Dead Gorgeous

by Peter Lovesey

  They shook hands. He must have been ten years Antonia’s senior, possibly more. Redheaded people carry their age well.

  Rose was trying hard to place the accent. She hadn’t expected a foreigner.

  ‘I’ve never seen such an amazing fridge.’

  ‘You like to see my high power vacuum cleaner?’

  Antonia put a restraining hand on Hector’s shoulder. In her heels she was cruelly taller than he. ‘Hec, my cherub, you’re boring my friend already. Why don’t you take her into the sitting room and talk about something unmechanical while I brew up my delicious coffee?’

  Out of earshot in the sitting room Rose confided to Hector that after all she would be interested to hear about his work.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Certain.’

  ‘I thought so.’ He pulled two chairs together and gestured to her to be seated. ‘Antonia has heard it many times before. It’s not news to her no more. You know, Rosie, engineering is in my blood. My father he had the first motor car in Prague. When I was still in short trousers he showed me how to strip. You understand?’

  ‘Take the engine to pieces?’

  ‘And assemble again. Clever boy, oily fingers, I went to technical school. Worked in a motor car factory seven years, made enough ackers to kiss my father goodbye, go to America. Detroit. Bloody hard work. Making automobiles by day, aeroplane parts by night. I worked six to midnight for a small guy starting up. Four, maybe five hours sleep, but no matter. This was one hell of a good time to be in aero-engineering. I had a brilliant idea for a carburettor nobody thought of. So my friend says, Hec, why don’t you give up making automobiles and be my partner? Half-share in the business. We shake hands and sign a paper. In two years, big profit. Big expansion. I expanded, too. Don’t smile. I mean I got married. Maudie, a sweet girl from Detroit who wanted only one thing – to get the hell out of there. So I told my partner the problem. He bought me out and we sailed to England. 1931. Mauretania.’

  ‘Romantic.’

  Hector winked. ‘Good business, too, Rosie. Plenty of customers for aero parts. I made the best carburettors Britain ever saw. I started a small factory in Surbiton, handy for Vickers. In seven years I had customers all over. I built factories in Birmingham, Southampton, Oxford. Many orders. Then the war came along. Aircraft production went crazy. Lord Beaverbrook cried out for carburettors. Everyone wanted carburettors. A. V. Roe, Vickers Supermarine, Handley Page, Fairey.’

  Hector was warming to his story. The cat made a run for the door as Antonia came in with the coffee.

  ‘Has he bored you stiff with his carburettors, darling? He talks about them the way other people talk about their operations.’

  ‘I find it fascinating.’

  ‘Liar. You don’t have to stand on ceremony with us. Hec, do something useful and hand round the biscuits. I bet he hasn’t said a word about your unhappy experience. You’re all dressed up in black and he hasn’t even asked why. You’d have to arrive in a hearse for him to take any interest and then he’d have the bonnet up to look at the carburettor. Hector, my friend Rose lost her husband last week, and when I say lost I mean he fell off the platform in the tube.’

  ‘The tube. Oh, Jesus. Six hundred and thirty volts.’

  ‘See the way his mind works?’

  ‘It doesn’t offend me.’

  Rose smiled at Hector. To be fair, he’d looked distinctly concerned when he spoke of all those volts. If there was offence to be taken, it was at being invited to discuss his shortcomings in front of him as if he were deaf or stupid. He may have been socially out of step, but he had energy and honesty. She liked the disarming way he’d told his story, without the pretended modesty that most Englishmen seemed to feel was necessary when speaking about their achievements. He’d earned his fortune through hard work and enterprise and wasn’t ashamed to say so.

  Now for some curious reason he was looking at Rose with awe.

  He refused to be intimidated by Antonia. He found a way of excluding her just as blatantly as she’d talked over him. ‘I feel close to you, Rosie. You and I, we both had the same experience.’

  Antonia thrust a cup of coffee towards Rose. ‘He means his wife had an accident, too. Careful how you drink this stuff. It’s out of a bottle. I won’t blame you if you spit it out.’

  She took a sip. ‘It’s not at all bad.’

  Hector held out the biscuits. ‘These help to disguise the taste. She drowned, my Maudie.’

  ‘How dreadful.’ In common decency she felt obliged to react as if she hadn’t heard the information before. She just hoped Antonia wouldn’t take her up on it.

  ‘It was in a swimming pool. In the war I had this country house in Hampshire for weekends. Nice grounds. Nice pool. Long way from Portsmouth and Southampton. Pretty safe from bombing. Our friends came sometimes. Maudie liked to give parties.’ He glanced across at Antonia, which was a mistake because she slickly took over the story.

  ‘She’d had a skinful, and that’s no exaggeration, darling. She’d been on rum and peppermint, of all things. She couldn’t have swum a stroke if she’d tried.’

  ‘Did anyone see what happened?’

  ‘Most of us were on the terrace dancing to the gramophone. One of the staff spotted her lying on the bottom soon after midnight. Six feet down.’

  ‘Six feet six.’

  ‘There speaks the engineer again. Hector, dear, you shouldn’t say things like that. It gives an appalling impression, as if you didn’t care. Of course we both know that couldn’t be further from the truth. It wasn’t his fault she was so depressed.’

  Hector gave a nod. ‘Time to change the subject, eh? Rosie, do you like to cook?’

  ‘Well, when I could get eggs and things, yes.’

  ‘We can get plenty. Butter. Sugar.’

  Antonia sighed. ‘There you go again.’

  ‘What’s wrong now?’

  ‘Rosie’s going to think we’re on the black market, that’s what’s wrong. The fact is, Rose, that I’m the world’s worst cook, so we generally go to restaurants. I never get through my ration books.’

  Hector grinned. ‘Biggest fridge in London. Bugger all in it.’

  He got a glare from Antonia.

  Rose laughed. Why take offence? She and Antonia had heard plenty worse in the old days. She was suddenly aware how much those few minutes with Hector had relaxed her. She’d been terribly strung-up before.

  She smiled happily. ‘I don’t blame you. I’d bloody well eat out as well if I could afford it.’

  ‘Why don’t you come out with us, then?’ Antonia suggested.

  ‘Oh, I didn’t mean that.’

  ‘Don’t be so coy. We’d like your company, wouldn’t we, Hec?’

  ‘But of course! Tomorrow?’ His sharp eyes shone at the prospect.

  She was ambushed by their solidarity. ‘I couldn’t possibly before the funeral. Perhaps later in the week?’

  ‘Saturday.’

  Soon after this was agreed, Hector had to answer the phone. Antonia got up.

  ‘You look all in, darling. I’ll drive you back to Pimlico.’

  In the Bentley, Rose tried to launch a bland, undemanding conversation.

  ‘I love your house.’

  ‘Who wouldn’t?’ Antonia didn’t pause. She came straight out with it. ‘What do you think of my husband?’

  The tension clamped Rose again like pincers. What was she expected to say? ‘I didn’t realize you’d married a foreigner. He’s so different from most Englishmen.’

  ‘God, I hope so!’

  ‘He made me welcome.’

  ‘He would, so long as you listen to his tedious life story and coo at intervals. I’m sick of it. It drives me up the wall. That and his vacuum cleaners.’

  ‘Do you think he knows?’

  ‘Of course he does. He’s so full of himself that he doesn’t give a shit.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Sweetie, I’m not fishing for sympathy. I didn’t wast
e any on you, did I?’

  Rose looked away, not wanting to go into what Antonia had done in lieu of sympathy. ‘Doesn’t it get dark early now? It’s not even five o’clock.’

  ‘I want an end to it.’

  ‘A divorce?’

  ‘No chance of that. It’s against his religion. He’s a Catholic. Doesn’t go to church or eat fish on Fridays, but when it comes to divorce, he’s unshakeable. It’s against God’s law. That’s how he was brought up.’

  ‘Have you asked him? If it doesn’t mean so much to him now, perhaps he’d see his way to giving you a divorce.’

  ‘What use is that to me? I’d lose everything and have to pay the costs.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’d be the guilty party, wouldn’t I?’

  ‘You mean . . . ?’

  ‘You know what I mean. Let’s face it, Rose. I’ve got a lover. To put it in legal claptrap I’ve committed adultery on a number of occasions. No prizes for guessing the name of the fascinating man.’

  ‘Does Hector know?’

  ‘He turns a blind eye. The only way it would come to his attention is if he found us at it in his precious fridge, or doing something naughty with the vacuum cleaner.’

  ‘There may be other grounds. Has he ever been cruel to you?’

  ‘Hector?’ She found this amusing.

  Now Rose had started, she felt obliged to continue. ‘Is there any chance that he’s been with someone else? There must be plenty of designing women who’d fancy a man with his money.’ She wished immediately that she’d kept her mouth shut.

  ‘Like I did, you mean?’ Antonia let the question hang in the air just long enough to give Rose a wrench of embarrassment, then dismissed it. ‘No, darling, no vultures circling overhead. I’d know.’

  Mercifully the conversation stopped for the traffic at Piccadilly Circus. When they’d crossed to the Haymarket, Rose changed to a different tack.

  ‘I’d be glad if you’d put me down in Victoria Street. I’d like to get these documents to the undertaker.’

  ‘Whatever you want, my dear.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  Antonia added, ‘By the way, I shan’t be coming to Barry’s funeral.’

  ‘That’s all right. I didn’t expect you.’

  ‘It doesn’t mean I’ve lost interest.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘And no disrespect meant to Barry.’ She slowed for a traffic light. ‘It’s a burial, I take it?’

  ‘Yes. Just a few people.’

  ‘Brompton Cemetery?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Poor old Barry. Grounded at last.’ The light changed to green. ‘I’m going to have Hector cremated.’

  12

  On the night before the funeral Rose was surprised to get a phone call from Rex Ballard, one of the Kettlesham Heath pilots, a Squadron Leader who it turned out was still serving there. He had heard about Barry’s death from his sister who worked in the coroner’s office. He remembered Rose, of course. He said he would be driving up from Suffolk in the morning with three old chums from Battle of Britain days. Rose tried explaining that it was to be a quiet family funeral. Rex was not to be put off. In that case, he said, there would be room at the graveside for a few old friends who wanted to pay their respects, wouldn’t there?

  The ‘old friends’ had grown to fourteen by the time they gathered around the grave in Brompton Cemetery. Three civil service people from the Stationery Office who Rose had never seen before stood rigidly at one end with their furled umbrellas in front of them like reversed rifles. The Irish couple who lived two doors away in Oldfield Gardens and never missed a thing had turned up, thoughtfully with only two of their six children. Also, wearing black armbands, one of the barmen and two regulars from The Orange, where Barry used to drink. Then the quartet from the RAF, stouter and redder in the face than they’d looked in 1940 and now without a moustache between them.

  The family group consisted of Barry’s stepsister Daphne and her obnoxious husband Ronald, Rose’s parents and Aunt Joan. And Rose herself.

  Her father had offered to read the service. She’d said at the risk of hurting him that she would find the whole thing too distressing. She preferred to have the words spoken by a priest she didn’t know. Daddy nodded and said he understood. Rose hoped to God that he didn’t and never would.

  Even then it was an ordeal going through the motions of lament with them beside her and everyone watching for evidence of grief from the wretched widow. She kept her head bowed and bit her lip and dabbed her face with a hankie. They were genuine tears. The ritual hardly touched her, but she wept for all the lies she would be forced to tell before the afternoon was out.

  They all said afterwards how splendidly brave she had been.

  Her mother and aunt had helped her prepare some food at the house for after the funeral. Spam sandwiches mostly, plates of digestive biscuits and slabs of trench cake. The cake was her mother’s contribution, from a First World War recipe that the Ministry of Food had disinterred for the Second. It was made without eggs and Mother rashly announced that the original trench cakes had kept for three months on the Western Front. No one enquired why they hadn’t been eaten in all that time, but when she offered to pass the recipe on there was an embarrassing silence. Only the Irish children tried any.

  Much against her desire, Rose remained the centre of attention. Offers of support were showered on her.

  ‘I want you to know, my dear, that we at the Stationery Office wouldn’t want you to get into difficulties. If there’s anything that needs attention, my name is Gascoigne and this is McGill and our young colleague here is Tremlett. Remember, won’t you? Anything under the sun.’

  She had an engaging picture of Gascoigne, McGill and Tremlett under the sun, bare-chested on the roof replacing the war-damaged tiles.

  ‘So kind.’

  ‘Not at all. Barry was held in the highest esteem at the depot. We shall not look upon his like again, as the Bard expressed it. Now that we know each other . . .’

  The bonhomie was excessive, like Victory Day all over again. Why am I so cynical? Rose asked the kettle as she filled it.

  As for the RAF mourners, they had their own way of combating depression. They took turns going out to the car to top up with something from a bottle. Out of respect for the cloth, as they put it (meaning Daddy, who could see very well what was going on, and wouldn’t have been averse to a nip), they used teacups and let it be known that they were drinking Russian tea.

  ‘Never would have guessed your Pop was a parson, Rose. You should have told us, you know.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Freddie here would have moderated his language.’

  ‘Did he say something? I didn’t hear him.’

  ‘Lord, no. He’s been the soul of discretion today. I’m talking about the war. In the ops room. The things you heard must have made your toes curl.’

  Rose shook her head. ‘Let’s make no bones about it, we were all living on our nerves. I said a few strong words myself when I was pressed.’

  ‘My dear, I never heard them pass your lips. But you’re right about the pressures. Say what you like about our flying skills, we needed the luck of Old Nick to survive. Dear old Barry, rest his soul, was in the thick of it and came through triumphant every blessed time. Even when he got in trouble he limped back somehow, hours late, with that beautiful fatuous grin on his face. He was indestructible.’

  ‘So were you, as it turned out.’

  ‘Yes, but we could all name plenty of good lads who didn’t make it home. If there’s any sense in it all, we’re bound to ask why we were spared.’

  ‘Rex, I’d better get round with the tea before it gets cold.’

  ‘Just a moment, dear. I’m shockingly hamfisted with words, I know. Always was. What I’m getting at is this. Somehow we knew Barry would always come back. He gave you that sense of living a charmed life. So when I was told he’d fallen off a railway platform, I couldn’t believe my ears. The
Piccadilly Line? Dear old Barry? That’s not like him, I said, not like him at all.’

  ‘Accidents happen all the time.’

  ‘Not to the likes of Barry. To tell the truth, I still haven’t taken it in properly. Standing there in the cemetery this afternoon I kept thinking, this isn’t right. Any minute I’m going to feel a tap on my shoulder and I’ll turn round and it’ll be old Barry in his flying kit having a bloody good laugh at us.’

  One of the others, Peter Bliss, had been getting restless. ‘Put a sock in it, Rex.’

  ‘What’s up?’

  ‘You’re talking baloney.’

  ‘Pardon me, old son, but it’s a fact. Barry always came back. Always.’

  ‘This is hardly the time and place to go on about it.’

  Rose gave Bliss a nod of thanks and moved off to fill the teapot again. She found her mother in the kitchen washing plates with Aunt Joan. An opportunity, Mummy had decided, for a heart-to-heart.

  ‘Now that it’s over, we want you to come home with us for at least a few weeks, my pet. You look so dreadful, I can hardly believe it’s my own daughter.’

  ‘Mummy, I appreciate the thought.’

  ‘It’s more than a thought, dear. I absolutely insist, and so does your father.’

  ‘I know you mean well, but it’s out of the question. There’s too much to be done here.’

  ‘Nothing that can’t wait. I couldn’t possibly go away tonight and leave you alone in this dreadful . . . I mean, in this house with . . . with so many memories.’

  Aunt Joan came tactfully to her sister’s aid. ‘It was that face on the hoarding across the road that upset us. So depressing for you to look out on all the time.’

  ‘The widow? I’ve got used to her now. She doesn’t bother me in the least. Really.’

  ‘As if we haven’t all seen enough horrors since the war ended.’

  ‘I’ll manage perfectly well by myself, Mummy.’

  ‘It isn’t as if you have friends you can turn to. I don’t mind telling you I don’t take to those Irish people.’