by Lissa Evans
One of the daughters gave a sob, and Vee looked away, trying to dispel the awful image of Mr Embleton’s last moments. The courtroom was nearly empty: a single reporter in the back row, and a stenographer working at a desk to one side. The two Americans were sitting as far away from Embleton’s family as they possibly could, the driver of the lorry looking down at his enormous boots, and the officer staring directly at Vee. She felt another jolt of nerves.
The coroner was making a series of notes; for a minute or two there was no noise except the soft scrape of his pen, and then he looked up at Vee. She knew the type: a homely potato-face and a gaze like a paring-knife.
‘So, Mrs Overs, would you say you had a clear view of the accident?’
‘Yes, quite clear.’
‘Could you speak up a little, so that our stenographer can hear?’
‘Sorry. Yes, it was clear.’
‘And how near to the deceased were you?’
‘I was next to him.’
‘Could I remind you to speak up, Mrs Overs?’
‘Yes, sorry. I was right next to him – I was talking to him just before it happened. If I hadn’t stepped away, I would have been hit myself.’
‘And are you certain of the sequence of events in your statement: first the lorry made the complete turn into the wrong lane, then it braked, and then it skidded?’
Was she certain? She’d related the memory so many times that it now had all the lustre and detail of a scene in a film, whereas at the time it had simply been a sliding blur.
‘I think so,’ she said, suddenly less confident.
‘You think so?’
‘Yes.’
‘I see.’
He made another note. ‘And Sergeant Bayliss, can you assure me that efforts were made to find the taxi driver in question?’
‘Yes, Your Honour. We made enquiries at all the West End ranks, and left a wall poster appealing for information at the nearest cabmen’s shelters, but no one came forward.’
‘It’s a great pity. A crowded street, and we have only a single witness. Quite an indictment of public spirit, I’d say.’
Yes, thought Vee, because who wouldn’t want to spend a freezing December morning dragging themselves halfway across London in order to be treated like a criminal, for no pay?
‘Very well, so be it. Thank you, Mrs Overs – no, don’t leave quite yet. Captain Van Steen?’
The coroner looked over at the American officer, who stood up and straightened his jacket before walking in a leisurely fashion towards the witness box.
‘Captain Van Steen is counsel for Corporal O’Mahoney, the driver of the lorry,’ said the coroner, to Vee. ‘He wishes to ask you one or two questions, on behalf of the Army of the United States of America. Captain Van Steen, in this country, we address the witness from the counsel’s stand.’
‘I’m sorry, Your Honour.’ The captain turned, but not before he’d got so close to Vee that she’d caught a whiff of his shaving soap. He had pale blue eyes and hair so blond and close-cut that it was almost invisible. He returned to his seat and stood in front of it, hands clasped across his stomach, just above his belt.
‘Mrs Overs, I imagine that it must have been a very frightening experience for you?’ His voice was unexpectedly soft, and his accent was strange to her, neither Gene Kelly nor Gary Cooper. Ah ee-magine. Ver’ fratt-nin.
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘And it must all have happened very fast?’ Ver’ fay-ust.
‘Yes.’
‘And it was a very cold day, I understand, and the road was very icy?’
‘Yes, it was.’
The coroner made an impatient gesture. ‘Captain Van Steen, could I request that you confine yourself to questions to which we don’t already know the answer? As I’m sure you’re aware, we are already running nearly an hour behind time, due to your late arrival, inadvertent though the delay may have been.’
‘I’m sorry, Your Honour, I was just trying to set the scene.’
‘Consider it set.’
‘Yes, Your Honour.’ The pale blue eyes moved back to Vee again, but the brisk exchange had had an oddly calming effect on her; the American’s knuckles had been rapped, but hers were unscathed. She almost wished that Noel had been allowed in, so that he could see how well she was conducting herself.
‘Could you tell me then, Mrs Overs, precisely what you were doing when you heard a shout.’
‘I was talking to the gentleman.’
‘To the deceased?’
‘Yes.’
‘Talking about what? Can you recall?’
‘Well, we were talking about … about his wife, as a matter of fact. He was telling me that he’d hurt his ankle out dancing at the Palais, and that he’d first met Mrs Embleton at a dance in Kentish Town. It was a nice conversation – a happy one.’
She dared to glance at the family. Now all three women were crying.
‘So you were occupied in discussing this when you heard the shout.’
‘Yes, but then I looked up straight away and I saw a …’ She hesitated, trying to remember what the Yanks called lorries – they had a different word for them. Wagons, was it?
‘Vee,’ said Captain Van Steen, clearly and firmly.
The world seemed to stop, but momentum flung her onwards so that she lurched towards the front of the witness box and stuck out a hand. It clapped against the wood with a hollow boom.
‘It’s Mrs Overs,’ she said, her voice a startled gabble. ‘Mrs Margery Olive Overs.’
Van Steen’s head was cocked, his expression that of someone who’d just heard a dog miaowing. Out of the corner of her eye, Vee could see the coroner lean forward.
‘Are you feeling unwell, Mrs Overs?’
Unwell? She felt as if she were just about to drop dead. She looked from one man to the other. What was going on? Was it a trap of some kind? How did the American know her real name? Was she about to be arrested for impersonation?
‘I’m all right,’ she said from a mouth full of sand.
‘You were telling us,’ continued Captain Van Steen, ‘that you saw a vehicle.’
Vee-hicle.
He pronounced the word with the emphasis all on the first syllable.
VEE-hicle.
Oh, for heaven’s sake, thought Vee, revelation dawning. She heard herself make a noise like the starting wheeze of a set of bagpipes, half relief, half hysterical laughter at the absurdity of her mistake, and she brought up a hand to her lips to choke it off.
‘Mrs Overs, do you need a glass of water, or a brief adjournment?’ asked the coroner. ‘I do hope not,’ he added, pointedly. Vee shook her head, though the courtroom seemed to be gently rotating, with the Embletons and the Americans bobbing up and down, as if on a merry-go-round.
‘It was a lorry,’ she said, between her fingers. ‘A … a … wagon.’
‘Could I remind you to speak clearly, Mrs Overs.’
‘Do you mean a truck?’ asked the captain.
‘Yes, an army truck. And it turned and skidded.’
The captain seemed to stiffen.
‘It turned. And it skidded.’ He repeated the words slowly, as if they had tremendous significance.
‘Yes, and it braked. It braked as well as skidded, it did both, I saw it do both.’ Words seemed to be spraying out of her mouth, almost at random.
‘And before it skidded, had the truck completed the turn, or was it still in the process of turning?’
‘Captain Van Steen, we have already been through this sequence of events,’ said the coroner.
The American ducked his head, deferentially. ‘I beg your pardon, sir, but I believe this sequence is the crux of the matter, it being the only point on which the driver and the witness differ. And if the witness is not entirely certain about it, and I submit that it appears to be the case that she is not entirely certain, then I’m sure you’ll understand the need to go through it one more time.’
‘Oh, very well, then. Mrs Overs, co
uld I ask you to concentrate extremely hard on what Captain Van Steen is about to ask you?’
She nodded, aware that the eyes of everyone in the court were fixed upon her. Even the lorry driver was looking up now. He had the wide, loose, black-eyed face of a mastiff.
‘So Mrs Overs,’ said the captain. ‘What exactly happened after you saw the VEE-hicle begin to turn?’ And there it was again, that misplaced syllable flying across the room and knocking her off course so that her answer was a hopeless fumble of contradictions in which the lorry either skidded, turned or braked before either braking, turning or skidding, and even as her mouth moved, she was doubting her own words. It was like recounting a fever dream, the images splintering and dissolving. Had she even been in Oxford Street in the first place?
‘Thank you, Mrs Overs,’ said the captain, interrupting her.
‘… I think,’ she heard herself add, in a final flourish of self-doubt.
‘Thank you,’ he repeated, sounding genuinely grateful.
‘You may step down, Mrs Overs,’ said the coroner, not sounding grateful at all.
The usher gestured her to the exit, and as Vee passed the three Embletons, the old lady gave her a pale nod, a tiny flexion of the features that was perhaps an attempt at a smile, and Vee didn’t know what to do with her own face – whether to offer sympathy or apology – so she mouthed, ‘I’m sorry,’ which covered both.
Noel clapped his book shut when he saw her.
‘What’s wrong?’ he asked.
She kept walking towards the outer door, and he hurried to catch up with her. The hall outside was patterned with wet footprints, and she could see a thin, icy snowfall rattling against the lobby window, like rice at a cheap wedding.
‘I think I made a fool of myself,’ she said, putting on her gloves. ‘Not for the first time.’
‘Did you tell the truth?’
‘I tried,’ she said. ‘But it’s not nearly as easy as you’d think – one of the Yanks was badgering me about what I’d seen, he was going on and on, and then for a second I thought he said … well, I’ll tell you all about it on the way to the bus stop. Knowing you, you’ll think it’s funny.’
Noel opened the door, and snow blew into his face. ‘I’m just going outside and may be some time,’ he said, cryptically, pulling up his green scarf to cover his nose and mouth, and she followed him into the street, ducking a little as the cold wind hit her. He was almost tall enough to shield her from the weather and she shouted the vee-hicle story over his shoulder as they walked towards Kingsway, and sensed, rather than heard, his laughter.
‘The Americans will be pleased, anyway,’ he said.
‘Why?’
‘Because I expect the driver’s story was that he’d started to turn correctly before accidentally skidding across both lanes, and since you’re the only witness to say otherwise …’
‘You mean that he’ll end up getting away with it because of me?’
‘Probably.’
She didn’t quite know how she felt about that. ‘I suppose, either way, it wasn’t deliberate,’ she said.
‘But it was careless. If I waved a kitchen knife without looking and accidentally killed Mr Reddish, would that be my fault? And should I be punished for it?’
‘If you did it when he was halfway through a poem, I’d give you a prize.’
Well, she had done her utmost, she thought – though it seemed that her utmost had been, as ever, inadequate. And then she checked her stride, her whole body suddenly suffused with a glorious slackness, an unknotting that was almost spiritual (‘Burst Satan’s bonds, oh God of might!’) because the ordeal was over now. Other people might eulogize about love at first sight or joy in the morning but, personally, she didn’t know of any feeling more wonderful than that of sheer relief – the trap avoided, the snare broken. She’d got away with it again. Even though this time, of course, she hadn’t actually done anything wrong.
The cataclysm occurred three days later, on a viciously cold and sunny afternoon.
Noel had spent the morning at Dr Parry-Jones’s surgery in Finchley, dissecting the embalmed rat that she’d ordered for his birthday. It had actually been rather less interesting than he’d anticipated, but then the same applied to most of Dr Parry-Jones’s lessons. She taught him the sciences one fact at a time – cementing a straight and unvarying pathway, along which they progressed at a steady pace. There was thoroughness to her method, but no excitement or spontaneity; it made him ache for the way that Mattie had unfolded knowledge like a vivid map, showing him a dozen routes to every destination. Nevertheless, he found occasional, comfortable echoes of his godmother in the doctor’s presence: the large, blunt-nailed hands with their shiny knuckles, the coiled and plaited white hair, the knee-creaks, the deliberation it took to rise from a chair.
Noel and the rat had been placed in a small, windowless room – a makeshift pharmacy adjoining the consulting room, and containing a spirit stove, a pestle and mortar, a set of scales and a padlocked cupboard. While Dr Parry-Jones had been seeing patients, Noel had worked from the diagrams in a brittle-leafed textbook. He had measured the length of the gut (two feet, seven and a quarter inches from mouth to anus) and dissected the heart, flushing out the dark sludge to reveal the neatness of the four chambers. He had also sketched the lungs, weighed the liver and failed totally to find the spleen. The rat’s eyes had been partially open, its expression one of understandable disbelief.
Far more interesting than rodent viscera had been the odd snatches of speech seeping under the door. He’d tried not to be prurient – had actually stuffed his fingers in his ears a couple of times – but despite this, the hoarse weeping of one woman had cut through: ‘… he promised he’d be careful, he promised, he promised. Oh God, what will I ever tell my husband …?’ Dr Parry-Jones’s answer had not been audible.
‘Your initial cut has a distinct slant,’ she said afterwards, inspecting the hollow carcass. ‘I wonder if you suffer from astigmatism. When did you last see an optician?’
‘I can’t remember,’ said Noel, who had never seen one. Mattie had trusted her own judgement in all matters political, educational and medical, and Vee rigorously avoided talking to anyone at all in authority, just in case they wrongfooted her with a trick question such as ‘What is your name?’
‘I’ve noticed that you’ve recently had a growth spurt, which can accentuate minor ocular irregularities. But apart from that’ – the doctor peered at the cluster of organs laid out like a Lilliputian butcher’s display – ‘you’ve done quite well. Where is the spleen?’
‘I must have vented it,’ said Noel. There was no change of expression on the doctor’s face beyond a slight crease of puzzlement. ‘I don’t know,’ he amended, rather feebly.
‘Perhaps you should think about studying medicine,’ said Dr Parry-Jones as he helped her to clear up, swabbing the marble counter-top with disinfectant. ‘You have both the brain and the stomach for it.’ Noel mentally filed the suggestion next to ‘architectural historian’.
On the way back to Hampstead, the combination of Jeyes Fluid and formaldehyde meant that he had the front seat of the bus to himself. The morning frost had held hard, though a strip had melted along the very tops of the hedges, and the sight of this prompted Noel to ring the bell two stops early, and alight at Winnington Road. The official entrance to the nine-hole Hampstead golf course was halfway down it, but Noel took his usual route, walking brazenly along the side passage of a house called The Cedars, and squeezing between a fence post and a tree. He emerged into a crystalline world, every twig and bramble feathery with hoar frost, the grass of the fairway squeaking underfoot. A single golfer was visible in the far distance, teeing up on the third.
Noel kept to the sunlit parts of the course, his gaze on the ground. Almost immediately he spotted a ball at the edge of the rough, its skull-cap of ice newly melted. It was greenish-grey, old but intact, and he pocketed it and carried on looking, kneeling to grope around the familiar h
ollows at the base of a beech, and to prise the ice from a half-thawed rivulet. He’d found another two by the time he’d reached the solitary golfer.
‘Available for purchase,’ said Noel, holding out a ball.
‘Is it, indeed?’ The man looked at it speculatively. ‘How much?’
‘Six shillings.’
‘Oh, don’t be ridiculous.’
Noel nodded and turned away.
‘No, no, wait a moment.’
The man was already groping for his wallet. He was wearing a Russian fur hat, dewed with condensation, and a leather coat, a muffler at the neck. ‘Do you just have the one?’
‘Three, altogether.’
‘I’ll give you ten bob for them.’
‘No, the total for three is eighteen shillings.’
‘Don’t be cute. I’m bargaining.’
‘And I’m selling golf balls at six shillings apiece. You’re welcome to buy them elsewhere.’
‘Yes, very amusing, you know quite well that they’re not available.’ The man took off a glove and picked out two notes and a handful of coins. ‘I’ve been jewed, no doubt. Why aren’t you at school?’ he asked, stowing the balls in his golf bag.
‘Why aren’t you at work?’ countered Noel, walking rapidly away, the money crackling in his pocket. Vee would be tickled pink.
He arrived home to find a lorry parked outside the house – an American Army truck, grey-green, the cab empty, the engine still ticking. A tarpaulin was stretched and roped over a large and irregular load, and across the tailgate someone had painted a life-sized reclining blonde woman in a very short skirt, her stocking tops fully visible. The words ‘IDLIN’ IVY’ were written beneath her.
The driver was sitting in the kitchen.
‘Oh, Noel!’ said Vee, turning as he came in through the scullery door. ‘This is Corporal O’Mahoney.’ She looked strange, her mouth relaxed, almost as if she’d just been laughing, her face flushed. It was a moment before Noel could pull his gaze away from her, and look instead at the baggy Hercules on the other side of the table.