The Saint Zita Society (29 page)

June was on the alert two days later when the Princess asked her if she would give the little dog a rather longer walk than usual and reminded her that the vet had said he shouldn’t put on any more weight. Mr Brookmeadow was coming to tea. No, nothing important, only something that had to be done before a notary public, and Mrs Neville-Smith would also be there. Did she want anything special for tea? Rocksana was seeing to all that, fetching a cake from Patisserie Valerie. June was convinced a new will was to be made and in Rocksana’s favour. She cheered up a bit next morning when, although Rocksana told her she was moving into the two top floors, the Princess demanded a short lease renewable after six months.

The Saint Zita Society meeting was well attended. Beacon who wasn’t working that day came over to the Dugong specially, complimented Jimmy on the excellence of the duck and made a stirring speech about Thea’s fine qualities. Apparently she had confided in him that she intended to be married in church and had asked him to give her away. Jimmy wept a bit and bought him a Drambuie. It was rare for Beacon
to drink alcohol and taken as a good omen. Dex again sat on his own at a table in the corner listening to his mobile and looking at messages which appeared on it. Jimmy, who was turning the meeting into a wake, bought him a Guinness but said afterwards that his smile when he thanked him ‘made your blood run cold’.

Dex had gone by then. The proceedings had mystified him. They seemed to be about some woman who had died but who it was, where the death had taken place and why these people cared, he didn’t know. They were all people, not evil spirits, that was clear. The Guinness had been nice and he had forced a smile of thanks for it, but smiling was unusual with him, he had few occasions for it. Sometimes, when a plant he had grown came into flower and it was a good colour or a pretty shape, then he would smile, but that could only be a summer event and never happened at this bitter time of the year. January and February were the times when he best remembered being shut up in that cold place and the door bolted on him.

On the way home he picked up a tin of sardines and a bag of chips for his supper. His room was cold, and though he couldn’t afford it, he put on the electric fan. The old lady on the floor below got something called the winter fuel allowance, two hundred pounds. Dex couldn’t understand why he didn’t get it but when he asked he was told he wasn’t old enough and he couldn’t understand that either. Why was it better to be old than young? He put on the television. The woman who had found his knife in her bag was talking again and then a policeman was talking about tests being done on his knife. With her black hair and fluffy coat the woman reminded him of the evil spirit he had destroyed, but he had got rid of her so he was no longer either afraid or angry.

His mobile phone made a little sound just as he was getting ready for bed, two little musical notes and then another one. He had a look at his screen and to his mounting excitement saw that a message from Peach had come.

As a little thank you
, he read,
for being a Peach customer we’d like to give you 10 free calls
.

He was very pleased, not so much for the cost-saving as for the care for him this showed. In his world not many people had cared for him; Dr Mettage perhaps, and Dr Jefferson had been good to him. But he felt that Peach really cared. After all, he hadn’t asked for these messages, this kindness, it had just come, preceded by the little tune. Peach loved him.

J
oe Chou helped Rocksana move in and stayed the night but didn’t apparently intend to live here with her.

‘The Princess wouldn’t have it anyway,’ said June. Her employer had never taken a stand on any moral issue but it did no harm to tell the new tenant the rules, formulated by herself. ‘Not unless the rent goes up fifty per cent,’ she added.

‘Joe’s just got himself a flat over the restaurant. He wouldn’t want to give that up.’

June got up at two o’clock in the morning to check on the will. The Princess had been in bed for five hours, Rocksana for perhaps one. Creeping up the top flight every quarter-hour in the hope of the crack of light under Rocksana’s bedroom door going out, she had made three such journeys, dragging her rock-bound right arm behind her until she met total darkness. It was nearly three when she entered the drawing room and looked for the will. Either the old one or a new one was what she expected but what she found was no will at all. Impossible to tell whether a fresh one had been made. Possibly it had and Mr Brookmeadow had taken
it away with him to have a copy made; possibly a copy would come back. But perhaps the old will had not been superseded, June was still the legatee, and Mr Brookmeadow had suggested there was no point in her keeping it at number 6 Hexam Place when it would be more secure with its fellow in the safe in Northumberland Avenue. There was no knowing.

If there was a new will Mrs Neville-Smith had been one of the witnesses but who was the other? Not Zinnia. She had gone long ago and would have been up at number 4 cleaning for Sohrab and Lambda by the time Mr Brookmeadow arrived. There was of course a third possibility. A new will could have been made with June no longer the sole heir but with Rocksana and even possibly Zinnia herself as additional beneficiaries. Humbled by stress and anxiety, June thought she wouldn’t much object to that, she was not entirely averse to sharing, she could bear it. In a rather more resigned frame of mind, she went back to bed.

In spite of his being a paediatrician, ninety-nine per cent of whose patients were under the age of ten, most of the residents of Hexam Place called for Dr Jefferson when in need of medical attention. He lived in the same street, he was a doctor and everyone agreed he was very nice. Before the separation from his wife, Preston Still had regularly rung his doorbell (or sent someone else to do it) when one of his children had a temperature or a rash; Damian Philemon phoned when he or Roland had a sore throat and Bibi Lambda asked for a repeat prescription for her contraceptive pill. Even Simon Jefferson, the mildest of men, remarked to Jimmy that this was a bit much.

He never said no and wouldn’t have considered saying no when June presented herself at his front door and told him she had found the Princess unconscious on the bathroom
floor. Dr Jefferson accompanied her back to number 6 where Rocksana told him, to everyone’s surprise, that she had attempted the FAST test for stroke, examining the Princess’s face for distortion, attempting to get her to raise her arm and to speak, none of which had results.

‘Best call an ambulance. It looks like a stroke, in which case time is of the essence.’

T
he Princess never regained consciousness. June could see little point in visiting her when she wouldn’t know if anyone was there or not but Rocksana thought otherwise.

‘They, like, know you’re there,’ she said to Zinnia, ‘even if they can’t hear or speak.’

She went every day and sat by the Princess’s bed. June was made very uneasy. She hunted through the medicine chest in the Princess’s bathroom and seemed to recall a bottle of sleeping pills that had been there for at least twenty years but was there no longer. A search of Rocksana’s flat revealed neither the pills nor the bottle but June put this down to Rocksana’s cunning. Three days after she had been admitted to the hospital the Princess had a second stroke and died. Rocksana wept bitterly. June put on the Princess’s mink coat and a hat made of lesser quality fur because the weather was still very cold, and walked up to number 3.

Doing this took a good deal of nerve. It was only knowing that a fortune might be at stake that kept June to her resolve. Dr Jefferson was a doctor, he lived in the same street, he was famously kind and easy-going. He would listen. But she was afraid. Her mouth went dry as she rang the front doorbell.
The butter-coloured Lexus was parked at the kerb, so there was no escape now. He was there.

Jimmy was there too. It was he who answered the door. He didn’t exactly ask her what she wanted but as good as.

‘Oh, hi, June. What brings you here?’

‘That’s for Dr Jefferson’s ears only,’ said June in a very stiff but hoarse tone.

‘Sounds like you’ve got a bad cold. Maybe you shouldn’t be out.’

June made no reply. It was the first time she had ever been inside the house. Through the half-open drawing-room door she could see the place was very elegantly furnished, so without waiting for Jimmy to show her the way, she went in there and sat down on the kind of chair she thought of as French, with curly gilded arms and legs and red silk upholstery. The sitting down was not entirely a gesture of defiance aimed at Jimmy but also because she feared her legs were about to give way from nerves.

Dr Jefferson kept her waiting only two minutes. He wore a sympathetic look, a gentle half-smile, said, ‘I was sorry to hear about the Princess. I’m afraid you’ll feel it deeply.’

‘Yes, well – yes, of course I do. We’d been together sixty years.’

‘Dear oh dear, that’s a long time. Now what can I do for you?’

June came out with it bluntly. If she hadn’t, she wouldn’t have done it at all. ‘I want to know if we can have a post-mortem.’

‘A post-mortem? And why would you want that?’

Always one to fall back on drama in difficult situations, June said, ‘I suspect foul play.’

‘I am not hearing this,’ said Dr Jefferson in a very cold voice.

Outside the half-open door Jimmy heard her on the subject of the pill bottle, the Princess’s good health right up to the minute she was found lying on the floor, Rocksana’s arrival at number 6 and her ‘worming her way into the Princess’s affections’.

‘I think she persuaded the Princess to change her will. Why else would Mr Brookmeadow have come to tea? And it would have been changed in Miss Castelli’s favour. You’ll see.’

June had more to say but her voice had faltered and she put her left hand up to her mouth, for Dr Jefferson’s face had changed. He had gradually come to look quite different, to look in fact like another person. Now he was no longer the kindly genial man who was the favourite of mothers at Great Ormond Street Hospital and whom their children seemed to prefer over their own fathers, but the just judge, stern and uncompromising. Two deeply etched parallel lines appeared between his eyebrows and his thin lips were thrust forward. Jimmy, within earshot but unable to see through door and wall, gleefully awaited the explosion. None came.

Dr Jefferson spoke very quietly. ‘It’s best to give you the benefit of the doubt, June. You have lost your employer and closest friend, you are plainly not well yourself. As a doctor, I suggest you go home to bed, have a good rest and let’s hear no more of this nonsense.’

With that, half of it inaudible, Jimmy had to be content. He appeared at the appropriate time to show June out, saying as he watched her make her way unsteadily down the path, ‘Didn’t I say you shouldn’t be out with that cold you’ve got?’

Back in the kitchen Dex was waiting patiently for Jimmy’s return to give him his money. Jimmy had absent-mindedly put the envelope in his pocket. He retrieved it and handed it over, rather relieved that when Dex thanked him he didn’t also manage one of his spine-chilling smiles. Careful to lock
the back door before leaving to drive Dr Jefferson to Great Ormond Street, Jimmy was back again after about a quarter of an hour. It was too early for lunch but Jimmy felt in need of a snack. The knife block had six slots, the bread knife occupying the one at the top on the left. The slot on the right, which a smaller, very sharp fruit knife usually occupied, was empty. Strange, thought Jimmy, but not particularly sinister. It must be all these appearances of that woman on TV, the one who found the knife that killed Thea in her bag, getting to him. That couldn’t be the missing one, could it? No, because he was sure that slot had been filled yesterday.

He began cutting bread, spreading the slice with butter and laying a thick wedge of Cheddar on it. Eating drove the knife question from his mind and he concentrated on missing Thea.

P
utting off her resignation from day to day, Rabia decided she must postpone the writing of that letter no longer. It was Mr Still who had interviewed her and engaged her but Mr Still was gone, a divorce was imminent, and it seemed that Lucy alone was her employer now. Of this she wasn’t quite sure but surely it was Lucy to whom her notice should be given. Mr Still lived somewhere else and she didn’t know how to find out where. Lucy would know, of course, but Lucy would want to know why she asked. Montserrat might know; Rabia was reluctant to ask her. So she put it off from day to day.

There was another reason for this postponement, she knew that. While she told no one in the Still family that she would be leaving, she was still Thomas’s nanny, as close to Thomas as ever. Secretly, privately, she could go on telling herself what she knew was true, that she was Thomas’s best-beloved, of all the people in his world he loved her best. Once she was
gone, once she had announced that she was going, this would cease to be true. It would have to cease, for Thomas’s own sake. He must not be made unhappy by her departure. If this were possible, he must be disturbed as little as could be by her leaving him. Rather to her surprise, when she put this into words – to herself only, silently to herself – she began to cry. Rabia had believed that her tears when Nasreen died were the last she would ever shed. And so it had been until now.

She was crying for a child who wasn’t dead, who wouldn’t die until he was an old, old man, and who wasn’t her own. She must lose him, there was no escaping that. She must lose him, marry Khalid and maybe have children of her own. Drying her tears, she took out from the dressing-table drawer in her bedroom the pad of writing paper she had bought specially for this purpose and the envelope with the first-class stamp already stuck on it, and settled down to write her resignation to Lucy. It took her a very long time. The three children slept. Rabia wrote one draft after another before she was satisfied.

The letter in its envelope but destined to lie on her dressing table for several days before she would give it to Lucy, she went into Thomas’s room and sat for a long time by his bed, watching him while he slept.