V for Victory

by Lissa Evans

  They shook hands again, and Winnie walked back up the hill towards Highgate Tube, while Noel headed in the opposite direction for half a mile, before taking a narrow passage that ran between two stucco houses and emerged at the edge of the Heath. The only noise was the faint pitter of snow. The grass was already covered, though the layer was still so thin that when he turned to watch a group of rooks lifting lazily above the old gun emplacement, he could see the long, straight line of his own footsteps, like a green zip fastener across a white gown. And it occurred to him then that he’d forgotten to mention to Winnie his attempts to find the Green Man at the V&A, and that this omission might mean that they might speak again at some point, and that he could hear more about Ida Pearse, who could stalk with the panther skill of the Last of the Mohicans and quell bullies with a single glare …

  The reporter who usually attended North London Crown Court for the Monday sessions had gone down with ’flu, and Jepson had volunteered to take his place. He’d been hoping for spivs or fraudsters but had been landed with an interminable case based on the illegally high percentage of sugar that a Palmer’s Green confectioner had been using in his fruitcakes (‘The cook’s hand may have shaken when putting in the sugar,’ said Mr Harry Ricketts, defending …’). By lunch-time, he was having to pinch his arm in order to stay awake.

  Brookes from the Evening Standard was off to Islington to review a pantomime (‘Goldi-fucking-locks and the three moth-eaten fur coats from the director’s gran’s wardrobe’) and the youngster from the Muswell Hill Advertiser was so new and conscientious that she was spending the entire lunch hour transcribing her notes, so Jepson sat alone in the window seat of a cold little restaurant, its floor footprinted with melting slush, and ate stewed oxtail (not a patch on Noel’s) while reading a rather racy new novel about air-raid wardens, borrowed from the arts desk.

  He was waiting for the bill when he noticed his landlady on the opposite pavement, peering into the fogged-up window of a café. She stepped back, looked up at the street name and then at the name of the café, before once again edging up to the glass. The whole set of her shoulders signalled uncertainty. When she half turned, he lifted a hand, but her eyes scraped past him, unseeing. He had not, in any case, had anything approaching a conversation with her since their exchange about Corporal O’Mahoney three days before. You’re an idiot, he thought to himself, for about the fiftieth time. There’d been absolutely no need to actually tell Mrs Overs what had seemed fairly obvious to him – attuned as he was from decades of court-reporting – even before he’d spotted O’Mahoney just after New Year, exiting the woods at the top of the Heath a step or two ahead of a flushed-looking airman; she’d clearly had the time of her life with the corporal, had laughed her head off and dropped ten years and skipped around like a schoolgirl, and where was the harm in that? – it had been finite; she wasn’t going to end up pregnant in the middle of Nebraska, with coyotes tugging at her washing, like half the girls in Norfolk. And God knows there’d been no malice in the man: he’d been bonhomie personified, had shaken up the house like a snow-globe and made Jepson feel like the dreary bore that Della had always labelled him.

  He watched Mrs Overs touch the handle of the café door as if there were a chance it was electrified, and then spring aside as the door opened, emitting an elderly man, and a gout of steam. She caught it before it closed again, and went inside, and Jepson, drawn by curiosity, paid his bill and crossed the street.

  From the pavement, he could see her seated at a table against the side wall, her posture rigid, her hands clasped, her eyes fixed on the entrance. It took him a moment to define her expression, and when he realized, with a jolt, that it was fear, he was through the café door before he could think about it.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ he said, taking off his hat as he approached, threading between the cramped grid of tables.

  Her eyes widened and then darted past him towards the door again. ‘Afternoon.’ Her voice was all air.

  ‘I was passing, and saw you here. I’m working at the Courts today.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’

  ‘I’ve ordered. Thank you.’

  ‘Could I …?’ He indicated the other chair at her table.

  ‘No. Sorry. I’m waiting to meet someone.’ Her speech was staccato, terrified, but she forced a dreadful smile. ‘Thank you very much,’ she added, turning her head so that she was looking away from him and towards the yellow-painted wall by her shoulder, its surface slick with condensation.

  Jepson hesitated, and then sat at the table immediately behind, so that he was back to back with her, their chairs almost touching. He heard her tea arrive, and ordered a pot for himself.

  ‘Please could you go,’ said Vee, when the waitress had left.

  ‘I shouldn’t like to walk off without knowing why you look so frightened. Is there anything I can do to help?’

  ‘No.’

  He could hear her spoon tinkling in the teapot, mashing the leaves.

  ‘I’ve often had conversations in this way,’ he said, turning his head slightly, talking along the wall, his speech clear but quiet. ‘I do it when I need to interview someone who’d rather not be seen to be talking to a reporter. You can put a hand to your mouth – I have pretty good hearing, despite everything.’

  ‘I don’t need you to stay, Mr Jepson.’

  ‘What if I give you my promise that if the person you’re waiting for arrives, I’ll leave immediately and say nothing at all, then or in the future. Would that be acceptable?’

  She didn’t reply, but he took the silence as assent, and when his tea came, he ordered a jam roll and custard, to give himself an excuse to stay longer. And he speculated on why she might be frightened, though the exercise made him realize that despite almost a year in the same house, he knew nothing about Margery Overs beyond the basic facts of her everyday life; that she worried about money, loved going to the cinema, attended chapel apparently out of habit rather than obvious religious fervour, and danced to the wireless when she thought no one could see her; that she was a good needlewoman, and dressed well on very little; that she noticed everything; that she moved and spoke quickly and that even her laugh was abrupt. She was a widow, but never mentioned her husband; she was Noel’s aunt, but never mentioned his parents – the social and educational mismatch between her and the boy was striking, but so, too, was their closeness. As a landlady, she was unusual, lacking the territorial instincts of her breed; there was little division of the house between ‘mine’ and ‘theirs’, so that Green Shutters, despite its cavernous cold, felt far more of a home than the lodgings he’d lived in as a young man; far more of a home, in fact, than the flat he’d shared with Della.

  If Jepson’s reporter instincts had noted anything, it was that Mrs Overs always acted as if she had fifty things that she wanted to say but was forcing herself to hold back at least forty-seven of them. Some of those were bound to be secrets; everyone had secrets.

  The jam roll, somewhat lacking in jam, arrived and was eaten. The weak tea was sipped. The café, busy when he’d entered, fell into a mid-afternoon lull.

  Vee, still glancing up every time the door opened, could sense Jepson just behind her, though she was careful not to turn her head. The letter she’d received had not specified an exact time, only that she should be in the Rose Café from two o’clock onward, and that she was to bring payment in a paper bag rather than an envelope. ‘As I know what you look like, there is no need to describe myself.’ For a mad moment, when Jepson had doffed his hat to her, she’d thought that he must be the mysterious letter-writer, blackmailing her from within the house, but it had turned out that he was just being unwontedly kind. Unwantedly. Though she was quite glad, now, not to be alone in the café during the wait.

  She leaned an elbow on the table and put a hand to her lips. ‘Shouldn’t you be at work?’

  ‘I can get the notes from the other reporter, later on. Besides, it was a very dull case.
’

  ‘Was it?’

  ‘It revolved around Clause 5 of the National Emergency Confectionery Law of 1939. The sort of thing that ends up as two paragraphs on page seven.’

  Vee stiffened as the café door opened again, and then relaxed at the sight of two women with shopping. For the umpteenth time, she checked her handbag, wedged between her feet. It contained Dr Simpkin’s jewellery, rolled in a piece of oil-cloth and placed in a paper bag: a garnet brooch, a ring that might be a sapphire, a necklace that looked expensive. She had kept back some of the other items in case the blackmailer asked again, because she knew that’s what blackmailers did. ‘I am aware that you are not actually Noel Bostock’s aunt, and that you are therefore living in Green Shutters under false pretences and using an assumed identity, something that would certainly be of considerable interest to the police.’ She’d opened the letter in the kitchen and had almost dropped dead, her heart jumping around like a clockwork monkey, the cheap paper gripped so tightly that her thumbnail had gone straight through the signature. Yours sincerely, A concerned observer. Thank God she’d been on her own, because it had been minutes before her lips had stopped trembling – and yet, beyond the shock, there had been an awful sense of inevitability; she’d spent half of her life waiting for one axe or another to fall.

  ‘You could tell me about an interesting case,’ she said to Jepson. ‘To take my mind off.’

  ‘All right.’ He thought for a moment. ‘Last month I reported on a woman who received a summons for failing to comply with a Ministry of Labour direction. She was supposed to report to a factory as a trainee, but she said she was already doing work of extreme national importance.’ He left an enticing pause.

  ‘What was it?’ asked Vee.

  ‘Spiritual healing. Using her nose.’

  ‘Her nose?’

  ‘She’d stand in front of the person and smell which parts of them required healing. And then she would take a scent bottle – one that had been blessed – and squirt that particular part. She had numerous testimonials from satisfied customers.’

  Vee was assailed by the jealousy she always felt when learning about people who made easy money, apparently legally. ‘Did they say what sort of scent it was?’ she asked.

  ‘Cedar, I think. I rather suspect it was a moth spray.’

  Vee almost laughed, and then remembered where she was, and why she was there, and it was as if someone had dropped a cinder block on her heart. ‘Oh dear God,’ she said, involuntarily, and covered her face with her hands.

  ‘I wish I could help you,’ said Jepson, half turning.

  ‘You can’t.’

  ‘You know, there isn’t much I haven’t seen or heard about – I’ve covered crime and scandal and cruelty and extortion, and I can’t think of anything that shocks me any longer. Are you being dunned for a loan? If you need some money, I could help you out.’

  From the corner of his eye, he saw her shake her head.

  ‘Or is someone threatening you in some way?’

  She straightened, as if jabbed in the back. He spoke even more softly. ‘Are you being blackmailed?’

  The door opened as he said the words, and Vee flinched so violently that the table jerked forward and her empty tea cup fell over.

  ‘Can I get you anything else?’ asked the elderly waitress, rather crossly. By the entrance, a small girl and her mother were shaking snow off their matching tam-o’shanters.

  ‘Another tea, please,’ said Vee, her voice wavering like a musical saw.

  ‘I’ll have a cocoa,’ said Jepson, and then, as the waitress left, he turned his head towards the wall again. ‘It’s much commoner than you might think – there’s a case in the paper every week because nearly everyone has something they’d rather keep hidden. Often it’s not even a past crime, it’s just something quite ordinary – a shameful moment – and half the time the blackmailer has no intention of actually exposing the victim, because they’d end up in trouble themselves. My advice would be: don’t.’

  ‘Don’t what?’

  ‘Pay up.’

  There’s the voice of someone who’s never heard the policeman’s knock, thought Vee. ‘Easy for you to say,’ she said.

  ‘You might think that,’ said Jepson, ‘but I spent twenty-four years in a marriage that should have ended in five, because I was blackmailed. Not for money – well, it was partly for money, I suppose …’

  Footsteps approached. ‘One cocoa. One tea,’ announced the waitress. ‘You do know that we don’t charge extra if you want to sit at the same table,’ she added, tartly.

  Vee gave her a look. ‘Go on,’ she said, once the waitress had left. ‘If you can, I mean. If you want to.’ She kept her eye on the window, on the passers-by, bulky with scarves, heads down against the snow, and Jepson ran a finger over his moustache and wondered why he had just told someone he scarcely knew a fact that he had never told anyone else, and he thought that it was partly because he wasn’t having to look her in the eye. An inadvertent confessional; the Catholics knew a thing or two.

  ‘So what was your wife’s name?’ asked Vee.

  ‘Della.’

  ‘Where did you meet her?’

  ‘On a tram, not long after the war – I gave her my seat. I was very young, and she was a few years older and she was worried that she’d never find anyone, like half the girls of her generation, I suppose – and I had a profession, and prospects.’

  ‘What did she look like?’

  ‘Delicate. Dainty.’ A porcelain shepherdess, he’d thought, the mud of the trenches still in his eyes. She had seemed like a miracle; he had thought that no one would ever want him.

  ‘And what happened?’

  ‘Oh …’ He’d never tried to frame it in words before; it was like using a rusty typewriter. ‘She was disappointed. I disappointed her. Time went by and we didn’t have the children we’d hoped for. And I worked irregular hours and it wasn’t as … as important a job as she’d thought. She felt I’d let her down; she was bitter.’ The missing ear, which hadn’t seemed to matter at first, had become the focus of her misery. ‘That’s the reason you never listen to me,’ she’d said. Shouted. Involuntarily, he placed a hand over the ugly crinkle of scar tissue. ‘I wanted a divorce, but Della refused – she said that she couldn’t manage on her own, that it would be humiliating. She said that people would either pity or despise her.’

  ‘Only rich women can get away with divorce,’ said Vee.

  Jepson, startled, looked round at her. ‘But I would have made sure that she always had enough money to live on … Anyway, eventually I decided I couldn’t stick it any longer,’ he said, turning back again. ‘I told her I was going to move out.’

  ‘And is that when you were blackmailed?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But who by?’

  He made a harsh noise, like a heel scraped along the floor. ‘By Della. She said if I left, she would put her head in the gas oven.’

  There was a shocked pause.

  ‘Do you think she would have?’ asked Vee.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Jepson. ‘Yes, she’d have done that.’ There had never been much of a gap between Della’s emotions and her actions. He had learned to expect violence in both: her knuckles jabbing at him in frustration – always the head, the ear. He thought with crawling horror of that moment in the kitchen at the Methodist Christmas party, when Mrs Claxton had shot out a hand and for a second it had been Della, and he’d cringed and covered his head, as he’d done so many times, for so long.

  He wondered, now, how he’d endured it. There had, he supposed, been odd weeks of almost-normality, odd days of ordinary companionship, an occasional smile that had met with another; the years had slithered by and somehow he’d divided himself, so that at work he’d remained the dependable Jepson, diffident but well liked, and at home he’d been something hopeless and shapeless, a glove puppet playing the same character for every performance, Judy to Della’s Punch. And then, abruptly, it had ended. />
  ‘It’s a rotten story, really,’ he said. ‘Two miserable people who shouldn’t have been together.’

  ‘So when did your wife pass away?’ asked Vee.

  ‘Pass away? No, Della’s living in Stevenage. She left me. A cousin of hers died and willed her a house and nine thousand pounds, and she was gone the week after. You were right about rich women; she’s already filed for divorce.’

  ‘No!’

  Vee, gaping, swung right round to look at him, and he managed a wretched half-smile. ‘Ridiculous, isn’t it?’

  ‘But what a – a – well, I won’t say what I think of her.’

  ‘No, don’t,’ said Jepson, looking down at his hands. He wanted to simply leave that part of his life behind, now, like the south-coast train of his childhood, holiday-bound, dividing at Haywards Heath, one part carrying on to the crowded seaside, the other swinging eastward, to the open light of the Downs. ‘There,’ he said, looking up again. ‘I’ve told you my tale.’ And if he hadn’t told her the whole of it, it was still more than he’d ever vouchsafed to anyone else.

  Vee remembered where she was, and turned her gaze to the door again. ‘It’s not the same for me,’ she said. ‘For a start, I don’t know who wrote the letter, and if that person ever decided to tell the …’ She paused. ‘The thing is, I wouldn’t want you to think I’d done anything wicked.’ Because, after all, which commandment had she actually broken by pretending to be Noel’s relation? There was ‘Thou shalt not lie,’ of course, but that had never seemed like a truly enforceable rule, since if it were, it would result in a hell stuffed not only with murderers and adulterers but also people who’d told the man from the rates that they hadn’t heard the knock because they’d been in the outside lav.

  ‘Of course it wasn’t wicked,’ said Jepson.

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Because you’re not a wicked person.’ He said it simply, just as someone might say, ‘You’re not wearing gloves,’ and Vee felt a bizarre rush of pride.

  ‘I did it for a proper reason,’ she said. ‘I almost had to do it.’ The snow was beginning to turn to sleet, clumps of ice sliding down the window. ‘But what good will it do if I tell you?’