Rebuilding Coventry (19 page)

Only
one more plane is due from the Algarve this evening. Our plan is to stand back
and wait for Sidney and Ruth to come through into the Arrivals lounge. We will
then follow them at a distance. We will be heavily disguised and when we
consider it safe, I will make myself known. I don’t know what will happen then.
I want to ask Sidney to look after my children until I can send for them and
look after them myself Again, I don’t know how Sidney will react. He pretends
not to like children but I’m sure he must have a soft spot for
my
kids.
They are so nice, I don’t see how anybody could dislike them. It is now over a
week since I saw them and in that time not an hour has gone by that I haven’t
thought about them. They are splinters in my brain. I will take them with me
everywhere I go for the rest of my life. Only my own death will release me from
them.

I haven’t
missed Derek. But I feel very sad about leaving him to cope on his own and I
hope he’ll find somebody to love him one day. A good listener, who likes
tortoises and can do the foxtrot, would be ideal.

Dodo
has been on the telephone to her brother for over twenty minutes. I don’t know
what she’s saying; all I know is that she looks serious and insistent and she
is doing most of the talking. I wish she would hurry; Sidney’s plane is due to
land in thirty-five minutes.

35
Podger’s World Collapses

Podger was in the bath
reading the
News of the World
when Nicholas Cutbush rang. His wife
answered the phone and at first refused to put the call through to their
en
suite
bathroom. ‘Honestly Nick, it’s the only time he gets to truly relax
all week, I’m furious with you.’

Nicholas
sounded hysterical as he said, ‘Unless I speak to him
now
he’ll be out
on his arse and reading the Sits Vac by Tuesday morning.’ So she put him
through and scrambled the phone, as she had scrambled the eggs earlier in the
day.

‘Nick,
what is it?’

‘My
bloody sister’s got a photograph of you fondling the left breast of a fugitive
murderess.’

‘Which
fugitive murderess?’

‘For fuck’s
sake, Podger, how many do you know?
Jaffa!
The dinner party. Caroline
took your pie…’

‘Oh
Jaffa.
She
did a murder? Christ!’

‘Christ
indeed. Jaffa is Coventry Dakin.’

‘Who?’

‘Coventry
Dakin, she smashed a bloke’s head in with a doll. It’s been on the front page
of every …’

‘Nick,
I’m finished.’

‘You’re
not, not yet. Dodo wants two false passports. ‘‘ Right.’

‘And,
of course, money.’

‘Of
course.’

‘Today.’

‘But it’s
Sunday afternoon.’

‘If she
doesn’t get them today she sends the photo round to Paul Foot in a minicab.’

‘Mike’s
nephew?’

‘Well
it wouldn’t be Paul Foot, chiropodist, would it? Or Paul Foot, interior
decorator? Yes, Paul Foot,
investigative journalist,
committed
socialist.’

‘Oh
God! Oh God! … Nick, this is in confidence. Herself the PM is announcing
the date of the by-elections tomorrow.’

‘Oh
lovely, marvellous, perfect timing.’ ‘Nick, shouldn’t I just resign?’

‘You’ve
only been doing the job a bloody month, if that.’

‘But
Profumo, Thorpe, Parkinson, Archer … We’ll never get away with …’

‘You
utter, utter prat, Podger. If we lose those by-elections the money will flood
out of the country and leave us up shit street.’

‘It was
your wife who took my photograph. It’s all your fault. One assumes when one
goes to dinner that one’s amongst friends or, at the very least, vetted
strangers.’

‘OK,
OK. Sorry Podge. Now calm down, calm down. Phone the Duty Officer and arrange
the passports. You know Dodo and Jaffa: both forty-ish, no distinguishing
marks, one dark, one redhead, both about five foot seven … they’re having
their passport photos taken now.’

‘All
right. Can I finish my bath now?’ ‘There’s something else, Podger.’ ‘Go on.’

‘You’ll
say it’s impossible, but it
has to be done.’

As
Podger listened the bath water cooled around his belly and the scum rose to the
surface.

36
I Face Myself

Dodo came off the phone
and said: ‘Let’s have our photograph taken in one of those dinky little booths.’

I chose
the blue background curtain, adjusted the winding stool and sat down and
composed myself in front of the mirror. I wanted to appear serious, clever,
happy, sad, sexy, detached, mysterious and kind; but when the sticky
photographs spewed out of the machine I was disappointed.

‘What
do you think?’ I asked Dodo, when she came back from wherever she’d been with a
set of stationery and stamps.

‘You
look pale, startled, and thoroughly forty,’ she said, putting the stamps on the
envelopes. Dodo doesn’t mince her words, she grinds them into paste. ‘What you
need, Jaffa dear, is a holiday.’

Dodo
went into the booth and stayed in there until eight photographs had been
taken. The first four were of Dodo, looking stern. The second four were of Dodo
laughing and holding up the photograph of me and Podger.

‘Just
for the record,’ she said, as she waved the second strip around in the air to
dry.

‘What
are you going to do with those?’ I asked.

‘Escape,’
she said. ‘And take you with me, if you want to come.’

‘Where
are we escaping to?’ I asked.

‘Anywhere
in the world,’ she said. ‘Perhaps the Welsh mountains.’ At the time I thought
she was joking, or perhaps fantasizing. She took my photographs from me and put
them inside her big leather shoulder-bag, saying, ‘They’ll be safer in here.’

I thought
it a strange thing to do because Dodo knows that I am very careful with my
possessions. I’ve never lost anything I didn’t want to lose. I’ve had the same
front door key for nineteen years, whereas my precious daughter Mary has lost
ten keys in four years. Oh my sweet, lovely Mary, I’m pining for you. How
surprised you’d be to read these words. We were not an openly affectionate
family. We stopped touching each other and swopping endearments long ago, and
became embarrassed and awkward in each other’s company.

I’m so
sorry this happened. Dearest Mary, I want you to stay on at school and have an
education; it’s the only dignified way out of Grey Paths Council Estate. We are
not lost to each other, Mary. We are bound by a cord far stronger than the
umbilical one that was cut and tied on the day you were born to me. Dear Mary,
don’t stoop and slouch, walk proudly with your shoulders back. And look around,
don’t look away. And speak out clearly, don’t mumble. Don’t lie or dissemble,
or only tell people what you think will please them. And don’t forget me, Mary.
Remember that I loved you. Oh, and try very hard not to lose your front door
key. And always, always, be kind.

Sidney’s
plane has landed! Dodo, who knows about these things, says that it takes at
least twenty minutes to get through Passport Control, Baggage Reclaim and
Customs. So, to kill more time we spend more of the stolen money and buy
sweaters, gloves, scarves, and woolly hats. Dodo says that we will need warm
clothes, but won’t say why. I think we are escaping to the Welsh mountains
after seeing Sidney. I hope so. Though I will look silly, not to mention conspicuous,
climbing mountains in my leopard-skin coat.

My
darling son went to Wales for a weekend when he was fourteen. The school
organized it, but it was a business called ‘Mobile Adventure’ that actually
took him and eight other children. They left our gently undulating county in a
minibus and drove to wild Wales and walked a mountain ridge. My son still had
his head in the clouds when he arrived home. I was pleased that he had seen
other horizons. A young woman called Andrea had been responsible for him
abseiling down a rock face.

Dear John,
I hope that you will never forget that you once put your life in such safe,
womanly hands.

37
Bradford Treads the Grey Paths

Bradford Keynes stood
outside Number 13 Badger’s Copse Close, Grey Paths Estate. He now knew that
Lauren McSkye was also Coventry Dakin and he loved her more than ever. He could
hardly believe that such a gorgeous woman had spent the majority of her adult
years in such an abysmal place, had been obliged to tread these rancid grey
pavements and look out upon such a lustreless landscape. He was not surprised
that such a passionate, full-blooded woman had resorted to murder. She was an
enchantress and needed to live in a magical place, not this pettifogging
collection of concrete and brick they called an estate. His artist’s eye was
repelled by the T-squared design of the houses, with their skimpy front doors
and meagre garden paths. He thought: ‘This is nothingness’ and he thanked a God
he didn’t believe in for his own quirky inner city terrace with its corner shop
and Lowry matchsticks walking by his front room window. He scorned the
nonsensical pseudo-Georgian front door and windows of Lauren’s house.

‘She’s
married to a parvenu,’ he thought and, fired by curiosity, he walked up the
path and rang the bell.

‘If I
Ruled the World’ chimed inside the house and Derek Dakin opened the door as far
as the security chain would allow. Bradford had not expected anybody so
old.
This guy must be forty-five at least. He had prepared nothing to say.

‘Mr
Dakin?’

‘Yes?’

‘I’m a
friend of your wife’s.’

‘I
don’t know you.’

‘No. I
did
say
I was a friend of your
wife’s.’

‘But I
know
both
of my wife’s friends. Are you sure you’ve got the right
address?’

‘Your
wife is a very talented artist.’

‘Yes,
you’ve got the wrong house, young man. Now, if you wouldn’t mind …’

‘Could
you give me something of hers? I’d like a keepsake, a token, something I can
hold …’

Bradford’s
bushy beard was poking through the chain length of the open door. He hadn’t
meant to sound so subservient, but he couldn’t pull himself together at all. Oh
the humiliation! He knew he would hate himself tomorrow. He’d read about love
and how it reduced people to staging histrionic scenes but he couldn’t believe
he was taking part in one himself. He’d learned, from reading Jung, that he was
an introvert.

‘A
handkerchief would do. Is there anything in the washing?’

‘No, go
away. Take your foot and your beard out of my hallway.’

‘I love
her, I love your wife and when I find her I’m going to take her away and keep
her to myself!’ Bradford hadn’t known he was capable of shouting with such
passion.

‘You’ll
wait for her to come out of prison, will you?’ said Derek.

‘Why?
Is she
in
prison?’

‘No,’
said Derek. ‘But when she’s captured she will be.’

‘Then I’ll
pitch a tent outside the prison gates.’

‘The
authorities would never allow it. You’d be contravening several by-laws.’

‘I’ll
hire a plane to fly over the prison. It will carry a banner: I LOVE YOU LAUREN
MCSKYE. She’d look out of her little barred window and see it.’

‘Lauren
McSkye?’ said Derek with relief. ‘I
said
you’d got the wrong address. My
wife’s name is Dakin, Mrs Derek Dakin.’

Derek
kicked Bradford’s foot out onto the doorstep and slammed the door, trapping the
end of the madman’s straggling beard. Bradford screamed in pain but Derek did
not dare risk opening the door and confronting the maniac again, so he hurried
to the kitchen, found the scissors and passed them out through the letter-box
to Bradford who was forced to trim his beard by four inches. Bradford posted
the ginger hairs back through the letter-box but Derek didn’t want to be
accused of theft, so he posted them back to Bradford. He had enough on his
plate: the children had been told to be home by two-thirty, but there was no
sign of them and it was now four-fifteen and their Sunday dinners were
dehydrating in the oven.

Derek
turned the gas down and went outside to his shed. He had his tortoises to
prepare for hibernation. ‘Lucky little things,’ said Derek, stroking the waving
prehistoric heads. ‘You’re well out of it.’

38
The Young Dakins Grow Up

The young Dakins got off
the coach at Gatwick and hurried into the Arrivals hall. They had quarrelled
throughout the journey. It was Mary’s idea to meet Uncle Sid and Aunty Ruth off
the plane. ‘We’ll ask Uncle Sid to drive us round London, perhaps we’ll see
Mum.’