End in Tears (26 page)

“Do you have a job, Ms. Lucas?”

“I work nights on the checkout at Tesco. Four nights a week. My mum keeps an eye on Elkanah.” She seemed to realize, in a dim puzzled way, that rather more explanation was needed for this expenditure than she had given. “I did want a baby of my own, you see. I'd tried and tried. I just longed for a baby. I used to look at other women with babies and I don't know why I didn't take one of them, I was that sick about it.” Elkanah was sucking on his bottle with enthusiasm and at great speed. Sharon stroked his head with infinite gentleness. “But I'm all right now,” she said. “I've got my own baby.”

 

“And we've got to take him away from her,” Wexford said. “We've got to take the babies away from all those women, or someone has. I almost feel I haven't the heart to do it. I haven't the heart to go ahead with this. Why not pretend we never heard any of that from Gwenda Brooks?”

“You're joking, of course.” Burden said it sternly, almost fiercely. “Of course we have to go ahead with it. Of course we do. What, let these villains go on conning these fool women? Go on raking in ten thousand a time for one of the dirtiest scams I've ever come across?”

“I was joking, Mike, if joking can be the word in this context. He has to be stopped. It's just that I wish…well, I wish people weren't so wicked. That sounds daft, doesn't it? An old copper like me. So we send Hannah into Miracle Travel, posing as a baby-hungry would-be mum?”

“I think so. You wouldn't believe it, though, would you? You couldn't invent it. A whole bunch of women who want babies so much they're prepared to think they can go to Africa, give birth without being pregnant, and bring back an African baby as their own child?”

“I once learned by heart something Bertrand Russell said. Let's see if I can remember it. ‘The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it isn't utterly absurd. Indeed, in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.'”

“It's not labor, darling,” said Mary. “You're having Braxton-Hicks contractions. It probably means baby's coming in a week or two. Could be sooner.”

Sylvia heaved her great bulk up off the sofa. “I had them with Ben, but I'd forgotten. I've got to the stage now when I just want it to stop. I mean I just want to get it over with. Have you noticed something? Unless you have and haven't told me, we haven't heard a word from Naomi for two whole days.”

“I have.”

“And something's happened to stop you telling me.”

Mary went out to the kitchen, was gone perhaps two minutes and came back with a bottle of sparkling water flavored with elderflower and two glasses. She filled the glasses, held one out to Sylvia and said, “I don't know how you'll feel, but somehow I think you won't like it much. Women don't, even if they no longer care for the man.”

“For God's sake, what is it?”

“Naomi and Neil are getting married in two weeks' time.”

Sylvia sipped from her glass. She set it down. “It's nothing to me, is it? If it weren't her it'd be someone else. I left him, anyway. I've nothing to complain of.” She closed her eyes, said slowly, “Yes, I suppose I do mind, I don't like it. Oh, what a fool I am, Mary.”

She began to cry, the tears trickling out from under her closed lids. Mary came to sit beside her and took her hand.

CHAPTER 27

I
n the fur coat she borrowed from her mother, Hannah set off for London by the ten fifty-one train from Kingsmarkham. She wore gray flannel trousers, ankle boots, and, tied around her head, a silk scarf with a pattern on it of harness and horse brasses. Dressing like this depressed her and made her self-conscious. Never, in her real undisguised life, would she have dreamed of wearing ranch mink or a headscarf or trousers with a long coat. At least she was warm. She had no high heels to impede her if she had to run, or tights to ladder. She took off the headscarf in the train and felt a little better.

Having been to university in London, Hannah knew it well. She took the tube from Victoria to Green Park and walked up. It was rather less cold than in Sussex—it mostly was—but she had put back the headscarf. They said London was warmer because of all the hot-water pipes. Could that be true? She passed Nicky Clarke, the hairdresser, and had the ridiculous thought that the people inside must all be looking at her, thinking how dowdy she was and that her hair must be horrible if she needed to cover it up.

Miracle Tours was a little way along. The travel agent's wasn't so much a shop as a bow-windowed office squeezed between two tall houses of Georgian elegance. A bell had to be pressed to let you in. She was the last person they'd let in if they knew what she was up to, Hannah thought. She pressed the bell and the door made a little growling sound allowing her to push it open.

Inside the small and cozily warm office a young woman with long blond hair sat at a desk stacked with the usual brochures. The emerald-green carpet was thick and soft, the furniture of blond wood and steel. On the walls were the usual posters, advertising holidays in Sharm-el-Sheik, Innsbruck, Penang, and Rio de Janeiro but all framed in steel.

“How may I help you?”

Hannah wished she could have her nails done like this girl's, but she never could. It was out of the question. They were immensely long, obviously with artificial extensions, and on each was a tiny picture of a tropical beach with silver sand, palm trees, and iridescent blue sea. She looked longingly at them, averted her eyes, and began on what she had come for.

“I hear you arrange, er, miracle tours.” She sounded nervous, she could tell, but all the better. Anyone asking about a thing like that would be nervous.

The girl said cagily, “We are Miracle Travel. Did someone you know recommend us?”

“Mrs. Brooks,” Hannah said and when this seemed to have no effect, was suddenly inspired. “She sent me to Mr. Quickwood.”

“Oh, yes.” Miss Tropical Beach's accent had gradually been growing more refined and from this Hannah took heart. She must be making the right impression. “Yes, that's excellent. May I know your name?”

“It's Anna Smithson,” said Hannah.

“And your home address?”

Hannah gave her own. Who could prove no Anna Smithson lived there?

“What kind of miracle tour did you have in mind?”

The time had come for a frank avowal, an opening of the heart woman-to-woman. “I'm desperate to have a baby. I've tried everything. Miracle Travel is my last hope. I'm so depressed, I think I'll do something, well, something awful, put an end to everything if I can't have a child. Do you think I'm a fool?”

It went against the grain with Hannah to talk like this. The words almost stuck in her throat but she realized that this choking awkwardness was all to the good. This was ten times better than a smooth stating of the case. A spark of sympathy had appeared in Miss Tropical Beach's glassy blue eyes.

“It's best if you speak to our managing director, but he won't be up till this afternoon. Could you come back at three…well, say three-thirty?”

Hannah could. Going out into the cold was very unpleasant and there was no car to dive into. What had that girl meant by “up”? “He won't be up till this afternoon”? That he wouldn't be up to London, say, or he wouldn't be out of bed? Surely not the latter. Wexford had said to go shopping. Why not? Reappearing with a couple of Bond Street bags could only add verisimilitude to her disguise when she returned and it was ages since she had bought anything new…

 

On the concrete slab outside the bungalow, instead of the aged Volvo stood a new red Toyota. On closer inspection it turned out not to be quite new and, though a gift from Ross, had been given from necessity not simply altruism. Rick had managed to write off the little Volvo, tough car though it was, by reversing it down a one-way street and crashing it—more violently and disastrously than could have been conceived of in those circumstances—into a big four-wheel-drive Land Cruiser parked by the curb.

“They say I'm accident prone,” said Rick. He presented a sorry sight, limping from jarring his left knee, his right arm in a sling from a sprained wrist, and a plaster half covering his forehead from where he had struck it on the rear mirror. “I never saw that four-by-four. I told the guy it belongs to I reckon I had a stroke. They said at the Princess Diana I hadn't, but that's all that accounts for it.”

Burden shook his head. “You're lucky to have your brother, aren't you?”

Rick gave him a resentful look. “Haven't I always said so? I'm sure I know the meaning of gratitude.”

He began rolling himself a cigarette. Burden could have sworn the soup plate in use as an ashtray hadn't been emptied since he was last in this house. He thought he recognized one particular twisted cigarette end with a grease stain on its tip. There was an art in surprising someone you were questioning and while Barry Vine asked Rick more about his road accident, Burden planned his attack.

Rick uttered his final miserable monosyllable and Burden said, “How long has Ross been seeing Lydia Burton?”

As a shock tactic, it was disappointingly ineffective. “With her now, is he?” Rick said, his habitually depressed tone unchanged. “One woman's enough for any man, if you ask me. You have two on the go and all it means is that they'll both of them get your money off you and if one gets your home off you, the other one'll get your kids.”

 

Naomi sounded excited. Cold weather suited her, she said. “Actually I'm on top of the world, Sylvia. All these years I've been against marriage, but somehow, when Neil asked me, I went all weak at the knees. It means a man really loves you, doesn't it, when he proposes?”

This served, unexpectedly, to remind Sylvia of when Neil had proposed to her. They had both been very young and very much in love. It hadn't been snowing then but a moonlit midsummer, and the way they felt had, of course, been going to last forever. Sylvia knew she ought to say she hoped Naomi would be very happy. She ought to
feel
happy for her and Neil because she had read in the paper only that morning that the children of couples who are married to each other grow up in a more stable environment than those of people cohabiting. And these two were going to have a child. As if to confirm this, the child they were going to have gave a great lurch and a kick. She could see it, not just feel it.

“I hope you'll be very happy,” she said in the voice of someone breaking bad news.

“I think we will. The wedding's on Saturday week. We'd actually love you to come, but I don't suppose…?”

“You don't suppose right,” said Sylvia. “I'm not as big as a house. I'm as big as a palace.”

“Well, not long now. Bye-bye. I'll call you again tomorrow. And don't worry about the snow. It won't settle.”

Quite alone, the boys at school and Mary at work at the Princess Diana Hospital, Sylvia tried to phone her mother but got the answering service. Her sister was in a place called Bora-Bora. She didn't even know where that was, but presumably it was reachable by mobile. The idea of trying the number and failing to get it depressed her. She lay down on the sofa, picked up the book she was reading, but read nothing. She looked at the snow powdering the lawn, then covering it so that blades of grass could no longer be seen. Watching paint dry was supposed to be the slowest thing you could do; waiting for a baby to come was slower. And usually you got the reward for your patience of a baby at the end of it. Not this time, though, not this time.

 

Spending a great deal of money, far more than she could afford, on a party dress for Christmas and a trouser suit, Hannah economized on lunch, eating a sandwich in a café off Oxford Street. As if, as she said to herself afterward, saving ten pounds would make a difference when you'd spent several hundred. She walked back to Carlos Place carrying her two large glossy bags and thinking about Bal. They barely spoke these days. Still, she thought of wearing the party dress while out with him on, say, Christmas Eve. She thought of him suddenly asking her out in a way she couldn't refuse and making it clear he'd had a change of heart and wanted her, really wanted her and spontaneously.

Miss Tropical Beach let her in, said, “The managing director will see you now.”

Didn't he have a name? Hannah supposed she would find it out, but when she was shown into a room at the back, the man who came to greet her merely held out his hand and said how nice it was to meet her. He reminded her of David Suchet playing Poirot, but minus the mustache. There were no posters here and no brochures but a little drawing room full of eighteenth-century French furniture. Two paintings on the walls looked to Hannah like Gainsboroughs. The one opposite her was of a very young woman in a low-cut white gown and a huge white hat covered with ribbons and feathers. Something strange about the room puzzled her, and then she realized it had no windows.

He offered her a cigarette. It wasn't quite the first Hannah had been offered in the past ten years, but probably only the third.

“Oh, no, thank you.” She had already slipped into a gushing tone.

“You won't mind if I do?”

“Of
course
not. These are your premises.” She gave him a sad smile. “I don't know if the young lady told you how, well, how desperate I am for a baby. My husband and I, I mean, well, I'll go anywhere, do anything…”

He smiled, exhaling blue smoke. “You won't have to do anything much, Mrs. Smithson. What you have to do will be, I hope, a pleasure. A comfortable flight to a beautiful part of Africa, an excellent hotel to stay in, a tour including a two-night safari, and—and what you want at the end of it.”

If only she could be recording this, but it would hardly be admissible in court…“I shall actually give birth at the end of it.”

He didn't answer. “You have already talked to Ms. Brooks, I believe?”

“That's right.”

“Good. Then you'll know some preparation is necessary. The usual period is six months in which clients build themselves up with a diet and exercise regimen.”

She persisted. “Will I…will I give birth in Nairobi?”

“The fact is the nursing home has excellent facilities and a trained staff including two senior medical practitioners. Sam will give you a brochure on your way out and a diet sheet and so on. But I don't want to rush you into anything. I'd like you to study the brochure and the other information, discuss the matter with your husband, and then come and see me again. Now you live in Kingsmarkham, I believe?”

“That's right.”

“The fact is I have a home near Pomfret myself. Perhaps you'd come and see me there when you've made up your mind.”

“I've made it up already,” said Hannah.

He smiled in fatherly fashion. “No, Mrs. Smithson, believe me you haven't. You need to think some more about it and then, if you want to, come and see me again. As a matter of fact, you can give me a ring here and we'll fix a date.”

Again they shook hands. He hadn't told her his name and he had avoided confirming the purpose of the Miracle Tour. She had mentioned birth and babies, but he hadn't. She could almost admire his skill in calling the doctors involved “medical practitioners” instead of obstetricians. Outside, in the office where Sam Tropical Beach presented her with a prettily packaged sheaf of papers, Hannah asked her what the managing director was called.

“Oh, Mr. Arlen. Mr. Norman Arlen. Didn't I say?”