No Place of Safety

by Robert Barnard

  ‘How long ago was that?’

  That bothered Splat. Time was something he had contracted out of.

  ‘Six or seven years. Don’t know exactly.’

  ‘How do you survive?’

  A shifty look came into his eyes.

  ‘Beg an’ that.’

  He was grateful to Ben for providing the refuge, but he had no pipe dreams about getting a job or settling down and becoming part of the community. He thought he’d probably be dead by thirty (’an’ that’s all right by me’). He had heard nothing the previous night until all at number twenty-two had gone down to witness the confrontation on the doorstep of number twenty-four. He’d heard nothing after that, though he agreed he could have gone next door, even if the door had been locked, because he had a key. They all had, while they were in residence.

  ‘We all could have done it, but none of us would. Ben is a good bloke. We all appreciate what he’s done.’

  ‘The chap called Mouse doesn’t seem to have been grateful.’

  ‘Oh, Mouse – he’s a basket case,’ said Splat, putting a great distance between himself and Mouse.

  • • •

  ‘So did your sister know Ben Marchant when you and he were going together?’

  ‘Alicia? No, they never met. Alicia was married to Joe Newsome then – the father of Paul and Susannah – though she may have been starting the affair with Randolph. Joe was eminently acceptable socially, but extremely unsatisfactory as a husband and father.’

  Mrs Boulting then took over the answering. She felt strongly on the subject of her elder daughter.

  ‘Alicia has very little to do with us, as you probably gathered earlier. But periodically she descends on us when the meddling itch has nothing better to feed on, and organizes our lives for us. If it’s small matters, we just say “Yes, Alicia” and wait for her to go away – which she does in almost indecent haste, feeling a great glow that she has “put things right”.’

  ‘But if it’s an important matter?’

  ‘If it’s an important matter, like putting Jeremy into a home, of course we have to fight.’

  ‘Why should she want Jeremy put into a home?’

  Mrs Boulting looked at her daughter. Charlie had a sense of great closeness between the once-beauty and this plain, middle-aged woman.

  ‘We’ve discussed this, haven’t we, Carol? Alicia doesn’t like being associated with anything ugly, or anything disturbing. I’m afraid she sees Jeremy as both. She’s always talking about having things done with style. It’s difficult to have style when you don’t have full control of yourself, isn’t it? And since she’s always trying to bully other people into thinking as she does – she has no sense of other people being different, no sense of the beauty of variety and diversity – she periodically comes down here to tell us how much fuller and richer our lives would be if we put Jeremy into care somewhere.’

  ‘Instead of which they would be infinitely emptier and poorer,’ said Carol.

  ‘Of course when that happens we have a row,’ said Mrs Boulting. She clapped her hands. ‘I love a row. Carol is no good at rowing, and hates having one because it disturbs Jeremy. That leaves a great gap in my life. I fill it up with the church – infinite scope for rows there, thank God, and the only reason I go, because I’m not at all sure that I believe in any meaningful way. Then there’s the occasional visit from Alicia to satisfy my war-lust. By now you will have guessed that I thoroughly dislike Alicia.’

  ‘How did you come to grow so far apart?’

  ‘It happened, as I’ve said, when she went away to boarding school. Every holiday we seemed more and more to be strangers to each other . . . But, I don’t know, maybe it was in the make-up, in the genes. My husband’s mother was just the same – a Labour politician who loved organizing people for their own good. It was to have a more disorderly life than that that George married me. And really we did have fun for a while. Parties and drugs and sleeping around – just like young people today. I suppose Alicia is reverting to type by going into politics, even if it is with a different party. And of course it’s the Tories who are the bossy, preachy party now.’

  ‘The question is, why did Mrs Ingram decide to descend on you today?’ said Charlie.

  ‘Right,’ said Mrs Boulting determinedly. ‘And I suspect that on that you may have to enlighten us.’

  • • •

  Sexual intercourse, Philip Larkin believed, began in 1963. It was around that time, in Oddie’s mind, that the British lost the art of bringing up children. Bett Southcott was a malevolent, whingeing example of that process in the late stage.

  ‘No, I don’t have to be on the bleeding streets,’ she said, looking from one to the other of her interrogators with no sense that she was making a bad impression. ‘Or in this bleeding hostel, come to that. It’s my cow of a mother. Can’t stand the idea of me ever having a good time.’

  ‘I shouldn’t have thought sleeping rough represented any sort of good time,’ said Oddie. Once again he had felt WPC Gould stir in irritation on the chair beside him in the dining room of number twenty-four.

  “Course it doesn’t. It’s bleeding rough, and its scary. But I’ll show her. Rules, rules, rules, that’s all I ever had from her. Well, she’ll come round and I’ll go back on my terms. She’s set my gran against me, otherwise I’d have gone to live with her yonks ago.’

  ‘So will you tell me what happened last night?’

  ‘Oh God, last night! They call this place a refuge, and you get the same sort of hassle as you get on the streets.’

  The events of the day before seemed to have revived in her all the resentment and sense of grievance that had made Katy for one her enemy from the beginning of her time at the hostel. It was obvious she was on the streets not because she couldn’t help it, but for a purpose of her own. Either she would achieve it, or she would go back to the genteel comfort of her mother’s house on her mother’s terms. In the meanwhile she did have one piece of useful information. Her account of the confrontation added nothing to what they knew, and was marked by her total lack of interest in anyone other than herself. It was for the period after that that she was able to shed a new ray of light.

  ‘I came in here ten minutes before it happened,’ she said. ‘It could have been me that was attacked. I wanted to make some coffee – we’ve got gas rings in our rooms, but I’d run out of milk. I came to see if there was any in the fridge. Of course there wasn’t a bleeding drop. I complained to Alan, who was slumped in front of the television.’

  ‘Did you hear anything from this room?’

  ‘’Course I did. The door was open. Ben and that Paki girl were talking. Anyway, the front door was locked when I came in, and I locked it again when I went out. So unless someone else came in before it happened and left it unlocked, whoever did it had a key.’

  • • •

  ‘The thing is,’ said Mrs Boulting, ‘she rang last night – oh, about half past nine it would be. Said she’d discovered where Jeremy’s father was. You’d have thought we’d been employing her as a private eye.’

  ‘In fact, we’d never tried to find him,’ said Carol, ‘and had never even told Alicia his name.’

  ‘Nor had she ever expressed much interest in “finding” him before,’ said her mother, ‘beyond a general expression of the view that he ought to help with the special expenses Jeremy’s condition creates. All she knew about him was that photograph, and we took care not to let the name slip.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because of her insatiable need to interfere. Jeremy is Carol’s business, our business. It was our way of saying Keep Out, not letting her know his name. Then suddenly there she is on the phone saying she knows where he is, that Carol should sue him for maintenance, make him contribute to a nursing home for Jeremy.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘Told her to mind her own business, as usual. But she said that from what she’d heard he had had a big lottery win and kept on and on about hi
m paying a hefty whack for his past sins and for avoiding his responsibilities up to now.’

  ‘What did you say to that?’

  ‘Carol took over the call, said “Bully for Ben”, and refused to consider suing him. After a minute or two she simply put the phone down.’

  ‘But not before she’d threatened a visit today,’ said Carol. ‘That was why I put the phone down.’

  ‘Right,’ said Charlie, meditating. ‘But, as I understand it, when she arrived today she had changed her tune?’

  ‘Definitely. Though she couldn’t do a 180-degree turn, because even she could see she would never convince us we had misheard or misunderstood to that extent. But she did her best. Now the talk was all about making cautious contact, telling him about Jeremy, congratulating him on his good fortune, suggesting we meet to discuss his future, and so on. No talk about suing, none of this “he ought to be exposed” rant.’

  ‘Yesterday she was News of the World, today she was Marjorie Proops,’ said Mrs Boulting. ‘Of course she was up to something, both times. But what had happened to change her tune?’

  ‘The matter I came to see her about,’ said Charlie. ‘The attempted murder. If it’s not by now murder itself.’

  The women’s eyes were avid with interest. If he went back to Leeds and arrested Alicia they’d probably go for a celebratory drink at the George Washington that evening. Families – Charlie would never understand them.

  CHAPTER 13

  Refugees

  The very large young man (only he did not give off the feel of being young) sat slumped in his chair on the other side of the dining table and told Oddie that his name was Simon Prentice. It was the first time Oddie had been favoured with a surname by any of the male residents in the refuge. He conjectured that, like Bett Southcott, this boy would eventually return home and resume some sort of place in the community, even if only as a supplicant for any state benefit going.

  With his bulk went a strong feeling of lethargy: Oddie got the impression that what energy the boy had went into servicing his gross body – feeding it, putting clothes on it, propelling it around. The dull eyes, the absence of curiosity or even excitement about the events of the previous night, all suggested a torpor of intellect and spirit equal to the torpor of his body.

  ‘They were all on at me to get my weight down,’ he whined: ‘the doc, the social workers, my parents . . . Never stopped nagging me.’

  ‘Wouldn’t it have been sensible to try?’ Oddie asked.

  Something close to strong emotion came into his face.

  ‘It hurts! It’s terrible wanting food and knowing you won’t be eating for hours and hours, and then there won’t be enough. And people like me never get any sympathy.’

  ‘And that was why you left home?’ asked WPC Gould, incredulous.

  ‘That and other things . . . Well, that was the basic thing.’

  Oddie tried another tack.

  ‘How do you live?’

  ‘Begging . . . People are mean to me, though.’

  ‘You can’t be eating as well as you used to do at home.’

  ‘I manage. And I can eat what I want to.’

  Shoplifting, thought Oddie. His clothes were still respectable enough not to make shop managers automatically suspicious. Probably shoplifting was the ‘other thing’ that had led to the breach with his family: they’d put him on short commons and he’d supplemented it from elsewhere.

  ‘What can you tell me about what happened last night?’

  ‘Nothing . . . Well, I heard all the others going down, so I followed. There was some sort of a scene going on next door, here I mean, but they were all crowding the doorway and I couldn’t see properly. So I went back up to bed.’ He paused, remembering, and then he brought out his real grievance: ‘The police came and woke me up!’

  Oddie had seldom had so strong a sense of death-in-life, of existence being stumbled through rather than lived.

  • • •

  When Charlie arrived back in Leeds he went straight to Portland Terrace. It was already after midday, and Alan was in the sitting room alone, eating a plate of toasted cheese and reading the morning paper.

  ‘Katy’s doing the shopping,’ he said. ‘We usually do it together, but we thought someone should be here.’

  ‘I heard my boss in the front room as I came in. How is the questioning going?’

  ‘They’re getting through them. I don’t suppose they’re getting very much.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Well, I was closest, wasn’t I, and I was too late to see anything.’

  ‘True.’

  ‘And they tend to . . . keep out of things, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘Keep out of things involving the police?’

  ‘Yes. They wouldn’t hurry when they heard the screams.’

  ‘Does that mean they’d lie if they did see anything?’

  ‘It might. But I doubt if they did.’

  Charlie nodded. It made sense.

  ‘Is there any news of . . . your father?’

  Alan raised his eyebrows.

  ‘Ben? I find it difficult to think of him as my father. The operation’s over, he’s still fighting, but it’s touch and go. At least that’s how I interpret what they told me on the phone. They’re so cagey, and the language they use is so – I don’t know – bland.’

  ‘Hospitals have always been a bit like that.’

  ‘It seems to make Ben into a case, not a human being.’

  Charlie sat down and accepted a square of toasted cheese when Alan offered him the plate.

  ‘How did you and Ben meet up again?’

  ‘It wasn’t again. We’d never met at all. He told me that almost the first thing. He’s very honest, Ben.’

  ‘He came looking for you, then?’

  ‘That’s right. He was waiting at the school gates – he’d asked someone to point me out. I was a bit suspicious at first.’

  ‘I should think so.’

  ‘But of course there were lots of others around, so there couldn’t be a problem, and, well, I just looked at him, and he was explaining that he had something very important he wanted to talk to me about, and somehow I just knew he was on the level, knew it was important, and that he was going to be important in my life.’

  Charlie could only think of what might have happened, remembering some of the child-molesters he had known.

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘Went down to the St Mary’s graveyard nearby, sat on one of the seats in the sun, and he told me he was my real father. You’d think I would have disbelieved him, thought he was having me on, but I didn’t: I believed him right from the beginning. Ben’s like that. You know you can trust him.’

  Charlie, from his short conversation with Ben, could understand why Alan felt like that, dangerous though the feeling was. He hoped he was right.

  ‘Did he explain about – well, your birth and that?’

  ‘Oh yes. He was quite open. Said he had had a brief affair with my mother, and that she must have married my father soon after I was born. “All credit to him”, I remember him saying. “He’s your father, and I’m not trying to take his place”. He said he was young and irresponsible at the time.’

  He would have been, Charlie estimated, in his mid twenties when Alan was born. Youngish, but hardly adolescent. He wondered whether Alan had done his mathematics.

  ‘Did he say why he and your mother didn’t marry, or try to make a go of the relationship?’

  Alan shook his head, untroubled.

  ‘Not really. Just said it didn’t work out. But he said he was a bit of a Casanova, and he’d fathered other children. He said he thought one of them was also at Bramsey High.’

  Charlie’s brow was creased.

  ‘I don’t really see why he suddenly contacted you both.’

  ‘Because he was back in the area. He’d been away for years – in Lincolnshire, then managing big estates first in Derbyshire, then near here. Recently he’d ha
d a big lottery windfall, and he realized he’d got children walking the streets of Bramsey that he’d never seen. He said he’d sobered up a lot since his early days, but that thought really made him realize how irresponsible he’d been. Particularly as he was now working with homeless young people. It seemed to him that one day a kid might turn up at the door, and he’d find out that it was his own.’

  ‘Out came the children running’ – the line came to Charlie’s mind from his schooldays.

  All the little boys and girls,

  something, something, something

  Tripping and skipping, ran merrily after

  The wonderful music with shouting and laughter.

  But was the Pied Piper a benign or a malign figure? And what was Ben Marchant?

  ‘Did he ask you to get in touch with Katy Bourne?’

  ‘Oh no. That wouldn’t have been right. He talked to her himself. But a couple of days later we all three went and had tea and cakes together in a café.’ He thought seriously about the experience. ‘It was sort of odd, really. There was this girl who I’d never looked at twice at school, and she turned out to be my sister.’

  ‘What did you talk about?’

  ‘Oh, home, and school, and what we wanted to do when we left school. Ben talked about setting up the refuge, what he was trying to do here. Invited us round to see it.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Charlie had known he would do that. But was he using their adolescent enthusiasm and conscience as a bait, or just providing it with a natural outlet?

  ‘And then, when he had to go and cook the meal here, Katy and I sat on for a bit talking, then we walked part of the way home together, and we – ’

  ‘Decided to leave home and come and work in the refuge?’

  Alan shook his head vigorously.

  ‘No. It wasn’t like that at all. But we both felt we should have been told about Ben.’

  ‘Did it occur to you that your mothers may have known very little, and none of it recent?’

  ‘They could have told us what they knew. They could have told us the truth. But we didn’t get all steamed up about it, and we didn’t decide anything. It was just that . . . coming to help Ben was in the air.’