‘I thought it was ponyskin,’ Maureen said. ‘I was going to label it that way.’
Monty picked up the garment and peered at it more closely. It was a dark brownish-black in colour, a short sleek garment, simply made and rather dull, except for the sheen on the surface. He made a face at it.
‘Ponyskin, bullskin, dog or cat or moleskin, what’s the odds? Once they’re dead you might as well use up the bits and pieces. It says that in the Bible, don’t it? Man having dominion over the animals and so forth.’
‘Well, the Bible’s got it wrong,’ Jade snapped. ‘It’s revolting for people to wear dead animals. I won’t do it.’
‘No one asked you to,’ Monty said. ‘Now go home. Your dad’ll be wondering where you are and I don’t want him breathing down my neck. Be a good girl, come here and give me a kiss.’ He was reaching into his breast pocket as he spoke and the girl saw the movement from the corner of her eye. She came over to him, her brows raised in the same supercilious curve but eagerly enough, and George watched as he pulled a handful of notes from his wallet and pushed them into her hand.
‘Jade,’ Maureen Ledbetter said as the girl turned to head for the front door. ‘Could you come over tomorrow and give me a hand? I have to take all this up to the shop and there’s some stuff there that has to be taken over to Connie’s, and then I need to take the money into the office at the hospital. I thought you could drive me?’
‘Car’s up the spout, Auntie Maureen,’ the girl said, looking sideways at Monty. ‘I won’t get it back till Friday. If I could drive the Merc?’
‘Not on your bloody Nelly,’ Monty roared. ‘What have you done to yours? Pranged it again?’
‘Some nerd ran into me,’ Jade said. ‘It wasn’t my fault. These days you’re not safe out with the sort of people who drive –’
‘Like you,’ Monty interrupted. ‘I’ve seen you. The nerd who pranged it was you, and don’t you deny it. I suppose you’re expecting me to pay for it.’
‘Dad is,’ Jade said sulkily. ‘I wasn’t even going to tell you. If Auntie Maureen hadn’t asked me to take her somewhere I wouldn’t have.’
‘That is not the point,’ Monty began wrathfully, and suddenly George couldn’t stand it any more. She had hovered at the edge of this family squabble long enough and wanted to be out of it. But until she heard the words coming out of her own mouth she didn’t know what she was going to say to arrange that.
‘I’ll drive you, Mrs Ledbetter,’ she said. ‘I’m free tomorrow and I’ll be glad to help. Charity work – so useful.’
There was a little silence as they all stared at her and then Jade said, ‘OK then. That’s settled. I’ll be off ’Bye, all.’ She went sliding out of the door almost, but not quite, slamming it behind her.
‘Well that’s very kind of you, I’m sure,’ Maureen said doubtfully. ‘But it’s asking a lot. I mean –’
‘It’s no trouble,’ George said wretchedly, hating her own impulsiveness for dropping her into this, wasting precious time she needed to help Gus. ‘What time shall I collect you?’
‘Well, about nine would be nice, if that isn’t too early,’ Maureen began to brighten. ‘Connie has to be away by eleven, I know, and I promised not to be late.’
George felt better. ‘Then it’s just the morning?’
‘Pretty well. Though we could have lunch at the hospital.’
‘The hospital?’ George shook her head. ‘Oh, no. That’s not possible. We don’t have any arrangements at Old East for –’
Maureen laughed. ‘I don’t mean Old East. I raise money for St Dymphna’s. The Psychiatric Unit, you know? It’s a lovely little hospital and so – well, it’s one I care about. We could have lunch there.’
‘Oh.’ George smiled brilliantly. ‘That’s very kind of you, Mrs Ledbetter. I’ll be glad to help. Nine o’clock, you say? I’ll be in good time, I promise.’ And she went at last, leaving them both on their doorstep waving her goodbye.
Someone somewhere had been on her side, she decided, when they prompted her into offering her services. There could be some value in going to St Dymphna’s, from her own professional point of view. And getting into Maureen Ledbetter’s good books could be one way of persuading her husband to make even more efforts for Gus. Taking it all round, her visit to Gidea Park had been a profitable one.
Repeating the journey to Gidea Park next morning was much quicker; she knew the route, which helped, but she drove quickly too, partly because she was rather annoyed with herself. What had seemed a reasonable idea yesterday now seemed a waste of time. To be carrying stuff for Maureen Ledbetter? What could that do to help Gus, after all?
But once she was there, and found Maureen waiting anxiously for her, surrounded by boxes, her irritation melted. There was no harm in doing something for someone else, even if there were no benefit to herself or Gus in it. She loaded the boxes in her little car as quickly as she could, and then settled Maureen in the front passenger seat.
‘You’ll have to direct me,’ she said. ‘I’ve no idea where your shop is, I’m afraid.’
‘Barking,’ Maureen said. ‘I know it doesn’t sound a very interesting area, but you’d be surprised how many regular customers I have. When times are as hard as they are these days, people aren’t as fussy as they used to be about buying secondhand.’
‘I’ve often wondered about charity shops,’ George said, as much to make conversation as anything else. ‘Where do you get your stock?’
‘Oh, that’s not a problem – right here – I ask people around here in Gidea Park where they’ve got a lot of money for their cast-off stuff. They’re glad enough to let me have it. Then they can nag their husbands for more money because they’ve got nothing to wear.’
George laughed. ‘It sounds a good wheeze, I guess. And that gives you enough stock?’
‘Oh, no, I buy some cheap things in and sell them at a small profit. It doesn’t get me much but it makes the shop more interesting. And then I get a certain amount from Connie.’
‘You mentioned that name yesterday,’ George said. ‘Do I go straight on here?’
‘Yes, right down to the next roundabout and then follow the signs for Barking. Connie? Oh, yes, he’s part and parcel of the shop, as much as I am, really.’
‘He?’ George was amused. ‘Here am I with a man’s name and there’s a he with a girl’s name?’
‘Constantine. He’s called Constantine Georgiopoulis. Greek, you know. Lovely chap. Can’t do too much for St Dymphna’s. Really.’
‘St Dymphna’s,’ George said casually. ‘You know a lot about it?’
‘Oh, yes,’ Maureen said, and there was a tension in her voice that made George glance at her. She was staring ahead out of the windscreen, her expression bleak. ‘Oh, yes.’
George had been a pathologist for the greater part of her professional career, but in her early medical days she had worked with live patients as well as dead ones, and some of her expertise with them lingered still. She could certainly recognize emotional distress when she met it, and she responded as she had been trained to do.
‘Would you like to talk about it?’ she said quietly.
There was a little silence and then Maureen said, ‘I used to be there every day, you know. They said it made no difference, that she never knew me and never would, but all the same … Every day.’
‘Yes?’ George said gently when the silence had gone on long enough. She was driving carefully, watching out for the signs so she could find her own way without distracting Maureen.
‘And then what?’
‘Well, she died, didn’t she?’ Maureen said. ‘I knew she would. They told me she would the day she was born and she did better than they’d said. I mean, she wasn’t quite two and they said she’d never make it to a year old, so she did well. But she went and then … Well, it was still there, wasn’t it? St Dymphna’s? She wasn’t but the place was and I was used to it. So I went on going every day. It was –’ She stopped then. ‘I went every
day. And they gave me things to do like being one of the Friends, you know, and then I started the shop.’
She smiled widely and leaned forwards so that she could look at George directly, distracting her from her attention to the road. ‘It was the best thing that could have happened really. It’s made all the difference to me. The shop.’
Once again it was intuition, whatever that might be and wherever it came from, that gave George her next question. ‘And did you name the shop after her?’ she said.
‘Of course. I couldn’t call it anything else, could I? We’ve made getting on for half a million, you know, since we started. Built the swimming pool in the basement out of it, they did, and the gymnasium where they do the exercises – the physios – and all sorts of stuff like that. And now they need more for the new units they’re building. I dare say we’ll be helping with that too.’ She produced a broad grin of great satisfaction. ‘Maybe they’d call part of it after her, too. I’d like that.’
‘I hope they will,’ George said, and then after a moment, ‘That was a lot of money to have made just from the shop, wasn’t it? Selling just old clothes and so forth?’
‘It’s good, isn’t it?’ Maureen was plump with satisfaction. ‘It’s been pretty steady, right from the start. In the last few years the recession’s been a bit of a problem, of course, and in the beginning money wasn’t so – well, prices were lower. But on average we’ve made about two hundred and fifty pounds a week over the years. Less at the beginning, not so much now, lots in the middle, know what I mean? It all adds up.’
‘It does indeed,’ George said abstractedly, trying to do the arithmetic in her head. How long does it take to convert two hundred and fifty pounds a week into half a million? Say that’s a thousand a month, twelve thousand a year: the sums wobbled in her head but she managed it. Forty years. No, longer. For the past forty years or so, this woman at her side had been sorting through old worn clothes and buying and selling cheap oddments to help her hold on to her grief for a dead child. A child who had died before she was two, who had never recognized her mother – or so it appeared from what Maureen had said. That had been the spring of a vast sum of money for the hospital that had taken care of her. For the first time George was glad she was helping Maureen Ledbetter, not because she wanted to get anything out of her; but because it was worth being with her just for her own sake; and she at last brought the car, under Maureen’s directions, to a halt in front of the shop proudly displaying its name: Carolynn’s Charity Shoppe.
24
It was surprising how much fun it was to play shops, George thought. She helped Maureen and a little bustling woman in a pink overall, one of the regular volunteers who acted as saleswoman, hang the new stuff they had brought on the rails, while another helper, who looked much the same as her colleague but wore a blue overall, busied herself writing price tags. Maureen kept up a steady chatter of explanation.
‘Ah, these will sell fast, Dr Barnabas. They always do, these new things. Connie gets them for me, and we’re so grateful. I don’t know for sure where he gets it all from. I suspect he uses new material, you know, and gets some of his contacts to make the things up for us. Isn’t that kind? Then there’s the cabbage, of course.’
‘Cabbage?’ George was diverted. ‘I thought you just sold clothes and books and knick-knacks. Do you sell food as well?’ She looked round the shop, which showed no signs of any such items.
Maureen laughed merrily. ‘Oh, no, not vegetable cabbage! It’s what the people who get cloth from big firms to make up into coats and dresses and so forth call the leftovers. The big firms can’t do all their work so they get these little local firms to do it.’
‘Ah,’ said George. ‘Sweatshops?’
Maureen looked vague. ‘I’m never sure what that means. Anyway, it’s called CMT work in these parts. Cut, make and trim. If they’re clever, they can get as many as a dozen extra dresses or coats out of the material they’ve been allowed for making a hundred garments, say, and then they can sell the dozen for what they can get. Well, Connie buys up cabbage and then lets me have it. He’s so good to us and to St Dymphna’s.’
‘Did he have –’ George began and then stopped, but Maureen wasn’t fooled.
‘No. He does it out of the sheer goodness of his heart. He’s not married, so he’s got no children.’
George almost smiled. There was something very sweet about Maureen’s naïvety.
‘I tell him to put a move on or he’ll be too late but that’s a joke. Monty thinks … well …’ She stopped and then made a little face. ‘Monty said I ought to introduce Connie to a nice girl, but I like to keep Connie to myself, to tell the truth. He really is a great friend to me. Look at this.’ She held out the skin coat that had so incensed Jade. ‘That’s new, you know. I sometimes get cleaned-up leather and suede jackets Connie’s rescued from the stuff that comes to him, but this one looks new to me. Doesn’t it to you?’
George looked at it and had to agree it did. It had a garish red lining in very new rayon and there was the faint smell of tailor’s soap about it that bespoke an unworn garment.
‘I wonder if it is bullskin,’ she said, handing it back to Maureen who hung it on the rail. ‘My mother had a bullskin coat once.’
‘Dogskin,’ the little woman in the pink overall said unexpectedly. ‘I used to live on Tenerife when my husband was alive, and they were always selling them there. People used to say it wasn’t fair on a dog to keep one, especially a big one. They used to steal them for their skins when they couldn’t get any bullskin. It was for the cruise ships, you know. They used to come in with all those Americans and …’
But George wasn’t listening. She was staring at the dark brownish-black short-haired skin coat hanging on the rail and hearing in memory the voice of the woman in the betting shop. He’s got a dog. Bloody great black thing…
She reached out a finger to touch and then let her hand fall without doing so. There was something so hideous in the thought that she couldn’t bring herself to make the contact. She frowned as she thought and Maureen went on burbling away.
‘… there now, that’s all that done. Dolly, have you got the stuff that’s to go back to Connie? You see, Dr Barnabas, we can’t always sell everything we get so what we can’t, we take to Connie and he buys it back, just like he does everyone else’s.’
‘Mmm?’ George said.
‘He does it for most of the charity shops in London, and the junk shops, and jumble sales. Wherever they get old clothes. Buys them in, sorts them, sells them on, and so forth. That way everyone benefits. It’s ever so ecological, too.’ She beamed her satisfaction at being so very up-to-date.
‘I’d like to see this man’s place,’ George said abruptly. Maureen stopped and stared at her, a little startled by the sharpness of her voice.
‘Well, we’re going there,’ she said. ‘At least, we are if it’s still all right with you. You did say …’
‘Oh, yes.’ George managed a smile, sounding as casual as she could though now she was itching to get away and see this man Connie and his establishment. ‘That was what I meant. What can I carry out?’
Again the car was filled with boxes, and sacks too this time, all bulging with clothes, some of which had the slightly sour smell of old wardrobes. Unobtrusively George opened her car window a little to keep the fresh air flowing through. Once more Maureen was quicker than she expected her to be.
‘It does whiff a bit, doesn’t it? It’s amazing to me that there isn’t a bad smell at Connie’s, seeing how stuff like this can reek a bit, but he’s very fussy. The place smells more like a hospital than a hospital does these days.’ Again she produced that cheerful laugh of hers. ‘He uses lysol and carbolic and all those unfashionable things, to keep the mice and rats away, he said. Mind you, he’s got the cats for that.’
‘Yes,’ George said, not really concentrating on what she was saying. ‘Maureen, do tell me – left here? Oh, I see.’ She swung the wheel and Maureen hun
g on to her seat belt as the car hurtled round a corner. ‘Tell me how the place works. So that I don’t seem too ignorant when I’m there. I hate to seem a complete fool.’
‘Oh, I do know what you mean,’ Maureen said in heartfelt tones. ‘Well, let me see. The stuff comes in the front of the warehouse. You’ll see – it’s piled up, miles high. They do the first rough sorting there. He has ordinary workers for that. The homeless do a stint sometimes, just to get a few bob, though they wouldn’t do it full time. Well, no one would really, though he’s got some who don’t seem to mind. Anyway, they throw all the shoes on one pile and all the handbags on another and the odds and ends somewhere else, you know the sort of thing. Then all the clothes, they’re thrown on the conveyor belt. You should see it! Ever so big it is. Well, you will see it, won’t you?’ Again that tinkling giggle. ‘That’s when it gets really tricky. The people who work on it, they have sort of bins beside them, big things on wheels, great big dustbins really, and they pick out the stuff that’s right for their section.’ She shook her head admiringly. ‘Connie’s ever so clever, you see. He discovered that what goes in one country won’t go in another. So he gets people from all different countries to come and do the sorting for him. He’s got a regular United Nations there.’
‘You mean he uses immigrants?’
‘You’ve got it. Students and so forth. It’s all on shifts, you see, so they fit in what hours they can. And they know how to sort. There’re the East Africans: they’ll take high-heeled shoes and really bright-coloured stuff that the Nigerians won’t look at, and there’re things he can sell to Taiwan that they wouldn’t touch in Hong Kong and so on. You’ll see. Just turn here, into those double gates. That’s it. If you’ll pull over right by those double doors the unloading will be easier.’
Obediently George brought the car to a stop beside the huge doors that stood open to the morning sun of the courtyard, a wide expanse filled with vans and lorries, some of which were piled high with great knotted bales of what looked like greyish gauze. There were men moving around tying loads into place and checking clipboarded lists; the whole yard had an air of purpose.
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