‘Eastenders,’ said Letitia. And they got up from the table and, knocking chairs over in their haste, they rushed from the kitchen and into the sitting-room. I stacked the dishwasher, and from the hallway then dialled the familiar telephone number connecting me to Sidney’s villa: 010 351 89 … He was in.
‘Sidney? It’s me!’ I was shouting with relief.
‘Coventry? I’ve just had the police onto me. They reckon you’ve killed one of your neighbours.’
‘Yes, I have, Sidney. What did the police say?’
‘They wanted to know if you’d phoned me. I told them I’d had the phone off all day. We’ve only just got out of bed,’ he added. ‘Coventry, you’ve made a balls-up of the twelfth commandment, haven’t you?’
‘What’s that?’ I said.
‘Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself,’ he laughed down the phone.
‘Sidney, I’m in London, but don’t tell anyone; do you promise?’
‘Even Derek?’
‘Especially Derek.’
‘Don’t come out to Portugal, will you, Coy? I’ve got a week left and I want to enjoy it without complications. I’ll help you when I get back, but I just want this week, OK?’
‘How could I, Sid? I’ve got no money, no passport or …
‘Good. Ring me when I get back … at the shop.’ He inhaled on his cigarette, then said, ‘Did this neighbour you killed deserve to die?’ He asked this as casually as someone might say, ‘Sugar?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘He deserved to have a nasty bang on the head but he didn’t deserve to die. I shouldn’t have killed him.’ A manic woman cut in and said something in what I presumed to be Portuguese. Then the phone went dead.
A voice behind me said, ‘Who have you killed?’
It was Keir; he was chewing on a rolled-up copy of Private Eye. He swallowed a cartoon while he waited for me to reply. Eventually I said: ‘You’re very ill, you know.’
‘But not mad,’ he replied. ‘Not like them in there.’
He turned and went slowly back upstairs to his room. I put the phone down and went upstairs and knocked on Keir’s door. He opened it at once: ‘I knew it would be you.’
‘Can I come in?’
‘No. Nobody ever comes in.’
Grey feathers floated about on the bare boards under his feet.
‘Has your pillow burst?’ I asked him, indicating the feathery floor.
‘No, stupid, these are pigeon feathers,’ he said. ‘I’m surprised you didn’t identify them immediately. Doesn’t everybody keep pigeons in the north?’
‘No. So I can’t come in?’
‘No.’
‘And you won’t come out?’
‘No. No need. Not now I’ve got my fags.’
He closed his door. A feather escaped from his room and descended the stairs. On my way down I picked it up. There was a smear of blood on the quill shaft.
I put my head round the sitting-room door. My employers were sitting on a sofa shaped like an oyster shell. They were engrossed in a TV conversation going on between black and white cockneys. I shouted, ‘I’m going to have a bath.’ Willoughby D’Eresby gave a Hitler salute of acknowledgement and I backed out. There was no lock on the bathroom door but I barricaded myself in with an Ali Baba basket and a pile of books.
Earlier in the day I had cleaned the bath and wash-basin and had emptied three bottles of bleach down the foetid lavatory. But there was nothing I could do about the ragged coconut matting prickling under my feet or the topographical shapes of mildew that crept around the walls. The water trickled lethargically out of the hot tap, accompanied by banging in the pipes. I’ve never been in a more inconvenient household. Hardly anything worked; or if it did, it only worked the second time and was accompanied by noise or smoke or slight electric shocks. In that house even pressing a light switch took courage.
I looked around for soap. I found five slivers stuck together at the bottom of a jam jar. After ten minutes there were still only a few inches of water in the bath; but I couldn’t wait. I took my filthy clothes off and got in.
My bathroom at home is cosy and has a matching avocado suite, set off well with brown and beige contrasting towels. Recently Derek made a clever shelf that fits above the wash-basin. He used his jigsaw to cut out convenient shapes for the family’s toothbrushes … Each slot is labelled with the owner’s name: MUMMY, DADDY, JOHN, MARY. I mentioned to Derek that my name is not ‘Mummy’ but he hates ‘Coventry’ and refuses to use it. He’s called me ‘Mummy’ since John was born seventeen years ago. Derek once said, ‘I’m a laughing stock at work because of your name.’
But I know that my name is not the reason for any hilarity that greets him on the shop floor: Derek is. His most famous boring monologue is ‘How to boil the perfect egg’. What should, by nature, have taken at most four minutes in the telling, in Derek’s mouth became an epic and is now legend and myth. Everyone who was within earshot in the factory remembers the day Derek delivered his boiled egg lecture. Just as they remember where they were when J.R. was shot. That afternoon at clocking-out time one of his workmates was heard to say, ‘If that bleedin’ Derek opens his trap tomorrow, I’ll crack his egg-head open and I’ll pour salt in the cavity an’ all!’
To be fair to Derek he has got an unpopular job. He is a chaser in a shoe factory, Hopcroft Shoes Ltd. It is his function to track down orders in the various manufacturing departments and then nag the various foremen and forewomen to hurry the order through. He takes his responsibilities very seriously and will be awake at night worrying that twenty dozen cossack boots are still kicking their heels in the finishing room waiting for their buckles, when they should have been on sale in the Co-op shoe department two days before.
We always used to go to Hoperoft’s Annual Dinner and Dance, but we were never invited to join the big, noisy tables where people were obviously enjoying themselves. Instead we sat at a table for four with a senile retired worker and his wife. Last year Derek talked solidly throughout the whole of the turkey dinner. His subject was tortoise gestation. The old couple listened uncomprehendingly, as I did myself.
His nickname at work is ‘Boring Derek’. I know this because as the dinner progressed to dance and Derek’s workmates became intoxicated with alcohol and atmosphere, they shouted: ‘Get out the way: here comes Boring Derek.’ A path as wide as a sheep drover’s road opened before us. At such times I felt sorry for Derek and wanted to protect him. I half fell in love with him again and kissed his neck when we were dancing. When the balloons were released from their net at the end of the evening, I dived into the mob and grabbed the biggest I could find and presented it to Derek. Like a mother placating an unpopular child.
We always made love after the Annual Dinner and Dance. Derek talked all the way through, asking me questions about the various men who attended the function. His fantasy was that the managing director, Mr Sibson (a man of twenty-three stone), and I were copulating on the dance floor, surrounded by his workmates doing the hokey-cokey.
I married Derek because I was in love with him. I was eighteen.
17 Norman Hartnell with Plimsolls
Letitia Willoughby D’Eresby pushed the bathroom door open and fell over the barrier of books. A mildewed face flannel crunched under her hand as she scrambled to her feet. I was sitting in the bath dyeing my hair dark auburn with a do-it-yourself kit I’d bought in a hardware shop during the day. Gobbets of dye were dropping from my head, onto my body and into the bathwater, staining it blood-red. Letitia opened her mouth and screamed, ‘For Christ’s sake, Gerard, come in here at once! The hired help’s topped herself’ She then leapt at the artery under my throat and pressed hard with her big, broad thumbs.
It was some time before I was able to explain to the Willoughby D’Eresbys that it was a change of appearance I was hoping to achieve, rather than translation into another world. In the confusion I left the dye on too long and my hair is now the colour of a particularly tangy satsuma. The W.D.s approve
of this dramatic change in my appearance. Letitia said, ‘You must wear green,’ and she has given me a pair of jade earrings she bought in Indonesia. They are four inches long. She offered to pierce my ears with a darning needle and a cork but I declined this kindness.
I have thrown my chimney-sweeping clothes away and am now wearing a Norman Hartnell mohair suit which Letitia last wore in 1959, when she was a size ten. It is luxuriously soft, with a navy sheen though, of course, it doesn’t look at its best with plimsolls.
That night I lay awake for hours thinking about my children. When I eventually slept, I dreamt of being in prison. I was sharing a cell with Ruth Ellis. We were very jolly and plucked each other’s eyebrows. Then, just before daybreak, we were taken from our cell and hanged by our necks until we were dead. In my dream, death was Grey Paths Council Estate, stretching into infinity. Ruth and I set out to find the shopping centre. But …
I woke up at 6 a.m. and smelt burning meat. I dressed quickly in my Hartnell suit and plimsolls and went to investigate. Outside on the top landing the smell was stronger and was mixed with an acrid stench that stung the back of my throat. Looking down the stairs I saw wisps of smoke curling from under Keir’s door.
‘KEIR! KEIR! WAKE UP! THERE’S A FIRE IN YOUR ROOM!’
I banged on the door until my knuckles hurt. Letitia and Gerard came out of their room, lighting cigarettes. I shouted: ‘Smoke!’ and indicated the base of the door. The professor said: ‘Perhaps the poor boy is hitting the ciggies more heavily than usual.’ Letitia said:
‘That’s not fag smoke, dolt. Break the sodding door down!’
Eventually it was Letitia herself who shouldered the door aside, her husband having misjudged the angle and bounced off the architrave. Keir was sitting cross-legged on the floor, roasting a pigeon in the fireplace. A tiny coal fire glowed in the grate. Keir withdrew the toasting fork and poked at the pigeon’s neck, testing it for edibility. He looked up at us dully. ‘I hope you’re not expecting to join me,’ he said. ‘There is no way this will stretch to four.’
‘No sweat, old chap,’ said Willoughby D’Eresby. ‘Never did like pigeon, prefer woodcock.’
‘Darling,’ said Letitia, ruffling her son’s matted hair, ‘it is nice to see you eating. Shall I fetch you some redcurrant jelly?’
Keir spat out a feather and whined: ‘I’m not eating because I want to eat. I’m doing this as a public service. If it wasn’t for me, London would be overrun… They’re vermin you know, absolutely crawling with parasites.’
‘Yes, well, you will make sure it’s cooked through, won’t you, darling?’ said Letitia, staring with some dismay at the pigeon’s pin-button eyes. Keir turned his attention back to his cooking, and after a long pause the professor said, rather too heartily, ‘Well, m’boy, we’ll leave you to your breakfast.’
As we trooped out of the door Keir said: ‘It isn’t my breakfast, it’s my campaign.’ The only adult objects in Keir’s room were the smoking materials on his bedside table. Even the toasting fork was stamped with Winnie the Pooh decorations. The room was a museum piece. There ought to have been a braided rope across the door and a printed card on the wall:
A TYPICAL FIVE-YEAR-OLD BOY’S BEDROOM
CIRCA 1969
‘Is there much nourishment in a pigeon, darling?’ asked Letitia outside Keir’s door.
‘There’s protein of course,’ replied Professor Willoughby D’Eresby. ‘I’ll have a word with Archie Duncan, the nutritionist.’ And that was that. They went into the bathroom to share a bath.
I was reminded of a horror film I once saw. A group of holidaymakers had rented a Gothic castle for a fortnight. At dinner on the first night a violent thunderstorm broke out. A chandelier fell onto the dinner table. A statue toppled down the stairs. And all the candles went out and then mysteriously lit themselves again. Yet the holidaymakers cheerfully went to bed in their spooky bedrooms and managed to sleep through organ music and screams coming from the cellar.
The Willoughby D’Eresbys and the holiday-makers in the film had much in common: severe cases of taking life as it comes. Had Keir been born on the Grey Paths Estate he would have been secure in the care of the community. Some nosy neighbour would have reported him for strangling pigeons on the windowsill.
18 I Leave the Unconventional Household
I was stirring porridge when Professor Willoughby D’Eresby came into the kitchen and said, ‘I’ve been watching breakfast television. Your name is Coventry Dakin, isn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Your photograph has just been on the news. In the photograph you’re pointing some kind of firearm and looking quite fierce.’
‘A firearm?’ I was baffled.
‘You look frightfully pretty in the photograph. You were wearing a rather fetching blue and white checked frock.’
‘Oh that,’ I said. ‘It was a pop gun; the photograph was a joke. It was my son’s birthday… .’
‘According to the police you’re rather dangerous. They have warned the public not to approach you.’
‘Oh dear.’
‘You have a grudge against men, according to the boys in blue.’ I shook my head.
‘But you killed a man?’
‘Yes.’
‘So you are rather a violent person?’
The porridge was heaving about at the bottom of the pan, dangerously near to sticking. My wrist had gone limp; the wooden spoon bobbed about independently, rattling the sides of the saucepan.
‘Are you going to turn me in?’ I asked.
‘Not in. But, sadly, out. It’s not that I’m shocked, my dear. Murder is yawningly ordinary to me; but, even so, I cannot harbour you under my roof I’m a professor of forensic medicine. I’m in daily contact with the police. You do see the position I’m in?’
‘Yes.’
‘Letitia is desperately unhappy. She was hoping that you’d be with us for years. Servants are such a problem, what with her naturism and Keir’s eccentricities.’
‘When do you want me to go?’
‘I think immediately would be best, don’t you? I’m so very sorry.’
The porridge burnt, so I gave them Weetabix. They ate in uncharacteristic silence. After I’d put the bowls in the dishwasher the Willoughby D’Eresbys gave me a leopard-skin coat and a fifty-pound note.
‘Was it a crime passionnel?’ asked Letitia. ‘If so, you may be treated leniently by the courts.’
‘What is a crime passionnel?’
The professor answered. ‘It’s French, m’dear. Means bumping off a person you’ve been rogering or want to roger. Usually because they’ve started rogering someone else. The frog judiciary recognize that when one’s glands are overexcited, then one’s common sense flies out of the window and one is likely to act somewhat erratically.’
I said, ‘Oh no, it was nothing like that at all. There was never any question of … rogering.’
‘Oh dear,’ said Letitia. ‘In that case I shouldn’t give myself up; should you, Gerard?’
‘Wife! Are you asking me to put myself in the place of a murderer? Have you forgotten that my profession is partly the investigation of murder?’
‘I’m only asking you to empathize with the poor girl.’
‘I do, I do. But you really mustn’t ask for my advice on what I’d do or where I’d go should I have committed a murder.’
‘But I didn’t…’
‘I expect I’d nip up to Scotland and plead sanctuary in my old friend Buffy’s hilltop castle. He’s got twenty thousand acres of low-lying ground for a garden … and a moat. Could see the boys in blue approaching for three miles. Simple, pull up the drawbridge, pretend we’ve all gone to the shops and sit in front of the library fire with a Trollope and a glass of Scotland’s finest. There, Letitia, are you satisfied? That’s what I would do. Good old Buffy, decent old stick.’
‘Husband, shut your gob. Coventry doesn’t want to hear about that dreadful snuff-stained old soak you call a friend. She’s anxio
us to be off, aren’t you, dear?’
I shook their hands. Then they both kissed me and I opened the door and left. The professor came out onto the steps to wave me goodbye, but Letitia, being naked, stayed inside the house and waved through the letter-box.
The late autumn sun was showing off like mad, getting in people’s eyes, dazzling drivers, illuminating dirty windows. I sweated inside the leopard-skin coat. The trees in Russell Square gardens flamed red in the buoyant air as I threw two pound-coins onto the patch of grass where I’d lain, underneath Leslie, the man with the missing teeth.
There was a little café in the corner of the gardens. A sprinkling of chairs and tables were set outside. It didn’t seem like England, more like how I imagined a Saturday abroad to be. I ordered a cup of coffee and a toasted teacake, then remembered I’d only got a fifty-pound note.
‘I don’t suppose you can change … ?’ I held the large note out.
‘You suppose right, lady. This ain’t the tea-room at the Ritz. I ain’t catering for the moneyed classes ‘ere.’
I went back to the area where I’d tossed the two pound-coins, found them, picked one up, left the other, went back to the café and paid the man behind the counter.
He laughed. ‘Christ, lady, you got a good nose for money, ain’t you? … Just leaps from the grass into your hands.’
It felt very strange to be sitting in the sunlight, smoking a cigarette and drinking my coffee, with nowhere to go and nothing to do. No husband hurrying me to drink up and move on. No whining children rocking the table and spilling their Coca Cola. I think the strange feeling was happiness.
Whenever Gerald Fox’s dead face swam into my mind, I pushed it out.
It was only ten-thirty in the morning, so the whole day stretched ahead. My agenda was that of a rich woman: buy shoes, get ears pierced, find a hotel room. But meanwhile, how lovely to sit under the trees and look around. I left when the sun went in. The man behind the counter shouted: ‘See you, your ladyship,’ as I fastened my fur coat around me and left the gardens.