Death in Summer

6

‘You read that?’ the red-haired proprietor of the Soft Rock Café asks, jerking a thumb at the newspaper open beside him. ‘They got that car-tyre guy.’ A car-tyre vandal, he says, eighteen hours’ community service. A pound thirty-eight, he says, returning his vast metal teapot to the electric ring on which he keeps it hot. ‘There you go,’ he says.

Albert carries a glass mug of tea and one of coffee to a table and returns to the counter for the doughnuts. He puts a saucer over Pettie’s coffee because she hasn’t arrived yet. He didn’t order her coffee, the man just set his machine going and put her doughnut in the microwave, maybe thinking she was outside on the street. Albert doesn’t drink coffee himself, having read in a newspaper that it doesn’t do you any good.

‘What I’d do for vandals,’ the red-haired man calls across the café, empty of customers except for Albert and the dumb man in the window, ‘is bring the stocks back. Coat over the head’s the first thing any villain wants. Know what I mean, Albert?’

Albert says he does, and hears about a young bloke beaten to a pulp when he wouldn’t give two other blokes a bag of crisps. ‘I’d have the cat o’ nine tails back, Albert. Electrically operated, no call for anyone to demean their-selves working the cat this day and age. Know what I mean?’

Albert again says he does. Pettie doesn’t like the red-haired man. He called her pert once; he said she’d fit into a thimble. Pettie complained that that was familiar, and Albert worries that something similar may have again offended her, that she may have come in on her own and taken exception, that because of it she won’t come this morning. In Mrs. Biddle’s house she comes and goes when he’s asleep, or at night when he’s at work; half the time he doesn’t know if she’s there or not.

‘You see Pettie around?’ he asks the man, going back to the counter to do so.

‘She ain’t here yet, Albert.’

‘She been in though?’

The man says no, not earlier, not yesterday, not the day before. He’d set the stocks up outside Burger Kings and Kentuckys, outside pin-ball joints, and toilets, in car parks — wherever people go by he’d have them. ‘Settle their hash for them, languishing in the rain.’

When she arrives she starts the music. She lifts the glass saucer from her coffee. Ignoring the raspberry doughnut that has been heated up for her, she lights a cigarette. She’s wearing a different T-shirt, yellow with music on it.

‘You OK, Pettie?’

She doesn’t answer. She doesn’t nod or shake her head.

‘You got work then?’

‘I feel for him, Albert.’

Albert looks away. He stares at the matador in one of the posters, then at the bull, head bent, horns ready to attack.

‘I’ve been going out there,’ Pettie says.

‘The man with the baby, Pettie?’

‘All the time I feel for him.’

Albert shifts his glance, allowing it to fall for a moment on the excitement that brightens his friend’s features, her eyes lit with it behind her glasses. Distressed, he surveys the similar bull and matador of the poster on the opposite wall, then asks:

‘You going to eat your doughnut today, Pettie?’

She shakes her head. She eases the wrapping from her cigarette packet and begins to make a butterfly of it. Albert watches her fingers twisting the transparent film. He asked her once who taught her how to make the butterflies, but she said she taught herself.

‘He’s old, Pettie. You said.’

‘Forties. Why’d it matter?’

Her cigarette smoulders in the table’s discoloured ashtray, a thread of smoke floating lazily from it. The man in Ikon Floor Coverings was older too, fifty or so, Albert guessed. A tired face, she said. Albert remembers that although he never met, or even saw, the man. ‘It could be he’s gone off sick,’ she said at this very table, before she discovered the man had moved on to another store.

‘Every day I go out there.’

She tells about the difficult journey, the trains that are few and far between. Twice she’d had to thumb a lift on a lorry. The bus from the station goes round the long way and an hour it can be, waiting for it. You get there quicker if you walk by the drained canal. You turn away from the towpath when the spire of the church appears; you come out by the shop.

‘You shouldn’t go thumbing lifts, Pettie.’

‘You have to, morning time.’

The lorries go down Romford Way, out beyond the Morning Star. Ifyou get there early they’ll stop. She wouldn’t take a lift in a car.

‘That man going to give you the job out there after all then?’

As old as Mrs. Biddle, the grandmother is. No more’n a laugh, Mrs. Biddle minding a baby. The grandmother’s got herself in there like she said she would.’

‘Best left if there isn’t work there, Pettie.’

‘Left? How could you leave it?’

‘Won’t do you no good, Pettie. That place.’

She reaches for her cigarette, knocking off the ash that has accumulated at the tip. You’re nearly at the gateless pillars when you take the path through the field, she says, the fir trees on your right at first. Every time the dog comes back to the house in the car it gives a bark, she says. First thing when it gets out, then again if the car comes back and it’s not in it. Other times it don’t bark at all.

‘You take care with a dog, Pettie.’

‘D’you understand what I’m saying to you, Albert?’

‘You get a bite off a dog, you’re in trouble. A woman got a bite off a dog that came over the wall — ’

‘I’m talking about something else.’

Albert nods. He knew she was, he says; it’s just that any dog can be vicious. He read about the woman in the paper, stitches in her neck. He rubs the surface of the table with a finger, drawing a shape that isn’t visible on it. He went in to ask at the Marmite factory, he says. He went to ask if there was anything for a girl, only they didn’t have anything at present. He made enquiries in the KP, in the dairy yard, down the Underground. He heard they were looking for machinists up Chadwell way, but when he went in they said they weren’t.

‘Yeah,’ she says.

‘You eat your doughnut, Pettie.’

She picks her mug up and goes to get more coffee. Albert watches her, her thin legs beneath the denim skirt, her high heels clonking on the tiled floor. When first they ran away, when they were in the seed place, she said what she wanted was to get work in a store. Someone had left two car seats in a glasshouse and put corrugated up where the glass had gone. Stone was still on pallets around a rusting weighing-machine at one end, paving stones, quarry stones. Spreading out rolls of plant-sacking to lie down on, and fixing up shelving they found to keep the rain out where more glass had been broken, they used to talk about the work they’d try for when they had somewhere better to live. Pettie always said a store.

‘You try the stores again?’ he asks when she comes back. ’You been round them at all?’

She doesn’t answer, stirring her coffee. He heard the red-haired man saying the T-shirt suited her, but she didn’t bother with that either. She tastes her coffee and breaks a bit off her doughnut, the fat on it no longer glistening because it’s cold. She says she gave up the stores yonks ago. Same’s she gave up the idea of getting office skills. Same’s she gave up trying to get work at the swimming-baths.

‘If there’s a vacancy at the Marmite, you’d go for it, Pettie? The woman said keep in touch.’

Yeah, great, she says, but he knows she doesn’t mean it. He tries for a distraction, drawing attention to Air India going over. Always at this time, he reminds Pettie, smiling at her, twenty to eleven. No way that’s anything but Air India.

‘Rosie the dog’s called.’

His smile remains when he shakes his head. ‘Won’t do no good, Pettie.’

‘I put flowers on the grave.’ She wipes a smear of jam from around her lips. ‘The grandmother’s beyond it.’

‘You still all right for the rent, Pettie?’

She doesn’t answer, and he explains that Mrs. Biddle won’t be put upon. In case she has forgotten, he mentions that. He has known it before, he says, this state she’s got into, having feelings for this man. It’s the same thing happening all over again.

‘It’s not the same. It’s like you’re waiting for something and then it happens. It’s like it’s meant, Letitia gone, then the advertisement.’

‘I know what you mean, Pettie.’

‘You hear her voice, you know it’s meant.’

‘It’s only you wouldn’t want to lose the room.’

She doesn’t look at him, she doesn’t care. Despair comes as a hollowness in Albert’s stomach, a cavity of dull, unfeeling pain. Within a week of losing her room she’ll be up Wharfdale.

‘The grandmother falls asleep,’ she says. ‘I seen her at it.’

The receiver is put down, and Pettie visualizes it on the table in the hall, where she noticed a telephone while she sat there waiting. Clearly she recalls the dark panelling in the hall, the half-open door of the dining-room, the sluggish tick of the clock.

‘I’m sorry,’ he says, coming back when she is beginning to think that maybe he won’t, that maybe he hasn’t understood. ‘I’ve asked, but no ring has been found.’

‘I think maybe where I was sitting. On that settee. I think maybe it slipped under a cushion. A finger-ring,’ she says.

Again the receiver is placed on the table’s surface, more of a rustle than a thud, as if his hand is partly over the mouthpiece as he lays it there. There are his footsteps moving away, and then there are different, distant sounds. She puts another coin in the slot. She lights a cigarette. She couldn’t stop smoking after she went back to the Floor Coverings place with the tie she had acquired, and the book about tennis stars because he’d said he liked to watch the tennis. ‘Oh, Eric’s gone,’ they said, putting an end to what hadn’t yet begun. She stood there looking at them and they asked her if she was all right. How could she search for him? she thought, and yet she trailed from store to store.

‘No, nothing there, I’m afraid.’

His voice is as it was when first she heard it, when he gave her directions, on the telephone also. It’s soft, just a little different from what it is when she hears it in the garden or as it was at the interview. But not a whisper; every word is clear. Again he says he’s sorry.

‘I’ve pulled the cushions out,’ he says.

She wonders if settee is right. Couch she might have said, but it wasn’t called that when she was there, and she remembers now that the grandmother said sofa. Finger-ring was Miss Rapp’s word. ‘Grey soapstone,’ Miss Rapp said when someone asked. ‘Mother’s grey soapstone.’ Just say a ring and it could be a curtain ring or something for an ear.

‘No, sentimental only,’ she says when he asks if it’s valuable. She must have fiddled with it, nervous because of the interview, she says, because she wanted the position so. She must have slipped it up and down her finger. She only noticed afterwards, in the train.

‘I didn’t like to bother you before, sir. I didn’t want to be a nuisance, a time like this for you. But then I thought that’s silly.’

‘It’s no trouble at all.’

‘I was the last girl that came on the Friday. I think you remarked I was the last.’

‘If you could let me have a phone number or an address we’ll let you know if your ring is found.’

There are twenty pence left, registered on the screen. She has another coin ready in case it’s necessary, a fifty. She wonders if he’s wearing his fawn shirt and light-coloured trousers, the brown leather shoes that could do with a shine. He doesn’t wear a chain or anything, nothing on the wrist or at the neck.

‘D’you think I could come out, Mr. Davenant? Could I look on the driveway in case it slipped off there?’

He doesn’t say anything and for a moment she thinks the money has run out, that they have been cut off. But the screen says 16p. Once he had other shoes on in the garden, canvas, light-coloured like his trousers.

‘I’m afraid it’s a little like a needle in a haystack.’

She can feel his concern, as she did when first she said she’d lost something. Thaddeus suits his voice as well as his appearance. It suits an older man. When you get used to it you realize he couldn’t be called anything else.

‘Maybe it’s silver, or only silver-coloured. The gem’s a soapstone. Grey.’

‘Well, I’m sorry to say we haven’t found it.’

‘I’d have a look along the lane I walked on. All right to do that, Mr. Davenant?’

‘Of course it is. And if you do, please come back here and see for yourself.’

For a moment Pettie cannot speak. In the silence she hears his breathing and knows everything is different because he has said that. No two people could have more in common than a baby: Georgina Belle, and the long days of his bereavement becoming shorter, time the healer. In the silence she can feel the closeness again, like there was when he held his hand out, the moment their hands touched. Like when she looked at the photograph among the flowery paperweights, when he saw her looking and didn’t have to say anything.

‘I’ll come,’ she says, and asks him when she should.

‘I never wanted her here.’

‘It’s only temporary, Mrs. Biddle. Pettie’s down on her luck, but that’s just for the moment. Pettie’ll walk in with news of a job and it’ll be like it used to be.’

‘She’ll get up on her legs and go is what she’ll do.’

Albert mentions the Dowlers. He explains that he has looked up Dowler Drains in the telephone directory, 21A Side Street. No way the Dowlers won’t take Pettie back when he puts it to them.

‘Pettie’s got into a muddle, Mrs. Biddle.’

‘The time I woke up she was standing there with a camel in her hand.’

‘Pettie was only looking at the camel, Mrs. Biddle.’

‘She could look at it on the mantelpiece, nothing stopping her. She could stand there looking at it all day, only she never come in when I’m lying awake. Creeping about the place, that girl’d get you into an early grave. She was nicking that camel. She’d nick the whole display, give her a chance.’

‘Soon’s she hears no problem with the Dowlers she’ll be OK.’

‘You have a room, you pay for it.’

‘It’s only I’m worried what’ll happen to her.’ Albert mentions Bev gone missing and Marti Spinks and Ange up Wharfdale. He mentions Joey Ells.

‘You told me about Joey Ells. We’re talking about paying the rent.’

‘If the chutes wasn’t clogged, there’d have been water in that tank. Could’ve been she was lying there drowned.’

Propped up on her pillow, the backs of her hands cool at last after the day’s heat, Mrs. Biddle quotes thirty-six pounds as the sum due to her. It isn’t much to pay for getting rid of a girl you didn’t want to have near you in the first place, but she refrains from saying so.

‘Joey Ells can’t hardly walk ever since.’

‘You told me, Albert. It lowers me to hear about Joey Ells. I’m low enough without hearing about Joey Ells all over the place.’

The hot weather brings out a testiness in Mrs. Biddle. All day long, wafting in through her open windows, the comments of the pedestrians on the pavement outside have had to do with the unabating heat. A drought is spreading throughout the country, the television News has three times informed her. Even though it’s gone eight and the evening cool has come, grown men go by in shorts.

‘She can creep about somewhere else. You tell her that from me, Albert. You tell her if she paid what’s owing ten times over she’s not coming back to that room. Par for the course, this is.’

‘I’d call in at the Dowlers’ tonight.’

‘That girl ain’t coming back here.’

He’ll call in at the Dowlers’ all the same, he says. His smile has gone; his eyes are dull. There isn’t often any kind of disagreement between them. In a flat voice he asks:

‘You got an appetite now the warmth’s gone? You fancy pilchards?’

She says she would and he goes to open a tin, leaving the door open because she likes to hear him in the kitchen. Smells waft in and she likes that too. ‘Make us a bit of toast?’ she calls out, and he says he will.

Extraordinary, that he’d be mixed up with a girl who’d sweet-talk her way into a bed-ridden woman’s house. All you have’s your house, the view from the window, folk going by. You can’t be expected to take in all and sundry. ‘Lovely animals,’ was what the girl said when she was caught with the camel.

‘All right then, Albert?’

He calls back, saying he is. She tries the television, but all that happens is snow coming down. She turns it off and watches a woman across the street sweeping the pavement in front of her door. He’s far from all right, with that girl affecting him, that Joey Ells coming up the way she always does. The last few weeks he’s not been himself by a long chalk.

The woman across the street leans on her brush, talking to a gas man. A car turns into the terrace and West Indian people get out of it, a man laughing, a girl with a sleeping baby. She can smell the toast now. When he comes in with the meal she’ll soothe him. They had to have the upset, but it’s behind them now. She’ll try to get it to him that they’ll be like they used to be.

‘Television’s gone on the blink again,’ she says when he comes back, not wanting to rush in with the other immediately. His arms are tense, carrying the tray in the careful way he has, clutching it tightly. When he pushes the door closed with his elbow she says that the upset’s over and done with, that she had to put her foot down. She advises him to put the girl behind him, same’s he should that Joey Ells. ‘You forget them bad things, Albert. There’s no one can look after me better’n you do. No one ever did.’

He places the tray on the bedclothes the way she likes him to do, not too far down, so that she doesn’t have to sit up more.

‘You having enough there, Albert? You make more toast if you want to.’

‘No, I’ve enough.’

‘You don’t want to starve yourself. You take what you want.’

‘I’m all right.’

‘I like a pilchard, Albert.’

She brings in Bolton then, reminded by the fish. Tomkins Avenue, Number Seventeen, and Harvey Clegg put the breakfast herrings down the armchair. Nineteen forty-nine it would have been.

‘A Mrs. Frist that landlady was, thin little woman, sharp’s a tooth. Couldn’t stand her, Harvey couldn’t, and the herrings was off. Stank the house out inside of a day and she knew, of course. She said she’d have the law on him.’

He wags his head; she can tell he’s interested. He’s interested in everything, he likes to hear. She takes a mouthful of tea, washing bits of pilchard from under her teeth, then settling the teeth back into place.

‘He was always up to something, that Harvey Clegg. The time he brought the Widow Twanky into Little Red Riding Hood you’d have laughed your head off. “Next for shaving, the Widow Twanky!” he shouted out when Red Riding Hood’d just said what big eyes. Not a pick of sense it made, but they roared.’

His head is cocked to one side a bit, as it is when he listens for his planes, but all there is to hear is the distant traffic in Bride Street. He finishes his pilchards, always quick with his food. He turns the television on, then goes behind it.

‘You getting a picture now?’

There’s sexual intercourse, which is on constantly these days. Either that or people at death’s door in a Casualty. Or it’s the female who reads out letters and winks at you, some kind of tic she has.

‘That OK now, Mrs. Biddle?’

She changes the channel, pressing the numbers on the remote control. Blood spatters a wall and drips over a vase of flowers. A boot is kicking the stomach out of a body on the ground.

He goes on fiddling, then comes round to look himself, and she says that’s OK now, they can turn it off. He does so and the picture disappears, taking with it another thump of the boot, and frenzied music that is beginning to give her a headache. On the street outside an old man goes by, unkempt and bleary-eyed in the gathering dusk.

‘She took advantage, Albert.’

He piles his own dishes on to her tray and waits for hers. One morning he didn’t come in and she thought he was dead. Out on the streets in the night hours, someone like him could easily be set on because he’s the way he is, because he’s different.

‘I’ll make a jelly,’ he says. ‘Greengage. For tomorrow.’ The door closes behind him and then she hears him beginning to wash up. After that he’ll go and have his evening rest. They told him down the platforms he must have his sleeps and he always does. She listens to the clatter of the dishes, then drops off for a moment, waking to hear his footsteps in the room above her. The day she managed the stairs when he was resting, his sleeping face was like an angel’s, the empty eyes closed over, lips parted a little. Everything in the room was tidy around him, the little decorations on the walls. Sometimes all she wishes for before she goes is to have his worries taken from him, to know he’ll be all right when she isn’t there to think about him. When she can’t move at all, which won’t be long now, she wouldn’t mind it if he washed her. He could bring the basin in and lift her nightdress off. She’d lie there with something else private between them, not anyone else’s business, like the upset over the girl isn’t.