The Second-last Woman in England (14 page)
The traffic along Piccadilly was like a funeral procession and the cab crawled along at barely five miles an hour before coming to a complete halt at Hyde Park Corner. Cecil peered out of the window to take his mind off his growing frustration.
The day had begun unpromisingly when a low and menacing bank of apparently unending grey clouds had settled over London. Now, seemingly against all odds, the sky had brightened and, as the cab slunk through Knightsbridge, a shaft of sunlight shone down in a way that made one suddenly appreciate being alive, and made Cecil glad he had abandoned habit and decided to come home for lunch.
‘Just drop me here, driver,’ he called, leaning forward to tap on the glass. An impulse (the second impulse in an hour!) urged him to quit the cab and walk the remaining distance in the sunshine. It would probably be quicker, in any case. ‘Thank you, my good man,’ and he threw in a small tip.
He rarely walked along Old Brompton Road and certainly never found himself in Old Brompton Road at lunchtime on a Monday. The road was busy with late morning shoppers, mothers with smart prams and smartly turned out babies, neatly attired shopgirls on their lunch breaks, bank clerks carrying packets of sandwiches in search of benches to sit on. It was perfect. London functioning exactly as London had for two millennia: mothers and babies, commerce, life. It made him proud to be a functioning part of a functioning city.
He turned left into Palmerston Terrace, then into Athelstan Gardens with a pleasant sense of homecoming just as the sun slid beneath a large bank of dirty brown cloud and a few spots of rain began to fall. But he would make it home before the shower took hold. The private garden was deserted, as though everyone had anticipated the turn in the weather. Not even the wretched elderly couple, who seemed as permanent a fixture as the pigeons, were there.
I ought to have telephoned ahead, Cecil realised, the awkwardness of arriving home unannounced and unexpected in the middle of the day striking him keenly. His pace slowed. Harriet would think it very strange. But Harriet was out. And damn it, it’s my house, he reasoned.
He picked up his pace again and began to cross the road, seeing for the first time a couple standing just inside the padlocked gate. So the garden had not been empty; the privet hedge had simply obscured them, and indeed one of the two people in the garden appeared to be Harriet.
And the other person was Freddie.
Cecil paused, forgetting for one dizzying moment how to walk. He willed his legs to move onwards and they jerked forwards stiffly. It could not be Freddie. Freddie had gone abroad.
The man said something indistinctly and repositioned his hat. It was Freddie. No question about it.
Keep moving. Don’t let them see you.
Cecil continued walking yet it was impossible not to look back. They hadn’t moved. Harriet was saying something with a frown, looking off behind her—not this way, thank God. Something final had been said and now they were embracing, briefly, almost bitterly.
Keep walking, eyes straight ahead. Don’t look back.
When he turned again Harriet had come through the gate and was walking briskly across the road towards the house without a backward glance, apparently not having noticed him. Freddie, too, had crossed the road but was walking in the other direction, back towards Old Brompton Road, his head down, thoughts somewhere else.
Cecil kept on walking, past the house and round the corner into Fulham Road. He ought to have telephoned first.
Jean watched from the window of her room as three storeys below, on the far side of the street in the enclosed confines of that unwelcoming and closed-off garden, Mrs Wallis embraced the young man. Then she strode from him with her head held high as though she had no conscience at all. And the man stood and watched her go, then he too left.
Mrs Wallis wore a spotted black and white head scarf, the sort of head scarf the new Queen wore at Sandringham, and a large pair of sunglasses and a long raincoat that covered her from neck to mid-calf. She was dressed like someone who did not wish to be recognised. But someone
had
recognised her. Two people, in fact. Herself and another—and it looked very much like Mr Wallis.
She had watched him as he drew almost level with the two lovers and began to cross the road. His step faltered, then he continued on his way, though now his head was bowed.
Was
it Mr Wallis? All the men in this street wore identical raincoats and hats and brandished the same rolled umbrella. But something about the way he walked, the angle of his head, the curve of that slightly beaked nose, told her it was him. She recognised him even from three storeys up. And she had summoned him.
Just as God had summoned her here.
She had gone to the Festival of Britain—and so had a great many other people that day.
It had been a hot and dry Saturday in early August, last year, and she had gone with the O’Riordans—Eddie and his brother, Liam—and Liam’s girl, Maureen. The O’Riordans were Mrs McIlwraith’s sister’s boys and Jean had had misgivings right from the start.
They were Catholics, of course, and Dad did not approve of Catholics. One of the O’Riordan sisters was an unmarried mother and the older boy was on remand at Brixton. But what had it mattered by then, by that hot Saturday in August when Dad had been gone six years already?
Liam’s girl, Maureen, had said, ‘Come with us, Jean. Us girls, we got to stick to together’. What Maureen had meant by this was hard to say, but Jean had agreed, because it was the Festival and she was a little excited, though she made it clear it was with Maureen that she was going.
And so it had turned out … as far as the bus stop on Commercial Road. As soon as the number 11 turned up Maureen and Liam had hopped down the back and made it pretty clear they didn’t need any company.
‘Back seat for us then, Jean?’ Eddie had asked her with a wink and she had glared at him and taken a seat directly behind the driver.
‘You can forget any of that funny business, Eddie O’Riordan. I’m not interested. I’m just here to see the Festival.’
And so, it turned out, was everyone else. The Festival site was heaving that Saturday; they seemed to have chosen the most popular day of the year for their visit.
‘Right then, where’s the beer tent?’ said Liam, standing on the riverbank and staring all about him as though he expected to see a large sign that read:
Welcome to the Festival of Britain—beer tent this way
.
There hadn’t been a beer tent. Instead there had been striped umbrellas and open-air cafés. There had been a funny little railway and a Mississippi Showboat and a spindly metal spiral staircase that went up and up but didn’t go anywhere. And a vast silvery pointy thing hanging in the air, pointy-end downwards, so that you wondered how it stayed up. Everyone ate ice-cream and strode about in 3-D Polaroid spectacles, wandering in and out of the pavilions. One pavilion showed you what the world would be like in the future. It had a car from the future which made Eddie whistle appreciatively and Liam said, ‘It ain’t no good, Eddie, me old son—ain’t got no back seat’, and he and Maureen had giggled.
‘Ships and Sea Pavilion,’ read Eddie as they stood outside the next hall. ‘Sounds boring.’ He paused to light a cigarette.
They had eaten their ice-creams and worn their 3-D Polaroid spectacles until the cardboard had rubbed a sore spot on the bridges of their noses. They had drunk four pints of Bass at the Festival Bar (well, Eddie and Liam had—Maureen had had a gin and orange, thank you very much, and Jean had had a cup of tea), they had ridden on the paddle steamer and Liam and Eddie had taken turns seeing who could spit the furthest over the side, and now Eddie was getting restless.
‘Where them other two got to, then?’ he had muttered, irritably thrusting his 3-D spectacles further up his nose, then pulling them off and tossing them into the river. Liam and Maureen had had a row outside the Dome of Discovery. Something to do with a girl in a red hat and a man whom Liam had thought was the girl’s father and who had turned out to be her fella.
‘There’s Maureen,’ said Jean pointing. Maureen could just be seen clipping angrily through the crowd on her very high heels some distance ahead of them.
‘Leave ’er, moody cow … Blimey, what’s this?’ said Eddie, pointing through the entrance-way of the Ships and Sea Pavilion with his cigarette. It was the front of a huge ship, the pointed bit. MV
Titania
it said in black lettering on the side. It was so big you had to crane your neck to see the top and it must have scraped the roof of the pavilion near enough, even though the pavilion was so big.
‘Where’s the rest of it, then?’ called Eddie as they walked around to the side of the giant hull, and Jean could see that it was really just the front bit of the ship and the rest of the ship wasn’t there at all, which was a bit of a swiz. Jean followed Eddie into a small room that was made up to look like the ship’s engine-room and there were noises and sudden bursts of steam that made a small girl burst into tears. Her mother led her out and Eddie made a grab for one of the levers.
‘Hey, look at me! Full steam ahead!’
‘Careful! Don’t break it, Eddie!’
‘I ain’t breakin’ it, am I! It’s fake, innit? It ain’t goin’ nowhere. ’Ere, you know what? Me old man worked in one of these. Hundred degree heat in midwinter, he used to say, while the toffs is bein’ served gin and wotsits upstairs.’
‘You said your old Dad worked the Woolwich ferry.’
‘Same difference. Here, Jean, how’s about it?’ and he grabbed her and pulled her close and tried to kiss her.
‘Give over, Eddie. I told you I weren’t interested.’ She could feel one of the levers pressing painfully into her back and she pushed him away. An elderly couple appeared in the doorway and stared at them both with a frown. ‘Well,
really!
’ said the man.
‘What you lookin’ at, Grandad?’ demanded Eddie menacingly.
Alarmed, the couple backed rapidly out.
Jean pushed furiously past Eddie. She was tired and hungry and a little sick from all the ice-cream and the 3-D Polaroid spectacles had given her a headache. Why had Eddie even come here? Just so that he could act the fool with Liam and get drunk and make fun of everyone and embarrass her in front of all these people and spoil it for them all? She threw her spectacles in a rubbish bin and marched off.
There was Maureen, standing in the distance near the entrance to the pavilion smoking an angry cigarette, tapping her foot furiously. Of Liam there was no sign. He’d be for it when he did eventually turn up, that was certain. Jean veered towards her. At least she and Maureen could leave together—that was a bit more dignified than flouncing off home on your own. But a large group of nuns appeared out of nowhere and in the swirling black confusion of habits and wimples Jean lost her bearings, and when she looked again Maureen had gone. She waited and walked up and down for a bit, but there was no sign of her.
So be it. If they had chosen to desert her, she would go home on her own.
The nuns reappeared out of nowhere, surrounding her in an excitable cluster like pigeons at Trafalgar Square, and suddenly it felt as though everyone had chosen that exact moment to visit the Ships and Sea Pavilion.
Jean fought her way through the swirling black mass, using her elbows for leverage, until finally she was back at the huge hull of the
Titania
. Then she saw where the nuns had just been and why they had so suddenly emerged and were twittering so excitedly: beside the hull was a small room made up to look like the first-class cabin of a luxury liner, complete with two neat little compartments cut into the cabin wall containing beds, and a porthole overlooking a picture of the sea. There were little red curtains across both berths and if you pulled one aside what you saw wasn’t just a neat little berth, you saw Eddie. And Maureen. Lying on the bed, having it away.
‘Excuse me, I need to get past,’ she said, pushing past a young couple who were rooted, wide-eyed, to the spot right behind her.
She couldn’t seem to find her way out of this wretched pavilion; instead she found her face practically pressed up against a large glass display case. What was inside the glass case she could not make out; there was only the image of Maureen and Eddie, obliterating all else.
