A Clear Conscience (11 page)

E
mily Eliot sang as she worked. Occasionally, when her usual reserve deserted her, Cath would croon a little too, stopping if she thought she was heard. For some reason Emily could not discern, Cath rarely seemed to get further than ‘Onward Christian Soldiers', and only the first verse of that. ‘With the blood of Jesus, going on before!' The words would emerge in the midst of a barely recognisable tune, half grunted, half sung. She and Emily rarely sang in unison, although that was often the way they worked. There was never a shortage of tasks in the long mornings Cath spent in the house. One day a week, they would tackle something specific. Today it was a large dressing room attached to the main bedroom. Emily was sure it had moths in it. One of Alistair's suits had been eaten to death. She did not enjoy these joint tasks: they made her loud.

‘Little
sods,' Emily yelled. ‘Look at that! Why the hell can't they go for cheap old sweaters? Why concentrate on the one thing which costs money? Mohair and something, this was once. Nice and soft for them to get their little teeth into, they can't even make an effort. Look at it.'

‘He didn't wear it once, last winter,' Cath pointed out. Emily beamed, her rage subsiding. Put Cath in here, with her awful disinfectant smell, the moths would die anyway.

‘He never really liked it, that's why.' She emerged from the depths with an armful of clothes on hangers.

‘In fact, most of the things in the back of here no-one really likes. I just hate the thought of the bloody moths chomping away without asking permission first. Most of this belongs on the rubbish heap. Unless there's anything you want, of course.'

‘I'll think about it, can I?'

Emily nodded, suppressing the irritation which so often beset her when she and Cath worked in close proximity. It was a reluctance to touch her, no more than that, which Emily translated into a slight aversion to one who was at once so passive and deferential, and at other times as stubborn as a mule. She knew Cath would take the clothes as soon as her back was turned. She just could not do it while she was being watched, and that was irritating too. If Cath felt the slightest insult at the idea that she was a fitting recipient for old garments otherwise unfit to wear, she did not show it and knew no such insult was intended. There were features of the upper middle class which made Cath marvel. The money they had never seemed to go on new things: people like Emily could bargain like a trader in an Eastern market, she was always making do. The children wore hand-me-downs without complaint since they had long since realised there was no choice; the cars were far from streamlined and the furniture was old. Cath could see the value of the furniture she treated with such care, but although she admired the taste, she wondered why Emily would not give her the second-hand rug with the faded colours and get herself a new one. If their positions were reversed, she was quite sure that Emily herself would take home the contents of her employer's wardrobe without turning a hair.

‘Coffee,'
said Emily firmly. Cleaning ladies were supposed to have a reputation for time-wasting gossip, talking when they should be working, or so she heard, but here, the situation was reversed. Emily talked, at length, about nothing and everything, and it was usually Cath who rose and said, time to get on. Emily sometimes talked to avoid the challenge of silence and a sense of intimacy she resented, but she did not admit that, even to herself. It seemed ungrateful. Instead, she loathed, without comment, the way Cath ate wholemeal bread with open-mouthed hunger, never closing her mouth until it was finished. They went downstairs, Cath last, Emily singing and shouting for Jane. Cath watched her.

On the first landing, Jane appeared, with one finger over her lips in a request for Cath to say nothing, then took her hand. She was an affectionate child; they all were, even Mark, the surly teenage son home from school. He would greet Cath with a bear hug; she would pretend to protest, giddy with the sensation of outrageous affection. She bent towards Jane. ‘What is it? A game? Are you hiding?'

‘No. I got something for you. Quick.' She darted away into her father's study. Cath shook her head. Mr Eliot's study was strictly taboo: no child was allowed inside; even Cath herself was forbidden to enter Alistair's domain which remained more or less orderly, the way he was himself. Cath made a warning tut, tut.

‘Lovey, you know you shouldn't be in here. What if Mum catches you?'

‘I know,' Jane whispered. ‘But I wanted to draw you a picture and I didn't have any paper. Not the right kind.'

The
child loved the perforated listing paper which spilled out of the old and faithful printer in the study. Her own supplies were never as good as those she stole, and Cath could see the point. Jane held up a banner of three pages, waving it like a flimsy flag. The multicoloured drawing began with a large head, wearing a hat with flowers. A stalk-like neck led on to the next sheet, containing a thin torso with the suggestion of a bosom, dressed in a black dress with straps over the shoulders. The waist led on to curvy hips and the final sheet depicted a pair of inordinately slender legs ending in high heels, and the name CATH.

‘It's a picture of you,' Jane said, urgently, impatient at the lack of comprehension. ‘You. Going to a party. In Mummy's clothes. Can't you tell? Here.' She thrust the fluttering paper, already creased, towards Cath's calloused hands and Cath wanted to weep. Emily's voice came from the kitchen, faint but definite from this level.

‘Thank you,' said Cath gravely. ‘Thank you very much indeed. I shall keep it for ever.'

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?'

S
ometimes 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?

T
hou
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, like a kind of spittle she could not avoid. The pages she turned were damp.