Thirteen Steps Down (16 page)

time for a servant's troubles,but Gwendolen observed the change in the

girl's figure. She was with her more than the other occupants of the

house.

"You're beginning to get stout, Bertha," she said, using a favorite word

applied to others in the vocabulary of the skeletal Chawcers. Gwendolen

was too innocent and ignorant to suspect the truth, and when Bertha

confessed it she was deeply shocked.

"But you can't be expecting, Bertha. You're only seventeen and you

can't have ... " Gwendolen couldn't bring herself to go on.

"As far as that goes, miss, I could have ever since I was eleven, but I

never did and now I am. You won't tell the missus or your dad, will you?"

It was an easy promise for Gwendolen to make. She would have died

before she mentioned such things to the professor. As for her mother,

she couldn't forget how once, when she whispered to Mrs. Chawcer, with

much shame and diffidence, of an old man who had exposed himself to

her, she had been told never to utter such words again and to wash her

mouth

out with soap.

"What will you do with the baby?"

"There won't be a baby, miss. I've got the name and address of someone

who'll get rid of it for me."

Gwendolen was not so much in deep waters as in an unknown country

peopled with men and women who did forbidden things and spoke a

language of words that should never be uttered, a land of mystery and

discomfort and ugliness and danger. She wished very much that she

hadn't asked Bertha why she was gaining weight. It never occurred to

her to be sorry for this young girl who worked ten hours a day for them

and was paid very little for performing tasks their own class would

shudder to think of. It never entered her mind to put herself in Bertha's

shoes and imagine the disgrace which would come to an unmarried

mother or the horror of watching herself grow so large that further

deception was impossible. She was curious rather against her will, but

afraid and anxious to be,uninvolved.

"You'll be all right then," she said brightly.

"Miss, can I ask you something?"

"I expect so," said Gwendolen with a smile.

"When I go to him, would you come with me?"

Gwendolen thought this an impertinence. She had been brought up to

expect deference from servants and indeed everyone from a "lower class."

But her shyness and her fear of the different and of things she hadn't

experienced wasn't absolute. Curiosity was a novelty for her but she felt

it worm its way into her mind and wait there, trembling. She might see a

little more of this new country which had unprecedently opened its

borders to her. Instead of replying to Bertha with a sharp, "Do you know

whom you're speaking to?" she said, quite meekly but with an increased

beating of the heart, "Yes, if you like."

The street was squalid, with the old chimney of an iron foundry at the

far end of it, the Metropolitan Railway from Ladbroke Grove to Latimer

Road running nearby and above ground. The man they had come to see

lived at number 10. It smelled and it was dirty. The kitchen was

furnished with two deckchairs. Christie might have been in his forties or

past fifty,it was hard to tell. He was a tallish but slight man with a

beakyface and thick glasses and he seemed dismayed to see Gwendolen.

Later on she understood why. Of course she did. He wanted no one else

to know Bertha had been there. She refused to sit down. Bertha took one

of the chairs and Christie the other. Perhaps she had antagonized him or

perhaps he onlyever dealt with his clients tete-a-tete, but he immediately

said he would want to see Bertha alone. For chaperonage, his wife would

be present. Gwendolen never saw the wife nor heard anything of her. All

they would do now, Christie said, was make an appointment for the

examination and the "treatment,"but Miss Chawcer must go. Everything

that passed between himself and his patient must be confidential.

"I won't be long, miss," Bertha said. "If you'd wait for me at the end of

the street, I won't be a minute."

Another impertinence, but Gwendolen did wait. Various passersby

stared at her with her carefully made-up face, hair permed into sausage

curls and her full-skirted, tight-fitting blue dress. One man whistled at

her and Gwendolen's discomfort showed in her darkly flushed cheeks.

Eventually Bertha came. "I won't be a minute" was true. She had been at

least ten. The appointment was for Bertha's next day off, a week ahead.

"I'm not to tell anyone, miss, and you mustn't."

But Christie had frightened her. Although Mrs. Christie wasn't there, he

had done some strange intimate things, asked her to open her mouth so

that he could look down her throat with a mirror on the end of a rod, and

asked her to lift her skirt up to mid-thigh level.

"I've got to go back, miss, haven't I? I can't have a baby, not unless I'm

married."

Gwendolen felt she ought to have asked about the father of the child,

who he was and where he was, did he know about the baby and was

there a chance of his marrying Bertha if he did. Itwas too embarrassing,

it was too sordid. At home, in the quiet and civilized atmosphere of St.

Blaise House, seated comfortably among cushions on the sofa, she was

reading Proust, and had reached Volume 7. No one in Proust ever had

babies. She retired into her cocooned world.

Bertha never went back to Christie. She was too frightened. By the time

Gwendolen read about his murders in the papers, the young women who

came to his house for abortions or cures for catarrh, his wife, perhaps

too the woman and baby upstairs, it was 1953 and Bertha long gone.

She left before the child was born, and someone married her, though

whether itwas the father Gwendolen never knew. The whole thing

washorribly sordid. But she never forgot her visit to RillingtonPlace and

how Bertha too might so easily have been one of those women immured

in cupboards or buried in the garden.

Bertha--she hadn't thought of her for years. The visit to Christie's house

must have been three or four years before his trial and execution. It

wasn't worth wasting time looking for the 1949 calendar but what else

had she to do with her time? Read, of course. She had long finished

Middlemarch, reread Carlyle's French Revolution and completed some of

the works of Arnold Bennett, though she considered them too light to

spend much time on. Today she would start on Thomas Mann. She had

never read him, a dreadful omission, though they had all his works

somewhere in the many bookcases.

The British Fungi calendar for 1949--what a ridiculous subject!--she

found after searching for an hour, in a room on the top floor, next door to

Mr. Cellini's flat. In the night gone by, more the hour or so before dawn,

she had been awakenedby a scream and a thud she thought came from

there but shewas probably mistaken. This was one of the rooms which

the professor had insisted it wasn't necessary to have wired for

electricity. Gwendolen had been a child at the time but she remembered

quite clearly the wiring of the lower floors, the men taking up floorboards

and making great caves in the plaster of walls. This morning was bright

and hot, light flooding in from the window on which the curtains had

fallen into rags sometime in the thirties and never been replaced. It was

several years since she had been up here, she couldn't remember when

had been the last time.

The bookcase, a store place for ancient, never very readable books there

was no room for downstairs, novels by Sabine Baring-Gould and R. D.

Blackmore among bound numbers of Victorian journals, The Complete

Works of Samuel Richardson,and Darwin's The Origin of Species.No

Thomas Mann. Perhaps she would reread Darwin instead. She looked in

the drawers underneath the shelves. Blunt pencils and elastic bands and

receipted bills filled them, along with pieces of broken china in labeled

bags someone must have intended to repair but neverhad. The big chest

of drawers was her last hope. Taking the fewsteps that would bring her

to it, she tripped and would have fallen but for grabbing hold of the top

of the chest. One of the floorboards stuck out perhaps half an inch above

the rest.

Bending over as best she could, she peered at the floor. He rreading

glasses were in one pocket of her cardigan and the magnifying glass in

the other. She made use of them. The boards appeared not to be nailed

down but they must be and the glasses weren't strong enough for her to

see. How odd. Perhaps it was the damp making one of them protrude.

There was a lot of it in this old house, rising damp and whatever the

other kind was. With some difficulty, she got down on her knees, her

joints cracking, and felt the surface of the protrudingboard. Quite dry.

Odd, she thought. And all those littleholes were odd too, dozens of them

peppering the woodwork. But perhaps it was always like that and she

had never noticed.On her feet again, she began to examine the chest.

The fungicalendar came to light in the second drawer she looked

through, and with it was one of those letters from a property developer,

offering her huge sums to sell her house, this one dated 1998. "Why on

earth had she put it there five years before? She couldn't remember but

she was sure the floorboard hadn't been that way then.

The calendar she took over to the window, the better to read her own

handwriting. There it was, for 16June, a Thursday."Accompanied B. to

house in Rillington Place." She recalled writing that but not the entry for

the following day, "Think I may have flu but new doctor says no, only a

cold." The rapid beating of her heart began again and she felt th eneed to

put her hand over her ribs as if to hold it still. That wast he first time she

had met him. She had gone to the Ladbroke Grove surgery, waited in the

waiting room for old Dr. Smyth, but the man who opened the door and

smiled, ushering her in, was Stephen Reeves.

Gwendolen let the hand holding the calendar fall down t oher side, and

going back in time to her first sight of him in her youth and his, gazed

almost unseeing out of the window. Otto lay sleeping on the wall, the

crinolined birds pottered about in their wilderness as their owner in a

white turban came down the path with corn to feed them. She saw

Stephen, his bright smiling eyes, his dark hair, heard him say, "Not

many folks waiting this morning. And what can I do for you?"

The weekend would have passed with Danila's disappearance going

unnoticed but for Kayleigh Rivers waking up with a bad cold. Danila had

worked at Shoshana's Spa every weekday from 8 A.M. till 4 P.M. and

Kayleigh worked there on Saturdays and Sunday mornings and every

evening from four till eight. Kayleigh tried calling Danila on her mobile to

ask her if she'ddo her weekend and when she got no reply, called Madam

Shoshana.

"She's still asleep, isn't she?" Shoshana said. "Like I was. She's got her

mobile switched off. Look at the time."

She waited till eight. The spa didn't open till nine on Saturdays."When

she rang Danila's mobile all she got was dead silence. It might be early,

but it was too late to get a temp. She paid her girls--illegally-ten pounds

a week below the minimum wage but Kayleigh needn't think she was

paying her for pretending to be ill. As for Danila ... Shoshana understood

she was going to have to do it herself and she heaved herself unwillingly

out of bed. In spite of owning and running a fashionable gym and beauty

clinic with manicurist and pedicurist, waxing and electrolysis studio,

aromatherapist and salt baths unit, Shoshana paid no personal attention

to herself or any of these things and didn't wash much. "When you got

older youdidn't need more than a once-weekly bath and an occasional

dip for hands, face, and feet. Patchouli, cedarwood, cardamom,and

nutmeg covered up any possible odors.

She visited the spa itself as little as possible. It interested he ronly

insofar as it made money. Exercise and beauty treatments, keeping fit

and retaining youth, bored her and when she satdownstairs at the

receipt of custom, she tended to fall asleep. Her grandfather and then her

mother had run hairdressing establishments, so it had seemed the

natural thing to carry on, only on her own terms and with her own ideas

in a contemporary form. She would really have liked to be a guru,

founder of her own mystic cult, but had been obliged to compromise and

settle for soothsaying.

In the underclothes she had taken off the night before with a baggy red

velvet dress on top and a knitted shawl, she glanced into the mirror.

Even to her uninterested eyes her hair looked in a bad state, dry and

sprinkled white with dandruff. She tied it up in a red and purple scarf,

rinsed her hands, splashed water on her face, and stumped downstairs.

Her temper, never sunny,was going from bad to worse. She had intended

to spend the day at a field event organized by her water-divining teacher.

A final attempt at getting hold of Danila failed and Shoshana perched