Undercurrent

by Frances Fyfield

  In the midst of the morning's work displacement activity by reverie, Edward removed his gaze from the ceiling cracks and found Henry sitting on the opposite side of the desk as if he belonged. He was wearing the same jacket but it was shrunk and the texture and colour had changed into something vaguely reptilian. It made him occupy the chair as if he was a person in a straitjacket unable to hold his arms to his own sides.

  Either it had shrunk or the man had grown. He looked pathetically grubby and out of place in a jacket like that, but he had obviously wielded either authority or stealth to get past that phalanx of bosoms downstairs and in one moment of wry observation, Henry Evans was elevated in Edward's estimation into the ranks of clients he liked rather than tolerated. He leaned across the desk, arm extended for a handshake, as if he had been expecting him to call. Henry's attempt to reciprocate was awkward enough to send flying a pile of correspondence which both of them ignored. There were no apologies or awkward attempts to pick it up and Edward approved of all economies of effort. Both settled back into their chairs and regarded one another frankly.

  'Do you ever think,' Henry asked, 'that you might have missed your vocation?'

  'Frequently, yes. But I've very little idea of what it might have been, so it doesn't cause me much distress. One always assumed that a vocation would obviate boredom, but it doesn't follow, does it?' 'No, it doesn't. Scientists are bored; so are millionaires, I guess . . .'

  'Carpenters must be bored. Policemen must be bored. Can't be a thinking man alive who doesn't imagine he could be doing better or different. I shall go to my grave mourning the fact that I haven't had enough fun. Or caught enough fish. What can I do for you?'

  'Cup of coffee would be nice.'

  Edward went to the door and bellowed down the stairs, 'COFFEE! TWO!' 'It might work; he said, resuming his chair and the endless search for a cigarette. 'The women here don't consider it beneath their dignity to make coffee. Perhaps you would have preferred tea?'

  'No. Thank you. I just wanted to run through a few facts with you.'

  'I thought you might,' Edward said, immediately understanding the subject. 'All we can ever rely on, facts."

  'I was beginning to prefer instincts.'

  'Bugger instincts. They're almost as bad as principles. As soon as I hear somebody say, it's a matter of principle, I want to scream. Likewise when they say I feel this is right, or I've got a gut instinct about that person or this. At the end of the day, it's rarely anything to do with guts, only money, which you don't keep in your gut unless you're very odd indeed.'

  The coffee arrived. Ineffectual coasters were produced to guard the wrecked desktop and a plump woman floated away in a waft of splendid perfume.

  Henry struggled out of his jacket. Leaning forward to pick up a mug would otherwise have been impossible.

  'Which is why; Edward continued, 'I can't detect any alternative explanation for the untimely death of Harry Chisholm other than the one given. No one else had any motive for killing him, especially not a financial motive. If there was a cousin and an inheritance I could see it, but there isn't. There's desperation; there's pity for a life which is not going to unfold well, there's a woman at her wits' end having a moment of madness with a child who is being naughty and there's no other motive at all. An instinctive killing. Nagged at me for a long time before you came along.

  Nags me every day. My own bloody instinct, telling me she was far too controlled a woman to lose it like that. Or to have let that child out of her sight.' A plume of cigarette smoke curled towards the yellow ceiling. Henry lit one too. Smoking was infectious.

  'What I see as inherently unlikely; Henry said, 'is this child who hated the cold going out on his own.

  Was it raining, do you know? I can't find anyone who can tell me if it was raining. Seems important to me: less reason than ever for him to go out, more reason for him to slip. And the woman downstairs can't remember that he ever did go out without his mother unless someone came to take him. I know it wasn't raining when he was found, it says so in the case papers.' The coffee was intensely good. Fuelled by coffee like this, Henry could understand how Edward survived a day in this uncomfortable room. He would probably float from task to task in his own, peculiar haze.

  'Good Lord, man, the weather changes every five minutes here or haven't you noticed?

  Nobody could possibly remember. And suppose he was driven out?

  A screaming row about nothing or something, an order, GET OUT - something of the kind happens in my house once a week. The mother being dictatorial, cruel even. You see, Mr Evans, you may have to accept that your own blundering investigations, if such you call them, may reveal Francesca Chisholm in a worse light than ever. I hope you've thought of that. By the way, what happened to your jacket?'

  'I don't think it's even mine,' Henry said. 'I was on my way to buy another. And a hat. All those thrift shops.. .'

  'Thrift? Oh I see. I get it. Second hand.' The slightly dreamy look of an enthusiast came over Edward's face and it occurred to Henry to guess the source of his ill-fitting clothes. He could see Edward throwing out the whole wardrobe at the end of each month and starting again and the thought of doing such a thing was appealing.

  'And it crossed my mind,' Henry went on relentlessly, 'that all kinds of junk end up in thrift shops' he did not add, such as you wear - 'and if I hunted around, I might find Francesca's things. She threw out her clothes as well as his and where did they go?

  They had to go somewhere. This isn't the kind of place where people throw things away.'

  'Good point, but I doubt there'd be any of it left by now. Were there any other facts you wanted to mention?

  And while we're on the subject, I think our client has faxed us from prison. I faxed her, she faxed Maggie. She's allowed to do that. Only to her lawyers.

  Old lawyers don't die, you know, they simply lose their appeal.'

  'Does she write it herself? What does she say?' He wanted to see her handwriting. Edward scuttled beneath the desk to emerge the other side among the pile of spilled correspondence, clutching the shiny paper of a fax in one hand and a cigarette in the other. 'What does it say?' Henry repeated.

  Edward adjusted his glasses, squinted at crumpled paper. Henry? Who's Henry? he read, his mouth forming the words which he failed to speak as he scrunched the thing into a ball and thrust it into his pocket. 'Says nothing,' he sighed theatrically. 'The fucking fax machine only works on Fridays.' He skipped round the desk and slumped back into his chair which swivelled with a mind of its own and spun him round so that his back was to Henry and he faced the fish. Henry could see tufts of his black hair above the chairback and see the curl of smoke.

  'There's something very odd going on with Uncle Joe,' he announced. 'There seem to be two of him. I think it might be in everyone's interest if you went to see one of them.'

  Edward was far more articulate when not facing an audience. Henry could empathize with that. 'Uncle Joe?' he queried.

  'Disgraced Uncle Joe. Whom Francesca visited regularly. She refused to take notice of tarnished reputations. Angela Hulme took over visiting a few months back and I wonder why? Sits and talks for hours to someone, I'm told, but whoever it is, it ain't a Chisholm. It's a man who picks up strangers, So you'll do very well. Do your shopping first. I would.'

  There was just about enough in this High Street to keep a smallish mind happy. A true city sophisticate might think otherwise, but Bond Street was a long way off, in another country entirely and it was another person than the one Maggie now recognized in herself who had agonized over which neutral shade of carpet for which room in a branch of John Lewis big enough to cover the whole of this row. There were exquisitely furnished houses in Warbling and, occasionally, well dressed people who did not do their buying here, and it was when they replaced their finery that the rest had the benefit. The richer of Warbling (the larger houses behind the town and out of the wind; the buildings with lawns, away from the warren of narrow streets of mixed fortu
nes adjacent to the seafront) dutifully recycled clothes, artefacts, pots and pans, linens, redundant toys, but mostly clothes, into the charity shops.

  There was a time of her life when she would not have been seen dead inside a charity shop and Maggie regarded her present pleasure in their very existence as an indicator of how much she had changed: she loved them without a thought and so did everyone else. It was almost mandatory to explore them on a weekly basis; it was risk-free shopping; it was a common denominator for the elderly retired in Harris tweed jostling politely with impecunious young mothers with babes in arms, each with a different avenue to explore and nobody minded the fact that windows would be re-hung with dead Aunt Ethel's velvet curtains, or that Jimmy went to school in the cast-off clothes of someone two forms higher.

  The same garments were unrecognizable on a different body; they changed with a new owner. Reborn, rejuvenated, given a lease of life, Peter said. The shops were an acceptable aspect of change, decay and death, but there was another thing about the clothes. Displayed on hangers, crushed together like a crowd trying to get out of a door, it was impossible to visualize who might have worn them last. There were uniformly coiffed, grey-haired ladies who wore the stock and counted out change with great precision, sharing the excitement of bargains. Maggie had a distinct preference for one shop out of the five, Timothy preferred Oxfam for the towels and sheets, while she favoured Age Concern for varied clothing and the manager's frivolous inability to turn away any kind of hat.

  There were better things to do; she knew it, but she could not do what she had set out to do

  – find Angela - and she did not want to digest her encounter with Tanya; she did not want to do very much at all.

  It was a state of non-specific indecision, halfway to misery and useless introspection, so she pressed her nose to the window of the shop. Dear God, there was a swimsuit in there, draped artfully over a plastic plant and topped with a deerstalker, dreams of winter and summer combined.

  Someone would buy it to encourage the weather to change, and if it didn't fit, It didn't matter.

  Seasons did not dictate stock; winter coats were next to summer cottons, woolly scarves along with beads and boots marking time with sandals on the floor.

  Maggie loved an organized mess.

  New hats, right at the back there, hats left over from forgotten weddings and christenings and never kept for funerals, all the more interesting for being dented.

  She needed a hat like she needed a hole in the head.

  She needed prayers, not a hat, but Henry needed a hat and as long as somebody needed a hat, there was reason to look.

  Think of the devil and he arrives; never was the saying truer than in a small town. Pausing for a minute, she caught Henry's reflection in the glass, standing beside her looking through the window in perplexity, as if her thinking of him had conjured his presence. He had noticed the dirt on his leather jacket and was trying to rub it off. She touched his arm; the material felt rough and ruined and his arms were held stiffly. He smiled his infectious, forgiving smile and she found herself smiling in return. Oh dear, what had she done to him.

  'Were you waiting for me?'

  'Nope, but I'm glad you're here. I've never been inside a thrift shop. Don't know the code.'

  'Henry, you haven't lived. There is no code.'

  There was a surge of warmth and a draught of smells. From the makeshift changing room at the back there came a bellow of laughter before a woman emerged in a skirt which touched her ankles and gaped round the middle. Henry could see how this was a place where looking ridiculous and being too fat was a cause for celebration and perhaps in this town, the beautiful people were few and far between. He eased himself out of the jacket which saturation or something had wrecked to the extent that it had changed in colour as well as in size and made him feel fatter than anyone.

  His eye was drawn to the deerstalker, he reached for it and put it on his head. It was oversized for a large man and the brim descended to his nose to land on the bridge of his glasses, so that he had to tilt his head back in order to see. A very silly person was visible in the cheval glass, looking like a retard newly released from an institution which could have kept him in, while next to him, made a foot higher by the addition of a large black hat with an excrescence of veil and a broken feather, Maggie peered at them both with her head at a similar angle.

  The black hat was like a piece of broad stovepiping, the net which exploded from the top a desiccated bird's nest. The feather had once been turquoise.

  They looked at their own images seriously and nodded in unison. The hats wobbled. Slowly, Maggie removed her hat with a flourish and handed it to him.

  He took off the deerstalker and handed it to her. Each donned the other hat. Sizes were deceptive. She wore his hat halfway down her face with the peak turned to the side, giving her the profile of a duck, while the stovepipe sat on his crown like a saucer on top of a cup.

  'I'll take two,' Henry said.

  'No sillier than the hat you lost,' Maggie said.

  He handed her a scarlet beret which made her look like a tired streetwalker in a 1950s French film, while the blue Breton cap she handed him gave him the look of an idiot savant. The balaclava he tried next was so difficult he knew he was as honour bound to buy it as never to wear it. Released from temporary blindness, he saw Maggie, wearing a tartan cap, leaning against the counter and shaking silently while immediately behind her the manager was in the act of selling Henry's leather jacket. He watched without protest as it was carried out of the door by a man several sizes smaller than himself and wondered why he had ever liked it, and there was a moment as the door closed when he seriously wondered if it was his coat at all.

  'How did you know I lost a hat, Maggie?' he asked over his shoulder as, now well into the swing of things, he looked at a crowded rail of unattractive and musty-smelling woollens. There was a way of behaving in here which would not be useful in other shops.

  Here, you could treat the clothes as if they were already yours and nobody gave a damn.

  'You told me,' she said airily, and he tried to remember if he had.

  He found a jacket: brown, serviceable and cleanly nondescript, seven dollars and big enough for that sum to be able to shrink with impunity. She had bought nothing and said that was not the point. To the side of the lady counting change and yelling comments into the tiny changing area beyond, there was a wodge of scarves spilling from a basket. He sorted through them, feeling the harsh texture of synthetic fabrics, and then his fingers encountered something softer. Pulling at it, he saw the edge of a cream, embroidered shawl.

  He felt the texture between his fingers, thrust it back and then pulled it out again. It was old and yellowed, but still soft. Henry held it against the light and saw the holes and a label stating £5.

  No wonder it had not moved: £5 was a lot in a thrift shop. He seemed to remember he had spent much more than that, even in India, twenty years ago.

  He fancied it smelt of heat, spices and dust. Maggie had stopped laughing and looked at him with concern. Tears stung his eyes. 'Nobody should be thrown out, he said. 'Nor their belongings either.'

  'Would you want them all to die with you, Henry?'

  'No. I hate waste.'

  'Time we talked properly. Henry. No messing.'

  'Time you stopped fobbing me off.'

  'Yes.'

  The jacket felt inexpensive rather than cheap and he felt it gave him anonymity. Now that his shoes were broken in and his hair unstyled he could meld into this street by the simple expedient of wearing someone else's clothes. Maybe he would begin to think and talk in the same roundabout way, never quite getting to the point, like they did. People who looked like Edward seemed to command respect, people who looked like him certainly did not. No one would know him now. Out in the street, the sunlight blinded him. It ricocheted off the wet ground and straight into his eyes. He stuffed the balaclava into his pocket and resolved to get rid of it soon, lifted his
face to the light and sniffed in sheer pleasure at the sensation of relative warmth. Maggie pulled at his arm and he resisted the irritated urge to shrug her off, not because he didn't like her close, for all her cryptic commentary, but really, she should stop leading him round. He wasn't a dog.

  'This way,' she said, urgently.

  'Which way?' And he must stop asking questions.

  She pulled, he resisted, bumped into a person made featureless by the reflected light.

  'Sorry,' he said, automatically.

  'Angela,' Maggie said formally. 'How nice. I was just coming to see you.'

  The figure of Angela Hulme recoiled, shopping bags rustling angrily.

  'Oh, really? Don't bother. And don't bring him.'

  She leaned forward, thrusting her face into Maggie’s, close enough to exchange breath, speaking through clenched teeth, loud enough for everyone to hear.

  'Do you know what he was doing on Sunday? He was putting his dirty hands up my little girl's jumper, that's what he was doing. He won't leave her alone.

  He wants locking up. So keep him away or I'm getting him arrested. Are you listening to me?'

  Henry saw himself captured in a brief reflection, in the plate glass window of the betting shop on the other side of the road, where a posse of men were visible only because their noses were planted against the glass. He looked like a shifty specimen himself and all he got was the impression of a dozen sets of cold eyes. The urge to make a face and stick out his tongue was quick in passing.

  The population moving through the bottleneck at the junction of two streets parted like a wave against a breakwater. This time, Henry allowed himself to be guided away. He did not feel quite so anonymous any more.

  Inside these walls, dress becomes important. 'Taking care' with appearance is encouraged and we have our own clothes. Taking care of washing and clothes is tantamount to taking care of self, not letting go entirely, although the thought is tempting. There's a sharp division in the reactions to compliments, so that if I were to say to my friend in the kitchen, 'You look nice', the response could be pleasure, hostile suspicion or a denial of looking nice at all, accompanied by the explanation that the dress, skirt, whatever are really pieces of shit. This may mirror the generally low self-esteem: I'm not a shrink; I don't know, but I still think a compliment is worth the risk of a slap in the face.