“I don’t want to see her,” she said aloud. “I don’t want to see her and I don’t want to see Auntie. They don’t need me, they’ve got each other.”
No one answered her.
Clean and in clean clothes, light grey Dockers from the charity shop and a white T-shirt with Auntie’s silver cross on the chain round her neck, Minty sat in the window reading the papers and from time to time looking up at the street outside. It was after five and the Wilsons hadn’t come back. Gertrude Pierce came out of Mr. Kroot’s with a letter in her hand. Her orange hair was quite white at the roots. She had a purple coat on with a fake fur collar, a winter coat on a warm summer afternoon. Minty watched her cross the street and walk down to the postbox on the corner of Laburnam. Now, returning, she was facing this way and Minty saw that she’d covered her face with makeup, coats of it, and scarlet lipstick and black stuff on her eyebrows. It made you shudder to think of wearing all that muck on your skin, and she must have been seventy-five if she was a day.
The ghost voices didn’t comment. They hadn’t spoken for the past couple of hours. Minty made herself a cup of tea in a nice clean white mug and had a Danish pastry with it that she’d personally watched the man, wearing gloves, pick up with stainless-steel tongs from under a cover, on a white plate with a white doily on it. Then, when she’d washed up the mug and the plate and dried them, she put on a clean white cardigan and went across Harrow Road to the cemetery. On the way she passed Laf and Sonovia and the little girl and Daniel’s wife, Lauren, coming home in Laf’s car. They waved to her out of the open windows. Lauren had her long black hair done in what they called corn rows and pictures of flowers on her fingernails, which wasn’t right in a doctor’s wife.
The cemetery was very green and lush, buttercups and daisies growing among the grass and fresh gleaming moss climbing over the old stones. The full gasometer loomed on the far side of the canal. Sometimes, when it was nearly empty, it was just the bones of itself, like the skeletons that lay everywhere here in moldering boxes under the ground. She went along the path between the ilexes and conifers where ivy clambered over mossy fallen angels and lichened mausoleums. Some of the gravestones had stone ivy carved on them with real ivy climbing over it. No one was about. It was just here, where the two paths intersected, that she had seen Jock coming toward her in his black leather jacket. She was sure she’d never see him again. She’d never pray to Auntie again, not after the way she’d been treated, and there’d be no more flowers on the grave.
It was hard because Auntie had been all she’d got, really, until Jock came along. Sonovia had once said Auntie was like God to her, and Laf, who’d been there, was shocked and said not to talk like that, Minty didn’t worship Auntie, she didn’t pray to her. The truth was she did but she couldn’t say so, though when she went home she got down on her knees and prayed. She was muddled, she didn’t know what to do, to thank Auntie for dying and leaving her the house and the bathroom, or to wish her alive again. Well, in a way, that second wish had come true.
The carnations and gypsophila she’d put on the grave a couple of weeks ago were dead now and brown. The water in the vase was brown too and only about an inch of it was left. She pulled out the dead flowers, threw the water on the ground, and put the vase back where she’d found it, on the slab in front of some old man’s tomb. The sun warmed her and she lifted up her face to its gentle evening light. She’d expected Auntie and maybe Mrs. Lewis to say something. Auntie must know by now that she’d meant it when she’d said there’d be no more flowers. Removing the vase would have told her that. The dead knew everything, saw all. But no voices came, they’d gone away somewhere, back to where they’d come from.
That done, she’d go to the pictures. On her own. Walk it, it wasn’t that far to Whiteley’s. If she was going to see them anywhere, she thought, it would be in the underpass by Royal Oak station, though she’d no special reason to associate either of them with tunnels under roads. And they weren’t there, not even their muttering voices. Something called The Insider and something else called The Beach were the choices before her. She chose the latter and had to sit through a story about a bunch of teenagers in some foreign place.
A man came and sat beside her and offered her a Polo mint. She shook her head and said no, but of course it reminded her of Jock, and when the man put his hand on her knee she remembered how she’d told Jock she was his and would be forever. There’d never be anyone else. It made no difference that Jock had stolen all her money. She picked up the man’s hand, digging her nails into the back of it until he cried out. Then she moved three seats along the row and after a minute or two he left.
When she came out of the cinema it was dark and no longer very warm. She walked up toward Edgware Road and waited for a 36 bus. It was while she was standing there, quite alone, in a dreary, isolated place near Paddington Basin, that she saw Auntie sitting on the seat under the bus shelter. She wasn’t as clear as Jock had been but a shape that you could see through, a semitransparent entity that was nevertheless unmistakably Auntie from her iron gray hair in a coil on the back of her head and her rimless glasses to her sensible black lace-up shoes.
Minty wasn’t going to speak to her, she wouldn’t give her the satisfaction, but she did wonder if taking the vase away and throwing out the dead flowers was what had brought her back in visible form. Of Mrs. Lewis there was no sign. Minty stared at Auntie, and Auntie purposely looked away toward the bridge over the canal. Within a few minutes the double-decker came. I’m not getting on it if she does, Minty said to herself. But when the bus stopped Auntie got up and went away toward the underpass.
“Good riddance to bad rubbish,” Minty said as she passed her money to the driver.
“You what?”
A lot of people were staring at her.
“I wasn’t talking to you,” she said to the driver, and to the rest of them, “or any of you.”
She went upstairs to the top, to escape them.
Chapter 21
NEVER IN HIS life, as far as he could recall, had Jims been so angry, and his anger was compounded in part of rage and in part of fear. Up to a point he was an imaginative man and he saw his career lying in smithereens while ever before him loomed the ogrelike shape of the Opposition chief whip.
He was lying in bed in Fredington Crucis House, having dutifully listened to an hour of the Today program on his bedside radio. At eight-thirty Mrs. Vincey brought him up a cup of tea-something she’d never done before-and two tabloid newspapers. They must have been her own, for Jims took no papers in the country and, if he had, would never have chosen these. He’d often thought she hated him and now he was sure of it.
This was the day he was supposed to go over to Shaston and support the Conservative candidate. He pictured the media with their cameras and recording devices waiting for him and was just making up his mind not to go because it would do more harm than good to the Party, when the phone rang.