*
Maidment keeps the hall door open for a while in an effort to expel the oppressive odour of Flowers of Egypt.
‘High and low they went,’ he comments crossly in the kitchen. ‘I could have told them.’
‘Precious to the girl, it probably is.’
‘No ring was lost in this house.’
‘You’d have noticed it, of course.’
‘The song and dance, it could have been the Crown jewels.’
With that, the visit passes without further interest into the couple’s memory, and other matters are spoken of.
*
‘She was hoping to come here,’ Thaddeus says on the lawn beneath the catalpa tree, ‘even though we said no.’
Briefly that is wondered about, bewilderment silencing what might be said. Then in the garden, too, interest in the visit recedes and finally dissipates, the visitor forgotten.
Cow parsley is high in the hedgerows, foxgloves decorate the verges. Joe Minching said he worked the farms once, moving from place to place, all over the country. Silage-making and harvesting, lifting potatoes.
She walks slowly, going nowhere. She doesn’t know what the crops on either side of her are, barley or wheat or oats, undisturbed on a breezeless day. There are fields of peas, and new green plants sprouting in the dry earth. A tractor is working somewhere, a low hum reaching her over flat landscape that’s varied only by what is grown.
‘I feel for you,’ she whispered, close to him when she’d said about putting the flowers in the jam-pot. ‘I feel for you,’ she said again. He gave a kind of shrug, and she knew he thought she meant because he had been left a widower.
The sun is hot on her head and the back of her neck, a white glare in her eyes. Lost in the network of lanes, she is deep in the countryside now. She picks peas and eats them, sitting in the shade at the edge of a field.
He went down on his hands and knees; with a poignancy that softens her distress, she remembers that too. He stood by that nursery door and a beam of sunlight slanted across the room and ht up his pale eyes. ‘We’d supply the uniform, of course,’ he said the first time, on the phone. She could be with him now as he had wanted her to be, as she
would be if there hadn’t been an old woman’s interference. Over and over again he said he was sorry.
The disappointment fills you and then empties; nothing’s left except what might have been, what should be still. ‘Oh yes, my dear’: just for her there was that murmur on a Sunday afternoon, special and only for her. ‘Oh yes, my princess,’ and no one ever heard. On the side of his cheek the birthmark was shaped like a crescent moon and once she touched it.
She slips peas from another pod, then throws them away. ‘The day will come I’ll give you anything you want.’ He had to come near, his breath warm on her cheek. ‘Everything I have, darling, when I take you away with me.’ A pencil-sharpener that was a globe of the world it was the first time, a Minnie Mouse watch later on. ‘I never mind,’ she said, looking away while she did what he wanted her to do, not wanting to see but still not minding. He didn’t take to any of the others because only she was affectionate, because she said all sorts of things to him, how she liked being with him, how she’d be awake and think about him. She didn’t mind that he was corpulent, the word Miss Rapp used when she noticed him going by in the downstairs passage once. She didn’t mind anything about him because he meant it when he called her his princess and said he was her lonely king. Because he lived alone that was, in a house he’d bring her to one day, a house that was warm and dim, with a long back garden, aubrietia in his rockery, and once he brought a sprig to show her what aubrietia was. ‘Wife and kiddies,’ Joe Minching contradicted, and she said no. ‘Pull the other one,’Joe Minching said. ‘Oh, definitely.’ It wasn’t true, she shook her head, but when she asked again it seemed she had
misunderstood. If only it could be, was what there was now; of all things in the world he would choose it, he wanted only that. His treasure, his lovely princess.
You don’t believe it won’t be all right. You don’t believe you’ll go back to the flooring place and they’ll say you frightened Eric off. You don’t believe an old woman will get in the way with her venom. On the seaside outing the fishermen pulled in their boats, the shingle rasping on the wood, and when the last of them went by, ruddy-cheeked, in wading boots, he smiled and said that mackerel was what they caught. She walked on with him while the others played and he pointed up the cliffs to where he lived, lifting his arm and you could see his jersey needed a darn. She’d have done it for him. She’d have gone with him to his house.
Her feet are sore. She takes her shoes off. ‘I’m sorry,’ her Sunday uncle whispered when he told her that she could never see the aubrietia in his rockery, offering her instead another sprig. His wife was sharp-voiced when she phoned her up, screaming abuse. His wife said accusations like that should be reported, you couldn’t throw filth around and get away with it. But nothing was reported. And nothing was when she asked Joe Minching where the house was and cut the woman’s clothes with a razor-blade, when she poured away her powder and marked the television screen with her lipstick. She cut the sheets on her bed and on her children’s beds, and dumped stuff in the dustbins, and smashed the light-bulbs in the rooms: nothing was said, there was no complaint. She knew there wouldn’t be. Nothing happened except that he didn’t come back to the Morning Star.
It’s different now. The empty, pale blue sky, the green pea
stalks, and grass and clay: all that makes it different, like looking for the ring together did. When he said, No luck? he wanted her to be in luck, he wanted everything to be all right. He wanted her to tend his baby, to give it all her love: in the nursery you could tell he wanted that. His voice is as it always is; it has not left her, his face has not blurred.
When she reached up for the fisherman’s hand it was only to be affectionate, and when the rictus began in his face she thought he was smiling back, but he wasn’t. He couldn’t go quickly on the shingle, his flopping fisherman’s boots a drag, holding him for another instant to her. When he was far away she picked a stone up, and felt her bitterness like vomit in her stomach when she tried to damage his boat. Riff-raff was what the old woman would have said, is maybe saying it again. The other woman was snooty on the landing that afternoon, you could tell by the way she looked. It was only him that wasn’t, and he never would be.
Pettie walks again, and rests again, and then the evening shadows come, and lengthen as she watches, the shapes of trees and stubble softening. Joe Minching walked coast to coast, he said, labouring at anything, killing rabbits, skinning squirrels, sleeping out. She’d have gone with him if he wanted it, giving him affection, a baby if he wanted it. But he’d finished with the country then and was after a barmaid – Dainty he said her name was and showed round pictures of her, not dainty at all, spreading all over the place.
It’s twilight now and Pettie sleeps, and wakes when it is dark. She put the blade back in the razor, not caring if they returned, if they walked into the bathroom while she was at it. She’d get sent to a Borstal, Magi Laye and Sylvie said when she phoned up the woman, but she didn’t care about
that either. You reach out for a ballpoint, you slip away a counter tricket, or panties or a vest. No one calls out, no one bars your way. She could have said to the old woman that the worms are in the body now; she could have said that all the flowers in the world won’t keep the worms out of a body, but no good would come of that.
He wanted to agree about a grandmother being beyond it. Everything they both felt was in his expression and in his eyes. But the old woman has come and what is meant cannot happen until her greed for a baby is taken from the house she has invaded, until her venom ceases, until she isn’t there.
*
Sometimes the words Albert removes are scrawled in mammoth letters on the tiled surfaces, sometimes they are cramped, pushed into one another, as if recording a private utterance. Often such attempts at communication are in a language unknown to him, a pattern of strokes and marks that seems like decoration. Strictly speaking, only the tiles are Albert’s concern in the Underground stations: to remove as best he can all messages, statements, pronouncements, incitements to violence, abuse of the police authorities, expressions of lust. But he also, for his private satisfaction, erases with a rubber anything in pencil on a nearby poster, any crude additions to figures advertising stage shows or films.
He works on the tiles with cloths and brushes, bottles of erasing liquid, a bucket of soap and water. In the eerie quiet of the night it again outrages his orderly nature that he cannot cleanse the posters as he does the tiles, that it is not his remit to do so, that only the pencilled messages can be rubbed away while bolder obscenities must remain.
Tonight there is the further disappointment that he has failed in his visit to the Dowlers. ‘I can’t go rodding, this hour,’ Mr Dowler crossly protested, misunderstanding and continuing to misunderstand. A smell of beer came from him, specks of foam on the moustache that joined up with his sideburns. A woman’s voice called down the stairs, inquiring what the problem was, and Mr Dowler didn’t answer and Albert explained that it was Pettie he’d come about. ‘Pettie was the girl was looking after your kids, Mr Dowler. Only she made a mistake.’ Mr Dowler, still confused, shook his head; Mrs Dowler shouted down again, drawing attention to the time. ‘Look, what’s your problem, son?’ Mr Dowler demanded and Albert repeated what he’d said several times already ‘Listen, son,’ Mr Dowler said then, ‘you ask that little bitch where the wife’s shoes is.’ Pettie was wanted by the police, he said, and closed the door.
Eyes smile at Albert from the advertisements that, every night, become his world. Mouths simper, limbs are frozen as they gyrate, words ooze their promise. Black on pale yellow, a scrawl records an experience of Ecstasy. A smiling woman is defiled in two places and Albert tears part of the paper away, bundling it under a seat on the platform.
AIDS the Saviour!
is written, and beside it an account of how a woman was humiliated in a car park. Up Wharfdale the needles are thrown down on the street and in the gutters. There’s vomit in the doorways; the girls go by, not seeing you. The time the rent boys turned on him, Little Mister joined in because he was afraid not to.
He bombed … She couldn’t resist him
… The message is edged with fire, its urgent letters spread across an explosion,
the concrete of buildings a dance of destruction, debris arrested in a night sky. No more than a shadow a man was once, five past three in the morning, stayed down to leave a device after they’d locked the gates.
Albert squeezes dirty water out of his cleaning rags and stares morosely at the scum of bubbles in his bucket. The water that came out of the standpipe at the seed nursery was clean enough, rusty at first but then becoming clear. They should never have left that place. They could have found a Primus stove and done their cooking on it. You see things on skips when you go wandering, no reason why there wouldn’t be a Primus stove. He could have got in crisps and more Heinz beans and long-lasting milk and Mother’s Pride. They could have bought seeds themselves and grown lettuces and carrots in the tumbled-down glasshouse. They could have got blankets thrown out on a skip.
She’ll go up Wharfdale now. What else can happen to a girl without a bed to sleep in? It’s fourteen months since Bev went missing. It’s a week already since Pettie’s been about.
Albert empties the water from his bucket on to the track and replaces his rags and brushes, soap and bucket, in a cupboard on Platform 2. His night’s work hardly begun, he climbs up a moving staircase that is stationary now. He’ll make up the time, he promises the man who’s tidying up around the turnstiles at the top.
The thump of music reaches him as he walks away from the Underground entrance, and when he turns a corner there’s a disco’s flashing neon, a bouncer with cropped head and stubble belligerent in a doorway. A bigger man than Mr Dowler, he cups the remains of a cigarette in the palm of a
hand, a dirty blue T-shirt stretched over his beer-sag. Three girls leave the disco as Albert passes, one pausing to ask the bouncer for a light. A decoration glistens in her nostril as she bends her head over the massive, lazily raised hand. ‘Ta,’ she says, and for a moment Albert wonders if she’s Bev, then sees she isn’t. He wonders if Bev would remember him, or pretend she doesn’t. Up Wharfdale, Ange pretended once.
Voices from the disco follow him, incomprehensible and loud, beating out the music’s rhythm. Leeroy heard voices, Bob Iron and the Metalmen, Ivy On Her Own. Famous, Leeroy said, but no one else at the Morning Star was familiar with Bob Iron and the Metalmen or Ivy On Her Own. A woman in the gas queue said if you hear voices they never go away.
There’s no one he knows up Wharfdale when he gets there, not Ange nor Bev, nor Pettie. There are new girls he has never seen before, twelve or thirteen years old. The rent boys are in Samuel Street and Left Street. He stays for a while, then begins the journey back to the streets he prefers. She could be anywhere.
He sits for a while on a low wall, leaning against the wire mesh of a fence. A plane passes over but he can’t see what it is. A street light illuminates a notice with a jagged lightning sign: interference with the iron container that the fence protects will result in death.
A man goes by, a white dog running in front of him. He doesn’t look at Albert but straight ahead, as if he’s nervous of catching a stranger’s eye. The dog runs on and he calls it, Tippy, Tippy. She broke her glasses at the Morning Star and they said she’d have to manage for a while. But it was only
the side bit and he fixed it to be going on with, a matchstick and Sellotape.
‘Come on, Tippy,’ the man orders when the dog begins to lick Albert’s shoes. ‘Sorry about that,’ the man says, his head turned sideways, as if he is examining something in the distance, and Albert says it doesn’t matter.
He goes on, crossing a common, coming out by the dairy yard he knows, where electric floats are being loaded. ‘You got your lot, Sean?’ a voice calls out, and there’s an incomprehensible reply. Two Indians, one with a suitcase, cross the street to ask him where Caspar Road is, and he says the other side of the dairy yard. Cars pass, going faster than they would in the daytime. A quarter to three it is, the figures luminous on his Zenith. ‘I work the Underground nights,’ he explained when policemen in a car drew up beside him once. He called the policeman who questioned him sir. He always does that, to be on the safe side. He explained that to Pettie in case she was ever questioned herself, but he doesn’t know if she listened.