Other People's Worlds Page 9

  Francis nodded, and walked behind the boy past an amusement arcade that had recently closed, past a Wimpy Bar where girls sat at red-topped tables and a woman in a tattered fur coat crouched over a cup of coffee. In Air Street and Glasshouse Street Francis followed his companion at a distance. Negotiations took place in a doorway and then the youth led the way to a car-park that contained a single car, an old metallic-coloured Cortina. He’d been in the car-park before, the same Cortina had been there. ‘All right then, friend?’ the youth said. ‘A bloke’ll be along. My, aren’t we lovely?’

  Ten minutes later a stout man appeared. He wore a chalk-striped blue suit with a waistcoat, across which a watch-chain hung. He had dark, well-shaven jowls and a head the colour of dripping, with black strands drawn carefully over his baldness. His shirt-cuffs were slightly frayed. ‘He said fifteen,’ were the first words he uttered. ‘Fifteen right, is it?’

  Francis nodded, accepting the money. He thought of it as a present, as he always did, the only nice part of what was happening. ‘I gev him a five,’ the man said. ‘You never know if a chep’ll be there. But you’re here all right, aren’t you, sailor?’

  Francis nodded again. They stood by the car; the man moved closer to him. ‘Officer cless, are you?’ he inquired.

  ‘I’m not in the navy actually.’

  ‘Chep said you were. What’s your name, love?’

  ‘Adrian.’

  ‘O.K. then, Adrian? Our chep’s on the look-out.’

  When it was over Francis again walked quickly away. ‘Any time, friend,’ the youth with the ear-ring invited, watchful at the entrance to the car-park. Francis had had dealings with him before, but naturally the boy had forgotten. He thought he might have had dealings with the man as well, but he couldn’t be sure because the light was never good in the car-park. ‘Hey,’ the youth called after him and when Francis turned he said, ‘You’re on the telly, eh? You’re on them ads?’ He laughed, and Francis hurried away.

  When he knew the boy couldn’t see what he was doing he dried away the tears that had spread on to his cheeks. He felt unwell and he’d begun to shiver. It was always the same after anger had driven him in search of presents and the melancholy that followed was always the same too. It dragged into his mind images he didn’t wish to see: his mother’s face, and his father’s, in 14 Rowena Avenue when he was still a child; most of all, the face of the debt-collector who was their lodger. In the sitting-room his mother’s knitting-needles clicked, there was his father’s talk of the Midland Bank, of customers spoken to that day, of changes due to come about. In the sitting-room there was Francis’s affection for both of them, for their faces and their hands – his mother’s very soft, his father’s fingers stained with red ink, tobacco-brown. She smelt of powder and cleanness, his father of cigarettes.

  He told them about school, every single bit of gossip, of marks he’d been awarded, compliments and criticism. The footsteps of their lodger sounded often on the stairs, and sometimes his mother said they couldn’t have let the rooms to a pleasanter man. On Thursdays there was sago, its brown skin the nicest part. On Sundays there were their walks on Ealing Common, and Sunday teas of buttered toast and jam, with raisin scones, his father’s special treat. ‘Your father was happy?’ the younger Massmith sister remarked years later when Francis told the Massmiths all about it in their bungalow. ‘Yes, he was happy,’ he replied. ‘He wasn’t boring, you know,’ he said to the Kilvert-Dunnes while helping in their glasshouses on the Isle of Wight. His father’s affection for the Midland Bank seemed touching to the Kilvert-Dunnes in the end, and to the Massmith sisters, and to the doctor and the doctor’s wife. On the wireless in 14 Rowena Avenue there were comedy programmes, and the news at nine o’clock.

  But then, when the secret came, all of it was different. When the secret came the silences in the sitting-room seemed shadowed with treachery. Francis explained all that to the Massmith sisters, and to the others, too: how the footsteps on the stairs were different then, how the stairs themselves, winding up to the attics, were not as they had been. During meals or on the common, in the sitting-room where the clock and the knitting-needles kept time with one another, he told years afterwards how he had fought a bleakness and a despair that often made him want to smash the cosiness to pieces by screaming out the truth. But the debt-collector had said it was their secret now. ‘Yours and mine, Francis,’ he’d said, his fingers cold and white, like ivory. Every morning the debt-collector cycled off, a frail man in a fawn gabardine raincoat over his pin-striped suit, a wisp of moustache enlivening his face. Francis was eleven then.

  In all his conversations with the Massmith sisters and the others Francis had expunged the debt-collector’s name, not wishing even to think of it himself. ‘I’ve got the Cumberland Hussars,’ the man had said, pausing in the sitting-room doorway on his way to the attics, and Francis explained to the Massmith sisters that his parents would have considered it unusual if he had not eagerly agreed to mount the stairs with their lodger to inspect the newly acquired regiment of soldiers. The secret might have unfolded there and then if Francis had hesitated too long, if he hadn’t done what he had done so often before. With the colourful regiments spread out on the table kept specially for the war games, the same words were always whispered, the same passion entered the debt-collector’s eyes. Among the marching soldiers the deception and the treachery increased, becoming as much part of everything as the acts the debt-collector taught him. School, and the friends there might have been there, became absurd. His mother and his father seemed like two bothersome old mice, filling the sitting-room with fustiness. ‘Oh, my dear,’ the younger Massmith sister tearfully murmured, hearing that. He was ashamed, he explained to the doctor’s wife, to stand in the same room as his parents; but all the doctor’s wife had done was to take advantage of him also. In the end the debt-collector had paid him.

  Francis walked along Piccadilly, hurrying away from what had taken place in the car-park. He’d have a bath in the Rembrandt Hotel, no matter what the time was when he arrived there. ‘Hi, dear,’ a woman with a Pekinese said and he didn’t answer, knowing that the woman would demand money, not offer it. Taxis, their orange lights glowing, moved rapidly on the wide, empty street. He passed the Ritz and thought of the people sleeping there: men with girls they’d picked up, women with bar-room lovers, dreary married couples, the rich. Once upon a time he’d believed that he might stay there himself, that he and a friend might sit among the ferns and palms, drinking Tio Pepe at two pounds a glass and laughing quietly in a companionable way.

  In his bedroom in Rowena Avenue he’d imagined scenes like that, escaping from the debt-collector and from his own tears, promising himself that it would never happen again. He’d thought of Kim Novak and had replaced the debt-collector’s ivory hands with hers, telling himself a story that seemed like one of her films. Sim tanned his body, the wind rustled her headscarf. Their sports car sped along the roads of islands. Money meant nothing.

  Even now, the stories continued. There wasn’t Kim Novak any more, nor did sunshine tan his body, nor were there island roads. But for years there’d been an idyll in an English village: a post office and village stores, a little shop that sold everything, where people met and lingered. He and his friend were there– a woman or a man, it didn’t matter – he attending to the grocery side of things, his friend selling stamps, or vice versa, it didn’t matter either. There’d been enough for a little red MG, his friend always driving because Francis still hadn’t learnt to drive himself. Now and again on an autumn evening they slipped out together to have dinner in a lakeside hotel, dressing up a bit because both of them liked to. They kept two cats, one tawny, the other black. Recently that idyll had changed again: the village setting had been tidied away, as the headscarf of Kim Novak had been. The one that replaced it was incomplete, and shadowy. It took place in a German city.

  Francis walked by the railings of Green Park, not taking a taxi, still practising the frugality he h
ad developed after his failure to appropriate the dressmaker’s money. It wasn’t important that the idyll had changed again; what mattered was he had no friend. He’d gone on holidays with friends, but always there’d been sulkiness and tears. ‘You’re a nutter, Francis,’ a girl he’d thought to be sympathetic had pronounced six months ago in Cleethorpes.

  ‘You’re sick the way you cry, old boy,’ a man once said in Dieppe.

  His melancholy deepened as he progressed through the London night. People left a gambling club near Hyde Park Corner, young men in evening dress shouting and laughing, girls laughing also, all of them tumbling into taxis, going on to somewhere else. For a moment Francis hated them. He stopped in his walk, indulging his dislike, listening to the shrill voices, the late-night cries of people determinedly having a good time. He wouldn’t have cared if all of them had been shot down dead, if gunmen had appeared from the Mayfair doorways and opened fire in the orange street light. He imagined the bodies scattered, reminding him of the bodies in the train crash, and the victims of the terrorists the director in the drill-hall had referred to, and the victim of Constance Kent. ‘What a bitter world he drew you into,’ the younger Massmith sister had sadly whispered, and both of them had later condemned the debt-collector as a monster.

  In the Rembrandt Hotel Francis inquired of the Vietnamese night-porter if there was a typewriter he could use for five minutes. The man said there wasn’t, but under pressure he led the way to a small office behind the reception area and pointed at a typewriter on a desk. Francis inserted a piece of hotel writing-paper and typed a brief message to the effect that the jewellery listed below had been freely made over to him by Julia Ferndale, now Julia Tyte, and was his property: an amber and gold dragon brooch, a necklace of seed pearls, a pair of sapphire ear-rings with a bracelet and a ring that matched them. He typed her name, leaving a space for her signature.

  Francis had learnt by heart the prayers and responses in the Catholic prayer-book he had bought. He had learnt by heart as well the Gospel according to St Mark, and often pleased Julia by murmuring the verses in the Catholic voice he’d cultivated. He had pored for hours in Folkestone public library over Butler’s Lives of the Saints, later talking at length about St Colette and St Fulgentius. He had bought a rosary and a crucifix, and had regularly attended services in the Church of Our Lady of Grace in Folkestone, observing how holy water was taken on the fingertips and the wafer received on the tongue. He particularly enjoyed confession and delighted in the sign of the Cross, the rapid gestures, the Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost. In Our Lady of Grace he had been present at more than forty weddings.

  That night Francis dreamed of being married and making again the sign of the Cross. He dreamed of the jewellery he’d typed a message about, and of the uncle he’d invented on the spur of the moment, who came quite vividly to life. The nakedness of the dressmaker and the doctor’s wife repeatedly occurred in his dream, and so did the moustached face of the debt-collector. Doris and Joy were there also, with Mrs Anstey and the two men he had met in the night, and the prettiness of Susanna Music. But it was the real Constance Kent who always was closest to him, who comforted him and made him happy, like the people in his stories.

  5

  Julia’s

  ‘Well, this is nice,’ Mrs Anstey declared, in her usual place beneath the tulip tree. The evening was so still that the flow of the river could scarcely be discerned. In a distant field brown and white cattle grazed.

  ‘Nicer than London,’ Katherine said, depositing a tray on the beech-wood table beside her grandmother’s chair. There were glasses on the tray, and a bottle of white burgundy, the girls’ weekend gift.

  ‘The streets are dirtier when it doesn’t rain,’ Henrietta said. ‘London’s dreadful in a heatwave.’

  Henrietta was the older, twenty-three to Katherine’s twenty, but often they were taken to be twins. It wasn’t just the similar beauty of their features, and their hair: both had a gangling look, and unlike their mother were flat-chested and narrow-hipped. Both were taller than Julia.

  The wine was poured, the talk about life in London continued. They shared a flat with two other girls in Barnes. Henrietta worked for the managing director of a mail-order firm, Katherine in a china shop in South Audley Street. The names of boyfriends littered their conversation, different names each time they came to Swan House. They still looked virginal, but Mrs Anstey knew there had been nights with these different names, Friday evening drives to somewhere pleasant like Cambridge, or Southsea out of season. No doubt they were sensibly on the pill.

  ‘And what’s been happening in Stone St Martin?’ Katherine inquired, laughing a little as she spoke because in the opinion of the girls nothing did tend to happen in the town. Henrietta laughed also, but Mrs Anstey said you’d be surprised.

  Easy conversation was part of the household. Without making an effort, Mrs Anstey could recall scenes that were full of it: the girls in Julia’s bedroom, sprawled over a patchwork counterpane, cups of tea everywhere; walks near Anstey’s Mill; moments in the garden and the kitchen and the drawing-room. The girls were always talking, Julia asking questions. Returning from St Mildred’s Convent, they told of changes since her time there and complained far more about the nuns than Mrs Anstey ever remembered Julia herself complaining. Yet often there were repetitions, the girls’ conversation full of shadows from Julia’s own so many years ago. In Anstey’s Mill Julia had chattered just as the girls did in Swan House, while Mrs Anstey had asked the questions. The difference was that at Anstey’s Mill there’d been a father in the family. The death of Roger Ferndale had caused the flow of conversation in Swan House to become more feminine than it might have been.

  In answer to Katherine’s question about what had happened in the town Mrs Anstey mentioned Mrs Spanners. She described the charwoman’s appearance on the evening of the cocktail party and told of a newspaper cutting she had brought to Swan House concerning Princess Margaret. She reported that Nevil Crapp, whose identity was remembered by the girls because he’d featured so often in court cases, had become engaged to Diane of the Crowning Glory Salon. The elderly father of Mr Humphreys, on the cheese and bacon counter in Dobie’s Stores, had died a few days ago.

  ‘And then of course,’ Mrs Anstey finished up, ‘there have been the preparations for the wedding.’

  She spoke as casually as she could. Julia had said she would join them for a glass of wine but she might well be occupied in the kitchen for another twenty minutes: this was as good a time as any to mention the uneasiness that had first been a worry on the evening of the cocktail party and which had since persisted, in spite of her efforts to be reasonable. It was Mrs Anstey who had suggested that the girls might be invited for a weekend, a last gathering of a family that would be different in the future. ‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘A deal of preparation.’

  The wedding cake, already made by the Martin Street Bakery, awaited the moment of icing. A package of small cardboard boxes, printed with silver ribbons, had arrived at Swan House. In these, after the wedding, Mrs Anstey was to post pieces of the cake to those who had been unable to attend the occasion.

  ‘I dare say Mrs Spanners is in her element.’ Henrietta laughed again, and Katherine did too.

  ‘There’s something actually,’ Mrs Anstey began to say, before she caught sight of Julia on her way from the house. She changed the subject, and when Julia arrived they were talking again about life in London. Julia sat down and was poured a glass of wine.

  ‘I nearly forgot to telephone Father Lavin,’ she revealed. ‘It’s actually his birthday.’

  Mrs Anstey sighed without letting it show. How on earth, Henrietta and Katherine simultaneously thought, had a fact like that been discovered? The priest would hardly have drawn attention to the day last year or the year before, and even if he had it wasn’t something an adult would remember. The dates of birthdays were what children carried with them.

  ‘He’s getting on, I suppose,’ Katherine said. ‘S
ixty-ish?’

  ‘Fifty-five.’

  ‘And the new chap?’

  No age was attached to the new chap beyond the fact, supplied by Mrs Anstey, that he was young: Father Dawne hadn’t been in Stone St Martin long enough for Henrietta or Katherine to have met him yet. He was nice, Mrs Anstey added, but the girls, who might have wondered about his niceness had he not been a priest, failed to do so since priests were not their cup of tea. Like their grandmother, they had nothing against them, or against the notion of a God who presided over all humanity. They simply did not wish to have dealings with such a figure, either directly or through earthly minions.

  Tinges of red were beginning to appear in the sky, the midges weren’t biting yet. The two women and the girls sipped their wine and talked of other things; Mrs Anstey’s attention drifted. On Julia’s unwieldy typewriter she had noticed that morning a series of long, closely typed paragraphs concerning the sale of a field, with stipulations about boundaries and rights of way and land drains originating in another field. She often read the legal typing in case there should be something of interest, but there never was. There was no need for Julia to continue with the chore now that the girls were off her hands; there hadn’t been a need for years, but it was somehow typical of her that she didn’t give it up. It was typical of her, too, that she should be paying for the honeymoon in Italy, for at the back of Mrs Anstey’s mind there was a suspicion that that was so. She didn’t know why she thought it, something that had been mentioned presumably had caught her attention without her properly realizing.

  Later that evening there was a moment after dinner when she found herself alone with Henrietta, but the conversation they had wasn’t satisfactory. The truth she so strongly sensed contained no details, no faces of other people, no incidents or events, no facts of any kind: it seemed to Mrs Anstey that a fog shrouded a whole landscape. Perception couldn’t cope with the mystery of that and none of it was easy to explain to a young girl, whose reaction no doubt was to think her touched.