Buffet for Unwelcome Guests

by Christianna Brand

  ‘Yes, it was I who phoned you,’ said Mrs. Jennings when the police arrived. ‘But you’ve had a call already. From the people opposite. Up there, in the balcony flat. They watch me,’ said Mrs. Jennings. ‘Everything I do, they know all about me!’ She glanced down at her fleshless frame in the too-smart new clothes; glanced at the dead body on the floor. ‘Everything,’ she said. ‘They spy on me, they criticise; I never get away from them….They’ve ruined my life. If it hadn’t been for them, I don’t think—this—would ever have happened.’

  The officer made a sign to his sergeant and himself knelt down beside the body, glanced up at the mantelpiece, at a grey hair on the edge of it and a smear of blood. ‘Fell against this?’ he suggested, standing up, easing his cramped back. ‘Stepped back, tripped over the mat, something like that?—hit his head as he went down?’

  ‘Do you mean—an accident?’ she said.

  ‘Well, that’s the way it looks. Is there something,’ he suggested, made very curious by the tone of her voice, ‘that you’d like to tell me?’

  ‘They’ll tell you anyway. The people opposite. It wasn’t an accident. I picked up the decanter and hit him with it. He insulted me. Just once too often. He insulted me.’

  ‘You hit him?’

  ‘With the decanter. He dodged back, trying to avoid it and then he fell and hit his head, but only a little bit, against the mantelpiece. But I hit him first.’

  ‘You mean, to—’

  ‘Oh, yes, to kill him. I might as well admit it.’ She repeated, ‘They’ll tell you anyway.’

  ‘The people opposite?’

  ‘They’ll have been watching. They’re always watching. The old woman in her wheel-chair: what else has she got to do? And the Family. Always talking about me. Can’t you hear them?’ said Mrs. Jennings. ‘Talking about me?’

  ‘Who was she telephoning?’ said the old woman.

  >‘Police most likely. She knew we’d tell anyway.’

  >‘It began with her putting on all that weight,’ said the daughter.

  ‘It began with me putting on weight,’ said Mrs. Jennings. ‘That’s what they’re saying. Can’t you hear them? “She knew we’d tell anyway,” they’re saying. Always watching me, always talking about me. But for them, I could have pretended this was an accident, I might have got away with it; but they wouldn’t have that. Better ring the police, they said. It was the daughter’s husband rang you, I heard him, we’ve just seen a murder committed he said, I heard him. I hear them all the time. They watch me and talk about me. Can’t you hear them? Listen!’

  ‘They’ve stopped now,’ said the policeman.

  ‘No, they haven’t, they’re chattering on, chattering on….’ A policewoman had arrived and now put an arm lightly about her shoulders. ‘Where is she taking me?’

  ‘Where you won’t hear them talking. You don’t have to worry, love; you won’t have them watching any more.’

  ‘They’ll watch you taking me.’

  ‘No, no, they’ve all gone inside, there’s no one now on the balcony.’

  ‘You can’t hear them talking? They’ll still be talking.’

  ‘Well, now you mention it, I think I can,’ he said. ‘But nicely. Sorry to see you go, they’re saying. Such a nice lady, really, they never meant anything against you; be sorry to see you go….’ Tenderly clucking, he urged her gently towards the door, the woman’s arm still about her shoulders. But when she was gone, he said to his sergeant, ‘No Family?’

  ‘Single-room bed-sitts., sir,’ said the sergeant. ‘One elderly lady on that floor, lives alone. Neighbour calls in, wheels her out on to the balcony with a thermos flask and some sandwiches, for the day.’

  ‘No one else calls?’

  ‘No one, sir. No friends, nobody. Sad for her, poor old girl,’ said the sergeant. ‘She’s blind.’

  PART FIVE

  Black Coffee

  Bless This House

  THEY WERE BEAUTIFUL; AND even in that first moment, the old woman was to think later, she should have known: should have recognised them for what they were. Standing there so still and quiet in face of her own strident aggression, the boy in the skin-tight, worn blue jeans, with his mac held over his head against the fine drizzle of the evening rain—held over his head like a mantle; the girl with her long hair falling straight as a veil down to the pear-shaped bulge of her pregnancy. But though suspicion died in her, she would not be done out of her grievance. ‘What you doing here? You got no right here, parking outside my window.’

  They did not reply that after all the street did not belong to her. The girl said only, apologetically: ‘We got nowhere else to sleep.’

  ‘Nowhere to sleep?’ She glanced at the ringless hand holding together the edges of the skimpy coat. ‘Can’t you go home?’

  ‘Our homes aren’t in London,’ said the boy.

  ‘You slept somewhere last night.’

  ‘We had to leave. The landlady—Mrs. Mace—she went away and her nephew was coming home and wanted the place. We’ve been hunting and hunting for days. No one else will take us in.’

  ‘Because of the baby,’ said the girl. ‘In case it comes, you see.’

  Suspicion gleamed again. ‘Well, don’t look at me. I got nothing, only my one bed-sit here in the basement—the other rooms are used for storage, all locked up and bolted. And upstairs—well, that’s full.’

  ‘Oh, of course,’ said the girl. ‘We didn’t mean that at all. We were sleeping in the car.’

  ‘In the car?’ She stood at the top of the area steps peering at them in the light of the street lamp, shawled, also, against the rain. She said to the boy: ‘You can’t let her sleep in that thing. Not like she is.’

  ‘Well, I know,’ he said. ‘But what else? That’s why we came to this quiet part.’

  ‘We’ll move along of course,’ said the girl, ‘if you mind our being here.’

  ‘It’s a public street,’ she said illogically. But it was pitiful, poor young thing; and there was about them this—this something: so beautiful, so still and quiet, expressionless, almost colourless, like figures in some dim old church, candle-lit at—yes, at Christmas time. Like figures in a Christmas crêche. She said uncertainly: ‘If a few bob would help—’

  But they disclaimed at once. ‘No, no, we’ve got money; well, enough, anyway. And he can get work in the morning, it’s nothing like that. It’s only… Well,’ said the girl, spreading slow, explanatory hands, ‘it’s like we told you. The baby’s coming and no one will take us in. They just say, sorry—no room.’

  Was it then that she had known?—when she heard herself saying, almost without her own volition: ‘Out in the back garden—there’s a sort of shed…’

  It was the strain, perhaps, the uncertainty, the long day’s search for accommodation, the fading hope; but the baby came that night. No time for doctor or midwife; but Mrs. Vaughan was experienced in such matters, delivered the child safely, dealt with the young mother—unexpectedly resilient despite her fragile look, calm, uncomplaining, apparently impervious to the pain—settled her comfortably at last on the old mattress in the shed, covered over with clean bedclothes. ‘When you’re fit to be moved—we’ll see.’ And to the boy she said sharply: ‘What you got there?’

  He had employed the waiting time in knocking together a sort of cradle out of a wooden box; padded it round and fitted it with a couple of down-filled cushions from their car. Taken nothing of hers; all the things were their own. ‘Look, Marilyn—for the baby.’

  ‘Oh, Jo,’ she said, ‘you always were a bit of a carpenter! You always were good with your hands.’

  Joseph. And Marilyn. And Joseph a bit of a carpenter, clever with his hands. And a boy child born in an out-house because there was no room elsewhere for his coming… She got down slowly on to her thick, arthritic knees beside the mattress and, with something like awe in her heart, gathered the baby from his mother’s arms. ‘I’ll lay him in the box. It’ll do for him lovely.’ And under her breath: �
�He won’t be the first,’ she said.

  The boy left money with her next day for necessities and went out and duly returned that evening with news of a job on a building site; and carrying in one scarred hand a small, drooping bunch of flowers which he carefully divided between them, half for Marilyn, half for Mrs. Vaughan—‘till I can get you something better’—and one violet left over to place in the baby’s tiny mottled fist. ‘And till I can get you something better,’ he said.

  They gave him no name… Other young couples, she thought, would have spent the idle hours trying to think up ‘something different’ or christened him after a pop-star, some loose-mouthed, longhaired little good-for-nothing shrieking out nonsense, thin legs kept jerking by drugs in an obscene capering. But no—it was ‘the baby’, ‘the little one’. Perhaps, she thought, they dared not name him: dared not acknowledge, even to themselves…

  For the huge question in her mind was: how much do they know?

  For that matter—how much did she herself know? And what?—what in fact did she know? The Holy Child had been born already, had been born long ago. Vague thoughts of a Second Coming wandered through her brain, but was that not to be a major, a clearly recognisable event, something terrible, presaging the end of all things? The End. And the other had been the Beginning. Perhaps, she thought, there could be a Beginning-Again? Perhaps with everything having gone wrong with the world, there was going to be a second chance…?

  It was a long time since she had been to church. In the old days, yes; brought up the two girls to be good Catholics, washed and spruced-up for Mass every Sunday, convents, catechism, the lot. And much good it had done her!—married a couple of heathen G.I.s in the war and gone off to America for good—for good or ill, she did not know and could no longer care; for years had heard not a word from either of them. But now… She put on her crumpled old hat and, arthritically stumping, went off to St. Stephen’s.

  It was like being a schoolgirl again, all one’s childhood closing in about one; to be kneeling there in the stuffy, curtained darkness, to see the outlined profile crowned by the black hump of the biretta with its pom-pom atop, leaning against the little iron-work grill that was all that separated them. ‘In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost… Yes, my child?’

  In the name of the Father; and of the Son… She blurted out: ‘Father—I have the baby Jesus at my place.’

  He talked to her quietly and kindly, while waiting penitents shifted restlessly outside and thought, among their Firm Purposes of Amendment that the old girl must be having a right old load of sins to cough up. About chance, he spoke, and about coincidence, about having the Holy Child in one’s heart and not trying to—well, rationalise things… She thanked him, made of old habit the sign of the cross, and left. ‘Them others—they didn’t recognise Him either,’ she said to herself.

  And she came to her room and saw the quiet face bent over the sleeping baby lying in its wooden cradle; and surely—surely—there was a light about its head?

  On pay day, Jo brought in flowers again. But the vase got knocked over almost at once and the flowers and water spilt—there was no room for even the smallest extras in the close little room, now that Marilyn was up and sitting in the armchair with the wooden box beside her and the increasing paraphernalia of babyhood taking up so much of the scanty space. The car was being used as a sort of storage dump for anything not in daily use. ‘During the week-end,’ said Jo, ‘I’ll find us a place.’

  ‘A place?’ she said, as though the idea came freshly to her. But she had dreaded it. ‘Marilyn can’t be moved yet.’

  ‘By the end of the week?’ he said.

  ‘You’ve been so good,’ said Marilyn. ‘We can’t go on taking up your room. We’ll have to get somewhere.’

  But it wasn’t so easy. He spent all his evenings, after that, tramping round, searching; but as soon as he mentioned the baby, hearts and doors closed against him. She protested: ‘But I don’t want you to go. I got none of my own now, I like having you here.’ And she knelt, as she so often did, by the improvised wooden-box cradle and said, worshipping: ‘And I couldn’t lose—Him.’ And she went out and bought a second-hand bed and fixed that up in the shed, brought Marilyn in to her own bed, was happy to sleep on a mattress on the floor, the box-cradle close to her so that if the child stirred in the night, it was she who could hush it and croon to it and soothe it to sleep again. Is He all-knowing? she would wonder to herself, does He understand, even though He’s so small, does the Godhead in Him understand that it’s I who hold Him? Will I one day sit at the right hand of the Father because on this earth I nursed his only begotten Son…? (Well, His—second begotten Son…? It was all so difficult. And she dared not ask.)

  She had no close friends these days, but at last, one night, a little in her cups, she whispered it to Nellie down at the Dog. ‘You’ll never guess who I got at my place!’

  Nellie knocked back her fifth brown ale and volunteered a bawdy suggestion. ‘A boy and a girl,’ said Mrs. Vaughan, ignoring it. ‘And a Baby.’ And she thought of Him lying there in His wooden bed. ‘His little head,’ she said. ‘Behind His little head, you can see, like—a light. Shining in the darkness—a kind of a ring of light.’

  ‘You’ll see a ring of light round me,’ said Nellie, robustly, ‘if you put back another of them barley wines.’ And to the landlord she confided, when Mrs. Vaughan, a little bit tottery, had gone off home, ‘I believe she’s going off her rocker, honestly I do.’

  ‘She looked all right to me,’ said the landlord, who did not care for his regulars going off their rockers.

  ‘They’re after her stocking,’ said Nellie to the pub at large. ‘You’ll see. Them and their Baby Jesus. They’re after what she’s got.’

  And she set a little trap. ‘Hey, Billy, you work on the same site as this Jo of hers. Give him a knock some day about the old girl’s money. Got it in a stocking, saving it up for her funeral. Worried, she is, about being put in the common grave. Well, who isn’t? But she, she’s proper scared of it.’

  So Billy strolled up to Jo on the site, next break-time. ‘I hear you’re holed up with old Mother Vaughan, down near the Dog. After her stocking then, are you?’ And he pretended knowledge of its place of concealment. ‘Fill it up with something; she’ll never twig till after you’ve gone. Split me a third to two-thirds if I tell you where it’s hid?’

  And he looked up for the first time into Jo’s face and saw the look that Jo gave him: a look almost—terrible. ‘He come straight home,’ Mrs. Vaughan told Nellie in the pub that night, ‘and—“They’re saying you got money, Mrs. V.,” he says. “If you have, you should stash it away somewhere,” he says, “and let everyone know you’ve done it. Living here on your tod, it isn’t safe for you, people thinking you’re worth robbing.” ’ And he had explained to her how to pay it into the post office so that no one but herself could ever touch it. Only a few quid it was, scrimped and saved for her funeral. ‘I couldn’t a-bear to go into the common grave, not with all them strangers…’

  ‘Never mind the common grave, it’ll be the common bin for you, if you don’t watch out,’ said Nellie. ‘You and your Mary and Joseph—they come in a car, didn’t they, not on a donkey?’

  ‘You haven’t got eyes to see. You don’t live with them.’

  ‘They’ve lived other places before you. Did them other landladies have eyes to see?’

  What was the name—Mrs. Mace? Had Mrs. Mace had eyes to see, had she recognised, even before the baby came—? ‘Course not,’ said Nellie, crossly. ‘She chucked ’em out, didn’t she?’

  ‘No, she never. She was moving out herself to the country, her son or someone needed the flat.’ But if one could have seen Mrs. Mace, consulted with her…‘Don’t you ever visit your last landlady?’ she asked them casually. ‘Does she live too far?’

  ‘No, not far; but with the baby and all… All the same, Marilyn,’ said Jo, ‘we ought to go some day soon, just to see she’s all r
ight. Take you along,’ he suggested to Mrs. Vaughan. ‘You’d enjoy the drive and it’s a lovely place, all flowers and trees and a little stream.’

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t half like that. I dare say,’ said Mrs. Vaughan, craftily, ‘she thought a lot of you, that Mrs. Mace?’

  ‘She was very kind to us,’ said Marilyn. ‘Very kind.’

  ‘And the baby? She wasn’t, like—shocked?’

  ‘Shocked? She was thrilled,’ said Jo. And he used an odd expression: ‘Quietly thrilled.’

  So she had known. Mrs. Mace had known. The desire grew strong within Mrs. Vaughan’s anxious breast to see Mrs. Mace, to discuss, to question, to talk it all over. With familiarity, with the lessening of the first impact of her own incredulous wonder, it became more difficult to understand that others should not share her faith. ‘I tell you, I see the light shining behind His head!’ She confided it to strangers on buses, to casual acquaintances on their way to the little local shops. They pretended interest and hastily detached themselves. ‘Poor thing—another of them loonies,’ they said with the mirthless sniggers of those who find themselves outside normal experience, beyond their depths. She was becoming notorious, a figure of fun.

  The news reached the ears of the landlord, a local man. He came round to the house and afterwards spoke to the boy. ‘I’ve told her—you can’t all go on living in that one little room, it’s not decent.’

  ‘There’s the shed,’ said Jo. ‘I sleep out in the shed.’

  ‘You won’t like that for long,’ said the man with a leer.

  Billy had seen that look, on the building site. But the boy only said quietly: ‘You couldn’t let us have another room? She says they’re only used for storage.’

  ‘They’re let—storage or not, no business of mine. For that matter,’ said the man, growing cunning, ‘it’s no business of mine how you live or what you do. Only… Well, three and a kid for the price of one—’