A Clear Conscience

by Frances Fyfield

  Helen was instantly charmed.

  ‘And of course,’ Cath continued, ‘I could help you with the garden.’ That made Helen defensive again. The garden was hers.

  ‘I like doing the garden,’ she said. ‘It’s the housework I can’t stand.’

  ‘That’s all right then,’ said the woman mildly, in a quiet, almost whispering voice. ‘I was only suggesting it because Mrs Eliot said I should.’ She was suddenly disconcertingly chatty, as if she now knew the worst and could cope with anything else. ‘Now, when it comes to dirt, you should see what Mrs Eliot’s lot can do. Amazing. Bathroom and kitchen look like bomb sites most mornings. And what those kids take to bed is anyone’s guess.’ She spoke of them with a kind of urgent fondness and reverence, shaking her head. Helen felt a guilty treachery to find herself so avidly curious about the true state of Emily’s house. It was like looking in windows: she could not suppress it.

  ‘Tell me more,’ she demanded.

  Mark sometimes went to bed in his wellington boots, could she believe that? Yes, she could. Jane had learned to make pastry recently, then thrown a lump of it at the old-fashioned extractor fan in Emily’s kitchen, there were still clods of it stuck to the ceiling and probably getting mouldy in corners. Along with the fragments of boiled egg which Mrs Eliot had left on the stove while she got embroiled in one of her incessant phone conversations. Boiled eggs go off like bombs, Cath remarked. And then there was the grill pan with fat in the bottom, set alight when Mr Eliot had forgotten his bacon; the marks of that joined all the others. Helen was secretly delighted. It was a relief to know that Emily’s fine house also carried scars.

  ‘Well, do you want me to come or not?’ Cath asked.

  Helen did, very much.

  ‘I can do Tuesdays and Thursdays, say two hours in the afternoon. You’re a long way from Mrs Eliot, but it’s halfway home for me, same bus route. Number fifty-nine.’

  Her voice was peculiarly flat when she stopped talking about the Eliots. She seemed in no hurry to leave, but stood looking round the walls of Helen’s living room with slow pleasure. ‘I do like it here,’ she said.

  On her way to Bailey’s, driving with careless abandon, Helen felt as if she had passed some kind of test. And, as far as the Eliots were concerned, achieved some kind of equality. The Eliots were a couple of very few friends she and Bailey could call mutual to them both. Usually, it was difficult to share friends with Bailey. He was not a sociable animal, despite his great and diffident charm, and there were hazards in taking him out and about among friends who thought policemen were dangerous freaks. He would find himself attacked for a parking fine, sneered at for the release of a terrorist, forced to defend himself for the latest police scandal, cross-examined for ancient miscarriages of justice; and although he ignored it all, she could not. Many a supper party had ended in awkward silence, with the pair of them relieved to depart. He was too proud a creature to be baited like a bear. But with Alistair Eliot there was the firm foundation of professional experience and mutual respect. They had all shared the same cases and similar concerns, while Emily shared gossip. The charismatic Eliots had no preconceptions about whom they should and should not know. Alistair’s father was a bishop: Bailey had suggested there was something loosely Christian in their ever-open door.

  When we next go there, Helen was thinking, I must remember to look at the kitchen ceiling. And ask Em why she thinks Cath smells of soap.

  The number 59 bus route rose like a sluggish wave in the depths of north-east London, where Cath lived, and moved with the speed of a canal boat right through the centre; it dawdled around the glories of South Kensington, where the Eliots lived, and then over to the depressed south. The depot, into which she had often ridden on the top deck, remaining where she was until the bus turned back again, always saying, if asked, how she had gone to sleep or there was something she had forgotten to buy, was a place she loved for the serried rows of buses, coaches and double-deckers standing under the high roof like so many Thomas the Tank Engines. The fumes filled her nostrils, but the place was cool in summer. There was something immutable about the number 59. They were all such old buses with conductors and drivers, never the newer, one-man-operated type which she hated for their impersonality and the rude noise of their brakes audible from her bedroom on a quiet night. When the number 59 had gone in for a cream and maroon livery, she had simply sat up straighter in her seat, as proud as any shareholder. If anyone got on the bus and refused to pay, Cath was incensed, even if their inability was accidental or their condition clearly wretched. Cath despised people who did not pay their way. She did not think she was poorly paid, abhorring those who were poorer still.

  Joe was well paid, he had not wanted her to get a job. Between you and me girl, they would show ‘them’, a thing or two, the bastards. She thought of ‘them’ whenever the bus took her into Kensington where Joe worked. Not really a public house, more of a hybrid between that and a wine-and-cocktail bar, standing in a mews and, at this time of year, obscured by blooming window-boxes, flowering tubs and trailing plants which covered the white walls in a blaze of pink, blue, white and green. Busy Lizzie and ivy added an air of discreet and tasteful attraction, underlining the promise of privacy.

  By this point in its journey, the number 59 had lumbered into the undisputed territory of ‘them’, Joe’s adopted territory and that of his enemies. Part of her was infected by his formless class hatred as the bus turned through Sloane Square and shot up Sloane Street to Knightsbridge. It was as though it traversed foreign territory, littered with women shaped like horses or greyhounds, wearing a uniform of smart cotton shirts embellished with pearls. They got on the bus for jolly short hops, braying at children called Justin or Hugo. The children were all rather like Emily’s, Cath had reflected with a shock as the bus had lurched round the corner, taking her to Islington and Helen West. Cath had never thought of Emily as one of this alien breed. She was just Mrs Eliot with a face full of freckles, husband and family, the epitome of everything Cath admired.

  Thinking of Emily and her brood made Cath wince with longing. It was the hot love for the children she would never have, the love for a family who asked her to belong, poured praise and gifts upon her head, said, come in, come in! and seemed to mean it, whereas she knew she couldn’t come in. Not ever. Not even close.

  Twenty minutes north from Helen’s, forty minutes from Emily’s, accelerating as if scenting home territory, the 59 bus lurched level with the leisure centre. It could have been a million miles from Harrods. This was where she lived, in the maisonette with attics which Joe had wangled from some army connection, next to the park where Damien had died. She was now in the land of the ‘us’, where never a ‘them’ was seen, but the local community had forged a similar version. ‘Them’ was those with houses worth burglary; ‘us’ was those who did it. She felt light hearted, almost light headed, as she took the longer route to the late-night supermarket, avoiding the leisure centre grounds. She had found another place to love, if not a person. Another set of keys, belonging to a voice which did not have the same high, light tone of enquiry that Emily’s did. And a place to clean which was, to Cath’s mind, safer than houses.

  Dark and secret and safe, with a cat and a garden. Down there, without a view, where she could make everything shine, and Joe would never know where she was.

  When Emily phoned Alistair in a slight state of panic at seven to say, darling, could you possibly remember exactly who the hell is coming to supper, he consulted his diary and said he did not know.

  ‘Where did they come from?’ Emily asked, wildly.

  ‘I really don’t know. Are they friends of mine, or friends of yours?’

  ‘I don’t know. Listen, darling, are you ready to come home?’

  ‘Not quite. Need to talk to the other junior in Monday’s thing. Matter of fact, I’d arranged to meet him for a drink. Is that all right with you?’ he added, anxiously.

  Emily was glad to have a husband as uxorious as
this, but there were times when his delays irritated, even though she did not really want him home yet. She did not care whether he met a colleague in a pub or a playground. It was a different sense of anger, fuelled by the fact that although Cath had been there, labouring all day, the house remained doggedly out of control, with Emily, as usual, inexplicably relieved to be rid of her. Emily stood on the first-floor landing and yelled, her voice drowning the racket of a fight below.

  ‘Quiet, you downstairs, just bloody shut it, will you?’ Then on a lower scale, no less authoritative, in a voice sounding more like a growl she abandoned the subtle approach.

  ‘Help required here, you bunch of little sods! All hands to the mast! Those who do as they’re told get to stay up watching this perfectly wonderful video I’ve got. Loads of sex and violence. Those who don’t, go to bed. And that means you, Jane. Mark, your surfboard is going out of the window, now. Jane, do you hear me?’

  It was a long, skinny house where voices echoed. Three children, fifteen, twelve and nine, stood in the hall looking up as their mother came down.

  ‘Ah, there you all are,’ she said in mock surprise. ‘Dad’s in the pub,’ she announced, casually. They looked at her, wide-eyed, expectant, suspicious, trusting.

  ‘So will someone lay the tables, please. For eight. I want the knives and forks, one big knife, one little one, not from the kitchen drawer, all in straight lines. Two wine glasses each. And I want both bathrooms tidy. If you please. Oh, and while we’re at it, can anyone remember if I wrote down the names of the people who are coming?’ There was the sound of a small stampede as they disappeared. She had, after all, taught them everything they knew about bribes. She had not really needed the help; simply needed to look at them, check they were still there.

  The oh-so-busy Lizzies and the vivid, purple lobelia, balm to the spirit, bloomed on a preternaturally hot July evening, when the light seemed endless. Outside the Spoon and Fiddle, a title hidden by greenery, Alistair Eliot sat and regretted the lie he had told his wife. He was not meeting anyone: he had simply wanted to stop and nurse half a pint of lager the way he did once in a while in summer, and even then he agonised about deceit. Last summer, during the reign of a super-efficient, albeit slightly sluttish nanny, alas, now departed, Emily and he escaped their progeny to sit for an hour as he sat now when the house seemed fit to burst and Em had to admit she was going mad. They needed to be somewhere else to discuss their domestic concerns and the show of flowers here was better than any left remaining in their own little garden after the stamp of juvenile feet and the constant cry of ‘Catch this!’

  Emily had brief but intense flirtations with places outside home, and for this one in particular, they had cause to be grateful. It was the barman here who had listened to them talking a year ago about what Em described as the rising tide of scum in their house. He introduced them to Cath. Excuse me, he had said with a careful swipe of the table, I couldn’t help listening. I happen to know of someone who’s rated highly. You hear things in here, you see? Shall I tell her to call? Cath had been a godsend, but it did not follow that the Eliots both went back to the Spoon. Emily alone had surmised Mr Fixit the barman was married to Cath, but, apart from that, they did not know quite from whence she came, and cared even less. She was Cath, the Treasure, with no surname and a telephone number only for emergencies.

  Alistair sat, early in the evening, fiddling with his half pint and his good fortune. Raising his right fist level with his mouth in order to sip the drink, he noticed his cuff smelt of perfume, a lingering smell, which had been with him all day, competing with the window-box flowers, irritating and refreshing by turns. It had been pleasant to smell the blossom among the disinfectant fumes of the cells where he had been first thing this morning, but not so pleasant now. The scent of it seemed to have grown stronger as the day wore on. Alistair smiled. He need have no conscience about his wife. He carried her with him, wherever he went. Or it might have been Jane, with her arms round his neck this morning, her nightie soaked with eau de parfum.

  Quite aside from the need to have an interval, however short, between the circus of court and the more stimulating circus of home, Alistair stopped at the Spoon and Fiddle to nod to the barman. There were refinements to Alistair’s conscience which Emily did not share. She did not see that once you were bored with a place, you did anything other than simply stop going there, even if the service had been excellent and the memories delightful, and in this wide, pragmatic sweep of temporary patronage she included hairdressers, butchers, bakers and restaurants in the constant search for something new if not necessarily better. Alistair, on the other hand, would have gone to the same small rat-run of entertainments and services, year in year out if left to his own devices. To do otherwise made him feel slightly guilty. Objectively, he was well aware that he owed nothing to the Spoon, with its strange decor of flowers outside and an odd assortment of military memorabilia above the bar inside, either for good times had or for the respite it had given during the difficulties of last summer, nor was there any real debt to a barman because he was so pleasant and married to the cleaning lady. He simply felt a kind of duty to call in from time to time, just in case Joe felt unfairly abandoned. There was another feature, too, in this strange refinement of manners. For all that he was born of patrician stock with a lineage in Debrett, Alistair was secretly more at home with the little people of his world than he was with the great, the rich and the good.

  In any event, the motives did not matter, since Joe the barman (known as nothing but) seemed to appreciate the effort. When Alistair had walked into the miniature saloon during the slack hour between the end of post-working-hour sippers and the start of serious evening drinkers, the smile on the barman’s face lit the dim interior. Joe knew everyone by name and with minimal supervision from the owner, he ruled this little roost with all the efficiency of a quartermaster. The cocktails, along with the military memorabilia, were only an optional extra to attract those seeking either novelty or the quickest road to oblivion. Alistair wished they would take down all those regimental badges on the wall, as well as the ceremonial sword and the crossed bayonets which did not go with the immaculate chintz. He drank like someone who has never really learned the habit, ordered the usual half.

  ‘Ah, Mr Eliot! What a pleasure. No need to come into the dark. Sit outside, I’ll bring you the usual. I feel like one myself. Get into the sun, will you. Tomorrow it’ll rain …’

  The man never showed sign of drink. He looked like the ex-soldier he was (ex-barman, officers’ mess, sir, he had told Alistair once), so the latter supposed he had long since overcome the alcoholic hazards of his profession. Alistair did not mind the chattiness, he liked it, in fact. It was a change from the taciturnity of many of his clients, and once he got home he was in for a long evening of holding several conversations at once.

  ‘Family well, Mr Eliot?’

  Alistair was a literally minded and humble man. If anyone asked him a question, he answered it fully. Joe Boyce thus knew quite a lot about his family.

  ‘Well, Jane and her brother have been fighting like cat and dog. Funny that, they used to play like puppies and in between bouts of scrapping and when they aren’t leaving marks all over one another, they still do. Strange, isn’t it? I don’t understand these relationships, really, do you? I was a one and only. I would have loved a brother.’

  ‘Well, you say that, Mr Eliot, but they can be a mixed blessing, you know.’ It was one of Joe’s virtues, Alistair decided, that he not only spoke softly, but also expansively. Alistair loved to listen. Part of him did not want to be a barrister at all: he was sick of talking.

  ‘Me, I’m like yourself, the only one. They got rid of me into the army as soon as they could, don’t blame them. But my wife, now, she had a brother and he was a real trial to her. Needed looking after every day of his life. Always on the scrounge for money, always in trouble with the law, drunk as a skunk. I tell you, Mr Eliot, he nearly had us divorced. Because you can’t
turn away your brother, can you? You have to let him into your house, come what may, even if he is a disgrace.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose you do,’ Alistair agreed, genuinely curious. ‘And then how do you get rid of him?’ He had a sudden vision of how Emily might deal with a recalcitrant relative of his own. The thought was not comforting.

  ‘Well, this one, Mr Eliot, he got rid of himself. After I’d tried to befriend him and everything. Got him a job, even, but no, he wasn’t having anything, that one. You can’t stop a man if he wants to kill himself, can you?’

  ‘Is that what he did?’

  ‘Yes, you could put it like that, in a manner of speaking. Got himself killed in a fight.’

  ‘Sad,’ Alistair murmered, the lager suddenly sour on his tongue, even though Joe spoke airily, as if the incident were many moons ago and a hundred miles from here. Pub brawls, affray, the spontaneous formation of little gangs to exact petty revenges were all part of his stock in trade. He had dabbled in more cases of manslaughter than he could count, and suddenly did not want to talk about it. As usual, Joe Boyce sensed the need to move the conversation aside, in the same way he knew how to move a chair for a customer who was only on the brink of deciding they needed to sit.

  ‘Now, Mr Eliot, here’s a joke for your daughter. We’re down at the bottom of the sea, sharks swimming about all over the place. One shark is a moneylender shark, and another one in debt, so the second one he goes off and catches a poorly old octopus, brings it back to the other one, for breakfast. So what does the moneylending shark say?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘He says, Hallo there. Have you got that sick squid you owe me?’ Alistair, who loved such childish and ghoulish wit even more than his youngest daughter, laughed immoderately.

  There were times when even Joe Boyce forgot the distinctions between them and us.