Doris left the Army and Navy Stores by a different set of doors, and after that the day filled up with colours. In the supermarket where she bought half a bottle of vodka the tins of soup and vegetables were startlingly vivid, as if they should be feared. She listened to a voice singing, bewildered for a moment and then remembering that it came from a machine she couldn’t see. ‘You’ve picked a fine time to leave me, Lucille,’ drawled the voice. ‘Four hungry children and a crop in the field.’
She sat for a while in a branch of Lloyd’s Bank and when she was asked to leave she sat on a bench in a children’s playground. The colours from the supermarket appeared to have accompanied her, like technicolour shadows: brightly green peas, chicken in a sauce, steam rising from kidney soup. They came and went, often making her blink. She told herself to be careful in case she fell asleep. She wondered who Lucille was, trying to remember if it was the dressmaker.
In a cinema there were different images, people and faces sliding out of focus, blurring away to nothing and then explosively returning. She sipped at the bottle she had, smoking and sipping, quite happy to be in the cinema. ‘I’ve fallen in love with you, Dorrie,’ he suddenly said, and then his face was sliding about like the others on the screen. People hurt him, his voice whispered again, telling her he only wanted to cry sometimes. In the darkness a torch was flashed and someone in a uniform said she’d have to be quiet or else leave the cinema. But Doris knew they’d got it wrong, she hadn’t for a moment been shouting.
‘Like tit for tat,’ she said to the man in the off-licence, and the colours of the bottles behind him were like the colours in the supermarket, almost alive. All the way to the attics it was a hell, she said to the man, and all the time among the soldiers, and then again in the dressmaker’s workroom. The dressmaker was old and horrible, a violent person. She’d always been horrible, grasping with her talons, greedy when he didn’t want her. ‘And then he caught a dose of you know what,’ Doris explained. ‘And then again he married this new woman just to get a bit of money so’s we could be together.’
The man had a moustache which nicotine had yellowed, and pale eyes that almost matched it. He gave Doris her change, saying he was sorry to hear about her trouble. Doris stared at his moustache, wondering why she had gone into a cinema when she should be getting on with things. Going into the cinema was all part of the mix-up there sometimes was, her own fault entirely. She staggered as she hurried from the off-licence, determined that there should be no more delays, determined not to go under.
Julia mounted the stairs to the upstairs bar of the Spread Eagle. She sat there for several hours, watching the fan on the ceiling that looked like an aeroplane propeller. She sat through the lunchtime crowd and the juke-box music. At four o’clock she hovered near the shoe department just in case she had somehow misunderstood the Indian she had spoken to the day before. But Doris was not there.
She returned to the hotel and telephoned her mother to say that she might well not be returning until the morning. She again made the journey to the flat in Fulham.
‘Oh no,’ Joy said. ‘Not a sign of her.’
A comedian was telling a joke about Irishmen drilling for oil, then four girls in glittering trouser-suits danced and sang.
‘I’m worried in case she tries to hurt this actress she thinks your father was involved with,’ Julia said.
‘Screwing her, was he?’
Julia shook her head and again left the flat. The number of this telephone-box is 385 1001, a notice said, and she remembered dialling that number at Doris’s instruction. She imagined Doris’s cigarettes and matches on top of the grubby, dog-eared directories. Doris alone here in the middle of the night. She dialled C. H. Music’s number, but there was no reply.
‘Excuse me,’ Doris said to a man who was wheeling a bicycle, a uniformed man, a Customs officer she put him down as. But when he paused, waiting for her question, she couldn’t for the life of her remember what it was she had wanted to ask him. Her mackintosh was blown against her body by the wind, a cigarette smouldered between her fingers. The tins from the supermarket were no longer there, but the sea seemed to tumble about and she remembered being on the sand with her father, turning a sandcastle out of her red and blue bucket, and all the empty deck-chairs. ‘A Saturday it was,’ she said to the Customs officer. ‘July 2nd 1966. He was married to that Lucille at the time.’
‘Sorry?’ the man said, finding it difficult to hear her above the sound of the wind.
She remembered then what it was she wanted to ask him and said to herself that she was stupid, mentioning July 2nd to a stranger when what she’d wanted to know was the way. It was all that drink, she said to herself, on an empty stomach. She laughed and ran after the man.
‘Left at the traffic-lights,’ he said. ‘Left again at the bottom of the hill.’
‘Have you looked in the Bricklayer’s?’ Joy asked. ‘It’s the nearest one. By the telephone-box?’
‘Yes, I looked in there.’
‘Then there’s a new one she mentioned the other day. The Turbaned Turk. I don’t know where that one is.’
‘She could be anywhere, I suppose.’
‘I wouldn’t worry if I was you.’
‘You haven’t had a proper meal all day, Joy.’
‘We could go down the Pizzaland. She’s probably mentioned the Pizzaland to you.’
‘Yes, I think she did.’
‘We could go down while you’re waiting. There’s nothing much on till the film at half past ten. The Corrupt Ones it’s called.’
‘We’d better leave another note. Shall I write it this time?’
Joy had a Pizzaland Special and said she’d never before been in the restaurant with anyone except her father and her mother. It was not the kind of place she could afford to come on her own, and she told Julia about the Rialto Café and the Light of India Take-Away and the Woo Han and the Chik ‘n’ Chips. She told her about the disagreeable woman who’d taken over in the Rialto, and the couple who’d been there on the afternoon when she’d glanced through the window and seen her father passing by with the actress. There’d been a quarrel about blue films, she said, and told Julia all about it, easily remembering because she’d so often repeated the details in Tite Street Comprehensive. ‘I took a drug,’ she said, ‘as she probably told you.’
‘Yes, she did.’
‘I wonder if the tattooing craze is over.’
‘Probably.’
‘You never know how long a craze’ll last. Don’t you like that pizza?’
‘I’m afraid I’m not very hungry.’
‘I think I’ll maybe go back tomorrow, see if it’s over. It’s dead boring in the flat.’
Joy had an ice-cream, and then they returned to the flat. Doris was not there, and it wasn’t time for The Corrupt Ones.
‘I just want to make another telephone call,’ Julia said, but when she rang C. H. Music’s number from the box by the Bricklayer’s Arms there still was no reply.
‘No, with a tea-pot,’ Doris said.
They made her instant coffee in the small police station, and she took an almost empty bottle of vodka from her handbag and poured what remained of it into the cup. She smiled at the three policemen who were present.
‘So Frankie’s gone, is he?’ the desk-sergeant inquired. ‘And you decided to set the matter straight? You’ve had a drink or two, haven’t you, miss?’
‘Did you ever hear of Constance Kent?’
The policemen shook their heads, and the desk-sergeant made a note of the name.
‘Susie Music,’ Doris said, ‘played the part for the telly.’
The desk-sergeant made a note of that name also.
‘Poor Frankie was a weirdo in the end. Poor Frankie was in a mess.’
‘Of course, miss. Now this Susie girl. Would you remember where she lives at all?’
‘C. H. Music her dad’s called, SW I.’
C. H. Music, wrote the desk-sergeant, and the three policemen si
ghed, all of them thinking the same thing: that it was almost routine nowadays for people like this to come wandering in, weaving fantasies about the acts of violence they’d performed.
Doris drank her coffee. Quite suddenly, after the third blow, the neck had gone limp. After that she’d counted the other blows, forty-three there’d been.
‘Making forty-six in all,’ she said to the policeman. ‘Exactly forty-six. Yes, I’ve had a drink or two,’ she admitted.
Amusedly they listened, the desk-sergeant with his collar undone. It was half past nine, the summer dusk just giving way to darkness. They listened to her telling them about table-mats and a shoe department and how some child or other had trouble with her stomach. The desk-sergeant buttoned his collar, continuing to listen while the woman rambled on.
Julia gave the taxi-driver the address that went with C. H. Music’s telephone number, not knowing what she was going to do when she arrived at wherever it was. She’d wait, she supposed, keeping an eye out for Doris Smith. She’d just look at the place, and if everything seemed all right she’d come away again.
But when she arrived there it wasn’t quite like that. There were lights on in the house and she immediately rang the bell beside the hall door, without looking about her to see if Doris Smith was lurking in the shadows. It had become quite urgent, once she was actually at the house, to enter it and present her fears.
‘Good evening,’ a big man in a fawn suit said. He smiled at her, crunching his soft, pink face into knobs of flesh. He looked like a cherub, Julia thought, his curly white hair accentuating the aptness of this comparison. ‘Good evening,’ he said again.
‘Mr Music?’
‘Yes indeed.’
‘I’m sorry to call like this. I’ve been trying to telephone you.’ ‘We’ve just come in.’ He smiled encouragingly. ‘How can I help you?’
‘Are you,’ she began, and hesitated and then began again. ‘Are you the father of Susanna Music?’
‘Yes, I am.’
‘I wonder if I might see your daughter for a moment?’
He held the door open and Julia stepped into a large hall. Abstract paintings were brightly lit on the pale hessian of its walls. Some where music was playing: Brahms’s Symphony Number3, the end of the first movement.
‘You have a visitor, Susanna,’ Mr Music said, leading Julia into a room with wheat-coloured cushions on armchairs that might have come from Sweden, and long-haired rugs all over a polished wood floor. The symphony was coming from the television set; the sound ceased and the busy image of violinists was snapped from the screen.
‘How d’you do,’ a woman said. She smiled as Mr Music had, turning from the television set. Her hair was rinsed a shade of blue. She was much thinner and smaller than her husband.
‘I’m Susanna,’ another voice said, and a girl stepped out of a shadowy corner, more like her mother than her father, her eyes gazing out of long dark hair, as Doris Smith had said they did.
‘I’m sorry about all this,’ Julia said. ‘I think you’ve been bothered a bit already. By a woman called Doris Smith.’
‘She made a nuisance of herself to Susanna,’ Mr Music said quickly, his tone rather different from what it had been a moment ago. There was a hint of suspicion in it now, and the implication that any further nonsense in this matter would not be tolerated.
‘She was quite unpleasant to Susanna,’ his wife supplied, speaking quickly also. No one was sitting down in the room.
‘She’s in rather a state. She’s an alcoholic and a bit eccentric. My name is Julia Ferndale,’ Julia added, realizing she hadn’t revealed this yet. ‘I’m the person Francis Tyte bigamously married some time ago. I don’t know if you know all that.’
‘She told me,’ Susanna said.
‘My daughter wasn’t a friend of this man’s. He was just another actor in a television show, Miss Ferndale.’
‘It’s Mrs Ferndale, actually. Yes, I know your daughter didn’t know him well. It’s just that I’ve become concerned for your daughter’s safety.’
There was a pause after Julia said that. Then Mrs Music asked her to sit down. Mrs Music sat down herself and so did her husband. Mr Music turned on another light in the room, as if he wished to examine Julia more closely. He said:
‘Please tell us all about this, Mrs Ferndale.’
‘Yes, of course.’
Julia went through it all. She told the story of herself and Francis, and the story of Doris Smith and Francis, and the birth of the child. She mentioned the dressmaker and Francis’s parents. It was a relief to tell everything to people who didn’t know.
‘I don’t quite understand,’ Mrs Music said, ‘why she believes the man committed suicide.’
‘Her drinking confuses her, I think.’
Susanna remembered thinking, on the afternoon when Doris had approached her on the street, that she was like someone Francis Tyte had invented. The thought had occurred to her again when Doris had come to see her and had astonishingly suggested that she had given him venereal disease.
‘Yes, she’s like that,’ Julia said when Susanna put this theory forward. ‘She has become like that. She hasn’t been back to her flat for quite a time, since she left it yesterday morning in fact. I’m afraid I became alarmed. She’d been talking rather wildly.’
‘It’s awfully good of you,’ Mrs Music said gently, as if she sought to convey with the words far more than they baldly stated. She seemed to wish to commiserate, and to applaud Julia’s courage in coming to their house. ‘We’re grateful, Mrs Ferndale.’
‘Yes, thank you,’ Susanna said, and her father nodded slowly. Julia said:
‘I dare say alcoholics often become like this.’
‘Not quite like this, I think.’ Mr Music was just beginning to expand on that in a medical way when the hall-door bell rang, causing all four people in the room to share the same thought. But it wasn’t Doris whom Mr Music brought back with him to the room a few minutes later. It was two uniformed policemen.
‘This is my daughter,’ Mr Music said. ‘And this is Mrs Ferndale, who knows a lot about the matter.’
One of the policemen smiled, a long, lazy, bored smile. The other said:
‘Sorry to trouble you with this, Miss Music. We had a report there might’ve been a spot of bother.’
‘Bother?’
‘Apparently there’s this lady who’s had a drop too much. She appeared to think she’d done you a mischief. Sorry about all that, miss.’
‘Where is she?’ Julia asked, and the policeman who had already spoken mentioned a police station near Victoria. He asked Julia if she happened to be a friend of the lady who was there. Julia said she knew her.
‘If she’s issuing threats against my daughter,’ Mr Music intervened, ‘I’m afraid We’re going to have to do something about it.’
Susanna shook her head. She could take care of herself, she protested quite firmly.
‘You can’t do much, sir,’ the policeman who was doing the talking pointed out, ‘if the lady’s on the juice. It’s all just fancy stuff, you know. And it’s probably gone out of her system, sir, now that she’s said her bit.’
The smile began again on the other policeman’s face. ‘They see these things on the box,’ his colleague continued. ‘Guns and knives and stranglings. It was spiders sucking the blood out of people the other night.’
At that Mrs Music displayed some alarm and her husband said, laying down the law, that if the alcoholic woman visited the house again, or telephoned it even, the police would immediately be informed. He would want to see the woman arrested and calmed down. He would want to see her undergo a medical examination.
‘You do that, sir,’ the policeman responsible for the talking agreed, and both of them began to move out of the room. Julia rose and prepared to leave also, although she could feel that the Musics were expecting her to stay a little longer, perhaps to agree to some plan of campaign for dealing with the nuisance. In the hall the policeman said:
/> ‘If you could let us have the lady’s address, madam, it would be a help. Or if you like we’ll run you over to Victoria. If you’d care to have a word with her.’
Julia didn’t know why she agreed, and hardly did so except just perceptibly to nod. She said good-bye to the Musics, promising she would continue to persuade Doris that she was mistaken about their daughter. ‘Thank you again,’ Mrs Music said. ‘Thank you so very much.’
Politely a door of the police-car was held open. ‘Silly, really,’ the policeman who’d done all the talking said as the car began to move, and Julia felt silly herself, even though the Musics had been appreciative and nice.
‘Alive and living in splendour,’ the policeman reported over the car’s radio system: a friend of the drunk was coming to take care of things.
The policeman who hadn’t spoken was driving. ‘It appears she claimed she’d done that kid,’ he said now, ‘with a tea-pot.’ They were held up at a traffic light and he turned slightly as he spoke. Through the gloom Julia could just see the same tired smile flitting across his face. The reference to a tea-pot heightened the absurdity of everything, and Julia was glad that a tea-pot hadn’t been mentioned to the Musics.
‘Any idea what it’s all about?’ the other man inquired, turning round too.
A lot of people had been upset, Julia explained, because of someone who’d disappeared. There’d been malice and misunderstandings. In the messiness that had been created it was hard to establish just what was what.
‘We got a message over the radio,’ the driver said, moving the car swiftly on from the lights. ‘We had our doubts, of course. Like we said to that gentleman, you always have your doubts when it’s someone on the juice.’
The conversation ceased. Other messages came through on the radio system, reports of crime and distress, and of a fire somewhere. It was very kind of them to drive her all the way to Victoria, Julia said when there was a lull, but both men shook their heads, the more talkative one pronouncing that it was all in a patrolman’s day.
Other People's Worlds Page 22
