The Miracle Inspector (9 page)

Hopefully by the time Delilah went round to Joanna Jones’s house, he’d be in Cornwall with Angela. Otherwise this joke was going to go sour very soon.

‘No, I see.’ Jenkins tried to look very secretive and trustworthy, which had the opposite effect of suggesting that the next time Lucas saw him, Jenkins might very well be wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with
Guess who found a miracle?
and a pointy-fingered hand which would allow Jenkins to stand next to Lucas and align himself so the finger was pointing towards him.

‘You travel all over, with the cats?’ Lucas asked him.

‘Yes.’

‘You go outside London?’

‘Very occasionally.’

‘You got a special pass?’

Jenkins understood that this was the payback for the info about how to get ahead in the Ministry by prostituting his wife on camera. But still, a pass outside of London was a big deal. He was going to make Lucas work for it.

‘See, I got to get outside London because of this project. I need a pass. I was thinking of asking Jones.’

‘He can’t help you.’

‘No.’

‘You got to fill in endless forms.’

‘I know. And I don’t want to do that – it’s a secret, see. Listen, Jenkins. I’m serious. Don’t tell anyone. I shouldn’t even tell you but, well, I trust you. You know?’

‘It is a miracle, isn’t it?’

He was silent. Jenkins took his silence for agreement. He was so excited, perhaps he would also take to wearing a comedy
Guess who found a miracle
hat with the T-shirt. He could get them printed in bulk and distributed to relatives. Delilah could wear one while she was doing her sex show with Joanna Jones.

‘I can’t believe it,’ Jenkins said. He clearly did believe it.

‘If I had found a miracle – and I’m not saying I have – it would take a long time to investigate and I’d need to get around outside of London to do it properly.’

‘I’ve got passes for most of the territories in England, Scotland and Wales.’

‘Pretty much everywhere, then?’

‘Not Cornwall, Liverpool or Leeds.’

‘Oh. Well, never mind. You got Devon?’

‘Yes.’

Devon was next to Cornwall and getting close was better than nothing. They could do the rest alone. He’d bribe the border guards. He’d figure something out.

Through Jenkins’s open door, Lucas saw Jones leave his office and walk down the corridor away from them. Lucas spoke quietly. ‘You been to Wales, Jenkins? Is it nice?’

‘Yeah, I got family there. You know, people think this cats job isn’t so good but I’m one of the few people gets to see my family, since the partition.’

‘How about Delilah’s family? You ever get to Ireland?’

‘No. Matter of fact, she was trapped over here when the fences went up. Makes her pretty sad.’

‘Come on,’ Lucas said. ‘I want to show you something.’

He led Jenkins into Jones’s office. He felt sorry for Jenkins, with his family in Wales, his sad wife with her big frying pan hands and her donkey face. He wanted to warn Jenkins against the sick porno ring in the Ministry that, even though it was entirely of his own invention, disgusted him.

The office was empty. Jenkins was nervous. They went to the computer. Lucas nudged the keyboard, found the video player on the desktop. JJ. There she was. A lovely shot. She was in the kitchen, talking to the older woman with the jam who Lucas had met the other day. Jenkins was gobsmacked. He still had the camera equipment in his hands. Perhaps the fact that the older woman was sensible and unsexual reminded Jenkins of Delilah. He clearly suspected that here was a woman who had been sent to Jones’s house for some hanky-panky. Lucas watched as the horror and shame of it hit Jenkins; he couldn’t help looking, though he was repelled by it.

They left the office. Jenkins was silent. Lucas could tell by the way he was carrying it that Jenkins didn’t want the camera equipment any more. They went to Jenkins’s office and Jenkins looked out some passes for Lucas. Drinking Ribena in Jones’s office was never going to have the same thrill for Jenkins, if he ever did it again.

On Jenkins’s desk there was a photo of a woman who didn’t look like a donkey. She had dark hair and high cheekbones and a smiling face. Delilah, presumably. Lucas looked at the photo and then looked at Jenkins. Jenkins saw him looking. Lucas smiled at Jenkins. Jenkins looked away.

So now he had passes which would take him as far as Devon, at least. He was sorry he’d had fun at Jenkins’s expense. He’d demeaned both of them by it. Perhaps he could make amends by being kind to someone; time to go and have another look at Christina, the little miracle child.

He went down to the lobby in the lift, went to his car, got into it and drove away from the Ministry. As he drove he wondered, if he had secret cameras installed at home now, what would they show? He had no idea what Angela did all day. When he asked her, she just said ‘nothing much’ or ‘I made a cake’ or ‘I made a fish stew.’ Perhaps, if she was lonely, he ought to introduce her to Delilah Jenkins, although not in a ‘home video’ way. The woman had a nice face. She and Angela could be friends. But he was going to take Angela to Cornwall. It would be just as well if she didn’t make any new friends, he didn’t want her confiding in anyone and ruining their plans. Besides, Jenkins would never stand for it. He’d think there were cameras installed at the house and Delilah was showing her arse to the men at the Ministry without any chance of a promotion in it for him.

He was almost at Maureen and Christina’s house when he decided, on a whim, to go home and surprise Angela and see for himself what she did all day when he wasn’t there. Why hadn’t he ever thought of doing that before? Why didn’t he go home and have lunch with her every day? Because he had work to do. But still.

He parked in one of those chichi little villagey streets that used to make London such a nice place to live, and he went into a flower shop. There was a time when flower shops, cake shops, beauticians and so on were places where you’d be guaranteed to find a woman serving. Now it was always a man. It was good, in one way, because there was no unemployment. But it might have been nice to go into a flower shop and see a woman in one of those nylon aprons putting together a bouquet. Today, there would be a gay man behind the counter – he was so sure if it, he wouldn’t even bother taking a bet with himself – and the bouquet would be done with good taste and the man would be called Kevin, and he’d try to steer the choice of bouquet towards something tasteful, when actually Lucas wanted something scented and gorgeous and ludicrously over the top to take home for Angela.

The bell jangled as he went into the shop. The man behind the counter was wearing one of those green cotton aprons that men barbecue in. He wasn’t especially gay or experimental in attitude or appearance, which was slightly disappointing. The man made up an extraordinary bouquet of towering spikes of scented and non-scented English flowers: phlox, snapdragons, foxgloves, delphiniums, roses. Lucas felt emotional when he looked at it, which surprised him. Was it the Englishness of it when England, as such, didn’t exist any more? Was it only because he was buying a gift for Angela and it reminded him how much he loved her?

‘What’s your name?’ he asked the man in the green apron. He still had a soppy expression on his face from admiring the flowers. The man looked at him as if he was the gay one.

‘Arthur.’

‘Those flowers are lovely, Arthur. Very English, like your name. Like seasides and countrysides.’

‘Long time since either of us have seen the sea, I’ll bet.’

‘You can go down to the sand on the Thames at low tide, near London Bridge. Have you seen them do it?’

The trouble with asking questions of strangers was that they were often wary of you, especially if you drew up outside their place of work in a Ministry car with tinted windows. But Arthur responded openly, if perhaps a little too respectfully: ‘Yes. Not the same though, is it, sir? That saltiness in the air as you lick your ice cream. The sound of the waves, kids laughing, sand castles, going home to put on after-sun cream.’ He didn’t say whether he’d seen it on a documentary on TV or whether he remembered these things from his childhood. He was older than Lucas, perhaps he remembered it.

Lucas took the flowers and the scent almost overwhelmed him. He could have stood there and cried, looking at the man, Arthur, with his English name, his not-especially gay attitude to floristry and his distant memories of a better life, when people had thought nothing of going to the seaside and buying ice creams for their kids.

‘Lucky lady,’ said Arthur. ‘Your wife, is it? Or girlfriend?’

‘My wife. She’s pregnant.’

‘Oh, lovely. When?’

Did Arthur want to know when she had got pregnant? Was that the sort of thing that people asked when you announced the news? How intrusive and awful. He gawped at Arthur, horrified. Should he say ‘a month ago’ or would that be considered too early to go about telling strangers?

‘When’s it due?’ prompted Arthur.

‘Oh. Um…’

‘Do you know what it is yet?’ Arthur said, as if determined to get through the allocated list of questions florists were supposed to ask prospective fathers, irrespective of whether Lucas answered them or not. ‘Or is it a surprise?’

‘A girl.’

Arthur ducked down behind the counter and came up with a very small pink teddy bear, which he waved in the air as if Lucas was a child and they were playing a game. With two hands needed to hold the bouquet, Lucas couldn’t take hold of the toy. The only solution was for Arthur, with a tailor’s efficiency, to tuck the pink teddy into one of Lucas’s pockets.

Arthur held the door open so Lucas could go to his car.

‘Goodbye, Arthur.’

Arthur looked at Lucas as if he knew that he’d been lying about everything. ‘Goodbye, sir,’ he said.

Lucas drove home with the bouquet buckled into the passenger seat next to him, that’s how large it was. It was a bouquet a man would only buy for his wife if he was guilty about something. Lucas had never bought Angela anything so extravagant before, even for her birthday.

He wished he would go home and she’d tell him that she was pregnant. He’d produce the flowers and say, ‘I know.’ He’d know because of the way they’d made love the particular day it had happened, the way she’d looked at him, something about her body and the way it had seemed softer in the last few days.

He’d give her the flowers and it would be the start of something. They’d thought that getting married was the start but this was the real thing; the three of them, another little life to care about. They’d sit down and make their plans to go to Cornwall. He’d be especially solicitous of her. He’d make her a cup of tea, get her a hot water bottle, rub her back. He’d run her a bath. He’d pull some of the petals from the roses in the bouquet and strew them in the bath for her (would he? Or would that make her cross because it would spoil the bouquet? He wasn’t sure how to proceed on that one.) She’d take off all her clothes and sit in the bath with her knees up and lots of bubbles the way they had it in films, and she’d talk to him. Then he’d make dinner and she’d fiddle about in the kitchen, singing. She’d come and stand behind him and nuzzle him and he’d feel her heartbeat against his back, and maybe the baby’s heartbeat. Then he realised he was imagining himself in one of those green barbecuing aprons that Arthur had been wearing. They didn’t even have an apron like that. Arthur was intruding into his perfectly legitimate and lovely baby announcement fantasy. It made him cross. It put him in a slightly bad mood as he drew up outside the house and went in.

Angela wasn’t there. He called out her name. He expected to find her singing or in the bath or whatever women did when the men weren’t at home. The house was silent, not even any music playing. He cocked his head and listened. He put the bouquet on the table, very carefully, so the stems and flowers wouldn’t be damaged.

He touched the kettle and it was cold. He went upstairs.