‘Yes.’
‘Pettie had it in mind she’d say she came back after her ring and seen a woman with the baby. She had it in mind that she manages to get the baby off the woman in the toilets.’
‘I see.’
‘Only the kids was playing on the towpath. Soon’s the kids seen Pettie it has to be there wasn’t no woman on account Pettie has the baby. Soon’s -’
‘Yes, we understand.’ vI come out to explain, sir, Pettie didn’t mean no harm. Time of the ring was like when she went to look out for the man at the tennis championships. Miss Rapp said Pettie never meant no harm.’ vOh, do spare us Miss Rapp!’ She’s furious again. She calls what he’s saying a rigmarole. They don’t want to hear about Miss Rapp, she says, or Mrs. Biddle or Captain Evans or some man selling vinyl. It was absurd that the girl should have imagined she could be employed here. ‘We’re not concerned with these people. What we’re concerned about is that this girl is unstable and should be put where she can’t cause distress like this again.’
‘Pettie’s dead, Mrs. Iveson.’
A watery sunlight has begun to brighten the room, dappling the polished oak of the floor, a single beam falling across the bookcases. Outside, a blackbird tentatively begins its warble. Thaddeus has not witnessed his mother-in-law’s anger before. Replacing at last the hall’s rewound blind, Maidment has not either.
Mrs. Iveson herself, startled by what has just been said, senses an inner reprimand, even though her anger is still potent. The boy looks at her foolishly, his dark hair wet, his ill-fitting uniform seeming as ridiculous as the woman he spoke of said, his face gone empty, registering nothing.
No more than fifteen or so, Thaddeus remembers thinking, that girl in her grubby yellow jacket before she took it off on the afternoon of the interview. Her skirt rose up when she sat on the sofa, and she didn’t pull it down. ‘You’ve had a journey for nothing,’ he said the second time she came, and she said no, not for nothing. In the nursery, when she stood so close to him, he knew and didn’t want to know, darkening a truth that came from outside his life, hurrying on, away from it.
‘Dead?’ he says, in confusion, unable to suppress the thought that death surely does not beget death, as it seems to have this summer.
‘They bulldozed down the Morning Star, sir. I saw her in the brick and stuff lifted away. I saw Pettie in the sky.’
Rubble swung across the sky in its great metal bucket is brought to Zenobia, and Maidment sits down at the kitchen table, upset. Nausea spreads in his stomach, where drama at a remove brings usually a ripple of pleasure.
Would she not have known what was happening? Zenobia’s question is. A house knocked down around her? Would she not have heard the noise?
And Maidment says that’s just it.
He has to say again that Pettie took a shine, but this time it’s all right. It was all to do with that, he has to say.
‘I could have put them in the picture if they asked me, the day they was knocking down the Morning Star. I could have told them why she done it, sir, why Pettie didn’t walk away. Only I didn’t hang about. No point, sir.’
‘No.’
‘She goes back to the Morning Star, the time she’s frightened, the time the police is out looking for her.’
They’ve gone quiet. She’s staring out into the dampness. He didn’t mention it to Mrs. Biddle, he says. Age she is, best not to, stuff like that. They still don’t say anything, so he stands up.
The doors are opened for him — the door of the room, the outside door. On the steps they shake his hand. He says again why he came out, in case there’s any confusion left. They say they understand.
He walks slowly because there is nothing to hurry for. The rain has taken away the stifling warmth, the hedgerows on either side of him drip. A breeze occasionally shakes more drops from the leaves of trees, and sometimes a withered leaf falls too.
The hymn starts in his head. He wonders what it means, All laud we would render. Not that it matters. Best part of the day it was, the morning hymn. Thus provided, pardoned, guided. Then again Speak through the earthquake, wind and fire. He should have told them he’ll buy an instrument with the money. People give you money, they like to know a thing like that. He hesitates, thinking about going back, but decides against it.
He passes the graveyard and the church, and then the public house and the petrol pump. He walks again by the sludge of the canal, wondering if the greyhounds will come out, but they don’t. A fast greyhound’s worth a lot of money, the man with elephantiasis told him, knowing about such matters as a frequenter of greyhound tracks in the days before his body became a burden to him.
A thing happens. You can’t change that. He looked up when the crane man shouted and then the crane man swung the bucket down, gentle as anything, getting it to the ground. He meant to tell them that, too. He had it ready, but in the end it got forgotten that the crane man had been gentle.
There is a quietness after Albert has gone, still there when the first wisps of twilight come. The room Thaddeus has always known, in which he searched beneath the sofa cushions for a ring that did not exist, is different now. There is an echo in the room, and in the hall and on the stairs. ‘Everything is lovely here.’
His childhood past seems nothing much: the cruelty of love has damaged but not destroyed. To that Mrs. Iveson might add that in her merciless mind’s eye she sees, this evening, neither a husband lost to kind confinement nor a daughter’s funeral. Her compassion faltered: shame creeps through guilt and feels like retribution.
The cups and saucers are gathered, the tea things stacked on Maidment’s tray. Georgina’s day is ending; she, too, is taken from the room. In time her curiosity will bring a mother back and offer misty images, like strangers vaguely present in a dream, of Eva Paczkowska and the husband who adored her. Again there will be dancing on the lawns, the hall door thrown open wide, music and voices on the cool night air. The laughter of Georgina’s friends is waiting for Georgina’s growing up, as the picture on the floor was waiting for her birth. The pets’ memorials are waiting too, the summer-house built to catch the autumn sun, the gardener who showed his bayonet wound, servants remembered in a journal kept.
The coats hang on the hallstand pegs. In her party dress the child comes smiling down the stairs. Her Sunday uncle looks up from a leaflet he has finished reading. He smiles in turn, and reaches out for her. Afterwards there’s Sunday tea.
Will there be offices built in the place? Thaddeus wonders. A supermarket? Will bright computer screens smudge away the nourishment of fantasy and delusion? Will checkout chatter silence the fearful whispering in grubby hideaways, the soft enticements? Has defilement left no trace? Will no one know among the tins of soup and processed peas that death was a balm here when it came? There was a life that ended for his onetime mistress, in its heyday a jolly, bouncing life. And for his wife there was a childhood softened by affection, and contentment later on, her goodness an enriching. The walls of a house were smashed to fragments, a bundle in the rubble lifted away: no life there’d been.
As the warmth of blood might miraculously seep into a shadow, or anaesthesia be lifted by a jolt, feelings he has never before experienced invade Thaddeus’s solitude. The emotion stirred by the birth of his child was particular to that one event. His sadness was stony when he stood at the funeral of the wife he could not love. The flowers that Mrs. Ferry so often longed for were sent when it was safe to send her flowers. Tonight he pities, and is angry.
The dusk is darkening when Mrs. Iveson walks with Thaddeus in the garden, her stoic’s stamina defeated in the pain of that same pity. A light comes on in a window of the house, then in another, a curtain’s pulled across. High in the oak trees the rooks have settled on their branches. Below, among the shrubs and faded flowers, the single sound is Rosie’s rustling in the sodden undergrowth, sniffing the fresh scent of moisture. The two do not walk close yet cling together, at one in honouring the ghost that has come to haunt this garden an
d this house.
‘Albert.’
It is a whisper from what seems to be an empty doorway. He peers, and then a figure emerges, shaking off the dark, and it is Bev.
He speaks her name. He says he has been looking for her. vI been around.’
‘You OK, Bev?’
‘I done with all that stuff. You know.’
‘I wondered about you, Bev.’
‘Yeah.’ There is a silence, then Bev says: ‘I ain’t got nowhere to go nights.’
‘You got work daytime?’
Bev shakes her head. She says she has tried for work, day work, nights, anything.
‘You’d go for the Marmite factory? You’d go for anything like that?’
Bev says she would. The Marmite, the stocking place, up Chadwell, it doesn’t matter.
‘A woman told me they’ll maybe be taking on at the stocking place.’ Albert nods, lending emphasis to that. It would have been Tuesday he asked the woman, he remembers; it could be tomorrow they’ll be taking on. ‘Never does no harm to ask.’
They walk together, by the common, past the dairy yard. She isn’t a tearaway, you wouldn’t ever call Bev a tearaway and once she is taken on regular no way there’ll be a problem with the rent. That’s how he’ll put it. There’ll be reluctance at first, stands to reason there would be, but the rent will be the draw.
They cross Caspar Road. In the artificial light the blank shopfronts of Bride Street are tinged with orange. The KP Minimarket and Ishi Baba’s take-away are secure behind their night grilles. Outside the Soft Rock Cafe the cat that is Albert’s only enemy is rifling a dustbin.
‘Turn of luck running into you, Bev.’
She says it was. She’s tired. Albert can tell. She’s dragging her footsteps a bit, the sole of a shoe flapping. Except to say it isn’t far to Appian Terrace, he doesn’t bother her with talk.
Death in Summer Page 18
