Blind Date (37 page)

P
atsy
walked across the bridge on her way to work, holding flowers for her secretary, part of the ritual of apology for being away. In comparison to others she had known, the hangover was manageable. Gone were the days when she could phone her friends and compare notes. Nobody else drank alone. Not as far as she knew.

Time for a forward look on life, never really had time to do it before. Surely the policemen, with their unanswered questions about Angela's life, would have gone by now. A nip in the air, taste of wine at the back of the tongue, nothing terminal. She felt slightly cheerful and almost ashamed of it. This was it, this was life and this was all there was and maybe when life reached an all time low, there was nowhere to go but up. She bought ten copies of the
Big Issue
from the seller on the far side of the bridge. He had told her once there were two ways to go. Down into the river, or up.

Up, into
the lift and out into a room which looked over nothing but other rooms. Hazel trailed in after her. There were flowers for her, waiting at reception. She looked at the card, pulled a face and bore them aloft into Patsy's office, kicking open the door.

“About bloody time, too. Where do you think you've been?

“Sulking.”

“Three days” worth? You give up answering your phone … Tell me why. Apart from the obvious.”

“There is only the obvious. Do they still think Angela had a secret lover?” Hazel sprawled in a chair. There was plenty to be done, moguls to be pleased, contributors placated, stuff to be produced, working arrangements for flexi-time mothers, meetings, office politics to be diffused. Stuff: all that, diminished into nothing by a common, if temporary boredom. Because none of it really mattered and there was nothing which could not wait.

“Shall I tell you what I did yesterday evening?” Hazel said, assuming, rightly, that Patsy would want to know. “Well, I went out with one of Mrs. Smythe's a la carte; where else would I have found him? A very select friend. Drinks at the Savoy, my dear. Dinner at the Ivy, and not a thing to wear! Oh, he was so sweet, and not even terribly fat, and so lonely and
so
boring. More than twice my age, darling, and then add some. Lonely, like I said. Flowers this morning.”

“Bugger flowers. Cheap currency. Debased.”

“Look, if I'd wanted champagne and roses for breakfast, they'd have been there.”

“You didn't…”

“No I fucking didn't. He told me about his house. His grown-up kids. He was … nice. Don't think I've ever met anyone more ready for the taking. I could see it, you know. A bloke like that, he was anybody's. If I played it right, if any woman played it right, I bet they could reel him in like a fish. Get herself into the house and behind the wheel of his Daimler before the end of the week.”

“So?
Get on with it. That's what you wanted, isn't it? The house?”

“Is it? I couldn't, Pats, I couldn't. It'd be like taking an ice cream from a baby, only easier. I looked at me and I looked at him, and I thought, you cow, you even considered it. Or, you might have done if he was thinner and younger, know what I mean? Couldn't ever speak the same language. So what do I want, anyway? Nothing at that price.”

“Spare me the virtue, just spare me. You couldn't fleece a man you don't fancy. Didn't you know that?”

Hazel examined her nails, blushed.

“I'm not sure about this introduction agency stuff,” Patsy said.

“Nor me. Phone up that old cow. Go on.”

“She scares me.”

“Go on.”

There was an answermachine. Closed today. Please speak after the tone.

“I want my money back,” Hazel raged. “I paid for a year.”

“You want instant results.”

“Dead right I do. I'm going to buy a caravan and call it Mon Repos.”

“It is
not
like you to give up easy.”

“It is
not
giving up! It's adjusting the sights. Looking for someone sweet and truthful, like Angela wanted. A little boy in long trousers waiting to be remodelled. Along with his house.”

She was knitting together the pile of paperclips, forming them into a chain. Her eyes held tears. Her right leg, crossed across the left, kicked at nothing. She held the paperclip chain aloft, gazing at it as if it was a work of art, or a talisman.

“Oh,
by the way, Pats. Watch your back, will you? As soon as you're away for the day, three of the lean and hungries are after your job, OK?”

“We'll see about that.”

For the first time in the encounter, they smiled at each other.

M
rs. Diana Kennedy, together with an American gentleman of indeterminate years, sat in her drawing room over tea. The house seemed extraordinarily peaceful today. It looked at its best: light fell gently through large, sparkling clean windows onto a gracefully faded carpet, once a darker green, but she had the clear impression that it was the garden which fascinated him most. “The achievement of growing so many disparate plants so close to the sea,” he said. “Now that's a challenge, mam. Not only a challenge, but a triumph.”

“Triumph?” she said, indignant at the mere suggestion of luck. “Oh I don't know about triumph. Constant effort, perhaps. You've got to know what's friend and enemy; what flourishes against all the rules, what won't. I suppose,” she added, surprising herself, “that in many ways I love the garden more than the house.”

“Is that so?” he asked shrewdly. “So, if you move to an even better garden, it would be some kind of compensation?”

She shook her head. The fine white hair stayed in place.

“No.”

He dipped his grey head. Diana found him peculiarly restful, not at all as Steven had described him. He was nodding, gravely, twinkling at her with a smile which merely raised the corners of his mouth.

“No, I
didn't really think so.”

He remained restful, about her own age, looking younger than he was until one looked again and disregarded the foreign nature of his clothes. Check and stripes never did go together. He was polite, with none of the evasiveness she had perfected, and she found herself copying him.

“I adore this house, mam. You may as well know that.”

A man, making such a statement with such fervour, was bound to be appealling. He accepted more tea, looked around himself, a big man comfortable in a big chair.

“Wouldn't change a thing,” he muttered. “Love the drapes.”

“The what?”

“Excuse me?”

They laughed, politely enough, but it was still laughter.

“Was there ever a chandelier of kinds in this room?”

“Yes. We took it down. It's the wrong kind of house for a chandelier. My husband's mother had pretensions to grandeur, no, I lie, she simply entertained a lot, wanted to make it look like a little ballroom. You can open these doors to the garden, extend the place indefinitely, in summer. I've often yearned to have a party here, but I can't. Even so, it was always the wrong kind of house.”

He carried his tea cup and saucer halfway round the room, examined the ceiling, took his time.

“You are quite right. Wrong kind of house for any extra glass. Can we take another look at the garden?”

They walked the paths. There was a little, late-summer litter lying underfoot and intruding on to the lawn: she noted it with such a slight frisson of disapproval, it was nearly indifference. Dead leaves, the breeze spreading them, and the Michaelmas daisies which always looked shaggy from the moment they appeared, and the dog at heel, yapping at the wasps.

“Will
you just sshh, you,” he ordered. In the following, bewildered silence, Diana wished the animal would do the same for her.

Matthew came from the gate by the sea, stopped at the sight of them, skinny little runt, ready to scowl. Then recognized the man who had been so good at shifting the chandelier, the one who did not even notice about getting dirty. He grinned, broke into a trot and made for the house. His house.

“I guess that one rules the roost,” the man said.

“I guess he does. Doesn't know it, though.”

“Mrs. Kennedy, let me tell you something. I am not going to push to buy your house. What for? That kid and your daughters would be hanging around like a tribe of ghosts forever and ever, Amen. So I'll just take a room for a while, if that's OK. Look for something else, again. Do you think I could have a cutting of that?” He pointed to a clump of daisies. He was a liar, pretending he knew nothing about plants.

“No. You can't cut, it doesn't like it. You can have the whole thing, with pleasure. For your wife. If we can dig it up and you can get it home.”

“Wife? Who said anything about a wife?” He shook his head. “Not in a long time. You don't think my wife would ever have let me choose a house or a plant, do you?” His laughter was loud and genuine. “I'd be dead, Mrs. Kennedy, I tell you. Dead.”

“J
oe? Are you awake?”

“No.”

“Joe?”

“Go
away.”

“All right. I'll go. I'm going now.”

“No, don't. Stay.”

“I'm sorry about this, Joe.”

“Oh, Jesus, Lizzie.”

“Don't call me Lizzie. Or take anyone's name in vain.”

He opened his eyes. Opened them wider.

“Christ's sake, Elisabeth, what have they done to you?”

“Seen worse, have you? You're the same. I'm sorry, Joe: they had to cut your hair.”

He felt his scalp, a mixture of tuft and stubble. Memory came back like a tidal wave, drowning him. He struggled for reality.

“What time is it?”

“Ten to three.”

“Lizzie, why are you such a liar? It is never, ever, ten to three.”

T
he man in the separate room, guarded against visitors, could not understand why his mother was not there, holding his hand, adjusting the discomfort of drip and tube. The impedimenta kept him chained: he had no voice. Where are you, Mummy? There was no-one else to call for. He wanted her like never before, even though he had begun to loathe her with a loathing so fierce, it choked him. He could not recall the precise moment when obedience had turned to resentment, he struggled to remember. When she would not let him touch Emma; when he introduced her to Jack, and she seemed to take Jack over, leaving him so lonely and confused. Jack was the closest he had ever had to a friend: she should not have done that. She had made Jack laugh, promised him things, took him far away. She took things away, just as she did with his independence. First, she let him have things, and then she took them back. And he let her, because of what he had done to her.

Michael
was in a room by himself, pinioned and bound and dizzy with morphine. If he closed his eyes, he could feel the weight of the bell crushing his chest and shoulder, just as his fingers touched … Felt himself fainting away in that total darkness: waking again to scream for Mummy, Mummy, Mummy. With his eyes wide open now, he looked towards a sealed window and a patch of sky which was turning from brilliant blue to grey and black. He was terrified of the very thought of darkness. Once it was dark, he would be back beneath the bell, and he would have to scream again, this time in words, unless she came and told him what to do.

“I'd stop his fucking painkillers,” Jenkins suggested, brutally. “Then he'll sing like a budgie.”

“Get out of here: who asked you?”

“Listen, I know more about this man than anyone else.” Someone, at least, had conceded that.

“He won't talk. And he's too sick to persuade, even nicely.”

“Put a man outside the door, to listen. No, not me.”

“No, Jenks, not you.”

They paced down the long corridor to the room where he could smoke. Even without the cigs, Jenks might have managed to sit all night outside that door and listen to Michael, singing. He would hum the fucking chorus.

“What did the mother say?”

“Hysteria. Total shock. No idea about the proclivities of her boy. Says he's still a child at heart. They all say that, don't they?” There was a ventilator rattling like an old train in the window of the airless room.

“She says he cheats: he's a liar and a fantasist: she keeps him away from her business and anything to do with it, but he gets access to her computer and plays around. None of that's quite true. ‘Cos his friends at work say he got them to go and see Mummy, sort out the love life. He even pushed one aside to get at Angela Collier. Funny, ain't it, the way that little chap with the big specs turned up last night, all on his own, to tell us that? Amazing. Mummy knows a thing or two, but I don't know how sonny boy got inside Elisabeth Kennedy's place. I really don't; nor does Mum. Maybe she asked him in.”

“Naah,
not even Lizzie,” Jenks said.

“How can she live there? Is she mad or what? She must be. Will she mend, d'you think? Don't like to lose a witness.”

Jenkins coughed, sounding like a rusty trumpet with spittle in the corners. Looking at this model for a mobile health warning, the other man pocketed his own cigarettes. Jenkins spoke between the hacking, prolonging it, without shame.

“Oh for sure she'll mend. She was already mended. Now she's got her culprit, she'll mend, all right.”

“Why the hell had she carved away at that cross beam over the bell? There was only an inch left. Bloody thing may as well have been hanging on a piece of string. She's mad. Why the hell did she do that?”

Jenkins turned, found no space to pace up and down, walked, then half ran down the corridor, turned back. He thought he knew why. She was waiting for someone. It could have been Joe, under that bell. Skinny Lizzie, better at subterfuge than fighting, making a virtue of weakness, always something to hide, just like before.

The other man hurried to keep up with him, afraid of what he might do; remembering his instructions to watch Jenks more than the prisoner.