The Under Ground (Strong Women Book 4)

by Sarah Till

  “I won’t be in today. In fact, I wondered if I could take two weeks annual leave?”

  I could almost detect his delight.

  “Hell, yes, Jinny. No one would expect you in after, well.”

  I sighed. So that was it.

  “No, Ted, I didn’t try to commit suicide. I was attacked. By the same person who killed my mother.”

  I could hear his breathing become heavier.

  “Christ, not by the terrorists? Christ, Jinny, I’m sorry, I didn’t realise. The papers said that... Oh right I get it, MI5 and all that. Don’t worry I won’t blab. No, whatever you say is safe with me.”

  I nearly smiled but the implications of what Ted had said were too horrendous. As if John Baxter had won his quest to shift the blame for this onto the whole ethnic community.

  “Right, right, no it wasn’t a terrorist. Look, Ted, I have to see my solicitor and I can’t really explain exactly what happened. I’ll give you a call over the next couple of days?”

  Ted’s breathing had reached fever pitch.

  “Oh, yes, loose lips cost ships and all that. Of course, Jinny, if there’s anything I can do.”

  I sighed and sank back into my pillows. I looked at the bedside clock. Seven o’clock and Ted was already approaching the office.

  “Yes, Ted. There is something you can do. Stop mentioning terrorists. It’s nothing to do with that. And let Lynus Joyce know I’ll be back in a fortnight. Martina will have his number.”

  He was ready to blow as he huffed and puffed on the other end.

  “Lynus Joyce? Erm, is that a code for something? Never mind, we’ll speak when you get back. OK. Will do. Roger and out.”

  Clearly, this had suddenly turned into some spy novel for Ted. I could picture him running through Euston station with his briefcase flying behind him, pushing people out of the way as he hurried to the office to pass my message on. How he would be barely able to contain himself now I had asked him not to mention it to anyone. On the bright side, I realised that at least it looked like I was still employed and that one day I would be able to walk self-consciously though the office amidst a mêlée of pointing fingers. I shuddered at the thought. Ellis turned over.

  “Morning, gorgeous. Oops. Better get up and out.”

  He flopped out of bed, into the shower and dressed in fifteen minutes, then I heard the door shut gently behind him.

  Having already decided to travel the tube during the rush hour, with Henry’s office only three stops away I could easily make it by nine. I got up stiffly and showered, dried my hair and pulled on some old clothes. No point dressing up. I ate a bowl of porridge and absently started at the television. Someone had died in a speeding car. A boy had accidentally shot his sister. Someone had adopted three stray puppies. All the usual stuff. My mother was dead. A sense of grief suddenly hit me. She and Dad, sitting in the back garden of the cottage in the warm sunshine, back in the days when they were entwined around each other. She must have loved it when he was there and hated it when he wasn’t. Yet she was never really horrible to me. Just indifferent. Who could blame her? Every waking hour must have been devoted to wondering what he was doing with Sandra, the other woman, and the other family. Of course, she wouldn’t have known any details and somehow this was worse; just some faceless woman, probably younger, invariably more good looking, smiling and laughing with her husband. I idly wondered when she had found out who Sandra was. She certainly recognised her at the funeral.

  My mind strained to delve into the heavily suppressed memories of my mother when I was young. She often wore dresses with full skirts and tiny waists, that much I was sure. Her hair had been blonde and permed, then arranged in little rolls on her head, sort of tight curls that felt rough to the touch. At the weekend, she would sit in her bedroom in front of her dressing table mirror, and back-comb the curls into swoops of blonde softness that dropped over her forehead. She would throw her head back and pin the candy-floss fuzziness with a gilt clip. When Dad was around, her eyes were blue lined with thick black lashes, her lips ruby and smiling. When he was present, but absent in his thoughts, and her baiting had reached fever pitch, she was like a smudged version of her former self, as if someone had dragged the palm of their hand across her and left her to dry. Her red-rimmed eyes would cut through the blue-black makeup and her blonde hair became stiff and one-sided with the wetness of tears mingling with the hair products to form a steely lacquer shell. She was prickly, like fibreglass and just as toxic with her whisky and tranquilisers.

  Then she was gone. She turned into someone lost. The blonde rolls and the eyeliner were still there, but they rested on fuzzy thoughts and empty eyes. Her mouth, lipstickless, was always set in a grim show of determination as she carried out the mundane tasks of the day. I thought that she missed daddy, and in my then-childlike mind she did, but I now knew the real torment she was feeling. We went through the motions, but her heart was never in it. She was indeed desperate and as my memory flicked through the pages of the drunken fights and the overdoses, I could see that this woman was frenzied with her helplessness. In the final analysis, I had always blamed her heinous crime against my father on her treacherous nature, her selfishness and her inane evil. Now, I was slowly able to glimpse the reasons for her descent into lies. She was almost certainly fighting fire with fire. Even now, I thought that her actions were extreme. Feigning illness was a desperate act, one of ultimate manipulation. She involved not only herself and my father, but my family and the medical profession. What extremities of his behaviour had driven her to this? I tried to remember events around the time she was admitted to hospital.

  Dad had just been away. We had spent two long weeks sitting silently together in the evenings, watching TV or reading, as she waited for him. Even as a teenager, I had been able to sense her unease, her pain, but it had not been clear to me what had caused it. I knew that it made me feel uncomfortable, the way she dragged heavily on her cigarette, letting out a long, noisy hiss as she blew the smoke into the room. The constant sighing and the rapid movements of her foot as she swung her leg over and over again. The tapping of her finger on the dining room table. It was the nineteen seventies by then, the decade where I fell in love with various teen idols. When Mum became surly, I would go to my room and listen to the satin tones of David Cassidy singing about how love would be for me. I was seduced by the romantic ideal at the exact time that my mother fell out of love with love and resorted to manipulation to keep her man. But how did she know? No major events sprung to mind.

  I searched further back. Mum had lots of friends. Actually, they were more like acquaintances. Some were the wives of Dad’s business colleagues, some were women from the village who had children may age, people she could pass the time with until my father returned from his mistress. I scanned the years preceding her pseudo-illness for anything on the landscape that seemed to indicate a change. There certainly had been a lot of comings and goings by father, and a lot of drunken rows following them. When had she become sadder? My mind settled on one incident when she was crying. I had never seen her cry outside her alcoholic dramas before. When we were alone, she never cried. If she was sad she just hardened like concrete. I remembered now that she sat at the kitchen table for a full day and cried. Where had we been that day?

  I laboured with my memories, skimming the fragments of events that flitted across the landscape of my mind. I remembered that she had worn a green dress with big purple pansies on it. The green coat she always wore to the park remained hanging on the hook behind the kitchen door and at the last minute she fetched her best black coat. I had been quite young, maybe six or seven. She had dressed me in my yellow dress and tied my hair in plaits, each with a yellow ribbon. It had almost certainly been near the end of the school holidays as that was the time when we used to go out a lot, when she was bored of the cooking, baking and reading. She liked to take me to the park where she could flick through her stylish magazines whilst I sat alone on the roundabout, turning and tur
ning in the afternoon glow. I was quite used to playing alone. Being an only child and living in a village whose population’s average age was fifty made the loneliness seem normal. On this particular day, we had arrived at the park and she had taken her usual place on the bench. Instead of a magazine, she nursed cigarettes, one after another. I had made my usual attempt to push myself on the swings, while she stared into space. I moved onto my solo attempt to get the roundabout to spin. I gripped the cold steel of the outer handles with my tiny hands and ran for my life. At the moment I could feel the roundabout take its own momentum, the second it was spinning faster than I could run, I jumped on. I would sit on the inner ledge, as mother went past me ten, twenty, maybe forty times before I had to push again. On push number two or maybe three, around the middle of the spin, mother went past. On the next spin, two more people had joined her. I remembered the woman vaguely. She was smaller than my mother and wore a short mac, tied tightly in the middle with a belt that didn’t match. Her hair was brushed out into a sleek bob that was slightly upturned at the bottom. Beside her sat a child about my age. The image now in my mind was like a flicker book, where the motion of the roundabout disrupted the image. The boy would sometimes be sticking his tongue out, sometimes still, sometimes holding his mother’s hand.

  Mum and the woman seemed to be arguing, their hands moving quickly in explanation. The woman began to shake her head and I heard my mother’s voice raise several octaves to what I already knew was danger pitch. I knew that there would soon be an explosive exchange and I ran to the distant see-saw and took my place one end, not really knowing what would happen if someone was to sit on the other seat that seemed far too high. I stood up and bounced down. Up and down. Up and down. Then up. I looked at the once empty seat and saw a boy, his legs only slightly longer than mine. Balancing the leverage of the see-saw so that I hung slightly in the air. John Baxter.

  My mother had run across the playground and grabbed my hand, dragging me from the park. I saw her black tears making smoky lines down her powdered face. She tried to wipe her cheeks but made it worse. Only yards from home, she almost fell and sobbed as she readjusted my bows. Once inside, she had thrown her coat off and sat at the kitchen table, head in hands, wailing and sobbing. Her chest heaved and her blonde rolls unfurled until she looked like Medusa with strands of stiff hair sticking up at angles from her head. Her lips were loose and scarlet and quivered as she lifted her head. I remembered taking a chance and speaking to her.

  “What will we have for dinner, mummy?”

  It had been an innocent question, but one that sent her into racking sobs and moans. I went upstairs and waited a while. When I came back to the table, she had made me a cheese sandwich and lay on her forearms. She was sobbing but her eyes stared straight ahead and had no tears.

  What had Sandra told her that day? Had it been the first time she had realised that my father had a son? Had she told her about their ongoing affair? Had it been the first day that she had been able to realise the woman she had only so far imagined? If this was true, why had it taken her another eight years to find a way to manipulate him into monogamy? Why hadn’t she divorced him? I realised now that the meeting in the park had only slightly preceded the overdose where I had found her passed out. It might have been only days later for all I knew, as the timescale of my childhood experiences was never very reliable; I tended to gauge the era by my hair style rather than the calendar date.

  I straightened my legs now at the kitchen table and marvelled at how my mother had managed to cope with the situation. They had hidden it from me, shielded me from their flaws and scars and weaknesses, the true nature of my parents only bursting through when their arguments erupted in my ears and their anger overflowed. After my mother gently lowered herself, ever so stylishly, into the wheelchair, their marriage was dead. Everyone assumed that the reason was that now Mum was paralysed there would be no bedroom action, poor Dad, denied his manly desires. Doubly, as it turned out. I had often wondered what was missing from their relationship, how two people who were so fiery and passionate could, overnight, turn into an aged version of themselves, a charcoal drawing of their life, two dimensional and pancaked into an inanimate frieze of their former selves. It was becoming clear that Sandra was the missing piece. The moment that Dad was denied her, he died inside. All the justification and guilt and shame that rained on him as he walked down our garden path, fresh from his conjugal visit with his other wife was drained. All the resulting over-show of hugs, love and gifts showered on the waiting wife and child were cancelled out. No need for arguments, guilt, worry, sneaking, ducking, diving or lies. No need for anything. His empty eyes had said it all. Deprived of Sandra, and presumably John, he was no longer interested in living, just going through the motions for the sake of decency.

  I shuddered. All the gifts he bought me. All the jewellery he pressed on mum, the compliments, the closed mouth kisses, the taut hugs. What was the reverse side of the coin? What was he telling Sandra Reid? Did she know that he was married? Did she even know about me? Was he there at John’s birth, as he had been at mine? Was he married to her, telling her too that he was away on business? I had always assumed that this woman had been a hussy, claiming a married man for her own. She had certainly looked as angry as Mum had in the park, but she didn’t look like a slut or a tart. She had looked just like a normal woman. I guessed now that, until the meeting in the park, neither woman had known the full truth about the other, just an inkling that something was amiss, a nagging doubt about the business trips and the long absences. I envisaged now the battle that had begun that day in the park. The silent battle, understated by the rules of society. That we must remain decent and shame-free at all times. That we must never admit that we have been duped by a man. Never profess our helplessness or struggle, whilst fighting tooth and nail to keep the man they both loved, or at least wanted. This battle must never be explicit, the rules of engagement being indirect, and amounting to a competition as to who can make his life most comfortable, fun, amorous, stylish, gourmet, loving, caring, clean, tidy and, most of all, conflict-free. Any small amount of blame or conflict would have undoubtedly resulted in him fleeing to the opposition. This is where mother fell down. Her inability to control her appetite for alcohol, which seriously loosened her tongue and her legs ending inevitably in blame and shame heaped upon him. Off he ran to Sandra, tail between his legs, only to return when the scenery had improved.

  I had no doubt that the final pull, the winning stroke was partly his obligations to the woman he married. I remembered his words. “Til death us do part, Virginia.” I could almost smell the cigarette smoke that constantly surrounded his deathly pallor. The other, probably major, part was the money. Financially, my mother was the major player. Goodness knows what Sandra Reid’s talents were, but Mum had enough income to easily get by on. Her parents had built up a farming empire and the proceeds had been passed down to Sally. I had no doubt that she threatened him in some way with either divorce, where he would receive nothing, or cutting him out of her finances. He would have been appalled. He may have been a philanderer and a liar, but he was certainly astute; all along he had been playing the rich gentryman, then farm owner. It was my mother’s money. What would he take to Sandra if he was denied of Sally’s financial backing?

  Time spun back to the present and I realised I would have to embark on my journey now if I was to arrive by nine o’clock. I pulled on a short jacket and brushed my hair, checking my reflection in the hallway mirror. A large blue bruise sat above my eye. My bruised legs felt tender, and my insides were sensitive to my every move. I was beginning to get a headache so I grabbed a bottle of ice-cold water from the fridge and slurped it. Pushing it into my bag, I moved towards the door. I felt a little afraid. The tiger moths flapped around in my intestines as I contemplated my journey. Sensible Jinny told me that I would have to do this sometime. Fearful Jinny reminded me, as if I didn’t remember every second of the day, that John Baxter would be in the s
ecurity capsule at the station, probably watching my every move. What if he stopped the train mid-journey? My heart beat faster. Of course he wouldn’t. Not in the middle of the day with people watching. He probably wouldn’t even notice I was there. I opened the door and stood on the step. The air bit into my lungs and I watched as the cyclists and the cars set off at speed, revving against the red light. On green, they went. I was still on red but set off anyway. I strode down the road, past the tourist buses. No one looked at me, so I guessed that the bruise wasn’t so conspicuous after all. I stood at the crossing and looked towards the station. Hundreds of people swarmed in and out and I dismissed my previous fears about John Baxter. Just to be sure, I pulled on a woollen hat. Catching a glimpse of myself, I thought that I looked like a mad old bag lady. No makeup, my hair scraped back and unusually flat shoes. No one would recognise me. I approached the station and waited for a few minutes near the escalator. The dank smell made its familiar way into my nostrils and I felt a sense of comfort. Turning slightly, I got my bearings. This was the route the hospital trolley had taken. I looked up and saw the high steel structure that my fuzzy vision had traced on that journey. I descended into the underground station and stood outside the toilet door. The thumps in my chest increased and I pushed the door open. My eyes went first to the tiles and the pipes below the sink, then to the door. It was no longer Out.Of.Order. Just to check that this was all real, I pulled back the door. Suzzy luvs Robert 4 eva. The toilet was clean and tidy, its lid gaping up at me. I suddenly felt sick. How the hell had he got me down here without being seen?

  Immaterial

  Here I was, back in the underground. On one hand, my heart ached for the solace of my own thoughts. On the other, my fear was heightened. Fear of terror, of the underground tomb, of the sudden explosion, of the unseen watcher, of the vulnerability of the depth, with no escape route. I wandered over the gate, fishing in my bag for my Oyster card. My paranoia getting the better of me, I imagined for a moment that John Baxter was using my card to track me through the infrastructure. It wouldn't be difficult for someone with security access. I bought a ticket with cash and pushed it into the gate. It popped out of the top and I rushed through. Down, down, and now round to the platform. People waited almost silently, five-deep to the edge. I could feel the prickle of anticipation, the competitive edge beginning to form as the train approached and we all vied to be the first one on. Or at least the second. A flurry of movement forward and a deep rumble announced the arrival of the train. I hesitated for a second, wondering if I should wait for the next train. Then, as if cushioned by a round of rolling casters, the crowd surged and carried me, hardly walking, onto the train. I set myself down near the doorway and held onto the handle. Three stops. Only a few minutes.