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‘There’s a good girl. Stand up now and Angel will dry you.’ With Angel’s help, Lucy struggled to her feet. Water and foam dripped down her body. Eddie stared at the pink, glistening skin and the cleft between her legs.
‘Uncle Eddie will pass the towel.’
He hurried to obey. There had been an unmistakable note of irritation in Angel’s voice, perhaps brought on by tiredness. He noticed dark smudges under her eyes. He knew she had gone out the previous evening and had not returned until well after midnight. Eddie had tried the door to the basement while she was out, only to find that it was locked.
Angel wrapped the large pink towel, warm from the radiator, around Lucy’s body, lifted her out of the bath and sat her on her knee. Eddie thought they made a beautiful picture, a Pre-Raphaelite Virgin and child: Angel in her long white robe, her shining hair flowing free; and Lucy small, thin and sexless, swaddled in the towel, sitting on Angel’s lap and enclosed by her arms. He turned away. His head hurt this morning, and his throat was dry.
The clothes they had bought for Lucy were waiting on the chair. Among them was a dark-green dress from Laura Ashley, with a white lace collar, a smocked front and ties at each side designed to form a bow at the back. Angel liked her girls to look properly feminine. Boys were boys, she once told Eddie, girls were girls, and it was both stupid and unnatural to pretend otherwise.
‘Perhaps Lucy would like to play a game with me when she’s dressed,’ Eddie suggested.
The girl glanced at him, and a frown wrinkled her forehead.
‘She might like to see the you-know-what.’
‘The what?’ Angel said.
Eddie shielded his mouth with his hand, leaned towards her and whispered, ‘The conjuring set.’
He had bought it yesterday morning and he was longing to see Lucy’s reaction: all children liked presents, and often they showed their gratitude in delightful ways.
Angel rubbed Lucy’s hair gently. ‘Another day, I think. Lucy’s tired. Aren’t you, my pet?’
Lucy looked up at her, blinking rapidly as her eyes slid in and out of focus. ‘I want to go home. I want Mummy. I –’
‘Mummy and Daddy had to go away. Not for long. I told you, they asked me to look after you.’
The frown deepened. For Lucy, Eddie guessed, Angel’s certainty was the only fixed point among the confusion and the anxiety.
‘Now, now, poppet. Let’s see a nice big smile. We don’t like children who live on Sulky Street, do we?’
‘Perhaps if we played a game, it would take Lucy’s mind off things.’ Eddie removed his glasses and polished the lenses with the corner of a towel. ‘It would be a distraction.’
‘No.’ Angel picked up the little vest. ‘Lucy’s not well enough for that at present. When we’ve finished in here, I’m going to make her a nice drink and sit her on my knee and read a nice book to her.’
To his horror, Eddie felt tears filling his eyes. It was so unfair. ‘But with the others, we always –’
Angel coughed, stopping him in mid-sentence. It was one of her rules that they should never let a girl know that there had been others. But when Eddie looked at her he was surprised to see that she was smiling.
‘Lucy isn’t like the others,’ she said, her eyes meeting Eddie’s. ‘We understand each other, she and I.’ Her lips brushed the top of Lucy’s head. ‘Don’t we, my poppet?’
What about me?
Eddie held his tongue. A moment later, Angel asked him to go down and warm some milk and turn up the heating. He went downstairs, the jealousy churning angrily and impotently inside him as pointlessly as an engine in neutral revving into the red. The two of them made such a beautiful picture, he accepted that, the Virgin and child, beautiful and hurtful.
He altered the thermostat for the central heating and put the milk on the stove. His headache was worsening. He stared into the pan, at the shifting disc of white, and felt his eyes slipping out of focus.
Virgin and child: two was company in the Holy Family. Poor old Joseph, permanently on the sidelines, denied even the privilege of making the customary biological contribution to family life. The mother and child made a whole, self-contained and exclusive, Mary and the infant Jesus, the Madonna and newborn king, the Handmaiden of the Lord with the Christ Child.
Where did that leave number three? Somewhere in the crowd scene at the stable. Or leading the donkey. Negotiating with the innkeeper. No doubt paying the bills. Acting as a combination of courier and transport manager and meal ticket. No one ever said what happened to old Joseph. No one cared. Why should they? He didn’t count.
What about me?
It seemed to Eddie that almost all his life he had been condemned to third place. Look at his parents, for example. They might not have liked each other, but their needs interlocked and they excluded Eddie. Even when his father allowed Eddie to join in the photographs, Stanley’s interest was always focused on the little girl, and the little girl always paid more attention to Stanley than to Eddie; they treated him as part of the furniture, no more important than the smelly old armchair.
When Stanley died, the pattern continued. His mother hadn’t wasted much time before deciding to find a lodger. But why? There had been enough money for them to continue living at Rosington Road by themselves. They could have managed on Thelma’s widow’s pension from the Paladin, her state pension, and what Eddie received from the DSS. They would have had to live frugally, but it would have been perfectly possible with just the two of them. But no. His mother had wanted someone else, not him. She found Angel and there was the irony: because Angel preferred Eddie, at least for a time.
Only Alison and Angel had ever taken him seriously. But Alison had gone away and now Angel no longer needed him because she had Lucy instead. But what made Lucy so special?
Eddie’s eyes widened. The milk was swelling. Its surface was pocked and pimpled like a lunar landscape. A white balloon pushed itself over the rim of the saucepan. The boiling milk spat and bubbled. He lunged at the handle of the saucepan and a smell of burning filled the air.
I blame you.
Mummy, Mum, Ma, Mother, Thelma. Eddie could not remember calling his mother by name, not to her face.
Angel had taken charge when Thelma died. Eddie had to admit that she had worked miracles. When he finally managed to drag himself downstairs on the morning of his mother’s death, he had sat down at the kitchen table, in the heart of Thelma’s domain, and laid his head on his arms. Still in the grip of an immense hangover, he hadn’t wanted to think because thinking hurt too much.
He had heard Angel coming downstairs and into the room; he had smelled her perfume and heard water gushing from the tap.
‘Eddie. Sit up, please.’
Wearily he obeyed.
She placed a glass of water in front of him. ‘Lots of fluids.’ She handed him a sachet of Alka-Seltzers which she had already opened to save him the trouble. ‘Don’t worry if you’re sick. It usually helps to vomit.’
He dropped the tablets one by one into the water and watched the bubbles rising. ‘What happened to her?’
‘I suspect it was a heart attack. Just as she expected.’
‘What?’
‘You knew she had a heart condition, didn’t you?’
A new pain penetrated Eddie’s headache. ‘She never told me.’
‘Probably she didn’t want to worry you. Either that or she thought you’d guessed.’
‘But how could I?’ Eddie wailed.
‘Why do you think she gave up smoking? Doctor’s orders, of course. And those tablets she took, not to mention her spray … Didn’t you ever notice how breathless she got?’
‘But she’s been like that for years. Not so bad, perhaps, but –’
‘And the colour she went sometimes? As soon as I saw that I knew there was a heart problem. Now drink up.’
He drank the mixture. At one point he thought he might have to make a run for the sink, but the moment passed.
‘It’s a pity she didn’t change her diet and take more exercise,’ Angel went on. ‘But there. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks, can you?’
‘I wish – I wish I’d known.’
‘Why? What could you have done? Given her a new set of coronary arteries?’
He tried to rid his mind of the figure on the bed in the front room upstairs. Never large, Thelma had shrunk still further in death. He glanced at Angel, who was making coffee. She was quite at home here, he thought, as if this were her own kitchen.
‘What happened last night?’
She turned, spoon in hand. ‘You don’t remember? I’m not surprised. The wine had quite an effect on you, didn’t it? I didn’t realize you had such a weak head.’
He remembered the basement restaurant in Soho. Snatches of their conversation came back to him. The silk tie, blue with green stripes. Himself vomiting over the shiny bonnet of a parked car. Orange candle flames dancing in Angel’s pupils. The three white tablets in the palm of her hand.
‘Did you see my mother last night?’
‘No.’
‘So what happened when we got back?’
‘Nothing. I imagine she must have been asleep. I took you upstairs and gave you some aspirin. You went out like a light. So I covered you up and went to bed myself.’
‘You’re sure?’
Angel stared at him. ‘I’m not in the habit of lying, Eddie.’
He dropped his eyes. ‘Sorry.’
‘All right. I understand. It’s never easy when a parent dies. One doesn’t act rationally.’
She paused to pour water into a coffee pot which Eddie had never seen before. He sniffed. Real coffee, which meant that it was Angel’s. His mother had liked only instant coffee.
A moment later, Angel said in a slow, deliberate voice: ‘We had a pleasant meal out last night. Your mother was asleep when we got home. We went to bed. When I got up this morning I was surprised that your mother wasn’t up before me. So I tapped on her door to see if she was all right. There was no answer so I went in. And there she was, poor soul. I made sure she was dead. Then I woke you and phoned the doctor.’
Eddie rubbed his beard, which felt matted. ‘When did it happen?’
‘Who knows? She might have been dead when we got home. She was certainly very cold this morning.’
‘You don’t think …?’
‘What?’
‘That what happened yesterday might have had something to do with it?’
‘Don’t be silly, Eddie.’ Angel rested her hands on the table and stared down at him, her face calm and beautiful. ‘Put that right out of your mind.’
‘If I’d stayed with her, talked with her –’
‘It wouldn’t have done any good. Probably she would have made herself even more upset.’
‘But –’
‘Her death could have happened at any time. And don’t forget, it’s psychologically typical for survivors to blame themselves for the death of a loved one.’
‘Shouldn’t we mention it to the doctor? The fact she was … upset, I mean.’
‘Why should we? What on earth would be the point? It’s a complete irrelevance.’ Angel turned away to pour the coffee. ‘In fact, it’s probably better not to mention it. It would just confuse the issue.’
The dreams came later, after Thelma’s funeral, and continued until the following summer. (Oddly enough, Eddie had the last one just before the episode with Chantal.) They bore a family resemblance to one another: different versions of different parts of the same story.
In the simplest form, Thelma was lying in the single bed, her small body almost invisible under the eiderdown and the blankets. Eddie was a disembodied presence near the ceiling just inside the doorway. He could not see his mother’s face. The skull was heavy and the two pillows were soft and accommodating. The ends of the pillows rose like thick white horns on either side of the invisible face.
Sometimes it was dark, sometimes misty; sometimes Eddie had forgotten his glasses. Was another pillow taken from Stanley’s bed and clamped on top of the others? Then what? The body twitching almost imperceptibly, hampered by the weight of the bedclothes and by its own weakness?
More questions followed, because the whole point of this series of dreams was that nothing could ever be known for certain. What chance would Thelma have had against the suffocating weight pressing down on her? Had she cried out? Almost certainly the words would have been smothered by the pillow. And if any sound seeped into the silent bedroom, who was there to hear it? Who, except Eddie?
There had not been an inquest. Thelma’s doctor had no hesitation in signing the medical certificate of cause of death. His patient was an elderly widow with a history of heart problems. He had seen her less than a week before. According to her son and her lodger she had complained of chest pains during the day before her death. That night her heart had given up the unequal struggle. When he saw the body, she was still holding her glyceryl trinitrate spray, which suggested that she might have been awake when the attack began.
‘Just popped off,’ the doctor told Eddie. ‘Could have happened any time. I doubt if she felt much and it was over very quickly. Not a bad way to go, all things considered – I wouldn’t mind it myself.’
After Thelma had gone, 29 Rosington Road became a different house. On the morning after the funeral Angel and Eddie wandered through the rooms, taking stock and marvelling at the possibilities that had suddenly opened up. For Eddie, Thelma’s departure had a magical effect: the rooms were larger; much of the furniture in the big front bedroom, robbed of the presence which had lent it significance, had become shabby and unnecessary; and his and Angel’s footsteps on the stairs were brisk and resonant.
‘I think I could do something with this,’ Angel said as she examined the basement.
‘Why?’ Eddie glanced at the ceiling, at the rest of the house. ‘We’ve got all that room upstairs.’
‘It would be somewhere for me.’ She laid her hand briefly on his arm. ‘Don’t misunderstand me, but I do like to be by myself sometimes. I’m a very solitary person.’
‘You could have the back bedroom.’
‘It’s too small.’ Angel stretched out her arms. ‘I need space. It wouldn’t be a problem, would it?’
‘Oh no. Not at all. I just – I just wasn’t quite clear what you wanted.’
There was a burst of muffled shouting. Eddie guessed that it emanated from the basement flat next door, which was occupied by a young married couple who conducted their relationship as if on the assumption that they were standing on either side of a large windy field, a situation for which each held the other to blame.
‘Wouldn’t this be too noisy for you?’ he asked.
‘Insulation: that’s the answer. It would be a good idea to dry-line the walls in any case. Look at the damp over there.’
As they were speaking, she moved slowly around the basement, poking her head into the empty coal hole and the disused scullery, peering into cardboard boxes, rubbing a clear spot in the grime in the rear window, trying the handle of the sealed door to the garden. She paused by the old armchair and wiped away some of the dust with a tissue.
‘That’s nice. Late nineteenth century? It’s been terribly mistreated, though. But look at the carving on the arms and legs. Beautiful, isn’t it? I think it’s rosewood.’
Eddie remembered the smell of the material and the feeling of a warm body pressed against his. ‘I was thinking we should throw it out.’
‘Definitely not. We’ll have it reupholstered. Something plain – claret-coloured, perhaps.’
‘Won’t all this cost too much?’
‘We’ll manage.’ Angel smiled at him. ‘I’ve got a little money put by. It will be my way of contributing. We’ll need to find a builder, of course. Do you know of anyone local?’
