Death in Summer (5 page)

‘I understand, Pettie.’

‘The drawing-room they called the room. He’d have been working in the garden, the clothes he was in.’

When she first walked into the room and he held his hand out for her to shake she noticed it was grimed. ‘Georgina’s father,’ he said, the same way he’d said it on the phone, only this time he didn’t give his full name as well. When she was alone with him she kept thinking Thaddeus suited him. The sound of it suited him, his eyes and his face. Thin as a blade he was.

‘I said it was sad, his wife and that. I said it, even though the woman was back in the room. “I’ll show you the nursery,” she said, but I knew it was no good. No chance, I knew. You could tell with that woman.’

Sensing the depth of his friend’s disappointment, and fearing it, Albert’s unease increases. He knows Pettie well. He knows what Mrs Biddle means when she calls her a tearaway. Another person mightn’t use the word, but he knows what’s in their landlady’s mind.

‘He stayed where he was when the grandmother brought me up to the nursery.’

A couple were hanging about on the landing, the man in dark clothes who had opened the front door and a woman with a blue apron over clothes that were dark-coloured too. The man was up a stepladder, doing something to the top
of the curtains at a window. The woman was standing with pins in her mouth.

‘Well, here’s Georgina,’ the grandmother said in the nursery, and the baby looked up from a picture painted on the floorboards, blue-eyed, not like her father. The picture was of hills and trees, flowers outside a cottage, sheep on a slope. Lanes wound through ploughed fields and fields of corn or something like it. A railway line was as straight as a die and there were houses and a church, and the Ring o’ Bells Inn. Cattle ate hay. There were pigs and chickens in a yard. Horses were looking over a fence.

Albert listens to this description, but none of it means much to him. The streets are what he knows. Once a year there was an outing from the Morning Star home, where he and Pettie were brought up and from which, eventually, they ran away. You saw fields then, all the way to a seaside place where there were slot machines on the promenade, where they all walked in a bunch along the sands and clambered over the shingle, a wind blowing nearly always. Joe Minching drove them in the minibus that was hired for the day from Fulcrum Street Transport. Joe Minching threw his sandwiches to the seagulls, saying he was used to better grub than that.

‘Quiet,’ Pettie says. ‘I never knew a place as quiet.’

It was quiet when she walked up to the front door and in the hall, in the room where the interview was and on the stairs, on the landing even though those two people were there. Albert listens while more details of the nursery are given, but in his mind’s eye he sees the playroom at the Morning Star, where there were toys also – train trucks with a wheel gone, limbless dolls, jigsaws with half the pieces
missing, anything that other children had finished with. Old armchair cushions were drawn close to the stove that smelt of burning paraffin in winter. Doorless lockers filled one wall. It was here that Marji Laye told how her father and mother were ice-rink skating stars who had put her in a home for the time being, better than carting her about with them all over the world, depriving her of an education. Sylvie talked about parties, someone playing the melodeon, everyone happy until there was a fire and she was the only one left. Bev said her father was in the House of Lords and knew the Queen. But Joe Minching said Sylvie’s mother and sisters were on the game and always had been, that Marji Laye was found wandering on a tip, that Bev came in a plastic bag. From the playroom windows you could see Joe Minching’s coke shed, and the tall yard doors with the dustbins in a row beside them, straggles of barbed wire trailing round the manhole of the underground tank that used to conserve rainwater in the old days, its missing cover replaced by planks weighed down with concrete blocks.

‘Georgina Belle,’ Pettie says. ‘When I saw her I kept thinking I’d call her Georgina Belle. I’d get the job and I’d call her that. We’d go downstairs and the grandmother would have changed her mind on the way. The way he smiled when he was patting the dog, you could see he’s keen.’

‘Keen, Pettie?’

‘Keen I’d come there is all I mean.’

Albert doesn’t respond to that. There’s an aeroplane passing over and what he’d like to do is go to see what line it belongs to, to wait for it to come closer and catch the
emblem. But this is not the morning for that, and instead he makes another effort at distraction.

‘You give that bugle in, Pettie?’

A week ago, when they had left the Soft Rock Café and were walking about, Pettie found a bugle in a supermarket trolley that someone had abandoned in a doorway. She tried to blow it but no sound came, and Albert wasn’t successful either. A special skill, a man going by said.

‘Yeah, I give it in.’

‘Salvation Army property.’

‘I give it in at the hostel.’

She took it to a man who buys stuff for car-boot sales, who generally accepts anything she brings him. He said at first the bugle was worthless. In the end he gave her forty pence for it.

‘Salvation Army do a good job, Pettie.’

The grandmother took her into the bed-sitting room they’d got ready for the minder. ‘Come next door, Nanny,’ she said. Why’d the woman bring her in there if they didn’t want her? Why’d she bother? Why’d she even bring her upstairs? Why’d she call her that? ’Course she wouldn’t change her mind. All the time she was against her.

‘I asked at the hostel,’ Albert says. ‘I said I couldn’t play an instrument, but the man said no problem if I wanted to join the Army.’

The couple were moving away from the landing when they passed again, the man carrying the stepladder. ‘Wait here a minute, would you?’ the grandmother said in the hall. A clock in the panelling ticked and there were voices from behind the closed door, but she couldn’t hear what was being said. The voices went on and on, and then the
old woman came out. She shook her head. Twice she said she was sorry.

‘Best forgotten, Pettie.’

‘She give me a ten-pound note for the fare. Ten pounds eighty it cost me.’

‘You like I go round and put it to the Dowlers for you?’ Another smile lights Albert’s eyes, upsetting the composure of his face, crinkling his cheeks and forehead. ‘You like I say you made a mistake about the job?’

‘The Dowlers are the pits.’

Eight till eight, the arrangement at the Dowlers’ was, but more often than not neither parent turned up till ten, with never a penny offered for the extra hours. ‘Give them something about six,’ Mrs Dowler would say, and there was always a fuss because they didn’t like what was in the few tins that were regularly replaced on the kitchen shelves. Dowler fixes people’s drains for them, driving about in a van with
Dowler Drains 3-Star Service
on it, a coarse black moustache sprawled all over the lower part of his face. Overweight and pasty-skinned, Mrs Dowler in her traffic-warden’s uniform harangues her children whenever she’s in their company, shouting at them to get on, shouting at them to be quiet, telling them to wash themselves, not noticing when they don’t. ‘They had the NSPCC man round,’ the woman next door told Pettie once, and Pettie realized then that she was only there because the NSPCC man had ordered Mrs Dowler to get a daytime minder.

‘You lend me a few pounds, Albert?’

He counts the money out in small change. He makes stacks of the different coins on the table and watches Pettie scoop them into her purse. Two girls have come into the
café and are playing the fruit machines. The lights of the antiquated juke-box have come on. The deaf and dumb man is still in the window, the middle-aged couple still don’t speak. The red-haired proprietor turns over a page of his newspaper.

‘Fancy the dinosaurs, Pettie?’

He smiles, but when she shakes her head the light goes from his eyes and his features close in disappointment. It was her idea to go to see the dinosaurs in the first place. A million years old, those bones, she said.

‘Fancy going out to the Morning Star?’

When they were still there the Morning Star home was condemned as unfit for communal habitation. The inspectors who came round investigated the load-bearing walls, took up floorboards and registered on their meters the extent of damp and rot. A year after Albert and Pettie left they went back to look.
Site for Sale after Demolition
, a notice said. They managed to get in, and still occasionally return to wander about the passages and rooms, Albert showing the way with his torch.

‘No, not the Morning Star.’ Pettie shakes her head again. ‘Not today.’

Albert drinks the last of his milky tea, cold now in the glass mug. She won’t be comforted. Sometimes it’s as though she doesn’t want to be. Her high-heeled shoes are scuffed, her white T-shirt has traces of reddish dye from some other garment on it. He knows from experience that she’s in the dumps.

‘What you going to do, Pettie?’

‘I got to sort myself. I got to go wandering.’

‘Down the shops, Pettie? I need a battery myself.’

‘I got to be on my own today.’

She stands up, telling him he should rest because of his night work. He needs to sleep, she reminds him, everyone needs sleep. Albert works in Underground stations, erasing graffiti when the trains aren’t running.

‘Yeah, sure,’ he says, because it’s what she wants. The girls playing the fruit machines move from one to the other, not saying anything, pressing in coins and hoping for more to come out, which sometimes happens.

‘Yeah, sure,’ Albert says again.

She knows he’s worried, about the job, about the rent, maybe even because she has feelings for that man. Not being the full ticket, he worries easily: about cyclists in the traffic, window-cleaners on a building, a policeman’s horse one time because it was foaming at the teeth. He worried when they found the bugle, he worried when Birdie Sparrow found a coin on the street outside the Morning Star, making her give it in because it could be valuable and she’d be accused. He said not to take them when the uncles came with their presents on a Sunday, but everyone did. He was the oldest, the tallest although he wasn’t tall. The first time he helped Marti Spinks to run off in the night they caught her when it was light, but she never said it was he who had shown her how. The next time she got away, with Merle and Bev. When Pettie’s own turn came he said he was coming too because she had no one to go with. ‘Best not on your own,’ he said, and there wasn’t a sound when he reached in the dark for the keys on the kitchen hook, nor when he turned them in the locks and eased the back door open. He didn’t flash his torch until they’d passed through the play yard and were half-way down the alley, the long
way round to Spaxton Street but better for not being seen, he said. ‘Crazy’s a bunch of balloons,’ Joe Minching used to say, but nobody else said Albert was crazy, only that he wasn’t the same as the usual run of people.

‘You don’t go messing with the Dowlers, Albert. You leave them be.’

‘I only wanted to put it to them.’

‘You leave them be. Cheers, Albert.’

‘Take care now, out there on your own.’

‘Yeah, sure.’

As she always does, Pettie buys the cheapest ticket at the Tube station in order to get past the barrier. Two youths on the train keep glancing in her direction. They’re the kind who don’t pull their legs back when you stand up, obliging you to walk around them: Pettie has experienced that on this line before. Ogling her, one of them holds his hands out, palms facing each other, indicating a length, as a man boasting of a caught fish might. But Pettie knows this has nothing to do with fish. The other youth sniggers.

She looks away. The uncle with the birthmark took off her glasses the first time they were on their own. ‘Let’s have a look at you,’ he said and put the glasses on the window-sill. ‘Oh, who’s a beauty now?’ he said, and when he whispered that he liked her best a warmth spread through her that came back, again and again, whenever he said it.

The youths get off at Bethnal Green. One of them says something but she doesn’t hear it, not wanting to. ‘Prim little lady,’ the uncle who liked her said. ‘Who’s my prim little princess?’ He told her what a cheroot was because he had a packet in his pocket. She was prim and she still is; being prim is what she wants. ‘
Never so much as a morsel taken
from the knife’
Miss Rapp read out from the
Politely Yours
column. ‘
Return the fork to the plate between mouthfuls.’
She practised that, and Miss Rapp was pleased.

Aldgate goes by, and Bank; Pettie closes her eyes. Wild summer flowers are in bloom, and it could be the picture on the floor but it isn’t because she’s in the picture herself. She’s in the lane with a buggy, far beyond the few houses by the shop and the petrol pump, far beyond the church and the graveyard and the gateless pillars of the house. She’s walking out into the countryside, and fields stretch to the horizon, with the wild flowers in the hedges, a plain brick farmhouse in the distance. ‘Look, a rabbit,’ she whispers, and Georgina Belle waves at the rabbit from the buggy, and you can smell honey in the honeysuckle.

At Oxford Circus she goes with the crowd, jostled on the pavement. A gang of girls gnaw chicken bones and drink from cans, laughing and shouting at one another, strung out, in everyone’s way. Beggars poke out their hands from doorways, tourists dawdle, litter is thrown down. Street vendors sell perfume and watches and mechanical toys. Men in coloured shorts unwrap summer lollipops. Women expose reddened thighs. ‘Thaddeus Davenant,’ Pettie says aloud.

He ran his fingers along the pale wood that edged the back of the sofa, standing there for a moment before she sat down, the grandmother already occupying a chair. He was solemn, not smiling when she held out the reference and the certificate. Still mourning his loss, he naturally wouldn’t have smiles to spare. Something about him reminds her of the man who talked to her in Ikon Floor Coverings, who explained why he recommended 0.35 wearing thickness in
a vinyl. Thaddeus Davenant’s clothes were nothing like the grey suit and clean white shirt,
Eric
on the badge in the lapel, but there was something about his quiet manner that reminded her. More than once she went back to Ikon Floor Coverings, until the time he wasn’t there, gone on to another store, they didn’t know where. Not that she wants to think about the floor-coverings man now, nor the Sunday uncle either, since they let her down in the end. ‘Oh, yes, a lovely walk,’ Pettie says instead, and Thaddeus Davenant takes his tiny daughter from her arms. ‘Georgina Belle,’ he says.