Death in Summer

15

A man exercises greyhounds on the towpath where horses once drew the narrow boats of the canal. The muddy sediment that separates the two banks is dankly shadowed, its surface active with autumn insects. The greyhounds are obedient, running on and turning when they’re whistled back, one jet black, the other speckled.

The walk from the town has taken Albert forty-seven minutes, the time checked on his Zenith because he likes to check the passing of time. He has paused quite often to watch the greyhounds racing on the towpath opposite; now, he turns to the right, leaving them behind when he sees the spire of the church in the distance, and houses clustered nearer. A few minutes later the notice he has been told about says the petrol pump is out of order. Then there is the shop, and the public house next door to it. ‘That name’s all over the graveyard,’ she said, and there it is: Davenant on upright and horizontal stones. ‘Thaddeus Davenant,’ she said, but there’s no one answering to that, Johns and Williams and Percivals mostly, all sorts when it comes to the women. No stone yet marks the newest grave; she said that, too.

He leaves the graveyard, and on the lane a tractor comes slowly towards him and he stands in against the hedge to let it pass. The driver waves his thanks, an old man in a cap, his glance passing inquisitively over Albert’s clothing — the red and blue uniform he has coveted for so long, found for him when he was accepted into the ranks.

It’s quiet in the lane once the tractor noise has faded, no aeroplanes to look up at, no one about. The edges of the leaves are withering; there are a few white flowers, a few pink and yellow, in among the brambles. The sky is grey and dull, all sunshine gone, but Albert doesn’t mind: there are the flowers, even though they’re past their best. ‘Immortal, Invisible’ is the hymn that is in his mind. He has never walked in the country before.

There’s a wood behind a fence of barbed wire. Some sort of path through fields he was told about, but he doesn’t look for it. A breeze is getting up, rippling through a crop and in the high grass of a meadow. Merle said she came from the country, a big house by a river, brown horses grazing, like in the picture above Mr. Hoates’s desk. Don’t ever throw down sweet papers in a country field, Miss Rapp ruled. Because the country was our heritage.

Drops of rain begin, heavy drops that spread damp patches on Albert’s jacket and are cold on his forehead and his cheeks. Cows move slowly in a field, all going together, maybe for shelter. The gateless pillars that have been described are straight ahead. The drops have become a downfall, puddles already filling, the surface of the lane awash.

On the drive, the parched laurels drip and glisten; water streams into gratings; Albert’s shoes are soaked. He blinks the rain out of his eyes, he turns up the collar of his jacket. It is the first time rain has fallen on his uniform. Who’d ever have thought that it could rain?

‘A look of an egg about the face,’ Maidment reports. ‘With eyes that do not express a lot, if anything at all. Drenched from head to foot. I wonder he didn’t shelter.’ He leaves the best till last. ‘Togged out by the Salvation Army.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘I’m telling you what’s there.’

‘You know when the Salvation Army was mentioned.’

This has struck Maidment too. A Salvation Army barracks, or whatever the term is. The name of the street was given, but he has forgotten.

‘He say what he wanted?’

‘A word. He said he wanted a word. He called me sir.’

‘It’ll be that boy’

Weeks have passed since their outing to Scarrow Hill. On subsequent Sundays there have been visits to Notham Manor and the Dolls’ Museum at Hindesleigh, to Tattermarle Castle and a steam-engine display in a field. On each occasion Zenobia has attended church en route while Maidment read the News of the World in the Subaru. ‘No, I want to forget about it,’ Zenobia has firmly laid down when attempts have been made by her husband to embark on fresh speculation about the abduction. She doesn’t at all like the advent of this boy.

‘Come for another handout.’ And Maidment pronounces fiscal gain to be the universal language of the age, cure for all ills, salver of all conscience.

‘You’ll need to take in tea,’ Zenobia interrupts this flow, lifting a cherry cake from a tin. ‘You have tobacco on your breath,’ she points out also. ‘Take Listerine, I would.’

‘You ever get the planes going over?’ Albert asks. ‘Alitalia? Icelandic? Air Canada with the leaf? Air India, you get?’

Nothing much in the way of plane traffic, they say, the man saying it first. ‘Mrs. Iveson,’ she said when he came into the room and he wondered how she was spelling that, but didn’t ask. ‘Mr. Davenant,’ she said, and he didn’t say he knew.

Virgin has the pin-up, he says, the Saudis have the swords, the Irish the shamrock. ‘You’d know a shamrock never grew in England, sir?’

The man Pettie took the shine to nods. The woman she didn’t like says the shamrock is special to St. Patrick, which he had ready to say himself. Pettie got off on the wrong foot with her on account she gave short on the fares, but it could have been she didn’t mean to. It could have been she hadn’t checked it out. He didn’t say it to Pettie, a waste of breath that would have been. Pettie didn’t go for her and that was that.

‘He took it as a sign.’ He explains in case there is confusion about the shamrock. ‘A three-leaved clover.’

‘Yes, he did.’

‘You’d know it’s a bird on a lot of them, sir? One way or another, not that people realize. Singapore for starters, sir. Then again Indonesia. Then again Nigeria and the Germans.’

‘I see.’

‘Not much to Cathay Pacific, sir. Not much to Egypt Air.’

‘No, I suppose not.’

‘They give me the money, sir. What you sent.’

They nod their heads. A Friday it was when she came out here the first time, a Saturday a.m. when she said Thaddeus Davenant the first time in the Soft Rock.

‘We’re extremely grateful to you,’ the woman says.

‘They said you was grateful.’

‘More than we can express.’

The man who opened the door comes in with a tray. It’s laden down with a cake and toast cut into strips, and a plate of biscuits, and jam, and plates and cups and saucers. You can tell there’s butter on the toast from the glisten.

‘Georgina Belle recovered from her adventure?’ He planned to say that first of all, but he forgot, so he says it now. Then he asks about Iveson, how it’s spelt, explaining that he takes an interest in a name.

‘I, v, e,’ the woman says, ‘s, o, n.’

The man puts the tray down. He fiddles with the cups and saucers, setting them out. Pettie didn’t go for him, either. She didn’t like the way he looked at her when he opened the front door. You wouldn’t trust a man like that, she said. vIveson,’ the woman repeats, and he’s put in mind of Ivy On Her Own, who sang for Leeroy. Still not speaking, the man who brought the tray in goes away.

‘Why d’you call her that?’ the woman asks. ‘Georgina Belle?’

‘The baby that is, Mrs. Iveson.’

Just Georgina it is.’

He mentions Leeroy. Ivy On Her Own, he explains, Bob Iron and the Metalmen. ‘I thought it was Georgina Belle,’ he says, and explains that Leeroy’s singers didn’t exist, that no one could hear them except Leeroy. Probably no one can to this day, he explains.

‘I see,’ the woman says.

‘One of those things, like.’

He likes the cup his tea’s in, flowers all over it and a gold ring on the edge, and another round the saucer. He likes the cake he’s eating, as good as anything Mr. Kipling does. ‘You know Mr. Kipling at all?’ he asks them and then he realizes they think he means personally so he explains that Mr. Kipling is a cake-maker. Mrs. Biddle is partial to Mr. Kipling’s almond slices, he says, anything with jam in it and Mrs. Biddle’s away. When she was younger she had to watch her waist.

‘All right then, Mrs. Iveson?’

‘Yes, of course.’ vNot that Mrs. Biddle’s stout these days. Skin and bone, as a matter of fact.’

‘Would you like to see Georgina? I’m sure you would.’

She goes away and Thaddeus Davenant offers him the biscuits. The dog’s asleep, stretched out in a corner. There are more books in those bookcases than he has ever seen in a living-room before. Albert says that, keeping things going.

‘What’s his name, sir?’ he inquires, looking over at the dog.

‘Rosie.’

He remembers. And he remembers this same dog described, friendly and brown, and how he warned her that you can’t be too careful with a dog. The rain’s still coming down, sounding on the window glass.

‘They don’t like a uniform, sir. Depending on the dog, a postman said to me once.’

‘Postmen have a lot to put up with in that respect.’

He’s a man who doesn’t say much, which maybe was what she took to. She could sit in silence with a person, it didn’t matter. When they lived in the glasshouse she didn’t speak herself for hours on end. It would come on dark and he daren’t flash on his torch, but she never minded. She’d things to think about, she said.

‘You read all them books, sir?’

‘Not all of them. But most, I think, one way or another.’

Mrs. Biddle has a few behind glass in the hall. Not his business, so he never took one out. Magazines are more Mrs. Biddle’s thing. Hello! and Chic he gets her, the People’s Friend.

‘Read a Book with Me, by the Man Who Sees. You come across that, sir? I come across it somewhere, maybe Miss Rapp it was. The Home Encyclopaedia we had. Arthur Mee’s Talhs for Boys, sir? You’d have known that in your young days?’

‘No. No, I’m afraid I didn’t.’

‘You ever go on Varig, Mr. Davenant? Varig Brazilian?’ vActually, I’ve never flown.’ vThey have the rainforest down Brazil way.’

‘Yes, they do.’

Mrs. Iveson is back with the baby, and the baby’s eyes are fixed on him, not that she shows recognition. Too much to expect, in a baby.

‘Hullo, there,’ he says.

She puts the baby down on a chair, bunching it back into a corner, with a cushion in front of it in case it tumbles off, although it’s hard to see how it could.

‘Is it Albert?’ she asks. ‘I think at the time they said Albert.’

‘What?’

‘Did you tell us your name?’

He feels foolish, as he did when he forgot about the dog being mentioned. He should have given his name when he entered the room. Best to call it an adventure was what he was concentrating on, best to smile, which he did, only he forgot to give his name.

‘Albert Luffe.’

‘We guessed when we saw your uniform. We were told you took Georgina to one of your hostels.’

‘You think it’s all right?’ He strokes one lapel and then the other, to indicate what he means. They say it suits him. ‘You look ridiculous, dear,’ Mrs. Biddle said the first time he wore it, taking against it because it was something new. ‘You’re in that uniform again,’ she has taken to calling out, knowing he has it on when he doesn’t look in to say goodbye to her on his way out. Mrs. Biddle needn’t see it if she doesn’t want to, no way he’d foist something new on her. He didn’t tell her Captain Evans is going to teach him an instrument, soon as they find out which one he’d be all right on. Best not to bring it up if it isn’t what she wants.

‘Sorry about that, Mrs. Iveson.’

‘Sorry?’

‘I had it in mind to give my name first thing. Otherwise you’d be confused.’

‘It doesn’t matter in the least.’

‘I wasn’t wearing my uniform that day, as a matter of fact. I wasn’t in the Army even. To tell you the truth, I wouldn’t be in the Army if it wasn’t for that day.’

She smiles at him. She says they owe the baby’s life to his quick thinking, knowing what to do.

‘No sweat, Mrs. Iveson.’

The rain has soaked through a place in his jacket and through his trousers at the knees. He feels the dampness, colder now than a moment ago. When he gets back he’ll iron the uniform first thing in case there’s damage done. It was definitely Miss Rapp who was on about the Man Who Sees, some different magazine because Hello! and Chic weren’t going then.

‘She wasn’t kicking up a row, nothing like that. Only gurgling a bit. Many’s the time we had a baby left there. In the coke shed. By the doors. Many’s the time we’d hear the screeching first thing, wake you up it would. Newborn, maybe a day, maybe a week. “What’ll we call it?” Mrs. Hoates would say.’

The other man comes back with water for the tea. He lifts the teapot lid and pours some in. He checks the food, making sure there’s enough. He still doesn’t speak. They take no notice of him.

Mrs. Hoates would say what’ll we call it, but every time she’d pick the name herself. You’d make a suggestion and she’d say lovely, but then she’d go for something else. He explains that to them, thinking he’d better, in case of misleading. vWhat’s this?’ She smiles at him. ‘What’s this about, Albert?’

‘The Morning Star, Mrs. Iveson.’

‘I think it’s where he found Georgina,’ Thaddeus Davenant says. ‘A derelict children’s home, they said.’

Albert stirs two lumps of sugar into a fresh cup of tea. The biscuits are mixed creams and chocolate-coated. He takes one that has raspberry jam in with the cream. Another thing is, it was Miss Rapp who gave the information about the shamrock, how the slave boy banished the toads and serpents, bringing in the harmless weed instead.

‘Spaxton Street,’ he says. ‘Round the Tipp Street corner is where the brown yard doors are. You know the neighbourhood, sir? Fulcrum Street?’

‘I’m afraid I don’t.’

‘You were a child in the home yourself, Albert?’

He says he was. He gives some other names because they’re interested. He tells the story of Joey Ells, the Sunday when it snowed. Crippled, he says, and she asks about the tank, and he explains that Joey Ells thought there were steps where there weren’t. An iron ladder there used to be, only it gave way under rust.

‘What a terrible thing!’

You can see they both think it was terrible, and he tells how Miss Rapp walked away from the Morning Star the next day. He mentions Joe Minching and Mrs. Cavey. Mrs. Cavey did the cooking, he explains. The milkman sometimes stopped to play football in the yard, clattering down his crate of bottles as a goalpost.

‘Your home?’ she wants to know. ‘You still think of it as home, Albert?’

‘I have a room with Mrs. Biddle these days. Appian Terrace. You know Appian Terrace, sir?’

‘No, I don’t think I do.’

He says where Appian Terrace is and how he came to get the room there. He says that Mrs. Biddle is bed-bound, how he’s worried about the teapot because the stuff is unravelling off the handle, how she could have a fall. He puts down Cat Scat because a cat comes that’s a nuisance to her. But it isn’t any good.

‘Mrs. Biddle has her memories,’ he says. ‘Theatrical.’

He can see the photograph Pettie was on about, the plain dress with the collar up a bit, the woman who’s in the grave they haven’t erected a stone for. There was an accident once on the April outing, a red car squeezed shapeless, hub-caps and metal on the road, the radio still playing, no chance. That comes into Albert’s mind, but he doesn’t mention it. Too much speed, Joe Minching said, and they got out of the minibus at a Services and watched the speed, everything going by below them on the motorway, reds and greens and blues. ‘More blues,’ Ram said, and Leeroy argued.

He’s offered the biscuits again and takes another, the chocolate heart. He tells them about the Underground because she asks if he has work. He remembers Pettie saying you could hardly see the make-up on her face and he can hardly see it today either. Mrs. Biddle puts lipstick on first thing, then her powder.

‘Little Mister’s with the rent boys,’ he says, and he watches a sadness coming into her face. He likes her clothes and the way she stands so straight when she’s on her feet, and the softness in her eyes. He liked her the minute she held her hand out to him, smiling then too, giving her name. He tells about Little Mister left on the step and how he got to be called that. He tells them he heard from Merle one time that Mr. and Mrs. Hoates were down Portsmouth way now.

‘Running an old folks’ residential.’

She asks about Merle, and he says she’s not around these days, not since she went up Wharfdale. Nor Bev, he says.

Darkened by the rainfall, the drawing-room is invaded by other people and another place, by the faces of children, black and white and Indian; by dank downstairs passages, Cardinal polish on concrete floors, a mangle forgotten in a corner; by window-panes painted white, bare stairway treads, rust marks on mattresses. A handbell rings, there is the rush of footsteps.

They listen because there is a debt they can never repay, neither by the money that has been given already nor by their attention, yet their attention continues. From time to time they do not easily follow what they’re being told, bewildered by new names when they occur, the order of events a muddle. Easing ten minutes ago, the rain comes heavily again.

‘Her party dress she always wore on a Sunday. The others wouldn’t bother.’

His friend would put on Mrs. Hoates’s perfume. As soon as she saw Mrs. Hoates setting off on a Sunday afternoon to visit her relation who wasn’t well she would try out a different perfume. Nail-varnish she tried out once, and another time a pair of earrings. She’d do her hair in Mrs. Hoates’s mirror and then she’d go downstairs. There’d be the uncles’ coats hanging on the hallstand pegs, the uncle with the birthmark waiting, never impatient, reading any leaflets that were lying about the hall.

‘Uncles?’

‘ “Don’t take no presents,” I’d always say, but they’d take them and then they’d try to get away. You get the picture, sir?’ vYes, we do.’

Removing a roller-blind in the hall in order to adjust the tension, Maidment gets the picture also. A hell is the picture Mrs. Iveson gets, doors closed and silence, the hiding after they tried to get away. In her party dress, only one of them never minded. Pertly, she smiled at her Sunday uncle, scented and made-up for him.

‘So you went back to that place all this time later and found Georgina?’

‘Nothing doing in the yard, like, so I go in by the bottom window. Not a sound, Mrs. Iveson. Nothing there, is what I says at first.’

Thaddeus wishes he didn’t have to hear. He tries not to, apprehensive about what may be said next. He tries not to see the bleak, empty house to which his child was taken, to be abandoned for a reason that is unknown.

‘I come to the bathroom, not that you’d know it with the bath gone and the basin taken down. Mrs. Hoates’s bathroom that was, Hoates’s too. First thing I notice is the baby in a corner. I had the torch. With the windows boarded it’s dark enough in there. Not that there hasn’t been squatters, not that they hasn’t taken a board or two down. Only you need the torch in case.’

‘Of course.’ Uneasy too, Mrs. Iveson nods.

‘No place for a baby, and I give it in at Tipp Street. I just give in Georgina Belle. I didn’t tell a lie, sir.’

Thaddeus watches the shaking of the tidy head, slowly, emphatically, back and forth, back and forth, as rhythmic as a pendulum. It’s not a lie when you don’t say. It’s not a lie when you just give something in.

‘Of course it isn’t,’ Mrs. Iveson reassures, not understanding.

Five minutes later Zenobia learns that this boy knew what he was looking for when he went to that bathroom. Well known to him and given to crime, the bespectacled girl had come to the house where he lived and had knocked on the kitchen window. She was a girl who’d vandalized a man’s possessions once, who walked out on employers whenever she felt like it. Calm as you please, she told the boy she’d stolen a baby, and told him where she’d put it.

‘She says would I hand it in. Like I done, Mrs. Iveson.’

They don’t say anything. Albert watches the baby trying to join her fingers together, holding them up in front of her face. She pulls them apart again. She’s gurgling and smiling, trying to laugh, only she can’t laugh properly, the age she is.

‘She put Georgina Belle down in the Morning Star on account of everything going wrong.’

‘What went wrong?’ They both say that, one after the other. She says it twice.

‘Pettie’s plans, like.’ Albert shakes his head. ‘Pettie didn’t know what to do.’

‘Why did she take Georgina?’ She says Pettie was a girl they didn’t know. She came to the house by chance, she says. ‘Was she hoping to get money? Did she just want a baby?’

‘Mrs. Biddle says Pettie’s a tearaway, Mrs. Iveson.’

‘You should have told all this to the police.’

‘Pettie took a shine to Mr. Davenant, like. Pettie takes a shine to the older man, sir.’

He explains that a man showed Pettie vinyls for the floor, different colour runs and weights, what was suitable for a kitchen, what was not. Eric he was called, she saw it on his suit lapel. He lived out Wimbledon way; he took his holidays for the tennis, always got good weather. A year ago it was; every day she went on about it in the Soft Rock. And there was a fisherman once, and another time a man who took her back to his room and she was frightened when he got up to things. The older man, Albert says again, in case there is confusion. vShe took Georgina because Georgina is Mr. Davenant’s child? Is that it? Did she tell you what she intended?’

‘Pettie was in a state, Mrs. Iveson.’ She wouldn’t have left the Dowlers if she hadn’t got into a state, and he tells them about going round to the Dowlers and Mrs. Dowler shouting down the stairs. ‘I never seen her in such a state as this time, Mrs. Iveson, and the next thing is she takes the baby. Pettie never done that before. Like I say, I’m in the kitchen and there’s this rapping on the panes. Four times she’s come round only I’m on the night work and then I have a sleep.’

‘You’ve told us all that.’

‘Soon’s I flashed the torch in the bathroom I saw the butterfly. Pettie’d make butterflies out of a cigarette wrapping. Then again the packet and the butts she left. Pettie’d always break a butt open. In the Soft Rock, anywhere. I flashed the torch and saw the bread and that. There could be rats, the bread’d bring rats. I was remarking that to myself when I picked up Georgina Belle.’

‘Her name’s Georgina.’ There is a whiteness in her face, in her cheeks and around her eyes. A moment ago she kept looking at him, but now the only movement’s a frown coming and going in her forehead. Her voice has changed, a crossness in it now, and the dog pokes up its head, then flops it down again. The baby has gone to sleep.

‘One p.m. it was when I seen her; three-quarters of a minute past. I looked at the Zenith in case they’d ask me.

He gave the time as three-quarters of a minute past one when they did, and they asked how he knew and he said. vHow about a tea?’ Captain Evans offered him when the police left, the first time he knew Captain Evans, not even knowing his name then. All the time the butterfly and the cigarette butts and the empty cigarette packet were in his pocket because there hadn’t been a chance to drop them into a bin.

‘Not that Pettie’d care,’ he says. ‘The way she was then, she couldn’t care less.’

‘That girl took a baby to a house where her crying couldn’t be heard. She walked away and left her.’

Everything is different in the room now. The sympathy’s gone, there are no smiles. It would be all right, he thought when they said they were grateful, and when she asked if he took sugar and put the lumps in with a tongs. A clock strikes quietly in the hall, and then she says he must go immediately to the police, that he must give them Pettie’s name.

‘It was Pettie wore the party dress, Mrs. Iveson.’

She takes no notice, nor does he. He thought they would. He thinks maybe they didn’t hear; but he doesn’t say it again. She says does he realize this could happen to someone else?

‘Other people will suffer as we have.’

‘Pettie never took babies before, Mrs. Iveson. She didn’t do no harm to Georgina Belle.’

She would have married the floors man. His hands were well kept, tapering fingers, she said, the tips light on the vinyl samples. She hung about the tennis when the time for the next championships came. She’d have given him a family, she said, if that was what he wanted. She’d have cooked and mended for him.

‘The baby’s back safe, Mrs. Iveson.’

The damp has spread, through to his shoulders and his back. There’s a mark on the rug at his feet where water has dripped from the ends of his trousers, or from the jacket cuffs, he doesn’t know which. She was in a state when she lost track of that Eric, same’s she was when she went round to that uncle’s house. The face went with the name, she said in the Soft Rock that Saturday morning, the pale eyes, no wasted flesh. Another time in the Soft Rock she put the same thing to the red-haired proprietor, not that she ever liked him. ‘You hear that name?’ she said. ‘Thaddeus?’ And winding Pettie up, the red-haired man said Thaddeus was the name of the inventor of the bikini.

‘Why’d she do it?’ Thaddeus Davenant is standing by the windows and he speaks with his back turned, still looking out at the rain. His voice isn’t raised like hers is, but low and ordinary, as if he’s not fussed, but Albert can tell he is. ‘Why’d she do it?’ he asks. vLike I say, sir — ‘

‘Why’d she take Georgina?’

‘On account she was her own worst enemy, Mr. Davenant. I never knew anyone more her own worst enemy.’

The baby whimpers in her sleep, a single whimper and then a sigh. She whimpered when he picked her up from the floor; she whimpered a bit on the way downstairs, maybe not liking the dark although he had the torch going. When she wasn’t much older than that, the mongol girl cried every time she woke up and it was dark. Merle walked in her sleep, Leeroy used to shout out.

‘Why’d she take Georgina?’ He turns round from the window to ask that again. ‘Why?’

‘On account it was no good, coming back here for the ring, sir.’

He didn’t tell Mrs. Biddle about the ring. He didn’t say about the baby. A lie is a lie if it has intention was the way Miss Rapp put it. No way just saying nothing is a lie. No way it: could be.

‘Why was it no good?’ vLike you wouldn’t have nothing to do with her, sir. She took a shine to you, Mr. Davenant -’ vYes, we know.’

‘Then again, Pettie thought she’d get the minding job.’

‘She wasn’t suitable.’ vShe thought you was offering it to her on the phone, sir. The time she called up she thought it was going to be all right from what you said, sir. Then again, the ten pounds wasn’t right.’

‘What ten pounds?’

‘Ten eighty the cost of the fares is.’

Again nothing is said. He watches the man Pettie had a passion for turn his back again, the rain streaming on the glass of the windows. The old lady gets up and crosses to where the baby’s still asleep, and then sits down in a different armchair, as still and straight as before. vIf the train fare I gave her wasn’t enough she should have said so.’ vLike I say, the baby’s back, Mrs. Iveson -’ vWhy have you come here?’ Thaddeus Davenant is standing by him now, his voice still quiet. ‘What do you want with us?’

‘I come to tell you about Pettie, sir. So’s you wouldn’t think too badly of her, sir.’ vToo badly?’ she says. ‘What on earth do you mean?’

‘Pettie was improving herself, Mrs. Iveson. All the time at the Morning Star, all the time she was at the Dowlers’. She could have come down the platforms, she could have got clearing-up in the parks a few months back. She went in for the baby-minding because it was a better type of work.’ Pettie was a law unto herself, he explains. ‘I’d worry about Pettie, Mrs. Iveson. I’d worry in the Soft Rock, times she didn’t turn up.’ He explains about Wharfdale, and Pettie taking lifts in a lorry. ‘Pettie come out here the first time and she was on about it in the café, the picture there was on the floor, the dog coming in through them windows. I said to leave it.’

‘Your friend stole a sleeping baby and left it where it could have been eaten by rats.’

‘I got there quickly as I could, Mrs. Iveson. Soon’s ever Pettie told me. Mrs. Biddle’d make the tea, she’d trip over with that teapot, but I had to take the chance. I didn’t do another thing soon’s Pettie told me. I said it to Captain Evans, but he reckoned Mrs. Biddle’d be all right. I had to wait there for the police, the problem was.’ vShe put flowers on my daughter’s grave. Why’d she do that? Why’d she come looking for a ring that didn’t exist? We don’t understand what all this is about. We don’t understand why she took against us when all we ever did was not to give her enough money for a train fare.’ vPettie seen the photograph when she come out here, Mrs. Iveson. She seen Mr. Davenant grieving, she said that in the Soft Rock. Pettie took a shine to Mr. Davenant, Mrs. Iveson — ‘

‘Oh, for God’s sake, stop saying that!’ She is furious now, her voice raised, two specks of red in her cheeks.

‘It’s upsetting for us.’ Thaddeus Davenant is still quiet, the same as all the time he has been, hardly a change from when he was talking about the planes. ‘We’re grateful to you, but all this is too much for us.’ vAll Pettie was doing, sir, was putting it to you the baby could be taken. Like Mrs. Iveson was sitting out in the sun and the next thing she drops off. Pettie had it worked out, like Mrs. Iveson would pack her bags soon’s the baby went missing. You get that, sir?’

‘Yes.’

‘Pettie had it in mind she’d say she came back after her ring and seen a woman with the baby. She had it in mind that she manages to get the baby off the woman in the toilets.’

‘I see.’

‘Only the kids was playing on the towpath. Soon’s the kids seen Pettie it has to be there wasn’t no woman on account Pettie has the baby. Soon’s -’

‘Yes, we understand.’ vI come out to explain, sir, Pettie didn’t mean no harm. Time of the ring was like when she went to look out for the man at the tennis championships. Miss Rapp said Pettie never meant no harm.’ vOh, do spare us Miss Rapp!’ She’s furious again. She calls what he’s saying a rigmarole. They don’t want to hear about Miss Rapp, she says, or Mrs. Biddle or Captain Evans or some man selling vinyl. It was absurd that the girl should have imagined she could be employed here. ‘We’re not concerned with these people. What we’re concerned about is that this girl is unstable and should be put where she can’t cause distress like this again.’

‘Pettie’s dead, Mrs. Iveson.’

A watery sunlight has begun to brighten the room, dappling the polished oak of the floor, a single beam falling across the bookcases. Outside, a blackbird tentatively begins its warble. Thaddeus has not witnessed his mother-in-law’s anger before. Replacing at last the hall’s rewound blind, Maidment has not either.

Mrs. Iveson herself, startled by what has just been said, senses an inner reprimand, even though her anger is still potent. The boy looks at her foolishly, his dark hair wet, his ill-fitting uniform seeming as ridiculous as the woman he spoke of said, his face gone empty, registering nothing.

No more than fifteen or so, Thaddeus remembers thinking, that girl in her grubby yellow jacket before she took it off on the afternoon of the interview. Her skirt rose up when she sat on the sofa, and she didn’t pull it down. ‘You’ve had a journey for nothing,’ he said the second time she came, and she said no, not for nothing. In the nursery, when she stood so close to him, he knew and didn’t want to know, darkening a truth that came from outside his life, hurrying on, away from it.

‘Dead?’ he says, in confusion, unable to suppress the thought that death surely does not beget death, as it seems to have this summer.

‘They bulldozed down the Morning Star, sir. I saw her in the brick and stuff lifted away. I saw Pettie in the sky.’

Rubble swung across the sky in its great metal bucket is brought to Zenobia, and Maidment sits down at the kitchen table, upset. Nausea spreads in his stomach, where drama at a remove brings usually a ripple of pleasure.

Would she not have known what was happening? Zenobia’s question is. A house knocked down around her? Would she not have heard the noise?

And Maidment says that’s just it.

He has to say again that Pettie took a shine, but this time it’s all right. It was all to do with that, he has to say.

‘I could have put them in the picture if they asked me, the day they was knocking down the Morning Star. I could have told them why she done it, sir, why Pettie didn’t walk away. Only I didn’t hang about. No point, sir.’

‘No.’

‘She goes back to the Morning Star, the time she’s frightened, the time the police is out looking for her.’

They’ve gone quiet. She’s staring out into the dampness. He didn’t mention it to Mrs. Biddle, he says. Age she is, best not to, stuff like that. They still don’t say anything, so he stands up.

The doors are opened for him — the door of the room, the outside door. On the steps they shake his hand. He says again why he came out, in case there’s any confusion left. They say they understand.

He walks slowly because there is nothing to hurry for. The rain has taken away the stifling warmth, the hedgerows on either side of him drip. A breeze occasionally shakes more drops from the leaves of trees, and sometimes a withered leaf falls too.

The hymn starts in his head. He wonders what it means, All laud we would render. Not that it matters. Best part of the day it was, the morning hymn. Thus provided, pardoned, guided. Then again Speak through the earthquake, wind and fire. He should have told them he’ll buy an instrument with the money. People give you money, they like to know a thing like that. He hesitates, thinking about going back, but decides against it.

He passes the graveyard and the church, and then the public house and the petrol pump. He walks again by the sludge of the canal, wondering if the greyhounds will come out, but they don’t. A fast greyhound’s worth a lot of money, the man with elephantiasis told him, knowing about such matters as a frequenter of greyhound tracks in the days before his body became a burden to him.

A thing happens. You can’t change that. He looked up when the crane man shouted and then the crane man swung the bucket down, gentle as anything, getting it to the ground. He meant to tell them that, too. He had it ready, but in the end it got forgotten that the crane man had been gentle.

There is a quietness after Albert has gone, still there when the first wisps of twilight come. The room Thaddeus has always known, in which he searched beneath the sofa cushions for a ring that did not exist, is different now. There is an echo in the room, and in the hall and on the stairs. ‘Everything is lovely here.’

His childhood past seems nothing much: the cruelty of love has damaged but not destroyed. To that Mrs. Iveson might add that in her merciless mind’s eye she sees, this evening, neither a husband lost to kind confinement nor a daughter’s funeral. Her compassion faltered: shame creeps through guilt and feels like retribution.

The cups and saucers are gathered, the tea things stacked on Maidment’s tray. Georgina’s day is ending; she, too, is taken from the room. In time her curiosity will bring a mother back and offer misty images, like strangers vaguely present in a dream, of Eva Paczkowska and the husband who adored her. Again there will be dancing on the lawns, the hall door thrown open wide, music and voices on the cool night air. The laughter of Georgina’s friends is waiting for Georgina’s growing up, as the picture on the floor was waiting for her birth. The pets’ memorials are waiting too, the summer-house built to catch the autumn sun, the gardener who showed his bayonet wound, servants remembered in a journal kept.

The coats hang on the hallstand pegs. In her party dress the child comes smiling down the stairs. Her Sunday uncle looks up from a leaflet he has finished reading. He smiles in turn, and reaches out for her. Afterwards there’s Sunday tea.

Will there be offices built in the place? Thaddeus wonders. A supermarket? Will bright computer screens smudge away the nourishment of fantasy and delusion? Will checkout chatter silence the fearful whispering in grubby hideaways, the soft enticements? Has defilement left no trace? Will no one know among the tins of soup and processed peas that death was a balm here when it came? There was a life that ended for his onetime mistress, in its heyday a jolly, bouncing life. And for his wife there was a childhood softened by affection, and contentment later on, her goodness an enriching. The walls of a house were smashed to fragments, a bundle in the rubble lifted away: no life there’d been.

As the warmth of blood might miraculously seep into a shadow, or anaesthesia be lifted by a jolt, feelings he has never before experienced invade Thaddeus’s solitude. The emotion stirred by the birth of his child was particular to that one event. His sadness was stony when he stood at the funeral of the wife he could not love. The flowers that Mrs. Ferry so often longed for were sent when it was safe to send her flowers. Tonight he pities, and is angry.

The dusk is darkening when Mrs. Iveson walks with Thaddeus in the garden, her stoic’s stamina defeated in the pain of that same pity. A light comes on in a window of the house, then in another, a curtain’s pulled across. High in the oak trees the rooks have settled on their branches. Below, among the shrubs and faded flowers, the single sound is Rosie’s rustling in the sodden undergrowth, sniffing the fresh scent of moisture. The two do not walk close yet cling together, at one in honouring the ghost that has come to haunt this garden and this house.

‘Albert.’

It is a whisper from what seems to be an empty doorway. He peers, and then a figure emerges, shaking off the dark, and it is Bev.

He speaks her name. He says he has been looking for her. vI been around.’

‘You OK, Bev?’

‘I done with all that stuff. You know.’

‘I wondered about you, Bev.’

‘Yeah.’ There is a silence, then Bev says: ‘I ain’t got nowhere to go nights.’

‘You got work daytime?’

Bev shakes her head. She says she has tried for work, day work, nights, anything.

‘You’d go for the Marmite factory? You’d go for anything like that?’

Bev says she would. The Marmite, the stocking place, up Chadwell, it doesn’t matter.

‘A woman told me they’ll maybe be taking on at the stocking place.’ Albert nods, lending emphasis to that. It would have been Tuesday he asked the woman, he remembers; it could be tomorrow they’ll be taking on. ‘Never does no harm to ask.’

They walk together, by the common, past the dairy yard. She isn’t a tearaway, you wouldn’t ever call Bev a tearaway and once she is taken on regular no way there’ll be a problem with the rent. That’s how he’ll put it. There’ll be reluctance at first, stands to reason there would be, but the rent will be the draw.

They cross Caspar Road. In the artificial light the blank shopfronts of Bride Street are tinged with orange. The KP Minimarket and Ishi Baba’s take-away are secure behind their night grilles. Outside the Soft Rock Cafe the cat that is Albert’s only enemy is rifling a dustbin.

‘Turn of luck running into you, Bev.’

She says it was. She’s tired. Albert can tell. She’s dragging her footsteps a bit, the sole of a shoe flapping. Except to say it isn’t far to Appian Terrace, he doesn’t bother her with talk.