A Sight for Sore Eyes (29 page)

Bustling about, tidying the living-room, dusting, she sang to herself the songs of her own adolescence. Francine, in the kitchen, heard the melody of 'Mending Love' and remembered her mother's record that she had broken and being sent to her room and the man coming... Once Julia knew Francine was occupied with preparing lunch, she had seen her tearing lettuce and stripping peel from an avocado, she made her preparations. Carrying a clean bath sheet and a clean bath towel, she took the key out of the laundry-room door and the key out of the cloakroom door and went upstairs. She had calculated that one of them was bound to fit the lock on Francine's bedroom door. It was always so in houses such as this, one key fitted half the locks and the other the rest of them. The key from the cloakroom door slid into the keyhole in Francine 's bedroom door and turned smoothly. Julia put the key into her skirt pocket. Then she opened Francine 's door very softly and went into the room. She saw the mobile phone lying on the bedside cabinet. Obviously, she should take that away. As she came out of the bathroom she heard Francine on the stairs so had time to do no more than drop the mobile and push it under the wardrobe with her toe. 'Just puffing clean towels in your bathroom,' she said. Francine had the roast chicken and baked potatoes on the table by just after one. The salad looked very pretty with its slices of pale-green avocado and strips of red pepper against the dark-green cos lettuce in a glass bowl. Julia hadn't intended opening a bottle of wine, but she suddenly felt expansive, she must be kind to Francine and it would, after all, be a mercy if she passed part of the afternoon in sleep. I don't like doing this, said Julia to herself, but I must. Now I know what the Victorians meant when they beat their children and said, this hurts me more than it hurts you. Francine would only have one glass of wine, but she poured a second one for Julia and then a third. 'Are you going out this afternoon?' She asked. 'Is anyone coming?' Her guilt was talking, thought Julia. 'I shall be quite alone.' 'I heard you talking to Noele and I thought maybe she was coming over.' 'If you're going to do as you said, Francine,' said Julia, 'and clear up, I wish you'd get on with it. Or do you want to leave it to me?' 'No, I'll do it,' said Francine. She washed up the roasting pan and the salad bowl. She put the dishes and plates and glasses and cutlery in the dishwasher and the soap powder in, closed the door and switched the machine on. Then she asked Julia if she would like her to make coffee. Julia said, 'I've had quite enough coffee for one day.' She sat in an armchair and looked at the Sunday paper. There was a scandalous story about an artist called Simon Aipheton turning homosexual and a picture of him with his arm round a young man. Both were smiling. Julia thought how easy life was for some people. As soon as Francine had gone upstairs to change, she ran out into the front garden. Jonathan Nicholson was already there, sitting in the bus shelter with a young woman. He had brought a woman with him to make his appearance seem respectable. There was no end to his craft and deviousness. He had a baseball cap on and big leather boots. Julia stared at him but he refused to look in her direction. Of course she had no doubt he had seen her. He would soon find out who was in control here. He could wait all afternoon and all evening, too, in that draughty bus shelter and she hoped he got flu for his pains. She went inside and closed the front door. At the foot of the stairs she stood and listened. When she heard the sound of water running in Francine's shower she went upstairs and paused only for a moment, a few seconds, outside Francine's door in which to take a deep breath and brace herself, before turning the key in the lock.

Chapter 32

The locking of her door passed unheard by Francine. She was in her bathroom, wrapped in the clean bath sheet after her shower, with a k. d. lang CD on rather loudly. Too loudly for Julia's comfort, she was thinking, and she stepped across the room to turn down the volume. She heard Julia going downstairs. Her tread had become heavy. Francine went back into her bathroom, plugged in the hair-drier, switched it on to full power and set about drying her hair. Then she put on the white dress because Teddy liked it. A coat, or at any rate her leather jacket, would have to go over it because, though mild for November, the temperature was no more than ten degrees. To let her hair hang loose or plait it? In the end she decided on neither, but twisted it up into a geisha's knot and fixed it in place with long silver pins. Teddy was expecting her at three. He would pick her up two hundred yards down the road as he had been doing lately. She put on shoes with high heels because Teddy liked them, decided they were only possible if no walking was to be done and found comfortable boots instead. Then she tried the door handle. The door wouldn't open. It must be stuck. She turned the handle to the right and to the left. She pushed and pulled it, but the door wouldn't budge. For a moment she failed to understancL There were no keys in the house except for the one that locked the downstairs cloakroom. No one needed to lock doors, they all respected each other's privacy, or she had thought they did. But if there was no key there was a keyhole. She had never noticed it before, not in all her ten years in this house. A keyhole without a key? She pulled one of the silver pins out of her hair and poked it into the keyhole. No key. If she knelt down and squinted through the hole she could see out to the other side, the landing and a gleam of light from the landing window. By now she knew what had happened and she was hit by shock. No one had laid a hand on her, but it was as if she had been assaulted. No one had used force on her, but it was as if she had been shackled. Without attempting to find a voice, without even opening her mouth, she thought that the shock had deprived her of the power of speech as it had once before. For a moment she was afraid to try and then she did, she spoke, though not loudly enough to be heard beyond the confines of her room. 'Julia, Julia...' To be able to talk was in itself a huge relief. She asked herself if she should begin shouting, screaming to be let out, please, Julia, please let me out, let me out, please, Julia... Her natural dignity held her back from that. Nor would she hammer on the door. She sat down on her bed, she took off her jacket. At least she could phone Teddy. Her mobile phone, which was Julia's gift, was the best present she had ever had. There was an irony there that in other circumstances would have made her smile. The mobile should have been on the bedside cabinet, but it wasn't. Julia had taken it, of course she had. Francine now recalled her encounter with Julia on the threshold of her bedroom before lunch and Julia saying she had been putting clean towels into her bathroom. That must have been when she removed the mobile to prevent her prisoner phoning anyone. Francine had a quick, sinking sensation of despair. But she got up and went to the window and opened the casement. People in books got out of windows down ivy obligingly placed at strategic levels or they took the sheets off their beds, knotted them and climbed down the rope thus made. But no one told you what you anchored the rope to at this end or what to do if you had a duvet on your bed and only one sheet. Besides, it was frighteningly far down, Francine couldn't calculate how far, but enough to cause you to break bones if you fell. In the garden next door but one a woman was working, planting bulbs. Francine knew her as a pleasant but not very sociable neighbour. Certainly she was not numbered among Julia's friends and Francine doubted if she had ever been in the house. Should she call out to her? What would she say? 'My stepmother has locked me in my bedroom and taken away my phone. Could you please.. Could you please what? Call the police? You don't call the police because someone has locked you in your bedroom. 'My stepmother' sounded like a character in Grimm ~ Fai~y Ta/es. The whole idea of calling for help was humiliating and somehow ridiculous. While Francine was thinking along these lines, still leaning out of the window, the woman brushed earth off her gloved hands, picked up the now empty trug basket in which the bulbs had been and went into her own house. Francine closed the window. It had begun to rain, a gentle pattering at first, then a downpour. With the rain a good deal of light faded. She switched on a bed lamp. What was she supposed to do about eating and drinking? And how long did Julia intend to keep her here? All day? All night? Because he didn't want Francine to see those words that defaced the Edsel's boot lid, or he didn't want her to see them again, Teddy went out on Sunday morning and found a place where they sold him a can of pale-yellow spray paint called Primrose Dawn. On the way back he stopped at a cash dispenser in West End Lane and drew a further two hundred pounds out of Harriet Oxenholme 's bank account. A wineshop next door was open. He bought Australian Chardonnay for Francine and a box of liqueur chocolates because he thought she might expect him to give her presents. Manoeuvring the Edsel into the mews, he saw, standing in the middle of the cobbled area, the woman who had waved to him from a car on the night Harriet died. He recognised her at once. And she, putting the little dog she had been exercising on to its lead, seemed to recognise him. 'Hallo,' she said, and then, rather ominously, 'We meet again.' 'That's right.' What else could he say? 'Harriet well, is she?' There was no mistaking the note of spite in her voice. What was she getting at? What did she know? Fear flickered through him. 'She's fine,' he said firmly. 'Tell her Mildred said hallo.' It was a disturbing encounter. He waited until she had gone and then he rubbed down the area of bodywork on the Edsel with emery paper and wiped down the surface. Mildred reappeared at her own gate, carrying a black plastic rubbish bag. She left the gate open, the bag propping it. That must mean the contractors Westminster Council used to collect householders' rubbish would come on Monday morning as well as Thursday morning. He had better put a bag out. Not doing so would only attract attention to himself. He sprayed on a thin coat of paint. While it was drying he had lifted up the manhole cover and tried slipping his oak frame into place. Here was a setback. The frame was fractionally too small. Any pressure on it - such as the weight of a flagstone - and it would drop through. He asked himself angrily how he had come to make such an easily avoidable mistake. Now he would have to make that frame all over again or find some other way. How about wire netting stretched across to form a kind of basket? That might do it. He would have to buy some wire netting or even a piece of chain-link fencing. By now it was time to apply a second coat of spray paint to the Edsel. It didn't look too bad, not perfect, but at least those offensive letters were obliterated. Orcadia Cottage was due for a clean. He vacuumed and polished, cleaned the bathroom basin and bath and shower, put out the rubbish bag, made himself some lunch and scrupulously cleaned the kitchen afterwards. He put a bottle of white wine in the fridge. It wouldn't be right for her to drink too much wine, but he would permit her one glass. A lot of clothes shops would be open, so if he went out in plenty of time he could buy her the black velvet dress on the way to meet her. Then she could wear it when they came back here. He considered postponing the purchase of the dress until she was with him, but dismissed that idea as pointless. He knew her size and it was his taste that counted. It had begun to rain. He put the manhole cover back. The DLY place was in a shopping mall. Coming out with his roll of heavy-duty wire netting, he saw the dress in the window of a boutique between the pharmacy and the video rental place. Figured velvet, not black but the darkest of greens, the green of a pine forest, sleeveless, with a scooped neckline cut so that it hung in three folds. It cost eighty pounds, a huge amount, but it was worth every penny, and he imagined Francine wearing it, reclining on the sofa in the Orcadia Cottage drawing-room. She should have Harriet's gold bracelets on her arms and hold a black ostrich feather in her hand. The rain was coming down in sheets. He ran for cover to the Edsel. By three minutes to three he was at the appointed meeting place. Somewhat abated now, the rain pattered steadily on the car roof. He began making new plans for fixing the flagstone into the manhole. The wire netting would be pinned in initially and act as a kind of sling or hammock... She was often a little late. He couldn't understand anyone being even a minute late, but he accepted it from Francine. Still, today she wasn't a mere minute or even five minutes late. He had been sitting there for nine minutes now. Why say three o'clock if you mean three-fifteen? Rain had emptied the street of people. The dreariness of a wet Sunday afternoon pervaded the place, enough to depress anyone forced to look at those big, semi-detached, thirtiesvintage houses, without a light in a single window, the dripping trees, the grey gloom, passing cars sending a spray up out of the gutters. A quarter of an hour later he was going mad. He, who was always punctual or early, was tortured more than most people by enforced waiting. At twenty to four he drove up to her house, drove past it and round the block. There was no sign of her, no sign of any life, only the rain and the black, glassy puddles lying everywhere. He parked again, on the opposite side of the road. She had promised, guaranteed, undertaken, to come and she had failed to appear. He knew why and he was covered with shame and bitterness. Whatever she had said - and all those loving words, meant to reassure, came back to him - she despised him. She was contemptuous of his background, his voice, his home and above all, of his failure as a man. Sitting there in the car, he cursed her under his breath, she was a bitch, a cow, a stupid snob, a liar and a cheat. But by four o'clock he had been swallowed up in the pit of his own pain. A rage and misery disproportionate to the offence she had committed engulfed him. He wanted to destroy things and now he remembered a long-forgotten fact, how in that play-pen he had broken things in a vain bid for attention. A memory of his low-pitched grizzling came back to him and his shouts for one of them to look at him, speak to him. His strong baby's hands had torn the heads off toys and the wheels off toys until there were no more, and no one replaced them. There was nothing to shatter here and if there had been, if he had been at home or at Orcadia Cottage, he valued things too much to break them. Things were what mattered. He knew he would never see her again. She had chosen this way to leave him. James, or someone like James, who had money and the right voice and the right family, had prevailed with her. Even now, he thought, her slender white body was bared for James. She would never again look in his mirror and see his ring reflected there. The feelings Teddy had were all new to him. Not the anger, that was usual enough, but the sensation he couldn't define, as of being injured. It was new, yet he could recall distant previous instances, long ago, when he was a small child. Those old feelings of hurt rose up in him now. They had lain there for years, slumbered there, an ancient sore, which Francine's defection awakened. In Francine's broken promise, her failure to come, he felt anew all the pain of his mother's refusal to care for him, talk to him, touch him. Securing Francine in her bedroom did more for Julia than she had expected. It brought her, temporarily, relief from the raging anxiety that at present governed and dictated everything she did. When she knew Francine must have realised she was locked in, she crept upstairs as quietly as she could - actually crawled up on the thick carpet on all fours - and sitting on the landing, listened outside Francine's door. She heard her open the window, but there was nothing else to hear. No calling for help, no appeals. She had thought Francine might start crying, but if she was she must be stifling the sounds. Relief. It was all right. She was pleased that there was no protest, no rebellion. Francine had accepted her lot, had recognised Julia's mastery, her right to control, and had bowed to superior authority. Julia sat in the dining-room and drank the rest of the wine she and Francine had had with their lunch. It was a celebration of her victory, her success. When the bottle was empty she poured herself a small brandy. Nothing stayed the same for long in Julia's always troubled mind. Silence from Francine, which she had taken for acceptance, might only mean she was working on a way of escape. Soon it would be dark. It was raining steadily. Julia put on a raincoat and took an umbrella. She reflected that she had no need to be covert about this, it didn't matter in the least if Francine saw her. The bus shelter was empty. He had gone. He knew when he was beaten. Julia went through the side gateway. First she looked into the big shed on the left-hand side of the garden. At one time they had kept a ladder, the extending kind, in the shed. Or the builder who had been working on the house had. It was gone now, she was glad to see, and the little pair of steps presented no danger. She went out into the rain, under her umbrella, and looked up at Francine's window. It was closed. now. About six feet below the bottom of the window frame a variegated yellow and green ivy grew up against the wall. Julia closed her umbrella, getting wet was of no importance, and began tearing the ivy off the wall. She pulled and wrenched and tore at the tough tendrils and tender shining leaves until the ivy lay in shreds around her feet. Removing this possible aid to climbing out of the window brought Julia her second phase of relief. It was getting dark now, would soon be night. She went back indoors. The phone was ringing. It would be Jonathan Nicholson, calling to know why Francine hadn't come to meet him in the bus shelter. Julia picked up the receiver and said in her iciest tone, 'She is not coming.' Richard's voice said, 'What did you say?' 'I'm sorry,' Julia said, 'I thought it was someone else.' 'Who did you think it was?' Julia had no answer for that and before she could think of one the noise started upstairs. Francine must have heard the phone ringing and begun to hammer on the door, not