‘You’re not responsible for the whole world.’
But for once, I could see myself through Cousin Ben’s eyes and I didn’t like it. Nell marching for this and campaigning for that, not caring about anyone’s feelings.
I said, ‘That’s assuming she knew she was pregnant.’
‘Uh?’
‘Only two months. She might not even have known. I don’t suppose you want me to go into details but…’
‘I don’t mind. My father was a doctor.’
‘So was mine.’
‘You mean she might not have noticed that she hadn’t menstruated?’
It was a relief to find him so unembarrassed and I thought how few men, even among my friends, I could have talked to like this.
‘It’s just possible if her periods were irregular, and not all women feel sick.’
‘Alright, granted that’s possible, but if she didn’t know she was pregnant, why did she kill herself?’
‘If she killed herself. Don’t you see how neat that pregnancy made it? She’s supposed to have committed suicide but there isn’t any motive. Then, after the postmortem, she’s pregnant and a morphine addict so naturally she killed herself and it can be all wrapped up and put away and we needn’t worry.’
Bill said, ‘I’ll admit one thing still puzzles me, and that’s the speed of it. She leaves home in November, very much the conventional girl from a good family. And by your account, things haven’t changed a lot when you see her in December.’
‘No, except she was wanting to get involved with things her father wouldn’t have approved of.’
‘And she managed it with impressive speed. Next time you see her, three months later, she’s living in a household of anarchists and free lovers and, in your view, has already started on her first affair.’
‘Things do move fast when you’re nineteen.’
‘That fast? Then another two months later she’s pregnant, injecting morphine – and dead. That’s less than six months from beginning to end. I’d guess that whatever happened to her started longer than six months ago.’
‘Prudence said she was keyed up before she went to London “like at school, when it’s your turn to sing the solo”.’
‘Poor kid.’
Prudence or Verona? We sat there for a while, looking out to sea – at least I thought he was looking out to sea, but when I turned to say something, he was looking at me instead. To be honest, I’m not sure whether I kissed him or he kissed me, or perhaps it was like one of those decisions in anarchist communities, emerging by popular will without any need to take a vote. I’d told him that things move fast when you’re nineteen. Thank the gods, that’s true sometimes when you’re nearly twice that age.
Chapter Ten
WE RACED EACH OTHER DOWNHILL ON THE WAY back to Teignmouth, disturbed the bicycle hirer at his supper to return our machines and managed to get the train back to London that night. It was too late for the friends in Camden, so Bill spent the night with me in Hampstead, not without some fussing about my ‘reputation’. I told him it would give the initials – the way I thought of the watchers after that talk with Max Blume – something to write home about at last.
He had to get up at first light to catch an early train back to Manchester and I went to see him off. There were the usual awkward few minutes before the train left, with me standing on the platform, Bill hanging out of the window and smoke from the engine drifting back into our faces. More to cover the awkwardness than any real curiosity, I asked him about the fashionable woman who’d been sitting next to him at the inquest.
‘The one in the odd hat? No, I don’t know who she was. She came in just after things started, a bit breathless and nervous. There was an empty seat beside me and she took it. I assumed she was a friend or relative.’
‘Not a relative that I’ve met. Did she seem to know anybody else there?’
‘No. One thing I did notice about her was how quickly she got away afterwards, while you were talking to the admiral. She had a sporty little green car in the yard. She drove off so fast a couple of people had to jump for their lives.’
The whistle blew and the train started moving. Bill waved through the smoke, shouting something about seeing me soon. When the train was out of sight I walked back up the platform, working out dates in my head.
* * *
If Verona had been two months pregnant, it dated from somewhere near the time back in March when I’d last spoken to her at the student house. It was no consolation now that I’d been right about that woman-of-the-world look. If only I’d been less tolerant or, as her parents would see it, more careful of her morals, I’d have got her to talk to me. We’d have quarrelled, probably, but at least she’d have known that I cared about her. Only I hadn’t, or not enough. I was angry with myself, angrier still with somebody else. If I’d been free I’d have gone straight from the station to the student house in Chelsea, only I wasn’t. There’d been a message in my mail that the old press in Clerkenwell was giving trouble again and I was needed urgently to knock some good manners into it. It was well into the evening by the time we got it working, more or less, and printed a batch of leaflets. When I caught a motorbus for Chelsea I was covered in printer’s ink, had added a couple of injured fingers to the bashed thumbnail from my last battle with it and was in a mood for taking things out on somebody. It was dusk when I got to the student house. There were lights on in the windows, raised voices inside. The front door was ajar. I pushed it open without knocking, went straight upstairs and flung back the door of the common room. Two pairs of eyes turned towards me through the cigarette smoke, Rizzo’s and Toby’s. Toby was sitting on a chair by the window, Rizzo lying on the chaise-longue with a glass of wine in his hand. A fair-haired woman I hadn’t seen before was kneeling beside him holding a red-blotched handkerchief to his nose.
‘I want to speak to you two,’ I told Toby and Rizzo.
Toby said: ‘She hit him with a bottle.’
‘Good.’
The woman glanced at me and went, slamming the door behind her. She took the handkerchief with her. A slow trickle of blood oozed from Rizzo’s nose. He was looking dazed, whether from alcohol, opium or violence I didn’t care.
‘Where did Verona go when she left here?’
Rizzo pretended not to take any notice.
Toby said, ‘We don’t know.’
‘You let her go just like that – not even asking?’
‘We … we tried to stop her. We begged her not to go.’
‘I didn’t,’ Rizzo said. ‘You did the begging.’ His eyes were closed.
Toby said, ‘But she’d made up her mind. She wouldn’t listen.’
‘She must have made up her mind quickly. She wrote to her mother on May the third, saying nothing about moving. The day after that her room’s free and Janie’s moving in. What made her decide to go?’
Rizzo groaned to the ceiling, ‘Oh the inquisitions of families.’ A bubble of blood appeared in his nostril.
‘I’ll tell you why. She went because she’d told you she thought she might be pregnant and you didn’t care.’
Rizzo opened his eyes and turned his head towards me. The bubble broke and trickled down his face. I could have sworn he looked surprised, but it was no more than a flicker before the bored pose was back.
‘Supposing she had been, why should I care about it?’
I had to press my fists together to keep from hitting him.
‘“Why should I care about it?” Was that what you said to her?’
He closed his eyes again. I stood up and went over to the chaise-longue. The rickety leg had been propped on a brick. I kicked it hard and the end of the chaise-longue collapsed. He slid off it as slickly as herring guts into a bucket.
‘Answer me, or you’ll have a lot worse than a nosebleed to worry about.’
He looked first at the toe of my shoe a few inches away from his ribs, then up at my face.
‘I didn’t say that because she di
dn’t tell me she was pregnant. I didn’t know until you just said so.’
‘It’s true. She didn’t tell us.’
Toby sounded scared and miserable. He’d lost weight and his red beard was untrimmed and straggly. I turned to him but kept my toe within reach of Rizzo’s ribs.
‘When I told you she was dead, you blamed him.’
‘Not for that. It wasn’t for that.’
‘So what was it for?’
Toby looked uncertainly at Rizzo. Even supine, the man controlled him.
‘For quarrelling with her. It was his fault.’
‘So there was a quarrel?’
‘There wouldn’t have been if Cur hadn’t been trailing her like a mongrel after a bitch on heat.’
The yelp that Toby let out when he heard that did have something dog-like about it. He stood up and Rizzo scrambled to his knees, alarmed. I gave him a shove and he settled back, sitting on the floor against the broken chaise-longue.
‘Sit down,’ I said to Toby. He sat. ‘For all I care, you can knock each other senseless when I’ve gone, but I want some answers first or I’m telling the police that you know something.’
An empty threat. As far as the police were concerned the case was closed when the jury foreman said it was suicide. These two didn’t know that. Rizzo, a self-proclaimed anarchist and an alien in a country that didn’t like Hungarians much more than Germans, couldn’t take too many chances. Toby had been brought up to be law-abiding. I was taking unfair advantage, but I hadn’t come there to be fair to them.
I said to Toby, ‘Were you trailing her?’
‘No. Well, only because I was worried about her. I wanted to help her, and…’
‘Yes, in other words?’
He nodded, looking at the floor.
‘Why?’
Rizzo said, ‘Because he was besotted with her.’
Toby looked at me. ‘Because I loved her.’
There was a desperate dignity about the way he said it, in spite of a derisive noise from Rizzo. Once Toby had started he went on talking, pouring it out. He wanted me to understand because I was the nearest he could get to Verona.
‘She’d stopped going to art classes and meetings. We used to go to a lot of meetings and things together.’
‘What sort of things?’
‘Political. Wild things, mostly. Pacificism, socialism, syndicalism – all the isms.’
I remembered her quizzing me about left-wing politics soon after she’d arrived in London.
‘Are you involved?’
‘No. There are some rum people at those meetings. I went along to protect her.’
‘Did she seem particularly attracted to any of the isms?’
‘No. She took a lot of notes. She said she was trying to make up her mind.’
It seemed oddly methodical to me. Most people just plunged in headlong.
‘Then you say she stopped going? When?’
He thought about it. ‘Around March or April. I didn’t mind, at first, because the meetings were unbelievably dull. I hoped we could do other things like going to galleries and concerts together, but she never had time. She’d go out early in the morning and come home late at night and sometimes she wouldn’t come home at all.’
Rizzo said, ‘And after a few weeks of this, it began to dawn on Cur that she might perhaps have a lover.’
Toby yelled at him, ‘It was you who said that. I’d never have thought of it if you hadn’t suggested it.’
‘Never mind who suggested it. So you followed her?’
‘Only because I was worried. I thought if she was in some sort of trouble, I could help her.’
‘Little Sir Galahad.’
He ignored Rizzo, looked at me, imploring me to believe him. I did, up to a point.
‘Yes, I followed her. She went out one evening. I saw she’d left her scarf in the hall, and I thought I could catch her up with it … but she was walking fast. She went down the King’s Road. It was dusk and there were some drunks around. I thought I’d keep an eye on her, in case anybody tried—’
Rizzo opened his mouth. I glared at him and he closed it.
‘… in case anybody tried to accost her. She kept on going, all the way down to World’s End. You know it?’
I nodded. It was a big public house at the place where the trams turned round. We sometimes went there distributing leaflets but it was quite a rough area. A basically conventional young man like Toby might well be worried about a girl going there on her own as dusk fell.
‘Then?’
‘She went into a shop. It was down one of those little streets near the pub.’
‘What sort of shop?’
‘Scrubby little place, mostly maps in the window and a few books.’
‘Open at that time of the evening?’
He shook his head. ‘No. It wasn’t open. There wasn’t even a light on. She had a key. She let herself in. I waited a long time, more than an hour, but she didn’t come out. I wondered if she might have gone out the back entrance, but there wasn’t one. So I came home, but she wasn’t here. She didn’t come in until nearly midnight.’
‘Did you ask her where she’d been?’
‘Yes. She was angry. She said it was nothing to do with me.’
‘But you went on following her?’
‘No. I didn’t want to make her angry with me again. But I went back to the shop, several times. It was always closed. The maps and things in the window were all dusty. Then, one day, I saw a man going in.’
‘Did he have a key?’
‘He must have.’
‘What was he like?’
‘Ordinary. Just ordinary.’ He said it in the puzzled way of any man wondering how a woman might prefer somebody else.
‘I mean, what did he look like?’
He struggled. ‘Older. Bowler hat, little moustache. Nothing special about him at all. I thought he might be the shop owner. I waited for him to open up so that I could go in and buy something, only he didn’t. I went over and rattled the door. I saw his face looking out of the window upstairs. He ducked down when he saw me looking at him. He didn’t come down.’
‘At which point,’ Rizzo said, ‘it occurred even to young Cur that the shop might be a maison d’assignation.’
‘No, it didn’t. You said that.’
‘I suggested to Toby that we should take a stroll together one night, so we did. We followed Verona all the way to World’s End, saw her unlock the door of the shop and go inside, just as he’s told you. Half an hour later, along comes our bourgeois with the little moustache, all impatience, looks round to make sure nobody’s watching, lets himself in. A light goes on in the room on the first floor. We settle down to wait…’
‘I wanted to go. You made us wait.’
‘… but we’re not waiting as long as we expect because no more than five minutes later the door opens and out comes the man, looking angry. Just after that the light goes off and out comes Verona, grim and determined, and goes back up the King’s Road so fast that she gets back here some time before us. That’s when we quarrelled.’
‘You shouldn’t have said anything to her.’
‘My dear Cur, I had your interests at heart. I merely suggested to her that if one lover had proved unsatisfactory, she could find another one nearer home.’
‘By which he meant himself, of course,’ Toby said.
‘It would have been up to her to choose.’
I said, ‘In any case, I take it she refused your generous offer.’
‘He told her what we’d seen,’ Toby said. ‘She was furious with both of us. She said she was leaving. She said she’d been intending to leave anyway, but this was the last straw.’
‘When was this?’
‘May the first. She packed her suitcase and went next morning. That was the last I ever saw of her.’
So the letter to her mother, dated 3 May, had stretched the truth a little. If Toby and Rizzo were not lying, Verona was already at a new address b
y then.
‘Will you show me this shop?’
‘Now?’
‘Now.’
* * *
It was a warm, soft night. Smells of horse dung and petrol vapour hung in the air, along with whiffs of river mud and coal dust from barges going up to the power station at Lots Road. In this part of London, even when you couldn’t see the river you were aware of it as if its tides were dragging at the earth under the pavement and the foundations of the houses. We turned away from the river, Rizzo on my left, Toby on my right. King’s Road was still busy, with lamps lit, men drinking pints at the doorways of public houses, a few women strolling arm in arm, cabs going up and down. As we walked further down the road in the direction of Fulham there were fewer people strolling and the public houses looked rougher. There was a fight going on outside one of them and men standing round, cheering on the fighters. I imagined Toby trailing Verona and had no trouble in believing that he was worried for her. We came to the tram stop and World’s End pub. The windows were brightly lit and the subdued roar of men happy and drinking came from inside, along with wavering notes of Nellie Dean.
‘It was down there,’ Toby said.
We walked past the pub, turned left down a narrow street. There were terraced houses on either side, a few dark shop windows. It smelt of dog excrement and rotting fruit, and looked far from prosperous.
‘It’s still there.’
Toby sounded surprised. It was only six weeks or so since they’d watched Verona coming out. Did he think the shop would have gone out of existence because she had? The street was dim, lit only by a gas lamp at our end of it, no other lights showing. We walked slowly along the uneven pavement, stopped in front of a shop that looked as if it hadn’t seen a customer in years. The name over the window said ‘Townsend Bakers’ but was so faded I doubted if it had sold a loaf since Queen Victoria’s jubilee. A painted sign advertising Coleman’s Mustard suggested it had been a grocer’s in one incarnation but it had the air of a place where nothing survived for long. As Toby had said, its trade now seemed to be mostly maps, which in a place like this seemed to guarantee another failure. The door was firmly locked, the window in it covered with a net curtain, with a ‘Closed’ sign lodged at a slant between curtain and glass. Upstairs, another net curtain covered the dark window. Even allowing for the glow that being in love gives to places, it was altogether the least attractive assignation place imaginable.
The Perfect Daughter Page 10
