Rebuilding Coventry

  ‘No,’ said Derek. ‘Go back to sleep.’

  John opened his door. He avoided looking at Derek’s face.

  ‘I can’t go to sleep,’ said Mary. ‘I want my mum.’

  The three of them stood on the landing in their nightclothes. Nobody knew what to say or do. Mary felt bereaved twice over. For three years she’d had a violent crush on Gerald Fox. He had never known about her love for him and now he never would.

  Eventually, after an awkward silence, Coventry’s family went to their respective beds.

  15 Over in Three Minutes

  WANTED. HELP IN RATHER UNCONVENTIONAL HOUSEHOLD.

  LIVE-IN. SMOKER PREFERRED.

  APPLY IN PERSON TO PROFESSOR WILLOUGHBY D’ERESBY,

  BUT PLEASE DON’T INTERRUPT EASTENDERS.

  GOWER STREET. NO NUMBER, ALAS, BUT LOOK FOR

  LARGE URN OUTSIDE FRONT DOOR.

  I was staring at Professor Willoughby D’Eresby’s advertisement in a newsagent’s window when a man with an executive brief-case came and stood by my side. It was five o’clock in the morning. The street was shiny black and deserted. The newsagent’s window spilt yellow light onto the man’s black lace-up shoes. He cleared his throat.

  ‘Are you a business girl?’

  ‘Yes, I’m a self-employed chimney-sweep.’

  He looked at me. He had a nice, stupid face. He was disappointed. ‘Sorry to bother you.’

  He turned away and walked down the street. His shoes clicked loudly on the pavement.

  He walked like a man who had nowhere to go. I clung to the pool of light and watched him. He turned around and looked at me. We stared at each other for a few seconds. London had defeated me. I was mad from hunger and terror. He walked back to me, swinging his brief-case. He said very quietly: ‘Have you got anywhere to go?’

  ‘No, have you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘A park?’

  ‘Yes, all right.’

  ‘It’s not too cold?’

  ‘No.’

  He held my hand; he’d been drinking. He asked me my name. I refused to tell him. He said his name was Leslie and that he’d missed his train. Three of his teeth were missing. We walked without speaking until we came to a square. The gates were locked.

  ‘Can you jump over the railings?’ he asked, in his quiet voice. I answered him by pulling on the overhanging branch of a tree and, using it to steady myself, onto the top of the railings. I balanced on them for some time, comfortable in my old clothes and shoes; ready to leap and run and turn somersaults in the grass.

  It took him longer to climb over. He was careful and slow and I said, ‘You’ve only got one decent suit, haven’t you?’

  ‘The one I’m wearing,’ he said. ‘My interview suit. I didn’t get the job, though,’ he added. When we were in the park he held my hand again. ‘I don’t like the dark,’ he said. The trees swayed overhead as we lay down together. It started to rain.

  ‘I can smell soot,’ he said.

  ‘It’s me,’ I said.

  He took his white shirt off and put it, carefully folded, inside his brief-case. He started to tremble in the cold. I told him to put his suit jacket back on.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘We’ll soon be warm.’

  We lay together in the rain for a few quiet moments, and then he asked politely if I was ready to start. We started, went on and finished. It was all over in three minutes. His wet string vest shone in the dark under his breathless back. ‘Well, that was very nice,’ he said as we separated and became two bodies again.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  We could have been talking about a slice of home-made cake. As the sky lightened we discussed my fee. ‘I’ve only got a few quid,’ he said, and turned his pockets inside out, as though I had called him a liar. For further proof he opened his brief-case. I looked inside.

  ‘Can I have the cigarettes and the Kit-Kat please?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘and I can spare two pounds.’

  He handed the coins to me and I pressed them to my cheek. I ate the Kit-Kat and smoked a cigarette while Leslie told me about his wife and how much he loved her. The day had crept up unnoticed. It was light. We stood up.

  ‘I didn’t know you were so lovely,’ he said. ‘Is your hair natural?’

  ‘No, it’s a wig,’ I said and ran towards the railings, scaled them and was off, running, to find Professor Willoughby D’Eresby’s house.

  16 Unconventional Household

  ‘Pronounce it Darby,’ coughed Professor Willoughby D’Eresby, as he stood on the top doorstep of his house in Gower Street looking at me. ‘I say, you’re splendidly dirty, aren’t you? Like traffic, do you, noise and smell of?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Pity, I’m very partial to the smell of diesel and, my dear, I’m in seventh heaven if a juggernaut crashes its gears outside my study window. Odd, isn’t it?’

  He looked happily up and down Gower Street at the snarling rush-hour traffic, inhaled deeply on the fumes, then flung his lighted cigarette stub into an urn by the door containing hundreds of fellow stubs and nodded me into the interior of the house. He immediately lit another cigarette, coughed, choked and, with watering eyes, said, ‘Is that a Benson you’re smoking?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Thought so. Got a frightfully good nose for a fag.’

  The professor’s super-refined upper-class accent sounded like a foreign language. When he spoke I had to strain to understand him.

  As I was about to enter the kitchen, he put a restraining hand on my arm. ‘Perhaps I ought to tell you that my wife is a psychologist and she doesn’t wear clothes in the house.’

  From the kitchen came the sound of wild laughter and then a shrill voice shouting, ‘Stop pissing about, Gerard, and bring her in. She’s seen a naked woman before.’

  ‘You’re swearing again, Letitia, and it’s not yet noon.’

  Professor Willoughby D’Eresby pulled me into the kitchen and towards his wife, who put the Guardian down and revealed her head and torso and breasts. It took me a few seconds to recover, but I managed to say, ‘Hello.’

  ‘Sit yourself down, my dear,’ she said. ‘I expect you want a few quiet moments in which to recover. Shocking sight, aren’t I?’

  I thought it best to say nothing.

  ‘I admire my wife enormously,’ said the professor defensively.

  ‘She does as she pleases, you know.’

  ‘Within the law, Gerard,’ added Letitia, lighting a large cigar.

  ‘Oh yes, within the law,’ drawled her husband.

  I glanced around the kitchen. Flies had colonized the sink. The cardboard remains of Marks & Spencer’s oriental dinners for two were thrown about the floor. Ashtrays contained insecure pyramids of cigar butts and cigarette ends. Milk bottles contained penicillin-like substances.

  I sat at the kitchen table with my feet sticking to the floor. I tried not to breathe. Somewhere a drain was blocked. Letitia Willoughby D’Eresby started to read aloud an item from the Guardian, something about child abuse. Her husband listened attentively, saying:

  ‘Awful! awful!’ every now and again. An evil-looking cat loped in, worrying a half-dead mouse. It deposited it at Letitia’s feet.

  ‘Ah look, darling! Thatcher has brought you in a little present!’

  ‘Thank you, Thatcher, you old bastard,’ said Letitia. Then, ‘OK … we can’t keep this gorgeous child waiting a moment longer.’

  She threw the Guardian onto the floor and turned to me. I glimpsed grey pubic hair and mottled thighs as she raised herself to turn her chair to face me. I shut my eyes… . ‘As you can see, we’re lazy sods. We do no housework. We can’t cook. We smoke compulsively and I walk around displaying my clapped-out old tits. Can’t keep domestic help, can we, Gerard? …’

  ‘Can’t get domestic help, darling,’ said Gerard, smiling fondly at his moustachioed wife.

  Letitia smiled back and continued: ‘We’ll give you forty pounds a week an
d free board, if you’ll keep us straight and cook us a meal every now and again … How say you?’

  ‘I say yes.’

  ‘Oh, that’s supercalafragilistic!’ said Letitia.

  ‘Wife!’ boomed Gerard. ‘You’re never to use that word again in my hearing. It’s twee, it’s regressive and it is not a proper word.’

  ‘Did you see Mary Poppins?’ Letitia asked me eagerly.

  ‘Four times,’ I said.

  ‘I’ve seen it eleven times at the pictures, and fuck knows how many times on video. I find its naïve — not to say moronic — simplicity to be utterly enchanting.’ Her voice changed, her eyes narrowed. She turned on her husband. ‘And it sodding well really is a proper word, it’s in the Oxford English Dictionary . . . I think! And if it’s not, it jolly well ought to be. As well you know, I use it on a daily basis.’ She stood up. I closed my eyes.

  ‘Right, Gerard, get up them bleeding stairs!’ she said. Letitia and Gerard wheezed up the stairs in front of me. I watched Letitia’s buttocks with great interest as they swayed and dimpled and generally behaved like two grey blancmanges on the move. As we turned the stairs towards the attic floor, I thought, ‘I wish Derek could see me now, with my nose only inches away from Letitia’s bare bum.’

  The thought of Derek being here in this house at all made me laugh out loud, and my companions turned and laughed with me; but asked for no explanation.

  ‘We never come up here,’ said Letitia, unnecessarily, as she looked around at the two tidy rooms and ash-free carpets. ‘So you can do your own thing, play your pop records, practise body-popping … or whatever it is you young people do.’

  ‘I’m nearly forty,’ I said: the first piece of information I had volunteered.

  They had not asked me for my name or my circumstances.

  ‘If you’d wear your glasses, Letitia, you would have seen the tiny wrinkles on this dear girl’s face. Vanity, Letitia, vanity.’

  Professor Willoughby D’Eresby stroked his wife’s buttocks fondly. They stood in reverie for a few moments and then Letitia wobbled about, opening windows and skylights and apologizing for the graffiti on the white walls.

  GET OUT WHILE YOU CAN!

  CAROLINE

  SHE’S A LOONY. HE’S A NUTTER.

  JOANNE

  WATCH OUT FOR THE SON.

  GLORIA

  Gerard smiled at the writing on the walls. ‘We’re used to being called “nutters”, aren’t we, darling?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ smiled Letitia. ‘I used to work with Ronnie Laing.’

  ‘So you’ve a son?’ I enquired.

  Their faces clouded over. They looked old and dirty and smelly.

  Their shoulders drooped, they sighed.

  ‘Keir,’ said Professor Willoughby D’Eresby, sadly.

  ‘He’s very hard to reach. He’s in a state of ontological insecurity, ‘added his wife.

  ‘Where does he live?’ I asked, suddenly nervous.

  ‘Floor below,’ said Willoughby D’Eresby, lighting another cigarette and flinging the discarded stub of his previous cigarette into the sparkling wash-basin. ‘We must go to work. Here, get yourself whatever you need, abrasive powders, black plastic bags …’ His voice trailed off; he was on uncertain domestic ground. He searched his suit for money and pulled out a bundle of fifty-pound notes.

  ‘Ooh, can I have one of those, darling?’ asked Letitia.

  He gave us one each and they went downstairs to prepare for work. Mad Keir was much on my mind.

  I bolted the attic door and sat on my bed. I had nothing to put in the chest of drawers or the matching pine wardrobe. I had no face flannel to display or soap to arrange. I was simply … there, in that most traditional of fugitives’ hiding places, the attic.

  I heard the front door slam and poked my head out of the skylight window, hoping to see the Willoughby D’Eresbys. Professor Willoughby D’Eresby came into view, crossing Gower Street with a smart, middle-aged woman on his arm. She was wearing a fashionable padded-shouldered suit in a grey checked material. She teetered on black high-heeled court shoes and she carried a bulging black brief-case. She said something and, as they both laughed, she turned her head. It was Letitia Willoughby D’Eresby, in clothes and scarlet lipstick.

  They walked out of sight and I was very sorry to see them go.

  I was now alone in the house with Keir.

  I pressed my ear to the carpet and listened hard. I could hear no wild mutterings or crazed monologue from the floor below. Perhaps he raved through the night, and slept during the day. I hoped so.

  I was too frightened of Keir to be able to luxuriate in a bath. Instead I took my clothes off and washed at the wash-basin in my room. One of the previous occupants had left behind a little bottle of Marks & Spencer’s liquid soap. I pressed the plunger joyfully over and over until the bottle signalled it was empty by making a disgusting noise. I washed away the soot, the tears, the rain, the sweat and Leslie’s semen from the night before. I washed until I was gloriously renewed and all my tribulations and all my sins had trickled down the waste-pipe and disappeared underground. Then, having no others, I put on my dirty clothes and started to work.

  They hadn’t left me a key but it didn’t matter because the lock to the front door was broken; so I came and went all day, shopping and taking out the rubbish and lining clean milk bottles up on the step. I ate non-stop: fruit, sweets, crisps, two pork pies. But I didn’t buy a newspaper. To read about myself and my crime in black and white would make it real. I rang Sidney every hour, but got no reply.

  I found a cooker, a fridge and a dishwasher in the kitchen, all out of action due to encrustations of dirt or ice. It was deeply satisfying getting them all to work and I quite forgot Keir for ten minutes at a time. The remainder of the time I spent looking over my shoulder and waiting for an axe to fall between my shoulder blades. I was scraping grease off the kitchen wall with a fish slice when the Willoughby D’Eresbys returned. They made no comment on the spectacular renewal of their domestic appliances. They were deep in conversation. They flung their coats onto the newly scrubbed kitchen table and ignored me.

  ‘But, Letitia, the Tsarevich’s haemophilia was the cause of Alexandra’s depression and subsequent religious fervour. You’re being very silly to try to prove that it was a simple ease of post-natal depression.’

  Letitia unbuttoned her blouse. ‘Rasputin took advantage of that poor woman during a time of hormonal upheaval. Hello, my dear, have you been busy? It’s very light in here.’ She looked around, bemused. She took off her skirt.

  ‘I cleaned the windows,’ I said, getting to my feet. The rest of the wall would have to wait. I threw the fish slice into the sink.

  ‘I’ve never seen that before,’ said Professor Willoughby D’Eresby, pointing in astonishment at the newly scrubbed kitchen floor with its mock terracotta tiles. Letitia examined it as she unhooked her bra.

  ‘Of course you have; it’s been down at least seven years. We chose it together… from Habitat. When we were paying for it a man had an epileptic fit on a pile of dhurries,’ she prompted.

  ‘Remember now,’ said Willoughby D’Eresby. ‘You pushed a lollipop stick into his mouth and splintered his tongue.’

  I took a casserole dish out of the oven and put it on the newly scrubbed table. I had expected amazed cries and perhaps a jump or two of joy, but the Willoughby D’Eresbys sat down at the table and slopped the beef casserole onto their plates without comment. They were not discreet eaters; they smacked their lips, gravy dribbled down their chins unchecked and unnoticed. Letitia finished first.

  ‘Any afters?’

  ‘A rice pudding,’ I said and got up and took it out of the oven. It was perfect: brown crispy skin concealed a creamy bed of plump rice. Professor Willoughby D’Eresby said quickly: ‘Bags I the skin.’

  Letitia shouted: ‘No, bags I the skin.’

  The rice pudding dish, though hot, was pulled to and fro across the table.

  Keir came into th
e kitchen. ‘Où sont les cigarettes?’ he said.

  ‘Speak English in front of the housekeeper, dear,’ said Letitia. ‘She is uneducated.’

  Keir glanced at me without interest. He was a very tall, bare-foot man in his early twenties. His matted dark hair fell onto his shoulders and framed a face like a thin grey pillow. A pair of dark blue workman’s overalls hung from his emaciated body. His toenails needed cutting. He didn’t look capable of lifting an axe, let alone going berserk with one. Letitia handed him her cigarettes and he took them and went out of the kitchen without speaking another word.

  ‘He’s stopped eating properly,’ said the professor, breaking the silence.

  ‘Since when?’ I asked.

  ‘Since he was seventeen and we packed him off to Oxford,’ said Letitia.

  ‘He was quite astonishingly clever, y’see,’ cut in her husband, ‘but he didn’t want to go. We had to prise him out of the car and into Balliol. He made an awful scene on the stairs outside his room, said some quite unforgettable things to his mother, accused her of abandoning him.’

  ‘We’d never spent a night apart,’ explained Letitia.

  ‘Within a fortnight the poor boy had regressed to a state of chaotic nonentity and he has never properly recovered.’

  ‘But he must eat something,’ I insisted. ‘I mean, if he didn’t he’d die, wouldn’t he?’

  Willoughby D’Eresby drew heavily on his cigarette and, marking his points by tapping on the table with his dessert spoon, said: ‘But he doesn’t eat with us. He never leaves this house. No food is ever missing. And nobody ever calls to see him. So you see, my dear, it’s a mystery to us why he is still alive but he is.’

  ‘Has he seen a doctor?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh no, he’d hate that,’ said Letitia. ‘He has entirely negative feelings towards the medical profession.’

  ‘He looks very poorly,’ I ventured. ‘Very thin and undernourished.’

  ‘Well he’s bound to, isn’t he?’ said Professor Willoughby D’Eresby with an air of finality, ‘if he doesn’t eat.’