A Clear Conscience

by Frances Fyfield

  ‘Wait a minute, sir,’ said Joe, tapping his finger to his nose, Mickey Gat style. ‘Take home a little something for Mrs E, will you?’ To Alistair’s ill-disguised horror, Joe Boyce presented him with a box of perfume. Ma Griffe.

  ‘Plenty of that in our house,’ Joe whispered conspiratorially with a frightful wink. ‘Not quite the real thing, if you see what I mean, but it does the trick with the wife.’

  Alistair could only stammer thanks. He was even more bewildered. Why should Cath steal perfume when she had so much already?

  There was a mirror in Damien’s place: Damien would never have left the house without looking in a mirror, not even if he had been in a state of Saturday-night fever. Now Cath stood in front of the mirror, crying in the way she could only ever have done in private. Helen West had meant well: she had found Cath the promise of three jobs and kept her fully employed painting gloss paint on windows, making a new home, taking up those lovely curtains, keeping up a stream of chat, and then, with the usual carelessness kept for such gestures, doing what Emily Eliot did, turning out her wardrobe in Cath’s direction. What made Cath weep now was not the pile of clothes she had brought home on the bus, but the thought that, unlike Emily Eliot, Helen West, whom she had rather despised, did not give away what was strictly surplus. She gave away her best things, only pretending they were no longer needed, when what she had done was select garments which would fit and look good on Cath’s lumpy figure. Cath was finally moved by the subterfuge, and by that underground flat which did not sway with the wind, heat like an oven or reek with loneliness. She had the fleeting notion of asking Helen West to give her the cat, watch the silly woman hesitate for a moment and then say, Yes, of course, Cath, if you treat it nicely and you think it would help. She would, too, the stupid woman.

  Crying made her deaf, until the knock on her door made her freeze. She heard shuffling steps outside, a firm rapping repeated. It was too late to put out the light and simply pretend she was not there. Cath shut her eyes in panic: it couldn’t be Mickey Gat this time. What was it Damien had told her about what happened here when youths, high on glue or worse, broke in and found nothing to steal? They smashed bones, that’s what; old people living here barricaded themselves in, burned to death when they could not get out. The knock was repeated, someone was calling her name, a female voice, soft, but demanding. Cath opened her door to Mary Secura.

  ‘Just passing,’ Mary remarked. Even Cath could tell it was a lie. No-one was ever just passing a place where you had to climb twenty flights of stairs.

  ‘You look nice,’ Mary remarked with unflattering surprise. So I do, in a way, Cath thought, turning back to the old wardrobe door which served as mirror. Nicer than usual in a cream-coloured blouse and a full skirt which twirled round her calves in a rich, dark floral print. She could only think of one thing at a time. She stripped off the blouse and dropped the skirt to her ankles, totally unselfconscious of her semi-nakedness. Mary Secura gasped, then coughed to hide it: she had seen worse by way of violent injury, but her eyes were transfixed by the scar on Cath’s belly. Ugly, puckering, disfiguring in the minute it remained revealed, before Cath pulled a loose dress over her head, buttoned the neck and turned a circle.

  ‘Not as good,’ she muttered.

  ‘You could get that scar fixed, you know, Cath, if you wanted. Wouldn’t cost you,’ Mary volunteered, casually.

  ‘I don’t want to, thanks,’ said Cath, looking at her for the first time. ‘It’s mine. Think I’ll keep it. Joe doesn’t mind it.’

  Mary was not listening. She was in another planet, hovering above the hemisphere, disorientated by the height, remembering how far away she had left the car which might not be there when she went back. She sat on one of the uncomfortable chairs, letting the handbag drop.

  ‘Cath, how is it you can leave that man and even think of going back? I want to leave mine without ever going back.’

  ‘Well, more fool you,’ Cath said.

  ‘I came to tell you something. About your man, Joe.’

  ‘I know all about him.’

  ‘No, Cath. You think you do, but you don’t. What time does he normally come home? What time did he come home when he went out drinking with your brother?’

  Cath was fussing with the dress.

  ‘He always came home just before pub closing. Fridays, he went out. He usually gets time off on Fridays.’ She was mumbling, looking slightly alarmed, staring at the mirror and seeing not herself, but the photo she had seen of Damien in Mr Eliot’s study. The irritating voice of Mary Secura came from a distance: Cath wished she would simply go.

  ‘Did he ever carry a weapon, Cath? Like when he was carrying money from the pub? Might have needed one sometimes. He was jealous of your brother, Cath, wasn’t he?’

  Cath undid the top buttons, turned in front of the mirror.

  ‘We’re going to have a nice time, Monday,’ she chanted. ‘Me and Joe. Talk things over. Mickey Gat said. Going out, we are, somewhere special. He promised.’

  ‘Did Joe ever keep a weapon at home?’ Mary continued inexorably. ‘Up in those attics of yours? Something which could just about cut a man in half?’

  ‘Who asked you here?’ Cath shouted. ‘Get out! Get out before I kill you!’

  She gestured towards the window with a stubby finger, but the window would not open. She stood by the glass as Mary’s voice continued. It was a long way down: Cath could feel herself wanting to jump, to float before she hit the ground, and still Mary went on talking.

  ‘Out on the piss,’ Bailey said, looking across the road. It was what Helen called his loud look full of challenge, the kind of look which would make anyone behave worse. She had long since decided she was a coward. If she met a mugger she would smile and say, of course, have my purse, in the same way she would pretend to laugh if she were teased. She would have skirted round the herd of half-drunk youths who jostled them on the pavement, and although Bailey also preferred stand-off to confrontation, the lines on his face did not indicate the same degree of acceptance. It was a Saturday night out: the place he had chosen to eat was rarely so crowded and the wait for a table irritated him. They should have been dining chez Eliot, but words had been spoken between Emily and Helen which had put the invitation into abeyance. Bailey could not understand why Helen did not simply shout down the phone, Emily you got this all wrong, in the same way he would have yelled at Ryan and then forgotten about it, but women were women, and their diplomacies a mystery. In pursuit of food, he had invited Helen well into his own territory, a terrain uneasy on the eye, ugly, craggy, uneven, good in parts, foul for the remainder, the restaurants not for the rich and famous, especially the latter, since no-one would know who they were.

  The inside of Arrivederci made Helen sigh with pleasure: Bailey could watch her relax before her long, paint-stained fingers fluttered in indecision over bread and aromatic olives and then fished for a cigarette in guilty postponement of more fattening pleasures. When in this Italian ambience, one ate like a Roman; the plants were dusty and the proprietor a tyrant who could not stand small appetites. Persons who tucked his napkins under their chins, cleaned the dish of olives and ate the bread were served with alacrity.

  I love you looking jubilant and greedy, Bailey wanted to say, and I am sorry for my evasions, equally sorry for yours this week. He thought they were up to date on Cath the cleaning lady, he had told her most of what he knew, including Cath in her high-rise flat receiving advice from PC Secura. He knew rather less of what Cath had been doing in Helen’s house for most of the week. Since he had, as she put it, flounced away from the mess, access had been either unsought or denied, but all distractions forgotten, she was as sunny as the weather this Saturday night. Bailey placed his hand over hers, wanting to say something momentous, not as yet articulated; something which contained apology and declaration. She used the other hand deftly, to stroke the corner of his mouth.

  ‘Black olive,’ she said. ‘You messy eater. Have you mended that clock
yet?’

  ‘Which clock?’ He had thirty-seven clocks at the last count, not including sufficient pieces of clock to make five more, and he had still fallen into this strange habit of consulting his watch.

  ‘The one which races us into the next decade.’

  ‘I forgot to show you. Yes, I mended it, but it’s given me a neurosis.’

  He was hungry, not only for the food, but for the humour and the intimacy of trust she always offered, along with that heady formula of mutual respect. I have abused that mutual respect, he thought; she knows it and so do I. I have also abused the time-honoured tradition that if you do not keep on asking a woman to become your wife, she will find another man, or at least, another way of living.

  The proprietor appeared, looked warmly at the dearth of bread. Helen opened her mouth to speak but Bailey looked at her warningly, in the knowledge that in this place you ate what the boss told you to eat. The moment for making an effort to say something personal was past. He felt it slip like the taste of garlic on his tongue, hid the biting sensation in a question.

  ‘Listen, what exactly are you doing to your flat, Helen? Tunnelling for freedom? Knocking down walls?’

  ‘I’m turning it into a brothel,’ she said seriously. ‘Grand opening night next Tuesday, I think. Don’t rely on a discount.’

  He laughed, but his heart sank. Lamb, the proprietor had ordered. You havva the lamb and eat it all. His spirits lifted at the prospect. Bailey looked at the contentment of her face and wondered if it still had anything to do with his presence.

  ‘How much did Emily Eliot help with all this interior design?’

  ‘Think I can’t do this kind of thing on my own, do you? She helped quite a bit, to tell the truth. You know Emily can’t stand indecision. Go shopping with Emily and there’s no hanging about, no luxuriating in choice. And she always knows someone who knows someone who gets things done cheap. It’s an art. She’s clever.’

  ‘She wasn’t very clever with Cath.’

  Helen was silent. ‘Do you know, I’m glad to be single?’ was all she said. ‘I’d hate to be a megalomaniac wife and mother. Mothers run a closed book. They shut the world out, close off anything inconvenient, as if being mum in charge of a family is so self-justifying, so sanctifying, they never need have a conscience about anything else. Some of them make me sick.’

  Prejudiced, judgemental, politically incorrect, leaping onto a band wagon and waving a flag: the Helen he loved.

  ‘You see them in shops and cars,’ Helen continued angrily. ‘Expecting everyone else to give way. Look at Emily. She’d put Cath in prison without a backward glance if it meant motherly peace of mind and, what’s more, she wouldn’t even regret it. She owes Cath nothing. Cath isn’t family. Beware the family who say you’re one of us. They never mean it.’

  Bailey was enjoying this. ‘We’re talking about the survival of the human race,’ he objected.

  ‘No we aren’t. It survives all by itself. Probably because people without families have to devote themselves to looking after those who have. And then get splattered all over the pavement and reviled for not being normal. I’m going on, aren’t I? This lamb is good.’

  ‘I wasn’t wanting you to stop.’

  ‘What irritates me so much is that people like Emily feel superior and make me feel inferior. She has the right to pigheaded intolerance: I don’t. Do you know what she said to me on the phone? She said …’ Helen swallowed. ‘She said she pitied me. If I had kids, I would understand.’

  ‘Now that,’ said Bailey, ‘was unwise.’

  Saturday was passing into Sunday. Upstairs in the flat where Joe Boyce lived, the air was stuffy underneath the eaves, lit by the streetlight and a moon the colour of milk. There were shuffling sounds from the attics: nervous laughter, whispers in the half light and sounds like the dragging of a body, something bumping downstairs from the top floor, slowly, pauses in between as one box after another hit each step in turn. Gradually, they grew bolder, less concerned about the noise. Pause, thump, pause, thump: unrhythmic but certain, repeated time and time again.

  The neighbours downstairs turned off the music to listen, then decided to turn it on again lower, so they could hear at the same time as pretending they did not. They kept the door closed. Has he killed her then? one asked in a stage whisper; has the bastard finally done it? Mesmerised by the prospect, until they heard more muffled laughter and a sharp command from above their heads, herald of more shuffling, thumping on the lower stairs which passed their entrance and on out into the street. They turned the music up a notch and wished their front-room curtains did not hang in shreds with gaps in between they had never noticed before. The sound of removals did not mesh with the music, but the bass had more resonance than the footsteps going out into the road, laden, heavy. Had he killed her? Had he, the bastard who yelled at them for the noise but never turned it down himself when he belted his wife all round the kitchen? Had he really? Of all the half-stoned theories which passed across five sets of lips, not one included the suggestion that they should do anything other than listen. One of them had been drunk since noon; three others were slightly high and the fifth not a day over fourteen, with no wish to go home to mother. She shook, choked on a cigarette, drank the cider and looked for the darkest corner. When she could no longer stand the suspense, she crouched by the gap in the curtains and watched while the others watched her watching.

  She turned back, scorning them for their huddled circle and exaggerated dread of a second visit from the police in one week. They had done nothing wrong, had they? She danced across the room in the same eerie light which lit the attics, put her thumb to her nose. Naa, she said, nobody’s dead. It’s only all them boxes he keeps getting delivered. He’s only moving them out, doing a flit. Or more likely, he’s getting done over. They collapsed into giggles. Nothing to worry about, but still she gazed back to the street where the burglars, one of whom had heard Joe Boyce boasting in a pub somewhere, loaded the van; and when it pulled away, she waved, as if to say, take me with you.

  Saturday had slipped away and with it, the word ‘weekend’, which meant very little to Joe Boyce, the last passenger on almost the last bus wheeling across London, with his head resting against the cool of an upstairs window as the number 59 raced past empty shops at one fifteen, rattling his anaesthetised bones, only just keeping him awake. Fuck you, up yours, he kept on repeating to himself, singing little snatches of songs for as long as he could recall the words. ‘Onward Christian Soldiers, marching on to war’ … ‘Hit the road, Jack, ain’t you coming back no more, no more?’ And somehow, ‘God rest you, merry gentlemen’, in memory of the colonel who had been in this evening and treated him as if he was lord and master. Oh yes, young Joe was on the up and up, and then the bus turned the corner like a frantic sniffer-dog on a scent and almost tipped him out of his seat. He was not drunk, merely tipsy. In vino, as Joe had told the colonel, tapping his own nose in the manner of Mickey Gat, does not always mean in veritas, hey, old boy? Memory’s not so good with drink aboard, is it, old son, but didn’t we have a good time the other night? Rather, said the colonel, suddenly a trifle uncertain about why his drinks were still generous, and, incidentally, free.

  Not drunk, merely Brahms and Liszt, still capable of making sweet music. Maybe Cath would be home, unable to wait until Monday because she really could not stay away. At home, sleeping like a baby. He could not think in anything but clichés and he was singing, ‘Hello, Dolly’ as he walked, not stumbled, up the stairs and saw the light on.

  No double lock either, but the emptiness inside was like a punch in the stomach, repeated as he went from room to room, wailing, ‘Cath, where are you?’, his voice echoing from floor to ceiling. A joke, that was what it was, a joke, the house looking like this, rooms emptied not only of physical presence but of almost everything else too. There were table and chairs, carpet on floors, kitchen stuff, sofa, bed, all Cath’s secondhand things. Nothing in the attics but drip-stained floors and the
rubbish of packing.

  There were old wardrobes in the attics, Cath again, but the doors which were formerly jammed shut by the weight of things piled outside them were now hanging open. In one of these, on top of listing floorboards, he found the last box of all. Damp to the touch, full of army insignia, his beret, three olive-coloured sweaters eaten by moth and three old bayonets, the last of the collection.

  The white moon winked scorn through the window as Joe Boyce stood and wept for the loss of his only possessions and for the dreams which had gone into the acquisition of a thousand useless things. He wanted to plead with the thieves, then replaced his misery with bitterness. None of this would have happened if Cath had been at home, doing her duty. Then Joe became maudlin again, then bitter.

  Wife, come home. He was nothing without her; felt he had loved her since the day he was born, counted on the fingers of both hands all the things she owed him.

  And at last, sinking into sleep, he could remember where he would have put the other bayonet, the one in his dream. Upstairs in that cupboard. So the only good thing the burglars had done was to take it too.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Helen saw them through her office window, spotlit in the cruel gaze of early Monday morning. Something was going on.

  On the other side of the road, secretary for supervisor number two (without spectacles), entered her own little box of a room, stage left. The secretary to number one (office Lothario, with specs), sidled into her own room at the other end of the floor. On each of their desks was a red rose faded by the weekend, the blooms variously disposed in a glass vase and a blue mug. Simultaneously, each woman adjusted the flower in its receptacle. Then for reasons unknown, both ladies moved from their cubicles and marched straight across Helen’s line of vision to the opposite end of the floor. The meeting in the middle resembled a square dance and was obviously something of a mutual shock. They handled it well, smiling distant smiles and looking hell bent on important errands. Number two’s secretary carried a sheaf of paper towards the copier standing next door to number one’s office, while number one’s secretary seemed destined for the fax machine. Once ten steps beyond the other, and hidden by open-plan screens, each raced into the other’s room and began rummaging around in the desk. They made swift, unskilful searches, leaving a trail of fingerprints of which Helen did not approve. Then, each of them decapitated the red rose belonging to the other. Helen sighed. She could have told them that they both kept the cards given by number one, he with the specs and the scholastic air, in the top right hand drawer. Also, they both sat on his knee. Also, he took one of them out for drinks and promises on Wednesdays, the other, Tuesdays and Thursdays She could have saved them coming in early on Monday. All they had to do was wave and she would have answered in Morse code.