Facing the Tank (24 page)

The bus dropped its country passengers – two old men in cloth caps, three farmers’ wives out for their weekly razzle and Evan – in an anonymous square behind the town hall. It was a part of town he had not seen. He stood by the bus stop and saw a multi-storey car park, a bingo hall, a Methodist chapel and, close by, the Salvation Army building. It was market day. The stalls were ranged along the sides of a gravelled plot in the square’s centre. At a loss, he crossed the road and wandered in the crowd. The glare of fruit alternated with the iced sourness of fish barrows and the stench of blood and pine chippings by the butchers’ vans. The Salvation Army band was playing ‘Abide With Me’. Evan stood to listen but fled when a man wreathed in smiles encouraged him to join in or, at least, give some money to Christ’s soldiers.

‘Not one, not two, but
three
bottles of real, French perfume for the price of one and I’ll throw in a non-stick dry fryer for any lovely lady or gentleman who splashes out and buys a fourth!’

There was a cart laden with garish plastic toys. Dolls dangled by their feet in polythene bags and, in a cage, two wind-up kittens and a Sherman tank gyrated on their backs emitting clockwork mews. A curious stone block like a milestone announced that its observer was now as far from the sea as it was possible to be in the British Isles. The next cart held nothing but brushes, the next, an array of oversize shoes and the next, an assortment of watches, ties and handbags.

‘All prices slashed! Real silk! Genuine leather!’

Evan paused to finger an antique, spangled dress on a second-hand clothes stall then moved on to a nightmare array of sweets from which he bought a bag of white chocolate buttons sprinkled with hundreds-and-thousands. Then he saw a place called Kath’s Cath Caff and escaped.

The room was redolent of cigarettes, coffee steam and the savoury hiss of frying pork. Evan bought a coffee foaming with hot milk and a doughnut oozing pink jam. The seating was along one wall so that everyone faced the room and one could watch what was going on without seeming obviously rude to one’s neighbour, or sit alone with less pathos. Evan sat in a space between a sad young man stirring sugar into his tea and a young couple who were pawing a map. He ate the doughnut quickly because it was more necessary than pleasurable then leaned back to sip coffee and think.

He had wrecked everything and made a fool of himself. Enough. The research was finished. He would lie low tonight then slip away straight after Emma Price-Hamilton’s lunch tomorrow.

‘Fool,’ he thought. ‘Goddamned fool,’ then ‘Why?’ then ‘Madeleine’. The coffee was too weak and the milk had coated his tongue unpleasantly. Beyond the condensation on the windows the sky was turning darker still.

‘Ok. Have it your way,’ said the map girl and began to pull on a duffle coat. ‘But it’ll cost us an arm and a leg.’

‘Well do you want a bath or don’t you?’ her companion urged. She sighed impatiently as they rose to leave. Evan was about to follow their example when a pair of deeply tanned middle-aged women in identical mackintoshes arrived to take their place.

‘Excuse me. Are these places free?’ asked one in broad Texan.

‘Indeed they are,’ said Evan with an automatic smile and he cleared a space for her friend’s tray.

‘Oh but you’re American!’ she exclaimed. ‘What a great surprise!’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘We’re just over. This is my sister Amy, and I’m Pam. We’re from San Antonio.’

‘So I had heard.’

She roared with laughter and dug her sister in the ribs.

‘So he had heard. Did you hear that, Amy? So he had heard.’ She turned back to Evan with an earnest expression. ‘You’re very funny. Boy, this is nice.’

‘Yes,’ said Evan.

‘Oh, excuse me?’ Pam caught the waitress’s attention. ‘I think this gentleman would like the same again.’

‘What were you wanting?’ The waitress stared at Evan, pen poised over pad.

‘Oh … er … a hot chocolate,’ said Evan. ‘I’m afraid I’m only a Bostonian,’ he said to Pam and Amy.

‘So
we
had heard,’ said Amy and they both roared with laughter this time. Evan watched them laugh.

‘This your first day here?’ Pam asked him.

‘No. I’ve been working here nearly a week but this is my first day off.’

‘We’re due on a guided tour at half of eleven. Wanna come?’

‘What a perfectly wonderful idea,’ he said seriously. ‘Watch out for the doughnuts, Amy – they squirt.’

And so he found himself on a guided tour with a pack of trouser-suited Texans. They saw the Cathedral, the Chapter House, Tatham’s, the town hall, the Hanover Street baths, the old Guildhall, the Butter Cross and the Hermitage. It was rather fun. The best parts were being shepherded into the Chapter House to see Petra Dixon’s face when she caught sight of him in the unlikely crowd and being shown around the Tatham’s library by Perkin Philby, whom Evan asked extremely awkward questions and affected not to recognize.

It had been drizzling gently all the while they were looking at the Butter Cross and being told about the Hermitage (now a busy auction house). As they wandered back up the hill, the Texans to go shopping and Evan to go nowhere in particular, a storm broke. He and the sisters managed to lose the others and took shelter in a tea shop where, it being mid-afternoon and dark as a midwinter five o’clock, they felt no guilt about ordering a full cream tea for three. The storm was the most spectacular Evan had ever witnessed outside New England. The rain was so heavy that it became hard to see across the High Street between the white flares of lightning. A wind howled down the chimney beside them and the thunder was so loud that Amy grew quite querulous. Pam, the elder, told her to stop making a fuss and to eat her second scone, which calmed her down. Pam was the older by four years, Evan learned, and married to a man who had perfected a fake fur that sold for half the price of mink and was far more comfortable on sticky summer evenings. Amy had recently lost her husband, a pharmacist. At least, he was not dead but he had become a little too eccentric and had had to be moved to a special place (‘very exclusive’) and they had come to Europe to help her forget. Evan pictured Amy’s husband, scrawny in cord-free pyjamas, talking to thin air and hidden microphones about the New Jerusalem, staring at the towering cacti from his padded suite and trailed by discreetly mounted cameras.

The storm blew itself away after half an hour and there was a sudden rush for the sisters to rejoin their coach. Feeling sick, Evan insisted on treating them and they left, clutching his ex-wife’s address should they ever be up in Massachusetts. He paid the bill, smoked a cigarette then ventured out. A weak sun was creeping through rags of cloud and as he crossed the Close the grass glittered and steamed. The car had not returned and he had to use his key to get in so he knew himself to be alone. There was a note on the hall table.

‘Dear Ma and Evan,’ it said. ‘Have just driven over to Arkfield to cinema. Back 9-ish. Love, M.’

Cheered by the inclusion of his name, though still feeling sick from the cream tea, he let himself into the granny flat. He slung his damp coat over a chairback and decided to enjoy a quiet lie-down, possibly with Sukie Lark Rosen.

His first thought as he slid back the second bathroom door was that there had been a burglary. The French windows were open, one of the curtains hung free, the other, twisted over the outside of a door, was rain-soaked. His suitcase, which he had never unpacked, seemed to have exploded. His shirts littered the room. The one he picked up as he came in had had its sleeves ripped off. The others were in a similar condition – some almost in rags. There were little muddy trails across the carpet and over the unmade bed. This was the work of an animal, not a burglar. Curiously, considering its importance, it was only when he started forward to pull the sodden curtain back inside that Evan remembered his manuscript.

He tended to work in fountain pen in small, fifty-leaf exercise books which, as they were filled up, became strung across with a weave of directions and cross references that only he could decipher. He always did the typing up himself because it would have taken too long to explain to any typist his system of codes and arrows, also because he relished the days of undemanding drudgery at the typewriter after months of brainwork. There was a simple pleasure in watching the pile of freshly-typed sheets growing from the battered heap of little notebooks. Whoever – whatever – had broken into the bedroom had taken the notebooks and scattered them across Mrs Merluza’s garden. A few remained whole, the others had been torn from their staples and been thrown into the wind to flutter on to bush and border. Feeling nothing yet but weakening disbelief, Evan pushed past the ripped curtains and drifted into the garden. Judging from all the mud inside, the visitor had been fairly wet on arrival, but the manuscript would seem to have received the benefit of at least half the storm. He stooped to pick up one of the whole books and it squelched in his grasp. The cover disintegrated as he tried to open it and the precious contents had turned to so much inky porridge. A few pages at the centre were still legible but even as he laid them bare, trickles of blue-black rain slipped across them, slicing angels, obliterating saints. He returned to his room and emerged with a carrier bag from the local stores and began carefully to load it with the sodden text.

‘I’m the man collecting tinned peaches for my children after the blast,’ he thought. ‘I’m the radio officer tapping out polite requests for information after the power has died. This is a last whimper.’

One of the few typed sheets – those he had produced on the old Underwood at Tatham’s – had been speared on a rose bush. Evan teased it off, trying not to tear it further, then stuffed it in the bag. The bag was thick paper, not plastic, and the weight of waterlogged manuscript soon tore through its base. Evan stopped in the act of reaching up to an apple tree and looked down at the heap by his feet. He dropped the remains of the bag, wiped some paper off his shoe and walked back inside. He found a local number under the Pest Control section of the Yellow Pages.

‘No, I’m sorry, but you’ve got to come now,’ he said, quite calmly. ‘Tomorrow’s no good. I leave tomorrow.’

A man came in a little van and left bowls of poisoned nuts around the garden.

‘You don’t have a dog, do you, sir?’ he asked.

‘No,’ said Evan. ‘I live alone,’ and he wrote the man a cheque.

Unable to do the professional thing by telephoning Jeremy, he pulled on his damp coat again. He locked the French windows and, with a banana in his pocket, Mrs Merluza’s cooking brandy and the white chocolate buttons, he set out to follow Madeleine’s example and take refuge in the thoughtless dark of a cinema. He too left her mother a note.

‘Dear Mrs M,’ he wrote. ‘You’ve got rats. Big ones. Have had poison put in garden. No dogs. Back late. Evan.’

‘Dawn, my little darling. What weather this afternoon! Come on in.’ Having greeted her masseuse, Deirdre Chattock leaned against the palace door and broke out in a thick cough. Dawn reached out a sure hand and pressed a point below Deirdre’s left ear with her forefinger. The coughing stopped at once. Not even breathless, Deirdre exclaimed. ‘I wish you’d teach me to do that. Old Merloozy just beats me till my back’s blue.’

‘You can’t do it yourself unless you’re completely relaxed,’ Dawn told her. ‘And you’re hardly relaxed if you’re coughing your lungs up.’

They made the slow ascent to Deirdre’s apartment.

‘I suppose I should get you to teach Gavin, in case of emergencies,’ said Deirdre.

‘If he got the wrong spot, though, he could kill you,’ Dawn replied placidly. ‘I saw him on
Faith Forum
in the rental shop window on my way up, by the way,’ she went on.

‘Isn’t it exciting! He’s almost finished. Do you mind if we watch the last bit, Petal, before we get down to business?’

‘Fine by me.’

‘Good.’

They walked through to the bedroom which was in darkness except for a television’s spectral beam which lit up Deirdre’s generous double bed. The two of them climbed on and sat side by side, leaning against the cushioned headboard. By normal light the latter was cerise with grey buttons.

In the past half hour, Mr Gavin Tree had run circles round a panel comprising the Bishop of Bath and Wells, the chairwoman of a morality watchdog group, the MP for Bournemouth West (Con) and a senior committee member of the Mother’s Union. Not only had he led them to air the less palatable of their doctrines but he had utterly charmed the studio audience which, as Deirdre rejoined the programme, was being given the final air time to pose a few questions of its own.

‘Do you believe in a female priesthood?’ asked a forthright man in plate-glass spectacles.

‘Well, like the Holy Ghost, women priests are seen to be everywhere and are therefore undeniable,’ answered Gavin and raised a laugh which he stilled by continuing. ‘Yes, of course I do. It’s daft in this instance to draw up biblical evidence and say that all the disciples and apostles were male; society has altered far too radically since then, praise be. Despite appearances, we are not, like poor Saint Paul, members of a patriarchal society under military rule. I think there is a place for women on an active level in the church, just as there will always be a place for women doctors, lawyers, roadsweepers and fisherpersons.’ There was a quiet cheer. The camera cut briefly to the disgusted expression on the face of the Bishop of Bath and Wells and then to the presenter.

‘And I’m afraid we’ve run out of time,’ she said, ‘though I’m sure that our studio audience will keep the Bishop busy for at least another hour. So thank you to Basil Amiss, Conservative MP for Bournemouth West, to May Gerard of Parents in Moral Authority, to …’

Deirdre pressed a button on her remote control unit and the presenter continued in silence.

‘Good old Gav,’ she said. ‘It was taped an hour or two ago. They daren’t do these things live in case some bore in the audience tries to ruin things. He should be home soon. Of course, we’ll be flooded with cards and little somethings tomorrow.’

Dawn was taking off her shoes and pop socks.

‘Your hour has come, Mrs Chattock,’ she said.

‘Off we go, then,’ said Deirdre. She stood and stripped down to a black bra and discreetly lacy, black panty-girdle. Humming to herself, she tossed a pillow on to the floor and lay down on her front, the pillow under her chin. Dawn turned on a bedside light then switched off the television. She walked through to the sitting room and pushed a cassette into the stereo system that was hidden by the sofa. Peggy Lee began to croon that she was feeling kind of lonesome and hadn’t slept a wink. Deirdre gave a contented sigh and hummed along in a lower register. Dawn took a jar of yellowish cream from her bag and slapped three fingersful of it on to Deirdre’s well-padded spine and some more onto her legs. It must have been cold, for the Bishop’s mother said ‘ooh’ and chuckled. Then, arms folded in the Oriental fashion, with fingers straight, Dawn began to walk very slowly on her client. For the following ten minutes, as attention was paid in this way to her spine, legs, pelvis and shoulders, Deirdre kept up a throaty monologue along the lines of,

‘Oh! Your feet are bloody cold dear why couldn’t you have oh Christ that’s good it hurts but oh oh God yes there that’s it buggery hell yes ooh mmm you’re incredible Miss Harper ow! steady on mmm yes and in between I drink ooh black coffee mmm yes love’s a hand-me-down brew shit Jesus God that’s oh oh oh. Thanks.’ When Dawn finally stepped off and began to pull on her socks again, Deirdre sighed, ‘You always stop too soon.’

‘It’s better that way. If you go on too long you get bruises. Here. Look.’

‘What?’ Deirdre sat up and readjusted her bra straps on her shoulders with a gesture young beneath her years.

‘I made another batch of dope cakes.’

‘Wonderful.’

‘Twenty-five for that lot.’ Dawn handed over a bag of home-made biscuits.

‘My purse is on the desk, Petal. I meant to tell you,’ Deirdre laughed. ‘Well, perhaps I shouldn’t. I’m normally so discreet.’

‘Oh go on,’ said Dawn, smirking as she returned from the desk, tucking two brown notes and a blue into the back pocket of her jeans. ‘I’m quiet as the tomb.’

‘Well I gave one to old Merloozy yesterday.’

‘You never!’

‘I did.’ Deirdre laughed and nearly coughed again. ‘I put a whole collection out on a plate. I always eat one anyway before she comes, because they help me go under, but she normally gets nothing stronger than ginger nuts.’

‘What happened?’

‘Bless me if she didn’t go into a trance and chatter in Swahili or something. It was quite scary. Sick as a parrot when she woke up; I knew she’d never had the stuff before.’

‘Poor old bat. Did she tell you what she saw?’

‘No. Mouth tight as a drum. Pretended she’d just fainted but I could see she’d seen something and was nervous as hell about it, whatever it was.’

‘Do it for me,’ said Dawn after a moment’s reflection.

‘Do what?’

‘Go into a trance. Contact someone.’

Deirdre stopped, half way into a Turkish silk dressing gown. ‘Are you serious?’ she asked.

‘Course.’

‘Is there someone you want to hear from, then? Yes, I think there must be,’ she teased. ‘Your face, my lady, is as a book.’

‘Well?’

‘Just this once. Because you’ve got rid of my bloody backache.’

‘Fantastic!’

‘Come on then.’

Deirdre walked into her sitting room and set about lighting candles.

‘Do you want a dope cake?’ Dawn asked her.

‘Yes, but it’s OK. I’ve still got one of the ones I offered Merloozy in this tin.’ Munching, she took her usual seat and told Dawn to turn off the music and bedside light then come to the sofa. Dawn did as she was bidden.

‘What now?’ she asked. ‘Do you need a name or—’

‘Ssh!’ Deirdre interrupted her. ‘Just sit and listen. Sssh!’ Slowly her breathing came under such control that Dawn would never have believed she was a smoker. Then it grew slower and slower. And slower still. Tense on the edge of the sofa, Dawn clenched her eyes tight and conjured up a silhouette against the glinting Bross. A bush of red hair. A gleam of muddy thigh. A narrow, childish leg.

‘Sasha,’ she thought. ‘Sashasashasasha.’ Deirdre’s breathing stopped altogether. ‘Christ!’ thought Dawn. ‘The old bird’s heart’s stopped.’ She opened her eyes and was about to speak when there was a growl from the chair opposite. In the thin wash of light from the candle she could just see Deirdre’s lips curled back like a dog’s. Her teeth – not her own, Dawn had once seen the Dentufix in her desk – her teeth were just visible. They looked wet and sharp. Dawn could just hear the tobaccoey phlegm flapping in the older woman’s throat. Another growl emerged, louder this time. ‘Sasha?’ Dawn whispered. ‘Is that you, Sasha?’ the growl lurched into a blood-chilling guttural bark and Deirdre flew forwards out of her chair, knocking out the candle, and tried to bite Dawn’s ankles. Dawn swore brutally and, leaping to her feet, pushed her back hard with a foot. The growling continued, enraged. Dawn lost her nerve and ran to flick on the standard lamp. After much groping for the switch, she was successful and span around.

Deirdre was on all fours, her dressing gown hanging open on her unlikely underwear. Her eyes were turned up into her head so that only their blood-laced whites were showing. She was dribbling profusely. She looked far from friendly.

‘Sasha?’ tried Dawn once more and the beast in Deirdre took another lunge towards her.

Snatching her bag from the bed, Dawn ran from the flat, slamming the door. She ran as fast as her remarkably good legs would carry her, down the great stairs, past the portraits of previous Bishops and out of the front door which took two hands to lug it open. A light rain was falling. She put up her collapsible umbrella and hurried on down the avenue. At the gateway she ducked back into the shadows to watch the Bishop arrive home in a taxi.