Rebuilding Coventry (21 page)

‘Mrs
Ruth Lambert?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m a
policeman [though not for long, not for bloody long!]. Your niece and nephew
have come to meet you; they’re outside, near the cab rank. I’ll watch your
luggage for you.’

42
Practicalities

Podger’s official car,
containing Podger, Nicholas Cutbush and a Secret Service officer called Natasha
Krantz, drove into a VIP entrance at the back of the airport and parked.

Podger
was still distraught. Before the car arrived he had told his wife everything;
about Jaffa, about his mistress, and about other marital and financial
infidelities. Once he’d started he couldn’t stop. To his surprise his patrician
wife had gone berserk and attacked him in his own bathtub. She had screamed and
had hysterics and turned the shower attachment on and directed scalding water
onto his unprotected genitals. With vicious malignity she had shouted, ‘Don’t
expect
me
to stand by you and play the brave little woman and be
photographed hand in hand with you walking on the lawn. There’s no
way
we’re
going to pose for the press patting the sodding Labrador, you bastard! If this
scandal breaks I shall sue for divorce. I’m not cut out for martyrdom! I will
not do a Mary Archer!’

Podger
had smeared Vaseline onto his sore pink genitals under his wife’s Medusa-like
gaze. He wouldn’t have minded being turned to stone then and there. Anything
was better than getting through the days that lay ahead. He had an appointment
with the PM in the morning. They were to discuss law and order. His penis
shrivelled at the thought.

With
his companions Podger got out of the car and shuffled painfully along
corridors, and then into a VIP ante-room where Dodo was waiting, as had
previously been arranged.

‘What’s
wrong, Podgie?’ said Dodo. ‘You look as though you’ve pooed your pants.’

Podger
lowered his haunches into a chair with great circumspection. He wished that he
had taken his genitalia to a doctor, but there had been no time and anyway
wouldn’t the mutual embarrassment be even more painful than the scalds? The
celebrity of his face seemed to make the ordinariness of his sexual organs
harder to bear. Nicholas ordered the Security officer to cheek the room for
listening devices and hidden cameras. Natasha Krantz appeared to do a thorough
job, even to the extent of fetching step-ladders and unscrewing the recessed
lighting in the ceiling. Nobody spoke until she said, “Sclean, sir.’

‘Now
check my sister.’

Natasha
set her face and frisked Dodo. ‘Clean, sir.’

‘Where’s
your murdering friend?’ said Nicholas.

‘She’ll
be here soon,’ replied Dodo. Then, ‘Have you brought everything I asked for,
Nick?’

Natasha
Krantz opened her brief-ease and took out bundles of money and various
documents. Dodo opened her black bag and gave Ms Krantz the passport
photographs and Ms Krantz began to change the official identities of Coventry
and Dodo. Their new names were suited to their class and accents. Dodo became
Miss Angela Stafford-Clark, birthplace: Leamington Spa; and Coventry was about
to mutate into Ms Suzanne Lowe, birthplace: Nottingham.

43
Parting

It was Natasha Krantz who
parted me from my children. ‘You must come now! Now! Say goodbye and come!’ She
peeled their hands away from my waist and neck and, very sternly, said: ‘You
did not see your mother tonight, did you?’ They shook their lovely blond heads.

‘And
you did not see me?’ Again they shook their heads.

‘Now
say goodbye to your mother; she must go.’ Splinters in the brain.

44
The Sun Rises in the
East

‘Please don’t cry, Jaffa
darling. I can’t bear it. Nicholas, give her your handkerchief’

‘It’s
silk,
it’s not meant to be used.’

Podger
proffered his and I took it and covered my face in white linen. I could look
nobody in the eye. I had turned my back on nature. I was an outcast, a pariah.
Murder was a mere triviality compared to my most recent outrageous act. That of
leaving my children.

Dodo
forced something between my fingers, thin, hard, rectangular. I removed the
handkerchief and saw a navy book. I opened it and read my new name: Ms Suzanne
Lowe, birthplace: Nottingham. The pages of Suzanne’s passport were stamped
with visas to America and Australia and India.

‘Did
you do the impossible, Podger?’ said Dodo. Podger indicated that Natasha Krantz
would speak for him.

‘Yes,
it was done.’ She handed Dodo some sheets of paper. Dodo looked at them and
sighed.

‘Wonderful,
thank you. When does it leave?’

Natasha
said, ‘They owe us a favour, they have diverted a plane from Paris. You will be
most unpopular with the other passengers. Now, where is the photo?’

Dodo
gave Podger the polaroid photograph that had caused so much trouble. He tried
to tear it in half, gave up and sat with it on his painful lap.

‘You
have copies, of course,’ said Podger.

‘Of
course,’ replied Dodo. ‘They’re in the post.’

‘You fucking
little cow, you’ve ruined my marriage and probably my career.’ Podger’s eyes
sparkled with angry tears. He put the photograph into an ashtray and set fire
to it. We all watched as the image twisted and melted and eventually turned in
on itself.

Dodo
said: ‘Cheer up, Podger old love; you’ve still got the mistress and the bank
balance, not to mention the English Establishment behind you. Things could be
worse.’

‘We
should have had them killed,’ burst out Nick. ‘None of us will sleep easy in
our beds ever again.’

I know
that I got on a bus and then a plane; and that I felt the plane accelerate,
then rise, bank and turn towards the East. I remember looking out of the little
window and seeing the airport lights in the far distance. Somewhere, down
there, were my children, preparing to go home. And down there with them, now
left behind, were Miss Coventry Lambert, my parents’ daughter; Mrs Derek Dakin,
my husband’s wife; Margaret Dakin, my son’s invention; Lauren McSkye, Bradford
Keynes’s student; and Jaffa, Dodo’s friend.

‘Where
are we going?’ asked Suzanne Lowe.

‘To
Moscow,’ was the unexpected reply.

45
Edna Dakin Takes to the
Road

Coventry’s mother-in-law,
Edna Dakin, was only half listening to her son Derek. The other half of her
attention was focused on the street outside where, as usual, nothing was
happening. She saw another woman of her own age group looking forlornly out of
her window. Edna thought, ‘It’s these awful buildings; they’ve put a spell on
us, a dreary grey spell. Why haven’t we got colours and patterns and plants
that grow up walls like they have abroad? No wonder we don’t want to walk about
in the ugly plain streets they’ve built for us.

‘And
that new community centre!’ Edna scoffed. ‘Nasty low echoing concrete thing
that
is. I used to work in a laundry which was more comfortable and pretty than
that.’ Edna felt a huge rage swell inside her chest as she looked out upon the
rows of identical concrete houses stretching down the hill. ‘No wonder the kids
broke the young trees,’ she thought. ‘It’s because they can’t wait for them to
grow.

‘And
those terrible shops! Which they call a
Parade,
a parade of shops. Ha!
But a parade is a nice thing, a celebration. You wave a flag at a parade. You
don’t buy your groceries at one. And why is there nowhere for children to play?’
asked Edna in her mind. ‘They ought at least to learn how to play before they
go on the dole.’

‘Mum,
are you listening?’

She
turned her slummocky body round to face her son. What a little runt he was! How
did he end up with Coventry, so beautiful that she turned heads where’er she
walked? Like the song.

‘Mum,
you’re making a noise.’

‘I’m
humming an old song: “Where’er she walks, cool vales …”‘

‘But we’re
having a conversation …’

‘No, we’re
not, Derek. It takes two to have a conversation and, as usual, you’re talking
and I’m forced to listen.’

‘Mum!
Aren’t you well?’

‘I’m as
well as somebody can be who’s bored out of her bleedin’ brains.’

‘Mum! I’ve
never heard you use bad language before.’

‘Oh, I
use it quite a bit when I’m on my own indoors. I ‘eff and blind like mad. I
enjoy swearing.’

‘You’re
not well, are you? It’s all this worry about Coventry, isn’t it?’

‘Funny
Derek, but I’m not worried about her at all. I’m sort of pleased for her. I
wish I’d done the same.’

‘What!
Murdered someone?’

‘No.
The running away bit. I mean,
it’s exciting,
isn’t it? She could be
anywhere: Timbuctoo, Constantinople, Land’s End, anywhere. Better than living
round here and going to the shops once a day. I’ve decided I hate my life,
Derek. I’m having a go at changing it.’

‘How?’

‘Well,
for a start, I’m having driving lessons.’

‘Driving
lessons? You’ll kill yourself!’

‘No I
won’t. I’m quite a sensible woman, and there
is
such a thing as dual
controls, you know.’

‘It’s
ridiculous. How can you afford a car? You’re a pensioner.’

‘When I
pass my test, I’ll cash in my funeral insurance.’

‘You
can’t do that, what about the coffin you wanted — and the mourners’ cars? And
the sit-down funeral tea?’

Mrs Dakin
laughed at the panic-stricken expression on her son’s face. ‘Let the council
burn me up. I’ve paid ‘em enough rates over the years.’

A car
hooter sounded outside. Derek got up and went to the window. A driving school
car was parked at the kerb. A young man was settling himself into the passenger
seat.

‘That’ll
be him,’ said Mrs Dakin. She turned the gas fire off, picked up her handbag and
went into the hall.

“Bye
Derek,’ she said, pointedly.

They
left the house together. Derek walked away without looking back.

He
heard an engine revving fiercely, then the driving school car accelerated past
him with his old mother at the wheel. She papped the hooter and waved. Derek
watched as the car vanished over the brow of the hill. In his opinion the car
was exceeding the speed limit by at least fifteen miles an hour. He made a note
of the name of the driving school: Surepass. He would telephone them when he
got home and report the instructor who was supposed to be teaching his mother
to obey the laws of the road.

Derek
wondered why all the women he knew appeared to be going mad. It wasn’t just
members of his own family. The girls at work were getting stroppy: demanding
things, more money, improved conditions, flexi-hours. And hadn’t women’s
voices got louder? Weren’t their clothes gaudier and their bodies taller and
more imposing? Derek lumbered home, like a dinosaur unhappily parted from its
swamp, uneasily sensing that the climate was changing.

Epilogue

Six months to the day have
passed since Coventry ran away from her home and family. Since then a Russian
Christmas card has arrived at Badger’s Copse Close addressed to ‘the children’.
There was no message. The inside of the card was completely blank, but the
children knew who it was from.

RUTH
Has stopped taking her contraceptive pills. Sidney doesn’t know.
Ruth will not inform him until she is twenty-nine weeks’ pregnant.

SIDNEY
Has been promoted: he is now Area Manager for the East Midlands, a
total of thirty-seven stores. Since his promotion sales figures have increased
dramatically. One of Sidney’s first recommendations to head office was that
all references to ‘Shops’ should be changed to ‘Centres’.

HORSEFIELD
Is living in a caravan with Barbara and Matthew just outside
Cambridge. He attends a theological college. He is very happy, he doesn’t know
that Barbara isn’t.

PODGER
Thinks about Coventry as soon as he opens his eyes in the morning.
He is alone in the double bed. His wife has left him and is living with a
Labour candidate. One of Podger’s arteries is furring up. He doesn’t know this,
and won’t until the blood fails to get through to his heart on 2 August 1992.