‘Say I’m sorry,’ Thaddeus requests, watching her leave the room, her back held so straight that she might only yesterday have had her last deportment lesson. His own mother did not hold herself so well when she aged. Wrapped in her damson-coloured dressing-gown, shabby at the edges, she was restless sometimes in this room, happier when she walked about the garden with the husband she lived her life for. In winter they sat and watched the rain or played chess by the fire, their two bent heads reflected in the looking-glass that stretches the length of the mantelpiece. Reflected still are the spines of books on old teak shelves, The Essays of Elia and Eliana Lamb embossed and tooled, F. L. Hall’s History of the Indian Empire, the Reverend W R. Trace’s Portrait of a Clergyman, being Anecdotes and Reminiscences, Daudier’s Fly Fishing, Great Scenes from the Courts, A Century of Horror Tales. All of Charlotte, Anne and Emily Brontë is there, all of George Eliot and the Waverley novels, Sir Percy Keane’s Diary of an Edwardian Hell-Raiser, all of Thackeray and Dickens. The romantic works of Mrs. Audrey Stone and Marietta Kay Templeton are there in their cheaper editions, and Murder in Mock Street and The Mystery of the Milestone and The Casebook of Philippe Plurot.
‘We must not sell the things,’ his mother said the day his father died, when Thaddeus was thirteen. They never did. Paintings and furniture continued to be a reminder of the Davenants’ heyday: the drawing-room landscapes in tarnished frames, the Egyptian rugs on the wide boards of the floor, the rosewood sofa-table, the white marble of the mantelpiece, Georgian coins. Rigby, Charing Cross, the engraving on the carriage clock beneath a glass dome recorded. He would go on being sent away to school, his mother said the day his father died: arrangements had been made for that. Not selling the things, going away to school: all of it was part of something, and the penury must be borne.
‘We’ve talked it over,’ comes Mrs. Iveson’s voice from the hall, and then there is the opening of the hall door, a rasping sound that is particular to it. When his mother died Father Rzadiewicz stayed overnight, and pointed about him at the possessions that had been kept and said that really it was ridiculous not to sell them. Thaddeus agreed, but still did not do so. Instead, as his mother had, he sold the apples and the gooseberries, the pears and plums. He cultivated parsley beds and went in for other herbs, for asparagus and new potatoes, Belle de Fontenay. It was then that he teased back to health the vine in the conservatory. For all his years alone, other people did not come to the house, as they hadn’t before: solitude was what he knew and did not fear. ‘Yet you have married me in order to be rescued from it,’ Letitia pointed out, preferring to believe that.
‘Well, that’s that, poor little thing.’ Returning, Mrs. Iveson interrupts these flickers of memory. ‘Down in the mouth, I’m afraid.’
‘You’re really sure about all this?’
Thaddeus doesn’t ever address his mother-in-law by name, ‘Mrs. Iveson’ seeming unnecessarily formal, and there has never been an invitation to be more casual in this regard. The question he has asked her is academic; he knows she’s sure, and wonders how long it will be before he becomes used to this face across the breakfast table, beauty’s remnants in lips that were a rosebud once, in fragile bones beneath well-tended skin, eyes the feature that has not aged. Again he is unnerved, filled with apprehension, and for a single instant he feels that none of this is real, that Letitia has not come back yet on her bicycle, that all that’s happening is the nonsense of a dream.
‘Yes, I am sure.’
He doesn’t want to nod and yet he does, signifying gratitude and finality. Death is mysterious, he finds himself reflecting, in ordering so calmly what life can not. It is a graveyard’s gift that a grandmother’s rights are sturdier than they were before. Privately rejected when she made it, Letitia’s last request will be honoured now: Mrs. Ferry will be visited and money paid to her.
3
‘A mansion,’ Pettie reports. ‘He’s left with this kid in a mansion.’
Albert’s ovoid countenance remains impassive. He nods an acknowledgement in the Soft Rock Café. Pettie says:
‘Garages and that.’
As she speaks, the house she has visited becomes vivid for her, as in a photograph: red-brick façade and tall brick chimneys, slender and rounded, spikily decorated; blue paintwork setting off the windows, a blue front door, tarmacadam turn-around, grass and roses and stone steps. The dado of stairway lincrusta — in shiny green — appears, and blue blinds half drawn, softening the sunlight in the dining-room she could see into while she waited in the hall.
There was scarlet-striped wallpaper in the room where the interview took place. There were armchairs in the hall, and a glass door that led to a conservatory full of flowers.
‘You get the job, Pettie?’ Albert’s question is not accompanied by the inflection that indicates interrogation. His voice is toneless, as it invariably is when he is worried, and this morning he is worried about his friend. He smiles to cheer her up, a huge upset in the curve of his features, like an eggshell exploding. Then all expression goes and his eyes are dead again.
Bleakly, Pettie shakes her head. She fishes in a pocket of her short denim skirt for a cigarette, finds two remaining in a crushed packet of Silk Cut and lights one. ‘I thought I got it, but I didn’t.’
She was dragged all the way out there, but in the end they didn’t offer her the job. Quincunx House the place is called, and when Albert asks how they’re spelling that she tells him. She tells him which train station she got out at, and how there was a bus journey after that and how she walked up through a village street, not that you could call it a village, with only a shop and a public house and a petrol pump that wasn’t working. The other girls were on the train and the bus, three in all. Two of them went into the graveyard by the church, putting in time, and when they finished there she went in herself because she was more than an hour too soon. A grave was new, flowers on the dry earth, but she didn’t guess then whose it was. She sat on a railing going round another grave; she read the inscriptions on the stones, the sun beating down on her. Then she went out into the country, along a lane. Miles away, in Essex.
‘They didn’t take to you, Pettie?’
‘They didn’t say.’
It could be that they noticed the certificate, but if they did they didn’t comment. Years ago, when Pettie first decided to go for child-minding, she borrowed Cassie May’s certificate and had it photocopied in a Kall-Kwik with a tab over Cassie May’s name. When the tab was peeled off Cassie May didn’t know a thing, not even that the certificate had been borrowed.
‘No reason why they wouldn’t take to you, Pettie.’
‘They didn’t give no reason.’
Pettie is small, just into her twenties but seeming younger, seeming to be hardly passed out of her childhood. Her shoulders and elbows are sharp, a boniness that’s noticeable in her hands and feet. Her face is sharpish also, economically made, without waste. Beneath a narrow forehead trimmed with a sandy fringe, pale-lashed eyes are steady behind their wire-rimmed spectacles, and sometimes taken to be hostile. She could do with a fuller mouth, Pettie considers, and an ounce or two more flesh about the chin, but generally she is content enough: when she makes herself up she considers she can challenge other girls of her age and stature.
‘You upset then, Pettie?’
‘Yeah.’
She used the typewriter at the Dowlers’ to type the reference, scrawlingM. J. Dowler at the bottom, the back-hand slope of Mrs. Dowler’s signature reproduced as near’s no matter. Not that she knew how to type but she did the best she could; she had to because she knew the Dowlers wouldn’t be able to compose a reference, not being the kind of people who know what a reference is. She wasn’t asked for one when she started there, which was just as well because the one she got out of the Fennertys wasn’t much good, and the people before that refused to give her one because of the necklace business.
‘Thaddeus Davenant,’ Pettie says, lingering on the syllables. ‘The name of that E
ssex man.’
He gave the full name when she rang up. ‘Georgina’s father,’ he added, and didn’t say then there was no mother. Nor did he mention the grandmother who was hanging about, who did the talking at the interview.
‘I’m sorry you’re upset, Pettie.’ Obscuring the brand name of a lager, Albert’s chunky hands encircle one of the glass mugs in which tea or coffee is served in the Soft Rock Café. He smiles again, lending emphasis to this expression of sympathy, and when there’s no response he doesn’t take offence. He looks around the Soft Rock Café, at its pine tabletops charred here and there where a cigarette has slipped from the edge of an ashtray, its grey metal chairs and unlit juke-box, the two similar posters of a bull and matador, two fruit machines. The red hair of the café’s proprietor falls in greasy strands on to the newspaper he is hunched over at the counter. A middle-aged couple do not converse at a table by the door. The deaf and dumb man who spends the greater part of each morning in the café sits where he always sits, with a view of the street.
‘You going after another job then, Pettie?’
She’s finished with child-minding, Pettie says. She’s finished with kids making a bedlam — flour and raisins all over the floor the minute your back’s turned, Shredded Wheat floating in the sink, the bedclothes set on fire one time. The morning she typed the reference, Brendan Dowler ate the best part of a packet of Atora. The first day at the Fennertys’, Dean put the cat in the fridge. When she walked into the toilet the time Dowler hadn’t locked the door he said be my guest.
The house in Essex was a different kind of set-up altogether, you could tell that even before you got there; you could tell from the advertisement, you could tell from the man’s voice when she rang up. Living in, the job was, and the minder’s room had a carpet and an armchair, dried flowers in a vase, a television. Because of how the man sounded on the phone, giving her directions, saying they were looking forward to seeing her, she was so sure she’d get the job she didn’t turn up at the Dowlers’ the next morning. Passed on in the Soft Rock Cafe, this information causes Albert some dismay.
‘Don’t do to go behind on the rent, Pettie.’
A couple of months ago it was Albert who got Pettie the room in Mrs. Biddle’s house, across the landing from his own. Mrs. Biddle wasn’t keen — asserting, in fact, that Pettie frightened her — but in the end she agreed, and Albert feels responsible for the arrangement. Sometimes Pettie is headstrong, not realizing what the consequences of her actions may be. If she doesn’t pay the rent she’ll have to move on, no way she won’t. A tearaway, Mrs. Biddle calls her.
‘You think about going back to explain to the Dowlers, Pettie? A Saturday today, they wouldn’t be at work.’
The time he persuaded her to go back to the Fennertys she said she’d been in a hospital with suspected appendicitis. He was against her saying that, but she argued that she couldn’t just tell them she was fed up. Not that any of it mattered: they didn’t even listen when she said about the hospital, glad to have anyone for the kids, no matter who.
‘Mrs. Biddle can’t be short on the rent, Pettie. I’m only thinking about that.’
‘No way she’ll be short.’
‘I’m only mentioning it, Pettie.’
Stockily made, two years older than his friend, Albert is a dapper presence in the Soft Rock Café, the three buttons of his brown jacket buttoned, as are the buttons of its matching waistcoat. These clothes have been acquired in a charity shop; his tie and the shirt into which it is tightly knotted were the property of Mrs. Biddle’s late husband. He wears a watch he sometimes draws attention to, a Zenith, given to him by a couple whose windows he used to clean.
‘You hear that name before?’ Pettie is saying. ‘Thaddeus?’
Albert shakes his head, on which darkish hair is tidily combed and parted. After a moment he says he thinks he has heard the name, but can’t remember where. It could have been Miss Rapp in the old days; it could have been a person he was talking to on the street. Fearful of falsehood, as Albert is, he wouldn’t like to say.
‘The wife was in a photograph.’
And Pettie describes this because it kept catching her eye: a photograph in a silvery frame on a round table with paperweights on it. There were coloured flowers in the glass of the paperweights, and you could tell the photograph was of Thaddeus Davenant’s dead wife because it was given pride of place. A road accident was all that was said, which was why a minder for the kid was necessary.
There’s too much speed on them motorways, Pettie.’
Pettie says speed wasn’t mentioned. They didn’t give a reason, any more than they did for not taking her on, except the grandmother saying they’d changed their minds. The same three girls were waiting for the bus back, and got on to the train. An hour and a half they had to wait in all, longer than the journey itself.
‘It’s my opinion the old woman done the damage. If he hadn’t all but given me the job over the phone I’d not have walked out on the Dowlers, would I? “I’m very sorry,” that woman said. You could tell she was lying her face off.’
Albert doesn’t comment. Pettie hasn’t got the job and that’s the end of it. There’s no percentage in harping on the house she went all that way out to, or the people she met there. In an effort to change the subject he tells of what he read in a magazine he bought for Mrs. Biddle, an account of two interesting coincidences. How a man, having thrown away his mother’s purse after he rifled it as a child, saw it forty-one years later in the window of a pawnshop he happened to be passing in another town. How two sisters, separated at birth, identified one another in middle age on a Dutch bus when they were on holiday to see the tulips. Other such cases were recorded in the magazine, and always there was significance in the coincidence, as if what happened was something meant. The worry that had nagged at the man who found his mother’s purse was lifted from him when at last he was able to return it, placing in it coins to the value of those he had taken. The sisters who met on the Dutch bus set up house together.
‘Oh, yes?’ Pettie acknowledges this. She shouldn’t have worn the yellow jacket. They’d have seen the state of the covered buttons, they’d have seen the state of the lining when she took it off. The windows that reached down to the floor were open all the time they were in the room because of the warmth, and a big brown dog came padding in and nosed up for a cuddle. The old woman was the grandmother on the wife’s side. She had make-up on but you could hardly see it. Soon’s she opened her mouth you could tell she was against you.
‘She went out of the room to send off the last girl. The only time I was alone with him.’
Her skirt had ridden up a bit because she was sitting on the edge of the sofa, not wanting to be too casual. She pulled it down when she heard the old woman’s footsteps coming back, but that wasn’t for a few minutes. She smiled at him and he talked to her, even though he was engaged with the dog, patting it. ‘He saw me looking at the photo. He nodded, like he could understand what I was thinking.’
Albert listens while the face in the photograph is described. There was fair hair coiled, a dress without a pattern on it, collar turned up. ‘Half a smile she had on. Like she was shy.’
‘I understand, Pettie.’
‘The drawing-room they called the room. He’d have been working in the garden, the clothes he was in.’
When she first walked into the room and he held his hand out for her to shake she noticed it was grimed. ‘Georgina’s father,’ he said, the same way he’d said it on the phone, only this time he didn’t give his full name as well. When she was alone with him she kept thinking Thaddeus suited him. The sound of it suited him, his eyes and his face. Thin as a blade he was.
‘I said it was sad, his wife and that. I said it, even though the woman was back in the room. “I’ll show you the nursery,” she said, but I knew it was no good. No chance, I knew. You could tell with that woman.’
Sensing the depth of his friend’s disappointment, and fearing it, Albert??
?s unease increases. He knows Pettie well. He knows what Mrs. Biddle means when she calls her a tearaway. Another person mightn’t use the word, but he knows what’s in their landlady’s mind.
‘He stayed where he was when the grandmother brought me up to the nursery.’
A couple were hanging about on the landing, the man in dark clothes who had opened the front door and a woman with a blue apron over clothes that were dark-coloured too. The man was up a stepladder, doing something to the top of the curtains at a window. The woman was standing with pins in her mouth.
‘Well, here’s Georgina,’ the grandmother said in the nursery, and the baby looked up from a picture painted on the floorboards, blue-eyed, not like her father. The picture was of hills and trees, flowers outside a cottage, sheep on a slope. Lanes wound through ploughed fields and fields of corn or something like it. A railway line was as straight as a die and there were houses and a church, and the Ring o’ Bells Inn. Cattle ate hay. There were pigs and chickens in a yard. Horses were looking over a fence.
Albert listens to this description, but none of it means much to him. The streets are what he knows. Once a year there was an outing from the Morning Star home, where he and Pettie were brought up and from which, eventually, they ran away. You saw fields then, all the way to a seaside place where there were slot machines on the promenade, where they all walked in a bunch along the sands and clambered over the shingle, a wind blowing nearly always. Joe Minching drove them in the minibus that was hired for the day from Fulcrum Street Transport. Joe Minching threw his sandwiches to the seagulls, saying he was used to better grub than that.