‘Don’t be silly, Ted darling. They’re no different from you and me. They’ve just got caught up in an everyday problem that’s gone a teeny bit wrong.’
Edward began to bluster. He found Alma infuriating, quite apart from the way she addressed him. He jiggled Binny up and down on his agitated knees. ‘It may be an everyday problem to you, but personally I’m not used to being hijacked in my own home by armed thugs.’
‘Here, here,’ said Simpson.
‘They’re alien to us,’ insisted Edward. ‘It’s a different breed, a different culture.’
Binny put her lips to his temple. His hair smelt of tobacco. She knew he had made a slip, thinking this was home, but all the same it was nice of him. At the back of her mind she thought she was making a fuss of him for somebody else’s benefit. To gain attention.
Edward jerked his head away; he was trembling. Surely it was perfectly natural to go for aspirins if one’s wife was feeling groggy. One would do it for the dog. None of them knew each other well enough, that was the difficulty. They were all behaving in an unreal manner. He couldn’t count on their reactions under stress. One of them was potentially dangerous – it might even be himself.
Simpson said, ‘Mussolini used to say, whenever I hear the word culture I reach for my gun.’
‘Exactly,’ cried Alma, though she didn’t know what he meant.
‘Be quiet,’ said Muriel. She was staring into the kitchen.
They stopped breathing and looked fearfully at the woman by the sink. She had ceased to roll the pram and was now hunched over the shot gun, nursing her ribs.
Binny felt she was taking part in some sort of documentary – one of those programmes that used members of the public and portrayed ordinary lives from a melancholy point of view. She realised she’d been in it right from the moment she went shopping with Alma. Those old ladies posed on the bed down the alleyway . . . the waitress in the Wimpy Bar so reluctant to serve them. The woman in the chair was the character who’d left her pram outside the bank. She wasn’t instantly recognisable because her face was altered by that scene in which she’d been battered; her stockings were a different colour. They’d been shooting her from various camera angles in the National Westminster, that’s why she kept moving from queue to queue at the counter. The black man with his neck in plaster also fitted in somewhere.
‘Why has she changed sides?’ Simpson whispered. He thought the woman must be incredibly fit. Had he been treated half as brutally he was sure he would have succumbed from shock. He recalled his mother who had taken to her bed every afternoon, prostrate from a fatiguing morning spent attending to the furniture with a feather duster. His aunts had been the same – fragile, languid. He thought of Marcia living with two men, and Muriel quite capable of pushing the car single-handed round the block, when it was a cold morning and the engine wouldn’t start. It was a generation of Amazons.
‘She hasn’t changed sides,’ hissed Binny. ‘She’s the same side but she’s double-crossed them or something. She was on the wrong route. She tried to explain it to them but they wouldn’t listen. They were looking for her.’
‘They don’t have mixed prisons,’ Alma said. ‘She must be an outside contact. She probably had a change of clothing for them in the pram.’
Edward had come to the conclusion that the guns couldn’t be loaded; they were purely for intimidation purposes. That particular type of weapon, with the barrel sawn off, was surely more suited to gang warfare than for going over the wall.
‘He’s awfully sweet,’ Alma said into Binny’s ear. ‘You shouldn’t be so cross with him, darling. It’s quite natural to go to the chemist.’
Ginger and Harry entered the room. Edward caught himself nodding. It was like growing familiar with people on the television – actors, celebrities – and then seeing them on the tube or in a restaurant. One imagined one knew them socially.
Harry was holding his hands distastefully in front of him. ‘It’s bloody disgusting up there, missus,’ he said. ‘Don’t you believe in cleaning?’ He went to the sink and turned the tap full on.
Despite his rudeness Binny wondered if she should offer to make a cup of tea. It wouldn’t be a fawning gesture – more of a cooperative one, in line with Edward’s suggestion.
Ginger murmured something into the woman’s ear. She put the gun down on the draining board and attempted to pull herself upright.
‘You’re breaking my heart,’ cried Ginger. ‘Stop playing silly buggers.’
Kicking off her high-heeled shoes and wincing with pain, the woman succeeded in standing.
‘What about them?’ asked Harry.
‘Christ,’ Ginger said. ‘They’re all past it. We’ve landed in an old people’s club.’ He looked scornfully at the group around the table. ‘Stay exactly where you are,’ he told them, ‘and you won’t get hurt.’ He followed Harry and the woman into the hall and shut the door.
‘Of course, it’s dark,’ observed Alma, after a moment’s silence. ‘And I’ve got this dreadful coat on.’ She struggled with the toggles at the front. ‘What on earth possessed you to wrap me in this thing, darling?’
‘You’d been sick over everything else,’ Binny said. She was trying to hold in her stomach muscles. She had never pretended to be younger than she was. There was hardly any grey in her hair and sometimes in the warm weather, in a summery outfit, people remarked how juvenile she looked. She glanced at Muriel. She was somewhat thick about the waist and her make-up was elderly – powdered cheeks and pencilled brows – but she wasn’t decrepit by any means. Ginger was probably referring to Simpson and Edward, with their beer bellies and their old men’s suits.
‘I’m frantic to spend a penny,’ said Edward. He squirmed in his seat and the rickety chair swayed under him. He remembered a newspaper report he’d read about people being locked up in a vault for several days. The article hadn’t spelt it out in so many words, but reading between the lines it was obvious everyone peed into a communal bucket. Some men, he realised, rather went for that sort of carry on – women squatting, tinkling into chamber pots and so forth. He himself grew faint with nausea at the prospect.
‘We ought,’ said Simpson, looking directly at Edward, ‘to be thinking of a way out of this mess. Just in case your cooperation theory doesn’t work. I’d like to have an alternative plan up my sleeve.’
‘I never suggested total cooperation—’
‘It’s true,’ said Binny loyally. ‘He did mention firmness as well.’
‘I don’t altogether care for being firm,’ said Simpson. ‘Not when I’m under armed guard. What I propose is that we try to create some kind of diversion and then one of us should make a break for it.’
Edward stared at him appalled. ‘I don’t really see what good that would do. It would have to be me or you and that would leave the women with very little protection.’
‘Any minute,’ said Simpson, stabbing the tablecloth with his finger, ‘they could start separating us. Taking away our sense of unity. You upstairs, Binny in the bathroom, the rest of us scattered elsewhere, bound and gagged.’
‘Do stop it,’ protested Edward. ‘Can’t you see you’re alarming the girls?’
‘What sort of diversion?’ asked Alma with interest. She was thinking of a film she’d seen in which prisoners of war gave a concert party while under the stage a tunnel was being dug.
‘There’s a back door,’ Binny said helpfully. ‘It leads into the garden.’
‘It’s quite impossible,’ cried Edward. ‘There’s broken glass on one wall and a wicked rose on the other. You wouldn’t stand a chance.’
‘He might have meant you,’ said Binny. ‘You could go.’ She didn’t really mean it and would much rather have Simpson take any risk that was called for, but it was like those rare occasions when she visited relatives with the children and they refused to help with the washing-up or to talk about O levels. One was forced to show them up.
‘Out there,’ said Edward, ‘the police ar
e watching our every move.’ He pointed dramatically at the shuttered windows. ‘They know everything that’s going on. They have manpower, resources, know-how. The most sophisticated areas of psychology and technology are being explored and utilised. They don’t need us to throw a spanner in the works. They can probably hear every word we say.’
The women looked at him, impressed. Aware that he had their full attention, he struggled upright. Dumping Binny on her feet, he strode to the fireplace and tapped the wall authoritatively; he felt like a military instructor pinpointing the danger spots on the globe. ‘Behind there they are taping our conversations. Every sentence we utter. We don’t need to endanger our lives to pass on information, we have merely to speak to the wall.’
‘I don’t believe it,’ said Simpson sceptically. ‘They’d need to push wires through the bricks. We’d have heard noises.’ He wished to God Freeman would stop playing head boy. It was bloody irritating under the circumstances.
‘The sort of device I’m thinking of is far more advanced than that,’ Edward informed him severely. ‘You’ll have to take my word for it. We really mustn’t have any more foolish talk about diversions, and mock heroics in the backyard.’ It was imperative, he thought, to nip Simpson’s ridiculous bid for escape in the bud. The man was itching for glory and only thinking of himself. While he was gallivanting over walls, others would be left to cope with his wife.
Alma tiptoed to the hearth. She leaned against the flowered wallpaper and whispered urgently to a leaf, ‘Hallo, hallo. Are you there? Over and out.’ She waited. ‘Is it similar to that thing at the doctor’s?’ she asked Edward. ‘When he listens to your chest?’
‘Same principle,’ he agreed. He returned to the table and like a conscientious mother scooped Binny once more on to his knee. ‘I feel so damned uncomfortable,’ he confided miserably, nuzzling into the dark curls on her neck. Deep down he was thinking that no technological breakthrough on earth was going to remove the pressure on his bladder, or make Helen understand what he was doing in a house she’d never heard of when he’d implied he was going to Simpson’s office. Part of him, now that midnight had passed, welcomed an extended imprisonment. The longer he remained captive the better; it would give Helen time to come full circle from anger to relief. With any luck she’d be so grateful finally at his release, that she wouldn’t insist on divorce. I’ve been a fool, he heard himself telling her. But by God I’ve paid for it.
‘You wouldn’t need to make holes in the brick,’ said Alma, kneeling on all fours and putting her head in the grate. ‘They could dangle a little bug thing down the chimney.’ She felt about in the darkness for wires.
Simpson averted his eyes from her buttocks. He said stubbornly, ‘I’m not prepared to sit here and do nothing. Personally it won’t give me any satisfaction at all to know my groans are being recorded when I’m trussed up like a turkey. I want to know the lay-out down there.’
‘Down where?’ asked Binny.
‘The garden. How many steps are there into the garden?’
‘Six,’ said Binny, after some thought.
‘Eight,’ corrected Edward. He detested inaccuracy.
‘And what’s at the bottom of the steps? Flower pots . . . garden furniture?’
‘There’s nothing,’ Binny said. ‘Except for a rabbit hutch against the back wall. It’s just a yard.’
Alma returned to the table and told them that when she was little she thought Father Christmas lived up the chimney. ‘My Uncle Len used to stand in front of the fire on Christmas eve and shout in a funny voice, “Are you all right, Father Christmas? Not too hot, I hope?” Isn’t it silly, darlings, what you think of?’
‘I can’t remember its name,’ mused Edward. ‘Tiger . . . Twinkle . . . something like that.’
If they really were listening to every word, thought Simpson, the police would think they were cracking up. When he got out of this, even if it was dawn, he was going to go straight round to Marcia’s and find out who had answered the telephone. The lunches he’d bought her, the bottle of perfume he’d sent on her birthday, the time he’d wasted when he should have been attending to his business! He wondered sadly if she found bald men unattractive. Muriel had once told him he was better-looking now than when she’d first met him. But then, when she’d met him, Marcia hadn’t been born. How the devil had she known he was in a call box?
‘The gun,’ Muriel said. ‘On the draining board.’
They stared bewildered at the weapon not six feet away. ‘It proves my point,’ Edward said uneasily. ‘They wouldn’t leave a loaded gun lying around.’
‘They’re under a considerable strain,’ reminded Simpson. ‘Particularly that poor girl.’ He was acutely aware of his wife, sitting there in the shadows in an attitude of childlike passivity, detached from the general discussion yet capable of noticing such things. She was behaving oddly. Usually in a crisis – the girls late home, a minor accident to the car – she was prone to bossiness, to taking control. He’d tried twice in the last half hour to comfort her; each time she’d removed her cold hand from beneath his and withdrawn it to her lap. He sensed she was watching, waiting, and it unnerved him. ‘I think you ought to have a dekko at it, Freeman,’ he said. ‘Your background and all that.’
‘Look here, I never saw any action, you know.’
‘I meant the ducks, old man. That sort of thing.’
‘They told us we mustn’t move,’ whispered Binny. ‘They said we’d better not.’ All the same she loosened her arms from about Edward’s neck.
‘I’ll provide a cover,’ offered Simpson, as Edward rose reluctantly from his chair. He began to mutter absurdly, ‘Rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb . . .’
The floorboards creaked as Edward tiptoed laboriously towards the kitchen. Though he was inching his way with obsessive caution, one foot placed carefully in front of the other, it was as if he was running full tilt across the room. It was similar to those agonising moments in the school gymnasium, when it was his turn to vault the horse. Any second now he was doomed to spring upwards and attempt the splits in mid-air. Perspiration began to trickle down the collar of his shirt. He should never have mentioned those beastly birds. He peered at the gun from several angles, bottom thrust to the group in the other room, heart thumping lest Harry should return – or worse, the inhuman brute who had leapt upon the woman. To his relief the gun was lying on a bed of upturned plates. Moving considerably faster on his return journey to the table, he explained that the whole thing was rather like a house of cards. The weapon was lodged among dishes and things. One false move and the whole caboodle would fall with a fearful clatter into the sink. If the women hadn’t been present he might have been prepared to take the risk. As things stood he simply couldn’t take the responsibility for a confrontation at this point. They could all be shot down like flies. ‘You see my dilemma,’ he said, hovering thankfully about the table.
‘But you said the guns wouldn’t be loaded, pet.’
‘We can’t be certain. Not one hundred per cent certain.’
Binny made no move to let him sit again. He was forced to lean against the wall, fists clenched to the pit of his stomach.
‘Loaded or not,’ Muriel remarked. ‘It won’t make any difference. They don’t mean us to live.’
11
Outside, the police were requesting householders to remove their cars from the street. Several women in torn nightclothes dragged deck chairs on to the balconies.
A confused report had come in regarding a woman and two children held for six hours in a house in Wood Green and just released. Nothing had been verified, but someone higher up thought that the events in Wood Green and the uprising in Fulton Street might be connected. A baby’s shawl had been found on the railings and the tracks of pram wheels on the pavement.
The taxi, abandoned with open doors in the middle of the road, was briefly scrutinised and then photographed. Later a breakdown van arrived to take it away for more serious examination. There was a subdued
round of applause from spectators as the taxi was hoisted into the air, doors swinging, and lowered gently on to the bed of the truck. Inquiries were made and statements taken. A dishevelled Mrs Montague, spitting with excitement, told of a crying female sprawled on the step earlier in the evening, of a lady in a blue frock holding a suspicious-looking parcel in her arms. A youth across the road swore he’d seen a man with a wooden leg dragging himself toward the garage at about nine o’clock. Several people recalled a shortish individual in a suede overcoat, prowling up and down the steps of houses and behaving like a Peeping Tom.
The neighbours on either side of Binny were warned they might have to be evacuated. It was not clear what was going on inside the barricaded house, or how many persons were involved, but investigations were under way. Sybil Evans answered the questions put to her as discreetly as she was able. She was shy and hated explicit conversation. She had known Mrs Mills for a number of years – they were friendly, not close. It was a popping-in-and-out sort of relationship – borrowing things, feeding cats when one or other of them went away on holiday. Loyally she forbore to mention that it was Binny who did the borrowing. Two older children were staying with friends and the youngest child was upstairs sharing the back bedroom with her own daughter. When asked if she thought any significance could be attached to the absence of all the children from the house, she was nonplussed. ‘Well,’ she said weakly, ‘there’s a dinner party, I believe, and she wanted the house to herself.’ As she spoke, she realised she’d implied that Binny might have been planning some kind of orgy. ‘They’re large children,’ she added. ‘Noisy and hard to control.’ She hadn’t been told who was coming to dinner and she hadn’t asked. It was none of her business. She had no objection to a policewoman asking the youngest child for information, but not until the morning – the little girl was fast asleep and it was going to be difficult enough to cope with her when she woke; she was very attached to her mother. To her knowledge Binny wasn’t in the habit of entertaining formally – people dropped in for a drink, but she didn’t hold dinner parties. She had no idea why tonight had been an exception. There was a gentleman friend, but she hadn’t met him and she didn’t know his name. ‘Please,’ she said finally, ‘I don’t wish to say any more.’ Pressed, she admitted she’d glimpsed Binny that morning throwing something down into the yard. Only for a second. Her interrogators wanted to know how Binny had seemed. Was there anything unusual about her, peculiar – ? With some spirit she declared that anyone would appear peculiar in these particular circumstances. ‘Life itself is peculiar,’ she cried. Willingly she described the interior of Binny’s house, the position of the furniture. She allowed an assortment of men, uniformed and otherwise, to bring their equipment into the hall. Painstakingly they began to measure the dimensions of the rooms.
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