The gutter man must have been not a little startled. Such overwhelming gratitude and warmth was not the usual response of his customers to delays and cancelled appointments. Still, you never know your luck. It just goes to show.
Twice more the telephone rang through the quiet house—once for the people upstairs, and once about an overdue library book. Perfectly innocuous calls, both of them, but by this time Sharon’s nerves were all on edge waiting for the next one, and planning what on earth to say when it came.
In bed still? In the bath? In the loo? Out shopping? There weren’t all that many excuses on which to ring the changes… Sooner or later Miranda’s mother was going to suspect something.
And suspect something she did, as was made clear by her very first words when Sharon next picked up the phone.
“Sharon, dear, please don’t lie to me any more,” she started off, causing Sharon’s heart to hurl itself against her ribs in terror. “I know you mean well, dear, I know you are only doing it to spare my feelings, but please, please stop it, and tell me the truth. Miranda’s refusing to come to the telephone, isn’t she? She doesn’t want to speak to her own mother any more. That’s it, isn’t it? Isn’t it?”
Well, really, this was a way out of it! It really was! Sharon would never have thought of it herself in a hundred years; but having it handed to her on a plate like this…
“Look, Mrs Field, I’m awfully sorry, but … well … since you’ve guessed … well, yes, I’m afraid it is a bit like that, just at the moment…”
Well, and it was, too. It must be. Nothing short of a most frightful row with her mother would have induced Miranda to take flight in this precipitate and unprecedented manner. Sharon wasn’t lying, then, but telling what must be (surely it must?) the sober truth: after a row on that scale, Miranda wouldn’t be feeling like speaking to her mother.
“Yes, Mrs Field,” she repeated, more firmly. “I’m awfully sorry, but I’m afraid there’s no way I can get her to come to the phone … not just now, anyway…”
And this again was as true a word as she had ever spoken.
CHAPTER XIII
“NORAH! NORAH! DID you listen to the News just now? That baby was snatched from its pram—apparently it all happened quite near here! Not ten minutes away from the bus station!—Just imagine!”
Janine Parkes, a bouncing divorcée in her forties, with lacquered golden curls, beautifully manicured hands, and a pair of tattered down-at-heel slippers quite good enough for popping in on Norah, had burst in from next door; and although it was not yet nine o’clock, was already settling herself cosily at Norah’s kitchen table in expectation of a nice cup of coffee. She felt confident of a warm welcome, so bad was the news with which she had come primed.
“They still haven’t found it, you know,” she reported, leaning forward confidentially, elbows on table. “They’ve had police dogs out all night … and house-to-house enquiries all over the neighbourhood… Isn’t it awful! I don’t know how a person can do such a thing… And when you think of that poor young mother—well, not all that young, actually, not by her looks anyway. She looked really quite middle-aged—and that awful jumper she was wearing—you know, really frumpy. They had her picture in the Gazette this morning, did you see it, and all those children lined up on either side of her, left to right you know—all their names and ages. Look, here you are—I brought it over to show you.”
As a matter of fact, Norah had already seen the picture, but all the same she took the proffered copy, and while the kettle boiled she had another look.
Janine was absolutely right—though not, of course, particularly kind, in view of the unhappy circumstances. The woman was frumpish. There was no other word for it. With her sagging jowls, her layer upon layer of ill-fitting and unseasonable woollies, and her grimly down-turned lips, it was impossible to see her as a figure of tragedy or high drama. The lineaments of that heavy face were less those of grief than of one damn thing after another, with this the final bloody straw. Nor were the pack of children alongside in much better case. They looked awkward rather than grief-stricken, and a bit embarrassed, as if no one had told them how they ought to feel. Well, I suppose no one has, mused Norah. Having a three-week-old baby sister stolen from the family circle isn’t a thing that happens all that often; there aren’t any rituals for it.
Steam spurted from the kettle, the lid leaped and chattered, and Norah went through the routine of making coffee, though she herself had only just finished breakfast, having made a late start this morning.
Milk? Sugar? Sorry there aren’t any biscuits, I had to rather rush through my shopping yesterday. I’ve been a bit disorganised lately, since—
No, she didn’t want to talk about Miranda, not if she could help it. And certainly not to Janine. Fortunately, Janine did not seem to notice the hiatus, she was still busily scanning the paper for further items of information to titillate her sense of outrage.
Outside Sainsbury’s, would you believe it? She, Janine, shopped there quite often, or would do if it wasn’t for the parking … and so if this shocking event had only taken place a week … a month … a year go, and if instead of being on a Thursday it had been on a Saturday, and if it had been morning instead of late afternoon—why, then she, Janine herself, might actually have been there when it happened!
“Now, that’s the thing I really don’t understand,” she remarked, gently censorious as the indubitably non-involved can afford to be, “How all these people—‘Hundreds of shoppers’ it says—how they can all have just let it happen! Now, if I’d caught sight of someone stealing a baby…!”
They argued, for a few desultory minutes, the justification or otherwise of this reproach. By what signs or symptoms could the ordinary passer-by be expected to recognise such a crime, even if it should take place under his very eyes? Snatching a baby isn’t like snatching a handbag: all that the outsider would observe would be a young woman lifting from its pram—tenderly and solicitously, in all probability—a baby that he would take for granted was her own. Well, he oughtn’t to take it for granted, Janine countered: people should check on these things. What, on everything? Every time you see someone opening a car door, it might be someone other than the owner, mightn’t it? Soon, the streets would be jammed solid with everyone checking on everyone else, and business would come to a standstill.
“You wouldn’t talk like that if it was your baby that had been stolen!” Janine retaliated, illogically but with crushing effect; almost anyone can be persuaded to agree that two and two make five if the assertion that they make four can be made to seem heartless and lacking in compassion.
Besides, she did have a point, of sorts.
“I’m quite absolutely sure,” Janine resumed, “that someone stealing a baby from a pram would behave quite absolutely differently from a real mother. There’d be all sorts of signs… Here, listen to this—this is the kind of thing I mean…”
Here she proceeded to read out in full detail an account (which, as it happened, Norah had already read for herself, as well as hearing it on the news) of how some woman had noticed—or claimed she had noticed—a young girl with long fair hair leaning over a pram, whispering to the baby, and crying. Nothing seemed to have come of this clue—there was so far no iota of proof that the pram that was being cried over was the same as that from which a baby was snatched—but no doubt the police were following it up. If there was anything in it, then in due course they’d hear all about it on the News.
A young girl with long fair hair, crying.
Later, Janine was to declare that she’d known all along that it was Miranda Field, from the very first moment she’d read about this fair-haired girl; but you’d never have guessed it at the time. On the contrary, it was at just about this point in the conversation that her interest in the whole matter appeared to flag, as if she felt that the episode had by now been milked dry of all it had to offer of coffee-morning scandal. And when, a little later, she did come round to the subject of Mi
randa, it was in a totally different connection.
Like everyone else in their circle, Janine had heard rumours of Miranda’s little slip-up, and she assumed (again like everyone else) that the Fields, enlightened couple that they were, would have arranged an abortion for their daughter. It was unthinkable that they’d have any old-fashioned moral scruples about it—wasn’t Edwin Field a prospective Left Wing candidate of some sort, and thus wholly in favour of the Permissive Society in all its manifestations?
Probably, the whole thing was over and done with by now; but it was tantalising—it really was—not to have been told any of the details while it was all going on. Such close neighbours, too, she and Norah, and still friends of a sort, despite Norah’s reluctance, at the time of Janine’s divorce, to corroborate Janine’s claim to be a battered wife. True, she hadn’t looked battered, whereas Charlie had, rather; but surely women should stand together on this sort of issue, otherwise what is Women’s Lib all about? Wife-battering is so heinous a crime that a man shouldn’t get away scot free even if he hasn’t done it.
Still, all this was water under the bridge now, or would be if Charlie would stop being so difficult about the maintenance. One way and another, she and Norah Field had been through a lot together as measured in gallons of tea and coffee over the years. It was mean of Norah, now, to be so secretive over this Miranda business. More than mean, indeed: it was downright anti-social. For is it not very nearly a duty, if something bad happens to you, to feed it into the neighbourhood pool of gossip? To donate it, as it were, to those with less eventful lives than your own? Some people are stingy with their misfortunes as others are stingy over money. Still, this is no reason for letting them get away with it.
“Miranda still on holiday, is she?” Janine asked, carefully casual, and with an air of simply making conversation; but when nothing more revealing than a non-commital murmur of assent was forthcoming, she allowed herself to press a little harder.
“She’s been gone for more than a fortnight, hasn’t she?” she continued; and when this, too, evoked nothing beyond an affirmative nod, Janine, with a pleasant smile, moved in for the kill.
“It seems funny, not seeing her around all this time. I quite thought last night that she must be back … all that pop music… My goodness, you could hear it three gardens away! I could have sworn it came from here … one of your upstairs windows… But I suppose…”
When you leave a sentence unfinished specially to give your companion a chance to interrupt, and then she doesn’t, it can be most annoying. Janine gave a little shrug of irritation and impatience. Really, Norah was being impossible! What a waste of a morning! And not even any biscuits, either… But before this silent catalogue of her hostess’s omissions and shortcomings had got any further, the object of them raised her head and gave an apologetic little laugh.
“Oh, that! Yes, I’m afraid it was from here, actually—I’m awfully sorry if it disturbed you. Sam’s home, you see—” here she paused, as if waiting for the significance of this to sink in; then, “Yes, he’s back home again—you know, from that Overland trip to India.”
Ah, Sam! The delinquent son; the blot on the Field escutcheon. Janine pricked up her ears.
“And you know what?” Norah was laughing again, wryly. “He’s brought back this extraordinary friend with him, that he picked up in Katmandu, or somewhere. A terribly thin, disapproving young man who’s allergic to whatever it is our pillows are stuffed with, and goes on and on about us being middle class. He told me last night that the amount of food I’d put on his plate would keep an Indian peasant for a week. I nearly asked him if his second helping would have kept another Indian peasant for another week, but I didn’t dare because Sam thinks he’s wonderful. He’s into the Wider Consciousness, Sam says, and so we’re going to be stuck with him for weeks and weeks while he seeks the Reality within the Reality, which apparently takes ages and ages, and is why his parents won’t have him home, they’re sick of it. He’s recovering from hepatitis, too, so we have to swill out every single cup and glass with boiling water after he’s drunk from it—and in secret, too, so as not to hurt his feelings. Sam nearly killed me when he smelt Dettol in the bathroom last night, he accused me of trying to disinfect Yoshi as if he was a thing, a non-sterile object… Well, he is, isn’t he? Hepatitis is no joke, after all. And then of course I’ve got poor Edwin to worry about as well, you know how he relies on me to keep things from him, and how can I when they’re both of them around the place all day long? And then the pop records as well—I will do something about that, Janine, I promise I will, but just at the moment I’m having to be so tactful it’s not true! What with telling Edwin that it’s only for another day or two, and telling Sam that of course his friends are welcome for as long as they like to stay—Oh, dear, I never seem to stop telling lies from morning till night! You know how it is! And now, Janine, if you don’t awfully mind, I really think I ought to be…”
Reluctantly, Janine took her leave. It was a pity that it should all have to finish now, just when it was getting really interesting; but at least it was good to know that Sam was still being a problem despite his travels. Having heard so little about him all these months, Janine had almost begun to fear that he was going the way so many of her friends’ problem children had gone, one after another getting jobs, coming off drugs, going back to finish their degrees—really, it was quite getting her down, especially just now, with her own life going so rottenly.
A blast of discordant noise from the top floor of the Fields’ home cheered her a little as she made her way past the side entrance and into her own garden. Soon, the rest of the neighbours would be complaining, and that was always fun. Jauntily, and more or less in time with the screeching music, she almost skipped up the path and into the pleasant, well-appointed home which Charlie was still rabbiting on about his half of; but who cared? Charlie was a born loser—that was the very thing that had wrecked the marriage, actually—and so let him damn well lose this one, too!
It wasn’t such a bad old life: and there was still half a bottle of gin left in the dining room cupboard. Not that Janine was letting her troubles turn her into an alcoholic, or anything like it, but it did give you something to look forward to in the mornings when coffee time was over.
As she sipped, it crossed Janine’s mind that she hadn’t after all succeeded in worming out of her neighbour any of the low-down on Miranda and her misfortunes; the Sam saga had somehow intervened, and all that stuff about the hepatitis and everything. It was odd that Norah was being so uninhibitedly communicative about her problems with her son, and yet so obstinately silent about those of her daughter. Surely she wasn’t ashamed of Miranda’s predicament? Schoolgirl pregnancies were two-a-penny these days, and abortion the obvious and easy answer in any modern, enlightened family of even mildly Left-Wing leanings…
It was this last phrase, drifting through her mind, which brought Janine up with a jerk; it illumined, in a single, blinding flash, the whole tantalizing puzzle.
Of course! Fancy not having thought of it before! It was not their daughter’s pregnancy that the Fields were so ashamed of, nor the abortion. No, it was the fact that they must have had the operation done privately! To people of their egalitarian convictions, this was the disgrace, this the unmentionable shame, the skeleton in their Left-Wing cupboard!
Poor old Norah! What a come down!
Janine smiled pityingly, and treated herself to a second little drink, as if in celebration.
CHAPTER XIV
MEANWHILE, FAR AWAY on the other side of London, Merve was staring resentfully into his typewriter, trying to piece together the trampled remnants of dialogue that had been going so marvellously last night before the interruption. He had just got it exactly the way he wanted it, in all its mordant realism, and had been about to immortalise it in a top copy and three carbons, when—wham!—there had imploded into the flat the Great Happening, scattering before it all traces of consecutive thought, and drowning inspir
ation in squeals of imbecile amazement.
“A girl!” they’d shrieked, back and forth through the juddering doorways. “A girl! Isn’t that wonderful!”
The only other thing it could have been was a boy, Merve reflected sourly. The chances were almost exactly fifty-fifty. This idiot wonderment was almost more than he could stomach, especially on top of all that he’d put up with already.
It wasn’t that he disliked Miranda, or had resented her unheralded arrival, pregnant, on their doorstep. On the contrary, he quite liked the girl, and during the long hours when the two of them were alone together, with the others all out at work, they got on famously. Being left in Miranda’s company was the nearest thing to being left alone that you could hope to find this side of Paradise. She didn’t bother him in any way at all, neither waking him before midday, nor trying to tell him her troubles; nor even asking how the book was going. And if she ever felt bored during the long, silent afternoons of dust-laden August heat, she had the decency not to tell him so. There is nothing so disturbing to creative genius as someone else’s boredom.
Yes, Miranda was okay. Her pregnancy was okay too, as far as Merve was concerned; he had nothing against unmarried motherhood, or indeed any other kind. Even the baby might turn out to be okay, for all Merve knew to the contrary.
But what was not okay, and hadn’t been, right from the very beginning, was the way the rest of them had chosen to act towards their new flatmate: it made him feel quite sick, though of course he’d never dare say so. It was like a mixture of worshipping the Virgin Mary and fussing over a geranium cutting, he sometimes reflected sourly, as he listened to the soft, fluting patter about the baby this and the baby that, the baby, the baby, the baby, on and on, evening after evening, while he was trying to work. And then there was Tim, with his worried, semi-professional frownings and questionings whenever he happened along—really, it was enough to get on anyone’s nerves, even if they weren’t trying to write a novel about life as it really is.
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