A Sight for Sore Eyes (33 page)

space in the neighbourhood seemed to be occupied. He knew it would be risky parking on a double yellow line, or even a single yellow line, at this hour, but in a side-street off the back of Kensington Church Street he found areas demarcated on the roadway with white lines. All but one of these was occupied and it was just large enough to take the Edsel. While there, he decided he might as well make another attempt on a cash dispenser. He tried, failed once more and went back to the car. Carrying the suitcase, he made his way up Kensington Church Street. He had been obliged to park the car at such a distance that Designers Please was nearly half a mile away. A woman who wasn't in the least like Noele, being overweight, dark and multi-chinned, was attending to a customer and it was another ten minutes before she asked how she could help him. He fidgeted and paced, and looked at his watch. He was beginning to realise that if he wanted to spend the evening with Francine he was not going to make it to Liphook that day. The woman scarcely glanced at the clothes in the suitcase, but said she couldn't consider anything that hadn't been dry-cleaned. Swallowing his anger, Teddy asked her just to take a look and tell him if she'd be interested in the event of his having the clothes cleaned. Her contemptuous expression changed when she saw the Lacroix label and the Givenchy. It seemed as if he had some very high-quality garments there, she said, but he'd have to have everything dry-cleaned - he did understand that, didn't he? There was a cleaners a few doors up the street. The unremitting wind blew him along, once stopped him in his tracks, it was so fierce. He opened the suitcase once more, piled Harriet's suits and dresses on the counter and was told they would be ready by Thursday. While he was putting the suitcase back in the Edsel's boot he saw a sign he hadn't noticed before which seemed to be explaining that this was residents' parking and available only to permit holders. The relief he felt was premature. He got into the driver's seat and switched on the ignition, but the engine wouldn't start. Nothing like this had ever happened before. He tried again and again, urging the engine to fire but hearing only that monotonous and maddening chug-chug-chug. Another ten minutes had passed before he noticed his lights were on and simultaneously understood that this was why the car failed to start. The battery. He had run the battery flat. Keith would have known what to do, Nige would know, that Christopher would know, but he didn't. The words 'jump leads' he distantly remembered Keith uttering in connection with a flat battery, but what these things were he had no idea. The only thing would be to find a garage and get the people there to restart the car. Although not vet four, it was dark. The wind tore the air, carrving with it spitting rain. The Edsel's windscreen was patterned with huge splashes and thin trickles. People baffled through the wind, heads lowered, coats clutched about them. A woman brandished a black umbrella, blown inside out. Teddy sat in the car and counted his money, all he had in the world. Twenty-four pounds and some loose change. Suppose the garage people charged him twenty pounds for starting the car? They might. Equally they might charge him five or forty. He had no idea. The only thing to do was leave the Edsel, go home and think. Come back tomorrow. Meanwhile, think how to get his hands on money. Could he sell some of Harriet's silverware or glass? Her jewellery? It wouldn't be stolen - or not until he stole it - so the jeweller wouldn't have it on any stolen-property list. Leave the suitcase in the boot. There was no point in being lumbered with that. He had to fight the wind in order to get out of the car, baffle with it and push himself on to the pavement. Getting up to St John's Wood took a long time and then there was the walk home, struggling against the wind. The front garden of Orcadia Cottage was lost under a carpet of fallen Virginia creeper leaves, red and purple and yellow-green and gold, by now a sodden, slippery mass. He went out again and in by the back way. He had to. Francine had the front-door key.

Chapter 36

A wise move would be to collect up the silverware and jewellery immediately, before Francine came back. She wouldn't believe any explanation he might give her as to why he was selling Harriet's property. The future, which he seldom thought about for long, now presented itself to him as a blank, a mystery. It had to be filled - with money, with work and above all with Francine. Speculating about people, their motives, their wishes, hopes and fears, came very hard to him. He had never done it before, he had never cared. He cared now. He struggled to understand her, to know what she wanted. Money, of course. A girl brought up like that, with those parents, going to that school, needed a constant supply of money. Not for a moment had he believed that stuff about not wanting him to support her. She had liked the ring and the dress and that restaurant, being taken about by car, drinking wine. If he wanted to keep her, and he desperately did, he had to have, find, make, money. He went upstairs and into the bedroom. Harriet's jewellery was already familiar to him. Often enough he had draped these pearls and ropes of shining stones round Francine's neck and put these bracelets on her arms. He put a handful into each pocket of his jacket. A small silver bowl, a silver-backed hairbrush and silverbound comb also looked saleable. He would take a necklace to one jeweller's and a bracelet to another, the hairbrush to a third. It would take a long time, but he might realise a thousand pounds out of it. Francine would want clothes and a car to go about in, more of those restaurants and maybe books. She seemed keen on books. Could he let the Neasden house? Hard to imagine anyone wanting to live in the neighbourhood, pay rent for such a house, but Megsie and Nige liked it, they had bought next door. Or maybe he could even rent out this place? It was a daring thought. During the long slow journey by tube, Francine reflected that this was the first time in her life she was going home without, so to speak, an appointment; going to where Julia was without a prearrangement to be there by seven or nine or ten. On all those previous occasions, hundreds of them, she had been apprehensive as to how Julia would greet her. Even if she were early or on time. Tears or rage or happy smiles, reproaches or gratified approval, it was bound to have been one of these. Never had Julia simply acknowledged her arrival with a nod or a simple 'hallo'. She realised, looking back, how terribly it had plagued her life. How she would have loved a casual, laid-back or light-hearted companion, someone who took things easy. But it was over now, the end had come on Sunday and she was no longer in the least afraid of Julia's reception of her. She emerged from the station to find the rain coming down harder than ever and the wind blowing it in horizontal sheets. It was also growing dark and she saw that she had left her departure from Holly's till rather too late, for now it was past four. Getting back to Orcadia Place by six would be difficult, but as that thought came to her she remembered Holly's words. 'France, don't get into that again. Not with Teddy, not with anyone.' She could phone him from home, she could tell him she'd be back late. All the taxis were taken. They always were when it was raining. She could walk, it would take a quarter of an hour, that was all, and if she got wet through she had plenty of clothes there to change into. Walking - even walking in a gale and a downpour - was a good activity for thinking and clearing the mind. She had often noticed this. Things fell into place more logically and reasonably than when one tried to concentrate before going to sleep at night. She thought about Teddy and she knew suddenly and regretfully that it wouldn't work. He wasn't for her and never could be. They had nothing in common and they looked at life quite differently. Probably she would never have gone out with him, never had secret meetings with him, if Julia hadn't put the pressure on and her father been so moralistic. That didn't mean she wouldn't go back. Of course she would, and tonight as she had undertaken to do. She'd even stay a few days and she'd explain and make him listen and trv to show him they weren't suited to each other. At the time, at each time, she had felt verv frustrated and somehow deprived of a right, but now she was glad they had never had sex. Well, never had real sex, proper sex. She would have felt more committed to him if they had. She hadn't liked the way he wanted her to dress up and pose and be stared at. It was - she searched for and found the unfamiliar word - voyeuristic. It was like a striptease in reverse. She had felt uncomfortable all the time during those sessions and bored too. How anyone could bear to be a model she couldn't imagine. But worse than any of that had been his behaviour of the night before. She hadn't told Holly, she couldn't have told anyone, but she knew now, if she hadn't then, that he had wanted to have sex with her, had almost been able to have sex, because her mother had been murdered and she had talked about murder. It had been a sort of trigger to excite him and she couldn't bear that. That had been the end, the final thing. His ring slid on her finger in the wet. She brought her hand up in front of her face and looked at the blue stones and the diamond. He must have it back. Books had taught her that you gave a man back his ring, even if it wasn't ever an engagement ring. It was a joyous reunion. They collected De Valera from the kennels on their way home from Heathrow. The Irish setter gave the same welcome, it seemed, to each of them, favouring Franklin equally with Anthea in bestowing licks and uttering whimpers of happiness. 'With luck,' said Anthea, 'they'll put an end to this ghastly quarantine and we'll be able to take him with us next time.' They had firmly become 'us' and their future a joint affair. If there was a problem it was only that Franklin, being without a resident's parking permit in the City of Westminster, had to put the BMW in an underground car-park. He and Anthea ordered Thai food over the phone. They disliked the idea of going out and leaving De Valera again. 'Are you going to phone Harriet?' Anthea said. 'I've thought about that and I can't see why I should. I never do, normally. She expects me back tomorrow and tomorrow I shall go back - for half an hour.' 'It had better not be more than half an hour,' said Anthea, who was beginning to exhibit her old signs of possessiveness. Franklin rather liked it. For one thing, he hadn't seen much of it for nearly thirty years and for another, it brought back tender memories of his youth. 'I shall stay long enough to tell her what has happened and that I am leaving her. I shall pack some of my clothes into a suitcase and come away.' 'Mind you don't weaken.' 'I never weaken, you know that,' said Franklin with one of his awful smiles. It was true. He always did exacdy what he wanted, whatever the cost in money and trouble. He had wanted Harriet, so had got rid of Anthea, though it took him five years and cost, until she married again, something in the region of half a million. Now he wanted her again and was getting rid of Harriet. Probably it would take another five years and cost three or four times that. But he would do it. She supposed she must love him. It was very hard to know quite what that meant when you got to her age. Certainly there were things about him she loved and had missed. The way he threw cushions on the floor before sitting down in an armchair. The way he had of emptying his pockets on the dressing-table each night before he went to bed, a crumpled handkerchief, his keys, his wallet, his loose change tipped into a little glass powder bowl. She had always found it touching and when she saw him go through those endearing manoeuvres the first night they had spent together in Half Moon Street after so many years, tears came into her eves. 'What are the waterworks in aid oP' he had asked and turned on her his skull grin, so that for a moment it was Father Time she saw standing there, the Grim Reaper. And then he came to her. The newspapers were still in the letter-box. That was the first thing she noticed when she came up to the gate. Could Julia have gone away? She closed the gate behind her. It was dark now, but no lights were on. Yet as she came up the path to the door her past experiences warned her that Julia could be waiting behind it. A split second before her key went into the lock Julia would open the door. Julia didn't. Francine had a very strong sense by now that Julia wasn't there. She unlocked the door and went inside. The hall was dark, the whole house seemed to be in darkness. It felt stuffy, oppressive, as if unaired for days. Plainly, no one was at home. She put on the hall and landing lights, went upstairs and into her own room, took off her wet clothes and laid them over the edge of the bath. There was no point in packing another suitcase, for she would be back in two or three days. The idea of coming back wasn't pleasant, but where else could she go? If Holly could get her on this Trinidadian trip or even on the coral reef study... Would her father let her? He might. He would be incensed about what Julia had done and so in the mood to make great concessions. She dried her hair on a towel, put on fresh jeans, a T-shirt and sweater, boots that would keep water out. Teddy would hate every item of that costume, but worrying about what Teddy wanted and thought was also soon to be a thing of the past. She put her mobile into her bag and went downstairs. It was rare for the living-room door to be closed. She had noticed when she first came in, but the fact of it hadn't really registered. She hesitated and then she opened the door. It was dark inside, but with a twilight sort of darkness, grey, shadowy, a blaze of light suddenly flaring across wall and ceiling from a passing car's headlights. On the carpet, by the end of the sofa, was a shoe. Last night, in the struggle with Teddy, she had kicked off a shoe and it had flown across the room, breaking a china statuette. This was Julia's shoe, she recognised it, a suede pump with a highish heel. Blue, she thought it was, but she couldn't see colours in the dimness. Why had Julia left her shoe in the middle of the living-room floor? The back of the sofa was towards her. She went into the room without turning on a light. Before, just immediately before, rounding the sofa and looking down on to it, she realised that it was fear of what she might see which had stopped her switching on the light. She didn't want to see it, whatever it was. But there was no help for that. Julia's face, white as bone, white as pearl, gleamed in the dusk. Her eyes fixed on the girl who looked fearfully at her accusing gaze. One hand hung at an unnatural angle, looking stiff, controlled, but when Francine touched it, subsided with a faint rustle, weak as thread. Icy cold, the touch of that skin had been. The face was like a waxwork's mask, dewy, gleaming, unlined, as if it had never been alive. Francine sank on to the floor and broke into silent dry sobs. Richard found her there when he came into the house at just after six. Light flooding the room showed him his dead wife on the sofa and his daughter sitting on the floor beside her. There. was no blood this time and Francine was a dozen years older, but that seemed to him the only difference. She was conscious. When he lifted her up she came thankfully into his arms. But she could tell him nothing. She had no words, once more she was dumb.