Vital Signs Page 10

  “Oh, Mummy. . . .”

  “This minute!”

  They grinned at each other as they listened to her footsteps dragging up the stairs. Jeanne called after her, “And fetch my boot from the front lawn.”

  The boot dropped through the window into the sink. Anna’s face appeared and said, “Can we go to the zoo this afternoon?”

  “Why not?” said Jeanne. “Do you want to come, Peter? Anna found a rhinoceros that eats ice-cream.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t mind but I’ve got to look at this school sometime, Jeanne, so I think I’ll get that over with.”

  “It’s nicer at the zoo.”

  “I know,” said Peter.

  * * *

  He stooped over the basin patting hot water onto his face to soften four days’ bristle. He had run out of new razor blades but Jeanne had picked the lock on Jim’s door and stolen one for him. He peered into the mirror, examining his face. Suntanned certainly, but the long weeks had left no lines or creases, no major changes. He pressed the button on Jim’s aerosol can of shaving cream and watched the thick whorls rising in his palm.

  Water gurgled into the hot water tank and the pipes whined into silence. Three weeks he said to his reflection. The house empty, the bed stripped down to its springs and piled with folded blankets, Nick now living in America.

  Three weeks, but, if he didn’t find out where the school was, check the bus numbers and time the route, it would only undermine the days he had left. And while he was out he must go down to the Valley to pay Mrs. Jenkins for cigarettes and Hilda at the newsagent’s. There would be seven weeks of Jazz Journal, The Listener, and the New Statesman, and two copies of Encounter. He hoped she hadn’t returned them. He smiled as he thought of Mrs. Jenkins searching through piles of old paper bags and the backs of cigarette packets to find the scrap on which she’d scrawled his account.

  “Goodbye, Peter!” shouted Anna.

  “Goodbye!”

  “The Zoo!” shouted Anna to everyone.

  “Back about six,” called Jeanne.

  “Bye!”

  The front door slammed and their voices died away down the path.

  His hands idle in the warm water, he pictured the vast Victorian houses all the way down the hill to the Valley where they gave way to grey Georgian tenements, divided and subdivided into flatlets and bedsitters. Windows here and there were broken or boarded over, and pink willow herb sprouted from roofs and guttering.

  On the blackened walls of the United Methodist Chapel, gangs of grimy children had chalked a frieze of houses and trees and stick-people and airplanes. Behind the hoardings which masked the bomb sites, the older children threw rocks at the abandoned cars.

  Behind the Chapel, in Canning Street, was the fish and chip shop run by a moody Chinese and, three doors up, the Three Feathers, where the Irishman showed everyone his scars. Next to the pub was a row of small houses. Over one door, painted into the brick, was a sign from 1945, Welcome Home Our Bill. Hilda in the newsagent’s, shapeless in her floral apron, who gave him credit and urged him not to ruin his eyes with reading. The garage and then Ramsey Family Butcher, sawdust spilling out onto the pavement, where the ginger cat sat all day, so fat its tongue poked out of its mouth. Beyond the bomb site was the Universal Buy Sell Company with its window full of second-hand clothes and shoes, 78 records, National Geographics, chipped crockery, motor-bike parts, cutlery, old spectacles, and walking sticks.

  On the other side of the road was Sam McAllister, chemist and barber, where he always had his hair cut. The window displayed a sun-faded board of ancient snapshots, which was propped against a jumble of fallen tins and boxes. At the top of the board were the words We Develop. Every surface was thick in grime and scattered with the husks of bluebottles. Mr. McAllister always fried his lunch, always sausages, on a gas ring in the middle of the floor.

  At the end of the Valley, before the land rose again to the spire of the university, was the Post Office, regulated by the Misses Griffin, the younger sister well over seventy, who countered impatience by looking at the clock over her half-moons and remarking loudly, Manners maketh man.

  He dried the razor and wiped the blade on a facecloth. He pulled out the plug and then squeezed a blob of Jim’s foam into the water and watched it as it swirled lower and lower round the plughole. He studied his face again in the mirror.

  Many of the houses were empty now, windows blind or boarded over, notices tacked on gates and doors. When the rest of the notices had been served, the wreckers would gut the houses, dropping roofs inside the shells and toppling walls, and the bulldozers would raze the Valley to an uneven field of rubble—broken brick and plaster, splintered lath.

  * * *

  The bus turned off the main road and lumbered up to the Gartree Hill Estate. The conductor had told Peter that the bus went as far as Gartree Square, where it turned around for the return journey; that Gartree Comprehensive School was a few minutes’ walk beyond the square.

  Peter looked out of the window at the parallel rows of streets. The concrete council houses marched along each road and out of sight as the bus passed. Hazel Row. Blackthorn Street. Honeysuckle Drive. Elderberry Avenue. Briar Street. There was not a tree in sight.

  The bus stopped and he got out and looked around the square. There were shops on all four sides and, in the centre, a public lavatory.

  He walked on up the hill, past the Clinic, Gartree Elementary School, the Gartree Community Centre, and the Parish Church of St. Michael and All the Angels, and turned down Beech Tree Way.

  The school was glass and coloured panels, a deserted stretch of asphalt, ragged shrubs in a strip of garden by the front doors. It had taken him half an hour from the city centre. He stared through the railings.

  On the padlocked gates was a metal shield—a blue ground on which was painted an oak tree. Underneath the roots of the tree were three black birds that looked like rooks. Underneath the rooks, a scroll. On the scroll were the words Virtue and Knowledge.

  He turned back towards Gartree Square. He cut through Magnolia Street and passed a small public garden which was surrounded by a wire-mesh fence. An old man in a black overcoat was sitting on a concrete bench staring at the floral clock.

  A hot wind blew grit and dust about the square and stirred the ice-cream wrappers. Five boys on bicycles without mudguards rode round and round the public lavatory. He waited for the bus.

  * * *

  Jeanne was peeling potatoes when the bell rang.

  “See who that is, Pete,” she said.

  He went upstairs and opened the front door. Two men stood there. The older one, who was wearing a tweed jacket and a yellow tie with red fox heads on it, stepped forward and said, “Good evening, sir. Sorry to inconvenience you. CID .”

  He held out his identification card. “I’m Sergeant Hope, sir, and this is Detective Constable Flynn.” The younger man nodded.

  “What’s the problem?” said Peter.

  “We’d like a word, if we may, with the lady of the house?”

  “What lady?” said Peter.

  “Mrs. Anderson?”

  “There’s no one of that name here.”

  “I see,” said Sergeant Hope. He looked at Detective Constable Flynn.

  “Are you the owner of the house, sir?”

  “No. I’m just staying here. I have a room here.”

  “And the owner of the house is. . . ?”

  “Mr. Rawley. James Rawley.”

  Constable Flynn wrote in his notebook.

  “And Mr. Rawley lets rooms, does he?”

  “Yes, that’s right. University students.”

  “And I expect Mrs. Rawley does the housework—tidies the rooms and so on?”

  “No. There’s a housekeeper. Mr. Rawley’s a widower.”

  “Ah! A housekeeper. And her name wouldn�
�t be Anderson?”

  “No. Mrs. Charleton.”

  “Would you happen to know Mrs. Charleton’s first name, sir?”

  “I believe it’s Jeanne,” said Peter.

  “I see,” said Sergeant Hope. “Jeanne.”

  “Why?” said Peter. “What’s going on?”

  “Oh, nothing to be alarmed about, sir. Just routine enquiries.”

  “Could we have a word with Mrs. Charleton?” said Constable Flynn.

  “I’m afraid she’s not in at the moment.”

  “This Mrs. Charleton, sir,” said Sergeant Hope. “She wouldn’t have a small female child, would she?”

  “Yes, she has.”

  “Answers to the name of Anna?”

  “Yes.”

  “Five years of age or thereabouts?”

  “About that.”

  “And this Mrs. Charleton. About how old would you say she was?”

  “About thirty-five or so. Maybe a bit older.”

  “Short? Tall?”

  “I should think she’s about five foot seven.”

  “I see,” said Sergeant Hope.

  “And she’s not at home right now, you say?” said Constable Flynn.

  “What awful crime has Mrs. Charleton committed?” said Peter.

  “We just want to ask her a few routine questions in pursuance of enquiries, sir.”

  “When’s she coming back?” said Constable Flynn.

  “She’s gone away for the weekend. To see her mother at Bridgeport, I believe she said.”

  “Get on all right with her, do you, sir?”

  “Well, I don’t see much of her. I’m usually down at the university and she’s—well, she’s just the housekeeper. I don’t mean to sound. . . .”

  “Oh, quite, sir. Quite,” said Sergeant Hope.

  “It was just that she was leaving as I was on my way out.”

  “She didn’t, by any chance, intimate when she’d be returning, sir?”

  “Monday morning, I think. I think that’s what she said.”

  “Is Mr. Rawley at home?”

  “No. He’s usually a lot later than this.”

  “Have there been any phone calls or letters here for a Mrs. Beazley?” said Constable Flynn.

  “Not that I know of.”

  “I see,” said Sergeant Hope. “Well, you’ve been most helpful, sir.”

  “Not at all,” said Peter.

  “Perhaps we can pop round on Monday and have a word with her. Sorry to have taken up so much of your time, sir.”

  Peter watched them turn out onto the pavement before he closed the door. “Jeanne!” he called as he hurried down the stairs and burst into the kitchen. “Jeanne, that was two policemen looking for you.”

  “What did you tell them?”

  “I said you weren’t here.”

  “What did they want?”

  “They wouldn’t say. They were asking for a Mrs. Anderson and Mrs. Beazley but they had a description of you and Anna.”

  “What did you tell them?”

  “That you were away for the weekend and that you were coming back on Monday.”

  “Did they believe it?”

  “I think so. It’s hard to tell with them, though.”

  “CID?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, shit!” she said.

  “What’s it about, Jeanne?”

  She had turned her back and was staring out of the tiny window above the sink.

  “Jeanne?”

  “What?”

  “What do they want you for?”

  “How do I know! Maybe it’s for drawing unemployment insurance.”

  “They don’t send two detectives round for that.”

  “It’s Friday today?”

  “Yes. What’s all this about Mrs. Anderson?”

  “Friday.”

  She was staring through him, the cheese grater in her hand forgotten.

  Just then, the front door slammed. They heard heavy footsteps in the tiled hall. Something thudded to the floor.

  “Jeanne?” said Peter.

  She chucked the cheese grater into the sink.

  The footsteps crossed the hall again and Jim came down the stairs.

  “Good evening, all and one!” he said. “Peter! Delighted to see you, old boy!”

  He clasped Peter’s hand and pumped. His pink moon-face beamed at them. Under his fair, thinning hair, his scalp glowed pink. He was wearing his usual navy-blue blazer with the RAF eagle on the breast pocket worked in gold wire. His tie was dark blue and dotted with golden airplanes.

  “How’s dinner, Jeanne? The inner man is crying out.”

  “Just waiting for the potatoes,” she said.

  “Jolly good!” said Jim.

  “Peter, can you. . . .” She pointed to the pile of cutlery on the table. He started to set the places.

  “What an absolutely putrid day!” said Jim.” Ah, salad. Jolly good. Traipsing around nasty little suburban boxes with difficult clients in this heat isn’t my idea of jollies, I can tell you. And I’m going to have to give up Saturday to it as well.”

  “You’re going to be working tomorrow?” said Jeanne.

  “Crack of dawn, old thing. No rest for the wicked, eh?”

  “Salt and pepper in the cupboard,” said Jeanne.

  “So, young Peter. Jeanne informs me you’ve been venturing off to forring parts.”

  “Not really very foreign, Jim.”

  “Cheap grog and ciggies, eh?”

  “Yes, about a third of the price they are here.”

  “That’s the ticket!” said Jim.

  Jeanne started to mash the potatoes.

  “Oodles of butter, old girl, mmmh?” said Jim.

  She put plates in front of them and bowls of salad, grated cheese, hard-boiled eggs, and a platter of ham in the centre of the table.

  “So, you’ve left the Alma Mater?” said Jim, helping himself to the ham. “The halcyon days are over. Out into the cold, harsh world. Nose to the grindstone, eh?”

  “Would you. . . ?”

  “Ah, thank you.”

  “Jeanne?”

  “If you could just. . . . Jolly good!”

  “Salt?” said Peter.

  “Still, I bet you’re looking forward to it,” said Jim.

  “Well . . .” said Peter.

  “How does it go?” said Jim. “‘If all the year were playing holidays to work would.’ No. That’s not it. ‘To play would . . . ‘ Something, something ‘tedious.’ Mmmm?”

  “I expect you’re right,” said Peter.

  A silence settled over them as they ate. Jeanne hardly touched the food in front of her. Peter kept on glancing at her. Jim ate heartily, frequently touching his napkin to his lips.

  “Hal!” he said suddenly.

  “Pardon?” said Peter.

  “Prince Hal. That’s the chappie. You can’t beat the old Bard,” he said.

  “Jesus Christ!” said Jeanne and got up and walked out. Her bedroom door slammed shut.

  “What on earth’s wrong with her?” said Jim.

  “I don’t know,” said Peter. “Maybe it’s the heat.”

  “Probably that time of month,” said Jim. “The monthlies, as we used to say in the service.”

  Peter nodded.

  “A wonderful woman, though,” said Jim. “A real character. Sterling qualities.”

  * * *

  Jeanne was flipping through the dresses in her wardrobe. Peter was lying on her bed watching her. She was humming a waltz tune to herself. As she reached into the wardrobe, the short blue slip was lifted up her legs. She took out two dresses and held them up.

  “Which do you like better?”

  “T
he black one.”

  She stepped into the dress, pulling it up and shrugging her shoulders into it.

  “Jeanne. . . ?”

  “No, Peter. Just shut up about it. I know you’re worried and it’s sweet of you but I’ve got everything under control.”

  “Sweet, my arse!” said Peter. “Stop trying to be so bloody patronizing.”

  She came around the bed and sat in front of him.

  “What’s all the mystery in aid of, anyway?” said Peter.

  “Will you do me up at the back?”

  “And for Christ’s sake, stop humming!”

  He lifted her hair away from the nape of her neck and hooked the collar of the dress.

  “What if they come back before Monday?”

  “Peter! I think you’re deliberately trying to ruin my evening. I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t even want to think about it. So just leave it alone. We’re both dressed up. We look respectable. We’re going to have a fashionably late dinner. And we are going to behave nicely.”

  She lifted up her dress and pulled her slip into place. As she smoothed her stockings up her thighs, she looked at herself in the dressing-table mirror. She turned sideways, lifting her dress higher.

  “I’m bony,” she said, “and my mouth’s too wide. And my tits are like empty hot-water bottles but I have got good legs.”

  “Where are we going?” said Peter.

  “Chez Pierre.”

  “But you can’t afford that!”

  “You’ve got to admit I’ve got good legs.”

  “Let me pay for it.”

  “Learn to accept graciously,” she said.

  “But it’ll cost. . . .”

  “Don’t talk about money,” she said. “It’s vulgar.”

  She opened her purse and tossed a wad of notes onto the bed.

  “You’d better take this now so you can pay for things. Go and call a taxi while I finish tarting myself up.”

  Chez Pierre was small and quiet. There were only eight tables. Thick orange curtains blocked out the night and the noises of the street. Peter lay back in the softness of the chair and looked at Jeanne as he sipped the martini. The pleasant rituals of the restaurant, the flash of the chef’s knives, the smell of bruised herbs, the crisp linen, and the sparkle of wine glasses failed to soothe or lift his spirits. She was in the middle of a complicated story about smuggling watches through Folkestone customs just after the war. A piece of fat flared orange on the grill.