A Clear Conscience (6 page)

According
to the clock, one hour had passed in one minute. Helen was late. They were currently in one of their tranquil phases, a celebration of the hazy days of summer, but despite his silent insistence that their relationship remain as it was, the uncommitted, nevertheless exclusive kind, he had to admit that all this talk about tearing down walls in her flat disturbed him a little. He wanted her independent, of course, but not so independent that she built a life without reference to him at all. You're getting your cake and eating it, said Ryan, ever jealous of the bachelor state. Bailey supposed he was. He hadn't said to Ryan that even eating cake took effort.

Nor did he confide in Ryan that Helen and he had hardly made a good job of living together the one time they had tried, although the choice of place, which both of them loathed, had been less than fortunate. And their tastes did not coincide. She was all for deep colours, dozens of pictures, warm fires, dark old curtains, so that her red-walled living room resembled a gentleman's club. Bailey's huge single floor, with not one curtain, contained less colour than her bathroom. There was wood and more wood. Shelves rather than cupboards, the pastel work surfaces of the integral kitchen where he placed the clock all cleaned with a spray and wipe. The only dirty thing around here was the cat which came and went and remained missing for days at a time. Cats are like women, Bailey told himself with the cynicism of a policeman; they stay if they want to.

Eight thirty, supper simmering and no-one to share it. If all else failed, he would read a book. He had been thinking of going further than his LLB, acquired at night school; he might even read a law book. Pity, though: it was one of those evenings when he really needed to talk. There were not many couples, he reflected, who could discuss murder while eating lamb chops. Nor those who study post-mortem photographs for dessert. He wanted to share his current moral dilemma: a trial in which he knew they had not arrested the right man. If not exactly the wrong man, not the right one either.

The
flat was clean: he was clean. Only his conscience was like a dirty windscreen.

H
elen did not know what to do with a cleaning lady. The confrontation made her awkward. It struck her as a rather lonely and boring job; and, for that reason, she hated to ask anyone to do it, even though as a Crown Prosecutor, not rich like her City and commercial cousins, there was enough for a good standard of living. Including someone to clean the house, if only she could suppress the guilt which came with asking.

‘And this is the living room. And this is the bathroom,' she heard herself saying, sounding to her own ears like a condescending estate agent to an idiot client. Cath nodded. Of course she would see what they were, she wasn't blind, Helen told herself furiously, her own embarrassment made worse by Cath's passivity. She was a strong-looking young woman, but she walked with a slight stoop, as if she carried something heavy round her waist, and instead of speaking, she inclined her head. But she showed no sign of recoiling from the scattered clothes in the bedroom, or the gritty feel to the kitchen floor.

‘I'm sorry about the mess,' Helen was saying, ‘only I don't have much time …'

‘I wouldn't call this mess,' Cath said neutrally. ‘It isn't even really dirty. You've got a nice place.'

Helen was instantly charmed.

‘And of course,' Cath continued, ‘I could help you with the garden.' That made Helen defensive again. The garden was hers.

‘I
like doing the garden,' she said. ‘It's the housework I can't stand.'

‘That's all right then,' said the woman mildly, in a quiet, almost whispering voice. ‘I was only suggesting it because Mrs Eliot said I should.' She was suddenly disconcertingly chatty, as if she now knew the worst and could cope with anything else. ‘Now, when it comes to dirt, you should see what Mrs Eliot's lot can do. Amazing. Bathroom and kitchen look like bomb sites most mornings. And what those kids take to bed is anyone's guess.' She spoke of them with a kind of urgent fondness and reverence, shaking her head. Helen felt a guilty treachery to find herself so avidly curious about the true state of Emily's house. It was like looking in windows: she could not suppress it.

‘Tell me more,' she demanded.

Mark sometimes went to bed in his wellington boots, could she believe that? Yes, she could. Jane had learned to make pastry recently, then thrown a lump of it at the old-fashioned extractor fan in Emily's kitchen, there were still clods of it stuck to the ceiling and probably getting mouldy in corners. Along with the fragments of boiled egg which Mrs Eliot had left on the stove while she got embroiled in one of her incessant phone conversations. Boiled eggs go off like bombs, Cath remarked. And then there was the grill pan with fat in the bottom, set alight when Mr Eliot had forgotten his bacon; the marks of that joined all the others. Helen was secretly delighted. It was a relief to know that Emily's fine house also carried scars.

‘Well, do you want me to come or not?' Cath asked.

Helen did, very much.

‘I can do Tuesdays and Thursdays, say two hours in the afternoon. You're a long way from Mrs Eliot, but it's halfway home for me, same bus route. Number fifty-nine.'

Her voice was peculiarly flat when she stopped talking about the Eliots. She seemed in no hurry to leave, but stood looking round the walls of Helen's living room with slow pleasure. ‘I do like it here,' she said.

O
n
her way to Bailey's, driving with careless abandon, Helen felt as if she had passed some kind of test. And, as far as the Eliots were concerned, achieved some kind of equality. The Eliots were a couple of very few friends she and Bailey could call mutual to them both. Usually, it was difficult to share friends with Bailey. He was not a sociable animal, despite his great and diffident charm, and there were hazards in taking him out and about among friends who thought policemen were dangerous freaks. He would find himself attacked for a parking fine, sneered at for the release of a terrorist, forced to defend himself for the latest police scandal, cross-examined for ancient miscarriages of justice; and although he ignored it all, she could not. Many a supper party had ended in awkward silence, with the pair of them relieved to depart. He was too proud a creature to be baited like a bear. But with Alistair Eliot there was the firm foundation of professional experience and mutual respect. They had all shared the same cases and similar concerns, while Emily shared gossip. The charismatic Eliots had no preconceptions about whom they should and should not know. Alistair's father was a bishop: Bailey had suggested there was something loosely Christian in their ever-open door.

When we next go there, Helen was thinking, I must remember to look at the kitchen ceiling. And ask Em why she thinks Cath smells of soap.

T
he number 59 bus route rose like a sluggish wave in the depths of north-east London, where Cath lived, and moved with the speed of a canal boat right through the centre; it dawdled around the glories of South Kensington, where the Eliots lived, and then over to the depressed south. The depot, into which she had often ridden on the top deck, remaining where she was until the bus turned back again, always saying, if asked, how she had gone to sleep or there was something she had forgotten to buy, was a place she loved for the serried rows of buses, coaches and double-deckers standing under the high roof like so many Thomas the Tank Engines. The fumes filled her nostrils, but the place was cool in summer. There was something immutable about the number 59. They were all such old buses with conductors and drivers, never the newer, one-man-operated type which she hated for their impersonality and the rude noise of their brakes audible from her bedroom on a quiet night. When the number 59 had gone in for a cream and maroon livery, she had simply sat up straighter in her seat, as proud as any shareholder. If anyone got on the bus and refused to pay, Cath was incensed, even if their inability was accidental or their condition clearly wretched. Cath despised people who did not pay their way. She did not think she was poorly paid, abhorring those who were poorer still.

Joe
was well paid, he had not wanted her to get a job. Between you and me girl, they would show ‘them', a thing or two, the bastards. She thought of ‘them' whenever the bus took her into Kensington where Joe worked. Not really a public house, more of a hybrid between that and a wine-and-cocktail bar, standing in a mews and, at this time of year, obscured by blooming window-boxes, flowering tubs and trailing plants which covered the white walls in a blaze of pink, blue, white and green. Busy Lizzie and ivy added an air of discreet and tasteful attraction, underlining the promise of privacy.

By this point in its journey, the number 59 had lumbered into the undisputed territory of ‘them', Joe's adopted territory and that of his enemies. Part of her was infected by his formless class hatred as the bus turned through Sloane Square and shot up Sloane Street to Knightsbridge. It was as though it traversed foreign territory, littered with women shaped like horses or greyhounds, wearing a uniform of smart cotton shirts embellished with pearls. They got on the bus for jolly short hops, braying at children called Justin or Hugo. The children were all rather like Emily's, Cath had reflected with a shock as the bus had lurched round the corner, taking her to Islington and Helen West. Cath had never thought of Emily as one of this alien breed. She was just Mrs Eliot with a face full of freckles, husband and family, the epitome of everything Cath admired.

Thinking of Emily and her brood made Cath wince with longing. It was the hot love for the children she would never have, the love for a family who asked her to belong, poured praise and gifts upon her head, said, come in, come in! and seemed to mean it, whereas she knew she couldn't come in. Not ever. Not even close.

T
wenty
minutes north from Helen's, forty minutes from Emily's, accelerating as if scenting home territory, the 59 bus lurched level with the leisure centre. It could have been a million miles from Harrods. This was where she lived, in the maisonette with attics which Joe had wangled from some army connection, next to the park where Damien had died. She was now in the land of the ‘us', where never a ‘them' was seen, but the local community had forged a similar version. ‘Them' was those with houses worth burglary; ‘us' was those who did it. She felt light hearted, almost light headed, as she took the longer route to the late-night supermarket, avoiding the leisure centre grounds. She had found another place to love, if not a person. Another set of keys, belonging to a voice which did not have the same high, light tone of enquiry that Emily's did. And a place to clean which was, to Cath's mind, safer than houses.

Dark and secret and safe, with a cat and a garden. Down there, without a view, where she could make everything shine, and Joe would never know where she was.

W
hen Emily phoned Alistair in a slight state of panic at seven to say, darling, could you possibly remember exactly who the hell is coming to supper, he consulted his diary and said he did not know.

‘Where did they come from?' Emily asked, wildly.

‘I really don't know. Are they friends of mine, or friends of yours?'

‘I don't know. Listen, darling, are you ready to come home?'

‘Not quite. Need to talk to the other junior in Monday's thing. Matter of fact, I'd arranged to meet him for a drink. Is that all right with you?' he added, anxiously.

Emily was glad to have a husband as uxorious as this, but there were times when his delays irritated, even though she did not really want him home yet. She did not care whether he met a colleague in a pub or a playground. It was a different sense of anger, fuelled by the fact that although Cath had been there, labouring all day, the house remained doggedly out of control, with Emily, as usual, inexplicably relieved to be rid of her. Emily stood on the first-floor landing and yelled, her voice drowning the racket of a fight below.

‘Quiet,
you downstairs, just bloody shut it, will you?' Then on a lower scale, no less authoritative, in a voice sounding more like a growl she abandoned the subtle approach.

‘Help required here, you bunch of little sods! All hands to the mast! Those who do as they're told get to stay up watching this perfectly wonderful video I've got. Loads of sex and violence. Those who don't, go to bed. And that means you, Jane. Mark, your surfboard is going out of the window, now. Jane, do you hear me?'

It was a long, skinny house where voices echoed. Three children, fifteen, twelve and nine, stood in the hall looking up as their mother came down.

‘Ah, there you all are,' she said in mock surprise. ‘Dad's in the pub,' she announced, casually. They looked at her, wide-eyed, expectant, suspicious, trusting.

‘So will someone lay the tables, please. For eight. I want the knives and forks, one big knife, one little one, not from the kitchen drawer, all in straight lines. Two wine glasses each. And I want both bathrooms tidy. If you please. Oh, and while we're at it, can anyone remember if I wrote down the names of the people who are coming?' There was the sound of a small stampede as they disappeared. She had, after all, taught them everything they knew about bribes. She had not really needed the help; simply needed to look at them, check they were still there.

T
he oh-so-busy Lizzies and the vivid, purple lobelia, balm to the spirit, bloomed on a preternaturally hot July evening, when the light seemed endless. Outside the Spoon and Fiddle, a title hidden by greenery, Alistair Eliot sat and regretted the lie he had told his wife. He was not meeting anyone: he had simply wanted to stop and nurse half a pint of lager the way he did once in a while in summer, and even then he agonised about deceit. Last summer, during the reign of a super-efficient, albeit slightly sluttish nanny, alas, now departed, Emily and he escaped their progeny to sit for an hour as he sat now when the house seemed fit to burst and Em had to admit she was going mad. They needed to be somewhere else to discuss their domestic concerns and the show of flowers here was better than any left remaining in their own little garden after the stamp of juvenile feet and the constant cry of ‘Catch this!'