In the dark Pettie tries to repair the reality she is left with. She could go out now and phone him up, not bothering with 999 because it’s too late for that. She could ask to speak to him if someone else answered, and then explain — how she ran away in a panic from the car park when she saw the woman still hanging about. ‘All I thought to do was take Georgina Belle to a place of safety, Mr. Davenant.’ She could trust to luck that they wouldn’t bother with the children, now that they knew.
Pettie goes over that. ‘What I thought was she’ll snatch her from me when I’m getting her back to your house, sir. Like on the towpath or in the fields.’ She hears his sigh of relief, and her own voice saying it was only lucky she came out that afternoon to look for her finger-ring where she hadn’t looked properly before.
But the children heard the whimpering and already they’ll have said. Squatting on the dirty floorboards of the bathroom, again she tries to find a way, but again knows that from the moment the children stopped to stare there never was one.
She lights a match and then a cigarette. ‘Wife and kiddies,’ Joe Minching said; and the rictus began in the fisherman’s face; and they said she was to blame when Eric wasn’t in Ikon Floor Coverings any more, they said she should be taken in. In the brief illumination, pipes hang from the walls where bath and wash-basin have been crudely disconnected before being taken away. A mirror has been shattered, its fragments in a corner. All the whimpering in the world, all the crying and screaming won’t attract attention here, as now and again it did at the Dowlers’ and the Fennertys’.
When the cigarette is finished Pettie lights another and then another, the flare of the match each time flickering on the sleeping face of the baby she has taken. While the last match is still alight she gently places the dummy — once Darren Fennerty’s — between the slightly open lips. In the dark she makes a butterfly and places it where it will be something for Georgina Belle to look at later, when light comes through the cracks between the window boards.
Then Pettie goes, closing the bathroom door behind her.
12
In the dining-room the dinner table has been laid, but no food is eaten. Much later, in the drawing-room, not huddled now but straight-backed in an armchair, Mrs. Iveson can hardly see her son-in-law when he comes in because she has not turned on the lights. She watched him in the garden before darkness fell — among the birch trees and the plum trees, by the summer-house, pacing slowly around the lawns, stooping now and again to pull a weed out from a flower-bed. He says nothing when he comes in, and she wonders at first if he knows she’s there. Rosie is with him and settles down, pressed against her legs.
‘I’m sorry, Thaddeus.’
He stands still in the gloom. She senses the shaking of his head, but does not see it. Time seems not to be passing, even though the evening has darkened so, even though the clock in the hall has chimed the hours and half-hours.
‘I’m sorry.’
He still says nothing. In the hall the telephone rings and he goes to answer it. ‘Yes,’ she hears him say. ‘Yes.’ He listens and then says thank you, listens again and says good-night. She can tell it isn’t what it might have been.
‘Of course it wasn’t your fault,’ he says, returning. ‘Of course not.’
He doesn’t stay, and a few minutes later she hears his car drive away and wonders what he hopes for. ‘We’ve called her Georgina,’ Letitia told her father in St. Bee’s, and then repeated that, twice or three times. But it never impinged. The last time they visited St. Bee’s a shaft of sunlight kept catching the blue stripes of the tie that was always so very tidily knotted. Sharp as a card, the tip of a handkerchief protruded from the outside breast pocket and she thought of a figure in a shop window. How fortunate, she tells herself, he is tonight.
Thaddeus struggles against thought while flat suburbs spread about him. Ribbons of development are broken, then begin again; dormitory settlements give way to mouldering warehouses, waterworks stretch for half a mile. Bombsites have not been built on, used-car lots are fenced with high wire mesh. Streets are straight and short, Victorian brick.
A woman with a baby hurries on none of them, no abandoned bundle fills a darkened corner. ‘She asked that you be informed,’ the voice of the hospital sister interrupted his silent plea that the telephone call would bring some other news. ‘A merciful release, we can only say.’ And he thought yes, a merciful release, and hardly knew.
Again, as best he can, he veils the images that have recently brought him solace but are painful now: Georgina just born, Letitia’s smiling tiredness, his own hands reaching out; Georgina when he saw her last, sleeping in her nursery after lunch. Ahead of him, lit up and open, a public house is called the Old Edward, and for a moment he is tempted to enter it, to talk to its landlord or some woman across a grimy bar, to be someone else and have someone else’s thoughts. For an hour or so yet he could drink and in the end be drunk and know oblivion.
‘We’ll go, Tadzio’: his mother saying that comes back, as if from her limbo she seeks in this cruel time to make amends, to rescue from it the child she never knew a man, nor ever knew at all. Through Metz and Kaiserslautern and Berlin, her long white finger first traced their journey to the country he had invented from her scraps: ships and sails on a frozen sea, her remembered street lamps of brightly decorated metal, coal dug out with a spade. Eva Paczkowska she showed him, handwritten on a certificate he could not understand, and in a photograph she pointed at the house where she’d been born. At a café table she had looked up and for the first time saw his father, his fur hat on a table by a coffee percolator, his hands held back from the red-hot metal of a stove. ‘Tadzio, you were born that day.’ Born because of the love that began in the fug of a coffee house, because his father had come to her cold, dark country to sell soap.
‘Look, Tadzio!’ But it was still his father, not he, she pointed for — at St. Hyacinthus’ Church, at all the sights of Lazienki. ‘Palaces! Palaces!’ his father had exclaimed. ‘How many more, for heaven’s sake!’ The Blue, the Primate’s, the Archbishop’s, the Pac, the Raczyski, the Krasiski, the Palace upon the Water. ‘Kanapka,’ an old sandwich-seller offered, opening a sandwich to display its contents, which years ago she had done for his father too. There was the restaurant where his father first ate nalesniki, the florid waiter no more than sixteen then. ‘Oh, what happiness it was!’ And strangers in Eva Paczkowska’s city listened to the story of the Englishman who once came to Poland, who gave a Polish girl, in return for Poland’s gift to him, a quiet English house, cherry trees at each corner of a garden.
Thaddeus passes the Old Edward by. He tries to hear his mother saying a tailor sat cross-legged in that window, to hear her telling him that jajko is egg and kawa coffee, making him repeat Górale mieszkaja w górach. But the distraction does not hold. Still warm, the air is drily odorous, a smell of old dust and buildings. Litter has gathered in the gutters and neglected doorways. Street lights are dim, as if the neighbourhood deserves no better.
He has not come to this nowhere place with hope, but only to escape all that his house is now. Tonight it’s inconsequential that his beautiful mother used up her love in comforting an invalid of misfortune and of war. Or that his father sighed and only wished to be alone with her, his body shivering in a bout of pain.