The Likes of Us (58 page)

‘The Royal Oak, y'mean?'

‘Yes. I hope you don't mind. They seemed a bit... a bit cagey.'

‘They wouldn't know who you were.'

‘No.'

‘Did you tell 'em?'

‘No. I didn't think it was any of their business.'

‘You're right, it isn't.'

Jordan held out the envelope. ‘The money's here, just as I left it for you. You might need it if you've lost your wages at the pub as well.'

‘Thanks. You're very thoughtful.' Taking the envelope, she lifted both hands to rub at her upper arms. ‘There's a rare draught coming up them stairs. Didn't you shut the front door?'

‘Yes, I'm sure I did.' He went to the top of the stairs and looked down. ‘Yes, I did.' He glanced back at her. ‘Well, I hope you'll soon feel better. Can I expect you on Tuesday? I mean, don't worry if you're still not up to it.'

‘Don't you want to come in a minute?'

‘I mustn't disturb you.'

‘Come in, if you want. I'll warn you, though, it's a tip. I haven't cleaned up today.'

Jordan followed her into the room. A sink, electric cooker and a small fridge occupied a curtained-off corner. She cleared some garments and magazines off the seat of a wooden-armed easy-chair. ‘Sit down.' She went and sat on the edge of a divan whose covers were crumpled as though she had been lying on it. ‘See how the other three-quarters live,' she said. ‘Cosy, isn't it?' There was a sardonic glint in her eyes as she looked at him.

‘Is this all you have, just the one room?'

‘That's all.'

‘You rent it furnished?'

‘If you can call this junk furniture.'

Jordan's was the only chair. He wondered where the man he had met at the door had sat, if he had been in the room.

Mrs Nugent was tearing open the envelope. As Jordan remembered that his note about the fur coat was still in there, she took it out, glanced at it and replaced it with the banknotes, without comment.

‘You seem nicely back on your feet, anyway.'

‘I had a couple of important meetings. It seemed to leave me as quickly as it came. I hope you didn't catch it from me.'

‘No, mine's a woman's ailment. I wait every month, wondering if it'll be a bad one. When it is, it crucifies me. Fair cuts me in two. No wonder they call it the curse.'

‘Surely nowdays there are things…'

‘I was fine while I was on the pill. But then they began to get windy about keeping women on it too long.' She shrugged. ‘So now it's back to codeine and cups of tea.'

‘The chap I bumped into,' Jordan said, ‘is he a fellow tenant?'

‘My step-brother. He comes and goes. Works away a lot. Oil rigs and suchlike. Sometimes abroad, among the Arabs.' She got up. ‘He brought some whisky. Would you like some?' There was a half-bottle of Johnny Walker on the draining board.

‘Well, I…'

She was rinsing a tumbler under the tap. ‘Have a drink. You like whisky, don't you?'

‘Just a small one, then,' Jordan said. ‘I had a couple in the pub.'

‘Another one won't get you into trouble.'

He asked for water and she handed the drink to him, half and half.

‘Cheers, then.'

‘All the best.'

‘And thanks for coming over with the money.'

‘I had visions of you laid up without any.'

‘I wonder you've no more to think about than me. Do you look after all your people that way?'

‘I try to see they get a fair deal. But I have staff for that.'

‘Are there any jobs going at your place?'

‘I'm afraid not. We've enough on finding work for those we have. Perhaps when things pick up.'

‘If they ever do.' She drank, her face suddenly sombre.
Jordan wondered if she ever allowed herself to think about the future, or simply lived from day to day.

‘Could I ask you,' he said, ‘if it's not too personal. But do you manage to make ends meet?'

‘Look at this place,' she said, ‘and work it out for yourself.'

After the chill of the night outside and the draughty stairs, the heat in the room was beginning to make Jordan's head swim. An electric fire blazed at full a few feet from his legs. He would, he thought, have to take off his overcoat or leave. About, for the moment, to shift the chair back for
fear of scorching his trousers, he paused in his movement and relaxed his weight as the orange glow of the fire's elements suddenly faded to a dull red, then to black.

‘Blast!' Audrey Nugent said. She reached for a purse and poked her forefinger into its pockets. Then she got up and looked on the narrow mantelshelf.

‘Is it on a meter?' Jordan asked.

‘You bet it's on a meter. He could nearly let you live rent-free, the profit he makes on that.'

‘Let me...' Jordan took change out of his pocket and counted out half a dozen tenpence pieces. ‘Here...'

‘If you can make it up to the pound, I'll give you a note for it.'

‘There's not enough,' Jordan said. ‘It doesn't matter.'

She knelt by the sink and fed coins into the meter. ‘Lucky you came.'

As the fire began to glow again, Jordan said, ‘I wonder you can breathe in such heat.'

‘Happen you're right. I do overdo it a bit when I'm not feeling well.' She switched off one of the bars, then drew on a woollen cardigan over the housecoat. At once all the presence – the allure, even – bestowed by the coat was gone. ‘I was going to make meself a hot drink and get into bed, anyway.'

‘I'm being a nuisance,' Jordan said.

‘You walk on eggshells trying not to offend people, don't you?'

‘Not everybody,' Jordan said. ‘Not by any means.'

‘What's so special about me, then?'

‘You're in my private employ,' Jordan said, and wondered what other, less pompous form of words he could have used.

She drew the cardigan together across her chest and fastened the top buttons. Then she felt about in the crumpled folds of the divan cover until she found a cigarette packet, which she shook before tossing it towards a wastebox by the sink.

‘You wouldn't have a cigarette on you?'

‘I don't smoke,' Jordan said. ‘I'll go and get you some, if you like.'

‘Don't bother. Harry 'ull bring some back with him, if he remembers.'

‘He's coming back?'

‘He's kipping down here for the time being.'

‘Oh...' Despite himself, Jordan let his gaze take in once more the limits of the room. ‘You mean...?'

‘I mean in here. That's his sleeping-bag on the floor behind your chair. It's just till he finds a place of his own, or takes his hook again. It won't be for long. He says it won't, anyway.' She shrugged. ‘It helps with the expenses.'

Letting his imagination run free, Jordan had been rehearsing in it an exchange in which he offered to pay her rent for the privilege of visiting her one evening a week and making love to her on that narrow divan. Only an idle fantasy, he told himself. But he was sick of cold women with pretensions; he wanted someone direct, earthy, warm. He tried to imagine her response should he venture the suggestion, and saw her laughing in his face before ordering him out.

An alternative began to form – one more drastic in its way, but an offer she could refuse without offence, while leaving him with room for further manoeuvre. While he was turning it over, wondering if now was the right time to put it to her, she got up with a restless movement and taking the whisky bottle held it out to him without speaking, her hips moving inside the housecoat as she shifted her weight from one leg to the other, like one waiting for some overdue event.

She probably wanted him to go, he thought, as he shook his head and she carelessly slopped another half-inch into her own glass; wondering why he was hanging about now that his errand was done. Yet although this single cluttered room with its cheap tat of fittings and furniture oppressed him, he was held by the intimacy of their being alone here. The material of the housecoat – some kind of thin stretch velvet, he thought – hugged her hips in a clean slim line, and as she sat again its weight settled into the V of her thighs at the bottom of her flat belly. She carried no spare weight and her breasts would be small, small and firm and white, high on her long white body.

‘Aren't you sweltering in that overcoat?' she asked suddenly, when neither of them had spoken for a time.

Jordan realised how long his silence had been and that this might have brought on the nervous energy of her movements.

‘I must go,' he said. ‘I've taken up too much of your time.'

‘You're not spoiling anything. But I wondered why you'd turned so broody.'

‘I'm sorry,' Jordan said, ‘but I –'

‘I've never heard anybody apologise so much. What d'you think you've done?'

‘Made you slightly uneasy, perhaps. I don't know you well enough to go quiet in your company like that.'

‘Be my guest,' she said. ‘Was it something important?'

‘Yes,' Jordan heard himself admitting, and knew that he must now carry the thought through. ‘I was just weighing the pros and cons of –'

‘The what?'

He was thrown for a moment. ‘I don't understand.'

‘It's me that doesn't understand you. The pros and...what did you say?'

‘Things for, things against,' Jordan said.

‘For and against what?'

‘Asking you to come and be my housekeeper.'

It silenced her. She looked quickly at him and just as quickly away. A small smile touched her lips – whether of amusement, embarrassment or gratification he could not tell.

‘If you'll just let me explain,' he went on.

‘I think you'd better.'

Jordan was struck by the panicky thought that the step-brother might return before he could say it all.

‘The house needs a woman in it,' he said. ‘I mean, more than you can give it by just coming in twice a week. And I'm tired of cooking for myself. If it comes to that, I don't like living on my own there, either. There's plenty of room. You could easily –'

‘You are talking about living in, then?'

‘Oh, yes,' Jordan said. It was not, in fact, what he'd immediately had in mind, but the idea had grown as he was talking. ‘You could have your own, er, quarters. I could easily make one of the upstairs rooms into a bedsitter. But other than that you'd have the run of the place and be perfectly free to do what you liked with your spare time. You could carry on working in the evenings if you felt you needed the change and the company. You might think that what I could offer you wasn't a full wage. I'm sure we could work something out, though, and you would have a comfortable home and all found.'

‘Wait a minute,' she said as he stopped talking. ‘Hold on a tick. This is all a bit fast for me. It wants some thinking about.'

‘You don't have to decide now.'

She had clenched the fingers of one hand and was pushing the fist deep into her abdomen. The sudden pallor of her face perturbed Jordan.

‘Is there anything I can get you, Mrs Nugent?'

‘It'll go,' she said. ‘That's the only good thing about it.'

Jordan got up. ‘We'll talk about it another time, when you can put your mind to it.'

‘You're a fast worker, I'll say that for you.'

‘Please,' Jordan said, ‘don't get me wrong.'

‘I mean, you know next to nothing about me.'

‘Nor you me, if it comes to that.'

‘Haven't you thought what a risk you'd be taking?'

He had. Yet he also knew that a desire to do something for this woman had been growing in him ever since she had first smiled at him, in the Beehive. Why, if she would only let him, he could transform her life: he could take her out of this squalor, put her into decent clothes, give her a security that picking up part-time work where she could had never offered her. He would become her benefactor, friend, protector. Gradually, she would learn that she had someone of substance to turn to.

He held in his excitement at the prospect and curbed the urge to press his offer now, though the spasm of pain seemed to have left her as she drew herself upright, arching her back and taking a deep breath which she let out in a long sigh.

‘What if it didn't work out?' she said. ‘Where would I go then?'

‘Why not come for a week or two first?' Jordan suggested. ‘Keep this place on in the meantime. Let your step-brother look after it.'

‘When would you want to know?'

‘There's no hurry,' Jordan said. ‘Don't bother about it now. Think it over when you're well again.'

 

On his way home Jordan was stopped by the police, who had put a barrier across the suburban road he had chosen on no more than a whim. They did not tell him what they were looking for, only that they were on a routine check, before they asked him who he was, where he lived, where he had been and how long he had been away from home. Then they requested permission to shine their torches over the interior of his car and to examine the contents of the boot.

Jordan guessed what had happened and the local news on his alarm-radio woke him next morning with the details. A girl had been done to death only two hundred yards from a busy main road. It seemed that she had been found more quickly than some of the others and that she must have died while he was talking to Mrs Nugent. There were no details of how the killing had been carried out, but there were the usual hints of appalling savagery. Women were once again warned not to go out alone after dark: the attacks were no longer confined to one type of woman and all women should now consider themselves at risk.

During the next few days he found himself fretting about Audrey Nugent's safety. True, she had her step-brother at hand, but Jordan did not know how responsible he was; and Mrs Nugent herself, though sometimes anxious, was unlikely to let her movements be restricted.