‘Quiet,’ Pettie says. ‘I never knew a place as quiet.’
It was quiet when she walked up to the front door and in the hall, in the room where the interview was and on the stairs, on the landing even though those two people were there. Albert listens while more details of the nursery are given, but in his mind’s eye he sees the playroom at the Morning Star, where there were toys also — train trucks with a wheel gone, limbless dolls, jigsaws with half the pieces missing, anything that other children had finished with. Old armchair cushions were drawn close to the stove that smelt of burning paraffin in winter. Doorless lockers filled one wall. It was here that Marji Laye told how her father and mother were ice-rink skating stars who had put her in a home for the time being, better than carting her about with them all over the world, depriving her of an education. Sylvie talked about parties, someone playing the melodeon, everyone happy until there was a fire and she was the only one left. Bev said her father was in the House of Lords and knew the Queen. But Joe Minching said Sylvie’s mother and sisters were on the game and always had been, that Marji Laye was found wandering on a tip, that Bev came in a plastic bag. From the playroom windows you could see Joe Minching’s coke shed, and the tall yard doors with the dustbins in a row beside them, straggles of barbed wire trailing round the manhole of the underground tank that used to conserve rainwater in the old days, its missing cover replaced by planks weighed down with concrete blocks.
‘Georgina Belle,’ Pettie says. ‘When I saw her I kept thinking I’d call her Georgina Belle. I’d get the job and I’d call her that. We’d go downstairs and the grandmother would have changed her mind on the way. The way he smiled when he was patting the dog, you could see he’s keen.’
‘Keen, Pettie?’
‘Keen I’d come there is all I mean.’
Albert doesn’t respond to that. There’s an aeroplane passing over and what he’d like to do is go to see what line it belongs to, to wait for it to come closer and catch the emblem. But this is not the morning for that, and instead he makes another effort at distraction.
‘You give that bugle in, Pettie?’
A week ago, when they had left the Soft Rock Café and were walking about, Pettie found a bugle in a supermarket trolley that someone had abandoned in a doorway. She tried to blow it but no sound came, and Albert wasn’t successful either. A special skill, a man going by said.
‘Yeah, I give it in.’
‘Salvation Army property.’
‘I give it in at the hostel.’
She took it to a man who buys stuff for car-boot sales, who generally accepts anything she brings him. He said at first the bugle was worthless. In the end he gave her forty pence for it.
‘Salvation Army do a good job, Pettie.’
The grandmother took her into the bed-sitting room they’d got ready for the minder. ‘Come next door, Nanny,’ she said. Why’d the woman bring her in there if they didn’t want her? Why’d she bother? Why’d she even bring her upstairs? Why’d she call her that? ‘Course she wouldn’t change her mind. All the time she was against her.
‘I asked at the hostel,’ Albert says. ‘I said I couldn’t play an instrument, but the man said no problem if I wanted to join the Army.’
The couple were moving away from the landing when they passed again, the man carrying the stepladder. ‘Wait here a minute, would you?’ the grandmother said in the hall. A clock in the panelling ticked and there were voices from behind the closed door, but she couldn’t hear what was being said. The voices went on and on, and then the old woman came out. She shook her head. Twice she said she was sorry.
‘Best forgotten, Pettie.’
‘She give me a ten-pound note for the fare. Ten pounds eighty it cost me.’
‘You like I go round and put it to the Dowlers for you?’ Another smile lights Albert’s eyes, upsetting the composure of his face, crinkling his cheeks and forehead. ‘You like I say you made a mistake about the job?’
‘The Dowlers are the pits.’
Eight till eight, the arrangement at the Dowlers’ was, but more often than not neither parent turned up till ten, with never a penny offered for the extra hours. ‘Give them something about six,’ Mrs. Dowler would say, and there was always a fuss because they didn’t like what was in the few tins that were regularly replaced on the kitchen shelves. Dowler fixes people’s drains for them, driving about in a van with Dowler Drains 3-Star Service on it, a coarse black moustache sprawled all over the lower part of his face. Overweight and pasty-skinned, Mrs. Dowler in her traffic-warden’s uniform harangues her children whenever she’s in their company, shouting at them to get on, shouting at them to be quiet, telling them to wash themselves, not noticing when they don’t. ‘They had the NSPCC man round,’ the woman next door told Pettie once, and Pettie realized then that she was only there because the NSPCC man had ordered Mrs. Dowler to get a daytime minder.
‘You lend me a few pounds, Albert?’
He counts the money out in small change. He makes stacks of the different coins on the table and watches Pettie scoop them into her purse. Two girls have come into the café and are playing the fruit machines. The lights of the antiquated juke-box have come on. The deaf and dumb man is still in the window, the middle-aged couple still don’t speak. The red-haired proprietor turns over a page of his newspaper.
‘Fancy the dinosaurs, Pettie?’
He smiles, but when she shakes her head the light goes from his eyes and his features close in disappointment. It was her idea to go to see the dinosaurs in the first place. A million years old, those bones, she said.
‘Fancy going out to the Morning Star?’
When they were still there the Morning Star home was condemned as unfit for communal habitation. The inspectors who came round investigated the load-bearing walls, took up floorboards and registered on their meters the extent of damp and rot. A year after Albert and Pettie left they went back to look. Site for Sale after Demolition, a notice said. They managed to get in, and still occasionally return to wander about the passages and rooms, Albert showing the way with his torch.
‘No, not the Morning Star.’ Pettie shakes her head again. ‘Not today.’
Albert drinks the last of his milky tea, cold now in the glass mug. She won’t be comforted. Sometimes it’s as though she doesn’t want to be. Her high-heeled shoes are scuffed, her white T-shirt has traces of reddish dye from some other garment on it. He knows from experience that she’s in the dumps.
‘What you going to do, Pettie?’
‘I got to sort myself. I got to go wandering.’
‘Down the shops, Pettie? I need a battery myself.’
‘I got to be on my own today.’
She stands up, telling him he should rest because of his night work. He needs to sleep, she reminds him, everyone needs sleep. Albert works in Underground stations, erasing graffiti when the trains aren’t running.
‘Yeah, sure,’ he says, because it’s what she wants. The girls playing the fruit machines move from one to the other, not saying anything, pressing in coins and hoping for more to come out, which sometimes happens.
‘Yeah, sure,’ Albert says again.
She knows he’s worried, about the job, about the rent, maybe even because she has feelings for that man. Not being the full ticket, he worries easily: about cyclists in the traffic, window-cleaners on a building, a policeman’s horse one time because it was foaming at the teeth. He worried when they found the bugle, he worried when Birdie Sparrow found a coin on the street outside the Morning Star, making her give it in because it could be valuable and she’d be accused. He said not to take them when the uncles came with their presents on a Sunday, but everyone did. He was the oldest, the tallest although he wasn’t tall. The first time he helped Marti Spinks to run off in the night they caught her when it was light, but she never said it was he who had shown her how. The next time she got away, with Merle and Bev. When Pettie’s own turn came he said he was coming too because she had no one t
o go with. ‘Best not on your own,’ he said, and there wasn’t a sound when he reached in the dark for the keys on the kitchen hook, nor when he turned them in the locks and eased the back door open. He didn’t flash his torch until they’d passed through the play yard and were half-way down the alley, the long way round to Spaxton Street but better for not being seen, he said. ‘Crazy’s a bunch of balloons,’ Joe Minching used to say, but nobody else said Albert was crazy, only that he wasn’t the same as the usual run of people.
‘You don’t go messing with the Dowlers, Albert. You leave them be.’
‘I only wanted to put it to them.’
‘You leave them be. Cheers, Albert.’
‘Take care now, out there on your own.’
‘Yeah, sure.’
As she always does, Pettie buys the cheapest ticket at the Tube station in order to get past the barrier. Two youths on the train keep glancing in her direction. They’re the kind who don’t pull their legs back when you stand up, obliging you to walk around them: Pettie has experienced that on this line before. Ogling her, one of them holds his hands out, palms facing each other, indicating a length, as a man boasting of a caught fish might. But Pettie knows this has nothing to do with fish. The other youth sniggers.
She looks away. The uncle with the birthmark took off her glasses the first time they were on their own. ‘Let’s have a look at you,’ he said and put the glasses on the windowsill. ’Oh, who’s a beauty now?’ he said, and when he whispered that he liked her best a warmth spread through her that came back, again and again, whenever he said it.
The youths get off at Bethnal Green. One of them says something but she doesn’t hear it, not wanting to. ‘Prim little lady,’ the uncle who liked her said. ‘Who’s my prim little princess?’ He told her what a cheroot was because he had a packet in his pocket. She was prim and she still is; being prim is what she wants. ’Never so much as a morsel taken from the knife,’ Miss Rapp read out from the Politely Yours column. ’Return the fork to the plate between mouthfuls.’ She practised that, and Miss Rapp was pleased.
Aldgate goes by, and Bank; Pettie closes her eyes. Wild summer flowers are in bloom, and it could be the picture on the floor but it isn’t because she’s in the picture herself. She’s in the lane with a buggy, far beyond the few houses by the shop and the petrol pump, far beyond the church and the graveyard and the gateless pillars of the house. She’s walking out into the countryside, and fields stretch to the horizon, with the wild flowers in the hedges, a plain brick farmhouse in the distance. ‘Look, a rabbit,’ she whispers, and Georgina Belle waves at the rabbit from the buggy, and you can smell honey in the honeysuckle.
At Oxford Circus she goes with the crowd, jostled on the pavement. A gang of girls gnaw chicken bones and drink from cans, laughing and shouting at one another, strung out, in everyone’s way. Beggars poke out their hands from doorways, tourists dawdle, litter is thrown down. Street vendors sell perfume and watches and mechanical toys. Men in coloured shorts unwrap summer lollipops. Women expose reddened thighs. ‘Thaddeus Davenant,’ Pettie says aloud.
He ran his fingers along the pale wood that edged the back of the sofa, standing there for a moment before she sat down, the grandmother already occupying a chair. He was solemn, not smiling when she held out the reference and the certificate. Still mourning his loss, he naturally wouldn’t have smiles to spare. Something about him reminds her of the man who talked to her in Ikon Floor Coverings, who explained why he recommended 0.35 wearing thickness in a vinyl. Thaddeus Davenant’s clothes were nothing like the grey suit and clean white shirt, Eric on the badge in the lapel, but there was something about his quiet manner that reminded her. More than once she went back to Ikon Floor Coverings, until the time he wasn’t there, gone on to another store, they didn’t know where. Not that she wants to think about the floor-coverings man now, nor the Sunday uncle either, since they let her down in the end. ‘Oh, yes, a lovely walk.’ Pettie says instead, and Thaddeus Davenant takes his tiny daughter from her arms. ‘Georgina Belle,’ he says.
Carefully, Albert attaches the Spookee sticker to his wall. He has all eight of the Spookee stickers now, collected from Mrs. Biddle’s cornflakes’ packets. He stands back a foot or two to inspect the arrangement, his empty eyes engaged in turn with each of the grey, watery creatures, one with a red tongue lolling out, another gnashing devilish teeth. He moves further away, surveying the stickers from the door in order to see what the decoration looks like just in case Mrs. Biddle ever glances in, not that she can manage the stairs, but you never know.
Albert looks after Mrs. Biddle in return for this room. Years ago, when he and Pettie ran away from the Morning Star, they slept rough, at first in an abandoned seed nursery and after that in cars if they could get into them, or in sheds left unlocked on the allotments that stretched for half a mile behind a depository for wrecked buses. In time Albert heard about the night work on the Underground; he slept by day, on benches or in waiting-rooms. Then, because he happened to be passing, he helped a man with elephantiasis to cross a street and the following morning he noticed the man again and helped him again, this time carrying for him a pair of trousers he was taking to a dry cleaner’s.
Albert waited on the pavement outside the cleaner’s and when the man emerged he fell into step with him. He felt compassion for the man’s suffering — the great bloated body, the moisture of sweat on his forehead and his cheeks, the difficulty he experienced in gripping with his fingers. Albert did not say this but simply walked beside the man, restraining his own natural motion so that it matched the slow drag of the man’s. They did not speak much because speech was difficult for the man while he was engaged in the effort of movement, but when they reached a small supermarket — the Late-and-Early KP Minimarket — he thanked Albert for his assistance and his company, and turned to enter the place. He had time to spare, Albert said, and followed him in.
He carried the wire basket around the shelves, filling it as he was directed. The man rested, leaning against the shelves where tins of soup and vegetables were stacked, calling out to Albert the remaining items on his list. A family of Indians ran the minimarket, two young men and their parents, the mother at the till. When the shopping was complete and paid for, Albert took the carrier-bags that contained it and the man did not demur, although when they were on the street again he might have been left standing there. Later, when he and Albert knew one another better, the man mentioned that. It would not have been an unusual occurrence nowadays for a young person to befriend an afflicted man in order to steal from him when the moment was ripe. ‘But though I look no more than sawdust in a skin,’ the man with elephantiasis stated, ‘I can spot an honest face.’
On the morning of the shopping expedition he had led the way to his council accommodation and had invited Albert in when they reached it. He was tired, resting again while Albert, at his instruction, buttered cream crackers and prepared two cups of Bovril. He noticed that the man was not in the habit of washing the dishes he ate from and so, every morning after this one, Albert called in to attend to the chore, to make the Bovril and at one o’clock to open a tin of beans, which they shared on toast, with a banana afterwards. Still unable to afford a place to sleep, his work on the Underground being ill-paid, Albert was grateful for the comfort of the man’s rooms, for the armchair that became the one he always sat in, for the warmth and the food. But this convenience was not his motive. He did not seek to cultivate a relationship for profit: it had come naturally to him to assist the man across the street when he recognized signs of stress. It was natural, too, that he should have accompanied him to the Late-and-Early KP Minimarket and should have carried his purchases. Not much thought, certainly no cunning, inspired these actions. Elephantiasis Albert wrote down, having asked the man how he was spelling that. He liked the sound of the word; he liked the look of the letters when he wrote them.
One day, arriving as usual on a morning there was to be a visit to the minimarket, Albert was ta
ken aback when his ringing of the doorbell remained unanswered. A neighbour was attracted by his worry as he stood there, and then another neighbour. Something was wrong, they said, and there was excitement when drama was anticipated. A small crowd gathered, a police car arrived, and already the man who did not open his door was spoken of in the past tense. Forcible entry was made; inside, the television screen flickered, an American domestic comedy in progress. Slumped low in his outsize armchair, eyes still and glassy, the man Albert had looked after was no longer alive.
Five days later, at the funeral, Albert met Mrs. Biddle when she slipped on the crematorium steps, saving herself by sitting down. Albert was one of several mourners who helped her to her feet and it happened that it was his arm she particularly held on to. There was to be a drink or two in the house next door to the dead man’s, since neighbours rather than any family had been his associates for as long as people could remember. ‘You’ll come on in?’ Mrs. Biddle invited Albert, and afterwards she asked him to see her safely to where she lived herself, in Appian Terrace, two streets away from the council estate. As he did so, she told him that some days her arthritis was so bad she couldn’t move from her bed. She lived in fear of the social services, she confided, constantly apprehensive that they would poke their noses into her life, counsellors they called themselves. Mrs. Biddle Albert wrote down afterwards, having learnt that this was her name. He perceived a significance in the fact that she had been at the funeral, as previously he had perceived a significance in the fact that he was passing by when the man with elephantiasis wished to cross the street. He cleaned Mrs. Biddle’s house for her, did her shopping, and was instructed to give the social services a flea in the ear if they arrived on the doorstep. Years ago in the kitchen of the Morning Star home he had learnt how to fry — sausages, bacon, bread, an egg — and something fried was good for her, so Mrs. Biddle said. Sometimes, for a change, he brought her a take-away, a curry, chips with a burger, or chicken from the Kentucky. He made her hot drinks, Oval-tine or Horlicks, Ribena or Marmite or cocoa, whatever she was in the mood for. ‘I come in for a place,’ he passed on to Pettie. ‘There’s an old lady give me a room.’