Death in Summer (22 page)

*

‘She says would I hand it in. Like I done, Mrs Iveson.’

They don’t say anything. Albert watches the baby trying to join her fingers together, holding them up in front of her face. She pulls them apart again. She’s gurgling and smiling, trying to laugh, only she can’t laugh properly, the age she is.

‘She put Georgina Belle down in the Morning Star on account of everything going wrong.’

‘What went wrong?’ They both say that, one after the other. She says it twice.

‘Pettie’s plans, like.’ Albert shakes his head. ‘Pettie didn’t know what to do.’

‘Why did she take Georgina?’ She says Pettie was a girl they didn’t know. She came to the house by chance, she says. ‘Was she hoping to get money? Did she just want a baby?’

‘Mrs Biddle says Pettie’s a tearaway, Mrs Iveson.’

‘You should have told all this to the police.’

‘Pettie took a shine to Mr Davenant, like. Pettie takes a shine to the older man, sir.’

He explains that a man showed Pettie vinyls for the floor, different colour runs and weights, what was suitable for a kitchen, what was not. Eric he was called, she saw it on his suit lapel. He lived out Wimbledon way; he took his holidays
for the tennis, always got good weather. A year ago it was; every day she went on about it in the Soft Rock. And there was a fisherman once, and another time a man who took her back to his room and she was frightened when he got up to things. The older man, Albert says again, in case there is confusion.

‘She took Georgina because Georgina is Mr Davenant’s child? Is that it? Did she tell you what she intended?’

‘Pettie was in a state, Mrs Iveson.’ She wouldn’t have left the Dowlers if she hadn’t got into a state, and he tells them about going round to the Dowlers and Mrs Dowler shouting down the stairs. ‘I never seen her in such a state as this time, Mrs Iveson, and the next thing is she takes the baby. Pettie never done that before. Like I say, I’m in the kitchen and there’s this rapping on the panes. Four times she’s come round only I’m on the night work and then I have a sleep.’

‘You’ve told us all that.’

‘Soon’s I flashed the torch in the bathroom I saw the butterfly. Pettie’d make butterflies out of a cigarette wrapping. Then again the packet and the butts she left. Pettie’d always break a butt open. In the Soft Rock, anywhere. I flashed the torch and saw the bread and that. There could be rats, the bread’d bring rats. I was remarking that to myself when I picked up Georgina Belle.’

‘Her name’s Georgina.’ There is a whiteness in her face, in her cheeks and around her eyes. A moment ago she kept looking at him, but now the only movement’s a frown coming and going in her forehead. Her voice has changed, a crossness in it now, and the dog pokes up its head, then flops it down again. The baby has gone to sleep.

‘One p.m. it was when I seen her; three-quarters of a minute past. I looked at the Zenith in case they’d ask me.’

He gave the time as three-quarters of a minute past one when they did, and they asked how he knew and he said. ‘How about a tea?’ Captain Evans offered him when the police left, the first time he knew Captain Evans, not even knowing his name then. All the time the butterfly and the cigarette butts and the empty cigarette packet were in his pocket because there hadn’t been a chance to drop them into a bin.

‘Not that Pettie’d care,’ he says. ‘The way she was then, she couldn’t care less.’

‘That girl took a baby to a house where her crying couldn’t be heard. She walked away and left her.’

Everything is different in the room now. The sympathy’s gone, there are no smiles. It would be all right, he thought when they said they were grateful, and when she asked if he took sugar and put the lumps in with a tongs. A clock strikes quietly in the hall, and then she says he must go immediately to the police, that he must give them Pettie’s name.

‘It was Pettie wore the party dress, Mrs Iveson.’

She takes no notice, nor does he. He thought they would. He thinks maybe they didn’t hear, but he doesn’t say it again. She says does he realize this could happen to someone else?

‘Other people will suffer as we have.’

‘Pettie never took babies before, Mrs Iveson. She didn’t do no harm to Georgina Belle.’

She would have married the floors man. His hands were
well kept, tapering fingers, she said, the tips light on the vinyl samples. She hung about the tennis when the time for the next championships came. She’d have given him a family, she said, if that was what he wanted. She’d have cooked and mended for him.

‘The baby’s back safe, Mrs Iveson.’

The damp has spread, through to his shoulders and his back. There’s a mark on the rug at his feet where water has dripped from the ends of his trousers, or from the jacket cuffs, he doesn’t know which. She was in a state when she lost track of that Eric, same’s she was when she went round to that uncle’s house. The face went with the name, she said in the Soft Rock that Saturday morning, the pale eyes, no wasted flesh. Another time in the Soft Rock she put the same thing to the red-haired proprietor, not that she ever liked him. ‘You hear that name?’ she said. ‘Thaddeus?’ And winding Pettie up, the red-haired man said Thaddeus was the name of the inventor of the bikini.

‘Why’d she do it?’ Thaddeus Davenant is standing by the windows and he speaks with his back turned, still looking out at the rain. His voice isn’t raised like hers is, but low and ordinary, as if he’s not fussed, but Albert can tell he is. ‘Why’d she do it?’ he asks.

‘Like I say, sir –’

‘Why’d she take Georgina?’

‘On account she was her own worst enemy, Mr Davenant. I never knew anyone more her own worst enemy.’

The baby whimpers in her sleep, a single whimper and then a sigh. She whimpered when he picked her up from the floor; she whimpered a bit on the way downstairs, maybe not liking the dark although he had the torch going.
When she wasn’t much older than that, the mongol girl cried every time she woke up and it was dark. Merle walked in her sleep, Leeroy used to shout out.

‘Why’d she take Georgina?’ He turns round from the window to ask that again. ‘Why?’

‘On account it was no good, coming back here for the ring, sir.’

He didn’t tell Mrs Biddle about the ring. He didn’t say about the baby. A lie is a lie if it has intention was the way Miss Rapp put it. No way just saying nothing is a lie. No way it could be.

‘Why was it no good?’

‘Like you wouldn’t have nothing to do with her, sir. She took a shine to you, Mr Davenant –’

‘Yes, we know.’

‘Then again, Pettie thought she’d get the minding job.’

‘She wasn’t suitable.’

‘She thought you was offering it to her on the phone, sir. The time she called up she thought it was going to be all right from what you said, sir. Then again, the ten pounds wasn’t right.’

‘What ten pounds?’

‘Ten eighty the cost of the fares is.’

Again nothing is said. He watches the man Pettie had a passion for turn his back again, the rain streaming on the glass of the windows. The old lady gets up and crosses to where the baby’s still asleep, and then sits down in a different armchair, as still and straight as before.

‘If the train fare I gave her wasn’t enough she should have said so.’

‘Like I say, the baby’s back, Mrs Iveson – ’

‘Why have you come here?’ Thaddeus Davenant is standing by him now, his voice still quiet. ‘What do you want with us?’

‘I come to tell you about Pettie, sir. So’s you wouldn’t think too badly of her, sir.’

‘Too badly?’ she says. ‘What on earth do you mean?’

‘Pettie was improving herself, Mrs Iveson. All the time at the Morning Star, all the time she was at the Dowlers’. She could have come down the platforms, she could have got clearing-up in the parks a few months back. She went in for the baby-minding because it was a better type of work.’ Pettie was a law unto herself, he explains. ‘I’d worry about Pettie, Mrs Iveson. I’d worry in the Soft Rock, times she didn’t turn up.’ He explains about Wharfdale, and Pettie taking lifts in a lorry. ‘Pettie come out here the first time and she was on about it in the café, the picture there was on the floor, the dog coming in through them windows. I said to leave it.’

‘Your friend stole a sleeping baby and left it where it could have been eaten by rats.’

‘I got there quickly as I could, Mrs Iveson. Soon’s ever Pettie told me. Mrs Biddle’d make the tea, she’d trip over with that teapot, but I had to take the chance. I didn’t do another thing soon’s Pettie told me. I said it to Captain Evans, but he reckoned Mrs Biddle’d be all right. I had to wait there for the police, the problem was.’

‘She put flowers on my daughter’s grave. Why’d she do that? Why’d she come looking for a ring that didn’t exist? We don’t understand what all this is about. We don’t understand why she took against us when all we ever did was not to give her enough money for a train fare.’

‘Pettie seen the photograph when she come out here, Mrs Iveson. She seen Mr Davenant grieving, she said that in the Soft Rock. Pettie took a shine to Mr Davenant, Mrs Iveson –’

‘Oh, for Gods sake, stop saying that!’ She is furious now, her voice raised, two specks of red in her cheeks.

‘It’s upsetting for us.’ Thaddeus Davenant is still quiet, the same as all the time he has been, hardly a change from when he was talking about the planes. ‘We’re grateful to you, but all this is too much for us.’

‘All Pettie was doing, sir, was putting it to you the baby could be taken. Like Mrs Iveson was sitting out in the sun and the next thing she drops off. Pettie had it worked out, like Mrs Iveson would pack her bags soon’s the baby went missing. You get that, sir?’

‘Yes.’

‘Pettie had it in mind she’d say she came back after her ring and seen a woman with the baby. She had it in mind that she manages to get the baby off the woman in the toilets.’

‘I see.’

‘Only the kids was playing on the towpath. Soon’s the kids seen Pettie it has to be there wasn’t no woman on account Pettie has the baby. Soon’s –’

‘Yes, we understand.’

‘I come out to explain, sir, Pettie didn’t mean no harm. Time of the ring was like when she went to look out for the man at the tennis championships. Miss Rapp said Pettie never meant no harm.’

‘Oh, do spare us Miss Rapp!’ She’s furious again. She calls what he’s saying a rigmarole. They don’t want to hear
about Miss Rapp, she says, or Mrs Biddle or Captain Evans or some man selling vinyl. It was absurd that the girl should have imagined she could be employed here. ‘We’re not concerned with these people. What we’re concerned about is that this girl is unstable and should be put where she can’t cause distress like this again.’

‘Pettie’s dead, Mrs Iveson.’

*

A watery sunlight has begun to brighten the room, dappling the polished oak of the floor, a single beam falling across the bookcases. Outside, a blackbird tentatively begins its warble. Thaddeus has not witnessed his mother-in-law’s anger before. Replacing at last the hall’s rewound blind, Maidment has not either.

Mrs Iveson herself, startled by what has just been said, senses an inner reprimand, even though her anger is still potent. The boy looks at her foolishly, his dark hair wet, his ill-fitting uniform seeming as ridiculous as the woman he spoke of said, his face gone empty, registering nothing.

No more than fifteen or so, Thaddeus remembers thinking, that girl in her grubby yellow jacket before she took it off on the afternoon of the interview. Her skirt rose up when she sat on the sofa, and she didn’t pull it down. ‘You’ve had a journey for nothing,’ he said the second time she came, and she said no, not for nothing. In the nursery, when she stood so close to him, he knew and didn’t want to know, darkening a truth that came from outside his life, hurrying on, away from it.

‘Dead?’ he says, in confusion, unable to suppress the thought that death surely does not beget death, as it seems to have this summer.

‘They bulldozed down the Morning Star, sir. I saw her in the brick and stuff lifted away. I saw Pettie in the sky.’

*

Rubble swung across the sky in its great metal bucket is brought to Zenobia, and Maidment sits down at the kitchen table, upset. Nausea spreads in his stomach, where drama at a remove brings usually a ripple of pleasure.

Would she not have known what was happening? Zenobia’s question is. A house knocked down around her? Would she not have heard the noise?

And Maidment says that’s just it.

*

He has to say again that Pettie took a shine, but this time it’s all right. It was all to do with that, he has to say.

‘I could have put them in the picture if they asked me, the day they was knocking down the Morning Star. I could have told them why she done it, sir, why Pettie didn’t walk away. Only I didn’t hang about. No point, sir.’

‘No.’

‘She goes back to the Morning Star, the time she’s frightened, the time the police is out looking for her.’

They’ve gone quiet. She’s staring out into the dampness. He didn’t mention it to Mrs Biddle, he says. Age she is, best not to, stuff like that. They still don’t say anything, so he stands up.

The doors are opened for him – the door of the room, the outside door. On the steps they shake his hand. He says again why he came out, in case there’s any confusion left. They say they understand.

He walks slowly because there is nothing to hurry for. The rain has taken away the stifling warmth, the hedgerows on either side of him drip. A breeze occasionally shakes more drops from the leaves of trees, and sometimes a withered leaf falls too.

The hymn starts in his head. He wonders what it means,
All laud we would render:
Not that it matters. Best part of the day it was, the morning hymn.
Thus provided, pardoned, guided
. Then again
Speak through the earthquake, wind and fire
. He should have told them he’ll buy an instrument with the money. People give you money, they like to know a thing like that. He hesitates, thinking about going back, but decides against it.

He passes the graveyard and the church, and then the public house and the petrol pump. He walks again by the sludge of the canal, wondering if the greyhounds will come out, but they don’t. A fast greyhound’s worth a lot of money, the man with elephantiasis told him, knowing about such matters as a frequenter of greyhound tracks in the days before his body became a burden to him.