Death in Summer (7 page)

In the kitchen Albert washes up. The Chicken Madras is always the preference from Ishi Baba’s. He doesn’t mind himself, the Chicken Madras or the beef, whatever’s on. He separates the squares of a Chivers’ strawberry jelly and when
the water on the gas jet boils he pours it on to them, stirring until they dissolve.

No way will Pettie have money for the rent if she doesn’t go back to the Dowlers or start in somewhere else. Come Friday there’ll be the knocking on the ceiling with the walking-stick and Mrs Biddle saying she’s not a charity. She never wanted that girl in the house in the first place, she’ll remind him, which from time to time she does anyway, rent or no rent. It rouses her suspicion that Pettie keeps a low profile in the house, hardly making a sound on the stairs or when she opens the front door or closes it behind her. Claiming that the sitting-room has a smell, she never looks in for a chat with Mrs Biddle. It worries Albert that she won’t be able to find other employment and will make for the streets where Marti Spinks and Ange hang about, where Little Mister’s with the rent boys. ‘Don’t ever go up Wharfdale,’ he has warned her often enough, but sometimes she doesn’t answer.

Finding room for the jelly among packets of frozen peas and potato chips in the refrigerator, Albert’s concern for Pettie gathers vigour. She won’t be able to give him back the money she borrowed, and when he asks her what she’s doing for work she won’t say. She’ll sit there in the Soft Rock, making butterflies out of the see-through wrap of a cigarette packet or tapping her fingers if the music is on, not hearing what’s said to her because of this house she has been to. He’ll say again that he should go round to the Dowlers to try to get the job back. The chances are she won’t answer.

A fluffy grey cat crawls along the windowsill, pausing to look in at him. Albert doesn’t like that cat. Closing the
refrigerator door, and catching sight of the animal again as he turns around, he remembers how it once jumped down from the opening at the top of Mrs Biddle’s window and landed on her pillow, terrifying her because she was asleep. The cat is another worry Albert has, though nothing like as nagging a one as his worry about Pettie. As if it knows this and is resentful, it mews at Albert through the glass, displaying its pointed teeth. There’s a cat that goes for postmen’s fingers when they push the letters into the box, vicious as a tiger, a postman told him.

The mewing ceases and Albert is spat at. Claws slither on the window-pane, the fluffy grey tail thrashes the air, and then the creature’s gone. It’ll be the end of her if Pettie goes up Wharfdale, same’s it was for Bev.

*

At a scarf counter she unfolds scarves she can’t afford to buy, trying some of them on. Busy with another customer, the sales assistant isn’t young, a grey, bent woman whom Pettie feels sorry for: awful to be on your feet like that all day long, at the beck and call of anyone who cares to summon you, forever folding the garments that have been mussed up.

In the coat department the assistant is younger, a black girl with a smile. She keeps repeating that the blue with the ows at the collar suits Pettie, and brings her a yellow and a green of the same cut. ‘’Course the bows slip on and off, you have what colour bow you want,’ the black girl points out, and Pettie is reminded of Sharon Lite, who had to have electric-shock treatment years afterwards. Albert occasionally comes across someone from the home, someone who recognizes him on the street or in an Underground, who
passes on bits of news like that. ‘No, sorry,’ Pettie apologizes, and the black girl says she’s welcome.

In a shoe shop she tries on shoes, fifteen pairs in all. She walks about with a different shoe on either foot. She asks for half a size larger and begins again. She asks about sandals, but sandals are scarce at the moment, she’s told, everyone after them. She examines the tights on a rack by the doors and leaves the shop with a pair of navy blue and a pair of taupe. No way you can walk out of a store with a coat, but at least she has a scarf with horses’ heads on it, and a blue bow and a silvery one, and the tights.

On the street again she examines spectacles in an optician’s window. All of them are more attractive than hers. She saw the grandmother looking at hers, not thinking much of them. ‘No, I don’t think so,’ the grandmother would have said to him behind that closed door, and he’d have argued that he didn’t see why not. But the grandmother would have gone on and on.

‘Of course, you could go for contacts,’ the woman in the optician’s suggests, although she’s wearing glasses herself, with jewels in the hinge area and silver trim on the side pieces. Disposable contact lenses you can have now, she points out, no more than a film over the eyes, throw them away every night. Available on EasiPlan, the woman says.

‘How much, though?’ Pettie asks, and there are questions then, and calculations, and a form to fill in, information required about the applicant’s bank account, name and address of employer, length of time in present position, if credit has ever been refused or withheld. Pettie says she’ll think about it. The scarf with the horses’ heads on it is draped over a pair of smoky blue frames which Pettie is about
to take into her possession. But she can tell that the woman with the jewelled hinges is sharp, and changes her mind.

‘Excuse me, please.’

For a moment she imagines the man outside the optician’s is a detective who has followed her from the scarf counter or the shoe shop, but when he speaks again it is to ask the way to Marble Arch. Pettie directs him, repeating the directions because he isn’t quick on the uptake. When she has finished and has told him how long she estimates the journey will take on foot, which is how he has indicated he intends to make it, he invites her to have a cup of tea or coffee. ‘Maybe stronger?’ he offers also. He’s sallow-skinned, from somewhere in the East, Pettie speculates. Beer? he suggests, still smiling. Maybe barley wine, which bucks you up?

Pettie walks away. In Leicester Square she sits at the end of a damp wooden seat otherwise occupied by a couple fondling one another. There was a smell of lavender when she was waiting in the hall, maybe coming from the polish on the panelling because you could smell a waxiness, too. There was a gong like the one the slave hits at the beginning of old films, only smaller, and through an open door she could see the dining-room silver – little ornamental fowls on a big oval table, and salt and pepper containers – and blue glasses on a sideboard, and a fireguard that was a seat as well, upholstered in red leather and buttoned. The silver was valuable, anyone could tell that. One of the fowls would have gone into her bag so’s you’d hardly notice the bulge, spoons from the sideboard, a little china box from the table in the hall. But she didn’t even consider it.

The couple who have been fondling one another go away. She took her glasses off when the grandmother was
out of the room. She held them for a minute, wanting him to see her without them, but unable to see him properly herself. ‘I hope you didn’t find the journey too terrible,’ he said, and she shook her head; the journey was nothing. ‘There would be adequate time off,’ he’d said on the phone. ‘We could arrange that between us.’ He had made his mind up then. He had made his choice; he was a man who knew immediately. Time off she would spend in the garden or just walking about the country, not ever bothering to go back to the streets. She would have told him that if the grandmother hadn’t come back then.

A black man, talking, sits down where the couple were. He scatters crumbs for the pigeons, breaking up bread he takes from a pocket. He is speaking about someone for whom he would lay down his life or obtain money by whatever means. His eyes are bloodshot, his teeth flash as he converses, seeming occasionally to address the pigeons, who softly coo for him. Two women go by, talking about their health.

It was just before the old woman said they’d go upstairs to the nursery that she knew she definitely had feelings for him. She looked back from the door and he was stroking the dog again, a consolation in his hurting. That grave would have been in his mind, and his motherless baby.

It has helped, going round the shops: it’s nice to think of the scarf in her handbag, and the bows from the coats, and the tights. If she’d walked out of the optician’s with the smoky frames she would have had to find out in another shop if she could replace her wire ones with them, which would cost her – some exorbitant amount, as always is the case when you want something. Tuesday or Wednesday
she’ll take what she’s got to the car-boot man, with a few more items added in the meantime. No point in going out there with only three.

Taking possession of things touches a part of Pettie she does not understand, stirring an excitement in her that never fails to brighten up the day. The first time she did it in a shop – her fingers edging towards a blue ballpoint pen – she experienced a throb of fear and hesitated, thinking she couldn’t. Yet a moment later she did. ‘No, over to the right,’ she instructed the man behind the counter, who had to stand on a stool to reach a box of chocolates with a castle on it. Her fingers drew the ballpoint towards her, then closed around it. A bigger box was what she was after, she said, and flowers she’d prefer to a castle. Outside, she threw the ballpoint away.

The car-boot man approached her one day when she’d just come out of a shop. If ever she had anything she wanted to get rid of – articles of clothing she had tired of, odds and ends she might dispose of – he’d give her a good price, old or new, it didn’t matter. She went with him to his house and spread out on a table what she had just acquired. He didn’t pay much in spite of what he’d said about a good price, and never has on any of the occasions she has visited him since. He makes an offer, take it or leave it; the best he can do, times are hard. Bearded, with glasses, he has never revealed his name. His house is stuffy, the windows always tightly closed. The money he pays her comes from odd jobs, she tells Albert, who always wants to know where money comes from. Cleaning, she says. Working a price-gun.

‘No, man. No more.’ The last of the black man’s crumbs have been scattered, but the pigeons still crowd his legs.
Two weeks he has gone without a drink, he assures the pigeons and the companion who is not present. ‘Honey, that is for you. Honey, I suffer.’

People wait outside the cinemas, drab against the glamour of the posters and the familiar faces of the stars. Georgina Belle could be a star’s name, and Pettie wonders how it came into her thoughts. ‘A total waste that was,’ a cross voice complains, and a couple walk away.

The grandmother said they’d only minutes ago decided on another arrangement. She would be coming to live in the house herself, to take her daughter’s place as best she could until the baby was older. It was sensible in the circumstances, but Pettie didn’t listen to why that was. The clock in the panelling struck, five o’clock it would have been. The grandmother said something about the heatwave when she held the front door open, then gave her the ten-pound note.

In a Wimpy Bar Pettie squirts tomato ketchup on to chips and grey minced meat.
When out to dinner
, Miss Rapp’s column laid down,
refrain from recounting the details of a hospital operation while other folk are eating
. You’d get into the way of things in a house like that one. You’d leave something for Miss Manners, you’d get your grammar right. Blush pink on your fingernails, nothing objectionable, nothing the woman holding the stepladder could sniff at. Magic Touch on any skin defects.

Her Coca-Cola comes. She sips a little, then slowly begins to eat, not registering the taste, nor where she is. She lights her remaining cigarette and crumples up the empty packet. ‘Come downstairs for a sherry,’ he invites, his quiet baby asleep, a rag doll on the pillow. The sherry glasses have
long stems, two glasses on a red and gold tray. ‘It suits you, Nanny,’ he says, about the uniform they have given her. Two shades of blue, with only touches of white, the stockings black. A widower is lonely: that’s there between them. He doesn’t say it; he doesn’t have to; the old woman couldn’t manage it is what he says, too much for her. It’s dark outside, a winter’s evening and the fire is lit.

Six days go by and then Thaddeus does what he feels he has to, having put it off, but now wanting to get it over. He has been given a time and a place, four o’clock in the Tea Cosy. He brings with him fifty pounds in notes.

The teashop is in the town where Mrs Ferry was once the receptionist at the Beech Trees Hotel. The Beech Trees has gone, and with it Mrs Ferry’s onetime husband, whom she would settle for now. She lives alone, in a room above a confectioner’s. The Tea Cosy is in a busier street, five minutes away.

‘Bad Hat!’ Mrs Ferry exclaims from where she sits when Thaddeus enters, lowering his head beneath the beam with a sign on it to warn him.
Bad Hat!
her Valentine message ran seventeen years ago, among others in a local paper.
But good for his ever-loving Dot!

She has ordered tea, and a plate of cakes, which she was always partial to and used to say she shouldn’t be. She bulges out of a spotted yellow dress, a hat reminiscent of a turban hiding much of her henna hair, her lipstick a splash of crimson. Coloured beads lollop over double chins and reach an artificially deepened cleavage, exposed between mammoth breasts. There is no sign in this spectacle of the ill-health so regularly touched upon in Mrs Ferry’s letters. Only her weight would seem to be a subject for a consulting room.

‘Hullo,’ Thaddeus greets his afternoon woman of long ago, recalling her underclothes on the back of a chair, the curtains pulled over. ‘Hullo, Dot.’

‘Well, dear, you haven’t changed. He’ll have put on a year or two, I said, but truth to tell you hardly have.’

He smiles, wiping away with his fingers the lipstick she has left on his cheek, which would have been his mouth if she’d had her way. She pours his tea, remarking that, after all, it wasn’t yesterday. She speaks in a hurried gabble, doing her best to be lighthearted. She offers Thaddeus the plate of cakes.

‘I have to explain,’ he interrupts when there’s a chance.