“I have to go back to work,” she said.
“This is more important than work.”
“I have to work, I need the money,” she said.
“I can get enough for two of us,” he said. He bent down and kissed the top of her head. She was reminded of her father taking two half crowns from his trouser pocket on a Saturday morning.
She said, “I bought some new lingerie this morning. I’m wearing it now.”
“What’s it like?” he said.
“It’s red, and it’s satin, not real satin.”
He pulled her off the pavement and into the doorway of a boarded-up shop. The dog stood sentinel on the slightly raised marble doorstep as Christopher pushed her against the door and opened the buttons of her overcoat. She pushed him away.
“Not here, Chris.” She struggled against him.
But his hand had already found a way through the layers of clothes to the satiny smoothness next to her skin.
“It feels lovely,” he said, and he pulled away slightly so that he could see as well as feel the red camisole she was wearing.
♦
Gregory stopped outside a Car Phone Warehouse and looked across the High Street to where his wife and the tall man were kissing in a shop doorway, in daylight, in the middle of town. He took a small disposable camera out of his pocket and took three photographs of them. He needed concrete evidence: he didn’t altogether trust his own eyes. This morning when he had woken up with Angela beside him he’d sought desperately to find an explanation for the scene he’d witnessed in the garden last night. Was the tall man a long-lost brother, reunited with the sister he’d never met? It was just possible, but did long-lost brothers crush their lips into the mouths of their newly found sisters? Gregory knew they did not. Still he’d given her something to think about this morning. He’d punished her by telling her about those other women.
Angela’s face was pressed against Christopher’s scratchy tweed overcoat. She noticed that he had already replaced the buttons he had torn off the night before. Angela turned her head and read ‘30,000 sq metres of Retail Space To Let’ which was written on an estate agent’s window. The town is dying, she thought.
♦
Over the road Gregory took one more photograph before moving away, and because there were twenty-four more possible photographs left on the film, he continued to snap away at the city centre: the clock tower, the McDonald’s restaurant; the market stalls and the grinning stallholders; and the concrete Market Cross and its wino regulars with their squashed noses and red eyes. He was anxious to get the film developed that same day. He needed proof other than his own eyes that his wife was seeing another man. The last photograph he took was of his own shop. He posed his black assistant, Lynda, in front of a tower of white bath towels, for the contrast.
♦
Christopher took Angela to Pasta’s, an Italian restaurant in an area called St Kevin’s Square, a new development of shops and up-market eating places. Genuine old buildings had been knocked down so that fake old buildings could be erected in their place. There was a bandstand in the middle of a small square where the Salvation Army played at Christmas and buskers licensed by the Council played throughout the rest of the year.
Christopher tied the dog to the bandstand under the apprehensive eye of a young man in a clown’s costume who was about to juggle three clubs whilst riding on a unicycle. When they had been seated at a table by the window by an authentic-sounding Italian waiter, Christopher said, “I hope you still love Italian food.”
Angela laughed nervously and said, “;This is mad, Chris. I’ve only got ten minutes before I have to be back at work.” He handed her the huge menu and said, “You’re not going back to work this afternoon. You’re coming with me to find out where our Catherine is.”
“I’m here.” Catherine sat down next to Angela and cricked her neck around to read the menu.
“Have the garlic bread, Mum; then I can have some.”
Angela smiled at Catherine and couldn’t resist adjusting the collar of her white shirt, smoothing it down over her navy blue uniform cardigan. Catherine playfully tapped her mother’s hand away.
“Mum, I’m not a baby.”
Angela said, “I’ll have some garlic bread, but I can’t manage anything else, Chris.”
Catherine was laughing at the young clown’s ham-fisted attempts to manage the unicycle and the clubs.
“What a saddo!” she said, then her own laughing face became sad as the clown fell off the unicycle yet again.
“He’s not very good, is he?” said Angela.
“He’s probably been on one of those poxy government training schemes for clowns,” said Christopher. Angela and Catherine laughed, and Christopher said, “You think I’m joking, Angie. I’m not. We’ll soon have more trained clowns in this country than trained engineers.”
Angela laughed again and held Catherine’s hand under the table. Her daughter’s hand felt exquisitely soft. Is this what it’s like to have a family? she wondered to herself. She looked at Catherine’s flawless complexion and thought to herself how lucky she was to be the mother of such a beautiful child. It wasn’t only her looks she admired: she had won every sporting and academic prize open to her. Angela was so proud of her daughter.
She felt Catherine pull her hand away and when she turned the girl had gone, without saying goodbye.
∨ Ghost Children ∧
Thirty-Eight
They walked in pouring rain to the railway station, where a long line of taxis waited for passengers under a glass-fibre roof. The driver of the first taxi in line was playing cards on the front of his cab with another driver. When Christopher approached him and gave him the address of the nursing home, he frowned and addressed his fellow drivers in Hindi. They conferred in Hindi for some moments while Christopher and Angela waited. Then, the first taxi driver said in English, “It will be a lot of money. Leamington Spa is many miles.”
Christopher said, “That’s all right, I’ve got a lot of money.”
The driver then said, “Please, the dog is not allowed to sit on any seat. This taxi is a London cab, only three weeks old.”
Christopher ordered the dog to lie on the floor with such ferocity that for the first few miles of the journey it lay as still as a stone dog, not daring to move.
Christopher and Angela held hands on the back seat and watched in silence as the town gave way to rainy suburbs and then to flooded countryside: they passed swollen brown rivers and ditches and once, to the driver’s excitement, they were forced to take a diversion to avoid a flooded road under a railway bridge. The taxi seemed to be driving under water. A tractor carrying bales of hay made its way slowly towards them, the tyres half-submerged in the flooded field.
Angela tried not to watch the meter which changed with horrific frequency from pence to pounds. When it reached thirty pounds she whispered, “Chris, the meter.”
He squeezed her hand and said, “I’ve got money today, and this is how I want to spend it.”
They passed through a small village, where mothers waited under umbrellas outside an infants school.
The nursing home had hardly changed at all. The elm trees lining the drive had gone and been replaced by deadened green conifers. As the taxi crunched along the gravel drive Angela looked up at the small, dark-paned window of the room she had spent three days in before emerging to live her life as a childless woman. She knew that this journey was wasted. They would never find where Catherine was laid to rest. It was all so very long ago. She said none of this to Christopher, who was leaning forward £agerly on his seat, like a child on a trip to the seaside waiting for his first glimpse of the distant sea.
Christopher paid the driver, then persuaded him to wait for them, arguing that he was unlikely to get a fare for the return journey. The driver looked at the forbidding façade of the nursing home and the misty fields surrounding it and agreed to wait.
The rain had stopped. They walked the dog around the grounds and wait
ed while it squatted at the side of a hedge. Angela was reluctant to go inside the building. She still remembered the sounds and the smells that had invaded and disturbed her thoughts for years after her two visits here. She still remembered the pain. They stopped and looked at the red-brick walls, the turreted roofs and the chimney stacks. Smoke escaped from one chimney pot. The taxi driver agreed that the dog could sleep on the floor of the cab. Then Christopher looked at his watch and said, “It’s time we went in.”
They walked across the staff carpark. In the area marked ‘Doctors’ Cars Only’ stood two cars, a pale blue Bentley and a dark green Jaguar XJS. Christopher stroked them as he passed by and said, “I see the murderers are at their work.”
They watched a mini-bus draw up to the steps by the porticoed main entrance. The driver, a young man in a dark business suit jumped out and went to the back of the van and opened the doors and pulled down a set of collapsible steps. Four women got out, each holding a small overnight bag. The driver held out his hand to help them down the steps. Each woman touched his hand briefly to aid her balance. The driver led them into the entrance hall and left them at a counter, like a hotel reception desk. Christopher and Angela followed, and waited their turn. The woman behind the counter wore a medical type uniform and a badge on her breast which said, ‘Mrs Forsythia Oxenbury—Elms Nursing Home’.
Each woman gave her surname in a quiet voice: Cart-wright, Taylor, Smith, Leystone, then stood back. Angela imagined the tiny floating things each woman carried in her womb. When the women had been processed by Mrs Forsythia Oxenbury and taken to their beds, Christopher told Mrs Oxenbury that he had an appointment to meet the owner of the nursing home, Mr Porteous De Lavery. This was news to Angela, but nothing he did surprised her now.
They waited for ten minutes, before being shown by Mrs Oxenbury into what looked like a private lounge. A coal fire burned in a grate. Porteous De Lavery was a small, polished man, whose greying hair was carefully arranged in strands across his head. He got up from the sofa and came towards them, smiling.
“Mr Moore?” he said. His voice was light and pleasant.
“And this is Mrs Lowood,” said Christopher. She saw De Lavery’s glance of dismissal. A fat uninteresting woman, it said, though well enough dressed.
“I didn’t quite understand what you wanted to see me about when you rang…please, do sit down.”
Christopher and Angela sat side by side on the chintz-covered sofa, and De Lavery sat in a leather armchair next to the fire. He crossed his small legs and turned towards them still smiling. Christopher said, “Seventeen years ago our daughter was born here.”
De Lavery frowned and uncrossed his legs. “Can I stop you there Mr Moore? This is not, and never was, a maternity hospital.”
“I know that,” said Christopher, “but, as I said, our daughter, Catherine, was born here on June 20th, 1979 at—what time was it, Angie?”
“Twenty to five in the afternoon,” she said quietly.
“She lived for about twenty minutes,” said Christopher.
“Then there should have been a birth certificate and a death certificate issued,” said Mr De Lavery. “Was there?”
Angela shook her head.
“I’m not bothered about the paperwork,” said Christopher, “but I would like to know where our daughter is.”
“I don’t know what you mean by is, Mr Moore. Are you talking in the religious sense?”
Christopher laughed. “Would I come to you if I wanted a discussion about heaven and hell? I’ve got shelves full of theology at home. Just now I’m half-way through St Thomas Aquinas.” Mr De Lavery was not a reader and was baffled by this turn in the conversation.
Angela said, “Is she buried somewhere?”
Mr De Lavery got up and stood with his back against the fire. “No,” he said. “We ran out of consecrated ground in 1976.”
“So, what did you do with our little one, Mr De Lavery?” said Christopher.
“The…foetuses are incinerated, Mr Moore.”
“Whereabouts?”
“At the medical incinerator. The Waterloo Road Crematorium.”
“They’re just thrown in, are they, in a bag?”
Mr De Lavery turned and kicked the coals in the grate. Red sparks flew up the chimney. “Yes, they are just thrown in, in a bag. What would you expect us to do with them?”
Christopher took the question seriously. He thought for a moment, then turned to Angela and said, “Did you think about it, Angie, at the time?”
“No,” she said. “I just wanted rid of her, Chris.”
Mr De Lavery smiled gratefully at Angela, and went to the door and opened it. And as there was no more to be said, they thanked him and allowed him to show them out.
He watched until their taxi had turned the corner at the bottom of the drive, then went back to his room and warmed himself by the glowing coals of the fire. He should have remembered, he thought, to tell them that the incinerator was blessed annually by certified churchmen of various denominations. It might have given them a little comfort.
Later, as he made a short cut to his private apartment in a wing of the house, he passed by the operating suite. He stopped at the door of the recovery room and looked in. Women lay on their sides on high trolleys. Each had a stainless-steel bowl next to her head in which to vomit. Some were still sleeping, but of those awake, all were crying. It was only the effect of the anaesthetic, he knew that, but he found it particularly disconcerting today. He made a mental note to speak to the senior theatre nurse and ask that in future the door to the recovery room be kept closed.
∨ Ghost Children ∧
Thirty-Nine
Gregory could hardly wait for the hour it took to develop the photographs to be over. He filled it by going back to the shop and arranging his Christmas lines. Putting boxed sets of tablecloths and napkins across a counter in a fan-like arrangement and sticking notices saying ‘Gift Idea’ on more or less everything. In the napery section he found the cardboard box that contained the Lowood’s Linens Christmas decorations. He took out last year’s nativity advent calendar, which was stilt in good condition, and opened the cardboard flap marked with the number one. A star, improbably yellow and surrounded by many dazzling beams of light, was pictured inside. Gregory drawing-pinned the calendar above the cash till, next to a yellowing list of numbers of counterfeit £20 notes, supplied to him by the police. Between customers Lynda and he together with Betty, whom he’d inherited from his father and who helped him out at busy times, decorated the little shop, criss-crossing the ceiling with paper garlands and surrounding the shop window with twinkling fairy lights. When they had finished Gregory stood outside on the pavement and looked inside. “It could be Santa’s grotto,” he said to Betty.
“Except there’s not a bleddy queue to get in,” she said.
Gregory wished he could ask Betty to retire permanently. Her cackling laugh and loose dentures lowered the tone. He only kept her on out of respect for his father.
He put his overcoat, hat and gloves on and walked through the market to the store to collect the photographs he’d taken earlier in the day.
Ken was in the same store looking for pregnancy testing kits. He had never seen one. He only knew of their existence from reading the problem pages of the Daily Mirror. He prowled around the shelves of women’s things, baffled by the sheer number of goods on display. Then, by a process of elimination, by understanding that the creams and gunk that they put on their faces and hair were separated from their medical stuff, he tracked down what he wanted. It was called ‘Predictor’. He took his reading glasses from the top pocket of his jacket and put them on and read the back of the ‘Predictor’ packet. It promised completely accurate results. He would have to persuade Tamara to give him some of her wee somehow, but he would think how to do that on the journey home. As he made his way to the cash desk he saw the Estee Lauder soap, talc and bath-cube gift set he bought for Cath every Christmas. He bent and sniffed at the dis
play and Cath’s smell overwhelmed him for a moment, but he straightened his back and joined the queue and waited to pay.
Gregory was upstairs killing time by looking at the educational toys. He had already presented his ticket at the photography department counter, and had been told by a Chinese girl assistant to return in five minutes. He moved along the shelves until he came to a section labelled, ‘pocket-money toys’. He picked up a kaleidoscope and held it to his eye, and was enchanted by the lustrous colours and multiplicity of patterns it contained. Gregory was impressed that it took only a slight turn of the metal tube for the luminous interior to regenerate itself into an entirely different multi-faceted world.
He took a wire basket from the stack next to the escalator and put the kaleidoscope inside. Why shouldn’t he buy toys for himself, he thought. He didn’t remember having many as a boy, and the few he did have, the train set and the lead soldiers, he was always having to tidy away. He bought himself two glove puppets, a monkey with a face that made him laugh, and a dog with a lolling left tongue. He bought a Scuba Diver Action Man, a Barbie Doll in a wedding dress and Ken her boyfriend in top hat and tails. Once started, he couldn’t stop. He bought a battery-driven robot, a baby doll that wet herself, and a Hornby model train. Two metres of track, a railway station and, inside a bubble pack, a station-master, a guard and two porters. The woman at the toy department checkout asked him how many children he had. “Three,” he said. “Two boys and a girl.” Then, burdened by two carrier bags and the bulk and length of the train set, he collected the envelope of photographs from the Chinese girl.
He sat down in the pedestrian precinct, on a wooden bench outside the shop, settled his parcels and bags around him and opened the envelope. He sorted through them quickly, until he came to the three he’d taken first. His wife was in each photograph, as were the tall man and the dog. They were in the doorway of the shop, but, bafflingly, in each photograph there was another person. A beautiful dark-haired adolescent girl, wearing the uniform of one of the city’s premier girls’ schools. Gregory knew there had been nobody else in the doorway when he took the three photographs of his wife and the tall man. There had obviously been a mistake made during the processing. Somehow an image of a schoolgirl with a dazzling smile had been superimposed on to his own photographs.