Mrs. Hoates would say what’ll we call it, but every time she’d pick the name herself. You’d make a suggestion and she’d say lovely, but then she’d go for something else. He explains that to them, thinking he’d better, in case of misleading. vWhat’s this?’ She smiles at him. ‘What’s this about, Albert?’
‘The Morning Star, Mrs. Iveson.’
‘I think it’s where he found Georgina,’ Thaddeus Davenant says. ‘A derelict children’s home, they said.’
Albert stirs two lumps of sugar into a fresh cup of tea. The biscuits are mixed creams and chocolate-coated. He takes one that has raspberry jam in with the cream. Another thing is, it was Miss Rapp who gave the information about the shamrock, how the slave boy banished the toads and serpents, bringing in the harmless weed instead.
‘Spaxton Street,’ he says. ‘Round the Tipp Street corner is where the brown yard doors are. You know the neighbourhood, sir? Fulcrum Street?’
‘I’m afraid I don’t.’
‘You were a child in the home yourself, Albert?’
He says he was. He gives some other names because they’re interested. He tells the story of Joey Ells, the Sunday when it snowed. Crippled, he says, and she asks about the tank, and he explains that Joey Ells thought there were steps where there weren’t. An iron ladder there used to be, only it gave way under rust.
‘What a terrible thing!’
You can see they both think it was terrible, and he tells how Miss Rapp walked away from the Morning Star the next day. He mentions Joe Minching and Mrs. Cavey. Mrs. Cavey did the cooking, he explains. The milkman sometimes stopped to play football in the yard, clattering down his crate of bottles as a goalpost.
‘Your home?’ she wants to know. ‘You still think of it as home, Albert?’
‘I have a room with Mrs. Biddle these days. Appian Terrace. You know Appian Terrace, sir?’
‘No, I don’t think I do.’
He says where Appian Terrace is and how he came to get the room there. He says that Mrs. Biddle is bed-bound, how he’s worried about the teapot because the stuff is unravelling off the handle, how she could have a fall. He puts down Cat Scat because a cat comes that’s a nuisance to her. But it isn’t any good.
‘Mrs. Biddle has her memories,’ he says. ‘Theatrical.’
He can see the photograph Pettie was on about, the plain dress with the collar up a bit, the woman who’s in the grave they haven’t erected a stone for. There was an accident once on the April outing, a red car squeezed shapeless, hub-caps and metal on the road, the radio still playing, no chance. That comes into Albert’s mind, but he doesn’t mention it. Too much speed, Joe Minching said, and they got out of the minibus at a Services and watched the speed, everything going by below them on the motorway, reds and greens and blues. ‘More blues,’ Ram said, and Leeroy argued.
He’s offered the biscuits again and takes another, the chocolate heart. He tells them about the Underground because she asks if he has work. He remembers Pettie saying you could hardly see the make-up on her face and he can hardly see it today either. Mrs. Biddle puts lipstick on first thing, then her powder.
‘Little Mister’s with the rent boys,’ he says, and he watches a sadness coming into her face. He likes her clothes and the way she stands so straight when she’s on her feet, and the softness in her eyes. He liked her the minute she held her hand out to him, smiling then too, giving her name. He tells about Little Mister left on the step and how he got to be called that. He tells them he heard from Merle one time that Mr. and Mrs. Hoates were down Portsmouth way now.
‘Running an old folks’ residential.’
She asks about Merle, and he says she’s not around these days, not since she went up Wharfdale. Nor Bev, he says.
Darkened by the rainfall, the drawing-room is invaded by other people and another place, by the faces of children, black and white and Indian; by dank downstairs passages, Cardinal polish on concrete floors, a mangle forgotten in a corner; by window-panes painted white, bare stairway treads, rust marks on mattresses. A handbell rings, there is the rush of footsteps.
They listen because there is a debt they can never repay, neither by the money that has been given already nor by their attention, yet their attention continues. From time to time they do not easily follow what they’re being told, bewildered by new names when they occur, the order of events a muddle. Easing ten minutes ago, the rain comes heavily again.
‘Her party dress she always wore on a Sunday. The others wouldn’t bother.’
His friend would put on Mrs. Hoates’s perfume. As soon as she saw Mrs. Hoates setting off on a Sunday afternoon to visit her relation who wasn’t well she would try out a different perfume. Nail-varnish she tried out once, and another time a pair of earrings. She’d do her hair in Mrs. Hoates’s mirror and then she’d go downstairs. There’d be the uncles’ coats hanging on the hallstand pegs, the uncle with the birthmark waiting, never impatient, reading any leaflets that were lying about the hall.
‘Uncles?’
‘ “Don’t take no presents,” I’d always say, but they’d take them and then they’d try to get away. You get the picture, sir?’ vYes, we do.’
Removing a roller-blind in the hall in order to adjust the tension, Maidment gets the picture also. A hell is the picture Mrs. Iveson gets, doors closed and silence, the hiding after they tried to get away. In her party dress, only one of them never minded. Pertly, she smiled at her Sunday uncle, scented and made-up for him.
‘So you went back to that place all this time later and found Georgina?’
‘Nothing doing in the yard, like, so I go in by the bottom window. Not a sound, Mrs. Iveson. Nothing there, is what I says at first.’
Thaddeus wishes he didn’t have to hear. He tries not to, apprehensive about what may be said next. He tries not to see the bleak, empty house to which his child was taken, to be abandoned for a reason that is unknown.
‘I come to the bathroom, not that you’d know it with the bath gone and the basin taken down. Mrs. Hoates’s bathroom that was, Hoates’s too. First thing I notice is the baby in a corner. I had the torch. With the windows boarded it’s dark enough in there. Not that there hasn’t been squatters, not that they hasn’t taken a board or two down. Only you need the torch in case.’
‘Of course.’ Uneasy too, Mrs. Iveson nods.
‘No place for a baby, and I give it in at Tipp Street. I just give in Georgina Belle. I didn’t tell a lie, sir.’
Thaddeus watches the shaking of the tidy head, slowly, emphatically, back and forth, back and forth, as rhythmic as a pendulum. It’s not a lie when you don’t say. It’s not a lie when you just give something in.
‘Of course it isn’t,’ Mrs. Iveson reassures, not understanding.
Five minutes later Zenobia learns that this boy knew what he was looking for when he went to that bathroom. Well known to him and given to crime, the bespectacled girl had come to the house where he lived and had knocked on the kitchen window. She was a girl who’d vandalized a man’s possessions once, who walked out on employers whenever she felt like it. Calm as you please, she told the boy she’d stolen a baby, and told him where she’d put it.
‘She says would I hand it in. Like I done, Mrs. Iveson.’
They don’t say anything. Albert watches the baby trying to join her fingers together, holding them up in front of her face. She pulls them apart again. She’s gurgling and smiling, trying to laugh, only she can’t laugh properly, the age she is.
‘She put Georgina Belle down in the Morning Star on account of everything going wrong.’
‘What went wrong?’ They both say that, one after the other. She says it twice.
‘Pettie’s plans, like.’ Albert shakes his head. ‘Pettie didn’t know what to do.’