Play Dead (5 page)

‘Not a spot on him anywhere.'

‘Actually he's got an invisible black collar under the white. You can only see it when he's moulting. He's behaving like this because of the mackerel.'

‘I'm stopping you eating your tea.'

‘Don't worry—it's cold. Won't you have something? I've got some gin. Or I could make some coffee.'

‘I wouldn't say no to a spot of gin and water.'

‘Just water? Not tonic?'

‘Water—about half and half.'

‘Ice?'

‘Bruises the gin, my dad used to say.'

Now that she had the excuse Poppy gave herself a smaller tot than she might have if she'd been swigging defiantly alone.

‘Ta,' said Jim.

‘How did you know my name? Where I lived?'

‘Asked Mrs Jinja. How're you feeling, then? Nasty that was for you. But you told the kiddie's mum about it, acourse?

‘Yes—she's my daughter-in-law. I played it down a bit. I didn't want to frighten her. But you're right, Jim … I don't know your other name …'

‘Jim Bowles. Jim'll do fine. Nobody calls me anything else these days.'

‘I'm Poppy. It's silly, but it can't be helped. What was I saying?'

‘Me being right about something.'

‘Oh yes—it
was
nasty. Afterwards I felt as if I'd, well, had a rape attempt on me, myself.'

‘Don't blame you.'

‘What did he say?'

‘Effed and blinded a bit, and then he tried to make out as he was from the papers, following up a story. Hadn't got a press pass, natch.'

‘I keep asking myself what I'm going to do if he shows up again.'

‘Came to see you about that. Now, first off … Hold it …'

He was listening to the music, head cocked on one side and lips moving. Poppy rose and turned the volume up. It was the famous march, of course, but when he started to hum along he wasn't following the main theme.

‘Is that the woodwind?' said Polly. ‘Bassoon?'

‘Trombone,' he said and returned to the music, absorbed as a child. Poppy joined in with the trumpets, far less expertly. Encouraged, he let himself go, bomping and baahing full throat. They were driving into the final
tutti
when Poppy noticed Elias staring up at her with that look of affront and disbelief which cats keep for outrages on their ideas of dignity. She collapsed into laughter. Jim closed with an unperturbed flourish and turned the volume down. Poppy could sense an inner lip-smack of self-satisfaction.

‘If I had a fiver for every time I've played that,' he said.

‘Was Verdi using trombones as early as
Aida
?'

‘Brass band I'm talking about. West London Police Band. I still turn out for them if they're short.'

‘What else have I got …'

‘First things first, Poppy. About if that fellow comes hanging around at the play centre. I'll drop down to the station tomorrow, have a word with Terry Hicks. He'll send someone along to talk to you, Ozzie Osborne, most like. Telephone at the play centre?'

‘Yes. George has probably reported it already.'

‘Right. Ozzie will know, then. She'll give you a number and who to ask for. And most like she'll drop by off and on for a couple of weeks, walk you home.'

‘Oh, Jim, that's marvellous! It's such a load off my mind! I can't thank you enough.'

‘Listen to a bit more music, shall we? Not this caterwauling, mind.'

‘It isn't caterwauling!'

‘And those fellows bawling away like they're showing their tongues to the doctor.'

‘1 don't think I've got any proper brass band music.'

‘Bet you have, too. Bet you've got old Vivaldi.'

‘Yes, of course, but …'

‘Let's have
Spring
, then, for starters. Some bloody good tunes in there. Anything left in that gin bottle?'

Buying her
Guardian
next morning Poppy thanked Mrs Jinja for her advice.

‘He was wonderful,' she said. ‘He didn't just rescue us; he came round in the evening to tell me what to do if the man turned up again. Oh, you know that, of course—you gave him my address.'

‘I hope you did not mind.'

‘Of course not. Why?'

Mrs Jinja's mouth closed to a purple blob, like a shrinking anemone, in the large fawn face.

‘Jim has a certain reputation, you understand me?' she said. ‘I was careful to ask Mr Jinja's permission before I consulted him about Farah's difficulty.'

‘I think I can look after myself.'

‘He has his pension from the police. He does not need the money for being a crossing warden.'

‘He says he likes being useful.'

‘He also likes to inspect the young mothers who come to collect their children, and to make friends while they are waiting by the gate, and to be asked for advice, and to call round perhaps while the husband is working, and then … who knows, Mrs Tasker, who knows?'

Poppy laughed.

‘I promise you we spent the whole evening listening to music.'

‘You do not object to my telling you this?'

‘Of course not. I'm flattered.'

OCTOBER 1989

1

A
vast Mercedes was waiting by the far entrance to the park. The chauffeur, blue-chinned, Greek-looking, simply stood and watched while Peony and Poppy collapsed their pushchairs and stowed them in the boot. There was a baby-seat fixed for Deborah in the back, but Poppy had to sit beside her with Toby on her lap, trying to control his impulse to explore every knob and handle. Peony sat in the front with the chauffeur, separated from the rear by a glass partition, and Poppy had the amusement of being able to watch their body language. When people know you can't hear them they tend to forget how much their subsidiary modes of communication express their meanings and emotions. Even the back of the man's head and the way his hands rested on the wheel expressed a ruthless assumption of dominance, while Peony's shrugs and turnings away, hoity-toity but come-hither, were just as speaking. Poppy had little doubt by the time the short trip was over that the chauffeur had been the squid-guzzling brandy-plier responsible for Peony's sorry state a few days ago.

The house was nothing like as imposing as Poppy had expected, nor as large, until she realised that the establishment included the house next door. The two stood in a twisting, cobbled side-street, one of those sudden oddnesses you find in London's inner suburbs, where the rush of patterned development over what until a hundred years ago had been fields and gardens was intruded on by an older shape, some track or lane which had been there for centuries as a thoroughfare when Acton and Kensington were still villages and Kensal still was green. Poppy, in lonely evening walks after her separation from Derek, had passed through it several times and had told herself that she must try and look up old maps and see what its purpose had been but had never got round to doing so.

Deborah had what was effectively her own suite, with day nursery and kitchen on the ground floor and bedrooms for herself and Peony on the floor above. Mrs Capstone had her office on the top floor, Peony said, but she and Mr Capstone lived and entertained next door. There was a little garden behind, paved, with a few shrubs, and beyond that the back of a mews, where the cars were kept, with a flat for the chauffeur above. Deborah instantly assumed the role of chatelaine and insisted on showing Toby her realm, so Poppy kept an eye on them while Peony got tea ready. Interestingly, though the place reeked of wealth, it did so as much by restraint as by ostentation. Even Deborah's bedroom, for instance, didn't have the hoard of toys Toby owned, and there were only a couple of soft animals in the cot, and no dolls.

The bathroom contained a bidet. Toby was entranced. Real taps at his level, with real water gushing out, and a fancy waste-plug operated by a lever. The situation remained under control for about thirty seconds, with Poppy closing the taps and opening the plug as fast as he opened and closed them. Deborah at first hung back. It had apparently never crossed her mind to treat the bidet as a plaything, people rather than objects being her sphere, but as soon as she joined in Poppy had four hands against her two, one for each tap, one to keep the plug closed and the fourth to flail at the rapidly rising water, drenching all three of them and a fair-sized area round the bidet.

‘No!' cried Poppy. ‘Stop it, Toby! Stop it, Deborah! No!'

But their joint excitement had reached critical mass, feeding each other's, whipping them towards hysteria, a two-tot rioting mob, out of control of the state apparatus. Poppy seized both taps, forced them shut and held them All four fists welted the water. The splash shot into her face. Her spectacles fell. She was soaked, blind. The children whooped with the joy of freedom.

‘And what is going on here?' said a woman's voice at the door.

‘Help!' said Poppy.

Deborah was snatched away and immediately started to scream. Poppy groped, grabbed Toby and held him to her while she tried to rub the water from her eyes with the back of her wrist and then peered for her spectacles. Their tortoiseshell frames made them invisible on the brown carpet. She patted desperately around. Toby wriggled like a trapped animal.

‘More,' he shouted. ‘More baa!'

(‘Baa' was a new word, corrupted from the adult ‘bath' and describing all things wet, other than drinks.)

‘Not now, darling. Please, where are my specs—I'm blind without them.'

‘By your left knee,' said the voice, both brisk and patient.

Poppy shoved them on and rose. The lenses were wet, so all was still blur. Toby threshed in her grasp.

‘I'm terribly sorry,' she began, but the rest was drowned by Toby's yell. Why, after days of angelhood, must he choose this moment for a tantrum?

‘If you go on like that, Deborah, you will be shut in your room,' said the woman, dim-seen through wet lenses but obviously Mrs Capstone, though somehow not what Poppy had expected from the public image. Of course the scene in the bathroom was different from the average photo opportunity. Mrs Capstone seemed not to need to raise her voice to penetrate the yells but Poppy had to mouth her answers.

‘Toby will stop in a minute or two,' she said. ‘I'm terribly sorry. I'm afraid they're drenched.'

‘I'll find him something. This way. Close the bathroom door, please.'

They carried the yelling infants into Deborah's bedroom. Mrs Capstone put Deborah down, opened a cupboard and began to pick out clothes. Deborah stood where she'd been placed, concentrating on her note.

‘More baa! More baa!' bellowed Toby.

Poppy had never seen him so outraged. Perhaps he had sensed her own discomfort at the visit to this formidable woman's home having begun with such a display of ill-discipline, mess and temper. (Mrs Capstone's latest campaign was for stiffer penalties for football hooligans.) He was making more noise than Deborah, so much so that she must have noticed that she was being upstaged. Her scream continued but the look in her eyes changed. She took a couple of paces forward. Her hand rose to her mouth and moved to and fro, making the note waver.

Poppy knelt and twisted her threshing burden round till he faced Deborah.

‘Look, darling. Look what Deborah's doing.'

He took no notice, still wrestling, still trying to make for the door. Deborah came up and put her face only inches from his, yodelling away, and all at once he gave in. Poppy could sense a sort of inner male, ‘Oh, well. Women!' He gave one more sulky look towards the door before he set up an alto hoot, stopping and unstopping his mouth with his hand. At last Poppy was able to let go and wipe her specs dry.

The children kept the game up, with variants, while they were laid side by side on the bed, stripped and changed into dry clothes. The noise was possible to talk through.

‘I haven't heard her do that before,' said Mrs Capstone.

‘It's something they invented. Deborah's taught him to sing, too, after a fashion. She's very musical, isn't she?'

‘I wouldn't know. If she is it comes from her father. You're Mrs Tasker, aren't you—his grandmother?'

‘Poppy Tasker.'

‘I'm Clara Capstone.'

‘I'm terribly sorry about the mess in the bathroom. He's never seen a bidet before. He simply has to find out how things work and what you can do with them, but then Deborah joined in and it got out of control.'

‘Would he be allowed to play with a bidet at home, supposing there were one?'

‘He's pretty good, really. He knows where he's allowed to make messes, and my daughter-in-law organises it for that.'

‘I discourage messes of any kind.'

Time, Poppy decided, to rise above the level of acquiescent contrite worm, though it had in fact taken her time to get used to what Janet regarded as acceptable levels of chaos—painting sessions, for instance, in which floor and walls, clothes and flesh, moved towards a sort of visual entropy of puddled blue and yellow smears.

‘I brought my own children up like that,' she said. ‘Now I'm not sure I was right. Of course it's so much easier with the kind of paints you can buy, and everything washable.'

Mrs Capstone rose without replying.

‘There,' she said. ‘That's better. You're dry now, Deborah, so you can stop making that racket and we'll go and have some tea. I'll tell Peony to put Toby's clothes in the tumbler and they'll be dry by the time you go home. What about you, Mrs Tasker?'

Poppy fastened the Velcro shoulder-strap on the loaned overalls and took off her specs for a final wipe.

‘I'll be all right,' she said. ‘It mostly went over my face. I'll steam off during tea. I was going to wash my hair this evening anyway.'

She settled her specs on and saw that Mrs Capstone was gazing at her, openly weighing her up, as if considering whether to hire her as an employee. She did this in a perfectly straightforward way, so that it didn't seem an intrusion on inner privacies. It was the sort of look the young give you sometimes on meeting, those adventurers for whom the decades seem to spread away before them like rich provinces waiting to be sacked. Mrs Capstone still had that look of youth, though she was thirty-nine according to Janet, a child of the squirearchy, reared and educated to marry her kind and breed more of the same. She must have decided that the power which was her birthright had left the ancestral acres, and she must seek it elsewhere for herself, but she still had that look about her, the forthright gaze, the slightly plump assurance, the blonde and tended hair, the good bones.

‘More baa?' said Toby hopefully, now that he had a whole set of dry clothes to soak again.

‘Tea now,' said Poppy.

It went well enough. Baked beans and ice cream for the children, tea and digestives for the adults. Toby was too interested in his surroundings to feed himself with proper attention, so spread his meal lavishly in the general area of his mouth. Deborah concentrated on eating with the same attention as that with which she could concentrate on her scream. At home she seemed a half-different child, a handful still, but neat and self-possessed.

Poppy, meanwhile, coped with Mrs Capstone's inquisition. Mrs Capstone had that kind of quick, superficial intelligence which needs to be fed a mass of fact which it will then store with great efficiency, so that if they were to meet in a year's time she would immediately know Poppy's name and ask whether there were any more grand­children in New Zealand and what her doctor son-in-law thought of the health system there. The process wasn't mechanical. She was genuinely­ interested, within the limits of a not very subtle imagination. Long ago Poppy, faced with the occasional need to account for her separation from Derek and knowing the impossibility of explaining­ (even to herself) the involved, self-generating network of motives and actions, of understandings and misunderstandings, which had led to the event, had decided it was simplest to say flatly ‘He left me for a younger woman.' This was at least true, though really a crude and, in a way, unimportant part of the truth.

Mrs Capstone sighed, shook the blonde waves and said just as flatly ‘They will do it.'

There it was. Life. Airlines overbooked flights. Maintenance engineers failed to keep appointments after you'd waited in for them all day. Boys hit tennis bails through neighbours' conservatories. Men left wives for younger women. Not impersonal facts, but all worth a perfectly genuine brisk sigh. It was easy to see why Peony had found her kind.

‘But your son is still in England?'

The awkward moment was coming. Not that Poppy intended to lie, or even to conceal the truth if the conversation came anywhere near it. Mrs Capstone was perfectly capable of handling the trivial contretemps with complete aplomb, but the danger was that she might be able to make something of it later, to Janet's disadvantage.

‘Hugo, yes. He's in charge of the legal list at an academic publisher's. I can't say …'

‘Deborah, no!'

Poppy turned her head and saw that while Deborah had finished her ice-cream Toby, having smeared large dollops round his cheeks, was now engaged in seeing whether by piling what was left in his bowl up into a mound he could convert it from its semi-liquid state back into its original solid. Ice-cream wasn't regular fare at Abdale Grove; so this wasn't an experiment he'd been able to try recently. Absorbed, he seemed not to notice as Deborah leaned across and scraped a blob of ice-cream off his face. The spoon paused in mid-air at her mother's command. Then, with a look of defiant smugness, she popped her booty into the neat round of her mouth. Poppy laughed. Encouraged Deborah reached out for more.

‘You can put her down now, Peony,' said Mrs Capstone. ‘I think Toby's really finished too,' said Poppy. ‘Shall I clean you up, darling?'

‘Num gone?'

‘Yes. It melts if you don't eat it up. That's why you have to keep it in the fridge.'

He nodded and let her remove the bowl and wipe his face with kitchen paper.

‘He can't really understand that,' said Mrs Capstone.

‘No, of course not, but he likes to have things explained. He knows there've got to be explanations. It's no use just saying “Don't touch. Hot.” You have to tell him about electrons jiggling around to make it hot or something like that.'

‘You're lucky to have the time. You were telling me about your son—Hugo, you said—law publishing. I imagine that's been …'

Rescue again, and what for an instant Poppy thought was a theatrical mask being poked round the door.

‘Daddydaddydaddydaddydaddy,' squealed Deborah and rushed across the room. The man picked her up as he came in and held her bouncing on his arm and yelling his name. The mask effect had been only an accident of light, enhanced by the angle at which he had held his head. His features were acceptably human, though emphatically modelled on the large head, with strong black eyebrows slashed across prominent brows, a bony nose and a wide, hard mouth. He was of medium height but very broad-shouldered, the sort of build no tailoring seems to fit. His pale grey suit looked expensive but was still under strain.