That silly joke of his kept running through her head. She hadn’t thought of it for years until Eugenie came out with it the other day. Adam and Eve and Pinch Me went down to the river to bathe. Adam and Eve were drownded. Who was saved? Perhaps he actually was dead. But no. She reminded herself that whatever she pretended or told Jims, Jerry was her legally wedded husband. She’d have been the first to be officially informed. He was her husband and she was his wife. Uneasily, she remembered that for some reason, now forgotten, Jerry had required and got the old form of marriage service from the Book of Common Prayer. There had been a bit about whom God had joined together let no man put asunder, and keeping only unto him as long as they both lived. Moreover, she was going to have to go through all that again at St. Mary Undercroft, where she didn’t exactly know but could guess that they’d have the same old service. And the vicar (or whatever-the canon?) would say those awful words about answering as they would at the dreadful day of judgment that no just cause or impediment stood in the way of their getting married. Zillah didn’t really believe in the dreadful day of judgment but the sound of it struck superstitious terror into her just the same. Jerry, wherever he was, was six feet and 182 pounds of just cause and impediment. Why did she always have to marry men who wanted their weddings to be in church?
After a while she got up and wandered back to the tube station. The trouble with thrusting unpleasant thoughts from your mind is that the thrusting can never be absolute and each time they come back it seems to be with redoubled threat. There were her parents to worry about too. She hadn’t yet told them Jerry was dead. Nor had she informed them that the official version of their relationship was that they’d never been married at all. Ostensibly, they’d be giving the wedding reception. Jims, of course, would be paying. She wondered how she was going to stop her mother telling the leader of the Opposition, not to mention Lord Strathclyde, how she used to take little Zillah with her when she went making beds and washing dishes up at the big house and the five-year-old was sometimes allowed to play with seven-year-old James.
The train came. The carriage she got into was full of yardies from Harlesden drinking lager out of cans, reminding her of the world she’d soon be leaving behind forever. At Kilburn Park she moved carriages and went on to Oxford Circus. The best remedy she knew for nerves and depression was shopping, a taste she’d never till now been able to indulge. It was amazing how quickly she’d taken to it and how much she enjoyed it. Already, after only a few weeks, she knew the names of all the designers, was beginning to get a good idea of what their clothes looked like and how one differed from another. If only academic subjects were so easily learned she might have got herself some qualifications by this time. Married to Jims, she wouldn’t need them.
Emerging from Browns some hour and a half later, laden with bags, she felt enormously happy and carefree, wondering why she’d been down in the dumps earlier. She took a taxi back to Battersea. The children were having tea, the table presided over by the babysitter.
“Mrs. Peacock says you’re going to marry Jims,” said Eugenie, “but I said you can’t because you’re married to Daddy.”
“My mistake, Mrs. Leach, I thought they knew.”
“Mummy marry Daddy,” said Jordan. “Marry him tomorrow.” He picked up his plate and banged it on the table, overturning a mug of orange juice in the process, which set him off screaming, “Jordan wants Daddy! Wants him now!”
Zillah fetched a cloth and began mopping up the mess while Mrs. Peacock sat tight, her eyes traveling from Zillah to the Browns and Liberty bags and back again. “Is there any tea left in the pot, Mrs. Peacock?”
“It’ll be cold by now.”
Chapter 8
THIS WOULD BE the first wedding Minty had ever been to. She was never beset by the ordinary woman’s anxieties, so she worried not at all about what to wear and whether she ought to buy a hat. If Jock hadn’t stolen her savings, she’d have bought Josephine and Ken a present, but now she had only her wages with nothing left over for luxuries, which included gifts. Would he have paid her back if he’d lived? Was he returning, his ghost appearing the way it did, not to take her away with him but because he wanted to pay his debt?
She hadn’t seen him again since that night in the cinema, but she’d brooded about the things Sonovia and Laf had said. The cat walking on her grave. She couldn’t help thinking about it, her burial ground maybe up in that huge, awful cemetery in the far north of London where Auntie’d once taken her to her sister Edna’s funeral. It wouldn’t be like Auntie’s resting place, nice and cozy under the big dark trees and near to her home, only just the other side of the high wall, but one of a bleak row of white tombstones, each indistinguishable from the rest, her name that had been engraved upon it obliterated by the wind and rain. But would her name be engraved on it? Who would do that for her? There was no one now Auntie was gone and Jock was gone.
She dreamed of the grave. She was lying in it under the earth but not in a box. They couldn’t afford the cost of a coffin. She lay under the cold, wet earth, the worst place she’d ever been in, and she was coated all over with dirt, on her skin, in her hair, in her fingernails. Mr. Kroot’s old cat came and scratched the earth, scraping with its paws the way they do. She saw it above her, looking down through the hole it had dug, its gray muzzle all bared teeth and angry flashing eyes and shaking whiskers. Then it scraped back all the earth into her mouth and nose, and she awoke fighting for breath. After that dream she had to get up and have a bath, though it was the middle of the night.
What Laf had said about her muttering and her eyes being shut and Josephine that talking to yourself was the first sign of insanity, she hadn’t liked either. She hadn’t been muttering, she never did, and she’d had her eyes shut because she was scared. They’d been laughing at her all the time they were in that pub. Next time she wanted to see a film, she’d decided, she’d go on her own. Why not? She used to go on her own and she could again. She’d buy herself a packet of Polo mints. Or a banana because he didn’t like them-but no, not that, she’d have to dispose of the outside of it somewhere.
In the bus on the way back, a man came and sat next to her. She wouldn’t look round because she was sure it was Jock’s ghost and she could hear a voice whispering, “Polo, Polo.” But when she edged her head very cautiously and slowly toward the right, an inch at a time, she saw it was someone quite different, an old man with white hair. Jock must have sneaked off when she wasn’t looking and made this old man sit there.
People didn’t often go to the three-thirty showing. The multiplex cinema was always nearly empty then. Immacue closed at one on a Saturday, so in the afternoon Minty went to see The Talented Mr. Ripley. She bought one ticket and was told which theater to go in. There were only two other people there and she had the whole row to herself. Jock didn’t appear. She hadn’t seen him for a week, for you couldn’t count that meeting on the bus. It was nice being alone; you didn’t have to keep saying thank-you when someone passed you the popcorn or a chocolate, or have the person behind you telling you to shut up.
The evenings were getting light now. She could buy flowers for Auntie from the man at the cemetery gate and walk down to the grave in sunshine. There was no one about. It had rained so much lately that the vase was brimming over, though the flowers in it were dead. Minty threw them away under a holly bush and put her daffodils into the water. Then she took two tissues from her bag, laid them on the slab, and knelt down on them, holding the silver cross between her forefinger and middle finger. Her eyes tight shut, she prayed to Auntie to make Jock go away forever.