A Clear Conscience (25 page)

I love you looking jubilant and greedy, Bailey
wanted to say, and I am sorry for my evasions, equally sorry for yours this week. He thought they were up to date on Cath the cleaning lady, he had told her most of what he knew, including Cath in her high-rise flat receiving advice from PC Secura. He knew rather less of what Cath had been doing in Helen's house for most of the week. Since he had, as she put it, flounced away from the mess, access had been either unsought or denied, but all distractions forgotten, she was as sunny as the weather this Saturday night. Bailey placed his hand over hers, wanting to say something momentous, not as yet articulated; something which contained apology and declaration. She used the other hand deftly, to stroke the corner of his mouth.

‘Black olive,' she said. ‘You messy eater. Have you mended that clock yet?'

‘Which clock?' He had thirty-seven clocks at the last count, not including sufficient pieces of clock to make five more, and he had still fallen into this strange habit of consulting his watch.

‘The one which races us into the next decade.'

‘I forgot to show you. Yes, I mended it, but it's given me a neurosis.'

He was hungry, not only for the food, but for the humour and the intimacy of trust she always offered, along with that heady formula of mutual respect. I have abused that mutual respect, he thought; she knows it and so do I. I have also abused the time-honoured tradition that if you do not keep on asking a woman to become your wife, she will find another man, or at least, another way of living.

The proprietor appeared, looked warmly at the dearth of bread. Helen opened her mouth to speak but Bailey looked at her warningly, in the knowledge that in this place you ate what the boss told you to eat. The moment for making an effort to say something personal was past. He felt it slip like the taste of garlic on his tongue, hid the biting sensation in a question.

‘Listen, what exactly are you doing to your flat, Helen? Tunnelling for freedom? Knocking down walls?'

‘I'm turning it into a brothel,' she said seriously. ‘Grand opening night next Tuesday, I think. Don't rely on a discount.'

He laughed, but his heart sank. Lamb, the
proprietor had ordered. You havva the lamb and eat it all. His spirits lifted at the prospect. Bailey looked at the contentment of her face and wondered if it still had anything to do with his presence.

‘How much did Emily Eliot help with all this interior design?'

‘Think I can't do this kind of thing on my own, do you? She helped quite a bit, to tell the truth. You know Emily can't stand indecision. Go shopping with Emily and there's no hanging about, no luxuriating in choice. And she always knows someone who knows someone who gets things done cheap. It's an art. She's clever.'

‘She wasn't very clever with Cath.'

Helen was silent. ‘Do you know, I'm glad to be single?' was all she said. ‘I'd hate to be a megalomaniac wife and mother. Mothers run a closed book. They shut the world out, close off anything inconvenient, as if being mum in charge of a family is so self-justifying, so sanctifying, they never need have a conscience about anything else. Some of them make me sick.'

Prejudiced, judgemental, politically incorrect, leaping onto a band wagon and waving a flag: the Helen he loved.

‘You see them in shops and cars,' Helen continued angrily. ‘Expecting everyone else to give way. Look at Emily. She'd put Cath in prison without a backward glance if it meant motherly peace of mind and, what's more, she wouldn't even regret it. She owes Cath nothing. Cath isn't family. Beware the family who say you're one of us. They never mean it.'

Bailey was enjoying this. ‘We're talking about the survival of the human race,' he objected.

‘No we aren't. It survives all by itself. Probably because people without families have to devote themselves to looking after those who have. And then get splattered all over the pavement and reviled for not being normal. I'm going on, aren't I? This lamb is good.'

‘I wasn't wanting you to stop.'

‘What irritates me so much is that people like Emily feel superior and make me feel inferior. She has the right
to pigheaded intolerance: I don't. Do you know what she said to me on the phone? She said …' Helen swallowed. ‘She said she pitied me. If I had kids, I would understand.'

‘Now that,' said Bailey, ‘was unwise.'

S
aturday was passing into Sunday. Upstairs in the flat where Joe Boyce lived, the air was stuffy underneath the eaves, lit by the streetlight and a moon the colour of milk. There were shuffling sounds from the attics: nervous laughter, whispers in the half light and sounds like the dragging of a body, something bumping downstairs from the top floor, slowly, pauses in between as one box after another hit each step in turn. Gradually, they grew bolder, less concerned about the noise. Pause, thump, pause, thump: unrhythmic but certain, repeated time and time again.

The neighbours downstairs turned off the music to listen, then decided to turn it on again lower, so they could hear at the same time as pretending they did not. They kept the door closed. Has he killed her then? one asked in a stage whisper; has the bastard finally done it? Mesmerised by the prospect, until they heard more muffled laughter and a sharp command from above their heads, herald of more shuffling, thumping on the lower stairs which passed their entrance and on out into the street. They turned the music up a notch and wished their front-room curtains did not hang in shreds with gaps in between they had never noticed before. The sound of removals did not mesh with the music, but the bass had more resonance than the footsteps going out into the road, laden, heavy. Had he killed her? Had he, the bastard who yelled at them for the noise but never turned it down himself when he belted his wife all round the kitchen? Had he really? Of all the half-stoned theories which passed across five sets of lips, not one included the suggestion that they should do anything other than listen. One of them had been drunk since noon; three others were slightly high and the fifth not a day over fourteen, with no wish to go home to mother. She shook, choked on a cigarette, drank the cider and looked for the darkest corner. When she could no longer stand the suspense, she crouched
by the gap in the curtains and watched while the others watched her watching.

She turned back, scorning them for their huddled circle and exaggerated dread of a second visit from the police in one week. They had done nothing wrong, had they? She danced across the room in the same eerie light which lit the attics, put her thumb to her nose. Naa, she said, nobody's dead. It's only all them boxes he keeps getting delivered. He's only moving them out, doing a flit. Or more likely, he's getting done over. They collapsed into giggles. Nothing to worry about, but still she gazed back to the street where the burglars, one of whom had heard Joe Boyce boasting in a pub somewhere, loaded the van; and when it pulled away, she waved, as if to say, take me with you.

S
aturday had slipped away and with it, the word ‘weekend', which meant very little to Joe Boyce, the last passenger on almost the last bus wheeling across London, with his head resting against the cool of an upstairs window as the number 59 raced past empty shops at one fifteen, rattling his anaesthetised bones, only just keeping him awake. Fuck you, up yours, he kept on repeating to himself, singing little snatches of songs for as long as he could recall the words. ‘Onward Christian Soldiers, marching on to war' … ‘Hit the road, Jack, ain't you coming back no more, no more?' And somehow, ‘God rest you, merry gentlemen', in memory of the colonel who had been in this evening and treated him as if he was lord and master. Oh yes, young Joe was on the up and up, and then the bus turned the corner like a frantic sniffer-dog on a scent and almost tipped him out of his seat. He was not drunk, merely tipsy.
In vino
, as Joe had told the colonel, tapping his own nose in the manner of Mickey Gat, does not always mean
in veritas
, hey, old boy? Memory's not so good with drink aboard, is it, old son, but didn't we have a good time the other night? Rather, said the colonel, suddenly a trifle uncertain about why his drinks were still generous, and, incidentally, free.

Not drunk, merely Brahms and Liszt, still capable of making sweet music. Maybe Cath would be home, unable to
wait until Monday because she really could not stay away. At home, sleeping like a baby. He could not think in anything but clichés and he was singing, ‘Hello, Dolly' as he walked, not stumbled, up the stairs and saw the light on.

No double lock either, but the emptiness inside was like a punch in the stomach, repeated as he went from room to room, wailing, ‘Cath, where are you?', his voice echoing from floor to ceiling. A joke, that was what it was, a joke, the house looking like this, rooms emptied not only of physical presence but of almost everything else too. There were table and chairs, carpet on floors, kitchen stuff, sofa, bed, all Cath's secondhand things. Nothing in the attics but drip-stained floors and the rubbish of packing.

There were old wardrobes in the attics, Cath again, but the doors which were formerly jammed shut by the weight of things piled outside them were now hanging open. In one of these, on top of listing floorboards, he found the last box of all. Damp to the touch, full of army insignia, his beret, three olive-coloured sweaters eaten by moth and three old bayonets, the last of the collection.

The white moon winked scorn through the window as Joe Boyce stood and wept for the loss of his only possessions and for the dreams which had gone into the acquisition of a thousand useless things. He wanted to plead with the thieves, then replaced his misery with bitterness. None of this would have happened if Cath had been at home, doing her duty. Then Joe became maudlin again, then bitter.

Wife, come home. He was nothing without her; felt he had loved her since the day he was born, counted on the fingers of both hands all the things she owed him.

And at last, sinking into sleep, he could remember where he would have put the other bayonet, the one in his dream. Upstairs in that cupboard. So the only good thing the burglars had done was to take it too.

H
elen saw them through her office window, spotlit
in the cruel gaze of early Monday morning. Something was going on.

On the other side of the road, secretary for supervisor number two (without spectacles), entered her own little box of a room, stage left. The secretary to number one (office Lothario, with specs), sidled into her own room at the other end of the floor. On each of their desks was a red rose faded by the weekend, the blooms variously disposed in a glass vase and a blue mug. Simultaneously, each woman adjusted the flower in its receptacle. Then for reasons unknown, both ladies moved from their cubicles and marched straight across Helen's line of vision to the opposite end of the floor. The meeting in the middle resembled a square dance and was obviously something of a mutual shock. They handled it well, smiling distant smiles and looking hell bent on important errands. Number two's secretary carried a sheaf of paper towards the copier standing next door to number one's office, while number one's secretary seemed destined for the fax machine. Once ten steps beyond the other, and hidden by open-plan screens, each raced into the other's room and began rummaging around in the desk. They made swift, unskilful searches, leaving a trail of fingerprints of which Helen did not approve. Then, each of them decapitated the red rose belonging to the other. Helen sighed. She could have told them that they both kept the cards given by number one, he with the specs and the scholastic air, in the top right hand drawer. Also, they both sat on his knee. Also, he took one of them out for drinks and promises on Wednesdays, the other, Tuesdays and Thursdays She could have saved them coming in early on Monday. All they had to do was wave and she would have answered in Morse code.

The two ladies passed again in the middle,
heads high, no greeting this time. Other staff had arrived, filling up the space. One of the women was crying.

Helen turned her back to the glass, regretfully. The sun rose a little higher. The day was all but accounted for: two hours form-filling, the relentlessly stupid, bureaucratic curse of working for cut-price, ill-managed justice, then a funeral, then the last of home improvements. Not bad for a day off which Redwood would resent because it was summer and she did not have children.

I
t had taken some time to get Shirley Rix arranged for her passage from corpse to ashes. The husband had made a fuss, said he wanted horses with plumes, until he realised fuss meant money and he only got a small grant for a fiery consignment to mother earth. Mr Rix might have been as sad as Mary Secura, but his primary symptom was resentment. He sat on one side of the Chapel of Rest, still bearing signs of prison pallor among persons looking slightly tanned, his son sandwiched between himself and his own mother with a smattering of hunched family behind, while on the other side was Shirley's crowd, planning kidnap of the child and so full of hate they could scarcely say their prayers. The arrangement into combat zones was more appropriate to a wedding. Mary Secura, braced, but not motivated to keep the peace, bristled when Helen West slid into the seat beside her.

There was the disembodied sound of pre-recorded organ music and the sensation of being crushed by the queue waiting for the next one outside.

‘What are you doing here?' Mary sniffed. ‘What did you have to come here for?'

‘Same as you. Showing respect.'

The place stank of flowers, the lingering perfume of exotic blooms, tributes in wreaths and hothouse bouquets. More sweetly from home-grown bunches of roses, sweet peas from allotments, backyard scented stocks predominating over sterile lilies.

‘How did you know this was going on?' Mary hissed, her voice drowning in a languid hymn. Helen was wishing religious culture could catch up with the times: in a building with supermarket
windows, it seemed odd to be playing music which belonged in a dark church.