by A. N. Wilson
Lennox Mark’s behaviour, when she had first realized that she was pregnant, was one of the many secrets which Mercy Topling carried in her heart. It was during the first week that her condition was obvious to her, when she was feeling very friendless and frightened, that the buzzer went in the inner office, and she heard Lennox’s voice on the intercom.
‘Mercy, would you mind coming’ – pause – ‘in. I have – something to show you.’
He had used exactly this form of words before, and she knew therefore exactly what she could expect when she went into the office. The thought passed her mind that she could send a message to the senior secretary, Mrs Claydon, that the Chairman needed her to step into his office; but Mercy was not a vindictive person; she did not want to punish Lennox particularly, merely to indicate that her affair with him was over. It would have been rather cruel to Mrs Claydon, a somewhat haughty individual with grown-up sons, who took the train in each morning from Sevenoaks, to make her enter the Chairman’s office and see that few inches of overexcited chipolata signalling for her attention above the blotter. So, Mercy had gone in to see him herself, and, sure enough, there it had been.
Lennox was eating caviar out of a jar with a spoon, and as he stepped out of his trousers to see her, he dolloped some of the grey sludge on the top of the erection.
‘Have a little beluga!’ he suggested, with his mouth full.
‘We have to talk,’ she said, realizing as she did so that she had burst into tears.
Both his immediate reaction and his behaviour over the next few days had been shaming. When she allowed herself to think about it, she pitied him. Even as, with furious imprecations, he was wiping the caviar off his floppy little knob with a piece of tissue, he was accusing her of being a blackmailer. There was no tenderness in him at all as he zipped up the trousers and tried to reclaim his dignity; just anger, and behind the anger a tangible and woefully unstylish funk. She immediately wondered how she could conceivably have fancied, or told herself she fancied, such a tub of lard, but she felt no malice, only bewilderment, as the smallest vestiges of sexual love drained between both of them, leaving only horrible distrust and mutual self-loathing.
When he had sworn – using every swear word in a variety of surreal orders, and then again in a different order – he had produced a cheque-book from his pocket.
‘That’s not what I want, Lennox.’
It was the first – indeed, the only – time she’d used his name.
‘That’s not what it’s about.’
‘Then what is it sodding, fucking, cunting, buggering Jesus fucking Christ about?’
Behind his fat head and his smoothed blond hair and the heaving shoulders of his tropical pale grey suiting, the great dome of St Paul’s, and the City of London which stretched behind him to the east, proclaimed the Kingdom of the World, but not the glory thereof. She saw him in this painful few seconds as the king of this world. She saw him as ruling and owning it all, with his cheque-book, his bespoke suits spattered with food and semen, his cars, his companies, his dodgy deals which as a secretary she had heard him hatch, with his employees, his wage-slaves, his rolling, furry wobbling belly and his stupid little prick. She remembered the one time – on that sofa over there – when he had actually removed all his clothes. The Naked Ape, hadn’t there been a book with that title? She saw his dominance over herself and his employees on the newspaper as something as deeply basic as that of a great primate in a patch of jungle. He was some tremendously powerful, angry gorilla and she knew that the only thing to do was to get away from him, fast.
‘I don’t want the money – I do not want …’
She had run from the office during another stream of expletives.
As soon as the interview was over, she went down to the personnel manager and gave her notice. A P45 form and a month’s salary were forwarded a few weeks later. Before that, however, she received a solicitor’s letter. It was an abominable letter, sent by one of the grander firms in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. It stated that their client did not, and would not at any time, acknowledge the paternity of the child in her womb. It libellously and untruthfully stated that she had tried to extract money from the Chairman. It said that if she presented herself at Number – Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and signed the appropriate documents, she would be committed never to repeat the claim that their client was the father of the child. She would, on signature, receive a sum of £20,000 which would be a one-off payment, never to be repeated …
No one in Mercy’s family had ever possessed a sum even approaching £20,000. After she married, especially after Trevor became mentally ill, she had sometimes thought with some wistfulness about the letter she wrote back to the lawyers, with its suggestion of a suitable destination for the cheque. She had never exactly regretted refusing the money, though. Lennox had tried to buy her silence, as if it needed purchase. As the years passed, and particularly after her marriage to Trevor, she was sure that she had as much desire as Lennox did to bury the memories of earlier escapades and follies.
For years, in fact, the question of Peter’s paternity had been put aside. She had stopped thinking about it, until the boy began to attend his sessions with Kevin Currey. For all her initial scepticism about therapy, she was half persuaded that some of Peter’s troubles might stem from not knowing his father. So, these meetings with the psychiatric social worker had forced her, in the secrecy of her heart, to gouge out the sixteen-year-old memories. She could not face the truth any more: namely that she did not know who the father was. That sex-crazed twenty-one-year-old was a different person from thirty-seven-year-old Mercy. To shock her mother by recalling the incident with Father Vivyan was impossible. The boy on the sports desk – he’d be married himself, with kids by now. It was as well she’d forgotten his name: she could not endure the idea of Peter wanting to meet him and claim him as Dad. As for old L.P. – well, it was not as embarrassing as having slept with her mother’s favourite priest: but Lily liked to chuckle over the columnist’s extreme views as she had her coffee and biscuits … It was somehow imaginatively impossible to suggest that Mercy remembered anything more about the man personally than that he once bought her a Manhattan in the American Bar at the Savoy. What happened after the cocktail had been consumed could safely be forgotten.
That left her the choice of lying about Peter’s father – saying, for example, that he had been killed in a motor accident years ago, or naming Lennox Mark as his father. For a couple of weeks she had vacillated between the two options, while Kevin pressed the point home: Peter was unrooted. The ‘lad’ had tried to come between his mum and his stepfather and the tactic had failed. He had gone to live with Granny. The deep-seated hunger for Dad – for Dad’s love, Dad’s encouragement …
‘It’s Lennox Mark,’ Mercy had blurted out one day during one of these tirades of Currey’s. ‘My old boss from the days I worked at the Legion. Well – the owner …’
She did not think, when the name had been drawn from the air, that it made much impression. She hoped for a day or two that this would be the end of the matter. Perhaps the boy himself – who had appeared indifferent, almost sullen, when told – would be unconcerned, and show no desire to make contact with Lennox. Kevin had told him not to do anything hastily, not to get in touch with Mr Mark on his own. Peter had to realize, said Kevin, that they were all right behind him. As Kevin squeezed Peter’s shoulder and called him ‘Good lad’ in the presence of Mercy and Lily, it really seemed as if that might be the end of the matter. But now Lily, as they rose to go, after this week’s meeting with Kevin, was saying, ‘He war better ahf before, I’m telling you, before you made Mercy tell him. You say she owed it to him. He’s on the verge of manhood, you said: he could presently be a father himself, you said, well Lordy, Lordy, keep us from dat … But did you really, truly think it through? What it was going to mean to Mercy to have to tell the boy? What it would mean to Peter himself, to the two other kids? She’ll have to tell dem too, you know. So far,
so good. Peter’s keeping shtum, but dey’ve met it hard enough in dat family, man. Don’t you tink Trevor and Mercy have enough problems? When she tell him now, he’s quiet; he run off down de street and doesn’t want to know ‘bout it. But one day, I know dat boy, he’ll come in and want to get insultive, throw his weight aroun’ and he’ll say, “Brad, Lucius, your dad’s a failed secondary school teacher who can’t do nothing, ‘cept sit round all day staring into space wid de depression, and my dad? You know who my dad is? He owns The Daily Legion …” Have you thought what that’s going to do to our family? And don’t you think my Mercy was right not to tell us all those years ago, and right to keep it to herself? You know what I tink? I tink that boy will get all sorts of hopes and dreams and it won’t make nothing better. He’ll go out a jonnycake and come back a dumpling.’
They were halfway down the stairs when Lily delivered herself of this prediction, and Mercy took her mother’s arm as they teetered out into the dark and the rain.
FOURTEEN
Long strides, hare lopes, carried him away. The women had kept their word, and let him go out through the garden, over a fence, and, by means of climbing another wall, back to the streets. They’d kept the fuzz talking.
What if they now broke their word – what then? How much did they have on him? Nothing. No names. Jus’ a bit o’ spit on her fingers – but that couldn’t prove nothing.
But if he went back, like she say he must? Which one come back then, man? Inside the boy’s head, a cluster of different characters were to be found. As often happened at moments of crisis they all jabbered for attention. There was the strutting, streetwise sex maniac:
Chrise, when he’d sucked her fingers, he’d got a hard-on, thought he was in there with a chance. Like, she was gagging for it. Oozing. And, like, whether she said yes or no, he’d have given it to her once she took him up those stairs.
‘You’d better come upstairs.’
That was what she’d said. She’d slithered up the stairs in that white silk thing. He’d looked forward to ripping that off her, wrenching her bra, grabbing those tits in his teeth before down come his zip and out come Big Joey wanting to stick in that juice-jar of hers. He’d have given it to her, hard, hard. Then taken a few diamonds, a bit of money. Then taken maybe jus’ one thing of his. A toothbrush, maybe: a hairbrush? A tie? Maybe one of those really expensive cufflinks he’d watched him buy in Bond Street, like, last week?
So up the stairs they’d gone. Martina. That was her name. He’d followed that wiggling ass up the staircase. Nice one. Seen her walk over to her bed, and then she’d turned. He’d seen in her strange expressionless smile something like recognition.
So she knew? She knew who he was, and why he’d really come there? Knew he didn’t give a shit for some pizza delivery boy, not a shit for the jewels or the money, but – Jesus.
Fucking Jesus.
In that split second of confusion, he realized that she wasn’t looking at him. He’d turned round and there she was – that hag. Was that a dyed blonde? Or was it a wig on top of that face? Oh, Jesus Christ, that face, or what was left of it: Whatever happened to give her a face like that? On one side there was one eye. The other was just an empty socket, and the scar went right down where the cheek would have been; only there hardly was any cheek, and the white scar-tissue contrasted horribly with the sun-tanned skin – it was like streaky bacon, that flapping bit of non-face! And the nose half there, half not there, and the mouth so twisted, and more scars in the neck. And she was jabbering in some fucking language, man, while she waved a fucking gun.
Sex Maniac had gone. Frightened Child took his place.
And Martina was saying, Nein, Mutti, nein.
And in her other hand the old hag had a knife. Not a little knife, a fucking great Sabatier kitchen knife. And she was shrieking something about kastrieren den Neger. And Jesus, you don’t need GCS fucking Es to know what that meant as she released the safety-catch on the revolver, and moved the knife towards him.
She looked, the one-eyed witch, like she’d used big carvers on men before. Often. Ate cocks like other people ate hot dogs.
And then he didn’t know what was happening, but they’d got him in the bathroom, which led off the bedroom. Jesus, man – that bedroom was bigger than the whole of Grammy’s flat put together! And they were jabbering in Spanish, Russian, whatever the language was, right, and his one, Pussy-Glamour, pointed at the edge of the bath; like, at the cloth, and the cleaning-fluid?
‘Get scrubbing.’
He’d been so surprised at first that he had not understood what she meant. Then the older woman had waved her gun and he’d thought it was a good idea to do as he was told. So he’d cleaned the bath with Jif. Then he’d cleaned the toilet, and the floor, and tidied up the towels. And then she’d made her deal with him.
‘You’re good.’
‘My grammy,’ – the terrified child had begun the sentence, but one of the others finished it for him, one of the ones who could speak posh – ‘my grandmother needs help. I do the cleaning for her,’ he had said.
‘Now, listen.’
She spoke, the beautiful lady with coppery hair, very distinctly, in her foreign accent: not very foreign, just with a bit of a lilt to it – whereas the one-eyed monster, when she spoke English, it was, like, a joke, the accent was so strong.
‘You have a choice,’ said Beautiful. ‘You can clean this house – from top to bottom: or we call the police, now.’
Before he was taken at gunpoint downstairs to the utility room, and shown the cupboard where the Filipinos had left mops, J-cloths, rubber gloves and plastic buckets, she’d opened her palm to him and insisted, ‘My rings. If you please.’
He’d given them back to her quite meekly.
Once the whole strangeness of the situation was, if not forgotten, put to one side, and once he stopped shaking, he found it quite interesting, seeing that fucking great palace. They in their turn, the two women, gradually trusted him more. While he did the kitchen, the old woman insisted he still wore that studded collar which they’d fitted round his neck, even yanking his chain a little if he failed to spot a tea-leaf or a smear of butter. By the time he had finished washing up the dishes, cleaning the floor, emptying the rubbish bin and tying knots in the black plastic sacks, swabbing the tables and surfaces, and mopping the floor, they unclipped his chain.
He had emptied the Dyson, cleaned the drawing room, the study and a small inner sitting room, and then brushed down and hoovered the main staircase.
‘You’re a good worker,’ the Beautiful One had conceded. ‘If you come back tomorrow, I’d pay you …’
The old hag tried to interrupt with a stream of abuse in her language. Martina replied in that language, then added, ‘Trust me. I know what I’m doing.’
‘If you come back,’ she repeated, ‘I’d pay you. If you tried to steal one fivepenny piece, one envelope, one crumb of bread …’
He had stammered general agreement to her terms. If he would consent to become her house-slave for a week, then she would protect him from the police. There was not time to fine-hone the contract. At that moment the police had rung the front door-bell.
‘Leave this with me,’ she had commanded him. ‘Get out of the back. And fast.’
The old hag in a yellow wig had escorted him to the back door and pushed him in the small of the back, projecting him into the darkness of a yard. He could hear police sirens wailing at the front of the house. So, they’d found the kid he’d knifed. The women had got the Stanley knife, covered in blood. The old one made him drop it into a cellophane freezer-bag, like it was forensic evidence. So they could, probably, get some evidence on him, if they wanted.
As he paced along, the memories and impressions of the previous few hours were shaken up inside him. In Brompton Road he jumped on a double-decker and stepped coolly off it again in Piccadilly when the conductor asked him for a fare. Suddenly, he was Bertie Wooster.
‘What ho!’ he said to th
e conductor. ‘What ho!’
FIFTEEN
Mercy went home. There was no knowing where Peter had got to. Presumably, he would turn up at his gran’s flat and express surprise that anyone had been worried about him. (His mother did not altogether blame him for boycotting the sessions with the psychiatric social worker. Kevin’s meddling was doing no good. Mercy shared Lily’s wish that they’d never started with the man, who, in some nameless way, gave her the creeps.) So, she went back to Lily’s flat for a coffee, and then took herself off – a journey which involved two buses – home to Streatham. On the bus, she read her public library book, Zola’s Nana. Its sauciness fascinated her, as much as its jaded tone shocked. Could human beings really be as depraved, as cynical, as money-centred as the French novelist depicted them? But – what a novel! She turned the pages eagerly, and nearly missed the stop in East Dulwich where she changed.
If only Trevor could bring himself to read once again. When she had first met him (he was seven years older than she was) Trevor had been a teacher in a secondary school. He taught English literature to children between eleven and thirteen. His love of teaching and books, his seriousness, quite as much as any physical attraction, drew him to her in the first place. She loved his kind, earnest face. They’d met at a party given by some friends in common. She’d dressed herself up to kill, as usual. She’d been to Afro-Styles in Crickleden High Road (Julie, the stylist there, was one of her best mates) and had her hair straightened and flattened against her head – very Josephine Baker. She had purplish-red lip gloss, a bright cerise top with a plunging neckline, and a skirt which was split up one side to reveal lots of fleshy thigh. Her throat and ears jangled with glister. He wore a grey open-necked shirt, a boring tweed coat, brown trousers, crinkly pale-brown socks and the sort of shoes which looked like Cornish pasties with a pastry-rim round the toe. Yet, when they met, he did not assume, as so many clever people would have done, that good-time girl equals airhead. He spoke earnestly about the books he was asked to teach the children, while – most satisfactorily – not being able to take his eyes off her chest. Although Mercy had not been serious at school, and had therefore been stuck in a series of boring clerical jobs for the previous decade, she was a person who enjoyed books and reading.
