Authors: Gillian White
There were no words of wisdom Georgie could say to the girl with the bright-blue eyes, this overgrown child who stood so inadequately, so hopelessly before her, but she tried all the same. Once a meddler always a meddler. Maybe a good discussion with somebody with her welfare at heart might spur her on to take action. ‘Perhaps, after Chad’s moved my stuff back, you’d like to come over and have a drink and a chat, help me sort the place out.’ She hesitated, afraid she might sound patronizing. ‘I need a friend.’
Donna, filled with dismay, explained, ‘Oh, I daren’t, Chad wouldn’t like that.’
‘No?’
‘He doesn’t like being bested you see, especially by a woman.’
‘No, I understand that.’
‘Perhaps tomorrow, when he’s gone out.’
‘I won’t be here tomorrow, Donna. I’m leaving in the morning. I have to get back to London.’
And then Chad was calling from below. It was a cup of tea he was wanting and Donna hurried down to oblige, apology in her backward glance, an appeal for understanding.
When Georgie had finally finished she went downstairs and confronted Cramer. ‘The sooner you make a start the better, while there’s some light left. I’ll expect the first load in about… what? …An hour?’
Cramer did not look her in the eye. He glowered into the fire, one eye closed against spiralling cigarette smoke, then he answered sourly, ‘That brother of yours couldn’t paint a bleeding fence, not with a brush and a tin of whitewash. The lot together aren’t worth fifty.’ And he spat the dog-end angrily into the hearth.
‘The canvas alone is worth more than that, as well you know, Mr Cramer. So, as I said, I’ll be waiting. And there might be a few bob in it for your troubles if you’re lucky.’
He missed the insult completely for he was a man without shame. If she’d slapped his face he’d have understood. And Georgie heard him cursing some clumsiness of Donna’s as she briskly and triumphantly showed herself out. In these difficult circumstances, she congratulated herself, she thought she had done rather well.
N
OT ONLY WAS GEORGIE
aware that Cramer was slyly eyeing her departure, but that several other hostile stares were following her from the other two lonesome habitations that made up Wooton-Coney. She looked for the twitching curtains, but saw only vague reflections on glass. Not a woman given to dramatic imagination, nevertheless she could not dismiss the certain feeling that her every move was being watched and had been watched, carefully watched, since the moment of her arrival. But why?
At the cottage she fed Lola, then sat in the damp, distressed chair waiting for the devious Cramer to arrive with the first load. It might be inconvenient for the slob to leave the comfort of his miserable fire, it might be unreasonable to expect such exertions in the snow and in the dark, but there was no alternative. Georgie, determined to get her belongings back, was quite clear in her own mind that if the villain did not return them straight away she would go to the police in the morning.
Cramer was no lovable local scoundrel. The cheeky poacher. The colourful rustic. Georgie disliked him intensely.
Half an hour later Cramer arrived. He did his work with sullen efficiency, Donna tagging mutely behind to help him hump his load. The caterpillar tracks left by the Buckpits’ tractor meant that the battered old Land Rover and trailer had no real difficulty grinding their way up the road. Cramer cursed darkly as he worked, grim reluctance in every movement. He was rough with Stephen’s belongings now they were no longer his for the taking, and Georgie watched him nervously while she traversed the awkward stream, backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, making sure the breakables, at least, reached the house in one piece.
Total darkness overtook the horizon and fluttered the valley like a fan. A tawny owl hooted and the churring note of a nightjar tore the stillness of the night. Quite alone with nature in the complete stillness between Cramer’s deliveries, it was easy to think her strange and hostile, busy with her own life, indifferent to the needs of men. Georgie’s taughtened hearing meant that the chattering stream flowed more swiftly and small animals moved in the snow.
It took Cramer four journeys to finish the job, and by the time the Land Rover rattled away the night sky was pitch-black. She had looked at the mess Cramer had left and decided not to tip him. It was a relief to close the door and make a start on sorting it out.
Already the cottage felt more comfortable, began to breathe real life. The battered yet comfortable sofa and the second, more reputable, armchair removed the vacant feeling of space. It was a relief to be busy, absorbed in something positive, removed from her normal relentless problems. Already Georgie was aware of the gulf that divided this life from the other. She positioned the lamps and turned them on. Some of the old horse harness she hung on the obvious hooks. She laid the rugs down over the carpet and the eerie echo went out of the place. She wiped Stephen’s books and stacked them in the bookcase, not a great deal to be learned from those, mostly classics, collections of poetry, books about painters and the history of art. She tried the archaic TV and was surprised to find that it worked. She filled the little walnut dresser with bits and pieces from boxes: a portable typewriter, a chess set, music tapes, again mostly classics, a clarinet in a case, a silver cigarette lighter, a camera and several photograph al
bums filled with nothing but views. And there’s nothing so bleak and empty as a photograph of a view.
Even the kitchen was slightly improved with the bright selection of tins on the shelves, the bread board, the mat on the floor, the vegetable rack and the small kitchen cupboard.
Tired by now, she went upstairs where Cramer had thoughtlessly dumped the furniture and boxes of art materials. She tried to sort the bedroom out to look as though someone had once slept there. There were clothes in the chest of drawers, more in the blanket chest. The sweaters and shirts and corduroy trousers, mostly old and unfashionable, the rolled-up socks and underwear, did not smell of Stephen, after their sojourn in that damp old carriage they smelled of decay. And the brown flying jacket was in the process of growing a white and unpleasant coating of mould. Ugh! She would have liked to have made a ‘studio’ out of the second bedroom again, but was frustrated by ignorance. How had Stephen arranged his things? So she left the paints and brushes in their boxes, and only when Georgie was satisfied that she’d done as much as she could did she go downstairs where the paintings were waiting for her excited perusal.
But along with the ashy smell of wood, now there was something else, something underneath, and pervasive, hard to pinpoint save to say that the smell had not been there before. And then she suddenly had it: the sickly sweet smell of gin gone sticky. It came to the house on her brother’s things and touched her like a troubled hand.
Savage. Primitive. Breathing on her as she backed away.
There were many times, after the tragedy, when she’d started out to the Hopkins’s flat to visit Gail and offer consolation on the death of a child, to offer a shoulder to cry on, to try to share the grief in some way, to find out how to do her own mourning. Yes, many times she had started out only to return to her flat, daunted by her own inability to handle her feelings and by the vast impossibility of grasping exactly what had happened to Angie, to Gail, to herself…
Eventually Georgie chose evening, certainly not the happiest time for a visit to Kurzon Mount Buildings, but a time when she would probably find Gail in. She stood at the familiar door, the door she had waited at so many times, she held her breath as she pressed the bell. She didn’t know what she might find, and she wasn’t at all sure what she would say. She was unprepared for the angry reaction.
‘
You!
’ It was a hiss.
Gail? But so different. No longer the lazy, easy-going veneer; stripped of that lethargic good nature, now she was lean and predatory, her cheeks thin and hollow and her red eyes ringed with tiredness and grief.
‘I thought we might talk,’ ventured Georgie, already aware she had blundered badly.
Gail Hopkins recoiled with revulsion. ‘Me?
Talk to you?
’
Embarrassed, bewildered and forgetting why she had come, yet still unable to walk away, Georgie tried to explain, ‘I want to tell you how sorry I am, and how much I am sharing your pain…’
‘Piss off, you bitch.’ And yet Gail did not attempt to slam the door in her face. She seemed to actually be gaining strength from this hellish encounter. Her face was thin and hollow, her eyes stared brightly as she spat, ‘You!
You interfering cow.
You don’t give a toss. You make things happen with your poking and your prying, all your vile suggestions and your bleeding filthy minds.’ She spat on the floor, a bitter taste. The spittle sizzled. ‘You dirty everything up. None of this would have happened if it wasn’t for you and your sick mind. Angie fell down the bleeding stairs! But no, no, you won’t have that, will you! You went and bleeding told them all, you filled their heads with your filthy lies and now they think that Ray did it. You’ve taken my kiddie and they’ve locked up my bloke.’
‘But Gail!
Surely you can’t believe…?
’
‘And now you have the nerve to come here and tell me I’m wrong… as if I don’t know my own husband, my own kids…’
As woodenly unhappy as she could ever remember feeling before, Georgie pleaded, ‘I didn’t come here to talk about this. I came here because of Angie and because I was so fond of her, and I wanted to let you know…’
‘Yeah, yeah!’ Gail’s face screwed up, knotted with a defiant rage. ‘You came here for yourself, you bastard. Because of your bleeding guilt. Because you know bloody well what you’ve done to me!’
Despair blocked every route of thought. It clogged the channels of speech. Georgie’s head worked from side to side as she fought a battle with desperate tears, and she would never know if she won it or not. Everything she said was hopeless. ‘If I’d known this was how you were feeling I wouldn’t have dreamed of coming here, Gail, and making this any worse for you.’
Gail stabbed her with her eyes. ‘But I’m glad you came! I’m glad you gave me this chance to tell you how it bloody well is. D’you really know what’s happened to me? D’you know what’s been going on with me and the kids? They can’t go out to play in the yard and they’re too upset to go to the playgroup, people are so bloody vicious. They tell them their dad’s a killer. The other kids, yeah, that’s what they say to Carmen and Patsy. I’ve had insults daubed on my sodding door. I’ve had broken windows. I’ve had shit shoved through my letter box, and all the while this crap is going on, while I’m breaking my heart over Angie,
where’s Ray?
You tell me, Mrs fucking Jefferson.
Where’s Ray in all this?
He’s shut up inside, that’s where he is. And if I get one half-hour with him a week then I’m lucky, if I can get someone to mind the kids, ’cos I’m not taking them to that place…’
‘Gail, listen! Perhaps the social services would be able to help you…’
And then Gail Hopkins threw back her head and laughed in Georgie’s face. Patsy, a tiny figure in a dressing gown, crept shyly along the passage and tugged nervously at her mother’s hem, then backed away into the room on the right. Gail’s laugh grew more hysterical, shaky. ‘Oh, that’s right!
That’s right!
Say what you’ve been trained to say. Come out with all your glib answers. Move us? Is that it now? D’you think there’s a place left in London where they won’t soon know who I am? The wife of the killer! The mother who let her kiddie die! She did it! She did it! That’s what they’re really saying and that’s what they’re really thinking.’ Gail stopped laughing suddenly and tried to pull herself together. ‘If you honestly want to help me, Mrs Jefferson, if you really came here with good in your heart, then get down to that bleeding nick and tell them that Ray never touched her, that he’s never touched a child in his life, that he was a good and caring dad and that Angie fell downstairs like he says…’
‘But, Gail, you know if I truly believed that I would have said it long ago…’
‘Oh no, oh no you wouldn’t. Don’t give me that shit. You and your lot, sick, suspicious, spreading rumours, telling lies.’ Gail rammed her hands on her hips. ‘Tell me this! Tell me, is this how you get your sick kicks, Mrs Jefferson? Ray says it is. Ray’s always known what this is about. Prying. Spying. Can’t have kiddies yourself so you have to nose about other people’s. Other people’s lives. Reducing them all to pieces of paper. Your fucking library of files.
At risk!
At risk my arse.’
She was reduced to begging. ‘
Please
,
Gail
, let me come in.’
‘To watch me crying, you mean? To gloat, you freak? To make notes about me and take them back to your bloody office for all your mates to see? To make sure that I’m coping properly and the other two aren’t at risk now? Like Angie? Is that why you are so sodding eager to get back in my house? You want the others, is that it? Well? Is that fucking it? Oh no, you cow, the next time one of your lot sets foot in here is over my bloody dead body, and I’m telling you that for fucking nothing.’
Georgie gradually realized she was no longer alone on the windswept landing outside the Hopkins’s flat. A small group of neighbours had gathered round to listen. They had come out onto the landing quiet as ghosts, and their faces were white in the dirty light. Little yellow pools in doorways told her from which flats they had come. There were no men with them, just the women, for this was women’s work. One held a dustpan and brush. One had a baby under her arm. Georgie stared about her in alarm, but they held their ground aggressively, the judge, the jury, the just.
‘You’re the cunt, aren’t you?’ growled a woman with a long nose and darting, sneaky eyes. ‘I’ve seen your bleeding picture. You’re the bitch in charge of this whole bloody mess, the one supposed to be taking care.’ And Georgie noticed Gail Hopkins quietly closing her door.
‘Should be inside with the bastard himself.’
A small woman in rollers and slippers wiggled a thin forefinger and her eyes flashed with menace. ‘And I hope you’re bleeding satisfied. We knew what was bloody going on. We knew. No fancy education, no bleeding letters after our fucking names, but we knew what was happening inside there; we heard the kiddies crying and yet you did fuck all about it.’