In a Good Light (33 page)

‘Like
84 Charing Cross Road
?' Mum suggested.

‘Hardly,' said Dad.

I could see Christian starting to squirm in his seat. He hated this sort of talk, which he regarded as ‘arty-farty'.

‘Will you be allowed to watch the execution?' he asked, to bring the conversation back on track.

‘Oh no,' said Aunty Barbara. ‘I wouldn't want to. I'll be holding a vigil outside. There'll be protesters like me on one side, and the pro-death penalty lobby on the other with their barbecues and frying pans. Apparently it's the same old ghouls who show up at these executions. They go from state to state.'

‘There are no shortage of ghouls over here,' Dad murmured.

‘Oh yes, I read about your girl in the paper.'

‘What girl?' I asked.

‘Janine Fellowes,' Dad replied. ‘The Home Secretary is wringing his hands over it now. She's twenty-one, so they've got to decide whether to release her or transfer her to an adult prison.'

‘There'll be an outcry if she's freed, surely?' said Aunty Barbara.

‘I must say the force of public opinion has surprised me. I don't think anyone except me and the Home Secretary wants to let her out.'

‘That's because the gutter press have completely demonised her,' said Mum. ‘Anything to sell papers.'

‘The broadsheets are no better,' said Dad. ‘I haven't seen a single sympathetic editorial.'

‘It's because she's an affront to people's ideas about
childhood innocence,' said Penny. This sort of discussion was right up her street. Christian and Donovan were jousting for the same cube of bread, which had fallen into the cheese.

‘Especially female innocence,' said Mum. Aunty Barbara and Penny nodded vigorously.

‘The irony is that she is more fully rehabilitated than any prisoner I've ever met,' said Dad.

‘Have you got involved with any public pronouncements, Gordon?' Aunty Barbara asked.

‘I was hoping not to this time,' said Dad. ‘But I probably will.'

‘More bricks,' Mum sighed.

‘She'd be lynched if she was let out anyway,' said Christian. ‘She's safer inside.'

‘That's another consideration,' Dad agreed. ‘She'd have to assume a new identity, move to a new place, cut all ties with her family. That's quite a tall order.'

‘Oh, I don't know,' said Aunty Barbara, dividing the last of the Veuve Cliquot between herself and Penny. ‘Donovan threatens to do it regularly.'

The accused smiled at her. ‘I still might.'

‘I remember that time you ran away from here,' said Mum. ‘I nearly had kittens.'

‘I'm afraid that's one habit he hasn't grown out of. He's quite likely to take off at a moment's notice.'

‘Perhaps you could leave us a little note this time, Donovan,' Mum suggested. ‘Then I'll know not to worry.'

Donovan nodded placidly.

‘Where do you go when you take off?' Penny asked.

‘Nowhere special,' said Donovan. ‘I just wander.'

Dad left for the Airport with Aunty Barbara before the rest of the house was awake, allowing plenty of time for queues, breakdowns and all manner of delays. He was always inclined to be early for things, and was overcompensating for Aunty Barbara's tendency to become embroiled in last-minute emergencies.

She had tried to give Mum some money for Donovan's keep, but there had been the usual to-ing and fro-ing and stubborn refusals to give in on both sides.

‘It's no use leaving it behind,' I said to Aunty Barbara, as she put the bundle of notes on the mantelpiece. ‘It'll only go to the Less Fortunate.'

‘Oh, bugger the Less Fortunate,' she said, retrieving it. ‘What have they ever done for us?' She entrusted the money to Donovan with the proviso that he use it for household expenses and not his own idle gratification.

Her other parting instructions were that he should not smoke in the house (a courtesy she only observed herself now that she had given up smoking) and should make sure he ate heartily at work instead of raiding our fridge. To all of this he listened with an attitude of deep concentration and when she'd finished, said, ‘Can I offer some advice in return?'

‘Of course you can,' said his mother.

‘Don't marry him.'

Aunty Barbara replied to this with a peal of merry laughter but no promises.

ON DONOVAN'S FIRST
day at work I watched from my bedroom window as he set off for the city, stiff and self-conscious in his suit. Evidently he'd misjudged the dress code, as on day two he'd abandoned the jacket and tie and by day three he was in jeans.

Normally I would have been on my paper round at that hour, but since turning fifteen I'd felt the job to be beneath me and had quit. To replace the lost earnings I had set myself up as a babysitter. A new breed of professional couple had started moving into the Victorian cottages near the Fox and Pheasant, and were happy to pay stupid money to escape from their own children for a few hours. I'd stuck a card in the newsagent's window:

Reliable, friendly, local girl (15) available for babysitting (evenings). Reasonable rates. References on request.

I had put that last line in at Penny's suggestion, and she had agreed to act as a satisfied customer and vouch for my character if required. Since then, I'd had a call at least once a week, and was building up a list of regular clients. It was a beautiful arrangement: the children were usually asleep, or at least in bed out of my way, the parents were delirious with gratitude, and as well as paying me, left me treats and snacks and the freedom of the fridge. I could lie at full stretch on the couch and watch colour TV all evening, uninterrupted by Grandpa's noisy breathing and anxious commentary.

During that first week of Donovan's residency I had several bookings, so I hadn't seen much of him in the evenings. According to Mum it was his habit to arrive home from work towards 6.30 and disappear upstairs, closing his bedroom door behind him. Taking Aunty Barbara's parting injunction to heart, or perhaps remembering Mum's cooking from previous visits, he couldn't be persuaded to share our supper, but ate alone, or fasted, in his room.

Then one evening that week I'd been babysitting for the Conways, my favourite clients, and because it was a warm summer night and I had the fidgets I declined their offer of a lift home and decided to walk instead. Once I'd left the pub and the green behind there were no more streetlamps, but there was a crooked old moon hanging just above the trees to light my way, and, besides, I knew every curve and crater of those lanes and could have negotiated them blindfolded. Although it was after midnight the air was still sultry, heavy with the scent of crushed petals, woodsmoke and sweating foliage. There was no breeze, but the hedgerows seemed to seethe and rustle as I passed. As I reached the
bend where Penny had run Aunty Barbara off the road and where there was almost no moonlight, I stopped to enjoy the stillness and darkness and silence. In that moment of sensory deprivation, I suddenly experienced a blissful feeling of calm, contentment, the perfect rightness of the universe. I suppose I was having what is crudely described as an out-of-body experience, and yet it was more as if my body was dissolving into the darkness.

Presently, a twig cracked, and I picked up the distant crunch of footsteps. This roused me from my dreamlike state and I set off again. As I penetrated the bramble snare of the driveway I saw the orange glow of a cigarette tip between the rhododendrons, and Donovan loomed out of the shadows.

‘What are you doing, skulking in the bushes?' I asked.

‘I'm having a smoke. What are you doing?'

‘I've been babysitting in the village. I walked home for a change.'

‘Oh, that's where you go in the evenings, is it? I thought you were just avoiding me,' he said, squinting at me through the smoke.

‘Why would I want to do that?'

‘I don't know. Because your mum and dad have warned you that I'm a bit dodgy, and you mustn't get tangled up with me,' he suggested.

An indignant noise, somewhere between a laugh and a cough, escaped me. Indignant because although I knew he was only winding me up, the idea of some sort of entanglement had in fact occurred to me from time to time since his arrival, most often as I was dropping off to sleep at night.

‘But I never had any intention of getting tangled up with you,' I said primly.

Donovan laughed. ‘You're a bit young for me, anyway. I go for older women.'

It's impossible to put up any defence against a slur like that. My ego was still reeling when the porch light came on and Mum appeared in her dressing gown and slippers, holding a rinsed milkbottle for the doorstep.

‘Is that you, Donovan?' She peered at us, blind without her glasses. ‘Have you seen Esther? Oh, there you are. I wondered where you were.'

‘I'm here,' I confirmed.

‘Righto. Lock up when you come in. Night night.' She withdrew, leaving the porch light on, the bulb, in its death throes, flickering madly.

‘You see. Mum doesn't think you're the least bit dodgy, Donovan. She thinks you're completely normal.' This was intended, and received, as an insult. Having delivered it I was about to suggest going in, then realised Donovan still had an inch or so of cigarette left, so instead I sat down on the edge of a stone planter in which nasturtiums and chickweed fought for space. ‘Besides,' I added, ‘if anyone's doing the avoiding, it's you. You never come out of your room.'

‘The reason I don't come out of my room is that I know the moment I do, someone is going to ask me how the job's going.'

‘How's the job going?' I asked.

Donovan pulled a face at me. ‘It's awful. It's the total pits. I don't even want to talk about it,' he said, and then proceeded to do just that for the next ten minutes. He was working for a big estate agent and surveyor near Cannon Street, he said, but instead of being up in the office doing the exciting stuff like valuations, he was stuck down in a windowless vault all day long by himself, filing maps. Every
so often the phone would ring and someone upstairs would request a particular map. He would have to locate it amongst the thousands of files, put it in a tube, and send it up this chute. At other times a whole batch of used maps would be returned for re-filing. That was it, all day. There wasn't even a chair, just a desk. ‘I thought there would be people to talk to,' he said. ‘But the only time I've actually seen a human being is when I lit up a fag and set off the smoke alarm and someone came down to switch it off and have a go at me. There isn't even a window to look out of. It's like a tomb.'

‘Can't you listen to your Walkman?'

‘I tried that, but then I can't hear the phone. I tell you, Esther, it's so tedious, I go off into this trance of boredom for hours on end, and then I look at my watch and only five minutes have gone past.' He glanced automatically at his watch. ‘Only nine hours till it all starts again.'

‘Why don't you just leave if you hate it so much?'

‘I can't. It's a friend of Dad's who got me the job, and Dad made such a big deal of it – what a favour this guy was doing me and how lucky I was to be earning money, etc. etc. I can't just leave. Anyway, what else could I do? I can't go home. The house is let all summer.'

‘Maybe one of your older women could look after you?' I suggested evenly. Later I thought this was rather a mean remark, in view of his recently broken heart, but I was still smarting from that dig about my tender age.

Donovan smiled. ‘The fact is, I'm between older women at the moment.' He sighed. ‘No, I'll just have to grin and bear it.' He bared his teeth in an experimental grin, then an idea seemed to strike him. ‘What do you do around here all day?'

I shrugged. ‘I sort of mooch about. Sometimes I go and hang around the precinct with my mate, Dawn. Or I might go over to Penny's to walk the dogs. Mostly I just mooch about,' I conceded.

‘You could come up and meet me for lunch tomorrow,' he suggested. ‘If you're not too busy mooching.'

I said I could probably spare a few hours from my packed schedule. ‘If you're sure you can put up with my extreme youth,' I couldn't resist adding.

Donovan flung his cigarette butt into the bushes, laughing remorselessly.

We had arranged to meet on the steps of St Paul's Cathedral at five past one. This precision timing was important as Donovan had exactly one hour for lunch and couldn't afford to waste a minute of it. I wasn't used to making my own way around London, but reckoned that even I ought to be able to find something the size of St Paul's without too much trouble.

I was rather hot and flustered when I arrived, after my experience in the underground. The automatic barrier had swallowed my ticket, and one of the men on duty had practically stripped the machine down to retrieve it, eating into those valuable extra minutes I had allowed myself for getting lost. As it happened I was still early, so I went into the cathedral to cool off. As I stepped inside, the roar and hum of the London traffic was replaced by a purer sound: the reverential hush of large numbers of people trying to keep silence. Then over the top of that came the angel voices of the choristers, rising in perfect unison, clear and true. I stood, spellbound for a while, and then looked at my watch and discovered it was six minutes past one. I emerged,
blinking, into the noise and sunlight, and saw Donovan sitting on the steps. He was in black jeans and a T-shirt and the soft leather cap he always wore, which made him look like a Russian peasant. Dad had christened it his Raskolnikov hat.

‘You're late,' he accused, but he looked pleased to see me, nevertheless. One side of his face was red and crumpled as though he'd been lying on something patterned. I refrained from mentioning it, but he must have caught me staring as he rubbed his cheek and said, ‘I fell asleep. I was only woken by the phone. If it hadn't rung I'd have slept through the whole lunch hour.' He seemed horrified by this thought. ‘Where shall we eat?'