Adam and Eve and Pinch Me (30 page)

Notices directing you were everywhere but they never seemed to point to what she wanted, never to Auntie’s grave. She read the one ahead, she didn’t know why, as she pounded along, afraid to look back in case she was pursued. It said: Exit. The relief was enormous. She knew where she was now, approaching the western gate that was opposite her own street and where the flower seller was. By the time she reached it she was walking quietly, managing a smile and nod for the flower man. And there was no one and nothing behind her.

It was rare for Minty to feel happy. Fear drives away happiness as much as sorrow does and she was mostly afraid. She lived in a climate of unnamable fears, terrors that could only be kept within bounds by strict routines. Something else had allayed them, had once or twice entirely banished them, and that had been what she’d never known in her first thirty-seven years, the feeling she’d had for Jock. When she’d told him, after he’d made love to her, that she would never be like this with another man, for she was his forever, she was expressing for perhaps the first time in her life her true and honest feelings, unaffected by cleanliness or tidiness or eating prejudices. And what he gave her back, or she thought he did, had given her a strange, unfamiliar sensation she didn’t know how to name. Happiness. She felt it now, returned in some small measure, as she left the cemetery and walked toward Syringa Road.

With Jock it had been relatively long-lived. If he hadn’t died, she sometimes thought dimly, not knowing quite what she meant or wanted, if he’d stayed alive and with her, those feelings she’d had and he’d inspired might have changed her into a different woman. This present scrap of happiness was doomed to be short, she knew it while it was with her, succeeding raw terror, for fear was returning as she approached her front door. She was afraid of what awaited her inside and she even thought of knocking on the Wilsons’ door, spending half an hour with them, having a cup of tea, a chat, maybe telling them about her experience looking for Auntie’s grave, of which, now it was over, she could see the funny side. What, a woman who’d lived a stone’s throw from the cemetery all her life, unable to find her own auntie’s grave! If she went into Sonovia’s house she’d only have to come out again and enter her own. She couldn’t stay in next door all night.

She put the key in the lock and turned it. Although it wouldn’t be dark for hours, she switched the hall light on. Nothing. Emptiness. She went upstairs, fearing to meet Auntie on the way, but there was no one, nothing. Very faintly, through the dividing wall, she could hear music, the kind of music very young people like. That wouldn’t be Mr. Kroot’s radio, it must be Gertrude Pierce’s. A strange woman she was, playing teenagers’ music. Minty ran a bath, using the kind of gel that makes foam, washed her hair in it, scrubbed the blood off her hands with a nailbrush. The punctures the thorns had made were a hundred tiny wounds. The music was turned off and silence followed. Minty dried herself, dressed in her usual clean T-shirt, clean trousers, socks. She never wore sandals, even in hot weather, because the streets were dirty. Things could burrow their way into your feet and give you a disease called bill-heart-something, she’d read about it in Laf’s newspaper. That was in Africa but she couldn’t see why it wouldn’t happen here.

She wasn’t hungry. Those sandwiches had been very filling. Maybe later she’d have a scrambled egg on toast. You never knew where the egg came from but it must be out of a chicken and, anyway, she’d cook it very thoroughly in a clean saucepan. Out of the kitchen window she could see washing sagging on the line in Mr. Kroot’s garden. It looked bone dry, had probably been there since before Gertrude Pierce came into Immacue. Minty went outside. It hadn’t been hot all day, there was too much cloud for that, but it had been gently warm and still was. She studied next door’s washing. So much sagging had taken place, one of the poles that supported the line leaning over at an angle of forty-five degrees, that the edges of the sheets and towels were on the ground, actually touching the dry, dusty grass. Minty was shocked but there was nothing she was prepared to do about it.

Sonovia’s voice called to her over the other fence, “Minty! Long time no see.”

In fact, it wasn’t very long. No more than two or three days. Knowing it would please, Minty told her, with many glances over her shoulder, about Gertrude Pierce coming into the shop, not realizing she worked there. Sonovia laughed, especially at the bit about her being amazed Minty knew her name. Some twenty years ago Mr. Kroot was reputed to have made a racist remark, though where and to whom he’d made it no one seemed to know, but it was enough for Laf, who’d never addressed a word to him since. Sonovia was often heard to say that she wished it hadn’t been so long ago but now instead and she’d have him up in court.

“Someone told me she’s going home on Saturday week. We’ll all be glad to see the back of her.” She listened, smiling, while Minty told her what had happened in the cemetery. The smile didn’t waver but when Sonovia went back into her own house, she said to Laf, “If Winnie Knox is buried in Kensal Green Cemetery it’s the first I’ve heard of it.”

“She isn’t buried at all. She was cremated. You ought to remember that, you and I were there.”

“Of course we were. That’s why I said that was the first I’d heard of it. Minty had the ashes in a box on the shelf for months, but I noticed they’d gone. She’s just told me she got lost in the cemetery looking for Winnie’s grave. White roses she’d bought because she said her auntie was fed up with tulips. What d’you make of that?”

“We’ve always said Minty was peculiar, Sonn. Remember all that stuff about ghosts?”

Minty had for a moment forgotten all that stuff about ghosts. She went back into her kitchen and through to the living room thinking about Gertrude Pierce and the washing and the evil-smelling clothes she’d brought to be dry-cleaned. In the doorway she stopped. Two women were standing between the fireplace and the sofa, Auntie and an old bent person with a humped back and a witch’s face. Minty couldn’t speak. She stood there on the threshold, still as one of the cemetery statues, and closed her eyes. When she opened them again they were still there.

“You know very well that wasn’t my grave, was it, Mrs. Lewis? You put those roses on a stranger’s grave. How d’you think that makes me feel? Mrs. Lewis was disgusted.”

Auntie had never talked like this to her while she was alive, though Minty had often thought she’d like to but for some reason had resisted. There had been anger in her eyes, this anger that was now coming out, while she said nice things. Mrs. Lewis stood quite still, not looking at Auntie nor in Minty’s direction, staring at the floor, her gnarled old hands clasped.

“Can’t even manage a word of apology. She never could say she was sorry, even when she was little, Mrs. Lewis. There was never a word of regret passed her lips.”

Minty found a voice. “I’m sorry. It won’t happen again. There, will that do?” Her tone strengthened, though her fear hadn’t lessened, and the words came out in a throaty croak. “Go away, will you? Both of you. I don’t want to see you again. You’re dead and I’m alive. Go back to where you came from.”

Auntie went but Mrs. Lewis stayed. Minty could see Jock’s face in hers, the same features but wrinkled and aged as if by a thousand years. His eyes had looked like hers, defeated and tired, when they’d been to the racing and the dog he’d put money on came in last. One day he might have come to look like her if the train crash hadn’t taken him. The old woman raised her head. She was less solid than she’d been when Minty first saw her and again she was aware of that mirage effect, the watery waviness that made Mrs. Lewis’s loose cardigan and floppy skirt shiver as in a breeze. They stared at each other, she and Jock’s mother, and she saw that the eyes were not blue as she’d first thought but a dull, cold green amid the wrinkles, each one like a bird’s egg in a nest.

If she turned and walked away the old woman would follow her. For the first time, she wanted a ghost to speak, in the midst of her fear she wanted to hear what kind of a voice Mrs. Lewis had. “Say something.”

As she spoke, the ghost vanished. Not immediately but like smoke disappearing into the neck of a bottle. And then she was gone and the room empty.

Chapter 25

WHEN JIMS ARRIVED in Glebe Terrace, Natalie was waiting for him in a bedroom in a flat on the other side of the street. It belonged to Orla Collins, whom she’d met at the dinner party. Orla had had some qualms at first but these vanished when Natalie explained she was spying on a member of Parliament who’d married his wife bigamously while at the same time carrying on an affair with a man on the opposite side of Glebe Terrace. Thursday was the third evening she’d been there, but she wasn’t surprised he hadn’t turned up the previous night. Even Jims might jib at making an assignation with a lover on his wedding day.

In her own words, Zillah had spilled the beans. When Natalie arrived on Wednesday afternoon she was still in the white suit she had worn for her wedding. “I thought you might not be able to take a photograph of me,” Zillah said, “on account of your union or whatever, so I did a Polaroid.” As Natalie was looking at it, she said, “And now I’m going to tell you everything.”

She had. It was the best story Natalie had secured in fifteen years of journalism. For all that, she didn’t quite dare take Zillah’s word for Jims’s adventures with Leonardo Norton. That would have to be confirmed. She sat in a wicker armchair by the window at Orla Collins’s, eyeing, not for the first time, the photographs Zillah and Jims had taken on their honeymoon. His were of little use to her, for they were only of island views but for a single shot of Zillah bathing in the Indian Ocean. Hers, on the other hand, were a revelation. She admitted to having taken them because even then she felt jaundiced by this mock marriage. Jims and a young man whose face was turned away lay on adjoining recliners, they sat side by side on spread towels on a beach and, best of all, most damning of all, sat at a table alfresco, Jims’s hand resting on the young man’s thigh. It was interesting that Jims was always smiling at him and once into the camera, while Leonardo contrived to hide his face from view. These photographs would make it an easy matter to recognize the MP when he came down Glebe Terrace or stepped out of a car. How would he come? As time passed, as her watch told her seven-thirty, eight, eight-fifteen, Natalie considered the possibilities. Sloane Square was only three stops on the Circle Line from Westminster. He could take the tube and then a cab. Or a cab all the way. Reputedly, he had a large private income. He could drive himself and, since it was past six-thirty, park anywhere on a single yellow line. The idea of a bus Natalie dismissed as too plebeian for the likes of Jims. As for a bicycle . . .

At twenty minutes to nine he came by the only means she hadn’t considered. On foot. He was even better-looking in the flesh than in the Maldives pictures. Natalie, like many women taking a view never shared by homosexual men, said to herself, What a waste! To her delight, he produced a key from his pocket and unlocked Leonardo Norton’s front door. A blind was down in the window she took to be that of a living room but an upstairs window was uncovered except for an inch or two of curtain showing on either side. Any picture she might take Natalie had grave misgivings about, but she was ready with her camera. Within minutes she almost wished she hadn’t brought it with her, for the shot she got no newspaper editor would dare to use. In the two-foot-wide gap between the curtains Jims and Leonardo were locked in a passionate embrace.

Almost immediately Leonardo, dressed only in a pair of red and white candy-striped briefs, drew the curtains. Natalie remained. She was resolved to stay the entire night in that chair if necessary, eating the sandwiches she’d brought and sipping from the half-bottle of Valpolicella.

But at eleven-thirty Orla wanted to go to bed. “There’s no point in you staying,” she said. “He always stops the night.”

If the police had never reappeared in Holmdale Road, Michelle might have extended her forgiveness of Fiona to forgetfulness. She might have taken the advice Matthew gave her and excused her neighbor on the grounds of her grief, her shock, and the almost unbearable pressure she had been under. After all, she and Matthew had shown their support by accompanying Fiona to the funeral of a man they had both disliked and distrusted. But the police came back on Friday morning to say they’d been unable to find any confirmation of the Jarveys’ presence on the Heath on that crucial afternoon. On the other hand, a car of the same make and color as theirs had been seen parked on a meter in Seymour Place, W1, at the relevant time, and Seymour Place, as they must know, was only a short distance from the Odeon, Marble Arch.

Matthew said, in a cool, almost detached voice, “That was not our car.”

“The witness wasn’t able to take the number.”

“If he or she had, it would not have been the number of our car.”

Michelle, glancing at her husband and then down at her own plump hands that lay in her bulky lap, marveled that anyone looking at the two of them could even momentarily suspect them of committing a crime. A fat (if no longer obese) woman of forty-five who couldn’t climb half a dozen steps without gasping and—as much as she loved him, she had to put it like this—a poor skeleton crippled by his own grotesque phobia. That was the last realistic and level-headed thought she was to have for days.

She drew in her breath when the woman asked her, “Can you give us something firmer to establish that you were in your car on the Heath at that time?”

“What kind of thing?” She heard her own voice grown thin and hoarse.

“Or even in Waitrose? The staff don’t remember you there. Well, they remember you”—Michelle thought she detected the suspicion of a grin—“but not which day. Apparently, you often go there.”

The implication was plain, that she and Matthew had purposely planned frequent visits to the supermarket in order to confuse witnesses about the only day they
weren’t
there.

“And about the Heath, Mrs. Jarvey?”

“I told you, there were other cars there with people in them, but I didn’t know any of them and they didn’t know us.”

After the officers had gone, she clutched hold of Matthew and looked piteously into his face. “I’m so frightened, I don’t know what to do. I thought—I thought, Fiona’s got us into this, she ought to get us out.”

“What does that mean, my darling?”

“I thought, we could ask her to say she saw us on the Heath, she drove up there as soon as she got home—I mean, she could say she got home an hour sooner than she did—and saw us and spoke to us. Or—and this would be better—she could get a friend of hers to say she saw us, someone from down the street, she knows the woman at a hundred and two, I’ve seen them together, and she could—”

“No, Michelle.” Matthew was gentle as always but tough too, as he used to be long ago. “You’d be inciting her to perjury. It would be wrong. And apart from the morality of it, you’d be found out.”

“If she can’t do a little thing like that for us I’ll feel like never speaking to her again.”

“You don’t know. Maybe she would do it. You haven’t tried her—and, Michelle, you’re not going to.”

“Then what will become of us?”

“Nothing,” he said. “Innocent people don’t find themselves in court on a murder charge,” though he was by no means sure of that. “You’re being silly. This is simply hysteria.”

“It is not!” She began sobbing and laughing at the same time. “It’s not, it’s not!”

“Michelle, stop it. I’ve had enough.”

She looked up at him, the tears streaming down her face. “And now she’s made us quarrel. We never quarrel.”

Fiona had returned to work on the previous Monday. People said how sorry they were about Jeff, but those who couldn’t remember his name referred to him as “your friend,” and Fiona thought this reduced him to the status of someone she’d happened to know at college. But she faced more curious glances and inexplicable silences than she would have done if Jeff had died of cancer or a heart attack. Murder marks its victim’s loved ones forever. Fiona knew her name would never again be mentioned among acquaintances without some qualifying phrase defining her as the woman “who lived with that chap who was murdered in a cinema.” Added to this was her bitter regret that she’d mentioned the Jarveys’ names to Violent Crimes. She no longer knew why she had and was driven to the conclusion that, as is often the case in these circumstances, she had come out with it because she had nothing to say, knew nothing, and could think of no real help to offer.

Michelle’s declaration of forgiveness hadn’t been accompanied by much warmth. This quiet, sad woman wasn’t the affectionate and demonstrative maternal creature she’d known, but subdued, retired into herself. Fiona had been into the Jarveys’ house three times since Sunday’s contretemps, so often, she now believed, in the ever-renewed hope that this time Michelle would have changed back into her familiar self, but though perfectly courteous and hospitable, she never had. This Friday afternoon Fiona was there again, using the back door to demonstrate an intimacy she desperately wanted to re-establish. And for a moment it looked as though she was approaching it, for Michelle came out to meet her and kissed her cheek.

Matthew’s manner seemed heartier than usual. It was Michelle, not he, who generally offered her a glass of wine. He fetched a bottle he’d had on ice, filled a glass for her and one for his wife. To her dismay she saw that Michelle’s eyes had filled with tears. “What is it? Oh, what is it? If you cry you’ll have me crying too.”

Michelle made the effort. “The police were here this morning. They don’t believe we were where we said we were that—that day. Someone saw a car like ours parked near the cinema. They want us to prove we were up on the Heath and we—we can’t, we can’t. We’ll never be able to.”

“Yes, you will. I’ll help you. It’s the least I can do. I can’t say I saw you there because the people in my office have already told them I was there till five. But I can find someone who’ll say it. I know someone—I mean, I know her well—who lives in the Vale of Health, and she’ll say you were there, I know she will. She’s just the sort of person who’d go to the police and tell them she’d come to offer evidence to support your story. Let me do it, please. I know it’ll work.”

Michelle was shaking her head, but Matthew had begun to laugh as if he hadn’t a care in the world.