. Two jars of baby food, and he’d drunk all the milk. I didn’t have any left for the morning. That’s when I phoned.’
The cut-off point varies every time, Mary Secura said. No telling what will make them crack, the smell of another woman; the drinking of the baby’s milk. Presto.
Summer had grown into a stultifying incubus of grey skies and humid life. Later, cooler, Helen was attempting to explain to Emily Eliot not only the wonder she was feeling two weeks after the arrival of Cath to clean the house, but also the mixture of emotions she felt at the end of a case she had managed to win. How it should have been a sense of triumph, justice done: a man waiting sentence of imprisonment, Mary Secura grimly pleased, witness weeping. There was no sense of triumph at all. Nothing but the sensation that all her manoeuvring, posturing, bullying and flirting in cross-examination could ever reveal was simply a pale and inaccurate version of the truth. Emily did not really want to listen; no-one wanted to listen to this, not if they came from the foreign realms of normal family life. No-one wanted to hear her expound on the frustration of playing justice by the rules, not for the sake of actually doing any good, but simply because that was the only way of doing the best possible. Emily did not want philosophical conversation.
‘I think your lifestyle is perfect, you know,’ Emily was saying, mournfully. ‘A virile man visiting a couple of days a week, no kids, double income, all that,’ she added in the wine-and-coffee bar next to Peter Jones, late-night shopping, Wednesdays. For the first time ever, Helen was irritated with Emily, which was why it was important to put the record straight. A friend was a friend. A friend with kids was one you always had to cross London to see, since your convenience was always subject to theirs, your time infinitely less important, your own commitments to keeping yourself alive, apparently, nil.
‘You make it sound as if I do nothing for the rest of the time,’ she said. ‘And I don’t have access to Bailey’s income, don’t want it either. Pity, he earns far more than me.’
Emily looked crestfallen. ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ she said, defusing any misunderstanding before it grew into discomfort. ‘I’m not being very sensitive or realistic, am I? Only there are times when I envy you.’
‘You joke,’ said Helen. ‘All I’m saying is you wouldn’t have envied me this morning in court. And, as it happens, I often envy you.’
Her own words came back at her like little arrows. Envy for another was anathema. Even if they did have healthy children, faithful husband, wonderful house and a vision of life Helen found increasingly appealing. Castle walls, she told herself. Just build them.
‘No, I don’t joke,’ said Emily pulling a face. ‘I know you work hard, and it isn’t easy, but keeping a family like mine often makes me feel like the clothes in the tumble dryer, all mashed up, even if they come out all right in the end. I don’t know how long it is since I read a book.’
‘Well, tough,’ said Helen, crossly. ‘I read them to stop having nightmares.’
They had only come out to make the final choice on the blues and yellows which had haunted Helen for a fortnight and now made her see double. Helen loved to shop; Emily Eliot knew how. Emily turned shopping into a mission with measurable targets; Helen treated it as an excuse for glorious indecision.
‘You wouldn’t like a conventional family life, Helen, you really wouldn’t.’
Funny how people go on protesting that their own fortune is not as good as it looks, Helen thought. Samples of the chosen curtain material lay on the table in front of them; Helen had a dozen others at home. She slightly regretted the finality of choice, still agonised, reeling at the shock and the cost, wondering if there was still time to change her mind before Emily’s needlewoman did her worst.
‘How could you say I wouldn’t like married life with 2.2 kids? I could just about do it if I got a move on, even though I’d be an elderly primagravida and I could save precious time by having twins.’
‘Yes, well, you’d better decide before you redecorate the house. Don’t think you know it all just because you’ve got a cat.’
Helen said nothing, feeling the stirring of a depression which often arose, like the beginnings of a headache, when she subjected her life to scrutiny. Emily watched her closely, then picked up a small piece of golden coloured cloth with blue woven into the fabric in thin stripes.
‘You were right about this one,’ she said. ‘Listen, H, am I right in thinking you’ve got to the stage of wishing dear old Bailey would make an honest woman of you? Do I detect faint yearnings towards the joint mortgage and the patter of tiny feet?’
‘Put like that, I don’t know.’
‘Well, just in case you were, let me suggest the primitive approach. You know how they dislike upheaval, poor darlings, and adore their creature comforts? Well, once your three or four rooms are revamped, beckon him in to an oasis of domestic bliss, nice food smells and all that. Works a charm.’
Helen laughed out loud. ‘Is that what you did with Alistair?’
‘You’d better believe it. Even the nicest men are ambivalent, you know. You have to lead them to it.’
‘And now,’ Helen said, ‘even if it crossed his mind to want to go, which it wouldn’t, of course, your darling Alistair couldn’t possibly leave, could he?’
‘Over my dead body,’ Emily said, with a grim determination Helen found slightly disconcerting. ‘I’d fleece him,’ she added, ‘then kill him. Another glass?’
‘You only have to go round the corner. I have to get the 59.’
‘Oh Gawd, never mind.’ A hand
was waved. Emily shuffled forward on the small table, arms across bosom, confidential. ‘Now, never mind men. How are you getting on with Cath?’
‘What?’ Helen was thinking of nest-building, a spider making a web to catch a big, ungainly fly. Emily drummed her fingers on the table, then snapped them in front of Helen’s eyes.
‘Look, I need gossip. Cath, our cleaning lady. Listen, I never mentioned it, because she is such a treasure, and I trust her absolutely round the kids, but she can irritate. A bit clumsy here and there. Sometimes she’s so careful I want to scream. Then she goes off into a different world. Must be why she’s got the most frightful bruise from falling into your bath.’ She bit her tongue, in memory of Cath’s habit of open-mouthed eating.
Cath never cleaned the bathroom. Helen had been specific in saying leave the bathroom, that is the only bit I never mind doing and besides, I just can’t ask anyone to clean my lavatory. The bathroom was the only thing pristine in the first place: Helen felt defensive and evasive.
‘I’ve scarcely seen Cath since the first time,’ she said, carefully. ‘I don’t have to. She’s usually going out as I’m coming in. Otherwise, I’ve only seen what she can do. Oh, by the way, who came to dinner the other week?’
Emily put her head in her hands.
‘Vegetarian judges. Three. With their wives. I’d cooked a leg of lamb.’
The sultry day had transformed itself into an evening of treacherous splendour after a shower. The light was perfect, and the stillness made the trees flanking Helen’s street and Helen’s garden droop with graceful relief, the leaves green and luscious from the earlier rain. There was the pretence of a fickle greeting in the languid movement of the branches, like a hapless crowd of tired school-children hired to greet a late-arriving celebrity.
Curtain material bought, paint purchased. Renew the house; there was nothing more important.
No Bailey tonight, no hand and body held in the dark. Helen let herself in through the basement door, noticing as she did so how clean the windows were, reflecting her pale face and long dark hair, distorted into greater untidiness. And then when the door swung inwards, she noticed the smell, the first, now familiar and pleasant scent of Cath’s ministrations. Lavender polish, a whiff of bleach, an absence of dust and the removal of any other odour. Helen revelled in this smell, liked it enough to mitigate her own reluctance to give away keys, an aspect of the arrangement she detested. She was not like Emily Eliot: she did not really like an open house.
A Clear Conscience Page 9