‘Letitia talked about it,’ she says.
‘Letitia liked it.’
It seems it’s history now, this diary, written during some
woman’s sleepless nights, yonks ago – entries about a chimney being swept and milk going sour and marmalade made, an Indian selling carpets at the door. A punnet of raspberries, picked and left down somewhere, could not be found. A cousin got engaged. The well didn’t fill, a duchess was murdered in some foreign place. He’s making conversation with all that; doing his best, you can tell from his voice. He doesn’t want what has happened. He doesn’t want this old woman in his house.
‘At parties they used to dance outside. Waltzes lit from the downstairs windows and the front door. Music in the hall.’
‘Yes. Letitia said.’
Some gardener or other came back from the trenches in a shocking state. ‘He showed his wound to the children. Here, among his vegetable-beds. Among them was my father.’
Hinchley the gardener was called. His scar stretched from wrist to elbow because while an enemy soldier was inflicting it he was shot and fell forward, bringing this Hinchley to the ground with the bayonet trapped in his arm. After he’d shown the children his wound Hinchley always had a smoke apparently, a small, charred pipe for which he pared tobacco from a plug.
‘Stories hang about old family houses like ghosts.’ It was his mother who told him all that about the gardener; his father didn’t tell stories much.
‘Letitia kept a diary when she was little,’ the grandmother gets her say in.
‘Yes, I know.’
‘It’s interesting about the summer-house.’
You can tell she isn’t interested in the least, even though she has said she is twice. She has wangled her way into the house, pulling the wool over his eyes with her talk. He was referring to that other diary and she has to bring Letitia into it, harping on the name when he’s trying to forget it in his grieving.
She’s on about a shoe now, a heel coming off when Letitia was little and Letitia not minding when she had to walk in her bare feet on a street. There’s something about how Letitia went in for music, how she always had music going apparently, how she couldn’t be without it. He makes some comment on that, but his voice is too low to carry.
‘Well, I must go and see if my charge has woken up,’ the old woman says.
Dismally, Pettie watches while he pats the dog’s big brown head, the way he’s always doing. A blackened tennis-ball falls by his feet, a paw prods his trousers. There’s foam on the dog’s tongue and when the ball is thrown it’s carried back again and dropped at his feet.
‘Thaddeus.’ She says his name, louder than a whisper. Each day going by and the old woman still not here, she thought there was a chance. Just by looking at the old woman you can see it: anything goes wrong she’ll be all over the place.
The ball is pushed against his shoe when he takes no notice. The dog’s fond of him, standing back and barking now. Letitia’d never want it, an inadequate tending Georgina Belle. Grandmother or not, well longer than thirty years it would be since she tended a baby.
She says his name again. She wants to push the door wide open and go to him. She wants to tell him she knows he’s
hurting, to tell him she put the flowers there. She wants to tell him what Letitia would, that the baby isn’t properly minded, that the baby isn’t safe.
She watches while he smiles down at the dog. He throws the ball again, skittering it over the grass, and her longing is more than she can bear. She closes her eyes and his voice whispers between his caresses, saying he knows too well the old woman shouldn’t be here. His fingertips are light on her skin, and on her lips when he whispers that it is their secret, that they have always had a secret, since the first day she phoned him up, that everything in the end will be all right. His arms hold her to him. He whispers that a thing like this can happen. He calls her his princess.
‘You read that?’ the red-haired proprietor of the Soft Rock Café asks, jerking a thumb at the newspaper open beside him. ‘They got that car-tyre guy.’ A car-tyre vandal, he says, eighteen hours’ community service. A pound thirty-eight, he says, returning his vast metal teapot to the electric ring on which he keeps it hot. ‘There you go,’ he says.
Albert carries a glass mug of tea and one of coffee to a table and returns to the counter for the doughnuts. He puts a saucer over Pettie’s coffee because she hasn’t arrived yet. He didn’t order her coffee, the man just set his machine going and put her doughnut in the microwave, maybe thinking she was outside on the street. Albert doesn’t drink coffee himself, having read in a newspaper that it doesn’t do you any good.
‘What I’d do for vandals,’ the red-haired man calls across the café, empty of customers except for Albert and the dumb man in the window, ‘is bring the stocks back. Coat over the head’s the first thing any villain wants. Know what I mean, Albert?’
Albert says he does, and hears about a young bloke beaten to a pulp when he wouldn’t give two other blokes a bag of crisps. ‘I’d have the cat o’ nine tails back, Albert. Electrically operated, no call for anyone to demean their-selves working the cat this day and age. Know what I mean?’
Albert again says he does. Pettie doesn’t like the redhaired
man. He called her pert once; he said she’d fit into a thimble. Pettie complained that that was familiar, and Albert worries that something similar may have again offended her, that she may have come in on her own and taken exception, that because of it she won’t come this morning. In Mrs Biddle’s house she comes and goes when he’s asleep, or at night when he’s at work; half the time he doesn’t know if she’s there or not.
‘You see Pettie around?’ he asks the man, going back to the counter to do so.
‘She ain’t here yet, Albert.’
‘She been in though?’
The man says no, not earlier, not yesterday, not the day before. He’d set the stocks up outside Burger Kings and Kentuckys, outside pin-ball joints, and toilets, in car parks – wherever people go by he’d have them. ‘Settle their hash for them, languishing in the rain.’
When she arrives she starts the music. She lifts the glass saucer from her coffee. Ignoring the raspberry doughnut that has been heated up for her, she lights a cigarette. She’s wearing a different T-shirt, yellow with music on it.
‘You OK, Pettie?’
She doesn’t answer. She doesn’t nod or shake her head.
‘You got work then?’
‘I feel for him, Albert.’
Albert looks away He stares at the matador in one of the posters, then at the bull, head bent, horns ready to attack.
‘I’ve been going out there,’ Pettie says.
‘The man with the baby, Pettie?’
‘All the time I feel for him.’
Albert shifts his glance, allowing it to fall for a moment on the excitement that brightens his friend’s features, her eyes lit with it behind her glasses. Distressed, he surveys the similar bull and matador of the poster on the opposite wall, then asks:
‘You going to eat your doughnut today, Pettie?’
She shakes her head. She eases the wrapping from her cigarette packet and begins to make a butterfly of it. Albert watches her fingers twisting the transparent film. He asked her once who taught her how to make the butterflies, but she said she taught herself.
‘He’s old, Pettie. You said.’
‘Forties. Why’d it matter?’
Her cigarette smoulders in the table’s discoloured ashtray, a thread of smoke floating lazily from it. The man in Ikon Floor Coverings was older too, fifty or so, Albert guessed. A tired face, she said. Albert remembers that although he never met, or even saw, the man. ‘It could be he’s gone off sick,’ she said at this very table, before she discovered the man had moved on to another store.
‘Every day I go out there.’
She tells about the difficult journey, the trains that are few and far between. Twice she’d had to thumb a lift on a lorry. The bus from the station goes round the long way and an hour it can be, waiting for it. You get there quicker if you walk by the drained canal. You turn away from the towpath when the spire of the church appears; you come out by the shop.
‘You shouldn’t go thumbing lifts, Pettie.’
‘You have to, morning time.’
The lorries go down Romford Way, out beyond the Morning Star. If you get there early they’ll stop. She wouldn’t take a lift in a car.
‘That man going to give you the job out there after all then?’
‘As old as Mrs Biddle, the grandmother is. No more’n a laugh, Mrs Biddle minding a baby. The grandmother’s got herself in there like she said she would.’
‘Best left if there isn’t work there, Pettie.’
‘Left? How could you leave it?’
‘Won’t do you no good, Pettie. That place.’
She reaches for her cigarette, knocking off the ash that has accumulated at the tip. You’re nearly at the gateless pillars when you take the path through the field, she says, the fir trees on your right at first. Every time the dog comes back to the house in the car it gives a bark, she says. First thing when it gets out, then again if the car comes back and it’s not in it. Other times it don’t bark at all.
‘You take care with a dog, Pettie.’
‘D’you understand what I’m saying to you, Albert?’
‘You get a bite off a dog, you’re in trouble. A woman got a bite off a dog that came over the wall –’
‘I’m talking about something else.’
Albert nods. He knew she was, he says; it’s just that any dog can be vicious. He read about the woman in the paper, stitches in her neck. He rubs the surface of the table with a finger, drawing a shape that isn’t visible on it. He went in to ask at the Marmite factory, he says. He went to ask if there was anything for a girl, only they didn’t have anything at present. He made enquiries in the KP, in the dairy yard, down the Underground. He heard they were looking
for machinists up Chadwell way, but when he went in they said they weren’t.
‘Yeah,’ she says.
‘You eat your doughnut, Pettie.’
She picks her mug up and goes to get more coffee. Albert watches her, her thin legs beneath the denim skirt, her high heels clonking on the tiled floor. When first they ran away, when they were in the seed place, she said what she wanted was to get work in a store. Someone had left two car seats in a glasshouse and put corrugated up where the glass had gone. Stone was still on pallets around a rusting weighing-machine at one end, paving stones, quarry stones. Spreading out rolls of plant-sacking to lie down on, and fixing up shelving they found to keep the rain out where more glass had been broken, they used to talk about the work they’d try for when they had somewhere better to live. Pettie always said a store.
‘You try the stores again?’ he asks when she comes back. ‘You been round them at all?’
She doesn’t answer, stirring her coffee. He heard the red-haired man saying the T-shirt suited her, but she didn’t bother with that either. She tastes her coffee and breaks a bit off her doughnut, the fat on it no longer glistening because it’s cold. She says she gave up the stores yonks ago. Same’s she gave up the idea of getting office skills. Same’s she gave up trying to get work at the swimming-baths.
‘If there’s a vacancy at the Marmite, you’d go for it, Pettie? The woman said keep in touch.’
Yeah, great, she says, but he knows she doesn’t mean it. He tries for a distraction, drawing attention to Air India going over. Always at this time, he reminds Pettie, smiling
at her, twenty to eleven. No way that’s anything but Air India.
‘Rosie the dog’s called.’
His smile remains when he shakes his head. ‘Won’t do no good, Pettie.’
‘I put flowers on the grave.’ She wipes a smear of jam from around her lips. ‘The grandmother’s beyond it.’
‘You still all right for the rent, Pettie?’
She doesn’t answer, and he explains that Mrs Biddle won’t be put upon. In case she has forgotten, he mentions that. He has known it before, he says, this state she’s got into, having feelings for this man. It’s the same thing happening all over again.
‘It’s not the same. It’s like you’re waiting for something and then it happens. It’s like it’s meant, Letitia gone, then the advertisement.’
‘I know what you mean, Pettie.’
‘You hear her voice, you know it’s meant.’
‘It’s only you wouldn’t want to lose the room.’
She doesn’t look at him, she doesn’t care. Despair comes as a hollowness in Albert’s stomach, a cavity of dull, unfeeling pain. Within a week of losing her room she’ll be up Wharfdale.
‘The grandmother falls asleep,’ she says. ‘I seen her at it.’
*
The receiver is put down, and Pettie visualizes it on the table in the hall, where she noticed a telephone while she sat there waiting. Clearly she recalls the dark panelling in the hall, the half-open door of the dining-room, the sluggish tick of the clock.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says, coming back when she is beginning to
think that maybe he won’t, that maybe he hasn’t understood. ‘I’ve asked, but no ring has been found.’
‘I think maybe where I was sitting. On that settee. I think maybe it slipped under a cushion. A finger-ring,’ she says.
Again the receiver is placed on the table’s surface, more of a rustle than a thud, as if his hand is partly over the mouthpiece as he lays it there. There are his footsteps moving away, and then there are different, distant sounds. She puts another coin in the slot. She lights a cigarette. She couldn’t stop smoking after she went back to the Floor Coverings place with the tie she had acquired, and the book about tennis stars because he’d said he liked to watch the tennis. ‘Oh, Eric’s gone,’ they said, putting an end to what hadn’t yet begun. She stood there looking at them and they asked her if she was all right. How could she search for him? she thought, and yet she trailed from store to store.
‘No, nothing there, I’m afraid.’
His voice is as it was when first she heard it, when he gave her directions, on the telephone also. It’s soft, just a little different from what it is when she hears it in the garden or as it was at the interview. But not a whisper; every word is clear. Again he says he’s sorry.
‘I’ve pulled the cushions out,’ he says.