‘Sorry?’
‘I had it in mind to give my name first thing. Otherwise you’d be confused.’
‘It doesn’t matter in the least.’
‘I wasn’t wearing my uniform that day, as a matter of fact. I wasn’t in the Army even. To tell you the truth, I wouldn’t be in the Army if it wasn’t for that day.’
She smiles at him. She says they owe the baby’s life to his quick thinking, knowing what to do.
‘No sweat, Mrs. Iveson.’
The rain has soaked through a place in his jacket and through his trousers at the knees. He feels the dampness, colder now than a moment ago. When he gets back he’ll iron the uniform first thing in case there’s damage done. It was definitely Miss Rapp who was on about the Man Who Sees, some different magazine because Hello! and Chic weren’t going then.
‘She wasn’t kicking up a row, nothing like that. Only gurgling a bit. Many’s the time we had a baby left there. In the coke shed. By the doors. Many’s the time we’d hear the screeching first thing, wake you up it would. Newborn, maybe a day, maybe a week. “What’ll we call it?” Mrs. Hoates would say.’
The other man comes back with water for the tea. He lifts the teapot lid and pours some in. He checks the food, making sure there’s enough. He still doesn’t speak. They take no notice of him.
Mrs. Hoates would say what’ll we call it, but every time she’d pick the name herself. You’d make a suggestion and she’d say lovely, but then she’d go for something else. He explains that to them, thinking he’d better, in case of misleading. vWhat’s this?’ She smiles at him. ‘What’s this about, Albert?’
‘The Morning Star, Mrs. Iveson.’
‘I think it’s where he found Georgina,’ Thaddeus Davenant says. ‘A derelict children’s home, they said.’
Albert stirs two lumps of sugar into a fresh cup of tea. The biscuits are mixed creams and chocolate-coated. He takes one that has raspberry jam in with the cream. Another thing is, it was Miss Rapp who gave the information about the shamrock, how the slave boy banished the toads and serpents, bringing in the harmless weed instead.
‘Spaxton Street,’ he says. ‘Round the Tipp Street corner is where the brown yard doors are. You know the neighbourhood, sir? Fulcrum Street?’
‘I’m afraid I don’t.’
‘You were a child in the home yourself, Albert?’
He says he was. He gives some other names because they’re interested. He tells the story of Joey Ells, the Sunday when it snowed. Crippled, he says, and she asks about the tank, and he explains that Joey Ells thought there were steps where there weren’t. An iron ladder there used to be, only it gave way under rust.
‘What a terrible thing!’
You can see they both think it was terrible, and he tells how Miss Rapp walked away from the Morning Star the next day. He mentions Joe Minching and Mrs. Cavey. Mrs. Cavey did the cooking, he explains. The milkman sometimes stopped to play football in the yard, clattering down his crate of bottles as a goalpost.
‘Your home?’ she wants to know. ‘You still think of it as home, Albert?’
‘I have a room with Mrs. Biddle these days. Appian Terrace. You know Appian Terrace, sir?’
‘No, I don’t think I do.’
He says where Appian Terrace is and how he came to get the room there. He says that Mrs. Biddle is bed-bound, how he’s worried about the teapot because the stuff is unravelling off the handle, how she could have a fall. He puts down Cat Scat because a cat comes that’s a nuisance to her. But it isn’t any good.
‘Mrs. Biddle has her memories,’ he says. ‘Theatrical.’
He can see the photograph Pettie was on about, the plain dress with the collar up a bit, the woman who’s in the grave they haven’t erected a stone for. There was an accident once on the April outing, a red car squeezed shapeless, hub-caps and metal on the road, the radio still playing, no chance. That comes into Albert’s mind, but he doesn’t mention it. Too much speed, Joe Minching said, and they got out of the minibus at a Services and watched the speed, everything going by below them on the motorway, reds and greens and blues. ‘More blues,’ Ram said, and Leeroy argued.
He’s offered the biscuits again and takes another, the chocolate heart. He tells them about the Underground because she asks if he has work. He remembers Pettie saying you could hardly see the make-up on her face and he can hardly see it today either. Mrs. Biddle puts lipstick on first thing, then her powder.
‘Little Mister’s with the rent boys,’ he says, and he watches a sadness coming into her face. He likes her clothes and the way she stands so straight when she’s on her feet, and the softness in her eyes. He liked her the minute she held her hand out to him, smiling then too, giving her name. He tells about Little Mister left on the step and how he got to be called that. He tells them he heard from Merle one time that Mr. and Mrs. Hoates were down Portsmouth way now.
‘Running an old folks’ residential.’
She asks about Merle, and he says she’s not around these days, not since she went up Wharfdale. Nor Bev, he says.
Darkened by the rainfall, the drawing-room is invaded by other people and another place, by the faces of children, black and white and Indian; by dank downstairs passages, Cardinal polish on concrete floors, a mangle forgotten in a corner; by window-panes painted white, bare stairway treads, rust marks on mattresses. A handbell rings, there is the rush of footsteps.
They listen because there is a debt they can never repay, neither by the money that has been given already nor by their attention, yet their attention continues. From time to time they do not easily follow what they’re being told, bewildered by new names when they occur, the order of events a muddle. Easing ten minutes ago, the rain comes heavily again.
‘Her party dress she always wore on a Sunday. The others wouldn’t bother.’
His friend would put on Mrs. Hoates’s perfume. As soon as she saw Mrs. Hoates setting off on a Sunday afternoon to visit her relation who wasn’t well she would try out a different perfume. Nail-varnish she tried out once, and another time a pair of earrings. She’d do her hair in Mrs. Hoates’s mirror and then she’d go downstairs. There’d be the uncles’ coats hanging on the hallstand pegs, the uncle with the birthmark waiting, never impatient, reading any leaflets that were lying about the hall.
‘Uncles?’
‘ “Don’t take no presents,” I’d always say, but they’d take them and then they’d try to get away. You get the picture, sir?’ vYes, we do.’
Removing a roller-blind in the hall in order to adjust the tension, Maidment gets the picture also. A hell is the picture Mrs. Iveson gets, doors closed and silence, the hiding after they tried to get away. In her party dress, only one of them never minded. Pertly, she smiled at her Sunday uncle, scented and made-up for him.
‘So you went back to that place all this time later and found Georgina?’
‘Nothing doing in the yard, like, so I go in by the bottom window. Not a sound, Mrs. Iveson. Nothing there, is what I says at first.’
Thaddeus wishes he didn’t have to hear. He tries not to, apprehensive about what may be said next. He tries not to see the bleak, empty house to which his child was taken, to be abandoned for a reason that is unknown.
‘I come to the bathroom, not that you’d know it with the bath gone and the basin taken down. Mrs. Hoates’s bathroom that was, Hoates’s too. First thing I notice is the baby in a corner. I had the torch. With the windows boarded it’s dark enough in there. Not that there hasn’t been squatters, not that they hasn’t taken a board or two down. Only you need the torch in case.’
‘Of course.’ Uneasy too, Mrs. Iveson nods.
‘No place for a baby, and I give it in at Tipp Street. I just give in Georgina Belle. I didn’t tell a lie, sir.’
Thaddeus watches the shaking of the tidy head, slowly, emphatically, back and forth, back and forth, as rhythmic as a pendulum. It’s not a lie when you don’t say. It’s not a lie when you just give something in
.
‘Of course it isn’t,’ Mrs. Iveson reassures, not understanding.
Five minutes later Zenobia learns that this boy knew what he was looking for when he went to that bathroom. Well known to him and given to crime, the bespectacled girl had come to the house where he lived and had knocked on the kitchen window. She was a girl who’d vandalized a man’s possessions once, who walked out on employers whenever she felt like it. Calm as you please, she told the boy she’d stolen a baby, and told him where she’d put it.
‘She says would I hand it in. Like I done, Mrs. Iveson.’
They don’t say anything. Albert watches the baby trying to join her fingers together, holding them up in front of her face. She pulls them apart again. She’s gurgling and smiling, trying to laugh, only she can’t laugh properly, the age she is.
‘She put Georgina Belle down in the Morning Star on account of everything going wrong.’
‘What went wrong?’ They both say that, one after the other. She says it twice.
‘Pettie’s plans, like.’ Albert shakes his head. ‘Pettie didn’t know what to do.’
‘Why did she take Georgina?’ She says Pettie was a girl they didn’t know. She came to the house by chance, she says. ‘Was she hoping to get money? Did she just want a baby?’
‘Mrs. Biddle says Pettie’s a tearaway, Mrs. Iveson.’
‘You should have told all this to the police.’
‘Pettie took a shine to Mr. Davenant, like. Pettie takes a shine to the older man, sir.’
He explains that a man showed Pettie vinyls for the floor, different colour runs and weights, what was suitable for a kitchen, what was not. Eric he was called, she saw it on his suit lapel. He lived out Wimbledon way; he took his holidays for the tennis, always got good weather. A year ago it was; every day she went on about it in the Soft Rock. And there was a fisherman once, and another time a man who took her back to his room and she was frightened when he got up to things. The older man, Albert says again, in case there is confusion. vShe took Georgina because Georgina is Mr. Davenant’s child? Is that it? Did she tell you what she intended?’
‘Pettie was in a state, Mrs. Iveson.’ She wouldn’t have left the Dowlers if she hadn’t got into a state, and he tells them about going round to the Dowlers and Mrs. Dowler shouting down the stairs. ‘I never seen her in such a state as this time, Mrs. Iveson, and the next thing is she takes the baby. Pettie never done that before. Like I say, I’m in the kitchen and there’s this rapping on the panes. Four times she’s come round only I’m on the night work and then I have a sleep.’
‘You’ve told us all that.’
‘Soon’s I flashed the torch in the bathroom I saw the butterfly. Pettie’d make butterflies out of a cigarette wrapping. Then again the packet and the butts she left. Pettie’d always break a butt open. In the Soft Rock, anywhere. I flashed the torch and saw the bread and that. There could be rats, the bread’d bring rats. I was remarking that to myself when I picked up Georgina Belle.’
‘Her name’s Georgina.’ There is a whiteness in her face, in her cheeks and around her eyes. A moment ago she kept looking at him, but now the only movement’s a frown coming and going in her forehead. Her voice has changed, a crossness in it now, and the dog pokes up its head, then flops it down again. The baby has gone to sleep.
‘One p.m. it was when I seen her; three-quarters of a minute past. I looked at the Zenith in case they’d ask me.
He gave the time as three-quarters of a minute past one when they did, and they asked how he knew and he said. vHow about a tea?’ Captain Evans offered him when the police left, the first time he knew Captain Evans, not even knowing his name then. All the time the butterfly and the cigarette butts and the empty cigarette packet were in his pocket because there hadn’t been a chance to drop them into a bin.
‘Not that Pettie’d care,’ he says. ‘The way she was then, she couldn’t care less.’
‘That girl took a baby to a house where her crying couldn’t be heard. She walked away and left her.’
Everything is different in the room now. The sympathy’s gone, there are no smiles. It would be all right, he thought when they said they were grateful, and when she asked if he took sugar and put the lumps in with a tongs. A clock strikes quietly in the hall, and then she says he must go immediately to the police, that he must give them Pettie’s name.
‘It was Pettie wore the party dress, Mrs. Iveson.’
She takes no notice, nor does he. He thought they would. He thinks maybe they didn’t hear; but he doesn’t say it again. She says does he realize this could happen to someone else?
‘Other people will suffer as we have.’
‘Pettie never took babies before, Mrs. Iveson. She didn’t do no harm to Georgina Belle.’
She would have married the floors man. His hands were well kept, tapering fingers, she said, the tips light on the vinyl samples. She hung about the tennis when the time for the next championships came. She’d have given him a family, she said, if that was what he wanted. She’d have cooked and mended for him.
‘The baby’s back safe, Mrs. Iveson.’
The damp has spread, through to his shoulders and his back. There’s a mark on the rug at his feet where water has dripped from the ends of his trousers, or from the jacket cuffs, he doesn’t know which. She was in a state when she lost track of that Eric, same’s she was when she went round to that uncle’s house. The face went with the name, she said in the Soft Rock that Saturday morning, the pale eyes, no wasted flesh. Another time in the Soft Rock she put the same thing to the red-haired proprietor, not that she ever liked him. ‘You hear that name?’ she said. ‘Thaddeus?’ And winding Pettie up, the red-haired man said Thaddeus was the name of the inventor of the bikini.
‘Why’d she do it?’ Thaddeus Davenant is standing by the windows and he speaks with his back turned, still looking out at the rain. His voice isn’t raised like hers is, but low and ordinary, as if he’s not fussed, but Albert can tell he is. ‘Why’d she do it?’ he asks. vLike I say, sir — ‘
‘Why’d she take Georgina?’
‘On account she was her own worst enemy, Mr. Davenant. I never knew anyone more her own worst enemy.’
The baby whimpers in her sleep, a single whimper and then a sigh. She whimpered when he picked her up from the floor; she whimpered a bit on the way downstairs, maybe not liking the dark although he had the torch going. When she wasn’t much older than that, the mongol girl cried every time she woke up and it was dark. Merle walked in her sleep, Leeroy used to shout out.
‘Why’d she take Georgina?’ He turns round from the window to ask that again. ‘Why?’
‘On account it was no good, coming back here for the ring, sir.’
He didn’t tell Mrs. Biddle about the ring. He didn’t say about the baby. A lie is a lie if it has intention was the way Miss Rapp put it. No way just saying nothing is a lie. No way it: could be.
‘Why was it no good?’ vLike you wouldn’t have nothing to do with her, sir. She took a shine to you, Mr. Davenant -’ vYes, we know.’
‘Then again, Pettie thought she’d get the minding job.’
‘She wasn’t suitable.’ vShe thought you was offering it to her on the phone, sir. The time she called up she thought it was going to be all right from what you said, sir. Then again, the ten pounds wasn’t right.’
‘What ten pounds?’
‘Ten eighty the cost of the fares is.’
Again nothing is said. He watches the man Pettie had a passion for turn his back again, the rain streaming on the glass of the windows. The old lady gets up and crosses to where the baby’s still asleep, and then sits down in a different armchair, as still and straight as before. vIf the train fare I gave her wasn’t enough she should have said so.’ vLike I say, the baby’s back, Mrs. Iveson -’ vWhy have you come here?’ Thaddeus Davenant is standing by him now, his voice still quiet. ‘What do you want with us?’
‘I come to tell you about Pettie, sir. So’s
you wouldn’t think too badly of her, sir.’ vToo badly?’ she says. ‘What on earth do you mean?’
‘Pettie was improving herself, Mrs. Iveson. All the time at the Morning Star, all the time she was at the Dowlers’. She could have come down the platforms, she could have got clearing-up in the parks a few months back. She went in for the baby-minding because it was a better type of work.’ Pettie was a law unto herself, he explains. ‘I’d worry about Pettie, Mrs. Iveson. I’d worry in the Soft Rock, times she didn’t turn up.’ He explains about Wharfdale, and Pettie taking lifts in a lorry. ‘Pettie come out here the first time and she was on about it in the café, the picture there was on the floor, the dog coming in through them windows. I said to leave it.’
‘Your friend stole a sleeping baby and left it where it could have been eaten by rats.’
‘I got there quickly as I could, Mrs. Iveson. Soon’s ever Pettie told me. Mrs. Biddle’d make the tea, she’d trip over with that teapot, but I had to take the chance. I didn’t do another thing soon’s Pettie told me. I said it to Captain Evans, but he reckoned Mrs. Biddle’d be all right. I had to wait there for the police, the problem was.’ vShe put flowers on my daughter’s grave. Why’d she do that? Why’d she come looking for a ring that didn’t exist? We don’t understand what all this is about. We don’t understand why she took against us when all we ever did was not to give her enough money for a train fare.’ vPettie seen the photograph when she come out here, Mrs. Iveson. She seen Mr. Davenant grieving, she said that in the Soft Rock. Pettie took a shine to Mr. Davenant, Mrs. Iveson — ‘
‘Oh, for God’s sake, stop saying that!’ She is furious now, her voice raised, two specks of red in her cheeks.
‘It’s upsetting for us.’ Thaddeus Davenant is still quiet, the same as all the time he has been, hardly a change from when he was talking about the planes. ‘We’re grateful to you, but all this is too much for us.’ vAll Pettie was doing, sir, was putting it to you the baby could be taken. Like Mrs. Iveson was sitting out in the sun and the next thing she drops off. Pettie had it worked out, like Mrs. Iveson would pack her bags soon’s the baby went missing. You get that, sir?’