A Clear Conscience (2 page)

H
elen
West, hot and sticky after a long day's work, sat and waited for the resentment to die. The only debate remaining was between the merits of gin against white wine, but even such decisions were academic in this house. There was no ice for gin; the fridge, panting like a dog in a desert, was capable of cooling, but not of making ice after all these years, so she held the wine while wandering from room to room, only four in all, excluding bathroom, suffering as she went the kind of discontent which felt like the rising damp she could detect in the bedroom. There were also a few summer beetles escaping garden predators in favour of a hostess who hoovered her basement floors as rarely as Miss West did. Helen thought, If I took down the wall between the dark hall and the living room, the place would be lighter, especially without a blind at the kitchen window. The legal mind which was her curse and her profession turned on complications such as planning permission, building regulations and other bureaucratic interference, before moving on to simpler ideas, such as new colour schemes, which required less fuss. Major alteration would only spawn a thousand minor problems; the hell with it.

The second glass of wine began to wane, and the mess from the kitchen floor was inside the rubbish bin when Bailey arrived. Her turn to cook. After three years of evasion she was finally learning how to overcome reluctance by buying only the best and simplest ingredients she could prepare inside ten minutes, but despite that, he usually came prepared for the eventuality of hunger, armed with a polythene bag, this time containing cheese, bread and a punnet of leaking strawberries. Usually she was grateful; sometimes irritated; today, simply neutral. The hug was perfunctory.

‘What
happened to that blind, then? Finally gave up?'

He was careful not to jeer. Most things in his place worked. He had one efficient floor on top of a warehouse, acquired before fashion knocked the prices out of sight and then knocked them down again. A distinguished flat, clean, clear and easy to keep. She liked it, never envied.

‘Drink in the garden?'

‘Fine.'

She hated him for knowing when to hold his tongue. Also for dusting an iron chair before sitting down, so that he would rise with the trousers of his dark grey summer suit clean enough for a man who did not like anyone to detect where he had been, while her cotton skirt would be striped with the dusty pattern of the seat. The garden always soothed her spirits, resembling, as it did, a warm, wet jungle in need of the kind of ferocious attention she could not apply indoors, but even while she was admiring the fresh sprung weeds, the controlled shambles of the kitchen remained disturbing.

‘I was thinking of knocking down the living-room wall,' she volunteered. ‘Or painting everything yellow. New curtains, new everything.'

He nodded wisely, sipped his lager. Two of these and he would feel the difference, but Bailey's diplomacy survived any amount of alcohol, while Helen simply became more talkative, more expansive with the wide-armed gestures which knocked things over.

‘Expensive plans,' he murmured. ‘You been taking bribes again?' She laughed, the bad mood lifting like a driven cloud.

‘Oh yes, of course. Chance would be a fine thing, wouldn't it? Imagine anyone paying a prosecutor to lose a case. They'd have to be mad to think there was any need. They lose themselves. Anyway, I was thinking, yellow all over. Let the light in.'

Ah, my generous girl, he thought, with the dark hair, and the dark flat and a liking for light. Bailey thought of his own current work, more darkness than light, plenty of jokes. A solicitor for the Crown and a senior police officer should never meet like this to discuss the decor of their lives. They had tried to keep their professional roles apart since their personal fortunes were inextricably mixed, half the week at her place, days off in between, half the week at his, in a muddled relationship, full of affection and argument, waiting for a better formula to occur to both of them at the same time. Bailey looked at Helen. If it ain't broke, don't fix.

‘Hmm,'
he said. ‘Yellow's a nice colour. Some yellows, anyway.' The woman he had interviewed this morning had worn a yellow blouse, blood from her broken nose mottling the front. The whole effect had resembled rhubarb and custard. He could not remember the colour of her skirt, only that it was held in her fists as she spoke and her bare arms were patterned with bruises. She loved the man, she said. She did not know why he did this to her. Bailey did not understand why. Even less did he want Helen to understand why.

Bailey loved Helen. Helen loved Bailey. It was as complicated as that. The thought of either of them raising a hand against the other was as alien as the planet Mars. Making a simple suggestion was dangerous enough. The cat, fresh from a roll in damp grass, rubbed against his calves, leaving a green stain which Helen noticed with satisfaction.

‘But,' he continued cautiously, ‘whether you paint it yellow or not, you'll always have a downstairs flat, therefore dark. Won't you? Why don't you just get in an odd job man and a spring cleaner? Then you'll be able to judge what else you really need.'

She pulled a face and stroked the cat with a bare foot. Bailey had often offered his services as Mr Fixit, carpenter, and, latterly, been rebuffed. He had been hurt by this, sensing in retrospect some tribute to the doctrine of the self-sufficient, liberated woman Helen would never quite be.

‘Are you suggesting my home is dirty?'

‘No, of course not. Only that you don't have time to clean it. Not clean isn't the same as dirty. The place gets a lick and a promise at least once a month. Why should you clean it anyway? Liberated women get help.'

‘From other, unliberated women, you mean?'

‘There's nothing wrong with domestic labour. You never mind helping someone else scrub their house, you just don't like doing your own. And if you were otherwise unemployed, you'd be glad of the going rate.'

‘A
pittance.'

‘Regular employment, a mutually beneficial arrangement and clean windows.'

She went inside for more wine and another lager for him. The cat followed, licked up the traces of butter on the kitchen floor with noisy enthusiasm. Bailey's nonchalant figure in the garden was slightly blurred by the dust.

He was not ornamental. He was infuriating but consistent. He was still slightly more defensive than she was. There had never been a courtship, there had just been an event. If it ain't broke, celebrate.

The wine gleamed light golden through a slightly smeared glass; the lager was deep amber. In the evening light after summer rain, the red walls of the living room resembled a fresh bruise. Like the inside of a velvet cave in winter, with the firelight covering all the cracks, it was dull and garish now.

She could make it corn coloured, all over. Get some good old-fashioned, middle-class chintz. Clean up the cat; forget the blind. Start all over again. Make herself and her home both elegant and safe.

C
ath's lampshade was yellow. A colour once parchment, a nice shade from a second-hand shop, faded even then, the fringes dark brown. A pig of a light for sewing, but Cath liked it. Not that she could sew here, anyway; she hadn't done such a thing for months. Perhaps it was years. She just sat by the lamp and waited.

The room around her bore traces of effort, now sustained on a less frequent basis. The walls were smudged from frequent cleaning and the patchy renewal of paint. She shuddered to think what was under there. Some of her blood, she supposed, a lot of her sweat and a bucket of tears.

Joe had offered to cook. Ready-made, frozen pancakes with something called chicken 'n' cheese in the middle, about as good for a man as they were for a small woman, accompanied by frozen peas, boiled to death, and the bread and butter which was better than the rest put together, her contribution. She sat listless although aware, ready to spring into an attitude of appreciation, her eyes tracking his progress in the kitchen, stage left, while her head was turned towards the TV screen. When the meal arrived, she knew she was supposed to murmur appreciation, ooh and ahh as if the man was a genius to find a plate; she was already rehearsing the lines, dreading what he might burn, unable to suggest a better method. So far, the mood augured well. Cath did not quite know the meaning of relaxation, but as far as she could, she allowed herself lethargy, listening to his movements and his voice as she slumped, forever guilty in the slumping.

‘Anyway,
this bloke says to me, Jack, you're a very fine chap. Know an ex-army chappie when I see one. Got discipline, knows how to mix a cocktail even better than I know how to get'em down, hah bloody hah. That's fine, I said, but the name is Joe, sir, not that it matters, much. And then, Cath, do you know what he did? Right in front of the bar at the Spoon, the bastard downs his drink in one and falls off his chair. Could not rouse the silly old sod. He was a picture, I tell you. Gets this look of surprise on his face, grinning all the time, trying to focus, just before he slides away. Laugh? I could have died.'

She tried to match the pitch of her own laughter to his shrill giggle, managed fairly well, encouraging him to continue. Surely, oh surely, there was a formula for managing her own tongue.

‘What did you give him, Joe, to make him fall down like that?' Joe worked in the kind of pub which catered to what he called the gentry. And their ladies, haw, haw, haw. And their bloody sons, baying at one another and sticking crisps in the ear of the next person, all good clean fun with Daddy picking up the bills when they were sick or went outside to kick cars on their well-heeled way to somewhere else. Joe had a love-hate view of the officer class, mostly love, an adulation which also got a thrill from seeing them in the dust.

Cath, tired beyond even her own belief, which marvelled constantly at how exhausted and how hurt a person could be while still remaining conscious, sometimes pretended to share his prejudice. People's problems, she reckoned privately, were all the same, provided you liked them enough to listen.

‘I
said, what did you give the bloke to make him fall over, Joe?' There was a smell of burning from the kitchenette: the transformation from frozen to carbon, all too easy.

‘Vermouth, gin, mostly gin. Oh, a touch of Campari to give it colour; a smidgeon of fruit juice. Mostly gin and French. He downed it in one. For the third time, would you believe?'

The smell of burning increased, a waft of smoke drifted in from the oven, bringing with it an end to relaxation.

‘Can I help you, Joe?'

‘No.'

Anger stirred. Because he would not let her salvage the food. Because of the vision of some poor, lonely old man, buoyed up to spend his money until he fell off his stool, poisoned by a barman he trusted.

‘Joe, you shouldn't have done that …'

‘Done what?'

He was struggling in the kitchen, couldn't find the thing to strain the peas: it made him mad. Cath could see the end result of all this; she should not carp at his cruel jokes on drunken customers, could not stop, either.

‘Done that. What you did. Encouraged that bloke to drink that poison. He relied on you, didn't he? Poor old sod. Poor old Colonel Fogey. Shame.'

There was silence. She turned her head away towards the inanities on the TV screen, wondering too late if there was time to move. Then the food arrived in her lap. Without plate or tray. A heap of hot, burnt pancake and soft peas which burned through the fabric of her skirt into her thighs. She braced herself, with her hair hiding her face while he hit her in the ribs and bosom, finished his flurry with a punch towards the abdomen exposed by the futile defence of her arms across her chest. They were hard blows, repeated for emphasis, making the peas bounce and flutter among the folds of her skirt. The sound from her mouth was simply a grunt as he stopped.

‘Pig,'
he said, dismissively. ‘That's what you are. You even sound like one.'

He retrieved his plate, sat back and ate with his eyes fixed on the screen. For a while she was quite still, then she got up and carried her skirt in front of her, like an apron, her movements silent and unsteady. He did not take his eyes off the television and she did not speak. On her return, five minutes later, she was carrying a plate of bread and butter. Cath ate more bread and butter than anything else.

‘What did you do,' he demanded, ‘with that food I cooked for you?'

‘I ate it, of course. What did you think I would do?' she whispered.

‘You might have thrown it away, or something.'

‘No, it was lovely. Thanks.' She began to cough, stopped herself because it hurt and would annoy him. Coughing lead to vomiting and that annoyed him more. She had learned to control nausea, to use it as a last resort, since there was an element of fastidiousness about the man. He would not go on hitting while she was being sick, but the downside of that was the knowledge that the presence of regurgitated food always stopped him feeling sorry afterwards.

‘They don't feed you,' he grumbled, still not taking his eyes off the screen.

‘No they don't, Joe, you're right.'

She nibbled at the bread and margarine spread. Not the stuff of genteel sandwiches, nor the stuff of doorsteps. The sight of it sickened her: pallid dough, golden fat. At work she had another kind of sustenance: bread with nuts, rich brown stuff with real butter layered on with a trowel.

She could have eaten anything out of their fridge if she wanted. She could have told them she was in trouble, but then she was not really in trouble. As long as she was clever and he did not hit too hard or scar her face, and she was able to pretend that the cleaning job was as hateful as the gentry who employed her.

‘Joe?'
she asked, pleadingly. ‘Joe, would you get me a drink? Tea, I mean?'

Joe only drank tea at home. He drank alcohol behind the bar where he worked, noon and evening, not that it showed until he came home, unless anyone could call the odd snarling a symptom. She could imagine what he was like, wondered why they put up with him, hoped that they always would since the thought of Joe without work was tantamount to a nightmare. If he did not work, he would stop her working, but as long as he stayed where he was and she pretended her job never involved any conversation, that was all right. Drinking alcohol at home was not. Together, they preserved the pretence that he never touched a drop; she acted now as if she believed he could not bear the stuff, which, in his way, he could not. His body could not. On a bad day, which meant a day when he had trouble crossing the road, an argument with a customer, or suffered any kind of assault on his pride, the alcohol combined with disillusion to make a poisonous cocktail. It was only the booze which turned him from saint to sinner. He was staring at the screen, his plate empty, his belly unsatisfied.