The Saint Zita Society (7 page)

They had gone to work an hour before or Thea wouldn’t have dared sit here to smoke her cigarette. She watched Beacon sitting in the Audi, waiting for Preston Still. He was late this morning. Perhaps he wasn’t going to his office in Old Broad Street but off to another of those eternal conferences in Birmingham or Cardiff. Henry had departed with Lord Studley before she had started on her first cigarette. The only interesting thing to happen this morning was the departure of the Princess and June for Heathrow and somewhere in Italy. Their taxi was due at ten thirty, June had told her, and it duly arrived, five minutes early which was par for the course with that company. From where she sat Thea couldn’t see the front door of number 6 but she could just see the bottom steps, the driver go up them and June appear with him after a couple of minutes. The amount of baggage those two old women took with them! June was hauling some of it along behind her, bump, bump, bump down the steps with her, the driver balancing a huge suitcase on his right shoulder like a furniture remover. The Princess never carried anything except her handbag. She minced down the steps in the high heels and on two sticks. Thea thought they must be the only pair of heels she owned, red snakeskin with toes pointed enough to stab someone. June went back for the rest of the bags and they got into the taxi.

Thea was watching it disappear northwards, sucking on the stub of her cigarette, when Damian appeared from nowhere, opened the gate and advanced to the foot of the steps.

‘When the cat is away,’ he said in his snooty accent,
‘the mice will play. I thought I caught a whiff on you the other day.’

‘I can’t give up. I
have
tried.’

‘It’s not so much the smoking, though if you’ll forgive the cliché, it
is
a filthy habit. No, it’s sitting on the steps I mind. Like some slag on a council estate. Still, since you’re here perhaps you’ll go inside and find my briefcase for me. Unaccountably I forgot it.’

Thea could have said it wasn’t unaccountable, he was always forgetting things, but she didn’t. She found the briefcase on the table just inside the front door and brought it to him.

‘Thank you. You do have your uses.’

He walked off to pick up a taxi in Ebury Bridge Street. Thea lit a third cigarette, walked round the house into the back garden where the paths and the lawn were invisible under a thick wet layer of fallen leaves. Unidentifiable toadstools that looked like hunks of purple liver poked their heads through the brown mush. It had begun to rain again. Thea sheltered under the gingko tree, scraped the mud off her shoes on its trunk and thought she might get smoking or ‘the smoking question’ put down as an item on the agenda of the next Saint Zita meeting. Where were smokers to smoke, for instance? In the street? Surely not. Perhaps someone’s flat or studio room might be turned into a smoking room like you got at certain airports. That reminded her that she couldn’t put anything on the agenda as June had departed on her holidays.

‘N
ever pass a weed,’ said Abram Siddiqui, stooping down to pull up a dandelion growing among the chrysanthemums. He explained to his daughter, who in any case had heard it before, ‘This means not to walk past it but to pull it out so that you
do not actually
pass it.’

‘Yes, Father, I remember. We have so many weeds in our garden – well, Mr Still’s garden – that you could not help passing them. There are only weeds and not any plants.’

Thomas, in his pushchair, was making friendly overtures to a customer’s German shepherd, holding out his arms and shouting, ‘Doggy, doggy.’

Rabia picked him up and his cajoling turned to screams of protest. She carried him towards the temperate house where the café was while pushing the buggy with her free hand, said, ‘Thomas, be quiet now. Stop screaming and stop kicking or you will have no chocolate biscuit with your drink.’

Abram looked on approvingly but waiting, Rabia knew, to see if she carried out her threat. Orange juice came for the still-yelling Thomas and coffee for Rabia and her father. The biscuits on offer today were a particularly delicious variety. Seated in what Rabia called a ‘grown-up chair’, Thomas was now sobbing and reaching out for the biscuit plate. The woman with the German shepherd passed by on the other side of the glass wall.

‘No, Thomas. Drink your juice.’

Rabia moved the plate out of his reach but otherwise ignored his pleas. Abram, pleased with her handling of the biscuit crisis, said, ‘Khalid told me he saw you when he came to take the Christmas-tree booking. He said, but very respectfully, Rabia, that you are beautiful and dressed like a good Muslim lady.’

‘It is not his business, Father, to talk about how I am dressed.’

‘It was very respectful. I am your father and I know what is proper. I could not object. There are not many like Khalid, I can tell you, Rabia.’

‘There may be ten thousand for all I know. They are nothing to me. And now Thomas is behaving like a good boy and
there are not
any
like him he is so good.’ She reached over, took his face in her hands and kissed his fat pink cheek. ‘Now we will go home. And on the way home we shall buy some biscuits just like those and you shall have one at teatime.’

‘It is good to hear you do not let him eat in the street,’ said Abram rather sourly. ‘Children must not be allowed to eat in the street in any circumstances.’

W
hat Montserrat saw in the mirror was a petite young woman, slim but not thin, with beautiful breasts and rounded hips, shapely legs and fine ankles. The face she saw was oval, the skin very white, the eyes large and very dark brown, the features symmetrical and the hair a dense mass of black curls. Did she know anyone with as fine a head of hair as hers?

Thea and Henry and Beacon saw a short young woman, about twelve pounds overweight, with oversized breasts (Thea), quite good legs (Henry), far too pale, looked ill (Beacon), nothing special about her features except that the eyes were attractive, if too starey. All agreed that her hair was her best feature; a true black, Beacon said, glossy as ebony, but he only admired the looks of his own ethnic group. Unfortunately, he said, she hadn’t a very nice nature.

‘On the make,’ said June. ‘You know how they say of people – mostly dead people, I must say – that she’d have done anything for anybody. Well, that Montsy wouldn’t do anything for anybody unless it was to her advantage. You’ll see.’

Montserrat’s father and Lucy Still’s father had been at school together and remained friends, though Charles Tresser had lost all his money in some banking scandal while Robert Sanderson got richer and richer. Charles happened to mention
that his daughter had dropped out of the university he had got her into with some difficulty and Robert suggested the problem of where she was to go and how to earn her living would be solved by her going to work for his daughter who was expecting her third child. That was how Montserrat came to be an au pair and called Lucy by her first name. What she was supposed to do she had never been told. Zinnia did the housework, Rabia looked after the new baby and the girls when they needed looking after, Beacon drove the Audi. Lucy had no car but took taxis everywhere. Montserrat had the one-bedroom basement flat which would have been Beacon’s if he had chosen to live in it instead of with Dorothee, William and Solomon.

If her duties had never been specified, she soon knew that she would be expected to perform those vaguely secretarial tasks that weren’t to Lucy’s taste. Sending for a plumber when one was required, informing credit card companies that a card was lost, asking for help from the provider when Lucy’s computer failed to work. Much the same as the ‘little jobs’ that Thea carried out for Damian and Roland for free. Montserrat found this tedious but she mostly did it. Her conscience had never troubled her when she found she was expected to admit, escort upstairs and eventually dismiss Lucy’s lover. While living with her mother in Barcelona when she wasn’t living with her father in Bath, she saw her mother’s lovers come and go and in some cases a secret was made of their visits. This was normal, she thought. She never thought it beneath her dignity or degrading to take the twenty-pound note Lucy tucked into her jeans pocket when she brought Rad along to the bedroom or the fifty-pound note he thrust into her hand when she saw him out of the basement door.

Now, on a morning in October, she found herself asked, not by Lucy who cared nothing for such things, but by Mr
Still on his way to get into the Audi, if she would find someone to mend the loose banister at the top of the basement stairs.

‘Some sort of builder, d’you mean?’

‘Try the Yellow Pages,’ said Preston Still, sounding impatient. ‘I don’t know. Just do it.’

Montserrat couldn’t find the Yellow Pages. For one thing, she didn’t know where to look, so she opened every drawer and cupboard she came to and was emerging from one of the spare rooms when she met Lucy coming out of her bedroom. Lucy was wearing a pale yellow suit the same colour as her hair with a skirt some eight inches above her knees, lacy tights and shoes with five-inch heels. Montserrat asked her if she knew where the Yellow Pages were.

‘No one uses phone directories any more,’ said Lucy. ‘This is the age of the cellphone or hadn’t you noticed?’

‘Mr Still wants someone to mend the banister.’

‘Oh, I shouldn’t bother. He’s probably forgotten all about it by now. He’s a chronic amnesiac.’

Lucy tottered downstairs, waved once and slammed the front door behind her. Her bedroom was in its usual chaotic state before Zinnia got to work on it, the bed a sprawl of discarded clothes, the sheets scattered with ash and crumbs, the breakfast tray she had taken up two hours before cluttered with smeary plates and coffee dregs in which fag ends floated. Montserrat, no believer herself in the virtues of cleanliness, almost admired Lucy’s ability to turn a neatly laid tray of prettily packaged foodstuffs into a filthy tip like the contents of a waste bin ravaged by urban foxes. She looked in vain inside the clothes cupboards and the drawers for the Yellow Pages, abandoned the room to Zinnia and went on up to the nursery floor.

Rabia was teaching Thomas to feed himself. He sat in his high chair with a spoon in each hand, digging away at a bowl
of goo. The spoon in his right hand was used to transfer the goo to his mouth, more or less haphazardly, the other to fling its contents on to the floor or as far across the room as he could reach. Montserrat, who disliked children, had seldom seen a more disgusting sight.

‘He is so clever and good, aren’t you, my sweetheart?’ Rabia was kept busy, crawling about, wiping up messes on floor, wall and skirting board.

Thomas laughed, goo leaking out of his open mouth. ‘Love Rab,’ he said, wiping a spoon on his nanny’s hair.

Montserrat could have sworn tears of joy had come into Rabia’s eyes.

‘Where can I get someone to mend the banister, Rabia?’

‘Maybe Yellow Pages.’

‘Yeah, but I can’t find them.’

‘My cousin Mohammed, he is very, very good carpenter. Better than carpenter,
joiner.’

‘How can I find him? You know his mobile number?’

‘Of course, Montsy,’ said Rabia. ‘I have it by heart.’ She gave it to Montserrat, then expecting the other girl to forget, wrote it down on the shopping-list pad. ‘I have all relations’ and friends’ numbers in my memory.’

‘Wow, I wish I had.’

‘Yes, it is a gift.’ Rabia smiled modestly, picked up Thomas and hugged him, contriving to smear his mouth all across her blouse. ‘Now we shall both have to put clean clothes on, my darling. Will that be fun?’

Evidently it would, for Thomas roared with laughter.

A message had to be left on Mohammed’s voicemail. He called back when Montserrat was in the Dugong, having a drink with Jimmy and Henry.

‘I am coming on Saturday the sixth,’ said Mohammed.

‘The sixth of
November
?’

‘That is the next sixth, isn’t it? Between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m.’

‘You mean someone’s got to be in all day?’ Montserrat knew that someone would be her. ‘Can’t you say morning or afternoon?’

‘You take it or leave it, my dear. You will get top-class job.’

‘Oh, OK, if I must,’ said Montserrat.

The paediatrician at number 3 would require Jimmy no more that day so his driver was having a stiff gin and tonic. Henry, needed by Lord Studley in Whitehall at five thirty, thought it best to stick to elderflower water. He could have a real drink with Huguette that evening, possibly a few glasses of burgundy and a nip or two of Campari which was what Montserrat was having with orange now.

‘If anything goes wrong at number 7,’ she was saying, ‘and Rabia is separated from that child, she’ll break her heart.’

‘What d’you mean, goes wrong?’ Henry thought the elderflower water would be improved by a spot of gin but he dared not.

‘Well, if they split up. You never know, do you? Lucy wouldn’t think twice about getting rid of Rabia.’

‘She’ll be all right,’ said Jimmy. ‘I hear she’s getting married to that guy who drives the flowerpot van.’

Montserrat didn’t like her news to be capped, especially by something more positive and dramatic. She got up, said she’d see them at the next Saint Zita Society meeting which couldn’t be long delayed now that June and the Princess were back from Florence. And there they were, their taxi drawing up outside number 6. It was one of those big taxis, like a little bus with sliding doors, and obviously needful for the quantity of luggage which began to spill out on to the pavement. Montserrat hurried down the area steps in case she was asked to help with carrying it in.

I
n common with Damian and Roland, the Princess and the noble family of Studleys, neither Lucy nor Preston Still ever did anything in the house which could be categorised as a menial or horny-handed task. The paediatrician, on the other hand, much to Jimmy’s disgust, rather enjoyed knocking a nail in here and there, mending a fuse, or putting a washer on a tap. Jimmy would have agreed with the sentiments in Belloc’s verse: