by Patrick Gale
‘Lean on me, I am your friend,’ they sang.
‘Spot of bother, Inspector?’ He bent down and laid a hard hand on the girl’s shoulders.
‘Oi! What the hell d’you think you’re doing, then?’ he roared, and tugged her. The foetus closed tighter. Mo nearly lost her balance.
‘Steady,’ she said.
Higgins lost his temper. ‘Go on! Get up, will you?’
The girl started to sing the first song again. ‘You can’t kill the spirit.’ Her voice was high and sharp. ‘She goes on and on and on.’
‘Oh does she?’ shouted Higgins and kicked her.
He didn’t kick her particularly hard, but his boots were reinforced and the blow landed at the base of her spine. The foetus unfolded at once, yelling a curse and rubbing her back. Instinctively, Mo dropped down and touched her shoulder.
‘Christ! Are you OK, love?’
Higgins’ voice intruded from above, shocked and mocking. ‘You bleeding dyke, Faithe!’
Mo looked up. He was turning away. Her gorge rose. She sprang up and, without thinking, kicked him savagely on the back of the legs. He fell twisting awkwardly on to the mud.
The consequences of this rare loss of temper had been predictably severe. A report was made, and first Higgins and then she had been summoned to appear before their superiors. There had been the usual condescending mention of past record and achievements, then the grilling began.
‘Inspector Faithe, did you attack your colleague because his violence enraged you? Were you protecting your good name, or had he, perhaps, touched on a raw nerve?’
Of course she had pleaded PMT and an abhorrence of Higgins’ violent techniques. Defeated by such unwonted softness on her part, though they didn’t believe her for a moment, they had suggested a transfer within the Met. Perhaps she could work for Superintendent Timson in the West End sector? A change of atmosphere. Maybe even a little investigative work? They could have been a bunch of ruddy doctors suggesting that a little light gardening was good for the nerves. It was punishment plain and simple.
As she gazed through the crowds. Mo wondered how many telly heroes ever had to see bleeding sculpture exhibitions on the South Bank. She glanced at her watch. Nearly three. McEnery would be here soon to drive her back. McEnery the Perm. Everyone got a nickname after a year at the station. Mo had found her own on the toilet wall by a smutty cartoon.
I’m Faithe the Peg
Fiddle diddle diddle dee,
With my extra leg
Twiddle diddle fiddle dee.
A pickpocket. A real live pickpocket. Mo homed in. It was a girl. A punky type with spiky black hair and a leather miniskirt. She had slid into the back of a crowd that had gathered around a sculpture. A strong gust of wind had set it whirling like a tin firework. Its clattering bells had attracted valuable attention. Mo watched, marvelling at her technique. The kid’s head craned with the rest of the crowd, pretending an interest in the sounds and colours, while her fingers slipped, an expert lizard, into her neighbour’s handbag. She had on an oversized jacket with baggy sleeves, into which a wallet, then a bottle of perfume and then a cheque book were slid. Then, with the distracting grace of a master magician, she yawned loudly, covering her mouth with the offending hand, thus sending the ill-gotten contents of her sleeve well out of sight. She remained apparently rapt while her elegant victim strolled away to another exhibit, then placed her hand in her pocket, shaking it as if to search for loose change. Mo walked over and stood beside her. She wished her civvies ran to an Italian handbag complete with trailing headscarf. She would stuff a wallet with papers reading, ‘I know all but, for a kiss, will keep silent.’
She saw McEnery strutting through the gate, in uniform, punctual to a fault. The wind died and the wheels grew less frenetic. As Big Ben chimed three, Inspector Faithe decided, for the first time, to wield the great cloaked power on behalf of the underdog. Letting go of her ID card in her pocket, she turned with a smile to the thief.
‘Great, isn’t it?’ she said, and walked away.
FRIDAY three
‘I suppose we should wake him,’ said the kind young man.
‘British Rail apologizes to passengers on the Intercity service from Bournemouth for any delay, and hopes that no inconvenience has been caused.’
Seth blinked awake.
‘Too much bed and not enough sleep?’ An unexpected shot at ribaldry from the gorgon. Seth smiled up blearily, his tongue waking dry. She turned and left the carriage, in search of chocolate.
‘Here. Let me help you.’ Pinstriped suit, well cut dark brown hair, blue eyes, square jaw, a hint of suntan. Seth watched him lift his suitcase off the rack and swing it down to the platform in one long movement of impeccable animal grace.
‘Thank you,’ the boy swallowed, and stepped down beside him.
‘Your violin.’ Strong white teeth.
‘Oh. Thanks. Goodbye.’
‘Bye.’ He marched away, pink paper neatly furled under his arm. No comment.
There was Mother. Darling Mummy was running to meet him.
‘Darling!’
‘Hello.’ They hugged and kissed – humming to avoid having to say ‘I love you’. She laughed.
‘Who was that devastating man who handed down all your stuff?’
‘Oh. Just a man.’ He recalled the Cosmopolitan lying on the carriage floor. Make way for the little firecracker.
As the Volvo swung out over Waterloo Bridge, she unfurled an eloquent hand in front of Seth’s face, her eyes ahead, her tone abstracted.
‘Down there. Ilena’s new exhibition opened today. Dear Ilena. It’s called Waterstretch and Metalbeam or something, but very good. Very good indeed.’
They had to stop for a bus. He glanced across and was met by her strong green return. ‘But’ was so like her – involuntary making of allowances for everything she encountered. Prizes to everyone for trying. He looked the other way to hide his spot and glimpsed the exhibition through the railings. A little knot garden of moving bars on the concrete. Dear Ilena worked on kinetic/sonic structures in a converted warehouse on the canal in Islington. Finding her at a poetry reading in Camden, Evelyn’s set had embraced her with an almost unseemly appetite for the new. Seth suspected her of lusting after his mother.
‘They’ve cut off your curls, but it’s rather nice.’ Did Mother know about lesbians? Did she need to? ‘You filthy little man!’ The car in front was lurking indecisively between two lanes as they approached the underpass. ‘Out of my way!’
‘Next stop Moshinski’s?’
‘Of course. But it’s the last time. I’m getting a girth.’ The first evening of the holidays was marked with a visit to a pet Hungarian cake shop.
‘How’s Father?’
‘All right, I suppose. He’s gone ahead to Cornwall.’
Tall and forty-six, Evelyn Peake’s silver helmet of hair, emerald stare and superb carriage accentuated the fact that she was more pre than Raphaelite. Her only softness was a pair of full lips. A warrior-maid who had taken on wedlock as the cardinal trial of her strength. She brought out in most women those characteristics that man have earmarked as quintessentially feminine, those that all women of integrity eschew. Her father died in a hospice for the alcoholic elderly. Her mother had drifted off to a nursing-home on the south coast where she masticated vacantly among the potted palms while the eighties crashed on the pebble-dash outside. Evelyn had never missed parents who had so rarely been around. While Father had drunk his way from outpost to outpost of an illusory empire, Mother, made uneasy by her plain offspring’s baleful eyes, had left her for longer and longer stays with her own parents in Hampstead while she visited Nice – for her health.
Faced with such shoddy examples of human endeavour, Evelyn emerged rigorously self-disciplined and altruistic; a tall, thin Protestant. She drank in a first-class musical education from her grandparents. The latter had met at the Paris Conservatoire, married and become a much-lauded cello-piano duo. Evelyn was
not gifted – they saw that straight away – but she was blessed with determination and intelligence. With their encouragement and her perseverance, she not only gained a teaching diploma on the cello, but won a scholarship to visit Paris to study under Emmanuel Jakobsen who was then making breakthroughs in the sonic education of deaf children. She returned, qualified, to London to find that her mother had returned from Nice, having run out of money after a cancer operation, and out of admirers in her efforts to disguise its cruel effects. The ravaged creature was trying to form the home she had never had, with the tremulous shell that remained of her husband. To her grandparents’ dismay, Evelyn moved with the freakish pair into a house in Kensington. They urged her repeatedly to look to herself and after a year were relieved to see her marry an intelligent, albeit mature, young man and start a new life. With their wedding present, she founded what was to become a highly successful music school for the deaf, working under her maiden name of Davenham. Within a year of her marriage, her father got violently out of hand and was sent to the institution where he died of cirrhosis of the liver.
‘Be a devil. Have that chocolaty thing. I’ll have the coffee one and then we can swop half-way through.’
Evelyn laughed. ‘Oh, all right, Tempter.’
She was sure he was beautiful. Aware of the blindness of parents, she was constantly on the watch for the reactions of others, for proof. The waitress liked him, but that was her job. She often saw men look at him, though, which must clinch the question. The same sex was the truest, because the cruellest judge. She liked his high forehead, and those almost black eyes. Then she saw the spot.
‘Are you sad to be leaving school for good?’
‘Oh, not really. Another two years would only have been more of the same.’ He remembered that she had paid most of the fees and threw her a smile, ‘Can’t wait for Trenellion again. What are our plans?’
‘Well, Netia’s being dropped off by Benji at about eight.’ She lowered her voice. ‘She thinks he’s rather nice so I may have to make him stay for dinner.’
‘Which one’s he?’
‘He reads English at Caius. You remember – he was in that Shakespeare with her last summer. The tall, blond one.’
‘Oh yes. More tea?’
‘No thanks. But we must go round everywhere locking windows and turning off valves in case I forget. And I must shut up school. We can do that on the way home, before Neesh gets back.’
It was a lie he had learnt: a benevolent question to be asked, whose answer was immaterial, whenever he could sense her discomfort. Once the questions had been those of any infant; now, stripped of any shred of credibility, their posing had entered the realms of comfortable ritual.
‘Then what?’ he prompted.
‘Well, all my packing’s done. You and Neesh will both have brought home mounds of filthy washing. I vote we take it all down and wash it at Saint Jacobs. Just pray that bloody twin-tub has been fixed. I wrote to Mrs Stock about it.’
‘Mrs Pym.’
‘Yes, to Mrs Pym. But she’s so very absent-minded.’
‘What about music?’
‘Oh, that’s all done. I picked up the copies from Swiss Cottage yesterday morning and Peter and Grigor took it down in the van today along with all the stands and t-bars and things.’
‘Dear Grigor, with his awful “yokes”. How’s his eye?’
‘Beastly. Well it was. He’d got one of those floating retinas – retinae? – and had to have it lasered back on. He only had it done a couple of weeks ago, but thank heavens he says his sight is safe for driving now. Oh, thank you.’
The waitress clicked a saucer on to the table. The bill lay under a sugar lump. She smiled at Seth and walked away. He smiled back without his eyes. Evelyn detected the first shifts of sexual calculation.
‘Now we must hurry.’ She reached for her bag.
‘No,’ said Seth, ‘let me, for once.’ He seized the bill and walked to the till.
Determined that deaf children had enough frustrations without the added barricade of what she called ‘the School Concept with a capital S’, Evelyn had fought formality throughout what had been her grandparents’ house. Every room was brought to life, not only with plants and small trees, but by a menagerie of birds. Out of term time the mynah birds, parrots, canaries and rose finches were farmed out with pupils’ families ‘to inculcate in each child’, the prospectus said, ‘a sense of responsibility and love; restoring to him, and her, that trust of others which disability may have undermined’. Even the dullness of the instrument cases lined up in the hall for collection had not remained unchallenged. Cello cases were sky blue, violin cases apple green, trumpet cases canary yellow, and so on. Each case bore a name tag inscribed in magisterial marker on one side, and in crayons, lovingly, on the other. Elspeth, Marianne, Eustace, Candida, Dan, Joe, Phoebe and Quintus. Seth had met Phoebe at the Christmas concert. She had carroty hair in bunches, and a winning grin that almost distracted one from the flesh-pink box dangling incongruously from her neck. Joe was said to be the more promising.
‘You check the doors and windows down here and I’ll do upstairs.’
Seth wandered into the main room. The light streamed in across the garden. He took the burglar key and tightened the locks on each section of the large bay window – the only generous window in the house. Then his eye fell on a violin case lying on the window-seat. SFP on the lid. The dusty snakeskin of his childhood. He opened it, lifted out the small, and now unfamiliar instrument, tightened the bow and began to play.
Evelyn was marching back across the landing when she heard Brahms. She sat in a white painted rocking-chair. Her features took on the unguarded loveliness they had so often worn in an unwatched corner of the room where Seth practised. Her eyes filled with painless water. The reaction was Pavlovian but heartfelt; one offered tears to Brahms as a token of grateful humility.
The boy was prodigious beyond question. Over thirty years of music-making she had heard countless children perform. Many had attained a technical mastery far beyond their years, but there lay no mystery – the Japanese had demonstrated the childish openness to technique. Such technical precocity could execute a piece of Vivaldi without blemish, but faced with a Brahms sonata or a Beethoven quartet fell short of grace. Passion could no more be compassed by dexterity than a ten-year-old could be expected to understand the vagaries of lust, but when Evelyn first heard Seth play Brahms she had been as shocked as if her son had gravely proposed incest. He seemed uncannily to comprehend sufferings of maturity, torments transmuted into the bony code of a score. She wept in silence, as this boy who had never known any woman beyond his nearest kin, perceived and gave fresh voice to the longings of a man old enough to be his father.
FRIDAY four
Sixteen, Lydia Villas, was one of a row of snug cottages in Hackney. Most of Mo’s neighbours had forgotten or had never known that she was a policewoman – the newspaper articles were far in the past, and she changed into civvies at work. Not a trace of her job to be seen. She’d memorized the handbooks at training school then thrown them away. She was useless at gardening – hadn’t enough patience – but there was a snot-rag-sized lawn at the back, which she kept trim, and she planted a few bulbs and seeds when Mum reminded her. She didn’t live alone because there was Andy. Some years before, the local pet shop had burnt down and this tabby torn had been one of the refugees. Now he was family. He’d lie on her bed until she was asleep then let himself out and reappear at breakfast for a saucer of milk, some bacon and a barrage of ribald teasing about his night on the tiles. She let him share her breakfast, but dinner was left-overs from the station canteen – cold sausages, bits of bacon rind, crusts of sliced bread soaked in milk. Bella, the canteen cook, said she reckoned Mo ate it all herself because she was too mean to buy her own. Silly cow. Mum offered to buy her a budgie once. That was before Andy. Mo hated budgies; ugly, boring birds.
The house was comfortable but a bit lifeless. Mo sensed this on the rare occa
sions when she had someone round, but somehow she could never find the energy to cheer it up. A refuge. The only pictures were two photographs by her bedside: one of Mum and Dad, and one of Maggie. She’d bought the three-piece suite at a sale in Heal’s and she’d bought a big colour telly with the money from when Dad died. It was a special German one, with remote control so she didn’t have to wake Andy when he was asleep on her lap. Mumsy had been on an over-sixties holiday to Spain last year and had sent her a straw donkey with little baskets for pepper and salt pots. It stood on the mantelpiece with the calendar. No bookshelves – Mo couldn’t see the point of buying books when you could get them from the library, but she had one book. Maggie’d given her a collection of prints by Gustav Klimt on their last birthday together. It lay in pride of place on the coffee table.
They’d met in the Gateways Club the very first time she’d been there. Not a bad advert for the place. She’d plucked up courage, spent a good hour deciding what to wear, had a couple of whiskies in a nearby pub, then turned up at the address she’d learnt off a toilet door. After five minutes, this girl had marched up to her and asked for a dance – simple as that. Mo was living with her parents, looking for a job after finishing school and Maggie was at art college, training to be a textile designer. For three amazing years they’d shared a flat over an Earls Court supermarket. Maggie had gone off to college each day and Mo had worked as a barmaid in a local pub. No-one had batted an eyelid; lots of girls were sharing flats in the Sixties.
It had happened soon after her twenty-second birthday, the birthday of the book. She’d come home from working at the Boltons and had been surprised to see that there were no lights on in the flat. As she opened the door a policewoman had touched her gently on the shoulder and said,
‘Miss Faithe?’
She’d asked if she could come in and then, when they were sitting down in the lounge, she’d told her how Maggie had been killed on the flyover when her car had skidded in the rain and went under the wheels of a lorry. Maggie had had a little red sports car with a soft roof. Mo had listened in silence then broken down and wept on the policewoman’s shoulder. It was all fresh still, right down to the smell of her hairspray and the little blonde curl she had teased out from her uniform hat to hang in front of each ear. Some girls became nurses because they’d had a big operation when they were kids – Mo became a policewoman.
