Hush Hush (34 page)

‘Wait!’ she croaked
in panic. ‘That’s not fair, delivering ultimatums.’

‘I think it’s
perfectly fair. I came all the way out here to tell you how I feel
about you. Affirmative action
‒
which isn’t easy for me to take. Now put yourself on the
line. Tell me you love me too.’

Angela’s panic mounted and
with it, a dizzying sense of speaking now or for ever holding her
peace. She didn’t want him to get back on that steamer, simple
as that. The waiter plonked their meals in front of them. Conor
picked up his fork.

‘Think about it over the
meal.’

‘I love you!’ shouted
Angela, startling the waiter and the cats under the table. ‘I
love you and I don’t want you to get on the steamer. Is that
enough?’

Conor
McGinlay’s nut-brown face split into a slow, steady grin. ‘It’s
a start.’

‘Fancy Dad telling a whopper like that!’
crowed Shane, slathering honey over a wedge of fluffy white bread.
‘Didn’t know the old man had it in him. Getting back on
the steamer in an hour, indeed!’

Angela stared at the buttery
knife left in the honey-pot. Like Sadie, Shane had blossomed in the
ripening heat. His muddy hair looked thicker and glinted with gold
highlights. His scrawny frame was browning nicely. They were having
breakfast as a foursome in Angela’s and Sadie’s
apartment.

Conor and Shane had pre-booked an
apartment in a nearby street for the week. Conor had never had any
intention of clearing off on the steamer. He’d used the threat
of his departure to put teeth in his ultimatum. As he’d teased
her over dessert in the Fig-Leaf: ‘You didn’t really
think I’d shell out for a holiday and then book into a place at
the other end of the island, without getting my money’s worth
here?’

‘Shane,’
said Conor now through a mouthful of grapes. ‘Tell Ange and Mrs
F about the new house.’

‘Oh yeah, like, it’s
a dump,’ said Shane enthusiastically. ‘Coming down with
mildew, earwigs in the woodwork
…
Loads of potential, though,’ he ended in a mumble, under the
heat of Conor’s glare.
‘
So
Dad says anyway.’

‘It’s closer to
Wilmesbury,’ explained Conor, turning to include Sadie. ‘Needs
a lot doing to it, but that’s right up my street. I was
thinking, Mrs F, of converting the downstairs level for easy
mobility, in case, you know, you ever wanted to visit and stay on for
a bit.’

Sadie tried not to look too
thrilled. ‘It’s very kind of you to think of me, Conor.’

‘You two getting married
and living with me in this show house, then?’ demanded Shane.
‘What?’ he asked of his father’s despairing
expression. ‘It wouldn’t exactly be a shock, would it?
And I’m only asking what everyone else is thinking.’ He
flung down his half-chewed bread. ‘I’m honest, me.’

‘Too honest for your own
good,’ concluded Conor, using paternal fierceness to avoid
looking at Angela. She’d been strangely quiet since their
arrival for breakfast. He hoped to God she wasn’t going cool on
her declaration of love.

She stood up abruptly, her gaze
straying to the balcony where another perfect blue day beckoned. ‘I
think I’ll go and finish my postcards out on the balcony. I’ll
be home before anyone receives them at this rate.’

Conor’s wondering look
strayed after her. Sadie stood up with almost sprightly ease and
nodded at Shane. ‘Conor, why don’t you take your son off
to the supermarket? I bet you haven’t stocked up your apartment
yet.’

While Sadie piled crockery,
Conor’s look stayed stubbornly fixed on Angela, who now leant
on the balcony rail, apparently oblivious to the domestic bustle
behind her.

‘I thought we’d be
eating out all the time,’ Conor muttered belatedly to Sadie,
with a mulish dislike of being humoured that made him look, suddenly,
like Shane.

‘You’ll still need
the basics. Be off with you now, the pair of you!’ She looked
steadily at Conor until his mouth quirked and his instinct told him
that Sadie was trying to help
‒
again.

‘All right, you win. Come
on, Shane.’

Shane’s interest was
guarded. ‘Can I get Pop Tarts?’

‘I’ll let you know
when I see them.’

They clattered out, Conor
determined to make an exit that signalled his grasp of the subtleties
of a mother-daughter hotline. Whatever was bugging Angela, maybe
Sadie’s instinct was right, and it was best left to maternal
probing.

Sadie dragged a chair onto the
balcony. Angela was slumped on a white iron garden chair that dwarfed
the wobbly Formica table beside her. She’d spread her postcards
into a peacock’s fantail of rainbow colours on the table-top.
She’d already told Sadie who she was sending them to. One for
the girls at work, one for Magdalena at Hartley’s and a couple
of others she’d probably keep as souvenirs. Sadie looked down
at the postcards. They were still blank. Angela stared out over the
pepperpot chimneys, chewing her pen. For once, reflected Sadie, she
seemed genuinely preoccupied rather than ignoring her over-solicitous
mother in the hope she’d go away.

‘What’s got into you,
lovey? Conor’s worried sick that you’re having second
thoughts.’

‘Huh!’ Angela looked
round. ‘No way. I’ll have to talk to him about his
fragile male ego. To be honest, I was wondering whether or not to
send Rachel a postcard.’

‘Oh,’ sniffed Sadie.
‘Well, of course, forgiving Rachel would be an act of Christian
charity.’

‘I’ve already
forgiven her,’ said Angela, to Sadie’s amazement. ‘The
truth is, since I found out, I feel kind of at peace. I find, after
thinking a lot about it, I don’t hate her or Robert. She
liberated me from torturous suspicion. And I can see she’s an
unhappy woman.’

‘As far as I can see, the
best thing is to cut her out of your life.’

Angela said slowly, ‘No,
I’ve turned my back on people who need me once too often. Maybe
‒
maybe if I can
rediscover the Rachel I knew and liked at school, before she got all
hard about life, I can make up for
‒
neglecting someone else. A stranger, someone I can’t stop
thinking about this morning.’

‘Who?’ asked Sadie,
intrigued.

So, shutting her eyes briefly,
Angela decided to go for confessional broke. She prepared to tell
Sadie the ultimate thing, the thing she kept buried under all the
other guilt, in a lead-lined box. She began to tell her about the
girl on the Underground.

‘She was the real reason I
gave up working in London on
Women
Today
.
It had
nothing to do with being tired of London per se, or anything to do
with Robert, just in case you thought he was a factor.’

‘I never did,’ put in
Sadie defensively.

‘Well, anyway, I was
travelling home after working late one night. It had gone nine
o’clock. There was no one else in the Tube compartment apart
from this girl
‒
well,
girl hovering on being a woman. Pretty but plastered in make-up. She
had a small suitcase. The man got on at Tufnell Park. He made
straight for her, screaming,
“
You’re
coming with me, you bitch!
”
I could smell the drink off him from a foot away. I’ll never
forget the naked terror on her face. Or when she looked across at me
and mouthed two words,
“
Help
me!
”’
Angela
paused and avoided Sadie’s eye, and her depth of attention. ‘He
held her by the hair until the next Tube stop,’ she resumed. ‘I
caught his eye by chance and he yelled,
“
What’re
you looking at?
”
and
I feared for my miserable, cowardly life. The Tube stopped and he
grabbed her case and dragged her off by her roots while she screamed
with the pain. I sat there, frozen, full of relief. Hurrah! Saved by
the next stop! There were a few people on the platform, but they did
nothing either; just another couple of crazies to side-step on the
Underground. He dragged her off by her hair, and I just sat there.’

Sadie waited, but this was the
end of a sparsely told story, minus the gorier details imprinted on
memory. ‘It wasn’t just you,’ she said gently.
‘There must have been a few strapping blokes who could’ve
gone to her aid.’

‘But she spoke to me. And I
looked away. I scuttled home to Robert and we rang the police to
report an assault. A policeman with bum fluff came round and took a
statement, said they’d pass it on to the Met. But it was too
late by then. He’d probably done her in, or she’d taken
an overdose. I know I’d have topped myself if I’d been in
her shoes, and another woman looked the other way, left some brute to
batter me into submission.’

‘How could you have
confronted him? He’d probably have attacked you, too.’

‘I could’ve pulled
the emergency cord! I could’ve
‒
oh, I dunno. Anything but look the other way. What’s
that saying? All it needs for evil to triumph is for good men to do
nothing. I had to give up my job,’ she hurried on, forestalling
her mother’s next soothing platitude. ‘The journey forced
me to relive it every day, see her haunted face pleading with me
every day. I couldn’t cope.’

And then some. The Tube journey
from work to Victoria had become unbearable, peppered with sweats,
cramps, panic attacks. Her self-disgust was laced with different
kinds of fear that she’d come face to face with either the man
or girl-woman again. Her GP had told her she’d crack up if she
didn’t get counselling and change work locations. Afraid of
being labelled an eggshell personality and, much worse, a bad
Samaritan, she’d given in her notice, hinting only to Lazlo of
a mini-breakdown caused by a personal nemesis.

‘I meant to get a job
locally,’ she resumed.
‘
But
it became easier and easier to hide away at home, and more and more
difficult to face the world, which meant that counselling didn’t
get a look-in either. Because you’re right, Ma, it wasn’t
just me. I kept asking myself, what sort of people are we all?
Collective scum? The world looks such an ordinary place, but its very
ordinariness is full of shadows. It’s always the
harmless-looking bloke who turns out to be the rapist or serial
killer. The outwardly doting parent who shuts the garage door, turns
on the car engine
‒
and
takes the kids along for the ride. The house was my refuge from all
that tainted horridness.’

‘Look, lovey. You acted
‒
or failed to act
‒
on the spur of the moment and lived to regret it. Then you sat at
home, brooding over naturally depressing things, letting them swell
out of all proportion to reality.’

‘Robert said I’d used
all my luxurious brooding time to build a case of adultery against
him.’

Sadie looked uncomfortable. ‘Well
now, you said yourself, you’ve moved on from that. Rachel’s
confession means you don’t have to wonder any more. One day
soon, you’ll be able to look back on the good times of your
marriage, without a
‒
a
one-night stand getting in the way. My point is, there are as many
examples of the kindness of strangers as there are of man’s
inhumanity to man.’

‘Do you think so?’
asked Angela thoughtfully. She’d already resolved to tell Conor
‒
one day soon
‒
about Robert and Rachel and, eventually, about the Underground girl.
She’d suspected for a long time that Conor saw Robert as a
husband beyond reproach, simply by virtue of having died young, and
been retrospectively canonised by her. But she couldn’t start
her new life clinging to a lie about the old. And putting Conor right
didn’t mean assassinating Robert’s character. It had been
one lapse in a lifetime.

Sadie bent forward suddenly and
wrapped her old, gnarled hands around her daughter’s. Angela
recoiled out of sheer habit, but in the next instant, relaxed and
returned the pressure. Her mother’s hands had a sure grip and
resonated with the heat that they’d lapped up from the sun,
lying in her lap as she sat on the balcony. The intensity of her
touch, strong and yet almost impersonal, was a marvellous thing. Only
a short time ago, before she was sure of Conor’s love and had
found the courage to declare her own, Angela couldn’t have
imagined sharing such an intimacy with her mother. She felt the
pebbly little scree in her heart, marking the spot where her last
secret had lain buried, skitter away and let in the sun.

‘You and Conor can have a
marvellous life together,’ said Sadie. ‘Ultimately, what
happened to that poor woman was her own responsibility. Maybe someone
did help her, outside the Tube station. We just don’t know.’

‘I suppose it’s that
collective responsibility thing,’ sighed Angela. Robert had
said the same sensible, placating things. ‘You can’t
always walk by on the other side and leave it to someone else.’
She was thinking, too, of Conor’s responsibility to Kate. He
wasn’t abandoning her to fend for herself, like a domestic cat
dumped in the wild. She could cope with the fact that he still cared
about his ex-wife. It made him a better man to be all hers.

‘I know you shouldn’t
always walk by, lovey. But you can’t go on punishing yourself
for past mistakes either.’ Sadie smiled sadly. ‘I speak
from experience.’

They exchanged a look that bonded
them in pure, unsullied mutual understanding. This moment may never
come again, thought Angela, holding her mother’s hands on the
sunny balcony. Its rarity value makes it so special. I’ll go
back to being difficult, unpredictable Angela, and she’ll go
back to ‘advising’ me and driving me up the wall.

Sure enough, seconds later, the
spell was broken by the slam of the apartment door and Shane yelling,
‘Hi honeys, we’re home.’

Sadie roused herself. ‘I
want to go and buy my own postcards.’ She rose stiffly and
looked down at Angela. ‘I think you’ll find someone’s
male ego needs reassuring. I’ll rope in you-know-who for
another expedition to the shops.’