Death in Summer

3

‘A mansion,’ Pettie reports. ‘He’s left with this kid in a mansion.’

Albert’s ovoid countenance remains impassive. He nods an acknowledgement in the Soft Rock Café. Pettie says:

‘Garages and that.’

As she speaks, the house she has visited becomes vivid for her, as in a photograph: red-brick façade and tall brick chimneys, slender and rounded, spikily decorated; blue paintwork setting off the windows, a blue front door, tarmacadam turn-around, grass and roses and stone steps. The dado of stairway lincrusta — in shiny green — appears, and blue blinds half drawn, softening the sunlight in the dining-room she could see into while she waited in the hall.

There was scarlet-striped wallpaper in the room where the interview took place. There were armchairs in the hall, and a glass door that led to a conservatory full of flowers.

‘You get the job, Pettie?’ Albert’s question is not accompanied by the inflection that indicates interrogation. His voice is toneless, as it invariably is when he is worried, and this morning he is worried about his friend. He smiles to cheer her up, a huge upset in the curve of his features, like an eggshell exploding. Then all expression goes and his eyes are dead again.

Bleakly, Pettie shakes her head. She fishes in a pocket of her short denim skirt for a cigarette, finds two remaining in a crushed packet of Silk Cut and lights one. ‘I thought I got it, but I didn’t.’

She was dragged all the way out there, but in the end they didn’t offer her the job. Quincunx House the place is called, and when Albert asks how they’re spelling that she tells him. She tells him which train station she got out at, and how there was a bus journey after that and how she walked up through a village street, not that you could call it a village, with only a shop and a public house and a petrol pump that wasn’t working. The other girls were on the train and the bus, three in all. Two of them went into the graveyard by the church, putting in time, and when they finished there she went in herself because she was more than an hour too soon. A grave was new, flowers on the dry earth, but she didn’t guess then whose it was. She sat on a railing going round another grave; she read the inscriptions on the stones, the sun beating down on her. Then she went out into the country, along a lane. Miles away, in Essex.

‘They didn’t take to you, Pettie?’

‘They didn’t say.’

It could be that they noticed the certificate, but if they did they didn’t comment. Years ago, when Pettie first decided to go for child-minding, she borrowed Cassie May’s certificate and had it photocopied in a Kall-Kwik with a tab over Cassie May’s name. When the tab was peeled off Cassie May didn’t know a thing, not even that the certificate had been borrowed.

‘No reason why they wouldn’t take to you, Pettie.’

‘They didn’t give no reason.’

Pettie is small, just into her twenties but seeming younger, seeming to be hardly passed out of her childhood. Her shoulders and elbows are sharp, a boniness that’s noticeable in her hands and feet. Her face is sharpish also, economically made, without waste. Beneath a narrow forehead trimmed with a sandy fringe, pale-lashed eyes are steady behind their wire-rimmed spectacles, and sometimes taken to be hostile. She could do with a fuller mouth, Pettie considers, and an ounce or two more flesh about the chin, but generally she is content enough: when she makes herself up she considers she can challenge other girls of her age and stature.

‘You upset then, Pettie?’

‘Yeah.’

She used the typewriter at the Dowlers’ to type the reference, scrawlingM. J. Dowler at the bottom, the back-hand slope of Mrs. Dowler’s signature reproduced as near’s no matter. Not that she knew how to type but she did the best she could; she had to because she knew the Dowlers wouldn’t be able to compose a reference, not being the kind of people who know what a reference is. She wasn’t asked for one when she started there, which was just as well because the one she got out of the Fennertys wasn’t much good, and the people before that refused to give her one because of the necklace business.

‘Thaddeus Davenant,’ Pettie says, lingering on the syllables. ‘The name of that Essex man.’

He gave the full name when she rang up. ‘Georgina’s father,’ he added, and didn’t say then there was no mother. Nor did he mention the grandmother who was hanging about, who did the talking at the interview.

‘I’m sorry you’re upset, Pettie.’ Obscuring the brand name of a lager, Albert’s chunky hands encircle one of the glass mugs in which tea or coffee is served in the Soft Rock Café. He smiles again, lending emphasis to this expression of sympathy, and when there’s no response he doesn’t take offence. He looks around the Soft Rock Café, at its pine tabletops charred here and there where a cigarette has slipped from the edge of an ashtray, its grey metal chairs and unlit juke-box, the two similar posters of a bull and matador, two fruit machines. The red hair of the café’s proprietor falls in greasy strands on to the newspaper he is hunched over at the counter. A middle-aged couple do not converse at a table by the door. The deaf and dumb man who spends the greater part of each morning in the café sits where he always sits, with a view of the street.

‘You going after another job then, Pettie?’

She’s finished with child-minding, Pettie says. She’s finished with kids making a bedlam — flour and raisins all over the floor the minute your back’s turned, Shredded Wheat floating in the sink, the bedclothes set on fire one time. The morning she typed the reference, Brendan Dowler ate the best part of a packet of Atora. The first day at the Fennertys’, Dean put the cat in the fridge. When she walked into the toilet the time Dowler hadn’t locked the door he said be my guest.

The house in Essex was a different kind of set-up altogether, you could tell that even before you got there; you could tell from the advertisement, you could tell from the man’s voice when she rang up. Living in, the job was, and the minder’s room had a carpet and an armchair, dried flowers in a vase, a television. Because of how the man sounded on the phone, giving her directions, saying they were looking forward to seeing her, she was so sure she’d get the job she didn’t turn up at the Dowlers’ the next morning. Passed on in the Soft Rock Cafe, this information causes Albert some dismay.

‘Don’t do to go behind on the rent, Pettie.’

A couple of months ago it was Albert who got Pettie the room in Mrs. Biddle’s house, across the landing from his own. Mrs. Biddle wasn’t keen — asserting, in fact, that Pettie frightened her — but in the end she agreed, and Albert feels responsible for the arrangement. Sometimes Pettie is headstrong, not realizing what the consequences of her actions may be. If she doesn’t pay the rent she’ll have to move on, no way she won’t. A tearaway, Mrs. Biddle calls her.

‘You think about going back to explain to the Dowlers, Pettie? A Saturday today, they wouldn’t be at work.’

The time he persuaded her to go back to the Fennertys she said she’d been in a hospital with suspected appendicitis. He was against her saying that, but she argued that she couldn’t just tell them she was fed up. Not that any of it mattered: they didn’t even listen when she said about the hospital, glad to have anyone for the kids, no matter who.

‘Mrs. Biddle can’t be short on the rent, Pettie. I’m only thinking about that.’

‘No way she’ll be short.’

‘I’m only mentioning it, Pettie.’

Stockily made, two years older than his friend, Albert is a dapper presence in the Soft Rock Café, the three buttons of his brown jacket buttoned, as are the buttons of its matching waistcoat. These clothes have been acquired in a charity shop; his tie and the shirt into which it is tightly knotted were the property of Mrs. Biddle’s late husband. He wears a watch he sometimes draws attention to, a Zenith, given to him by a couple whose windows he used to clean.

‘You hear that name before?’ Pettie is saying. ‘Thaddeus?’

Albert shakes his head, on which darkish hair is tidily combed and parted. After a moment he says he thinks he has heard the name, but can’t remember where. It could have been Miss Rapp in the old days; it could have been a person he was talking to on the street. Fearful of falsehood, as Albert is, he wouldn’t like to say.

‘The wife was in a photograph.’

And Pettie describes this because it kept catching her eye: a photograph in a silvery frame on a round table with paperweights on it. There were coloured flowers in the glass of the paperweights, and you could tell the photograph was of Thaddeus Davenant’s dead wife because it was given pride of place. A road accident was all that was said, which was why a minder for the kid was necessary.

There’s too much speed on them motorways, Pettie.’

Pettie says speed wasn’t mentioned. They didn’t give a reason, any more than they did for not taking her on, except the grandmother saying they’d changed their minds. The same three girls were waiting for the bus back, and got on to the train. An hour and a half they had to wait in all, longer than the journey itself.

‘It’s my opinion the old woman done the damage. If he hadn’t all but given me the job over the phone I’d not have walked out on the Dowlers, would I? “I’m very sorry,” that woman said. You could tell she was lying her face off.’

Albert doesn’t comment. Pettie hasn’t got the job and that’s the end of it. There’s no percentage in harping on the house she went all that way out to, or the people she met there. In an effort to change the subject he tells of what he read in a magazine he bought for Mrs. Biddle, an account of two interesting coincidences. How a man, having thrown away his mother’s purse after he rifled it as a child, saw it forty-one years later in the window of a pawnshop he happened to be passing in another town. How two sisters, separated at birth, identified one another in middle age on a Dutch bus when they were on holiday to see the tulips. Other such cases were recorded in the magazine, and always there was significance in the coincidence, as if what happened was something meant. The worry that had nagged at the man who found his mother’s purse was lifted from him when at last he was able to return it, placing in it coins to the value of those he had taken. The sisters who met on the Dutch bus set up house together.

‘Oh, yes?’ Pettie acknowledges this. She shouldn’t have worn the yellow jacket. They’d have seen the state of the covered buttons, they’d have seen the state of the lining when she took it off. The windows that reached down to the floor were open all the time they were in the room because of the warmth, and a big brown dog came padding in and nosed up for a cuddle. The old woman was the grandmother on the wife’s side. She had make-up on but you could hardly see it. Soon’s she opened her mouth you could tell she was against you.

‘She went out of the room to send off the last girl. The only time I was alone with him.’

Her skirt had ridden up a bit because she was sitting on the edge of the sofa, not wanting to be too casual. She pulled it down when she heard the old woman’s footsteps coming back, but that wasn’t for a few minutes. She smiled at him and he talked to her, even though he was engaged with the dog, patting it. ‘He saw me looking at the photo. He nodded, like he could understand what I was thinking.’

Albert listens while the face in the photograph is described. There was fair hair coiled, a dress without a pattern on it, collar turned up. ‘Half a smile she had on. Like she was shy.’

‘I understand, Pettie.’

‘The drawing-room they called the room. He’d have been working in the garden, the clothes he was in.’

When she first walked into the room and he held his hand out for her to shake she noticed it was grimed. ‘Georgina’s father,’ he said, the same way he’d said it on the phone, only this time he didn’t give his full name as well. When she was alone with him she kept thinking Thaddeus suited him. The sound of it suited him, his eyes and his face. Thin as a blade he was.

‘I said it was sad, his wife and that. I said it, even though the woman was back in the room. “I’ll show you the nursery,” she said, but I knew it was no good. No chance, I knew. You could tell with that woman.’

Sensing the depth of his friend’s disappointment, and fearing it, Albert’s unease increases. He knows Pettie well. He knows what Mrs. Biddle means when she calls her a tearaway. Another person mightn’t use the word, but he knows what’s in their landlady’s mind.

‘He stayed where he was when the grandmother brought me up to the nursery.’

A couple were hanging about on the landing, the man in dark clothes who had opened the front door and a woman with a blue apron over clothes that were dark-coloured too. The man was up a stepladder, doing something to the top of the curtains at a window. The woman was standing with pins in her mouth.

‘Well, here’s Georgina,’ the grandmother said in the nursery, and the baby looked up from a picture painted on the floorboards, blue-eyed, not like her father. The picture was of hills and trees, flowers outside a cottage, sheep on a slope. Lanes wound through ploughed fields and fields of corn or something like it. A railway line was as straight as a die and there were houses and a church, and the Ring o’ Bells Inn. Cattle ate hay. There were pigs and chickens in a yard. Horses were looking over a fence.

Albert listens to this description, but none of it means much to him. The streets are what he knows. Once a year there was an outing from the Morning Star home, where he and Pettie were brought up and from which, eventually, they ran away. You saw fields then, all the way to a seaside place where there were slot machines on the promenade, where they all walked in a bunch along the sands and clambered over the shingle, a wind blowing nearly always. Joe Minching drove them in the minibus that was hired for the day from Fulcrum Street Transport. Joe Minching threw his sandwiches to the seagulls, saying he was used to better grub than that.

‘Quiet,’ Pettie says. ‘I never knew a place as quiet.’

It was quiet when she walked up to the front door and in the hall, in the room where the interview was and on the stairs, on the landing even though those two people were there. Albert listens while more details of the nursery are given, but in his mind’s eye he sees the playroom at the Morning Star, where there were toys also — train trucks with a wheel gone, limbless dolls, jigsaws with half the pieces missing, anything that other children had finished with. Old armchair cushions were drawn close to the stove that smelt of burning paraffin in winter. Doorless lockers filled one wall. It was here that Marji Laye told how her father and mother were ice-rink skating stars who had put her in a home for the time being, better than carting her about with them all over the world, depriving her of an education. Sylvie talked about parties, someone playing the melodeon, everyone happy until there was a fire and she was the only one left. Bev said her father was in the House of Lords and knew the Queen. But Joe Minching said Sylvie’s mother and sisters were on the game and always had been, that Marji Laye was found wandering on a tip, that Bev came in a plastic bag. From the playroom windows you could see Joe Minching’s coke shed, and the tall yard doors with the dustbins in a row beside them, straggles of barbed wire trailing round the manhole of the underground tank that used to conserve rainwater in the old days, its missing cover replaced by planks weighed down with concrete blocks.

‘Georgina Belle,’ Pettie says. ‘When I saw her I kept thinking I’d call her Georgina Belle. I’d get the job and I’d call her that. We’d go downstairs and the grandmother would have changed her mind on the way. The way he smiled when he was patting the dog, you could see he’s keen.’

‘Keen, Pettie?’

‘Keen I’d come there is all I mean.’

Albert doesn’t respond to that. There’s an aeroplane passing over and what he’d like to do is go to see what line it belongs to, to wait for it to come closer and catch the emblem. But this is not the morning for that, and instead he makes another effort at distraction.

‘You give that bugle in, Pettie?’

A week ago, when they had left the Soft Rock Café and were walking about, Pettie found a bugle in a supermarket trolley that someone had abandoned in a doorway. She tried to blow it but no sound came, and Albert wasn’t successful either. A special skill, a man going by said.

‘Yeah, I give it in.’

‘Salvation Army property.’

‘I give it in at the hostel.’

She took it to a man who buys stuff for car-boot sales, who generally accepts anything she brings him. He said at first the bugle was worthless. In the end he gave her forty pence for it.

‘Salvation Army do a good job, Pettie.’

The grandmother took her into the bed-sitting room they’d got ready for the minder. ‘Come next door, Nanny,’ she said. Why’d the woman bring her in there if they didn’t want her? Why’d she bother? Why’d she even bring her upstairs? Why’d she call her that? ‘Course she wouldn’t change her mind. All the time she was against her.

‘I asked at the hostel,’ Albert says. ‘I said I couldn’t play an instrument, but the man said no problem if I wanted to join the Army.’

The couple were moving away from the landing when they passed again, the man carrying the stepladder. ‘Wait here a minute, would you?’ the grandmother said in the hall. A clock in the panelling ticked and there were voices from behind the closed door, but she couldn’t hear what was being said. The voices went on and on, and then the old woman came out. She shook her head. Twice she said she was sorry.

‘Best forgotten, Pettie.’

‘She give me a ten-pound note for the fare. Ten pounds eighty it cost me.’

‘You like I go round and put it to the Dowlers for you?’ Another smile lights Albert’s eyes, upsetting the composure of his face, crinkling his cheeks and forehead. ‘You like I say you made a mistake about the job?’

‘The Dowlers are the pits.’

Eight till eight, the arrangement at the Dowlers’ was, but more often than not neither parent turned up till ten, with never a penny offered for the extra hours. ‘Give them something about six,’ Mrs. Dowler would say, and there was always a fuss because they didn’t like what was in the few tins that were regularly replaced on the kitchen shelves. Dowler fixes people’s drains for them, driving about in a van with Dowler Drains 3-Star Service on it, a coarse black moustache sprawled all over the lower part of his face. Overweight and pasty-skinned, Mrs. Dowler in her traffic-warden’s uniform harangues her children whenever she’s in their company, shouting at them to get on, shouting at them to be quiet, telling them to wash themselves, not noticing when they don’t. ‘They had the NSPCC man round,’ the woman next door told Pettie once, and Pettie realized then that she was only there because the NSPCC man had ordered Mrs. Dowler to get a daytime minder.

‘You lend me a few pounds, Albert?’

He counts the money out in small change. He makes stacks of the different coins on the table and watches Pettie scoop them into her purse. Two girls have come into the café and are playing the fruit machines. The lights of the antiquated juke-box have come on. The deaf and dumb man is still in the window, the middle-aged couple still don’t speak. The red-haired proprietor turns over a page of his newspaper.

‘Fancy the dinosaurs, Pettie?’

He smiles, but when she shakes her head the light goes from his eyes and his features close in disappointment. It was her idea to go to see the dinosaurs in the first place. A million years old, those bones, she said.

‘Fancy going out to the Morning Star?’

When they were still there the Morning Star home was condemned as unfit for communal habitation. The inspectors who came round investigated the load-bearing walls, took up floorboards and registered on their meters the extent of damp and rot. A year after Albert and Pettie left they went back to look. Site for Sale after Demolition, a notice said. They managed to get in, and still occasionally return to wander about the passages and rooms, Albert showing the way with his torch.

‘No, not the Morning Star.’ Pettie shakes her head again. ‘Not today.’

Albert drinks the last of his milky tea, cold now in the glass mug. She won’t be comforted. Sometimes it’s as though she doesn’t want to be. Her high-heeled shoes are scuffed, her white T-shirt has traces of reddish dye from some other garment on it. He knows from experience that she’s in the dumps.

‘What you going to do, Pettie?’

‘I got to sort myself. I got to go wandering.’

‘Down the shops, Pettie? I need a battery myself.’

‘I got to be on my own today.’

She stands up, telling him he should rest because of his night work. He needs to sleep, she reminds him, everyone needs sleep. Albert works in Underground stations, erasing graffiti when the trains aren’t running.

‘Yeah, sure,’ he says, because it’s what she wants. The girls playing the fruit machines move from one to the other, not saying anything, pressing in coins and hoping for more to come out, which sometimes happens.

‘Yeah, sure,’ Albert says again.

She knows he’s worried, about the job, about the rent, maybe even because she has feelings for that man. Not being the full ticket, he worries easily: about cyclists in the traffic, window-cleaners on a building, a policeman’s horse one time because it was foaming at the teeth. He worried when they found the bugle, he worried when Birdie Sparrow found a coin on the street outside the Morning Star, making her give it in because it could be valuable and she’d be accused. He said not to take them when the uncles came with their presents on a Sunday, but everyone did. He was the oldest, the tallest although he wasn’t tall. The first time he helped Marti Spinks to run off in the night they caught her when it was light, but she never said it was he who had shown her how. The next time she got away, with Merle and Bev. When Pettie’s own turn came he said he was coming too because she had no one to go with. ‘Best not on your own,’ he said, and there wasn’t a sound when he reached in the dark for the keys on the kitchen hook, nor when he turned them in the locks and eased the back door open. He didn’t flash his torch until they’d passed through the play yard and were half-way down the alley, the long way round to Spaxton Street but better for not being seen, he said. ‘Crazy’s a bunch of balloons,’ Joe Minching used to say, but nobody else said Albert was crazy, only that he wasn’t the same as the usual run of people.

‘You don’t go messing with the Dowlers, Albert. You leave them be.’

‘I only wanted to put it to them.’

‘You leave them be. Cheers, Albert.’

‘Take care now, out there on your own.’

‘Yeah, sure.’

As she always does, Pettie buys the cheapest ticket at the Tube station in order to get past the barrier. Two youths on the train keep glancing in her direction. They’re the kind who don’t pull their legs back when you stand up, obliging you to walk around them: Pettie has experienced that on this line before. Ogling her, one of them holds his hands out, palms facing each other, indicating a length, as a man boasting of a caught fish might. But Pettie knows this has nothing to do with fish. The other youth sniggers.

She looks away. The uncle with the birthmark took off her glasses the first time they were on their own. ‘Let’s have a look at you,’ he said and put the glasses on the windowsill. ’Oh, who’s a beauty now?’ he said, and when he whispered that he liked her best a warmth spread through her that came back, again and again, whenever he said it.

The youths get off at Bethnal Green. One of them says something but she doesn’t hear it, not wanting to. ‘Prim little lady,’ the uncle who liked her said. ‘Who’s my prim little princess?’ He told her what a cheroot was because he had a packet in his pocket. She was prim and she still is; being prim is what she wants. ’Never so much as a morsel taken from the knife,’ Miss Rapp read out from the Politely Yours column. ’Return the fork to the plate between mouthfuls.’ She practised that, and Miss Rapp was pleased.

Aldgate goes by, and Bank; Pettie closes her eyes. Wild summer flowers are in bloom, and it could be the picture on the floor but it isn’t because she’s in the picture herself. She’s in the lane with a buggy, far beyond the few houses by the shop and the petrol pump, far beyond the church and the graveyard and the gateless pillars of the house. She’s walking out into the countryside, and fields stretch to the horizon, with the wild flowers in the hedges, a plain brick farmhouse in the distance. ‘Look, a rabbit,’ she whispers, and Georgina Belle waves at the rabbit from the buggy, and you can smell honey in the honeysuckle.

At Oxford Circus she goes with the crowd, jostled on the pavement. A gang of girls gnaw chicken bones and drink from cans, laughing and shouting at one another, strung out, in everyone’s way. Beggars poke out their hands from doorways, tourists dawdle, litter is thrown down. Street vendors sell perfume and watches and mechanical toys. Men in coloured shorts unwrap summer lollipops. Women expose reddened thighs. ‘Thaddeus Davenant,’ Pettie says aloud.

He ran his fingers along the pale wood that edged the back of the sofa, standing there for a moment before she sat down, the grandmother already occupying a chair. He was solemn, not smiling when she held out the reference and the certificate. Still mourning his loss, he naturally wouldn’t have smiles to spare. Something about him reminds her of the man who talked to her in Ikon Floor Coverings, who explained why he recommended 0.35 wearing thickness in a vinyl. Thaddeus Davenant’s clothes were nothing like the grey suit and clean white shirt, Eric on the badge in the lapel, but there was something about his quiet manner that reminded her. More than once she went back to Ikon Floor Coverings, until the time he wasn’t there, gone on to another store, they didn’t know where. Not that she wants to think about the floor-coverings man now, nor the Sunday uncle either, since they let her down in the end. ‘Oh, yes, a lovely walk.’ Pettie says instead, and Thaddeus Davenant takes his tiny daughter from her arms. ‘Georgina Belle,’ he says.

Carefully, Albert attaches the Spookee sticker to his wall. He has all eight of the Spookee stickers now, collected from Mrs. Biddle’s cornflakes’ packets. He stands back a foot or two to inspect the arrangement, his empty eyes engaged in turn with each of the grey, watery creatures, one with a red tongue lolling out, another gnashing devilish teeth. He moves further away, surveying the stickers from the door in order to see what the decoration looks like just in case Mrs. Biddle ever glances in, not that she can manage the stairs, but you never know.

Albert looks after Mrs. Biddle in return for this room. Years ago, when he and Pettie ran away from the Morning Star, they slept rough, at first in an abandoned seed nursery and after that in cars if they could get into them, or in sheds left unlocked on the allotments that stretched for half a mile behind a depository for wrecked buses. In time Albert heard about the night work on the Underground; he slept by day, on benches or in waiting-rooms. Then, because he happened to be passing, he helped a man with elephantiasis to cross a street and the following morning he noticed the man again and helped him again, this time carrying for him a pair of trousers he was taking to a dry cleaner’s.

Albert waited on the pavement outside the cleaner’s and when the man emerged he fell into step with him. He felt compassion for the man’s suffering — the great bloated body, the moisture of sweat on his forehead and his cheeks, the difficulty he experienced in gripping with his fingers. Albert did not say this but simply walked beside the man, restraining his own natural motion so that it matched the slow drag of the man’s. They did not speak much because speech was difficult for the man while he was engaged in the effort of movement, but when they reached a small supermarket — the Late-and-Early KP Minimarket — he thanked Albert for his assistance and his company, and turned to enter the place. He had time to spare, Albert said, and followed him in.

He carried the wire basket around the shelves, filling it as he was directed. The man rested, leaning against the shelves where tins of soup and vegetables were stacked, calling out to Albert the remaining items on his list. A family of Indians ran the minimarket, two young men and their parents, the mother at the till. When the shopping was complete and paid for, Albert took the carrier-bags that contained it and the man did not demur, although when they were on the street again he might have been left standing there. Later, when he and Albert knew one another better, the man mentioned that. It would not have been an unusual occurrence nowadays for a young person to befriend an afflicted man in order to steal from him when the moment was ripe. ‘But though I look no more than sawdust in a skin,’ the man with elephantiasis stated, ‘I can spot an honest face.’

On the morning of the shopping expedition he had led the way to his council accommodation and had invited Albert in when they reached it. He was tired, resting again while Albert, at his instruction, buttered cream crackers and prepared two cups of Bovril. He noticed that the man was not in the habit of washing the dishes he ate from and so, every morning after this one, Albert called in to attend to the chore, to make the Bovril and at one o’clock to open a tin of beans, which they shared on toast, with a banana afterwards. Still unable to afford a place to sleep, his work on the Underground being ill-paid, Albert was grateful for the comfort of the man’s rooms, for the armchair that became the one he always sat in, for the warmth and the food. But this convenience was not his motive. He did not seek to cultivate a relationship for profit: it had come naturally to him to assist the man across the street when he recognized signs of stress. It was natural, too, that he should have accompanied him to the Late-and-Early KP Minimarket and should have carried his purchases. Not much thought, certainly no cunning, inspired these actions. Elephantiasis Albert wrote down, having asked the man how he was spelling that. He liked the sound of the word; he liked the look of the letters when he wrote them.

One day, arriving as usual on a morning there was to be a visit to the minimarket, Albert was taken aback when his ringing of the doorbell remained unanswered. A neighbour was attracted by his worry as he stood there, and then another neighbour. Something was wrong, they said, and there was excitement when drama was anticipated. A small crowd gathered, a police car arrived, and already the man who did not open his door was spoken of in the past tense. Forcible entry was made; inside, the television screen flickered, an American domestic comedy in progress. Slumped low in his outsize armchair, eyes still and glassy, the man Albert had looked after was no longer alive.

Five days later, at the funeral, Albert met Mrs. Biddle when she slipped on the crematorium steps, saving herself by sitting down. Albert was one of several mourners who helped her to her feet and it happened that it was his arm she particularly held on to. There was to be a drink or two in the house next door to the dead man’s, since neighbours rather than any family had been his associates for as long as people could remember. ‘You’ll come on in?’ Mrs. Biddle invited Albert, and afterwards she asked him to see her safely to where she lived herself, in Appian Terrace, two streets away from the council estate. As he did so, she told him that some days her arthritis was so bad she couldn’t move from her bed. She lived in fear of the social services, she confided, constantly apprehensive that they would poke their noses into her life, counsellors they called themselves. Mrs. Biddle Albert wrote down afterwards, having learnt that this was her name. He perceived a significance in the fact that she had been at the funeral, as previously he had perceived a significance in the fact that he was passing by when the man with elephantiasis wished to cross the street. He cleaned Mrs. Biddle’s house for her, did her shopping, and was instructed to give the social services a flea in the ear if they arrived on the doorstep. Years ago in the kitchen of the Morning Star home he had learnt how to fry — sausages, bacon, bread, an egg — and something fried was good for her, so Mrs. Biddle said. Sometimes, for a change, he brought her a take-away, a curry, chips with a burger, or chicken from the Kentucky. He made her hot drinks, Oval-tine or Horlicks, Ribena or Marmite or cocoa, whatever she was in the mood for. ‘I come in for a place,’ he passed on to Pettie. ‘There’s an old lady give me a room.’

Mrs. Biddle says Albert is as a son to her. She would prefer it if he didn’t go out every night, but he has pointed out that cleaning up the Underground is work that has to be done. He is fortunate to have the work, he explains, a stroke of good fortune come his way.

‘You OK then, Mrs. Biddle?’ he inquires after he has stuck up the Spookee stickers. ‘You manage to eat a bit?’

Mrs. Biddle has eaten everything. In the sitting-room where she also sleeps she is still in bed, watching television, a game show with numbered boxes. She turns it off because when Albert is there she likes to hear his news.

‘Yeah, I been down the shops,’ he answers when she asks. ‘I paid the gas.’

‘You get the woman with the hair?’

‘Yeah, I got her. Violet she’s called. She has it on her badge.’

‘I wouldn’t be surprised what she’s called, that woman.’ Albert says it takes all sorts. He stacks the dishes Mrs. Biddle has eaten from, making room on a tray for the metal teapot she has herself carried to her room. For a moment he worries, reminded by the teapot of her picking her steps from the kitchen, shuffling dangerously along, the teapot’s handle wrapped in a cloth where the black plastic binding fell off years ago. A trip and she could be scalded, lying there while he’s out or asleep. But when Mrs. Biddle decides to make her own tea she will not be moved from doing so.

‘No hurry on them dishes. Rest in the chair, Albert. Keep me company a bit.’

Even more than hearing Albert’s news Mrs. Biddle likes to share with him the memories that keep her going when she’s alone. As Gracie de Lisle, girl assistant to Halriati the Sicilian, and before that as one of the four Singing Cow-slips, she has not been unknown. When Mr. Biddle married her she was professionally engaged, twice nightly at the Tottenham Grand Empire.

In the small, crowded room — rows of cottages on shelves and in cabinets, camels and elephants and reindeer on the mantelpiece — Albert hears further highlights from the theatres and the halls. The cottages are of china, dully glazed so that a sense of reality is retained; the animals are of a brown material that has been grained to resemble carved wood. Theatrical photographs are displayed in mock-wooden frames on two tables and on the walls.

‘Nineteen forty-eight, the old Hip in Huddersfield. Puss in Boots and the lights failed.’

‘What did you do, Mrs. Biddle?’ Albert asks, although he knows.

‘Candles we had to resort to, the usherettes’ flashlights, you name it we had it. The day after Boxing Day. Spoilt it for the kiddies, they said.’

Albert never minds hearing a highlight more than once, throwing in the odd response in order to keep company with her because it’s company she’s after. He stayed with her all day the time her front-garden ornaments disappeared, and again when the social services wrote about her pension, saying it could be reduced, and again when they sent a request to know when it was she’d died. Keeping company is the heart of looking after people, as Albert first experienced in his Morning Star days. ‘Stay by me, Albert,’ they used to say, a catchphrase it became. The time the youths laughed when the man with elephantiasis sat down to rest himself on the edge of the pavement he stayed with him until the youths went away, even though the man said he was used to abuse on the streets.

‘“Milk that cow!” Aubrey shouted from the stilts, and then the back kicked the bucket away and the front did the little dance that had them in stitches. Harry Sunders was the best back in the business. Clowny took the front, and those two always had strong beer in the cow. A couple of Stingos in their pockets and sometimes they spilt it. Brought the house down when the Stingo dribbled out. They’d be prancing about, not knowing they was leaving little pools.’

‘Yes,’ Albert says. Everything is on the tray now. He tidies the bed, gathering up pages of the local newspaper and a magazine, listening to further tales while he does so. When there’s a pause he says:

‘You know you can be in the Salvation Army without musical knowledge, Mrs. Biddle?’

Mrs. Biddle sniffs. Peculiar in this day and age, the Salvationists. Grown men and women with their tambourines. Dismissively, she shakes her head. She could do without the Salvationists this morning.

‘You hear of Joseph of Arimathea, Mrs. Biddle?’

Mrs. Biddle doesn’t know if she has heard of Joseph of Arimathea or not. There was Joseph and Dan Saul, kept a greengrocer’s, Jewish boys. The father was a Joseph, too. The family moved up West, Dan Saul went into jewellery. Flashy he always was.

‘Time of Jesus, Joseph of Arimathea. He took the body. There was another bloke come down out of a tree and carries the Cross. The time the Army was preaching I went up to them and asked the one with the glasses how they’re spelling Arimathea.’

Albert spells it now. Arimathea was a place, he explains, a desert locality, not so much as a bush to shade the ground. No water, nothing. Put seeds down and they wouldn’t grow.

You can’t live without water, Mrs. Biddle tetchily agrees, anyone living there should have moved away. Street preachers will tell you anything, Adam and Eve, feed the multitude with a fish. ‘Anything comes into their heads and then they get the tambourines out.’

‘They didn’t have no tambourines the day I asked the man, Mrs. Biddle. In their lunch hour it was.’

‘Same difference to me, Albert. All that about a burning bush, all that about a star. They lull you with the music.’

Albert doesn’t protest further. He collects a cup and saucer he hasn’t noticed on the window-ledge. Mrs. Biddle says there’s trouble with the Lottery.

‘Some man strung himself up. Win the Lottery and it’s the end of you, the new thing is.’

Albert asks about that, picking up the tray. It could be you have to pay for the uniform. Stands to reason, the Army couldn’t go handing out clothes. Albert understands that, but doesn’t say so now because her attention wanders whenever he mentions the Army — the way it does when he says SAS or Air India has just gone over, or when he tries to tell her about Joey Ells. The time he told her about scratching his initials on the brick under the windowsill at the Morning Star she fell asleep.

‘A couple of thousand you’d get in the Irish Sweep. Enough for anyone.’

‘Course it is, Mrs. Biddle.’

Twice he put his initials there, A. L., and the year, 1983. It was Mrs. Hoates who told him his other name was Luffe, something he hadn’t known. She’d chosen Luffe because it suited him, she said. Albert Luffe. She spelt it for him when he asked and he wrote it down.

‘Get us a curry later on, Albert? Something from Ishi Baba’s?’

Albert holds the tray with one hand while he opens the door. No problem about a curry. He’ll have a sleep and then he’ll see what’s on offer.

‘You know what I’d like, Albert?’

‘What’s that then?’

‘You make me a jelly, Albert? You make me a jelly and put it in the ice compartment for tonight?’

He nods, and Mrs. Biddle declares that with a jelly to look forward to she’ll get up. She’ll get up and she’ll catch the afternoon sun by the window. Then there’ll maybe be something on the TV. A load of rubbish, that show with the boxes was, the man’s clothes too tight on him.

‘Good for you to get up.’ Albert repeats what a woman in the KP told him when he reported that sometimes he has difficulty persuading Mrs. Biddle to leave her bed. Bedsores there could be, apparently. Joints seizing up if you lay there.

‘You got a red jelly at all, Albert?’

‘Yeah, I got one.’

The Morning Star has come into his mind because of remembering the initials. Miss Rapp in the mornings with ‘O Kind Creator’, her fingers dashing along the piano keys. Mrs. Cavey on her hands and knees in the bootroom, red polish on a hairbrush. Plaster falls from the stairway wall, the smell of boiling cabbage creeps upstairs. The cars come on a Sunday, the coats hang on the hallstand, big heavy coats worn to Rotary and to church, dark hats on the curved pegs, the uncles’ gloves on the shelf below the mirror. Johneen Bale was given a dress and socks an uncle’s children had grown out of, Leeroy a bottle-opener, the mongol girl a bangle she sold to Ange, Ahzar and Little Mister frisbees. Cakes and jamrolls there were, beads and rings and plastic puzzles: he found the places to hide when they didn’t want to take the presents any more. ‘Don’t bother me now, boy,’ Mr. Hoates said every time he tried to tell, Mr. Hoates gone sleepy, his hour of Sunday rest, his gas fire hissing. Mrs. Cavey said wash your mouth out. ‘Stay by me, Albert,’Joey Ells begged, but he couldn’t that time and she hid in the rainwater tank, crawling under the strands of barbed wire, making a gap in the planks that covered the manhole. ‘Who’s seen Joey Ells?’ Mr. Hoates asked at Sunday tea and someone said there was snow on the ground, there’d be her footprints. ’Shine your torch down, Albert,’ Mr. Hoates said, and she was there with her legs broken. Mrs. Hoates went visiting on a Sunday afternoon, when the uncles came. ‘Now, what d’you want to do that for?’ she said to Joey Ells when she returned. ‘Frightening the life out of us.’

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 ofblue, 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.