In silence they went into the house. With Alec settled at one end of the room to play with his cars, Vanessa faced Geoff. ‘Well – what’s going to happen?’
‘I told you, Cindy and I are close—’
Vanessa began to tremble. She was tempted for a moment to drop the subject, let him get on with it, wait for him to get fed up with Cindy and come back to her, or, if that was how it worked out, Cindy to snatch Geoff from her.
‘You shouldn’t be,’ she managed to get out. ‘You’re a married man – I’m your wife. I thought you loved me.’
‘I do love you—’
‘Not enough to give her up.’
‘That’s something different.’
Vanessa stared wildly at the tinsel decorations looped along the picture rails, the gold and silver balls on the Christmas tree, on top, the angel made out of kitchen foil Joanne had brought home from school. ‘It sounds all right for you. One for fun and games, the other for housework, cooking and kids. I’d like to know what she’s thinking, in her heart of hearts.’
‘Cindy doesn’t want to be tied down. She’s young. She wants a good time—’
Bitterly, Vanessa retorted, ‘You’ve got it made, haven’t you? Two women at your beck and call. And you really think she’s something, don’t you? She’s a little tramp, that’s all, going after somebody’s husband—’
‘And she gets them,’ he said, relishing some memory. ‘She certainly gets them.’
‘So that means you’re not the first?’ sneered Vanessa. ‘Well, I suppose not.’
‘Don’t start, Vanessa. Don’t start,’ Geoff warned. He was a big man and intimidating. But Vanessa was past caring.
‘You admire her, don’t you, with her tarty little skirt and not caring who’s married and who isn’t? That’s what you really go for, isn’t it, Geoff? She’s got you, hasn’t she? Never mind Vanessa. Forget Vanessa. I can take it or leave it as far as you’re concerned, can’t I? Well,’ she said, a little fearful now, ‘supposing I decide to leave it?’
Geoff Doyle would not be challenged by a woman. He stared at her, his face hard, ‘Well, then, darling, that’d be your decision, wouldn’t it?’
‘You’d risk your kids for that?’
‘You’re risking me.’
‘I still love you, Geoff.’
‘Then don’t do anything stupid.’
‘Oh, no? While she tries and gets you more and more on her side? She’s younger than me. She’s got more time and money to spend on herself. And,’ she added shrewdly, ‘her father’s in the Planning Department, isn’t he?’
He didn’t like the last thrust. ‘That’s got nothing to do with it.’
‘No – tell that to somebody else.’
Geoff was silent. Alec stopped playing with his toys and ran across the room. ‘Mum,’ he said. ‘I’m hungry.’
Vanessa picked up the bags of shopping and carried them into the kitchen. She lit the grill, found a packet of fish fingers and put some under the grill.
‘Ketchup,’ said Alec.
Vanessa gulped, and said, ‘Yes.’ He had turned a dismal face to her, his voice was uncertain. She didn’t want to cry in front of him. He was a quiet child but observant. He understood more than anyone gave him credit for. He was sensitive, already upset and doubtful. His father might leave at any moment. They’d have nothing to live on. Should she try to stick it out and win her husband back for the sake of the children? It would be like living in hell, she thought, though other women did it, God knew how. It seemed impossible Geoff was doing this to all of them, forcing these choices on her.
Then she heard the front door open. ‘I’ve got to go,’ called Geoff. ‘There’s a delivery in at one.’ And he left, just as if this was a normal day. To him it was. He’d been running between her and Cindy for months. This particular day was nothing new to him.
Doggedly, she persuaded Alec to eat a few more bites, took him to the lavatory and tucked him in bed with his red fire engine for company. She went downstairs and, pushing a big red crêpe paper ball away with her foot, phoned her mother.
‘Oh dear, oh dear,’ wailed Anita Davis. ‘Oh, Vanessa – what are you going to do?’
‘I don’t know, Mum.’
‘He’s been at it for years. I wonder you hadn’t suspected long ago.’
‘What?’ asked Vanessa.
‘Alan saw him coming out of the cinema with a girl ages ago …’ She did not add that Vanessa’s brother had reported Geoff’s arm was round the girl, or that Vanessa had been in hospital at the time. It had been just after Alec was born.
‘I suppose it could have been innocent.’
‘Oh, Vanessa,’ her mother said impatiently. ‘Word gets round, you know.’
‘I suppose I thought he might have been unfaithful, once or twice, but I never thought – I never thought—’
‘Keep calm. I’ll come round now.’
But even before Vanessa’s mother had left her own house Cindy Abbott rang. She began, ‘Vanessa – he’s not coming back to you. He’s made up his mind and that’s it. You might as well get used to it – it’s me he loves, he’s chosen me and we’re going to live together.’
‘I want to hear him tell me that himself.’
‘He doesn’t need to—’
‘Put him on the phone, Cindy—’
‘Wait, then,’ commanded Cindy. Vanessa could hear voices, Cindy’s and Geoff’s, then Geoff into the phone, ‘She’s right, Van. You would make me choose. I’ll send some money. But don’t start mucking me about—’
‘What do you mean?’
‘No lawyers – no funny business.’
‘Is this it?’ Vanessa could hardly speak. Everything seemed unreal. How could he be ending things just like that?
‘That’s right. You’d better believe it. But I’ve got to tell you, if you start involving lawyers, there isn’t any money, and there won’t be. Have you got that straight?’ He hung up.
‘Three days before Christmas,’ said Anita Davis, handing her daughter a little of the brandy she’d brought with her. She sat in a plum-coloured coat and large matching felt hat, holding her handbag. Vanessa in her jeans and jersey sat opposite. ‘Oh dear. He might have waited.’ She leaned forward. ‘Quite frankly, Vanessa, I think it was a mistake to challenge him. You might have done better to have pretended you didn’t know – hoping it would all blow over. These things often do.’
‘You said yourself this probably isn’t the first time,’ replied Vanessa.
‘Men!’ exclaimed Anita, throwing up her eyes. ‘Well, your dad’ll be having a word with Mrs Doyle tomorrow but I don’t know what good it’ll do. To that woman her son can do no wrong.’ She shook her head, ‘I don’t know, I’m sure. You’re telling me he threatened you when you talked about a divorce?’
‘I didn’t mention it. I think that’s what he was talking about—’
‘That’s the problem with self-employed men – they can use an accountant to creep out of anything. When the court looks at their books they’ve got nothing. The wife gets nothing. Even if she does, they can find a way of not paying. Just before Christmas too,’ she repeated.
Later, Vanessa collected Joanne from school while her mother looked after Alec.
‘Daddy’s gone on a little holiday,’ said her grandmother when they walked in.
‘He’ll be back for Christmas,’ the little girl answered confidently. ‘I’ve got his present – it’s three red handkerchiefs and a blue comb.’
‘You can go in now,’ announced the receptionist.
The girl stood up. Annie Vane stood too. ‘May I go in with her?’ she asked.
‘If you feel it’s necessary.’
Annie followed Melanie into the surgery and closed the door.
The receptionist indicated her disapproval with a ‘Tsk.’ What was she doing babying such a big girl, thirteen or fourteen, in that way? Her glance at Vanessa said, Who does she think she is? She’s not a regular like you. She doesn’t know
the rules. Vanessa’s lifted eyebrows said in return, What do you expect? She thinks she’s too good for us, thinks she can do as she likes.
2
George’s Café
George’s Café, busy, steamy and, frankly, a bit grubby, stands in a side street off Foxwell High Street. The area known as Foxwell Market is full of small shops and stalls selling everything from potatoes to boiling fowl, from watches to records and tapes. On the pavement outside George’s, Mrs Patel sells underwear for men and women, T-shirts, sometimes in summer, cheap skirts and blouses. Next to her comes Roger Smith’s fruit stall and, next to Roger, Roland Elliott, or some friend or relation of his, selling tapes, often reggae or rap. Roland is frequently shouted at by fellow stallholders or adjacent shopkeepers for making too much noise, whereupon he sometimes starts playing eighteenth-century music on his massive ghetto blaster.
Next to George’s is a barber’s, almost at the corner of the High Street. This broad Roman road leads directly south, to the coast, and north to the River Thames. On the opposite bank of the river lie the Houses of Parliament, the offices of Whitehall and other great buildings where laws are made and from which the affairs of a great nation are regulated.
On this cold January afternoon, George’s customers were not thinking about any of this. No one – not the two market traders sitting at a plastic table, wearing their big pouched change belts over thick overcoats, or the six workmen having a post-dinner tea and smoke and a warm-up before getting back to work on a big cold building site, or Arnold, middle-aged and unemployed, stringing out a cup of tea before making his way to his afternoon appointment at the public library – no one in George’s was dwelling on the wider issues or their part in them, though Mrs Patel, standing in a cutting wind at her underwear stall, did occasionally allow herself to think about the Home Office. She was waiting for a long-delayed official ruling as to whether two of her older children would be allowed to enter the country, DNA testing having proved what had first been denied: that she and her husband were their actual parents and not two tricksters trying to smuggle in children not their own.
At the middle table in the café Annie Vane and Melanie Pickering were sitting, pale with winter and the strain of a grim battle which had just taken place between them outside Kenton Town Hall, the large, ornate building which stood at the top of Foxwell High Street, a symbol of Victorian respect for civic government and the orderly, incorruptible management of local affairs. It had been on the steps of this building that Annie, wishing to regularise matters, had tried to drag a reluctant Melanie into the foyer. She wished to discover where to find the Social Services Department and enlist their help. Melanie, with more understanding of what such authorities are usually like imagined herself being packed on to the next train north and her family thereafter continually subjected to questions and intrusions they did not want. It would, she thought, either go like that or she would end up in a children’s home. She was unable to explain to Annie which laws or regulations would lead to these undesirable events. She just knew from experience that something would go wrong once they found themselves sitting on the wrong side of a desk opposite a well-meaning young man or woman who would try to help and end up making things worse.
‘They’ll help you find your uncle,’ Annie had claimed, as traffic passed and pedestrians steered round them.
‘No, they won’t – they’ll end up finding my dad. I don’t want that. Or they’ll send me home – if not worse.’
Annie sighed. ‘Melanie,’ she said. ‘Once you’ve told them the situation, they’ll help.’ Annie hoped to find in the Town Hall someone who spoke a language like her own and understood life as she did.
Melanie knew the system was against her. ‘They’ll send me to a children’s home,’ she said. ‘Or something. I’m not going in there. I’ll just get a job and manage for myself. I can find my uncle. I’ll ask the Salvation Army—’
Annie looked at the obstinate face and realised there was nothing she could do to make Melanie go into the Town Hall. Inwardly, she groaned. ‘You can’t get a job,’ she said. ‘It’s against the law. You’re only thirteen.’
‘There’s plenty of jobs,’ Melanie told her. ‘No one’ll ask.’
They ended up buying Melanie a new pair of trainers and dashing into George’s to get warm and eat baked beans on toast.
‘You’ll have to ring your mother and say where you are,’ Annie told the girl. ‘She’ll have reported you as missing to the police.’
‘All right,’ agreed Melanie. ‘She’ll be worried by now. Especially after our Ruth.’
‘Who’s Ruth?’
‘Ruth’s my sister. She ran away too. More than a year ago.’
‘Where is she?’
‘We don’t know. They never found her.’
Annie looked in horror at Melanie. What had seemed so plain a fortnight ago was becoming more and more complicated. Now, it seemed, there was another missing Pickering girl. It was all beginning to sound like one of those long, complicated accounts given to the police by the residents of Threpp Street in 1888.
Annie had found Melanie asleep on her step on 29 December, when she returned to London after Christmas with her family in Hampshire. She had arrived late at Waterloo, then taken the notorious tube to Foxwell, amid drunks, families and depressed people of both sexes and all statuses. Everyone avoided looking at everyone else and there was a concerted effort in the carriage to render invisible a group of black youths in the middle of the carriage, playing loud music and occasionally glancing around, half enjoying and half resenting the way they were able to strike fear into nearly all the other passengers, just by being there and being black.
Annie walked up Foxwell High Street with her bag. There were people wandering about in groups and a police van parked on the other side of the road. She reached Rutherford Street, quiet and dimly lit, and started walking towards her house, worried at the thought of entering her home alone, and finding it empty. It was as she was about to cross the road that she saw the dark bundle huddled motionless on her own doorstep. She stopped, frightened. Somebody mad, or drunk, who would put out a hand and grab her, attack her, yell abuse or plead? Or might it be – horrible thought – a dead body? She supposed she could go back to the main road and ask the police to help but the van might be gone by now and if the person in her doorway needed help there was no way of knowing whether the police would behave well towards him, as they could, or turn him into another death-in-custody statistic. She knew no one in the street and the houses were nearly all darkened now. Even in houses where people hadn’t yet gone to bed the residents might not answer the door at this time of night. She heard footsteps behind her, which made her even more uneasy. She turned. A tall figure stopped near, but not too near, her, under the streetlight. The tall black man in a cap said, ‘That your house?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘There’s someone asleep there.’
‘Looks like a kid,’ he told her. Annie hesitated. ‘You just step past him quickly, go in and shut the door and phone the police – they’ll take him away to a children’s home, or something.’ She gazed at him. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘You got to get in. What you going to do? Wake him up, give him a bath and a meal, take him to live with you? Do what I say – you’ll be all right.’
She drew a deep breath, nodded. He moved past her and went on up the street with long, graceful steps.
Annie crossed the road, walked the few paces up her short path, leaned over the huddle in the doorway and put her key in the lock. As the door opened the sleeper fell across the threshold. Annie snapped on the light and saw a girl’s face, a lot of brown hair spreading out from under the hood of a brown anorak. The voice said in a blurry northern accent, ‘What’s happening?’ Then as the girl woke a little more and took in the situation, she mumbled, ‘Oh – you were out. I thought you were asleep inside. Don’t worry – I’m leaving.’ She pushed some hair from her face with a grimy hand.
‘What are you doing here?’ as
ked Annie. ‘Can’t you get home? You shouldn’t be sleeping in doorways.’
‘Don’t worry. I’m off,’ said the girl, scrambling to her feet. Her jeans were very dirty.
‘I don’t want you to go off into the night,’ Annie said. ‘It’s very late and the streets are full of drunks. Come in, we’ll organise something.’
‘Who else is in there?’ asked the girl, glancing down the lighted hall.
‘Only me,’ responded Annie. ‘Look – it’s worse out there …’ Two young men, walking unsteadily along on the other side of the road, were stopped by a police car which had just eased up beside them.
‘All right,’ said the girl, coming inside. Annie shut the door.
‘Would you like some tea? I’ll see what there is to eat.’ She put the heating on and opened a tin of soup.
Annie, conscious of Julian’s absence, stirred the soup while the girl sat in silence. She asked, finally, ‘Where are you going?’
‘My uncle’s. He lives in London.’
‘You must have come from somewhere,’ Annie stated. ‘Come and drink this in the other room.’
Annie trod on a Christmas tree ornament as she walked into the sitting room. A pair of trousers and a sweater lay on the chair where she’d left them. Other ornaments lay on the carpet. The room looked neglected and felt cold. There was something else amiss. ‘Oh, my God!’ she exclaimed. Alarmed, the girl stared at her. ‘The sofa’s gone!’
‘Have you been robbed?’ The girl stared at the room.
Annie, noticing the absence of the computer and the video, which had been on the floor when she left for the country, rushed upstairs, saying, ‘At least they left the TV.’
Julian’s grandmother’s walnut chest of drawers on the landing, had gone, leaving only a rectangle on the carpet. As far as she could see, nothing else had been moved. No drawers appeared to have been opened, nothing disarranged. She opened the airing cupboard and noted that two pairs of linen sheets, part of a wedding present from her parents, had been removed. She came heavily downstairs.
In Search of Love, Money & Revenge Page 3
