Facing the Tank (10 page)

Later on Monday afternoon Mrs Merluza, whose husband no one had ever met, left Evan Kirby’s room where she had been having a quiet snoop and dialled the Bishop’s Palace number.

‘Deirdre,
c’est moi
,’ she said when someone answered. ‘No, I am coming but I’m running rather late. I’ll be there in ten minutes … Yes. So sorry. Are they all there? … Oh Lord. I’ll set off now. Bye, dear.’

She kept up a muttered commentary as she hurried, hair-patting, to the kitchen. When alone she no longer spoke Spanish, but worked unconsciously at her English vowels.

‘Now. Harrods bag. Bag. Bag. Ah there you are. Harrods bag into which we put one candle.’ She pulled a candle from a candlestick. ‘One candle yes and one piece of perfect fruit.’ She gave the fruit bowl a tentative shake which released a shimmer of fruit fly. ‘No,’ said Mrs Merluza. ‘Not really. Try the fridge.’ She tried the fridge and found a cellophane-wrapped bunch of grapes. ‘One perfect grape,’ she announced, tugging one off and tossing it into her bag. Then she opened the bottom drawer of the dresser and took out a carefully folded square yard of deep blue cloth. ‘And one meditation mat,’ she declared, folding the mat one more time so as to fit it into the carefully preserved carrier bag. ‘Now, what else?’ she asked, moving to the hall and pulling a cotton cardigan about her shoulders. ‘
Ah, si
,’ she answered with a frown. Leaving the bag on a chair in the hall she went to open the door of the downstairs lavatory.

The Victorians showed a cavalier attitude towards many of their downstairs lavatories, contorting their importance into whatever awkward space remained on an architect’s plan; curious behaviour given their delight in a well-proportioned bathroom. Though half-redeemed by a stained-glass window, Mrs Merluza’s was no exception. It stood a little over four feet wide, ten feet deep and twelve feet high. When she emerged a few minutes later her breathing was wild and a faint smile pulled at her lips at every breath. She returned to the kitchen telephone and called the Bishop’s Palace again.

‘Deirdre? … Yes,
c’est moi encore
. Look, you’ll have to do without me this evening … Yes, you see my little girl’s coming home … No, I’ve just found out.’ There was a pause for Deirdre Chattock’s conjectures then Mrs Merluza (whose name she allowed to be pronounced to rhyme with ‘medusa’ as in raft of, as opposed to ‘marelootha’ as in Spanish for hake) explained in the tone of one who knows she will be understood, ‘No Deirdre, she hasn’t. I just
know
.’

She left her meditation-class paraphernalia on the table beside her then walked to the hall and stood before its mirror a while to calm herself. She ran her pointed fingers through her full black hair. Its deep raven hue was the only part of her colouring which was wholly natural but, Marge Delaney-Siedentrop had recently confided, as only an intimate could, that there were those who took it for a superior wig. She had since taken to braving high winds without a headscarf and had even been seen to comb her hair in public.

Mrs Merluza did not only visit the Palace for meditation classes. In private sessions Deirdre Chattock was helping her to unravel her past. She could remember nothing of her parents, though she liked to think that her mother had possessed the same black hair until her deathday. The story she had allowed to be passed around was that she came of a good Barcelona family and that home and relatives had been destroyed by a Basque separatist incendiary bomb while she was picking her daughter up from a party. Looked on therefore as a sweet refugee, she had let only Mrs Chattock into the secret that she was actually orphaned by amnesia. Try as she might, she could reach back no further than a Barcelona nightclub where she had danced as a child or, more precisely, a
jeune fille
and where Jésus had danced with her and shown her things …

Her reverie was interrupted by the opening of the front door. It was her Professor Kirby, who had arrived yesterday. She had been taking lodgers ever since her Madeleine left for university. She missed her daughter’s presence – company was not the
mot juste
for that brooding creature’s social contribution – and it pleased her to cook the occasional breakfast and to feel that there was someone else under her roof.

Professor Kirby was the first lodger to whom she had entrusted a latchkey. So far they had all been foreign students (Barrowcester was a perennial favourite with the Germans), visitors from further north or shifty little organists who had come to give recitals. He was how she would imagine an eagle might look if turned into a man. He was at once broad-shouldered and thin so that he seemed to stoop, although his posture was perfect. He had a great beak of a nose which made the pale blue of his eyes piercing rather than babyish. His manner towards her was so polite and distinguished that they had been talking for some minutes before she remembered that he was American and that she should say how she had always wanted to see Maine. One of his huge, clever hands was forever teasing at a packet of cigarettes and his lighter was never in the pocket he tried first.

‘
Buona sera
, Mrs Merluza.’

‘Hello there, Professor,’ she tinkled at him from the corridor. ‘A productive day, I hope.’

‘Very productive, thank you.’ He had been shopping and bore a carrier bag of food. She hoped he would not burn anything. ‘Yours is a beautiful city,’ he said.

‘Isn’t it, though,’ she agreed.

‘I went to the Cathedral library and Miss Dixon told me about the happening there this morning. Were you at the service?’

‘Yes. It was a beautiful’ – she sought momentarily for a word – ‘stunt.’

‘A stunt? So you don’t think it was miraculous?’

He came closer in the hall. She could smell the mixture of his cigarettes and cologne. His hair had streaks of grey in it and there was a curl which refused to lie down and was a terrible temptation to touch.

‘No,’ she said. ‘They need money to pay for the building works. This will bring crowds and crowds mean money.’

‘Ah, but might not Saint Boniface have had such a worthy cause in mind?’

‘Ouph!’ she scoffed with a flap of the hand, and he laughed at her, opening the door to the granny flat.

She returned to the kitchen and opened the fridge to look for food. There was veal and she could make a sauce with tomatoes and basil from the pot outside the French windows. The telephone rang. It was a call-box. After the pips Madeleine’s voice said,

‘Mum?’ in a strained, rushed way.

‘
Cariño!
’ They always spoke Spanish when alone or on the telephone, it created instant intimacy. When the subject was an awkward one however, or when either mother or daughter lost her temper, they used English. ‘Where are you?’

‘I’m at King’s Cross. Can I come and stay for a bit?’

‘But of course!’ Mercy Merluza laughed and, kissing her thumb, crossed herself. ‘Is everything all right?’

‘Sort of. I’ll tell you tonight. Be with you in two hours.’

‘I’ll make up a bed.’

‘No. Let me.’

‘Ssh. Go catch your train.’

‘See you.’

Mercy unhooked an apron from the back of the kitchen door and, tieing it around herself, went to knock on the granny flat door.

‘Professor Kirby?’

‘Come in.’

She opened the door. Steam was coming from the bathroom. He emerged from it in a long silk dressing gown.

‘Oh. Forgive me for disturbing you.’

‘Not at all. Forgive my state of half-dress.’

‘It was only that my daughter has just rung to say she is coming home and I wondered whether you’d care to join us for dinner.’

‘That’s very kind but I’m sure she’d rather see you alone.’

‘No. Please. Please.’ There was almost panic in her voice. ‘It’s more fun with three and I’m sure she’d like to meet you – she too is an academic.’

‘How can I refuse?’ He chuckled. ‘I’d be delighted. Thank you.’

‘About eight? Come up for a sherry in the sitting room first. Now I’ll leave you to your, er …’ She waved a bird claw at the steam.

‘Oh. Thank you very much.’

He was an attractive man for a bookworm, she reflected as she climbed the worn stairs. He had a vest under his dressing gown, which she found faintly moving.

Her daughter’s room was at the front of the house and looked over a pattern of grey and brown-red rooves to the Cathedral. Mercy preferred to sleep at the back. She loved her view down over the garden and, from her bed, into the great copper beech at the garden’s end. She found that the Cathedral loomed quite enough over all their lives, without her having to greet it every morning on waking. Besides, the sight of it at night, spotlit, like some gargantuan Marie Celestial aircraft carrier was unsettling. Far from filling her with a warm sense of Divine protection, it encouraged morbid fantasies. More than once she had dreamt of opening her eyes in the dead of night to find herself transported, mattress, cotton gloves, nightcream and all, to a precarious position on its kestrel-haunted roof with churning flood water glinting all around in bright moonlight.

On leaving home, Madeleine had commanded Mercy to turn her bedroom into a spare room.

‘Left to your own devices you’d go and turn it into a horrid shrine,’ she had said.

Mercy had complied although her only guests were paying ones and although there was more relief than sadness at seeing Madeleine off for life. She had set about taking down the posters and scratching the stickers off the windows with a heart unmaternally light.

Madeleine had not been an easy daughter. A child of accident, born under trying circumstances, the little burden was not even graced with a lightening beauty. Lumpish and wooden, with muddy skin and curly brown hair, she bore all too strong a likeness to Abi Merluza, Jésus’ mother, a cruel, unleavened woman who owned the nightclub and who died soon after his arrest and just before Mercy’s slow flight to England. Undemonstrative as she was unlovely, little Madeleine’s saving grace was a grim sense of humour far beyond her years. She was an early developer, like her mother; unlike her mother she was fiercely intelligent. Always a good girl on the surface, her sharpness could bring an obstinate set to her public jaw and a needle’s point to her private temper.

Soon after their arrival in Bayswater, Mercy had tried to prettify her child, dressing her in frills and sending her to dance classes. She did not do this without a vengeful glint in her eye for the child was so much the reincarnation of Jésus’ mother. Then the girl’s brain began to frighten her so she left her alone to her dungarees and her books.

They had enough money to live in some comfort. Madeleine had always been told that this was ‘family’ money and life insurance for her late father, because its actual source pained Mrs Merluza. Jésus died resisting arrest for molesting some schoolgirls and his mother, Abi, died shortly afterwards, rotten with the twin moulds of spite and grief. Nervous and pregnant, Mercy had sat up all night with the smitten corpse then rung the doctor and notary in the morning. She had sold the nightclub and adjoining flat for a handsome price before any relations stepped forward. Quickly ransacking her ‘mother-in-law’s’ boudoir before she left for France, she found a stash of jewellery hidden in the hem of an ugly fur coat which she had intended to take with her to sell when times were hard again. A few quick scratches on the bathroom mirror proved the stones to be better than paste. Abi had never worn or displayed them so, assuming them to be stolen, but thinking of the future of her unborn child, Mercy had sewn some into the linings of her own scant wardrobe and hidden the rest in the hollowed-out heels of some boots. Sweating like a fever victim, she wore the boots and the three most loaded of the dresses all the way to Paris where she quickly sought out a hungry jeweller. She opened a bank account to earn interest on the money from the nightclub and, as soon as she could walk after Madeleine’s birth, spent some of the jewellery earnings on a nanny, a smart new outfit and a session in a beautician’s sufficiently intensive to secure her work as an assistant in a dress shop. She worked there until Madeleine was old enough to attend school, then upped roots again, moved to London and sold the rest of the jewels. In Paris as a sales assistant and in London as a dressmaker, she worked so hard that she had never needed to touch the ever swelling money from the sale of her former lover’s property.

In the late 1960s, however, London was becoming expensive, so when, on a teacher’s advice, Madeleine was entered for and won a full scholarship to Tatham’s, her mother had leapt at the opportunity to settle in Barrowcester. In those days the city was several hours from London and still ludicrously cheap. Girls had been admitted to the school for only three years and Madeleine had been the first to win one of the ten annual scholarships. Mercy at last felt a shifting of pride, even if the sight of her fast-growing girl in a scholar’s black gown and eighteenth-century waistcoat was something nightmarish.

While Madeleine enjoyed a bargain education (free except for books, which she found or ordered at the city library, and ‘extras’, for which she never asked) Mercy took over a small curio shop in Tower Place. She changed the name from The Treasure Trove to Boniface Crafts and, although the place only opened between eleven and four each day, did a thriving trade selling overpriced jerseys and unpleasant local pottery. Her taking in lodgers had started with a kind offer made to some enquiring tourists who had just relieved her of an especially difficult coffee pot.