“And Worcester sauce,” added Resnick.
“I’m not putting that in no wine,” the woman said.
“For the cob,” Resnick explained.
“There’s them relishes. Mustard.”
He shook his head. “Worcester sauce.”
When she brought the bottle to the table, the waitress did so with her eyes squinting off to one side as if not wanting to see what use he was going to put it to.
“So?” Rachel pressed.
“Gives it a bit of bite,” Resnick said.
“Why are you avoiding the question?”
Resnick blinked. “I was married for five years. It was a long time ago.”
“Any children?”
“No. You?”
“Children or married?”
“Either. Both.”
“Yes, I was married. That seems like a long while ago as well, although I suppose it wasn’t. We didn’t have any kids, I haven’t had any since.”
He wanted to ask her about that, about having-not having-children. Instead he said, “Why did you get unmarried?”
Rachel turned the wine glass round between her fingers. “It was like trying to breathe under water.”
He watched her come back from the Ladies. She still wore her hair pinned up, silver pendant earrings like slim cylinders accentuating the line of her neck. It made her jawline seem stronger, her mouth fuller.
Watch my lips move, she had said.
“I shall have to go soon,” she said, sitting back down. Resnick nodded, asked her the same question that Skelton had asked him, about the jury. She didn’t know either, not for certain.
“A year ago,” she said, “I think I would have been. Six months even.”
“You think attitudes have changed that much?”
“Don’t you?”
She knew the figures: an increase in cases of reported sexual child abuse that ran close to a hundred and forty percent. Local Authorities with over three thousand children on their abuse registers. In the wake of the Jasmine Beckford case, extra staff had been appointed with special responsibilities in that area, special knowledge. The same after Cleveland.
“The trouble is,” she said, “it became fashionable.”
“Didn’t that encourage a lot of kids to speak out?”
“Of course it did. But the trouble with fashions is that they change. Pop stars, styles. The big thing used to be that we were never acting quickly enough. Read a newspaper and you’d think the whole country wanted us to go charging in at the least sign of danger and whisk kids away from home.”
“And now it’s gone the other way,” Resnick said. They thought about the police in much the same way, the public.
“D’you know,” Rachel said, leaning a little towards him, “that, when one of those children up in Cleveland was taken off a Place of Safety Order, there was a headline in one of the papers, inches deep-THE FIRST CHILD IS SET FREE.”
“So you think the jury’s going to find for the father if they can?”
Rachel just looked at him.
Resnick shifted back on the seat, drank some more of his Guinness, assumed she wanted the subject dropped. Busman’s holiday.
“It’s the guilt they won’t accept,” Rachel said suddenly, her voice rising up a tone. “Their guilt.”
“Theirs?”
“It used to be, anybody who abused a child, sexually abused them, they were psychopaths. Push them off to one side, lock them up. Criminally insane. People used to think Myra Hindley, Ian Brady.” She touched her fingers to her cheek, where it was beginning to burn. “Now it’s all over the place, everywhere. Ordinary people. That’s what they don’t want to believe. It’s them, their friends, their kids. Them.”
Rachel lifted her glass and emptied it in one long swallow. Those who had been turning round and listening went back to their own conversations, their own silences. Resnick watched as the colour slowly began to fade down again on her cheeks, the light began to leave her eyes.
“I’m sorry,” Rachel said, “I didn’t mean to treat you to an outburst.”
“That’s okay,” Resnick said.
Rachel stood up. “I must go.”
“Thanks for the drink,” she said, out on the pavement.
Traffic was moving down the hill at a steady rate, twin lines of headlights sliding into the center. Groups of men and women, strictly segregated, were gathered on the far side of the street, outside Huckleberry’s, Zhivago’s, The Empire.
“Thanks for coming,” Resnick said.
She smiled, something of a smile. “It was supposed to help me unwind.”
“It’s probably not too late for a yoga class.”
She pushed both hands down into her pockets and hurried away. The same group of students who had entered the pub with Resnick emerged and stood near the doorway, laughing. The lads were all wearing long raincoats, shapeless as the one the insurance man had always worn when he’d called to collect on the penny-a-week policy his mother had taken out for him when he was born.
Nine
If Dizzy had been human, Resnick thought, he would have spent days meandering drunkenly around shopping centers, splashed through municipal fountains with a red and white scarf dangling from his belt. He would have traveled back and forth across the Channel barricading himself behind a wall of lager cans in the ferry bar. Resnick blinked at the insistent wailing, eased his body from beneath the covers without disturbing the somnolent Miles, and barefooted to the window.
The leafless black of the tree yielded up the softer blackness of the cat. A soft thump against the ledge and yellowed eyes stared through the pane. Something hung down from the mouth, inert. Resnick pushed up the window and Dizzy moved with a quick pad across the room, tip of his tail crooked. Outside, the rain had not long ceased: sheen of water under the street light; soughing of wind.
Glancing at it, Resnick had taken Dizzy’s prey for a bat, but no, a field mouse, gray in the smudged hollow of the pillow. Its back broken, a brief trail of pink and palish yellow slipped from the puncture of its underside.
From the floor beside the bedside table Dizzy looked up at him, daring rebuke.
Resnick used a tissue to lift the mouse away. Stripped the cover from the pillow and took it to the bathroom. Pepper was curled around the lid of the laundry basket and when Resnick switched on the light, lay one paw across his eyes.
It was not yet a quarter-past four.
Resnick made tea.
He remembered his grandfather: collarless shirts and cardigans that hung past the cave of his chest; gray trousers always with a flap sewn to the front and held in place by two large safety pins. Two things he would do in the house: he would make a fire each morning in the blackened range; he would make tea. Thin fingers would rub the strands of tea between them then sprinkle them across the bottom of the enamel pan like droppings. When the water boiled, he would pour it over the leaves and let it stand. Always the pan at the side of the range, tea growing thicker and blacker. All day.
He could scarcely recall his grandfather’s voice. Little else about him. A slow-stepping figure that would move between the kitchen and the outside lavatory, where strips of newspaper, torn in two and two again, hung from a metal skewer bent into a hook. Once, on a Sunday, the rest of his family had brought a stranger home from church and Resnick had seen his grandfather struggle into a collar and tie-Resnick had used his young fingers to press the collar stud home, had twisted straight the knot of tie-and shiny coat and gone into the parlor with them, closing fast the door. From the hallway, between the banisters on the stairs, he had listened to the clamor of voices and then his grandfather, angry, bitter, and pitched oddly high, forcing out all argument.
And since he knew, then, little Polish, having stopped his ears to it, old-fashioned nonsense, Resnick had never known what those heated words were about.
Thinking back now, he did not think, in all the years they had inhabited the same house, that his grandfather had even spoken to him directly as much as a single word.